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Eric Weinstein Λ Mick West on UAPs, Evidence, Skepticism, and Stigma [Theolocution]
July 8, 2022
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The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze.
Culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region. I'm particularly liking their new insider feature. It was just launched this month. It gives you, it gives me, a front row access to The Economist's internal editorial debates.
Where senior editors argue through the news with world leaders and policy makers in twice weekly long format shows. Basically an extremely high quality podcast. Whether it's scientific innovation or shifting global politics, The Economist provides comprehensive coverage beyond headlines. As a toe listener, you get a special discount. Head over to economist.com slash TOE to subscribe. That's economist.com slash TOE for your discount.
In the interest of disclosure, Eric and I may be working together on explanations of the mathematical concepts behind geometric unity. As for what specific form, it's undecided, but consider this a potential teaser. As always, you can click on the timestamp in the description or over here to skip this longish introduction. Today's theolocution involves Eric Weinstein and Mick West on the topic of the evidence of UFOs, as well as the relationship between skeptics, debunkers, disclosure, the public perception, and scientific inquiry.
Eric Weinstein is the inventor of geometric unity, a proposed theory of everything, as well as being an advocate for UFO disclosure. Mick West is a science writer as well as skeptical investigator who's had some choice words to say about the disclosed footage of the phenomenon, as well as being the creator behind the software that, at least,
A special thank you goes out to Mick because he was in the hot seat with the difficult task of defending the quote-unquote skeptical communities' perceived tenor against those who see some non-terrain explanation behind UFOs.
The links to their respective podcasts, that is The Portal by Eric and Tales from the Rabbit Hole by Mick, can be found in the description. Another podcast that's terribly worth subscribing to is Ross Coulthart's Need to Know with Zabel, and the links to that are in the description as well.
My name is Kurt Jaimungal. I'm a Torontonian filmmaker with a background in mathematical physics dedicated to the explication of the variegated terrain of theories of everything from a mainly theoretical physics perspective, but as well as analyzing consciousness and determining what constitutive role does that have to play in reality and the fundamental laws provided these laws exist at all and are knowable to us.
A theolocution stands in contrast to a standard debate format, which I dislike because it's destructive and not furthering, generally speaking. Instead, theolocutions are attempts to understand one another and even advance the interlocutor's position, fructifying in real time rather than maligning.
If you'd like to hear more podcasts from the Toe channel, then do consider going to patreon.com slash Kurt Jaimungal. That's C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L. Supporting with whatever you can if you like as the sponsors and the patrons are the only reason that I'm able to bring conversations of this quality and depth consistently as this is what I'm able to do full time now.
Today's sponsor is Brilliant. During the winter break, I decided to brush up on some information theory because I would like to do a deep dive in constructor theory. So I took Brilliant's courses on random variables, distributions, and knowledge slash uncertainty. After taking that course, I could finally see why entropy is defined the way it is. It's an extremely natural formula.
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Thank you and enjoy this Theolocution of Eric Weinstein and Mick West. All right. So, by the way, have any of you met prior to this? No, we've just kind of interacted on Twitter a little bit, but we've never actually had a direct conversation before. Why don't we start with Mick, what is it that you respect about Eric? And then Eric, what is it that you respect about Mick?
Well, I really respect Eric's intellect and the way he kind of frames issues in a rather sophisticated way, I think. I think he brings a lot to the table and that he has a background in science and he understands the processes of science and he understands scientists. And I also very much like his perspective that we should be doing more
Erick.
I guess what I believe is that Mick is quite fearless in going up against the very determined UFO community that is clear in its beliefs. I believe that there is a certain amount of complete nonsense out there which needs to be
destroyed. And I think that that's yeoman's work. So it's kind of thankless in many ways, even if it gives you some notoriety. And I feel like Mick has been willing to blow apart things that should not have gotten the kind of mind share in the world that they did. And I think that anybody having the courage of their convictions and being willing to stand alone and be a lightning rod for controversy and particularly directed hatred of a group
I may as well tell you both what I respect about each of you. Eric, you have unexampled views on almost every topic, and it reminds me of this comedian, Patrice O'Neill. He's one of my favorite comedians. He's no longer around. Whenever you would ask him, well, what's your opinion on
on something for which 99% of people agree upon and you think you would predict his response, it would be original and it would make you think. And I find that quality is something that you also have, Eric, and that it's difficult to summarize what you say. Usually that happens for people who are more avant-garde in their thinking. And then for Mick, I like that your actions follow your words. So you're not just deriding the UFO community and then leaving it.
You follow it with tens and tens or hundreds of hours of work put into your website and simulations and software. So it's not just saying, hey, this clearly can't be the case. And then you run away. Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's, it's not a job. I must set that up from the beginning. This isn't something that anybody pays me to do. This is something I'm doing of my own kind of interest, partly because I just find it fascinating.
All right, Mick, do you see yourself as a skeptic or a debunker? And what's the difference between those two?
That's a very loaded question in a way, because for a long time I've struggled with the term debunker. I wrote an article for Skeptical Inquiry a while back called In Defense of Debunking, when I laid out the case for using the term debunker. And my argument there was that if you show something to be false, then you have debunked it. And no one has a problem with the word debunked in the past tense.
If someone says, oh, that has been debunked, everyone's like, oh, OK, then that's been debunked. And assuming that they can demonstrate that is true. But if you're doing it in the present tense, in the active sense, people tend to think that means that you are trying to get to a certain predetermined outcome, which is very much not what I'm doing, especially in the realm of UFOs. Now, if I was doing something like investigating flat Earth,
then yes, I would say that I'm trying to get to a predetermined outcome because, you know, we've already done the work to determine that the earth is not flat. So, you know, we're trying to figure out the best way of explaining why it's not flat. But with UFOs, you know, I'm more of an investigator. And, you know, often in the course of that investigation, I do debunk things, you know, people make a claim about a particular video. So this demonstrates amazing g-forces.
And I will end up debunking that, but that's in the process of investigation. Now skepticism, I see the problem with skepticism is that it's not really a verb. It's not really something that you do. Do you skeptic something? You can debunk things, but you can't skeptic them. Skepticism is kind of more of a, of an attitude. So in a way I feel
skepticism is a little bit more negative if you really get down to it but in popular usage debunking takes on this negative term so i've actually actually after i talked to ryan graves one of the pilots uh he told me the the fact that i had debunking in my twitter profile was a turn off for him and he didn't want to talk to me initially because of that
And because of that, that was kind of like the straw that broke the camel's back. And now I've decided to remove that from my Twitter profile and just focus on being a skeptical investigator who does sometimes end up debunking things. But debunking isn't the label. A debunker isn't really a label that I would actively use. Eric, what's the salutary role for skepticism? And do you see Mick as being a proponent of that?
I'm confused by Mick and I don't understand Mick, but consider that I really haven't been out here for very long in UFO territory. It's not a region of the world, the intellectual landscape that I expected to visit or spend any time in. So as of two years ago, I was pretty much the guy who shut down every UFO conversation that people wanted to have around me.
and so that was sort of my role in my own intellectual set and then I came to believe that clearly I had been the target of miss and disinformation from all sides and then it became this question of well what the hell is this topic if it's not what I thought it was and I guess I've been very surprised to have
encountered Mick in the Twitter sphere. So I don't think of him as particularly gunning for me or out to get me, but there is some aspect of he sees himself in a role with respect to a community, which, and let me just say that the positive part of this, there's a lot of complete nonsense in UFO land that is not only false,
but is also bunk in the sense that a bunko artist needed to create the bunk in order for the bunk to exist. It's not a question of somebody saw a mile-hour balloon and got confused. So there's really a role for debunking, and in particular I think there's a role for debunking aimed at our government, because clearly the government has been up to bunk
Either then or now or both, but it can't be neither. There has to be some aspect of this that is bunk. Where I get very confused is for those of us who have never particularly focused on an incident or a set of people or a group of names. I mean, I am very confused as to what Mick is trying to police
because at the moment I'm just saying like I'm confused and apparently somehow it's not good enough to be confused. One must also be clear that this is nonsense and I'm not at all clear that this is nonsense.
Well, you're confused about me. Maybe I can clear up what my position is, what I'm actually trying to do here. And partly is I'm not really trying to do anything. I got into this field simply as a hobby. I originally started investigating, debunking the chemtrails conspiracy theory like over 10 years ago.
After I left the video game industry and I had a lot of spare time on my hands and I was like learning to fly and doing things like that and it was just very interesting to me and it was like essentially a series of puzzles. And people say like why do you spend so much time on this when I kind of respond to that with.
Some people have hobbies. Some people spend an inordinate amount of time on things like running model trains or painting little figurines or making funny dolls or skydiving or whatever, whatever their hobby happens to be. And this topic here, investigating things happens to be something that really intersected with my skill sets of
Debugging things like figuring things out. What's the root cause the root cause analysis of things and my interest in science I've always been interested in popular science and so it's just something I just kind of got sucked into and it kind of spread out and you know, eventually I kind of settle down in a way on this UFO thing because
It's so interesting in terms of the mathematics, the geometry and the physics, you know, very simple physics, you know, just simple Newtonian stuff, linear algebra and things like that. It's nothing complicated, but it's stuff that I used in my previous career. And so I kind of enjoy flexing those muscles. And recently I've been enjoying flexing my muscles programming simulations.
And I do also enjoy the interactions with people. I like talking to people. I like talking to people who believe and people who used to believe. And to a certain degree, talking to skeptics. Although, to be honest, a lot of the skeptics are rather the grumpy, boring types that don't have a lot of fun. And UFO people are much more fun. Best one I ever had was the Flat Earth Conference I went to. That was a real party. But yeah, I'm not
trying to do anything huge here. Perhaps in the broader sense of debunking conspiracies, I want to make the world a better place by having fewer conspiracies out there. But the vast majority of what I do is like, Oh, an interesting UFO video. Let's have a look at it. Or, you know, this guy said something, let's see if it checks out. It's kind of like this, this fun hobby
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Well, that gives us a great deal of insight. So let me just to mix it up with you. Say you've mentioned chemtrails.
And you've mentioned flat earth and you've mentioned UFOs and the fun of interacting with people and debunking and making the world a better place. And I think I'm starting to see the outline of where this problem occurs. So the key issue in a lot of these things is type one versus type two error. Chemtrails sounds pretty stupid. And to be honest, little green men seems pretty dumb to me too.
to say nothing of the flat earth, which seems idiotic and preposterous. But if you ask me, the idea of the Tuskegee medical experiment and untreated syphilis sounds dumb. Oh, really? The government's can allow people to go untreated into tertiary syphilis, or we're actually going to kill Fred Hampton in his bed through COINTELPRO using the Cook County Sheriff's Department, or we're going to trade, you know,
Drugs for arms with Iranians and the Iran Contra all of these things sound dumb to me because they're clearly preposterous and the concern that I have is that I don't believe in ghosts and I don't believe in the Loch Ness monster and I do believe in J. Edgar Hoover's FBI as an agent
agency, you know, filled with evil targeting ordinary Americans for their political beliefs up to and including their personal destruction and death, including using our free press to plant stories and destroy people. And so I imagine you in all of these contexts, and I imagine you as the guy who said, Oh, really, you think the FBI is going to come up with a story and planted in the Los Angeles Times that Gene Seberg has been a leading actress has been impregnated and cuckolded
And this is where I start to get into my issue, which is I really don't like the personal destruction of individuals who are trying to sort out fact from fiction and type one versus type two error and incredible and preposterous stories that are clearly not true.
and incredible and preposterous stories that are absolutely true. And the debunking energy of this is fun, it's a hobby, it's a pastime with other people on the other side of this who are not bunko artists, who've come to believe things. Some of those things may be completely false. Some of those things may be confusions. Some of those things may be true and we're going to call them false because they're actually
part of a storyline. For example, you could easily imagine in the UFO case that we would use a UFO cover story to disguise the testing of stealth technology before anyone knew that we were working on it. And if so, if I see a giant black wedge in the sky that looks like no airplane ever and was thin as a pancake,
I would be in need of debunking simply because the government had created a bunko story, I had seen something and then I had to be personally destroyed in order to make sure that the program stayed secret. So I guess, to be blunt about it, I see this as punting the responsibilities of a human being, a scientist and a skeptic to take a side in this. It's like the really difficult thing is decision boundaries, type one versus type two errors,
trying to figure out who's active in trying to bunk things that needs to be debunked, who's confused, who needs to be made unconfused, and who is saying that they're seeing something that needs to be followed up and not necessarily having their reputation destroyed because somebody wants to, in your own words, flex. I don't find the flexing fun. I didn't say flex. You did say flex.
I don't, well, it's not a word I actually use. So, uh, I'd say something about flexing your own, Oh, flexing my muscles, but it's not like flex. I was in like, you know, flexing. Yes, I know. But, uh, for me, flexing actually, you mean it's the same thing as stretching or an exercise. Okay. But right now I just went through exactly one of these moments where I tried to remember something you'd said. And then you told me that you don't use that as a phrase. Then I happened to be, yes, but in a sense, the sense that you meant, no,
I think you did say it in the original sense from which the internet term flex comes from. So I don't think that's even correct. So my point to you is I don't enjoy the feeling in my body right now, which is I've just contradicted you. You assured me that that's not a term that you use. We had perhaps at most a misunderstanding, but the feeling of something
But the feeling of somebody saying, no, you're wrong. And thinking that that's fun. Your initial description of your activities as a hobby. I don't much care for this as a hobby. If it's a duty, because the world is going to be filled up with nonsense. I actually appreciate that. I want to be very clear about that. But the fun of interacting with people, many of whom are scared. I've seen people
close to and filled with tears. I've seen people who feel that their lives have been destroyed because they have made contact with something that they can't talk about. Me too. I want to be very clear here. Like I'm not doing that for fun. When I talk to people and I have a podcast, Tales from the Rabbit Hole, where I talk to people who are believers or experiences or whatever.
And I'm very respectful. And I think the vast majority of people who, who are in that position, who are very upset, you know, there are people who have developed serious, uh, emotional issues because of their experiences. And that's something I very much respect. And I certainly would not in any sense say I'm having fun, uh, debunking that. In fact, there's some people that I prefer not to even talk to because I know that they are, they are so sensitive.
When I'm talking about fun, I'm talking about things like geometry and programming and figuring out what's in this video. And those things should be things that are essentially neutral from a personal perspective. I know some people don't like it, but I try to always keep that personal aspect of it separate. I enjoy talking to people just simply from the interactions with people, but I'm always very sensitive to people's feelings. I haven't enjoyed our interaction.
Well, that's that's perhaps you know, my my interaction style could do with some improvement But you know when I said utterly mine could as well and I look forward to improving. I haven't blocked you I'm just saying that the feeling I've had is I was Effectively lied to that there was absolutely no there there. I believed it What are you referring to?
I thought that in essence, the entire UFO story could just be dismissed with the back of a hand that this is complete nonsense.
I'm with you in a sense on that aspect of it. I think that the UFO story is something that needs investigating. And I think what we have here is something I think that perhaps you have been doing here is kind of simplifying a very complex subject down into like, you know, it's either one thing or the other. Like you would
You were describing my debunking as some kind of calling. I can't remember exactly what you said, but I think you were kind of describing it at a very high level, as if what I am doing is trying to prove that little green men don't exist and that all these people are wrong.
When I look at it, I look at it kind of the micro level, where I am looking at individual cases, I'm trying to figure out what's actually going on in this individual case. Now, someone asked me my opinion about the broader implications of this analogy of that, but that's not my goal. That's not what I'm actually trying to do. And when you're describing what I'm doing, you're describing like, as if I have some kind of big agenda, trying to debunk UFOs as a whole.
I think if you look before two years ago, you'll find no discussion. I discuss almost everything under the sun, zero discussion of UFOs.
I don't think I have any particular history of, Oh, didn't you understand in the, in the go fast video this, but on the Nimitz video, you know, such and such and Fravor said this and, but Lazar said that like this whole world, I'm just not even a part of. Uh, I know that there's somebody with the last name of Greer. I couldn't tell you the first name. I don't know whether they're pro or anti. It's like, I'm really not part of this world. Um, what I have learned is.
that the amount of indirect evidence that something is up and something I have to say when I don't when I say something I don't mean little green men and I mean little green men not as little or green or men but just as the phrase to aliens yeah it's like what could be up could easily be just a disinformation campaign it could be a cover for us a stealth program it's there's something up and
I don't need to please you to tell you what weights are on the branches of the decision tree. I simply need to say, boy, was I confused. This isn't just a bunch of people seeking attention or some sort of promo stunt for a Spielberg film gone wrong. It's quite a bit larger than that. It's a tremendous amount of indirect evidence. The basic puzzle, as I understand it, and again, I'm new here,
is that there is zero convincing direct evidence where there's a chain of custody with the data and it's not only a question of a few seconds of video but very detailed multiple sensor data, everything sort of fits in some kind of a way that you could actually say there's essentially no way of faking this. There's almost none of that.
To my knowledge, there is no convincing proof in the public sphere. So that's the big thing that argues for the fact that this is not about UFOs or in the sense of aliens and little green men and sentient intelligence. The thing that goes in the other direction though, is just how much indirect evidence there is that something has been going on
and how willing we've been to destroy people who've been willing to poke at this and if you believe that the direct evidence argument is effectively a pretty good argument that nothing's here because so many of us have cameras it's kind of amazing that nobody ever captures something that's really really convincing that doesn't make sense to me
If you believe that story, you've got a big problem with the level of indirect evidence. If you believe the indirect evidence, you have the reverse problem. For God's sakes, why is there no absolutely crystal clear data set that has slipped into the public's hands? So whatever your resolution to that puzzle is,
I'm usually in the position where I come up with too many explanations. This is one of the only topics I've ever met where a creative brain can't come up with a single explanation to fit all these data points. Well, I think the reason for it is that there isn't a single explanation and I think it's a mistake to try to look for one. I think there's a lot of things that explain both the actions of government and the military and the various interested parties like, you know, to the stars Academy and people like that.
And there's a variety of explanations for the sightings that people are having, the evidence that arises, and trying to kind of shoehorn it into either one big cluster or one big cover-up. Perhaps there's a degree of both in that. Perhaps the government does use things like UFO stories to allow them to be out there at least for distractions from other things.
and certainly like we know that there's a variety of different interesting parties within the government there are there's infighting there's there's a degree of incompetence which i think you know is kind of endemic anywhere there's corruption there's kind of you know there's back dealing there's people who are doing things for their friends in government
And there's a variety of things and i think it's not going to be simple if we actually figure out what's going on with this whole ufo thing i think you can be looking at hundreds and maybe thousands of different data points that and there won't be like one big smoking gun either way let's just take one category.
of UFO things. So we have mylar balloons and swamp gas and disinformation campaigns and experimental aircrafts and drones and then non-friendly nations blah blah blah. Let's just take everything that is a normal sounding explanation that can account for this and let's take various claimed UFO encounters and attribute those to those explanations that we're all prepared to accept
includes some of the sightings or experiences. Is there anything left over in your opinion that's really unsettled? Because it's a question of overlapping explanations for like, it could be the Chinese, or it could be the Russians, or it could be the Iranians, or it could be swamp gas. It's like, I get that those are all the same style of explanation.
I mean, if the government says they have 143 unsolved or 142 now, the chief scientists just said they solved one yesterday. Those are actually cases that are unsolved, that they were unable to determine what they actually are. And the likely explanation is simply that there isn't enough data. So there's definitely going to be lots of interesting things out there.
They probably fit into one of the categories of things like airborne clutter or atmospheric effects or heavenly bodies or planes and misidentifications, things like that. But we can't determine what they actually are. But what we don't have is what you said earlier, we don't have something that's unambiguously unusual, something that demonstrates advanced aerodynamic capabilities or something that seems to defy the known laws of physics.
But we certainly have lots of unresolved things. I don't think that necessarily means anything. I think that's just something that's inevitable. And I think that when we have more detailed inspections of datasets, it's just going to resolve more things, not resolve, it's going to bring up things like that. RV Loeb's new program, the Project Galileo program,
He's trying to set up these telescopes and these sensors, which will detect when something's there and then they'll zoom in on it and then they'll take photographs of it. And he says, maybe they'll see the, you know, made in made in outer space sticker on it. But probably what's going to happen is just, you're going to get more blurry photos and they will be on undetermined. So it's inevitable. Let's get back to your superposition argument.
We all agree that it's going to be a superposition. That's not the interesting, if it could be Iran or it could be China, that's a superposition of different explanations. No one says that all drones have to come from one country. The key issue isn't superpositions of different mundane categories. The key issue is, is there anything at the moment that argues in your mind
Not in my mind, no. I'm curious as to
Why do people believe weird things? Why do people think that time traveling humans from the future is actually a reasonable explanation? Why do they think that trickster spirits
is a reasonable explanation. I know there's some fairly serious people who use the term trickster as kind of an explanation for UFOs. There's some kind of trickster from another dimension who has come over. Jacques Vallee, I think, is a big proponent of this. And his colleague, I forget his name now, they talk about tricksters. What is it that actually makes people who are at one point
serious scientists go over to thinking that, uh, essentially poltergeists from outer space is a reasonable explanation to things. Now I don't say that to, I mean, that sounds like I'm mocking them, but that's actually the type of things they did.
It does sound like I'm mocking them. Yes, I know, but that's an unfortunate look. I don't want to trap you in Mick. I don't want to trap you in language. If it sounds that way to your ear. Well, it's just real quick. It's real quick. I want to address that point. Like I'm not mocking them. I'm essentially trying to accurately describe their positions. And it's unfortunate that with a lot of these things, if you talk about say flat earth, if you try to describe the position, it comes across as ridiculous.
When someone is using tricksters from another dimension as an explanation for UFOs, it comes across as ridiculous, but it's actually what they say. Let's try this carefully. Let me imagine that you and I are living on North Sentinel Island in the Andaman chain in the Indian Ocean. And I say, you know, I can't help but feel
that there's a bigger world out there and that every time something tries to contact us, there's a force, an unseen force that stops them from making contact. And we've become really belligerent. We keep throwing spears and shooting arrows at anything that approaches our beaches. But I have this feeling that a power exists that is screening all contact and that there's an entire world of people like us and dissimilar from us who want to contact us. And you say,
Oh really? You think there's like a federation that really cares about us and stops us from being contacted and they're tricksters in the sense that they they prevent landings so that we will think that we are isolated and alone in the world and you know I'm trying to describe India and you're making fun of the fact that I'm trying to describe India. I don't have the word India because I've never
spoken a word of Hindi or I don't know that I'm probably an Indian citizen according to the world but North Sentinel Island has one of these problems which is it's got effectively an unseen force called India that acts in some sense as a trickster to make sure that they're not in good Copernican position to be able to observe the world and here I've got Mick West
Talking about this in terms of what sounds ridiculous because it is ridiculous and the answer is no, it's not ridiculous at all No, it's not. But if I was on North Sentinel Island, I would be pointing out all the evidence that we have For this thing, you know, we see contrails from jets flying overhead. We see boats Occasionally people come and they land on the island and there's trouble. So we've got a lot of evidence that
I believe that we have evidence both for and against
active visitation by intelligent life that we do not perceive as any of our own civilization. Not very good evidence. They have very good evidence on North Central Ireland because they can actually see people. They can actually see things like planes. They can see boats. You know, very often in, in science experiments, I've watched people throw out the outliers because they have a feeling that you're allowed to throw out the outliers. And sometimes the outliers are bad pieces of information.
This occurs in, you know, the tau theta puzzle story that Richard Feynman tells about the asymmetry of the weak force. And sometimes, you know, sometimes it's real information, sometimes it's an artifact of the environmental setup. What outliers do you think are being thrown out of the UFO sphere? What outliers do you think are being thrown out of the UFO sphere? We don't have like amazing videos that are just being thrown out because they're... Well, I think you and I are disagreeing about something more fundamental.
My feeling is that there's a sort of debunking energy versus a scientific energy. I kind of like debunking, to be honest, when it's your great aunt's poltergeist in her second home. There's a story about a kid who committed suicide in 1913 and now haunts the house.
I don't want to have to deal with that stuff scientifically. I don't want to have to write an NSF grant and get the University of Puget Sound involved or whatever. There's a role for debunking and then there's the problem of the debunkers and I think we have to actually talk about debunking as kind of an anti-social negative movement. I want to
Sorry. I think that's ridiculous though. I think that's frankly, I think it's ridiculous because you know, I, I identify as a debunker. Uh, you know, I've said there are problems with that term. So unless you're talking about somebody else, I assume you're talking about me. No, no, no. I'm talking about there's a movement of people, right? All right. So do you see me as being part of that movement? Well, you've been curious in my mind, you're certainly,
And again, I'm not angling for anything in particular. I'm not a takedown artist. I don't love interpersonal conflict. It feels to me like in the world of debunkers, and I've now met them in multiple fields, you are one of the most disciplined, and to be honest, one of the most charitable that I've met. Now, so this isn't principally about Mick West.
The problem that I have with this as a movement, first of all, skepticism doesn't pay very well. I've talked to Michael Shermer about this. It's very hard to do the yeoman's work of skepticism and make it entertaining. So the problem with most of the skeptic movement is that you start off trying to say, look, I'm just trying to keep the crap out of science so that we can have a conversation. It's not always
Cluttered with somebody's ghost stories or whatnot. Okay, so that's very important particularly with respect to religion religion always wants to intrude Then you get into this problem, which is you have to spice up your skepticism because it's not really Tremendously entertaining so that's when you typically get snark you get condescension you get stigma and All of those things tend to chase good people out of these discussions
much the way good people are chased out of politics. There's an idea that politics belongs to people who don't mind having five private investigators scurrying about over their life to interview every ex-boyfriend or girlfriend, you know, to dig up any dirt to be printed on the front page of the New York Times. My feeling about this is a lot of us who would like to run for office, like to see other people run for office, are very angry
that the political crowd is taking this over and it's like, if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Well, the same thing is true with UFOs. My feeling is I want to hear from a lot more people. And one of the things that I want, no, I want to hear from a lot more people. And one of the things that I want them to know is that there are smart, caring people who, as long as they're not telling some BS story, and as long as they're willing to reconsider their views, don't need to be debunked.
Because that stigma is antithetical to science. Well, just be careful what you agreed to because I don't want to... It all sounds good so far, except for the implications. Why don't you recapitulate what Eric said so that we can see if there is indeed agreement? Well, I think Eric is saying essentially that there's a certain type of
Criticism of various fields and we're talking about UFO in particular here the type of criticism that is identified as the debunking community that has a stifling effect like a negative effect the chilling effect.
Which prevents discussion because people feel like they're being attacked. They feel like they're being ridiculed. People don't like that. A lot of people involved have a deeply emotional connection to it. And so they're not going to come forward if they feel that they are going to be ridiculed. And I agree that that is a problem. And I think in the broader sense, it's been a problem at the government level.
and that historically the government has basically completely ignored the UFO issue. If you look at what the FAA was doing, say, even just 10 years ago, they basically said, call this paranormal hotline. It was a UFO hotline, but it still went to a site which also dealt with ghosts and things like that. So there has been this kind of ridicule
of the issue and I really don't think that I or indeed most skeptics who actually look into UFOs are really part of that type of ridicule. We actually investigate cases in great depth. We do the math, we do the work, we sometimes go out and do the field work, we do recreation experiments, we try to figure things out. I've interviewed lots of eyewitnesses and I do it with the greatest respect and I trust
What they are telling me is what they believe to be true. So I would really welcome
Why would you trust them? I would imagine that some of those people are not to be trusted in their attention. Trust is simply my default position. I usually assume from the start that people are going to tell the truth because that's been my experience that most people do. Now that has burnt me in the past a little bit. People will do overtures to you and then they'll turn around.
But most of the time you catch more flies with honey and not going to catch flies is probably a poor analogy, but it's I I I'm naturally a nice guy. I when I talk to people, you know, I Emphasize with them and I understand but you know, it's it's a difficult thing to talk about So well, let me ask you I don't have the sense that
there's any real reason for any animosity between you and myself, to be honest at all. Why do I have the takeaway of what are you doing in my timeline? In other words, I would imagine that in a slightly different world, universe a prime rather than a where we live, you and I would be naturally allied on this topic. And yeah,
We're scientists, scientific type people who have a natural skepticism of things. Okay. So I didn't come looking for you and then multiple times you've sort of entered in and you're, you know, you're talking in specific about Lou Elisando and somebody who I think I've never mentioned the name Chris Mellon. I hope I'm that it's Chris Mellon. I can't remember everybody's name. He's the government official who's part of the whole invisible college type thing. Okay.
So what is it that you perceive me as doing that needs to be sort of minded? Well, you make bold, declarative statements about this, you know, this is a huge deal. I believe this is the thing where I started to interact with you that you thought it was like a huge deal that either there are some kind of advanced technology flying around that we don't know what it is, or there's some kind of big
You know, cluster, starting with Harry Reid. Yeah, I can't remember exactly what you said, but I think you were something along those lines. And I think at the time I was basically saying what I am saying now that it is more complicated than that. And the reason I interacted with you and I probably wouldn't with just some sort of random person is that you have reach. You know, you've got a lot of followers, you've got a very popular podcast, you've written books, you're quite well known, and people take what you said,
and you become a hero within the UFO community and they listen to what you said. So I feel it needs addressing. Eric's written a book. I haven't gotten the coffee. It's a secret invisible book. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. So Mick, I stand by my statement. This is a huge big deal. And I don't mean this UFOs. I mean, this decision tree has no boring branch.
Yeah, I'm actually kind of in a little way coming around a little bit more to that than I was at the time when I first disagreed with you. First of all, I really appreciate you saying that. Yeah, well, it's not not in a victory lap kind of a way just in terms of evolution. Yeah, I have no problem changing my opinion when new data arrives.
Well, let me explain why I've kind of come around a little bit. I think it's really being the increasing looks behind the curtain that we've been having, I guess, over the last year and actually culminating just a couple of days ago. And you probably didn't have a chance to look at it. I sent the email yesterday about Travis Taylor, the chief scientist at the UAP Task Force.
And he's someone who was hired by the lead of the UAP Task Force to be the chief scientist. And he contributed to this UAP report that we're all familiar with. But he's also the chief scientist on a TV show, The Secrets of Skinwalker Ranch. And he's also been a visiting scientist on other things like ancient aliens. And he had a TV show called Red Net Rockets, I think, or Backyard Rockets scientists. He's, he's
really very unexpected as the choice of someone who wants to be neutrally investigating UFOs. Because on the one hand, he's at Skinwalker Ranch on TV, basically promoting the idea that there's some kind of weird interdimensional tricksters coming through and doing weird things at Skinwalker Ranch. Also at the same time,
He's supposed to be soberly investigating the evidence and writing UAP reports and briefing Congress. It really doesn't make any sense. And I was frankly, I was flabbergasted when the news broke a couple of days ago that he was in fact the chief scientist. Do you know this person? I've talked to him a little bit online, but I don't know him personally, no.
So I have spoken to Eric Baird, who is out there on that Skinwalker Ranch History Channel project. And I've spoken to Brandon, who I know a little bit, who owns the ranch. Yeah. I've spoken to Brandon too. Pardon me? I interviewed him for my podcast. I interviewed Brandon for my podcast. We're kind of friendly on Twitter too. Yeah.
I have to tell you that part of their problem is that they believe, and I don't think they're lying to me, I could be wrong. I'm going to be careful about this. I believe that they think they've seen enough weird stuff that it's effectively almost impossible to keep this air of detachment going. And if you look carefully on Travis's statements,
He basically has gotten to the point where he's like, we've seen so much weird stuff here. I never would have believed this two summers ago, but this and that. He's still careful to say we don't know what's going on, but he's certainly decamped into a position where he's saying, I've now seen so much weird unexplainable stuff that I cannot
affect the same position of studied neutrality that would occur before I tutored my Bayesian prior. And this is not necessarily a knock against him. In other words, I have been told by multiple people who do not strike me as charlatan, I only wish you'd seen what we have because we're wasting time in this conversation.
Now I have noted on social media that I am tired of being told that I'm going to be shown something. And then like Lucy in the football, I never managed to make contact with the football. And as a science, as a PhD in STEM, I feel duty bound to report that I have been spun up several times only to be wound down and told that it's got to be deferred because of some meeting or some change in plans. So,
I have no idea whether this outreach is a form of disinformation in which well-meaning individuals are constantly put in some sort of tantalus-like situation. Was one of those invitations to go to Skinwalker? I've had multiple invitations to go to Skinwalker from Brandon. And have you taken up on that? No, I haven't. And for reasons that you may find amusing.
One of the things that I did was consult with some people about the safety issues of this UFO stuff. And they said things that I wasn't really prepared for. One of which particular individual said to me, there is absolute tissue damage that we can record that comes out of stories of encounters
and you make what you want of the encounter story, but it is completely consistent with our biopsies and our understanding of what cell death has occurred, which I found really interesting. I mean here I'm talking to published scientists. It sounds like evidence. It sounds like evidence.
But my point would be whether or not I understand that as aliens or whether or not I understand that is that there's a uranium deposit or who knows what, I don't know enough about secret weapons or geology or who knows what, you know, I do know that I've been warned that
Bad things happen to people who get too close to some of this stuff.
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Well, it doesn't stop them filming a TV show. Brandon actually invited me. It may not stop me from going out either. Yeah. No, Brandon has invited me. Maybe we should go together and then we can compare notes. Brandon has invited me and I have not. I recently reached out to him to try to take up on him, but he's being like busy and hasn't really got back to me yet. But you know, I would still like to go to Skinwalker. And if you're interested, I'm potentially willing to consider it.
Off air, I asked Mick if he would be willing to engage in so-called CE5, that is Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind, if someone offered to perform it with him, and time was sufficiently limited, travel paid for, it was done by someone known for their consistency and disregard, etc., as this is a technique which purportedly, reliably induces quote-unquote contact.
There's some topics I would love to actually hear your take on as an expert because I'm not one.
One thing I found very distressing about this whole topic is I was willing to reconsider my UFO position separately from attended positions, which I don't really want to get into. So the first thing that's very hard to separate off is this cattle mutilation claim. Right? So in other words, you think you just want to talk about, um,
Actually, I'll go in later to the issue about why I'm interested in UFOs for scientific reasons. But some that you just want to talk about UFOs, you get into cattle mutilation, and then you get into progressively weirder and weirder sounding stuff that I'm not excited about. The least exciting thing for me is this remote viewing stuff. Right?
It's interesting from a historical perspective, from the actions of the government. The government did research into remote viewing and in reaction to the Russians doing research into remote viewing, I believe back in the 50s or 60s, Project Stargate. And this was a real thing. So I think, you know, even though it's something that sounds kind of somewhat ridiculous, it's something that's actually bubble this way to the top in a way that, you know, UFOs are bubbling their way up now. It's something that's
If the door is open for UFOs being a real phenomenon, whatever place brackets and to say it's an extraordinary phenomenon, then why does that not open the door to other extraordinary phenomenon, which is also attested to by high ranking individuals and there are government studies
such as remote viewing. Why is it provoking an unfavorable reaction from you? I don't know whether you saw my interaction with how put off on the topic of predicting the markets. Yeah, why don't you? Well, no, it was a bit more subtle than that. His claim was that he was able to predict the markets in order to effectively replace a bake sale or something at a local school.
And by getting 10%, he could make somebody else, I forget, $260,000 and he could get $26,000, which is all he needed. Then he stopped predicting the markets. The typical energy around that would go like, dude, if you could become rich, why wouldn't you do it? Right? That's not my energy. My energy is different. My energy is if you could do this reliably, you could settle so many debates.
By proving like you assume you don't care about money and assume whatever this that and the other thing. You do care about credibility and you could increase your credibility by inviting people onto your private jet to take you to your private islands, et cetera, et cetera, by just doing this relentless. And then that conversation didn't go anywhere. Now, if you notice in Jesse's cut of that interaction,
I stayed on that point doggedly and he cut a lot of it out, but you see him say this thing where he says like, I think we've, I think we've addressed this issue. But I was always trying to be polite. I was not trying to take Hal to task in a way that let him look ridiculous. I was, you know, I, I find this claim disturbing.
Like you, I don't want to let these claims in if they cloud our judgment. It's very important to me that we not have nonsense claims. I don't want to say he's a liar. I don't want to say I believe this to be true. I don't know what to make of it. I'm probably backing off of it before I do more damage. I don't like these other claims, Kurt, because the cattle mutilations are the ones that are closest to sounding like UFOs.
And the remote viewing sounds like a different force carrier. In other words, if you imagine that you want current, where are you currently Toronto Toronto and Mick, you are in Sacramento Sacramento. So somehow we're all having this conversation on a screen in real time almost. And this is only possible because of photons and electrons.
Imagine that there are new force carriers like photons that can be used to transmit information that can go through, I don't know, seawater or who knows what. It's possible that you could get a new physics to explain remote viewing and that microtubules are, you know, antenna in the brain and blah, blah, blah. It's not completely outside of the realm of possibility, but it's also pretty far-fetched, right? And,
It's important to be able to say this sounds like total nonsense without necessarily needing to destroy somebody in the process.
I think your polite questioning of Hal Putov was the right thing. You were pressuring him there. And it's not really about why don't you use this to make loads of money because you could very easily give a reason why you don't need the money. It's why don't you demonstrate this amazing new physics or this amazing new phenomena to science. If remote viewing was actually a demonstrable thing,
It would be one of the most incredible revolutions in science ever really. It would be, as you describe, perhaps a new force of physics, an entirely new understanding of consciousness and the brain. It would be a big deal. And yet Hal Puthoff is just like, I kind of got bored of doing that and didn't took too much time. I wanted to do other things. It was, it seemed ridiculous. I couldn't understand the answers that came back. Yeah. Yeah.
Mick, do you see remote viewing as equally far-fetched as taking UFOs seriously as some extra ordinary phenomenon? I see it as equally unbased in evidence. If it's something that could be done, it would be huge. And to that extent, you can understand why people in the military, perhaps people with a little bit of magical thinking, went for it. If you hear that the Russians are doing something and they're having success doing something, obviously the
Let me come up with a more plausible explanation. We know that, for example, Leon Theremin, who discovered capacitance as a musical instrument, which bears his name,
was in the Sharyashka prison system, which is these country club prisons for like stem geniuses to work on Soviet projects while in prison. And he came up with, if I'm not mistaken, a means of watching the vibrations of a window pane and using it as a microphone so that you could tell what was going on in the U.S. embassy, for example.
And I believe there was also a plaque that was a listening device. Imagine you had lots of ways in to listening to the Americans inside of the Russian embassy, more broadly. I would easily think about developing remote viewing as an explanation for how could they have known that, right? It could be a fine cover story because you would actually be able to tell what conversation somebody was having in private.
As a result. They're using magic to explain the way their own incompetence in a way that that plaque that you referred to was was on the wall for I think several years before they discovered it had a microphone in it. And so they know that secrets were getting out. And rather than actually go down the actual real route of like sweeping their embassy for bugs. They started perhaps you know, this this kind of magical thinking that remote viewing was real and we should investigate it.
So in such a case, I would understand why there would be a story. And this is one of the reasons that I think a lot of these stories got formed in a time before the internet. And so the problem with a story like this is that you can, it was easier to keep brittle structures of narrative together before there were so many people chiming in and you could crowdsource data or understandings of
What was going on? And that's what's happening. I think to a degree now with whenever the secret evidence comes out, it gets examined by a very large number of people and quite often gets resolved. And when that happens, it essentially reveals the incompetence
of the people who have been looking into it. There's this green triangle video that's been knocking around for quite some time. Your lens aperture pointer. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it's basically been a hundred percent conclusively shown that this is just an artifact of the camera and that the vast majority of the green triangles in this video were just stars. And yet we have statements and leaks that say that they thought that these
stars in the sky that appear triangular were actually some kind of flying craft and even some kind of flying triangular craft. But when it gets released, and especially the high quality video, when that gets released, it's pretty much apparent what it is to people who are familiar with these things. So someone made the argument that perhaps they're not releasing this data partly because they don't want to be shown up. They're afraid of
The things being solved and then looking stupid, which is kind of what happened with this green triangle thing, you know, the the lead scientist of the task force, Travis Taylor, he didn't think that they were they were stars.
And then I kind of explained it to him in a bit more detail and now he's changed his mind and now he thinks that they are. But, you know, for years, the UAP task force was laboring under this misapprehension that these flying things were green triangles when they were in fact identifiable stars that we can name and show on a star map. So there's a real issue there of cover your ass, which might be cooling things down a little. Well, one of my questions is why do we not have our best people
And this was my point, I think, where you and I came in contact in some sense in Twitter, where I was saying, if somebody is claiming that we cannot control airspace that is sensitive from a military perspective,
Is that what they're claiming though? I mean, they're not claiming we can't control it. They're claiming that we occasionally see things in there that we can't identify and we haven't determined that they are under control by an intelligent entity. So it's more of an issue of we have clutter in our airspace and we don't know what it is. You and I have heard different things. I have heard that we cannot control our airspace, that these things are not that uncommon, that
These are actually much more frequently found near sensitive military installations and exercises. They can potentially turn off and on nuclear devices. Well, these are claims beyond... How do I even put this? One of the things that you don't know about in this world until you actually start talking to people
is which of these stories are highly conserved through people who don't seem to even know each other. So for example, let me just take two sets of triangular pyramid-like issues. There is apparently a configuration of a craft, like people who chart these things say,
that a lot of these UFOs look very dissimilar but that there are clusters of things that seem to be highly conserved over decades. One of these conserved things is supposed to be a flat equilateral triangle with three lights in it slightly recessed from its vertices with rounded points. Then you have this thing with the fact that
The way that these lenses open and close is with, you know, some sort of, and Nick, you'll have the right terminology for these sort of interlinked. Yes, the leaves of the iris. I didn't have the word leaves. So that somehow the leaves create triangles, and then you have this
Confluence
I have heard many of these stories now from pretty sober people. And I would never have heard any of these stories until I was willing to make myself stupidly vulnerable to this topic saying, geez, I thought this was all BS. Having now opened myself to that, I cannot explain how many highly conserved stories I've heard from various people that
don't show any interest in being public, don't seem to be happy about the fact that they have pieces of information that distress them. It's pretty weird for, yeah. But I think, you know, this is something that has historically been the case. And I think it perhaps might tell us something more about people than about what's going on up in the sky. There was a famous ufologist, J. Allen Heineck,
who used to be a debunker for the government. And his job was really to investigate things and figure out what they were and explain them to the public. But over time, he became convinced that there was something to it. And he largely became convinced from the eyewitness accounts of a number of people. But on the way there, he did a lot of research into how easy it is for people to make mistakes. And he interviewed a lot of people who were very convinced that they saw something
But he also managed to resolve what it was that they actually saw. And this is something that we see time and time again, that people are deeply convinced that their memory or their perception of an event is very accurate. And they did in fact see some kind of equilateral triangle block out the stars. But sometimes it can be resolved if you actually have enough information into something like a blimp or a plane or a flock of birds. Have you ever heard Brandon's story?
Yeah, where there's suddenly the people seem to be paralyzed and right over the mesa, not very many feet from his head is a giant floating metallic structure.
I mean, yeah, it's fascinating. Where does that, where does that come from? It's, uh, is, is there something there or is it, you know, did he, did he imagine it? Is it a dream? Is it hallucination? Is there some kind of weird gas in the air that's making him do these things? These, these are valid questions. I think he told that story at a dinner. I was at two, maybe there were 12, 15 people at the dinner. At the end of the dinner, we walk out.
And I'm standing around with maybe 10 of those people. Brandon is not an evidence. And we talked about many things and I said, well, what did you guys think of the dinner? And nobody brought up the fact that a businessman who seems to be ostensibly normal oriented towards family and real estate and all these things just described an unfakable
encounter i mean you know it could have been that a small amount of very weird dmt got into his kombucha but on the other hand um probably not i just don't know what that story corresponds to it's too vivid too clear it's too unlike other things
I think that the reaction you described there is interesting to me from the other people, but perhaps also from Brendan himself. I always kind of, I'm reminded by a thing in medicine called la belle indifference, which the beautiful indifference, which is a medical term for people who have essentially somatic injuries, like they believe that their hand is paralyzed or that they're blind in one eye, but that they're not, but they're kind of indifferent to it. And
it is that kind of inexplicable indifference to something that you would think they would, would be a big deal that you see quite often in UFOs and the people who see them, they, they, you know, they're getting on with their lives that, Oh yeah, I saw a UFO once. And if I saw a UFO, that'd be the biggest thing ever. That was the amazing thing in my life. Even if someone told me that I trusted about, you know, told me a story that would be, Whoa, that is amazing. And why is this guy talking about this? You would think there would be some kind of reaction.
It's almost like there's a little, I don't know, attention blindness or something. Have you ever had a near death experience? Like a really, I have not. No. Yeah. It wears off really quickly. Like right after you have it, you think, Oh my God, I'm so happy to be alive. You make all these plans of what you're going to do. And in two weeks you're just back to normal. Yes. Yes. I've had things like that with an illness where during the illness is the worst thing ever. And your world is collapsing.
And then you get better at it. Whatever. Whatever. So I understand that people can screen this out. But what I'm trying to say is that by making this stuff outre, stuff that cannot be discussed, pushing it outside the overton window, we're screwing up the science. And I don't do many of these. I really hate interpersonal drama. And so in general, I avoid these
I'm worried that you're screwing up the Overton window when we need to be dragging it more open so we get more information. And the idea that this can be debunked before it's really understood speaks to me of how I would
handle faith healing where somebody's trying to separate older people from their money by claiming that a laying on of hands can replace their health care. I think, I think again, you're, you're oversimplifying it and saying, I'm trying to debunk the whole subject. Sure. If it was faith healing, that would be a valid argument that I would be trying to debunk faith healing. Cause I think faith healing, perhaps other than a placebo effect is nonsense, but UFOs, I think represent a variety of different things.
And I think there's a possibility that some of them are, you know, perhaps interesting technology from other countries and a very small possibility that it's, uh, aliens and an even smaller one that it's because the door is open. So let me get my foot wedged in it. Like a good, uh, encyclopedia salesman from days of old. What if, what if aliens were real? Uh, it doesn't have to be aliens. Could be, yeah, could be us.
Yeah, no, if there was something there in terms of advanced technology, that would be very, very interesting. Why do you say technology? Because, you know, if it's not technology, it's going to be magic. And I think technology is kind of the thing to come through first. Oh, you're talking about the, you know, perhaps like some kind of weird government cover up type thing. No, no, no, no, no. Slow it down. Okay. I'm mostly interested in this ultimately because of science.
technology. I don't think that I know anything about there. There's no reason that this has to involve new science. But if I saw somebody explode an atomic weapon before the neutron was discovered, I'd search for the neutron. Sure.
So the neutron was discovered in 1932, which I keep thinking about my aunt is older than the discovery of the neutron. What's interesting here is assume for the moment that that slim possibility that you and I both acknowledge exists that we could be looking at alien technology, but it would be built on science. We don't have not technology because people keep freezing Einstein in, which has become very distressing to me.
You cannot go faster than the speed of light within Einstein's construct. But Einstein's construct is the map, not the territory. We don't know whether a better map allows us to do things that are prohibited on this map, but not necessarily with a better understanding of reality. So if this were,
technology based on new science held by some civilization that we don't know anything about could be us from the future could be somebody from neighboring galaxies who knows what it's hugely consequential scientifically and one of the things that causes me to despite wanting to get on with you and understand each other better you know also sort of push back relatively forcefully
is I don't want that window stigmatized anymore. It's like, it's enough. Sure. Well, I think with the technology versus science question, I'm kind of in the why not both camp. New science is great and new technology would indicate new science, but new technology is also an implementation of that understanding of those scientific principles, which in itself would be useful and interesting. They should be clear about why I'm saying it.
There's a general tilt away from science towards technology, and there are two hijacked conversations. One is that every time we end up talking about this, it goes to the technology discussion, because markets have been hot and science, in particular physics, has been kind of stagnant for a long time. And that means that people
inadvertently start thinking about new technology from old science if we don't actually keep talking about science. The other thing is that Elon has more or less taken an imperative, which is that humans figure out whether we can stop sharing one planet and one atmosphere in order to diversify our risk and turned it into a conversation about SpaceX and Mars.
And in both cases, what we're doing is we're taking away from a very real conversation, which is we've got a potential situation with a dictator who's invaded a neighboring country as if the 20th century had never happened in Europe of all places.
right next to Article 5 territory. This is extremely dangerous. And if human beings don't take the message from COVID and from Putin in Ukraine, that we better try to figure out whether we can spread out because anything like an airborne respiratory virus or radiation can cover the planet very quickly. We're in trouble. So it's very important to me to prop the window open to, is it possible to leave this place?
And the chief reason that we are unlikely to be able to leave this place, and thus we are likely to die in relatively short order due to our technological prowess and our lack of wisdom, is the Einsteinian limit on travel. Now, it's very hard to prop that window open because people have frozen Einstein in and Elon
And those two individuals have changed this conversation. The Einsteinian contribution means we always talk about is faster than light possible, which we shouldn't be talking about. We talk about wormholes. We talk about Alcubierre drives. We talk about time dilation and multi-gen. We talk about uploading into silicon. All of these things are useless. On the other front, Elon has focused us in the diversity conversation
to diversify from all on Earth to all on Earth plus Mars, as if we're going to terraform Mars before Elon turned 60. And both of these are very dangerous conversations when we have a very narrow hope of asking, should we be looking to figure out whether there's something beyond Einstein which gives us possibilities beyond Einstein?
So this is one of the reasons I'm most interested in the Overton window here, which is if Einstein's restrictions persist to the ultimate theory, we're in a lot of trouble. It means we're probably not going anywhere, and our only hope is to stabilize this planet, which I don't see much hope in doing given how powerful we've become.
We have to get away from technology and from rockets and from Elon and from Einstein. If we're going to actually turn this into a legitimate question, which is, is there anywhere we can actually go or as is likely the case, we're stuck here. And I think again, why not in the, why not both camps there? It's, uh, you know, obviously we need to develop our technology and yes, it would be great if we had more adventurous explorations of physics.
I want people who think they have UFO data to be welcomed scientifically and not stigmatized and made to feel as if they're aberrant freaks.
If people have UFO data, I think I personally am very happy to look at that data. I'm not just going to dismiss it out of hand. I'm going to analyze it. Uh, no, I guess the question you're raising there is should other scientists be looking at this with some degree of seriousness? And yeah, there's, there's an issue that there is this stigma in science. Uh, but I think that stigma is, is largely well founded because of all the ridiculous stuff that comes along with, with UFOs.
And I think if there was some good evidence, then people like the UAP task force would have actually brought it forward and actually done something with it. Where are our top physicists? I don't know. You're a top physicist. Well, you're a physicist. I don't know where you are in the world rankings, but I'm actually a mathematician.
I don't know anybody in the top physics community who knows what the hell is going on. Yeah. Well, nobody knows what's going on. So it's not like, you know, they've been given the evidence and they've studied it and they've determined that there's nothing is going on. It's that the evidence, the evidence isn't really very good. What is the fact that our top people don't have the evidence indicative of something?
I don't know. I think from my perspective, I think it's more likely that the evidence doesn't rise to the level where you would be able to justify bringing in outside people. Now if it's something like the Manhattan Project where they brought in a whole bunch of scientists, there's a lot of motivation there.
There was a lot of reason to believe that the race for the atomic bomb was a very important matter of national survival. But with UFOs, the base level of evidence doesn't really seem to be there. We don't have this huge push that would be justified if there was actually this evidence of new technology or new physics out there which would be worth trillions of dollars. Instead we get these stupid little programs with 22 million dollars. Hear that sound?
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It doesn't make any sense. It seems like they might even not really be, they almost might be decoys for relatively small amounts of money. Are you familiar with the history that brought in the great topologist Solomon Lefschitz and Bryce DeWitt
and Peter Higgs and Lewis Whitten together, where there were two very weird efforts, one nakedly anti-gravity by a guy named Babson. No, I'm not very familiar with that, but I've heard you talk about it before, the kind of this secret gravity research. Yeah. So there was a very weird thing whereby in the 1950s,
There was, if you look at Feynman's popular books, there's a story called Any Questions, where he gets a black eye in a bar that was frequented by bookies and prostitutes. What he's actually talking about is that he was going to Buffalo from Cornell to an aerospace company to deliver lectures. And there's this weird confluence between aerospace
what's known as the Golden Age of General Relativity and all of these top scientists that's never made a wit of sense, which almost certainly seems like there was some sort of program run through a couple of individuals named Babson and Bainson, which is extremely confusing, to bring a small cadre of leading scientists to discuss
something that sounds like anti-gravity in the guise of discussing general relativity anew. Right. And I would dearly like to know what that program actually was. Yeah. And I would like more of us to be talking openly because we know, for example, that Solomon Leschetz was affiliated with this crazy gravity research foundation.
Is there a bunch of like classified documents about that that people have been trying to get or is there just nothing there? Cause it seems to me like David Kaiser at MIT, the physicist and historian would probably be the best person to answer that. I've never gotten at this nor have I put in the time or the energy. I've just noted that for some reason, suddenly in the 1950s, general relativity, which had been asleep since the late teens wakes up as a field.
There's a conference at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, which Feynman attends, which all of this seems to be spurred by two individuals. One of which creates what's called the Research Institute for Advanced Study to make it sound like the Institute for Advanced Study. The other is something called like something the Institute for the Study of Physical Fields at UNC, North Carolina, Chapel Hill. And there's some weird thing between the Martin
aircraft company, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, a bunch of these sorts of things. And I never even heard anyone talk about them to put it all together until I talked to Kaiser and I said, am I losing my mind? He's like, no, no, no, this is this really weird history where the great, I mean, just to put a weird period on it, the
top mind in theoretical physics is the son of the leading anti-gravity researcher from the 1950s. It's a very bizarre state of affairs. I guess you got to try to think what what might have actually happened there. And from my perspective, it kind of the most likely hypothesis and just floating this out there is that there was a research program into something that was quite extraordinary. But it didn't pan out.
in the same way that Project Stargate was a research program into remote viewing. This is obviously a bit more hard science, but it was something they thought, oh, the Russians are going to be looking into this type of thing. We too should form a working group, maybe two working groups, and try to figure out if we can figure out what they figured out. And they look into it, but the same way that Stargate, nothing happened, nothing happens there. But it's classified, stays classified, and it's a mystery.
No technology that we know of is antigravity. Nothing apparently came from it, unless there's this weird parallel track of science that is going on. Antigravity may be a head fake, which means that it's really just post-spacetime physics. It's now become very fashionable in theoretical physics.
to say that space-time is the problem, and that it's doomed as a concept, and that what we're looking for is the successor to Einstein's fabric for reality. It may be that anti-gravity is a really bad name for something, to make it sound junky, but what we're really talking about, and particularly the presence of left-shets, is very interesting here.
that what we may be discussing is a post-Romanian or pseudo-Romanian understanding of space time, just a geometric replacement. Yeah, and I heard you talk on Brian Keating's show about how you thought that might be kind of related to UFOs in a way, and that whatever the UFOs are kind of represents someone who has access to that higher level understanding that's above space time.
Yeah. Or it could be that it's all nonsense and it's all disinformation. I mean, look, I'm very open minded about this. I was in a discussion with Sam Harris not too long ago and he said that one of the characteristics that he had noticed that differentiate us is that he tends to be very closed on the way in relative to my openness on the way in, but that he notes that I don't tend to slide all the way down the slippery slope to say, yeah, it's definitely aliens and
What I'm trying to do is really to keep that possibility open that what we're talking about is we're talking about a science program, not a technology program, not a defense program that has technological and military and security implications. Yeah, I'm all for keeping everything on the table. And this is part of my general philosophy of investigations. I'm glad to hear that.
that I would, uh, I would keep like, you know, uh, some kind of advanced technology, new physics, uh, or, um, or aliens or even things like, um, you know, say the simulation hypothesis, you know, perhaps these things are a glitch in the matrix. Yeah. It's a possibility. Uh, it doesn't seem like there's any good evidence for it, but it's something that you, why not consider that? Why not have all these things in the mix? Cause if you're closing off,
various things, you might close off things by accident. Okay, so look, there are minor branches of the decision tree that I find so remote is to say that I, you know, I really don't want to spend time on it. But what I'm asking time on it, what you keep it around. Well, I guess what I'm asking is, do you see any banal branches of this decision tree that are still alive?
Yeah, well, I think that there's a very big branch of the decision tree that does not involve, you know, extraordinary flying craft. I think there's a large possibility, there's a large possibility that all the UFO encounters have essentially simple explanations.
And in those simple explanations, I would include things like experimental aircraft by the US government and perhaps occasionally experimental aircraft by other governments. But the vast majority are going to be things like airborne clutter, people misidentifying things, people having hallucinations from stress, like fighter pilots who have been in the air for a real long time, things like that. And I think that is
Definitely the avenue of this decision tree of what things might be that I go down and I think it's likely to be a decision tree that has very many leaves that's probably not the right way of putting it because it's still like you end up with one leaf, but you don't. There's all these different things. You're going to end up with a branch that has lots of leaves.
And all of these things are contributing to what we actually see. People see things that are optical illusions, like this triangle thing, like a DC-8 looks exactly like a triangle because it has a light on each wingtip and a red one in the middle. And it looks like a triangle with three lights on the corners and a red thing in the middle. So that probably accounts for a bunch of those. There's lots and lots of different things. And then there's also this other layer of it, which is this government
The pressure from the invisible college these people who are really into it and the government people in government who are either somewhat corrupt to getting kickbacks or whatever and the people pay them to do things or they just have interest themselves always complicated layers of things going on that doesn't really involve.
some vast new hidden parallel track of science or defense departments like science program or aliens or time travelers or anything like that. So I would keep those things as possibilities, but it seems like to me everything is probably going to be in this big old branch over here. Okay. Airborne clutter.
I have this feeling that we're well beyond airborne clutter. I do not. It's the number one thing that they list on the UAP report. It's also the one thing that they actually solved was a balloon and it's something that Scott Bray mentioned in the hearing. This is something that comes up as a problem over and over again. People see airborne clutter is too far away. They mentioned four branches. They mentioned airborne clutter,
They mentioned atmospheric effects. They mentioned our technology, and they mentioned the technology of others. And I've gone through this in terms of the first two are things unintentionally in the air. The next things are... No, the first one includes drones, which actually is an intentional thing. That's what I'm trying to say. It's not airborne clutter. Yeah. Right. So the point is, is that the first two branches
The first question is things that are unintentionally in the air or clutter an atmosphere. The next branch is things produced by sentient life that are intended to be in the air, and that branches into us, not us, and then other.
Therefore is alarmingly interesting because it's not airborne clutter. It's not unintentionally in the air. It's intentionally in the air and it's not us and it's not anybody known to us. So my question to you, Mick, is do you believe that there's enough Mylar balloons, swamp gas, Venus on the horizon, et cetera, et cetera, to effectively remove just about everything from
I wish you wouldn't say swamp gas because that's kind of, you know, it's a red herring, a straw man. Let me throw it out. It was used to explain one case in the fifties or sixties and it became like a joke in the same way that seagulls have become a joke. Look, I just got here. I don't think it's all
Seagulls and Mylar balloons. Can I say that? Yeah, I don't think it's all about Seagulls, Mylar balloons, like plastic bags and drones are the things that were in the airborne clutter thing by the government. That does not explain everything. I mean, I think there's even categories that they haven't listed there, like distant planes, which are a huge source of UFOs. My sense of it is just from people coming forth out of the woodwork to me,
The stories I've now heard of encounters are so far beyond plastic bags and seagulls. And again, I'm not, if you told me that there was like a huge theater troupe that was out to convince us that this stuff was real, sure. But I can't process
I don't think there's enough Mylar balloon in the world to explain all the weird stuff going on. No, I don't think they're all things like that. I mean, there's a bunch of other things as well. It is simple optical illusions. Like a lot of what people see, they see at night and they describe things like large things moving overhead or giant craft. Uh, and people's perceptions of things can be completely off from reality. Uh, and I think you've got to really, you know, this is, this is kind of a sore point in ufology.
is this, this huge discrepancy between the eyewitness testimony and the recorded evidence, uh, things like videos. You know, a lot of these encounters happen during the day and people describe seeing things in daytime, but somehow they're always too surprised to actually take a, take a video or when they do take a video, it doesn't really show something like what they were describing because they say, Oh, it was a little bit further away now.
So I think eyewitness testimony, while it's an important part of the equation, you really have to take that with the possibility that a lot of it, if not, I wouldn't say all of it, but it depends what we're talking about, isn't really very reliable evidence. And the fact that it's not backed up with hard evidence, with data, with recordings, is a problem. The major point in favor of the debunkers
is the fact that we've never gotten good evidence. I've ceded that to you from the beginning. Now, the thing that I'm surprised by is it feels to me like you're trying to take a twin size fitted sheet of explanation and fit it over a king size mystery and corner keeps popping off and you're pointing out that you can fit one or two corners
And my claim is, is that I think that that ship sort of sailed and I don't need to be rude about it. I think that we're still in range of some serious disinformation. And to your point, yes, I understand very well that we can pile up different explanations. There are mylar balloons and confused sightings of seagulls and et cetera, et cetera. But my claim is that that's the
That works well enough for a twin size bed. There is a real mystery here and the real mystery is what explains this amount of indirect evidence with this little direct evidence where I only find out about the indirect evidence when I'm willing to put myself in a position for debunkers to ridicule, which is to say I'm not dismissing this out of hand the way I was two years ago. I've got a hypothesis on that.
Which is when I think I've shared before, but it's basically kind of like, you know, the cream rising to the top. And what I mean by that is that I talked to people who are traffic controllers, senior traffic controllers, I asked them how many times to pilots report UFOs or talk about them, you know, whilst they're actually flying. So it's not like it's not like they're worried about it when they get back home, they see something and they will ask, you know, what is this thing over there? How many times do you get genuine
I think these things are pretty rare. But if you take something that's pretty rare, as you know, like law of large numbers, and you spread that over even the 380 million people in the US, you're going to get some hits, you're going to get people who think they saw something.
and become convinced that they saw something when they actually didn't see exactly what they thought they saw. And what we see is this, this cohort of people, this large group of people, hundreds, perhaps thousands of people who are really just a miniscule kind of tip of the spear of all these possible sightings. These are the best ones. You know, we've got this 144 sightings from the Navy. These are just the ones that have risen to the top.
And it looks like a lot. You say, oh, we've got 144 cases. It's 144 cases out of millions of hours of pilot training. But if I ask you to just live inside your own construct, what are the five that have risen to the top of Mick West's, that is a puzzling, disturbing story for which I do not have an explanation. Like if you were to have to give your own assessment using the cream theory, what is the top five that have troubled you?
1988 I briefly saw a tiny speck of light that was traversing the heavens stop and reverse course. I had no idea how high it was because you can't tell distance and it seemed like it was a satellite but seemed like too late at night.
it would never have risen to any strong level of interest because I'm not a sky watcher. So I don't know what's normal and what behaviors things have. Certainly I would never call myself an experiencer. That's not even a word that I knew. But my question to you is assume that you and I have never seen something. I assume that Curt has never seen something that is dispositive. What are the top five things that you've encountered that
like specifics, man, not Yeah, no. It's like, you know what? It's difficult because, you know, I got this this general theory of ufology is that all UFOs exist in the low information zone, which is where he's too far away to determine what things are. And the things that I've been unable to resolve are things like that. Yeah, I guess the number one thing would be the commander of David Fravor's encounter with the white tic tac
Which is backed up to some degree by his wingman, Alex Dietrich, who saw something from above. So they have this compelling account of an encounter with a flying tic tac that they got into a kind of a dogfight with. And that's kind of a difficult one for me to explain what it is.
I don't think that some kind of alien craft rises very high to the list of possibilities, but I don't really have a very good set of explanations around that. And honestly, I would struggle to find more cases that are similar to that in my own personal experience. So that really far and away what you would say would be that's number one and there's nothing in second place?
No, I mean, there's lots of eyewitness accounts that sound incredible. You can go back through history and look at these things. Say if you take the Robert Sallis Maelstrom Air Force Base in Montana accounts on face value, that's bizarre. Nuclear weapons being shut off whilst the UFO hovers outside the gate.
But I think that when you examine the story and it doesn't really hold up to scrutiny, but yeah, yeah, I don't, I don't know. Maybe you can send some people my way who are very convincing accounts and say, and perhaps I would. Well, I just, we brought up the Brandon story. And to be honest with you, that one flipped me out because, you know, it's like, there's no part of me that wanted to call Brandon a liar.
And there was no part of me that wanted to call him. It didn't sound like a burning man. I've been up for three days, dehydrated on every psychedelic known demand story. And it didn't sound like anything. And, you know, and to be horribly honest about it, the TV show that's built around the skinwalker ranch thing has the effect of turning anything that happens on that show into something that can be
lampooned because it's being somewhat sensationalized as a commercial product. But clearly they have shown on that show things that are their attempts to say, Oh, look, there's a UFO right there, right? Yeah. Multiple. Well, you shake your head. Well, the UFOs they show are things like little white dots in the sky that aren't doing anything spectacular. And they're probably planes or birds or something like that. They really haven't said anything convincing.
You had this point about the low information zone, assume that I've understood. Yeah, exactly. Well, what they've been trying to claim is that they've triangulated something in the general sense of triangulation, not the specific sense where, you know, they're showing extraordinary readings here and I don't know how they're doing their baselines. Like, I don't know in general, if you pass current through earth, how unusual that is. So I can't watch the show and learn anything as a guy who's too far removed from what they're doing out there.
But I think what I am trying to say is I have now been compelled that I've had so many weird conversations with grownups who are putting way too much specificity on this once they get over the fact that you're not coming to get them and make fun of them. They're seemingly like always looking over their shoulder because they don't want to be considered kooky.
This is how they get you. Sorry, go ahead. Has Brandon told any of you that he's in possession of high information evidence, but he just can't release it for whatever reason? Not in terms of secret evidence. He keeps saying that they've got loads of terabytes of data and that they have some things like actual specific triangulations with two cameras with known angles that they've done. But I keep asking him,
And he keeps promising and he never delivers. So to me, it sounds to me like you're saying there's only one really top drawer incident that is meeting your levels for saying that's really interesting. And what I'm trying to say is there are people who've come forward, which I can discuss like Brandon, and there are people who've come forward that I won't discuss that sound quite a bit like this.
making claims that seem entirely inconsistent with sober military, just the facts, kind of straight ahead orientation. And in particular, I have a pretty good sense of when people are limelight seeking, or people are limelight avoiding. And a lot of these people seem like limelight avoiders. Like Bob Lazar. See,
I have almost no knowledge of Bob Lazar. No, I'm not kidding. It's not like... I understand. I vaguely know who Graham Hancock is and something about Chariots of the Gods. I don't know anything. This is not my world. No, Bob Lazar is, I guess, a divisive figure in the UFO community and a lot of people just think he's a fraud, including me, but he presents himself as very much limelight avoiding.
even though he has ended up on various shows, but he always says like, it's very, he's very reluctant to talk about it. And if you talk to him, apparently, people who have talked to him will say it's very limelight avoiding. But you know, I do not want to kind of draw parallels between those and the people you've talked to, because they're completely different people. But being limelight avoiding, I don't think is necessarily a, a factor that increases my confidence in somebody's story. Yeah, but to be to be to push back rather, rather forcefully.
When you have a secret that is deranging your life, there's both an urge to purge and an urge to avoid. And you see both of these things in certain people, which is that they're trying to get back home to normal. You know, they've been exposed to some piece of information, you know, to be blunt, war used to create divisions where somebody had seen war and somebody hadn't. And how do they live under the same roof now that one of them has
seen something that the other can't even imagine. So if this in fact breaks you out of polite society, it's entirely consistent to have somebody with a basic limelight avoiding personality who's going to keep going back to the well because at some level they're trying to say, I'm not crazy. And just to be very clear about it, part of my desire to stick up for people out here is that I watch the
Power to silence that comes from stigma and shame, in particular stigma and shame as entertainment. And the idea of laughing at people, like the use of the words clown, buffoon, debunk, lol, rotfl. Most people can't stand up to this. And it really bugs me
that an entire group in the world thinks it's completely okay to destroy an individual who dares raise a voice. The non-science reason I'm out here in UFO territory is that, which is I can't stand basically bullying and gaslighting people who've seen something, want answers, want to ask questions,
And then somehow it's like there was a secret meeting where everybody decided the truth and you weren't part of it. And the basic attitude towards people who engage in this kind of gaslighting is F you. Science has your back. These people don't belong in our community and they have to be driven out.
Peter Daszak is in a very serious position trying to orchestrate the idea that only, you know, racists entertain the lab leak hypothesis. Everybody should want to know what the hell he was doing in the Wuhan Institute of Virology with Defense Department funding. Conversely, when we turn over to the UFO community, you know, the issue is I don't want people who have seen something or who have data
scared anymore. And it's very scary. I mean, you keep talking about this debunking community, but who exactly are you referring to? I mean, I'm not a person who mocks people. So that just comes across to me as playing be blunt that comes across to me as playing dumb. No, I think that lots of people are genuine question. It's a genuine question because there's not very many UFO debunkers out there.
I think it's a it's a really disingenuous sounding question. I may have I may have you wrong. But I can tell you that I find your interaction unpleasant. It's like I've never I've never said
I've never said anything like, this is real. It's true. Or did you hear about the Nimitz incident? Or with these new cameras, they can tell that that's not my energy. My energy is, oh, I was lied to. I was lied to about many things. For example, psychedelics. I was told that acid would destroy your body and your brain. And it turns out that it's very well tolerated. And even micrograms.
The dose needed to kill you, I think, is not known because it's so well tolerated. When I found out that I had been lied to about psychedelics, I was very angry because I had taken on the trust that the government knows what it's talking about and that these were dangerous substances. In the case of UFOs, I've been lied to. It is very clear that a lot of very smart people
have had their lives destroyed over taking this seriously as a topic. Not by me though. What? Not by me, perhaps by their colleagues and perhaps by the government. Why do I have the impression that you police UFOs? I wouldn't say that. What do you mean when you say that, Eric? What do you mean?
I forget what our last interaction was, Mick, but somehow I tried to say something general and you tried to bring it back to like Lou Elizondo and Chris Mellon. I don't remember what that was. Well, it doesn't much matter, but I think what I'm trying to get at is,
Are you unaware that people feel that they've been ridiculed and have had their credibility shredded because of something that they, they sincerely believe they came in contact with as either data or a primary experience? Well, you know, I let's, let's kind of, in a way, shelve that question a little bit, because I think we can perhaps divide the experiences into two groups. One group would be the experiences who,
yeah sensitive and would get upset by that type of thing and you wouldn't like that and then the other ones are the people who you know they don't don't don't really care people like David Fravor
They come out. He didn't have his life ruined. He's given this extensive discussion of his encounter and nothing happened to him. His career was just fine. Now we're in territory where I can map this very well. No, things did happen. I don't need to know him personally. I've never met him. I've never had a conversation with him, but I can tell you two things that have happened. One thing is that people have treated him as another.
And the other thing is that people have celebrated him as a truth-seeking hero. Both of these things happen to you out here. And it's pretty disturbing when people treat you as a nutter and you're saying something that's pretty sober. Like, I was minding my business when the following thing happened to me and I'm not responsible for it. Do you have the sense that he's lying?
No, I don't. I do not have the sense he's lying. Most people who have some kind of experience, I do not think that they are lying. People often say that I am saying that people lie. I think he's telling what he thinks, what he thought happened. I think his memory may have changed over time. His initial perception may have been faulty, but I do not think he's lying. So you have no perception that people are paying a personal price for saying, I was in contact with data, I've seen data, or I had a direct experience.
All of them, everyone's being prevented from coming forward. No one's got the cojones to actually step up. I don't want to belittle people who have genuine trauma from these encounters and their reaction to the encounters, but it doesn't explain the complete lack of this type of thing of people actually coming forward. Well, I mean, nobody came forward from Co-Intel Pro and that was a pretty large operation to stay hidden. I mean, there's a,
a trope at the moment that the government legally required not to come forward and that if you have a situation in which the government is alleged to keep a secret somebody now says oh i don't believe three people can keep a secret much less thousands as if d-day was never planned i mean this is just it's sort of this willful playing dumb that i don't understand it doesn't seem like
To be honest, it doesn't seem like you. I understand your point. I understand your point. You know, there's this kind of just chilling effect of, of, uh, mockery. I don't think that what I am doing is mockery and I don't really see, um, a huge amount of evidence of some kind of organized group of people doing it. You talk about this, uh, the debunking community, but I don't think the debunking community is really having this big of an effect on people's lives.
So you do see the snide remarks or the disparagement against people who come out either saying that they've witnessed something firsthand or that they just want to investigate the phenomenon, for example, avilob. So you do see that there's disesteem at times from a nebulous source.
Yeah, it's like I talked about before, like it's something that's always been there in UFOs. It's this stigma which hinders genuine investigation, but unfortunately it's something that arises naturally from the somewhat ridiculous nature of some of the stories that are in UFOlogy and some of the things like the hoaxes and the silly photos. But yeah, it's a problem that is an impediment to serious research and it's
You know, it is something that I've increasingly tried to avoid when I've been talking to people. And, you know, I get feedback all the time that I come across as being perhaps abrasive or perhaps seeming like I'm mocking. And I take Eric's perception to heart here that perhaps, you know, my, my discussions with people, my encounters with people are not always enjoyable. And I perhaps should try to improve that. Yeah. The thing is,
I came very close to blocking your account. It didn't make me happy because I feel like you have a lot to contribute and I really do value getting rid of the idea that nothing can explain these videos because I think that's completely preposterous. We're in a world in which the Matrix and Star Wars have shown us things far more interesting than these videos and the idea that you can't create these videos any other way is ridiculous. Now that said, I just don't
It's more like the role you're playing is like a border colleague keeping these people away from chem trails and flat earth. It's like if the conserved quantity, imagine for example, you grew up in a religious family. I know nothing about your family. I'm not making this as a claim. I grew up Catholic. Okay. It's entirely possible that in a
in a family in which mythology is rammed down your throat and you better believe and only bad people don't believe that you pick up an energy, which is I hate forced belief and I hate it when stories become so big that people crawl inside of a story and lose their family and lose their mind. I've met people who've been in a cult like environment. Their key thing is we've got to make sure that we don't let any cult like beliefs in the door. And then I've grown up
Myself as an atheist in an atheistic family for like five generations and my feeling is in part that that relentless focus on let's not believe anything that can't be demonstrated in a lab has its own set of problems. It's very hard to do the cutting edge research if you can never believe in your own imagination enough
to let it run wild for a while. You know, my personal belief is that we should all have a creative side and a debunking side living inside of our brains where we're debunking our creative impulse. Yeah. Because it's in part tied to like ego, you know, the issue that I'm having though is, is that the skeptic energy and the scientific energy things have tilted far enough
with what we now believe to be true, that it's really important to me that we stop scaring pilots who may... Like, if your explanation is that somebody's under a lot of stress, or that somebody needs a psychological workup because they might be having a psychotic break, or that somebody may be hallucinating, a lot of the explanations that may not involve UAP
are of a personal, psychological, characterological nature. And to somebody who might have as their employment plan that they're going to fly commercial aircraft after their stint in the Navy, they're not going to want to come forward if your explanation is effectively that these were phosphenes or the person may have had a flashback from an acid trip from a few years ago.
I want people to feel comfortable saying what they've seen without this extra life. Well, we now kind of have that in some, uh, some arenas, like specifically the Navy training ranges where we've got a couple of these videos from, they now have specific guidelines in place for reporting, uh, you know, this type of encounter and they're actually encouraged to do it. Now we also have with the FAA, uh, a strong encouragement,
with pilots to report drone sightings and they don't need to be necessarily identified as a specific type of drone and so we're actually getting a bunch of UFO reports because of this emphasis on looking at drones.
you know, things that essentially I saw a happy accident because of drones becoming a threat. That is a happy accident. Yeah. But the Navy thing was a specific response to the UFO thing. It was, it was something that they recognized that there was this stigma and they tried to, they tried to remove the stigma and that's, that's a laudable thing. And I think that was showing results. Let me try to put it,
a different sheen on it. So last attempt to make the point. I am very much more careful. I want to figure out the phrases. I am much more careful when I hear somebody talking about chemtrails, for example, if they come from the black American community than if they don't.
And I'm much more understanding if somebody comes from a radical progressive family that went through the McCarthy era and they don't trust the government. So in other words, when particular groups of people are repeatedly lied to and manipulated and have a different history than the rest of the country, I tend to take their
fears much more seriously. If you went through the Tuskegee medical experiment, it's not that crazy to worry about what's in a vaccine. If you didn't go through the Tuskegee medical experiment, if your community wasn't subjected to that, you may have a very different sense that, you know, something's going on. Or if you're aware that we've experimented with biological agents involuntarily against people in subway stations,
There's all sorts of weird stuff that we've gotten up to. I forget there was a ship that maybe was supposed to disperse something so it could be recorded. The history of secret government behavior is not a great history, whether it's Operation Ajax or Operation Condor, who knows what. And the pressure not to question these things because it's a conspiracy theory,
really bothers me because we have a group that is simultaneously engaging in conspiracies and not clearing up things that they could clear up, which does feel that personal destruction is a good way to keep secrets. And I guess what I'm asking you is, can you be a bit more charitable to people who've been lied to? Okay, that's a perfectly reasonable request, I think. And yes, yes, I think I can.
And I'd like to invite other people who are watching this to give me feedback on, you know, whether they like, you know, not necessarily just agree, disagree, but like, in what way could I do better? In what way could the debunking community do better? And what specifically should we do? Because I interview people who have had experiences, you know, a number of people like, you know, say Kevin Day, one of the guys off the Nimitz, and Gary Voorhis, another guy from the Nimitz encounter, a different ship,
But I'm nice to them. I'm not mocking them. What a lot of what I'm doing in my just day to day stuff isn't like questioning people's eyewitness accounts. I very rarely actually take cases where it's just an eyewitness account simply because there's not a lot you can do with it. And it often it gets very contentious because people are very emotional about their things.
So a lot of what I do is just simply the nuts and bolts type thing of looking at individual videos and photos and things like that. So if I could do something that was better in terms of outreach to people who have had experiences, yes, but I think it's really more about kind of in a way avoiding
that type of confrontation, because there's not a lot you can do with someone who just has an eyewitness experience, someone who tells you, I saw this, this this black triangle, you know, I talked to quite a few of them, you know, kind of online on Twitter. And there's only so far you can go. You can perhaps like perhaps do a hypothesis to what it might be, you can listen to their their explanations. And you can ask them questions about, you know, what angular size do you think it would be? Like, how many hand widths would it be? And you know, what time it was? And where were you?
But at some point, you know, you enter the low information zone and there's not much further you can go. And I generally just say, well, I can't really help you. I don't mock them. I don't like make fun of them. And in general, I don't I don't mock people. So I'm sure there are things I can do to improve.
that I don't really accept your kind of characterization of me of being part of this very dangerous community. I think you described it as an abomination that we need to get rid of the debunking community and in your last last thing. Yeah, I mean, I think that the point is that these people are not necessarily bunko artists. But that's not me. I think what you're not figuring out is when you come at something from the point of view of debunking it,
Right. What you're really doing. That's what I was saying from the very start is that with UFOs, what I do is come at it from the perspective of investigating it to try to figure out what that thing is. If someone comes to me with a story of what they saw, but you don't use the word. I'm an investigator. I'm moving away from it. You're moving away. I said at the start, yeah, that, um, you know, what's his name? The, the pilot Ryan Graves.
You know, he told me he didn't want to talk to me because I had debunked. You know, I always try to, I've been trying to reframe debunking as a positive thing because it is about investigating things to see whether they are true or false. It's not about working towards a certain result. Maybe think about it from the follow. I understand that one of the things that's very interesting to some of us who do commentary on social issues is that people who are employed by legacy media outfits,
react to anybody who makes a living as an individual, not attached to a legacy media outfit. They refer to these people as grifters in order to give the idea that you can trust Harpers in the Atlantic, but if somebody is telling you something on the internet, then it's probably nonsense. I think that what you have to understand is, is that bunk and bunko and the idea of fooling people
I appreciate that you're moving away from it, but maybe a repudiation of the energy around that is really necessary because it's one thing to say, yeah, I'm trying to use that less. A lot of the fun that comes from skepticism is mixing in this dunking in dragon.
And whether or not one is actually doing the dunking and dragging, just let me get to the end of this. Whether one is actually doing the dunking and dragging or whether one is painting a bullseye on a target for someone else to execute, I think is really kind of the issue. And my feeling... Go on. I'm not the snark and the debunking and the dragging. You're saying I'm painting a target on things by actually
investigating it and figuring out what it is and then other people can make fun of it. Is that on me that I investigate something and it turns out not to be true and therefore other people perhaps mock whoever came up with the thing originally? I don't think that all one has to do is to say, look, I really don't want these people ridiculed.
Well, I can't like add a disclaimer at the end of all my investigations as a don't make fun of people because... No, no, no, look, there are Bunko artists, right? There are people who are trying to deceive other people, let's say for profit, okay? Sure. I think that it is reasonable to return fire against such people at a proportionate level. Fair game, I think. Well, to a point, right? I mean, you know, you can also...
What? If someone is a Charleston and they are basically selling nonsense for money, then yes, I think they deserve to be. Somebody is a Charlotte and the community has the right to drive their costs in a particular way up to a point, right? But, you know, what we're seeing here in my estimation is that there are a lot of people who confide in me and say that they are frightened.
where they say, I really appreciate you entering into this space, because I couldn't even talk to my own family. And there's just sort of no emotional affect that I see in you when I'm like, I believe that you and I both know this to be true. That could be false, because I'm making the assumption that we both know this. But I have now heard from so many people that they're frightened by what they experienced for what they saw. That
For you to say, well, like who's it? Who's frightened? Who's experienced? Nothing bad happened to David Fravor. I don't need to know David Fravor to know that lots of good and lots of bad. Pardon me. I said that there are, there must be some people who are not frightened by what they saw. There are people who are deeply affected by it, but there's people who are just simply will see it as a scientific observation and they'll be able to report it.
We don't seem very many people. Almost nobody I know who's not independently wealthy can afford to say, oh, that was interesting. Would you want a surgeon operating on your child if the surgeon had had lots of discussions with aliens? Sure. I mean, yeah, I would.
It's a perfectly normal thing for someone to see something in the sky and think it's this weird thing. This happens all the time. If somebody told me that they were abducted by aliens and that they wanted to operate on my kid, I'll be honest, that would tutor my prior to say I don't want to take that risk that this person might be a lion. Yeah.
Yeah, but like simply seeing a craft in the sky, that is, that's a different thing entirely. I think that's a very understandable thing to happen to people. And there will be inevitably some people who have some kind of misperception or illusion that, uh, you know, isn't, doesn't deserve mockery. Certainly not. It's, it's a perfectly understandable thing. And, you know, I tell people this when I talk to them that, yeah, I can see how this might even, even that is a very sensitive thing. Even that, uh, they, they, they see that as being,
I think it's completely reasonable to say we may have to dismiss some things that are very deeply personally held as beliefs and people may get very injured but the fact is we can't afford to be taking this as some super serious threat let's say to our nuclear arsenal because Mrs. O'Connell thought she saw a cigar-shaped object hovering in her backyard for half a second.
Yeah, I think there's real serious issues in ufology. There are unidentified flying things that people have seen and we should investigate what they are, all the reasons why people are seeing these things. And I agree, like, let's get away from the stigma of it and then we'll get closer to some resolution one way or another. I join with you on that and I think that's very positive. How is it practically that we can get
I understand that you don't see yourself as contributing to the stigma, but do you see that you could contribute to the removing of the stigma by let's say tweeting a repudiation of the stigma?
No, I think I'm a small fish and I think very few people are going to listen to me and millions of people out there, very few people are going to see what I say. I think it has to come from a higher level and I think we've already started to see it, like I said before, from the Navy by having specific guidelines where people are required to report sightings. If someone is required to report a sighting, I think it helps a great deal in removing the stigma. I think
inevitably, it's still going to be there to some degree. And perhaps more people could talk about it when they make public appearances to discuss the topic that we should not have this stigma. And like if I'm on CNN again, then perhaps that is something that I should bring up. And yeah, I think I have I have discussed that on on major media that there is a stigma and it's good that it's being diminished. So
I don't think I'm going to be able to tweet out, you know, stop making fun of people and people will stop or people will feel better about it. But I think it's a slow process that we're part way along. I think they would. I don't think people would stop, but I think a large set of people would. By the way, just as just as there's excoriation to the people who come out as experiencers or people who investigate this topic, there is also fulmination directed at you and generally people who are skeptics. And I don't like that personally. I think that should stop.
I think that that's something we haven't discussed not even a single bit today and I hope people would do that less.
I imagine that if Eric, that if you said something, not, we're not trying to make this all into let's make public. I'm just hypothetically saying, Eric, if you were to say something like, Hey, please, please don't gang up on Mick. Mick has a role to play. Then people will be less. Same with me. No, but Kurt, the problem that we have is, is that I've been in Mick's general role historically. It's only been for like a year and a half or two years. I don't know what this is that I took this at all.
The way I see it is, what Mick is doing, and I said this at the beginning, is a lot of it is yeoman's work, a lot of it is thankless. The skepticism is not that well rewarded.
And it has to be done because we need people to come up with prosaic explanations in order, even if it's true, you'd want somebody doing exactly what Mick is doing to say, you know, this isn't evidence of speed. If you drag your finger over a picture of the Grand Canyon, that doesn't mean it's going hundreds of miles an hour, right?
There's all sorts of stuff that is thankless that has to do with understanding photography and parallax and things that are not that much fun. The issue is when Mick is doing that, it's very important that people not go into, are you telling, are you calling me a liar mode? Because that's the inverse of that. And that's harassing Mick. And, you know, again, I think Mick gets energy out of this from what I can tell.
But it's not pleasant to be called names. And I've seen name calling directed at Mick and that's not right. I think where Mick mistakes his importance is it really matters. You're not that famous except in this community. In this community, everybody knows who you are. And if you say something, it will be heard much differently than if you were to say something about food rationing. Right.
But my point there is that the people in the community now are not going to be the ones reporting UFOs in the future, because UFO sighting is pretty much a once in a lifetime thing. So the people you want to reach are all the other people who are outside the community, who view it as being a silly topic that they don't want to get involved with. So when they have a sighting, and people in the UFO community now, if they have a sighting, they're all like, Oh, yeah, I saw this, they posted on on UFO Twitter.
How do we get this message out to the broader audience? How do we reduce the stigma for the general public and for pilots? I think you can go a long way towards that because to be honest, I think that you've been doggedly on this and my fondest hope coming out of this discussion would be that we didn't have a dust-up. We had a respectful conversation. People can hear the commonality.
and that people hear that Mick West believes that in the interest of science, we've got to make sure that people feel maximally comfortable. I do think some people are comfortable coming forward, but to be honest, there's another thing that's just about generosity of spirit. Like I was wrong and a jerk to many people in the UFO community, and I'm sorry about that.
And it's not just a question of they, you know, Eric Weinstein is so important that his condemnation of us on previous occasions really hurt us. It was that I was backed by an implicit army of science people who know that this topic is total garbage or think they know and
In being an agent for that, the same way that I was an agent against LSD use, because I thought it was hugely detrimental to the brain and to the body, I had just been very effectively propagandized, and there's no evidence that that's true. And there is no evidence, in my opinion, that the UFO community is
That should crazy in reporting these things that seem preposterous and they still seem preposterous to me. Most of them are not. Yeah, there are a few crazy people in there, but you know, the crazy people everywhere, everywhere, crazy people outside. Yes. It's like say that with the chemtrail community is like, you know, there's all kinds of people in it. There's people with PhDs who believe in chemtrails. There's people with PhDs who believe in UFOs. So it's, uh, it's, it's not like it's a group of,
To wrap this all up, what is the one ask that you would want either of the other person or of society? So for example, if Avi Loeb, he says, okay, we need more evidence. There's something like extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Yeah, but extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary funding is a phrase that he likes to
I want something very clear. I want our top quantum field theorists, general relativists and differential geometers read in to what data we have and I would like them to be the representatives
that actually get go through whatever data may exist as to whether anything is moving in ways that are inconsistent with our physics. I would like to figure out whether this is a physics issue or whether this is a defense security technology public policy issue.
If it's physics, I want this turned over to the people who actually understand where the cutting edge of theoretical physics is and what's possible under the twin theories of the standard model in quantum field theory and general relativity and gravity theory. I would like to know whether or not we are seeing anything that is indicative of science beyond the science we have. That said, I think there's a small probability
that something like that would be true. The other basic ask is that we stop destroying people through our skepticism, through our fears of bunk, through our fears of a conversation run out of control. It's really important to me that we recognize that gas-lit people
are everywhere and that we need to do as much as we can to restore that and whether the end of, you know, Blue Book or something ushered in an era where we poo-pooed all of this, even if it's nonsense or a cover story, that we start treating people who take this decision tree seriously and not force them to either say it's UFOs or a PSYOP, but recognize the possibility that we may be looking at a confluence of many different things
and to allow people the freedom to behave as scientists and invite anecdote, data and disclosure so that the government really has to realize it's not their effing information, it belongs to all of us and it's time to put this thing to bed in one way or another so that Mick actually gets some great data that he can go over
and see whether it's just some some some bugs seagulls mylar balloons and apertures or whether there's something really here and I feel much emboldened that Mick if he saw something extraordinary would be likely to say something. Yeah what he said plus what I want is to figure out what's going on and I think the best way to do that is to refine the evidence
And I think the best way to refine the evidence is one, like what Eric proposed is to read in experts on various subject matters. But also that doesn't always work. There's been lots of examples historically where experts have studied UFO cases and they've come up with completely erroneous interpretations of those things. There's the famous Chilean case, which anybody can look up, where a huge panel of experts couldn't figure it out
But what happened was that they released the data, they released the video, and then people on the internet, myself included, figured out what it was. So what I would like is for as much data as possible to be declassified. And I think that is something that is not an insurmountable thing. I don't think there's good reason for the classification of a large amount of this data. When something comes out like this
green triangle video, which was classified, you know, something that shouldn't have been released. Uh, there's, there's nothing that's harmful to us interests except perhaps a little embarrassment where they couldn't identify stars. So I think, uh, we should push for clarification by having the data refined in whatever way the people who have that data can, can accept, you know, if it's scientists, that's, that's great. But if you can release videos to the general public,
A lot of them are going to get solved. Some of them might turn out to be gems. Some of them might turn out to be things we can't figure out, but there's, there's, there's things that just basically aren't being done now. And part of that is because of the stigma. And so I would, you know, I'm, I'm agreeing with Eric that that is something that needs to be diminished or removed. We need to have people who have experiences.
or have sightings or even have video or photos be able to come forward without fear of recrimination. We also, you know, just to temper that a little bit, we don't want to encourage a vast amount of low quality reporting. But if there's stuff there that is significant, we shouldn't immediately dismiss it out of hand. And we should try to figure out what's going on by refining and examining
I would like for the invective from each side to be tempered. When I say each side, I mean, if one was to split this into people who are promoters of the idea that UFOs and what's behind UFOs is something non-terrain, it's not banal, then
So that's one camp. And then the other camp is the more skeptical Michael Schirmer, Neil deGrasse Tyson, perhaps even Mick West type, though I don't, I'm not going to lump you in there, Mick. That, that side would, would not inadvertently contribute to the disprisement of the other side. And I see it, I see it on both. And I like this concept of extending and well, to, to love thine enemy.
So even people who dislike you intensely, Mick, or dislike you intensely, Eric, or dislike me, perhaps intensely, then, well, forget about me. I'm not going to advocate for myself. But what I mean, I hope that people, the vitriol or the cycle of it to be accelerated or intensified. And it starts with tempering one's own. See, I was
I was interviewing someone named Salvatore Pius and he was ridiculed by Eric Davis and how put off. And I was asking him, so what do you think of, what do you make of their theories? Then he said, well, and he just looked down and he just retreated in himself and he said, well, you know, maybe they're right. Maybe I'm wrong. And I think that they should be investigated. And I think that their ideas are worth, are worth investigating.
And I don't know why they say that about me, but, but I wish them the best, something like that. And that of all of that whole podcast, that's what's, that's what stuck with me the most. I just, well, that, that I think about almost daily. I, I wish that we would all have a little bit more of that. I wish that in myself, because I'm an extremely MLS and
Thank you all for coming out. Mick, your podcast name please.
It's called Tales from the Rabbit Hole. It's a little out of date, but it does have a bunch of UFO episodes that might be interesting to the audience here. And Eric, what is something that you can promote? Your Twitter, your podcast? I did a guitar video with Mike Palmisano, but other than that,
The Portal is the podcast, it's been quiest recently and I think there are no UFO episodes to the best of my knowledge. But look, I hope to be doing some things with you all in the not too distant future and having to do with the issue of what is our best hope for diversifying humanity's fate beyond one single sphere and that remains
A question that I think serious people need to be talking about because it's a very thin hope. But if we don't get our best people on our very thin hope, then we're going to bet all of humanity on the likes of Putin, Xi and company. And I think I'm increasingly just unwilling to see that these people have enough wisdom to steward this one planet forward. So stay tuned and let's try to think about the way in which this weird topic
can both derange us into thinking that extraterrestrial visitation is around the corner or that we're trapped in nothing is possible and we should probably steer a middle course where we say what is true and if we do have a slim hope for visiting beyond Mars, how would we approach it through science so that technology can follow? And if I had something to promote
People who are watching this, if you're interested in math or learning a little bit more about physics, I have a crash course video on physics which goes through several different topics. You can look through the timestamps and click through. It also goes through some tips I have for what helped me when I go about learning mathematics and physics and different sticking points I've had where I try to clear up confusion. I think it was the video on this whole channel that took the longest to produce, so I recommend you at least check it out.
Thank you all. Thank you, Kurt. Thank you, Mick. Thank you. Thank you for a very interesting and illuminating discussion. Well, honored is an understatement to be here with both of you. Thank you for spending so much of your time. You didn't get to any Twitter questions. No. Well, a question I had, Mick, if you all have two more minutes, if this can even be answered in two minutes,
that there's this phrase, the vastness of space or the vastness of the universe. So given that, and our supposed insignificance in it, and as scientists always like to point that out masochistically, the only thing that's sadistic and not masochistic. So seeing how unbelievably finite we are, is it so improbable that we're being examined or kept as livestock by creatures beyond our comprehension?
given that we do that for virtually every other species. So if one wants to say, well, where's the evidence? Well, virtually all the evidence that we have is one more intelligent species looking at another lower intelligence species, which can't even cognitively grasp that there's someone higher than them. I think it's kind of an unanswerable question because we don't really have enough data about the universe to answer, like to figure out like how common life is.
in the universe and what it would have done, how it would have spread through the universe and it really just for me it boils down to sure it's possible. I'm a science fiction fan and I read all kind of hypotheses about you know kind of
gardens like the earth being a cultured thing like and the aliens are watching us and just waiting for us to discover a certain bit of physics that uh it becomes dangerous and then they'll step in and sure yeah it's it sounds plausible but is there any evidence that it's happening and there really isn't so it's something that i think you would keep on the table in the same way that you would keep the simulation hypothesis on the table but it's not something that really
Um, you know, I,
I guess that we don't have any really good way of coming up with a Bayesian prior. The vastness of space indicates to me that it's very unlikely that we're the only sentient life in it. The difficulty of crossing the vastness of space
according to Einsteinian restrictions, gives me some sense that even if life is abundant, it may be forever trapped locally where it is, if it's based on waves reverberating in this space without too much alteration in our fundamental ideas. So there are countervailing forces pointing in very opposite directions to me, as to why we are functionally quite likely to be alone.
and why we are very unlikely statistically to be alone, even if we are functionally isolated. With all that said, I am motivated and I believe that we should always try to understand our own motivated reasoning. And my worst piece of motivated reasoning is, if nobody is able to visit us, it probably means that we're doomed.
And if we have a hope of not being doomed, it's almost certainly because we were able to survive the period where we had God-like powers but only one shared atmosphere. Because any idiot with the God-like powers can sort of end the experiment at will. And as a result, if there aren't aliens here,
I would think that we are far more likely to die soon en masse because there really isn't a lot of hope for leaving. So the desire for aliens, and again I don't really love the idea of being anybody's pet in the zoo or a rat in a maze, so it's not like I'm sitting there hoping that the aliens are there and they're benevolent.
But if nobody is able to visit us, I think the odds that we are going to be able to leave and survive dwindle to close to zero. And so I'm very hopeful that the Universe is not only inundated with life from various places, but that much of that life figures out that the theories beyond those we know contain hope and options
Even if they risk limitless power, we already have the power to destroy ourselves. So physics led us into the valley of death. What we have to ask is, if you push farther into the valley of death with physics, is there a way out? Okay. Thank you all. I'm going to go talk to my wife. All right. If you're ever in Southern California, let me buy you a beer.
The podcast is now finished. If you'd like to support conversations like this, then do consider going to patreon.com slash C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L. That is Kurt Jaimungal. It's support from the patrons and from the sponsors that allow me to do this full time. Every dollar helps tremendously. Thank you.
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"text": " The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze."
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"text": " In the interest of disclosure, Eric and I may be working together on explanations of the mathematical concepts behind geometric unity. As for what specific form, it's undecided, but consider this a potential teaser. As always, you can click on the timestamp in the description or over here to skip this longish introduction. Today's theolocution involves Eric Weinstein and Mick West on the topic of the evidence of UFOs, as well as the relationship between skeptics, debunkers, disclosure, the public perception, and scientific inquiry."
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"text": " Eric Weinstein is the inventor of geometric unity, a proposed theory of everything, as well as being an advocate for UFO disclosure. Mick West is a science writer as well as skeptical investigator who's had some choice words to say about the disclosed footage of the phenomenon, as well as being the creator behind the software that, at least,"
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"text": " A special thank you goes out to Mick because he was in the hot seat with the difficult task of defending the quote-unquote skeptical communities' perceived tenor against those who see some non-terrain explanation behind UFOs."
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"text": " The links to their respective podcasts, that is The Portal by Eric and Tales from the Rabbit Hole by Mick, can be found in the description. Another podcast that's terribly worth subscribing to is Ross Coulthart's Need to Know with Zabel, and the links to that are in the description as well."
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"text": " My name is Kurt Jaimungal. I'm a Torontonian filmmaker with a background in mathematical physics dedicated to the explication of the variegated terrain of theories of everything from a mainly theoretical physics perspective, but as well as analyzing consciousness and determining what constitutive role does that have to play in reality and the fundamental laws provided these laws exist at all and are knowable to us."
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"text": " A theolocution stands in contrast to a standard debate format, which I dislike because it's destructive and not furthering, generally speaking. Instead, theolocutions are attempts to understand one another and even advance the interlocutor's position, fructifying in real time rather than maligning."
},
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"text": " If you'd like to hear more podcasts from the Toe channel, then do consider going to patreon.com slash Kurt Jaimungal. That's C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L. Supporting with whatever you can if you like as the sponsors and the patrons are the only reason that I'm able to bring conversations of this quality and depth consistently as this is what I'm able to do full time now."
},
{
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"text": " Today's sponsor is Brilliant. During the winter break, I decided to brush up on some information theory because I would like to do a deep dive in constructor theory. So I took Brilliant's courses on random variables, distributions, and knowledge slash uncertainty. After taking that course, I could finally see why entropy is defined the way it is. It's an extremely natural formula."
},
{
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"text": " There are plenty of courses. For example, there's also group theory. So many of you are interested in the standard model and you hear that the gauge, the internal gauge symmetries are U1 cross SU2 cross SU3. Those are examples of what are called Lie groups. Visit brilliant.org slash totoe to get 20% off the annual subscription. And I recommend that you don't stop before four lessons. And I think you'll be greatly surprised at the ease at which you can now comprehend subjects that you previously had an extremely difficult time grokking."
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"text": " Thank you and enjoy this Theolocution of Eric Weinstein and Mick West. All right. So, by the way, have any of you met prior to this? No, we've just kind of interacted on Twitter a little bit, but we've never actually had a direct conversation before. Why don't we start with Mick, what is it that you respect about Eric? And then Eric, what is it that you respect about Mick?"
},
{
"end_time": 308.473,
"index": 13,
"start_time": 282.108,
"text": " Well, I really respect Eric's intellect and the way he kind of frames issues in a rather sophisticated way, I think. I think he brings a lot to the table and that he has a background in science and he understands the processes of science and he understands scientists. And I also very much like his perspective that we should be doing more"
},
{
"end_time": 330.435,
"index": 14,
"start_time": 308.848,
"text": " Erick."
},
{
"end_time": 355.708,
"index": 15,
"start_time": 332.193,
"text": " I guess what I believe is that Mick is quite fearless in going up against the very determined UFO community that is clear in its beliefs. I believe that there is a certain amount of complete nonsense out there which needs to be"
},
{
"end_time": 382.824,
"index": 16,
"start_time": 355.998,
"text": " destroyed. And I think that that's yeoman's work. So it's kind of thankless in many ways, even if it gives you some notoriety. And I feel like Mick has been willing to blow apart things that should not have gotten the kind of mind share in the world that they did. And I think that anybody having the courage of their convictions and being willing to stand alone and be a lightning rod for controversy and particularly directed hatred of a group"
},
{
"end_time": 408.456,
"index": 17,
"start_time": 383.643,
"text": " I may as well tell you both what I respect about each of you. Eric, you have unexampled views on almost every topic, and it reminds me of this comedian, Patrice O'Neill. He's one of my favorite comedians. He's no longer around. Whenever you would ask him, well, what's your opinion on"
},
{
"end_time": 436.425,
"index": 18,
"start_time": 409.155,
"text": " on something for which 99% of people agree upon and you think you would predict his response, it would be original and it would make you think. And I find that quality is something that you also have, Eric, and that it's difficult to summarize what you say. Usually that happens for people who are more avant-garde in their thinking. And then for Mick, I like that your actions follow your words. So you're not just deriding the UFO community and then leaving it."
},
{
"end_time": 463.183,
"index": 19,
"start_time": 436.766,
"text": " You follow it with tens and tens or hundreds of hours of work put into your website and simulations and software. So it's not just saying, hey, this clearly can't be the case. And then you run away. Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's, it's not a job. I must set that up from the beginning. This isn't something that anybody pays me to do. This is something I'm doing of my own kind of interest, partly because I just find it fascinating."
},
{
"end_time": 489.377,
"index": 20,
"start_time": 463.507,
"text": " All right, Mick, do you see yourself as a skeptic or a debunker? And what's the difference between those two?"
},
{
"end_time": 518.387,
"index": 21,
"start_time": 490.128,
"text": " That's a very loaded question in a way, because for a long time I've struggled with the term debunker. I wrote an article for Skeptical Inquiry a while back called In Defense of Debunking, when I laid out the case for using the term debunker. And my argument there was that if you show something to be false, then you have debunked it. And no one has a problem with the word debunked in the past tense."
},
{
"end_time": 547.585,
"index": 22,
"start_time": 518.831,
"text": " If someone says, oh, that has been debunked, everyone's like, oh, OK, then that's been debunked. And assuming that they can demonstrate that is true. But if you're doing it in the present tense, in the active sense, people tend to think that means that you are trying to get to a certain predetermined outcome, which is very much not what I'm doing, especially in the realm of UFOs. Now, if I was doing something like investigating flat Earth,"
},
{
"end_time": 573.148,
"index": 23,
"start_time": 547.91,
"text": " then yes, I would say that I'm trying to get to a predetermined outcome because, you know, we've already done the work to determine that the earth is not flat. So, you know, we're trying to figure out the best way of explaining why it's not flat. But with UFOs, you know, I'm more of an investigator. And, you know, often in the course of that investigation, I do debunk things, you know, people make a claim about a particular video. So this demonstrates amazing g-forces."
},
{
"end_time": 597.449,
"index": 24,
"start_time": 573.695,
"text": " And I will end up debunking that, but that's in the process of investigation. Now skepticism, I see the problem with skepticism is that it's not really a verb. It's not really something that you do. Do you skeptic something? You can debunk things, but you can't skeptic them. Skepticism is kind of more of a, of an attitude. So in a way I feel"
},
{
"end_time": 619.053,
"index": 25,
"start_time": 597.79,
"text": " skepticism is a little bit more negative if you really get down to it but in popular usage debunking takes on this negative term so i've actually actually after i talked to ryan graves one of the pilots uh he told me the the fact that i had debunking in my twitter profile was a turn off for him and he didn't want to talk to me initially because of that"
},
{
"end_time": 646.817,
"index": 26,
"start_time": 619.48,
"text": " And because of that, that was kind of like the straw that broke the camel's back. And now I've decided to remove that from my Twitter profile and just focus on being a skeptical investigator who does sometimes end up debunking things. But debunking isn't the label. A debunker isn't really a label that I would actively use. Eric, what's the salutary role for skepticism? And do you see Mick as being a proponent of that?"
},
{
"end_time": 675.879,
"index": 27,
"start_time": 647.585,
"text": " I'm confused by Mick and I don't understand Mick, but consider that I really haven't been out here for very long in UFO territory. It's not a region of the world, the intellectual landscape that I expected to visit or spend any time in. So as of two years ago, I was pretty much the guy who shut down every UFO conversation that people wanted to have around me."
},
{
"end_time": 703.302,
"index": 28,
"start_time": 676.698,
"text": " and so that was sort of my role in my own intellectual set and then I came to believe that clearly I had been the target of miss and disinformation from all sides and then it became this question of well what the hell is this topic if it's not what I thought it was and I guess I've been very surprised to have"
},
{
"end_time": 734.77,
"index": 29,
"start_time": 704.957,
"text": " encountered Mick in the Twitter sphere. So I don't think of him as particularly gunning for me or out to get me, but there is some aspect of he sees himself in a role with respect to a community, which, and let me just say that the positive part of this, there's a lot of complete nonsense in UFO land that is not only false,"
},
{
"end_time": 758.575,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 735.299,
"text": " but is also bunk in the sense that a bunko artist needed to create the bunk in order for the bunk to exist. It's not a question of somebody saw a mile-hour balloon and got confused. So there's really a role for debunking, and in particular I think there's a role for debunking aimed at our government, because clearly the government has been up to bunk"
},
{
"end_time": 786.305,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 759.224,
"text": " Either then or now or both, but it can't be neither. There has to be some aspect of this that is bunk. Where I get very confused is for those of us who have never particularly focused on an incident or a set of people or a group of names. I mean, I am very confused as to what Mick is trying to police"
},
{
"end_time": 802.142,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 786.834,
"text": " because at the moment I'm just saying like I'm confused and apparently somehow it's not good enough to be confused. One must also be clear that this is nonsense and I'm not at all clear that this is nonsense."
},
{
"end_time": 827.022,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 803.029,
"text": " Well, you're confused about me. Maybe I can clear up what my position is, what I'm actually trying to do here. And partly is I'm not really trying to do anything. I got into this field simply as a hobby. I originally started investigating, debunking the chemtrails conspiracy theory like over 10 years ago."
},
{
"end_time": 846.271,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 827.534,
"text": " After I left the video game industry and I had a lot of spare time on my hands and I was like learning to fly and doing things like that and it was just very interesting to me and it was like essentially a series of puzzles. And people say like why do you spend so much time on this when I kind of respond to that with."
},
{
"end_time": 871.783,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 846.596,
"text": " Some people have hobbies. Some people spend an inordinate amount of time on things like running model trains or painting little figurines or making funny dolls or skydiving or whatever, whatever their hobby happens to be. And this topic here, investigating things happens to be something that really intersected with my skill sets of"
},
{
"end_time": 890.486,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 872.329,
"text": " Debugging things like figuring things out. What's the root cause the root cause analysis of things and my interest in science I've always been interested in popular science and so it's just something I just kind of got sucked into and it kind of spread out and you know, eventually I kind of settle down in a way on this UFO thing because"
},
{
"end_time": 913.353,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 891.459,
"text": " It's so interesting in terms of the mathematics, the geometry and the physics, you know, very simple physics, you know, just simple Newtonian stuff, linear algebra and things like that. It's nothing complicated, but it's stuff that I used in my previous career. And so I kind of enjoy flexing those muscles. And recently I've been enjoying flexing my muscles programming simulations."
},
{
"end_time": 940.947,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 913.797,
"text": " And I do also enjoy the interactions with people. I like talking to people. I like talking to people who believe and people who used to believe. And to a certain degree, talking to skeptics. Although, to be honest, a lot of the skeptics are rather the grumpy, boring types that don't have a lot of fun. And UFO people are much more fun. Best one I ever had was the Flat Earth Conference I went to. That was a real party. But yeah, I'm not"
},
{
"end_time": 962.807,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 941.442,
"text": " trying to do anything huge here. Perhaps in the broader sense of debunking conspiracies, I want to make the world a better place by having fewer conspiracies out there. But the vast majority of what I do is like, Oh, an interesting UFO video. Let's have a look at it. Or, you know, this guy said something, let's see if it checks out. It's kind of like this, this fun hobby"
},
{
"end_time": 973.695,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 963.268,
"text": " Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store"
},
{
"end_time": 1007.363,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 978.507,
"text": " Well, that gives us a great deal of insight. So let me just to mix it up with you. Say you've mentioned chemtrails."
},
{
"end_time": 1034.77,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1007.91,
"text": " And you've mentioned flat earth and you've mentioned UFOs and the fun of interacting with people and debunking and making the world a better place. And I think I'm starting to see the outline of where this problem occurs. So the key issue in a lot of these things is type one versus type two error. Chemtrails sounds pretty stupid. And to be honest, little green men seems pretty dumb to me too."
},
{
"end_time": 1064.36,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1035.452,
"text": " to say nothing of the flat earth, which seems idiotic and preposterous. But if you ask me, the idea of the Tuskegee medical experiment and untreated syphilis sounds dumb. Oh, really? The government's can allow people to go untreated into tertiary syphilis, or we're actually going to kill Fred Hampton in his bed through COINTELPRO using the Cook County Sheriff's Department, or we're going to trade, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 1087.176,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1064.838,
"text": " Drugs for arms with Iranians and the Iran Contra all of these things sound dumb to me because they're clearly preposterous and the concern that I have is that I don't believe in ghosts and I don't believe in the Loch Ness monster and I do believe in J. Edgar Hoover's FBI as an agent"
},
{
"end_time": 1117.278,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1088.029,
"text": " agency, you know, filled with evil targeting ordinary Americans for their political beliefs up to and including their personal destruction and death, including using our free press to plant stories and destroy people. And so I imagine you in all of these contexts, and I imagine you as the guy who said, Oh, really, you think the FBI is going to come up with a story and planted in the Los Angeles Times that Gene Seberg has been a leading actress has been impregnated and cuckolded"
},
{
"end_time": 1144.599,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1117.927,
"text": " And this is where I start to get into my issue, which is I really don't like the personal destruction of individuals who are trying to sort out fact from fiction and type one versus type two error and incredible and preposterous stories that are clearly not true."
},
{
"end_time": 1173.439,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1145.179,
"text": " and incredible and preposterous stories that are absolutely true. And the debunking energy of this is fun, it's a hobby, it's a pastime with other people on the other side of this who are not bunko artists, who've come to believe things. Some of those things may be completely false. Some of those things may be confusions. Some of those things may be true and we're going to call them false because they're actually"
},
{
"end_time": 1195.981,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1174.087,
"text": " part of a storyline. For example, you could easily imagine in the UFO case that we would use a UFO cover story to disguise the testing of stealth technology before anyone knew that we were working on it. And if so, if I see a giant black wedge in the sky that looks like no airplane ever and was thin as a pancake,"
},
{
"end_time": 1224.923,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1196.374,
"text": " I would be in need of debunking simply because the government had created a bunko story, I had seen something and then I had to be personally destroyed in order to make sure that the program stayed secret. So I guess, to be blunt about it, I see this as punting the responsibilities of a human being, a scientist and a skeptic to take a side in this. It's like the really difficult thing is decision boundaries, type one versus type two errors,"
},
{
"end_time": 1251.886,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1225.367,
"text": " trying to figure out who's active in trying to bunk things that needs to be debunked, who's confused, who needs to be made unconfused, and who is saying that they're seeing something that needs to be followed up and not necessarily having their reputation destroyed because somebody wants to, in your own words, flex. I don't find the flexing fun. I didn't say flex. You did say flex."
},
{
"end_time": 1280.213,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1252.654,
"text": " I don't, well, it's not a word I actually use. So, uh, I'd say something about flexing your own, Oh, flexing my muscles, but it's not like flex. I was in like, you know, flexing. Yes, I know. But, uh, for me, flexing actually, you mean it's the same thing as stretching or an exercise. Okay. But right now I just went through exactly one of these moments where I tried to remember something you'd said. And then you told me that you don't use that as a phrase. Then I happened to be, yes, but in a sense, the sense that you meant, no,"
},
{
"end_time": 1306.527,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1281.681,
"text": " I think you did say it in the original sense from which the internet term flex comes from. So I don't think that's even correct. So my point to you is I don't enjoy the feeling in my body right now, which is I've just contradicted you. You assured me that that's not a term that you use. We had perhaps at most a misunderstanding, but the feeling of something"
},
{
"end_time": 1333.473,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1306.715,
"text": " But the feeling of somebody saying, no, you're wrong. And thinking that that's fun. Your initial description of your activities as a hobby. I don't much care for this as a hobby. If it's a duty, because the world is going to be filled up with nonsense. I actually appreciate that. I want to be very clear about that. But the fun of interacting with people, many of whom are scared. I've seen people"
},
{
"end_time": 1356.988,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1333.712,
"text": " close to and filled with tears. I've seen people who feel that their lives have been destroyed because they have made contact with something that they can't talk about. Me too. I want to be very clear here. Like I'm not doing that for fun. When I talk to people and I have a podcast, Tales from the Rabbit Hole, where I talk to people who are believers or experiences or whatever."
},
{
"end_time": 1385.776,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1357.551,
"text": " And I'm very respectful. And I think the vast majority of people who, who are in that position, who are very upset, you know, there are people who have developed serious, uh, emotional issues because of their experiences. And that's something I very much respect. And I certainly would not in any sense say I'm having fun, uh, debunking that. In fact, there's some people that I prefer not to even talk to because I know that they are, they are so sensitive."
},
{
"end_time": 1414.753,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1386.032,
"text": " When I'm talking about fun, I'm talking about things like geometry and programming and figuring out what's in this video. And those things should be things that are essentially neutral from a personal perspective. I know some people don't like it, but I try to always keep that personal aspect of it separate. I enjoy talking to people just simply from the interactions with people, but I'm always very sensitive to people's feelings. I haven't enjoyed our interaction."
},
{
"end_time": 1438.422,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1415.725,
"text": " Well, that's that's perhaps you know, my my interaction style could do with some improvement But you know when I said utterly mine could as well and I look forward to improving. I haven't blocked you I'm just saying that the feeling I've had is I was Effectively lied to that there was absolutely no there there. I believed it What are you referring to?"
},
{
"end_time": 1451.374,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1439.343,
"text": " I thought that in essence, the entire UFO story could just be dismissed with the back of a hand that this is complete nonsense."
},
{
"end_time": 1473.217,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1451.886,
"text": " I'm with you in a sense on that aspect of it. I think that the UFO story is something that needs investigating. And I think what we have here is something I think that perhaps you have been doing here is kind of simplifying a very complex subject down into like, you know, it's either one thing or the other. Like you would"
},
{
"end_time": 1491.664,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1473.763,
"text": " You were describing my debunking as some kind of calling. I can't remember exactly what you said, but I think you were kind of describing it at a very high level, as if what I am doing is trying to prove that little green men don't exist and that all these people are wrong."
},
{
"end_time": 1521.613,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1492.261,
"text": " When I look at it, I look at it kind of the micro level, where I am looking at individual cases, I'm trying to figure out what's actually going on in this individual case. Now, someone asked me my opinion about the broader implications of this analogy of that, but that's not my goal. That's not what I'm actually trying to do. And when you're describing what I'm doing, you're describing like, as if I have some kind of big agenda, trying to debunk UFOs as a whole."
},
{
"end_time": 1538.66,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1522.244,
"text": " I think if you look before two years ago, you'll find no discussion. I discuss almost everything under the sun, zero discussion of UFOs."
},
{
"end_time": 1567.193,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1539.94,
"text": " I don't think I have any particular history of, Oh, didn't you understand in the, in the go fast video this, but on the Nimitz video, you know, such and such and Fravor said this and, but Lazar said that like this whole world, I'm just not even a part of. Uh, I know that there's somebody with the last name of Greer. I couldn't tell you the first name. I don't know whether they're pro or anti. It's like, I'm really not part of this world. Um, what I have learned is."
},
{
"end_time": 1596.544,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1568.131,
"text": " that the amount of indirect evidence that something is up and something I have to say when I don't when I say something I don't mean little green men and I mean little green men not as little or green or men but just as the phrase to aliens yeah it's like what could be up could easily be just a disinformation campaign it could be a cover for us a stealth program it's there's something up and"
},
{
"end_time": 1628.097,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1598.183,
"text": " I don't need to please you to tell you what weights are on the branches of the decision tree. I simply need to say, boy, was I confused. This isn't just a bunch of people seeking attention or some sort of promo stunt for a Spielberg film gone wrong. It's quite a bit larger than that. It's a tremendous amount of indirect evidence. The basic puzzle, as I understand it, and again, I'm new here,"
},
{
"end_time": 1656.578,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1628.916,
"text": " is that there is zero convincing direct evidence where there's a chain of custody with the data and it's not only a question of a few seconds of video but very detailed multiple sensor data, everything sort of fits in some kind of a way that you could actually say there's essentially no way of faking this. There's almost none of that."
},
{
"end_time": 1685.538,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1657.227,
"text": " To my knowledge, there is no convincing proof in the public sphere. So that's the big thing that argues for the fact that this is not about UFOs or in the sense of aliens and little green men and sentient intelligence. The thing that goes in the other direction though, is just how much indirect evidence there is that something has been going on"
},
{
"end_time": 1712.5,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1686.613,
"text": " and how willing we've been to destroy people who've been willing to poke at this and if you believe that the direct evidence argument is effectively a pretty good argument that nothing's here because so many of us have cameras it's kind of amazing that nobody ever captures something that's really really convincing that doesn't make sense to me"
},
{
"end_time": 1732.79,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1713.2,
"text": " If you believe that story, you've got a big problem with the level of indirect evidence. If you believe the indirect evidence, you have the reverse problem. For God's sakes, why is there no absolutely crystal clear data set that has slipped into the public's hands? So whatever your resolution to that puzzle is,"
},
{
"end_time": 1761.988,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1733.439,
"text": " I'm usually in the position where I come up with too many explanations. This is one of the only topics I've ever met where a creative brain can't come up with a single explanation to fit all these data points. Well, I think the reason for it is that there isn't a single explanation and I think it's a mistake to try to look for one. I think there's a lot of things that explain both the actions of government and the military and the various interested parties like, you know, to the stars Academy and people like that."
},
{
"end_time": 1788.37,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1762.551,
"text": " And there's a variety of explanations for the sightings that people are having, the evidence that arises, and trying to kind of shoehorn it into either one big cluster or one big cover-up. Perhaps there's a degree of both in that. Perhaps the government does use things like UFO stories to allow them to be out there at least for distractions from other things."
},
{
"end_time": 1808.916,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1788.541,
"text": " and certainly like we know that there's a variety of different interesting parties within the government there are there's infighting there's there's a degree of incompetence which i think you know is kind of endemic anywhere there's corruption there's kind of you know there's back dealing there's people who are doing things for their friends in government"
},
{
"end_time": 1832.995,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1808.916,
"text": " And there's a variety of things and i think it's not going to be simple if we actually figure out what's going on with this whole ufo thing i think you can be looking at hundreds and maybe thousands of different data points that and there won't be like one big smoking gun either way let's just take one category."
},
{
"end_time": 1862.824,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1833.268,
"text": " of UFO things. So we have mylar balloons and swamp gas and disinformation campaigns and experimental aircrafts and drones and then non-friendly nations blah blah blah. Let's just take everything that is a normal sounding explanation that can account for this and let's take various claimed UFO encounters and attribute those to those explanations that we're all prepared to accept"
},
{
"end_time": 1887.142,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1863.131,
"text": " includes some of the sightings or experiences. Is there anything left over in your opinion that's really unsettled? Because it's a question of overlapping explanations for like, it could be the Chinese, or it could be the Russians, or it could be the Iranians, or it could be swamp gas. It's like, I get that those are all the same style of explanation."
},
{
"end_time": 1910.794,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1887.654,
"text": " I mean, if the government says they have 143 unsolved or 142 now, the chief scientists just said they solved one yesterday. Those are actually cases that are unsolved, that they were unable to determine what they actually are. And the likely explanation is simply that there isn't enough data. So there's definitely going to be lots of interesting things out there."
},
{
"end_time": 1935.179,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1911.254,
"text": " They probably fit into one of the categories of things like airborne clutter or atmospheric effects or heavenly bodies or planes and misidentifications, things like that. But we can't determine what they actually are. But what we don't have is what you said earlier, we don't have something that's unambiguously unusual, something that demonstrates advanced aerodynamic capabilities or something that seems to defy the known laws of physics."
},
{
"end_time": 1958.166,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1935.503,
"text": " But we certainly have lots of unresolved things. I don't think that necessarily means anything. I think that's just something that's inevitable. And I think that when we have more detailed inspections of datasets, it's just going to resolve more things, not resolve, it's going to bring up things like that. RV Loeb's new program, the Project Galileo program,"
},
{
"end_time": 1985.299,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1958.439,
"text": " He's trying to set up these telescopes and these sensors, which will detect when something's there and then they'll zoom in on it and then they'll take photographs of it. And he says, maybe they'll see the, you know, made in made in outer space sticker on it. But probably what's going to happen is just, you're going to get more blurry photos and they will be on undetermined. So it's inevitable. Let's get back to your superposition argument."
},
{
"end_time": 2011.8,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 1985.964,
"text": " We all agree that it's going to be a superposition. That's not the interesting, if it could be Iran or it could be China, that's a superposition of different explanations. No one says that all drones have to come from one country. The key issue isn't superpositions of different mundane categories. The key issue is, is there anything at the moment that argues in your mind"
},
{
"end_time": 2026.101,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2012.841,
"text": " Not in my mind, no. I'm curious as to"
},
{
"end_time": 2046.476,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2027.21,
"text": " Why do people believe weird things? Why do people think that time traveling humans from the future is actually a reasonable explanation? Why do they think that trickster spirits"
},
{
"end_time": 2076.459,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2046.476,
"text": " is a reasonable explanation. I know there's some fairly serious people who use the term trickster as kind of an explanation for UFOs. There's some kind of trickster from another dimension who has come over. Jacques Vallee, I think, is a big proponent of this. And his colleague, I forget his name now, they talk about tricksters. What is it that actually makes people who are at one point"
},
{
"end_time": 2092.005,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2076.647,
"text": " serious scientists go over to thinking that, uh, essentially poltergeists from outer space is a reasonable explanation to things. Now I don't say that to, I mean, that sounds like I'm mocking them, but that's actually the type of things they did."
},
{
"end_time": 2117.312,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2092.5,
"text": " It does sound like I'm mocking them. Yes, I know, but that's an unfortunate look. I don't want to trap you in Mick. I don't want to trap you in language. If it sounds that way to your ear. Well, it's just real quick. It's real quick. I want to address that point. Like I'm not mocking them. I'm essentially trying to accurately describe their positions. And it's unfortunate that with a lot of these things, if you talk about say flat earth, if you try to describe the position, it comes across as ridiculous."
},
{
"end_time": 2145.896,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2117.654,
"text": " When someone is using tricksters from another dimension as an explanation for UFOs, it comes across as ridiculous, but it's actually what they say. Let's try this carefully. Let me imagine that you and I are living on North Sentinel Island in the Andaman chain in the Indian Ocean. And I say, you know, I can't help but feel"
},
{
"end_time": 2176.152,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2146.681,
"text": " that there's a bigger world out there and that every time something tries to contact us, there's a force, an unseen force that stops them from making contact. And we've become really belligerent. We keep throwing spears and shooting arrows at anything that approaches our beaches. But I have this feeling that a power exists that is screening all contact and that there's an entire world of people like us and dissimilar from us who want to contact us. And you say,"
},
{
"end_time": 2202.995,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2176.459,
"text": " Oh really? You think there's like a federation that really cares about us and stops us from being contacted and they're tricksters in the sense that they they prevent landings so that we will think that we are isolated and alone in the world and you know I'm trying to describe India and you're making fun of the fact that I'm trying to describe India. I don't have the word India because I've never"
},
{
"end_time": 2227.961,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2203.319,
"text": " spoken a word of Hindi or I don't know that I'm probably an Indian citizen according to the world but North Sentinel Island has one of these problems which is it's got effectively an unseen force called India that acts in some sense as a trickster to make sure that they're not in good Copernican position to be able to observe the world and here I've got Mick West"
},
{
"end_time": 2251.203,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2228.473,
"text": " Talking about this in terms of what sounds ridiculous because it is ridiculous and the answer is no, it's not ridiculous at all No, it's not. But if I was on North Sentinel Island, I would be pointing out all the evidence that we have For this thing, you know, we see contrails from jets flying overhead. We see boats Occasionally people come and they land on the island and there's trouble. So we've got a lot of evidence that"
},
{
"end_time": 2273.848,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2251.527,
"text": " I believe that we have evidence both for and against"
},
{
"end_time": 2300.742,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2274.838,
"text": " active visitation by intelligent life that we do not perceive as any of our own civilization. Not very good evidence. They have very good evidence on North Central Ireland because they can actually see people. They can actually see things like planes. They can see boats. You know, very often in, in science experiments, I've watched people throw out the outliers because they have a feeling that you're allowed to throw out the outliers. And sometimes the outliers are bad pieces of information."
},
{
"end_time": 2330.452,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2301.152,
"text": " This occurs in, you know, the tau theta puzzle story that Richard Feynman tells about the asymmetry of the weak force. And sometimes, you know, sometimes it's real information, sometimes it's an artifact of the environmental setup. What outliers do you think are being thrown out of the UFO sphere? What outliers do you think are being thrown out of the UFO sphere? We don't have like amazing videos that are just being thrown out because they're... Well, I think you and I are disagreeing about something more fundamental."
},
{
"end_time": 2351.817,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2331.288,
"text": " My feeling is that there's a sort of debunking energy versus a scientific energy. I kind of like debunking, to be honest, when it's your great aunt's poltergeist in her second home. There's a story about a kid who committed suicide in 1913 and now haunts the house."
},
{
"end_time": 2374.65,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2352.756,
"text": " I don't want to have to deal with that stuff scientifically. I don't want to have to write an NSF grant and get the University of Puget Sound involved or whatever. There's a role for debunking and then there's the problem of the debunkers and I think we have to actually talk about debunking as kind of an anti-social negative movement. I want to"
},
{
"end_time": 2401.596,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2376.391,
"text": " Sorry. I think that's ridiculous though. I think that's frankly, I think it's ridiculous because you know, I, I identify as a debunker. Uh, you know, I've said there are problems with that term. So unless you're talking about somebody else, I assume you're talking about me. No, no, no. I'm talking about there's a movement of people, right? All right. So do you see me as being part of that movement? Well, you've been curious in my mind, you're certainly,"
},
{
"end_time": 2428.746,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2402.108,
"text": " And again, I'm not angling for anything in particular. I'm not a takedown artist. I don't love interpersonal conflict. It feels to me like in the world of debunkers, and I've now met them in multiple fields, you are one of the most disciplined, and to be honest, one of the most charitable that I've met. Now, so this isn't principally about Mick West."
},
{
"end_time": 2454.343,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2429.838,
"text": " The problem that I have with this as a movement, first of all, skepticism doesn't pay very well. I've talked to Michael Shermer about this. It's very hard to do the yeoman's work of skepticism and make it entertaining. So the problem with most of the skeptic movement is that you start off trying to say, look, I'm just trying to keep the crap out of science so that we can have a conversation. It's not always"
},
{
"end_time": 2484.411,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2455.06,
"text": " Cluttered with somebody's ghost stories or whatnot. Okay, so that's very important particularly with respect to religion religion always wants to intrude Then you get into this problem, which is you have to spice up your skepticism because it's not really Tremendously entertaining so that's when you typically get snark you get condescension you get stigma and All of those things tend to chase good people out of these discussions"
},
{
"end_time": 2511.63,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2484.633,
"text": " much the way good people are chased out of politics. There's an idea that politics belongs to people who don't mind having five private investigators scurrying about over their life to interview every ex-boyfriend or girlfriend, you know, to dig up any dirt to be printed on the front page of the New York Times. My feeling about this is a lot of us who would like to run for office, like to see other people run for office, are very angry"
},
{
"end_time": 2540.538,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2512.329,
"text": " that the political crowd is taking this over and it's like, if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Well, the same thing is true with UFOs. My feeling is I want to hear from a lot more people. And one of the things that I want, no, I want to hear from a lot more people. And one of the things that I want them to know is that there are smart, caring people who, as long as they're not telling some BS story, and as long as they're willing to reconsider their views, don't need to be debunked."
},
{
"end_time": 2566.596,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2541.135,
"text": " Because that stigma is antithetical to science. Well, just be careful what you agreed to because I don't want to... It all sounds good so far, except for the implications. Why don't you recapitulate what Eric said so that we can see if there is indeed agreement? Well, I think Eric is saying essentially that there's a certain type of"
},
{
"end_time": 2583.729,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2567.363,
"text": " Criticism of various fields and we're talking about UFO in particular here the type of criticism that is identified as the debunking community that has a stifling effect like a negative effect the chilling effect."
},
{
"end_time": 2607.432,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2584.48,
"text": " Which prevents discussion because people feel like they're being attacked. They feel like they're being ridiculed. People don't like that. A lot of people involved have a deeply emotional connection to it. And so they're not going to come forward if they feel that they are going to be ridiculed. And I agree that that is a problem. And I think in the broader sense, it's been a problem at the government level."
},
{
"end_time": 2633.541,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2607.927,
"text": " and that historically the government has basically completely ignored the UFO issue. If you look at what the FAA was doing, say, even just 10 years ago, they basically said, call this paranormal hotline. It was a UFO hotline, but it still went to a site which also dealt with ghosts and things like that. So there has been this kind of ridicule"
},
{
"end_time": 2662.688,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2633.985,
"text": " of the issue and I really don't think that I or indeed most skeptics who actually look into UFOs are really part of that type of ridicule. We actually investigate cases in great depth. We do the math, we do the work, we sometimes go out and do the field work, we do recreation experiments, we try to figure things out. I've interviewed lots of eyewitnesses and I do it with the greatest respect and I trust"
},
{
"end_time": 2668.797,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2662.91,
"text": " What they are telling me is what they believe to be true. So I would really welcome"
},
{
"end_time": 2694.172,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2669.309,
"text": " Why would you trust them? I would imagine that some of those people are not to be trusted in their attention. Trust is simply my default position. I usually assume from the start that people are going to tell the truth because that's been my experience that most people do. Now that has burnt me in the past a little bit. People will do overtures to you and then they'll turn around."
},
{
"end_time": 2718.695,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2694.531,
"text": " But most of the time you catch more flies with honey and not going to catch flies is probably a poor analogy, but it's I I I'm naturally a nice guy. I when I talk to people, you know, I Emphasize with them and I understand but you know, it's it's a difficult thing to talk about So well, let me ask you I don't have the sense that"
},
{
"end_time": 2745.947,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2719.155,
"text": " there's any real reason for any animosity between you and myself, to be honest at all. Why do I have the takeaway of what are you doing in my timeline? In other words, I would imagine that in a slightly different world, universe a prime rather than a where we live, you and I would be naturally allied on this topic. And yeah,"
},
{
"end_time": 2775.93,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2746.408,
"text": " We're scientists, scientific type people who have a natural skepticism of things. Okay. So I didn't come looking for you and then multiple times you've sort of entered in and you're, you know, you're talking in specific about Lou Elisando and somebody who I think I've never mentioned the name Chris Mellon. I hope I'm that it's Chris Mellon. I can't remember everybody's name. He's the government official who's part of the whole invisible college type thing. Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 2805.333,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2776.578,
"text": " So what is it that you perceive me as doing that needs to be sort of minded? Well, you make bold, declarative statements about this, you know, this is a huge deal. I believe this is the thing where I started to interact with you that you thought it was like a huge deal that either there are some kind of advanced technology flying around that we don't know what it is, or there's some kind of big"
},
{
"end_time": 2833.712,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2805.691,
"text": " You know, cluster, starting with Harry Reid. Yeah, I can't remember exactly what you said, but I think you were something along those lines. And I think at the time I was basically saying what I am saying now that it is more complicated than that. And the reason I interacted with you and I probably wouldn't with just some sort of random person is that you have reach. You know, you've got a lot of followers, you've got a very popular podcast, you've written books, you're quite well known, and people take what you said,"
},
{
"end_time": 2862.312,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2834.07,
"text": " and you become a hero within the UFO community and they listen to what you said. So I feel it needs addressing. Eric's written a book. I haven't gotten the coffee. It's a secret invisible book. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. So Mick, I stand by my statement. This is a huge big deal. And I don't mean this UFOs. I mean, this decision tree has no boring branch."
},
{
"end_time": 2883.097,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2863.899,
"text": " Yeah, I'm actually kind of in a little way coming around a little bit more to that than I was at the time when I first disagreed with you. First of all, I really appreciate you saying that. Yeah, well, it's not not in a victory lap kind of a way just in terms of evolution. Yeah, I have no problem changing my opinion when new data arrives."
},
{
"end_time": 2907.449,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2884.838,
"text": " Well, let me explain why I've kind of come around a little bit. I think it's really being the increasing looks behind the curtain that we've been having, I guess, over the last year and actually culminating just a couple of days ago. And you probably didn't have a chance to look at it. I sent the email yesterday about Travis Taylor, the chief scientist at the UAP Task Force."
},
{
"end_time": 2937.654,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 2908.097,
"text": " And he's someone who was hired by the lead of the UAP Task Force to be the chief scientist. And he contributed to this UAP report that we're all familiar with. But he's also the chief scientist on a TV show, The Secrets of Skinwalker Ranch. And he's also been a visiting scientist on other things like ancient aliens. And he had a TV show called Red Net Rockets, I think, or Backyard Rockets scientists. He's, he's"
},
{
"end_time": 2959.787,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 2938.148,
"text": " really very unexpected as the choice of someone who wants to be neutrally investigating UFOs. Because on the one hand, he's at Skinwalker Ranch on TV, basically promoting the idea that there's some kind of weird interdimensional tricksters coming through and doing weird things at Skinwalker Ranch. Also at the same time,"
},
{
"end_time": 2985.367,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 2960.316,
"text": " He's supposed to be soberly investigating the evidence and writing UAP reports and briefing Congress. It really doesn't make any sense. And I was frankly, I was flabbergasted when the news broke a couple of days ago that he was in fact the chief scientist. Do you know this person? I've talked to him a little bit online, but I don't know him personally, no."
},
{
"end_time": 3009.531,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 2986.34,
"text": " So I have spoken to Eric Baird, who is out there on that Skinwalker Ranch History Channel project. And I've spoken to Brandon, who I know a little bit, who owns the ranch. Yeah. I've spoken to Brandon too. Pardon me? I interviewed him for my podcast. I interviewed Brandon for my podcast. We're kind of friendly on Twitter too. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 3040.128,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3012.688,
"text": " I have to tell you that part of their problem is that they believe, and I don't think they're lying to me, I could be wrong. I'm going to be careful about this. I believe that they think they've seen enough weird stuff that it's effectively almost impossible to keep this air of detachment going. And if you look carefully on Travis's statements,"
},
{
"end_time": 3065.401,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3042.005,
"text": " He basically has gotten to the point where he's like, we've seen so much weird stuff here. I never would have believed this two summers ago, but this and that. He's still careful to say we don't know what's going on, but he's certainly decamped into a position where he's saying, I've now seen so much weird unexplainable stuff that I cannot"
},
{
"end_time": 3094.07,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3066.715,
"text": " affect the same position of studied neutrality that would occur before I tutored my Bayesian prior. And this is not necessarily a knock against him. In other words, I have been told by multiple people who do not strike me as charlatan, I only wish you'd seen what we have because we're wasting time in this conversation."
},
{
"end_time": 3124.224,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3095.128,
"text": " Now I have noted on social media that I am tired of being told that I'm going to be shown something. And then like Lucy in the football, I never managed to make contact with the football. And as a science, as a PhD in STEM, I feel duty bound to report that I have been spun up several times only to be wound down and told that it's got to be deferred because of some meeting or some change in plans. So,"
},
{
"end_time": 3153.575,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3124.701,
"text": " I have no idea whether this outreach is a form of disinformation in which well-meaning individuals are constantly put in some sort of tantalus-like situation. Was one of those invitations to go to Skinwalker? I've had multiple invitations to go to Skinwalker from Brandon. And have you taken up on that? No, I haven't. And for reasons that you may find amusing."
},
{
"end_time": 3184.002,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3154.77,
"text": " One of the things that I did was consult with some people about the safety issues of this UFO stuff. And they said things that I wasn't really prepared for. One of which particular individual said to me, there is absolute tissue damage that we can record that comes out of stories of encounters"
},
{
"end_time": 3210.145,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3184.582,
"text": " and you make what you want of the encounter story, but it is completely consistent with our biopsies and our understanding of what cell death has occurred, which I found really interesting. I mean here I'm talking to published scientists. It sounds like evidence. It sounds like evidence."
},
{
"end_time": 3235.111,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3210.981,
"text": " But my point would be whether or not I understand that as aliens or whether or not I understand that is that there's a uranium deposit or who knows what, I don't know enough about secret weapons or geology or who knows what, you know, I do know that I've been warned that"
},
{
"end_time": 3261.681,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3235.486,
"text": " Bad things happen to people who get too close to some of this stuff."
},
{
"end_time": 3277.073,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3261.681,
"text": " Anything from touchdown to threes and if you're right, you can win big. Mix and match players from any sport on ProgPix, America's number one daily fantasy sports app. ProgPix is available in 40 plus states including California, Texas,"
},
{
"end_time": 3298.677,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3277.295,
"text": " Florida and Georgia. Most importantly, all the transactions on the app are fast, safe and secure. Download the PricePix app today and use code Spotify to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup. That's code Spotify to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup. PricePix. It's good to be right. Must be present in certain states. Visit PricePix.com for restrictions and details."
},
{
"end_time": 3329.309,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3300.333,
"text": " Well, it doesn't stop them filming a TV show. Brandon actually invited me. It may not stop me from going out either. Yeah. No, Brandon has invited me. Maybe we should go together and then we can compare notes. Brandon has invited me and I have not. I recently reached out to him to try to take up on him, but he's being like busy and hasn't really got back to me yet. But you know, I would still like to go to Skinwalker. And if you're interested, I'm potentially willing to consider it."
},
{
"end_time": 3350.282,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3329.616,
"text": " Off air, I asked Mick if he would be willing to engage in so-called CE5, that is Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind, if someone offered to perform it with him, and time was sufficiently limited, travel paid for, it was done by someone known for their consistency and disregard, etc., as this is a technique which purportedly, reliably induces quote-unquote contact."
},
{
"end_time": 3373.933,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3350.691,
"text": " There's some topics I would love to actually hear your take on as an expert because I'm not one."
},
{
"end_time": 3402.688,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3375.009,
"text": " One thing I found very distressing about this whole topic is I was willing to reconsider my UFO position separately from attended positions, which I don't really want to get into. So the first thing that's very hard to separate off is this cattle mutilation claim. Right? So in other words, you think you just want to talk about, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 3430.23,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3403.592,
"text": " Actually, I'll go in later to the issue about why I'm interested in UFOs for scientific reasons. But some that you just want to talk about UFOs, you get into cattle mutilation, and then you get into progressively weirder and weirder sounding stuff that I'm not excited about. The least exciting thing for me is this remote viewing stuff. Right?"
},
{
"end_time": 3460.333,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3430.623,
"text": " It's interesting from a historical perspective, from the actions of the government. The government did research into remote viewing and in reaction to the Russians doing research into remote viewing, I believe back in the 50s or 60s, Project Stargate. And this was a real thing. So I think, you know, even though it's something that sounds kind of somewhat ridiculous, it's something that's actually bubble this way to the top in a way that, you know, UFOs are bubbling their way up now. It's something that's"
},
{
"end_time": 3489.48,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3460.862,
"text": " If the door is open for UFOs being a real phenomenon, whatever place brackets and to say it's an extraordinary phenomenon, then why does that not open the door to other extraordinary phenomenon, which is also attested to by high ranking individuals and there are government studies"
},
{
"end_time": 3516.817,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3489.684,
"text": " such as remote viewing. Why is it provoking an unfavorable reaction from you? I don't know whether you saw my interaction with how put off on the topic of predicting the markets. Yeah, why don't you? Well, no, it was a bit more subtle than that. His claim was that he was able to predict the markets in order to effectively replace a bake sale or something at a local school."
},
{
"end_time": 3543.319,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3517.466,
"text": " And by getting 10%, he could make somebody else, I forget, $260,000 and he could get $26,000, which is all he needed. Then he stopped predicting the markets. The typical energy around that would go like, dude, if you could become rich, why wouldn't you do it? Right? That's not my energy. My energy is different. My energy is if you could do this reliably, you could settle so many debates."
},
{
"end_time": 3573.234,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3543.643,
"text": " By proving like you assume you don't care about money and assume whatever this that and the other thing. You do care about credibility and you could increase your credibility by inviting people onto your private jet to take you to your private islands, et cetera, et cetera, by just doing this relentless. And then that conversation didn't go anywhere. Now, if you notice in Jesse's cut of that interaction,"
},
{
"end_time": 3603.49,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3574.155,
"text": " I stayed on that point doggedly and he cut a lot of it out, but you see him say this thing where he says like, I think we've, I think we've addressed this issue. But I was always trying to be polite. I was not trying to take Hal to task in a way that let him look ridiculous. I was, you know, I, I find this claim disturbing."
},
{
"end_time": 3634.189,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3604.377,
"text": " Like you, I don't want to let these claims in if they cloud our judgment. It's very important to me that we not have nonsense claims. I don't want to say he's a liar. I don't want to say I believe this to be true. I don't know what to make of it. I'm probably backing off of it before I do more damage. I don't like these other claims, Kurt, because the cattle mutilations are the ones that are closest to sounding like UFOs."
},
{
"end_time": 3660.811,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3635.606,
"text": " And the remote viewing sounds like a different force carrier. In other words, if you imagine that you want current, where are you currently Toronto Toronto and Mick, you are in Sacramento Sacramento. So somehow we're all having this conversation on a screen in real time almost. And this is only possible because of photons and electrons."
},
{
"end_time": 3689.94,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3661.613,
"text": " Imagine that there are new force carriers like photons that can be used to transmit information that can go through, I don't know, seawater or who knows what. It's possible that you could get a new physics to explain remote viewing and that microtubules are, you know, antenna in the brain and blah, blah, blah. It's not completely outside of the realm of possibility, but it's also pretty far-fetched, right? And,"
},
{
"end_time": 3699.906,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3690.845,
"text": " It's important to be able to say this sounds like total nonsense without necessarily needing to destroy somebody in the process."
},
{
"end_time": 3727.927,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3700.265,
"text": " I think your polite questioning of Hal Putov was the right thing. You were pressuring him there. And it's not really about why don't you use this to make loads of money because you could very easily give a reason why you don't need the money. It's why don't you demonstrate this amazing new physics or this amazing new phenomena to science. If remote viewing was actually a demonstrable thing,"
},
{
"end_time": 3754.94,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3728.336,
"text": " It would be one of the most incredible revolutions in science ever really. It would be, as you describe, perhaps a new force of physics, an entirely new understanding of consciousness and the brain. It would be a big deal. And yet Hal Puthoff is just like, I kind of got bored of doing that and didn't took too much time. I wanted to do other things. It was, it seemed ridiculous. I couldn't understand the answers that came back. Yeah. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 3784.872,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3755.811,
"text": " Mick, do you see remote viewing as equally far-fetched as taking UFOs seriously as some extra ordinary phenomenon? I see it as equally unbased in evidence. If it's something that could be done, it would be huge. And to that extent, you can understand why people in the military, perhaps people with a little bit of magical thinking, went for it. If you hear that the Russians are doing something and they're having success doing something, obviously the"
},
{
"end_time": 3811.459,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3785.572,
"text": " Let me come up with a more plausible explanation. We know that, for example, Leon Theremin, who discovered capacitance as a musical instrument, which bears his name,"
},
{
"end_time": 3836.749,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3812.978,
"text": " was in the Sharyashka prison system, which is these country club prisons for like stem geniuses to work on Soviet projects while in prison. And he came up with, if I'm not mistaken, a means of watching the vibrations of a window pane and using it as a microphone so that you could tell what was going on in the U.S. embassy, for example."
},
{
"end_time": 3866.886,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3837.91,
"text": " And I believe there was also a plaque that was a listening device. Imagine you had lots of ways in to listening to the Americans inside of the Russian embassy, more broadly. I would easily think about developing remote viewing as an explanation for how could they have known that, right? It could be a fine cover story because you would actually be able to tell what conversation somebody was having in private."
},
{
"end_time": 3895.043,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3867.244,
"text": " As a result. They're using magic to explain the way their own incompetence in a way that that plaque that you referred to was was on the wall for I think several years before they discovered it had a microphone in it. And so they know that secrets were getting out. And rather than actually go down the actual real route of like sweeping their embassy for bugs. They started perhaps you know, this this kind of magical thinking that remote viewing was real and we should investigate it."
},
{
"end_time": 3924.428,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3895.606,
"text": " So in such a case, I would understand why there would be a story. And this is one of the reasons that I think a lot of these stories got formed in a time before the internet. And so the problem with a story like this is that you can, it was easier to keep brittle structures of narrative together before there were so many people chiming in and you could crowdsource data or understandings of"
},
{
"end_time": 3943.37,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 3925.247,
"text": " What was going on? And that's what's happening. I think to a degree now with whenever the secret evidence comes out, it gets examined by a very large number of people and quite often gets resolved. And when that happens, it essentially reveals the incompetence"
},
{
"end_time": 3973.609,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 3943.677,
"text": " of the people who have been looking into it. There's this green triangle video that's been knocking around for quite some time. Your lens aperture pointer. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it's basically been a hundred percent conclusively shown that this is just an artifact of the camera and that the vast majority of the green triangles in this video were just stars. And yet we have statements and leaks that say that they thought that these"
},
{
"end_time": 4002.21,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 3974.258,
"text": " stars in the sky that appear triangular were actually some kind of flying craft and even some kind of flying triangular craft. But when it gets released, and especially the high quality video, when that gets released, it's pretty much apparent what it is to people who are familiar with these things. So someone made the argument that perhaps they're not releasing this data partly because they don't want to be shown up. They're afraid of"
},
{
"end_time": 4014.991,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 4002.705,
"text": " The things being solved and then looking stupid, which is kind of what happened with this green triangle thing, you know, the the lead scientist of the task force, Travis Taylor, he didn't think that they were they were stars."
},
{
"end_time": 4044.872,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 4015.282,
"text": " And then I kind of explained it to him in a bit more detail and now he's changed his mind and now he thinks that they are. But, you know, for years, the UAP task force was laboring under this misapprehension that these flying things were green triangles when they were in fact identifiable stars that we can name and show on a star map. So there's a real issue there of cover your ass, which might be cooling things down a little. Well, one of my questions is why do we not have our best people"
},
{
"end_time": 4062.005,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 4046.135,
"text": " And this was my point, I think, where you and I came in contact in some sense in Twitter, where I was saying, if somebody is claiming that we cannot control airspace that is sensitive from a military perspective,"
},
{
"end_time": 4091.664,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 4063.08,
"text": " Is that what they're claiming though? I mean, they're not claiming we can't control it. They're claiming that we occasionally see things in there that we can't identify and we haven't determined that they are under control by an intelligent entity. So it's more of an issue of we have clutter in our airspace and we don't know what it is. You and I have heard different things. I have heard that we cannot control our airspace, that these things are not that uncommon, that"
},
{
"end_time": 4120.299,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 4093.234,
"text": " These are actually much more frequently found near sensitive military installations and exercises. They can potentially turn off and on nuclear devices. Well, these are claims beyond... How do I even put this? One of the things that you don't know about in this world until you actually start talking to people"
},
{
"end_time": 4142.312,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4120.93,
"text": " is which of these stories are highly conserved through people who don't seem to even know each other. So for example, let me just take two sets of triangular pyramid-like issues. There is apparently a configuration of a craft, like people who chart these things say,"
},
{
"end_time": 4167.927,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4142.654,
"text": " that a lot of these UFOs look very dissimilar but that there are clusters of things that seem to be highly conserved over decades. One of these conserved things is supposed to be a flat equilateral triangle with three lights in it slightly recessed from its vertices with rounded points. Then you have this thing with the fact that"
},
{
"end_time": 4187.073,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4168.183,
"text": " The way that these lenses open and close is with, you know, some sort of, and Nick, you'll have the right terminology for these sort of interlinked. Yes, the leaves of the iris. I didn't have the word leaves. So that somehow the leaves create triangles, and then you have this"
},
{
"end_time": 4206.323,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4187.329,
"text": " Confluence"
},
{
"end_time": 4240.435,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4214.531,
"text": " I have heard many of these stories now from pretty sober people. And I would never have heard any of these stories until I was willing to make myself stupidly vulnerable to this topic saying, geez, I thought this was all BS. Having now opened myself to that, I cannot explain how many highly conserved stories I've heard from various people that"
},
{
"end_time": 4268.029,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4241.203,
"text": " don't show any interest in being public, don't seem to be happy about the fact that they have pieces of information that distress them. It's pretty weird for, yeah. But I think, you know, this is something that has historically been the case. And I think it perhaps might tell us something more about people than about what's going on up in the sky. There was a famous ufologist, J. Allen Heineck,"
},
{
"end_time": 4297.551,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4268.336,
"text": " who used to be a debunker for the government. And his job was really to investigate things and figure out what they were and explain them to the public. But over time, he became convinced that there was something to it. And he largely became convinced from the eyewitness accounts of a number of people. But on the way there, he did a lot of research into how easy it is for people to make mistakes. And he interviewed a lot of people who were very convinced that they saw something"
},
{
"end_time": 4327.022,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4298.046,
"text": " But he also managed to resolve what it was that they actually saw. And this is something that we see time and time again, that people are deeply convinced that their memory or their perception of an event is very accurate. And they did in fact see some kind of equilateral triangle block out the stars. But sometimes it can be resolved if you actually have enough information into something like a blimp or a plane or a flock of birds. Have you ever heard Brandon's story?"
},
{
"end_time": 4347.995,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4327.944,
"text": " Yeah, where there's suddenly the people seem to be paralyzed and right over the mesa, not very many feet from his head is a giant floating metallic structure."
},
{
"end_time": 4376.937,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4348.541,
"text": " I mean, yeah, it's fascinating. Where does that, where does that come from? It's, uh, is, is there something there or is it, you know, did he, did he imagine it? Is it a dream? Is it hallucination? Is there some kind of weird gas in the air that's making him do these things? These, these are valid questions. I think he told that story at a dinner. I was at two, maybe there were 12, 15 people at the dinner. At the end of the dinner, we walk out."
},
{
"end_time": 4406.493,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4377.329,
"text": " And I'm standing around with maybe 10 of those people. Brandon is not an evidence. And we talked about many things and I said, well, what did you guys think of the dinner? And nobody brought up the fact that a businessman who seems to be ostensibly normal oriented towards family and real estate and all these things just described an unfakable"
},
{
"end_time": 4426.561,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4406.732,
"text": " encounter i mean you know it could have been that a small amount of very weird dmt got into his kombucha but on the other hand um probably not i just don't know what that story corresponds to it's too vivid too clear it's too unlike other things"
},
{
"end_time": 4458.046,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4428.473,
"text": " I think that the reaction you described there is interesting to me from the other people, but perhaps also from Brendan himself. I always kind of, I'm reminded by a thing in medicine called la belle indifference, which the beautiful indifference, which is a medical term for people who have essentially somatic injuries, like they believe that their hand is paralyzed or that they're blind in one eye, but that they're not, but they're kind of indifferent to it. And"
},
{
"end_time": 4485.896,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4458.899,
"text": " it is that kind of inexplicable indifference to something that you would think they would, would be a big deal that you see quite often in UFOs and the people who see them, they, they, you know, they're getting on with their lives that, Oh yeah, I saw a UFO once. And if I saw a UFO, that'd be the biggest thing ever. That was the amazing thing in my life. Even if someone told me that I trusted about, you know, told me a story that would be, Whoa, that is amazing. And why is this guy talking about this? You would think there would be some kind of reaction."
},
{
"end_time": 4514.923,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4486.596,
"text": " It's almost like there's a little, I don't know, attention blindness or something. Have you ever had a near death experience? Like a really, I have not. No. Yeah. It wears off really quickly. Like right after you have it, you think, Oh my God, I'm so happy to be alive. You make all these plans of what you're going to do. And in two weeks you're just back to normal. Yes. Yes. I've had things like that with an illness where during the illness is the worst thing ever. And your world is collapsing."
},
{
"end_time": 4544.548,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4515.367,
"text": " And then you get better at it. Whatever. Whatever. So I understand that people can screen this out. But what I'm trying to say is that by making this stuff outre, stuff that cannot be discussed, pushing it outside the overton window, we're screwing up the science. And I don't do many of these. I really hate interpersonal drama. And so in general, I avoid these"
},
{
"end_time": 4569.155,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4545.367,
"text": " I'm worried that you're screwing up the Overton window when we need to be dragging it more open so we get more information. And the idea that this can be debunked before it's really understood speaks to me of how I would"
},
{
"end_time": 4598.916,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4570.299,
"text": " handle faith healing where somebody's trying to separate older people from their money by claiming that a laying on of hands can replace their health care. I think, I think again, you're, you're oversimplifying it and saying, I'm trying to debunk the whole subject. Sure. If it was faith healing, that would be a valid argument that I would be trying to debunk faith healing. Cause I think faith healing, perhaps other than a placebo effect is nonsense, but UFOs, I think represent a variety of different things."
},
{
"end_time": 4627.705,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4599.309,
"text": " And I think there's a possibility that some of them are, you know, perhaps interesting technology from other countries and a very small possibility that it's, uh, aliens and an even smaller one that it's because the door is open. So let me get my foot wedged in it. Like a good, uh, encyclopedia salesman from days of old. What if, what if aliens were real? Uh, it doesn't have to be aliens. Could be, yeah, could be us."
},
{
"end_time": 4656.647,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4628.951,
"text": " Yeah, no, if there was something there in terms of advanced technology, that would be very, very interesting. Why do you say technology? Because, you know, if it's not technology, it's going to be magic. And I think technology is kind of the thing to come through first. Oh, you're talking about the, you know, perhaps like some kind of weird government cover up type thing. No, no, no, no, no. Slow it down. Okay. I'm mostly interested in this ultimately because of science."
},
{
"end_time": 4681.493,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4657.551,
"text": " technology. I don't think that I know anything about there. There's no reason that this has to involve new science. But if I saw somebody explode an atomic weapon before the neutron was discovered, I'd search for the neutron. Sure."
},
{
"end_time": 4712.568,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4682.722,
"text": " So the neutron was discovered in 1932, which I keep thinking about my aunt is older than the discovery of the neutron. What's interesting here is assume for the moment that that slim possibility that you and I both acknowledge exists that we could be looking at alien technology, but it would be built on science. We don't have not technology because people keep freezing Einstein in, which has become very distressing to me."
},
{
"end_time": 4732.534,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4713.353,
"text": " You cannot go faster than the speed of light within Einstein's construct. But Einstein's construct is the map, not the territory. We don't know whether a better map allows us to do things that are prohibited on this map, but not necessarily with a better understanding of reality. So if this were,"
},
{
"end_time": 4761.152,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4732.739,
"text": " technology based on new science held by some civilization that we don't know anything about could be us from the future could be somebody from neighboring galaxies who knows what it's hugely consequential scientifically and one of the things that causes me to despite wanting to get on with you and understand each other better you know also sort of push back relatively forcefully"
},
{
"end_time": 4791.357,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4762.125,
"text": " is I don't want that window stigmatized anymore. It's like, it's enough. Sure. Well, I think with the technology versus science question, I'm kind of in the why not both camp. New science is great and new technology would indicate new science, but new technology is also an implementation of that understanding of those scientific principles, which in itself would be useful and interesting. They should be clear about why I'm saying it."
},
{
"end_time": 4816.374,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4792.841,
"text": " There's a general tilt away from science towards technology, and there are two hijacked conversations. One is that every time we end up talking about this, it goes to the technology discussion, because markets have been hot and science, in particular physics, has been kind of stagnant for a long time. And that means that people"
},
{
"end_time": 4840.589,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4818.012,
"text": " inadvertently start thinking about new technology from old science if we don't actually keep talking about science. The other thing is that Elon has more or less taken an imperative, which is that humans figure out whether we can stop sharing one planet and one atmosphere in order to diversify our risk and turned it into a conversation about SpaceX and Mars."
},
{
"end_time": 4858.831,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4841.698,
"text": " And in both cases, what we're doing is we're taking away from a very real conversation, which is we've got a potential situation with a dictator who's invaded a neighboring country as if the 20th century had never happened in Europe of all places."
},
{
"end_time": 4888.302,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4859.258,
"text": " right next to Article 5 territory. This is extremely dangerous. And if human beings don't take the message from COVID and from Putin in Ukraine, that we better try to figure out whether we can spread out because anything like an airborne respiratory virus or radiation can cover the planet very quickly. We're in trouble. So it's very important to me to prop the window open to, is it possible to leave this place?"
},
{
"end_time": 4913.831,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 4888.575,
"text": " And the chief reason that we are unlikely to be able to leave this place, and thus we are likely to die in relatively short order due to our technological prowess and our lack of wisdom, is the Einsteinian limit on travel. Now, it's very hard to prop that window open because people have frozen Einstein in and Elon"
},
{
"end_time": 4943.814,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 4914.65,
"text": " And those two individuals have changed this conversation. The Einsteinian contribution means we always talk about is faster than light possible, which we shouldn't be talking about. We talk about wormholes. We talk about Alcubierre drives. We talk about time dilation and multi-gen. We talk about uploading into silicon. All of these things are useless. On the other front, Elon has focused us in the diversity conversation"
},
{
"end_time": 4968.268,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 4944.224,
"text": " to diversify from all on Earth to all on Earth plus Mars, as if we're going to terraform Mars before Elon turned 60. And both of these are very dangerous conversations when we have a very narrow hope of asking, should we be looking to figure out whether there's something beyond Einstein which gives us possibilities beyond Einstein?"
},
{
"end_time": 4995.333,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 4969.138,
"text": " So this is one of the reasons I'm most interested in the Overton window here, which is if Einstein's restrictions persist to the ultimate theory, we're in a lot of trouble. It means we're probably not going anywhere, and our only hope is to stabilize this planet, which I don't see much hope in doing given how powerful we've become."
},
{
"end_time": 5025.776,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 4995.845,
"text": " We have to get away from technology and from rockets and from Elon and from Einstein. If we're going to actually turn this into a legitimate question, which is, is there anywhere we can actually go or as is likely the case, we're stuck here. And I think again, why not in the, why not both camps there? It's, uh, you know, obviously we need to develop our technology and yes, it would be great if we had more adventurous explorations of physics."
},
{
"end_time": 5047.722,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 5026.305,
"text": " I want people who think they have UFO data to be welcomed scientifically and not stigmatized and made to feel as if they're aberrant freaks."
},
{
"end_time": 5077.927,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 5047.995,
"text": " If people have UFO data, I think I personally am very happy to look at that data. I'm not just going to dismiss it out of hand. I'm going to analyze it. Uh, no, I guess the question you're raising there is should other scientists be looking at this with some degree of seriousness? And yeah, there's, there's an issue that there is this stigma in science. Uh, but I think that stigma is, is largely well founded because of all the ridiculous stuff that comes along with, with UFOs."
},
{
"end_time": 5103.353,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 5078.439,
"text": " And I think if there was some good evidence, then people like the UAP task force would have actually brought it forward and actually done something with it. Where are our top physicists? I don't know. You're a top physicist. Well, you're a physicist. I don't know where you are in the world rankings, but I'm actually a mathematician."
},
{
"end_time": 5129.394,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 5104.599,
"text": " I don't know anybody in the top physics community who knows what the hell is going on. Yeah. Well, nobody knows what's going on. So it's not like, you know, they've been given the evidence and they've studied it and they've determined that there's nothing is going on. It's that the evidence, the evidence isn't really very good. What is the fact that our top people don't have the evidence indicative of something?"
},
{
"end_time": 5153.575,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 5130.316,
"text": " I don't know. I think from my perspective, I think it's more likely that the evidence doesn't rise to the level where you would be able to justify bringing in outside people. Now if it's something like the Manhattan Project where they brought in a whole bunch of scientists, there's a lot of motivation there."
},
{
"end_time": 5182.142,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 5153.968,
"text": " There was a lot of reason to believe that the race for the atomic bomb was a very important matter of national survival. But with UFOs, the base level of evidence doesn't really seem to be there. We don't have this huge push that would be justified if there was actually this evidence of new technology or new physics out there which would be worth trillions of dollars. Instead we get these stupid little programs with 22 million dollars. Hear that sound?"
},
{
"end_time": 5209.189,
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"start_time": 5183.114,
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},
{
"end_time": 5235.316,
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"start_time": 5209.189,
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{
"end_time": 5261.067,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5235.316,
"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklyn. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase."
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{
"end_time": 5285.06,
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"start_time": 5261.067,
"text": " Go to Shopify.com slash theories now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in Shopify.com slash theories with TD early pay you get your paycheck up to two business days early which means you can grab last second movie tickets in 5d premium ultra with popcorn extra large popcorn"
},
{
"end_time": 5318.183,
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"start_time": 5288.677,
"text": " It doesn't make any sense. It seems like they might even not really be, they almost might be decoys for relatively small amounts of money. Are you familiar with the history that brought in the great topologist Solomon Lefschitz and Bryce DeWitt"
},
{
"end_time": 5347.773,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5318.797,
"text": " and Peter Higgs and Lewis Whitten together, where there were two very weird efforts, one nakedly anti-gravity by a guy named Babson. No, I'm not very familiar with that, but I've heard you talk about it before, the kind of this secret gravity research. Yeah. So there was a very weird thing whereby in the 1950s,"
},
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"index": 209,
"start_time": 5348.37,
"text": " There was, if you look at Feynman's popular books, there's a story called Any Questions, where he gets a black eye in a bar that was frequented by bookies and prostitutes. What he's actually talking about is that he was going to Buffalo from Cornell to an aerospace company to deliver lectures. And there's this weird confluence between aerospace"
},
{
"end_time": 5399.36,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5375.009,
"text": " what's known as the Golden Age of General Relativity and all of these top scientists that's never made a wit of sense, which almost certainly seems like there was some sort of program run through a couple of individuals named Babson and Bainson, which is extremely confusing, to bring a small cadre of leading scientists to discuss"
},
{
"end_time": 5425.725,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5400.691,
"text": " something that sounds like anti-gravity in the guise of discussing general relativity anew. Right. And I would dearly like to know what that program actually was. Yeah. And I would like more of us to be talking openly because we know, for example, that Solomon Leschetz was affiliated with this crazy gravity research foundation."
},
{
"end_time": 5452.585,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5426.715,
"text": " Is there a bunch of like classified documents about that that people have been trying to get or is there just nothing there? Cause it seems to me like David Kaiser at MIT, the physicist and historian would probably be the best person to answer that. I've never gotten at this nor have I put in the time or the energy. I've just noted that for some reason, suddenly in the 1950s, general relativity, which had been asleep since the late teens wakes up as a field."
},
{
"end_time": 5482.568,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5453.114,
"text": " There's a conference at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, which Feynman attends, which all of this seems to be spurred by two individuals. One of which creates what's called the Research Institute for Advanced Study to make it sound like the Institute for Advanced Study. The other is something called like something the Institute for the Study of Physical Fields at UNC, North Carolina, Chapel Hill. And there's some weird thing between the Martin"
},
{
"end_time": 5506.118,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5483.336,
"text": " aircraft company, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, a bunch of these sorts of things. And I never even heard anyone talk about them to put it all together until I talked to Kaiser and I said, am I losing my mind? He's like, no, no, no, this is this really weird history where the great, I mean, just to put a weird period on it, the"
},
{
"end_time": 5533.131,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5506.442,
"text": " top mind in theoretical physics is the son of the leading anti-gravity researcher from the 1950s. It's a very bizarre state of affairs. I guess you got to try to think what what might have actually happened there. And from my perspective, it kind of the most likely hypothesis and just floating this out there is that there was a research program into something that was quite extraordinary. But it didn't pan out."
},
{
"end_time": 5561.152,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5533.558,
"text": " in the same way that Project Stargate was a research program into remote viewing. This is obviously a bit more hard science, but it was something they thought, oh, the Russians are going to be looking into this type of thing. We too should form a working group, maybe two working groups, and try to figure out if we can figure out what they figured out. And they look into it, but the same way that Stargate, nothing happened, nothing happens there. But it's classified, stays classified, and it's a mystery."
},
{
"end_time": 5583.643,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5561.664,
"text": " No technology that we know of is antigravity. Nothing apparently came from it, unless there's this weird parallel track of science that is going on. Antigravity may be a head fake, which means that it's really just post-spacetime physics. It's now become very fashionable in theoretical physics."
},
{
"end_time": 5608.66,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5584.104,
"text": " to say that space-time is the problem, and that it's doomed as a concept, and that what we're looking for is the successor to Einstein's fabric for reality. It may be that anti-gravity is a really bad name for something, to make it sound junky, but what we're really talking about, and particularly the presence of left-shets, is very interesting here."
},
{
"end_time": 5638.49,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5610.043,
"text": " that what we may be discussing is a post-Romanian or pseudo-Romanian understanding of space time, just a geometric replacement. Yeah, and I heard you talk on Brian Keating's show about how you thought that might be kind of related to UFOs in a way, and that whatever the UFOs are kind of represents someone who has access to that higher level understanding that's above space time."
},
{
"end_time": 5668.319,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5639.582,
"text": " Yeah. Or it could be that it's all nonsense and it's all disinformation. I mean, look, I'm very open minded about this. I was in a discussion with Sam Harris not too long ago and he said that one of the characteristics that he had noticed that differentiate us is that he tends to be very closed on the way in relative to my openness on the way in, but that he notes that I don't tend to slide all the way down the slippery slope to say, yeah, it's definitely aliens and"
},
{
"end_time": 5698.49,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 5668.78,
"text": " What I'm trying to do is really to keep that possibility open that what we're talking about is we're talking about a science program, not a technology program, not a defense program that has technological and military and security implications. Yeah, I'm all for keeping everything on the table. And this is part of my general philosophy of investigations. I'm glad to hear that."
},
{
"end_time": 5725.64,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 5698.746,
"text": " that I would, uh, I would keep like, you know, uh, some kind of advanced technology, new physics, uh, or, um, or aliens or even things like, um, you know, say the simulation hypothesis, you know, perhaps these things are a glitch in the matrix. Yeah. It's a possibility. Uh, it doesn't seem like there's any good evidence for it, but it's something that you, why not consider that? Why not have all these things in the mix? Cause if you're closing off,"
},
{
"end_time": 5753.2,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 5726.084,
"text": " various things, you might close off things by accident. Okay, so look, there are minor branches of the decision tree that I find so remote is to say that I, you know, I really don't want to spend time on it. But what I'm asking time on it, what you keep it around. Well, I guess what I'm asking is, do you see any banal branches of this decision tree that are still alive?"
},
{
"end_time": 5777.534,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 5753.558,
"text": " Yeah, well, I think that there's a very big branch of the decision tree that does not involve, you know, extraordinary flying craft. I think there's a large possibility, there's a large possibility that all the UFO encounters have essentially simple explanations."
},
{
"end_time": 5804.565,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 5777.858,
"text": " And in those simple explanations, I would include things like experimental aircraft by the US government and perhaps occasionally experimental aircraft by other governments. But the vast majority are going to be things like airborne clutter, people misidentifying things, people having hallucinations from stress, like fighter pilots who have been in the air for a real long time, things like that. And I think that is"
},
{
"end_time": 5824.616,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 5805.964,
"text": " Definitely the avenue of this decision tree of what things might be that I go down and I think it's likely to be a decision tree that has very many leaves that's probably not the right way of putting it because it's still like you end up with one leaf, but you don't. There's all these different things. You're going to end up with a branch that has lots of leaves."
},
{
"end_time": 5853.899,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 5824.94,
"text": " And all of these things are contributing to what we actually see. People see things that are optical illusions, like this triangle thing, like a DC-8 looks exactly like a triangle because it has a light on each wingtip and a red one in the middle. And it looks like a triangle with three lights on the corners and a red thing in the middle. So that probably accounts for a bunch of those. There's lots and lots of different things. And then there's also this other layer of it, which is this government"
},
{
"end_time": 5874.462,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 5854.292,
"text": " The pressure from the invisible college these people who are really into it and the government people in government who are either somewhat corrupt to getting kickbacks or whatever and the people pay them to do things or they just have interest themselves always complicated layers of things going on that doesn't really involve."
},
{
"end_time": 5896.22,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 5874.889,
"text": " some vast new hidden parallel track of science or defense departments like science program or aliens or time travelers or anything like that. So I would keep those things as possibilities, but it seems like to me everything is probably going to be in this big old branch over here. Okay. Airborne clutter."
},
{
"end_time": 5927.602,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 5898.422,
"text": " I have this feeling that we're well beyond airborne clutter. I do not. It's the number one thing that they list on the UAP report. It's also the one thing that they actually solved was a balloon and it's something that Scott Bray mentioned in the hearing. This is something that comes up as a problem over and over again. People see airborne clutter is too far away. They mentioned four branches. They mentioned airborne clutter,"
},
{
"end_time": 5955.964,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 5928.166,
"text": " They mentioned atmospheric effects. They mentioned our technology, and they mentioned the technology of others. And I've gone through this in terms of the first two are things unintentionally in the air. The next things are... No, the first one includes drones, which actually is an intentional thing. That's what I'm trying to say. It's not airborne clutter. Yeah. Right. So the point is, is that the first two branches"
},
{
"end_time": 5978.626,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 5956.323,
"text": " The first question is things that are unintentionally in the air or clutter an atmosphere. The next branch is things produced by sentient life that are intended to be in the air, and that branches into us, not us, and then other."
},
{
"end_time": 6009.77,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 5979.991,
"text": " Therefore is alarmingly interesting because it's not airborne clutter. It's not unintentionally in the air. It's intentionally in the air and it's not us and it's not anybody known to us. So my question to you, Mick, is do you believe that there's enough Mylar balloons, swamp gas, Venus on the horizon, et cetera, et cetera, to effectively remove just about everything from"
},
{
"end_time": 6033.541,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 6010.06,
"text": " I wish you wouldn't say swamp gas because that's kind of, you know, it's a red herring, a straw man. Let me throw it out. It was used to explain one case in the fifties or sixties and it became like a joke in the same way that seagulls have become a joke. Look, I just got here. I don't think it's all"
},
{
"end_time": 6061.459,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 6033.541,
"text": " Seagulls and Mylar balloons. Can I say that? Yeah, I don't think it's all about Seagulls, Mylar balloons, like plastic bags and drones are the things that were in the airborne clutter thing by the government. That does not explain everything. I mean, I think there's even categories that they haven't listed there, like distant planes, which are a huge source of UFOs. My sense of it is just from people coming forth out of the woodwork to me,"
},
{
"end_time": 6085.469,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 6062.312,
"text": " The stories I've now heard of encounters are so far beyond plastic bags and seagulls. And again, I'm not, if you told me that there was like a huge theater troupe that was out to convince us that this stuff was real, sure. But I can't process"
},
{
"end_time": 6116.886,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 6086.954,
"text": " I don't think there's enough Mylar balloon in the world to explain all the weird stuff going on. No, I don't think they're all things like that. I mean, there's a bunch of other things as well. It is simple optical illusions. Like a lot of what people see, they see at night and they describe things like large things moving overhead or giant craft. Uh, and people's perceptions of things can be completely off from reality. Uh, and I think you've got to really, you know, this is, this is kind of a sore point in ufology."
},
{
"end_time": 6142.79,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 6117.483,
"text": " is this, this huge discrepancy between the eyewitness testimony and the recorded evidence, uh, things like videos. You know, a lot of these encounters happen during the day and people describe seeing things in daytime, but somehow they're always too surprised to actually take a, take a video or when they do take a video, it doesn't really show something like what they were describing because they say, Oh, it was a little bit further away now."
},
{
"end_time": 6172.807,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 6143.456,
"text": " So I think eyewitness testimony, while it's an important part of the equation, you really have to take that with the possibility that a lot of it, if not, I wouldn't say all of it, but it depends what we're talking about, isn't really very reliable evidence. And the fact that it's not backed up with hard evidence, with data, with recordings, is a problem. The major point in favor of the debunkers"
},
{
"end_time": 6197.807,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 6173.302,
"text": " is the fact that we've never gotten good evidence. I've ceded that to you from the beginning. Now, the thing that I'm surprised by is it feels to me like you're trying to take a twin size fitted sheet of explanation and fit it over a king size mystery and corner keeps popping off and you're pointing out that you can fit one or two corners"
},
{
"end_time": 6226.237,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 6198.49,
"text": " And my claim is, is that I think that that ship sort of sailed and I don't need to be rude about it. I think that we're still in range of some serious disinformation. And to your point, yes, I understand very well that we can pile up different explanations. There are mylar balloons and confused sightings of seagulls and et cetera, et cetera. But my claim is that that's the"
},
{
"end_time": 6256.203,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 6226.732,
"text": " That works well enough for a twin size bed. There is a real mystery here and the real mystery is what explains this amount of indirect evidence with this little direct evidence where I only find out about the indirect evidence when I'm willing to put myself in a position for debunkers to ridicule, which is to say I'm not dismissing this out of hand the way I was two years ago. I've got a hypothesis on that."
},
{
"end_time": 6285.043,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 6256.732,
"text": " Which is when I think I've shared before, but it's basically kind of like, you know, the cream rising to the top. And what I mean by that is that I talked to people who are traffic controllers, senior traffic controllers, I asked them how many times to pilots report UFOs or talk about them, you know, whilst they're actually flying. So it's not like it's not like they're worried about it when they get back home, they see something and they will ask, you know, what is this thing over there? How many times do you get genuine"
},
{
"end_time": 6310.828,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 6285.367,
"text": " I think these things are pretty rare. But if you take something that's pretty rare, as you know, like law of large numbers, and you spread that over even the 380 million people in the US, you're going to get some hits, you're going to get people who think they saw something."
},
{
"end_time": 6339.906,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 6311.544,
"text": " and become convinced that they saw something when they actually didn't see exactly what they thought they saw. And what we see is this, this cohort of people, this large group of people, hundreds, perhaps thousands of people who are really just a miniscule kind of tip of the spear of all these possible sightings. These are the best ones. You know, we've got this 144 sightings from the Navy. These are just the ones that have risen to the top."
},
{
"end_time": 6370.52,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 6340.896,
"text": " And it looks like a lot. You say, oh, we've got 144 cases. It's 144 cases out of millions of hours of pilot training. But if I ask you to just live inside your own construct, what are the five that have risen to the top of Mick West's, that is a puzzling, disturbing story for which I do not have an explanation. Like if you were to have to give your own assessment using the cream theory, what is the top five that have troubled you?"
},
{
"end_time": 6401.357,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 6372.671,
"text": " 1988 I briefly saw a tiny speck of light that was traversing the heavens stop and reverse course. I had no idea how high it was because you can't tell distance and it seemed like it was a satellite but seemed like too late at night."
},
{
"end_time": 6429.206,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 6401.561,
"text": " it would never have risen to any strong level of interest because I'm not a sky watcher. So I don't know what's normal and what behaviors things have. Certainly I would never call myself an experiencer. That's not even a word that I knew. But my question to you is assume that you and I have never seen something. I assume that Curt has never seen something that is dispositive. What are the top five things that you've encountered that"
},
{
"end_time": 6460.964,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 6431.186,
"text": " like specifics, man, not Yeah, no. It's like, you know what? It's difficult because, you know, I got this this general theory of ufology is that all UFOs exist in the low information zone, which is where he's too far away to determine what things are. And the things that I've been unable to resolve are things like that. Yeah, I guess the number one thing would be the commander of David Fravor's encounter with the white tic tac"
},
{
"end_time": 6482.551,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6461.561,
"text": " Which is backed up to some degree by his wingman, Alex Dietrich, who saw something from above. So they have this compelling account of an encounter with a flying tic tac that they got into a kind of a dogfight with. And that's kind of a difficult one for me to explain what it is."
},
{
"end_time": 6508.746,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6482.978,
"text": " I don't think that some kind of alien craft rises very high to the list of possibilities, but I don't really have a very good set of explanations around that. And honestly, I would struggle to find more cases that are similar to that in my own personal experience. So that really far and away what you would say would be that's number one and there's nothing in second place?"
},
{
"end_time": 6538.217,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 6509.872,
"text": " No, I mean, there's lots of eyewitness accounts that sound incredible. You can go back through history and look at these things. Say if you take the Robert Sallis Maelstrom Air Force Base in Montana accounts on face value, that's bizarre. Nuclear weapons being shut off whilst the UFO hovers outside the gate."
},
{
"end_time": 6564.616,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 6538.712,
"text": " But I think that when you examine the story and it doesn't really hold up to scrutiny, but yeah, yeah, I don't, I don't know. Maybe you can send some people my way who are very convincing accounts and say, and perhaps I would. Well, I just, we brought up the Brandon story. And to be honest with you, that one flipped me out because, you know, it's like, there's no part of me that wanted to call Brandon a liar."
},
{
"end_time": 6591.834,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 6565.708,
"text": " And there was no part of me that wanted to call him. It didn't sound like a burning man. I've been up for three days, dehydrated on every psychedelic known demand story. And it didn't sound like anything. And, you know, and to be horribly honest about it, the TV show that's built around the skinwalker ranch thing has the effect of turning anything that happens on that show into something that can be"
},
{
"end_time": 6619.309,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 6592.363,
"text": " lampooned because it's being somewhat sensationalized as a commercial product. But clearly they have shown on that show things that are their attempts to say, Oh, look, there's a UFO right there, right? Yeah. Multiple. Well, you shake your head. Well, the UFOs they show are things like little white dots in the sky that aren't doing anything spectacular. And they're probably planes or birds or something like that. They really haven't said anything convincing."
},
{
"end_time": 6649.872,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 6619.906,
"text": " You had this point about the low information zone, assume that I've understood. Yeah, exactly. Well, what they've been trying to claim is that they've triangulated something in the general sense of triangulation, not the specific sense where, you know, they're showing extraordinary readings here and I don't know how they're doing their baselines. Like, I don't know in general, if you pass current through earth, how unusual that is. So I can't watch the show and learn anything as a guy who's too far removed from what they're doing out there."
},
{
"end_time": 6674.445,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 6650.845,
"text": " But I think what I am trying to say is I have now been compelled that I've had so many weird conversations with grownups who are putting way too much specificity on this once they get over the fact that you're not coming to get them and make fun of them. They're seemingly like always looking over their shoulder because they don't want to be considered kooky."
},
{
"end_time": 6704.991,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 6676.681,
"text": " This is how they get you. Sorry, go ahead. Has Brandon told any of you that he's in possession of high information evidence, but he just can't release it for whatever reason? Not in terms of secret evidence. He keeps saying that they've got loads of terabytes of data and that they have some things like actual specific triangulations with two cameras with known angles that they've done. But I keep asking him,"
},
{
"end_time": 6735.026,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 6705.401,
"text": " And he keeps promising and he never delivers. So to me, it sounds to me like you're saying there's only one really top drawer incident that is meeting your levels for saying that's really interesting. And what I'm trying to say is there are people who've come forward, which I can discuss like Brandon, and there are people who've come forward that I won't discuss that sound quite a bit like this."
},
{
"end_time": 6764.94,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 6735.401,
"text": " making claims that seem entirely inconsistent with sober military, just the facts, kind of straight ahead orientation. And in particular, I have a pretty good sense of when people are limelight seeking, or people are limelight avoiding. And a lot of these people seem like limelight avoiders. Like Bob Lazar. See,"
},
{
"end_time": 6793.729,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 6765.316,
"text": " I have almost no knowledge of Bob Lazar. No, I'm not kidding. It's not like... I understand. I vaguely know who Graham Hancock is and something about Chariots of the Gods. I don't know anything. This is not my world. No, Bob Lazar is, I guess, a divisive figure in the UFO community and a lot of people just think he's a fraud, including me, but he presents himself as very much limelight avoiding."
},
{
"end_time": 6821.544,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 6794.394,
"text": " even though he has ended up on various shows, but he always says like, it's very, he's very reluctant to talk about it. And if you talk to him, apparently, people who have talked to him will say it's very limelight avoiding. But you know, I do not want to kind of draw parallels between those and the people you've talked to, because they're completely different people. But being limelight avoiding, I don't think is necessarily a, a factor that increases my confidence in somebody's story. Yeah, but to be to be to push back rather, rather forcefully."
},
{
"end_time": 6851.971,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 6823.148,
"text": " When you have a secret that is deranging your life, there's both an urge to purge and an urge to avoid. And you see both of these things in certain people, which is that they're trying to get back home to normal. You know, they've been exposed to some piece of information, you know, to be blunt, war used to create divisions where somebody had seen war and somebody hadn't. And how do they live under the same roof now that one of them has"
},
{
"end_time": 6881.425,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 6852.363,
"text": " seen something that the other can't even imagine. So if this in fact breaks you out of polite society, it's entirely consistent to have somebody with a basic limelight avoiding personality who's going to keep going back to the well because at some level they're trying to say, I'm not crazy. And just to be very clear about it, part of my desire to stick up for people out here is that I watch the"
},
{
"end_time": 6911.766,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 6882.21,
"text": " Power to silence that comes from stigma and shame, in particular stigma and shame as entertainment. And the idea of laughing at people, like the use of the words clown, buffoon, debunk, lol, rotfl. Most people can't stand up to this. And it really bugs me"
},
{
"end_time": 6938.08,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 6912.244,
"text": " that an entire group in the world thinks it's completely okay to destroy an individual who dares raise a voice. The non-science reason I'm out here in UFO territory is that, which is I can't stand basically bullying and gaslighting people who've seen something, want answers, want to ask questions,"
},
{
"end_time": 6956.084,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 6938.848,
"text": " And then somehow it's like there was a secret meeting where everybody decided the truth and you weren't part of it. And the basic attitude towards people who engage in this kind of gaslighting is F you. Science has your back. These people don't belong in our community and they have to be driven out."
},
{
"end_time": 6985.247,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 6956.749,
"text": " Peter Daszak is in a very serious position trying to orchestrate the idea that only, you know, racists entertain the lab leak hypothesis. Everybody should want to know what the hell he was doing in the Wuhan Institute of Virology with Defense Department funding. Conversely, when we turn over to the UFO community, you know, the issue is I don't want people who have seen something or who have data"
},
{
"end_time": 7013.78,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 6985.981,
"text": " scared anymore. And it's very scary. I mean, you keep talking about this debunking community, but who exactly are you referring to? I mean, I'm not a person who mocks people. So that just comes across to me as playing be blunt that comes across to me as playing dumb. No, I think that lots of people are genuine question. It's a genuine question because there's not very many UFO debunkers out there."
},
{
"end_time": 7035.23,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 7016.715,
"text": " I think it's a it's a really disingenuous sounding question. I may have I may have you wrong. But I can tell you that I find your interaction unpleasant. It's like I've never I've never said"
},
{
"end_time": 7065.845,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 7036.425,
"text": " I've never said anything like, this is real. It's true. Or did you hear about the Nimitz incident? Or with these new cameras, they can tell that that's not my energy. My energy is, oh, I was lied to. I was lied to about many things. For example, psychedelics. I was told that acid would destroy your body and your brain. And it turns out that it's very well tolerated. And even micrograms."
},
{
"end_time": 7091.34,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 7066.237,
"text": " The dose needed to kill you, I think, is not known because it's so well tolerated. When I found out that I had been lied to about psychedelics, I was very angry because I had taken on the trust that the government knows what it's talking about and that these were dangerous substances. In the case of UFOs, I've been lied to. It is very clear that a lot of very smart people"
},
{
"end_time": 7117.073,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 7092.278,
"text": " have had their lives destroyed over taking this seriously as a topic. Not by me though. What? Not by me, perhaps by their colleagues and perhaps by the government. Why do I have the impression that you police UFOs? I wouldn't say that. What do you mean when you say that, Eric? What do you mean?"
},
{
"end_time": 7137.056,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 7119.974,
"text": " I forget what our last interaction was, Mick, but somehow I tried to say something general and you tried to bring it back to like Lou Elizondo and Chris Mellon. I don't remember what that was. Well, it doesn't much matter, but I think what I'm trying to get at is,"
},
{
"end_time": 7165.674,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 7137.824,
"text": " Are you unaware that people feel that they've been ridiculed and have had their credibility shredded because of something that they, they sincerely believe they came in contact with as either data or a primary experience? Well, you know, I let's, let's kind of, in a way, shelve that question a little bit, because I think we can perhaps divide the experiences into two groups. One group would be the experiences who,"
},
{
"end_time": 7177.363,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 7166.22,
"text": " yeah sensitive and would get upset by that type of thing and you wouldn't like that and then the other ones are the people who you know they don't don't don't really care people like David Fravor"
},
{
"end_time": 7202.534,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 7177.756,
"text": " They come out. He didn't have his life ruined. He's given this extensive discussion of his encounter and nothing happened to him. His career was just fine. Now we're in territory where I can map this very well. No, things did happen. I don't need to know him personally. I've never met him. I've never had a conversation with him, but I can tell you two things that have happened. One thing is that people have treated him as another."
},
{
"end_time": 7229.275,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 7203.37,
"text": " And the other thing is that people have celebrated him as a truth-seeking hero. Both of these things happen to you out here. And it's pretty disturbing when people treat you as a nutter and you're saying something that's pretty sober. Like, I was minding my business when the following thing happened to me and I'm not responsible for it. Do you have the sense that he's lying?"
},
{
"end_time": 7259.991,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 7230.162,
"text": " No, I don't. I do not have the sense he's lying. Most people who have some kind of experience, I do not think that they are lying. People often say that I am saying that people lie. I think he's telling what he thinks, what he thought happened. I think his memory may have changed over time. His initial perception may have been faulty, but I do not think he's lying. So you have no perception that people are paying a personal price for saying, I was in contact with data, I've seen data, or I had a direct experience."
},
{
"end_time": 7287.739,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 7260.657,
"text": " All of them, everyone's being prevented from coming forward. No one's got the cojones to actually step up. I don't want to belittle people who have genuine trauma from these encounters and their reaction to the encounters, but it doesn't explain the complete lack of this type of thing of people actually coming forward. Well, I mean, nobody came forward from Co-Intel Pro and that was a pretty large operation to stay hidden. I mean, there's a,"
},
{
"end_time": 7309.906,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 7288.148,
"text": " a trope at the moment that the government legally required not to come forward and that if you have a situation in which the government is alleged to keep a secret somebody now says oh i don't believe three people can keep a secret much less thousands as if d-day was never planned i mean this is just it's sort of this willful playing dumb that i don't understand it doesn't seem like"
},
{
"end_time": 7338.575,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 7310.52,
"text": " To be honest, it doesn't seem like you. I understand your point. I understand your point. You know, there's this kind of just chilling effect of, of, uh, mockery. I don't think that what I am doing is mockery and I don't really see, um, a huge amount of evidence of some kind of organized group of people doing it. You talk about this, uh, the debunking community, but I don't think the debunking community is really having this big of an effect on people's lives."
},
{
"end_time": 7357.858,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 7341.271,
"text": " So you do see the snide remarks or the disparagement against people who come out either saying that they've witnessed something firsthand or that they just want to investigate the phenomenon, for example, avilob. So you do see that there's disesteem at times from a nebulous source."
},
{
"end_time": 7382.022,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 7358.626,
"text": " Yeah, it's like I talked about before, like it's something that's always been there in UFOs. It's this stigma which hinders genuine investigation, but unfortunately it's something that arises naturally from the somewhat ridiculous nature of some of the stories that are in UFOlogy and some of the things like the hoaxes and the silly photos. But yeah, it's a problem that is an impediment to serious research and it's"
},
{
"end_time": 7412.278,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 7382.346,
"text": " You know, it is something that I've increasingly tried to avoid when I've been talking to people. And, you know, I get feedback all the time that I come across as being perhaps abrasive or perhaps seeming like I'm mocking. And I take Eric's perception to heart here that perhaps, you know, my, my discussions with people, my encounters with people are not always enjoyable. And I perhaps should try to improve that. Yeah. The thing is,"
},
{
"end_time": 7444.275,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 7414.445,
"text": " I came very close to blocking your account. It didn't make me happy because I feel like you have a lot to contribute and I really do value getting rid of the idea that nothing can explain these videos because I think that's completely preposterous. We're in a world in which the Matrix and Star Wars have shown us things far more interesting than these videos and the idea that you can't create these videos any other way is ridiculous. Now that said, I just don't"
},
{
"end_time": 7469.224,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 7447.108,
"text": " It's more like the role you're playing is like a border colleague keeping these people away from chem trails and flat earth. It's like if the conserved quantity, imagine for example, you grew up in a religious family. I know nothing about your family. I'm not making this as a claim. I grew up Catholic. Okay. It's entirely possible that in a"
},
{
"end_time": 7496.135,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 7469.514,
"text": " in a family in which mythology is rammed down your throat and you better believe and only bad people don't believe that you pick up an energy, which is I hate forced belief and I hate it when stories become so big that people crawl inside of a story and lose their family and lose their mind. I've met people who've been in a cult like environment. Their key thing is we've got to make sure that we don't let any cult like beliefs in the door. And then I've grown up"
},
{
"end_time": 7518.848,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 7496.374,
"text": " Myself as an atheist in an atheistic family for like five generations and my feeling is in part that that relentless focus on let's not believe anything that can't be demonstrated in a lab has its own set of problems. It's very hard to do the cutting edge research if you can never believe in your own imagination enough"
},
{
"end_time": 7547.125,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 7519.565,
"text": " to let it run wild for a while. You know, my personal belief is that we should all have a creative side and a debunking side living inside of our brains where we're debunking our creative impulse. Yeah. Because it's in part tied to like ego, you know, the issue that I'm having though is, is that the skeptic energy and the scientific energy things have tilted far enough"
},
{
"end_time": 7575.742,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 7547.432,
"text": " with what we now believe to be true, that it's really important to me that we stop scaring pilots who may... Like, if your explanation is that somebody's under a lot of stress, or that somebody needs a psychological workup because they might be having a psychotic break, or that somebody may be hallucinating, a lot of the explanations that may not involve UAP"
},
{
"end_time": 7604.906,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 7576.92,
"text": " are of a personal, psychological, characterological nature. And to somebody who might have as their employment plan that they're going to fly commercial aircraft after their stint in the Navy, they're not going to want to come forward if your explanation is effectively that these were phosphenes or the person may have had a flashback from an acid trip from a few years ago."
},
{
"end_time": 7633.114,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 7605.367,
"text": " I want people to feel comfortable saying what they've seen without this extra life. Well, we now kind of have that in some, uh, some arenas, like specifically the Navy training ranges where we've got a couple of these videos from, they now have specific guidelines in place for reporting, uh, you know, this type of encounter and they're actually encouraged to do it. Now we also have with the FAA, uh, a strong encouragement,"
},
{
"end_time": 7648.848,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 7633.66,
"text": " with pilots to report drone sightings and they don't need to be necessarily identified as a specific type of drone and so we're actually getting a bunch of UFO reports because of this emphasis on looking at drones."
},
{
"end_time": 7674.667,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 7649.07,
"text": " you know, things that essentially I saw a happy accident because of drones becoming a threat. That is a happy accident. Yeah. But the Navy thing was a specific response to the UFO thing. It was, it was something that they recognized that there was this stigma and they tried to, they tried to remove the stigma and that's, that's a laudable thing. And I think that was showing results. Let me try to put it,"
},
{
"end_time": 7702.892,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 7676.34,
"text": " a different sheen on it. So last attempt to make the point. I am very much more careful. I want to figure out the phrases. I am much more careful when I hear somebody talking about chemtrails, for example, if they come from the black American community than if they don't."
},
{
"end_time": 7730.367,
"index": 297,
"start_time": 7705.23,
"text": " And I'm much more understanding if somebody comes from a radical progressive family that went through the McCarthy era and they don't trust the government. So in other words, when particular groups of people are repeatedly lied to and manipulated and have a different history than the rest of the country, I tend to take their"
},
{
"end_time": 7759.718,
"index": 298,
"start_time": 7732.398,
"text": " fears much more seriously. If you went through the Tuskegee medical experiment, it's not that crazy to worry about what's in a vaccine. If you didn't go through the Tuskegee medical experiment, if your community wasn't subjected to that, you may have a very different sense that, you know, something's going on. Or if you're aware that we've experimented with biological agents involuntarily against people in subway stations,"
},
{
"end_time": 7786.135,
"index": 299,
"start_time": 7760.282,
"text": " There's all sorts of weird stuff that we've gotten up to. I forget there was a ship that maybe was supposed to disperse something so it could be recorded. The history of secret government behavior is not a great history, whether it's Operation Ajax or Operation Condor, who knows what. And the pressure not to question these things because it's a conspiracy theory,"
},
{
"end_time": 7815.469,
"index": 300,
"start_time": 7786.664,
"text": " really bothers me because we have a group that is simultaneously engaging in conspiracies and not clearing up things that they could clear up, which does feel that personal destruction is a good way to keep secrets. And I guess what I'm asking you is, can you be a bit more charitable to people who've been lied to? Okay, that's a perfectly reasonable request, I think. And yes, yes, I think I can."
},
{
"end_time": 7845.811,
"index": 301,
"start_time": 7815.998,
"text": " And I'd like to invite other people who are watching this to give me feedback on, you know, whether they like, you know, not necessarily just agree, disagree, but like, in what way could I do better? In what way could the debunking community do better? And what specifically should we do? Because I interview people who have had experiences, you know, a number of people like, you know, say Kevin Day, one of the guys off the Nimitz, and Gary Voorhis, another guy from the Nimitz encounter, a different ship,"
},
{
"end_time": 7872.841,
"index": 302,
"start_time": 7846.357,
"text": " But I'm nice to them. I'm not mocking them. What a lot of what I'm doing in my just day to day stuff isn't like questioning people's eyewitness accounts. I very rarely actually take cases where it's just an eyewitness account simply because there's not a lot you can do with it. And it often it gets very contentious because people are very emotional about their things."
},
{
"end_time": 7899.394,
"index": 303,
"start_time": 7873.473,
"text": " So a lot of what I do is just simply the nuts and bolts type thing of looking at individual videos and photos and things like that. So if I could do something that was better in terms of outreach to people who have had experiences, yes, but I think it's really more about kind of in a way avoiding"
},
{
"end_time": 7929.087,
"index": 304,
"start_time": 7900.299,
"text": " that type of confrontation, because there's not a lot you can do with someone who just has an eyewitness experience, someone who tells you, I saw this, this this black triangle, you know, I talked to quite a few of them, you know, kind of online on Twitter. And there's only so far you can go. You can perhaps like perhaps do a hypothesis to what it might be, you can listen to their their explanations. And you can ask them questions about, you know, what angular size do you think it would be? Like, how many hand widths would it be? And you know, what time it was? And where were you?"
},
{
"end_time": 7946.664,
"index": 305,
"start_time": 7929.804,
"text": " But at some point, you know, you enter the low information zone and there's not much further you can go. And I generally just say, well, I can't really help you. I don't mock them. I don't like make fun of them. And in general, I don't I don't mock people. So I'm sure there are things I can do to improve."
},
{
"end_time": 7974.326,
"index": 306,
"start_time": 7947.244,
"text": " that I don't really accept your kind of characterization of me of being part of this very dangerous community. I think you described it as an abomination that we need to get rid of the debunking community and in your last last thing. Yeah, I mean, I think that the point is that these people are not necessarily bunko artists. But that's not me. I think what you're not figuring out is when you come at something from the point of view of debunking it,"
},
{
"end_time": 8001.732,
"index": 307,
"start_time": 7975.384,
"text": " Right. What you're really doing. That's what I was saying from the very start is that with UFOs, what I do is come at it from the perspective of investigating it to try to figure out what that thing is. If someone comes to me with a story of what they saw, but you don't use the word. I'm an investigator. I'm moving away from it. You're moving away. I said at the start, yeah, that, um, you know, what's his name? The, the pilot Ryan Graves."
},
{
"end_time": 8030.196,
"index": 308,
"start_time": 8002.142,
"text": " You know, he told me he didn't want to talk to me because I had debunked. You know, I always try to, I've been trying to reframe debunking as a positive thing because it is about investigating things to see whether they are true or false. It's not about working towards a certain result. Maybe think about it from the follow. I understand that one of the things that's very interesting to some of us who do commentary on social issues is that people who are employed by legacy media outfits,"
},
{
"end_time": 8055.725,
"index": 309,
"start_time": 8030.657,
"text": " react to anybody who makes a living as an individual, not attached to a legacy media outfit. They refer to these people as grifters in order to give the idea that you can trust Harpers in the Atlantic, but if somebody is telling you something on the internet, then it's probably nonsense. I think that what you have to understand is, is that bunk and bunko and the idea of fooling people"
},
{
"end_time": 8078.49,
"index": 310,
"start_time": 8057.739,
"text": " I appreciate that you're moving away from it, but maybe a repudiation of the energy around that is really necessary because it's one thing to say, yeah, I'm trying to use that less. A lot of the fun that comes from skepticism is mixing in this dunking in dragon."
},
{
"end_time": 8109.002,
"index": 311,
"start_time": 8079.087,
"text": " And whether or not one is actually doing the dunking and dragging, just let me get to the end of this. Whether one is actually doing the dunking and dragging or whether one is painting a bullseye on a target for someone else to execute, I think is really kind of the issue. And my feeling... Go on. I'm not the snark and the debunking and the dragging. You're saying I'm painting a target on things by actually"
},
{
"end_time": 8133.473,
"index": 312,
"start_time": 8109.428,
"text": " investigating it and figuring out what it is and then other people can make fun of it. Is that on me that I investigate something and it turns out not to be true and therefore other people perhaps mock whoever came up with the thing originally? I don't think that all one has to do is to say, look, I really don't want these people ridiculed."
},
{
"end_time": 8166.63,
"index": 313,
"start_time": 8137.022,
"text": " Well, I can't like add a disclaimer at the end of all my investigations as a don't make fun of people because... No, no, no, look, there are Bunko artists, right? There are people who are trying to deceive other people, let's say for profit, okay? Sure. I think that it is reasonable to return fire against such people at a proportionate level. Fair game, I think. Well, to a point, right? I mean, you know, you can also..."
},
{
"end_time": 8192.125,
"index": 314,
"start_time": 8167.039,
"text": " What? If someone is a Charleston and they are basically selling nonsense for money, then yes, I think they deserve to be. Somebody is a Charlotte and the community has the right to drive their costs in a particular way up to a point, right? But, you know, what we're seeing here in my estimation is that there are a lot of people who confide in me and say that they are frightened."
},
{
"end_time": 8221.681,
"index": 315,
"start_time": 8192.483,
"text": " where they say, I really appreciate you entering into this space, because I couldn't even talk to my own family. And there's just sort of no emotional affect that I see in you when I'm like, I believe that you and I both know this to be true. That could be false, because I'm making the assumption that we both know this. But I have now heard from so many people that they're frightened by what they experienced for what they saw. That"
},
{
"end_time": 8247.671,
"index": 316,
"start_time": 8222.363,
"text": " For you to say, well, like who's it? Who's frightened? Who's experienced? Nothing bad happened to David Fravor. I don't need to know David Fravor to know that lots of good and lots of bad. Pardon me. I said that there are, there must be some people who are not frightened by what they saw. There are people who are deeply affected by it, but there's people who are just simply will see it as a scientific observation and they'll be able to report it."
},
{
"end_time": 8270.077,
"index": 317,
"start_time": 8247.927,
"text": " We don't seem very many people. Almost nobody I know who's not independently wealthy can afford to say, oh, that was interesting. Would you want a surgeon operating on your child if the surgeon had had lots of discussions with aliens? Sure. I mean, yeah, I would."
},
{
"end_time": 8289.121,
"index": 318,
"start_time": 8270.776,
"text": " It's a perfectly normal thing for someone to see something in the sky and think it's this weird thing. This happens all the time. If somebody told me that they were abducted by aliens and that they wanted to operate on my kid, I'll be honest, that would tutor my prior to say I don't want to take that risk that this person might be a lion. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 8320.077,
"index": 319,
"start_time": 8290.213,
"text": " Yeah, but like simply seeing a craft in the sky, that is, that's a different thing entirely. I think that's a very understandable thing to happen to people. And there will be inevitably some people who have some kind of misperception or illusion that, uh, you know, isn't, doesn't deserve mockery. Certainly not. It's, it's a perfectly understandable thing. And, you know, I tell people this when I talk to them that, yeah, I can see how this might even, even that is a very sensitive thing. Even that, uh, they, they, they see that as being,"
},
{
"end_time": 8350.196,
"index": 320,
"start_time": 8320.64,
"text": " I think it's completely reasonable to say we may have to dismiss some things that are very deeply personally held as beliefs and people may get very injured but the fact is we can't afford to be taking this as some super serious threat let's say to our nuclear arsenal because Mrs. O'Connell thought she saw a cigar-shaped object hovering in her backyard for half a second."
},
{
"end_time": 8381.51,
"index": 321,
"start_time": 8351.647,
"text": " Yeah, I think there's real serious issues in ufology. There are unidentified flying things that people have seen and we should investigate what they are, all the reasons why people are seeing these things. And I agree, like, let's get away from the stigma of it and then we'll get closer to some resolution one way or another. I join with you on that and I think that's very positive. How is it practically that we can get"
},
{
"end_time": 8398.797,
"index": 322,
"start_time": 8381.749,
"text": " I understand that you don't see yourself as contributing to the stigma, but do you see that you could contribute to the removing of the stigma by let's say tweeting a repudiation of the stigma?"
},
{
"end_time": 8427.432,
"index": 323,
"start_time": 8399.599,
"text": " No, I think I'm a small fish and I think very few people are going to listen to me and millions of people out there, very few people are going to see what I say. I think it has to come from a higher level and I think we've already started to see it, like I said before, from the Navy by having specific guidelines where people are required to report sightings. If someone is required to report a sighting, I think it helps a great deal in removing the stigma. I think"
},
{
"end_time": 8453.456,
"index": 324,
"start_time": 8427.705,
"text": " inevitably, it's still going to be there to some degree. And perhaps more people could talk about it when they make public appearances to discuss the topic that we should not have this stigma. And like if I'm on CNN again, then perhaps that is something that I should bring up. And yeah, I think I have I have discussed that on on major media that there is a stigma and it's good that it's being diminished. So"
},
{
"end_time": 8483.08,
"index": 325,
"start_time": 8454.206,
"text": " I don't think I'm going to be able to tweet out, you know, stop making fun of people and people will stop or people will feel better about it. But I think it's a slow process that we're part way along. I think they would. I don't think people would stop, but I think a large set of people would. By the way, just as just as there's excoriation to the people who come out as experiencers or people who investigate this topic, there is also fulmination directed at you and generally people who are skeptics. And I don't like that personally. I think that should stop."
},
{
"end_time": 8495.503,
"index": 326,
"start_time": 8483.609,
"text": " I think that that's something we haven't discussed not even a single bit today and I hope people would do that less."
},
{
"end_time": 8526.442,
"index": 327,
"start_time": 8496.476,
"text": " I imagine that if Eric, that if you said something, not, we're not trying to make this all into let's make public. I'm just hypothetically saying, Eric, if you were to say something like, Hey, please, please don't gang up on Mick. Mick has a role to play. Then people will be less. Same with me. No, but Kurt, the problem that we have is, is that I've been in Mick's general role historically. It's only been for like a year and a half or two years. I don't know what this is that I took this at all."
},
{
"end_time": 8549.206,
"index": 328,
"start_time": 8526.869,
"text": " The way I see it is, what Mick is doing, and I said this at the beginning, is a lot of it is yeoman's work, a lot of it is thankless. The skepticism is not that well rewarded."
},
{
"end_time": 8570.879,
"index": 329,
"start_time": 8549.889,
"text": " And it has to be done because we need people to come up with prosaic explanations in order, even if it's true, you'd want somebody doing exactly what Mick is doing to say, you know, this isn't evidence of speed. If you drag your finger over a picture of the Grand Canyon, that doesn't mean it's going hundreds of miles an hour, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 8600.572,
"index": 330,
"start_time": 8571.698,
"text": " There's all sorts of stuff that is thankless that has to do with understanding photography and parallax and things that are not that much fun. The issue is when Mick is doing that, it's very important that people not go into, are you telling, are you calling me a liar mode? Because that's the inverse of that. And that's harassing Mick. And, you know, again, I think Mick gets energy out of this from what I can tell."
},
{
"end_time": 8629.735,
"index": 331,
"start_time": 8601.186,
"text": " But it's not pleasant to be called names. And I've seen name calling directed at Mick and that's not right. I think where Mick mistakes his importance is it really matters. You're not that famous except in this community. In this community, everybody knows who you are. And if you say something, it will be heard much differently than if you were to say something about food rationing. Right."
},
{
"end_time": 8659.48,
"index": 332,
"start_time": 8629.991,
"text": " But my point there is that the people in the community now are not going to be the ones reporting UFOs in the future, because UFO sighting is pretty much a once in a lifetime thing. So the people you want to reach are all the other people who are outside the community, who view it as being a silly topic that they don't want to get involved with. So when they have a sighting, and people in the UFO community now, if they have a sighting, they're all like, Oh, yeah, I saw this, they posted on on UFO Twitter."
},
{
"end_time": 8686.459,
"index": 333,
"start_time": 8660.043,
"text": " How do we get this message out to the broader audience? How do we reduce the stigma for the general public and for pilots? I think you can go a long way towards that because to be honest, I think that you've been doggedly on this and my fondest hope coming out of this discussion would be that we didn't have a dust-up. We had a respectful conversation. People can hear the commonality."
},
{
"end_time": 8710.009,
"index": 334,
"start_time": 8687.278,
"text": " and that people hear that Mick West believes that in the interest of science, we've got to make sure that people feel maximally comfortable. I do think some people are comfortable coming forward, but to be honest, there's another thing that's just about generosity of spirit. Like I was wrong and a jerk to many people in the UFO community, and I'm sorry about that."
},
{
"end_time": 8728.575,
"index": 335,
"start_time": 8710.623,
"text": " And it's not just a question of they, you know, Eric Weinstein is so important that his condemnation of us on previous occasions really hurt us. It was that I was backed by an implicit army of science people who know that this topic is total garbage or think they know and"
},
{
"end_time": 8751.971,
"index": 336,
"start_time": 8729.138,
"text": " In being an agent for that, the same way that I was an agent against LSD use, because I thought it was hugely detrimental to the brain and to the body, I had just been very effectively propagandized, and there's no evidence that that's true. And there is no evidence, in my opinion, that the UFO community is"
},
{
"end_time": 8780.828,
"index": 337,
"start_time": 8752.21,
"text": " That should crazy in reporting these things that seem preposterous and they still seem preposterous to me. Most of them are not. Yeah, there are a few crazy people in there, but you know, the crazy people everywhere, everywhere, crazy people outside. Yes. It's like say that with the chemtrail community is like, you know, there's all kinds of people in it. There's people with PhDs who believe in chemtrails. There's people with PhDs who believe in UFOs. So it's, uh, it's, it's not like it's a group of,"
},
{
"end_time": 8810.947,
"index": 338,
"start_time": 8781.391,
"text": " To wrap this all up, what is the one ask that you would want either of the other person or of society? So for example, if Avi Loeb, he says, okay, we need more evidence. There's something like extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Yeah, but extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary funding is a phrase that he likes to"
},
{
"end_time": 8837.415,
"index": 339,
"start_time": 8811.732,
"text": " I want something very clear. I want our top quantum field theorists, general relativists and differential geometers read in to what data we have and I would like them to be the representatives"
},
{
"end_time": 8855.213,
"index": 340,
"start_time": 8838.234,
"text": " that actually get go through whatever data may exist as to whether anything is moving in ways that are inconsistent with our physics. I would like to figure out whether this is a physics issue or whether this is a defense security technology public policy issue."
},
{
"end_time": 8885.725,
"index": 341,
"start_time": 8856.169,
"text": " If it's physics, I want this turned over to the people who actually understand where the cutting edge of theoretical physics is and what's possible under the twin theories of the standard model in quantum field theory and general relativity and gravity theory. I would like to know whether or not we are seeing anything that is indicative of science beyond the science we have. That said, I think there's a small probability"
},
{
"end_time": 8910.179,
"index": 342,
"start_time": 8886.186,
"text": " that something like that would be true. The other basic ask is that we stop destroying people through our skepticism, through our fears of bunk, through our fears of a conversation run out of control. It's really important to me that we recognize that gas-lit people"
},
{
"end_time": 8938.609,
"index": 343,
"start_time": 8910.759,
"text": " are everywhere and that we need to do as much as we can to restore that and whether the end of, you know, Blue Book or something ushered in an era where we poo-pooed all of this, even if it's nonsense or a cover story, that we start treating people who take this decision tree seriously and not force them to either say it's UFOs or a PSYOP, but recognize the possibility that we may be looking at a confluence of many different things"
},
{
"end_time": 8961.084,
"index": 344,
"start_time": 8939.326,
"text": " and to allow people the freedom to behave as scientists and invite anecdote, data and disclosure so that the government really has to realize it's not their effing information, it belongs to all of us and it's time to put this thing to bed in one way or another so that Mick actually gets some great data that he can go over"
},
{
"end_time": 8987.346,
"index": 345,
"start_time": 8961.374,
"text": " and see whether it's just some some some bugs seagulls mylar balloons and apertures or whether there's something really here and I feel much emboldened that Mick if he saw something extraordinary would be likely to say something. Yeah what he said plus what I want is to figure out what's going on and I think the best way to do that is to refine the evidence"
},
{
"end_time": 9017.858,
"index": 346,
"start_time": 8987.892,
"text": " And I think the best way to refine the evidence is one, like what Eric proposed is to read in experts on various subject matters. But also that doesn't always work. There's been lots of examples historically where experts have studied UFO cases and they've come up with completely erroneous interpretations of those things. There's the famous Chilean case, which anybody can look up, where a huge panel of experts couldn't figure it out"
},
{
"end_time": 9045.043,
"index": 347,
"start_time": 9018.746,
"text": " But what happened was that they released the data, they released the video, and then people on the internet, myself included, figured out what it was. So what I would like is for as much data as possible to be declassified. And I think that is something that is not an insurmountable thing. I don't think there's good reason for the classification of a large amount of this data. When something comes out like this"
},
{
"end_time": 9074.172,
"index": 348,
"start_time": 9045.555,
"text": " green triangle video, which was classified, you know, something that shouldn't have been released. Uh, there's, there's nothing that's harmful to us interests except perhaps a little embarrassment where they couldn't identify stars. So I think, uh, we should push for clarification by having the data refined in whatever way the people who have that data can, can accept, you know, if it's scientists, that's, that's great. But if you can release videos to the general public,"
},
{
"end_time": 9099.616,
"index": 349,
"start_time": 9074.599,
"text": " A lot of them are going to get solved. Some of them might turn out to be gems. Some of them might turn out to be things we can't figure out, but there's, there's, there's things that just basically aren't being done now. And part of that is because of the stigma. And so I would, you know, I'm, I'm agreeing with Eric that that is something that needs to be diminished or removed. We need to have people who have experiences."
},
{
"end_time": 9126.8,
"index": 350,
"start_time": 9100.077,
"text": " or have sightings or even have video or photos be able to come forward without fear of recrimination. We also, you know, just to temper that a little bit, we don't want to encourage a vast amount of low quality reporting. But if there's stuff there that is significant, we shouldn't immediately dismiss it out of hand. And we should try to figure out what's going on by refining and examining"
},
{
"end_time": 9154.138,
"index": 351,
"start_time": 9127.261,
"text": " I would like for the invective from each side to be tempered. When I say each side, I mean, if one was to split this into people who are promoters of the idea that UFOs and what's behind UFOs is something non-terrain, it's not banal, then"
},
{
"end_time": 9185.196,
"index": 352,
"start_time": 9155.265,
"text": " So that's one camp. And then the other camp is the more skeptical Michael Schirmer, Neil deGrasse Tyson, perhaps even Mick West type, though I don't, I'm not going to lump you in there, Mick. That, that side would, would not inadvertently contribute to the disprisement of the other side. And I see it, I see it on both. And I like this concept of extending and well, to, to love thine enemy."
},
{
"end_time": 9213.899,
"index": 353,
"start_time": 9185.606,
"text": " So even people who dislike you intensely, Mick, or dislike you intensely, Eric, or dislike me, perhaps intensely, then, well, forget about me. I'm not going to advocate for myself. But what I mean, I hope that people, the vitriol or the cycle of it to be accelerated or intensified. And it starts with tempering one's own. See, I was"
},
{
"end_time": 9240.964,
"index": 354,
"start_time": 9214.172,
"text": " I was interviewing someone named Salvatore Pius and he was ridiculed by Eric Davis and how put off. And I was asking him, so what do you think of, what do you make of their theories? Then he said, well, and he just looked down and he just retreated in himself and he said, well, you know, maybe they're right. Maybe I'm wrong. And I think that they should be investigated. And I think that their ideas are worth, are worth investigating."
},
{
"end_time": 9268.609,
"index": 355,
"start_time": 9241.357,
"text": " And I don't know why they say that about me, but, but I wish them the best, something like that. And that of all of that whole podcast, that's what's, that's what stuck with me the most. I just, well, that, that I think about almost daily. I, I wish that we would all have a little bit more of that. I wish that in myself, because I'm an extremely MLS and"
},
{
"end_time": 9298.456,
"index": 356,
"start_time": 9269.445,
"text": " Thank you all for coming out. Mick, your podcast name please."
},
{
"end_time": 9322.363,
"index": 357,
"start_time": 9299.565,
"text": " It's called Tales from the Rabbit Hole. It's a little out of date, but it does have a bunch of UFO episodes that might be interesting to the audience here. And Eric, what is something that you can promote? Your Twitter, your podcast? I did a guitar video with Mike Palmisano, but other than that,"
},
{
"end_time": 9351.357,
"index": 358,
"start_time": 9323.626,
"text": " The Portal is the podcast, it's been quiest recently and I think there are no UFO episodes to the best of my knowledge. But look, I hope to be doing some things with you all in the not too distant future and having to do with the issue of what is our best hope for diversifying humanity's fate beyond one single sphere and that remains"
},
{
"end_time": 9380.52,
"index": 359,
"start_time": 9351.834,
"text": " A question that I think serious people need to be talking about because it's a very thin hope. But if we don't get our best people on our very thin hope, then we're going to bet all of humanity on the likes of Putin, Xi and company. And I think I'm increasingly just unwilling to see that these people have enough wisdom to steward this one planet forward. So stay tuned and let's try to think about the way in which this weird topic"
},
{
"end_time": 9408.285,
"index": 360,
"start_time": 9381.101,
"text": " can both derange us into thinking that extraterrestrial visitation is around the corner or that we're trapped in nothing is possible and we should probably steer a middle course where we say what is true and if we do have a slim hope for visiting beyond Mars, how would we approach it through science so that technology can follow? And if I had something to promote"
},
{
"end_time": 9437.466,
"index": 361,
"start_time": 9408.712,
"text": " People who are watching this, if you're interested in math or learning a little bit more about physics, I have a crash course video on physics which goes through several different topics. You can look through the timestamps and click through. It also goes through some tips I have for what helped me when I go about learning mathematics and physics and different sticking points I've had where I try to clear up confusion. I think it was the video on this whole channel that took the longest to produce, so I recommend you at least check it out."
},
{
"end_time": 9467.517,
"index": 362,
"start_time": 9439.002,
"text": " Thank you all. Thank you, Kurt. Thank you, Mick. Thank you. Thank you for a very interesting and illuminating discussion. Well, honored is an understatement to be here with both of you. Thank you for spending so much of your time. You didn't get to any Twitter questions. No. Well, a question I had, Mick, if you all have two more minutes, if this can even be answered in two minutes,"
},
{
"end_time": 9489.65,
"index": 363,
"start_time": 9467.824,
"text": " that there's this phrase, the vastness of space or the vastness of the universe. So given that, and our supposed insignificance in it, and as scientists always like to point that out masochistically, the only thing that's sadistic and not masochistic. So seeing how unbelievably finite we are, is it so improbable that we're being examined or kept as livestock by creatures beyond our comprehension?"
},
{
"end_time": 9517.568,
"index": 364,
"start_time": 9489.838,
"text": " given that we do that for virtually every other species. So if one wants to say, well, where's the evidence? Well, virtually all the evidence that we have is one more intelligent species looking at another lower intelligence species, which can't even cognitively grasp that there's someone higher than them. I think it's kind of an unanswerable question because we don't really have enough data about the universe to answer, like to figure out like how common life is."
},
{
"end_time": 9534.616,
"index": 365,
"start_time": 9517.927,
"text": " in the universe and what it would have done, how it would have spread through the universe and it really just for me it boils down to sure it's possible. I'm a science fiction fan and I read all kind of hypotheses about you know kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 9565.145,
"index": 366,
"start_time": 9535.674,
"text": " gardens like the earth being a cultured thing like and the aliens are watching us and just waiting for us to discover a certain bit of physics that uh it becomes dangerous and then they'll step in and sure yeah it's it sounds plausible but is there any evidence that it's happening and there really isn't so it's something that i think you would keep on the table in the same way that you would keep the simulation hypothesis on the table but it's not something that really"
},
{
"end_time": 9592.637,
"index": 367,
"start_time": 9565.367,
"text": " Um, you know, I,"
},
{
"end_time": 9612.159,
"index": 368,
"start_time": 9593.558,
"text": " I guess that we don't have any really good way of coming up with a Bayesian prior. The vastness of space indicates to me that it's very unlikely that we're the only sentient life in it. The difficulty of crossing the vastness of space"
},
{
"end_time": 9641.544,
"index": 369,
"start_time": 9612.858,
"text": " according to Einsteinian restrictions, gives me some sense that even if life is abundant, it may be forever trapped locally where it is, if it's based on waves reverberating in this space without too much alteration in our fundamental ideas. So there are countervailing forces pointing in very opposite directions to me, as to why we are functionally quite likely to be alone."
},
{
"end_time": 9668.609,
"index": 370,
"start_time": 9642.176,
"text": " and why we are very unlikely statistically to be alone, even if we are functionally isolated. With all that said, I am motivated and I believe that we should always try to understand our own motivated reasoning. And my worst piece of motivated reasoning is, if nobody is able to visit us, it probably means that we're doomed."
},
{
"end_time": 9693.712,
"index": 371,
"start_time": 9670.111,
"text": " And if we have a hope of not being doomed, it's almost certainly because we were able to survive the period where we had God-like powers but only one shared atmosphere. Because any idiot with the God-like powers can sort of end the experiment at will. And as a result, if there aren't aliens here,"
},
{
"end_time": 9722.432,
"index": 372,
"start_time": 9694.36,
"text": " I would think that we are far more likely to die soon en masse because there really isn't a lot of hope for leaving. So the desire for aliens, and again I don't really love the idea of being anybody's pet in the zoo or a rat in a maze, so it's not like I'm sitting there hoping that the aliens are there and they're benevolent."
},
{
"end_time": 9749.155,
"index": 373,
"start_time": 9722.892,
"text": " But if nobody is able to visit us, I think the odds that we are going to be able to leave and survive dwindle to close to zero. And so I'm very hopeful that the Universe is not only inundated with life from various places, but that much of that life figures out that the theories beyond those we know contain hope and options"
},
{
"end_time": 9776.237,
"index": 374,
"start_time": 9750.111,
"text": " Even if they risk limitless power, we already have the power to destroy ourselves. So physics led us into the valley of death. What we have to ask is, if you push farther into the valley of death with physics, is there a way out? Okay. Thank you all. I'm going to go talk to my wife. All right. If you're ever in Southern California, let me buy you a beer."
},
{
"end_time": 9797.705,
"index": 375,
"start_time": 9778.507,
"text": " The podcast is now finished. If you'd like to support conversations like this, then do consider going to patreon.com slash C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L. That is Kurt Jaimungal. It's support from the patrons and from the sponsors that allow me to do this full time. Every dollar helps tremendously. Thank you."
}
]
}No transcript available.