#262 – Garry Nolan: UFOs and Aliens

The following is a conversation with Gary Nolan, professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, respected and very well published in fields of microbiology and pathology. But he also is known for analyzing UFO artifacts and materials and for taking a rigorous scientific approach to reports of UFO sightings and experiences. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description

it's the best way to support this podcast. First is Athletic Greens, the all-in-one nutrition drink I drink twice a day. Second is Inside Tracker, a service I use to track my biological data. Third is Blinkist, the app I use to read summaries of books. Fourth is ExpressVPN, the VPN I've been using for many years and fifth is 8th sleep, a self-cooling mattress cover I sleep on. So the choice is health, wisdom or privacy.

Choose wisely my friends. And now onto the full ad reads, as always no ads in the middle, I try to make these interesting but if you skip them please still check out our sponsors I enjoy their stuff maybe you will too.

This show is brought to you by Athletic Greens and it's newly renamed AG1 Drink. In fact I just had one of those. It's an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. It replaced the multivitamin for me and went far beyond that with 75 vitamins and minerals. It's the first thing I drink every day, I drink it twice a day now. It is the nutritional basis that allows for the insanity that is my physical and mental endeavors.

So whatever diet I'm on, whatever physical training or crazy amounts of push-ups and pull-ups are running that I'm doing for no good reason whatsoever, or all the long hours of deep work. I know I'm safe because I got all the vitamins and the nutrition I need. Plus it tastes delicious. I mean that's really what life is all about.

Anyway, it gives you one month supply of fish oil, which is another thing I take every day. When you sign up on Athletic Greens.com slash Lex, that's Athletic Greens.com slash Lex. This show is also brought to you by Inside Tracker, a service I use to track biological data. They have a bunch of plans, most of which include a blood test.

That gives you a lot of information that you can then make decisions based on. They have algorithms that analyze your blood data, DNA data, and fitness tracker data to provide you with a clear picture of what's going on inside you, and to offer you science-backed recommendations for positive diet and lifestyle changes. I really don't need to say all that.

The most important thing is it's your data from your body and using state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms to interpret that data and to give you advice. This feels like the future. I love this idea. Advice of what you should do with your health should come from your personal data, not population data, which is where most science comes from.

Of course, you need the basis of the population data, but the specific fine tuning of the lifestyle changes and advice should be coming from your own body. For a limited time, you can get 25% off the entire Inside Tracker store if you go to insidetracker.com slash Lex. This show is also brought to you by Blinkist, my favorite app for learning new things. Blinkist takes key ideas from thousands of non-fiction books and condenses them down into just

15 minutes. They can read or listen to. There's so many recommendations that I can give you, including sapiens, meditations, biomarkers, or reallyist, beginning of infinity by David Doge. This note in book is on there. There's many, many, many others. I use Blinkist to do several things, including pick the books that I'm going to read in full first.

It's excellent preview. If you're trying to choose which non-fiction book to read, and it gives you that kind of the basis of key ideas from which you can now explore deeply. And the cool thing about non-fiction books is there's not really spoiler alerts. So you can get the key insights and still get a lot of value from reading the book fully.

Anyway, go to Blinkist.com slash Lex to start your free seven day trial and get 25% off of a Blinkist Premium membership as Blinkist.com slash Lex, spell BLI and KIST Blinkist.com slash Lex. This show is also brought to you by ExpressVPN. I use them to protect my privacy on the internet. Many good things I could say. So one, you should probably know that if you're using Chrome and Cognito mode, your ISPs can still get the data.

So all that weird stuff you do on the internet when you're in the incognito mode, people can still know about it. Surprise. I'm so, so very sorry. You can also change your location to watch different shows and different, uh, sort of video services, you know, this thing I love the most is the thing just works. It works nice. The interface is simple and beautiful. It's fast. The connection is fast. It does not affect the connection as much as you would think it would.

It works on any operating system. But if you know what you're doing, you should be using Linux. That's my favorite operating system. And as I sometimes say about serial, it's the operating system of champions. Anyway, go to ExpressVPN.com slash Lex pod to get an extra three months free. That's ExpressVPN.com slash Lex pod. This episode is also and finally brought to you by 8th sleep and it's pod pro mattress. It controls temperature with a nap,

it's packed with sensors and can cool down to as low 55 degrees on each side of the bed separately. It's snowing outside. It feels like the holidays and we're in Texas. This is beautiful. Nothing is quite as good as a full night sleep or just that intense power nap on a bed with an 8th sleep cover.

It's a warm blanket, cool bed, it's heaven. One of the many things I am deeply grateful for in this life. Of course, I'm also happy just sleeping on the floor with no blanket and just passed out lost in the madness and the beauty of the ideas that I'm playing with in my head.

If I really want to enjoy that experience, I'm going to go with 8th sleep. Go to a sleep.com slash Lex to check out the pod pro cover and save $200 to check out 8th sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada and the United Kingdom. They told me to tell you this. That's a sleep.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Friedman podcast and here is my conversation with Gary Nolan. You are a professor Stanford studying the biology of the human organism at the level of individual cells.

Let me ask first the big ridiculous philosophical question. What is the most beautiful or fascinating aspect of human biology at the level of the cell to you? The micro machines and the nano machines that proteins make and become that to me is the most interesting. The fact that you have this basically dynamic computer within every cell that's constantly processing its environment.

And at the heart of it is DNA, which is a dynamic machine, a dynamic computation process. People think of the DNA as a linear code. It's codes within codes within codes and it is the actually the epigenetic state that's doing this amazing processing. I mean, if you ever wanted to believe in God, just look inside the cell.

So DNA is both information and computer. Exactly. How did that computer come about? A big continuing on the philosophical question. It's this both scientific and philosophical. How did life originate on Earth, do you think? How did this at every level? So the very first step and the fascinating complex computer that is DNA that is multicellular organism and then maybe the fascinating complex computer that is the human mind?

Well, I think you have to take just one more step back to the complex computer that is the universe. All of the so-called particles or the waves that people think the universe is made of and appears to me at least to be a computational process. And embedded in that is biology, right? So all the atoms of a protein, et cetera, sit in that computational matrix. From my point of view, it's computing something. It's computing towards something.

It was created in some ways if you want to believe in God. And I don't know that I do, but if you want to believe in something, the universe was created or at least enabled to allow for life to form. And so the DNA, if you ask where does DNA come from and you can go all the way back to Richard Dawkins and the selfish gene hypotheses. The way I look at DNA though is it is not a moment in time.

It assumes the context of the body and the environment in which it's going to live. And so if you if you want to ask a question of where and how does information get stored DNA, although it's only three billion base pairs long, contains more information than I think the entire computational memory resources of our current technology.

Because who and what you are is both what you were as an egg all the way through to the day you die and it embodies all the different cell types and organs in your body.

And so it's a computational reservoir of information and expectation that you will become so actually I would sort of turn it around a different way and say if you wanted to create the best memory storage system, possible, you could reverse engineer what a human is and create a DNA memory system that is not just the linear version, but is also everything that it could become.

So you're talking about DNA, we're talking about Earth and the environment creating DNA. So this you're talking about trying to come up with an optimal computer for this particular environment. Right. So if you reverse engineer that computer, what do you mean by considering all the possible things you could become.

You are today, right. So three billion bits of information does not explain Lex Friedman. Yeah, doesn't explain me, right. But the DNA embodies the expectation of the environment in which you will live.

Yes, and grow and become so all the information that is you right is actually not only embedded in the DNA, but it's embedded in the context of the world in which you grow into and develop right. But so all that information though is this is packed in the expectation of what the DNA expects to see. Interesting. So like some of the information, is that accurate to say stored outside the body exactly. Yeah, the information is stored outside because there's a context of expectation.

Interesting. Yes, fascinating. I mean, to link on this point, if we were to run Earth over again a million times, how many different versions of this type of computer would we get? I think it would be different each time. I mean, if you assume there's no such thing as fate, right. And it's not all pre-programmed.

And that there is some sort of let's say variation or randomness at the beginning, you would get as many different versions of life as you could imagine. And I don't think it would all be unless there's something built into the, you know, into the substrate of the universe. It wouldn't always be left handed proteins.

Right. But I wonder what the flap of a butterfly wing what affects it has because it's possible that the system is really good at finding the efficient answer. And maybe the efficient answer is there is there's only a small finite set of them for this particular environment.

Exactly. Exactly. That's the kind of in a way the anthropomorphic universe of the multiverse expectations, right. That, you know, there's probably a zillion other kinds of universes out there if you believe in multiverse theory. We only live in the ones where the rules are such that life like ours can exist. So using that logic, how many alien civilizations do you think are out there? There's there's like trillions of environments, aka planets, or maybe you can think even bigger than planets.

How many lifelike organisms do you think are out there thriving and maybe how many do you think are long gone but were once here. I think, well, innumerable. I think in terms of the way zero, much greater than zero. I mean, I would just be surprised what a waste, right, of all that space just for us if we're never going to get there.

That would be my first way to think about it. But second, I mean, I remember when I was about seven or eight years old, and I would love if any of your listeners could find this national geographic. I remember opening the page of the National Geographic. I was about again seven to ten years old, and it was sort of a current picture of the universe. It was a bomb probably 1968, 1969.

I remember looking at it and thinking, what kinds of empires have risen and fallen across that space that we'll never know about? And isn't that sad that we know nothing about something so grand? And so I've always been a reader of science fiction because I like the creative ideas of what people come up with.

And I especially like science fiction writers that base it in good science, but base it also in evolution that if you evolve a civilization from something life like, right, some sort of biology, it's assumptions about the universe will come from the environment in which it grew up. So for instance, Larry Niven is a great writer, and he imagines different kinds of civilizations.

In some cases, what happens if intelligence evolved from a herd animal? Right, would you lead from behind? Right, would you be, you know, in his case, one of them were the so-called puppeteers. And to them, the moral imperative is cowardice. You put other people forward to run the risk for you. Right. And so he writes entire books around that premise.

There's another guy, a Brynn, David Brynn is his name and he writes the so-called uplift universe books. And in those he takes different intelligences each from a different evolutionary background. And then he posits a civilization based around where and what they came from. And so to me, I mean, that's, that's just fun. But I mean back to your original question is, how many are there? I think as, as many stars as we can see.

Now, how many are currently there? I don't know. I mean, that's the whole, that's the whole question of, you know, how long can a civilization last before it runs out of steam? And you, for instance, does it just get bored or does it transcend to something else? Or does it say I've seen enough and I'm done?

What is running out of steam look like it could be destroyed itself would get bored? You know, it said, or we've done everything we can and they just decide to stop. I don't know. I just don't know. It's the Elon Musk worry that we stop reproducing or we slow down the reproduction rate to where the population can go to zero. We can go to zero and we can't and we collapse. I mean, so the only way to get around that is perhaps create enough machines with AI to take care of us.

What could possibly go wrong? You've talked to people that told stories of UFO encounters. What is the most fascinating to you about the stories of these UFO encounters that you've heard that people have told you? The similarity of them. The uniformity of the stories. Now, I just want to say upfront, a lot of people think that when I speculate, I believe something. That's not true.

Speculation is just creativity. Speculation is the beginning of hypothesis. None of what I hear in terms of the anecdotes, do I necessarily believe are they true? But I still find them fascinating to listen to because at some level, there's still raw data. And you have to listen. And once you start to hear the same story again and again, then you have to say, well, there might be something to it.

Maybe it's some kind of a youngian background in the human mind and human consciousness that creates these stories again and again. It's coming out of the DNA. It's coming out of that pre-programmed something. And young talked quite a bit about this kind of thing, the collective unconscious. But actually one of the most interesting ones I find is this constant message that you're not taking care of your world.

And this came long before climate change. It came long before many kinds of, let's say, current day memes around taking care of our planet, pollution, et cetera. And so, you know, for instance, perhaps the best example of this, the one that I find the most fascinating is a story out of Zimbabwe, 50 or 60 children one afternoon in Zimbabwe. It's a well-educated group of white and black children who, and lunchtime in the playground saw craft. And they saw little men.

And they all ran into the teachers and they told the same story and they drew the same pictures. And the message several of them got was, you are not taking care of your planet. And it got, you know, there's actually a movie coming out on this episode. And 30 years later now, the people who are there, the children who have now grown up say, it happened to us. Now, did it happen? Was it some sort of hallucination or was it an imposed hallucination by something? Was it material? I don't know.

But these kids were seven to ten years old. You see them on video. Seven to ten year olds can't lie like that. And so, you know, whether it's real or not, I don't know. But I find that fascinating data. And again, it's these unconnected stories of individuals with the same story. That is worthy of further inquiry.

Yeah, so here we are humans with limited cognitive capacities, trying to make sense of the world, trying to understand what is real and not. We have this DNA that somehow in complex ways is interacting with the environment. And then we get these novel ideas that come from the populace. And then they make us wonder about what it all means. And so how to interpret it. If you think from an alien perspective, how would you communicate with other life-like organisms?

You perhaps have to find in points on this interaction between the DNA and its manifestations in terms of the human mind and how it interacts with the environment. So it gets some kind of, all right, what is this DNA? What is this environment? I have to get it in somehow to interact with it, to perturb the system to where these little ants, human-like ants get excited and figures and see stuff out.

Yeah, and then somehow steer them. First of all, for investigative purposes, to understand like oftentimes to understand a system you have to perturb it. Exactly. It's like poke at it. You get excited or not. And then the other ways you want to, if you worry about them, you can steer in one direction or another.

And this kind of idea that we're not taking care of our world, that's interesting. I mean, that's comforting. That's hopeful because that means the greater intelligence, which is what I would hope, we want to take care of us. Like we want to take care of the gorillas in the National Parks in Africa. Yeah, but we don't want to take care of cockroaches. So there's a line we draw. So you have to hope that right now we're a bunch of angry monkeys.

And maybe whatever these intelligences are, are also keeping an eye on us. You know that you don't want a bunch of, you know, you don't want the angry monkey troop stomping around the local galactic arm. Do you think these folks are telling the truth? Do you think they saw what they say they saw? I think they saw what they said they saw, but I also think they saw what they were showing.

I mean, if you go back to the whole notion of, okay, how long has this been around? It didn't just start showing up in 1947. There are stories going back into the 1800s of people who saw things in their farm fields in the US. It's in local newspapers from the 1800s. It's fascinating. But if you can go even further back. So to your point of how would you as a higher intelligence represent yourself to a lesser intelligence? Well, let's go back to pre civilization.

Maybe you show yourself as the spirits and the forest. And you give messages through that. Once you get a little bit more civilized, civilized, then you show yourself as the gods and then your God. Well, we don't believe in God anymore necessarily. Not everybody does. So what do we believe in? We believe in technology. So you show yourself as a form of technology. Right. But the common thread is you're not alone.

And there's something else here with you. And there's something that's, as you said, watching you and at least watching over your shoulder. But I think that like any good parent, you don't tell your student everything. You make them learn and learning requires mistakes. Because if you tell them everything, then they get lazy.

You've looked at the brains of information coming from the brain of some of the people that have had your phone counters. What's coming about the brain of people who encounter your phones? So the study started with a group of, let's say a cohort of individuals that were brought to me and their MRIs to ask about the damage that had been seen in these individuals.

It turns out that the majority of those patients ended up being as far as we can tell Havana syndrome. And so for me, at least that part of the story ends in terms of the injury. It's likely almost all Havana syndrome that somebody else's problem now. That's not my problem. But when we were looking at the brains of these individuals, we noticed something right in the center of the Basil Ganglia in many of these individuals that at first we thought was damage.

It was basically an enriched patch of MRI dense neurons that we thought was damage. But then it was showing up in everybody and then we looked and said, oh, it's actually not the other readings on these MRIs showed that actually that's living tissue. That's actually the head of the caught it in the containment. And at the time, and I remember even asking a good friend of mine at Stanford who is a psychiatrist, what does the Basil Ganglia do?

Is it all the Basil Ganglia is just about movement and nerve and motor control? Well, that's odd because these other papers that we were reading at the time started to suggest that it was involved with higher intelligence and is actually downstream of the executive function and involved with intuition and planning.

And if you think about it, if you're going to have motor control, which is centralized in one place, motor control requires knowledge of the environment. You don't want to move something and hit the table. Or if you're walking across the room, you want to be aware and cognizant of what you might bump into. So obviously, all of that planning is requires access to all the senses. It requires access to your desires and memory, knowledge of where and what you want and desire to walk nearby.

Like I use the example of your at a party you want to avoid that person, you like that person, the waiter is about to drop something all without thinking you maneuver. So that actually all that planning is done in the Basil Ganglia. And it's actually now called the brain within the brain. It's a goal processing system, subservient to executive function. So what we think we found there was not something which allows people to talk to UFOs. I mean, I think the UFO community took it a step too far.

What I think we found was a form of higher functioning and processing. So what we then looked at, and this was the most fascinating part of it, we looked then at individuals in the families are those, let's say the index case individuals. And we found that it was actually in families. And more so, this is the most fascinating part. We've probably looked now at about 200 just random cases that you can download off of databases online.

You don't see this higher connectivity. You only find it in what green would have called or has called higher functioning individuals, people who are, I mean, he called them savants. I don't have the means to, we haven't done the testing, but it turns out my family has it. Right. We found it in me, my brother, my sister, my mother.

We found it as well in other individuals, husband and wife pairs. So statistically, if you had a group of 20 individuals and you found two husband wife pairs, both of whom had it. And yet, it's only found it about we think one and 200, 100 individuals. The fact that two individuals came together. Two sets of individuals came together, both whom had it implied either a restricted breeding group or attraction.

The reason why it seems to be in, let's say, so-called experiencers or people who claim, if intuition is the ability to see something that other people don't, I don't mean that in a paranormal sense. But being able to see something just in front of you that other people might just dismiss. Well, maybe that's a function of a higher kind of intelligence to say, well, I'm not looking at an artifact. I'm not looking at something that I should just ignore.

I'm seeing something and I recognize it for not what it is, but that it is something different than it is normally found in my environment. Yeah, you know, I have a little bit of that. I seem to see the magic in a lot of moments. I have a deep, it's obviously not obviously, but it seems to be chemical in nature that I just am excited about life. I love life. I love like stupid things. It feels like I'm high a lot on like mushrooms or something like that where you'd really appreciate that.

You're able, I'm able to detect something about the environment that maybe others don't, I don't know, but like I seem to be over the top grateful to be alive on a lot of stupid reasons. And that's in there somewhere. I mean, it's kind of interesting because it really is true that our brains, the way we're brought up, but also the genetics enables us to see certain slices of the world.

And some people will probably be more receptive to anomalous information. They see the, they see the magic, the possibility in the novel thing, right? As opposed to kind of finding the pattern of the common of the regular. Some people are more, wait a minute, this is kind of weird. I mean, a lot of those people probably become scientists too.

Huh. Like there was this pattern happening over and over and over and then something weird just happened. And then you get excited by that weirdness that start to pull the string and discover what is at the core of that weirdness. Like perhaps is that. You know, maybe by way of question, how does the human perception system deal with anomalous information? Do you think? Well, it's first tries to classify it and get it out of the way. If it's not food, if it's not sex, right?

If it's not in the way of my desires, or if it isn't the way of my desires, then you focus on it. And so the, I think the question is how much spare processing power? How much CPU cycles do we spend on things that are not those core desires? What is the most kind of memorable, powerful, you phone counter report you've ever heard? Just to you person on a personal level, like something that was really powerful?

Well, I mentioned the Zimbabwe one that's particularly interesting and one that actually most people don't know about, but family driving down the highway, two little girls in the back, open glass top car, and little girl see a craft right over their car. And then the middle of the day on a busy highway, the mother sees it. Nobody can, they look around, nobody else seems to see it. So the girls take out their camera, take a picture of it.

And then they get home. They look at the picture. There's no craft, but there's a little object, about 30 feet above their car or so. Three feet across kind of star shaped. It's not the craft, but it's something else. There's obviously there was something there. And so what were they seeing? Were they seeing a projection? Were they seeing and why were only they seeing it?

And the photograph was capturing something very different than they were seeing. They're still an object. What can you give a little bit of context? Is this from modern day? It's modern day. Oh, yeah, they had a camera. I mean, they had a cell phone camera. And this is like a five years ago report provided. By the way, where's the central place to provide reports? Oh, there's a move on, but this isn't public. I've seen the picture.

Oh, this is something you've directly interacted with. Yeah. Yeah. I've seen the picture. So those moments like that. They captivate your mind. It's so different. It doesn't fall into the standard story at all, but it also, but in another way, it's kind of a, it's a clear renunciation of this notion that when people see events, they don't all see the same thing.

Now, we've heard this about like traffic accidents. Different people will see the color of the car differently or the chain of events differently and just tells you that memory isn't anywhere near what we think it is. But the issue around these so-called UFO reports is that the same people will see a very different thing almost as if whatever it is is projecting a is projecting something into the mind rather than it being real.

Right. Rather than it being a real manifestation, you know, material in front of you, it's actually almost some sort of an altered virtual reality that is imposed on you. I mean, you know, I think the company meta and all the virtual reality companies would love to have something like that. Right. Well, you don't have to actually wear something on your face.

Yes, to experience a virtual reality, what happens if you could just project it? Well, that's the fundamental question from an alien perspective. When you look at it or as we humans look at ants, how does this perception system operate? So not only how does this things mind operate? How does the human mind operate? But how does it their perception system operate so that we can like stimulate the perception system properly to get them to think certain things.

And so, you know, that's a really important question. The humans think that, you know, the only way to communicate is in like 3D or 4D space time. There's physical objects or maybe you write things in some kind of language. But there could be just so much more richness in how you can communicate. And so from an alien perspective, or somebody has much greater technological capabilities, you have to figure out how do I use the skills I have to stimulate the human, the limited humans.

Right. Well, I mean, let's take the ants exam again as an example. Let's say that you wanted to make ants practical. You wanted to use them for something. Right. You wanted to use them as a form of biological robot. Now, DARPA and other people have been trying to use insects for, you know, turn them into biological robots.

But if you wanted to, you would have to interact with their sense of smell, right. They're a pheromone system that they use to interact with each other. So you would either create those molecules to talk to them to make them do not say talk to them as if they're intelligent, but talk to them to manipulate them in ways that you want.

Or if you were advanced enough, you would use some sort of electromagnetic or other means to stimulate their neurons in ways that would accomplish the same goal as the pheromones, but by doing it in a sort of a telefactoring way. So let's say you wanted to telefactor with humans, you would interact with them. And this is again, this is a technology which you could imagine possible. You could telefactor information into the sensory system of a human.

Right. But then each human is a little bit different. So either you know enough about them to tailor it to that individual or you just basically take advantage of whatever the sensory net is that that individual has. So if you happen to be good at sound or you happen to be a very visually inclined individual, then maybe the sensory information that you get that's most effective in terms of transmitting information would come through that portal.

I think the aliens would need to figure out the human's value physical consistency. So we've discovered physics. So we want our perception to make sense. Maybe they don't they haven't you know that's not an obvious fact of perception that you have to figure out what kind of things are humans used to observing in this particular environment of Earth.

And how do we stimulate the perception system in a way that's not anomalous or not to listen across the threshold of just like well, that's way too weird. Right. So they have to I mean that's not obvious that that should be important.

You know, maybe you want to err on the side of anomaly like lean into the weirdness. So communication is complicated. Yeah. Well, that's why I always I always find this issue of people talking about the so called grace as interesting because it is related to what you're saying. They're different enough, but they're not so different as to be scary right they're not venom dripping fangs right there different enough.

But they they all it's also like they're there what you could imagine us becoming in some distant future. So is that a purposeful representation. I don't know I mean I don't believe in the grace for instance, but I believe that people think that they see it. So if we're talking about a communication strategy that says, you know, we're we're like you but not the same as you. This might be a manifestation that you that you represent in terms of a communication strategy.

What do you make of David favorite sighting of the tic tac UFO and other pilots who have seen these objects that seem to defy the laws of physics. Well, I think you have to take them at their word. Are they fascinating to you? Absolutely. No, I know I know a lot of these people right so I know Lou Elizondo, Chris melon.

The whole crowd I've been I saw the videos about three weeks or so before they went public. I was at a bar with Lou overlooking the Pentagon in crystal city and they showed them to me and my hair stood on end. I said this is this is coming out soon and I know one of the guys on the inside who was the naval intelligence who had interviewed all of these pilots again before this came out and it was hair raising to hear this.

But also exciting that you know here's not just people's testimony these are credible individuals and if you've seen the 60 minute episode with some of the pilots.

You know they have no monetary gain of anything they've got negative gain from coming up but then you also have all of those simultaneous ship analysis from the USS Princeton and the radar analysis etc. So you know at the end of the day it's just data it's not a conclusion I'm I'd be perfectly happy honestly perfectly happy if somebody showed that it was all a hoax.

I'm going to go back to my day job right that could be a hoax but other things might not be me that this is the point I mean what this is why it's nice to remove some of the stigma about this topic because it's all just data and and a namo events are such that there's going to be they're going to be rare in terms of how much data they represent.

We have to consider the full range of data to discover the things that actually represent something that's if we pull at it will discover something that's extraterrestrial or something. Deep about the phenomena on earth that we don't yet understand right well if it only stimulates people for instance to think okay well what happens if we could move like that with momentumless movement.

And and it stimulates young individuals to go into the sciences to ask those questions that to me is fascinating I mean after I've been openly talking about this in the last year especially I've had a number of students from top schools who aren't my students come to me and say if I can help let me how can I help I never had thought about this before but you opened.

You and others not just you and others have opened your mind to thinking about this matter yeah that's why it's actually funny that Elon Musk doesn't think too much about this. These kinds of propulsion systems that could divide the laws of physics as we currently understand them to me it's a powerful way to think what what is possible.

It's it's inspiring even if some of it doesn't represent extraterrestrial vehicles I think the observation itself it's like something you mentioned which is you know hypothesizing imagining these things considering the possibility of these things I think opens up your mind in a way that.

Ultimately can create the technology first you have to believe the technology is possible before you can create it in my own lab you know we always look for as I've said before what is inevitable and you know saying inevitably this is the kind of data we need.

But if we need that kind of data the instrument we want isn't doesn't exist okay so I imagine the perfect instrument I can't make it and you back into something which is practical and then you in a sense reverse engineer the future of what it is that you want to make and I've started and sold like least half a dozen or more companies using that basic premise and so it was always something that didn't exist today but we imagined what we wanted.

And at the time many people said it couldn't be done I mean for instance all the gene therapy that's done today with retrovars is came from a group meeting in David Baltimore's lab I was a postdoc with him and one of the other postdocs was unable to do you make retrovars is in a way that he wanted to and I realized I had a cell line that would allow us to make retrovars is in two days rather than two months.

And so he and I then worked together to make that system and now all gene therapy with retrovars is done using this basic approach around the whole world because something couldn't be done and we wanted to do it better and we imagined the future.

And so that's I think what the whole UFO phenomenon is doing for people is like well let's imagine a future where these kinds of technologies are but also let's imagine a future where we don't blow ourselves up right so if these things are there they managed to not blow themselves up. So it means that at least one other civilization got past the inflection point. So if some of the encounters are actually representing alien civilizations visiting us why do you think they're doing so.

You suggested that perhaps it's the study and understand their own past right right what what what are some of the motivations do you think and again from from our perspective us humans what motivations would we have when we approach other civilizations we might discover in the future.

Well I think one motivation might be to steer us away from the precipice right or on the assumption that you know even if we make it past the precipice at least we're not a bunch of psychopaths you know running around so maybe there's a little bit of motivation there to make sure that you're the neighbor that's growing up next to you is not you know unruly.

You know but I mean maybe it's sort of a moral imperative like what we have with you know creating national parks where animals can continue to live out their lives in a natural way. I don't know I mean that would be I mean the problem is we're imagining from an anthropomorphic viewpoint what an alien might think and as I said before alien means alien right I mean not Hollywood aliens but a whole different way of thinking and a whole different level of experience and let's say wisdom hopefully.

That we could only hope to understand now but if we ever get out there if we ever make it past our current problems and even if we don't have faster than light travel and even if we're only using ramscoops or light sales to get where we want to go on it takes us 10,000 years to get somewhere or to spread out we might encounter such things and we're just going to stop all over it.

Like we did in colonial South America or Africa or all the rest on our current path likely you know and so what are we going to learn well we're getting better and better at understanding what is life. And I think we're getting better and better being careful not to step on it when we when we see it and I this is one of the nice things about talking about UFOs is it expands the over to the window expands our understanding of what possibly could be life.

It gets us to think it gets a scientific community to think when we go to Mars we'll go to these different moons that possibly have life you know we're not looking at a legged organisms we're looking at some kind of complexity. That arises in resistance to the natural world and there's a lot of insurance to the natural.

But somehow there's a rebellious process complex system going on here and I don't know you know the many ways it could take form and there's a sense you know for aliens that as a technology develops they take form more and more in as information as something that can influence the space of ideas of the processing of data itself.

So I just this idea of embodiment that we humans so admire physically visible perceivable embodiment maybe a very inefficient thing right if you think just about you know your area AI you know we're we're trying to make smaller and smaller and smaller circuitry that is.

Basically closer and closer to the physics of how the universe operates right right down at the level of any quantum computers are basically right down about quantum information storage so fast or 10,000 a hundred thousand years maybe somebody found a way to embody AI directly into the physics of the universe right and it doesn't require physical manifestation it just it just sits in space time.

It's just a locally ordered space we're just locally ordered space time right you know I mean people but maybe they just they found a way to embody it there they probably have to get really good at not you know trampling on the ants. The the better your technology gets the easier it is to accidentally like oops right just destroy these simpleton biological systems.

We constantly think about whatever these things might be we think that they are some sort of a unified force well maybe they're not unified maybe they are as disparate as you and I are and maybe what keeps them from stomping all over the ants is each other right that they are in a self tension to prevent one or more of them from running amok.

Oh yeah I mean that's kind of the energy of nations that we have on earth so there's always there's always going to be this is hierarchy this hierarchy that's formed of greater and greater intelligence is right and they're all probably also wondering what's bigger than me exactly that's what I always wonder is that maybe that they're what keeps them in line is something that is beyond them like what created the universe I mean that in that that's what I'm going to do is I'm going to do that.

That's probably a question that bothers them to what about the communication task itself how hard do you think it is fail is to communicate with humans so is this something you think about about this barrier of communication between biological systems and something else how difficult is it to find a common language. Well I think if you're smart enough or technologically enables enough it's relatively straightforward now whether your concepts can ever be dumbed down to us that might be hard.

I mean again talking to the ants talking to the ants I mean they don't Instagram so you want to look good in this picture let me explain let me explain to you why yeah so that's the essential problem of you know perhaps they realize who it is that they're talking to and they say we're rather than money the picture we're only going to give them limited information.

Yeah right and yeah maybe we could sit down like you and I and have a conversation but then they would make assumptions the humans would then make assumptions about us that aren't true because we're not humans right so let's stay at arms length let's just let them know that we're here right and here's the limited amount of communication again this this notion that if you give somebody everything they'll get.

If you give somebody everything they'll get lazy and you know if they've been around as long as they have they've seen every kind of thing that can go wrong and so it's it's they know as much as they might want to step in that would be a wrong thing. Yeah you have to also understand that the amount of wisdom they carry yeah.

And so it's it's very easy as well for religions to I don't want to I don't want to get into a whole religious conversation but you could very easy for a little you could see how religions could call them angels or devils or what have you because again if you're trying to fit it into a frame or a cultural understanding.

The first thing you reach for is God and so it when you when you look at what these things are and again with the angels and the devils in a similar sort of way their communication is limited they just kind of give little what's the oracle of Delphi they kind of give these Delphic pronouncements and then it's up to you to figure out what it is that they really mean.

Stephen Greer claimed that a skeleton discovered in a Tacoma region of Chile might be an alien you reached out to him and took on the task of proving or disproving that with the rigor of science the result is a paper titled whole genome sequencing of Adacama skeleton shows novel mutations linked with this pleasure can you tell this full story. The story was as you put it right there correct reached out.

Got a sample of the body did the DNA sequencing then worked with the team of two other Stanford scientists and. Roche sequencing group. Roche diagnostics and probably a total team of about 11 or so people. And as is as a standard in these kinds of things the professors actually don't do the work the students do the work and figured out the answer and then we helped them put together the story.

And the story was simply that it was human 100% I went into it thinking it was originally a monkey of some sort. I got kind of excited a few months into the process thinking well what happens if it is an alien. Right you would describe some of the characteristics of the skeleton that make it unique and interesting primarily it had dysmorphias of the of the brain. And so the first thing I did actually when I got pictures of it I took it to a local expert at Stanford.

And he was on the paper and he was the world expert in pediatric bone dysmorphias though he literally wrote the book. And on this because that's what you do you go to an expert when is outside of your field of interest and he said well I haven't seen this particular collection of mutations before or this. This physiology before but here's what I think it might be. And he said but based on the size of the of the thing and the bone density. It would appear to be like six or seven years old.

Now again that's the that's the thing where I think the lay public. Doesn't understand or takes a speculation like that and turns it into a fact no one ever said that it was that age we only said that the bones made it look like it was that age. But then we went back and looked for genetic explanations of why things might look the way they did.

And if you again read the paper is very carefully caveated to say that these mutations might result in this but what we did find was an unexpected the large number of mutations associated with bone growth in this individual. And it was just a bad role of the dice right you roll the dice enough times with enough people born every year and someone will roll the wrong dice.

All it wants so the sad part about it was individuals in the UFO community who wanted to think that they were some sort of conspiracy around it right that somebody had somehow convinced all of my students. To lie. I mean come on you know I would lose my I would lose my job first of all and they would all be you know in trouble forever.

Yeah but also is just projecting the level and center people that doesn't I don't think exists in normal populace and especially doesn't exist in the scientific community. The kind of people that go into science I mean this is what bothers me with the current distrust of science is there they might be naive.

They might they might not especially modern science look at the big picture philosophical ethical questions all that kind of stuff but ultimately they're people with integrity and just a deep curiosity for the discovery of cool little things and there's no. There's no more level and broadly speaking in the scientific community and so I mean there's a bigger story here which is.

You know there's a hunger in the populace to discover something anomalous something new and you know science has to be both open to the anomalous but also to reject the anomalous when the data doesn't support it right what would you make of that you know walk.

That you walk in that line for you because you're dealing with your phone counters you're dealing with with the anomalous well people have said let's go back to the Otcoma case that I was debunking it well debunking is a loaded term sort of assumes that you were going in purposefully to prove something is wrong.

I was on I was just going into collect the data and you know I I showed that this one was human there was another skull that somebody had at one point it was called the star child they called it the star child skull I said you know I looked at it I looked at the DNA sequencing that they had done I said this is human.

And of story the people who own the thing at the time disagreed with me and then eventually another group came in and proved that I was right and it's not about debunking it's about getting the more spectacular and hyped cases off the table I mean the reason I got interested in it is because somebody was hyping it and not because I wanted to prove it but because I just wanted to know and let's get it off the table because it's usually the most.

Extravagant things that are most likely to be wrong somewhere in the rubble will be something interesting and so that's what you do you get the you get the the the draw off the table and then somewhere in the data will be something worth.

It real inquiry and that if you inquire deeply enough will be extravagant yes exactly and that's what actually excite scientists is to I mean you want with the rigor of science to actually reveal the extravagant and so look at crisper as probably the most perfect example of that these weird sequences in bacterial genomes all arrayed one after the other with these strange sequences are.

So how do they get there and lo and behold after you know a lot of effort and work will couple of Nobel prizes went out the door but these strange things ended up having extraordinarily extravagant possibilities. So that you are a form materials you are in possession of your form materials yourself claimed you are form materials clenched alleged you are form materials that's right some.

What's another term weird materials that don't seem to have a story that the story that doesn't seem to be of natural origins but it's not you know there's a process to proving that and that process may.

Take decades if not centuries because you have to keep pulling at the string of discover where they could possibly come from but anyway you you're in possession of some materials of this kind can you describe some of them maybe also talk to the process of how you investigate them how do you analyze them right so let's say that there's two classes of materials that I've been given by people and they're not given by like the.

Government or anything just given people who've collected them and there's a reasonable chain of evidence associated with them that you believe it's not just a pebble somebody picked up off a road. There are almost always things that people have claimed have either been dropped off as like some sort of a left over material multi metals or they are from an object that was released from this that kind of exploded there are almost always metals.

I have some couple of things that might be biological that are interesting that I haven't really spent a lot of time on yet when you look at a metal you basically well okay what are the elements in it and what's it made up. And so there's pretty standard approaches to doing that most of them involve a technology called mass spectrometry and there's probably about five or six different kinds of mass spectrometry that you could bring to bear on answering it.

And they either tell you depending upon the limit of the resolution of the instrument they either tell you the elements that are there or they tell you the isotopes that are there and you're interested not just in knowing whether something is there or not you are interested in knowing whether they're you know the the amounts of it the and in the case of elements.

And that's kind of where in some of these cases it gets interesting right because on in at least one of the materials as we first studied it the isotope ratios of in this case it was magnesium or way off normal.

And I just don't know why it doesn't it doesn't prove anything it just all it proves is that it was probably accomplished by some kind of an industrial process whether it's the result of a process or whether and this is sort of the leftover or whether it was made that way for a particular purpose I don't know all I know is that it it was

engineered that's it right but then it's the question is sort of you go one step deeper why would you engineer it right well why engineer what is the engineer means there's all kinds of it could be a byproduct it could be the main result of an engineering process it would be a small part of the engineering process that is the main part well so the ratios of isotopes for any given element are basically the result of stellar processes

supernova blew up sometime several tens you know several billion years ago that became a cloud those atoms coalesced gravitationally to form another son and a ring that became a rocky planet and the ratios of the isotopes were determined at the time of that explosion and so everything in the local solar system is more or less of that ratio depending upon certain gravitational different but but by fragments of a percent not whole tens of percent difference

so what do humans use isotopes for mostly the blow stuff up I mean the vast majority of the isotopes that have been made in the in the per pound or ton are things like certain ratios of plutonium and uranium to blow stuff up we don't make

it here isotopes which is today is relatively easy to do but it's still expensive for any other reason apart from let's say as anti cancer we use stable isotopes and money these days as a counterfeiting tool you basically embed certain ratios of isotopes into make it harder for counterfeiters to accomplish and so but other than that we don't do anything with that so why would you make grams of such material in this one case and drop it around on a beach in Brazil

so which case we're talking about this is the uva tuba case can you describe this case a little bit further like what material we're talking about just the full story of the case so it's an interesting one it's an interesting one so it a fisherman saw an object that

released something or it it exploded and it was this relative I'm you know I've got some big chunks of it relatively pure magnesium with obviously something else in it because magnesium burns so it had something in it that would other metals simple alloy that would prevent it from from basically burning up

and so the question is and so so then we had we had two pieces that came from two different chains of custody both claimed to be from the same object at least physically when you look at the two things they look the same right so we took small fragments of each of them we put them in an instrument called a secondary ion mass spec

which is an extremely sensitive instrument and it can see down to 0.001 mass units which is important for let's say more arc arcane reasons but it's a sensitive instrument and so one of the chains of custody we had two pieces from the same chain of custody and then two pieces from the other chain of custody

one of them had completely normal magnesium isotope ratio spend easy 24 25 26 and the other was off not just like slightly off way off and they were both off to the same extent so I mean it was sort of like you had an internal control of what was normal and you had this other one which was which was well and so you're left with

that's what kind of an open question was this a hoax were these two chains of custody one of them a hoax that somebody purposefully introduced those things because you could do it you would cost a lot I mean at the time that this was found I guess the 1970s or so I might have been earlier I forget

the amount that I had would have cost several tens of thousands of dollars to make again it's not something you would just throw around and why would you do it in the hope that some guy 30 years from then would would pick it up and study it

very subtle it's a long term plan so so I just don't know I just don't know what to make of it except it's interesting but it's but so different kind of question that you're asking is what constitutes evidence right so is is this sufficient evidence absolutely not

but somebody's put it forward I have the time it's my time I'll study it and I my objective is to sort of take those that I think are credible enough and do a reasonable analysis put it out there and maybe somebody else will come up with an idea as to what it is now what would be better is some sort of true technology right something that is obviously we don't have it you know and people like

on Neil deGrasse Tyson and Seth Shostak have come out rightfully and have said you know when you show up with you know something really obviously technology that we don't understand you know then we'll pay attention

right just material not just material piece of metal is is interesting are but and several of the things that I've looked at and things that people other things that people have come to me with we found to be completely banal or we're actually pieces of aircraft that were invented back in the 1940s and so take them off the table

see but I think again I think showing up with technology that we humans would find completely novel is actually a really difficult task for aliens because it obviously can't be so novel that we don't recognize it for what it is for what it is and so and I would say most the technology aliens likely have would be something we don't recognize

so they it's actually a hard problem how to convince ants like you first have to understand what answer tweeting about like what what they care about in order to like inject into their culture because you know that's why I think it would be the technology that you present is in the space of ideas is in the is is try to influence individual humans with the encounters and try to with this kind of thing you the the mention about us not taking messages about us not taking care of the world

it's difficult to come I mean I to for them to understand you have to come up with trinkets that impress us maybe the very technology the fascination with the development of technology and the development of technology the actual act of innovation itself is the thing that they're communicating I mean this is kind of what you know Jack valet thinks about is the role of the control system he calls it the control system well let me ask about Jack at who is he you know him who is Jack valet

what have you learned from him about life about about your father's about technology about our role in the universe well I met Jacques actually soon after the whole out of comma thing happened I was visited by those people associated with the government and the whatever around the

the havanis what ended up mostly being have on a syndrome patients but also Jacques at the same time they were actually working behind the scenes with each other that here's this stand for professor who is willing to talk about this stuff and investigate things maybe we should go talk to him and he reached out through a colleague and you know I had lunch actually at the rosewood in up on your sand hill so Jacques is one of the first openly

active scientists and he's really a scientist in this area going back to the 1960s and you know he's put forward a number of ideas speculations about what it might be that people interacting with and he the first thing that I learned from him is this notion of what he called kabuki theater

that many of the things that people have seen are I remember reading his books and thinking he uses this word absurd a lot he said the things that people claim they see are absurd right a ship doesn't land in a farmers field

and then come up and knock on the door and say can I have a glass of water and these are stories literally out of newspapers from the 1930s is it's absurd you know and the other thing that people say ships don't crash if you're so technologically advanced you don't crash it's absurd that they crash so

it says this is put on as a show it's meant to it's an influence campaign right it's it's not meant to influence individuals it's meant to influence a culture as a whole maybe they don't look at us as individuals maybe they look at us as an organism that lives on a planet right and perhaps right

so that's how you interact with them that's how you influence them so that was one of the first things that kind of took me back and realized wow there's actually maybe there's a puppet master behind the scenes that's you know doing this influencing that all this stuff about aliens is just is not true per say they're just a representation of something that is meant to influence

so that was probably the most interesting I mean the man is brilliant he's also it can be and I'm sorry Jacques you can also be incredibly annoying to have a conversation with because he will pick apart your arguments or anything that you think you know and show you why you don't know what you think you know

and he uses the he used the example that for me that is is all you need is one counter example to any conclusion and you're wrong and so I learned from him I mean I'm supposed to be a good scientist but I learned from him don't talk about conclusions just talk about the data because data is not wrong I mean convince yourself that the data is not wrong or not an artifact but be careful about your conclusions because whatever is going on it's it's much more complicated than we then we imagine

well that's powerful being able to always step back is we get we humans get excited yeah we start to jump to conclusions from the data but always step back well are for being able to always step back is we get we humans get excited yeah start to jump to conclusions from the data but always step back well in some of my Twitter feeds when I dare to go on Twitter are full of well when you're going to give us the answer

you know science is not immediate you got to have to be patient and even some of my science colleagues are said well where's the data my answer them has been where's been your work to try to produce any you know I'm not here to give you everything on a silver platter

we talked offline how much I love data and she learning and so on and I've been really disheartening to see the US government not invest as much as they possibly could into this whole process so let's jump to the most recent thing which is what do you make of the report titled preliminary assessment

on identified aerial phenomena that was released by the office of the director of national intelligence in June 2021 so this was like okay we're going to step back and we're going to like what where do we stand and where do we hope the feature is what do you make of that report is a hopeful is it is very helpful

I think the adults are finally stepping up in and being in charge right in the good sense of adult what's that in the good sense of adult you know child like curiosity is pretty powerful thing that's true yeah I it's but it's also I think the people who were worried that the populace at large might run screaming into the streets and riot you know they basically the

empiric evidence is the wrong you know this these videos and all these things have been out for now what five years most people don't even know about it right so as as as hyped as it's been and all over the newspapers that it's been and et cetera you know even Tucker Carlson has talked about it many times on his news program Joe Rogan has a lot of people don't know about it so I think people if it's not affecting their day to day life

they're going on with their day to day life so but that said I think it was an important see change in the internal discussion is going on in the government because and the reason being that I think this is actually partly true with the the maturation of human social technology it was becoming so obvious that this stuff was showing up again and again and again around our ships they just couldn't

keep it quiet anymore right and so it's like we need to do something about it and Louis Alizondo and Chris and others to their great credit found the right angle to talk about this says well okay let's say it's not out there maybe it's the Russians the Chinese or somebody else we should know about this because we damn sure no it's not us so that to me is an important thing to to finally be a little bit

more open about the matter but like I often say I'm not looking for people to give me permission to do anything I'm just going to do the analysis myself with what I have Avilobe has taken the same approach he said I'm not going to wait for the government to give me telescopic information about technologies or things that might be even in our own solar system I'm just going to collect it myself

and that's the right way to do it right don't wait for somebody else to give it to you it's also possible to inspire a large number of people to do a wider spread data collection yes you yourself can't do a large enough data collection that would if you're talking about anomalous events right right you you should be collecting high resolution data about

everything that's happening on earth in terms of like it in terms of the kind of things that would indicate to your strong signal that something weird happened here and this is why you know governments can be good at funding large scale efforts yes you know NASA and so on working with space X would blorge in you know fund capitalistic sort of fund companies fund company efforts to do huge moonshot projects right in the same way do huge moonshot data collection efforts in terms of UFOs

I mean we're not it needs to be like 10 X like one or two orders of magnitude more funding exactly to do this kind of thing and I understand on the flip side of that if you make it about what are the Russians whether the Chinese doing you make it a question of geopolitics it gets touchy because now you you kind of taken away from the realm of science and

making it military making a military some of the greatest this is what makes me as an engineer makes me truly sad that some of the greatest engineering work ever done is by Lockheed Martin and we will never know about it.

Yeah I agree I agree I wish we were it was different but it's the world we live in. You know but related to that U.I.P. Task Force announcement that you just said you know the bill was passed in the department of defense and now formally established as an office to collate that information and also to be transparent about it money is now set aside right what do you think it just in case people

don't know the DOD establishing new department to study UFOs called airborne naming come on but yes airborne object identification and management synchronization group. Do you know how to pronounce that no I don't know I know I am a stupid and I'm a renamed but I am as G. AO. All right is directed by the under secretary of defense for intelligence and security what do you make of this office do you are you hopeful about this office.

I think there's still a tug of war going on behind the scenes as to who's going to control this but I do know though that money has been set aside that will be used to make things more public right to start to get others involved and you know there's I'm involved with an effort to get other academics involved. Do you think there might be some of that money could be directed towards funding maybe like groups like yours.

To do some research right so they would be open to that you think I hope so I mean nothing is said in stone yet so you know I am not hiding anything so I just don't know anything right but I do.

I do think that there will be public efforts now there are there are being set up other private efforts to bring monies involved and to use that to leverage and get access to some of the internal resources as well so what you're seeing is kind of an ecosystem building up in a positive sense of people who are willing to do the research. So you know before it it would be you couldn't even go to a scientist and ask them to help.

Now if there's money as I said before scientists are essentially capitalist we go where the money is you know we're I mean the work that I've done I did out of my own pocket and probably about 50 60 70 and $50,000 of money went into the paper we published out of my own pocket and you know but the amount of money that needs to go in is in the in at least the few millions to do a proper analysis of these materials.

The work I know that the Galileo project is involved with it's probably in the in the you know five to 10 million range to get stuff done but that's actually a relatively modest amount of money to accomplish something that has been in the zeitgeist for decades.

I should also push back a little bit on something you probably will agree with you said scientists are essentially capitalists what I've noticed is there's certainly an influence of money but oftentimes when you're talking about basic research and basic science the money is a little bit a little bit ambiguous to what direction you're doing the research in and the scientists get really good at telling a narrative of like yeah yeah yeah we're fulfilling.

The purpose of this funding but we're actually they end up doing really what they're curious about yes and of course you cannot deviate like if you're getting funded to study penguins in Antarctica you can't start building rockets but probably you can because you'll

convince some con you concoct the narrative saying rockets are really important for studying penguins in the entire right I I think that's actually this is one thing I think people don't generally understand about the scientific mind is I don't know how capitalistic it is because if it was they would start a

thing company no no no I mean when I met capitalist I didn't mean in the they'll they'll they'll start companies per se I mean we can only do the research where there's money and so from from you know maybe it's a bad use of the term capitalist so but the we will only do the research where there's money I mean why do most people work many biologists work in cancer research because there's a lot of money there it's an important problem but I might not have ever gotten involved

in it if there wasn't money I might have gone and I was going to be a botanist when I when I was a kid that's what I wanted to do so having money available will bring people to bear now another mistake that's often actually made I think by the lay public about science is that people think that we're paid to do things just as you said I get a research grant and luckily from the NIH there they give you a fair amount of latitude I will go my own way and I'll find something I might have proposed

something but I'll end up somewhere entirely different by the end of the project and that's how good science is done you follow the you follow the data you follow the results and so that's what I'm hoping can be done here I think the worst kind of thing that could be done with this subject area is to put it inside another company where they have a set plan of what is it going to do and the scientists either tell do what the executives tell them to do or not

that isn't how anything will really get discovered put it get it out into the public get open minds thinking about it and then publishing on it and doing the right kind of work that's how real progress will be made with this let's again put put our sort of philosophical hats on do you think the US government or some other government is in possession of something of extraterrestrial origin that is far more impressive than anything we've seen in the public

if I I'm not seeing anything personally but if I believe the people who I don't think can lie yes how does that make you feel in terms of the way government works the way our human civilization works that there might be things like that

and we're not they're not public is is there a hopeful message for transparency that's possible like if you were if you were in power and I'm not saying president because maybe the president is not the source of power here would you release this information in some way or form

yes if I were I think it would I think it's I think it's something that can bring humanity together right I think that knowledge of this kind of thing to know that we are you know we are more alike than we are different in comparison to whatever this is is is a positive thing for us

and to know you know I don't necessarily care that the government has been hiding it and I think you know people who've been talking about we should give government officials or whatever amnesty I think that's probably the right the right answer we don't this is in a time to look back and say you did something wrong you did whatever you did because that was the data you had available to you at the time and those you had good reasons for doing it

now if your reasons were selfish if your reasons where you wanted to do it because you wanted to monetize it yourself to the to your benefit but against that of others then I think maybe there's something else that could be said but you know an opportunity to get all this information out if I were in charge I would I would try to do it now I might be shown something though this is there's a reason why you don't want to let anybody know this

you know maybe you don't want everybody have having access to unlimited energy because maybe you might turn it into a bomb or something that gives you hints that something like unlimited energy is possible but you haven't figured it out yet

and if you make a public maybe some of the other governments you have tensions with will figure it out first right I mean I that it's kind of an arms race going on I think and all forms and it makes me truly sad because it's obvious that for example the origins of the COVID virus it's obvious to me that the Chinese government whatever the origins are is interested in not releasing information about it because it can only be bad for the Chinese government

and every government thinks like this like every actually this has been disappointment to me talking to PR folks at companies like they're always nervous they're always like conservative right in the sense like well if we release more stuff

it can only be bad and then an Elon Musk character comes along who tweets ridiculous memes and doesn't give a fuck and I've been encouraging CEOs I've been encouraging people to be transparent and of course government national security is really like another level it's human lives is stake

but let's start at the lighter case of just releasing some of the awesome insides of the tech how how the sausage is made the technology and being transparent about it because it excites people it like you said it connects people it inspires them it's good for the brand it's good for everybody

I honestly think this kind of idea that people will steal the information and we use it against you is an idea that's not true and is an idea of the 20th century like you said some of the benefits of the social media our social world is that transparency is beneficial and I hope governments will learn that lesson of course there's usually the last to learn such lessons what do you make a Bob Lazar story in terms of possession of aircraft do you believe in?

I don't believe in the Bob Lazar story to be quite honest I mean Jeremy Corbell has done a great job interviewing him and has done some beautiful documentaries I just don't I don't know how to interpret it and you know again there's some of the people who I fraternize with I think it's all rubbish

uh yeah but he maybe he's right but I don't know I mean the problem is and um this is a little bit different about how I approach the whole area than a lot of others I'm less interested in going over old paperwork and all these old histories of who said what you know the the whole he said she said of the history of of UFOs I'm a scientist I worked on the brain area because it's something I can collect data on

I can go back to the same individual collect their MRI again and redo it I can hand that MRI to somebody else they can analyze it I can get materials I can analyze them I can get some of these skeletons I won't touch any skeletons ever again but I can analyze it and somebody else can reproduce the data yeah I mean that's what I'm good at and so you know I'm I I'm not going to go into the hole I'm not a historian

yeah that's true but there's a human side to it I want it's sometimes I think with these because again an almost rare events some of the data is inextricably connected to humans the observations right right I mean I hope in the future you know that that sensory data will not be polluted by human subjectivity but you know that's still that's still powerful data even direct observations like if you talk about pilots

and so it's an interesting question to me whether Bob was our telling the truth whether he believes he's telling the truth too and what also what impact his story and stories like his have on the willingness of governments to be transparent

and so on so you know you have to credit his story for captivating the imagination of people and that getting the conversation going he's maintained his story for all these years with little to no change that I'm aware of but there's so many other people who are let's say experts in that story

they're got you know you accumulate us a set of sort of circumstantial evidence where your guide will say that somebody is not telling the truth yeah you mentioned Avilob I forgot to ask you about a more more you know because you've analyzed specimens from here on earth what do you make of that one and what do you make broad the of our efforts to look look at rocks essentially or look at objects flying around in our solar system

is that a valuable pursuit or maybe most of the stories can be most of the fascinating things can be discovered here on earth or on other nearby planets just going to a more more you know I think obvious insight is an interesting speculation right

like I was saying before people can sometimes look at something and not see it for what it is many would just look at that and say always an asteroid and dismiss it there was something odd about the data that Avi picked up on and said well here's an alternative explanation

that doesn't fit that actually better fits the models than it just being a rock you know and to his credit he just has ignored the critics because he believes the data is real and is using that then as a battering ram to go after other things so I think that's I think that's great you know

yeah what is this main conclusion does he say it could be of alien extraterrestrial origin is that is one of the things I mean he you know he's explained how it could be a light sale and a light sale is certainly within

near human capabilities to make such a thing I think Yuri Milner he's a Russian billionaire he's involved I think in a project to make light sales with laser you know to to launch them with laser power essentially towards Alpha Centauri right so it's something that humans could make I think

obvious proposal is perfectly within the realm of possibility I mean sadly the thing is you know now nearly out of our solar system yeah so I mean to me that's inspiring to do greater levels of data collection yeah in our solar system but also here on earth

it just seems like we should be constantly collecting collecting data because the tools of software that we're developing get better and better dealing with huge amounts of data it's changing the nature of science I mean collect all of the data right collect the data I mean I

am the Galileo project asked me over the weekend to join and I did so I'm you know I'm not a specialist in any of the stuff that they're doing but you know in looking at the list of people who are on there there are really no biologists on there so at some point if my

expertise is required for something what's the goal in the vision of the go the project better talk to Avi but my understanding and just actually looking at the at the sort of the bylaws this morning literally just got them is number one collect the data on UAP

and number two collect data on local potentially local technological artifacts and you to look into this this is fascinating and the obvious heading the Galileo project yeah have you spoken to him on the spot yes yes that was before I believe is before he was

heading this is a new creation yeah the Galileo project was I think it's about six or seven months old now you know amazing and he's getting a group of scientists together yeah 100 oh it's actually I am I was looking at some of their stuff over the weekend I'm

shocked at the level of organization that they've already got put together that's amazing it looks like a moonshot project I mean I've been involved with a lot of NIH large NIH projects which involve a lot of people in coordination and they're putting it together so you're extremely well published in a lot of the fields we began this conversation with so you're legit scientists but yet you're keeping an open mind to a lot of ideas that that maybe require you to take a leap outside of the

conventional so what advice would you give to young people today that are you know in high school or in college that are dreaming of having impact in science or maybe in whatever career path that goes outside of the conventional that really does something new if you believe in something you believe that an idea is valuable or you have an approach to something don't let others shame you into not doing it as I said shame is a societal control

device to get other people to do what they want you to do rather than what you want to do so shame sometimes is good to stop you from doing something unethical or wrong but shame also is something that is circumscribing your environment I've never let people who've told me you know you shouldn't do that line of science you should be ashamed of yourself or even thinking that give me a break I'm you know why is it wrong to ask questions about this area what's wrong

with asking the question frankly you're the person who's wrong for trying to stop these questions you're the person who's almost acting like a cultist you basically have closed your mind to what the possibilities are and if I'm not hurting anybody and if it could lead to an advance and if it's my time why does it bother you I mean I had a very well known scientist once tell me that I was going to hurt my career talking about this if anything it's enhanced my career

I have a couple question on this so first of all just a small comment on that I've realized that it feels like a lot of the progress in science is done by people pursuing an idea that another senior faculty would probably say this is going to hurt your career I think it's actually a pretty good indicator that there's something interesting when when a senior wise person tells you this is going to hurt your career I think that's just the one as a small if I were to give advice to young people

if somebody senior tells you this is going to hurt your career think twice about taking their advice yeah I mean I think that's the primary thing and the other I tell my own students you know I have a lab of about 20-30 people and has been that big since 1992 people come and go is it's not the data that falls in line that's it that's so interesting it's the it's the spot off the graph that you want to understand

that's it you want to when something is way off the graph that's the interesting thing because that's usually where discovery is and a number of times that I've stopped people in my lab and said wait a second go back a few slides what was that and then it end up being something interesting that made their careers I could you know count on a few hands yeah get excited by the extraordinary that's outside of the thing that you yeah that you've done in the past

I just on a personal psychological level is there you know I'm sure it's Stanford I'm sure in you exploring some of these ideas there's pressure how do you how do you not give into the pressure how do you not give into the people that say

like that push you away from these topics that what would you say shame I just point to my successes I say what you know you're the ones who told me not to start companies all this time ago you know and now you're the one coming to me for advice for how to start a company yeah right um but the from the scientific area it's it's you're wanting to take something off the table that might be an explanation how how is that the scientific method so you I reverse shame them

reverse shame so purely with reason through conversation you're able to do that so it doesn't feel because to me it would just feel lonely there's there's a community yeah there's a community of science and you know when you're working on something that's outside a particular uh conventional way of thinking it could be lonely I mean there's a you know in the AI field if you're working on neural networks in the 90s it could be lonely

I have met some of the most fascinating people ever that had I stayed the conventional track I would never have met I mean truly yeah brilliant people because of this so you know it is for those worried about well should I step outside of my comfort zone you're going to meet some really interesting people and you know because I open about this area you know I'll go and give a talk you know in Boston Harvard or MIT

and at dinner inevitably this subject comes up and inevitably somebody else at the table will admit both that they're interested or that they've seen something and suddenly the whole tone of the conversation changes it's kind of like there's safety in numbers

and uh and then or I've had people coming to me afterwards after dinner and say hey you know I don't talk about this openly but so the number of scientists who who know that there's something else going on is much larger than the scientific community would like to think that's a really powerful one which is I don't talk about this you know openly but here's what I believe and you'd be surprised how many people speak like this and hold those beliefs

and I am optimistic about social media and a more connected world to reveal more and more like us not to have these two personalities where like this public and private one we've mentioned the big questions of the origins of the universe what do you think is the meaning of this whole thing for us humans are human existence here on earth or just at the individual level of a human life

what Gary is the meaning of life? I think that what we're going through today with this realization it's uh it's kind of like you've lived on an island your whole life and you've looked across the ocean and you've never imagined there was another island with anybody else on it

and then suddenly a ship with sales shows up you don't understand it but you realize that suddenly your world just got a lot bigger I think we're in one of those moments right now that our world view our galactic view is opening right to something a little bit bigger and not just but there might be somebody else but that there's something else and what it is is yet to be understood and the fact that it isn't understood to me is what's exciting because I can fill it with my dreams

and this discovery our world might is about to get a lot more humbling and a lot more fascinating once we look out and realize we were on an island all along it makes us both smaller but larger at the same time to me you know I can look outside at the stars and think and imagine what else might be out there and although I will I know that I will never see it all it excites me to know that it's there

well Gary both to respect your time and also because at 12 I turn into a princess let me just say thank you for doing everything you're doing as a great scientist as a person willing to reject the conventional and thank you for spending your extremely valuable time with me today thanks for talking thanks so much it was great talking thanks for listening to this conversation with Gary Nolan to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description

and now let me leave you some words from Stanislav Lem in Solaris how do you expect to communicate with the ocean when we can't even understand one another thanks for listening and hope to see you next time