Garry Nolan: UFOs and Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #262
how would you as a higher intelligence represent yourself to a lesser intelligence do you think they saw what they say they saw it didn't just start showing up in 1947. how hard do you think it is for aliens to communicate with humans 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 you are a professor stanford studying the biology of the human organism at the level of individual cells so 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 the philosophical question is 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 uh 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 right all of the the so-called particles or the waves that people think the universe is made of and uh appears to me at least to be a computational process and embedded in that is biology right so all the atoms of a protein etc 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 uh 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 when we'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 a optimal computer for this particular environment right so if you reverse engineer that computer what do you mean by considering all the possible things it could become so who 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 is packed in the expectation of what the dna expects to see interesting so like some of the information is that accurate to say is stored outside the body exactly yeah the information is stored outside because there's a context of expectation isn't that interesting yeah it's fascinating i mean it to linger 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 you know 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 effects it has because it's possible that this system is really good at finding the efficient answer and maybe the efficient answer is uh 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 there's like trillions of environments aka planets or maybe you can think even bigger than planets how many life-like 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 uh i think in terms of the rate of 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 uh 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 uh 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 around 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 would 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 lifelike right some sort of biology its assumptions about the universe will come from the environment in which it grew up so for instance larry niven is a great writer uh and he imagines different kinds of civilizations in some cases what happens if uh evolut what happens if intelligence evolved from a herd animal right would you lead from behind right would you be uh 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 bryn david brin is his name and he writes the so-called uplift universe books and in those he takes different uh intelligences each from a different evolutionary background and then he posits a civilization based around where and what they came from and so i 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 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 does running out of steam look like it could be destroy itself or get bored you know it said or we've 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 uh the population can go to zero can go to zero and and we can't and we collapse i mean so the only way to get around that is uh 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 uh that you've heard that people have told you the similarity of them uh the uniformity of the of the stories now i just want to say up front a lot of people think that when i speculate i believe something that's not true right 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 i mean maybe it's some kind of a jungian background in the human mind and human consciousness that creates these stories again and again as 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 uh message that you're not taking care of your world and this came long before climate change it came long before uh many kinds of you know let's say current day memes uh around uh you know taking care of our planet pollution etc 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 uh 50 or 60 children one afternoon in zimbabwe it's a it was a well-educated group of white and black children uh who and lunchtime in the playground saw a 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 they've got you know there's actually a movie coming out uh on this uh episode and 30 years later now the people who were there the children who've now grown up say it it happened to us now did it happen was it some sort of hallucination or was it a an imposed hallucination by something was it material i i don't know but these kids were seven to ten years old you see them on video seven to 10 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 the it's these unconnected stories of individuals with the same 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 uh 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 endpoints on this interaction between the the dna and its manifestations in terms of the the the human mind and the how it interacts with the environment so get some kind of all right what is this dna what is this environment i have to get in somehow right to like interact with it to get to perturb the system to where these little ants human like ants get like excited and figure and see stuff out yeah yes and then and then somehow steer them uh first of all for investigative purposes understand like oftentimes to understand a system you have to perturb it exactly it's like poke at it you get they get excited or not and then the the the other ways you want to if you worry about them you can steer in one direction or another and this kind of idea of that we're not taking care of our world um that's interesting i mean that's comforting that's hopeful because that means the greater intelligence which is what i would hope would want to take care of us look 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 you know 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 shown 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 right there are stories going back uh you know into the 1800s of people who saw things in their farming in their farm fields in the u.s it's it's in it's in local newspapers from the 1800s it's fascinating but if you can go even further back you know so to your point of how are 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 in 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 you're 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 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 uh looked at the brains of um or information coming from the brain of some of the people that have had ufo encounters what's common about the brain of people who encounter ufos so the 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 this you know that part of the story ends in terms of the injury it's likely almost all havana syndrome that's somebody else's problem now that's not my problem um but when we were looking at the brains of these individuals we noticed something right in the center of the basal 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 and 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 show that actually that's living tissue um that's actually the head of the caudate in the potamin um and at the time and i remember even asking a good friend of mine uh at stanford who is a psychiatrist what does the basal ganglia do he said oh the basal ganglia is just about uh movement and nerve and motor control i said well that's odd because uh you know these other papers that we were reading at the time started to suggest that it was involved with uh 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 know you you don't want to move something in and hit the table or if you're walking across a 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 memory knowledge of where and what you want and desire to walk near or by like i use the example of you're 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 basal ganglia and it's actually now called the brain within the brain it's a 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 uh 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 of 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 kit green would have called or has called higher functioning individuals people who are uh i mean he he called them savants i i don't have the means to uh we haven't done the testing but it turns out my family has it right we we found it in and 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 founded about we think one in 200 1 or 300 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 if intuition is the ability to see something that other people don't and 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 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 is normally found in my environment yeah you know i have a little bit of that i i seem to uh see the magic in a lot of moments like have a deep it's obviously not obviously but it seems to be chemical in nature that i just i'm excited about life i i love life i love like stupid things it feels like i'm high a lot unlike mushrooms or something like that where you'd really appreciate that so you're able i'm able to detect something about the environment that uh 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 first a lot of stupid reasons and that's in there somewhere i mean it's kind of interesting because um 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 are probably more receptive to anomalous information they see the they see the magic the possibility in the novel thing right as opposed to kind of uh 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 like huh like there's this pattern happening over and over and over and then something weird just happened and then you get excited by that weirdness and start to pull the string and discover what is at the core of that weirdness and 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 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 uh in the way of my desires or if it is in 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 uh is the most kind of um memorable powerful ufo encounter report you've ever heard just to you pers on a personal level like this 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 topped car and the little girls see a craft right over their car this is 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 uh they look at the picture there's no craft but there's a little object about 30 feet above their car or so probably about 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 we're seeing there's 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 okay they had a cell phone camera and this was like a five years ago report provided by the way where's like a central place to provide a report is this oh there's a mufon 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 uh well 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 enunciation 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 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 or as we humans look at ants how does this perception system operate so not only how does this thing's 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 uh you know that's a really important question 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 into some kind of language but there could be just uh so much more um richness in how you can communicate and so from an alien perspective where somebody has much greater technological capabilities you have to figure out how do i use the skills i have to stimulate uh 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 uh people have been trying to use insects for you know and to turn them into biological robots but if you wanted to you would have to interact with their sense of smell right their 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 tell a factor 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 that humans 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 uh not anomalous or not too doesn't cross 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 uh 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 grays as interesting because it 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 they're different enough but they they all it's also like they're they're what you could imagine us becoming in some distant future so is that a purposeful representation i i don't know i mean i don't believe in the grays 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's 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 um are they fascinating to you absolutely no i know i know a lot of these people right so i i know lou elizanto chris mellon the whole crowd i've been i i saw the videos about three weeks or so before they went public i was um at a bar with lou overlooking the pentagon um in crystal city and they showed them to me and my hair stood on end and he said they said this is he said this is coming out soon and i 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 uh 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 uh some of the pilots uh you know they have no monetary gain of anything they've got negative gain uh from coming out but then you also have all of those simultaneous uh ship analysis from the uss princeton and the radar analysis etc so um you know at the end of the day it's just data it's not a conclusion um i'm i'd be perfectly happy honestly perfectly happy if somebody showed that it was all a hoax i go back to my day job right that could be a hoax but other things might not be i mean right 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 uh and anomalous events are such that there's going to be they're going to be rare in terms of how much data they represent but we have to consider the full range of data to discover the things that actually represent something that's um if we pull at it we'll 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 momentum-less 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 my mind to thinking about this matter yeah that's why it's actually funny that uh elon musk doesn't think too much about this these kinds of propulsion systems that could defy the laws of physics as we currently understand them to me it's a powerful way to think what is possible it's uh it's inspiring even if somebody doesn't represent uh uh extraterrestrial vehicles i think the the observation itself it's like uh something you mentioned which is uh you know hypothesizing imagining these things considering the possibility of these things i think opens up your mind in a way that uh ultimately can create the technology first you have to believe the technologies possible before you can create it right 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 at 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 retroviruses came from a group meeting in david baltimore's lab i was a postdoc with him and one of the other postdocs wasn't able to you make retroviruses in a way that he wanted to and i realized i had a cell line that would allow us to make retroviruses 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 retroviruses 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 it's 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 manage 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 this study understand their own past right right what what are some of the motivations do you think and again from from our perspective us as humans what motivations would we have when we approach other civilizations we may 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 uh 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 your the neighbor that's growing up next to you is not you know unruly um you know but i mean maybe it's sort of a moral imperative like what we have with you know creating uh 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 a anthropomorphic viewpoint what an alien might think and as i've 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 uh and even if we don't have faster than light travel and even if we're only using ram scoops or light sails to get where we want to go uh and it takes us 10 000 years to get somewhere or to spread out um we might encounter such things and are we just going to stomp 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 i this is one of the nice things about talking about ufos is it expands the overton window it expands our understanding of what possibly could be life it gets us to think it gets the scientific community to think when we go to mars go and we go to these different moons that possibly have life you know we're not looking at uh legged organisms we're looking at some kind of complexity that uh arises in resistance to the natural world and um there's a lot of instruments like that resistance to the natural world yeah so 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 the technology develops they take form more and more in as information as something that can influence the space of of ideas of the processing of data itself so i just uh this idea of embodiment that we humans so admire physically visible perceivable embodiment may be a very uh 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 uh circuitry that is uh basically closer and closer to the physics of how the universe operates right right down at the level of i mean quantum computers are basically write down about quantum information storage so fast forward ten thousand 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 a 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 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 anarchy of nations that we have on earth so there's there's always there's always going to be this um there's a hierarchy this hierarchy that's formed of greater and greater intelligences right and they're all probably also wondering wait 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 and that's probably a question that bothers them too um what about the communication task itself how hard do you think it is for aliens to communicate with humans so is this something you um 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 enabled enough it's relatively straightforward um 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 on instagram so [Laughter] 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 muddy 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 arm's 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 lazy and you know if 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 the amount of wisdom they carry yeah you know and so it's it's very easy as well for religions to i don't want i don't want to get into a whole religious conversation but you could very easy for rel 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 framework of cultural understanding um 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 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 uh claimed that a skeleton discovered in atacama region of chile might be an alien you reached out to him and uh took on the task of proving or disproving that with the rigor of science the result is a paper titled whole genome sequencing of atacama skeleton shows novel mutations linked with dysplasia 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 a team of uh two other stanford scientists and uh roche sequencing group roche diagnostics and probably a total team of about 11 or so people um and as as is standard in these kinds of things the professors actually don't do the work the students do the work and figured out the answer uh and then we help them put together the story uh and the story was simply that uh it was human a hundred percent i went into it thinking it was originally a monkey of some sort um i got kind of excited a few months into the process thinking well what happens if it is an alien right can you describe some of the characteristics of the skeleton that makes it unique and interesting primarily it had dysmorphias of the of the brain um and so the first thing i did actually when i got pictures of it i took it to a local expert at stanford uh and uh he was um on the paper and uh 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 it's outside of your field of interest and he said well i haven't seen this particular collection of mutations before uh or this uh this physiology before but here's what i think it might be um 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 uh genetic explanations of why things might look the way they did and if you again read the paper it's very carefully caveated to say that these mutations might result in this but what we did find was an unexpectedly large number of mutations associated with bone growth in this individual and it was just a bad roll of the dice right you roll the dice enough times with enough people born every year and someone will roll the wrong dice all at once so the sad part about it was individuals in the ufo community who wanted to think that there was some sort of conspiracy around it right that somebody had somehow convinced all of my students uh to lie right i mean come on you know i i would lose my i would lose my job first of all uh and they would all be uh you know in trouble forever yeah but also it's just projecting malevolence onto people that doesn't i don't think exist in normal populous 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 uh people with integrity and just a deep curiosity for the discovery of cool little things and there's no um there's no malevolence broadly speaking in the scientific community 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 um 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 do you make of that you know walking 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 atacama case that i was debunking it well debunking is a loaded term sort of assumes that you are going in purposefully to prove something is wrong i wasn't i was just going in to collect the data and um 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 end of story um the people who owned 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 is because somebody was hyping it and not because i wanted to disprove 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 dross off the table and then somewhere in the data will be something worth real inquiry and that if you inquire deeply enough will be extravagant yes exactly and that's what actually excites scientists is to i mean you want with the rigor of science to actually reveal the extravagant and so look at crispr as probably the most perfect example of that these weird sequences in bacterial genomes all arrayed one after the other with these strange sequences around them but when you looked at the sequences they looked like viruses and so how did they get there and lo and behold after you know a lot of effort and work well a couple of nobel prizes went out the door but these strange things ended up having extraordinarily extravagant possibilities you've also looked at ufo materials you are in possession of ufo materials yourself claimed ufo materials alleged geophone materials that's right some what's another term weird materials that don't seem to uh uh have a story they have a 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 uh take decades if not centuries because you have to keep pulling it at the string and discover where they could possibly come from but anyway you you're in possession of some materials of this kind can you um describe some of them and 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 um there are almost always things that people have claimed have either been dropped off as like some sort of a leftover material molten metals or um they are from an object that was released from this so that kind of exploded they're 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 of and so there's pretty standard approaches to doing that most of them involve a technology called mass spectrometry uh 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're interested in knowing whether they're uh you know the the amounts of it the the and in the case of elements how many different isotopes are there and 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 are 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 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 why and what is the engineered means there's all kinds of it could be a byproduct it could be um 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 uh a supernova blew up sometime several tens you know several billion years ago uh that became a cloud those atoms coalesced gravitationally to form another sun and a ring that became a rocky planet uh 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 diff but but by fragments of a percent not whole tens of percent difference so what do humans use isotopes for mostly to blow stuff up i mean the vast majority of the isotopes that have been made in in the per pound or ton are things like certain ratios of plutonium and uranium to blow stuff up we don't make or engineer isotopes which it's it's today is relatively easy to do but it's still expensive for any other reason apart from let's say uh as uh anti-cancer we use stable isotopes in money these days as a counterfeiting tool you basically embed certain ratios of isotopes in to make it harder for counterfeiters to accomplish um 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 this is the ubertuba 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 a fisherman saw an object that uh released something or it it exploded and it was this relative you know i've got some big chunks of it uh 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 uh basically burning up um and so the question is and so then we had we had two pieces that came from um two different chains of custody both claimed to be from the same object at least uh 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 0.0001 mass units uh which is important for let's say more arcane reasons but um 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 uh magnesium isotope ratios magnesium 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 uh i mean it was sort of like you had an internal control of what was normal then you had this other one which was which was wrong and so you're left with uh 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 it would cost a lot i mean at the time that this was found i guess the 1970s or so um might have been earlier i forget uh the amount that i had would have cost several tens of thousands of dollars to make um and 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 that's a very subtle subtle it's a long-term plan um so so i i just don't know i just don't know what to make of it except it's interesting but it's but so a 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 not just material not just material a piece of metal is is interesting uh 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 were actually pieces of aircraft that were invented back in the 1940s yeah and so take them off the table see but i think um 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 ants are tweeting about like what they care about in order to like inject into their culture because uh you know that's why i think it would be the technology that you could present is in the space of ideas is in uh it's tried to influence individual humans and with the encounters right and try to with this kind of thing that you mentioned about uh us not taking messages about us not taking care of the world it's difficult i mean i to for them to understand you have to come up with trinkets that impress us i mean 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 right i mean this is kind of what you know jacques valet thinks about is the role of the control system he calls it the control system well let me uh ask about jacques who is he um you know him who's jacques valet what have you learned from him about life about about ufos about technology about our role in the universe well i met jacques actually soon after the whole atacama thing happened um i was visited by those people associated with the government and whatever around the um the havanas what ended up mostly being havana syndrome patients but also jacques at the same time and they were actually working behind the scenes with each other that oh here's this stanford professor who is willing to talk about this stuff and investigate things um maybe we should go talk to him and he he reached out through a colleague and you know i had lunch actually um at the rosewood inn um up on uh near sandhill so jacques is one of the first openly active scientists uh and he's really a scientist in this area going back to the 1960s um and uh you know he's put forward a number of ideas speculations about what it might be that people are 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 um he said the the things that people claim they see are absurd right a a ship doesn't land in a farmer's 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 um he 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 rightly so and 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 a 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 se they're just a representation of something that is meant to influence so that was probably the most interesting thing i mean the man is brilliant uh he's also it can be and i'm sorry jacques he 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 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's 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 than we imagine wow that's powerful being able to always step back because we get we humans get excited yeah we start to jump to conclusions from the data but always step back powerful being able to always step back because we get we humans get excited yeah we 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 are you going to give us the answer well you know science is not immediate you're going to have to be patient and even some of my science colleagues have said well where's the data my answer to 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 machine learning and so on and uh it's been really disheartening to see the 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 unidentified aerial phenomena that was released by the office of the director of national intelligence in june 2021 so this is what's like um okay we're going to step back and we're going to like what where do we stand and where do we hope the future is what do you make of that report is it hopeful is it i see it as very helpful very hopeful i think the adults are finally stepping up in and being in charge right in a good sense of adult what's that in the good sense and the good sense of adult um because childlike curiosity is pretty powerful thing that's true yeah i 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 uh you know have you know they basically the empiric evidence is they're 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 etc you know even tucker carlson has talked about it many times on his news program um 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 sea change in the internal discussions 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 lou elizondo and chris and others to their great credit found the right angle to talk about this it 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 avi loeb 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 on our own solar system i'm just going to collect it myself and 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 at in terms of the kind of things that would indicate to you a strong signal that something weird happened here and this is why you know governments can be good at funding large-scale efforts yes i mean you know nasa and and so on working with spacex uh with blue origin uh to you know fund uh capitalistic sort of fun companies fun company efforts to do huge moonshot projects and in the same way do huge moonshot data collection efforts in terms of ufos i mean we're not it needs to be like 10x like one or two orders of magnitude more funding exactly to do this kind of thing and i i understand on the flip side of that if you make it about what are the russians whether the chinese doing you know make it a question of geopolitics it gets touchy because now you you're kind of taken away from the realm of science and picking it military making it 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 i wish we were it was different but um it's the world we live in um you know but related to that uap task force announcement that you just said you know the bill was passed in the department of defense and now it formally establishes an office to collate that information and also to be transparent about it money is now set aside right what do you think of just in case people don't know the dod establishing new department to study uh ufos called airborne naming come on but yes airborne object identification and management synchronization group hey do you know how to pronounce that no i do not no aoi msg it's stupid and it's renamed but ay msg ao all right it's directed by the under secretary of defense for intelligence and security what do you make of this office do 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 uh but i do know though that money has been set aside that will be used to uh make things more public right to start to get uh others involved and um you know there's i'm involved with an effort to get other academics involved so 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 it nothing is set in stone yet so you know i and i'm not hiding anything because i just don't know anything right but i do um i do think that there will be uh public efforts now they're going there there are being set up other private efforts to bring monies involved and to use that to leverage uh and get access to some of the internal resources as well so um what you're seeing is uh kind of an ecosystem building up uh in a positive sense uh 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 i mean the work that i've done i did out of my own pocket and probably about 50 60 70 000 of money went into the paper we published yeah out of my own pocket um 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 uh it's probably in the in the you know five to ten 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 in 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 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 kind you'll concoct a 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 an effing company no no no no i mean when i met capitalist i didn't mean in the uh 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 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 uh many biologists uh 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 um 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 they give you a fair amount of latitude uh 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 um 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 it is they're 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've not seen anything personally but if i believe the people who i don't think can lie yes this is 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 uh 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 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 uh is a positive thing for us um 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 what we should give government officials or whatever amnesty i think that's probably the right the right answer we don't this isn't 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 were you wanted to do it because you wanted to monetize it yourself uh 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 that says there's a reason why you don't want to let anybody know this maybe you don't want everybody have having access to unlimited uh 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 it public maybe some of the other governments you have tensions with will figure it out first right i mean it's kind of an arms race going on i think in all forms and it's it makes me truly sad because uh it's obvious that um 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 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 at stake but let's start at the lighter case of just releasing some of the awesome insides of the how how the sausage is made the technology and being transparent about it because it excites people it uh like you said it it connects people and it inspires them it's good for the brand it's good for everybody i i honestly think this kind of idea that people will steal the information and we use it against you is is an idea that's not true in his idea of the 20th century like you said some of the benefits of the social media uh our our social world is that transparency is beneficial and i hope governments will learn that less and of course they're the usually the last to learn such lessons right what do you make of bob lazar's story in terms of possession of aircraft do you believe him 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 uh has done some you know beautiful uh documentaries um i just don't i i don't know how to interpret it and um you know and again there's some of the people who i fraternize with think it's all rubbish uh yeah but 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 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 i'm not going to go into the whole i'm not a historian yeah that's true but there's a human side to it i want sometimes i think with these because again anomalous rare events some of the data is inextricably connected to humans the observations right um 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 uh direct observations like if you talk about about pilots so it's an interesting question to me whether brah bazaar is 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 so um but there's so many other people who are let's say experts in that story um their gut you know you accumulate us a set of sort of uh circumstantial evidence where your gut will say that somebody is uh not telling the truth yeah you mentioned uh avi loeb i forgot to ask you about a moa you know because you've analyzed specimens from here on earth what do you make of that one and what do you make broadly 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 are can be most of the fascinating things can be discovered here on earth or on other nearby planets just going to omomoa uh you know i think avi's 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 oh it's 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 what is his main conclusion does he say it could be of uh alien extraterrestrial origin is that well that's one of the things i mean he you know he's explained how it could be a light sail um and a light sail is certainly within near human capabilities to make such a thing i think yuri milner is 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 uh towards alpha centauri right so it's something that humans could make i think avi's proposal is perfectly within the realm of possibility i mean sadly the thing is you know now nearly out of our solar system yes 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 at 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 i um the galileo project asked me over the weekend to join and i did so um you know i'm not a specialist in any of the stuff that they're doing uh 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 galileo project better talk to avi but my understanding and just actually looking at the uh at the sort of the bylaws this morning literally just got them um is uh number one collect the data on uap and number two collect data on uh local potentially local technological artifacts i need to look into this this is fascinating and the is heading the galileo project yeah have you spoken to him i've on this podcast yes that was be i believe is before he was headed it was a new creation yeah the galileo project was i think it's about six or seven months old now okay you know amazing and he's getting a group of scientists together oh yeah about 100 oh it's it's that's actually i am i was looking at some of their stuff over the weekend i'm 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 uh large nih projects um which involve a lot of people in coordination and uh they're putting it together so you're extremely well published in a lot of um the fields we began this conversation with so you're legit scientist but yet you're keeping an open mind to a lot of ideas that um 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 haven't approached something don't let others shame you into not doing it as i've 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 for 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 questions 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 uh person tells you this is going to hurt your career i 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 um think twice about taking their advice yeah i mean i think that's the primary thing um 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 is it that's so interesting it's the it's the spot off the graph that you want to understand yeah that's that's it you wanna when something is way off the graph that's the interesting thing because that's usually where discovery is and the 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 ended up being something interesting that made their careers i i could you know count on a few hands yeah get excited by the extraordinary that's outside of the thing that you uh that you've done in the past right um just on a personal psychological level is is there you know i'm sure at stanford i'm sure in you exploring some of these ideas there's pressure how do you um how do you not give in to the pressure how do you not give in to the people that say uh like uh that push you away from these topics that um what you said 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 uh 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 reversing them 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 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 uh 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'm 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 come to me afterwards after dinner and say hey you know i 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 in 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 our 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 uh 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 that 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 uh this discovery our world might uh 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 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 uh gary uh both to respect your time and also because at 12 i turned into a princess uh let me just say and uh 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 with 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 you