In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, we discuss the story of a man who claims to have seen UFOs in a U.S. Government Hangar, and whether or not he's telling the truth or if it's just another urban legend. We also talk about the possibility that it's not a UFO at all, and that it could be something else entirely. We also discuss the theory that the aliens in the story may not be aliens at all... they could be people from another galaxy... or maybe it's something even more advanced than we think... Conspiracy theories is a podcast about the things we think we know about the world and the people who know the most about them. This episode is hosted by John Rocha and Matt Knost, and this week's guest is none other than John's good friend and former co-worker, David Goggans. Thanks to John for coming on the show, and for being kind enough to join us on our journey to find out the truth behind the legend of Bob Lazar's supposed encounter with the UFO. If you like conspiracy theories, this episode is for you. If you don't like them, you'll love this episode. It's a must-listen! - John and Matt are both big fans of conspiracy theories and all things related to them, so you won't want to miss this one! Enjoy! - Tom and Matt Enjoy, and spread the word to your friends about it! Cheers, John & Matt! Mike & Matt - Conspiracy The Facts: Conspiracy the Facts about UFOs and the UFO Mythology. See you next week! Check us out on Anchor.co.nz/ and tell us what you think about it on your thoughts and theories about it in the comments section! and let us know what you thought of it on Reddit or on your feed! or do you think it's cool, and we'd like to hear it on the pod? or your thoughts on it's a good one? or share it on it on Insta! & what do you'd like it's weird or not weird or weird? and what you would like to say about it? - we'd love to hear about it?? Thank you for your thoughts about it or not? :) - Tom's thoughts on the truth, anyway, we'll be checking it out! -- Tom's Thoughts:
00:01:27.000I mean, you know, I don't know why I'm just not believing it, but I believe him.
00:01:31.000But I don't know if there is an aircraft from another galaxy in a hangar in the United States somewhere.
00:01:38.000See, it's not necessarily from another galaxy.
00:01:44.000We're assuming that we have an accurate understanding of what's currently possible with technology.
00:01:55.000I don't necessarily know if that's correct, and it is possible that they were experimenting with some really wild shit So you think it could be human-made?
00:02:07.000If it's real at all, it's a physical thing, right?
00:02:12.000If it's real and it isn't a hangar, it's a physical thing.
00:02:15.000Let's assume that they would tell this guy who has a questionable education background, who obviously is brilliant, and obviously has a deep understanding of propulsion systems.
00:02:30.000He strapped a rocket engine to the back of his Honda.
00:02:36.000Clearly a super, super intelligent guy, but doesn't have the best credentials in terms of his education background, his accomplishments, published papers.
00:02:54.000Well, he thinks they picked him because they were just banging their heads off the wall trying to figure out how to back-engineer these things or what these things were.
00:03:03.000And they said, let's think outside the box and let's get this genius guy who worked at Los Alamos Labs.
00:03:30.000Some gravity system that supposedly operates on this element, element 115. The thing about his story that's fascinating to me is that it's never changed.
00:04:43.000I don't, you know, it's possible that that's ours.
00:04:46.000It's possible that there's a thing like that that...
00:04:49.000But doesn't he go into a lot of detail about, maybe I read it somewhere else, but the height of the occupants of it, right?
00:04:55.000They're all sort of like four foot or less.
00:04:59.000So, I mean, the level of sort of US military deception to start building miniaturized seats and stuff and like lower ceilings, it's like, how far does the conspiracy go?
00:05:08.000But whatever it is, I kind of hope it's real.
00:05:14.000But what I'm saying is, if you had, look, the possibility of it being from another galaxy is so crazy that the idea of them pretending it's from another galaxy is not that crazy.
00:05:28.000Like if they say, oh, little tiny green guys and they live inside this little ship and it's real easy for them to fly around...
00:05:34.000Like, that's easier than it actually being from another galaxy and actually being designed for these little tiny creatures that live in this other galaxy.
00:05:43.000It would be cool to push that further where they also build some kind of, like, get into real sort of gene therapy or something and make humanoid aliens to continue that on.
00:06:24.000They're hugely violent, covered with hair.
00:06:27.000And as human beings get We're kind of like sitting at desks all day and we don't really need muscles.
00:06:45.000We have all these different methods of communication and typing.
00:06:51.000We're moving around in cars that drive themselves.
00:06:54.000And if Elon Musk has his way and they get that Neuralick thing and they start drilling holes in your brain, we're not going to need words to talk.
00:08:05.000I always felt like the aliens that you see in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, that iconic shape, it's almost like we have an understanding of where we're going.
00:08:13.000Some innate, sort of shedding hair, everything becomes cerebral.
00:08:17.000There would be a Neuralink heavy brain-computer interface system where everything would allow you to go somewhere else.
00:08:27.000One of the things that Peter Watts, I'm working with him on a sci-fi idea at the moment, and one of the things that he It's more like dial-up rather than high broadband.
00:08:56.000So, if you were to increase the volume of data of information being sent between the two brains, what would happen at a certain point is the two versions of self would dissolve into one united self.
00:09:12.000And you would have one superorganism that would be the consciousness of both.
00:09:17.000And if you were to somehow remove that, if you were to limit the bandwidth again, those two souls would never return.
00:09:23.000Because the way the neural system has been aligned at the point that you poured more, you allowed the consciousness to expand, it never reverts back.
00:09:31.000So you can imagine a world where, like, Neuralink talks about, you know, if you fuse hundreds of brains together in some kind of hive mind and everyone can think together, What may happen is you may actually get a situation where you create a superintelligence that thinks of itself as I,
00:10:01.000If Neuralink really can accomplish something like that, that could legitimately...
00:10:07.000Well, I think the sort of science fiction version of thinking about the topic is that you create a hive mind of where you can imagine your brain interfacing with hundreds of other humans and you can share ideas quicker than you can speak.
00:10:51.000So if the entire human race connects to this thing, there's no more human race.
00:10:58.000There's no more individual—you could—I mean, hypothetically, it could be some sort of, like, newly linked, you know, superorganism that would just never return to individual humans.
00:11:13.000Maybe we wouldn't see images coming out of Afghanistan like we're seeing at the moment if we had one of those.
00:11:17.000It would solve everything, but you also wouldn't be surprised by individual creativity.
00:11:22.000Maybe it would just turn the light switch off.
00:11:24.000As soon as it achieved that, it just clicks it off.
00:11:27.000Maybe it's antinatalist and it shouldn't think we should be here at all.
00:11:30.000Well, yeah, like at a certain point in time, what do we lose that we love about being human?
00:11:38.000And like how much of the chaos and the negative aspects of human beings and human nature is necessary for art and creativity and all the things like your movies?
00:11:51.000Like no one's gonna make a cool movie if we can all read each other's minds.
00:11:54.000Well, I think art—I think everything humans do is as a result of taking a primordial brain that is—because, I mean, we're all slaves to just biological programming.
00:13:00.000If you think about what we need, the biological needs to reproduce are responsible for So much negativity, but also so much positivity, so much chaos, so much entropy, so much momentum.
00:13:15.000Yeah, and they may be, like maybe one day we go, you know, we've realized that all this war and chaos and stealing and murder, what this is about is biological needs that we can bypass with technology, and we could reproduce through some sort of genetic engineering instead of...
00:13:49.000Well, it depends how you define forward.
00:13:51.000I mean, that's what's so fascinating about any discussion, like the negativity around people building rockets, like Elon and Bezos going up into space, and being along the lines of Elysium in some ways.
00:14:04.000It's like, so are we not supposed to move forward at all?
00:14:08.000So if we can't agree on what the end goal is that we're striving for, Then there's going to be many disputes about the sort of road between here and there.
00:14:19.000So I'm all for exploration and for us trying to better ourselves.
00:14:24.000And I think part of that is about leaving the planet.
00:14:27.000I'd rather put money into that than have it squandered in what clearly we seem to squander it on.
00:14:32.000Well, not only that, in the case of Bezos and Elon Musk, now you're dealing with private companies that are involved in this, which is really fascinating.
00:14:41.000Because instead of it all being like NASA and the argument was like, why is NASA spending all this money on this when we have people starving here on Earth?
00:14:50.000It is kind of, though, isn't it sort of subsidized?
00:14:53.000Like, doesn't SpaceX have a contract with NASA? Yeah, no, I mean, it's definitely subsidized, but it's less than a NASA budget of hundreds of billions of dollars.
00:15:02.000And it's a very different scenario, where, you know, you have these super genius billionaire characters who are essentially living out a sci-fi movie, right?
00:15:23.000You know, I am so obsessed with this concept of life from somewhere else that...
00:15:29.000Like, as I said before, with the Bob Lazar story, it's really hard because I want it to be real.
00:15:35.000The thing that gets me more than anything is not just Bob Lazar, but people like Commander David Fravor that had that encounter with the Tic Tac.
00:16:44.000So it was a fusion—go back to that, please, where you just were.
00:16:50.000So here it says, it's a fusion device, and this thing is some sort of a, where were you at before?
00:16:59.000This is exactly where I was, so I clicked on this to try to get better.
00:17:01.000It was just the beginning of the article.
00:17:04.000It's a fusion reactor for U.S. energy independence.
00:17:08.000The physicist appears to have bona fide credentials, including a Ph.D. from Case Western, and published some of his work While much of it is presumably classified.
00:17:19.000And so the idea is that there's some sort of novel propulsion system.
00:17:25.000And a lot of people were going over this stuff going, well, what the fuck is this?
00:17:33.000And what does this propulsion system consist of?
00:17:35.000And what I get from people that are talking about it is that it's at least similar to what these people are describing in terms of this device.
00:17:46.000There's that thing right there, actually, that little object right there that supposedly Bob Bazar worked on.
00:17:54.000Gravitational field created by this element 115 which we talked about was only theoretical up until the early 2000s when they actually used a particle collider and managed to prove its existence.
00:18:09.000Bob Lazar claims they had a stable version of this element 115 and that was the propulsion I'm not exactly sure how it worked.
00:18:21.000They used a piece of this element 115 and through some method...
00:18:29.000And then he also said someone cut into it and caused some kind of nuclear explosion in the desert.
00:18:36.000I mean, yeah, the thing I think that the whole discussion comes back to is I wish that it was built by some other super intelligent species on some other planet just because that would be cool.
00:18:54.000The discussion about, you know, where do we think we're going and what do we think the outcome is from sort of being human and going through an evolutionary process?
00:19:02.000Because that's the other thing with the common conception is that, well, we're here, like we're human.
00:19:07.000It's like, no, we're maybe one-fifth or one-millionth or one-hundred-millionth of the journey of evolution of what we will become.
00:19:15.000We're somewhere along the timeline that you've hit pause and we look kind of like this.
00:19:19.000It's why I have lower back plane from playing squash.
00:19:26.000But it's because I used to be quadrupedal and then I became bipedal and now I have structural issues.
00:19:33.000So where are we going is a question that I think if humans could come to some kind of – if it was discussed more, like what are we actually aiming for?
00:20:13.000So those kind of discussions are really interesting and they're at the backbone of things to do with either religion or finding UFOs that are in Area S4 in Nevada, in my mind.
00:20:26.000Well, it seems like human beings have this innate desire to constantly improve upon everything they've created.
00:20:34.000And the way I've talked about it, it's almost like bees building a beehive.
00:20:53.000I think we have some weird biological coding to constantly and consistently improve upon everything that we've created and to innovate and to constantly come up with new ideas.
00:21:03.000And when a new, completely transcendent idea like the internet, for example, comes along, you see how it has this massive shift in global culture, in every single aspect of human life.
00:21:15.000Yeah, it changes the trajectory of the culture.
00:21:17.000And these things can happen in these big explosions, like an internet, you know, like a combustion engine, like the printing press, like so many different things that happen, and it causes this huge wave of innovation to be spread off from that.
00:21:31.000And I've said multiple times that what I think we're doing is we are in some ways like an electronic caterpillar that's making a cocoon, and we're going to give birth to this butterfly.
00:21:45.000And this butterfly is probably going to be a form of artificial life.
00:21:52.000Like some kind of, in a sense, that we're a stepping stone biologically to something else.
00:21:58.000It's like we're the first sentient, self-aware species that's able to use our hands to build tools to go further down the line and carry the ball a certain amount of distance.
00:22:08.000Until through what we do, we give birth to something that, you know, is just far outstrips us and goes off to do other things.
00:22:15.000And that's probably how it's going to play out.
00:22:17.000I mean, I think as soon as you start introducing AI and maybe you have hybrid human AIs, but they will start communicating in ways that we can't.
00:22:32.000I mean, it's so funny when it becomes a religious discussion where it's like people are totally atheist, which I don't understand that approach.
00:22:46.000So it's like, I'm not that version of science fiction with the space god, but I am the version where all matter and everything that I know blew out of like one 100 trillionth of, you know, of a grain of rice and came into existence.
00:22:58.000And it's like, sure, that could have happened, but it also means that there is some unbelievably complicated shit going on that maybe you should be a little bit more open-minded about some of the other things that are out there, right?
00:23:10.000Right, that's the ultimate science fiction.
00:23:16.000The craziest thing that you could come up with would be to sit at a typewriter like Asimov and write, first there was nothing, and then everything exploded out of a grain of rice into being...
00:23:28.000It's like, oh, okay, yeah, that sounds like, let me just knock down any discussions about God, but that sticks.
00:23:34.000What's even really crazy is it's universally agreed upon, right?
00:23:39.000Like, all these cosmologists go, yep, that's it.
00:23:42.000Like, it's the wildest theory ever, and that's the one they all agree happened.
00:24:54.000I also think that everything that is going to happen has already happened.
00:25:02.000And there's a paradox where free will also exists.
00:25:06.000I think I have the ability to go around and act with free will.
00:25:09.000I don't think that things are completely deterministic.
00:25:13.000But I think the free will is informed by the biological programming we were talking about before.
00:25:18.000But I'm still choosing within a given set of what I'm allowed to choose from.
00:25:23.000But the paradox is also that I think that I'm probably on my deathbed If you collapse time down and look at it as like a linear thing, if you just observe it, it's like Neil's death is here, his birth is here, these are these other events.
00:25:39.000Theoretically, with free will, as you move through that three-dimensional map, these other events should change, right?
00:25:44.000Each day with choices you make, all of these other outcomes should move.
00:26:31.000And see you make these choices, and then they would see you begin and make these choices again.
00:26:36.000And he kind of used it as a thought experiment where he said that if I went to most people out in the world and I said to them that your life is going to repeat exactly like this forever, he said it was a burden that would be too heavy for most people to be able to deal with.
00:26:54.000That they don't want to live their life over the way that they've lived it enough that it would be literally the worst burden that they could be given.
00:27:02.000I've pondered this before and I've heard this brought up before.
00:27:05.000In fact, Elio Gracie is a famous Brazilian jiu-jitsu guy.
00:27:11.000He's the patriarch of the greatest martial arts clan ever.
00:28:16.000Because from a three-dimensional standpoint in that linear timeline, when you die, that feels like the end of the play.
00:28:24.000From a fourth-dimensional different observational standpoint, you can watch it repeating.
00:28:29.000But his point was with free will inside of that linear timeline, you should live your life in a way that you would want it to go on forever.
00:28:40.000But what I was getting at was the feeling that, to me, it feels like things are set in place.
00:28:45.000And because this comes from the solipsistic thing that we were talking about, where I think that it's all in the person, it's in the observer's eyes.
00:28:56.000And I also think time is an illusion as well.
00:28:58.000So by the time you get to the end of your life and you're lying on your deathbed, all of these events could have been a dream.
00:29:51.000Because the creative process of writing and then I'm sure...
00:29:56.000I've never edited a film, but I would imagine editing and filming it and choosing the angles is...
00:30:02.000You're visualizing this creation, and you're putting it together, and then ultimately you get a final product, and that's what people go to see.
00:30:09.000It's similar to people's lives, you could say, right?
00:30:12.000The choices that you're making, because there's infinite possible outcomes, and you're collapsing that down.
00:30:18.000You're collapsing the wave function into one outcome.
00:30:22.000And so that's what I think is happening.
00:30:26.000I think that we are given infinite numbers of options and we have the ability to act on those.
00:30:31.000We choose a path and in the action of choosing, we collapse all possibility to one outcome and the tree is crushed down.
00:30:38.000One of the things that I've always thought of when it comes to UFOs, this is like a side pondering, is that The preposterous nature of them, the things like what Commander David Fravor saw, the things like what Bob Lazar saw,
00:30:54.000it's almost like the universe is trying to let you know that you don't know shit.
00:31:00.000Like that this weird little possibility that is not outside of the realm of what's Potentially available if you think about the idea that there's hundreds of billions of stars Just in this galaxy and there's hundreds of billions of galaxies in the known universe and right here on this planet where we walk There's two super billionaires that are currently shooting rockets into space.
00:31:29.000You know NASA has a rover right now on Mars That's roaming around taking photos sending them back to us We know that all that's possible.
00:31:38.000Why wouldn't it be possible for something from some other place to come and visit us?
00:31:45.000But yet the fact that it does, it seems so crazy.
00:31:51.000In many ways, it makes me really ponder simulation theory.
00:31:55.000Because it seems so weird that this thing can go from 60,000 plus feet above sea level to 50 feet in less than a second and then take off...
00:32:07.000Like it's behaving with different laws of physics.
00:32:11.000The Drake equation is that equation, right?
00:32:13.000The number of planets that could potentially house life.
00:32:19.000And then this is what I think is happening.
00:32:21.000What I think is happening is that the concept of the Great Filter where...
00:32:25.000If the Drake equation has X number of exoplanets that have liquid water and the ability to harbor life, and there's however many hundred million of them, and we see dark night skies with no aliens, then the idea of the Great Barrier being a filter for something happening to all of these things,
00:32:45.000like they reach a certain level of civilization and then they snuff themselves out somehow.
00:32:57.000I mean, it's also plausible that some of them, like maybe a couple make it through and we end up seeing some other life form, but it does seem rare.
00:33:06.000Well, the variability of intelligent life that we have here, like we know octopus or octopi are super intelligent, right?
00:33:32.000There could very well be some super intelligent thing that instead of manipulating its environment in the way we do, it figured out a way through evolution to join minds in some strange way.
00:33:48.000Yeah, it would be some sort of evolutionary mutation that is sort of anti, you know, it's counterintuitive and surprising in the way that it took form.
00:33:57.000Like, oh shit, all of these starfish linked together and they built a nuke.
00:34:27.000If you looked at us from above, if you were an outside life form that was completely objective, not human at all, and you came to this planet and you go, what is going on with this number one species that seems to be on every single continent like rats on a sinking ship?
00:35:04.000It's kind of like things have gotten away from it even though it's able to build a certain amount of highly advanced things.
00:35:11.000And I wonder if those things getting away from it, the pollution, the overfishing, the changing of the environment, the CO2 levels, almost motivates this acceptance of the symbiotic relationship with man and electronics,
00:35:26.000because that's the only way out of it.
00:35:52.000Well, when you make films like Elysium, you know, these dystopian films about potential futures, it's got to sort of spark these thoughts in your mind, like how many of these possibilities could we encounter in our lifetime?
00:36:08.000I mean, Elysium and District 9 are both kind of cut from the same cloth in the sense that I do think a lot of that had to do with growing up in South Africa and just being affected by...
00:36:18.000I'm very naturally interested in how society seemed to stratify and how wealth inequality...
00:36:26.000You know, again, this is biological programming, right?
00:36:28.000Like, I think that people hang on to resources that they have.
00:36:39.000You're just hoarding food in your cave to live through the winter and keep your family safe.
00:36:46.000But Elysium really, if District 9 was the sort of racial part of growing up in South Africa and just Being very aware of the environment that I was in.
00:36:55.000Then Elysium is the kind of wealth discrepancy part of it.
00:36:59.000You know, where South Africa and Brazil and India would be in first place when it comes to that.
00:37:45.000So we went through the border into Mexico as the sun was going down and we got there and we were on some street corner and we bought beers and then we were walking around in Tijuana with the beers and these federales saw us doing it.
00:38:01.000And we got arrested, like, kind of relatively violently, where we were, you know, it was a shakedown for money, obviously, but it was like we got cuffed and thrown in the back of a police car.
00:38:10.000And then they started driving out of Tijuana in the darkness.
00:38:15.000And the producer that I was with kept putting, like, $100 bills through the graded thing to the front seats.
00:38:22.000And then once there was enough money that had gone through, they just kind of opened the doors and let us out.
00:38:27.000And we had to walk back to where the car was.
00:38:34.000It felt like 40 or like an hour maybe, 40 minutes, somewhere in there.
00:38:38.000But the thing that was crazy about it was...
00:38:41.000Was I could see US Blackhawks flying the border with like lights on them and floodlights on the far on the US side.
00:38:52.000And we were walking through basically favelas with dogs barking and like they had dropped us in places that like tourists from the US would never go.
00:39:01.000So we were walking in basically what felt like a South African shantytown in Mexico with feral animals and just like this.
00:39:08.000But to see this country that, you know, was this sort of global hyperpower that everyone from Mexico was moving into, was trying to get into, was incredibly striking.
00:39:25.000I mean, it is crazy if you think about that level of poverty up against the U.S. border and then...
00:39:30.000And I think Elysium really was the sort of subconscious part of it was South Africa, but the conscious part was that.
00:39:37.000In that moment, I was like, I really want to find a way to turn that experience into visuals that represent these two worlds that live on one another's doorstep like this.
00:39:50.000So as you were walking by, you could see the planes that were flying over the U.S. side?
00:40:16.000And you get to imagine these people living in this environment, literally visually seeing this place where the world is completely different right there.
00:40:25.000And trying to figure out how to get over it.
00:40:26.000And where there's opportunity and a way out of poverty.
00:40:30.000And South Africa has something similar happening.
00:40:33.000It's just that the difference is it's all happening within one country, right?
00:40:37.000And so that leads to gated communities and, you know, the rich getting richer and sort of separating and the poor getting poorer.
00:40:43.000And, I mean, it's a phenomenon that's seen across the whole world.
00:40:47.000But in South Africa, it's right there because it's the way that the society, you know, is set up.
00:40:54.000And obviously in America, you'll see that same sort of wealth stratification begin to happen more and more.
00:41:00.000But at the moment, being on either side of the border, you can see it.
00:41:04.000The current situation in South Africa with the recent riots and chaos, what is your take on all that?
00:41:11.000I mean, it seems like it's Jacob Zuma as the ousted president moving to try to, you know, create calamity for the current president and its divisions within the ANC. So I think,
00:41:26.000I guess what I'm saying is I think it was political in the way that some of those riots potentially happened and not as simple as what it appears to be.
00:41:34.000And growing up in South Africa and creating these movies like District 9, do you feel like you have an obligation to sort of illuminate a perspective through these movies?
00:41:54.000Yeah, I mean, I'm always really weary when filmmakers say that they, you know, I think at the end of the day, you're just making films.
00:42:03.000And what I think I'm trying to do as an artist is reflect the world that I see back to the audience.
00:42:09.000Like, this is the world through Neil's eyes, right?
00:42:13.000That's the kind of creativity that I'm interested in.
00:42:15.000And that's why walking through that area in Mexico, looking at the U.S. border, the feeling was I wanted people to I'm not sure if someone from Beverly Hills knows what that feels like.
00:42:25.000And it's like it would be interesting to create a film that attempted to create what this feeling is like.
00:42:31.000And so I think a lot of what I'm trying to do as a filmmaker is just show the world through my eyes.
00:42:35.000But I would never be so presumptuous as to say that there's some level of importance to what I'm doing.
00:42:43.000I don't know if that's the right way for me to think about it.
00:42:47.000I didn't mean like a level of importance, but you almost feel like you have an obligation to express the way you see it.
00:42:55.000I mean, I feel an impulse to do it, you know.
00:42:58.000It was similar with District 9. The original idea with District 9 was, I mean, one part of it was growing up in South Africa in that period of time, but the other part was a huge influx of, you know, people from Mozambique and Zimbabwe and stuff were going into South Africa in the 2000s.
00:43:19.000And local South Africans were getting frustrated with how many were coming into the country and effectively taking jobs from them in their mind.
00:43:28.000And so District 9, the aliens, was a representation of the idea of illegal aliens.
00:43:36.000And I made a short film before I actually made the film where I was interviewing real South Africans about how they felt about Mozambicans or Nigerians or Malawians.
00:44:06.000There are quite a few sightings there.
00:44:10.000But a friend that I have who's the most obsessed with UFOs, a South African, who moved to Canada when he was relatively young, he thinks he saw a UFO right before moving to Canada.
00:44:22.000And every time I go out with him, he talks about it.
00:44:25.000He's totally convinced that something happened.
00:44:39.000They all sound like that, until you get a guy like Commander Framer, you know?
00:44:43.000Yeah, who's also backing it up with footage shot from the nose of some fighter jet.
00:44:49.000Yeah, that's the craziest shit, is the footage.
00:44:52.000The footage, when you're looking at, they have an image of this thing taking off from a dead standstill, like instantaneously taking off at what they believe is thousands of miles an hour.
00:47:34.000And apparently, Jackie Gleason and Nixon were drinking.
00:47:37.000And Nixon goes, you want to see a UFO? And he takes them, I don't remember what base it was supposedly at, but the aftermath was Jackie Gleason designs his house in, was it upstate New York?
00:48:38.000Because if Jackie Gleason really did party with Nixon and he really did take him to see a UFO and then Gleason apparently was obsessed with UFOs after that.
00:48:54.000So in 2015, I created this small experimental studio called Oats Studios with my brother, which was designed for me to kind of create experimental small films.
00:49:08.000And I wanted to turn it into something later.
00:49:11.000But one of the films that I wanted to make, and I still want to make, is heavily UFO-based, which is what got me into all of this stuff.
00:53:26.000And it's like, yeah, I don't know if I'm going to do that.
00:53:28.000Well, if you get attacked by a black bear, most of the time it's trying to eat you.
00:53:33.000If you get attacked by a brown bear, most of the time it is defending either its cache, like it has a dead animal that it's killed and it's buried nearby and you've stumbled upon it.
00:54:07.000Yeah, an Alaskan seaplane pilot demonstrated nerves of steel early this week as he calmly convincing a massive grizzly bear not to attack him and his group of tourists.
00:56:17.000When I moved to Canada, I mean, you know, I remember people that I was hanging out with asking me about South Africa and if we had wild animals roaming around.
00:56:28.000Like when we were in West Vancouver, you know, in the...
00:56:31.000In the sort of suburban areas of West Vancouver, which touch on the North Shore mountains.
00:56:35.000And it's like, what are you talking about?
00:56:37.000Like, you're the people that have frickin' bears coming down at the back of your house every day.
00:59:11.000Does that inspire, like, when you see wild predators and things like that, does that inspire, like, you write a lot of, like, the new film is horrific.
00:59:24.000I mean, the main, you know, it was during COVID, it was like we could either not...
00:59:29.000Not work while everything was paused or make something.
00:59:32.000And so I always wanted to shoot a low-budget horror film.
00:59:37.000And so I kind of looked at all of the elements that I had available and got the same team that did our experimental stuff for Oat Studios on YouTube together to make basically a bigger version of what we were making for our experimental stuff.
01:00:57.000So the way that that was captured was just very...
01:01:00.000It's an unusual process to be used in that way in a film.
01:01:04.000So, like, there's a process in computer graphics called photogrammetry where if you take a hundred photos of, like, an object like this, hundreds of different angles, and you give it to a computer, it can extrapolate a three-dimensional object, kind of like a CAD file.
01:01:18.000But the cool thing with photogrammetry is it also brings all of the image data with it as well.
01:01:24.000So you'd get the different colors and the surfaces and stuff.
01:01:27.000So volumetric capture is the idea of doing that 24 times a second.
01:01:32.000So if you were to capture an actress 24 times a second, she would be fully three-dimensional in the way that this is.
01:01:42.000And then once you have the performances from the actors, you can put them in synthetic computer-generated environments and then begin to light them and select your cameras.
01:01:53.000So that's what the sequence when she's lying there and she goes into her mother's mind.
01:02:02.000That was part of the reverse engineering of how the movie came about was Oh, if everything is paused for now, let's use this time to make something else.
01:03:31.000But that's one where you maybe shouldn't wish it was true.
01:03:36.000If demons really are running around...
01:03:38.000I mean, I agree, but it would also be exciting.
01:03:40.000Like if someone was demonically possessed that you knew...
01:03:43.000Like, if you could go visit him, you know, in a clinic where he was demonically possessed and just sort of look through the bulletproof gloss and see how he was doing, it would be interesting.
01:03:52.000And if someone stabbed him with some sort of, you know, object from the Vatican, you see the demon coming out of his body.
01:04:00.000It's been around for so long, the idea of demonic possession.
01:04:03.000Do you think that the roots of that are like mental illness, you know, psychotic breaks?
01:04:09.000Yeah, I think it's very primitive, you know, medicine or lack of medicine trying to understand things that we understand better now.
01:04:17.000And it gets built into the culture and it gets built into the religious system and it becomes a staple.
01:04:24.000One of my favorite science fiction slash horror movies is The Event Horizon.
01:05:26.000You know, it's Ridley's world that he created, and it's like, it should be his to do what he wants with, so it's all good.
01:05:35.000Yeah, I get that, but still, it would've been fun.
01:05:39.000Yeah, it would have been fun for me as well.
01:05:41.000I mean, the thing that I would have really enjoyed about it was Sigourney Weaver was really down for what I'd written.
01:05:46.000And the main thing to me was, even though I like Alien 3 and I love Fincher as a director, I just wanted a version of the continuation of what happened after Aliens.
01:05:58.000And for Newt to be alive and for Ripley to continue that story.
01:06:03.000And it was sort of based on that idea.
01:06:06.000Is the kid who played Newt, how old is she now?
01:06:12.000I mean, in my story, she was in her kind of mid-20s.
01:06:17.000I mean, in reality, I mean, Aliens just turned 35, so she must be, you know, like 44 or something.
01:06:43.000I saw it in a theater a couple of years ago, and I couldn't believe just the quality of everything.
01:06:48.000You know, it's really amazing how well it was filmed.
01:06:50.000I accidentally watched the Blu-ray version of Aliens, and it's kind of hilarious.
01:06:56.000Because in the Blu-ray version, things that were not meant to be HD are now HD. So there's a scene where the spaceships are lined up, and there's clearly a mural of spaceships in the background.
01:07:23.000Because there's, you know, there's like this physical ship and then behind it is just some bullshit.
01:07:30.000It's like it's so clear that they used, you know, they expected like focus and, you know, the kind of grainiest of film to mask that.
01:07:38.000Yeah, matte paintings pre-computer graphics were done on panes of glass.
01:07:43.000And so, I mean, in a way, Aliens is like using the technology that they had at the time is actually like totally incredible.
01:07:51.000But I do know what you're saying, though.
01:07:53.000I mean, for audiences now weaned on the stuff that we have access to, you know, these techniques are so dated.
01:07:59.000But it would be a large pane of glass, like a shower piece of glass, and then they would paint what they want the set to look like and shoot through it with your other real environments as well.
01:08:12.000That's why the shots are always locked off, right?
01:09:24.000No, I mean, I can imagine in 1979 seeing that in a theater where I think the studio executives, there's one famous quote where they thought they had gone too far.
01:09:32.000There was like a test screening with the audience where they're like, this may have gone too far.
01:10:07.000I think it's Alien Isolation, which is made by Creative Assembly in the UK as a video game.
01:10:14.000And then someone ported it over to VR. So it's kind of like a hack.
01:10:20.000I could be wrong, but I don't think they released an official proper one.
01:10:23.000But I've played the game, which is really cool, and I haven't seen it in VR. I know it exists, though.
01:10:30.000You could do something really terrifying in VR. This one in particular, people that I know that have played it or have done the experience said it's horrific.
01:10:39.000It's really scary because you really do feel like you're trapped inside these tunnels in this ship.
01:10:44.000I love the idea of it just going too far, which you can do with VR, where it's like, it's too much.
01:12:37.000If you hook your Oculus up to your PC you can play it that way.
01:12:40.000But yeah, you need a computer I believe because you need to download the game.
01:12:44.000That's to me the future of just of entertainment in general.
01:12:50.000My kids would come to the studio in LA and they would literally have a race to see who could get to the Oculus first because they just wanted to play the VR games constantly.
01:13:02.000And they'd be, like, walking the plank, screaming, and, like, walking around and playing the, you know, the one with the drums where you're slicing the boxes apart.
01:13:10.000This guy is actually, I think he's using an Oculus, it looks like, but it's hooked up to his PC. And this is the game.
01:14:37.000And everything he does has such a textural feel to it.
01:14:40.000So those films, just the scenes, if you just watch independent moments within it, they feel so specific and so Ridley.
01:14:51.000But the VR thing is interesting because, you know, I think people often talk about the idea of narrative.
01:14:59.000They talk about the future of games and they talk about, like, how films and games are going to kind of merge.
01:15:05.000And it's interesting because I think what your kids are responding to is where I think games truly are going, which is just some kind of pure immersion.
01:15:29.000The whole point is that someone has learned something in life or gone through some event or has some point of view on something that they're passing down to you in the form of a story.
01:15:40.000And as an audience member, you can almost simulate what may have happened to you if you had done that or if you had lived through it or what choices would I have made, right?
01:15:49.000There's a sort of a meme of cultural data that's kind of given to you or personal information that's given to you in a way that's sort of beyond words.
01:15:58.000And I think games are the exact opposite, what they hold.
01:16:03.000They hold the ability for you to be the player inside of the world that makes your own decisions and makes your own mistakes.
01:16:11.000So there's this misconception where it's like some cases of narrative could work, but for the most part it feels like doubling down on photoreal immersion, which is basically some kind of like wish fulfillment, right?
01:16:24.000You're dropping an audience into – it's like Strange Days with the bank robbery.
01:16:27.000And then you wear the neural link and you can feel what it's like to rob a bank.
01:16:32.000It's like that's where games, I think, are going.
01:16:35.000And that's where VR and everything is sort of moving in that direction.
01:16:38.000Yeah, I'm terrified of that because I think that's what leads us to the Matrix.
01:16:42.000Is that people are going to willingly accept the fact that This life is better than real life.
01:16:47.000The Matrix is already happening on people's phones, though.
01:17:22.000I think it's like if you look at the progression of technology, go from Pong to where we have today with Oculus, like, oh, I see where this is going to go.
01:17:29.000And also how little that has been in amounts of time.
01:17:34.000I mean, that's the one place the human technology really just has its foot flat on the gas is microprocessor increases, like million-fold increases in speed.
01:17:44.000Yeah, I mean, coming also from visual effects and computer graphics, I'm super interested in the realm of games as much as film, just for what it holds.
01:17:53.000I just joined a company now, actually, that's based in Kiev in Frankfurt called Godzilla, that I'm part of the design team working on a new game.
01:18:02.000So it's like filmmaking and games for me.
01:19:03.000But what I mean is where it's as mainstay as the way that when you go to multiplexes now, there's a very high possibility that you could see a big game adaptation.
01:21:58.000So speaking about demonic and volumetric capture, we used Unity, which is a game engine, to render the scenes that are in the virtual reality parts of the movie.
01:22:11.000So what that means is they're live scenes.
01:22:14.000So the audience, when they're watching the movie, it looks like you're just watching a VR scene.
01:22:18.000But we could, like Alien Isolation, we could port those out to VR. So you could sit and watch those scenes in total virtual reality because...
01:22:27.000Of what I was saying about volumetric capture, capturing the actors in 3D. So it's not like the gimmick that people do with films into VR where it's a 360 degree camera and it's fake.
01:22:37.000It's actual immersive, real three-dimensional footage running in a game engine.
01:22:43.000Do you anticipate a time where there's ever a legitimate film released in VR like that?
01:22:50.000Whether it's for the Oculus or some new technology where you put some headphones on and everybody does that to go watch a film.
01:23:01.000But, I mean, it goes back to the narrative versus, you know, the passive versus active experience discussion.
01:23:09.000I think the way to do it, like if you imagine a Tarantino coffee table discussion, like the amazing beginning of Inglourious Bostads, right?
01:23:18.000If you were sitting at that table like we are now, and it was immersive three-dimensional VR... The experience would be really pretty great.
01:23:26.000So you can still be a passive audience member and watch it in VR like that.
01:23:32.000But it's still different to merging narrative with a game structure where I think audiences will be very particular about they want to either be in control of everything or they want to be given a story and be taken on a ride.
01:27:17.000Imagine what the world was like for him at like day 10. He said, I wanted to prove that bad things didn't happen if you went without sleep.
01:27:33.000There's a time, like if you stay, imagine, if you stay awake long enough, you like open up a door to demons.
01:27:38.000It says he just slept, afterwards he slept for 14 hours and 40 minutes the one day, and then the next day he slept for like 10 and a half hours, and after that he was fine.
01:27:53.00064. They didn't know shit about people back then.
01:27:57.000Yeah, it seems like the data would be quite slim.
01:27:59.000And there's an Australian thing that says it's 18 days and almost 19 days, but that's like a sleep project.
01:28:05.000It is really interesting when you think about the fact that they knew so little about human beings in 1964 comparatively, especially medically.
01:28:12.000If you needed to get a knee surgery in 1964, you were fucked.
01:34:12.000Actually, I split open this year where I had to have plastic surgery on the cartilage, shooting a commercial for Halo, for the film that I would have done for Halo.
01:34:29.000We built a physical one of those at Weta, and we would have used it for the movie, but we ended up doing these kind of short film commercials for Halo.
01:34:37.000And I was in the back on one side, and my friend-slash-director of photography was on the other side, and the stunt team strapped us down.
01:35:21.000And then all this blood shot across my jacket.
01:35:24.000And it was interesting because I realized I hadn't really – it kind of reminds me of my shoulder in rugby or just anything in high school.
01:35:31.000In high school, you're always getting beaten up.
01:35:32.000And I realized I hadn't felt that feeling for like 10 years.
01:35:44.000And then the medic like patched me up and like, you know, I went back to shooting for six hours.
01:35:48.000There's hilarious photos of me on that set with this massive like strapped up ear and like, you know, like the forming of like a black eye kind of style where I just looked like death essentially after that.
01:35:59.000And then at the end of the shoot, I went and had plastic surgery outside of Wellington in New Zealand where we were living.
01:36:05.000And I got all of the cartilage put back together because that's what had fractured.
01:37:28.000Like, they try to stitch them up together and hope it heals, but a lot of times it doesn't because the blood supply there and the blood flow there is not very good.
01:37:35.000Yeah, see, all of that stuff, it's weird.
01:37:37.000I mean, I'm obviously completely comfortable putting, you know, excessive amounts of violence in cinema or, you know, silicone puppetry and prosthetics and blood, but...
01:37:46.000In real life, man, it's just, I don't know what happens, but it's like, when I moved to Canada, there was a bunch of stuff on TV, because obviously, you know, in 1997, there's sort of mainstream media is the only way you could really get stuff.
01:37:59.000And it was like in South Africa, there were limited channels.
01:38:01.000In Canada, there were far more channels.
01:38:02.000And one of the channels was basically 24-hour surgery.
01:38:09.000Like, I don't know what it was, but it would be like, here, we're going to do this surgery for the next six hours on TV. It's so fascinating, though.
01:38:15.000It's a great idea if you wanted to get people to tune in.
01:39:08.000He's had to have nerve surgery because his nerves weren't regenerating quick enough, so they had to relocate one of the nerves to a new area, attach it, and then the way the doctor described it is literally sewn together with doll hair.
01:39:21.000That's how small the threads are, and he now is slowly going to be able to move These the the last two fingers of his hand right the first two fingers of his hand worked perfectly But the last two just weren't moving it wasn't getting the signal,
01:39:37.000So they had to do the surgery now because they waited too long Then it wouldn't it wouldn't work the nerve would probably die or yeah something on those lines.
01:40:12.000So, last night he's showing us these images of his arm completely opened up and the doctor filmed it because he's kind of teaching other people how this is done and he wanted to film it because it's a very unusual surgery.
01:40:29.000And so Tom has all these videos on his phone of his own arm and it's splayed open.
01:42:30.000Because if someone's going for particular moves, Like, when you're controlling people, oftentimes you'll wind up in a position where someone has their knee on your neck.
01:43:42.000Yeah, it is amazing how the body does.
01:43:44.000I mean, it's just a bunch of mechanical, understandable components that can be laid out on a lab table, and each one of them just makes complete mechanical sense.
01:43:55.000It's kind of disturbing to reduce a human to that.
01:45:22.000Obviously I don't know what it feels like for him, but when you see him walk, He looks like a guy, like if he just had pants on, you would never know that he has an artificial leg.
01:45:37.000When he reaches out to shake your hand, you're like, oh my god, I'm shaking your robot hand.
01:45:42.000Yeah, I mean, it would be cool to see all of, you know, just to have that be more common with people that have lost limbs in wars or anything.
01:45:52.000And I think as they get more and more advanced, it's going to be more and more interesting because they're going to be able to develop feel.
01:45:58.000They're going to actually be able to send signals to the nerves that do remain the rest of your arm, and you're going to have a realistic interpretation of what it feels like to touch delicate things, the amount of pressure, like if you're holding a wine glass.
01:46:11.000I mean, the whole, going back to the game immersion thing, the whole brain-computer interface part of that allows for, like how Peter Watts was saying that consciousness will spread to the available neurons it has at hand.
01:46:25.000There's something, I think, there's a neural plasticity element to do with limbs and articulating limbs that can be explored in future, far future games with brain-computer interfaces where you could give people more than two arms, for example,
01:46:41.000If you suddenly had two extra arms right now that were being simulated but driven by the same motor control that you have that you use your real arms with, they would be like a toddler.
01:46:53.000And your brain would begin to be able to train those third and fourth arms to work.
01:46:59.000Right, like trying to write with your left hand.
01:47:01.000Like if you're a right-handed person, you know how to write, but you try to write with your left hand.
01:47:07.000Yeah, and over time you would get good at it, right?
01:47:09.000But imagine, it's like your brain isn't locked into having two arms and two legs, is what I'm saying.
01:47:15.000It's open to whatever you plug it into.
01:47:20.000So if you plug it into something that's a simulation with eight arms and five legs, theoretically, you could begin to use that other version of yourself.
01:47:29.000In the simulation, you're this other thing.
01:47:31.000Your mind can adapt and learn how to use that.
01:47:35.000What's really fascinating to me is if they can map out, when you're talking about neuroplasticity and think of fine motor skills, like the ability to play piano at a very high level.
01:47:46.000I would love to see if there's a way to map out what's going on in the human mind.
01:48:55.000Watching The Matrix in a theater, I was 19 when I saw that film in 99, and that was my favorite theatrical thing event that I've ever been in in my life.
01:51:12.000And one of the reasons his brother was so fucked up was Ted Kaczynski at an early age had some sort of a disease and they took him away from his parents for a prolonged period of time and had him in a hospital where he had no touch,
01:51:28.000no contact with the outside world when he was a baby.
01:51:35.000Where he lived like this, where they could only visit him one day a week, and he didn't have anybody touching him and cradling him and caring for him.
01:51:43.000And he became a sociopath, perhaps because of that, and then compounded by these Harvard LSD studies that he was a part of in the 1960s.
01:51:57.000He goes to Berkeley, teaches, just to develop enough money so that he could buy a cabin and implement this plan to kill all the people that were involved in the future propagation of technology.
01:52:09.000Yeah, he was incredibly anti-technology.
01:52:11.000Well, that's one of the ways you would get if you were on acid.
01:52:13.000And you started thinking about how this plays out.
01:52:20.000The technology is going to overcome us.
01:52:22.000I mean, the thing that's so crazy about MKUltra, because I think, I don't know if it was part of MKUltra, but it may have been, but they also experimented on this Canadian town as well.
01:52:30.000Canada was part of that test scenario, too.
01:52:35.000And then there was the Tuskegee experiments on black males in America with, I think, syphilis, right?
01:53:00.000That was the only way they felt like they could find out what happens when people take too much acid, or what happens when people think they're getting medication for syphilis, but they're not.
01:53:09.000But still, the fact that they're allowed to do those kinds of experiments, where the people caught in the crossfire, the people that are being experimented on, will never...
01:53:22.000I think it's a thing, again, where there's little to no oversight.
01:53:25.000And it's also, they have this ultimate ability to just make everybody disappear.
01:53:33.000Like in the 60s, when they were doing MKUltra and Operation Midnight Climax, where they would dose up Johns and brothels, they ran brothels.
01:53:43.000In San Francisco and one other place, I forget where it was, but they would get these prostitutes and they were in on the deal and the prostitutes would deliver these drinks to these guys before they would, you know, have sex and inside the drink was a large dose of acid.
01:54:00.000And so these guys would take the drink and then they would just freak the fuck out while they were being observed through a two-way mirror.
01:54:38.000And as he was studying it, he realized that he was uncovering layers upon layers and that what this is really all about, the reason why Manson kept getting out of jail and kept committing crimes and they would release him, was because he was a part of this study.
01:54:52.000And that they had dosed up Manson when he was in jail, they had taught him how to essentially run a cult, and they had provided him with acid.
01:55:00.000And there was an actual clinic in Haight-Ashbury, the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, that was hilariously deemed because it was run by the CIA. After Tom's book comes out, We're good to go.
01:56:03.000And it's so hard to believe this guy was hired to write a short story for a magazine.
01:56:08.000So as he's investigating the story, he goes deeper and deeper, and he's like, ah!
01:56:13.000And he realizes the prosecution was flawed, and they had something on the prosecutor, so they had the whole thing set up, and they made it look like this was...
01:56:22.000They were trying to make the anti-war movement, and the flower children, the hippies, they were trying to make it seem like this was this evil, nefarious thing.
01:56:30.000And one of the ways they did that was Manson.
01:57:27.000But his thought about technology, as evil as he was, and as brilliant as he was, his thought about technology one day being the doom of human race, there's some wisdom to that.
01:57:42.000Or at least there's some potential insight.
01:57:46.000It's either the savior or it'll not put the final nail in the coffin.
01:57:52.000I think we're just not meant to stay this for very long.
01:57:55.000No, we're in the intermediate child smash, having a temper tantrum phase, like knocking things over.
01:58:00.000And it's so obvious that up until now, I mean, if you go back through human history, there's a development of tools and weapons and all these different things which really help people overcome predators and enemies and their environment and all these different things happen,
01:58:23.000And electronics and anything digital and anything involving electricity and anything involving machines and anything involving things that biologically we can't possibly evolve fast enough to compete with anything that's connected to the internet.
01:58:39.000Anything that's connected to artificial intelligence.
01:59:08.000It's like the moment that the balance tipped where we were just the absolute alpha control of the environment that we live in, then that's when everything got completely out of balance.
01:59:19.000And it's like that's the dangerous phase that we're in now.
01:59:22.000And that could be part of the great barrier that ends up snuffing out all these other hypothetical civilizations.
01:59:27.000It feels like Nukes, overpopulation, limited resources, you know, runaway.
01:59:34.000I mean, when you start introducing things like just the volume of stuff that is in the system right now, there's too much chaos.
01:59:43.000So you either have to come out on the other side of it with some other new way of living or it's going to wipe us out.
01:59:48.000The real great moment is the Manhattan Project, right?
01:59:52.000The great moment where everything changed forever was Oppenheimer when he reads from the Bhagavad Gita when he talked about- I am become death.
02:00:02.000When he says it, and this guy worked with Einstein and he's this incredible genius and made this thing, and then here he is aware of the consequences of this thing that he helped create.
02:00:54.000It's like you have the ancient mammalian brain that is doing its biological programming bidding by building weapons to beat the other tribe.
02:01:14.000It's like genes, what the genes are asking for are only thinking 15 minutes in advance, right?
02:01:21.000There's no long-term thinking to the human race.
02:01:23.000So the result of doing what is being told on a biological programming level immediately, which is I need a better weapon, results in these massive long-term catastrophes that are not thought through.
02:01:37.000Yeah, just because we can doesn't mean we should, but we always do.
02:02:09.000To me, the only thing that I wonder is, I mean, obviously from a writing perspective, you need some sort of anthropomorphic human to visualize the AI. And she takes that form.
02:02:21.000And all of that within the context of the movie makes a lot of sense.
02:02:24.000And I know that she's also, or the AI, is cut off from the web.
02:02:28.000So it needs a way to get out of the building.
02:02:42.000In terms of realism, because everything else feels very realistic.
02:02:45.000It's just, I wonder about if there was a way for her to leave at the end in a way that felt like non-physical, something that represents AI or where the future may take that direction.
02:03:02.000If AI does become sentient, will we even know?
02:03:08.000Wouldn't it just sort of engineer our demise slowly through manipulation?
02:03:14.000If AI decided that the human race is a mess, maybe what AI would do is create bots online and have people argue with people to the point where they nuke each other.
02:04:18.000I don't necessarily think it plays out that way.
02:04:20.000I think it plays out more like it's not actually sentient and it's executing a task that was required of it, but it's doing it in a way that is so far outside the boundaries of how we think that there was no war game we could play where we could imagine this outcome.
02:04:38.000It just went so polar opposite to any way we could have imagined.
02:05:18.000I'm trying to remember where I read this.
02:05:19.000It was either there or it was somewhere else.
02:05:21.000But the example that they give is, I think it's a paper stationery company that has an AI. And they make the error of plugging it into the rest of the web, right?
02:05:35.000So now it's like it's able to access everything.
02:05:37.000And its task is please make this paper stationary company more profitable.
02:05:43.000And the result, a few generations later, is, like, every planet in the known universe is coated in, like, stationary equipment, and there's no life form anywhere.
02:06:47.000When they're in the meat phase, the meat phase is going to be based on genes and a propagation of genes.
02:06:55.000So you could definitely argue that whatever form of multicellular, highly intelligent life out there would initially start from a paradigm that we would understand.
02:07:06.000Because it definitely would start there.
02:07:08.000But it could merge with technology where you'd have alien-AI hybrid, or it could just be pure alien silicon-based computer technology that is sentient.
02:07:21.000At which point then it's the same scenario.
02:07:23.000You could have, you know, an alien AI wipe us all out.
02:07:26.000Maybe they understand that the natural course of progression for the bipedal hominid that's fascinated by innovation is that one day it's going to achieve that thing that you were talking about earlier where the minds all do combine and achieve one huge super organism consciousness and that they just want to make sure we don't blow ourselves up before we do it.
02:07:48.000So they're just sort of like cultivating the garden like, oh, we got a snake in the garden.
02:07:53.000Or putting, yeah, putting like guardrails up at a ten pin bowling lane or something.
02:08:00.000I mean, that's what everybody would hope, right?
02:08:02.000That daddy space alien is going to come down and make sure we don't blow ourselves up.
02:08:06.000And, you know, that's also one of the things that's interesting about the increase in sightings that corresponds with the dropping of the nuclear bombs.
02:08:30.000You know, there's the Kenneth Arnold story where this is the original flying saucer imagery came from Kenneth Arnold's spotting of a bunch of different disks in formation that's in the movie Phenomena.
02:10:09.000Their ability to extrapolate from small images and create these large things in their mind and they repeat the story over and over again and they seem like it's true.
02:10:19.000When someone talks about the past and they talk about a thing that they saw that doesn't exist in our modern point of reference, there's no Triangular, silent craft that just zips across the sky.
02:11:06.000It's hard, but the thing that gets me is those things that were hovering, the lights that were hovering around the city, and then the government's explanation for it was that these were flares that were dropped out of the sky.
02:11:17.000Well, that's horseshit, for sure, because they're hovering there.
02:11:22.000They're literally floating in the sky.
02:11:55.000Well, when the government comes out, the Pentagon comes out and starts talking to you about, you know, off-world ships that are not made on Earth, you're like, what?
02:15:00.000See if you can find the clip of the guy getting out of the UFO, though, because as the UFO lands, the door opens up out of nowhere and it sort of dissolves.
02:17:41.000But he realizes that there was another test subject that's a week ahead of him.
02:17:45.000And he calculates because of this that this other person, if it's an exponential rise in intelligence, is this much further ahead than he is.
02:19:26.000And there's one character in it which is absolutely amazing.
02:19:30.000And I just emailed him and contacted him and started speaking to him.
02:19:34.000And I want to create something out of one of the characters that's in there.
02:19:40.000And that's kind of one of the first times that I can think of that that's really happened.
02:19:45.000Usually, I mean, if you, you know, like my Elysium thing about being on the other side of the U.S. border, it often seems to be stuff that's generated through observing the world and observing life, generally, for me.
02:19:59.000But I think because I've taken a bunch of years off from Hollywood when we were working on our own stuff, I've kind of, there's, I've sort of accumulated a number of projects just by being away from Hollywood for a bit that are gathered from a whole bunch of different places.
02:20:15.000So there's a few different avenues now, I think.
02:20:17.000But you, Peter Watts, man, this character is pretty incredible.
02:20:23.000It's like, the idea is he applied evolutionary biology to how you could viably justify a vampire.
02:21:04.000So, the lions also have a disproportionate amount of sort of intelligence and logic compared to a gazelle because they're the predator that hunts this predated animal.
02:21:16.000So, he took that philosophy and created a branch off of sort of hominid upper primates that would be 10 times more intelligent than a human, that would keep the human numbers in check.
02:21:48.000So it could actually just drink a little bit of blood and get what it needs that's only created by human beings.
02:21:53.000And then the rest of its diet could be like a normal diet, right?
02:21:57.000But the thing that he wrote that is the most incredible part of it is he's got this thing called The Crucifix Glitch, which is it's so intelligent and it can hold like the way that you're conscious or I'm conscious now.
02:22:09.000It can hold two or three or four versions of consciousnesses like that in its head at any given moment.
02:22:13.000So it can look at topics from multiple real points of view.
02:23:51.000So the idea is basically that some pharmaceutical company would will them back out of, like Neanderthal DNA. They're doing gene therapy to basically bring this out of humans again.
02:24:02.000But it's similar to AI where once it crosses a certain threshold, it's way smarter than the people that are willing it out through gene therapy.
02:24:12.000And all of a sudden, you have a real problem on your hands, right?
02:24:16.000Where, I mean, it's sort of like describing it like a bunch of cows went and genetically willed a wolf into being, right?
02:24:24.000The wolf doesn't want to be caged in by the cows.
02:24:26.000And it's also a fascinating concept that we're a pest species that's grown like a mold around the planet because our natural predator has been absent for a few hundred thousand years.
02:25:13.000It's basically like you're mixing something like the approach to serial killers like Silence of the Lambs with vampires.
02:25:21.000Because he comes from evolutionary biology, everything is about...
02:25:27.000It sort of looks like an NBA basketball player where its limbs are elongated because it's all about venting heat.
02:25:34.000And when vampires have that pallor kind of white color, it's because it keeps all of its blood around its central organs.
02:25:41.000So he kind of, he explains on a biological level why every single thing is happening with it, right?
02:25:46.000So if you're sitting here with it, it has reflective cat eyes for night vision with a 900 IQ. It's totally sociopathic.
02:25:53.000And it's out-thought everything that you're possibly thinking in here.
02:25:57.000And it also kind of ties into a deeper part, I mean, within the mythology that he's written of human psyche, where we haven't been around one for hundreds of generations.
02:26:07.000But when you're around them, you feel like you're being preyed on in a way that none of us are used to.
02:26:17.000So in his book, in Blindsight, it's a first alien encounter book about aliens on the far...
02:26:27.000Basically, they take a snapshot of planet Earth where 65,000 flashes go off around the globe simultaneously, and they take a flash moment of the human race.
02:26:36.000And it just happens, like, all of a sudden.
02:26:38.000So our response is to completely freak out, not knowing what did this.
02:28:35.000I mean, a lot of cultures have different versions, too, of vampires.
02:28:38.000But the sort of anti-garlic, anti-cross, like, one that we, you know, is definitely Eastern European.
02:28:45.000I'm sure there's others that are, like, you know, thousands of years old.
02:28:51.000It's such a compelling horror theme, the idea that there's a person that pretends to be like us but just wants to drink our blood, just wants to get a hold of you and pray upon you.
02:29:03.000Yeah, although in this world they are unmistakable.
02:29:11.000Yeah, I mean, it's such a cool villain.
02:29:13.000I love the idea, too, that human beings, through their own ridiculous need to tamper with things, have re-engineered them and brought them back.
02:29:25.000See, well, they're—well, I mean, by—yeah, I'm sort of explaining the plot for what we want to do, I guess, by explaining this, so I shouldn't.
02:29:33.000But yeah, humans bring them back, erroneously.
02:32:44.000It would be cool to use some of those techniques and sort of merge them with CG in the right ways to get some really amazing results out of it.
02:32:51.000Yeah, because the CGI versions of Underworld, it's like, those werewolves are...
02:32:58.000I don't know if I've seen any of the Underworld films.
02:33:28.000In American Werewolf in London, one of the best scenes is the businessman who's running through the subway station trying to get away from the werewolf, and then he's falling apart, he's exhausted, and he's on the escalator, and then you see it slowly come into frame.
02:33:44.000It feels threatening, but also very real.
02:33:48.000There's a realness about it that's awesome.
02:35:00.000But no, normally it would be about two years.
02:35:03.000Yeah, I have a sci-fi film that I'm working on now that I hope is the next one that I make that would be, it's been, I don't know, a year of thinking and writing.
02:35:12.000And then, so maybe 2.5 years maybe for that, if there's 1.5 left to go.
02:35:18.000You know, maybe four to six months of sort of light and then proper pre-production.
02:36:05.000Or, I mean, the incredible chance of District 9 happening, which is really all down to Peter Jackson and Fran for letting that film happen.
02:36:14.000If you think about a first-time director with...
02:36:20.000With a film set in South Africa, with a person who is my friend as the actor, who doesn't have an acting background, at $30 million.
02:36:29.000Makes no, like, logical sense that that film exists, but I'm super thankful that it does.
02:36:35.000So, no, you would have control over cost.
02:36:38.000I mean, Shalto in that case was just, he kind of reminds me of Sachin Baron Cohen, where he's very, he can take on personalities and stuff, and he's always done that since I've known him.
02:36:47.000So I described this Afrikaans character to him as a test to show Peter what I was thinking.
02:36:53.000And he just did it so well that it's like we should put this guy in the lead of the film.
02:37:11.000The chance, you know, the sort of randomness, it's a luck event the way that that film came about.
02:37:17.000It must have felt bizarre when it was actually out and super successful.
02:37:20.000You must have felt like, what the fuck have I created?
02:37:23.000Well, we also didn't test it with anyone, which is uncommon for movies, right?
02:37:26.000So it was watched for the first time at Comic-Con in San Diego.
02:37:31.000And Sholto and I genuinely were concerned that the audience wouldn't understand the accent.
02:37:36.000Because we hadn't shown it to anyone except the people that we worked with, like Peter and Fran, and then Terry, my wife, and like a handful of people in New Zealand had seen it.
02:37:45.000And they're New Zealanders, which means their accent's more in a line with South Africa.
02:37:48.000So suddenly show a bunch of Americans this thing.
02:37:51.000It was only on like the premiere night that it's like, wait, is anyone going to understand what he's saying?
02:37:56.000You know, which they ended up, thank God, understanding him.
02:38:00.000But unusual, very unusual way that that came into being.
02:38:04.000God, what a strange way to start a movie career.
02:38:47.000I mean, if you look at Avatar with James Cameron, it's like Cameron is such a well-respected filmmaker that Sam Worthington wasn't really known in the lead of the most expensive film ever made.
02:38:59.000Because people were signing up for what Cameron would be bringing.
02:39:03.000But the typical process is you would need enough of a star to carry the sort of financial weight of the film, merged with however interesting the IP may appear to be.
02:39:26.000A lot of that comes down to the audience.
02:39:31.000A lot of what the studios are doing is dictated by what the audience wants.
02:39:35.000It's not like you could make something and the audience, especially depending on the budget level, Could not go if you didn't have the right star in there.
02:40:36.000There's a thing about that, but then there's also a thing like, one of the things that I loved about Game of Thrones is I didn't know who anybody was.
02:40:43.000I mean, there was a few people that were fairly well-known actors that were in there, but I didn't know any of them by name.
02:40:49.000I couldn't really remember what they had been in.
02:40:52.000A couple of them, I go, I kind of recognize that person, but a lot of the younger people, never seen them before.
02:40:58.000A lot of the characters were brilliantly played.
02:43:06.000What is it like now because of COVID and people don't necessarily want to go to a screen in a theater with a bunch of people that they don't know all breathing around them and films are simultaneously being released and I know that there was this Scarlett Johansson lawsuit because of Black Widow because it wasn't supposed to be released the way it was and What is it like to try to get a budget for a film,
02:43:32.000and how much different is the whole process now because of COVID? Well, I mean, that's an interesting question.
02:43:42.000I think that the budgeting situation is...
02:43:45.000I think what's going to happen is people are obviously going to gravitate towards streaming more and more, right?
02:43:52.000And I think movie theaters may be thinned out, unfortunately, a little bit.
02:43:57.000Like, there could be a few fewer theaters.
02:43:59.000But I think what'll happen is the movies that will be in theaters will become bigger and bigger.
02:44:23.000So I think you could see this stratification between larger event stuff that feels more comic book-y and huge.
02:44:33.000In movie theaters as events against longer format Game of Thrones style, more complex character pieces that can also be epic that are occurring over much longer timelines that are happening at home.
02:44:48.000So I think that's probably what it will look like going forward.
02:44:51.000So the budgeting process now, it's like the budgets are relatively high in either direction there.
02:44:58.000And then it just comes down to whether what you're trying to make is viable or not.
02:45:01.000Because some stuff I want to make is commercial and other stuff is not commercial, which is what Oates was for.
02:45:38.000It's an interesting thing where the audience is the only thing telling you whether they want something or not with their dollars.
02:45:45.000Well, I always loved the ability to watch a film at home, and sometimes I would wait until a film was released on, like, Apple Movies or whatever it is.
02:46:15.000So part of me was like, oh, this is great with COVID because so many of these films are being released simultaneously in streaming as in theater.
02:46:25.000But then other part of me is like, boy, I hope this is just as financially successful because I want these great films to keep being made.
02:46:31.000And I want there to be these budgets so they can make an avatar, so they can make these big...
02:46:40.000It is a weird one also because the amount of content that's being created is so extreme, you know, that there's so much, especially on the streaming side, that's being produced.
02:47:00.000So maybe you don't see that scale in a filmic sense, but I think things like Game of Thrones or things like Westworld and high-budget TV shows, I think those could presumably get bigger and bigger and bigger.
02:47:12.000That is the thing about streaming, right?
02:47:14.000If your film is being released at the same time...
02:47:18.000As all these other options and these streaming platforms, you're so overwhelmed with content.
02:47:24.000There are so many options for people in terms of like Netflix series and Amazon Prime series.
02:47:31.000And it also makes it feel disposable, which is irritating.
02:48:38.000I hope the theatrical experience stays.
02:48:40.000Because I agree with you in terms of annoying audiences, but I also love it.
02:48:44.000And as a filmmaker, I would really love stuff to be in theaters because it is a different experience where your brain sort of ingests the movie.
02:48:52.000Yeah, and for comedies, it's amazing because laughter is contagious.
02:48:56.000And so when everyone around you is laughing in a film, it makes it funnier.