In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, the legendary comedian and science fiction writer joins me to talk about his new documentary, "A Tear in the Sky." We talk about the film and how science has changed the way we view UFOs, and what it means to be a skeptic about them. We also talk about some of our favorite conspiracy theories about them, and why we should be worried if we think they re real. And of course, we talk about our favorite aliens and what they might be up to! This episode is brought to you by the National Museum of American History and the Center for Creation Research at the University of St. Thomas in Baltimore, MD. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers and use the promo code: CRIMINALS at checkout to receive 10% off your first purchase of a copy of the new film "A tear in the sky" when it's released on Blu-ray or DVD! Thank you so much to everyone for all the support and all the hard work you all put into this amazing film! We can't wait to see it on the big screen! Cheers, Joe and Anthony! Check it out on Amazon Prime and wherever else you re listening to this podcast! See you next week! Thanks for listening and share it with your friends! - The Joe Rogans Podcast! Timestamps: 0:00:0:00 - What do you think of A Turds? 5:10 - Who do you believe in UFOs? 6:50 - What are you think they're real? 7: What are they a threat? 8:30 - What would you believe they're not? 9:00 | What do they don't believe in them? 11:00 13:30 | What does it matter? 16:00 / 16:10 | Who do they're a threat to us? 17:30 18:40 | Is there a threat from aliens really? 19: Is it possible? 21:00 // 17: Is there any threat from us a threat ? 22:40 27:00 + 17:40 - Are they not a threat?? 26:00 & 27:30 // Is it a threat by us better than we can see them a threat in space?
00:00:31.000When a person like yourself, you're in this documentary, A Tear in the Sky, and for a person like yourself, who is a very well-respected scientist, to be discussing the subject of UFOs, to me it signifies that there's been a shift in the way our culture perceives these things.
00:00:52.000It used to be the third rail of a scientific establishment that if you talk about UFOs, you are pretty much relegated to being a nutcase and the giggle factor kicks in, right?
00:01:03.000But things have changed then, you know, because of the fact that the military is now basically releasing hours of videotapes of things that defy the normal laws of physics.
00:01:16.000And the military has admitted that, quote, they're not ours.
00:01:21.000Before there was always that ambiguity that maybe it's a new stealth bomber or a new fantastic device being prepared by the military.
00:01:29.000The military now admits that they're not ours.
00:01:32.000Then the question is, whose are they then?
00:01:35.000Yeah, the 2017 New York Times article, in my mind, that was a big shift because when the New York Times is reporting about it and saying that this is major news and this is real and there's video evidence that they can't ignore,
00:01:52.000when you talk to high-level people at the government and people like Commander David Fravor who had that infamous spotting off of the coast of San Diego, when you hear about people like that, that are very reputable, It starts to change the conversation in a lot of people's eyes.
00:05:38.000Do you think that this is something that maybe another government from another country has created that far surpasses our abilities or do you think that this is coming from somewhere else?
00:05:50.000Well, the Pentagon has listed, I think, five different options.
00:05:54.000One option, of course, is that they're weather balloons or something that's an artifact of our space program.
00:06:00.000Maybe a piece of rocket that is plunging back into the Earth's atmosphere.
00:06:45.000The Russians in the Battle of Ukraine is actually using hypersonic drones to hit targets inside Ukraine.
00:06:53.000To be hypersonic, you have to go faster than Mach 5. Anything faster than five times the speed of sound is called hypersonic.
00:07:00.000And so the Russians are now fielding hypersonic drones in warfare.
00:07:05.000But you see, this is something just in the last few months.
00:07:08.000These sightings, they go back decades into the past with objects executing these gyrations decades ago.
00:07:17.000And that's why you have to take them seriously.
00:07:19.000So the Commander David Fravor event that we talked about off the Nimitz, that was 2004. Do we have an accurate understanding about military capability in terms of, like, drones and propulsion systems from 2004?
00:07:35.000Or are there things that are classified that we are not going to have access to?
00:07:40.000Like, is it possible That, you know, 18 years ago they had the capability to have a vehicle or a drone move this way that just that information has just not been released.
00:07:54.000Well, two years ago, the United States military admitted that it stopped working on these hypersonic drones.
00:08:33.000They were not reliable and it was not worth the amount of money to put into it because the military was invested in the Star Wars program, not the anti-Star Wars program.
00:08:44.000But because Vladimir Putin announced the hypersonic drones, then the United States military said, oops, nope, we have to get into the game too.
00:08:52.000So now the United States is also working on hypersonic drones as well as the Chinese.
00:08:58.000So the Chinese, the Russians, and the Americans are all working on these things, but you can see how primitive they are.
00:09:03.000We're talking about objects that defy the known laws of aerodynamics with a technology beyond what we have today.
00:09:12.000And so that's why people are scratching their heads.
00:09:15.000Whose are these things, if they're not the Chinese, the Russians, or the United States?
00:09:20.000So one of the main points of contention is the lack of visible propulsion method, right?
00:09:28.000There's no, essentially, there's no heat signature.
00:09:32.000There's nothing that we understand to be present that normally exists when something is going at a tremendous rate of speed.
00:10:01.000We don't see any exhaust trail from these objects.
00:10:04.000So either they're an optical illusion of some sort, or they have a set of laws of physics beyond what we can muster.
00:10:13.000Now, if they are a optical illusion, If an object were to move in front of your eyes traveling at a very slow velocity, but you don't know how far they are away, you may think that object is very far away from you traveling at enormous velocities.
00:10:30.000So a weather balloon drifting in front of your eyes Can simulate an object traveling at hypersonic velocities if you think that weather balloon is far away from you.
00:11:01.000These objects can go against the direction of the wind.
00:11:04.000Not only that, but we have multiple sightings.
00:11:07.000If an object is very, very far away, I mean, if an object is close to you but you think it's far away, then it's traveling at an enormous velocity while it's actually just drifting in front of your eyes.
00:11:51.000Is there anything that's theoretical that you're aware of that could be applied, like from some other planet or some other galaxy or whatever, something that maybe we have theorized that could be responsible for the way these things are able to move?
00:12:10.000Well, you know, when I talk to my friends who are physicists like myself about these things, they sort of like laugh, giggle, their eyes roll up to the heavens, and they say something very simple, that a rocket using conventional means would take 70,000 years to reach us from the nearest star.
00:12:29.000Therefore, these objects cannot exist.
00:12:32.00070,000 years for a Saturn rocket traveling at 25,000 miles per hour to go from a nearest star to the planet Earth.
00:12:40.000That's why most scientists disregard these sightings, because they defy the laws of Einstein.
00:12:57.000And that's why I say that that assumes that these aliens or whatever are maybe a hundred years more advanced than us.
00:13:04.000But open your mind to the possibility that they are a thousand years more advanced than us.
00:13:10.000A thousand years is nothing compared to the age of the universe.
00:13:14.000The universe is about 13 billion plus years old.
00:13:20.000That's how the age of the universe And so the age of a civilization, just a few thousand years ahead of us, that is just a blink of an eye to the universe itself.
00:13:32.000And once you go to higher energies, the laws of physics begin to break down.
00:13:37.000The laws of Einstein and the laws of the quantum theory break down at something called the Planck energy.
00:13:46.000I work on something called string theory, which lives at the Planck energy.
00:13:51.000The Planck energy is 10 to the 19 billion electron volts.
00:13:55.000That is a quadrillion times more powerful than our most powerful atom smasher outside Geneva, Switzerland.
00:14:02.000Any civilization that could harness the Planck energy would be able to become masters of space and time.
00:14:10.000Space and time, as we know it, become unstable at the Planck energy, which is far beyond anything that we can muster here on the planet Earth.
00:14:20.000So, we physicists theorize how advanced do you have to be to access the Planck energy.
00:15:13.000They play with black holes, like the Empire of the Star Wars series would be a typical Type III civilization.
00:15:23.000Then the next question is, what type do you have to be to harness the Planck energy?
00:15:28.000The energy at which space and time become unstable.
00:15:32.000Where wormholes may develop, gateways through space and time, portholes through empty space.
00:15:40.000You have to be type 2 or most likely type 3. Then the next question is, how long will it take before you become Type 3?
00:15:48.000Well, we are maybe a hundred years away from being Type 1. We're maybe a few thousand years from being from Type 2. And we're maybe a hundred thousand years from being Type 3. And a hundred thousand years is nothing.
00:17:38.000The number 1 and 2 languages on the internet are English and Chinese.
00:17:43.000So we're seeing the beginning of a type 1 language.
00:17:46.000So in other words, the greatest transition in human history is maybe a hundred years from now when we become Type 1, a planetary civilization harnessing planetary forces.
00:17:57.000That is perhaps the greatest transition in modern history, and we're about a hundred years from becoming Type 1. So the Type 1, we would be able to control weather events and we'd be able to control planetary events.
00:18:18.000We'll have the power of an entire planet at our disposal.
00:18:22.000And we see the beginnings of that today because that's been the biggest change in the last 100 years.
00:18:29.000100 years ago, we existed as a fragmented civilization, nations battling each other for small turfs.
00:18:35.000Now we're beginning to see the emergence of planetary blocks, a planetary economy beginning to develop.
00:18:41.000And the internet, as I said, is the first Type 1 telephone system to fall into this century.
00:18:49.000When you think of technologies that could potentially change the pattern of progression, meaning that we're on this sort of exponential rate of increase in technology, what about something along the lines of what Elon Musk is proposing with Neuralink?
00:19:07.000Something that would change the way a human being's brain interfaces with information and with each other?
00:19:16.000First of all, when you look at the history of science and technology, the first phase was the Industrial Revolution of 1800, when we physicists worked out the laws of steam engines and thermodynamics.
00:19:29.000That was the first great transition in human society.
00:19:32.000The second great transition was when we physicists worked out electricity and magnetism.
00:19:37.000They give us the electric age with dynamos and generators and radio and television.
00:19:43.000The third great transition was the computer revolution when we physicists worked out the quantum mechanics of transistors.
00:19:49.000So all of a sudden we have lasers, transistors, and the internet.
00:20:37.000We're going to have the power of the sun in a bottle in the fourth stage of technology.
00:20:43.000So Elon Musk, I think, is ahead of his time, but it's going to take time to develop the brain hooked up to the computer, hooked up to the Internet.
00:20:53.000So the future of the Internet, Internet 2.0, Is BrainNet.
00:20:58.000When we mentally control the internet, you simply think and all your commands or your wishes are fulfilled.
00:21:46.000Two years ago in Sao Paulo, Brazil, it made headlines when a paralyzed man was hooked up to an exoskeleton designed at Duke University, and he kicked the football, initiating the soccer game, international soccer games in Sao Paulo,
00:22:50.000And once we have BrainNet, then the actors of today could be put out of business because people will want to know what actors are feeling, their emotional state, their sensations.
00:23:03.000And that's then going to be the internet of the future.
00:23:10.000What is the bottleneck in terms of communication?
00:23:14.000If we do develop some sort of a method where human beings can communicate through technology with our brains, via Neuralink or some similar technology, would the bottleneck be language?
00:23:30.000And if so, would there be a way to create a universal language?
00:23:35.000Like, are we married to the languages that we currently have because of our region?
00:23:41.000Because of, you know, you live in America, you speak English or Spanish, or whatever you speak, but it's primarily English and Spanish.
00:23:48.000But if you live in Chinese, you speak the various dialects, you know, obviously, there's a lot of languages.
00:23:54.000And that is an impediment to understanding each other.
00:23:58.000Do you think that it's possible that a universal language could be created?
00:24:02.000And if so, would it be created in a way that is very different than any language that's ever existed before?
00:24:11.000First of all, the impulses of the brain are digital signals, little blips on a computer screen, and then a computer simply tries to interpret what these little blips are, and then tries to construct, for example, an alphabet so that you can type.
00:24:46.000What about a visual language, like a hieroglyphics, like something along those lines, like where you could have a universal visual language that everyone learns at a young age?
00:24:57.000Well, we already at the University of California at Berkeley been able to put the human brain into an MRI machine which calculates blood flow at thousands of points inside the living brain.
00:25:10.000Once you know the blood flow at thousands of points on the human brain, you feed that into a computer and the computer prints out a picture, a picture of what you are thinking.
00:26:46.000Remember, this is the first time in history that someone with an exoskeleton has been able to, on national television, execute something that we just take for granted.
00:26:56.000Can you imagine what's going to happen in the future?
00:26:59.000Well, one of the things that Elon has said is that one of the first uses of this Neuralink technology will be to help people that have damaged spinal cords and help them regain full motion of their body.
00:27:12.000You know, the human brain, we can have a map of the human brain where the arm, the leg, the tongue are attached.
00:27:20.000So this creates what is called the homunculus.
00:27:23.000The homunculus is an image of a human body superimposed on the surface of the brain.
00:27:31.000So when you want to activate your leg, you simply know what part of the brain is connected to the leg, and you simply put a chip there, and by thinking through that chip, you can then move your leg.
00:27:43.000Well, obviously, by putting many chips throughout the surface of the brain, you can control the entire human body.
00:27:50.000And stick that into an exoskeleton and become Iron Man.
00:27:55.000And Iron Man can fly, but of course we can put jet packs with hydrogen peroxide fuel inside a jet pack and you can start to fly just like Iron Man.
00:28:05.000Now we're not there yet, but I'm just saying that in principle it is possible.
00:28:27.000For example, William Shatner sat for, what, three or four days answering questions and having it then recorded.
00:28:36.000And then a computer homogenizes it, cuts it up, puts it in logical sequence so that you can talk to William Shatner years after he has passed away.
00:28:46.000And so this gives you a form of digital immortality.
00:28:55.000One is you can talk to your great-great-great-great-great-grandkids long after you're gone.
00:29:01.000You can talk to them because all your thoughts, your feelings, your history, your dreams have been recorded and you can impart your knowledge, your wisdom to your great-great-great-great-great-grandkids long after you're gone.
00:29:15.000Another application is then to take this digitized human Put it on a laser beam and shoot it throughout the universe.
00:29:43.000And in four years, you're on Alpha Centauri, the nearest star.
00:29:48.000And so what do you do when you're on the moon?
00:29:51.000On the Moon, you download your digital information that codes who you are onto an avatar.
00:29:58.000And the avatar then can roam the Moon and not have to suffer from weightlessness, cosmic rays, accidents, loss of oxygen.
00:30:08.000No, you are an avatar controlling all the movements on the Moon.
00:30:13.000In other words, you can explore the galaxy this way.
00:30:17.000At the speed of light, the fastest known velocity in the universe, your digital brain waves and information about your brain and thinking can be shot throughout the universe.
00:30:29.000Now, this is all well within the laws of physics, and this is something that could easily be done within the next 50 to 100 years.
00:30:43.000I think that aliens in outer space don't use rocket ships.
00:30:46.000They don't use rocket ships because they crash, they have problems with gamma rays, radiation, food, whatever.
00:30:53.000They've digitized themselves, placed their consciousness on a laser beam, and there's a laser highway.
00:31:01.000A laser highway that could be right next to the earth, for all we know, carrying the digitized souls of civilizations and we're totally clueless.
00:31:12.000We're so stupid, we don't even know that that's how the aliens move from place to place.
00:31:20.000I mean, isn't there an option of, with a lack of better words, folding space-time and generating enough power where you can move from one point to another point almost instantaneously?
00:32:06.000The second way to do it was done by Michael Bier, a friend of mine, who was watching Star Trek one day and noticed how the Enterprise zapped across space by contracting the space in front of you and expanding the space behind you.
00:32:33.000You can walk across the carpet, which is the long way, or you can contract and compress the carpet in front of you, expand the carpet behind you, and then simply hop, hop over to the other side of the carpet.
00:33:01.000You would probably have to have energy comparable to that of a black hole.
00:33:04.000In other words, a Type III civilization would have the power, perhaps, to utilize wormholes or compress space to go across galactic distances.
00:33:14.000This, of course, is science fiction, but it's well within the known laws of physics that wormholes and Alcabierre drives that are possible within the laws of physics.
00:33:26.000What kind of an energy source could, at least theoretically, be used to generate that kind of power?
00:33:34.000Well, in Star Trek, of course, they talk about the dilithium crystals.
00:33:38.000Of course, there's no such thing as dilithium crystals, but there is something that could energize this machine, and that's called negative energy.
00:33:50.000But there is a situation where energy can become negative and that's called the Casimir effect, which is actually measurable.
00:33:57.000We've actually measured in the laboratory.
00:34:00.000The Casimir effect is negative energy and that's the fuel for a wormhole.
00:34:06.000Wormholes are stabilized by negative energy.
00:34:08.000In fact, it was Stephen Hawking who actually created a theorem using Einstein's equations to show that all possible wormholes, all of them, are based on negative energy.
00:34:34.000So if we're talking about a civilization that is a hundred thousand or a million years more advanced, that's what we're possibly looking at.
00:34:45.000So when you have these encounters like they had with that tic-tac-shaped object that went from, I believe it was 60,000 feet above sea level to 50 feet above sea level.
00:35:07.000Through a method that is far beyond chemical rockets.
00:35:11.000Chemical rockets, as I said, take 70,000 years to reach us from the nearby stars.
00:35:16.000While if this is a huge shift, if you could harness the power of Einstein's wormholes or Alkaver's drive, then you could do this almost instantly.
00:35:27.000But you would need negative energy on a fantastic scale, stellar scale.
00:35:32.000In other words, you're basically type three.
00:35:35.000So if you are a Type III civilization, then you do have access to the Planck energy, which is the energy of a black hole.
00:35:43.000So we're doing a lot of looking at the potential for the future.
00:35:49.000And we're looking at, you know, what we think human beings are capable of doing thousands of years from now.
00:35:58.000What about, are we looking at the potential different kinds of life forms?
00:36:04.000Like, we're the only intelligent life form on Earth that manipulates its environment in the sense of, like, what humans do?
00:36:11.000We build houses and planes and things along those lines.
00:36:13.000We have other intelligent life, like orcas and whales, but they don't have the same capabilities that we have.
00:36:20.000Is it possible that there's something that exists that evolved in a way far different than us that has access to intelligence beyond what we think is possible?
00:36:36.000Well, there are three basic ingredients that made us become intelligent.
00:36:41.000First is the opposable thumb, or a claw, or a tentacle, a manipulation device.
00:36:47.000Second is predator eyesight, eyesight of a predator.
00:37:40.000But that doesn't mean that in the universe there couldn't be other situations with different combinations which have these three ingredients.
00:37:50.000Communication, manipulation of the environment, and the coordination of that.
00:37:57.000That's how we became intelligent, and it could happen in other planets.
00:38:02.000Do you think that one of the impediments is what we were talking about earlier, that the languages are so different?
00:38:08.000Like, in order for us to share knowledge with people in China, we have to learn their language.
00:38:15.000There's got to be some sort of communication.
00:38:19.000What if a species developed where they didn't have a language barrier or perhaps they communicate in a method that we don't understand yet or that we're not capable of because we live in a completely different environment than them.
00:38:33.000Like maybe they communicate from the jump telepathically.
00:38:38.000Well, they would have a definite advantage if they could communicate telepathically because then they can share knowledge almost instantly.
00:38:46.000That's not outside the realm of possibility, right?
00:38:50.000However, it would be very difficult because our brain has not developed a universal language that allows us to communicate with other brains.
00:39:00.000Now, we do have what is called synthetic telepathy.
00:39:02.000Synthetic telepathy already exists, but that's mediated by a laptop computer.
00:39:08.000You take two people who are paraplegics or have problems with their brain, you can connect the two brains together, but the language these two brains speak is still English.
00:39:26.000But we do know that there's some species that communicate without language, like bees.
00:39:32.000You know, I remember we were filming this television show on Sphere Factor, and one of the things we did was we had this stunt that these people had to get covered in bees.
00:39:41.000So this beekeeper who was hired to cover these people in bees had to stop the production down because a neighboring beehive had come over to investigate.
00:39:53.000And so these bees flew up into the air to visit with the neighboring bees, and they communicated.
00:40:00.000And I said, well, what do you have to do?
00:40:01.000And he goes, we just have to let them work it out.
00:40:03.000He goes, they're going to figure it out.
00:40:05.000It'll take a little while though, so everybody should just move away.
00:40:07.000So we all moved away, and he watched his bees communicate with these other bees.
00:40:17.000But somehow or another, they're going to relay that they are not moving in, that they're just temporarily here, and that will be enough for the neighboring bees to say, well, enjoy your time here and take care.
00:40:31.000I mean, obviously I'm simplifying it in the language, but something happened where they've worked out that these bees somehow or another knew that these other bees were not from there.
00:40:42.000Well, when you look at ants in your own house, for example, or in the forest, you notice that when two ants meet, they exchange chemicals, invisible chemicals, and they move on to the next ant, and they bump into them, and then they exchange chemicals,
00:40:59.000So we've tried to decipher that language.
00:41:02.000And it turns out there's only a handful of chemicals that we've identified that are exchanged between ants.
00:41:07.000And then, at MIT, they tried to construct artificial ants, robot ants.
00:41:14.000So when two robot ants meet, they exchange a limited vocabulary.
00:41:19.000Just like what ants do in real life, a limited vocabulary.
00:41:22.000And then the next question is, with these mechanical ants, can you reconstruct ant society?
00:41:29.000All of ant society, given a primitive language that exists between two ants.
00:41:35.000And the verdict is still out, but the answer seems to be yes, that given a limited vocabulary between two ants, it's possible to construct ant society on the basis of a rather primitive language.
00:41:47.000And when you say ant society, do you mean like the hierarchy of queen and workers and all that?
00:42:33.000It's all these tubes that lead to these rooms and there's vents that go up through the ceiling.
00:42:39.000And when they pour cement in it, it almost is a shame because it's the only way that you get to see it.
00:42:45.000But you have to kill all the ants and...
00:42:47.000You know, we get a chance to look at it, but it's magnificent what they're able to do.
00:42:53.000And somehow or another, this is a universal trait amongst these leafcutter ants.
00:42:58.000I mean, they're able to do this all over the world.
00:43:00.000Yeah, but unfortunately, we humans are stuck with language, and these languages are embedded to a society that created that language, and there's no universal language, unfortunately.
00:43:11.000And it would be very difficult to extract a mental language using electrodes because the language that we get from the brain is interpreted through English, and so it would be very difficult to have two brains communicate telepathically without having to go through English.
00:43:29.000But what about what the ants are doing?
00:43:34.000Have you ever stopped and thought about, like, the technology involved in the creation of all these labyrinths and these colonies and the fact that they're able to do this repeatedly?
00:43:45.000Well, figure for the moment that they have a language, a language that is chemical, and they're able to exchange maybe 10 to 100 different chemicals.
00:43:55.000What kind of society can you create with 100 words?
00:44:00.000Well, if you think about it, we humans do pretty well with just a few hundred words to take a look at the evolution of human society.
00:44:08.000A few hundred words is enough to create a semblance of human society.
00:44:13.000A few thousand words, and then of course you're talking about accumulating new knowledge and new strategies, but just to have a society that operates, a few hundred words is probably enough.
00:44:23.000When people gossip, how many words do people use when they gossip?
00:44:34.000Yeah, and we realize that just a few hundred words is sufficient to communicate most human interactions.
00:44:42.000Now, to communicate power hierarchies, engineering requires more than a few hundred words.
00:44:50.000But with a few hundred words, that's enough to create a model human society.
00:44:55.000And I imagine that these insects you talk about have a vocabulary of a few hundred words.
00:45:00.000Well, it's interesting that you just said to communicate things like power hierarchies requires more words, but they have power hierarchies.
00:45:19.000You may have seen the impressive spectacle of leafcutter ant highway full of millions of bugs carrying cut sections of leaves, grass, or flowers back to their homes, but did you know that leafcutter ants don't eat the leaves that they harvest?
00:45:38.000They cultivate their fungal gardens by providing them with freshly cut leaves, protecting them from pests and molds, and clearing them of decayed material and garbage.
00:45:48.000In return, the fungus acts as a food source for the ants' larvae.
00:46:10.000But I claim that the number of words necessary to communicate with other entities, like insects, is probably not that large.
00:46:19.000A human being, for example, can reasonably work with about 5,000 words.
00:46:23.000Someone who's semi-educated, went through high school, knows about 5,000 words.
00:46:27.000But just to create a society that works probably requires only a few hundred words.
00:46:33.000And that's probably well within the capabilities of insects.
00:46:36.000Are we limiting our ability to theorize by saying words, by thinking of words?
00:46:48.000Is it possible that instead of words, they have an understanding of the tasks at hand without defining them with sounds or with symbols?
00:46:59.000And that this allows them a freedom of communication without all of the baggage that comes with words, enunciation, context, all those different things.
00:47:09.000Well, it's possible to record memories now.
00:48:27.000We want to see whether or not primates can learn a simple task, like for example, drinking water.
00:48:32.000That's what the mice were trained to do.
00:48:35.000Drink water, record the memory of drinking water, and then give it to another mouse.
00:48:40.000Was it a complicated way to drink water, like drinking water from a feeder or something?
00:48:44.000These are simple memories because, of course, this is the first time it's ever been done.
00:48:48.000And so by doing this, you can actually transfer memories between organisms that seem to be universal.
00:48:55.000But isn't drinking water a universal thing with mammals?
00:48:59.000Yeah, but any feat that they learn, okay, can in principle be encoded in the hippocampus, and then the hippocampus in turn, its memory can then be encoded into another hippocampus.
00:49:12.000That's the point, that memories in some sense can be recorded.
00:49:16.000I understand, but how do we know that the memories of drinking water are recorded and transmitted to another mouse?
00:49:34.000So that different memories can be, and again, these are small snippets of memory.
00:49:38.000We're not talking about reading a book.
00:49:40.000We're just talking about a simple memory can be recorded by looking at the impulses that go across the hippocampus.
00:49:47.000Wasn't there an experiment where they took a mouse, or they took mice or rats, and they put them through a maze on the East Coast, and because of that, the mice or rats, I forget which rodent it was, on the West Coast was able to go through this maze quicker?
00:50:08.000Well, it turns out that with monkeys, it's possible to train monkeys to do certain very simple tasks and hook that by the internet to another monkey in Japan, and that these memories can be transferred via the internet.
00:50:24.000And so that is something that's been done with monkeys, not just with mice.
00:50:28.000Right, but with the mice, I don't think there was an exchange of information in a traditional sense.
00:50:33.000I think this was, if I'm remembering it correctly, this is Rupert Sheldrake's concept.
00:50:39.000He had this concept of morphic resonance, and the idea was that you could somehow or another bestow information, like in a primitive sense, through a species, where one member of the species learns it,
00:50:56.000And that information somehow through some unknown method becomes more readily available to other members of that species that are not directly connected.
00:52:01.000It's encoded as impulses, electrical impulses that go across the hippocampus that you simply tape-recorded.
00:52:07.000In other words, there's no translator, there's no intermediary that translates into English and back into electrical signals.
00:52:15.000We're talking about raw electrical signals, the raw signals that you don't process at all, simply being tape-recorded and then shot into the same person months later, and they recall the memory that they forgot.
00:52:49.000But when you say drinking water, doesn't every mouse know how to drink water?
00:52:54.000Yeah, but other things can be done, but they started with the simplest first.
00:52:58.000Right, but how do we know that this information is transmitted to the mice since water drinking is just from the womb?
00:53:04.000Well, what happened was they taught the mouse some tricks, and then they actually gave it a chemical which allowed the mouse to forget the trick, okay?
00:53:14.000And then later, months later, after the mouse forgot the trick, They then shot the same electrical impulses into the hippocampus, and the mouse immediately remembered the trick.
00:53:42.000They want to create a memory chip that you push a button and then memories come flooding into the hippocampus of an Alzheimer's person so they know where they live.
00:53:53.000If they get lost, they know how to get back home.
00:53:56.000They know who to call, telephone numbers and things like that.
00:53:59.000That's the ultimate goal is to create a memory chip for people that have fading memories like Alzheimer's patients.
00:54:26.000What do you think about Ray's ideas that we're going to eventually be able to download consciousness into some sort of a computer or something and you will essentially inhabit that rather than be a biological entity like that?
00:54:43.000Do we know enough about consciousness that that's even possible?
00:54:47.000Well, digital immortality is coming, but digital immortality is coming in stages.
00:54:53.000What's being done now, today, is something that can be done anywhere.
00:54:58.000They took William Shatner, sat him in a room, and simply let him talk about his life.
00:55:04.000They recorded this huge volume of information, digitized it, so that in the future his descendants Can talk to him with a holographic image.
00:55:29.000Like, if I smile, you smile back, we laugh, we joke around together.
00:55:33.000This is two human beings interacting with each other.
00:55:35.000If it's just your digital memory, and just your voice in this digital, that's great for other people to experience, but you won't experience it at all.
00:55:46.000How far do you think we are, or is it even possible, To make you exist inside some sort of a computer or some sort of an electronic entity.
00:55:57.000This gets us into the connectome project, which I mentioned in my book, The Future of the Mind.
00:56:03.000The connectome project is to locate the connections of every single neuron in your brain.
00:56:11.000So far, the connectome project has been able to take a fruit fly, Slice up the brain of a fruit fly, put it in an MRI scan, and then map exactly all the neural connection of 100,000 neurons inside the brain of a fruit fly.
00:57:32.000We vary depending upon whether or not you got good sleep, whether or not your heart is broken, whether or not you got fired from your job, whether or not you've had a great success in what you do for a living or what your hobbies are.
00:57:52.000The romantic idea of what a person is is something that creates and interacts and there's so much more to a person than just your digital memory and the amount of information that you've accumulated and the standard patterns that you've expressed throughout your life up until now.
00:58:10.000You can have some sort of a profound life-changing experience tomorrow and decide that you're going to change your ways and essentially be a different person than you were prior to that experience.
00:58:22.000When we're talking about a digital identity or a digital life, we're really talking about this sort of static thing that you are now, existing forever.
00:58:34.000But isn't what being a person is, one of the more interesting things about it, Is that we evolve and that with adversity and new information and relationships and the way we interact with each other, it changes.
00:58:49.000We vary depending upon the climate that we live in, the community that we find ourselves in.
00:58:55.000There's so many variables that we could think of as just data points, but there's something more complex about being a person.
00:59:04.000Okay, now there are two approaches to this question.
00:59:08.000The first approach is the top-down approach.
00:59:10.000The top-down approach says that we're nothing but a bunch of neurons and you duplicate all the neurons and you feed all the information necessary for these neurons to calculate and voila, we have a human.
00:59:58.000It takes a lot of effort to make a robot walk because every single motion you have to include Newton's laws of motion, mechanics, leverage, and so on and so forth.
01:01:36.000One is the bottom-up approach, which is called the neural network approach, and the other one is the top-down approach, which is what most people think robotics is.
01:01:45.000One of the things that we were talking about with the nurse outside before we came into this podcast is that I think that what we are now is not long for this world.
01:01:58.000I think that this thing, this romantic thing that creates music that can...
01:02:03.000That can create a Jimi Hendrix or that can make comedy, create a Richard Pryor.
01:02:26.000I mean, I'm sure if you played a Jimi Hendrix song to a giraffe, it wouldn't give a shit.
01:02:31.000But to us, it's something incredibly magical.
01:02:35.000But I think that if you looked at what's possible in the future, that might be more of an impediment than it is an asset.
01:02:47.000And I wonder if with our integration, if we have this symbiotic integration with technology, that that might be one of the bottlenecks that we have to lose.
01:03:00.000And that our future selves, whatever we become, like if we used to be a single-celled organism, we became multi-celled organisms, we became ancient primitive primates, we become modern humans, we become symbiotic with some sort of an electronic thing.
01:03:21.000And one of the problems, if we look at all the things that are going on in the world If we look at the greed that makes people become corrupt politicians, if we look at the horrors of war, we look at some of the more terrible things that people are capable of,
01:03:38.000how many of those things are attached to our ancient primate minds and our ancient primate instincts?
01:03:47.000And wouldn't it be far simpler and far easier to evolve if we left all those behind?
01:03:53.000But in doing so, We're going to lose everything.
01:04:00.000We're going to lose creativity and chaos and laughter and music, literature.
01:04:06.000We're going to lose it all because we're not going to be people anymore.
01:04:09.000We're going to be more efficient thinking machines.
01:04:14.000Well, some people ask yet another question, which is collary to what you said, and that is, at what point do the machines become dangerous and turn on us?
01:05:26.000Yeah, because imprinting, when you're very young as a puppy, you imprint immediately on who's the top dog, who's the mother dog, and you're very early in your stage of growing up, you know your pecking order.
01:05:41.000Very, very clear because they are pack animals, unlike cats.
01:05:51.000While dogs are pack animals, they understand the hierarchy and they understand that you are the top dog.
01:05:57.000They are the underdog and you are the top dog.
01:06:00.000But if you met my dog, you know that he reacts very differently to people than he does to animals.
01:06:05.000If he meets another dog, it's a very different experience.
01:06:09.000I think he knows the difference between a dog and a person.
01:06:12.000I just think he accepts the fact that humans are the dominant animal, but I don't think he thinks we're dogs.
01:06:20.000Well, he thinks that this is tribe, because dogs are tribal animals, that whatever you call it, we are members of that tribe, and we're the top dog.
01:06:30.000We're the leader of that tribe, and therefore they follow.
01:06:32.000But I don't think he thinks you're a dog.
01:06:34.000I think he's got the ability to discern between people and dogs.
01:07:22.000So when you say that they could have murderous intentions...
01:07:31.000Aren't murderous intentions attached to all the things that we discussed earlier, like ego, like the need to breed, to control territory, all those things, all these biological functions that make competition a necessity for human beings in order to perpetuate the survival of the fittest?
01:07:52.000All those things exist because human beings are these complicated animals that are trying to advance.
01:08:00.000But why would an artificially intelligent thing that's been created have any instincts to advance or to get better?
01:08:10.000Well, we would have to program it because we are the gods.
01:08:13.000In some sense, we have to create these things in our machines.
01:08:52.000And why should they take orders from us when they're not part of the tribe?
01:08:55.000So I think as an interim measure, we should put a chip in their brain that simply shuts them off once they start to question who they are with respect to humanity.
01:09:04.000What I'm saying is what happens when they're so smart that they can remove that chip.
01:09:09.000Right, I understand what you're saying.
01:09:11.000But what I'm saying is all those feelings Of wanting to do bad things, of not trusting people, of wanting to dominate people and take over.
01:09:25.000And aren't all those thoughts and all the negative aspects of human beings, aren't they related to our biological need to reproduce and to control territory?
01:10:08.000And the idea of war itself isn't the problem that human beings have these primitive primate minds that are accustomed to tribal warfare, so we scale that up when we can control entire continents and perhaps even control the entire world.
01:10:27.000So some people have postulated that what we need is a new philosophy toward AI, good AI, friendly AI as they call it, rather than having robots being created to kill other robots and kill humans, which is the driving force behind this technology,
01:10:55.000But that's ideally where you want to go.
01:10:57.000This is called friendly AI, where AI does not necessarily go in the direction of survival of the fittest.
01:11:03.000Right, but wouldn't there be money involved in cooperative interaction with all people?
01:11:09.000Our economies are based on interactions, they're based on exchanges.
01:11:16.000Wouldn't more cooperation and more exchanging of resources and more Cooperation in terms of intellectual properties, wouldn't that be better for everyone overall?
01:11:37.000But we live in a practical world, a world where sometimes idealistic notions don't get anywhere because there's no funding, there's no impetus, there's no desire in that direction.
01:11:49.000We have to create a situation where we want to create robots, want to create entities that want cooperation and to build rather than to destroy.
01:12:00.000And wouldn't it be more intuitive for people to sort of accept those ideas if we slowly but surely abandoned a lot of our biological instincts?
01:12:13.000Like, one of the things that freaks me out about aliens is that they're so uniform.
01:12:19.000And, like, when people have these visions of these greys...
01:12:23.000Now, I don't know if they're real or not.
01:12:28.000But it's fascinating to me that they all take on the same sort of image.
01:12:33.000It's like this spindly thing with no muscle.
01:12:36.000It has a big giant head and it seems to have no sexual organs.
01:12:41.000And when I think about humans and all the things that trip us up and all the things that cause so many of the problems you experience as civilizations, It's ancient primate stuff.
01:12:55.000Like if we didn't have sexual desire, if we didn't have ego, if we didn't have all the biological necessities of breeding and controlling property and territory, all the things that make war and violence,
01:13:50.000Well, we're becoming more like what we imagine those aliens to be.
01:13:54.000It's almost like they're a blueprint for us.
01:13:58.000Well, if you go back a few hundred years into the past, back then they didn't talk about aliens.
01:14:04.000They talked about gremlins and they talked about all sorts of forest creatures and things like that.
01:14:10.000And then you look at pictures, pictures created by people that were fearful of gremlins and leprechauns and stuff like that.
01:14:18.000You say to yourself, oh my God, they look just like the aliens of today.
01:14:22.000So in other words, there's a subconscious fear in our brains that these objects are going to be dangerous to us, and it's been with us for hundreds of years.
01:14:33.000Now, there's something called sleep paralysis.
01:14:35.000Sleep paralysis afflicts about 5% of the human race.
01:14:39.000When you wake up in the morning, you are paralyzed.
01:14:42.000Now, of course, when you dream, you are paralyzed.
01:14:45.000Otherwise, you would act out your dream, which is very dangerous.
01:15:14.000So it's part of our subconscious mind that we fear this image of a dwarf-like creature's weak, big eyes, and that's the aliens that we see in the movies.
01:15:34.000It seems like it's more connected to the animal world than it is to some sort of a futuristic advanced civilization type thing.
01:15:45.000I wonder if we know when human beings started seeing that very specific iconic image, the image of the gray.
01:15:55.000Because that's the, like, I mean, how much of it is through pop culture, we don't know, but I know Betty and Barney Hill were one of the first people that experienced this You know, ironically, it always happens at night, right?
01:16:08.000So it always happens when people are sleepy.
01:16:10.000And the problem that I have with that is that we know that when people are asleep, when they're dreaming, the brain releases all sorts of psychoactive chemicals.
01:16:20.000And that's responsible for these hallucinations and all these wild, vivid imageries.
01:16:26.000And I wonder how much of what's happening when people see these aliens is just because it's permeated pop culture from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which is the quintessential alien encounter movie.
01:16:42.000I mean, that's what they all look like.
01:16:43.000They're these tiny creatures with the big heads.
01:16:46.000Yeah, well, I agree with you that there's a canonical alien that big eyes and a dwarfish body and spindly arms and legs and so on and so forth.
01:16:56.000But that may have nothing to do with the aliens that actually do exist in outer space.
01:17:09.000And we know that 100% of them have planets on average.
01:17:15.000100% of the stars you see at night have planets going around them.
01:17:18.000Therefore, they probably have life forms on them, but they don't have to look like us.
01:17:24.000As I said before, all you need is eyesight, an appendage to manipulate the environment, and language.
01:17:32.000Beyond that, like an octopus, I believe you could take an octopus, breed it, breed it for a few thousand years, and perhaps it'll become intelligent.
01:17:41.000Because it has eyesight, which is kind of feeble, but it has eyesight, it has tentacles by which to manipulate the environment, but it has no language.
01:17:50.000But I think it is possible that we could, if we could orchestrate this, grow an intelligent species from the earth that don't look anything like us.
01:18:01.000So the fact that we see these alien creatures look just like a dwarfish version of us is imprinted in our hippocampus and our amygdala of our brain.
01:18:12.000Is intelligence limited to language though?
01:18:14.000Because we do know that octopi do things that seem to indicate intelligence, like they know how to twist jars open.
01:19:12.000Yeah, that's really fascinating because they also have dialects.
01:19:16.000They have different sounds that they make if they're in different parts of the world.
01:19:20.000And we know they're intelligent because if you tape record their signals and run it through a computer program, the computer program looks for the repetition of certain sounds, like the letter E. The letter E is the most common sound in the English language, and you can rank them in terms of how often you use these symbols,
01:19:38.000and then run Shakespeare through it, and you can actually tell whether two works of art were written by the same person.
01:19:46.000Whether Shakespeare really did invent and write all these plays by running them through a computer program.
01:19:52.000You do that with the dolphin now, and sure enough, there's intelligence there.
01:19:57.000You can actually see the intelligence in a tape recording of the sounds made by a dolphin.
01:20:02.000How much of an effort is underway to try to decipher what they're doing and to maybe even communicate with them somehow or another by recreating those sounds?
01:20:34.000John Lilly is a pioneer of interspecies communication who developed a...
01:20:38.000He tried to come up with methods to communicate with dolphins and they had this one study that they were running that got shut down because this woman was living with a dolphin, essentially.
01:20:51.000It filled a tank up and had it waist high in water and gave her a bed so she would climb out of the water into the bed and she would live with this dolphin and communicate with it but the dolphin was always sexually aroused and it wouldn't communicate and it wouldn't participate in any of the things while it was horny essentially.
01:21:15.000So she, for lack of a better phrase, manually manipulated the dolphin to climax.
01:21:22.000And they found out about that and they shut down the study because they thought it was disgusting that this woman was masturbating a dolphin.
01:21:32.000But what he was trying to do, he was trying to come up with a bunch of different ways to interact with dolphins, but he was trying to get the dolphins to communicate with human language, like get the dolphins to say human things and teach them.
01:21:46.000I don't think they ever really got anywhere with it, unfortunately, but he was a wild guy.
01:21:51.000He was also the guy that invented the sensory deprivation tank.
01:21:54.000Well, I think it's the opposite, that instead of having dolphins learn English, we should learn the language of the dolphins.
01:22:02.000Also, back then I still remember that the pleasure center of the human brain was isolated, and that by pushing a button you can stimulate your own pleasure center.
01:22:11.000You take a mouse and you stick a mouse to a telegraph key, and the telegraph key stimulates the pleasure center of the mouse until the mouse dies of starvation.
01:22:23.000So the mouse would rather die of starvation than stop stimulating his pleasure center.
01:22:51.000So the porpoise was stop, get some food, and then go back and stimulate himself some more.
01:22:57.000Well, you know, those dolphins or the mice, when they did that with mice and rats, the problem with that was they had put these things in a very unnatural environment, like the same thing they did with cocaine and heroin with rats.
01:23:11.000And that when they tried to recreate the study, but they gave them a much larger, more natural environment, they stopped doing it.
01:23:19.000They stopped taking cocaine until they died.
01:23:21.000They stopped taking heroin until they died.
01:23:23.000They didn't self-stimulate the same way they did before.
01:23:25.000They essentially were doing it to medicate themselves because they were in a very unnatural laboratory environment of being in a cage and bright lights and the whole deal.
01:23:36.000When they gave them an environment that's much more normal and natural, they didn't do that.
01:23:42.000They would, you know, occasionally dabble with whatever drugs they were stimulating them with, but they went on to live normal rat lives.
01:23:50.000Well, as I understand, some experiments were done on humans years ago.
01:23:55.000This, of course, would be unethical probably today.
01:23:58.000But back then, humans had realized that this is going nowhere, that at a certain point they begin to stop.
01:24:04.000They're smart enough to realize this is madness.
01:24:08.000There was a woman in the 1970s, I actually have a joke about it in my act, where she was allergic to pain medication.
01:24:14.000So they drilled holes in her head and they stuck wires into various parts of her brain and gave her an electrical device.
01:24:22.000And when she felt discomfort, she could hit this button and a surge of electricity would go into the pleasure centers of her brain and she would orgasm.
01:25:06.000It's somewhere in the 1970s, but this is from the study.
01:25:14.000At its most frequent, the patient self-stimulated throughout the day, neglecting her personal hygiene and family commitments.
01:25:20.000A chronic ulceration developed on the tip of the finger used to adjust the amplitude dial, and she frequently tampered with the device in an effort to increase the stimulation amplitude.
01:25:34.000At times, she implored her family to limit her access to the stimulator, and each time demanding its return after a short hiatus.
01:29:01.000The CID constructed something called MKUltra.
01:29:05.000You've probably read about MKUltra, right?
01:29:07.000But that's one of the motivations for MKUltra, the fact that you could actually determine the behavior of a bull who's charging at you with a button.
01:29:33.000Yeah, he was one of the test subjects of this guy named Jolly West, who was one of the head guys of MKUltra.
01:29:42.000And they directly connect Jolly West to visiting Charles Manson in jail, supplying him with LSD, teaching him these sort of manipulative methods of controlling people with these psychedelic drugs.
01:30:16.000They would set up these brothels, and they had them in San Francisco and one other place, I forget.
01:30:23.000But they would have these two-way mirrors, and they would have these Johns go in there with the ladies, and the ladies would give the man a drink, and the guy would drink it, and there was LSD in the drink.
01:31:08.000There's a video from, I believe it's the late 50s, where these soldiers in England, and they dosed them and then filmed them.
01:31:19.000And it's this black, see if you can find that, black and white LSD studies from these soldiers.
01:31:26.000You know, they were trying to figure out how to control people with LSD. They knew it had a profound effect on consciousness, but they didn't exactly know what the dosage were, or Operation Moneybags.
01:31:37.000So this is the British Army, and I want to say this is like, 56?
01:32:16.000Like, they thought that it was going to be a way of controlling people's minds, and then they thought, no, it's not that, but it might be a way of extracting the truth, because they would abandon all their cultural ideas and all of these preconceived notions, and ultimately proved to be too blunt of an object to get surgical results.
01:32:38.000They also did experiments on remote viewing and they would put people in front of a map of the world and ask them to identify the location of Soviet submarines.
01:32:49.000Put pins in a map locating all the Soviet submarines.
01:33:19.000I mean, but people want to believe that there is some, either whether it's an emerging phenomenon or some ability that human beings innately have to understand things that you can't weigh, you can't measure, that they're not exactly the standard,
01:33:35.000you know, we have the standard understandings of what people are able to do with their mind.
01:33:40.000But we always want to believe that there's someone out there that has just a little extra.
01:33:49.000Do you think that that might be an emerging aspect of human beings like we were talking about before, that like ants have a way of communicating, bees have a way of communicating, that it's not outside the realm of possibility that one day human beings could develop an ability to see things or to communicate without words,
01:34:10.000and that maybe that's what we're grasping for?
01:34:13.000Well, as I mentioned, there could be a universal language, a language of neurons.
01:34:18.000So far, we take the language from the hippocampus, run it to our laptop, a laptop that converts these impulses into letters of the alphabet, let's say, and you learn how to type.
01:34:30.000What about bypassing the laptop and being able to communicate directly through these impulses so you can put two people together and they exchange impulses to each other?
01:34:42.000So that's an area that has not been explored, but it's a possibility because that would give you a universal language by which you could talk to people, not just exchange memories, but exchange words and communicate with each other.
01:34:59.000What do you make of the idea that people have a connection to other people and that maybe you're thinking about that person and then they call you?
01:35:07.000And it could just be random, it could be luck, but there's a lot of people out there that are really married to the idea that there's some unknown phenomenon that's taking place.
01:35:19.000Well, synchronicity is probably evolutionarily programmed into the brain because if you think about Jane and the phone rings and Jane is not there, you forget about it.
01:36:35.000But like I said, on average, most of the times, you just get nonsense calling you on the telephone, you know, selling you things, whatever.
01:36:44.000And the brain simply throws it out of its memory because it's useless information.
01:36:50.000And the brain has to sort out good versus bad memories.
01:36:53.000It remembers the hits, but does not remember the misses.
01:36:57.000I think Sheldrake was also one of the people that theorized this morphic resonance thing and used it, applied it to dogs.
01:37:06.000That dogs are able to figure out when their owner was coming home.
01:37:11.000And critics and skeptics said, well, the dog probably has a biological clock and the owner comes home around the same time every night.
01:37:19.000But I don't really remember the parameters of the experiment, if they tried to work around that by having the person come home at random times.
01:37:30.000Well, if you take a brain scan of the dog's brain, you realize that it looks very different from our brain.
01:37:39.000The area of the brain of the dog, I think, is about 100 times larger than the counterpart in the human brain.
01:37:47.000And so the brain, as soon as it sniffs the presence of its master, even though the master is quite a distance away, The dog will immediately sense that.
01:37:58.000And that's been used for COVID-19 detection at Helsinki Airport, for example.
01:38:04.000The dogs can be trained to recognize with 95% accuracy the presence of COVID-19.
01:38:12.000Dogs can be trained to recognize cancer better than most cancer tests because their olfactory area of the brain is much, much larger than the olfactory counterpart in human beings.
01:38:23.000So if you were to read the mind of a dog, You would not see the world as we see it.
01:38:30.000You would see a world of smells, a world swirling with hundreds of different kinds of smells that you are completely oblivious to.
01:38:38.000So the mind of a dog and the daydreams of a dog are quite different from the daydreams of a human being.
01:38:43.000Well, I can attest to that because my dog has a What's the best way to describe this?
01:38:51.000The fox friend visits the yard and shits in the yard, and my dog loves to roll around in the fox shit.
01:38:59.000So the other day, I let him out in the yard, and he's in the house, and I don't think anything of it, but my wife goes, what is on his neck?
01:39:08.000And I look, and he's just smeared all over his chest and his neck, and I go, oh, gee, I know what it is before I even smell it.
01:39:20.000So not only is his sense of smell far superior to ours, but it's very different because he liked that smell and he wanted to get it all over him for some strange reason.
01:41:09.000We have nothing going for us except the brain.
01:41:13.000Right, but didn't we evolve that way because of the brain and tools and our ability to cook food and all these different things that sort of slowly but surely weakened our physical body?
01:41:45.000And that's why your teeth are impacted.
01:41:47.000The dentist has to remove your impacted back teeth because the jaw kept getting smaller and smaller and smaller, jammed all the teeth together.
01:41:57.000So at the back of your mouth, all the teeth are jammed together and they have to be removed or else you get infected.
01:42:05.000And it's due to the fact that we learned how to cook meat.
01:42:08.000And meat is soft, while the meat of our ancestors was raw and extremely hard to eat and the bones had to be cracked apart.
01:42:17.000This is what I was talking about when I said that if you go back to look at ancient hominids and then you extrapolate and you think about what we're going to look like in a million years, don't you think we would probably look like those aliens?
01:42:30.000Well, I tend to think that all those science fiction stories of humans having gigantic heads and small, spindly bodies is wrong, because we have stopped evolving.
01:42:43.000There's no evolutionary pressure on us anymore.
01:42:46.000You can have kids anywhere on the planet Earth.
01:42:49.000There used to be bottlenecks, like Australia.
01:42:52.000There used to be bottlenecks where evolution speeded up.
01:42:54.000That's why evolution speeded up in Australia, because they were cut off from the mainstream evolution in Eurasia.
01:44:01.000So there's always an evolutionary pressure not to mate with a sick person.
01:44:05.000But if the person is reasonably healthy and, you know, makes a moderate good living, then you want to mate with that person and keep evolution going, and there's no evolutionary pressure.
01:44:16.000There was evolutionary pressure for us to have a big brain because we have nothing else going for us, right?
01:44:23.000But there's no evolutionary pressure to do anything else with the body.
01:44:28.000And that's why I think that in the main, gross anatomical features have stopped evolving.
01:44:33.000Chemically, we're still evolving because we don't mate with sick people.
01:44:38.000But other than that, I think that for the most part, evolution has stopped.
01:44:43.000But aren't we still, in some way, involved in natural selection?
01:44:48.000And isn't that one of the driving forces of evolution?
01:44:51.000Yeah, but what are the pressures on that happening?
01:44:54.000If you look at the movies, you'll find out that what they select for is people that are healthy.
01:45:00.000And no diseases in their history, but healthy.
01:45:05.000And healthy, in turn, correlates with beauty.
01:45:08.000Because beautiful forms tend to be healthy and vice versa.
01:45:11.000And so we mate with healthy people who are good looking because they're healthy.
01:45:17.000And as time goes on, and as we continue this mating with beautiful people that are healthy, don't you think there's at least some members of the human race that are experiencing some form of evolution?
01:45:34.000And maybe that will all be radically accelerated by technology when we integrate.
01:45:39.000When and if we decide to integrate via Neuralink or something along those lines, will that change the course of our advancement?
01:45:49.000Because when we're thinking about evolution, we're thinking about some sort of an improvement and a better adapting to our circumstances and environment.
01:45:59.000That's the difference between us as we are now versus ancient hominids with no language.
01:46:04.000Well, what humans do is enhance themselves.
01:46:31.000I think on a scale of, let's say, 200 years, It may be possible for us to mentally enhance ourselves, increase our memory, our capabilities, live on other planets, for example, by enhancing the human being because that's what we do.
01:46:49.000So do you think that that would be the solution to the bottleneck?
01:46:53.000So if we are right now sort of stagnant in the terms of natural evolution, That's some sort of a technological evolution, whether it's through things like gene manipulation, like CRISPR or the like, or some new, not yet invented technology that will be able to design a better human being.
01:47:16.000You know, in science fiction stories that I used to read as a kid, the human of the future has a gigantic head and very, very spindly organs of the body with a huge head to support.
01:47:27.000But you see, there's no evolutionary pressure in that direction.
01:47:31.000People do not want to mate with somebody with a gigantic head.
01:47:36.000There's no pressure in that direction.
01:47:38.000I think in the future, on the other hand, when we have artificial enhancement of the human body, we will enhance ourselves to look better looking.
01:47:46.000Not ugly like gigantic heads, but stronger supermen and superwomen rather than these deformed creatures from science fiction.
01:47:56.000But isn't that because we have this biological imperative to breed naturally, the way humans Animals do.
01:48:04.000The survival of the fittest aspect of it.
01:48:07.000The fact that the bigger, stronger animals breed before the weaker ones.
01:48:13.000And that we are sort of trapped in that dynamic by our biology, but we could escape that.
01:48:21.000If we are willing to abandon that method of reproduction and that would make us look like the aliens, that we would be these genderless, you know, almost like, you know, muscle-less things and that by integrating with technology And by having the satisfaction,
01:48:42.000being able to satisfy all of those biological imperatives, like the need for breeding, sex, all those things, if all those things are eliminated and we come up with something that's far superior than that, and it exists technologically or electronically or whatever it is,
01:48:58.000wouldn't that be a way to solve that issue?
01:49:01.000Well, some of that is happening already.
01:49:03.000Decades ago in Brooklyn, the Jewish population had to worry about Tay-Sachs.
01:49:08.000Tay-Sachs is a hereditary disease that afflicts Jewish people.
01:49:12.000And by taking a look at the embryos, you can simply discard the embryos that have the Tay-Sachs syndrome and keep the ones that don't.
01:50:36.000This has been going on for decades in the Jewish community.
01:50:39.000Now it's pretty much available commercially.
01:50:41.000And I think in the future, then you're talking about evolution being changed at the chemical level, that genetic diseases like hemophilia and cystic fibrosis for Europeans and sickle cell anemia for African Americans.
01:50:58.000These genetic diseases could deliberately be eliminated by choice.
01:51:04.000And that would just be one stage of our ability to manipulate people and improve upon when we think about the human race.
01:52:10.000If you take two twins and take a look at their life history and so on and so forth, you realize that about 50% of their behavior is genetically programmed and 50% is not genetically programmed.
01:52:23.000So even with two identical twins, behavior is actually quite difficult.
01:52:29.000But in the future, if we get better at this, Then that opens the possibility of people choosing which traits they want in their own family tree to propagate.
01:52:40.000So this is called gene therapy, and there's two kinds of gene therapy, somatic gene therapy and the gene therapy where you can actually change the genetic heritage of your lineage so that that gene that's afflicted your family for centuries can now be totally eliminated.
01:52:58.000But when you extrapolate that kind of technology and that kind of ability, ultimately, if you look at 100 years from now or 500 years from now, where do you think this goes?
01:53:09.000Well, I think that as time goes by, there's going to be a black market.
01:53:13.000Somebody will advertise a smart gene, a good-looking gene, a muscular gene, even if it's totally fake, and put it on the internet.
01:53:22.000We have not been able to monitor the drug trade.
01:53:27.000Think of what happens when genes Illegal genes are entering on the internet.
01:53:48.000I mean, maybe we'll put some restrictions on it in this country, but I would imagine that there'd be other countries if they had access to that technology and they wanted to create a superior version of a human being.
01:54:00.000I mean, think about the horrors that Hitler created in Germany because he was trying to create the Aryan race.
01:54:05.000This is the Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.
01:54:09.000In that society, they deliberately reduced the oxygen on embryos to make them mentally retarded.
01:54:16.000They deliberately made the workers stupid by depriving them of oxygen, and therefore, they would control the intelligence of their society that way.
01:54:27.000Now, that was a dream when he wrote that back in the 1930s, but many aspects of the technologies that he wrote about are actually possible.
01:54:36.000But, of course, morally, it would be, of course, a disaster to have these policies carried out.
01:54:42.000But what happens if you have a dictator?
01:54:44.000A dictator that wants soldiers that are mentally retarded but are very strong and obey orders to kill.
01:55:25.000So there was some sort of, at least an attempt, I mean I don't think, obviously it never worked, but I think he was trying to figure out a way if he could combine humans and apes and create a superior soldier.
01:55:41.000By the way, when you take a look at the movie Planet of the Apes, the recent versions of the movie are actually becoming possible in the sense that we know the complete genome of chimpanzees, we know the complete genome of humans,
01:56:12.000The genes that differ are the genes for manual dexterity, which we have and chimpanzees don't have very much, vocal cords, and of course, the size of the brain.
01:56:24.000We know which genes created, in some sense, the big brain, better vocalization, and manual dexterity.
01:56:33.000So it is conceivable, though we can't do it today, conceivable that something like Planet of the Apes may be possible.
01:56:40.000So like what Stalin theorized could be something that we could introduce human specific characteristics into apes and they could create like a super soldier.
01:56:53.000Well, how it would work, I don't know.
01:56:55.000All I'm saying is that we do know the genes that are different from chimpanzees and humans.
01:57:00.000We do know they accumulate in three major areas, manual dexterity, vocalization, and brain size.
01:57:19.000We're not there yet, but sooner or later we will be at the point where we have to look at the ethics of what happens when we transfer genes between species.
01:57:27.000Well, I mean, we need to look at the ethics of what happens when we experiment with makeup on, you know, animals, because we're still doing things along those lines.
01:57:35.000They're still doing all sorts of weird animal studies that may or may not be necessary.
01:57:41.000Well, the good aspect is that you can take certain organs of pigs that are compatible with humans and therefore extend the lifespan of people that have fatal diseases.
02:01:02.000You're a really great science communicator, and I know you've been doing this for a long time, but is it just a natural thing that you maintain this enthusiasm for all this new information?
02:01:17.000Well, my favorite Einstein story is Einstein said that if you cannot explain the theory to a child, the theory is probably useless.
02:01:27.000Meaning that great theories are based on simple principles, concepts that you can see visually, pictures.
02:01:36.000Useless theories are just a bunch of algebra that go nowhere.
02:01:39.000So if you take a look at all the great theories, they're pictorial.
02:02:12.000That's right, and they're very profound.
02:02:13.000We can explain the entire solar system with Newton's laws of motion and gravity based on, you know, balls going around other balls.
02:02:22.000Have you always been a person, though, that has not just been interested in these ideas, but also been interested in illustrating them to other people in a way that's comprehensible?
02:02:32.000Well, when I was a kid, well, first of all, when I was eight years old, something happened which completely changed my life.
02:02:41.000All the newspapers were saying that a great scientist had just died, and they put a picture of his desk.
02:03:07.000Why didn't he simply make up a theory?
02:03:10.000So I went to the library and I found out this man's name was Albert Einstein.
02:03:17.000And that unfinished book was The Theory of Everything.
02:03:22.000An equation that would allow us to, quote, read the mind of God.
02:03:27.000So I said to myself, wow, that's for me.
02:03:31.000But then when I tried to communicate this idea to other people, their eyes would glaze over.
02:03:37.000And it's because great ideas have a picture, have some kind of concept, a principle that can be explained in a few words.
02:03:48.000Evolution, one of the greatest principles of biology, can be explained by saying survival of the fittest.
02:03:54.000And so great ideas have very simple paradigms behind them.
02:03:59.000But to explain that is very difficult unless you know what the paradigm is.
02:04:05.000And so this idea of explaining the mind of God, do you think that we're going to ever come to a point as human beings where we can understand the creative force of the universe of everything?
02:04:19.000Well, the driving force behind the universe is energy.
02:04:44.000And that certainly exists with the human race, but it seems to exist with just the creation of the universe itself, from the Big Bang Theory to stars exploding, creating carbon, which is the source of all carbon-based life forms like us.
02:05:01.000All these things are constantly becoming more and more complex.
02:05:14.000I'm just happy that I get to talk to you.
02:05:17.000I mean, I don't have a conclusion, but I'm wondering why the universe tends to have this momentum towards further and further levels of complexity.
02:05:43.000Well, one of the fundamental paradoxes of the universe is the universe is based on a simple number of constants, like the speed of light, the mass of a proton.
02:05:56.000These numbers are tuned, tuned like a radio, to be exactly those frequencies and energies which make life possible.
02:06:05.000If the nuclear force were a little bit stronger, the sun would have burnt out billions of years ago, and we wouldn't be here talking about this.
02:06:13.000If the nuclear force were a little bit weaker, the sun would never ignite it at all, and we still wouldn't be here.
02:06:20.000Everything is just right to be tuned to allow for life.
02:06:25.000So when I was in second grade, I'll never forget my elementary school teacher said, Quote, God so loved the earth that he put the earth just right from the sun.
02:06:41.000And I said to myself, my God, that's right.
02:06:45.000The earth is tuned, tuned just right to allow for life.
02:06:51.000The nuclear force is tuned just right.
02:06:53.000If gravity were stronger, the universe would have been blown apart billions of years ago.
02:06:59.000The universe is tuned just right to allow for life.
02:07:04.000So, my elementary school teacher said, therefore, God exists.
02:07:08.000Well, now we have discovered thousands of planets which are too close.
02:07:14.000Which are too far from the Mother Sun, and there's no life as we know it on these planets.
02:07:19.000So in other words, it's a crapshoot that there are probably billions and billions of planets out there, but only a handful of them have things just right from where they should be.
02:07:32.000Do you think it's possible that we're the most advanced life form in the universe?
02:07:37.000Probably not, because on average, well, first of all, we've discovered 5,000 planets orbiting other stars, and of the 5,000 planets, maybe 20% of them are Earth-like, and our galaxy contains 100 billion stars,
02:07:56.000each one on average with one planet or more going around it.
02:08:01.000So the probability of life in the galaxy is almost 100%.
02:08:05.000100% life, but what about intelligent life?
02:08:09.000Yeah, that's what I was getting to, because all the bottlenecks, all the issues that keep all the other animals on this planet besides us from being the intelligent, manipulative creatures that we are, the way we manipulate our environment, I mean, and our constant thirst for innovation,
02:08:27.000that doesn't seem to exist in other animals.
02:09:18.000But there's enough planets out there that it's most likely common in the universe for some sort of an intelligent, innovative species to exist in not just one planet, but maybe an infinite number of planets.
02:09:33.000And just remember, the dinosaurs did not have a space program.
02:09:36.000And that's why they're not here today.
02:09:58.000Either before you get hit with an asteroid or become one of those societies, what is it, level one, where you're able to do something about supervolcanoes.
02:10:21.000That's Type I. And that's what we need to get to.
02:10:23.000And then we need to eventually become interstellar so that we can escape.
02:10:28.000If our star burns out, if there's a supernova in a nearby galaxy, if there's something that happens that kills us all, we at least can propagate the universe.
02:10:38.000And that's Type II. And we actually found evidence of something that may look like a Type II civilization, though that's very, very speculative.
02:10:46.000There's something called Tabby's star that decreases in intensity by 20% periodically.
02:12:07.000That's the only evidence we have of a possible Type II civilization.
02:12:12.000Which is called a Dyson sphere, a gigantic sphere that uses up all the energy of the Mother Star.
02:12:18.000How do you think the human race would handle it if we were confronted with just complete absolute evidence that intelligent life exists on another planet and they have the capability of coming here?
02:12:35.000Well, everyone thinks that when a flying saucer lands on the White House lawn and the aliens come out promising advanced technology for all of us, that there are protocols.
02:12:55.000There's no protocol for us to confront what happens when an extraterrestrial civilization lands on the planet Earth and announces its existence.
02:15:11.000It wouldn't be like other dolphins cruising in on a new pod of dolphins that didn't know any better and taking all their stuff, which is essentially what happened when Cortez met Montezuma.
02:16:07.000One is the aliens may simply step on us because we're irrelevant.
02:16:10.000And the other one is that they'll simply ignore us because we have nothing to contribute to them.
02:16:17.000What do you make of the stories and reports of nuclear weapons facilities being shut down when there was a sighting and that these things hovered over these nuclear facilities and they shut them down?
02:16:50.000And in the presence of a glowing ball in the air, so people put two and two together and said, maybe the aliens want to neutralize our ICBMs for the hell of it.
02:17:03.000All we know is that these are military men, these are military-grade equipment, there's plenty of documentation, and I think there's 120 military men over the years who've said that there are things like this at other missile bases.
02:17:21.000Now that means at least one of two things.
02:17:23.000Either the aliens are interested in our nuclear capability, Or our military simply has sensors everywhere that the average amateur does not.
02:17:36.000And therefore, of course, of course the military is going to pick it up because they have the radar, they have the sensors, and we don't.
02:17:45.000So there's several ways of looking at that.
02:17:47.000So it could be random that the machines and that all the ICBMs shut down at the same time that they're being visited by an unexplained aerial phenomenon.
02:17:59.000But if you were an intelligent species that had an eye on Earth and you're like...
02:18:04.000They're coming along, but they're kind of crazy.
02:18:07.000They're wild, territorial apes with thermonuclear weapons, and they get jealous and greedy, and some of them are evil sociopaths, and they lack moral intelligence, and they do crazy stuff.
02:18:19.000We have to just make sure that they don't destroy themselves.
02:18:22.000Because one of the things about UFO lore that I find fascinating is the uptick, the generally agreed upon uptick that happened after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
02:18:35.000Like that those bombs were dropped and that once they realized that we not only had nuclear capability but that we were willing to murder hundreds of thousands of people.
02:18:47.000That that's when all the sighting started.
02:19:25.000Nothing known to science can completely destroy a type 1 civilization unless there's a virus of some sort because they have no weapons that can do that.
02:19:33.000Once you're type 1, you have nuclear weapons, you discover element 92. As a Type 0 civilization, you discover element 1, 2, 3, 4. What is element 92?
02:19:46.000So once you go up the scale and you're Type 1, you eventually, inevitably, hit element 92, which is uranium, which has a finite critical mass, about 20 pounds, and you're able to create a nuclear weapon.
02:20:00.000And that's at the instant that you have become a Type 1 civilization.
02:20:05.000So if I was an alien with an advanced civilization, I would monitor those planets that are on the verge of becoming Type 1 because those are the planets that have the capability of discovering element 92. And once they did discover element 92 and implemented it in warfare,
02:20:25.000then I would think if you were really concerned, that would be the time to step in.
02:20:33.000But there is a logical basis to thinking about that because we are about to make the greatest transition in human history from Type 0 to Type 1. Are you aware of the story of Bob Lazar?
02:20:48.000He's the guy that supposedly worked at Area S-4, and he worked on back engineering spacecrafts.
02:20:55.000And this was in the late 1980s, and George Knapp had him on television, and he discussed it because he was concerned that they were going to...
02:21:04.000Possibly have him killed because he had access to this information.
02:21:08.000He worked at Los Alamos labs and he was a propulsions expert and they brought him on board to try to back-engineer this craft.
02:21:19.000It's one of the most famous stories in UFO folklore because there's a lot of chicanery involved.
02:21:30.000It's hard to know what's true and what's not true.
02:21:32.000But one of the things that he said was that this alien civilization that created the spacecraft had harnessed a stable version of Element 115. And he talked about this in the late 80s.
02:21:47.000And I don't believe they isolated Element 115 outside of it being theoretical.
02:21:53.000I don't think they isolated it until somewhere in the 2000s.
02:21:57.000Well, I get a lot of emails and some of them talk about conspiracy theories.
02:22:02.000And my advice to them is, if you are ever kidnapped by a flying saucer, for God's sake, steal something.
02:22:10.000An alien chip, an alien hammer, an alien paperclip, steal something because there's no law against stealing from an extraterrestrial civilization.
02:23:21.000The only thing that they have pointed to as evidence is, and it's not from this particular situation with Bob Lazar, but they've found objects that are made in a very sophisticated manner,
02:23:40.000No, I've heard that some people claim that they've been able to get globs of melted metal when a flying saucer landed, and among the debris they saw some pieces of melted metal.
02:23:51.000But these have never been analyzed to my degree.
02:23:53.000We should put them through a spectroscope to see what they're made of.
02:25:04.000And it tends to be unstable, and it does not seem to have any magical properties, but it's actually been created very briefly with our particle accelerators.
02:25:13.000That's what Bob Lazar discovered, or that he discussed, rather.
02:25:18.000But we didn't find anything unusual about it.
02:25:21.000I see people have looked for what are called metastable states that are transuranic, that is beyond uranium.
02:25:26.000Some people have theorized that way beyond uranium, there's an island of stability so that these elements are stable and you can make maybe bombs out of them.
02:25:37.000So the military was interested in that concept.
02:25:39.000But so far, no one's ever seen this island of stability that's way out there.
02:25:43.000What he was trying to say is that this extraterrestrial civilization had either developed or was in possession of a stable version of 115 and through that stable version of 115 they were able to distort gravity and that that's how that thing manipulated the environment around it to move at insane rates of speed.
02:26:04.000And what's interesting is, what he described, they actually observed on one of the videos that the government had gotten from fighter jets.
02:26:29.000The E in Perry is like a 3, I believe.
02:26:32.000And he's created this artistic version that is a recreation of what Bob Lazar described as seeing at Area S4. And what Bob Lazar says is this thing...
02:26:44.000Turns sideways, or turns like, instead of being perpendicular, or parallel rather, it goes up and down, and then moves at insane rates of speed.
02:26:58.000And it uses this element, obviously this sounds like crazy talk, He uses this element to bend gravity around it.
02:27:06.000And the way he described it was as if you were taking a bowling ball and placing it in the center of a mattress, that the weight of the bowling ball would push down and make everything else come around it.
02:27:20.000All I know is that in gravity theory, there's something called the equivalence principle, and that pieces of matter of the same weight are basically, operate the same under gravity.
02:28:06.000However, if it's possible that you are a Type III civilization, It's possible to have energy on a scale that is incomprehensible by our standards, and then you can start to manipulate gravity at will, okay?
02:28:54.000One of the things that I'm really interested in is supposedly there is evidence that hasn't been released.
02:29:03.000There's video evidence and photographic evidence that the government is in possession of.
02:29:07.000Christopher Mellon, who formerly of the Department of Defense, he discussed it, that there's some really high resolution, fascinating videos and photographs And that what we've seen is just a drop in the bucket and that the government is in possession of much more of this stuff.
02:29:30.000Has anybody ever discussed that with you?
02:29:32.000Well, no, but the military now admits that there is much more data out there that they have not been released.
02:29:41.000And their pilots many times shut off their cameras because no one would believe them, but they would report it verbally, but there's no record of it because they realized people would laugh at them.
02:29:53.000So the military has now issued a statement saying that pilots should report these things rather than simply erase these things.
02:30:02.000In fact, there's one report that said that these would go on for days.
02:30:06.000For days, these objects would be flying around, not just one second or whatever.
02:30:11.000So, yeah, there's a lot of stuff that's been not released to the public.
02:30:15.000Well, it's a very fascinating subject.
02:30:17.000And to me, it means a lot that someone like yourself, who is a very respected physicist, is willing to entertain these thoughts and discuss it with people.
02:30:27.000And I'm glad we're in a new era where that's possible.