The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2318 - Harold "Sonny" White

00:00:12.000 How's it going, Joe?

00:00:14.000 Pleasure to meet you.

00:00:15.000 Yeah, thank you for having me here today.

00:00:17.000 I appreciate it.

00:00:18.000 My pleasure.

00:00:18.000 Well, as soon as I saw the subject, I was like, oh yeah.

00:00:20.000 Like, what are you doing?

00:00:22.000 Right, right, right.

00:00:23.000 Advanced power and propulsion.

00:00:25.000 Kind of been a passion of mine for the last 20-some-odd years.

00:00:29.000 I suppose if I kind of look back through the annals of my life, right, I've been thinking about advanced power and propulsion ever since I was a teenager.

00:00:38.000 What do you think inspired that?

00:00:39.000 Was it space missions?

00:00:41.000 Did you look at it and go, I think we can do better?

00:00:44.000 Like, what was it?

00:00:46.000 Well, you know, I grew up in Washington, D.C., and so I got a chance to spend a lot of time.

00:00:53.000 In the Air and Space Smithsonian, I don't know if you've ever had a chance to go to that.

00:00:57.000 But growing up in D.C., getting a chance to go to the Air and Space Smithsonian, I got to see all these awesome examples of people working together to try and accomplish amazing things.

00:01:12.000 You might walk into the Air and Space Smithsonian and you just think about, wow, this is full of a bunch of stuff.

00:01:18.000 But it's not just about...

00:01:19.000 The stuff, right?

00:01:21.000 It's about the people that worked together to do all these amazing things, right?

00:01:25.000 Like the Bell X-1 rocket.

00:01:27.000 I mean, if you really want to go back, the Wright Flyer, right?

00:01:31.000 That's something where two guys worked together that made bicycles for a living that decided to go create something that flew.

00:01:39.000 And then in less than 50, you know, 50, 60 years from when they flew that Wright Flyer, right?

00:01:46.000 Putting human beings on the surface of the moon.

00:01:48.000 And so all that really resonated with me as a kid and I think tended to make me gravitate towards a technical field, although it wasn't a straight line.

00:02:00.000 I'd like to say I knew at an early age what my calling was and what I was going to do, but I bounced around for a little bit until I finally got on a path that I really connected with.

00:02:12.000 And so I think I knew...

00:02:14.000 Very early on in my journey in university, right, when I was going and getting my degree, that I wanted to work in advanced power and propulsion.

00:02:23.000 And so at that point, everything I did kind of worked towards how do I get the skills, how do I get the math and physics training that helps me kind of work in this domain?

00:02:32.000 Because I was thinking about the idea of space warps very early on, right?

00:02:36.000 It's amazing that you were so focused so early.

00:02:38.000 What a great head start.

00:02:40.000 It's a huge advantage to know what you're really interested in at such an early age.

00:02:44.000 Well, there were a few speed bumps along the way.

00:02:46.000 We took a few detours like any human, right?

00:02:50.000 You're like, I don't know if I want to do this yet, right?

00:02:52.000 Well, it is pretty extraordinary if you look at that number that you said, like from Orville Wright and Wilbur Wright to space travel, like how quick that is.

00:03:00.000 I mean, and we think about in terms of ancient history, how long it took us to get to this point and that kind of acceleration so rapidly.

00:03:11.000 Absolutely.

00:03:15.000 You know, there's another interesting story, right?

00:03:19.000 So my background is I've got a PhD in physics.

00:03:23.000 I had a master's in mechanical engineering, so I'm both a scientist and an engineer.

00:03:28.000 So I have, you know, deep appreciation for both disciplines.

00:03:32.000 But within the discipline of science, right?

00:03:34.000 You know, we just talked about the right flyer and then going to the surface of the moon, and that's more of a kind of an engineering story.

00:03:40.000 On the topic of science, you know, think about E equals MC squared.

00:03:46.000 Probably heard that or saw it on a coffee cup.

00:03:49.000 I don't really honestly know what it means.

00:03:51.000 It's a theory of relativity.

00:03:52.000 It's theory of relativity.

00:03:53.000 I could say it to people like, come on, man.

00:03:55.000 E equals mc squared.

00:03:57.000 Whatever.

00:03:58.000 What is the theory of relativity?

00:04:00.000 So E equals mc squared, right, is an equation that relates energy to mass.

00:04:06.000 If you were to take some modest piece of mass, say you've got some tidbits here, the mass that's in this pen right here.

00:04:15.000 Take the mass that's in this pen and you convert it to energy.

00:04:18.000 That equation helps you understand exactly how much energy you can potentially release.

00:04:23.000 And so that equation, why it might sound very humble, right?

00:04:26.000 Oh, equals mc squared.

00:04:27.000 That's cool.

00:04:28.000 But it had super big implications.

00:04:30.000 And you just talked about how quickly things move.

00:04:33.000 So let's talk about that for just a second.

00:04:35.000 Equals mc squared.

00:04:36.000 Einstein comes up with this equation.

00:04:39.000 1911.

00:04:39.000 Somebody will look it up on the internet and correct me if I'm wrong.

00:04:42.000 It comes up with the equation in 1911.

00:04:44.000 They split the first atom in 1928-1932 time frame.

00:04:49.000 I can't remember the exact time frame.

00:04:52.000 1942, we have the first nuclear reactor underneath the squash court.

00:04:58.000 At University of Chicago, they did things very differently in the 1940s, Joe.

00:05:03.000 Under a squash?

00:05:04.000 Yeah, right.

00:05:05.000 Did they let the people playing squash know?

00:05:07.000 Who knows, right?

00:05:08.000 What happened to them?

00:05:09.000 Are they X-Men now?

00:05:10.000 Right, exactly.

00:05:11.000 That's the origin story.

00:05:12.000 That's the Spider-Man origin story, right?

00:05:14.000 Yeah.

00:05:15.000 That's where Phoenix came from.

00:05:17.000 Yeah, your friends tell you, I can...

00:05:18.000 I think I can hear the color blue now, right?

00:05:22.000 So anyway, I had the first nuclear reactor underneath the squash court in 1942, and then the Trinity test.

00:05:29.000 That's the atomic bomb test in 1945.

00:05:32.000 And so in the span of just a few decades, we go from a cute coffee cup-worthy equation to a paradigm shift in human existence, right?

00:05:44.000 And that's...

00:05:45.000 Without computers and the way we think of it, that's without machine learning and without AI.

00:05:51.000 And so as we continue to move forward, right, we've got, you know, if you think about everything we know in physics today, general relativity and quantum mechanics are kind of the two bookends of everything that we know.

00:06:02.000 We're going to continue to expand our knowledge, and we will come up with new E equals MC squared kind of equations.

00:06:11.000 But now we're equipped with computers.

00:06:14.000 We're equipped with machine learning, AI.

00:06:16.000 And so it's going to be exponential growth, right?

00:06:19.000 So it'll be interesting to see how quickly we go from, hey, I have this new insight.

00:06:25.000 Found this funny thing in a lab to, wow, it changes everything.

00:06:29.000 How we do everything as a...

00:06:32.000 Culture and community, right?

00:06:33.000 So there's several problems with the current propulsion systems, right?

00:06:39.000 And the big one is like biological entities being able to absorb g-force.

00:06:43.000 No matter if you super hyper-engineer something and have it really crazy, but the things that we're seeing in the sky, the things that people describe, like Commander David Fravor, when he described that tic-tac, that vehicle, that thing, whatever it was, that went from...

00:06:59.000 Above 50,000 feet to sea level in a second and shot off at insane rate speeds.

00:07:05.000 Biological entities can't survive that kind of G-force, we think.

00:07:11.000 Yeah, so I think in terms of a human ability to take Gs...

00:07:17.000 Yeah, I should say human, not like tardigrades could... 1.00

00:07:19.000 Right, right.

00:07:21.000 Yeah, so a human being can, well...

00:07:25.000 Trained human beings can take potentially up to 9 Gs.

00:07:29.000 Have you ever done that before?

00:07:30.000 I have not.

00:07:31.000 I did it once with the Blue Angels.

00:07:33.000 I got to 7.5 Gs.

00:07:35.000 It was bananas.

00:07:36.000 That's awesome.

00:07:37.000 I bet that was an experience.

00:07:39.000 I am so jealous.

00:07:41.000 Mad respect for those guys.

00:07:44.000 First of all, the biggest thing when you go to that area, these guys are jacked.

00:07:49.000 They're in, like, insane shape.

00:07:50.000 Because you're literally forcing blood into your brain to tolerate the G-force.

00:07:55.000 So they have to hold on to their stick, you know, their joystick, and they're going...

00:07:59.000 While they're flying, going, you know, through the canyons, it's bananas.

00:08:05.000 Like, extraordinary.

00:08:06.000 So imagine...

00:08:08.000 A person being able to tolerate that on a regular basis and perform fine motor skill functions like, you know, pointing and aiming and shooting and all the crazy stuff that those guys are capable of doing.

00:08:19.000 Being able to think.

00:08:20.000 And in some cases, if they're in combat, being able to make critical decisions.

00:08:24.000 You know, in some ways, what you're talking about...

00:08:26.000 When you look at NASA's astronaut corps, right, as part of their regimen, they have to go up in T-38s on a regular basis to try and help train with the whole, how do you make decisions, right, when your life is on the line and the time is finite, right?

00:08:43.000 So there's a whole aspect of this that's kind of geared towards keeping those portions of the brain trained and sharp, right?

00:08:50.000 Right, which is the best argument for AI taking over.

00:08:56.000 So when you hear about stories about these fighter pilots finding these objects in the sky that exhibit extraordinary capabilities and don't have all the signatures of traditional propulsion systems, what is your thoughts?

00:09:19.000 I have a lot of friends that are extremely interested in a lot of things that are out and about in the media and in the literature.

00:09:28.000 But generally, I tend to be agnostic.

00:09:32.000 And here's why.

00:09:34.000 In everything that's currently out that people talk about and highlight, it's difficult for me to take the data and the evidence and then...

00:09:46.000 Pull that into the work that we do in the lab with some of the different test devices we work with as we kind of explore the frontiers of where physics and propulsion might intersect.

00:09:58.000 It's hard to take that and turn that into some kind of an action plan, if you will.

00:10:03.000 So I'm certainly aware, like David Fravor, the experience that he had with, I think he calls them Tic Tacs, right?

00:10:10.000 An amazing account.

00:10:13.000 And there's multiple people that saw it, multiple platforms that saw it.

00:10:19.000 And so to start with, right, I thought maybe there was a small chance that was...

00:10:25.000 Just like we have stealth technology, right, where if you want to hide a plane, what if we had the ability to project something, right, through some mechanism where we could make people go where we wanted them to go, right?

00:10:38.000 Because I know there's a technology that uses, like, two different lasers that triangulate a certain point in open air, and they put enough energy into a particular location that they ionize the air, and so it creates like a...

00:10:51.000 A bright pixel.

00:10:52.000 And so they use that to create three-dimensional displays that kind of look like they're just floating out in air.

00:10:58.000 Now, they're not quite as big as what we saw described with the Nimitz encounter on the West Coast.

00:11:05.000 So I thought for a little while, maybe...

00:11:07.000 That might be something that we're seeing.

00:11:09.000 They can project plasma as well, right?

00:11:11.000 Is that the same thing?

00:11:13.000 It's the same thing.

00:11:13.000 So the two lasers intersect.

00:11:15.000 They ionize the air, which creates a plasma.

00:11:17.000 And they can do this over long distances as well, right?

00:11:20.000 I don't know about long distances.

00:11:22.000 I know they can do it over short distances.

00:11:24.000 And so for a while there, I wondered if that might be something that could explain some of what...

00:11:30.000 That makes sense.

00:11:31.000 ...what David Fravor and the group saw.

00:11:33.000 The only problem would be the radar.

00:11:35.000 Because I don't know.

00:11:37.000 You wouldn't pick up that on radar, would you?

00:11:39.000 Because it's not a mass, right?

00:11:41.000 Well, the plasma would certainly absorb a radar signal, right?

00:11:45.000 Because it's going to polarize any electromagnetic wave that tries to go through it.

00:11:49.000 So it would show up?

00:11:50.000 It might.

00:11:52.000 Would it be possible to make something that big that's 20 feet long out of that?

00:11:58.000 It's hard for me to imagine that.

00:12:00.000 Right.

00:12:01.000 So I think there's one piece of data that just came out.

00:12:05.000 In the last few weeks, I think David Fravor's wingman, Alex, I think her name is Alex Dietrich.

00:12:13.000 I can't remember the name.

00:12:14.000 I think you're right.

00:12:15.000 Something like that.

00:12:16.000 So she came out.

00:12:17.000 And so in all the things associated with that particular encounter, right, one of the things I've been trying to figure out is how do they describe the specular surface of the tic-tac, right?

00:12:30.000 Because if it's the...

00:12:31.000 These plasma pixels that I'm talking about that kind of creates a volumetric display, I would speculate it might be kind of a glowy-looking thing.

00:12:40.000 But I think Alex, in her account, described as kind of a flat type of...

00:12:47.000 Like Matt, yeah.

00:12:48.000 Yeah, so that kind of torpedoed my working theory.

00:12:52.000 But again, while it's amazing and incredible, and it's something that people...

00:12:58.000 I want to go think about and go try and collect more data.

00:13:01.000 It doesn't help me do what I'm doing in the lab.

00:13:04.000 And so I think I kind of keep, you know, my eyes dart every once in a while over to that particular topic.

00:13:10.000 What's that about?

00:13:11.000 That's interesting.

00:13:12.000 Yeah.

00:13:12.000 I mean, I'm honestly agnostic as well.

00:13:15.000 I bounce back and forth from being really excited about it to feel like I'm being duped.

00:13:19.000 All the time.

00:13:20.000 Jamie and I talk about it all the time.

00:13:22.000 I'm back in.

00:13:23.000 Jamie's back in and Jamie will find something.

00:13:25.000 He's like, I think I'm back in.

00:13:26.000 How are we right now?

00:13:27.000 I'm looking through the article about the Navy laser that can do this and trying to figure out how big the objects are that they can make move.

00:13:33.000 But they're definitely...

00:13:34.000 They're designed to trick heat-seeking missiles, so they've got to be big enough for that.

00:13:39.000 Okay, so they make a heat signature, which makes sense, right?

00:13:43.000 Because they're plasma.

00:13:44.000 Yeah, they come from tens to hundreds of meters away.

00:13:46.000 Where are you at right now with UFOs?

00:13:48.000 Are you in or you're out?

00:13:52.000 I'm still in on something, but I don't know what the object is or what it is.

00:13:58.000 But we've both been in and out a bunch.

00:13:59.000 The consciousness thing.

00:14:01.000 I'm on that this week or month.

00:14:03.000 Oh, the one where they think they can call them in?

00:14:05.000 Not just that you need consciousness to use it or talk to it or see it.

00:14:09.000 Maybe.

00:14:10.000 Maybe.

00:14:12.000 There was some talk of gravity propulsion systems in the 1950s, I believe.

00:14:18.000 There was some work that was being done, and there was some discussion about whether or not it would be possible to use nuclear energy to create some sort of a gravity drive.

00:14:27.000 What is your thoughts on that stuff?

00:14:29.000 Well, I think in order to do – so I'm going to use a different parlance.

00:14:33.000 Okay.

00:14:33.000 Please do because obviously I don't know what I'm talking about.

00:14:35.000 No, no.

00:14:36.000 That's okay.

00:14:37.000 Right.

00:14:37.000 So in terms of some of the language that we use in the literature when we talk about something that would, I think, trace to what you mean when you say a gravity drive, right?

00:14:45.000 We might use the parlance space drive, right?

00:14:48.000 And so conceptually, it would be a form of propulsion that instead of using – Some form of onboard propellant in a tank, right?

00:14:57.000 It's found some way to couple to some external field, whatever it might be, and can generate some kind of a propulsive force.

00:15:06.000 And so in my mind, in order for us to ever be able to go down a path where we're trying to create something like that that might look like that or smell like that or what have you, we need to have a deeper understanding of gravity, right?

00:15:23.000 You know, we just talked about E equals MC squared, and so I'm going to back up just a minute.

00:15:29.000 If you think about everything we know today in physics as a Venn diagram, there are two circles on this Venn diagram, and they touch at a little tangent point.

00:15:39.000 One of those circles is quantum mechanics that helps us understand how atoms behave, how light moves.

00:15:47.000 And in the other circle, we have the words...

00:15:50.000 General relativity.

00:15:52.000 And so that helps us understand how the cosmos evolves, how stars move and galaxies move.

00:15:58.000 And so those two circles touch at a single tangent point.

00:16:02.000 They don't overlap.

00:16:04.000 So what that says is gravity.

00:16:06.000 We don't know how to connect gravity to quantum mechanics.

00:16:09.000 We don't understand that.

00:16:11.000 But in terms of all of our daily life, just that level of physics helps us every single day, right?

00:16:16.000 This cell phone.

00:16:17.000 It's only possible because of quantum mechanics and GPS is only as accurate as it is because we use general relativity to correct the atomic clocks on the GPS satellites.

00:16:29.000 But until we develop...

00:16:32.000 A better understanding of how gravity might connect to quantum mechanics or alternately how quantum mechanics might connect to gravity.

00:16:42.000 I don't know that we'll be able to make meaningful progress, right?

00:16:47.000 And so we need more circles on the Venn diagram.

00:16:50.000 Just those two aren't enough.

00:16:52.000 There are a number of people that would speculate that...

00:16:55.000 You know, quantum mechanics is incomplete.

00:16:58.000 General relativity is incomplete.

00:17:00.000 Perhaps it's even emergent.

00:17:03.000 I think you had Hal Puthoff on here a few days ago, right?

00:17:06.000 And he talked about a physicist by the name of Sakharov who talked about the fact that I think he was one of the guys that first pioneered the thought process.

00:17:14.000 Maybe gravity is simply an emergent phenomena and we'll develop a better understanding as we add more circles in and around the quantum mechanics circle, if you will.

00:17:24.000 And so I think in order for us...

00:17:27.000 To be able to, you know, come up with a widget, right?

00:17:30.000 You know, some widget that generates a force in the form of a space drive.

00:17:35.000 We're going to have to have more physics than what we currently have.

00:17:38.000 So we'll have to have more of an understanding of what gravity actually is.

00:17:41.000 Yes.

00:17:41.000 And what generates gravity.

00:17:42.000 Yeah.

00:17:43.000 And it's not just the gravity thing.

00:17:45.000 It's quantum mechanics.

00:17:47.000 Quantum mechanics is completely incompatible with general relativity, right?

00:17:52.000 So this is a big issue, right?

00:17:54.000 There are tons of people that spend their entire life...

00:18:00.000 It's a big conundrum.

00:18:02.000 Well, it's so fascinating to me because if you were a scientist in the 1400s and you were having this discussion with those people, they would think you're a wizard.

00:18:09.000 Absolutely.

00:18:10.000 Especially if you held up something like that. 0.98

00:18:13.000 I'd get burned at a stake.

00:18:14.000 Imagine they show the screen.

00:18:16.000 And if I said, Jamie, pull something up.

00:18:18.000 They're like, what is he doing?

00:18:19.000 What is happening?

00:18:20.000 What is it that you showeth upon thy wall?

00:18:23.000 So imagine...

00:18:26.000 Imagine going into the future and seeing what all this stuff is going to look like once we gain more and more understanding, more scientists, more researchers piling on their discoveries, and then ultimately one day we'll be looking back on 2025 going, look at those barbarians. 0.89

00:18:42.000 Oh my gosh, did you see that show with Sonny and Joe where they were talking about what a bunch of maroons, right? 1.00

00:18:47.000 They didn't even know what gravity was yet.

00:18:48.000 Oh my gosh, yeah.

00:18:49.000 It would be like bloodletting. 0.99

00:18:51.000 It's really kind of interesting because I bet Every current civilization thinks it's at the pinnacle, and that everybody else is a moron, and we are a seriously advanced society. 0.93

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00:20:26.000 It's interesting.

00:20:27.000 You know, I get a chance to go do a bunch of discussions with students all over the globe, right?

00:20:33.000 And talking about space exploration, specifically, you know, advanced power and propulsion, right?

00:20:40.000 I really kind of get into this whole difference between to space and through space.

00:20:45.000 And so as part of that narrative, right, I always spend a little bit of time.

00:20:49.000 Telling them, right, we live in a society where everybody likes to pretend like we got all this stuff figured out, right?

00:20:55.000 There's nothing left to figure out, right?

00:20:58.000 You know, we got cell phones and internet and airplanes and all different kinds of stuff.

00:21:03.000 There's really nothing left.

00:21:04.000 Just maintain what we have.

00:21:06.000 Right, well, yeah, exactly.

00:21:07.000 And so I like to remind them, right, when I talk about, well, let's talk about that.

00:21:13.000 What do we know?

00:21:13.000 And then I kind of take them through that little thought process of...

00:21:18.000 The Venn diagram, just to say, hey, look, right, these two models are not compatible.

00:21:24.000 That says there's a bigger circle, right, that connects the dots between all this stuff.

00:21:29.000 And I highly doubt we'll ever come up with a single step that goes from just the two circles on the Venn diagram to a final one, some grand unified theory.

00:21:38.000 I don't think we'll ever take like one single step.

00:21:41.000 I think it's going to be a series of a bunch of different steps by a bunch of different people over many.

00:21:46.000 And it's like there's so much stuff to go figure out.

00:21:50.000 Come help us push back against the darkness.

00:21:53.000 Help us forever hunting the edge of the map, if you will.

00:21:57.000 And so I think sometimes in today's society, we get lulled.

00:22:01.000 Into this sense of security that we got it all figured out.

00:22:04.000 I mean, we got AI, says all kinds of neat, helps us out, you know, all these different things.

00:22:09.000 And so we get lulled into this sense that we've got it all figured out.

00:22:13.000 And there's just, there's so much mystery out there for us to go figure out. 0.96

00:22:16.000 Also, there's a lot of people that are full of shit that are muddying up the water, so it's very difficult to know what is exactly true at any current moment. 0.99

00:22:24.000 I mean, just in the UAP world, there's a ton of grifters. 0.99

00:22:29.000 There's a ton of people that are just putting sensational nonsense out to just get a bunch of clicks.

00:22:34.000 In some ways, again, when I talk to students and I kind of give them suggestions and advice and mentoring, it's like if you've got some particular area that you're interested in and it's high...

00:22:46.000 Highly technical.

00:22:47.000 You know, go do the work that's necessary to give yourself the, you know, the math skills, the engineering skills, the science, whatever you need.

00:22:55.000 Make sure you're equipped.

00:22:57.000 So that you can, whatever's in front of you, you can go look at it with a discerning eye.

00:23:02.000 Because like you said, the Internet's changed the world for both the better and the worse.

00:23:07.000 The signal-to-noise ratio has changed a lot.

00:23:10.000 There's a lot of noise out there.

00:23:12.000 And so the best thing you can do to try and cope with something like that is just to make sure you're trained and you're capable of being able to discern something that's real versus something that's, you know.

00:23:23.000 Nonsense.

00:23:24.000 So what is real, in terms of at least conceptually, what is real about warp drives?

00:23:33.000 You know, great question.

00:23:39.000 When we talk about space exploration, right, a lot of times people think of like a Falcon 9 rocket, Saturn V, or...

00:23:51.000 A space shuttle.

00:23:53.000 And these are all wonderful examples that should come to mind.

00:23:56.000 But this is what we need to get to space, right?

00:23:59.000 You've got to climb against the gravitational well, if you will, and get into space.

00:24:03.000 But when you get into space and you want to try and move through space, right, you...

00:24:07.000 The things that you might use to solve that problem in an optimal sense might look very differently from the idea of rockets to get you to space.

00:24:17.000 And so through space is a lot of things that we can bring to bear.

00:24:20.000 But this gets into, I think, a larger framework I'd like to unpack with you today to talk about this through space type of thought process.

00:24:30.000 But since you specifically asked about warp, I'm going to kind of jump forward.

00:24:33.000 I'm going to jump forward on the discussion thread.

00:24:37.000 We don't have to.

00:24:37.000 We can use it as a teaser.

00:24:38.000 Okay.

00:24:39.000 Well, let's use that as a teaser.

00:24:41.000 Let's back up then.

00:24:42.000 And so I provided a...

00:24:46.000 A video that we pulled together called Go Incredibly Fast.

00:24:51.000 I did it with a Swedish digital artist, Eric Ornquist.

00:24:54.000 He's done a bunch of wonderful videos for NASA and a bunch of other friends.

00:24:59.000 But this video kind of encapsulates the challenge of time and distance in space, right?

00:25:07.000 If you want to send human beings past Mars and the solar system, that sets up a problem statement, right, that changes the nature.

00:25:15.000 of the types of technologies that you might think about bringing to bear to solve the problem.

00:25:20.000 And so this video tells us what are some things that we can do to solve this problem spanning from things that we kind of know to things that we kind of don't know in terms of both physics and engineering.

00:25:33.000 And so this video is kind of an emotional encapsulation of a highly technical story.

00:25:39.000 So let's watch this to be a great way to kind of tee off this discussion.

00:25:45.000 The sky calls to us.

00:25:46.000 We do not destroy ourselves.

00:25:47.000 We will one day venture to the stars.

00:25:50.000 Carl Sagan.

00:25:58.000 As incredible as it may seem, there will be a time, and it may be closer than you think, when we live on other worlds.

00:26:07.000 The moon, Mars, and in the space between.

00:26:12.000 And when that day comes, Just as always, our children will look with curiosity across these new horizons with a desire to go further and to explore what lies beyond.

00:26:29.000 But beyond Mars, the distances between worlds grow immensely, even within our own solar system, and become truly vast in between stars.

00:26:43.000 If we ever want to reach out across these distances, we need to learn how to go fast.

00:26:54.000 Nuclear electric propulsion.

00:26:56.000 Here we go.

00:26:58.000 Yeah, so this is what we know.

00:26:59.000 Using our current knowledge of physics and engineering, we could build nuclear locomotives to take humans to all the worlds in our solar system.

00:27:08.000 But a starship powered with a nuclear heart?

00:27:12.000 Aimed for even our closest star, Proxima Centauri, would have to harbor hundreds of generations of people all living their entire lives aboard before reaching its destination four and a quarter light-years away.

00:27:30.000 It would take two years just to reach the orbit of Saturn and another 2,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri.

00:27:40.000 We need to be able to go faster.

00:27:48.000 Fusion propulsion.

00:27:52.000 We should re-record this with you doing that for each of our current knowledge of physics.

00:27:56.000 But with engineering we have yet to develop, we can imagine a propulsion system with the sun for a heart.

00:28:03.000 A fusion engine that could accelerate a starship up to 5% of the speed of light.

00:28:13.000 This ship could cross the orbit of Saturn in six months and reach Proxima Centauri in just over a century.

00:28:23.000 But if we want to traverse interstellar distances in less than a human lifetime, we have to go incredibly fast.

00:28:38.000 The universe has shown us that this can be done.

00:28:41.000 By altering the scale of space itself.

00:28:44.000 And we are working to develop new understandings of physics to learn how this might be controlled.

00:28:51.000 If we could construct a starship with a propulsion system that decreases space in front of it and expands space behind it, this ship could cross enormous distances effectively faster than the speed of life.

00:29:09.000 *music*

00:29:15.000 Such a ship would reach from Mars to Saturn in just a matter of minutes and be able to reach Proxima Centauri in less than six months.

00:29:30.000 Whoa! 0.71

00:29:35.000 From there, there are no limits to where we could go.

00:29:45.000 Perhaps one day, humanity will look up at an alien night sky and strain to find the pale yellow dot that is our sun, our home, and know for the first time, as we look back on ourselves, that we are not alone in the universe.

00:30:06.000 This journey starts today.

00:30:11.000 Whoa! 0.71

00:30:12.000 First of all, whoever did the graphics for that...

00:30:15.000 Yeah, Eric Wernquist was the Swedish digital artist that we used to develop that video.

00:30:22.000 And so...

00:30:23.000 That guy nailed it.

00:30:24.000 Oh my gosh, didn't he?

00:30:25.000 That's pretty cool.

00:30:26.000 Yeah, we had like a three-swim lane chart, if you will, that's a very technical version of this.

00:30:31.000 We have a copy of it.

00:30:33.000 We don't need to bring it up, Jamie.

00:30:34.000 I can just do it verbally here.

00:30:36.000 But it kind of encapsulates that thought process of this time-distance problem.

00:30:42.000 You know, when we think about space exploration with humans, we think about Mars, right?

00:30:47.000 We've sent human beings to the moon.

00:30:49.000 We're probably going to go back to the moon sooner rather than later.

00:30:52.000 And then eventually we want to send human beings to Mars.

00:30:55.000 But what if we wanted to send human beings to Saturn and we want to get them there in 200 days?

00:31:05.000 That's a timeframe that's kind of compatible with what we've thought about for humans to Mars, 180 to 220 days.

00:31:11.000 If you frame the question that way, the amount of energy that's necessary to get humans to Saturn in 200 days is an order of magnitude more energy than it takes to get a payload from the surface of the Earth to low Earth orbit.

00:31:28.000 So all that to say, right, that particular problem...

00:31:32.000 Chemical propulsion can't solve that problem.

00:31:36.000 And so this is starting to kind of frame the discussion, this narrative that we've pulled together when we talk to students all around the globe, the difference between to space and the difference of through space.

00:31:48.000 When you talk about through space, the distances are just so big, right?

00:31:51.000 You have to rethink the problem, especially when you constrain it with how long does it take to get there, right?

00:31:58.000 And so this particular...

00:32:01.000 This particular video encapsulates things that we might do to solve problems like that, and maybe even into another star system, talking about things that we know.

00:32:11.000 Like the very first part of the video, the vignette was, like you said, nuclear electric propulsion, right?

00:32:20.000 And so this is a situation where it's known physics, known engineering.

00:32:24.000 We've got a nuclear reactor that's fissioning.

00:32:28.000 Uranium, let's say.

00:32:29.000 It's splitting apart atoms, and that's the source of energy.

00:32:33.000 You use that energy to plug into some form of electric propulsion, like you've got the neon sign that's behind you.

00:32:41.000 Imagine you could take one of those tubes and cut the end off and allow the blue or green glowy bit to come out the back, right?

00:32:50.000 And so the efficiency of electric propulsion versus chemical propulsion is much better.

00:32:57.000 And so that's a way we can potentially think of a spacecraft architecture, nuclear electric propulsion, a nuclear reactor coupled to some form of electric propulsion that allows us to send human beings to Saturn in 200 days.

00:33:12.000 And technically speaking, that capability, if we didn't invent anything else beyond that.

00:33:18.000 That would allow us to send human beings everywhere in the solar system.

00:33:22.000 That's why that's extremely important.

00:33:23.000 And now we're getting into the passion of what I fought for so hard working at NASA to try and advocate for this understanding of the big difference between these two types of problems, if you will.

00:33:37.000 If we make up our minds to...

00:33:42.000 Perfect the idea of nuclear electric propulsion as a capability.

00:33:46.000 I mean, that unlocks the whole solar system, right?

00:33:49.000 That's just kind of like just the tip of the iceberg.

00:33:51.000 And so the video then goes on.

00:33:53.000 After we, you know, after we kind of say, you know, nuclear electric propulsion can open up a lot of stuff for us.

00:33:59.000 But it's still going to take, you remember how long it said to go to Proxima Centauri?

00:34:03.000 It was like, you know.

00:34:03.000 A hundred years.

00:34:05.000 Two thousand years.

00:34:06.000 Two thousand years.

00:34:07.000 Oh, that's right.

00:34:07.000 So, I mean, I don't know about you, but that better be one comfortable window seat, right?

00:34:11.000 That's a long time to be on a flight, if you will. 0.90

00:34:13.000 Now, yeah, how screwed up are the people that live? 0.59

00:34:17.000 Right. 0.98

00:34:17.000 Because you're inbreeding. 0.98

00:34:18.000 Yeah, it's definitely, it's going to be generations, right?

00:34:21.000 It's going to be generations.

00:34:23.000 We're going to have to have babies.

00:34:24.000 With who?

00:34:25.000 How are you going to do that?

00:34:26.000 How are you going to choose?

00:34:26.000 Are we going to have arranged marriages in space?

00:34:28.000 Is that progress?

00:34:30.000 Right, right.

00:34:31.000 Force people to carry children? 0.98

00:34:33.000 Or they might be frozen.

00:34:37.000 What's that movie?

00:34:39.000 With the blue aliens.

00:34:40.000 I can't remember.

00:34:41.000 Imagine if they're debating a woman's right to choose while they're in space. 0.89

00:34:44.000 You know what I'm saying?

00:34:45.000 Oh my gosh, right.

00:34:46.000 It gets weird.

00:34:47.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:34:47.000 We need to keep civilization.

00:34:49.000 If you all commit.

00:34:51.000 But I didn't commit.

00:34:52.000 My grandparents did.

00:34:52.000 But you're still on this thing forever.

00:34:54.000 Yeah, my great, great, great, great, great grandparents committed, right?

00:34:57.000 This episode is brought to you by Visible.

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00:35:03.000 I want to know everything about everything.

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00:35:59.000 Not only that...

00:36:00.000 The reality is, by the time they get there, the human beings will have created technology that far exceeds that and will probably beat them to it.

00:36:09.000 You kind of see that hinted in the video, too, right?

00:36:11.000 Where you got the slow boat, and then you got the fusion's the next one that comes by, and the guy's waving as he goes by. 0.98

00:36:19.000 Well, for sure, you would be a sucker to get on the first ship.

00:36:22.000 Because by the time it gets there, the new ships will have already been there for months. 0.91

00:36:27.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:36:27.000 They'll welcome you when you arrive, right?

00:36:29.000 And children of those people will welcome you.

00:36:32.000 So the fusion propulsion is kind of the next step in the story.

00:36:36.000 And so when we make that step, we're a little bit into the unknown, right?

00:36:40.000 We understand the physics, right?

00:36:43.000 The sun at the center of our solar system works on fusion.

00:36:45.000 It fuses atoms together instead of splitting them apart to generate electricity.

00:36:51.000 And so fusion propulsion is kind of another step in capability, right, that allows us to do...

00:36:57.000 Maybe do an interstellar mission that's measured in 100, maybe 200 years.

00:37:03.000 Still kind of long, but that's a lot more respectable than 2,000 years.

00:37:09.000 Contrary to what the movie Iron Man might say, we don't have fusion reactors that are gigawatts the size of this coffee cup, right?

00:37:16.000 They can stick in your chest.

00:37:17.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:37:18.000 We got a little work to do before we get there.

00:37:23.000 Well, that comic book was written probably in the 50s.

00:37:26.000 Right, right.

00:37:27.000 So when you think about this kind of progress, this ability to generate that amount of power and to bend gravity and to bend space, What kind of a timeline do you think we're on for something like that?

00:37:44.000 That's actually one of the most popular questions I get when I go talk to students, right?

00:37:49.000 Whenever you talk about that last swim lane in the video, the idea of a space warp, you can expand and contract space and that allows us to potentially go somewhere in months, whereas we were just previously talking about millennia and centuries, right?

00:38:05.000 Just to remind folks, we just talked about everything that we know of physics today, quantum mechanics, general relativity, right?

00:38:12.000 We got to add some more stuff to the Venn diagram to develop an understanding.

00:38:18.000 And so my crystal ball is no better than yours, Joe.

00:38:22.000 I couldn't say specifically if, when, something like that might happen.

00:38:29.000 But I can say I actually do know.

00:38:31.000 What we need to be working on right now, right?

00:38:34.000 And so in that context, right, I'm certainly doing the things that I think might help make meaningful progress towards that type of operative goal at some point in time.

00:38:45.000 But, you know, I just don't know how long it might take.

00:38:49.000 And so let me kind of give an experience that I had.

00:38:54.000 So I taught at International Space University over in Strasbourg in France.

00:39:01.000 And they have a cathedral there in Strasbourg.

00:39:04.000 Absolutely stunning.

00:39:06.000 But the thing that's even more interesting about this structure, it's like 500 feet tall.

00:39:13.000 They started building it in 1100 A.D. And they didn't finish the cathedral until 1700 A.D. So the people that built the basement had no hope.

00:39:29.000 Of seeing the finished product.

00:39:31.000 All they could do was imagine in their mind's eye what it might look like.

00:39:35.000 But they knew what they needed to do to kind of make meaningful progress.

00:39:41.000 And so they did their work and then they hand the baton off to the next generation.

00:39:45.000 Maybe they're putting the floor in and then another generation does the buttresses and so forth.

00:39:51.000 So from that standpoint, I think sometimes it's important.

00:39:55.000 You know, we talk about teamwork, right?

00:39:57.000 Teamwork is a great thing.

00:39:59.000 But teamwork, we typically think of shoulder to shoulder, right?

00:40:03.000 But I think there's also value in teamwork across generations, if you will, right?

00:40:09.000 You get impatient if you text somebody and they don't text you back in like 30 seconds.

00:40:14.000 I think we've lost an appreciation for the value of what that means, right, in terms of working over stuff longer than what your horizon might be.

00:40:23.000 I'd love to see the idea of a space warp before I go to the next chapter, but I don't know that that will happen for sure.

00:40:32.000 But I do know specifically what I need to be doing.

00:40:35.000 And so from that standpoint, that's how I grapple with that.

00:40:42.000 I would love to be able to tell you a very concise answer that would fit with what I would hope it would be.

00:40:47.000 But I don't know for certain.

00:40:49.000 But I do know what I need to be doing next.

00:40:51.000 And that gets into...

00:40:53.000 Maybe we can unpack that in just a little bit.

00:40:55.000 That gets into the idea of how the idea of a space warp works and how that traces back to those two circles on the Venn diagram, quantum mechanics and general relativity.

00:41:03.000 Yeah, let's talk about that.

00:41:04.000 Yeah, so maybe what we can do, Jamie, I sent you, there's a slide that's got like a cartoon space warp.

00:41:12.000 It looks like a little sheet of a mesh or something like that.

00:41:19.000 I don't know how to explain it.

00:41:20.000 If you could pull up.

00:41:21.000 There it is.

00:41:22.000 Yes, yes, that's the one.

00:41:25.000 That's the one.

00:41:25.000 So we actually did that graphic on the right for Nature, the journal Nature.

00:41:29.000 They were doing an article on the 50th anniversary of Star Trek, and so they asked us to pull together that graphic.

00:41:36.000 And so this is an illustration of the idea of a space warp.

00:41:41.000 Let me give just a little bit of background.

00:41:43.000 You know, in physics, there is a speed limit that we have to acknowledge when we talk about trying to go somewhere really quickly.

00:41:52.000 And so I like to call it the 11th commandment of physics, thou shalt not exceed the speed of light.

00:41:57.000 It's kind of a hard and fast speed limit.

00:41:59.000 And so if you talk about trying to get to another star that's four and a quarter light years away, that should automatically set in your mind, well, shoot, we can't get there any quicker than four and a quarter light years.

00:42:11.000 Well, there is a little bit of hope because there's a loophole in general relativity that establishes that hard speed limit.

00:42:20.000 General relativity says we can expand and contract space at any speed, and we see evidence for this when we look at the nature of the cosmos right after the Big Bang.

00:42:32.000 14 billion years ago, there was something called an inflationary phase, right, where if you were to pick two random points in this expanding bubble of the early cosmos, you stood on one point and you looked at another point and figured out how fast it was moving away from you.

00:42:50.000 It would move away from you like 10 to the 30th, you know, 10 with 30 zeros times the speed of light.

00:42:58.000 Yeah, really, really, really fast, right?

00:43:00.000 And so we know from astrophysics and cosmology that this is possible.

00:43:05.000 And so this idea was kind of rattling around in a physicist's brain called Alcubierre who said, hey, you know, this is interesting.

00:43:15.000 Nature can do it on a grand scale.

00:43:17.000 Can we potentially do it?

00:43:19.000 In a purposeful way.

00:43:22.000 And so he published a paper in 1994 that kind of encapsulated the mathematics for this idea.

00:43:30.000 And if you take his mathematics and you put it into physical form, it's going to look like my little cartoon here on the right.

00:43:36.000 And so you got the little ring that goes around the little surface here.

00:43:41.000 It looks like a wave.

00:43:42.000 And then there's a little central portion there.

00:43:43.000 It kind of looks like a football, let's say.

00:43:46.000 And so what happens is...

00:43:49.000 That ring that goes around that little football, that's what's necessary to make the trick work.

00:43:55.000 And so it has to be filled with something called exotic matter.

00:43:59.000 And so that's an important issue, right?

00:44:02.000 What's exotic matter, right?

00:44:03.000 So it's something in general relativity.

00:44:06.000 That's also equivalent to negative mass.

00:44:10.000 And so we all understand positive mass, right?

00:44:13.000 If your little brother hits you on the head with something, that's positive mass hitting your head, right?

00:44:17.000 Negative mass is not only zero mass, but it's a negative value.

00:44:21.000 And so what does that even mean?

00:44:23.000 And so in the context of general relativity, if we come up with a model that requires exotic matter, we have to highlight that as a problem because we don't, in general relativity...

00:44:34.000 General TV doesn't tell us how to make that.

00:44:36.000 And so that could potentially be an obstacle that would prevent something like this from ever being physically real.

00:44:42.000 But if we could figure out how to make it, and I'll actually speak to that in just a second, if we could make that and we could create a ring that could manifest that exotic matter, it would cause space-time to respond in such a way so that it would expand and contract to allow you to go to Proxima Centauri in five and a half months as measured by you on board the spacecraft.

00:45:04.000 And as measured by folks over in Mission Control over in Houston.

00:45:10.000 Whoa.

00:45:11.000 Now, this exotic matter, what do you speculate that would, what would that be?

00:45:19.000 So exotic matter, and the cool thing is, these are the equations, so there'll be a test later, Joe.

00:45:26.000 Oh, I'm ready.

00:45:29.000 In Alcubierre's paper in 1994, he rightly highlights the fact that, hey, there's a problem.

00:45:35.000 Danger, Will Robinson.

00:45:37.000 This stuff requires exotic matter.

00:45:39.000 That may mean it's non-physical.

00:45:41.000 However, he highlights the fact, hey, we have this other circle over here called quantum mechanics.

00:45:47.000 And there's something in the context of quantum mechanics called negative vacuum energy density.

00:45:54.000 And so that's something that's connected to the idea of the quantum mechanics.

00:45:57.000 We'll unpack that later, but that is something that could serve as a proxy for the idea of exotic matter and may help us one day make the idea of a space warp a physical real thing.

00:46:16.000 Ability to go as fast as you're describing, where you could conceivably make it to other solar systems.

00:46:26.000 This obviously is a version of it that will probably be improved upon.

00:46:32.000 So if this ever does come to fruition...

00:46:36.000 You could conceivably imagine a time where you generate even more power, have even more capability, and you can go everywhere in the universe.

00:46:43.000 Right, right.

00:46:43.000 Potentially.

00:46:44.000 Yeah, it unlocks just about anything.

00:46:49.000 Let's go back a slide real quick, Jamie.

00:46:51.000 I want to share something with you.

00:46:52.000 So the next time you're in an airport, you can do this, right?

00:46:54.000 Okay.

00:46:55.000 So if you want to try and imagine the idea how a space warp works in theory, if you will.

00:47:02.000 Now, this is just...

00:47:04.000 A thought experiment.

00:47:05.000 So thought experiments aren't exactly precise, but they do help communicate the idea.

00:47:09.000 So you know when you go to an airport and they've got those Those long conveyor belts, if you will.

00:47:16.000 I think they call them travelators.

00:47:18.000 And so they help us move quicker between gates.

00:47:22.000 Yeah, by the way, folks, you're supposed to walk on those things.

00:47:25.000 Right, exactly.

00:47:26.000 You hear me?

00:47:26.000 Absolutely.

00:47:27.000 Walk.

00:47:27.000 Right.

00:47:28.000 Lazy bucks. 0.75

00:47:30.000 So, you know, if you think about what happens when you make use of one of these travelators, it's just like you said, most of us walk, right?

00:47:38.000 So when we're at the airport, we're walking, we're dragging our bag, and we usually walk about three miles.

00:47:43.000 And then when we get onto the belt, we keep walking.

00:47:47.000 Now, if you think about what, so let's say Jamie's sitting at a gate and he's watching you walk by.

00:47:53.000 Before you get onto the belt, he sees you walking at three miles an hour.

00:47:59.000 When you get onto the belt, all of a sudden to Jamie, it looks like you're going six miles an hour.

00:48:04.000 So what's going on here?

00:48:06.000 Well, think about the belt, right?

00:48:08.000 The length of the belt in front of you, what's happening to it?

00:48:12.000 It's technically, it's going underneath, right?

00:48:14.000 This is a metaphor.

00:48:16.000 It's going underneath, but the length of belt in front of you is actually contracting, right?

00:48:20.000 And so by the same token, the length of belt behind you, yes, it's a conveyor belt, but it's expanding behind you.

00:48:27.000 So the belt is contracting and expanding in such a way that it now seems like to Jamie that you're moving at six miles an hour.

00:48:36.000 So the next time you go to an airport and you get onto one of these travelators, I want you to put your hand.

00:48:41.000 Stand on the railing and say, "Engage." Well, that's a great comparison. 0.98

00:48:46.000 .

00:48:53.000 That video, by the way, is so cool.

00:48:56.000 .

00:49:09.000 Particularly unusual.

00:49:11.000 Right.

00:49:11.000 The cool thing is if you pop forward one more slide.

00:49:17.000 Jamie.

00:49:19.000 There we go.

00:49:20.000 When you look at the math and physics associated with this, right, the proper acceleration alpha on board the spacecraft is formally zero.

00:49:30.000 So what that means when they turn the warp on and off...

00:49:34.000 It doesn't, like, splatter the crew against the bulkhead.

00:49:37.000 You talked about, in the beginning of the show, we talked about G-forces, right?

00:49:40.000 And so I don't know if Elcubier specifically was hoping to, you know, land on that kind of observation, but...

00:49:49.000 The little toy model that he came up with has got a lot of appealing characteristics, and that's one of them, right?

00:49:53.000 When you turn the warp on and off, the proper acceleration alpha is formerly zero, so it's actually zero G. So he stumbled into a really nice solution, if you will.

00:50:06.000 If you don't mind, while we're here, I'd love to maybe spend just a second to talk about life imitating art.

00:50:14.000 There's some interesting things that I think it's the next...

00:50:17.000 Slide or two?

00:50:19.000 Keep going.

00:50:19.000 We'll come back to this one another time.

00:50:22.000 So this is a modern rendering done by Mark Rademacher, a digital artist from the Netherlands I've worked with over the years.

00:50:32.000 This is a Star Trek ship concept that was developed by Matthew Jeffries in the 60s for the TV show Star Trek.

00:50:41.000 And so you might notice there are some qualitative similarities here.

00:50:46.000 To this little structure, to the little gray cartoon that I just showed you.

00:50:51.000 It's got the rings on it, right?

00:50:52.000 It's got this little central structure.

00:50:54.000 But there are actually a couple of fatal flaws with this concept.

00:50:59.000 But the thing that's fascinating to me before we talk about the things we're going to fix is Matthew Jeffries is not a physicist, number one.

00:51:07.000 Number two, the math and physics associated with the idea of a space warp.

00:51:11.000 Hadn't been published in the 60s when he came up with his artwork, but look how close he got, right?

00:51:17.000 For somebody just following his gut instinct in terms of pulling something together.

00:51:21.000 What was his background?

00:51:23.000 Did he have some sort of a background in science?

00:51:25.000 I couldn't say.

00:51:27.000 I don't know for certain, but man, he sure did.

00:51:30.000 He nailed it.

00:51:31.000 Yeah, he sure did get close.

00:51:32.000 He got so close.

00:51:34.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:51:35.000 So the interesting thing is that...

00:51:38.000 The nature of this ship, the fatal flaws that it has.

00:51:41.000 So we did an update of this as part of like an education outreach.

00:51:46.000 So I reached out to Mark Rainemaker and some folks from CBS Studios.

00:51:49.000 And so we did an updated version of this for a Star Trek Ships of the Line calendar.

00:51:54.000 That's cooler looking.

00:51:55.000 Yeah, and that's the one that's in the video, right?

00:51:57.000 The IXS Enterprise.

00:51:58.000 Go back just one more slide, Jamie.

00:52:00.000 So the problem with this...

00:52:04.000 The rings that go around the spaceship are entirely too thin.

00:52:08.000 So when you calculate how much of the exotic matter I just talked about that you might need to make this thing do something useful, it's going to be a very large number that might be impossible to ever make.

00:52:19.000 So it's like fatal flaw number one.

00:52:21.000 Fatal flaw number two is the bridge of the spaceship goes way out in front of where the warp bubble would form as a result of those rings.

00:52:29.000 So the rings would form like a warp bubble that looks like a little capsule.

00:52:32.000 We'd actually cut the bridge off, and the bridge would go floating away, and Scotty would be so fired.

00:52:37.000 That's not good.

00:52:38.000 That'd be a short, sad episode of Star Trek.

00:52:40.000 I hope they have a parachute.

00:52:41.000 Right, right, exactly.

00:52:42.000 So we work with CBS Studios.

00:52:44.000 Now you can go to the next slide.

00:52:45.000 So now we've got, you know, the rings are much more athletic.

00:52:49.000 They have more heft to them.

00:52:50.000 They're thicker.

00:52:51.000 So that reduces the energy requirements.

00:52:53.000 And then the spaceship itself is kind of properly nestled into the warp bubble.

00:52:58.000 It just looks cooler.

00:52:59.000 Right.

00:53:00.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:53:00.000 Like all things from the past, they can make a better version today.

00:53:04.000 Right, right, right, right.

00:53:05.000 So this exotic material...

00:53:10.000 Do you imagine that this is an undiscovered element?

00:53:15.000 What's the theory?

00:53:17.000 And this is the reason for some of the lamentation about general relativity and quantum mechanics.

00:53:25.000 General relativity just doesn't tell us how to address it.

00:53:29.000 It just simply says you have to highlight it in your paper before you submit it for peer review and say this may cause problems.

00:53:36.000 But quantum mechanics has this stuff called negative vacuum energy density.

00:53:43.000 And so maybe we can unpack that.

00:53:46.000 So what is negative vacuum energy density?

00:53:49.000 So let's talk about some of the implications of quantum mechanics.

00:53:56.000 And how they're a little different from our day-to-day experience at the macroscopic level, right?

00:54:04.000 Empty space in quantum mechanics is actually not empty.

00:54:08.000 So if I told you to think about a vacuum chamber, right, and I told you the vacuum chamber is under vacuum and there's nothing in the vacuum chamber, right?

00:54:17.000 That operative word, nothing, right?

00:54:20.000 You have vacuum pumps that turn on and pull all the air out, so there's nothing in the vacuum chamber.

00:54:24.000 Quantum mechanics says, wait a minute, hold on.

00:54:27.000 The idea of empty space, even though there's this classical vacuum, right, that we might think about, it's not actually empty.

00:54:34.000 There's these fluctuating fields and forces that are always going on all the time.

00:54:39.000 So even though, like, this is Plum Brook, you know, NASA's large vacuum chamber up in Ohio.

00:54:45.000 And so if you imagine you took that vacuum chamber and pumped on it so there was no air on there, then you might say there's nothing in that vacuum chamber.

00:54:53.000 Well, quantum mechanics says that at the microscopic level, there are fluctuating fields and particles all the time.

00:55:00.000 And so this sounds very...

00:55:02.000 Very, you know, counterintuitive to what we experience in our day-to-day life, right?

00:55:07.000 You pick up a coffee cup and you push against the door, right?

00:55:10.000 That's how we think of the world, if you will.

00:55:12.000 But quantum mechanics deals with the microscopic realm and things are a little bit different.

00:55:17.000 And so that's kind of background.

00:55:24.000 This peculiar nature that I'm explaining to you, you can actually do an experiment that provides you an observational consequence of this peculiar nature.

00:55:36.000 And it's called the Casimir Force.

00:55:39.000 I think I have a slide in there, Jamie.

00:55:41.000 So the Casimir Force can be thought of in the following way.

00:55:44.000 Imagine that you've got two metal plates, like you see here in the graphic.

00:55:50.000 You put them very, very close to one another.

00:55:52.000 That separation distance is maybe 100 nanometers.

00:55:55.000 So certainly much smaller than a human hair.

00:55:58.000 Very, very small distance.

00:55:59.000 And then you imagine you have a vacuum chamber that you put these two small plates in.

00:56:06.000 And then you turn on the vacuum pumps and you pull all of the air out.

00:56:09.000 So there's nothing in there, right?

00:56:11.000 At least that's the way we would think about it.

00:56:13.000 So now we're going to conduct a little thought experiment.

00:56:16.000 We're going to imagine that Jamie has superhero powers, and he can shrink himself down to being a wee tiny little atomic person.

00:56:24.000 And we're going to ask him to go into the vacuum chamber, and we're going to ask him to measure the pressure on the outside of the plates, and we're going to ask him to measure the pressure in between the two plates.

00:56:36.000 And so we're going to expect, based on...

00:56:38.000 The normal way we exist, he's going to say zero, zero on the outside, and he's going to say zero in between the two plates.

00:56:45.000 But what he's going to report back is he's going to say zero pressure on the outside, like we expect, but he's going to say there is a negative pressure between the two plates.

00:56:56.000 Well, what the hell is going on?

00:56:58.000 Well, the quantum field is full of fluctuating fields and forces.

00:57:04.000 Matter is both a particle and a wave.

00:57:07.000 You may have heard that statement at some point in your life.

00:57:09.000 And so all these little bits of energy, right, they have wavelengths associated with them.

00:57:15.000 And so any wavelength that is bigger than the physical gap of the cavity, it won't be able to manifest between the cavity.

00:57:25.000 So when we add up all the bits of energy on the outside, that's our zero reference.

00:57:30.000 When we add up all the bits of energy on the outside.

00:57:33.000 And then we add up all the bits of energy in between the two plates.

00:57:36.000 There are less bits of energy because all the bigger wavelengths are excluded.

00:57:41.000 And so there is a deficiency of vacuum energy that manifests between the two plates.

00:57:47.000 And that results in that negative pressure that wants to pull those two plates together.

00:57:53.000 That's called the Casimir force.

00:57:55.000 A guy by the name of Casimir was a guy that derived that back in 1948, but it took us until the late 90s to actually measure this in the lab to the physics community's satisfaction.

00:58:06.000 And so it's been studied hundreds of times since, you know, measuring forces at different regimes, if you will.

00:58:15.000 And there's also something called the transverse Casimir force.

00:58:20.000 So when you try and...

00:58:21.000 When you try and slide those two plates relative to one another, the vacuum wants to resist you sliding those two plates.

00:58:29.000 And so this is a very real phenomenon, and it's a wonderful illustration of the peculiar nature of reality at the microscopic level, right?

00:58:42.000 You know, the theory was worked out in the late 40s.

00:58:45.000 The experimental stuff was started in the 90s, and then there's been a bunch of work since then.

00:58:49.000 And I think they're even looking at trying to use the Casimir Force in MEMS devices.

00:58:55.000 What is a MEMS device?

00:58:58.000 Microelectromechanical machines, some small gears that you can't see with your eyes, but they serve different purposes that people are trying to come up with for sensors, maybe some things in your car, some future chips that might be in your phone or something like that.

00:59:11.000 Things where they make micromechanical systems, they make them with light because you can't even see those kinds of things.

00:59:19.000 So the quantum vacuum, this fluctuating field of particles and forces and so forth, is a very real phenomenon.

00:59:29.000 And so this stuff I just described to you is the negative vacuum energy density that Alcubierre highlighted in his paper when he said, We don't know how to make exotic matter in general relativity.

00:59:43.000 So that circle on the Venn diagram doesn't tell us where to go.

00:59:47.000 But quantum mechanics tells us how to make negative vacuum energy density in the context of what we see in a chasmere cavity.

00:59:55.000 And so maybe we can, you know, some future generation of scientists will figure out how to do something in some way to, like if you ask what's in those rings around the IXS enterprise, right?

01:00:07.000 You know, maybe it's some...

01:00:09.000 Deeper understanding of the nature of the quantum vacuum.

01:00:13.000 And point in fact, you know, I talked to you about, you asked me when might this happen?

01:00:20.000 And I said, you know, I can't tell you when, but I know what I need to be doing next, right?

01:00:25.000 And so in my mind, I think some of the next...

01:00:29.000 Big chapters in physics are going to be centered around understanding the nature of the quantum vacuum and the quantum field.

01:00:36.000 I think there's going to be a lot of fruit there, and that may provide us the opportunity to add more circles to the Venn diagram or maybe expand one or what have you and so forth.

01:00:45.000 So what kind of experiments have to be conducted in order to expand this?

01:00:49.000 Are you talking about things that are going to be achieved in particle colliders?

01:00:54.000 What do you anticipate?

01:00:58.000 That's a good question.

01:01:01.000 So there's a lot of different approaches people have taken to try and explore the nature of the quantum vacuum.

01:01:08.000 And you could even start to look at cosmological observations.

01:01:12.000 We talk about dark energy, right?

01:01:14.000 That's equated to the quantum vacuum at scale and the cosmological scale, if you will.

01:01:21.000 I think there's even some recent stuff that's come out in the peer-reviewed literature that the A cosmological constant may not be constant.

01:01:29.000 It may actually be changing over time.

01:01:31.000 And so there's some experimentation.

01:01:33.000 It has nothing to do with the idea of a space warp.

01:01:35.000 The people that do work on that could care less about space warps.

01:01:39.000 But they're trying to understand the nature of the cosmological constant of the quantum vacuum at scale.

01:01:43.000 So there's a domain where some interesting work might be done.

01:01:47.000 I know universities all over the globe still do work today.

01:01:51.000 With studying the Casimir force, they make different types of things, different materials, and so forth, just to try and understand how materials respond when they make these small things and trying to understand how the quantum vacuum works with it.

01:02:04.000 But I think there's also some other things that we can try, right?

01:02:07.000 And so that goes, I think you've seen some of our work that we've been doing, right, with some nanostructured devices that we were, we've been doing some work for DARPA for a number of years, where we were actually We're actually trying to work on some systems that generate power.

01:02:24.000 And so in the process of doing that, we've actually found that our nanotechnology may actually have some intersections with the idea of a space warp.

01:02:32.000 So I think it's...

01:02:37.000 You're saying that, like, our nanotechnology might be used to create some sort of a space warp.

01:02:44.000 In what way?

01:02:46.000 Right.

01:02:47.000 Jamie, can you pull up...

01:02:49.000 One of those slides close to the—not that one.

01:02:52.000 Go back.

01:02:53.000 Keep going back.

01:02:55.000 A little bit more.

01:02:57.000 Yeah, keep going up.

01:02:59.000 Right there.

01:03:01.000 Right there.

01:03:04.000 So there's this—on the left-hand side of this image, there is a scanning electron microscope.

01:03:11.000 Image of a nanostructure that we, in this case, we 3D printed and then we metallized it.

01:03:17.000 And so the work that we were doing for DARPA associated with that structure is focused on trying to harvest energy from the quantum field.

01:03:26.000 And so we've been working towards trying to generate a voltage potential on that little structure where the pillars in the middle are at a different voltage from the walls that are in the picture there.

01:03:40.000 And in the process of doing the analysis to help us understand how thin do we need to make those rod-like structures you see inside the cavity gap, when we study how the quantum field responds to those structures, we noticed a kind of an unanticipated intersection with the idea of a space warp.

01:04:03.000 If you look at, there's like in the picture, there's like a little...

01:04:07.000 Blue surface overlaid on top of the center pillar there.

01:04:11.000 And you've got those two little regions that are like yellow.

01:04:14.000 I think Jamie just moved his mouse over those, right?

01:04:17.000 So that's the pillar.

01:04:18.000 And if you move up, that blue surface shows the quantum field's response.

01:04:22.000 So that negative vacuum energy density distribution you hear me talking about, that is like a section cut in terms of what that looks like.

01:04:32.000 And so we're trying to make sure that the nature of that distribution allows us to see a voltage difference, right, which we do see.

01:04:41.000 But now we can go to the middle pane here.

01:04:46.000 The top picture there is that image on the bottom left.

01:04:50.000 And so you see those little...

01:04:52.000 Yellow kind of looks like a lenticular shape.

01:04:55.000 And then if you look at the picture beneath that, that is a section cut of a space warp, that ring that goes around the spaceship.

01:05:03.000 So if you look at the distribution of the exotic matter on the bottom pane versus the distribution of negative vacuum energy density in the top, they're qualitatively very similar.

01:05:16.000 To one another.

01:05:17.000 So we, as part of an extra credit, right, we're still, you know, DARPA doesn't care about the idea of a space warp, to be clear.

01:05:23.000 They don't care about that.

01:05:25.000 But as scientists, you know, we were interested in, wow, we didn't expect to see this.

01:05:30.000 This is interesting.

01:05:32.000 And so we took that insight and we said, all right, the distribution that's on the left around that center pillar.

01:05:41.000 It's prismatic, right?

01:05:42.000 It's a straight up and down kind of distribution.

01:05:45.000 It's not a ring, which is what we might think about when we think about a space warp.

01:05:49.000 So we said, all right, well, let's do a slightly different model.

01:05:53.000 Let's make a sphere inside a cylinder, and then let's study how the quantum field responds to that structure.

01:06:01.000 And so the energy density distribution to that, the little green items there in the cartoon, the energy density distribution for that, Properly matches the requirements for the idea of a space warp.

01:06:14.000 And so we published a paper.

01:06:17.000 Yeah, this is significant, right?

01:06:18.000 Because before we did that, the only thing we could talk about in the literature was just the math, right?

01:06:25.000 If somebody said, well, what might you build to make something like that?

01:06:28.000 All we could do is just shrug our shoulders and go, oh, right?

01:06:31.000 And so this allowed us to go through and say, hey, you know, now we can propose a real structure.

01:06:39.000 And you can 3D print that.

01:06:41.000 There are 3D printers that print down to that level.

01:06:44.000 We could 3D print those structures.

01:06:46.000 Maybe some clever scientist will come up with a good experiment on how to go through and maybe study the optical properties of this.

01:06:53.000 And somebody could do something like that where they could take our insights that we published in our paper and then they could go 3D print some stuff and do some experiments to show that they can, hey, we've measured the change in optical properties associated with these little It's

01:07:34.000 Leonardo da Vinci's drawing of...

01:07:37.000 That's a wonderful metaphor.

01:07:39.000 It definitely could be something like that.

01:07:40.000 Yeah, when DaVinci was drawing flying things.

01:07:44.000 Yeah.

01:07:45.000 Well, it looks like what you would expect something to look like in Star Trek that generated a warp drive.

01:07:51.000 Right?

01:07:52.000 Doesn't it?

01:07:52.000 Like you could see it lighting up.

01:07:54.000 Yeah, it has some kind of a humming noise, right?

01:07:56.000 It sounds like a heartbeat or something.

01:07:59.000 The idea of using quantum energy is so fascinating because I don't understand what that means.

01:08:06.000 I don't understand the whole idea of subatomic particles because it seems so fake, seems so crazy that the universe is made out of things that are essentially working on magic.

01:08:18.000 They appear and disappear.

01:08:20.000 They're in two places at the same time.

01:08:22.000 They're both still and moving.

01:08:23.000 They're in superposition.

01:08:25.000 They're entangled.

01:08:27.000 In the grand scheme of things, I would speculate that as we add circles to the physics Venn diagram, we may actually be able to change some of that narrative.

01:08:43.000 You know, now we're getting into like the philosophical history of physics and some of the debates that have gone on for the better part of a century.

01:08:51.000 But, you know, maybe as we continue to move forward and we add more circles to the physics Venn diagram, you know, instead of having this narrative or this framework where we talk about...

01:09:04.000 Probabilities and chances and entanglement and the cat is alive and the cat is dead.

01:09:09.000 Maybe there is a deeper level of understanding that we have yet to uncover beyond what we know in quantum mechanics today that helps us understand things at a more fundamental level.

01:09:21.000 There is a sub-quantum dynamics that explains the randomness, the stochasticity that we see, and there'll be a much more...

01:09:34.000 I would almost play back some of what you just said.

01:09:37.000 If you think about it, it actually has kind of a bit of a metaphysical...

01:09:40.000 Kind of sound to it, if you will, right?

01:09:42.000 You know, the collapse of the wave function, well, what does that really even mean, right?

01:09:46.000 So maybe as we continue to move forward and we add, we get deeper understandings, we'll have answers that are much more compelling and logical in some way we don't currently understand yet.

01:09:59.000 Well, when you try to explain to people the double slit experiment...

01:10:04.000 Try to explain that to people, the waves and particles.

01:10:07.000 Like, what are you even saying?

01:10:09.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:10:09.000 You have one slit, you get a nice...

01:10:13.000 Gaussian distribution around a center point, then you open up two slits and you've got this weird interference pattern, right?

01:10:18.000 And that's the whole matter is both a particle and a wave, right?

01:10:22.000 That's how you kind of see that, if you will.

01:10:24.000 But how do you explain that?

01:10:25.000 And so actually there are thought processes that people have to explain that type of stuff in some of the stuff that's out in the literature today.

01:10:33.000 Bohmian trajectories is specifically one of the things.

01:10:38.000 It's almost frustrating because I know we're going to crack it one day. 0.89

01:10:41.000 It's like, damn, I wish I was born in 2090. 0.90

01:10:44.000 You know what I mean? 0.99

01:10:45.000 They probably would have already nailed it.

01:10:47.000 Not really.

01:10:47.000 I really like being born right here.

01:10:49.000 I love being alive right now because it's such a fun time where these technological innovations, they're compounding and they're building on each other in such a very incredible way.

01:11:02.000 This kind of experiment is actually possible, and now you can actually prove, oh, we have a theoretical warp bubble.

01:11:08.000 Let me show you how we can make it.

01:11:09.000 Right, right.

01:11:10.000 And so some of the stuff that we're focused on, right?

01:11:15.000 20 years at NASA, and then I left NASA at the end of 2019 to go help stand up a nonprofit Limitless Space Institute where we did some of the work that we just showed you, right?

01:11:25.000 And that's where we were doing some of the initial work for DARPA on the little nanostructures that we're working on.

01:11:31.000 And so we got a lot further with that work than we thought we were going to, and so created a commercial company called Casimir.

01:11:38.000 Where we're trying to commercialize our power-generating nanotechnology.

01:11:42.000 And so, in some ways, it's like the interesting aspect of this story is in the process of us trying to pursue this romantic vision of the idea of a space warp, you know, we may have stumbled into this power-generating nanotechnology that could be useful here and now in a lot of ways, right?

01:12:02.000 Ranging from, you know...

01:12:05.000 Powering the Fitbit on your wrist or tire pressure monitor system in your car, maybe one day as we continue to grow the capability, it'll do a lot more than that.

01:12:15.000 But, you know, in the process of chasing the romantic dream, we've stumbled across some technology that might be useful in the here and now, right?

01:12:22.000 And so when you ask what might be in the rings around that spaceship, the IXS Enterprise, maybe those could be long-standing descendants from some of the stuff we're working on in the chips that we're making in the lab today.

01:12:37.000 Essentially, like the people put the foundation for the St. Peter's Basilica down.

01:12:41.000 They're not going to say they've completed a project.

01:12:43.000 Absolutely.

01:12:44.000 Yeah, and this is just how it goes with everything that's really extraordinary like that.

01:12:49.000 It's neat to think the speed at which innovation occurs, right?

01:12:54.000 I think you've had Elon Musk on this show a few times, and it's neat to see what he's been able to accomplish with SpaceX.

01:13:02.000 Actually, I met him in 2003.

01:13:07.000 This was the very beginning of his journey, right?

01:13:10.000 I was on a planning committee for a conference, American Astronautical Society, and we were doing a conference in Houston with a focus on...

01:13:21.000 A commercial spaceflight.

01:13:22.000 So this is at the dawn of the idea.

01:13:25.000 At the time, I was working at Lockheed Martin.

01:13:28.000 And so we had Elon Musk come in and talk to us about this crazy idea of SpaceX that he had, right?

01:13:33.000 And so Lockheed Martin...

01:13:36.000 A corporate contacted me and asked me, hey, we know you're going to be interfacing with this guy.

01:13:41.000 And so we want you to write up a profile on him after the conference and tell us what you think.

01:13:47.000 And so I went to the conference and got a chance to watch a number of people come in and talk about great ideas.

01:13:53.000 And Elon came and gave his talk and so forth.

01:13:56.000 And after the conference was over...

01:13:58.000 I wrote up a profile and submitted it to Lockheed Corporate, and I said, you know, I think this guy is going to do everything he said he's going to do.

01:14:06.000 I think Lockheed Martin should consider buying his company at some point in time.

01:14:11.000 And so fortunately, they didn't, right?

01:14:13.000 Because I think if they did, they would have like ruined the magic, if you will, right?

01:14:17.000 Yeah, you need it in his control.

01:14:20.000 He's got some pretty bizarre ideas.

01:14:24.000 Just watching them catch that rocket, you're like, what?

01:14:27.000 That's nuts.

01:14:28.000 That is absolutely nuts.

01:14:30.000 My brain looks at that and goes, no.

01:14:33.000 Right.

01:14:34.000 It looks like, I mean, that's why the cooks on the internet think it's fake.

01:14:37.000 Because it almost looks fake.

01:14:39.000 It's such a leap above anything that's ever been done before.

01:14:42.000 Yeah.

01:14:43.000 Could you imagine the design meeting?

01:14:45.000 Right.

01:14:45.000 And I'm sure it was probably Elon that said this.

01:14:48.000 Yeah.

01:14:48.000 I want to catch a 20-story building.

01:14:51.000 Yeah.

01:14:52.000 I can see all the engineers.

01:14:54.000 Is he serious?

01:14:55.000 Right.

01:14:55.000 Exactly.

01:14:56.000 Because everybody thought they just had to deteriorate and fall to Earth.

01:14:59.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:15:00.000 Right.

01:15:00.000 They run out of gas when you're shooting the rocket up in the sky and then you plant it so they fall into the ocean.

01:15:05.000 Like, okay.

01:15:06.000 Yeah.

01:15:06.000 I do think that...

01:15:09.000 I don't know if you've ever met Gwen Shotwell.

01:15:11.000 I think Gwen Shotwell is kind of like his secret weapon.

01:15:14.000 Right?

01:15:15.000 So, you know, Elon Musk strikes me as one of those guys that's like an idea generator.

01:15:20.000 All this great stuff's coming out at the speed of light, if you will, and he's coming up with all these different ideas.

01:15:25.000 But you've got to have somebody who can take all that chaos and pull out the important tidbits and then put them into action, if you will.

01:15:34.000 And so I think Gwen is kind of his secret weapon.

01:15:37.000 She helps.

01:15:38.000 Take all of that chaos and then starts to put it into, you know, actionable steps, if you will, to help SpaceX make the progress.

01:15:45.000 That's the case.

01:15:46.000 She rules.

01:15:47.000 Oh, yeah.

01:15:48.000 Just imagine as technology increases, if you have someone with that sort of an innovative mind and someone like Gwen who can put it together as all these new ideas come to fruition, you could imagine where we're going to be with this stuff.

01:16:04.000 Right.

01:16:04.000 Absolutely.

01:16:05.000 And just to kind of put that in context, right, in my mind, SpaceX is an example of mastering the art of getting to space, right?

01:16:14.000 SpaceX is conquering that climbing against the gravity well as opposed to moving through space.

01:16:21.000 Therein lies a great opportunity to kind of re-highlight that perennial difference, the challenge between the two, right?

01:16:27.000 Right.

01:16:28.000 Moving through space.

01:16:29.000 Yeah.

01:16:29.000 And then...

01:16:31.000 The idea of some sort of a space station somewhere, like not just circling the Earth, but out in the cosmos.

01:16:40.000 There's so many different ways they can take this stuff and the idea of eventually colonizing other planets, which is always like people go, okay, well, that's...

01:16:49.000 That's what we're probably going to try to do.

01:16:51.000 Wouldn't another civilization do that to us?

01:16:53.000 And that's where you get into the weird talk.

01:16:55.000 Yeah, right.

01:16:56.000 Whether or not it's actually happening.

01:16:57.000 I guess it gets into the whole, you know, if somebody has the ability to come here, right, it's almost like I would rather be the one that was technically advanced and able to go somewhere else rather than have them come here.

01:17:09.000 Oh, yeah.

01:17:09.000 Way better.

01:17:10.000 Well, if you look at history, that hasn't ever gone well for the tribes that get visited.

01:17:18.000 It just never tends to go well for us.

01:17:20.000 That's why I'm like, I'd rather be the one doing the visiting than...

01:17:23.000 Exactly.

01:17:24.000 And then imagine the exotic viruses.

01:17:27.000 Oh, yeah.

01:17:27.000 Right.

01:17:28.000 That's a good point.

01:17:29.000 It always makes you think, you know, Star Trek, they just go, they beam down to the planets.

01:17:33.000 No problems.

01:17:34.000 They have air there.

01:17:35.000 Yeah, right?

01:17:35.000 It's just like...

01:17:36.000 They breathe air, same atmosphere, same pressure, same gravity.

01:17:40.000 It's like, you know, I keep waiting for the episode where somebody starts bleeding from their eyes, right?

01:17:46.000 Explodes.

01:17:46.000 Yeah, the guy with the...

01:17:48.000 A red shirt, you know, right away, right?

01:17:49.000 That guy's gone.

01:17:51.000 Yeah.

01:17:51.000 I mean, you have to take a chance.

01:17:54.000 You know, when you think of what's currently available today in terms of research that people have done on propulsion systems, when...

01:18:06.000 When people speculate that there's some sort of a black ops program that the government's been running secretly, and this is what a lot of these drones are that people are seeing, and this is what a lot of like the Tic Tac stuff, that it's probably our stuff, which is why it's off military bases.

01:18:22.000 Given your understanding of the current state of science, do you think that's even possible?

01:18:27.000 Yeah, no.

01:18:28.000 Well, it's hard to imagine that being possible, right, just in terms of – Because my entire professional experience has been about wrestling with, you know, how do we conquer this time-distance problem?

01:18:45.000 And so I know all too well all the shortcomings.

01:18:49.000 I know where we are for the most part today, where we're lacking, right?

01:18:55.000 And so I just don't know that there is an organization that has...

01:19:02.000 Things that could potentially operate in the ways that we've—like the Tic Tacs.

01:19:06.000 I don't know that there is a black ops that actually has that capability.

01:19:12.000 What I'm kind of asking, though, is it even conceivable that there could be a program where you could get the brightest minds who are working on this stuff to make advancements that are far beyond anything that conventional wisdom— Yeah, now I'm with you.

01:19:29.000 I was on a different frequency.

01:19:30.000 Thank you.

01:19:31.000 You know, if we had some kind of kit, right, that is not from here, however we got it, right, and people will spend some time studying it, you know, maybe they could figure it out.

01:19:43.000 But that also gets into, you know, a little bit of a...

01:19:48.000 A logic conundrum, right?

01:19:50.000 Because I think you talked about going back to the 1400s and holding up an iPhone, right?

01:19:55.000 If you handed something like this to Isaac Newton.

01:20:03.000 Right.

01:20:03.000 He would have no idea what to make of this.

01:20:07.000 He might figure out the interface.

01:20:09.000 Apple's done a good job of making this thing pretty user-friendly.

01:20:13.000 Even if he looked at it with a glass that allowed him to see, maybe start to make out the pixels, he doesn't have the benefit of any of the math and physics and so forth.

01:20:24.000 It's possible, but those are the things in gaming situations in my head.

01:20:30.000 What might that look like?

01:20:31.000 It's like, wow, this might be real.

01:20:36.000 Speaking for the people that believe that they have recovered these vehicles from somewhere else, one of the ways they describe them that's really kind of bizarre is they describe them as donations.

01:20:54.000 I've heard that word.

01:20:55.000 If you are going to try to get someone to figure out how to construct their own automobile, You wouldn't give them a 2025 Corvette ZR1, which you'd give them as a Model T. You'd give them some simple combustion engine, a carburetor that you could go, okay, like someone who knows how to make a locomotive, they could look at that and go...

01:21:17.000 Okay, I see what they're doing.

01:21:19.000 Oh, wow.

01:21:20.000 All right, so this thing, the combustion, and then the gases spin around, and then it creates energy, and then it spins these wheels.

01:21:26.000 Then this thing has different gears, and that goes to the back wheels.

01:21:31.000 Okay, I think we could do this. 0.99

01:21:33.000 But, you know, if you gave them some electric Tesla, you know, like a new Model S Plaid, they'd go, what the fuck is this? 0.99

01:21:40.000 Porsche 911. 0.98

01:21:40.000 Yeah, exactly. 0.98

01:21:41.000 They would go, what is this?

01:21:42.000 Well, especially electric.

01:21:44.000 Right.

01:21:44.000 Electric vehicles, they go, this is bananas.

01:21:46.000 Like, this thing goes 0 to 60 in 1.9 seconds.

01:21:48.000 Yeah, that's amazing. 1.00

01:21:49.000 It's a fucking car. 1.00

01:21:50.000 That's amazing, isn't it? 1.00

01:21:51.000 It does feel – have you ever been in an electric Tesla, like the Model S Plaid?

01:21:55.000 It feels like a spaceship.

01:21:56.000 Like, it feels like you're not in this time period.

01:21:59.000 Right.

01:21:59.000 You're in something in the future.

01:22:01.000 If they gave us something to back-engineer, they would most likely give us a Model T. Actually, I had never thought about it that way. 0.99

01:22:08.000 We wouldn't just start with the best shit we have. 0.99

01:22:11.000 You know what I mean? 1.00

01:22:12.000 Give these dummies a Jeep from the 50s. 0.92

01:22:15.000 You know what I mean?

01:22:16.000 A Willys, right?

01:22:17.000 Carburetor.

01:22:18.000 Figure it out.

01:22:19.000 Look at all the stuff.

01:22:20.000 You can work on it.

01:22:21.000 If you open up the hood of one of those things, an old Jeep, you go, I see where everything is.

01:22:25.000 Here's the spark plugs.

01:22:27.000 Here's the distributor cap.

01:22:28.000 I get it.

01:22:29.000 Yeah.

01:22:29.000 Well, I guess, you know, if that were the case, I guess you could – I could follow you down that thought process, if you will.

01:22:36.000 So then could you imagine – I mean, this is just – I'm just asking you because I know you understand science and you understand engineering.

01:22:43.000 Is it possible that there could have been some program that's been going on in complete total secrecy, shielded from Congress, shielded from the higher levels of government on the most need-to-know basis?

01:22:58.000 Possible with our current security systems that they could have some kind of a program that's working on this stuff.

01:23:05.000 You know, I certainly couldn't rule that out, right?

01:23:09.000 But some things I think about when I think about that problem, let's talk about the F-117 stealth fighter, right?

01:23:18.000 There was a program that was unclassified.

01:23:21.000 I think it was in the late 70s, maybe the early 80s, called Have Blue.

01:23:26.000 And so that's when they were first starting to explore the idea of having an aircraft that could be extremely stealthy.

01:23:36.000 It was unclassified for a good amount of time until they put the first test shape onto a radar stand out in California in the desert, whatever the case may be.

01:23:48.000 And then they turned on the radars and they're like, well, something's wrong because we're not seeing anything, right?

01:23:52.000 And then a bird landed on the prototype and they saw the bird.

01:23:57.000 And so when that happened, the whole program went black.

01:24:00.000 Right.

01:24:01.000 It became classified.

01:24:02.000 Before then, it was not classified.

01:24:04.000 Then it was classified.

01:24:05.000 But it, of course, came out in the 90s with Gulf War I, right?

01:24:11.000 I think we saw some manifestations of this.

01:24:15.000 And so there is a program that's extremely classified for the obvious reasons, but it still came out, right?

01:24:22.000 And then I also think about, you know, I worked at NASA, right?

01:24:29.000 Of people serving different roles in a facility.

01:24:32.000 And so you're always going to have people that, you know, take out the garbage and do other different things like that.

01:24:38.000 And so, you know, if you've got something that has implications like that, I mean, it could happen.

01:24:47.000 But that's the thing I struggle with is that, you know, there's a lot of different moving parts to try and keep that big of a secret.

01:24:53.000 I mean, maybe it could happen, right?

01:24:55.000 Well, if I was running things and that was going on, I would talk to you.

01:25:00.000 It's like, look at this guy.

01:25:01.000 He seems to be on this pathway that we are currently exploring.

01:25:08.000 I would...

01:25:09.000 I'd want to bring somebody in.

01:25:11.000 Well, if somebody's got a manual that can help me figure out to go do something, give me a call, right?

01:25:19.000 And I know I'm going to get all kinds of emails as a result of saying that, right?

01:25:23.000 I already get that now, right?

01:25:24.000 You're going to get the kooks.

01:25:25.000 But, you know, the question I guess I'm asking is, are there even experts in physics and engineering that are out there that could be quarantined?

01:25:38.000 That could be taken away from everyone else and put on these projects and could they achieve Right.

01:25:49.000 Maybe the thing that we could throw into the sandbox on this discussion is the Manhattan Project.

01:25:55.000 Maybe there's a better example of something where they were working on something that was extremely important for humanity, and they were able to keep a lot of those secrets for quite some time.

01:26:06.000 So, yeah, maybe that's how you would have to run something like that, I guess.

01:26:10.000 I don't know.

01:26:13.000 Expertise.

01:26:14.000 I mean, are we aware of who all of the experts are?

01:26:19.000 Is it possible that the government could have had access to brilliant minds that are on this sort of path like you are, gotten them?

01:26:29.000 Move them into these projects and kept it all hush-hush.

01:26:32.000 Is that even...

01:26:33.000 Certainly.

01:26:33.000 So the government also has an organization called the Jasons, right, where they have a lot of extremely smart folks from academia.

01:26:42.000 And they come in...

01:26:43.000 Typically, I think it's like a summer assignment, if you will.

01:26:46.000 And so they band together in the summer to go work on a series of problems that folks might have.

01:26:52.000 And so what you're asking me kind of makes me think about that kind of a mechanism where you have access to the best and the brightest across the entire spectrum of U.S. academia.

01:27:02.000 And you pull them together and make them seal Team 6 on whatever particular problem that you've got.

01:27:08.000 But you could run into a problem where, you know, they might look at...

01:27:13.000 And they don't want to think about new things that could potentially be brought to bear.

01:27:22.000 So there could be some flies in the ointment with that thought process.

01:27:26.000 But in some ways, that does kind of exist in what we know as the Jasons.

01:27:31.000 And they do classified work all the time.

01:27:35.000 Interesting.

01:27:37.000 So I guess the question is where are the brightest minds in this particular area of innovation?

01:27:44.000 If I was running the government and I wanted someone to work on some sort of top-secret stuff like this, how would I even find the people?

01:27:52.000 That's a tough question to answer because you might – so going to – Taking that question and going into some specific steps you might take.

01:28:04.000 What disciplines are relevant?

01:28:06.000 And that's a difficult question to answer because there's so much stuff that we don't know.

01:28:11.000 You probably would have to sample from a number of different disciplines, both in general relativity and quantum mechanics, with some hope that maybe you've got the right sprinkling of ingredients to bring to bear to that.

01:28:25.000 And then there is a history of, I think...

01:28:27.000 Some folks in academia that actually like to think about advanced power and propulsion that are also just...

01:28:33.000 Primarily physicists in their day-to-day capacity.

01:28:38.000 Hal Puthoff, although he's got a lot of many and varied interests, he's a great physicist.

01:28:43.000 He's published a lot of great papers in the literature just thinking about physics.

01:28:48.000 He's got some stuff he's looked at called the polarizable vacuum.

01:28:51.000 And so in my drawer of preferred papers, I have a number of papers in there that are from Hal's work on the polarizable vacuum because I find that interesting and fascinating.

01:29:00.000 And so there may be some things.

01:29:05.000 That's a fascinating thing for you to say, because Hal believes they have them, and he believes that we have 10 of them.

01:29:13.000 Oh yes, I know that.

01:29:14.000 Yeah, which is just so nuts.

01:29:16.000 And then, you know, he's a little agnostic on the Bob Lazar story.

01:29:20.000 But the Bob Lazar story, which I'm sure you're aware of, is essentially what we're talking about.

01:29:25.000 Like you would bring in some out-of-the-box thinkers. 0.99

01:29:29.000 And if you found some wildly intelligent young scientist who put a rocket engine in the back of a Honda, which is what he did, you would go, what is that crazy fucker up to? 0.99

01:29:42.000 Like, let's have him look at it. 0.99

01:29:44.000 What's it hurt?

01:29:45.000 The guys at Rocketdyne say he's a wizard, you know, bring him out there.

01:29:48.000 Or the guys that, wherever he was, he wasn't at Rocketdyne, he was at Los Alamos.

01:29:53.000 The guys at Los Alamos said he's a wizard, so let's bring him out here.

01:29:55.000 Let's see what's going on.

01:29:57.000 Yeah, his story is – I'm not too familiar with it.

01:30:00.000 It's the nuttiest story of all time.

01:30:03.000 And he supposedly – well, they denied that he ever worked at Los Alamos, but then they found him on an employee log.

01:30:12.000 And not only that, he knew the outline of the place.

01:30:15.000 He knew the security people.

01:30:16.000 George Knapp took him on a tour of it, and he knew everybody.

01:30:19.000 He knew the people that worked there.

01:30:21.000 He knew how to get around.

01:30:22.000 Like, he clearly worked there.

01:30:23.000 So that's interesting that they tried to deny that he ever worked there.

01:30:27.000 And then from there, he gets this job where he is flown out to the desert to Area 51, Site 4. And this is allegedly, right?

01:30:36.000 During this time, he can't even tell his wife what he's doing.

01:30:40.000 So his wife thinks he's going having affairs.

01:30:42.000 He's got to leave and fly away at 11 p.m. at night.

01:30:45.000 Like, right, buddy.

01:30:46.000 You can't tell me where you're going?

01:30:47.000 You want to work?

01:30:48.000 Yeah, you're working late again?

01:30:49.000 The wife starts having an affair.

01:30:51.000 And because of his clearance...

01:30:53.000 This almost sounds like a movie, right?

01:30:54.000 It does sound like a movie.

01:30:55.000 Which is one of the beautiful things about reality, is that reality seems so fake that sometimes actual true stories are bizarrely fictional.

01:31:06.000 So his wife starts having an affair.

01:31:09.000 Because of his clearance, he cannot be working on these things if he could be under extreme emotional duress.

01:31:15.000 So they fire him.

01:31:16.000 They don't give him any explanation.

01:31:19.000 They don't tell him his wife's cheating on him.

01:31:20.000 He starts taking people out to the desert, explaining to them, you have to see what we're working on.

01:31:26.000 They fly this thing on certain nights, and they do these test flights around the base.

01:31:30.000 It's nuts.

01:31:31.000 So he takes these people into this area.

01:31:33.000 They see it.

01:31:34.000 They get arrested.

01:31:34.000 When he gets arrested, he gets caught there.

01:31:36.000 He explains what he was doing.

01:31:38.000 He says, okay, I've got to go public or they're going to kill me.

01:31:41.000 So he goes public with George Knapp. 1.00

01:31:43.000 Initially they hide his face and then he says, you know what, fuck that. 1.00

01:31:46.000 Let's just film me. 1.00

01:31:47.000 Let me tell you everything.

01:31:48.000 He goes over the diagram of this device and he calls it the sport model and it looks like that.

01:31:55.000 That thing that we have right there.

01:31:57.000 It's almost like a hubcap, right?

01:31:58.000 Exactly.

01:31:59.000 That's a copy of it.

01:32:00.000 In the middle of that thing is some sort of a generator.

01:32:05.000 That he said works on this unknown element, this element 115.

01:32:09.000 Oh, some of this is coming back to me.

01:32:11.000 I think I've seen some stuff over the years.

01:32:13.000 Yes.

01:32:13.000 Yeah, some of it's coming back to me now.

01:32:15.000 And essentially, the way he describes it traveling, and again, this is in the 1980s, the way he describes it traveling is exactly the way you describe that sort of warp drive changing space and time around it.

01:32:31.000 And that you would point that thing where you wanted to go, and it would just...

01:32:35.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:32:37.000 It all sounds very surreal, right?

01:32:40.000 Oh, yeah.

01:32:40.000 There's another story.

01:32:45.000 Again, as I said, I have a number of friends that are keenly interested in this, and so I've been exposed to some of the different things.

01:32:51.000 To me, the Tic Tac account is interesting because it's got a lot of...

01:32:55.000 Rigorous data, if you will, that helps you go, well, I can't explain that, I can't explain that, I can't explain that.

01:33:01.000 There is another accounting that I just put in the category, my brain doesn't even know what to make of it, and it's the concept of Rendlesham Forest.

01:33:10.000 I don't know if that...

01:33:11.000 If that rings a bell, there's something over in the UK where there's a base over there and some airmen came across some very weird...

01:33:17.000 I can't even begin to describe.

01:33:19.000 I'm not sure if I know this one.

01:33:21.000 Yeah, it's pretty bizarre.

01:33:23.000 I don't know it well enough to unpack it today other than to say it's so bizarre that when you listen to the accounts that were recorded, right, it doesn't make any sense.

01:33:35.000 It's like, you know...

01:33:40.000 If you watch an octopus in an aquarium, right, and the octopus is doing something, you can sometimes understand what their motivation is.

01:33:51.000 There's like a cross-species ability.

01:33:55.000 It's like communication but without words, right?

01:33:58.000 You know, that octopus wants to go eat that little...

01:34:03.000 And so our chemical computers, even though they're different, we can look at their behavior and we can go, all right, I think I understand what that octopus might be wanting to do today or a shark or a dog or a porpoise.

01:34:17.000 But when you hear what happened in that Rendlesham Forest thing, it breaks all of my guessing machine.

01:34:24.000 What is the story?

01:34:26.000 A colonel and some airmen reported some weird stuff that was going on in Rendlesham Forest.

01:34:34.000 Yeah, and they went out and tried to investigate it, and they saw some...

01:34:40.000 Again, I'm doing such a terrible job of summarizing it because I don't really know the lore very well.

01:34:45.000 Here it is right here.

01:34:46.000 Everything they saw was very bizarre and crazy looking.

01:34:49.000 We can read it.

01:34:50.000 It says, 40 years ago, a remote force in Suffolk was the scene of one of the most famous purported UFO sightings in history.

01:34:55.000 So just what did happen, and will we ever know for sure?

01:34:59.000 Victor Thurn Kettle was out chopping wood one morning in Rendlesham Forest in late December 1980 when a car drew up.

01:35:06.000 Out stepped two men, aged about 30, dressed in suits.

01:35:09.000 Good morning.

01:35:10.000 Do you mind if we ask you some questions?

01:35:11.000 Asked one in a well-spoken English accent.

01:35:13.000 Earlier on 26th and 28th of December, United States Air Force security personnel stationed near...

01:35:20.000 Stationed at nearby RAF Woodbridge had reported seeing strange lights in the surrounding forest.

01:35:28.000 Forestry worker, Mr. Thurnkuddle, unannounced and unidentified visitors asked if he had been out the previous night.

01:35:35.000 I said, no, he recalls.

01:35:37.000 They said, did you leave the house at all?

01:35:40.000 Did you see anything?

01:35:41.000 I said, what?

01:35:42.000 They said, oh, there's a report of some red lights in the forest.

01:35:46.000 We're just checking.

01:35:46.000 And the two men, very politely but firmly, asked me probably about 20 questions.

01:35:50.000 I thought they were journalists.

01:35:52.000 They suddenly said, oh, well, fair enough.

01:35:54.000 There's probably nothing in it and left.

01:35:56.000 So I bought the papers every day for the next few days to find out what was going on.

01:36:01.000 And, of course, there was nothing.

01:36:03.000 Three years later, however, sightings made the News of the World front page story proclaimed UFO lands in Suffolk, and that's official.

01:36:12.000 The story was based on a memo from RAF Woodbridge Deputy Base Commander Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt to the Ministry of Defense.

01:36:21.000 It was released by the U.S. government described as an encounter with an apparent UFO in the forest.

01:36:28.000 Since then, the sightings have been the source of much debate and speculation among UFO enthusiasts and the subject of numerous books, articles, and TV programs.

01:36:35.000 In March, a documentary concluded the sightings had achieved legend status like the Loch Ness or King Arthur.

01:36:41.000 The forest even has its own official UFO trail, complete with a life-size replica of the flying saucer.

01:36:50.000 And this is the replica with the Hamza thing on it, that hand thing.

01:36:55.000 Bizarre.

01:36:57.000 Thurnd Kettle, UK authorities have said they didn't learn about the incident.

01:37:01.000 Okay, what is the story though?

01:37:02.000 Let's get to like, what is the story?

01:37:04.000 Scroll down more.

01:37:05.000 What does it say?

01:37:06.000 Yeah, that gets into the stuff that it doesn't make sense in terms of what they describe the UFO doing.

01:37:12.000 It's just very peculiar, right?

01:37:15.000 Yeah.

01:37:17.000 It got there and my heart absolutely plummeted.

01:37:19.000 There was nothing.

01:37:19.000 It was an absolute normal glade in the forest with three rabbit scrapes.

01:37:22.000 They're all carefully marked.

01:37:23.000 It happened to be roughly a triangle.

01:37:25.000 Okay, what else does it say?

01:37:29.000 What is the sighting?

01:37:31.000 Burn marks on trees, but what's the sighting?

01:37:34.000 I can show you what the UFO looked like.

01:37:36.000 Okay, sure.

01:37:38.000 That's what they said it looked like?

01:37:39.000 Whoa.

01:37:42.000 And it had those markings on it?

01:37:45.000 My Google search said that Grush brought it up when he was on here, but I couldn't find even clips about it, so I don't know that we went that deep into it.

01:37:52.000 How bizarre is it that it has that symbol?

01:37:54.000 That's an ancient Hindu symbol, correct?

01:37:56.000 That Hamza symbol? 0.96

01:37:58.000 I don't know.

01:37:59.000 Oh, they're different.

01:38:01.000 That looks very weird.

01:38:05.000 Huh.

01:38:07.000 So what about this one stands out to you?

01:38:10.000 I put this one in the category of, I just...

01:38:13.000 I don't understand if it's a real account.

01:38:16.000 I think when you have a lieutenant colonel that's reporting something as factual, I tend not to just immediately dismiss it.

01:38:25.000 And it's not just him, it's several people around him.

01:38:28.000 What they described doesn't make sense to me.

01:38:32.000 In terms of David Fravor talking about the tic-tac, that's not...

01:38:38.000 Totally alien to me.

01:38:40.000 I could, oh, well, it's trying to maneuver with the aircraft and it's maneuvering to their cap or whatever the case may be.

01:38:46.000 And I can kind of connect the dots with that.

01:38:49.000 But the Rendlesham Forest thing, it doesn't make any sense to me.

01:38:51.000 Well, what about it doesn't make any sense?

01:38:54.000 What they saw, why it was doing what it was doing.

01:38:57.000 What was it doing?

01:38:57.000 It just was out in the woods.

01:38:59.000 It was out in the woods, you know, with blinky lights and doing weird stuff.

01:39:05.000 Why is that weirder than the tic-tac to you? 0.95

01:39:08.000 I don't know.

01:39:09.000 So this is a gut thing, right?

01:39:11.000 In terms of my gut's telling me I don't understand this.

01:39:14.000 This doesn't make sense to me.

01:39:15.000 I don't know how to explain it any better than that.

01:39:18.000 But if it's just an object that's in the wood blinking lights and looks like it's flying, I just don't understand why that's weirder.

01:39:25.000 I think they also described it had like melty bits or something like that that were like dripping off of it and so forth.

01:39:33.000 It sounds so completely surreal.

01:39:35.000 I think maybe what I'm unconsciously trying to do is I'm trying to map.

01:39:42.000 How might I map math and physics to what it is that they're describing to me?

01:39:48.000 Jamie, is this the one where they found debris at the scene?

01:39:52.000 Someone brought this up.

01:39:54.000 Was it Jacques Vallée that brought this up?

01:39:57.000 Here it says, yeah, a piece of debris is seen burning up as a fireball over England.

01:40:01.000 Servicemen thought it was a downed craft.

01:40:03.000 Holt's memo says, glowing object, metallic in appearance, colored lights.

01:40:08.000 Attempt to approach the object.

01:40:09.000 appeared to move through the trees and the animals on a nearby farm went into a frenzy one of the servicemen Sergeant Jim Penn Penniston later claimed to have encountered a craft of unknown or origin while in the forest, although there was no published mention of this at the time, and there is no corroboration from other witnesses.

01:40:27.000 Hmm.

01:40:35.000 Yeah, so no matter how far you dig, there's not going to be very much satisfactory resolution of the mystery, if you will.

01:40:43.000 It's just a bonkers kind of story.

01:40:46.000 Why does this one stand out to you more than, like, say, Roswell?

01:40:49.000 Because Roswell, to me, is one of the most bizarre ones.

01:40:51.000 When you look at the front page of the Roswell Daily Record, I believe, that has this story saying that the government has recovered a flying saucer.

01:41:03.000 And that a crashed flying saucer was found.

01:41:06.000 And, you know, the story is that they grabbed the wreckage and flew it out to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in two separate planes in case one of them crashed and Truman met them there.

01:41:16.000 Maybe in that case it's, you know, it's potentially a purported spaceship.

01:41:23.000 It was around military bases.

01:41:25.000 I don't know.

01:41:28.000 Again, we're getting into the fact that I don't have a lot of depth in some of these areas, right?

01:41:34.000 I understand.

01:41:35.000 But it's just the weirdest aspect of this whole crashed retrieval program, the alleged crash retrieval program.

01:41:44.000 If it has occurred, and it really does go back to the 1940s.

01:41:48.000 How did you guys hide this?

01:41:50.000 How have you kept this secret so long?

01:41:53.000 Is that even conceivably possible?

01:41:56.000 That's one of the things I wonder about.

01:41:57.000 There's a book I was recommended to read called Blind Man's Bluff.

01:42:03.000 And it's a book about deeply classified projects connected to the Navy, right?

01:42:12.000 I think the end effect of what they were trying to achieve as part of what's detailed in this book is you remember hearing about deep-sea rescue vehicles, right?

01:42:22.000 So deep-sea rescue vehicles, basically that was a cover for some...

01:42:28.000 Submarines that the Navy was using to put listening systems on communication cables that were at the bottom of some of the bodies of water I think the Soviet Union was using at the time.

01:42:40.000 And so this book kind of details a number of programs that went through and developed kit and hardware to go through and accomplish these different tasks.

01:42:52.000 And so it's neat to kind of, you know, see how black programs like that unfold. 1.00

01:42:57.000 I don't know how that book got published, but it's a fascinating book.

01:43:00.000 But then that speaks to what you're wrestling with, right?

01:43:02.000 How do you have something that's so classified that doesn't leak?

01:43:07.000 Because all the other data that we see from other programs, you can keep a secret for a little while, but you can't keep it for that long.

01:43:17.000 When I look at these other things, that's what comes to my mind.

01:43:21.000 Now, that doesn't mean I'm right.

01:43:22.000 There could definitely be programs that are out there that are...

01:43:27.000 Maybe they've figured out how to get around that.

01:43:30.000 But when you look at some of the most classified military things that are out there, they usually have a lifetime associated.

01:43:36.000 Maybe it's just one of those things the government's really good at.

01:43:38.000 Like the government's really bad at a lot of things, but maybe they're really good at that.

01:43:42.000 Just that one thing, they've got it down.

01:43:44.000 Right, right.

01:43:44.000 Or at least there's a small section of the government that's really good at that, right?

01:43:47.000 Well, Hal's speculation, you know, when Hal says that he's pretty sure that there's 10 of them, that gives me pause.

01:43:54.000 Because that's a very serious problem.

01:43:56.000 Well, yeah, he's a very discriminating individual.

01:43:58.000 He likes to question everything.

01:44:01.000 And even though he's thought about some very interesting things over the span of his career, he does bring a little bit of that squinty-eyed physicist to some of the different things.

01:44:10.000 And so that gives you some measure of comfort.

01:44:13.000 Even though he's thought about some wide-ranging things, he's bringing a little bit of that skepticism to whatever he's been confronted with.

01:44:20.000 Also, as crazy as what he says is, there's some things that he won't talk about.

01:44:25.000 Okay, what is that?

01:44:27.000 Like, if you're telling me there's 10 crashed UFOs of non-human intelligence, and then there's stuff you can't tell me, that makes me just go...

01:44:37.000 What have you seen, Hal? 0.99

01:44:39.000 Stop bullshitting. 0.99

01:44:40.000 You're 88 years old. 0.99

01:44:41.000 Let's go.

01:44:42.000 Yeah, yeah, right.

01:44:42.000 You're on the clock, bud.

01:44:43.000 You're on the clock.

01:44:44.000 Spill the beans, buddy.

01:44:45.000 Right, right.

01:44:46.000 Come on.

01:44:46.000 If anybody knows, please.

01:44:47.000 But I guess if you did spill the beans, my goodness, you would no longer have access to any of that stuff and you'd probably be in trouble.

01:44:54.000 You know, they'd probably immediately get audited.

01:44:57.000 Oh, yeah.

01:44:58.000 Absolutely.

01:44:59.000 You'd have a lot of special things that would happen.

01:45:01.000 A lot of bad things would go your way, I would imagine.

01:45:04.000 Yeah.

01:45:05.000 What he describes that put it in light and perspective to me, he said you have to understand that one of the things that would happen is there would be real problems because you'd have to figure out how this stuff was funded.

01:45:16.000 So this is funded by misallocation of finances, so you lied to Congress.

01:45:21.000 So these are crimes.

01:45:22.000 These are crimes that put people in prison for life.

01:45:24.000 And then on top of that...

01:45:26.000 By the way, that goes back to that book I was telling you about, Blind Man's Bluff, because it talks about the amount of money that went into that program.

01:45:33.000 That was hundreds.

01:45:34.000 of millions of dollars.

01:45:35.000 Right.

01:45:36.000 And it's interesting.

01:45:37.000 That gives you like a little bit of a window of insight into how the black classified world moves stuff around.

01:45:44.000 And then you also have this national security problem because what Hal's saying is that we're not the only ones that have these things and that there's essentially a mad race to try to back-engineer these things and to successfully complete.

01:45:57.000 And this was the real fear, like when people were seeing the New Jersey drones amongst conspiracy theorists.

01:46:02.000 I was like, oh my god, what if China's already nailed it and they're buzzing us?

01:46:06.000 I got to think when you look at any of the counts of these things, the important things to maybe help categorize the nature of things that they see.

01:46:18.000 If a craft has the ability to manifest extremely fast speedy, I mean, SR-71 does Mach 3.2.

01:46:28.000 If you've got something that has radar track data that shows it's doing Mach 8 or Mach 10, that's interesting.

01:46:35.000 Now, we do have hypersonic stuff, so you can't just automatically say that it's something exotic.

01:46:40.000 It still could be...

01:46:41.000 Something that we know might exist out there with some other flags on the side of the vehicle.

01:46:46.000 But then, like you talked about G-forces, if it can do like a Tron turn, that 90-degree kind of turn, and you've got a radar track, that might help you categorize the nature of the different signals that are out there.

01:47:01.000 And to me, that's why I like the...

01:47:03.000 The Tic Tac thing has always been something that's hard for me to just sweep away because of the quality of the data.

01:47:08.000 And some of the stuff they describe, I can't imagine other conventional systems that could potentially explain what they're seeing.

01:47:16.000 But a lot of the other stuff I can actually probably piece together in my head.

01:47:19.000 It could be this or it could be that, right?

01:47:22.000 You know, they talk about the...

01:47:26.000 There are patents in the system for radar corner cubes that are a cube, a metallic cube inside of a clear balloon that gets floated to evaluate radar sensitivity.

01:47:40.000 What do those look like?

01:47:42.000 It just looks like there's a patent in the system.

01:47:45.000 So it's a corner cube, but there's a patent that has a version of that that's light enough to go inside of some kind of a...

01:47:53.000 Balloon, maybe it's filled with helium or something like that.

01:47:55.000 There you go.

01:47:55.000 That's the patent, right?

01:47:57.000 So there's a patent in the system.

01:47:59.000 And so I can certainly see maybe if that's tethered to a boat, right?

01:48:03.000 They're just evaluating our...

01:48:04.000 You know, our radar systems, if you will.

01:48:06.000 Well, that would kind of make sense until you listen to Ryan Graves' depictions of what these things were doing.

01:48:12.000 They were standing motionless at 120 knot winds.

01:48:15.000 If it's tethered, well, if it's moving, I can't describe that.

01:48:20.000 But if it's static, it could be tethered to a boat.

01:48:23.000 Right.

01:48:23.000 But that looks goofy.

01:48:24.000 Like, if you look at what that looked like, Jamie, pull that photo off you just had.

01:48:27.000 Like that, I don't think that's tricking.

01:48:31.000 The one on the left though, it's actually a metallic cube inside.

01:48:35.000 Interesting.

01:48:36.000 The one on the left, is there an image of that?

01:48:38.000 With the metallic cube inside the sphere?

01:48:41.000 Just a patent.

01:48:42.000 Okay, so it's theoretical.

01:48:44.000 They don't want us to know how it works.

01:48:45.000 Right, of course.

01:48:47.000 So in a lot of cases, I can, again, I'm agnostic, and so I bring this framework to the table.

01:48:53.000 And so only, you know, the Tic Tac ones really, I think, the one that bubbles up in my mind with the highest quality data that I haven't been able to categorize.

01:49:02.000 Well, it could be A, B, or C that's, you know, a more boring explanation.

01:49:06.000 Jamie, go back to that blue click on that.

01:49:08.000 I wanted to explore.

01:49:08.000 It could be some fake AI.

01:49:10.000 Could be nonsense.

01:49:11.000 Pilot's notes for...

01:49:12.000 Cube, transmedium vehicle, promulated by order of air control.

01:49:16.000 That's got to be AI.

01:49:17.000 It's restricted.

01:49:18.000 Come on, it's restricted.

01:49:19.000 It's super important.

01:49:20.000 It says for official use only.

01:49:21.000 This is on the internet.

01:49:22.000 It's got to be legit.

01:49:24.000 I am a French model.

01:49:28.000 It's just to buy stuff.

01:49:30.000 It's just goofy. 0.93

01:49:31.000 It's just silly.

01:49:32.000 We need to get those.

01:49:33.000 Get some Tic Tac stuff.

01:49:35.000 The lack of sonic boom is one of the things I want to talk about.

01:49:38.000 If that thing could move at that kind of a hyperspace.

01:49:41.000 Hypersonic speed, there would be some sort of a sonic boom.

01:49:43.000 Right.

01:49:44.000 If it's not...

01:49:45.000 Exactly right.

01:49:46.000 If it's not some kind of laser system that's creating pixels, and it's some solid thing, if it's going supersonic...

01:49:54.000 Based on everything we know with aerodynamics, it should have a sonic boom.

01:49:58.000 And if it doesn't, and it is a physical thing, then that demands an explanation, right?

01:50:03.000 And I wouldn't be able to explain that, right?

01:50:06.000 And that's exactly why something like the data that comes out of the Tic Tac thing, I haven't been able to just pound flat and make go away, right?

01:50:15.000 It keeps surviving all of my grumpy physicist attacks, right?

01:50:20.000 Does it frustrate you that you've never seen one of these things, or have you?

01:50:25.000 Funny story.

01:50:27.000 And beer is involved.

01:50:29.000 Uh-oh.

01:50:29.000 How much?

01:50:30.000 A little bit.

01:50:31.000 Are you drinking with Shane Gillis?

01:50:32.000 A little bit.

01:50:33.000 A little bit.

01:50:33.000 So we were down at Kennedy Space Center.

01:50:36.000 And this is a cautionary tale to don't always believe what your eyes see, right?

01:50:42.000 Because you potentially could lead yourself down the wrong path.

01:50:46.000 So we're down at Kennedy Space Center.

01:50:48.000 We had...

01:50:49.000 Put some docking cameras on some space station modules and spent a lot of, you know, a number of days working long hours wearing those uncomfortable bunny suits and so forth.

01:51:01.000 And so finished all this stuff, wanted to go celebrate.

01:51:03.000 So we went to the beach and had a little bit of unwinding time and drank a few beers, hanging out.

01:51:08.000 And so we're out on the East Coast down there close to Kennedy.

01:51:13.000 And we're looking up at the sky, and you could see some of the satellites coming over, right?

01:51:18.000 Your eyes adjusted to the light.

01:51:20.000 You could occasionally see some satellites coming over, and you kind of expect them to have a track that goes, you know, west to east, if you will, generally.

01:51:29.000 I mean, they can come to all different angles.

01:51:31.000 But then we started seeing some satellite tracks that were very different from what we might expect.

01:51:41.000 Being rocket scientists, right?

01:51:42.000 We're watching this stuff and that looks a little different.

01:51:44.000 That's kind of interesting.

01:51:45.000 And it's a very different angle.

01:51:47.000 Well, maybe it's a Russian spy satellite that's retrograde and it's, you know, we're trying to figure out what this could be and then, you know, a couple more beers later.

01:51:56.000 We see four or five more of these tracks, right?

01:51:59.000 And we're like...

01:52:00.000 Well, maybe all these people that talk about these crazy things, right?

01:52:04.000 Maybe there's something to that, right?

01:52:06.000 No, it's about an hour has gone by as we've gone through this process.

01:52:10.000 And we finally see another one of these little glowy orbs, if you will.

01:52:15.000 And I look at it, and I just realize out of the edge of the glowy orb, the wings of a seagull.

01:52:22.000 Right?

01:52:23.000 So it's the white belly of a seagull reflecting the light from the nearby city.

01:52:30.000 And so that's what we're seeing, right?

01:52:32.000 And so that's one of those things that's just something to make you think about what you're seeing.

01:52:37.000 Of course.

01:52:38.000 Because it's breaking all my guessing machines.

01:52:41.000 It's breaking all of our guessing machines.

01:52:43.000 And we're wondering and speculating about it.

01:52:45.000 But in the end, it was just a seagull doing their...

01:52:50.000 Nightly business, right? 0.98

01:52:51.000 Look at these silly guys looking at me, right? 0.99

01:52:53.000 That's funny. 0.99

01:52:54.000 That is funny.

01:52:55.000 So that's my only experience.

01:52:56.000 Yeah, well, the mind definitely plays tricks on you, especially when beer is involved.

01:52:59.000 Right, right, right.

01:53:00.000 But I can't dismiss all of the different very serious people that have talked about these things.

01:53:06.000 And that's where I get really perplexed and my agnosticism gets tested.

01:53:14.000 Right, right.

01:53:15.000 You know, I tend to try and always keep a squinty eye towards it.

01:53:19.000 And I think that's probably good to do that because then the stuff that survives that filter, right, is high-quality stuff, right?

01:53:27.000 So the things that keep coming out of the tic-tac thing, I just – I can't kill that.

01:53:33.000 I keep wanting to try and kill it, but I can't kill it.

01:53:36.000 What about when you look at things like the Go Fast video or the FLIR video and you look at these crafts that are moving in some very weird way that they don't exhibit traditional propulsion signatures?

01:53:50.000 So, yes, those are interesting videos and they come from trained professional fighter pilots.

01:53:56.000 Hope the one where it rotates, Jamie.

01:53:58.000 Fighter pilots.

01:53:59.000 And so I can't dismiss those accounts.

01:54:04.000 But the integrated...

01:54:06.000 The quality of that data is not the same as the Tic Tac, right?

01:54:10.000 Where you've got multiple aircraft, multiple radar systems over multiple days, right?

01:54:17.000 That's one of those...

01:54:18.000 And eyewitnesses.

01:54:18.000 Yes, exactly.

01:54:19.000 And not only eyewitnesses, I mean, they're laying eyes on this thing.

01:54:23.000 And it's not just one plane where sometimes you can fool yourself.

01:54:29.000 This thing is very...

01:54:30.000 This is the gimbal video.

01:54:31.000 This thing is very strange.

01:54:32.000 Put the guys talking about it because...

01:54:37.000 We're going against the wind.

01:54:38.000 The wind's 120 knots far west.

01:54:40.000 I don't want to think, dude.

01:54:42.000 Thank you.

01:54:51.000 That's not our LNS, though, is it?

01:54:53.000 It's not our LNS, dude.

01:54:55.000 Look at that thing! 0.99

01:54:57.000 It's rotating.

01:55:00.000 It's rotating.

01:55:02.000 It's going against the wind and it's rotating.

01:55:05.000 And, you know, I acknowledge the fact it doesn't have any thermal signatures that were indicative of like a plume or something like that, right?

01:55:12.000 So some of those things definitely are hard to explain.

01:55:16.000 It's also listening to these guys, listening to fighter pilots going, look at that thing.

01:55:21.000 Yeah, because their eyes are trained to go through and discern different things.

01:55:26.000 Because, you know, they're always thinking about...

01:55:28.000 Can this kill me? 0.99

01:55:30.000 Can I kill it? 0.99

01:55:31.000 I completely acknowledge the fact they have that framework drilled into their head, and that helps put this into a special category. 0.63

01:55:42.000 But those are, unfortunately, single data points, so I can't do anything with that.

01:55:46.000 And that gets back to what we talked about at the beginning of all this.

01:55:49.000 I would love for somebody to show up with a notebook.

01:55:53.000 Full of all these great observations that would help me.

01:55:57.000 We're making these little nanochips that we're trying to use to extract energy.

01:56:01.000 Can I see those?

01:56:01.000 Yeah, sure.

01:56:02.000 Is that the actual nanochips?

01:56:03.000 These are a bunch of the...

01:56:05.000 Nanochips that we're doing.

01:56:06.000 This is part of the Casimir company that we spun out.

01:56:09.000 These chips interact with the quantum field and generate a voltage potential between those leads.

01:56:15.000 And so we measure voltage on those guys.

01:56:17.000 We put them in dark RF shielded enclosures.

01:56:20.000 There's some pictures.

01:56:21.000 That's so cool.

01:56:22.000 Just looking at these is so cool.

01:56:24.000 Yeah.

01:56:25.000 And it's fun to think about how do you even make stuff like that?

01:56:28.000 We can talk about that in just a minute.

01:56:29.000 But, you know, let's talk about some of the applications, right?

01:56:34.000 Let's see.

01:56:35.000 Can we go back a couple slides?

01:56:38.000 Keep going.

01:56:41.000 One more.

01:56:42.000 All right.

01:56:44.000 Let's just spend maybe three minutes here talking about the Casimir force, at least picking up where we left off.

01:56:52.000 So we talked about the idea of the Casimir force is a macroscopic observational consequence of something called the quantum vacuum, these fluctuating fields and forces.

01:57:02.000 If you go to the next slide, Jamie.

01:57:05.000 So conceptually, the following is true, independent of anything that we're doing with the nanotechnology we're developing.

01:57:13.000 If you allow the quantum field to interact on these two metal plates that we talked about as part of the Casimir force, it will apply a force over a distance, and it will cause that gap to close and go to zero, right?

01:57:26.000 So that is, by definition, a force over a distance, and so that is a unit.

01:57:33.000 So the Casimir Force phenomena is an illustration of extracting energy from the quantum field.

01:57:41.000 So independent of anything that we're doing, right, that's part of what's baked into the idea of the Casimir Force interacting with the quantum field.

01:57:49.000 Now, you might say, well, maybe we could use that as a power source.

01:57:53.000 The only problem with this...

01:57:56.000 Textbook illustration of a casimir cavity.

01:58:00.000 Once the plates have collapsed, you can't get any more energy out of it.

01:58:04.000 You have to actually pull the plates apart.

01:58:06.000 You have to wind the watch again, if you will.

01:58:09.000 And so this type of an approach would at best simply be a battery.

01:58:14.000 So you couldn't extract continuous energy from the quantum field from this type of an apparatus.

01:58:19.000 So this leads into an innovation that we came across.

01:58:23.000 So, Jamie, if you go forward one more slide.

01:58:26.000 This is a slightly larger version of that scanning electron microscope image.

01:58:31.000 So we've changed the standard chasmere cavity concept by adding these pillars along the midplane.

01:58:40.000 So we have these structures that we put inside the middle of the chasmere cavity.

01:58:44.000 And so you see we've got a cavity wall on the left and a cavity wall on the right and these big three pillars.

01:58:49.000 The walls are fixed to the substrate.

01:58:52.000 They can't move.

01:58:54.000 We don't want them to move.

01:58:56.000 We want them to stay still.

01:58:57.000 And then the pillars are also fixed to the substrate.

01:59:01.000 They cannot move.

01:59:03.000 The walls are electrically connected to one another, and the pillars are electrically connected to one another, but they're isolated.

01:59:11.000 So that's just a physical description of what this is.

01:59:15.000 So now let's talk about how does this custom structure...

01:59:20.000 Interact with the quantum field.

01:59:22.000 What's the difference with this particular structure?

01:59:25.000 So for that, let me give you a metaphor.

01:59:29.000 Imagine a Pacific atoll island out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

01:59:34.000 It's surrounded by the Pacific Ocean with all this random wave energy that's beating the outside of the atoll island.

01:59:41.000 But at the center of the atoll island, there's a nice...

01:59:44.000 Lagoon, right?

01:59:46.000 Very quiescent, very smooth.

01:59:48.000 The water's connected to the Pacific, but a lot of that wave energy can't manifest on the lagoon.

01:59:53.000 So it's a protected and nice environment.

01:59:56.000 So imagine, Joe, you're sipping some nice water and having a nice paddleboard day, quiescent, enjoying yourself.

02:00:07.000 And, you know, Jamie, he took the other package and he went deep sea fishing out on the Pacific Ocean.

02:00:13.000 And so he's really bobbling back and forth and it's much more uncomfortable for him.

02:00:18.000 Maybe he's getting sick and feeding the fish.

02:00:20.000 Right.

02:00:20.000 So now with that metaphor in mind, let's come back to the structure.

02:00:25.000 So this structure, the walls on the outside are like the Pacific Atoll Island.

02:00:31.000 Inside the quantum field, which is like the Pacific Ocean.

02:00:34.000 So it's assaulting that structure on all sides.

02:00:37.000 The pillars are like you on your paddleboard in the lagoon.

02:00:42.000 It's a protected environment.

02:00:43.000 And so the way the quantum field interacts with this structure is it will occasionally cause a real electron inside the walls to quantum tunnel to the pillars.

02:00:54.000 And so the pillars are like you.

02:00:57.000 On your paddleboard.

02:00:58.000 It's a very quiescent environment.

02:00:59.000 And so the electron shows up through this quantum tunneling process.

02:01:03.000 But there's no wave energy on the lagoon to mirror that current back to the walls.

02:01:10.000 So in that way, this structure will interact with the quantum field and generate a voltage potential.

02:01:18.000 So we can measure a negative voltage on the pillars relative to the wall.

02:01:23.000 And so...

02:01:24.000 Although this is a very tiny little cavity, and we can measure the voltage directly using atomic force microscopes, if we put these guys together by the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, then we can get to voltage and current levels that map to things that we care about in application, like a tire pressure monitor system, something that uses a microwatts worth of power.

02:01:51.000 A Fitbit or, you know, you've got the ring there.

02:01:53.000 I think that's an electronic ring or something like that.

02:01:55.000 There's an oral ring.

02:01:57.000 Yeah, some low power applications.

02:01:59.000 And so using this, you know, this approach, we're trying to generate, we're trying to create chips that are about the size of your pinky nail.

02:02:09.000 You know, generate one and a half volts and 25 microamps.

02:02:13.000 And so that maps to a number of chips that are on the market today that operate at that power level.

02:02:19.000 But they, you know, they have to be recharged.

02:02:21.000 We don't have to be recharged.

02:02:22.000 We're like a solar panel that works in the dark.

02:02:25.000 So you can put us in your device and then it can go down to the bottom of the ocean and it will continue to work.

02:02:31.000 Or you can, we can give it to our buddies at Intuitive Machines and they can carry it to the surface of the moon.

02:02:36.000 And maybe they want to throw a sensor off to go.

02:02:39.000 We'll measure something and it'll collect data, even though the sun stops shining.

02:02:43.000 So the cool thing is, like I said at the beginning of this interview, we were going down this whole path of trying to understand the nature of the quantum field because we were motivated by where we might envision it could lead one day.

02:02:58.000 Maybe we could add more, a deeper understanding of that physics Venn diagram and get to a point where we can figure out.

02:03:05.000 What do we need to put into the rings that go around that IXS Enterprise concept shift, if you will?

02:03:11.000 And so it's cool to think that maybe we could come up with a technology that provides useful power today for things like this.

02:03:20.000 Maybe if we put it in aggregate, if we put a lot of them together, we could get to a point where...

02:03:27.000 What is that chip?

02:03:27.000 So this is just a 3D print of having a bunch of those little chips that are five millimeters by five millimeters, one and a half volts, 25 microamps.

02:03:37.000 If we add a bunch of those together at a very large extreme, you know, that particular board might generate 3.4 watts.

02:03:44.000 And so that board could recharge your phone in three hours.

02:03:50.000 And so imagine a scenario where you had a phone that's pretty resilient that for the most parts...

02:03:55.000 You'd never have to plug it in.

02:03:57.000 that might be pretty useful, right?

02:03:59.000 And it's neat to think that pursuing this whole reaching for the stars type of thing has fueled this exploration of pushing the boundaries of what we know and then kind of coming across instantiations that make us go, hey, wait a minute, although we were thinking about these kinds of things, look at what we could potentially do now.

02:04:22.000 And so we could find ways – To, you know, feed the research and still bring value here in incredible ways.

02:04:30.000 I mean, this capability is amazing to think in terms of what it could unlock, right?

02:04:35.000 Especially if we could, you know, if this is three and a half watts, you could imagine you put a bunch of these together, you could rapidly get to a kilowatt or even more, right?

02:04:46.000 Have expeditionary power.

02:04:47.000 I don't know if you've ever wanted to have a farm out in the middle of some untouched area where you didn't want to pay the money to run the power line.

02:04:56.000 Well, now maybe in 10, 15 years, maybe you wouldn't have to.

02:05:00.000 We could provide a solution that would allow you to come off the grid, right?

02:05:04.000 I was seeing something online about some new technology that I believe was invented in Japan where they have figured out a way to extract far more energy from solar panels.

02:05:15.000 Yeah, I think they've increased the efficiency on solar panels, but there is a limit to that, right?

02:05:20.000 In terms of, I think it's, you know, when you get to close to 40% efficiency on a solar panel, you're kind of at the limit of what you can do.

02:05:31.000 And then the challenge you have with a solar panel is at the surface of the Earth during...

02:05:37.000 Ideal peak lighting conditions, the flux of power you get is about a thousand watts per square meter, right?

02:05:44.000 So if you wanted, you know, a system that provided five kilowatts of power, you could do the math and figure you need a fairly big area.

02:05:53.000 With our technology, we can stack it on top of one another.

02:05:57.000 We don't have to stretch out like that.

02:05:59.000 And so the quantum field could potentially provide a lot more power with a much smaller footprint, if you will.

02:06:06.000 Now, I have to acknowledge we're still very early, right?

02:06:09.000 We're very low power levels, and so we want to crawl, walk, run.

02:06:13.000 But we're thinking about what can we do now to provide use, right, and then use those applications to continue to grow the capability.

02:06:23.000 At Casimir.

02:06:24.000 And then ultimately, if you have those things stacked 50 feet thick and, you know, 700 meters in a circle, you know, then you have enough power to make a warp drive.

02:06:37.000 Right.

02:06:37.000 Well, and so this gets into the cool thing is what we're...

02:06:43.000 What we're trying to understand and study inside these little chips that we're making is we're trying to understand the nature of the quantum field, right?

02:06:52.000 The structure to the quantum field.

02:06:53.000 How can we alternate?

02:06:54.000 How can we tweak it?

02:06:55.000 What can we do with it?

02:06:56.000 Because, you know, we talked about the fact that negative vacuum energy density is potentially a good proxy for the idea of exotic matter in terms of what general relativity requires.

02:07:07.000 And so in the process of developing a deeper understanding...

02:07:11.000 Of the quantum field with what we're doing with these devices, right?

02:07:15.000 I would contend that we're actually adding another circle on that Venn diagram that's potentially not only overlapping part of quantum mechanics, but it's also overlapping part of general relativity.

02:07:27.000 And I think that's kind of what's going to be necessary to be able to make the idea of space warp real one day.

02:07:34.000 We're going to have to have that new body of physics, those new E equals MC squared equations, right, that allows us to potentially, ah, hey, if I do this and this and this, then it might, you know, maybe I could solve that problem.

02:07:47.000 But I think your instincts are right on, right, from the standpoint, what we're doing in the micro here, right?

02:07:54.000 If you cracked open one of the...

02:07:56.000 Access panels on the IXS Enterprise.

02:07:58.000 You looked.

02:07:59.000 You might see some stuff that's like, I can see how these guys are descendants to what gets put together in that ring in macroscopic, whatever that might be.

02:08:10.000 It's got to be so frustrating that this has this immense potential, but imagine seeing it.

02:08:18.000 How do you get to do it?

02:08:21.000 I don't want to say frustrating.

02:08:23.000 Challenging, exciting.

02:08:24.000 Just knowing that there's this potential energy source that can be tapped.

02:08:29.000 And knowing that just like all technology...

02:08:32.000 I mean, if you go back to the Apollo program...

02:08:35.000 The amount of power that you have in your phone far exceeds what they used.

02:08:39.000 And they had like a whole giant room filled with supercomputers.

02:08:42.000 And now you just carry it around.

02:08:43.000 And you plug it into the wall and it's 50% charged in 20 minutes.

02:08:46.000 It's like nuts.

02:08:47.000 Yeah, we take that for granted.

02:08:49.000 It's interesting you mention that, right?

02:08:50.000 If you look back through, if you think about the Industrial Revolution, when we came up with steam power, right?

02:08:59.000 And then when we later figured out, you know.

02:09:03.000 Gasoline engines, right?

02:09:05.000 The amount of power we had available to us changed so drastically, right?

02:09:11.000 The change that it had on human civilization and human culture is just hard to fully comprehend because, I mean, if you think about all the different things that get done, you know, a single tractor with one person on it will...

02:09:27.000 You know, do all the stuff that's necessary to seed a field, to cultivate a field, to plow a field.

02:09:35.000 And it's amazing to think that that's possible just with one human being at the helm of the tractor.

02:09:41.000 But you had to unlock all the energy.

02:09:44.000 The insights to unlock the energy in what we know from petrochemical, right?

02:09:49.000 Just gas, diesel, whatever, right?

02:09:51.000 And so, yeah, it's neat to think how things like that change civilization.

02:09:55.000 And so, in some ways, it's like if you think about the long-term benefits of reducing something like this to practice, right?

02:10:08.000 We talk about the grid, right?

02:10:10.000 You were here in Texas, and I think we had some issues during a very cold winter where ERCOT got its R removed, right?

02:10:17.000 The power grid had some issues because it got really cold.

02:10:21.000 But imagine a future where we can start to create microgrids, maybe even eventually move away from something like that.

02:10:29.000 And then what would that kind of a capability do for...

02:10:33.000 Parts of the world that currently don't have any infrastructure in place.

02:10:37.000 There's a lot of places in Africa where if you brought this type of a capability where you could plop a brick down on the table that's one kilowatt and let people know, hey, can you make use of this?

02:10:50.000 And so just like Starlink provides this opportunity for people in remote locations to have...

02:10:58.000 We could potentially bring a solution to the table that could help a lot of places on the planet that they might not ever see that otherwise.

02:11:07.000 Those are some things that have us excited about as we continue to wrestle.

02:11:13.000 With technology, right?

02:11:14.000 Anytime you're trying to do something, you're trying to establish order where there's only chaos, it's hard, right?

02:11:19.000 But the things that help us weather that is the long-term implications of what we're doing, both in the near term and in the far term.

02:11:29.000 It's really cool to think, right, we can provide benefits, you know, here.

02:11:34.000 And then farther down the line here, and then farther down the line here, and then, oh, by the way, the whole reason we're doing all this stuff is because we hope to try and make the idea of a space warp possible one day, right?

02:11:45.000 It's cool to kind of have that connection between all these different nodes along the way.

02:11:51.000 Or you can see the path.

02:11:52.000 Yeah, yeah, you can see the path.

02:11:54.000 And you can see how it'd be warp useful for people today.

02:11:57.000 Right, right.

02:11:57.000 I mean, think about, like, what...

02:12:00.000 When we have a hurricane that hits, right, and the power goes out, you're without power until they can get the power lines up, right?

02:12:06.000 If you have capabilities like this maybe 50 years in the future or something like that, right, where everybody just, you know, they're off the grid, that changes the nature of how we contend with, you know, disasters like that.

02:12:21.000 And monopolizing resources. 0.71

02:12:23.000 That's the other issue.

02:12:24.000 We'd no longer be dependent upon fossil fuels or...

02:12:27.000 Essentially, everyone would be independent.

02:12:30.000 Right.

02:12:30.000 And then you could imagine as it scales up, it gets better and better, just like cell phones were initially these very large bricks that, you know, remember from Wall Street?

02:12:40.000 Oh, hi!

02:12:40.000 Yeah!

02:12:41.000 Okay, yeah, sure, I can do dinner.

02:12:43.000 You had that big brick with you, and now they're little tiny things.

02:12:46.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:12:47.000 And so you could imagine how that would...

02:12:49.000 We'll eventually get to a point where it's portable and anyone can have power everywhere you want to go.

02:12:55.000 Yeah.

02:12:56.000 Some of the things we think about in terms of the roadmap for things, right, you know, it may take us a little while before we could provide all the power that's necessary for like a Tesla.

02:13:08.000 But we could imagine a scenario where like – I'm going to hold this little prop up again.

02:13:13.000 We've got this 3.5-watt brick – 3.5-watt card.

02:13:17.000 Maybe we put a bunch of them together to create a one kilowatt module of sorts.

02:13:23.000 So maybe a Tesla's got 50 kilowatt hours worth of capacity in it.

02:13:31.000 Of your daily driving that folks do is, you know, to work and home.

02:13:36.000 So that's maybe 50 miles to and 50 miles from, 100 miles a day, right?

02:13:43.000 And so if you've got an electric vehicle that has all the batteries already in it, but then you make the decision to buy a one-kilowatt...

02:13:51.000 Casimir module, right?

02:13:54.000 And you connect it to your car.

02:13:56.000 That module will provide, over a 24-hour period, it will provide 24 kilowatt hours of capacity.

02:14:03.000 And so in terms of the driving duty that I just talked to you about, right, you're not going to drain the battery enough where the Casimir cell couldn't just...

02:14:14.000 Continue to recharge it.

02:14:15.000 So in that particular instance, even though we might be a little bit farther away from being able to power a whole car, we might be able to find opportunities for early adopters where, hey, for 99% of how you might use your electric vehicle, you don't have to plug it in, right?

02:14:32.000 So from where we are now with your current research and all this...

02:14:36.000 These incredible ideas.

02:14:39.000 What steps have to be taken in order to advance this stuff?

02:14:43.000 Right, right.

02:14:44.000 So the first step is trying to get to the power magnitude I just described, 1.5 volts and 25 microamps.

02:14:50.000 So we have chips.

02:14:52.000 These chips right here, you know, they can achieve very high voltages, but then they relax to a certain steady-state voltage over a long term, right?

02:15:01.000 So they have the ability to provide steady-state power, but it's like 30 millivolts.

02:15:06.000 With a steady state current.

02:15:08.000 And so it's the current that we're currently working on right now.

02:15:11.000 We're trying to get the current up to that 25 microamp ability right now.

02:15:15.000 And so that's the stuff that we're doing.

02:15:18.000 You know, every month we're trying to do another generation of chips to go through and work the material science and get that capacity to that level.

02:15:27.000 And making chips, that's tough.

02:15:30.000 That is tough business.

02:15:31.000 So it's been quite the slog.

02:15:33.000 We've been doing this since 2020.

02:15:36.000 The first chips we worked on took us 18 months to make.

02:15:41.000 And then we got the time down to 12 months.

02:15:43.000 And then we got the time down to 7 months.

02:15:45.000 And then we got these guys down to...

02:15:49.000 Actually, this was a two-week sprint from the time we did the design to the time we got them in hand.

02:15:53.000 But roughly, we're anticipating we can make these generations once a month. 0.97

02:15:59.000 So making chips is very different from...

02:16:01.000 You know, how we view the rest, like this wooden table, right?

02:16:04.000 You know, if you think about making something, you think about drills and saws and cutting holes and putting bolts in and so forth.

02:16:13.000 But when you talk about making chips, it's an entirely different approach to how you make things.

02:16:18.000 You make things with light and you make things with plasma, right?

02:16:24.000 This would be a good opportunity for me to use a little verbal description, and then you can grade me on how well I communicate this, right?

02:16:30.000 Okay.

02:16:31.000 So, you know, in concept, how do you make something smaller than what you can see with your eyeballs?

02:16:39.000 So, ordinarily, when we want to look at something very small, we use a microscope.

02:16:43.000 So we've got this optical system we look through, and then we look at something.

02:16:47.000 Maybe it's got a paramecium or whatever in it.

02:16:51.000 Now, what we're looking at is very tiny, and we use optics to blow that up.

02:16:57.000 And in some cases, instead of putting our eyes against the little viewports on the microscope, maybe we'll put an imager, a camera, on there.

02:17:05.000 And the camera will collect the image and put it on a big screen, a big LCD screen.

02:17:11.000 Now, if you think about that in reverse, what if you, you know, like let's say you're looking at our chips and you're seeing these squares and circles and tiny little different shapes and so forth, but it's projected on a big screen.

02:17:25.000 Now imagine for a moment instead you go through in some CAD program and you draw squares and circles or whatever.

02:17:32.000 Maybe you draw a picture of Jamie's head, right?

02:17:35.000 And then you go through and you take that digital file you just created.

02:17:40.000 And you kind of look at this whole process that I was talking about in reverse.

02:17:44.000 And so instead of using an imager to collect the image, use a projector to project the image back down through the optics, right?

02:17:53.000 Where now you project some shape you want to manifest on a chip, right?

02:17:59.000 But you can't see it.

02:18:00.000 You could look at it with your eyes, but you couldn't see it, right?

02:18:03.000 But you're using this projection system through the microscope in reverse to put the image down on the chip.

02:18:09.000 So now the next thing you do is you take, let's say you got a silicon wafer, and then you go through and you apply something we call photoresist.

02:18:17.000 It's like a really thick, almost like a honey type of consistent, a little thinner than that, right?

02:18:25.000 But you put some photoresist on the wafer, and then you spin it at really high RPM, and it spins that photoresist so that it's very thin.

02:18:34.000 And you take that wafer with the photoresist and you expose it to the image you want to put onto it with ultraviolet light, right?

02:18:42.000 And so that hardens part of that photoresist.

02:18:45.000 And then you develop that wafer to remove all of the photoresist that was not exposed to the ultraviolet light.

02:18:51.000 And then maybe you expose it to a plasma and you etch it.

02:18:55.000 And so every place where there's no...

02:18:58.000 Photoresist, it etches the surface.

02:19:00.000 But where the photoresist survived because you exposed it with your ultraviolet light, you now have an image.

02:19:08.000 So you could look at that with a microscope again, and then you'd see, you know, Jamie's mug on the surface of the silicon wafer.

02:19:16.000 And so in concept, that's how the idea of when you make a CPU or you make memory or you make any of this digital technology, that's technically how it works.

02:19:28.000 Are you old enough to remember microfiche?

02:19:31.000 What is that?

02:19:32.000 Oh, the little film?

02:19:34.000 Yeah, the little acetate things in school that you put in.

02:19:37.000 So that's another kind of illustration of it, but just not applied to a chip.

02:19:42.000 Well, I would imagine the manufacturing of something like this is a spectacular undertaking that would require a long time to develop the kind of factories that you would need.

02:19:53.000 to do this kind of stuff at scale in the United States.

02:19:56.000 And this is an issue that we have that was really highlighted by the COVID pandemic where we weren't able to get shipments of things and a lot of cars weren't for sale because they didn't have the chips to put in a lot of the new American vehicles.

02:20:11.000 Or in some cases they took functionality out because they couldn't get the ding-dang chips to go do what they wanted to go do.

02:20:18.000 I was really glad to see a lot of attention be brought to bear.

02:20:23.000 I think it was the Chips Act.

02:20:26.000 And even Texas has taken a very strong stance on trying to attract some chip manufacturing capability here in Texas, right?

02:20:38.000 Yeah, we were talking about the Samsung plant that they built here.

02:20:42.000 But the Samsung plant kind of highlights the issues because they weren't able to achieve the tolerances that they required in large batches.

02:20:50.000 I think they'll eventually get there, right?

02:20:53.000 Those are just illustrations of the fact it takes a while to get everything dialed in.

02:20:58.000 It took us 18 months to get our first chip, and then now we're getting a two-week sprint.

02:21:02.000 We can make our chip, and it took five years to get to that capability, if you will.

02:21:07.000 I think they'll get all that figured out.

02:21:09.000 But in my mind, the other value proposition for chip manufacturing is, to me, chip manufacturing is like the 21st century automobile manufacturing jobs, if you will.

02:21:22.000 It seems like that could provide a great opportunity for...

02:21:26.000 You know, people to get meaningful work that pays well, that makes a product that a lot of people need, right?

02:21:32.000 And so I think in some ways that's the upside to trying to focus on getting more chip manufacturing here in the States, right?

02:21:42.000 So I just think that's a win.

02:21:45.000 That's a win-win, right?

02:21:47.000 Yeah, because chip manufacturing, one of the things that Apple stated, they have apparently a big leap coming forward with the iPhone 17. And they think that they're going to have to manufacture these in China.

02:21:59.000 I was reading Tim Cook talking about it because they're saying that China is the only nation that's capable of achieving what they're trying to put into these.

02:22:09.000 Is it China or Taiwan?

02:22:10.000 I don't know.

02:22:11.000 I believe it's China.

02:22:12.000 I don't know definitively either, right?

02:22:18.000 Actually, maybe it's just manufacturing that's the issue, not the chips.

02:22:22.000 But see if you can find what Tim...

02:22:24.000 Tim Cook said about needing to develop the iPhone or manufacture the iPhone 17 because I think a lot of their stuff they do in India now, but they think this new one is going to be so sophisticated that they're going to have to have it made back in China again. 0.99

02:22:37.000 Yeah, so when I think of cutting-edge chip capability, I think of TSMC that is in Taiwan, right?

02:22:46.000 And they've got those machines, the ASML machines that are...

02:22:52.000 This is a very interesting thing, right?

02:22:54.000 So the machines that help make some of those tiny chips that are inside the iPhone, they're made by this machine that's developed by a company called ASML over in the Netherlands.

02:23:07.000 And, you know, part of me thinks it's like, that's a very small brain trust of people, right, that are making machines that are kind of, you know, setting the pace for, you know, because I think about what happens if...

02:23:20.000 Somebody, you know, a bus has an accident or something like that, right?

02:23:23.000 Because it's just like such a small group of people that have this skill on how to make these tiny little features that are two or three nanometers.

02:23:32.000 I mean, that's like, that's crazy small.

02:23:35.000 What percentage of the population can do that?

02:23:37.000 Right, there's not a lot.

02:23:38.000 And two or three nanometers, it's like, that's, you know, if you were to put DNA on the table, right, and you calculated two or three nanometers, it'd be as varied.

02:23:50.000 Here's a better comparison.

02:23:52.000 If you hold a marble in your hand...

02:23:55.000 And you imagine that as one nanometer, right?

02:23:58.000 It's just kind of a comparison here.

02:23:59.000 So you have a marble in your hand.

02:24:01.000 That's one nanometer.

02:24:02.000 Well, how big is a meter?

02:24:03.000 A meter is the size of the Earth by comparison.

02:24:06.000 So just to put a nanometer in mind, right?

02:24:11.000 So we can all envision a meter, right?

02:24:13.000 So that puts a nanometer to scale, right?

02:24:15.000 And so they're making things, lateral features, that have this handful of nanometers in mind.

02:24:22.000 Now, that said, I do think...

02:24:24.000 That is so crazy.

02:24:26.000 I do think chips are reaching a limit in terms of what they can do for the lateral features, the next big chapter.

02:24:32.000 I think for chips is they're going to go 3D.

02:24:34.000 They're going to start making them.

02:24:35.000 They've got a bunch of efforts in place to try and figure out how to make chips much more 3D, especially when they may even include multiple different chips that serve different purposes, if you will.

02:24:47.000 You'll no longer just have the single flat chip that does the surface.

02:24:50.000 There'll be a bunch of chips on top of one another that get integrated into assembly.

02:24:54.000 You already see it in this.

02:24:56.000 Tire pressure monitor system.

02:24:58.000 There's a little chip here on the back that's actually a system of chips.

02:25:00.000 There's a bunch of chips in that little silver piece on the end there.

02:25:03.000 There's a microprocessor.

02:25:05.000 There's a Bluetooth module.

02:25:06.000 There's a pressure sensor.

02:25:08.000 And then there's a receiver.

02:25:10.000 Look how small that is.

02:25:10.000 Yeah, that's nothing, right?

02:25:13.000 That little shiny silver piece.

02:25:15.000 Yeah, that shiny silver piece.

02:25:17.000 That's not only just the pressure sensor.

02:25:19.000 It's all the other support electronics. 0.80

02:25:21.000 And everything else is just simple dumb stuff, if you will.

02:25:24.000 And a big battery in comparison.

02:25:25.000 And a big battery that has to last five years, right?

02:25:29.000 So that's why they...

02:25:31.000 And you don't take the lid off this thing.

02:25:34.000 This is glued on, right?

02:25:36.000 When it's done, you just throw it away, right?

02:25:39.000 So that's the current operating process.

02:25:41.000 So crazy.

02:25:42.000 Now, when you think about the current capabilities of AI...

02:25:47.000 You know, I think...

02:25:58.000 So when AI first came out, I tried it a few times, and I wasn't satisfied with, you know, the quality of what I was able to do with it.

02:26:07.000 This is a number of years ago, right?

02:26:09.000 But, you know, in the last 12 months, I've kind of gotten in the habit of using it much more in a lot of the different things that I do.

02:26:18.000 And it certainly does bring a lot of value in certain areas.

02:26:23.000 And, you know, a lot of people talk about...

02:26:28.000 Artificial intelligence is going to kill us.

02:26:30.000 Oh my gosh, it's going to kill us.

02:26:31.000 And I don't think it's artificial intelligence that's going to be a potential big problem.

02:26:38.000 It's more a measure of artificial incompetence.

02:26:42.000 So let me unpack that.

02:26:44.000 So I think AI is an amazing tool and it's only going to get more useful as we continue to move forward.

02:26:49.000 And I use it every single day in terms of different things that I explore.

02:26:54.000 It's extremely...

02:26:55.000 Useful.

02:26:56.000 And there's times when you're interacting with it where you might even think to yourself, come on, is there some dude actually typing on the other side of the screen?

02:27:03.000 Because it's like, it's joking with me for crying out loud.

02:27:05.000 And it's instantaneous.

02:27:06.000 Right, and it's instantaneous, right?

02:27:08.000 And so I think...

02:27:10.000 As human beings, we tend to anthropomorphize everything, right?

02:27:14.000 And so I think in a lot of ways, we want to give it more credit than it is due, right?

02:27:18.000 And so when we interact with it, we might think based on the quality of the interaction, oh my gosh, this stuff is amazing.

02:27:25.000 This is artificial general intelligence.

02:27:27.000 But then it'll go off and do something. 0.85

02:27:29.000 Totally boneheaded.

02:27:31.000 And you'll even call it on it.

02:27:33.000 And it'll say, no, I did this exactly right.

02:27:36.000 And it's just like, you know from your own training, right, that whatever it offered up is quite wrong, right?

02:27:43.000 And so I keep waiting for somebody.

02:27:46.000 Do you remember the movie Dr. Strangelove from the 60s, right?

02:27:50.000 So the Stanley Kubrick thing and this movie of absurdity showing, you know, how...

02:27:57.000 Incompetence in the government and the military leads to the destruction of the world, if you will.

02:28:03.000 We need a Stanley Kubrick equivalent today to do a movie called AI Bob, right?

02:28:10.000 Where AI Bob accidentally takes out the world while trying to help, right?

02:28:15.000 And I think it's one of those things where I think AI is an amazing tool.

02:28:20.000 We need to find out more ways to use it.

02:28:22.000 It's incredible.

02:28:23.000 But I think we just need to remind ourselves it's not quite as capable as we might think it is.

02:28:29.000 And we need to be careful of that so that we don't...

02:28:32.000 You know, put it in control of something in a certain way where because it has these other faults, it does something that's really unfortunate, right?

02:28:40.000 So we have to make sure that it's reached a very high level of proficiency before it gets...

02:28:45.000 Right.

02:28:45.000 Or just be careful about how we use it and never be afraid to question what it provides, right?

02:28:51.000 Because there's no question.

02:28:52.000 It helps me be faster at a lot of stuff I want to do, right?

02:28:55.000 But I have a lot of skills and talent that I use to filter whatever it's given me and I go, ha ha, no.

02:29:01.000 That's totally wrong.

02:29:02.000 But I wouldn't be able to do that.

02:29:05.000 I would just trust it. 0.99

02:29:07.000 I'd build something that kills everybody. 0.98

02:29:10.000 Dang it, I forgot to carry the two.

02:29:12.000 Well, when you think about the potential future versions of AI, that's where things get very interesting.

02:29:17.000 Because if you do get to a point where it achieves a much higher level of understanding of all the physical properties of the universe and does really understand the quantum vacuum and does really understand how to utilize it.

02:29:30.000 So I think one of the things, because I have been thinking about this, and I know a lot of other people are trying to figure out how to use AI to go through and help navigate on physics frontiers.

02:29:43.000 You know, AI is trained on a bunch of existing data, right?

02:29:50.000 And so in some ways, it is an enormous experiment in statistics.

02:29:58.000 So I would wonder how much an AI system by itself could innovate new ideas.

02:30:07.000 It certainly could recognize patterns.

02:30:09.000 Once you institute sentience and then, if it's possible at all, to make it creative.

02:30:18.000 That's where I wonder.

02:30:21.000 Great question.

02:30:22.000 And I'm not an AI expert, so I'm going to tread very carefully here.

02:30:27.000 When I think about how they train AI today, it is certainly a measure of statistics, right?

02:30:34.000 And so when you talk about an AI agent being able to actually think in the way that you and I might consider thinking, I don't think anything that we have does that per se, right?

02:30:48.000 You just got a bunch of GPUs that are taking in input and then passing it through.

02:30:56.000 A matrix of all this stuff that's from training and then so the statistics of what comes out, right, is a result of whatever training that was done.

02:31:03.000 So it's not like Leonardo da Vinci imagining where he's going to put his next brushstroke on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

02:31:15.000 But certainly it could...

02:31:17.000 It could potentially, you know, take an image of the Sistine Chapel and mix it with an image of some other modern art or whatever and come up with some cool homogenization of things, right, and so forth.

02:31:29.000 So I still think – I think we need to better understand what is consciousness, right, before we can really even do that.

02:31:37.000 What do you think it is?

02:31:39.000 Oh, that's – yeah.

02:31:40.000 I know you've thought about it.

02:31:42.000 You think about everything.

02:31:45.000 Yeah, I don't know.

02:31:46.000 It's a good question.

02:31:46.000 I would speculate, right?

02:31:50.000 Maybe this comes down to the nature of the quantum field, the quantum vacuum.

02:31:58.000 I think there are other forms of radiation.

02:32:04.000 Scalar field fluctuations with the quantum field that are beyond electromagnetic, like the lights in this room, that's electromagnetic radiation.

02:32:13.000 Scalar fluctuations would potentially be a whole other realm of radiation that we currently don't have any sensors to detect, right?

02:32:21.000 But maybe biology uses those types of things. 0.97

02:32:23.000 And so there are things inside cell structures called microtubules.

02:32:28.000 I think Hal maybe even mentioned something about microtubules to you when he was here the other day.

02:32:33.000 But cells have microtubule structures in them, and I think that may be connected to the idea of consciousness.

02:32:41.000 Although I don't have a well...

02:32:43.000 Enough formulated answer to be able to defend anything.

02:32:47.000 So I'm treading very carefully because this is not my area of expertise.

02:32:51.000 But it's so fun to speculate.

02:32:52.000 It is fun to speculate.

02:32:53.000 And maybe we can schedule another opportunity to come back and we can talk about consciousness, bring a couple other folks that are more cognizant than me.

02:33:02.000 I would love that.

02:33:02.000 Yeah.

02:33:03.000 You want to organize that?

02:33:04.000 Yeah.

02:33:04.000 Do you know who you would call?

02:33:05.000 I don't know yet.

02:33:06.000 I'll think about it.

02:33:07.000 Let's do it.

02:33:08.000 I'll have a think.

02:33:09.000 I actually probably have a couple other cool ideas for cool things we can.

02:33:12.000 I think a lot of people would really enjoy learning and listening about.

02:33:16.000 Well, that would be a fantastic collaboration with people that have theories about consciousness along with these theories, these quantum theories.

02:33:23.000 Fascinating stuff.

02:33:24.000 Harold, thank you so much.

02:33:26.000 So interesting and I'm so happy that people like you are out there in the world working on this stuff.

02:33:33.000 I'm sure one day, you know, when people look at the past and say, boy, look at those cave people. 1.00

02:33:38.000 Look what they're doing.

02:33:39.000 You know what I'm saying?

02:33:40.000 Because, like, we would look at the Victorian people or we would look at people from thousands of years ago.

02:33:44.000 I think they'll look back at this going, wow, this is where it all started.

02:33:48.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:33:49.000 This was the moment.

02:33:50.000 Yeah, so let's definitely do that.

02:33:52.000 Let's definitely have another visit and bring in some people that will explore consciousness together.

02:33:56.000 Sounds good.

02:33:57.000 I love it.

02:33:57.000 Thank you so much.

02:33:58.000 Really appreciate it.

02:33:59.000 Thank you, Joe, for having me.

02:34:00.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - May 08, 2025

Joe Rogan Experience #2318 - Harold "Sonny" White

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