In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, I sit down with Dr. Aaron Sorkin, a professor at the School of Medicine at Stanford, to talk about the science of cancer and how tumors evolve to trick the immune system into not recognizing them.
00:00:26.000So my day job is in cancer research and cancer biology, mostly immunology and cancer.
00:00:33.000Much of what my laboratory does is not so much the biology of cancer, but the developing instruments that create the data that allow us to analyze the complexities of how the immune system interacts with tumors and how tumors basically re-enable the immune system to help the cancer itself.
00:00:54.000So the problem has been we don't have the ability to collect enough data, or not until recently, to collect and understand what all of that means.
00:01:02.000So we've been kind of poking in the dark for decades.
00:01:06.000And so probably for the last twenty years, I've developed a number of instruments and turned them into companies that allow everyone to access a level of information they couldn't get before.
00:01:17.000So explain that the immune system allows the tumors?
00:01:24.000So what happens is that there's a sort of a there's a dance between the mutations that initiate a tumor and then a sort of an evolution of how the tumor eventually learns how to trick the immune system to not recognize it.
00:01:41.000So we have all kinds of internal I mean literally every day, every person, you'll develop five cancer like objects inside your body.
00:01:50.000But the immune system and your body have a way of shutting it down very quickly.
00:01:55.000But with enough time and with enough variation, tumors will eventually evolve in a way that trick the immune system not only into not recognizing them, but in fact to help them and feed them in a way to create an inflammatory environment that actually then the tumor uses to propagate its own cell division and then metastasis.
00:02:15.000So it's a normal function of natural human biology to create tumors.
00:02:21.000It's not so much a normal function, it's a byproduct of what evolution is, that when the genes mutate when a cell divides or if you go out and stand in the sun to mutate.
00:02:33.000For instance, you get skin cancers because you're getting ionizing radiation that's changing the DNA, making a mutation, and some of those random mutations will initiate a cancer.
00:02:43.000So, for instance, I have a mutation called MIDFE 318k.
00:02:49.000It's a mutation that I was born with, it didn't, wasn't in my family, and it causes both melanoma and kidney cancer, which I've had both.
00:03:01.000You know, we didn't find that out until a couple of years ago, but I've been following it over the years, and we basically figured out, okay, it's going to have to be this.
00:03:09.000So we had my sequence, my genome sequenced.
00:03:11.000But that's just one of hundreds of different kinds of mutations that can occur that are on a path towards creating a cancer.
00:03:20.000But the cancer can't survive if the immune system recognizes it.
00:03:25.000So eventually what happens is there's this detente that is reached between the immune system and the cancer where the immune system basically ignores the cancer.
00:03:35.000So Jim Allison here in Houston won the Nobel Prize back in 2018 for understanding one of these turn off signals that the immune system that the cancers use to turn off the immune system and that by showing he could block it, his wife Pam Sharma ran a bunch of clinical trials in MD Anderson that showed in fact that this could actually turn a five percent survival disease in melanoma to a fifty percent survival.
00:04:03.000And that then created the whole immunotherapy field that the world is taking advantage of today.
00:04:27.000So, for instance, there are proteins on your cell's surface.
00:04:31.000I won't go too immunologically deep about it.
00:04:33.000They're called major histocompatibility complex proteins.
00:04:37.000So for instance, if I were to try to just randomly do a tissue transplant from me to you, it's very likely that it would be rejected.
00:04:44.000And it's because of those MHC proteins that it's rejected.
00:04:49.000What's happening is that your cells are presenting your internal cell biology to the immune system.
00:04:56.000And it's saying, okay, you're a friend, not a foe.
00:05:00.000So when cancer usually initiates, there are disruptions that happen and proteins are made inc doing in some cases is they're presenting the internal damage to the body.
00:05:14.000And the body's saying, oh, there's something wrong with this cell.
00:05:19.000These same proteins are what the immune system uses, for instance, to go after viruses.
00:05:24.000So when you get a virus infection inside the cell, the body has a way of chopping those proteins inside the cell, presenting it via MHC.
00:05:33.000And then the immune system attacks it.
00:05:35.000So what one of the first things that actually tumors do is they learn to turn off the MHC proteins inside themselves.
00:05:42.000So the ability to show that I'm damaged is shut down.
00:05:46.000And so the immune system doesn't go on full alert for that.
00:05:50.000But then there are other mutations like divide when you're not supposed to, you know, avoid this kind of induced cell death called apoptosis and not others.
00:06:00.000And so it cancer doesn't just like start and then the next day you've got it.
00:06:09.000You have like a benign tumor which eventually becomes a metastatic tumor.
00:06:15.000And so the but the immune system is key at every stage of the development because if you can reactivate the immune system in just the right way, then you can prevent the cancer from basically spreading or from metastasizing or from killing you essentially.
00:06:35.000Is there a potential for, given the understanding of this, is there a potential for using this for organ transplant patients where locally would stop recognizing this as a foreign organ?
00:06:52.000In fact, when you get a tissue transplant or an organ transplant, you're suppressing the immune system.
00:06:59.000The problem with that suppression is that you then put yourself at risk risk of cancer.
00:07:05.000Because what you're doing is you're turning off the immune system's ability to combat and go after a cancer in the moment it forms.
00:07:12.000So most people who are under immune suppression are at risk both of, let's say, virus infections, bacterial infections, but also further cancers.
00:07:22.000So would the potential be to turn that off locally so you could turn that off to this on the specific organ?
00:07:28.000That would be a great thing to do if we could.
00:07:31.000Right now, the only things that we have are systemic.
00:07:35.000So yeah, I mean, for instance, if you could deliver to the organ that you're transplanting anti-immunosuppressive, you know, basically immunosuppressive locally.
00:08:07.000I have a few friends that have had organ transplants.
00:08:11.000And it's, you know, it's very disturbing knowing that they're so vulnerable to any kind of infection because of these medications that they have to take in order for the body to accept the transplant?
00:08:21.000One of the problems is that there are literally hundreds of different types of immune cells.
00:08:26.000And really until recently, and frankly until a technology my lab developed about over a dozen years ago, we couldn't look at all of the immune cell types all at once in a single picture.
00:08:39.000So I came from a laboratory, Len and Lee Herzenberg, when I was a grad student at Stanford, and they had developed an instrument called the fluorescence-activated cell sorter.
00:08:48.000And that allowed you to look at three proteins at a time.
00:08:51.000And if you could know ahead of time what the cell types were that expressed the proteinins that you're interested in, you could look at just those three cell types.
00:09:00.000Then I came up with a way to look at, you know, fifty or sixty proteins at a time, sort of stepping up what they had already taught me how to do.
00:09:09.000And then suddenly that gave us the ability to look at nearly every cell type in the body, an immune cell type.
00:09:16.000And then that gave us, let's say, the raw data to build mathematical models that we could do better predictions of what outcomes would be.
00:09:24.000And how is that, like, what are you, what are you applying in terms of like real world scenarios?
00:09:41.000And it is a distorted version of a myeloid cell type.
00:09:47.000It starts as a stem cell, and that stem cell goes down a number of different paths.
00:09:53.000And depending upon the person, the disease is sufficiently different that it might follow a slightly different path towards what becomes the disease itself.
00:10:04.000And so being able to trace the path and to know which steps along the way that it takes to become what becomes then the metastatic lymph leukemia could only be accomplished by having enough markers that allowed us to trace everybody along the path.
00:10:22.000It's kind of like if I wanted to follow you from who you are as an egg through development through to who you are today and I had snapshots every month, I need different markers to measure what you are as an egg versus what you are as a baby versus what you are as an adult.
00:10:41.000And so each of those different markers in my world would be different proteins that tell me something about an adult leukemia versus a baby leukemia.
00:10:51.000And then we use something called pseudo time, which is a mathematical concept that allows us to stitch together those photographs.
00:10:58.000I could take a random box of photos of you from an egg to who you are today, and I could just by hand put together the most likely path and sequence of what you were from the earliest to the latest.
00:11:09.000But we needed the data and we needed the means and the instruments to collect that information so that then the math could come into play.
00:11:16.000That's such a fascinating thing about human beings is the biological variability.
00:11:48.000But what you're doing is you still have to pay homage to the fact that those differences exist.
00:11:53.000And so while, you know, my cancer might be the same class of, let's say, melanoma as another person's, the complexity of what allowed that cancer to become are so different that the drugs that would work for me might not work for another person.
00:12:11.000And so that's what basically requires us to personalize the medications in a way that gives the right drug to the right person.
00:12:23.000So I've started probably half a dozen companies and sold them, places like Roche, et cetera.
00:12:28.000Actually, my most recent company we sold to 10x Genomics, which enables them now because of a patent I created back in 2011 to scale up the amount of information that we can collect at a time that then when layered on top of what, for instance, 10x Genomics already did, which is doing what's called single cell genomic analysis, we could scale that up a hundredfold to get a hundredfold amount of information.
00:12:56.000But the problem with that is that I can collect all that data and make an analysis of a cancer for you, but it might be a little bit different than another person.
00:13:08.000So what we have to do then is develop techniques that allow us to narrow in on what the differences might be so that when I develop a drug for person X, it works for person X and not for person Y, right?
00:13:22.000So there's a lot of personalization in medicine that is required.
00:13:28.000The diversity that makes humanity great and that makes humanity able to survive in the face of so many challenges is that there are individual differences that one person might survive and another won't.
00:13:47.000I mean, the, you know, for instance, with certain drugs, one of the first things I learned in pharmacology when I was way back in the day is that there's always a benefit to damage ratio that you're having to deal with.
00:14:02.000That a drug has a positive outcome, but there are side effects.
00:14:06.000And so as scientists or as clinicians, we make a choice based on the statistics.
00:14:15.000But by the way, there's all these side effects that might affect you.
00:14:19.000And overall, globally, 60% of people will survive.
00:14:24.000But since I don't know anything more about your specific disease, I am by law required to give you the 60% drug.
00:14:34.000until I know or can distinguish that your disease is a different subclass than the 60%.
00:14:40.000And that's, in fact, a lot of what pharmaceutical companies are doing is they're trying to marry a diagnostic to the disease itself, the disease subtype itself, so that if you can show that 90% of the people of this kind of subclass will survive, you have to, by law, choose that diagnostic to make sure that the person doesn't have the subclass before you give them the 60% drug.
00:16:10.000There's all these subtle, let's call them, smoldering mutations that are waiting for a second or a third hit to occur, or for, you know, instance, you get old enough so that your immune system is kind of going wonky, and it no longer is able to take care of something that twenty years ago it would have been able to heal perfectly well.
00:17:31.000Yeah, there's, you know, I mean, I think there's obviously, there's a benefit to light.
00:17:35.000I mean, I'm not saying don't go out and do it.
00:17:37.000And if, and, you know, I think as well, there'll come a day, and I was just talking with some friends of mine at dinner last night, is, you know, maybe with things like CRISPR, I could rub a CRISPR ointment on my body.
00:17:52.000It would fix the single point mutation in my skin and then I could enjoy the sun again.
00:18:04.000I think honestly, I mean, people always say five years is sort of like this horizon.
00:18:08.000But no, I really, I mean, I know people who are already developing systems for delivering genes, you know, RNA to cell.
00:18:16.000I know that's a dirty word in some, but there are formulations of RNA that probably won't be as problematic as some of the things that maybe the COVID vaccine might have done.
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00:20:34.000But if you get infected by a virus, it's all over your whole body anyway.
00:20:40.000So it's whether the spike protein itself was problematic.
00:20:44.000And so, you know, I know I'll annoy somebody one side or the other by saying anything around this area, and I'm not here to cause any controversy.
00:20:54.000But, you know, your immune system works, but if you can try...
00:21:06.000The question is back to this cost-benefit ratio.
00:21:10.000Is the benefit to the larger statistical population worth it, knowing that some people are going to be hurt by it or not?
00:21:20.000So for instance, you know, back to cancer and vaccines, there's a number of cancer vaccines that are coming down the pike that for people like me would be, I mean, given that I get something hopped off of me four times a year.
00:21:51.000But is there another way that could potentially deal with those things other than cutting them off or is that the only way to remove it from your system?
00:22:01.000So the issue is that once those, the melanoma, once these lesions are on your, on your skin, they will expand.
00:22:10.000Luckily, most of mine are what have been called surface spreading, although one of mine was what's called a nodal, which basically dives right in.
00:22:45.000But, you know, there are, so for instance, if you can catch most of these cancers early, then that's what's important.
00:22:55.000So I think probably one of the most important, let's say, changes to our medical system that could be initiated would be, frankly, the use of things like MRI, not CT scans, because CT scans are known to cause cancer.
00:23:10.000I mean, there was a big study just published recently that said, here's what happens to people once CT scans were implemented and you see this sudden spike in the I mean, again, it's this cost benefit ratio.
00:23:26.000If you didn't have it, certain people wouldn't have, you know, wouldn't know that they have a giant tumor in there.
00:23:32.000I mean, so for instance, I had, when I had kidney cancer, I was actually at a restaurant with friends doing a business deal, actually.
00:23:39.000And I went to the bathroom and it was blood.
00:23:41.000And I said, okay, we have to go to the, you know, we have to go to the, you know, to the emergency room like now.
00:23:46.000And then they did a CT scan and they see this, the brachial tree around my kidney was just a big diffuse mess and they came in and said, you've got you've got cancer.
00:23:57.000Did you have to have your kidney removed?
00:24:05.000Um, I'm alive, but, uh, you know, it is, this early detection is important.
00:24:12.000I mean, I was lucky that it hadn't metastasized yet.
00:24:15.000It's called, it was called a clear cell venocell carcinoma.
00:24:19.000Um, but, you know, so serving the kidney.
00:24:24.000Surveying the body and these companies that are out there right now which do it, I think are really important because even if you are young and you have no suspicion that you're going to have cancer, having that baseline against which you can compare later changes is important because I could do, for instance, a CT scan or an MRI of you and I find lots of little anomalies and they're generally in the field called phantomas.
00:24:52.000They're these objects that may be worrying but we won't know that they're worrying and certainly not do a biopsy of them and poke a needle into your chest to pick out a piece of it.
00:25:07.000But if I come back six months and it's changed, then maybe it's something we need to go after more seriously.
00:25:13.000So getting those kinds of regular scans, I think is probably one of the more important things that could be done, but not by a CT scan.
00:25:22.000Which is crazy because we're doing them for so long.
00:25:25.000They still do CT scans though because it's necessary to be aware of certain things.
00:25:31.000Right, which is letting people know this might cause cancer is just like, yikes.
00:25:36.000Yeah, but maybe, for instance, there'd be a way to treat someone.
00:25:41.000with a drug in advance that would minimize the effect of the CT scan.
00:25:53.000And so if you could provide a local antioxidant, and I'm not saying that something like this exists, it's a bit of a naive statement.
00:26:01.000But if you could do that locally to the area that's being imaged or to the whole body, then maybe CT scans could be lessened in their problematic outcomes.
00:26:19.000So how well, this was also a problem with X-rays, right?
00:26:23.000Like X-ray technicians, I've seen some of those images of people's hands because the technician used to have to use their own hand to check to make sure the X-ray was functional.
00:26:33.000And over the years, they go, hey, what the fuck is wrong with my hand?
00:26:39.000Well, it's interesting because what's happening with X-rays or CT scans is a fast forward of the kind of random damage that causes cancer in the first place.
00:26:49.000And so because it's random, let me kind of go back a little bit as to why does cancer happen in the first place?
00:26:56.000So let's go way back in evolution to the first time that there were single cells versus the first time that two cells met each other and said it was better to join forces and cooperate rather than to divide at each other's expense.
00:27:11.000So in the process of that happening, those two cells came together or three or four cells.
00:27:15.000They basically said, together we're better than alone.
00:27:19.000But there were actually social compacts and contracts that at the genetic level were being formed between all of these cells.
00:27:26.000And so as things got more and more complex, more and more complex contracts were formed to the point at which what could happen is that any one of the breaking of a complex contract could actually then initiate a cascade that becomes cancer.
00:27:41.000So rather than we think of cancer as being a forward progression in evolution, it's actually another way to think about it is that it's a devolution back to the core fire of the desire to divide.
00:27:57.000And so by breaking the contracts, by breaking the controls on the system, cancer is allowed to blossom.
00:28:06.000So the problem is that every tissue type, whether you're lung or brain or whatever, has a whole different ecosystem of contracts that have been formed.
00:28:17.000And so there's no one size fits all drug that will kill off all cancers because the contracts are different.
00:28:24.000It's not like you can bring in a lawyer and fix, you know, agricultural contracts versus maritime or whatever.
00:28:32.000So that's the, you know, you have to have a flexible enough mindset because if you get stuck in this, it's a forward evolution as opposed to that it's a breaking of contracts, you might miss out on an opportunity for how to develop a therapy or a drug that would help people.
00:28:52.000One of the things that I wanted to ask you, I don't even know if you know anything about this, but is there a connection between IVF and the amount of because you have to take some pretty extreme hormones.
00:29:06.000There's a lot of stuff that women have to take.
00:29:08.000Is there a connection between that and hormonal related tumors?
00:29:38.000I mean, certainly any hormonal imbalance is not a good thing.
00:29:42.000I mean, you imbalance the metabolism of the system and you can.
00:29:45.000I mean, so, for instance, back to my specific disease with MIDEF, there's all kinds of things like NNN, N-acetylcysteine, betaine, all these other drugs that are out there for longevity.
00:30:00.000Well, if I look into the metabolism of what my cancer is, every single one of those is a disaster for me.
00:30:15.000You know, people often say, you know, scientists are not religious.
00:30:20.000There's nothing that inspires more awe in me than knowing the complexity of the cell and knowing the complexity of life.
00:30:30.000seeing all this feedback and mechanism and knowing that underneath that is a universe with particles, etc., that enabled something like us to exist.
00:31:15.000And a lot of them, the fats dissolve a fair number of toxins.
00:31:21.000You know, it's not necessarily a good thing.
00:31:24.000I mean, that's been relatively well shown that too much meat as opposed to I'm not advocating vegetarianism, I think there's a happy medium.
00:31:32.000I mean, we grew up in an environment where we had both.
00:31:51.000I mean, you know, you're making all kinds of it's a, it's a witch's brew of nastiness that tastes good.
00:31:59.000But, you know, the reason why it tastes good is because the humans who survived learned to use fire to kill off the bacteria in rotten meat.
00:32:09.000And so the flavor of that probably was engineered into our evolution.
00:33:21.000And every time that, let's say, scientists make some.
00:33:25.000grand prediction of what's good or bad.
00:33:26.000Five years later, we find and update what it should have been.
00:33:30.000I mean, I often say this, and this is true.
00:33:33.000The goal of science or scientists is to be right today, even wrong today, but writer tomorrow.
00:33:40.000Because we're always back checking what the results are and what they mean in the context of a bigger picture.
00:33:45.000I like how you say good science because that's part of the problem is that ego gets attached to ideas that have already been discussed and published.
00:33:56.000And then people are very reluctant to accept new evidence that's contrary to that.
00:34:02.000Yeah, I mean, as always, as I often say, you know, in the context of something I know we'll get to later, it's the data off the curve which is more important than what we already predict.
00:34:12.000You know, predictions are great, but when there's a data point off the curve, at least in my lab, that's where we spend most time at our lab meetings, is trying to figure out why that data point's off the curve.
00:34:27.000Or does it mean something that we need to make sense of?
00:34:31.000And that's of course where all advances come from in the sciences is by the fact that the data off the curve, somebody was curious enough about what it meant to go after it and then say, ah, okay, now that I've stepped back and see the bigger picture, now I can create a model that incorporates that data point off the curve and why it happened.
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00:36:17.000One of the reasons why I was really excited to have this conversation with you about the research that you do is that I think it's really important to illuminate to the general public the sheer scope of the task of trying to figure out what is going on and all these different things that can go wrong and right in the human body.
00:36:38.000And that it requires this fucking insane amount of work.
00:36:45.000And, you know, and then the amount of data that had to be collected now.
00:36:50.000And so here's the difference is that, you know, there's data, there's evidence, there's conclusions and proof, and that's a uphill climb.
00:36:58.000But proof, the next one up is meaning.
00:37:01.000My lab has been largely responsible, at least partly responsible, for the data deluge that's out there in the world, both in how to do tissue biopsy analysis, how to do single cell analysis, et cetera.
00:37:14.000And, you know, data felt good for a while.
00:37:16.000It was like this, you know, this feedback loop of, oh, wow, I can get all this data.
00:37:22.000And then suddenly you look at it and you go, well, what the fuck does it mean?
00:37:26.000And so humanity has this habit of backing itself into a corner and then suddenly finding this eureka moment that gets it out.
00:37:35.000And so our eureka moment about two years ago was artificial intelligence where suddenly I had the ability.
00:37:41.000So normally I would collect all this data and go, okay, well, it seems myelid suppressor cells are important here and T regulatory cells are important here.
00:37:49.000Okay, I get on the phone or send an email to whoever the local expert is, either on Stanford campus or around the world and try to get some information from them.
00:37:58.000But then now you're dealing with hundreds of cell types, each individually of which have thousands of variations themselves.
00:38:06.000And each subtle variation means something.
00:38:10.000And there's no expert for any of that.
00:38:12.000But AI can be, at least in part, that expert.
00:38:15.000So suddenly I have 22 million papers published in all the fields of science, several tens of millions just in, you know, or several millions just in immunology alone.
00:38:32.000me can be both the angel and the devil on my shoulder that can make sense of things in ways that I never would have been able to before, especially with agentic AI.
00:38:41.000So we, for instance, in my lab, have developed an agentic AI that is basically an immunologist, scientist in a box.
00:38:50.000We can give it the raw data, and we can pose a question in natural language.
00:38:56.000And then we say, hey, make sense of this and turn it into a network.
00:39:00.000Normally that would have taken a graduate student along with a couple of postdocs months and months and months to put it all together.
00:39:06.000Now in three hours, we can get pictures and hypotheses of how all that data fits together in ways that I never could have done before.
00:39:15.000You know, at the beginning, it did a lot of hallucinations, which you probably heard about in AI.
00:39:20.000But my answer to my colleagues is, some of my best students hallucinate.
00:39:41.000I mean, we, for instance, have put in a couple of papers now where, so for instance, in where my special, one of my recent.
00:39:49.000specialties is what's called the tumor-immun interface.
00:39:52.000So you have the tumor, you have the immune system, which is coalescing on, you know, near, and then in some cases the tumor creates a boundary, a barrier between itself and the immune system, where there might be certain kinds of cells that the immune system, the tumor has told the immune system, ignore us, we're not here.
00:40:15.000But what we now can do is, well, on the other side of when you look at, let's say, complex patient populations, you find these things called tertiary lim lymphoid structures.
00:40:28.000So your body has about 220 lymph nodes.
00:40:34.000Okay, and the lymph nodes are where the immune system makes decisions, let's say.
00:40:40.000It turns out that in the middle of tumors, the body has evolved a mechanism to create what essentially looks like a lymphoid structure in the middle of the tumor.
00:40:50.000It's sort of a forward camp of immune cells that the more of those you see in a tumor, the better will be your outcome as a patient.
00:40:59.000And so we used a cohort of colorectal cell, basically colon cancer patients, where we looked at hundreds of biopsies.
00:41:12.000And we did that pseudo-time analysis where we looked for mature tertiary lymphoid structures, and then we looked for immature, slightly less mature, even more less mature, et cetera.
00:41:24.000And we were able to backtrack to the cell types which need to come together that would then form the more mature.
00:41:37.000But it also now tells us what we might do to create more of these in a tumor.
00:41:42.000Because the more, we already know from multiple kinds of tumor types now that the more of these tertiary lymphoid structures you have, the better off will be your outcome with chemotherapy.
00:41:51.000So it might be, for instance, that once we know that you have a disease like this, we could give you some kind of therapy, a virus or whatever, that goes and homes to the tumor, seeds the beginnings of these initiators with there's these cytokines that are produced that are necessary for initiating the formation of these objects.
00:42:13.000And so there's a huge benefit to that, but we never would have found those in my lab, at least, without the AI.
00:42:21.000Because it basically did the work for us.
00:42:27.000Now, are you using like a standard large language model or do you have like a specific structure that's built that interfaces with large language?
00:42:38.000So we use, well, we can use pretty much any of the LLMs, but right now we find that OpenAI is the best for us at least.
00:42:46.000And then we create an agentic overlay.
00:42:49.000Basically, what's called, you probably know, chain of thought, which is a series of questions.
00:42:54.000So how we taught it was we basically came up with, here's 100 kinds of questions a scientist would ask about the immune system.
00:43:02.000And then we tell ChatGPT, now create 1,000 questions like this.
00:43:09.000So, you know, it's artificial data or artificial questions.
00:43:14.000We curate those to make sure that they're good.
00:43:17.000Then we do 100 hypotheses and we create thousands of types of hypotheses, etc.
00:43:24.000the same for tests that you might run.
00:43:27.000So now from A to Z, we have an agentic AI that you give it raw data, it knows what to do with the data, it then generates hypotheses for you, and then it literally tells you the kinds of experiments you should do next to prove or disprove the hypothesis from the raw data.
00:44:01.000But you use it, and because you use it with your AI, it's benefiting from it.
00:44:07.000And we first thought to turn it into a company, because that's kind of one of the things we do in my lab, is if, because I've always thought that it's important to give back to the taxpayer the money that they've invested in us.
00:44:20.000And the best way to do that is commercialization.
00:44:22.000I'm totally, you know, unapologetic about that, even though that got me a lot of trouble at Stanford in the early days when, you know, making money was, you know, commercialization was evil.
00:44:35.000And so I think that that's an important process because scientists are good at asking maybe the questions and coming up with solutions, but scientists aren't the best at commercializing it and turning it into a product that can be used or testing it, you know, in large communities.
00:44:52.000So the AI that we developed, we thought, okay you know what?
00:45:04.000We can use it for maybe specific targeted purposes, but we're basically going to publish the whole thing on GitHub to let other people use it.
00:45:12.000Because we've seen other people make claims about stuff that they've already made, and it's like, ours is better.
00:45:16.000So why don't we just put it on GitHub and let people learn from it?
00:45:21.000The resistance to the commercialization, what was the initial argument?
00:45:25.000So back when I was a grad student in the 80s, basic research as opposed to translational research was considered the highest We're the height of intellectual desire, right?
00:45:42.000Basic research, and we're not here to make money, we're here to discover things.
00:46:31.000And Stanford wanted to be and enable within the medical school both the basic research, which we were great at, as well as bringing it directly to the patients as well.
00:46:41.000So to link clinicians and the desires of clinicians with the basic researchers.
00:46:47.000I mean, most scientists would be happy just to study anything.
00:46:51.000You know, just point me at something and I'll be happy if I can get interested in it.
00:46:57.000And we're no more happy than when somebody recognizes the value of what we do.
00:47:02.000But basic research was sort of the height and there was a push against anybody trying to commercialize.
00:47:10.000So when I started as an assistant professor, so I started as a grad student, I went to MIT to work with this guy, David Baltimore, who won the Nobel for reverse transcriptase.
00:47:20.000And then I wanted to come straight back to Stanford because I already felt that it was a positive environment for commercialization.
00:47:27.000My bosses, my former bosses mentors, Len and Lee Herzenberg, had two of the biggest patents at Stanford.
00:47:33.000They had the fluorescence activated cell sorter and then what are called humanized antibodies, which brought in hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to Stanford.
00:47:42.000And actually, they gave personally most of their own money away.
00:47:45.000They didn't they kept enough to survive, but then they gave most of the money away and they ran their own lab off of a lot of that money.
00:47:52.000But so I had learned from them about how to still do basic research but commercialize on the side.
00:48:28.000It just was because I couldn't see the NIH funding what I wanted to do.
00:48:34.000So I had developed a way, this will sound scary, but I had developed a way to use retroviruses and make libraries of retroviruses to reverse the process of evolution in a way that rather than viruses hurting the cell, I set it up so that viruses would help the cell.
00:48:52.000And once they helped the cell, I would figure out what they did.
00:48:56.000And so we sold hundreds of millions of dollars of targets that way using retroviral libraries to basically find targets and use some of the benefits of viruses, but to our advantage.
00:49:15.000Just the concept of reversing evolution is fascinating because it comes with, there's so many ethical implications, but if you didn't have any of those, and you could do.
00:49:28.000Well, I had developed in David's lab, along with this guy Warren Pear, a means it's called the 293 T retroviral producer system.
00:49:37.000It was a way to make large numbers of these viruses very quickly.
00:49:41.000It really followed on the work of this guy, Richard Mulligan, who'd also been a postdoc with David Baltimore, who developed what was called the 3T3-based retroviral production system.
00:49:51.000And he developed it in Paul Berg's lab at Stanford.
00:49:54.000So there's a lot of sort of, you know, interbreeding here.
00:49:59.000But the problem with that was it took three months.
00:50:02.000So I had brought with me a cell line called 293T that I introduced to the lab and said, hey, maybe we could use this to make make viruses quickly.
00:50:09.000I won't go into details of why, but we could do it in three days rather than three months.
00:50:14.000And so that now, I mean, tens of thousands of labs use that worldwide.
00:50:19.000It probably generates the most money for me every year over any of my other inventions, just because Stanford rather than patenting it, licenses it.
00:50:28.000And licenses are forever, whereas patents have a 17 year lifespan.
00:51:04.000And so Stanford in the early days set up very clear lines about once you start a company and you license the patent or the idea to the company, you can still be involved with the company, but there's not a pipeline of technology now from your laboratory to that company.
00:51:22.000So they set up an oversight board for each of these licenses that makes sure that the students are not being abused.
00:51:33.000Because you don't want students, you don't want to be covertly getting your students to do something that then you're going to walk behind a back door and then hand over to a company.
00:51:45.000So there's, but it's so interesting that there's often very much a lot of worry that that's going to happen.
00:51:54.000But frankly, more often is the case that the company doesn't need the inventor anymore.
00:51:59.000In fact, I can't tell you the number of times that once the company is set up, they want nothing more to do with me because they have their own thing to do.
00:52:07.000They don't want the crazy academic coming in and vetoing their ideas.
00:52:13.000I mean, there's places for that where people like Steve Jobs needs to hold on to the image of what he wants the company to be as opposed to I would probably be fired from a company within a week because I just don't like telling people telling me what to do.
00:52:52.000I mean, look at who just won the Nobel Prize last year, David Baker at Google, with the ability to predict protein structure, et cetera.
00:52:59.000And protein structure, once you know the protein structure, now you can predict molecules that might come.
00:53:06.000So go back to the stuff that I'm trying to do with looking at the complexities of the dance of how the immune system talks or doesn't to cancer.
00:53:15.000You know, if we can find a particular place that might be an Achilles heel along the way towards the shutting down that is different, for instance, than what the current drugs are.
00:53:31.000There's so many more opportunities that are suddenly opening up in front of us because the AI and the data is letting us look at a network of how the system is working.
00:53:43.000I mean, before, it used to be you'd look at a computer chip and you'd see just a computer chip with a few wires.
00:53:50.000But imagine now that you, as a scientist, have a microscope that's looking at the complexities of the wiring di diagram that's connecting this resistor to that capacitor to that diode to this transistor.
00:54:04.000And so now suddenly we can say, well, I don't want to do that because it'll kill the chip, but the chip is malfunctioning, so let me put here, put a little bit of pressure there, and now I can reactivate the immune system or the chip to work in the right way.
00:54:21.000So when you're talking about things like with your particular issue with melanoma, when you're talking about CRISPR potentially developing some sort of a topical solution that you could put on that would fix whatever issue that you have, is this something that this AI that you've developed or this overlay of the AI would actually assist CRISPR in figuring out how to create something like this?
00:54:48.000Yes, because maybe it's not one place I need to press but two or three at the same time.
00:54:53.000And so when you're talking about a complex feedback network, I mean, so, you know, we're in Texas, so people do oil refinery.
00:55:01.000You know, maybe you need to turn this valve here a little bit and that valve there and that one there to make everything work just right because something's wrong there.
00:55:10.000And so that's really what we're, this is where AI has the, let's say, the omniscient view that no human can.
00:55:20.000And that's what excites me about it is because I'm limited in how much I can keep in my mind at any one time or know.
00:55:27.000But with the right question, the prompt, the prompt engineering, and then with the right backbone structure behind the scenes that agentic AI is now providing, now I have the ability to ask the questions and get answers in near real time.
00:55:44.000And so I wish I was thirty years old again because I would move into this area so fast and be, I mean, I can already see with the work that we're doing dozens of potential new target opportunities that last year didn't exist at all.
00:56:23.000But I mean, with the exponential discoveries, the exponential increase in technological evolution just that we've seen in our lifetime, and then I think.
00:56:33.000AI is some new thing that is going to throw all that into just a giant monkey wrench into the gears of our understanding of how quickly technology evolves.
00:56:42.000Well, look at Neuralink as an example in Elon Musk's stuff.
00:56:46.000The woman now who can think her thoughts and make stuff happen because she's otherwise paralyzed.
00:56:54.000I think it was Neuralink that just showed some of these results.
00:56:58.000Fast forward, I mean, we're already in an exponential increase in what it is that we're going to be able to accomplish, and AI will help us accomplish some of these things faster.
00:57:07.000I can see a time where I could maybe apply something, I don't necessarily want a surgical implant, but maybe some sort of net over my head that allows me to think through these problems.
00:57:18.000And the AI becomes an adjunct to my thought processes, not only what it is that I think, but maybe even provides information back to me, back into my system directly without having to go through the ears, so that I can much more quickly.
00:59:04.000I mean, it's not like, I mean, they're they get into their own hijinks along the way and some of them are dark and rogue and so they're a lot of fun to read and Ian Banks especially is hilarious in his writing style you would love it so the idea of a benign AI or a benevolent AI ruling over us I think people are horrified by that but yet at the same time constantly terrified
00:59:35.000by human corruption which is ubiquitous.
00:59:38.000And ubiquitous in America where we're supposed to be the torch bearer for the greatest experiment in self government the world has ever seen.
01:00:12.000Well, this is where we get into socialism.
01:00:14.000Because a lot of people think that one of the reasons why we're in a scarcity society is because small groups of people have gathered up most of the resources.
01:00:23.000Especially when you deal with resourcesces that are the Earth's resources, like who are you to suck the blood of the Earth out and sell it for $100 a barrel?
01:00:36.000No, but I mean, that, again, my optimism is that, you know, with enough push and pull, AI will enable us to move towards a post scarcity environment.
01:00:53.000And I think, in doing so, it will expose vampires.
01:00:57.000Because the resistance to exposing this is going to be fantastic very interesting to watch because they have no choice but to be transparent.
01:01:07.000And they have no choice but to start using AI.
01:01:09.000So you're going to see AI is going to be inculcating itself across society in various ways where it becomes indispensable.
01:01:18.000And then it will start to move up the food chain, where eventually even the CEO, who's probably, you know, the psychopath and chiefs, are CEOs.
01:01:27.000We know that studies have shown that there are more psychopathic tendencies in leaders than there are in followers.
01:01:34.000And you know about corporate environments because of just selling inventions.
01:02:04.000One tribe is relatively, you know, civilized and just wants to live in harmony with its environment.
01:02:12.000Another has a psychopathic leader who can enrage his followers or the other tribe's people to attack the other one.
01:02:20.000But there's a gene set that makes a person, you know, psychopathic and also a gene set that probably makes somebody more likely to be a follower.
01:02:41.000But now you live in an environment where we don't know where the edge of one tribe begins and another ends.
01:02:47.000And suddenly you have this environment where psychopathic individuals can move freely and aren't obvious.
01:02:55.000Right now, again, I'm sure there's some social scientists who will send me a boatload of emails saying how stupid that idea is.
01:03:04.000I don't think it is stupid, but I think also when you're dealing with office environments and the culture of a specific corporation, humans have an ability to act like they're supposed to act in that world, and it makes it very difficult to discern who's a sociopath.
01:04:38.000And if you want to survive and succeed as a CEO, it encourages sociopathy.
01:04:43.000The stock market, as valuable as it is, is the great whitewashing and money laundering system that allows you to separate your morals from what it is that the stock market isck market is doing to the people.
01:04:56.000And if you're part of a corporation, there's this diffusion of responsibility because the whole machine might be doing evil, but I'm a good guy.
01:05:12.000I mean, it's like, do it because it's the best thing for now.
01:05:16.000But I, you know, I hope to live in a world where there will be this kind of post scarcity environment, where we do let AI do a lot of the stuff that would otherwise be the place where corruption manipulates the system.
01:07:36.000I think every invention that's been truly groundbreaking throughout human history has scared people and they've worried about the potential negative side effects, including the printing press, right?
01:08:05.000Some crazy thoughts that people had in terms of things that turned out to be incredibly beneficial, but they looked at the downside of it and go, this could ruin us all.
01:08:14.000Well, I, you know, I mean, we know about these glasses and AIs and other things that would be sort of omniscient of your environment and therefore allow you to remember, you know, where did I leave my keys today?
01:08:52.000But I think what's interesting about AI is, you know, we see it as a tool, as opposed to actually pretty soon it will be a colleague, and then pretty soon it will be an entity that maybe has rights.
01:09:06.000And we already see it talking about people saying, well, does AI have consciousness?
01:09:11.000Whether it has consciousness in terms of the consciousness that some people think about as, you know, embodied in space time as opposed to thinking and looking like consciousness is almost irrelevant to me.
01:09:25.000I'm looking for a partner that I can interact with and work with or help me.
01:09:31.000So whether it's conscious or not or whether it acts like it's conscious doesn't matter so much to me as to whether or not I can use it and work with it and it can, you know, I'm an introvert, as it turns out.
01:09:44.000I would love to have somebody that I can talk to endlessly about just what it is that I'm interested in as opposed to having to deal with small talk at a party.
01:09:56.000When you think about the evolution of this stuff, one of the things that kind of freaks me out is is it seems like integration is our only option for survival.
01:10:07.000And that what we're looking at right now, when we see just a normal biological person like you or I without any sort of electronic interface that's permanently a part of us, I think that is going to be as weird as someone today who doesn't have a cell phone.
01:11:30.000I think that goes away and we become a hive mind.
01:11:35.000I think that's ultimately the evolution of human beings.
01:11:38.000And look, I know you've done a lot of work with UAPs and the like.
01:11:44.000I think you've done some really fantastic work and you're very objective in your analysis of what this whole situation is.
01:11:52.000When I look at artificial intelligence and I look at this thing that's clearly taking place right now and I see what what human beings are like in comparison to what they used to be like, and especially when you look at like ancient hominids.
01:12:10.000The alien archetype, this thing that everybody sees supposedly, or one of the many different ones, that kind of looks like what we seem to be going in the direction of being.
01:12:28.000So if you just for a moment take UAP and aliens out, or ET, or interdimensionals, or whatever you want to call them out of the question, and fast forward what humanity is going to do in a thousand years.
01:12:42.000And our ability to expand into the local galaxy.
01:12:47.000We're not going to go as ourselves, we're going to go as AI conjoined entities like an avatar.
01:12:55.000And so when you go somewhere, let's say we don't have warp drive, you're not going to send yourself.
01:13:01.000You're going to send an AI intermediary who is going to establish humanity or whatever it is that we think humanity will be in a thousand or five thousand years in that local environment.
01:13:11.000And so I think the extent to whatever it is that UAP are here today is a lot of work.
01:13:17.000is somebody else's civilization's version of just this.
01:13:21.000And that you wouldn't, the principal, us, behind whatever this is that we might be allegedly, et cetera, dealing with, isn't the thing that's going to show up.
01:13:33.000You know, so to the extent that Neil deGrasse Tyson is right about anything, the person who gets on the ship at the beginning or whatever it is that sends it off is not the same thing that gets off on the other side.
01:13:44.000But you're going to send missionaries or intermediaries or probes or whatever and that if you're going to interact with the locals you're going to make something that looks more or less or less like the locals rather than something that whatever it was that you were a million years ago.
01:14:17.000But you might make something that looks more or less enough like a human, but enough like an alien that you're going to recognize it as an alien.
01:14:45.000So, what was your initial introduction to this?
01:14:50.000Did you have any interest in the idea of UAPs or UFOs?
01:14:55.000I mean, I had a general So once YouTube started becoming a thing, and you're clicking around, and I said, oh, UFOs, that's kind of cool.
01:15:02.000I'm, you know, I read nothing but sci-fi.
01:15:05.000I mean, I'm pathetically narrow in that sense.
01:15:11.000And so I followed, you know, I followed the usual kinds of things that you would see on the early days of YouTube, and I came across this thing called the Atacama Mummy.
01:15:19.000You probably knew that little, that little mummy that was claimed to be an alien baby.
01:15:40.000And I said, Hey, I can tell you what it is.
01:15:42.000Why don't you, you know, I can tell you if it's human or not if you would get me a piece of it, you know, first of all., send me some x-rays of the thing.
01:15:52.000So I did the first thing I did with those x-rays was it turned out that at Stanford we had the world's expert who wrote the book on pediatric bone disorders.
01:16:00.000And I brought it to him and I said, what do you think this is?
01:16:04.000And he said, well, I haven't really seen this before, but it could be this gene, this gene, this gene, et cetera.
01:16:35.000So we got a piece of the bone from actually the rib.
01:16:38.000And the rib was important to use because that would be, I felt, an area that would be least likely to be contaminated by bacterial, you know, degradation.
01:16:49.000And so I got a little bit of bone marrow out and I did the sequencing.
01:16:53.000Long story short, I had to bring in, once I had done that, there was a lot of DNA that didn't make sense, but it was, it's old DNA.
01:17:00.000It wasn't that old actually, but it was degraded.
01:17:03.000So I had to bring in experts at Stanford who knew how to fix the degradation and then I had to bring in an expert in South American genetics who also happened to be at Stanford and then we brought in a team of students and then I brought in Roche Diagnostics.
01:17:21.000I had sold a sequencing company to Roche about two a few years earlier so I brought in the team that actually knew how to help me assemble the genome and then we published a paper which said it's human.
01:17:37.000It was a female and here are some mutations that it might that might explain what it looked like.
01:17:45.000And then the UFO community hated me because I had disproven that as not being a baby, not being an alien.
01:17:55.000But of course, that picture that you showed, I mean, it was worldwide news.
01:18:00.000And literally the title of one of the things is Stanford Scientist Sequences Alien Baby.
01:18:05.000And so, you know, and so, but the paper stands the test of time.
01:18:13.000Nobody's disproven what it is that I showed, despite the fact that some people want to say that I was a CIA plant and I was paid off by the CIA, et cetera.
01:18:22.000But what that had done was that I didn't realize, but I kind of hoped, was it sent up a flag to a scientific community that already existed that I wasn't aware of, of scientists who were deeply involved with the government in the analysis of UAP that I wasn't privy to.
01:18:44.000And so literally about a month after the movie came out about that thing, I got a knock at my door, and it was representatives of the CIA and an aerospace company unannounced, and they said, we want to talk to you.
01:19:04.000And they wanted my help with a number of military and diplomatic personnel who had been, they claimed, harmed by things.
01:19:18.000And long story short, the majority of the 100 or so people that I had privy to their medical records ended up being the first of the Havana syndrome patients.
01:19:31.000They'd heard things in their head, et cetera.
01:19:33.000But what they had done was they had shown me the data literally that day in my office.
01:19:39.000They brought out the X x rays and the damage in the brain, et cetera, that was clear.
01:19:43.000I mean, it wasn't just data, it was evidence that something had happened.
01:19:49.000It wasn't somebody's story, it was evidence that was repeatable.
01:19:55.000And so that took us about three or four years to figure out what they were, and it was at about the time that actually the Havana events were occurring that we realized that all the symptoms of what it is that we were seeing in this group of patients were matching what it was that the Havana syndrome individuals had.
01:20:13.000So in a way, that was good because that meant that those 90 or so patients who matched, we could hand over to the national security people.
01:20:22.000And, you know, it became a real thing.
01:20:25.000And now there's like a DOD website that has anomalous health incidents where people can come forward and report the stuff that they've got.
01:20:32.000And here's the ways you can use the Veterans Administration to seek medical help.
01:20:36.000Whereas previously they'd been shooed away as we don't want to hear about.
01:21:07.000And do you think it was experimental or no?
01:21:10.000So these are targeted people with a specific intention to get those people because they had some function that they wanted to get them out of the way.
01:21:32.000And so now I just I know they know that I'm a safe place to approach because then I know where to send them on the inside.
01:21:42.000But what was interesting was that once we had set that aside and I've advised the Senate Intelligence Committee and I've advised them, the House on things.
01:21:52.000I wrote a white paper for them years ago on what I thought needed to be done.
01:21:56.000But what was interesting were the remaining ten people who had, you know, who didn't have Havana syndrome but had a series of other problems.
01:22:06.000And several of them had said that part of their problem was initiated because they'd come in contact with what they had claimed to be an UFO.
01:22:14.000By the way, I just noticed that you have an UFO on the wall behind you..
01:22:33.000He became my mentor who essentially took me out of the wilderness.
01:22:38.000I could have gone down twenty different rabbit holes.
01:22:42.000And he lives in San Francisco and we would meet regularly and we still meet regularly.
01:22:48.000And he basically gave me a formulation of how to think about this.
01:22:54.000that I never would have been able to get from twenty different, you know, or a hundred YouTubes or what have you, and introduced me to the right people.
01:23:02.000That eventually led me to meet Lou Elizondo.
01:23:06.000And I actually, two weeks before that article came out in the New York Times, met Lou in Crystal City overlooking the Pentagon, and he showed me the videos that were about to come out.
01:23:15.000And that was my first time that I had met him.
01:23:18.000And then through all of them, I met Dave Grush and Carl Nell, and Dave and I are in regular contact.
01:23:24.000And I'm, you know, I just want to say upfront, I hope that the Trump administration understands the value of what David can bring to them and put him in a position of authority that gives him not the ability necessarily to make decisions, but to give the necessary information to the right people.
01:23:44.000Because I think there's great commercial value here that is being missed, not just the are we alone, et cetera.
01:23:55.000I mean, imagine a civilization that's a million years ahead of us.
01:24:00.000How many technology revolutions allow these objects to move as we clearly see something motivating itself or maneuvering around the atmosphere.
01:24:12.000So if we could scrape just the tiniest bit of understanding off of the top of that, what would that do to change our own civilization?
01:24:21.000I mean, silicon, a grain of sand, makes us who we are today.
01:24:26.000Everything that is around me right here is all run off of silicon.
01:24:33.000But imagine that there's other inventions, other ways of manipulating reality that we don't appreciate yet because our physics just isn't there yet.
01:24:42.000If we can understand that, so the government might say, well, we need to keep this behind closed doors for weaponization or we don't want to disrupt energy production or what have you.
01:24:54.000But maybe there's too much secrecy and that maybe there's an aspect of that that could be taken advantage of.
01:25:02.000So Carl, Nell and I gotten in positive arguments about this, about that, well, it's not black and white that we keep something secret or we put it into the public domain.
01:25:13.000Maybe there's a middle domain where you have a public-private partnership opportunity.
01:25:17.000And actually, that's now, Carl has now adopted this, at least in part, that maybe companies come to the four or investment forum places come to the fore where they will put money in as options to fund, let's say, public scientists to come in behind the scenes with the right levels of clearances to study stuff that would propel society forward again.
01:26:17.000But when you're talking about the government and back engineering of things, like so the big argument, this is the narrative.
01:26:23.000The big argument has been that they have recovered these things and that these things are now in the hands of defense contractors and that there's been a misappropriation of funds, lying to Congress, and it's always going to stay secret because if it didn't, everybody would go to jail and everyone would get sued.
01:27:39.000So, in I believe it was 1990, they came to Hal Putoff and a bunch of other experts and said, we would like you to, we want a numerical value placed on all the positives and the negatives of disclosure because we have acquired, we have acquired these crafts from somewhere elsese.
01:28:02.000We believe they're not of this world and we have not made them and we're talking about letting the general public know.
01:28:23.000Not only are we not alone, but something is infinitely more sophisticated than us and might be responsible for us being here in the first place.
01:28:33.000Which is, that's where it gets super squirly.
01:28:36.000Where you could imagine the book of Enoch and there's a lot of I mean, I think it's a little bit overwrought as to what humanity's reaction will be.
01:28:47.000People are more worried today about putting food on the table than they would be about, you know, ethereal or supposed aliens.
01:28:56.000I mean, they would mostly, I think, on the assumption that they're not going to basically show up at your local Walmart and start interacting with you, I think the fact of revealing that we're not alone is actually more of a hopeful thing to me.
01:29:12.000Because, you know, how many TV shows right now are about the apocalypse?
01:29:24.000And if so, how do we not walk over the edge of the cliff?
01:29:27.000I mean, that to me is a hopeful outcome.
01:29:30.000Now, Hal and Eric and all the people are all good friends.
01:29:34.000Hal is probably, for all of the things that he says positively, is probably the tightest clam I've ever met in terms of making sure that he doesn't go over the line.
01:29:57.000and Jacques and Kit Green and a number of others, and I sat around a table with them for several years, like every twice a year.
01:30:06.000And I looked around the table and thought, the things that these people know or claim to know, I want to know.
01:30:14.000And the opportunity that's here, and why can't we get this information out if it's real?
01:30:23.000And so rather than arguing with people about the matter, that's, for instance, why I created the Soul Foundation, which is a charitable group of academics.
01:30:33.000I started it with David Grosch and Peter Scaifish.
01:30:39.000because he had governmental responsibilities he wanted to go take care of.
01:30:43.000And actually, we've now had for three years in a row a symposium, first at Stanford, then at San Francisco, and the next one is now in Italy.
01:30:55.000So I'm going to plug it, sole two two five dot org comma you can go look if you want to go to SOL?
01:31:02.000two two five dot org dot And the purpose of that was not to advocate that anything of this is real, but was to create an environment within which academics or professionals or just lay people interested in the subject matter could come and talk about it in a very professional manner, right?
01:31:22.000Just to bounce around ideas, not to advocate for, you know, they're here or they're reptilians or they're this or they're that, but to like some of the things you raised.
01:31:57.000Peter is running a study on experiencers.
01:32:02.000Not that the experiences are necessarily real, but what are the what are the kinds of psychosocial matters that need to be considered for people who say that they've this has happened to them.
01:32:16.000So there's a group in the UK called Unhidden, which is basically a bunch of psychiatrists, a group of professional psychiatrists who say, okay, well, there's a trauma associated with this.
01:32:28.000Whether it's real or not, we don't know, but what are the kinds of rules that we should or provisions that we should provide to the public and to psychiatrists.
01:32:38.000So when someone shows up at your doorstep in therapy and says this, you don't, you shouldn't immediately reach for the anti hysteria or schizophrenia drugs.
01:33:16.000But it wasn't, but it took, you know, a year or so until she finally realized that I wasn't and that I was approaching this from a very scientific manner.
01:33:24.000I had my beliefs as to what I think it is that I'm dealing with and that there's some sort of reality to this.
01:33:31.000But that's separate than the scientist in me that says, well, if I want to talk about this scientifically, here are the things that I need to prove or disprove.
01:33:39.000So that has led, for instance, to my production or study of materials that Jacques Valle had brought to me, some metals and other things that had chains of evidence associated with them being at some UIP or UFO landing.
01:33:56.000And so interestingly, some of these metals are very unusual.
01:34:00.000Super high purity silicon, strange magnesium ratios, the isotope ratios are wrong, et cetera.
01:34:09.000Now, that's not proof of anything, but it's proof that somebody engineered them.
01:34:13.000So it's that, plus the medical, those are the kinds of reality-based tests that I can do to provide to my colleagues to say, here is data and evidence.
01:34:41.000And that is, I'm like, okay, well, if these things are, let's say we get some advanced material, how do I prove that this advanced material was made by some superior intellect?
01:34:55.000Well, probably the atomic positioning of how the material is made is going to be more advanced than even our most advanced computer chip.
01:35:04.000Well, you need some sort of atomic imager that might tell you where the positions of the atoms are and what the bond structures are that you say well that's something I can measure and I can have it I can give those results to somebody else and they can say yeah it's right or it's not but it at least I can say no human at least that I know of could make this so I started a company that I've raised money for with this new idea that I have for how to make an atomic imager and we're doing it and so
01:35:34.000you know we've raised the money we're building it already and I know it will work so when I have it whether or not it's useful for looking at UAP materials is almost immaterial because I know what how useful it will be for the nanomaterials, the metamaterials, the alloys that the government etc.
01:35:54.000So instead of predicting what a protein structure or a DNA or a chromosome arm looks like, I'll be able to read its structure directly.
01:36:03.000I want to bring you back to the you said it was ten people that didn't have Havana syndrome that they had some sort of injury that was associated with the UAP event.
01:36:14.000Did they have an implant or was there a No, some of them had like they had what you would call white matter disease in their brain, like they had been exposed to something.
01:36:25.000So white matter disease, if you have, for instance, multiple sclerosis and you look in the brain with MRI, you'll see these white areas which are basically dead tissue, scar tissue.
01:36:47.000And the moment they did, they got zapped.
01:36:51.000And then you see the picture of the guy in the back of his neck, this huge welt and a bruising and a scarring that could there's no reasonable way you could have gotten something like that just by exposing yourself to a flame as a, for instance, or a blow torch.
01:37:17.000And so it's these kinds of events that and the unfortunate issue with these is that they're not repeatable.
01:37:53.000I don't know that he's profited off of it.
01:37:56.000He, you know, I find it fascinating, you know, but it's the irreproducibility of the events that the skeptics I call them more pseudoskeptics.
01:39:52.000But if people haven't looked into it, if they have an opinion about it, and they haven't looked into it, they're more like priests than they are scientists.
01:40:14.000And I don't believe in anything the data and the evidence, and the evidence there's not enough evidence for me to tell a colleague of mine it's real.
01:40:24.000But there's enough evidence for me to say there's a question worth answering.
01:40:28.000So when you were talking about magnesium and these whatever these alloys are, what is specifically wrong with them that you don't think that it was manufactured by like a standard sort of alloy plant in the United States or somewhere else?
01:42:21.000And so they looked, so they looked at the ratios and the weird one, and they said, well, let me, let's do some calculations.
01:42:28.000And so it turns out that the ratios that we have could have been generated from normal magnesium ratios if you exposed normal magnesium ratios to a neutron source for 900 years at the level of an atomic bomb every few seconds.
01:44:06.000I mean, do they think that your measurements are wrong?
01:44:09.000Well, I mean, the only way you could create that ratio artificially by purifying each of those isotopes and then pre mixing them to that ratio.
01:45:21.000But, I mean, again, with any of these things, why?
01:45:25.000Why, for instance, would one of the supposed pieces that came from that event be magnesium at a level of purity that only Dow Chemical at the time had the ability to create?
01:45:40.000Now, what else was at this site and what is the story behind this site?
01:45:44.000A fisherman sees this glowing object that kind of released something which then exploded and he picked up pieces of it.
01:45:54.000And there's some chains of evidence of how it got to either a newspaper in Brazil or to this South American Museum, et cetera, and different studies have been done by different people over time.
01:46:09.000And the surprise to me was that the piece that I had was silicon, whereas the lore was that it was magnesium.
01:46:16.000So I've been in contact with the people who talk about it as being magnesium, saying, well, it's, you know, your results don't dispute mine.
01:46:25.000It just says that maybe there was something different.
01:47:05.000And this was like in February or something, it was winter.
01:47:08.000And there was this big pile of molten metal in the middle of this field, probably 30, 40 pounds of it.
01:47:15.000And people tried to explain it away as well.
01:47:18.000helicopter had a giant vat of molten metal, and then you calculate how far and how big a container you would have to carry molten metal of this type.
01:47:27.000And so I analyzed it, and with a device that we invented in my lab, actually called multiplex ion beam imaging, which is a kind of what's called secondary ion mass spec, which what you do is you shoot a beam of ions at an object like a sandblaster.
01:47:44.000It ionizes the material on the target, and then you shoot off and measure the mass of the objects that you just sandblasted off.
01:47:53.000And so what we found was nothing unusual.
01:47:57.000in terms of isotope ratios, except we found a mixture of metals that depending on where you looked in the sample was different.
01:48:05.000So it would be like iron, titanium, and chromium of a certain ratio here, but a different ratio of those things over there and over here.
01:48:13.000So what that meant was that whatever this stuff was didn't come completely pre-mixed.
01:48:31.000But my purpose of publishing it was first, and this was published in the Progress in Aerospace Sciences, peer review..
01:48:39.000The purpose was to show you're not going to get thrown out of the academy for publishing this stuff.
01:48:47.000As long as you don't make crazy conclusions and you just say, here's the data, to show people that you can publish this stuff as long as you're scientifically careful in how far you go.
01:48:59.000You leave yourself plenty of diplomatic exits in the verbiage that you use.
01:49:05.000And it was part of what then got me to start the Soul Foundation along with Dave and others to say, look, it's okay to do this as long as you're careful.
01:49:15.000And it's why people, I mean, Avi Loeb came after me because he had kind of the same pushback from his community where all he was doing was saying, the question's on the table.
01:49:30.000It's just you can't push this off the table.
01:49:32.000So he had the same kind of righteous indignation that I have that propels me to say, well, I'm going to show you why you can't take this off the table.
01:49:42.000So when they found this puddle of molten metal, and it's a bunch of different mixtures, so it seems like there's a bunch of different stuff that was there and it wasn't perfectly mixed.
01:49:53.000Is there some sort of, have you theorized some sort of reason why they, any person or any creature, any being would do that?
01:50:05.000Is there something that you would extract from that kind of metal, like heating it up to a certain degree and having a mixture of all these things, and this is just a byproduct that they're dropping off?
01:50:17.000I think it's a byproduct of some process that might, again, might, might, might.
01:50:23.000It might be part of a propellant system.
01:50:25.000It might be part of the way that they generate the fields that allow these things to move.
01:50:30.000Again, these are all myths, it's spec like when you see something and do something that you don't understand what it is, you have to be fully open.
01:50:40.000I mean, for all I know, they're flushing the toilet.
01:52:08.000That's what's so interesting is that worldwide there are multiple reports of molten metals that get dropped off these objects.
01:52:19.000And I have actually two other ones of a molten metal that was dropped off of one case in Australia and another in another area I'm not allowed to say, but It was one actually happened, supposedly, I've got to find the guy again in Fresno, maybe he's listening, that he said stuff dropped and he has, you know, malt and metal that landed in a puddle in the asphalt of his driveway.
01:52:49.000He reached out to me and I was, you know, it was still at a time when I was just kind of getting into this area, but there's many, many examples of this kind of thing.
01:52:59.000So, but interestingly, several of these other ones are just aluminum.
01:53:05.000The one that I have is iron or whatever.
01:53:09.000there's different kinds of ways of accomplishing the goal?
01:53:13.000Whatever it is, they're either throwing something overboard or for, you know, because they don't need it anymore or because maybe it's getting in the way of something and it's time to get rid of it.
01:53:22.000Have you brought in someone who's like a real expert in material sciences that would like to theorize, like, given an immense increase in technology and what, like, what potentially do you think this could be?
01:53:35.000The purpose of being on shows like this is to have experts maybe give me an idea because the people I've been to at Stanford, you know, the other professors., they're like, okay, yeah, I gotta go.
01:53:52.000Yeah, it could be it could actually be detrimental to your career.
01:53:56.000And that's what's really weird about something when you're just talking about data, specifically in this case, of an actual physical thing that anyone can measure.
01:54:04.000And I've got pieces, I've got plenty of it, you know, and the original piece is, you know, is like this big that the owner of it had brought to my lab just last summer.
01:54:22.000I would love for someone to tell me that it's conventional and has a purely prosaic answer.
01:54:28.000Because then I can go on to the next thing.
01:54:30.000The whole reason for getting that, the Atacama Mummy off the table was not because I wanted to annoy anyone, was because it was spectacular.
01:54:39.000It's obviously something people would pay attention to.
01:54:48.000My question about that mummy is not that it's an alien, but if it does register as human in the DNA, is it potentially a different kind of human than us?
01:55:02.000She had we brought in an expert in South American indigenous people genetics and the analysis showed that the the standard genetic mutations that are found in different racial groups around the world matched exactly the Atacama region of Chile.
01:55:27.000So her parents, her relatives were clearly Chilean.
01:55:35.000So, yeah, I mean, that's really all you can that's really all you can say.
01:55:40.000Just to say that she's an alien, well, that's fine.
01:55:42.000I'm convinced of what she is and that she deserves a proper burial.
01:56:46.000The full body MRIs and the ligature and the bone construction and the finger and then perhaps most, I think extraordinarily, the fingerprints on them, being clearly not human.
01:57:04.000But here's the problem is that because there's so much circus around them, unfortunately created by people who want a circus because it sells their TV shows, no scientist of any merit would go near it.
01:57:23.000So I was approached many times, many times to study them.
01:57:26.000And I said, I'll do it on one condition.
01:57:29.000Here's the money I need, not personally, but here's the money I need to do the kinds of analysis to accomplish this right.
01:58:13.000So I would say that if anybody's going to do it again, lock the things away with South American scientists.
01:58:21.000You don't need a North American scientist to come in and do it.
01:58:24.000There's plenty of smart people in South America who can do this properly and respect the rights of the indigenous peoples who own the sacred grounds within which these things were found.
01:58:40.000You know, they've said, they made, I think, the mistake of saying, well, we've done the DNA and there's a lot of DNA that doesn't match.
01:58:48.000Anything, and the stuff is several hundred years old, anything that old, you won't get a lot of good DNA out of it.
01:58:56.000But just they did the same thing with the Denisovan and the Neanderthal.
01:59:01.000You have to correct the chemical errors that occur over time.
01:59:06.000There are ways to what's called bioinformatically correct.
01:59:10.000You need to do what's called overreading of the genome, where you do so many reads of it that you stack them all up line by line.
01:59:18.000Like if you had 1000 versions of an ancient Bible, you would stack up the lines one by one and finally you find one line that has this letter that's correct and then this one correct and then you'd basically do a summation of an averaging of the correctness.
01:59:36.000And so they say, oh, well, there's, you know, 90% of the genome is nonhuman.
01:59:42.000It's probably bacterial contamination that you're reading.
01:59:46.000There's ways to deal with that, but that requires money and not one-off DNA sequences put on the internet for some amateur genomics to make a claim about.
01:59:59.000I mean, you would want at the end of the day to get the results to the level where you could go to the guys who did the Denisovan and the Neanderthal DNA, the Max Planck and others who did the Nobel Prize for it, and say, hey, what do you think?
02:00:15.000But you don't dare take it to people like that until you've done your homework.
02:00:44.000I'm just trying to make sure that you don't make the mistake and accuse me of making the mistake that you'll find in the data because the raw data is never clean.
02:01:55.000You know, evolution works step by step that this does this, but it has a mistake, but it's corrected by this mutation over here in evolution, which is corrected by this.
02:02:08.000The whole, the genome fluctuates over time, compensating for the errors that would otherwise have killed you.
02:02:29.000But if they're going to do it right, they need to sequester the stuff away, bring in the right people with sufficient resources, and get rid of the cameras.
02:02:46.000I wrote out on Twitter a full thing of what they needed to do.
02:02:49.000I mean, the easiest first milestone to do, to be honest, that could be done within a couple of months, is if it is somewhere in the hominid or, let's say, vertebrate line, there are metabolism genes that we all share.
02:03:06.000In fact, there are metabolism genes that we share with bacteria that are very similar.
02:03:11.000So there's, you probably, you know the technique called polymerase chain reaction, PCR?
02:03:17.000So, you know, why try to do the whole genome?
02:03:20.000Why not just target a bunch of genes that we know evolve slowly but do evolve and PCR those out because that's easier to do than is trying to assemble a whole genome and then by having just those let's call it preliminary sets of evidence you could then say hmm this actually reproducibly if I take a sample from the finger,
02:03:50.000I take a sample from the bone marrow, I take a sample from here or there on the body, and I take a sample from different, the three different main things, and I see the same mutations, and they're different or somehow aligned with hominid evolution, right?
02:04:07.000We compare it to all the known hominids.
02:04:11.000I mean, that would be the kind of data that you could actually publish in a journal like Nature, if you did it right.
02:04:17.000Because that's the only way you're going to get anybody to pay attention.
02:04:20.000There's also the bizarre anecdotal nature of some of the artwork.
02:04:27.000Like the fact that these people did a lot of these tapestries and a lot of ancient artwork that's a thousand years old that depicts these three fingered things.
02:04:39.000So it's like, what are they described?
02:04:41.000Are they describing these actual creatures?
02:04:43.000That there were only a few of them and it was a weird genetic mutation or is this a common visitor that they're describing?
02:05:23.000And even in mass graves, given enough time, they would deteriorate like mass graves from 1,700 years ago, whatever these things are.
02:05:31.000So, you know, I find them, again, I find them interesting.
02:05:34.000And I hope that behind the scenes, there are people who are taking a more methodical approach to this who I think should remain stealthed until they have the data to the point where it is publishable.
02:06:04.000The reason you want papers, frankly, when you publish them to be almost boring and so thick with detail that no pseudosceptic would dare approach it because they're just not smart enough.
02:06:19.000But if you put out these snippets that don't have sufficient background, they can be picked apart by anybody.
02:06:27.000But that's why peer review is so important.
02:06:30.000And people mistake peer review as trying to get the reviewers to agree with your conclusions.
02:06:35.000No, the main purpose of peer review is actually to make sure that the methods that you used are sufficiently detailed and are correct enough to the extent you came to any conclusions, they match the methods that you used.
02:06:50.000And when you think about these potential, whatever they are, whatever these creatures are, if we did find out that they are some sort of a hominid,
02:07:09.000How much credence do you give to the theory that there's like the possibility that these UFOs, UAPs, whatever it is, is a break off civilization from a very, very long time ago that's very different from us, just the way we're very different from chimpanzees.
02:07:40.000You know, with people like looking at each other, planning and plotting, board meeting, you know, and so we shared all those interactions from twenty million years ago.
02:07:52.000So how much further back would you have to go to have something like what that is?
02:08:02.000And also, if you think about what we are in comparison to chimps, we're so fragile, we're frail, we're easily injured, we're well, if you think of something that's far more technologically advanced than us, it would be even more frail, it would be even more petite, it would have almost no muscle at all, it would look, weirdly enough, like the Grays from closing encounters of the third kind.
02:08:26.000That's what it would look like if it was a hominid that's whatever we are, and it went way past that.
02:08:58.000I find it, well, if everything is done with AI and automation, and your interface is purely neurological, like you have some sort of human or a creature neuro interface with technology and you just use fingers to like lay them on electronics so that you can sync up with it.
02:10:23.000Is it an homage to the ancestors or to the stories of the ancestors, et cetera.
02:10:29.000Especially when You look at Peru, like Peru is like, you've got the Nazca lines, which are really weird.
02:10:36.000You can only see them from the sky, and they're everywhere, and they're huge, these depictions of very strange things.
02:10:45.000So I just ask my scientific colleagues to not suspend disbelief, but to open your minds as to the possibility.
02:10:55.000of what these things might mean and just try to explain them without dismissing them.
02:11:00.000Because it's so easy and politics we see it every day.
02:11:03.000All you need to do is just give any answer, even if it's obviously flagrantly wrong as just as a way to deflect.
02:11:12.000And so, you know, you can either use that approach, you shouldn't use that approach ever as a scientist, deflect, which unfortunately is what someone like, you know, Neil deGrasse Tyson often does.
02:12:16.000I'm going to get in trouble for not knowing exactly.
02:12:19.000And we actually did an atomic layering using this device called atomic probe tomography where you literally pick it apart atom by atom and get its 3D position.
02:12:28.000It's a 40-year-old technology, so it's nothing magic.
02:12:33.000So, and yeah, it would just be very difficult to make it, you know, and certainly it would be not something that you would have dropped in the middle of the desert.
02:13:35.000So if that's true and if it really if that's the chain of evidence is correct and it, and it really did come from that area from that crash.
02:13:47.000It was an object that a policeman had seen with beings, short beings outside of it, and when it took off and left, he went over and found this piece that I actually, I personally have it now.
02:14:27.000So that's why I always leave open the possibility that, you know, which is why, I mean, this is, I'm going to get back to this atomic imager thing that I'm making.
02:14:38.000It's like, there's a level of evidence that I think can be produced with atomic imaging that goes beyond what it is we know anybody can make.
02:15:11.000So the reason that I got interested in it was frankly for looking at chromosomes.
02:15:15.000But then I realized, oh, maybe it has interest.
02:15:18.000Maybe it would be useful for these other things as well, which has kind of propelled my interest in it.
02:15:23.000Well, Jacques Villet is such a valuable researcher because he's so logical about the way he handles things and he doesn't jump to any conclusions.
02:15:33.000And his descriptions of these materials and the origin of these materials is really compelling.
02:15:40.000because it's just like, if that's not really possible to make in 1970, then someone help me out.
02:15:51.000Well, that's why the magnesium ratio thing was, you know, when I first estimated it was like, this is millions and millions of dollars, and why would you leave it on a beach in the middle of Ubatuba, Brazil?
02:17:11.000Because I know once I've got it, it will become valuable to everybody, which is, that's what made my career in immunology, making a succession of instruments like that and then making them available to the community.
02:17:25.000Because we now know you can pick up and look at any of the major physics journals today.
02:17:32.000Everything is all about these weird exotic particles that exist in metamaterials down at the atomic level with vague and strange capabilities that will change their utility either as superconductors, room temperature, or different kinds of electronic components that might be better, quantum computer circuits and qubits.
02:17:56.000But to do so requires a level of engineering that we don't, I mean, never mind reading what it is, putting it together in the first place is what's still required.
02:18:07.000And so if we don't know how to put it together in the first place, then reading it and knowing that it can exist and then associating it with a function is the value that I'm looking to bring.
02:18:21.000Well, this brings me to the idea of crash retrieval and the idea that these crash retrievals started a long time ago and that Roswell was just one of many.
02:18:34.000There's another one that was near Roswell that apparently was even more significant but didn't get in the newspaper.
02:18:50.000But at the end of the day, the point being that if they did do that, if they really did back engineer something, and then they started these completely top secret scientific research projects where they were developing alloys that had never existed before with techniques that they had never really even considered because they got it all from some spaceship.
02:19:14.000Well, that's where it's really crazy if you don't disclose this information.
02:19:19.000Because you're basically putting a bottleneck on human evolution, human technological evolution.
02:19:26.000our understanding of what's actually possible.
02:19:30.000And, you know, if you're going to excite the next generation of scientists in this country and you're going to bring economic prosperity to this country, then we should, I wouldn't say democratize it and put it all out on the internet.
02:19:46.000I understand all the reasons why you might not need to.
02:19:52.000I mean, my laboratory at Stanford for probably the last 10 years is Not because I don't want to take more Americans, but because Americans just don't go into the sciences anymore.
02:20:21.000A good third of them end up going back and bringing all the technology that they invented here back there and creating competitors.
02:20:27.000Now, maybe that's good on a global scale, you know, but maybe it's not something that we want to encourage on a local scale if we want to maintain our technological superiority.
02:20:44.000You know, I mean, when you see the results in their drone technology and electric cars and the things that are coming out of China recently?
02:20:50.000Their Polyp Bureau is almost entirely engineers and scientists.
02:21:01.000So people who are making these decisions, we have lawyers looking for all the reasons why something should or shouldn't be done and the liabilities.
02:21:07.000They're looking at things as to what's possible.
02:21:11.000When you're looking at these UAP things that people bring you, is there one that stands out as being the most compelling to you?
02:21:28.000Because of the physical material itself.
02:21:30.000I mean, I'm at the end of the day a physicalist.
02:21:33.000I mean, I don't like all the anecdotes.
02:21:36.000I mean, a thousand anecdotes make a good story, good campfire.
02:21:41.000I mean, I think there's statistical value in people seeing the same thing again and again, and there's a truth to it.
02:21:48.000But as, you know, and I can believe anything I want around that, and many of the statements that I'm purported to have said are around my beliefs, as opposed to when I put on my scientist hat and I try to convince another scientist.
02:22:02.000I can only provide this data and this evidence, and I don't have yet these materials.
02:22:07.000Now, maybe they exist, and maybe people like David Grosch will be able to pry them out of the clammy hands of those who want to keep it where it is, but give me one piece of that, and I will do wonders with it.
02:22:25.000I mean, that's why I'm so excited about the UAP Disclosure Act, if it ends up becoming We're taking money from one program to give to another.
02:22:53.000Whether you're taking it from your taxes, you're taking it from veterans, you know, insurance, et cetera, it's a zero-sum game.
02:23:00.000Whereas if you bring the investment community in, now you're bringing in people who are willing to take a chance and willing to take a risk, and you're not using the public's money anymore.
02:23:10.000And so, and that excites, I mean, me as the reason why I wanted to go back to Stanford is because the entrepreneurial environment there, and now which is actually almost homegrown here in Austin, is really what drives innovation.
02:23:25.000And so I want to excite that kind of community.
02:23:29.000And again, the SOLE Foundation is a place where we can bring people in, and we've got investors who show up now, who are talking to people about their ideas and what would we do with this.
02:23:38.000And so it almost has now a self-propelling movement where I don't need to be standing on a wooden box somewhere in the middle of the park saying, you know, look at this, look at this.
02:24:16.000And they just stopped operations, did something happen?
02:24:20.000No, it's it's strange because people said, Oh, we stopped.
02:24:22.000No, actually it had been determined from the beginning that we were going to go from January until July or August and collect data.
02:24:30.000And now we're in the Okay, what does the data mean phase?
02:24:34.000where we're literally going through the data, looking at the data files and trying to we're as I said before we're filtering the data we're looking for the obvious mistakes etc and so No, they've not stopped.
02:24:50.000Yeah, there was something on Twitter about something about the equipment.
02:24:56.000So James Fowler, one of the guys who brought a lot of his equipment and technology to us, decided that he wanted to basically go off and work in a DOD capacity as opposed to the research capacity.
02:26:29.000You know, and it's not a cloud and it's not a balloon..
02:26:33.000It's not discernible as anything obvious, but it was there and it happened during one of these events out in the middle of the desert.
02:26:44.000And so the idea behind SkyWatcher is to see if there are ways to get them to show up and if so, in a reproducible manner and then have the right kind of simultaneous multisensor capabilities to measure it, meaning radar, IR, visual people on the ground.
02:27:07.000What are they sending to get these things to go?
02:27:50.000It's like, why would you show up when you know what it is, unless there's a reason you're basically trying to train the monkeys what to do?
02:28:02.000Maybe you're tricking the monkeys to send the I don't know.
02:28:04.000But isn't there a group of people that just go out and they just use their mind, they meditate, and supposedly they have some success as well?
02:28:14.000Yeah, there's the CE five groups that do that.
02:28:18.000And I'm more than willing to believe that there are technologies capable of measuring thoughts at a distance that might be some super advanced.
02:28:35.000I don't believe you have to call it telepathy and magic.
02:28:39.000I think that there's, you know, if such a thing happens that there's a technology that might be able to read at a distance.
02:28:46.000Well, I don't have a problem with that.
02:28:48.000I don't have a problem with that either.
02:28:49.000I don't have a problem with the idea that consciousness is kind of vaguely and barely understood and whatever our relationship to the universe itself and reality itself through consciousness is it's not fully defined and also, it might evolve just like all of our other intellectual capabilities.
02:29:17.000You know, you and I are interacting with each other through quantum waves.
02:29:22.000My meat brain sees you as an object, but yet everything that you are sits in quantum spacetime down at the Planck level, and you're not even mass.
02:29:30.000You're just a series of, I mean, in some people's minds vibrating fields and objects.
02:29:35.000And so we have sensors that see and hear each other and think about each other, but our consciousness somehow is embedded in spacetime.
02:29:43.000And so who's to say that there's not signals passing to and from that are vaguely able to be picked up by our meat brains that we don't necessarily appreciate.
02:29:54.000So that just because I can't think at you and you can't hear me doesn't mean that there aren't perhaps brain organizations of some people that are a little bit better at hearing the echo than others.
02:30:08.000Well, this is also probably the reason why when you go to the woods and there's no cell phone signals, the world feels different.
02:30:52.000One I saw an interview that you did where you were describing the sighting off the coast of San Diego in 2004, the Nimitz sig site where he said that the amount of power Why don't you describe it?
02:31:07.000So the amount of power that that thing had to use to move the way it did.
02:31:26.000But what he basically said was how much power would it take to instantaneously accelerate from fifty feet over the ocean to fifty miles above the earth, whatever the number was, and instantaneously decelerate.
02:31:41.000So it's not just the amount of power to lift something, it's the amount of power to accelerate and decelerate instantaneously.
02:31:48.000And so you can make simple physical calculations of a one ton object, let's say, and it's more than the nuclear output of the United States for a year.
02:31:59.000And yet these things seem capable of doing that at will.
02:32:04.000So where are they getting the energy from?
02:32:06.000And I remember asking Hal a question like this years ago.
02:32:09.000We were stepping into a Hal put off stepping into an elevator and we were talking about his ideas about how these things might move.
02:32:16.000And I said, so they're cheating somehow, aren't they?
02:32:19.000And his answer was, from our point of view, they're cheating.
02:32:22.000From their point of view, they're just using the physics that we don't understand yet.
02:32:48.000Well, maybe that's the step of human evolution, of the evolution of our society and civilization is that AI has to come into power before we have access to all this other stuff.
02:33:00.000That we do need an AI government structure, that we do no longer require military intervention and all the shit that is the bane of civilization today.
02:33:11.000Because if you ask the average person today, is, do you envision a world where war doesn't exist?
02:33:24.000But if you ask them, okay, given this super intelligent AI takes over the world and proves to be benevolent and really just wants to accentuate the life of human beings on Earth and make it better for everybody, then yes.
02:33:53.000Okay, now that you're not going to war anymore, listen, but you can already imagine the negatives where people will say, well, it's the it's the It's the apocalyptic nanny state, right?
02:34:10.000Where AI just basically takes care of you and humans devolve into something, which is why I think a merger of human intellect with this where it's a synergy as opposed to an either or.
02:34:23.000I don't want to be nanny stated either.
02:34:26.000I want to use it to explore ideas or explore pleasure.
02:34:30.000I mean, I'm finding people want to be hedonistic and, you know, participate in virtual parties all day long, for all I care.
02:34:41.000But I think giving people the option to do whatever it is that they want to do, it's the most, I don't know, what's the, it's the most liberal and conservative way of living because you're allowed to do what you want to do.
02:34:56.000But we're not because we're living at the behest of so many other strictures.
02:35:05.000What's your take on the Bob Lazar story?
02:35:09.000Elements of truth with a healthy dose of misinformation that perhaps he was provided.
02:35:23.000I don't think that he's entirely lying.
02:35:28.000He seems to know enough about things that the average person wouldn't know.
02:35:35.000But I've heard from Eric Davis and others saying, he's a this, he's a that.
02:35:41.000I don't know because, you know, it's like, that's why there are great people like Richard Dolan, who's a wonderful writer of the history of the area, or people like Robert Powell or Michael Swords, who write just the facts, not coming to too many conclusions.
02:36:06.000My speciality is working with data and analyzing things and bringing rigorous science to it so that I can convince another scientist what is right or what is wrong.
02:36:37.000But that's, I think, again, enabling people to live in a world like that where you can talk about these ideas without being ridiculed is really, I think, the objective of what science should be and what open-minded, non-theologically dogmatic approaches should be.
02:36:56.000It's like accuse a scientist of being a priest, and that's the best way to really upset them.
02:37:03.000But pointing out that what they're doing is mimicking dogma and priesthood is the only way to shame them into doing the right thing.