Eric Weinstein & Michael Shermer: UFO DEBATE!

[Music] we are going live we should be broadcasting to several thousand people out on the internet and all different places in all different locations in the known universe and it is a great great pleasure to have two of my friends actually the man who gave me my start in podcasting during pandemic podcasting dr michael shermer who has uh influenced me and set me up my initial interviews a year and a half ago almost when i started my pandemic podcast journey with his book giving the devil his due michael is a professor he's the publisher of skeptic magazine he's a noted skeptic an avid cyclist an all-around all-around good guy and um i look i look forward to chatting more and learning from you professor shermer how are you today well uh well given the alternatives yes life is good and on my uh on my left on the screen at least is dr eric weinstein who is no stranger to the into the impossible podcast we have been together for many many uh decades it feels like but it's uh but it's been less than that and also coming up on our anniversary or our youtube first conversation this i think is our ninth one so uh so it's great to have you too as well dr weinstein how are you today um great to be here thanks for having me very interesting uh also to be with my friend michael shermer um i really am glad to uh have this crew assembled for this topic so uh what's so interesting to me is there's sort of this phrase in german the germans have the best words for everything michael knows that better than anybody i'm sure uh but uh but they have words for everything like ambulance the word for ambulance eric do you know what the word for ambulance is in german no i just know that exit is also fought yes i think the word for ambulance michael can confirm is crank wagon so you know if you're sick you get hit you go to the cranker wagon and uh but one of the other things they have is zeitgeist the spirit of the times and it seems like right now we're in an interesting age where people are kind of uh being affected by this notion that there may be extraterrestrial visitors it may be other factors contributing to a rash of sightings that have been popular in the news media and i thought we would kind of discuss it today in a friendly debate and and and really hash out some of the issues on the skeptic side as michael shermer eric is coming from a side i think of curiosity and of great interest in particular in some of the uh second order implications of these of these sightings if true and if not true so i think i think it's quite interesting that when you guys are both able to join me hang on here as a guy who never talked about ufos ever because i deeply detested the topic up until april of last year i think we have three skeptics and three open-minded people i don't want to put anyone yeah i agree i concur all right well i i can't really say that i concur them because look at this is one of my air tags that i got from apple and you can see the symbol on it maybe it'll focus it's a there it is i'm not a skeptic and don't forget brian you're you're the one that did the cover story of in the beginning you rewrote genesis so uh what does that say that's right so i was talking um about this uh for you know several weeks i've been having a lot of individuals on the podcast ranging from uh debunker famous debunker mick west who may be watching he sent me a question to ask of eric uh seth shawstak i've been on other podcasts my friend jeremy reese who runs alien scientist uh that podcast and kind of fleshing out the implications if true i've talked to the pilots involved in some of the encounters that have been in the message in the in the media but i want to ask you do you guys see something else some other reason why this particular moment this particular issue is uh so much in people's forebrains i'll start with eric why is this issue taken whole not not the alien or whatever you know you want to say but this issue as an issue itself why is it so important why is it so popular why is it so um such in demand for for people to discuss well i think it's been forced on us which many of us resent uh i think that the idea of um i don't even know how to put this but i've been able to avoid ufos sasquatch remote viewing uh esp my entire life with relative ease and when our government takes a position that makes it impossible to avoid that by hiding its data and making provocative statements involving a thermonuclear narrative you know the thermonuclear threat did not disappear with the cold war and it is fashionable to treat it as if it is a solved problem of our past when it will be a problem throughout any future we might hope to have i come with an unfun curmudgeonly get off my lawn perspective that you don't mess around with thermonuclear narratives and i think it's wonderful that you know the internet generation uh feels so secure that we can have fun with giant bug-eyed aliens and you know skinwalker ranch and cattle mutilations but when you actually are talking about things probing your airspace or areas in which military presence is found you're talking about something that potentially could lead to a conflagration and so you know just the way i don't expect people to be you know singing popular songs in church i don't really enjoy narratives about ufos in military airspace so i think it's really important to recognize that we have now been taken by the new york times by the pentagon into a very weird place where our scientists don't seem to have any data there are a tiny number of videos all of which seem to me to be rather low quality there's some anecdotal reports and there's enough claimed behind the scenes to warrant a change indicating that we were either lying before lying now um but whatever it is we've been putting a tremendous amount of pressure on people not to report things apparently that they see because they don't want we don't want career ending behavior in pilots this is one of the few issues that i've never been able to fit any curve through the points normally the problem is you can fit too many curves through a set of points then you have to discriminate between which is a likely narrative and which is a less likely narrative i got nothing at the moment i don't know any story that i can tell um in which it makes sense what we're doing either we've become incompetent we've become bored uh we're being visited by something that would be the story of the millennium or we've been leapfrogged every single narrative uh goes to some place that makes i think what we're trying to fit is a sheet that is too small on a mattress that is too large and every time we get one corner of the fitted sheet onto the mattress another one pops off so i've never seen anything like this and it has beaten me in the sense that i don't have a story that i can tell michael when you look at this issue do you see you know other narratives besides the you know simplest occam's like explanation do you see other narratives media driven or you know popular um you know pop science driven what do you see as bringing this to the forefront of the of popular culture 60 minutes and every newspaper in america and baited breath and what do you attribute that to yeah so having some institutional memory here helps this something similar like to this happened in the early 1990s you know we founded skeptic magazine 92 and the roswell incident was all the rage and there was a lot of pressure on the government to issue a statement what really happened and uh all the way up to president clinton when you know when he was president said all right i will look into it and uh and then finally in 1995 the the government issued pentagon issued a report on roswell in which they said okay that stuff back in the 1950s when we said it was a weather balloon they're referring to this crash debris at mac brazil's ranch outside of roswell new mexico you can see pictures of it online it looks like balsa wood and tin foil and and so forth and they said okay it wasn't a weather balloon like we said it was this high altitude surveillance balloon listening for the acoustic signatures of uh nuclear explosions in the upper atmosphere because we thought that's what the soviets might have been doing so that's what crashed then they offered other details you know well what about the alien bodies that some people said that they saw and well those were some other experiments we were doing these high altitude balloon tests where we would heave a crash test dummy out of the balloon at 90 000 feet just to see what happens and so maybe the people saw the crash dummies uh being hauled away by the military that kind of thing so there was a lot of excitement and build up to this report like oh my god oh my god they're going to tell us what really happened and then when they told us none of the ufologists said oh okay now we're satisfied and uh we'll you know we'll go home and work on something else no no they just figured the government is still lying so whatever the report is going to be released later this month if at all uh it's i'm predicting it's not going to say but anything particularly uh revelatory about uh super advanced drones that the russians have or alien visitations or anything like that and ufologists will not be satisfied with it because you know short of them saying yes it's aliens and we have the bodies they're in area 51 and we have a camera you can go live and see it yourself and they won't be satisfied so uh i think eric's got it perfectly uh said it perfectly well uh that it's being forced on us that is a commentary on the uh sort of the media landscape you know when the when the new york times you know the paper of record all the news that's sit fit the print you know the gray lady says ufos are real then of course everybody has to you know take notice but let's deconstruct that for a minute now this wasn't a a report in the new york times uh conducted an investigation conducted by new york times journalists that are you know go sent out by their bureau chief to look into something two of the three authors of that 2017 paper are ufologists leslie keane wrote a best-selling book called ufos uh you know pilots and and generals go on the record the second author blumenthal wrote a book on alien abductions it was a very positive uh report about um the whole uh 1980s and early 1990s alien abduction uh narratives that were recounted um you know in breathless tones of like you know it's here it's real it's true and so this is you know this is not a a dis interested report by investigative journalists it's it's an article by believers and so it's astonishing to me that people seem to miss that and and all the way up to last week or today you know real that word real is doing a lot of work in those headlines you know finally the government the pentagon says they're real they mean the videos the videos that have been passed around since 2007 and they keep getting released like oh there's new videos they're not new they're the same videos that get recycled over and over and finally the pentagon said okay look they're not fake they're real videos they were actually shot by navy jets they're not made by some um uh you know hacker in a in in a basement with his laptop or cgi in some hollywood studio they're actual videos okay that's all it means but the problem is is that when people hear real their brains autocorrect to extraterrestrial the government has said aliens are real no that isn't what they said nobody is saying that right and that's the problem and eric's right this how can you ignore it yeah 60 minutes oh my god how can you ignore that all right well we're done here you guys are both in agreement this is a boring debate thank you all good night no i'm just great but one of the things that bothered me most and i think scientists are to blame and i think the military is to blame but most of all i think the media is to blame as i'll explain in a second the you know the topic comes up in the new york times in the recent headline pentagon you know or navy can't rule out this but they can't prove that either and you know this is like unfalsifiable hypotheses you know and with no discriminatory no sensitivity and then the other hand you have you have pilots like uh commander fravor and again i have you know less courage in my entire body than he has in this little cuticle over here uh but isn't that part of the problem he says things like you can't you know criticize it because if you're not a fighter pilot if you don't know what a cap point is if you don't know what a thread vector is um or he says you don't know how to operate a fleer camera on one hand on the other hand we as scientists and we're all trained here at different uh different branches of science and or social science and the point being how do we how do we communicate to the public that no you don't have to be a pilot to uh to say something about uh about a phenomenon and the viability of something as a phenomenon a physicist can do that likewise you don't have to be a physicist to speculate on the existence of of of perhaps sightings eyewitness testimony etc so you know michael i think it's i think it's a it's an interesting time and i keep asking who's benefiting from this when you have a headline that's like you know um you know unicorns could exist they can't be ruled out either you know my daughter you know likes to claim that there's an invisible unicorn and the proof is that he visits her room every night that there's no residue of their unicorn ever found or discovered when i go in a room so the absence of evidence as our friend carl sagan and my listeners will will hate me if i don't put up a sock puppet to that finger puppet but you know absence of evidence isn't necessarily evidence of absence but nevertheless we're in this narrative now where people are being asked to speculate on the nature of what scientific proof constitute you know is constituted by and and getting scientists to say things like well science never proves anything i mean it's very diff it's a very dangerous time to be in on the other hand i can't say anything because i didn't have the courage to put on the uniform so where do we go where do we where did we make an impasse past this impasse eric i'm slightly worried that we've mis-framed the problem that i think we've we've got the portion that we all agree on right and can we all agree that the videos to an untrained observer i think all three of us are untrained observers i mean i don't know if you could train for this but um don't seem very impressive is that is that a fair statement michael totally yeah yeah impressive they're weird they're weird but they're not like super high resolution with you know data at the infrared um you know optical thermal radar blah blah blah and okay so put that to one side the concern is that many of us are hearing a great deal more from other sources that are not usually i don't know unreliable people who i've known who i've tracked their history people are reaching out and the claim that i don't know how to evaluate is that there's a great deal more it's higher resolution it's actually data rather than sort of video anecdote it appears that none of our top scientists have access to this at an official level they may have secret access to it but i certainly can tell you that i've poked around in you know differential geometry general relativity and quantum field theory which would be three places i would want to to consult if i thought that i was being visited from another dimension another part of the galaxy or that there was a major breakthrough that allowed um alien civilizations to visit us easily or even our own future selves what have you and that's the data that really i find fascinating it's not it's not that look these videos you know to the extent that they're actually just straight up videos of something they certainly seem weird i'm not i'm not i'm not claiming that that it's nothing but i don't think i've ever said the words fravor or tic tac or nimitz or any of these things during the entire discussion which i've been relatively focused on not because um well because i don't think that's where the story is i think that the story is the pentagon authenticating the existence of a program i'm i'm plugging in i'm seeing all of these papers um you know like 38 papers they seem to be from relatively obscure academics for the most part there seems to be a ufo community that has security clearances there seem to be top physicists who don't know nothing about this i mean i think brian and i surprised lee smolin who didn't even know that there was any change in the ufo narrative recently when we were on a live podcast with him and all of this i find to be the it is the data the data is the absolutely pathologically bizarre disconnect between what appears to be the strength of what has been released and authenticated with what is being claimed with the extent to which things are being hidden and the absence of any adults in the defense complex or the intelligence community to shut down what seems to be some sort of arguable fever dream on the part of people who desperately want to meet aliens now i would say i desperately want to meet aliens but not so desperately that i don't have other things to do on this planet if there are no aliens to be met and so my question is where's my goddamn data so michael to that extent when you have multiple reports from multiple pilots these are trained professionals great costs great sacrifice to our country um even if there's you know the type two error probability is small you know that might be a a false a false negative it could be a false positive but you know don't we have an obligation to investigate all you know to protect our pilots uh at some level don't we have an obligation as eric says this is our data i mean you and i you know have a right to see what what's what data are being promulgated and by the way you put a lot of faith michael for a skeptic in the efficacy of our of our pentagon to and our military apparatus to be both transparent and accountable and i think the lessons of the last 15 months should have disabused all of us of that notion so what do you say about not to mention the not to mention the lessons of wiki wikileaks and all the way back to the pentagon papers 50 years ago this week uh well so one of the most revealing statements by the pilot one of the pilots on 60 minutes was that he sees these things every day and bill whittaker the journalist for 60 minutes says what every day he goes oh yeah every day like it's a common occurrence okay if that's true what else should be true what else should be true is we should have thousands of high resolution high definition clear photographs and videos of whatever these things are shot by passengers on commercial jetliners people sitting at the beach you know there's a hundred million or more uh you know uh cell phone smartphones with high resolution cameras on them you know we should have tons of videos and and yet as eric points out we have a handful of these grainy blurry videos i've been in the ufo business for 30 years they're all you know grainy blurry it's i'm almost beginning to think the aliens are just blurry that's just what they look like you know the ufos are blurry that's part of their stealth technology they're controlling us they're trolling us that way so and it's not to say that um you know pylons aren't trained and but they're not immune to the normal perceptual misperceptions that we all have misperceiving the size or speed of something at a distance when you're moving it's dark whatever you'll see these reports like one in um leslie keane's book on ufos uh of where you know you know the pilot uh gives this description you know the craft is 150 feet long and it's traveling 350 miles an hour how do you know i mean this is and there was no radar uh measurements of this this is just his visual sight okay this is very difficult to to take seriously without some corroborating measurements now to your first point that the pilots are corroborating either each other or their visual reports with what was seen on radar on the ship or something okay that confirms what the pentagon said when they said they're real that is to say something out there is being filmed it's not just an artifact of inside the lens like a lens flare for example the history of ghosts and haunted houses is is fraught with lens flares okay just the the light is bouncing around inside the series of lenses in a 35 millimeter uh camera so it's not that it's obviously something else okay but but but what and you know to his credit you know mick west did the heavy lifting on this by you know kind of looking at each of those videos like the one you're showing now and looking at what those numbers around the edge of the frame mean you know i don't know what they mean and you know most of us looking at have no idea and you know mick looked it up well presumably someone in the pentagon or the navy or whoever knows exactly what every one of those numbers means why aren't they telling us okay it's not actually shooting off to the left at a high rate of speed the zoom is going from one to two this is one of the things that mick pointed out i think this is the one there where you see it says one and then if you go forward a little bit it it jumps to two so the image is is blowing up twice as is as big which means the object is going to move suddenly there it's about to go to the left and you know why is it that it's mick west has to figure this out for us why didn't the pentagon go out and go guys guys calm down this is nothing zooming off anywhere this is not anti-gravity technology this is not a chinese russian super secret drone it's the zoom on the camera all right presumably if they issue a report they would at least do what mick west has done for us yeah and i want to point out i did have been in contact with alex dietrich as lieutenant commander at lieutenant junior grade at the time of the incident uh and actually mick had her on their on her on his podcast yesterday i want to point that out that she's incredibly gracious she has you know she's she's talked a lot about this and i think you know her recollections you know there are discrepancies between her and favor i don't think that's particularly germane to what her argument is you know she wants to make it less of of a taboo for pilots to come forward as do i i want our military men and women who are as i say a million times braver than i am to have the best equipment the best training and the best protection against threats uh like this but eric um i want to get go back to to your your take uh on this so when absent these videos you know in the new york times i feel that there is only one institution that stands to benefit you've done a lot with the gated institutional narrative promotion you coin those and i think in this case there's only one clear-cut winner and it is the media and the media have a vested interest in making the story persist as long as possible even in the old gray lady that prints all the news fit to print and we know how accurate they are they never make mistakes they never have any political agendas whatsoever right guys so my question is how can we be possibly being manipulated in some sense again uh by by media forces that jeff bezos owns the washington post uh has no profit motive necessarily anymore his infinite money can shovel into it has to do with space maybe it's interesting for his space missions who knows but the bottom line is you know these things in the washington post from the washington post to the new york times uh they go unquestioned or we don't report them 60 minutes shows one side only and doesn't report the uh the the scientist perspective or a skeptic's perspective and they oh afterwards um 60 minutes overtime see what they said when they landed back on the carrier deck so how do you balance this against cui bono eric you know and and and again the nancy kerrigan question i always ask you why now why here why us well um okay so i'll play tanya harding to your nancy kerrigan i don't want to do that yet we're not at the cui bono question because almost certainly the media is going to be humiliated for taking this seriously if the strength of this is what is all that we're seeing i mean i really i don't i had an interaction with mick west the other day on twitter which if if i had to describe it it was sort of like white to move in mate in five and the claim was the story is fantastically interesting no matter what it's a very branched decision tree much the way you'd have in a chess problem where lots of things can move but every single way of resolving the story resolves to something fascinating so so actually he has a question for you mick has a question for you that he um well let me let's not let mick drive the bus unless he wants to come on the show right now you can ask it to me later i don't i'm not afraid of it but i won't like to continue my my line of thinking mick effectively you can grant him all sorts of you know a rook a bishop a queen you know yes i i don't find these videos particularly compelling yes maybe pilots are starved for attention yes maybe some of it is bokeh and yes maybe the camera turning very quickly would have the illusion of something speeding off etc etc seat at all assume that in fact there is a group of escapees from marin county deep in wu who have taken over a pentagon narrative about military air space uh in order to amuse themselves and uh you know effectively this is a burning man camp uh gone out of control that's a huge story it's a really big deal and it doesn't really matter in some sense whether the former paper of record uh turned i don't know institution that isn't has inscrutable motives we all know that the new york times has slid downhill at an incredible level we're in a highly politicized era people are desperate for funding they're desperate for excitement they can't find meaning in their lives blah blah blah blah we are still a thermonuclear nation and we need bad narratives reigned in because we're we are not even in a bipolar situation we're in a multi-polar situation it is simply uh if if michael shermer's best explanation were true or if mick west's best explanation is true we've had a massive collapse if we are at the level in which we are talking about incentives that one part of the pentagon wants money that another part of the pentagon has or people are squabbling and there's no one to lower the boom and say cut it out this is an extremely serious situation what it's what it means to be in the military you guys don't get it we can't afford this i just i don't think that any of this really resolves the basic puzzle we have we've been starved for the data there appear to be i i just checked today with a friend of mine who i believe is uh luella zondo's attorney dan sheehan who i've been following since the iran contra um you know scandal we did the pentagon papers uh a storied famous attorney um i checked with many things that he wished to say i said that i would keep them all in confidence he said i didn't have to keep them in conference by the way michael you you should know that you are the of the three of us most likely to be an alien because you seem blurry to my uh to my weight right it's coming from the past michael's calling from people are saying how do you still have those aol compact discs but don't be cruel to those of us over 50. um the thing i'm i'm just shocked by is is that we can't actually have a conversation we keep getting distracted because we don't have the language that says you have to you have to integrate over the entire decision tree you nobody can say that it's aliens and what was represented to me just and i checked before i came on the podcast is that in essence all what was represented is that all plausible explanations um appear to have been ruled out that's a claim i'm not saying it's true i'm saying that it's a claim there's also a claim that there's a vast amount more data and it is much higher quality that it hasn't been down down sampled it hasn't been degraded so as to preserve um you know military secrets i don't know how to evaluate it because i'm not saying i'm not being lied to i'm not saying that people are not themselves confused what i am saying is that people are not representing the problem correctly and if you set up the problem in any one of various ways i can set it up so that either absolutely this is a funding dispute that got out of control where people were trying to have some fun and uh you know and it became this international story or i can set it up in a different way in which basically we know it's aliens and we just can't say that the final words and what i asked dan sheehan today was are we at the point in your opinion or in the opinion of people who came out of the pentagon's atip program that the only the is the explanation for why no one will say it's aliens that all of the remaining branches of the decision tree that we can think of have career-ending pos uh implications and i thought that that was a pretty good way of grouping the set of things like you know it's atlantis or orcas developed opposable fins or were being visited from other dimensions or these are future humans going back in time along closed time like curves or any one of the things that would sort of get get you a trip to the nuttery are those what's left and the answer came back to me and i and i hoped in if if i i think i i got this straight so uh i will apologize if i didn't understand it the dan's answer was yes that's what's left now does that mean that dan knows dan wasn't part of atip he's a lawyer does that mean that atip understands this maybe not maybe they're a bunch of crazy enthusiasts i don't really understand what a ufology i just found out that ufology is a word that's how backwards i am on this topic um no no i am late as late can be to this party this has had zero interest to me i think we are not representing the weirdness of the story accurately if we're already at quibona but if we isolated just to the pentagon i mean you could think of many different internecine type squabbles from military fighter jet competitions to inter-agency squabbles like the space force air force now these are all navy pilots and one narrative i've heard is this is you know kind of par for the course and navy's has the last gasps that attempting to get the high frontier under its control before space force and the air force kick in this is typically the purview of air force uh these are space space activities if indeed that's the case what is typically the purview of the air force uh activities and external to our planet if indeed these are ufos and so forth coming from other other advanced technological civilizations maybe i'm i'm just missing it but i'm being reached out to by various people i have contacts that i didn't cultivate for this purpose i've tried to check in on what i am hearing and again what i am hearing is not data and that's just hearsay does not strike me as having any analog in my previous life i've never seen my the closest i've ever seen been to a ufo sighting is in 1988 i was lying on a pier with my now wife then girlfriend looking up at the stars on lake waban and there was a light in the sky that appeared to be a satellite of the space station i pointed it out it had a beautiful very clean arc as if it was in orbit and then it reversed and it was it appeared to be a very point like source very very distant i didn't understand how something like that could do it could could do that move i couldn't figure it out but i haven't spent 30 years obsessed with the point of light that i couldn't figure out why it did the thing that it did it was just like anomalously weird and you know look i've been known to tipple occasionally and you know look hey she was she was good looking so you know maybe maybe i was just moved by the moment um but i really i don't have this part of my soul unquenched i don't need ufos to have a meaningful existence i don't think we're listening i think that what we're being told repeatedly from multiple sources is that these are daily occurrences in many cases there are two basic loci that seem to crop up over and over again off the east coast i guess around virginia north carolina and some locus of activity off the coast of southern california um i guess there's a few mexican islands in baja and san diego and i'm not quite sure why we're having trouble saying that the data is weirdly the withheld claims that appear to be fairly consistent from very different people and the otherwise inexplicable behavior of people who respond when queried um in a profound way i i've just never encountered this before but you're computing you know potentially impugning you know or pointing to a monumental security you know vulnerability in our pentagon at the highest level you know as michael said there are people i think he's even a friend of ours who's or at least twitter friends as close as i can get to a real friend these days uh and and that is you know people who are reporting daily incident sightings so that is a falsifiable hypothesis so fly out there oh it wasn't there today okay we'll come back tomorrow it wasn't there tomorrow we're reporting very different things the tic tac is unique it's suey generous there's nothing like it then there are other things balls and spheres and sphere or spheres and boxes and and so forth what's that i heard a new one over the mediterranean from the same source about we were going at incredible speeds in our fighters and suddenly and you know i had to make sure that i was parsing the sentence accuracy somebody said that circles were being flown around are fighters at very high speed and i said you mean that something appeared to be flying much better because the colloquy you know to run circles around means uh you know to do much better than i said no literally uh this is what was occurring now i keep trying to push on all of this stuff and it doesn't resolve one way or the other so in general my feeling about this is that this is an invitation for the scientific and the skeptical communities to destroy themselves by not setting the problem up and not saying give us the damn data because we don't know what we're talking about the major data we have right now is withheld uh is a narrative involving withheld information that is the data and you know i just i don't understand the passion for david fravor the tic tac the nimitz the the the the pyramids you know is it bokeh is it this is uh this this should leave us cold the key issue are the consistent widespread allegations without the condemnation of the pentagon that this is an irresponsible narrative dangerous to the security of the nation that provides the world's responsible use of force michael what do you make of eric's claims you know the meta issue here that has to be addressed is what does this say even if it's not true as he's stipulating let's say all these are fake but then you're getting these reports what is this saying about the the you know our integrity of our of the of the high command of the of the agencies that are sworn and put on the uniform and as alex says you know raises her right hand to protect us are they often you know off the ranch here or you know is that something is it basically you know eric is imputing you know perhaps malice i think more incompetence and i'd like to get your take on it yeah well a couple of things first of all we uh it is good to remember that the branches of the military do compete with one another for funding uh and uh you know budgets and so forth i've been i've been reading quite a few books on um the arms race during the cold war the cuban missile crisis the history of the bomb and so on and you know a couple things that came clear in fred kaplan's book the bomb and martin sherwin's book uh the on apocalypse let's see it's called uh gambling with armageddon on the um missile crisis is that the the real arms race was not between the u.s and the ussr it was between the army navy and air force and each of them wanted uh the bomb because they could get more funding and this is why we have a triad we have a triad because the navy said well we want a bomb so we got to put in our submarines and the air force said well we want a bomb so we have them in our bombers and the army said well we want a bomb so we have missiles that's why we have a triad so basically it tripled the overall military budget just on that alone and uh you know it's staggering that that was far more competitive than that we were competing against the russians there never was a missile gap when kennedy ran against nixon uh while eisenhower was finishing up his term there was this whole thing about the missile gap between us and the in the soviet union it it that that never existed that was only in the minds of you know politicians and so that's a concern so whatever it is we're talking about here we should keep in mind that the for the forces do compete with one another for claims on things that are going on especially as it affects their budgets um i i um in terms of why this interest well how could you not be interested if it was true that we're being visited by aliens of course that would be the discovery of the century if not of all time and uh and so let's put that off on one side and then say well what's the other hypothesis they're super advanced russian or chinese assets but somehow that they've gotten decades or centuries ahead of us technologically and without us knowing you know i make the case in that quilette article i did that this is just not how history of science and technology evolves you know it's very incremental everybody knows what everybody else is doing they all scientists and technologists read each other's journals uh nations steal each other's secrets and so on and so forth the manhattan project the most secret project of all time in our country uh the russians had all everything we knew within four years they stole it and you know apple and all these uh tech companies you know they have super secure uh systems and and uh protect their property rights through lawsuits and so on and yet all cell phones and computers are roughly within six months of each other in terms of development so the chances that whatever we're looking at are super advanced chinese or russian assets that we just just don't know about is is pretty slim so what does that leave us with two things one it's the kind of things that mick west is talking about you know camera motion uh distance uh distortions the movement of the cameras and zooms and things like this or anomalies we just can't explain and you know so this is called the residue problem there's always a residue of unexplained anomalies that no current scientific theory can account for 100 of observations so what do you do with that well i don't know we just live with it or we wait for the pentagon somebody knows i i think in my opinion somebody knows and they're just you know why they're not telling us i don't know mike michael let me just ask you a question you and i had a friendly skeptic on skeptic knife fight on twitter and oh yeah that's right right and my claim was that's not how innovation works innovation works sometimes you have an incremental aspect to what has been learned or understood but it may unlock what appears to be discontinuous power and so you know i put the problem with you that um you've proven that renaissance technologies on long island doesn't exist because we have a secretive hedge fund that has maintained an advantage over every other investment system known to man that cannot be easily related you know if the idea is that it's not actually a hedge fund uh i think that's a fascinating idea we know that there are um you know i gave the example of uh herod sato in table tennis who was the one who figured out that if you put uh rubber on both sides of a sandpaper bat um it muffled the sound and he was able to be the worst player on the japanese team who won the entire world the table thomas champ championship in bombay bob beeman's long jump he did something on that one particular jump that produced an outcome that wasn't a few millimeters difference but you know just an unimaginable flop right well that was the same olympics in mexico city and i i don't need to tell you that eddie van halen and jimi hendrix both represented a complete discontinuity in both cases people got a chance to understand what they were doing but generally speaking i would say that nobody's really figured out what generates the majesty of jimi hendrix i don't think that what you're saying is accurate not because the input may not move incrementally for the most part but that the consequence of getting something a little bit better may be an enormous difference and so i asked if i recall correctly you were citing matt ridley how many years difference is 1900 or 1902 from 1952. in one case you don't even have powered flight in the other case you're dropping fusion devices you know about neutrons and antimatter relativity quantum theory we're in a situation in which if you think about the early 20th century i i noted that my friend and our mutual friend sam harris made the same thing the same claim about tens of thousands if not you know hundreds of thousands or millions of years in the future um no you can't tell how much more advanced the civilization is in that metric because the amount of power that's unlocked need not be consonant with the discovery that unlocked it but i think you're you're missing one of the points michael was making in that tweet was that innovation the fosberry flop it wasn't like people stopped you know didn't adopt it everybody adopted it really quickly efficient market thesis applied to technology and michael's talking primarily about about let me just finish the thought michael's talking primarily about it not being an adversary on earth because in that case you know they would be likely look the chinese have yet the russians have let we beat them to the moon they have yet to send a man mission to crude mission to the moon right so if you look at it he's saying innovation-wise not speculating about the physics of the 25th century visited upon us by some distant galaxy like we would all be quite thrilled to uh to witness but he's saying it ruling out the adversary let's take this as a bayesian problem so what kind of credence can you put on eyewitness testimony it carries some evidence michael was abducted at one point on his race across america he can talk about that uh 1992 i believe he's he's actually been abducted uh so we can we can talk about it so eyewitnesses uh we can put some bayesian uh prior on that we can put on technology so advanced they can get here but not advanced enough that it can't evade uh ages two radar uh et cetera and then you could go through the list and how you could maneuver in the earth's atmosphere and why you'd want to go to a warning area off the coast of southern california but not be spotted you know over over the white house anyway you could go through this whole list of things that we could try to pre-game and dunk and experiment until the until the proverbial cows get mutilated no i hope no cows would get mutilated by any of these aliens but the point i'm trying to make is the the question if it's if it's a physics problem you and i could talk about it if it's a sociological problem you and michael can talk about it but if it's a pentagon problem if it's a data problem you keep saying this is our data this is our data you know we own nasa has has as a hubble space telescope right so i can show you data now the hubble space telescope's data i'll put it up on my screen right here it's beautiful well that's not the data i want to show i want to show my firefly there we go what up there it is okay so there's the hubble deep field is this data as a scientist is this data it's very weak data but you actually have access to it you can get you can you don't need a foia to get this data actually it's not a very weak data it was it was it was constructed for a very particular purpose and actually the data relative to that particular purpose is fairly compelling no actually there's far more data there's far more actual data that we astronomers use from the individual spectrum of the individual luminosity the photometry the the aperture we can do a lot more with this data than just look at it on screen savers we're talking past each other the reason for collecting that as data i mean you and i agree i think as to what what you're saying but it's the framing of it we had this question if we look if we tried to find the blankest part of the blank sky what would we find if we left the lens open for a very long time for a long exposure we were somewhat surprised that relative to that question this is actually very interesting data to for a smattering of a different questions it's very very cute that's right it's very weak data but you know when i tried to make the point that renaissance technologies is a different paradigm because it hasn't been copied it hasn't defused um that's a different issue than the fosberry flop replacing the scissors you know that was the previous high bar maneuver and so in that situation uh there was radically quick adoption i mean i find it very interesting for example that um nobody has bothered to uh just to ask the question why do ashkenazi jews over perform in physics why do two countries uh overperform in the boston marathon i think it was before was it 1967 and nobody from kenya or ethiopia had ever won and then those two nations completely dominated the results so you can say well that's the ability to diffuse heat uh you know there's been a competing explanations there are different things that go against michael's um broad claims based on the assertions of matt ridley and michael is a very reasonable guy we've talked for a long time we're not trying to get each other we're just trying to say so eric let me addre let me address that because it's a good point let's let's say the chinese have a a lab let's say it's in wuhan and it's next to that viral lab and and they're not only inventing viruses they're also inventing uh you know super fast technology that allows a jet to go faster than uh this the speed of sound without making a uh a sonic boom something yeah yeah yeah for sure okay that that's possible that you know somehow our scientists missed that their scientists are not publishing in the journals that our scientists would read to see the incremental improvements because they've been kept isolated by their government something like that um if that were true then of course i don't think the pentagon is going to tell us this when they release this report you know oh boy we up you know the chinese got way ahead of us uh in this one you know fell swoop in the last five years and so now we're going to copy their technology and we promise we'll catch up we just won't hear about it um so your hypothesis is possible but i don't know how we can test it because again that data is you know they're not going to share that with us and um and so that would be the only way i could see that that's possible because the diffusion would happen pretty quickly after that if that were the case it reminds me of the scene in the movie uh airplane uh where they're trying to help land this jet this is should we turn on the runway light and they say no that's just what they'll be expecting so we're gonna starve our own scientists of the data that would be necessary to keep pace with china right what i'm trying to get is very different none of these simplistic explanations work right you can't get rid of it by saying that there are no secrets you can't really get rid of it saying that there are no permanent advantages you can't get rid of it by saying that all progress is incremental every time somebody's asserted that i think i've tried to be relatively diligent and saying no here's a here's a counter example here's a counter example now if you said it's rare i'd appreciate that it's not that usual it's somebody to something wholly discontinuous that can't be copied etc etc i don't think that's where we are and i think that it just it's very frustrating because i i look at the number of permanent clusters there's a cluster out here of people who believe that china in particular has zoomed ahead of us in hypersonic technology and that this is a closely guarded secret and that's the explanation there's another group of people who believe that we the us have lodged secret knowledge inside of our aerospace companies maybe the glenn martin company in particular who knows where the secret knowledge is all about technology it's not about physics they're working with the same physics as everybody else there's a different group right which claims this is a funding thing it's a psyop it's the psyop i've i've talked to each of these communities none of these communities can answer all of the questions that's my point and and the problem that i answer all the questions though eric is it necessary to prove every rule out every possible explanation for ufo sighting by mick west or does he just need one no no that's i don't know why this is so confusing we have i would expect almost all of us would go through all of the explanations and say i've noticed that every time i get these three corners on the mattress the fourth corner doesn't get anywhere close and the mattress is bowed in this really unnatural shape at some point you say i think i have a twin size fitted sheet for a queen size mattress and that's what i'm trying to say i'm trying to say that i have a category which i can't explain which is none of this makes any effing sense and the skeptics don't make sense the bug you know the the wild-eyed dreamers don't make sense every single thing i can run through this doesn't add up and what i keep hearing is can't i get back to one of the positions that i i feel like you know it's propaganda it's fighting it's infighting it's people who don't understand the difference between anecdote it's social pressure that pilots pressure each other we've got a mystery and that's where we are i mean one so i have to because i said i would um our mutual friend mick west he asks you a question suppose that robert bigelow's a tip style wu had started to seriously overlap real issues like drone airspace incursions and human equipment identification limitations in other words the atip had exposed some weakness that's vulnerable and real how long uh could how could the pentagon shut that down before the report is released in other words do they do they have this i mean are you are you really you know overestimating how good the pentagon is how monolithic they are or are you more worried about them having the keys to the to the cadillac at you know at age 14 and doing something extremely dangerous potentially with it if i were the pentagon one thing i would do is i would come and talk to me and people like me very quickly and say you're on team america right i'd say you got it you got a big audience yeah i guess i do you're smart guy you've got a degree i don't know the latter is true we need to talk to you we need you to understand that there's some real sensitivities and we need your help we need to get this that we need to get the toothpaste back in the tube we need to get the genie back in the bottle because we've got real problems and we've got a woo narrative intersecting with a crazy narrative this is where i got to with with mick before which is isn't that a huge story now is that a story that i would be willing to keep quiet let me be entirely honest i would keep that story quiet if the issue is that we had a really serious threat we had a really garbagey narrative yeah the pentagon were to reach out to me i'm on team america and i know what to do if you don't reach out to me i'm going to behave like every single scientist i'm going to try to set up the problem try to figure out what i know what i don't know what i believe what seems anomalous and my claim is that i hear silence but i've reached out to by one or two groups i'm not going to say more if what you're saying is that we have a an overlapping problem of real drones and fake aliens somebody has blown it in our national science and our national intelligence complex and they've got to get their act together it's a big deal why do you have more faith in their ability to craft a media narrative when we know the uh the plethora of failures in their own purview in their belly with the f-35 lightning trillions of dollars a project that is still by all accounts completely inadequate for the pilots that fly it putting potential of our brave men and women at risk that's their job that's their day job in other words if you ask me brian you know why aren't you good at crafting this narrative of the media when you go out that's not my job i'm a professor of astrophysics at uc san diego you're you're faulting them are you using that as sort of evidence that that that the trains off the tracks at the pentagon when in reality they're not even good at some of the things that they've done in terms of monitoring threats how about this eric we had a threat that they knew about in 20 and 20 19 20 20 and all i can hear about is oh it's great the chinese can build a hospital in nine days haha look at them we should have known at that point i was buying stuff on amazon you know when i started to hear that because i was like that's unusual why are they building a hospital yeah they're awful human you know treatment of human beings welding them in or doing whatever they were reputed to do but we have trillions of dollars in the nsa and the pentagon the dod why didn't we catch that how come how come you're not more concerned about that what do you mean i mean i just put myself at risk as a noted xenophobe and racist for claiming that a wet market that does not appear to sell bats is an unlikely source and that the wuhan institute of virology before john stewart decided that the rest of us could say what was obviously true i'm very tired of these people and at some point and i don't mean to be rude uh you have to ask people with an above 80 iq for help and if you're not willing to do that then we are not in in possession of we don't i i don't understand something i i don't mean to be rude about it but we developed the world's best factory for producing smart people out of ordinary human beings and i know those people those are my friends they're your friends and we've got a large number of them and they're completely in the dark they are so far as i can tell unless they've all been taken to um you know method acting school and each one of them can put dustin hoffman to shame nobody bothered to wake the scientific community the idea of saying we're going to have a manhattan project by getting middle school teachers together in in the desert um and make president powerpoint presentations to each other is not what you do you'd go call the institute for advanced study first and foremost there were like five guys if i were just to go one place i'd go pick up and and brian you and i thought about this before i'd pick up ed whitt and robert dycraft nema arcane hamed juan mao de santa and natty cyber just be before breaking a sweat i call up jim simons and ask uh for his help i would make sure that i was talking to people who are have domain expertise with respect to general relativity particle theory differential geometry every time we get into this conversation i hear about material science and i say i really don't care that much you know at some level if it's just a change in technology if somebody figured out hypersonic technology fine i get it but this has become completely crazy the idea that we avoid smart people at all costs we make sure that there are no smart people on our coveted narrative there are no smart people in our physics narratives there are no smart people in our threats this yes i i understand i'm stepping into the following bear trap eric you sound elitist no kidding look at the prosperity all around you if you happen to live in an advanced country you're welcome now get the data to the smart people and stop effing around maybe they are just to be you know devil's advocate as michael's written about and his book giving devils do behind me there uh just a reminder around michael shermer he has a wonderful channel on this very uh channel which will hopefully not get banned or taken down anytime soon uh and that is called skeptic so at skeptic and eric weinstein has a channel as well i put that in the show notes as well as the proprietor of the portal podcast with the pros of t and the popping and i've got my good sr uh 71 blackbird filter on top of my ssl 2 microphone uh i'm brian keating chancellor's distinguished professor of physics at uc san diego and the proprietor of the into the impossible podcast but eric perhaps as a devil's advocacy method uh perhaps the pentagon and these uh and our rulers they do know that this is actually nothing to waste the time and you remember you know paul of the mathematician erdos who was forced by his colleagues and students to get off methamphetamines for some period of time for a month in the 1950s i believe it was and at the end of the month he came to his colleagues in the student's door and he said congratulations you've set back mathematics exactly one month now i'm wondering what if they know this what if they know that there's nothing there's no there there there's no there there and then why waste edwin's time your your friend with the same initials although there's only one ew that i care about there are multiple ews we care about edwin's an amazing person who i don't think it was a very good steward of the physics enterprise it's not the issue the issue is i mean i i don't know you have to appreciate every day i get up i look at the world the world is so far shifted from what i expect i write about it on twitter i used to do podcasts i will do them again the reason people listen to me is that i'm perpetually just scratching my head and saying what did somebody let off a neutron stupid bomb all over the all over the world now we're having the craziest discussions about narratives that make absolutely no sense we either have a significant threat or we don't if you have a significant threat you hire the people you train the people you go talk to them in the 1950s for example we appeared to have two separate programs that were dealing with anti-gravity and uh involving uh two separate philanthropists one of them worked through an aerospace company in a military air force base the other one worked for the university system i believe that the higgs mechanism bizarrely came out of all of this stuff you know we have dabbled in this before i looked through the list of names on this 38 papers of atip i don't know that atip is the only thing that's been tasked with you know understanding this we are not behaving as an advanced technological society facing a genuine mystery with military and safety implications and i will you know you will see people writing things like wow eric goes on at great length he says the same thing um you know paul erdish wasn't that important of a mathematician he was very good but he was like a combinatorist he wasn't you're not talking about alexander growth and deep you're not talking about michael latia or ed whitton i'm saying that we have people who would i believe in general if we have real data would go through this like the night out like a knife through butter now somebody in the comments said something about has eric never heard of the jason's well one how badly degraded are the jasons uh if you know that this is supposed to be our super elite um advising group i believe we tried to shut them down because we can't figure out why we still train smart people we are behaving like lunatics who built the society that was able to build the blackbird to build the bombs to do all of the amazing things that we do our chip factories nobody in the private sector would put up with this kind of avoidance of scrutiny and one of the reasons that it was is least likely to be aliens as least likely to be anything really exciting is is that no one's scared enough to make a trip to cambridge massachusetts berkeley california princeton new jersey hyde park illinois i don't know i i just don't know how to think about people who avoid smart people and continually have discussions about nothing i mean look at these papers this is not what we're supposed to be doing okay devil's advocate back to what michael said earlier which is you could have made the same argument back in 1949 michael richard feynman needs to know about this this uh this strange material this this uh found crass how come we're not talking to richard feynman michael we were talking to richard feynman about uf uaps sorry when richard feynman tells the amusing story about getting off in north carolina at the airport and he doesn't know which university to go to and he says to the cab driver you know the genius richard feynman says were people going to any university saying gmu knew and they said oh yeah that's unc chapel hill well that was bainsen institute right something like the institute for the study of physical fields uh extended a position to bryce dewitt his wife cecile moritz dewitt uh that was about antigravity and and you know it just it bothers me that nobody has david kaiser onto their program to know the history of this stuff he was on this program talking just about that and and he can look for a link to it why do you think i come on this program i mean brian you're doing stuff that nobody else is doing but what i'm trying to say is i call up mit and i call up david kaiser and i say look here's the history that i know you know we're not talking to people i deal with colleagues who believe that peer review is is an intrinsic part of science which is clearly not true the brainwashing of our scientific institutions the the fact that we don't know the history of the golden age of general relativity that we don't understand the way in which antigravity intersected the way that we don't understand that we distributed programs in the interstitial regions between non-profits like universities government agencies like units of the military and private corporations like our aerospace corporations we used to know how things got done and then we passed the mansfield amendment in the late 1960s early 1970s to put the kibosh on military funding of civilian research and we went completely insane i mean i understand their motivation for not wanting the military to be directing civilian research during the vietnam war but when you knock out a load-bearing wall you are responsible for putting some support in its place before the destruction is complete michael if you're in char sorry uh by michael if you're in charge of the the audience is clamoring to hear from michael make sure that he's still there or if he's frozen in 1990 i'm still here on his aol 56k modem dial michael we love you um michael you're in charge of the pentagon you've got access to you know kamala harris our lead no no joe biden and uh you're able to do whatever what do you think is warranted at this point what do you think is warranted uh to to kind of address these legitimate concerns of eric on one hand of the pilots uh alex and dietrich heroes um uh of the others um who are making claims and of earnest individuals many of whom are listening and watching a thousand two hundred people listening on watching online right now i mean what would you do what to what level do we apply resources yeah go ahead yeah so you know of course if i you know transported myself into the pentagon and i would just release everything but that's because i'm on the outside and i don't know what i don't know that's on the inside and so it's like my one of my concessions to conspiracy theories that are true is that when you get elected president or whatever and you go and you see the inside and you go oh that's why we didn't pull the troops out of iraq or that's why we didn't close gitmo or that's why we can't close that base in germany here or whatever because you know i don't know what they know and so while it's easy for us on the outside to say yeah just release the information i mean come on uh there could be reasons why they don't i mean we didn't know about the stealth bomber for you know probably 20 years from the time they were building it a really revelatory book i read was um kelly's book on on the uh burbank located um the skunk works where they designed the u2 spy plane all that was going on right here in los angeles i mean people are driving by on the 134 freeway and here's these spy planes being designed nobody knew about it so it's possible that you know it's something like that on the other hand it could be nothing and and and uh it could be something like we're all in the middle of a like a psych experiment one of these illusions with degraded information you know like backward masking of playing rock songs backwards to see what different people hear or that remember a couple years ago that dress that was golden and white no it was blue and black and you know people looking at degraded information or hearing degraded information you know there's this pattern illusory i call it patternicity where we tend to find patterns in that when you can't quite tell what's going on and this is my sense about these videos and photographs is they're degraded just enough we can't quite make it out you have people like mick west you know crunching the numbers could be this here's some trigonometry could be that okay somebody in the pentagon knows exactly what the videos mean why aren't they telling us this is the question and i don't know you know again of course i if i if i went in there i would release it all but maybe if i went in there i'd go oh okay now i see why we can't agree with what's going on i think it sounds like we're in agreement like i'm not saying we should release all data i'm saying that you should either release the data or you should get the smart people uh in one place as we have done in the past to say look we got a problem uh we've got a blue on blue situation our ufo enthusiasts have stumbled on our top secret drone program or uh on the knowledge that we've been leapfrogged by our adversaries or something like this but you don't just like not worry about it and and why does why is mick west anywhere in the story like the debunking because he's though because he's the one that's offered some actual hard arguments for what the numbers mean on the screen and what this is probably as an alternative to the other two hypotheses why did mick west ever make west has got other things to do why is he being put to this task when presumably the experts who run these uh these cameras and these planes should be doing i mean it's exactly what you said they should and by the way you know what you just said though is is that the history of the stealth bomber is a counter example to the idea that all information leaks instantly you know in some sense is is that if well no my point there was that it didn't uh okay so this would be a counter argument to what i usually say is the skunk works the skunk work was operating for decades where you know those of us in the public had no idea what was going on so it is possible for secrets to be kept at least for a while yeah but in free societies of course is much harder i mean the soviets had a replica of the space shuttle called the baron identical in every way to one of our you know highest performing vehicles ever invented ever created because we're an open society which puts us at an informational disadvantage i want to talk more about science and scientists you guys are are some of my favorite you know deep thinkers about science we're living in an unscientific age but getting back to this uh this notion that i talked about earlier where on the cover of the new york times you know pentagon says it's not ufo it's not aliens but doesn't can't rule it out either um how do we talk to people eric you made this point you know the risk of typing right you didn't do that it was two different headlines two different one vision of the other yes and and and they use their favorite technique where they say something that's defensible to indicate something that they really wish to convey to the public so i think newsdiffs.org still exists let's be very careful because every time the new york times plays that particular game it's important to catch them at it and not pretend that we're just reading a newspaper trying to inform us right so that's why i want to get to this core issue of the media and who benefits uh it's clear i don't think either one of either one of you can refute the fact that the media is benefiting they have almost nothing to lose from performing both sides of the story not featuring you know skeptics on a 60 minutes show not featuring you know a counter narrative in the new york times article uh but but how do we uh science-minded people how do we you know take this burden upon us do we have to educate the peop the population on what type one errors are type two errors are so that they'll answer eric's legitimate question michael you know if the risk is small but the cons you know the probability is low but the the impact factor of not picking up the phone and calling eric and i'll give out his phone number let me just no no but uh but if the if the risk is incredibly high even if the chances are low why aren't they calling him so that's a legitimate thing that's type one versus type two do we have to educate the public and fight the battles and uncover what these things are where do you come down on that well yeah what's up i should i should point out a book that just came out may 3rd it's called the gray lady winked how the new york times is misreporting distortions and fabrications radically alter history i haven't read the book yet i want to get the author on the podcast uh um you know he reaches back to the first world war the second world war and how you know the media is just not as unbiased as we'd like them to be including you know all the news that's fit to print so yeah it's um i don't know it's frustrating you know when i hear stories like on this particular topic and i can see the mistakes that are made in the media that are so simple that they didn't have to make it makes me wonder when i hear a story about israel and palestine or russia and civil rights violations in china or something else i know next to nothing about i can't help but wonder well what kind of am i getting when i know they were wrong over here on a simple subject like that or just take the wuhan you know uh viral clinic and all that's so much worse right i mean with with eric's pointed out and with his brother as well but you know really they've been on the front lines of all this and now we're seeing for the first time in history zero profit motive instantaneous ability to disconnect huge audiences you know from from people who are legitimate scientists trained individuals and and basically u.s senators i mean whether you agree with johnson or not he's a u.s senator it's very unusual to think about this taking away a former president's ability to communicate using some now we're in this new era where misinformation disinformation even if it is incorrect information how can you that can you check how can you cross-check and i just find it to be very dangerous and i'm wondering what can we do about it uh as scientists or people who care about this country and and want to benefit the public as i say i'm a public employee i work for the state of california at university of california and i view it as my obligation to give moral obligation to teach to the public in words they can understand but at what level do they do we you know really hold the people accountable that may be throttling accounts information followers videos etc so i mean eric what do you what do you think is is the less likely thing to happen is it cancellation of this information redaction where are we going from here well we don't know i mean i have to admit to be blunt about it that if we find out that this was a that there was really very little here at all which is still i guess possible because the the real data is i don't know how they created this uh this sort of haystack of nonsense at this to hide a needle of of something um it's a very weird thing to call up sam harris and have him say well it's probably not aliens i mean you know we have michael shermer here and i don't love the whole skeptic sort of vibe because i think that these people uh the best of us and i'm really glad to have michael on this program um are somewhat open but you know recognize that it's very unlikely to be something of such earth-shattering uh consequence i i i guess what i feel like is if they're chewing up the credibility of everyone who can hope to talk to the public i mean let me just say this this is against the backdrop of covid where some of us had to say i'm not so sure that we should be going to see chinese new year uh celebrations i'm not sure we should be running the la marathon i'm not sure that masks only magically work for people who work in hospitals and the rest of us shouldn't wear them oh no no we have to wear them in two weeks to flatten the curve made no sense what you're seeing is almost like a constant attack on the credibility of scientists with these child-like official narratives and a bunch of smart people who are held hostage to them because in order to challenge them results in in censorship and expulsion and you know just check out the comments the the number of negative things that you see scrolling by so what you're seeing is you're seeing the degradation of your scientific uh class forced to deal with inadequate information spending their time in things that are completely inefficient because of the presence of centralized narratives which are then given the sort of blessings of the institutions and so what's what's ultimately going to happen here is is that we're not going to believe almost anybody if we keep chewing through this the way we're doing uh i'm worried about what happens when you can't go to sam harris for sobriety or michael shermer for sobriety like i'm willing to swing at a bunch of pitches in part because i came from a family that went through the mccarthy era and we found out hey you know all those conspiracies a lot of them were really true because they were targeted on you and your family right and so my bayesian priors have to do with the fact that a spy was sent against my own family and when people say oh well you know that's conspiracy talk well if we if we had known that there was a spy sent against our own family we wouldn't have had our names read on national television and that turned into peris now would we so you know in part i'm going to take the prerogative of saying having been betrayed by my government which i still love and support but i also know that they actually do conspire right now the biggest danger we have is the degradation of trust in authoritative voices because if to to sit inside of the institutions means to depend on a paycheck that is subordinate to a narrative to sit outside is to be is to risk becoming a crank talking to the public the question is why why are these people having these conversations why are grown people talking about little green men and you know i just i have to tell you i came off um a a 3 000 person call on twitter spaces because my brother just got the second strike as a an evolutionary theorist talking about whether or not ivermectin might be effective against covid and that whether or not novel mrna vaccines might result in free-floating spike proteins that would have degradation at the level of histology and cytology and the idea that susan wojiki whoever the hell she is has the right to shut down biologists and even potentially the originator of the mrna vaccine technology or one of the innovators we have a right now brian what we have to do is we scientists have to stop being employees we have to have our professors remember that they're not meant to be the employees of the universities they are the owners and to subject people to implicit bias testing which doesn't make any sense or to have somebody who can compute the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron subjected to critical race theory to get them to be more racist as a compulsory part of employment is a degradation of the condition of american citizenship and it is getting to the point where i'm ready to pick up a torch and a pitchfork and march on the chancellors of the uc system and other fine universities and say over my dead body give us our data give us our dignity get the hell out of our labs get out of our classrooms pretty pleased with sugar on top we've created the prosperity of the country and it is now time for you to remember that you don't have administrative rights over me and if if susan wojcicki starts to throw brett weinstein off of youtube and if we get thrown off because we're having a ufo conversation i'm going to have to ask whether our society has been hijacked by a geopolitical strategic rival because this is incredibly dangerous you don't chew through the credibility of your public-spirited smart people who are technically capable of set separating fact from fiction when given proper data and autonomy and subject them to being you know supervised as if they're toddlers in the nursery michael any response from you about the uh listening listening to you is like it's like martin luther nailing the 95 theses on the door i though he's got more theses you know i call eric you know they say michael most people are if they're lucky they're broken clocks they're right you know twice a day well eric is my atomic my atomic clock so how do you respond to all this michael well so i guess well no i mean these are all good points but the question is that the way eric describes it sounds very top-down very agent-prone like there's somebody kind of manipulating things i do wonder if it's more just bottom-up just the way the system is designed uh to end up with these kinds of sensorial uh actions against individuals or universities becoming these just kind of quagmires of bureaucracy that can't seem to stop from tripping over themselves i don't know it's it's a hard call it could be both uh you know when you start pushing critical race theory and and you force people to take implicit uh bias tests which have we know don't work they do not measure what you think you're measuring we've shown that we ran columns seven years ago from carol tavres summarizing the meta studies on this implicit race test showing it doesn't work it's not measuring implicit racism it's measuring the speed at which you respond to objects you're familiar with or not familiar with as a race or a gender or a size or whatever it is that you're doing so not to mention the second part of that which is that there's no evidence whatsoever that any of these training programs do anything to alter people's attitudes to other people uh unless it ends up making them even more hostile for having to go through these programs trying to make me more racist of course that's the problem you know michael yeah you know if i say michael what what are you doing for your anti-anti-semitism training there's no way he can answer those questions right i can't answer it right right but but my point is this is this just what big bureaucratic agencies end up doing just sort of kind of going along with the media narrative that you know black lives matter okay so we got to do these following things i don't want to do it but you know we should do it uh and that's kind of a bottom-up more of a bottom-up explanation of what we're going through versus there's a handful of people at the top kind of manipulating us uh into going in this direction or you know some combination of folks there definitely is a handful i mean as eric said you know eric susan majiki when i was looking on there the first thing i thought is like where is they have a youtube medical team like that's pretty awesome like you know they're really looking out for it but they don't right who are they what are their credentials if if that which can be refuted by scientific evidence in the preponderance of we have a right for transparency and accountability but then eric can't they say to you you don't like it you make your own platform are you kidding me i mean i've been through look i don't mean to be there's a point at which you have to appreciate that the more i reiterate the same simplistic points that these are communications utilities and i have an old joke as a democrat should republicans be allowed to use the roads lord knows they could get up to something conservative they might actually meet and they might have unfettered conversations behind closed doors so at some point when you're having a conversation about should republicans be able to use the roads to meet in an unfettered context having conversations in plain political action um you have to recognize that is not a natural conversation that is an insane conversation and i say that as a democrat and maybe even a progressive democrat uh what we're talking about all of us have enough years on us that we remember a very different world whatever this thing is you know as i say everyone can prove to themselves by doing any research that peer review is not naturally a part of science there is nothing that i am held up as a crank for more than reminding people of this truth anyone who speaks a particular truth becomes a crank in the eyes of the narrative this idea of calling vichy france france is intrinsically a offensive to a frenchman uh sheltering in england plotting and caucusing with the english as to how to retake the nation of france right now what we need to do is we need to retake the nation of science we need to take our own universities back and you know nobody believes in this stuff who's smart we just all sit around cowering like uh spineless invertebrates every time somebody threatens to call us a name and what i'm trying to say is brian you remember how to do physics you remember how to do science you remember how to communicate it but what we don't do is we don't stand up and say what jordan peterson said or brett weinstein said or i say we have to effectively say no moss you can fire me and as einstein said so brilliantly and clearly it is the obligation of the public intellectual to face financial ruin in prison and if we're not willing to face financial ruin and prison to defend our values which provide the prosperity and security under which everyone else shelters then we deserve to learn mandarin in our schools in preparation for our future now i personally would like to avoid that i'd rather learn yiddish or hindi but i think it's extremely important to recognize that this is the moment and you can't slither away from your destiny forever and you know kind of uh turning now to some questions and uh from the audience that people are asking things you know that that i find are legitimate again i don't have the courage to put on a uniform and fly in an f-18 i'd love to do it it would be a lot of fun and i'm hoping someday you have the courage to talk about jeffrey epstein and the intelligence community do i yeah oh uh not to the level of of you but i find it fascinating i'd love to know more about it i think we've covered i think i have a one conspiracy limit per per episode so i would love to keep talking about it but uh but no seriously i would like to talk about it but obviously you you've taken that issue saying that you you can't ask the same people to load up on the wuhan lab leak jeffrey epstein the madness of critical race theory we've got these designated expendables right and they have to hit every single thing to keep our society from going in this extremely degraded direction do you think it's coming primarily from the university michael you teach at chapman university um your classes are you know renowned for their clarity for their excellence and for their popularity um you know what do you see on campuses do you see us being outmoded i've talked to eric about this in the past are my days numbered are our days numbered as faculty when we can get instantaneous access to information perhaps filtered perhaps not but um why learn from me when they can learn from you know galileo or carl sagan or or whoever essential threats to all these institutions including media and academia if it was just the knowledge then maybe but the uh value of the degree of having gone to the brick and mortar buildings at that particular ivy league or prestigious university that carries weight according to the current narrative that's what you're supposed to do then yeah then no we're our days are not numbered you know that's that will continue to those autodidacts who don't care about that they just want to learn uh they can do all that without going to the brick and mortar buildings and i think they will i just think the levels of education will increase dramatically uh through you know internet sources and so on without having to do that but the universities will continue i think it'll be interesting to see you know the fallout from the pandemic those universities uh that were just kind of on the margins financially anyway they may fold uh much like a lot of restaurants that close that just could never reopen again that may happen uh remains to be seen on that after they got their ppp loans you know and now they still can't bounce back you know we'll see in the next year or so but the big ones you know they have endowments they can last for years being hammered financially and and so i i think they'll continue because we continue to overvalue a college education i have to say even though i'm in the academy and i value it um you know i just you don't need that to have a good life to have an enriched life or even to be rich for that matter you don't have to have a college degree uh you know so i think you know that's it in general i think we're going to have to move away from we're going to have to decouple uh teaching and uh and babysitting from research though i think that it's very important to recognize that the babysitting that rockefeller university the university of california san francisco perimeter institute the institute for advanced study are all effectively universities without undergraduates and in the case of the institute for advanced study it's without graduate students not to say that you can't be on loan from princeton the university i think what we're coming to understand is that the danger of housing weaker subjects next to stronger subjects and teaching next to research with actually a tremendous hazard and that what had previously seen been seen as a symbiosis whereby teaching and research both aided each other in a particular life it is actually a tremendous risk when the culture of academics has been lost the culture of academics being lost has to do with a bunch of different things has to do with the eilberg amendment of 1976 the by don't buy dole amendment of 1980 the immigration act of 1990 the mansfield amendment of the late 60s early 70s i think that you have to recognize that something has marched by making structural changes through time that leave us less free our professors have less autonomy they are now thought of as teachers um they are subordinate students all of this is completely wrong to be called nas lug um have made disastrous choices for our elite research universities and people have to recognize that there are certain things that we have lied to the public about or at least misled the public about the principal feature of a research university is research not the teaching of undergraduates and until we actually get to the point where we can say look this was a funding model it has a lot to do with a guy named vannevar bush and something called the endless frontier which was the blueprint post world war ii until we were actually able to educate our people in a non-fictitious history of how we got to be this powerful rich and smart um we are going to assume that americans have always been stupid that in fact universities have always been about teaching that all subjects all professors are called scholars no subjects are better than any others that there's no relationship between the military and our science that there's no national character of science that just actually um you know sort of uh is something that we fund with our taxpayer dollars but all these things are for the good of the planet that our graduate students aren't students they're workers the problem is is that when we wake up in the morning and we have a steady diet of lies that can be detailed but there's no place inside of the establishment in the institutions that is keeping an accurate version of our history so imagine you're living in a house where the plans to the house are completely fictitious and every time you try to do remodeling or you try to fix a water main or a sewage pipe you find out that the plans to the house aren't actually corresponding to the house at all that's the problem with lying to yourself about your own system by the time the people who started the lying uh pass on and their great grandchildren are manning the system the the family no longer knows how the house works they live in it but they don't actually understand how it was built and what changes were made and that's where we are right now is that we can't fix our own problems because nobody who's courageous enough to actually say what's true can get anywhere close to being a provost or president or a chaired professor yeah we had a taste of that during commencement season in the various universities across this great state of california where where i'm privileged to teach but again we see as i see existential threats i see you know if you do a swot analysis we have certain opportunities but the opportunities seem to be if you divide opportunities by threats i i think the ratio is not looking very good for my profession and and as you look at i had on michael saylor at the beginning of this year and he was making public sailor academy making an accredited university to teach stem subjects now he's not going to teach you know as he says he's not going to teach you know literature and uh and french poetry but he's going to teach stem you know can you learn to code you can do stuff online with some class-based cohort stuff i think it's it's interesting but i'd like to know from you guys so we know and we believe and i am worried actually to be honest about you know demonizing you know china and russia i don't see how that serves thermonuclear nations to to to view each other not xenophobic purely although that's evil and wrong and racism is evil and wrong we all agree uh but but just to stipulate you know um what what are the are there any bright spots i mean i look at india i see them very fast to adopt things like cryptocurrencies i see them extremely highly educated huge population very mobile with 4g 5g these are incredibly you know is that is that a bright spot where do you guys see as a bright spot amidst it or are we really gonna you know potentially descend into a lot of potential you know xenophobia anti-anti-progress narratives i'll start with michael do you see any bright spots for either addressing you know addressing the claims of this original podcast or are just bright spots for progress of humanity technology etc given your efficient market hypothesis theory well i don't know how efficient it is but well anti-progress has always been around i mean you can you can go back to the ancient greeks who complained about uh you know the the lack of progress and so on and that's just human nature you know to focus the negativity bias drives us to notice negative things more than positive things and if you're a pundit you get almost no kudos for saying things are getting better uh but but if you're a pundit that you know constantly talks about the you know at the end of the at the end of this and the in the demise of that then you get a lot more hits um and it's not that these things can't happen it's just that they they rarely do most downfalls are more incremental than than sudden not only but you know um so again the you know the end of the academy you know probably not i could see you know many positive shifts everything eric said i think is a concern uh you know how do you become a dean and then a provost and a president and and so forth well there's you know a lot of politicking and i would want the job in particular because that's like a real job instead of getting to you know do research and and teach and all the fun stuff that we went into this in the first place uh and now it looks more and more like um within the last year or so that if you want those jobs you you absolutely have to to play the critical race theory card i i i just don't see any way around it at least for the next year or two many of us are pushing back on this but you know it's hard to say if the pendulum is going to swing back any time soon i'm fond of telling the story of my wife from germany you know when she came here and we started noticing these these trends and she kept saying oh my gosh you know i'm worried about our kid going off to school and getting indoctrinated and i kept don't worry that pendulum is going to swing back any day now and it's just been getting worse and worse and you know now the trans stuff on top of the race stuff and gender and everything else and you know it does seem like we've lost our collective minds but on the other hand there's a lot of us pushing back there's a lot of organization like barry weiss's new organization fair uh and they're not the only ones there's a dozen like that and also organized groups like the heterodox academy there's a dozen of those of organized professors saying we're not gonna you know we're mad as hell and we're not gonna put up with it anymore now maybe they'll lose their jobs i don't know but uh in any case there's an if you know it's the spiral of silence problem to break the spiral of silence you just have to have enough people speak out at just a tipping point might be three percent five percent of people stand up and say no and that releases the next 10 percent to say yes i was worried about the same thing i was afraid to say anything and then 20 more and then 30 percent and pretty soon you have a majority that say yeah yeah now we're not going to do this anymore and you know that's how it happens and so i i i'm hoping that that unfolds in the next i don't know five years or so um i can't say it's going to turn around the next six months though eric what do you see is any optimism i mean anything you've changed your mind on anything to be uh to not go away and and hit the sauce like i normally do after we chat tipple to make me not tipple is that my japanese whiskey no i never gave you the bite i only have water i gotta but this is ruach but uh not scotch unfortunately oh we're together um look i mean it's a it's an odd question i mean i i just people say well don't complain do something i do and i like one thing is is that um so far as i can tell people stopped trying to unify physics and geometric unity is in a live attempt waiting for somebody to engage it to push beyond both the einsteinian paradigm and the standard model paradigm that's a direct attempt to come up with new physical fields new forces to question the actual standard model as it is there are two generations not three and there's a reason you're being fooled about the third the world is not chiral it's emergently chiral so in essence attempting to learn your own source code is you know we didn't really get to the point of saying which would have been responsible but terrifying assume that it's aliens then what yeah right so if it is aliens which has to be a leg on the decision tree the question is how would aliens make the most sense so one of the things that i've been trying to point out is is that we always talk about extra dimensions as if they are extra spatial dimensions but in my theory i believe that there are additionally either four or six temporal dimensions the ability to hack both time and space at the level of dimension is not clear to me as to whether they're accessible but imagine for example that you could enlarge rulers to shrink distances i'm excited about the idea of junking this fetishization of mars and uh and and the moon and taking a look at the night sky and asking the question if einstein theory is only an effective theory uh as indicated by the existence of schwarzschild and initial singularities in our model then wouldn't it be amazing if we could get beyond that as an effective theory and do to einstein what einstein did to newton and recover him as an approximation and find out whether a change in in our understanding and actually getting to the source code would unlock something new conversely the level of markets i've put forward uh a field theoretic um you know approach to economics together with my wife and i'm delighted to see that stephen wolfram uh seems to be in the process of discovering that inflation uh is a physical theory and that holonomia uh looks like the beaumarinov effect and he will soon i believe rediscover our work which will be tremendously exciting as his pr is somewhat better than mine so the issue of finding excitement with respect to new biological applications new crypto applications i think distributed computing is incredibly exciting um if you supplement bitcoin fixes this with things like academic freedom fixes this or geometric unity or gauge theory fixes this uh those those are memes uh unfortunately to the kitties in the uh bitcoin maximalist community who just like to cause trouble for the most part but to be honest those guys really have a point and a soul and they're trying to do great things i think that what happened in el salvador may be a disaster but the idea of a of a country adopting a cryptocurrency uh that it does not control to try to bring fiscal discipline and freedom is tremendously exciting given how bad el salvador has been in terms of all sorts of governance problems one of the interesting questions is does bitcoin fix this so i think that what you have to say is ar and vr are tremendously exciting uh personalized medicine is tremendously exciting space travel temporal uh and spatial dimension hacking is exciting i think that all sorts of things that we could be doing would be great the really interesting thing is is that sooner or later somebody with probably 11 figures of wealth and up is going to watch one of these pro programs and say you know there's only so much i can do with one more effing lamborghini why don't we try to actually do something that moves the needle and give a small number of the people trying to push the frontier the freedom over their lives that we take for granted or we can just go uh you know and put one more private plane in the fleet one more mega yacht in the mediterranean and just watch the whole thing crumble and burn so what my real hope eventually is is that doing this at scale we are eventually going to find somebody who wants to do something very different with money and so far as i know none of our billionaire class not one billionaire is really interested in rebuilding the stuff that is now crumbling and so you know if you're out there and if you're watching this there's a tremendous amount of stuff to do some of us will pick up shovels some of us will pick up torches and pitch forks but somebody else should pick up their checkbook and get us the hell out of here so that we can actually do something even more interesting than this amazing podcast which i've really enjoyed me too and that's actually eric y invited michael you talked about 11 figures of wealth and michael's here yeah yeah right yes retail i'm getting my bikes do you need michael yes yeah here's my checkbook how much how much is it that you need exactly how many zeros on that check uh it's just one how many is that yeah you should have said this one does he does he really need another all right guys i'm gonna i'm gonna sign off and go have gage theory uh whiskey great this has been wonderful michael thank you so much eric thank you so much as usual just point to people i've had interviews with both these gentlemen wonderful conversations over the years i hope to have many more with you guys i always enjoy the conversation and uh look if you are interested i have a lot of videos about aliens i'm sorry to say this is my last video i'm gonna do i have one uh in the can that i did with uh seth strosstech but um i've had a very fascinating uh ride learning about from different signs doing what the military calls a red team approach you get people on the best sides on both sides and you and you hopefully come to some notion of truth but now this expedition is over as we wait all with our uh collective attention drawn to what gets released in the next couple weeks i am dubious but i i hope i'm hoping for the more fantastical because that'll ensure job security for me forever for now please give a subscription to michael's channel skeptic on youtube please subscribe to eric's channel also on uh on itunes both these guys leave them reviews leave them ratings it really helps us grow our channels and grow the audience with the algorithm that is continually working to defeat us anyway i'm brian keating your fearful host here at uc san diego uh co-director of the arthur c clarke center for human imagination stay tuned for some really cool videos that i have coming up about uh string theory loop quantum gravity uh polarization and also inflation in the multiverse and god why are so many physicists talk about god we'll get michael and eric back on for that guys love you guys all right wonderful night thank you all for joining good night guys bye-bye bye eric i see you again see you as always [Music]

Channel: Dr Brian Keating

Views: 227,638

Keywords: artificial intelligence, alien ufo, eric weinstein, eric weinstein the portal, the portal podcast, michael shermer, skeptic michael shermer, into the impossible, ufo debate, lue elizando, tic tac, david fravor fridman, eric weinstein geometric unity

Id: vmgVy7-WCjc

Length: 109min 26sec (6566 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 16 2021