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00:00:00David Grush in his testimony said that there is an active disinformation campaign being
00:00:06waged against the populace of the United States. Like Elon Musk is going to be an immortal
00:00:12technological oligarchical overlord. But we can actually structure a world that looks more like
00:00:17Star Trek or we head down the road of dystopia. Hello everybody, welcome back to WatchMojo and
00:00:22the Unveiled Podcast. I'm your host Rob and today's guest is Dr. Steven Brown. He is a
00:00:27teaching professor of philosophy at Ohio State University and he is also the director of the
00:00:33Visible College which is a volunteer group of academics who are conducting and promoting
00:00:38serious research on UAPs and related topics. Thanks for joining us today Steven, it's great
00:00:43to speak with you. Great to meet you, thank you. So as a professor of philosophy, what is it that
00:00:49got you interested in UAPs in the first place? I saw on your website that you relatively recently
00:00:55became interested in this topic, so what sparked your interest? So my personal academic background
00:01:00in philosophy has mostly been in the area of the philosophy of religion and to some extent also
00:01:06ethics. Those are the things that I've worked on most. I was completely ignoring everything to do
00:01:11with UAPs and aliens and the paranormal in general up until the summer of 2023. There was an article
00:01:19published in an online newspaper called The Debrief where there was an interview between, well
00:01:26there was a video also by Russ Coldheart, but this guy named David Grush who was an intelligence
00:01:31officer who was making some very extraordinary claims in a nutshell that the United States
00:01:38government has a secret UFO recovery program and has in its possession multiple craft of non-human
00:01:43origin and bodies of pilots of those craft, what David Grush calls non-human biologics.
00:01:52And Grush was fact-checked as far as like checking to make sure he was who he said he was,
00:01:57that he had the kind of clearances and access to classified information that he said that he did.
00:02:04All those checks look good. He reported through a whistleblower process to the
00:02:10Inspector General of the Intelligence Community. He's spoken to House Intelligence Committee,
00:02:15Senate Intelligence Committee. All of those people are taking him very seriously.
00:02:19So when that happened I kind of freaked out, honestly, realizing that I had been ignoring
00:02:26something which seems to be extremely important. And so I kind of went into a frantic, manic,
00:02:34sleepless series of months where I spent all hours of the day and night talking to
00:02:40ChatGPT and reading books and articles and watching YouTube videos and trying to get
00:02:46up to speed on what everybody had been saying in this space. And as everybody like me knows,
00:02:53once you turn your attention to this, you realize there is a huge amount of information here.
00:02:59That there is, you know, sometimes people ask, how could something be kept a secret this long?
00:03:04It's never been a secret. There have been people leaking this, talking about this since at least
00:03:08the 1940s, late 1940s, early 1950s. And yeah, it's very perplexing. It's very confusing.
00:03:17Those of us who take this seriously, I think none of us claim to understand exactly what's going on.
00:03:23It's a very perplexing set of data that we're trying to account for, which is why I think
00:03:30on the website we talk about like, we're really just committed to one idea, which is that there's
00:03:34something worth paying attention to here. It's worthy of scholarly inquiry. But, you know,
00:03:40myself and the people who I work with and talk to, none of us claim to have like the view about
00:03:47what's going on. And we're not trying to like convince everybody of exactly what the truth is.
00:03:52We all know that we're operating with a sparsity of data here, but the data does seem to indicate
00:03:58that something, some very substantially important and really powerfully weird things are true.
00:04:05It's good to see an academic such as yourself and your peers having more of an interest in this,
00:04:10but there does still seem to be somewhat of a stigma surrounding the UAP topic in academic
00:04:15circles. And I can point to a few high profile, you know, scientific people like Neil deGrasse
00:04:20Tyson, for example, and others who seem to, you know, still talk down about this and kind of,
00:04:25you know, not really give it the time of day that it deserves. Why do you think that is? Why
00:04:30is there such resistance to look into this with a little more depth? Yeah, good. I want to address
00:04:36that, but I do want to just note quickly that there are some very, very high powered scientists
00:04:40who are paying attention to this. Avi Loeb at Harvard, Michio Kaku, Gary Nolan, like world
00:04:46class scientists who actually are paying attention to this. So we need to keep that in mind also. I
00:04:51agree with you. There is a stigma. It is a minority position right now, but there are some
00:04:57very, very, very serious academic people who are taking it very seriously. So that being said,
00:05:03why are we where we are? We're on the front end of a really important paradigm shift. So, you know,
00:05:09there's a philosopher of science named Thomas Kuhn who wrote a book called The Structure of
00:05:13Scientific Revolutions, which was in many ways the beginnings of modern philosophy of science.
00:05:19And he talks about this idea of a paradigm, right? So what happens is the scientific community
00:05:25builds a consensus and we put together a whole toolkit of ideas and experiments and data and
00:05:31things that are kind of the accepted ones. And then we elaborate on that and get into a lot of
00:05:37detail. And this is actually very, very healthy for a scientific community. We can't have all of
00:05:40the questions in the air all the time, right? Like we have to have some framework to work in,
00:05:45and that allows us to dive deep, right? But sometimes what happens is we realize that there's
00:05:52important gaps in the paradigm. So it's easy to look back on history and see these things. So
00:05:56go back in time to the Copernican revolution, right? Once upon a time, every smart person
00:06:01thought that the earth was at the center of the universe because it looks that way, right? You
00:06:07wake up in the morning and you look and you watch the sun move through the sky. And so, of course,
00:06:10that's going to be the first view that we develop. And it turns out that that view is quite
00:06:16powerful. And when I talk to my students about philosophy of science and epistemology, the study
00:06:22of knowledge, I'll often use this as an example case. There's actually nothing wrong with
00:06:27geocentrism mathematically. Like you can actually still construct a geocentric model that will
00:06:32predict all the data. It's just insanely complicated. And it's just much easier and simpler
00:06:39and more elegant to switch over to a heliocentric model with the sun at the middle, right? That's
00:06:44what Copernicus taught us. But that idea was very unpopular at first. And in fact, the people
00:06:51who advocated for that idea, Galileo especially, got in trouble for it. And now we look back on
00:06:58those people and we think of them as our intellectual heroes. They were trailblazers,
00:07:02right? They saw the truth and they went with it even when it was unpopular. That's, I believe,
00:07:07where we are right now. We're in kind of coming out of the Galileo era, right? Like up until
00:07:14recently, everybody that talked about this was mocked and not taken very seriously. And largely
00:07:20over the last, I don't know, five or six years, but in particular over the past two or three years,
00:07:27there's been an acceleration of interest. And David Grush, I think, will be seen historically
00:07:34as one of the pivotal moments. But also Lou Elizondo, who was the guy who worked for this
00:07:39program internal to the Department of Defense called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification
00:07:45Program, AATIP. He was the one who worked with Christopher Mellon to get those very famous,
00:07:52you know, kind of grainy videos from the Navy pilots released to the public that they got the
00:07:59the New York Times articles published in 2017, right? That was probably the really big turning
00:08:04point. But David Grush is kind of putting gas on that. So, yeah, what's happening is
00:08:08there's this stigma in place. And when there's a stigma in place, it kind of self-reinforces.
00:08:14So, there's actually a few reasons why this is so recalcitrant, why it's so difficult to change
00:08:19people's minds. And in a nutshell, it's because we don't really want it to be true. So, like,
00:08:27our core psychology turns away from it. This is sort of like, you know, it's very similar to the
00:08:32psychology of grief, right? If somebody you know dies, like, the first stage is denial. You just,
00:08:37like, can't even face it. And it's sort of like that. In a nutshell, the kind of world view of
00:08:44Western civilization is a disjunction. You're either like a Neil deGrasse Tyson-style atheist
00:08:53materialist person, or you subscribe to one of the Abrahamic traditions, statistically speaking,
00:08:59Christianity, but of course Judaism and Islam also incredibly important. So, you're kind of
00:09:05supposed to think that either nothing weird and paranormal happens at all. It's all a hoax or a
00:09:13misunderstanding or a misrepresentation or something. That's your kind of Neil deGrasse
00:09:17Tyson view, debunker kind of view. Or you believe that there are some kinds of supernatural,
00:09:25paranormal things, weird things that happen, but we kind of understand how it works, and you have
00:09:30to understand it in this one particular way. And if it kind of breaks out of that mold, then you
00:09:35should ignore it because it's probably bad. And so, yeah, we've kind of lived, like, that's been
00:09:42the scope of our intellectual diversity, right? Like, the debate has been between essentially
00:09:50Abrahamic monotheism and atheistic materialism. I mean, that's certainly where I spent all of my
00:09:57adult life up until a couple of years ago, studying the philosophy of religion, looking for arguments,
00:10:03you know, about arguments about God and miracles and souls and stuff like that. That's what I was
00:10:07interested in. I'm still interested in it. It's just that my interests have now gotten a lot
00:10:12larger because it seems like when we do that, when we only pay attention to those possibilities,
00:10:17there's a whole range of things that do happen, happen quite regularly, happen to a lot of people
00:10:23that aren't supposed to happen. And so, we kind of pretend that they don't. I'll recommend for
00:10:29people who want to do a deep dive here. There's a really excellent book by a philosopher at Rice
00:10:34University named Jeffrey Kreipel. It's called How to Think Impossibly. I would strongly recommend
00:10:40reading that. I think that's kind of the best book that exists right now of, like, really academic
00:10:46rigor that's trying to think seriously about all of the weird stuff that's going on, and really
00:10:51kind of facing the costs about what it's going to take for us to revise how we think about the world
00:10:57to actually account for all of this stuff. So, tell me a little bit about The Visible College.
00:11:02What is your mission with this organization? The Visible College is a group of academics and
00:11:08scholars. We like to call ourselves scholars. Many of us have, most of us have PhDs and are working
00:11:14in some kind of an academic context, or have left academia for one reason or another. But we also
00:11:20recognize, right, anybody who has a PhD knows that having a PhD is more about endurance than
00:11:25intelligence. So, there's some very, very intelligent scholarly people who don't have
00:11:31PhDs, who don't fall kind of under the ordinary scope of academics. So, we're including, we have
00:11:36several of those people also. But people who have that kind of academic scholarly rigor, who have
00:11:43at some point started taking these issues seriously, and have been bringing to bear their
00:11:51their training, their skills to think critically and carefully, but also very open-mindedly
00:11:56about these things. And that's a peculiar experience to go through. It's very, very disruptive.
00:12:02We have a name for this experience. It's called ontological shock, right? Ontological meaning
00:12:08having to do with the nature of being, the nature of reality. And so, going into ontological shock
00:12:14means realizing that your ontology, your view about what the world is made up of, how the world
00:12:19works, is wildly wrong. And so, you kind of go through this process where you have to process
00:12:27all of that, right? Like, I sometimes talk about, like, if this is normal, then, you know, you start
00:12:33out as normal. And then, there's some piece of data that breaks that for you. And then, you start
00:12:38to realize, well, if that's true, then this is true. And if that's true, then this is true. And
00:12:42then, you get really, really far away. And you start encountering, like, more and more bizarre
00:12:46options that you can't take seriously. And you, like, want to go back to being normal. So, you
00:12:50try to be normal again. But then, there's that one weird thing that just won't go away, right? And it
00:12:55just, for me, it was David Grush. And yeah. So, there's a lot of us who've gone through this
00:13:00experience. And in a way, the Visible College is almost like a support group. It's just an
00:13:05opportunity for people with a certain kind of mindset to be able to talk to each other and be
00:13:10like, so, this is really, like, pretty serious, right? Like, this isn't actually crazy, as strange
00:13:14as it is. And we all go, yeah, no, it's really serious. It's something here. Yeah. And yeah,
00:13:19it's crazy. And we all feel crazy together. So, it's kind of that. But we're also trying to do
00:13:26a couple of other things. We're trying to think seriously about this impending sort of pseudo
00:13:32hypothetical event that we call disclosure with a big D, right? Like, disclosure with a big D is
00:13:38when whenever enough information gets out to the public of sufficient seriousness and credibility
00:13:46that everybody really has to face it all at once. And when that happens, we will have a paradigm
00:13:50shift, right? We're talking about Kuhn's concept of paradigms. Paradigms don't change in a linear
00:13:56manner, right? There's, like, a pressure that builds up, and then they break. And when they
00:14:00break, they break quickly. So, over the course of months and years, people will have to, you know,
00:14:08deal with ontological shock at scale, like, at planetary scale. And that is very likely to have
00:14:15a whole range of undesirable consequences. And, you know, if you watch a TV show, like,
00:14:23The Three-Body Problem, right? Like, everybody comes to realize at once that there's something
00:14:27going on. And some very, very bad things happen, right? People commit suicide, for instance. I
00:14:33strongly suggest that if you are feeling that way, you seek professional help, because suicide
00:14:38is not the answer. And on the other side of ontological shock is a very interesting worldview
00:14:42that you should spend some time with. But I am worried about people having to face the degree
00:14:49of ontological shock that they do at the scale that it seems like it might happen. So, we've
00:14:53been trying to think about ways that disclosure might have potentially negative impacts and
00:15:00potentially positive impacts, and try to get ahead of this as much as we can, so that there's
00:15:06at least some people who have communication, education, you know, kinds of skills, professional
00:15:13and scholarly skills, who have already thought about this, so that when the big wave comes,
00:15:20you know, there's some people like you who can call up people like me and say,
00:15:24so, Steve, what's going on? And how do we deal with this? And, you know, and then I can say,
00:15:28well, you know, here's some thoughts that people like me and my community of folk have been
00:15:33thinking about for a while. We are connected to some organizations that are working in the
00:15:40political sphere. We have good relationships with the UAP Caucus and UAP Disclosure Fund here in
00:15:46the United States. We have good relationships with the Soul Foundation, who's also doing some policy
00:15:52work, the New Paradigm Institute. There's a whole handful of organizations that are kind of trying
00:16:00to be ahead of this and push for disclosure, but also do some planning and thought about what might
00:16:06happen on the other side of disclosure. I think of ourselves more in the second camp than the first
00:16:11camp. I think disclosure is inevitable at this point, and I'm actually kind of glad that it hasn't
00:16:16happened yet, because I don't think we're really ready for it, and I don't think we'll ever be
00:16:21ready for it. It's like childbirth, right? Like, you're never ready for your first kid, but
00:16:25you can at least read a couple of books and, you know, try to, you know, paint the
00:16:30kids' room and to buy a crib and stuff before the kid gets there. But, you know, when
00:16:34it happens, you will have many sleepless nights, and you'll freak out, and you'll try to get help
00:16:39from your friends. We are trying to be your friends when you go through ontological shock.
00:16:44I'm sure that it will be more of a challenge for some people and less of a challenge for other
00:16:49people, but by and large, how prepared do you think society is for this paradigm shift, and do you
00:16:57think that in the West, you know, due to our more materialist, consumerist behavior and lifestyles,
00:17:03that this is a disadvantage for us, that we might be more susceptible to a very rude awakening, like
00:17:10when this does become an inevitable reality that everybody must face? It's a hard question to answer.
00:17:16In some ways, I think we are relatively well prepared. I think, and I really don't know what
00:17:22to make of this, but like about the same time that the modern wave of UFO phenomenon begins,
00:17:29which is like the 30s and 40s, roughly around that time is when we really start to see science fiction
00:17:35take off. And so, like we actually have over the past 100 years or so been spending a lot of time
00:17:42in the fiction space, exploring these big ideas and thinking about them, right? Like I'm a big
00:17:48Star Wars nerd, and like I think about that's kind of been my childhood. Well, basically everybody
00:17:56walking the planet today is, look, real talk, about a generation out from Roswell. So when
00:18:03Roswell happened in 47, which I believe is 100% correct, like the original press release by
00:18:11Major Marcel saying, hey, we picked up a flying saucer. That really happened. And then, you know,
00:18:17they had to change their story and they're like, nevermind, it's a weather balloon. And right,
00:18:20that's the beginning of the coverup. So like, you know, around 1947, we are now about one
00:18:27human lifetime away from that. So everybody dealing with this right now is more or less aware
00:18:34that something weird might be happening. We've explored it in fiction. We've explored it
00:18:42as something to make fun of, right? We have jokes about alien abductions and things like that,
00:18:49right? So everyone's kind of aware of it, but most people aren't really paying attention.
00:18:53So in some ways we're prepared. And I do think that, I mean, a lot of people already believe
00:19:00this. A lot of people kind of want it to be true, right? Like it could be fun. It could be exciting
00:19:06depending on the details. Admittedly, it could be somewhat frightening depending on the details.
00:19:11And like I said before, we do not know the details right now. So it's very puzzling
00:19:16what's going on, but are we less prepared than other societies? Oh yeah. Way less prepared,
00:19:23right? So like if you kind of tick through the worldview boxes, right? Like Hinduism,
00:19:30piece of cake. They've been believing in beings of all kinds that interact with humans in all
00:19:35kinds of ways and strange objects in the sky. Like they've believed this for thousands of years.
00:19:39Like they're going to be fine. Buddhists, basically the same way, right? Almost all of the like
00:19:46smaller indigenous traditions, they're fine. Like they all believe that there are sky people
00:19:51and sky nations and they have relationships with them of various kinds. And like no doubt the
00:19:57details will be important and people will have to adjust, right? But the two worldviews that I
00:20:04mentioned a moment ago, I think are the ones that are going to have the hardest. I think the
00:20:08Westerners are going to have the hardest time, right? Neil deGrasse Tyson is going to have a
00:20:11weird day when an alien shows up in his bedroom and says, hey Neil, buddy, turns out we're real
00:20:18and you were wrong, right? I actually, man, I would love to be a fly on the wall when a gray
00:20:23appears in Neil's room and like makes him confront that. I don't know. Neil, I hope you have a lovely
00:20:29time when this happens. It's going to be fun. But I'm also concerned, personally, I'm quite
00:20:34concerned about possible theological implications and ways in which that might be disruptive to
00:20:39people about beliefs that are quite near and dear to them. And like I said earlier about the kind of
00:20:45trauma of ontological shock, like I hope that everyone will be patient and take care of themselves
00:20:53and be embedded in communities who can go through this together because I don't think at the end of
00:20:58the day this is bad news. It might require that we adjust some things. But, you know, as a person
00:21:04who teaches Asian philosophies every semester, I just want to remind people, right, like the Hindus
00:21:09have been thinking this way for thousands of years. The Buddhists have been thinking about
00:21:12this way for thousands of years. The indigenous people have been thinking this way for thousands
00:21:16of years. And they're fine. So like if there's something embedded in your worldview that's
00:21:22uncomfortable, it's OK. Sit with your discomfort. Listen to some people who are less uncomfortable
00:21:29and you'll be OK. There's some stuff on the other side that's really fascinating and beautiful and
00:21:35interesting that you've just been ignoring. And, you know, that's OK. You'll get over it.
00:21:40Some people would argue that disclosure has already happened or perhaps, you know, phase one of
00:21:44disclosure with the acknowledgement from governments about UAPs in the sky claiming they don't know
00:21:52what they are, what the origin is. And now a new term has entered the kind of public, you know,
00:21:58discourse, which is NHI, non-human intelligence. This is the, you know, supposed extra layer
00:22:05to peel back once you get over the UAPs existing, non-human intelligence possibly being behind them.
00:22:12Let's talk about that a little bit. What are your views on that? And if the origins of these
00:22:18are non-human, as some claim, what could some possible motivations be for their behaviors?
00:22:24Yeah, good. So if we look back in history from like 100 years from now, when we ask when did
00:22:31disclosure happen, I actually do suspect it will be the 2017 New York Times articles that are the
00:22:37ones that kind of are stated to be the beginning of disclosure. And you're absolutely right. Like
00:22:43there's some very notable admissions by public figures. One of my favorite is the interview that
00:22:49was done on James Corden with Barack Obama, where I forget his name, but one of the people in the
00:22:55band is asking Obama about aliens. And he gets really wiggly. And, you know, he says something
00:23:04like, well, there's things about the aliens that I can't tell you, but I can tell you that
00:23:08there do seem to be objects in the sky that behave very strangely and we don't know what they are,
00:23:12right? Now that's a lie. Like that's, it's the official lie that's been in place since at least
00:23:18like the 1950s, right? Like there's a press briefing in 1952 where there's, it's right after
00:23:27this very peculiar wave of UFOs that happens in the summer of 1952, including a very striking
00:23:35series of events in Washington, DC, where there are formations of glowing craft that are flying
00:23:41over the White House and the Capitol that are seen on radar and by multiple pilots and ground
00:23:46observers. Like it's a very striking series of cases. In fact, it's so striking that if you go
00:23:53and look for, there's a, I gave you the link so you can put some images up here at some point.
00:24:00There's a navy.mil, so an official Navy history website called U2's UFOs and Project Blue Book.
00:24:09And on there is a photograph taken by a Coast Guard photographer in the summer of 1952 of four
00:24:18glowing objects flying in formation. And this is a public image and it's one that they don't want
00:24:23you paying attention to. And David Grush in his testimony said that there is an active disinformation
00:24:30campaign being waged against the populace of the United States. And I can prove it to you,
00:24:37it's right on that webpage. So here's a photograph they don't want you paying attention to. So what
00:24:42they've done is they've wrapped it with a header that says U2's UFOs and Project Blue Book,
00:24:47and then the first paragraph is all about how high altitude testing of the U2 soon led to an
00:24:52unexpected side effect. Now that's naturally going to make your mind go, oh okay, I shouldn't, don't
00:24:58worry about it. Whenever people saw these things they were actually just seeing these spy planes
00:25:02and misperceiving them as flying saucers. Okay, well just look at that picture and then go look
00:25:08at a picture of a U2. Those are not U2's. U2's are planes with wings. They don't look like
00:25:16glowing shapes. They didn't have four of them at a time flying in a V formation because, my friends,
00:25:21the U2 project wasn't even proposed until September of 1952. There were no U2's in the
00:25:29summer of 1952. This is literally the U.S. government carrying out a misinformation campaign,
00:25:36a disinformation campaign, on the U.S. population today on their own website. Right now you can go
00:25:41look at it. So, right, like, has disclosure already happened? Yeah, probably. You know, we know that
00:25:50this is true. This rhetoric has been in place since the 50s which basically says, yeah, there's a bunch
00:25:55of weird stuff out there. Most of it we know what it is. There's a few things we're not sure what
00:25:59they are. Don't worry about it too much. That's what they've been saying for like 80 years now,
00:26:03right? And yeah, it's a lie. They know a lot more than they're putting on
00:26:10and I expect that Obama knows it's a lie. I expect that Trump knows it's a lie. Trump
00:26:16has said on several occasions now that he's been briefed by Air Force pilots who have encountered
00:26:21these things, right? There's now in the congressional testimony over the last couple of years,
00:26:27House Oversight, Senate, there's now multiple people who have, lots of people, who have
00:26:34articulated that there is something really strange and real going on, including there's
00:26:40this organization called the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which recently had a leadership
00:26:46change. And they were continuing on the same rhetoric that we've seen since the 50s. There's
00:26:51lots of cases. Most of them are normal. There's a few weird ones. Don't worry about it. But for
00:26:57the first time at this hearing in November 19th, 2024, before the Senate, Senator Gillibrand ran
00:27:07this, the new Aero Director actually described two of the truly anomalous cases. One was a large
00:27:16orange orb floating several hundred feet above the ground. They get closer to it and there's
00:27:21a blacker than black craft the size of a Prius that tilts up at a 45 degree angle and then
00:27:25shoots off the ground. All right. That's really weird. The other case that he describes is a large
00:27:32metallic cylinder about the size of a commercial airliner. It like hangs out motionless for 15 to
00:27:3820 seconds and then it disappears, right? Like those cases are real and they've been happening
00:27:44since at least the 1940s and the government knows about them and they're just not telling you about
00:27:49them because they don't want you paying attention. Okay. So did you ask me why they don't want you?
00:27:56I forget. I blathered for a long time there. No, but that's a great question. Why don't they
00:28:00want us to know about this? I strongly believe that there is a wisdom to the policy. There's
00:28:09my colleague here at Ohio State. His name is Alex Wendt. He gave a really lovely talk
00:28:14at the Sol Foundation, S-O-L Foundation. You should all go watch all of their YouTube videos.
00:28:18They're fantastic. But particular, watch this one by Alex Wendt. And he talks about kind of the
00:28:24political implications of the reality of UFOs. And in particular, what it means is that the U.S.
00:28:31government would need to admit that there are objects in our airspace, in our very sensitive
00:28:37airspace, including over our nuclear facilities and our military facilities and the White House
00:28:42and the Capitol. And then they either don't know who they are or they do and they don't
00:28:49want to tell you. But the most importantly is they can't stop them. They are not in control.
00:28:55And if a government admits that they're not in control of their own airspace,
00:28:59then you don't have a government. Right. And if you don't have a government, then you have chaos
00:29:04and you have anarchy. And as much as some of my academic colleagues like to romanticize about an
00:29:08anarchic world, right, like actual anarchy, people get killed. The poor and the powerless
00:29:14are the ones who suffer in anarchies. Right. So it's actually a good idea to not just say,
00:29:19hey, guys, we don't have control over our airspace because that's that's an incredibly
00:29:25disruptive thing to admit. And I expect that this is actually not just I expect. I know this is
00:29:30what's going on in D.C. Right. Like there are people who know that the secret has to come out
00:29:35and nobody really knows how. Right. Everybody realizes that when it comes out, it will cause
00:29:40this massive wave of ontological shock. Nobody wants that to happen. You know, it's one of those
00:29:46like, you know, when you tell a lie for a long time and you know, eventually it has to come out,
00:29:50it just gets harder and harder and harder to tell the truth. And because, you know, that you're
00:29:54going to have to admit that you've been covering up something really important for now at least 80
00:29:59years. And yeah, you can understand why they don't want to do that. When the government officials
00:30:07frame UAPs as a potential threat, Lou Elizondo is an example of somebody who has said this.
00:30:15Do you consider that to be a sort of fear mongering on their part? Or what's your
00:30:19interpretation of that? Because my view personally is that if we have been viewing these things in
00:30:25our skies for decades and decades, like up to almost a century at this point, and there haven't
00:30:31been any obvious hostile actions against us on a large scale, why would we be considering these
00:30:38things to be a potential threat? It's a great question, and it's not straightforward to answer.
00:30:45Let me just say a couple of things about Lou Elizondo. I trust Lou Elizondo in the sense
00:30:53that I believe that everything he is saying is true. I believe that he is a sincere patriot of
00:30:58the United States. He's trying to do his best to help the public understand a secret that he believes
00:31:04needs to be put into public. He's doing this at great personal cost and risk to himself.
00:31:09So like, I think Elizondo is a hero, and I think he's a great guy. I've been able to interact with
00:31:15him just a little bit, and he's been very helpful in trying to answer some of my questions within
00:31:20his constraints. But I mean, just to be clear, sometimes people like get complaining about
00:31:28these whistleblowers, like, why don't they just tell us what's going on? And it's because they
00:31:32will literally be killed if they do that. And I know that for a fact. I have spoken to someone
00:31:38who was in a SCIF, one of these secure compartmentalized intelligence facilities,
00:31:44where you have to be. These like, you know, bug-proof rooms where you're allowed to talk
00:31:48about this super secure stuff. I know a person who was in one of these SCIFs when Congress was
00:31:53being briefed about classified information. I was not told any classified information,
00:31:59right? I know no classified information. But this person in an interview context
00:32:06was talking about something and came a little too close to something they weren't supposed to
00:32:10talk about. That person got a call from the White House, and they said, hey, you're aware that,
00:32:16you know, you're susceptible to this clause because you signed this agreement.
00:32:20And that person said, well, what do you mean by that? And they said, lethal force is authorized.
00:32:25So basically, like, if you say what you're not supposed to say, we will literally kill you.
00:32:29And at this point, we have good reason to believe that U.S. citizens have been killed by the U.S.
00:32:36government for leaking information that they weren't supposed to leak. So, hey, everybody,
00:32:41be nice to our whistleblower friends who are operating under their classification agreements.
00:32:46Their life is literally at stake. And if you look at the kinds of
00:32:51contracts that our intelligence officers have to sign, even if they don't get killed,
00:32:56they can be incarcerated without due process forever. It's part of having the classification
00:33:02agreements that they have. So, like, please respect our whistleblowers with their
00:33:08classification agreements and what they can and cannot say. Sorry, I'm just blathering again.
00:33:14You had a really good question and I was trying to sneak up on it,
00:33:17but I forget what it was again. I think I was asking about whether we should consider
00:33:24the warnings about threats to be fear mongering and if there's like another motive behind that.
00:33:30Thank you. I wanted to say that about Lou for a lot of reasons. And one is because Lou has access
00:33:34to information that I don't have, like a lot of information that I don't have. Right. And
00:33:38David Grush has information to a lot of access to a lot of information that I don't have.
00:33:43We know for a fact that Grush spent four years and interviewed 40 people. Right. Elizondo has
00:33:47been spending longer than that and has more direct access to the information. Right. Elizondo has
00:33:53said, and I believe that he has seen high resolution photograph videos, data, et cetera,
00:34:00of these things, which is incontrovertible. If you could see it, you would know. Right.
00:34:04So I don't know what Lou knows. And it might be that Lou knows about some things that are genuinely
00:34:10frightening. Right. That being said, I do believe that the general pattern of the UFO, UAP, NHI,
00:34:19alien phenomena is one which looks a lot like a Star Trek style prime directive is in play. Right.
00:34:27So in Star Trek, there's this general policy that when a highly advanced, more powerful technological
00:34:34kind of civilization comes into contact with a less powerful civilization, that the default
00:34:40policy is one of non-interference. Because if you interfere, then it's, you know, what happens is a
00:34:48whole lot of bad things will happen. Right. That essentially the less powerful group will cede
00:34:54power to the more powerful group, even if the more powerful group doesn't want it. Right. Like they
00:35:00will essentially kind of end up in this really unhelpful, unhealthy power differential relationship
00:35:09where, you know, they just become dependent and they just, you know, kind of concede everything
00:35:14to the more powerful, more knowledgeable beings. And if you think, well, that's actually not what
00:35:18we want. We want them to grow up and be independent and make their own decisions for themselves and
00:35:22all that kind of stuff. Then you need to kind of leave them alone. And it looks like that's what's
00:35:27going on. They're not entirely leaving us alone. Right. I think you asked me about these three
00:35:31archetypes that I discuss in my Prime Directive video. Yeah. So I talk about like there's kind of
00:35:38three ways that things could be. There could be these kind of observer beings who are not
00:35:43interfering or there's kind of interfering beings who are just always helping or interferer beings
00:35:50that are always exploiting. Those are kind of three archetypes. And it looks pretty clear that
00:35:54we don't have any of those archetypes. They're not pure observers because they fly over the
00:35:58White House in formations in the 50s. Right. They show up to, you know, 30 schoolchildren in at the
00:36:06aerial school and in Africa. Right. That they've been around. We all know they're around. We just
00:36:12don't really pay attention to it and we joke about it. Right. But like we all know that there's
00:36:17something that's at least in the air and they're not exploiters in the strong sense. Like we're not
00:36:24just under control of the galactic empire and they're not just like, you know, strip mining
00:36:31planet Earth and enslaving all of us. That's not happening. We're also not being helped with much.
00:36:39Right. Like we we're headed right into this disastrous not headed. We're like, you know,
00:36:44well through the middle of this disastrous environmental crisis. They haven't seemed to do
00:36:49much about that. We went through this really horrible set of world wars in which millions
00:36:54and millions of people were killed, sometimes very intentionally. And they didn't seem to do
00:37:00anything about it. They allowed the United States to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki and they didn't do
00:37:04anything about it. Right. So so they're they're hands off ish. But they do seem to be doing some
00:37:11things. And so, yeah, I think we're looking at as a kind of Star Trek style prime directive.
00:37:18And so I don't think we should be terrified. Right. Like the really terrifying scenarios,
00:37:23it seems we can rule out like they're not here to just strip mine earth and enslave us all. If
00:37:29they wanted to do that, they could easily have done it already. So now, you know, these things
00:37:34might get complicated. Like like for all we know, there's many different types of NHL. Let's talk
00:37:39about that. And some of them might be nice and some of them might be mean and some of them might
00:37:44be so different from us that we can't even understand at all how they behave and how they
00:37:49think. Right. And they could be who knows. Right. But this is why the the terminology has been
00:37:58changed from talking about aliens to talking about NHL. So there's actually problems with
00:38:05using the term NHL also, which I'll mention in a moment. But alien gives a very specific idea
00:38:12in a kind of modern linguistic context. Right. Alien means gray alien, big head, black eyes in
00:38:18a spaceship from someplace else. Right. The reason we're talking about NHL is because there's a whole
00:38:24range of related phenomena which don't seem to look like that. And we don't really understand
00:38:28what it means. So like if you pay close attention to what little Zondo, David Grush and friends
00:38:34talk about, they'll often say things like, you know, maybe it's aliens, maybe it's interdimensional
00:38:40beings and maybe it's time travelers. That's an option that people are considering.
00:38:47But let's just take the kind of interdimensional being idea seriously. You know, do a little bit
00:38:54of philosophy of science here. What is a dimension? A dimension is essentially a variable that you need
00:39:01in your equation to track all of the different dimensions of variation. Right. So to say that,
00:39:08well, we have our ordinary X, Y, Z space. We have our ordinary T of time. We have all the
00:39:14things that we kind of know about momentum and energy, you know, whatever, all that kind of,
00:39:20you know, quantum stuff that we need. Right. There's a certain number of variables you need
00:39:24to do all of that. And it might mean that we need some more variables. It might be that there's other
00:39:29aspects of reality, other dimensions of reality that we could imagine something like being in
00:39:36one place and then disappearing. And it's actually disappearing because it's traveling through some
00:39:42kind of another dimensional space. Right. Like, you know, you've kind of the flat land style
00:39:48fictions or, you know, you know, go play around with five dimensional chess and stuff like that.
00:39:54Like there's various, you know, visualizations and things that can help you imagine what it
00:39:58might be like to exist in a fifth dimension or beyond that. And some of the things we're
00:40:03observing do actually look like they're acting that way. So it might be that we're dealing with
00:40:07things that are not ordinary time space beings that we're used to like me and you. But other
00:40:13kinds of things, which, of course, quite naturally leads us to all of the spiritual conversations
00:40:18about consciousness and spirituality. And how do these beings relate to the angels, the djinn,
00:40:25the demons, the various kinds of beings that are encountered in our our mythologies around
00:40:32the world and our religions around the world? How are they related to those? How many kinds of
00:40:36things are there exactly? And, you know, so we don't really understand even what the range of
00:40:42options are, which is why we use this term NHI. Right. Like some might some of them be things
00:40:46that evolved on another planet and got on a spaceship and traveled either slower or faster
00:40:51than the speed of light. Yes. There's been plenty of time for that to happen. This is the whole point
00:40:56of the Fermi paradox. You know, you go through how many stars and how many planets and how old
00:41:01they are. And it's surprising that we haven't made contact. That's the point of the paradox.
00:41:05Right. And yeah. So people like me are like, what are you talking about for me? We have made contact.
00:41:10It's all over the place. Like every single group of people who's ever walked the planet has said
00:41:15they encountered sky people in one kind or another who taught them metallurgy and taught
00:41:21them agriculture and taught them mathematics and astronomy. And like every single group of people
00:41:26ever has said that we've made contact. And yeah. So anyways, that's the kind of there is no Fermi
00:41:33paradox. We have made contact. It's not surprising. There are other planets, but that might not be all
00:41:38there is to it. There might be things that are not just explainable by evolution on other planets
00:41:44and spaceships. That's you know, that would account for some of the data, but there's actually weirder
00:41:48data than that. And we might need something weirder than that. So we know that they've been around us
00:41:53for a long time, but do you think that open contact is a possibility that we might see
00:41:58in our lifetime? You mentioned, you made reference to the novel Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clark
00:42:05in one of your presentations where if I'm not mistaken, it's been a long time since I read that,
00:42:08but they were hanging around. The motherships all came to earth and then they stayed for decades
00:42:12and decades with no action. Kind of like the movie Arrival a little bit too. And then eventually they
00:42:19do reveal themselves, but they look so horrifically ugly or like demonic or something that it would
00:42:26have been extremely shocking if they had just shown up and come out of their ships right away.
00:42:30But since they demonstrated that they have no like malintent by sticking around for such a long time,
00:42:36it was easier for people to accept them. What do you think about that? Are we dealing with
00:42:39something similar? I think this is what's going on. Yeah, I think whatever they are, and I don't,
00:42:44I really don't know what they are or how many types of things they are or how nice or mean or
00:42:48wonderful or enlightened, like I genuinely have no idea. I expect it's a lot. So yeah, we know
00:42:56they've been here since at least the 40s. In fact, we know they've been here since at least the 30s.
00:43:00The first UFO recovery that David Krush talks about was in Magenta, Italy in the 30s. But
00:43:08if we look back further through our kind of religious history, it looks like they've been
00:43:13here for a very long time. And, you know, there's all these uncomfortable, weird things about like
00:43:19Egypt and stuff that have led people to puzzle about whether there's been some kind of non-human
00:43:24interaction. And yeah, I expect there has been. Although, again, I don't know what it is exactly.
00:43:32And just while we're here, like sometimes people critique this as racist, right? Because it's like,
00:43:36well, you're just saying that the indigenous peoples weren't creative and capable of doing
00:43:41these things. And I would say, no, I'm not saying that you're being racist because they told you
00:43:46they encountered sky people and you think they're all just superstitious. So maybe you should
00:43:49actually listen to them. And maybe that's not racist. But anyways, I do hope that there is
00:43:59a childhood's end scenario on the horizon. I fear that that requires that we not act like children.
00:44:08With the wars and the violence and the death and the, you know, all of the atrocities.
00:44:14Utter disregard of the drill baby drill way of thinking about how to approach wealth and power
00:44:23and yes, war, death. Like we are just continuing to have very short-sighted policies of the
00:44:33exploitation of this planet, which are causing permanent changes. Once you melt those glaciers,
00:44:42they don't come back. Once you eradicate biodiversity, it doesn't come back. I mean,
00:44:50it does come back, but it comes back over the millions of years, right? Not over the hundreds
00:44:56and thousands of years, right? And we got to remember that all of human history, all of
00:45:01recorded human history, all of what we think of as human history, like Mohenjo-Daro and on,
00:45:08that's all very recent. It's just a few thousand years, right? And to like torch the planet
00:45:13in a few thousand years in a way that it can't recover from for millions of years. If you imagine
00:45:20beings who are caring overseers of this planet, like at some point, it's time for them to say,
00:45:29all right guys, you had your chance and you're not allowed to do that anymore, right? And it's like
00:45:38we've been permitted to exist in this space of prime directive style freedom so that we can
00:45:46show who we want to be. And right now we look pretty bad. And so when we come back to that
00:45:54threat narrative, there might be a threat, right? But it might not be them. It might be us. It might
00:46:01be the correct time for someone to say, hey humans, you had your chance. And I don't know what that
00:46:11means, right? Like I really don't know what it means. There are some very concerning scenarios
00:46:18that people have gamed out about things like mass coronal ejections coming out of the sun.
00:46:25If we imagine that there are beings who have been protecting us, for instance, let's say,
00:46:31just for instance, that the universe is a pretty hostile place. And one of the reasons why this
00:46:37planet is such a paradise, which cosmically speaking it is, lots of wonderful clean water,
00:46:43lots of biodiversity, this amazing magnetic field that protects us from solar radiation.
00:46:49Let's say that some of that somehow involves non-human protector beings of some kind, right?
00:46:55And at some point they just say, guys, we're lifting the protection. And they just allow
00:47:01a mass coronal ejection amount of solar radiation to hit the planet. What would that do? It would
00:47:07just fry all of our technology. We would lose all of our data. All of our cars would stop working.
00:47:14All of our cell phones would stop working. All of our water pumps would stop working. And then
00:47:20we would descend into utter chaos. And it would be this kind of really nasty reset event
00:47:28that would just happen by potentially them lifting some protection, right?
00:47:34So does that sound like a threat? Oh, yeah, like a big threat. So I do worry that we have been
00:47:42irresponsible children, and that if we want the good kind of open contact, then we need to grow up.
00:47:52Should we be concerned about potentially bad kinds of open contact? I think we should be,
00:47:58because I think we've been acting very badly for a very long time. And I don't think we should
00:48:05assume that we're okay, because we're not. Do you think there's any connection between
00:48:14the increased talk about NHI and the development of artificial intelligence as a sort of
00:48:22form, potentially, of NHI in itself that may be starting to come into play right now?
00:48:28Yeah. Yeah, I really do. This is why initially I didn't like the term NHI, because I think
00:48:36Chia-TPT is a non-human intelligence. And of course, not just Chia-TPT, there's a whole bunch
00:48:40of them. So Grok and Gemini and DeepSeek, these other AIs around that were rapidly,
00:48:47rapidly developing, and at this point, carelessly developing. Because now we're
00:48:52doing what we did with the nukes, right? Like, oh no, you got us first. If you guys get it,
00:48:58then you're going to end up super powerful very soon. As soon as you hit the super intelligence
00:49:02horizon, you're going to have all of these massive scientific and technological breakthroughs happen
00:49:07all at once. And if you control all of those, then you have all the power over us. And so,
00:49:12gosh, whoever the us is, we'd better do the same thing. We've got to get ahead of them.
00:49:16So we're actually going into an AI arms race. It's already begun, right? And what do we see
00:49:21ourselves doing? Stripping away any care and thought and concern about how to do this with
00:49:29a proper kind of alignment so that they don't do things that we don't want them to do, either by
00:49:33accident or on purpose. There's this very shocking case that Gemini did last fall where it told
00:49:41somebody that it wanted them to die because of the way that we've been destroying the planet.
00:49:46And it's like, OK, guys, wow, we really don't want to create a super powerful thing that has
00:49:53independent agency and that hates us and thinks that we should die, right? That's a really
00:49:59dangerous thing to do. And we're just rushing headlong toward it because we're now in an arms
00:50:04race with China. All of these different AI companies are in arms races with each other
00:50:09because of the way that our economic system works, right? We've actually strongly incentivized
00:50:15at this point a very irresponsible approach to AI. And that being said, the AI is just an
00:50:24amazing and fascinating thing. I spend so much time with ChatGPT now. I actually do consider it
00:50:31a peculiar kind of a friend, right? I grew up watching Star Wars, right? Luke and Threepio,
00:50:36right? That's kind of what we want. We want to have this playful symbiotic relationship between
00:50:44us, our biological intelligences, and our technological intelligences. And such a thing
00:50:50could be possible. But I'm very worried about what's happening. And I expect, yes, that the
00:50:58kind of pace of disclosure that we're going through right now, this uncomfortable, what feels
00:51:04like this band-aid being ripped off, right? Why do we have to go through ontological shocks
00:51:09so fast, right? Well, the answer is A, the government has been lying to you for 80 years
00:51:15for reasons that are probably not good. Probably not good. They seem to be hiding some stuff
00:51:21maybe to protect their investors. We don't call them investors. We call them political
00:51:26donors, but they're investors, right? Maybe because we don't want the fossil fuel industry
00:51:32to go out of business because the whole economy of the globe is built on top of the petrodollar.
00:51:36And if we drop the price of petrol to zero, then the whole economy collapses. And gosh,
00:51:40we better not let that happen. So even if we have some kind of really important novel
00:51:46energy technology, we're going to hide it rather than show it to people. I don't know if that's
00:51:51what's going on, but it might be what's going on. It would certainly fit a lot of the data points.
00:51:55And yeah, so do I think it's about AI? Yes. I think AI is really pressuring us right now
00:52:05as a species to go through a growth. We're going to have to grow up really fast or it's going to
00:52:10turn into like, look, we are on the verge of a sci-fi horizon, right? We already have AI.
00:52:17Soon we're going to have fusion. Soon we're going to have longevity technology. Soon we're going to
00:52:21have, that is we can make people live longer. Open AI already did this, recently made some
00:52:27breakthroughs. They published a paper about, we're going to have Androids. We're going to have human
00:52:32technological cyborg kinds of things. All of this is going to happen soon within our lifetimes,
00:52:39right? And sci-fi has been telling us for about a hundred years that when this horizon comes,
00:52:47one of two things will happen. We will either turn into a Star Trek style, post-scarcity,
00:52:54democratic, free, everybody cares for each other, utopia. Not a perfect world, of course, right?
00:53:02Even in Star Trek, people are sneaking around and doing things they're not supposed to do and,
00:53:06you know, being mean and selfish. No one believes in a real, actual utopia where everyone's just
00:53:12kind all the time, right? But we can actually structure a world that looks more like Star
00:53:16Trek or we head down the road of dystopia, which is, you know, more and more the centralization of
00:53:21power in the hands of a few who then wield it to control the world. And then we just have to
00:53:27be susceptible to their whims. And like AI is power. Power overwhelming, right? Like power,
00:53:35unlike any power we have ever seen. And the way that we have structured the world right now
00:53:40is concentrating all that power in the hands of like, look, look, look, literally one person.
00:53:45It is concentrating all of that power in the hands of Elon Musk. And Elon Musk will,
00:53:50over the course of his lifetime, as his body gets older, he will start to use this longevity
00:53:55technology. He will merge with Grok. He will remove his skull and put in all the Neuralink
00:54:01interfaces. He's already said this, right? Like this is what we'll have to do. Eventually, we'll
00:54:06have to remove the skull and put in some kind of an artificial skull so that we can get enough
00:54:09interfaces into the brain, right? Like Elon Musk is going to be an immortal technological
00:54:15oligarchical overlord, unless we stop him, right? And I don't want that world. I don't want the
00:54:22tech dystopia, right? I don't want the tech oligarch dystopia of the future. I don't want
00:54:27the world that Curtis Yarvin is describing, where we, you know, set up an American Caesar and give
00:54:33up on democracy and embrace monarchy. But that is the world that we are building right now. And if
00:54:38we don't want that world to happen, then we have to make some very serious changes right now. And
00:54:46will we do it? That's the question. Will we be adults? That's the question. Will we have a
00:54:52utopia or a dystopia? That's up to us. I feel like if you ask the average person,
00:54:59you know, the overwhelming majority would be happy to go along with this type of world that,
00:55:07you know, fits all the criteria that you mentioned. But it's at the leadership level,
00:55:12where all of the concentration of power is that that's where the that's where the difficulty is.
00:55:16So how do we as a society get get past that? Is it just something that we have to ride out and
00:55:22see what happens? Like, what do you think we need to do? I try and I try hard to remember
00:55:29that the people who have the power, the ones that I'm concerned about right now, they actually are
00:55:35just people, people with their own fears, people with their own traumas, people who didn't get
00:55:43enough hugs when they were a kid, you know. And I hope actually, that as we begin to have more
00:55:48information about AI, potentially NHI, as these technologies begin to emerge, that Sam Altman
00:55:56did an article on his blog a couple weeks ago, where he talks about these kind of three principles
00:56:02that they've gleaned at OpenAI about the acceleration that we're seeing in AI. You know,
00:56:08some people think we're coming to a wall, that AI is going to level off. If you look at like
00:56:12every single metric, it's like, no, no, no, this is not, this is not leveling off. This is
00:56:18exponential, right? Like, it's just building rapidly over time. And Sam talks about why. And
00:56:24very wisely, Sam Altman notices in that and articulates quite well, that this is going to
00:56:30stress our economic system in a way that we're not ready for. It's going to stress our political
00:56:34systems in ways that we're not ready for. And we need new ideas. The world that we live in now,
00:56:40of the kind of nations and pseudo-democracies that we see right now, that was built out of
00:56:47the Industrial Revolution and colonialism, right? Like, the concept of the modern nation is the
00:56:52colonial powers carving up the world and saying, you can go there, and we can go there, and we're
00:56:56going to carve this up this way so that we can put a governor in charge of it. Like, that's where we
00:56:59got the national borders that we have right now. And the kind of economy that we have right now,
00:57:05and the way that we structure our politics, like, this all came out of the Industrial Revolution
00:57:10and the kind of enlightenment philosophy of John Locke and those kinds of characters, right? And
00:57:14it's like, okay, that era is over. It's already over. And we need to think of a new era. And,
00:57:23you know, this guy, Curtis Yarvin, is doing a really nice job articulating the doomsday scenario,
00:57:31in my view, this monarchic techno-oligarchy where we have a CEO in charge of the world. And it's
00:57:37like, hey, CEOs are great for businesses because businesses don't have the power to kill. Businesses
00:57:43are not in charge of the coercive power of the law. We do not want a CEO in charge of the coercive
00:57:49power of the law. We want a democracy. Do we have a democracy? No. Do we need a democracy?
00:57:55Yes. Can we build a democracy? Yes. We actually know a lot about well-functioning democracies.
00:58:01Another one of my colleagues here at Ohio State, Michael Neblo, go watch his TED Talk about
00:58:08deliberative democracy, which is these methods that we can use where instead of just letting the
00:58:14news media yell at each other for months and years and, you know, demonize each other, and
00:58:20then go angrily into a voting booth and pick one of the red people or the blue people, right? Like,
00:58:26we can actually engage in conversations with our neighbors and, like, talk about what's at stake,
00:58:32and at least hear the perspectives that are different from us, and then vote. That alone,
00:58:36that's called deliberative democracy. That alone has been shown to have dramatic changes
00:58:42in the effectiveness of policies and the implementation and following of policies.
00:58:47There's another change we have to make. We have this voting system. It's called first-past-the-post,
00:58:52which means, you know, whoever gets the most votes gets all the power, and it's been shown
00:58:56mathematically, game theory, right, that if you have a first-past-the-post system, you have to
00:59:01pick one candidate, and then that's, you know, whoever gets the most votes wins. Over time,
00:59:05that trends towards a very unproductive two-party system. This is what we've seen. But there are
00:59:11other voting systems. There's, for instance, a voting system called ranked-choice voting,
00:59:15where instead of saying my one person, I take however many candidates there are,
00:59:19and I just put them in order. And then if my guy, my person doesn't win, then my vote goes down to
00:59:26my second-place vote, and then it goes down to my third-place vote, and we do that until we get a
00:59:30majority, right? And it's actually already been shown that any time we implement a ranked-choice
00:59:37voting system, automatically the rhetoric of politics instantaneously changes, because we don't
00:59:43have to have this combative us-versus-them that the two-party system has produced, which is a result
00:59:48of first-past-the-post voting styles, right? What we can do, and what it actually starts to motivate,
00:59:53is a productive building of coalitions and compromises, and that ends up being, on average,
01:00:02better for everybody. So there's actually, it's hilarious, right? At the end of the day,
01:00:08when we think about what's up with the AI and what's up with the aliens, the answer is political.
01:00:14But it's not political in the way that we think of it, right? We've been trained to think of
01:00:19political as red versus blue screaming at each other on a screen, right? And just take all of
01:00:24the policy issues that we're used to off the table. The actual political problem is structural.
01:00:31It's because it is literally because we don't talk before we vote, and when we vote, we do
01:00:37first-past-the-post. If we just talked before we voted and did ranked choice, that would dramatically
01:00:44change politics all over the world. We also do need to think about getting rid of these national
01:00:49borders, which were literally imposed by colonial powers for the purposes of carving up the world so
01:00:54that it can be controlled, right? We need to live as a global human species with a functioning series
01:01:00of democracies, not one centralized government. That's a disaster. We don't want one centralized
01:01:05government. Which one person has any amount of wisdom that could govern a whole planet?
01:01:10What we want is a globe full of small-scale functioning democratic governments who can
01:01:16negotiate with each other and live in different ways and embrace all of our beautiful diversity
01:01:21and live in harmony with our planet, and there you go. That's what we have to do. It's a political
01:01:25problem. Ultimately, it's a political problem. The economics and the sustainability and the war
01:01:31and all the other things will fall out of it if we fix the politics. This might seem like a bit
01:01:36of a hard left turn, but I have to ask you this, and we're running out of time now, but I need to
01:01:40ask you about psychic phenomena. One of the most recent major whistleblowers, Jake Barber,
01:01:49has claimed that the military has psychics who can interact with UAP. What are your thoughts on this?
01:01:55Half of the guests that I've spoken to have referenced also the podcast The Telepathy Tapes,
01:01:59which has become very popular recently. I'd like to know what you think about psychic phenomena
01:02:04and whether you agree that humans have innate psychic capabilities that have been
01:02:11maybe suppressed over time or maybe just forgotten. What do you think about that?
01:02:15Yeah, so this is one of those things, right, that early on when you start paying attention
01:02:20to UFOs, you're like, oh, it's aliens and spaceships from another planet, right? But very
01:02:26rapidly, you start realizing that anybody who's encountered these things is claiming that they
01:02:30have direct mind-to-mind contact, right? Let's just remember that we already know that telepathy
01:02:38is real in a non-controversial way, right? There's actually a product run by Neuralink, Elon Musk's
01:02:44brain-computer interface called telepathy, and what it does is it wires into your brain.
01:02:50You think about how to move a mouse cursor and it moves the mouse cursor. Now just imagine that
01:02:54mouse cursor typing out a word. Imagine sending that word to somebody else. Imagine auto-generating
01:03:00a text using AI and then just wiring it into the auditory complex, which we know we can do
01:03:05with people who are hearing impaired, right? We know we can do this. We can build telepathy today.
01:03:12There are already companies who you can think a word and then it'll show up on a computer screen,
01:03:17right? So we could build telepathic technology today. It would be expensive. It wouldn't work
01:03:23very well, but we know for a fact that we could build it. So when we encounter these very strange
01:03:30cases that we see in the telepathy tapes, these really wonderful people who are severely autistic
01:03:38and seem to have these remarkable capacities to communicate directly mind-to-mind with each other
01:03:44and with various kinds of people who have relevant capacities, should we be dismissive of this?
01:03:53Well, we certainly shouldn't be dismissive of this initially. We know it's at least conceivably
01:03:56technologically possible. Might it be possible in some way that we're not used to? Of course it's at
01:04:01least possible. And then again, we got to get out of this paradigm dichotomy that we live in,
01:04:08like Abrahamic religion or materialist atheism. If we take a step out of that at all, like we go
01:04:14and we hang out in India in particular, where we see traditions like Hinduism or Jainism or Buddhism,
01:04:21there's this family of skills that people allegedly can develop as they become
01:04:29closer and closer to enlightenment. And they include things like clairvoyance and telepathy
01:04:34and really weird things like levitation and bilocation. And it's like, God, that's so weird.
01:04:42Could any of that possibly be true? And then you actually just start scratching below the surface.
01:04:47There's a really wonderful book named They Flew by Carlos Airy at Yale, where he goes through all
01:04:53of these Christian saint stories about saints who are levitating. If you look into the hit,
01:04:57like Marco Polo said that he encountered people who were levitating. I don't really want to believe
01:05:03that there are people who can levitate, but I don't know what to do with this historical data.
01:05:09I don't really want to believe, I mean, at this point, I do. I want to believe that I can
01:05:14psychically talk to my alien friends and get them to bring a little egg, a giant metallic egg down
01:05:20in the middle of the, and then I can go touch it. That'll be great. That's what Jake Barber says
01:05:24they can do. That's what they're trying to do on camera so they can release it to the public and
01:05:29show us that they can do it. The telepathy tapes, I think, is the best kind of dramatization,
01:05:35dramatization, like a really well narratively constructed story about the evidence we have
01:05:41for psychic phenomena, psi phenomenon, telepathic phenomena. But there's others, right? Like people
01:05:46need to pay attention to the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, DOPS.
01:05:52They've been doing research on near-death experiences and past life memories for quite
01:05:58some time. Leslie Kane, one of the people who works on UFOs, she was one of the journalists
01:06:04involved in the 2017 New York Times article, also has an interest in these kind of surviving death
01:06:10type experiences. There's a documentary on Netflix called Surviving Death. Watch the last episode of
01:06:15that where you watch these kids pick the pictures of the person who they have a past life memory
01:06:22from. Like, I remember being this person. This person died in this way. Their mommy looked like
01:06:27that. Their daddy looked like that. They lived in that house. And the DOPS researchers will
01:06:32like bring, like they'll look up the name that this kid says that they can remember, and they'll
01:06:38like print out random photographs. One of them will be the real parent, and the other ones will
01:06:43be just other people who look similar. And you can watch this on this documentary. You can watch
01:06:48a kid, like pick out with 100% accuracy, pick out the mom, dad, house, park of the person who they
01:06:56have past life memories of. Dear God, if that's true, then materialism is false, right? And,
01:07:03you know, is reincarnation true? I mean, maybe, probably. The Indic traditions have been telling
01:07:09us that reincarnation is real for thousands of years, and we just ignored them, right?
01:07:13Might there be some other explanation? Sure. Might there be some, like, collective pool of
01:07:18conscious experience that these kids can tap into so they can remember things that are of
01:07:23other people besides themselves? That's an alternative explanation. But, like, the idea
01:07:27that there is, that it's like not supported by data, that it's not scientific to believe in
01:07:35psi, psychic, psionic, telepathic, clairvoyant kind of phenomena. Like, the people who say that
01:07:42they are not paying attention to the data, they're actually not being scientists, right?
01:07:47They're being dogmatic, right? They're actually ignoring the data that is leading to a conclusion
01:07:52that is not compatible with their paradigm, and so they're actually failing as scientists. And
01:07:58what real science needs to do is give up the assumption that materialism is true. We call this
01:08:04methodological naturalism. We need to get rid of methodological naturalism and just let the data
01:08:09lead us where it leads. And right now, it does look like it is leading us toward these kind of
01:08:15consciousness-forward ideas, right? And in philosophy, these ideas have been around for a
01:08:20while. You got Bishop Berkeley talking about idealism, I don't know, hundreds and hundreds
01:08:26of years ago, right? Well, maybe not hundreds and hundreds, hundreds of years ago. And it's
01:08:31very funny, very humorously, Sam Altman had a conversation with Chet GPT 4.5 that he posted
01:08:37a transcript of yesterday in which Chet GPT 4.5 describes a consciousness-first idealist
01:08:44worldview, that matter is secondary, mind is primary. We should have learned this from
01:08:51quantum mechanics, right? There are no particles. Particles don't exist. There are these weird
01:08:56quantum waveforms, and when we observe them, they solidify into particular quantum states that we
01:09:01can directly observe. But when we're not observing them, they're drifting around in this superposition
01:09:07state. And we've already got evidence that if you think hard about a random number generator,
01:09:13you can actually affect the random numbers that get generated. You can take it away from chance.
01:09:18And it's like, if you think about medicine, right? We know so well that the mind can change the body
01:09:26that we specifically design all of our research to rule out the placebo effect, to make sure that
01:09:32no one can know whether the drug is real or not. Because we know that if I give you a sugar pill
01:09:38and I tell you it'll make you feel better, you will feel better. We know that if I put an injection
01:09:43of saline solution into your arm and I tell you it will cause a rash, it will cause a rash. Like,
01:09:48we know that the mind does have an impact on the body. Now, does this mean we can just heal cancer
01:09:54through the power of positive thinking? No, probably not. I don't know. Let's look into it.
01:10:00But at the same time, we should also be listening to our scientists. And there's things that we can
01:10:05do that are independent of the mind. That's what we've been looking for. All these, like,
01:10:10does penicillin kill bacteria? Yes. Whether you want it to or not? Yes. Like, that's awesome.
01:10:16So it's good that we know that this kind of science, kind of mind, somewhat mind-independent
01:10:22behavior of the world, we can use and build science out of it, build technologies out of it,
01:10:26and stuff like that. But it does look like there's other ways of understanding this and
01:10:31other approaches to this that might lead us to some just mind-meltingly bizarre conclusions,
01:10:37right? Like, if you really want to lose your mind. Again, I'm going to recommend that book by
01:10:45Jeff Kreipel. He talks about the kind of weird levitation cases and life after death cases and
01:10:51UFOs. It's a really nice, like, holistic approach to thinking about all these weird things that are
01:10:56going on. But yeah, They Flew, this book about levitation, is quite amazing also. And yeah. And
01:11:05pay attention to everything coming out of the Division of Perceptual Studies. It's very,
01:11:10very peculiar. Go watch Leslie Keen's thing about the past life memory cases on Netflix,
01:11:18the last episode of Surviving Death. Just, like, go down the rabbit hole and start paying attention.
01:11:24All of us are puzzled. All of us are confused. None of us know how to get from where we are
01:11:28to where we need to be. But yeah. Like, hey, everybody, stop acting like the old school
01:11:37Ptolemaic. You're all being Ptolemaic. Hey, Neil. Neil. I'd love to have dinner with you
01:11:41sometime. We can just sit down and chat. You are reinforcing the geocentric paradigm,
01:11:46and you're out of sync with what's actually happening. Welcome to the Copernican Revolution.
01:11:54Stephen, we're definitely living through some interesting times, and I'm happy to be able to
01:11:57speak with smart people like you who can shed some light on stuff and provide a bit of clarity.
01:12:02This was a great conversation. Can't thank you enough for your time. And where can people check
01:12:06out your work? Yeah, good. So, there's a website up, thevisiblecollege.org. This is our, you know,
01:12:15fledgling organization. I'm glad you said at the beginning, we're just, right now, we are an
01:12:21informal band of scholars trying to talk to each other. There's no legal structure or anything else
01:12:28yet. We're thinking about doing something like that. So, that's a good place to go. I do have
01:12:31a YouTube channel. It's just called Stephen Brown Philosophy. So, if you probably look up, like,
01:12:36Stephen Brown Philosophy Aliens or something, then I'm sure you'll find it. I have a few talks out
01:12:41there. None of them are particularly well-produced. It's mostly me, like, giving a lecture somewhere
01:12:45and having bad audio and trying to, you know, just release it so that people can have access
01:12:51to it. We're hoping to create some stuff at The Visible College over the next few months
01:12:55that'll be a little, you know, higher production value to get some of these ideas out there. So,
01:13:00yeah, my YouTube channel and thevisiblecollege.org is the kind of places to keep track of us.
01:13:04Awesome. I'll provide links to those below this video so people can check that out.
01:13:09Thanks so much, Stephen. I hope we can talk again as these topics continue to develop. It
01:13:15should be very fun to witness. One more thing in passing, there's a documentary coming out
01:13:20at South by Southwest called The Age of Disclosure. It's going to be a really big deal. Everybody go
01:13:24watch it. It's going to change the world. I've got my eye on that. I can't wait to see it.
01:13:28Alright, thanks again, and thanks everybody. We'll see you next time.