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Garry Nolan, PhD, is an immunologist and professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. He is also a business executive and Executive Director of the Board of the Sol Foundation, a research and advocacy center focused on UAP studies. www.thesolfoundation.org
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Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
Derek, very nice to meet you, sir.
Nice to meet you as well.
Thank you for doing this. I really appreciate it.
Tell everybody what you do.
Tell everybody what your official position is.
You're a professor at the School of Medicine at Stanford.
What do you do?
So my day job is in cancer research and cancer biology, mostly immunology and
cancer.
Much of what my laboratory does is not so much the biology of cancer,
but developing instruments that create the data that allow us to analyze the
complexities of how the immune system interfaces with tumors
and how tumors basically re-enable the immune system to help the cancer itself.
So the problem has been we don't have the ability to collect enough data, or
not until recently, to collect and understand what all of that means.
So we've been kind of poking in the dark for decades.
And so probably for the last 20 years, I've developed a number of instruments
and turned them into companies
that allow everybody to access a level of information they couldn't get before.
So explain that, the immune system allows the tumors?
So what happens is that there's sort of a dance between the mutations that
initiate a tumor
and then sort of an evolution of how the tumor eventually learns how to trick
the immune system to not recognize it.
So we have all kinds of, I mean, literally every day, every person, you'll
develop five cancer-like objects inside of your body.
But the immune system and your body has a way of shutting it down very quickly.
But with enough time and with enough variation, tumors will eventually evolve
in a way that trick the immune system,
not only to not recognize them, but in fact to help them and feed them in a way,
to create an inflammatory environment that actually then the tumor uses to
propagate its own cell division and then metastasis.
So it's a normal function of natural human biology to create tumors?
It's not so much a normal function.
It's a byproduct of what evolution is, that when the genes mutate, when a cell
divides,
or if you go out and, you know, stand in the sun too much, for instance,
you get skin cancers because you're getting ionizing radiation that's changing
the DNA, making a mutation.
And some of those random mutations will initiate a cancer.
So, for instance, I have a mutation called MIDFE318K.
It's a mutation that I was born with.
It wasn't in my family.
And it causes both melanoma and kidney cancer, which I've had both.
I've had a dozen melanomas alone.
You know, we didn't find that out until a couple of years ago, but I've been
following it over the years.
And we basically figured out, okay, it's going to have to be this.
So, we had my genome sequenced.
But that's just one of hundreds of different kinds of mutations that can occur
that are on a path towards creating a cancer.
But the cancer can't survive if the immune system recognizes it.
So, eventually, what happens is there's this detente that is reached between
the immune system and the cancer,
where the immune system basically ignores the cancer.
So, Jim Allison here in Houston won the Nobel Prize back in 2018 for
understanding one of these turnoff signals that the immune system,
that the cancers use to turn off the immune system, and that by showing he
could block it,
his wife, Pam Sharma, ran a bunch of clinical trials at MD Anderson that showed,
in fact,
that this could actually turn a 5% survival disease in melanoma to a 50%
survival.
And that then created the whole immunotherapy field that the world is taking
advantage of today.
Wow.
So, what is cancer actually doing?
Like, how do tumors develop this ability to trick the immune system?
Is this something that other animals have?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
So, it's a constant battle.
It's a constant battle.
So, for instance, there are proteins on your cell's surface, and we'll get too
immunologically deep about it.
They're called major histocompatibility complex proteins.
So, for instance, if I were to try to just randomly do a tissue transplant from
me to you, it's very likely that it would be rejected.
And it's because of those MHC proteins that it's rejected.
What's happening is that your cells are presenting your internal cell biology
to the immune system, and it's saying,
okay, you're a friend, not a foe.
So, when cancer usually initiates, there are disruptions that happen, and
proteins are made incorrectly, et cetera.
And so, what these MHC proteins are doing, in some cases, is they're presenting
the internal damage to the body,
and the body's saying, oh, there's something wrong with this cell.
We better wipe it out.
We kill it.
These same proteins are what the immune system uses, for instance, to go after
viruses.
So, when you get a virus infection inside of the cell, the body has a way of
chopping those proteins up inside of the cell,
presenting it via MHC, and then the immune system attacks it.
So, one of the first things that actually tumors do is they learn to turn off
the MHC proteins inside of themselves.
So, the ability to show that I'm damaged is shut down.
And so, the immune system doesn't go on full alert for that.
But then there are other mutations, like divide when you're not supposed to,
you know, avoid this kind of induced cell death called apoptosis, and not
others.
And so, cancer doesn't just like start, and then the next day, you've got it.
It's a progression of events.
You have these precancerous lesions.
You have like a benign tumor, which eventually becomes a metastatic tumor.
And so, but the immune system is key at every stage of the development, because
if you can reactivate the immune system in just the right way,
then you can prevent the cancer from basically spreading or from metastasizing
or from killing you, essentially.
Is there a potential for, given the understanding of this, is there a potential
for using this for organ transplant patients where locally would stop
recognizing this as a foreign organ?
That's exactly what is done.
In fact, you, when you get a tissue transplant or an organ transplant, you're
suppressing the immune system.
The problem with that suppression is that you then put yourself at risk of
cancer, because what you're doing is you're turning off the immune system's
ability to combat and go after a cancer the moment it forms.
So, most people who are under immune suppression are at risk both of, let's say,
virus infections, bacterial infections, but also for their cancers.
So, would the potential be to turn that off locally so you could turn that off
on the specific organ?
That would be a great thing to do if we could.
Right now, the only things that we have are systemic.
So, yeah, I mean, for instance, if you could deliver to the organ that you're
transplanting anti-immunosupp, you know, basically immunosuppressives locally,
that would be great.
We don't have that yet, but that would be via a form of gene therapy.
But the problem would that be that if you, like, let's say you had a lung
transplant, if you had a lung infection, it would be catastrophic.
Do you want to come work in my lab?
You're accepted as a graduate student in the Stanford Department of Pathology.
Wow, that was easy.
Yeah.
I have a few friends that have had organ transplants.
Yeah.
And it's, you know, it's very disturbing knowing that they're so vulnerable to
any kind of infection because of these medications that they have to take in
order for their body to accept a transplant.
So, one of the problems is that there are literally hundreds of different types
of immune cells, and, you know, really until recently and, frankly, until a
technology my lab developed about over a dozen years ago, we couldn't look at
all of the immune cell types all at once in a single picture.
So, I came from a laboratory, Lennon-Lee Herzenberg, and I was a grad student
at Stanford, and they had developed an instrument called the fluorescence-activated
cell sorter.
And that allowed you to look at three proteins at a time, and if you could know
ahead of time what the cell types were that expressed the proteins that you're
interested in, you could look at just those three cell types.
Then I came up with a way to look at, you know, 50 or 60 proteins at a time,
sort of stepping up what they had already taught me how to do.
And then suddenly that gave us the ability to look at nearly every cell type in
the body, an immune cell types.
And then that gave us the, let's say, the raw data to build mathematical models
that we could do better predictions of what outcomes would be.
And how is that, like, what are you applying in terms of, like, real-world
scenarios? How are you applying this?
Well, so, for instance, there's a kind of leukemia called AML, acute myelogenous
leukemia. It starts in the bone marrow.
And it is a distorted version of a myeloid cell type. It starts as a stem cell,
and that stem cell goes down a number of different paths.
And depending upon the person, the disease is sufficiently different that it
might follow a slightly different path towards what becomes the disease itself.
And so, being able to trace the path and to know which steps along the way that
it takes to become what becomes then the metastatic leukemia could only be
accomplished by having enough markers that allowed us to trace everybody along
the path.
It's kind of like, if I wanted to follow you from who you are as an egg through
development through to who you are today, and I had snapshots every month.
I need different markers to measure what you are as an egg versus what you are
as a baby versus what you are as an adult.
And so, each of those different markers in my world would be different proteins
that tell me something about an adult leukemia versus a baby leukemia.
And then we use something called pseudotime, which is a mathematical concept
that allows us to stitch together those photographs.
I could take a random box of photos of you from an egg to who you are today,
and I could just by hand put together the most likely path and sequence of what
you were from the earliest to the latest.
But we needed the data and we needed the means and the instruments to collect
that information so that then the math could come to play.
That's such a fascinating thing about human beings is the biological
variability.
Is that everybody is, we're so the same, two lungs, a heart, but so different
in how our body reacts to things and what happens to us and environmental
factors, diet, stress, all sorts of different factors.
And you're kind of piecing together this puzzle of all these things.
And, but what you're doing is you still have to pay homage to the fact that
those differences exist.
And so, while, you know, my cancer might be the same class of, let's say, melanoma
as another person's, the complexity of what allowed that cancer to become are
so different that the drugs that would work for me might not work for another
person.
And so, that's what basically requires us to personalize the medications in a
way that gives the right drug to the right person.
So, I've started probably half a dozen companies and sold them, places like Roche,
et cetera.
Actually, my most recent company we sold to 10X Genomics, which enables us,
enables them now, because of a patent I created back in 2011, to scale up the
amount of information that we can collect at a time that then when layered on
top of what, for instance, 10X Genomics already did, which is doing what's
called single cell genomic analysis.
We could scale that up a hundred fold to get a hundred fold amount of
information.
But the problem with that is that I can collect all that data and make an
analysis of a cancer for you, but it might be a little bit different than
another person.
So, what we have to do then is develop techniques that allow us to narrow in on
what the differences might be, so that when I develop a drug for person X, it
works for person X and not for person Y, right, the right way.
So, there's a lot of personalization in medicine that is required.
The diversity that makes humanity great and that makes humanity able to survive
in the face of so many challenges is that there are individual differences that
one person might survive and another won't.
It's the same thing with cancers.
And it's the same thing with drugs.
I mean, you know, for instance, with certain drugs, one of the first things I
learned in pharmacology when I was, you know, way back in the day is that there's
always a benefit to damage ratio that you're having to deal with, that a drug
has a positive outcome, but there are side effects.
And so, as scientists or as clinicians, we make a choice based on the
statistics, who will benefit the most, and will it benefit the most, but by the
way, there's all these side effects that might affect you.
And, you know, overall, globally, 60% of people will survive, but since I don't
know anything more about your specific disease, I am, by law, required to give
you the 60% drug.
Until I know or can distinguish that your disease is a different subclass than
the 60%.
And that's, in fact, a lot of what pharmaceutical companies are doing is they're
trying to marry a diagnostic to the disease itself, the disease subtype itself.
So that if you can show that 90% of the people of this kind of subclass will
survive, you have to, by law, choose that diagnostic to make sure that the
person doesn't have the subclass before you give them the 60% drug.
Does that make sense?
Yes.
Yeah, it does.
The narrative has always been over the, you know, last few decades, stay out of
the sun.
Mm-hmm.
But recently, people have started saying, no, it's actually, you need to become
accustomed to the sun, and the real issue is people using sunscreen all the
time and then going out and getting burned.
Obviously, your situation is very different because you have a specific gene.
Yeah.
And I'm Irish.
Yeah.
That's the problem, right?
Yeah.
The genes of the people that lived in cloudy-ass places for hundreds of
thousands of years.
Right, exactly.
And my mother, when we were kids, I mean, I'm 64 years old, so when I was a kid,
you know, we'd go to the beach in Connecticut, and they'd smother me in, you
know, coconut oil.
Oh, yeah.
Right.
Yeah, baby oil when I was a kid.
Yeah.
Everybody had baby oil, and everybody got barbecued.
Yeah.
Plus, I worked in the, you know, in the fields as a kid for, you know, farm
labor.
And that's not good.
That wasn't good.
The burning, that's the real damage to the skin, and then it manifests itself
as cancer far later in life, right?
Right, right.
Yeah.
There's all these subtle, let's call them smoldering mutations that are waiting
for a second or a third hit to occur.
Right.
Or for, you know, instance, you get old enough so that your immune system is
kind of going wonky, and it no longer is able to take care of something that 20
years ago it would have been able to heal.
Right.
Healed perfectly well.
That makes sense.
So is there any, this narrative that you need to be in the sun more, and that
just don't get burned, is that reality?
Well, it depends on who, I mean, for someone like me, no.
But there are positives, obviously, for the sun.
I mean, vitamin D, as an example.
But they're also, you know, resetting your clock in the morning rather than
taking melatonin at night.
Go and just, you know, use glass to shield out the ultraviolet and get some
bright light.
It's the UV that's the danger.
It's not light.
So, for you, you don't ever just go sit in the sun?
Not anymore.
No, but I was...
Because of the melanoma.
Because I was an idiot when I was a kid.
I mean, I would go use tanning beds.
Yeah.
Because I thought, well, I wanted to look, you know, tan.
Right.
And I did tan back then.
But, you know, obviously can't anymore.
Yeah, you don't really see those anymore, do you?
No.
You do.
Maybe in like Seattle.
Some people do.
Yeah, there's, you know, I mean, I think there's obviously there's a benefit to
light.
I mean, I'm not saying don't go out and do it.
And, you know, I think as well, there'll come a day, and I was just talking
with some friends
of mine at dinner last night, is, you know, maybe with things like CRISPR, I
could rub a
CRISPR ointment on my body, it would fix the single point mutation in my skin.
And then I could enjoy the sun again.
Is that really potentially down the pipe?
Oh, yeah.
I think...
Oh, yeah.
No, I think we're...
How far away are we?
I think, honestly, I mean, people always say five years is sort of like this
horizon.
But, no, I really, I mean, I know people who are already developing systems for
delivering genes,
you know, RNA to cell.
I know that's a dirty word in some, but there are formulations of RNA that
probably won't
be as problematic as some of the things that maybe the COVID vaccine might have
done.
Right.
Yeah.
RNA right now, you say, and people clench.
Yes, exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But, I mean, your cells are full of RNA.
Right.
So, I mean, you can't get away from the fact that your cells are full of RNA.
It's just the messenger RNA.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But it's also the means by which they delivered it.
Mm-hmm.
Right?
I mean, the means by which it was delivered was a formulation of a nucleotide
that by itself
was meant to be something called an adjuvant.
An adjuvant is something which activates the immune system you want.
I mean, when you get a vaccination, you are co-injected with something that
hyperactivates
the immune system to say, "Come hither."
Right.
And most of the pain that you get from an injection is not the vaccine itself.
It's the adjuvant.
Right.
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And so the problem with this was that it turned your whole body into like a
spike protein
factory.
Yeah.
Well, at least locally.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I've read some of the work.
But not always locally, right?
Because they didn't aspirate with a lot of people?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't think they aspirated with anybody.
They didn't with the president on TV.
But if you get infected by a virus, it's over your whole body anyway.
Right.
So it's whether the spike protein itself was problematic.
And so, you know, I know I'll annoy somebody one side or the other by saying
anything around
this area and I'm not here to cause any controversy.
But, you know, your immune system works.
But if you can trick your immune system into getting ahead of the game, then
that's a good
thing.
The question is back to this cost benefit ratio.
Is the benefit to the larger statistical population worth it knowing that some
people are going to
be hurt by it or not?
That's the question.
So, for instance, you know, back to cancer and vaccines, there's a number of
cancer vaccines
that are coming down the pike that for people like me would be, I mean, given
that I get
something chopped off of me four times a year.
Really?
Oh, yeah.
You should see me.
I look like I've been in a war zone.
You know, some people say, oh, that's hot.
And that's the only thing that's hot.
Wow.
Someone's into cutters?
Yeah.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So that's so fascinating.
But is there another way that could potentially deal with those things other
than cutting
them off?
Or is that the only way to remove it from your system?
Right now, it has to be cut off.
So the issue is that once the melanoma, once these lesions are on your skin,
they will expand?
Yes.
Luckily, most of mine are what have been called surface spreading.
Although one of mine was what's called a nodal, which basically dives right in.
And believe it or not, my dog found it and was sniffing at it on my arm.
Really?
And like started like scratching at it and it stopped bleeding.
You know, I'll show you the scar.
What kind of dog do you have?
Well, this was 15 years ago.
He was a Pomeranian.
But, you know, you can see the scar there.
Oh, that's crazy.
And it wouldn't stop bleeding.
And so, you know, I went in and had it looked at.
And they said another week and it would have metastasized.
Yeah.
Wow.
Yeah.
What a great dog.
He was great.
Yeah, he was great.
But, you know, there are, so for instance, if you can catch most of these
cancers early,
then that's what's important.
So I think probably one of the most important, let's say, changes to our
medical system that
could be initiated would be, frankly, the use of things like MRI, not CT scans,
because
CT scans are known to cause cancer.
Which is so crazy.
Yeah.
Like, when did we figure that out?
I mean, there was like a big study just published recently that said, here's
what happens
to people once CT scans were implemented and you see this sudden spike in the...
Oh.
I mean, again, it's this cost-benefit ratio.
If you didn't have it, certain people wouldn't have, you know, wouldn't know
that they have
a giant tumor in there.
Right.
I mean, so for instance, I had, when I had kidney cancer, I was actually at a
restaurant
with friends doing a business deal actually.
And I went to the bathroom and it was blood.
And I said, okay, we got to go to the, you know, we got to go to the, you know,
to the
emergency room like now.
And then they did a CT scan and they see this, the brachial tree around my
kidney was just
a big diffuse mess.
And they came in and said, you've got, you've got cancer.
Did you have to have your kidney removed?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was, you know, it's okay.
I'm alive.
Nice to have two of them.
Yes, exactly.
I'm alive.
But, you know, it is, this early detection is important.
I mean, I was lucky that it hadn't metastasized yet.
It's called, it was called clear cell, renal cell carcinoma.
But, you know, so surveying the body and these companies that are out there
right now, which
do it, I think are really important because even if you are young and you have
no suspicion
you're going to have cancer, having that baseline against which you can compare
later changes
is important because I could do, for instance, a CT scan or an MRI of you.
And I find lots of little anomalies.
And they're generally in the field called phantomas.
There are these objects that may be worrisome, but we won't know that they're
worrisome.
And certainly I could do a biopsy of them and, you know, poke a needle into
your chest.
To pick out a piece of it.
But if I come back six months and it's changed, then maybe it's something we
need to go after,
you know, more seriously.
So getting those kinds of regular scans, I think, is probably one of the more
important things
that could be done, but not by a CT scan.
Which is crazy because we're doing them for so long.
Yeah.
Do they still do CT scans, though?
Because it's necessary.
It's necessary for certain things.
Right.
Which is letting people know this might cause cancer.
It's just like, yikes.
Yeah.
But maybe, for instance, there'd be a way to treat someone with a drug ahead of
time that
would minimize the effect of the CT scan.
Right?
So that, you know, because the CT scans are generally causing oxidative damage.
And so if you could provide a local antioxidant, and I'm not saying that
something like this
exists.
Right.
That's a bit of a naive statement.
But if you could do that locally to the area that's being imaged or to the
whole body,
then maybe CT scans could be lessened in their problematic outcomes.
I would say innovative and hopeful.
Okay.
Yes.
With naive.
Yeah.
I don't think it's naive because you're recognizing the issue.
Right.
Thank you.
So, well, this was also a problem with x-rays, right?
Oh, yeah.
Like x-ray technicians.
Yeah.
Like, I've seen some of those images of people's hands because the technician
used to have to
use their own hand to check to make sure that the x-ray was functional.
Right.
And over the years, they go, "Hey, what the fuck is wrong with my hand?"
And then they realize, "Oh, boy."
Right.
Yeah.
Well, it's interesting because what's happening with x-rays or CT scans is a
fast forward of
the kind of random damage that causes cancer in the first place.
And so because it's random, let me kind of go back a little bit as to why does
cancer happen
in the first place.
So let's go way back in evolution to the first time that there were single
cells versus the
first time that two cells met each other and said it was better to join forces
and cooperate
rather than to divide at each other's expense.
So in the process of that happening, those two cells came together or three or
four cells,
they basically said, "Together we're better than alone."
But there were actually social compacts and contracts that at the genetic level
were being
formed between all of these cells.
And so as things got more and more complex, more and more complex contracts
were formed
to the point at which what could happen is that any one of the breaking of a
complex contract
could actually then initiate a cascade that becomes cancer.
So rather than we thinking of cancer as being a forward progression in
evolution, it's actually
another way to think about it is that it's a devolution back to the core fire
of the desire to divide.
And so by breaking the contracts, by breaking the controls on the system,
cancer is allowed to blossom.
So the problem is that every tissue type, whether your lung or brain or
whatever, has a whole
different ecosystem of contracts that have been formed.
And so there's no one-size-fits-all drug that will kill off all cancers because
the contracts are different.
It's not like you can bring in a lawyer and fix, you know, agricultural
contracts versus maritime or whatever.
Yeah.
So that's the, you know, you have to have a flexible enough mindset because if
you get stuck in this,
it's a forward evolution as opposed to that it's a breaking of contracts.
You might miss out on an opportunity for how to develop a therapy or a drug
that would help people.
One of the things that I wanted to ask you, I don't even know if you know
anything about this,
but is there a connection between IVF and the amount of, because you have to
take some pretty extreme hormones.
There's a lot of stuff that women have to take.
Is there a connection between that and hormonal related tumors?
I honestly don't know.
So I don't want to opine and have half my colleagues send me emails tomorrow
scolding me.
Okay, good.
Well, I'm glad you answered that way.
I was told by someone who I really trust that there is.
And then we tried to Google it and it said there's not, but that's not
surprising.
Probably there hasn't been the right kind of study yet.
And if there is not, there should be.
I mean, certainly any hormonal imbalance is not a good thing.
I mean, you imbalance the metabolism of the system and you can.
Right.
I mean, so for instance, back to my specific disease with mid-F, there's all
kinds of things
like N-acetylcysteine, betaine, all these other drugs that are out there for
longevity.
Well, if I look into the metabolism of what my cancer is, every single one of
those is a disaster for me.
It accelerates.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Not good.
Not good.
So, because there's all these feedback mechanisms.
Right.
I mean, you know, people often say, you know, scientists are not religious.
There's nothing that inspires more awe in me than knowing the complexity of the
cell and knowing the complexity of life.
Right.
And seeing all this feedback and mechanism and knowing that underneath that is
a universe with particles, et cetera, that enabled something like us to exist.
I just sit in awe of that.
Well, yeah, it's awe-inspiring for sure.
I mean, anybody who doesn't think it is is not paying attention or they're
purposely being ignorant.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, you get a lot of that though.
Oh, yeah.
Well, that's okay.
You know, teachers are here to hopefully teach and not preach.
Hopefully.
Yeah.
Because of your specific type of cancer and your situation, like, do you have
to like very closely monitor your diet?
I probably shouldn't eat as much meat as I do.
Meat?
Yeah.
Well, because, you know, fats and a lot of them, the fats dissolve a fair
number of toxins.
You know, it's not necessarily a good thing.
I mean, that's been relatively well shown that too much meat as opposed to, I'm
not advocating vegetarianism.
I think there's a happy medium.
Mm-hmm.
I mean, we grew up in an environment where we had both.
I mean, we're omnivores.
Mm-hmm.
And we succeeded, I think, because we're omnivores as a society, as a, you know,
as a civilization.
So, but, you know, charred meat, for instance.
That's the issue though, isn't it?
Yeah.
Isn't it burnt?
Yeah.
I mean, it's carcinogens.
It's a, it's a witch's brew of nastiness that tastes good.
But, you know, the reason why it tastes good is because the humans who survived
learned to use fire to kill off the bacteria in rotten meat.
And so, the flavor of that probably was engineered into our evolution.
But again, it's a cost benefit.
But didn't the cooking of it also allow us to absorb more protein?
Um, I'm not sure about that.
I believe so.
Okay.
That could be.
I believe that's the case, that cooking meat actually allows it to be more
easily absorbed by the body.
It could be broken down more readily.
Yeah.
But certainly it kills bacteria.
So, you know, day-old or three-day-old deer.
Right.
You know, that you just killed.
We're not a bear.
Or not, yeah.
Yeah.
So, you know, I mean, yeah, we're not vultures that seem to have digestive
systems that can handle all of that.
Mm-hmm.
So, you should eat less meat.
What else?
Do you avoid sugar, which seems to be a real problem with cancer?
Yeah.
I avoid, yeah, I avoid too much sugar.
Yeah.
Thanks for this, by the way.
Is that sugar-free?
No.
But it's okay.
That one's not?
No, it's okay.
The sugar-free ones have stuff in them that are just as bad as xylitol and all
the others.
What about Zevia?
Yeah.
That would be good.
Is Stevia bad for you?
I don't think so.
I haven't seen anything on that.
But, you know, I mean, look, like I said, I'm 64.
It's way too late.
And every time that, let's say, scientists make some grand prediction of what's
good or bad,
five years later we find and update what it should have been.
I mean, I often say this, and this is true.
The goal of science or scientists is to be right today, even wrong today, but
right or tomorrow.
Because we're always back checking what the results are and what they mean in
the context of a bigger picture.
I like how you say good science because that's part of the problem is that ego
gets attached to ideas that have already been discussed and published.
Right.
And then people are very reluctant to accept new evidence that's contrary to
that.
Yeah.
I mean, it's always, as I often say, you know, in the context of something I
know we'll get to later, it's the data off the curve, which is more important
than what we already predict.
You know, predictions are great.
But when there's a data point off the curve, at least in my lab, that's where
we spend the most time at our lab meetings is trying to figure out why that
data points off the curve.
Is it because the machine was wrong?
It was a, you know, it was a glitch or does it mean something that we need to
make sense of?
And that's, of course, where all advances come from in the sciences is by the
fact that the data off the curve, somebody was curious enough about what it
meant to go after it and then say, ah, okay, now I, now that I've stepped back
and see the bigger picture, now I can create a model that incorporates that
data point off the curve and why it happened.
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One of the reasons why I was really excited to have this conversation with you
about the research that you do is that I think it's really important to illuminate
to the general public the sheer scope of the task of trying to figure out what
is going on in all these different things that can go wrong and right in the
human body.
Yeah.
And that it requires this fucking insane amount of work.
Yep.
Yep.
Many, many, many, many people.
And, you know, and then the amount of data that had to be collected now.
And so here's the difference is that, you know, there's data, there's evidence,
there's conclusions and proof.
And that's an uphill climb.
But proof, the next one up is meaning.
My lab has been largely responsible, at least partly responsible for the data
deluge that's out there in the world, both in how to do tissue biopsy analysis,
how to do single cell analysis, etc.
And, you know, data felt good for a while.
It was like this, you know, this feedback loop of, oh, wow, I can get all this
data.
And then suddenly you look at it and you go, well, what the fuck does it mean?
And so humanity has this habit of backing itself into a corner and then
suddenly finding this eureka moment that gets it out.
And so our eureka moment about two years ago was artificial intelligence, where
suddenly I had the ability.
So normally I would collect all this data and go, okay, well, it seems myelid
suppressor cells are important here and T regulatory cells are important here.
Okay.
I get on the phone or send an email to whoever the local expert is either on
Stanford campus or around the world and try to get some information from them.
But then now you're dealing with hundreds of cell types, each individually of
which have thousands of variations themselves.
And each subtle variation means something.
And there's no expert for any of that.
But AI can be, at least in part, that expert.
So suddenly I have 22 million papers published, you know, in all the fields of
science, you know, several tens of millions just in, you know, or several
millions just in immunology alone.
And AI can be the sleuth for me, can be both the angel and the devil on my
shoulder that can make sense of things in ways that I never would have been
able to before, especially with agentic AI.
So we, for instance, in my lab have developed an agentic AI that is basically
an immune, an immunologist scientist in a box.
We can give it the raw data and we can pose a question in natural language.
And then we say, hey, make sense of this and turn it into a network.
Normally that would have taken a graduate student along with a couple of postdocs
months and months and months to put it all together.
Now in three hours, we can get pictures and hypotheses of how all that data
fits together in ways that I never could have done before.
You know, at the beginning, in the beginning, it did a lot of hallucinations,
which you probably heard about in AI.
But my answer to my colleagues is some of my best students hallucinate.
Right?
Right.
And so, but, you know, humans still in the loop.
And so with all of this together, now we can make meaning out of the data.
And we can skip a lot of the intermediary steps and speed it up.
And it's just getting better.
I mean, we, for instance, have put in a couple of papers now where, so for
instance, in where my special, one of my recent specialties is,
what's called the tumor immune interface.
So you have the tumor, you have the immune system, which is coalescing on, you
know, near.
And then in some cases, the tumor creates a boundary, a barrier between itself
and the immune system, where there might be certain kinds of cells that the
immune system, the tumor has told the immune system, ignore us.
We're not here.
And then, but what we now can do is there's, well, on the other side of when
you look at, let's say, complex patient populations, you find these things
called tertiary lymphoid structures.
So your body has 220 or so lymph nodes, okay?
And the lymph nodes are where the immune system makes decisions, let's say.
It turns out that in the middle of tumors, the body has evolved a mechanism to
create what essentially looks like a lymphoid structure in the middle of the
tumor.
It's sort of a forward camp of immune cells that the more of those you see in a
tumor, the better will be your outcome as a patient.
And so we used a cohort of colorectal cell, basically colon cancer patients,
where we looked at hundreds of biopsies.
And we did that pseudotime analysis where we looked for mature tertiary lymphoid
structures.
And then we looked for immature, slightly less mature, even more less mature,
et cetera.
And we were able to backtrack to the cell types which need to come together
that would then form the more mature.
What use is that?
It's a nice paper.
But it also now tells us what we might do to create more of these in a tumor.
Because we already know from multiple kinds of tumor types now that the more of
these tertiary lymphoid structures you have, the better off will be your
outcome with chemotherapy.
So it might be, for instance, that once we know that you have a disease like
this, we could give you some kind of therapy, a virus or what have you, that
goes and homes to the tumor,
which seeds the beginnings of these initiators with, there's these cytokines
that are produced that are necessary for initiating the formation of these
objects.
And so there's a huge benefit to that, but we never would have found those, in
my lab at least, without the AI.
Wow.
Because it basically did the work for us.
That's fascinating.
Yeah.
So are you seeing like a standard large language model or are you, do you have
like a specific structure that's built that interfaces with large language?
Correct.
So we use, well, we can use pretty much any of the LLMs, but right now we find
that OpenAI is the best, for us at least.
And then we create an agentic overlay, basically what's called, you probably
know, chain of thought, which is a series of questions.
So how we taught it was we basically came up with, here's a hundred kinds of
questions a scientist would ask about the immune system.
And then we tell ChatGPT, now create a thousand questions like this.
So, you know, it's artificial data or artificial questions.
We curate those to make sure that they're good.
Then we do a hundred hypotheses and we create thousands of types of hypotheses,
et cetera, in the same four tests that you might run.
So now from A to Z, we have an agentic AI that you give it raw data.
It knows what to do with the data.
It then generates hypotheses for you.
And then it literally tells you the kinds of experiments you should do next to
prove or disprove the hypothesis from the raw data.
It's a genius in the lab with you.
Exactly.
Is open AI learning from this agentic AI?
Oh, yeah.
So there's a mutually beneficial relationship.
Yeah.
I mean, we're not working with them directly on it.
But you use it.
We use it.
And because you use it with your AI.
Right.
It's benefiting from it.
And we first thought to turn it into a company because that's kind of one of
the things we do in my lab is if I've always thought that it's important to
give back to the taxpayer the money that they've invested in us.
And the best way to do that is commercialization.
I'm totally, you know, unapologetic about that, even though that got me in a
lot of trouble at Stanford in the early days when, you know, making money was,
you know, commercialization was evil.
And even at Stanford.
And so I think that that's an important process because scientists are good at
asking maybe the questions and coming up with solutions.
But scientists aren't the best at commercializing it and turning it into a
product that can be used or testing it, you know, in large communities.
So the AI that we developed, we thought, okay, well, maybe we can do this.
We thought, you know what, AI is moving so fast.
Why don't we just give this to the community?
Why don't we open source this?
We can use it for maybe specific targeted purposes, but we're basically going
to publish the whole thing on GitHub to let other people use it.
Because we've seen other people make claims about stuff that they've already
made and it's like, oh, ours is better.
So why don't we just put it on GitHub and let people learn from it?
The commercial, the resistance of the commercialization, what was the initial
argument?
So back when I was a grad student in the 80s, basic research as opposed to
translational research was considered the height of intellectual desire, right?
Basic research and we're not here to make money, we're here to discover things.
And that's important.
And nearly every major discovery and every major therapy in the world came from
basic research.
But then, you know, there were limits to how much money you could give to basic
research and then there was a desire at a certain point to say, hey, are you
going to do anything about this?
You know, are you going to make it?
So translational research became a push.
So there's a guy at Stanford by the name of Paul Berg who won the Nobel Prize
for recombinant DNA way back in the day.
And Paul came up with this concept, you know, bench to bedside, meaning that we
don't have to be either or.
We can be part of an arc.
And Stanford wanted to be and enable within the medical school both the basic
research, which we were great at, as well as bringing it directly to the
patients as well.
So to link clinicians and the desires of clinicians with the basic researchers.
I mean, most scientists would be happy just to study anything.
You know, just point me at something and I'll be happy if I can get interested
in it.
So, and we're no more happy than when somebody recognizes the value of what we
do.
Right.
But basic research was sort of the height and there was a push against anybody
trying to commercialize.
So when I started as an assistant professor, so I started as a grad student.
I went to MIT to work with this guy, David Baltimore, who won the Nobel for
reverse transcriptase.
And then I wanted to come straight back to Stanford because I already felt that
it was a positive environment for commercialization.
My bosses, my former bosses, mentors, Len and Lee Herzberg, had two of the
biggest patents at Stanford.
They had the fluorescence activated cell sorter and then what are called humanized
antibodies, which brought in hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to
Stanford.
And actually, they gave personally most of their own money away.
They kept enough to survive, but then they gave most of the money away and they
ran their own lab off of a lot of that money.
So I had learned from them about how to still do basic research, but commercialize
on the side.
And so I wanted to bring that back.
But the department that I came into, the Department of Pharmacology at the time,
I was warned by many professors, don't commercialize that.
And I ignored them and I went and started a company that went public on NASDAQ.
And many of those same professors came back to me, you know, years later and
sitting in my office asking me how to start a company.
Why did you, was it just a courageous decision to ignore them?
What did you, was it instinctual?
It just was because I couldn't see the NIH funding what I wanted to do.
So I had developed a way, this will sound scary, but I developed a way to use
retroviruses and make libraries of retroviruses to reverse the process of
evolution in a way that rather than viruses hurting the cell, I set it up so
that viruses would help the cell.
And once they helped the cell, I would figure out what they did.
And so we sold hundreds of millions of dollars of targets that way, using retroviral
libraries to basically find targets and use some of the benefits of viruses,
but to our advantage.
Just the concept of reversing evolution is fascinating because it comes with,
there's so many ethical implications.
But if you didn't have any of those.
Yeah.
And you could do that large scale.
Well, I had developed in David's lab, along with this guy Warren Pear, a means,
it's called the 293T retroviral producer system.
It was a way to make large numbers of these viruses very quickly.
It really followed on the work of this guy Richard Mulligan, who'd also been a
postdoc with David Baltimore, who developed what was called the 3T3 based retroviral
production system.
And he developed it in Paul Berg's lab at Stanford.
So there's a lot of sort of, you know, interbreeding here.
But the problem with that was it took three months.
So I had brought with me a cell line called 293T that I introduced to the lab
and said, hey, maybe we could use this to make viruses quickly.
I won't go into the details of why, but we could do it in three days rather
than three months.
And so that now, I mean, tens of thousands of labs use that worldwide.
And it probably generates the most money for me every year over any of my other
inventions.
Just because Stanford, rather than patenting it, licenses it.
And licenses are forever, whereas patents have a 17 year lifespan.
So Stanford made a good choice there.
So do you think it was just a bias, academic bias?
Like we shouldn't be focusing on money.
We should be focusing on the work.
Yes.
And they missed the forest for the trees.
Right.
But then people, I mean, they eventually learned, you know, I mean, and it's,
it, I, I wouldn't say that it's the, it's the way that people think anymore.
Um, but it, there's still a little bit of a, I mean, you shouldn't walk into
the lab thinking I'm here to make money.
That's what they're worried about.
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
And so Stanford in the early days set up very clear lines about once you start
a company and you license the patent or the idea to the company, you can still
be involved with the company, but there's not a pipeline of, uh, technology now
from your laboratory to that company.
So they set up, you know, uh, an oversight board for each, uh, of these
licenses that make sure that, you know, the students are not being abused, you
know, cause you don't want students, you don't want to be, you know, covertly
getting your students to do something that then you're going to walk behind a
back door and then hand, hand over to a company.
Patent it.
Patent it.
Yeah.
You know, so, you know, there's, but it's, it's, it's so interesting that there's
often very much a lot of worry that that's going to happen.
But frankly, more often is the case that the company doesn't need the inventor
anymore.
In fact, I can't tell you the number of times that once the company's set up,
they want nothing more to do with me because they have their own thing to do.
They don't want the crazy academic coming in and vetoing their ideas.
I mean, you know, there's, there's places for that where people like, you know,
Steve Jobs needs to hold on to the, the image of what he wants the company to
be, as opposed to, I would probably be fired from a company within a week
because I just don't like telling people tell me what to do.
That's just a fact.
Yeah.
So, where, where you're at right now with this cancer research, when will this
be applied in real world scenarios?
It already is.
It is.
Already is.
I mean, you know, I mean, look at who just won the Nobel Prize last year, David
Baker at Google with the, you know, ability to predict protein structure, et
cetera.
And protein structure.
Once you know the protein structure, now you can predict molecules that might
come into it.
So, go back to the stuff that I'm trying to do with looking at the complexities
of the dance of how the immune system talks or doesn't to cancer.
You know, if we can find a particular place that might be an Achilles heel
along the way towards the shutting down that is different, for instance, than
what the current drugs are, well, maybe we should aim at that.
There's so many more opportunities that are suddenly opening up in front of us
because the AI and the data is letting us look at a network of how the system
is working.
I mean, before it used to be, you'd look at a computer chip and you'd see just
a computer chip with a few wires.
But imagine now that you, as a scientist, have a microscope that's looking at
the complexities of the wiring diagram that's connecting this resistor to that
capacitor to that diode to this transistor.
That's where we are now.
And so, now, suddenly, we can say, "Well, I don't want to do that because it'll
kill the chip, but the chip is malfunctioning, so let me put here or put a
little bit of pressure there, and now I can reactivate the immune system or the
chip to work in the right way."
So, when you're talking about things like with your particular issue with melanoma,
when you're talking about CRISPR potentially developing some sort of...
a topical solution that you could put on that would fix whatever issue that you
have, is this something that this AI that you developed or this overlay of the
AI would actually assist CRISPR in figuring out how to create something like
this?
Yes.
Yeah, because maybe it's not one place I need to press, but two or three at the
same time.
Right.
And so, when you're talking about a complex feedback network, I mean, so, you
know, we're in Texas, so people do oil refinery.
You know, maybe you need to turn this valve here a little bit and that valve
there and that one there to make everything work just right because something's
wrong over there.
Mm-hmm.
And so, that's really what we're...
This is where AI has the, let's say, the omniscient view that no human can.
And that's what excites me about it is because I'm limited in how much I can
keep in my mind at any one time or no.
Right.
But with the right question, the prompt, the prompt engineering, and then with
the right backbone
structure behind the scenes that agentic AI is now, you know, providing, now I
have the ability to ask the questions and get answers in near real time.
And so, you know, I wish I was 30 years old again because I would move into
this area so fast and be...
I mean, I can already see with the work that we're doing dozens of potential
new target opportunities that last year didn't exist at all.
I hope I got good news for you.
With AI and with CRISPR, you might be 30 again.
Maybe.
Oh, I would love it.
I would love it.
I think that's on the...
I would love it.
I think that's on the menu in about two or three decades.
Mm-hmm.
I hope earlier.
Given we survive.
I'm just being...
Yeah.
No.
Realistic.
Realistic.
I don't even know if I'm being realistic.
Don't give false hope.
Well, yeah.
Don't give false hope.
But, I mean, with the exponential discoveries, the exponential increase in the
technological evolution just
that we've seen in our lifetime and then I think AI is some new thing that is
going to throw
all that into the...just a giant monkey wrench into the gears of our
understanding of how quickly
technology evolves.
Well, look at Neuralink as an example and Elon Musk's stuff and, you know, the
woman now
who can think her thoughts and make stuff happen because she's otherwise
paralyzed.
Right.
I think it was Neuralink that just showed some of these results.
So, fast forward, I mean, we're already in an exponential increase in what it
is that we're
going to be able to accomplish and AI will help us accomplish some of these
things faster.
I can see a time where, you know, I could maybe apply something.
I don't necessarily want a surgical implant but maybe some sort of net over my
head that
allows me to think through these problems.
And the AI becomes an adjunct to my thought processes.
Not only what it is that I think but maybe even provides information back to me,
back into
my system directly without having to go through the years so that I can much
more quickly come
to conclusions.
Now, there's all kinds of apocalyptic scenarios you could imagine with that as
well.
Of course.
I'm an optimist, at heart, perhaps, again, naively so.
Me too.
But I prefer that kind of an outcome because if you're not an optimist, then
there'll be
no progress because all you'll do is worry about disaster.
Yes.
That's a good point.
But also, realistically, we might be giving birth to a new life form.
Yes.
And I think we are.
A superior one.
And, you know, I welcome the day of our AI overlords running the government
rather than
hopefully in an unbiased way.
I've said that too.
And people get horrified because they're like, "Well, people are going to be
programming AI."
Up to a point.
Are you a sci-fi fan?
Yes.
Do you know the work of Ian Banks, the culture series?
No.
Neil Asher, the polity universe, as he calls it.
So basically, both of them postulate a future where AI more or less benignly
rules humanity.
When did they write this stuff?
Oh, probably 10, 15 years ago, but it's still ... But Neil Asher still has
stuff coming out
regularly.
They're both ... Ian Banks unfortunately died of cancer about 10 years ago,
Scottish writer.
Neil Asher is still alive and writes regularly and his stuff ... They're both
great, full of
ideas.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: Check it out.
Neil Asher: And ... but the AIs are also hilarious.
I mean, it's not like ... I mean, they get into their own hijinks along the way,
and some
of them are dark and rogue.
And so they're a lot of fun to read.
And Ian Banks especially is hilarious in his writing style.
You would love it.
Neil Asher: So the idea of a benign AI or a benevolent AI ruling over us.
Neil Asher: I think people are horrified by that, but yet at the same time,
constantly terrified
by human corruption, which is ubiquitous.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: Yes.
Neil Asher: And ubiquitous in America, where we're supposed to be the torch
bearer for the
greatest experiment in self-government the world has ever seen.
Neil Asher: Mm-hmm.
Neil Asher: This is us.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: And we're corrupt as fuck.
Neil Asher: Exactly.
Neil Asher: Because it's humans.
Neil Asher: Because humans are kind of gross in a lot of ways.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: At least some of us.
Neil Asher: That's because we live in a scarcity society.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: And if AI enables a post-scarcity, maybe we have nothing to do but
sit around
and try out various new drugs.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: Or enjoy things.
Neil Asher: Well, this is where we get into socialism, because a lot of people
think that
one of the reasons why we're in a scarcity society is because small groups of
people have gathered
up most of the resources-
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: ... and are in constant control of them.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: And especially when you deal with resources that are the Earth's
resources.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: Like, who are you-
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: ... to be sucking the blood of the Earth out and selling it for $100
a barrel.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: Right.
Don't get me started-
Neil Asher: Don't get me started either.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: No, but I mean, that again, my optimism is that, you know, with
enough push and pull,
Neil Asher: AI will enable us to move towards a post-scarcity environment.
Neil Asher: I think so too.
Neil Asher: And I think in doing so, it'll expose vampires, because the
resistance to-
Neil Asher: Yes.
Neil Asher: ... exposing this is going to be fantastic.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: And it's going to be very interesting to watch because they have no
choice but to
be transparent.
Neil Asher: And they have no choice but to start using AI.
Neil Asher: Ah.
Neil Asher: So you're going to see AI is going to be inculcating itself across
society in various ways where it becomes indispensable, and then it will start
to move up the food
chain, where eventually even the CEO who's probably, you know, the psychopath
in chiefs-
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: ... or CEOs.
Neil Asher: We know that the studies have shown that there's more psychopathic
tendencies
in leaders than there are in followers.
Neil Asher: And you know about corporate environments because of just selling
inventions.
Neil Asher: Yes.
Neil Asher: There's...
Neil Asher: That's real.
Neil Asher: Oh, it's...
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: It's real and it's weird.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: It's weird when you encounter them.
Neil Asher: When you encounter like complete sociopathic CEOs.
Neil Asher: But look at how...
Neil Asher: I mean, I'll probably get in trouble for seeing this, but I don't
care.
Neil Asher: This is the Joe Rogan show where, you know...
Neil Asher: You're probably in trouble just for being here.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: Oh, I already am.
Neil Asher: It's okay.
Neil Asher: I don't care.
Neil Asher: So, you know, imagine two tribes.
Neil Asher: One tribe is relatively, you know, civilized and just wants to live
in harmony
with its environment.
Neil Asher: Another has a psychopathic leader who can enrage his followers of
the other tribe's
people to attack the other one.
Neil Asher: But there's a gene set that makes a person, you know, psychopathic.
Neil Asher: And also a gene set that probably makes somebody more likely to be
a follower.
Neil Asher: Well, which genes survive?
Neil Asher: Right?
Neil Asher: We know.
Neil Asher: Right?
Neil Asher: And suddenly now...
Neil Asher: But when those tribes were separated and independent, it was
perfectly fine.
Neil Asher: But now you live in an environment where we don't know where the
edge of one
tribe begins and another ends.
Neil Asher: And suddenly you have this environment where psychopathic
individuals can move freely
and aren't obvious.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: Right?
Neil Asher: Now, again, I'm sure there's some social scientists who will send
me a boatload of
emails saying how stupid that idea is.
Neil Asher: I don't think it is stupid.
Neil Asher: But I think also when you're dealing with office environments and
the culture of a specific
corporation, humans have an ability to act like they're supposed to act in that
world.
And it makes it very difficult to discern who's a sociopath.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: Because you're all kind of following an act.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: Yes.
Neil Asher: The rules.
Neil Asher: There are the rules that you're supposed to follow.
Neil Asher: And then there's the edge of the rules.
Neil Asher: Now, but I've lived at the edge of the rules.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: I mean, if I followed my rules as told to me by the chairman of my
first department,
Neil Asher: then I wouldn't be here today.
Neil Asher: So I ignored him.
Neil Asher: And I basically found I got permissions from the deans to do what I
did.
Neil Asher: And they basically overruled the chairman.
Neil Asher: But that's only because I dared to do it.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: Because you have to believe in the value of what you're trying to
do.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: Well, that's, see, this is the problem that I have with
corporations because I think as a structure,
Neil Asher: when you have something that has an obligation to its shareholder
to consistently make more money every quarter,
Neil Asher: every year, constantly, you're in a constant growth cycle.
Neil Asher: Then you have to do whatever it takes.
Neil Asher: Yes.
Neil Asher: Like you have to survive.
Neil Asher: If you want to survive as a CEO, we don't want some fucking kumbaya
shithead ruining our stock profile.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: Or portfolio.
Neil Asher: Get to work, bro.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: Get shit done.
Neil Asher: And if you want to survive and succeed as a CEO, it encourages sociopathy.
Neil Asher: The stock market, as valuable as it is, is the great whitewashing
and money laundering system that allows you to separate your morals
Neil Asher: from what it is that the stock market is doing to the people.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: Unfortunately.
Neil Asher: And if you're part of a corporation, there's this diffusion of
responsibility because
Neil Asher: The whole machine might be doing evil, but I'm a good guy.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: I just work in this department.
Neil Asher: I'm an unapologetic capitalist.
Neil Asher: You know, unlike many of my colleagues.
Neil Asher: Good for you.
Neil Asher: At Stanford.
Neil Asher: I mean, it's like you do it because it's the best thing for now.
Neil Asher: But I, you know, I hope to live in a world where there will be this
kind of post-scarcity environment where we do let AI do a lot of the stuff that
would otherwise be the place where corruption manipulates the systems.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: My only fear with AI really is automation and the complete removal
of a gigantic swath of the American workforce.
Neil Asher: Yes.
Neil Asher: And the global workforce.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: That scares the shit out of me.
Neil Asher: That's coming.
Neil Asher: That's why it scares the shit out of me is because I think it's
inevitable and I just don't think any solution other than universal basic
income is going to remedy that.
Neil Asher: And even that, the problem I have with that is that goes against
human nature.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: And that's a problem and it removes people's identity, removes
their sense of worth.
Neil Asher: Mm-hmm.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: I agree.
Neil Asher: No, I don't.
Neil Asher: I'm in some ways happy that I'm 64 years old and I'm not going to
have to deal with some of the problems.
Neil Asher: I think you're going to have to deal with it, dude.
Neil Asher: I think you're going to live.
Neil Asher: I know.
Neil Asher: Thank you.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: No, I know.
Neil Asher: Also, you're privy to a lot of information and you're going to know
when things are really valuable and working.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: When you think of the potential for AI, I think there's a balance,
right?
Neil Asher: There's a battle.
Neil Asher: I think there's a real problem with AI in terms of military
objectives.
Neil Asher: Mm-hmm.
Neil Asher: It's a real problem because it's not going to make moral and
ethical decisions.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: It's just going to say like, well, the decision, the clear answers.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: I'm programmed to do this.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: If you want me to succeed, I'll just kill everybody there and then
you'll have the land.
Neil Asher: You can get minerals out of it.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: That scares the shit out of me.
Neil Asher: You know, I think it should.
Neil Asher: And I don't know what the answer is, but there's plenty of people
working in the area.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: I mean, I try to keep to the positive aspects of what I think AI
can do in science.
Neil Asher: I mean, for instance, it's enabled me to take my lab from 30 people
down to six.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: I don't need to produce.
Neil Asher: I mean, so it's actually already reduced the workforce in my own
lab.
Neil Asher: Hmm.
Neil Asher: Because I don't need to produce any more data anymore.
Neil Asher: I need to make meaning of the data.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: I think every invention that's been truly groundbreaking throughout
human history
has scared people and they've worried about the potential negative side effects,
including
the printing press, right?
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: There's a lot of people in the beginning that said, "This should
not be a thing.
This is terrible.
This is going to ruin society."
Neil Asher: Hmm.
Neil Asher: People thought books were going to ruin things.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: There's a lot of people that thought writing was going to ruin your
memory.
You shouldn't write.
Neil Asher: Oh, really?
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: Some crazy thoughts that people had in terms of things that turned
out to be
incredibly beneficial, but they looked at the downside of it and go, "This
could ruin
us all."
Neil Asher: Well, I, you know, I mean, we know about these glasses and AIs and
other things
that would be sort of omniscient of your environment and therefore allow you to
remember, you know, where did I leave my keys?
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: Today.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: Let me rewind.
Neil Asher: Let me rewind.
Neil Asher: My personal hard drive.
Neil Asher: I don't, I would want that, but I don't want it uploaded into meta.
Neil Asher: You don't want anybody in control of it and then offering you ads
for things.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: You know?
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: You know, maybe you have a thought like, "Boy, wouldn't Ho Ho be
nice right now?"
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: You know, and then like, "Why don't you buy some Ho Ho's?"
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: They're on sale right now.
Neil Asher: But I think what's interesting about AI is, you know, we see it as
a tool as opposed
to actually pretty soon it will be a colleague and then pretty soon it will be
an entity
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: that maybe has rights.
Neil Asher: And we already see it talking about people saying, "Well, does AI
have consciousness?"
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: I mean, whether it has consciousness in terms of the consciousness
that some people
think about as, you know, embodied in space-time as opposed to thinking and
looking like consciousness
is almost irrelevant to me.
I'm looking for a partner that I can interact with and work with or help me.
Neil Asher: Mm-hmm.
Neil Asher: So whether it's conscious or not or whether it acts like it's
conscious doesn't
matter so much to me as to whether or not I can use it and work with it and it
can, you
know, I'm an introvert as it turns out.
Neil Asher: I would love to have somebody that I can talk to endlessly about
just what it is
that I'm interested in as opposed to having to deal with small talk at a party.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: No, I get it.
Neil Asher: I get it.
Neil Asher: When you think about the evolution of this stuff, one of the things
that kind
of freaks me out is it seems like integration is our only option for survival.
Neil Asher: Mm-hmm.
Neil Asher: And that what we're looking at right now when we see just a normal
biological person
like you or I without any sort of electronic interface that's permanently a
part of us, I
Neil Asher: I think that is going to be as weird as someone today who doesn't
have a cell phone.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: I agree.
Neil Asher: And I think that's a really-
Neil Asher: It's coming.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: The cell phone is like the best now, like Elon has famously said,
we're already
cyborgs.
Neil Asher: Mm-hmm.
Neil Asher: We just carry it with you.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: And eventually it will-
Neil Asher: It'll be way more integrated.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: This is super inefficient to be actually have to go look things up
and use your thumbs and type
up stuff.
Neil Asher: Mm-hmm.
Neil Asher: It's just going and even talking to it and asking a question and
waiting for the
response.
Neil Asher: Mm-hmm.
Neil Asher: That's inefficient in comparison to a human neural interface that
allows you to
instantaneously access large language models.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: Like that.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: Not only that, but then why do we have a hundred and I mean, how
many different
fucking languages do we have?
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: I don't even know.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: Thousands?
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: And dialects and all of that.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: Everybody with a chip gets.
Neil Asher: Mm-hmm.
Neil Asher: And then boy.
Neil Asher: Mm-hmm.
Neil Asher: Boy, do we have a soup of ideas flowing around and no problem with
language
barriers, no problem with cultural barriers.
Neil Asher: But then do you have a problem with the edge of who you are versus
who the
other person is?
Neil Asher: I don't think that.
Neil Asher: I think that goes away.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: I think that goes away and we become a hive mind.
Neil Asher: Mm-hmm.
Neil Asher: That's what I was getting at.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: I think that's ultimately the evolution of human beings.
Neil Asher: And look, I know you've done a lot of work with UAPs and the like.
Neil Asher: And I think you've done some really fantastic work.
Neil Asher: And you're very objective in your analysis of what this whole
situation is.
Neil Asher: When I look at artificial intelligence and I look at this thing
that's clearly taking
place right now.
Neil Asher: And I see what human beings are like in comparison to what they
used to be like.
Neil Asher: Mm-hmm.
Neil Asher: And especially when you look at like ancient hominids.
Neil Asher: The alien archetype, this thing that everybody sees supposedly or
one of the many
different ones.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: That kind of looks like what we seem to be going in the direction
of being.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: Which is one of the reasons why I find it so odd.
Neil Asher: So, if you just for a moment take UAP and aliens out or ET or interdimensionals
or whatever it is you want to call them out of the question and fast forward
what humanity
is going to do.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: In a thousand years.
Neil Asher: And our ability to expand into the local galaxy.
Neil Asher: We're not going to go as ourselves.
Neil Asher: We're going to go as AI conjoined entities.
Neil Asher: An avatar.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: And so when you go somewhere, let's say we don't have warp drive,
you're not going
to send yourself.
Neil Asher: You're going to send an AI intermediary who's going to establish
humanity or whatever
Neil Asher: Is we think humanity will be in a thousand or five thousand years
in that local
environment.
Neil Asher: And so I think the extent to whatever it is that UAP are here today
is somebody else's
civilization's version of just this.
Neil Asher: Hmm.
Neil Asher: And that you wouldn't, the principle us behind whatever this is
that we might be allegedly,
et cetera, dealing with, isn't the thing that's going to show up.
Neil Asher: You know, so to the extent that Neil deGrasse Tyson is right about
anything,
Neil Asher: The person who gets on the ship at the beginning or whatever it is
that sends
it off is not the same thing that gets off on the other side.
Neil Asher: But you're going to send missionaries or intermediaries or probes
or whatever.
Neil Asher: And then if you're going to interact with the locals, you're going
to make something
that looks more or less like the locals rather than something that whatever it
was that you
were a million years ago.
Neil Asher: Does that make sense?
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: I get what you're saying.
Neil Asher: So you make something that looks like the locals so that they're
more likely
to accept that it's a real thing?
Neil Asher: That's a real thing.
Neil Asher: But you're not going to make something that looks like a human
because then you'd
mistake it as a human.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: But you might make something that looks more or less enough like a
human,
but enough like an alien that you're going to recognize it as an alien.
Neil Asher: And again, I'm just speculating.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: So the Daily Mail don't say, you know, put an article out tomorrow.
Neil Asher: Oh, they're going to do it anyway.
Neil Asher: They're going to do it anyway.
Neil Asher: They're going to do it anyway.
Neil Asher: The stuff that I'm seeing supposedly having quoted a saying is
ridiculous.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: They got me too.
Neil Asher: They get everybody.
Neil Asher: It's the nature.
Neil Asher: How did you even get involved in this?
Neil Asher: Let's bring it to that.
Neil Asher: Like, so your...
Neil Asher: What was your initial introduction to this?
Neil Asher: Did you have any interest in the idea of UAPs or UFOs?
Neil Asher: I mean, I had a general...
Neil Asher: And so once YouTube started becoming a thing and, you know, you're
clicking around
Neil Asher: And I said, oh, UFOs.
Neil Asher: That's kind of cool.
Neil Asher: You know, I read nothing but sci-fi.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: I mean, I'm, you know, pathetically narrow in that sense.
Neil Asher: And so I followed, you know, I followed the usual kinds of things
that you would see on the early days of YouTube.
Neil Asher: And I came across this thing called the Atacama Mummy.
Neil Asher: You probably knew that little, that little mummy that was claimed
to be an alien baby.
Neil Asher: Is this the Peruvian one?
Neil Asher: Yes.
Neil Asher: It was, no, Chilean.
Neil Asher: Okay.
Neil Asher: So this is the original one.
Neil Asher: The original one, long ago.
Neil Asher: Okay.
Neil Asher: And so I reached out to the people who were claiming to represent
the owner of the thing.
Neil Asher: And I said...
Neil Asher: What year was this?
Neil Asher: 2010, 2011.
Neil Asher: And I said, hey, I can tell you what it is.
Neil Asher: Why don't you, you know, I can tell you if it's human or not.
Neil Asher: If you would get me a piece of its...
Neil Asher: You know, first of all, send me some x-rays of the thing.
Neil Asher: So the first thing I did with those x-rays was it turned out that
at Stanford we had the world's expert who wrote the book on pediatric bone
disorders.
Neil Asher: Mmm.
Neil Asher: And I brought it to him, and I said, what do you think this is?
Neil Asher: And he said, hmm, well, I haven't really seen this before, but it
could be this gene, this gene, this gene, et cetera.
Neil Asher: He said, but here's...
Neil Asher: Oh, there it is.
Neil Asher: There it is.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: And so, yeah.
Neil Asher: It looks weird, doesn't it?
Neil Asher: Super.
Neil Asher: And so, um, so the expert told me, okay, I need this view of an x-ray,
this view, this view, this view.
Neil Asher: And so we got that and he came back and he said, okay, well, you
know, we need to get some DNA sequencing, he said.
Neil Asher: I said, okay.
Neil Asher: So we got a piece of the bone from actually the rib, and the rib
was important to use because that would be, I felt, an area that would be least
likely to be contaminated by bacterial, you know, degradation.
Neil Asher: And so I got a little bit of bone marrow out and I did the
sequencing.
Neil Asher: Long story short, I had to bring in, once I'd done that, there was
a lot of DNA that didn't make sense, but it was, it's old DNA.
Neil Asher: It wasn't that old actually, but it was degraded.
Neil Asher: So I had to bring in experts at Stanford who knew how to fix the
degradation.
Neil Asher: And then I had to bring in an expert in South American genetics,
who also happened to be at Stanford.
Neil Asher: And then we brought in a team of students, and then I brought in Roche
Diagnostics.
Neil Asher: I had sold a sequencing company to Roche about two, a few years
earlier.
Neil Asher: So I brought in the team that actually knew how to help me assemble
the genome.
Neil Asher: And then we published a paper which said it's human, it was a
female, and here are some mutations that it might, that might explain what it
looked like.
Neil Asher: They did have some mutations in gene.
Neil Asher: And then the UFO community hated me because I had disproven that as
not being a baby, not being an alien.
Neil Asher: But of course, that picture that you showed, I mean, it was
worldwide news, and literally the title of one of the things is Stanford Scientist
Sequences Alien Baby.
Neil Asher: And so, you know, and so, but the paper stands the test of time.
Neil Asher: Nobody's disproven what it is that I showed, despite the fact that
some people want to say that I was a CIA plant and I was paid off by the CIA,
etc.
Neil Asher: Of course.
Neil Asher: But what that had done was, that I didn't realize, but I kind of
hoped, was that it sent up a flag to a scientific community that already
existed that I wasn't aware of, of scientists who were deeply involved with the
government in the analysis of UAP.
Neil Asher: That I wasn't privy to.
Neil Asher: And so, literally about a month after the movie came out about that
thing.
Neil Asher: I got a knock at my door.
Neil Asher: And it was representative of the CIA and an aerospace company.
Neil Asher: Unannounced.
Neil Asher: And they said, we want to talk to you.
Neil Asher: And they wanted my help with a number of military and diplomatic
personnel who'd been, they claimed, harmed by things.
Neil Asher: They'd either heard stuff, etc.
Neil Asher: And long story short, the majority of the hundred or so people that
I had privy to their medical records ended up being the first of the Havana
syndrome patients.
Neil Asher: They'd heard things in their head, etc.
Neil Asher: But what they had done was they had shown me the data literally
that day in my office.
Neil Asher: They brought out the MRIs.
Neil Asher: They brought out the x-rays and the damage in the brain, etc.
Neil Asher: That was clear.
Neil Asher: I mean, it wasn't, it was not just data.
Neil Asher: It was evidence that something had happened.
Neil Asher: It wasn't somebody's story.
Neil Asher: It was evidence that was repeatable.
Neil Asher: And so that took us about three or four years to figure out what
they were.
Neil Asher: And it was at about the time that actually the Havana events were
occurring that we realized that all the symptoms of what it is that we were
seeing in this group of patients were matching what it was that the Havana
syndrome individuals had.
Neil Asher: So, in a way, that was good because that meant that those 90 or so
patients who matched, we could hand over to the national security people.
Neil Asher: And, you know, it became a real thing.
Neil Asher: And now there's like a DOD website that has anomalous health
incidents where people can come forward and report the stuff that they've got.
Neil Asher: And here's the ways you can use the Veterans Administration to seek
medical help.
Neil Asher: Whereas previously, they'd been shooed away as we don't want to
hear about this.
Neil Asher: What do they think it is?
Neil Asher: It's an energy weapon of some kind, a microwave or other energy or
gamma energy weapon.
Neil Asher: And that sounds, okay, that sounds crazy, except no one would admit
or no one would deny that we have the capability to do it.
Neil Asher: It's basically, if you take the front off your microwave and turn
it on and put your face near it, you'll get burned.
Neil Asher: So, this is just a way to direct the microwaves or sound waves.
Neil Asher: At specific individuals.
Neil Asher: At specific individuals.
Neil Asher: And do you think it was experimental?
Neil Asher: No.
Neil Asher: No.
Neil Asher: So, these are targeted people with specific intention to get those
people because they had some function that they wanted to...
Neil Asher: They wanted to get them out of the way.
Neil Asher: Oh, because they were in Havana.
Neil Asher: Because they were in Havana.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: But it's been used all over the world.
Neil Asher: You know, I still get emails from military personnel saying this
and this and this happened to me.
Neil Asher: Here's my medical records.
Neil Asher: And so, now I just...
Neil Asher: I know...
Neil Asher: They know that I'm a safe place to approach because then I know
where to send them on the inside.
Neil Asher: But what was interesting was that once we had set that aside and I've
advised the Senate Intelligence Committee and I've advised them...
Neil Asher: A house on things, I wrote a white paper for them years ago on what
I thought needed to be done.
Neil Asher: But what was interesting were the remaining 10 people who had, you
know, who didn't have Havana Syndrome but had a series of other problems.
Neil Asher: And several of them had said that part of their problem was
initiated because they'd come in contact with what they had claimed to be a UFO.
Neil Asher: By the way, I just noticed that you have a UFO on the wall behind
you.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: We're all in over here.
Neil Asher: That...
Neil Asher: So that got me introduced to what, you know, people like Jacques
Vallée, who you've had on the show, I think.
Neil Asher: Yes, a couple times.
Neil Asher: Great guy.
Neil Asher: Great.
Neil Asher: He became my mentor who essentially took me out of the wilderness.
Neil Asher: I could have gone down 20 different rabbit holes.
Neil Asher: And he lives in San Francisco and we would meet regularly and we
still meet regularly.
Neil Asher: And he basically gave me a formulation of how to think about this
that I never would have been able to get from 20 different, you know, or 100
YouTubes or what have you.
Neil Asher: And introduced me to the right people.
Neil Asher: That eventually led me to meet Lou Elizondo.
Neil Asher: And I actually, two weeks before that article came out in the New
York Times, met Lou in Crystal City overlooking the Pentagon and he showed me
the videos that were about to come out.
Neil Asher: And that was my first time that I had met him.
Neil Asher: And through all of them, I met Dave Grush and Carl Nell and Dave
and I are in regular contact.
Neil Asher: And I'm, you know, I mean, I just want to say up front, I hope that
the Trump administration understands the value of what David can bring to them
and put him in a position of authority that gives him not the ability
necessarily to make decisions, but to give the necessary information to the
right people.
Neil Asher: Because I think there's great commercial value here that is being
missed, not just the are we alone, etc.
Neil Asher: I think there's extraordinary commercial value.
Neil Asher: I mean, imagine a civilization that's a million years ahead of us.
Neil Asher: How many technology revolutions allow these objects to move as we
clearly see something motivating itself or maneuvering around the atmosphere?
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: So if we could scrape just the tiniest bit of understanding off of
the top of that, what would that do to change our own civilization?
Neil Asher: I mean, silicon, a grain of sand, makes us who we are today.
Neil Asher: Everything that is, that's around me right here is all run off of
silicon.
Neil Asher: Right?
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: Compute.
Neil Asher: But imagine that there's other inventions, other ways of
manipulating reality that we don't appreciate yet because our physics just isn't
there yet.
Neil Asher: If we can understand that.
Neil Asher: So the government might say, well, we need to keep this behind
closed doors for weaponization or we don't want to disrupt energy production or
what have you.
Neil Asher: That's fine.
Neil Asher: But maybe there's too much secrecy and that maybe that there's an
aspect of that that could be taken advantage of.
Neil Asher: So Carl Nell and I have gotten in positive arguments about this,
about that, well, it's not black and white that we keep something secret or we
put it into the public domain.
Neil Asher: Maybe there's a middle domain where you have a public private
partnership opportunity and actually that's now, Carl has now adopted this, at
least in part, that maybe companies come to the fore or investment form places
come to the fore where they will put money in as options to fund, let's say,
public scientists to come in behind the scenes with the right levels of clearances
to study stuff that would propel society forward again.
Neil Asher: But this is assuming two things.
Neil Asher: One, that we have actually recovered these things.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: And then another one is that it's from a society from somewhere
else that's far more advanced than we are today.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: Which might not be correct.
Neil Asher: It might not be that it's from somewhere else.
Neil Asher: It might be that it's from somewhere here.
Neil Asher: Mm-hmm.
Neil Asher: Or a dimension that we don't have access to.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: This is assuming that all this stuff is real.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: But when you're talking about the government and back engineering
of things, like, so the big argument, this is the narrative, the big argument
has been that they have recovered these things and that these things are now in
the hands of defense contractors.
Neil Asher: And that there's been misappropriation of funds, lying to Congress,
and it's always going to stay secret because if it didn't, everybody would go
to jail and everyone would get sued.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: Right?
Neil Asher: Is that fair?
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: I mean, that's fair.
Neil Asher: I mean, but I would say amnesty would be one way to...
Neil Asher: This is...
Neil Asher: Were you in the Age of Disclosure documentary?
Neil Asher: Briefly, yes.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: Okay.
Neil Asher: Which I thought was very good.
Neil Asher: Very good.
Neil Asher: And I can't wait for that to come out.
Neil Asher: How can I see it?
Neil Asher: I don't know how you can see it.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: It's not out yet.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: And I don't know why.
Neil Asher: Whoever it is, go Netflix.
Neil Asher: Yo, Ted, go buy that.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: It's really good.
Neil Asher: Yeah, exactly.
Neil Asher: It's really good.
Neil Asher: It's a great show.
Neil Asher: I mean...
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: And it has a number of officials.
Neil Asher: And I think I sent you guys some of the videos basically coming
forward.
Neil Asher: I mean, you know, Marco Rubio, our current Secretary of State.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: I mean, you saw him.
Neil Asher: Yeah, he's in it.
Neil Asher: He's in it like for like 10 minutes saying some remarkable things.
Neil Asher: You know, Senator Rounds, you know, you name it.
Neil Asher: More recently, Tulsi Gabbard.
Neil Asher: Yes.
Neil Asher: Coming out and saying, "Well, there's something going on."
Neil Asher: I think one of the most fascinating things is Hal Puthoff's
descriptions,
of descriptions rather, of what happened during the Bush administration,
Herbert Walker Bush.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: So in, I believe it was 1990, they came to Hal Puthoff and a bunch
of other experts
and said, "We would like you to, we want a numerical value placed on all the
positives and the negatives
of disclosure because we have required, we have acquired these crafts from
somewhere else.
We believe they're not of this world and we have not made them.
And we're talking about letting the general public know."
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: And while they overwhelmingly said that the positives were dwarfed
by the negatives.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: The negatives being banking, religion, government, societal
structure, everything
would fall apart if we knew we weren't alone.
Neil Asher: Not only were we not alone, but something is infinitely more
sophisticated than
us and might be responsible for us being here in the first place.
Neil Asher: In the first place.
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: Which is, that's where it gets super squirrely.
Neil Asher: Right, right.
Neil Asher: Well, you could imagine-
Neil Asher: The Book of Enoch and there's a lot of-
Neil Asher: I mean, I think it's a little bit overwrought as to what humanity's
reaction
will be.
Neil Asher: People are more worried today about putting food on the table than
they would be about,
you know, ethereal or supposed aliens.
Neil Asher: I mean, they would mostly, I think, on the assumption that they're
not going
to basically show up at your local Walmart and start, you know, interacting
with you.
Neil Asher: I think the fact of revealing that we're not alone is actually more
of a hopeful
thing to me, because, you know, how many TV shows right now are about the
apocalypse?
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: Of a thousand different varieties?
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: Wouldn't it be nice to know that somebody got beyond it?
Neil Asher: Yes.
Neil Asher: That there's not a cliff that we all have to walk over?
Neil Asher: Right.
Neil Asher: And if so, how do we not walk over the edge of the cliff?
Neil Asher: I mean, that to me is a hopeful outcome.
Neil Asher: Now, Hal and Eric and all the people are all good friends.
Neil Asher: Hal is probably, for all of the things that he says positively, is
probably
the tightest clam I've ever met in terms of making sure that he doesn't go over
the line.
Neil Asher: Yeah, he knows too much.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: That's the thing.
Neil Asher: He has to be very careful who he's talking to and what he says.
Neil Asher: Yeah.
Neil Asher: I like to mind-meld him the Spock thing where you find all the
information.
Neil Asher: But it's people like him and Jacques and Kit Green and a number of
others.
Neil Asher: And I sat around a table with them for several years, like every
twice a year.
Neil Asher: And I looked around the table and thought, the things that these
people know
Neil Asher: or claim to know, I want to know.
Neil Asher: And the opportunity that's here and why can't we get this
information out if
it's real?
Neil Asher: And so rather than arguing with people about the matter, that's,
for instance,
Neil Asher: why I created the Sol Foundation, which is a charitable group of
academics.
Neil Asher: I started it with David Grush and Peter Scafisch.
Neil Asher: David, of course, had to leave because he had governmental
responsibilities he wanted
to go take care of.
Neil Asher: And actually, we've now had for three years in a row a symposium,
first at Stanford,
and then at San Francisco, and the next one is now in Italy.
So I'm going to plug it, sol2025.org.
Neil Asher: Okay.
Neil Asher: You can go look if you want to go to Monica.
Neil Asher: Sol, S-O-L?
Neil Asher: S-O-L, as in the sun.
Neil Asher: 2025.org.
Neil Asher: .org.
Neil Asher: And the purpose of that was not to advocate that any of this is
real, but was
to create an environment within which academics or professionals or just lay
people interested
in the subject matter could come and talk about it in a very professional
manner.
Right?
Just to bounce around ideas, not to advocate for, you know, they're here or
they're reptilians
or they're this or they're that, but to like some of the things you raised,
what are the
ethical issues?
What are the religious issues?
Neil Asher: So we have put out a number of white papers, for instance, where we
had a member
of the Catholic hierarchy write a paper on the issues related to Catholicism
and religion.
We've had Timothy Gallaudet, who's actually on our advisory committee, talk
about USOs
and those issues.
We've talked about near space issues.
Peter is running a study on experiencers.
Not that the experiences are necessarily real, but what are the kinds of psychosocial
matters
that need to be considered for people who say that this has happened to them?
So there's a group in the UK called Unhidden, which is basically a bunch of
psychiatrists,
a group of professional psychiatrists who say, "Okay, well, there's a trauma
associated with
this."
Whether it's real or not, we don't know.
But what are the kinds of rules that we should or provisions that we should
provide to the
public and to psychiatrists?
So when somebody shows up at your doorstep, you know, in therapy and says this,
you don't,
you shouldn't immediately reach for the anti-hysteria or schizophrenia drugs.
Right, right.
I was lucky enough in my neighborhood, our next door neighbor, who moved in for
a while,
was the chair of psychiatry at Stanford.
And so we go over to have dinner with her and her husband.
And you know, like one of the first things that she says, "Hey, what do you do,
blah,
blah, blah."
And I happened to mention the UFO thing and she just sort of like sat back in
her seat.
Okay.
Oh, you might be a kook.
Okay.
But it wasn't, but it took, you know, a year or so until she finally realized
that
I wasn't and then I was approaching this from a very scientific manner.
I had my beliefs as to what I think it is that I'm dealing with and that there
is some
sort of reality to this.
But that's separate than the scientist in me that says, "Well, if I want to
talk about
this scientifically, here are the things that I need to prove or disprove."
So that has led, for instance, to my production or study of materials that
Jacques Vallée had
brought to me, some metals and other things that had chains of evidence
associated with
them being at some UIP or UFO landing.
And so, interestingly, some of these metals are very unusual.
Super high purity silicon, strange magnesium ratios, the isotope ratios are
wrong, et cetera.
Now, that's not proof of anything, but it's proof that somebody engineered them.
So it's that plus the medical, those are the kinds of reality-based tests that
I can do to provide
to my colleagues to say, here is data and evidence.
Evidence isn't proof of evidence of anything.
Evidence like in a court of law is just evidence that you provide to the jury
of peers.
Right.
Right?
So, but I sort of have gone a step further.
And that is, I'm like, okay, well, if these things are, let's say we get some
advanced material.
How do I prove that this advanced material was made by some superior intellect?
Well probably the atomic positioning of how the material is made is going to be
more advanced
than even our most advanced computer chip.
So how do you determine that when you need some sort of atomic imager that
might tell you
where the positions of the atoms are and what the bond structures are that you
say, well,
that's something I can measure and I can have, I can give those results to
somebody else and
they can say, yes, it's right or it's not.
But at least I can say no human at least that I know of could make this.
So I started a company that I've raised money for with this new idea that I
have for how
to make an atomic imager and we're doing it.
And so, you know, we've raised the money, we're building it already.
And I know it will work.
So when I have it, whether or not it's useful for looking at UAP materials is
almost immaterial
because I know how useful it will be for the nanomaterials, the metamaterials,
the alloys
that the government, et cetera, uses for biology, et cetera.
So rather than predicting what a protein structure or a DNA or a chromosome arm
looks like, I'll
be able to read its structure directly.
Mm.
I want to bring you back to the, you said it was 10 people that didn't have Havana
syndrome,
that they had some sort of an injury that was associated with a UAP event.
What was their thing?
Did they have an implant or was there a...
No, some of them had like, they had what you would call white matter disease in
their brain,
like they had been exposed to something.
So white matter disease, if you have, for instance, multiple sclerosis and you
look in the brain
with MRI, you'll see these white areas which are basically dead tissue, scar
tissue.
They had things like that.
One person, one of the pictures that I had was that they had claimed to have
seen something
in their backyard.
They shone a flashlight at it.
And the moment they did, they got zapped.
And then you see the picture of the guy in the back of his neck, this huge welt
and a bruising
and a scarring that could...
There's no reasonable way you could have gotten something like that just by
exposing yourself
to a flame as a, for instance, or a blow torch.
And so it's these kinds of events that...
And the unfortunate issue with these is that they're not repeatable.
They're one-off anecdotes.
Right.
And you certainly can't put a person in a place where they become bait for
these kinds
of events to occur.
And so you're sort of...
Some people would volunteer for that, though.
Somebody might, yeah.
To go get zapped.
Do you know about the Travis Walton story, right?
Very much, yeah.
Yeah.
What do you think of that?
He's kept to his story over all of the years.
That's what's so confusing.
Yeah.
I mean, he's had no reason.
I don't know that he's profited off of it.
He, you know, I find it fascinating, you know, but it's, it's, it's, it's the
irreproducibility
of the events that the skeptics, I call them more pseudo skeptics, they're pseudists,
like
nudists, they're pseudists, they're pseudists that use these one-offnesses of
these events
to disparage the entire, you know, idea of it.
It sounds ridiculous.
Well, of course it sounds ridiculous because you're talking about something
that is outside
of...
It's a spaceship that zaps people.
Yeah, that's ridiculous.
You know, and, and I don't think that even he would propose, Travis, that he
was purposefully
hurt.
Right.
I mean, if you walk across an airfield and get in the plume of a jet engine,
you're going
to get hurt.
Right.
You know.
Yeah.
And his story is that he was taken aboard to heal him.
Yeah.
There was something, something happened to him during that event.
And, but the crazy part is that all the other people that are in the truck,
they witnessed
it and then they passed polygraph examinations.
Right.
Right.
They also told the same story independently when they took them and separated
them.
And then Travis Walton shows up five days later with the same clothes on.
Right.
With this crazy story.
Right.
You know, so when people say that, you know, there's no evidence or where's the
evidence?
My first question to them is, well, what have you, have you read any books
about any of this?
Do you, have you spent even a moment looking into it?
And, you know, I would point them at books like by Robert Powell and Michael Swords,
UFOs
in Government, which is not a proposal that any of this is real.
It's just the story of these events over decades.
And so there's, there's books like that, dozens of them that tell the story of
data and evidence.
How you contextualize it is, you know, up to your personal biases, let's say,
but there's
plenty of evidence.
But if people haven't looked into it, if they have an opinion about it and they
haven't looked
into it, they're more like priests than they are scientists.
Yeah, that's, it's also the public, the general public narrative is UFO equals
kook.
Right.
You're a kook.
You believe in that?
That's ridiculous.
That's ridiculous.
And, and I don't believe in anything.
I believe in the data and the evidence and, and the evidence, there's not
enough evidence
for me to tell a colleague of mine it's real.
Right.
But there's enough evidence for me to say there's a question worth answering.
So when you were talking about magnesium and these, whatever these alloys are,
what is
specifically wrong with them that you don't think that it was manufactured by
like a standard
sort of a alloy plant in the United States or somewhere else?
Right.
So the, so the silicon that I'm talking about is from an event in Ubatuba,
Brazil,
which interestingly, there's another piece of it that appears to have been
magnesium, but
both of them are of a purity that is unusual for the day in the late 1950s.
So the magnesium, and I did an atomic mapping of my piece of silicon down to a
level of where
it's like 99.999% silicon.
And so one piece of it had magnesium ratios that were earth normal.
And these are, these were impurities, let's say.
The other piece were way off earth normal.
So for instance, anywhere on earth, if you look at the ratios of what the three
magnesium
isotopes are, 24, 25, 26, it should be like 80%, 11%, 9% more or less.
And anywhere in our solar system, that's more or less what the values should be
of the ratios.
And that has to do with stellar evolution and how, you know, radioactive
compounds might decompose
to whatever.
But we got this, we got this ratio that was just way, way off.
So by luck, I came across a postdoc at Stanford.
And he and a graduate student, they're both in applied physics, who are
interested in UAP.
And I said, I've got these ratios, what do you think it means?
And so they looked, so they looked at the ratios and the weird one.
And they said, well, let me, let's do some calculations.
And so it turns out that the ratios that we have could have been generated from
normal magnesium
ratios.
If you exposed normal magnesium ratios to a neutron source for 900 years at the
level of an atomic
bomb every few seconds.
Okay.
So, so you, they, yeah.
Wow.
So, so it's like, I'm looking, and this, this data is literally two weeks old,
but the calculations
are, are, are math.
So you're like, okay, well, where and how, you know, the, the chance of getting
that number
correct on three things is low, you know, to put it mildly, but to say that you
had exposed
these things to that kind of a neutron source means something interesting,
right?
So again, it doesn't prove anything other than that.
The result is mathematically and materially true.
So what does it, what does it mean again?
It's just, it just for a scientist like me who loves data off the curve, it's
catnip.
I can't help myself, but want to know and understand more about it.
Yeah.
I mean, just what you said is what you said about the magnesium ratios.
Like that's, has there ever been any debunkers that have some sort of a, an
explanation for
why you would find that?
No.
I mean.
Do they think that your measurements are off?
Well, I mean, the only way, I mean, you could create that ratio artificially by
purifying
each of those isotopes and then pre-mixing them to that ratio.
But why you would blow it up over a beach in Ubatuba, Mexico in the late 1950s,
and then
let it sit in a museum in Argentina for 50 years until Jacques Vallée ended up
going and
grabbing a piece of it and bringing it to me in a measure on an instrument in
the engineering
department at Stanford.
Why?
Could you do it physically back then?
Would that be possible in the 1950s?
It would have been very hard.
It would have been very, very hard.
You could, but in the late 1950s, we were still busy trying to isolate and
separate uranium isotopes
for making more bombs.
I mean, let's be serious.
What do humans separate isotopes for?
To make bombs or to do health-related tagging, which is really only something
that came to
the fore in the '60s and '70s.
And this predates that by a decade.
It predates it.
So it's unusual.
It's possible.
But I mean, again, with any of these things, why, for instance, would one of
the supposed pieces
that came from that event of be magnesium at a level of purity that only Dow
Chemical at
the time had the ability to create.
Now, what else was at this site and what is the story behind this site?
A fisherman sees this glowing object that kind of released something which then
exploded
and he picked up pieces of it.
And there's some chains of evidence of how it got to either a newspaper in
Brazil or to
this South American museum, et cetera, and different studies have been done by
different people
over time.
And the surprise to me was that the piece that I had was silicon, whereas the
lore was
that it was magnesium.
So I've been in contact with the people who talk about it as being magnesium
and saying,
well, it's, you know, your results don't dispute mine.
It just says that maybe there was something different.
Is that him there?
Travis Walton.
That's Travis?
Yeah, that's Travis.
Travis Bobblehead.
He gave me this.
That's cool.
So, you know, I don't know what it means.
I mean, I published probably one of the first peer review papers on a UAP
material from an
event in Council Bluffs, Iowa.
And the event was an object is seen rotating, lights flashing, et cetera.
Something appears to drop from the object.
The police saw it, several other groups saw it in the 1970s.
They all converged on the locale.
And this was like in February or something, it was winter.
And there was this big pile of molten metal in the middle of this field,
probably 30, 40
pounds of it.
And people tried to explain it away as, well, the helicopter had a giant vat of
molten metal.
And then you calculate how far and how big a container you would have to have
to carry
molten metal of this type.
And so I analyzed it with a device that we invented in my lab actually called
multiplex ion beam imaging, which is a kind of what's called secondary ion mass
spec, which what
you do is you shoot a beam of ions at an object like a sand blaster.
It ionizes the material on the target.
And then you shoot off and measure the mass of the objects that you just sandblasted
off.
And so what we found was nothing unusual in terms of isotope ratios, except we
found a mixture of metals that depending on where you looked in the sample was
different.
So it would be like iron, titanium and chromium of a certain ratio here, but a
different ratio of those things over there and over here.
So what that meant was that whatever this stuff was, didn't come completely
premixed, wasn't like a milkshake, it was a slurry of partially mixed materials
that somebody decided to drop off.
So again, this is just data, but my purpose of publishing it was first, and
this was published in the Progress in Aerospace Sciences, peer reviewed.
The purpose was to show you're not going to get thrown out of the academy for
publishing this stuff, as long as you don't make crazy conclusions and you just
say, here's the data, to show people that you can publish this stuff as long as
you're scientifically careful in how far you go.
You leave yourself plenty of diplomatic exits in the verbiage that you use.
And it was part of what then got me to start the Soul Foundation, along with
Dave and others, to say, look, it's okay to do this, as long as you're careful.
And that's why people, I mean, Avi Loeb came after me, because he had kind of
the same pushback from his community, where all he was doing was saying, the
question's on the table.
Well, I'm not saying it's true, it's just you can't push this off the table.
So he had the same kind of righteous indignation that I have that propels me to
say, well, I'm going to show you why you can't take this off the table.
So when they found this puddle of molten metal, and it's a bunch of different
mixtures, so it seems like there's a bunch of different stuff that was there,
and it wasn't perfectly mixed.
Is there some sort of, like, have you theorized some sort of a reason why any
person or any creature or any being would do that?
Is there something that you would extract from that kind of metal, like heating
it up to a certain degree and having a mixture of all these things, and this is
just a byproduct that they're dropping off?
I think it's a byproduct of some process that might, again, might, might, might.
Might, might, might, extract.
It might be part of a propellant system.
It might be part of the way that they generate the fields that allow these
things to move.
Again, these are all mights, it's speculation, but it's like when you see
something and do something that you don't understand what it is, you have to be
fully open.
I mean, for all I know, they're flushing the toilet, right?
Oh, boy.
Yeah, ew.
But...
They got metal poop.
So, but, but, you know, I have the original Polaroids from the police
department of it, so, you know, it was real, and people have said, oh, it was
thermite.
Well, if it were thermite, there'd be, there'd be aluminum oxide, you know.
Thermite, meaning that's how it was melted down?
That's how it was melted down, and it's just some kids playing around, et
cetera, and it was, it was a big joke.
Wacky kids with their thermite.
With their thermite.
You know, but it turns out there's no aluminum hydroxide or oxide, I should say,
in the sample.
I mean, I have the analysis, it's just not there.
It had to have been extreme heat of some kind that would produce it, and, you
know, whatever it was, was hovering for a moment, so it wasn't an airplane, and
there was no helicopters, and at least no helicopters with flashing lights, and,
you know, I've got, there's been huge chunks of it still exist.
And the amount of cauldron, and the amount of cauldron that would have to exist
in order to melt this would be immense.
It was immense, yeah.
So, people back in the 70s already sort of made estimates of what was required,
and people said, oh, it's a meteorite.
Well, no, we basically showed mathematically how, you know, first of all,
meteorites make holes when they hit the ground.
First of all, meteorites make holes when they hit the ground.
They don't melt when they hit the ground, and they make explosions.
Are there similar instances of something along this line?
Several.
Really?
Well, I think that's what's so interesting, is that worldwide there are
multiple reports of molten metals that get dropped off of these objects, and I
have actually two other ones of a molten metal that was dropped off of one case
in Australia and another in another area.
I'm not allowed to say, but it was, one actually happened supposedly, I've got
to find the guy again, in Fresno.
Maybe he's listening, that he said stuff dropped, and he has, you know, molten
metal that landed in a puddle in the asphalt of his driveway, and he saw this
object.
So, and he's just holding on to it?
He's holding on to it.
He reached out to me, and I, you know, was still at a time when I was just kind
of getting into this area, but there's many, many examples of this kind of
thing.
So, but interestingly, several of these other ones are just aluminum.
The one that I have is iron or whatever.
So, what does that tell me?
Does that tell me there's different kinds of ways of accomplishing the goal?
Whatever it is, they're either throwing something overboard or for, you know,
because they don't need it anymore, or because maybe it's getting in the way of
something and it's time to get rid of it.
Have you brought in anyone who's like a real expert in material sciences that
would, like, theorize, like, given an immense increase in technology and what,
like, what potentially do you think this could be?
The purpose of being on shows like this is to have experts maybe give me an
idea because the people I've been to at Stanford, you know, the other
professors, they're like, okay, yeah, I got to go.
Yeah, it could be, it could actually be detrimental to your career, and that's
what's really weird about something when you're just talking about data,
specifically in this case, an actual physical thing that anyone can measure.
Right, right, and I've got pieces, I've got plenty of it, you know, and the
original piece is, you know, is like this big that the owner of it had brought
to my lab just last summer again.
It's like big as an iMac.
Yeah, exactly.
Oh, it's huge.
Crazy.
And so, what is it?
I would love for somebody to tell me that it's conventional and has a purely
prosaic answer, because then I can go on to the next thing.
The whole reason for getting that, the Atacama mummy off the table was not
because I wanted to annoy anybody, it was because it was spectacular, it's
obviously something people would pay attention to, so if it's real, let's do it,
if it's not, let's get it off the table, because it's usually the stuff that's
hidden under the rubble that's the most interesting.
My question about that mummy is not that it's an alien, but if it does register
as human in the DNA, is it potentially a different kind of human than us?
Well, certainly she had, we brought in an expert in South American indigenous
people genetics, and the analysis showed that the genetic, the standard genetic
mutations that are found in different racial groups around the world matched
exactly the Atacama region of Chile.
So, her parents, her relatives, were clearly Chilean, so, yeah, I mean, that's
really all you can, that's really all you can say.
If someone wants to say that she's an alien, well, that's fine, I'm convinced
of what she is and that she deserves a proper burial.
And so, it's just a genetic anomaly?
Just a genetic anomaly.
I do know that you've paid attention to the Tridactyl mummies.
Yeah.
What is your take on that?
So, you know, I think people have conflated a lot of the different mummies that
are out there, first of all.
There's like 60 of them or something.
And probably a fair number of them, I wouldn't necessarily call them hoaxes.
I would say that they are constructed, but they're old constructs.
So, maybe there's some sort of homage paid to the ancestors or something like
that, whatever they are.
So, there are some ones that you clearly look at, you go, oh, come on.
Right.
That never lived.
Then there's the fetal position ones.
Then there's the fetal position ones, the big ones.
Yeah.
And I was at the beginning – I was – you know, I'm always open to being
wrong.
I was at the beginning thinking, oh, well, because of the small ones, those are
probably not real.
But then the MRIs started coming out.
Yeah.
The full body MRIs and the ligature and the bone construction and the finger
– and then perhaps most, I think, extraordinarily, the fingerprints on them
being clearly not human.
So, it's interesting.
But here's the problem, is that because there's so much circus around them,
unfortunately created by people who want a circus because it sells their TV
shows,
no scientist of any merit would go near it.
So, I was approached many times, many times to study them.
And I said, I'll do it on one condition.
Here's the money I need, not personally, but here's the money I need to do the
kinds of analysis to accomplish this right.
Second, there will be no TV cameras.
And you won't hear from me again until I'm ready to talk because I'll have
double-checked and triple-checked and quadruple-checked the results.
And then I've gone out, as I do with the Atacama Mummy, bringing in further
contiguous circles of experts to double-check me.
And not make it a circus.
And not make it a circus.
Because I won't name the TV show that wanted to do it, but they wanted me –
they wanted to follow me around with a camera.
And I'm like, no, this isn't how science is done.
I can't do it with those strictures.
So, I would say that if anybody's going to do it again, lock the things away
with South American scientists.
You don't need a North American scientist to come in and do it.
There's plenty of smart people in South America who can do this properly and
respect the rights of the indigenous peoples who own the sacred grounds within
which these things were found.
I think that's important.
And then do the analysis right.
You know, they've said – they made, I think, the mistake of saying, well, we've
done the DNA and there's a lot of DNA that doesn't match.
Anything – and the stuff is several hundred years old.
Anything that old, you won't get a lot of good DNA out of it.
But just – they did the same thing with the Denisovan and the Neanderthal.
You have to correct the chemical errors that occur over time.
There are ways to what's called bioinformatically correct.
You need to do what's called over-reading of the genome where you do so many
reads of it that you stack them all up line by line.
Like if you had a thousand versions of an ancient Bible, you would stack up the
lines one by one.
And then finally you find one line that has this letter that's correct and then
this one correct.
And then you basically do a summation of an averaging of the correctness.
And so they say, oh, well, there's – you know, 90% of the genome is non-human.
It's probably garbage.
It's probably these mistakes.
It's probably bacterial contamination that you're reading.
There's ways to deal with that, but that requires money and not one-off DNA
sequences put on the interwebs for some amateur genomicists to make a claim
about.
Right, right.
You know, so there's ways to do it.
I mean, you would want at the end of the day to get the results to the level
where you could go to the guys who did the Denisovan and the Neanderthal DNA,
the Max Planck and others who won the Nobel Prize for it, and say, hey, what do
you think?
But you don't dare take it to people like that until you've done your homework.
I see.
Yeah.
And you do it behind the scenes.
You don't put them under a flashlight.
Right, right.
You know, and people, I think, have gotten used to this click mentality of
impatience where I want the result today.
Why can't you just make it all transparent?
Dump all the data on the web tomorrow.
You're not transparent.
You're hiding something.
No, I'm not.
I'm just trying to make sure that you don't make the mistake and accuse me of
making the mistake that you'll find in the data because the raw data is never
clean.
And the Daily Mail headline is never accurate.
So, long story short, I think there's still something worth looking at there.
Well, the scans are fascinating, right?
Yeah.
The scans are the most interesting to me.
Have you seen the Jesse Michaels, the newest video?
Yeah, Jesse's a good friend.
He's great.
I love that guy.
And the episode that he did is fantastic.
And when you see the scans and they go over the bone structure of the thing and
you look at it, you're like, God, that looks real.
If that's a hoax from 1700 years ago or whoever it is.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Whoever, if the carbon isotope dating that they did on it is accurate.
I've looked at that data.
It looks good.
Okay.
So, then it is that old.
Fuck you, then.
Yeah.
Because there's no way someone back then could fake that.
And somebody asked me the other day, they said, well, could you have a single
mutation or a set of...
I said, no.
I mean, because you don't get one mutation that does all that.
Right.
You know, evolution works step by step that this does this, but it has a
mistake, but it's corrected by this mutation over here in evolution, which is
corrected by this.
And so, the whole, the genome fluctuates over time, compensating for the errors
that would otherwise have killed you.
Also, one of them is pregnant.
That's fast.
Yeah, I know.
Okay.
So, it's a three-foot pregnant thing that doesn't look remotely human being.
Yeah.
So, the jury is still out.
Right.
But if they're going to do it right, they need to sequester the stuff away,
bring in the right people with sufficient resources, and get rid of the cameras.
Have you talked to them?
Have you encouraged this?
Is this possible to nudge this in the right direction?
Where is it at right now?
I wrote out on Twitter a full thing of what they needed to do.
I mean, the easiest first milestone to do, to be honest, that could be done
within a couple of months, is if it is somewhere in the hominid or, let's say,
vertebrate line, there are metabolism genes that we all share.
In fact, there are metabolism genes that we share with bacteria that are very
similar.
So, there's, you probably, do you know the technique called polymerase chain
reaction, PCR?
Yes.
So, you know, why try to do the whole genome?
Why not just target a bunch of genes that we know evolve slowly, but do evolve,
and PCR those out?
Because that's easier to do than is trying to assemble a whole genome.
And then by having just those, let's call it preliminary sets of evidence, you
could then say, hmm, this actually, reproducibly, if I take a sample from the
finger, I take a sample from the bone marrow, I take a sample from here or
there on the body,
and I take a sample from different, the three different main things, and I see
the same mutations, and they're different or somehow aligned with hominid
evolution, right?
We compare it to all the known hominids.
I mean, that would be the kind of data that you could actually publish in a
journal like Nature, if you did it right.
Because that's the only way that you're going to get anybody to pay attention.
There's also the bizarre anecdotal nature of some of the artwork, like the fact
that these people did a lot of these tapestries and a lot of ancient artwork
that's a thousand years old that depicts these three-fingered things.
So it's like, what are they describing?
Are they describing these actual creatures?
Is there only a few of them and it was a weird genetic mutation?
Or is this a common visitor that they're describing?
I don't know.
I don't know either.
I mean, why would you put them in a cave in Peru?
I don't know.
And if you didn't put them in a cave in Peru, what would be left?
That's the problem.
The problem is it's really hard to make a fossil.
It's really hard to find bones.
Think about all the people that died and we don't find that many bones,
relatively speaking, in comparison to the fucking billions of people that died.
It's not like we're tripping over human bones every day.
Right, except in mass graves.
Yeah, right.
That's really, yeah.
And even in mass graves, given enough time, they will deteriorate, like mass
graves from 1,700 years ago, whatever these things are.
So, you know, I find them, again, I find them interesting.
And I hope that behind the scenes there are people who are taking a more methodical
approach to this who I think should remain stealthed until they have the data
to the point where it is publishable.
You know, publishing a white paper or putting something out on the Internet is
not the same as putting out data that has all of the instruments that you used,
the methods that you used, etc.
The reason you want papers, frankly, when you publish them to be almost boring
and so thick with detail that no pseudoskeptic would dare approach it because
they're just not smart enough.
But if you put out these snippets that don't have sufficient background, they
can be picked apart by anybody.
Right?
But that's why peer review is so important.
And people mistake peer review as trying to get the reviewers to agree with
your conclusions.
No, the main purpose of peer review is actually to make sure that the methods
that you used are sufficiently detailed and are correct enough to the extent
you came to any conclusions, they match the methods that you used.
And when you think about these potential whatever they are, whatever these
creatures are, if we did find out that they are some sort of a hominid,
how much credence do you give to the theory that there's like the possibility
that these UFOs, UAPs, whatever it is, is a break-off civilization from a very,
very long time ago that's very different from us,
the same way we're very different from chimpanzees, which we coexist with.
Right. I have no problem conjecturing that.
Did you ever see the Netflix show Chimp Empire?
Yes.
Amazing, right?
Amazing.
20 million years of separation, and it looked like fucking faculty meeting, you
know, with people like looking at each other and planning and plotting, board
meeting, you know.
And so we shared all of those interactions from 20 million years ago.
So how much further back would you have to go to have something like what that
is?
I mean, it's clearly not recent.
And also, if you think about what we are in comparison to chimps, we're so
fragile, we're frail, we're easily injured, we're, well, if you think of
something that's far more technologically
advanced than us, it would be even more frail, it would be even more petite, it
would have almost no muscle at all, it would look, weirdly enough, like the grays
from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Yeah.
I mean, that's what it would look like if it was a hominid that's whatever we
are, and it went way past that.
Right.
Yeah, no, technology gives evolution the excuse to no longer make or allow for
you to be robust.
Thank you.
That was the word I'm looking for.
And also, why do you need opposable thumbs?
Yeah.
Right?
These things don't even have opposable thumbs.
That was what's weird about it.
Right.
It's like, how do you interact with your environment?
They look more like sloths than they do.
Right, right, right.
I mean, at least their hands do.
Yeah.
And, and I, I don't know, I find it-
Well, if everything's done with AI and automation, and your interface is purely
neurological, like
you have some sort of a human or a creature neuro interface with technology,
and you just use fingers to like lay them on electronics so that you can sync
up with it.
Right.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Why are you picking things up, bro?
You don't have to pick things up anymore.
Those go away just like, you know.
Can you imagine the scenario of, I mean, these things we know are, the body's
real, what they
are, we don't know.
But can you imagine the scenario of what happened as they were being buried?
You know, what would they, could you like make a, you know, a film of the
ceremonial burial
of these things?
Hmm.
You know, what would, what led to their death?
Right.
What led to their placement there?
Right.
Or if they were constructed, which I have a hard time with given the MRIs that
we've all seen,
et cetera, what led to it?
Um, and so that to me is as almost interesting as to whether or not they're
real or not.
Right.
Like the ones that are clearly constructed, that's where it gets fascinating.
Because like, what were you trying to reproduce?
Yes.
And why are they so similar to the ones that look real?
Yeah.
Are you, is it an homage to the ancestors or to the stories of the ancestors,
et cetera?
Yeah.
Especially when you look at Peru, like Peru is like, you've got the Nazca lines,
which are
really weird.
Right.
You can only see them from the sky and they're everywhere and they're huge.
Yeah.
And these depictions of very strange things.
I, you know, I just, so I just ask my scientific colleagues to not suspend
disbelief, but to
open your minds as to the possibility of what it, of what these things might
mean.
And just try to explain them without dismissing them.
Because it's so easy and politics, we see it every day.
All you need to do is just give any answer.
Even if it's obviously flagrantly wrong as just as a way to deflect.
And so, you know, you can either use that approach.
You shouldn't use that approach ever as a scientist, deflect.
Which unfortunately is what someone like, you know, Neil deGrasse Tyson often
does.
Yeah.
And as opposed to try to explain in a way that teaches your audience the right
way to think.
Yeah.
Well said.
One of the things that Jacques Vallée highlighted is there's an alloy, another
piece of metal,
some that they'd found that had layers like these at an atomic level.
Yep.
That if you wanted to make this alloy today, it would be almost impossible and
it would cost billions of dollars.
So I worked with him on one of those pieces.
I got the atomic imaging of some of that.
And it's, oh God, I'm blanking on the event, but it was the Sirocco event.
And where was that?
I think New Mexico.
I'm going to get in trouble for not knowing exactly.
But, and we actually did a atomic layering using this device called atomic
probe tomography,
where you literally pick it apart atom by atom and get its 3D position.
It's a 40-year-old technology, so it's nothing magic.
So, and yeah, it would just be very difficult to make it.
You know, and certainly it would be not something that you would have dropped
in the middle of the desert.
Socorro?
Socorro.
Socorro.
In the middle of the desert, you know, in the 1970s or whenever it was.
I wouldn't say it's impossible to make, but why you would do it is another
question.
It's clearly evidence of technology and manufacture.
And that's what interests me is, first of all, why would you do it?
Why would you create something, for instance, with the silicon and the
magnesium with the altered ratios?
Not the, where did it come from?
So what is it evidence of?
It's clearly evidence of technology.
Was this technology available at the time this supposed crash happened?
Uh, which one?
This?
No, not, no.
Not at the level of precision that was done and a chunk of, and no, it just
wasn't.
It just wasn't.
So if that's true and if it really, if that's the chain of evidence is correct
and it really did come from that area, from that crash, that's not a human
creation.
Well, it wasn't a crash.
It was an object that a policeman had seen with beings, short beings outside of
it.
And when it took off and left, he went over and found this piece that I had.
Actually, I personally have it now.
Huh.
So, you know, it's hard to say what's possible and what's not possible.
So, you know, there's plenty of military programs that make stuff that are way
outside of mainstream capabilities right now.
I mean, just look at the stealth bomber, for instance, and the skin of the
stealth bomber is just remarkable.
Is it possible they were doing that in 1970?
Maybe.
Maybe.
So that's why I always leave open the possibility that, you know, which is why,
I mean, this is, I'm going to get back to this atomic imager thing that I'm
making.
It's like there's a level of evidence that I think can be produced with atomic
imaging that goes beyond what it is we know anybody can make.
Right?
So, and so that's my reason for wanting to do it because, you know, look, I can
make money on it with looking at alloys and nanomaterials, et cetera.
And that's going to be what the purpose of the, of making the instrument will.
That's how it will be a company, but it will have value elsewhere.
So, the reason that I got interested in it was, frankly, for looking at
chromosomes, but then I realized, oh, maybe it has interest, maybe it would be
useful for these other things as well, which has kind of propelled my interest
in it.
Well, Jacques Vallée is such a valuable researcher because he's so logical
about the way he handles things and he doesn't jump to any conclusions.
Yeah.
And his descriptions of these materials and the origin of these materials is
really compelling because it's just like, if that's not really possible to make
in 1970, then someone help me out.
Yeah.
What is that?
Yeah.
And is it possible to make today?
And how much would it cost?
Right.
And where would you do it?
The magnesium ratio thing was, you know, when I first estimated, it was like,
this is millions and millions of dollars and why would you leave it on a beach
in the middle of Uba Tuba, Brazil?
Right.
You know, it's just, it just seems, it seems unlikely.
Nothing's impossible.
No.
But unlikely.
Well.
And then it's usually the chain of evidence.
It's, it's, there's lots of materials that you might find that are unusual.
And believe me, I get rocks sent to me at my lab in the mail that people say,
oh, this isn't, no, it's a rock.
Sorry, it's a rock.
But, you know, I have not yet been given anything which I could definitively
say, this is not something a human might have been able to make.
Um, it might be difficult, but not impossible yet.
And so that's because the level of resolution required to claim something is
impossible is something we actually don't even have yet.
Mmm.
Does that make sense?
Yes, that does make sense.
So that's what I, so my whole career has been inventing instruments that were,
I felt inevitable, but not yet possible.
But I could see a path to making them.
And so I said to most people, get out of my way.
I'm going to do this.
Because I know once I've got it, it will become valuable to everybody, which is,
that's what made my career in immunology, making a succession of instruments
like that, and then making them available to the community.
So I think the next level is atomic.
Because we now know, you can pick up and look at any of the major physics
journals today, everything is all about these weird exotic particles that exist
in metamaterials down at the atomic level with vague and strange capabilities
that will change their utility, either as superconductors, room temperature, or
different kinds of electronic components that might be better.
That might be better, quantum computer circuits and qubits.
It's all down at that level.
But to do so requires a level of engineering that we don't, I mean, never mind
reading what it is, putting it together in the first place is what's still
required.
And so if we don't know how to put it together in the first place, then reading
it and knowing that it can exist and then associating it with a function is the
value that I'm looking to bring.
Well, this brings me to the idea of crash retrieval and the idea that these
crash retrievals started a long time ago and that Roswell was just one of many.
There's another one that was near Roswell that apparently was even more
significant, but didn't get in the newspaper.
"Trinity" are you talking about?
I think...
There was the one that Jacques was involved with studying.
I don't know.
I'm basing this off of Richard Dolan's book.
Okay.
But at the end of the day, but the point being that if they did do that, if
they really did back engineer something and then they started these completely
top secret scientific research projects where they were developing alloys that
had never existed before with techniques that they had never really even
considered because they got it all from some spaceship.
Well, that's where it's really crazy if you don't disclose this information
because you're basically putting a bottleneck on human evolution, human
technological evolution and our understanding of what's actually possible.
Right.
I agree.
And, you know, if you're going to excite the next generation of scientists in
this country and you're going to bring economic prosperity to this country,
then we should...
I wouldn't say democratize it and put it all out on the internet.
I understand all the reasons why you might not need to, but you need to excite
the populace.
I mean, my laboratory at Stanford for probably the last 10 years is 90%
foreigners.
And not because I don't want to take more Americans, but because Americans just
don't go into the sciences anymore.
They don't study math.
You know, they aren't encouraged to approach this.
So we're importing a lot of our scientists from overseas.
Well, guess what?
A good third of them end up going back and bringing all the technology that
they invented here back there and creating competitors.
Now, maybe that's good on a global scale, you know, but maybe it's not
something that we want to encourage on a local scale if we want to maintain our
technological superiority.
I mean, we're basically governed by lawyers.
China is governed by engineers.
Hmm.
You know, I mean...
Do you see the results in their drone technology and electric cars and the
things that are coming out of China recently?
Their Politburo is almost entirely engineers and scientists.
Oh.
Interesting.
Yeah.
There's a little article in the Atlantic recently about that.
Oh, that's a giant advantage.
Yeah.
So people who are making these...
We have lawyers looking for all the reasons why something should or shouldn't
be done on the liabilities.
They're looking at things as to what's possible.
When you're looking at these UAP things that people bring you, what...
Is there one that stands out as being the most compelling to you?
One event?
Well, both the Council Bluffs and the Ubatuba event are interesting to me.
Because of the physical material?
Because of the physical material itself.
I mean, I'm, at the end of the day, a physicalist.
You know, I mean, I don't like all the anecdotes.
I mean, a thousand anecdotes make a good story, good campfire.
I mean, I think there's statistical value in people seeing the same thing again
and again.
And there's a truth to it.
But, you know, and I can believe anything I want to around that and many of the
statements that I'm purported to have said are around my beliefs.
As opposed to when I put on my scientist hat and I try to convince another
scientist, I can only provide this data and this evidence and I don't have yet
these materials.
Now, maybe they exist and maybe, you know, people like David Grush will be able
to pry them out of the clammy hands of those who want to keep it where it is.
But give me one piece of that and I will do wonders with it.
Yeah.
I mean, that's why I'm so excited about the UAP Disclosure Act, if it ends up
becoming law, because there will be this ability to start to maybe eek some of
this out.
And again, it's the reason why I think this commercial opportunity is the
direction we want to go where we have a sort of public private partnership is
that the defense budget in and of itself is a zero sum game.
We're taking money from one program to give to another.
You know, whether you're taking it from your taxes, you're taking it from
veterans, you know, insurance, et cetera.
It's a zero sum game.
Whereas if you bring the investment community in, now you're bringing in people
who are willing to take a chance and willing to take a risk and you're not
using the public's money anymore.
And so, and that excites, I mean, me as the reason why I wanted to go back to
Stanford is because the entrepreneurial environment there, and now which is
actually almost homegrown here in Austin, is really what drives innovation.
And so I want to excite that kind of community.
And again, the Soul Foundation is a place where we can bring people in and we've
got investors who show up now who are talking to people about their ideas and
what would we do with this.
And so you, you, it almost has now a self propelling movement where I don't
need to be standing on a, you know, wooden box somewhere in the middle of the
park saying, you know, look at this, look at this.
People are just doing it now.
There's now a whole, almost a cottage industry of small groups or formalized
groups who are doing this independently now.
So it's almost like it's inevitable.
So Skywatcher as an example, you probably know the Skywatcher group.
Yeah, I've heard of it.
And Jake Barber.
Didn't they just stop operations?
No.
Did something happen?
No, it's, it's strange because people said, oh, we stopped.
No, actually it had been, it had been determined from the beginning that we
were going to go from January until July or August and collect data.
And now we're in the, okay, what does the data mean phase where we're literally
going through the data, looking at the data files.
And China, we're, as I said before, we're filtering the data.
We're looking for the obvious mistakes, et cetera.
And so, no, they've not stopped.
Yeah.
There was something on Twitter about the, something about the equipment.
I forget.
No.
So James Fowler, one of the guys who brought a lot of his equipment and
technology to us, decided that he wanted to basically go off and work in a DOD
capacity as opposed to the research capacity.
But he's still advising us.
I was just on a phone call, a Zoom call with him last week going over the data
files.
So, explain this Sky Watcher thing to people, because it sounds insane.
Well, the idea behind it was that there might be ways to send a signal and get
things to show up.
Right.
And James Fowler claimed that he had such a thing.
I was at one of the events where something showed up.
It was transient, momentary, but, you know, indisputable.
But it's just like...
What did it look like?
It was just a silver ball moving quickly through several frames of a video,
which was not fast enough, frankly, to pick it up.
We just saw it move.
It went that way and then...
You didn't see it with your naked eye?
No, I didn't see it with the naked eye.
Which, of course, is a problem.
Do they sometimes see things with the naked eye?
One guy did, yeah.
One guy.
I mean...
So, are these things variable in their appearance?
I wish I had my...
I don't have my phone here.
But we do have a picture of one next to the helicopter, about 200 feet away.
And it's just kind of a fuzzy white blob against a blue sky.
But it was there.
You know, it's not a cloud and it's not a balloon.
Mm-hmm.
You know, it's not discernible as anything obvious, but it was there and it
happened during one of these events, out in the middle of the desert.
Mm-hmm.
And so, you know, so the idea is, behind Skywatcher, is to see if there are
ways to get them to show up.
And if so, in a reproducible manner, and then have the right kind of
simultaneous multi-sensor capabilities to measure it, meaning radar, IR, visual
people on the ground.
What are they sending to get these things to go?
What signal?
Um...
James has a signal that, unfortunately, he won't, um...
I don't know what it is.
He won't let everybody know what the bat signal is to climb UFOs?
Well, I mean, you know...
I mean, maybe...
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, it sounds kind of silly, but, I mean, why would you put that out on the
internet?
Because, you know, you might render it useless.
They're like, ugh, I don't gotta show up.
Everybody's using it now.
Oh, so you think it's a trick?
Like, it tricks them into showing up?
I don't know.
I really don't.
Do you think they'd be smarter than that?
Well, that tells you something, maybe, about the level of smarts that might be
incorporated into these, let's say, dumber machines.
Hmm.
Maybe...
Yeah.
That was exactly my thought.
It's like, why would you show up when you know what it is, unless there's a
reason you're basically trying to train the monkeys what to do?
Maybe you're tricking the monkeys into sending...
I don't know.
But isn't there a group of people that just go out and they...
Meditate.
...just using their mind.
They meditate.
Yeah.
And supposedly they have some success as well.
There's the CE5 groups that do that.
And I've never participated in any of that because I don't know how to measure
it.
Uh-huh.
I'm, you know, I'm more than willing to believe that there are technologies
capable of measuring thoughts at a distance that might be some super advanced.
I don't believe you have to call it telepathy and magic.
I think that there's, you know, if such a thing happens that there is a
technology that might be able to read at a distance.
Right.
Well, it's all...
I have no problem with that.
I don't have a problem with that either.
I don't have a problem with the idea that consciousness is kind of vaguely and
barely understood.
And whatever our relationship to the universe itself and reality itself through
consciousness, it's not fully defined.
And also, it might evolve just like all of our other intellectual capabilities.
Right.
Well, I mean, think of it this way.
You know, you and I are interacting with each other through quantum waves.
I, my meat brain sees you as an object, but yet everything that you are sits in
quantum space-time down at the Planck level and you're not even mass.
You're just a series of, I mean, in some people's minds, vibrating fields and
objects.
And so, we have sensors that see and hear each other and think about each other,
but our consciousness somehow is embedded in space-time.
And so, who's to say that there's not signals passing to and from that are vaguely
able to be picked up by our meat brains that we don't necessarily appreciate?
Right.
So, that just because I can't think at you and you can't hear me doesn't mean
that there aren't perhaps brain organizations of some people that are a little
bit better at hearing the echo than others.
Well, this is also probably the reason why when you go to the woods and there's
no cell phone signals, the world feels different.
Yeah.
Because you're probably experiencing a bunch of signals that your brain vaguely
interacts with.
Right.
You know, might not even necessarily be good for you.
Right.
But they're out there and they're a part of the world that you live in.
Mm-hmm.
And you just, you can't, you don't have a radio.
Right.
Right.
So, you're not like tuning into them.
You don't have a cell phone.
Right.
So, you can't just like make calls with it, but you're experiencing it.
Right.
Well, and you know, our civilization is drowning us in constant noise.
Yeah.
And so, maybe, you know, that drowns it out and that's why meditation is why
people claim that they can interact with other things.
I don't know.
Yeah.
I don't know either.
One, I saw an interview that you did where you were describing the sighting
over off the coast of San Diego in 2004, the Nimitz sighting, where you said
that the amount of power, why don't you describe it?
Right.
The amount of power that that thing had to use to move the way it did.
Right.
So, it's on radar.
It's on radar.
So, these are actually calculations by Kevin Newth, a physicist from the
University of Albany, and a published paper.
Again, just speculation, but what he basically said was how much power would it
take to instantaneously accelerate from 50 feet over the ocean to 50 miles
above the earth, whatever the number was, and instantaneously decelerate.
So, it's not just the amount of power to lift something, it's the amount of
power to accelerate and decelerate instantaneously.
And so, you can make simple physical calculations of a one-ton object, let's
say, and it's more than the nuclear output of the United States for a year.
And yet, these things seem capable of doing that at will.
So, where are they getting the energy from?
And I remember asking Hal a question like this years ago, we were stepping into
an elevator, and we were talking about his ideas about how these things might
move.
And I said, "So, they're cheating somehow, aren't they?"
And his answer was, "From our point of view, they're cheating.
From their point of view, they're just using the physics that we don't
understand yet."
So, where's the energy coming from?
What are they doing?
And so, that might be, as a for instance, a reason why you don't want everybody
having access to it.
Yeah.
Because any one of those objects is worse than a thermonuclear bomb.
You shoot one of those things at a city, and that's the end of the city.
And if anybody could do it, you know.
Well, maybe that's the step of human evolution, of the evolution of our society
and civilization,
is that AI has to come into power before we have access to all this other stuff.
Right.
That we do need an AI government structure.
Right.
That we do no longer require military intervention and all the shit that is the
bane of civilization today.
Because if you ask the average person today, do you envision a world where war
doesn't exist?
Most people are saying no.
Right.
The vast majority, except for a few delusional hippies.
They're going to say no.
Right?
But if you ask them, okay, given this super intelligent AI takes over the world
and proves to be benevolent and really just wants to accentuate the life of
human beings on earth and make it better for everybody, then yes.
Right.
Then 100% yes.
Right.
Right.
Right?
So maybe something like that has to take place before we get to a situation
where, okay, this is how you really travel.
Right.
Right.
Okay.
Now that you're not going to war anymore, listen, I'll show you about gravity
bubbles.
You can already imagine the negatives where people will say, oh, well, it's the
apocalyptic nanny state.
Right?
Where AI just basically takes care of you and humans devolve into something.
Which is why I think a merger of human intellect with this where it's a synergy
as opposed to an either/or.
I don't want to be nanny stated either.
Right.
I don't want to use it to explore ideas or explore pleasure.
I mean, I'm finding people want to be hedonistic and, you know, participate in
virtual parties all day long.
Right.
For all I care.
I don't care.
Right.
But I think giving people the option to do whatever it is that they want to do,
it's the most,
I don't know, what's the, it's the most liberal and conservative way of living
because you're allowed to do what you want to do.
But we're not because we're living at the behest of so many other structures.
Always.
Yeah.
Um, last question.
Woody, what's your take on the Bob Lazar story?
Um, elements of truth, um, with, uh, a healthy dose of, um, misinformation that
perhaps he was provided.
Hmm.
Um, I don't think that he's entirely lying.
He seems to know enough about things that the average person wouldn't know.
But, you know, I've heard from Eric Davis and others saying, you know, he's a,
he's a this, he's a that.
I don't know because, you know, it's like, that's why there are great people
like Richard Dolan, who, who's a, you know, a wonderful writer of the history
of the area, or people like Robert Powell or Michael Swords who write just the
facts, not coming to too many conclusions.
Um, I don't live in that world.
That's, it's, it's not my specialty.
My specialty is working with data and analyzing things and bringing rigorous
science to it so that I can convince another scientist what is right or what is
wrong.
Cause I won't be happy.
I mean, I'm pretty sure of what I know, but I want to validate that to my
colleagues.
If only to be able to say, I told you so.
Hmm.
Right.
There's a little bit of human pettiness in there, you know.
A little bit of pettiness is great motivation.
Yeah.
But, you know, but, but that's, I think, again, enabling people to live in a
world like that, where you can talk about these ideas without being ridiculed,
is really, I think, the objective of what science should be and what open-minded,
you know, non-theologically dogmatic approaches should be.
It's, it's like, accuse a scientist of being a priest and that's the best way
to really upset them.
Mm-hmm.
But pointing out that what they're doing is mimicking dogma and priesthood is
the only way to shame them into doing the right thing.
Ah.
Does that make sense?
It does.
It does.
Well, listen, man, I'm glad we finally did this.
Yes, thank you.
Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you so much for all the research that you're currently involved in and
all the stuff that you've done.
And it's been amazing talking to you.
I really appreciate it.
Same as well.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
All right.
Bye.
Bye, everybody.