Interview with Mick West: UFOs, Aliens, and Conspiracy Psychology
UFOs are all the rage now, and it's certainly a topic that excites many of our gurus *cough* <Eric Weinstein>. Hidden mysteries, advanced technologies, conspiracies, and government cover-ups. What's not to like!?The truth, as Mulder so eloquently put it, is out there. And sometimes if you combine the outcome of some posterior technical analysis with some basic priors about the fallibility of human perception and memory, then the truth might be a little prosaic (happy Bayesians!!?).Joining us today is the esteemed Mick West, retired video game developer, who has a long track record of investigating UFO footage, along with a range of other outré phenomena. Mick is admirably positioned to provide practical advice on how to apply critical thinking while being empathetic to friends and family who may have fallen down one or more conspiratorial rabbit holes. Chris and Matt enjoyed the conversation with Mick a lot, and we think you will too!LinksAn example of Eric's UFO Tapdance Lex's Reddit thread for the Matthew McConaughey EpisodeMick West's Book: Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and RespectTheories of Everything Channel: Eric Weinstein and Mick West: UAPs, Evidence, SkepticismOther LinksOur PatreonContact us via email: decodingthegurus@gmail.comThe DTG Subreddit
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Matt Brown and with me is my junior co-host, younger, less senior in other respects as well, Chris Kavanagh.
How are you doing, Chris?
How are you doing, lad?
I'm just trying out different things.
I didn't really like that one.
I'll come up with a better one next time.
Yeah, that one wasn't great.
That was from South Park.
Oh, wasn't it?
It's the pool.
The little toilet.
Yeah, he does do that.
That wasn't who I was going for.
But I will tell you that, you know, we're going to do a decoding of Matthew McConaughey, but he recently just went on Lex's podcast and I've been listening to a bit of it.
God, it's just like, if you ever wanted to hear like endless vapid truisms spun through a Texas drawl, like McConaughey is your man.
And it's quite impressive.
Yeah, he's such a good actor.
I know, I was going to say that.
It's such a shame that I want to go back to the time when I just thought of him as a good actor that I enjoyed.
I'm wondering if his advice will be too generic and saccharine for Lex's audience.
I'm kind of curious, is this their candy?
You know, that they will love his homespun philosophical Texan outlook, or if they'll find it too insubstantial for their tastes.
It's not actually rigorous enough.
I can't tell.
I suspect that they will like it.
Yeah.
It felt like licking sandpaper.
Well, how vapid is it compared to Lex's normal?
It's much more vapid.
Really?
Really?
You had my interest and now you have my attention.
So, yeah.
I don't recommend anyone does that.
I'm just saying that exists in the world.
Well, that's good.
You've clearly been spending your time wisely.
Productively.
Speaking of which, you know, we decoded Yudkowski.
We're not going to spend that much time on it.
We did a Garometer episode.
We've talked about AI to death.
But there was just one or two little random things of pushback.
So a lot of people wanted us to mention he wrote an insanely long Harry Potter fan fiction.
660,000 words.
Actually well-reviewed.
By the way, the name was Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
But that does seem important.
Context that we might have missed.
Other people wanted us to go more into, you know, the whole rationalist community and that kind of thing.
And, you know, it was a long enough episode.
Other podcasts and deep dives are available.
Yeah, we can't do everything.
Can't do everything.
I was vaguely aware that he wrote fan fiction before we recorded.
But then when I was writing the show notes, I saw more specifically that it was Harry Potter fan fiction and that he'd written quite a bit of it.
It's a lot.
660,000 words, but he doesn't do things by half.
And the other thing, Matt, which I feel I need to give you a chance to defend yourself because you were unfairly besmirched all over the internet by people thinking you credulously consumed that news story about the AI missile-destroying AI or killer thing.
You know what we talked about on the episode about the...
The tests were in a simulation and AI took out the person and then took out the control tower, right?
Yeah, that's right.
If you don't remember what we're talking about, go back and listen to the whole episode again.
So you really thought that was true?
You were very disturbed by it and you would tell me, Chris, Chris, the AI is coming to get us, right?
No, in case it wasn't clear, I brought that up because...
I was immensely sceptical of the story.
And I thought it was a good example of the kind of ways in which the discourse about AI melds this fiction or hearsay slash fantasy as kind of evidence.
And since recording, it has become totally clear that it is exactly what I suspected, that it was a totally, basically trumped up story that wasn't actually real.
See, Matt knew that, and I can verify that he was pointing that out to me before we discussed it in the podcast, so he's not retroactively claiming ahead.
And if you listen to what I say, I say, I don't care if it's true or false, because I'm just not that shocked in general.
Like, this event didn't happen.
It could happen.
Somebody could make a little program where an AI kills someone in a game.
So what?
Like, bots kill being games all my tedious lives.
It's not news.
You always think it's bots, but, you know, actually, it's just 15-year-old kids who are much better at it than you are.
They're all bots, right?
They're all bots.
No, bots and humans.
But actually, I'm thinking of Quake prior to internet when it was hard, but you could run bots locally.
So there were bots, Matt, okay?
No, it's good.
There's a lot of discussion about AI, and rightly so.
It's a hot topic, and also rightly so, there's a spectrum of opinion.
We're not able to reply to everything.
But just to be clear, I think it's fair to say you and I are skeptical about Yudkowsky's claims of AI...
We're all going to die.
That's the bit that we probably strongly disagree with.
But that's not to say that it's irrational or unreasonable to have concerns about AI safety or to be thinking through what might happen next.
That part's all fine.
It's just that there's a lot of...
Missing gaps between the various parts and they're generally filled in.
Well, then like the outcome as opposed to the actual steps of why we would get there.
If there was an evil AI that was intent on sneaking past, this is something it could do.
Right.
But that's already posited the conclusion that the evil AI is there.
Anyway, so that was the AI episode.
That's not what we were looking at today.
We are looking at the topic of...
UFOs rebranded as UAPs, but they're the same, people.
Don't let the slight change in letters confuse you.
Unidentified aircraft...
What's the P stand for?
Projectors?
Aerial...
Phenomena.
Phenomena, yeah.
Or unidentified flying objects.
Choose your poison.
They're the same.
But we're going to have an interview.
With the investigator, writer, skeptic, Mick West, who has covered a whole bunch of topics, but is quite well known for investigating, some would say debunking, various claims made for foodie and given UFO encounters.
And yes, so we're doing an interview with Mick West, which you'll hear shortly.
And we're also going to decode...
Episode that he recorded a discussion with our good friend Eric Weinstein discussing mixed dismissive attitude towards UAPs and how badly he's treated Eric online.
And during that we will hear various things about Eric's opinion.
But we're not doing that today but that's coming.
It's coming.
I'm looking forward to it.
I'm looking forward to it.
Yeah, it does feel like somebody needs to call out what Eric did in that conversation and Mick is far too polite.
So one thing, though, that is worth discussing, I think Eric is a very good illustration of this trend.
It's been long enough, just a couple of minutes, but, you know, strategic ambiguity where you're both endorsing and not endorsing positions.
We've seen Eric be a master of this.
Throughout the pandemic and in general.
He cannot make a kind of statement or thread on Twitter where he doesn't include some level of ambiguity so he can slide out of any interpretation as necessary.
And with these accounts, there's a particular interview with a so-called whistleblower, David Grush.
Who is purporting to have all this information, this classified information about alien spacecraft and alien bodies.
And Eric is tweeting about it.
But the thing that Eric is doing is he's managing to constantly balance on the knife edge of promoting it, saying it's a big story and it's important.
And still simultaneously saying, but of course I'm not...
Falling for it if it's not real, and it might not be real, I have concerns, but isn't it a huge story anyway?
So, yeah, he's doing that little pop dance.
Yeah, and he's very, very good at it, to emote.
The very strong impression that something huge is going on.
The stuff that we don't know.
But, you know, big things are happening.
We need to be paying very close attention to this and investigating and get to the bottom of it without actually committing himself to a position in which he could get egg on his face.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, allow me to read.
This is one of his initial threads.
This is Eric.
I have no direct evidence that this is real.
But what you're hearing here has oddly spread quite far within the defense and intelligence sectors.
You pick it up from multiple high-level informants, and we'll hear some more about the informants in the interview.
Assuming it is all BS, then that BS is absolutely...
Compromising our security.
Try it the other way.
Assume that it is not BS.
Then the stigma and the knee-in-stovepipe security strategy of keeping this away from our own scientists is totally compromising our security.
Both ways, we have a security problem.
The answer is to investigate the claims either way.
We either have a paranormal cult running around our nuclear strategy.
A disinformation campaign.
Targeting our own people or something unprecedented, kept away from our own scientists.
You don't need to know which is true to know that this needs to be cleaned up pronto, as I've been saying.
Yes, thank you, Chris.
And just to provide a little bit more evidence here, this is him on June the 7th commenting on a slightly irresponsible article by The Guardian, which sort of kicked a lot of this off.
The article saying, US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claimed that it has intact alien vessels.
And Eric's commentary is, when I finally understood and told you that something huge, this is in emphasis, was up in this space, this is what I meant.
Anything from aliens to gaslighting our own team.
This headline is nuts, but we have now crossed the barrier from rumour to sworn testimony under oath.
But again, with the...
Just to be careful.
I still have zero hard evidence that this is real at the level of crafts.
None.
Lots of rumours with no hard evidence backing up any of it.
Nothing has changed on that front.
It may well be a massive sigh-up, but it can't be nothing.
It has to be huge one way or the other, as you can now see here.
So, he's very happy about this.
He's been talking about UFOs for a long while, you know, feeling a bit sensitive about people not taking him seriously.
Felt the latest claims by this fellow Grush, whatever his name is, was giving him validation.
And it validates him either way, right?
Because it's either a massive sigh-up, there's a faction within the thing that is whatever, the US government that's doing all these things, and there's a conspiracy happening either way, basically.
Yeah, Eric, from all the various possibilities that he gives to offer himself, the one that he doesn't is just...
Maybe people are a bit credulous, like me.
Like, maybe this is just somebody repeating stories that they've heard too credulously, and Vidya paying attention.
Maybe there actually isn't something, but that's not possible.
For Eric, it has to be indicative that there's something.
Come on, there must be something.
We just have to remind people that the claims by this guy Grush, which is all based on hearsay, right?
What some people told him.
It started off with, oh, there's evidence of...
A spaceship.
Yeah.
Some people saying that the US government has got an alien spaceship.
And then it became, they've not only got a spaceship, but they've actually got aliens.
There's aliens.
In the spaceship.
And then it became the hardest spaceship ever since 1933.
You'll hear the details in the conversation.
No spoilers.
No spoilers.
That's it.
And I can see that Eric is tweeting today as well about another story.
He's now pointing to a different one.
You know, somebody's testimony that he found persuasive.
Not the one that everybody is paying attention to.
It's always the hipster.
You guys.
I think this one is the big deal.
But actually, I've been on this.
And yeah, we'll get into this more when we cover his content.
But fundamentally, it's Eric being very swayed by testimony by people.
And he does this thing where he presents it that he's not endorsing it, but he's not dismissing it.
And so, you know, if you're going to be so certain and just dismiss things, that shows what a closed-minded fool.
That you are.
And nobody knows.
And now Eric isn't saying he's got it all figured out.
It's just that he knows he's not good.
He's humble.
So he listens, Matt.
He listens.
And there's a lot of continuity to the first-hand accounts that can't be explained by any other possible explanation.
But he does throw out some of them.
We won't get into it now.
It's very tempting, too.
But we won't get into it now.
But, yeah.
The saga continues.
The saga continues, but first, let's hear from someone who does know about UFOs, does look into them critically, with empathy, and has a long history, well documented, of looking at things critically and designing computer games.
Let's go to our interview.
Yeah.
Okay, so we have with us today Mick West, British-American science writer, skeptical investigator.
And retired video game programmer.
Which I didn't know until we did your profile.
But for our purposes, Mick is most well known for producing investigations into UFO phenomenon or UAPs, whatever your preferred terminology is.
Sometimes...
Described as a debunker, but I think not hugely in favor of that terminology.
But yes, you may have seen Mick on various shows whenever people are discussing new footage of UFOs and there's been a relative bevy in the past couple of years.
We thought it would be good to have Mick on to talk about some of the recent news stories around aliens and UFOs, but also more broadly.
about his experiences dealing with investigations in the UFOs and the UFO advocacy community.
I don't know their preferred terminology.
Alien rights now.
Yeah, that's an alien rights activist.
But Mick, is there anything I'm missing significantly from your bio there?
Well, I'm not just a UFO investigator.
I do a lot of different investigations of a variety of conspiracy theories.
I just happen to be doing a lot of UFO stuff at the moment.
My background has kind of started with investigating the chemtrails conspiracy theory.
And then moving on to a variety of other conspiracy theories like 9-11 and people who think the earth is flat and election fraud, vaccine denial, things like that.
So a whole bunch of different things.
I even wrote a book about it, which I shall plug shamelessly here, which is called Escaping the Rabbit Hole, How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect.
And I do have debunking on the...
That's front of the book, but like you say, I try to stay away from that term now because when I got into UFO investigating, I discovered that debunking is kind of like almost like a curse word to UFO people.
And I didn't realize this.
It was this very strong distinction that was made in the community between debunkers on the one side who are evil tools of the government and skeptics on the other side who are just good-natured folk who like looking into things.
You know, I'm actually a skeptic because I am a good-natured guy who likes looking into things.
And the government isn't paying me anything.
So I stay away from debunker.
But, yeah, it's all good.
That's what I do.
I lock into UFOs.
A rose by any other name, right?
It's interesting that they placed so much emphasis on that.
I think it's fine to take the approach of debunking when you're talking about the Twin Towers or chemtrails and things like that, but we're not going to talk about your recent discussion with Eric Weinstein, but it was interesting to see how focused he was on that.
Yeah.
I think investigators sum things up a lot better because I investigate UFOs.
I don't set out to debunk.
Like if someone sends me a video of a light in the sky, I mean, I can't debunk it.
I can't say that's not a light in the sky.
I'm just trying to figure out what the light actually is.
And quite often I succeed, but sometimes I fail.
And Mick, you outlined quite a long-term interest in a whole bunch of different...
Aspects of conspiracy, fierce communities, or, you know, various controversial topics.
And I'm just curious then, so how long have you been involved in, you know, skepticism and investigation and how this isn't your main activity?
So is this like a very involved hobby or how do you frame your kind of investigation work?
Well, it is a very involved hobby, and I'm actually retired from the video game industry now, so this is my main interest, I guess.
I mean, I do other things as well, but I do this, and I enjoy it as a hobby.
I think it's very interesting, and I have fun and learn new things and discover new things.
But I've been doing it since, I guess, around the mid-2000s.
I set up my first website, Contrail Science, I think in 2006, which is getting back a bit.
There's a bunch of people who weren't even born back then.
And I set up Metabunk, which is my bigger forum, in 2010.
So that by itself is like 13 years old.
So I've been doing it a while and I think the UFO thing kind of stepped up in importance and interest in the last few years as it became much more of a public interest thing and we got these kind of interesting UFO videos from the government to analyze.
So I started that in earnest I guess around 2018 would be like when I really started getting into it.
Yeah, so I think for most listeners like me, the recent stuff that was in the news, well, semi-recent now, was those recordings, I think, US Air Force pilots sighting and apparently interesting, fast-moving objects recorded on gimbaled cameras.
Do you want to tell us a bit about that?
Yeah, well, those were the ones that came out in 2017, 2018, and there was three videos.
One was called FLIR 1, one was called Gimbal, and one was called GoFast.
And they're a bit long in the tooth now, really.
They've kind of been superseded by others, but they're still there as the iconic.
Poster boys of UFOs.
Like, if you tune into a program about UFOs, you will very often see the gimbal video in the background because it looks like a flying saucer.
But that was one that I spent some time analyzing.
Now, all these videos, they're taken with infrared cameras.
So they're all just showing the heat that comes off things rather than the actual light.
And some of them weren't even taken a night, so they wouldn't be able to see anything anyway.
But, you know, one of them, the gimbal video, it looks like a flying saucer zipping over the top of the cloud.
But I did quite a lot of analysis on that over probably like a year or two, and eventually ended up building a fairly detailed simulation of what was going on and kind of determined that what we're seeing wasn't actually a flying saucer, but was actually the infrared glare of something that obscured.
What was behind it?
Like if you look at the sun, you're not really seeing the sun, you're seeing just a big glare around the sun.
Or if you look at a flashlight, you often can't see the person behind it because it's obscured by this glare.
And the rotation of this object turns out it matched exactly the rotation that was required to do the movements that you could see by looking at the numbers on the screen.
So it is some fairly technical analysis, but I think that's been fairly conclusively shown.
That it's not actually a rotating object, it is actually a rotating glare, but we don't know exactly what's behind the glare.
So there's still the possibility that it's a hot flying saucer that's doing this, or it could be that we're looking at the tail end of an F /A-18 that's flying away from the camera.
And, you know, different people prefer different explanations.
One of them seems slightly more likely, but that's perhaps my bias.
But I'm curious.
So two things that struck me there is, one, just, this is me editorializing, but the fact that you would spend, you know, a year or upwards on a particular video, it does counter the sort of image of you or other people that investigate this being Clibly.
Dismissive of things, but related to that is, I'm just curious, your expertise for things like, you know, looking at the potential mechanics of the camera that might explain the feature.
Like, why do you know that?
I know you have some experience training as a pilot, but is it from that or is it from your programming background or just your interest in the topic?
It's really mostly from my programming background.
I know how to fly a plane.
I took flying lessons to fly a plane.
I know how to use a camera and take videos and stuff.
So I've had nice cameras.
I've got a big shelf full of cameras behind me since I was quite young.
But really it's to do with the math behind what you need when you're making a 3D game.
And in a 3D game, you essentially have a virtual camera.
Often you have multiple different cameras.
But when you're playing a game, like say a skateboarding game, you have a virtual camera that's following the skateboarder.
And then sometimes when you bail, you might cut to another camera and then you would show it from a different angle.
So when you're programming it, you actually have to program what does it take to take this 3D scene and take an imaginary camera and then create the image.
On screen, this two-dimensional picture of what the camera's looking at, and then how does that work in terms of animation?
How does the camera move?
How do the objects move?
And what does that look like?
So the math that's required for that, it's not super complicated.
It's not like PhD in physics, but you're taking a three-dimensional position in the world, and then you're transforming it into a point on the screen.
Then you take that to a point on the screen.
So if you can do that, then if you've got a video of a UFO with the UFOs moving around the screen, you can take those 2D points and you can say, "Where might that be in the 3D world?"
So you basically take the math and you do it backwards.
Now you can't do it perfectly because you lose information when you go from three dimensions to two dimensions.
So you've got to kind of use other...
Clues in the scene to try to figure out how far away the object is, which is kind of the missing third dimension.
And then you can do all kinds of analysis on it.
And when I was doing video games, I actually did a skateboarding game called Tony Hawk's Pro Skater.
We used very simple physics in that.
It was you skating along and you're moving over a surface or you're flying through the air, you jump and you have to fly through the air.
The physics of that...
It's just simple Newtonian mechanics.
There's very simple equations of motion.
That's all you need.
You don't need anything complicated.
It's not like you're doing planetary orbits or anything like that.
So you can use the same math again that I used for doing a skateboarding game in reverse and figure out how is this object moving in three dimensions?
How might it be moving?
How fast is it going?
How big is it?
What's the acceleration?
All these things are determinable.
From the video.
And that's what you do to try to figure out what's going on.
If you figure that stuff out, you can see what's possible.
Like, is it a plane as far away?
Or is it like an insect that's flying along that's very close to the camera?
Is it something like a reflection or something like that?
Knowing all the math and what's actually going on in the cameras helps you determine that.
So it's fascinating to think about the influence of Tony Hawk on analyzing potential UFO videos.
I think few conspiracy theorists have that in the model of potential motivations.
But an interesting thing, Nick, from the videos that have come out over the past couple of years, I think there's a common narrative now that the...
Government kind of silencing or censorship has been broken to some extent, and that now we're beginning to see at least the tip of the iceberg of the material that they've collected over the decades and censored, right?
And a lot of the figures that we cover in the kind of guru space, that's their preferred narrative, right?
That it's really quite naive.
If you are skeptical after what's already revealed and what more is promised to be delivered.
But I'm wondering from the deep dive that you've done into the material that's been released, how you would characterize what's come out over the past couple of years with these releases.
It's not very compelling in terms of making the case that these are alien spaceships or even any kind of advanced technology.
There's really nothing in any of the videos that unambiguously demonstrates anything anomalous.
And there's a lot of the videos that come out, not just these three older videos, but some of the newer videos, that initially people say this is the best UFO video of all time.
And then when you do a bit of analysis of it, it just shows nothing.
And, you know, that's true for things that were leaked.
There was a famous green triangle video that came out, like, two or three years ago.
And the guy who released that, Jeremy Corbell, was saying, this is the best government-sourced UFO video of all time.
And this was the big headline at the time.
And, like, ten minutes after he released the video, I pointed out what it actually was, which was these green triangles, which was just a camera artifact.
And everyone's like, "No, Mick, that can't be right.
Jeremy Corbell said it was like a flying pyramid."
And Corbell says that people on the ship said it was a flying pyramid.
And he had all these witnesses saying it was a flying pyramid.
But then I matched up the video to a star map.
You can see this triangle here is this star, this triangle is this star, and all these triangles match stars.
There's one triangle that's flying along and it's flashing, and the flashing of the lights is pretty much identical to the navigation lights of a 737.
So instead of it being like a video of amazing flying UFOs that are pyramid-shaped, it turned out to be a video of some stars and a plane flying over.
And this type of thing is kind of indicative of a lot of things.
One is the claims people make, but also people in the military make mistakes.
This video, I did the analysis, but about a year later there was a congressional hearing where they showed the same video and then they explained essentially that my analysis was correct.
They didn't mention me or anything, but they said that this is a camera artifact.
They didn't say they were stars.
They hadn't even got to that bit yet.
They're doing that now.
They said recently that they're going to look at some star maps and they're going to try to fully close this case.
But I figured it out two years ago.
But they also released some new videos at the time.
And two of the videos they released had audio.
And the audio was the guy who was called the Snoopy Team Leader, which sounds like a silly name.
But Snoopy stands for like, I don't know, like systems, operations, integration or some acronym.
But it's basically the people who are tasked with taking video and photos of things that approach the ship.
So they stand on the bow or the railings and they have their really big cameras or their night vision and they take video of things.
So this guy's talking.
About what he's looking at.
And he's saying, Snoopy team leader, blah, blah, blah, this location, this time, this angle, this speed, looking at three unidentified aerial systems, which is military speak for drones, essentially.
And they're showing this video, and there's these three things, these three triangles in the sky.
But those three triangles, they weren't drones.
They were stars.
There weren't even any flashing lights in this one.
It was just three stars that he was looking at.
And this happened twice.
These are two different videos.
The exact same thing.
Like the guy is like, you know, USS Russell looking at the bow.
This is like unidentified aerial system, which is, I think he said like 400 feet off the bow.
And it was the star, I can't remember, it was a capella, I think.
So it's a known star.
And he said it was flashing red, green, and white, which is the colors that...
The Capellus flashes.
It's one of those stars that twinkles in different colors.
So military people make mistakes, and this has been revealed over and over again.
They released a video of what they said was a drone in infrared, but it was actually a plane.
And they haven't even owned up to that one yet.
It's obviously a plane.
Anyone can see it as a plane.
But there's this kind of, I don't know, there's this thread of mistakes running through all of this UFO stuff coming from the government.
And I guess it shouldn't be surprising, should it?
I mean, the atmosphere and even the ocean is visually speaking an inherently ambiguous place.
And it is unlike sort of normal objects that are maybe closer to us and you might encounter in everyday life.
Things are often like ungrounded.
So it seems like it should be quite easy for people to make errors when assessing things they see.
Sure, but like, you know, when you're, you know, what they call the trained observer, this is something that's very big in the UFO community.
They say, like, this was observed by trained observers.
And here we have examples of someone who, you know, not just pilots who are trained to fly a plane and look for other things.
They're not really trained to observe things.
These are people whose only job.
It's to observe.
They're trained observers of things coming towards the ship.
And they were mistaking stars for drones.
I mean, it's pretty bad.
It's pretty bad.
People are reporting things on video.
These triangles went up the chain of command and people were investigating it.
And it wasn't for it.
They said it was a year later that they figured out that these triangles were actually just artifacts of the camera.
I mean, like...
They've had this video, and it's like, there's these bizarre triangles swarming the ship.
I said, no, there are artifacts of the camera.
And they're actually stars, which is, I'm sure they'll release a little report on that.
I think it's coming in August or something, but they might push it till next year.
But they'll eventually admit that these things are stars.
Yeah, it's not a good look.
And even the more recent videos, they're showing videos now saying, look, we've solved this case.
And they show a video and it's like three dots moving around on the screen and you can tell obviously it's just the cameras moving around that's making these dots move around.
And they were saying this is something that we all thought was anomalous at the start.
The pilots couldn't figure out what it was.
They tried to catch up with these three dots but they couldn't catch up with them.
And it was just three planes off in the distance.
And it was moving around because the camera was moving around.
They couldn't catch it up because it was 100 miles away.
And there's more.
I mean, I could keep going, but you get the idea here.
What's going on?
The interesting thing there is a little bit that I find it fascinating with the UFO community that...
They have a kind of selective charity which they apply whereby eyewitness accounts, like you said, trained pilots or whatever that have accounts of observing a UFO are treated as if to disagree or at least to propose alternative explanations for what they observed.
It's like insulting of their expertise.
But on the other hand, they're very clear that you should...
Always be skeptical of everything that the government says and does.
So it's like there's a hyper skepticism towards any narrative that contradicts or says, you know, they investigated UFOs and they didn't find enough evidence to find it credible.
And then on the other hand, there's like a hyper charity or credibility extended.
To eyewitness testimony.
And it's interesting because it's often in the same conversation.
It's sometimes in the same paragraph that both of those approaches are deployed.
It must be frustrating to deal with.
Yeah, it's kind of understandable, though, that you would treat Two things differently.
One is kind of an organization doing things and the other one is an individual doing things just speaking for themselves.
So if you think like a government spokesperson saying we don't know anything about UFOs, it's very different to a pilot saying I saw a UFO once.
So you think the government spokesperson is doing their job.
Pilots, their job isn't to lie to people about seeing UFOs.
So I think it's kind of understandable that you would get there.
But there is this kind of veneration for pilots, and military pilots in particular.
If I say things about pilots, not about them, but just to question their account, it's viewed sometimes as a grave insult that I really should apologize for.
But what I'm doing is saying, well, maybe...
Maybe he was a bit mistaken in judging the size of this object or the distance away that this object is.
And that's basically all I'm saying, that pilots are humans.
They can make mistakes.
And pilots do make mistakes.
I've been talking about the other mistakes.
Pilots themselves, they're not immune to mistakes.
Sometimes pilots...
You know, fly into the ground because they misjudged how high they were off the ground.
This is something that happens.
You know, there's a famous UFO pilot, Commander David Fravor.
He didn't fly into the ground.
He's a great pilot.
But he says that when he was engaging with this Tic Tac object, this supposed Tic Tac object, he very deliberately flew down very slowly.
And he explains why he does this.
He's explained this several times.
He says...
The sea looks the same from 2,000 feet as it does from 8,000 feet.
So if you're not careful, you'll misjudge your altitude and you'll fly into the ocean, so you should descend towards the ocean surface slowly.
So he's admitting there that pilots make mistakes and you have to be careful and you have to be aware of these mistakes.
And yet we're also meant to...
Take everything that he says about the observations of a tic-tac object that he's never seen before as being the word of law written in stone.
It must have happened exactly like that when it probably didn't.
Yeah, I think that's one of the most frustrating things about that discourse, which the immense amount of credulity, I guess, that is given to eyewitness accounts.
My background is in psychology, which is basically the study of human fallibility, how our memories are often reconstructed and hazy, and we make mistakes with that.
We make mistakes in what we see, and we often bring...
A huge amount of expectations, you know, informed by our culture or our personal psychology into what we think we see.
So I find the discourse kind of frustrating, which is that it's like, I feel like the general public should know this or does know this, that humans are fallible, yet...
They don't, though.
I mean, that's the thing.
You know all this stuff.
You've read all the books.
You're familiar with false memories like Elizabeth Loftus and things like that.
And you know about culture-bound things where different cultures see things in different ways.
But the general public, they think memory is like a video recorder.
And if I see something and I later play it back in my mind, then that's what happens when, like you say, memories are constructed.
And when they're reconstructed later, they can change and things get added to them.
I see this always.
I'm myself in my own memories.
You have a memory of doing something, and one detail of that gets removed and replaced with something else, like it becomes a different person.
You think, oh, I was talking to this person, and then I was talking to this person then, or it was at this event, when it's actually a completely different event.
And if we ourselves can have these memories changed like that, I think people trying to recall some kind of UFO encounter from years ago can certainly do that.
I think that there are certain memories called flashbulb memories, a bit of an old-fashioned term, but it's like the camera flash going off, freezes the action, and then you remember things exactly what it was, like really dramatic things.
Like, where were you when you heard about 9 /11?
A lot of people will say that they can remember that exactly, and I think I can.
I'm 99% sure that I can.
But they've done studies on this, and people's stories change over the years.
Like, they had a large cohort of people, and they asked them, you know, describe your feelings and what was going on at the time.
Then they came back to them, like, you know, a year later, or maybe five years later, or something like that, and asked them again.
I don't know if it's completely changed, but a lot of them change very significant details.
So we've got these UFO cases, which in some cases...
Some of them are going back, say, maybe just five years.
That's still quite a lot.
Some of them are going back 10, 15 years, and some of them even further than that.
And we're asking whoever the observer is to remember.
So what you're going to get isn't going to be what happened.
I really feel like somebody should tell Eric Weinstein this, but unfortunately...
He's not available, unfortunately.
He's not available, unfortunately.
Yeah.
The point that you make is good, and I think...
One that I would completely agree with, that, you know, it is right to be skeptical of, like, government spokespeople, and there's been plenty of occasions where they've denied programs exist, which subsequently have been proven to exist, whether or not, you know, they actually reveal anything useful.
But I guess the two things that stick out to me when it comes to the level of charity and where it's unequally distributed is you're just a guy.
You're not the head of some, it's sometimes presented as, but the skeptics community is not exactly like a huge, powerful block.
In large respects, it is a lot of individuals around some organizations, but not hugely well-funded or that kind of thing.
But there isn't a lot of charity, in my experience, extended towards the skeptics that are engaging with that.
And similarly, the case, you know, you've detailed a couple of examples where the government is clearly, it's not that people don't have expertise, it's just that they might not have particular expertise in identifying artifacts in videos or that kind of thing.
And yet, a lot of people respond, you know, you're not a...
A professional pilot in the government.
So how come you can identify these things that these people with trained expertise and projects dedicated to it don't get it?
So that seems to be attributing like a hyper competency to the government when it's convenient.
Yeah, no, I agree.
And, you know, I would just ask people to look at the track records of the people involved, like, you know, what cases have they solved?
Like, I've solved a bunch of cases.
And what cases did they mess up?
Like, and some of these people have messed up cases, like the Green Triangle case, for example, and other cases.
It's very easy to kind of say, why should we trust you when a large body of experts or whatever says something else, or even just one expert?
But I come back often to this one case that was the Chilean Navy case from 2016, which was a story by Leslie Keene, who was one of the reporters on the New York Times thing, and more recently on this whistleblower thing.
And she released this video of a UFO that...
The Chilean military had been investigating for two years.
The Chilean military has a UFO investigation body, like a, you know, kind of a UAP task force in Chile.
And they've been looking into this for two years.
And they had...
A general, a brigadier general, I think, in charge of the whole group.
A whole bunch of scientists, a bunch of pilots and researchers and lots of resources.
And they looked into everything possible, interviewed people and did all kinds of research and tried to figure out what it was.
And they couldn't do it.
It took them two years.
Then they released the video.
Leslie Keen wrote a big story about how amazing it was and how it's going to change ufology forever.
And then me and the guys at Metabunk solved it in, I believe, like three days.
It took us to find what it actually was and then a few more days just to prove it conclusively by making 3D models of what was going on.
So credentials don't mean anything.
Results mean something.
I've solved loads and loads and loads of UFO cases.
How many UFO cases?
Have these other people solved?
And then weigh that one against the other.
Don't be like, you know, this guy's got a PhD.
Mick doesn't have a PhD.
Therefore, we'll trust the PhD.
When this PhD has just done nothing and got a whole bunch of things wrong.
That's, again, I can't help.
Usually, in my experience of looking at your interviews, you're very polite about it.
But I find some of this frustrating that people...
Are presenting that they're very skeptical of authority and they don't, you know, just automatically trust credentials, but then they do things like that where they'll kind of point to somebody's professional or the fact that they have a doctorate in something as if it means something.
And for all the reasons you've said, you know, it's not that expertise is irrelevant, but just that like is absolutely no guarantee.
That a particular outcome or investigation is correct just because somebody with credentials did it.
Yeah, they like people with credentials who are on their side.
They don't like people with credentials who are arguing against them because they're obviously government shills.
And they don't like authority in the sense that they don't like the government and they don't like academia and they don't like science and big money and stuff like that.
They prefer individual mavericks who are going against the system.
So they like scientists who tend to be a little more maybe eccentric than the scientists who will entertain their ideas and in some cases support their ideas.
But yes, they definitely do like the authority of credentials when someone agrees with them.
Kind of describing one of the main themes of our little podcast there.
We definitely agree.
But yeah, it is a tricky one, isn't it?
And I do have sympathy for people who struggle to allocate the right amount of trust to various sources.
It is complicated because sometimes a government department or scientists working for a government agency of some kind are the right people to trust when it comes to something like vaccines or global warming or something.
It's nuanced, isn't it?
Because I doubt that there is a government agency that employs a crack team of UFO investigators.
Like the Liam Neeson quote, it's a very particular set of skills.
It is, it is.
But what I do isn't really like, it's not just me, I use crowdsourcing quite a lot.
And there's a bunch of people on Metabunk and I don't just...
I'd sit in my room and figure it out.
I'd post something onto Metabank.
Other people would look at it and suggest other things, or they'll come up with things themselves, and I'll look at what they did, and then we'll go on.
I'll say, "I don't know what this is," and someone will go off and spend hours and hours researching it and find out what this thing is in a photo or where a particular location is, like geolocating things or looking at the weather on a particular day.
So having a team is good.
But it's kind of also in a way misleading, like that Chilean Navy thing, like having a team of experts.
You really want...
You're more than just a team of experts.
You really want to have it kind of open to everybody.
And the investigations I do are mostly kind of just in open threads on Metabunk where anyone can read them and anyone can comment.
But if people are squirreled away working on things, I think it's very easy for them to go down the wrong path and maybe eliminate something.
That's what happened with the Chilean thing.
They eliminated the possibility of this UFO being a plane.
And they had five different reasons as to why they'd eliminated it.
It wasn't showing up on the radar, it wasn't answering the radio calls, it was dumping some kind of hot liquid out of the back, and it didn't look like a plane, and something else as well.
But all these things were actually...
Entirely explainable, but they prematurely eliminated this possibility.
And this is kind of what happens if you get these kind of rigid structures, like we're going to do this, we're going to figure this out and eliminate it.
If it's not that, then we'll move on to the next thing.
If you've got a much more freeform thing, a whole bunch of people looking at things, like suggesting things, I make mistakes, people correct my mistakes, they make mistakes, I correct their mistakes, and eventually we kind of, it bubbles together and we come up with the answer very rapidly.
So there's definitely a risk in kind of trusting a team of experts.
Yeah.
Well, I like the way you framed that because it does seem like a very positive example of like a citizen science of crowdsourced enthusiasts focusing on something.
And a lot of those principles are like, you know, open science academic principles, which is individual academics.
Get it hugely wrong, have their own particular pet theories and insane obsessions.
But the whole principle, the way it's meant to work anyway, is that it's self-correcting because you have enough people.
Yeah, and with the whole peer review system, obviously that's supposed to be the gate you've got to get past and then other people will read it and then they'll respond to it and they'll replicate things.
It's very, very slow though.
It's not like a very fast process.
If you want to figure out what's in a video, you can't just say, well, I'll put a paper out and get it peer-reviewed and then see what happens and see if people agree with my hypothesis and then we'll publish it and a couple of months later maybe someone else will come up with something.
No, I'm doing it in this live thread.
I post something and 10 minutes later someone says, Mick, your math is wrong.
It's not...
Typical academic science, but it's rapid iteration of an investigation that uses essentially scientific principles and engineering principles and just general investigation principles to hone in on the solution very rapidly.
Again, this is me.
Giving a bit of an editorial, but I think the way you describe it, it could be extraordinarily healthy when the motivations are correct.
I don't like to use that word, but obviously you see heaps of examples of conspiratorially minded people who are also amateur sleuths, amateur investigators, going just further and further down rabbit holes.
But the way you described your own motivations, which I suspect applies to a lot of other...
People in your network at the beginning, which is that it's a hobby, like building model trains, and you're interested in the technical aspects.
Those are your genuine motivations, and it's not that there's a broader agenda to prove something true or something else true.
Yeah, I mean, that's a big problem in that a lot of people, they're not investigators, they're advocates.
They're trying to prove a certain thing rather than trying to find out what's going on.
When I'm looking at a UFO video, I'm trying to find out what that video actually shows.
Whereas some people, when they look at a video, they're trying to prove that it's an anomalous video.
So they're trying to eek any little ounce of anomaly out of it, and they're ignoring anything that might actually explain it.
They don't want to go down that road.
They want to go towards the light.
They want to find out, is this an anomalous UFO?
They don't really care.
To solve it, I mean, they would, but they have this kind of bias towards a certain explanation.
And a lot of people are not even investigating.
They're just advocating.
They're saying this is obviously an anomalous thing.
This guy told me that this is anomalous.
This guy's one of us.
I'm going to trust him.
And so they just end up advocating.
But over on Metabunk, hopefully all that we're doing is trying to find out.
What things actually are.
And if something was an alien and I discovered it was an alien, that would be awesome.
So I'm not against that idea.
It would be wonderful if that's what bubbled to the surface.
You know, this thing actually is going at 500G, but it doesn't actually work out that way.
Yeah, we'll have you back if that happens.
Well, motivated reasoning, as they say, is a hell of a drug.
But, you know, where I'm sympathetic for people who might...
Trust the wrong people or be misled is that, like, everybody says that they're doing dispassionate investigation.
Everybody claims to be doing that.
And it takes, I think you'd agree, a little bit of, I don't know, street smarts or social intelligence or something to tell the difference.
And even then, if you're good at it, you might be wrong.
Yeah, I'm sure I have some biases.
When I go into an investigation, I've looked at so many things already and they all...
I turn out to either be not enough information or some kind of mundane explanation.
And so when I look at something, I guess I kind of automatically think, oh, that looks like a reflection of a light in the window.
And that would be the first explanation I would check out.
I wouldn't automatically think, oh, that looks like a flying saucer.
So the priorities of my investigations are perhaps a little bit different.
But I'm still just trying to figure things out.
So if I think this is a light reflecting in the window, then I've got to investigate that.
Like, are the inside or the outside?
Was there a light in the room that would do that?
And what are the various settings on the camera?
Things like that.
So you still kind of eliminate it.
If you're saying...
Maybe it's a flying saucer, then it's a little harder to do anything with because you can't actually kind of prove something's a flying saucer just from a photograph.
So it's kind of an asymmetric kind of investigation in a way.
You do end up kind of just eliminating things.
Because the thing about UFOs is there's never something that's unambiguously anomalous.
And that's what you want, even if you can't figure out what it is.
You don't get something that has no other explanation.
There's always potential explanations for these things.
And this is something that UFOlogy lacks, kind of this black swan event of, say, two people taking a video of a silver orb in the sky from known locations, and the orb goes zip, zip, zip, with 100 g's of acceleration.
And that would be it.
That would demonstrate unequivocally, if these people are to be trusted, that something anomalous was happening.
We never get anything that even approaches that very simple level of evidence.
We just get a white dot moving around in the distance.
Could be anything.
Could be a bird.
Could be a plane.
Or we get these fuzzy blobs on the Navy videos.
Or we get eyewitness accounts of things that you can't verify.
Chris wants to pivot to another interesting topic.
But just before we do, I have a very personal...
Just curiosity, I'd like to ask.
I mean, because one exception to that, these ambiguous fuzzy dots in the distance, is the totally fabricated videos, which I've seen, you know, the technology these days for doing stuff and whatever the software is, is very good.
And I've seen a bunch of these posted on social media, and I've also read the comments.
And it seems as though, at least some people take it at face value.
I'm just wondering, you must have seen a bit of that.
What's going on there?
There's a variety of people in the UFO community, and some of them are much more ready to believe than others.
If you want to experience it, just join a few UFO groups, and you'll see there's a...
A variety of different types, some of them a bit more nuts and bolts into looking into UFOs, but very, very rapidly when you start looking into UFO culture, you get towards essentially what's supernatural.
People who believe in, excuse me, a supernatural explanation of things are very credulous about accepting a video at face value.
And, you know, someone posts a video of something that looks like a face reflecting in the window and it's obviously just some blobs of light or something.
You'll get a whole bunch of people saying, "Yeah, I can see what you're saying."
And other people say, "Yeah, I can kind of feel vibrations coming off this picture."
And with UFOs, like someone posts a fake video and people...
Why wouldn't it be real?
They accept it.
They think that there are beings coming from other dimensions and that projecting realities and all kinds of things are going on.
So there's always a range of people who are going to view any particular video and some of them are going to view it a certain way.
The obvious alien autopsy in the room is the recent testimony by David.
Grush, the former intelligence officer or some position in the government who has claimed, too much fanfare.
So speaking about that people, whether or not they're critical or not, I'm consistently amazed by the coverage of this particular story.
But yeah, so in any case, he's alleged that...
I don't believe he's seen the video.
He's just heard...
That the evidence exists, but people have presented it as very significant that he's been willing to go on the record acknowledging this.
There's articles in The Guardian.
It's been discussed by pretty much everyone that I can see online in the guru sphere.
And I'm just curious.
I think I know, but in any case, your response to this story and how it's being presented?
Well, the claims are pretty amazing.
And if they are true, they would change the world in an earth-shattering way for forever.
It would be the biggest story in human history.
But you'll notice that if you go and look at all the front pages of the media, there's not really any coverage of it.
I think everybody's being pretty cautious about it.
There's a few media outlets that are doing stories on it, but it's not like leading stories.
And the reason is that...
He doesn't really have any evidence.
This is one guy saying that other people have told him that there is an alien spaceship crash retrieval program.
And he's telling a whole bunch of stories that people have told him that he believes to be true, but he doesn't actually know if they're true.
He believes them to be true because people have told him.
And I think he's seen some documents, but he hasn't even seen any photos.
He didn't work in the program, didn't work in the crash retrieval program.
And he's not seen any of the spaceships or anything like that.
And, you know, the story broke on this media site called The Debrief.
Originally, they wanted the New York Times to do it.
One of the reporters there, Ralph Blumenthal, was an old New York Times reporter, and the other one, Leslie Keen, worked with Ralph Blumenthal, and they did this original story back in 2017.
About Lou Elizondo and the whole UFO thing back then.
That's when the videos came out.
So they actually started the ball rolling.
They tried to kind of repeat that.
They tried to get the New York Times to do a story on this, which would have been huge.
New York Times essentially turned them down because of various demands that they wanted about it.
I can't remember exactly what the deal was, but the New York Times said no.
They went to, I think, Politico.
Then they went to Washington Post.
The Washington Post needed more time to fact-check it.
So they didn't have the time for some reason, so they went to this other outlet called The Debrief, which is just kind of like a military, small media outlet, military-themed with a UFO thing, UFO overtones.
And they just pushed it out, pushed out this article.
And initially...
This article, they just say, we have this crash retrieval program, we have documents, people have told me this, blah, blah, blah.
Then we get a video, a bits of interview of this guy, Dave Grush, done by this Australian journalist, Ross Coulthart.
And he starts saying things that are even more amazing.
He says that not only do we have crashed alien spaceships, some of the crashed alien spaceships have bodies in them.
Which I thought really should have been the lead.
Really should have been the lead thing.
We have crashed alien.
We have actually alien bodies.
But turns out he never talked to Leslie Keen about that.
He never talked to the two journalists about that for some reason.
And she was like, yeah, I don't want to talk about bodies.
And if he had told me about bodies, I wouldn't have put them in the story because bodies is too much.
So it's almost like she...
She doesn't believe him on the bodies thing, but she does believe him on the spaceship thing, but she wants to do a spaceship story because she knows that's all true, but the bodies thing is a bit sketchy.
And then he does another interview for a French newspaper, I think, La Parisienne, something like that.
And in that, he makes a claim that the US acquired a UFO in 1944, nearly 80 years ago, from Italy.
And this UFO landed in Italy in 1933 and was captured by Mussolini's guys and held in a warehouse somewhere for nine years until towards the end of World War II when the Allies invaded Italy.
And they took this UFO back to the States and they started analyzing it.
And then they discovered Velcro and Teflon and stuff like that and semiconductors by analyzing this UFO.
It's just basically part of UFO mythology.
It's this old story that's been knocking around for a long time, and a lot of people think that it's just a fake story.
So it almost seems like, you know, it's not like he's discovered all these secrets.
It's like somebody who believes in all the UFO stuff has been talking to someone else, telling them stuff, and then they talk to Dave Grush, and Dave Grush is, oh my god, we got this thing back in 1944.
And, you know, it's just all of it.
All of it is essentially UFO mythology.
I remember someone tweeted today and they said there's nothing in what Dave Grush has said today that we didn't already know.
It's just that he's, you know, a trained professional who's coming forward for the first time.
He told us that he was asked, what evidence do you have that these are alien craft?
So they've got these alien craft with dead aliens inside them.
And he says, "What evidence do you have that these are alien craft?"
He doesn't say, "Oh, well, they had aliens inside them."
He says, "We did some analysis of the isotope ratio of some metal, and it was an unusual isotope ratio that must have been engineered."
They just ignored the alien bodies.
Yeah, they're just aliens sat around there.
They're like, "What is this weird bit of tinfoil?"
So it's not the most compelling-sounding story to me.
It sounds pretty ridiculous.
And apparently he has receipts.
Apparently other people are going to come forward and corroborate what he's saying.
But it just sounds like he's repeating UFO mythology.
The isotope ratio thing is at least 10 years old, I think.
People have been finding bits of metal and being like, oh, this isn't the right isotope ratio.
And then there's another piece of metal.
It's this little triangular piece of metal and it's made of multiple layers of magnesium and bismuth and a bit of zinc.
And people are saying, like, you know, no human technology can create this.
It's a metamaterial.
It's a terahertz waveguide.
But this is something that I believe it was sent in to Art Bell, who was this conspiracy theorist radio host, like, 20 years ago, with this cover letter of this guy saying, my grandfather had these things from his time in the military when he was, like, a telepathic communicator with the aliens.
And I found this in an envelope in the attic, and I was sending them to you to take care of.
And they'd be knocking around.
The UFO community ever since.
It's just a little bit of scrap metal, essentially.
It's got these weird layers that probably come from some industrial process, like it was sputtering or something like that, where you coat things and then a bit of the side of the container got coated with something.
Again, it's just all UFO mythology.
Being repeated in this weird framework of playing telephone, where everyone tells everybody something else, and it's all top secret, and you don't know that it was originally just this silly story, and now it's gone through to Dave Grush, and now he's telling it to Congress.
We had a slight experience of this through the content that we analyzed, looking at that kind of secular guru space, because in particular, there were a couple of other people that mentioned it as well, but the two most prominent were Sam Harris and Eric Weinstein indicated that they'd been contacted,
I believe independently, by someone.
And the person had got their telephone number.
This was part of the thing that they found very convincing.
And that person promised That they were going to reveal evidence to them.
And this was around the same time as that information was starting to appear in the New York Times and the stories that you just talked about.
And Sam Harris talked about it on this podcast.
And he seemed quite, you know, he acknowledged that I'm not all in on this.
I'm just saying that there's credible...
People who appear to be contacting me and letting me know that they want me to help break the story.
And seeing with Eric, and Eric indicated that this person had been in contact with him for years.
And in your conversation with Eric, and subsequently with Sam, I think Sam ended up disillusioned and doesn't talk about it anymore.
But I find that this kind of narrative that there's...
Evidence that's forthcoming, and it's going to be explosive.
And that the government, or whoever it is, wants to release it to someone like Sam Harris, Eric Weinstein, who are influential people, but not exactly, I would imagine, the primary sources that we need to release the existence of UFOs from.
So I just find that interesting.
Actually, the part that interests me is, There is clearly someone involved who is promising the release of information.
And I wonder, is that something that you have experience with?
Or is that just a constant that people do that?
And are they able to persist for years without actually providing the information or the proof?
Yeah, there's a whole group of them.
And they call themselves the Invisible College.
And this is going to be a historical term, but it was kind of coined, I believe, by Jacques Vallée, who's a big UFO guy, French UFO guy, lives in America now.
But the Invisible College is basically a bunch of people in academia and in other institutions, including the Pentagon, who believe that aliens are here and they're doing stuff to try to...
Promote disclosure.
They're trying to work behind the scenes to make the government admit what they know about UFOs.
And they've been doing this for at least 20 years or so, and probably longer.
So with Jacques Vallée, and there was a whole bunch of other people at the time, some of them were deceased, and then there's kind of a new generation of people coming in and being mentored by the old generation.
Jacques Vallée has a guy called Gary Nolan, who is this Stanford scientist, is kind of a neuro...
He's a biology, geneticist type guy.
Very accomplished in his field, but he's also very into UFOs.
And he's part of the Invisible College.
He's one of the people who's behind Dave Grush.
He's one of the people who's basically been going around with Dave Grush and introducing him to people and saying, this is the whistleblower who's going to tell us everything that we need to know about UFOs.
And then there's other people like there's journalist George Knapp, who's this guy who's...
Behind Bob Lazar, who's this guy who's kind of similar in a way to Dave Grush.
He said he lacked all the credentials.
He was the guy who's seen all these UFOs.
He actually claims he actually saw them, unlike Grush.
And George Knapp routed this guy in complete fraud, Bob Lazar.
And he has a protege now, like Jeremy Corbell, who's doing similar types of things.
He's the guy behind the Green Triangle video.
So there's this kind of almost like a generational group of people.
Trying to do this stuff.
And I think they've been approaching people.
And people have described it as grooming, which the term acquired very negative meanings now, so you can't really use it.
But they're kind of like training these people and courting their attention and then kind of building them up to do certain things, like you use their position.
So they approach people like Sam Harris.
And they sound great because they're people who are, they've got credentials.
There's people like Hal Putoff, who's a guy who's a physicist who's done work for the government, but he's also done work on telepathy, and he was a big fan of Yuri Geller.
They get someone like him, and there's a guy called Kit Green, who's, I think, a doctor who's studied the brains of people who had UFO encounters, and he's worked with Gary Nolan.
They're all kind of together in this invisible college.
So they approach someone like Sam Harris.
Sam Harris is like, ooh, this guy from the CIA, Kit Green.
It might be someone else.
There's a bunch of different people.
CIA is approaching me and they're telling me things and they're promising that I'm going to get to see this evidence.
But Sam Harris isn't stupid.
So he figured it out.
He figured out that, you know, you've got to get some actual real evidence.
And he's kind of demanding the actual real evidence.
And they're like, oh, we'll take you to see the evidence.
And then they don't take him because it doesn't really exist.
And then he's like, you know, this is bullshit.
And eventually he becomes disillusioned.
And then he watches some of my videos.
He actually, he cited that at one point in one of his interviews that he watched my videos and found them reasonably compelling to explain the other videos.
And now he's like, you know, that was just nonsense.
Eric, the same.
I think he uses the analogy of, I don't know if you'll know Charlie Brown, Lucy.
There's this famous scene in Peanuts where Lucy has a football and Charlie Brown is running up to kick it and Lucy pulls it away.
And she's been doing this forever.
She's been doing this for like 60 years.
And he hasn't figured it out yet.
And there are a lot of people who still haven't figured it out.
Sam Harris and Eric Weinstein have figured out that that's Lucy over there, and she's promising you a football to kick, but when you run up to kick it, she's going to pull it away.
And so they've been turned away, but lots of other people are lining up to kick that football.
Yes, I remember Eric signing that story from years back, so I think it took him a while to figure out that it was Lucy, but anyway.
Yeah, it is interesting, and you know, the point you made about...
People having protégés.
We've observed amongst the kind of gurus that we cover, it's not all of them, and we cover a range of people.
The same as you, I'm sure, Mick, that there are various people that we've looked at who are relatively normal people and they're not necessarily doing terrible harm.
They're just, you know, they have particular interests.
So I'm not trying to say that this applies to all of them, but some of them...
They do encourage these kind of devotional communities and this very strong in-group, out-group dynamic whereby the people in the in-group are the truth seekers and the people outside are part of a distributed idea suppression complex, for example.
And then those networks are quite good at generating what we've referred to as minor gurus or satellite gurus.
They're kind of followers who are very defensive of their selected But they gain an independent kind of following.
And then they become, you know, some of them they don't get that big.
Other ones completely spin out and get their own platform.
And I observed in some of the more extreme conspiratorial content I consume, like Alex Jones, that he was grooming, in a sense, Paul Joseph Watson to be his replacement.
That, as subsequently, Paul Joseph Watson became big on his own and doesn't seem to be fulfilling that role.
So, yeah, I wonder if that dynamic is something that the personality type that seeks to be a guru or believes that they have secret insight cultivates.
Yeah, I think with the UFO culture, there are a number of people that are these bigwigs that people look up to, like Lou Elizondo.
And there's a bunch of people who are his acolytes, like people who are big fans of him, and they kind of get a bit of a following because they kind of have access to this person.
This person will respond to their tweets and things like that.
So you get a bit of the fame by association.
Like if a typical UFO fan in this culture, this kind of like this subculture, not all UFO enthusiasts are really into this current group of invisible college people.
But people who, someone who really is, and if Lou Elizondo was to follow them on Twitter, they're like, oh my god, it's like, you know, a superstar has followed me.
They think there's this super famous person, you know, someone who, they've seen him on TV and stuff like that.
But yeah, there is this kind of secondary and tertiary tier of different people and lots of people with podcasts and then people, like you say, they will probably move away.
I mean, at the moment it's kind of pretty close knit because everyone's focusing on these few things and Lou Elizondo has been.
You know, Lou's still very much in the mix, Elizondo.
He was the guy who was revealed by the original Leslie Keene story back in 2018, 2017.
He kind of, like, has stepped back a little bit, and other people are kind of taking the front, and things are going on behind the scenes.
Now you've got, like, Gary Nolan is stepping up, and Ross Colhart, the Australian guy.
Various other people.
And then there's these younger kids, this guy called Chris Sharp, who has a blog called the Liberation Times, which is basically just kind of, you know, an invisible college mouthpiece.
And he writes things for the Daily Mail sometimes.
And there's another guy at the Daily Mail who's pretty friendly with.
With him, and they write things about UFOs together, kind of promoting the narrative.
And these are younger guys, like 30 or so.
So there's these generations of people doing this, looking up to the older generations, and then the mentoring, and then the passing on.
And then, like you said earlier, there's this idea of kind of othering people and excluding them.
Gary Nolan has told all his followers that they should all ignore me.
And this has become a bit of a narrative in the UFO community.
Uh, which is in dispute.
Not everyone thinks they should ignore me, but like everyone's like, you know, Gary said we should ignore him.
And that's like, you know, well, why were you even talking about him then?
Let's, let's don't say anything.
Like, so people are trying to ignore me when they talk about work that I do.
They don't mention me by name on TV.
They will say like some debunkers think that this is just a camera artifact, but they don't have PhDs when they won't, they won't mention me by name.
He who should not be named.
Yeah.
Names are power.
Yes.
So.
You've not only looked at UFO stuff, but going back, you had an interest in flat earthers and chemtrails and stuff.
And I shared those interests with you, by the way.
I was a bit fascinated by those communities, not to mock or ridicule them, but rather just that I was fascinated by why they believed the things they did.
And it was very interesting to have one-on-one virtual conversations with them.
But what I wanted to ask you was, there's clearly an awful lot of overlap.
In terms of the conspiratorial nature of these sort of belief systems, and yeah, there's an awful lot of overlap in terms of motivations and the psychology, but I wonder, can you think of anything that is unique to the people that are fans of UFOs?
Like, what makes them, if anything, distinct and special from other kinds of conspiratorial beliefs?
Well, it's really that the UFO culture is, to a very large extent, based on personal experience.
And not just believing something that you've read.
A huge portion of people who are deep into this UFO stuff are people who claim to have had some kind of experience with the UFO.
Gary Nolan had, when he was a child, he had small beings visit him in his bedroom and later saw a UFO fly over his head when he was delivering papers.
And even later than that, as a young man, he had an experience with some kind of entity talking to him in a hotel room.
So if you have someone who has a deep personal experience that they think was very significant to them, it really makes a huge difference in how they interpret these ideas and the framework that's presented to them.
And they find it very attractive, the idea that UFOs are some kind of advanced technology, some kind of higher non-human intelligence, because it explains their experience.
And they love the idea that their experience becomes validated.
Well, you don't really have that with flat earthers.
They have the idea that the earth is flat.
They're sure they personally can see it kind of looks like it's flat, but they're seeing the exact same thing that everybody else is seeing every day.
They're not having this unique experience that UFO people have.
People who are interested in JFK, it's just purely historical.
Nothing's going to change.
Chemtrails, it's just, again, you're seeing the same things that other people are seeing.
It's not unique.
The nature of the personal experience is what makes UFO culture this very specific thing.
Yeah, that's interesting.
Sorry, Chris, but I just wanted to ask Mick, because it seems like there's a personal revelatory and spiritual...
Aspect to part of it.
And you reminded me of that fellow, Mike Clelland.
I'm sure you're probably aware of him.
You wrote the messages, owls, synchronicity and UFO.
Oh, you're in for a treat.
I encourage you to look into it.
I'm familiar with owls.
Did you say owls?
Owls, yeah.
Synchronicity and owls.
You know, owls are basically a...
Trans-dimensional smokescreen for aliens in a nutshell.
I'm simplifying it a bit.
Birds are not real, but more specifically to UFOs and owls.
Owls, yeah.
Owls do look very alien.
If you've ever seen a little baby owl standing up, they look decidedly alien.
And they also explain a few alien encounter cases because they've got their big eyes and they can look like they're...
Aliens in low light, and then they have their claws reaching out towards you.
Yeah.
I will link people up to a lecture given by Mike Collin in the notes.
And he's actually an extraordinarily well-spoken person.
He comes across as a very nice person, actually.
And he describes his research into this phenomenon.
And he had the suspicion about Al's synchronicity, which is like singing.
Strange things like the letter three times or something like that.
And then seeing an owl.
You know, these weird coincidences.
So he put out, to research it, he put out a call on the various websites for people to send in describing this phenomena and asking people to check whether they'd had similar types of experiences.
And he got a torrent.
And you compiled all of this evidence.
It was just very telling in terms of just the epistemics of it.
It's casting a very large but very loose net.
You're going to catch a bunch of specific fish.
It's like you put out the word for a certain type of coincidence.
It's like you've put out a call.
Have you ever thought about a person and the phone rang and it was that person?
Yeah.
You're going to get a lot of responses because that's something that just happens to people.
And if you just...
This is something in all these conspiracy theories.
There's a lot of taking the cream of the crop, especially with UFOs.
Random things are going to happen.
Coincidences are going to happen.
Some of those coincidences are going to be more interesting coincidences than others.
And if you just, you know, you've got all these coincidences, some of them are low-level coincidences, some are medium-level coincidences, some are like super high, some of them are like amazing coincidences.
You just like draw a line somewhere about the 99% level, take the few coincidences that are way up at the top, and it's like miracles.
That's how miracles happen.
These are the most amazing things that ever happened.
So if you, you know, you filter out the amazing stuff, you get amazing stuff, but because amazing stuff is inevitable.
Someone's going to win the lottery.
And if someone thinks, I'm going to play these numbers, and then they win the lottery, it's a miracle.
But it's not.
Someone's going to win.
It's going to happen to somebody.
I mean, I'm sure there's a psychological term for it, but it's like interpreting a coincidence as having special significance, when really it's just something that is actually inevitable.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, there's very well understood.
Chris and I have talked about this, and I won't.
Distract people from it now.
But yes, it is quite interesting that there are good psychological reasons for having this trigger finger on the interpretation and over-extrapolating from events.
But that's a discussion for another day.
Yeah, it's a fun topic, though.
I wrote an article on, I don't know if you know, the game show Jeopardy.
It's just a quiz show in America.
My wife and I watch it every day, and we started noticing that there were strange coincidences between things on the show and things that would happen during the day.
So I actually did the math on what are the likelihoods of these coincidences actually happening.
So I did some simple analysis of it.
You get so many things you talk about during the day and so many clues on the thing.
And there's going to be some overlap at some point.
And approximately, I think it was once every 200 shows, you're going to get a really amazing coincidence, like a one in a million coincidence.
It seems like one in a million, but it's actually...
Much, much more likely because there's so many things that can possibly overlap.
And it played out.
I see the same frequencies that I calculated.
So we occasionally get these awesome coincidences.
My wife and I will be talking about, you know, what's the Spanish for chicken and rice?
And then the same day, that was a question on Japanese.
It took a year for something else like that to happen.
But that comes up all the time, you know, like in UFOs.
I say, well, perhaps it was just a coincidence that they went to this spot on the radar and then they saw this thing and they said, no, that's impossible.
There's no way it could be a coincidence.
That's just so unlikely.
But at some point, an amazing coincidence is going to happen to a fighter pilot and he's going to misinterpret it as a UFO.
It's inevitable.
Yeah, people are just terrible at, including myself, everybody.
I do a lot of work in statistics, but it doesn't make my intuitions necessarily any better.
And have you heard of the little mathematical thing where if you have a room of, I forget the numbers, it could be 30 people.
The birthday paradox.
The birthday paradox, yeah.
Yeah, it's the same math, actually, that I used for the Jeopardy thing, because it's two intersecting groups, essentially, like, you know, what are the odds that one will intersect with the other?
I mean, it's really a set intersecting with itself, but it's the same type of thing.
It's hard to constantly miss.
Eventually, you're going to get a hit.
But people think that it seems very odd.
It's like one in 30, the chance of two people in a room.
If you have 30 people, you've got an even chance of them having the same birthday.
But it seems like, oh my god, you have the same birthday as me.
What are the odds?
They're pretty good.
Yeah, you mentioned before, Mick, about flashbulb memories.
And actually, I do research on transformative rituals that people go through.
And flashbulb memories are part of that.
But like you indicated, the initial research was suggesting people have these very good memories, accurate memories for those kind of emotional events.
But subsequently emerged that they just have...
Very strong attachments.
And often these events are very core to their identity.
So they're often very important memories for autobiographical identity, but not more accurate than any other memory.
And so when you were describing that one of the features of the UFO community is that they often have personal experiences, it does feel that that lays the groundwork for...
People undermining or presenting alternative naturalistic To evoke an emotional reaction because you're undermining a core part of someone's personal autobiographical identity.
And if you do that, it's not just a discussion about the facts or particular interpretations of memory.
It's more like challenging someone's self-identity.
I wonder because of that, the reaction that you get from the UFO community, so you mentioned some people don't want to invoke your name or that kind of thing, but I wonder, do you...
Do you experience stronger, more hostility from that community, notably?
Or is it much-for-muchness if you're talking with contrails and flat-wervers as well?
Yeah, you definitely do.
You get as much more blowback, I guess, from people who believe in UFOs.
I was very surprised when I first started investigating UFOs that people would be much...
Significantly, like two or three times more if I was to put numbers on it, reactive.
I got like the first kind of hate mail that I'd really got, like people sending me pornographic photos and things like that, which never happened before.
And it was a surprise to me.
And it wasn't until someone else pointed out that these people have these personal experiences that I really understood what that was.
But yeah, I definitely noticed it.
And it's definitely something I still notice.
If someone believes in 9-11 conspiracies, they know that that's generally not believed by other people, and they're kind of all right with it because they know that it's just something that's outside of society.
But when it's actually something they personally experience, I think it just becomes so much more personal when someone offers a rebuttal of something adjacent to what they've believed.
Or if you even have the temerity to actually suggest something.
About their experience.
They'll tell you that, you know, I've gone over this a thousand times in my mind and there's no doubt in my mind what I saw.
And they have these super clear memories.
But we know from research that false memories can be just as vivid as real memories.
They seem just as vivid and just as significant and you can replay them in your mind in exactly the same way.
And I don't know.
To what degree that's happened with these people.
And I always try to stay away from it now.
I don't even go there and say maybe you've got a false memory because there could be no, there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever about what happened.
I remember exactly what happened, where I was, who I was with, where I looked up and what this big flying triangle actually did.
And it's stayed with me ever since.
And there's not a lot you can do with something like that.
Yeah, I think that's a really important point, and a point of distinction, because for many conspiracy theorists, the uniqueness, the fact that they're not commonly shared...
In the general population, and they're not believed, kind of makes them feel a bit superior, right?
They're the goats and you're the sheep.
And it's been identified as one of the psychological rewards associated with conspiratorial belief.
But that's a bit different when you're talking about a very personal, even spiritual, transformational experience, which is a key part of your identity.
And then for someone to be denying that, that is a very different thing.
Yeah, it is.
The person, in some ways, it's almost like they're kind of marginalized because it's this very small thing that only they experience.
So they're not really in this group of people who have discovered the truth about the world.
They've got that as well in that they're part of the UFO culture, but they've got their own experience, which only they, not even the other people in the UFO community can share.
Some of them will seek out groups of people who have had similar experiences.
And you get these very self-reinforcing groups of people who do not question what anybody said.
So you can go into one of these groups and you can say, a giant ape came into my room last night.
And they'll be like, oh yeah, that's just the type of manifestation of an unhuman intelligence, like projecting a certain type of reality into your brain.
And that's the type of thing that happened to me like that.
It wasn't an ape, it was like, you know, it was an alien.
And they will...
Come up with something that will explain the experience and fit it into this framework.
But, you know, it's all these individual people and they're seeking validation for their individual experiences.
So he kind of ends up with this huge melange of different types of things.
And you have to really jump through some incredible hoops.
I mean, there's really kind of a one overarching explanation that they've ended up coming with.
And this was something that Jacques Vallée, who I mentioned earlier, came up with, which is that These experiences aren't real experiences.
This is something that the non-human intelligence is projecting a reality to you.
And this reality can even differ between different people who were in the room when it happened or in the car when it happened.
So different people will have different experiences, which normally when different people have different experiences, that generally means that their accounts are unreliable.
But in UFO culture, in some aspects of UFO culture, different people having different experiences makes it more reliable because that's an element of what they think is going on.
They think that people are having essentially hallucinations of UFOs projected into their brains.
But of course, on top of that, there's also real UFOs as well.
So you get everything blended together in this explanation of everything, which really explains nothing.
Yeah, this really came through quite strongly as a theme, actually, in that recent discussion with Eric because he kept coming back to that point that it also actually almost had like a social justice kind of flavor to it, which is that...
You should respect their individual subjective experience and to deny that, to deny their lived experience is harmful and a form of aggression.
Yeah, it's a problem.
And this is something that Jacques Vallée is the prime mover in this way of dealing with people.
A witness comes forward, they tell a story, and you assume that their story is entirely accurate, and then you try to figure out what happened.
And really the only way you can do it is this new theory.
We're not new, it's been around forever.
This theory of projected reality.
And so then you've got to try to figure out what's projecting this reality.
And the whole thing with just aliens and spaceships isn't really satisfactory.
And so they've come up with it being beings from another dimension.
And these are essentially trans-dimensional tricksters who are using this kind of...
Reality projection thing with UFOs to do things.
But it's really just that's all they could come up with.
That isn't what they discovered by careful analysis.
It's just if you're going to believe everything that everybody says and everyone's saying different things, then individual realities is the only way you can explain it.
When, of course, it's just a big excuse.
Tricksters could be, I'm just throwing that out there.
The trans-dimensional tricksters, that seems possible.
But it is interesting, isn't it?
I don't want to compare it to schizophrenia or something or pathologize it, but it's like a Philip K. Dick.
It's like when things are approaching a Philip K. Dick novel, right?
It's a fantasy.
It's a weird way of looking at the world.
Kind of throw out all kind of objective reality, really.
And you're saying we're living in some kind of projected reality.
What can you do?
Can you actually trust anything?
You get into some of the more esoteric aspects of this and people are doing experiments in psychic powers and they say, I read this one experiment, it's kind of related to this thing, but it was an experiment on intentionally enhanced chocolate.
So they got these bars of chocolate and they had a control sample they did nothing to.
A guru prayed over one.
They had a machine that prayed over another one.
And then they had another one which had some kind of computer did something to it.
I don't know.
They waved some sage over it or something.
And then they measured what people felt after taking all of these.
And they found the ones that were intentionally enhanced in some way made people a little bit happier than the control sample.
But in the paper, they said, use caution here, because I'm kind of paraphrasing you.
If skeptics read this paper in the future, then their negative intentions may travel back in time and alter the results.
Which is just, you know, it's like you're coming up with excuses for everything.
Better not look at the data sets.
Yeah, but it's just ultimate magic.
Beings from another dimension projecting a reality to people are like...
Time-traveling negative intentions, changing test results.
There's a lot of excuses and not a lot of reality.
Yeah, and I think psychology has a lot of experience with such things because of the influence of Darrell Baum's Feeling the Future article, which...
Positive, retroactive causality that you could do the stimulus and get the result afterwards.
And as a result, we had served as a potent impetus for the replication crisis.
So it did have some positive aspects, those kind of approaches.
At least he did not go so far as to say, if you look at my data, you might.
Retroactively change it so it looks like it's less impressive.
He should have.
That's a good one.
We took up a lot of your time this evening, but it's been an absolute pleasure.
I could continue harassing you for UFO stories and Tales of Intergalactic, Oz, or other trans-dimensional tricksters, but where should people...
Look, if they want to see more of your content or investigations, is there like a hub?
There's your book, which we'll put in the show notes.
Yeah, my book, Escaping the Rabbit Hole.
New edition is coming out June 20th, so hold off on buying it, everybody who's going to buy it.
My YouTube channel has a lot of my investigations of things like UFOs and a bunch of other stuff.
If you dig down, there's loads and loads of videos there.
But the investigations of the UFOs are front and center if you're interested in that.
On Twitter, I'm at Mick West.
On YouTube, I'm at Mick West as well.
And I have my site, Metabank, where you can dig down into a whole bunch of interesting things or maybe even join in the conversation.
Okay, great.
Well, thanks again, Mick.
Great to meet you and enjoy your evening.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
It's been a very interesting conversation.
I've enjoyed it.
That was a good job, Matt.
You did very well.
Perceptive questions.
Good.
Good answers by Mick.
Yeah, good listening on both the parts from what Nick had.
We did well.
Collectively, we did a good job.
Nick did all right, too.
He was fine.
He was all right.
Yeah, he was possible.
We might have him back.
Yeah, and those nice insights, Matt, about transformative personal experiences and kind of rituals, that's the kind of thing that you don't get.
Oh, you mean your insights?
Yeah, my insights.
It's the kind of thing you don't get on a glib.
That's why people are here, Chris, for your insights.
We've got real expertise here.
Okay?
Okay?
Funny how you find a way to, you know, just wedge in your own personal research obsessions.
I rarely say anything about my own research, Matt.
So, how dare you?
There was one.
So, the review of reviews today, I don't have because I haven't been canvassing for them enough, Matt.
And I, as a result, they're all too familiar for me.
I've read them all.
Nothing sparking my imagination and seeing it.
No, it's fine.
It's fine.
I replied to a very thoughtful comment on our Yudkowsky AI episode.
What did you say?
Well, I don't want to read it all out, but it was a thoughtful comment about the degree to which if humans have evolved and, well, animals can evolve.
Then isn't it reasonable to expect that we can see the same things with AIs?
And it's a good point on the face of it because we do have such things like genetic algorithms and optimization for software that is based on evolution.
And we have had things like computer viruses, you know, which sort of mutate to some degree and do replicate themselves and spread that way.
But, yeah, there are also...
You just wanted to...
You mentioned that your response to that was great.
My response was great.
It's too, I don't know, it's too technical.
It's too long to get into.
Yeah, for the players.
Yeah, just sign up to Reddit.
Sign up to Reddit.
It's free.
Join the Reddit community.
That's right.
So our review of reviews today is a little bit odd, but in any case, the thing that we do need to do is shout out patrons, Matt.
That is a non-negotiable.
It's a deal breaker.
We do this at the end of the podcast, we read out names, and then we say thank you.
You know how it goes, right?
Yeah, it's the most fascinating part of our format.
Yeah, that's good.
So I'm going to tell you who the people that we're thanking are, Matt.
Today, I'm starting from the lowest tier, the conspiracy hypothesizers.
Not lowest.
Not lowest.
First shall be last.
No way.
Yeah, yeah.
That's not the way that usually goes.
That's right.
Okay.
The meek and the lower tier patrons will inherit the earth.
The earth.
Yeah.
So they go first.
So I've got Aaron Boyd, H. Farmer, Ian Grieve, Christian Chili Grib, Chinmai, Nancy Heal, Jason Eden.
Kevin Gojmarak, Joshua McGonagall-Illaz, Carla Crane, Blake Lever, No,
Efridge, and Alexander Tebowl and Mohamed Ahmed.
Those are all conspiracy hypothesizers for this week.
Thank you.
Thank you, thank you.
Every great idea starts with a minority of one.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
Okay.
So that map, that's the conspiracy hypothesizers.
Now, the revolutionary geniuses.
And there, we've got Peter Clerken, Andrus Reddick, Chesie, Heller Gewerding, Susan Abramson,
Diane Camp Yanai Sined Copy Duncan Scott Brewer The
Erin Emichigan and Roddy also Marianne Hasberg and Pavel
That's our revolutionary thinkers for this week, Matt.
Fantastic.
Well done, everybody.
Good decision.
I'm usually running, I don't know, 70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time.
And the idea is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm.
I'm someone who's a true polymath.
I'm all over the place.
But my main claim to fame, if you'd like, in academia is that I founded the field of evolutionary consumption.
Now, that's just a guess, and it could easily be wrong.
But it also could not be wrong.
The fact that it's even plausible is stunning.
Could not not be wrong, Jordan.
Could not not not.
Could not not be wrong.
Right, that's important.
Now we've got a couple, Matt, just a couple to shout out this week for the Galaxy Brain Gurus.
And there we have MetaValent Demididact.
It's a good name.
Hustletron9000.
Another good name.
Rez.
Julius Horsfus.
And...
Amber, hi.
Oh, and Keaton Patterson.
Good old Amber helped host a live Hangout when you weren't there.
So that was nice of her.
So we should pay her.
Yeah, it feels like, yeah, sorry.
I feel like I haven't been to a Hangout for a while.
I guess it's been almost two months, maybe.
That's true, yeah.
I'll be there.
I had a good excuse, didn't I?
I was at a family.
You did, a very good excuse.
So, yeah.
All right.
Well, that's it for this week, Ma.
Bye-bye.
We got weird energy in this outro.
That's fine.
You know, they can't all be bangers.
That's right.
It's been pleasant.
Nice to see you again.
See you soon.
Ciao. Ciao.
Ciao. you you
Yeah.
You know, one reason for me is I've been doing Chris's statistics for the last couple of hours and coding statistics in R leaves me feeling kind of autistic.
Like I can't deal with people.
I'm just dealing with, you know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I might, yeah.
I get it.
That's the mood.
That's the mood.
And while you were working with statistics, I was studying with the sense makers.
Oh, God, yeah.
We'll have our crosses to bear.
All right.
Well, I'm out of here.
I'm not even going to warn you about the disc in the gin.
