UFOs, Aliens, and What Science Actually Says | From First Principles Pod

In this collaboration episode of Curiosity Theory and From First Principles, Dr. Dakotah Tyler and Justin Shaifer join Lester Nare and Krishna Chaudry for a wide-ranging conversation about UFOs, science, and the future of knowledge.

They explore the reality of UAP sightings, what counts as scientific evidence, and how physics places constraints on extraordinary claims. The discussion also dives into how misinformation spreads, why the modern content ecosystem often rewards being wrong, and the role science communicators play in bridging the gap between research and the public.

The episode expands into emerging technologies like AI, genetic engineering, and the accelerating pace of discovery, raising deeper questions about how society keeps up with scientific progress.

Visit our Merch Store
https://www.curiositytheorypod.com/merch

Join our Patreon
https://www.patreon.com/c/CuriosityTheory

Follow the show @curiositytheorypod

Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler and Justin Shaifer

Stay curious.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The most commonly reported UFO by pilots.

SPEAKER_04 0:07

There's stuff flying around and we don't know what it is.

SPEAKER_02 0:20

And then they're using this like warp drive to move through the galaxy.

SPEAKER_00 0:28

So we went from handles to potentially robots walking around in like less than 200 years.

SPEAKER_02 1:06

Chris McCaddery, co-host of From First Principles.

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Nice. Uh, Dr. Dakota Tyler, aka Dr. Starkid, science communicator, astrophysicist, author, and co-host of Curiosity Theory.

SPEAKER_04 1:20

And to my left, and Lester Nare, co-host of From First Principles, previously and sometimes known as Elroy Spacely. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:30

So we're going to be diving in on a host of topics. We talked about science communication in the modern era. We talked about what else? AI and pedals got all off with you, LEA.

SPEAKER_00 1:41

So in like the 80 seconds, we have um Lester trying to convince all of us, and actually, I think making some headway. Uh on I'm just trying to get us to neutral. Very interesting. UFOs, we're talking all sorts of crazy stuff.

SPEAKER_05 1:57

So stick around and dive in with us right now. Right now.

SPEAKER_00 2:00

You said that you are the president of a UFO foundation. I I I didn't say that. Can you please expand on that?

SPEAKER_04 2:07

I did not say that. Um I've been volunteering for the Disclosure Foundation as the director of operations for about a year and a half. Um, I'm sure you guys have seen, and I think you actually talked about this on a previous episode. Like there's this new term unidentified anomalous phenomenon that the government has been talking about since this sort of uh groundbreaking New York Times article in 2017 that identified the U.S. government has had multiple, you know, UFO study programs within our lifetime. The one that the New York Times talked about was funded by the then Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, uh Democrat from Nevada. And since then, there's been sort of this string of government whistleblowers, reports. The Pentagon currently has a UFO office called uh the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office that was mandated by Congress to create because Navy pilots, Air Force pilots have been seeing these objects ostensibly of technological origin, both abroad and in training ranges domestically.

SPEAKER_00 3:08

I just want to plug in that the most commonly reported UFO by pilots is in fact the planet Venus.

SPEAKER_04 3:18

No, which is which is totally fair. And I think there is a new ecosystem of both data, and now we're having a combination of like the Galileo Project by Ivy Love at Harvard, the Seoul Foundation at Stanford. Are you now getting academia actually leaning into this and doing real, like similar to multi-messenger astronomy type studies, where we're creating sensor systems that are specific to looking for this near-earth, you know, transient objects. And like it is it has been a fascinating experience because there's a sort of weird juxtaposition where there's like this overwhelming amount of indirect evidence that something is happening. I mean, the US government's current position is that there are objects that are not in the U.S. inventory that are currently regularly flying over the continental United States, right? That is not a debated fact by the Department of Defense. What's weird about that though?

SPEAKER_00 4:12

That doesn't sound weird to me.

SPEAKER_04 4:14

No, I I understand your point. What with the US government's not in the uh business of talking about things they can't solve, right, publicly. And so the position they've taken on this, they've had to because their their hands kind of been forced a little bit. Uh, not having air sovereignty over the continental United States is uh a problem. Um and if we're spending all this money and we are not able to maintain that, particularly when you look at what's happened in the Ukraine war with drone warfare and this next generation of smaller, lower cost devices having outsized impacts, it is just from a purely national security lens, right? It is it is a it is a threat that needs to be addressed just in that isolated box, right? And the it is just not getting the same level of of four. If you were to say that, oh, those things have a flag on it and it's the Chinese flag, it would be like we saw with the spy balloon, absolute pandemonium. But because we can't currently ascribe it to another nation state, it kind of gets couched in this box from just the historical stigma of this issue of it's misidentifications, uh, and there's nothing to see here, which is just no longer true. That doesn't necessarily mean that the origin is non-human, whether that's terrestrial or extraterrestrial, but the objects are there, and it's a matter now of being able to. I mean, even NASA had a UAP study team where they did a report on this.

SPEAKER_00 5:44

Did you look at the numbers of explanations? The vast majority of them were like birds and weather balloons. Like the vast majority. 100%. 100%. There were some, but to your point though, there were some that could not be explained by that.

SPEAKER_04 5:55

And and the the outliers are always where the signal is, right? Like even if you think about research studies, like the most interesting part of the data sets are sometimes at the outer edges of the distribution. And so, you know, Pearl Harbor, 9-11, all these black swan type of events come from the edges of the distribution, right? These low probability, high impact cases. And so, just simply from that perspective, it is worthy of somebody looking into it. We're not reallocating massive amounts of US government funding to deal with the issue, but saying there is not something worth studying, right? Science is about curiosity, it's about exploring the unknown. And so just applying that simple lens on there, I think is reasonable. And it's part of what has gotten me interested in the subject because it is one of these issues, again, understandably, yeah, because there's so much hype and so much like, ah, it's aliens.

SPEAKER_00 6:48

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let me ask you, what like what is your do you think that what do you think the the answer is?

SPEAKER_04 6:54

So there's there's two there's two parts of the conversation. One half is that there's stuff flying around and we don't know what it is. The other half of the conversation is that there's this historical UFO crash retrieval and reverse engineering program.

SPEAKER_00 7:05

Yeah, I want to know what you think about that.

SPEAKER_04 7:06

And that's like the the the sort of elephant in the room. Here's here's what I would say. Um, I have I've not seen anything personally that would make me have knowledge that that is true. Um there is a sufficient amount of people who have uh both financial, political, other re like things to lose. Like if you just think about human nature, people are not in the business of like uh burning, especially when you're talking about folks who are at senior executive status, both within the executive branch and the legislative branch, they operate on a very like Machiavellian, like power, the the acquisition of power is the driving force. And so if that's the environment you're from, uh you're very risk averse, just naturally from a pure purely human nature perspective. And so there's enough people who um have been in classified program, like we're in a position to know, whether it's being on the special access program office that like literally looks at all the classified program and funding, who are like, yes, there are these programs that that exist that are outside of congressional oversight, that are misappropriating funds that are associated with advanced aerospace vehicles. Like it is, I I don't know how to explain the human behavior in the context of the incentive structure. Um, and again, the UAP there was a piece of legislation called the UAP Disclosure Act that was put out in 2023, 2024, and 2025 that was going to create a records review board of Senate confirmed nine people that would be nominated by the president that would have to be Senate confirmed, that would be in charge of taking the existing data sets in the US government and having a declassification process because apparently the data is there. Chuck Schumer was a co-sponsor, Kirsten Gillibrand was a co-sponsor, Marco Rubio was a co-sponsor. Two presidential candidates, the then Senate majority leader, previous Senate majority leader, are all saying there's a there there. They've talked to these pilots, they know where the programs are. I'm just saying, like, that's interesting. And I don't know why any of those people would do so. Marco Rubio is the current national security advisor and secretary of state. He was asked about this question on Hannity last week. Yeah, and he's like, I stand by what I said. I have not independently that we have people who've been in these classified programs, they've come to us, they've identified that they believe he's saying that he had somebody tell him tell him that okay. I understand.

SPEAKER_00 9:50

So I'm not I'm I'm not doubting. No, no, no. He's honestly saying that somebody honestly said that to him.

SPEAKER_04 9:56

And so the question becomes how do you independently verify? Right. Well, I guess like as a scientist, it's super simple. Evidence. 100%. So this is where, again, the Galileo project at Harvard, they're setting up these observatories to look for these options.

SPEAKER_00 10:10

Actually, I'm not actually familiar with that the Galileo project.

SPEAKER_04 10:13

So uh it sounds like it's run by Avi Lode. It's run by Avi Lode. I'm familiar with it, and everyone knows he's been big on the three eye atlas comets.

SPEAKER_00 10:22

Yeah, this is not the first time. He's anytime.

SPEAKER_04 10:24

Amulua, Borisov, etc. He he didn't he didn't make a stink about Borisov. He did not. No, he did not. But the thing is, like, he's now doing, right? They have multimodal, right? So it's uh visual, they do audio, and then infrared, yeah, right? Doing whole capture of the night sky. And so like that's been running for about your whole observations to make regardless. At least you're gonna get a uh like a null data set as an example of like how to clear out all the noise, etc. Stanford has a similar program. So like the there the research in the academia is happening that would then come to a conclusion about this issue. So independent of the government disclosure process, which is dependent on classified programs being declassified, which doesn't happen that often, there is an ecosystem within the scientific community that is now doing the work to drive Avi Loeb's ecosystem, though.

SPEAKER_00 11:19

He's only one. And he did True. Oh, there's more people?

SPEAKER_04 11:22

So he's only one of again. I mentioned that Stanford has the Seoul Foundation, which is doing work around this issue. This is also actually quite big with European universities. I was just in Italy a couple weeks ago at a conference run by the Seoul Foundation, where there is a variety of research teams, France, Ukraine, uh not France, Ukraine, and I want to say Portugal, where they are also doing again dissimilar multimodal detection platforms around this issue. I all I'm just sort of identifying is no one's actually done the work to look in this way. And so now that we're doing the work to look, we can actually get to a conclusion about what the data say, which I think is interesting.

SPEAKER_00 12:02

Yeah, yeah. Well, I do, I agree with you on on that. You know, we have the Voyager uh space probe left the solar system a couple years ago, uh, one and two, I believe. Two maybe like a decade ago, and one recently, or vice versa.

SPEAKER_03 12:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:19

You know, presumably these things will last many billions of years. Like it's gonna, they'll die, right? They won't they won't work, but uh it's not outside the realm of of possibility that one day the pioneer or Voyager spacecraft enters another solar system in a similar way that 3i Atlas did with us. And so it's like, you know, if that ha if there happened to be an Avi Lobe on that planet who had set up this sort of survey system, yeah, then they at the right time, you know, then they they could find something and you would have to be looking for it, which I think is interesting.

SPEAKER_05 12:54

Yeah, quick fact check, they're both launched in 1977.

SPEAKER_04 12:57

Yeah, but when do you but they left the solar system pretty much? Oh, oh, okay. I didn't realize that's what you were. Most of our current observational tools are not actually necessarily like we were really good at deep space observation, but near Earth is like very uh like function specific. Yeah, right. And so there's not as a robust ecosystem of near-earth object detection um for transient objects that would ostensibly, which we're seeing as evidenced by three iatlas coming in, and we're like scrambling to repurpose like the Mars or the like Europa Clipper probes to look at it, and they don't have the tools to really get the type of data we want out of it. And so I think even if you're just thinking about it from a planetary defense perspective, yeah, right, it'd be nice to have these systems.

SPEAKER_00 13:43

So, yeah, right. So do you think well, you do you think that maybe what the guy who told Marco Rubio something is like serious? I think I think I think that chance is non-zero. What do you put a number on it?

SPEAKER_04 13:56

In your opinion. This is tough. It's it's really it's really tough. I don't know, I don't, I just because I've the prior distribution is so unknown. Yeah, it's it's because like I get like the the the skeptical view is very valid and I get it, right? Like I totally, it's just one of those, you know, because one of the things you have to ask about is like, okay, well, what's the origin, right? And so a lot of times when you have this conversation, the origin is defaulted to extraterrestrial. I don't necessarily know that that's the only option on the list, right? What are some of the other ones? I mean, you could you could imagine that, like, what if it's what if they're just objects from here, right? But they've just were here from before our human evolutionary part, but they've just our legacy artifacts from a a civilization that happened to exist before our current iteration, like ancient aliens. I mean, again, I'm just identifying that people always say, well, it takes so long for them to get here, so obviously it's not aliens, right? Okay, I would say, which is true, but who said that they're extraterrestrial to begin with? Like, why is that a prior that we're we're we're starting from as the entry point? So I just there's a like the there's a variety of origin classification that is not simply the extraterrestrial hypothesis for a non-human intelligence being co-located on Earth, right?

SPEAKER_02 15:15

Yeah, and I think for me it's like you know, the more I talk to Lester about it, the the what alarms me is the whole like deep state thing where it seems that there's so many people that are just admitting that there's massive deep state programs that are doing these crazy things, and then as you said, like people with a lot to lose are just like going up in congressional hearings saying that yeah, yeah, there's like I I don't I don't I don't know if I believe like almost any of it, but the fact that there's so much like infrastructure around like a program like this is kind of alarming to me.

SPEAKER_00 15:53

Really? Yeah, wouldn't why wouldn't you expect that if it were defense and it were I mean what if it like and it were let's just just to throw this out there just paint this uh hypothetical that actually um the US uh Department of Defense, Department of War, I think they call it now, actually has uh a number of completely confidential, small programs that not only the other programs, but the rest of the military doesn't know about. Uh I think that's true. And so, okay, and so Yeah, I think that's that's fine. Yeah. In that case, I think something that you may expect if it had to do with developing, you know, craft or satellites or whatever it is, what you would expect is tons of pilots in the militar, tons of people who are flying to see things that they can't explain and will not get explained to them. So that kind of makes sense to me. Uh, people who know like of these adjacent uh programs that are very secreted. I like I feel like what would emerge in that environment is this sort of thing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:57

So what's alarming? I think I think what's alarming is like how how I guess entrenched it is. Like the fact that presidents don't know about it, and when they try to find out, it's hard for them. It's like you're the you're literally the president of the United States. I think there's a couple of interesting issues. And like they admit it. Uh multiple presidents admit that they when they ask questions, they just get run around. It's like you're the president. Like there's no yeah, maybe. But like, you know, there's like Obama said this, Jimmy, as far as Jimmy Carter has said this, yeah, right? It's like to me, to me, if this is something that's happening, fine, it's like a taxpayer funded like defense thing, right? This seems to be an an alarmingly low amount of oversight for something like that.

SPEAKER_04 17:43

The the the this it's fundamentally a separation of powers issue, independent of what the origin of these objects are. If it's just yeah, that that's that's what's concerning to me. If it's an advanced DOD program that's an special access, waived, unacknowledged, so like it's in, you know, it's covert, you know, black ops. That exists. That's like known that these programs exist. Okay. But there's still like the gang of eight in Congress, which is like the ranking and majority leaders in the armed services and intel committees, right? Along with like a couple of others, they always are allowed access into all black programs, right? They have the ability to get the information because Congress is an Article I branch of government. Their responsibility is they have the power of the purse and oversight over the executive branch. Executive branch is Article II, right? And so the issue becomes if you now have a national security state that is fully operational in terms of being able to derive its own funding and execute its own programs without the ability for Congress to get oversight access to it, and also outside of the purview of the executive office of the president, you're you have a fundamental constitutional crisis, regardless of what the substance of the programs are, right? And some people might say, well, that's how the US has operated forever. It's like, yeah. And like that's and you can say, okay, great. Like, are you okay with that or are you not okay with that? And there's no it's never too late to change if we view that we don't want. I mean, this, and this is like where unfortunately, like the way that you know Trump has labeled the deep state has kind of become a caricature. But there are actually like real, again, like separation of power questions about an a permanent bureaucratic state that is not impacted by the vote of the people and has not given and it does not have any accessibility by the elected representatives that are meant to provide that oversight. I mean, this kind of comes back to the misalignment problems with AI because who now is who gave these bureaucrats in the national security state the right to decide, hey, we have Manhattan Project 2.0 and we've figured out anti-gravitic craft, right? And we can now go all over the world and deliver a nuclear weapon faster than any missile defense system can stop it. Like, there's no feedback loop for like even just the members within the like DC blob who's job it is to like have these discussions, to access the information, to make decisions about what these people are doing with money we're providing them. So, again, regardless of the origin, like they're like real substantive like governance problems if you have a runaway national security state. Uh again, because black programs does not mean no oversight.

SPEAKER_00 20:37

Yeah. Well, I think that it could mean lack of transparency to marker for Marco Rubio. Sure. And I think that for me, I don't know, I'm not saying like if I'm if I'm okay with that or not, but I think that that's kind of makes it like seems sort of almost obvious to me a little bit. Well, so let me ask so let me ask this then if um let's say that it is either let's say that it is either an extraterrestrial craft or whatever, or pre uh pre pre-Earth or like pre-human civilizations or something on Earth that somehow evaded all um detection in like the fossil record and all these things. Why would that be like what about that would be hidden? Like why would that be hidden? Why would that be something that nobody knew about that like needed to be hid on that level? Like I don't even think that that's you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_04 21:38

No, no, I and I I understand your question. Like, like what uh and I think the the part of the argument, again, one way or another, is that there is a fundament there's something fundamental about the means by which these objects operate that can be weaponized. So, like as an example, like imagine that. That uh it you know, there is some insight about being able to move through three-dimensional space that these objects have that allow you to move faster than hypersonic, which is our current, like you know, the ceiling for how fast we're able to have objects move. Currently, the whole globe operates on this like mutually assured destruction doctrine or on nuclear weapons, right? You're not gonna shoot us because if you shoot us, we'll shoot you. And they're equivalent in their pace of being able to arrive at their destination, yeah, that we're all gonna die.

SPEAKER_00 22:32

Yeah, 90 if it if it goes off somewhere in an hour and a half later, it's we're all done.

SPEAKER_04 22:37

Uh that new Netflix movie, uh House of Dynamite, kind of talks about this uh heavily. If you get an asymmetric advantage where I can now deliver a nuke faster than you, and it's orders of magnitude faster, but you have to figure out how to reverse engineer the fundamental physics of what enables that speed of movement, you're never gonna share. Even though, like, the it's the discovery of life non-human intelligence is independent of that function, you're not gonna share that information because of the asymmetric advantage that it would give you in the theater of war and great power.

SPEAKER_00 23:12

Agree with that, but I think that that also just applies to RD, period.

SPEAKER_04 23:16

I think that's true. Yeah, no, I think that's true. I think the difference is that we with uh nuclear, for example, we still allow us to talk about energy and have it be accessible, the information is generally known, but the instructions for how to build a nuclear weapon is classified. And so I think all people would were say are saying is if the Department of Defense have has discovered a new form of energy, a new form of propulsion, whatever, in a Manhattan Project 2.0, right? Historically, the social contract between the defense ecosystem and the public is that all these technologies that we use militarily are dual use. They eventually trickle down into the economy for consumer use. What happens if we create something that no longer because we're funding these things, right? It's our money that goes into this stuff being able to be researched and developed, and we get the benefit of dual use. But what happens when that contract breaks down and they're developing these things and we don't subsequently get the dual use benefit in society? For example, if it's energy, if it's a power system, that we figure out something crazy, we have a huge societal benefit to that being accessible to all of us. And if that's being not allowed to happen, that is not like a problem.

SPEAKER_00 24:35

Yeah, like in in principle, I think I agree with you completely on that on that point.

SPEAKER_04 24:40

So it it and I mean I don't want to like monopolize on this conversation, but there's like a lot of interesting stuff to talk about in this space, again, that actually has nothing to do with aliens, but touches on this like intersection of governance, national security, uh frontier technologies and research and development, the social contract between nation states and the people, and like how do all these things intermix when you get like again, I I know people like to be cynical about oh, the government's just gonna do whatever it wants, and like we're just the peons. It that's true to some extent, right? But there's also like levels of how like ridiculous that can get. Yeah, and there's been at least a balance historically. And so, like, if you start having this culture of this oligarchy in the US, which is sort of like the Russian model, really starting to take hold and you start getting a stronger and stronger stranglehold on this kind of stuff, we're going in the wrong direction, even if we started in a position that was not ideal to begin with. Right. So I I just I don't think it's I think it's worth having conversations about what is the contract between us as the public and these institutions that clearly no one likes, and is a big part of the like current social friction we have is this like our institutions are no longer in alignment with where society is because of technology, because of income inequality and all these things. And like institutions get rebuilt all the time. Why is our generation should why should our generation be any different? Why do we feel like there's nothing to do or we're limited because you know this, that, and the third? So it's it's a fascinating space because you have to think about all these ancillary things that are not just purely the question about uh data, which is a part of the conversation, but then also understanding how the ecosystem actually operates.

SPEAKER_01 26:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:33

Okay. That's pretty fascinating stuff.

SPEAKER_04 26:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:37

I could talk about it all day, I promise. I feel like if I were a betting man, I would bet that there was not a pre-human technological civilization, but I di don't disagree with anything that you uh that you said.

SPEAKER_04 26:55

It's a it's a very open problem. I think you know, most people don't spend a lot of time thinking about it because the assumption is that the presence of a non-human intelligence will be obvious. And I don't know why, like I don't I don't think that's actually true. And like, can we like from a first principle perspective, like, why would that be true? Think about Sentinel Island, right? Off the coast of India. It has this native population there. They're completely they're owned by India, they're completely isolated from human contact. And as a practical matter, it's a you could take extrapolate the model of Sentinel Island and imagine all of Earth is Sentinel Island, right? We already have this social contract where there is a place on Earth that does not get exposed to anything else happening on the planet and has basically been able to evolve in isolation, even though it's right next to it's on it's on the planet and it's right next to all this stuff happening. You'll occasionally see a plane flying over, and they probably look at that and looks like an alien because they don't know what that thing is. No one's allowed to go there. The Indian military protects the island from people going there. So that's like a microcosm of the of that model. If you just extrapolate it up one level of the hierarchy of being, we've already seen it happen here. And so I'm just I'm just like, there's no what what is the uh what is the basis by which we are saying that a non-human intelligence presence on the planet would be obvious or accessible? We don't even know what it would look like. What if they're in if it's an infrared, right? What if it's managing cameras? Well, I agree with you, but not on our iPhones. And so people are like, oh, well, I would have seen it with my iPhone. Your iPhone's not an infrared camera.

SPEAKER_05 28:34

Yeah. One of the uh imaginative exercises that we talked about in a previous episode was uh envisioning a microscopic intelligent alien civilization that's microscopic. Yeah, like maybe it could pack its DNA into or whatever or some other weight of some other molecule in a in a much smaller form factor and therefore you know be microscopic. But also we think about space travel, uh, the idea of solar sails, uh, I think the weight, the mass of the ship, like if it was a thousand times smaller, we'd be able to travel with a lot less energy demand. Uh and so just imagining a microscopic, intelligent alien civilization on Earth theoretically could hide pretty easily. Like I think that would be pretty difficult for us to sift out if if they wanted to remain hidden, for example.

SPEAKER_02 29:23

Yeah, but I think you can put constraints on like size of complexity. It can't be too small.

SPEAKER_05 29:31

Like what would you suggest the constraints would be predicated?

SPEAKER_02 29:34

I don't know what the constraints would be, but like, for example, you'd need a molecule that can like store a bunch of information. Yeah. Molecules are made out of atoms, so you're already at a constraint of like angstroms to tens of angstroms.

SPEAKER_00 29:46

Yeah, I think uh Justin, before I had this idea, like it could be, it doesn't necessarily need to be like biological either, right? Like you could imagine tiny, like, I don't know, little quantum computer chips or something like that. Uh see. Right.

SPEAKER_02 29:59

Uh that maybe like at the level of electrons are storing like some, you know, something like that.

SPEAKER_00 30:04

So it could it could get pretty small. But when it comes to constraints, I think you can put a constraint on a lot of things. I think you can also put, and maybe this isn't right if we don't understand what we don't understand about physics yet, but it seems like you can put some constraints about things that are like um like violating enormous energy demands for like this is what I bring up all the time. GR, right? So yeah, exactly. Um we should, if there's something that you know has like the sort of the d energy density of a black hole that's like moving around quickly and talking space-time, okay, good.

SPEAKER_02 30:38

Like a gravitational wave detector wouldn't be if it's operating in our yeah, because because you know, one of the one of the things that um like when when they talk about these UAPs, like one of the I guess uh candidate technologies of like how to do faster than the sp fashion than light travel and like uh the how to travel so fast through medium, go into water and come out, like some of the stuff that was off the coast of San Diego that that one Navy pilot who was on 60 Minutes was talking about. You know, they said, okay, you could have this like weird um GR probe where I I mean I'm not exactly sure how it works, but the analogy that they use is like it's like pulling space-time in front and then like pushing it behind.

SPEAKER_00 31:22

So this is like a warp warp drive.

SPEAKER_02 31:23

Yeah, it's like one of these warp drives that's based on negative energy. First of all, I don't know what negative energy means. Nobody does in modern physics, but fine, I'll give you negative energy, right? Then it's saying, okay, like it's cha it's curving space-time. There was actually a paper that came out um that was saying, suppose we have like aliens in our galaxy that are using, let's say, a craft that's about a hundred meters by a hundred meters by a hundred meters around that, and then they're using this like warp drive to move through the galaxy really fast. That's gonna create a gravitational wave. But the gravitational wave is gonna have a very distinct profile. Currently, the what gravitational wave detectors at LIGO and Virgo and the one in Japan that I forget the name of, um they when they detect the waves, they're looking for that very characteristic group, the chirp like the chirp, right?

SPEAKER_00 32:17

Yeah, the Which is uh for y'all have probably covered this, but we really haven't. Like when you have two small black holes or two neutron stars that are spiraling inward, the last like split second, they're moving at like some insane fraction of the speed of light. And that is actually what causes space-time to ripple, and we use that's what you see. You see like those last few uh orbits.

SPEAKER_02 32:40

Yeah, because the the gravitational wave is only big enough in the last fraction of a second. They're always happening, they're always happening, but like detect then. Our detection is like you know, 10 to the minus 21 centimeters. Oh sorry, and 10 to the minus 21 strain.

SPEAKER_00 32:53

Insane.

SPEAKER_02 32:54

Yeah, which is already in slip. Like to be clear, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but LIGO, LIGO is tuned enough where it's like at those last fractions, we can finally, we can finally get a signal, right? But the but the the algorithm is combing through the data to find that, right? This faster than light warp drive thingy, the the paper was showing that the waveform is going to be very different, right? And perhaps the the the algorithms that are being used currently don't have that trigger, right? So it would be it would be interesting to just put that trigger in. Yeah, um, but at the same time, if it's happening, so that this is this it was saying okay, it's happening like hundreds of thousands of light years away from Earth or like tens of thousands of light years away from Earth, then you would get just enough amplitude to be able to see in LIGO. Okay. Now, I mean, I haven't done the actual back of the envelope calculation, but here there's gonna be a much smaller signal, but it's also gonna be like right here. Yeah. Right? So by inverse square law, you're gonna get like that much more amplitude because it's closer, but like I don't know how smaller the signal is gonna be based on size and things like that. But again, as you said, you can put constraints because we have detectors now that work that we know work, and you can like this stuff is now falsifiable given like all of the stuff that we have, right? We also have particle detectors all over the world. So if some random like probe is using, let's say, like neutrinos, before like 20, 30 years ago, we didn't have enough neutrino detectors to like really figure that out. But if now there's like a giant burst of neutrinos, we've got enough detectors all over the world to trigger at the same time or like trigger with the delay based on the speed of light for us to localize where this would be. Right? So yeah, I think I think it is interesting. Like, I don't know where to go from this. I'm just like I'm a little alarmed that like the Pentagon is talking, like there's like fighting in the government about this. Like, if it's if it's chill, if it's just a black program, why are you why are you on 60 minutes? Like it's it's a little alarming that like this is happening like full scale in front of everybody. Um, and and then the presidents are being like, uh yeah, I tried. It's like what do you what do you mean you tried, dude? Like we might figure the happens. I don't know. I try to figure out if we have or not, but you just gave up like all right. So so it's it's weird, but I think yeah, uh taking it from a scientific lens is I think very important, and being extremely skeptical about it is very important. And I don't like eyewitness testimony either, so I'm not gonna take any of that, yeah. Right? But if you can show me a date, like you know, you say you've got all these detectors that are like that like locked in on this object, this tic-tac object that like went underwater and then came out and then was like you know 10 kilometers away in an instant. Okay, well, if you have that data, just like I think it should be made public because either it's either it's BS, which from all of my training in physics tells me that it's probably BS. Right. All of the training that I have in physics that I've um that I've a lot of faith in, by the way. Over the past 400 years, we've been doing really well. Really well, right? So so either it's BS or like we're wrong. That's the non-zero, as you said, it's a non-zero probability that we're wrong. In that case, this is an insanely big deal.

SPEAKER_04 36:13

Wrong is a strong term because it could just be there are emergent properties.

SPEAKER_02 36:18

Like we're wrong in the sense that we're using Newtonian gravity when we should be using GR. Now, maybe you know, that's what I mean. Like Newton wasn't wrong, he was right for the energy scales that he was right privy to, right? But then as we got bigger and as we made smaller and smaller errors uh in our measurements, we started seeing discrepancies, right?

SPEAKER_04 36:40

So uh yeah, I wouldn't say wrong, but I'd say if there's like if there's that next step, then I think what'll what'll be interesting is um I'm you guys may have seen this announcement about the quote unquote Genesis mission, um, which is this like new uh they're they're literally calling it the Manhattan Project 2.0, or basically all the main hyperscalers, AI labs are all involved in this. So we have this national lab ecosystem, Lawrence Livermore, etc., where a lot of uh these fundamental discoveries we've talked about previously on our pod, they they do incredible work in these like sort of classified research labs. They have all these data sets, right? That just are on a shelf somewhere that are not accessible. So I'm not I'm I'm not saying that the Genesis mission is a good idea or is not a good idea, but the idea is that we want to bring there needs to be a mechanism to take these classified data sets for taxpayer-funded research and make them accessible to the public. Genesis mission is doing it so that it can be used to train AI models on this like new set of training data that no one has had access to before, with the intent of now training them to be able to like make novel insights about different areas of science and stuff like that. I bring this up in the context of the UAP conversation because now there would be a mechanism. The Nimitz case you brought up in San Diego. Oh, yeah, that's the one. He's the guy who's on 60 Minutes, right? They they they they have the, you know, there's multiple documented pieces that there's multi-sensor data that exists. It's just not been made available to the larger scientific community. Just declassify it and then make those data sets available because more eyes on it will then be able to come to conclusions about, oh, well, actually it's X, Y, or Z, but there's not really the mechanism to get classified data sets like out. And the Genesis mission, which is going to be headed up by the Department of Energy, uh, which has its own classification system and there's some complexities there, is at least now a mechanism to get classified data sets into academia. And so, like, not only for the UAP issue, but a whole variety of other frontier subjects, that could be very interesting to like getting more of our best people looking at this stuff. This is one of the other reasons why people say, like, why now on this subject? In China, whoever, if you're the best at X, you get picked from wherever and you get put on whatever program they tell you to get to work on. In the US, we don't, you have to kind of be in the classific, like classified like system in order to kind of get access to the programs. We used to bring the best people.

SPEAKER_02 39:13

Yeah. I mean, Manhattan Project was exactly that.

SPEAKER_04 39:15

Yeah, it's not necessarily quite the same anymore for whatever dynamic reasons. And so loyalty is pride at a there's great and brilliant people working in our classified science ecosystem. I'm not saying otherwise, but there's brilliant people outside that are not given the access. And like we need to kind of break down those walls because we can continue to be a leader in science research, but we can't allow the paranoia about like our enemies knowing what we know to like prevent like the best people from getting access to the data. Interesting.

SPEAKER_05 39:49

Yeah, that's I mean, yeah, that's tough, right? Because so much of our I think research ecosystem in the US depends on like H1B visas and people coming in from out of basically from outside of the boundaries of the US. And so it especially with an administration that doesn't take kindly to people from outside of the US. Or research and education at all. But simultaneously wants to remain competitive in the AI landscape, it requires substantial amounts of ongoing research. Yeah. It's in disconnection from reality. I would say so. Uh one of the things that we talked about on our podcast, actually, uh I feel like this is interesting. Uh, National Science Foundation. We're like working with him to uh on one of the grants uh to potentially fund our podcast. And in our deck, when we shared it with one of the decision makers, we used the term, I think it was addressing misinformation. We used that in one of our sentences. And what one of those people said was that you can't include the word misinformation in your deck. Uh that's one of the words that gets that puts you taught, you know, tosses you into the garbage pile. And it's like, well, that's the purpose of education is to like on some level redirect misinformation if someone after going through your program is still misinformed and they're they're not educated, like in my mind at least. That's insane. Yeah, it's the National Science Foundation. NSF. NSF, which you know, I actually had a a PBS show. Part of the emphasis for this podcast being created also is that a PBS show that I was going to be working on is the second one I ended up selling to PBS was defunded uh because it was it was funded by NSF, which lost money. So this is a lot of changes happening that I think impact science education. And you know, one of the questions that we were asking each other was kind of like, okay, well, whose interest does this serve, right? Like if your agenda is, and you know, I don't want to sound too conspiratorial here, I think this is just kind of a rational sequence of steps. If your agenda is to make people believe anything you want them to believe, you defund scientists, you you silence scientists, you make people challenge or question the validity of expert testimonies or expert opinions, uh, and then you don't give people the opportunity to develop new research while simultaneously pumping your own narrative into the ecosystem and owning and controlling the mechanism by which all that's distributed. Yes. Uh and that's all happening right in front of us.

SPEAKER_00 42:16

And uh, you know, when you when you say that, and I sort of think reflect back on all the points that you were making, uh, these two ideas seem closer to each other um than than they do, you know, far apart. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 42:30

And so we are in a we're in a general information war, like generally, uh, which is mediated by all these technology platforms, which is how a lot of people consume information now. Yeah. And on top of the general information war, there's clearly an anti-science movement that was already happening pre-COVID, but was exacerbated, you know, because of COVID, you know, and there's sort of, you know, the public health conversation, could it have been done a little bit better? Sure, etc. Like if we could do it again, we would do things differently. But the the the the like counterforce of the anti-science movement has been so heavy-handed uh in the last five years. It's like it's like very, you know, when you have a health and human services secretary who is actively anti-science, don't trust the experts.

SPEAKER_00 43:22

He says, don't trust the experts. We've got to stop trusting the experts. Like, how many times has that been said on earth? Not to trust the experts. This has got to be like a that's not a you know what I mean? Like, who has ever said that before? That's that's we've gotta stop trusting the experts. We've gotta start trusting the people with don't that don't have the expertise. But Justin and I have talked about this before, and it's like, you know, inherent there is this idea that um when you learn something, you're actually being brainwashed. Like your physics education is the result of you being sitting down and being brainwashed by you know whatever was written down in the physics book. Right. And that really the people who understand what's going on are the people who haven't been brainwashed. This makes them this is why flat earther is so more qualified, so much more qualified to tell you about the shape of the earth because they haven't been brainwashed.

SPEAKER_05 44:13

You guys are just a cog in the wheel of big academia.

SPEAKER_00 44:16

Just big academia, big knowledge. Big knowledge. Just big knowledge. Going through all the all the all the knowledge. Allergy.

SPEAKER_02 44:23

Yeah, that's insane. I mean, but there is that argument, fine, that I I haven't done all of these physics experiments on my own, right? But also, like stuff works. You can't, too. Yeah. There's been millions of them. Yeah, but at the same time, I I don't think people realize how much how many physics experiments they're actually doing day to day. Like when I use my phone, yeah, that's a physics experiment in action.

SPEAKER_00 44:49

Special relativity, semiconductors, electromagnetism.

SPEAKER_02 44:52

Yeah, yeah. General relativity if I'm using GPS. Yes.

SPEAKER_04 44:55

Like, you know, so I mean, guys, this this is why I think with our pod, we we try to take frontier research and then like you know, break it down from first principles because like we don't necessarily instead of telling people what is the truth, right? It's sort of helping them understand the framework of like how was an experiment designed, yeah, executed on, what did the data show, and what is the connective tissue of the story so that they have these like Lego blocks rather than giving them a fully completed Lego structure and saying this is what it is, believe me.

SPEAKER_02 45:33

These are the results, you know, right, right. We yeah, we we focus a lot on our podcast on experimental design and the methods of the research papers that we cover because I think that's the biggest part of science for me is like, how do you know this information? You're not just making it up, and it's it's actually you know, every single research paper that we've covered, when you dig deep about how they got where they got, it's so like amazing to think about all of the controls that these guys had to had to do to make sure that what they're saying, they're like super confident, and they can actually put a put a number on how confident they are, right?

SPEAKER_04 46:11

It's and it can be replicated by other people, yeah. Uh with different levels of degrees of complexity and cost associated with that. But it's not a lot, like a lot of the science definition is like is trust me, bro. It's actually the it's not, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:26

Uh we, you know, we haven't talked about this in a while. We haven't like dug into a paper or anything like that. But I think it's important to point out that like this peer review process, it's not, it is, it's not about like just trust me. It's like what you have to do when you submit your paper and when it gets reviewed, is you have to be sure and show yourself. You have to you try to debunk yourself throughout, like, well, well, how do you know that it's not this thing that a star was doing, or how do you know that it's not your uh electronic uncertainty for your your sense, your sensors, or something like that. And part of your job is literally to try and prove yourself wrong, to demonstrate that that isn't what's going on, and that isn't something I think that that a lot of people are aware of in the scientific process.

SPEAKER_02 47:09

Yeah, yeah. And um, it's really nice because you know, more and more journals are actually making peer review public now. Like if you go on nature, if you if you publish on any of the nature journals, um peer you can go into the peer review documents and see what the peer reviewers said about us. Oh, that's pretty cool. I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah. So actually, you know, the I think uh you guys covered the story too of like the Mars um life on Mars thing. Yeah. And um we we covered that on our podcast, and one of the things that I did was go into the peer review file to see what the what the what the people were saying. There were two reviewers that were like they they pushed back on some of the stuff, and they were like, you need to show a few more of these checks and so on and so forth. Some of the language here is bad. And then I think it was reviewer number two just like went in on them and was like, like, and he for me, for me, for me, it was mine was reviewer number one, which which was really depressing because I opened the rear for pre-review file, and the first guy is just like spreading. I don't know. I was like, dude, this is gonna, but then two and three were like fine. I was like, Oh, okay, I got a chance here. But like here, this guy was just like starting from the title, he was like, I can't believe you put this in the title, and then and then I can't believe you're damn you're NDW. I can't believe that you're you're calling it leopard spots. That's such a you know you made up term, and and then and then he was like, it is, but then but you you can also see the rebuttals, you can also see the rebuttals that the authors put, and the authors for they did change the title, they have because in the title it was saying like like something about bio life and stuff like that, and the and reviewer number two was just like you can't mention life in the title.

SPEAKER_00 48:49

Yeah, I mean they that's fair if it wasn't demonstrated, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 48:52

So then so then in the actual paper, you know, the the announcements are all like best sign of life and all this other stuff, but the actual paper is just saying we found these chemicals, and like the title itself is just like we found these chemicals in the sediment in this spot on Mars. That's it. Um and then the the other part that I think they they were um what was I going with this? They he also compared them to um one of the discoveries in I think the 90s when a paper came out in science where they got a Martian meteorite in Antarctica and then they put it under an electron microscope, and there were like things that look like bacteria, and so then they just published that in science, and then Bill Clinton got in front of the press and was like, We discovered life on Mars and shit like that. We discovered life and and then there was a lot of pushback, yeah. Yeah, I didn't but uh it was it was pretty bad, yeah. And and there was a lot of pushback because people are like, No, you didn't do that, yeah. That's not what you did. Yeah, you saw something that looked like bacteria, and then turns out in the lab you put it under conditions in deep space and you get little structures that look like that, yeah. But it's cool that you can see the peer review happening, you know. So yeah, and uh that's something that we highlight in our podcast.

SPEAKER_04 50:12

I think this is something that's really important about the function that you know you guys are performing, Curiosity Theory, all a bunch of other science communicators, because you can see there's a not all the time, but there will be a disconnect between what the title of the paper is in the journal versus what insert online blog, mainstream media thing will say it is, and they'll still link to the original article, but they'll have a science editor or somebody in there who you know, and they have financial incentives that are different and all this other stuff. But like there's a huge like gap between what the papers are saying and then what the headlines say, and like trying to fill in that gap, right? Um, and also just get people interested in the actual process, not just the conclusions. Because the process is actually like the fun. That's my favorite.

SPEAKER_02 51:02

Well, it's fun for us nerd. Yeah, but I guess the the the the point is to try to make it fun for everybody, for everyone.

SPEAKER_05 51:10

I would say the challenge though is that uh we are kind of like science journalism platforms and that we are not incentivized to like we are not incentivized to only publish articles. That's only like an ethics and principle thing, you know, like right, right, right. Like if we could sensationalize the science that comes out there, we get more views, we get more clicks that could convert to other things for us, right? Um, so we are purely doing this on a principled basis. 100%. Um, which, you know, I think it it it goes to show the need to have that community support as well. 100%. Uh but I think what you all are doing is is super important for that reason. It's just that we we don't have a proper incentive structure in the content ecosystem to publish reliable factual information.

SPEAKER_04 51:56

I this is actually a great point about how like how the medium is the message, and or like how the changing culture of like online media or digital media over the last even just like five to eight years, right? The move to vertical video, the move to short form, talk about brain rot, quote let's where don't bleep that because then that will uh DL Demandel D uh Brain Rot? Yeah, brain rot is like a trigger word on Ted.

SPEAKER_02 52:24

You can't say it like now he's gotta do three. Now you gotta edit it out.

SPEAKER_04 52:26

Yeah, then it was like, no, that yeah, no, like you you if you try to comment brain rot, it weren't it won't show up. Uh and so like they because they they didn't say they don't wear now? Like clanker for uh talking about robots is now the new this stuff for but the it's it is interesting because you you know ultimately at the end of the day, like all this beauty, like the way the reason this looks great, it's 4K, like all this costs money, right? And where is the money going? The money is going to the people who are the loudest and the most wrong, right? Because then it's driving the most engagement, which is how like the the key change was when uh Elon bought Twitter and they moved from purely ad-based monetization to content monetization based on impressions, and I think this is a very fundamentally different thing. So now X did it, then TikTok did it, now the meta ecosystem has invite-only programs. Here's why it's fundamentally different before the advertisers, right, don't want their products next to wild stuff, and so you have to have all these ecosystems of understanding what was in the content, and then when you're an advertiser, you say, I don't want to be next to violence or misinformation or this, all this and that. And so the advertisers like need to have brand like safety, created this filter where bad stuff was not necessarily as much like emphasized, but when you move to pure content monetization based on impressions, so if you get five million impressions on X, then you get into the program, and then for every 1,000 views, you get X amount of you know money, right? So now it's just purely a numbers game. All that matters is that you're in the feed, so now you're seeing all this miss and for disinformation ramp up, does not AI doesn't help. So all these fake photos and fake videos, people are just pumping because they're getting paid really good money, yeah, just because of the amount of people that see it in their feed, not the amount of ads that can be placed interstitially with your content, which at least had the brand safety filter there. And so you've seen a ramp up of this nonsense because people just get paid off of outrage directly, not indirectly.

SPEAKER_05 54:46

Yeah, and a social media platform is incentivized in general to pump that because I mean, yeah, we want to make maximize the amount of impressions that our platform is getting.

SPEAKER_04 54:56

Time on site is what matters, that's the variable they care about, and it doesn't matter what the content is. Yeah, and now if you're monetizing it directly to creators, they've masked it in like, oh, we're empowering creators by paying them directly. Great, but there's no there's no content moderation threshold on what content gets paid out for. Right. Yeah, content moderation.

SPEAKER_00 55:14

Um I and I appreciate getting paid as a content creator. 100%. It's the the rates uh vary wildly. There's like certain like on TikTok, for example, there was a time in which people were getting like these really hard I RPMs, it was just kind of like your rate per view or something like that. Uh and that has like changed a lot. And then they've kind of like pivoted. Yep. I think after the the fake ban, yep. Um, they pivoted to caring more about um incentivizing people to make more educational content.

SPEAKER_03 55:46

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 55:47

And I'm actually in the um like the learning rewards program or something like that, where they're trying to encourage people to make make that sort of thing. But you we talked about something, I think before it may have been when we broke, and I'm not sure if y'all were there for that, but you were saying that the you kind of looked up the top science podcasts, and like half of them are like UFO or or Bigfoot style things. And whoever created it listed it as a science podcast because to them I'm sure that this is they like you know, they're talking about anything that it's science.

SPEAKER_04 56:17

They uh they also know that it is a less competitive chart to chart on. Yeah, you know what I mean? Like entertainment or culture, those have huge numbers, yeah, and it's like there's less competition, it's so it's both things, yeah, and and it's self-selecting. It's not dictated by Spotify or Apple what is constitutes a science pod to be in the science category, right?

SPEAKER_00 56:39

And it's yeah, and like oddly enough, you know, like y'all do your homework, you're looking, you're literally looking at the peer review comments, right? So you're like getting you're getting granular with these papers, and your goal is to be right, to be like as right as possible, or given maybe give a new opinion, a perspective, but that's right. Yeah, and these, you know, these UFO, these, these bigfoot podcasts or whatever, they're actually rewarded more on being wrong, on not getting things right, on being more sensationalized, on being more like extravagant or telling a better story. Yes. Uh, which is yeah, it's like a bad, kind of sort of like a bad place, I think, for a society to find itself in.

SPEAKER_04 57:19

This is why I think it's important for like, you know, and this is the challenge I think for pods like ours, which is like, you know, how do we make the fundamentals sexy again? Right. Like it's like if you think about in basketball, there's this era where like fundamentals matter, and then you get into the like the swag era, everyone's dude one-on-one, and that's not by basketball fundamentals. The Europeans over the last couple of years have been dominating the drafts and all this stuff, and everyone's like, what happened to American basketball players where we're now like losing out to like the Lucas and the Wembe's who are coming from Europe? Because in Europe they don't do they they just teach you fundamentals like forever, and there's not one-on-one culture is not a thing, and so they're just better basketball. I don't know about that. I'd say that all the best players are still American.

SPEAKER_02 58:07

No, no, no, but just as an analogy of like if you if you there's a rise, you can't there's definitely a rise, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 58:12

Uh especially when you I guess when you think about the populations of those countries, yeah, comparatively, and you we still have the best, we still have the best here.

SPEAKER_04 58:19

But it's saying is LeBron James or 100%, but it is it is an interesting, like the the we are currently incentivizing the wrong things in this content space, and so you know it it it just doing the right thing is not enough.

SPEAKER_05 58:38

Yeah, like we have to also find a way to make it yeah, let's defund all of public media in addition to yes, yeah. I think that's probably gonna get us a step closer, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_04 58:48

Yeah, uh, it's it's it's tough, but I it you know, we are clearly everyone's finding a lane, and I think there is a demand. Like now that the internet's so inundated with nonsense, there is act like there's now a premium on the good stuff, yeah. And so it's very recyclical, fingers crossed. Yeah, so you know, I I think we are, you know, again, it's not gonna be everybody, yeah, but it's incumbent on you know us to find ways to connect with people where they are, which we're doing by being on the platforms, by spending the extra time to make a vertical video and all this stuff.

SPEAKER_05 59:20

Yeah, I I mean I think this idea of truth is something that is becoming increasingly valuable because it is increasingly scarce on the internet. Yep, yeah, right? Like, yeah, like most people don't know where to go to find the truth in general. Like, I think if you ask the average scroller, and I think I I would argue that most people are generally aware at this point of all of the optics around uh like the attention economy and rage bait and all these other kind of things. Do you think so though? Like, I mean, even the term rage bait being a colloquially understood term, yeah, suggests that people understand. Oh, you're just saying this to hook me in.

SPEAKER_00 59:57

Yeah, yeah. But it's it seems like it's so effective and successful that it works on over half of people. You know what I mean? Or like I feel like I could be successfully rage baited. Yeah, like that happens and I it's happened to me.

SPEAKER_05 1:00:12

Yeah, I'm not denying that it's effectiveness, but I think there is again this awareness, growing awareness, yeah. A growing awareness of this problem and almost like a growing like irritation and annoyance at this repetitive type of content. Like a new era, perhaps, is on the horizon where truth is like, oh, this is so refreshing. Yeah. And I mean, I I've seen some of the comments you guys get on your stuff. It's similar to some of the stuff we'll receive, is like, you guys are such a breath of fresh air. You know, finally somebody's talking about these things, like, man, I where where have you guys been all my life, right? Like it does suggest to me that there is an appetite for it. Yeah, don't know how large the appetite is. Yeah, uh, but I think part of uh like that's why it's incumbent on us to be strategic in cross-pollinating each other, because I think that's how we get closer to that. 100%.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:00

It's it's also true, like, you know, people, you know, who you like, I'm sure, like growing up, for example, for me, right? Like I played soccer growing up, and at the time, you know, there weren't as many black soccer players in the US that I could like see myself in. Same idea with like superhero movies, like seeing Black Panther was like a very personally gratifying and emotional experience, seeing a black main character as a superhero. And so, like, I know DEI is out of fashion and all this stuff right now, but like representation does matter. And so, like, having different types of people or different ways about speaking about an issue or different language, like can connect with a different set of an audience that has not been able to be accessed before. I think so. Part of it is like, you know, I have a 22-year-old brother, I kind of hear how that generation talks. And so, like, I'll pick up some of the lingo and you know, sprinkle it in there. And like that, you know, hits the eardrum a little bit differently than seeing someone from the ivory tower, which could be viewed as maybe they're condescending or the tone is not right as a thing that turns off folks from science company.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:07

And they can be, and they also can literally, just by virtue of the their background, not be able to connect with people uh and perhaps not even be thinking about trying to connect with people that are so much uh more different than them. And I think that that's something that has always been important to me. Like, I got into science maybe when I was like 23, 24, but I was always into sports growing up. I played football and I ended up getting injured. And so, like, oftentimes when I'm trying to do science communication or I'm talking about like any given thing, I can put myself in the shoes of the person that was interested in these things, but sort of had no foundational knowledge, like no first principle understanding of anything, but an interest in it. And so I think that that's something probably on my platforms that resonates with uh with my audience as well, is like having that ability to relate to people because that literally was me not so long ago. That's such a good point.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:02

Yeah. Um, you when you get into a silo, particularly in academia, it is kind of a little bit of a walled garden and it has a different operating system for how you can excel and succeed in that walled garden. It was down on science communication, which honestly, which you know, like okay, but when we're in a war, because in my view, like there is a anti-science science war, like if it is an active issue of people spending a lot of time and energy trying to de-emphasize the importance of the fundamentals, and that is net negative for the livelihoods of everybody. Like it's not just specific to scientists who are gonna be screwed over by this.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:40

Yeah, like they'll lose their jobs, but also society is gonna lose innovation.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:44

Right, right. Like all the things we take for granted. It's it's so so, but it it is a it is a good point that you know, being able, having the ability to communicate ideas to people who are not exactly the way you are, or that with the same level of understanding is a skill in and of itself that is not necessarily like distributed by everyone who has the knowledge and the expertise. And so you need folks who are the bridge, the on-ramp. Uh it's a the way, I always look there's always the frontier and then the caboose. And like the frontier is moving along, you don't want the frontier to move along faster than your ability to bring the majority of population along behind it, because then you start to get this like two-two yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:04:20

Yeah, yeah, navigation. The frontier is getting too far ahead of the caboose.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:25

It's just it's so it's so important.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:28

It really is. I love it. And I think I think to have like a functioning democracy, you need uh an educated electorate, right? This is not a new thing. This is something that the the guys who invented democracy, the ancient Greeks said. Right. And like we're getting dangerously to the point where if there's like no trust and and it's like don't trust the experts, like that's not a functioning democracy. Right? That's not that's not a society I want to live in.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:01

Yeah, I wonder if um and it's I mean it seems like this sort of thing probably pops up throughout history in all civilizations, and I wonder if uh we are simply ill equiped by virtue of our evolution, our genetics, the way that the animals that we came to be to ever deal with this appropriately, short of um like hacking those genes out of ourselves in some sort of like CRISPR fashion.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:27

This is what the tech billionaires want to do, right? You know, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:31

Dude, I mean, have you seen those advertisements? Not to not to totally change course, but like with the um CRISPR on human DNA. Have you seen those advertisements that are out in the New York City subway about it's literally Gattaca? I don't do you guys know that movie Gatta. I haven't seen it. Amazing movie. Gatta Gattaca. Um yeah, I think Uma Thurman. Um lot of really great actors, but it's it's about like genetic engineering on humans and um design. Babies and basically these advertisements in the New York City subway. I'm really hoping that this was not a deep fake, and I got fooled, but it was like basically finding the best. It's like it's got a baby, and then it says, like, IQ is 70% genetic. Find the make make your baby the best version of you. It's crazy. Like, we're there, there's actually like no, there's gonna be there's gonna be straight up CRISPR babies.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:26

The the tools to accomplish it are now fair, and you know, the commercialization, like you know, the the entrepreneurs are now coming in to strip mine the place.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:38

Yeah, and I I should say this isn't really CRISPR babies, this is really just like genetically profiling the parents' genetics and then combining them so to create the best version of both parents. So this is uh not new genes. It's still it's still, but it's like it's like the most favorite alleles from both.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:56

Right, because otherwise you have like oh sorry, go ahead.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:58

I was gonna say it looks like it's from this company, Nucleus Genomic, which is doing in vitro finalization techniques.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:03

Yes, it's IVF Plus, yeah, exactly. The IVF was already there, but this is the plus is so crazy. Yeah, it's uh 10 IQ points bar. Exactly, yeah. And it's like so now it's like You're gonna have ads. It's and and this is only gonna be a package, yeah. And this is only gonna be accessible by the elite and the rich. So there's gonna be an even more ridiculous Exactly the best after be the rich kids instead of like the yeah, it's it's yeah, this is yes, this is like easy, right? Like that's it's so insane. This is just and there's like there's like uh this is our corporate board, and this we go AI generated scientists.

SPEAKER_05 1:07:48

Oh no, they they might be real people though.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:50

So real people, so being able to to hand select traits in that way, um, which if I'm understanding what you were saying, right? It's like yeah, the a mother and a father each have tons of different genetic material. And within those, the what are they called? The reproductive thing. Is it called zygotes or something? What are the reproductive embryos? Chromosomes. Oh thinking not like so, like in a sp, there's like 800 trillion sperm, yeah, and they have like this distribution of all my genes.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:20

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:21

And then there are however like 40,000 eggs or something, and they each have like a distribution of the genes, and you kind of like get what you get. Yeah, but what you're saying is you can choose actually the you can kind of like you gotta like create your own, you can create like the super sperm that has everything that you want, and the super egg has everything exactly all the right traits, yeah. And so what you sort of do is you put your foot on the gas for evolution, right? Yeah, and you can end up with this um with literally a class of superhumans that are actually literally better, smarter, stronger, whatever you know, whatever that is more empathetic, like whatever the thing is that you want to um and then still look like you, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:09:00

Yeah, right, right. Well, if they want, if they want, yeah. Yeah, I mean, actually, yeah, like you could take all of the recessive traits, like maybe there's like a blonde hair trait hiding in mine, right? Just take that, and then there's definitely not one hiding in mine.

SPEAKER_05 1:09:16

Ain't no way, boy. So, so uh just uh this is not an ad, but I feel like this is an important thing to add to the conversation. So uh for people that are already undergoing IVF, it's just nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars. And then if you're I guess trying to have your best baby start from scratch, it's uh it starts at$9,999 a month for four months, depending on location.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:41

Well, so accessible, right?

SPEAKER_05 1:09:43

Yeah, it's gonna be really given to those who need it most. Absolutely, absolutely. I understand why they have them subway ads because you know everybody there will definitely use it.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:53

Yeah. Well, in New York City, it's like the subway is used for everybody. Yeah, everybody also so expensive to live in New York.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:59

Yeah, it's like the average person of socioeconomic line is probably relatively higher than other local issues.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:05

It's hard to argue against selecting against like genetic diseases, for example. Yeah, yeah. And so it's so it's like so and that's been done before, too.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:18

Yeah, yeah, it's tough, it gets a real dicey.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:21

But then you know, like if you can do it, then you can do it with anything, you know, with whatever you want.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:25

I mean, I think about I mean, you know, you know, I'm I'm married, I have I have a wife, and so we we're thinking we think about children, and you know, we're literally at a stage where as we're thinking about the idea of having children, this existing is like a real factor in the conversation. Not that we would do it, but like it that it exists at all, and that like people in our cohort like also have that optionality, yeah. And so and it it's just like it it's a crazy, it's crazy to think about because our middle school age child, our theoretical middle school age child in 15 years could be competing in track and field against a genetic super baby, and then do you now have mote absolutely crushed, right? And like what do you do? Do you now have like genetic, do you have to like have markers if you're um a modified baby and you have to be putting a specific it's gonna be Olympics plus Olympics plus?

SPEAKER_05 1:11:25

But I mean, yeah, if you think about a parent's like incentives, it's like well, what do I want to do if if I've gotten to a certain point in life, like and I have certain resources, like I want to do the best I can to provide a great opportunity for my child to thrive in this world. And like a part of that is engineering them from the start.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:44

Exactly. Do you choose do you choose to set them up to be less competitive? Right.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:48

And then you're yes, and your relationship with that child when they get older, knowing you made that decision for them. What the hell? I'm on the fake forty other days. What a reason I got cooked.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:00

That shit was only$200 a month. You didn't get the Pro Plus.

SPEAKER_05 1:12:05

Literally, I could have done chores and then paid you back.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:08

Um that's one of the things that uh they talk about in Gattaca. It's like the um the parents have one child, spoilers, have one child naturally, and then the second child they have with this. And so it's within the siblings, like the older child is natural, and the second one is you know genetically engineered in some sense. It's it's a really great movie. Yeah, you gotta check it out, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:12:34

Yeah, that's tough.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:36

That's tough. What's fascinating about all the topics we've talked about today is something that I like just that we talk about all the time, which is there is an unbelievable amount of uh parallel and orthogonal like innovations happening at the same time that have this like forced multiplier on each other that is like really hard to comprehend because the societal impacts for each of them individually are crazy. Yeah. And the fact that they're all making this like progress at almost exponential rate now is just it's also when we're almost the most ill-prepared at a societal level to like deal with it, yeah. It's just like things are happening, yeah, a lot of them quite fast, very quickly. And the the the time from being in the lab, like validating in the lab to being in production as a consumer product, that's also shrinking. So, like the problem with science and why it's been hard to like make it sexy and entertaining in part is because it moves so slow. So it's not this like you know, every night you have the late night show, you have the sports broadcasts, and that uh because it takes time for things to play out, but that's actually kind of shrinking now, where like the cycle time is much faster. And so what I'm still so shocked when we look at these papers we cover at like how incredible, even the example where we talked about the strongest evidence of uh life off-earth paper. The fall, the fall on the follow-up papers to it, where like in two weeks, yeah, there was already a rebuttal, yeah. And then another two, four weeks, there's two more rebuttals. And so, like, it is very interesting to see this acceleration happening, but like it's not the the like understanding of the impact that that's having is not like really discussed and or generally well understood because we're in this anti-science macro environment, right? And so it's like this is all BS and it doesn't matter. I was like, well, it's actually a time where it matters probably more than ever, you know, in human history.

SPEAKER_05 1:14:43

It's it's crazy. Yeah, I think existentially I'm like somewhat terrified, but extremely excited as well. It feels like a lot of the sci-fi stuff I read about as a kid is like my real reality now.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:56

Yeah, it's it's you guys gonna get a robot for the pod? You know, just have it running around doing all the like a humanoid?

SPEAKER_05 1:15:04

Like a production assistant? Yeah. I don't know about that. What do you think? Um, I mean, I would I would appreciate that.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:12

So that's my I gotta do all the those now. But but that's like a real question though. Like in the next two, three years, you could legit like not for like a bunch of stuff, but you could literally do that. And like you have to have the ethical conversation, the there's a financial piece, but like these are real questions now that didn't exist even a year ago, which is unbelievable.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:34

Yeah, it's wild, man. It's a crazy time that we live in. It's very cool. I wonder what the like in uh what the next thousand years looks like for for humans or ten thousand or just look at the last hundred, it's insane.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:49

Yeah. It didn't extrapolate that 10x right. When was uh when did electricity start to become widespread?

SPEAKER_00 1:15:54

Was that 1800s? 1800s, I think. Yeah, late 1800s. Late 1800s, yeah. So we went from candles instead of light bulbs to potentially robots walking around in like less than 200 years?

SPEAKER_02 1:16:09

Yeah, yeah, less than 200 years, like 150. Insane.

SPEAKER_05 1:16:14

The incandescent light bulb, Thomas Edison, 1879. Yeah, wild.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:20

Yeah, and Maxwell's equations were like right in the 1800s. So crazy, crazy progression, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:16:27

And it's it's it's important for us to appreciate that by making sure we talk about the science fundamentals and the importance of that in all the conveniences. There's such a disconnect where we think like our phone and science are not, there's no overlap. And it's like, yeah, actually, if you were like, if you don't like if you think science is dumb, I want you to go through a single day without using any anything that is the result of like fundamental science research that led to an end product.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:55

Right.

SPEAKER_04 1:16:55

Yeah. Have fun.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:58

It'll take a while. Yeah, you might need to get Chat Chupichi to hallucinate something. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:17:05

Yeah, I'm like trying to walk myself through it like trying to do that.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:09

Right.

SPEAKER_05 1:17:10

Basically, like go camping. But even that, probably.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:14

Uh the tent that you used is probably fundamental material science.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:17

Yeah, yeah. This is what blows my mind is that it's like, so we were in uh Tulsa not too long ago shooting some episodes, and it was cold. It was like really cold. And it was I mean, really cold. It was like 40 or so 35. No, and uh, I was like, I remember I said we walked outside and we're like, damn, humans used to live in this, like just outside, and um that's not even that difficult to live in, you know. Like it really came down to it 40 degrees or something, and it's like, nah, man, we've been completely we live in it. Carl Sagan has a really good quote about this that that we sort of we live in this increasingly advanced technological civilization where everything is built on science that almost nobody understands, and nobody like has a problem with it. Everybody just seems like entitled to these things, and it's not good because it somehow allows that foundation to be attacked, like it's something bad, like oh, science. People have this idea about scientists, and like I'll have people all the time, I'll make a video uh going over a paper about exoplanets, something they found a cool planet that maybe is a water world, and I'll get especially on Facebook. This is where I get the the dumbest comments. Um, also tons of great comments. Uh, in case this clip ends up on Facebook, lots of great comments on there as well, but the dumbest are also there. And uh it'll be like, Oh, yep, y'all always have theories for everything, it's all theories, it's not none of it's not facts, it's all theories. Yeah, it's like still to this day, people don't understand what a theory is, yeah. Which is like an explanation of a bunch of facts, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:18:54

An overarching, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:55

Yeah, and it's like the the facts are the theory, it is like the story that encompasses all of these things, yeah. Which is why people will oftentimes say that you know a theory is is like very well tested, right? But theories can be wrong, you know. Like I think a good example of that is um in uh like these epicycles. So now we know that the sun is at the center of the solar system, but for a long time they didn't they didn't know that they thought that the earth was at the center, kind of looks like that. The moon comes up, goes down, the sun comes up, goes down, the stars spin around. Kind of looks like you're at the center, but and you can actually explain the motion of the planets which move across the star uh the night sky relative to the stars. Um, but they move in these weird epicycles. It's like it seems like they're orbiting, but then they do this retrograde thing, and you can build a model where all the planets do these little mini orbits as they're orbiting the earth, and the model works fine. Uh, it's wrong, but like that theory, it you know, it was an okay theory that would tell you what the planets were doing, but completely wrong. Yeah, like totally, totally wrong.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:00

Yeah, and I mean you know, to to piggyback off that, like that theory of the epicycles and stuff like that, it came about because humanity had forgotten an older theory that put the sun at the center of the cosmos. Like there was the ancient Greek philosopher Aristarchus, who's like one of the top like humans, I think, in terms of intellect. He's he's like, you got Einstein-Newton. I would put actually Aristarchus up there too, because he's ancient Greece, he observes the planets and he actually figures out that the simplest way to explain the motion is the sun at the center and Mercury, then Venus, then Earth third, and then Jupiter-Saturn. Or sorry, Mars, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. He actually like figured that out by just observing that they're all in a line, and that Mercury hangs out next to the sun, and Venus hangs out a little bit farther, and then Mars is behind us, but it's moving pretty fast. Like all of this stuff, right? Um, but then we forgot it all. Or, you know, there's the death of the classical age, and then there were the dark ages where I guess like no one knew what the hell was going on. And then out of the dark age, we're that's where we're in right now. Yeah, and then but then in the dark ages, like the Catholic Church became such a big part of society, right? And it was in their interest to put the earth at the center because that is how they made their claim to fame about how man is at the center of the earth and or of the universe, and like they have a direct line with God, and therefore, you know, it puts them at this place of self-importance, and then now you have like legitimate scientists who are trying to make sense of that, observing, making the observations, being like, Okay, okay, Earth is at the center. How do I make this work? I'm gonna put epicycles and like all this other stuff, yeah. You know, and it and then it took the Copernican revolution to finally get back on track. But Copernicus was just rediscovering something that Aristarchus had done like all those ages ago. And and so it's it's an interesting story between like the science and the observation and also having like this like political entity or like pressure to like make it make the truth this, yeah, you know, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:13

Oh yeah. There's this. I have a a great a great story about that. It's called uh I don't know if you've heard of it, it's called Lysan Lysenkoism. No, so there was this uh agriculture, he was uh called an agronomist, like an agriculture economist in Soviet Union named Troflim uh Lysenko. And this he was around at a time when Mendelian genetics was sort of uh spreading like wildfire. Okay, right. So people were um you know think punnett square.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:42

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:44

Well, that uh this idea, the concept that traits can be inherited for a pure socialist feels dangerously close to uh like human nature being something that's concrete. It sort of goes against this um this idea that everything is just socially conditioned, which I think that there's a lot right now of people who think that everything is socially conditioned, and they kind of forget about this like we you inherit traits, like you've inherited the shape of your body, right? Like there are a lot of things that that we inherit. And so this guy, Lysenko, he was able to convince Stalin, and this was this sort of aligned with the party view that Mendelian genetics was actually just like the bourgeoisie capitalist science, pseudoscience, right? This is this thing that the capitalists think, where they think that there's this hierarchy and these things are set in stone, and so they ran with it. They like jailed, killed, and forgot all the people who were saying, No, bro, like this is this is actually like this is real. Yeah, and Lysenko's idea was that what you could do is you could you could train the crops to live in the winter, right? You could like socially condition, you could condition them to be able to survive a harsh winter. Obviously, one of the big problems in the Soviet Union is that they ran they ran short on food, and lots and lots and lots of people starved. Yeah, and it's like Lysenkoism, this this idea that um the truth should align with politics, yeah, right. And any political faction, any political movement is going to favor something like that because here you see that the science actually backs up what we think, right? And everything else is is solo science, and this is very dangerous, and it can lead to lead to mass massive deaths, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:24:32

Yeah, wait, that's so interesting. Well essentialism, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:24:36

Yeah, I mean, you could argue we had sort of a microcosm of that in the wake of COVID, where everyone who just didn't like there was a period of time where there wasn't enough information yet, but people just didn't like the government telling them what to do with their body. Funny. That's a whole nother conversation. Yeah, it depends on whose body. Depends. But but you know, so people were just looking for whatever person with PhD after their name was just saying what they wanted to hear, and to be like, look, science says that da-da-da-da-da. And so there was basically a first mover advantage for if you were on Twitter and you were like the PhD that said that vaccines don't work, yeah, like you got huge engagement because people were just seeking to have something validate their pre-existing view, and like now you've seen that basically metastasize into you know RFKism, where now you know he's in a position where he's trying to do the similar thing, which is make the science map onto his political belief about what should and shouldn't happen. And so now HHS is doing crazy stuff to like re uh like uh to like uh uh white like white wash away like the entire history of like uh vaccinations as an example and just like say no this is what it is now and moving forward.

SPEAKER_03 1:25:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:56

Something uh recently that was done on the uh CDC's website was they altered the verbiage to show that uh um autism that vaccines have not been pro proven positively or I guess negatively to not be linked at all with autism, vaccines and autism. And it's like, well, yeah, you can't do a study that that like proves the negative. You can't prove a negative, right? It's not possible. Yeah, yeah. And so I mean, if you just change that verbiage and you're like, well, there's no there has never been a study that proved that autism and vaccines are not linked in any ways whatsoever, and never could be, and it's like, I mean, yeah, but why does the why does the website say that? And then they come out and they say that Tylenol is linked to to autism.

SPEAKER_04 1:26:42

I can't believe they did not uh that uh there's not been a class action lawsuit by Tylenol to sue the government. Wait a second, didn't uh Trump ri shortly after that buy oh no stock?

unknown 1:26:57

No.

SPEAKER_04 1:26:58

Somebody yes, let me look this up before I start looking at the street. This is I cannot believe you had the president of the United States go on national television and say that Tylenol, when taken by pregnant women, causes autism in their children. And if I'm an executive at Tylenol in the legal department, my class action is filed the following morning. Because you you now immediately have potentially millions of mothers of autistic children who are now gonna go to town and say, Hey, I heard the president say you're the reason why my child has autism, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:27:34

Yeah, and like sort of like libel on the colour.

SPEAKER_04 1:27:36

Which is right, like if you have uh the data to show that, then like then let's go. Let's go. Wonderful, right? I don't, I think he just because it was it was meant to be acidaminophen, but he couldn't pronounce it. So he just said Tylenol instead because he knew that it's the Tylenol.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:53

So he was like asking off camera. No, hold on. That one was crazy because I also Remember in that him saying something, he like made something up. He looked over his shoulder and he asked, like, this is this is true, right? There's the oh here. The Amish community has no Thailand on, no rates of vaccine. I hear, right? I we heard that, right? This is true. And then, like, somebody's, I don't know, like mumbled something. He was like, Yeah, so I'm hearing, and then he like cites himself. Um, he just asked somebody, he didn't really get it confirmed. And he was like, Yeah, so you know, this is true, this is what I'm hearing. This is this is so saying that Amish people had no vaccine, or I'm sorry, no rates of of all because yeah, all vaccines or whatever vaccines, Tylenol, whatever it was, whatever it was.

SPEAKER_04 1:28:39

And well, you know, it's I just I can't believe it. I just you know, I again I'm not a lawyer, but I assume that Tylenol would have a case. Yeah. Uh that makes a lot of sense.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:50

I mean, the the voting machines people had a case, yeah, right.

SPEAKER_04 1:28:53

Yeah, they that's a really good point. And yeah, Fox had to pay out a lot of money, a lot of money, and they had to like fire a bunch of people, like just taking their time. I'm I'm guessing. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:02

I can't find anything. I thought that Tylenol got reacquired like recently after that. Oh, got it. I don't I can I I wasn't able to like look up something quickly, so that maybe not.

SPEAKER_04 1:29:10

But it this is why it, you know, information and also who controls the algorithm matters, right? The networks and the algorithms, right? Because now it's kind of a little bit of both. Um, I I find it fascinating that um the people that have the least digital media literacy are the boomers, and they're the ones with the strongest opinion about stuff based on just seeing it on the internet, right? With no, I saw this thing, and it's like where did you see it? They get so full of Oh, I just I saw it on the internet. Like where on the internet? Ah, it was some news site. Was it a news site or was it just a website?

SPEAKER_02 1:29:48

Ah, I mean it's even worse as with me. I don't know if um, like you know, in in my Indian extended family, we've got like WhatsApp group chats, and those are just notorious for random nonsense that just gets forwarded because in WhatsApp it's so easy to forward, it's just one click, you select, and then the exact message this goes just goes to those people. And so, like, there it's like almost like a living entity, these these little misinformation like articles and videos that that like go from one WhatsApp group chat to another, to another, and it's so bad. It's so bad. I don't know, and I don't know, like how how often I'm gonna be like, no, that's not our ass.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:30

That's so it's so effective. If you think about think about it from like an evolutionary perspective of a virus spreading, yeah, it's like that's such an effective way to do it. There are these little things that are like it's very hard to inoculate yourself against because they're sort of contained maybe within a family or like a dozen people or a few dozen people, and this thing can spread like wildfire, and there's no way to really stop that and put that out.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:53

Yeah, and it's super easy to replicate in this case. You know, that's the replication mechanism in this WhatsApp, and the person is doing it, like you know, the virus doesn't do it itself himself. It's like the person who's the host of the the WhatsApp group chat is the one doing it. It's an interesting way to, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:11

Yeah, it's like all ideas to some extent are are that, yeah. These these like things that we that get inside of us and then even control the way that we behave. Yeah, right. You um a member, if you're a member of a certain political ideology or political group, this heavily influences you uh in a way that I mean you could consider a a virus, it doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing, right? You could have a great idea that um is positive for society, but it is interesting how I guess the the more and more that I learn, the more obvious it is to me that humans are just animals and we're like very hijackable, yeah. Um and ultimately like not really that impressive on an individual basis. I mean, our society is cool, but that's because we sort of compounded the knowledge over many thousands of years and millions of people putting tons of hours of work.

SPEAKER_05 1:32:03

Well, that's just because you don't have IVF Plus.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:08

Well, I mean, imagine the civilization that all those IV that would be crazy and then IVF Plus Pro.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:13

Yeah, that's when they start using CRISPR to make like glow in the dark skin and shit.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:20

Yeah. Insane. You know, yeah. Anything else? Anyone else wanna wanna cover? I think we got like a couple minutes left where we gotta start wrapping up.

SPEAKER_04 1:32:29

The the only last thing I'll just get, you know, just on the same track of kind of what we were just talking about, you know, this idea about talking about ideas. You know, there's a there's recently there's been a culture where it's like there are ideas that you should not platform because they're damaging, like in the in the in just in a general sense. And so, like, as you know, as an example, like political ideologies that have been reprehensible historically, like don't platform the Nazis or like don't get into the arena and like push back on it because inherently they are looking for platforms to legitimize their ideas as being in the same arena or playing field as other ones. And so by even just trying to combat them on the facts, they're not there for the facts, they're just trying to launder through, you know, a platform of prestige or whatever. So the question is like I'm curious the like how you guys feel about this idea of you know, you you we should have the conversation and push back or or not. I mean, this is like the poop pee booty judge thing of like if you don't go on Fox News, people can't get inoculated. Yeah, you know, and so you have to be in the arena where things are being talked about despite the limitations. And there's good arguments in both directions. I'm just curious how you guys think about that. The problem of like dealing with uh harm what are perceived to be harmful concepts, and how do you address that?

SPEAKER_00 1:33:57

Yeah, I think that's a really good question. I've heard people say before, and this seems like very um naive and reductive, that well, the way that you beat a bad idea is with a good idea or a better idea. And I I don't really think that that's the case, especially now it's like um visibility sort of equals credibility, right? And so it's not that you have two people come that have different views and one person uh is like speaking the truth and the other person is speaking the facts, and it's clear to everybody that this idea is worse than that idea. That's not really what happens. Um people go and they see things, they look for confirmation, right? Confirmation bias. So I don't know, I'm kind of torn. It just seems like whoever is the most visible will be seen in one way or another as the most credible, um, or there's some sort of relationship there with visibility and authority. And so, you know, I think that it was wise of us all to start these like science and and education podcasts to try and get more visibility out there with some positive information to to combat. I don't know. What do you what do you think?

SPEAKER_05 1:35:01

Yeah, but I I think I think it's still incumbent on us to take it a step further and step into some of these rings. Um, if we want to be on the side of progress, because a lot of times if we just kind of stay in our echoing chamber of nerddom, right? Like there's a certain type of people that gravitate to a certain depth of intellectual conversation that are probably not the people that would benefit the most from it. And so, like things that that we are now starting to do, go on other podcasts that may not be science oriented, but you know, we are like the the science perspective uh on these podcasts. I think that gives new audiences an opportunity to open their minds. Uh, so I think that that is, you know, I I think you still have to be discerning about, you know, which battles to pick. Yeah. And like who's actually there to have a constructive conversation and who just wants to tell you that you're wrong. Right. Um, and so you have to seek those kinds of forums. But I do think that that is the next step of advocacy. Once you've decided to build a platform, once you've developed an ideology and an audience, it's like, okay, well, now let me go to pollinate this in other places. Yeah. If we don't do that, we stay in our echoing chamber. I agree with you.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:12

Yeah, I think that's a good thing. What's uh what's what you also take? No, I think I think I really agree with what Justin over here.

SPEAKER_04 1:36:18

Yeah. I think it it comes down to I think the editorial decision. Like I do think you have to get into the arena uh and combat. I don't think you can vacate the idea space. However, um, you have to pick and choose your battles because there are now spaces that are uh not meant to be a deliberative context. Like there are people who like legitimately are on like an the opposite side of an issue that really want to have that intellectual jousty, right? Um how you discern one it and you have it's like it's a you have to have your own mindset about it and your own kind of box that you dictate of like, okay, what are the platforms that are are not you know, quote unquote legitimate or actually here for the conversation? Like that's the art, the art of it is like making that discerning uh decision point. But I I do feel strongly that you know, and being in the arena could still in part is just like having our own channels that is putting content out into the algorithm. So as you're scrolling through the brain rot, you get at least some a dose of medicine, right? Six, yeah. But it it's it is a it is a challenge. I do think that vacating the idea space entirely is not the solution. Um, and that's kind of been in the battle with like the anti-science thing, part of the like response has been, oh, just don't just don't address it uh because that's giving it oxygen. I think the media it depends on the medium and the platform and all these other things. I don't think you can just blanket say that. It is true in some cases, I don't think it's true in all cases. And it is incumbent on if we believe that it is important that science be viewed as being as cool or as sexy or as fun or as accessible as sports, as music, as art, right? Then we have to be the ones evangelizing and we have to do it in where like we have to meet people where they are, um, to the extent that is possible if they're reachable. Not everybody's reachable. That's the other issue, right? Some people are already in their blinders, yeah, which is fine. Like you can you guys probably see this in comments where you see someone sideswipe you, like you you will brush on a subject that has political social conversations related to it, and then you get sideswiped because you know, brown faces, or you say a trigger word, and then they start hitting you with stuff that has nothing to do with what you're actually saying, yeah, but they have already ossified their view about whatever. So it's complicated, but I I think it's it's an ongoing conversation that's important for like I think folks like us to keep in mind is like how do we um how do we not only make the content but also be in the places uh to sort of maximize visibility to audiences that maybe either uh can't don't get in any other way, um and the algorithm won't organically give it to them. Right. Like just by us posting. So, but that's that's uh we're already on the path. I think we're we're all kind of doing the right stuff, and this is why it's so important not only to talk about the subject matters, but the context in which we're operating in. Because that kind of matters.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:34

Dope, dope. You have anything you want to close on?

SPEAKER_05 1:39:36

Well, I was just thinking about what Lester said, and uh, I think a lot of the people listening to this have an opportunity to throw their hat in the ring in the war on science information, right? And uh, I remember a time in which I was offline not engaging with all of the wild discourse that I kind of felt was intellectually beneath me. And I don't think this is that time. I think that if you have the capacity uh and the desire and you have an issue with it, like I think we all do, uh, this is the opportunity and this is the call to action that you probably need to hear to get out and do something about it.

SPEAKER_04 1:40:13

And it could be anything, and no matter how small that action is, it's meaningful. Um, like it is if if not us, then who? It's really, really important. That's why I really appreciate what you guys are doing because clearly you were inspired in for similar contexts and reasons that we were, and you know, there's a generational gap where you sort of have the OGs and then like it's kind of like the gray area, and there's a couple of the younger folks now kind of trying to fill that void. But we need if CNN, the way I described it to Krishna earlier is if CNN or CNBC needs someone in the sciences to come on, it can't just always be Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michio Kaku, uh Sean Carroll, and like a couple of other of these folks who've done incredible work and like fantastic and wonderful. But who is who in our demographic and our age group are the ones producers are going to think about and call into those rooms? And like that's you know the destination we should try to head for as the next generation that has to carry this sort of torch that folks like Carl Sagan, etc. Like we all love, like really set the foundation for. I remember watching Bill Nye or like even things like Mr. Rogers, right? Like it and there's it, there is stuff out there, but it can always be more, particularly because the medium has changed. And it's not just television anymore.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:36

Totally agree.

SPEAKER_05 1:41:36

Right on, totally agree. Right on, as we always say, use first principles to develop a theory of curiosity. It's trademarked. Peace out.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:48

Um, not to change the subject, but they all spell chicken soup or something. Yeah, something. Okay. It was making sure I wasn't having a stroke.