211 segments
What do you make of all the UFO sightings?
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I am all in favor of an open, agnostic, transparent scientific investigation of UFOs and UAPs.
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But the idea that there is any data that we have that links UFOs and UAPs to nonhuman
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technology, I just think they're the standards, they just none of what is claimed to be the
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data lives up to the standards of evidence.
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Let's just take a moment on that idea of standards of evidence because I've made a big deal
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about this both in the book and elsewhere whenever I talk about this.
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So what people have to understand about science is we are really scientists, we are really
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mean to each other, we are brutal to each other because we have this thing that we call
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standards of evidence and it's the idea of like you have a piece of evidence that you
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want to link to a claim.
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And under what conditions can you say, oh look, I've got evidence of this claim x, y,
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And in science, we are so mean to each other about whether or not that piece of evidence
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lives up to the standards that we have.
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And we spent 400 years determining what those standards are.
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And that is why cell phones work, right?
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If you didn't have super rigorous standards about what you think, oh this little antenna,
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I've invented a new kind of antenna that I can slip into the cell phone and I can show
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If you didn't have these standards, you know, every cell phone would be a brick, right?
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And when it comes to UFOs and U.S.
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The evidence you have and the claim that though this shows that, you know, we are being
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visited by non-human advanced civilization just doesn't even come close to the same standards
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I'm going to have to obey or whatever live under.
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If my team, you know, the group I work with is one of them says, look, we've discovered,
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we've announced that we've discovered a techno signature on an alien planet.
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We're going to get shredded as we expect to be beaten up.
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And you know, the UAP, UFO community should expect the same thing.
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You don't get, you don't get a pass because it's a really cool topic.
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So that's where I am right now.
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I just don't think any of the evidence is even close to anything that could support that
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Well, I generally assign a lot of value to anecdotal evidence from pilots.
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Not scientific value, but just like, it's always nice to get anecdotal evidence as a first
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I was like, hmm, I wonder if there's something there.
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But unfortunately with this topic, there's so much excitement around it.
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There's a lot of people that are basically trying to make money off of it.
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There's hoaxes, all this kind of stuff.
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So even if there's some signal, there's just so much noise, it's very difficult to operate
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So how do we get better signal?
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So you've talked about sort of, if we wanted to really search for UFOs on Earth, and
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maybe detect things like weird physics, what kind of instruments would we be using?
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So in the book, I talked about the idea.
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This is really stupid.
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But you know, you want to look up, you want to look down, and you want to look all around.
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I think that's brilliant.
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I mean, it's simple, not stupid.
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It's like literally.
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So you want to do ground-based detectors that, you know, upward looking ground-based
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detectors of the kind we're already building for meteors, right, for tracking meteors.
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You want to have space-based detectors, put them on satellites.
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This is what the NASA UAP panel was thinking about.
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And then probably on pile, you know, all we have lots of people in the sky, there should
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be detectors on the planes, or at least, you know, some kind of alert system that if
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some pile, it says, oh, look, I'm seeing something.
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Boom, presses the red button.
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And that triggers the ground-based and space-based data collectors.
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And then the data collectors themselves, this is something that people really don't understand.
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And it's so important.
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In order to actually do science with anything, the data you have, you have to understand
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where it came from, like down to the, you know, the nth degree.
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You have to know how that camera behaves in a bunch of different wavelengths.
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You have to characterize that.
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You have to know what the software does, what the limits of the software possibly have
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to know what happened to the camera, was it refurbished recently?
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In every spectral wavelength, in all of its data collection and processing, you have
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to know all of those steps and having them all characterized.
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Because especially if you want to claim, like, oh my god, I saw something take a right
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hand turn at Mach 500, right?
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You better have all of that nailed down before you make that kind of claim.
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So we have to have characterized detectors looking up down and maybe on planes themselves.
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We need a rational search strategy.
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So let's say you want to lay out these ground-based detectors.
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Where do you put them?
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There's only so much money in the world.
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So do you want to put them near places where you've seen a lot of things beforehand or do
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you want to have them try and do a sparse coverage of the entire country?
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And then you need the data analysis, right?
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You're going to have so much data, so many false positives or false triggering that you
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need a way of sorting through enormous amounts of data and figuring out what you're going
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to throw out and what you're going to keep.
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And all of these things were used to doing in other scientific enterprises.
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And without that, if we don't do that, we're going to be having the same damn argument
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about these things for the next 100 years.
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But if I ask you, I give you a trillion dollars and ask you to allocate to one place, looking
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out, steady, or looking at Earth, which should you allocate?
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But as I always like to say, here's my codification of this.
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If you said, hey, Adam, I'd like to find some Nebraska's.
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And I said, oh, good, let's go to the Himalayas.
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You'd be like, why am I going there?
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I'm like, well, maybe there's some Himalayas, some Nebraska's in Himalayas.
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Say no, no, let's go to Nebraska.
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If we're looking for aliens, why don't we look on alien planets where they live?
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Because that's we have that technology now, as opposed to the bucket of assumptions that
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you have to come up with in order to say, oh, they're here right now.
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They just happen to be here right now.
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And also the very important thing, I call this the high beam argument.
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To deal with the UFO stuff, you have to deal with all of these weird, irrational things
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Like, okay, there's an advanced civilization that is visiting Earth regularly.
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They don't want to be detected.
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They've got super powerful technology, but they really suck it using it because they keep
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We keep seeing them, but then they disappear, right?
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I mean, explain to me what rational world that works under.
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Like, you know, so there's that whole sort of argument you've got to explain, like, why
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if they want to stay hidden, are they so bad at it?
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So that's why I take that level of difficulty.
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And then I put it on top of where should I look?
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I should look at the, you know, I should look at where they're from.
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That makes me want to look at, do the telescope, big stuff.
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Yeah, I think the more likely explanation is either the sensors are not working correctly
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or it's a secret military technology being tested.
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I mean, if you had to, I listen, I, that's what again, I think UAP, you know, the, absolutely
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UAP should be studied scientifically.
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But if I had to make a bet, and it's just a bet, I would say this is, you know, this
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is pure state adversary stuff.
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When I did, I did a, a New York Times op-ed for this in 2021, which, you know, blew up
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and, and so, you know, I had a lot of, you know, people talking to me.
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While I was doing that, I sort of looked at the signals intelligence people, the
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SIGINT and EINT, electronic intelligence communities and what they were saying about,
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you know, the New York Times articles and the various videos.
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And really none of them were talking about UFOs.
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They were all talking about, you know, pure state.
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That's why I learned the word, pure state adversaries.
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How like even simple drone technologies, you can, you know, and you want it, you purposely
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You want to fake, you know, signals into the electronics of their, their, so they crank
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So then you can just soak up all the electromagnetic radiation and know exactly what those advanced
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That said, I'm not saying that that's what this is.
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If I wasn't the head of an alien civilization, and I chose to not, to minimize the amount
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of contact I'm doing, I would try to figure out what would these humans, what would these
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That's why like the big heads in the humanoid form.
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Like, I mean, that's kind of like how would I would approach communication?
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If I, if I was much more intelligent, I would observe them enough.
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It's like, all right, if I wanted to communicate with an alco, colony, I would observe it long
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enough to see what are the basic elements of communication.
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And maybe I would do a trivial thing like do like a fake ant and then a robot ant, robot
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ant, but then it's not enough to just do a robot ant.
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You have to do a robot ant that like moves in the way they do.
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And maybe aliens are just shitting at doing the robot ants.
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But no, I do sort of, I just wanted to make the case for this.
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This is the plot actually of a great science fiction book called Eon by Greg Bear.
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And the idea was like these sort of, you know, this is actually where my first, I got,
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I became sort of a more than agnostic anti-medie because the idea is that yes, our aliens
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They sort of make their arrival.
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And really their point is to get rid of us.
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It's the dark forest hypothesis.
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And what they do is they sort of literally the way they present themselves is in this sort
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of classic UFO thing.
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And they do it and they, you know, they arrive at the, this was during the Soviet Union,
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they arrive at the US, they arrive in China.
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And they're kind of faking us out so that we never can organize ourselves against.
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So it was really, they did exactly kind of what you're talking about, but for nefarious
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Let me ask the podhead question.
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Yet another podhead.
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The whole conversation.
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Bugs before breakfast.
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It's science that bothead questions back and forth.
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What if aliens take a form that's unlike what we kind of traditionally envision in analyzing
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What if they take the form of say ideas?
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What if real podhead is its consciousness itself, like the subjective experience?
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Maybe ideas and is an easier one to visualize because we can think of ideas as entities
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traveling from human to human.
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When you know, I made the claim that the most important that finding life, any kind of
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life would be the most important discovery in human history.
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And one of the reasons is again, as I said, that, you know, life, if we're not an accident
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and there's other life, then there's probably lots of other life.
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And because the most significant thing about life is it can innovate, right?
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If I give you a star and, you know, give you tell you the mass and the composition, you
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can basically pretty much use the laws of physics to tell exactly what's going to happen
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to that star over its entire lifetime.
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Maybe not the little tiny details, but overall it's going to be a white dwarf.
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It's going to be a black hole and a story.
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If I give you a single cell and said what's going to happen in a few billion years, you'd
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never be able to predict a giant rabbit that can punch you in the face, right?
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So life has this possibility of innovating, of being creative.
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So what it means is, and that's a part of a kind of a fundamental definition of what
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it means to be alive.
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It goes past itself.
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So give life enough time, you know, and what are the end result?
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Like, you know, there's, you know, that's why I love science fiction so much.
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It does, at some point does life reach a point where it climbs into the laws of physics
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It becomes the laws of physics.
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Or, you know, these sort of lie at the extreme limits of thinking about what we mean by
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reality, what we mean by, you know, experience.
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But I'm not sure what we can do with them scientifically, but they're open-ended question
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about the open-ended nature of what it means to be alive and what life can do.
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