Transcript
Hello. This is your captain speaking from the Red Click control room with an important message. Whether you're tired of jumping through hoops for car insurance or just looking for the best deal in town, remember this, insurance that's easy, insurance that's quick. Whenever you need us, you just need to click. For our latest offers, visit redclick.ie. Redclick, insurance that just clicks. Generali Sigors Iraes Sigors SAU Trading as Redclick and Generali is authorized by the general directors of insurance and pension funds in Spain and is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland for conduct of business rules. Get ready for your mind to be totally blown, or maybe not. I don't know. But I've got on my good friend, Jesse Michaels. He's been interviewing people all over the world for his show about psychic powers, UFOs, curiosity, and the frontier of human thinking. So here he is. This isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show. By the way, I'm Twitter verified as of this morning. So Jay, you're Twitter verified? Congratulations. Yeah. I pay $8. Oh. So Oh, it, they you could do it now? You could pay $8? Yeah. Yeah. If you look at my Twitter, I'm verified. I I have the blue chat mark now. Jesse, are you gonna get Twitter verified? Yeah. I will. But I like Yuan, and, I wanna give him a chance and opt in to Yeah. Whatever he does initially. I think it's a very smart move, actually. Like, to you know, everybody's complaining, oh, $8 a month. A, we use Twitter all day long, so it's not like it's it's like some useless thing we never use. B, who wants all the ads? I'd rather have, Twitter be stay you know, finally make some money and be stable. And you know what? It'll be good for the feed because it'll eliminate all the bots that won't pay $8 a month, and just people who are willing to take this seriously and and pay will be on my feet. That's fine with me. 100%. Ads just create a crazy bad incentive system where you have to the more hyperbolic and attention seeking and, click baity you are, you know, the better. And I think if if it's more of kind of a payment subscription model, you'll just end up with more incentives towards quality and, like, substantive discourse, which ideally Twitter moves towards. And and and also I would think that because you're actually paying now for the service, which means you're no longer the product, you know, there's that saying, if you're not paying anything, then you're the product. So they they would sell our data to advertisers and so on. But now if I'm actually buying something from Twitter, they probably need to be a little bit more transparent about their algorithm because I wanna make sure if I'm paying that my tweets are seen more than, like, a bot's tweets or some troll's tweets. You know what I mean? Totally. Yeah. No. It's a really good initial litmus test for like, is this person a human? And then, you know, beyond that, I think they need to do some kyc. Because the one thing that this does do is it like reduces the barrier to entry to becoming verified like anybody. It's not like an exact authentication marker. But I think if they can move in that direction, and then you have the the initial filtering of bots, yeah, hopefully it moves in a positive direction. It does feel a little chaotic right now. I don't know what your take on that is. Like, all of the moves just feel like insanely, you know, everything feels, like, really fast and slightly manic or something. But, yeah, hopefully, he pushes through. I mean, that's just called getting getting s**t done. Yeah. That could be. Totally. Jack Dorsey even came out and said he hired way too many peep like, people are equating all these layoffs in Facebook and Twitter with the economy. They're just they've just been very poorly run companies the past 5 years, both of them. Oh, man. I used to work I think you know this. I used to work at Google. I was there for 4 years. You interviewed me at Google. Thing. Yeah. That's right. That's where we got. Google Talks there. That was awesome. The interviewer. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. We for choose yourself. That was that was a lot of fun. I remember that day. But I remember just being there and and thinking, you know, they could can 95% of this company, and it would be fine. Like, there's like a printing press, which was search. And then there was, you know, all this ridiculous fat in the form of like, r and d projects that were kind of bridges to nowhere. And, yeah, it's, I think, party time is over in the tech world. I think it's maybe 2,001 all over again, I think it's probably healthy. It's, you know, I'm a believer in Schumpeterian creative destruction. And I think, things kind of blowing up and a lack of resources can actually beget innovation. And the opposite kind of stagnates it. So I'm excited to see what happens. And I think Twitter sets a good precedent for everybody else. We saw today, meta fired, I think, 11%, 12%, a a a decent amount of their 70,000 person workforce. I think, you know, I just wanna point out, like, I I feel bad for all these people laid off. And, obviously, the fact that the stock market's sitting down for a straight year is not helping their financial situations, and and it's on and on and on. But I think what you just said is very important that lack of resources encourages innovation. And I'm not speaking at an entrepreneurial level, but at a personal level. Like, whenever I've been personally suffering, whether it's financially or in my relationships or whatever, what you just said is really true. If you have the right, you know, mindset about it that's even a cliche word. I don't know how to say it. But with a lack of resources, if you don't go to the worst case scenario in your head every second, you can find innovative solutions that are that would put you in even in a better spot than you were before. And I know this because I experienced it over and over. When I was most scared, if I didn't let the fear kill me, I could rise. And it was hard and it was painful, but you're right. Like, that is such an important sentence you just said. Yeah. It's like a it's like a Kabbalistic principle or something. Like, the inner and the outer are diametric opposites. People think if you if you get money, it'll solve your problems. And you'll have all these you have all these brilliant ideas now. And if you as long as you you know, you're a millionaire, then you can just invest in all these things and do all this cool s**t. And it's just BS. It's like, it's really on you to like, make it kind of a personal internal change. And that will change your outer circumstances. And there's like a weird, you know, translation delay where it sometimes that takes it takes a little bit longer for really positive changes to occur when you once you've changed internally. But you have to kind of have faith, you know, that it's not a perfect it's not like a vending machine. But every time I think you your back is up against the wall, you're putting, like, a coin in, like, a spiritual piggy bank or something, and it will come to roost in the future. If that's what you're focused on. It like, you you use a critical word, which is seldom used in today's language, which is faith. And then we're not talking about faith in an old book or faith in some religion, but faith in yourself that's and and the brain, really, and consciousness that if you know that when you're when you're you're when you're backed into a corner, you see everything around you. Like, if you have that faith, it's you're either gonna see everything bad around you, or you're gonna start seeing everything good around you while fighting really hard not to see the bad. Because the bad is overwhelming because that's the fear, and and you'll have it when you have that lack of resources. But it will work if you take that energy and turn it around. And it might be painful, and it might take a while, like you said, but you've gotta have faith that it'll work. I mean, it's amazing to me when I resorted to a it doesn't mean have faith and just sit around and wait for an idea to drop on you. You have to take action every day that you have it's like you said, the actions in those moments are those quarters in the vending machine. But action plus faith plus, you know, focusing on your creativity will will create real opportunities. And I've seen it over and over again, not only with me, but my readers and so on. I think so too. And I you know what? You know, people always say, you know, it's a cliche to say life is unfair. And I think short term, it can be super unfair. And it can be super kind of, you know, wonky in terms of what happens to you and unpredictable. And then obviously, people are born into like, really disadvantageous sort of circumstances. And so, you know, you can't sort of knock that. But having said that, I think life is more fair than people realize. And if you apply that philosophy you just mentioned, over a very long time horizon, things tend to actually work out. And you see it, you see certain friends or whatever, where it's like, they just they have good energy. And you know, whatever happens to them, they keep fighting through obstacles, and they see adversity actually is kind of instructive, you know, growth catalyzing kind of events instead of the opposite, you know, instead of these things that happen to them that are kind of arbitrary or random. And then, you know, things tend to work out for those people. I would take it even one step further. Like, let's say everything's going great for you, and you have the millions in the bank, you have a great family, relationships, all this stuff. Try to find an area of life that you're passionate about where you do lack resources, where things will be hard for you to to excel in in a in that community or that industry or whatever. And you need that to to grow. And it's not it's not that hard to do. And it's good practice for those inevitable times when when things are scary, because no matter what, it all gets scary at the end. But this is this is only related to what I wanna talk to you about, Jesse. You've been you've been doing these amazing interviews on basically what I would say I'll first describe it as the extreme fringe of technology combined with mystery. That's how I'll describe it. Specifically, though Yeah. Like, you were talking to serious scientists and professionals, people that we can largely, you know, believe in their credentials, and you're talking them to them about UFOs, psychic powers, all sorts of interesting things where you're no matter what somebody believes, there's some interesting things out there Yes. That you've talked to people about. And what what got you into this? Because it's it's so fascinating. Because, again, we have to we have to be okay with not knowing everything in the world, and you're kind of hitting into that frontier of where we know some things, but not a lot of things. And but there's definitely things we don't know. What what got me into this is I have a close friend who's a both a kind of a high agency, you know, impressive person. He works in finance. And his in a sort of a past life, he, was really involved with the kind of a Princeton Parapsychology Lab. And so, he got me interested in all these experiments in the 70 sixties seventies and and even earlier, actually. Every elite university in the US had what was called a parapsychology department or most of them did. And this was literally the study of mind over matter. And so, the experiment that he was, you know, most deeply involved in was called the random event generator, which is basically a, you know, binary computer. So it's a computer that produces ones and zeros, it shows up on a on a graphical interface. And it's tied to something that's provably random, like, you know, radioactive isotope decay, something like that. And quantum mechanics, you know, it's it's gonna be random. And so you should get the same amount of ones as you do zeros over a long enough time scale. It's essentially like flipping a coin. And there's an observer present, and they try to skew the output towards ones and zeros. And, you can statistically in a statistically significant way, you can skew the effect. You can actually, like, make more ones show up or more zeros show up. Just to go down, that's a very big thing you just said. So I'm sorry to interrupt, but Yeah. We need to drill down a little bit. So they've seen Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hear me. People who claim to have Mhmm. The power to do so come in and statistically significantly have more ones than z than zeros. Yeah. Beyond the expected standard deviation. Exactly. So, yeah, you get, like, a z score. You're, you know, statistical distribution that's be beyond what you would expect over, you know, a a group of people. And so for me, it's always like the inroad the the my foray into okay. There's something interesting here in any topic is high agency, really impressive person that I trust on, like, a really, you know, kind of filial personal level. And then they're saying something that doesn't fit my, like, normal epistemological paradigm of reality. Like, in that test that they did when they tested on a group of people, there are gonna just by statistics, some people will have a lot of ones. So if everybody's claiming to be psychic, and they're testing, like, a a 1000 people, one of those people will have a statistically significant number of ones. I mean, it's sort of like you have to have a group of people who aren't claiming to be psychic and a group of people who are claiming to be psychic and see if the group who's claiming to be psychic have more ones than zeros. I'm just wondering if the the statistics holds up. Yeah. Yeah. It does. So, basically, it's more you take, an average you know, a a sampling of the average population size and you adjust for all the sort of basic things like demographics. And then you get all of those people to intend on ones. And then you would see beyond the normal standard deviation, a skewing effect towards ones. And you could do that in sort of a repeatable way. And then you could do the same thing with zeros. I see. So so it's like the same group of people are showing higher than above average ones when told to do ones and higher than average zeros when told to do zeros. Exactly. Exactly. That's interesting. It it yeah. And this guy named JB Rhine who ran Duke's Parapsychology Institute from 1930 to 1960 I did this test. And he did this. You did it. Okay. There you go. I I I was not going to card the card test. Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah. I have an app actually on my phone called ESP trainer that is based on that that card, guessing game. Well, you don't know. You know, maybe if you get into a flow at a certain point, you you are you might be more so I think everybody's a little psychic. But I think that's true. All of that is to say, all of that is to say, you know, you you asked, like, what got me into this? And it was, it was that it was like the idea that I think, you know, I believe in paradigm shifts in in science and then in kind of a larger epistemology as well. And I I've seen things kind of seems things, seem to be slowing down in science. You know, it feels like we're reaching kind of the Heisenberg limits of of things, and and physics has largely stagnated. You know, string theory hasn't really, given us a lot of progress. And so, I think the next kind of paradigm shift involves mind over matter. I think there's something very fundamental about consciousness that we don't understand. And then I think that really relates to the to the UFO story as well. And so to the extent I can investigate this stuff as much as I can with as much empirical rigor as I can, I think, you know, maybe we can we can bring about the next the next paradigm shift, which would be which would be super exciting? It it is interesting because at first glance, I would dismiss I mean, you mentioned every elite university had a parapsychology, department, and I would emphasize the word had. I don't think they do anymore. I think it's basically Correct. I think a lot of it is is a lot of the claims out there are is basically BS, and the whole field was kind of debunked. But I do agree there's results like what you're mentioning, and there's there's other things just about the brain that we don't understand. For instance, let's say you move your arm. Your brain knows you're going to move your arm before you know you're gonna move your arm. Before. Which seems odd. Like, you're the one making the decision to move the arm and but the brain you're not even thinking of your arm yet, and the brain is already getting you know, firing the synapses to move your arm. And you're not even you haven't even begun thinking that I need to pick this Rubik's cube up or whatever. And so so we know that there's stuff about the there's a lot of things about the brain we don't understand, that it's literally it's a gray area. You know, it's all gray matter in the brain, and we don't understand what's in there. So and we're just beginning like like, I talked to neuroscientists, and they start telling me stuff. And I say, oh, I never heard that. And they said that's because this was a scientific result just 6 months ago. So, like, we're just on this frontier of learning what the brain does right now. With at the risk of sounding, too iconoclastic, especially for an, you know, amateur I'm not I'm not a neuroscientist, but I do think that's a problem with our modern sort of zeitgeist is you have to sort of disclaim that before saying anything. I think we have no idea how consciousness works. I don't think it's locally produced in the brain. I think it's transmitted by the brain. I think the brain is a an antenna or a receiver. And I think one kind of inroad into that being the answer, or one one tell on that being the answer is the binding problem, which is sort of a classic problem in neuroscience, which is like, why do I have this uninterrupted movie that I'm watching in the form of consciousness? Like, why am I I'm like, seeing you on the screen, James, I'm looking at Jay, you know, looking at this picture behind me. It's all this sort of seamless thing. And yet all we can understand in the brain are these kind of disparate pathways, the optical pathway, the auditory pathway, you know, Wernicke's language area, Broca's speech area, all these things, and we don't understand how they sort of meld together. And to me, that pattern matches to a TV or a radio, where if you listen to beautiful music playing on on a radio or you're watching this this amazing you know, watching Saving Private Ryan, whatever, You don't know how that image or how that music is being produced by just looking at the capacitors or the battery or the, you know, the the metal and the antenna or whatever. Like, the constituent parts of the thing don't tell you how the thing is produced. You would need to know that that's actually tapping into, RF and do a radio frequency that is transmitting the content, and the content is coming from somewhere else. And so I think that's the most interesting and William James was a big fan of this theory as was Aldous Huxley and some other interesting thinkers. This guy, Henry Bergson, French guy in the late 19th century too. And a lot of those guys were considered, you know, a little, let's say, beyond the frontier. But also, like like, do you meditate? Yes. So as you know then, probably, like, a lot of types of meditation kind of take the view that your your thoughts are not you. Like, a lot of people, quite reasonably, I think, think their thoughts are them. These are my thoughts. This is what I am thinking. I, you know but but in in various there's lots of different kinds of meditation, but in various styles of meditation, the whole idea is to to put arms length distance between you and your thoughts, observe not stop them, but observe them, understand that that's not you, and just keep practicing that. Like, a lot of like, Zen meditation is all about saying I'm not my thoughts. And it's not again, you can't stop your thoughts, but you could observe them. Like you said, you can't it's an ongoing movie. You can't stop it. I don't which is, I think, a myth of meditation that stops it. But so I think the you you know, meditators for 1000 of years have had this insight that I'm not my heart. I'm not my brain. These are all things that are part of this body, but not the real me. Totally. And and and I think, another way to put it is that every brain has an electromagnetic field around it. And there's actually a a British, professor of molecular genetics at the University of Surrey named John Joe McFadden that talks about this. Like, that that could be the literal receiver of ideas. And when you quell the activity in your brain, maybe you're you're just you're reaching a different frequency. And that's why the ideas you get are more sort of distilled and better and pure or whatever once you've done your 20 minutes of transcendental or Zen meditation or whatever. And I just think we're we're we don't understand this stuff yet, but I think I think I think that's the the, road to progress. I don't think it's, like, more dissecting. Yeah. That's interesting. Like, instead of taking the traditional kind of science path of, okay. Here's where we are. We know how to sequence the human genome. What's next? You're kind of going Mhmm. To this extreme question and and kind of moving back. Like, how can we how can we get some answers about something that's almost unknowable as opposed to looking at what's knowable and trying to figure how to learn a little bit more? Like, what what if like, you've talked to now a lot of these, I don't wanna say psychics, but, like, professors and scientists who have explored this. Like like, for instance, you talk you already talked to the CIA agent guy, I wrote down his name, the Stargate guy, Paul Smith, who who would help he helped he trained Rob Lowe, the actor, how to do remote viewing. Like, what was his story? Yeah. So he was, in the Stargate program, and he was a little later. I think he was in the eighties. So Stargate, I believe, started in 1972, and it ended in 1995. And, originally, it was a CIA program, and then it it got moved to the, I think, the DIA or the defense department. And it was this sort of motley crew of former military personnel, who were often kind of self reported psychics along with honestly stage magicians, people like, you know, Yuri Geller, who was literally a stage magician, and then like Ingo Swann, who just he was really the guy who kicked off the whole thing. This guy Hal Putoff, who started the program, who's actually a, you know, classically trained laser physicist, found Ingo Swann, and Ingo Swann is just notoriously freakishly good sort of psychic. And Paul Smith joined later in the eighties. And I think the first person I met actually, in the program was a guy named Joseph McMonagle, who's known as remote viewer number 1. He's done more remote viewings than anyone else, that have been publicly documented. He's been on TV a bunch. And, I I I got to know him, and and it's just one of these people where you're like, okay. Something's going on here. Like, he's he's got some special powers. And and that sort of got him down. Like, what what did he tell you? And and and my second question to that would be, if you put him in a room with Penn and Teller, what would they do to try to debunk him? I'm not sure on the Penn and Teller thing because I know, like, James Randy tried to debunk all these people, but I'm pretty sure, like, he put out, like, a bounty. But then, like, when people were, you know, actually trying to like, prove these things, like he didn't actually get follow through on on, engaging with them at all. And I think a lot of people had issues with him. I'm not sure what Penn and Teller would do. That's a really good, sort of question. But what what Joseph McMonagle did when I initially met him is I was with 2 friends, and he, came with, like, these envelopes. And, he was like, okay. I have a picture in this envelope. 1 of you is just gonna draw what you think is in the picture. 1 of our friends one of my friends just drew, like, this, like, kind of ball with, like, some spikes on top of it. And, so me and my other he left the room, the friend that that did the drawing. Me and my other friend were left, and, we were, like, kind of left to, like, guess what was in the drawing. And, we had to look at what was just like the draw? Yeah. Yeah. We saw him draw it, and then he left the room. And so we we're just we're looking at this ball with the spiky thing, and Joe's sitting with me and my friend and, saying, basically, what does this look like to you? And so, basically, my friend that did the drawing kind of did, like, essentially, like, kind of a remote viewing. Like, he didn't even know it was in the envelope, but he just did this drawing. He left the room. Me and my friend are left trying to figure out what the ball with the spiky thing is. And we're like, okay. Maybe maybe it kinda looks like a pineapple. And so, you know, one of us says that, and then boom, take out the photo, and it's a pineapple. And so it's just, like, weird that it is crazy. But, you know, I'm wondering, like, this this guy has done that. Let's say he's done this Mhmm. 10000 times, okay, with people. Mhmm. And he knows Mhmm. Statistically because the photograph's small. It's not gonna be, like, a very complicated, you know, intricate picture. It's gonna be something simple. So that's kind of the message he's conveying. And so people either gonna draw a a a circle or a square. And so he has one maybe he has one envelope that's a a circle like a pineapple, and another that's a square like a house. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I there are also, like, things he could've done. He could've said pineapple in conversation a few times or whatever. They're, like, you know, ways he could, like, have subliminally messaged Yeah. You know, the the thing. Like, for magicians, they could push the card that you they they know what card you're gonna pick because they can make it sort of slightly different than the rest and you and they know subconsciously you'll pick that one. I'm I'm not I'm not saying what you're saying is ridiculous. I'm just questioning. I'm I'm this is how I I question the whole thing. No. I think it's good to question, and I question it sort of constantly. I guess, I I am I am pretty a prior. I bought into the fact that I think, consciousness sort of doesn't work the way we think it does. And I think a lot of scientists used to believe that too. Like, I think if you look at like, the writings of a lot of early quantum field theorists, they don't seem to believe there's this, like, complete separation between mind over the matter, and they play with the idea constantly that that our mind affects matter. And then, you know, before that, you had, like, like, every all the, you know, original kind of enlightenment thinkers were, like, alchemists and stuff. Well, and even, like, the original quantum mechanics physicists, I mean, it's a very eerie area of science. I mean, nobody talks about that an an object light years away can change instantly by observing something here on the Earth. Like, it's part of one of the implications of of quantum mechanics. That's the whole Schrodinger's cat thing and also Einstein's entanglement theory. So why this happens, we don't really understand as far as I know. Yeah. No. We we have no idea how it understands, how how those things work. Entanglement, or, you know, or, you know, tunneling or Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, all all of these things are, you know, well transcend. I mean, basically, there's this big debate, at the Copenhagen School, and it was like quantum reality. Is it a descriptor of reality, or is it merely a set of mathematical formalisms that sort of, both has instrumental and predictive value? And the latter was sort of just chosen. That, you know, it was like that that from mid century onwards. And there were there were heretics who disagreed with this, like David Bohm. But but and and, again, early quantum field theorists like Heisenberg and and Niels Bohr that flirted with the idea that was more of a descriptor of reality. But really now all it is is it's sort of, you know, shut up and calculate is sort of the, you know, that was Feynman and onwards. That was the the motto. And, I think sometimes to to make big progress, you have to go down the branch and then take another route. And I think that might be, you know, an interesting route to to new scientific progress here. And and and I often think that, like, when you look at an anomaly, an anomaly can be a harbinger of the next paradigm. That's why I'm so interested in the UFOs and the mind over matter thing. Like, if you look at quantum mechanics, like, black body radiation was discovered in the 18 sixties by this guy named, I think it was Gustav Kirchhoff or something like that. He's a German guy. And only until we figured out that light was quantized in the in, like I think it was, like, 1903 or 4 or something, did we realize why that occurred. But it was it was it was it was basically, in the Newtonian system, black body radiation was this crazy anomaly that, like, didn't make any sense, or or the flight path of Mercury pre relativity. You know? Also, crazy anomaly that we just didn't didn't understand until, you know, until Einstein. And so I think it's really important to look at anomalies because I think they're harbingers of the next paradigm. Did I ever tell you about the time I met Yuri Geller, the the psychic? No. Tell give me that story, man. That's awesome. So you're a galore I knew about since I was a kid because there was even a comic book where he teams up with Daredevil in Marvel Comics, and you see him, like, melting tanks with his psychic powers. Like, he was really most famous in the seventies eighties. And but, anyway, I met him in 1999, and he was pitching me on he wanted to create a website. This is in early days of, you know, web and venture capital for the web and stuff. He pitched me on he wanted to make a website that would increase people's psychic powers, and it basically would be a big button. And if you click on this button, your psychic powers would increase. And so he did do some stuff with me where, like, for instance, the picture thing. He's he said, I want you to draw something, and I'm gonna tell you what you drew. And so he gave me a piece of paper and a a very noisy magic marker, and I drew a tree. And he basically said, it's either a tree or a flower. But I think it's because he's used to hearing, you know, here this is what a circle sounds like. This is what branches sound like. Yeah. The trunk of a tree sounds like. So so I don't know. And then he also did the whole thing where he bent a spoon, but, you know, I didn't know what to make of that either way. Like, I've I've I've heard lots of things. Did you bring the spin, or did he bring the spin? Somebody found this we were in an office space that we were just borrowing, like, someone a conference room. So somebody Okay. Somebody who I knew very well So okay. Got got out of the kitchen a spoon. Somebody who wasn't in cahoots with him prior to you meeting him. Definitely not. But Okay. He's supposedly, like, extremely strong with his hands, and he was rubbing the spoon kind of near a radiator. And so who knows what effects these things had? I mean, I've never tried to figure it out. You know, Yuri Yuri Geller attributes a lot of his powers. And, again, not saying he does have powers. I haven't met him. I'd love to. But he he said he attributes a lot of his powers to an, an alien contact event he had as a child. See and it's interesting. On the one hand, this the skeptical side of me says that if you believe in one thing, you believe in everything. So that is no Sure. That is no surprise to me. Mhmm. And I actually remember that from from his story. But on the other thing, this does start to connect the dots on all these things you're interested in. Like, we'll get back to the SEG stuff, but you've met again, like, Stanford professors who have supposedly material from UFOs with with materials that aren't seen anywhere else on Earth. So, like, describe that. Yeah. There's a guy named Gary Nolan. And, actually, so as you know, I used to produce Eric Weinstein's, podcast, The Portal. And I remember going with Eric to Joe Rogan's outfit or whatever, you know, and he was he was he was a guest on the show. And I was I was like, so excited to meet Rogan. And the first thing I said to Rogan and Jamie, his producer, I was like, you guys have to interview this, this Stanford professor. He has, UFO reported UFO crash materials with isotope ratios that don't exist naturally on Earth. And they just looked at me like, who the f**k is this kid? Like, he's crazy. But it's true. There is literally a Stanford microbiologist who is very well respected by all the other Stanford professors who's tenured. He has a corner office. He has a team of PhDs. He spun out 2 or 3 companies, with, like, at least one of them was a a 9 figure exit, to big pharma. I think I think Roche and and and other big pharma company. So he's a super well respected guy. He's not a, you know, a It was a public company by any means. He r r I g l was the symbol. Like, he was ahead of a public company. He I don't know if he was ahead of he spun it out. I think it spun out of his lab, and he's done that multiple times. But he's a he's a super hard headed real guy with no woo in his past. He's not one of these, like, new AG people. And he has materials in his possession that don't have isotope ratios found on this Earth or in asteroids. And they And how does he know that? By he knows that through, ion mass spec, through through mass spectrometry. And so that's the typical way of discovering isotope ratios. There's certain isotope ratios that, you know, that you find on Earth and then certain isotope ratios that you don't find. And you just he was looking at things that had ratios that were just way way outside what we would normally find. And he got the materials from Jacques Vallee, who is basically, like, the go to for, like, if you're if you see, like, a UFO crash, you send the materials to Jacques. He's like the citizen's collection depot for UFO, crash parts. He is actually the the basis for Francois Truffaut's character, this, like, kind of eccentric French scientist in Close Encounters for the 3rd Kind with, you know, made by Steven Spielberg. Steven Spielberg consulted with Jacques. So Jacques is like the godfather of ufology, and he was like, I need a real kind of a person with, more of a material science background than me, to to look at this, and he he found Gary Nolan. Gary Nolan did the analysis, and he sort of confirmed that these things just don't exist normally on Earth. So if you wanted to make say If if you wanted to make something, a material that Yep. Hasn't previously existed on Earth, is it possible? Yeah. So so it's, it's possible. And if these things were really heavy elements, like, you know, the classic example would be, like, uranium, plutonium, you know, I think it's really expensive. So it would be possible to do with a centrifuge. But the question is why? Like, if you could so assuming you can sort of, like, you know, move go through the chain of events, like this person, you know, and and, in Ubatuba Brazil or whatever sees the this, or was it Ubatuba is Ubatuba Brazil? I don't know. I was gonna ask you if that if that's a real place because that's a crazy name. Hi. Ubatuba is Ubatil. It is in Brazil. Yes. And and there there was and that is one of the parts came from Ubatuba. So it's like this person in Ubatuba just sees a crash and then mails it to Jacques. What like, one of those people has to be, like, a bad actor who's, like, fabricating materials for this to be true. It has to have access to a centrifuge. It's just a strange story that I think is worthy of following up on. And so the following up that Gary is doing to, like, have more of a smoking gun here, because admittedly, somebody with, again, 0 motive or cause could have, you know, created these bizarre isotope ratios, is Gary's actually developing kind of an atom mapper, where he can figure out whether the atoms were kind of config configured in very deliberate ways that are completely outside of human capabilities to even configure. Like, we're we we're we don't, get that granular in terms of our ability. I think it's, it's like I don't know. It's it's, like, 0.2 nanometers or 0.3 nanometers or something, but we we can't configure atoms. That's just like it's literally outside human abilities. So, yeah. I I mean, if he sort of does that, I think that that becomes even more inclusive. So so what does he think ultimately? Like like, one question I would have is why is why are there atoms involved at all in the sense that if someone is traveling, you know, faster than the speed of light in order to you have to go faster than the speed of light or you have to live, like, 1000000 of years if you're gonna go from 1 even one solar system to another. And Mhmm. Why is the why are there metals involved at all as opposed to some other, you know, non you know, beyond human understanding way of traveling? Yep. That's a really great question. I think it it cuts to something I believe, which is that these things are probably intentionally dropped for us, to look at, and I don't think that they're necessarily essential parts of some traveling vehicle, to your to your point, because they're probably it's usually like John Mack, who is the head of the Harvard psych so again, talk about the intersection between credentials and saying crazy s**t. John Mack was the head of the Harvard psychiatry department, and he spent the last 10 years of his career, maybe 15 career years of his career, studying alien abductions. And what he used to say is that the things you would see in the forms of UFOs were, like, barely comprehensible tech that was sort of the frontier. It would like, these things sort of beget technological progress because they were, like, the next thing that we had to develop as a society. Like, what's an example? So maybe these, like, the in, the late 19th century, we'd see these, like, airships. So it was, like, right when we were starting to get, like, sort of hot air balloons, but it would be these, like, metallic airships that, you know, now you might call a UFO, but, like, that's how they interpreted it back then. And then obviously, sort of you get the Wright brothers. I don't know if the Wright brothers knew about the airships, but it's like, it's always like the the next sort of thing. And then and then there are more conspiratorial sort of bizarre narratives. Like, there's a guy named Philip j Corso, who claims to have been in the Roswell cleanup collection crew, and ended up on Dwight Eisenhower's National Security Council. So he's not like a fake guy, like he was in the national security apparatus, but he claims to have been in the the Roswell cleanup crew under Roscoe Hillenkroder, who was, one of the heads of the CIA at the time in 47. And he claimed that his whole claim was that, you know, 5 modern fiber optics and, transistors and semiconductors were reverse engineered from, you know, what was collected. And, again, I don't know if I believe that. How does he connect the dots to, let's say, Shockley or the other people involved in the first semiconductors? He claims that there was some sort of, like, the government sort of handed these things out to I mean, I think the private sector was more entangled than it is now. And some I mean, now it's still more entangled than people realize with the public sector, but you had things like like Bell Labs was sort of quasi, you know, public private. Like, there's a lot of public funding that went into there. So I was super probably type interface with, you know, military and intelligence. And so I think his view would have been that they would have given it to to them or whatever. But, you know, look, I I'm more of the mind in that case that, you know, what was it like the was it like the traitorous 8? In Fairchild and then and you had, Bell Labs? Like and then and then I think there was there was a patent for the semiconductor that was actually in, in Munich, I think, as early as the thirties. So I don't I don't believe that narrative necessarily. But I do think if if the UFO crash thing is is real, which I I do think it's real, I think it's it's probably above 50% in my mind that it's real, then they're, like, left for us. And to your point, they're not, like, part of the they're not essential parts of the craft. And and what what has led you to think that it's real? Like, have you talked like, you mentioned this guy was on the Roswell cleanup crew, which sounds very official, but who else was on the Roswell cleanup crew? Like, did everybody else just keep a secret which humans don't really do? Well, a lot of s**t has come out about UFOs for the last 50 years, And that cleanup crew probably wasn't that big, so I don't know. I'm not sure. But the UFO thing, if you okay. If you were to take, like, the opposite side of the UFO thing, if you do deep research on it for, like, 2 or 3 days, you come away with the conclusion that, like, this is either, like, insane and true, or it is the most sophisticated psyop you've ever experienced in your life. It it involves it's an intergenerational SIOP, so it's like it's like decades long. It involves all these disparate players that are don't seem coordinated at all. It involves, like, navy fighter pilots who have, like, no incentive to, like, lie, and they don't you know, attention seeking behavior is super reprimanded among them. And so it's just just like it just feels way too elaborate. Well Or, you know, like like, to your point, things come out. And so yeah. Yeah. Like, the government what was it? 2 years ago? I forget when it was because of with COVID, like, like, 2018 was essentially last year. So Yeah. Right. Like, whatever it was, just in the past few years, the government did release video footage for the first time ever of what the Pentagon said was they didn't call it UFOs. They said it was unidentified aerial phenomena. There was they have on video navy pilots. I think they were navy pilots videotaping something that was moving faster than them, wasn't like a figment of light, and, like, it was real and then suddenly just sped off. Yeah. Ex exactly. Yeah. And and the guy commander David Fravor, you know, the the famous video is his TikTok seen, at Nimitz, naval base, off the coast of San Diego in 2004. And the the the fighter pilot, this guy commander David Fravor, you know, he has a pretty serious track record. He was actually tasked with protecting LA during 911. You know, like, when 911 occurred, it was like, we don't know what city's next sort of thing like that day. Like he was the guy who was supposed to protect LA. So you like hear him interview and you're like, this guy's not a liar. Like, it just doesn't feel like he's full of s**t. And I've actually met the radar operator on the USS Princeton, Sean Cahill. Again, like, really cool guy. Doesn't seem like an attention seeking, like, you know, and and, yeah, what was seen was bizarre and miraculous. And, yeah, it came out in 2017. And I I think there's there have been a lot of other sightings. Like, what what was seen? Like, could and how do they know it wasn't, like, just some reflection off the clouds or whatever? I don't know. Whatever the explanations are for these things. It was it was, sort of the a Tic Tac shaped object, and it I think it went from, like, 60,000 feet above sea level to, like, you know, right next to sea level in, like, a second or something. It was, like, just a ridiculous time lapse that you would just never basically broke our laws of physics. And and the 5 observables that are consistently seen among these crafts are, you have transmedium travel. So, they actually often come out of water and and and sort of seamlessly go in and out of water. Low observability or like cloaking mechanisms, so they're like not well detected. No, you know, Yeah. Did I say no visible signatures? Yeah. I guess, like, cloaking low observability. They instantaneous acceleration, so they break conservation momentum. They they they go faster than the speed of light ostensibly. Like, they go insanely fast, and they, like, stop on a dime. So sort sort of, you know, things like that that just don't seem to make, any sense. And then no visible propulsion as well, which is, you know, this bizarre, again, bizarre thing. Like, obviously, you need you need some propulsion that you're that you're looking to need an engine or something. And how do they know? It wasn't some just weird, you know, what do you call it when you see something, in the distance, but it's not real, like an illusion? An illusion? Yeah. Yeah. An illusion or a Mirage or something? Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's just like they're Oh, oh, because they saw it on radar. You said You have you have so you yeah. Oh, yeah. It's corroborated by it has forward forward looking infrared radar, which they had just installed these new systems from Raytheon in the case of Nimitz. And, and I think maybe, you know, the infrared piece of their the infrared thing is maybe a bigger part of the story than we realized. I think there are certain sensors that pick these things up. But, yeah, I'm with you, but, like, the same things consistently get seen across, like, all these people. So unless there's, like, unless scientists can figure out some, like, illusion or mirage effect created for fighter pilots, but then also people on the ground, and then they also seem to be super attracted to our nuclear facilities in this bizarre way. It just feels like, you know, an overwhelming amount of evidence. And I think it's bursting at the seams. And I think in our lifetime, the consensus is gonna shift pretty wildly on this topic, which, I'm excited about. You know, it's interesting if I were to make a venture bet, it would be it would be on this. And that it for me, it's not cynical. It's not a venture bet. It's a it's a meaning seeking bet. But I think, you know, if I were trying to be strategic or whatever and bet, I bet on this How would you bet on it? Like, what what would what what would something look like that would get you to to bet on it? I don't I don't know, you know, what sort of financial instrument, you know, especially in the wake of yesterday and Sam Bankman fried and crypto blowing up or whatever. I don't think a world where everything's a derivative is necessarily a good one. But, but, I think so I don't know if it'd be good to be able to bet on it. And I don't know exactly what the repercussions are. I'm just saying if there was some, like, say there was like, some some market that was made that was like, you know, you UFO, the UFO consensus. Like, would I go along that? Yeah, like any day. For sure. I would. And I think you'd make a lot of money on that. But again, I'm I'm I just wanna like figure out how reality works like that. I'm just fascinated with that. I mean, it's interesting you bring up the nuclear power thing. Like, obviously, there was a big spike in UFO sightings after we were doing nuclear testing and dropping nuclear bombs and so on. And so there's some idea maybe that kind of nuclear power was the tipping point for, you know, people for you know, beings from other planets to take notice of the Earth. But is nuclear power such an interesting thing? Like, why wasn't electricity the interesting thing? Like, oh, we could make we could actually make something that benefits our lives that moves at the speed of light. Like, that seems even more incredible to me than than nuclear power or even fire. So suddenly, for the first time in Earth's history, one member of a species could wipe out a forest in minutes. Like, never before in the history of human society until Right. A homo sapien set fire to a forest has that happened. And so why weren't these events that triggered, oh, this civilization's waking up? It's a great question. I think there's something that is uniquely apocalyptic about nuclear force in terms of our ability to sort of wipe ourselves out. So I guess that, you know, few possible theories are the one sort of Occam's razor theory is they're, like, benevolent protectors, and they don't want us to kill ourselves. The second theory would be, like, they use they sort of mine Earth for, like, resources. And these could be like energetic resources, like, that we don't quite understand, like, love could be like something they're mining, and then like, distraction and war could be something that like another faction is mining or something. So they don't want their, like, mine their their gold mine to be, like, destroyed or whatever. So that could be the second reason. Then the third reason is, like, this gets into stuff that, like, Tom DeLong, who's been really, you know, at the forefront of disclosure, former or, actually, current Blink 182 front man says. And that's that there you get all this gamma radiation fallout when a nuke goes off, and there's sort of an EMP effect. And, he has said that that might actually f**k with the, excuse my French, flight path of, these UFOs and actually pop them into our sort of timeline and our visible reality. And so I find that sort of, to be fascinating as well. I think it's more 1 and 2 than 3. And the reason I think it's more 1 and 2 is because they show up around nuclear facilities. They don't just show up around tests, nuclear tests that have gone off. They do show up around tests that like, the first nuclear test that went off was Trinity in New Mexico. And 20 days later, an avocado shaped metallic object fell out of the sky, and Jacques Vallee wrote a whole book about it, actually. It's really good. And and that has happened multiple times, but they also just seem to show up at nuclear, you know, enrichment deployment sites pretty consistently. So I think they're protecting their resources, and I don't know exactly what the resources are. But yeah. Do you think do you think Getting into wacky territory here, James. No. But it's it's really fascinating because, like I said, it's on this frontier where look. Even the government has released videos of objects they can't identify. And Yes. And you were mentioning to me the other day when we were on the phone that Barack Obama has has even said, yes. There are things we don't know about that we've observed. Totally. And I look. I've had a lot of you know, Eric Weinstein, who I love, has publicly apologized to me as, you know, he used to call me a quack or say, you know, I was dropped on my head as a child or something. It's like this one place where I'm brain dead around the UFO topic. I would push it all the time. And I think a lot of people sort of apologized to me over the last couple of years, and I think more people will continue to over the next couple of years. I really believe that. I think, what why what what led him to apologize to you? Like, what did he observe? And and not and by the way, I I like when I think you you should be a priori skeptical. So I don't and I don't I don't feel, like, I need an apology from anybody. Like, I think everybody should be like, this is bulls**t first. And then I need some apologies from people, but that's another story. Fair enough, man. But, yeah, I think I think it was like, yeah, the government and the New York Times and like all these sort of, like, you know, institutional gatekeepers, them admitting, okay, there's something probably here. And then and then now it's a question around, like, hard evidence and, you know, if we had any programs in the government that have studied these things that we don't know about and stuff like that coming out, which I think all of those things are gonna come out in the next decade or so. Particularly since, like, I don't know what the time is. It's, like, 50 years. But, like, you know, things filed by the government in this or things that became classified in the sixties or seventies are gonna be start to be unlocked soon, so we're gonna see what some of these government documents reveal. But what why did Totally. You you mentioned this once, program, Stargate, that was stopped, I guess, in 1995. Why did they stop it if there were results? It's a great question, and I don't really think they did stop it because, actually, there's a book that came out called Skinwalkers at the Pentagon about modern UFO research and about the ATIP and AUSAP AUSAP program that was revealed in that New York Times article that you mentioned, the Leslie Kane article in 2017. And they mentioned remote viewing being a part of the study for ATIF and OSAP. So the idea that, remote viewing was sunsetted in 1995, I think, was BS. I think it got moved somewhere else. You know, obviously, that begets a lot of optical scrutiny. And so I think sometimes these things have exoteric versions and esoteric versions or versions that seem dysfunctional and then underlying versions that are more functional. And I think I think maybe the, you know, that was just the Stargate was just the initial r and d or something, and then, you know, they've done they've they're doing more since then. I I don't I don't know if they've gotten really good at parapsychology because I think that requires a sort of spiritual and moral purity or something that, you know, maybe people in the government don't have. There's something like that. This guy wasn't this guy you spoke to, though, what was his name? Paul Metz or, Paul Smith? This guy that you Paul Smith. Yeah. Yeah. This guy that you spoke to said, you know, he he gave you all these examples of remote viewing in this government program. And how does he think it works if it if it exists? So the way it worked then was I think you would have a a core kind of remote viewer, and that was like the quote unquote psychic, and then you'd have, like, an analyst. And that's really important because you didn't you have, like, a left brain kind of overlay, and you wanna shut that off as much as possible if you're doing, like, the right brain psychic download. And then the analyst is, like, using the left brain to, like, figure out what the actual object or, like, you know, the thing is that the that the psychic is sort of describing. And then beyond that, truthfully, James, I am out of my depth and don't know the full protocol. But I do wanna take a class at some point, and I might, I might hit up Joseph McMonagle and try to try to go out to Virginia or the Monroe Institute out there and try to learn. If you wanna join, we could we could do it to you. Let's do it, man. Let's do it. I'm down. Cool. And and so what like, let's say there are, you know, something we don't understand, like some sort of parapsychology powers or whatever that are are Mhmm. Are actionable. Like, meaning, you could do things that are useful, like remote viewing or whatever. Mhmm. What do you think is is the most like, why can't someone have godlike powers? Like, what what's the most you've seen or heard about in terms of, you know, reaching beyond what we think is our our humble mortal selves? There the re recent examples are people like Ingo Swann. I mean, you can always ask yourself the question, like, does somebody like a David Blaine have more of this than, you know, we realize or something like that? I I don't know. I've met him. He seems pretty mystical and interested. Like, there's something going on there. But I I I go back to Jesus. Like, you know, I don't know if you you think he existed or not, but but I think he's a sort of a great a great example. But I do think I think looking at these things, where it gets dark are, like, you know, classic examples of people who have these powers are, like, Aleister Crowley, you know, somebody like that. And, like, yeah, I don't know if you're familiar with him, but he's sort of like this, like, demonic occultic figure from the early 20th century. And, like, he was, you know, may he was maybe, like, British intelligence or something. But he he he was, like, a really bad and he was using this cult called the OTO. He he's, like, the perfect example of, like, why you shouldn't do this stuff. Like, why it's it's sort of like you're like it's like staring directly at the sun or something. It's really bad. And, like, I think there's there's a marked difference between the occult and having faith, and the occult involves trying to do something in a repeatable way to gain power with it. And having faith involves sort of submitting yourself to God and letting almost God hybridize its himself with you or something in a in a in a strange sort of way or act through you. And, I think there's a there's a big difference between those two things. And so you can you can do it in the sort of black magic way. You know, there's a left hand path and a right hand path, and I think you do it in the sort of black magic way, the occult way, or you can just have faith or something. Well, like, for you, like, you've really explored this stuff at at a a deep level, and you've done I highly encourage people to go to your YouTube channel. They Google Jesse Michaels, but it's I forgot the name. It's, like, alchemy American alchemy. American alchemy. Yeah. I love that name. Yeah. Even though I didn't remember just then. I need better I'm getting older. I need a better memory. But, how has studying this stuff changed your life and the way you view, kind of the the normal obstacles of life? It it gives me it makes me think that there's a lot about humans we don't understand. There's a and then and then it's like, there's probably a lot about yourself you don't understand. And you probably have all these capacities that you don't really understand. And if you sort of have faith in that, you can sort of cultivate these things again, just through, like, living your your earnest genuine life and not through, like, you know, reading, like, a cult text or anything like that, which I would not suggest you do. And then I think on a sort of a more macro level, I think it just makes you realize there's still you know, there's this view, I think, in in academia that we're at the end of history and that we sort of all stones have been unturned. And I love the, you know, Nietzsche has an essay on history, and he talks about the academia then, and this was, you know, 19th century, sort of being purveyors of undigested stones of knowledge. It really feels like if you're in academia now, you are being force fed an already set body of knowledge. You are being dispersed from a citadel of priestly professors on high, a set of knowledge that is set in stone, and we know everything there is to know and this sort of it's like the Steven Pinker, you know, like, we are at the peak enlightenment, you know, we are enlightened as people or whatever. And I think the opposite view is the one that I have, which is actually, no. There are tons of bizarre human beings are amazing, but we're super depraved and we are groping in the dark. Science is the map. It is not the territory. And it is interesting in terms of its predictive and instrumental value, but it does not it is not the ultimate descriptor of reality. And, looking at these anomalies gives you a sense of wonder. And, you know, Plato says says, you know, all philosophy starts with wonder. And I think it that sets you down this sort of, like, really fun, dialectic, peripatetic, inquiry process into, like, reality that I think everyone should do. That is just really amazing, and it makes you grow, and it's good for you. And it makes you feel more excited about life because not everything's set in stone. You know, there are new frontiers to be to be discovered. And so that's the goal of the show, is to sort of, like, make other people excited like that. And then, yeah, just sort of spread that, evangelize that. You know, it's a really great point. Like, science basically thinks we've uncovered this is not being anti science by saying this, but academic science basically thinks we've uncovered 99% of what we could know. We just gotta get that final 1 tenth of 1% or whatever. And and Exactly. But yet, it's common sense to think we've learned so much about life and reality and how the universe works in the past 100 years, and only really in the past 100 years. Imagine what we'll learn in the next 10000 years, like, you know, a 100 times a 100 years. So clearly, we're gonna learn a lot of things that we would have thought unimaginable right now, but and we're probably not gonna be around to see it, but it you know, science is gonna continue to innovate as long as the the world survives, and it's innovating in a faster and faster rate as pointed out by many authors and scientists and writers and and so on. So having that sense of wonder, just like Einstein did when he imagined what would it be like if someone was traveling the speed of light looking at someone on earth, these types of thought experiments that are that seem very childlike at first, but result in, you know, that one thought experiment resulted in nuclear energy, ultimately. So, you know, it's it's gonna be amazing to see, you know, how this sense of wonder continues to to fuel our understanding of consciousness, the world, whether or not even any of these things are true. There's we know common sense. We know most of the things out there, we don't know. Like, what most of our reality is we it's probably the other it's, like, 99.9% of things we don't know yet, and all we only know 0.1%. There's a great book by a guy named Sam Arbesman. He's actually a friend of mine who, it's called the the half life of facts, and it talks about how facts have a literal decay function on them. Like, there it is it's it's not only, you know, ahistorical to say that we know everything. It's it's literally like a safe bet to say that, like, at least half of what we say is true now will get overturned in the future. And I think we have to ask ourselves, are we over indexed on protecting the current citadel of knowledge? Do we have too many, like, Michael Shermers out there saying, you know, I'm skeptical of this new idea because it's it it attacks the status quo or whatever. Are we over indexed on that, or are we over indexed on, like, really cool frontier wacky science? You know, is is it are things too fringy? Do we have too much, like, border science and, like, you know, heretical science, or do we have too much skepticism? And I think we live in the age of disenchantment, and we have way too much skepticism. And if we can weight things a little more towards the the wackiness, I think we can make progress. And it's obviously Scylla and Charybdis. You know, you can't you can't, there's some efficient frontier there. You know, you don't wanna be fully wacky and and, you know, open to everything. But, I think we're over indexed on the on the opposite. Because there are a lot of people who try to just take this psychic stuff and make a quick dollar on it. And and that's, of course, given a bad, given a bad rap. But there are as everybody as even the government admits, as many people admit, there are things that have been observed that we don't understand, whether it's psychic or UFOs or or other things. And I think being on that quest and talking to the serious people you've spoken to and and looking at the evidence and and listening to these stories and being discerning, which you have, I could tell you have because nobody on your show has seemed wacky. Everybody is, like, super smart, actually, and serious. And it's an incredible show that you put together. What's the next episode gonna be? I can't can't wait to watch the next episode. Yeah. It should be fun. Well, Graham Hanc**k's coming over, this week. Are you familiar with him? He he was just on Rogan, actually. He is he's kind of an ancient civilizations guy, and he thinks that, there was a maybe a preceding civilization. There was, like, an antecedent civilization to ours, something like Atlantis maybe, and it was wiped out, in the Younger Dryas period by a comet from a torrid meteor stream that might have hit the earth. And he has all this sort of interesting archaeological evidence. Really? You know, this put yeah. And he he's super interesting. So I think doing one with him, doing one about about China and TikTok, because I think that's a big undercover story. And then I agree with you on that. With John. Right? And then I did one with Jacques Vallee, who I mentioned on this show that sort of, you know, godfather of the UFO. Oh, man. And then I might do one with Jordan Peterson. I'm gonna email him today and see if I can do one. He's been on the podcast. He's he's a good guest. And, you know, I'm sad to say when I had him on, I didn't really know every I just read his his first book, 10 Rules for a Living or whatever with Squirrel Blur. I forget the title now. But, I didn't really know everything about him, and I instead just asked I viewed him as, like, my personal psych psychologist and just asked him questions that would solve his problem. You know what? I was thinking, like, if I do something with him, I was thinking I would do the same thing. I think that's cooler. And I think, you know, he's so in the media already. He's done so many interviews that maybe the the less commoditized thing to do that you'd also get more value out of is actually just, like, doing therapy with them. I think so. Yeah. That's cool. I mean I mean, one of the last questions I asked him was, you've been on Joe Rogan. Now you've been on my show. How can I be a better podcaster? What would you tell me to be a better podcaster? And he said straight out and, like, we've only been speaking for about 2 hours at this point, and that that's the extent to which I knew him then. He said, you know, you lack confidence. And I was thinking about it a lot afterwards, and he was right. Like, I get, you know, sometimes intimidated by my guests and a little nervous, and that kind of you know, I think most people don't notice it when I'm doing the podcast, but he noticed it and and pointed it out directly as the as the I don't think that's the only difference between me and Joe Rogan. There's a lot of others, but he he was basically saying you could be a lot better if you were more confident. And I don't think I'm bad. I think I'm good, but it was a good insight. Wow. That's amazing. Yeah. He's pretty he's a kind of a piercing incisive guy. I remember yeah. I met him a few times, and he kinda, like, looks through you. He doesn't look at you or something. Yeah. And and and, he's very serious. And, Yeah. I remember I was I felt like super under we got dinner once, and I was just, like, not like, he was, like, wearing a full suit, and I was like, I feel like I should I was wearing some, you know, stupid tech, like, pullover. It's just like I feel out of place here. But, but he's quite a I wonder why he wears a a a suit so formally. I wonder if because he's so into symbolism and what things mean that you have to question. Like, if he's wearing a a formal suit when he's suspected probably that other people wouldn't be, because, you know, you're a tech guy. Tech guys rarely wear suits. Mhmm. I wonder why he chose to wear a suit. That just feels like his whole vibe is, like, make your bed, get your life in order, you know, wear a suit, you know, like, present well, do the little things right, and then your your life will sort of, you know, it's like it's like 12 rules of life or whatever. Your your life will sort of come together as a result. I find that to be the less and you know, the bible and Joseph Campbell. And, like, I I think that part of him and the more sort of mystical part of him is more interesting than the sort of rote self help stuff. But, you know I I agree. Like like The second thing sells better. Yeah. The the videos he's done you know, he's videotaped all his class sessions when he was a professor. And those stories he's told linking, you know, mythology and and storytelling with current day, you know, behaviors is just fascinating. All the connections he draws from all every different religion, every different, you know, belief system, it's just it's just fascinating how he connects all the dots. And I peep think I agree. People underappreciate that of him. Like and that those core those, lectures he gives really show how how smart he is. Like, all the other stuff is just political and whatever. I don't even that's why I didn't know about his whole I was more interested in in basically the the psychology of what he's doing. So Yeah. Jesse Michaels, American alchemy. I appreciate we've known each by the way, I was thinking, this is the first time probably that now a father son team have been on my podcast. And I I totally forgot that, like, your dad, Barry Michaels Mhmm. Who wrote, the The Tools. The Tools. Yeah. That book was a game changing book for me, and, really, your dad's book really helped me. And he's and his appearance on the podcast really Oh, man. I always try to get personal elevation from the guests on my podcast. Else, why do a podcast? And your your dad is one I could clearly point to and say and you as well. And you guys have have changed my life. So thank you, and tell your dad thank you. I really, you know, enjoy his stuff. And and you're following in his footsteps. You've changed my life. I'll always remember meeting you and hanging at Google, and, I loved your book. I'm I'm a huge fan. And it and it was I read it at a time in my life to, choose yourself where I was sort of at a dead end and, you know, didn't know what the next path was. And, it sort of came together and and, you know, I really think it was in no small part due to due to your stuff. So I'm a I'm a master fan. Yeah. And you you you also, you know, blazed the initial trail for you know? I think having people like you and Rogan and people to look up to on the podcasting front who are independent and clearly just themselves and how they, like, interact with their guests is is so essential. Because, like, I I looked at, you know, going into, like, media, you know, out of college and stuff. And, you know, like working for one of these publications or something. You know, I interned for Charlie Rose and John Stewart back in the day. And, and that just looks so bad to me. And now now I can do this. And it's really because of people like you. Like, you know, just like, go and interview people yourself. Like and and it you need that. You need people to do that to show you that it's possible. So You know, I'll tell you a little a little story. When I was 12 years old, I just really always even when I was looking, I read books about journalism and about interviewing, and and and so I would I was I would I talked about this a little bit before on on the podcast, but I I was 12 years old. It was 1980, and I called around to every senator and congressman's office and and the president and the White House. And I basically said, I was interviewing for this politicians for this local newspaper. It was called The Home News. And can I talk to the senator? Can I talk to the congressman? And so on. And I interviewed, like, a ton of senators, congressmen, the the chief usher of the White House. I didn't get to Jimmy Carter, who was president at the time, but I talked to people at the White House, talked to the, you know, high up people. And then finally, one senator's office called the home news and said, is there this 12 year old boy who's interviewing people for you guys? And the editor in chief was like, no. Like, who is this kid? And so the editor in chief called me and said, you can't say you're from the home news. And he said, but why don't you come over and hang out for a while? So I went there, and he showed me all around the newspaper. We had lunch with journalists. We we, you know, we're we're we're hanging out. And he said and I said, can I interview for you guys, interview politicians? He said, listen. We have PhDs in journalism applying to do work to work for us. We can't do anything with you, but keep at it and cost, you know, 20 years from now. So That's awesome. That's the best, though. When when you just you kinda, you know, just like take that leap and you take the shot and you're, you know, super underqualified, but you just go for it. I mean, you need to do that. And, yeah, that's that that's how everything gets started. And that was I mean, when I when I was at Google, really, like, the reason I feel like I started this show, and it all started when I was at Google, when I was reaching out to people like you, who I was just a fan of. I was just like, I like your stuff. And, I was like, oh, I have this big name behind me, it's Google, and then, you know, maybe I can meet James and we can, you know, do a cool interview or whatever. And I remember yeah. It's it's it's it's, I think, great to do that. Well, that was so much fun for me too. Like, what a what a a real great thing to talk at this company that has changed so many lives as well, and and, you know, you you conducted the interview, and and it was it it was a lot of fun. So so, again, Jesse, we gotta we gotta do this more often. It's been a couple years since we last spoke before this. So but I'm glad we did, and I'm glad we we've caught up. And we've gotta do this, more often because you're you're you're on to so many interesting things, and let me know if I could ever help in any way. So I I appreciate you coming on on the show. This is a blast, man. It was an honor, and, let's let's do remote viewing class together. I'll I'll follow-up Excellent. On that. Yeah. Definitely. Cool. Thanks again. Alright. Later. The nation's favorite car buying site, Dundeele Motors, is home to the largest range of new and premium used cars from all of Ireland's trusted car dealerships. That's why you'll find Spirit Volvo on Dundeele. Visit the Spirit Volvo showroom on Dundeehl to find your next car. Dundeehl Motors, for confident car buying and deals to feel great about from all of Ireland's trusted car dealerships. Visit dundeel.ie today.
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