TMS001 Audio Transcription

Is the Government Hiding Aliens? With Matthew Pines

Release date: Friday 21st July

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Matthew Pines. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

Matthew Pines is the Director of Intelligence at the Krebs Stamos Group and a Fellow at the Bitcoin Policy Institute specializing in national security. In this interview, we discuss the growing sense that the US government may imminently disclose the existence of craft of non-human origin and that it actually possesses intact and partially intact examples of such craft.

“The Senate thinks there’s something fishy going on; either they’re being mislead to think there’s a secret crash retrieval alien reverse engineering program – or there is a secret crash retrieval reverse engineering program…either way this is concerning.”

— Matthew Pines

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: All right, Matthew, how are you? 

Matthew Pines: I'm doing well Peter. 

Peter McCormack: I think we're not going to talk about Bitcoin today!

Matthew Pines: We might, we'll see. 

Peter McCormack: I don't think Danny has ever been so excited about an interview.

Danny Knowles: That's definitely true. 

Peter McCormack: He has not shut up about this one.  I don't think he's ever prepared so much for a show.  Also, actually every time we interview you, people afterwards always say, "Did you talk about aliens?"  And we've never really got into it. 

Matthew Pines: Let's do it. 

Peter McCormack: Let's do it.  Okay, why now? 

Matthew Pines: Why now?  Well that is kind of the big existential question.  I don't think we actually understand why now, fundamentally.  But if you're just paying attention to the news, you'll have been noticing there's been a lot more sort of UAP stuff happening in the public discourse at a serious level, so institutional level.  I think that is what is drawing, I think, most serious attention, why is that happening, and that's where I think we can get into. 

Peter McCormack: I don't think there's anything in my lifetime that would be more exciting than finding out that aliens are real, we know who they are, they might be talking to us.  I remember as a kid, we used to have the crop circles that would come on the news.  I remember one morning, I was a kid and my brother came in and told me -- he was working for air traffic control, he was training to be an air traffic controller and I was a lot younger.  And he'd come back from Luxembourg on his training and he said, "I've got to tell you something, Pete".  So I said, "What's that?"  He said, "Look, I'm going to tell you this, but you cannot tell anyone".  I was like, "What is it, what is it?"  He said, "Right, as part of our training in air traffic control, we have UFOs come on the screen and we know what they are and we have to manage that because obviously there's aircraft, but we know they're real".  And I was like, "Really?"  He's like, "No, I'm fucking with you!" and it broke my heart.  So recently, with all this stuff that's coming out, I'm fascinated by knowing whether it's real or not.

Matthew Pines: Yeah, and that story I think is a common refrain that has been one of the leading justifications behind Congress taking this seriously, is that they've heard from naval aviators, other military intelligence personnel that have reported to them, that they've been encountering unidentified anomalous phenomenon in the course of their official duties, whether it's in submarines, whether it's at radar stations, whether it's tracking space traffic, whether it's piloting our most advanced jets.  And up until recently, there wasn't a formal process to report those encounters up the normal chain of command, and it was perceived by some aviators as a safety of flight concern. 

So, this was one of the initial angles of interaction with Congress that put pressure on the military to create more formal channels, official channels to report this, try to help remove the stigma, as you mentioned.  There was a stigma around this topic that went throughout the military, and it made reporting these things very difficult, getting common situational awareness very difficult.  That was one of the things that Congress had put a lot of energy behind, putting pressure on the military to create official reporting channels, and that has happened over a number of years, and they stood up an office inside the Pentagon called the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which is like the latest incarnation of similar efforts, started with the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon Task Force that was supposed to look at these reports, with some degree of analytic rigour try to capture as much data as possible, interview the pilots and other witnesses, and resolve the observations.  And that's been kind of the tip of the iceberg of official government action; that's where it started, but I think it's progressed a lot since then. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, what's interesting about that is there's this one end of the spectrum where there's certain reports of unidentified objects that may cause some kind of collision risk; and then there may be this other end of the spectrum whereby there are alien craft that exist that are in control, or biological, I don't know how you refer to it, you'll correct me, but yeah, some kind of biological samples which may be alien.  And these guys over here might know fully well, "Yeah, that's real because we've got one over here", but they're not really talking to each other and they can't really talk to each other?

Matthew Pines: Yeah, so maybe it's helpful to step back and think about how to think about this problem set, because it is a very tricky question that I think is, one, it's layered with a lot of historical sort of taboo and legacy pop culture dogma and taboo, so it's very hard to get a grip of where do you start thinking about this in a serious, rigorous, analytic approach, and how do you start to separate out what it is that could explain these apparent observations, and then to go through a rigorous process of analysis and investigation to discern what's underlying it. 

Peter McCormack: Should we go one step back further and go, why should anyone listening care that Matthew Pines is telling us? 

Matthew Pines: 100%, yeah, and you probably shouldn't necessarily care what I have to say, but if you want to listen to it, I'm happy to share my thoughts. 

Peter McCormack: I do.

Matthew Pines: Yeah, so my background, I think, has primed me to think about this with a particular mental model.  So my educational training was in physics and philosophy, so I was intellectually attracted to the deeper questions, right, that everyone always wants to know the answers to: what is reality; what's the basics of physics; are we alone in the universe; what's the nature of life and consciousness; all these essential questions of existence.  So, I was always deeply attracted to those and decided not to become an academic and shifted into public policy and did a career in national security consulting.  And so as a professional, I really focused a lot on these low-probability, high-consequence events, doing analysis for the government on all the things that could happen that shouldn't be disruptive to our systems and institutions, that we don't think are likely, but if they did happen, would be very significant. 

So, I looked at things like everything from pandemics to nuclear war, cyber attacks, massive earthquakes, the whole kit and caboodle of bad case scenarios.  And I think UAPs, if they turn out to be non-human intelligence interacting with humanity, would be the ultimate low-probability, high-consequence event.  And so, I think both my intellectual orientation towards deeper questions and taking the idea that there's always a mystery to try to unravel seriously, and to apply rigorous analytical tools to do that, as well as a professional orientation thinking from a national security lens about low-probability, high-consequence events, putting those two things together makes me think about these things, you know, I take them seriously.  I want to understand what's going on here.

Peter McCormack: Right, okay, so leading on then, explain how these branches of government work and why there's like this shrouded mystery around it?

Matthew Pines: Well, yes.  I mean, really the mystery around this topic, I mean, if you want to go really through the history, starts shortly after World War II, right?  So, everyone knows about the Roswell case, right?  And you can look up all sorts of videos on YouTube where they go through kind of the history of Roswell, but that was a real incident, there was something that crashed, there was a report that said it was flying saucers from the Air Force, and then it was turned into a story of essentially a weather balloon.  Subsequently, what came out was that that was a cover story for a secret weather monitoring, radiation monitoring system the Air Force had, called Project Mogul.  The suspicion has been, that itself was a cover story for an actual non-human craft vehicle that was retrieved, etc.  But that was the genesis of modern pop culture lore.

Going back to the 1940s and 1950s, unidentified flying objects was a major topic of sort of cultural discourse, and it was taken very seriously by the institutions of power.  There was a serious incident over Washington, DC in the early 1950s.  It gripped national attention, there was a massive press conference, all the senior brass of the military had to go out and speak to this.  It was a serious thing.  And the government spun off a bunch of official investigative bodies that went through various iterations, but the most famous one was Project Blue Book.  They convened expert panels with scientists to investigate this question and issue reports, again, very similar to what we're seeing now. 

One of those reports that has been maligned in history is the Project Blue Book report and the Robertson panel, which basically recommended to the CIA that they should officially try to dissuade this as a topic of public discourse through ridicule, so that from their perspective, reports of UFOs were actually a strategic threat, given the fact we were worried about, say, Soviet bombers coming into our airspace.  And if everyone was reporting a UFO, it would swamp our ability to potentially do early detection.  So, it was like a matter of national security, at least the nominal justification at the time was, "We need to turn what was a very serious, un-fringy topic of pop culture and political discourse and serious national security focus, turn it into kind of a cultural taboo", and that's what they did, and it was very successful.  

Then many decades of cruft in pop culture and Hollywood stories have implanted, I think, a certain set of images and tropes in our minds about what this is, what it could be, and of course, everyone has seen all the different film and narrative portrayals that are most of our common reference points and anchors for how to think about this.  And so, that makes it hard to treat it objectively, it makes it hard to treat it analytically, because everyone comes to it with this extremely loaded cultural and historical baggage, which somewhat colours how you can sort of peel off and try to get to the bottom of what's happening here.  We want to go into the government structure here.  This is where it may be best to start with something more tangible and something more recent. 

So, David Grusch is probably the best place to enter into that conversation, because I think his claims as a US Government whistleblower are the most explicit in potentially peeling the curtain back on what the structure of secrecy is around this and the relationship between these alleged legacy crash retrieval, reverse engineering programmes was to the formal structures of government and accountability in Congress.  So, I think we can peel into that.  But first I would step back and provide just a simple analogy to how to think about thinking about this topic, knowing there's a massive historical legacy lore and a whole bunch of cultural baggage and dogma and preconceptions about what this is or isn't, and it becomes a very emotionally fraught topic it's very hard to treat objectively. 

So, I think it's safest to start by analogy is, you're in a forest clearing and it's well-lit and you have a pretty good idea of the epistemic terrain around you.  You can discern what are the tufts of grass that are immediately approximate to you, and you can go and tangibly investigate those are real things.  So, that category of high-credence, epistemic terrain would be the things that we're seeing happening in Congress, sort of objective on-the-record statements by political and senior military intelligence officials, historical records that have been declassified.  Again, those don't get you to all the answers, but those are the high-credence places to start.  So, really forming that as the foundation for how you investigate this is start at a clearing, and then you recognise you're really only going to go so far by investigating the terrain.  It's not going to answer all of your questions.  You're going to know you're going to have to venture into the forest around you. 

The problem with venturing into the forest around you is you can get lost in the dark forest, you might not find your way back.  So, if you start this conversation, investigation, off in the middle of the dark woods, and you start to say, are these time travellers from the future; are these aliens that have been around for millions of years; you can start there, but you can easily get lost.  And so I like to start in the clearing and then work our way out and knowing that as a Bayesian, that my credences and my beliefs have to be revised always with new evidence, and that I'm going to treat every claim that's further out into the dark forest with more scepticism because I don't think they're as well lit, they're not as well discerned from my perspective.  But I think that's the direction of travel is start from the dark, start from the clearing, work your way out into the forest and I think David Grusch is like the critical bridge that takes you from the clearing into the forest.  So, that's maybe the best way to structure the conversation. 

Peter McCormack: And before we get into that, just understanding the structure and the branches of the US Government, because it's very hard to understand there is an election every four years, a new Administration comes in, but it feels like even the Administration, there's parts, branches of government they can't access that almost operate secrecy.  And so I can't even wrap my head around what are the governance structures of these independent secretive branches; how does they operate;  how do secrets get maintained with them; how do you join those, how do you elevate yourselves within them; and who do they essentially report to?  Because, you think of a company as a top-down, and whoever runs that company has access to every part of that company, or they can get access to every part of that company, but it's almost like there's these secret silos within the US Government.

Matthew Pines: Yes, so I can explain.  There's three main buckets of classification categories that's run by really three different parts of the government.  So, the Department of Energy has their own entire classification system for nuclear weapons, and so you have to get a separate security clearance, a separate investigation into your background.  If you get a job that requires access to that sensitive information, the equivalent of a top secure clearance in the Department of Energy is called the Q clearance and it gives you access to what's called restricted data, which is data that we classify as pertains to really nuclear weapons design information, things relating to the nature and the performance of nuclear weapons.  So, that is an entirely separate area of the classification universe that is managed through the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is part of the Department of Energy, it's overseen by a separate set of committees in Congress, but that's part of the executive branch, Nuclear Secrets. 

Then of course there's the more well-known Department of Defense and intelligence community channels, and those share a classification clearance system that is the more well-known confidential, secret, top secret.  And so if you're applying for a national security sensitive position in government or as a contractor and your position requires access to, say, top secret information, which is the highest classification level, you go through a background investigation and you have to turn over records, you've got to submit to interviews, etc.  And that is like, you get a top-secret clearance granted to you as a person.  That's like you get essentially a ticket to the restaurant or a ticket to the bar, you're now allowed into the bar. 

But there's VIP sections that you're not allowed into just because you bought the ticket, right?  There's a whole bunch of VIP sections inside the classified world that require separate tickets to get into, and that's actually what they're referred to, are tickets.  And those go under the rubric of compartmented programmes.  And then Department of Defense is a whole separate structure of what are called Special Access Programs, SATs.  And then the intelligence community is similar, called compartmented access programmes, CAPs, so SATs and CAPs in the DOD and the intelligence community, and mainly referred to either, say, research development for weapons platforms in the Department of Defense and compartmented intelligence sources and methods and R&D on that side.  And so, those are like two separate universes of intelligence and DOD compartmented programmes.  And you have to have both the clearance and you have to have the need to know in order to get access to the VIP ticket, and you do not necessarily know what all those are. 

So, there are within just, say, SAPs, the Special Access Program world in the Defense Department, for example, there are a lot of SAPs.  Special Access Programs are used as a structure to protect the most sensitive military programmes, say, whether they're active operations or whether they're research and development concepts for new weapons platforms.  And in that is a whole management structure that reports up to what's called the Special Access Program Oversight Committee, SAPOC.  And their job is essentially to manage and control access to these compartmented programmes and report to Congress on the money they're spending on these, that's what black budgets refer to, right?  Black budgets refer to money spent on those SAPs.  But there's a lot of SAPs, and there's a difference between acknowledged SAPs and unacknowledged SAPs. 

So, acknowledged SAPs, you might even find there might be, like in a line item that says some benign name for something, but we're going to spend $10 billion on it, whatever.  Those are reported to Congress, they're usually pretty well-documented even they're classified, but they're reported out, "Here's what we're going to spend money on.  This is what the justification is for.  We're going to have a whole bunch of paperwork for it".  And then there's unacknowledged Special Access Programs.  Those are ones that the US Government will officially deny.  There's no paper, there's no public trail that refers to those at all.  As far as the government is concerned, they don't officially exist.  They are by law still required to report their existence to Congress, to a special subset of Congress, called the Gang of Eight, which is the two senior members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the two senior members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the two most senior members of the House and the Senate.  So, those are eight individuals that get usually verbally briefed into the unacknowledged Special Access Programs. 

Then, again I'm going down the third rabbit hold here, there are waived unacknowledged Special Access Programs.  So, the Secretary of Defense can sign a letter that waives certain reporting requirements to Congress on unacknowledged Special Access Programs, where it might be like very limited verbal brief only.  There'd be no written documentation provided to Congress and maybe superficial justification or description of what's happening.  And sometimes it might not even be to all the Gang of Eight, it might be to like four of them.  So, that is the structure of secrecy for the most sensitive programmes inside the government. 

So, to connect this to the UAP story, the allegation that has surfaced in the past several weeks was from a former very senior intelligence officer, named David Grusch, who was a career Air Force, then became an intelligence officer for the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency in the National Reconnaissance Office.  He was a GS-15, which is like the highest civilian position inside the government.  And his job, before he got involved with the UAP topic officially, was to help compile the President's Daily Brief, which is the most sensitive intelligence document that exists in the US Government.  And he helped compile that on behalf of the director of the National Reconnaissance Office, which is responsible for all of our spy satellites, basically, the national overhead system.  And so he in that position had, if you go back to the analogy of like tickets, he had among the most tickets you can get in the government, right?  What was reported by journalist Ross Coulthart, who led the interview with David Grusch and has helped report out some of these aspects of the story, is that he had up to 2,000 tickets.  So, that is an enormous amount.  That's insane, right?  That is as many as I've ever heard.

Peter McCormack: He had access to a lot.

Matthew Pines: He had access to a lot.  And he was tapped, that's probably a reason why he was tapped, by the leadership to become the senior National Geospatial-Intelligence liaison to what was then called the Unidentified Arial Phenomenon Task Force, which was stood up in response to congressional pressure after the 2017 New York Times article and a bunch of pilots and other folks went to Congress and said, "You need to investigate, you need to do more official things".  And the pressure on that forced the DOD to stand up this official task force.

Peter McCormack: Was that the Tic Tacs?

Matthew Pines: Yeah, it was the Tic Tacs and a few other things that David Fravor from the Tic Tacs, or a few other of these now well-known, with the 60 Minutes report, have kind of entered the public discourse.  But there were other folks that had been involved in this topic, had gone to Congress and said, "You should put the pressure on".  This kind of works where there's the official legislative constraints put on the duty, and then there's the behind-the-scenes, "If you want that special programme funded, you've got to do this for me".  And so they set up this task force and he was the senior co-lead for UAP for the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency on this task force. 

The job of the task force, to answer to the congressional remit, was to figure out, what does the government know about UAPs, these things that these pilots are seeing.  And so he did his job, he went and started talking to people.  And because he had such wide access to all these facts, he had the access; and because he had this official position, he had the need to know.  And so that gave him the golden ticket to go and talk to all of these folks inside the complex Byzantine Matryoshka doll of secrecy in these legitimate programmes. 

What he alleges is that legitimate legal programmes, Special Access Programs, being used to, say, capture and reverse engineer some North Korean missile that falls into the ocean, were being illegally diverted to do crash retrieval, reverse engineering of non-human intelligence vehicles.  That's his allegation.  That's what makes it very explosive, because he's the first senior intelligence official to come on the record with such explicit detail and to have gone through the official whistleblower process inside the Defense Department and the intelligence community to make these allegations. 

That's kind of where we are now, is that these allegations have been made in a formal and official manner, and now the Congress is seriously investigating them.  The Inspector General of the Intelligence Community did their own investigation of his allegations, interviewed maybe six other folks to corroborate the core claims, and reported that to the senior leadership of the Intelligence Community and the Senate Select Committee and the House Permanent Select Committee.  And they interviewed David Grusch, both the Inspector General as well as the Senate.  The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence interviewed David Grusch in December of 2022 and took apparently 7 to 11 hours of testimony, hundreds of pages of transcriptions. 

I think my reasoned speculation is that what happened since December 2022 and now is that more cleared members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence have read those transcripts and have now realise this is for real, and now you're seeing more legislative action that has taken place.  We can go into that more detail. 

Peter McCormack: Okay, there's a lot there. 

Matthew Pines: Yes, there is a lot!

Peter McCormack: Okay, firstly, in being a whistleblower, he hasn't committed a crime? 

Matthew Pines: No, so he has been very careful to go through the official process, so he's not the Edward Snowden, "I'm going to take the CD and run".  The chronology was, he was assigned to this role as the task force lead in 2019, I believe, co-lead, and started doing his investigations, realised that people were telling him there are these other activities that are being conducted without proper authorisation under the existing SAP charters, that are being used to fund their activities, and this is potentially a violation of federal acquisition regulations, is a potential violation of congressional reporting obligations, maybe even other illegal things were done to protect those activities from disclosure.  He had folks inside those programmes, by his account, tell him that, give him programme materials, give him programme locations, the actual locations of the facilities, the programme managers that were involved in these things.  So, he collected the whole dossier of where all this stuff is. 

He went to the Defense Department Inspector General and said, "In the course of my official duties, I've encountered allegations, serious allegations of impropriety.  I've collected information from witnesses to that impropriety and I'm going to report it to you".  That's the official government whistleblower process.  When he reported to the Defense Department Inspector General, the allegations that he subsequently made is that he was retaliated against, that his access was curtailed, that his he was threatened, and basically realised that someone had leaked the fact that he had made this whistleblower complaint. 

So then, about nine or twelve months later, I don't know the exact timeline, he submitted another complaint to the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, not only on the original claims that there's impropriety going on with these other rogue SAPs, but that he was also retaliated against and threatened.  And so, that's what the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community investigated, found urgent and credible, and then officially reported that finding to the leadership of the House and Senate Select Committees on Intelligence and the leadership of the Director of National Intelligence.  So, he has followed kind of a legal process to report in the formal channels, give testimony, etc. 

When he came out publicly and gave the interview, he had all of his statements cleared through what's called DOPSA, which is the Defense Office of Pre-Publication Security Review which is if you want to make any public statements that relate potentially to classified information, you have to get them pre-cleared by the defence or intelligence community.  And so he sent them, "I'm going to do this interview, these are the topics, this is what I'm going to say.  What can I, can I not say?"  They cleared him to say everything he said in that interview. 

Peter McCormack: Okay, and he's reporting back that he's been told these programmes exist, where they exist and what they're doing, but he hasn't directly seen the programmes or seen craft or captured vehicles?

Matthew Pines: Yeah, this is entirely what you would call first-hand hearsay. 

Peter McCormack: Okay. 

Matthew Pines: So, he is alleging that he has had first-hand interaction with individuals who themselves are directly involved in those programmes, but he has not himself been in a hangar and witnessed the vehicle. 

Peter McCormack: And when you think this through and try and think through it critically, what scenarios could exist here?  I mean, obviously the one scenario is that it's true and it's fact, these programmes exist.  Could he also be being used for some purpose collectively to disseminate false information for some PSYOP reason; is that a possibility? 

Matthew Pines: Yeah.  In fact, you have literally just paraphrased what Senator Marco Rubio had just stated in the past week, and what Representative Mike Gallagher, who is the Chair of the China Select Commission on the House side, has also stated because they've read the transcripts, they have heard his testimony and they basically have the exact same dilemma, which is he's a very credible person, so they can't dismiss his claims full stop.  He's a very serious person, he is who he says he is.

Danny Knowles: Can I ask a question on that? 

Matthew Pines: Yes. 

Danny Knowles: So, he's really successful, he's not that old, and you said he's got more tickets than anyone that you've ever heard of. 

Matthew Pines: He's 36, yeah.

Danny Knowles: How has he had such incredible success? 

Matthew Pines: He's very smart, he's very good.  I mean, yeah, that's what I've heard is that he's just a very good intelligence officer and he worked his way up.  I mean, he's been in the Air Force since I think he was 18.  That was his only job, so he's been there for almost 18 years.

Danny Knowles: Because on the PSYOP side of things, you could see how you might think this is just basically a planted person.  

Matthew Pines: Oh yeah, I think at this point, those are the two options, is that you either think he's lying, which I think is unlikely, or you think he's telling the truth, or you think the people he's talking to were conducting a systematic deception of him for the purposes of getting his getting him to make these claims, right?  Those are the three options. 

Peter McCormack: What is the incentive to get him to disseminate false information about programmes? 

Matthew Pines: I mean, you can construct a whole bunch of plausible potential explanations.  I mean, where I stand at this point is that regardless of which of those you might think you lean in one direction or the other, they all I think require serious investigation.  That's kind of the bottom line.  I think that's also the recognition that the Senate and the House have come to, which is why you're seeing them take this very seriously.  This is why Senator Schumer just the other day, yesterday, basically announced that he's backing an official panel, a commission, modelled off of the JFK assassination review commission, that's going to be appointed by Biden, about nine members in law, that will collect all UAP-related documents across the federal government, do a systematic review to disclose what they can about this topic. 

I mean, this is unusual for the majority leader of the Senate to make this a serious topic, because he's heard and he's a member of the Gang of Eight.  So, I think that the Senate thinks there's something fishy going on.  Either they're being misled to think there's a secret crash retrieval, alien, reverse engineering programme, or there is a secret crash retrieval, reverse engineering programme.  And I think if you're in their shoes, you've got to wonder, "Well, either way, this is concerning.  We're either being manipulated by folks inside the intelligence community to believe aliens are real and they're not, or we're being manipulated by people in the intelligence community to believe the aliens are not real when they are".  If you're the standpoint of democratic accountability and you want to have oversight over these institutions, you've got to dig in. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I'm struggling to imagine what the scenario is for misleading that they

make people think they do exist when they don't.  What is the PSYOP; what is the benefit?  The people who have misled him or use him to mislead, what incentive is there?

Matthew Pines: I mean, I can construct a -- again, it becomes more like, Ptolemaic epicycles, right?  We have to construct a story to fit the known facts.  It might strain some credulity, but again, one plausible story you could imagine if you wanted to construct that scenario was, imagine there's no such -- so let me step back.  There are four categories of explanation, I think, that apply to the UAP topic writ large, and I think they are not mutually exclusive, but I think they're comprehensively exhaustive, meaning you can mix and match them, but there are only these four categories: the first category is systematic error; the second category is systematic deception; the third category is real human secret technology; the fourth category is real secret, or not so secret, non-human technology, right? 

The first two share the distinctive characteristic there's no real objects, they're just either fictive inventions or confections of sensor malfunction.  Scenario one, systematic error, all of our radars, all of our human eyeballs and pilots are just making systematic mistakes, consistently seeing things that aren't there.  Category two is systematic deception; there's some coordinated effort over many, many years to make other people believe that there are such things that display these anomalous performance characteristics.  You can construct different motives for why they would want to do that, but that's the category of explanation.  The third category is, these are real objects, but they're human origin.  We had a breakthrough technology, we figured out some aspects of physics a while ago, and we're keeping it super-secret for strategic geopolitical reasons.  Category four is, this is non-human technology.  It is something created technologically that's not from human origin.  Those are the four options. 

But to your scenario there, to get to this Grusch scenario, you can imagine maybe it's a mix of two and three, right, to construct that scenario.  It's a mix of, we created these things, they are super-secret, ace-in-the-hole, strategic capabilities that we have been holding onto for a while, but now maybe we want to whisper to the Chinese we've got this in the hole, we want to threaten them or warn them, credibly deter them from Taiwan ambitions. 

Peter McCormack: Deterrence

Matthew Pines: It's deterrence, but you need to do it in a way that's plausibly deniable, it doesn't give too much away.  And so you spin this tale that in a hall of mirrors, counterintelligence fashion confuses the Chinese as to whether we have something secret that can do crazy things and that maybe they should think twice about going after Taiwan. 

Peter McCormack: And you can do that in two on its own, just systematic deception, without having a breakthrough. 

Matthew Pines: You could; that would be bluffing. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's a bluff.

Matthew Pines: Yeah, so it's either bluffing or it's deterrence. 

Peter McCormack: Well they're both deterrence. 

Matthew Pines: Yeah, but the deterrence doctrine of the United States, you don't deter on a bluff, you do strategic deception.  So, there's strategic deception and strategic deterrence.  Strategic deception is, you confuse the enemy, right?  You create inflatable tanks; that's strategic deception, which we did during World War II and all sorts of stuff.  Then there's strategic deterrence, which is you actually have a real capability that it gives you overmatch in a military conflict, and you want the adversary to know that that capability exists so that it actually deters them. 

In fact there was a statement by a senior Space Force officer a few years ago that said, "Deterrence doesn't happen in the black, deterrence happens in the white.  The adversary has to know the thing exists for them to be worried about it, for them to change their plans and strategies accordingly, the way that you want them to change their plans and strategies".  So, if we want the Chinese to think second about going after Taiwan, we want them to believe that maybe we have this crazy thing.  We don't want to give too much away about it, because then they may be able to counter to mitigate it, create their own version potentially.  But that would be the category of explanations you would have to construct that says this is all about some super-secret military capability and this whole operation is designed for the purposes of strategic deterrence, while retaining a manner of ambiguity, with the downside consequence that you basically have to manipulate Congress into thinking maybe they're not human intelligence; have senior politicians that go out and start speculating about aliens; the whole public becomes in a tizzy about, are aliens here. 

So, there's a downside to civic trust, social stability if people start to believe the deception.  And technically, doing that kind of deception operation on American citizens is illegal.  1970s church committee reforms made it explicitly legal to construct to conduct disinformation operations on the American public.  So, that's a high-risk approach.  But yeah, you asked me to construct a scenario, that would be the scenario I would construct. 

Peter McCormack: So, if you say if there's a mix of two and three, systematic deception and it is real craft, but maybe a breakthrough technology, you add that to the Tic Tac videos, you can start to construct that scenario.

Danny Knowles: But at the same time, as you said, it happens in the white, not in the black, what does anyone get from this?  If you're trying to deter China, what are you actually seeing that could deter China?

Matthew Pines: I mean, again, you asked me to kind of put myself in the position of someone who is trying to plan this operation.  It doesn't seem like a very well-coordinated, well-planned operation.  I mean, but maybe that's because people are not that competent in general, and it doesn't necessarily all make a whole lot of sense.  But that's the fundamental limitation of constructing a just-so story off of hypotheticals.  I think you can't necessarily resolve this question by going down that road, you need to actually do tangible, empirical investigation, take people, put them under oath, get documents. 

I mean, we're in a position right now where we have these videos that have come out, the government has acknowledged they're real, people have pored over them and tried to investigate, is it really anomalous; are they not anomalous; is this thing actually doing things that can't be conventionally explained?  And you really have to get into the technical weeds to try to discern, is this weird or is it not weird?  I don't think this is dispositive one way or the other.  There are reasons for paying attention, but I think what this really comes down to is people have now claimed, officially on the record and official channels, that not only are there high-quality imagery and video of these objects, which would be very useful to see, if we can declassify them, but then we actually have tangible materials, vehicles associated with them.  Even David Grusch said pilots, right? 

So, he went all the way there.  He went from where we were before, which was speculating about, are these figments of pilot's imagination, lens flare, a weird artifact of the camera sensor setup, to a disinformation operation.  But now we're going to the point where, okay, there's hours of sworn testimony, corroborated testimony, alleged in official settings that says we're way beyond videos.  We are like, Lockheed Martin has stuff in a hangar, and this is the address, and this is the building.  If you went there, Senator Blah, and knocked on the door, and went two steps down, take the elevator, etc, there'd be an alien vehicle right there.  That's where we are now, that's the level of specificity and the claims that have been made in official settings. 

That to me is moving beyond speculating about some fuzzy video, to get someone in a position of authority to go to that building, knock on the door, and it's like a binary; open it, is there an alien vehicle or not?  That's a pretty clear, "No?  Great, done.  We can wash our hands of this whole thing and maybe now we can figure out why people are constructing some weird deception operation behind all this".  Or, you open the door and there's something there, in which case now we're in a different conversation. 

Peter McCormack: Do you have a gut feel; like based on everything you've seen, what do you think?

Matthew Pines: Yeah, so this is where I try to be as rigorous and as Bayesian as I can about all things, and in this topic you have to be very careful about how you ascribe evidence to different sources, especially in our current kind of epistemic environment, where it's very hard to find reliable sources.  And this topic is especially fraught because there are no, I would say, institutional markers of high-quality sources.  The premise of the allegation is that the government themselves, or some elements of the government, are hiding this.  So, the government itself, which is normally a marker, at least in certain settings of prima facie credibility, a government report usually well-written, maybe there's a lot of editing that goes behind it, "Oh, a government report should be believable", that's not necessarily entirely dispositive in this setting, because the whole premise of the allegation that Grusch alleges is that this was being done illegally by elements within the government deceiving other aspects of the government.  So, of course, if the government investigated this, they would be deceived by elements that are looking to hide this from themselves. 

Then, people that are outside that apparatus of secrecy are speculating off of titbits, whispers, rumours, hints, back-channel off-record conversations, which creates a kind of miasma of rumour and potential reinforcing fictions and disinformation that makes it very hard to discern what's true or not.  So, that's for the premise.  So, it makes it very hard for the average person to look at this topic and decide, is this a zero or 100%?  Those are the Bayesian set; this is impossible, not a chance, to of course, 100%, these are aliens.  You've got to find somewhere in the middle, you're probably not going to be zero or 100%.  I think I started at 5%.  I was a pretty hard-nosed physics person, the universe is kind of an empty place, I was all about the Fermi paradox and doing that whole, "This is just an empty universe and we just had this lucky chemical spark 4 billion years ago". 

Now that I've actually looked into it and I've talked to people that are credible, serious people that are very close to this, I would say I'm more like 90%. 

Peter McCormack: That's a big shift. 

Matthew Pines: Yeah, I mean I had to be your true Bayesian.  It's like, look at evidence, update, and not rely on some preconception bias, not rely on some cultural taboo or cultural trope to weigh or constrain how I update.  I treat it as any other topic.  Prima facie, it's very unlikely that someone that I'm on a jury to serve as their civic trial participant, committed a murder, right?  I'm probably going to go into that trial being like, prima facie, it's pretty rare for one person to murder another person, very unlikely that if the government just picked someone off the street and decided to charge them with murder, that they'd be guilty. 

So, in general, you have a presumption of innocence, and it's the government's responsibility to present evidence, and our system of government, our system of jury trials is juries drawn from the public, look at the evidence presented by the prosecutors and the defence and they go, "Okay, have they met the reasonable standard of evidence?" and then convict.  So, you have to move from a position of probably implicitly very low prima facie, so what you might call a prior, that the person's guilty, you have to move up by looking at evidence.  And you have to say, okay, 60%, 80% people debate what is the reasonable standard of proof for reasonable doubt, beyond reasonable doubt. 

I'm pretty confident we've tripped over that beyond reasonable doubt, for me, just because I have -- but that's my own epistemic journey.  I do not have the same expectation that the median consumer of available information is going to necessarily have updated to the same level.  So, yeah, I'm not here to convince people to update to the same level that I've updated, but that's where I'm at right now. 

Danny Knowles: So, the one place I've always found it hard is, if we've got these aliens that are from another Solar System or the galaxy or interdimensional, or whatever they are, if they've come to Earth, why are they crash landing?  They've got all this technology but we're recovering crashed ships; I find that hard to square. 

Peter McCormack: What, they can travel light years, they've got the technology to travel light years --

Danny Knowles: And then they crash in the desert.

Peter McCormack: -- which we can't do, and then they, I don't know, have an engine failure! 

Danny Knowles: Yeah.

Matthew Pines: I mean, there's two assumptions in there that I would unpack because I don't think they could be true, but they're embedded assumptions.  One is that these non-human crafts did come from another Solar System and that they are crashing.  They could just be gifted, they could just be given away, they could just be trash.  It's like one-time use sort of things.  Again, these are all possibilities, I don't think we can necessarily assume --

Danny Knowles: Gifted to humans? 

Matthew Pines: Yeah. 

Peter McCormack: Like a rival? 

Matthew Pines: Or yeah, I mean again, I'm giving you the distribution of possibilities.  The way you probably need to investigate any claim in any topic, but in particular here, is what's the full partition of possibilities?  And then you want to ascribe a prior to all those possibilities, and then look for empirical evidence, investigate, and then update how your distribution of credences across those probabilities adjust.  And so, for example, if you're looking at the claim, if you're in that scenario four, so we're stipulating we moved from this hypothetical of scenarios one, two, and three, we're now looking at what does that scenario four category, non-human intelligence category look like; how does that branch, because that could branch in many, many different ways?  And that gets to your exact question. 

So, I think the four kind of canonical ways you can branch scenario four is like a branching tree.  We're now in scenario four, we're splitting scenario four out, non-human technology scenario.  The four, I think, canonical branches would be the traditional one; these are non-human technologies from another Solar System that evolved in a similar fashion to us on a different star system, travelled here using either known or unknown means of propulsion and physics to get here and now they're here.  That you can investigate itself in many different ways, but that's one category. 

Another category is they're not from a different place, they actually have been around planet Earth, they're actually from planet Earth.  Maybe they were the result of technology developed by civilisations that predated modern human civilisation and they just stuck around.  Maybe it was a prehistory, early technologically advanced civilisation that had some cataclysm or whatever and got wiped out or maybe most of them left, a few of them stuck around, and this is the technology that we're seeing.  They're actually indigenous to Earth, they're not extraterrestrial, they are terrestrial, just of a different civilisation, a different potential origin on Earth. 

Another, again, you've got to think about the radical options, right, if you want to not take anything for granted, is time travel, that these represent future humans or future non-humans that are coming to our timeline now for whatever reason, and that's the technology, that's the origin.  Whether time travel is physically possible, whether it's even logically consistent, whole different story.  But that is one initial starting condition that you could consider. 

The fourth, and this is probably the most amorphous, is just what has currently gone under the rubric of interdimensional, but it's somewhat of a loose term of art, because in physics, a dimension is a degree of freedom in a manifold; but I think what that concept alludes to is that our normal three-plus-one spacetime manifold that we interact with, that we've been biologically conditioned to perceive, isn't the full story of physical reality, and that there may be other intelligences that exist or can access other degrees of freedom in physical space that we don't have easy access to, and that they're entering and exiting from that degree of freedom that we don't currently understand.

Those are the four, and so each of those four, I'd say it's a crapshoot, right?  We have no evidence right now, as far as I I'm aware of, that allows you to discern which ones of those is more likely, and that's you getting into more sci-fi speculation.  And then in each one of them, when you're doing this serious, what I would call it, because you want to treat this seriously and not try to be dismissive of it, you want to look at, okay, what do we know with decent high credence about physics that either make certain types of things less likely than other types of things?  That's very difficult to do in this whole discussion, because I think a pretty safe assumption you can have in analysing the nature of non-human technology, is that they probably have access to knowledge of physics that we don't have.  Maybe they don't, but I would say most likely they do.

Peter McCormack: The way I always play with that one is, I think about the advancements we've had in technology over the last 100 years.  We've gone, I mean just my lifetime, we've gone from no internet to supercomputers here.  That's what we have, right?  And so the timeline of any civilisation can be super-long.  So, where will we be in just 1,000 years?  And we're not on the same timeline as them, it's not the spark of life happened exactly the same time.  So, this could be technology that's developed over tens of thousands of years.  They most likely have much more advanced technology than us.  To me that's just all a certainty.  These breakthroughs will be possible. 

Matthew Pines: Yeah and that's I think one of the most, I'd say, rigorous places to start in doing this analysis, is because we probably do believe that physics is the fundamental boundary of constraint for possible technology.  And so, every new physics advance unlocks a new possible technology set.  And we kind of believe, this is maybe more philosophical, but that there is some fundamental set of physics that any observer can ever figure out.  So, once you've figured out all the possible physics that you can figure out, that basically binds the space of possible technologies you can invent.  And then that kind of sets a limit. 

If you think about an S-curve of, Homo sapiens now become technologically advanced, start doing physics experiments, maybe in a few hundred years, maybe a few thousand years, which is a blink in cosmic time, to figure out all the rules of possible physics, and then they taper off.  Whatever is physically possible, civilisation eventually figures out.  And therefore, any civilisation in the universe eventually gets to the same level, where everyone has the same technology toolkit, there's no competitive advantage anymore.  Everyone's just kind of like, "Yeah, this is where we are.  You're now a member of the cosmic club.  Like we've all figured out everything we can possibly figure out".  And in that sense, almost progress kind of stops, because everyone just is at the maximal possible level of technology.  It might be impossibly advanced, you might not be able to imagine it, but there's probably a limit there.  And then everyone that ever survives to get to that level, doesn't blow themselves up, kind of settles out of that level. 

You can imagine, if you're now at that level, whatever that perspective looks like to you, you're probably interested about what new members -- that's the only most interesting thing would be the new members to the club.  And you might be, and this is more speculative, this is super-speculative, but I find it interesting to think about, well, if you're in an ecosystem where every civilisation is essentially maximally advantaged with respect to each other, there's no mutual advantage, there's no competition, no one can get a leg up on the other, there's no need to compete; so, the only really differentiations are essentially inherited cultural dispositions, or some whatever weird artifacts that they create that just keep them from getting bored.  The only source of novelty might be new potential aspirants to the club.  A bunch of old, stodgy people have been in the universe for a billion years, and every once in a while, a new, sprightly aspirant knocks on the door and says, "Hey, can I be a member of your club?"  Some might be welcoming, others might be hesitant, because, "Well, we're a bunch of monkeys with nuclear weapons", they figure this out.  Maybe we want to not just admit them, we want to check them out.  And maybe, maybe some might want to block.

Peter McCormack: Or guide?

Matthew Pines: Or guard, or guide, exactly.  This is what we might call cosmic, political, sociology speculation, which I find interesting.  But that is the latent set of analyses you'd have to give if you're trying to explain, "Well, why are they here?" the whole branch of those possible explanations.

Danny Knowles: So, that kind of gets into something we've spoken about before in the past, where you said there may have been a correlation between the frequency of these events and us discovering nuclear weapons.

Matthew Pines: I mean, it has been officially and semi-officially alleged that the uptick happened to coincide with the detonation of nuclear weapons, and that there was a lot of observations of weird things around the Los Alamos test sites in Nevada, and that these things have been a strong correlation over history of interacting with our nuclear weapons.  Official reports that even Congressman Gallagher brought up in Congress about the Malmstrom incident, where a nuclear weapons launch facility silo in the bunker basically had all 12 missiles go offline.  And the security guards -- 

Peter McCormack: Hold on, what was that? 

Matthew Pines: It's 1980 I believe, no, maybe 1960, I forget the exact time.

Peter McCormack: Where was that?

Matthew Pines: Malmstrom, North Dakota, I think.  Yeah, I mean, this has been one of the more well-reported kind of incidents, officially documented, of the security guards on the surface basically called down and said, "There's a weird glowing orb above us". 

Peter McCormack: Hold on, here we go, "Whatever the mysterious lights in the sky were, they seemed to have an interest in our nukes.  One of the more out-of-the-ordinary press conferences held in Washington this week consisted of former Air Force personnel testifying to the existence of UFOs and their ability to neutralise American and Russian nuclear missiles".

Danny Knowles: This what Neil was telling us about, something similar to this. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, the Rendlesham Forest one, Neil was talking about.  "Robert Jamison, a retired USAF nuclear missile targeting officer, told of several occasions having to go out and 're-start' missiles that had been deactivated after UFOs were sighted nearby".  How credible is this? 

Matthew Pines: I mean, this is credible as the first-hand reports and documentation.  People have come out and said publicly they were involved in the incident investigation.  Engineers went out to test the missiles again, found nothing wrong with them.  Congressmen asked the Pentagon to investigate this, they owe him a get-back.  I mean, we know as much as it is very likely a real incident.  There's many witnesses that said, "We saw these things and the nukes went off", and the government was like, "Well, this is a problem"! 

Peter McCormack: Yeah! 

Matthew Pines: Now, again, that's as far as it goes.  And there's a whole book, called UFOs and Nukes, it was written by a researcher who went and collected these reports from former what they called missileers, both in the US and I think even some reports out of the Soviet Union, they reported similar things happening around their nukes.  Even some nukes may have been turned on.  And people have speculated this was a way of kind of taking the grenade out of the baby's hands, or a way of demonstrating to us that we're playing with fire.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, because it's almost like they see it as teenagers have discovered drugs, want to guide them away from it.

Matthew Pines: I mean it was a serious topic, it was enough to motivate I think an element of a start treaty between the US and Soviet Union back in the 1970s that basically was about, "How do we prevent inadvertent misidentification of anomalous objects to trigger nuclear launches?"  We were on mutual hair triggers, we had dodged many bullets in the Cold War of a flock of birds being misperceived by an early warning radar system as a potential ICBM incoming, and that triggering things up to the point where someone had to make a decision of like, "Wait, this doesn't seem right, I shouldn't actually launch".  And we got pretty close a few times during the Cold War, where a few people making a prudent decision saved the world from nuclear annihilation. 

So, if you are an alien civilisation looking at this, you're like, "These are toddlers playing with knives.  We need to we need to help let them know".  I mean, that's speculation.  But that is I think an obvious point of focus.  If you're national security minded, you're like, "Well, this is a problem, because if we don't know why this is happening, maybe it's benign, maybe it's not.  I don't know.  It probably shouldn't be something we just ignore", would be my starting point.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and then a time where we've got war in Eastern Europe and threats of the use of nuclear weapons is happening at a time where we've got this kind of increased chatter, talk about aliens?

Matthew Pines: Well, the timing is one of the things I think about a lot, which is like, why now?  If you go by David Grusch's reported allegations and his words, he says that this started basically in earnest after World War II, and that there was a sub rosa aspect of the Cold War between US and Russia mainly about who can figure out how this stuff works.  Because the lesson of World War II was that whoever has fundamentally a physics advantage has a technology advantage, therefore has a strategic advantage.  Like physics won World War II, that's basically what was the lesson.  And so the lesson that most nations would draw from that was like, "We need to make sure we understand physics more than our adversaries".  And if you have objects either in your possession or that you're observing that can give you clues to new physics, that would be among the most important strategic issues to investigate, and therefore probably the most important secret to keep. 

Because the lesson of World War II was that nuclear weapons are extremely secret.  We have an entire separate apparatus of secrecy just for nuclear weapons.  It started as an entirely separate area; we still have it, right?  So, by assumption or by analogy, if this was the locus of new physics research, just like nuclear physics became the locus for nuclear weapons, which we then enshrouded an entirely separate classification apparatus, maybe you would do the same.  Maybe you would have an entirely separate compartmented apparatus just to protect this potential new physics that could give you a strategic advantage, or might be so dangerous that you just don't want it to let out into the well.  There just might be technologies in that Pandora's box of discovery that you bring them out of the box and they blow you up.  And you have to be at a certain level of civilisation, you have to be mature enough to take your hand in that box.  And maybe the lesson with nukes was that we dipped our hand in the box, maybe we were like, "We haven't blown ourselves up yet, but we had close calls".

Peter McCormack: Well, look, my education on this recently, from the trailer for Oppenheimer, was that when they first started testing this, the nuclear weapons, they didn't know if they're going to just blow up the world.

Matthew Pines: I mean that's yeah it's a little bit apocryphal, but yeah, there was a true historical exchange where they were doing the calculations to figure out whether the ignition heat would be enough to trigger a chain reaction in the atmosphere.  And they did the numbers and said it was extremely unlikely, but that has always been you're relying on your understanding of physics and maths to make the determination, right?  You are in uncharted territory, essentially doing an experiment on fundamental aspects of reality that you don't quite know how they're going to unfold until you do the experiment.  You've got the maths, but press the button.

Peter McCormack: So, the Large Hadron Collider, they were like, "Will we create a black hole here that swallows up the Earth?" 

Matthew Pines: I mean, again, they did the maths and they realised that, yes, we'll create a little microscopic black hole, but there's something called Hawking radiation, where the virtual particles on the boundary take energy away, so you actually get what's called black hole evaporation.  And the characteristic evaporation time is so quick that in basically Planck time, 10-25, 10-30 seconds, the black holes just evaporate into virtual paraparticles.

Peter McCormack: Can we just take a moment to recognise how impressive that I mentioned that and you knew the exact answer?!

Matthew Pines: I mean, I'm a huge physics nerd!  I told you, this is why I paint.  So, if there's one motivation that really draws my attention to UAPs as a topic is the physics part of it.  Because one of my overriding intellectual through lines from since I was a teenager is, "What is the nature of reality?"  And so, everyone thinks about little green men and spaceships, but I actually think about, "Well, someone might have figured something out that we haven't figured it out".  And that's essentially proof of concept that we can bootstrap ourselves for.  Instead of wandering around in the darkness waiting for someone to figure out quantum gravity, we've kind of been stalled since 1970s with our physics research, maybe intentionally, maybe not; that's a whole separate conversation that might relate to the UAP stuff. 

But the fact is, we are making radical advances in our fundamental understanding of reality.  And civilisation dramatically benefited from that.  This isn't just some abstract, "Oh, wouldn't it be nice to know how things really are?"  It's like, human civilisation is directly downstream of our knowledge of physics.  We figured out how electromagnetism works, we get generators, we get electrification, we get modern industrial civilisation, we figured out chemistry, we can create explosives, we can fix nitrogen, we can feed an extra several billion people on the planet.  Then we figured out quantum mechanics, the computational structure of the universe, with mainly Turing and von Neumann and a few other researchers, we figured out we can create computers and we can build computers, and computers can do crazy things for us.  We get integrated circuits, we get modern technological civilisation.  We figured out nuclear physics, we create nuclear power, we create nuclear weapons. 

So, it's like, I think --

Peter McCormack: What's next?

Matthew Pines: Well, this is the key point.  I think our modern culture, because we haven't really since the 1970s, we haven't really progressed that fast or that far in our fundamental physics knowledge, we've kind of forgotten that lesson, that if you were alive in the 1920s and 1930s and 1940s and 1950s would have been just obvious to you that of course, the physicists are figuring out new things, and then 10 or 15 years later, the world changes, right?  And that was just an embedded expectation that stopped in the 1970s and then now in the 2020s, we've forgotten that that's the deal.  You need to figure out new physics in order to fundamentally bootstrap your civilisation. 

So, we're looking at AI, and a quick parenthetical, I find it interesting that as a sociological observation, the idea of an emergent super-intelligent AI that rapidly self-improves and is misaligned with human goals and value systems takes over and destroys us.  That was a sci-fi plot, niche subculture coming out of Silicon Valley, not effective altruism movement, considered as this super-speculative sci-fi scenario.  The past six months, post-ChatGPT and the explosive application growth of these technologies from generative AI, is now a serious topic of conversation in policy discourse among major capitals. 

Elon Musk went to Beijing and his pitch to them was artificial general intelligence is the biggest, most plausible threat to the CCP's rule.  So, maybe he was playing to an audience there because that's their biggest worry, is being toppled from power.  But he's using that as a serious talking point in his engagement with Chinese leadership, which shows you how quickly the Overton window moved from what was fringe, niche, absurd topic of analysis and serious discourse, "Super-intelligent AI taking over the world, are you crazy?  Go off and don't bother me, I'm a serious person", to now, there's a moment of anxiety, do we sneer at this, do we snicker?  But then look at the growth curves, and if you actually look at the growth curve, it's kind of a little concerning, and now policymakers get briefed, and things get moved along in a semi-official manner, and now it's becoming a serious topic.  Like, how do we make sure we have a global governance regime put in place to regulate access to this hardware, control these foundation models, regulate these things on a supernational basis?  It's a very serious topic of pressing an urgent need in most major capitals now.

Peter McCormack: FYI, I think it's a waste of time.  A bit like I came to the conclusion too late that trying to lock down to prevent a pandemic is pointless because the virus exists, the cat's out of the bag.  I mean, I don't think you can stop AI, even with regulation, because there will be an AI that will escape.

Matthew Pines: I mean, we have a whole separate podcast on that, because I do focus a lot on that.  It's actually interesting to the Bitcoin folks, that it is an interesting test case for the full stack of modern, most advanced technology goes from hardware, semiconductor manufacturing, to infrastructure platforms that run most of the global internet, to most of the major, say, platforms for service providers.  So basically, you've got Nvidia, TSMC, etc, hardware manufacturers; you've got the platforms, AWS, Azure, IBM Cloud, Google, etc; then you've got the sort of model developers, OpenAI, Anthropic, who are the other ones?  Inflection, a bunch of foundation model developers; and then the proliferation of platform developers and applications and APIs and user consumer services. 

That's a whole chain of technology stack that if you're trying to keep it in the box, you need to have tight regulation.  And you can imagine, there's actually been policy papers put out to enforce KYC on the cloud and on chips.  So, we put in place a whole export control surveillance regime on high-end chips, motivated principally about China, but it's very easy to apply that same framework to foundation for, say, GPUs, all at the stack for delivering services over cloud.  But that's an AI sidebar. 

Back to the key analogy I was making was, I think that should be a lesson that we draw in thinking about the UAP topic was, something can go from the tail, fringe, niche thing, and quickly become a very pressing topic of policy discourse, right?  I think we saw something similar with the coronavirus, where if you were just a lay observer of reports out of Wuhan in January 2020, you were facing this choice, "Do I do I sneer at the people that are alarmist about a global pandemic; or do I go to Costco and load up the truck?" 

Up until that point, it would have been somewhat rational to say, "This is not likely to be a global pandemic because we haven't had a global pandemic in 100 years.  It's very unlikely for any given report of some virus to turn into a global pandemic.  We saw Ebola, we saw a bunch of these things that were false alarms", whatever.  So, your rational stance would have been to dismiss it.  The person who is more conspiratorial-minded, maybe more paranoid, maybe more on a hair trigger went, "No, I'm going to Costco", or someone who maybe had access to maybe more niche insights, say intelligence reports about the growth rate that was underreported, etc, would have moved as well. 

So, I think that's similar, again, they're not all entirely analogous, but I think those are cautionary tales we should think about when applying our analytical lens to the UAP topic.  And you should look for markers, indicators, that this is moving along that similar trajectory, that it's moving from the fringe, and the Overton window is shifting officially. 

Peter McCormack: So, that movement you made from kind of 5% chance to 90% chance, that very significant shift, what were the key things that made you go, "Okay, I think about this differently now"? 

Matthew Pines: It was probably a gradual process with a few step functions.  I would say, and it's hard for me to go back and reconstruct it, but if I would say the one that probably made the most relative difference to me was a book I read by journalist, Ross Coulthart, called In Plain Sight.  And it's probably the most serious investigative journalist treatment of the subject that I've read.  And he's a serious journalist from Australia, was part of the 60 Minutes flagship news programme.  As a result of that, he had a career where he did lots of stories and reporting on the military intelligence.  So, he's had contacts and connections, and he just was like, "I'm curious about this.  I'm not going to let the editorial stigma dissuade me from digging under the rock".  And so he did because he had the sources.  His sources told him off the record there's something here, don't let go of this story, there's something to look at here. 

So he did, and he wrote this book, and he got, I think, among the more impressive kind of detailed on-the-record statements, and one in particular that stuck out to me was an on-the-record statement made by a senior naval science and technology officer, named Nat Kobitz, who was dying, and basically told him after several months of them developing a rapport, Ross asked him the question, "Were you ever aware of US Government programmes to retrieve or reverse engineer non-human technology?"  And he said, "Yes.  Don't talk to me anymore about it".  And he put that in the book.  And then subsequent, he has reported that Nat Kobitz, before he died, gave him a bunch of other names of people in these programmes that led him ultimately to David Grusch as well.  And so, it's kind of an aggregation of things, but again, it's all first-hand hearsay. 

So, I mean I've held clearances in the past, but I'll tell you right now, I have not worked on these reverse engineering programmes, I do not have first-hand accounts.  This is why I'm 90%, not 100%.  So, until the government comes out and shows me the things, I'm not going to be 100%. 

Peter McCormack: There is no present, physical, observed evidence that we can see.  There is hearsay and... 

Matthew Pines: I mean, again, a picture will be -- people will debate a picture too, people will debate a government statement, people will always find some reason to doubt whatever level evidence is meeting some threshold for the median observer. 

Peter McCormack: So, what about the Tic Tac video? 

Matthew Pines: Yeah, I mean, David Grusch, in his official position as the UAP task force lead, that was one of the reports that they investigated. 

Peter McCormack: Can you explain it to me?  Because, okay, we're seeing something, but I can't tell the speed.  All I'm seeing is a white dot.

Danny Knowles: So, I think it's better if we have the audio too, because you can hear the pilots talking it through.

Peter McCormack: I saw this, I'm pretty sure I saw it on Rogan.

Matthew Pines: Yeah, I mean this one's been poured over ad infinitum. 

[Video plays]

Danny Knowles: So, this, I'm just going to pause it.  Is this where we have the transmedium craft?

Matthew Pines: Well, let me take two things, right?  So, what you just saw there, I believe, was the flare camera footage from, I think it was an F-16.  I could be wrong on that, I don't remember all the case details.  But David Fravor and his wingman were doing their workups there.  They had been tasked to go investigate this radar return that was being seen by some of the fleet.  So, they redirected themselves to go look at this object that they had been tasked to look at.  When they got there, they saw this Tic-Tac-looking object hovering, kind of bouncing off like a ping-pong a little bit just above the water, the water was a little bit disturbed.  David Fravor comes in and tries to do a manoeuvre to investigate it closely.  The Tic Tac does this counter move, circles around and then pops off a gun, a bullet and just disappears and shows up at their cap point, I think 60 miles away. 

That was the initial encounter.  They returned to the aircraft carrier.  Then I think another sortie was launched, other pilots, and they said, "Yeah, go out and try to take a picture or try to get a video", and that's where they got this video.  It was someone going out trying to find it again on radar.

Danny Knowles: Yeah, I did hear on a podcast, I think someone was describing they go out and run circuits, right?  And when they're on these circuits, they used to see them almost daily, apparently. 

Matthew Pines: Yeah, I mean that's a separate kind of set of observations from people who have come out publicly.  Ryan, oh God, now I'm blanking on his name.  His name is, his Twitter handle is @uncertainvector, but he's another senior Naval pilot.  He actually now has an association going to Congress just on aviation flight security to help make it less of a taboo for airline pilots and other pilots to report seeing these objects, which there is a strong taboo and punishment if you do that in the commercial aviation sector now.  But he went up and they reported seeing these all the time.  And the radar operators would see these things coming from 8,000 feet to sea level, zooming up in half a second, they would see swarms of these objects on the radar. 

It's kind of an open secret if you talk to folks in the military, that they see these things all the time, as you're reporting, in almost every domain.  And that's why the US Congress, when they put in place these escalating provisions, starting in FY 2022, National Defense Authorisation Act, to the FY 2023 National Defense Authorisation Act, very explicit language, dialling up the heat on the Pentagon and the Defense Department and the intelligence community.  And they shifted the language from Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon.  And in the statutory language, which is going back to my analogy of in the clearing, where you where you're on safe epistemic ground, just read what has been already passed in law.  Just look at the language in the policy guidance that the Congress has given the authorisations to the Pentagon, the intelligence community, that were unanimously approved by very sensitive committees in Congress and passed and now are in force.  They have very explicit language.  If you just read the language, I think your eyes would open. 

So, that's one of the first indicators, as I mentioned, the Overton window's shifting, was the shift from Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon, which was the rebranded term for UFOs because they didn't want the same baggage to carry over; then they said, "Well actually, we're seeing these things not just in the air, we're seeing them in space, we're seeing them in the ocean".  So, the term shifted to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon, specifically to categorise the transmedium aspect of the observed behaviour, things moving from water to air to space and back.  And that is the anomalous performance characteristic that is now officially being investigated by the Pentagon.  They have an office, this is their job, and Congress just now got them fully funded to do this job. 

Danny Knowles: So, they're picking up something on underwater radar as well? 

Matthew Pines: Yeah, I mean they're going to have their own name, like USOs, Under Surface Objects.

Peter McCormack: The fact that they keep getting spotted off the coast of the US pushes me to the idea, I wonder if this is a physics advancement within the US Government, because it's not like it's happening in Australia, India, UK. 

Matthew Pines: Well, I mean there have been reports globally, and in fact if you believe Sean Kirkpatrick, who's the director of this office, AARO, he's a senior intelligence officer, scientist, PhD, his job is to run AARO, and he is collecting global reports from our global sensor apparatus.  So, the US Government has a massive, global surveillance system, you can imagine, space, everything; we can see lots of things.  He is now put in place where he can collect what we're seeing from all these different sensor systems.  That was one of the main objectives of the people that were pushing for this process to stand up was getting the data coming out of all these sensor system, say, space-based collection systems, underwater collection systems, radar systems, pilot reports, which were in their own very compartmented silos, to put those into one place, looking at the raw radar track logs to see what maybe was not classified. 

Because, the way we do these detections is you see lots of things, right?  The radar picks up lots of things in the raw returns.  So, we have specific classifiers, things like AI signatures that say, "This is what an ICBM looks like, this is what a MiG looks like.  And so it only cues or alerts to a human operator when it sees an object that's been pre-categorised as something of interest to the military.  We don't have, we haven't had classifiers built for these things, maybe we do, maybe we don't.  But the allegation is that there's a lot of things maybe that were observed but maybe not officially categorised.  And so what he has done, apparently, is create classifiers specific for these signatures to then look across all these different domains to identify these anomalies to do his investigation.  And they've seen them around the world.  He's had a map where he sees them all.  And of course, there's always been anecdotal first-hand reports of people seeing weird things around the world. 

China also stood up their own UAP thing.  In their translation, it kind of refers to drones, and there's always a geopolitical potential double meaning there, whether they want to know what US drones might be flying in their airspace.  But the historical legacy that the Russians have also had serious programmes on this has been pretty well documented as well. 

Peter McCormack: So, what do you think these are?

Matthew Pines: Well, now you're just jumping back to the kind of like, where in that four extraterrestrial, ultra-terrestrial --

Peter McCormack: Well firstly, do you think these are real objects and these were really photographed; this isn't some PSYOP?

Matthew Pines: Well these are definitely real objects.  The question is are they non-human technology, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Because, what's the context here?  Like, that's the ocean, that looks a tiny little speck, what's the size of it?  I can't tell anything.  Is it like the size of a fighter jet?

Matthew Pines: Yeah, I don't think you can draw decent inferences from these videos, would be my bottom line.  I don't think I can give you a claim and then substantiate that claim using these YouTube videos.  I don't think that's going to be epistemically satisfying to you or anyone else who's listening, right?  They are a starting point for peaking curiosity, and then looking at what else is happening in the official sphere to say, okay, is there something here that is an indicator that these things might be truly anomalous.  And looking at first-hand witness testimony that you ascribe maybe not 100% credence to, but if you listen to what David Grusch said, that he investigated these incidents officially. 

The Tic Tac thing, he says definitively was anomalous, not human technology.  Now, he didn't explain how he arrived at that conclusion, but he made that conclusion public in a pretty definitive manner.  Now, he's a person that I ascribe prima facie credibility to, but I don't believe everything he says, but I see that as something I didn't hear before, that moves my needle for that particular event up. 

Peter McCormack: Okay

Matthew Pines: So, that's how I reason.  These other events, I think we're at a point where fundamentally, the more salient top question is, does Lockheed have the thing in the bunker; yes or no?  Because apparently, the Senate, there's hours of transcripts in the SCIF, in Capitol Hill, in the safe, that have all the programme details on paper.

Peter McCormack: We need to see them.

Matthew Pines: Well, this is the delicate thing.  This is why it's, I think, a very tricky subject, because I think when we started this conversation, I talked about the nesting dolls of the secrecy, is that some of the things we do, a lot of things we do, we do for a good reason.  Like, you don't want the Chinese to know the secret capabilities we have or the programmes we're running.  So, the tricky part is that if those legitimate programmes that we want to keep secret, part of them were being used illegally as cover for these UAP-related activities, it's difficult to disclose that part without burning the legitimate capability.  And in fact, the people doing the illegal part probably did that intentionally, it's like a shield, it's like using a human shield.  It's hard to hit them without hitting this thing that you don't want to hit, right? 

That's the position I think the Senate is in right now, is they're now aware that these allegations are very credible, not just David Grusch, but multiple other witnesses from these programmes have allegedly come forward to them, given very specific testimony in classified settings to them that say, "Yeah, this is real and you should get to the bottom of it".  This is why you're seeing these legislative manoeuvres be much more aggressive year over year, and it's why Senator Schumer had just come out.  So, I think now this is getting to the point where enough of the Senate has now read these transcripts and has heard from these witnesses that they can't put this in the box, they know this can't be kept in the box.  And so now it's becoming less a matter of the DOD doing this technical investigation and writing these reports for the next few years, and more a matter of, "Okay, how do we put in place a political framework to allow this to come out in a controlled, deliberative manner that doesn't burn the critical capabilities that we don't want to burn?"

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Matthew Pines: That's the reason why, I think, what Senator Schumer just announced yesterday, and the New York Times article reported on, is this commission, this nine-member commission, who will be appointed by Biden within 300 days of the NDAA passing at the end of this year.  And their job will be to do a private inventory of all the UAP stuff in the inventory, and then decide, that panel will have the authority to declassify selectively information.  So, they'll be able to get all the documents in, say, that SAP about Chinese hypersonic missiles, whatever it is, and then go, "All the Chinese hypersonic stuff stays in the box.  All the illegal UAP stuff, some of it, maybe we'll declassify".  That is what they're setting up now, that's the purpose of that.  That's why that Schumer -- and he's a Senate majority leader, nothing he does is done without clearance from the White House. 

You can imagine the timeline here is going to be very tricky.  2024 is campaign season, and I draw attention to Representative Mike Gallagher.  Again, pay attention to what these people are saying.  People that otherwise have other things to do, like, Marco Rubio, Senator Gillibrand, Mark Warner.  Mike Gallagher in particular I find very interesting, because he is a PhD military intelligence officer.  He was tapped to be the Chair of the Senate Select Committee on China, which is a very important position, gives him a lot of potential political juice.  He's I think very ambitious politically.  He might run for President in 2028.  He's from Wisconsin, kind of a moderate Republican, checks all those boxes, right?  He went on the Pat McAfee syndicated sports talk show two weeks ago, and it was a 40-, 45-minute interview.  And it was kind of somewhat informal with a bunch of ex-NFL players and they talk about the draft, whatever. 

They bring him on, it's a 45-minute interview, all he talks about is UAPs.  And his whole objective in that conversation was to try to normalise the subject with the blue-collar audience, right?  It was very strategic.  And he put it in the context of other statements made by Marco Rubio.  They're trying to normalise this discussion, the public discourse, they're trying to inch it along slowly, but make it a gradual --

Peter McCormack: Well, it's the opposite of what they did when they tried to make it a laugh, a joke.

Matthew Pines: Yeah, which is very curious, isn't it? 

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Matthew Pines: Like, all the traditional assumptions about, "Well, they'll just try to poo-poo it, put it back in the box, reject it", they're doing the exact opposite.  The Senators and Representatives are holding themselves back, it seems, from saying what they really want to say, which is that in fact just yesterday or today, Representative Gallagher just kind of threw off the pretence, because some reporter was asking about UAPs, and he's like, "UAP talk, UAP tech, let's just talk and say what it is.  It's aliens, we're talking about aliens".  That's what he said, that was his quote.  This is a guy who has a portfolio of strategic conversation with China.  He's got a lot of things on his plate.  He's made this a focus of his, he's introduced legislation. 

If you actually look at the legislative text, I don't think this will actually make it in, but similar language will probably make it in as we go through this whole messy sausage-making of the current package of intelligence and defence authorisation bills; but in the most recent statutory language that he introduced and a few other folks introduced on the Senate side is, "It is the sense of Congress that in order to prevent technology surprise from foreign adversaries, the US Government must open up and maintain broader awareness of, 'Historical exotic technology antecedents'".  And another part of a different bill, it was actually, "Historical exotic technology and the scenes previously provided by the federal government for research and development purposes".  That language is put in there explicitly because, at least what I've heard, there is intense resentment, not only by other defence contractors, but really Big Tech, that they have been cut out. 

So, if you can imagine the political economy of this whole thing, which is again, this is me speculating, but I think it's semi-informed speculation, is Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, big defence contractors, they used to be the big dogs in DC.  They used to get what they always wanted, whether the fundraising, revolving door sort of thing, they were the big heavyweights, especially throughout the Cold War.  What's really changed in the past 10, 20 years, and it's really accelerated the past 5 years, especially now with AI, is the political heavyweights are now Big Tech; Google, Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Intel, etc.  And they have been making the argument to the White House and to the Senate that they are at the forefront of strategic technology, leading this technology competition with China, that they are the ones that are essential to national security.  And they are cut out from this entire world of potentially strategic advanced technology. 

The allegation is that, say, Lockheed has been having this thing in this secret programme but they haven't made much progress, because it's been so compartmented that only a few engineers get access to it, they try to figure it out, they can't, they stall, they put it back for ten years until they figure some more advanced science out, and try it again.  So, the Big Tech, I think, is lobbying and saying, "Give us access to this.  We've got the best and brightest now.  We're on the front lines of technology.  Silicon Valley has got all the brightest minds, and yet we're entirely blocked out from this DC, DOD world".  And that's how I interpret the sense of Congress language, is that maybe they don't want to disclose everything to the public, but there's a clear political economy, I think, dynamic where there's other forces at play that previously were able to keep it contained.  Now, there's big money on the line, big political interests on the line that have the juice to potentially pry it open.  And that, if you're looking for the most salient explanation for why now, it's that Big Tech got wind, they don't have the political juice, and the Senate is respecting a different viewpoint than necessarily the Lockheed had. 

So, that is, I think, the really interesting thing.  One of the pieces of the legislation that's in there is it explicitly requires, if this goes through in the National Defense Authorisation Act, it requires that any contractor or government programme that has been involved in, say, non-Earth origin exotic technology, like, "non-Earth origin" is in the law, it's in the draft legislation.  So, we have all this speculation about TikTok videos.  I'm just like, "Have you read what members of Congress and people meeting in SCIFs have gone into a SCIF, heard someone tell them there's secret alien technology in a bunker?".  They take that seriously enough to now introduce legislation.  They pass that legislation unanimously out of the Senate Select Media Intelligence on a bipartisan basis.  That goes into the National Defense Authorisation Act.  It gets endorsed by the Senate Majority Leader.  The White House gives it an implicit nod.  I'm sorry, but forget the Tic Tac video, this is the story, this is what's happening! 

I think only now, people are going to start paying attention, because it was kind of a taboo subject to report on.  No one wants to be seen as being the weird alien reporter, but I don't know what to tell you, it's in the law.  Either our military intelligence community has gone insane and all of our legislators have gone along for the ride.  It's possible, but that should be something we should be worried about.  Why is our entire Congress political system, why is the Senate majority leader tweeting, essentially drawing explicit attention to this new commission that he analogises to the JFK assassination? 

Peter McCormack: There's too much there. 

Matthew Pines: I'm like, "Why?"  I mean, we could say it's all big PSYOP, but I'm like, "Okay, but that's a crazy PSYOP". 

Peter McCormack: For what benefit?

Matthew Pines: That should be almost more concerning than it's really alien technology, like why is this all happening?  And people seem to -- I think we have this resistance to it.  I get it, right, because it's such a bizarre thing and most people don't want to talk about it, because it kind of makes people feel uncomfortable. 

Peter McCormack: Well, it answers one of the biggest questions that everybody has is, "Are we alone?"  It just answers that question.  It's like, "Okay, now we know we're not alone.  Now we're in Star Wars world". 

Matthew Pines: Well, we're in a different world, I don't know what world we're in, but I think people also -- I don't know how much that's true, because humanity has gone through so many radical shifts in just what you might even call our basic metaphysical condition, like humanity has never really been in a single stable place, especially in the past few hundred years of industrial, technological civilisation.  Our view of the world of reality is radically revised as we figured out, "Oh, the world is round and there's other planets that aren't just cracks in the firmament, and asteroids can fall from the sky, they're not just made-up things". 

Peter McCormack: But we all look up at the sky, I think everybody questions that are we alone.  And in the next 300 to 600 days, we might find out that we're not alone and there's direct evidence.

Matthew Pines: I think that's a reasonable possibility.

Peter McCormack: To me that's like, "Fuck!"  That's something we've thought about, I don't know about you, but that to me is a holy-fuck moment.

Danny Knowles: Of course.

Peter McCormack: More than anything in my life, that's a holy-fuck moment, we're not alone.  We might even see, well, we don't know what we'll see.  We might see a craft and go, "Fuck, here it is!"

Matthew Pines: Yeah, and I think, again, because I've been thinking about this for a while, you have the wow, and I think you have the shrug, a bit like, "I still have to pay my taxes, got to drop the kids off at school".  So, until you tell me this materially changes my life, there's going to be the, "Oh shit, what is this?  This is crazy", and then you go, "I've got to drive to school, whatever, the next day".  But I think what does concern me a bit, I think about this a lot, is the second- and third-order implications for say financial stability, for political stability.  This is why it's a very delicate thing. 

If this is true, I mean only 90%; I'm pretty sure the median person watching this is maybe 25%, 30%.  But if that's your median credit, maybe you're zero.  But I don't think you should be zero, especially if you're paying attention to what the Senate's doing and what the Congress is doing.  Maybe that's only enough to get you up to 5% or 10%.  But even if you have a 5% or 10% credence on a world-changing scenario, if you're something, if you play in markets you're like, I think about tail options, I think about, "There's a tail event for every option price", right, and maybe it's underpriced at the moment, would be my -- no, I don't think I can bet on this.  I don't think there's a good market for this!  I thought about it.  It's hard to think about how you would put a good directional wager on disclosure, what financial assets would move up or down.  It's an interesting sidebar. 

But I actually think what's interesting to me about the implications of, if we get to this point where the government slowly boils the frog, I don't think it'll be an event where all of a sudden the President says --

Peter McCormack: Press conference with little green men.

Matthew Pines: I think it'll be a slow build, they're putting in place a framework, right?  Because we think about our whole political semiotics and symbology around the inauguration, we literally construct an edifice, there's certain rituals that we perform, everyone gathers in a certain place, essentially incantations of oaths, etc, and nothing physically changed, but you've now transitioned power in an official process.  So, we human beings ascribe a lot of meaning to social fiction, social what you call, prestidigitation, like magic tricks, right?  An inauguration is a magic trick that everyone believes.  What does it mean to transition power?  One president leaves, it's like, they don't sleep in the same bed, but what it really means is that some person put their hand on the Bible, said an oath in front of a lot of people, everyone watched it, everyone believes, and now that person is what we call the President and that person's not.  That's a political topic, right? 

But that means a lot, that is what shifts belief, and that shifts the whole structure of political and power arrangements in our society.  Those things are triggered and now different people can give orders to the military, different people can launch nuclear weapons because of that social fiction.  So, these are extremely powerful systems of cultural production reification.  And I think we're going to have to construct a similar thing for this, and that's I think what you're seeing now.  That's really what to me, that commission is the most important thing that has ever happened in this entire, probably 75-year history of this subject.

Peter McCormack: It could be a gift, Arrival, I mean, look into Hollywood, you've seen Arrival?  Can there be a gift here that's just going to change humanity?

Matthew Pines: Is this good news; is this bad news?  I've been giving you kind of my analytic assessment of the situation as it pertains to the legislative developments, the different classes of explanation, my personal epistemic journey to elevate my credences by looking at these different pieces of circumstantial first-hand witness testimony, etc.  All this amounts to, okay, if I'm 90% non-human intelligence, well, what does that 90% ascribe to those other four categories of explanation?  Do I think it's some extraterrestrial cousin who's coming here to kind of be our big brother/guide?  Are they here to contain us because they think we're a threat to them?  Are they interdimensional beings?  Are they us from the future here to warn us of an impending cataclysm that they want to prevent?  Are they ultra-terrestrials that have been here for hundreds of thousands of years and they're just stuck here for whatever reason?  I really don't know, I have no evidence one way or the other. 

I find myself radically moving pretty quickly because I don't have -- one feature when you don't have a whole lot of evidence is that, one, you should update a lot.  It doesn't mean you shouldn't update, but you should update very, very frequently.  That's something that some people have a mistake in reasoning where if you don't have enough to change your mind, you shouldn't just change your mind.  But actually what it means is, you should constantly be jumping from alternatives, but your what you might call the reaction function, or the energy gradient that flips you from one belief to another belief, should be pretty low.  So, you can explore all of them and that way you're never locked in, because if you ever stick in one belief, then usually, psychologically, you tend to look for evidence that confirms that belief.  You tend to want to reject evidence, even presence of strong evidence, that really works against whatever you've kind of anchored on.  So, if you don't anchor on anything, then you can kind of play with everything. 

But it also makes it very hard, because you could ask me today and think, "Yeah, I just read an interesting paper that I think is really cool that if it's correct, it's a good candidate theory of quantum gravity, and in this theory of quantum gravity, in fact, the conformal future and the conformal past are essentially identical, which makes time travel potentially theoretically possible".  And so maybe now, if I see there's a candidate unification of quantum gravity that makes time travel at least theoretically feasible, that should instantly tell me to update on my time-travel credence.  Because before I read that paper, I would say, "I don't think time travel is physically possible.  I have a metaphysics of time that thinks time is relatively objective.  There's no threads of time, there's no multiverse, it's just one universe that updates a computational process going to the indefinite future, which is literally unmade, or literally made as it happens".  But if I change that view, then I shouldn't change the view of what could explain this technology. 

So, that's what I think, but people are very unsatisfied with that because people want to know, "Well, what is happening here?"

Peter McCormack: Of course!

Matthew Pines: And I think fundamentally you just have to be very comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Peter McCormack: I'm okay with just knowing.  I just want to know.  We're not alone, and that's fucking cool because to me, it's not this binary, "Oh, there's this other alien civilisation in the universe".  That to me says there's lots of them.

Matthew Pines: Yeah, I mean, the one point I really want to mention here, because I've been thinking about this, is you can't keep this subject in the -- if we go on this trajectory, lots of things are affected, but one of the things that I professionally focus on is the geopolitical situation, as we've talked about in similar and previous conversations.  But professionally, I look a lot at both, say, the cybersecurity, cyber threats from nation states, multinationals; and because of that, I also pay attention a lot to the geopolitical dynamics driven by the US-China relationship, either waxing or waning.  And so, I have to try to think about putting those different domains together.  And I think, okay, well if this is true, if this is the trajectory that we're officially on, with this commission being set up, with these official reports being written, with potentially more witnesses coming out, like Grusch, but maybe witnesses that actually have first-hand accounts that give that give us accounts in public --

Peter McCormack: Do you think that's what's coming next?

Matthew Pines: I would think it's more likely than not.  Again, nothing guaranteed, but I'm reasonably confident there will be more people coming forward in a similar manner.

Peter McCormack: Do you have any inside secret information?

Matthew Pines: I've only heard what people tell me, and I don't know if that's true, but they say, "Yeah, more people are coming".  Now, they can change their mind, they could be told to shut up, I mean, who knows?  Until they sit down in front of Congress, raise their hand and spill the tea, it's all it's all a crapshoot. 

But I think really intensively about the US-China relationship is the most strategic relationship this decade.  And I mean we've had previous conversations about the tail risk of, say, a Taiwan war being extremely destabilising for the global economy, if not existentially threatening if it really escalates.  And it's one of the most anxiety-producing topics of analysis for anyone who seriously looks at geopolitics or if you're a policymaker in the military, in looking at, well, what does this look like as China maybe reaches closer to military parity in the South China Sea and they get ambitious?  That is this defining geopolitical flashpoint potentially this decade. 

Anything that potentially can affect the trajectory I think should be really closely examined.  And if there's anything that could steer the trajectory that makes that really bad scenario less likely, I think we should find ways to encourage that.  There's very few things I could think of that would materially change the decision-making and strategic calculus of Beijing, given their historical imperatives, their promises to their people, their technology modernisation objectives, the intense security dilemma between the US and China.  There's very few things I can imagine a deus ex machina that would be sufficient to steer that relationship in a positive direction. 

This might be one of the few things that you could imagine getting to that level where it's like, "Oh, well maybe this is enough of a shock, enough of a rejiggering of the decision-making calculus, that if we play our cards right, could be used to advantage global peace".  And I'm not crazy, you think I'm crazy saying this, guess what I just paraphrased?  I paraphrased Representative Mike Gallagher, who's the Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on China, who's got both UAPs on his mind and China competition on his mind and how we can bring this together, who wants to, "Bring this into the presidential conversation".

Danny Knowles: But that may help move towards world peace, but is it not a risk of having to fight aliens?

Matthew Pines: Well, I would reject both of those assumptions.  I don't think disclosure would lead to world peace.

Peter McCormack: Towards, maybe.

Matthew Pines: I don't think we should try to fight aliens, I don't think it'd be a good idea.

Peter McCormack: We'd probably lose.

Matthew Pines: I don't think we'd end up on the winning side. 

Peter McCormack: Let's hope they're not assholes! 

Matthew Pines: I think things are weirder than we give, than we want to believe.  We construct an account of history, an account of our civilisation, an account of who we are as human beings that allows us to go about our day without having to constantly question too many things.  Just cognitively, you have to assume a lot to just go about your day and just not have to care.  But if you are forced to care, there's lots of things you will go look at.  You're like, "Oh, this is weird", and I think reality is weird.  Physics is weird.  Now, we call it normal because people study it in labs and they get paid and they have nice titles and they give good talks and they're seen, professional articulate people describing quantum mechanics.  Quantum mechanics is insane.  Yet we're producing technology potentially, speculative, whether it works or not, quantum computing, that's based off of the weird superpositions that apparently physical reality enables.  We just accept that. 

So, there's a certain category of things that are objectively bizarre, but we've put into the box of normal, and we've built technology, systems and arrangements of power and money and funding and technology, businesses, premised on them.  But I think there's no hard line between what we consider bizarre that's in that box, and what's bizarre that's not in that box.

Peter McCormack: I don't know, I think we've agreed that quantum is weird.

Matthew Pines: Quantum is weird.

Peter McCormack: I mean, what was it Einstein said about quantum?  He said it's weird.

Matthew Pines: Well, there's the Feynman quote, which is that, "No one truly understands quantum mechanics".  Einstein had the quote, "God doesn't play dice".  He actually rejected this idea of spooky action at a distance.  He wanted to try to find what he called hidden variables.  So, he created, which was actually disproven, but he put it together with Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen, a model of quantum mechanics where there actually were objective hidden variables, discrete variables.  So, there was no inherent ambiguity in quantum mechanics.  And then we did these tests.  They're called the Bell tests.  There were two Bell inequalities by David Bell.  They did these tests looking at entangled photons and electrons and they basically found they violated these inequalities and there actually are no hidden variables, that there's an implicit trade-off between non-locality and determinateness in reality.

Peter McCormack: Hold on, what does that mean in the --

Matthew Pines: I mean, nature at a fundamental scale is fuzzy, right?  The object in quantum mechanics is a wave function.  That's the ontological entity that the mathematics describes.  It's this little sphere-looking thing.  That's the thing that is evolving.  There's a Schrödinger equation which basically says, "This is how this wave function, which is defined as an energy field over a manifold, just this spreading out, it exists in all defined space".  The equations of quantum mechanics, the Schrödinger equations, say how that curve moves over time.  And then when you make a measurement, the measurement problem of quantum mechanics is, we never actually see the whole wave function.  We don't see an electron everywhere, we see an electron here, because when we see it, we're making a measurement that what's called "collapses" the wave function into a determinant particle with a measured energy and momentum.

So, the mystery of quantum mechanics is you have these discontinuities between the unitary evolution of the Schrödinger equation, which describes an object that exists in superposition in all possible energy states, where they're called eigenstates, and then you do a measurement and it collapses to one measured eigenstate.  And there's a philosophical question of like, well is that a physical process; are you actually collapsing the wave function?  It's created a whole, I think, somewhat more mystical and ill-founded conceptual confusion about the observer's consciousness is manipulating reality and you're measuring it with your brain.  But it's still a mystery of many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, where the wave function doesn't collapse at all. 

In fact, what I was just referring to in that physics paper I was just reading, is it just basically bites the bullet and assumes quantum mechanics is true at all scales and there's no collapse, what's basically the full many-worlds interpretation, the Everettian interpretation of quantum mechanics, and that in fact, there is no collapse, there's just an infinite number of all possible conditions that obtain.  And you play that out to all possible scales, and you can do some interesting sort of gauge dualities that show that you get consistency, mathematically; philosophically, it's bizarre, but that's where that gets you.  That's why I did physics philosophy as an undergrad. 

I think the UAPs, if they're real, manifest some knowledge about physical reality we don't have, which is going to force -- all revolutions in physics force a fundamental conceptual revaluation of how we think about the world.  Like, we think about the world very differently now that we figured out quantum mechanics.  But we know quantum mechanics isn't the final story.  Everyone looks at Einstein's general theory of relativity, we look at quantum mechanics, and they work in their respective domains, but they don't work when you try to examine them in domains where you need, say, high mass and tiny scales, like black holes or the Big Bang, and the equations are mutually inconsistent.  And that's where we've been stuck. 

So, yeah, the speculation is maybe we're not stuck, actually.  Maybe somebody has this secret physics knowledge that's been inspired by their study of UAPs, but just how maybe if we had gone back in time, if the US Government had the ability to keep all of nuclear physics secret, would that have prevented some of the proliferation risks?  If nobody even knew that nuclear physics was possible, I'm arguing against myself, but just being hypothetical, if that was possible, the US Government probably would have done that, right? 

Just like we did with encryption, up until Diffie-Hellman, the NSA was threatening Diffie with not releasing his asymmetric encryption publicly.  They said, "You're effectively exporting control of weapons, we're going to throw you in jail".  He called their bluff and they backed down eventually and there was obviously a big court case and all that stuff.

Peter McCormack: You know, I interviewed him.

Matthew Pines: Oh, really?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Matthew Pines: Smart guy.

Peter McCormack: Long time ago.  Three, four years ago?

Danny Knowles: Longer.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  One of my favourite ever interviews.

Matthew Pines: I mean, that's a good example of someone just figured something out about the nature of reality that's fundamental to the way things are structured, that allows asymmetric encryption.  It starts super-abstract, pure maths, and then it turns into the foundational technology for modern civilisation.  We don't get cloud systems, we don't get Bitcoin, you don't get any of this without them.  And so, I think we sometimes lose the lesson of these very abstract, somewhat opaque, maybe even mysterious domains of intellectual investigation are disconnected from everyday life, but they're not.  They quickly inhere and can basically be the main determinants of how our civilisation evolves.

Peter McCormack: When was it?

Danny Knowles: It was four-and-a-half years ago.

Peter McCormack: Wow!

Danny Knowles: If we did figure out the missing piece between those two equations, is it impossible to know what that would unlock; or do we have an idea of what that would unlock?

Matthew Pines: Well, now you're really speaking my language here, because this is what my late-night readings are often about, frontier physics.  And I always try to think about them with a -- because I'm not a theoretical physicist, I'm not at the leading edge of research, I'm just trying to keep pace with what I think are more of the interesting frontiers.  But I'm always trying to understand at a semi-intuitive level, what does this mean; what's the intuitive, grokking condition that I can have for this extremely complex set of ideas and mathematical concepts?  And then from that, what does that imply about technology, engineering?  It's super-fascinating. 

I mean, one area, just to plug it, because I think it deserves more attention, so I'll take the opportunity here to force people to read these interesting but very dense papers, is a physicist, mathematical physicist by the name of Jonathan Gorard.  And he was inspired by some insights, really, that Stephen Wolfram made, who's somewhat of a controversial figure, heterodox physicist, but I think is very, very smart, very accomplished, and certainly had this key insight about looking at hypergraphs, very abstractly; what's the most abstract thing you can think of?  Like a collection of points, just a bag of points that have directed edges to each other, connections from one point, abstract point to another point.  What can you do with that?  If you just started with that, just an abstract bag of points that can have potential directed edges to each other, you can create that as a hypergraph. 

So then, okay, you start with this very abstract collection of points.  This is just a very simple mathematical collection.  But you can have a rule that says, okay, take a section of the hypergraph that looks like this, this node connected to this node connected to this node.  And the rule is just, delete this edge, add a point, connect it to here.  And you can have an arbitrary number of different rules that are just rewriting the hypergraph, you're just rewriting hypergraphs.  And you can have a simple rule, you can just apply it iteratively.  Everywhere you see this specific structure in the graph, apply this rule, change it, do it arbitrarily across the hypergraph.  What Wolfram and really Gorard has really elaborated on is, if you actually just start from that very, very simple foundation, they've been actually able to show you can basically reconstruct quantum mechanics and general relativity.  It's kind of insane, but on a discrete basis. 

I find that fascinating.  It's like, start with something that's very, very simple, as simple as you can possibly imagine, and then just basically playing it out, doing the proper mathematical analysis, getting to the point where you re-derive the laws of physics that we've already figured out, and then take it further, right?  Where does that go?  And it gets really abstract, but I think it's super-fascinating, because one of the connections to UAPs I've been speculating about, and we're really in the deep end, you have to get there if you're really trying to think about what these are, because you're playing in unknown physics and so go swim in those deep waters, is there's one of the things that's come out of this model, and I won't reconstruct it because we don't want to send the audience to sleep, is there's a really tight relationship between how they represent the observer in these models and the physics that that observer sees.

Danny Knowles: What do you mean, how they represent the observer? 

Matthew Pines: So, there's two conditions that they mathematically define as making up an observer.  One is that they have a linear thread of time, which really implies a certain causal invariance to the history of updates.  So, you imagine this graph, you apply an update, it's a new graph.  You apply an update, it's a new graph.  You apply an update, it's a new graph.  You can imagine just do the chain of all those different states of the graph and look at a line that looks at the different updates that go through the network; that is the causal history.  And there's different possible updates you can apply at any given time.  And you can basically look at the space of states that are causally invariant, meaning you apply the rule here or apply the rule here, but then two or three or any arbitrary number of steps later, they lead to the same state of the graph. 

So, you can imagine it's like quantum mechanics, it branches and then it reconverges to the same state.  So, there are basically alternative paths.  In quantum mechanics, this is what's called the Feynman path integral, where you look at all possible states of particle interaction and eventually you look for the ones that basically converge to this single state.  So, that is a loose analogy, but that's kind of essentially the analogy of a loose, single thread of time, and are computationally bounded.  Those are the two conditions.  So, if you apply those two conditions in how you look at this abstract structure of just pure hypergraphs, those two conditions mathematically make an observer who's part of that graph that's changing, we're all part of this hypergraph that's constantly being updated. 

Then an observer who's in that hypergraph, who's just a piece of the hypergraph, is being updated as part of the hypergraph that has a linear thread of time, what it sees in this structure, what it can look at, what in general is called light cone, which is really just its causal history, its causal past, its causal future, which possible influence in its past could lead to its state, which possible influences from its current state could lead to the future.  It's kind of like hourglass shape, but in a discrete fashion, because this is a graph, not a continuous manifold.  Then, those conditions of having this causally invariant thread of time, and having -- so the observer just is that history, and it's computationally bound, I mean, it's a finite amount of computation that can be packed into a single volume of that network; if you just have those two conditions, then that observer perceives a manifold-like structure that obeys quantum mechanics and general relativity.  You kind of re-derive the equations of the Einstein field equations and the Schrödinger equation from those two key conditions.

But the main difference is that it's all discrete.  In quantum mechanics and general relativity, the main thing I've always disliked about those unification approaches is they assume a background, a space, they assume a continuous manifold, and these are just fields that play out on top of that manifold, where there's a structure to that manifold, continuous geometry.  But I don't know, continuous stuff is the old Zeno's problem.  You zoom in, you zoom in, you zoom in, there's no inherent scale.  Whereas if you have a discrete structure, there is a fundamental scale, and the universe is just fundamentally discrete.  But you create a discrete version of quantum mechanics and general relativity. 

But I find that fascinating, because one of the implications for, say, thinking about both AI and UAPs, is it embeds the concept of an observer deeply into how you think about what physics you see.  Essentially the space of physics, the space of minds, defines the space of possible physics, but not in a woo-wee spiritual way, but in a hard mathematical way.  And so you have to think about, well, what would other minds that are defined differently see in reality?  And this gets to the last bit of abstract physics talk here, is I mentioned you have these rules that you can apply.  Well, what if you could apply a single rule, you could apply two rules, you could apply three rules, what if you applied every possible rule?  It's a little bit mathematically ambiguous how you define every possible rule, but Girard, I think, does his best in a decent way using what's called higher-order category theory or homotopy type theory, which is the frontiers of current mathematics that he elaborates using this structure. 

What you get to is essentially an abstract mathematical object that is essentially the collection of all possible rules that can apply to any arbitrary configuration of these very abstract fundamental entities, right, just like a bag of points and relationships between them.  And they define this, what in category theory is called an (infinity,1)-topos or an infinity-groupoid.  We're really going out there!  But imagine this big braided abstract ball that's in the ethereal realm, right?  That is all of reality.  And an observer, being an observer of a certain kind, essentially slices that higher dimensional, infinite dimensional ball in a certain way.  And slicing that higher dimensional ball in a certain way, being an observer of a certain kind, gives that observer a universe, makes that observer see a universe, the one that we see, sees a universe of three-plus-one dimensions with quantum mechanics, relativity has its basic laws.  Which implies, if you could slice that higher dimensional structure differently, if there was a different foliation, is what mathematicians call it, there'd be a different rule of physics. 

Now conceptually, think, is that a multiverse?  Is it just one object sliced different ways, perceived differently?  Is it this interdimensional blob?  But I don't know, that's an interesting question.  We assume that every mind that exists in the universe is going to see the same universe as us, but maybe not.  Maybe actually there's different aspects of reality that you only perceive when you have a different cognitive structure, a different conscious structure.  So, that's really going really into the bar conversation later tonight. 

Peter McCormack: Could you re-explain that all in a bar later?

Danny Knowles: Could I fuck!  I'm not even going to try.  If we do have another being that is living under a different set of physical conditions, would we be able to interact with them though? 

Matthew Pines: Oh, yeah, this is a fascinating topic and actually Stephen Wolfram has done an interview with Lex Friedman and he talks about this specifically because inherently, communication is about information exchange and information, we think, is -- well, in computer science, is a, information theoretic concept.  If you think about it, everything is computation.  There's a certain way of describing something that at a certain level of detail accounts for all of its apparent properties.  So, physics is essentially just a way of mathematising how the universe as a ball of information is computing itself. 

So, we are blobs of information computing ourselves, structured in a certain way that gives us consciousness, and aliens might be structured in a slightly different way.  So, I don't think we know what are the conditions under which you can transfer information from one blob of computing to another blob of computing.  We have this problem with dogs.  How do you commune with a dog or a dolphin?  I think it's just an analogy from there to aliens.  We can communicate with some of these other intelligent creatures, but very roughly.  We can't get all the high-fidelity exchange that human beings have evolved as a social animal, to not just communicate verbally, but to read all the delicate signals of the maxillofacial movements and embedded expectations.  We have an entire dedicated brain region, the Broca region, this is just for language. 

So, there's no implicit reason why it's not possible to have communication, but I think just you would expect it to be very, very difficult.  And that I think is one way to think about the UAPs coming here.  If you just dropped into a community of dolphins that were building nuclear weapons, how would you tell them it's a bad idea, right?  Go and just start squeaking at them and hope that they understand it?  I don't know if that would work.  You'd have to find some way to communicate with the dolphins in a way that would be intelligible to them, that would get the message across.  And maybe that's what you're seeing, is that you find some way of sending messages in whatever way that you think can go, but it's probably going to be somewhat lossy, because every system is fundamentally unique to its own pattern of embedded communication in a certain social group or species.  It's highly evolved and attuned to how their brains interpret information.  So, it's very difficult to think that you could construct a seamless way to communicate across that sort of -- 

Danny Knowles: Maybe rather than try and communicate, you'd just figure out how to remotely turn the nukes off.

Matthew Pines: Yeah, I mean, you might just do things that are kind of obvious.  But another paper folks should read is by Robin Hanson, who's a kind of a polymath economist, super-smart guy.  He was thinking about this topic, and a lot of my ideas are inspired by him as well, because he's very similar, kind of tries to be as rigorous and Bayesian as possible about this topic.  And he's looked at the panspermia hypothesis, which is in the ET version of subset four, which is based off of what we have decent physical scientific evidence for.

So, for example, we know that Earth was born as part of the Solar System in a stellar nursery with about 10,000 maybe other stars, 5 billion years ago.  And so, the 10,000 other star systems, they were all kind of born in the same gas cloud.  And in that first several hundred million billion years, there was a lot of material exchange between the different systems, so they're close together.  So, they're constantly being bombarded by asteroids and just sharing crap around.  And so you can imagine if one of those star systems kind of got the spark of life, saw this combinatorial, sort of self-replicating chemistry problem on some geothermal vent, maybe we weren't the first, maybe some other planet got lucky before us, and then got some way up the genetic complexity ladder, got hit by an asteroid, bunch of stuff splashed into space, drifted around for a few hundred million years, got captured by our Solar System, eventually landed in our oceans and helped seed life here. 

This is a somewhat speculative but serious topic of investigation in astrophysics and exobiology.  And okay, that's an interesting hypothesis, but then play it out.  Imagine, say, that sibling of ours, the big brother, big sister, that had a head start on us, that evolved life, maybe advanced life, got to a point where they decided, "You know what, we don't want to expand any more".  Maybe there's a binary choice for life.  Life either decides to expand, in which case, once it gets to a certain point, it's hard to stop the expansion.  You send out probes, those probes can self-replicate, send out more probes.  It's a chain reaction, it's impossible to stop.  And they know that that could happen, and they want to stop that for whatever reason.  Maybe it's a cultural reason.  Maybe they don't want to create seeds of their own civilisation that can come back and compete with their home civilisation.  Maybe they don't want their future inheritors to be fundamentally different from them and radically change their culture.  They want to keep what they've got, so they lock themselves down.  They decide not to become a grabby alien civilisation.  They decide to become a non-grabby civilisation, meaning they don't expand.  That is a very strong rule that they have, and they've been able to effectively enforce it potentially for hundreds of millions of years if they've gotten this head start. 

They get to a point where they successfully enforce this rule, which means they really don't let anyone leave.  They have the strong ability to enforce that rule.  But they look across the rest of the galaxy, and they can detect the stars that were their cousins because of their stellar composition, we can see they have a characteristic gas composition, and they might be like, all right, they might know about panspermia as a possibility.  They might worry that another civilisation could eventually nucleate in one of their sibling star systems and emerge, and basically maybe not adopt their rule about not being grabby, may start expanding, and may come and take over their civilisation, which would not be good for them. 

So, they would probably be very proactive and they would do the one limited exception to their non-grabby rule, which would be sending out limited probes to any potential planet system that could emerge as an advanced technological civilisation.  And this would be their standard operating procedure, is wait around for that civilisation to get to the point where it evidences capability to potentially be about to expand, you know, be the Elon, we're launching self-replicating rockets potentially in a few decades, is his ambition.  And that would be the one you'd want to intervene.  Then you maybe have a protocol which is you detect gamma rays or characteristic energy signatures of nuclear weapons.  It's like, this is the key, it's an indicator that a civilisation is about to potentially be a threat to you. 

Then you buzz around, you let that civilisation know that they're not the top dog.  And you implicitly put yourself at the top of the status hierarchy, that there's an advanced civilisation that's here that you can't do anything about, that can do things that you can't do, that you don't understand.  Implicitly, human beings, we tend to defer to that.  The way we select kings and presidents still is like, they have the most power.  They're all the most important, most obviously impressive things around.  We're going to defer to them.

Peter McCormack: This is the alien version of fuck about, find out; fuck around, find out.

Matthew Pines: Yeah, yeah, and so they wouldn't want to give too much away about them, but they'd sit at the top of our status hierarchy, just eventually we'd get the hint, and we'd either get the hint, in which case they successfully implanted their rule about not being grabby, we voluntarily decide to agree with their rule.  But there's always a catch.  If we decide not to obey their rule and decide to go out and sprout in the universe, they might intervene.  And that might not be so good for humanity.  So, that would be the implication of like, "Well, maybe we should just accept the rule".  And that would be kind of a depressing reality. 

I don't know if that's the case, but this is like, "Okay, aliens are here, but maybe they actually don't want to share too much about themselves.  Maybe we'll never know too much about them.  They're here to basically enforce the rule about not being grabby and that's it.  And we're kind of trapped here until maybe we figure out a way to escape".  That would be one interesting sci-fi scenario.  Or, it's not that at all, and that was just an interesting story.  I have no idea.

Peter McCormack: Right.  What's the TL;DR timeline we need to look to now?

Matthew Pines: Well, this summer I think is going to be very interesting.  There may be hearings at the end of July in the House Oversight Committee, which I've heard everything from "Meh", to, "Oh my God!", so I don't know.  The House Oversight Committee is the committee in Congress that has probably the least direct access to the testimony given by these whistleblowers, which has happened in the intelligence committees.  But they may get some interesting witnesses to come forward.  It could be very compelling open public testimony, it could be riveting television.  They haven't set the date yet, but it looks pretty likely to happen at the end of July. 

Then the Congress breaks for August session, and then they go off to the district, nothing formal or official happens.  Action might pick back up again in September, and that is really where I think there's going to be a lot of wrangling on the political side between the White House and the Senate about what happens with specifically the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.  Do they do open hearings or not in September?  That's an open question debate, whether that actually happens or not.  But that would be a political decision, probably being directed by the White House, because Senator Mark Warner, who's the Democratic Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, he's been very mum on this whole topic, while his Vice Chair, Senator Marco Rubio, the Republican, has been up front, being very explicit in acknowledging David Grusch's testimony. 

But Marco Rubio and Mark Warner, when it comes to the subject of Intelligence, they're actually quite bipartisan, very close in how they coordinate these public messagings, and all of the things that have come out of the committee have been bipartisan and unanimous.  So, I suspect Mark Warner is fundamentally not on a different page, but politically he can't be the one leading it, because he doesn't want to put the White House in a difficult position.  Ross Coulthart has reported that the National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, attended one of these crash retrieval witness briefings sometime in the last few months.  And if you remember after the Chinese balloon incident that occurred, the White House set up a specific White House-led UAP working group led by the National Security Advisor and the Secretary of State, the DNI SecDef, and it was formed, they announced it, and then nothing's been said anything about it.  So I'm like, "What's happening with this White House UAP working group that is at the level of a Principal?" 

So, in the White House National Security Council structure, the Principals Committee is the most senior structure.  That is where the critical war decisions get made, right?  They created an equivalent structure specific for UAPs with that senior level membership after the balloon incident, which always struck me as odd.  If you knew the structure of the White House National Security Council, that's a very senior entity to create for what was perceived as this kind of, I think, little bit of a geopolitical goof.  Like, the winds went the wrong direction and we got embarrassed, we had to shoot it down, whatever.  So, it was an odd incongruity between the apparent significance of the balloon incident and then the structural response inside the White House that we haven't heard a single thing of.  And then the Senate Committee does this stuff with legislation for the NDA and Intelligence Authorisation Act, and then boom, Schumer comes out. 

Schumer was not involved in this conversation at all up until he just comes out and says, "We're going to do a presidential commission".  What?  Where'd that come from?  So, that tells me the clock is on.  And September hearings, the real question is how much comes out before a presidential campaign heats up.  There are folks, I think, that want as much to come out as possible before Thanksgiving because they don't want it to become such a partisan thing.  Once you spin up the machinery of the presidential campaign, it's hard to have a conversation about this in what you might want to say is a bipartisan, sober way. 

Peter McCormack: Aliens on the ballot box! 

Matthew Pines: So, I think there's a kind of a bit of an urgency to move it along.  Maybe you don't get the full kit and caboodle this year, but you get a lot.  And then, of course, the point of the legislation that Schumer just introduced gets passed by the end of the year, typically in December.  The legislation sets a 300-day clock for the commission.  So, that would basically put you at the presidential election in 2024.  So, the next 6 to 18 months, probably going to be very interesting. 

Peter McCormack: Wild!

Matthew Pines: Politically, what's been decided, I don't know.  My speculation is that what's safe is what we would call nuts and bolts, which is craft and maybe bodies or maybe drones, whatever, but stuff, material, objects that we can talk about that we've been trying to figure out how they work.  What I don't think they're going to talk about is the whole abduction thing, which is a separate ball of wax that's truly laden with taboo and cultural tropes, right?  But if you're being a true Bayesian, right, you start with the premise of there either are or not non-human technology in our presence, yes or no.  If you take the yes tree with some degree of credence, then you're like, do we have possession of these vehicles, yes or no?  Branch of the tree, have we successfully reverse engineered them to create similar or close to similar technology, yes or no?  Do they have pilots, yes or no?  Have we retrieved those pilots, yes or no?  Do we figure out whether they're, say, the builders of the craft, or whether they themselves have been made by the people who made the craft, yes or no?  So, you can clear the branches. 

Then you're like, if there are real craft flying around, and people are reporting having been taken into those craft, is that plausible?  I don't know, but once you've gotten to that point of the Bayesian tree --

Peter McCormack: You get to anal probes! 

Matthew Pines: I mean, there's a reason why it's a story, right?  It's because that's how we've socially processed that, right, because it's such a such a jarring possibility.  The way we socially digest it is we lampoon it, we make it into a cultural joke so we don't have to treat it as a serious possibility. 

Peter McCormack: And then all those people who said they were abducted, suddenly they're taking credit. 

Matthew Pines: I mean, if it were true, it would be sort of a grand tragedy.  These people were totally mocked and derided for decades for being crazy loons.

Peter McCormack: And they told the truth.

Matthew Pines: What if they weren't, right?  I'm just saying we have to treat that as a serious possibility and not rely on the typical cultural tropes that we've just inherited to guide us in this really bizarre and dark forest of an epistemic journey.  But that would be the thing I don't think we're going to get out of this commission.  I just think it's just, for whatever reason, we decided that's off limits.  We're going to get up to real non-human intelligence, their objects, trying to figure out how they work we're going to open it up a bit, it will bring in Big Tech, we'll bring in some more scientists, that's how we're going to play it. 

But then this other stuff, that's kind of what you would call in the woo file, alien abductions, consciousness experiences, weird remote viewing sorts of stuff, which has always been historically connected to this stuff.  If you actually look at the historical record, all the weird stuff that the US Government has done has all been in one big box.  And the UAP stuff and the UFO stuff was never really that separate from these other weird things that we did.  We did lots of things to try to -- there was remote viewing programmes for decades.  Whether they worked or not, who knows.  We spent a lot of money.  We actually had programmes set up, we've now reported on them, where the CIA hired and had training programmes for people that could try to see if they could see a nuclear submarine with their mind.  And those programmes were adjacent to, sometimes being run by the same people that were running the legacy UAP investigation programmes.  I don't know, that's a historical fact that's odd. 

But does that mean that you discount the UAP stuff?  Maybe it does, because it's associated with this thing that you've prima facie decided is totally implausible and crazy.  And so, by its association with the UAP stuff, that discounts your credence to the UAP stuff.  But it could go the other direction.

Peter McCormack: Okay.  Anyone listening, what would you recommend they read or watch if they want to learn more?

Matthew Pines: Yeah, I would recommend staying, to start, in that well-lit clearing.  You can venture off in a dark forest and you can be lost very quickly.  So, in that centre clearing, the book by Ross Coulthart, books by Leslie Kean, the reporting that they did, Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal did with David Grusch, the interview with David Grusch that Ross Coulthart had, subsequent interviews that Ross Coulthart has given.  He probably has the best sources that I've seen in this space.  Now, it doesn't mean I give everything he says 100% credence, but I think he has probably the most access to these programmes and has the best sources.  So, I listen basically to everything he says, just to try to get a hint.  The Debrief, which is the source of that original article, is a great publication. 

I would look at, there's a guy, Dean Johnson, on Twitter who has a website, and all he does is tracks all the legislative stuff on this.  He's super on top of it.  He's really good at looking through the legislative language and interpreting it.  That's a good guide to just look at all the legislation that has been proposed in the past two to three years, what's in law, just read the language.  Don't have to speculate what it means, just acquaint yourself with what your representatives in Congress, people that we know have been asked, have been privy to very jarring claims by well-informed and highly-cleared senior intelligence officials, are writing into law.  You, as a citizen in a democracy, should be aware of what your representatives are putting into law.  Whether you want to tell them that's crazy and stop doing it, that's your prerogative.  Whether you want to know more and want to understand what's motivating them to put that in law and you need to know what they know, and that's your right as a citizen, then I would also contact your representatives and advocate for that.  But that's where I would start. 

I mean, there's a whole -- if you really want to get into this, you can read and watch all sorts of YouTube videos.  Again, that can get you into lots of different potential rabbit holes.  But I'd just say, well, there's more than enough in that clearing for, I'd say, the average person to perk up and pay attention.  And that's where I would start.

Peter McCormack: There's a whole load of stuff, we're going to have to do this again sometime, because there's a whole load of stuff I want to ask you on the physics side of things, like the establishment of physics, where the laws come from, how can laws exist, that whole rabbit hole, but we can do that another time.  I probably won't understand 90% of what you tell me, but I'm actually --

Matthew Pines: Yeah, I'm not the best articulator of those ideas.  I try to read about them.

Peter McCormack: You pretty much nailed the large hadron collider. 

Matthew Pines: Oh yeah. 

Peter McCormack: But look, fuck, oh my God, this is unbelievable.  Matthew, thank you.

Matthew Pines: Thanks for having me.