Off in the Reeds- Episode 5 with Physicist, Zac Long

In this episode of Off in the Reeds Podcast, Zac Long joins the conversation to explore some of the biggest mysteries at the intersection of science, space, and the unknown. As an astrophysicist, Zac shares his perspective on reports of missing scientists, discusses ongoing conversations surrounding UAP disclosure and publicly available government information, and dives into thought-provoking theories about advanced technologies that could challenge our understanding of space and time.

From astrophysics to unexplained phenomena, this episode examines where scientific inquiry ends and speculation begins, inviting listeners to consider the possibilities while asking critical questions along the way. Whether you're fascinated by the cosmos, curious about UAPs, or interested in the future of human knowledge, all in the spirit of going Off in the Reeds. 

If you are an experiencer or seeker wishing to share your story, or if you'd like to come on the show and get "Off in the Reeds," please email us at Podcast@MostMillennial.Media 

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:06

So the question is then if it's not aliens or if they're trying to hide something, maybe there's some tech, maybe there's something that crashed here, and they have like secret tech that they're doing something with. The issue with any of this sort of stuff is almost certainly it would be hidden for a while, right? I mean, the the quintessential example is the Manhattan Project, right?

SPEAKER_02 0:31

Like again, like you said, we have cameras on on like the U2 and stuff like that, and some of these drones we have that are capable of literally like watching you, you know, what see what soap you're using to take a shower.

unknown 0:48

I know that the paranormal is real.

SPEAKER_03 0:56

Hello and welcome to the Off in the Reads podcast. This is a very special episode. I'm joined here by uh two lovely co-hosts. I've got Quinn and I've got Zach here. And we are gonna get off on the reads on some astrophysics.

SPEAKER_02 1:10

We can get on reads now?

SPEAKER_03 1:13

Way off in the reads.

SPEAKER_02 1:14

On the reads, though is what you said.

SPEAKER_03 1:16

Well, we're getting on, off, around, and near the reads. Reads is a substance. We need to explore that as a possibility. It's the ether or quintessence, which seems to be making a full circle in astrophysics right now.

SPEAKER_04 1:28

Exactly.

SPEAKER_03 1:29

Yep. So uh yeah, welcome back, Zach. Thank you for joining us on this new podcast project.

SPEAKER_04 1:36

Yep, excited to be here.

SPEAKER_03 1:38

Yeah, uh long time uh friend of the pod with most millennial podcast. Uh he came on and told us all about quantum computing and why I shouldn't be panicking immediately. But it's it's I'm panicked.

SPEAKER_04 1:52

Don't worry, one day you should panic if we're not quite there yet.

SPEAKER_02 1:55

If if one day I should, then now I must. That's that's the way my brain works. Why procrastinate panic when I can do it today? Exactly.

SPEAKER_04 2:03

Exactly. You have to be pro about these things.

SPEAKER_02 2:07

I don't plan panic, I just live within it. So like you just find that area to live within panic and normalcy. It's just you have to get the slider just right so you you still function through life. Yeah, I mean the blood pressure is always up there, but it's never high.

SPEAKER_04 2:20

Oh, okay, okay, I understand. Yeah, life is all it's all about balance, it's all about balance.

SPEAKER_02 2:24

Life is about living within the pre-hypertension like demographic, but never rising above it or dropping below it. That's exactly.

SPEAKER_03 2:33

Thank you, Quinn. Thank you. And Quinn, yeah, you've been joining us for most of our episodes that we've released so far. Uh, thank you for for hosting with us tonight and coming on off the reeds. On yeah, yeah, yeah, that made sense. Um, so this episode's a little bit of a pivot, but a very welcome one. We had a guest who had to cancel last last minute. Um, Zach, you were gonna help us interview him and provide uh your expertise. Uh I still want to talk about a lot of the topics that we have brought up, but uh Quinn, I think maybe is gonna put you on the spot a little bit with some space questions. Is that okay with you?

SPEAKER_04 3:16

It's good with me. I love space.

SPEAKER_02 3:20

So, like, beginning of time, right? We go we go way back. Way back, way back, way back. Well, okay, you're saying way, way back, but there's like half a billion people in this world that would say like not that far back. But like, how did we all get here? What's the what's the theory you follow? Was a supreme being involved?

SPEAKER_04 3:42

Uh I mean, it's not really a science question.

SPEAKER_03 3:48

I'm just gonna go with that from your scientifically informed mind.

SPEAKER_02 3:53

Religion is religion is a construct of humanity to explain what science can't in many regards. There you go. There's that that God of the gaps sort of idea.

SPEAKER_04 4:01

Yeah, no, I'm I'm personally, I don't think it's necessary to uh live in the universe that we do to have a supreme being. Uh that being said, we get we got no clue what happened before uh the start or what we call the start, which is the Big Bang. Um not sure if you're familiar, but the idea is we started off the time and everything started. Something like I don't remember what the actual number is anymore, 13.6 billion years ago. I think so. It's been updated quite a few times, but something like that. 14. A long time ago.

SPEAKER_03 4:31

13.6, somewhere around.

SPEAKER_04 4:33

Yeah, 13. It might be 13.8, yeah. It's it's somewhere in the 14 billion year ago range. Um, we think that everything just sort of started, and we've been going on since then. There's this period right at the beginning where everything expanded out really quickly, and you can still sort of see that. That's what the uh cosmic microwave background is, right? It's right after that point. There's a point where everything expands very quickly. Quantum fluctuation type stuff is sort of solidified at that point, right after uh I believe it's called Ooh, I didn't look this up beforehand. I'm pretty sure it's called recombination. Basically, it's where the universe cooled off enough so that uh you could form start forming like atoms and things, right? And photons didn't just immediately vaporize everything and not everything was energy, right? So that's C and B cosmic microwave background. Since then we've just been expanding pretty quickly and globing down into these galaxies and stuff, forming planets. We got ours like what 4.5 billion years ago or so.

SPEAKER_02 5:34

Are you more concerned that uh just you know an asteroid the size of like the Empire State Building comes and just takes us out, or that like the sun just evaporates and we all freeze to death?

SPEAKER_04 5:48

So the asteroid one's probably more likely. Um something about the size of the Empire State Building is kind of tricky to see. It's not gonna take everybody out, it's just not it's not big enough. It'd take out a city though, pretty easily. Right. So the ones that are the most dangerous are sort of these like mid-tier um like sub-half mile, a couple hundred or several uh yeah, a couple hundred meter sort of size asteroids that are very difficult to see but could do some serious damage, right? So Empire State Building's sort of getting up there, but if they're anything like a mile or big, we know where all those are, pretty much.

SPEAKER_02 6:26

You've just like kept me up for the next several nights because for basically every bit of my life up until this point, I thought that like you know, the dinosaurs were killed off by like you know, a basically a rock the size of a bus.

SPEAKER_04 6:39

You know, like no, no, it's a little bit bigger.

SPEAKER_03 6:44

Well, we talked about the beginning of time. Do you ascribe to big rip, big crunch, or like uh like heat death, I guess would just be full expansion of the universe or something else?

SPEAKER_04 6:58

So I'm definitely much more of like a heat death person, which sucks because that's the one that freaks me out the most. Yeah, I really wish like I want, I want big crunch. I think that's better, right?

SPEAKER_03 7:11

Because then it's like it is then at least we're cuddling.

SPEAKER_04 7:14

Because then you can like have the universe start over, and that's kind of fun. Oh, that's true. You can have a reboot, right? Right. And maybe it'd be better, unlike all the other reboots that we get normally get, you know. Like the reboot of scrub is not great, you know? It's like stuff like that. Yeah, so we we'd crunch back down and then uh bounce back out, crunch back out, uh bounce back out. That's something that we in theory could be able to check for. I don't think we really know how to check for it yet, or we don't have sense enough instruments to check for it to see if it's happened before. But I I wish there was a big crunch. It looks like it's probably more like either big rip or heat death. Uh, there's been some conflicting sort of numbers recently in our big um in basically the Hubble constant, right? Which is one of our big measures of how quickly the universe is expanding based on different measures. One some from the JWST, some from our old method. I can't remember exactly what. James Webb Space Telescope. Yeah, James Webb Space Telescope. He didn't know that.

SPEAKER_03 8:13

He knew that. Cool. He knew that. I just had to look pompous and arrogant.

SPEAKER_04 8:18

I saw that once, actually, at Goddard, when it was uh still getting sort of tested. It was pretty neat.

SPEAKER_03 8:24

You got to actually see the James. That's so cool. And now it's yeah, it was folded up, unfortunately.

SPEAKER_04 8:29

Yeah, but still pretty dope.

SPEAKER_03 8:32

That's right.

SPEAKER_02 8:33

You've just created like five different ways for me to not go to sleep at night. Like heat death, the crunch.

SPEAKER_03 8:39

Yeah. The big rip.

SPEAKER_04 8:41

The big rip, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 8:42

All serial names. Yeah. Or like I don't know, American Gladiators. Yeah. Yep. Yep.

SPEAKER_05 8:48

And in this quarter, we've got heat death.

SPEAKER_02 8:52

None of those sound appetizing.

SPEAKER_04 8:54

Like no, they're not, they're not great. I mean, to be fair, they're all in timescales that don't really matter, but right.

SPEAKER_03 9:00

I'm really interested by the big rip because you and I talked about this on our our last episode. It's so cool talking to an astrophysicist just like Tuesday night, this is the best. But we were talking about how space is expanding, and so things could be going faster than the speed of light at a certain point. Do you mind yes? I I'm still just kind of baffled by that. Do you mind going over that one more time?

SPEAKER_04 9:26

Yeah, so um effectively, what is happening when we say that uh space is expanding, the universe is getting bigger, things are moving away from us quickly, right? If you think about sort of I don't know, the universe is like the surface of a balloon, you want to put a bunch of dots on it, that's where all the stuff is, right?

SPEAKER_05 9:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 9:45

Uh as you expand the balloon, the dots get further apart, right? But they don't get further apart because they've actually moved, they get further apart because space itself has gotten bigger.

SPEAKER_05 9:54

Right.

SPEAKER_04 9:55

Right. So um basically, as time goes along, as things get further and further away from you, because this expansion factor depends on distance, you can have uh two points in space that are moving away from each other at effectively faster than the speed of light. So the horizon that you're looking at, the stuff that you can see over time gets smaller and smaller and smaller. You just can't see it anymore. And at some point in the distant future, when we've all combined with all the other galaxies around us into one big super galaxy, right? Us Andromeda, because we're gonna run into that in like I don't know, four or five billion years. I can't remember exactly how long it is. It's a while. We got some time, but you know, we're gonna run them, we're gonna run into all of our other um galaxies. We'll just see a big blob of stars and then nothing else eventually.

SPEAKER_03 10:43

Because just our local neighbors, that's it.

SPEAKER_04 10:45

Just the local neighbors, because everything else will have expanded outside of our horizon. Now, uh one caveat to that is that while stuff is still being emitted, and it might actually still get to us from these distant locations, right? It is uh being redshifted all the time. So it's being moved towards the red end of the spectrum. You sort of think of like when uh when an ambulance goes past you, it goes, it gets higher and then lower as it goes away. As it's going away, that's the redshift of the sound. We do the same thing with light. And when stuff expands, when the galaxy expands, all that light gets redshifted, and it's basically redshifted so much that we just can't detect it anymore. The wavelengths become too large for us to be able to detect with any instrument on Earth.

SPEAKER_03 11:29

That's that's wild, that's bizarre. Yeah, see why I had to have him come back to this. Like, yeah, that's it's so counterintuitive because it's like, no, an inch is an inch is an inch, but this is like at a certain point, an inch isn't an inch, and atoms actually start to fall apart because maybe the distances are too great for uh electron orbitals at that point.

SPEAKER_04 11:54

Yeah, so like this happens on larger scales at first, right? But yeah, eventually it will accelerate so much and get so large that it will rip literally all of the atoms in the entire universe apart, and then all the neutrons, and then we're all just in this weird quirk nonsense everywhere, and there's no actual particles anymore, and everything's the same temperature, and it's just it's all it's kind of depressing, honestly.

SPEAKER_03 12:20

Yeah, I I think I like the big crunch way better now. That's why I like the big crunch better. I'm all big crunch.

SPEAKER_02 12:27

The idea of just being eviscerated by something that I couldn't see, even if it's you know, after I'm long in the grave, but like that's terrifying.

SPEAKER_03 12:36

Yeah, yeah, it is.

SPEAKER_02 12:39

Did you find Zach that the more you like learned about space, the more you learned about the math and physics behind it, the the just the more like were you in awe, or were you like more terrified just trying ways to like calm yourself down about the you know unknowable universe that surrounds us?

SPEAKER_04 12:55

See if I can just focus on the math and stuff, I'm generally pretty okay. If I start actually thinking about the ramifications, though, nah, I'm just donezo. I can't do it anymore. I keep that stuff compartmentalized in a little box so I don't have to think about all the all the like you know what happens as T goes to infinity. Yeah, what happens at the end of time? You're just like, well, nope, I don't want to deal with this anymore. And the the thing is, like, if you actually start thinking like that, it's like all this stuff right now, it's like it doesn't, it literally does not matter because it all just like be gone in some time that is you know unfathomable, you know.

SPEAKER_03 13:30

It's like yeah, yeah. For me, it's kind of like medicine. The deeper you get into it, the more you understand, the more you're like, every single cough is cancer, or you know, it's like you become the Google search results.

SPEAKER_04 13:46

Exactly.

SPEAKER_03 13:46

Like you're looking around and you're like, big rip is happening right now.

SPEAKER_04 13:50

I can feel it. I could I can feel myself getting taken apart. Yeah. Yeah. I was like, man, it took longer to get there today than it did previously.

SPEAKER_02 14:01

I feel like that means that in the astrophysics community and just in NASA as a whole, it's it's not a bunch of people that like go to therapy, it's just a lot of drinking. Like, that's the kind of thing that like you know, no therapist could help you with that problem, you know.

SPEAKER_04 14:17

I mean, they don't tell you about that, but you really have to you have to have a a big tolerance because you just can't deal with it all.

SPEAKER_03 14:27

That's awesome. Uh yeah, I guess you are the only astrophysicist in the room. Do you mind telling us a little bit about what that training and what that looked like with NASA? You gave us a little bit off air. Um, but yeah, fill us in what that I don't know if that's an internship or what that looks like for you once you go through your schooling.

SPEAKER_04 14:47

Yeah, so um just as a little bit of background, I went to school, got my PhD at the University of Cincinnati uh back in like when was that? Let's call it 20 beans. Eight years ago. What is that? 2028, 2018, 2018. Yeah, yeah. So back in 2018. Um, during the time at my at UC, I was doing specifically astrophysics related things. So a lot of that um obviously I was getting a degree in physics, so there's lots of just you have to do all the other physics courses, lots of math, lots of um learning about all the fundamental forces, all that stuff. Uh but the actual like astro portion of it, most of that was uh done through uh talking with uh my advisor at the time, Mike, and um one of his friends who worked at Goddard Space Flight Center, her name is Carol. She's pretty big in specifically the uh protoplanetary disk formation um field, I guess. She's been there for like decades now. Yeah. So she's pretty much like one of the world experts. And um we worked a lot together on uh the various different objects that we were looking at. These were all young star systems, and there's a lot of learning of you know how to interpret data specifically, how to look at uh different objects using different instruments, uh trying to figure out specifically what instrument you should be using for a specific purpose and compiling all of that data together to get some sort of um an overall picture of what a system looks like.

SPEAKER_03 16:28

Right.

SPEAKER_04 16:29

And um then I did like uh I would do Monte Carlo simulations on it. So I would like look at the disk itself and try to fit all of the data based on our Monte Carlo simulations, and Monte Carlo is basically just a random sampling sort of idea. I could explain it um better at some other point if we if people are really interested, but just basically we probe things randomly and we get some idea of what it looks like based on uh whatever inputs we've already put in. So we do all this to try to get a good understanding of a system and then try to figure out uh what it's made of, its overall shape, uh where planets might be inside of it, um, how the planets are affecting the overall uh circumstellar disk itself. Sometimes they'll make spiral arms, sometimes they'll make uh little gaps in the disk. And you can see all this stuff visually through either um actual images, like straight up a picture taken. It's a different wavelengths, but there's like a picture of the disk or through interferometry. And interferometry is a way of taking multiple telescopes and combining the data from them in such a way that you can extract out an overall best estimate of what the system looks like. It's basically a way of simulating a larger telescope from a series of um smaller telescopes. But yeah, working with Carol was great. Um, she's been introduced me to a bunch of other NASA scientists. Uh, most of this stuff was done during my actual PhD work. Um, I was looking around for like getting into a postdoc, but I had already been in school for 11 years at that point and uh was not appealing to do another another three for basically no pay, which is what they do. Yeah, like all through all through grad school, I was making like somewhere in the 20k range. Yeah, and that's what I lived off of for like five years, and it's it wasn't too bad back then. I couldn't imagine being somewhere like more expensive than Cincinnati because they still get the same pay. Yeah, but yeah, no, it was it was a fantastic experience. Actually, I really do miss it sometimes. Uh, I currently I'm I'm a tech person, I work in software, so it's like eh, but back then that was it was like probably the funnest, uh, most interesting work I've done in my life. It was it was super cool.

SPEAKER_02 18:45

So, why did you go from being like the dude with crazy stories at Thanksgiving and and go from being like the astrophysics background? Why did you pivot to the software side? Was it just like because software is more lucrative, or was it something you found a passion in that was separate from the astrophysics?

SPEAKER_03 19:07

Well, to be fair, he still has crazy stories.

SPEAKER_02 19:09

Oh no, no, no. I mean, come on. They're still there.

SPEAKER_04 19:13

I haven't gotten away about it. Don't make as quite as many new ones in my current position. Yeah, so um there's a couple of reasons. Uh, one of the things is that as a physicist or an astrophysicist in this case, um, the point I the reason I say physicist is because technically that's what my degree was in. My focus was astrophysics for my research. But uh as a physicist, you have uh very limited opportunities to stay in academia, which is uh unfortunate because that's where I wanted to be. I tried very hard to stay in academia, but because I didn't go to one of like the top schools in the country, it's very difficult to get um like a teaching position or a research position at any of those schools. Like uh I went to some podunk place in Ohio for my um for my undergraduate degree, and my professors were from Caltech, Stanford, uh Yale, and then I can't remember the other, it was another one of the big name schools. Like those were the people who worked out in the middle of nowhere with a group of I think there were seven physics students in my class.

SPEAKER_01 20:26

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 20:26

So, like, I mean, that's the competition you have when you're trying to get into a teaching position. And if you want to do any real research, you're gonna have to go to a bigger school and even more competition there. So it's very difficult to get into, and you kind of have to basically have the right connections. And I had good connections in specifically space science stuff, but at the time there just wasn't very many postdocs to get into, and you have to do a postdoc, right, in order to get any of these teaching positions.

SPEAKER_03 20:53

It's kind of like med school and residency, and you have to it's exactly the same sort of thing, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 20:58

Um except people want to hire doctors and things, you know. Yeah, in theory. So you you pivot over to computer science, but I initially I comp pivoted over to defense contracting.

SPEAKER_02 21:13

Oh, well, that's a hell of a pivot.

SPEAKER_04 21:15

Yeah, so it's it's uh it's a bit different. I was still doing science though at the time. So I worked for um a fairly large defense contractor, um, and I did mostly laser-based physics there, which was a new field for me, but it's not it's physics, you it's light, you know. What how hard can it be? You know, that was the idea. Just call them in the easy. They they it's all shit that wiggles in the in the end, really. Everything's a small oscillator. Um anyway, so I I learned a bunch of like uh that sort of stuff and like some aeronautic stuff, and um it was all cleared work, so you had to like uh maintain the clearance and you couldn't like go places without telling. The government that you're going to a different country and then you have to approve it. It's just it's really annoying stuff. Uh, but it was very interesting work. I did most of my work was in vibrometry, which is where you shine a laser at an object, you um read the interference pattern, and then you extract out the vibrations that are happening there. And the idea was that we were gonna identify things based on their vibrations, right? That was one of the big projects I I ran there. Yeah, uh, super cool stuff. Um, did not like the cleared aspect of it. I got to like the the top secret level, and I was like, nah, this is way too restrictive in my actual life. And I kind of don't want to work in person anymore. So I was looking around and got a remote job at um, I think I've said before, I work at Microsoft now. So I got a remote job at Microsoft, and that was pretty great for a while. So the main the main reason I pivoted into that computer stuff, uh, from the more interesting science stuff is twofold. I mean, one, it pays more and I get to work from home. That's fantastic, right? That was the idea at least. Now I had to go back into works because they're lame, but um, but that I still get paid a lot more than I did previously, which is nice. Uh, but the other reason is I like I didn't really want to make stuff that was helping people blow people up. I mean, yeah, it's like a moral thing after a while. Like they especially when they started making me work on more things that were definitely gonna be used on um used for uh it was ostensibly for defense, but why are you defending yourself? But because you're fighting something, you're gonna blow them up. I mean, it's like yeah for for the specific platforms I was working on, that's what the end goal was, right? So I was like, I don't want to do this anymore, I want to get out. So I because I don't I don't really approve of it. So, you know, even if the work was very interesting, it's morally I couldn't do it anymore at some point.

SPEAKER_03 23:52

Well, and working in a skiff too is really like it sounds silly. You can't take your phone with you, which like that's kind of your lifeline to your loved ones. You can't like it's it's you're you're in work in your cubicle with your computer. And yes.

SPEAKER_04 24:11

That is yeah, you're in the skiff, you're sitting there, obviously in a phone, like you just said. Uh, there's basically no uh like I don't know about you guys, but when I work, I like to listen to stuff unless I'm like actively talking to somebody you're discussing. Yep. Just silence, podcast, dead silence, no podcast, no music, nothing because you don't have internet in there either, yeah most of the time. You are on a air gap system that you can sometimes get an approved USB drive to come in after somebody has looked to make sure that everything is okay on it, and then it's basically only to transfer files for stuff that you're working on, you know. That's that's all you get. So it that's also an absolutely miserable experience. And you're in there like I don't know, eight to nine hours a day, every day. Yeah. So yeah.

SPEAKER_03 24:59

Yeah, I I've had the experience to a lot of my friends have done very similar work with defense contractors and our post-military and all of that stuff, and it it sounds like a a job that is not it's not fun. It's not a fun job, in my opinion. So I'm glad that you found something that fits you a lot better as well, where you can listen to Spotify from your own house and like hang out with all three of your cats.

SPEAKER_04 25:26

Exactly. There you go.

SPEAKER_02 25:29

So is it giving you just kind of like a very broad like experience or grouping of experiences across like three different uh environments within uh like astrophysics astrophysics and and the physics realm in general, are are those just some really hard people to hang out with? Or is that like a place you feel like you're like in your your zone, you're in in the place where you feel like you fit in? Like, because I mean clearly you've got to have a you know a a reasonably high IQ, you've got to be an individual that's able to sustain themselves through 11 years of education, that's a certain type of individual that's capable of doing that. Do you feel like if me being not from the academic environment or background, if I stepped into a astrophysics-based friend group, like would I even be able to tolerate it for five minutes, or is it a difficult scene? Here's my take on that, real quick. Zach Long is rad as hell. No, I know, I know. Like if Zach made it out, you know what I'm saying? Like Zach was able to escape.

SPEAKER_04 26:39

Yeah, so no, uh honestly, good question. And the answer is it's kind of I'm not gonna say 50-50, but there's definitely a certain chunk of people. Like, I'm gonna say it's only like maybe 25% of the people are a little bit off. The rest of the people, they're generally pretty chill, but uh there are definitely a lot of jokes you're probably not gonna get because they're real stupid and they require some niche knowledge that five people in like the whole place know about. You know, it's like it's really dumb stuff like that.

SPEAKER_03 27:15

Is it competitive? Because I see like Eric Weinstein beefing with Michio Kaku, and he's talking about like, no, that's the dumbest thing ever. I don't know why he would say that. Like he's he's an entertainer, he's not a physicist, and I'm thinking, like, well, so's so is Weinstein a little bit. But do you see comp like competition within those circles as well?

SPEAKER_04 27:38

Uh so there's I guess there's two sets of like really people in the circles. There's the um there's like the true academics, the people who are just doing academia, and they can get some beef sometimes, yeah. You know, like um I definitely had a little bit of a beef personally. Another group that sort of scooped me right before I was gonna publish a paper. I had the thing done, and then one day I remember opening up um uh one of the sites that we check for new papers and stuff like that. Yeah, and then I see something with the same um object I was working on. I was like, wait a second. No, and I look through the the list of people and I was like, I know that guy. That's awesome. And I'm like, ah, so yeah, there's some beef started there. Uh but no, for the most part, it's like uh very collaborative. Okay. Um there are some beefs because you're just like trying to outpace other individuals in the field, and most of that's in good fun, right? So in internally, generally it's pretty chill. Occasionally you'll get some people who got some beef, but for the most part, you're trying to be competitive with each other, and a lot of it is collaboration. I had worked with some of the other people on that paper. Uh, you'll just get put on random papers occasionally. Like I got put on a planet discovery one that I didn't even read, and then they're just like, hey, you're on this paper. And I'm like, Okay, cool. What's the paper? And I see it published, I was like, ah, ah, I know that because it was a object I was working on, and I saw that they had actually found the planet that I predicted. And I was like, Yeah, go team. That's awesome. I was like, I didn't do anything for that part, but I was like, you know, I'm still on the paper, so it counts. Um, but as for the like the public figures, there there it seems like something happens when you become too well known in the field that you start talking about absolute nonsensical shit, and it drives me up the wall. So there's more of like they'll have like their own beefs in internally with each other, but there's also like the overarching uh scientific field that they are ostensibly part of kind of starts to hate them after a while because it's like you're really stuff that you're saying is not wrong, right? But it's also not helpful a lot of the time. I mean, some people are just straight up wrong, like um you mentioned Sabine Haasenfeldt. Sabine uh Sabine Haasenfeld, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 30:04

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 30:05

She was legit at one point. I used to watch her videos. I'm like, Sabine's got it going on, and then she started getting into the conspiracy nonsense. They were like, Sabine, what are you doing? Yeah, and she's uh it's a lot more lucrative on that side. Um, so same thing with Michio Kaku. He's uh he's less like grifty than Sabine is, but he's still like he's left the realm of like real science and is now in this like speculative ultra futurism stuff.

SPEAKER_03 30:34

Like is dark matter actually uh gravity spilling over from parallel universes was the thing that Eric Weinstein actually like grilled him on. He just like rolled his eyes and was like, ugh.

SPEAKER_04 30:46

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 30:47

I feel like we get for a future episode we need to get Zach on, and then we need to find somebody who's just a devout flat earther and just let him go hand. I I think that would kill my friendship with Zach. I mean I feel like Zach could could you know go go 40 rounds with them, you know? Like maybe.

SPEAKER_04 31:06

I mean, I could talk at him for a long ass time, but it's just like it's uh there's not there's not a lot you can do once you've once you've gotten in that rabbit hole, like it's very difficult to get people out. I have uh I'm not gonna say friends, acquaintances who I've found out are flat earthers, and I'm like, I've tried. Yeah, just pull them out. There's nothing, there's nothing you can do. They have to generally find their way out themselves.

SPEAKER_03 31:27

Did you see that uh documentary on Netflix where like the guy at the end of it, he's like doing the experiments with lasers shining over water? Yep. And then at the end he's like, Oh, and then it's like cut to black.

SPEAKER_04 31:40

That was the best ending to a documentary I've ever seen. It was so perfect.

SPEAKER_03 31:46

Mic drop. I I it was amazing, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 31:49

I saw that's one of my favorites. There's there's like a meme that they made out of the ending of that movie that's just iconic.

SPEAKER_04 31:54

So, like it is beautiful.

SPEAKER_02 31:56

It I work in real estate, right? And in real estate, there's like one of my my colleagues and mine least favorite statements is you know, oh, you just buy a house and rent it out and it's passive income, and passive being you don't have to do anything and you're getting paid, right? Lies. But like in your field, do you feel like you hear things from other people about astrophysics or just space in general that you're like not true? Pisses me off that you still believe that. Like, watch some YouTube, you idiot. Like, is is there are there some common misconceptions that at this point you're just like biting your tongue because you've explained it 10 times already? I'm gonna hear the list of things that I've asked you.

SPEAKER_04 32:36

Honestly, uh, there's not like common misconceptions that a lot of people get, uh, that I hear aside from like I like like basic things like you know age of the earth type stuff, you know, sp age of space, how far things away are away from each other, stuff like that. Uh, for the most part, that stuff is like fairly chill. I mean, I don't I don't really think there's anything to say about it for the most part. I think the things that actually actively bother me are things I keep hearing from people who just touch the surface and can't tell the difference between the real science and what other people are just saying that is nonsense. Like one of the ones I have run into, I don't know how many times now, and I don't know why it keeps coming up, is this like um it's the electromagnetic sun or liquid sun hypothesis, right? That the sun is a liquid, right? And then it's um that it's like got all these weird specific properties that just don't exist, right? I mean the sun is is a cool thing, right? It's uh it's not it's not this like weird soup of liquid nonsense, it doesn't have surface ripples that propagate like but people hear this sort of stuff and they sort of see sunspots and they start like you know being like, Oh, yeah, no, this makes total sense, and then it leads them down paths that are not helpful to like just I've never heard that.

SPEAKER_03 34:05

Thank you for opening a whole new conspiracy theory too.

SPEAKER_04 34:07

So fun thing um, that guy who what is his name? Hold on, I'm gonna look him up real quick because screw that guy. Uh I saw him in person uh one time give a talk uh at a double ES or triple AS. I think it's triple AS um thing. And I was like, I went there knowing that it was the nonsense crack crack room or crank room. It was the crank room. So every time I would go there, maybe a little maybe that's the reason why he came up with this. Uh but uh it's the crank room. There's always a crank room at these big conferences, and you go there because it's fun, right? Right, and you get to hear the people talk about absolute nonsense. Uh, there was another guy who said that we are not the center of the observable universe, which is patently nonsense.

SPEAKER_03 35:04

Yeah, we are the ones observing, and so therefore using the word observable is problematic.

SPEAKER_04 35:12

Yeah, like when you say that was the funniest part, was like when you say it's a liquid, um sorry, sorry, when you say that you're not the center of the observable universe, I was like, what the what are you even talking about? That that's the definition. I'm at the middle of everything I can see, and he's like, No, it's actually off a bit. Like, we weren't quite at the center of the universe. And he used a bunch of things, like some basic trigonometry to prove it. And then the same uh guy, I think it's Pierre-Marie Robotile, might be him. I think that's the guy who came with the liquid sun hypothesis. Liquid metallic. We'll still throw him shade. I'm throwing shade anyway. I know that he's a he was a crank as well. I think it was this guy at the top.

SPEAKER_02 35:50

Shade to that guy.

SPEAKER_01 35:51

Yep.

SPEAKER_04 35:51

Um, he was he was like, Oh, have you taken into account this new data? And as soon as he said that, I'm like, Oh my god, you're even dumber than I thought you were. That's not the issue here. It's not the data, it's that he's spouting absolute nonsense because you're at the center of your own. It's yeah, doesn't make sense. Oh god, it killed me.

SPEAKER_03 36:10

Well, I I think you're forgetting James Webb is way out far away from us now. And so this is true. Yeah, yeah. So it changes the center just a little bit. It's new. That makes sense, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 36:20

Because we're observing from over there now. Yeah, no, that makes sense. No, even some of it was something like crazy, like 10,000 light years away from where we currently are. That's how far away the center of the observable universe is. So on the universe scale, it's zero, and it doesn't make any sense to make a distinction, but also it's silly because that's right where you are.

SPEAKER_03 36:41

Exactly. That's that's absurd. Um, how do you feel about like some of the popsi people? Like uh, I'll use the Weinsteins in particular because they are on Joe Rogan, they're on all the podcasts, and they're just like very hand wavy with some of the things like they're so smart because they're so smart, it seems like like they uh so Eric Weinstein is straight up an idiot.

SPEAKER_04 37:06

I have heard this man talk a bunch of times, and it's like, oh, they just people just don't understand what I'm saying. I was like, No, you're just talking about things that are just patently wrong. Like, I mean, this is stuff that we have fairly good understandings of, and he tries to come up with this uh new physics to explain like fairly typical sorts of um like his geometric math or yeah, his geometric math stuff or his that that's the one of the big ones was it was like geometric unity or something like that, is what it's called. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 37:37

So like But are you taking the new data into account?

SPEAKER_04 37:41

You know, I haven't I haven't been doing that. I was just writing him. No, it's just it's silly, it's silliness. Uh so you know the issue is anytime you see somebody who is saying that they want to uh effectively redo the entire field of physics, uh, and that they have something that nobody has ever um thought of or figured out before. Like, I mean, he's competent at math from what I can tell, right? From the papers and stuff I've seen. Like he has a I think he has a degree, doesn't he? He's got like a real degree.

SPEAKER_03 38:09

Yeah, he he was actually a professor for a while, I want to say. Yeah, like anything.

SPEAKER_02 38:13

Normally the the whole never before never before seen concept, like that works on infomercials and nothing else. Yeah, like not necessarily branches of physics. Oh no, really.

SPEAKER_04 38:23

No, no, no. Yeah, so no, he's a he's a particularly bad one. Um, but yeah, he's he they keeps wanting to come up with this new physics that he claims nobody has ever been able to disprove or nobody un understands. And you get anybody who is competent in that's the specific field that he's trying to work in, and they pretty quickly just like tear apart everything that he does. Like, I mean, I've looked at the math, it's not like my field, so I'm not like super great at understanding exactly, but even I can tell is like something feels off about this when I'm reading through it. Right, these things don't make sense, you know. Right. A doesn't follow B, doesn't follow C. It doesn't I guess B doesn't follow A. Would make more sense. Anyway, you get what I'm saying. Like the steps just don't make they don't make a lot of sense, and um it makes it like feel like he's just sort of hand-waving things that are actually important to what would be true if his theories were true, if that makes sense. So Eric Weinstein is particularly bad about this sort of stuff, but he's one of those ones who is competent enough to uh make it seem like he knows what he's talking about to the layman and to people like uh Rogan who will just believe basically anything if you tell him and you sound smart enough, if you use enough words that he doesn't understand.

SPEAKER_03 39:39

So do do we pivot now just to the crazy shit? I mean, we brought up Joe Rogan, so we invoked him. I feel like we need to move to some of the off in the reads topics that that we talked about. Is that okay with you, Zach?

SPEAKER_04 39:52

That's cool. I do want to mention one more person though, since I um remembered him after hearing about Eric Weinstein, Avi Lobe. Yeah, but Avi Lobe, you need to be stopped, man.

SPEAKER_03 40:02

I wanted to bring up three i Atlas when you were talking about objects and measurements and all that stuff. Now that there's more coming out, and it's like, no, this is probably a natural object.

SPEAKER_04 40:11

Yep. He keeps doubling down though. He drives me insane. Like at first, I'm like, like, I don't know, it's kind of cool. Maybe it'll be something interesting, but he keeps doing it. He I just think he likes the popularity. Like he was he's he was a good, he probably still is an excellent scientist, but then he just like he's letting it get to his head.

SPEAKER_03 40:29

Do you think there's gonna be a four-eye lobe? And then he's just like, This is it for real this time.

SPEAKER_04 40:36

I mean, he's gonna say it.

SPEAKER_02 40:38

I I feel like the whole three eye atlas thing has been one of those uh intellectual missions where a guy made a mistake saying, like, this is probably a spacecraft, it's glowing. Can't explain why it's glowing, but then he was like, Wait, shit, I'm wrong. And then he's like, No, no, no. No, no, no, I've got to defend this now because my entire professional credibility is on the line. Like, I'm just gonna find ways to try and like he he just takes you know, like the political campaign of just defeating everybody else's objection rather than defending his own assertion, right? Like maybe that the the whole three i at this thing is all just a it's it's a gimmick that he just now has to sell.

SPEAKER_03 41:15

I think you described Avi Lobe in a nutshell. Uh there was really weird stuff about it, like jet symmetry and composition and all, but it was not from this galaxy. And so yeah, but we're using it. Or from this solar system, I'm sorry, yeah, it's not from the solar system. Yeah, really cool.

SPEAKER_02 41:33

They're using imagery and and like uh I guess scanning that is from how far out at this point, like right, it's it's still pretty far out there, am I wrong with it? No, it would be difficult, but also like the whole I I don't know, the the idea that that's some spacecraft from another you know galaxy is a bit far-fetched to me.

SPEAKER_03 41:56

Um, yeah, no, I I think he looked at like some of the weird things with it, and when like instead there's in medicine when you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras. And I think he's like, that's definitely a fucking giraffe.

SPEAKER_04 42:12

Yeah, that is about the leap that he made, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 42:18

Yeah, and I I appreciate like going back to medicine too, like you have to have your differential diagnosis, like what could all of these things be? But then you kind of have to hone in a little bit with that list and get to the most likely immediately alien spacecraft.

SPEAKER_02 42:34

Immediately.

SPEAKER_03 42:35

Are you sure this isn't a pimple on my ass? No, sir. That is actually an implant from an alien spacecraft, or it is itself an alien spacecraft.

SPEAKER_04 42:46

Never know.

SPEAKER_03 42:48

Yeah, thank you for bringing up Avi Loeb. Um, should we talk maybe about some of the specific scientists that uh have disappeared, like have been made disappeared? Did you look into this at all as far as like uh Amy Eskridge with her anti-grav stuff?

SPEAKER_04 43:09

Yeah, so I looked into Amy Eskridge a bit more and I looked into the general list of the disappearing sci disappeared scientists. I'm gonna find out my find my list here again because apparently I closed it.

SPEAKER_03 43:23

First off, you would have a better pulse on this. Uh the Huntsville, Alabama propulsion lab that she made using like evaluating anti-gravity propulsion. How credible should I take that as like an actual thing, or is it just like a money laundering I don't know.

SPEAKER_04 43:42

The thing that she has been doing, I would say, is is not is not legit at all. Like that it would not I would not find it anything there to be credible. There's no there there. There's no there there. Like uh recently I think that she came up with a presentation, which I did watch just to like, you know, sort of refamiliarize myself with um uh which sort of stuff she was talking about and there is nothing that I can tell that has come out from that group or from her in particular that is not a widely debunked older theory. Like most of the stuff that they've uh talked about in there is uh from like 50 years ago and some of the newer stuff is I mean it's just like some of it's sort of interesting. She talks about some things that are interesting but there's not no smoking guns there. There's nothing that actually is uh has been shown to be a legitimate uh anti-gravity type thing. I mean well I've got to say right up front that the idea of anti-gravity is almost certainly uh not a thing that we can ever make because it requires uh negative mass for true anti-gravity now the other thing that people talk about a lot of time is like reactionless drives also something that is probably at least in our current laws of physics not possible neither of those things are technically possible and a reactionless drive is that like accessing vacuum energy or like zero point energy or no so that's slightly different okay um so a reactionless drive is basically a drive uh propulsion device that doesn't use an actual like a it doesn't shoot anything out the back right it's reactionless in the sense that there's no reaction there's no momentum that comes out of the back there's only forward motion right there's a force without stuff coming out right no reaction um and uh like zero point energy or free energy this is the idea that when you have things that are very very small or very very close together there is some sort of force that will push them together for example there's like I think one it's called the Casimir effect.

SPEAKER_03 45:54

Yeah yeah where there's like two pieces of foil that'll actually get like pushed together if there's enough electrons uh because there's more force bouncing on the outside of them versus on the in between the two plates the very thin plates effectively gas you have to have of the the center evacuated effectively entirely for this sort of thing to even happen.

SPEAKER_04 46:18

And um from what we know that there's no way to really extract any usable energy out of that.

SPEAKER_03 46:23

Because you'd have to move the plates every time and that takes there there's energy that has to be put into the system that you cannot get back out.

SPEAKER_04 46:29

There is no free energy there. It's like the whole um I'm sure you guys have ever heard of Maxwell's demon uh I've heard of it but yeah please uh the basic idea is that you can have a box right it's got particles in one side and the other side they're both uh pretty evenly set and then you have this little demon who can perfectly open up a little door separating the two uh boxes right right next to each other divider in the middle opens up a little door that lets particles through one way but not out the other and the idea is that you could be able to like you know if you did this for long enough and if you had precise enough uh control you could get all of the stuff from the right hand side of the box to the left hand side of the box for example so you would have evacuated this entire side of the box and you have double the pressure on the other side of the box right and the idea is like this is a way that you could like move things around without uh using like without having any energy in put into the system right you're you're effectively pumping things over with no energy the issue is but you have to always move stuff on the box so that takes energy right it's the same sort of thing you have to put in more energy to do this than you're getting out in the first place. Right right right yeah so with her stuff it sounds like a lot of debunked older attempts at anti-draft yeah I couldn't find anything legit from it I did look and I was trying to uh see some stuff there was some like uh also some weird things that she kept bringing up about like uh some of these people who had been developing this uh this technology and they have either disappeared or mysteriously vanished or been killed or something like that. They died or you know were suicided as people say yeah so I didn't I didn't find anything too legit about that. Yeah I I guess my question like playing conspiracy theorist tinfoil hat um if if this is something that could be weaponized would it be made secret like like would it be published in the public domain if it had some sort of military value or like what's the chances of it being so uh I don't know top secreted and square like taken away that it's it's not in the public view uh something like anti-gravity for example yeah like some sort of uh way of or like a deck beam or whatever whatever whatever happens to yeah I mean the the issue with any of this sort of stuff is almost certainly it would be hidden for a while right I mean the the quintessential example is the Manhattan Project right then we blew up a nuke then we blew up a nuke people figured it out at that point yeah we we did uh was it we did a hydrogen bomb and we did a um fission bomb we did both didn't we I think for that yes yep we definitely made both I think we detonated both as well what is a test for each um but anyway so like that was hidden but people still knew about it outside of um outside of the Manhattan project to some degree and then later on it like came out obviously and this was like a big thing uh the issue with any of these sorts of breakthroughs though or any of this sorts of stuff it's not generally an issue of us or somebody else not having the knowledge it's about like funding and how much stuff you can put into it. If you know about um the nucleus for example or if you know about any of this sort of stuff basic physics will get you to the point eventually where you would come up with a nuclear bomb. And this thing is something that has been it had been theorized beforehand it had been come up with by a bunch of different people in the field and they just could not or would not execute on it. But if you come up with something like anti-gravity it's the same sort of thing should happen in theory. Everybody around the world should come up with this at around the same time. The same thing happened with even like basic stuff like calculus right like right calculus was developed separately two different places at the same time because the stuff that had been built up to that point in the zeitgeist or then like within the field had gotten to a point where it's like this is the next logical step right and we have seen none of that sort of stuff in this sort of case right but I mean it is something like if somebody did come up with one of these things before everybody else there would be some like large amount of dominance that would have it. It's like uh what is that movie about the about the bomb where they we can't have a nuclear bomb gap or whatever it was um it's an old black and white movie. Anyway it's the same story about Dr. Strange Love kind of Doctor Strange Love thank you it's the Dr Strange Love like sort of idea where it's like you can't have that gap because everybody's coming up with the stuff at the same time and they all know about it.

SPEAKER_02 51:19

You can't keep the stuff secret you can't like really um you can't hide it from everybody because if it's something that a person can figure out more than one person has figured it out right right it's it was really not necessarily a race to like do the thing build the thing blow it up it was like who has the balls right because like there were conceivable I mean to some degree yeah that was a big issue because they're like if we don't detonate this is it gonna blow up the whole world yeah the atmosphere could react with it right yeah yeah that was that was one of the big things and then eventually if somebody's just like nah we got to do it that's insane.

SPEAKER_03 51:54

Can you imagine that guy I don't want to be the guy push that button personally yeah well back to like the being disappeared I as I put in air quotes thing did you see some of those tweets that uh Frank Milburn put out about Amy Eskeridge I I put that in the email and it's like a lot of weird paranoid tweets between Amy Eskridge and her friend Frank Milburn.

SPEAKER_04 52:19

So I didn't read through all of them I did see a couple but I did did not read through all of them.

SPEAKER_03 52:23

And that's okay. There was a lot there and it's all like yeah it was like 17 pages or something like that. Yeah it was like a lot we went through these not long ago yeah um we we we went through some of these tweets and just frankly bizarre like she's showing bruises and like burned blinds on her house and like all kinds of weird stuff that looks like microwave uh heat radiation and stuff um and then I I just want to straight pivot yeah into the the the conspiracy realm oh we're already there like let's jump in with both feet and and I'm just gonna ask a hypothetical right I'm ready I I I think I I have a multitude of questions but with with this this gal right getting like bruises and and random you know shit happening and then disappearing whatever right like what are they what what are they trying to hide?

SPEAKER_02 53:19

Like because to some degree okay there's always the narrative in every movie that the aliens are bad and it's you know we're like oppressed by this alien you know force that comes to earth and just tries to take us all out and then like you know you have whoever it's it's always you know some big name actor that's too old to be on screen anymore. Come and save the day probably Tom Cruise Tom Cruise is a great example um come and save the day and it's like oh you know the aliens bad right so like I I do feel to some degree there's been some narrative shaping around aliens in general we watched Disclosure day recently which was an interesting uh conspiracy step to think almost like the aliens did you see that Spielberg movie? No I've wanted to see it I have not seen it yet okay I won't spoil it for you but basically the notion is the aliens are bad or not bad are not bad. Yeah yeah and so I I think it's an interesting uh perspective though like people that actually dig into this get close to it and then disappear or get suicided right um and it's like what what are they actually hiding if if if even if we're we're not talking conspiracy it's just some technology that you know whoever is trying to develop or whatever like what is that and why are they trying to hide it it it's that's the thing that's concerning to me because if it is aliens clearly they're they're not here to destroy us all and like send their orb down to like you know take us over. Right.

SPEAKER_04 54:41

Yeah yeah no 100% I I agree with that like uh let's let's go through this I guess the logic of it I if first of all if aliens were here I mean they we can't do anything anyway right I mean they've already made it across interstellar distances we couldn't do that if we tried at all right now right it's just not possible for us we don't have the technology if they were able to get here then there is nothing we can do to them just straight up we look we lost already yeah right so the question is then if it's not aliens or if they're trying to hide something maybe there's some tech maybe there's something that crashed here and they have like secret tech that they're doing something with I guess you would want to hide it just so that people were unaware or your I guess your enemies like abroad were unaware I don't ever think it's like this idea that um people are hiding it because like the big oil companies want to uh stifle it which is something that comes up a lot especially with the sort of free energy type thing like you cannot tell me that if um there was anti-grav or free energy tech that existed Elon Musk would not have stolen it and said it was his yeah that's true Tesla if that was possible yeah it would be a thing like Starship would be already a thing it'd be he'd be already on Mars like it's like so so I guess then what is the what is the motivation there I I don't really have good ones. I've tried to think about this a decent amount and I can't think of one that is not aside from they just don't want people to know for some reason.

SPEAKER_03 56:17

Yeah I'm open to suggestions but I don't know I I I think that if it's something uh fundamental to the nature of reality that might be like an upset of like the status quo somehow and power dynamics and if if there was a different understanding about the nature of reality that would change who's currently at the top like why would we accept Donald Trump being our leader if if we knew what was behind door number two um that's something that I wonder about is like power dynamics and uh going back to like the zeitgeist like what is our beliefs as like the human race and as a culture of people I I this came to mind and I had to Google for names and and record but Zach have you heard about the water car car dudes have you heard about this uh like cars that run on water cars that run on like salt water and then use electrolysis to separate or separate hydrogen so it it's maybe there's some some questionable physics there right but I and and okay he was found in a court of law to be fraudulent but even after the fact he had he had investors lining up for his product and some of them from big oil some of them from private equity groups right but then a second guy tried to do the same thing was able to replicate it in his garage and was not found guilty in a court of law for fraud took the the invention and showed it off to some investors and then promptly thereafter died as well saying the same thing that they poisoned him and so like to some degree maybe maybe he maybe the the the water powered car thing is a farce but maybe he was on the precipice of some some technology regardless.

SPEAKER_04 58:08

See this is always the question right like especially when there's like weird stuff that like this that happens where you have somebody who has ostensibly this really big uh groundbreaking technology and then they die for mysterious reasons or whatever it happens to be a lot of times you look into it and it's not that mysterious but other times it's like I don't know about what happened with this particular individual that you're talking about.

SPEAKER_02 58:31

But it it does raise questions right yeah I will I will say that the water cars thing there's nothing inherently wrong with the idea of having well cars powered by water the issue is it takes a lot more energy to right uh to do electrolysis than you're gonna get a gas well and it's crazy because the the eyewitness accounts say that he clutched his throat in gasp they poisoned me that was his last moment but he was diagnosed to have a I believe it was like a cerebral let me see but he died of like a brain aneurysm yeah cerebral aneurysm but clutched his throat and said they poisoned me.

SPEAKER_04 59:09

I need to have some sort of badass last words like that like for real that would be a actually no quick aside have you guys ever thought about what your last words are I I know what I want mine to be that's which I'm asking.

SPEAKER_03 59:20

I have I haven't thought of anything good I want to hear yours.

SPEAKER_02 59:24

Okay so I don't know what context this would be in but I want to be able to legitimately say right before I die there's too many of them I don't care what it is it's got to be too many of them though yeah I think I've decided that mine are gonna be did you know that 15 minutes could save you 15% or more last words Geico pays for my funeral like just completely trolling your family like come closer come closer my child that is awful that would be great have I told you about how I want my body taken care of once I've got once I'm dead concerned be loaded into a cannon and fired across an entire auditorium of people so you just like flail like you there's no like I don't know that's that's up to maybe my wife says no no last wishes and all that right thank you for taking us on that aside that is beautiful there's too many of what that's a great question because he's an astrophysicist by by trade so when he says that maybe maybe they start looking at his papers a little different you know maybe it could be good it could be like there's no there's too many chicken chalupas oh my god I can't eat them all I don't know could be something like that we'll have to find out ask me in and hopefully quite a long time you never know like we we may be putting you on on the radar by this conversation alone you know you are in the right field you know like be careful you got to commit that to memory be ready for it make it muscle memory to just say I mean you know hopefully not soon but you just need to keep saying the Geico line just like I can say that off the rip. Like did you know 15 minutes could save you 15% or more contracts like that's that's that was flawless off the tongue right exactly so last words ready.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:26

Yeah totally I want if you guys get an email about from me about some big discovery I've had and then never hear from me again.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:33

There were too many there were too many of them we're we're we're ready Zach we'll we'll make sure that it's you know talked about on Twitter and never fully published and then we'll die too and that's you know it's the way these things work.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:47

I want to pivot entirely to um Jack Parsons and JPL uh propulsions do you do you know much about like the weird occult stuff that Jack Parsons was into so I've heard of him and I have looked at his stuff previously but it has been a while I know he's into like some really weird occult stuff and he was actually like a legit like I guess engineer scientist type guy beforehand.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:14

Yeah yeah he founded JPL he he was in the OTO right yes yeah which is fantastic a wild guy but he was actually doing sex magic rituals yes sex magic rituals uh I mean it's the OTO yeah for those of you don't know it's the Ordo Temple Templi Orientis or something like that Orientis yes Ordo Templi Orientis Golden Dawn is is another uh I'm I'm not sure maybe I'm mixing them um but he was a follower of uh Alistair Crowley and like generally speaking thelema which is like the the religion that Alistair Crowley tried to build um and he did ritual sex magic that he documented in a diary that you can find archived online and it's like they go through like first we turn to the west and we do this ritual and then he's like this ritual is omitted and then it keeps but he was trying to invocate and incarnate a goddess of the moon to be born through this child that was conceived during this sex magic ritual but he's the man who's in charge of our rockets I think it seems like the logical choice you know I in the job interview what are you into yeah you know sex magic man sex magic and red rockets baby yeah exactly like um yeah you're well mind you though like that's the guy responsible for jet propulsion technologies when when we've got Kimi Kimmy J oon over in North Korea Rocket Man and all his craziness yeah we've got to balance it out you need a dark wizard we do not have a department of defense if we do not have individuals to balance out the crazy yin and yang yeah like sex magic could be the answer to defeating North Korea hot take but we might be able to hear from they're all addicted to porn now how much have we yeah that the you you haven't heard about the North Koreans?

SPEAKER_02 1:04:23

No so it was alleged that the North Koreans so they were inserted to go help the Ukraine or help the Russians against the Ukrainians? Yes I didn't the Ukrainians got them all addicted to porn oh jeez because they don't have like access to any of that in North Korea and so they don't have like an open internet right no not at all they have like this red star network which like is completely controlled and filtered and it's basically uh like cable internet where you just change channels it's bizarre but allegedly all of the North Korean army is addicted to porn now and pretty useless but um that was like a revelation for them. Yeah that that's wild sense no we don't have any sex magic departments anymore do we as far as I'm aware yeah I don't think so I I think the last one was well the last one we know of was taken away whenever that island got raided yeah no that's probably what it was that was the Department of Sex Magic Defense got taken down that day. Yeah um and their fearless leader was the toilet paper took out the Fearless leader so um we may never know if that was crazy.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:30

Yeah. Well the reason why I bring him up is because like a lot of the NASA projects have like Greek god names or uh pay some sort of homage to these mythical beings and these magical beings. Um there's a lot of conspiracy theories around that as well like like the people will get their tinfoil hats and draw lines and be like can't you see it the Osiris mission um What do you think about the references to like astrological Greek gods and things like that?

SPEAKER_04 1:06:08

I mean, my real take is that the NASA's a bunch of nerds and they like the idea of Greek gods as names because we already got all the planets and stuff named after uh I guess the Roman gods. Yeah. Right? And then the Greek gods is like our spacecraft usually. Yeah. Right? So, like, I mean, you just got they like the parody, they like the nerdiness. However, I'm gonna say that that makes a lot of sense. If they're using the um these things, like the spaceship might be like just a name for the project, just so they can have something, but realistically, all of the energy that they're pouring into it, if you subscribe to this idea that maybe the uh gods need some sort of like level of belief to give them power, like D. Yeah, like DD style, right? Or um oh no, he's cancelled now. I was because I had the guy who wrote American gods, right? But fantastic book, but oh well, you know, you lose your favorite authors because they're sex pests. Anyway, um, but yeah, like you had to like pour enough belief into them, and there you go, they're using this uh this additional funding and belief and pouring it all in there so that they can do additional work to bring back their gods. You never know. That could be I mean that sounds like a legit idea to me.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:25

It's like the orcs in 40k. If you believe red is faster and everybody psychically believes it, of course it's faster.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:33

Exactly. We just have a weak version of that, it's not quite as obvious as the the orcs, but we got that still, you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:39

Yeah, yeah, clearly.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:42

Um, I want to be cognizant of your time, and we haven't even talked on the war.gov UFO stuff. Do you want to give us your your brief overview and then I'll ask you about a couple specific things?

SPEAKER_04 1:07:53

Yeah, so a brief overview is that for the most part, um, this a lot of the especially the videos and stuff is like blob squatch, right? Yeah, you know, like you don't really see what it is, you can't tell. Um, the one video you did link was very interesting looking. I don't know what was going on if that was really cool.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:09

The one that went into the clouds and then did the 90 degree turn and came out.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:14

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:15

That that I mean looks really cool. Uh again, it's not really resolved well enough to tell what in the world it is. That's some weird behavior, definitely. But for the most part, um the thing is people keep claiming there's like some really juicy videos and good stuff in the docs that just have not been released yet. Because if we've had like two tranches, right? Or have we got three now? Three we just had the recent one, right? Three three tranches now. And I haven't seen anything that is like really groundbreaking to me, but I keep hearing that there's some there's stuff, you know. Yeah, always stuff.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:46

So where what what what gives, right? Because we're we're somehow capable of recording in 120 frames per second 4k resolution of football, move 10 yards down a field, but the equipment we have mounted to planes to you know scope out the Taliban or something is you know 480p, 12 you know frames per second. And when we see something worth looking at, we're like, holy shit, we can't focus on it. You know, like we we can't track this thing anymore. You know, it's I mean, come on, man. And then also, like, y'all don't have telescopes and shit that can you know turn fast enough to keep track of this. It's like I I I struggle to believe that what's being posted, if it's let's say for the sake of of this narrative, that all of it is of actual UAP, it's not just a guy that's paramotoring, it's not you know, random, you know, planes that are flying across the sky. But like, if that is the case and the government knows this is going on, like the the best footage is is just being absolutely wasted, but also the the I struggle to believe as an American citizen who can have AI generate literally anything, and technology is insane. That the best footage we have is being posted right now, because like that would to me, if I was a foreign nation and I saw the camera quality of these things, I'd say we could fuck them up. Like, I mean, because I'm clearly their their missiles only see things in 260p. You know, it's like we we can see the pour on a man's face before the missile hits him, you know. It's like I don't know that we got that ability if this is what they're showing us.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:29

No, it's a that's a good point. So I guess there's a couple explanations for that, at least in my mind. And we can talk about like the transcripts here in a little bit, because those are actually, I think, more interesting, the transcripts are me too. Um, but the uh for videos, like uh there's like two main things. Either A um the really good quality videos that we have show what the thing actually is, and it's clearly not a UAP, right? Which is the reason why we only get the bad ones, or uh B, they're holding all the best ones back for some reason. And maybe they're just like giving us little drips of stuff, you know, so that we get used to it, and then eventually they'll show us a straight up 4K alien autopsy nonsense, like a real one, not that fake one that they did a few years ago.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:14

Uh but I will say one thing, just cameras mounted on planes. Yeah, most cameras mounted on planes are not for looking at things with any sort of resolution because it takes a lot of effort to process that stuff. Ah, that makes sense, and you want somewhat lower resolution stuff because you don't actually need to know. Like I'm I'm gonna call bullshit.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:38

Uh I mean my iPhone has a better camera that can see like for like as far as these things can. Can it live stream from Afghanistan? Yes, in fact, it could. My iPhone could live stream in 4K from Afghanistan, like legitimately, like, but also you're telling me that the limitation is video processing when we like again, we can track a football moving down a field and you can see the stippling on the leather, but the the cameras we have on multi-million dollar defense area.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:13

No, no, you're right, you're right. If they're if they're visible light cameras, they should be doing way better than that. Most of the stuff is IR, but even so, we can get way better IR cameras.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:20

I think the iPhone 3 had a better camera than most of these videos are recorded with. Like I mean, yes, 100% they do. That to me, inexpensive.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:28

It's not it's not it's not great. Yeah, I mean, the cameras are they're somewhat suspect, like how bad they are. I think a lot of these are older videos, though. There's not much modern day video stuff, is there? Like actual, like this is all stuff from like 10 or 15 or 20 years ago.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:43

Some of them are videos 2024, 2025.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:47

They're still look crappy. I didn't look at the dates on them. Yeah, no, that's just not great. There's got to be something, but or they're just keeping all the good stuff back. Like I know they have low resolution cameras on planes, yeah, because of reasons. Uh, but they also have other cameras on planes that might be better. And like I know that like uh the big spy planes, they have fantastic cameras on them, yeah, right? They can see like you picking your nose from 80,000 feet. Yeah, you know, it's very good stuff, so it exists. We're just not seeing any of it.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:15

The U2 was invented and deployed like 30 years ago, though. Like way more in the 70s. Yes. Nikon and Canon have come a long way. Hell Apple they could definitely do it. Yeah, I mean, like you're you I think it's those those have to be downscaled uh in some way or just highly screwed up on in post. Yeah, because there's just like again, like you said, we have cameras on sp on like the U2 and stuff like that, and some of these drones we have that are capable of literally like watching you, you know, what see what soap you're using to take a shower, right? Like these things are plane. And I keep yelling at the plane in my shower, get out of here, get out of here. Exactly.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:00

Yeah. Um, that's why I think the uh debriefs were much more interesting. The PDF documents. Yes. What did you think about the Apollo documents where they're like talking about stuff coming into the capsule or they're seeing like debris floating when they shouldn't be? Like, what what's your take on that?

SPEAKER_04 1:14:21

So, I mean, obviously, some of them it's like probably nothing, but then also like stuff coming into the capsule or them seeing uh like I can't remember which one it was of these that was talking about uh like seeing something that is clearly visible out the window, like and it looks like a a physical object sort of like going around doing weird stuff, right?

SPEAKER_03 1:14:49

Yeah, it looks like a briefcase momentarily and then it changes angles and it looks like a tube. And so they're like, I don't know. This looks like a briefcase, and they're arguing with each other too.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:00

Jaggedy stuff out the window. It's all it's all super cool. I I don't know what it is exactly, obviously. And could it be it depends on you know, are they misinterpreting things? Is it something that is further away? It sounds to me like in some of these transcripts they think that stuff is like right outside the window or close enough that they can see a physical shape there, which is very interesting.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:19

Yep. See, that brings me to my next my next harsh objection, maybe hot tag. And and you can probably speak to this.

SPEAKER_05 1:15:28

Sure.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:30

What what what in the shit have we been doing in the ISS this whole time? Like, surely they've done all the plant experiments and all the zero grab shit like years ago, if that's what they were doing. But every like major nation that has a you know space program's been like, we want to be up in this this sucker. And I mean, if there is you know extraterrestrial shit going on, I think that we especially if there's stuff floating outside the Apollo capsule, like were we really you know learning how plants adjust to zero gravity? You know, like that's what they show in the movies and stuff, and like you know, like doing all these experiments, like you can only float around and like try shit out for so long before it's like maybe we're like defending ourselves or having conversations with some folks from out of town, because last I checked, that thing was up there since what 98, 90, 99, it was in the 90s. I can't remember the exact year, but it was in the 90s. We've been up there quite called around up 30 years. Let's call it 30 years. We've been up there. You you can grow plants in about two years, so we got that done with. We're trying shit out in zero gravity, seeing how different like forms of life do, give it three or four years. You know, we've written a couple of papers, you know, dudes have done backflips and drank water out of there and all that bullshit.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:45

I love when they do that.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:46

Yeah, but yeah, it's always a mess. What were we doing for the other 20 some odd years that were up there, especially knowing this now? I have to say, I don't think it was growing plants. What do you think? Growing space weed up there.

SPEAKER_04 1:17:00

Exactly. Uh no, I mean, like most like a lot, a lot of the like actual uh experiments that they do, from my understanding. Like, think of an experiment that you want to do on Earth and you can do it in space. You can justify why you'd want to do it in space. So there's always kinds of stuff you can do. Um, I'm gonna say though, that if if there were a bunch of aliens up and around there, they got really good cameras on the ISS. Yeah, like we would see them. There wouldn't be any of this nonsense with it. They would be. I've seen some of the pictures, they're wow, gorgeous. Yeah, but you haven't seen anything too too good come out of that. It's like always the uh the crappier cameras, or in this case, them just seeing it because back in what was it? I don't remember when Apollo 17 was like 71. Yeah. Anyway, like uh yeah, they didn't have great cameras back then, but even so, you think that somebody would have whipped something out if they were you're telling me, Zach, that we were able to live stream in the 70s from the surface of the moon. Yeah, it was dope.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:04

Yeah, because that's a thing. But then also, like we we couldn't make a cell phone call at that period of time remotely. But we were able to live stream what was at the time high fidelity video and audio from the surface of the 240p, but you know, yeah, for the time, come on. For the time, it's pretty good.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:23

The fact that we could live stream that at all is crazy. Actually, fun thing. Um, this is just an aside from uh them having to that had to be a live stream because they could not record a video long enough. They didn't have a media format, exactly. They didn't have a media format that could contain the to the however many hours it was they were live streaming for. It's crazy. But yeah, no, so they could do that, and they well, I guess they just didn't take out the camera or the pictures when they were doing that stuff in the back at the time, and and pardon the the language on this one, but were we just raw dog in space?

SPEAKER_02 1:18:57

Because, like, quite frankly, like the Saturn V rocket had a computer system that was less complex than a TI-84 graphing calculator. Oh, yeah, 100%. The battery capacity of it theoretically wasn't strong enough or of capacity enough to make it to the moon. So, like, I I I don't take the whole like you know, the the moon land whatever. But I have to ask, like I think we maybe maybe we did go to the moon, but we were just raw dog in space. Like, you know there was a lot of raw dog in space, I think.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:32

That's the episode title, by the way. Rawdog in space. That's a great yeah, I love it.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:37

I mean, so like what do you do up there, right? Like, you don't first of all, you don't need the the computers on while you're floating. Like, I mean, you already did it.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:43

I mean, but you need life support systems, you need yeah, yeah. Well, you know, you know, those can just a lot of stuff can be passive, I suppose, but but hey, perpetual motion machines, right? Like maybe they are a thing. That's not you know, we were we were circulating the air in the craft, you know, like rubber bands if you do it right. Like they just I've seen it on the five-minute crafts you know, brain rot before and it's possible.

SPEAKER_04 1:20:09

So clearly I mean, yeah, on TikTok, really anything is possible if you if you believe.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:14

I mean, that's a scientific community unlike any other, but but but uh on a real side though, uh we've we've not really gotten a good explanation for how we got from point A to point B and how miraculously because to me shooting a speeding rocket to to a point A to point B is impressive, but it's like okay, like it's just a missile, but bigger. Dude, you think about the sex magic before you get it. See, did the sex magic allow for telecommunications devices to somehow just cr like propagate and exist, just poof into reality that we could somehow make the longest distance phone call uh uh in mankind's history.

SPEAKER_04 1:20:56

How do you think they powered it? Come on, man. There you go. The sex magic on the ship. Yeah, and they had to leave somebody on the ship the whole time just in case to keep it powered. The jerk energy, you know, was what was powering the whole thing.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:14

No, I mean, but on a real note, like those things mentioned, right? It's impressive. No, it's incredibly not impressive. I have to sit here and go, like, whose homework did we steal? Slash, were they lying to us about the batteries on this shit? Did we always did we have this technology years before? Like, did we go if these things like are some pretty severe limitations, right? Like, again, we were not capable of making just a voice-only cell phone call from a device smaller than a room, but somehow we were able to communicate from the moon.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:52

I don't know what to tell you. I mean, it it clearly happened. Well at least I think it clearly happened. Uh I think the difference is one was like tens of millions of dollars, and you couldn't afford that on your phone, I suppose, at the time. Yeah, you could miniaturize it, I suppose. But also the antennas, like imagine this. If you had to call somebody with your cell phone, but in order to hear you, they had to have antennas the size of building, you know.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:20

Yeah. But if the antennas are the size of the building, where'd they fit in the rocket? No, no, no. The transmitter. Oh, oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:22:27

Yeah, like as like uh you can like have a little laser pointer that you're flashed on one side, and I could see it 20 miles away if I've been big enough telescope, right?

SPEAKER_03 1:22:35

Right.

SPEAKER_04 1:22:36

That's the idea.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:37

Um, going back to the sex magic, is that why we see all of these spaceships look so phallic?

SPEAKER_04 1:22:45

I mean, nature designed it that way for a reason.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:52

Zach, thank you so much. Um, any final thoughts on the war.gov stuff or any anything else that we got off in the reads with today?

SPEAKER_04 1:23:01

No, I first of all, I do love the uh the titles podcast. I think you mentioned it at some point previously when we talked, and I think it's fantastic. Thank you. But uh I would say for the most part, like especially the war.gov stuff, I really wish it was more compelling. I do enjoy watching it and reading all this stuff because especially the transcripts and especially the Apollo ones, the ones that you sent over, um, are super fascinating. It's like what were they seeing? What was happening? Yeah, because we don't have a video, we can't we can't look at it, we can't debunk it. I think it's just super cool. It's and I love conspiracies. I read them and look at them all the time. None of them I think are real. Aside from uh the fact that it is definitely uh Baron Steinbears, not Baronstein bears on top of that hill. Okay, yeah, same.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:43

That's how I react, you know. I I think it's just important, you know, maybe maybe a closing thought for me. Whenever whenever you go to vote in 2028, just if anybody mentions high fidelity videography being made available, yeah, that's who I'm voting for. Right? So that's fair. Make cameras great again, is what I'm that's the platform I'm voting for. Because I mean, clearly this is some horseshit.

SPEAKER_04 1:24:08

This is it is, and if they don't give it to us as soon as they get in office, done impeached immediately.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:16

Let's let's redo the January 6th, man. No high fidelity video.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:19

Like is it how most of those people got in trouble? Was high fidelity? I digress. Um, anything that you want to plug? Do you want to talk about your podcast a little bit before we let you know?

SPEAKER_04 1:24:31

Oh yeah. Uh just briefly, I completely forgot I have a podcast, everyone. Um, it's called Reading Room Ruffians. We read books. I do it with my um hometown library every couple of weeks. We talk about a book, we invite you to read the books too, and uh sometimes we do fun things. We recently just did a DD three-parter where we just played some played some DD with one of the authors that we had previously talked to. So that was fun.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:56

That's super cool.

SPEAKER_04 1:24:57

Uh yeah, check us out. We're everywhere.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:59

Yeah, I'm gonna check that out for sure. Uh thank you for coming on, Zach. This has been a really fun conversation. Thank you for for bearing with us with going into tangents upon tangents upon tangents. But uh, if you ever want to come back again, we would love to have you on the pod.

SPEAKER_04 1:25:16

Oh, totally. Yeah, you got anything else interesting to talk to me about, or I'll see if I find anything weird that'll be off in the Reese topic, and I'll I'll send you guys an email.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:25

That sounds great. Sounds great. Thanks, Zach. Thank you, Queen. Thanks for doing this with me. Absolutely for having me.

SPEAKER_05 1:25:35

The Apollo missions were fake.

unknown 1:27:09

It is real, it is real, it is real.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:12

It is real, it is real, it is real, the paranormal is real, it is real, it is real. The paranormal is real. It is real, it is real, it is real. The paranormal is real.