speaker-0: Spacefare. What is a UFO? Hi guys, this is Caleb. Hope you're well. This is a really cool show. We're talking with J. Mill, aka Jonathan Miller. He taught a course at MIT last year that he's hoping to expand about confronting the unknown and using sense making apparatus to understand the world in various ways. Really interesting dude, very high level thinker, brilliant guy. This is a bit of a heady conversation. I think you're going to have a lot of fun. We talked about some like sensors. We talk about the different modalities with which we approach this topic from different points of view. It's ⁓ not super juicy in terms of like where the mantids live or whatever, but ⁓ it's a high level responsible intellectual engagement with the subject as you have come to expect from WTUFO. So I hope you enjoy and I just want to say thank you to all the people who support this show on patreon.com slash WTUFO or on youtube.com slash at what the UFO. Either place you could support us for $1 a month or $10 a month if you'd like. Hey, go nuts, support us for $100 a month. But if you can afford $1 a month, which I think we could reasonably, reasonably hypothesize that you probably could, if you paid one more dollar a month for your wifi every month, you probably wouldn't notice that. So take that not noticed $1, throw it to WTUFO, the show will get bigger, more people will learn about it, we'll have more guests. and you will benefit as well as the rest of the world. You will help us advance our collective mission of bringing more light to this fascinating topic. So thank you for watching. Hope you enjoy the episode. Here you go. What the UFO? I'm here with Jonathan Miller, AKA J-Mill. Thank you so much for joining us, Jonathan.

speaker-1: Thank you so much, Kayla.

speaker-0: It's really great to talk to you. We spoke a little bit offline, so we're not meeting for the first time here, but I've been really excited to meet you. You have a fascinating, multidisciplinary background, and I thought we could start with that, and then I'll lay out our model of the conversation. Sound good?

speaker-1: Absolutely. Let's go.

speaker-0: Cool. So can you tell us a little bit about your sprawling, interesting history as an academician, ⁓ entrepreneur? ⁓ Where do you sit in this intersection of science and business and ⁓ curiosity and government? You seem to have a fascinating portfolio.

speaker-1: That's the happy spot. I'm in the liminal spaces across all of those. My passion and focus is on, particularly on early-stage frontier technology commercialization. I call it from lab to launch. I have background, as you mentioned, an entrepreneur, multiple companies, saw those to various levels of success. Also, a former venture capital investor. As well as, guess, fundamentally a champion for, an advocate for entrepreneurs who are trying to not only make a buck to help keep a good company going, but really to be able to ⁓ develop these science-advantaged organizations that can really deliver meaningful impact to the world in some form or function. so, those problem sets are incredibly challenging. They are incredibly I'm not just interdisciplinary, but transdisciplinary. so that's what gets me out of bed with a bounce in my step every day.

speaker-0: What would you, how would you describe the interdisciplinary versus transdisciplinary ⁓ distinction?

speaker-1: So some of it is for me is that we all have a tendency and I have some academic affiliations where we may want to try to box things into like, you this is chemistry, this is biology. Is this a robot or is this not a robot? Well, it's a little bit of hair splitting in some situations. There's utility in it, but to go someone who's interdisciplinary to me is someone who's able to say maybe a business person who's able to. speak well enough with, say, an engineer. I mean, we're sort of drawing rough demographics here. ⁓ And then there's a designer person who's trying to understand and translate on the fly what the engineer person's saying, what the scientist, what the business person is saying. That, to me, is an interdisciplinary skill, some fluency that way. But then with the transdisciplinary ⁓ work is someone, ⁓ someones who are able to do meaningful work. across multiple of those fields or domains, all on the same kind of person. Not that they are a soldier of one, necessarily, but they can have these kind of like multiple talents or multiple interests and are willing to kind of say, you know what, we can blur the lines a little bit on, is this topic A or topic B, because the focus is on the mission and the challenge to be solved. Challenges are emerging all the time. And I don't think that they're necessarily created in a way that says, you know what, I'm a challenge and I want just a chemist to solve this or just a seamstress who knows how to work her way around some kind of textile things or something. It's like, no, we just gotta throw out some little rule book, say, what tools do we have? What skills do we have? And let's bring it to bear across bits, across atoms, and across brains.

speaker-0: Wow, okay, well that's fascinating enough that we could just have a whole conversation about entrepreneurialism and transdisciplinary action, especially in this age of AI. But instead, we're going to talk about UAP because it's an area of shared interest. So to sketch out for people what we're going to cover here, we're going to loosely focus on, I guess, these four pillars here, and then we'll explore and weave as questions come up. One is your mental model of the UAP topic. What do you think we can say about what's going on, what questions do you have about what's going on. Two is sense making and confronting unknowns, your project and mission in this course and this framework of thinking about things, the value you see to this frame of inquiry and sub question how clear thinking and open curiosity can interact with and confront stigma and taboo. Then we're going to do on ramps to serious UAP research interdisciplinary approaches intersection between defense startup and academic cultures and practices and and we'll try to close with what we should do in the years ahead and We found ourselves talking in our offline interview about just the role of hypothesis in this investigation That doesn't necessarily have to be at the end. It's so interesting. Maybe we could even start with it, but like how we how we think about ideas that we propose that we're not sure about, questions that we're asking, how to investigate them, et cetera. So let's start with the 30,000 foot view, your mental model of the UAP topic. What do you think we can say about what's going on and what questions do you have about the situation?

speaker-1: Well, there's a lot there. And and and I think what the pillars you outlined are an absolutely great sort of like sort of scaffolding for this. let's let's get into some on say, UAP is well, definitionally, I mean, the definite words have meaning definitions sort of, you know, change a little bit, you know, used to be like UFO. There's some stigma attached to that or stigma attached to anything. But now, as UAP unidentified anomalous phenomena, Well, if we decompose that unidentified, what's that anomalous? Well, that's that's even hard to like describe what it wasn't seeing or, you mental model for that and phenomena, which is just like things, you know, whether it's physical or nonphysical or whatever. With UAP, then ⁓ it's well, we're living in a world of that's from, you know, 60 years ago, definitely 100 years ago, looks a lot like science fiction. ⁓ to century-old eyes. Now we have the benefit of seeing, well, science fact. I have a smartphone that is incredibly mind-boggling if you really think about it. This is like rock and just minerals and stuff that have been mushed together in certain ways and metals to make it do amazing things. I'm not saying that all science fiction is going to become fact, but the fact is that with UAP, There's such a ⁓ corpus of reports, and in some ways, data or lack thereof, to help us explore, or at least to challenge us in our thinking. ⁓ It's kind of like good, healthy scientific process and just good, healthy mental model to say, recognize I, and maybe nobody, knows everything. So let's. let's keep an open mind as to what it may be. Because in the pursuit of trying to face this challenge of that UAP, as an ensemble of challenges presents, along the way of trying to understand those kinds of unknowns, we may discover some really incredible stuff along the way. New types of sensor technology, new types of ways of fusing different data streams together, new ways of just understanding ⁓ whatever the phenomena. is or how it works or whatever origins. But a lot of it's kind of like mere holding in terms of how we as humans and our world around us, the prosaic world around us and dolphins, how do dolphins think? We actually really don't know. But they're there. Those are super to me. Those are like very useful, you know, potential discoveries on that bigger, longer path to understanding and characterizing UAP.

speaker-0: Interesting. A couple of things that floated up for me here was where that the idea of anomalimity, anomalusness embedded in the UAP concept ⁓ points to the unexplainable. we often say like, you know, 97 % of UFO sightings are just generic objects, right? And then I wonder what you think about saying, yeah, that's true. But the UAP are the things we can't explain when we've tried as hard as we could. So like the UAP are the 3%, rather than the UAP are everything. then most UAP turn out to be generic. Like the UAP are the distilled, refined. I don't know. Maybe that's not a useful distinction. ⁓ Curious what you think. The other two-ish points that sort of blend together are this history of outlying observations, like weird data, points that we can't explain with our models of the world as we have them are very interesting, but ⁓ many people don't know that they're there. Like a lot of people just the situation, even very serious, like scientifically minded people, they're just not aware that there is a large amount of anomalous data in the historic record. So it doesn't seem weird to them because they just don't know it exists. They think like there are a few thousand UFO reports and they're mostly explainable. probably don't know that there are millions, and they probably don't know that thousands of those millions are still unexplained to this day, even after we tried as hard as we could. So I'm curious what you think about that sort of two-part question. One, what do you think about sort of reducing the field of UAP to just the ones we can't explain? Like, does that make sense as a definition for the UAP? And then... to what do you think about this ⁓ sort of problem of noticing, like the failure of awareness, which should inspire curiosity.

speaker-1: Right. I mean, we, it would be fantastic if we could get that 3 % of unexplainable cases or situations down to zero. Um, I mean, that's, that's kind of the goal. Um, and, and so, yeah, let's explain as much as feasible, um, where I think the, the, the, point of concern is in, in, in various. groups and, you know, organize and otherwise, ⁓ over decades seem to say, well, we've explained it, ⁓ but this doesn't quite pass the muster of other sort of stakeholders or folks within that kind of ecosystem. Right. So just because someone has an explanation does not necessarily mean that it is explained. Right. It's kind of like, may be talking at each other, but are we really communicating? Like, is it, you know, is it going in and processing? ⁓ That's at least an analogy for me. ⁓ so ⁓ some of it comes down to the sausage making of an explanation. Well, what are the assumptions that were established? It's OK to have assumptions. It just becomes a problem if we fail to revisit assumptions in light of other things going on. So if you just anchor on it, that can be a problem. And that could be whether an intelligence field officer who's trying to try to keep folks alive and serve the mission or trying to go get your groceries. And the assumption is like, I assumed I had fuel in the gas tank. If you feel it, check it now and then, you'll be in a problem situation. so with UAP is, let's try to push the number of cases into single digit percentages and then even then start adding decimal points. in terms of how few are unexplainable, ⁓ provided that we can explain in a very reasonable way all those others. ⁓ so, you know, if it's, words have meaning. So if it's like drones, well, you know, tell us more. Let's figure out more. And I think some of that misinformation, potentially disinformation or malinformation, ⁓ that is what... the public certainly seems to be receptive to or pretty good at detecting is like, wait, there's like multiple kinds of statements being made that neither of which can be true together. either one or the other or both are either like maybe just misinformed or something. And that kind of creates a kind of a cognitive dissonance in the political discourse in just a general information environment that causes people to be like, either like. what's going on ⁓ and they either want to buckle down and try to like figure out better explanations, forming hypothesis, hypotheses, or we're just outright being like, no, this is all a bunch of awgwash. And now if it's just, you know, the ostrich algorithm of put your head in the sand, ⁓ that's fine for a lot of folks because we got to go get our groceries. We still have to live our lives. ⁓ But that doesn't necessarily get at the root and the potential uncorking of lot of opportunities if we face these challenges and recognize the unknowns and start to try to walk a ladder of making them more known, more characterized, potentially more explainable, and maybe some big scientific discoveries and life discoveries along the way.

speaker-0: Interesting. think you sort of just answered this, but I wonder what you think about this line between thinking that UAP are interesting or not, basically. Like, you think the situation is that you, from your perspective, UAP are interesting? Like, there is a curious question here ⁓ to which we don't have a good answer yet. And do you see ⁓ a line in the scientific or the... technological communities between people who are curious and people who assume there's no interesting answer to this question.

speaker-1: I think curiosity is super useful. ⁓ Now people may be like, well, curiosity killed the cat. Well, but also curiosity led us to like having like good antibiotics and stuff too. ⁓ So it's, you know, if one's perfectly happy in one's worldview and everything's well defined, everything's happy. Okay. I mean, that's a natural thing for a lot of humans. But also we think we've come a number of ways since the caveman days. ⁓ because we were curious about things like fire and building stuff and how to ⁓ use animals to help do work like pumping water, et cetera. And so that pursuit of what could be, ⁓ even if it may be, it could be self-serving, how to make me have to do less work. And I'll invent stuff along the way, like a productive procrastination in some way. ⁓ That can be, in my opinion, can be a very helpful. aptitude or disposition for a scientist or engineer or someone who may not even consider themselves a scientist or engineer. walking that pathway of, well, I'm going to try to not just shoot willy nilly on ideas. Let's try to describe it, use the words that we have available, and revisit as we go. Establishing that hypothesis, that optimism that there may be something we don't understand. And then as we feel like we have a pretty good 80, 90 % level of explanation, do the double blind kind of thing. let's kind of hand the data to someone and sort of a sense of explanation or whatever and methodology and see can they reproduce that without the enthusiasm that you or I may have for that. When you start to get it then, in the medical community, that's a common practice to say. You know, our team of doctors think this is the indication. Let's send radiology samples and stuff to other physician teams and see do they independently sort of have that kind of assessment. ⁓ And if you get a bunch of like, hey, yeah, this is weird, or this is this kind of indication or illness or whatever in a medical context, then you start to get a better confidence in. the explanations that we would be putting forth. in astronomy and ⁓ other, know, material sciences, et cetera, that would be a common thing to try to start to, you know, put some other eyeballs on it without beating our chest and say, this is how it happens. ⁓ well, here's a proposition and here's some evidence to do it. What do you think?

speaker-0: Yeah, one thing that occurred to me while you were speaking there was the difference that makes UAP so hard to investigate compared to say like a medical process or like an electromechanical process is that they're so far we haven't figured out a way for them to be useful to us and they're also not in the way of us doing useful things that we want to do. So if there's like... an electro-mechanical issue that's preventing us from building a certain type of circuit, well, we want to resolve that because we need that circuit. Or if there's a biomechanical issue that's causing heart attacks, we want to understand it because we want to stop the heart attacks. UAP are interesting, but they're not in our way, except in as much as they're sometimes a crash risk, which is why I think the Americans for Safe Aerospace have an intriguing angle in. And then you're starting to see a little bit of entrepreneurial interest. Like, well, if this stuff is real, maybe we could harness it for, I don't know, intriguing technological developments. ⁓ So curious if that does anything interesting for you. Yeah. ⁓

speaker-1: that saying that that ⁓ they're not an experiencer myself, but having, you know, like sort of, you know, engaged with folks who may have or been on some sort of like observational end of, of, of some element of UAP, it can be incredibly life changing. And not going to, you know, sort of spitball as to what that kind of some of those changes and influences the experiences can be. But if you put anybody or any anything, but let's say any any person and provide them an experience ⁓ that they just do not have a mental model to to process that. ⁓ It's kind of like divide by zero, like it does not compute. ⁓ And that can put somebody ⁓ highly likely will put them into a very sort of scared position. ⁓ We I don't think we would want anybody would want a say up. ⁓ a commercial airline pilot, much less a fighter pilot, you know, who is focused on whatever their job or task or mission is, and to be like, whoa, like, you know, like, you know, mental explosion. Like, what is that when we're trained as trained observers to understand and categorize and then disseminate and describe, you know, what it is? And so if UAP, you know, the situation emerges, and have a fighter pilot who is highly distracted from their mission, or even worse, ⁓ cases where there would be grounding of a fleet or even repositioning of ⁓ a fleet of jet fighter aircraft. now, because of a repositioning of the fleet, because of UAP incursions, ⁓ then seats in the US Senate are now unprotected. That causes... significant kind of like, ⁓ well, not more than head scratching. It's like, ⁓ my gosh, like we actually now have seats of power in the United States government that are physically unprotected from air cover because of repositioning of aircraft due to other bases being incurred on. Or flying through of like, I know concerns in parts of the Northeast and in mid Atlantic where there are nuclear energy facilities. and observations of UAP, in this case, like, you know, like orbs or whatever being flying through the toxic emissions of some of these facilities. And so whatever is flying through, as it's been described to me, whatever the concern is, if something's flying through that plume, ⁓ it's reasonable to be concerned that the toxins that are in that plume may have been then dispersed out of out of our spec into a neighboring community or something. That would be a big concern. Now, I'm not saying that UAP physics may or may not move air like that or move a plume, but those are valid concerns in my opinion that would cause very abrupt disruption to our normal day to day for particular people or particular groups of people.

speaker-0: Yeah, really good point. So this question is not super fun for everybody. You don't have to answer it if you don't want, but I would love to get the level at which you are comfortable answering it. It's just a what do you think is going on question? Like, do you have a best guess, a leading theory? Do you like to sort of bucket things into secret human tech, secret or secret US tech, secret adversarial tech, and then like atmospheric phenomena and then non-human? technological interference or, you know, higher woo theories than that? you do you how do you think about it? Like, do you work with buckets? Do you have a leading theory?

speaker-1: Well, it's likely that there is something going on or some things. It's probably an entire mosaic of all of the above and perhaps in some form or function. ⁓ that, you know, the one of the very human kind of issues that I see is that there can be statements made ⁓ based on appeals to authority that ⁓ that the public or your average person may be like, well, okay, who says? ⁓ And there may be comments or there may be non-comments toward particular situations that we'd see ⁓ bubbling up on the news or on X or whatever. ⁓ And there may be an information vacuum that opens up. whatever, just like in a normal science vacuum, whatever. is around, can feed into that, whether it's trolls, you know, some whatever agency, or anything else that can feed that. And so it can, that can sort of change hearts and minds a little bit, just from an information perspective. But I think that more at the core of what your question is around is that, like, you know, I mean, we have evidence to think and reason it's reasonable to think that there can be adversarial and sort of like domestic forms of multi-rotor drones or non-rotor kinds of ⁓ uncrewed craft. Certainly, mean, we're seeing labs and things that, and even in the commercial market here and there, ⁓ there's greater deployments of ⁓ pretty compelling kinds of ⁓ uncrewed aircraft that are doing ⁓ meaningful work. That's in the unclassified setting, in the classified settings. you know, we can imagine that it's probably, you know, more advanced in some ways, not necessarily that everything's a black triangle or, you know, it's all like, you know, secret government projects. Because if that if everything's just a, you know, US or Western world secret project, there would be significant violations of standard procedures to to taking, say, test or even production level kind of equipment and basically buzzing and distracting other service members from their work. For example, why hang around US carrier groups and cause disruptions day after day to flight operations? ⁓ That's like a blue on blue risk of attack, ⁓ like friendly. ⁓ But in an unfriendly way, it would be the same team influencing each other very negatively. so that would be concern if it's a wide-scale application of that. And near-peer frenemies, certainly there can be ⁓ very incredible levels of technologies ⁓ that could be developed. We see with artificial intelligence as a form of non-human intelligence. ⁓ getting better. so that can, you know, some of that can solve a lot of problems of humanity ⁓ that we have. We don't have enough pilots to get our Amazon goods from like one side of the country to the other. ⁓ If it was to go to from, you know, two pilot operation of a freighter cargo plane to single pilot operation with a really good basically robot, you know, wingman, so to say, that can solve We don't have enough humans that are trained to do the good job and the technology is getting better to handle that. It may even in some ways have even better safeguards in place to help. So when there is an issue, you can lose the plane, but you don't lose a person in addition to the plane, for example.

speaker-0: Definitely bullish on drone tech. This is sort of getting toward the last conversational question, so we may return to it. But ⁓ do you think it's reasonable to investigate the hypothesis that some UAP are non-human technology?

speaker-1: Sure. And we can leave it, or I will leave it blank as to what non-human would be. It's artificial intelligence. ⁓ if it's, and we have congressional record and folks ⁓ on various levels of authority saying non-human biologics, that's really interesting. ⁓ have friends and colleagues who work on biological robots. ⁓ sort like lab grade, ⁓ but fascinating to think about how we might be able to, you know, this would be probably down the road, but being able to figure out ⁓ ways of biology does amazing, amazing things. makes incredibly complex molecules. It makes us literally be able to like move around as like, you know, we're mostly water, but we've got some other stuff that helps give us, so we're not just pools of jello. ⁓ And so yeah, that would be fantastic to explore. Is it, but is everything like, you know, little green man or something? I don't know. Certainly wouldn't want to put, you know, presuppose and have mental foreclosure on, on, oh, that's that, you know, that is it. Let's keep an open mind. And I'm trying to follow some of that evidence where it leads.

speaker-0: Yeah. I agree. I just think that this is a good bright line because the way even very serious people talk about this when they get close to it, like I love the ODNI report to Congress in I think 2021. It's like nine pages. They summarize a whole bunch of important stuff. They find that most of these things are physical. They don't have evidence that they're adversarial. They don't have evidence that they're US tech, but then they don't speculate about what else they could be. so there's like They have like a five category list of possible explanations. It's like trash, know, tech we don't understand or whatever. And then the fifth one is just other, and they don't speculate non-human technology. Nobody says those words in that page, in that report. And I wonder if you think there's a value to kind of calling the shot there to say like, is it impossible to find something you're not looking for? I guess it's sort of. what I'm asking, like, do you think it's valuable to say, look, this is a specific hypothesis that we should investigate? Because if it's on one side of this bright line, it's extremely interesting. And if we can rule out that bright line, then it's interesting, but in a totally different way. So like, if any of these things are potentially non-human technology, or at least non-modern human technology to fold in the extra-tempestrial model, then that's fascinating and it opens the door as you suggested to like myriad potential explanations and possibly a panoply of such explanations. A myriad panoply. Just have some fun.

speaker-1: We're going above like sixth grade level vocabulary, which is exciting.

speaker-0: Both fantastic words. if it's not past that line, it's interesting, but it's a little more like, all right, let's just crunch the numbers and we'll find out who has what. It's just not that exciting anymore. So that seems to me to be like a bright line worth exploring. Rather than push you on that, I'll entree us into our next topic, which is sense making and confronting unknown.

speaker-1: bell those words is that if we walk the line of thinking of, it's not non-human biological technology, right? How would we approach things differently than we may be? Or as I could say, a citizen scientist, someone who's listening to this is like, I want to the central payload in my backyard that's going to detect blah, UDP. But if it's non-human biological versus something else, how would we even? change our sensor payload. I mean, look for more carbon. Well, that's pursuing, supposing that it's going to be carbon based, you know, like, so I think that there, well, there are, there, think there's intellectual utility to thinking in that way. think there is a practical sort of actionable insight that is difficult to gain from that. other as like the fifth column to be, know, like the McKinsey method of being mutually exclusive and collective exhaustive. Other is not a sexy way of saying it, but Technically, it works. And also that ⁓ I think with maybe like the ODNI report and others, there's a lot of utility. There's actually an extreme amount of utility in being able to rule out something. Ruling in, but we're ruling out other stuff. That itself is very useful. I don't need to know where I'm looking, but I need to know where I don't need to look. ⁓

speaker-0: Yes.

speaker-1: that helps us to start to put a little bit of that boundary boxes on whatever this is, literally or figuratively speaking. And so that's where I think there is utility as much as we'd like to say it is X. Well, we may be to at least say it is not Y or Z.

speaker-0: Yeah. So this is like you point out a very, very hard question. Maybe not impossible, but it's really hard to think of an experiment that would say, I am going to rule out human involvement with this technology. how? What way are you limiting this thing? And the best we've got right now is that like no known human technology can do x, y, You know, can move at 15,000 miles an hour or whatever and turn on a dime and the observables. ⁓ But that's where we run into this infinite morass is that we don't know what we don't know about advanced technological capabilities in like secret military developments. And that goes back 80 years. For me, it's like highly compelling that the early sightings of UFOs are still ⁓ being reported. Like similar things are still being reported that were reported in the 40s, 50s and 60s. And you could maybe explain those things with DARPA's tile tech today, but like It's just a huge reach to theorize that we had advanced propulsion techniques in the 50s that we then did not disseminate through the technological infrastructure of our planet for some reason. It would have to be a giant confusing secret. so that's the simple logic chain that makes me think that we are likely looking at non-human technology. And that's why I find this so interesting. But I wonder if we can fold that into you. explaining your course and your framework of sense making and confronting unknowns. And maybe you could tell us a little bit about what this is. I understand that you, at least in part, you taught a course at MIT around this framework. Is that right?

speaker-1: Yes, earlier this year, ⁓ we had the honor of being able to conduct ⁓ the inaugural Confronting Unknowns program at MIT, ⁓ where I'm a program engineer there and instructor in residence. ⁓ So this program or course was, I wanted it to be structured as an intensive ⁓ and inter slash transdisciplinary in its approach and in terms of ⁓ the cohort, both, you know, from those would be featured speakers, as well as those would be ⁓ participants in other ways. And so confronting unknowns, which information for your viewers and listeners is at ⁓ sensemaking.wtf. ⁓ There's no dot com, just sensemaking.wtf, put in your web browser. that is so we had ⁓ the benefit of having really incredible folks who were very enthusiastic to speak. And as part of my intention with this is that it didn't want ⁓ to be an aggravation sort of expressly sort of said we're not going to do this in the syllabus, which is we're not going to try to put ⁓ fingers on what something is again, a little green man or China or future humans or whatever. Like we're not going to worry about that right now. And we're not going to use it as a place to platform what we think individually, personally, know, an opinion based what it's going to be. We're going to take a technical evidence based approach. ⁓ And we're going to look at and have discussions from folks who know how to or at least working on how to make sense in their respective fields and domains. And so that In an aerospace, we use it as sense-making as the general leadership quality that I believe is a teachable element and useful, whether you're running an e-commerce company or you want to and understand the propulsion systems of different kinds of UAP. Either way, it's still sense-making as a skill. And then narrow that boundary, because that's like blowing the ocean. ⁓ said, OK, let's focus on aerospace safety. Why? Well, because it ties into defense, ties into advanced technology, NASA security. There's a lot of us, not everybody, a lot of us have flown in airplanes. ⁓ And so, we're at least hear them and see them. And so, there's a recognition that, okay, aerospace safety is important. ⁓ And then we get in using that ⁓ sort of domain and sense making as a skill, using those as the kind of like the lens or the wedge to then be able to explore the that myriad of monopolies or whatever, of ⁓ UAP, ⁓ where we have trained observers and friends and colleagues like Ryan Gray, former FAA team pilot, first active duty pilot to disclose ⁓ UAP, ⁓ as well as ⁓ others who are coming from, who are not like say, ooh, UAP, I ⁓ love that, I've been such a, following UAP since before it was called UAP. trying to find folks who are necessarily all in on UAP, but instead who are trained on how to focus on and detect anomalies and to confront unknowns in their respective fields of work. For example, Phil Erickson, the director of MIT's Haystack Observatory for near-Earth observation, hearing the way that he described in terms of how do ⁓ you know, so like geophysicists who are working on, you know, picture like the biggest like IMAX screen ever and they have, they're like, someone's like, I think there's like three pixels on the bottom corner that are either errors or there's something there. ⁓ And so you imagine a bazillion, kazillion pixels and there's like, someone's like, ⁓ there's like three over here that are weird. ⁓ How does the geophysical and astronomy community start to figure out is that error or is there something there? and, sort of, with respect to each of the fields, kind of copy pasting that kind of approach. How does ⁓ a ⁓ central intelligence agency, a career operative, how does she manage in the field building up of assumptions? ⁓ Where does that work? Where does it sometimes fail in very unfortunate situations? Again, not tied strictly to UAP, ⁓ but there are lots of, there's a utility ⁓ in terms of, in my perspective. to build up that leadership quality of sense making and apply it to whatever field. UAPs are certainly a very interesting and potentially world-changing kind of challenge or set of challenges. so folks like Harvard psychologist Tim Lamass and his co-authors and collaborators like Martin van Rennicamp, who work on and publish in peer-reviewed journals, in this case, Acta Astronica. ⁓ publishing a UAP assessment framework that's modeled on how do we do forensic science in like a crime scene investigation. Crime scene investigators, they're working with a lot of every possibilities on the table. it murder? it death? What's going on? And so how do they go and evaluate rigorously in a sort of a transferable and justifiable evidence-based approach their particular line of work. in the case of what Tim Lamass at all did, is like, well, let's be inspired by that. And now as a first pass, first effort in the space, let's try to then make a matrix for a UAP assessment to sort of qualify on whatever axes and being willing to say, is probably not one and done. Like, this is just a first sort of stab at it. We think it's decent. Now, community, ⁓ read that and try it. and revise it. To me, that's very healthy and very useful for all of us to be inspired. That's why say it's not just interdisciplinary. It's transdisciplinary people who can think across a couple of different ways of how engineers and business people and designers, cetera, think about it and then approach it to their particular mission set.

speaker-0: ⁓ that's so cool. Well, it segues really nicely into our on-ramp to serious UAP research question, which is to say, like, what ideas came up for you? What questions or concepts might have emerged from teaching this course for the first time about interdisciplinary approaches, intersection between defense, startup and academic cultures and practices? Like, do you feel like you made some progress or you have some ideas about what should come next in terms of serious research?

speaker-1: Well, yes, certainly substantial progress. A year ago, where I had a hypothesis that some course, I didn't have a name for it, and stuff like that, I think a course along these lines, A, should exist, B, or maybe one, should exist, two, this is the approach, two, three, it would be very important to have it at a place with which I have some familiarity at MIT. And then I think I'm on five, I lost count, that I may be one of those people that could help make that happen. So we, in my opinion, we very much sort of exhibited that when running Confirmed Unknowns at MIT earlier this year. And then the cohort was very receptive. And we were careful in terms of what we picked, in terms of finding really great people. And we did it. thank you cohort members and speakers for making it ⁓ magical. In a high net promoter score in terms of folks that are like, yes, this is a useful way of not just exploring UAP, but in general, ⁓ since making his leadership skill as a teacher that is important to me also. Coming out of this experience, we're still in it. actually right now working on a, I invited the whole cohort. as volunteers, let's collaboratively prepare a paper ⁓ on not like what happened at the course, but like a superset of that. Like what's relevant? What do we think folks should, what would like a Senate staffer, ⁓ what document would be helpful for him or her to have to then be able to hand to the senator that's employing them and that senator to then be able to hand it to his or her collaborators. Like what's, is the message that we should be sharing for that as a reflection of the course. So we're working on that, expect circa May for that release. And we'll post it at sensemaking.wtf. Cool. But other aspects are on, certainly funding is elusive, ⁓ we reasonably believe that that is resolvable. ⁓ better publication. record and more and more publications in peer reviewed and not peer reviewed environments. Legislation is always a little slow, always a little, I mean, it's politics. It's like the quintessential politics. there is sort of good movements in New Jersey, in Connecticut, in Pennsylvania, in Vermont, ⁓ outside of the US. There's in Ireland, for example, there are these You know, I semi-autonomous could have distributed groups and percolations that are occurring that are, in my opinion, very healthy and probably much needed to be able to make, particularly the public, better informed as to what this could be. There's ⁓ citizen scientists all the way like, hey, that's great. Like I was steady at home. way back when, my little like 300 megahertz Pentium or whatever. ⁓ There's a boink on the Berkeley Open, so distributing computing platform. these are older ways of doing it. ⁓ And ⁓ so what's the modern equivalent? Well, I think we're still trying to figure that out. ⁓ I have hope that there will be. ⁓

speaker-0: project listen or ⁓

speaker-1: sort of like what the inspired by what little we know about like the gremlin program that the Georgia Tech Research Institute has deployed at a particular national security site to do sort of baseline pattern of life assessment over 90 days. My understanding is that that that assessment is done. Now it's sort of data ingesting ⁓ whatever I mean, whatever the sensors are tuned to be looking for or to be not looking for right. And in terms of figuring out the negative of it. If I know where the negative space is, I can find the positive space to use art and design phrasing. ⁓ And we may be in a situation, and lot of the skews into some of our other work on national security and defense-oriented ⁓ frontier technologies, probably the best and most sophisticated systems are often in like, classified environments, often like the US military or allies, or even near peer adversaries in some situations. And so it can make sense in some ways why some of the UAP stuff skews heavily toward ⁓ some of those sites or situations. ⁓ Yeah, they've got some of the best sensor fusion. The Navy has as a branch. ⁓ of the military is special and they're all special on the runway. But, you know, the Navy has sea assets, undersea assets, air assets, space assets. Like the Navy's in a unique position to be in and the way the command and control structure works to be able to ⁓ sensor fuse and report and triangulate ⁓ or, you know, triangulate is not the right word. That's part of it. But also to have different modes of sensors being able to capture some sort of phenomena. Right. Is that out of reach of a citizen scientist? Well, on the fancy end, yeah. And so that's a little disheartening. I think it's worth the pursuit. know, if you get your, you know, I'm not saying everybody go out and get your big foot camera with your thermals and, you know, plunk $10,000 and spec out the RV to make your UAP hunting vehicle. But perhaps there are some ways of being able to document and contribute it. That's another part of it. If we once you got it, a footage or something, where do we disseminate that? Or how do we share it? Americans for Safe Aerospace, of which I'm a volunteer and a supportive member of that, ⁓ is striving to, as it's nonprofit, unbiased in this approach, ⁓ we are building, our team is building even better ways of sort ingesting reports in an unbiased way. then where feasible, being able to ⁓ interview folks, ⁓ very serious analysts who are looked through and without leading the witness, try to to the get an understanding of that person and the situation overall, and then work with, let's say, agency partners or whoever is appropriate. And this changes over time. know, Aero, for example, A-A-R-O. Ultimately, the Anomaly Resolution Office has sort of taken its licks over the years. We have hoped that it will earn its trust again, that had been, I think, maybe a little lost or presupposed in other agencies that do show a serious interest in the phenomena, broadly speaking.

speaker-0: Yeah, what this points me to is a broadly diffused effort, I guess, is what I was imagining when you were talking there was like a suite of sensors around the world that are in some sense calibrated similarly and like meet similar standards and ⁓ maybe they have like sensor watermarks on their data so that we know that they're real. I kind of feel like there might be an application for blockchain tech here like ⁓ to demonstrate at like the code level that the data coming through these sensors is in fact genuine and not AI, because it's a huge problem right now. ⁓ But it sort of sounds like what we're talking about is just the cheaper, better cameras and sensors in general being more widely available, potentially opening the door to widely diffused efforts to get better information about this, because right now the sensor monopoly overwhelmingly favors secretive organizations like militaries. I'm also curious what you think about the entrepreneurial space here. Like, do you think there's sort of an angle for run and gun entrepreneurs to say, I don't know, like, let's learn about physics in a way that we could benefit from financially, or maybe there's an entrepreneurial angle to that, the sensor manufacturing aspect of this. don't know, you could start a company around ⁓ a UFO kit that you can sell to a couple million people and develop a sensor platform that would be reliable and widespread. What do you think? Does either of those concepts or bounce anything interesting for you? What should we do next here?

speaker-1: Right. think there's plenty of ⁓ relatively low hanging fruit, certainly as an entrepreneur, an advocate for entrepreneurs, particularly tech focus, because that's sort of my jam, ⁓ that it's that, what's motivating you, you know, or one, right? And if it's, you know, the long view is like, you're interested in UAP and Why not you to help be able to figure out how to understand it and approximate it or characterize it or understand it in some way? demystification. As an entrepreneur, would take a little bit of hubris to say, it's me. But that kind of confidence or hope that I think is very important. In the United States, environment, we've done well as a nation based on entrepreneurs. Choose them who trying to risk their shirts to try to make something better.

speaker-0: Yeah, I'm bullish on entrepreneurialism. like ⁓ creative, independent, freewheeling, can-do spirits.

speaker-1: I don't know if we will. kind of they're they can do. Yeah, that's the thing. We we're on on ways of improving sensors and things like backyard sensors. Sure. I think all of what you mentioned could be could be of interest. I know of a weather station, whether not like the weather channel, but like a weather kit, I guess, that does ⁓ I mean, it meant like you mint tokens or whatever based on. how much data your particular weather station is feeding into the network. then, what's paying that? Well, I mean, I or somebody would be, you buy the hardware, but then that feed into the network, in this case on a blockchain-based thing, a network would then, ⁓ at least hypothetically, would be maybe of value as one of many layers of physical ⁓ data that a insurance company or like an insurer for like real estate or whatever. climate may want to understand or a financial institution about some other form that's underwriting this. So yeah, there could be something that that is on the path. Maybe in the entrepreneurs mind, it's part of their self described mission to pursue UAP and on the way they're like, we can we can build and fund and figure out what comes next by sort of like off takes along the way that could be perfect. Yeah, mean, maybe it could work. And I think Yeah, mean, there's more we could go in on that, but I think it could be cool.

speaker-0: Well, as we reach the end of our time here, I'd love to just ask, what do you think we should generally do in the few years ahead as this, well, hopefully in the many years ahead, but like in this next few years, what should we be focused on? What are the most important steps for people who are interested in UAP to take? And what do you hope to see the scientific, academic, military, and entrepreneurial communities pursuing?

speaker-1: Well, it takes some inspiration from like ⁓ Mike Gold, Michael Gold, who's ⁓ part of Redwire space. ⁓ they're building, it's almost bigger than a startup now. But as part of putting sensors, in their case, on the moon, ⁓ seeing and being willing to recognize that there's ⁓ of weird ⁓ lights, to use a nontenant description, just a light source or source or whatever that seemed to be. striped or banded in a way that we don't know what would be causing that. Is it definitely a little green men? No, I don't know. Whatever. It's on the moon. It's hard to tell. so inspiration from folks like him, they're like, well, let's see how we can deploy resources to serve that as well as other missions. We found the Titanic, the ship, through work by Bob Ballard and his team that were doing classified military work. and they got their job done and the military apparently was like, well, you've got the ship for another couple of days or whatever. You did the mission, so whatever you want. And so folks who were like Bob Ballard in this case or Michael who are like, I have an idea. Let's go looking for blah, and being willing to task resources to that. ⁓ To me, that's inspirational. And that's those are like the like happy accidents or whatever that that can lead to potentially world changing, you know, sort of ⁓ discoveries. ⁓ We you know, I think we need to for the everyday person ⁓ is to me one of the biggest concerns is the information environment. We are coming even like right now. Like I think when this episode releases is we have. Day of Disclosure, the documentary came out like publicly in November of 2025. ⁓ of Disclosure, sorry. And then Disclosure Day from Steven Spielberg, ⁓ a presumably fiction ⁓ work coming out in June. ⁓ so now and presumably into the future, ⁓ a heavy, noisy information environment. ⁓

speaker-0: Egypt disclosure, think.

speaker-1: I think it's as a actual insight that I myself try to get better at is, and for everybody else I encourage you to, is to really try to understand, an intuition for how information flows and where there is an absence of information, where there is a dearth of information, and using that as a way to help us to calibrate our psychology a little bit. And by that I mean that if we can have yet more evidence from like the 1960s crash or something, I grew up not far from Kexburg, Pennsylvania, where there's apparently Unsolved Mysteries, the TV show had like a feature on it. There was like an acorn shaped craft or whatever that kind of crashed into there. And it got like taken out on like a military style flatbed truck. It's like in the 60s or whatever. So if we get more and more information from like old cases, is that really going to change the discourse? I don't think so because some of that emerges and it feels like it a long time ago because it was a long time ago. So focusing on recency ⁓ is very important so that as things occur and you know, like another New Jersey drone flap or something. And these things happen across the world, not just in the United States, of course, as they occur and trying to be able to sort of live document and qualify and recognize that there's like, you know, agency X said this, then the FAA said that, and then, and all this other stuff that's going on, trying to just work on making sense in your own real worldview, trying to make sense of it and not try to convert. you someone, know, cherished a skeptic, ⁓ someone who just knee-jerk reaction says, it's not, that's not, that's not like a full on skeptic, like, you know, a skeptic who's like, we don't know. You know, that's to me, those, those people, all of us should have it's best practice if we all have some of that skepticism, ⁓ as well as enthusiasm for what may be, but that, that like, well, wait, what are we not seeing here? ⁓ Maintaining that sort of optionality of potential scenarios of what whatever, you know, maybe, you know, the next, you know, the Chinese, Chinese balloon incident of 2023. Just one, was, you know, like, at least like five different kinds of, you know, incursions or objects of concern, whenever the next kind of situation that will not look like that, probably, but you may have this sort of pattern matching of that, all of us to sort of do our best to not panic. sense make, ⁓ try to make sense, recognize ⁓ that there is an unknown start to try to identify and help others so that we don't run around with their hair on fire, right? Or to be kind of an optimistic, like, you know, I can try to make progress in understanding this and I still have to go get bread, you know, to feed the family.

speaker-0: Yeah, that's, it's very close to home for me. Wondering personally, just like, what are you up to this next year? What are you working on in 2026?

speaker-1: So a great question. ⁓ So certainly, I'm excited about what can be for ⁓ maybe what will be for sensemaking.wtf slash confronting unknowns, where it would be awesome to run that again at MIT with our ⁓ really fantastic collaborators there, as well as it's knowledge that I feel, aspirationally, is something that we can share and better, like so advance in the community in some way. So for your listeners and readers who are obviously interested in the UAP topic and sense making broadly, I encourage you all to consider signing up for the mailing list that I have at sensemaking.wtf. I send pleasantly infrequent correspondence there. But if you're game to read the Confronting Unknowns at MIT paper, the volunteer collaboratively written paper, we will be releasing it to the mailing list. when it's ready. That's Avenue 1 of 3. ⁓ Avenue 2 is, if you're interested in frontier technologies in general, and specifically around startup companies, entrepreneurs, if you're into market investing into those areas, I run a ⁓ new public benefit endeavor called The End Effector. It's at ENDEFF.com. The End Effector is ⁓ where I and my colleagues will rewrite about robotics and machine intelligence and the quantum sciences. And we also have a free mailing list that's semi-weekly called Telemetry. That's at telemetry.endeff.com. And finally, for those of you who want more sort of podcast content or YouTube channel content, I am a co-host with my friend Forrest of the podcast called Tough Tech Today, toughtechtoday.com. And there is where we have the opportunity to invite in ⁓ the tough tech trailblazers who are really sort of building or supporting the technologies. Probably half of our guests are the entrepreneurs themselves at the operator level. And the other half is a mix of ⁓ some of the key ⁓ supporters or enablers, like investors or policymakers, et cetera. And so we actually have a recent episode that's about solving the unknown that is directly linked to why maybe like, you know, the tough tech community should care about unidentified anomalous phenomena as a problem set worth pursuing. So that's, there's a couple different avenues and feel free to find me on LinkedIn or reach out. I'm happy to talk more. Thank you so much, Caleb, for talking with me about these topics. There's a lot of meat on the bone. So it's super exciting.

speaker-0: Seriously, this was a total delight for me. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time and I look forward to following up with you as we all learn more about this weird wild stuff.

speaker-1: Yeah, it takes a community. And so let's do it together.

speaker-0: Thank you, man. Great to meet you. Hope you have an excellent year and we'll be in touch. Thank you again for joining us.

speaker-1: Thank you, Caleb.

speaker-0: And that's the show. Thank you for listening. If you're enjoying it, please like and subscribe and share this with people who you think might like it. You could also directly support us at patreon.com slash WTF for a dollar a month. do some chatting in there and you can propose questions for future episodes. You could also check out spacefair.etsy.com. That's our company's main merch site where you could support us commercially and pick up some cool gear. Thank you again for listening. Hope you have a lovely day.