Jacques Vallee is brilliant | Garry Nolan and Lex Fridman

Transcript

well let me uh ask about jacques who is he um you know him who's jacques valet what have you learned from him about life about about about ufos about technology about our role in the universe well i met jacques actually soon after the whole atacama thing happened um i was visited by those people associated with the government and the whatever around the um the havana what ended up mostly being havana syndrome patients but also jacques at the same time and they were actually working behind the scenes with each other that oh here's this stanford professor who is willing to talk about this stuff and investigate things um maybe we should go talk to him and he he reached out through a colleague and you know i had lunch actually um at the rosewood inn up on near sandhill so jacques is one of the first openly active scientists and he's really a scientist in this area going back to the 1960s um and uh you know he's put forward a number of ideas speculations about what it might be that people are interacting with and he the first thing that i learned from him is this notion of what he called kabuki theater that many of the things that people have seen are i remember reading his books and thinking he uses this word absurd a lot um he said the the things that people claim they see are absurd right a a a ship doesn't land in a farmer's field and then come up and knock on the door and say can i have a glass of water and these are stories literally out of newspapers from the 1930s it's absurd you know and the other thing that people say ships don't crash if you're so technologically advanced you don't crash it's absurd that they crash so um he says this is put on as a show it's meant to it's an influence campaign right it's it's not meant to influence individuals it's meant to influence a culture as a whole maybe they don't look at us as individuals maybe they look at us as an organism that lives on a planet right and perhaps rightfully so and so that's how you interact with them that's how you influence them so that was one of the first things that kind of took me back and realized wow there's actually a maybe there's a puppet master behind the scenes that's you know doing this influencing that all this stuff about aliens is just is not true per se they're just a representation of something that is meant to influence so that was probably the most interesting thing i mean the man is brilliant uh he's also it can be and i'm sorry jacques he can also be incredibly annoying to have a conversation with because he will pick apart your arguments or anything that you think you know and show you why you don't know what you think you know and he uses the he used the example that for me that is is is all you need is one counter example to any conclusion and you're wrong and so i learned from him i mean i'm supposed to be a good scientist but i learned from him don't talk about conclusions just talk about the data because data's not wrong i mean convince yourself that the data is not wrong or not an artifact but be careful about your conclusions because whatever is going on it's it's much more complicated than we than we imagine wow that's powerful being able to always step back because we get we humans get excited yeah we start to jump to conclusions from the data but always step back powerful being able to always step back because we get we humans get excited yeah we start to jump to conclusions from the data but always step back well in some of my twitter feeds when i dare to go on twitter are full of well when are you going to give us the answer well you know science is not immediate you're going to have to be patient and even some of my science colleagues have said well where's the data my answer to them has been where's been your work to try to produce any you know i'm not here to give you everything on a silver platter you