 an awfully early hour to start a DEF CON talk. But I appreciate your being here and let's give it the best we can. Bruce and I just said to me as I was musing about well how much truth can I tell? And he said that's your job, that's why you're back. After 17 years of speaking here your job is to mirror the community and say what you see and tell the truth. Next month I'll be in London for a project and it is called Ironically the Truth and it is about surveillance and the national security state and what we can anticipate in the future. It is run by artists, I'll be speaking in Poland the next month, two curators of art museums because artists are the only ones with the imagination to imagine the kind of future we're going into. Artists and literary people and right brain people who are willing to plunge to the edges of their intuition to grasp that the unpredictable and inelectable life changers and game changers in society are not things we can point to in a linear way. We don't know what's coming and therefore those who synthesize and integrate as I will talk about later might be able to present a picture that has some hope for illuminating what's coming. Now the talk officially is about what I said 17 years ago. Here's the t-shirt, DEF CON 4. When I keynote at DEF CON 4 there were a total of 300 people at the con instead of the 10,000 that are here now and what I said then which I'm going to use as points of reference for what's going on and then what I see coming in the future. I did quote Mudge in my abstract and that's an accurate quote but I said it was called hacking is practice for transplanetary life in the 21st century and Mudge said some of us knew exactly what you're talking about he's at DARPA now and some of us thought you were crazy. Being called crazy is something you have to endure. It's like in the stock market being early and being wrong are very difficult to distinguish. You may see correctly but the timing is important and the information that's delivered has to connect to the cognitive structures people already hold and that's going to be increasingly difficult given the complexity and diversity of the points of view that we will be called upon to hack. My fear is that hacking is not as much an evidence at this quote hacking convention as I would like. This is a conference now about the information security industry. It's about business and there is a lot of theme park modules for hacking which continue to proliferate and be maintained kind of like diverse rings of a circus around that fundamental fact and so I don't know if it's hewing to what Bruce Potter said some years ago in a simple nomad he said I remember a conversation in the hotel bar for the system to work our system it must never grow up and it should always make us smile in other words the heart of a young hacker the duplicity and the larceny in that heart untrained by experience must still be alive on the edges of exploration and passion in order to pursue the art and science of hacking so you have to continue to manifest not merely business related or self-serving related interests but as Wilson said in conciliants all artists all scientists are characterized by passion and obsessiveness and daring and daring means acting differently from those assimilated uncritically into the consensus reality of what I call humplings some of you know this book which came out two years ago it's called mind games there's a story in here called break memory break memory is about the masters of society who see themselves as the 10 percent at the head of the hump curve the bell curve that moves slowly through society in time 80 percent are in the hump there the humplings and then 10 percent of the dregs the masters keep the dregs so the humplings will be glad they're not dregs and be grateful to the masters for keeping them in the hump as they move society forward but the humplings are generally those who are assimilated unselfconsciously and uncritically into the consensus reality which increasingly in the world in which we live is one of spin deception simulation and manufactured consent so how do you do that how do you do all that going forward it's not the same world it was in 1996 hacking simple nomad said and I'm going to quote him because he's not here and he's one of the great wise people in this world and I miss him sorry you're not here nomad he said uh meaning this for the children to whom I'm going to speak on sunday at the defcon kids track uh hacking for those who are older seems to get harder but it's only because we older folks get stuck in our ways and if we don't learn how to hack the new stuff we get lost so learn to see the difference between something really hard and something really hard because all the new things are nothing like what I know and the danger of course is if you're an engineer uh you may become so good at computer science and information security at engineering that you uh have a feedback loop from your own work in life that says this is what I need to get better and better at and you exclude all of those other disciplines and domains that are increasingly being manifest uh in in our in our worlds um I was once asked to speak uh on UFO phenomena which I'll mention briefly later uh to astronomers in Chicago and you always like to know who's going to be in the audience who's how smart are they how educated are they how receptive might they be to interesting but anomalous ideas and uh he said well they work in Motorola and they work here and they work there I said well it's a pretty educated group then and he said well yeah but they're engineers uh now he was an engineer I wouldn't say that about engineers because I love uh and respect engineers but he was one and what he meant was as engineers they were really good at having learned the discipline that they needed to know to be engineers so I go back to what a friend at NSA said are the unanswered and unspoken questions in this domain how do you live vibrantly how do you free the mind how do you live in a world without walls now I'm going to go back to hackers 17 years ago there are a lot of silverbacks walking around who were here 17 to 20 years ago and we need to relearn to see with the beginner's eyes because only the constant reinvention of ourselves is going to be up to the challenges of the times it's not like I said then you need to be able to transform yourself and use personas not only in social engineering ways but in societally beneficial ways you not only need to do that but you need to reinvent yourself again and again and again yes you need to take the red pill but then you need to take the red pill again it's a daily dose like antibiotics that you have to take day after day after day because the red pill discloses what's real at the base of what we believe by consensus and if you don't keep plunging and drilling deeper you won't see it don't forget what Langdon winner said one of my favorite quotes he said to invent a new technology requires a society invent the people who will use it all older practices relationships identities fall by the wayside new practices new relationships and identities take root in case after case computerization and digitalization means pre-existing cultural forms are going liquid they're losing their former shape as they are for computerized expression that was what I picked up on 17 years ago the immense engine of transformation that the it revolution really meant on the cutting edge of which hackers were then what's happened as a result of the it revolution is that the revolution has accelerated the rate of change and that reshaping of social political and economic reality in every domain of human society and that's why it becomes so difficult to get your mind around what is really happening when I'm introduced as a futurist I say that's ridiculous I can't even describe the present but if you live way in the past then the present will sound you like the future now what's happened is a result of the proliferation of the multiplicity of domains of expertise I mean think of it this way the future and this is tricky for 10 in the morning the future doesn't exist when when Alan Kay said the best way to predict the future is to invent it what he was saying in effect was the future is always invented and either you invent part of it yourself or you go into the future that other people have invented for you but you don't see their invention their hand of invention and therefore think it's what we call what happened to happen what merely happened in the course of the events of life itself so if you see the present as a human construction of reality in which using current sense data sensors feedback loops that move information faster and faster into the collective then you can see that the future is a construction of reality to that has to have some cognitive connection to the present we define that way we invent the present out of what we know and create a structure and then the future is that which we hold how we hold ourselves as possibilities for action based on what we see and can possibly for see now what that means when there's so many more domains of expertise is that in your domain of expertise you may be close to the present know almost as much as what there is to know even though no expert today can keep up with everything being published in their own domain of expertise you are behind the line that is a little in the past just a little in your domain of expertise but in all these other domains of expertise which are proliferating and for which we're inventing new names all of the time you are far in the past and therefore we all live in the past in most domains and therefore none of us can have the arrogance of thinking we have a clue unless we surrender ourselves to the collective the collaborative environment which the it revolution created in the first place as a higher level of abstraction for how human beings have to work we've worked in tribes we've worked in teams before but the it revolution transformed the very notion of identity so the things i predicted in the past that have come to true come to be true include generations born successively who are simulated or socialized by the technologies of the time unselfconsciously at the age of five six seven into those things being what is really real and that becomes the background point of reference or benchmark of their lives what's really real when you're seven eight nine ten is what you establish is what's really real everything else you call later uh technology but you take for granted and accept for what it is the things that are present when you are that age that means you have to critically examine the context again and again and again and one of the things i find myself repeating in other places uh as well is that you must turn context into content you must turn what for most people for the humplings is unseen invisible context of life into a cognitive artifact that you can hold in your mind and turn around like a 3d manipulation on a monitor and see and therefore manage and therefore handle and therefore leverage therefore make fundamental use of so when i started writing fiction again where mind games came from was when i was doing some work on ethics and intelligence over a period of a decade with people at the national security agency a few from cia who became traumatized by the executive orders that came into the director's office the during his office from then president bush saying this is what we are now going to do they became concerned because according to the ethical structures of the 20th century which they had believed meant these are things we never do it is unconstitutional and illegal and we don't do it now the executive order said we do these things and to work through and talk about the ethical implications was the point of an ad hoc group that came together for about 10 years that i co-led off site of course i'm always anomalous i'm always out of sight and i'm always on the edges which is how i derive information and it resulted in a little bit of something happening that i can't really address but uh it was a really tough slog uh they were traumatized because according to the reality that had assimilated them in the past something profoundly transformational had changed the very bedrock of their lives and now something else needed to be done that in my talk at def con and other places way back in the early 90s and even in the 80s i said was inevitable because my whole job has been to follow the technology and how is Langdon Winters said it would reshape and restructure our political and economic and social and spiritual and religious lives by creating new structures into which young people would be assimilated without knowing it and without thinking so it's not about president bush's order obama is more bush than bush when you get in the oval office and they hand you the daily briefing and this is what people say you must now do uh you have one response when you're president with the immense weight of responsibility that carries you say what do we need to do and then they tell you what we can do and the only sane response for leadership is to say do it do it all and they have been doing it all this is why the speech i mean i guess it was good public relations for the director of the nsa to be here yesterday and to speak to def con and to get great press someone told me from cnn said it was just a wonderful speech and everybody accepted him warmly but it was complete bullshit it was complete bullshit it's true he did not say one thing that had meaning reality currency or relevance and some things he said were outright lies there's a booth over there recruiting for nsa i love people i've spent a day at nsa recently doing a speech and a panel and and things some of my best friends from nsa i wouldn't want my daughter to marry somebody for nsa but uh i don't want to live next door to someone from nsa but some of my best friends friends are there and on the booth they list the attributes of the agency and one of them was transparency and i said how can you even have the balls to put the word transparency up there is one of the things to which you are committed and he said well ten years ago we didn't know you didn't know who we were well it's not true but he said uh now people know who we are and i said you know this is weasel word straight out of orwell that's not what transparency means and he went into alice in wonderland world where words mean exactly what i mean them to say and say they mean and they don't mean anything else but that at that point you just say uh well people are lining up to be recruited people were warm and respectful about twelve thirteen years ago i i oversaw panel of feds that was facing hackers who hooded at every statement i attended a session where everybody had a pendant that said bullshit on it and whenever a fed said something that was bullshit they waived the pendant like this and those pendants were always waving that's a different kind of dialogue with hackers where has it gone my my the children are assimilated so the task confronts you going forward is to reinvigorate the passion the obsessiveness and above all the daring that made a hacker a hacker but what you're going to be hacking is not just information systems anymore because as i said the proliferation of other domains of expertise especially biological especially biological but also including manufacturing and material science nanotechnology and using like printers to print out manufactured items at point of origin what is that going to do to restructure the trucking industry how is life going to change we don't see how things will change and you take for granted that water just comes out of the tap 19th century not only didn't it come out of the tap the consensus reality was that to bathe was unhealthy and in boston it was considered illegal to bathe without a doctor's prescription until who got a hold of that information where the plumbers and the soap manufacturers and they started their campaign about the day for everybody and then people got into their heads about the day is good actually it's not so good but you take for granted the consensus reality to which you're assimilated and yet things are changing so much faster that it takes that collective work at understanding and a knowledge of counterintelligence to push through the veil itself in order to have a clue as to what is going on and that's going to get worse and worse so they're going to be those few people who do it and the ones who have the capability some will become masters that is go into the agencies or work as contractors with them uh do the do the work and be assimilated and say look you got to compromise the world is gray and and and so on and others will kind of fight to the end like timothy leary or other people who go down fighting for the truth and fighting for their youthful passions and the other people will say you're just never going to grow up growing up means compromise and and just coming to terms with it and and loving it loving big brother not his big brother but there are also so many little brothers that's what dan geer said he was told years ago by an fbi agent actually was a ranking person fbi your choice is between one big brother or many little brothers and now everyone knows we have both so we don't have a choice anymore uh you know that ubiquitous surveillance ubiquitous intrusion uh database is global i had dinner with a dear friend in amsterdam who works with telecom companies to help them adapt policies which will enable them to do what they're going to do in the first place is the way she defined it she works with governments all around the world and i said you know naive will we ever get it back will we ever get back freedom from intrusion and surveillance and she said uh oh richard you know the tone oh richard of course not it's everywhere and it's deeply embedded now we sell everything to do it to the worst people on the planet we being anglo sexes uk northern europe america canada we sell them what they need to do it it's we're never going to get it back in any aspect of life i felt like k and the godfather when she said well michael but but senators don't murder people and he said okay who's being naive now so part of what i'm encouraging you to do is have the willingness and courage to see clearly and say clearly what you see if only to the trusted few on whom you can rely because when you do counterintelligence or try to do a non-type stuff um you don't know how much you're being permitted to do or allowed to do because it's so much easier to let the antelopes go to the waterholes and drink and then follow the antelopes to see who the antelopes hang out with then to try to shut down the waterhole i remember there was a little wave of jihadist websites being taken down by well-intentioned hackers some years ago and i said to a friend of mine isn't it funny how quickly they spring back up they're so resilient and he said okay look we often have to go behind the scenes put in firewalls rewrite the code and put them back up we uh so that they will stay up so we can watch the antelopes go to the waterhole and drink and then see where the antelopes go next the whole point of counterterror is who talks to who relationships communication out to nth degrees of relationship and who knows who so in order to do that level of investigation to provide this the net or oversight of safety uh that means surveillance and intrusion is ubiquitous who side are you are you on and are there even sides anymore so i was disappointed in the director's speech i i redefined hackers to my own taste and satisfaction a few years ago when i said that a black hat hacker is a hacker a gray hat hacker is a hacker who knows when to fudge the truth and a white hat hacker is a hacker who put the truth down somewhere and forgot where they left it well the director of the agency is a white hat hacker in the best tradition so a long time ago things changed a little more slowly lidar da Vinci predicted all kinds of things that came to be in 450 years and then jules verne wrote from the earth to the moon in the 1860s and the 1960s only a hundred years later we were on the moon and huxley talked about social conditioning and genetic engineering in the 20s and 30s in brave new world using a lot of the work of a brilliant guy named hall dame uh whose book from 1924 you can still find in the bowels of the library somewhere uh and then only uh a generation or two later 50 years later huxley's social engineering and genetic engineering is a reality of our lives and it's going to become more and more so and then cyberspace the word was coined by william gibson uh and 10 years later everybody was living in and using the word cyberspace and a couple years ago i did a talk on biohacking and the future of hacking in biology using markers like the president of mit having a background in biology people like bill gates saying if i was starting again today i would be in biology and not in computing because that's where the cutting edge of informatics is in how you we are going to recreate humanity and the identity of humanity and its attributes using enhancements augmentations and biological engineering of all kinds and so i gave a talk as current as i could thinking i was really on the edge and that week my economist magazine came using all the same damn sources and saying in effect all the things i had said a week i had a week lag time not as i had 16 years ago a few years for people to catch up this is why you know for anyone uh not to be confused really means is the physicist said that we don't understand what is going on identity as i mentioned has become corporate it can't help but become corporate here's a quote from a physicist named henry staff an elementary particle he said is not an element independently existing unanalyzable entity it is in essence a set of relationships that reach out and two other things if you get what that's about he's saying that what's primary in the universe is relationship not the things that are related it is the angles of relationship that determine who we are in terms of the multiplicity of communication and energy linear pathways we create in our lives to enhance our understanding of what's happening so if you reduce yourself to someone in solitude uh like those wonderful fictional lone uh hackers who are so aggrandized uh as as the uh the image of hacking itself then you've you've been deceived you have become self deceived that image of the lone passionate rebel hacker is a literary fiction it is a fiction that people like to assimilate because you have all been assimilated into many borgs by now and the question is to which borgs will we relate in order to be assimilated into the structures of possibility and ethos that we value and care about so when they talk about corporate identity what we're really saying is that the individual as it was constructed post renaissance as an identity of self as who we thought we were individuals with boundaries around them that's over that's over uh nation states which grew in the 18th and 19th uh 17th and 20th centuries as appropriate boundaries for the speed of the flow of information into and out of complex systems as an appropriate level of abstraction to organize our social and economic and political and spiritual lives those boundaries as you know have gone down the function of the intelligence community today is de facto to make sure that people know that when they wake up in the morning the world in which they went to sleep will pretty much be recognizably persistent so they can get on with their lives it's like uh you know uh men in black right there's always an achillian battle cruiser hanging off the earth and the reason people go about their daily lives and line up at Starbucks and do all the things we do is because we don't know it this is why when you go down the rabbit hole and you go into dark stuff you become traumatized by what you find a therapist never years ago this is a warning serious message and warning told me that I was showing the symptoms of uh of uh secondary trauma she asked me to read about trauma and I said okay and I went and read all the books I uh she had recommended and I came back and she said do you know why I read that and I why I wanted you to read those and I said sure because the people I'm talking to uh have been traumatized and who was they talking to this is before the Washington Post and others outed for the rendition was public I was talking to people who tortured and I was talking to people who were tortured you know this is not trivial I start writing in the nineties as soon as people start writing op-eds about when can we torture you know the jig was up because you will always find justifications for torture and that will mean just like all these people coming out of the innocence project now who are jailed unfortunately that we will sometimes torture the wrong human beings and talking to people who were tortured even if you can justify it you know this is not a TV series like 24 where if you don't shoot them in the kneecap you know you're not going to find the nukes it doesn't work that way that's propaganda and spin she said no I don't want you to read these things so you know about the people you're talking to who were traumatized I want you to read them because you are showing signs of secondary trauma talking to people who more and more and more are filtering into your life anomalous reality was the consensus reality people the humplings don't want to know about more and more and normal talks to normal people I have people say I don't want to know about that or as a guy said a few years ago you stop it you're making me feel helpless and I said great when you came in here you were at minus two you were helpless and you didn't know it I've moved you up to one which is helpless and aware of it you want to go up another notch to ground zero he's what's that and I said taking personal responsibility for doing the relearning and retooling that will let you be responsible for your life in the face of the radical change that we can't make go away now cross someone's face when you say that there's a glimmer of I can do that for just a nanosecond and then it goes back into a life posture of screw you I know no and that's the danger going forward there's a lot of people being manipulated into thinking something so that's not so who feel victimized angry and resentful and when the catastrophic event that is going to come comes whatever its source they will be ripe for exploitation as flocks of digital flocks of real birds in a digital cage because they will have already been assimilated into the mind structure that is intended to make them more malleable so the image of the lone hacker is self deception I wrote a piece about that for the the DVD and it's not about Bush or Obama it's about what's so in the world as a result of the technological transformation of the time and so it's also about what's coming hackers see deeply they see what's happening I mentioned talking to artists study visual art why because most of us just see the picture and don't notice that the picture is defined by a frame and don't see that the frame is defined by a ground of being a wall a structure an architectural space an architectonic level of fractal like abstractions that define the physical space which we think is quote real but which has been created for us into which to walk both visually and actually as if it is real and then we live in it as if it's real and then we create it together as a consensus reality and we call it life we call it what's so hackers see the context they see more deeply they see that the thing can be made to do all kinds of things it wasn't intended to do and so what's coming out of bio the people I talk to artists they talk about cyber war they're not afraid of cyber like they're afraid of bio somebody asked me I think last year what keeps you up at night and I said what keeps me up at night is the head technologist that I know at CIA telling me he can't sleep because he's reading the Pfizer intercepts about what people all over the world are trying to do you know humans being kind of land mammal that we are we will do almost anything for narrow self-interest and short term gain even if it means suiciding ourselves not with a bomb but with a disease look for the unknown unknowns look at how many people crossing borders into this country have exotic or unexpectedly high numbers of diseases see if you can get that data like we discussed years ago did you hear about the train that crashed with a load of chemicals no well if you don't know about it it's not a terrorist act because terrorists attack the mind of society and that means proliferation and exaggeration and amplification by the media which is complicitous with their work because their self-interest converges with that of the terrorists which is to terrify people so that you can keep things going you know we knew what happened in Aurora within 10 minutes right we didn't need five or six days of detailed interviews with every every victim or family of victim or someone who is traumatized by it that traumatizes us in turn like 9 11 did the media amplifying the images of the planes hitting the the buildings over and over again that amplified and created the terroristic event that would have been not nearly so potent in the soul and psyche of Americans as as it became so part of what hackers are supposed to do is see this stuff I mean I I believe futuring is what Dyson said I'm going to quote Freeman Dyson I'm interested in the long run the remote future where qualitative predictions are meaningless the only certainty in that remote future is that radically new things will be happening I have always said go look at the toys people are playing with for one of the domains look at R&D from the intelligence and dark communities I look at the vice industries to see where the money is falling because everybody loves that stuff that's why it's called vice it means it's stuff we like you know secondary sexual triggers what happens to a human a man when he sees a sexual trigger secondary trigger he gets excited and he feels pleasure so what is he going to do he's going to look at that which excites him and gives him pleasure that's a no brainer and so we're going to make it a felony or whatever to do that so that the industry can thrive in the black market of collusion and exchange last year I talked about the banking industry and how complicit it was in the money laundering and drug cartels and all those other things so that I'm not making stuff up this is from subcommittee hearings in the congress that if the money that flows into the US economy from cartels and arms trade and dictators stashing their money abroad if it all vanished our economy would collapse overnight so it's just seeing clearly what's so and trying to find your moral compass in that what those intelligence people were trying to do was wrestle with applying the ethics or ethos based on a prior conception of human identity formed by other technologies in the 20th century and past and trying to apply it to the kind of humanity you are already becoming and your children and your children's children will become because they won't be merely born they will be engineered and hand-stogmented and changed and they will have the reins of their own capabilities and capacities in their own hands now that's what distinguishes people the ones who are going to make it and the ones who don't wonderful book called what successful college students do what do they do when they fail at something and can't learn something then they say how can I learn this how can I approach it they don't allow themselves to know that they can't know something and they find a way to learn it they find a way to advance themselves that's one bunch the others are in that helpless basket that I mentioned they say I can't do it and there's a whole world of people in their 40s and 50s and 60s out there who are flummoxed and blindsided by what is happening and do not understand its sources that in my hometown Milwaukee the leadership refuses to name that the jobs they want will never come back because the world which created them is never going to exist again so kids are one of the things I like to look at kids 15 years ago Defconn four were playing with robotics Seymour Papert's Mindstorms had just come out and you say robotics is the future well now there are robots everywhere and the questions are how can we make them friendly you believe Siri right you believe she's your personal geisha right you love her admit it you love her who love come on raise your hand who who has thank you all right you love talking Siri my car my Prius has a French accent that I prefer to the English accent because that makes her my special friend secondary triggers we are evolved to respond to them as if that's what's so what are kids playing with today kids you're playing video games that are controlled by their minds they have bands around their heads they make balls levitate and move through hoops they levitate objects they are moving toward wearing the beanies which increasingly are replacing the implants which enable the electromagnetic intentionality the human organism organism that you are to do in effect what is telekinesis next of course is ubiquitous always on telepathic and clairvoyant communication among the nodes of the network which is going to be global humanity and the idea of carrying what we used to call a telephone do you remember we call it a phone that will become as obsolete as when my mother would say to me early on I'm on long distance right long distance has disappeared as a contextual category not being always on and connected with one another which older people say oh isn't it terrible they can't live alone no they can't because they've been born into a collective that connects them always and that is going to increasingly be enhanced biologically and with appliances so that you are always on without having to carry stuff type stuff touch stuff and sometimes even say voice is the next big thing for the ubiquitous internet which is in all things and in us in our cars in our clothing in our minds in our brains that's what's right around the corner be careful there's a talk coming up on augmentation pay attention to it because if you screwed up with your computer hacking 15 years ago yeah the FBI might knock down your door but if you weren't 18 you were cool if you screw up putting an appliance into your body or mind because you don't understand the medical consequences go to that talk I mean it's a guy in third year medical school who really knows what he's talking about it's worth it it's worth it how do you handle the anxiety that I'm talking about emerging necessarily from these pursuits on the edges you do it through mutuality feedback and accountability those are always the antidotes to the rigidity and the fear and the isolation that people feel in the face of radical change Feynman the great physicist said with more knowledge comes deeper and deeper and more wonderful mystery running one on to penetrate deeper still that's let me see how we are that's a great watchword to keep in mind but look at what kids are playing with now and see that this is what's going to be present in the future I've mentioned this before and I'm if I can find it toward the end because I'm always way ahead of myself I was standing by the museum in Milwaukee not that long ago and I looked at a list of things that they were selling for kids to play with and include thought reactors telekinetic and telepathic objects and extra to rest your life now I think it's time for me to say something about that right since I talked about hacking ufology a few years ago one of the things one of the things that I know will happen in this century is that we will not just know that there's life everywhere but we will know it we will know it and we will know that we know it now most of you already know it but you might not know that you know it nothing has been more effective in managing the herd than the whole subject of UFOs the whole subject why because in 1952 the intelligence community and the military community decided for good reason that it was a threat to the wellbeing of society because the Russians could use it to manipulate us to shut down our communications and people would panic if they knew what was happening and the robertson panel in 1952 created debunking and ridiculing as the appropriate response even with the most ridiculous assignation of causes to things that have been observed by multiple witnesses and that were self consistent in what was reported about the vehicles flying around now granted that that was a passion of mine ever since I was a priest and a colonel told me sitting alone in the basement in 1978 that UFOs were real told me why they chased them told me why they couldn't catch them and told me why it couldn't be our technology or the Russians or anything else that was terrestrial if nothing else we couldn't take the G's when you do a right angle turn and going from zero to ten thousand if you have a body that evolved from an insect life instead of a mammal you can take those G's but I don't want to go to the speculative stuff that's just kind of fun to play with you know what the alien heads look like looks like a fly right big black eyes but that's not what we're talking about what a group of others and myself start doing five years ago was research project a research historical project into how did the military intelligence communities respond to the phenomena we don't make any conclusions that are crazy no speculation we don't decide what the phenomenon is we leave that entirely up to the reader but we use only documents from within the military intelligence community from world war two up to the present found by combing through the archives for years years and decades to find these nuggets of gold that connect to show us what they did and why they did it it was complex it was multifaceted and it was deeply deeply real the result came out last week it's called UFOs in government as historical inquiry and I'm very proud to be listed among the authors of it there are almost a thousand citations I have one book I can sell for the usual price that is it's 30 bucks he's not going to put an electronic form for a long time and I have a few copies of mind games I always carry mind games that's only 20 bucks so it sounds cheap the point though of bringing that up is that we spent years researching and combing out and eliminating anything speculative from what we present as historical scholarly academic research into the phenomena and how it was treated from the 40s forward and why and when you understand how the national security apparatus works it makes perfect sense for the decisions to have been made but they did it wrong and it resulted in a lot of blowback and besides they can't control the phenomena which is not us or ours and continues to show up and therefore has probably been researched why because things that were seen and documented in the 40s and 50s were thought to be impossible then stealth technology not on radar invisibility cloaking electromagnetic pulse weapons particle weapons beams lasers and a list of other technological advancements which we now take for granted exist because we made them but which were thought impossible when they were trying to speculate on where could the things come from and they thought mars because we hadn't been anywhere in the solar system much less the galaxy on the edges right on the edges being called crazy being ridiculed it is the fate of anyone who hacks the truth and reality seriously but refuses to be taken in by all the subterfuge and craziness of those who would spin you into other assembled and constructed worlds in order to make you less potent it takes discernment it takes mindfulness it takes vigilance and it takes a lifelong passion and commitment to simply finding out what's real and what we can do to make reality do the things that we want it to do when we got one minute one minute q and a and we'll do more q and a in the q and a room for anyone who wants to know i mean you i joke about it but it's true i had about 20 pages and i made it to page four because i got exercised about how the dirns spoke i thought it was an insult an embarrassing insult to us and our intelligence to treat us like feeble sheep anybody bang um any questions microphone for questions you were talking about uh like alien technologies and giving a list of uh things that were science fiction in the past but are now realities today uh are you insinuating that we have like reversed engineered some of these technologies from um see that's the trouble that's the trouble everything i stayed with was really just solid and grounded and i said now this is speculative let's think about how we got there that's all i'm saying it's all i'm saying no i'm insinuating nothing i'm not even saying they're extraterrestrial or that we know what they're about i don't know our conclusion in 500 pages with a thousand citations is that part of the problem was that the intelligence military community certainly in the 40s and 50s didn't know they knew they had something real they knew it was doing things that were astonishing and that's where we start our story in world war two with food fighters and then the waves that began 47 uh with arnold and then progressively well into the 70s 80s and we have experts from other countries uh who wrote chapters in those countries um sweden uh chapter on france chapter in spain uh we talk about belgium we talk about brazil uh it's global phenomena and other governments have done other things france made it a major priority and they have again because they say out loud at the top levels of government this is a real phenomena and it's doing things we need to learn from so all i'm saying is it makes sense that there was at least some people certainly who are paying attention to the capabilities i could suggest hearsay about that but that's not that book is not about hearsay that suggests at least we knew things were possible toward which we moved but am i saying there was uh serious research and development based on the saucer they got at raswell or whatever no yeah i know that um our understanding of space travel is is currently running up against the wall uh like uh the theory of relativity and um how years passed in space over distance and um i can't i can't really address those from here that's a big question about a sidebar and i'd like to stand the main themes if anybody else has a question i'll talk to you in the q and a room about that stuff okay one one more question by the nature of parallel contexts aren't we all humplings in a certain way absolutely absolutely but some are more humbling than others but i mean some people are utterly unselfconscious and uncritical about how their ideas came into their heads whether it was talk radio or whatever it was they don't know how they got where they were they don't see the structures of insinuation complexity and and device that create ideas and move people in the direction they're intended to go in all kinds of domains uh when they changed the name of medil school of journalism to journalism and public relations you knew the jig was up it meant that manipulation and spin and all the things we know about which started with eddie bernet's and others in the early 20th century it's great history of how propaganda and spin came to be the dominant means of communication yeah i used to work in advertising and actually i used your eddie bernet's uh analogy to talk about uh context and you know the i'm glad i didn't use it again then okay uh he saw me we got a quit i do have a few books that somebody wants one i'm really just a few um and this ufo book check it out online go to my website and just click the link and read the discussion of it just see with an open mind that the history of the subject is worth investigating at the depth and in the detail that we did it because the compelling conclusions are important for the 21st century thank you very much