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Joe Rogan is fantastically meat headed about so many things, but really he's a jack of all trades, master of none, and he majors in cardio kickboxing. The thin

• somatic 7y ago
  There’s no question that Rogan’s style is to make every interview as “warm” as possible, rarely challenging any guest on any extraordinary claim. There’s also an argument to be made about his “platforming” of arguable kooks and so on, though it’s clearly preferable to entertain unconventional ideas than to dismiss them out of hand, the cumulative payoff of an unconventional idea being so very great. Flying saucers are always good entertainment, though not good enough to paper over the fact that half of that Bob Lazar “documentary” was footage of a tattooed guy shouting into his smartphone for the benefit of like three different GoPros. The open secret of physics is that nobody really knows WTF is going on. Particle theory is obviously a rough approximation, and string theory and quantum theory have been effectively stalled for long enough that it’s increasingly apparent that the complexity of the Universe has more moving parts than the working memory of the human brain. Humility is called for. “We know” ... yeah, okay.
  • slow-brogan 7y ago
    No, the open secret of high energy particle physics is that certain facts cannot be disclosed to the public, for fear of unchecked nuclear proliferation. Most of the smoke and mirrors is for want of preventing an excess of capable practitioners, so that motivated political entities are denied crucial information that might enable their ability to bargain with nuclear tipped devices. But the obvious flaw in the Joe Rogan UFO nonsense is the hypothesis of unlimited energy produced by UFO technology. The theory is that bombarding mysterious compounds with particle beams can generate nigh limitless energy. That special magic elements result in unbalanced equations where you get more out than you put in. The Blink 182 singer, Tom DeLonge, claimed during his Joe Rogan interview that his new company is developing technologies capable of harnessing magical anti-gravity drives just like those described by Bob Lazar's UFO legend lore. The thing is, they might have some credibility if they could simply speak in terms of the fundamentals of fission and fusion, but they never do. If they could frame their theories within the bounds of readily understood atomic principles, like converting the standing potential energy of strong nuclear forces into kinetic energy and photons, they might not sound like kooks. Bob Lazar is smart enough to know better, but Tom DeLonge not so much, it seems. Bob Lazar sticks to a script of what he read and what he saw, and relies on principles of military compartmentalization to add mystique to his tale. He knows enough to steer clear of hard science, because it would get him into the weeds with hot waste isotopes that burst the fantasy bubble. Bob Lazar leaves some breathing room to suspend disbelief by floating the premise that the documentation he was exposed to might have intentionally introduced absurdities as a means of obfuscation, and to spike the beverage with loaded secret keywords that might reveal leaks to counterintelligence. So we say "okay, Lazar's data might be poisoned" and then cognitively cherry pick what enthralls us. Maybe it wasn't "unobtainium" or "ununpentium" but some other dangerous heavy element (plutonium) that he'd have refused to work with or even get close to. Maybe it wasn't "space aliens" and that little tidbit was simply a conceit of the compartmentalization. Area 51 was real, so maybe as a civilian employee he lacked awareness beyond the scope of his project. It's not like nuclear reactions don't unleash huge quantities of energy, but there isn't much to differentiate UFO power supplies from the free energy that cold fusion promised, but failed to deliver. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion