#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Joe Rogan Experience #2318 - Harold "Sonny" White

Host: Joe Rogan
Guest: Dr. Harold "Sonny" White
Release Date: May 8, 2025
Description: In this engaging episode, comedian and podcast host Joe Rogan sits down with physicist and engineer Dr. Harold "Sonny" White to delve deep into the realms of advanced power and propulsion systems, the mysteries of the quantum vacuum, and the intriguing accounts of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs).

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1. Introduction and Background

[00:01] Harold White:
"Advanced power and propulsion [have] been a passion of mine for the last 20 some odd years."

Harold White introduces his lifelong passion for advanced power and propulsion, tracing its roots back to his teenage years inspired by visits to the Air and Space Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. Joe Rogan expresses admiration for White's early focus in a highly specialized field, recognizing the advantage of such a head start in scientific research.

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2. The Intersection of Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity

White discusses his educational background, highlighting his PhD in physics and master's in mechanical engineering, which provides him a unique vantage point combining both scientific theory and engineering application.

[03:14] Harold White:
"Everything we know in physics today, general relativity and quantum mechanics are kind of the two bookends of everything that we know."

He emphasizes the incompatibility between quantum mechanics and general relativity, illustrating the need for a unified theory to advance concepts like warp drives. White introduces the idea that new physics, potentially involving a better understanding of the quantum vacuum, is essential for breakthroughs in advanced propulsion.

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3. Challenges with Current Propulsion Systems

The conversation shifts to the limitations of current propulsion systems, particularly the inability of biological entities to withstand extreme G-forces during rapid maneuvers.

[07:12] Joe Rogan:
"Biological entities being able to absorb G force, right... what we're seeing in the sky... biological entities can't survive that kind of G force."

White concurs, discussing the engineering challenges in creating propulsion systems that can achieve unprecedented speeds without endangering human life. They touch upon the example of NASA astronauts using T38 jets to train under high G-forces for space missions.

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4. Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) and Scientific Scrutiny

Rogan introduces the topic of UAPs, referencing Commander David Fravor's "Tic Tac" encounter, and probes White's thoughts on whether these sightings could be technologies developed by humans or something else.

[10:36] Harold White:
"I tend to be agnostic... it's difficult for me to take the data and the evidence... and pull that into the work that we do in the lab."

White remains skeptical yet open-minded, analyzing potential explanations such as advanced stealth technology or atmospheric phenomena like plasma projections. He cites the inability of current propulsion understanding to fully explain the extraordinary maneuverability and speed reported in UAP sightings.

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5. The Alcubierre Warp Drive Concept

White elaborates on the theoretical framework of the Alcubierre Warp Drive, a solution to Einstein’s field equations that envisions a spacecraft capable of faster-than-light travel by warping space-time.

[28:15] Joe Rogan:
"Nuclear electric propulsion."

[29:13] Harold White:
"A fusion engine that could accelerate a starship up to 5% of the speed of light."

He discusses the significant energy requirements and the necessity of "exotic matter" with negative mass to create the warp bubble. The conversation highlights the mathematical foundations laid by physicist Miguel Alcubierre and the practical obstacles in realizing such a propulsion system.

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6. Practical Applications and Current Research

White introduces his ongoing work at the Limitless Space Institute and the development of nanostructured devices aimed at harnessing energy from the quantum vacuum.

[57:35] Harold White:
"The quantum field, this fluctuating field of particles and forces, is a very real phenomenon."

He explains the Casimir effect, an observed force arising from quantum vacuum fluctuations, and how his team's research into micro and nanostructures could lead to practical energy-harvesting technologies. The potential applications range from powering small electronics to enabling future space missions.

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7. Manufacturing Challenges and Technological Advances

The discussion turns to the complexities of chip manufacturing required for White’s nanotechnology, drawing parallels with the semiconductor industry's challenges illustrated by the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on chip supplies.

[127:45] Joe Rogan:
"Imagine a future where you could start to create microgrids... if you could stack these things."

White emphasizes the importance of advancing chip manufacturing capabilities to scale his technology, highlighting ongoing efforts to reduce production times and increase efficiency. He underscores the societal benefits of such innovations, including energy independence and resilience against infrastructure disruptions.

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8. The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Scientific Advancement

Rogan queries White about the potential of AI to aid in scientific breakthroughs related to propulsion and quantum mechanics.

[147:18] Harold White:
"AI is an amazing tool, and it's only going to get more useful as we continue to move forward."

White acknowledges AI's utility in pattern recognition and data analysis but cautions against overestimating its capabilities. He stresses the necessity of human expertise in guiding AI-driven research to ensure meaningful and accurate scientific advancements.

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9. Speculative Technologies and Government Programs

The conversation ventures into the realm of government-funded black projects and the feasibility of highly advanced, classified propulsion technologies existing beyond public knowledge.

[79:48] Harold White:
"I don't know that there is an organization that has things that could potentially operate in the ways that we like the Tic Tacs."

White remains skeptical about the existence of such advanced technologies within classified programs, citing historical examples like the development of stealth aircraft to illustrate the difficulties in maintaining extended secrecy over groundbreaking innovations.

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10. UFO Sightings and Empirical Evidence

Rogan and White explore various UFO sightings, including the Rendlesham Forest incident, drawing parallels between reported UAP behaviors and known physical phenomena.

[100:27] Joe Rogan:
"But when you hear about these fighter pilots finding these objects... what is your thoughts?"

White discusses the limitations of current scientific understanding to fully explain certain UAP encounters, emphasizing the need for high-quality data to distinguish between potential human-made technologies and unexplained phenomena.

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11. Future Outlook and Closing Thoughts

In their concluding discussion, White reflects on the interconnectedness of current research with future propulsion capabilities, the potential societal transformations driven by energy innovations, and the enduring mysteries of consciousness and the quantum realm.

[155:12] Joe Rogan:
"So let's definitely do that. Let's definitely have another visit and bring in some people that will explore consciousness together."

White expresses enthusiasm for future collaborations to explore consciousness and its possible links to quantum mechanics, underscoring the importance of interdisciplinary research in unlocking humanity's scientific frontiers.

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Notable Quotes

• Harold White [03:14]:
  "Everything we know in physics today, general relativity and quantum mechanics are kind of the two bookends of everything that we know."

• Joe Rogan [07:12]:
  "Biological entities being able to absorb G force... biological entities can't survive that kind of G force."

• Harold White [10:36]:
  "I'm pretty agnostic... it's difficult for me to take the data and the evidence... and pull that into the work that we do in the lab."

• Harold White [28:15]:
  "Fusion engine that could accelerate a starship up to 5% of the speed of light."

• Harold White [57:35]:
  "The quantum field, this fluctuating field of particles and forces, is a very real phenomenon."

• Joe Rogan [127:45]:
  "Imagine a future where you could start to create microgrids... if you could stack these things."

• Harold White [147:18]:
  "AI is an amazing tool, and it's only going to get more useful as we continue to move forward."

---

Conclusion

This episode of The Joe Rogan Experience offers a fascinating exploration of advanced propulsion systems, the enigmatic quantum vacuum, and the scientific pursuit of faster-than-light travel. Dr. Harold "Sonny" White provides insightful perspectives on the current state of physics, the challenges of developing breakthrough technologies, and the enduring mysteries surrounding unidentified aerial phenomena. The dialogue bridges complex scientific theories with speculative applications, presenting listeners with a thought-provoking journey into the future of space exploration and energy innovation.

Transcript

[Harold White]

Joe Rogan Podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.

[Joe Rogan]

Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. What's happening?

[Harold White]

Hey, how's it going, Joe? Good.

[Joe Rogan]

Pleasure to meet you.

[Harold White]

Yeah, thank you for having me here today. I appreciate it.

[Joe Rogan]

My pleasure. Well, as soon as I saw the subject, I was like, oh, yeah, like, what are you doing?

[Harold White]

Right, right, right. Advanced power and propulsion kind of been a passion of mine for the last 20 some odd years. I suppose if I kind of look back through the annals of my life, right. I've been thinking about advanced power and propulsion ever since I was a teenager.

[Joe Rogan]

What do you think inspired that? Was it space missions? Was it? Did you look at it and go, I think we can do better? Like, what was it?

[Harold White]

Well, you know, I grew up in Washington, D.C. and so I got a chance to spend a lot of time in the Air and Space Smithsonian. I don't know if you've ever had a chance to go to that, but growing up in dc, getting a chance to go to the Air and Space Smithsonian, I got to see all these awesome examples of people working together to try and accomplish amazing things. Right. You know, you might walk into the Air and Space Smithsonian and you just think about, wow, this is full of a bunch of stuff. But it's not just about the stuff, right? It's about the people that worked together to do all these amazing things, right? Like the Bell X1 rocket. I mean, if you really want to go back. The Wright Flyer, right? That's. That's something where two guys worked together that made bicycles for a living, that decided to go create something that flew. And then in less than 50, you know, 50, 60 years from when they flew that Wright Flyer, right, We're putting human beings on the surface of the moon. And so all that really resonated with me as a kid and I think tended to make me gravitate towards a technical field, although it wasn't a straight line. Right. I'd like to say, you know, I knew at an early age what my calling was and what I was going to do, but I bounced around for a little bit until I finally got on a path that I really connected with. And so I think I knew very early on in my journey in university, right, when I was going and getting my degree, that I wanted to work in advanced power and propulsion. And so at that point, everything I did kind of worked towards how do I get the skills, how do I get the math and physics training that helps me kind of work in this domain? Because I was Thinking about the idea of space warps very early on. Right.

[Joe Rogan]

It's amazing that you were so focused so early. What a great head start. You know, it's a huge advantage to know what you really interested in at such an early age.

[Harold White]

There. Well, there were a few speed bumps along the way. We took a few detours like, like any, like any human. Right. You're like, I don't know if I want to do this yet. Right.

[Joe Rogan]

So it is pretty extraordinary if you look at that number that you said, like from Orville Wright and Wilbur Wright to space travel, like how quick that is.

[Harold White]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

I mean, and we think about, in terms of ancient history, how long it took us to get to this point and that kind of acceleration so rapidly, inside of a lifetime to see just world changing events and the Internet all happening simultaneously.

[Harold White]

Right, Absolutely. You know, there's another interesting story, right. So my background is I've got a PhD in physics and a master's in mechanical engineering. So I'm both a scientist and an engineer. So I have deep appreciation for both disciplines. But within the discipline of science. Right. You know, we just talked about the Wright Flyer and then going to the surface of the moon and that's more of a kind of an engineering story on the topic of science. You know, think about E equals MC squared. You probably heard that or saw it on a coffee cup.

[Joe Rogan]

I don't really honestly know what it means. It's a theory of relativity.

[Harold White]

It's theory of relativity.

[Joe Rogan]

I could say it to people like, come on, man.

[Harold White]

Right? E equals MC squared.

[Joe Rogan]

What is the theory of relativity?

[Harold White]

So E equals MC squared. Right. Is an equation that relates energy to mass. If you were to take some modest piece of mass, say, you've got some tidbits here. The mass that's in this pen right here, you take the mass that's in this pen and you convert it to energy. That equation helps you understand exactly how much energy you can potentially release. And so that equation, why, it might sound very humble, right? Oh, E equals MC squared. That's cool. But it had super big implications. And you just talked about how quickly things move, so let's talk about that for just a second. Equals MC squared. Einstein comes up with this equation. 1911, somebody will look it up on the Internet and correct me if I'm wrong, comes up with the equation in 1911, they split the first atom in 1928, 1932. Time frame, I can't remember the exact time frame. 1942, we had the first nuclear reactor underneath the squash court at University of Chicago. They, they did things very differently in the 1940s, Joe. Under a squash court. Yeah, right, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Did they let the people playing squash know?

[Harold White]

Who knows, right.

[Joe Rogan]

What happened to them? Are they X Men now?

[Harold White]

Right, exactly. That's a, that's the origin story. That's the Spider man origin story, right? Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

That's where Phoenix came from.

[Harold White]

Yeah, yeah. Your friends tell you. I can, I can, I think I can hear the color blue now. Right, so, so anyway, had the first nuclear reactor underneath the squash court in 1942. And then the Trinity test, that's the atomic bomb test in 1945. And so in the span of just a few decades, we go from a cute coffee cup worthy equation to a paradigm shift in human existence, right? And that's without computers in the way we think of it. That's without machine learning and without AI. And so as we continue to move forward, right, we've got, you know, if you think about everything we know in physics today, general relativity and quantum mechanics are kind of the two bookends of everything that we know. We're going to continue to expand our knowledge and we will come up with new E equals MC squared kind of equations. But now we're equipped with computers, we're equipped with machine learning AI. And so it's going to be exponential growth, right? So it'll be interesting to see, to see how quickly we go from, hey, I have this new insight. Found this funny thing in a lab to wow. It changes everything, how we do everything as a, as a culture and community. Right?

[Joe Rogan]

So there's several problems with the current propulsion systems, right? And the big one is like biological entities being able to absorb G force, right. No matter if you super hyper engineer something and have it really crazy. But the things that we're seeing in the sky, the things that people describe. Like Commander David Fravor when he described that Tic Tac, that vehicle, that thing, whatever it was that went from above 50,000ft to sea level in a second and shot off at insane rate speeds. Biological entities can't survive that kind of G force, we think.

[Harold White]

Yeah. So I think in terms of a human ability to take GS.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, I should say human, not like tardigrades could.

[Harold White]

Right, Right. Yeah. So a human being can. Well trained human beings can take potentially up to nine GS.

[Joe Rogan]

Have you ever done that before?

[Harold White]

I have not.

[Joe Rogan]

I did it once with the Blue Angels. I got to seven and a half G's. It was bananas.

[Harold White]

That's awesome. You have to. I bet that was an experience oh my. I am so jealous.

[Joe Rogan]

Mad respect for those guys. Mad respect for those guys.

[Harold White]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

First of all, the biggest thing, when you go to area like, these guys are jacked. They're in like insane shape because you're literally forcing blood into your brain to tolerate the G force.

[Harold White]

Yeah, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

So they have to hold on to their stick, their, you know, the joystick, and they're going while they're flying, you know, through the canyons. It's bananas.

[Harold White]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Like, extraordinary. So imagine a person being able to tolerate that on a regular basis and perform fine motor skill functions like, you know, pointing and aiming and shooting and all the crazy stuff that those guys are capable of doing.

[Harold White]

Being able to think and in some cases, if they're in combat, being able to make critical decisions. You know, in some ways, what you're talking about when you look at NASA's astronaut corps, right. As part of their regimen, they have to go up in T38s on a regular basis to try and help, help train with the whole. How do you make decisions? Right. When your life is on the line and the time is finite. Right. So there's a whole aspect of this that's kind of geared towards keeping those portions of the BR trained and sharp.

[Joe Rogan]

Right, right. Which is the best argument for AI taking over. So when you hear about stories about these fighter pilots finding these objects in the sky that exhibit extraordinary capabilities and don't have all the signatures of traditional propulsion systems, what is your thoughts? This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Speed dating is an interesting concept, isn't it? Setting an allotted amount of time to get to know as many people as you can. It increases your chances of finding a good match. And there's not a whole lot of room for bullshit. You have to cut to the chase to find what you're looking for. Wouldn't it be nice if you had something like that when it comes to hiring for your business? Well, Good news, there's ZipRecruiter. Zip Recruiter has a new Zip Intro feature that helps speed up the hiring process, connect you with qualified candidates faster. You can try it for [e-mail] Rogan as soon as you post your job, Zip Intro will get to work. You could even be talking to candidates in back to back calls the very next day. All you have to do is pick a time and it'll start scheduling top talent for you to meet. Enjoy the benefits of speed hiring with the new Zip Intro feature only from ZipRecruiter. Rated the number one hiring site based on G2. Try Zip Intro for free at ZipRecruiter.com/rogan. Again that ZipRecruiter.com/rogan Zip Intro. Post jobs today, Talk to qualified candidates tomorrow.

[Harold White]

Generally, I tend to be agnostic to the topic. I have a lot of friends that are extremely interested in a lot of things that are out and about in the media and in the literature. But generally I tend to be agnostic and here's why. In everything that's currently out that people talk about and highlight, it's difficult for me to take the data and the evidence and then pull that into the work that we do in the lab with some of the different test devices we work with. As we kind of explore the frontiers of where physics and propulsion might intersect, it's hard to take that and turn that into some kind of an action plan, if you will. So I'm certainly aware, like David Fravor, the experience that he had with, I think he calls them, tic tacs, right? An amazing account. And there's multiple people that saw it, multiple platforms that saw it. And so to start with, right. I thought maybe there was a small chance that was just like, we have stealth technology, right. Where if you want to hide a plane, what if we had the ability to project something right through some mechanism where we could make people go where we wanted them to go, right? Because I know there is. There's a technology that uses like two different lasers that triangulate a certain point in open air and they put enough energy into a particular location that they ionize the air. And so it creates like a bright pixel. And so they use that to create three dimensional displays that kind of look like they're just floating out in air. Now, they're not quite as big as what we saw described with the Nimitz encounter on the West Coast. So I thought for a little while maybe that might be something that we're seeing.

[Joe Rogan]

They can project plasma as well, Right. Is that the same thing?

[Harold White]

It's the same thing. So the two lasers intersect, they ionize the air, which creates a plasma.

[Joe Rogan]

And they can do this over long distances as well, right.

[Harold White]

I don't know about long distances. I know they can do it over short distances. And so for a while there, I wondered if that might be something that could explain some of what that makes sense, what David Fravor and the group saw.

[Joe Rogan]

The only problem would be the radar, because I don't know if you wouldn't pick up that on radar, would you? Because it's Not a mass. Right.

[Harold White]

So the plasma would certainly absorb a radar signal. Right. Because it's going to polarize any electromagnetic wave that tries to go through. So it would, it might, it might, it might.

[Joe Rogan]

Would it be possible to make something that big that's 20ft long out of that?

[Harold White]

It's hard for me to imagine that, but it so in. I think there's one piece of data that just came out in the last few weeks. I think David Fravor's wingman, Alex. I think her name is Alex Dietrich. I can't remember the name.

[Joe Rogan]

I think you're right.

[Harold White]

So she came out. And so in all the things associated with that particular encounter, one of the things I've been trying to figure out is how do they describe the specular surface of the Tic Tac? Because if it's these plasma pixels that I'm talking about, that kind of creates a volumetric display, I would speculate it might be kind of a glowy looking thing. But I think Alex in her account described as kind of a flat type of like matte. Yeah, yeah. So that kind of, that kind of torpedoed my working theory. But again, while it's amazing and incredible and it's something that people want to go think about and go try and collect more data, it doesn't help me do what I'm doing in the lab. And so I think I kind of keep, you know, my eyes dart every once in a while over to that particular topic. What's that about? That's interesting.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, I mean, I'm honestly agnostic as well. I bounce back and forth from being really excited about it to feel like I'm being duped all the time. Jamie and I talk about it all the time. I'm back in. Jamie's back in. And Jamie will find something. He's like, I think I'm back in right now. I'm looking through the article about the late the Navy laser that can do this. I'm trying to figure out how big the objects are that they can make move. But they're definitely. They're designed to trick heat seeking missiles. So they got to be big enough for that. So they want to. Okay. So they make a heat signature so they trick the heat. Which makes sense, right. Because they're plasma.

[Harold White]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

From tens to hundreds of meters away. Where are you at right now with UFOs? You in or out? There's. I'm still in on something, but I don't know what the object is or what is. We've both been in and out. Consciousness Thing I'm on that this week or month. Oh, the one where they think they can call them in. Not just that you need consciousness to. To use it or talk to it or see it or maybe, maybe there was some talk of gravity propulsion Systems in the 1950s, I believe there was some work that was being done, and there was some discussion about whether or not it'd be possible to use nuclear energy to create some sort of a gravity drive. What is your thoughts on that stuff?

[Harold White]

Well, I think in order to do so, I'm going to use a different parlance. Right. Instead of like, obviously, I don't know what I'm talking about. No, no, no, that's okay. That's okay. Right, right. So in terms of some of the language that we use in the literature when we talk about something that would, I think, trace to what you mean when you say a gravity drive. Right. We might use the parlance space drive. Right. And so conceptually, it would be a form of propulsion that instead of using some form of onboard propellant in a tank, Right. It's found some way to couple to some external field, whatever it might be, and can generate some kind of a propulsive force. And so in my mind, in order for us to ever be able to go down a path where we're trying to create something like that, that might look like that or smell like that or what have you, we need to have a deeper understanding of gravity. Right. And so, you know, we, you know, we just talked about E MC squared. And so I'm going to back up just a minute. If you think about everything we know today as of in physics, as a Venn diagram, there are two circles on this Venn diagram, and they touch at a little tangent point. One of those circles is quantum mechanics. That helps us understand how atoms behave, how light moves. And in the other circle, we have the words general relativity. And so that helps us understand how the cosmos evolves, how stars move and galaxies move. And so those two circles touch at a single tangent point. They don't overlap. So what that says is gravity. We don't know how to connect gravity to quantum mechanics. We don't understand that. But in terms of all of our daily life, just. Just that level of physics helps us every single day, right? This cell phone is only possible because of quantum mechanics. And GPS is only as accurate as it is because we use general relativity to correct the atomic clocks on the GPS satellites. But until we develop a better understanding of how gravity might connect to quantum mechanics, or alternately, how quantum mechanics might connect to gravity. I don't know that we'll be able to make meaningful progress. Right. And so we need more circles on the Venn diagram. Just those two aren't enough. There are a number of people that would speculate that, you know, quantum mechanics is incomplete, general relativity is incomplete, perhaps it's even emergent. I think you had Hal Puthoff on here a few days ago, Right. And he talked about a physicist by the name of Sakharov who talked about the fact. I think he was one of the guys that first pioneered the thought process, maybe gravity is simply an emergent phenomena, and we'll develop a better understanding as we add more circles in and around the quantum mechanics circle, if you will. And so I think in order for us to be able to, you know, come up with a widget, right, you know, some widget that generates a force in the form of a space drive, we're going to have to have more physics than what we currently have.

[Joe Rogan]

So we'll have to have more of an understanding of what gravity actually is.

[Harold White]

Yes.

[Joe Rogan]

And what generates gravity.

[Harold White]

Yeah. And it's not just the gravity thing. It's. It's quantum mechanics, because quantum mechanics by itself, quantum mechanics is completely incompatible with general relativity. So this is a big issue. Right. There are tons of people that spend their entire life trying to figure out how to unravel this mystery. It's a big conundrum.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, it's so fascinating to me because if you were a scientist in the 1400s and you were having this discussion with those people, they would think you're a wizard.

[Harold White]

Absolutely. Especially if you held up something like that. I'd get burned at a stake. Immediately.

[Joe Rogan]

Show the screen.

[Harold White]

Right, right.

[Joe Rogan]

I said, jamie, pull something up.

[Harold White]

Yeah, something up.

[Joe Rogan]

Doing what is happening.

[Harold White]

What is it that you show it upon thy. Thy wall. Right. So.

[Joe Rogan]

So imagine, you know, extrapolating. Imagine going in the future and seeing what this. All this stuff is going to look like once we gain more and more understanding, which more. More scientists, more researchers piling on their discoveries. And then ultimately one day, we'll be looking back on 20, 25 going, look at those barbarians.

[Harold White]

Oh, my gosh. Did you see that show with Sonny and Joe where they were talking about what a bunch of maroons gravity was? Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

It'd be like bloodletting. Yeah.

[Harold White]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

It's really kind of interesting because I bet every current civilization thinks it's at the pinnacle and that, you know, we've. This is. You know, everybody else is a moron, and this is. We are A seriously advanced society.

[Harold White]

Right? Right.

[Joe Rogan]

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[Harold White]

Interesting, you know, I get a chance to go do a bunch of discussions with students all over the globe, right? And talking about space exploration specifically, you know, advanced power and propulsion, right? I really kind of get into this whole difference between to space and through space. And so as part of that narrative, right, I always spend a little bit of time telling them, right, we, we live in a society where everybody likes to pretend like we got all this stuff figured out, right? There's. There's nothing left to figure out, right? You know, we got cell phones and Internet and airplanes and. Right. All different kinds of stuff. There's. There's really nothing left and maintain what we have, right? Well, yeah, exactly. And, and so I, I like to remind them, right, When I talk about, well, let's talk about that. What do we know? And then I kind of take them through that little, that little thought process of the Venn diagram just to say, hey, look, right, These two models are not compatible. That says there's a bigger circle, right? That connects the dots between all this stuff. And I highly doubt we'll ever come up with a single step that goes from just the two circles on the Venn diagram to a final one, some grand unified theory. I don't think we'll ever take one single step. I think it's going to be a series of a bunch of different steps by a bunch of different people over many generations. And it's like there's so much stuff to go figure out. Come, you know, come help us push back against the darkness. Help us, you know, forever hunting the edge of the map, if you will.

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Harold White]

And so I think sometimes in today's society, we get lulled into this sense of security that we got it all figured out. I mean, we got AI says all kinds of neat, helps us out, you know, all these different things. And so we get lulled into this sense that we've got it all figured out and there's just, there's so much mystery out there for us to go figure out.

[Joe Rogan]

Also, there's a lot of people that are full of shit that are muddying up the water. So it's very difficult to know what is exactly true at any current moment. Yeah, I mean, just in the UAP world, there's a ton of grifters, there's a ton of people that are just putting sensational nonsense out to just get.

[Harold White]

A bunch of clicks in some ways. Again, when I talk to students and I kind of give them suggestions and advice and mentoring, it's like if you've got some particular area that you're interested in and it's highly technical, go do the work that's necessary to give yourself the math skills, the engineering skills, the science, whatever you need, make sure you're equipped right? So that you can. Whatever's in front of you, you can go look at it with a discerning eye, right? Because like you said, the Internet's changed the world for both the better and the worse. Right? The signal to noise ratio has changed a lot. There's a lot of noise out there. And so the, the best thing you can do to try and cope with something like that is just to make sure you're trained right, and you're capable of being able to discern something that's real versus something that's, you know, nonsense.

[Joe Rogan]

So what is real in terms of, at least conceptually, what is real about warp drives?

[Harold White]

You know the great question, the. When we talk about space exploration, right, A lot of times people think of like a Falcon 9 rocket, Saturn V or a space shuttle. And these are all wonderful examples that should come to mind. But this is what we need to get to space, right? You got to climb against a gravitational well, if you will, and get into space. But when you get into space and you want to try and move through space, right, the things that you might use to solve that problem in an optimal sense, might look very differently from the idea of rockets to get you to space. And so through space, there's a lot of things that we can bring to bear, but this gets into, I think, a larger framework. I'd like to unpack with you today to talk about this through space type of thought process. But since you specifically asked about warp, I'm going to kind of jump forward. I'm going to jump forward on the discussion thread.

[Joe Rogan]

We don't have to. We can use it as a teaser.

[Harold White]

Okay, well, let's. Let's use that as a teaser. Let's back up then. And so I, you know, I provided a video that we pulled together called Go Incredibly Fast. I did it with a Swedish digital artist, Eric Ornquist. He's done a bunch of wonderful videos for NASA and a bunch of other friends. But this video kind of encapsulates the challenge of time and distance in space. Right. If you want to send human beings past Mars in the solar system, that sets up a problem statement, right. That changes the nature of the types of technologies that you might think about bringing to bear to solve the problem. And so this video tells us what are some things that we can do to solve this problem, spanning from things that we kind of know to things that we kind of don't know in terms of both physics and engineering. And so this video is kind of a. An emotional encapsulation of a highly technical story. So let's watch. This would be a great way to kind of tee off this discussion.

[Joe Rogan]

The sky calls to us. We do not destroy ourselves. We're one day venture to the stars. Carl Sagan.

[Harold White]

As incredible as it may seem, there will be a time, and it may be closer than you think, when we live on other worlds. The moon, Mars, and in the space between. And when that day comes, just as always, our children will look with curiosity across these new horizons, with a desire to go further and to explore what lies beyond. But beyond Mars, the distances between worlds grow immensely, even within our own solar system, and become truly vast in between stars. If we ever want to reach out across these distances, we need to to learn how to go fast.

[Joe Rogan]

Nuclear electric propulsion.

[Harold White]

Here we go. Yeah. So this is what we know. Using our current knowledge of physics and engineering, we could build nuclear locomotives to take humans to all the worlds in our solar system. But a starship powered with a nuclear heart, aimed for even our closest star, Proxima Centauri, would have to harbor hundreds of generations of people, all living their Entire lives aboard before reaching its destination four and a quarter light years away. It would take two years just to reach the orbit of Saturn and another 2,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri. We need to be able to go faster.

[Joe Rogan]

Fusion propulsion.

[Harold White]

We should rerecord this with you doing that creature, the vignettes, knowledge of physics. But with engineering we have yet to develop, we can imagine a propulsion system with a sun for a heart, A fusion engine that could accelerate a starship up to 5% of the speed of light. This ship could cross the orbit of Saturn in six months and reach Proxima Centauri in just over a century. But if we want to traverse interstellar distances in less than a human lifetime, we have to go incredibly fast. The universe has shown us that this can be done by altering the scale of space itself. And we are working to develop new understandings of physics to learn how this might be controlled. If we could construct a starship with a propulsion system that decreases space in front of it and expands space behind it, this ship could cross enormous distances, effectively faster than the speed of light. Such a ship would reach from Mars to Saturn in just a matter of minutes and be able to reach Proxima Centauri in less and six months.

[Joe Rogan]

Whoa.

[Harold White]

From there, there are no limits to where we could go. Perhaps one day, humanity will look up at an alien night sky and strain to find the pale yellow dot that is our sun, our home, and know for the first time as we look back on ourselves, that we are not alone in the universe. This journey starts today.

[Joe Rogan]

Whoa. First of all, whoever did the graphics.

[Harold White]

Thanks, Jamie. Yeah. Eric Ornquist was the Swedish digital artist that we used to develop that video. And so that guy nailed it. Oh, my gosh, didn't he? Yeah, that's pretty cool. Yeah, we had. We had a, like a three swim lane chart, if you will. That's a very technical version of this. We have a copy of it. We don't need to bring it up, Jamie. I can just do it verbally here. But it kind of encapsulates that thought process of this time distance problem. You know, when we think about space exploration with humans, we think about Mars, right? We're trying to. We've sent human beings to the moon. We're probably going to go back to the moon sooner rather than later. And then eventually we want to send human beings to Mars. But what if we wanted to send human beings to Saturn and we want to get them there in 200 days? These are. That's a timeframe that's kind of compatible with what we've thought about for humans to Mars, 180 to 220 days. If you frame the question that way, the amount of energy that's necessary to get humans to Saturn in 200 days is an order of magnitude more energy than it takes to get a payload from the surface of the Earth to low Earth orbit. So all that to say, right, that particular problem, chemical propulsion, can't solve that problem. And so this is starting to kind of frame the discussion, this narrative that we've pulled together when we talk to students all around the globe. The difference between two space, the difference of through space. When you talk about through space, the distances are just so big, right? You have to rethink the problem, especially when you constrain it with how long does it take to get there, right? And so this particular video encapsulates things that we might do to solve problems like that and maybe even into another star system. Talking about things that we know. Like the very first, first part of the video, the vignette was like you said, nuclear electric proportion. I can't do your voice. Nuclear electric propulsion, right? And so this is a situation where it's known physics, known engineering. We've got a nuclear reactor that's fissioning uranium. Let's say it's splitting apart atoms, and that's the source of energy. You use that energy to plug into some form of electric propulsion. Like you got the neon sign that's behind you. Imagine you could take one of those tubes and cut the end off and allow the blue or green glowy bit to come out the back, right? And so the efficiency of electric propulsion versus chemical propulsion is much better. And so that's a way we can potentially think of a spacecraft architecture, nuclear electric propulsion, a nuclear reactor coupled to some form of electric propulsion that allows us to send human beings to Saturn in 200 days. And technically speaking, that capability, if we didn't invent anything else beyond that, that would allow us to send human beings everywhere in the solar system. That's why that's extremely important. And now we're getting into the passion of what I fought so. Fought for, so hard working at NASA to try and advocate for this understanding of the big difference between these two types of problems. If you, if we, you know, if we make up our minds to perfect the idea of nuclear electric propulsion as a capability, I mean, that unlocks the whole solar system, right? That's just kind of like the, just the tip of the iceberg. And so the video then goes on after we, you know, after we kind of say, you know, nuclear electric propulsion can open up a lot of stuff for us, but it's still going to take. You remember how long it said to go to Proxima Centauri? It was like 100 years. 2000 years for the new.

[Joe Rogan]

That's right.

[Harold White]

So, I mean, I don't know about you, but that better be one comfortable window seat. Right? That's a long time to be on a flight, if you will.

[Joe Rogan]

Now that. How screwed up are the people that live?

[Harold White]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

Because you're inbreeding.

[Harold White]

Yeah, well, it's. Yes, it's definitely. It's going to be generations. Right.

[Joe Rogan]

So either generations, you're going to have to have babies and, like, with who?

[Harold White]

Yeah, right.

[Joe Rogan]

How are you going to do that? How are you going to choose? We're going to have arranged marriages and space. Is that progress?

[Harold White]

Right, right. You know? Right.

[Joe Rogan]

Force people to carry child. Children.

[Harold White]

Yeah. Or they might be frozen. Like, was it. What's that movie with the blue aliens? I can't remember. Right.

[Joe Rogan]

Imagine if they're debating a woman's right to choose while they're in space. You know what I'm saying?

[Harold White]

Oh, my gosh. Right?

[Joe Rogan]

It gets weird.

[Harold White]

Yeah. Yeah. So we need to keep civilization.

[Joe Rogan]

Right? If you all commit. But I didn't commit. My grandparents did. But you're still on this thing.

[Harold White]

It's like, yeah, my great, great, great, great, great grandparents committed. Right.

[Joe Rogan]

This episode is brought to you by Visible Now. You know, I tend to go down a lot of rabbit holes. I want to know everything about everything, and if you' Wireless that can keep up. Visible is wireless that lets you live in the know. It's the ultimate wireless hack. You get unlimited data and hotspot so you're connected on the go. Plus, Visible is powered by Verizon's 5G network, meaning fast speeds and great coverage. And with the new Visible plus Pro plan, you get premium wireless without the premium cost. And the best part, it's all digital. No stores. You can switch to Visible right from your phone. It only takes about 15 minutes. And then you manage your plan in the app. Ready for wireless that lets you live in the know. Make the [e-mail] Rogan Plan start at $25 a month for the best features. Get the new Visible Plus Pro plan for $45 a month. Terms apply. See visible.com for plan features and network management details. Not only that, the reality is, by the time they get there, the human beings will have created technology that. That far exceeds that and probably beat them to it.

[Harold White]

Yeah. You kind of see that hinted in the video too, right, where you got the slow boat and then you got the. Fusion's the next one that comes by, and the guy's like, you know, waving as he goes by. Well, for sure, you would be a.

[Joe Rogan]

Sucker to get on the first ship, because by the time it gets there, the new ships will have already been there for months.

[Harold White]

Yeah, yeah. They'll welcome you when you arrive. Right.

[Joe Rogan]

The grandchildren of those people will welcome you.

[Harold White]

Yeah. So the fusion propulsion is kind of the next step. Step in the story. And so when we make that step, we're a little bit into the unknown, right? We. We understand the. We understand the physics, Right. The sun at the center of our solar system works on fusion. It fuses atoms together instead of splitting them apart to generate electricity. And so fusion propulsion is kind of another step in capability. Right. That allows us to do. Maybe do an interstellar mission that's measured in 100, maybe 200 years. Still kind of long, but that's a lot more respectable than 2000 years. But contrary to what the movie Iron man might say, we don't have fusion reactors that are gigawatts the size of this coffee cup. Right.

[Joe Rogan]

Stick in your chest.

[Harold White]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we got. We got it. We got a little work to do before we get there.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, that comic book was written probably in the 50s, right?

[Harold White]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

So when you think about this kind of progress, this ability to generate that amount of power and to bend gravity and to bend space, what kind of a timeline do you think we're on for something like that?

[Harold White]

That's actually one of the most popular questions I get when I go talk to students. Right. Whenever you talk about that last swim lane in the video, the idea of a space warp, you know, you can expand and contract space, and that allows us to potentially go somewhere in. Whereas we were just previously talking about millennia and centuries. Right. So just to remind folks, we just talked about everything that we know of physics today. Quantum mechanics, general relativity. Right. We got to add some more stuff to the Venn diagram to develop an understanding. And so my crystal ball is no better than yours, Joe. I couldn't say specifically if when something like that might happen, but I can say I actually do know what we need to be working on right now. Right. And so in that context. Right. I'm certainly doing the things that. That I think might help make meaningful progress towards that type of operative goal at some point in time. But, you know, I. I just don't know how long it might take. And so let me. Let me kind of give a. An experience that I had. So I taught at International Space University over in Strasbourg in France, and they have. They have a cathedral there in Strasbourg. Absolutely stunning. But the. The thing that's even more interesting about this structure, it's like 500ft tall. They started building it in 1100 AD, and they didn't finish the cathedral until 1700 AD, so the people that built the basement had no hope of seeing the finished product. All they could do was imagine in their mind's eye what it might look like. But they knew what they needed to do to kind of make meaningful progress. And so they did their work, and then they hand the baton off to the next generation. Maybe they're putting the floor in, and then another generation does the buttresses and so forth. So from that standpoint, I think sometimes it's important to. You know, we talk about teamwork. Right. Teamwork is a great thing, but teamwork, we typically think of shoulder to shoulder. Right. But I think there's also value in teamwork across generations, if you will. Right. In a day and age where you get impatient, if you text somebody and they don't text you back in like, 30 seconds, I think we've lost an appreciation for the value of what that means. Right. In terms of working over stuff longer than what your horizon might be. I'd love to see the idea of a space warp, you know, before I go to the next chapter, but I don't know that that will happen for sure. But I do know specifically what I need to be doing. And so from that standpoint, that's how I kind of. That's how I grapple with that particular question, because it's a wonderful question, and I would love to be able to tell you a very concise answer that would fit with what I would hope it would be. But I don't know for certain. But I do know what I need to be doing next. And that gets into. Maybe we can unpack that in just a little bit. That gets into the idea of how the idea of a space warp works and how that traces back to those two circles on the Venn diagram. Quantum mechanics in general. Let's talk about that. Yeah. So maybe what we can do. Jamie sent you. There's a. There's a slide that's got, like, a cartoon space warp. It looks like a little sheet of a mesh or something like that. I don't know how to explain. If you could pull up.

[Joe Rogan]

There it is.

[Harold White]

Yes. That's the One. That's the one. So we actually did that graphic on the right for Nature, the journal Nature. They were doing an article on the 50th anniversary Star Trek. And so they asked us to, to pull together that graphic. And so this is, this is a, an illustration of the idea of a space warp. Let me give just a little bit of background. You know, in physics, there is a speed limit that we have to acknowledge when we talk about trying to go somewhere really quickly. Right. And so I like to call it the 11th Commandment of Physics. Thou shalt not exceed the speed of light. Right. It's kind of a hard and fast speed limit. And so if you talk about trying to get to another star that's four and a quarter light years away, that might, or that should automatically set in your mind. Well, shoot, we can't get any there, can't get there any quicker than four and a quarter light years, right? Well, there is a little bit of hope because there's a loophole in general relativity that establishes that hard speed limit. General relativity says we can expand and contract space at any speed. And we see evidence for this when we look at the nature of the cosmos. Right. Right after The Big Bang, 14 billion years ago, there was something called an inflationary phase, right? Where if you were to pick two random points in this expanding bubble of the early cosmos, you stood on one point and you looked at another point and figured out how fast it was moving away from you. It would move away from you like 10 to the 30th, you know, 10 with 30 zeros times the speed of light. So, yeah, really, really, really fast. Right? And so we, we know from astrophysics and cosmology that this is possible. And so this idea was kind of rattling around in a physicist's brain called Alcubierre who said, hey, well, you know, this is interesting. Nature can do it on a grand scale. Can we potentially do it on a purposeful, in a purposeful way? And so he published a paper in 1994 that kind of encapsulated the mathematics for this idea. And if you, if you take his mathematics and you put it into physical form, it's going to look like my little cartoon here on the Right. And so you got the, the little ring that goes around the, the little surface there. It looks like a wave, and then there's a little central portion there, kind of looks like a football, let's say. And so what happens is that ring that goes around that little football, that's what would, that's what's necessary to make the trick work. And so it has to be filled with something called exotic matter. And so that's an important issue, right? The what's exotic matter, Right. So it's, it's something in general relativity that's also equivalent to negative mass. And so we all understand positive mass, right? If your little brother hits you on the head with something that's positive mass hitting your head, right. Negative mass is not only 0 mass, but it's a negative value. And so what does that even mean? And so in the context of general relativity, if we come up with a model that requires exotic matter, we have to highlight that as a problem, because we don't in general activity, general TV doesn't tell us how to make that. And so that could potentially be an obstacle that would prevent something like this from ever being physically real. But if we could figure out how to make it, and I'll actually speak to that in just a second. If we could make that and we could create a ring that could manifest that exotic matter, it would cause space time to respond in such a way so that it would expand and contract to allow you to go to Proxima Centauri in five and a half months, as measured by you onboard the spacecraft in that football and as measured by folks over in mission control over in Houston. Whoa.

[Joe Rogan]

Now, this exotic matter, what do you speculate that would, what would that be?

[Harold White]

So, exotic matter. And this, the cool thing is these are the equations, so they'll be a test later.

[Joe Rogan]

Joe, so I'm ready.

[Harold White]

So in Alcubierre's paper in 1994, right. He rightly highlights the fact that, hey, there's a problem. Danger, Will Robinson. This stuff requires exotic matter. That may mean it's non physical. However, he highlights the fact, hey, we have this other circle over here called quantum mechanics. And there's something in the context of quantum mechanics called negative vacuum energy density. And so that's something that's connected to the idea of the Casimir force. We'll. We'll unpack that later. But that is something that could be serve as a proxy for the idea of exotic matter and may help us one day make the idea of a space warp a physical real thing.

[Joe Rogan]

Whoa. So this ability to go as fast as you're describing, where you could conceivably make it to other solar systems, this obviously is a version of it that will probably be improved upon, Right? So if this ever does come to fruition, you could conceivably imagine a time where you generate even more power, have even more Capability, and you can go everywhere in the universe, Right?

[Harold White]

Right. Potentially, yeah. It unlocks just about anything. If we. Let's go back a slide real quick. Jamie, I want to share something with you, so the next time you're in an airport, you can do this. Right.

[Joe Rogan]

Okay.

[Harold White]

So if you want to try and imagine the idea how a space warp work in. In theory, if you will, this is. Now, this is just a thought experiment. So thought experiments aren't exactly precise, but they do help communicate the idea. So, you know, when you go to an airport and they've got those. Those long conveyor belts, if you will, I think they call them travelators. And so they help us move quicker between gates. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

By the way, folks, you're supposed to walk on those things, Right? Exactly. Hear me?

[Harold White]

Absolutely.

[Joe Rogan]

Walk, lazy bucks.

[Harold White]

So if you think about what happens when you make use of one of these travelators, it's just like you said, most of us walk, right? So when we're at airport, we're walking, we're dragging our bag, and we usually walk about three miles an hour. And then when we get onto the belt, we keep walking. Now, if you think about what. So let's say Jamie's sitting at a gate, and he's watching you walk by. Before you get onto the belt, he sees you walking at three miles an hour. When you get onto the belt, all of a sudden, to Jamie, it looks like you're going six miles an hour. So what's going on here? Well, think about. Think about the belt, right? The length of the belt in front of you. What's happening to it? It's technically, it's going underneath, Right? This is a metaphor. It's going underneath, but the length of belt in front of you is actually contracting. Right. And so by the same token, the length of belt behind you, yes, it's a conveyor belt, but it's expanding behind you, belt is contracting and expanding in such a way that it now seems like to Jamie that you're. You're moving at six miles an hour. So the next time you go to an airport and you get onto one of these travelators, I want you to put your hand on the railing and say, engage.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, that. It's a great comparison. Totally makes sense. If you think about expanding that idea just infinitely with gravity and just being able to.

[Harold White]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

And then the video, by the way, is so cool. Like the way he generated that and looks exactly like these people describe things they're seeing in terms of, you know, when. When people find UAPs that are particularly unusual Right.

[Harold White]

That. The. The cool thing is, if you pop forward one more slide, Jamie. There we go. When you look at the math and physics associated with this, right. The. The proper acceleration alpha on board the spacecraft is formally zero. So what that means when they turn the warp on and off, it doesn't, like, splatter the crew against the bulkhead. You talked about in the beginning of the show, we talked about G forces. Right. And so I don't know if Alcubierre specifically was hoping to. To, you know, land on that kind of observation, but the little toy model that he came up with, it's got a lot of appealing characteristics, and that's one of them. Right. When you turn the warp on and off, the proper acceleration alpha is formally zero. So it's actually zero g. So that's. He stumbled into a really nice. A really nice solution, if you will. If you don't mind, while we're here, I'd love to maybe spend just a second to talk about life imitating art. There's a. There's some interesting things that I think it's the next slide or two. I keep going. We'll come back to this one another time. So this is. It's a modern rendering done by Mark Rademaker, a digital artist from the Netherlands I've worked with over the years. This is a Star Trek ship concept that was developed by Matthew Jeffries in the 60s for the TV show Star Trek. And so you might notice there are some qualitative similarities here to this. This little structure to the. The little gray cartoon that I just showed you. It's got the rings on it, right? It's got this little central structure. But there are. There are actually a couple of fatal flaws with this concept. But the. The thing that's fascinating to me, before we talk about the. The things we're going to fix, is Matthew Jeffries is not a physicist, number one. Number two, the math and physics associated with the idea of a space warp hadn't been published in the 60s when he came up with this artwork. But look how close he got, right? For somebody just following his gut instinct in terms of pulling something together.

[Joe Rogan]

What was his background? Did he have some sort of a background in science?

[Harold White]

I couldn't say. I don't know for certain, but, man, he sure did.

[Joe Rogan]

He nailed it.

[Harold White]

Yeah, he sure did get close.

[Joe Rogan]

He got so close, I almost.

[Harold White]

The interesting thing is that the nature of this ship, the fatal flaws that it had. So we did an update of this as part of, like, an education outreach. So I reached out to Mark Rademaker and some folks from CBS Studios. And so we did an updated version of this for Star Trek Ships of the Line calendar. That's cooler. Yeah. And that's the one that's in the video. Right? The IXS Enterprise. Go back just one slide, Jamie. So the problem with this version here is the rings that go around the spaceship are entirely too thin. So when you calculate how much of the exotic matter I just talked about that you might need to make this thing do something useful, it's going to be a very large number that might be impossible to ever make. So it's like fatal flaw number one. Fatal flaw number two is the bridge of the spaceship goes way out in front of where the warp bubble would form as a result of those rings. So the rings would form like a warp bubble that looks like a little capsule. It would actually cut the bridge off and the bridge would go floating away. And Scotty would be so fired.

[Joe Rogan]

That's not good.

[Harold White]

That'd be a short, sad episode of Star Trek. So. Hope they have a parachute. Right, right, exactly. So we, we work with CBS Studios. Now you go to the next slide. So now we've got, you know, the rings are much more athletic, they have more heft to them, they're thicker. So that reduces the energy requirements. And then the spaceship itself is kind of properly nestled into the, the warp bubble.

[Joe Rogan]

It just looks cool, right?

[Harold White]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Like all things from the past, they can make a better version today.

[Harold White]

Right, Right, right, right, right.

[Joe Rogan]

So this, this exotic material, do you imagine that this is an undiscovered element? Do you, what do you. What's the theory?

[Harold White]

Right, yeah, it. So exactly. And this is where. This is the lamentate, the reason for some of the lamentation, right. About general relativity and quantum mechanics. General relativity just doesn't tell us how to address it. Right. It just simply says you have to highlight it in your paper before you submit it for peer review. And say this, this may cause problems, but quantum mechanics has this stuff called negative vacuum energy density. Right. And so maybe we can unpack that. So what, what is negative vacuum energy density? So let's talk about some of the implications of quantum mechanics and how they're a little different from our day to day experience at the macroscopic level. Empty space in quantum mechanics is actually not empty. So if I told you to think about a vacuum chamber, and I told you the vacuum chamber is under vacuum and there's nothing in the vacuum chamber. Right, that operative word, not nothing. Right. That you have vacuum pumps that turn on and pull all the air out. So there's nothing in the vacuum chamber. Quantum mechanics says, wait a minute, hold on. The idea of empty space, even though there's this classical vacuum, right, that we might think about, it's not actually empty. There's these fluctuating fields and forces that are always going on all the time. So even though, like this is the, this is Plum brook, you know, NASA's large vacuum chamber up in Ohio. And so if you imagine you took that, that vacuum chamber and pumped on it, so there was no air on there, and then you might say there's nothing in that vacuum chamber. Well, quantum mechanics says that at the microscopic level, there are fluctuating fields and particles all the time. And so this sounds very, very, very, you know, counterintuitive to what we, what we experience in our day to day life, right? You pick up a coffee cup and you push against the door, right? That's how we think of the world, if you will. But quantum mechanics deals with the microscopic realm and things are a little bit different. And so that's kind of background. So you can there this peculiar nature that I'm explaining to you, you can actually do an experiment that provides you an observational consequence of this peculiar nature. And it's called the Casimir force. I think I have a slide in there, Jamie. So the Casimir force can be thought of in the following way. Imagine that you've got, got two metal plates like you see here in the graphic. You put them very, very close to one another. That separation distance is maybe 100nm. So certainly much smaller than a human hair. Very, very small distance. And then you imagine you have a vacuum chamber that you put these two small plates in and then you turn on the vacuum pumps and you pull all of the air out. So there's nothing in there. Right? At least that's the way we would think about it.

[Joe Rogan]

It.

[Harold White]

So now we're going to conduct a little thought experiment. We're going to imagine that Jamie has superhero powers and he can shrink himself down to being a wee, tiny little atomic person. And we're going to ask him to go into the vacuum chamber and we're going to ask him to measure the pressure on the outside of the plates. And we're going to ask him to measure the pressure in between the two plates. And so we're going to expect, based off on the normal way we exist, he's going to say 0, 0 on the outside and he's going to say 0 in between the two plates. But what he's going to report back is he's going to say zero pressure on the outside like we expect, but he's going to say there is a negative pressure between the two plates. Well, what the hell is going on? Well, the quantum field is full of fluctuating fields and forces. Matter is both a particle and a wave. You may have heard that statement at some point in your life. And so all these little bits of energy, right, they have wavelengths associated with them. And so any wavelength that is bigger than the physical gap of the cavity, it won't be able to manifest between the cavities. So when we add up all the bits of energy on the outside, that's our zero reference. When we add up all the bits of energy on the outside and then we add up all the bits of energy in between the two plates, there are less bits of energy because all the bigger wavelengths are excluded. And so there is a deficiency of vacuum energy that manifests between the two plates and that results in that negative pressure that wants to pull those two plates together. That's called the Casimir force. A guy by the name of Casimir was the guy that derived that back in 1948. But it took us until the late 90s to actually measure this in the lab to the physics community's satisfaction. And so it's been studied hundreds of times since, you know, measuring forces at different regimes, if you will. And there's also something called the transverse Casimir force. So when you try, and when you try and slide those two plates relative to one another, the vacuum wants to resist you sliding those two plates. And so this is a very real phenomena and it's a wonderful illustration of the peculiar nature of reality at the microscopic level. Right. So, you know, the theory was worked out in the late 40s, the experimental stuff was started in the 90s. And then there's been a bunch of work since then. And I think they're even looking at, looking at, trying to use the Casimir force in MEMS devices. But all that.

[Joe Rogan]

What is the MEMS device?

[Harold White]

Microelectromechanical machines, some small, small gears that you can't see with your eyes. But they, they, they serve different purposes that people are trying to come up with for sensors. Maybe some things in your car, some future chips that might be in your phone or something like that, things that they, where they make micro mechanical systems, that they make them with light because you can't even see those kinds of things. So the quantum vacuum, this, this fluctuating field of particles and forces and so forth is a very real phenomena. And so this stuff I just described to you is, is the negative vacuum energy density that Alcubierre highlighted in his paper when he said we don't know how to make exotic matter in general relativity. So that circle on the Venn diagram doesn't tell us where to go. But quantum mechanics tells us how to make negative vacuum energy density in the, in the context of what we see in a Casimir cache gravity. And so maybe we can, you know, some future generation of scientists will figure out how to do something in some way to like if you ask what's in that, in those rings around the, the IXS Enterprise. Right. You know, maybe it's some deeper understanding of the nature of the quantum vacuum. And point. In fact, you know, I talked to you about, you asked me when, when might this happen? And I said, you know, I can't tell you when, but I know what I need to be doing next. Right. And so in my mind, I think some of the next big chapters in physics are going to be centered around understanding the nature of the quantum vacuum and the quantum field. I think there's going to be a lot of fruit there. And that may provide us the opportunity to add more circles to the Venn diagram or maybe expand one or what have you and so forth.

[Joe Rogan]

So what kind of experiments have to be conducted in order to expand this? Like is, are you talking about things that are going to be achieved in particle colliders? Like how are they? Like, what do you anticipate?

[Harold White]

That's a, that's a good question. And I'm there. So there's a lot of different approaches people have taken to try and explore the nature of the quantum vacuum. And you could even start to look at cosmological observations. We talk about dark energy, right. That's a equated to the quantum vacuum at scale and the cosmological scale, if you will. I think there's even some recent stuff that's come out in the peer reviewed literature that the cosmological constant may not be constant, it may actually be changing over time. And so there's some experimentation has nothing to do with the idea of a space warp. They don't. You know, the people that do work on that could care less about space warps, but they're trying to understand the nature of the cosmological constant of the quantum mechanism. So there's a domain where some interesting work might be done. I know universities all over the globe still do work today with studying the Casimir force. They make different types of things, different materials and so forth, just to Try and understand how materials respond when they make these small things, and trying to understand how the quantum vacuum works with it. But I think there's also some other things that we can try. Right. And so that goes. I think you've seen some of our work that we've been doing, right, with some nanostructured devices that we were. We've been doing some work for DARPA for a number of years where we were. We're actually trying to work on some systems that generate power. And so in the process of doing that, we've actually found that our nanotechnology may actually have some intersections with the idea of a space warp. So I think it's.

[Joe Rogan]

When you're saying that like our nanotechnology might be used to create some sort of a space world, in what way?

[Harold White]

Right. Jamie, can you pull up one of those slides close to the. Not that one. Go back. Keep going back a little bit more. Yeah, keep going up. Right there, right there. So there's this, on the left hand side of this image, there is a scanning electron microscope image of a nanostructure that we, in this case, we 3D printed and then we metallized it. And so the work that we were doing for DARPA associated with that structure is focused on trying to harvest energy from the quantum field. And so we've been working towards trying to generate a voltage potential on that little structure where the pillars in the middle are at a different voltage from the walls that are in the picture there. And in the process of doing the analysis, to help us understand how thin do we need to make those rod like structures you see inside the cavity gap, when we study how the quantum field responds to those structures, we noticed a kind of an unanticipated intersection with the idea of, of a space warp. If you look at, there's like in the, in the, in the picture, there's like a little blue surface overlaid on top of the center pillar there. And you've got those two little regions that are like yellow. I think Jamie just moved his mouse over those. Right. So that's the pillar. And if you move up that blue surface shows the quantum fields response. So the, that, that negative vacuum energy density distribution, you, you hear me talking about that is a, like a section cut in terms of what that looks like. And so we're trying to make sure that the nature of that distribution allows us to see a voltage difference. Right. Which, which we do see, but that. Now we can go to the middle pane here. The top picture there is that image on the Bottom left. And so you see those little yellow, kind of looks like a lenticular shape. And then if you look at the picture beneath that, that is a section cut of a space warp, that ring that goes around the spaceship. So if you look at the distribution of the exotic matter on the bottom pane versus the distribution of negative vacuum energy density in the top, they're qualitatively very similar to one another. So we, as part of an extra credit, right, we're still, you know, DARPA doesn't care about the idea of a spacewalk, to be clear. They don't, they don't care about that. But this, as scientists, you know, we were interested in, wow, we didn't expect to see this. This is, this is interesting. And so we took that insight and we said, all right, the, the distribution that's on the left around that center pillar, it's prismatic, right? It's, it's a straight up and down kind of distribution. It's not a ring, which is what we might think about when we think about a space. So we said, all right, well, let's do a slightly different model. Let's make a sphere inside a cylinder. And then let's study how the quantum field responds to that structure. And so the energy density distribution to that, the little green items there in the cartoon, the energy density distribution for that properly matches the requirements for the idea of a space wave warp. And so we put, we published a paper. Yeah, this is significant because before we did that, the only thing we could talk about in the literature was just the math, right? If somebody said, well, what might you build to make something like that? You know, all we could do is just shrug our shoulders and go, oh, right. And so this allowed us to go through and say, hey, you know, now we can propose a real structure, right? That we can, we can potentially. And you can 3D print that. There are 3D printers that print down to that level, right? We could 3D print those structures. Maybe some clever scientists will come up with a good experiment on how to go through and maybe study the optical properties of this. And somebody could do something like that where they could take our insights that we published in our paper and then they could go 3D print some stuff and do some experiments to show that they can. Hey, we've measured the change in optical properties associated with these little tiny warp bubbles that we're making on a chip, if you will. And so maybe that could be something a future scientist could do. But this is the first time in the literature that we can actually Say, as a community, this is a real thing that we could go make. And it's predicted to manifest a real wart bubble. It's not going to go anywhere. It's not going to do anything. But still, that's significant as a, you know, as a measure of a paradigm shift in our understanding.

[Joe Rogan]

So it's Leonardo da Vinci's drawing of.

[Harold White]

That's a wonderful metaphor. It definitely could be something like that.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. When DaVinci was drawing flying things. Yeah. Well, it looks like what you would expect something to look like in Star Trek that generated a warp drive. Right. Doesn't it? Like you could see it lighting up.

[Harold White]

Yeah. Has some kind of a humming noise.

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Harold White]

Sounds like a heartbeat or something. Right.

[Joe Rogan]

So the, the idea of using quantum energy is so fascinating because I don't understand what that means. I don't understand the whole idea of subatomic particles because it seems so fake, seems so crazy that the universe is made out of things that are essentially working on magic. They appear and disappear. They're in two places at the same time. They're both still and moving. They're in superposition. They're entangled.

[Harold White]

Right. In the grand scheme of things. I would speculate that as we add circles to the physics Venn diagram, we may actually be able to change some of that narrative. Right. So maybe, maybe some. And so this gets into, you know, now we're getting into like philosophical history of physics and some of the debates that have gone on for, for the better part of a century. But, you know, may, maybe as we continue to move forward and we add more circles to the, the physics Venn diagram, you know, it'll, It'll. Instead of having this narrative or this framework where we talk about probabilities and chances and entanglement and the cat is alive and the cat is dead. Right. Maybe there is a deeper level of understanding that we have yet to uncover beyond what we know in quantum mechanics today that helps us understand things at a more fundamental level. There is a sub quantum dynamics that explains the, the, the randomness, the stochasticity that we see. And there'll be a much more satisfactory explanation for things where it's not like this. I would almost play back some of what you just said has, if you think about it, it actually has kind of a bit of a metaphysical kind of sound to it, if you will. Right. You know, the collapse of the wave function. Well, what does that really even mean?

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Harold White]

So maybe as we continue to move forward and we add, we get deeper understandings, we'll have answers that are much more compelling and logical in some way we don't currently understand yet.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, when you try to explain to people the double slit experiment, try to explain that to people, the waves and particles, like what are you even saying?

[Harold White]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have one slit, you get a nice Gaussian distribution around a center point, then you open up two slits and you've got this weird interference pattern right, like this. And that's the whole matter is both a particle and a wave, right? That's how you kind of see that, if you will. But how do you explain that? And so actually there are, you know, thought processes that people have to explain that type of stuff in some of the stuff that's out in the literature today, Bohmian trajectories is specifically one of the things.

[Joe Rogan]

But what it's, it's almost frustrating because I know we're going to crack it one day. You know, it's like, damn, I wish I was born in 2090. You know what I mean? They probably would have already nailed not really. I really like being born right here. I love being alone alive right now because it's so, it's such a fun time where these technological innovations are, they're happening, they're compounding and they're building on each other in such a very incredible way that this kind of experiment is actually possible. And now you can actually prove, oh, we, we have a theoretical warp bubble. Let me show you how we can.

[Harold White]

Make it right, right. And so some of the stuff that we're focused on, right? So, you know, I spent 20 years at NASA and then I left NASA at the end of 2019 to go help stand up a non profit limitless space institute where we did some of the work that we just showed you. Right? And that's where we were doing some of the initial work for DARPA on the little nanostructures that we're working on. And so we got a lot further with that work than we thought we were going to and so created a commercial company called Casimir where we're trying to commercialize our power generating nanotechnology. And so in some ways it's like the interesting aspect of this story is in the process of us trying to pursue this romantic vision of the idea of a space warp, we may have stumbled into this power generating nanotechnology that could be useful here and now in a lot of ways, right? Ranging from powering the Fitbit on your wrist or tire pressure monitor system in your car. Maybe one day, as we continue to grow the Capability, it'll do a lot more than that. But you know, in the process of chasing the romantic dream, we've stumbled across some technology that might be useful in the here and now. Right. And so when you ask what might be in the rings around that, that spaceship, the IXS Enterprise, maybe those could be long standing descendants from some of the stuff we're working on in the, in the chips that we're making in the lab today.

[Joe Rogan]

Essentially like the people put the foundation for the same Peter's Basilica down, they're not going to see that completed project, right? Absolutely, yeah. And this is just how it goes with everything that's really extraordinary like that, Right, right.

[Harold White]

It's neat to think the speed at which innovation occurs. Right. You know, I think you've had Elon Musk on this show a few times and it's neat to see what he's been able to accomplish with SpaceX. I actually, I met him in 2003. Law this is very, the very beginning of his journey. Right. I was on a planning committee for a conference, American Astronautical Society and we were doing a conference in Houston with a focus on a commercial space flight. So this is at the dawn of the idea. At the time I was working at Lockheed Martin and so we had Elon Musk come in and talk to us about this crazy idea of SpaceX that he had. Right. And so, so Lockheed Martin corporate contacted me and asked me, hey, we know you're going to be interfacing with this guy and so we want you to write up a profile on him after the conference and tell us what you think. And so I went to the conference and got a chance to watch a number of people come in, talk about great ideas. And Elon came and gave his talk and so forth. And after the conference was over, I wrote up a profile and submitted it to Lockheed corporate and I said, I think this guy is going to do everything he said he's going to do. Do I think Lockheed Martin should consider buying his company at some point in time. And so fortunately they didn't. Right. Because I think if they did they would have like ruined the magic, if you will. Right. So yeah, you need it in his control.

[Joe Rogan]

He's got some pretty bizarre ideas that, you know, just watching them catch that rocket, you're like what?

[Harold White]

That's nuts. That is so absolutely nuts. Right. My brain looks at that and goes, goes no. Right.

[Joe Rogan]

It looks like, I mean, that's why the cooks on the Internet think it's fake because it almost looks fake. Like how it's such a leap above anything that's ever been done before.

[Harold White]

Yeah. Could you imagine the design meeting?

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Harold White]

And I'm sure it was probably Elon that said this. Yeah. I want to catch a 20 story building.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Harold White]

I can see all the engineers. Is he serious?

[Joe Rogan]

Right, exactly. Because everybody thought they just had to deteriorate and fall to Earth.

[Harold White]

Yeah, yeah, right.

[Joe Rogan]

They run out of gas. You know, when you're shooting the rock it up in the sky and then you plan it so they fall into the ocean.

[Harold White]

Like.

[Joe Rogan]

Okay.

[Harold White]

Yeah. I, I do think that, I don't know if you've ever met Gwen Shotwell. I think Gwen Shotwell is kind of like his secret weapon. Right. So in, in, you know, Elon Musk strikes me as one of those guys that's like an, an idea generator. All this great stuff's coming out at the speed of light, if you will. And he's coming up with all these different ideas, but you got to have somebody who can, who can, can take all that chaos and pull out the important tidbits and then put them into action, if you will. And so I think Gwen is kind of his secret weapon. She helps take all of that chaos and then starts to put it into actionable steps, if you will, to help. SpaceX makes the case. She rules. Oh yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Just imagine as technology increases, if you have someone with that sort of an innovative mind and someone like Gwen who can put it together as all these new ideas come to fruition, you could imagine where we're going to be with this stuff.

[Harold White]

Right? Absolutely. And just to kind of put that in context. Right. In my mind, SpaceX is an example of mastering the art of getting to space. Right. SpaceX is conquering that, climbing against the gravity well as opposed to moving through space. Space. That there's. Therein lies a great opportunity to kind of re. Highlight that, that, that perennial difference, the challenge between the two. Right. So.

[Joe Rogan]

Right. Moving through space.

[Harold White]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And then the idea of some sort of a space station somewhere, like not just circling the Earth, but out in the cosmos. There's, there's so many different ways they can take this stuff. The idea of eventually colonizing other planets, which was always like, people go, okay, well that's what we're probably going to try to do. Wouldn't another civilization do that to us? And that's where you get into the weird talk, whether or not it's actually happening.

[Harold White]

Right. I guess it gets into the whole, you know, if somebody has the ability to come here. Right. It's almost like I would Rather be the one that was technically advanced and able to go somewhere else rather than have them come here. Because that's. If you look at. Well, if you look at history that never. That hasn't ever gone well for the, for the, for the organization, you know, for the, the. The tribes that get visited, it just never tends to go well for them. So that's where I'm like, I'd rather be the one doing the visiting than.

[Joe Rogan]

Exactly.

[Harold White]

Right. So.

[Joe Rogan]

And then imagine the exotic viruses.

[Harold White]

Oh, yeah, right. That's a good point. It always makes you think, you know, Star Trek, they just go. They beam down to the planet, so they emblems.

[Joe Rogan]

They have air there. Yeah, right. It's just like they breathe air. Same atmosphere, same pressures, same gravity.

[Harold White]

It's like, you know, I keep waiting for the episode where somebody starts bleeding from their eyes. Right.

[Joe Rogan]

Explodes.

[Harold White]

Yeah. The guy with the red shirt, you right away. Right. This guy's gone.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. I mean, you have to take a chance. But, you know, when you think of what's currently available today in terms of research that people have done on propulsion systems, when people speculate that there's some sort of a black ops program that the government's been running secretly, and this is what a lot of these drones are that people are seeing. And this is what a lot of like the Tic Tac stuff, that it's probably our stuff, which is while it's off military bases. Given your understanding of the current state of science, do you think that's even possible?

[Harold White]

Yeah. No. Well, it's hard to imagine that being possible. Right. Just in terms of. Because my entire professional experience has been about wrestling with how do we conquer this time distance problem. And so I know all too well all the shortcomings. I know where we are for the most part today where we're lacking. Right. And so I just. I don't know that there is an organization that has things that could potentially operate in the ways that we like the Tic Tacs. I don't know that there is a Black Ops that actually has that capability.

[Joe Rogan]

What I'm kind of asking though is, is it even conceivable that there could be a program where you could get the brightest minds who are working on this stuff to make advancements that are far beyond anything that conventional wisdom describes.

[Harold White]

Yeah. Now I'm with you. I was on a different frequency. Thank you. If we had some kind of kids kit. Right. That is not from here. However, we got it right, and people spend some time studying it, you know, maybe they could figure it Out. But that, that also gets into, you know, a, a little bit of a. A logic conundrum. Right. Because I think you talked about going back to the 1400s and holding up an iPhone. Right. If you, if you handed something like this to Isaac Newton, he would have no idea what to make of this. So he might figure out the interface. Apple's done a good job of making this thing pretty user friendly, but I mean, how could. Even if he looked at it with like a glass that allowed him to see, maybe start to make out the pixels, he doesn't have the benefit of any of the math and physics and so forth. So it's possible. Right, but those are the things in gaming situations in my head. What might that look like? Well, it's like, wow, this might be really hard to figure that out, but it'd be awesome if somebody had figured that out if that. If that was in the realm of possibility. Right.

[Joe Rogan]

Speaking for the people that believe that they have recovered these, these vehicles from somewhere else, one of things that. One of the ways they describe them that's really kind of bizarre is they describe them as donations.

[Harold White]

I've heard that word.

[Joe Rogan]

If you were going to try to get someone to figure out how to construct their own automobile, you wouldn't give them a 2025 Corvette ZR1, which you would give them as a Model T. You'd give them some simple combustion engine, a carburetor that you could go, okay, like someone who knows how to make a locomotive. They could look at that and go, okay, I see what they're doing. Oh, wow. All right. So this thing, the combustion, and then the gases spin around and then it creates energy and then it spins these wheels. This thing has different gears and that. Okay, that goes to the back wheels. Okay, I think we could do this. But, you know, if you gave them some electric Tesla, you know, like a new Model S plaid, they'd go, what.

[Harold White]

The Is this Porsche 911?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, exactly. They would go, what is this? Well, especially electric, right? Electric vehicles, they go, this is bananas. Like, this thing goes 0 to 61.9 seconds.

[Harold White]

Yeah. That's amazing car. That's amazing, isn't it?

[Joe Rogan]

It does feel. Have you ever been in a Tesla like the Model S plaid? It feels like a spaceship. Like, it feels like you're not in this time period.

[Harold White]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

You're in something in the future. So if they gave us something to back engineer, they would most likely give.

[Harold White]

Us a Model T. Yeah, actually, that's. I had never thought about it that way.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, right. We wouldn't just start with the best we have, Right. You know what I mean? Like.

[Harold White]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

Give these dummies a Jeep from the 50s, right?

[Harold White]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

You know what I mean?

[Harold White]

A Willys. Right. Carburetor. Yeah. Figure it out.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Look at all the stuff you can work on it. Like if you open up the hood of one of those things, you know, an old Jeep, you go, I see where everything is. Here's the spark plugs, right. You know, here's the distributor cap. I get it.

[Harold White]

Yeah. Well, I guess, you know, if that were the case, and I guess you could, I could follow you down that thought process, if you will.

[Joe Rogan]

So then could you imagine. I mean, this is just, I'm just asking you because I know you understand science and you understand engineering, is it possible that there could have been some program that's been going on in complete total secrecy, shielded from Congress, shielded from the higher levels of government on the most need to know basis possible, with our current security systems, that they could have some kind of a program that's working on this stuff?

[Harold White]

You know, I certainly couldn't rule that out. Right. But some things I think about, when I think about that problem. Talk about the, like the F117 stealth fighter, right? There was a program that was unclassified, I think it was in the late 70s, maybe the early 80s, called have blue. And so that's when they were first starting to explore the idea of having an aircraft that could be extremely stealthy. And so it was unclassified for a good amount of time until they put the first test shape onto a radar stand out in California in the desert, whatever the case may be. And they turned on the radars and they're like, well, something's wrong because we're not seeing anything. Right. And then a bird landed on the prototype and they saw the bird. And so when that happened, the whole program went black. Right. It became classified before then. It was not classified then it was classified. But it of course came out in the 90s with Gulf War One. Right. I think we, we saw some, some manifestations of this. And so there is a program that's extremely classified for the obvious reasons, but it still came out. Right. And then I also think about, you know, I worked at NASA, right? And so you have the, worked at NASA for 20 years. And you get the full spectrum of people serving different roles in a facility. And so you're always going to have people that take out the garbage and do other different things like that. And so if you've got something that has implications like that. I mean, it's hard. It could happen. But that's the thing I struggle with is that's there's a lot of different moving parts to try and keep that big of a secret. I mean, maybe it could happen. Right?

[Joe Rogan]

Well, if I was running things and that was going on, I would talk to you. It's like, look at this guy. He seems to be on this pathway that we are currently exploring. I would, I'd want to bring somebody.

[Harold White]

In and well, if somebody, if somebody's got a manual, right. That can help me figure out to go do something, give me a call. Right? I'd love to. And I know I'm going to get all kinds of emails as a result of saying that. Right. So kooks. I already get that now. Right.

[Joe Rogan]

You're going to get the. But the question I guess I'm asking is, are there even experts in physics and engineering that are out there that could be quarantined, that could be taken away from everyone else and put on these projects and could they achieve meaningful results given that kind of compartmentalized science?

[Harold White]

Right. Maybe the thing that we could throw into the sandbox on this discussion is the Manhattan problem. Maybe there's a better example of something where they were working on something that was extremely important for humanity and they were able to keep a lot of those secrets for quite some time. So, yeah, maybe that's how you would have to run something like that, I guess. I don't know.

[Joe Rogan]

But would you have the expertise. Are we aware of who all of the experts are? Is it possible that the government could have had access to brilliant minds that are on this sort of path like you are, gotten them, moved them into these projects and kept it all hush hush. Is that even.

[Harold White]

Certainly the. So the government, government also has an organization called the Jason's, right, where they have a lot of extremely smart folks from academia. And they come in typically, I think it's like a summer assignment, if you will. And so they band together in the summer to go work on a series of problems that folks might have. And so they kind of, it's what you're asking me kind of makes me think about that kind of a mechanism where you have access to the best and the brightest across the entire spectrum of US Academia, and you pull them together and make them SEAL Team six on whatever particular problem that you've got. But you could run into a problem where, you know, they might, they might look at a problem and only look at it in the context of what we know Right. You know, quantum mechanics and general relativity and they don't want to think about new things that could potentially be brought to bear. So there could be some flies in the ointment with that thought process. But in some ways that does kind of exist in what we know as the Jason's and they do classified work all the time.

[Joe Rogan]

Interesting. So I guess the question is, where are the brightest minds in this particular area of innovation? If I was running the government and I wanted someone to work on, on some sort of top secret stuff like this, how would I even find the people?

[Harold White]

That's a tough question to answer because you need experts. So going to, taking that question, going into like some specific steps you might take. Right. What disciplines are relevant? Right. And that's a difficult question to answer because there's so much stuff that we don't know. You probably would have to sample from a number of different disciplines. Right. Both in general relativity and quantum mechanics, with some hope that maybe you've got the right sprinkling of ingredients to bring to bear to that. And then there is a history of, I think some folks in academia that actually like to think about advanced power and propulsion that are also just primarily physicists in their day to day capacity. Right. You know, Hal Puthoff, although he's got a lot of many and varied interests, he's a great physicist. He's published a lot of great papers in the literature. Just thinking about physics. Right. He's got some stuff he's looked at called the polarizable vacuum. And so, you know, in my, my, my drawer of, of preferred papers, I have a number of papers in there that are from Hal's work on the polarizable vacuum because I find that interesting and fascinating. And so there may be some things out there that are adjacent to the concept where you could try and pull some of that together.

[Joe Rogan]

I guess that, that's a fascinating thing for you to say because Hal believes they have them and he believes that we have 10 of them.

[Harold White]

Oh yes, I know that. Yeah, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Which is just so nuts. And then, you know, he's a little agnostic on the Bob Lazar story. But the Bob Lazar story, which I'm sure you're aware of, is essentially what we're talking about. Like you would bring in some out of the box thinkers and if you found some wildly intelligent young scientist who put a rocket engine in the back of a Honda, which is what he did, you would go, what is that crazy fucker up to? Like, let's have a look at it. What's it hurt.

[Harold White]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

The guy, Rocketdyne, say he's a wizard.

[Harold White]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

You know, bring him out there or the guys that wherever he was, he wasn't at Rocketdyne. He was at Los Alamos. The guys at Los Alamos said he's a wizard. So let's bring him out here. Let's see what's going on.

[Harold White]

Yeah, his. His story is. I'm not too familiar with it. Right.

[Joe Rogan]

It's the naughty story of all time. And he supposedly. Well, they denied that he ever worked at Los Alamos, but then they found him on an employee log. And not only that, he knew the outline of the place. He knew the security people. George Knapp took him on a tour of it, and he knew everybody. He knew the people that worked there. He knew how to get around. Like, he clearly worked there. So that's interesting that they tried to deny that he ever worked there. And then from there he gets this job where he is flown out to the desert to Area 51, Site 4. And this is allegedly right. During this time, he can't even tell his wife what he's doing. So his wife thinks he's going having affairs. He's got to leave and fly away at 11pm at night, like. Right. But you can't tell me where you're going. You want to work.

[Harold White]

Yeah. You're working late again.

[Joe Rogan]

The wife starts having an affair. And because of his claim, it almost.

[Harold White]

Sounds like a movie. Right, it does sound like a movie.

[Joe Rogan]

Which is one of the beautiful things about reality, is that reality seems so fake that sometimes, sometimes actual true stories are bizarrely fictional. So his wife starts having an affair. Because of his clearance, he cannot be working on these things if he could be under extreme emotional duress. So they fire him. They tell him he can't. They don't give him any explanation. They don't tell him his wife's cheating on him. He starts taking people out to the desert, explaining to them, you have to see what we're working on. They fly this thing on certain nights and they do these test flights around the base. It's nuts. So he takes these people into this area. They see it, they get arrested. When he gets arrested, he gets caught there. He explains what he was doing. He says, okay, I've got to go public or they're going to kill me. So he goes public with George Knapp. Initially, they hide his face. And then he says, you know what? Fuck that. Let's just film me. Let me tell you everything. He goes over the diagram of this device.

[Harold White]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And he calls it the sport model. And it looks like that. That thing that we have.

[Harold White]

Oh, yeah, right there. It's almost like a hubcap. Right. But it's a copy of it.

[Joe Rogan]

In the middle of that thing is some sort of a generator that he said works on this unknown element, this element 115.

[Harold White]

Oh, some of this is coming back to me. I think I've seen some stuff over the years.

[Joe Rogan]

Yes.

[Harold White]

Yeah, some of it's coming back to me now.

[Joe Rogan]

And essentially the way he describes it traveling. And again, this is in the nineteen nineteen eighties. The way he describes it traveling is exactly the way you describe that sort of warp drive changing space and time around it. And that you would point that thing where you wanted to go and it would just.

[Harold White]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that. It all. It all sounds very surreal, right? Oh, yeah, there's. There's another. There's another story. Again, as I said, I have a number of friends that are keenly interested in this. And so I've been exposed to some of the different things. To me, the Tic Tac account is interesting because it's got a lot of rigorous data, if you will, that helps you go, well, I can't explain that. I can't explain that. I can't explain that. There is another accounting that I just put in the category. My brain doesn't even know what to make of it. And it's the concept of Rendlesham Forest. I don't know if that rings a bell. There's something over in the UK where there's a base over there and some airmen came across some very weird. I can't even begin to describe.

[Joe Rogan]

I'm not sure if you know this one.

[Harold White]

Yeah, it's pretty bizarre. I don't know it well enough to unpack it today other than to say it's so bizarre that when you listen to the accounts that were recorded. Right. It doesn't make any sense. It's. It's like if you think about if you watch an octopus in an aquarium and the octopus is doing something, you can sometimes understand what their motivation is. There's like a cross species ability to. It's like communication, but without words, right. That octopus wants to go eat that little crab or whatever the case may be. May be. And so our chemical computers, even though they're different, we can look at their behavior and we can go, all right, I think I understand what that octopus might be wanting to do today, or a shark or a dog or a porpoise. But when you hear what happened in that rendlesham Forest thing. It breaks all of my guessing machine and it's like what is the story? A colonel and some airmen reported some weird stuff that was going on in Rendlesham Forest. Yeah. And they went out and tried to investigate it and they saw some. Again I'm doing such a terrible job of summarizing it because I don't really know the lore very well, but here.

[Joe Rogan]

It is right here.

[Harold White]

Everything they saw was very bizarre and crazy looking.

[Joe Rogan]

We can read it right? It says 40 years ago a remote forest in Suffolk was the scene of one of the most famous purported UFO sightings in history. So just what did happen? And will we ever know for sure? Victor Thurnkettle was out chopping wood one morning in Rendlesham forest in late December 1980 when a car drew up. Out stepped two men aged about 30, dressed in suits. Good morning. Do you mind if we ask you some questions? Asked one in a well spoken English accent. Earlier on 26 and 28 of December, United States Air Force security personnel stationed near stationed at nearby RAF Woodbridge had reported seeing strange lights in the surrounding forest. Forest forestry worker Mr. Thorncuttle unannounced and unidentified visitors asked if he had been out the previous night. I said no. He recalls. They said did you leave the house at all? Did you see anything? I said what? They said oh there's a report of some red lights in the forest. We're just checking. And the two men very politely but firmly asked me probably about 20 questions. I thought they were German journalist. They suddenly said oh well fair enough, there's probably nothing in it. And left. So I bought the papers every day for the next few days to find out what was going on and of course there was nothing. Three years later however, sightings made the news of the world front page story proclaimed UFO lands in Suffolk and it's and that's official. The story was based on a memo from RAF Woodbridge Deputy Base Commander lieutenant lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt to the Ministry of Defense. It was released by the US government. Described as an encounter with an apparent UFO in the forest. Since then the sightings have been the source of much debate and speculation among UFO enthusiasts on the subject of numerous books, articles and TV programs. In March a documentary concluded the sightings had achieved legend status. Like the Loch Ness or King Arthur. The the forest even have has its own official UFO trail complete with a life size replica go back up of the flying saucer. And this is the replica. Like the Hamza thing on it, that hand thing. Bizarre thorn kettle UK authorities have said they didn't learn about the incident. Okay, what is the story, though? Let's get to, like, what is the story? Scroll down more. What does it say?

[Harold White]

Yeah, that gets into the stuff, that. It doesn't make sense in terms of what they describe the. The UFO doing. It's just very peculiar. Right.

[Joe Rogan]

So, yeah, they got there. My heart absolutely plummeted. It was nothing. It was absolute normal Glade in the forest with three rabbit scrapes. They're all carefully marked. Happened to be roughly a triangle. Okay, what else does it say? What is the sighting? Burn marks on trees. But what's the sighting?

[Harold White]

I can show you what the UFO looked like, but.

[Joe Rogan]

Okay. I mean, sure, that's what they said it looked like. Whoa. And it had those markings on it. I Googled my Google search, said that.

[Harold White]

Grush brought it up when he was on here, but I couldn't find, like, even clips about it.

[Joe Rogan]

So I don't know that we went that deep into it. How bizarre is it that it has that symbol? What is that? That's an ancient Hindu symbol, correct? That Hamza symbol?

[Harold White]

I don't know.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, they're different. That looks very weird.

[Harold White]

Weird.

[Joe Rogan]

Huh? So what about this one stands out to you?

[Harold White]

I put this one in the category of. I just. I don't understand if it's a. If it's a real account. Right. I mean, so I think when you have a lieutenant colonel that's reporting something as factual, I tend not to just immediately dismiss it.

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Harold White]

But what the. What the. And it's not just him. It's several people around him. What they describe. Right. Doesn't make sense to me. Right. You know, in terms of the David Fravor talking about the Tic Tac, I can kind of, you know, that. That's not totally alien to me. I could. Oh, well, there it's trying to maneuver with the aircraft, and it's maneuvering to their cap or whatever the case may be. And I can kind of connect the dots with that. But the Rendlesham Forest thing, it doesn't make any sense to me.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, what about it doesn't make any.

[Harold White]

Sense, what they saw, why it was doing what it was doing.

[Joe Rogan]

What was it doing?

[Harold White]

It just was out in the woods. He's out in the woods, you know, with blinky lights and doing weird stuff. And I'm like, why is that weirder.

[Joe Rogan]

Than the Tic Tac to you?

[Harold White]

I. I don't. I. I don't know. So this is a gut thing, right? In terms of. My gut's telling me I Don't make. I don't understand this. This doesn't make sense to me. I don't know how to explain it any better than that. So.

[Joe Rogan]

But I. If it's just an object that's in the wood blinking lights and looks like it's flying, why. I just don't understand why.

[Harold White]

That's weirder than I think. They also described it had like melty bits or something like that that were like dripping off of it and so forth. And I just. It sounds so completely surreal. I think maybe what I'm unconsciously trying to do is I'm trying to, you know, map. How might I map, you know, math and physics to what it is that they're describing to me. And I just.

[Joe Rogan]

Jamie, is this the one where they found debris at the scene? Did someone brought this up? Was it Jacques Vallee that brought this up up here?

[Harold White]

It's.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Harold White]

Piece of debris is seen burning up.

[Joe Rogan]

As a fireball over England. Servicemen thought it was a down craft halt. Memo says glowing object, metallic in appearance. Colored lights attempt approached the object. It appeared to move through the trees and the animals on a nearby farm went into a frenzy. One of the servicemen, Sergeant Jim Pen Peniston, later claimed to have encountered a craft of unknown origin while in the forest on. Although there was no published mention of this at the time and there is no corroboration from other witnesses. Hmm.

[Harold White]

Yeah. So there's not, there's, there's. No matter how far you dig, there's not going to be very much satisfactory resolution of the mystery, if you will. It's just a bonkers kind of story.

[Joe Rogan]

This one stand out to you more than like, say, Roswell? Because Roswell to me is one of the most bizarre ones. When you look at the front page of the Ross, was it the Roswell Daily Record, I believe that has this story saying that the government has recovered a flying saucer and that a crash flying saucer was found. And you know, the story is that they grabbed the wreckage and flew it out the. Right. Patterson Air Force Base and two separate planes in case one of them crashed and Truman met them there of like.

[Harold White]

Maybe in that case it's, you know, it's a potentially a purported spaceship and it was around military bases. You know, I, I don't know, it's just the weirder. Again, again, we're getting into the fact. I. Oh yeah, I don't have a lot of depth in some of these areas. Right.

[Joe Rogan]

So I understand. But it's just the weirdest aspect of this whole crashed retrieval program. The alleged class crash retrieval program, if it has occurred, and it really does go back to the 1940s. Like, how did you guys hide this? Like, how have you kept this secret so long? Is that even conceivably possible?

[Harold White]

That's one of the things I wonder about. There's a book I was recommended to read called Blind Man's Bluff, and it's a book about deeply classified projects connected to the Navy. Right. They were. I think the end effect of what they were trying to achieve as part of what's detailed in this book is you remember hearing about deep sea rescue vehicles. Right. So deep sea rescue vehicles, basically that was a cover for some submarines that the Navy was using to put listening systems on communication cables that were at the bottom of some of the bodies of water that I think the Soviet Union was using at the time. And so this book kind of details a number of programs that went through and developed kit and hardware to go through and accomplish these different tasks. And so it's neat to kind of see how black programs like that unfold. I don't know how that book got published, but it's a fascinating book. But then that speaks to what you're wrestling with, right? How do you have something that's so classified that doesn't leave. Right. Because all the other data that we see from other programs there, you can. You can keep a secret for a little while, but you can't keep it for that long. Right. At least that's when I look at these other things. That's what comes to my mind right now. That doesn't mean I'm right. There could definitely be programs that are out there. Right. That are. Maybe they've figured out how to get around that. But when you look at some of the most classified military things that are out there, they usually have a lifetime time associated.

[Joe Rogan]

Maybe it's just one of those things the government's really good at. Like, the government's really bad at a lot of things, but maybe they're really good at that. Just that one thing. They've got it down.

[Harold White]

Right, right, right. Or at least there's a small section of the government that's really good at that. Right.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, how's speculation, you know, when. When Hal says that he's pretty sure that there's 10 of them, that. That gives me pause because that's a very serious person.

[Harold White]

Well, yeah, he's a very discriminating individual. Right. He likes to. He likes to question everything. And even though he. He's thought about some very interesting things or over the span of his career. Right. He does bring a little bit of that squinty eyed physicist to some of the different things. And so that gives you some measure of comfort that even though he's thought about some wide ranging things, he's bringing a little bit of that skepticism to whatever he's been confronted.

[Joe Rogan]

Also as crazy as what he says is, there's some things that he won't talk about which. Okay, what is that? Like if you're telling me there's 10 crashed UFOs of non human intelligence intelligence and then there's stuff you can't tell me, right. That makes me just go, what? Like what? What have you seen? Hal, stop bullshit. You're 88 years old.

[Harold White]

Let's go. Yeah, yeah, right. You're on the clock, bud. You're on the clock. Philippines, buddy. Right, Right.

[Joe Rogan]

Come on. If anybody knows, please. But I guess if you did spill the beans, my goodness, you would know no longer have access to any of that stuff and you'd probably be in trouble. You know, they're probably immediately. You'd get audited.

[Harold White]

Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely. You'd have a lot of special things that would happen, a lot of bad things would go your way, I would.

[Joe Rogan]

Imagine, because what he describes, that put it in light, in perspective to me, said you have to understand that one of the things that would happen is there would be real problems because you'd have to figure out how this stuff was funded. So this is funded by misallocation of finances. So you lied to Congress. So these are crimes. These are crimes that put people in prison for life. And then on top of that, by.

[Harold White]

The way, that goes back to that book I was telling you about, Blind Man's Bluff, because it talks about, about the amount of money that went into that program that was hundreds of millions of dollars. Right, right. And it's interesting, that gives you like a little bit of a window of insight into how the black classified world moves stuff around. Right, Right.

[Joe Rogan]

And then you also have this national security problem because what Hal's saying is that we're not the only ones that have these things and that there's essentially a mad race to try to back engineer these things and to successfully completely. And this was the real fear. Like when people were seeing the New Jersey drones amongst conspiracy theorists, I was like, oh my God, what if China's already nailed it and they're buzzing us?

[Harold White]

I got to think when you look at any of the accounts of these things, the important things to maybe help categorize the nature of things that they see if a craft has the ability to manifest extremely fast, fast speeds. Well In, I mean SR71 does Mach, you know, 3.2. If you've got something that has radar track data that shows it's doing, you know, Mach 8 or Mach 10. That's interesting. Now we do have hypersonic stuff. So you can't just automatically say that it's something exotic. It still could be something that we know might exist out there with some other flags on the side of the vehicle. But then like you talked about G forces. If it can do like, like a Tron turn, right, that 90 degree kind of turn, and you've got a radar track that might help you categorize the nature of the different signals that are out there. And to me that's why like the Tic Tac thing has always been something that's hard for me to just sweep away because of the quality of the data and some of the stuff they describe. I can't imagine other conventional systems that could potentially explain seeing what they're seeing. But a lot of the other stuff I can actually probably piece together in my head, it could have been, it could be this or it could be that. Right. You know, they talk about the, the cubes inside of a clear sphere. There are patents in the system for radar corner cubes that are a cube, a metallic cube inside of a clear balloon that gets floated to evaluate radar sensitivity. Right. So those like it just looks like there's a patent in the system. There's a. Yeah, so that's a corner cube, but there's a patent that has a version of that that's light enough to go inside of a, some kind of a balloon. Maybe it's filled with helium or something like that. There you go. That's the patent, right. So there's a, there's a patent in the system. And so, you know, I can certainly see maybe if that's tethered to a boat. Right. They're just evaluating our, you know, our radar systems, if you will. And so.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, that would kind of make sense until you listen to Ryan Graves depictions of what, what these things were doing. They were standing motionless at 120 knot winds.

[Harold White]

If it's tethered. Well, if it's moving, I can't, I can't just, I can't describe that. But if it's static, it could be tethered to a boat.

[Joe Rogan]

Right. But that looks goofy like if you look at what that looked like. Jamie, pull up photo of you just had like that. I don't Think that's tricking.

[Harold White]

The one on the left, though, is it's actually a metallic cube inside.

[Joe Rogan]

Interesting.

[Harold White]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

So the one on the left. Is there an image of the. That with the metallic cube inside the sphere? I don't know how to pick it back. Just a patent. Okay, so it's theoretical.

[Harold White]

They don't want us to know how it works.

[Joe Rogan]

Right, of course.

[Harold White]

So in a lot of cases, I can. Again, I'm agnostic. And so I bring this framework to the table. And so only, you know, the Tic Tac one's really, I think the one that bubbles up in my mind with the highest quality data that I haven't been able to categorize. Well, it could be A, B or C. That. That's, you know. Go back to that more boring explanation, Jamie.

[Joe Rogan]

Go back to that. Blue. Explore. It could be some fake AI could be nonsense. Pilots. Notes for cube Trans medium vehicle promulated by order of. That's got to be AI super restricted. Come on. It's restricted. It's like super important.

[Harold White]

It says for official use only on the Internet.

[Joe Rogan]

It's got to be legit.

[Harold White]

Yeah. I am a French. I am a French model. Right? Yeah. That's just to buy stuff.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, it's just to buy stuff. Stuff. It's just goofy. It's just silly. We need to get those. Get some Tic Tac stuff. You know, the lack of sonic boom, it's one of the things that I want to talk about. Like, if that thing could move at that kind of a hyperspot, hypersonic speed, there would be some sort of a sonic boom.

[Harold White]

Right. If. If it's not exactly. Right. If it's. If it's not some kind of laser system that's creating pixels. Right, Right. And it's some solid thing. If it's going supersonic, it's based on everything we know with aerodynamics. It should have a sonic boom. And if it does. Doesn't. And it is a physical thing, then that demands an explanation. Right. And I. I wouldn't be able to explain that. Right. And so that those. And that's exactly why something like the. The data that comes out of the Tic Tac thing, I haven't been able to just pound flat and make. Go away. Right. Keep surviving all of my grumpy physicist attacks. Right.

[Joe Rogan]

So does it frustrate you that you've never seen one of these things or have you?

[Harold White]

Funny story. And beer. Beer is involved.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh. How much.

[Harold White]

Beer? A little bit. So we were down at Kennedy Space center, and this is this is a cautionary tale to don't always believe what your eyes see, right? Because you potentially could, you know, lead yourself down the wrong path. So we're down at Kennedy Space Center. We had put some docking cameras on some space station modules and spent a lot of, you know, number of days working long hours wearing those uncomfortable bunny suits and so forth. And so finished all this stuff, wanted to go celebrate. So we went to the beach and had a little bit of unwinding time and drank a few beers, hanging out. And so we're out on the east coast down there close to Kennedy, and we're looking up at the sky, and you could see some of the satellites coming over, right? Our eyes adjusted to the. To the light. You could occasionally see some satellites coming over, over. And you kind of expect them to have a track that goes, you know, west to east, if you will, generally. I mean, they can come to all different angles. But then we started seeing some. Some satellite tracks that were very different from what we might expect being rocket scientists, right? We're watching this stuff, and that looks a little different. That's kind of interesting. And it's at a very different angle. Well, maybe it's a Russian spy satellite that's retrograde and it's, you know, we're. We're trying to figure out what this could be. And then, you know, a couple more beers later, we see four or five more of these tracks, right? And we're like, well, maybe all these. All these people that talk about these crazy things, right? Maybe there's something to that. Right now there's about. About an hour has gone by as we've gone through this process, and we finally see another one of these little glowy orbs, if you will. And I look at it, and I just realized out of the edge of the glowy orb, the wings of a seagull, right? So it's the white belly of a seagull reflecting the light, the. Near. The light from the nearby city. And so that's what we're seeing, right? And so that's one of those things that's just something to make you, you know, think about what you're seeing. It may not be because it's breaking all my guessing machines. It's breaking all of our guessing machines. And we're wondering and speculating about it. It. But in the end, it was just, you know, it was just a seagull doing their nightly business, right? Look at these silly guys looking at me, right?

[Joe Rogan]

That's funny. That is funny.

[Harold White]

So, yeah, that's My only experience.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, well, the mind definitely plays tricks on you, especially when beer's involved.

[Harold White]

Right, right, right.

[Joe Rogan]

But I can't dismiss all of the different, very serious people that have talked about these things. And that's where I get really perplexed and my agnosticism gets. It gets tested.

[Harold White]

Right, right. You know, I tend to try and always keep a squinty eye towards it, and I think that's probably good to do that because then that the stuff that survives that filter. Right. Is high quality stuff.

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Harold White]

And so the things that keep coming out of the Tic Tac thing, I just, I can't kill that. I keep wanting to try and kill it, but I can't.

[Joe Rogan]

What about when you look at things like the Go Fast video or the FLIR video and you look at these crafts that are moving in some very weird way that they don't exhibit traditional propulsion signatures.

[Harold White]

So, yes, those are interesting videos and they come from trained professional fighter.

[Joe Rogan]

Pull up the one where it rotates, Jamie.

[Harold White]

Fighter pilots. And so I can't dismiss those accounts. But the integrated quality of that data is not the same as the Tic Tac attack. Right, right. Where you've got multiple aircraft, multiple radar systems over multiple days. Right, that's one of those.

[Joe Rogan]

And eyewitnesses.

[Harold White]

Yes, exactly. And, and not only eyewitnesses. I mean, they're, they're laying eyes on this thing and you. And it's not just one plane where sometimes you can fool yourself.

[Joe Rogan]

This thing is very. This is the gimbal video. This thing's very strange.

[Harold White]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

Put the guys talking about it because.

[Harold White]

Going against the wind, the wind's 120 knots. That's not our LNS though, is it?

[Joe Rogan]

It's not.

[Harold White]

Well, if there's a thing, it's rotated.

[Joe Rogan]

It's rotating.

[Harold White]

Rotating.

[Joe Rogan]

It's going against the wind and it's rotating.

[Harold White]

And you know, I acknowledge the fact it doesn't have any thermal signatures that were indicative of like a plume or something like that. Right. So some of those things definitely are hard to explain.

[Joe Rogan]

It's also listening to these guys, listening to fighter pilots going, look at that thing.

[Harold White]

Yeah. Because their eyes are trained to go through and discern different things because, you know, they're always thinking of about, can this kill me? Can I kill it? What do I need? I completely acknowledge the fact they have that framework drilled into their head and that helps put this into a special category. But those are unfortunately single data points, so I can't do anything with that. And that gets back to what we talked about at the beginning of all this, I would love for somebody to show up with a notebook full of all these great observations that would help me. You know, we're making these little. These little nano chips that we're trying to use to extract energy. Yeah, sure. These.

[Joe Rogan]

Is that the actual nano chips?

[Harold White]

These are a bunch of the nano chips that we're doing. This is part of the Casimir company that we spun out. These chips interact with the quantum field and generate a voltage potential between those leads. And so we. We measure voltage on those guys. We put them in dark RF shielded enclosures. There's some pictures.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Harold White]

And so looking at these is so cool. Yeah. And it's fun to think about. How do you even make stuff like that? We can talk about that in just a minute. But, you know, let's talk about the. Some of the applications. Right. You know, this. This is. Let's see. Can we go back a couple slides? Keep going, Keep going, keep going. One more. All right, so let's just spend maybe three minutes here talking about the Casimir force, at least picking up where we left off.

[Joe Rogan]

Okay.

[Harold White]

Right. So we talked about the idea of the Casimir force is a macroscopic observational consequence of something called the quantum vacuum, these fluctuating fields and forces. If you go to the next slide, Jamie. So, conceptually, the following is true. Independent of anything that we're doing with the nanotechnology we're developing. If you allow the quantum field to interact on these two metal plates that we talked about as part of the Casimir force force, it will apply a force over a distance, and it will cause that gap to close and go to zero. Right. So that is, by definition, a force over a distance. And so that is a unit of work. So the Casimir force phenomena is a illustration of extracting energy from the quantum field. So independent of anything that we're doing. Right. That's part of what's baked into the idea of the Casimir force interacting with the quantum field. Now, the. You might say, well, maybe we could use that as a power source. The only. The only problem with this textbook illustration of a Casimir cavity is once the plates have collapsed, there's no more. You can't get any more energy out of it. You have to actually pull the plates apart. You have to wind the wind the watch again, if you will. And so this type of an approach would, at best, rest simply be a battery. So you couldn't extract continuous energy from the quantum field from this type of an apparatus. So this leads into an innovation that we came across. So Jamie, if you go forward, one more slide. This is a slightly larger version of that. That scanning electron microscope image. So we've changed the. The standard Casimir cavity concept by adding these pillars along the midplane. So we have these structures that we put inside the middle of the cashmere cavity. And so you see, we've got a cavity wall on the left and a cavity wall on the right, and these big three pillars. The walls are fixed to the substrate. They can't move. We don't want them to move. We want them to stay still. And then the pillars are also fixed to the substrate. They cannot move. The walls are electrically connected to one another, and the pillars are electrically connected to one another, but they're isolated. So that's just a physical description of what this is. So now let's talk about how does this custom structure interact with the quantum field? What's the difference with this particular structure? So for that, let me give you a metaphor. Imagine a Pacific atoll island out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean ocean. It's surrounded by the Pacific Ocean with all this random wave energy that's beating the outside of the atoll island. But at the center of the atoll island, there's a nice lagoon, right? Very quiescent, very smooth. The water's connected to the Pacific. But a lot of that wave energy can't manifest on the lagoon. So it's a protected and nice environment. So imagine, Joe, you're sipping, you know, some. Some nice water and having a nice paddle. Paddle board day. Quiescent, enjoying yourself. And, you know, Jamie, he took the other package and he went deep sea fishing out on the Pacific Ocean. And so he's really bobbling back and forth, and it's much more uncomfortable for him. Maybe he's getting sick and feeding the fish. Right? So now, with that metaphor in mind, let's come back to the structure. So this structure, the walls on the outside are like the Pacific atoll island inside the quantum field, which is like the Pacific Ocean. So it's assaulting that structure on all sides. The pillars are like you on your paddle board in the lagoon. It's a protected environment. And so the way the quantum field interacts with this structure is it will occasionally cause a real electron inside the wall walls to quantum tunnel to the pillars. And so the pillars are like you on your paddleboard. It's a very quiescent environment. And so the electron shows up through this quantum tunneling process. But there's no wave energy on the lagoon to mirror that current back to the walls. So in that way, this Structure will interact with the quantum field and generate a voltage potential. So we can measure a negative voltage on the pillars relative to the wall. And so although this is a very tiny little cavity and we can measure the voltage directly using atomic force microscopes, if we put these guys together by the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, then we can get to voltage and current levels that map to things that we care about in application like, you know, tire pressure monitor system, something that uses a, you know, microwatts worth of power or a Fitbit or, you know, you've got the ring there. I think that's an electronic ring or something like that. There's an aura ring. Yeah, Some, some low power applications. And so using this, you know, this approach, we're trying to generate, we're trying to create chips that are about the size of your pinky nail that, you know, generate one and a half volts and 25 microamps. And so that maps to a number of chips that are on the market today that operate at that power level. But they, you know, they have to be recharged. We, we don't have to be recharged. So we're like a solar panel that works in the dark. So you can put us in your device and then it can go down to the bottom of the ocean and it will continue to work. Or you can, we can give it to our buddies at Intuitive Machines and they can carry it to the surface of the moon and maybe they want to throw a sensor off to go measure something and it'll collect data even though the sun's stops shining. So the, the cool thing is, like I said at the beginning of this interview, we, we were going down this whole path of trying to understand the nature of the quantum field because we were motivated by where we might envision it could lead one day. Maybe we could add more, a deeper understanding that physics Venn diagram and get to a point where we can figure out what do we need to put into the rings that go around that I access enterprise concept shift, if you will. And so it's cool to think that, you know, maybe we could come up with a technology that, you know, provides useful power today for things like this. Maybe you know, as we, if we, if we put it in aggregate, if we put a lot of them together right, we could get to a point where what is that chip? So this is, so this is just a 3D print of having a bunch of, of those little chips that are 1,5 millimeters by 5 millimeters, 1 1/2 volts, 25 micro ramps. If we add a bunch of those together at a very large extreme, you know, that particular board might generate 3.4 watts. And so that board could recharge your phone in three hours. And so imagine a scenario where you had a. Had a phone that's pretty resilient, that for the most part, you'd never have to plug it in. That might be pretty useful, right? So it's neat to think that pursuing, you know, this whole reaching for the stars type of thing has fueled this exploration of pushing the boundaries of what we know and then kind of coming across instantiations that make us go, hey, wait a minute, although we were thinking about these kinds of things, look at what we could potentially do now. And so we could find ways to feed the research and still bring value here in incredible ways. I mean, this capability is amazing to think in terms of what it could unlock. Right. Especially if we could, you know, if this is three, three and a half watts, you could imagine you put a bunch of these together, you could rapidly get to a kilowatt or even more. Right. And have expeditionary power. I don't know if you've ever wanted to have a, you know, a farm out in the middle of some untouched area where you didn't want to pay the money to run the power line. Well, now maybe, you know, in 10, 15 years, maybe you wouldn't have to. To. We, we could provide a solution that would allow you to come off the grid. Right.

[Joe Rogan]

So I was seeing something online about some new technology that I believe was invented in Japan, where they have figured out a way to extract far more energy from solar panels.

[Harold White]

Yeah, I think they've increased the efficiency on solar panels, but there is a limit to that, right. In terms of, I think it's your, you know, when you get to close to 40% efficiency on a solar panel, you're kind of at the limit of what you can do. And then the challenge you have with the solar panel is at the surface of the Earth, during ideal peak lighting conditions, the flux of power, you gets about a thousand watts per square meter, right? So if you wanted, you know, a system that provided 5 kilowatts of power, you could do the math and figure you need a fairly big area. With our technology, we can stack it on top of one another. We don't have to stretch out like that. And so the quantum field could potentially provide a lot more power with a much smaller footprint, if you will. Right now, I have to acknowledge we're still very early. Right. We're very low Power levels. And so we want to crawl, walk, run. But we're, you know, we're thinking about what can we do now to provide use, right? And then use those applications to continue to grow the capabilities at Casimir.

[Joe Rogan]

And then ultimately, if you have those things stacked 50ft thick and, you know, 700 meters in a circle, you know, then you have enough power to make a warp drive.

[Harold White]

Right? Well, and. But so this gets into the cool thing is what we're. What we're trying to understand and study inside these little chips that we're making is we're trying to understand the nature of the quantum field, right? The structure to the quantum field. How can we alternate? How can we tweak it? What can we do with it? Because we talked about the fact that negative vacuum energy density is potentially a good proxy for the idea of exotic matter in terms of what general relativity requires. And so in the process of developing a deeper understanding of the quantum field with what we're doing with these devices, right, I would contend that we're actually adding another circle on that Venn diagram that's potentially not not only overlapping part of quantum mechanics, but it's also overlapping part of general relativity. And I think that's kind of what's going to be necessary to be able to make the idea a space warp real. One day we're going to have to have that new body of physics, those new E equals MC squared equations, right? That allows us to potentially, ah, hey, if I do this and this and this, then it might, you know, maybe I could solve that problem. But I think your instincts are right on. Right from the standpoint what we're doing in the micro here, right? If you cracked open one of the access panels on the IXS Enterprise and you looked, you might see some. Some stuff that's like, I can see how these guys are descendants to what gets put together in that. In that ring in macroscopic, whatever that might be, right?

[Joe Rogan]

It's got to be so frustrating that this has this immense potential. But, like, imagine seeing it, like, how do you get to do it? It's not, I don't want to say frustrating, challenging, exciting. Just knowing that there's this potential energy source that can be tapped and knowing that, just like all technology, I mean, if you go back to the Apollo program, the amount of power that you have in your phone far exceeds what they used. And they had, like, a whole giant room filled with supercomputers. And now you just carry it around and you plug it into the wall, and it's 50% charge in 20 minutes.

[Harold White]

Yeah, we take that for granted. It's interesting you mentioned that, Right. If you look back through the, if you think about the industrial revolution when we, when we started, when we came up with steam power, right. And then when we later figured out, you know, gasoline engines, right. The, the amount of power we had available to us change so drastically. Right. The change that it had on human civilization and human culture is just hard to fully comprehend because, I mean, if you think about all the different things that get done, a single tractor with one person on it will do all the stuff that's necessary to seed a field, to cultivate a field, to plow a field. And it's amazing to think that that's possible just with one human being at the helm of the tractor. But you had to unlock all the energy insights to unlock the energy and what we know from petrochemical, right? Just gas, diesel, whatever, right. And so, yeah, it's neat to think how things like that change civilization. And so in some ways it's like if you think about the long term benefits of reducing something like this to practice, right. We talk about the grid. You were here in Texas and I think we had some issues during a very cold winter where ERCOT got its r removed. The power grid had some issues because it got really cold. But imagine a future where we can start to create micro grids, maybe even eventually move away from something like that. And then what would that kind of a capability do for parts of the world that currently don't have any infrastructure in place? Right, right. There's a lot of places in Africa where if you brought this type of a capability where you could plop a brick down on the table, that's 1 kilowatt, right. And let people know, hey, can you make use of this? And so just like Starlink provides this opportunity for people in remote locations to have, have access to the Internet, right. We could potentially bring a solution to the table that could help a lot of places on the planet that, you know, they might not ever see that otherwise. Right. So that's the thing. So those are some things that have us excited about as we continue to wrestle with technology. Right. Anytime you're trying to do something, when you're trying to establish order, where there's only chaos, it's hard, right? But the things that help us weather that is the long term implications of what we're doing, both in the near term and in the far term, it's really cool to think, right. We can provide benefits, you know, here and then farther down the line here and then farther down the line to here and then. Oh, by the way, the whole reason we're doing all this stuff is because we hope to try and make the idea of a space where it possible one day. Right. It's cool to kind of have that, that connection between all these different nodes, roads along the way.

[Joe Rogan]

Or you can see the path.

[Harold White]

Yeah, yeah, you can see the path.

[Joe Rogan]

Useful for people today, Right.

[Harold White]

I mean, think about like what when we have a hurricane that hits, right. The power goes out, you're without power until they can get the power lines up. Right. If you have capabilities like this maybe 50 years in the future or something like that. Right. Where everybody just, you know, they're off the grid.

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Harold White]

That changes the nature of how we contend with, with, you know, disasters like that. Right.

[Joe Rogan]

And monopolizing resources.

[Harold White]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

That's the other issue. We'd no longer be dependent upon fossil fuels or essentially everyone would be independent.

[Harold White]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

And then you could imagine as it scales up, it gets better and better. Just like cell phones were initially these very large bricks that, you know, remember from Wall street, the guy.

[Harold White]

Oh, hi. Yeah, okay. Yeah, sure. I can do dinner.

[Joe Rogan]

This big, big brick with you. And now they're little tiny things.

[Harold White]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And so you could imagine how that would eventually get to a point where it's portable and anyone can have power everywhere you want to go.

[Harold White]

Yeah. So some of the things we think about in terms of the roadmap for things. Right. You know, it may take us a little while before we could provide all the power that's necessary for like a Tesla. But we could, we could imagine a scenario where, where like I hold this little prop up again, we've got this, this three and a half watt brick, three and a half watt card. Maybe we put a bunch of them together to create a 1 kilowatt module of sorts. So maybe a Tesla's got 50 kilowatt hours worth of capacity in it. Most of your daily driving that folks do is, you know, to work and home. So that's maybe 50 miles to. And 50 miles from 100 miles a day. Right. And so if you've got a, an electric vehicle that has all the batteries already in it, but then you make the decision to buy a 1kW Casimir module, right. And you connect it to your car, that module will provide over a 24 hour period, it'll provide 24 kilowatt hours of capacity. And so in terms of the driving duty that I just talked to you about, right. You're not going to drain the battery enough where the Casimir cell couldn't just continue to recharge it. So in that particular instance, even though we might be a little bit farther away from being able to power a whole car, we might be able to find opportunities for early adopters where, hey, for 99% of how you might use your electric vehicle, you don't have to plug it in. Right.

[Joe Rogan]

So from where we are now, with your current research and all this, these incredible ideas, what steps have to be taken in order to advance this stuff.

[Harold White]

Right, right. So the first step is trying to get to the power magnitude I just described. 1 1/2 volts and 25 microamps. So we, we have chips. These chips right here, you know, they can achieve very high voltages, but then they relax to a certain steady state voltage over a long term. Right. So they have, they have the ability to provide steady state power, but it's like 30 mil, 30 millivolts with a steady state current. And so it's the current that we're currently working on right now. We're trying to get the current up to that 25 microamp ability right now. And so that's the stuff that we're doing. You know, every month we're trying to do another generation of charge chips to go through and work the material science and get that capacity to that level. So, and making chips is, that's tough. That is tough business. So it's been quite the slog. You know, we've, we've been doing this since 2000, 20, 20. The first chips we worked on took us, you know, 18 months to make. And then we got the time down to 12 months, and then we got the time down to seven months. And then we got, you know, we got these guys down to. It's actually this was a two week sprint from the time we did the design to the time we got them in hand. But roughly, we're anticipating we can make these generations once a month. So making chips is very different from, you know, how we view the rest. Like this wooden table. Right. You know, if you think about making something, you think about drills and saws and cutting holes and putting bolts in and so forth. But when you talk about making channels chips, it's an entirely different approach to how you make things. You make things with light and you make things with plasma. Right. You know, this will be a good opportunity for me to use a little verbal description and then you can grade me on how well I communicate this. Right. Okay. So in concept, how do you make something smaller than what you can See with your eyeballs. So ordinarily, when we want to look at something very small, we use a microscope, right? So we got this optical system. We look through, and then we look at something. Maybe it's got a paramecium or whatever in it. Now the. What we're looking at is very tiny, and we use optics to blow that up. And in some cases, instead of putting our eyes against the. The little viewports on the microscope, maybe we'll put an imager, a camera on there. And we'll take that, the camera will collect the image and put it on a big screen, a big LCD screen. Now, if you think about that in reverse, what if you, you know, like, let's say you're looking at, you're looking at our chips and you're seeing these squares and circles and tiny little different shapes and so forth, but it's projected on a big screen. Now imagine for a moment, instead you go through in some CAD program and you draw squares and circles or whatever. Maybe you draw a picture of Jamie's head. Head. And then you go through and you take that, that, that digital file you just created and you, you kind of look at this whole process that I was talking about in reverse. And so instead of using a imager to collect the image, use a projector to project the image back down through the optics, right? Where now you project some shape you want to manifest on a chip, right? But you, you can't see it with. You could look at it with your eyes, but you couldn't see see it, right? But you're using this projection system through the microscope in reverse to put the image down on the chip. So now the next thing you do is you take, let's say you got a silicon wafer, and then you go through and you, you apply something we call photoresist. It's like, like a really thick, almost like a, a honey type of consistent, little thinner than that, right? But you, you put some photoresist on the wafer and then you spin it at really high RPM and it spins that photoresist so that it's very thin. And you take that wafer with the photoresist and you expose it to the image. You want to put onto it with ultraviolet light, right? And so that hardens part of that photoresist. And then you develop that wafer to remove all of the photoresist that was not exposed to the ultraviolet light. And then maybe you expose it to a plasma and you etch it. And so, so every place where there's no photoresist it etches the surface. But where the photoresist survived because you exposed it with your ultraviolet light, you now have an image. So you could look at that with a microscope again and then you'd see, you know, Jamie's bug on the surface of the silicon wafer. And so in concept, that's how the idea of when you make a CPU or you make memory or you make any of this digital technology, that's, that's technically how it works. You, are you old enough to remember microfiche?

[Joe Rogan]

What is that? You know, the little film.

[Harold White]

Yeah. The little acetate things in school that you put in.

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Harold White]

So.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Harold White]

So that's another kind of illustration of it, but just not applied to a chip. Right. So.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, I would imagine the manufacturing of something like this is a spectacular undertaking that would require a long time to develop the kind of factories that you would need to do this kind of stuff at scale in the United States. And this is, this is an issue that we have that was really highlighted by the COVID pandemic where we weren't able to get shipments of things and a lot of cars weren't for sale because they didn't have the chips to put in. A lot of the new American vehicles.

[Harold White]

Or in some cases they took functionality out because they couldn't get the ding dang chips right to go do what they wanted to go do. Yeah, this, this, yeah. I was really glad to see a lot of attention be brought to bear with. I think it was the Chips act. And even Texas has taken a very strong stance on trying to try and attract some chip manufacturing capability here in Texas. Right?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. We're talking about the Samsung plant that they built here. But the Samsung plant kind of highlights the issues because they weren't able to achieve the tolerances that they required in large batches.

[Harold White]

I think, I think they'll eventually get there. Right. This is, those are just illustrations of the fact it takes a while to get everything dialed in. Just like, you know, it took us 18 months to get our first chip and then now we're getting a two week sprint. We can, we can make our chip, but it took five years to get to that capability, if you will. I think they'll get all that figured out. Out. But in my mind that the other value proposition for chip manufacturing. Right. Is to me, chip manufacturing is like the 21st century automobile manufacturing jobs, if you will. It seems like that could provide a great opportunity for, you know, people to get meaningful work that pays well, that makes a product that a Lot of people need. Right. And so I think in some ways that's the, the upside to trying to focus on getting more chip manufacturing here in the States. Right. So I just think that's a win. That's a win. Win, right?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Because the chip manufacturing, one of the things that Apple stated, they have apparently a big leap coming forward with the iPhone 17, and they think that they're going to have to manufacture these in China. Was reading Tim Cook talking about it because they're saying that China is the only nation that's capable of achieving what they're trying to put into these.

[Harold White]

Is it, is it China or Taiwan?

[Joe Rogan]

I believe, I don't know. I believe it's China.

[Harold White]

I don't know definitively either. Right. But when I, when I think of.

[Joe Rogan]

Actually maybe it's just manufacturing, that's the issue, not the chips.

[Harold White]

Okay.

[Joe Rogan]

But see if you could find what Tim Cook said about needing to develop the iPhone or manufacture the iPhone 17. Because I think a lot of their stuff they do in India now, but they think this new one is going to be so sophisticated that they're going to have to have it made back in China again.

[Harold White]

Yeah. So when I think of cutting edge chip capability, I think of TSMC that is in Taiwan. Right. And they've got those, those machines, the ASML machines that are. This is a very interesting thing, right? So the machines that help make some of those tiny chips that are inside the iPhone, they're made by this machine that's developed by a company called ASML over in the Netherlands. And you know, part of me thinks it's like that's a very small brain trust of people, right. That are making machines that are kind of, you know, setting the pace for, you know, because I think about how, what happens if somebody, you know, a bus has an accident or something like that, right? Because it's just like such a small group of people that have this skill on how to make these, these tiny little features that are 2 or 3 nanometers, I mean, that's like, that's crazy small. So we're.

[Joe Rogan]

What percentage of the population can do that?

[Harold White]

Right. There's not a lot. And 2 or 3 nanometers, it's like that's, you know, if you were to, if you were to put DNA on the table, right. And you calculated 2 or 3 nanometers, it'd be, it'd be as very. Oh, here, let me give you a, Here's a, here's a better comparison. If you hold a marble in your hand and you imagine that is one nanometer. Right. It just kind of a comparison here. So you have a marble in your hand. That's one nanometer. Well, how big is a meter? A meter is the size of the earth by comparison. So just, just to put a nanometer in mind, right. So we can all envision a meter. Right. So that puts a nanometer to scale. Right. And so they're, they're making things, Lateral features that have this, you know, handful of nanometers in mind. Now, that said, I, I do think, I do think that is so crazy. I do think chips are reaching a limit in terms of what they can do for the lateral features. The next big chapter, I think for chips is they're going to go 3D. They're going to start making them. They've got a bunch of efforts in place to try and figure out how to make chips much more 3D like, especially when they may even include multiple different chips, right. That, that serve different purposes, if you will. You'll no longer just have. Have this single flat chip that does this surface. There'll be a bunch of chips on top of one another that get integrated into assembly. You already see it in this tire pressure monitor system. There's a little chip here on the back of. That's actually a system of chips. There's a bunch of chips in that little silver piece on the end there. There's a microprocessor, there's a Bluetooth module, there's a pressure sensor, and then there was. There's a receiver.

[Joe Rogan]

Look how small that is.

[Harold White]

Yeah, that's nothing. Right? So that, that little shiny silver piece. Yeah, that shiny. That shiny silver piece that is. It's not only just the pressure sensor, it's all the other support electronics and everything else is just, you know, simple dumb stuff.

[Joe Rogan]

And a big battery in comparison to everything else.

[Harold White]

And a big battery that has to last five years. Right. So that's, you know, that's why they. And it. And it. This is not. You don't take the lid off this thing. This is glued on. Right, right. It's. It's a. You're. When it's done, you just throw it away. Right. So that's the current operating process. Process.

[Joe Rogan]

So, so crazy. Now, when you think about the current capabilities of AI and how it's expanding at a very rapid rate, do you think that that will assist us in being able to figure out new ways to accomplish these tasks?

[Harold White]

You know, I, I think so. When AI first came out, I, I tried it a few times and I wasn't Satisfied with, With, you know, the, the quality of what I was able to do with it. This is a number of years ago, right? But, you know, in the last 12 months, I've kind of gotten in the habit of using it much more in a lot of the different things that I do. And it certainly does bring a lot of value in certain. Certain areas. And, you know, the. A lot of people talk about artificial intelligence is going to kill us. Oh, my gosh, it's going to kill us, right? And I don't think. Think it's artificial intelligence that's going to, you know, that's going to be a potential big problem. It's more a measure of artificial incompetence. Right? And so let me, Let me unpack that, okay? So I, I think AI is an amazing tool, and it's only going to get more useful as we continue to move forward. And I use it every single day, right. In terms of different things that, that I explore. It's extremely useful. And there's times when you're interacting with it where you might even think to yourself, yourself, all right, come on, is there some dude actually typing on the other side of this screen? Because it's like it's joking with me, for crying out loud.

[Joe Rogan]

And it's instantaneous, right?

[Harold White]

And it's instantaneous, right? And so I think as human beings, we tend to anthropomorphize everything, right? And so I think in a lot of ways, we want to give it more credit than it is due, right? And so we, when we interact with it, we. We might think, based on the quality of the interaction, oh, my gosh, this, this stuff is amazing. This is artificial general intelligence. But then it'll go off and do something totally boneheaded and you'll even call it on it, and it'll say, no, I'm. I did this exactly right? And it's just like. And you know from your own training, right, that whatever it offered up is. Is quite, quite wrong. Right? And so I keep. I keep waiting for somebody that. Do you remember the movie Dr. Strangelove from the 60s, right? So Stanley Kubrick thing and this movie of absurdity showing. Showing how incompetence in the government, in the military, leads to the destruction of the world, if you will. It's like we need a Stanley Kubrick equivalent today to do a movie called AI bob, right, where AI Bob accidentally takes out the world while trying to help. And I think it's one of those things where I think AI is an amazing tool. We need to find out more ways to use. Use it. It's incredible, but I think we just need to remind ourselves it's not quite as capable as we might think it is. And we need to be careful of that so that we don't, you know, put it in control of something in a certain way where because it has these other faults, it does something that's really unfortunate. Right.

[Joe Rogan]

So, so we have to make sure that it's reached a very high level of proficiency before it gets right.

[Harold White]

Or just be careful of how we use it and never be afraid to question what it provides. Right. Because there's no question it helps me be faster at a lot of stuff I want to do. Right. But I have a lot of skills and talent that I use to filter whatever it's given me. And I go, no, that's totally wrong. Right. So.

[Joe Rogan]

But I wouldn't be able to do that.

[Harold White]

Just trust it.

[Joe Rogan]

And I'd build something that kills everybody. Yeah, that's.

[Harold White]

Dang it, I forgot to carry the two.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, when you, when you think about the potential future versions of AI, that's where things get very interesting because if you do get to a point where it, it achieves a much higher level of understanding of all the physical properties of the, of the universe and, and does really understand the quantum vacuum and does really understand how to utilize it.

[Harold White]

So I think, I think one of the things, because I have been thinking about this is, and, and I know a lot of other people are trying to figure out how to use AI to go through and help navigate on physics frontiers. You know, AI is trained on a bunch of existing data, Right. And so in some ways it is an enormous experiment in statistics. And so I would wonder how, how much an AI system by itself could innovate new ideas. It certainly could recognize patterns once you institute sentience.

[Joe Rogan]

And then if it's possible at all to make it creative.

[Harold White]

That'S where I wonder what. Great question. And I'm not an AI expert, so I'm going to tread very carefully here. When I think about how they train AI today, it is certainly a measure of statistics, right? And so when you talk about an AI agent being able to actually think in the way that you and I might consider thinking, I don't think anything that we have does that per se. Right. You just got a, a bunch of GPUs that are taking in input and then passing it through a matrix of all this stuff that's from training. And then so the statistics of what comes out out. Right. As a result of whatever training that was done. So it's not like Leonardo da Vinci imagining where he's going to put his next brushstroke on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But certainly it could potentially take an image of the Sistine Chapel and mix it with an image of some other modern art or whatever and come up with some cool homogenization of things. Right. And so forth. So I still think. I think we need to better understand what is consciousness. Right. Before we can really even do that.

[Joe Rogan]

What do you think it is?

[Harold White]

Oh, that's.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, I know. You've thought about it. You think about everything, right?

[Harold White]

Yeah. I don't know. It's a good question. I would speculate. Right. You know, maybe this comes down to the nature of the quantum field, the quantum vacuum. You know, I think there are other forms of radiation, scalar field fluctuations with the quantum field that are beyond electromagnetic, like the lights in this room. That's electromagnetic radiation. Scalar fluctuations would potentially be a whole other realm of radiation that we currently don't have any sensors to detect. Right. But maybe biology uses those types of things. And so there are things inside cell structures called microtubules. I think Hal maybe even mentioned something about microtubules to you when he was here the other day. But cells have microtubule structures in them, and I think that may be connected to the idea of consciousness, although I don't have a well enough formulated answer to be able to defend anything. So I'm treading very carefully because this is not my area of expertise. But.

[Joe Rogan]

But it's fun to speculate.

[Harold White]

It is fun to speculate. And maybe we can. Maybe we can schedule another opportunity to come back and we can talk about consciousness. Bring a couple other folks that are more cognizant than me.

[Joe Rogan]

I would love that.

[Harold White]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

You want to organize that?

[Harold White]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

You know who you would call?

[Harold White]

I don't know yet. I'll think about. I'll have it. I'll have a think. Actually. Probably have a couple other cool ideas for cool things we can. We can confab on. I think a lot of people would really enjoy learning and listening about.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, that would be a fantastic collaboration. Collaboration with people that have theories about consciousness along with these theories, these quantum theories.

[Harold White]

Yeah, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Fascinating stuff. Yeah. Harold, thank you so much.

[Harold White]

Yeah, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

So interesting. And I'm so happy that people like you are out there in the world working on this stuff, which I'm sure one day, you know, when people look at the past and say, boy, look at those cave people. Look what they're doing. You know what I'm saying? Because, like, like, we would look at the Victorian people, or we would look at people from thousands of years ago. I think they'll, they'll look back at this going, wow, they were. This is where it all started.

[Harold White]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This was the moment.

[Joe Rogan]

So let's definitely do that. Let's definitely have another visit and, and bring in some people that will explore consciousness together.

[Harold White]

Sounds good. I love it.

[Joe Rogan]

Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

[Harold White]

Hey, thank you, Joe, for having me.

[Joe Rogan]

Bye, everybody.