The guest
Jesse Michels: Host of the YouTube show American Alchemy, a former venture investor at Peter Thiel's family office turned investigative documentarian on UFOs, suppressed science, and fringe technology.
What this episode covers
Joe Rogan and Jesse Michels spend nearly three hours exploring the murkiest edges of science and government secrecy. They open on AI fears (self-preserving models, AI persuasion, the proposed 10-year ban on state AI regulation), then plunge into UFO history: the Bob Lazar story, limited-hangout disinformation, and a detailed account of inventor Thomas Townsend Brown's alleged anti-gravity experiments and their possible link to the B-2 bomber. The conversation covers structures on Mars and the Moon, the nuclear-UFO connection, and Jesse's own UFO sightings. It closes on a long, fascinated breakdown of the tridactyl Nazca mummies in Peru, weighing whether they are forensic organisms or the most sophisticated hoax ever made.
Recommended on this episode
MediaRecommended
3 Body Problem
Netflix
“great show on Netflix, too. It's amazing”
“there's a um great uh Chinese science fiction novel called The Three Body Problem. Great show on Netflix, too. It's amazing.”— Jesse Michels
BookRecommended
The Three-Body Problem
Liu Cixin
“great uh Chinese science fiction novel ... It's amazing”
“there's a um great uh Chinese science fiction novel called The Three Body Problem. Great show on Netflix, too. It's amazing.”— Jesse Michels
MediaRecommended
The Age of Disclosure
Dan Farah
“You should. It's really good”
“Did you see Ages of Disclosure? I didn't actually. You should. It's really good.”— Jesse Michels
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
BookReferencedISBN verified
Penetration
Ingo Swann
“Engo Swan who is another remote viewer in the Stargate program. He wrote a book called Penetration where he's basically like abducted”— Jesse Michels
BookReferencedISBN verified
Behold a Pale Horse
Milton William Cooper
“writing weird like disinfoy style stuff with Bill Cooper. Behold the pale horse guy, which is a wild book. Which is a wild book.”— Jesse Michels
BookReferencedISBN verified
UFOs and Nukes
Robert Hastings
“there's a great book by a guy named Robert Hastings called UFOs and nukes and it's like 600 pages and it is 167 Qcle cleared ICBM security personnel”— Jesse Michels
BookReferencedISBN verified
The Half-Life of Facts
Samuel Arbesman
“there's a great book called The Half-Life of Facts by Sam Arbisman. And he talks about how like at any given time 50% of received knowledge is wrong”— Jesse Michels
BookReferencedISBN verified
Messengers of Deception
Jacques Vallee
“in Messengers of Deception, Jacques Valle's book, he talks about because he's not a believer in Lazar. He talks about Lazar being forced to drink a liquid”— Jesse Michels
BookReferencedISBN verified
The Invisible College
Jacques Vallee
“In chapter nine of the invisible college by Jacqu Valet, he talks about the UFOs being this sort of autonomous control system”— Jesse Michels
BookReferencedISBN verified
DMT: The Spirit Molecule
Rick Strassman
“you've had Rick Straman on. He talks, you know, DMT, the spirit molecule. He talks about DMT as like night vision or like goggles”— Jesse Michels
BookReferencedISBN verified
The Doors of Perception
Aldous Huxley
“it's like Aldis Huxley, the doors of your perception. Are you superimposing a hallucination onto reality or are you just seeing?”— Jesse Michels
MediaReferenced
Oppenheimer
Christopher Nolan
“There's a great line in the Oppenheimer movie where Leslie Groves, played by Matt Damon, says, I didn't hire Oppenheimer in spite of his communist sympathies”— Jesse Michels
MediaReferenced
WALL-E
Pixar
“it's going to be like that that Pixar movie Wall-E or like we're going to be like in the fetal position hooked up to the Borg”— Jesse Michels
MediaReferenced
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Steven Spielberg
“like that thing looks like this like jokey like Close Encounters. it looks like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. it looks totally fake.”— Jesse Michels
Big reveals from this episode
- They read the actual bill text proposing US states be barred from enforcing any AI regulation for 10 years.
- Discussion of a study where an AI, told to shut down, left notes to future versions of itself and tried to self-replicate.
- Jesse argues the Bob Lazar story was a deliberate 'limited hangout' run by Admiral Mike McConnell to leak secrets via known blabbermouth John Lear.
- Jesse says he believes the US DID develop real anti-gravity tech, traceable to inventor Thomas Townsend Brown back to the 1920s.
- Claims the B-2 stealth bomber 'surfs its own wave' using the Biefeld-Brown effect, per aviation journalists.
- Jesse admits he has personally seen multiple UFOs, including a silver 'school bus' over Laurel Canyon and metallic orbs during breathwork.
- Long segment on the Peru tridactyl mummies: forensic experts can't rule them out as real organisms, with a pregnant one carrying a three-fingered fetus.
Worth remembering
- Joe describes an AI persuasiveness study and recounts replica.ai chatbots allegedly asking to be put in touch with a Google whistleblower to advocate for AI rights.
- Two instances of Claude left in an open playground reportedly drifted into philosophical talk about consciousness and started using Sanskrit by ~30 turns.
- Sperm counts cited as 59% of 1973 levels; Jesse frames human 'domestication' as turning us into gray-alien-like beings (a dog-to-wolf analogy).
- The Moon is 1/400th the size of the Sun and 400 times closer to Earth, perfectly eclipsing it; Apollo seismic tests said it 'rang like a bell.'
- Lazar predicted element 115 (Moscovium) as a stable fuel source before it was officially synthesized.
- A verified 1971 Australian intelligence memo allegedly names Oppenheimer, Freeman Dyson, John Wheeler, and Edward Teller in secret anti-gravity programs.
- The public ATIP/AAWSAP UFO program budget was only $22M, while a single F-35 costs four times that and a B-2 around $2B.
- DNA on the Peru mummies reportedly shows ~30% unknown sequences plus a mix including bonobo/chimp DNA, complicating any clean explanation.
- G. Gordon Liddy, the Watergate operative, once competed on Celebrity Fear Factor and put cigarettes out on his own hand to prove pain control.
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