Avi Loeb

These are programs to develop technologies that are useful for the Air Force, that are classified.

And others relate to nuclear fusion, where study of nuclear fusion obviously has important implications for...

energy sources, but also potentially for applications in space and some of which might be related to national security.

Adversarial nations might be interested in some of these secrets and they could have operations either trying to get the information about what these programs

entail or may perhaps even follow individuals.

And so definitely it comes with the territory if you sign up for a classified program that you have to worry about being monitored, about the data being available to espionage in that regard.

And that is a risk that everyone involved knows about.

Today I'm talking with somebody you probably know, Professor Avi Loeb.

He's a theoretical physicist at Harvard, he's the longest-serving chair of the astronomy department in its history, and he has over a thousand peer-reviewed papers.

He's got nine books.

The guy's resume is absurd.

But here's what makes Avi different from every other Harvard professor.

He took all that credibility and aimed it at the one question most scientists are afraid to touch.

Are we alone?

He's the one who said Oumuamua, the first interstellar object we ever detected, might be an alien light sail.

He dragged a magnet across the bottom of the Pacific Ocean to recover fragments of an interstellar meteor.

His childhood on a farm in Israel, how he accidentally ended up at Harvard because nobody else wanted the job, what Arrow told him behind closed doors, and a new threat to astronomy that nobody's talking about.

Let's go down to the basement.

Avi, welcome.

Thanks for having me.