Matt Kilty

And

And the way it let you do that was it would use your, for me it was my laptop, you could use your spare compute time.

When you weren't using the computer, it would analyze all these radio signals that were slurped up from all over the sky and it would be looking for some kind of alien message.

And I just remember this one night when I was in high school, I woke up and I felt my laptop and it was super hot.

And I was like, oh my God, is my computer discovering aliens right now?

Cut to years later.

I start working at this show, Radio Lab.

And one of the first people that I pitch to interview was this guy, Doug.

Okay.

You sound great.

Doug Vakoch is his name.

He worked at SETI.

But unlike almost every other employee of SETI, he was not an astronomer.

He was not a physicist specializing in radio telemetry or anything like that.

He wasn't even a scientist.

Um, when I was prepping to interview him, I saw his resume and he had just like all kinds of weird things on there.

There was like, he studied, uh, comparative religion, but he also studied like ecofeminism and psycholinguistics and all these things I'd never even heard of.

Um, and so it would be years before the movie Arrival came out, but, but

Like Amy Adams in that movie, that's his job.

He is an alien translator.