Matt Kilty

And he told me that in the interview, he'd wanted this job, he'd wanted to talk to aliens since he was a little boy.

So initially he wanted to be an astronaut until he realized that like just space is too big.

The distances are too vast.

Like you can't actually go meet an alien face to face.

You got to do it remote.

So that's why he got obsessed with SETI.

And he told me about how he basically made the job at SETI for himself.

Like he bugged them until they hired him.

And when I interviewed him, he had worked at SETI already for about 15 years.

And so I asked him, like, okay, say an alien message appears out of the blue today.

Like, how do you even start to translate this thing from an intelligence that is completely different, that's completely foreign, that's totally incomprehensible to us?

And his answer was like, okay, well, you can't really know how you'd start until it actually comes and you see how it comes, da-da-da-da.

But you actually don't have to go that far to practice.

So it's like, okay, I'm going to go try to, you know, talk to dolphins or octopi or something.

Another way to practice, try to understand Mayan or Babylonian ruins.

And so that was like, that was his job.

He would like practice this sort of thing every day, cracking codes and studying animal behavior and deciphering hieroglyphics.

And then so that we did that interview.

It's great.

A couple of years later, the movie Arrival actually comes out and I'm watching it.