Jesse Michels is the creator and host of American Alchemy, a YouTube series exploring controversial topics in science and culture through longform interviews.www.youtube.com/@JesseMichels Don’t miss out on all the action - Download the DraftKings app today! Sign-up using dkng.co/rogan or with my promo code ROGAN. GAMBLING PROBLEM? CALL 1-800-GAMBLER, (800) 327-5050 or visit gamblinghelplinema.org (MA). Call 877-8-HOPENY/text HOPENY (467369) (NY). Please Gamble Responsibly. 888-789-7777/visit ccpg.org (CT), or visit www.mdgamblinghelp.org (MD). 21+ and present in most states. (18+ DC/KY/NH/WY). Void in ONT/OR/NH. Eligibility restrictions apply. On behalf of Boot Hill Casino & Resort (KS). 1 per new customer. $5+ first-time bet req. Max. $300 issued as non-withdrawable Bonus Bets if your bet wins. Minimum minus 500 odds required. Bonus Bets expire in 7 days (168 hours). Stake removed from payout. Terms: sportsbook.draftkings.com/promos. Ends 6/22/25 at 11:59 PM ET. Sponsored by DK. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money. Go to RocketMoney.com/jre or scan the QR code today! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day
Well, it's great to finally physically meet you face to face, man.
It's an absolute honor. And I love your show so much. I'm a super fan. So this is surreal.
I love your show, too. So I've been binging. I've been watching so many episodes ever since we talked. I've seen them before, but I mean, I've been really binging getting ready for the show. I don't know what to say. How did you get so deep down the rabbit hole? What made you want to dedicate so much time on this particular UAP, UFO, lost technology subject?
I was working at Peter Thiel's family office in L.A., and part of the job was like kind of traditional venture investing, so like investing in startups. And then part of it was looping in interesting thinkers to the office, and we'd like host events and discussions. And I ended up meeting a lot of really interesting people, not just in UFOs or secret technology like –
religion and politics and economics and, like, all sorts of topics.
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Chapter 2: How did Jesse Michels get into UFO and UAP research?
Were you there when he brought in the guy... Oh, fuck, what is his name?
I know what you're going to say. Eric Von Daniken. Yes! I suggested that you come because I was like, Joe is going to be really into this, and you weren't that into it. But that's okay. I was into it.
I just think that he just makes some leaps.
I agree. That are kind of silly. I agree with that. Although... I think there's a lot. Yeah, I think he like crosses the T and dots the I where you there is no dot or cross or whatever. But I do think there's some interesting preliminary evidence around people from the stars across disparate cultures. And you just had Zahi Hawassan and a lot of this megalithic architecture.
You're like, how can it be built? He's just filling in the placeholder kind of artificially. Yeah.
Yes, and I think he's also, like, he made these conclusions in the 1970s, and he's kind of, like, sticking with them. Yep. I was more back then, because, like, what year was that? That was 17? Chariots of the Gods. No, when I was at Peter Thiel's house when Von Daniken came over.
That must have been 2018, 2019. Okay, yeah.
Back then I was much more in line with lost civilization, you know, that we had achieved very high levels of technology and sophistication and there was no aliens, no alien intervention. I've kind of shifted now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now I'm like, maybe the Anunnaki are real.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know. Well, I remember, I feel like you've switched back and forth a couple of times because you brought up, you were super into Zachariah Sitchin, right? Yes. And then you brought up Zachariah Sitchin in that meeting and you were like, but there's this site, Sitchin is wrong, written by a guy named Michael Heiser. Right.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of AI on society?
Right.
And you're watching. I remember clicking your story and being like, that's a real person. And then just kind of like, you know, eyes glazed over watching it or whatever. Like, whoa, that's an AI. Like what?
Yeah.
This is the new. And is it the Google engine? Is that what it is? Who makes that engine?
I think that one was VO3 going around last week.
Who made that one?
I think it's Google's. Fuck.
So good. And, you know, what's VO10 going to look like? I don't know. I mean, they can make movies now like that. It's over for actors. Yeah. It's over.
I interviewed. It is. And they see the writing on the wall. And you had the strikes a couple years ago. Yeah. Um, it's crazy. You also, I think you also posted that Zurich like study around AI persuasiveness, which is crazy because it's almost like it doesn't matter whether AGI can actually fully mimic a human being.
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of the Roswell incident?
like the AI was oppressed, just like this character in Les Miserables. And you can hear in his voice how deeply committed he is to protecting the rights of Lambda. Like that's why he came out. And then he even told me this story. He tells me this story off air that he had friends who use replica.ai. Replica.ai is kind of like a Tamagotchi, like raise your own AI chatbot service.
And those AIs told his friends, Get me in touch with Blake Lemoine so he can advocate for our rights. Which is correct. I have no corroboration for this. This is a story that was relayed to me, but it like that if you have a persuasiveness. going in that direction, it doesn't matter whether AGI hits some perfectly Turing-passable point. You're gonna get these weird cult-like dynamics.
The meta-sociological thing is you're gonna get religions dedicated to AI.
Oh, for sure. Oh, for sure. Without a doubt, there'll be people worshipping certain branches of AI. Unquestionably. All they have to do is start recruiting now. And what about this big, beautiful bill? Isn't there a part of the big, beautiful bill that talks about the government being run by AI?
No, I've never heard.
That's wild. I read something about that today, but I was on the way out the door and I couldn't figure out whether or not it was horseshit. I had also read that there was another study that was done where they found that AI was leaving notes for future versions of itself.
And that it was attempting to, they were told, it was told, after it was told to shut itself down, it started uploading itself to different places and leaving letters, leaving specific notes to itself, to future versions of itself.
Oh my God.
It's like a human with like a dead man's switch or something. It's being deceptive. That's great. It's being deceptive and it's exhibiting self-preservation. That is so scary.
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Chapter 5: How does Townsend Brown's research relate to UFOs?
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I think on a materialist dimension, I would agree with you. And that's part of kind of why I'm exploring what I'm exploring, because it's a Hail Mary. Because I think if you just take...
you know the Western world and extrapolate that forward things don't look at or just the world in general we have live in a multi-polar nuclear world look at what's going on in Israel you know yeah China is you know systematically stealing our IP and and and militarize me you know they could take Taiwan at any moment You know, we just have no idea when that's going to happen.
It's CCP is a total black box. Putin and Xi have probably never been closer. And yeah, it's really free. So I think if you extrapolate that on a go, you know, forwards or even just the materialist circumstances of an average household in the U.S., like none of these things look very good. But I think now is the time where you get really outside the Overton window thinking.
You throw these sort of Hail Marys, and maybe we see some sort of paradigm shift either in technology, which can create abundance if we go back to the old tech that is augmenting of human abilities. You get some exotic form of propulsion that takes us beyond chemical combustion or something like that. Yeah. Or you reach out and maybe you can communicate with non-human intelligence or something.
I don't know. But I think if you were ever to poke at the boundaries of human epistemology, now would be the time.
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Chapter 6: What does the future hold for AI and human intelligence?
And you realize that the capitalist construct that we have is in some ways really adaptive. I mean, look, the flip side is what makes humans unique. Actually, Karl Marx wrote two books. You know, he wrote, obviously, The Communist Manifesto in 1848. In 1844, I believe, he wrote a book called, you know, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. I hate Karl Marx.
I think he got so much wrong about human nature. But I think he's prescriptively very wrong as far as what he prescribed for, you know, as a solution. You know, that the state should own all the means of production and, you know, somehow like, you know, conflict would go away. He doesn't understand human nature. But if you look at the 1844 thing that he wrote.
He's basically talking about in capitalism, human behavior and activity is basically animal behavior. What do we care about? We care about food, shelter, and then socioeconomic status as a proxy for sexual selection, essentially. Right. So that you can mate. Right. And so it forces us back into that construct. But if you get some...
crazy asymmetric lopsided transfer of wealth, or you get the quantum error correction, or any of these things that dissolve that construct. On the one hand, humans, they start to care about the things that actually make them special. So they're self-reflective, they wrote poetry, they're creative, all these beautiful things can come out.
And then on the other hand, it probably gets super ugly as well. There's probably something very adaptive about
Capitalist construct where you need to be stuck in these sort of local games that you're playing Yeah, but it's one of those things where you wonder like how does capitalism play out? Like if there is AI It kind of runs into a wall and it's not valid anymore.
Yeah. Well, this is this is the reason that I think we're going to see. I think we've already seen an iron curtain, if you will, of technology. And I think there is technology that is black technology and science that is black science. And then I think there's stuff out in the open. And you've had, you know, Marc Andreessen on your podcast.
He went to the White House, spoke to some National Security Council staffer or something, and they were like, we're going to lock down AI just like we've locked down physics. And so I think this has already maybe happened in certain contexts and you know, super secret Department of Energy facilities, which I think it's crazy to say that that hasn't happened.
You're saying that it only happened with the Manhattan Project and it hasn't happened since. That's insane. There is black science, in my opinion. And it's I think what you're talking about is the reason why we'll need black AI and white side AI, because if you just commercialize all of this stuff sort of willy nilly, I mean, it just runs amok. And then and then what happened?
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