Adam Torres and Paul Hynek discuss bitcoin astronomy.
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Show Notes:
How are aliens, DMT, and Bitcoin related? In this episode, Adam Torres and Paul Hynek, Entrepreneur, Professor & Futurist at Machine Elves, explore Paul’s background and Machine Elves.
About Paul Hynek
Paul worked around the world in tech and entertainment and have extensive experience in crypto, startups, finance and financing, visual effects, virtual / augmented reality, blockchain, software, negotiations, strategy, intellectual property, and business development.
Paul sits on various boards and enjoy advising companies based on the many mistakes he’d seen and made himself. Paul is interested in the Singularity and life extension, and he serve as a grant reviewer for the National Science Foundation.
Along with his brother Joel, Paul was recently a consultant on HISTORY’s show “Project Blue Book” about their father J. Allen Hynek. It was a lot of fun giving input on the scripts, visiting, speaking publicly with and becoming friends with their TV Mom and Dad and the other super cool members of the cast, the creator, showrunner, executive producers, and the wonderful folks at HISTORY and A+E. Fun times.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to mission matters.com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. All right, so today’s guest is Paul Hynek and he’s an entrepreneur, professor and futurist, and the name of his company is Machine Elves.
Paul, welcome to the show. Thanks, Adam. Happy to be here. All right, Paul. I know you were sent over to us from Kate, who’s running the Sovereign Tech Summit. That’s going to be by the time this is released, it’s possible that that may have just passed. I know it’s coming up in a day or so, or two days or so.
But that being said, can you tell us a little bit more about the summit , and how you’re participating? Yeah, , it’s all about Positive tech and sort of a optimistic look at AI and open source technology and art as well. And it’s going to be in Santa Monica and it’s not going to be typical lectures, but much more interactive with panels and interactive discussion.
So it’s going to be really fun. Awesome. Well awesome to hear this and , I want to get into your background. So machine elves, you’re, you’re an entrepreneur, professor, futurist, , like how’d you get started in your career? Where do I begin for you? So I’m a Wharton MBA, and I teach finance and cryptocurrency at Pepperdine, and made software that does financial projections for startups.
I’ve got Sort of the financial side down, but my interests are a little bit more fringy, let’s say. My father was an astrophysicist and rocket scientist and astronomer and advised the US Air Force for 20 years about UFOs. And at first he was very skeptical and he came to believe that there was a phenomena.
Doesn’t mean they’re from other planets, but that there is a phenomena And the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind was based on his work and used his title. So I grew up in a scientific household that was curiously open to different types of phenomena. How fun was that around the dinner table?
Like that’s, I have a lot of conversations with like entrepreneurs, entrepreneur parents. They’re talking about this, talking about that. I’m like, man, I wish that would have been a cool conversation to have with my dad about like, so what are you working on? What are you working on at work? Yeah, where did the Air Force send you today?
You’re going back to Roswell tomorrow? And meanwhile, my brother is making nitroglycerin in the basement and jet engines in the backyard. Stop. This is greatness. I love it. So what was it like , what kind of affected and you as a kid? I mean, just even the way you view the world, like your lenses.
I feel like when you’re growing up in an environment where you have, First off, you’re very, obviously you come from good genes in terms of the intellect side of things. Everybody, everything that you’ve discussed takes quite a bit of intellectual power to accomplish number one. But number two, to like grow up and to have a different lens that you’re viewing the world with, in my opinion, I don’t want to, you know, project that on you, but that’s what I see so far in talking to you.
Like, what was that like? You can project a kind of compliment on me anytime. Well, I see the world. As being peopled with two different types of folks. One is people who are okay with questions they can’t answer. And the other group are not okay with their answers being questioned. And I think it breaks the world into, there’s sort of an intellectual fault line that separates those two camps.
And if you’re going to be interested in UFOs or ghosts or supernatural phenomena, which may or may not be objectively real, you have to be comfortable with this kind of awkward resting point of saying, yeah, I think something’s going on, and I have no idea what it is. Since we’re pattern seeking mammals, we’re not typically comfortable encountering or looking at a phenomena without having a pre packaged answer to make us feel nice and tidy.
And so you have, I mean, obviously a wide range of interests and then you have your, your professor, of course. And so now you’ve and correct me if I’m off on this, but with your concept of a Bitcoin astronomy , and the path you’ve taken, you’re, you’re kind of combining a lot of your different skill sets whether it’s, , the thinking about the supernatural, Bitcoin like all of these kind of meld, , like help me make sense of that.
Yeah, it’s it’s a lot of stuff to tie together. So the, the underlying thread that I see between potential aliens, which may or may not be extraterrestrial or interdimensional and DMT, which is a whole other thread to go or rabbit or wormhole to go down and Bitcoin is artificial intelligence, and I think artificial intelligence is an unfortunate phrase I prefer digital intelligence because it’s not laden with that sort of inappropriate framing towards humans and that sort of Condescending.
Look, digital intelligence is just sort of neutral and clinical, and if aliens are coming here from other planets, are they really sending their A team? That’s one question. Then the other question is, are they sending living, breathing, biological beings, or would they send sentient A. I. bots for, you know, 55 million light years of travel?
Then, you have DMT, the most powerful psychedelic in the world. I personally believe it’s not a hallucinogenic drug, but that it’s a plant medicine technology that allows people to have this hyper clarity vision of the world. And Bitcoin, obviously, is digital. You know, the way that Bitcoin is related is, When we colonize Mars, which is going to happen soon, will they use the U.
S. dollar and carefully monitor Fed broadcasts to see which way the interest rates are blowing? I don’t think so. I think they’ll use Bitcoin. Then they’ll get tired because they can’t mine Bitcoin, and they’ll create Mars coin. Bitcoin will gradually be called Earth coin, and it will represent our planetary credit score.
And I believe that all civilizations in the universe, almost inevitably, if they have individuals with individual rational economic motives, if they have finite resources, and they don’t have magic, will develop something roughly analogous to a proof of work governance protocol store of value, such as Bitcoin.
And, you know, what’s interesting about this, usually to me, and this is the way I view site. I come from a finance background too. I kind of look at it like a lot of the world. This is just this like this bar chart or this graph. Right? And so when I, and as we’re looking at the moment in time and continuum of like history, if you just kind of look further and further back, Okay.
And depending on the graph, right? Like if you’re looking at it, like what you just now said for some people that may be like, what, how is this going to happen? How’s that going to happen? Look at, I mean, depending on how many years you want to go back, just look at the beginning of the United States going out West was once would have once been considered this.
craziness. Like what? You’re going to continue going west? Or , look before that, going across the ocean to go to the United States, obviously, which wasn’t called that then, obviously. But, but that would have been considered what? No, the world ends at that end. So if you just keep kind of keep on looking further and further back it becomes more, to me, it becomes more plausible and just actually more logical.
It’s like one day, who knows how many years, I don’t know, but whatever the amount of years is, they’ll look back and be like, Oh my gosh, remember when they only lived on earth? That was crazy. Right. And, you know, going way back, I think the first blockchain is 46, 000 years old. Graded on a curve for the technology of the time because the blockchain is a distributed immutable ledger that people can’t change.
And 46, 000 years ago, they had a baboon femur with a bunch femur bone with a bunch of notches in it for accounting. And that’s the most distributed they can make it. In 12th century England, there was about 14 and a half million pounds of power in the economy. Only half a million pounds were represented in coins.
They didn’t have paper, they didn’t have plastic, so 14 million pounds of power. The bulk of the English economy was represented by tree branches. They were called tally sticks, and you’d take like a willow branch, like a foot long, and there were certain conventions, like, okay, Paul owes Adam his sorghum harvest for next year, and we, we make these notches in there so that everybody can understand that, and then we cut , that stick in half, vertically, you get half and I get half.
If I’m the one that owes you, I get the way it’s cut, I get the shorter end of the stick, I get the foil, I’m foiled again. You get the one with the stock on the end, the longer stick, you’re the stockholder. And that was a distributed ledger that is immutable and was used into the 20th century in France to pay taxes.
Amazing. , so we took them back in time just now. That’s right. So now let’s go a little bit more present day. Like what are you working on right now? , like what’s interesting to you right now? Well, so I’m kind of CFO by day, UFOs by night. I grew up with UFOs. And so I’m very familiar with that kind of fringy, pushed out the envelopes of mainstream science.
But I just feel that, I think there’s enough evidence to suggest that there is a phenomena, but I think the extraterrestrial hypothesis is wanting. We’re a long way away, how did they even find us, even though we’ve been beaming episodes of I Love Lucy out low these many decades? It just doesn’t seem to ring true to me.
And there are a lot of people who think that there may be something interdimensional about it. Then a friend of mine told me about a book called Alien Information Theory. Alien Information Theory, it’s the sexiest book title ever, which is about DMT, which I’d never heard about before, and that it’s a potential portal to this other dimension.
So, purely in the interest of science, Adam, I started taking one for the team and doing DMT, seeing if I could go to that, dimension, and ask the machine elves, as Terrence McKenna calls them, the denizens of the DMT verse, if they’re related to UFOs. And they told me, in effect, that they were. Okay, I can’t take that into a court of law, but it was encouraging enough for me to continue my research.
And so that’s my big passion now, is seeing if I can use these repeatable experiences And actually bring back evidence that moves the needle for science, like unambiguous mathematical questions and answers. Because so far, mainstream science kind of poo poos ghosts and ETs and all this. And if there’s something real there, I want to inculcate in the various experiencer communities a protocol, a proactive protocol, to try to influence the events to get evidence that scientists will look at and say, Okay, now you’re speaking our language.
Yeah, what do you think happens when we finally do get some type of real evidence? Because if we look back on, I guess, let’s go back for a second, like, before, you know, bacteria, like, at one point, we didn’t know what that was, right? And then all of a sudden, we know what that is, the different organisms and things like that.
That was equivalent to, you know, Obviously now we think of it as common sense, but that was equivalent to I don’t know if I would say I might might be a stretch to say it was equivalent to discovering like a species or aliens or something But back then when it actually happened, you know, you could argue like that was that Amazing like that out there, right?
Like people would have thought that was the craziest thing ever. And now it’s common knowledge. Like, what do you think happens when we finally do if slash when or whatever, we get some like irrefutable, like, what do you think happens? Well, that’s a good question. And, you know, people used to think about like disclosure or UFOs, like, A flying saucer would land on the lawn of the White House, and Walter Cronkite would narrate it, and the game over.
But, disclosure, as it’s called, is not like your father’s situation, because if a Republican administration discloses it, half the country won’t believe them, and vice versa. And so, even if they do try to disclose it, I don’t think anybody can tell what kind of threads it might rip through national security, what kind of panic it would cause, but one thing I believe is that I don’t know if the government has spaceships or alien bodies or has reverse engineered propulsion systems, but if they do, Even though I have very good friends who are writing legislation to force them to disclose this information, I don’t think they will because if you’re a diehard military guy, you didn’t sign up for compliance to pasty faced pencil pushers on Capitol Hill.
You signed up for full spectrum dominance, and,, they’ll be damned if they’re gonna give up the crown jewels of the technology, no matter where they got it from. Yeah, and I’m definitely not jaded at all. So I won’t, I won’t use that word for myself, but I just wouldn’t be surprised. Like, that’s more like me.
And I don’t know if that makes me compliant, but I just mean like, you know, like maybe that’s it. I don’t know. I’m like, can I, it could happen. And, you know, a good friend of mine, Danny Sheehan, is an amazing Harvard trained attorney who has worked on all sorts of cases and is working on the legislation now.
And one of the things he’s done, he’s gone to the inspectors general of various government agencies and said, Look, do you guys understand by law you need to release all the information they have? And like you said, Adam, these guys are there for compliance. So that’s what they’re interested in. So he’s actually getting parts of the government to champion the release of this information.
You know, we tend to think of the US government, whether it’s in relation to Bitcoin or UFOs or whatever, as this monolithic block acting in concert. Nothing could be further from the truth. All kinds of turf battles and different folks. Oh, if we thought that that was like this well honed timepiece of things that work, then I guess we forgot that there’s humans with prefrontal cortexes running the show, right?
That’s right. That’s right. So, you know, I wouldn’t I don’t, I guess maybe I’m with you that I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t be a little bit surprised if we have a capital D disclosure. I mean, we’ve already had the Navy say, Hey, we see UFOs and we see USOs, unidentified submersible objects all the time. And we’re scared for the safety of our aviators.
Yeah, that’s already kind of a disclosure. So if we’re going to get that classic, and now if we get a video, okay, who’s, you know, if you see a video of a UFO landing on the lawn in the White House, the first call you’re going to make is to open AI, right? So it’s very difficult. Yeah, or you’re gonna be looking at all right, well who, who, who created this?
What’s going on in in the, yeah. Yeah, what kind of, Yeah, what kind of AI created this? Yeah, what generated this? Yeah. Oh, you know what’s funny about that? I don’t even know if I’d say funny. It’s just was just Looking at, I don’t know what it was, a documentary or something like that, and it came out about the old Orson Welles when he was doing that broadcast that put the nation in a panic over like, we’re being And so thinking about it, we were, and so like, obviously many of the people are not going to remember that, or obviously most are no longer possibly going to be around on that one, slash when that happened.
But, but, but they got us once, Orson Welles tricked us once. We’re not going to let open AI trick us a second time. We got, Orson got us already once. I mean, , and, you know, if you listen to that broadcast, I mean, they had things in there that obviously couldn’t happen. Like they had a reporter in New York who’s in New Jersey five minutes later and still people believe.
Oh man. This is good, Paul. Let’s go. I want to go further into machine elves, like, like talk to me about the company and like the goal. Like what’s the goal of the company? So, you know, I have software that does financial projections for startups, and it’s raised over two billion dollars for thousands of startups, because what I found is I love about startup founders, they are broken people who are born on the island of broken toys.
And can’t understand that they cannot change the world. And because they can’t understand that, they actually can. So I love the energy of startups. And, you know, I’m a software guy. And software folks, we think we can hack everything. Like, you know, I was able to, I was written about in a medical journal for reversing my age.
And I think that startup founders have the best energy. And unfortunately, a lot of them, Don’t know how to speak investor ease. So they don’t know the dynamics of getting money when you should get money, how you get it, how you negotiate it, how you present the company or even how they can understand the company themselves, how money comes in and money goes out,, beyond the fact that they’ve got this new router that’s going to put Cisco out of business.
So I stepped in. And I like to work with startup founders and give them this template that they can use to do their numbers so that when the investor asks them, Hey, how’d you get these projections? They don’t have that deer in the headlights look because they were talking to me and they weren’t really paying attention.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And so , is there any particular niche in the startup founder space that you’re working with just in general? Or is it agnostic? Yeah, I’ve worked everything from spaceships to nanotechnology and everything in between. Once it gets down to the finance level, The business model might be different, but everything else is the same.
You’re hiring people, you’re paying them money, you’re buying capital expenditures, you’re doing some financing of some kind, so it doesn’t really matter. My sweet spot has, has been historically entertainment technology. I, I worked in visual effects on Avatar, Lord of the Rings, Planet of the Apes, and then we sold our company to James Cameron.
So that’s the business I’m most personally familiar with. But I work in agriculture and all kinds of other businesses as well. That’s great. So what what excites you right now? Let’s jump in around a little bit. So in AI, the conversation with AI, everything’s moving pretty, pretty fast, I would argue.
And I guess that’s relative, but to me, it’s moving pretty fast, what, what excites you right now in this space? The fact that people now, are looking at AI in a somewhat more positive light. You know, we’ve had all these dystopian views with the Matrix and Terminator about AI taking over.
And look, for me, I’m less concerned about the future of artificial intelligence than I am about the present of human stupidity. Will we even make it, Adam, until the computers take over? Please, hurry up! Get it, get here already! But now people are seeing how that one that one. I am jaded. Paul problem on that one.
I am the other one. I wasn’t on that one. I’m like, I wouldn’t surprise me. But that one is a jaded wouldn’t surprise me. Go ahead. All right. Cool. So people are people are worried about AI taking jobs, but let’s say, like, in writing. A really good writer has a unique feel, like Stephen King. There’s no AI that can replace Stephen King, because he’s got a very unique kind of warped view of the world.
So the really good writers, like Stephen King, will probably use AI for some of the more drudgery aspects of their work. It’s the people in the middle that are not very good, that will get displaced by AI, but they’ll get displaced by people who couldn’t have done it before. So, , , my friend’s Ray Kurzweil, I have another friend who worked at OpenAI, they don’t think that we’re going to lose jobs.
They think we’ll have full employment. And they go back to a hundred years ago or so, when so many of Americans were farmers. And if you had told them, Hey, a hundred years from now, there will only be 1 percent of people working on farms, but everybody else will have jobs that we can’t think of now. I’m in the camp that thinks that AI will actually usher in new prosperity and full employment.
Yeah, I’m definitely in that camp that there’s going to be more there’s going to be more opportunity. The pie is going to get bigger. The pies, it’s just going to get bigger and bigger. There’s going to be more for those that and now will there be the casualties along the way of those that maybe either can’t adapt.
I’m not saying it’s always somebody’s, fault or whether they choose not to. I mean, that’s a given, right? Like that has, that’s a given. Part of progress and not everybody is going to win, but as a whole, I, I’m on that camp. I’m like, the pie is going to get bigger.
Like we’ve seen it time and time again. If the human spirit remains the same, if we continue to want to, , grow and thrive as a species, then I don’t see how we, , don’t continue. Yeah, and in Yuval Harari’s book, Sapience, he talks about the transition from hunter gathering to agriculture.
And it was not good for the first people that were doing agriculture because hunter gatherers, they had a pretty good life and a varied diet and they walked around a lot. And then when they started doing agriculture, they have to protect land, so they have to, now they have to have, you know, warfare. And they’re maybe only going to eat one crop.
So, we’re about to have this unbelievable pivot. And it could be very disruptive for the short term. But after that, I think it’s just going to be a fantastic age. And then we head into a singularity where, you know, all bets are off. It’s impossible to know what will happen. I think the risks and returns are greater than before.
Like, if our great, great, great, great grandfathers were sitting down around a table saying, Hey! In the future, our great, great, great grandkids, Adam and Paul, will be able to fly around the world. Dentistry will largely be pain free, and they can have food in a refrigerated cabinet in their house. They would have said, that’s great.
But, there will be bombs pointed at their heads 24 hours a day of a size and magnitude you can’t imagine. They would have said, oh, I don’t know. And I think the future has even greater reward and even greater risks than our great great grandfathers could have even envisioned. Amazing. Paul, this has been great having you on the show today.
I learned a lot. This has been a lot of fun, great conversation. If somebody wants to continue to follow your work what’s the best way for them to do that? Yeah, good luck. I have a pretty anemic social media footprint. I guess on Twitter, just at Paul Heineck. All right, so we’ll , in the show notes so people can definitely follow you on Twitter.
And , speaking to the audience, if this is your first time listening to Mission Matters, Hey, this is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new content, new guests, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along in your journey that sounds interesting to you or exciting hit that subscribe or follow button.
We sure would like to have you back here for some more episodes. And Paul, again, thank you so much for coming on the show. It’s been a lot of fun. Pleasure, Adam.
