AUDIO L – 97.

82%

what determines how language in a particular country evolves? Why is French, for example, so
different from German?

There's no simple measure of how different languages are from one another. In fact, if you look
at the languages structurally the way a linguist would look at them, French is different from the
other romance languages in a variety of ways which make it more similar to German and other
Germanic languages. There are a number of features of French which are sort of Germanic.
Incidentally, old French, middle French, say French in the medieval period was not. It was like
the other romance languages. So something happened to it that made it less like the romance
languages and more like the Germanic languages.

How does language change over time? How did 18th-century French change compared to 12th-
century French?

When we talk about language change, that's very misleading. I mean up until the turn of the
century, you could find people in nearby villages in France who virtually could not understand
one another. The idea of a national language is a pretty modern phenomenon. It has to do with
the rise of nationalism, and communication, and so on. And when we talk about language
changing, what's actually happening is that it's kind of like species changing. There's a mixture
of all sorts of dialects. And the mixture of these things changes every time. And you take a look
at it a few centuries apart, it looks like there's a different language. I mean within a couple of
generations the language can change structurally in quite dramatic ways. And of course, in say
lexicon, words of the language, well, that's a different matter altogether. So when technology
develops, you get a whole new vocabulary.

But if you were in France in the 12th century, and you understood all the nuances of language,
could you have predicted how these various languages would have evolved over time? Is it
partially random?

It's not actually random. For all we know, it might be completely deterministic. There's just too
many factors involved. Speakers of English can be misled by this. English is relatively
homogenous. I mean I just came from Boston and I understand everybody in Portland. But that's
not true for most of the world. In most of the world, you can get very different languages pretty
close by. And much of the world is what we would call multilingual. With the rise of national
states, and especially national communications, and national education systems, all of these
things, which is a pretty modern phenomenon, then you get what we call national languages.
Now as I say, English is unusual. You go to pre-colonial times, there were just hundreds of
thousands of different languages spoken in what's now called the United States. Well, through
the destruction of the indigenous population, and the conquest by speakers of basically one
group, you ended up having a large homogenous language.

Some French theorists for example, who argue that they must work very hard to keep the French
language pure, what does that mean?

It doesn't mean anything. Virtually, every national language, every national culture, or at least
the European ones, maybe others, has a mythology that that's the only really pure language, and
all the others are corrupt. But what does it mean for the language to be pure? First of all, there is
no such thing as a language. There are just a lot of different ways of speaking that different
people have which are more or less similar to one another.

Why is pronunciation and intonation so important to language? Why aren't words themselves
sufficient to convey meaning?

You have to understand somebody else's words. Part of your knowledge of language is a way of
decoding noises that you hear and converting them to a system that matches your own
representations. Then in order for that decoding system to work, the systems have to be close
enough. You and I can do it. But again that's a little artificial. That's because of the artificial
unity of the English language spoken in the United States. I happened to be in England last week,
and I couldn't find myself in places in England where I don't understand what they're saying. If I
listen to them for a while, we can establish communication. But you have to kind of retune your
system in some manner that's not understood so that you can begin to decode what you're hearing
AUDIO P – 98.61%

if you have various objects in space. What does space look like? How does the universe evolve?
I mean cosmology has turned into a science since the time of Einstein. I mean before that, people
had ideas about the universe. And you'll often see people refer back to the same notions that
occurred earlier. But really it's now a scientific theory. So it's true there were tremendous
breakthroughs in the last century. But if you know what the universe is made of, that's going to
tell you to some extent how it evolves. And if you know how it evolves, that gives you
constraints and what it's made of. So it's not like there's one field of physics and you can do it in
complete isolation from another one. I mean part of what makes the field rich and enjoyable for
me is that you can ask questions not just about elementary particles, but also about cosmology.
And when you begin to think about ideas about the whole global nature of space-time, you can't
help but think about cosmology as well.

You're now doing or you're writing a book called Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of
the Universe's Hidden Dimensions. I love three words there. One, unraveling the mysteries, and
secondly, hidden dimensions. What are you trying to find out? What is it you want to tell us that
we're going to be amazed by if it proves right?

We're really trying to understand, it sounds very vague, but what is the fundamental nature of
matter and forces? What are the fundamental forces, and why are they related in the way they
are? So we're trying to understand more about gravity, for example. Why is gravity so much
weaker than all of the other elementary forces we know about? That is to say the three other
elementary forces. We know about electromagnetism, the weak and strong nuclear forces.
Gravity is far weaker. I mean if you think about it, you can pick up a paper clip with a tiny
magnet competing against the entire earth. And the fact that you can jump up and down. I mean
gravity is not a strong force. Although it dominates things, it's only because there's big mass of
objects.

Is it only it's not a strong force where we are? It might be a strong force somewhere else?

So there's a question of how it manifests itself. And if there's a big energetic object, it seems
strong. But if you took two elementary particles and compared the force of electromagnetism and
the force of gravity, I mean gravity is negligible. You don't even have to consider it. You throw it
away. But why is that? Why is gravity so much weaker? And for a particle physicist, it's even
more mysterious than just why is it so much weaker. If you naively just sat down and calculated
how you expect the forces to be related, you would think that those forces should be about the
same strength. So there's a big question that particle physicists have is why is gravity so much
weaker than the other forces? And so that's one question we have. But we have other questions
too. What is the fundamental nature of gravity? Ultimately, we do want to know what's the
quantum theory of gravity that combines it with quantum mechanics. We want to understand
what the universe is made of. What is the dark matter? What is the dark energy that's not carried
by matter? So there are some pretty big questions that are driving us.

Okay. This multiple dimensions idea, I think even Einstein said there were four dimensions. And
then string theorists came along and said there are 10 dimensions

Yeah. String theorists seem to think that there are at least 10 dimensions.

And how many do you think there are?

I like to leave it an open question. I like to say, "What have we measured? What do we know?
And could there be other dimensions out there?" And there certainly could be other dimensions
out there. It might be 10 or 11 space-time dimensions as string theorists tell us now. So why is
that physicists today are really thinking about extra dimensions? Well, one of the reasons is that
we think it might actually have something to do with our universe. I mean that's I think for me
the most important reason. But another reason is in fact string theory. And it's introduced the
idea that maybe dimensions really are there because that's the only way the theory makes sense.
But string theory has also introduced something else. In the 1990s, the physicist Joe Polchinski
realized that there were these other objects in the context of string theory called branes. That
word is sort of related to membrane. And the idea is that there could be-- even if you have higher
dimensions, even if you have a fifth spatial dimension or fourth spatial dimension out there, there
could be objects in the universe called branes that don't spread throughout the entire universe.
And maybe stuff is stuck on this lower-dimensional surfaces. And that's one idea that we got
very excited about
AUDIO AQ – 98.35%

and this is something we like to ask all of our interviewees because it's always interesting to us
and to our listeners to hear how everybody started in the hobby. So tell us a little bit about how
you first started out with aquariums.

That's a great question. It was there as a child. I must have been 8 or 10. My mom had a fish
pond. I started keeping livebearers. I think I started out maybe with mosquitofish, which I used
to catch in the canals - this was in California. And I had a little 2-gallon bowl and kept
swordtails, mollies, and guppies at one time or another. I remember being absolutely fascinated
when they gave birth, and all those little swordtail babies, bright red. And then when the black
mollies had babies, the little black babies, I just couldn't get enough.

That is a neat experience.

I started out with livebearers as well, and I remember the same fascination with the little babies.

Yeah. I remember watching them pop out of the mother. I was just absolutely entranced.

So did you keep on with the aquariums up to now more or less?

At one time, these guppies that I had, they had a horrible disease that I couldn't get rid of. And I
remember being out of the hobby for many years because of that. But I kept coming back to
them, and then I started back up in 1987 with the planet tanks. But I've had tanks off and on all
of my life.

And I guess this is a good lead into our next question. What led you to develop your method or
what is widely known as the Walstad Method?

Well, I'll go back to my childhood here. I lived next to a dairy farm, and they had a big stock
tank in the yard with the cows. And it was filled with Vallisneria. The stock tank was out in full
sun. The substrate was probably manure from the cows. But the plants in the there, the
Vallisneria, it was like a forest. They were bright emerald green. There was no algae in there.
They were growing like crazy. It was just a beautiful site out in the middle of this feedlot. So that
kind of gave me something that I always returned to when I was having trouble going plants later
on as an aquarium hobbyist. I tried to grow plants in the aquarium, and I did what everybody
recommended: put gravel in and get your plants. It just never worked. So when I got back into
the hobby in 1987, I decided that I would just do something really different. And I kept that idea
of the stock tank with that beautiful growth of Vallisneria in my mind. And I thought, " Well,
none of the aquarium methods have worked. Why don't I just do what I had seen before?" So I
set up a 20-gallon in front of the window with sunlight, and then I just put soil at the bottom.
And I couldn't believe it. The plants just grew like crazy. I had never seen plants grown like that
in an aquarium. And that's kind of how it all started. It was like night and day from what I had
remembered in my earlier failures. Once you see plants really growing, it was just spectacular.

I can imagine. Yeah. That's a fascinating story that the method was inspired by the stock tank. I
had never heard of that.

And my method. it leaves the nutrients in the tank and lets the plants have them. And that keeps
the fish healthy, and it's just a completely different method.

You could almost call it the organic aquarium.

A very good term. That's it. It's an organic aquarium. I mean the soil is a tremendous supply of
carbon dioxide
AUDIO L – 98.63%

what determines how language in a particular country evolves? Why is French, for example, so
different from German?

There's no simple measure of how different languages are from one another. In fact, if you look
at the languages structurally the way a linguist would look at them, French is different from the
other romance languages in a variety of ways which make it more similar to German and other
Germanic languages. There are a number of features of French which are sort of Germanic in
character. Incidentally, old French, middle French, say French in the medieval period was not. It
was like the other romance languages. So something happened to it that made it less like the
romance languages and more like the Germanic languages.

How does language change over time? How did 18th-century French change compared to 12th-
century French?

When we talk about language change, that's very misleading. I mean up until the turn of the
century, you could find people in nearby villages in France who virtually could not understand
one another. The idea of a national language is a pretty modern phenomenon. It has to do with
the rise of nationalism, and communication, and so on. And when we talk about language
changing, what's actually happening is that it's kind of like species changing. There's a mixture
of all sorts of dialects. And the mixture of these things changes over time. And you take a look at
it a few centuries apart, it looks like there's a different language. I mean within a couple of
generations, the language can change structurally in quite dramatic ways. And of course, in say
lexicon, words of the language, well, that's a different matter altogether. So when technology
develops, you get a whole new vocabulary.

But if you were in France in the 12th century, and you understood all the nuances of language,
could you have predicted how these various languages would have evolved over time? Is it
partially random?

It's not actually random. For all we know, it might be completely deterministic. There's just too
many factors involved. Speakers of English can be misled by this. English is relatively
homogenous. I mean I just came from Boston and I understand everybody in Portland. But that's
not true for most of the world. In most of the world, you can get very different languages pretty
close by. And much of the world is what we would call multilingual. With the rise of national
states, and especially national communications, and national education systems, all of these
things, which is a pretty modern phenomenon, then you get what we call national languages.
Now as I say, English is unusual. You go to pre-colonial times, there were just hundreds of
thousands probably of different languages spoken in what's now called United States. Well,
through the destruction of the indigenous population, and the conquest by speakers of basically
one group, you ended up having a large homogenous language.

Some French theorists for example, who argue that they must work very hard to keep the French
language pure, what does that mean?

It doesn't mean anything. Virtually, every national language, every national culture, or at least
the European ones, maybe others, has a mythology that that's the only real, pure language, and
all the others are corrupt. But what does it mean for the language to be pure? First of all, there is
no such thing as a language. There are just a lot of different ways of speaking that different
people have which are more or less similar to one another.

Why is pronunciation and intonation so important to language? Why aren't words themselves
sufficient to convey meaning?

You have to understand somebody else's words. Part of your knowledge of language is a way of
decoding noises that you hear and converting them to a system that matches your own
representations. Now in order for that decoding system to work, the systems have to be close
enough. You and I can do it. But again that's a little artificial. That's because of the artificial
unity of the English language spoken in the United States. I happened to be in England last week,
and I couldn't find myself in places in England where I don't understand what they're saying. If I
listen to them for a while, we can establish communication. But you have to kind of retune your
system in some manner that's not understood so that you can begin to decode what you're hearing
AUDIO SS – 98.28%

and when Strangelove was finished and I had left the theatre, and I stood on the curb waiting for
my father to pick me up. I had totally forgotten that I had a letter threatening to draft me into
United States armed services. And that's when I first became aware of the power of Stanley
Kubrick. The first time I saw 2001, I believe it was in Hollywood, the Pantages Theatre, he took
you into space for the first time. I mean since 2001, no documentary, no other movie, no IMAX
experience being on the shuttle looking down at earth has ever really put me in space as much as
2001 did, and made me want it so desperately. Want to be part of that great mystery. Want to be
at the forefront of the pioneers that would discover the model that can Stargate and what lies
beyond. So that was maybe for me his most realistic movie that he had ever made. And I think
his second most realistic movie that he ever made for me was Clockwork Orange. Clockwork
Orange is a depiction of grotesque violence, but it also has utter contempt for violence. And it is
almost like saying why isn't somebody doing something about this? Where's the world when
these acts of man against man are happening all over the world every 30 seconds? Where's
justice? Where's order? Why do we allow this chaos to happen? And of course, the great
morality play that is Clockwork Orange is that after all of this deprogramming, and a kind of
proselytizing of the Malcolm McDowell character through science and theory, he comes out the
other end more charming, more witty, and with such a devilish wink and blink at the audience
that I am completely certain that when he gets out of that hospital, he's going to be worse than he
was when he went in. And so in a sense, I've always felt that Clockwork Orange was Stanley's
most defeatist movie. The film where he appears to totally give up on society. And the film that
maybe justifies why he lives in St Albans in the safety of the British countryside. I'll tell you a
quick story. When we first met, which was 1980 when he was just finishing the construction of
his sets for The Shining, and we met for the first time, we talked a lot about movies. And I was
about to make Raiders Lost Ark, and I was actually moving onto his stages. When he finished, I
was moving in. When it was all over and the movie was done, I saw Stanley again and went to
his house for dinner in London in St Albans. And he asked me, "How did you like my movie?"
And I only seen it once, and I didn't love Shining the first time I saw it. I have since seen Shining
25 times. One of my favorite pictures. Kubrick films tend to grow on you. You have to see them
more than once. But the wild thing is name me one Kubrick film that you can turn off once you
start it. It's impossible. He's got this fail-safe button or something. It's impossible to turn off a
Kubrick film. But I didn't like it the first time I saw it. I really wanted to be scared by it, number
one. I wanted to be frightened by it in a kind of carnival fear. I wanted things to pop out at me. I
wanted to jump out of my seat. I wasn't expecting a psychological shock storm. I was hoping for
a kind of sort of visceral, visual assault on all of my senses, and instead, it was about the descent
into madness. And he very inexorably pulled the entire audience down with him. So at that
moment where Shelley is reading the last three months of what he has been writing and we see
the litany of what he has written, that is the biggest shock of The Shining. That was the
equivalent of the chair turning around the psycho and the sudden reveal of Mrs. Bates. And it's
more shocking than the sudden reveal of Mrs. Bates. If you get into the protoplasm of that
movie, if you give yourself over to it, you'll be more shocked by what he's written over the last
four months
AUDIO AQ – 98.35%

and this is something we like to ask all of our interviewees because it's always interesting to us
and to our listeners to hear how everybody started in the hobby. So tell us a little bit about how
you first started out with aquariums.

That's a great question. It was there as a child. I must have been 8 or 10. My mom had a fish
pond. I started keeping livebearers. I think I started out maybe with mosquitofish which I used to
catch in the canals. This was in California. And I had a little 2-gallon bowl and kept swordtails,
mollies, and guppies at one time or another. I remember being absolutely fascinated when they
gave birth, and all those little swordtail babies, bright red. And then when the black mollies had
babies, the little black babies, I just couldn't get enough.

That is a neat experience.

I started out with livebearers as well. And I remember the same fascination with the little babies.

Yeah. I remember watching them pop out of the mother. I was just absolutely entranced.

So did you keep on with the aquariums up to now more or less?

At one time, these guppies that I had, they had a horrible disease that I couldn't get rid of. And I
remember being out of the hobby for many years because of that. But I kept coming back to
them. And then I started back up in 1987 with the planet tanks. But I've had tanks off and on all
of my life.

And I guess this is a good lead in to our next question. What led you to develop your method or
what is widely known as the Walstad Method?

Well, I'll go back to my childhood here. I lived next to a dairy farm, and they had a big stock
tank in the yard with the cows. And it was filled with Vallisneria. The stock tank was out in full
sun. The substrate was probably manure from the cows. But the plants in the there, the
Vallisneria, it was like a forest. They were bright emerald green. There was no algae in there.
They were growing like crazy. It was just a beautiful site out in the middle of this feedlot. So that
kind of gave me something that I always returned to when I was having trouble going plants later
on as an aquarium hobbyist. I tried to grow plants in the aquarium, and I did what everybody
recommended: put gravel in and get your plants. It just never worked. So when I got back into
the hobby in 1987, I decided that I would just do something really different. And I kept that idea
of the stock tank with that beautiful growth of Vallisneria in my mind. And I thought, " Well,
none of the aquarium methods have worked. Why don't I just do what I had seen before?" So I
set up a 20-gallon in front of the window with sunlight, and then I just put soil at the bottom.
And I couldn't believe it. The plants just grew like crazy. I had never seen plants grown like that
in an aquarium. And that's kind of how it all started. It was like night and day from what I had
remembered in my earlier failures. Once you see plants really growing, it was just spectacular.

I can imagine. Yeah. That's a fascinating story that the method was inspired by the stock tank. I
had never heard of that.

And my method. it leaves the nutrients in the tank and lets the plants have them. And that keeps
the fish healthy, and it's just a completely different method.

You could almost call it the organic aquarium.

A very good term. That's it. It's an organic aquarium. I mean the soil is a tremendous supply of
carbon dioxide
AUDIO F – 98.28%

great. So could you just tell us a little more about what you do here at the BSU and what your
position consists of?

Well, I arrived here at BSU in January of 2006. At that point, I was an instructor. And I came in
and was focusing on crisis management, and crisis communication and negotiation because of
my experience as a negotiator and love of that, and also interest in global hostage-taking.
Became interested in kind of moving up and got a great opportunity to become the unit chief of
behavioral sciences. So I put in and eventually I was selected. And since then, I've been kind of
reworking the BSU and expanding the programs. Typically, we have been focused on violent
crime, and we were the ones that developed the profile and criminal investigative analysis and
termed victimology and serial killing. All that came through our National Academy classes over
the years back in the '70s and '80s. And so what I wanted to do as unit chief and what I'm
continuing to do is move it forward and getting into areas like cyber and national security threats
in addition to doing our staple violent crime mission that we've always done.

Great. So would you mind just describing the structure of the unit and the function of the various
staff members you have here?

Sure. The Behavioral Science Unit has been around since 1972 as part of the FBI's training
division. And we are physically located in the basement area of the FBI Academy in Quantico,
Virginia. We are one of a number of training units here at the FBI Academy, and what our main
function here is to train our National Academy students that come in. And the National Academy
is kind of like the War College for law enforcement. It's been in existence since about 1935. At
the time that this Academy was formed or built in 1972, the National Academy program was
moved over here. And what that program involves is experienced law enforcement officers, mid-
level management types that compete, come to the FBI Academy for about 11 weeks. And when
they get here, they choose whatever courses they want to take. And if it's in behavioral science,
they'll come to our unit and take our courses. If it's in leadership, they'll go to leadership units.
And there's also forensics and communication and other areas that they can learn. Now with that
training, in addition to the National Academy, we also teach new agents training. We teach the
FBI intel analysts. And we take our courses and our blocks of instruction literally worldwide all
over the world where we'll get requests for training from everyone. And now in addition to
supporting our traditional law enforcement clients, we also train the military, the intel
community, and some of our international partners. And that's what we do. That's our bread and
butter. Now along with the training, we also do research and we also do consultations. And our
tagline or kind of the way we do business is that if we train it, we research it, and if we train it,
we consult it. And that's an important model because the consults are the things that a lot of
times we're known for where a police officer will call us and he'll let's say ask for interview
strategies. Let's say he's working a gang matter, a violent crime, maybe an abhorrent behavior,
weird sexual type crime, and he'll call and want help. And he may only have one shot to
interview the subject. And so we try our best to give him some idea of strategies and tactics to
get the person to confess or at least make admissions based on the behavior