004 - Garry Nolan on Reverse Engineering UAP, SOL Foundation, and Paradigm Shifts

Guest Info:

• Garry is a professor at Stanford Medical School, where he’s an immunologist and cancer researcher. He has published over 300 research articles, holds over 50 US patents, and has founded multiple publicly-traded companies listed on the NASDAQ. He’s also co-founder, with David Grusch and Peter Skafish, of the SOL Foundation, a policy think-tank, advisory board, and fund for serious research into UAP.

Topics:

• What is the SOL Foundation's role in the future of UAP research?
• How do you think through the landscape of theories about what UAP are?
• Is reverse engineering even possible if the tech is vastly more advanced than ours? Leonardo da Vinci couldn’t reverse engineer a smartphone, after all.
• Is a materialist, scientific worldview getting in the way of studying anomalous phenomena?

Links:

• ⁠Garry Nolan's faculty page at Stanford Medical School⁠
• ⁠Follow Garry on X⁠

Corrections:

⁠Michael incorrectly suggested that the journal Limina was a publication of the Scientific Coalition of UAP Studies. It is not. Limina is a publication of SCU's sister organization, The Society for UAP Studies. Check them out here: https://www.societyforuapstudies.org/

Episode Transcript

(00:24):
Welcome to the Anomalous Review,the official podcast of the
Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies.
My name is Michael Glawson. I'm a philosopher of science and
technology and the host of the Anomalous Review.
My guest today is Doctor Gary Nolan.
Gary Nolan holds the Ratchford and Carlotta A Harris Endowed
Chair in the Department of Pathology at Stanford Medical
School, where he's an immunologist in the cancer

(00:45):
Researcher Doctor. Nolan has published over 300
research articles and holds over50 US patents, which is a
staggering number of both. He has been the recipient of
several millions of dollars of grants from the FBDA to study
things like Zika and Ebola viruses, and he's founded
multiple publicly traded companies listed on the NASDAQ.
He's also a founder, alongside David Grosch and Peter

(01:07):
Skatefish, of the Soul Foundation, which is a policy
think tank and Advisory Board and fund for serious research
into UAP. Reading Gary's resume in
preparation for this interview felt a bit bewildering, to be
honest. His list of accomplishments is
so long as to be almost comical.He has so many publications,
companies, discoveries and inventions to his name that I
caught myself briefly wondering how much longer Gary's list of

(01:30):
accomplishments would need to bebefore I could reasonably
consider then. Maybe he'd simply stolen The
Time Machine and taken a lot of future scientific knowledge back
a few 100 years to the present. Or if perhaps he'd beaten a gin
in a game of chess. Whatever the case, though, it's
clear that the real source of his achievements is not merely a
great mind, but a kind of radical curiosity and openness
that make him willing to consider evidence for

(01:51):
conclusions that lie outside of current scientific orthodoxy,
despite the very real personal, professional, and existential
costs that might come with them.And that's why I'm so excited to
talk to him today. Gary Nolan, welcome to the
Anomalous Review. Thank you very much.
I'm delighted to be here. I'm delighted to have you.
So the first thing is you recently closed up the, not too

(02:13):
recently, but the first conference of the Soul
Foundation which you founded. Yeah, so I mean, the purpose of
the Soul Foundation was to be anarena within which academics,
scientists or other interested professionals or non

(02:34):
professionals, frankly, it couldbe a truck driver for all I
care, who can come and talk about this matter in a serious
manner and be respected for youropinions.
I mean, the idea first is to putup a forbidden sign for agendas

(02:56):
and stigma. I mean, you know, you want to,
you know, I just had a conversation with actually
somebody from the the Vatican news agency this morning and
said, you know, look, this is really about giving people
permission to talk about the ideas because people turn to

(03:17):
academics not to give them an answer, but to war game out the
possibilities of what an opportunity might mean.
And so if the opportunity is that we are actually dealing
with a non human intelligence here, what might that imply and
what might be the repercussions?And it's like, you know, you

(03:41):
want to be able to provide listsof opportunities of things that
we should consider. So one of the hurdles that I
imagine his like just endemic tothe subject is that there's the
perception that the UAP subject is just like rife with wild
speculation and bad thinking. But I'm not sure that's actually
true. Like if you go to YouTube or
Google and search for information about Egypt or

(04:03):
viruses or quantum mechanics or something, you'll like find
yourself pretty knee deep and sloppy thinking and bad
information pretty quickly. But the difference of those
subjects and the UAP subject is that there's like, it's not that
they're necessarily more fact oriented.
The difference is that physics and history and medicine have
already been professionalized. So they're like institutions
that are accredited grant degrees in medicine.

(04:24):
And there's the American MedicalAssociation.
And we know which presses and journals published consensus
views and like which university departments have established
track records of good research. So it's easier to like get our
bearings in those subjects. We don't have that for the UAP
subject yet. Is the sole foundation's role to
like eventually work towards that and how?

(04:45):
So like, what's your vision? Absolutely, yeah.
I mean, this to professionalize it.
I mean, look, I have lots of scientific friends who have an
interest in the matter, but theywant to go beyond what's on
YouTube or what's on, you know, the latest documentary about

(05:06):
aliens and UFOs. I mean, it's, it's way more than
that. And you know, I mean, you're,
you know, you're in the philosophy of science.
It's which is really the philosophy of asking questions.
And so it's, again, it's about, well, so I remember about three

(05:26):
or four years ago when I was sort of becoming acquainted with
the UAPUFO community on Twitter at least, and sort of being
pretty firm about the fact that,look, if you guys want to be
taken seriously, you've got to professionalize this discussion.

(05:47):
You know, I can't help you on matters of religion and a lot of
other areas, but I can help you about how science is done.
And so let me first help you with how you should state things
correctly so that you avoid attack.
And then how do you attack the attackers?

(06:10):
How do you recognize fallacious logic for what it is?
Call it out for what it is so that you can beat back the, you
know, the Barbarians at the gate.
So this is like rhetorical in ina, in a way, right?
You're just you're training people how to do the like

(06:31):
rhetoric of academia and speak the.
Exactly, exactly. It's how do you protect yourself
from other people's, you know, mistakes?
Or at least, how do you get youridea on the table and prevent it
from being taken off the table inappropriately?
Does that mean just first building like walls between the
UAP subject and other weird subjects that just sort of seem

(06:54):
to like naturally come along forthe ride whenever you're in
discussions? Yeah.
I mean, absolutely. That's one of them is that, you
know, UAP is very often equated with, first of all,
pseudoscience, which it's not. And I mean, at least those of us
who are involved in it. I mean, I don't think anybody
can call me a pseudoscientist. They can do so, but you know,

(07:19):
they've just disqualified themselves from further
discussion. And so you've got, you've got
that on the one side. On the other side, you've got
the, let's say the paranormal. Now, at some level, UAP is
paranormal. It's outside the normal
experience, but paranormal has another set of meetings.

(07:41):
But you know, less than a century ago, walking around
talking into a little box and actually getting an answer out
of it would be considered paranormal.
You'd be considered some form ofa medium, you know, typing into
it's a ChatGPT and getting back,you know, information that you
don't know would be considered paranormal.

(08:02):
No question. Yeah.
So, you know, and everybody I think on your podcast knows the
Arthur C Clarke quote about technology, you know, and.
Especially advanced to look likemagic, yeah.
So, you know, magic is paranormal, so I think you know,
it it it isn't too difficult to imagine that if whatever it is

(08:27):
we're dealing with has technology behind that we would
misinterpret it as magic. Is that the difference for you
like between the UAP and and other sort of metaphysically
paranormal ideas like ghosts or spirit mediums or something, is
that you can sort of build a kind of technological
understanding of what's going onit like it fits within some

(08:48):
framework. I would like to think that
things like, you know, claims ofremote viewing and mediumship,
etcetera are not magic. They are actually just accessing
an information space that exists, you know, and that
somehow some people have brain organizations that live in an

(09:13):
information system that they caninterpret that most people
can't. Where would you draw the line
then? Like what?
What are you trying to distinguish UAP from?
Like what counts as magical or or just like too wooy or or
whatever. I don't know.
I mean, you know, it's like porn, You'd recognize it when

(09:34):
you see it. The old adage.
No, I mean, I'm, I'm trying to stay on at least for the
meantime on the things that can be reproduced, right.
So if I define the limits of what I'm going to talk about by
those things that I can touch and feel or reproduce, then, you

(09:56):
know, that's a pretty wide fieldright then and there.
But at least in so far as technology, if I can hold it or
see it or measure its movements,then that's the framework I'd
like to to be in. So those are two.
Go ahead. No, I mean, so, so let's imagine

(10:17):
for instance, that again, this is pure speculation, Let's say
that you're an extra dimensionalintelligence, that we live in
some subset of dimensionalities and that they know a little bit
more about how to contact us. Then we know how to contact
them, but the only way that theycan do it is through some sort

(10:38):
of interface that we would interpret as a paranormal
experience, right? And that whatever it is that
their message that they're trying to send to us is so lost
in translation that you can't have a straightforward back and
forth conversation any more thanyou could with a chipmunk,

(10:59):
right? Or an Ant that it might be
sufficiently intelligent to understand you if you could talk
his language. But you know, as I've often
said, how do you tell an Ant about TikTok?
That's that's a great hearing. Nolanism.
How do you tell an aunt about TikTok?
So it might not be. I mean, a lot of people like to

(11:20):
game it out and say that, well, if we ever did meet an
extraterrestrial intelligence, or if some extra dimensional
intelligence is behind all thesephenomena, then we're never
going to be able to communicate with them simply because there's
like this cognitive gap. Like their machinery is just
more advanced than ours where they're working with some like
system of symbols and thought that just don't like
implementable with ours. But you're saying that maybe
there's just like no mode of translation that works between

(11:45):
them. It's not necessarily that
they're more advanced, but there's no language that would
work between us. I mean, there are other cultures
on the planet that are quite difficult to interact with.
I mean, you know that the, the social norms of politeness
differ across cultures. And so and that's, you know,

(12:06):
just amongst us, amongst humanity.
So, you know, I'm, I'm just interested in how it is that we
talk about it and sort of bring it back to the Soul Foundation
is, you know, it. And again, I've sort of related
to what I talked with the Vatican people about this

(12:27):
morning. You know, what is the definition
of humanity and what are the moral equivalences about
different intelligent beings? You know, you basically have to
reduce it. You have to create a variable
where the boundary set contains anything that can think and has

(12:51):
intent, right? And it can be housed in
everything from a, you know, an NVIDIA GPU eventually to, you
know, maybe a plasma that has intelligence or meat beings or
name another substrate. And so, but the point with the

(13:12):
conversation around religion and, and the Vatican reporter
was, well, what happens if you kill an alien?
Are you a murderer? You know, by the very definition
of the 10 commandments, if you're, you know, religious or

(13:33):
in the Catholic or Christian traditions, you know, it's thou
shalt not kill is #1 but it's thou shalt not kill a human
being. Is the is the you understood
part of that? Did you have an answer for them?
Did were they? I don't know what the answer is.
It's a question, But that was the example that I used of how
do we war game out as academics ahead of time?

(13:56):
The ethics, I mean, ethicists have to get involved in this,
which is not me. I'm not a, you know, the
ethicists sometimes drive me up the wall because they stopped me
from doing things that I think Ipretty much got figured out.
I'm not saying they're wrong, I'm just saying they drive me up
the wall. Yeah, yeah.
That's kind of their job. My husband drives me up the wall

(14:16):
too, but I'm not saying that he's wrong.
Or an emphasis? So, but I mean, so you know,
you, you, what you do is you provide as academics or any
group of professionals, you provide strategies and answers
for situations that you don't know what will happen, but might

(14:39):
happen. And you know, one of the points
about being human is we plan forfutures that might not happen,
but we worry could happen. Sure, because.
You're a strategy that's. You're ready for it.
And so often there's two kinds of academics.

(14:59):
One, do that kind of thing. They they imagine problems that
don't currently exist and they come up with solutions for them,
or they search for solutions to problems that do exist.
Now I tend to be more on that practical tinkerer side of
problems that I think exist today, and then I create a
solution for it. So what do you think of as the
UAP problem then in the practical sense, not just in

(15:21):
this like gaming out future scenarios since, but like what's
the problem that they pose that we need to solve?
Well, the first problem they pose is, you know, if they do
exist, why do people who seem tohave control over their, you
know, the ownership of them right now?

(15:42):
Why do they feel it's necessary to keep it from the rest of us?
You mean the sort of like security studies like security?
Issues anyway, everybody's been around it so I don't need to I
don't need to go over, you know,the likelihood scenarios of of
what if I think it's just AII think it well, everything from
danger will Robinson to people want to make money to we want to

(16:06):
exploit the commercial or military applicability first,
you know, and 10 other ideas. But I also think that there's no
reason why letting people know that it exists shouldn't be let

(16:26):
out and then you can probably keep armies of scientists quite
happy by dripping out a few pieces of technology.
You could reinvigorate U.S. military or even scientific
research, just scientific research.

(16:47):
I mean, imagine the hordes of students who would pour into the
sciences if they knew that they would have a crack at studying
some of this technology and whatit needs.
So that that raises a, a sort oftheoretical problem that I think
about a lot in relation to this.So maybe we could frame it this

(17:08):
way. Like if you brought an iPhone
back to Leonardo da Vinci, he probably couldn't get very far
reverse engineering it like, but, and, and there's a good
like, reason technology exists fundamentally not as like
individual objects, but as part of these complex systems.
You'd need to understand not just like the theories that and

(17:30):
principles that explain an iphone's operation, but you need
to have like satellite systems and cell towers and battery, you
know, charges battery and all those things.
But if so, if if a UAP or some kind of piece of alien
technology crashed or was given to us, why do you think we would
have a better chance of being able to reverse engineer it then

(17:53):
Leonardo would? I don't think you need to
understand the entire system to understand a piece of it, you
know? I mean, for instance, the last
40 years I've spent reverse engineering how cells work, how
DNA works, how cells interact with each other and.
How excellent analogy, yeah. The system means and so we don't

(18:20):
look at the whole body at once and then walk away and go, this
is too complicated. We look at little pieces a bit
at a time and, you know, derive understandings of local
mechanisms and provide theories of how we think it's working.
And you'd be both shocked at howmuch we do know and frankly, how
little we really know. You know you.

(18:42):
Mean about biology? About biology, right, We frankly
don't understand how DNA works and how it how it holds so much
information in so little space. You know, I think the best
analogy is I think people are are still not comprehending how
what these large language modelswith a few gigabytes of storage

(19:06):
somehow contain all information from the last 50 years of
written human history. It's just remarkable.
So there's a data, there's a data compaction problem there
that we have to understand and how DNA operates and how cells
interact etcetera. So and yet with a little

(19:29):
understandings that we do have, it's revolutionized medicine and
how to combat illnesses and cancers and things like that.
So I see the same thing here with UAP.
Give me a tiny piece of it and let me pull it apart and look at

(19:50):
the pieces and do my best to understand.
I might make a mistake in my interpretation of what its role
in the largest system is, but that doesn't mean that I can't
benefit from a principle. Sure, that I derive.
You know, I put on Twitter at one point about, I don't know,

(20:11):
six or seven months ago this premise that.
If you patented something from aUAP that you had reverse
engineered, if you know patent law, you know that you can't
patent something that somebody else has already discovered.
This probably was the most retweeted post I'd ever made,

(20:38):
and it brought in an awful lot of IP lawyers from out of the
blue. What was the consensus about
whether you can patent a piece of alien technology?
You can patent A use of it that you derive at the principle.
If you derive a principle that isn't in human understanding,

(21:01):
there's ways that patent lawyerscan hash and mince words to give
you access to it. But you can't likely patent the
concept of anti gravity. You can patent a piece of the
instrumentation that you've madethat does it, but if you were to

(21:22):
wholeheartedly copy what it is that some alien had made, that
might not be patentable. But.
But the workaround is the same as the ethics of Can you murder
an alien and get away with it? Because the premise of human law
is that it applies to humans. Oh, is that really?

(21:45):
And that's is there like. I mean, that's the internal,
that's the yeah, you can't, you can't patent nature, right?
I can't patent photosynthesis. But if I copy something, an idea
that somebody else already has ahuman has.
So the whole premise, the whole legal system would have to be

(22:06):
completely reworked. I mean, it would be as if we
don't pay lawyers enough, you know, sorry, lawyers.
We're. Not worried about it.
So orangutan invented something.I could.
I couldn't. I could patent it.
You're saying you could? Patent it, Yeah.

(22:28):
I mean, at least you, there'd bean argument in court, sure that
you that you could do that. Wouldn't be obvious that I that
I couldn't I guess actually alsopatent like the method of
manufacturing it? Yes, exactly.
Exactly. Yeah.
You're not the thing itself, so you're kind of a suspicious
person to be asking that question though, because you say
explicitly that you know that there are pieces of off world or

(22:53):
non human technology that are inthe possession of either
companies or governments and that they're doing this very
thing already, right? Let me qualify that a little
bit. I haven't seen it.
I trust the people who are telling me as much as I trust
another scientist to tell me that they did something or have

(23:13):
something in their lab. There's sort of a legacy and a
chain of custody of trust that scientists have amongst each
other that I don't need to standover there postdoc shoulder to
validate what they just told me.I'll put it into my database

(23:33):
and, you know, use it and yeah, maybe, yeah, OK, they can do
this. Great.
How they're interpreting what they're seeing with it, I'll
leave open to, you know, my own observation.
But you know, for the time being, I'll accept what they
said based on whatever their track record is.
And for skeptics who who might think that that's like kind of

(23:54):
weak, a weaker statement like this is how all of scientific
practice works. Like nobody goes in other
people's labs and look microscopes and sees what
there's. There's nothing.
This is how humans work. And so I, I use the totality of
my senses, the armamentarium of my, you know, interactions with

(24:16):
people in history to say I don'tsee a body language issue with
what it is that they're telling me.
And it comports with things thatI know and other things that I
know, etcetera. So it, it all is adding up to me
being quite comfortable stating on stage at that salt meeting a

(24:40):
year ago, you know, what is my confidence percentage that I the
likelihood 100%. That doesn't mean I know.
Sure. No, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
A a claim of, of strength of confidence is not a claim of, of
proof or yeah, absolutely not. But you're saying subjectively
the sort of like Bayesian sense in a battle, but.

(25:02):
Yeah, exactly. You know, but but the lay public
misses that and or at least the newspapers to sell clicks miss
and abuse that and remove the subtleties.
And so here you got a perfect example of even amongst humans,

(25:24):
a language problem, you know, knowledge domain transfer issue
where they don't understand the language of how a scientist
would talk with another person, another scientist.
And they you know, we fully understand each other and the
caveats that are coming along for the ride and everything we
say. But that doesn't translate to
the binary, yes, no, that the world wants to know, you know.

(25:49):
And so you know, scientists are put in an almost untenable
position with this because they people want an answer.
But when you qualify it, as you say, it sounds weak.
But that's just that's just life.
So this poses a, a pretty gnarlydilemma for the Soul Foundation

(26:11):
because you're trying to, on theone hand, take a bunch of people
who are sincerely interested in the subject and teach them the
language of academics, partiallyas a, as a bid for credibility.
But my dog is digging. Give me one second enough for
that. No, you don't need to.

(26:32):
I don't understand why she does that.
She's trying to get back to the other side of the earth, I
think. So let's restart that question.
So this poses a gnarly problem for the Soul Foundation because
you're trying to teach, take these people who are interested
in the UAP subject and teach them the language of academia.
But the language academia interest of science itself
doesn't exactly align with the sort of language of normal

(26:55):
public conversation. And there's this kind of
mismatch that causes problems with how the media reports what
scientists say or something like, so do we need to do dual
training to teach people how to here's how to talk in in a
science to a bunch of scientistsso that they don't think you're
stupid or crazy. And here's how to talk to the
media so that they don't take itin the wrong way.

(27:18):
I mean, they'll always be the New York Post who will you know,
And you know, it's it's even often out of the hands of the
writer of the article. You know, the there's a
department that write headlines,you know, and it can you know,
even the author is like, I didn't want a headline like

(27:38):
that. So, you know, it's I think what
it needs to come down to is don't make snap judgments on
comments that are made. And I don't know, in, in today's
social media environment, I'm not sure that that's that's

(28:01):
possible. So I think the answer is, you
know, for scientists is do your best in to try to explain it in
the ways that you know how to explain it to a limited group of
people. Do not feel it's your necessity
to prove anything to anybody. I always say, I'm not here to

(28:23):
prove to you anything. I'm here to get you to
understand that the data is real.
The evidence is real. Now science doesn't prove
anything anyway. I mean, proof isn't?
And, and evidence is not a claimof proof.
And so it's, you know, it, that level of subtlety is just an

(28:46):
intelligence test. I'm sorry.
And if they don't have the time for it, I don't have the time
for it either. I've got stuff to do.
You know, I think the I posted something online the other day
that from an old comedy movie, you know, some Italian guy in a
car with a saying that rips the rear view mirror off the off the

(29:11):
that off the wind screen and says what's the behind me
doesn't matter, you know, And that's the way I feel.
It's like I don't have time to convince you I'm not your daddy.
I don't need anybody to tell me what I think I know and I have

(29:33):
work to do. I mean, I'm 63 years old.
It surprises even me to think about that.
But you know, I have a limited I, maybe another 20 good years
left to do whatever it is I think I want to do.
I would like to think scientifically we'll be, we'll
have moved the conversation along, that the number of people

(29:57):
beating on the doors of the government to get the
information out will have led tosomething.
I'd be disappointed if it doesn't happen.
But I also feel that the time spent is not wasted because what
you're doing is you're providinga foundation for others to come
in and this. Wouldn't be the first time that
it happened. There was a surge of like

(30:18):
serious UAP and other kind of edge science in the 70s and 80s
that made progress and then sortof shut down.
Do you think that that's what doyou think it?
Might, I mean, we might have some extraordinary cataclysmic
problem that comes up that just takes it off the radar for

(30:38):
everybody. You know, it'll be like, look,
we don't have the time for this,you know, some crisis.
You think that's what it would take?
I I to to come off take it off this off the radar.
I think so yeah. I don't, I don't think, you
know, again, let's just sort of say, let's say this stuff is
real and, and that there's people in the government who are

(31:05):
doing their best to use the old tricks of disinformation to get
rid of it. The disinformation works a
little bit, but as it's pretty clear, it's not working the way
it used to. It's kind of like the debunkers
who are out there. Their tricks just aren't working
anymore. Maybe just because I blocked
them all, but I don't see them in my threads anymore.

(31:27):
Doesn't feel like it's working anymore.
Doesn't feel like it's working. I mean, but, and I think though
that's the other thing is that it comes back to is you, you
don't have to convince everybodyaround you that what you're,
what you're working on is worth it.
It's your time. You don't need their permission

(31:48):
to do the science that you're doing.
I mean, I learned that before I even got into the UAP arena.
I was told constantly, you know,you shouldn't do that.
That's not right. That's, you know, that's a,
that's that your idea doesn't work.
I'm like, well, you just don't know as much as I do, you know,
and I'm sorry, you're not as, you're not as smart as I am.

(32:11):
And I'm going to do it because Ithink I'm right and it's my
time. So get out of my way.
And it's also OK if your idea doesn't work like there.
There can be fruitful scientificresearch that just doesn't pan
out at the end. You still learn things and
that's fine. And that's another philosophy of
science as well. You know, I there's two kinds of
questions. There's the there's the Las
Vegas question, or if the answeris yes, you win.

(32:32):
If the answer is no, you just spent or wasted a lot of your
time or money. And then there's the Zen
question, where the answer is interesting no matter what.
And I learned very early on as agraduate student to to ask the
ask the Zen question as often asyou can.

(32:52):
I think the way to frame that inthe frame the questions, because
that's a question of framing, right?
It's like how you set up the question from the beginning.
And I think maybe the way to do that with the UAP question is
like to say not, OK, is there oris there not some weird
phenomena? It's to say, look, you have all
these reports of strange phenomena and they and they're
like multimodal. They go across lots of different

(33:13):
systems. There's eyewitness reports,
there's radar reports and all sorts of stuff.
You have all those reports. What interpretation of them is
best? And it turns out that there is
no prosaic, mundane, boring interpretation.
That's just like a loss of time.It's like if you have all these
people reporting that they've seen with their own two eyes,
strange objects, you've got a problem.

(33:35):
Like we don't have a theory of mind or psychology that explains
why this is so rampant. You need delusions or something.
People say Oh well everybody watch sci-fi movies and then
they start seeing things in the sky.
Like I've never heard any psychiatrist say that that's a
thing. Like everybody who watches
horror movies suddenly sees werewolves or something.
It's just not. I Yeah, exactly.

(33:55):
Or vampire movies. You know, when I saw the UFO
that went right over my head as a kid, you know, out on the
paper route early one morning inConnecticut, I didn't say that
was a UFO when I saw it. It wasn't until literally about
20 or so years later that retrospectively I'd go, oh that

(34:17):
would have been a UFO. What did you say it was to
yourself you just said? Lights and an object that went
right over me. It was, you know, but I had a
sense of wonder and like, sorry,that's amazing, you know?
And so it always stuck with me. And so in a way, I have my own

(34:43):
internal confirmation, but that anecdote doesn't translate as
science. And it's like, you know, Peter
Skatefish and I talk about this a lot and defining what it is
that the Seoul Foundation can work on and can say publicly or
should say publicly as like, I can have my own personal
beliefs, religious or otherwise,that are separate from the

(35:06):
discussion group and boundary conditions and fence that we set
around the Soul Foundation and what it is that we're talking
about. Because we want to be able to
invite other people in. It's kind of like Thanksgiving
dinner. You don't talk about religion
and politics at Thanksgiving dinner.
You talk about the weather and how nice, how nice the dinner
is, is sort of like there are rules of engagement and that

(35:30):
makes it comfortable for other people to come in and
participate in the conversation.So one of the objects of that
conversation is to come to a theory of what these things are.
And it seems like you are like squarely in the extraterrestrial
hypothesis. No, no.
OK, OK. Can you tell?
Can you take me through how you theorize about this?
I whatever it is, has control of, you know, at least if you

(35:56):
interpret it this way. Again, this is kind of my most
likely scenario. Not I'm 100% sure it has control
of time, space and perception, right?
It's not just the technology. It's not just the technology in
the way that we think of passivetechnologies like a Tesla or
something. It's doing something minds.
It's doing something in mind. It has, you know, maybe they,

(36:19):
you know, literally instantiate objects out of the quantum
phone, right? They just basically manipulate
local, you know, probabilities and things appear as they want
them to be rather than build them atom by atom as we would do
if we ever get to that level of,you know, even just additive

(36:40):
manufacturing. So whatever it is, it's been
here a very long time. Why do you say that?
What's that? Why do you say that?
Because there's, you know, just look at Jacques Vale's book
Wonders in the Sky, you know? Historical accounts like we've
been seeing. Historical accounts, it didn't
just show up because we blew of an atom bomb, right?

(37:04):
They might have gotten a little more concerned about us because
the neighbors on the block are, you know, shooting off
firecrackers in their backyard and might, might set the
interdimensional space on fire with it.
And so been here a long time. So one idea is that it evolved

(37:24):
before us, right? Something so so that it's, it's
called the solarium hypothesis, but something like that that's
pre-existing. Or terrestrials, whatever you
want to call them. They were here.
The other is, you know, I was just calculating the other day,
how long would it take, even by conventional means of about
10,000 mph, to populate the Galaxy with a Von Newman probe?

(37:49):
That's a probe that goes out andsort of like replicates itself.
Replicates and self and you know, so you know, probably
within another 50 years we'll have AI and robotics capable of
doing something like that, right?
And so, you know, from the center of the Galaxy to the edge
of the Galaxy, 50,000 light years.

(38:10):
Even at, you know, 10,000 miles an hour, it only would take you
5 billion years to get around the whole Galaxy.
Now, 5 billion years is a long time.
But the universe will be around a lot longer than that the.
Universe has been around that long already, plenty of time for
it to happen and along the way figure out better things.

(38:36):
Now kick that up to .1 speed of light .1 C and you know, now
you're now you're there in half a million years everywhere .1 C
is actually well within our timeframe of capability, RAM scoops
or other kinds of things that you might imagine or fusion

(38:57):
drives, you know, without any exotic technology.
And so the whole business of well, that is too far.
I just, I just don't understand Neil deGrasse Tyson saying this
kind of stuff. You get that either, yeah.
It's like, yeah, it's too far for me to live to get there, but

(39:17):
it's not too far for my machine descendants to get there.
I don't even have to freeze ova and sperm there.
I could probably build them whenI get there.
And it also take nearly as long if you're accelerating like
point if you're accelerating .1%the speed of light like this,
you start getting like, you know, relative relativity

(39:38):
effects and things like. That, I mean, I'm part of a
company with Avi Loeb Copernicus.
Copernicus OK. And, you know, one of our goals
is to look for life in the solarsystem and but the other is to
be the first to build our very first von Neumann probe, right,

(40:00):
to make humans or at least design humanity's first von
Neumann probe. Now, it might be that we don't
actually be the ones who launch it, but you know, Copernicus
might be the seed for future endeavors that do.
So you know. 1000 years feels like a long time to us.

(40:23):
But just think of it this way, 50,000 years ago we were around
and 50,000 years is a long time.We think of it as some you know
the past happened, but when you try to, you know, telescope into
the future, it seems further away. 50,000 years in the future
seems further away than 50,000 years in the past.

(40:46):
That seems a little hard enough.Yeah, we've already.
We have a hard time seeing beyond certain mental hurdles
and so it's it's going to happenwhether we like it or.
Not and you just need to do it. What's that?
And you want to be the first oneto do it just because it's.

(41:07):
I wouldn't mind being AI wouldn't mind being a footnote
in some historical LLM that theydig up and say, oh, look, there
was these people, you know, theywere so primitive, they didn't
have an understanding of anything.
But now we do, you know, and nowwe don't even need to travel

(41:27):
there. We just, we just make a, a
wormhole and, and jump to where we want to be.
And so you know, that it, it's, it's that lack of imagination by
others that disturbs me because they have such a certitude
around their limits that. We've already figured out the

(41:52):
limits so that nothing outside of this is even.
Nothing outside of this can be. And so that just, it just
frustrates me. And so, you know, 40 years of
frustrations like that have led me to say, well, I don't care
what you say. I'm, you know, I've got stuff to
do. I'll show you.

(42:12):
I I like that attitude. It's hard.
I mean, it's a privilege to be able to have that attitude in
the world as competitive as academic science.
I mean, you're always vying for credibility when you're early in
your career. So it takes it takes a sort of
level of accomplishment to be able to maintain that attitude
if you want to stay in at at least the academic because you
can go into. Where a lot of academics get it

(42:34):
wrong and I try to teach my postdocs and grad students.
This is just what I've said before.
Just do it. You don't have to convince
anybody else if you know you're right.
And the same thing applies here to the UAP.
We don't have to convince anybody.
I don't need to get bogged down in some discussion on a Reddit

(42:55):
subgroup about. You'd never get anything done.
About something that has alreadybeen argued a bazillion times.
And just because you woke up this morning and thought the
question doesn't mean that it hasn't been asked 10,000 times
before. And so I don't have time for it.
And so, you know, go learn it yourself and let's, but

(43:18):
meanwhile, let's get it done. You know, people, for instance,
we just started and launched theUAP disclosure group with, you
know, me and Yuan and Lou. And you know, in a way, it's
kind of round up the usual, the usual suspects and people say,

(43:39):
well, why what, why do we need another one?
What? Isn't that what the sole
foundation was supposed to be? Or isn't that what SCU is
supposed to be? Or isn't that what?
No, it's not. They all have a role in an
ecosystem that is different. The the new foundation that was

(44:00):
set up, the new initiative that was set up is aimed directly at
affecting policy and and Washington, whereas the Salt
foundation will affect policy, but we'll do it through white
papers. We'll do it through the the ACT,
creating a paper trail in the literature that other academics
can use to, you know, write their own works so they don't

(44:25):
have to retread ground. So this new group will do
something like actually lobbyingor?
Yeah. Yeah.
So it's a lobbying UAP disclosure.
And you know, so there's, you know, and so SCU is involved in
Lumina, right, the journal. So people are like, oh, well,

(44:45):
listen, aren't they doing white papers?
Isn't that in competition with Seoul?
No this. Isn't a competition.
That's not how like this. But I don't understand.
It's like, no, Seoul might actually publish some of its
papers in Lumina. How about that?
You know, we don't. That means we don't have to do
it. I've only been in the in this
sort of area for a few years, but I'm constantly baffled by

(45:07):
the sense of competitive, false sense of competitiveness that
people perceive as if like one group researching it is somehow
like shredding on the territory of another.
It's. Not a 0 sum game I mean.
This is. This is capitalism and an
expanding economy. And, you know, you create new
ecosystems by doing this. You know, AI, for instance,

(45:30):
created a new set of ecosystems,a whole new market that nobody
could have imagined a year ago. And so it's the same thing.
It's a cottage industry of opportunities.
Yeah, you don't want a monopoly.So let me ask you a question
about. So you, you give a, a, you
sketch the, the framework of a theory of what these things
actually are, these UAP things. And you say, well, it has some

(45:52):
sort of physical reality to it, but there's also some effect on
the mental. Those are traditionally, not
traditionally, but at least currently taken to be like 2
completely different spheres of reality, the mental.
But it may be that the UAP problem doesn't just present a

(46:14):
problem of like a missing theoryof physics.
Like it's not just that we, it might not be just that we're
missing a theory of how their propulsion systems work or
something. And once we get that, we'll
understand it. It might be that like our
current ways of like divvying upthe ontology of the world, like
our basic theories are wrong andkeeping us from understanding
them. Do you think it's how likely do

(46:36):
you think it is that in order tosolve this problem and really
understand what they are, we're going to need some like really
fundamental paradigm shift and how?
I mean, I don't think that any of the theories of what it is
are anywhere close to reality, you know?
I mean, I, you know, I, I, I only gave the ultra terrestrial

(46:58):
Solarian idea. I, I'd be perfectly happy if
it's some sort of interdimensional, you know, you
know, again, imagine two parallel universes whose
timelines are unlinked at, at that point, a civilization from

(47:18):
the Super distant future in thatother parallel universe could
learn how to Pierce The Veil andjump across.
At which point it probably has embedded its whole consciousness
into space-time, you know, a la the queue or something of, you

(47:39):
know, and of Star Trek lore. You know, it's, I think you just
have to keep your mind open to that and not again, like
unfortunately it seems, you know, Neil deGrasse Tyson
stopped mentally growing. Sorry, I'm picking on him
because. OK, he set himself up to be the

(48:00):
representative of like he. Set himself up for, you know,
proving himself to be an idiot and sorry.
And so if he, if he, if he wantsto, you know, act like a
sophomore in some state school, then do so.

(48:21):
As a, as a, as a former state school, sure.
No, I, I, I get the annoyance asa philosopher.
It's, it's especially annoying because a lot of times you hear
these really intelligent, I meanclearly intelligent in some
sense. People like Neil deGrasse Tyson
or Richard Dawkins will say things are going to make
arguments that I think that is just that wouldn't pass in like

(48:44):
a first year philosophy, you know, term paper or something.
But well, like I, I heard Neil deGrasse Tyson one time years
ago said that like, well, why would aliens come?
I mean, it's always the assumption is always aliens for
some reason. But why would aliens come to
Earth to study us? It would be like, it would be
like humans going from America to study in anthill in Africa.
And I'm like, that's exactly what we do.

(49:05):
Which is what we do. Yeah.
I, yeah. I mean, I don't know, you know,
I, I think though to to let's see, bring it back to Earth.
You know, there appears to be data which is just beyond reach.

(49:26):
And the government is, you know,acting as loyally as it
apparently can and twisting itself into, you know, verbal
pretzels to not state what it is.
Is it? Well, we have no evidence that
it's aliens. Yeah.
OK well does that mean you have no evidence it's a non human

(49:50):
intelligence? That so that annoys the hell of
me because like when I think Sean Kirkpatrick said that
NASA's NASA has said that, but it seems like obfuscating double
speaks to me because I don't think there is a consensus about
what would even count as evidence that something well.
That's the other thing, I that'sthe other thing.
We need standards of what proof is to to, for instance, to see

(50:16):
all these movements and it's forever out of reach.
Let's say that this stuff zips around forever and it never we
can never touch it or get at it.Well, then you could say we have
no evidence it's aliens. Well, I also have no evidence
that it's not, you know, you know, rabbits flying the things.

(50:38):
Sure. Yeah, because you can't get.
You can't get them, but I, I canat some point with reasonable
deduction state that it is not human and it is a technology or
it is something which is not natural.
And so that's what we still haveto find a way to verbalize, to

(51:05):
force them to answer that question, right.
And to stop people under oath infront of you who purposefully
are put there with zero knowledge.
Yes, Yeah. So they have possible
deniability. Yeah, they silo people from
information and then make them the the.

(51:25):
Spokespeople. Yeah, I mean, that's a, that's a
smart tactic, but. It's a smart tactic, but it's
pretty clear that's what's goingon, you know, for at least those
who are, you know, in the discussion.
The problem, of course, is that we have a lot of people who are
outside the discussion who, whenone of those things ends up on
the front page of the New York Times, I get five or six of my

(51:48):
colleagues emailing it to me andsaying, well, I thought you said
these were real. Now the Dodi said, yeah, but
come on, you know, so that that is frustrating.
But you know, the, the other thing to do is there's a
different way to think about it,which is, you know, and Avi

(52:09):
Lopez said this as well. First of all, the skies aren't
classified yet. And so we can look for it
ourselves. But you know, not everything
that falls on the ground has gotten to 1st by.
Whoever. Yeah, the.
Government, whoever. So, you know, perhaps there's a

(52:33):
way to set up, you know, an alternative but parallel
observation system that if something goes down, you know,
we in the public, not me personally, but we can get there
first. So here's a I'm going to try to

(52:54):
smush several questions into onebecause I know we're running low
on time. So if we take the assumption
that they are minimally some sort of technology, that raises
some interesting problems for me.
One is like, do we have a taxonomy of different kinds of
these things that we've that we're sort of working on from

(53:15):
the beginning? I mean, at least observationally
there's been, I remember there'slike a picture I I see in my
head of the various observation of the shapes that have been
observed, a huge table of them. That's how you would go about
building a taxonomy as first. At least and and what do the

(53:37):
capabilities seem to be of each of them?
And, you know, I think more recently there have been these
observations of so-called spheres that, you know, people
see that that seem to have less mobile capabilities than some of
the larger objects that seem to go from zero to whatever.

(53:58):
These other these spheres seem to be a little bit more
Newtonian in their movements andbut still seem to have the
ability to float. Yeah, they don't have flight
surfaces. We don't.
Flight surfaces, but they're a little bit more Newtonian, let's
say. So, you know, and then there's,

(54:23):
of course, the Tic Tac, which isonly been a more recent
observation. But if you go into the
literature, you actually find evidence of these things having
been seen, but they were dismissed because they weren't
part of what it is that people thought they should see.
If you see, oh, it's supposed tobe, you know it's supposed to
be. It's also shaped or whatever.
It is shaped and blanked. So here's another anxiety I have

(54:46):
about the technological aspect of it.
One is that technologies have biases in them.
I people tend to say well, Oh well, if it's an alien
technology or if it's a technology from off world, it's
going to be neutral in some sense.
It's not going to be good or it's not going to be bad.
But I don't think technologies are good, bad or neutral.
I think they been saying an innate biases to them and if we

(55:08):
start reverse engineering and adopting them, we're taking on
those biases. For instance, power sources like
wind energy and nuclear energy prefer totally different
governmental structures. Like if you have nuclear energy,
you've got to have a strong military that can protect the,
the creation and transmission and use of nuclear fuels in the

(55:30):
disposal of them. If you use wind energy, you
don't, you can have like a totally libertarian society
where everybody's powering themselves.
You don't have to have a huge military.
I wonder, do you ever think about in the in the the
possibilities of adopting technologies from a completely
different technological tree of life, what comes along with them
other than the technological benefits?

(55:51):
Are there like social costs thatmight come along with them?
Well, sure. I mean, well, the social cost of
free energy is, you know, a total disruption of our economy,
I mean, would be a disaster. I mean that's, you know, if and
if suddenly you made that available to everybody, there

(56:13):
would be a different, it would have to be a much more different
way that the economy is structured.
Doesn't mean that it wouldn't find its own way, but there
would be a a collapse of the stock market.
Do you think that's that's something that's necessary, like
a necessary piece of explaining how these things work is they've
got something like a free energysource?
I mean, they have to. I mean, how do you, I mean,

(56:34):
Kevin Neuth, you know, publishedthe equations and the energy
requirements, simple physics as he puts it, and said, look, this
is the entire nuclear output of the United States.
You know, I have, I've been talking to Jacques about a case
that happened, I don't know, probably 40 years ago of a
scientist near one of the energylabs, the US national labs,

(56:58):
driving with his family between X&YI can't remember the name of
the place. It's not that it's secret.
And saw this extraordinary bright light about half a mile
off the road that lit up everything, including the
mountains nearby. And so he went home and
calculated the amount of energy that that would require it to be
like a nuclear reactor at full, you know, throttle.

(57:21):
That's just the luminosity, that's not accelerated the
luminosity any, right? Just the luminosity and so so he
somehow managed to convince a pilot to do a fly over around
the area because he said that level of energy would burn out a
clearing. And lo and behold, he found such
a clearing. Oh no.

(57:42):
What, so heat energy too? It wasn't just.
Yeah, I mean the light, well, because the light if it bounces
off enough off of something. And so there were, there was
tree bark that has been obtainedthat you know has a depth of
burn to it that supposedly I'll get access to at some point.

(58:06):
And so, you know, of course someone's going to say, oh,
yeah, well, somebody burned it with a blowtorch or God knows
what. I mean, I have to suffer those
slings and arrows, but I don't care because I'll just, I said,
look, here's the chain of evidence, here's what we get.
Yeah, it got burned by light. And I have to go look up to see

(58:27):
how it is that you prove that something gets burned by light
versus heat is just energy, radiation, infrared.
So, you know, but again, the theenergy requirements are more
than what you would think you carry around in a battery.
Now maybe our concepts of batteries are primitive.

(58:50):
Yeah. It couldn't fit in any battery.
We can conceive of that. We can conceive inside that
machine or whatever it was. But I mean, there's Garrett
Medel at the University of Chicago, eminent physicist who
you know, claims to have structured Casimir cavity in a
way that is asymmetric and can collect energy from the from the

(59:15):
zero point field claims. So that means he's just got a
just a geometric shape that can create a rust or something do
work, just ambient ambient energy in the he.
Gets a voltage, you know, and they're, they're
microstructures, they're ultra tiny.
And so he's made literally millions of them in a row, and

(59:35):
he gets out of a decent thing, but they stop working after a
certain amount of time. And when you look at them
locally, you find that there's been local destruction.
Interesting. So that's like you would think
where from having done whatever work they've done, they've.
Done whatever work you're doing,it's just you, you burn out the
the the local thing you know there's there's people like the

(59:58):
people at at Brillion Energy whohave basically.
Conceptualized in a much larger way and that they fix the
problem of local work eating into the thing by by creating
the the energy and a local sort of plasma field, something they

(01:00:21):
call it, some people would call an exotic vacuum object that
seems capable of asymmetrically pulling information out, pulling
energy out of nothing. Now again, it's just claims.
I mean, I like reading this stuff because it's cool, but
they they have companies and they are moving those forward.

(01:00:43):
And these aren't stupid people. And if you look at the
laboratories that they've got set up to do this stuff, you see
the beginnings of an energy infrastructure that would change
everything. And so, you know, Fast forward

(01:01:07):
humanity, 5010 thousand years, Idoubt we're going to be using
oil. Certainly hope not.
You know, and I, I doubt that we'll you know, and if we are
linearly just requiring energy access via light, that's where
the Dyson sphere concept comes in, you know.

(01:01:29):
You have to say something that can collect an enormous amount
of. And and and and and.
That to me just seems stupid. I mean the amount of energy to
build the Dyson sphere alone andconvert matter locally to
collect it. You might never get a positive
return in your you'll. Never get a positive return on
it. You'll get living space.

(01:01:51):
But so you know, or just again, if you if you limit your
thinking to just our current level of technology and just
multiply it a little bit, you'renever going to get anywhere.
So we know the zero point field exists.

(01:02:12):
That's not fantasy. So OK, maybe somebody figured
out how to get access to it. But that might be the danger
that the government already recognized.
Those are some people who have the stuff already recognized it.
Is that it? Letting some of this stuff out
is really giving anybody the ability to blow up the Eastern
Seaboard. Yeah, it's not.

(01:02:33):
So it wouldn't just be, I mean, people like to to say that will
it be, it would be economically catastrophic, so the government
or whoever has incentives to suppress it.
But it would also be like reallyeasily weaponizable.
I think that even about like that we observe if you have got
something that can accelerate 50,000 GS, you could just crash
it into a nuclear reactor site and it would be.

(01:02:55):
You could fly out to the asteroid belt and push a rock
our way and, you know, do a dinosaur, you know, extinction
event on US. Sequel to the The Dinosaur Let
so I know we're almost done withtime.
Let me do we have time for one more question to wrap it up.
Yeah. Then I got to go.
Yeah. So you've said on several

(01:03:18):
occasions that you think of the UAP phenomenon or the subject as
an intelligence test for humanity.
But I think it's also, it's not just a test, but it's, it
transforms you. Once you've thought through it,
it does something to your worldview inevitably.
How have you fared in this intelligence test and what is it

(01:03:39):
done to your worldview to think through this problem?
How's it changed? I, when I look at what I see
around me, I look for what mightbe the hidden levers behind it
much more readily. I'm, I get excited by what I

(01:04:03):
don't know. It's weird.
I don't get excited by what I know.
I get excited by what I don't know, because then I want to
understand it. And then that is a new hill to
see the valley below that I wantto go to so that I can get to
the valley, so I can look for the next mountain.
And so I mean, I think that's, it's opened my mind into an

(01:04:28):
expansive future. I think that I, I don't feel, I,
I feel like there's somebody else who's learned something
that we don't currently have. That's a revolutionary jump and
I think it's a missed opportunity to not try for it.
So if, if anything, it is in this case to round it out, both

(01:04:54):
a Zen and a Las Vegas question. It's Las Vegas in the sense that
if I'm right, we win big. It's Zen in that if I'm wrong,
we're alone, and that kind of means that's a little more

(01:05:15):
depressing. You know, it's depressing to
lose at the roulette table, but it's depressing perhaps to know
that you're the only one in all of this.
But then again, you can flip it around and say, OK, well, if we
are the only ones in all of this, let's get going.
Yeah, it's actionable. At least it's worth.
We have work to do. There's a whole universe out

(01:05:36):
there waiting for us. Let's get going.
But. Gary Nolan, I think that the
real test has been whether you have the sort of existential
wonder and willingness to love not knowing and love going
outside of your your sort of intellectual comfort zone, and
that you've done very well on that test.
I think. So thank you so much for being
here today and for giving us your time.

(01:05:57):
Yeah. Thank you very much, Mike.
It's been great.