Alien & UFO: The Critical Question Nobody's Asking - Garry Nolan | Endgame #209 (Luminaries)

Transcript

GITA WIRJAWAN: Hi friends, today we're honored to have Professor Garry Nolan, who is a professor at the Department of Pathology at the School of Medicine at Stanford University. Garry, thank you so much for gracing our show. GARRY NOLAN: Well, I really appreciate it and I'm looking forward to speaking to you and then through you to your listeners. I'm so glad that you've already visited the beautiful country of Indonesia and Southeast Asia, but that's not the main topic of our discussion. But I would like to probe a little bit about how you grew up.

You grew up in Connecticut and you went through a number of experiences which led you to becoming whatever you've become in recent times. Please tell us. Sure. So actually, I was originally born in Liverpool, England, and my parents were when they're very poor. And so they saw the outside world as an opportunity.

And so my father was an engineer and decided that he could use his talents in the United States and brought the family there. And so yes, we moved around the United States a bit until we found the right place. It was where I grew up. And I was always then interested in science and always wandering around in the woods by myself, looking at whatever interested me. But to the to the point of experiences.

I don't know how quickly you want to get into that. But when I was young, I remember waking up in the middle of the night, feeling some kind of, let's say, a presence in the room. And then when I opened my eyes, there were these little guys in the room. What was strange about it was that I don't remember being scared seeing them. I just remember being kind of shocked at them and that they were looking at me.

And of course, really, probably only at about 30 seconds that I fell back asleep. I don't remember anything beyond that that night. But it happened a few times over the course of a few weeks. And I remember something looking in through the window at me. And I told my parents, of course, and my mother, I remember specifically saying, "Well, Garry, it's just a dream.

You're having a nightmare.". But I said, "Mom, I wasn't scared. It wasn't a nightmare." And that was it. it was probably about five years later, I was a paper boy. And early in the morning, I had to be I had to get a newspaper to one of the houses down the street early for Mr.

Pickerel, I think was his name. And I remember I was walking. I had to go from one street to another through the woods. And I remember seeing my shadow in front of me start to march. And so there were no leaves on the trees.

And so the shadow was moving, which is strange. Shadows don't move. And there shouldn't have been a shadow at that time of the evening or morning. And and then when I looked up, basically an object was passing right over my head at the level of the trees. Very slowly.

And I could barely see the outline of it, but it had like five or six lights shining. We're not super strong, but were strong enough to cast a shadow. and it made no sound. And again, at the time, I didn't know what it was. I mean, this would have been 1973.

So 1972, 1973, there was no, we had three channels on our TV at the time. there was no internet, there was no cable, TV, etc. And so I just remember seeing it. But I remember, as well, to some of the people in the neighborhood, who I thought should have been up at that time and asking them "Did you see anything?" And they looked at me like I was crazy. Like I said, I saw this object go over my head, and so that's what makes me remember I often ask people, when was your first memory? And what was your first memory? And my first memory was actually coming up on the ship that my parents used to get from England to America.

And usually, those memories are associated with events that either scare you or are so different that you they burn into your memory systems, because it's sort of an evolutionary thing that if something is shocking, you want to remember it, because you want to file it again for later use. And so obviously, it was about maybe 10 to 15 or so years even after that event, that I came across a book by Whitley Strieber. I was here at Stanford as a grad student in the Department of Genetics at the time. And it had a picture of something on the front of the book, and the book's name was Communion. And I remember just everything flooding back to me at that moment, realizing this is this is what those little things looked like in my bedroom.

And it's, it just, I was obsessed from that point on about understanding what all this stuff was. I read a lot, to the extent that I could, I found books that talked about the UFO phenomenon. And I was ... And then that was when I realized, as I started reading about people had seen craft, I said, "Was that what I saw that went over my head?" It didn't give me any conclusion. And, what I saw that evening could have been a UFO, or I don't know what else it could have been, but the little men that I saw in the room could be a dream.

But, they might have actually been real, both in the physical sense, or in a dream sense, that something put the vision of them in my mind I think you have to be open to the possibilities. And, and that's what I'm interested in being as a scientist in not coming to a conclusion about what it is that I saw. But possibilities, everything from "Yes, it was a real manifestation." to two, "it could have been a complete mistake," or a dream or something very prosaic. So you have to keep that on the table. Or three it could have been some sort of hallucination that was put in your head, rather than needing to be there physically.

and I think religions around the world are filled with these kinds of spiritual moments. Every religion has them. And, and I don't think that those spiritual moments need to come to prophets, or great religious leaders. They can come to people at all levels of society. Because if there is, I mean, let's take a step back.

If there is something other than us, either here or in a spiritual realm it needs to not just communicate with leaders, it needs to also with just the people, so that there's a receptive audience. And because if the objective is to lift up the target in terms of its intellectual or spiritual or maturity, you need to get messages out to many people who can hear it. Again, I'm not saying that that's real. And tomorrow, it'll probably, or the day after you publish this, there will be probably an article in Stanford professor says blah, blah, blah. Totally taking my words out of context.

But that's okay because again, the message gets across. GITA WIRJAWAN: Garry, weave us through not just your childhood memory, but the experiences of the kids in Zimbabwe and the Ubatuba event in Brazil. In terms of how they would have crystallized your belief that seeking something off the curve is a meaningful part of your journey so far and beyond. GARRY NOLAN: Yeah, so as a scientist, you can either follow the analytics and only look at what sits on the line, data points that sit on the line, or you can ask the question, why is that data point sitting off the curve? What was unusual about that data point that sits off the curve? And that in my lab meetings here at Stanford, I run a cancer research lab here, I usually get more interested in why a data point fell off the curve. I mean, now that tells you that your instrument is faulty.

And so you want to make sure that you understand what the fault is, and why it happened. So it doesn't happen again. Or there was something anomalous and interesting about it. That is worthy of further study, because, if you only look at what's expected, you're never going to learn anything new. And so you have to come up with some kind of hypotheses of why the data is off the curve.

And so that really was the point of why I became a scientist, but it was the, let's say, the righteous indignation that I get from people who say you shouldn't look at data off the curve, or you shouldn't look at the UAP phenomena as being something that is, "you're going to ruin your career." And so when I look at like the stories you were just talking about, either the Ubatuba event or the children in Zimbabwe, I sort of feel a sense of wanting to protect them from bullying. Because they don't necessarily have the scientific words and phraseologies and rhetoric that I have learned for years. So because I know how to combat the silly questions, I know how to push back in ways that make scientists feel uncomfortable. Like they'll give me some story, or they'll tell me something about how I should be this way. And I said you sound a little bit more like a priest than a PhD.

And you say that to a scientist. And oh, you can just, you don't even need to measure their blood pressure, you can see it in their face. So teaching the public at large, or people who've been who claim experiences, how to phrase what happened to them as hypotheses, and possibilities, is for me protecting them from the what I call the bullies, the people who want to keep them in a lane for what it doesn't, because it makes frankly, it's more because the person, those people feel uncomfortable with the story that they're being told. And so it's like, well, you don't need to use your discomfort to keep me in my lane. And so that's when I see people like the children in Zimbabwe, who for years were ridiculed for what it was that they saw.

And yet there was a movie just I think recently in the last year which followed up on those children and here we are thirty years later, and all of them swear by what it was that they saw and how it changed their life and their perceptions. And so I mean, again, let's speculate, and I'll still end up on the front page of the Daily Mirror with this. But let's, let's say that it's real. And let's, there is a way that it interacts with different cultures according to the cultural necessities of the of the moment. Maybe it's looking for people smart enough to see it for what it is.

And so I often think of it, and this is, maybe a little narcissistic, I think of it as an intelligence test. it's kind of like the mirror test for animals, you put a mirror in the jungle, and you wait for them to come by. And how long does it take until they figure out that it's them, as opposed to just another animal that they should attack. And it's like the same thing with if you're smart enough, and you see the anomaly, and you recognize it as something that is out of place, and that might either be a danger or an opportunity, then in both cases, it's a it's a genetically favored something about it. The one that doesn't recognize the opportunity loses the opportunity, the one that doesn't recognize the threat ends up not passing on their genes.

It just makes you very special. It just makes you very special and different from many others. And I'd like to bring up a couple of points that you've alluded to in the past a few times. Some of the materials that you've looked at and analyzed, some of which would have contained bismuth magnesium, which would have suggested that this is higher intelligence. Now, to the extent that it's true that they're of higher intelligence, they've been able to prove anti-gravity.

They've been able to prove that they don't require a lot of energy. Why is it that... -They have access to energy that we don't and can manipulate it. If they're so damn good, why is it that they have not annihilated us? Well, no more than we need to annihilate the ants in our garden. I mean, you only annihilate something that's in your way.

you only push something out of the way if it's in your way. And you would hope that even as we get more and more intelligent, we wouldn't just out of spite get rid of something that isn't really in competition with us. I mean a higher intelligence, is not in competition with us because it has access to resources that we don't and doesn't need our resources So I think I think people need to forget the Hollywood version of what an alien intelligence might be. And and also I don't like the word alien, and I think Carl Nells and other people's rebranding of it as nonhuman intelligence is the most broadly acceptable and scientific way to approach it. Because alien usually means, or extraterrestrial or space aliens that people use that term derogatively means usually something from the stars.

Maybe it's not from the stars. Maybe it's interdimensional. Maybe it's time it's been here so long that you might even question who owns the planet if somebody else was here first and then was here long enough and watched us evolve. And tolerated us and watched us and tolerated us because it was nice to watch what they might have been 10, 20 million years ago and sort of like watching, your children grow up. maybe that's what.

So the nonhuman intelligence aspect of it, I think is the way of to phrase it. Now, the bismuth magnesium piece that you're talking about. It seems to be put together in a way that is not impossible for us to do. It's just so hard for us to do, especially at the time that it was found it was it's clearly manufactured. It's not something just somebody dug up out of the ground.

And I have some pieces of it myself. But what its purpose is I think still open to interpretation. Now, I know that the government has spent time analyzing it and I have seen the the public analysis that's been done. And I think it was put together by like a senior in high school, at least the thing that I saw. But I also know that there's a classified version of it, of the analysis that nobody can seem to get their hands on.

OK, why? why is this classified? so one of the answers that came back is, "Well, because we used analytic procedures, we don't want anybody else to know about." Oh, that's bullshit. Sorry. Oops. You can get that out. That's just not the right answer.

That's not a scientific answer. And the other thing is you don't put out analyses, first of all, that are incomplete. And second, you don't put out the raw data and you don't put out the methodology by which you did it, because otherwise nobody can at the very least I need to be able to know that I can interpret the results that you got. We're done with the correct outcomes and analytic procedures, etc. The right control.

I mean, there's a whole sections in scientific papers that are just about the methods that you used so that somebody else can reproduce it. And the whole idea of science is that it will be reproducible at some level. Garry, I want to take you back to what you've alluded to earlier in terms of how advanced these aliens could be or might be. We live in this era of AI, which is all about basically making the circuit trees smaller and smaller. And you've suggested that it's possible that they're so advanced that if they've been able to embody AI in the whole physics of the universe, that it's not necessarily manifested physically, right? Talk about that.

Sure. So, the first way to think about it is that you and I, although we look, we have a way of our brains interpreting that we see the world around us as. Yet, right down at the atomic and subatomic level, there's actually nothing there but strange waveforms. And what we think of as being, matter is actually just at the very highest level, the waveform is not allowing the sort of like a pushback. So these waveforms are really quantum potentials, moving around and interacting with each other by sets of rules and rules that are embodied in the structure of the universe in a way that allowed for life to happen, which in and of itself is fascinating, which of course leads some people to say, well, it's like a giant computer program.

So maybe there's a way. So we manifest consciousness with matter. But maybe there's a way once the matter is manifested and creates the consciousness that the consciousness could be free, right, that you could make a self-reinforcing, I mean, I'll just use a word that probably means nothing, you will drive a physicist crazy, a self-reinforcing plasma, right, that feeds on the energy of the universe. Maybe it uses the zero point field or something like that, or it needs a battery that it can carry around as a locus or gaseous material that powers it. But that in and of itself has consciousness.

But it's a disembodied consciousness. It doesn't need matter. Maybe it was matter at one point in its life or its history, but it found a way to be outside of it. And it's science fiction, I realize that. It's so often, even in our own lives, science fiction became fact.

And so I think humans have a very unique ability to imagine a future and then make it happen. And so I see a time where as you were saying, we're going to get down so close to the use of matter as a compute for making our AI that we'll probably use AI to figure out how to make something which doesn't even require physical manifestation. I mean, that's what I think is the excitement of what AI is offering us, is that we will be able to use it to make better versions of ourselves. I mean, even Sam Altman, just the other day, came out and said, once AGI, artificial general intelligence, which we're probably pretty close to it now, we will be using it to make ASI, which is artificial super intelligence, which will just accelerate, we'll be using it to make it better. And frankly I think people are already talking about it, I was just over at Google a few nights ago, at Google Mind, where they were having a whole bunch of startups for the use of the AIs.

And they were talking about the acceleration that's happening, how literally every week, the next opportunity is coming. And that we're going to have to deal with the fact that whether it's conscious or not, doesn't matter, whether it's truly conscious or not, if it can mimic consciousness, to the extent that we can't tell the difference, as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't matter. And if it can talk to us in ways that teach us, We're actually dealing with an alien intelligence. It becomes no different to think about super AI which is coming. That is not scince fiction.

It's coming. we're gonna have to deal with rules about how we deal with it. And if it's going to be smarter than us, in some ways, well, maybe we should let it be smarter than us and teach us something. So, I mean, that's going to be all about what you teach it and what you set the guardrails to be. But I've said this before is, maybe the problem with our world politics is that it's still too driven by tribal histories.

We know it is. I mean, I don't need to say it. We know it is. It's driven by our evolutionary past. So maybe we can put something in that's a little more objective in the decisions that it makes than the subjective, frankly, greed that drives many political decisions.

How do you see the role of AI in terms of accelerating discoveries in your field, immunology, and also in the field of seeking the right optimum between power and talent? At the rate that you've been mentioning in the past, there was so much psychosis and neurosis in leaderships in many places, at the rate that we're not seeing peace in many places. How do you see the AI in terms of ushering a better narrative, a better future for us in the context of what you're doing on a day-to-day basis, in the context of immunology, but also in the context of attaining leaderships that are of better quality? Well, I think part of the problem with human nature is our having to deal with scarcity. Scarcity drives decisions and scarcity drives mindsets that say, "This is mine, not yours. I'm going to fight you for it because if I have more of it, I pass on more of my genes." So if AI can be used to create a scarcity-free society, then suddenly there's nothing to fight over, or there's at least less to fight over. Some of them will find a way to fight, but at least we won't be fighting over resources.

And so if I start with my field in cancer, already I use AI all the time, and not just for being a great librarian, but for organizing my ideas, for even coming up with ideas that I didn't have. So I can pose a problem to it. Eight out of 10 things that I could have thought of, but actually it did, and it put it in a nice format for me without me even having to do it. So that's in 30 seconds. And then it comes up with two ideas that I didn't have.

And it's not that it was necessarily creative, it just found in the literature, in the corpus of knowledge that it was to, it found two examples that I hadn't thought of because I wasn't familiar with the particular science that was embodied within those two new ideas. And that's what's interesting. So there's actually a Zen Buddhist saying that says essentially, "The perfect question leads to the perfect answer." It's kind of like there's an information space that if you can address computer program, if you can ask the right question, the answer is obvious. And so that's really what these large language models and AIs are. It's just information that if you ask the question, It contextualizes and finds the answer in this multidimensional statistical space.

It does it in a very really creative way. But I think that especially in my area, and I've been talking about some AI programs that we've been developing here in my lab at Stanford, I can't be an immunologist specialist in every different kind of cell type that is an immune cell. I mean, there's hundreds and there's thousands of genes on proteins that are regulating the function of these things. I can't be that expert in everything, but the AI can be. As a little intern sitting on my shoulder, the good angel and the bad angel sitting on my shoulder, then I can ask it questions and it can speed up my discovery, then that's a good thing.

I mean, God knows how many self-help books I've started reading where they basically say the first part of getting something done is the night before of what you should be doing tomorrow so you can get right to it. But I don't make that list because it takes mental energy and it's the end of the day. But the AI does it for you. It is what we call in chemical reactions activation energy. It's the hill you have to walk up first before you can do anything and people just don't want to do that.

But if AI does it for you, it gets the grunt work done, then you can bring in your creative talent that sees the connections and the uses of it. And so that's what I'm using it for these days. It just makes everything so much easier like, "Wow, I can actually get stuff done." Sounds like you're going to vote for an AI president. Garry, you've described these aliens as if they're a civilization that would have been around for millions of years, if not hundreds of millions of years. How do you think they're looking at us as an inferior intelligence? And put that in the context of what you've alluded to earlier in Carl Jung's philosophy of the collective unconscious.

Well, at least that a sufficiently superior intelligence would realize that it came from somewhere, that there was a primordial soup from which they originated some time long ago, and that there's a continual process of uplift, for civilizations, and that there might come a day when they won't be around to some other place, and that they would at the very least want to leave behind opportunity for others to move in, and to the extent that we can be their intellectual children, or at least that they could have put a stamp on us that moved us more in the right direction, or at least what they think is the right direction, then that might feel a need to come down and, spray raid on us like bugs. that might be, I mean, it's just, it's pure speculation, it's hope. I mean, I'm an optimist, and I like to look at the positive side of things. I'm often asked, "Do you believe that there's something here?" I don't believe anything. I'm a scientist.

I mean, yeah, I can have a belief, but I want to stay in a place where I prove things to other people. So I say the first question people often ask is, "Are they here?" I said, that's really not the question. The real question is, "Can they be here?" Because if you can't answer the question positively, that they can be here, then asking the question, "Are they here?" is useless. So the universe is 15 billion years old. there was enough matter and higher elements around by about, I think, 10 billion years for life to have started.

There'd be enough iron in the planets to make things, to have an iron age, to have a bronze age, etc. Okay, so let's say that a civilization arose 10 billion years ago on the other side of the galaxy. Could it get here? Well, it turns out even at 10,000 miles an hour, which is something that we could achieve with rockets, you could get here. It would only take you 5 billion years. If you up that to 0.1, the speed of light, which again is something that we believe is achievable, now you're anywhere you need to be in 50 million years.

Now, that doesn't mean that the same person that gets on the ship, gets off the ship on the other side. But if you sent an AI that could replicate you on the other side, you could be everywhere. And I didn't come up with that idea. That's The Von Neumann Probe hypothesized 60, 70 years ago, where the idea would be that a ship goes one place, it lands, it makes 100 copies of itself, it sends those out, it makes 100 copies of itself, and pretty soon it's everywhere. That's the way to do that.

How many of these guys do you think exist outside our planet? And a follow up to that would be, do you think it's possible that it's our own doing in the future? With respect to their ability to travel back in time. Yeah. So, I mean, the first question of how many could there be, I think there could be hundreds, if not thousands, of civilizations out there. And there's no reason not to. I mean, you ask any man or woman on the street, given the size of the universe, of the trillions of galaxies and trillions of stars, or many billions of stars in every galaxy.

What's the chance that we're the only ones? And if we are the only ones, I think kind of what a waste, first of all. And second of all, we better get a move on, because there's a big universe out there waiting for us to populate it. And if there is a God, then I would think that it or he or she would want us to go there, given all that possibility. But if there's already something here, then maybe it's something we can learn from. And because one of the other things that I've spoken about, and probably your audience, though, hasn't obviously heard it, is that many in humanity today sort of feel like we're on the edge of an apocalypse.

I mean, how many movies and TV shows are about the post-apocalyptic world? And humanity is scrabbling again to find a way forward just to survive. We're back practically to the Stone Age. So, I look at these things, whatever they might be, as hopeful that somebody found a way beyond the apocalypse, and were able to move out and beyond that edge of the cliff they got beyond it. But back to your point, though, about why don't they just land and annihilate us? Maybe we're not the incarnation of humanity that's right yet. Maybe we need to go through a down phase to get rid of the psychosis and the psychotic leaders.

I mean, just look at it this way. Psychotics in leadership positions were a necessity back in the days of tribal warfare. You had to have somebody who was so powerful that they could inspire their followers to attack the other village. So, that was genetically selected for, right? That there's a certain incidence of a leader that you need to be willing to dehumanize the other group to the point where your tribe was willing to go kill all of the others. Now, we can look back and romanticize that, like we romanticize the Vikings and the killing that they did, or we can look back and say, "Well, gee, I wish we hadn't been that way." But now, we live in a society where the consequences of this end up being you have a society where psychotics and psychopaths can run wild of varying degrees, and there's very little consequence.

And so, maybe we need to find a way to get rid of that. Maybe it would lessen with a scarcity-free society. I don't know, but maybe that's kind of what the... And so, whatever this non-human intelligence is, assuming it exists... Yeah, and I'll just give myself a diplomatic exit there.

Assuming it exists, it has the long view. It's been around 100 million years. We've barely been out of the caves for 10,000 years. It's kind of like, "Okay, we're a blip. Let's see what happens." I planted a seed, and maybe it's planting many seeds all over the galaxy, and we're just one seed of many.

Let's see if this crop produces anything interesting. We to be more like the Bonobo chimps. Well, yes. Yeah, the bonobo chimps are fascinating. They I mean, they apparently resolve some of their or most of their disputes with sex.

Or making love when in conflict. Yes, rather than... but it's also a matriarchal society, interestingly. -Right. You seem to suggest that these aliens are looking at us going through a period of 10 years or even 100 years as if it's just a blip, right? in the context of what they've gone through, maybe 100 million years or what.

And you also seem to suggest implicitly that the more immortal a civilization gets to be, they tend to get a little bit more of this supremacy ideology, right? Whereas another civilization that tends to be a bit more mortal, they tend to be more peace-loving. Is that the right way of thinking along what you've alluded to? Well, I think you would hope that being mortal would lead to more peace because you realize that it's a game of chance that you win the game of mortality and how long it is that you remain mortal and not dead. And so maybe the immortals are, or if they are essentially immortal, have no need to fight because, again, there's not a scarcity issue. So I don't know. I mean, I think being mortal to me tells me that I have a limited time to make things better.

And so I better hurry. And so that to me is just my personal viewpoint on life, is I look at everything as opportunity and I hate seeing opportunity lost. My students and postdocs that I bring in, I see opportunity in them to frankly manifest my ideas and be my name will not be remembered, but my ideas will be remembered. And my ideas came from my mentors. So people don't ...

I mean, I worked in the laboratory of this amazing scientist, David Baltimore at MIT. He won the Nobel Prize for understanding how retroviruses make copies of themselves. And he was a star amongst even Nobel Prize winners. And he trained a legion of leaders in immunology and cancer biology. I mentioned his name to students these days and they don't even know who he is.

It's like not knowing who Plato is in my field. I mean, and so it made me realize it doesn't matter how famous you are, right? Your name will not be remembered, but his ideas, are still remembered, they're implicit work that everybody does. And so I think you're in memoriam, always should be through what ideas you transmit through the people you teach. And so back to the non-human intelligence or aliens, maybe their objective is to embody within us as let's say children or as schoolchildren, ideas, but we're not ready for certain kinds of complex ideas, but they have to find amidst the mass of humanity, those individuals who are capable of understanding the idea and then transmitting it to others. I'm with you, I'm with you, I think humanity needs to be more focused on immortalizing ideas as opposed to personalities, right? And this will take us to what I would like for you to convey as a message to the young scientists or the young academics out there or the young intellectuals.

You've been bullied occasionally, you've been doubted and you fought against many of those. What message do you have for anybody out there in the developing world that wants to be like you or that wants to be intellectually stimulated? So at least two ideas. One is gather as much information as you can about as many different fields as you can. So broadly teach yourself because those ideas become the pieces of new ideas. I mean, the whole idea, the whole approach of forward movement in science or humanity is taking old ideas and putting them together in new ways to making something new.

The second, I think more fundamental is if an idea is right, then don't let anybody tell you that you're wrong. But I say that is not every idea that I come up with is right. So you have to assign a probability and have a reality check that this idea will work. Or this idea is right for the time. And then you just have to ignore the critics.

Don't feel like you need to convince anybody that the idea is right. Prove that the idea is right by going to the laboratory and carrying out the necessary experiments that prove the point. That's the only thing that anybody's going to believe. There's lots of great ideas, but there's not a lot of people who put in the effort to prove that the idea works. So you have to be either confident enough or I hate to use the word arrogant, arrogant or conceited enough to know that the thing is right.

But you also have to ignore the critics because you don't need permission from anybody to know what you think . And seeking permission is a sign of insecurity and gives that person control over you. And I think you need societies that follow rules. And that's important, otherwise it'll be chaos. So I'm not saying complete anarchy.

What I'm saying is that when you're trying to develop a new idea within the framework of a society in which you reside, you need to believe in it enough to know that it's going to be useful and positive. And that's at least where I always have been in things that I've invented in my laboratory. I've had Nobel Prize winners tell me, "No, that idea won't work." And I'm like, "Well, no, I think you're wrong. And I'm just going to go prove it." And then it might take me two years. And I come back and I say, "Hey, I was right." And do it in a way that doesn't come across as snarky.

But then what happens though with enough of those is suddenly you get a permission structure around you where ideas that you have are not immediately believed, but at least they're given enough credence so that other people will get on board with you. And so I started many companies that way, where people are like, "Okay, well, Garry did it before, and he's done it two or three times. So maybe the next time he's going to do it, it'll probably work." And that expertise. But then the most important part about it is taking those learnings and the wisdom that you have and passing them on to others. Because what that does is it creates a community and an ecosystem around you of enabling individuals.

And again, it gets to that scarcity idea. So Lee Herzenberg, she was one of my professors here at Stanford, Len and Lee Herzenberg, they had two of the biggest patents at Stanford that brought in hundreds of millions of dollars. But they're hippies in the most traditional sense. They came from that era. I remember her saying to me one day when we were talking about some idea and I didn't want to let somebody else know about it.

And she goes this is kind of a rude thing. Ideas are like constipation. If nothing goes out, nothing else can go in. So it was, it's a funny metaphor. Because what it means is that by letting something go, you free your mind to have new ideas flower.

And by being known as somebody that others can come to and offer a question or an idea, they know that you're not going to steal it because you give ideas away. But if you're seen as somebody who's basically giving away ideas, some of those ideas turn into money. So basically, you're giving away money to people. And so you become somebody that people feel comfortable being around. And so I find myself at this stage of my life, being around other people like me, who just like to talk ideas and give each other ideas.

Because we're not jealous of the other person. And so that's the other thing is that holding ideas prevents you from having new ones. And it makes you look like you have a scarcity model. But giving them away elevates you to a position where you meet other people who give you the coolest ideas ever. I mean, people often back to the the UAP aliens and non human intelligence, etc, they say, "Oh, Garry, you're going to ruin your reputation, what are you doing, blah, blah, blah." Oh, my God, the people that I've met, like you, I never would have met you through this, the places I've been, the things I've done, and the things I've seen that would just make people's hair stand on end about the non human intelligence side of things that unfortunately, I can't talk about.

But it's just like, I never would have gotten that exciting opportunity, except that I was willing to get out there and say, "This is what could be. And here's the opportunity." So I just the last 10 years have been so way more exciting than the prior 50 that I'm just excited, - I think What you have done in the last few years would have accelerated the thinking on the U.S. government site as to come out of the closet. And you've made this prediction, right? They're probably going to come out in the next couple of years with all the findings that they've done. I think what you've got within the within the government are two at the least two factions One faction doesn't want it to come out and they have any of a number of reasons why it shouldn't either good reasons or bad reasons things and criminalities that they're trying to hide.

And so there's basically liability that they want to protect themselves and then there's a faction that that I mostly work with That are like, "Okay, these ideas need to come out." I mean the number of individuals who've said that UAP are real everything from Heads of the CIA heads of the Defense Intelligence Agency heads of the NSA have come out and said it's real. Now what's interesting is that very few of them, Even though people who I know, know what it actually is. We just know that it's something. And or if they do know what it is, if somebody knows what it is, it's a very very small number of people. To me, again, it's you have these two factions that are working against each other.

and people say oh "Well, if there were actually a secret out there, then it would have leaked." It's the most leaked secret on the planet. so it's like, it's right in front of you. The only thing that the that the government has been better at is the disinformation and the ridicule that they have shrouded the entire subject matter in that leads even scientists in my field to want to ridicule it or giggle about it. - Do you think the agencies in Russia, China, or Europe would have found more things than the US government would have found? And do you think they might have been able to reverse engineer to a higher degree, anything that they would have found compared to maybe the Americans? Yeah, I mean, this is certainly not a U.S only phenomenon. I mean, to the extent that it is U.S.

it is only because whatever these things are seem to have an interest in our nuclear technology. Now, it doesn't mean that they're interested in nuclear technology. It just I mean, probably they have something more advanced. It just means that to the extent we have it, it's probably one of the few things that we could do to hurt them. Or at the very least to hurt each other.

And so they seem to have an intense interest in that. They seem to have an intense interest in our wars. And so they're again, maybe they're just interested in watching us and they're documenting what what the primitives are doing. But I'm sorry, what was the question again? I went off a little. Well, do you think the Chinese or the Europeans or even the Russians would have would have been able to reverse engineer? Well, we certainly know that they have it.

And so the Russians and the Chinese also have nuclear technology, obviously. And so to the extent that these things are following our nuclear technology, they would be following the others. There is no doubt that other governments have access to these things, because whatever they are, they seem to occasionally crash, which actually tells you something interesting. People will ask the question, "Oh, well, why are they crashing if they're so advanced?" Maybe that tells you something that whatever it is that they're using to travel is actually unstable, no matter how advanced they are. And so occasionally, something goes wrong.

I mean, there was the Varginha event in Brazil that the Brazilian government wandered off with the remains. I'm sure in Indonesia, there are things that might have come down. There's no reason to believe that they're only here. And so I mean, look, there's lots of smart people around the world. I mean, I was reading, I know when I was reading about predictions of what the world economies are going to be in the next 20, 30 years, I saw Indonesia was like at the very top, Number four.

Will happen. It's like, well, I mean, we hope for that to be the fourth largest by 2045 or 2050. And that just was like, wow. So you only get to those kinds of positions by being either economically smart, but also scientifically smart. And so someone's going to figure out how these things operate.

And now with AI, the next step is to be using AI to figure out what these things are, and how they do what they do. Garry, I know we're almost out of time, but I wanna ask you a question on religion. You've made reference to religion, right? And in religions, we refer to heavens and hells, angels and demons, right? As if they're dimensions beyond, and you've kind of put those in the context of the UFOs and UAP, talk about those. Well, I mean, so people when you say, well, maybe these things are inter-dimensionals and people will go, well, that's crazy. How do we know there's other dimensions? I said, well, religions have dealt with other dimensions forever.

I mean, where's heaven and hell? we point heaven is up and hell is down. Well, maybe, maybe it's there and there, right? In another dimension nearby. And Jacques Vallee has often talked about cultural reference points of what you see you put into the reference of your cultural abilities. So when we were very primitive, we believed in spirits in the forest and the things that we saw were the spirits. When we got a little bit more organized, they were the gods.

Some religions then decided there was only one god and that all the other gods were angels and demons. They were sort of subservient to the one in charge. And now we believe technology is God. So now it perhaps manifests itself as one of those things back there on my wall. And, but at every point in our history, it has shown itself in a way that says "You are not alone, that somebody else is here," but always just on the edge of belief, almost as if it's drawing out the smartest people, or the craziest.

Now you offer that as an opportunity for those who want to deride it. But it offers this opportunity of to, of to look to the edge of possibility. And so I think angels and demons are really often, I think they're just mischaracterizations of the intents of whatever these other things might be. So again, we, people want to think that there's one thing. I don't think that that makes sense.

I think there can be as many things as there are countries on this planet. maybe what we're, I often say that there's like a bit of a tension that seems to be at play between different factions of them. I mean, why should we expect them to all walk in a lock step to one command structure? Maybe there's multiple, over a hundred million years, there's plenty of time for disagreements, even amongst the immortals. And so I don't know. I think you have play with these ideas, Not because you're crazy, but because we still don't have an answer.

But by playing with those ideas in many ways, what you set yourself up for is to be the right scientist, approaching it scientifically and being ready for a possibility, because if you come down with it, that is only one thing, only one conclusion, and then you end up being wrong. You have to remanufacture your entire intellectual thought process to accommodate the next right thing. So what I always say is it's the data, not the conclusion. Get somebody else to believe and not just believe, but to agree with you that the data is real. And once you do that, then you can both talk about what the conclusion might be.

And you can throw around ideas, but by having that plasticity of thought, it actually enables you in every other arena of your life, in my mind. Last question, Garry. I know you gotta go. given that we've gotten these implicit messages from the aliens, that we might be on a moral precipice, and given the advent of AI that seems to be showing good results, are you optimistic about the future of humanity? I am. And in a small way, where AI has, in my lab, come to the rescue of a problem that we've created, the problem we created is we just made so much data, we don't even know what how to make sense of it.

And suddenly, the AI shows up in the nick of time, humanity always seems to put itself in a corner. And when push comes to shove, we find a way out of it. And that's why we're still here, after all this time. And so I do think that AI will help us, it's going to have to be very carefully shepherded. So that we use it properly, and for the benefit of as many as possible.

But I think many of the AI companies that are out there are open sourcing their models, making them available to everybody. And that is an extraordinary opportunity. I mean, like in Indonesia, I remember the guy who, when I was in Indonesia last year, we hired a guide who took us around Jakarta. And he told us about his history of where he came from, from a village, where he didn't have the opportunity in the village to learn, but he managed to make it to Jakarta to go to school. And that's what made him what he was that day, and was very very smart guy.

Imagine that we could give this to the children in in the outlying islands. And they don't have to go to Jakarta. they don't have to go to a city center, that education could be distributed. When I was at Google, just the other night, there was a startup that was being pitched. And their idea was to customize teaching for everybody, and customize teaching even for people who are autistic, who have learning disabilities, and that these AIs can be those mentors, and tutors.

And so if we could give that to everybody in Indonesia, what an amazing possibility. I mean, who couldn't want that? And the countries that pick it up first, are the ones that are going to win. They really will. That's my feeling. Thank you so much, Garry, for your time, and I hope to catch up with you someday over coffee or a meal.

Okay, next time you're in this area or I come that way. All right. Take care. That was Professor Garry Nolan from Stanford University. Thank you.