transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] We are clearly on the cusp of a new paradigm, a paradigm shift. We live in this world that is simulation-like, I mean, our universe is simulation-like, but is actually at its source, at its fundament as far as we can go, is based on information. What it craves is data and information. The universe doesn't care whether the information that presents itself, the data that comes back to it is good or evil.

Speaker 2:
[00:42] Hi, everyone, and welcome back to That UFO Podcast. As always, my name is Andy, and a big welcome back to today's guest, Nick Cook. Nick, welcome.

Speaker 1:
[00:51] Thanks very much for having me on the show, Andy.

Speaker 2:
[00:54] Good to have you back. It's been a little while since you were last on, and when we spoke a couple of years ago now, we spoke about your book, which I mentioned in the introduction, The Hunt for Zero Point, always brought up by listeners as a kind of seminal book for many in the topic. And this time, we've got you here to talk about, among many things, the launch of the EXO Institute. And I was fortunate to attend the event now, back on April 7th, which seems like a lifetime ago, but as of recording was about two weeks in London. And a little shout out to our mutual friend Holly for helping arrange me getting an invite to that. It was at Ladbroke Hall. It was standing room only. And I mean, when I say standing room only, people were sat on the stairs going between the first and second floor. It was very little room to move. And that's probably a testament to what was being put together. But what I'd love to do is get you to explain about the new venture, about the EXO Institute, and take us back to what was the inception of the idea.

Speaker 1:
[01:50] Yeah, that's a really good question. And again, we were talking off camera. Thanks for coming. I mean, you came a long way to the launch of that. And it wasn't a conference either. It was a launch. So it was literally, it was a two-hour evening. So it was a long way to come just for that. So thank you very much indeed. The inception for it actually goes back quite a long way. And it's interesting when you piece it all together and you do that kind of retrospective, retrocausal thing, because at the time, none of it kind of lodged in my brain as a sort of causal chain. But anyway, I think this is sort of the whole inception of it. I used to work for a magazine called Jane's Defence Weekly. I worked there for many years. I was the aviation editor. And it was a fantastic job. Took me everywhere, got me into the Pentagon, Soviet Russia, great job. When I left, which was just after I wrote The Hunt for Zero Point, I did one last thing there, which was I decided that I needed to go and benchmark the science and technology base of the entire aerospace and defense sector prime contractor community. So all of those companies we heard of, Airbus, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Saab, Talis, you name it. There are nine big companies in the Western world that form the prime contractor community. And pretty much actually, I mean, I'm talking now 20 some years ago. No, a bit less than that. But when exactly 20 years ago, I started doing this thing. And that prime contractor community largely has not changed. The names are the same. So it was a big endeavor. I knew it was going to take probably a couple of years, and it was going to be my sort of swan song. I'd already decided I was going to leave and go on to other things. And anyway, so I started to undertake this exercise. And I got incredible access. I was dealing with the chief technology officers of those companies by and large. And bit by bit, I began to map these companies, what they were doing. And I was asking these CTOs to extrapolate out maybe 15, 20 years. What are you doing now in the science and technology realm that will still be relevant in 15, 20, maybe even 25 years plus? And so I amassed all of this data. Took me two or three years. I wrote it up in the magazine. And then in a sort of a bit of a download moment, after I'd done that, something quite significant came to me, which was that all of these companies, they look almost identical. They do almost identical stuff. They have technology that spans subsea to deep space. And they know everything in between. So, but one thing, so in addition to them all doing quite similar stuff, their sort of bread and butter was systems of systems knowledge. They knew about very, very complicated systems, how to build them, et cetera. And the download was, if they know this stuff, and if they've got all of this tech that spans subsea to interstellar space, they know about the planet. What's the problem that everyone is talking about, particularly 20 years ago? Well, they still are now, but it was beginning to be talked about, very much so 20 years ago, was climate change. So, I thought these companies can map systems changes within the earth, and they've got technology that can actually do something about it, and they're not using it. That's what my mapping exercise told me, that maybe, I don't know, 25% of their actual knowledge was being transposed into technology, which were aerospace and defence platforms and weapon systems. This seemed to me like a complete waste. So, I got all of these CTOs together, eight of the nine, in Washington DC in 2011, and we sat down at a panel, and I said to them, you guys have extraordinary technology. Have you got technology that can save the planet? They said, yes, we have, but there's a problem. I went, what? They said, well, our business model doesn't support that. We engage with governments, we don't engage with the commercial world where by and large, clean tech exists. So that initially signaled to me a problem. I worked with those companies for about some of those companies, including Lockheed Martin at the CTO level for best part of two or three years to try and adapt their business model to allow them to engage in markets that would support counter climate change technology and other global challenge technologies that would address global challenges like food and water security. Anyway, 2014 comes along, as I said, you'll have heard some of this, Andy, the other night. 2014 comes along, ISIS pops up, Russia annexes Crimea. I walk into Lockheed Martin's headquarters in Bethesda one morning expecting to go to work. It's like something's changed. There's a shimmer in the room. The bottom line is the message that comes across was, well, everything we've been doing in the last three years, Nick, that was a lot of fun, but actually now it's back to business as usual. Of course, business as usual is defense systems, weapons systems, blah, blah, blah. That was the first waypoint of this journey. There was unfinished business, between me and that sector. I knew that they could do stuff that would help the planet, but as I said the other night, the problem wasn't technology, it wasn't really even the business model. There wasn't a will to do this. There just wasn't. It was a problem of thinking and thought. That was point one. Then long story short, I became interested in consciousness. That was because I had already written a book, The Hunt for Zero Point, about what I thought of as terrestrial technologies that some people could confuse for a smidge, a small section of UFO sightings. I knew that wasn't the whole story. It was part of the story, but it wasn't the whole story. There had to be another explanation for it. So I started looking into consciousness, and about three years ago, those two worlds collided, they merged. One was, how can we seriously engage in global challenge solutions differently? Because that got stuck when I tried to do that 15 years ago. And is there some component in the consciousness story that cross-links with it? And that again sort of resulted in a download, which was, well, yeah, there is, because actually if the problem is stuck thinking, that is a problem of consciousness. And we need to, in order to fix these planetary problems, we need to get to the root of that thinking. And that requires an exploration of consciousness, which as many slash most people will know, is not something that is understood by science. Science does not understand where consciousness comes from. It just knows that we have it. So could we merge these two things? Yes, we can. We've got to change the way people think. How do we do that? We do that by looking at the current science paradigm. What do we see in the current science paradigm? We see a whole load of anomalies that don't fit within it. Near-death experiences, psychedelic entities, UFOs, ghosts, cryptids. All the things that mainstream science pooh-poohs throws away. We shouldn't be doing that. As I said in my talk the other night, Darwin didn't throw those anomalies away. He actually realized that the anomalies in nature were the things that bespoke a new paradigm, which actually resulted, of course, in his theory of evolution. We should be looking at the anomalies because the anomalies tell us something very profound about the current paradigm we exist in. And that paradigm, as we know, is the space-time paradigm and the quantum-mechanical paradigm, which informs our present scientific understanding and has done for the last 100 years or so. So all of that to say, sorry, very long-winded answer, but all of that to say, we are clearly on the cusp of a new paradigm, a paradigm shift. The mere fact that Congress is looking at UFOs, UAP, studying them seriously, the mere fact that the current administration in the US is talking about some kind of disclosure, opening up the UFO files, all of that stuff, signals to me, I think to many people, that we are on the cusp of something very different and very new. My interest with the EXO Institute is ensuring that we can capture that, the data that's been discarded for so long, and make it work in a new way that works on the current science paradigm, that works on the way we think and understanding of who we are, and therefore how we deal with real world global problems.

Speaker 2:
[12:48] Yeah. Really good introduction there. It gives me a lot of platforms to jump off of. You mentioned about changing how people think, and that was put up on the screen at the event, and that's important. But as you listed the various phenomena there, UFOs, cryptids, ghost, you can hear the mainstream and a lot of the public jumping off along the way. Different to people listening or watching this. And that's an issue, and I no doubt that's something that you're talking about, trying to address UFOs and like many other topics you touch on are rich in words and really lacking in action. So what's the action that you can actually bring to this? Because this is actually going to be a few questions I was going to ask. So let me kind of bundle them together and let you go off on it. It seems we've had a lot of groups, initiatives, institutes, foundations spring up over the last four or five years, particularly as the UFO topic has become more popular. And some fizzle out, some go on to do work, others fade away or disappear altogether. How does EXO change that and actually turn words into action? And what are some of those early things that you plan on actually doing? And this is before we even get into looking at the people involved, and maybe you want to bring some of those in as part of that.

Speaker 1:
[14:07] So, that, you're right, that question goes to the very heart of the issue and the problem. And for me, it is a problem of, it's a problem of communication and language. So all of the things you've just mentioned and I was talking about, you know, the anomalies, whether it's ghosts, cryptids, UFOs, you know, I come from, as I explained at the beginning, a really real world background. I couldn't have been more real world. You know, I was getting briefed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base on future projects. I was going to Edwards Air Force Base and getting briefed on, you know, very futuristic programs there and within the Pentagon itself and here in the MOD, blah-di-blah, incredibly real world, real world tech. But I'm not an engineer. I don't even have a science background. I have an arts background. So when I was sitting down with these program managers and they were trying to explain very advanced concepts to me, they were often using language that I understood it, but it wasn't clear. So I would always go back to them and go, hang on a second, you need to rewind the clock here and explain to me in very clear terms what you're talking about. Because if you can't communicate the arcane engineering concept that you're very steeped in and I'm not, then whatever we're trying to do here, which is communicate information is not going to work. They did. So I learned that lesson very early on when I was at Jane's Defence Weekly. I'm applying it here in EXO, which is I have had most fantastic conversations over the last five or six years, a little bit more perhaps since the New York Times 2017 story came out about the UFO units within the Pentagon being disclosed. I've had really, really fascinating conversations about that. But I've come with a certain level of knowledge, not much, a certain level. Much of it, I found baffling to begin with. Concepts that people were talking about very lucidly amongst themselves was pretty arcane to me, not clear at all. And even as I have acquired more knowledge going forward up to today, and a lot of that was in the consciousness sphere, I found it very hard to grasp some of those terms. And I thought, God, if I'm finding it hard to understand what people are talking about when it comes to the consciousness dimension, its relationship to anomalous phenomena and UFOs, then what are people who have never had this conversation making of this? Well, they're going to be scared by a country mile by it. And so that to me, the very thing that you brought up, when we mention all of these things, some of which, even in the UAP UFO sphere, dare not mention their names, ghosts, cryptids, high strangeness, all the other stuff that happens or happened at Skimwalker Ranch back in the day and now. And yet is patently a part of the phenomenon, whatever that is. So I realized that what was missing was a communications component with all of this. I had to, or we have to, in order to get this into the real world and to address real world problems and address the problem of thought that is the real sticking point in solving global problems. You've got to communicate all of this stuff clearly and without scaring people. And as you'll know from the other night, the sectors that we want to communicate to are the real world sectors that can make a difference. So that's government and policy. It is banking and finance, it's technology and it's business. All of us in EXO come from those backgrounds in some shape, way or form. And so before anything happens, we've got to be able to communicate what is being discussed in this world of ours. You know, talking about the world that we discuss in your podcast and others related to consciousness. We've got to discuss that meaningfully to people who have no conception of it, but who can move the dial if they feel minded to do so. And you'll know because you were there that we had two, I would say very significant people on Tuesday night on the 7th of April, who came from the real world community. We had Eric Hahn speaking in a personal capacity, from Morgan Stanley, the huge investment bank in New York. And we had Philip Lutman from Deloitte talking as well. You couldn't get two more grounded people, people whose business is in the real world of physical stuff, talking about why this is important and why we need to be thinking about it now before whatever it is that's coming bursts upon us. Because if it just bursts upon us, and this taps into the whole sort of the ontological shock thing that people talk about in relation to UFO disclosure, if it just bursts upon us, we're all going to run around sort of headless chickens. But if you're prepared for it, then you can actually do something about it. And what I was very gratified to hear when we assembled as EXO, that the speakers and panelists that we did a couple of weeks ago, that I think these people were able to bridge that gap, or at least they were starting to bridge that gap. So again, sorry, that's a long-winded answer, but I hope it gets to some part of your question.

Speaker 2:
[20:52] Yeah, no, it does. And you mentioned Philip and Eric, and like you say, very real-world grounded folks with huge backgrounds. And I imagine backgrounds that when they go back to those businesses and those worlds they deal with, they'll be laughed at, scoffed at by some of their colleagues. If they go and mention what I'm talking about, UFOs and things like that. Some of them perhaps not, but there's still that stigmatization. And just as an example, one of the listeners in the Discord just this morning shared an article The Guardian published last week. And they praised it was actually a little bit more serious and a bit more grounded. But then at the same time, around the same publication had a title, The President promised to spill the beans about little green men. Is that why the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency registered the domains aliens.gov and aliens.gov? And there's still that. In one hand, you've got some folks, journalists looking going, maybe we should treat this seriously. And other hand, you've got the little green men, the scoffing, the eyebrows, the eyes being rolled. And it was interesting to see because even having like Lee Berger talking about Home on a Lady, a potential new species of human and what that could entail, what that would mean for us.

Speaker 1:
[22:08] Non-human.

Speaker 2:
[22:09] Yeah, non-human, yeah. Sorry.

Speaker 1:
[22:11] But an intelligent species of non-human. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[22:15] Up beside, like you say, someone from Deloitte, someone from Morgan Stanley. And then on the other side, you've got Haki Missler, who was there discussing psi phenomena. And then perhaps you've got a doctor, Ia Whiteley, who perhaps bridges a little bit more between those areas of the phenomena, the strange, the more out there for some. And a grounded psychologist, someone who works with astronauts, pilots and, you know, really real world, serious things. So it was an interesting group. How do you then take that forward to become actionable? What is it actually happens in the coming weeks and early stages for the EXO Institute that there's results, that people who listen to this now and perhaps reach out to you and say, how can I help? How can I be involved? I'm always amazed there are some incredibly serious, intelligent, well-backed people who listen to this podcast, who maybe reach out to you. How does that then grow and become something?

Speaker 1:
[23:13] Well, I'll get to that in a second, but I just wanted to address the first part of your question. So yes, there is stigma still around all of this, and there's always going to be stigma about something as controversial as this. But all I can say is, is the stigma has dropped away phenomenally since I first started engaging in any of this. And anyone who's read The Hunt for Zero Point will know, and I was researching that in the mid to late 90s, and it came out in 2001 and 2002 in the US. I say in the book, I'm not sure when this book is published, I'm still going to have a job because it was so taboo what I was talking about. And that was in the quotes terrestrial aspect of the sort of the UFO phenomenon, top secret technology stuff. But it still mentioned things like anti-gravity and zero-point energy obviously, which were taboo. Scientists all over the net are talking about all of those things now. And whilst it might be taboo in certain circles, I have regular conversations with people in the aerospace and defence industry at a very senior level who are talking about all of that stuff too. So we need to be clear that yes, there is still stigma, but a lot of it has dropped away. I mean, I couldn't be having this conversation 10 years ago, let alone 20 years ago. Couldn't, I couldn't. So that's something. In terms of how do we grow all of this, we grow it, I think, in a way that takes the messages of all of this just very credibly into all of those sectors I was talking about. You know, Philip Lutman and Eric Hahn, in their own way, are having those conversations already. You know, Philip has put out an extraordinary paper, you can find it on LinkedIn, about black swan events. And one of those black swan events in his Deloitte paper was about runaway AI. The other was about UFO, NHI, non-human intelligence disclosure. Those were the two black swans he's discussing. So maybe I'm sure he's getting some pushback. But you know what? Not as much pushback as you were getting even a couple of years ago. So those are the sorts of conversations, that credible conversations that we are now having, we are going to go forward and have. We're going to take them in very targeted ways into the communities that we want, or we know can make a difference on those global challenges, tech, government, business and finance. To begin with, it's going to be small. We'll hold small briefing groups. I honestly expect some of those to be funded by organizations that want to know more about this stuff. Because as Eric has pointed out, if there is a new revolution in science coming, that's all to do with this. The thing that's going to follow that is a revolution in technology. I go back to the last time we had a real revolution in scientific thought, which was sort of earthquake-like, was 250 years ago when Nicholas Copernicus and Kepler and others realized that the universe didn't go around the earth. The earth actually went around the sun and blah-de-blah. That triggered a Copernican revolution, rightly named, that has spiraled and rippled right their way out into where we are now. In that space-time theory of Einstein is a direct descendant of that moment, 250 years ago. If you want to get ahead of the technology boom and the knowledge boom that's going to come from this new Copernican revolution, start doing it now. The lesson for me from Tuesday night was that some people, thank God, have seen that opportunity. Now, you could say, that's really mercenary. We're just going to have the same old problems all over again. This is all about money making. But actually, that's again, I think, where part of the education of EXO will come in, which is as woo as this sounds, if you go back to business as usual, just let's grab the money and make money for its own sake and for our own purposes, I don't think that's going to work. I think that the new Copernican Revolution is going to say, no, actually, consciousness is embedded in this. And unless there are some higher principles at work, consciousness is going to have a hand in how that transcends into the real world. And even as I'm saying this, I'm realizing that that sounds pretty out there, and it does. But again, it's studying the lessons of the past. For me, it's like, I've only been involved in the consciousness space for a decade, and I'm learning something new every single day about it. But one of the things I do know is that what we see in the world, what we think we see, what we touch, the physical world, is largely illusory, and that there are depth levels of reality behind what we see, which we need to understand. Getting to understand that and studying it in the round, as mainstream academia is going to have to do one of these days, is a part of all of this too. That's how we're going to move this forward, is by holding these very credentials, real-world briefings in these sectors. We'll hold conferences as well. We'll gather all of these people in rooms, and we will communicate, and out of communication will come action. I've no doubt about that, but we're taking it one step at a time.

Speaker 2:
[30:20] On the day, it was set against an interesting backdrop because that was the day where tensions between the US and Iran were particularly high, and there was a lot of chatter online, not just online rumors, but a lot of major accounts with links to business, finance, technology, military institutes, talking about the very real possibility of nuclear weapons being used by the US on Iran. It was a pretty scary time for a lot of people that particular day. I remember I was in a taxi speaking to the driver was from Somalia, and he was talking to me about it in the London kind of taxi, just how crazy it all sounded. He was worried, he was kind of half joking, but are we even going to be here tomorrow? You're then turning up to this event, and like you say, before we hit record, it was mentioned at the event. We're in a scary time. But you're alluding to, like you say, something that sounds a little out there, but a change in paradigm, a new way of thinking, a new technology, a new science. In some ways, that seems so far off because in so many ways, we seem very close to going back several hundred years. Whereas you seem to talk about as being on the cusp of leaping forward generations in technology. And it's such a fine line between both. How quickly do you see that sort of technological revolution, that new way of thinking coming into play because it seems it has to happen relatively quickly.

Speaker 1:
[31:51] Yeah, you're so right. I mean, it was the atmosphere two weeks ago when we held the event was extraordinary for the very reason you said. And as we were talking about before we came online, not only did we have the imminent threat of some kind of cataclysmic event in Iran and the Gulf in the offing with that deadline hanging over us, literally as we were at the event itself, but we also had four astronauts coming back from the moon who were talking and subsequently spoke when they came back about the extraordinary transcendent experience that was of coming back from the moon towards Earth, seeing the Earth hang there like a marble in space, how vulnerable it was, how beautiful it was, all the rest of it. So we had these two polar opposite images to hold in our minds and contend with. So to address your question, of course I've thought long and hard about this. I've written a series on Substack called The Outlier Series, and it's taken me the best part of probably about nine months now. But I've got one more to go. It's a 12-part series and it takes a new look at the overlap between the consciousness phenomenon and the UAP, UFO phenomenon. I'm annoyingly curious. So when people first said to me, well, of course the UFO phenomenon is in integrally bound up with consciousness, I go, why? It doesn't seem very logical to me. This was when I was very much into thinking that the UFO phenomenon was very much a nuts and bolts technology thing. Well, so let's have a look at that. That's what the Outlier series does. What I come back with after this exploration of the overlap between UFOs and consciousness is that we live in this world that is simulation like, I mean a universe that is simulation like, but is actually at its source, at its fundament as far as we can go, is based on information. I remember back in 2017, I was in New York and I was listening to Hal Puthoff and Jacques Vallee on stage, and Vallee was talking about UFOs being both a physical phenomenon and a psychic phenomenon, being both real and unreal. And I'm listening to him and thinking, how can that be? How can something be real and unreal? Well, the Outlier series unpacks that in very kind of forensic detail, because I'm annoyingly forensic, but coming back from my old sort of Jane's Defence Weekly days. And what it comes down to in the end for me, I mean, I'm not saying this is true, but this is the evidence as it presents itself to me, says that we live in a universe that is computational at its heart, in its sort of, in its makeup. It is a computational machine. It is a calculating machine. What it craves is data and information. And every node of consciousness, by which I mean every thing in the universe, is a node that both receives and supplies data from the source. So that what the universe is ultimately doing is acquiring knowledge from its own creation. You know, which is both a spiritual idea and also a technological idea. So we, and the other thing that it, what the evidence said to me was at its heart, the universe doesn't care whether the information that presents itself, the data that comes back to it, is good or evil. I mean, we make that distinction, and rightly so, but I don't think the universe does. To it, it's just data. So we reach a point like last Tuesday, Tuesday two weeks ago, where the universe, civilization, the world, can go one of two ways. It can go down a destruction path, whole world blows up, or it can go down a different path. I don't think ultimately the universe actually cares. We think it does because we're very anthropocentric. We think the universe cares about us because we're the most intelligent thing in the universe. So whatever that word is, solipsistic, it's all about us. But actually, I don't think the universe cares. To it, it's just data. If the earth blows up, there are plenty of other earths, there are plenty of other worlds out there in the universe that it can get data from. But if actually we get to a point where the alternative to cataclysm is a revolution, a whole new system of thought that comes from this other branch off point, well, that is really interesting data. That's a fantastic source of new information that the universe learns from, and like an AI, evolves and grows. I think that's what this is all about. I mean, weirdly, two weeks ago at our launch, we were almost faced with that very situation. It didn't happen, thank God. And the revolution hasn't happened yet. But I don't think we should be under any illusions. We're going to get to that point again, again, unless we change the way we think. And we often quote at EXO, there's that Einstein attributed quote that says, no problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it. We've got to do something about our consciousness if we're going to solve these problems. So yeah, there we are.

Speaker 2:
[38:52] You know, you talk about that, and I agree with how important we are in terms of the overall universe and you're a blip on a radar screen. And you're quoting Einstein. I'm going to talk about, you know, have you ever seen a show called Solar Opposites? It's the creators of Rick and Morty.

Speaker 1:
[39:07] No.

Speaker 2:
[39:08] No.

Speaker 1:
[39:08] I know about Rick and Morty, but I don't know about Solar Opposites.

Speaker 2:
[39:11] Solar Opposites is quite good. And they've got a concept in it, though, where, so you've got the world and you have these aliens who live in our world, they've crashed in this house. But in that house, they have, one of them has a pet project called The Wall, where they are capturing everyday humans and shrinking them down. And for a pet project, they put them into this huge big glass emporium. But episodes center sometimes just around what's happening in the wall where these humans who are bankers, mechanics, greengrocers, gardeners have been taken, and they've had to basically assimilate into this little world. And all these huge paradigm changing things happen to the people who have had to accept this is their reality now. They've been shrunk down, they live in this glass cage, but they've got society, they've got hierarchy, they've got their own ways of working. And the camera now and again, something so important will be happening in this world. Life changing for these people, but it'll cut to the character in the bedroom just picking their nose, or just kind of having a little look in the wall like, and it's just like, it's just a thing happening, and it takes that, oh my God, serious moment, a character you've followed for years is about to die, they're vacuuming their room. And that idea of your world is only as important as you think it is, or you experience it, and everything else goes on and moves on outside of it, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[40:34] Yeah, and I mean, that's, yeah, that is a beautiful, if comic, description of kind of how I'm seeing the universe, as I very long-windedly just tried to describe it. But yeah, that's kind of it in a nutshell. There is one more thing to say, which is a serious point, which is for all the data agnosticism, as I see it, about the universe, it doesn't care one way or the other, as long as it just gets this data, and it learns from it evolves and grows. For all of that, actually, that does not make us irrelevant. It actually makes what we do extremely relevant, because we have a choice. We have a value-based choice as to what we can do within this system. Do we either roll over and give into it and go, well, actually, you know what, if we live in a simulation, we're all just cogs in the machine, so why don't we all just give up? We have no agency. Well, no, I think we do have agency. In a religious context, that's what free will is. But actually, in a simulation-based context, we somehow have agency. We know through PSI experiments that intention can change the physical world. You can impact your physical world with your intention. We have agency. We have a choice. We can choose whether we are going to be good or evil. That, to a database system, is more interesting data. I think also, and one of the other things that the Outlier series tries to show, which I think, I hope, is of interest in the UAP sphere, is that, you know, we look at something. I mean, I like patterns. I enjoy trying to analyse patterns. You know, one of the patterns that really interests me in the UAP field is the trope. No, it's real. UFOs are attracted to nuclear installations and systems. You know, I came out of that reporting world that's of deep interest to me. And of course, it's demonstrably real. There's data going right the way back to 1945 and the first atomic bomb that shows there is an attractor there between nuclear stuff and UAP. So it's then very tempting to go, okay, because this is what the evidence seems to show, that these craft and their occupants are conducting surveillance and reconnaissance missions of our military installations because they see this new weapon, particularly as a threat and maybe a cosmic threat. You know, you can take this stuff out there and do real damage with nuclear weapons. And of course, the evidence seems to support that. You know, I watched Age of Disclosure, as I'm sure many of your viewers will have, and I see quite a persuasive case put out by those guys that what we are dealing with here is, in the UAP, the UFO phenomenon, is a potential threat, a big potential threat. And that may well be so, and I'm not dismissing it. But actually, if you try and look at the data in a different way, you go, well, what is it about nuclear systems that may attract? What else is it? Well, if you go a little deeper, what might it be? Well, what I sought to do in the Outlier series is look at what a nuclear system represents. And even things like nuclear command and control centers, they represent what I call threshold systems on the planet, where we teeter, they teeter between extreme chaos or entropy, and extreme coherence on the other side, harmony. And these systems teeter between the two. We see UFOs drawn a lot to what I would call those threshold events or event systems. Battlefields, for example, seem to attract these UFOs and such. But if we extend it a little further into other highly strange phenomena, like let's say a near-death experience, or where entities are seen, where someone, a person, is on the physical cusp of life and death, and you often get orbs or phantasms, ghost-like appearances, we see the same thing, which is a system, in this case, a human body on a threshold, a threshold between life and death. And so what I'm trying to just suggest, I'm not saying that this is an explanation for UFOs, but I just think we need to think wider than what is apparent to us. And in this particular case, I'm saying that these may be, UFOs may be events that are thrown at us by the informational substrate of the universe to do something. And that's the question, to do what? Why would an informational universe throw an orb up over a nuclear installation or over someone's deathbed? And I think again, possibly, let's entertain this thought at least, that it's to get the system, the data-driven system of the universe, to operate a little better or faster when it begins to slow. And when we get into situations that you were describing earlier, Andy, where we have a world teetering on the edge of nuclear annihilation, we quite often get, and I think most people would agree, we have had a growing number of reports around UFOs at these very consequential times. Is that because there are entities surveilling us at a time of high consequence, wanting to know what's going to happen or checking out our weapon systems? Or is it a response from the universe itself that is throwing things up to try and get us to think differently and to spin up the universe's own calculating properties into something faster and more coherent? I'm interested in those things. I'm interested in deeper patterns than simply the obvious ones, because they may suggest something entirely different, that the UFO phenomenon is not actually a threat from an alien species or multiple alien species. It could be that we are actually weirdly confronting some aspect of ourselves and that these things are mirroring to us our own innermost human, very human tendencies for extreme violence or extreme coherence and dare I say it, love. So yeah, I'm interested in deeper patterns.

Speaker 2:
[48:57] No, I like that. And I've often discussed the idea that, or I like the idea that the earth is a large way biological and are some UFOs or UAP, like antibodies being sent out to respond to a virus or an illness or a sickness. I suppose if you take that data driven idea and the universe at large, are some UFOs UAP an anti-virus software where it's correcting an issue, it's searching for bugs or something wrong with the program. I think many of us love the Matrix movies. I know I certainly love the three. I'll never acknowledge that fourth one again. But the idea you've got the agents and they're correcting issues in the software and those things like Neo, the one is wrong and it's interfering with everything. I think there's something to that and those ideas is a great way to explain it. We're going to touch on, you mentioned the age of disclosure in the current US political progress with the UFO in just a moment. But I want to ask one more thing really on the EXO Institute. When I sat there at the event, like you say, it was very fairly as a launch event, not a conference. Although some of the speakers certainly took their time and ran with it, which meant I had to leave a little bit early. But it was fascinating. There was no one I was bored to hear, which I would have just not said that if that wasn't the case. But it was really interesting hearing everyone speak and make their pitches about why they were there, what they can bring and what they think the Institute can really do and flourish with. But it reminded me of the Saul Foundation. I attended the Saul Symposium in Italy back in October. And when you have professionals, academics, military folks, scientists, thinkers, cosmologists, I think Saul Foundation, is that comparison fair? Is that something you thought of? And I wonder what are the key differences between a Saul Foundation and the EXO Institute?

Speaker 1:
[50:48] Well, the question is very fair. And the answer is, I think, I may be wrong, I don't want to speak for Saul, but I was there too in Italy and I really enjoyed it. I thought it was great. But for me, Saul is very much focused on UFOs and non-human intelligence and with a disclosure sort of dimension component to it. I think we're much broader than that. UFOs for us are a small component of a much bigger question, which is around the nature of reality and consciousness and the engagement with the global challenge piece. Something is wrong with the world. Patently, we know that because it was thrown full in our faces at the EXO Institute launch as we've been discussing. Something is wrong with the world. It's been wrong with the world for a long time because conflicts have been raging since time immemorial. They've got to a point though where they are so consequential because of the weapons we have, that they now threaten to destroy us. Are we going to allow that to happen or not? There is that side of EXO and it's very outward facing in that respect. So is SOL, but they are very outward facing, I think in a very targeted way when it comes to UAP and UFOs. We're much broader than that. I'm, you know, as we've discussed, I'm interested, and my colleagues are too, in broader patterns, deeper patterns. You know, what is it that makes up reality? What is it that, you know, consciousness is? Where does it come from? And how do those twin questions impact the world of science and vice versa? So I would say we're, you know, in general, we're just much broader than them. We have the same communications, the same communications component that Sol has. They're very much about communicating messages. We have that too. And that will be the certainly the initial activity of EXO. But it will morph over time into an action component, where, I mean, we would even at the launch, we were beginning to see that, as we've discussed already, you know, with two very real world organizations, not necessarily represented organizationally, but certainly by the people who are on stage, talking about how their world is already being impacted by these, you know, what many people would consider to be very esoteric concepts. They're not actually esoteric. They really affect the way we are and the way we think. And therefore, they get at the very heart of what it is that makes us human. And if she push comes to shove, that's really what EXO is fundamentally about. It is what is the essence of humanity and a human being? Because if we don't understand ourselves, and I would conjecture we don't. You know, I spent a lot of time 15 years ago, shortly before he died, with Ingo Swann, who was famous for being the CIA's chief psychic in the remote viewing programme. Ingo always said, we are, you know, the human being you see is a fraction of the potential that we actually are. And I think, and I, of course, agree with that. We wouldn't be able to do things like remote viewing. Hakim Isler wouldn't be able to do things like the Psy Games, unless there was more to us than, you know, mainstream academic science tells us there is, and mainstream biology tells us there is. We need to understand that side of ourselves if we're going to, if we're going to act responsibly in the world. And we need to, because if we don't, we're going to blow it, blow us all up. And the world will end. Is that what we want? No, I think we need to start with this more fundamental understanding of who we are. And if I sound like I'm straying out of, out of areas I know about, I am, absolutely, but in amongst all the other things that I do, I have been, I've been a novelist. I've written novels. I'm really interested in character and motivation and what makes someone tick. So, all of these questions have been very prevalent in my mind. But of course, we all want to know fundamentally who we are. It's the age old question, what am I doing here? I don't know that we'll ever answer that, and we're not setting out to necessarily, but we're on a journey where we want to really try to understand that, so that we can fix these problems, these very real world problems that we have.

Speaker 2:
[56:33] Yeah. Right now, there's nothing more real world than the conflicts going on, escalating conflicts that change not on a daily, but an hourly basis at the moment between Russia and Ukraine seems to have faded into the background because of the US and Iran situation. Israel and Lebanon thrown into that as well as part of it. It's all a bit messy, but alongside that and increasing fuel prices, groceries going up, people's daily cost of living, you then have like you see these out there concepts, let's just take UFOs being dragged into that conversation. And for good or for bad, it may not be the best backdrop that we wanted to have the UFO conversation, but you have the sitting US President Donald Trump saying regularly now at various events, we are going to drop information. He's instructed Secretary of War slash Defence, depending what it is, Pete Hegseth to, I don't think declassifies the word, but release information and videos pertaining to UFOs and UAP. What's your take on this right now that we seem to be on the cusp of new information being released from your background again, working with Jane's Defence Weekly, like you say quite rightly, and we have to hammer home. I think some folks might look at that. And on a high level, I probably did when I first was exposed to your work, Nick. Okay, he was an editor for a magazine. What does that mean? But like you say, you were given access to some really incredible places and very high level people in doing that job, and it's exposed you to a lot. So what's your take on where the US is right now and the release of UFO information coming?

Speaker 1:
[58:14] Yeah, I suppose just to get to that point and just to address what you were saying about my background. Of course, naturally, the defence world is very opaque to many people, and it should be because there's lots of secrets in there and military secrets, many of which, not all of which, many of which need to be kept secret from enemies and so forth. Yeah, I get that part. I always have. And I was fortunate enough not only to report on the upper levels of that world, but also to go into bits that have become mythologised. Like the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, for example. I was taken into their headquarters building and exposed to program managers. And whilst, of course, they weren't divulging state secrets to me necessarily, I was always skirting around, always having those conversations. So I wasn't ever, none of the stuff that's become mythologized around that is myth to me, because I experienced it. And I also experienced, I never interface directly with organizations, with ARRO, you know, the, whatever ARRO stands for these days. The...

Speaker 2:
[59:52] All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office.

Speaker 1:
[59:54] Thank you very much. You know, I came across organizations like ARRO all the time. And if there's one thing I understand about ARRO, is that we really should not take at face value anything that it puts out, because it has its own agenda. And, you know, as others have said, it seems to be a clearinghouse for all kinds of things, you know, one of which is to sift out, you know, whistleblowers and, sort of, kind of get to them before they bring their message to the world. So I don't have huge high confidence, particularly if Arrow is involved, that what we're going to see is going to be particularly revelatory. What I am hopeful of, though, is that it will advance the conversation. Curiously, I think other things looming on the horizon are going to be more impactful, probably, than whatever files are released under Hegseth's order. One of which I would, or foremost among them, I would put Spielberg's new Disclosure Day movie. The way that is going to impact culture, potentially, is probably more, is going to be more impactful than whatever comes out of Arrow's office when it comes to releasing UFO information. But as I said just now, having said that, every increment helps. When I look back, I cannot believe how far we have come, particularly since The New York Times 2017 story. Like I said, I'm holding conversations all the time with people in the very world, the aerospace and defence world, that I wouldn't have dared hold a conversation like this with a decade ago, let alone 20. So I'm not unhopeful. I'm very hopeful that actually the shift, the tilt is coming. But I just don't think we should pin our hopes on whatever it is that Hegseth and Trump are talking about.

Speaker 2:
[62:16] We're both UK based here, so a unique position for me to ask this, because so many of my guests are from the United States or North America. Why do we seem so far behind in this conversation? And again, from your own particular unique expertise and exposure to the people you speak to, it seems like in the US, they're much more loose lipped and happy to have these discussions at various levels, but in the UK, it's far quieter.

Speaker 1:
[62:41] Well, I think the short answer to that is that the US has always been like that. And that was always my experience as a senior editor at Jane's Defence Weekly, was I used to go to the States a lot. In fact, I spent most of my time in the States because they were so much more open about things which were in that gray zone of classification, where the UK would just classify it willy nilly or not talk about it. The Americans were far more open about that stuff. They knew where, and this is partly because of the special access program of classification in the US. People knew absolutely where they could go up to information-wise and no further. We don't have that system in the UK. We have an Official Secrets Act, which is much more umbrella-like. People were much more reticent about talking about the things that I spoke to program managers about in the US, particularly around the stealth era, which was a big investigation topic for me and my colleagues. I could get a lot of stuff out of the Americans about it when it was declassified. I struggled to do that in the UK. We should make a distinction between what is actually going on and what is being talked about. I think the UK is all across this. I think it is absolutely across it. But as I discovered all those years ago, and I think as is very typically Brit, we just are much more subtle about talking about it and exposing what we know. When I was researching The Hunt for Zero Point, I would occasionally run into people whose government people whose background I could not quite explain. But they were as interested in that stuff then, this is 25 years ago plus, as I was and they were just an awful lot more subtle about it.

Speaker 2:
[65:06] I know for a fact there's politicians in the UK who are quite interested in this, but will not dare talk about it. They don't want to talk about it publicly. They just don't go there. There's no hint of a, yeah, I'll give you a comment, a quote or even to journalists. They just don't want to do it because they see it as the end of their career politically in the UK, as soon as they mention UFOs. I think the only mention we had in the last couple of years was, I can't remember, I think it was House of Parliament and was it Baroness Woolsey was asked about it by a gentleman around, our colleagues in the United States are having hearings and it might have been around the grush time. She laughed at it and said, I can quite assure you our skies are perfectly safe and there's no little green men and it was all laughed at and that was it, it was moved on from. That's about as far as we get politically in the UK with us.

Speaker 1:
[65:55] Yeah, I mean, we should make a distinction there as well between what I call the surface political stuff and then there's the deeper levels of knowledge. And again, when I was at Jane's, I was very interested in the so-called special relationship between the US and the UK. And it was often talked about during moments of political tension and crisis. Oh, the special relationship is broken. Thatcher and Reagan aren't talking to each other anymore, whatever it happened to be. And we all knew that was bullshit because the political dimension was just surface froth. It's what goes on at the deeper level was the connections that were important. And I got a real sense of that, funny enough, when I was doing the stealth story back in the 90s, and I was confronted by one day a stencil on the side of a stealth fighter that said, Squadron Leader Graham Wardell on it. And to my knowledge, when I saw this photograph, I thought, there has been no officially disclosed RAF component on the stealth fighter program. And when I looked into it, what I found was, because the thing I knew about the special relationship was that you as the UK junior partner, you've got to bring some very serious knowledge to the US in order for the US to be interested in having a relationship at that level, whether it's nuclear, satellite surveillance or special forces. The one thing I didn't, I knew that America was way ahead of in was stealth. So why are we on this stealth fighter program with a pilot? Well, when I dug into it, I found that we knew lots of stuff about stealth, going way back to the Second World War. And in 1960, we packaged all of this information up into an official report and we handed it to the Americans. And that was our entry ticket. All of those decades ago into stealth. And so, you know, I think be under no illusion. Whatever the US says, it is exchanging information with the UK, you know, at quite a, I would say probably quite a significant level. That may be slowing down under Trump, who has a deep suspicion of America's NATO allies. But I suspect that the special relationship is stronger, even now, than that Trump-Hegseth, you know, thing that's going on at the surface.

Speaker 2:
[68:46] Yeah, I wouldn't doubt that. And I really need to get your thoughts before you head off. And it's a subject I've been rested in to talk about too much. But these scientists and military figures who have gone missing, it started in the news with General Neil McCasland going missing, his links to Tom DeLong, going back to those WikiLeaks e-mails, him being the guy who has briefed DeLong and others on the UFO topic. He even putting that to the side as someone who would know some of those key major secrets of the United States military, how it works in the nuclear programmes and different propulsions. We've now branched out to people before and after that, going missing, turning up dead or worse. What's your take on this situation? Is it linked? It's difficult to talk about because it's a very sensitive area.

Speaker 1:
[69:39] Yeah. Again, I've been a bit agnostic on it and I'll probably be quite agnostic on it now because I just don't think the data, I mean, sorry, I don't need to put it in those very cold, prosaic terms. But I don't think the data is clear yet. Like you, I've seen these beautifully put together org charts online, which talk about the connections between all of these various missing scientists. Those connections are very real. You can see that. But the question is, how significant are they? And I'm not sure that that's entirely clear yet. Older viewers may remember that back in the 80s and 90s, there were a spate of deaths here in the UK amongst scientists who were connected to the Strategic Defence Initiative. And they were killed. I mean, I'm not going to kill them. Yeah, there were. There were murders, there were deaths, there were suicides, you know, and there were a lot of them. I mean, I can't remember how many there were now. They were all connected to, or a lot of them were connected to GC. Marconi. GC. Marconi was a huge company. And when you get tens of thousands of people in a company, you will get spikes in data and patterns that seem significant and may not be. And I'm not saying now that there wasn't a problem then, and there isn't a problem now. There may very well be, because when you get someone like Neil McCaslin go missing, a general with profound knowledge of the whole UFO UAP situation, you have got to wonder what is going on. I saw this just post The Hunt for Zero Point. When I researched The Hunt for Zero Point, I became very interested in a scientist who was working in the anti-gravity field called Dr. Ning Li. And she was working out of the University of Alabama at Huntsville, was demonstrating apparently these sort of weightless experiments and anti-gravity results. Then shortly after the book came out, she disappeared. She disappeared for a decade and a half. I don't know. Just after she got a contract from US Army Missile Command for half a million dollars to go and research stuff. You don't give out half a million dollars as US Army Missile Command unless there's something serious to be investigated there. Then she disappears. I know that people do vanish. They do disappear because they are working on sensitive stuff. But I'm not far enough into the data yet to be able to say with any conviction to myself or let alone anyone else, that this bespeaks a conspiracy yet.

Speaker 2:
[73:02] Yeah, that's not unfair. I've tried to come down on that area as well. I know a lot of people looking at the Amy Esquidge story again, and her father's been online talking about his daughter and her death, and he wants it left alone. You've got to respect that's a parent who's obviously gone through a lot when she did die several years ago now. To see that brought up in the realms of conspiracy and everything else must be difficult for him, regardless of what may or may not be have happened. It's a sensitive subject, there are connections there, but like you say, how strong or how loose those are remain to be seen at this moment. But listen, Nick, you've been great with your time, and I just want to wrap up by asking you about the EXO Institute and what happens now, because like I say, there will be people who reach out to me and yourself to say, how can I help? Do you even want at this point people's help? What does that look like now going forward?

Speaker 1:
[73:53] Well, thank you, and as I said, as we said, on the night, we are as interested in the experiences of people who've had anomalous experiences as we are about that interface with the real world. I'm very mindful that the experience of data has largely been neglected by mainstream academia because it is all the things that mainstream academia hates, which is non-repeatable or a lot of it is non-repeatable, and that makes it hard to verify and all the rest of it. What we see at EXO, we see patterns in that. We see the very real experiences that people have are at once uplifting and disturbing. They can be an anything in between. So we're interested in that. We're young, we're not hugely staffed, we're under resourced. We're all of those things that organizations and institutions are when they start. But in time we'll grow, and I hope that we will be able to be an organization that people of all stripes and all experiences can reach out to, because we're interested in that data and how we communicate that data to people who can make a difference and fix those real world problems. So short answer is, yeah, we have a website www.exoinstitute.io. I have a sub stack column where I talk about all of these things. And so there are channels that you can, I'm on Instagram as well. So there are channels that you can reach out to me on, and there are channels you can reach out to EXO Institute on. And if we're slow in getting to you, I apologize now because we said we don't have the resources yet to get to everyone as quickly as I'd like, but we will try to in time. So we're interested in anyone who feels that they can help and make a difference in the world that I'm talking about.

Speaker 2:
[76:24] Excellent. And you mentioned Hakim Isler earlier, just in the last 24 hours, Hakim is in touch with me and he'll be coming on the podcast in the coming weeks to discuss his work, his part in what you're doing, but also that Sai phenomena and his role in that too. So I look forward to speaking to Hakim, as he really interested me, as did all the guests on the night at the EXO Institute. So Nick, thank you for your time and very best of luck going forward.

Speaker 1:
[76:47] Thanks Andy. Really appreciate it. Great to be on the show.