Last Podcast On The Left - UFOs in the UK: An Interview with Nick Pope

Episode Date: August 28, 2024

Summer Break is in full effect at LPN so this week Henry & Ed bring you a very special Side Stories dispatch from Contact in the Desert 2024 as the boys sit down with journalist and former civil servant for the UK Ministry of Defence from 1985 to 2006 - the "real Fox Mulder", Nick Pope joins the show to discuss his time handling the UFO phenomenon from the UK's military perspective, exactly what would happen if Aliens touched down on the lawn of Buckingham palace, bringing his unique expertise to Hollywood, and the first ever - Inside the Alien Studio. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

Hi, it's me Henry Zabrowski from last podcast in the left. We're here with Ed Larson. How you doing? Also from last podcast in the left. We are here at contact in the desert, one of the biggest UFO conferences in the world, if not the biggest. I feel like it has to be the biggest. It's one of the biggest.

There's bigger ones than this. I don't know, but I want to go to those because it's been fun. But we're here with a very special guest. I'm so glad that you're here. I've been reading your work and reading your words and hearing your mouth for many, many years. And it's very nice to see you in clothes sitting here in a conference room alive. Yes, it's really great. Clothes are good. I always come clothed. Clothes is honestly, if you were nude, I would just understand that's a part of your belief system. This is Nick Pope. He is a journalist, former civil servant that's like an author, and you worked for the UK Ministry of Defense at the UFO desk from 91 to 94.

Correct? Yes. Yeah. And that was man, 29 years ago. Yes. My gosh. Time flies. But yeah, my job there was basically to investigate the

sightings and assess any defense national security and safety of flight issues. This is very, very interesting. I want to get into all of this. Is someone else doing your job now? Officially, no, because the British government claimed that at the end of 2009, after having done this for nearly 50 years, they terminated the program.

But I've heard fairly reliable sources basically say, look, they're still in the game, someone's doing something. And what actually got really announced literally yesterday was that the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology is actually doing a study on how it would be announced if we find life beyond Earth. This actually fits into a bunch of questions we already had.

Yeah. Because I wanted to start first with a just straight up, you've been at Contact in the Desert every year. How much has it changed all over this like time period? Like in terms of just like UFO cons in general? Because you are like, you run the gamut of all of these various UFO cons. And what would you call it, anomalous thought conventions? Yeah, alternative belief.

Yeah. Yeah, though some conferences really just focus almost exclusively on UFOs. Yes. But even within that, some people say, exclusively on UFOs. Yes. But even within that, some people say, well, UFOs, what about alien abductions? What about crop circles? Things that people think are connected with this.

But some conferences are a little bit more new age. They get into kind of spirituality, consciousness, crystals, that kind of thing. There's some crystals here. There are some crystals here. Oh, there's some crystals. Pretty impressive ones. Absolutely. Very athletic looking 60 to 7 year old ladies losing their minds out there, man.

Loving it out there. They are like, this is their Mecca. This is their Mecca. This is a crazy like, have you ever been into like, does George Norrie get drunk in public? You know, I think that's classified information. I just want to know. I haven't seen him around. We were like, have you seen George? I was like, I haven't seen George yet. I want to see him.

Well, I can neither confirm nor deny. No, I haven't seen him yet either. I'm sure he's here somewhere, but you know, it's just huge. And I've been doing things myself. I've been doing some interviews. I've been doing a workshop where I did an Ask Me Anything. But you know, to answer your question, I think there's two things. Firstly, this event, Contact in the Desert, has steadily grown over the years. I mean, it is huge. I think one big media outlet called it the Woodstock of UFOs. Yeah. Lontideye. Great quote. But the other, the big change actually was that the conference used to be held at the Joshua Tree Retreat Center. So it was kind of literally contact in the desert,

not contact in the hotel by the desert. And the Joshua Tree Retreat Center is great. It's a brilliant place, really great atmosphere, but sometimes the air conditioning was a little cranky and when it went down the we began to lose some of the older people. Oh, for sure. Peeling over. I legitimately think it would probably kill a lot of the clientele here. I had to pick someone up off the floor earlier today. Why are you doing that? Well, because they passed out.

What? Really? Yeah. This, you know, we shouldn't even be talking about this. But yeah, someone, it was too hot. People aren't drinking their water. Right. Make sure we got plenty of water for you, Mr. Pope.

Yes. He's covered in water. Make sure that you had Voss and VP, so you have your options. But I live in Tucson. So you know what you're doing. I know about heat. And my wife, Elizabeth, she describes 70 degrees as freezing.

Oh, yeah, no, that's where I come from. That's me now. Usually with an expletive before it. Yes, blank, blank, that's blank freezing. Yeah. And I'm with her on that. I hate it when you go into hotel rooms and someone set the thermostat to like 65, 66.

The temperature, oh, it creeps. It used to be 68. Now I've noticed more and more it's like 66, 60. Well, we probably, this is not what you want to talk to me about. No, it's fine. I'll talk about this for the rest of the interview. This is my favorite because honestly, we you've talked about UFOs for a long time and we like our audience is super interested in this. But when you will get to the subject. When you worked at

the UK Ministry of Defense, you say you investigated sightings and like, what does that ent entail like when you investigate something like what was the process that you'd go through first you get all the information and you know date and time of sighting location direction in which it was seen description estimated high speed angle of elevation, prevailing meteorological conditions, all of that. And then you just start to kind of, well, first of all, you apply a bit of common sense

and say, look, we've been doing this since 1953, we've got huge databases, what does it sound like it might be? Because most of these things, of course, turn out to be misidentifications. Yeah, and a lot of balloons. Yeah. And so you do that.

But then in terms of the methodology, radar is a big part of a government UFO investigation. So you reach out to your Air Force colleagues and say, hey, let's get the radar tapes. government UFO investigation. So you reach out to your Air Force colleagues and say, hey, let's get the radar tapes. I'd like to check this location, this time, what have we got? So we do that. Then if we have a photo or a video,

I would go to the intelligence community imagery analysts, leverage their resources and capabilities and say what number one is this a real photo or has someone faked it? Yeah. Number two, if it's real, you know, what can you tell me about it? You know, and does it look what can you what information can you pull from? Yes. And sometimes if it's a picture at night of just a light in the sky, the answer is not very much. But if you have a daylight photo, particularly if you have some of the background in so that you can triangulate,

you can start to calculate distance from the lens, height, diameter, that sort of thing. And then you can look at the structure and say, well, look, how does it fly? Because a lot of these things don't have the conventional, no fuselage, wings, tail, engine. But is there something there that could tell you something about the aerodynamics,

the propulsion system, the energy source, that sort of thing? Well, now they just recently talked about there has been breakthrough in this concept of, quote unquote, propulsion-less travel using electricity where I guess the magnetize like the air underneath the plane wings. A guy explained it to me very thinly in an email, but I was as I was reading through, but it does seem like we're

kind of heading towards that direction where the technology or military is making certain to kind of look like UFOs and act like UFOs. Oh, yeah, and at any given time there will be things being developed and test flown that are somewhere between 10 and 20 years ahead of what's publicly announced and some of those things for sure look like they come out of a sci-fi movie. I mean, can you imagine for example a pilot who happens to see a B-2 stealth bomber back in, say, the early 80s before they were revealed, they would think, my gosh, that's a UFO.

I guess one of my big pushbacks with, like, I believe there's a mixture of all of it within the phenomenon, that there's technology that we don't understand. There's some nuts and bolts aliens that maybe that concept might be real, like UFOs visiting here, intermentionality, the idea that they are on top of us right now. I think it's all very interesting. But I wonder, like nowadays, like when the idea of the government making things that look like UFOs to act like UFOs or to to sort of ape that like

how long do you think that's been going on and why would you like they always say that they are seeing it over like cities or they're seeing in populated areas and why would they test top-secret technology in places where people would even be able to see it well partly that might be to see how those people react. It's a kind of test, as it were. But generally speaking, you're right, generally we don't test top secret equipment anywhere other than really remote areas, like Area 51, of course,

or areas out over the sea. Yeah, usually at night. Reason being, obviously, you don't want somebody in a city getting a great high resolution film or photograph, and then publishing it. And the next thing, you know, Chinese, or Russian or both in military intelligence, say, Hey, great, We've got everything we need. Thanks. Yeah, you know, that's the part we were missing. Those, please.

From your brain. How do you feel about like how the US Navy was kind of like now? There obviously was an influx of all of these reports and people seeing stuff, talking about how they've always saw stuff out in the deep ocean. Like, do you think that that could possibly be military tech that we're seeing? Like, because there's a little bit of this kind of cat and mouse game that we're doing with Russia and China. It does seem like it's kind of just playing out more so in the news than in real life.

I, I think you have it right when, when you say it's a mix of things. And in fact, in June 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published a preliminary assessment of the phenomenon. And they said, look, there is not a single answer to this that explains all of these things. There are different things going on in our skies and under our oceans.

Some of it absolutely will be sensor errors. Some of it will be our own tech. Some of it may be tech belonging to an adversary. And some of it may be something else. So I think all of those explanations, none of this is mutually exclusive. Now, when you're you're working you're investigating all these different Incidents how often is it doctored?

like how often is someone sitting there and like making a video on their computer and You know computer graphics and CGI and a UAP. Does that happen often? It does but not when, when I, I was doing that job for the government, we didn't get much of that. And we could tell, because of course we had, I mentioned intelligence community, imagery analysis experts and, and things we'd, people didn't try and hoax us much, probably because seriously they thought we would send

round the men in black or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And yeah, they might well have gotten a knock on their door, just like wasting police time is an offense. You don't want to mess around with us. And so that may be a factor. But more generally, with the civilian research community and just generally out there on the internet, absolutely. And of course, stating the obvious, AI is going to make that 100 times worse.

Oh, absolutely. Yes, much, much, much harder to discern what is real and what is not real? Yes, although I think that in a way it's like first you have a missile Then you have an anti missile then you have an anti anti missile Yeah way to tell whether something is AI or not is to develop an AI Program to answer that and then we're gonna have to get rid of that AI with them We're gonna have to hire Harrison Ford He's gonna have to do Blade Runner 9 and he's going to have to kill that AI. All he does is crash spaceships and airplanes in real life and in movies.

That's all he does. What was the attitude of the government when you were working for them? Like how did they treat you guys in the UFO department? Like I know like you know people call you the real Fox Mulder, which honestly must make you very excited. Yeah, no, that was that was fun. And and of course, life imitates art, art imitates life. Eventually, of course, I, I met David and Jillian and Chris Carter and Jillian say hello to you. Did she talk to you? Yeah, I think you know, I went to the I had been doing some

work I do some sometimes because of my government background on this, I do some spokesperson work on, on sci-fi movies and video games. Like consultants? Yeah, consultancy, spokesperson. Awesome. So I did some work on the second X-Files movie and I got to meet them all at the UK premiere of that.

So that was, that was fun. But yeah, how were we treated? Yeah, pretty, I mean, in one sense, I know this sounds crazy, and it isn't, but it was just another government job. Sure. But of course, when you walk down the corridors, people did whistle either the theme from The Twilight

Zone or The X-Files. Yeah, sure. But also, of course, complete strangers would come up to you and whisper to you in the canteen, is it true? Right? That's a lot of power. Have we got the aliens? Yeah.

It's been like, honestly, I'd probably be getting paid more. You can tell me. Yes. If there was an alien, I'd probably get a raise. Yeah. If you could maybe ask somebody else if there's aliens alien, I'd probably get a race. You can maybe ask somebody else if there's aliens, that'd be great. I have an interesting question that I just it occurred to me before this interview. You worked for the British government. What would happen if a

very public landing happened in the middle of Britain? Like what would you run a Buckingham Palace like a UFO lands, who gets the call, who investigates it would in the first instance probably have to be the ministry of defense because the first question from the prime minister downwards would be, is there a potential threat here? Yeah. And if there is, what could we do to mitigate that threat? So you could not have a situation where the Ministry of Defense was not involved at some level. Do you think that's an issue with all of this altogether, that all of the interest comes from our weapons, like, sections and our military sections?

Like, does that color how we view the entire phenomena? It does. And it's a very interesting question, because the answer to it is most countries that have run and are still running UFO programs embed those programs either in their DOD or in their military. France is the only country that I can think of offhand. They actually embed their UFO program

in their space agency. So it's a different model. And absolutely, of course, if scientists are leading it, it's done a very different way and there's a different mindset to if the military are doing it. Because with the military, the two questions are always, is it a threat?

And can we acquire some of this technology, whatever it is, and weaponize it and stop it getting into the hands of an adversary who might also weaponize it, which by the way explains a lot of the UFO secrecy. But to answer your question, it's interesting because it goes back to that point about the fact that the British government is now. But of course, it reads across into any number of other scenarios, including the kind of landing on the White House lawn or in front of Buckingham Palace. Because you feel like in America, we would choose like, we're like, all right, the rock,

you gotta go say hello to these aliens, they're looking for your autograph. Like, I feel like it would be a, that's what I imagine. It's like you have a General, that's what I might, in my imagination, it's like you have a general, the rock, Terrence Howard, they go down, they go talk to the aliens and that would be like a peaceful like society. Wait, we get, surely we get Morgan Friedman

because then he does the kind of announcement in those silky tones. Oh yes. And that's how we do. And he's- He came all the way from Zeta Reticulum. He's done it in movies, so maybe he'd do it from real. No, but look, in real life, first as I say, you would have to gather information,

find out very quickly, is there a threat? If there is, what could we do about it? But very, very quickly, your scenario that it happens in Britain The the British Prime Minister and if it was the US the president would have to address the nation Hopefully to reassure the people that everything's fine and and we saw Interestingly people would say how how would that look We have kind of a blueprint for it. It's funny, it's not a movie. It's in 1996, remember that Martian meteorite

that they found in Antarctica? Yes. And they thought, now they've kind of walked it back, but NASA thought at the time that it was evidence of fossilized but microbial life. President Clinton went out into the Rose Garden and he gave a speech and you can still see it in the archive and it's out there

and he said something like, ladies and gentlemen, one of the biggest and most profound questions that we can ask as humans has come a step closer to being answered. Subject to further scientific validation, we will move forward with this and this is very interesting. So we've got the blueprint of what it might look like. God, he must have taken Monica out on such a fun date that night because that's such

a fun time. I can't imagine, because I feel like it would be, I don't think it would cause panic anymore. I think at this point, it doesn't. Well, I just think that the, we were a little bit worried about sort of a religious panic. I know that that was like one big thing because we, there's the, especially in the US government, there's an evangelical stripe throughout our military. There is, and some of them think that the UFO phenomenon is demonic. Yes. And that therefore you shouldn't engage with it because engaging with it feeds it by giving energy. Yes and that's scary to them so they don't want to engage but then it came out of a

volcano and be demonic. Yes yeah it would be interesting but I also think that the way that information disseminated right now I don't know if people believe it. That's another really interesting thing. We are so divided politically that if the president was to say, my fellow Americans, people of the world, we are not alone, everyone who supports the other political party would say this is fake news. This is a false flag alien invasion They're gonna do a space patriot act take away our freedoms, you know, etc. But let me you said That you don't think people would panic these days and up until fairly recently. I went along with that I was very much well, you know Kind of war at the world's panic in the streets,

run for the hills, that's probably not. Let me play devil's advocate and say, two or three years ago, the world kind of lost its collective mind and we tried to shut down the world because of something that although it was new, it was not unanticipated. I'm talking of course about COVID. Yeah. And it's not like governments all around the world didn't have contingency plans for global pandemics. They did and they still do. And yet,

what happened? Everything in those contingency plans went out of the window nobody anticipated how society would be torn apart by Aggressive debates about masks vaccines lockdowns and other mandates and like I say We had a collective meltdown and tried to shut down the world. If we did that for something where we had the contingency plan and we've had pandemics before, I'm not so sure that there wouldn't be panic if suddenly we got up close and personal landing on the White House lawn aliens.

Also the truly unknowable thing about the human psyche is that I think you'd see patches of people like, let's say you had a full scale biological alien invasion. There'd be like chunks of people that would like be on the alien side. There'd be people that would be on the government side. There are people who not think that it's happening. This is an absolutely true story because I did some, I did some, I mentioned I worked on some movies. I had some involvement with and did some interviews about Independence Day.

When they did the test screeners of that, the bit where the White House got blown up, some people started cheering. I mean, yeah. So, so yeah, there is. Well, that guy, he's blowing up the White House in like four different movies. And the only thing that's been blown up and destroyed more than the White House is the Golden Gate Bridge. Every single it's been earthquakes, aliens, Godzilla. What am I forgetting? More? I don't know why. I think it's because of Rice-A-Roni.

That's the San Francisco snack. Yes. Do you think that if there was contact, like official contact, and people from another planet or aliens from another planet came here, do you think there's anything to be scared of? There might be. In a universe nearly 14 billion years old, there might be civilizations out there a billion years ahead of us. And as Arthur C. Clarke always said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And even if they come here with altruistic or neutral purposes, who's to say that something might go wrong, you know? Mars attacks is always my favorite when they release the birds.

But you know, they give us gifts of technology, and what's the first thing we're going to do with that technology? Weaponize it. And if it's technology a billion years ahead of anything we've got, well, heck, we crack this planet open like a nut. So yeah, there is potentially something to be concerned about. I think that's government looks at everything through the lens of two questions. What are the threats? What are the opportunities? Those questions would arise, do arise with UFOs

and would arise with first contact just the same as they would arise with anything else. Yeah, because if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Yeah. And that's what they want to do. Life from North Ray. After all these years of, of working in this, this industry, or I don't even know

what you call the school of thought. Has anything gotten clearer to you or just, cause I have found in just my time of reading that I describe myself as a Robert Anton Wilson across the board agnostic where I no longer fully believe in a single thing. Like you now, you do twice the amount that I have. What are you, where are you at now? What do you think's going on?

Some things have gotten clearer. I mean, if you think back to before that, that kind of groundbreaking New York Times article in December 2017, before that time, we didn't even know for sure that the US government had a program still looking at this. We knew that they had Project Blue Book back in the 50s and the 60s, but we didn't even know there was a program. Well, now at least people might not like what they say

or believe some of it, but we have now acknowledgement that there have been these programs. We know their names. We know the names of some of the people who ran them. We have some of the videos. We have those three F-18 forward-looking infrared videos that have been released. We have some declassified reports. NASA have done a study.

The Pentagon has done several reports. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has done reports. So yeah, we have more data. We also have outside organizations, like the Galileo project run by Professor Avi Loeb at Harvard, getting involved with this. He's doing crazy work.

He's doing great work. Because a few years ago, scientists and academics were afraid this was like a third rail. You didn't touch it. It was career suicide. Now you've got heavyweight, internationally renowned astrophysicists like Avi Loeb talking openly about this and openly researching and investigating it.

So we have moved forward. But of course, as is always the case, when you have more data, sometimes you just have more questions to new questions arise for sure. Yeah. You know, in science, you have to conduct experiments to find out if things are true or not, you know, it's like, so if you're not even conducting the experiment, then how are we supposed to ever be prepared if anything does happen? Exactly.

And we need more scientists in this because the scientific method, absolutely, particularly in terms of things like repeatability, of course, you know, does not arise with a lot of the data in the UFO field, but it needs to if this is to truly become mainstream. I mean, the subject has come out of the fringe and somewhat into the mainstream. One thing though is that does the subject hold up to the spotlight? Because that's the one issue I find as someone

who's also wanting to help push UFOs into the mainstream is that then you start to realize, oh, there's some stuff in here that is like either real crazy, it's hard for people to maybe wrap their brains around or there's some like weird stuff in the bottoms of ufology. That's like bad completely there. Look, let's make no bones about it.

There is some material that gets brought into the UFO field, which is just plain wrong. And there are some people who attach themselves to the subject who are kind of either, frankly, crazy, or just making it up for whatever reason. And there's a range of reasons. It could be financial, it could be attention seeking, it could be just the satisfaction of trying to put over

a practical joke on people. So- Well now people are, I think a lot of ufologists are just excited to party with Tom DeLong. Well, yeah. But that's why we need the scientific method in this field more than we currently have it. So we need more scientists involving themselves.

And we need also to apply, and you know, this is a failing, I think, in the system more generally, but we need better critical thinking in terms of things like locating and citing proper sources. Yes. You know, that would be my number one thing. Internet literacy, essentially. Exactly. Hey, I've found something on Internet literacy, essentially. Yeah, exactly.

Not, hey, I've found something on the internet, so it must be true. See, also I'm a person that, you know, I ironically embrace out their ideas, and then more and more as I get older, it starts to become something I get into. And also, that's the problem sometimes. I just like the weirdo ideas. But people should push back against it. And all of this, not all of it will stand up to the spotlight, to go back to your point.

And that's good, because if it doesn't stand up to scrutiny to the spotlight, throw it out. And then let's focus in on the things where we do have good data. The more we can throw out and say, you know what? We've, we've looked at that and it's wrong. We can eliminate it. It's like, it's like, I don't know, a crime like, you know, one of these movies where there's a murder and lots of suspects. Well, the more suspects you can eliminate, the closer you get to the real culprit.

Yeah, that's really honestly, this has been great. First of all, we've learned a lot From you you're a very intelligent man, but we're about to ruin it. Okay With our game it's like this is not there's like we just want to know more about you. Okay Yeah, this is this is plumbing the depths of your soul. Okay, um with inside the alien studio plumbing the depths of your soul. Okay. With Inside the Alien Studio. Okay. Inside the Alien, yes. And I don't know if you've ever seen James Lipton or not before, but we will do a bad impression of him. He's not assuming that you know or have seen James Lipton because you're also British. Okay, But okay. All right. What is your favorite word? Wife. Ooh, very nice.

She's not going to see this. What is your least favorite word? It's two or it's three or four is it closing time or the bar is closed I'm sorry sir the bar is closed no least least favorite word if it's a single word hate yeah yeah because everything else that's bad, war, torture, prejudice, you know, everything probably stems from hate. Yeah. So my least favorite word is plump. I'm husky. I hate that word. What turns you on? It doesn't have to be sexual. It doesn't have to be sexual. It's not just what makes you hard. Is it the Vosswater? What interests you? This is a question about fetishes. No, no. I am going to take this

question in the more general sense. Please. Although it does read across intelligence. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What turns you off? Closed mindedness. Yeah. Yeah.

I can see that. This is a fun one. All right. What is your favorite curse word? It's and I'm probably going to mispronounce it, but obviously one of the- Will help. Yeah, thank you.

It is the one, and I was only recently introduced to it because congressional representative Tim Burchett, who is very engaged in the UFO field, uses it. And it's a Southern one. It's the God damn it. Dumb it. God damn it. Maybe it's a slightly different.

God damn it. God. I think it's that one. It's very Yosemite Sam. Yes, that is. Yeah, it's that one. That's a very purely American expression. Next. expression. Yeah, but next, what sound do you love? I'm going to be very corny

again, please same theme. The sound of my wife's voice again. She I mean, you don't gotta suck up to her. She doesn't. What is your least favorite sound? Oh, that's easy. It is. It's the fingers on the chalkboard. And that's interesting. I don't know what neurologists, neuroscientists say about that

and why it is. I think it's to do with a crying baby. Yes. Evolutionary biologists have said it's hardwired into us to be alerted by that so that we can protect the babies. And there's something about that. Yeah, and I'm always trying to nurse the babies that I see crying outside, no one likes it.

Let me kind of qualify that. So my answer to the question is, is the fingers on the chalkboard, but a baby on a long haul flight, that was kind of that's the same thing. They should be kept in the hold. Yeah, that's what you can't do. Yeah, they should be underneath the plane. All right. What profession other than your own would you like to have? When I was a kid, I always wanted to be a cop.

Wow. And you know, if I had my time again and had to do something else, I think I'd be a cop. Oh, and I would, I would, I would want, you know, maybe I just watched too many TV shows, but I would want to, to then become a detective looking at the most serious of cases, the homicides. So I see you in like a Punisher shirt with the Oakley's and like the backwards trucker hat. I would be the guy who opens the door after closing it and says, just one last thing. One last thing, man. One of my favorites.

What is a profession you would not want to try? Probably anything that involves heights. So I don't think I would want to be a lineman. Yeah. You know, I mean, it's also considered the number one most dangerous job in America. Yeah. Not only is it heights, but it's cables. So it's kind of like a double whammy.

But yet you researched the thing with the most height. He's on the ground. I'm on the ground. So yeah, lineman, but also something else that I would not like It would would be like, you know sewage working. Yeah Septic yeah, someone's got to do it though smells fumes Stuff this is the last one. Okay, if heaven exists and God is there and when you enter into the pearly gates, what do you wish he or she would say to you

that is a hard one i i think um something like welcome nick you did good yeah that's all i want to hear as well yeah honestly henry you did well, you know, did you leave a good life? Because yeah, that would be it. That would encapsulate. He would know. You would know. It's all real. But it might just be total blackness. Yeah. Well, this has been great. Honestly, Nick Pope, this has been awesome. Thank you so much for having time with us. Is there anything else you want to plug? Is there any book or socials or anything you want to plug? You know, Anything else you want to plug? Is there any book or socials or anything you want to plug? You know, my website, for those that want to know a bit more about my background and

my work is nickpope.net. And my Twitter, just changed to X, might change back to Twitter because Elon's apparently thinking about that. That's the social media platform I use most and my handle there is a handle is at Nick Pope M.O.D. Which of course the M.O.D. is Ministry of Defense. Yes. At Nick Pope M.O.D. Absolutely will harass you on the Twitter. I'm saying Twitter. Yeah, I'm saying I don't care. You do what you want to go. I'm going back. Thank you, Mr. Pope. Thank you very much. It's been great chatting with you. It's been great chatting with you too.

And say hi to your wife Scully for us. I will do. Say hi to your wife for me.