Latest / INSPIRE STORY / #092 _STORY INSPIRE: Decisions that transforman with Dean Radin

Transcript

#092 _STORY INSPIRE: Decisions that transforman with Dean Radin · INSPIRE STORY

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: The Joe Rogan Experience.
• 0:06
  Speaker 2: Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
• 0:09
  Thank you for being here. Good to be here. I'm
• 0:14
  excited to talk to you. Did you maybe manifest this
• 0:18
  conversation somehow?
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: Maybe.
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: I've seen a bunch of your talks online. First of all,
• 0:28
  let's start from the beginning. What is your background?
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: I thought I'd give you a 45-year arc in about
• 0:38
  three minutes.
• 0:39
  Speaker 2: Perfect.
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: Because then there's a lot of places you can get
• 0:41
  into it. So I started out as a musician, violin,
• 0:46
  up until about halfway through college. And then I realized
• 0:50
  to be a musician means you have to be an
• 0:52
  athlete because you're making your living with your body. No
• 0:56
  one told me that up through until I finally decided
• 1:00
  I don't think I want to make my living with
• 1:01
  my body. Because I've never been very strong. And more importantly,
• 1:05
  you also need to have a lot of stamina. And
• 1:07
  I didn't have that.
• 1:08
  Speaker 2: And you weren't interested in gaining it?
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: I couldn't. I have a genetic mutation that creates it.
• 1:17
  Like most people, when they exercise, you feel really good afterwards.
• 1:20
  I feel really exhausted. And I never understood why until
• 1:24
  many years later I realized that I have something called
• 1:27
  Gilbert syndrome, which is a mutation of a liver enzyme.
• 1:31
  And you have no recovery time.
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: Whoa.
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: Is there anything they can do for that?
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: Other than something like genetic engineering, which I've never heard
• 1:41
  anybody try yet, the answer is no.
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: I've never heard of that condition before, I don't think.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah. There's some missing enzymes, and more importantly, the bilirubin,
• 1:51
  which is unconjugated bilirubin. You have way too much of it.
• 1:56
  So there's an upside and a downside. The downside is
• 1:58
  that you can't recover from exercise quickly. So there's a
• 2:02
  lot of fatigue that happens. The upside is that unconjugated
• 2:06
  bilirubin is an antioxidant. It's one of the most natural antioxidant.
• 2:13
  So my cardiovascular system is like a 20-year-old. Oh.
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: So you got your pros and your cons with this. Yeah.
• 2:21
  Have you ever tried exercising in very small doses? Like
• 2:26
  throughout the day?
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: Well, I walk every day. So that's my primary exercise.
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: That's always great exercise.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: If I walk too fast, too hard, I will feel
• 2:36
  it for the next three or four days.
• 2:38
  Speaker 2: Wow. So too fast, too hard, too long? Yeah. So
• 2:43
  what if you do like two push-ups and then just
• 2:46
  do two push-ups like four hours later and then two
• 2:48
  push-ups like four hours later?
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, I can do that.
• 2:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: I can do seven push-ups.
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe that's the move. Maybe the move is just
• 2:56
  make yourself do things very lightly throughout the day just
• 2:59
  to keep your bone mass and all that good stuff
• 3:03
  that we lose when we get older. Yeah. But it
• 3:07
  sounds like there's a pro. The cardiovascular benefit is pretty sweet. Yeah.
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: So when you get to a certain age, your doctor says,
• 3:14
  let's take a cardiac calcium scan to see what your
• 3:20
  artery is doing. And the range is from zero. So
• 3:23
  they don't see anything in there. Up to 100 where
• 3:25
  you're basically about to die. So my doctor does do
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  that because your cholesterol is like off. It's way too high.
• 3:35
  And I have zero.
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: Oh, wow.
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  Speaker 1: And so he said, well, how could you have zero?
• 3:40
  Because I'm 74. I should not be zero, but I do.
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  And it's because of this.
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  Speaker 2: You look really good for 74.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: Thank you.
• 3:47
  Speaker 2: You do. You look like maybe 15, 20 years younger
• 3:51
  than you're supposed to look.
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So that's the other advantage of this particular mutation
• 3:57
  is longevity.
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: Damn, son. Well, that's good. There's a positive to it.
• 4:02
  So violinists, can I ask you this? Totally unrelated. What
• 4:05
  is the difference between a violin and a fiddle?
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: Well, a violin is a career track towards concert violinist.
• 4:13
  So classical music.
• 4:15
  Speaker 2: So it's how you play it?
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: It's partially how you play it, but it's mostly about
• 4:20
  the nature of the music that you're playing.
• 4:22
  Speaker 2: So is it just how it's referred in different cultures?
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  Like in southern music, it would be a fiddle.
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: It's also style. It's style, and it's also the intonation.
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  Like if you did like I did, I transitioned from
• 4:36
  classical violin, when I knew I wasn't going to do
• 4:38
  that as a career, into bluegrass, fiddle, and banjo. So
• 4:43
  I actually ended up playing 25 years, the last five
• 4:46
  years being bluegrass. And so there, I actually had to
• 4:50
  learn not to play– that well. It sounds better for
• 4:56
  bluegrass if you're a little bit off tune and you're
• 4:59
  not holding it right.
• 5:00
  Speaker 2: And it's... Authentic. Yes. Scratchy. Yes. Something to it.
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  Speaker 1: So in fact, in graduate school, I was in the
• 5:07
  competition for the Illinois State Fiddler Contest. And so I
• 5:12
  was probably 25 or something at the time. And Alison
• 5:17
  Krauss was like a teenager and she was in the
• 5:20
  same competition And I lost miserably. And she was incredible,
• 5:25
  even at that time.
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  Speaker 2: Who is she?
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  Speaker 1: Alison Krauss.
• 5:28
  Speaker 2: I don't know who she is. Sorry.
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: Do you know who she is, Jamie?
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  Speaker 2: Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: She's a very, very well-known, somewhere between country singer, but
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  she plays the violin and the fiddle and has a
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  fantastic voice.
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  Speaker 2: I'm out of the loop. I'm sorry. Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: If you heard one of her songs, I'm sure you
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  would know it.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, if you made me name a fiddler, I would
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  say Well, The Devil Went Down to Georgia was the
• 5:55
  first time America really understood popular culture. The fiddle got introduced.
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  Is that fair to say? Yeah. For a lot of people,
• 6:05
  that song, the Charlie Daniels Jr. song, that's the fiddle.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah.
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  Speaker 2: Is that good?
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  Speaker 1: Well, yeah, it's pretty good. It's a little bit like
• 6:14
  fiddle on steroids, but yeah.
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  Speaker 2: But I mean like as a fiddler, do you hear
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  that or is it like? only for the unwashed masses
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  that think that's good.
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  Speaker 1: No, no, no. It's good.
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  Speaker 2: Okay. Fiddling. Yeah. Yeah.
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: It's fiddling around.
• 6:27
  Speaker 2: It's a beautiful instrument. Sorry for the sidetrack. So, um, okay.
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: So I, I did that for, for 20 years or so.
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  And then in the middle of college, I decided, I
• 6:37
  think I want to get a job where I could
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  use my mind instead of my body. So I switched
• 6:42
  into electrical engineering. Uh, why? Because I like to take
• 6:45
  stuff apart and I, I used to make things in
• 6:48
  high school. Uh, So then I didn't know what I
• 6:52
  wanted to do after I got my degree, so I
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  went on to get a master's in electrical engineering. And
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  then I didn't want to be an electrical engineer anymore,
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  so I got a PhD in experimental psychology. And so
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  it sounds like flipping back and forth between lots of
• 7:06
  different things, and it kind of is. But you'll see
• 7:09
  that my career is a little bit like a game
• 7:12
  show in that you're presented with this is what you
• 7:15
  could do, like forever, or you can choose door number two.
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  And I almost always chose door number two because I
• 7:23
  would do this for a while and say, I sort
• 7:25
  of understand that now. I want to do something different.
• 7:28
  Door number two. So as a senior in college, I
• 7:34
  learned about this place called the Institute of Noetic Sciences,
• 7:37
  which was started by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who
• 7:41
  was the sixth man on the moon. And on the
• 7:44
  way back to the Earth, he had a mystical experience.
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  And so today, a lot of people who go into
• 7:49
  space talk about the overview effect. And he was one
• 7:52
  of the first to talk about it openly, even though
• 7:55
  all of the other astronauts had it. It expresses itself
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  in different ways. So people generally will turn from whatever
• 8:03
  they were, it's a transformative experience, and they become different.
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  And so in his way of expressing that after the
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  mystical experience and thinking what in the world is that,
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  because he felt one with the universe literally, he decided
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  to create this institute that would study what he had
• 8:22
  been studying for outer space, but for inner space, to
• 8:26
  explore inner space. So I remember in college reading about
• 8:29
  this new institute, and their motto was exploring the frontiers
• 8:34
  of consciousness. And I thought, that sounds like something I
• 8:39
  want to do. But there wasn't any place to do
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  that other than this one institute. So I always had
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  in the back of my mind That's where I want
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  to end up.
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  Speaker 2: What is that term, noetic? I know I've heard it before,
• 8:51
  but I never looked it up. Noetic.
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: So noetic is a feeling of intuition except that it
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  carries a sense of certainty that the intuition is correct.
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  So intuition is knowing something without knowing how you know it.
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  It just sort of arrives. But it's knowing with certainty.
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  And more often than not, the certainty is correct. So
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  people talk about downloads and meditation and other places. That's
• 9:18
  what that is.
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  Speaker 2: This is a subject that up until I would say
• 9:24
  the last couple decades was pretty openly dismissed by rational people, right?
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  There's almost like a desire to dismiss it, like a
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  desire to define the world in much clearer terms. Where
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  it's maybe ego-driven. You're in control of your own destiny
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  and then there are certain factors that are out of
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  your control and just this is how it is and
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  this is life. Deal with it. And all this mystical
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  woo-woo magic bullshit that people have been talking about for
• 9:53
  some strange reason for thousands of years, we just dismiss
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  and we dismiss it under. the narrative of science we're
• 10:02
  talking about science we're science people we want data but
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  there is data that's what's weird and if you're willing
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  to look a little preposterous which I certainly am I
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  think it's a good thing to do every now and
• 10:14
  then take a fucking chance and try to figure out
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  if the world is exactly constructed the way you've been told.
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  Because it might not be. There might be some weirdness
• 10:26
  to it all. And it seems like we all agree.
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  We all agree there is some weirdness. You could chalk
• 10:32
  it off to coincidence when you think about a person
• 10:35
  and you haven't thought about them forever and all of
• 10:36
  a sudden they call you. There's some weirdness in the world.
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  There's some weirdness in the world like knowing not to
• 10:43
  do something and then something happens. There's some weirdness in
• 10:47
  knowing something is going to happen and you ignore that
• 10:49
  feeling and then something terrible happens. You're like, fuck, I
• 10:52
  knew I shouldn't have gone there. There's weirdness in the
• 10:56
  world and it's not necessarily just pattern recognition and understanding
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  scenarios because you've experienced them before. There's something to that too.
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  That's part of it too. But there's also something else.
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  There's some weird connection that people have. There's a thing
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  that when you know someone's mad at you and they
• 11:14
  don't say anything, you're like, what is this fucking weird
• 11:16
  energy I'm getting off this guy? There's some stuff we're
• 11:19
  experiencing in the world that you can't put on a scale.
• 11:22
  You can't put a tape measure to it. You can't
• 11:26
  measure its density, but it's there. There's something. And we
• 11:30
  have a very limited amount of senses in terms of
• 11:33
  our ability to see, feel, touch, smell. It's not enough.
• 11:38
  There's probably some other stuff out there. We don't have
• 11:40
  the tools to measure, but it impacts us.
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  Speaker 1: But we do have the tools to measure. So that's
• 11:45
  what attracted me to the rest of my career. Because
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  exactly for the same reason you just said, that people
• 11:51
  have experiences. Oftentimes they feel pretty strange. And so they
• 11:55
  start looking for, well, what is that? So if you
• 11:58
  go to a conventional science spokesperson, they will echo back
• 12:03
  exactly what you're saying. It's coincidence. It's frailty of memory,
• 12:07
  all of that stuff. But I learned early on, even
• 12:11
  in college, that there is a branch of science that
• 12:15
  has studied these things. I mean, it's been going on
• 12:18
  since the late 1800s that the scientists have been interested
• 12:21
  in these kinds of phenomena. And science is really, really
• 12:24
  good at taking even strange subjective experiences and figuring out
• 12:28
  is that a coincidence or is that– what is that?
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  Is it real? That attracted me. So– and it partially
• 12:36
  came out of reading a lot of science fiction. So
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  your science fiction is saturated with these kinds of stories
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  where the element of the story is revolving around some
• 12:45
  kind of psychic or noetic thing.
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  Speaker 2: The force. Yeah. Classically.
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: The force in Dune, the series, Frank Herbert's Dune series,
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  the whole thing about spice. Why did they have to
• 12:57
  take spice? Because that's the only way you can navigate
• 13:00
  when you're jumping through wormholes. Like you needed to know
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  what you're about to expect on the other side. It
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  just saturates novels and science fiction. It's there. And generally,
• 13:11
  if you have a topic that people are paying attention
• 13:14
  to like that and are very popular, it's because something
• 13:18
  is resonating. Like if it was so strange that nobody
• 13:22
  even had a way of thinking about it, it wouldn't
• 13:25
  be popular. But it is, and it's perennially popular. So
• 13:30
  I took the science fiction interest. And as even a
• 13:32
  younger kid about fairy tales, which is saturated with these
• 13:35
  things too. And I thought, well, I wonder if that's real.
• 13:40
  But then you kind of get shuttled into a scientific career.
• 13:43
  And one thing that happens for fledgling engineers and scientists
• 13:47
  and for a lot of other academics is that you're
• 13:49
  being taught a set of assumptions about the way that
• 13:52
  the world works called materialism or physicalism. And the thing is,
• 13:58
  you're not taught that that is a set of assumptions.
• 14:00
  You take it for granted after a while because after
• 14:02
  you go through college for 20 plus years and no
• 14:05
  one ever mentions that we're working under a set of assumptions,
• 14:10
  a materialism, and no one ever talks about the philosophy
• 14:13
  of science, which is all about studying the assumptions and
• 14:17
  are they correct. Once you do start studying the philosophy
• 14:21
  of science, you find out that there's lots of different
• 14:23
  ways of understanding reality. And so there's the whole materialistic side,
• 14:27
  which is really, really good. at explaining aspects of the
• 14:31
  physical world. It gives us these kinds of technologies. But
• 14:35
  it doesn't explain subjective experience at all. And so that's
• 14:40
  like the existing number one mystery in science today because
• 14:45
  you have to challenge the idea that materialism is all
• 14:48
  there is. And so people have weird experiences. They're talking
• 14:53
  about a more comprehensive way of understanding reality. That's what's
• 14:56
  going on. And so that's why I end up writing
• 14:58
  a book like this So the magic here is not
• 15:01
  stage magic. It's the real magic, which we don't have
• 15:05
  a name for yet.
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: When they first started studying this in the 1800s, what
• 15:09
  were they specifically trying to isolate or figure out?
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: Well, just like today, people would see apparitions. They would
• 15:17
  have the sense that there were telepathic connections between people.
• 15:20
  They'd have precognitions. And it was the beginning of figuring
• 15:25
  out ways of using experimental science to be able to
• 15:28
  study these things. under controlled conditions. And the word control
• 15:32
  is important because it means you exclude coincidence by the
• 15:36
  design and you exclude leakage of information. You exclude all
• 15:40
  kinds of things. So the only thing left over is
• 15:43
  if that telepathic thing was real, then we'd be able
• 15:47
  to see it in the lab. And the short story is, yeah,
• 15:50
  we're now 150 years past that and we have very,
• 15:53
  very strong evidence that telepathy does exist.
• 15:57
  Speaker 2: So what was the first evidence that they... they were
• 16:01
  able to get out of these initial experiments?
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: They used to call it thought transference. And so the
• 16:07
  methods they were using then would not pass muster today.
• 16:10
  They would have like two kids who say, we can
• 16:14
  do telepathic transfer between us. And then many times they
• 16:18
  would find that the kids were using some kind of signal.
• 16:21
  And so that wouldn't work today. Today people have to
• 16:24
  be strictly isolated. Neither can know what the target is
• 16:28
  that they're trying to transfer to the other person. And
• 16:31
  we do lots and lots of replications with lots of people.
• 16:34
  And so that then forms a body of evidence where
• 16:38
  it becomes extremely difficult to think of what the flaw
• 16:41
  might be. And in fact, if you ask skeptics about
• 16:44
  it who know the literature, their usual response now is
• 16:47
  either there's no plausible flaw that they can identify because
• 16:52
  a lot of time has been spent to figure out
• 16:54
  what might be a flaw. And the second response, which
• 16:58
  is more recent now, is We're not even going to
• 17:00
  look at the evidence because we know it's impossible, which
• 17:03
  is no longer a scientific argument. But that's the approach.
• 17:07
  We're not going to look at the data.
• 17:08
  Speaker 2: That's silly. Yeah. Well, it's really silly when you consider
• 17:11
  the intelligence agencies have spent an enormous amount of money
• 17:14
  and a considerable amount of time studying remote viewing. Like why?
• 17:19
  Why would they invest that much time in nonsense? Why
• 17:22
  would they invest that much time in something where there's
• 17:24
  no evidence whatsoever and they've never achieved positive results? That
• 17:28
  doesn't seem to be correct. If you just– if you
• 17:31
  listen to the stories of the guys like Hal Puthoff
• 17:34
  and all these different people that have been involved in
• 17:36
  these remote viewing experiments, they had actionable data that they
• 17:42
  derived specifically from remote viewing. I don't understand it. I
• 17:46
  can't– I've never done it. I've never attempted it. I
• 17:48
  don't know if I can do it. I did it once.
• 17:51
  We had an experiment on a television show that I
• 17:54
  did where we had this guy who claimed to be
• 17:56
  a remote viewer, remote view this area. And it was–
• 17:59
  he was off. But it was also under duress with cameras.
• 18:03
  Like is that the state of mind that you want
• 18:05
  to be in when you're trying to remove– no, that's
• 18:07
  not ideal at all. And that is a factor, a
• 18:10
  major factor in whether or not you can understand intuition
• 18:16
  is what is your state of mind? Are you in
• 18:18
  a place of complete anxiety and fear or are you
• 18:22
  totally relaxed and focused on what you're doing? Is there
• 18:25
  any distractions? Is there a jackhammer nearby? Is there a
• 18:27
  dog barking? Is there something that could interrupt this state
• 18:31
  of mind that you're trying to achieve? Because there's different
• 18:35
  states of mind. We know this. We can measure this.
• 18:38
  We can measure the brainwaves. We understand that this state
• 18:41
  of mind– it's not a static thing like a toaster.
• 18:45
  It's not on or off. There's a bunch of different
• 18:47
  shit going on in your brain, in your mind at
• 18:50
  any given time. So the idea that remote viewing– Which
• 18:54
  is some very bizarre connection that some people have to
• 18:59
  reality that's nowhere near local. They can describe things in detail,
• 19:04
  talk about submarines that are being constructed in the Soviet Union.
• 19:09
  There's weird shit to that. And if you just dismiss that,
• 19:13
  you're being a fool. There's something there. And– The only
• 19:18
  way anybody figures out there's something there is if you
• 19:21
  study it, if actually intelligent people are willing to look
• 19:24
  a little foolish and spend some time studying it. This
• 19:27
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• 20:21
  Speaker 1: Right. So that brings us to my next job. So
• 20:24
  after I got my doctorate, I started working at Bell Laboratories.
• 20:28
  So it was the biggest laboratory in the world at
• 20:31
  the time. It was still a Bell system. And because
• 20:35
  I was interested in these kinds of things, for some
• 20:37
  of my time at Bell Labs, I started doing little
• 20:40
  psychic experiments involving mind-matter interaction and also involving precognition. So
• 20:48
  there's an ongoing link here that goes back to the
• 20:51
  Institute in Duetic Sciences in a strange way. Edgar Mitchell
• 20:55
  gave the first money to SRI International, which is where
• 20:59
  Hal Puthoff and Russ Targ was, to do remote viewing studies.
• 21:03
  He also brought Uri Geller to the United States, and
• 21:07
  he brought SRI and a bunch of other places, including
• 21:10
  Bell Labs. So when I was working at the labs,
• 21:12
  I knew that there had been people who had seen
• 21:14
  some of the stuff that Geller did, and I was
• 21:17
  doing these little psychic things. So I asked for permission
• 21:21
  to be able to present some of the work I
• 21:23
  was doing at an annual conference of the Parapsychological Association,
• 21:27
  which is an affiliate of the largest scientific organization in
• 21:31
  the United States. the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
• 21:35
  So many people don't know that the Parapsychological Association is
• 21:39
  one of the 200-some affiliates of the AAAS. It's a
• 21:43
  legitimate scientific organization. So I did this precognition test. I
• 21:47
  asked for permission, and I got permission not only to
• 21:50
  give my presentation at the conference but to use the
• 21:54
  Bell Labs imprimatur. So I was giving this as some
• 21:57
  guy from Bell Labs talking to this audience. Unbeknownst to me,
• 22:04
  there were a few people in the audience who came
• 22:06
  up afterwards, and one of them said, if there was
• 22:09
  an opening, would you be interested in joining the Stargate program?
• 22:13
  Speaker 2: Whoa.
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: And so that was an offer I couldn't refuse. That's
• 22:17
  one of these cases of you have this door or
• 22:19
  you have that door. Well, that door looked really interesting
• 22:21
  because it was known at the time that there were
• 22:24
  people at SRI doing this sort of thing, but the
• 22:26
  classified portions were a rumor, like nobody knew what was
• 22:30
  really going on.
• 22:31
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: So I took a leave of absence.
• 22:34
  Speaker 2: That must have been exciting. Yeah. You get that offer? Yeah. Stargate?
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Are you kidding?
• 22:39
  Speaker 2: Holy shit.
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: So I took a leave of absence for one year
• 22:43
  from Bell Labs. And so I went to SRI International.
• 22:48
  Hal Puthoff was my boss. And then Ed May, when
• 22:52
  Hal left in 1985, Ed May took over. He may
• 22:55
  not be a name that is known as well, but
• 22:58
  he was the director for 10 years. And so I
• 23:01
  worked on that project, and it took a long time
• 23:04
  to get the clearances because, first of all, I didn't
• 23:07
  know anything about classification or anything, but I figured, well,
• 23:11
  maybe it's just secret. No, it's just top secret. No,
• 23:16
  it's top secret SEI. No, it's top secret SEI special
• 23:20
  access program, which means there's literally a book that you
• 23:24
  have to sign, and you can see all the other
• 23:26
  people who have signed that book. Special access means that
• 23:30
  even if you have a top secret clearance, you cannot
• 23:32
  know about this place. You cannot know about the code word.
• 23:37
  The code word was classified. So, I mean, it seems
• 23:41
  kind of odd because if you have a code word,
• 23:43
  it's not saying anything. But nevertheless, that's how it worked.
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: So we were the research side of people who talk
• 23:51
  about Stargate. Mostly they're talking about the military side, the
• 23:54
  operational side. Well, we knew what they were doing, but
• 23:58
  our mission was different. Our mission was Figure out those
• 24:01
  questions that you're asking. How does this stuff work? Is
• 24:04
  it real? Yes. Some people are very talented. What are
• 24:09
  the limits of it? Can you block it? Can you
• 24:12
  shield it? Can you do camouflage? And one of the
• 24:15
  main areas was, what's the difference between someone like Joe McMonagle,
• 24:19
  who's a superstar in this area? Why is he any
• 24:23
  different than anybody else? Because when I first met Ingo
• 24:27
  Swann and Joe and a bunch of other people, They
• 24:31
  were so different than my stereotype of Madame Zodiac that they, like,
• 24:36
  I'd say, you've got to be kidding. These people are
• 24:38
  remote viewers. They're just like guys and gals. And so
• 24:43
  every method was used to try to figure out, is
• 24:46
  it psychological difference? Is it physiological? Is it medical? What
• 24:50
  is it? And the answer was, we couldn't find anything. Now,
• 24:54
  there may be some background about the people themselves, but
• 24:57
  in terms of, Finding out something that we could use
• 25:00
  to select because the army and others were interested in
• 25:05
  getting lots of other people who would be talented too.
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: So there was no consistent factors? No.
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: There wasn't anything.
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: Wow. That seems crazy.
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: Except maybe talent. Two things, talent and openness. So talent
• 25:19
  is natural talent. It's partially based on genetics. And openness
• 25:24
  is a psychological trait where you're simply open to experience.
• 25:27
  So people who tend to have a certain way of
• 25:31
  thinking about things and are not open to other stuff,
• 25:34
  they block it. They block it real good. People who
• 25:37
  are open to experience and willing to try new things,
• 25:40
  they in general tend to do better. So that brings
• 25:44
  us to talent, which I'll get to a little bit later,
• 25:48
  especially about the genetics of talent. So we didn't have
• 25:51
  the genetic tools at the time. Now we do have
• 25:54
  the genetic tools. And so we've done a couple of studies.
• 25:58
  looking for what we call the Psy gene. So we
• 26:02
  think we're onto something. Okay, so I work on Stargate
• 26:06
  for a year. I go back to Bell Labs and
• 26:09
  almost immediately get another invitation. It's one of these doors
• 26:13
  open again. How would you like to go to Princeton?
• 26:16
  Because at Princeton at the time was the Princeton Engineering
• 26:19
  Anomalies Research Laboratory. It was a lab doing Psy research
• 26:24
  that was headed by the Dean of the School of Engineering.
• 26:27
  And so that lab went almost for 30 years doing
• 26:30
  mind-matter interaction, doing remote viewing and a bunch of other
• 26:33
  stuff at Princeton. So my position was in the psych
• 26:38
  department because that's where I had my Ph.D., but to
• 26:42
  lead a program among many departments, one of which was
• 26:46
  the Pair Lab. And the idea was in order to
• 26:50
  have any chance of beginning to understand this stuff, you
• 26:52
  need to pull in every discipline. because it's way too big.
• 26:56
  It's too complicated for a single discipline. So we had
• 27:00
  the philosophy department and the psychology department and civil engineering
• 27:06
  and the pair lab and a bunch of other departments.
• 27:09
  My job was to sort of corral it together to
• 27:11
  create multidisciplinary research projects. And I was told in day one,
• 27:16
  that's impossible. This is a job you cannot do. Well, why?
• 27:20
  I mean, we had the money for it. And the
• 27:24
  answer is that In the academic world, you succeed within silos.
• 27:28
  You know an enormous amount about a very particular kind
• 27:32
  of topic. Like even in the psych department there, you
• 27:35
  have cognitive psychologists, perceptual psychologists, social psychologists, and on and
• 27:39
  on and on. They don't even talk to each other
• 27:43
  because it's outside of your discipline, outside the little silo.
• 27:46
  My job was to sort of mash it together, and
• 27:49
  it was ridiculously complicated.
• 27:52
  Speaker 2: Was there resistance?
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: Oh, my God. Resistance is not quite strong enough. It's
• 27:59
  like each one of the departments was getting money from
• 28:01
  this big grant that we had, so they were willing
• 28:03
  to play the game. But when it actually came down
• 28:06
  to doing some kind of a cross-filtering, no.
• 28:10
  Speaker 2: Why didn't they want to collaborate?
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: Because everything of value in the academic world is in
• 28:16
  your silo. So if you're trying to work across silos, again,
• 28:20
  even within the same department– Social psychology and perceptual psychology
• 28:25
  might not even talk to each other. Their offices are
• 28:28
  right next to each other. But that's simply the way
• 28:31
  they're saying.
• 28:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: But it also it sort of makes sense when you
• 28:34
  think about it to become an expert in something takes
• 28:37
  20 years from from the university and then the rest
• 28:40
  of your academic career just to keep up with it.
• 28:43
  So it kind of makes sense that you don't want
• 28:45
  to start turning your attention off to something else because
• 28:48
  you're not in that department anymore. So it's a problem
• 28:52
  and it's always been there. It's not getting any better either.
• 28:55
  Speaker 2: Well, it seems like there should be a way to
• 28:57
  fix that. The ultimate goal should be whatever we're all
• 29:01
  working on collectively should benefit mankind. If you're in the
• 29:05
  psychology industry, which you are if you're teaching psychology, if
• 29:08
  you're working on psychology, you should want to get involved
• 29:12
  in this. The fact that they're all siloed off like
• 29:14
  that seems insane. Yeah.
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: So the approach that's sometimes taken in the academic world
• 29:18
  is to create a center. Center for the Study of
• 29:21
  fill in the blank. That brings in people from different disciplines,
• 29:25
  and then they're kind of forced together.
• 29:26
  Speaker 2: But these people from different disciplines probably are already working
• 29:30
  on important stuff to them, and this is taking away
• 29:32
  from their time.
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: It could be, except that depending on the nature of
• 29:37
  the work, it may be something that requires information.
• 29:40
  Speaker 2: Discipline.
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: So you might have somebody in computer science who's working
• 29:43
  on that, and then you have somebody in psychology who's
• 29:45
  interested in the human side, like how do you connect
• 29:48
  the computer and the people? Well, there's a subdiscipline called
• 29:51
  human factors. That's where I was working in Bell Labs
• 29:54
  because I had engineering and psychology. So you kind of
• 29:57
  mash those two together, and then you could actually learn
• 30:00
  some new stuff that's of value to both. And also,
• 30:03
  that's how you create new disciplines. That's how the discipline
• 30:05
  of neuroscience began. So you go back, now it's more
• 30:09
  like 60 to 70 years ago, somebody noticed that you
• 30:13
  have all these people in biology and all these people
• 30:15
  looking at cells and people looking at things having to
• 30:19
  do with the nervous system. They were all different disciplines.
• 30:24
  So a large foundation came along and said, I think
• 30:28
  we need to create a discipline of the neurosciences. And
• 30:32
  they threw enough money at it to bring people together,
• 30:35
  and that formed a new discipline. So I work in
• 30:38
  the area of consciousness studies, which is only now starting
• 30:42
  to become its own discipline. Because before that, it was
• 30:46
  maybe a few philosophers interested in it and anesthesiologists, and
• 30:49
  that's it. But it's changing.
• 30:52
  Speaker 2: So when you were at Princeton, how did you start it?
• 30:56
  What specifically were you working on initially?
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: Well, besides trying to get people to talk to each other,
• 31:02
  which was frustrating.
• 31:03
  Speaker 2: The big task. Yeah.
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: So one of the things I did was meta-analysis. So
• 31:07
  this is a way of taking results of individual experiments
• 31:12
  that are similar to each other, like telepathy experiments, and
• 31:16
  putting them all together with a statistical method to see
• 31:19
  whether independent people are able to replicate the same thing.
• 31:23
  It's called meta-analysis. Meta meaning it's like an analysis of analyses.
• 31:28
  And so it answers two questions. One is, if this
• 31:31
  is really real in a scientific sense, then other independent
• 31:35
  people ought to be able to do the same experiment
• 31:37
  and get the same result. So that's one part. The
• 31:40
  other part is, if you do have a lot of
• 31:41
  people doing the same experiment, then what is the overall result?
• 31:45
  It's like one gigantic experiment now. So I did a
• 31:49
  number of meta-analyses, ended up writing a book on it
• 31:53
  that nobody wanted to buy, so I just sat there.
• 31:56
  And then I was doing experiments on precognition as part
• 32:00
  of my job. And because of my engineering background, I
• 32:03
  was using the latest version of machine learning at the time,
• 32:07
  which was neural networks, and applying it to the data
• 32:10
  from the repair lab to see if When you do
• 32:14
  an experiment involving mind-matter interaction, you usually use a random
• 32:18
  number generator and you ask somebody, you tell them this
• 32:22
  is going to push out a whole bunch of bits,
• 32:24
  random bits, and I want you to make more one
• 32:27
  bits than zero bits. That's your task. So they press
• 32:29
  a button and they get some kind of result. And
• 32:32
  now make more zero bits. And now don't do anything.
• 32:35
  So this is three different kinds of tasks in one session.
• 32:40
  And so what they were finding was that in general,
• 32:43
  if you run a lot of people in this kind
• 32:45
  of task, yes, their intention makes the bits go in
• 32:48
  the direction that you want. So you aim high, it
• 32:51
  goes up. You aim low, it goes down, so on.
• 32:54
  So the question then is not everybody can do that.
• 33:00
  Some people get the opposite result. Some people get really
• 33:04
  good at making it go high, but they can't make
• 33:06
  it go low. So the idea came about that there's
• 33:09
  something like a signature that was from each person. People
• 33:13
  had a way of interacting with the machine that made
• 33:16
  it do certain things that was unique to them, but
• 33:20
  overall it worked out. So I started using neural networks
• 33:22
  to see if I could train a neural network to
• 33:26
  tell who was doing the task based on how the
• 33:29
  random bits were working. And it turns out you can.
• 33:33
  So when I left Princeton... because it was getting way
• 33:36
  too frustrating. I took that idea.
• 33:38
  Speaker 2: Just trying to get people to work together.
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: Trying to do this multidisciplinary teams. Yeah, and as I
• 33:46
  told you, the first day I was there for the job,
• 33:48
  I was told, by the way, you have an impossible job.
• 33:52
  It's necessary, though, because this was part of the grant.
• 33:56
  What you're doing is part of the grant. So you
• 33:57
  have to do it anyway. And I did it for
• 34:00
  three years, and then I decided I didn't want to
• 34:02
  do that anymore. So I went back to industry, but
• 34:06
  I specifically told the people I was interviewing with, I
• 34:09
  want to pursue this. Like this is the beginning of
• 34:12
  a technology that will have a machine identify who you
• 34:16
  are and your intention, kind of like Neuralink, except there's
• 34:21
  no connection. There's nothing going in the brain. It's purely intention.
• 34:25
  So I did end up working for a company outside
• 34:27
  of Washington, D.C., where part of my work was doing
• 34:31
  exactly that. We're using more advanced neural networks with random
• 34:34
  number generators and got to the point where we're about
• 34:39
  to set a patent for this device because it worked.
• 34:43
  And the head of the organization at the time was
• 34:46
  a retired general who had a buddy who was an admiral.
• 34:49
  And he said the Navy's interested in this kind of
• 34:53
  for obvious reasons. They want ways of communicating with submarines.
• 34:58
  Speaker 2: So.
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: At that point, we're like right on the edge of
• 35:01
  doing that, and we get bought by another company. And
• 35:04
  the new company said, you're not going to work on
• 35:07
  that anymore. So the wheels internally started– it was like
• 35:11
  golden handcuffs. A lot of money. I mean it's a
• 35:14
  very good position, but I didn't really want to do
• 35:16
  that anymore.
• 35:18
  Speaker 2: Did they have a– was it a profitable issue?
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: The vice president in charge of the lab did not
• 35:24
  believe that it was possible.
• 35:25
  Speaker 2: Oh, God.
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: They also didn't look at the data.
• 35:28
  Speaker 2: Of course.
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: So he said, no, we're not going to do that.
• 35:30
  Speaker 2: He doesn't want to be silly. Yeah.
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: So, I mean, it's so frustrating.
• 35:35
  Speaker 2: It worked.
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: We have a thing here. It's working. No, he just
• 35:38
  didn't want to do it.
• 35:39
  Speaker 2: Oh, that's so frustrating. Yeah.
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: So a few years goes by. I kept doing all
• 35:44
  this stuff on the side now, outside of work, because
• 35:47
  it was just too interesting to drop. There was a recession.
• 35:52
  This was 1992. There was a recession. Part of my
• 35:56
  department was laid off, including myself. So unbeknownst to most
• 36:01
  people at the time that the Stargate program, and by
• 36:05
  the way, it wasn't called Stargate then. There's a lot
• 36:09
  of code words involved, but it's just known as Stargate,
• 36:12
  so we'll use that. That program was giving classified contracts
• 36:16
  to other people around the world, including at the University
• 36:20
  of Edinburgh in Scotland. So we had a colleague at
• 36:24
  the University of Edinburgh who was creating an automated Gonsfeld
• 36:27
  testing system. This is a telepathy system where you press
• 36:31
  a button and the people are involved and everything is automated.
• 36:34
  It's kind of getting the human out of the loop
• 36:36
  except for the two people in the experiment. Well, the
• 36:39
  man who was developing that unfortunately died. And so this
• 36:43
  was an unfinished project. So I went to Ed May,
• 36:45
  who was director of Stargate at the time, and I said, well,
• 36:49
  can I go there and finish the project?
• 36:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, sure.
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: Okay, so I went to the University of Edinburgh for
• 36:56
  about a year, and I worked on this project to
• 36:59
  finish the automated telepathy system. And they've run many, many
• 37:03
  people through that system by now. And so while I
• 37:09
  was there, I finished that pretty quickly. I started to
• 37:12
  develop the presentiment experiment. And you had Julia Mossbridge on
• 37:16
  the show recently. So I think she was talking about
• 37:19
  this experiment where you can see– if somebody's body is
• 37:25
  reacting to something in the future that is unanticipated, that's random. Well,
• 37:29
  I was developing that at the time. This would have
• 37:31
  been around 93 or so. And so let me tell
• 37:38
  you a story about the kind of effect that gave
• 37:42
  me the idea to do this experiment. So the usual
• 37:46
  way that people talk about it is that you drive
• 37:49
  to work the same way every day, thousands of times,
• 37:52
  and you have a, a traffic light that you're coming
• 37:54
  up to, and it's green, and normally you'd start accelerating
• 37:57
  towards it because you want to get through the light.
• 37:59
  Something tells you today there's something wrong. I don't know
• 38:03
  what it is, but I'm going to slow down. And
• 38:05
  you keep slowing down. The cars behind you are beeping
• 38:08
  and saying, what's going on? You get almost up to
• 38:11
  the intersection, and a truck blasts through their red light,
• 38:14
  and you would have been hit broadside if you didn't
• 38:16
  slow down. So you have this momentary shock of relief,
• 38:20
  realizing that you just saved your life, by paying attention
• 38:22
  to that little voice inside your head. So I thought, okay,
• 38:26
  let's simulate that in the laboratory. Well, we can't put
• 38:29
  people in danger, but we can do emotional tests like that.
• 38:34
  So you wire somebody up looking at skin conductance or
• 38:38
  pupil dilation or brain waves, all kinds of things in
• 38:41
  your nervous system. And then you just record that continually,
• 38:45
  tell them, press a button, and then they're going to
• 38:48
  see something on a screen. So it could be a
• 38:50
  very calm picture. Or it could be a very emotional picture.
• 38:54
  So emotion can split in two ways. It could be
• 38:57
  a very negative picture, like a picture of surgery or
• 39:01
  an explosion or something. Or it could be a positive,
• 39:03
  like a smiling baby. So they're two different valences, they're called.
• 39:08
  And you don't know which is going to come up
• 39:10
  because a true random number generator is the thing that decides.
• 39:13
  After you press the button, then it decides what it's
• 39:16
  going to show you. So nobody knows in advance, including
• 39:19
  the experimenter. So I set up an experiment to do that.
• 39:23
  And by this time, I already had left Edinburgh. I
• 39:27
  had to make a decision then again, Do you want
• 39:29
  to go back into industry? And I had an offer
• 39:31
  from Oak Ridge National Labs, which would put me back
• 39:35
  in the classified world. Or this other opportunity, which was
• 39:39
  to work at University of Nevada, funded by Robert Bigelow,
• 39:44
  who's probably best known for the OSAP program.
• 39:46
  Speaker 2: He's been on here before. Yeah.
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: So... Bigelow has very generously said, yeah, I'll pay for
• 39:53
  your way to go into the university there. And I
• 39:55
  was able to run my own lab. So one of
• 39:57
  the very first things I set up then was, first
• 40:00
  of all, I want to continue working on this neural
• 40:03
  network or machine learning method for making a technology of intention.
• 40:08
  That was one of the things. But the other one
• 40:10
  was this presentiment experiment. So I ran that experiment and
• 40:14
  it was unbelievably good. Like it's normally have little statistical effects.
• 40:20
  This is like in your face, holy smoke, this is
• 40:22
  a big thing. Big, big presentiment effects. Like if it's
• 40:28
  skin conductance, one and a half seconds before you press
• 40:33
  a button, you wait five seconds. Then it selects a picture.
• 40:37
  So one and a half seconds before the picture is selected,
• 40:39
  if it's emotional, you start to become emotional. If it's calm,
• 40:43
  you remain calm. So that difference beforehand we call the
• 40:47
  presentiment effect. That your body somehow or unconscious knowing what
• 40:52
  you're about to see. Just like approaching a light and
• 40:55
  slowing down. Something is telling you something. So we did
• 40:59
  an experiment. And I told this to one of the
• 41:01
  guys at the center I was working at. And he
• 41:04
  told me a story which is far more interesting than
• 41:10
  not going through a red light. So the story is this.
• 41:15
  So he used to go hunting with his buddies. And
• 41:17
  they had a whole bunch of guns. His favorite gun
• 41:20
  was a six-shot revolver, a double-action revolver. And so the
• 41:25
  way that he would take all the bullets out, he'd
• 41:27
  clean the whole thing out, and he'd put in one, two, three, four,
• 41:30
  five bullets and leave the hammer over the empty chamber
• 41:33
  so it wouldn't get jostled accidentally. So he's cleaning the gun.
• 41:36
  He's putting in bullet one, two, three, four. He picks
• 41:39
  up the fifth bullet, and he has that feeling. Something
• 41:43
  about this bullet isn't right. So he didn't put it in,
• 41:46
  left it aside. put the hammer over cylinder six, and
• 41:50
  then they went hunting. So this is now two weeks
• 41:53
  in advance. They come back from hunting. His pistol wasn't used,
• 41:58
  and a bunch of other guns weren't used, but they
• 42:00
  do what you should not do after you go hunting,
• 42:03
  which is starting to drink. So they're all getting a
• 42:06
  little bit too tipsy and drinking too much, and a
• 42:08
  fight breaks out between two people there. One of them
• 42:12
  picks up my friend's gun, points it point-blank, at somebody else,
• 42:17
  like right in their face. And my friend is now
• 42:19
  looking with horror because the trigger's getting pulled. The hammer's
• 42:23
  going back, the cylinder is turning, and he's trying to
• 42:26
  intervene now. He steps right in front of the gun,
• 42:30
  and it goes click. The hammer hit. It hit that
• 42:34
  fifth chamber because it rotated from six to five. So
• 42:39
  he realized with horror at that moment that if he
• 42:41
  had not taken out that bullet, he would be shot
• 42:44
  in the head. And so Afterwards, he said, everyone has
• 42:48
  a bullet with their name on it, and mine is
• 42:51
  in a safety deposit box, and I know exactly where
• 42:53
  it is, and it's not coming out.
• 42:55
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: So that's a real-life version of this, which is two
• 43:00
  weeks in advance. In the laboratory, we can only look
• 43:02
  seconds in advance.
• 43:04
  Speaker 2: Also, you should have the intuition and not go hunting
• 43:06
  and drinking with psychos that are willing to shoot somebody
• 43:09
  in the face over an argument.
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: Nevertheless, yeah. So it happens. Yeah, so.
• 43:16
  Speaker 2: That's crazy though.
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: So see, this is where we want to go in
• 43:20
  these kinds of experiments. You need like real life stuff
• 43:23
  that you can actually test in a controlled way in
• 43:25
  the laboratory. But there's all kinds of ethical reasons obviously
• 43:29
  why you can't do that. But I'm pretty sure that
• 43:32
  if we're able to get something at that level in
• 43:34
  the laboratory, we would have much, much stronger results than
• 43:37
  we currently do.
• 43:38
  Speaker 2: Now, when it comes to things like remote viewing and
• 43:43
  being able to be open and being able to actually
• 43:49
  pull it off and actually remote view things that you
• 43:53
  can prove. What is the state of mind these people
• 43:58
  are trying to achieve? And what is the protocol for
• 44:01
  achieving that state of mind?
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: It depends on whether you're naturally talented or not. So
• 44:08
  Joe McMonagle and a few others that I know, if
• 44:14
  you were to ask them at– at breakfast, could you
• 44:19
  remote view what I have in a hidden folder over here?
• 44:22
  They would continue eating and tell you the answer immediately.
• 44:25
  So for them, it doesn't take much at all. And
• 44:28
  in fact, what Joe would say, and I have some
• 44:31
  pictures from what Joe had done, Joe would say that
• 44:35
  if he knows in the afternoon he's going to do
• 44:37
  a remote viewing, he'll get all the information in the morning,
• 44:40
  like instantly. It'll just be there. And then he has
• 44:43
  to wait until the whole thing plays out. But it's like, bang,
• 44:47
  he got it. So it's a matter internally of simply
• 44:50
  knowing I need to get this information and it happens immediately.
• 44:54
  For people who don't have that natural talent, you go
• 44:56
  through training where, and by the way, almost everybody can
• 45:00
  do this, but it does require some training now. So
• 45:03
  for an average person, the training typically is to not
• 45:09
  name an impression, which is really tough. So you have
• 45:13
  a target. which may be somewhere in the world, maybe
• 45:16
  a person somewhere, maybe in an envelope, something like that.
• 45:20
  You're taught you will have something come to mind. You
• 45:24
  know that that's the target. You have no idea what
• 45:27
  it is, but you know that there is a target
• 45:28
  you're going to have to describe. So name the first
• 45:31
  thing that comes to mind, but without naming it. So
• 45:34
  you start little scribbles, and then you have more complicated scribbles,
• 45:38
  and you start adding feelings and senses that are associated
• 45:42
  with these scribbles. eventually you get to the point where
• 45:45
  it's kind of all gels together. And then you get
• 45:48
  a coherent image. The problem is that if you tell somebody,
• 45:52
  I'm going to show you a picture in 20 minutes
• 45:54
  that you don't know what it is, and you say, okay, well,
• 45:57
  just imagine what you're going to get. And you get
• 45:58
  a flash of yellow, you're instantly going to start thinking
• 46:02
  of bananas. And once that happens, you can't not think
• 46:05
  of bananas anymore. So that's what I mean by not naming.
• 46:09
  So that's one of the very first things that you
• 46:12
  learn is, Anything that comes to mind that you have
• 46:14
  a name to is probably not it. It takes practice,
• 46:18
  but you can get there. Wow.
• 46:21
  Speaker 2: What was the most impressive thing that you ever saw
• 46:23
  anybody achieve with remote viewing?
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: After I got the clearances, Hal gave me the briefing
• 46:32
  that everyone gets, like in skiffs in Congress and presidents, whatever.
• 46:36
  I got the same briefing. So one picture after the
• 46:41
  other of experiments by Joe and by a bunch of
• 46:45
  other people who are not as well-known that basically give
• 46:48
  almost a veridical drawing of the target. And these are
• 46:52
  targets that are elsewhere in the world. These are targets
• 46:55
  that are in envelopes. These are targets that are in skiffs,
• 46:58
  all different kinds of targets where nothing about the target
• 47:02
  is known. Like I will tell you a five-digit number
• 47:06
  which stands for the target. And so all you have
• 47:08
  is a five-digit number. Now give me a description of
• 47:11
  what I'm going to show you in two hours. And
• 47:13
  they do it.
• 47:14
  Speaker 2: So you're putting the number to the target? You're just
• 47:17
  saying like Moscow is number 654?
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: A random number, yes.
• 47:23
  Speaker 2: And just by you attributing that number to whatever this
• 47:26
  target is, there's a connection made? Yep. What's happening? How
• 47:30
  is that?
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 47:33
  Speaker 2: What's that?
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah. We don't know why that is. There are theories
• 47:38
  about it, and the theory requires probably stepping away from
• 47:42
  materialism as the only model of reality. So there are
• 47:46
  other models which allow for consciousness, whatever that is, because
• 47:50
  we don't know that either, but consciousness seems to have
• 47:52
  a non-local quality. So it's the same kind of non-locality
• 47:56
  that you talk about in quantum mechanics. So quantum mechanics
• 48:00
  has entanglement, which are non-local connections between things. It is
• 48:04
  also through time. So connections through space and time. So
• 48:08
  we know that that's a real thing. That's what the
• 48:10
  physical world allows. It is as though consciousness, whatever that is,
• 48:15
  also has that property. It is non-local. So if you
• 48:18
  push it hard enough, you end up with something like
• 48:21
  that movie, everything, everywhere, all at the same time. That's
• 48:26
  basically what we're talking about. There's an aspect of reality
• 48:30
  which we don't ordinarily see, but nevertheless connects everything. throughout
• 48:35
  space and time. And so if that were not true,
• 48:38
  then things like precognition wouldn't work so well. Telepathy wouldn't work.
• 48:42
  Remote viewing wouldn't work. None of that would work. But nevertheless,
• 48:46
  it does work. So that is like a more comprehensive
• 48:49
  way of understanding what reality is like.
• 48:52
  Speaker 2: Do you think this is an emerging quality in human
• 48:55
  beings or do you think this is an atrophied quality
• 48:58
  that we used to all have before the development of
• 49:03
  written language, Books, media, all these different things that sort
• 49:08
  of take away this quiet communication that people probably had
• 49:13
  with each other. We believe wolves have that with each other.
• 49:16
  Wolves coordinate somehow. They coordinate attacks on animals. and it
• 49:20
  could be through learned experience but how do they remember
• 49:23
  it and know what to do and how do each
• 49:26
  one have specific roles like one wolf will chase the
• 49:29
  elk into like a certain corridor and the other wolves
• 49:32
  will wait and be on like higher ground and come
• 49:35
  down and attack they know that they do weird stuff
• 49:37
  that Somehow or another requires some kind of communication. Yes.
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: And they're way more intelligent than we have usually thought.
• 49:46
  Speaker 2: Well, think about how intelligent some dogs are. Yeah. You know,
• 49:50
  like a Belgian Malinois or something like that. One of
• 49:52
  those dogs they use for military training. Those dogs are
• 49:54
  incredibly intelligent. Yeah. And they need exercise. They need activities.
• 49:59
  They need things to stimulate them because their brain is
• 50:01
  like firing all day long. Wolf is that times 100. Yeah.
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: And so– Most animals, plants, insects maybe have consciousness in
• 50:11
  some form. And if that consciousness is similar to ours,
• 50:14
  it is non-local.
• 50:15
  Speaker 2: Do you think it's an emerging thing or do you
• 50:17
  think it's a thing that we've always had?
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: I think that we are shaped as humans by evolution
• 50:24
  to not pay attention to the there and then. Because
• 50:28
  if we were paying attention to there and then a lot,
• 50:31
  then you may not notice that there's a tiger in
• 50:33
  front of you who's about to eat you. So if
• 50:35
  you look over the long span of development of whatever
• 50:39
  it is we are, people who are walking around thinking
• 50:43
  about Pluto a million years ago would have been pruned
• 50:47
  out of existence. So only certain kinds of people historically
• 50:51
  were able to do that. We called them shaman. And
• 50:54
  the shaman as part of a tribe were extremely important
• 50:57
  because they knew the food would be 10 miles away
• 51:00
  that way next week. But the shaman typically could not
• 51:04
  take care of themselves very well. Their minds were off
• 51:08
  in Pluto, and so the tribe took care of them.
• 51:12
  And so today we don't have that very much. We're
• 51:15
  distracted by everything, and we don't have the same kinds
• 51:21
  of needs that they would have had 10,000, 20,000 years ago,
• 51:26
  except in some indigenous societies. So one time I gave
• 51:30
  a talk for the Australian government. There was a whole
• 51:32
  bunch of ministers there and people in the military, and
• 51:35
  I was talking about this sort of stuff. And unbeknownst
• 51:38
  to me, one of the ministers was representative of the
• 51:41
  indigenous people there. So I finished this long talk on telepathy,
• 51:45
  and she came up afterwards and said, well, we've known
• 51:50
  this stuff for thousands of years. They would use it,
• 51:53
  like in the Outback. There was no phones, but somehow
• 51:57
  they were in communications, part of the culture. So they
• 52:00
  didn't have the distractions and they had a need. So
• 52:03
  you can imagine a more or less isolated culture for
• 52:06
  a long period of time that didn't have tigers immediately
• 52:10
  always trying to capture them. They had the need to
• 52:12
  be able to communicate that way. We don't have the
• 52:15
  need anymore. So it atrophies.
• 52:18
  Speaker 2: Okay. So it atrophies. And so with things like remote viewing,
• 52:22
  do you think this is almost like a relearning of
• 52:26
  a skill that people had at one point in time? Yeah.
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: And there's still some people who have some of the
• 52:31
  genetics because all of this is devolving back into talent.
• 52:36
  Some people have that talent.
• 52:38
  Speaker 2: And you think that's a genetic thing?
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: I think a good chunk of it is genetic, yes.
• 52:42
  Speaker 2: So it's from people in their ancient past that had
• 52:45
  that quality, had that ability, and they passed on that trait. Yeah.
• 52:49
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• 53:50
  Speaker 1: So like in Joe McMonagle's case, he was one of
• 53:53
  those guys who did search and rescue behind enemy lines.
• 53:57
  And he always came back. His team always found their
• 53:59
  guy and they always came back alive. And so, well,
• 54:03
  where did that come from? Well, he used his intuition
• 54:06
  in the field to decide, let's not go down that road.
• 54:09
  Let's go over here. And it was safe. So afterwards,
• 54:13
  when asked, when there was recruiting for people who had
• 54:16
  some abilities like this, they would ask people like that.
• 54:20
  Do you find, like, and you're in combat, you never
• 54:22
  get hit? Okay, let's talk. The other thing, of course,
• 54:26
  is did you ever have any experiences beforehand that suggests
• 54:30
  that maybe you had these experiences? Well, Joe did, and
• 54:33
  his sister did, too. So there suggests, again, some kind
• 54:37
  of a familial genetic underpinning for why people have these experiences.
• 54:43
  So I will continue the story because I'm going to
• 54:46
  intersect with this genetic part in a minute. So I'm
• 54:50
  at UNLV doing all kinds of interesting stuff. Somehow the
• 54:57
  New York Times learns about what I'm doing and they
• 54:59
  think it's an interesting character story for a parapsychologist to
• 55:02
  be working in Las Vegas because Las Vegas is sometimes
• 55:07
  called the largest parapsychology lab in the world. You have
• 55:11
  a whole bunch of people trying to mentally influence more
• 55:15
  or less random systems like they are all the time. So, okay.
• 55:20
  Speaker 2: That's an interesting way to look at Vegas. Yeah.
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: Well, it kind of is, right? You toss the dice,
• 55:24
  you want a certain result. Well, we do that in
• 55:26
  the laboratory, except we don't have a lot of money
• 55:28
  associated with it. I was able to actually get data
• 55:32
  from one of the casinos, the smaller casinos, because the
• 55:36
  general manager was interested in what I was doing. So
• 55:39
  I said, well, Can I get all the data, as
• 55:41
  much as you have, on jackpots for slot machines and
• 55:45
  also the table games? And a miracle occurred, and she said, yeah.
• 55:48
  So she gave us the data, was able to analyze it,
• 55:51
  and among other things, found that jackpots happened more often
• 55:56
  and payouts happened larger, and table games did better between
• 56:02
  plus or minus one day from the full moon, which,
• 56:07
  by the way, matches magical lore. I mean all kinds
• 56:11
  of things are related to when the full moon happens,
• 56:14
  religious effects and all kinds of things. So I thought, well,
• 56:17
  that's interesting. More jackpots happen, plus or minus the day
• 56:21
  of the full moon. And so I said to the
• 56:23
  general manager, maybe this is something you don't want to
• 56:25
  tell people because they'll all start coming in the full moon.
• 56:29
  She said, yeah, bring them in because all you could
• 56:33
  do with this information was lose a little bit slower
• 56:36
  because everything is– Vegas– Yeah, it's not rigged, but it's
• 56:41
  set up in such a way that the odds are
• 56:43
  against you. So you would lose slower. But nevertheless, you'd
• 56:47
  see it in the data. So there's something interesting. Okay,
• 56:50
  so I get to the end of my time at
• 56:53
  UNLV and a new door opens. And partially because of
• 56:58
  the New York Times piece, that book that I had
• 57:01
  written at Princeton that nobody wanted to buy, I suddenly
• 57:04
  had publishers calling me and saying, do you ever think
• 57:06
  about writing a book? Yeah. Yeah. I have one. So
• 57:11
  I published that book that caught the attention of people
• 57:14
  at an organization called Interval Research, which was funded by
• 57:19
  Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft. So Paul Allen was
• 57:24
  interested in doing what he called developing the wired world.
• 57:28
  This would have been started in 1990 as a 10-year
• 57:32
  project to develop Figure out, given that the internet was
• 57:37
  going to be a gigantic thing, what do we do
• 57:40
  with it? So this was people that were poached from
• 57:45
  Apple and from Xerox PARC and the MIT lab and
• 57:49
  lots of places. They brought 100 people together. And so
• 57:52
  I was invited to do a sci research program there
• 57:56
  with a budget that was 10 times larger than I
• 57:58
  had at UNLV and a salary that was three times larger.
• 58:01
  So I thought, yeah, that's the door that I want.
• 58:04
  So at interval, everything was proprietary because it was all
• 58:08
  leading into patents that would eventually create things. And so
• 58:12
  some of the things we take for granted now were
• 58:13
  developed there. I was there not so much to develop
• 58:18
  a psychic technology, but because a small percentage of the
• 58:22
  projects were considered blue sky. To make sure that everybody
• 58:28
  in the lab realized that we're trying to push the
• 58:31
  envelope hard in developing new things. And so it's always
• 58:35
  useful to have a couple of speculative projects around. So
• 58:39
  I worked on that. And then the 10 years was
• 58:43
  over in 2000. So this was all in Silicon Valley.
• 58:46
  So a couple of us then left to create a nonprofit,
• 58:52
  which we called the Boundary Institute, which would continue the
• 58:55
  research that we were doing. And then that lasted for
• 58:58
  about a year because there was the dot-com crash, and
• 59:02
  we couldn't raise money to keep ourselves afloat. I was
• 59:05
  invited then to join the Institute of Noetic Sciences, where
• 59:08
  I've been now for the last 25 years. So the
• 59:13
  circle here is, here I am in college and looking
• 59:16
  at this place, studying the frontiers of consciousness, and that's
• 59:19
  where I end up, and I've been there ever since,
• 59:22
  and no new doors have opened that have attracted me.
• 59:26
  So I'm there, and I've been having great fun at
• 59:29
  the Institute.
• 59:30
  Speaker 2: I interrupted you when we were talking about numbers being
• 59:33
  associated with targets and you were expanding on actionable data.
• 59:38
  Like what was the most impressive thing to you that
• 59:43
  you saw that people achieve with remote viewing?
• 59:46
  Speaker 1: Do you mean from an operational sense or.
• 59:48
  Speaker 2: I mean just for people listening. Like what would be
• 59:52
  the most spectacular example of something that couldn't be achieved
• 59:56
  any other way?
• 59:58
  Speaker 1: Well, one of the things was actually admitted by President
• 1:00:01
  Carter way back when, when they found a bomber, a
• 1:00:06
  nuclear bomber that landed somewhere in Africa, which could not
• 1:00:11
  be seen from above because of the canopy of all
• 1:00:14
  the– and nobody knew where it actually landed.
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 2: It crashed, right?
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: It crashed. There was a bomb on board that they
• 1:00:20
  did not want anybody else to get. And so they
• 1:00:24
  asked one of the remote viewers. In fact, this– they
• 1:00:27
  have several of them. But one of them specialized in location,
• 1:00:30
  which is very difficult for remote viewing. Like if you
• 1:00:33
  look at a map and you say, well, put a
• 1:00:35
  dot on the map for where it is. That turns
• 1:00:38
  out to not be very easy even for remote viewers.
• 1:00:40
  But this one lady was very, very good at that.
• 1:00:44
  She was a dowser. In fact, she was a map dowser.
• 1:00:48
  So you get a big piece of blank.
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 2: You're saying dowsers are like those people that walk around
• 1:00:51
  with the stick to find water?
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, except map dowsing is– You have a blank sheet
• 1:00:56
  of paper, which is linked by association to an actual
• 1:01:00
  map somewhere. You don't want to give anything away, so
• 1:01:03
  you don't use a real map. Use a piece of paper,
• 1:01:06
  which has little Xs on it that map onto an
• 1:01:09
  actual map. So we asked this lady, her name was Fran,
• 1:01:13
  put a mark on the map of where this bomber landed. And,
• 1:01:17
  of course, she doesn't know it's Africa. She doesn't know anything.
• 1:01:21
  She does her thing. She puts a mark on the
• 1:01:23
  map and says, I think it's there. So they go
• 1:01:26
  there and they find it within a couple of kilometers
• 1:01:29
  of that spot.
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 2: Whoa.
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 1: And so they originally go to that spot. They see
• 1:01:34
  natives nearby. So they ask the natives, you know, was
• 1:01:38
  there anything crashing out of the sky recently? They said, yeah,
• 1:01:41
  something happened over there. That's where it was.
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 2: Now, what did Carter say when he spoke about this publicly?
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 1: Carter was asked a very similar question. Did you ever
• 1:01:52
  encounter anything really weird? So that's the example that he used.
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 2: Didn't Carter have a UFO experience before?
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 1: He had that as well, yeah.
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 2: And Carter was– the folklore is that Carter was briefed
• 1:02:05
  about something having to do with alien life and he
• 1:02:08
  was so upset that he started weeping. Yes.
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 1: I've heard those stories, yes.
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 2: What do you think about those stories?
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: It could well be true.
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: I mean so there's.
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 2: Actually– Did you ever hear a rumor of what he
• 1:02:20
  was told? No.
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 1: I don't know what he was told. If I had
• 1:02:25
  to guess, given that he was a very religious person,
• 1:02:28
  it probably was pushing against his religious beliefs.
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: That's what I would guess.
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 2: Well, you know, that was the giant rumor that was
• 1:02:35
  going around recently, that there was going to be some
• 1:02:38
  big disclosure by the White House and that a bunch
• 1:02:40
  of pastors had been briefed about this to try to
• 1:02:43
  talk to their flock and, you know, get ahead of it. Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:02:49
  You heard that, right? Yeah. What did you think of that?
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 1: It could well be true. So I know Jacques Vallee
• 1:02:55
  really well.
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 2: He's a fascinating guy.
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And I know Gary Nolan. Another fascinating guy. Yeah.
• 1:03:02
  I work in circles where we basically all have known
• 1:03:05
  each other for a long time. And the UFO business, UAP,
• 1:03:10
  is very similar in some respects to the psychic side.
• 1:03:14
  Both in that there's an enormous amount of misinformation that
• 1:03:18
  has been pushed by government, by other places. to deflect attention.
• 1:03:24
  And so there's lots of examples of that, which, I mean,
• 1:03:30
  because of what we know now about the UFO thing,
• 1:03:34
  it's relatively easy to see how that could have happened
• 1:03:37
  for the Psi business as well. So just one example,
• 1:03:43
  I go to the Naval War College and I've given
• 1:03:45
  a number of lectures and one of them is on telepathy.
• 1:03:49
  How do we know that telepathy actually exists? There's a
• 1:03:52
  bunch of different ways of knowing that. And so afterwards,
• 1:03:55
  two sub commanders come up. In fact, that's the story.
• 1:03:58
  That's the opening story gambit in my book, Science of Magic.
• 1:04:02
  So the two sub commanders come up and they say, well,
• 1:04:05
  we have a story to tell you. These are two
• 1:04:08
  independent subs, or the commanders are two subs. So I'm
• 1:04:11
  telling them everything we know about telepathy. And they say, well,
• 1:04:15
  one time, and we're submerged, we're under maneuvers. A crewman
• 1:04:20
  wakes up from a dream and goes to the commander
• 1:04:23
  and says, we need to surface because something bad has
• 1:04:25
  happened at home. Well, we can't. We're under maneuvers. Next
• 1:04:30
  time we can surface, well, then you can call home.
• 1:04:33
  So the next time they surface, they call home. And
• 1:04:35
  sure enough, when the sailor woke up from his dream,
• 1:04:38
  there was indeed something bad happening at home. So both
• 1:04:43
  of the commanders had the same story. So I said, well,
• 1:04:45
  does this happen like every Tuesday? No, there were no
• 1:04:48
  false positives. It happened once, and both times it was correct.
• 1:04:54
  That's very important to know, not simply that it happens,
• 1:04:57
  but it is happening when the submarines are at a
• 1:05:00
  classified depth, which means at least 300 meters, probably more,
• 1:05:04
  below the surface of the ocean, where it's extremely difficult
• 1:05:07
  to get any kind of message there. So it's not electromagnetic.
• 1:05:11
  We don't know what that would be.
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 2: What were the events at home that were bad?
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: They didn't tell me the events at home.
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 2: Personal events, like in someone's family?
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 1: Something in their family, something was going wrong, which turned
• 1:05:23
  out to be correct. So one thing is, yes, it
• 1:05:26
  tells us something that's important to know from a scientific
• 1:05:29
  perspective because they are not reachable by ordinary means. That's
• 1:05:33
  the whole point about having a submarine. Very difficult to
• 1:05:35
  know where they are and get messages to them. The
• 1:05:39
  other thing is that people who are selected to be
• 1:05:42
  submariners are psychologically extremely stable. They're not prone to flights
• 1:05:48
  of fantasy. They don't have claustrophobia. They don't have any
• 1:05:51
  kind of the neuroses that you would imagine that somebody
• 1:05:53
  would need to go into a submarine for months, submerged
• 1:05:57
  who knows where. So it means that this happens to
• 1:06:00
  ordinary people, in this case, in an altered state of awareness,
• 1:06:04
  namely in a dream state. But nevertheless, they got it.
• 1:06:07
  And there were no false positives. So I was a
• 1:06:11
  little surprised. Whenever I give a talk to a new
• 1:06:13
  type of group, especially in the military, always thinking that
• 1:06:16
  these guys are– they think I'm nuts because I'm telling
• 1:06:19
  them stuff that shouldn't exist by any conventional perspective. It's
• 1:06:25
  exactly the opposite. Mostly I've talked to officers, like up
• 1:06:30
  to generals and admirals and a few levels below that.
• 1:06:34
  They're all completely on board, and I began to understand why.
• 1:06:38
  That not only are they in life and death situations
• 1:06:41
  and that's where these things tend to bubble up, but
• 1:06:44
  also they had to trust their intuition in making lots
• 1:06:47
  of decisions that affect other people. And they would not
• 1:06:50
  have risen through the ranks unless they were really, really
• 1:06:53
  good at it. So that's why I was not getting
• 1:06:57
  the kind of pushback that I expected to get.
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 2: Interesting. The Bell Labs connection is very interesting too. You know,
• 1:07:04
  Bell Labs is also the source of myth and folklore
• 1:07:08
  about the Roswell crash, that they received things from the
• 1:07:14
  Roswell craft and back-engineered it. Do you know that whole
• 1:07:18
  crazy story?
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 1: I know about those stories. I don't have any direct
• 1:07:23
  knowledge of any of that stuff.
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 2: You never heard anything when you were there? There was
• 1:07:26
  a company called the American Computer Company way back in
• 1:07:28
  the day, and they just would sell Windows computers. You'd
• 1:07:33
  pick out the hard drive and all this jazz online.
• 1:07:35
  They'd build it for you. And they had a whole
• 1:07:37
  page of their website that was dedicated to Bell Laboratories
• 1:07:43
  and Bell Laboratories being close to a military base, not
• 1:07:47
  because the military base is really to protect New York City.
• 1:07:49
  It was really to protect Bell Labs because they were
• 1:07:51
  working on this top secret stuff there and that they
• 1:07:54
  had back engineered some stuff from the Roswell crash. This
• 1:07:56
  is all like this. Maybe it's so fun. Why is
• 1:08:00
  that stuff so fun?
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe. I mean, after all, they invented the fiber
• 1:08:05
  optics and lasers and everything in the modern world.
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 2: Fiber optics specifically was one of the things that they
• 1:08:11
  discussed as being something that they discovered.
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 1: Well, there is– I mean, if you go to the
• 1:08:17
  ordinary history, you can figure out why that happened, that
• 1:08:20
  it didn't involve reverse engineering anything, that there's a long
• 1:08:24
  history about why somebody would have gotten to the point
• 1:08:27
  to realize that you can do certain things with glass.
• 1:08:30
  That would be interesting.
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 1: Whether the idea came from somewhere else, that I don't know.
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 2: It's just interesting. It's fascinating when you find out that
• 1:08:40
  there are these very limited access programs that are beyond
• 1:08:44
  top secret that even the president can't find out about them.
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And so one of the disadvantages of a special
• 1:08:51
  access program is that you could be working next to
• 1:08:53
  somebody and are not allowed to talk about what they're doing.
• 1:08:56
  And that was happening a lot. So a lot of
• 1:09:00
  the Stargate program is now public. There's like four volumes
• 1:09:05
  that go through great gory detail on this called the
• 1:09:07
  Stargate Archives. Not all of it has been released. So
• 1:09:12
  a lot of the military stuff will never be released
• 1:09:15
  because it involves people and methods and so on. Some
• 1:09:18
  of the research side is not released either. And so
• 1:09:21
  I know about that because I was in there. I
• 1:09:25
  also just by virtue of hanging around other people, you
• 1:09:29
  learn things that they talk about. So we know about
• 1:09:33
  some of those things too. And I know when you're
• 1:09:35
  talking to Hal Puthoff and occasionally you would ask him
• 1:09:37
  something and he'd say, well, I can't talk about that. Well,
• 1:09:40
  I can't talk about this.
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 2: That's a prompt. Does that frustrate you that you can't
• 1:09:47
  openly discuss some of these things? Yes.
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: It was especially frustrating when I was working there because
• 1:09:54
  we go into the building and we're doing all kinds
• 1:09:56
  of interesting psychic things. And you go out of the
• 1:09:58
  building and it not only doesn't exist, that if it
• 1:10:02
  ever comes up in conversation, you don't say I can't
• 1:10:04
  talk about it because that would mean they know. You
• 1:10:08
  have to go along with the game and just agree
• 1:10:10
  with everybody else that it's all nonsense. So it's nonsense
• 1:10:13
  out there. And in here, we're working on it.
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 2: So that kind of— What a weird psychological dilemma.
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 1: Well, even worse, the whole point about classification is to
• 1:10:24
  keep secrets. We were figuring out ways that you can't
• 1:10:28
  keep secrets, right? I mean, the whole thing about remote
• 1:10:31
  viewing and telepathy and all that stuff, there are no secrets.
• 1:10:35
  With the right talented people, nothing can be shielded, nothing. Outside,
• 1:10:41
  everything is all about secrets. So one of the reasons,
• 1:10:44
  I think, that these topics still have a stigma attached
• 1:10:47
  to them and why there's disinformation is because imagine how
• 1:10:51
  the society would work if there were no secrets.
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 2: Don't you think that technology is eventually taking us in
• 1:10:58
  that direction?
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 1: Yes, but it's not going to be Neuralink. It's not
• 1:11:03
  going to be brain computer stuff. It's going to be
• 1:11:07
  the real thing.
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 2: So you think technology will aid us in achieving the
• 1:11:12
  real thing? Yes. How so? Okay.
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 1: So one day we're talking to Gary Nolan. Gary says,
• 1:11:21
  have you ever looked at the genetics of highly talented people?
• 1:11:25
  There's a lot of folklore out there that there are
• 1:11:28
  people who are psychic who come from psychic families. And
• 1:11:32
  then there are people who don't have anything psychic and
• 1:11:34
  don't have anybody talking about psychic stuff. That suggests genetics.
• 1:11:39
  So this was a couple of years ago. We decided
• 1:11:42
  to do an experiment that we call Psygenes. We're looking
• 1:11:45
  for the psychic gene, more likely a polygenetic trait, but
• 1:11:49
  nevertheless something about genetics. So we do an experiment where
• 1:11:54
  we recruit 3,000 people using the Internet who say that
• 1:11:58
  they're psychic from psychic families. And then we do all
• 1:12:01
  kinds of vetting to make sure that they are who
• 1:12:03
  they say they are. And they have some talent. And
• 1:12:06
  we get their DNA. Okay. We only had enough money
• 1:12:09
  to find out of the 3,000 people, 13, because we
• 1:12:12
  also did face-to-face interviews to make sure they weren't nuts.
• 1:12:16
  So we get their DNA. Then we find match controls,
• 1:12:19
  and we do standard methods of comparing the two sets
• 1:12:23
  of genomes. And so we found something that we didn't expect,
• 1:12:28
  which was that the psychics were all so-called wild type.
• 1:12:33
  They didn't have any unusual things happening in their DNA.
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 1: The controls had a significant effect in an intron sequence.
• 1:12:43
  So when you have DNA, it's billions of base pairs.
• 1:12:46
  Only about 50,000 of them produce proteins. It's called the exome.
• 1:12:51
  It's a portion that creates our body. It's that stuff.
• 1:12:55
  All of the rest of it used to be called
• 1:12:57
  junk DNA because they didn't know what it did. It's
• 1:13:00
  the intron sequence. It's the thing between the genes. That
• 1:13:05
  now we know is the epigenetic. portion. It's the portion
• 1:13:08
  of the DNA that turns genes on and off. These
• 1:13:12
  controls had a mutation in their intron sequence. So they
• 1:13:16
  were turning something off. We still don't know exactly what
• 1:13:20
  it is, but something about their makeup was turning off
• 1:13:24
  psychic sensitivity. And so one of the people on our
• 1:13:27
  project was a specialist in the genetics of societies. Different
• 1:13:33
  societies have different genetic makeup. And he found that to
• 1:13:37
  our surprise there too, that countries that were exposed to Christianity,
• 1:13:42
  the longer they were exposed, the more this intron sequence
• 1:13:46
  was there, the mutation. We started thinking, well, how does
• 1:13:50
  that make any sense? And then suddenly we understood. The
• 1:13:56
  Inquisition had systematically looked for people over hundreds of years
• 1:14:01
  who had these abilities, and then they killed them.
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 2: And so.
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 1: You think about this is a non-evolutionary method but nevertheless
• 1:14:10
  a pruning of a portion of humanity. So they were
• 1:14:14
  getting rid of people who had this and what were
• 1:14:16
  left over were people who had this no psychic stuff
• 1:14:19
  at all. So it's like a eugenics in an opposite
• 1:14:26
  direction where they weren't trying to pull people for talent
• 1:14:29
  but get rid of the talent. And you can see
• 1:14:31
  it in the genome.
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 2: And this is directly connected to the Inquisition? Because– so
• 1:14:38
  the Inquisition, this is– what were they– like who were
• 1:14:43
  they targeting specifically?
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 1: They were targeting witches. So the witches were once– I
• 1:14:49
  mean an awful lot of innocent people were caught up
• 1:14:52
  in that as well. But people who were known as healers,
• 1:14:56
  people who had precognition– and of course the church at
• 1:14:59
  the time was just concerned that Somebody is going to
• 1:15:02
  come along that's going to attract our followers away from us.
• 1:15:05
  So magic was okay within the church. Within the bounds
• 1:15:10
  of the church, if a priest is anointed in a
• 1:15:12
  certain way, they can do magic. The whole ceremony of
• 1:15:15
  the Eucharist is a magical practice.
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 2: It's okay.
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 1: Outside of the church, it was not okay. And so
• 1:15:21
  it was a very heavy-handed way of ensuring that the
• 1:15:25
  power would remain in the church.
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 2: So by enforcing their Christian ideology, they eliminated anybody that
• 1:15:32
  had any alternative powers or visions or anything weird, any
• 1:15:38
  other kind of practices. Yeah.
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 1: And so the case of the Catholic saints is very interesting.
• 1:15:44
  Like Joseph of Cupertino was said to have levitated and
• 1:15:48
  also to do bilocation, very psychic things. He was very–
• 1:15:54
  he was lucky in a sense. That he was already
• 1:15:58
  a priest. Lots of people, thousands of people saw him levitate.
• 1:16:03
  And he made, basically a deal was made with the
• 1:16:06
  Inquisition that you now need to go to this place
• 1:16:09
  out in the middle of nowhere and don't show this
• 1:16:11
  anymore to anybody.
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 2: So when you say he could levitate, like how high?
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 1: There are stories of him levitating 30 feet.
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 2: Sometimes drifting into the rafters of churches in front of
• 1:16:22
  astonished crowds and even Pope Urban VIII. You could read
• 1:16:26
  more about it in his extraordinary life through Franciscan Media. Yeah, St.
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 1: Teresa.
• 1:16:32
  Speaker 2: The patron saint. Go back. Often called the patron saint
• 1:16:37
  of air travelers.
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, why not? We're all levitating.
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 2: That is the most famous levitator in Catholic history. So
• 1:16:44
  there's other levitators? Oh, yeah.
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a book called.
• 1:16:48
  Speaker 2: How come nobody could do that now?
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 1: There are stories that people can do it now, but
• 1:16:52
  so far in the laboratory, we haven't been able to
• 1:16:54
  see this. There's a book called... Stop, please.
• 1:16:59
  Speaker 2: Go back. This one, Saint Teresa of Avila, a Spanish
• 1:17:04
  mystic who famously recorded that her levitations occurred unexpectedly during
• 1:17:08
  states of deep spiritual rapture. She described the sensation as
• 1:17:11
  a violent force lifting her up from beneath her feet
• 1:17:15
  and was so embarrassed by it that she instructed fellow
• 1:17:17
  nuns to physically hold her down. Whoa.
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, dozens.
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 2: Francis of Assisi. But it's like, Do it now. Why
• 1:17:29
  do you think people don't do it now and film
• 1:17:30
  it on their iPhone?
• 1:17:32
  Speaker 1: Well, so the TM organization had a SIDI program, the
• 1:17:36
  SIDI Yogic Powers. And they had this whole thing for
• 1:17:39
  a long time about yogic flyers. So one time I
• 1:17:42
  went to the university where they were going to show
• 1:17:45
  the four best yogic flyers. So we're all excited about that,
• 1:17:49
  a few other people. And so there are four young
• 1:17:51
  men who go in full lotus position and then hop.
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 2: I've seen that. Yeah.
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 1: So we were like right next to them seeing hopping.
• 1:17:59
  And the hopping is pretty good because you're in a
• 1:18:01
  full lotus position and you hop around two and a
• 1:18:03
  half feet.
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 2: It's plyometrics though. Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 1: It was hopping. So I asked them, well, why aren't
• 1:18:10
  anybody– why is the flying not happening? There they go.
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 2: Right. Yeah.
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 1: So that's– it takes– you have to be pretty strong
• 1:18:18
  to do that.
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but that's all that is.
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 2: I know guys who can do that.
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 1: So the Maharishi was asked, why isn't anybody flying? And
• 1:18:25
  his response was there's too many people who think it's impossible.
• 1:18:29
  So it becomes like a sociological thing. So is that true?
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 2: I don't know. Do you think it's people are more
• 1:18:38
  closed-minded to the ideas than anything outside the norm? Anything
• 1:18:42
  like that, levitation, is nonsense. So it's like it's permeated
• 1:18:45
  our zeitgeist?
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 1: Yes. It also– I believe that it can act as
• 1:18:49
  a blockage. for other people. So you haven't asked yet
• 1:18:55
  why as a scientist who worked at Princeton and Bell Labs,
• 1:18:58
  why am I writing about magic? It's because of a
• 1:19:00
  couple of experiences that told me that our understanding of
• 1:19:04
  psychic effects now is like in a box. We generally
• 1:19:08
  do experiments. We get relatively small effects. They're not gigantic effects.
• 1:19:13
  They're not levitation. Well, maybe it's the same thing. Somebody
• 1:19:18
  can make a random number generator do something. You need
• 1:19:22
  statistics to see it. They're really small, but we don't
• 1:19:25
  know the limits. So I've had a few experiences that
• 1:19:29
  told me I really don't know what the limits are.
• 1:19:32
  And so that brings up this. So bending a bowl
• 1:19:36
  of a spoon without force, which I did. And so
• 1:19:40
  I brought you a spoon. This is the same spoon
• 1:19:43
  from– it's from 1961. It's this particular– so I set
• 1:19:48
  up this. I went to a so-called spoon bending party because.
• 1:19:53
  Speaker 2: You bent that spoon with your brain or your mind
• 1:19:56
  or your consciousness or whatever it is? Something?
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 1: I mentally did something, but I'll show you in a
• 1:20:01
  minute how we did this. So the reason I did
• 1:20:04
  this because I was at intervals. And at the time,
• 1:20:06
  Russ Targ was working for me and Ed May too.
• 1:20:10
  And Russ came back from one of these parties and
• 1:20:13
  he said he had bent a rebar, a half-inch rebar, which,
• 1:20:20
  I mean, some muscle men can do that, but you
• 1:20:22
  have to be pretty strong to bend a rebar and
• 1:20:24
  have it stay there. So I was thinking that is ridiculous.
• 1:20:28
  I didn't say that, but I was thinking that's impossible.
• 1:20:32
  And the same thing about this. If you bend the
• 1:20:34
  neck of a spoon, which is what typically people do,
• 1:20:37
  a person can do that just and it's gone so
• 1:20:41
  fast that you can't see it. And then you hide
• 1:20:43
  it and you reveal it and it looks like you've
• 1:20:45
  bent it. So I went to one of these parties
• 1:20:48
  and I heard that there was a woman there who
• 1:20:50
  was able to bend the bowl of the spoon just
• 1:20:52
  by touching it, not by itself but sort of touching
• 1:20:55
  it and moving it over. And I said, I want
• 1:20:57
  to see that because it's ridiculous. So I'm standing in
• 1:21:01
  front of this woman and she's holding it like this.
• 1:21:03
  She has a thumb there and a finger here. And
• 1:21:07
  so I'm waiting for her to do it. And I'm
• 1:21:10
  mimicking her because I want to see how she's doing it.
• 1:21:14
  You know, is it a trick? So we're doing that
• 1:21:16
  and nothing is happening. And then somebody says, look what
• 1:21:19
  you did. And I'm looking, oh, somebody did something? No, Dean,
• 1:21:22
  look what you did. I had bent it 90 degrees.
• 1:21:26
  And I immediately look at my fingers. Did I do
• 1:21:28
  this by force? No, no indication, no indentation or anything.
• 1:21:33
  And so the person said, bend it all the way.
• 1:21:35
  So it was halfway and I literally went and went
• 1:21:39
  all the way. So now I have this spoon and
• 1:21:43
  I'm sort of mind boggled by it because I know
• 1:21:46
  it wasn't force. I'm not strong enough to be able
• 1:21:49
  to do that. Very few people would be able to
• 1:21:50
  do it. So I have another spoon just like it
• 1:21:54
  and I'm on the plane flying home. and I'm trying
• 1:21:57
  to do it with the spoon, and I suddenly get
• 1:21:59
  a huge shock of fear because I'm in a metal
• 1:22:03
  tin can 30,000 feet up, and I don't know how
• 1:22:06
  I did it, and I don't want the wings to
• 1:22:08
  suddenly go, because I still don't know exactly how, but
• 1:22:14
  I know the metallurgy now. So it turns out that
• 1:22:17
  if you're holding it like that, and you can do
• 1:22:19
  between 50 and 70 pounds of force suddenly, like an impulse,
• 1:22:25
  you will cause the lattice that forms the grain boundary
• 1:22:29
  to momentarily soften. And then for about 20 seconds, it
• 1:22:33
  will be really, really soft. And at that point, you
• 1:22:37
  can literally just take a thumb and finger like this,
• 1:22:40
  which is what I did, and squish it over, instantly
• 1:22:42
  tightens up again.
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 2: But there's no explanation for what caused the initial force.
• 1:22:47
  Speaker 1: No, because I was holding it like this, and I
• 1:22:49
  can't do it.
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 2: Can you do that now?
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 1: No. I don't know how I did it. I do know, however.
• 1:22:56
  Speaker 2: Is that the actual spoon you did it with?
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, this is the spoon.
• 1:22:59
  Speaker 2: Can I feel it? This is a regular spoon. Yeah.
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 1: It's pretty easy to bend. I want to show you
• 1:23:06
  this other part here. This is the motivation. So I
• 1:23:12
  was told, well, more importantly than that, is to take
• 1:23:19
  the full spoon that you have, Because this is what
• 1:23:22
  I was working on.
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 2: Right, this one was already weakened, right? No. No, but
• 1:23:26
  I mean now it is.
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 1: No, that is the way it is. It's a little spongy.
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what I'm saying, like that. I just did that.
• 1:23:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you're applying.
• 1:23:34
  Speaker 2: Straightened it out.
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and you have to apply a lot of force.
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 2: To do it. Yeah, a lot. Yeah, I got to
• 1:23:40
  really strain. Yeah. And I have fat thumbs. But once
• 1:23:45
  it's like that, I can kind of do that.
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well now, of course, you smoothed it out. So
• 1:23:49
  now try to do it. Without it being in that position.
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 2: With just one finger?
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 1: No, just like this. Hold it like that. Hold thumb underneath,
• 1:24:00
  finger on top, and bend it down. Not the neck.
• 1:24:07
  The shell shape resists bending.
• 1:24:09
  Speaker 2: It's very hard to bend.
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 1: And more importantly, don't hurt your fingers on this.
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I can't do it. Well, I might be able
• 1:24:16
  to do it if it was more stable, but it's
• 1:24:17
  very hard to do. It's not something that's.
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 1: Easy at all. With leverage, certainly you can do it.
• 1:24:21
  But there was.
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 2: Maybe I could do it. Oh, yeah. But, I mean,
• 1:24:25
  I would want to use both hands. I'd want to
• 1:24:27
  get in there.
• 1:24:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. But that's not what happens.
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 2: But to do it with a finger, that's very hard
• 1:24:32
  to do. And you don't know how you did it.
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 1: Well, so I was in a very weird state of
• 1:24:37
  motivation because we were told that if you could do
• 1:24:40
  that without force– That you would get this button.
• 1:24:46
  Speaker 2: Certified warm former?
• 1:24:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So it's called warm formering because you're forming this
• 1:24:53
  as though it became warm because it feels like putty
• 1:24:55
  when it actually works. That's what I.
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 2: Had heard that people do with like the necks of them.
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. I wasn't interested in the neck. I've seen a.
• 1:25:03
  Speaker 2: Guy do that. He told me it was a trick. Yeah.
• 1:25:05
  He goes, I'm not going to tell you how I
• 1:25:07
  do it, but I'm not using magic.
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 1: It's a trick. You could just do it.
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 2: He said he was like doing something like rubbing it
• 1:25:11
  with his fingers and it would like– it was a
• 1:25:13
  specific type of spoon or something.
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 1: But even with this spoon, I mean you're certainly strong
• 1:25:18
  enough to be able to push it over at the neck.
• 1:25:21
  The shell shape is very difficult.
• 1:25:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I can't do it.
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 1: So I was told if– Oh, I did it.
• 1:25:29
  Speaker 2: But look, I had to use both hands.
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And you apply leverage and you're going to feel
• 1:25:33
  it tomorrow in your fingers too.
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 2: Nah, I'll be all right. But yeah, this is– that's
• 1:25:39
  very hard to do.
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 1: So if you could do it, you get a button.
• 1:25:43
  So the next day I was giving a talk to
• 1:25:45
  this conference. This was held at a conference. And I
• 1:25:48
  imagined myself with my suit on with the button. And
• 1:25:51
  it was like some kind of weird ego thing where
• 1:25:54
  I felt I needed to demonstrate to the people in
• 1:25:56
  the audience that I can do this stuff. And it
• 1:25:59
  was so strange because I'm not very egotistical and I'm
• 1:26:04
  not self-aggrandizing either. But there was something about getting this
• 1:26:08
  stupid button that put me in a position where I
• 1:26:11
  felt if I don't do this, the universe will end.
• 1:26:14
  I mean that kind of level of obsessiveness. I needed
• 1:26:18
  the button.
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 2: For no reason.
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 1: Well, because I needed the button.
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 2: I know, but that's kind of crazy.
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 1: I don't know how to explain it.
• 1:26:25
  Speaker 2: That doesn't seem like something you would be interested in,
• 1:26:27
  knowing you for the brief amount of time that I've
• 1:26:29
  known you.
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 1: Nevertheless, that is the strange state I was in. And
• 1:26:34
  it's relevant to the idea of how traditional magic is
• 1:26:38
  supposed to work. There's a number of factors involved. There's
• 1:26:41
  belief and motivation is very important, imagination and a bunch
• 1:26:45
  of other things. So it's very difficult in an experiment
• 1:26:49
  to create that level of motivation. This is not something
• 1:26:52
  I want. This is something I need. I need this
• 1:26:56
  to happen. So, well, so I got the button. And
• 1:27:00
  the moment I did that and he gave me the button,
• 1:27:03
  it all vanished. The whole thing about the need was
• 1:27:06
  suddenly and everything in the universe was okay again. So
• 1:27:10
  that's when you look into how magic works, you build
• 1:27:15
  up this sense and there's two ways of doing it.
• 1:27:18
  One is very long-term meditation where you can gain certain skills.
• 1:27:22
  And the other one I call screaming at fire. So
• 1:27:26
  the image that that evokes, you're screaming at fire. It's
• 1:27:30
  that kind of motivation which allows things to unfold that
• 1:27:33
  otherwise wouldn't happen.
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 2: So this state, have you ever tried to achieve this
• 1:27:40
  state again under any other circumstances?
• 1:27:42
  Speaker 1: Well, yeah, in the airplane. And now I don't do
• 1:27:44
  that in the airplane because I don't know how I
• 1:27:46
  did it in the first place. I have tried several
• 1:27:50
  times since. with a quarter-inch aluminum bar. This is the
• 1:27:54
  same kind of bar used in aircraft. It's very strong,
• 1:27:57
  very stiff. And you start with it flat, and it
• 1:28:01
  doesn't rock at all. And so I was able to
• 1:28:04
  make it go so that it rocks a little bit.
• 1:28:06
  So it moved at probably a fraction of a millimeter.
• 1:28:10
  And using the same kind of thing, but without that
• 1:28:11
  crazy motivation because I didn't have a button.
• 1:28:14
  Speaker 2: Did you film yourself ever doing this? No.
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 1: No.
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 2: Has anybody ever filmed themselves doing something like this?
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 1: There are some films of people doing this. Generally, what
• 1:28:23
  you see is it breaking. Like a spoon will break
• 1:28:27
  here and it'll go bleep. But again, there was a
• 1:28:31
  lot of research on this in the 1970s by metallurgists
• 1:28:34
  and physicists. Some became convinced that it's real and some
• 1:28:39
  became convinced that it wasn't real.
• 1:28:41
  Speaker 2: So there's some kind of energy, some unknown energy that
• 1:28:45
  you're transmitting to that spoon.
• 1:28:47
  Speaker 1: I think what's happening is very similar to what's going
• 1:28:50
  on with these micro-PK events, micro-psychokinetic events. But you're changing
• 1:28:56
  probabilistic structure at a very deep level, at the atomic level.
• 1:29:01
  And that would actually do it here. If you're able
• 1:29:03
  to target like a strip across here, you can momentarily
• 1:29:08
  cause the grains to shift.
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 2: And the fact that you didn't know you did it.
• 1:29:13
  Speaker 1: I didn't know how I did it. I just know
• 1:29:15
  what I wanted to happen.
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 2: But did you recognize it was happening while it was happening?
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 1: No. No, I was too freaked out.
• 1:29:20
  Speaker 2: See, that's what I'm saying. So the state of mind
• 1:29:23
  was so peculiar. Yeah. that you were doing it without
• 1:29:28
  even focusing on the fact that you were doing it.
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure if I was being analytical at the time,
• 1:29:33
  it would not have happened.
• 1:29:37
  Speaker 2: That's what's so weird about the whole idea of intuition
• 1:29:41
  is that if you try it, if you like, you
• 1:29:43
  really think about it too much, then you get fucked
• 1:29:48
  by your own perceptions in some way. Like you, you
• 1:29:52
  skew the thing, you start defining it and you can't
• 1:29:55
  see it anymore.
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 1: In a very general sense, it's right versus left brain.
• 1:30:01
  Our left brains are analytical. It's what allows us to
• 1:30:03
  do this sort of communication. It is maintaining stability about
• 1:30:08
  the way that we think the world works. The right
• 1:30:10
  brain isn't interested in that stuff at all. It's about
• 1:30:14
  form and function. That's where remote viewing and most psychic
• 1:30:16
  stuff takes place. And it's not simple as left and
• 1:30:20
  right brain, but it's generally a general idea. So, The
• 1:30:25
  second level of our CyGenes test, so they're both published now.
• 1:30:29
  So the second one, we need thousands of cases and
• 1:30:34
  controls in order to do this right. Like if you're
• 1:30:37
  studying schizophrenia, what's the genetic basis? Use tens of thousands
• 1:30:42
  of cases, and they know the genes now as a result.
• 1:30:47
  We don't have money to do that. So we've got
• 1:30:50
  data from 23andMe. and from ancestry and those kinds of
• 1:30:55
  places that give you your exome. So it's not the
• 1:30:58
  full genome. It's a portion of it. And we had
• 1:31:01
  people fill out a questionnaire of what kind of experiences
• 1:31:04
  you had. And then we're able to do an analysis.
• 1:31:06
  Is there a correlation between the two? And the answer
• 1:31:09
  is yes. We found 212 SNPs. These are single nucleotide polymorphisms.
• 1:31:16
  So it's a piece of the genome. 212 correlated with
• 1:31:21
  these psychic experiences. one of which correlated with a probability
• 1:31:25
  of a million to one. So that one's probably a
• 1:31:28
  real thing. So what is that SNP associated with? You
• 1:31:32
  go into the atlas and you can say, well, what
• 1:31:34
  portion of the body is that involved in? And it's
• 1:31:37
  involved with a whole bunch of different things happening in
• 1:31:39
  the brain. So anybody who's listening has $ 10 million to spare.
• 1:31:47
  And wants us to figure out what is the rest
• 1:31:49
  of the story. We can do that because we have
• 1:31:51
  the technology now.
• 1:31:52
  Speaker 2: Elon, you got some cash. Throw it at this thing.
• 1:31:55
  So do you– when you think of consciousness, do you
• 1:31:59
  think that we as individual biological entities are interacting with
• 1:32:04
  consciousness and with different levels of achieving certain aspects of consciousness? Yes.
• 1:32:11
  some of it being genetic, some of it being life experience, education, training,
• 1:32:18
  but that we're just these individual biological entities that are
• 1:32:21
  tapping into whatever consciousness is.
• 1:32:25
  Speaker 1: Yes and no, but you see the subtitle, How the
• 1:32:31
  Mind Weaves the Fabric of Reality. So I'm viewing this
• 1:32:35
  as consciousness and the physical world are like a tapestry.
• 1:32:40
  They're both necessary for understanding of reality. And they're weaved together.
• 1:32:44
  They're both part of it. You can't have just a
• 1:32:47
  physical world. Maybe you can't just have a consciousness world either.
• 1:32:51
  They're working together. So we are that. Our physical body,
• 1:32:55
  our consciousness are woven together into the form that we
• 1:32:58
  currently take. So that is essentially a philosophy called dual
• 1:33:02
  aspect monism. There's one world of which we don't know
• 1:33:07
  what that is, but two things split out of it.
• 1:33:10
  mind and matter. But they come out of something that
• 1:33:14
  is uniform. It's one thing. So Carl Jung called it
• 1:33:20
  the Unus Mundus, the one world out of which things split. Well,
• 1:33:24
  why does it split? His idea was that it splits
• 1:33:27
  because of meaning. So meaning is what caused this mind-matter split.
• 1:33:32
  And because they come out of the same place, they're
• 1:33:34
  tightly correlated, like two sides of the same coin.
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 2: But meaning being very subjective, right? What is meaning?
• 1:33:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good question because Jung did not clearly
• 1:33:45
  define what he meant by meaning. We sort of know
• 1:33:48
  what that means, what meaning means, but it's in that
• 1:33:52
  theory at least or the philosophy, it's not clearly defined.
• 1:33:55
  Speaker 2: So when you get down to this one thing that
• 1:33:57
  these two things branch out, what is the one thing?
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 1: It's the one thing that everything comes from. And also
• 1:34:05
  mind and matter are two aspects that split, but there's
• 1:34:08
  an infinite number of other aspects that that can split
• 1:34:11
  out of this one thing. So maybe it splits into
• 1:34:15
  other worlds. It splits into other universes. It splits, we
• 1:34:17
  don't know how. It splits into aliens.
• 1:34:19
  Speaker 2: We don't know. That's a lot of we don't know. Yeah.
• 1:34:23
  Speaker 1: When it comes down to anywhere in science, we don't know.
• 1:34:29
  The leading edge, we do not know. And it's largely
• 1:34:32
  because science doesn't answer why. We don't know why. Why
• 1:34:36
  does an electron have a certain charge on it? We
• 1:34:38
  don't know. That's the way it is. Science observes stuff
• 1:34:41
  and then tries to make theories to explain it and
• 1:34:44
  sometimes really good. We can make stuff out of it.
• 1:34:47
  But when it comes down to brass tacks, most of
• 1:34:49
  the answers are we really don't know.
• 1:34:50
  Speaker 2: Trevor Burrus And it gets down to the base of
• 1:34:52
  the observable universe. You get to like quantum mechanics and
• 1:34:57
  quantum theory and particles being connected, spooky action at a distance.
• 1:35:03
  You get to the weird stuff about quantum, the quantum
• 1:35:06
  world and it's– Particles being in superposition, moving and still
• 1:35:11
  at the same time, being connected over vast distances. Like,
• 1:35:16
  that's magic. Like, whatever the hell that is, that doesn't
• 1:35:19
  seem to follow any of the rules of reality that we, like,
• 1:35:24
  average people exist in.
• 1:35:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but our average experience is provincial. It's human-centric at
• 1:35:31
  human timescales.
• 1:35:32
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 1: Imagine a few thousand years ago, you'd look up at
• 1:35:37
  the dark sky and see a bunch of stars, and
• 1:35:40
  a couple of them look kind of fuzzy. Well, you
• 1:35:42
  didn't know they were galaxies. Well, you take the James
• 1:35:45
  Webb telescope now, and the estimate is at least 3,000
• 1:35:50
  galaxies in the observable universe. So imagine how your cosmology
• 1:35:54
  changes between those two. In one case, you're the center
• 1:35:58
  of the universe, and there's some smudgy stars, a few
• 1:36:00
  of them, five of them about. Now, We know we
• 1:36:04
  are in the middle of nowhere in some gigantic universe
• 1:36:08
  with basically no understanding of the rest of it. Cosmology
• 1:36:11
  is changing day by day. So I gave a talk
• 1:36:14
  on this recently about how every time a new instrument
• 1:36:18
  extends our senses, whole new realms of reality open up
• 1:36:22
  that weren't even imagined before. So the reason why I'm
• 1:36:28
  continuing to be so interested in what is the nature
• 1:36:30
  of consciousness, what is the frontier, is because without consciousness,
• 1:36:36
  we wouldn't know anything, quite literally. We wouldn't be aware
• 1:36:39
  of anything. So in some respects, we are creating all
• 1:36:42
  of this. And so something seems weird because we don't
• 1:36:46
  have the senses yet to be able to actually experience
• 1:36:49
  it directly.
• 1:36:51
  Speaker 2: God, it's such a fascinating subject. And the concept of
• 1:36:54
  consciousness interacting with things.
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 1: Less than, yes, interacting, but more so that it is,
• 1:37:03
  everything is built of it. It's like it's part of it.
• 1:37:06
  Speaker 2: Right. So if you're... It's not just experiencing it.
• 1:37:11
  Speaker 1: It is it, in a sense.
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 2: It is it. Yeah.
• 1:37:14
  Speaker 1: If you go all the way to full-blown idealism, which
• 1:37:17
  is the philosophy that everything is consciousness, everything, the physical
• 1:37:21
  world emerges out of consciousness, that's idealism. It turns out
• 1:37:26
  that almost all of the founders of quantum mechanics... were idealists,
• 1:37:32
  which is pretty odd when you think about it. The
• 1:37:35
  most successful physical theory developed so far were people who
• 1:37:39
  were idealists who felt that everything ultimately was consciousness. Not
• 1:37:44
  only that, most of them were also mystics. They read
• 1:37:47
  very extensively in Eastern philosophy. They knew about mysticism. They
• 1:37:52
  were deeply into it, and that still is true for
• 1:37:56
  leading physicists today.
• 1:37:58
  Speaker 2: Do you think there's ancient truths in all the mystic
• 1:38:02
  traditions and all these different things that have existed in
• 1:38:05
  religious texts?
• 1:38:08
  Speaker 1: There is truth there that has been distorted by history
• 1:38:11
  and language.
• 1:38:12
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 1:38:13
  Speaker 1: And it doesn't help that– I'm not going to pick
• 1:38:18
  on the Catholic Church. But religion in general has said,
• 1:38:21
  of course there's magic. Like everything is magic. Supernatural, fill
• 1:38:25
  in the blank, But don't pay too much attention to it,
• 1:38:30
  which is kind of strange, especially in the spiritual traditions.
• 1:38:33
  So I had an opportunity to talk to a famous
• 1:38:36
  guru called Sadhguru.
• 1:38:39
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 1:38:39
  Speaker 1: So I asked Sadhguru, I'm a scientist and I'm studying
• 1:38:44
  psychic phenomena. But within the yoga tradition and virtually every
• 1:38:47
  other spiritual tradition, you're told not to do that. Don't
• 1:38:50
  pay attention to these psychic things. They're a deflection. So
• 1:38:54
  I said, well, am I wasting my time as a scientist?
• 1:38:57
  I mean, what do I do then? And also, why
• 1:39:00
  did the spiritual traditions say that? And his answer was,
• 1:39:05
  imagine you're riding in a car and you've never ridden
• 1:39:08
  in a car before and you like the feeling of
• 1:39:10
  the air as it's going against your arm. Well, it
• 1:39:13
  might rip your arm off if you go near a tree.
• 1:39:16
  So the underlying story is you're dealing with something which
• 1:39:19
  is so powerful that You don't know what you're doing
• 1:39:22
  and it's too powerful. So don't do it. To which
• 1:39:25
  I was saying– thinking, well, you're saying I shouldn't be
• 1:39:28
  doing this. But that only makes me want to do
• 1:39:31
  it more because like we need to figure out what
• 1:39:34
  this stuff is, right?
• 1:39:36
  Speaker 2: The idea that you should just ignore it is ridiculous.
• 1:39:38
  Speaker 1: But that's what the spiritual traditions do. They say ignore it.
• 1:39:42
  Speaker 2: Is that so they can maintain control? So they can
• 1:39:45
  be the purveyors of knowledge and no one goes outside
• 1:39:49
  of that realm? And questions the ideology?
• 1:39:53
  Speaker 1: Some of it is that, yes. Certainly within Catholicism, Christianity
• 1:39:57
  in general. Yes, don't do that. It's written into the catechism. Like,
• 1:40:01
  don't do this magic stuff because it's demonic. I mean,
• 1:40:05
  that's kind of beaten into your head for a long time.
• 1:40:07
  Speaker 2: Where did that come from? Why demonic? Because of the
• 1:40:10
  potential for it going wrong?
• 1:40:11
  Speaker 1: Because it's not within the bounds of the church.
• 1:40:13
  Speaker 2: That's it. Yep.
• 1:40:15
  Speaker 1: Everything else is demonic, and it will get you. And
• 1:40:18
  by the way, there's still a lot of people in
• 1:40:20
  our own government and in the military who believe that,
• 1:40:23
  and that is one of the reasons why UFOs has
• 1:40:25
  been deflected.
• 1:40:27
  Speaker 2: Oh, J.D. Vance said he thinks they're demons. Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:40:31
  I mean, so— I can't wait to ask him about
• 1:40:33
  that again.
• 1:40:33
  Speaker 1: The same is true for psychic stuff and UFOs, right?
• 1:40:37
  This is demonic. People are like, we shouldn't be doing this.
• 1:40:40
  So within spiritual traditions, the other reason given is that
• 1:40:44
  the power is seductive. And people are too weak. And
• 1:40:49
  so if you gain this power, by one means or
• 1:40:51
  the other, you're going to use it badly. And that
• 1:40:54
  probably is true. That's why, at least within the yogic tradition,
• 1:40:58
  if you're going through the path where you're eventually going
• 1:41:01
  to gain the siddhis, you spend probably the first three
• 1:41:05
  to five years not doing that. You learn how to
• 1:41:08
  get your ego in check. And so that turns out
• 1:41:11
  to be an extremely important aspect of the yogic training.
• 1:41:15
  And the yoga, by the way, has very little or
• 1:41:17
  nothing to do with the whole stretching and the maneuvers,
• 1:41:20
  all of that. All of the things that we think
• 1:41:23
  of as yoga in the West are designed to get
• 1:41:27
  you strong enough so you can sit in a lotus
• 1:41:29
  position for eight hours because that's where the action starts
• 1:41:33
  in meditation. It's not the physical side.
• 1:41:38
  Speaker 2: It is a reality of the human condition that if
• 1:41:41
  you give people that kind of power and that kind
• 1:41:43
  of influence over others— a large percentage will abuse it. Yeah.
• 1:41:49
  Or at least use it to their own, for their
• 1:41:51
  own personal gain, control people and, and to set themselves
• 1:41:55
  up as being godlike or.
• 1:41:58
  Speaker 1: So here's what I told Sadhguru. So one of the projects,
• 1:42:01
  because of our interest in this side genes thing, uh,
• 1:42:05
  it's going to be a very complicated series of genes
• 1:42:08
  and probably intron sequence and so on. But nevertheless, we
• 1:42:11
  have the tools, we can do it if we had
• 1:42:12
  enough money. Uh, Setting aside the issue about ethics, about
• 1:42:17
  whether or not it's a good thing to do, seven
• 1:42:20
  years ago, a couple of colleagues and I formed a
• 1:42:23
  company called Cognigenics to see if we could use genetic
• 1:42:28
  engineering methods to do something like that. Could we significantly
• 1:42:31
  enhance perception and cognition and memory and all of that
• 1:42:35
  stuff so that you don't need to be a monk
• 1:42:37
  going into a cave for 30 years, but you can
• 1:42:39
  take a genetic edit and kind of get there quickly?
• 1:42:42
  So again, it's a good thing. Setting aside for a
• 1:42:44
  moment the ethics and the power seduction and all that,
• 1:42:47
  is it possible? And we now think it's possible because
• 1:42:53
  we've developed an intranasal delivery method for RNA interference. You
• 1:42:58
  shove it up the nose. You snort it up the nose.
• 1:43:00
  It gets into the brain, and it downregulates certain receptors.
• 1:43:04
  Speaker 2: Is it a one-time treatment?
• 1:43:06
  Speaker 1: It's a multi-time treatment because it's RNA. So our RNA
• 1:43:09
  will last for a while, and then months later you'd
• 1:43:12
  have to re-up it. You can do it as of
• 1:43:14
  one time.
• 1:43:15
  Speaker 2: So you could literally blast something up your nose and
• 1:43:19
  it will affect your ability to do this stuff.
• 1:43:23
  Speaker 1: In principle for psychic things. But we see that that's
• 1:43:27
  far in the future. What we're doing now as a
• 1:43:29
  company is addressing dementia. So we're looking for ways of
• 1:43:34
  how do you fix memory loss, especially short-term memory loss.
• 1:43:39
  It is related to certain receptors. It turns out to
• 1:43:41
  be the same receptors as in psilocybin, 5-HD2A. We can
• 1:43:45
  downregulate them.
• 1:43:46
  Speaker 2: You saw that study or that article recently about a
• 1:43:50
  woman who was– I believe she had dementia, but she
• 1:43:54
  couldn't speak anymore. She took five grams of psilocybin mushrooms
• 1:43:58
  and all of a sudden she could talk. Yeah.
• 1:44:00
  Speaker 1: So this is doing that without the hallucinations and much,
• 1:44:05
  much longer. Psilocybin will get in and out of your
• 1:44:08
  body pretty quickly. The RNA interference will come up and
• 1:44:12
  then stay for about, we think, a couple of months
• 1:44:16
  and then slowly begin to decline. And so you would
• 1:44:19
  need to take this treatment, this intranasal treatment, probably every
• 1:44:25
  two or three months. And we don't know about the
• 1:44:28
  dosing yet. We've done studies with mice and rats and
• 1:44:31
  now with monkeys. So we know it works in a
• 1:44:34
  primate brain. The next couple of steps.
• 1:44:37
  Speaker 2: When they do the studies with monkeys, what happens?
• 1:44:40
  Speaker 1: Well, there are two things that you look at. First
• 1:44:43
  of all, you want to make sure that it actually
• 1:44:45
  gets into the brain. So you do a radioactive tag
• 1:44:48
  on the compound itself and then use a PET scan,
• 1:44:51
  a depositron emission tomography, and you can then see, does
• 1:44:55
  it actually get out of the nose and go into
• 1:44:57
  the brain? The answer is yes. We can track where
• 1:45:00
  in the brain it's going. We mainly want it to
• 1:45:02
  get down to the limbic system because that's where the
• 1:45:06
  hippocampus is and where memory is encoded. And we know
• 1:45:09
  from our studies with mice and rats, you get 100%
• 1:45:12
  improvement in memory in mice and rats that are either
• 1:45:16
  aged or normal. A normal mouse will get 100% improvement
• 1:45:22
  in memory. Exactly at the same time, they'll get an
• 1:45:26
  almost 100% reduction in anxiety. So if you think about
• 1:45:30
  a treatment for dementia, dementia patients get very anxious. So
• 1:45:34
  you want to calm them down and improve their memory.
• 1:45:36
  This does both in one shot.
• 1:45:38
  Speaker 2: Wow. Yeah. And what does it do to regular people
• 1:45:44
  with no ailments?
• 1:45:46
  Speaker 1: We don't know yet.
• 1:45:47
  Speaker 2: No one's tried?
• 1:45:48
  Speaker 1: Well, we don't have permission from the FDA to do
• 1:45:51
  clinical trials yet.
• 1:45:52
  Speaker 2: Wink, wink.
• 1:45:54
  Speaker 1: If you ask the people.
• 1:45:56
  Speaker 2: Someone must have done it.
• 1:45:58
  Speaker 1: No, we haven't tried it yet.
• 1:46:00
  Speaker 2: Not a single person has said, shoot it up my nose?
• 1:46:02
  Speaker 1: That would admit it, no.
• 1:46:04
  Speaker 2: Oh, that would admit it.
• 1:46:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:46:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah. That's my point. Yeah.
• 1:46:07
  Speaker 1: So it actually has pretty much the same effect as psilocybin,
• 1:46:12
  but it is only doing this one receptor. Because when
• 1:46:15
  you take psilocybin, there's all kinds of things going on,
• 1:46:18
  which is one of the reasons you get hallucinogenics. So
• 1:46:21
  we wanted to do this for people who probably wouldn't
• 1:46:23
  take a hallucinogen. It would probably come on faster and
• 1:46:27
  it would last a lot longer. And for some cases,
• 1:46:30
  like if somebody was terminal and they're losing their memory,
• 1:46:33
  you can make this a permanent edit as well.
• 1:46:36
  Speaker 2: I wonder what would happen if you combined the two.
• 1:46:39
  Speaker 1: Which two?
• 1:46:40
  Speaker 2: The RNA and psilocybin.
• 1:46:43
  Speaker 1: Well, once we get this approved, we'll have you do
• 1:46:47
  it and see what happens.
• 1:46:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, let's find out.
• 1:46:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:46:51
  Speaker 2: I'll come back and quit the podcast immediately. I'm like,
• 1:46:54
  I've got other things to do. Yeah.
• 1:46:57
  Speaker 1: This would only last for a while. I mean, we're
• 1:46:59
  specifically making it temporary because if somebody had a bad
• 1:47:02
  trip on it, essentially— Right. It will eventually go away,
• 1:47:06
  and so it's not a big deal.
• 1:47:07
  Speaker 2: But if you continue to do it, like brushing your teeth. Yeah.
• 1:47:11
  Speaker 1: Well, so one of our concerns is that because this
• 1:47:14
  is going to improve memory, if a normal person who
• 1:47:17
  doesn't have dementia, would it be something that kids are
• 1:47:21
  going to try to just snort all the time?
• 1:47:23
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:47:23
  Speaker 1: So it's like Ritalin. That would not be good.
• 1:47:27
  Speaker 2: Or would it be awesome?
• 1:47:30
  Speaker 1: Let's put it this way. It probably will not ever
• 1:47:32
  be OTC. You're not going to be able to buy
• 1:47:35
  this at the drugstore.
• 1:47:37
  Speaker 2: It's going to be– you'll have to be prescribed.
• 1:47:40
  Speaker 1: You have to be prescribed.
• 1:47:41
  Speaker 2: So you have to find a dirty doctor in Tijuana.
• 1:47:44
  Speaker 1: You also– you will need– you need a special kind
• 1:47:48
  of delivery system. So we think of a nose spray.
• 1:47:51
  It's atomizing the stuff. It gets down in the lower nose.
• 1:47:54
  In order to get it into the brain, you need
• 1:47:56
  to shoot a stream all the way up to the back.
• 1:48:00
  It's like the cleft right up here and back. Just
• 1:48:03
  beyond that is a bone that separates it from the brain.
• 1:48:07
  A compound gets through that bone.
• 1:48:09
  Speaker 2: Whoa.
• 1:48:10
  Speaker 1: And it has all to do with how big is
• 1:48:13
  the compound.
• 1:48:14
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:48:14
  Speaker 1: So similar to like if you snort cocaine, it'll get
• 1:48:17
  in there. It gets in your brain because it's a
• 1:48:19
  certain size.
• 1:48:20
  Speaker 2: But you can imagine if this just becomes a performance-enhancing
• 1:48:23
  substance that normal people take.
• 1:48:26
  Speaker 1: That could very likely happen.
• 1:48:28
  Speaker 2: Wow. Yeah.
• 1:48:29
  Speaker 1: So I mean we're being very careful at this point.
• 1:48:32
  We have people on board who are ethicists to say–
• 1:48:35
  because we're talking about enhancing human performance. and human cognition
• 1:48:40
  and perception? Can we enhance it all the way out
• 1:48:43
  into extrasensory perception, ESP, meaning psychic stuff? We don't know.
• 1:48:49
  But as I said, once we find what the polygenetic
• 1:48:52
  trait is... This is the.
• 1:48:53
  Speaker 2: Story of the lady who did the mushrooms. Yeah. So
• 1:48:56
  the case study published in Frontiers in Neuroscience researchers focused
• 1:48:59
  on an 80-year-old Japanese-American woman with Alzheimer's. Her condition had
• 1:49:03
  declined over the last decade and was reduced to urinary incontinence,
• 1:49:07
  speaking in single syllables, and dependence on caregivers for mobility
• 1:49:11
  and support. She was then given a five-gram dose of
• 1:49:15
  magic mushrooms. During the initial phase, she was agitated, sweated profusely,
• 1:49:18
  and entered a prolonged sleep state that suggested unconsciousness. But
• 1:49:22
  around hour 19, she began speaking in full sentences, recalling
• 1:49:26
  life events she had been unable to articulate for years.
• 1:49:30
  In the days and weeks that followed, more incredible changes emerged.
• 1:49:33
  She regained urinary continence even in the evenings and began
• 1:49:36
  dressing herself. She was able to make and maintain eye contact,
• 1:49:40
  remember social interactions, emotionally respond to others, and hold lucid conversations. Right.
• 1:49:46
  And that's one dose.
• 1:49:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So what happens when you take psilocybin? The first
• 1:49:53
  effect is that it is a 5-HT2A agonist. It means
• 1:49:58
  it's souping up that particular receptor. But the brain notices that.
• 1:50:02
  And then it down-regulates.
• 1:50:03
  Speaker 2: You see what it says here? A subsequent three-gram dose
• 1:50:06
  of psilocybin was given to the patient and was followed
• 1:50:08
  by increased verbal expression, humor, and greater walking agility. Miraculously,
• 1:50:14
  miraculous as the mushrooms may seem, the study authors note
• 1:50:17
  that the patient's improvements were temporary and psilocybin did not
• 1:50:20
  reverse the disease as her neurodegeneration remained. They did not
• 1:50:27
  specify exactly how long the improvements lasted. However, the researchers...
• 1:50:31
  The research does demonstrate that some function believed to be
• 1:50:34
  irrevocably lost to late-stage dementia may not be gone but
• 1:50:38
  merely inaccessible and that a mushroom trip has the potential
• 1:50:41
  to recover it, albeit briefly. But it sounds like this
• 1:50:44
  would be even better at that.
• 1:50:46
  Speaker 1: Well, this has the hallucinatory part in the beginning. The
• 1:50:51
  reason why we think this works and the reason why
• 1:50:53
  we're doing a downregulation of 5-HD2A is because when you
• 1:50:57
  take psilocybin, it soups it up. It's an agonist. It
• 1:51:01
  makes it more expressed. That's when all the hallucinations and
• 1:51:04
  stuff happens. Then the brain compensates and it starts pushing
• 1:51:08
  it back down. So it starts suppressing 5-HD2A. We're doing
• 1:51:12
  that directly. So we would guess then that if the
• 1:51:15
  reason why this happened is because of the reduction of hyperactivity,
• 1:51:20
  which is involved with neurodegeneration, that it would happen immediately.
• 1:51:25
  So you don't need that initial push that you're starting...
• 1:51:29
  right from the get-go with the reduction in this 5-HT2A.
• 1:51:32
  Speaker 2: God, that would be a phenomenal game-changer for people that
• 1:51:35
  are suffering from this.
• 1:51:36
  Speaker 1: Yes, and also the same platform that we use to
• 1:51:39
  deliver this particular compound can be used with lots of
• 1:51:43
  other compounds. So the more that psychiatry learns about neurodegeneration
• 1:51:49
  and about memory loss and all that, we can just
• 1:51:51
  change the compound and change the receptors. So, yeah, we
• 1:51:57
  can do it now. Wow. Yeah, so this now links
• 1:52:01
  back into the Institute of Neurotic Sciences CyGenes project, which
• 1:52:06
  launched this thing. So we're launching it in a very
• 1:52:09
  pragmatic way, which could help a lot of people, keeping
• 1:52:12
  in mind that we can go into a place where
• 1:52:15
  we're beginning to enhance people. That's going to take a
• 1:52:19
  while to get there. And again, we think carefully about
• 1:52:23
  is this a good thing or not.
• 1:52:25
  Speaker 2: Of course. Why would it be a bad thing?
• 1:52:27
  Speaker 1: I think it's a good thing.
• 1:52:29
  Speaker 2: What would be the bad part of it when you
• 1:52:32
  try to look at it in the worst-case scenario?
• 1:52:34
  Speaker 1: What I have in mind is every time a new
• 1:52:36
  technology came along, people think this is the best thing ever.
• 1:52:40
  Like I met the guy who developed trans fats who
• 1:52:43
  thought he was going to help a lot of people
• 1:52:44
  because then fat wouldn't be so bad. It turned out
• 1:52:48
  to be really bad.
• 1:52:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:52:50
  Speaker 1: And so unintended consequences when we're developing new things.
• 1:52:54
  Speaker 2: Are there side effects? have been observed?
• 1:52:57
  Speaker 1: Not yet. It's partially because when you do preclinical work,
• 1:53:01
  there's only so many things you can infer about what
• 1:53:04
  a mouse or a rat is doing. Now that we're
• 1:53:07
  doing monkeys, we do know that there were two monkeys
• 1:53:10
  in our test that were very aggressive. You get near them,
• 1:53:14
  they'd bare their teeth. They don't want you to deal
• 1:53:16
  with them. They took the compound and then they were chill.
• 1:53:20
  For two days afterwards, having a single dose of Those
• 1:53:24
  two monkeys were no longer aggressive. So that's the anxiolytic effect.
• 1:53:28
  Speaker 2: We could fix society. Yeah.
• 1:53:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a nasal spray.
• 1:53:32
  Speaker 2: Can you imagine that? Just give it to everybody and
• 1:53:35
  everyone just gets along?
• 1:53:36
  Speaker 1: Well, I mean you probably need permission to do that.
• 1:53:40
  Speaker 2: Right, but I mean if you just like told people
• 1:53:42
  that this is available and we don't– no longer have
• 1:53:46
  to be in conflict with each other.
• 1:53:47
  Speaker 1: That would be nice.
• 1:53:48
  Speaker 2: And we might be able to connect with each other
• 1:53:50
  on some new realm.
• 1:53:51
  Speaker 1: That would be very nice.
• 1:53:52
  Speaker 2: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like the pluses way, way
• 1:53:59
  outweigh what potential negatives could be.
• 1:54:02
  Speaker 1: We would need to figure out first what the unintended
• 1:54:04
  consequences are.
• 1:54:05
  Speaker 2: I like how you think like a real scientist. Yes.
• 1:54:07
  The brain– I'm thinking like a person is like, let's go.
• 1:54:10
  Give it a shot.
• 1:54:11
  Speaker 1: The brain always compensates.
• 1:54:13
  Speaker 2: Of course.
• 1:54:14
  Speaker 1: For any kind of drug, it compensates immediately.
• 1:54:16
  Speaker 2: There's no biological free lunch. No.
• 1:54:17
  Speaker 1: So something would happen– It may be good. It may
• 1:54:21
  be bad. We don't know yet.
• 1:54:22
  Speaker 2: Right, particularly for people that don't have a problem. Right. Right.
• 1:54:25
  Speaker 1: We're targeting people who do have a problem.
• 1:54:27
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:54:28
  Speaker 1: And so far there's no treatment for it. I mean
• 1:54:31
  there's a couple of things that are mostly stimulus, stimulators,
• 1:54:35
  and they don't work that well. My dad died of dementia.
• 1:54:37
  I saw that happen. So I'm thinking if I can
• 1:54:40
  prevent that in anybody else, just to get short-term memory
• 1:54:45
  back because he– My dad had five degrees, including a
• 1:54:49
  law degree, made his living as a graphic artist. So
• 1:54:52
  he was very intellectual but had a very pragmatic kind
• 1:54:55
  of job. By the time he had advanced dementia, he
• 1:54:58
  could no longer watch TV. And I said, well, why not?
• 1:55:02
  He couldn't track what was happening in a show. He
• 1:55:06
  couldn't listen to audio books. I mean, that's not good.
• 1:55:10
  Speaker 2: What a terrible thing for someone who just relies on
• 1:55:13
  their mind.
• 1:55:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So I rely on my mind. I would take
• 1:55:19
  this stuff in a second if something like that started
• 1:55:22
  to happen. So, yeah, I'm thinking ahead.
• 1:55:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:55:27
  Speaker 1: So if we have time, I'd like to explain one
• 1:55:30
  other experience that I had which led me into thinking
• 1:55:35
  more about magic.
• 1:55:36
  Speaker 2: Can I ask you one more question about this?
• 1:55:38
  Speaker 1: Sure.
• 1:55:39
  Speaker 2: If you developed some sort of a compound that gave–
• 1:55:49
  psychic ability. Like something that was just undeniable. You could
• 1:55:54
  literally communicate with people. And you found out that this
• 1:55:59
  is something that you could give people as a supplement
• 1:56:01
  or some sort of a medication. What would you do
• 1:56:04
  with that information? Would you pause? Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:56:12
  Speaker 1: I would pause for the same reason that Sadhguru said
• 1:56:15
  this is not a good idea. Because Like I told
• 1:56:19
  him we were doing this research on telepathy. We might
• 1:56:21
  be able to make people super telepathic. He said that
• 1:56:25
  would be a bad idea.
• 1:56:26
  Speaker 2: Why?
• 1:56:27
  Speaker 1: Because we normally think of being telepathic as receiving other
• 1:56:32
  people's thoughts. But it's actually a two-way street. You can
• 1:56:36
  then inject thoughts.
• 1:56:37
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:56:38
  Speaker 1: And control people.
• 1:56:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:56:40
  Speaker 1: And he said that would be such a seductive power
• 1:56:45
  for most people that unless they were had significant training beforehand,
• 1:56:50
  you don't want to do that.
• 1:56:51
  Speaker 2: Significant training like you were talking about the monks.
• 1:56:53
  Speaker 1: Ego out of the way. Yeah, go through a meditation.
• 1:56:57
  And one of the things, one of the reasons why
• 1:56:59
  I'm interested in noetic sciences in general is that when
• 1:57:02
  somebody has an experience, whether it's psilocybin or some other method,
• 1:57:08
  oftentimes there's a personality transformation. The personality transformation is like
• 1:57:13
  the positive side of PTSD. Like their mind is blown away.
• 1:57:17
  They become prosocial, which is the fancy term meaning they
• 1:57:21
  suddenly become compassionate. They become more interested in service. They
• 1:57:24
  want to help others. They could have been a complete
• 1:57:27
  jerk beforehand. Something changes and it changes in a flash
• 1:57:32
  and it sticks. Well, we probably ought to understand why
• 1:57:36
  that happens. What is it about simply getting like a
• 1:57:40
  larger picture of who and what we are and what
• 1:57:42
  the nature of the universe is? That becomes really, really
• 1:57:45
  important to understand. So we know what happens. We don't
• 1:57:48
  know why it happens.
• 1:57:49
  Speaker 2: Well, that's one of the most fascinating aspects of the
• 1:57:51
  psychedelic experience is the ego death, right?
• 1:57:54
  Speaker 1: Right. Yeah.
• 1:57:56
  Speaker 2: So it's also like you would have to have the
• 1:57:59
  two of them together. If you had ego death induced
• 1:58:03
  by psychedelics along with some sort of supplemental medication that
• 1:58:09
  allowed you to achieve like legitimate psychic ability.
• 1:58:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I see. You really want to do this.
• 1:58:15
  Speaker 2: I'm fascinated by it. Yeah. I would be weirded out
• 1:58:19
  by it for sure. I mean I don't know how
• 1:58:21
  I would function if I was the only one who
• 1:58:24
  had it. I don't think that would be a fun
• 1:58:26
  place to be.
• 1:58:28
  Speaker 1: You would have to be prepared.
• 1:58:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it would be a real struggle.
• 1:58:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, think about in the old days when
• 1:58:34
  there were mystery schools, like in ancient Greece and elsewhere.
• 1:58:38
  So everybody would get the drug. They'd have this opening.
• 1:58:42
  Some people would be opened and more or less stay open.
• 1:58:46
  But there was that drug experience that did an ego change.
• 1:58:51
  And so you may be right that you need to
• 1:58:53
  have some kind of a noetic whatever in order to
• 1:58:57
  Push the ego down far enough to realize that we
• 1:59:00
  are all interconnected.
• 1:59:02
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:59:02
  Speaker 1: It's all one thing.
• 1:59:03
  Speaker 2: Right. And so– Well, I think that idea has to
• 1:59:06
  get out there more. And I think it is more
• 1:59:09
  now than ever before. It's more of a common discussion
• 1:59:14
  that we're all connected. I feel like over the last
• 1:59:17
  few decades, it's much more acceptable to discuss this concept
• 1:59:23
  of us being all connected without being dismissed as being
• 1:59:26
  a kook. Yep. So this, which is part of the
• 1:59:30
  whole thing of like, if you don't believe it, if
• 1:59:33
  you're completely skeptical, you're blocking it. Right. And then we
• 1:59:37
  have to kind of understand that there's real evidence that
• 1:59:40
  we are all connected. And this biological being that we
• 1:59:46
  live in, that is, you know, millions and millions of
• 1:59:49
  years of evolution have led us to this position. And
• 1:59:52
  over the last, you know, 20,000 years that's filled with
• 1:59:56
  barbaric acts and tribalism. All this stuff is encoded in
• 1:59:59
  us and we have to figure out how to squash
• 2:00:02
  that and how to move past it, move into whatever
• 2:00:05
  the next stage of the human experience is.
• 2:00:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we had better do that.
• 2:00:11
  Speaker 2: It better involve ego death. It can't just be the
• 2:00:16
  psychic ability because then you're just going to have manipulative
• 2:00:18
  psychopaths that have the ability that other people don't. Of course,
• 2:00:23
  All these crazy people that want to control the world
• 2:00:25
  and they're going to be the ones that first have
• 2:00:28
  access to it.
• 2:00:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think it's not exactly ego death. It's
• 2:00:32
  not a complete– you still need some ego because we're
• 2:00:35
  embodied systems.
• 2:00:35
  Speaker 2: We need to operate in the world. Yeah, it's a
• 2:00:37
  bad term.
• 2:00:38
  Speaker 1: It's more like a recognition of– like you teach a kid,
• 2:00:41
  you're really, really angry. That doesn't mean you need to
• 2:00:44
  act on it.
• 2:00:44
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:00:45
  Speaker 1: You recognize it and like mindful meditation.
• 2:00:48
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:00:49
  Speaker 1: You're learning that you– yeah.
• 2:00:50
  Speaker 2: Control of the ego is a better term.
• 2:00:52
  Speaker 1: Recognition of it and control.
• 2:00:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And understanding of it. Yeah. Having like legitimate methods
• 2:00:57
  that you use to keep it in check.
• 2:00:59
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 2:00:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah. But it's also like sort of encoding in people
• 2:01:04
  the discipline to be able to do that because that's
• 2:01:08
  also involved in controlling the ego. Right. But having that
• 2:01:12
  and where– it seems like we're– if all these things
• 2:01:15
  come to pass and this– Technology emerges and this research
• 2:01:20
  continues to bear fruit. You're looking at the potential for
• 2:01:24
  a completely different way of human beings interacting with each other. Right.
• 2:01:29
  Completely different paradigm. Like society moves into a totally different realm. Right.
• 2:01:35
  Speaker 1: Not everybody will– are interested in that.
• 2:01:37
  Speaker 2: Right. So– A lot of people are very uninterested in
• 2:01:40
  that in fact. Yeah. And they would fuck with their business.
• 2:01:42
  Speaker 1: Actively not interested.
• 2:01:44
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:01:44
  Speaker 1: Like in– we don't want that.
• 2:01:47
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:01:47
  Speaker 1: And we don't want you to have it either.
• 2:01:48
  Speaker 2: Well, that's a fear. That's a fear that like if
• 2:01:51
  you had some real breakthroughs that were somehow or another
• 2:01:56
  going to be a problem for powers that be.
• 2:02:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah. That's a problem.
• 2:02:02
  Speaker 2: Like when you hear about these scientists that are all
• 2:02:05
  involved with the UAP story wind up dead or disappearing
• 2:02:09
  and people say, well, statistically, this can't be a coincidence.
• 2:02:12
  This is a little too weird. It's gotten to some
• 2:02:15
  weird number where you're going. We have to look at this.
• 2:02:18
  So you hear the actual White House is now talking
• 2:02:20
  about it. Like we have to look into this.
• 2:02:22
  Speaker 1: So the way I keep myself safe and our other colleagues,
• 2:02:28
  we publish everything we do. It's all public domain. So
• 2:02:32
  we're not doing anything that's secret.
• 2:02:33
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:02:36
  Speaker 1: And the long-term consequences most people don't think about at all.
• 2:02:39
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:02:41
  Speaker 1: So that too– I mean there are all kinds of
• 2:02:42
  technologies that are being developed that may have bad consequences
• 2:02:45
  in the future. Not that many people except maybe professional
• 2:02:49
  ethicists are thinking about is this a good thing or not.
• 2:02:52
  Speaker 2: Well, just imagine a world where something comes along like–
• 2:02:57
  for lack of a better example, let's use GLP-1s, right? GLP-1s,
• 2:03:02
  nobody heard about Ozempic and Wagovi just a decade ago, right?
• 2:03:06
  Now all of a sudden it's a multi-trillion dollar industry.
• 2:03:09
  It's gigantic. There's something like 39 million Americans who are
• 2:03:13
  on these GLP-1 drugs. Imagine if something comes along that
• 2:03:19
  is beneficial. I'm sure it's beneficial to obese people but
• 2:03:23
  beneficial in a cognitive way for people. You have real science.
• 2:03:31
  Real science actually achieves a result. This result It becomes
• 2:03:36
  a supplement and it becomes something widely used and spread.
• 2:03:41
  Imagine the forms of control that are used by society,
• 2:03:46
  that are used by governments, that are used by mass media,
• 2:03:49
  that are used by corporations in order to pass whatever
• 2:03:53
  regulations they want. When you see politicians talking, when you
• 2:03:57
  see the real agenda behind it, all of it would evaporate.
• 2:04:01
  All the bullshit, all propaganda would be completely useless. You
• 2:04:07
  would enter into a completely new cooperative society where all
• 2:04:11
  the parasites and psychopaths and sociopaths would literally be exposed
• 2:04:16
  and you'd have to deal with them. You'd probably be
• 2:04:18
  terrified to realize how many of them are in control
• 2:04:21
  of so many institutions and how much of what you've
• 2:04:24
  been told is complete horseshit, how many nonprofits are a scam,
• 2:04:28
  how many different things that are happening are just happening
• 2:04:32
  in order to maintain control.
• 2:04:34
  Speaker 1: That's why you can't do this overnight.
• 2:04:36
  Speaker 2: Right. Right.
• 2:04:37
  Speaker 1: Right? So the justice system would be totally different.
• 2:04:40
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:04:41
  Speaker 1: Politics would be totally– everything would be totally different.
• 2:04:44
  Speaker 2: Economics. Yes. Everything.
• 2:04:45
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 2:04:46
  Speaker 2: Resources. Everything.
• 2:04:47
  Speaker 1: So there is a TV show kind of with this
• 2:04:51
  plot now, the one called Pluribus.
• 2:04:55
  Speaker 2: Yes. Right?
• 2:04:55
  Speaker 1: The science fiction show. Which I think is doing a
• 2:04:58
  great job in illustrating then that.
• 2:05:00
  Speaker 2: People– But it's a nightmare.
• 2:05:01
  Speaker 1: Well, people who are involved in the hive mind, it's
• 2:05:06
  like suddenly everything is fine.
• 2:05:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I don't like it. I like the lady that
• 2:05:09
  gets drunk and yells at everybody.
• 2:05:11
  Speaker 1: Well, because– yeah. Because it's a nice story. It's awesome.
• 2:05:15
  Speaker 2: It's more recognizable. It's human.
• 2:05:17
  Speaker 1: She's us basically.
• 2:05:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah. She's us. Yeah.
• 2:05:20
  Speaker 1: But– and of course there are stories like the Borg
• 2:05:23
  and Star Trek and that– The way a hive mind
• 2:05:26
  is portrayed is horrific.
• 2:05:28
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:05:29
  Speaker 1: Why? Because it's ego dropping.
• 2:05:31
  Speaker 2: That's why. It also eliminates creativity, individual expression.
• 2:05:35
  Speaker 1: We don't know that.
• 2:05:36
  Speaker 2: We don't know that. We think of it in the
• 2:05:38
  show it does. In the show, everybody just becomes a worker.
• 2:05:41
  Speaker 1: No, in Pluribus.
• 2:05:42
  Speaker 2: No, they're not a worker, but I mean they're all connected.
• 2:05:44
  They're all like they have a task.
• 2:05:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but that means everybody can have the skill of
• 2:05:47
  a surgeon. Everybody, right? So you have a bunch of
• 2:05:52
  naturally creative people out there. Well, they all have it now.
• 2:05:55
  Speaker 2: Right. That's the glass half full version of it, right?
• 2:05:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:05:59
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:06:00
  Speaker 1: So would we collectively even be more creative?
• 2:06:03
  Speaker 2: Right. If instead of, you know, asking perplexity a question,
• 2:06:07
  you just ask the universe a question.
• 2:06:09
  Speaker 1: You ask the collective.
• 2:06:10
  Speaker 2: You ask the collective how to fix a carburetor. Yeah.
• 2:06:13
  Speaker 1: And then you know how to do it.
• 2:06:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:06:16
  Speaker 1: So that's so I mean, it's from a point of
• 2:06:18
  view of efficiency and peace and all that stuff. I
• 2:06:21
  think it'd be great.
• 2:06:22
  Speaker 2: Well, it's also people have to look at it this way.
• 2:06:26
  Just what you have now by having a phone and
• 2:06:30
  being able to, like I said, just ask perplexity any
• 2:06:33
  question on human history, any question on mathematics, coding, anything.
• 2:06:37
  It gives you all the available information instantaneously in your phone.
• 2:06:41
  If you just said that to someone 30 years ago,
• 2:06:43
  they would say you're fucking crazy. You look at all
• 2:06:45
  the depictions in science fiction about the future. None of
• 2:06:48
  them involve the internet. None of them involve phones. None
• 2:06:51
  of them involve devices that you carry around that have
• 2:06:53
  24 hours of fucking battery life that can essentially do
• 2:06:57
  whatever you want. Take pictures, make videos, record audio, download movies,
• 2:07:05
  watch them instantaneously. You could fucking do anything in these things. Right.
• 2:07:09
  And we're just accustomed to it. It's just normal. Imagine
• 2:07:12
  a society where this technology that you're developing– Imagine this.
• 2:07:18
  You continue this research 10, 20, 30 years. What do
• 2:07:21
  we have? What does this look like? What does you
• 2:07:26
  and me even talking look like? One of the reasons
• 2:07:29
  why I insist on doing these things in person because
• 2:07:32
  I think it's a very different experience. I just intuitively–
• 2:07:36
  it just feels different when someone is in the room.
• 2:07:38
  When you're having a conversation with someone in the room,
• 2:07:40
  it's– I've had great conversations with people through Zoom like
• 2:07:43
  with Edward Snowden when we do podcasts. We have to
• 2:07:46
  do it that way for obvious reasons. But there's something missing.
• 2:07:50
  People– when you and I are talking right now, there's
• 2:07:53
  something else going on. We're– our minds are connecting and
• 2:07:57
  we're connecting somehow with all the people that are listening.
• 2:08:01
  There's this weird thing that happens and it happens when
• 2:08:03
  people are in proximity to each other, when they're right
• 2:08:05
  in the same room with each other. There's something to that.
• 2:08:09
  Speaker 1: So now think of the downside, the compensation for having
• 2:08:15
  phones everywhere.
• 2:08:16
  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.
• 2:08:16
  Speaker 1: So you talk to teachers about it and they are
• 2:08:19
  running scared.
• 2:08:20
  Speaker 2: Sure. Right?
• 2:08:20
  Speaker 1: Kids don't know how to write anything anymore.
• 2:08:23
  Speaker 2: No attention span.
• 2:08:24
  Speaker 1: And not only that, if you start relying on perplexity
• 2:08:28
  or any other kind of AI, you're in serious trouble
• 2:08:31
  because those things are not perfect.
• 2:08:32
  Speaker 2: Right. Right. They have hallucinations. Yeah. They give you bad information. Right.
• 2:08:37
  I'm sure you saw this. There was a gentleman who
• 2:08:39
  was recently– he was a lawyer involved in a case
• 2:08:43
  and he was citing– Oh, yeah. You know that story? Yeah.
• 2:08:47
  So he's citing various cases that just didn't exist. Yeah.
• 2:08:50
  And he had gotten them from AI. Yeah.
• 2:08:53
  Speaker 1: And it probably looks structurally correct, except it wasn't actually real.
• 2:08:57
  Speaker 2: He thought he had it. Beautiful. I got this case
• 2:08:59
  wrapped up. And the judge was like, none of these
• 2:09:02
  things you're saying have happened. They're not true.
• 2:09:05
  Speaker 1: That's some other world.
• 2:09:06
  Speaker 2: Bizarre. Right. Well, hopefully that'll get ironed out. Right. But
• 2:09:10
  the point is, you're relying now on the device. To
• 2:09:14
  do all the thinking for you. Yeah. And you're not
• 2:09:17
  absorbing much of that information. You're not absorbing it the
• 2:09:20
  same way.
• 2:09:21
  Speaker 1: I can say as a scientist that AI is making
• 2:09:24
  my job much, much, much easier. So I use cloud
• 2:09:27
  code a lot. We use it also in our genetic research.
• 2:09:32
  It is making things more efficient because basically for coding
• 2:09:37
  up until things like cloud code, it took a lot
• 2:09:40
  of skill and time. To be able to write something
• 2:09:43
  that did what you wanted to do.
• 2:09:45
  Speaker 2: But you're already a disciplined thinker. You're not a developing mind.
• 2:09:48
  Speaker 1: Well, not only that, but when I ask AI to
• 2:09:51
  help me write something, I immediately see all kinds of
• 2:09:55
  things that it doesn't know. I say, well, where did
• 2:09:57
  you even get that information? It basically responds, well, I
• 2:10:00
  scraped it off of the entire internet. Well, you didn't
• 2:10:04
  scrape very well. Because, you know, did you look at
• 2:10:07
  this and did you look at this and that? And
• 2:10:09
  it comes back immediately and says, oh, I apologize. I
• 2:10:12
  didn't look at that part. Because the algorithms are designed
• 2:10:15
  to work fast.
• 2:10:16
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:10:16
  Speaker 1: And so it'll pull like the surface off and usually
• 2:10:20
  that's okay.
• 2:10:21
  Speaker 2: It could be a troll Reddit post where someone's just
• 2:10:23
  fucking around.
• 2:10:24
  Speaker 1: Who knows what it is?
• 2:10:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:10:25
  Speaker 1: Like half of Wikipedia is written by teenagers.
• 2:10:28
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:10:28
  Speaker 1: So, yeah. So you need to already have a knowledge
• 2:10:31
  base so they can challenge you. What it's telling you
• 2:10:34
  because sometimes it's completely off.
• 2:10:36
  Speaker 2: Right. Well, this is in the beginning stages of this application, right?
• 2:10:40
  If you think about the beginning stages of the printing press,
• 2:10:42
  most of the books were like how to spot witches. Yeah.
• 2:10:47
  It's true.
• 2:10:47
  Speaker 1: So one hopes that things will– well, of course, the
• 2:10:50
  danger at this point is the AI is eventually right itself.
• 2:10:54
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:10:55
  Speaker 1: And it's already getting to that point. And then we
• 2:10:57
  completely lose what's going on. We have no idea.
• 2:11:00
  Speaker 2: Right. That gets weird. Yeah.
• 2:11:02
  Speaker 1: That was already true with the development of neural networks.
• 2:11:05
  So I was using neural networks back in the 80s
• 2:11:08
  when the idea first came up. And so you would
• 2:11:11
  learn that this is related to that. And I would
• 2:11:14
  do it through the neural network training. And then you say, well,
• 2:11:17
  what did you learn? You couldn't figure it out because
• 2:11:20
  you have all of these weights and nodes inside the
• 2:11:23
  network that were encoding the information. But you couldn't then
• 2:11:27
  extract out from it to say, well, how did you
• 2:11:30
  learn this? It couldn't even tell you how it learned it,
• 2:11:34
  but it did, and it learned it really well. So
• 2:11:38
  a lot of that is going on in the AI
• 2:11:40
  world too, that it's learning things really, really well, but
• 2:11:44
  it's too complex for us to understand.
• 2:11:47
  Speaker 2: Right. But do you think if you emphasize disciplined thinking
• 2:11:51
  and teach people specifically how to think and how to
• 2:11:55
  learn and how to do for themselves, that they could
• 2:11:59
  Then expand upon that knowledge with AI instead of using
• 2:12:02
  it as a crutch. Yes. Yes.
• 2:12:04
  Speaker 1: Is that happening? I haven't seen that yet.
• 2:12:07
  Speaker 2: Well, I haven't seen it either. But one of the
• 2:12:09
  things that gives me pause is the popularity of long-form
• 2:12:13
  conversations like this because we have this concept about today
• 2:12:17
  and about human beings in general that we're losing our
• 2:12:19
  attention span. But yet what's one of the most popular mediums?
• 2:12:23
  It's long-form podcasts. Yeah. Because I think there is still
• 2:12:26
  a hunger from a lot of people and whether it's
• 2:12:28
  people that grew up at a different time where they
• 2:12:31
  did learn how to think and now they're missing it
• 2:12:34
  and then they could find it in long-form conversations or
• 2:12:38
  whether it's just always going to be something that some
• 2:12:41
  people intuitively gravitate towards because they need more stimulation than
• 2:12:45
  they're getting from these simple TikTok videos and Instagram reels.
• 2:12:49
  I think there's– like we have this generalization about the
• 2:12:53
  perceptions of people. And they go, oh, we've lost all
• 2:12:55
  of our ability to concentrate. We don't care. Everyone has
• 2:12:58
  a short attention span. I don't think everyone. I think
• 2:13:02
  a lot of people because it's easy. If you leave
• 2:13:05
  junk food in front of a lot of people, they
• 2:13:07
  will eat it. If you leave healthy food in front
• 2:13:10
  of disciplined people, they will say, I don't want the
• 2:13:13
  junk food. I'm going to have the eggs and I'm
• 2:13:15
  going to eat healthy. I'm going to take vitamins. I'm
• 2:13:17
  going to do what I'm supposed to do because I
• 2:13:18
  know the benefits of it because I'm a thinking person.
• 2:13:20
  Speaker 1: Right. You may still want the junk food.
• 2:13:23
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:13:23
  Speaker 1: But you're able to override that.
• 2:13:24
  Speaker 2: You're able to discipline thinking, right? So I think maybe
• 2:13:28
  education will move into a realm of being able to
• 2:13:31
  understand your own personal psychology, being able to understand the
• 2:13:35
  value of discipline and the value of having a structure
• 2:13:39
  to the way you think and being able to apply
• 2:13:42
  those things and then also recognizing that Whatever this AI
• 2:13:46
  is doing, it's just giving you information. It doesn't make
• 2:13:48
  you smarter. It's not giving you more knowledge. It's just
• 2:13:51
  giving you data. And you have to then learn how
• 2:13:54
  to assimilate that data in an actionable way where you
• 2:13:57
  could use it in life. And we could teach people
• 2:13:59
  how to do that maybe.
• 2:14:02
  Speaker 1: I hope so.
• 2:14:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean it seems possible. But again, it's like
• 2:14:05
  every single technology that comes around. When television came around,
• 2:14:08
  people were terrified that people were just going to stare
• 2:14:09
  at the TV all day. And a lot of them did.
• 2:14:11
  Speaker 1: They do, yeah.
• 2:14:12
  Speaker 2: A lot of them did. But also … Television, which
• 2:14:14
  led to the internet. Yeah, it's definitely distracting people. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 2:14:18
  But also we have more access to information, more of
• 2:14:21
  an understanding of so many different things than ever before.
• 2:14:25
  And you have the ability to have a conversation like this.
• 2:14:29
  A three-hour weird conversation about a very esoteric subject.
• 2:14:33
  Speaker 1: It's not that weird.
• 2:14:35
  Speaker 2: No, I mean it's not weird. It's cool.
• 2:14:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's different.
• 2:14:38
  Speaker 2: It's exciting. I mean for the people that are interested
• 2:14:41
  in this kind of conversation, this is like food for them.
• 2:14:44
  They're like, oh, exciting. I guarantee you a bunch of
• 2:14:47
  people will see this and see the description of it
• 2:14:49
  in Spotify and go, oh, this is going to be
• 2:14:51
  a good one. Because there's a lot of people that
• 2:14:54
  have a hunger for interesting things. I'm not a dooms
• 2:14:58
  guy when it comes to technology. I have a feeling
• 2:15:01
  we're going to sort it out. But I think it's
• 2:15:04
  going to be a bit of a battle, a bit
• 2:15:07
  of a struggle. It's a new thing. And you're going
• 2:15:11
  to Exceptional people are always going to exist and there's
• 2:15:14
  always going to be people that aren't going to be
• 2:15:16
  willing to just give in to whatever this thing is
• 2:15:19
  that gives them this crutch and just become a blob
• 2:15:22
  that just presses buttons to get information instead of thinking.
• 2:15:25
  I think people are always going to want to think.
• 2:15:27
  It's part of what's fascinating about being a person is
• 2:15:30
  learning new things, expanding your understanding of things and just
• 2:15:33
  pretending you do. It's a party trick. But the real
• 2:15:38
  fascination– is actually learning something that changes your perceptions. I
• 2:15:43
  think people are always going to want that.
• 2:15:45
  Speaker 1: Well, I'm optimistic because humanity, at least our species, is
• 2:15:50
  extremely resilient.
• 2:15:51
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 2:15:52
  Speaker 1: So all of us have some percentage of mutations, which
• 2:15:56
  is part of the resilience. I forget exactly, 11% or
• 2:16:00
  something like that. Every single person, even identical twins. That's
• 2:16:05
  why we can survive an asteroid hit. That's why we
• 2:16:08
  can survive a mistake that happens somewhere.
• 2:16:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:16:11
  Speaker 1: So ultimately I'm optimistic about it.
• 2:16:14
  Speaker 2: I am too. But, I mean, I look back at
• 2:16:16
  things like, you know, I mean there's been moments– like
• 2:16:20
  you look at the pyramids. You go, okay, what happened?
• 2:16:22
  Where are those folks?
• 2:16:23
  Speaker 1: They took off.
• 2:16:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I don't know. What do you think happened?
• 2:16:30
  Speaker 1: An asteroid or– I don't know. I mean it could
• 2:16:34
  have been the Ice Age, right? We still don't know
• 2:16:37
  exactly how old the pyramids are.
• 2:16:38
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:16:39
  Speaker 1: So it may have been the Ice Age and now
• 2:16:41
  they all moved to Africa and they're Africans now.
• 2:16:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Something. Something definitely happened. Some strange shift. And that's
• 2:16:49
  the question is how many times has that happened over
• 2:16:52
  the course of human civilization? We want to think of
• 2:16:54
  it as being this linear progression from caveman to where
• 2:16:56
  we are now. It doesn't seem to be accurate.
• 2:16:59
  Speaker 1: No, I don't think so.
• 2:17:00
  Speaker 2: But there's a lot of people along with the same
• 2:17:02
  type of people that want to resist the idea. Even
• 2:17:06
  if you have data, they don't want to look at
• 2:17:07
  it because they think it's nonsense. There's also a perception
• 2:17:09
  of that. Like there's no way people were more advanced 5,000, 10,000, 15,000
• 2:17:13
  years ago than they are now. That's not possible. Well,
• 2:17:18
  it kind of is. Kind of. It's not impossible. That's
• 2:17:22
  for sure. And there seems to be some very weird
• 2:17:25
  evidence in the form of 2,300,000 perfectly cut stones that
• 2:17:30
  point to true north, south, east and west that were
• 2:17:33
  put in place by the civilization that just emerged out
• 2:17:37
  of nowhere with this ability. Kind of weird. That's kind
• 2:17:41
  of weird too. Yeah. To pretend it's not and just
• 2:17:43
  write it off to, oh, people were smart. Like, yeah. Yeah.
• 2:17:47
  that's it. That's it. It seems like they knew some
• 2:17:50
  shit we don't know. They did something we can't explain
• 2:17:53
  to this day. Like I don't know if I would
• 2:17:57
  be so confident as to be able to say that
• 2:18:00
  there's a linear progression from caveman to us. I don't
• 2:18:03
  think that's true.
• 2:18:06
  Speaker 1: Hardly anything in the natural world is linear.
• 2:18:10
  Speaker 2: Which just scares me if we fuck it all up
• 2:18:12
  right now and we have a nuclear war and there's
• 2:18:14
  only like 50,000 people left. Like how long before we
• 2:18:17
  get to this position where we're trying to almost get
• 2:18:20
  past this again? Yeah.
• 2:18:22
  Speaker 1: It's like it's rough adolescence.
• 2:18:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:18:25
  Speaker 1: And so it's true. How long do you need to take?
• 2:18:27
  Do you need 100,000 years of a high technology society maybe?
• 2:18:32
  Or where are we? Well, like 20 years, 50 years.
• 2:18:36
  Into it and, yeah, we're having a problem.
• 2:18:39
  Speaker 2: Well, that's where things get really weird when people start
• 2:18:42
  talking about UAPs and whatever these beings are if they
• 2:18:46
  are real. Like are they us? Are they us from
• 2:18:50
  the future that is coming back to make sure that
• 2:18:52
  we don't fuck it up and to sort of hold
• 2:18:54
  our hand through this experiment and just watch and observe
• 2:18:58
  on the outside in case things go horribly wrong but
• 2:19:00
  allow all these mistakes to take place and allow this
• 2:19:04
  progression to take place? And just wait it out.
• 2:19:08
  Speaker 1: I'm a fan of Hal Puthoff's ultra-terrestrial idea. That these
• 2:19:13
  are not from the future. They're from the past. They
• 2:19:15
  just happen to be way more advanced than we thought.
• 2:19:19
  Speaker 2: The past? Yeah. Like how far in the past?
• 2:19:23
  Speaker 1: A million years? More?
• 2:19:26
  Speaker 2: 100,000?
• 2:19:27
  Speaker 1: Something like that. It's because you think about convergent evolution.
• 2:19:34
  So when I was at UNLV, one of the places
• 2:19:37
  nearby was an ornithology laboratory, so birds. So I went
• 2:19:45
  to the museum and I said, oh, these are very
• 2:19:46
  nice penguins here. And the director said, those aren't penguins. Oh,
• 2:19:51
  what is that? It looks exactly like a penguin. No,
• 2:19:53
  those are auks. So there's different birds from the North
• 2:19:57
  Pole and the South Pole because of convergent evolution were
• 2:20:00
  shaped to be like this bird. And so, I mean,
• 2:20:04
  they looked absolutely identical to me because I don't know
• 2:20:07
  that much about penguins anyway. But, you know, I said,
• 2:20:09
  it looks like a penguin. It's not a penguin.
• 2:20:11
  Speaker 2: They evolved independently. Yes. Wow.
• 2:20:14
  Speaker 1: And so why is it that the aliens, that we.
• 2:20:18
  Speaker 2: That's not a penguin? Whoa.
• 2:20:21
  Speaker 1: It's probably an orc.
• 2:20:22
  Speaker 2: That's crazy. I know.
• 2:20:23
  Speaker 1: It's crazy.
• 2:20:24
  Speaker 2: That's crazy.
• 2:20:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. So we had one of those and had
• 2:20:28
  an actual penguin. next to each other in the museum.
• 2:20:31
  And I thought, well, what is that?
• 2:20:34
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 2:20:35
  Speaker 1: So a lot of these aliens that people talk about
• 2:20:38
  are basically like humans.
• 2:20:39
  Speaker 2: Ox can fly and swim, and they're smaller. Yeah. Wow.
• 2:20:45
  But they're so similar. Even the color.
• 2:20:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the color, the shape.
• 2:20:48
  Speaker 2: The color is crazy. Like what is the benefit of
• 2:20:52
  the color? The whole thing is very odd.
• 2:20:54
  Speaker 1: So why do we have so-called Nordic? that look a
• 2:20:58
  lot like people in Scandinavia.
• 2:21:00
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:21:02
  Speaker 1: But, I mean, you think either come from a planet
• 2:21:05
  that is almost exactly Earth-like, which is possible, I guess,
• 2:21:10
  or they've already been here. They've been here a long,
• 2:21:12
  long time. And the same for many of the other
• 2:21:15
  aliens that people talk about. They're humanoid. Well, humanoid is
• 2:21:19
  shaped for evolution to be in a certain place. Because, like,
• 2:21:24
  we're so well-shaped by evolution that, That we can go
• 2:21:27
  outside on an average place and even though there's only
• 2:21:31
  a couple of miles of atmosphere, we're perfectly fine.
• 2:21:36
  Speaker 2: Are you aware of those examples of very bizarre heads
• 2:21:39
  that they found, skulls they found in places like Peru
• 2:21:42
  that don't have the sagittal suture that have a brain
• 2:21:45
  capacity that's 30 percent larger than ours? There's some weird skeletons. Yeah.
• 2:21:51
  Speaker 1: So Gary Nolan talked about this I think.
• 2:21:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there's real examples of it. These
• 2:21:58
  aren't theoretical. You can find these skulls that have a
• 2:22:01
  larger brain capacity. And they've attributed to a real practice
• 2:22:07
  of flattening heads, of shaping skulls. That's a real practice.
• 2:22:11
  But the question has become, did that real practice emerge
• 2:22:15
  to mimic a type of creature that already existed? Because
• 2:22:21
  these skulls, see if you can find one of them, Jamie.
• 2:22:25
  They're very weird looking. Like they're very weird. They're big.
• 2:22:30
  They're bigger than a normal human skull. They have more
• 2:22:33
  brain capacity. And it's an elongated shape. It's a different shape.
• 2:22:38
  This is not like a science fiction theory. This is
• 2:22:41
  not like an artist's rendition. This is an actual real
• 2:22:44
  skull that doesn't have the sagittal suture. No, no, no.
• 2:22:48
  That's the alien things. That's those– Monsterot. That's that thing
• 2:22:54
  that a lot of people think is a fraud. That's
• 2:22:56
  the skulls they were talking about, no? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 2:22:58
  But there's actually elongated skulls that they found. Elongated skulls.
• 2:23:02
  Just don't pull in tridactyl mummy. Just put in elongated skull,
• 2:23:09
  no sagittal suture. There you go. Like that. That one
• 2:23:14
  right there. Like what the fuck is that? That does
• 2:23:19
  not look like a person. That is a real skull.
• 2:23:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so some of that is shaping.
• 2:23:26
  Speaker 2: Sure.
• 2:23:26
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 2:23:27
  Speaker 2: Some of it. Some of these are, but the ones
• 2:23:29
  without the sagittal suture are really weird. Yeah. Because that's
• 2:23:33
  a thing that all human babies have because as your
• 2:23:35
  brain grows and your head grows, your brain, your skull
• 2:23:40
  is kind of malleable. That doesn't have it. And some
• 2:23:45
  of these that they found actually have more brain capacity.
• 2:23:49
  So the shaping of it wouldn't change the brain capacity.
• 2:23:53
  So some of them do have that sagittal crest, that
• 2:23:55
  sagittal suture. Some of them don't. And that one that
• 2:23:59
  you showed up there, I hope that's not AI. That
• 2:24:02
  one doesn't. I think that's real.
• 2:24:04
  Speaker 1: It could just be hard to see.
• 2:24:06
  Speaker 2: It could be. It could be, but it's been described
• 2:24:09
  by people who have examined them as being different. There's
• 2:24:13
  also the positioning of where it connects with the spine
• 2:24:16
  is different. Oh, Sarah, that goes right there. Where the
• 2:24:19
  spinal column enters the bottom of the skull is very
• 2:24:21
  much further back than normal. A genetic adaptation. Or a
• 2:24:26
  different kind of person. Yeah. A different kind of person
• 2:24:29
  that coexisted. Like, look at that one right there, Jamie,
• 2:24:31
  that you have your cursor on. Click on that. That's crazy. Like,
• 2:24:36
  that is really crazy. That's a replica. Wild looking. That's
• 2:24:41
  a replica. So what's the real one? The real one
• 2:24:43
  is the one that you showed that has Instagram on it.
• 2:24:45
  That's a real one. Like... That is kind of bananas.
• 2:24:50
  And if that's not done through forming of the skull
• 2:24:53
  and pushing the skull into the new shape, what is it?
• 2:24:58
  And were they doing that because they were trying to
• 2:24:59
  mimic something that was superior to them? And that's where
• 2:25:02
  it gets weird. Like those real elongated skulls, Inca Museum
• 2:25:06
  up there, right above your cursor? Yeah, to the left,
• 2:25:10
  right there. That's crazy looking, man. That's really crazy looking.
• 2:25:14
  And again, that one doesn't seem to have that sagittal suture.
• 2:25:19
  Neither does that one down there that says 118. They're
• 2:25:22
  fucking strange. So if that was an actual different kind
• 2:25:27
  of human being that existed along with us, God, that
• 2:25:31
  explains a lot.
• 2:25:32
  Speaker 1: Well, they're not here anymore.
• 2:25:34
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:25:35
  Speaker 1: Unless they're ultra-terrestrials and they're living in the bottom of
• 2:25:38
  the ocean. Right.
• 2:25:40
  Speaker 2: I don't know about that. But if that's them, who knows?
• 2:25:43
  I mean, you could get to a point where A
• 2:25:48
  civilization becomes so advanced that the biological entities aren't necessary anymore.
• 2:25:52
  And then that would explain why they could exist at
• 2:25:55
  the bottom of the ocean, why they could exist with
• 2:25:57
  no oxygen, why they could– they no longer become dependent
• 2:26:01
  upon their environment to survive.
• 2:26:04
  Speaker 1: They might have creative environments. Right. Like the movie– there
• 2:26:11
  was a movie. I forget the name now.
• 2:26:16
  Speaker 2: What was the premise?
• 2:26:17
  Speaker 1: It was that there's a ship and there's like a
• 2:26:22
  missing submarine and so they dive down to it but
• 2:26:25
  then they see lights coming up.
• 2:26:27
  Speaker 2: Oh, The Abyss? Yes. Yeah, that was a great movie. Yeah.
• 2:26:30
  That was a good one. Yeah. Well, there's always been
• 2:26:33
  stories about– I mean Tim Burchett, the congressman, came on
• 2:26:36
  this podcast and was talking about how there's five different
• 2:26:39
  locations in the deep ocean that they're aware of activity,
• 2:26:42
  that things have happened there. They continue to happen. But
• 2:26:46
  if you were going to– study earth if you if
• 2:26:48
  you had to be like local like where would you
• 2:26:51
  go i mean if you can come here from another
• 2:26:52
  dimension another galaxy or wherever you're coming from you'd probably
• 2:26:56
  go in the ocean you'd have trans i mean they've
• 2:26:58
  observed these transmedium crafts they're able to fly and go
• 2:27:02
  into the water isn't that orc the awk thing isn't
• 2:27:06
  that kind of transmedium it flies swims.
• 2:27:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah it'd be an alien it's an alien form of
• 2:27:12
  a penguin.
• 2:27:14
  Speaker 2: But it is– at a certain point in time, you
• 2:27:16
  would imagine if we could get far more advanced than
• 2:27:20
  we are now and we found out about a society
• 2:27:22
  that is at a stage where we are currently, for
• 2:27:25
  sure we would go visit. For sure we would observe
• 2:27:29
  and we would also probably try to stop nuclear war.
• 2:27:33
  Speaker 1: It is an interesting question because the prime directive in
• 2:27:37
  Star Trek is you don't mess with them.
• 2:27:39
  Speaker 2: Right. Right.
• 2:27:40
  Speaker 1: But they always do.
• 2:27:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Well, Star Trek is– they didn't even have
• 2:27:44
  the internet. They had walkie-talkies. Kirk out.
• 2:27:47
  Speaker 1: Remember when they closed that thing? No, they had the
• 2:27:49
  communicator thing.
• 2:27:49
  Speaker 2: Oh, you're talking about the next generation.
• 2:27:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah. We don't know how that worked. Yeah.
• 2:27:52
  Speaker 2: I'm talking about the original. Yeah. No.
• 2:27:55
  Speaker 1: The original is pretty good though.
• 2:27:57
  Speaker 2: Really good. Yeah. Especially when you think about it was
• 2:27:59
  like the 1960s when it came out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
• 2:28:03
  Speaker 1: So part of my personal mission was to make Star
• 2:28:06
  Trek real.
• 2:28:08
  Speaker 2: That's like it's– Including beaming people up? Oh, no.
• 2:28:11
  Speaker 1: It's like the Vulcan. The most rational creature on there
• 2:28:14
  was the one who could do the mind meld.
• 2:28:16
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 2:28:17
  Speaker 1: That's why I was thinking, yeah, OK. An advanced species.
• 2:28:21
  This stuff is taken for granted.
• 2:28:23
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:28:25
  Speaker 1: That's where my vision is seeing.
• 2:28:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:28:27
  Speaker 1: And so that advanced species may be us. Might need
• 2:28:30
  a little evolutionary push with genetics. But yeah, we could
• 2:28:34
  do that too.
• 2:28:34
  Speaker 2: So in this concept of the ultra-terrestrial, that these things
• 2:28:38
  have come from the past, like how are they here?
• 2:28:41
  Speaker 1: They've always been here.
• 2:28:42
  Speaker 2: They've always been here. They just exist, but they exist
• 2:28:45
  in a different way.
• 2:28:46
  Speaker 1: Well, so imagine even given current technology, if there was
• 2:28:50
  another ice age coming and we may have a thousand
• 2:28:53
  years to prepare, would we be smart enough to do that?
• 2:28:57
  I don't know. Could we do it?
• 2:28:59
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 2:29:00
  Speaker 1: We probably could.
• 2:29:01
  Speaker 2: Boy. Yeah.
• 2:29:03
  Speaker 1: And then so another thousand years passes and you're below
• 2:29:06
  ground somewhere. And then the cavemen were beginning. Well, do
• 2:29:11
  we interact with them or not? Well, it's an interesting question.
• 2:29:15
  Like we don't want to get involved in all that mess.
• 2:29:19
  Speaker 2: Sort of like how we don't visit North Sentinel Island.
• 2:29:23
  Speaker 1: Maybe.
• 2:29:23
  Speaker 2: Maybe. You know? Yeah. Those people that– the uncontacted tribe. Yeah. Yeah.
• 2:29:29
  It's like– You're literally not allowed to go there.
• 2:29:32
  Speaker 1: Let them develop the way they shall develop. Yeah.
• 2:29:35
  Speaker 2: Wow. Yeah.
• 2:29:37
  Speaker 1: I can– I can accept that.
• 2:29:41
  Speaker 2: Well, there's– if it turns out that there is some activity,
• 2:29:46
  that there are some things that we can't explain that
• 2:29:49
  are happening from deep in the oceans, We're going to
• 2:29:51
  have to come up with some sort of an explanation.
• 2:29:53
  If that is an actual intelligent species, intelligent life form, something,
• 2:29:58
  whatever it is, there's got to be some explanation for that.
• 2:30:03
  So the ultra-terrestrial one is just as good. Yeah.
• 2:30:07
  Speaker 1: There's an explanation for everything. The question is, A, are
• 2:30:11
  we smart enough to figure it out? And B, how
• 2:30:15
  long will it take? And both of those are complete unknowns.
• 2:30:20
  But that's– I mean– That's yet another reason why I
• 2:30:22
  like the kind of work that I do, that you
• 2:30:23
  need to have very high tolerance for ambiguity, of which
• 2:30:27
  I do. Like I'm okay with not knowing a lot
• 2:30:31
  of basically everything. I know enough to be able to
• 2:30:34
  be dangerous, but otherwise I don't mind that I don't know.
• 2:30:38
  Speaker 2: Well, I'm very thankful that people like you are out
• 2:30:40
  there because if you weren't out there doing this work
• 2:30:43
  and you weren't out there expanding on this, I mean
• 2:30:45
  it's really fascinating. If something like this does emerge– It
• 2:30:49
  would change the human race. And think about the small
• 2:30:52
  amount of people that are involved in this research.
• 2:30:55
  Speaker 1: Tiny.
• 2:30:56
  Speaker 2: Kind of crazy. Yeah. It's a huge responsibility you have
• 2:30:59
  in a lot of ways.
• 2:31:00
  Speaker 1: Well, fortunately, I also enjoy it. So, I mean, I'm
• 2:31:04
  having fun while I'm doing this because otherwise I think
• 2:31:08
  I would have chosen some other door. I mean, I
• 2:31:10
  had plenty of opportunities to work with golden handcuffs somewhere.
• 2:31:14
  But I get bored easily. And this is the one
• 2:31:17
  area where I have never gotten bored.
• 2:31:19
  Speaker 2: Well, I'm very thankful. Thank you for being here, too.
• 2:31:23
  And tell everybody where they can get– did you do
• 2:31:25
  an audio version of this book?
• 2:31:26
  Speaker 1: I have an actor do it because I don't want
• 2:31:28
  anybody to have to suffer with 12 hours of my voice.
• 2:31:33
  Because it won't last that long.
• 2:31:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:31:35
  Speaker 1: So there's an actor that does it. It's very, very good.
• 2:31:40
  And so, yeah, this is– there's one other story I
• 2:31:43
  want to say that's in the book. So this is
• 2:31:45
  a synchronicity, which again– gave me the idea that we
• 2:31:48
  don't know the limits of what we're dealing with, which
• 2:31:50
  is important. So I had mentioned that after Interval, we
• 2:31:54
  started a nonprofit. This was called Boundary Institute. It was
• 2:31:58
  in Silicon Valley. We found an office park in Los Altos,
• 2:32:05
  which is just outside of Silicon Valley. And so we
• 2:32:09
  found a space. We liked it. We decided to get that.
• 2:32:13
  So that's where our new place would be. So I
• 2:32:16
  was close enough to where I lived, so I was
• 2:32:18
  able to walk to work. I always walked a certain way.
• 2:32:21
  One day, I decided to walk a different way, and
• 2:32:23
  I go past another office called PsyQuest, Inc., P-S-I-Quest, Inc.,
• 2:32:29
  and I thought, that's an interesting coincidence because we're doing
• 2:32:33
  Psy research, and now we have PsyQuest, Inc. We thought
• 2:32:36
  it was Personnel Services Incorporated something. We didn't know what
• 2:32:40
  it was. We thought that was funny. About three weeks
• 2:32:44
  go by and I decide to walk you a different
• 2:32:46
  way to work. I'm going through this office place different ways.
• 2:32:50
  And I notice that right next to our office is
• 2:32:53
  something with a tiny little sign that says SciQuest Labs.
• 2:32:57
  And so now we're thinking, what does a personnel services
• 2:33:01
  thing need with a laboratory? So I look through the
• 2:33:03
  mini blinds, there's nobody in there. So now I'm determined
• 2:33:06
  to find out what are you guys doing? So every
• 2:33:09
  day over the next couple of weeks, I go past
• 2:33:12
  that place. I knock on the door. I'm looking through
• 2:33:14
  the blinds. There's nobody there. Finally, one day, I see
• 2:33:18
  somebody in there. I knock on the door, and I'm
• 2:33:19
  going to say, hello, my name is. The door opens.
• 2:33:23
  The guy's jaw drops before I could say my name,
• 2:33:27
  and he says, Dean Radin? And now I'm thinking, well,
• 2:33:32
  I have never seen you before. I don't know who
• 2:33:34
  you are. How do you know who I am? So
• 2:33:37
  he says, he says his name. And I said, well,
• 2:33:43
  what are you doing here? I'm doing what you're doing.
• 2:33:46
  What do you think we're doing? Cyber search, parapsychology, like
• 2:33:50
  what you're doing. So I had to sit down at
• 2:33:53
  that point because we knew everybody in the world who's
• 2:33:56
  doing this. There's only like 40 of us around the
• 2:33:59
  world in maybe five or six different locations. Here is
• 2:34:03
  a psi research laboratory in Silicon Valley that no one
• 2:34:06
  has ever heard about before. And so I said, well,
• 2:34:09
  How did you know who I was? Even if you knew,
• 2:34:12
  you know, we had nothing in our door that said
• 2:34:15
  it was CyberSearch. It said Boundary Institute. He said, I
• 2:34:19
  was looking to contact you because I want you to
• 2:34:22
  be on my board of directors. But I didn't know
• 2:34:24
  where you were and I didn't know how to contact you.
• 2:34:27
  So I opened the door and there I am. So
• 2:34:30
  I said, well, what were you doing? He was doing
• 2:34:34
  an exercise called Yoga Nidra, which is the yoga of sleep.
• 2:34:38
  but there's a magical element to it as well. So
• 2:34:41
  over the course of 24 hours, for three hours he
• 2:34:44
  was awake, three hours he sleeps, back and forth over
• 2:34:46
  the course of 24 hours. While awake, he's picturing that
• 2:34:51
  I show up. And so I opened the door, and
• 2:34:55
  that's why his jaw dropped, because at that point he
• 2:34:57
  was awake, he was walking around, but I showed up,
• 2:35:01
  and he was trying to make me show up. So
• 2:35:03
  in a sense, he manifested me. Now, I think I
• 2:35:07
  have free will, Like we, you know, we freely chose
• 2:35:10
  that office next door. I freely went to the door.
• 2:35:12
  I freely did everything. But apparently it was being pulled
• 2:35:16
  by him. So, well, that was strange. And so I said, well,
• 2:35:22
  so how are you doing this? What are you doing?
• 2:35:24
  And so he gave me a tour of his laboratory.
• 2:35:27
  That's when my jaw dropped. Because what I had been doing,
• 2:35:32
  adjacent wall next to his, without knowing what's going over
• 2:35:35
  there on a whiteboard, I was drawing a special kind
• 2:35:38
  of chair that we wanted and a special shielded room
• 2:35:41
  and equipment and everything on the whiteboard. That's what he had.
• 2:35:45
  The other side of that wall is what he had
• 2:35:48
  in his laboratory.
• 2:35:50
  Speaker 2: Whoa. Yeah.
• 2:35:52
  Speaker 1: So it's like a four-part synchronicity where I was drawing
• 2:35:56
  to me what I wanted. I didn't know it was
• 2:35:58
  the other side of the wall, but I was drawing
• 2:36:00
  it into existence. He was at the same time drawing me.
• 2:36:05
  So we had the same intentions, draw each other essentially,
• 2:36:08
  and we literally got pulled into the same location at
• 2:36:11
  the same time.
• 2:36:12
  Speaker 2: That's incredible. Yeah.
• 2:36:14
  Speaker 1: So it was so incredible that I told the other
• 2:36:17
  guys in our institute and in a sense they understood
• 2:36:21
  what was happening because they saw the same laboratory and stuff.
• 2:36:26
  After a while, we never talked about it again. I
• 2:36:29
  mean it was so bizarre. And so magical in a
• 2:36:33
  sense that we all thought we were doing things of
• 2:36:36
  our own free will, but apparently not. So I started
• 2:36:40
  looking into Yoga Nidra, the magical side of it. It's
• 2:36:44
  all about intention. It's focused intention in a non-ordinary state.
• 2:36:49
  And it is literally a magical practice out of the
• 2:36:53
  yoga tradition. So yeah, another reason why I'm writing about
• 2:36:57
  the science of magic, the real magic, And showing how
• 2:37:00
  a lot of the science that we know now actually overlaps.
• 2:37:03
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 2:37:04
  Speaker 1: It's just– it's not at the level of what you
• 2:37:06
  would get in Harry Potter. But nevertheless, a lot of
• 2:37:10
  it is real.
• 2:37:12
  Speaker 2: Thank you for telling that story. That's awesome. Thank you
• 2:37:15
  for being here too. You're welcome. This is really exciting.
• 2:37:17
  I really enjoyed it very much. Thank you. So the book,
• 2:37:19
  The Science of Magic.
• 2:37:21
  Speaker 1: Yep.
• 2:37:21
  Speaker 2: Available everywhere. Thank you.
• 2:37:24
  Speaker 1: Yep. Is this for me?
• 2:37:25
  Speaker 2: Yep. Oh, I got a copy. All right. Thank you
• 2:37:28
  very much. This was really, really, really fun. Thank you.
• 2:37:31
  Let's do it again. I'm excited to hear where you
• 2:37:33
  go with this stuff. Okay. All right.
• 2:37:35
  Speaker 1: Maybe next time I'll bring that nose spray.
• 2:37:37
  Speaker 2: Let's do it. Bring it.
• 2:37:38
  Speaker 1: All right.
• 2:37:39
  Speaker 2: Thank you. Bye, everybody. Bye.