Transcript of #2513 - Dean Radin New

This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Once you've got a great name for your business, you need a great domain, and Squarespace makes it easy to lock in a domain. You just search the name you want, buy it, and then you're ready to build. No hidden fees, no weird upsells. Go to squarespace.com/rogan for a free trial, and when you are ready to launch, use the code ROGAN to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

Sehr gut, sehr gut, sehr gut. Sehr gut?

WISO Steuer ist sehr gut.

Das sagen ganz viele. Cool, wer sagt das?

Stiftung Warentest, Computerbild, Focus Money, Chip, Finanztipp. Such dir was aus.

Mega, aber das ist doch bestimmt kompliziert.

Nö, einfach Foto von der Lohnsteuerbescheinigung machen und fertig.

Klingt sehr gut. Ist sehr gut.

Hol dir dein Geld zurück mit WISO Steuer. Thank you for being here.

Good to be here.

I'm excited to talk to you. Did you maybe manifest this conversation somehow?

Maybe.

I've seen a bunch of your talks online and the— first of all, let's start from the beginning. Like, what is your background?

I thought I'd give you a 40 45-year arc in about 3 minutes. Perfect. Because then there's a lot of places you can get into it. So I started out as a musician, violin, up until about halfway through college, and then I realized to be a musician means you have to be an athlete because you're making your living with your body. No one told me that up through until I finally decided I don't think I want to make my living with my body. 'cause I've never been very strong. And more importantly, you also need to have a lot of stamina, and I didn't have that.

And you weren't interested in gaining it?

I couldn't. I have a genetic mutation that creates— like most people, when they exercise, you feel really good afterwards. I feel really exhausted. And I never understood why until many years later I realized that I have something called Gilbert syndrome. Which is a mutation of a liver enzyme, and you have no recovery time. Whoa. Yeah, so—

Is there anything they can do for that?

Other than something like genetic engineering, which I've never heard anybody try yet, the answer is no.

I've never heard of that condition before, I don't think.

Yeah, there's some missing enzymes, and more importantly, the bilirubin, which is unconjugated bilirubin, you have way too much of it. So there's an upside and a downside. The downside is that there, you can't recover from exercise quickly. And so there's a lot of fatigue that happens. The upside is that unconjugated bilirubin is an antioxidant. It's one of the most natural antioxidant. So my cardiovascular system is like a 20-year-old.

Oh, so you got your pros and your cons with this.

Yeah.

Have you ever tried exercising in very small doses, like throughout the day?

Well, I walk every day, so that's my primary exercise.

That's always great exercise.

Yeah. If I walk too fast, too hard, I will feel it for the next 3 or 4 days.

Wow. So too fast, too hard, too long?

Yeah.

So what if you do like 2 push-ups and then just do 2 push-ups like 4 hours later and then 2 push-ups like 4 hours later.

I can do that. Yeah, I can do 7 push-ups.

Yeah, maybe that's the move. Maybe the move is just make yourself do things very lightly throughout the day just to keep your bone mass and all that good stuff that we lose when we get older. Yeah, you know, but it sounds like there's a pro— the cardiovascular benefits, pretty sweet.

Yeah, so when you get to a certain age, your doctor says, let's take a cardiac calcium scan to see what are your arteries doing. And the range is from 0, so they don't see anything in there, up to 100 where you're basically about to die. So my doctor did say, "Just do that because your cholesterol's like off, it's way too high." And I have 0. Oh, wow. And say, "Well, how could you have 0?" Because I'm 74. I should not be zero, but I do, and it's because of this.

You look really good for 74.

Thank you.

You do. You look like maybe 15, 20 years younger than you're supposed to look.

Yeah, so that's the other advantage of this particular mutation is longevity.

Damn, son. Well, that's good. There's a positive to it. So violinists— oh, can I ask you this? Totally unrelated. What is the difference between a violin and a fiddle?

Well, violin is a career track towards concert violinist, so classical music.

So it's how you play it?

It's partially how you play it, but it's mostly about the nature of the music that you're playing.

So is it just how it's referred in different cultures, like in Southern music it would be a fiddle?

It's also style. It's style and it's also the intonation. Like if you're, if you're did like I did. I transitioned from classical violin when I knew I wasn't going to do that as a career into bluegrass fiddle and banjo. So I actually ended up playing 25 years, the last 5 years being bluegrass. And so there I actually had to learn not to play that well. Like, you have to— it sounds better for bluegrass if you're a little bit off tune and you're not holding it right and it's Authentic.

Yes.

Scratchy.

Yes.

Something to it. So in fact, in graduate school, I was in the competition for the Illinois State Fiddler Contest. And so I was probably 25 or something at the time. And Alison Krauss was like a teenager, and she was in the same competition, and I lost miserably. And she was incredible, even at that time.

Who is she?

Alison Krauss?

I don't know who she is.

Sorry. She is a—

Do you know who she is, Jamie?

Yeah. Yeah, she's very, very well known. Somewhere between country singer, but she plays the violin and the fiddle and has a fantastic voice.

I'm out of the loop. I'm sorry.

Yeah. If you heard one of her songs, I'm sure you would know it.

Yeah, if you made me name a fiddler, I would say— well, The Devil Went Down to Georgia was the first time like America really understood like popular culture, like the fiddle got introduced. Is that fair to say? Yeah, yeah. Like that, for a lot of people, that song, the Charlie Daniels Jr. song, that's the fiddle.

Yeah, that's like— Is that good? Well, yeah, it's pretty good. It's a little bit like fiddle on steroids, but yeah.

But I mean, like as a fiddler, do you hear that, or is it like only for the unwashed masses that think that's good?

Oh no, no, it's good fiddling, yeah. Yeah, it's fiddling around.

It's a beautiful instrument. Sorry for the sidetrack. So—

Okay, so I did that for 20 years or so, and then in the middle of college I decided, I think I want to get a job where I could use my mind instead of my body. So I switched into electrical engineering. Why? Because I like to take stuff apart and I used to make things in high school. So then I didn't know what I wanted to do after I got my degree, so I went on to get a master's in electrical engineering. And then I didn't want to be an electrical engineer anymore, so I got a PhD in experimental psychology. And so it sounds like flipping back and forth between lots of different things, and it kind of is, but you'll see that my career is a little bit like a game show in that you're presented with, this is what you could do, like forever, or you can choose door number 2. And I almost always chose door number 2. Because I would do this for a while and say, "I sort of understand that now. I want to do something different." Door number 2. So, as a senior in college, I learned about this place called the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which was started by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who was the 6th man on the moon.

And on the way back to the Earth, he had a mystical experience. And so today, a lot of people who go into space talk about the overview effect. And he was one of the first to talk about it openly, even though all of the other astronauts had it. It expresses itself in different ways. So people generally will turn from whatever they were. It's a transformative experience and they become different. And so, in his way of expressing that after the mystical experience and thinking, "What in the world is that?" because he felt one with the universe, literally. He decided to create this institute that would study what he had been studying for outer space, but for inner space, to explore inner space. So I remember in college reading about this new institute, and their motto was, uh, the— exploring the frontiers of consciousness. And I thought, that sounds like something I want to do. But there wasn't any place to do that other than this one institute. So, I always had in the back of my mind that that's where I want to end up somehow.

What is that term, noetic? I know I've heard it before, but I never looked it up.

Noetic. So, noetic is a feeling of intuition, except that it carries a sense of certainty that the intuition is correct. Hmm. So, intuition is knowing something without knowing how you know it. It just sort of arrives. But it's knowing with certainty. And more often than not, the certainty is correct. So people talk about downloads in meditation and other places. That's what that is.

This is a subject that up until, I would say, last couple decades was pretty openly dismissed by rational people, right? There's almost like a desire to dismiss it, like a desire to define the world in much clearer terms where it's maybe ego-driven. You're in control of your own destiny, and then there's certain factors that are out of your control and just this is how it is and this is life, deal with it. And all this mystical woo-woo magic bullshit that people have been talking about for some strange reason for thousands of years, we just dismiss. And we dismiss it under the narrative of science. We're talking about science, we're science people, we want data. But there is data, that's what's weird. And if you're willing to look a little preposterous, which I certainly am, I think it's a good thing to do every now and then. Take a fucking chance and try to figure out if the world is exactly constructed the way you've been told, because it might not be. There might be some weirdness to it all, and it seems like we all agree. We all agree there is some weirdness. You could chalk it off to coincidence when you think about a person and you haven't thought about them forever and all of a sudden they call you.

There's some weirdness in the world. There's some weirdness in the world, like knowing not to do something and then something happens. There's some weirdness in knowing something's gonna happen and you ignore that feeling, and then something terrible happens. You're like, fuck, I knew I shouldn't have gone there. There's, there's weirdness in the world, and it's not necessarily just pattern recognition and understanding scenarios because you've experienced them before. There's something to that too. That's part of it too, but there's also something else. There's some weird connection that people have. There's a thing that when you know someone's mad at you and they don't say anything, you're like, what is this fucking weird energy I'm getting off this guy? There's some stuff we're experiencing in the world that you can't put on a scale. You can't put a tape measure to it. You can't measure its density, but it's there. There's something. And we have a very limited amount of senses in terms of our ability to see, feel, touch, smell. It's not enough. There's probably some other stuff out there we don't have the tools to measure, but it impacts us.

But we do have the tools to measure. So that's what attracted me to the rest of my career, because exactly for the same reason you just said, that people have experiences, oftentimes they feel pretty strange, and so they start looking for, well, what is that? So if you go to a conventional science spokesperson, they will echo back exactly what you're saying. It's coincidence. It's frailty of memory, all of that stuff. But I learned early on, even in college, that there is a branch of science that has studied these things. I mean, it's been going on since the late 1800s that the scientists have been interested in these kinds of phenomena. And science is really, really good at taking even strange subjective experiences and figuring out, is that a coincidence or is that— what is that? Is it real? That attracted me. So, and it partially came out of reading a lot of science fiction. Science fiction is saturated with these kinds of stories where the element of the story is revolving around some kind of psychic or noetic thing. The Force, classically. Yeah, the Force in Dune, the series, Frank Herbert's Dune series, the whole thing about spice.

Why did they have to take spice? Because that's the only way you can navigate when you're jumping through wormholes, like you needed to know what you're about to expect on the other side. It just saturates novels and science fiction. It's there. And generally, if you have a topic that people are paying attention to like that and are very popular, it's because something is resonating. Like if it was so strange that nobody even had a way of thinking about it, it wouldn't be popular. But it is, and it's perennially popular. So I took the science fiction interest and as even a younger kid about fairy tales, which is saturated with these things too, and I thought, well, that— I wonder if that's real. But then you kind of get shuttled into a scientific career, and one thing that happens for fledgling engineers and scientists and for a lot of other academics is that you're being taught a set of assumptions about the way that the world works called materialism or physicalism. And the thing is you're not taught that that is a set of assumptions. You take it for granted after a while 'cause after you go through college for 20+ years and no one ever mentions that we're working under a set of assumptions, a materialism, and no one ever talks about the philosophy of science, which is all about studying the assumptions and are they correct.

Once you do start studying the philosophy of science, you find out that there's lots of different ways of understanding reality. And so there's the whole materialistic side, which is really, really good at explaining aspects of the physical world. It gives us these kinds of technologies. But it doesn't explain subjective experience at all. And so that's, that's like the existing number one mystery in science today. Because you have to challenge the idea that materialism is all there is. And so people have weird experiences, they're talking about a more comprehensive way of understanding reality. That's what's going on. And so that's why I end up writing a book like this. So the magic here is not stage magic, it's the real magic, which we don't have a name for yet.

When they first started studying this in the 1800s, what were they specifically trying to isolate or figure out?

Well, just like today, people would see apparitions. They would have the sense that there were telepathic connections between people. They'd have precognitions. And there was the beginning of figuring out ways of using experimental science to be able to study these things under controlled conditions. And the word control is important because it means you exclude coincidence by the design. And you exclude leakage of information. You exclude all kinds of things. So the only thing left over is if that telepathic thing was real, then we'd be able to see it in the lab. And the short story is, yeah, we're now 150 years past that, and we have very, very strong evidence that telepathy does exist.

So what was the first evidence that they were able to get out of these initial experiments?

They used to call it thought transference, And so the methods they were using then would not pass muster today. They would have like 2 kids who say, "We can do telepathic transfer between us." And then many times they would find that the kids were using some kind of signal. And so that wouldn't work today. Today people have to be strictly isolated. Neither can know what the target is that they're trying to transfer to the other person. And we do lots and lots of replications with lots of people. And so that then forms a body of evidence where it becomes extremely difficult to think of what the flaw might be. And in fact, if you ask skeptics about it who know the literature, their usual response now is either there's no plausible flaw that they can identify because a lot of time has been spent to figure out what might be a flaw. And the second response, which is more recent now, is We're not even gonna look at the evidence because we know it's impossible, which is no longer a scientific argument, but that's the approach. We're not gonna look at the data.

That's silly. Yeah. Well, it's really silly when you consider the intelligence agencies have spent an enormous amount of money and a considerable amount of time studying remote viewing. Like, why? Why would they invest that much time in nonsense? Why would they invest that much time in something where there's no evidence whatsoever and they've never achieved positive results? That doesn't seem to be correct. No. If you just— if you listen to the stories of the guy like Hal Puthoff and all these different people that have been involved in these remote viewing experiments, they had actionable data that they derived specifically from remote viewing. I don't understand it. I can't— I've never done it. I've never attempted it. I don't know if I can do it. I did it once. We had an experiment on a television show that I did. Where we had this guy who claimed to be a remote viewer remote view this area, and it was— he was off. But it was also under duress with cameras. Like, is that the state of mind that you want to be in when you're trying to remote view? No, that's not ideal at all. And that is a factor, a major factor in whether or not you can understand intuition is where— what is your state of mind?

Are you in a place of complete anxiety and fear? Or are you totally relaxed and focused on what you're doing? Is there any distractions? Is there a jackhammer nearby? Is there a dog barking? What— is there something that could interrupt this state of mind that you're trying to achieve? Because there's different states of mind. We know this. We can measure this. We can measure the brain waves. We can— we can— we understand that the state of mind, it's not a static thing like a toaster. You know, it's not on or off. There's a bunch of different shit going on in your brain. In your mind at any given time. So the idea that remote viewing, which is some very bizarre connection that some people have to reality that's nowhere near local— they can describe things in detail, talk about submarines that are being constructed in the Soviet Union. Like, it's— there's weird shit to that. And if you just— if you just dismiss that, you're being a fool. There's something there. And the only way anybody figures out if there's something there is if you study it, if actually intelligent people are willing to look a little foolish and spend some time studying it.

This episode is brought to you by Visible. How many of you are currently listening to this podcast on your phone? If you are chronically online, like most of us are these days, your wireless network should be too. With Visible, you get unlimited 5G and unlimited hotspot, all powered by Verizon. Verizon's 5G network. The perks of big wireless for half the cost. Visible isn't just a wireless plan, it's unlimited wireless designed to keep you connected and no contract holding you back. Switch today at visible.com. Plans start at just $25 a month, or get our premium Visible Plus Pro plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code ROGAN, an exclusive offer for podcast listeners.

Right. So that brings us to my next job. So after I got my doctorate, I started working at Bell Laboratories. Ooh. So it was the biggest laboratory in the world at the time. It was still the Bell System. And because I was interested in these kinds of things, for some of my time at Bell Labs, I started doing little psychic experiments involving mind-matter interaction and also involving precognition. So, there's an ongoing link here that goes back to the Institute of Noetic Sciences in a strange way. Edgar Mitchell gave the first money to SRI International, which is where Hal Puthoff and Russ Targ was, to do remote viewing studies. He also brought Uri Geller to the United States, and he brought SRI and a bunch of other places, including Bell Labs. So when I was working at the labs, I knew that there had been people who had seen some of the stuff that Geller did.. And I was doing these little psychic things. So I asked for permission to be able to present some of the work I was doing at an annual conference of the Parapsychological Association, which is an affiliate of the largest scientific organization in the United States, the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

So many people don't know that the Parapsychological Association is one of the 200-some affiliates of the AAAS. It's a legitimate scientific organization. So I did this precognition test. I asked for permission and I got permission, not only to give my presentation at the conference, but to use the Bell Labs imprimatur. So I was giving this as some guy from Bell Labs talking to this audience. Unbeknownst to me, there were a few people in the audience who came up afterwards and one of them said, "If there was an opening, would you be interested in joining the Stargate program?" Whoa. And so that was an offer I couldn't refuse. That's one of these cases of, you have this door or you have that door. Well, that door looked really interesting because it was known at the time that there were people at SRI doing this sort of thing, but the classified portions were a rumor. Like, nobody knew what was really going on.

Right.

So I took a leave of absence.

That must have been exciting.

Yeah.

You get that offer?

Yeah.

Stargate?

Yeah. Are you kidding?

Holy shit.

So I took a leave of absence for 1 year from Bell Labs. And so I went to SRI International. Hal Puthoff was my boss. And then Ed May, when Hal left in 1985, Ed May took over. He may not be a name that is known as well, but he was the director for 10 years. And so I worked on that project and it took a long time to get the clearances. Because, first of all, I didn't know anything about classification or anything, but I figured, well, maybe it's just secret. No, it's just top secret. No, it's top secret SCI. No, it's top secret SCI special access program, which means there's literally a book that you have to sign and you can see all the other people who have signed that book. Special access means even if you have a top secret clearance, you cannot know about this place. You cannot know about the code word. You can't. The code word was classified. So, I mean, it seems kind of odd because if you have a code word, it's not saying anything. But nevertheless, that's how it worked. Wow. So we were the research side of people who talk about Stargate.

Mostly they're talking about the military side, the operational side. Well, we knew what they were doing, but our mission was different. Our mission was figure out those questions that you're asking. How does this stuff work? Like, is it real? Yes. Some people are very talented. What are the limits of it? Can you block it? Can you shield it? Can you do camouflage? And one of the main areas was, what's the difference between someone like Joe McMoneagle, who's a superstar in this area? Why is he any different than anybody else? Because, like, when I first met Ingo Swann and Joe and a bunch of other people, They were so different than my stereotype of Madame Zodiac that they, like, I'd say, you gotta be kidding. These people are remote viewers? They're just like guys and gals. And so every method was used to try to figure out, is it psychological difference? Is it physiological? Is it medical? What is it? And the answer was, we couldn't find anything. Now, there may be some background about the people themselves, but in terms of Finding out something that we could use to select because the Army and others were interested in getting lots of other people who would be talented too.

So there was no consistent factors?

No, there wasn't anything. Wow. So—

That seems crazy.

Except maybe talent. Two things, talent and openness. So talent is natural talent. It's partially based on genetics. And openness is a psychological trait where you're simply open to experience. So people who tend to be— to have like a certain way of thinking about things and are not open to other stuff, they block it. They could block it real good. People who are open to experience and willing to try new things, they in general tend to do better. So that brings us to talent, which I'll get to a little bit later, especially about the genetics of talent. So we didn't have the genetic tools at the time. Now we do have the genetic tools. And so we've done a couple of studies looking for what we call the psi gene. So we've— we think we're onto something. Okay, so I work on Stargate for a year. Go back to Bell Labs and almost immediately get another invitation. It's one of these doors open again. How would you like to go to Princeton? Because at Princeton at the time was the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory. It was the— a lab doing psi research that was headed by the Dean of the School of Engineering.

And so that lab went almost for 30 years doing mind-matter interaction, doing remote viewing, and a bunch of other stuff at Princeton. So my position was in the psych department, because that's where I had my PhD, but to lead a program among many departments, one of which was the PEAR Lab.. And the idea was in order to have any chance of beginning to understand this stuff, you need to pull in every discipline because it's way too big. It's too complicated for a single discipline. So we had the philosophy department and the psychology department and civil engineering and the PAR lab and a bunch of other departments. My job was to sort of corral it together to create multidisciplinary research projects. And I was told on day one, that's impossible. This is a job you cannot do. Well, why? I mean, we had the money for it. And the answer is that in the academic world, you succeed within silos. You know an enormous amount about a very particular kind of topic. Like even in the psych department there, you have cognitive psychologists, perceptual psychologists, social psychologists, and on and on and on. They don't even talk to each other because it's outside of your discipline, outside the little silo.

My job was to sort of mash it together and it was ridiculously complicated.

Was there resistance?

Oh my God. Resistance is not quite strong enough. It's like each one of the departments was getting money from this big grant that we had, so they were willing to play the game, but when it actually came down to doing some kind of a cross-filtering No.

Why didn't they want to collaborate?

Because everything of value in the academic world is in your silo. So if you're trying to work across silos, again, even within the same department, social psychology and perceptual psychology might not even talk to each other. And their offices are right next to each other. But that's simply the way—

That's insane.

Yeah, but it also, it sort of makes sense when you think about it. To become an expert, in something takes 20 years from the university and then the rest of your academic career just to keep up with it. So it kind of makes sense that you don't want to start turning your attention off to something else because you're not in that department anymore. So it's a problem and it's always been there. It's not getting any better either.

Well, it seems like there should be a way to fix that. The ultimate goal should be whatever we're all working on collectively should benefit mankind. And if you're in the psychology industry, which you are if you're teaching psychology, if you're working on psychology, you should want to get involved in this. The fact that they're all siloed off like that seems insane.

Yeah. So the approach that's sometimes taken in the academic world is to create a center. Center for the study of fill in the blank. That brings in people from different disciplines and then they're kind of forced together.

But these people from different disciplines probably are already working on important stuff to them and this is taking away from their time.

It could be, except that depending on the nature of the work, it may be something that requires another discipline. So you might have somebody in computer science who's working on that, and then you have somebody in psychology who's interested in the human side, like how do you connect the computer and the people? Well, there's a subdiscipline called human factors. That's where I was working in Bell Labs, 'cause they had engineering and psychology. So you kind of mash those two together, and then you could actually learn some new stuff that's of value to both. And also, that's how you create new disciplines. That's how the discipline of neuroscience began. So you go back, now it's more like 60 to 70 years ago, somebody noticed that you have all these people in biology and all these people looking at cells and people looking at things having to do with the nervous system that were all different disciplines. So a large foundation came along and said, I think we need to create a discipline of the neurosciences. And they threw enough money at it to bring people together, and that formed a new discipline. So, I work in the area of consciousness studies, which is only now starting to become its own discipline.

Because before that, it was maybe a few philosophers interested in it and anesthesiologists, and that's it. But it's changing.

So, when you were at Princeton, what specifically— how did you start it? Like, what specifically were you working on initially?

Well, besides trying to get people to talk to each other, which was frustrating.

Big task.

Yeah. So one of the things I did was meta-analysis. So this is a way of taking results of individual experiments that are similar to each other, like telepathy experiments, and putting them all together with a statistical method to see whether independent people are able to replicate the same thing. It's called meta-analysis. Meta meaning it's like an analysis of analyzes. And so it answers two questions. One is, if this is really real in a scientific sense, then other independent people ought to be able to do the same experiment and get the same result. So that's one part. The other part is, if you do have a lot of people doing the same experiment, then what is the overall result? It's like one gigantic experiment now. So I did a number of meta-analyses. Ended up writing a book on it that nobody wanted to buy, so it just sat there. And then I was doing experiments on precognition as part of my job. And because of my engineering background, I was using the latest version of machine learning at the time, which was neural networks, and applying it to the data from the PEAR Lab to see if, you know, when you do an experiment involving mind-matter interaction, usually use a random number generator And you ask somebody, this thing is— you tell them, this is going to push out a whole bunch of bits, random bits, and I want you to make more 1 bits than 0 bits.

That's your task. So they press a button and they get some kind of result. And now make more 0 bits. And now don't do anything. So this is 3 different kinds of tasks in one session. And so what they were finding was that in general, if you run a lot of people in this kind of task, Yes, their intention makes the bits go in the direction that you want. So you aim high, it goes up, aim low, it goes down, so on. So the question then is, not everybody can do that. Some people get the opposite result. So some people get really good at making it go high, but they can't make it go low. So the idea came about that there's something like a signature that was from each person. People had a way of interacting with the machine that made it do certain things that was unique to them, but overall it worked out. So I started using neural networks to see if I could train a neural network to tell who was doing the task based on how the random bits were working. And it turns out you can. So when I left Princeton, because it was getting way too frustrating, I took that idea—

Just trying to get people to work together.

Trying to do this multidisciplinary teams. Yeah, and as I told you, the first day I was there for the job, I was told, by the way, you have an impossible job. It's necessary though because this was part of the grant. What you're doing is part of the grant. So you have to do it anyway. And I did it for 3 years and then I decided I don't want to do that anymore. But so I went back to industry, but I specifically told the people I was interviewing with, I want to pursue this. Like, this is the beginning of a technology where that will have a machine identify who you are and your intention, kind of like Neuralink, except there's no connection. There's nothing going in the brain. It's purely intention. So I did end up working for a company outside of Washington, D.C. Where part of my work was doing exactly that. We're using more advanced neural networks with random number generators and got to the point where we're about to set a patent for this device because it worked. And the head of the organization at the time was a retired general who had a buddy who was an admiral, and he said the Navy's interested in this.

Kind of for obvious reasons, they want ways of communicating with submarines. So at that point, we're like right on the edge of doing that and we get bought by another company. And the new company said, "You're not gonna work on that anymore." So the wheels internally started, it was like golden handcuffs. A lot of money, I mean, it's a very good position, but I didn't really wanna do that anymore.

Did they have a, was it a profitable issue?

The vice president in charge of the lab did not believe that it was possible.

Oh God.

They also didn't look at the data. Of course. So he said, "No, we're not going to do that." He doesn't want to be silly. Yeah. So, I mean, it's so frustrating. You have it work. We have a thing here. It's working. No, he just— he didn't want to do it.

Oh, that's so frustrating.

Yeah. So a few years goes by. I kept doing all this stuff on the side now, outside of work, because it was just too interesting to drop. There was a recession. This was 1992. There was a recession. Part of my department was laid off, including myself. So, unbeknownst to most people at the time, that the Stargate program— and by the way, it wasn't called Stargate then. There's a lot of code words involved, but it's just known as Stargate, so I'll use that. That program was giving classified contracts to other people around the world, including at the University of Edinburgh. In Scotland. So we had a colleague at the University of Edinburgh who was creating an automated Ganzfeld testing system. This is a telepathy system where you press a button and the people are involved and everything is automated. It's kind of getting the human out of the loop except for the two people in the experiment. Well, the man who was developing that unfortunately died. And so this was an unfinished project. So I went to Ed May, who was director of Stargate at the time, And I said, "Well, can I go there and finish the project?" "Yeah, sure." "Okay." So I went to the University of Edinburgh for about a year.

And I worked on this project to finish the automated telepathy system. And they've run many, many people through that system by now. And so while I was there, I finished that pretty quickly. I started to develop the presentiment experiment. And you had Julia Mossbridge on the show recently. So I think she was talking about this experiment where you can see if somebody's body is reacting to something in the future that is unanticipated, that's random. Well, I was developing that at the time. This would have been around '93 or so. And so let me tell you a story about the kind of effect that gave me the idea to do this experiment. So the usual way that people talk about it is that you drive to work the same way every day, thousands of times, and you have a traffic light that you're coming up to and it's green. And normally you'd start accelerating towards it because you want to get through the light. Something tells you today there's something wrong. I don't know what it is, but I'm going to slow down., and you keep slowing down. The cars behind you are beeping and saying, "What's going on?" You get almost up to the intersection and a truck blasts through the red light, and you would have been hit broadside if you didn't slow down.

So you have this momentary shock of relief realizing that you just saved your life by paying attention to that little voice inside your head. So I thought, "Okay, let's simulate that in the laboratory." Well, we can't put people in danger, But we can do emotional tests like that. So you wire somebody up looking at skin conductance or pupil dilation or brainwaves, all kinds of things in the nervous system. And then you just record that continually, tell them, press a button, and then they're going to see something on a screen. So it could be a very calm picture, or it could be a very emotional picture. So emotion can split in two ways. It could be a very negative picture, like picture of surgery or an explosion or something, or it could be a positive, like a smiling baby. So there are two different valences, they're called. And you don't know which is going to come up because a true random number generator is the thing that decides after you press the button, then it decides what it's going to show you. So nobody knows in advance, including the experimenter. So I set up an experiment to do that.

And by this time, I already had left Edinburgh, I had to make a decision then again. Do you want to go back into industry? And I had an offer from Oak Ridge National Labs, which would have put me back in the classified world, or this other opportunity, which was to work at the University of Nevada funded by Robert Bigelow, who's probably best known for the OSAP program.

He's been on here before.

Yeah. So Bigelow has very generously said, "Yeah, I'll pay for your way to go into the university there." and I was able to run my own lab. So one of the very first things I set up then was, first of all, I want to continue working on this neural network or machine learning method for making a technology of intention. That was one of the things. But the other one was this presentiment experiment. So I ran that experiment and it was unbelievably good. Like, it's— normally you have little statistical effects. This is like in your face, holy smoke, this is a big thing. Big, big presentiment effects, like if skin conductance 1.5 seconds before you— well, you press a button, you wait 5 seconds, then it selects a picture. So 1.5 seconds before the picture is selected, if it's emotional, you start to become emotional. If it's calm, you remain calm. So that difference beforehand we call the presentiment effect. It's your body somehow, or unconscious, knowing what you're about to see. Just like approaching a light and slowing down. Something is telling you something. So we did that experiment. And I told this to one of the guys at the center I was working at.

And he told me a story which is far more interesting than not going through a red light. So the story is this. So he used to go hunting with his buddies, and they had a whole bunch of guns. His favorite gun was a 6-shot revolver, a double-action revolver. And so the way that he would take all the bullets out, he'd clean the whole thing out, and he put in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 bullets and leave the hammer over the empty chamber so it wouldn't get jostled accidentally. So he's cleaning the gun, he's putting in bullet 1, 2, 3, 4, he picks up the 5th bullet And he has that feeling, "Something about this bullet isn't right." So he didn't put it in, left it aside, put the hammer over cylinder 6, and then they went hunting. So, this is now 2 weeks in advance. They come back from hunting, his pistol wasn't used, and a bunch of other guns weren't used, but they do what you should not do after you go hunting, which is starting to drink. So they all getting a little bit too tipsy and drinking too much, and a fight breaks out between two people there.

One of them picks up my friend's gun, points it point-blank at somebody else, like right in their face. And my friend is now looking with horror because the trigger's getting pulled. The hammer's going back, the cylinder is turning, and he's trying to intervene now. He steps right in front of the gun, and it goes click. The hammer hit. It hit that 5th chamber because it rotated from 6 to 5. Whoa. So he realized with horror at that moment that if he had not taken out that bullet, he would be shot in the head. And so the— afterwards he said, everyone has a bullet with their name on it, and mine is in a safety deposit box, and I know exactly where it is, and it's not coming out. Wow. So That's a real-life version of this, which is 2 weeks in advance. In the laboratory, we can only look seconds in advance.

Also, you should have the intuition and not go hunting and drinking with psychos that are willing to shoot somebody in the face over an argument.

Nevertheless, yeah. So it happens. Yeah, so—

That's crazy, though.

So that— but see, this is where we want to go in these kinds of experiments. You need, like, real-life stuff. That you can actually test in a controlled way in the laboratory. But there's all kinds of ethical reasons, obviously, why you can't do that. But I'm pretty sure that if we're able to get something at that level in the laboratory, we would have much, much stronger results than we currently do.

Now, when it comes to things like remote viewing and being able to be open and being able to actually pull it off and actually remote view things that you can prove. What is the state of mind these people are trying to achieve? And what is the protocol for achieving that state of mind?

It depends on whether you're naturally talented or not. So Joe McMoneagle and a few others that I know, if you were to ask them at at breakfast, could you remote view what I have in a hidden folder over here? They would continue eating and tell you the answer immediately. So for them, it doesn't take much at all. And in fact, what Joe would say, and I have some pictures from what Joe had done, Joe would say that if he knows in the afternoon he's going to do a remote viewing, he'll get all the information in the morning, like instantly, it'll just be there. And then he has to wait until the whole thing plays out. But it's like, bang, you got it. So it's a matter internally of simply knowing I need to get this information, and it happens immediately. For people who don't have that natural talent, you go through training where— and by the way, almost everybody can do this, but it does require some training now. So for an average person, the training typically is to not name an impression, which is really tough. So, you have a target which may be somewhere in the world, maybe a person somewhere, maybe in an envelope, something like that.

You're taught you will have something come to mind. You know that that's the target. You have no idea what it is, but you know that there is a target you're going to have to describe. So, name the first thing that comes to mind, but without naming it. So, you start little scribbles, and then you have more complicated scribbles, and you start adding feelings and senses that are associated with these scribbles. Eventually, you get to the point where it's kind of all gels together, and then you get a coherent image. The problem is that if you tell somebody, "I'm going to show you a picture in 20 minutes that you don't know what it is," and you say, "Okay, well, just imagine what you're going to get," and you get a flash of yellow, you're instantly going to start thinking of bananas. And once that happens, you can't not think of bananas anymore. So that's what I mean by not naming. So that's one of the very first things that you learn is anything that comes to mind that you have a name to is probably not it. It takes practice, but you can get there.

Wow. What was the most impressive thing that you ever saw anybody achieve with remote viewing?

After I got the clearances, Hal gave me the briefing. That everyone gets, like in SCIFs and Congress and presidents, whatever. I got the same briefing. So one picture after the other of experiments by Joe and by a bunch of other people who are not as well known that basically give almost a veridical drawing of the target. And these are targets that are elsewhere in the world. These are targets that are in envelopes. These are targets that are in SCIFs. All different kinds of targets where nothing about the target is known. Like, I will tell you a 5-digit number which stands for the target. And so all you have is a 5-digit number. Now give me a description of what I'm going to show you in 2 hours. And they do it.

So you're putting the number to the target? You're just saying, like, Moscow is number 654.

A random number, yes.

And just by you attributing that number to whatever this target is, there's a connection made. What's happening?

How's that? Yeah.

So— What's that?

Yeah. We don't know why that is. There are theories about it, and the theory requires probably stepping away from materialism as the only model of reality. So there are other models which allow for consciousness, whatever that is, because we don't know that either, but consciousness seems to have a non-local quality. So it's the same kind of non-locality that you talk about in quantum mechanics.

Mm.

So quantum mechanics has entanglement, which are non-local connections between things. It is also through time, so connections through space and time. So we know that that's a real thing. That's what the physical world allows. It is as though consciousness, whatever that is, also has that property. It is non-local. So if you push it hard enough, you end up with something like the movie Everything Everywhere All at the Same Time. That's basically what we're talking about. There's an aspect of reality which we don't ordinarily see, but nevertheless connects everything throughout space and time. And so if that were not true, then things like precognition wouldn't work so well, telepathy wouldn't work, remote viewing wouldn't work, none of that would work. But nevertheless, it does work. So that is like a more comprehensive way of understanding what reality is like.

Do you think this is an emerging quality in human beings, or do you think this is an atrophied quality that we used to all have before the development of written language, books, media, all these different things that sort of take away this quiet communication? That people probably had with each other. We believe wolves have that with each other. Wolves coordinate somehow. They coordinate attacks on animals, and it could be through learned experience, but how do they— how do they remember it and know what to do, and how do each one have specific roles? Like, one wolf will chase the elk into, like, a certain corridor, and the other wolves will wait and be on, like, higher ground and come down and attack. They know that they do weird stuff that that somehow or another requires some kind of communication.

Yes. And they're way more intelligent than we have usually thought.

Well, think about how intelligent some dogs are. Yeah. You know, like a Belgian Malinois or something like that, one of those dogs they use for military training. Those dogs are incredibly intelligent. Yeah. And they need exercise. They need activities. They need things to stimulate them because their brain is like firing all day long. Wolf is that times 100.

Yeah, and so most animals, plants, insects maybe have consciousness in some form, and if that consciousness is similar to ours, it is non-local.

Do you think it's an emerging thing? Yeah. Or do you think it's a thing that we've always had?

I think that we are shaped as humans by evolution to not pay attention to the there and then, because if we were paying attention to there and then a lot, then you may not notice that there's a tiger in front of you who's about to eat you. And so if you like look over the long span of development of whatever it is we are, people who are walking around thinking about Pluto a million years ago would have been pruned out of existence. So only certain kinds of people historically were able to do that. We call them shaman. And the shaman, as part of a tribe, were extremely important because They knew the food would be 10 miles away that way next week. But the shaman typically could not take care of themselves very well. You know, their minds were off in Pluto. And so the tribe took care of them. And so today we don't have that very much. We're distracted by everything. And we don't have the same kinds of needs that they would have had 10,000, 20,000 years ago. Except in some indigenous societies. So one time I gave a talk for the Australian government.

There was a whole bunch of ministers there and people in the military. And I was talking about this sort of stuff. And unbeknownst to me, one of the ministers was representative of the indigenous people there. So I finished this long talk on telepathy, and she came up afterwards and said, "Well, we've known this stuff." for thousands of years. They would use it. Like in the outback, there was no phones, but somehow they were in communication. It's part of the culture. So they didn't have the distractions and they had a need. So you can imagine a more or less isolated culture for a long period of time that didn't have tigers immediately always trying to capture them. They had the need to be able to communicate that way. We don't have the need anymore, so it atrophies.

Mm, okay. So it atrophies. And so with things like remote viewing, do you think this is almost like a relearning of a skill that people had at one point in time?

Yeah. And there's still some people who have some of the genetics because all of this is basically devolving back into talent. Some people have that talent.

And you think that's a genetic thing?

I think a good chunk of it is genetic, yes.

So it's from people in their ancient past that had that quality, had that ability. And they passed on that trait. Yeah. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Summer is great, isn't it? It's the perfect season for adventures, but it can also be pretty exhausting juggling chaotic schedules and trying to make the most of summer. That's why it's important to take a moment for you. Go out for a weekend without planning anything and just have fun or relax at home. Or if you're really struggling, try therapy with BetterHelp. With a network of over 30,000 quality therapists, they can connect you with the right one, just like they have for millions already across the globe. Together, you could work out what you need and how you can enjoy summer to the fullest. You don't have to say yes to everything this summer. Find support in therapy. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/JRE. That's better help.com/jre.

So like in Joe McMonigle's case, he was one of those guys who did search and rescue behind enemy lines, and he always came back. His team always found their guy and they always came back alive. And so, well, where did that come from? Well, he used his intuition in the field to decide, let's not go down that road, let's go over here, and it was safe. So afterwards, when asked, when there was recruiting for people who had some abilities like this, they would ask people like that. Do you find, like, when you're in combat, you never get hit? Okay, let's talk. The other thing, of course, is, did you ever have any experiences beforehand that suggest that maybe you had these experiences? Well, Joe did, and his sister did too. So there suggests again some kind of a familial genetic underpinning for why people have these experiences. So, I will continue the story because I'm going to intersect with this genetic part in a minute. So, I'm at UNLV doing all kinds of interesting stuff. Somehow, the New York Times learns about what I'm doing. They think it's an interesting character story for a parapsychologist to be working in Las Vegas.

Because Las Vegas is sometimes called the largest parapsychology lab in the world. You have a whole bunch of people trying to mentally influence more or less random systems, like they are all the time. So, okay.

That's an interesting way to look at Vegas.

Yeah. Well, it kind of is, right? You toss the dice, you want a certain result. Well, we do that in the laboratory, except we don't have a lot of money associated with it. I was able to actually get data. From one of the casinos, the smaller casinos, and because the general manager was interested in what I was doing. So I said, "Well, could I get all the data, as much as you have, on jackpots for slot machines and also the table games?" And a miracle occurred and she said, "Yeah." So she gave us the data. I was able to analyze it and among other things found that jackpots happen more often and payouts happened— were larger. And table games did better between plus or minus 1 day from the full moon. Which, by the way, matches magical lore. I mean, all kinds of things are related to when the full moon happens, religious effects and all kinds of things. So I thought, well, that's interesting. More jackpots happen plus or minus the day of the full moon. And so I said to the general manager, maybe this is something you don't want to tell people.

'Cause they'll all start coming in the full moon. She said, "Yeah, bring them in." Because all you could do with this information was lose a little bit slower because everything is, you know, Vegas. It's rigged. Yeah, well, it's not rigged, but it's set up in such a way that the odds are against you. So you would lose slower, but nevertheless, you'd see that in the data. So there's something interesting. Okay, so I get to the end of my time at UNLV and a new door opens. And partially because of the New York Times piece, that book that I had written at Princeton that nobody wanted to buy, I suddenly had publishers calling me and saying, "Do you ever think about writing a book?" "Yeah, I have one." So I published that book. That caught the attention of people at an organization called Interval Research, which was funded by Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft. So Paul Allen was interested in doing what he called developing the wired world. This was— this would have been started in 1990 as a 10-year project to figure out, given that the internet was going to be a gigantic thing, what do we do with it?

So this was people that were poached from Apple and from Xerox PARC and the MIT —lab and all—lots of places. They brought 100 people together. And so I was invited to do a sci research program there with a budget that was 10 times larger than I had at UNLV and a salary that was 3 times larger. So I thought, "Yeah, that's the door that I want." So at Interval, everything was proprietary because it was all leading into patents that would eventually create things. And so some of the things we take for granted now were developed there. I was there not so much to develop a psychic technology, but because a small percentage of the projects were considered blue sky. This kind of the— make sure that everybody in the lab realized that we're trying to push the envelope hard in developing new things. And so it's always useful to have a couple of speculative projects around. So I worked on that. And then the 10 years was over in 2000. So this is all in Silicon Valley. So a couple of us then left to create a nonprofit, which we call the Boundary Institute, which would continue the research that we were doing.

And then that lasted for about a year because there was the dot-com crash and we couldn't raise money to keep ourselves afloat. I was invited then to join the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Where I've been now for the last 25 years. So, the circle here is, here I am in college and looking at this place, studying the frontiers of consciousness, and that's where I end up, and I've been there ever since, and no new doors have opened that have attracted me. So, I'm there and I've been having great fun at the Institute.

I interrupted you when we were talking about numbers being associated with targets.— and you were expanding on actionable data, like real— like what was the most impressive thing to you that you saw that people achieved with remote viewing?

Do you mean from an operational sense or—

I mean, just for people listening, like what would be the most spectacular example of something that couldn't be achieved any other way?

Well, one of the things was actually admitted by President Carter. Way back when, when they found a bomber, a nuclear bomber that landed somewhere in Africa, which could not be seen from above because of the canopy of all the— and nobody knew where it actually landed. It crashed, right? It crashed. There was a bomb on board that they did not want anybody else to get. And so they asked one of the remote viewers. In fact, they asked several of them, but one of them specialized in location. Which is very difficult for remote viewing. Like if you look at a map and you say, well, you know, put a dot on the map for where it is, that turns out to not be very easy even for remote viewers. But this one lady was very, very good at that. She was a dowser. In fact, she was a map dowser. So you get a big piece of blank—

You're saying dowser like those people that walk around with the stick to find water?

Yeah, except map dowsing is you have a blank sheet of paper, which is linked by association to an actual map somewhere. You don't want to give anything away, so you don't use a real map. You use a piece of paper which has little Xs on it that map onto an actual map. So we asked this lady, her name was Fran, put a mark on the map of where this bomber landed. And of course, she doesn't know it's Africa. She doesn't know anything. She does her thing. She puts a mark on the map and says, I think it's there. And so they go there and they find it within a couple of kilometers of that spot. Whoa. And so they originally go to that spot. They see natives nearby. So they ask the natives, you know, "Was there anything crashing out of the sky recently?" They said, "Yeah, something happened over there.

That's where it was." Now, what did Carter say when he spoke about this publicly?

Carter was asked a very similar question, "Did you ever encounter anything really weird?" So that's the example that he used.

Didn't Carter have a UFO experience before?

He did. He had that as well, yeah.

And Carter was— the folklore is that Carter was briefed about something having to do with alien life, and he was so upset that he started weeping.

Yes, I have heard those stories, yes.

What do you think about those stories?

It could well be true, yeah. I mean, so here, there's actually— Did you ever hear a rumor of what he was told? No, I don't know what he was told. If I had to guess, given that he was a very religious person, it probably was pushing against his religious beliefs. Yeah. That's what I would guess.

Well, you know, that was the giant rumor that was going around recently, that there was going to be some big disclosure by the White House and that a bunch of pastors had been briefed about this to try to talk to their flock and, you know, get ahead of it. Yeah, yeah, you heard that, right?

Yeah. What did you think of that? It could well be true. So I, I know Jacques Vallée really well, and, uh, he's a fascinating guy. Yeah. And I know Gary Nolan, and another fast— yeah, I've, I've worked in circles where we basically all known each other for a long time, uh, and the, the UFO business, UAP, is very similar in some respects to the psychic side, both in that there's an enormous amount of misinformation that has been pushed by government, by other places to deflect attention. And so there's lots of examples of that, which, I mean, because of what we know now about the UFO thing, it's relatively easy to see how that could have happened for for the psi business as well. So just one example, I go to the Naval War College and I've given a number of lectures and one of them is on telepathy. How do we know that telepathy actually exists? There's a bunch of different ways of knowing that. And so afterwards, two subcommanders come up. In fact, that's the story, that's the opening story gambit in my book, Science of Magic. So the two subcommanders come up And they say, "Well, we have a story to tell you.

These are two independent subs." They're the commanders of two subs. So I'm telling them everything we know about telepathy, and they say, "Well, one time, and we're submerged, we're under maneuvers, a crewman wakes up from a dream and goes to the commander and says, 'We need to surface because something bad has happened at home.' Well, we can't. We're under maneuvers. Next time we can surface, Well, then you can call home. So the next time they surface, they call home, and sure enough, when the sailor woke up from his dream, there was indeed something bad happening at home. So both of the commanders had the same story. So I said, well, does this happen like every Tuesday? No, there were no false positives. It happened once, and both times it was correct. That's very important to know, not simply that it happens, But it is happening when the submarines are at a classified depth, which means at least 300 meters, probably more, below the surface of the ocean where it's extremely difficult to get any kind of message there. So it's not electromagnetic. We don't know what that would be.

What were the events at home that were bad?

They didn't tell me the events at home, but it was—

Personal events like someone's family or something?

Yes, something in their family, something was going wrong. Which turned out to be correct. So one thing is, yes, it tells us something that's important to know from a scientific perspective because they are not reachable by ordinary means. That's the whole point about having a submarine. Very difficult to know where they are and get messages to them. The other thing is that people who are selected to be submariners are psychologically extremely stable. They're not prone to flights of fantasy. They don't have claustrophobia. They don't have any kind of the neurosis that you would imagine that somebody would need to go into a submarine for months submerged who knows where. So it means that this happens to ordinary people, in this case, in an altered state of awareness, namely in a dream state, but nevertheless, they got it and there were no false positives. So I was a little— whenever I give a talk to a new type of group, especially in the military, always thinking that these guys are They think I'm nuts because I'm telling them stuff that shouldn't exist by any conventional perspective. It's exactly the opposite. Mostly I've talked to officers, like up to generals and admirals and a few levels below that.

They're all completely on board. And I began to understand why. That not only are they in life and death situations, and that's where these things tend to bubble up, But also, they had to trust their intuition in making lots of decisions that affect other people, and they would not have risen through the ranks unless they were really, really good at it. So that's why I was not getting the kind of pushback that I expected to get.

Interesting. The Bell Labs connection is very interesting too. You know, Bell Labs is also the source of myth and folklore about the Roswell crash.— that they received things from the Roswell craft and back-engineered it. Do you know that whole crazy—

I know about those stories. Story. I don't know any— I don't have any direct knowledge of anything like that.

You never heard anything when you were there? There was a company called the American Computer Company way back in the day, and they just would sell Windows computers. You could— you'd pick out the hard drive and all this jazz online. They'd build it for you. And they had a whole page of their website that was dedicated to Bell Laboratories. And Bell Laboratories being close to a military base, not because the military base is really to protect New York City, it was really to protect Bell Labs because they were working on this top secret stuff there and that they had back engineered some stuff from the Roswell crash. It was all like this. Maybe. It's so fun. Why is that stuff so fun?

Yeah, maybe. I mean, after all, they invented the fiber optics and lasers and everything in modern—

The fiber optics specifically was one of the things that they discussed as being something that they discovered. Well, there is—

I mean, if you go to the ordinary history, you can figure out why that happened, that it didn't involve reverse engineering anything, that there's a long history about why somebody would have gotten to the point to realize that you can do certain things with glass. That would be interesting. Whether the idea came from somewhere else, that's—

that I don't know. It's just interesting. It's just— it's fascinating when you find out that there are these very limited access programs that are beyond top secret that even the president can't find out about them.

Yeah. Yeah, and so one of the disadvantage of a special access program is that you could be working next to somebody and are not allowed to talk about what they're doing. And that, that was happening a lot. So a lot of the Stargate program is now public. There's like 4 volumes that go through great gory detail on this called the Stargate Archives. Not all of it has been released. So a lot of the military stuff won't— will never be released because it involves people and methods and so on. Some of the research side is not released either. And so I know about that because I was in there. I also just by virtue of hanging around other people, you learn things that they talk about. So I know about some of those things too. And I know when you were talking to Hal Puthoff and occasionally you would ask him something and he'd say, "Well, I can't talk about that." Well, I can't talk about this. Right.

That's a problem. Does that frustrate you that you can't openly discuss some of these things?

Yes, it was especially frustrating when I was working there because we'd go into the building and we're doing all kinds of interesting psychic things and you go out of the building and it not only doesn't exist, that if it ever comes up in conversation, you don't say, "I can't talk about it," because that would mean they know. You have to go along with the game and just agree with everybody else that it's all nonsense. Wow. So it's nonsense out there and in here we're working on it. So that kind of—

What a weird psychological dilemma.

Well, even worse, the whole point about classification is to keep secrets. We were figuring out ways that you can't keep secrets, right? I mean, the whole thing about remote viewing and telepathy and all that stuff, there are no secrets. With the right talented people, nothing can be shielded, nothing. Outside, everything is all about secrets. So one of the reasons, I think, that these topics still have a stigma attached to them and why there's disinformation is because imagine how this society would work if there were no secrets.

Don't you think that technology is eventually taking us in that direction?

Yes, but it's not gonna be Neuralink. It's not gonna be brain-computer stuff. It's gonna be the real thing.

So you think technology will aid us in achieving the real thing?

Yes. How so? Okay, so one day we're talking to Gary Nolan. Gary says, "Have you ever looked at the genetics of highly talented people?" There's a lot of folklore out there that there are people who are psychic who come from psychic families. And then there are people who don't have anything psychic and don't have anybody talking about psychic stuff. That suggests genetics. So this is a couple years ago. We decided to do an experiment that we call PsyGenes. We're looking for the psychic gene. More likely a polygenetic trait, but nevertheless, something about genetics. So we do an experiment where we recruit 3,000 people using the internet who say that they're psychic from psychic families. And then we do all kinds of vetting to make sure that they are who they say they are. And they have some talent, and we get their DNA. We only had enough money to find, out of the 3,000 people, 13, 'cause we also did face-to-face interviews to make sure they weren't nuts. So we get their DNA, then we find matched controls, and we do standard methods of comparing the two sets of genomes. And so we found something that we didn't expect, which was that The psychics were all so-called wild type.

They didn't have any unusual things happening in their DNA. The controls had a significant effect in an intron sequence. So when you have DNA, it's billions of base pairs. Only about 50,000 of them produce proteins. It's called the exome. It's a portion that creates our body. It's that stuff. All of the rest of it used to be called junk DNA, 'cause they didn't know what it did. It's the intron sequence, it's the thing between the genes. That now we know is the epigenetic portion. It's the portion of the DNA that turns genes on and off. These controls had a mutation in their intron sequence. So they were turning something off. We still don't know exactly what it is, but something about their makeup was turning off psychic sensitivity. And so one of the people on our project was a specialist in the genetics of societies. Different societies have different genetic makeup. And he found that, to our surprise there too, that countries that were exposed to Christianity, the longer they were exposed, the more this intron sequence was there, the mutation. We started thinking, well, how does that make any sense? And then suddenly we understood.

The Inquisition had systematically looked for people over hundreds of years who had these abilities, and then they killed them. And so— Jeez. —you think about this as a non-evolutionary method, but nevertheless a pruning of a portion of humanity. So they were getting rid of people who had this, and what were left over were people who had this, no psychic stuff at all. So, yeah, so it's like eugenics in an opposite direction where they weren't trying to pull people for talent but get rid of the talent. And you can see it in the genome. And this is directly connected to the Inquisition?

Because the Inquisition this is— what were they— who were they targeting specifically? They were targeting witches.

So the witches were once— I mean, an awful lot of innocent people were caught up in that as well. But people who were known as healers, people who had precognition. And, of course, the church at the time was just concerned that somebody's going to come along that's going to attract our followers away from us. So magic was okay within the church, within the bounds of the church. If a priest is anointed in a certain way, they can do magic. The whole ceremony of the Eucharist is a magical practice. It's okay. Outside of the church, it was not okay. And so it was a very heavy-handed way of ensuring that the power would remain in the church.

So by enforcing their Christian ideology, they eliminated anybody that had any alternative powers or visions or anything weird, any other kind of practices.

Yeah, and so the case of the Catholic saints is very interesting. Like Joseph of Cupertino was said to have levitated and also to do bilocation, very psychic things. He was very— he was lucky in a sense that he was already a priest. Lots of people, thousands of people saw him levitate, And he made— basically a deal was made with the Inquisition that you now need to go to this place out in the middle of nowhere and don't show this anymore to anybody because we don't—

So when you say he could levitate, like how high? There are stories of him levitating 30 feet, sometimes drifting into the rafters of churches in front of astonished crowds and even Pope Urban VIII. You could read more about it in his extraordinary life through Franciscan media.

Yeah, Saint Teresa La Colette.

The patron saint, go back, please. Often called the patron saint of air travelers.

Yeah, why not? We're all levitating. That is crazy.

The most famous levitator in Catholic history. So there's other levitators?

Oh yeah, yeah, there's a book called—

How come nobody could do that now?

There are stories that people can do it now, but so far in the laboratory, we haven't been able to see this. Hmm, there's a book called—

stop, stop, please go back. This one, Saint Teresa of Avila, Spanish mystic who famously recorded that her levitations occurred unexpectedly during states of deep spiritual rapture. She described the sensation as a violent force lifting her up from beneath her feet and was so embarrassed by it that she instructed fellow nuns to physically hold her down.

Whoa. Yeah, dozens, dozens of them.

Francis of Assisi. But it's like, do it now. Why do you think people don't do it now and film it on their iPhone?

Well, so the TM organization had a siddhi program, the siddhi yogic powers. Art of levitation. And they had this whole thing for a long time about yogic flyers. So one time I went to the university where they were going to show the 4 best yogic flyers. So we're all excited about that, me and a few other people. And so there are 4 young men who go in full lotus position and then hop. I've seen that. Yeah. So we were like, you know, right next to them seeing hopping. And the hopping's pretty good because you're in a full lotus position and you hop around 2.5 feet. It's plyometrics though. Yeah. It was hopping. So I asked them, well, why aren't anybody flying? Why is the flying not happening? There they go. Right, but— Yeah, so that takes, you have to be pretty strong to do that.

Yeah, but that's all that is. Yeah.

I know guys who can do that. So the Maharishi was asked, why isn't anybody flying? And his response was, there's too many people who think it's impossible. So it becomes like a sociological thing. So is that true? I don't know.

Do you think it's people are more closed-minded the ideas than anything outside the norm. Anything like that, levitation, is nonsense. So it's like it's permeated our zeitgeist.

Yes, it also, I believe that it can act as a block for other people. So you haven't asked yet, why as a scientist who worked at Princeton and Bell Labs, why am I writing about magic? It's because of a couple of experiences that told me that our understanding of psychic effects now is like in a box. We generally do experiments, we get relatively small effects. They're not gigantic effects, they're not levitation. Well, maybe it's the same thing. Somebody can make a random number generator do something. It's— you need statistics to see it. They're really small, but we don't know the limits. So I've had a few experiences that told me I really don't know what the limits are. And so that brings up this. So bending a bowl of a spoon without force, which I did. And so I brought you a spoon. This is the same spoon from— it's from 1961. It's this particular— so I set up this. I went to a so-called spoon bending party because—

You bent that spoon with your brain or your mind or your consciousness or whatever it is? Something.

I mentally did something, but I'll show you in a minute how we did this. So the reason I did this, because I was at Interval, and at the time, Russ Targ was working for me and Ed May too. And Russ came back from one of these parties and he said he had bent a rebar, a half-inch rebar, pshh, which, I mean, some muscle men can do that, but you have to be pretty strong to bend a rebar and have it stay there. So, I was thinking, "That is ridiculous." I didn't say that, but I was thinking, "That's impossible." And the same thing about this. If you bend the neck of a spoon, which is what typically people do, a person can do that just, pshew, and it's gone. So fast that you can't see it, and then you hide it and you reveal it, and it looks like you've bent it. So, I went to one of these parties, and I heard that there was a woman there who was able to bend the bowl of the spoon just by touching it, not by itself, but sort of touching it and moving it over. And I said, I want to see that because it's ridiculous.

So I'm standing in front of this woman and she's holding it like this. She has a thumb there and a finger here. And so she's, I'm waiting for her to do it and I'm mimicking her because I want to see how she's doing it. You know, is it a trick? So we're doing that and nothing is happening. And then somebody says, look what you did. And I'm looking, "Oh, somebody did something?" "No, Dean, look what you did." I had bent it 90 degrees. And I immediately look at my fingers. Did I do this by force? No, no indication, no indentation or anything. And so the person said, "Bend it all the way." So it was halfway and I literally went, pshh, and went all the way. So now I have this spoon and I'm sort of mind-boggled by it. 'Cause I know it wasn't force. I'm not strong enough to be able to do that. Very few people would be able to do it. So I have another spoon, just like it, and I'm on the plane flying home, and I'm trying to do it with the spoon, and I suddenly get a huge shock of fear because I'm in a metal tin can 30,000 feet up, and I don't know how I did it, and I don't want the wings to suddenly go, pshew, because I'm— Right.

I still don't know exactly how, but I know the metallurgy now. So it turns out that if you're holding it like that, you can do between 50 and 70 pounds of force suddenly, like an impulse, you will cause the lattice that forms the grain boundary to momentarily soften. And then for about 20 seconds, it will be really, really soft. And at that point, you can literally just take a thumb and finger like this, which is what I did, and squish it over, instantly tightens up again.

But there's no explanation for what caused the initial force?

No, because I was holding it like this, and I can't do that now. No, I don't know how I did it. I do know, however—

Is that the actual spoon you did it with?

Yeah, this is the spoon. Can't feel it?

This is a regular spoon. Yeah.

It's, yep. I want to show you this.

It's pretty easy to bend.

I want to show you this other part here. This is the motivation. So I was told— well, more importantly than that is to take the full spoon that you have because this is what I was working with.

This one was already weakened, right? No, no, but I mean now it is.

No, that, that is the way it is. It's a little spongy. But yeah, that's what I'm saying.

Like that. I just did that. Yeah. You're applying it out.

Yeah. And you have to apply a lot of force to do it.

A lot. Yeah. I got to really strain. Yeah. And I have fat thumbs. But once it's like that, I could kind of do that pretty well.

Yeah. Well, now, of course, you smoothed it out. So now try to do it without it being in that position. With just one finger. One hand. No, no. Just like this. Hold it like that. Hold thumb underneath, finger on top. Yeah. And bend it down. Not the neck. It's not bending the neck. Yeah. The shell shape resists bending.

It's very hard to bend.

Yeah. And more importantly, don't hurt your fingers on this. Yeah.

I can't do it. Yeah. Well, I might be able to do it if it was more stable, but it's very hard to do. It's not something that's easy at all.

With leverage, certainly you can do it. But there was—

If there was a clamp, maybe I could do it. Oh yeah. But I mean, I would want to use both hands. I'd want to get in there with my thumbs.

Yeah, but that's not what happens.

But to do it with a finger, that's very hard to do. And you don't know how you did it.

Well, so I was in a very weird state of motivation because we were told that if you could do that without force, that you would get this button. Certified Warm Former? Yeah, so it was called Warm Formering because you're forming this as though it became warm, because it feels like putty when it actually works.

That's what I had heard that people do with the necks of them.

Oh, yeah. No, I wasn't interested in the necks.

I've seen a guy do that, and he told me it was a trick. He goes, I'm not going to tell you how I do it, but I'm not using magic.

It's a trick. You could just do it.

No, he said he was doing something, like rubbing it with his fingers, and it was a specific type of spoon or something.

But even with this spoon, I mean, you're certainly strong enough to be able to push it over. At the neck. The shell shape is very difficult.

Yeah, I can't do it.

So I was told if I— I did it. But look, I had to use both hands. Yeah. And you apply leverage and you're going to feel it tomorrow in your fingers too. Nah, I'll be all right.

But yeah, this is— that's very hard to do.

So if you could do it, you get a button. So the next day I was giving a talk to this conference. This was held at a conference.. And I imagined myself with my suit on with the button. And it was like some kind of weird ego thing where I felt I needed to demonstrate to the people in the audience that I can do this stuff. And it was so strange because I'm not very egotistical and I'm not self-aggrandizing either. But there was something about getting this stupid button that put me in a position where I felt, if I don't do this, the universe will end. I mean, that kind of level of obsessiveness. Really? I needed the button.

For no reason?

Well, because I needed the button.

I know, but that's kind of crazy.

I don't know how to explain it.

That doesn't seem like something you would be interested in, knowing you for the brief amount of time that I've known you.

Nevertheless, that is the strange state I was in, and it's relevant to the idea of how traditional magic is supposed to work. There's a number of factors involved. There's belief, and motivation is very important, imagination, and a bunch of other things. So it's very difficult in an experiment to create that level of motivation. This is not something I want. This is something I need. I need this to happen. So, well, so I got the button. And the moment I did that, and he gave me the button, it all vanished. The whole thing about the need. Was suddenly— and then everything in the universe was okay again. So that's when you, you know, you look into how magic works, you build up this sense. And there's two ways of doing it. One is very long-term meditation where you can gain certain skills. And the other one I call screaming at fire. So that the image that that evokes, you're screaming at fire. It's that kind of motivation which allows things to unfold that otherwise wouldn't happen.

Hmm. So this state, have you ever tried to achieve this state again under any other circumstances?

Well, yeah, in the airplane, and now I don't do that in the airplane because I don't know how I did it in the first place. Right. Yeah. I have tried several times since with a quarter-inch aluminum bar. This is the same kind of bar used in aircraft. It's very strong, very stiff. And you start with it flat and it doesn't rock at all. And so I was able to make it go so that it rocks a little bit. So it moved at probably a fraction of a millimeter. Hmm. And using the same kind of thing, but without that crazy motivation because I didn't have a button.

Did you film yourself ever doing this? No. No? Has anybody ever filmed themself doing something like this?

There are some films of people doing this. Generally what you see is it breaking. Like a spoon will break here and it'll go bleep. But again, there was a lot of research on this in the 1970s by metallurgists and physicists. Some became convinced that it's real and some became convinced that it wasn't real.

So there's some kind of energy, some unknown energy that you're transmitting to that spoon.

I think what's happening is very similar to what's going on with these micro PK events, micro-psychokinetic events, that you're changing probabilistic structure at a very deep level, at the atomic level. And that would actually do it here. If you're able to target a, like a strip across here, you can momentarily cause the grains to shift.

And the fact that you didn't know you did it.

I didn't know how I did it. I just know what I wanted to happen.

But did you recognize it was happening while it was happening?

No. No, I was too freaked out.

See, that's what I'm saying. That's like— so the state of mind was so peculiar that you were doing it without even focusing on the fact that you were doing it.

I'm pretty sure if I was being analytical at the time, it would not have happened. Whew.

That's what's so weird about the whole idea of intuition is that if you try it, if you like really think about it too much, then you get fucked by your own perceptions in some way. Like, you skew the thing. You start defining it, and you can't see it anymore.

It's, in a very general sense, it's right versus left brain. Our left brains are analytical. It's what allows us to do this sort of communication. It is maintaining stability about the way that we think the world works. The right brain isn't interested in that stuff at all. It's about form and function. That's where remote viewing and most psychic stuff takes place. And it's not simple as left and right brain, but it's generally a general idea. So the second level of our PsyGenes test, so this, they're both published now. So the second one, we need thousands of cases and controls in order to do this right. Like if you're studying schizophrenia, what's the Genetic basis used tens of thousands of cases and they know the genes now as a result. We don't have money to do that. So we got data from 23andMe and from Ancestry and those kinds of places that give you your exome. So it's not the full genome, it's a portion of it. And we had people fill out a questionnaire of what kind of experiences you had.. And then we're able to do an analysis. Is there a correlation between the two?

And the answer is yes. We found 212 SNPs. These are single nucleotide polymorphisms. So it's a piece of, of the genome. 212 correlated with these psychic experiences, one of which correlated with a probability of a million to one. So it prob— that one's probably a real thing. So what is that SNP associated with? You go into the atlas and you can say, well, what portion of the body is that involved in? And it's involved with a whole bunch of different things happening in the brain. So anybody who's listening who has $10 million to spare and wants us to figure out what is the rest of the story, we can do that because we have the technology now.

Elon, you got some cash, throw it at this thing. So do you— When you think of consciousness, do you think that we as individual biological entities are interacting with consciousness and with different levels of achieving, like, certain aspects of consciousness, some of it being genetic, some of it being life experience, education, training, but that we're just these individual biological entities that are tapping into whatever consciousness is?

Yes and no, but you see the subtitle, How the Mind Weaves the Fabric of Reality. So I'm viewing this as consciousness and the physical world are like a tapestry. They're both necessary for understanding of reality, and they're weaved together. They're both part of it. You can't have just the physical world. Maybe you can't just have a consciousness world either. They're working together. So we are that. Our physical body, our consciousness are woven together into the form that we currently take. So that is essentially a philosophy called dual aspect monism. It says there are two— there's one world of which we don't know what that is, but two things split out of it: mind and matter. But they come out of something that is uniform. It's one thing. So Carl Jung called it the Unus Mundus, the one world out of which things split. Well, why does it split? His idea was that it splits because of meaning. So meaning is what caused this mind-matter split. And because they come out of the same place, they're tightly correlated, like two sides of the same coin. But meaning being very subjective, right? Like, what is meaning? Yeah, that's a good question because Jung did not clearly define what he meant by meaning.

We sort of know what that means, what meaning means, but it's in that theory at least, or the philosophy, it's not clearly defined.

So when you get down to this one thing that these two things branch out, what is the one thing?

It's the one thing that everything comes from. And also, mind and matter are two aspects that split, but there's an infinite number of other aspects that can split out of this one thing. So, maybe it splits into other worlds, it splits into other universes, it splits, we don't know how. Splits into aliens, we don't know.

That's a lot of we don't know.

Yeah, when it comes down to, comes down to anywhere in science, we don't know. The leading edge, we do not know. And it's largely because science doesn't answer why. We don't know why. Why does an electron have a certain charge on it? We don't know. That's the way it is. Science observes stuff and then tries to make theories to explain it, and sometimes we're really good and we can make stuff out of it, but when it comes down to brass tacks, most of the answers are we really don't know.

And it gets down to the base of the observable universe. You get to like quantum mechanics and quantum theory and particles being connected, spooky action at a distance. You get to the weird stuff about quantum, the quantum world, and particles being in superposition, moving and still at the same time, being connected over vast distances. Like, what? That's magic. Like, whatever the hell that is, that doesn't seem to follow any of the rules of reality that we, like, average people exist in.

Yeah, but our average experience is provincial. It's human-centric. At human time scales. And so imagine a few thousand years ago, you'd look up at the dark sky and see a bunch of stars, and a couple of them look kind of fuzzy. Well, you didn't know they were galaxies. Well, you take the James Webb Telescope now, and the estimate is at least 3,000 galaxies in the observable universe. So imagine how your cosmology changes between those two. In one case, you're the center of the universe, and there's some smudgy stars, a few of them, 5 of them about. Now, we know we are in the middle of nowhere in some gigantic universe with basically no understanding of the rest of it. Cosmology is changing day by day. So I gave a talk on this recently about how every time a new instrument extends our senses, whole new realms of reality open up that weren't even imagined. Before. So the reason why I'm continuing to be so interested in what is the nature of consciousness, what is the frontier, is because without consciousness, we wouldn't know anything. Quite literally, we wouldn't be aware of anything. So in some respects, we are creating all of this.

And so something seems weird because we don't have the senses yet to be able to actually experience it directly.

God, it's such a fascinating subject. And the concept of consciousness interacting with things.

Less than— yes, interacting, but more so that everything is built of it. It's like it's part of it. Right. It's not just experiencing it. It is it, in a sense. It is it. Yeah. If you go all the way to full-blown Idealism, which is the philosophy that everything is consciousness, everything. The physical world emerges out of consciousness. That's idealism. It turns out that almost all of the founders of quantum mechanics were idealists, which is pretty odd when you think about it. Yeah. The most successful physical theory developed so far were people who are idealists who felt that everything ultimately was consciousness. Not only that, most of them were also mystics. They read very extensively in Eastern philosophy. They knew about mysticism. They were deeply into it, and that still is true for leading physicists today.

Do you think there's ancient truths in all that, all the mystic traditions and all these different things that have existed in religious texts and—

There is truth there that has been distorted by history and language. Yes. And it doesn't help that the— not going to pick on the Catholic Church, but religion in general has said, of course, there's magic. Like everything is magic, supernatural, fill in the blank. But don't pay too much attention to it, which is kind of strange, especially in the spiritual traditions. So I had an opportunity to talk to a famous guru called Sadhguru. And I said, "Okay." So I asked Sadhguru, "I'm a scientist and I'm studying psychic phenomena, but within the yogic tradition and virtually every other spiritual tradition, you're told not to do that. Don't pay attention to these psychic things, they're a deflection." So I said, "Well, am I wasting my time as a scientist? I mean, what do I do then? And also, why do the spiritual traditions say that?" And his answer was, Imagine you're riding in a car and you've never ridden in a car before, and you like the feeling of the air as it's going against your arm. Well, it might rip your arm off if you go near a tree. So the underlying story is you're dealing with something which is so powerful you don't know what you're doing, and it's too powerful, so don't do it.

To which I was thinking, well, you're saying I shouldn't be doing this, but that only makes me want to do it more because we need to figure out what this stuff is, right?

The idea that you should just ignore it is ridiculous.

But that's what the spiritual traditions do. They say ignore it.

Is that so they can maintain control? Well— So they can be the purveyors of knowledge and no one goes outside of that realm and questions the ideology? Some of it is that, yes.

Certainly within Catholicism, Christianity in general, yes, don't do that. It's written into the catechism, like, don't do this magic stuff. Because it's demonic. I mean, that's kind of beaten into your head for a long time.

Where did that come from? Why demonic? Because the potential for it going wrong.

Because it's not within the bounds of the church. That's it. Yep. Everything else is demonic and it will get you. And by the way, there's still a lot of people in our own government and in the military who believe that, and that is one of the reasons why UFOs has been deflected.

Oh, J.D. Vance said he thinks He thinks they're demons.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, so—

I can't wait to ask him about that again.

The same is true for psychic stuff and UFOs, right? This is demonic. People are like, "We shouldn't be doing this." Yeah. So, within spiritual traditions, the other reason given is that the power is seductive and people are too weak. And so, if you gain this power by one means or the other, you're going to use it badly. And that probably is true. That's why, at least within the yogic tradition, if you're going through the path where you're eventually going to gain the siddhis, you spend probably the first 3 to 5 years not doing that. You learn how to get your ego in check. And so that turns out to be an extremely important aspect of the yogic training. And the yoga, by the way, has very little or nothing to do with the whole stretching and the maneuvers. All of that, all of the things that we think of as yoga in the West are designed to get you strong enough so you can sit in a lotus position for 8 hours, because that's where the action starts in meditation. It's not the physical side.

It is a reality of the human condition that if you give people that kind of power and that kind of influence over others, a large percentage will abuse it or at least use it for their own personal gain, control people and to set themselves up as being godlike or—

So here's what I told Sadhguru. So one of the projects, because of our interest in this Sai genes thing, it's going to be a very complicated series of genes and probably intron sequence and so on. But nevertheless, we have the tools, we can do it if we had enough money. Setting aside issue about ethics, about whether or not it's a good thing to do, 7 years ago, a couple of colleagues and I formed a company called Cognigenics to see if we could use genetic engineering methods to do something like that. Could we significantly enhance perception and cognition and memory and all of that stuff so that you don't need to be a monk going into a cave for 30 years, but you can take a genetic edit and kind of get there quickly. So again, setting aside for a moment the ethics and the power seduction and all that, is it possible? And we now think it's possible because we've developed an intranasal delivery method for RNA interference. You shove it up the nose, you snort it up the nose, it gets into the brain, and it downregulates certain receptors.

Is it a one-time treatment?

It's a multi-time treatment because it's RNA. So our RNA will last for a while, and then months later you'd have to re-up it. You can do it as a one-time.

So you could literally blast something up your nose and it'll affect your ability to do this stuff?

In principle, for psychic things. But we see that that's far in the future. What we're doing now as a company is addressing dementia. So we're looking for ways of how do you— How do you fix memory loss, especially short-term memory loss? It is related to certain receptors. Turns out to be the same receptors as in psilocybin, 5-HT2A.

We can downregulate them. You saw that study or that article recently about a woman who was— I believe she had dementia, but she couldn't speak anymore. She took 5 grams of psilocybin mushrooms and all of a sudden she could talk. Yeah.

This is doing that without the hallucinations and much, much longer. Psilocybin will get in and out of your body pretty quickly. The RNA interference will take— will come up and then stay for about a, we think, a couple of months and then slowly begin to decline. And so you would need to take this treatment, this intranasal treatment, probably every 2 or 3 months. And we don't know about the dosing yet. We've done studies with mice and rats and now with monkeys, so we know it works in a primate brain. The next couple of steps—

When they do the studies with monkeys, what happens? Well, they—

there are two things that you look at. Well, first of all, you want to make sure that it actually gets into the brain. So you do a radioactive tag on the compound itself and then use a PET scan, positron emission tomography, And you can then see, does it actually get out of the nose and go into the brain? The answer is yes. We can track where in the brain it's going. We mainly want it to get down to the limbic system because that's, that's where the hippocampus is and where memory is encoded. And we know from our studies with mice and rats, you get 100% improvement in memory in mice and rats that are either aged or normal. So normal mouse will get 100% improvement in memory. Exactly at the same time, they'll get an almost 100% reduction in anxiety. So as you think about a treatment for dementia, dementia patients get very anxious, so you want to calm them down and improve their memory. This does both in one shot. Wow.

Yep. And what does it do to regular people with no ailments? We don't know yet.

No one's tried? Well, we don't have permission from the FDA to do clinical trials yet. Wink wink. If you ask the people—

Someone must have done it.

No, we haven't tried it yet.

Not a single person has said, "Shoot it up my nose"? That would admit it, no. Oh, that would admit it. Yeah. That's my point.

Yeah, so it actually has pretty much the same effect as psilocybin, but it is only doing this one receptor because when you take psilocybin, there's all kinds of things going on, which is one of the reasons you get hallucinogenics. So we wanted to do this for people who probably wouldn't take a hallucinogen. It would probably come on faster and it would last a lot longer. And for some cases, like if somebody was terminal and they're losing their memory, you can make this a permanent edit as well.

I wonder what would happen if you combined the two. Which two? The RNA and psilocybin.

Well, once we get this approved, we'll have you do it and see what happens.

Yeah, let's find out. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, yeah.

I'll come back and quit the podcast immediately. Like, I've got other things to do.

Yeah. No, this would only last for a while. I mean, we're specifically making it temporary because if somebody had a bad trip on it, essentially, It'll eventually go away, and so it's not a big deal.

But if you continue to do it, like brushing your teeth.

Yeah. Well, so one of our concerns is that because this is going to improve memory, if a normal person who doesn't have dementia, would it be something that kids are gonna try to just snort all the time? So it's like Ritalin. That would not be good. So this would almost—

Or would it be awesome?

Let's put it this way, it probably will not ever be OTC. You're not gonna be able to buy this at the drugstore.

You'll have to be prescribed.

You have to be prescribed.

You have to find a dirty doctor in Tijuana.

You also, you will need, you need a special kind of delivery system. So when you think of a nose spray, it's atomizing the stuff. It gets down in the lower nose. In order to get it into the brain, you need to shoot a stream all the way up to the back. It's like the cleft right up here, and just beyond that is a bone that separates it from the brain. Our compound gets through that bone. Whoa. So, and it has all to do with how big is the compound. Right. So similar to like if you snort cocaine, it'll get in there. It gets in your brain because it's a certain size.

But you can imagine if this just becomes a performance-enhancing substance. That normal people take, you know?

That could very likely happen. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So, I mean, we're being very careful at this point. We have people on board who are ethicists to say, because we're talking about enhancing human performance and human cognition and perception, can we enhance it all the way out into extrasensory perception, ESP, meaning psychic stuff? We don't know. But as I said, once we find what the polygenic trait is.

This is the story of the lady who did the mushrooms. Yeah, so case study published in Frontiers in Neuroscience, researchers focused on an 80-year-old Japanese-American woman with Alzheimer's. Her condition had declined over the last decade, was reduced to urinary incontinence, speaking in single syllables, and dependence on caregivers for mobility and support. She was then given a 5-gram dose of magic mushrooms. During the initial phase, she was agitated, sweated profusely, and entered a prolonged sleep state that suggested unconsciousness, but around hour 19, she began speaking in full sentences, recalling life events she had been unable to articulate for years. In the days and weeks that followed, more incredible changes emerged. She regained urinary continence, even in the evenings, began dressing herself. She was able to make and maintain eye contact, remember social interactions, emotionally respond to others, and hold lucid conversations. Right. And that's one dose. Yeah.

So what happens when you take psilocybin, the first effect is that it is a 5-HT2A agonist. It means that it's souping up that particular receptor, but the brain notices that and then it downregulates.

You see what it says here, a subsequent 3-gram dose of psilocybin was given to the patient and was followed by increased verbal expression, humor, and greater walking agility. Miraculously— miraculous as the mushrooms may seem, the study authors note that the patient's improvements were temporary and psilocybin did not reverse the disease as her neurodegeneration remained. They did not specifically— they did not specify exactly how long the improvements lasted. However, the researchers— the research does demonstrate that some function believed to be irrevocably lost to late-stage dementia may not be gone but merely inaccessible. And that a mushroom trip has the potential to recover it, albeit briefly, but it sounds like this would be even better at that.

Well, this has the hallucinatory part in the beginning. The reason why we think this works and the reason why we're doing a downregulation of 5-HT2A is because when you take psilocybin, it soups it up. It's an agonist. It makes it more expressed. That's when all the hallucinations and stuff happens. Then the brain compensates and it starts pushing it back down. So it starts suppressing 5-HT2A. We're doing that directly. So we would guess then that if the reason why this happened is because of the reduction of hyperactivity, which is what's involved with neurodegeneration, that it would happen immediately. So you don't need that initial push, that you're starting right from the get-go with the reduction in this 5-HT2A. God, that would be a phenomenal game changer for people that are suffering from this. Yes, and also the same platform that we use to deliver this particular compound can be used with lots of other compounds. So the more that psychiatry learns about neurodegeneration and about memory loss and all that, we can just change the compound and change the receptors. So, yeah, we can do it now. Wow. Yeah, so this now links back into the Institute of Noetic Sciences' PsyGenes project, which launched this thing.

So we're launching it in a very pragmatic way, which could help a lot of people, keeping in mind that we can go into a place where we're beginning to enhance people. That's gonna take a while to get there. And again, we think carefully about is this a good thing or not? Of course.

Why would it be a bad thing?

I think it's a good thing.

What would be the bad part of it when you, you know, try to look at it in worst-case scenario?

What I have in mind is every time a new technology came along, people think this is the best thing ever. Like, I met the guy who developed trans fats, who thought he was going to help a lot of people because then they wouldn't, you know, fat wouldn't be so bad. Turned out to be really bad. Yeah. And so unintended consequences. When we're developing new things. Are there side effects that have been observed? Not yet. It's partially because when you do preclinical work, there's only so many things you can infer about what a mouse or a rat is doing. Right. Now that we're doing monkeys, we do know that there were two monkeys in our test that were very aggressive. They get near them, they'd bare their teeth. They don't want you to deal with them. They took the compound and then they were chill. For 2 days afterwards, having a single dose, those 2 monkeys were no longer aggressive. So that's the anxiolytic effect.

We could fix society.

Yeah. Yeah, it's a nasal spray.

Can you imagine that? Just give it to everybody and everyone just gets along?

Well, I mean, you probably need permission.

Right, but I mean, if you just like told people that this is available and we don't— no longer have to be in conflict with each other. That would be nice. And we might be able to connect with each other on some new realm.

That would be very nice, yes. Yeah. And so—

I mean, it sounds like the pluses way, way outweigh what potential negatives could be.

We would need to figure out first what the unintended consequences are. I like how you think, like a real scientist.

Yes, the brain— I'm thinking like a person's like, let's go, give it a shot.

No, the brain always compensates. Of course. For any kind of drug, it compensates immediately. There's no biological free lunch. No, so it's something would happen and maybe good, it may be bad, we don't know yet.

Right, particularly for people that don't have a problem.

Right. Right. Right, we're targeting people who do have a problem and so far there's no treatment for it. I mean, there's a couple of things that are mostly stimulus, stimulators, and they don't work that well. My dad died of dementia, I saw that happen. So I'm thinking if I can prevent that in anybody else, just to get short-term memory back because he— my dad had 5 degrees, including a law degree, made his living as a graphic artist. So he was very intellectual but had a very pragmatic kind of job. By the time he had advanced dementia, he could no longer watch TV. And I said, "Well, why not?" He couldn't track what was happening in a show. He couldn't listen to audiobooks. I mean, that's not good. What a terrible—

thing for someone who just relies on their mind. Yeah.

So, I rely on my mind. I would take this stuff in a second. I bet you would. If something like that started to happen. So, yeah, I'm thinking ahead. Yeah. So, if we have time, I'd like to explain one other experience that I had, which led me into thinking more about magic.

Can I ask you one more question about this? Sure. If you developed some sort of a compound that gave real psychic ability, like some— something that was just undeniable, you, you could literally communicate with people, and you found out that this is something that you could give people as a supplement or some sort of a medication. Mm-hmm. What would you do with that information? Would you pause?

Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I would pause for the same reason that Sadhguru said this is not a good idea. Because, like I told him, we were doing this research on telepathy, we might be able to make people super telepathic. He said that would be a bad idea. Why? Because we normally think of being telepathic as receiving other people's thoughts, but it's actually a two-way street. You can then inject thoughts and control people. And he said that that would be such a seductive power for most people that unless they had significant training beforehand, you don't want to do that.

Significant training like you were talking about the monks.

Ego out of the way. Yeah, go through meditation. And one of the things, one of the reasons why I'm interested in the noetic sciences in general is that when somebody has an experience, whether it's psilocybin or some other method, oftentimes there's a personality transformation. The personality transformation is like the positive side of PTSD. Like, their mind is blown. They become prosocial, which is the fancy term meaning they suddenly become compassionate. They become more interested in service. They want to help others. They could have been a complete jerk beforehand. Right. Something changes, and it changes in a flash, and it sticks. Well, we probably ought to understand why that happens. What is it about simply getting a larger picture of who and what we are and what the nature of the universe is? That becomes really, really important to understand. So we know it happens, we don't know why it happens.

Well, that's one of the most fascinating aspects of the psychedelic experience is the ego death, right?

Right, yeah. And so, and but again—

So it's also like you would have to have the two of them together. If you had ego death induced by psychedelics along with some sort of supplemental medication that allowed you to achieve like legitimate psychic ability.

Yeah, I see you really want to do this.

I'm fascinated by it. Yeah. I would be weirded out by it for sure. I mean, I don't know how I would function. If I was the only one who had it. I don't think that would be a fun place to be. You would have to be prepared. Yeah, I think it would be a real struggle.

Yeah, I mean, think about in the old days when there were mystery schools, like in ancient Greece and elsewhere. So everybody would get the drug. They'd have this opening. Some people would be opened and more or less stay open, but there was that drug experience that did an ego change. And so you may be right that you need to have some kind of a noetic whatever in order to push the ego down far enough to realize that we are all interconnected. It's all one thing. Right. And so—

Well, I think that idea has to get out there more. And I think it is more now than ever before. It's more of a common discussion. That we're all connected. I feel like over the last few decades, that's much more acceptable to discuss this concept of us being all connected without being dismissed as being a kook. Yep. Yeah. So this, which is part of the whole thing of like, if you don't believe it, if you're completely skeptical, you're blocking it. Right. And then we have to kind of understand that there's real evidence that we are all connected. And this biological being that we live in that is, you know, millions and millions of years of evolution have led us to this position and over the last, you know, 20,000 years, it's filled with barbaric acts and tribalism. Like all this stuff is encoded in us and we have to figure out how to squash that and how to move past it, move into whatever the next stage of the human experience is.

Yeah, we had better do that.

And it better involve ego death. It can't just be the psychic ability, because then you're just going to have manipulative psychopaths that have the ability that other people don't. And of course, all these crazy people that want to control the world, and they're going to be the ones that first have access to it.

Yeah, and I think it's not exactly ego death. It's not a complete— Right. You still need some ego because we're embodied systems.

We need to operate in the world. Yeah, it's a bad term.

It's more like a recognition of, like you teach a kid, you're really, really angry. That doesn't mean you need to act on it. You recognize it. And like mindful meditation, you're learning that you— Control of the ego is a better term. Recognition of it and control.

Yeah. And understanding of it. Having legitimate methods that you use to keep it in check. Right. Yeah. But it's also like, sort of encoding in people the discipline to be able to do that, to— because that's also involved in controlling the ego, right? But having that, and where it seems like we're— if all these things come to pass and this, this technology emerges and this research continues to bear fruit, you're looking at the potential for a completely different way of human beings interacting with each other, right? Completely different paradigm. Like, society moves into a totally different realm, right?

Not everybody are interested in that, right?

So a lot of people are very uninterested in that. Yeah. And they would fuck with their business.

Actively not interested, right? Like, and we don't want that, right? And we don't want you to have it either. Well, that's a fear.

That's a fear that, like, if you had some real breakthroughs that were somehow or another going to be a problem for powers that be. Yeah, that's a problem. Like, when you hear about these scientists that are all involved with the UAP story wind up dead or disappearing. Yeah. And people say, well, this statistically, this can't be a coincidence. This is a little too weird. It's gotten to some weird number where you're going, we have to look at this. Yeah. You know, so you hear the actual White House is now talking about it. Like we have to look into this.

So the way I keep myself safe and our other colleagues, we publish everything we do, right? It's all public domain, so we're not doing anything that's secret. Right. And the long-term consequences most people don't think about at all. So that too, I mean, there are all kinds of technologies that are being developed that may have bad consequences in the future. Not that many people except maybe professional ethicists are thinking about, is this a good thing or not?

Well, just imagine a world where something comes along like— let's, for lack of a better example, let's use GLP-1s, right? GLP-1s— nobody heard about Ozempic and Wegovy just a decade ago, right? Now all of a sudden it's a multi-trillion-dollar industry. It's gigantic. There's something like 39 million Americans are on these GLP-1 drugs. Imagine if something comes along that is beneficial in— I'm sure it's beneficial to obese people, but beneficial in a cognitive way for people. That is, you have real science, real science which actually achieves a result. This result becomes a supplement and it becomes something widely used and spread. Imagine The forms of control that are used by society, that are used by governments, that are used by mass media, that are used by corporations in order to pass whatever regulations they want, when you see politicians talking, when you see the real agenda behind it, all of it would evaporate. All the bullshit, all propaganda would be completely useless. You would enter into a completely new cooperative society where all the parasites and psychopaths and sociopaths would literally be exposed and you'd have to deal with them. You'd probably be terrified to realize how many of them are in control of so many institutions.

Yep. And how much of what you've been told is complete horseshit. How many nonprofits are a scam. How many, how many different things that are happening are just happening in order to maintain control.

That's why you can't do this overnight. Right. Right. So the justice system would be totally different. Politics would be totally, everything would be totally different. Economics, everything. Resources, everything. So there is a TV show kind of with this plot now, the one called Pluribus. Yes. Right, the science fiction show, which I think is doing a great job in illustrating then that people—

But it's a nightmare.

Well, people who are involved in the hive mind, Suddenly everything is fine.

Yeah, I don't like it. I like the lady that gets drunk and yells at everybody.

Well, because, yeah, because it's a nice story. It's also more recognizable. It's human. Yeah, she's us, basically. Yeah, she's us. Yeah, but, and of course there's stories like the Borg in Star Trek, and the way a hive mind is portrayed is horrific. Right. Why? Because it's ego-dropping, that's why.

It also eliminates creativity, individual expression. We don't know that. We don't know. We think of it in the show, In the show, everybody just becomes a worker.

No, in Pluribus—

No, not a worker, but I mean, they're all connected.

They're all like, they have a task. Yeah, that means everybody can have the skill of a surgeon. Everybody, right? So you have a bunch of naturally creative people out there. Well, they all have it now.

Right, that's the glass half full version of it, right? Yeah.

So would we collectively even be more creative? Right.

If instead of asking Perplexity a question, you just ask the universe a question.

You ask the collective.

You ask the collective how to fix a carburetor.

Yeah, and then you know how to do it. Yeah, so that's— so I mean, from a point of view of efficiency and peace and all that stuff, I think it would be great. Well, it's also—

people have to look at it this way. Just what you have now by having a phone and being able to, like I said, just ask Perplexity any question on human history, any question on mathematics, coding, anything. It gives you all the available information instantaneously in your phone, right? If you just said that to someone 30 years ago, they would say you're fucking crazy. You look at all the depictions in science fiction about the future, none of them involve the internet, none of them involve phones, none of them involve devices that you carry around that have 24 hours of fucking battery life. That can essentially do whatever you want, take pictures, make videos, record audio, download movies, watch them instantaneously. You could fucking do anything on these things. Right. And we're just accustomed to it. It's just normal. Imagine a society where this technology that you're developing, imagine this, you continue this research 10, 20, 30 years, what do we have? What— what— what does this look like? What does you and me even talking look like? One of the reasons why I insist on doing these things in person, because I think it's a very different experience.

I just intuitively— it just feels different when someone's in the room. When you're having a conversation with someone in the room, it's— I've had great conversations with people through Zoom, like with Edward Snowden. When we do podcasts, we have to do it that way for obvious reasons. But there's something missing. People— when you and I are talking right now, there's something else going on. We're— our minds are connecting and we're connecting somehow with all the people that are listening. There's this weird thing that happens and it happens when people in proximity to each other, when they're right in the same room with each other. There's something to that.

Right. So now think of the downside, the compensation for having phones everywhere. Oh yeah. So you talk to teachers about it and they are running scared. Sure. Right? Kids don't know how to write anything anymore. No attention span. And not only that, if you start relying on Perplexity or any other kind of AI, you're in serious trouble because those things are not perfect.

Right. Right. They have hallucinations. Yeah. They give you bad information. Right. I'm sure you saw this. There was a gentleman who was recently— he was a lawyer involved in a case and he was citing these— Oh, yeah. You know that story?

Yeah.

So he's citing various cases that just didn't exist. Yep. And he had gotten them from AI.

Yeah. And it probably looks structurally correct, except it wasn't actually real.

He thought he had it. Like, beautiful. I got this case wrapped up. And the judge was like, none of these things you're saying have happened.

They're not true. That's some other world. Bizarre. Right.

Well, hopefully that'll get ironed out. Right. But the point is you're relying now on the device to do all the thinking for you. Yeah. And you're not, you're not absorbing much of that information. You're not absorbing it the same way.

I can say as a scientist that AI is making my job much, much, much easier. So I use Claude Code a lot. We use it also in our genetic research. It is making things more efficient. 'Cause basically for coding up until things like Claude Code, it took a lot of skill and time to be able to write something that did what you wanted to do.

But you're already a disciplined thinker.

You're not a developing mind. Well, not only that, but when I ask AI to help me write something, I immediately see all kinds of things that it doesn't know. I say, "Well, where did you even get that information?" It basically responds, "Well, I scraped it off of the entire internet." Well, you didn't scrape very well because did you look at this and did you look at this and that? And it comes back immediately and says, oh, I apologize. I didn't look at that part because the algorithms are designed to work fast. And so it'll pull like the surface off and usually that's okay. It could be a troll Reddit post where someone's just fucking around. Who knows what it is? Like half of Wikipedia is written by teenagers. So yeah, so you need to already have a knowledge base so that you can challenge what it's telling you because sometimes it's completely off.

Right. Well, this is in the beginning stages of this application, right? If you think about the beginning stages of the printing press, most of the books were like how to spot witches.

Yeah, it's true. So one hopes that things will— well, of course, the danger at this point is the AI is eventually right itself. Right. And it's already getting to that point. And then we completely lose what's going on. We have no idea.

Right. That gets weird.

Yeah. That was already true with the development of neural networks. So I was using neural networks back in the '80s when the idea first came up. And so you would learn that this is related to that, and it would do it through the neural network training. And then you say, well, what did you learn? You couldn't figure it out. Because you have all of these weights and nodes inside the network that were encoding the information, but you couldn't then extract out from it to say, well, how did you learn this? It couldn't even tell you how it learned it, but it did, and it learned it really well. So a lot of that is going on in the AI world too, that it's learning things really, really well, but it's too complex for us to understand.

Right. But do you think if you emphasize disciplined thinking and teach people specifically how to think and how to learn and how to do for themselves, that they could then expand upon that knowledge with AI instead of using it as a crutch?

Yes. Yes. Yes. Is that happening? I haven't seen that yet.

Well, I haven't seen it either, but one of the things that gives me pause is the popularity of long-form conversations like this. Because we have this concept about today and about human beings in general that we're losing our attention span. But yet, what's one of the most popular mediums? It's long-form podcasts. Yeah. Right. Because I think there is still a hunger from a lot of people, and whether it's people that grew up at a different time where they did learn how to think and now they're missing it, and then they could find it in long-form conversations, or whether it's just always going to be something that some people intuitively gravitate towards because they need more stimulation than they're getting from these simple TikTok videos and Instagram Reels. Yeah. I think there's like we have this generalization about the perceptions of people and they go, oh, we've lost all of our ability to concentrate. Like, we don't care. Everyone has a short attention span. I don't think everyone. I think a lot of people because it's easy. If you leave junk food in front of a lot of people, they will eat it. If you leave healthy food in front of disciplined people, they will say, "I don't want the junk food.

I'm going to have the eggs and I'm going to eat healthy. I'm going to take vitamins. I'm going to do what I'm supposed to do because I know the benefits of it because I'm a thinking person." Right.

You may still want the junk food, right? But you're able to override it.

Yes. You live with disciplined thinking, right? So I think maybe education will move into a realm of being able to understand your own personal psychology, being able to understand the value of discipline and the value of having a structure to the way you think and being able to apply those things and then also recognizing that whatever this AI is doing, it's just giving you information. It doesn't make you smarter. It's not giving you more knowledge. It's just giving you data and you have to then learn how to assimilate that data in an actionable way where you could use it in life. Right. And we could teach people how to do that maybe. I hope so. Yeah. I mean, it seems possible. But again, it's like every single technology that comes around. When television came around, people were terrified that people were just going to stare at the TV all day. And a lot of them did.

They do. Yeah.

A lot of them did. But also television, which led to the internet. Well, yeah, it's definitely distracting people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But also we have more access to information, more of an understanding of so many different things than ever before. And you have the ability to have a conversation like this. Right. A 3-hour weird conversation about a very esoteric subject.

It's not that weird.

No, I mean, it's not weird. It's cool. It's— yeah, it's different. It's exciting. I mean, for the people that are interested in this kind of conversation, this is like food for them. Yeah. Like, oh, exciting. You know, I guarantee you a bunch of people will see this and see the description of it in Spotify and go, ooh, it's gonna be a good one. You know, because there's a lot of people that have a hunger for interesting things. You know, I'm not a dooms guy. When it comes to technology. I have a feeling we're going to sort it out, but I think it's going to be a— it's going to be a bit of a battle, a bit of a struggle. It's going to— it's a new thing and you're going to— exceptional people are always going to exist and there's always going to be people that aren't going to be willing to just give in to whatever this thing is that gives them this crutch and just become a blob that just presses buttons to get information instead of thinking. I think people are always going to want to think. It's part of what's fascinating about being a person is learning new things, expanding your understanding of things, and just pretending you do is a— it's a party trick, but the real people that— the real fascination is actually learning something that changes your perceptions.

I think people are always going to want that.

Well, I'm optimistic because humanity, at least our species, is extremely resilient. Yes. So all of us have some percentage of mutations, which is part of the resilience. I forget exactly, 11% or something like that. Every single person, even identical twins. That's why we can survive an asteroid hit, or that's why we can survive a mistake that happens somewhere. Yeah. So ultimately, I'm optimistic about it.

I am too, but I mean, I look back at things like I mean, there's been moments in society, like you look at the pyramids, you go, "Okay, what happened? Where are those folks?" They took off.

Yeah. I don't know.

What do you think happened?

An asteroid or I don't know. I mean, it could have been the Ice Age, right? We still don't know exactly how old the pyramids are. So it may have been the Ice Age and now they all moved to Africa and they're Africans.

Yeah, something, something definitely happened, some strange shift. And that's the, the question is how many times has that happened over the course of human civilization? We want to think of it as been this linear progression from caveman to where we are now. It doesn't seem to be accurate.

No, I don't think so.

But there's a lot of people along with the same type of people that want to resist the idea, even if you have data, they don't want to look at it because they think it's nonsense. There's a, there's also a perception of that, like there's no way. People were more advanced 5,000, 10,000, 15,000 years ago than they are now. That's not possible. Like, well, it kind of is. Yeah. Kind of. It's not impossible, that's for sure. And there seems to be some very weird evidence in the form of 2,300,000 perfectly cut stones that point to true north, south, east, and west that were put in place by the civilization that just emerged out of nowhere with this ability. Kind of weird. That's kind of weird too, to pretend it's not and just write it off to, oh, people were smart. Like, yeah, yeah, that's it. That's it. Seems like they knew some shit we don't know. They did something we can't explain to this day. Yep. Like, I don't know if I would be so confident as to be able to say that there's a linear progression from caveman to us. I don't think That's true.

No, hardly anything in the natural world is linear.

Which just scares me if we fuck it all up right now and we have a nuclear war and there's only like 50,000 people left. Like, how long before we get to this position where we're trying to almost get past this again?

Yeah, it's like it's rough adolescence. Yeah. And so it's true. How long do you need to take? Do you need 100,000 years of a high-technology society, maybe. But where are we? Well, like 20 years, 50 years. Yeah, into it. And yeah, we're having a problem.

Well, that's where things get really weird when people start talking about UAPs and these— whatever these beings are, if they are real. Like, are they us? Are they us from the future that is coming back to make sure that we don't fuck it up and to sort of hold our hand through this experiment and just watch and observe on the outside in case things go horribly wrong, but allow all these mistakes to take place and allow this progression to take place and just wait it out.

I'm a fan of Hal Puthoff's ultra-terrestrial idea that these are not from the future, they're from the past. They just happen to be way more advanced than we thought. The past? Yeah. Like how far in the past? A million years? More? 100,000? Something like that. It's because you think about convergent evolution. So when I was at UNLV, one of the places nearby was an ornithology laboratory, so birds. So I went to the museum and I said, "Oh, these are very nice penguins here." And the director said, "Those aren't penguins." Well, what is that? It looks exactly like a penguin. "No, those are auks." So there's different birds from the North Pole and the South Pole because of convergent evolution were shaped to be like this bird. And so, I mean, they looked absolutely identical to me 'cause I don't know that much about penguins anyway, but I said, "Well, it looks like a penguin." It's not a penguin. It's not— But they evolved independently in the North and South Pole? And so why is it that the aliens that we— That's not a penguin? Probably an auk. That's crazy. I know, it's crazy.

That's crazy. Yeah.

So we had one of those and had actually a penguin next to each other in the museum. And I thought, well, that's, you know, what is that? Wow. So a lot of these aliens that people talk about are basically like humans.

Augs can fly and swim, and they're smaller. Yeah. Wow. But they're so similar.

Even the color. Yeah, the color, the shape.

The color is crazy. Like, what is the benefit of the—

the whole thing is very odd. So why do we have so-called Nordic aliens that look a lot like people in Scandinavia, right? But that would— I mean, you think either come from a planet that is almost exactly Earth-like which is possible, I guess, or they've already been here. They've been here a long, long time. And the same for many of the other aliens that people talk about. It's, they're humanoid. Well, humanoid is shaped by evolution to be in a certain place. 'Cause like, we're so well shaped by evolution that we can go outside on an average place, and even though there's only a couple of miles of atmosphere, We're perfectly fine.

Are you aware of those examples of very bizarre heads that they found, skulls they found in places like Peru that don't have the sagittal suture, that have a brain capacity that's 30% larger than ours? There's some weird skeletons.

Yeah, so Gary Nolan talked about this, I think.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And there's real examples of it. These aren't theoretical. Find these skulls that have a larger brain capacity. And, you know, they've attributed to a real practice of flattening heads, shaping skulls. That's a real practice. But the question has become, was— did that real practice emerge to mimic a type of creature that was already— that already existed? Yep. Because these skulls— see if you can find one of them, Jamie. They're very weird looking. Like, they're very weird. They're big. They're bigger than a normal human skull. They have more brain capacity, and it's an elongated shape. It's a different shape. This is not like a science fiction theory. This is not like an artist's rendition. This is an actual real skull that doesn't have the sagittal suture. No, no, that's the alien things. These are— that's, uh, that's those, uh those monsterot. That's that thing that a lot of people think is a fraud.

That's the skulls they were talking about, no?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, but there's actually elongated skulls that they found. Elongated skull— just don't pull in tridactyl mummy. Um, just put in, uh, elongated skull, no sagittal suture. There you go. Like that. That one right there. Like, what the fuck is that? That does not look like a person. That is a real skull. Yeah.

So some of that is shaping. Sure.

Right. Some of it. Some of these are. But the ones without the sagittal suture are really weird. Yeah. Because that's a thing that all human babies have. Because as your brain grows and your head grows, you're, you know, your, your brain, your skull is kind of malleable. That doesn't have it. And some of these that they found actually have more brain capacity. So the shaping of it wouldn't change the brain capacity. So some of them do have that sagittal crest, that sagittal suture. Um, some of them don't. And that one that you showed up there, I hope that's not AI. That one doesn't. I think that's real.

It could just be hard to see. Could be.

Could be, but it's been described by people who have examined them. As being different. There's also the positioning of where it connects with the spine is different. Oh, Sarah, that goes right there, uh, where the spinal column enters the bottom of the skull is very much further back than normal. A genetic adaptation or a different kind of person. Yeah, a different kind of person that coexisted. Like, look at that one right there, Jamie, that you have your cursor on. Click on that. That's crazy. Like, that is really crazy. That's a replica. Wild looking, but that's a replica. So what's the real one? The real one is the one that you showed that has Instagram on it. That's a real one. Like, that is kind of bananas. Yeah. And if that's not done through forming of the skull and pushing the skull into the new shape, what is it? And were they doing that because they were trying to mimic something that was superior to them? And that's where it gets weird. Like, that— those real elongated skulls, Inca Museum up there, right above your cursor. Yeah, to the left, right there. That's crazy looking, man.

That's really crazy looking. And again, that one doesn't seem to have that sagittal suture. Neither does that one down there that says 118. They're fucking strange. So if that was an actual different kind of human being that existed along with us, God, that explains a lot.

Well, they're not here anymore. —right— unless they're ultra-terrestrials and they're living in the bottom of the ocean. Right.

I don't know about that, but if they are, if that's them, who knows? I mean, you could get to a point where a civilization becomes so advanced that the biological entities aren't necessary anymore, and then that would explain why they could exist at the bottom of the ocean, why they could exist with no oxygen, why they could— they no longer become dependent upon their environment to survive. They might have creative environments, right?

Like the movie— there was a movie, I forget the name now.

What was the premise?

It was that there's a ship and there's like a missing submarine, and so they dive down to it, but then they see lights coming up.

Oh, The Abyss? Yes. Yeah, that was a great movie. Yeah, that was a good one. Yeah. Well, there's always been stories about— I mean, Tim Burchett, the congressman, came on this podcast and was talking about how there's 5 different locations in the deep ocean that they're aware of activity, that things have happened there. They continue to happen. But if you were going to study Earth, if you had to be like local, like where would you go? I mean, if you can come here from another dimension or another galaxy, or wherever you're coming from, you'd probably go in the ocean. You'd have— I mean, they've observed these transmedium crafts. They're able to fly and go into the water. Isn't that ork, that ork thing? Isn't that kind of transmedium? It flies, swims.

Yeah. It could be an alien. It's an alien form of a penguin.

But it just, at a certain point in time, you would imagine if we could get far more advanced than we are now and we found out about a society that is at a stage where we are currently, for sure we'd go visit. For sure we would observe. And we would also probably try to stop nuclear war.

It is an interesting question because the prime directive in Star Trek is you don't mess with them. Right. Right? But they always do. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, Star Trek is— they didn't even have the internet. They had walkie-talkies. Kirk out.

Remember that thing? No, they had the communicator thing. So we don't know.

Oh, you're talking about The Next Generation.

Yeah, we don't know how that worked. Yeah, I'm talking about the original. Yeah, no, the original is pretty good though.

Really good. Yeah. Especially when you think about it was like the 19—

what, '60s when it came out? Yep. Yeah. Yeah. So part of my personal mission was to make Star Trek real. That's like it's— Including beaming people up? Oh no, it's like the Vulcan, the most rational creature on there was the one who could do the mind meld. Yes. That's why I was thinking, yeah, okay. An advanced species, this stuff is taken for granted. Right. That's where my vision is seeing. Yeah, and so that advanced species may be us, might need a little evolutionary push with genetics, but yeah, we could do that too.

So in this concept of the ultra-terrestrial, that these things have come from the past, like how are they here? They've always been here. They've always been here. Yeah. So they just exist. But they exist in a different way?

Well, so imagine even given current technology if there was another ice age coming, and we may have 1,000 years to prepare. Would we be smart enough to do that? I don't know. Could we do it? Yes, we probably could. Boy. Yeah, and then so another 1,000 years passes and you're below ground somewhere, and then there are the cavemen who are beginning, well, Do we interact with them or not? Well, it's an interesting question.

Like, we don't want to get involved in all that mess because we sort of like how we don't visit North Sentinel Island, maybe, you know, with those people that live, the uncontacted tribe. Yeah, yeah, it's like you're literally not allowed to go there.

Let them develop the way they shall develop. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, I can, I can I could accept that. Well, there's—

if it turns out that there is some activity, that there are some things that we can't explain that are happening from deep in the ocean, we're going to have to come up with some sort of an explanation. If that is an actual intelligent species, intelligent life form, something, whatever it is, there's got to be some explanation for that. So The ultra-terrestrial one is just as good.

Yeah, there's an explanation for everything. The question is, A, are we smart enough to figure it out? And B, how long will it take? And both of those are complete unknowns. But that's, I mean, that's yet another reason why I like the kind of work that I do, that you need to have very high tolerance for ambiguity, of which I do. Like, I'm okay with not knowing. A lot of— basically everything. I know enough to be able to be dangerous, but otherwise, I don't mind that I don't know.

Well, I'm very thankful that people like you are out there, because if you weren't out there doing this work and you weren't out there expanding on this— I mean, it's really fascinating when— if something like this does emerge, it would change the human race. And think about the small amount of people that are involved in this research. Tiny. It's kind of crazy. It's a huge responsibility you have in a lot of ways.

Well, fortunately, I also enjoy it. So I mean, I'm having fun while I'm doing this because otherwise I think I would have chosen some other door. I mean, I had plenty of opportunities to work with golden handcuffs somewhere, but I get bored easily. And this is the one area where I have never gotten bored.

Well, I'm very thankful. Thank you for being here too, and tell everybody where they can get— did you do an audio version of this book?

I have an actor do it because I don't want anybody to have to suffer with 12 hours of my voice because it won't last that long. Yeah, so there's an actor that does it who's very, very good. And so yeah, this is— there's one other story I want to say that's in the book. So this is a synchronicity which again gave me the idea that we don't know the limits of what we're dealing with, which is important. So I had mentioned that after Interval we started a nonprofit. This was called Boundary Institute. It was in Silicon Valley. We found an office park in Los Altos, which is just outside of Silicon Valley. And so we found a space, we liked it, we decided to get that.. So that's where our new place would be. So I was close enough to where I lived, so I was able to walk to work. I always walked a certain way. One day I decided to walk a different way. And I go past another office called PsiQuest Inc. P-S-I-Quest Inc. And I thought, that's an interesting coincidence because we're doing psi research and now we have PsiQuest Inc.

We thought it was Personnel Services Incorporated. Something. We didn't know what it was. We thought that was funny. About 3 weeks go by and I decide to walk a different way to work. I'm going through this office place different ways. And I notice that right next to our office is something with a tiny little sign that says SciQuest Labs. And so now we're thinking, what does a personnel services thing need with a laboratory? So I look through the mini blinds, there's nobody in there. So now I'm determined to find out what are you guys doing? So every day over the next couple of weeks, I go past that place and knock on the door and I'm looking through the blinds, there's nobody there. Finally, one day I see somebody in there, knock on the door and I'm gonna say, hello, my name is. The door opens, the guy's jaw drops before I could say my name and he says, Dean Radin? And then now I'm thinking, well, I have never seen you before. I don't know who you are. How do you know who I am? So he says his name. And I said, well, what are you doing here?

I'm doing what you're doing. What do you think we're doing? Cybersearch, parapsychology, like what you're doing. So I had to sit down at that point because we knew everybody in the world who's doing this. There's only like 40 of us. Around the world in maybe 5 or 6 different locations. Here is a psi research laboratory in Silicon Valley that no one has ever heard about before. And so I said, "Well, how did you know who I was?" Even if you knew, you know, we had nothing on our door that said it was psi research. It said Boundary Institute. He said, "I was looking to contact you because I want you to be on my board of directors, but I didn't know where you were." I didn't know how to contact you. So I opened the door and there I am. So I said, well, what were you doing? He was doing an exercise called yoga nidra, which is the yoga of sleep. But there's a magical element to it as well. So over a course of 24 hours, for 3 hours he was awake, 3 hours he sleeps, back and forth over the course of 24 hours.

While awake, he's picturing that I show up. And so I opened the door, and that's why his jaw dropped, because at that point he was awake, he was walking around, but I showed up, and he was trying to make me show up. So in a sense, he manifested me. Now, I think I have free will. Like, we, you know, we freely chose that office next door. I freely went to the door. I freely did everything. But apparently it was being pulled by him. So, well, that was strange. And so I said, "Well, so how are you doing this? What are you doing?" And so he gave me a tour of his laboratory. That's when my jaw dropped because what I had been doing adjacent wall next to his without knowing what's going over there on a whiteboard, I was drawing a special kind of chair that we wanted and a special shielded room and equipment and everything on the whiteboard. That's what he had. The other side of that wall is what he had in his laboratory. Whoa. Yeah. So it's like a 4-part synchronicity where I was drawing to me what I wanted. I didn't know it was the other side of the wall, but I was drawing it into existence.

He was at the same time drawing me. So we had the same intentions, draw each other essentially, and we literally got pulled into the same location at the same time. That's incredible. Yeah. So it was so incredible that I told the other guys in our institute, and in a sense, they understood what was happening because they saw the same laboratory and stuff. After a while, we never talked about it again. I mean, it was so bizarre and so magical in a sense that we all thought we were doing things of our own free will, but Apparently not. So I started looking into Yoga Nidra, the magical side of it. It's all about intention. It's focused intention in a non-ordinary state. And it is, it is literally a magical practice out of the yogic tradition. So yet another reason why I'm writing about the science of magic, the real magic, and showing how a lot of the science that we know now actually overlaps. Wow. It's just— it's not at the level of what you would get in Harry Potter, but nevertheless, a lot of it is real.

Thank you for telling that story. That's awesome. Thank you for being here, too. This is really exciting. I really enjoyed it very much. Good. Thank you. So the book, The Science of Magic— Yep. —available everywhere. Thank you. Yep. Is this for me? Yep. Oh, I got a copy. All right. Thank you very much. This is really, really, really fun. Thank you. Uh, let's do it again. I'm excited to hear where you go with this stuff. Okay.

All right, maybe next time I'll bring that nose spray.

Let's do it. Bring it. All right, thank you. Bye, everybody.