#2513 - Dean Radin

[00:00] Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day! [00:12] Thanks for being here. Good to be here. I'm excited to talk to you. [00:16] Did you maybe manifest this conversation somehow? Maybe. [00:23] I've seen a bunch of your talks online. [00:28] Let's start from the beginning. What is your background? [00:31] Thank you. [00:32] I thought I'd give you a 40... [00:35] 45-year [00:36] arc in about three minutes. Perfect. Because then there's a lot of places you can get into it.

So I started out as a musician... [00:44] violin [00:46] up until about halfway through college. And then I realized to be a musician means you have to be an athlete. [00:53] because you're making your living with your body. No one told me that. [00:57] up through until I finally decided I don't think I want to make my living with my body. [01:02] because they've never been very strong. And more importantly, you also need to have a lot of stamina. [01:07] And I didn't have that. And you weren't interested in gaining it?

[01:10] Thank you. [01:10] I couldn't. I have a genetic mutation that creates... Like most people, when they exercise, you feel really good afterwards. [01:20] I feel really exhausted. [01:22] And I never understood why until many years later I realized that I have something called Gilbert syndrome syndrome. [01:28] which is a mutation of a liver enzyme, and you have no recovery time. [01:34] whoa yeah [01:35] So is there anything they can do for that? [01:38] Other than something like genetic engineering, which I've never heard anybody try yet, [01:43] The answer is no.

I've never heard of that condition before, I don't think. Yeah. [01:47] There's some missing enzymes, and more importantly, the bilirubin. [01:51] which is unconjugated bilirubin. [01:54] You have way too much of it. So there's an upside and a downside. The downside is that you can't recover from exercise quickly, and so there's a lot of fatigue there. [02:03] The upside is that unconjugated bilirubin is an antioxidant. [02:09] It's one of the most natural [02:12] antioxidant. So my cardiovascular system is like a 20-year-old. [02:16] Oh. Oh. [02:18] So you got your pros and your cons with this.

Yeah. Have you ever tried exercising in very small doses? [02:25] Like throughout the day? Well, I walk every day. So that's my primary exercise. That's always great exercise. If I walk... [02:33] too fast, too hard, [02:35] I will feel it for the next three or four days. [02:39] So too fast, too hard, too long? Yeah. So what if you do like two push-ups and then just do two push-ups like four hours later and then two push-ups like four hours later? Yeah, I can do that. Yeah. I can do seven push-ups.

[02:53] 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. [03:06] Yeah. [03:07] You know, it sounds like there's a pro. The cardiovascular benefit's pretty sweet. Yeah. [03:12] So when you get to a certain age, your doctor says, let's take a... [03:16] cardiac [03:17] calcium scan [03:19] to see what your artery is doing. And the range is from zero, so they don't see anything in there, up to 100 where you're basically about to die.

[03:28] So my doctor said, "Just do that because your cholesterol is way too high." [03:35] And I have zero. [03:37] Oh, wow. [03:38] and say, well, how could you have zero? Because I'm 74, and I'm not going to have zero. [03:42] I should not be zero, but I do, and it's because of this. You look really good for 74. Thank you. [03:47] You do. You look like maybe 15, 20 years younger than you're supposed to look. [03:53] Yeah. [03:53] So that's the other advantage of this particular mutation is longevity. [03:58] Damn, son.

[03:59] Well, that's good. There's a positive to it. So violinists, can I ask you this? Totally unrelated. What is the difference between a violin and a fiddle? [04:09] Well, a violin is a career track towards concert violinists. [04:13] So it's classical music. So it's how you play it? [04:16] It's partially how you play it. [04:18] but it's mostly about the nature of the music that you're playing. [04:22] So is it just how it's referred in different cultures? [04:25] In southern music, it would be a fiddle. It's also style. [04:29] It's style and it's also the intonation.

Like if you did like I did, I transitioned from classical violin when I knew I wasn't going to do that as a career. [04:40] into bluegrass fiddle and banjo. So actually ended up playing 25 years, the last five years being bluegrass. And so there, [04:49] I actually had to learn not to play [04:51] that well. [04:53] It sounds better for bluegrass if you're a little bit off tune and you're not holding it right. Authentic. Yes. Scratchy. Yes. Something to it. So, in fact, in graduate school... [05:06] I was in the competition for the Illinois State University [05:10] Fiddler Contest.

[05:11] And so I was... [05:13] probably 25 or something at the time. And Alison Krauss [05:17] was like a teenager, and she was in the same competition, and I lost miserably. [05:23] And she was incredible even at that time. Who is she? Alison Krauss. I don't know who she is. [05:30] Sorry. [05:31] She is a... Do you know who she is, Jimmy? Yeah. [05:33] Yeah, she's very, very well known, somewhere between country, [05:38] 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 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 [05:52] Well...

[05:54] The Devil Went Down to Georgia was the first time America really understood popular culture. The fiddle got introduced. Is that fair to say? Yeah. [06:03] For a lot of people, that song... [06:06] The Charlie Daniels Jr. song. Right. That's... [06:09] That's the fiddle. [06:10] Is that good? Well, yeah, it was pretty good. It's a little bit like fiddle on steroids. [06:16] But, yeah. [06:17] But I mean like as a fiddler, do you hear that or is it like only for the unwashed masses to think that's good? No, no, no.

It's good fiddling, yeah. Yeah, it's fiddling around. [06:27] It's a beautiful instrument. [06:28] Sorry for the sidetrack. 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. [06:39] where I could use my mind instead of my body. [06:41] So I switched into electrical engineering. [06:44] Why? Because I like to take stuff apart and I used to make things in high school. [06:49] uh, [06:50] 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...

[06:56] And then I didn't want to be an electrical engineer anymore, so I got a D. in experimental psychology. [07:02] And so it sounds like flipping back and forth between lots of different things, and it kind of is. [07:08] But you'll see that my career is a little bit like a game show. [07:12] and that he presented with this is what you could do [07:16] like forever. [07:17] Or you can choose door number two. [07:20] And I almost always chose door number two. [07:22] Because I would do this for a while and say, I sort of understand that now.

I want to do something different. [07:28] Door number two. [07:29] So, as a senior... [07:32] In college, I learned about this place called the Institute of Noetic Sciences. [07:37] which was started by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who was the sixth man on the moon. [07:43] And on the way back to the earth, he had a mystical experience. [07:47] 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.

[07:58] It expresses itself in different ways. [08:00] So people generally will turn from whatever they were. [08:04] It's a transformative experience, and they become different. [08:07] And so... [08:09] In his way of expressing that, after the mystical experience and thinking, what in the world is that? [08:14] because he felt one with the universe literally [08:17] He decided to create this institute. [08:19] They would study... [08:21] what he had been studying for outer space, but for inner space. [08:25] to explore inner space. [08:27] So I remember in college reading about this new institute, and their motto was, [08:31] uh [08:32] the exploring the frontiers of consciousness.

[08:36] And I thought, [08:37] That sounds like something I want to do. [08:41] there wasn't any place to do that other than this one institute. So I always had in the back of my mind... [08:47] That's where I want to end up. What is that term, noetic? I know I've heard it before, but I never looked it up. Noetic. [08:54] So, noetic... [08:55] is [08:56] a feeling of intuition except that it carries a sense of certainty [09:01] that the intuition is correct. [09:03] So intuition is knowing something without knowing how you know it.

[09:06] just sort of arrives. [09:09] But it's knowing with certainty. And more often than not, the certainty is correct. [09:14] So people talk about downloads in meditation and other places. That's what that is. [09:20] This episode of the Joe Rogan Experience is brought to you by Paramount+. UFC history is going down at the White House. It's the world's greatest fights on America's biggest stage. Watch UFC Freedom 250 at the White House live today only on Paramount+. [09:39] This episode is brought to you by the Farmer's Dog. Here's a fun fact.

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If you're into fire, flavor, and doing things right, check out Traeger Grills. [11:39] This is a subject that up until I would say last couple decades was pretty openly dismissed by rational people. [11:49] There's almost like a desire to dismiss it, like a desire to define the world in much clearer terms. [11:59] 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, [12:07] deal with it. And all this mystical woo-woo magic bullshit.

[12:11] 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. [12:34] 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.

[12:44] There might be some weirdness to it all, and it seems like we all agree. [12:48] 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. [13:00] There's some weirdness in the world, like knowing not to do something and then something happens. [13:05] There's some weirdness in knowing something's going to happen and you ignore that feeling. And then something terrible happens.

You're like, fuck, I knew I shouldn't have gone there. [13:14] There's weirdness in the world. [13:16] And it's not necessarily just pattern recognition and understanding – [13:22] 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 you when you know someone's mad at you and they don't say anything like what is this fucking weird energy I'm getting off this guy there's some stuff where we're experiencing in the world that you can't put on a scale you can't put a tape measure to it you know you can't [13:45] You can't measure its density, but it's there.

[13:48] 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. [13:57] 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. [14:03] So that's what attracted me to the rest of my career. [14:08] Because exactly for the same reason you just said, that people have experiences, oftentimes they feel pretty strange... [14:14] And so they start looking for, well, what is that? So if you go to a conventional science spokesperson...

[14:22] they will echo back exactly what you're saying. It's coincidence. It's frailty of memory, all of that stuff. [14:28] But I learned early on, even in college, that there is a branch of science... [14:34] that has studied. [14:35] these things. [14:36] 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... [14:45] subjective experiences and figuring out is that [14:48] a coincidence or is that, what is that? Is it real? [14:52] That attracted me.

[14:54] Thank you. [14:54] So, and it partially came out of reading a lot of science fiction. [14:58] Your 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. [15:08] Yeah. Classically. The force in... [15:11] in Dune, the series, Frank Herbert's Dune series, the whole thing about spice. [15:15] Why did they have to take spice? Because that's the only way you can navigate when you're jumping through wormholes. [15:22] 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... [15:36] It's because something is resonating. [15:38] If it was so strange that nobody even had a way of thinking about it, it wouldn't be popular. But it is. It's perennially popular. So... [15:49] 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... [15:57] I wonder if that's real.

[15:59] But then you kind of get shuttled into a scientific career, and one thing that happens... [16:04] for fledgling engineers and scientists and for a lot of other academics. [16:08] is that you're being taught a set of assumptions. [16:11] about the way that the world works. [16:13] called materialism or physicalism. And the thing is, you're not taught that that is a set of assumptions. [16:19] You take it for granted after a while, because after you go through college for 20 plus years and no one ever mentions. [16:27] that we're working under a set of assumptions [16:29] and no one ever talks about the philosophy of science [16:34] which is all about studying the assumptions and are they correct.

[16:38] Once you do start studying the philosophy of science, you find out that there's lots of different ways... [16:43] of understanding reality. And so there's the whole materialistic side which is really, really good, [16:49] at explaining aspects of the physical world. [16:51] It gives us these kinds of technologies. [16:54] but it doesn't explain subjective experience at all. [16:58] And so that's like the existing number one mystery in science today. [17:04] because you have to challenge the idea that materialism is all there is. [17:09] And so people have weird experiences... [17:11] They're talking about a more comprehensive way of understanding reality.

[17:15] That's what's going on. And so that's why I end up writing a book like this. [17:19] So the magic here is not stage magic. [17:22] It's the real magic, which we don't have a name for yet. [17:26] When they first started studying this in the 1800s, what were they specifically trying to isolate or figure out? [17:32] Thank you. [17:33] Well, just like today, people would see apparitions, they would have the sense that there were telepathic connections between people. [17:39] They'd have precognitions, and there was the beginning of figuring out ways of using experimental science to be able to study.

[17:48] these things. [17:49] under controlled conditions. And the word control is important because it means you exclude coincidence by the design. [17:56] 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... [18:05] then we'd be able to see it in the lab. [18:08] And the short story is, yeah, we're now 150 years past that, and we have very, very strong evidence. [18:14] that telepathy does exist. So what was the first evidence that they... [18:19] 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. [18:30] They would have like two 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. [18:40] 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. [18:50] And we do lots and lots of replications with lots of people.

[18:53] And so that then forms a body of evidence where it becomes extremely difficult to think of what the flaw might be. [19:01] And in fact, if you ask skeptics about it who know the literature, their usual response now is either there's no plausible evidence, [19:09] flaw that they can identify [19:11] 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 going to look at the evidence because we know it's impossible. [19:22] which is no longer a scientific argument, but that's the approach.

We're not going to 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. [19:37] Like, why? [19:38] 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 listen to the stories of the guys like Hal Putoff and all these different people that have been involved in these remote viewing experiments, they had actionable data.

[19:59] that they derived specifically from remote viewing. I don't understand it. [20:05] 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 remove, you know, that's not ideal at all.

And that is a factor, a major factor in what. [20:32] whether or not you can understand intuition, [20:35] 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? Is there something that could interrupt this conversation? [20:50] state of mind that you're trying to achieve because there's different states of mind. [20:55] We know this. We can measure this. We can measure the brain waves.

We can we can we understand that this 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. [21:13] which is some very bizarre connection that some people have to reality that's nowhere near local. [21:21] They can describe things in detail, talk about submarines that are being constructed in the Soviet Union. Like there's weird shit to that. And if you just if you just dismiss that, [21:33] You're being a fool.

[21:34] There's something there. [21:36] And the only way anybody figures out 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. [21:46] 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's 5G network. The perks of big wireless for half the cost.

[22:16] designed to keep you connected and no contract holding you back. Switch today at com. Plan 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. [22:40] Right. So that brings us to my next job. So after I got my doctorate, I started working at Bell Laboratories. So it was the biggest laboratory in the world at the time. It was still the Bell System. [22:53] And because I was interested in these kinds of things, for some of my time at Bell Labs, I started doing little psychic experiments.

[23:01] involving mind-matter interaction and also involving precognition. [23:05] Thank you. [23:06] So... [23:07] There's an ongoing link here that goes back to the Institute of Endoetic Sciences in a strange way. [23:13] Edgar Mitchell gave the first money [23:16] to SRI International, which is where Hal Puthoff and Russ Targ was, to do [23:21] Remove viewing studies. [23:23] He also brought Uri Geller. [23:25] to the United States. [23:26] And they brought SRI and a bunch of other places, including Bell Labs. [23:30] 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... [23:40] to be able to present some of the work I was doing at an annual conference of the Parapsychological Association. [23:47] which is an affiliate. [23:48] 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.

[24:09] not only to give my presentation at the conference, but to use the Bell Labs Imprimatur. [24:15] So I was giving this as some guy from Bell Labs. [24:18] talking to this audience. [24:21] unbeknownst to me... [24:23] 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? [24:32] Whoa. [24:33] And so that was an offer I couldn't refuse. [24:36] 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. [24:48] like nobody knew what was really going on. Right. [24:52] So I took a leave of absence. That must have been exciting. Yeah. You get that. [24:56] Offer? Stargate? Yeah, are you kidding? Holy shit. [25:01] So I took a leave of absence for one year from Bell Labs. And so I went to SRI International... [25:07] Hal Puthoff was my boss, and then Ed May, when Hal left in 1985, Ed May took over.

[25:14] He's maybe not... [25:15] be a name that is known as well, but he was the director for 10 years. [25:20] And so I worked on that project, and it took a long time to get the clearances. [25:25] Because... [25:26] First of all, I didn't know anything about classification or anything, but I figured, well, maybe it's just secret. [25:32] No. [25:33] It's just top secret. No, no. [25:35] It's top secret SCI. No, no. [25:37] It's top secret SCI special access program. [25:41] which means there's literally a book [25:43] that you have to sign and you can see all the other people who have signed that book

[25:47] Special access means even if you have a top-secret clearance, you cannot know about this place. [25:53] Thank you. [25:53] You cannot know about the code word. You can't... The code word was classified correctly. [25:59] So, [26:00] I mean, it seems kind of odd because if you have a code word, it's not saying anything. [26:04] 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. [26:13] side, the operational side. Well we knew what they were doing [26:17] But our mission was different.

Our mission was figure out those questions that you're asking. How does this stuff work? [26:23] Like, is it real? Yes. [26:25] Some people are very talented. [26:27] 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... [26:36] What's the difference between someone like Joe McMonagle, who's a superstar in this area, and... [26:41] Why is he any different than anybody else? [26:44] Because like when I first met the Ingo Swann and Joe and a bunch of other people, [26:50] They were so different than my stereotype of Madame Zodiac.

[26:54] that they, like, I say, you've got to be kidding. These people are remote viewers? [26:58] They're just like guys. [27:00] and gals. [27:02] 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. [27:13] Now, there may be some background about the people themselves, but in terms of... [27:18] finding out something that we could use to select. [27:20] 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. [27:32] That seems crazy. Except maybe talent. [27:35] Two things, talent and openness. [27:38] So talent is natural talent. It's partially based on genetics. And openness is a psychological trait where you're simply open to experience. [27:47] So people who tend to be, to have like a certain way of thinking about things and are not open to other stuff, [27:54] They block it. [27:55] They could block it real good. [27:56] people who are open to experience and willing to try new things, [28:00] They, in general, tend to do better.

[28:02] Ciao. [28:03] That brings us to talent, which I'll get to a little bit later, especially about the genetics. [28:09] of talent. [28:10] Thank you. [28:10] So we didn't have the genetic tools at the time. [28:13] Now we do have the genetic tools. And so we've done a couple of studies looking for what we call the Psygene. [28:19] So will you... [28:21] we think we're onto something. [28:22] Okay, so I work on Stargate for a year. I 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? [28:35] because Princeton at the time was the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory. [28:40] It was a lab doing cyber search that was headed by the dean of the School of Engineering. [28:46] And so that lab went almost for 30 years. [28:49] doing mind matter interaction, doing remote viewing, and a bunch of other stuff. [28:53] at Princeton. So my position was... [28:57] In the psych department, because that's where I had my, [29:00] but to [29:01] lead a program among many departments, one of which [29:05] was the pair lab.

[29:07] 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. [29:19] So we had the philosophy department and the psychology department and... [29:24] civil engineering and the pair lab and a bunch of other departments. My job is to sort of corral it together [29:31] to create multidisciplinary... [29:33] research projects. [29:34] And I was told on day one, that's impossible. This is a job you cannot do. [29:39] Well, why?

[29:40] I mean, we had the money for it. [29:43] And the answer is that in the academic world, you succeed within silos. [29:48] you know an enormous amount about a very particular kind of topic. [29:52] Like even in the psych department there, you have cognitive psychologists, perceptual psychologists, social psychologists, and on and on and on. [30:00] They don't even talk to each other. [30:02] because it's outside of your discipline, outside the little silo. My job was to sort of mash it together, and it was... [30:09] ridiculously complicated. [30:12] Was there resistance?

[30:13] Oh my God. [30:15] 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. [30:29] Why didn't they want to collaborate? [30:32] Because everything of value in the academic world is in your silo. [30:37] So if you're trying to work across silos, again, even within the same department, [30:42] Social psychology and perceptual psychology might not even talk to each other.

[30:46] And their offices are right next to each other. [30:49] But that's simply the way that's... That's insane. Yeah, but it also, it sort of makes sense when you think about it, to become an expert. [30:55] in something [30:56] takes 20 years from the university and then the rest of your academic career. [31:01] just to keep up with it. [31:03] 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. [31:10] So it's a problem, and it's always been there.

It's not getting any better either. [31:15] Well, it seems like there should be a way to fix that. The ultimate goal should be [31:19] whatever we're all working on collectively should benefit mankind. And if you're in the [31:24] psychology industry, which you are if you're teaching psychology, if you're working on psychology, you should want to get – [31:31] involved in this the fact they're all siloed off like that seems insane yeah so the the approach that's sometimes taken in the academic world is to create a center [31:39] Center for the Study of Fill-in-the-Blank.

[31:42] That brings in people from different disciplines. And then they're kind of forced together. [31:46] But these people from different disciplines probably are already working on important stuff to them, and this is taking away from their time. [31:53] It could be, except that depending on the nature of the work, it may be something that requires another discipline. [32:00] 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. [32:12] That's where I was working in Bell Labs because I 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. [32:21] And also, that's how you create new disciplines. [32:24] That's how the discipline of neuroscience began. [32:27] 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 – [32:39] with the nervous system...

[32:41] They were all different disciplines. [32:43] So a large foundation came along and said, I think we need to create... [32:49] a discipline of the neurosciences. [32:51] And they've... [32:52] threw enough money at it to bring people together, and that formed a new discipline. [32:56] So I work in the area of consciousness studies. [33:00] which is only now starting to become its own discipline. [33:04] because before that it was maybe a few philosophers interested in it and anesthesiologists and that's it. [33:10] But it's changing. So when you were at Princeton, how did you start it?

What specifically were you working on initially? [33:18] Thank you. [33:19] Well, besides trying to get people to talk to each other, which was frustrating. The big task. Yeah. So one of the things I did was meta-analysis. [33:27] So this is a way of taking the 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. [33:42] It's called meta-analysis. [33:44] Meta meaning it's like an analysis of analyses. 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. [33:58] So that's one part. The other part is, if you do have a lot of people doing... [34:02] the same experiment, then what is the overall result? [34:04] It's like one gigantic experiment now. So I did a number of meta-analyses. [34:11] Ended up writing a book on it that nobody wanted to buy, so just sat there. [34:15] And then I was doing experiments on precognition.

[34:18] as part of my job, and... [34:21] Because of my engineering background, I was using... [34:24] the latest version of machine learning at the time, which was neural networks, and applying it to the data from the pair lab. [34:31] to see if... [34:32] You know, when you do an experiment involving mind-matter interaction, usually use a random number generator and you ask somebody, this thing is... [34:41] You tell them this is going to... [34:42] push out a whole bunch of bits, random bits, [34:45] And I want you to make more one bits than zero bits.

That's your task. So they press a button and they get some kind of result. And now make more zero bits. And I don't do anything. So this is three different kinds of tasks in one session. [34:59] 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. [35:09] So you aim high, it goes up, aim low, it goes down, so on. [35:14] So... [35:15] The question then is...

[35:17] Not everybody can do that. [35:19] Some people get the opposite result. [35:22] 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. [35:31] that was from each person. [35:32] People had a way of interacting with the machine that made it do certain things that was unique to them, [35:39] But overall, it worked out. So I started using neural networks to see if I could train a neural network to [35:45] to tell who was doing the task based on how the random bits were working.

[35:51] And it turns out you can. [35:53] So when I left Princeton... [35:55] because it was getting way too frustrating. I took that idea. Just trying to get people to work together. [35:59] This episode is brought to you by com. Texas summers don't mess around with patio surfaces easily reaching 150 degrees. Hot enough to make your backyard feel like a punishment. And if your windows are bare, indoor temperatures can go up 20 degrees. Get ahead of it with custom solar shades for your den and your patio from com. Whether you want to do it yourself or have a pro handle everything, they've got you covered.

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Learn more [37:59] is a registered trademark of fca us llc trying to 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 you have an impossible job it's necessary though because this was part of the grant [38:20] what you're doing is part of the grant. So you have to do it anyway. [38:23] And I did it for three years, and then I decided I don't want to do that anymore. [38:28] So I went back to industry, but I specifically told the people I was interviewing with, I want to pursue this.

This is the beginning of a technology that will have a machine identify who you are and your intention – [38:43] Kind of like Neuralink. [38:44] Except there's no connection. There's nothing going in the brain. It's purely intentioned. [38:49] So I did end up working for a company outside of Washington,, where part of my work was doing exactly that. [38:56] We're using more advanced neural networks with random number generators and got to the point where... [39:03] We're about to set a patent. [39:05] for this device because it worked. [39:07] 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. [39:17] kind of for obvious reasons. They want ways of communicating with submarines. [39:22] So at that point, we're like right on the edge of doing that, and we get bought by another company. [39:28] And the new company said, you're not going to work on that anymore. [39:32] So the wheels internally started, it was like golden handcuffs. [39:36] A lot of money. I mean, it's a very good position, but I didn't really want to do that anymore. Did they have a – was it a profitable issue?

Yeah. [39:46] 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. [39:52] Of course. So he said, no, we're not going to do that. He doesn't want to be silly. Yeah. [39:57] So, I mean, it's so frustrating. It worked. We have a thing here. It's working. No, he just 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... [40:11] work [40:11] because it was just too interesting to drop.

[40:14] uh, [40:15] There was a recession. This was 1992. There was a recession. [40:20] Uh... [40:20] Part of my department was laid off, including myself. [40:24] So... [40:25] unbeknownst to most people at the time, that the Stargate program... [40:29] And by the way, [40:31] It wasn't called Stargate then. There's a lot of code words involved, but it's just known as Stargate, so we'll use that. [40:38] That program was giving classified contracts. [40:41] to other people. [40:42] around the world, including at the University of Edinburgh. [40:46] In Scotland. [40:48] So we had a colleague at the University of Edinburgh who was creating an automated Gonsfeld 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. [41:06] 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... [41:14] there and finish the project. [41:16] Yeah, sure. [41:17] Okay. [41:18] So I went to the University of Edinburgh...

[41:20] for about a year, and I worked on this... [41:23] project to finish the automated telepathy system. And they've run many, many people through that system by now. [41:31] uh, [41:33] 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. [41:52] That's random. Well, I was developing that at the time.

This would have been around 93 or so. [41:58] and like uh... [42:00] And so let me tell you a story about... [42:04] the kind of effect [42:06] that gave me the idea to do this experiment. [42:09] 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... [42:17] 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 that, [42:26] There's something wrong.

[42:27] I don't know what it is. [42:28] But I'm going to slow down. [42:30] and you keep slowing down, the cars behind you are beeping, they say, well, what's going on? You get almost up to the intersection, and a truck... [42:36] blast through their red light. [42:38] 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. [42:49] So I thought, okay, let's simulate that in the laboratory.

[42:53] Well, we can't put people in danger. [42:55] but we can do emotional. [42:57] tests like that. [42:59] So, [43:00] You wire somebody up, looking at skin conductance or pupil dilation or brainwaves, all kinds of things in your nervous system. [43:07] and then you just record that continually, tell them to press a button, [43:11] and then they're going to see something on a screen. [43:14] So it could be a very calm picture. [43:16] or it could be a very emotional picture. [43:18] 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.

[43:30] So they're two different valences, they're called. [43:32] And you don't know which is going to come up because a true random number generator is the thing that decides... [43:38] After you press the button, [43:40] Then it decides what it's going to show you. [43:42] So nobody knows in advance, including the experimenter. [43:44] So I set up an experiment to do that. [43:47] And by this time, I already had left... [43:50] Edinburgh, I had to make a decision then again. [43:54] Do you want to go back into industry? And I had an offer from Oak Ridge National Labs.

[43:58] which would put me back in the classified world, or this other opportunity, which was to work at the University of Nevada. [44:06] funded by Robert Bigelow. [44:08] who's probably best known for the OSAP program. He's been on here before. Yeah. So... [44:14] Bigelow has very generously said, yeah, well, I'll pay for your way to go into the university there. And I was able to run my own lab. [44:21] 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...

[44:32] 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. [44:40] Like it's normally have little statistical effects. [44:44] This is like in your face, holy smoke, this is a big thing. [44:48] Big, big presentiment effects. [44:52] I give his skin conductance one and a half seconds [44:55] before you... [44:57] Well, you press a button, you wait five seconds. Then it selects a picture. So one and a half seconds before the picture is selected, if it's emotional, you start to become emotional.

[45:06] If it's calm, you remain calm. [45:09] So that difference... [45:10] beforehand we call the presentiment effect. [45:13] It's your body somehow or unconscious knowing what you're about to see. [45:17] just like approaching a light and slowing down. Something is telling you something. [45:23] So we did an experiment, and I told this to one of the guys at the center I was working at, and he told me a story about... [45:30] which is far more... [45:32] interesting than not going through a red light. [45:36] So the story is this. [45:38] So he used to go hunting with his buddies.

[45:41] and they had a whole bunch of guns. His favorite gun was a six-shot gun. [45:46] 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 [45:54] one, two, three, four, five 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 one, two, three, four. He picks up the fifth bullet. [46:05] And he has that feeling. [46:07] Something about this bullet isn't right.

[46:09] So he didn't put it in, left it aside. [46:12] Put the hammer over cylinder six. [46:14] And then they went hunting. [46:16] So this is now two weeks in advance. [46:19] They come back from hunting. His pistol wasn't used. [46:23] and a bunch of other guns weren't used, but they do what you should not do after you go hunting. [46:28] which is starting to drink. [46:29] So they're all getting a little bit too tipsy and drinking too much, and a fight breaks out. [46:34] between two people there. One of them picks up my friend's gun...

[46:39] points at point blank [46:41] at somebody else, like right in their face, and my friend is now looking with horror because the trigger's getting pulled. [46:47] The hammer's going back, the cylinder is turning, and he's trying to intervene now. He steps right in front. [46:53] of the gun... [46:54] And it goes click. [46:56] The hammer hit. [46:58] It hit that fifth chamber. [47:00] because it rotated from six to five. [47:02] So he realized with horror at that moment that if he had not taken out that bullet, [47:08] he would be shot in the head.

[47:09] And so 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. [47:20] Wow. So... [47:22] That's a real-life version of this, which is... [47:24] two 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 [47:32] They're willing to shoot somebody in the face over an argument. Nevertheless, yeah. [47:37] So what happens? [47:39] Yeah, so...

[47:41] That's crazy, though. See, this is where we want to go in these kinds of experiments. You need, like, real-life stuff. [47:47] 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. [47:55] But I'm pretty sure that if we're able to get something at that level – [47:59] in the laboratory we would have much much stronger results than we currently do. [48:04] When it comes to things like remote viewing and being able to be open and –

[48:10] and [48:11] being able to actually [48:13] pull it off and actually [48:15] Thank you. [48:16] remote view things that you can prove. [48:19] What is the state of mind? [48:22] These people are trying to achieve. [48:24] And what is the protocol for achieving that state of mind? [48:28] It depends on whether you're naturally talented or not. [48:31] So... [48:32] Joe McMonagle and a few others that I know. [48:35] uh, [48:37] If you were to ask them at... [48:42] at breakfast. [48:43] Could you remove what I have in a hidden folder over here?

[48:47] They will continue eating and tell you the answer immediately. [48:49] So for them, it doesn't take much at all. [48:52] And in fact, what Joe would say, and I have some pictures from what Joe had done, [48:58] Joe would say that if he knows in the afternoon he's going to do a remote viewing, [49:02] He'll get all the information in the morning. [49:05] 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. [49:12] So it's a matter internally of simply knowing I need to get this information and it happens immediately.

[49:18] For people who don't have that natural talent, you go through training, [49:22] And by the way, almost everybody can do this, but it does require some training now. So for an average person... [49:31] The training typically is to not [49:33] Name an impression. [49:35] which is really tough. [49:37] So you have a target. [49:38] which may be somewhere in the world, maybe a person somewhere, maybe in an envelope, something like that. [49:45] You're taught. [49:46] uh, [49:47] you will have something come to mind. You know that that's the target.

[49:50] 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. [49:57] but not without naming it. [49:59] So you start little scribbles. [50:00] 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. [50:11] 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, [50:25] you're instantly going to start thinking of bananas.

[50:28] And once that happens, you can't not think of bananas anymore. So that's what I mean by not naming. [50:33] So that's one of the very first things that you learn is anything that comes to mind that you have a name on. [50:39] Two, [50:40] is probably not it. [50:42] It takes practice, but you can get there. [50:44] Wow. [50:45] What was the most impressive thing that you ever saw anybody achieve with remote viewing? [50:52] After I got the clearances, Hal gave me the briefing. [50:56] that everyone gets, like in skiffs in Congress and presidents, whatever.

I got the same briefing. So one picture after the other of experiments. [51:08] by Joe and by a bunch of other people who are not as well known. They basically give almost a veridical drawing [51:15] of the target.