Inquiry with Kelly Chase - [The UFO Rabbit Hole] Ep 31: An Interview with Dean Radin: On Consciousness, Psi Phenomena, and Real Magic

Episode Date: December 22, 2023

Dean Radin, Ph.D., is a prominent figure in the field of parapsychology, known for his extensive research and publications on psychic phenomena. As the chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) and author of influential books such as "The Conscious Universe" and "Entangled Minds," Radin has played a pivotal role in investigating and promoting the scientific understanding of psi phenomena, including telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis. His work, characterized by its interdisciplinary approach and rigorous statistical analysis, has significantly contributed to the academic and public discourse on the legitimacy and implications of psychic experiences. Radin's efforts have been instrumental in advocating for the open-minded and scientific exploration of these often-controversial subjects within the broader context of consciousness studies.Before joining the research staff at IONS in 2001, he held appointments at AT&T Bell Labs, Princeton University, University of Edinburgh, and SRI International. Dr. Radin is author or coauthor of hundreds of technical articles, some 125 peer-reviewed journal articles, four dozen book chapters, and four best-selling, popular books. Links are in the episode brief if you want to learn more.NEW Class from Dr. James MaddenUnidentified Flying Hyperobject: UFOs, Philosophy, and the End of the WorldFour-week online class via ZoomWednesdays, March 27 – April 24 (skips April 10), 20247 – 9 pm ETLearn More About the ClassSign Up NowEPISODE BRIEFDONATE TO IONSIONS scientific research and free programs are entirely funded by generous gifts from members and donors. Make a gift today at noetic.org/give.BECOME A PATRONPatrons get lots of great perks like early and ad-free episodes, access to the private The UFO Rabbit Hole Discord server, and twice-monthly Patron Zoom calls with Kelly Chase.Memberships start at just $5/month.GET THE BOOKGet a SIGNED COPYGet it on AmazonFOLLOWWebsiteTwitterFacebookBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-ufo-rabbit-hole-podcast--5746035/support. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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deprioritization during times of high network usage. Welcome back to the UFO Rabbit Hole podcast. I'm your host, Kelly Chase. There had been a lot of very cool moments since I started the podcast, but one of the coolest came a few months ago when I got an email from Dean Radin, saying that he was enjoying the podcast, but that he had one correction to offer. In an episode, I'd referred to the alleged use of remote viewing by members of the legendary Stargate Project. He told me that there was nothing alleged about it. He knew because he'd been involved in the program. I was already very familiar with Dean Radin's work, and so that was an email that I was thrilled to receive. Early on in my research into UFOs, it became clear to me that I wasn't going to be able to make

progress in my understanding of the phenomenon without having a full reckoning with sci phenomena and abilities. As we discussed at length in the episode about Jacques Ville and Eric Davis's six-layer model, UFO encounters are characterized by a wide spectrum of different kinds of effects that they can have on people, many of which we would categorize as psychic. These include impressions of telepathic communication, poltergeist phenomena, UFOs appearing to anticipate the witness's thoughts, premonitory dreams or visions, personality changes, and unusual new abilities in the witnesses, and even healing phenomena. If we're going to take the UFO phenomenon seriously, then we have to take the stranger realities of UFOs seriously

as well. But no objective rational person should be willing to accept these stranger realities are, in fact, real, without scientific evidence to back it up. But surely, if we had evidence that things like telepathy, psychokinesis, and pre-cognitive events are real, we'd already know about that, right? What surprised me when I began diving into the research around sci phenomena was just how much sound, peer-reviewed, replicable evidence there is that these things do exist. And not only do they exist, but they're actually fairly common abilities. It turns out that most people are at least a little bit psychic.

It's been shown in highly controlled scientific experiments again and again that the average person has the ability to do things like since one another person is looking at them, influence a random number generator, receive telepathic information, and even remotely view distant locations, all to a degree of statistical significance that rules out mere chance. And in diving into the Vastew,

scientific evidence that exists for these phenomena, it's impossible not to become familiar with the work of Dean Radin. Dr. Dean Radin is a prominent figure in the field of parapsychology, known for his extensive research and publications on psychic phenomena. As the chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, an author of influential books such as The Conscious Universe and Entangled Minds, Raiden has played pivotal role in investigating and promoting the scientific understanding of sci phenomena, including telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis. His work, characterized by its interdisciplinary approach and rigorous statistical analysis, has significantly contributed to the academic and public discourse on the legitimacy and implications of psychic experiences.

Raiden's efforts have been instrumental in advocating for the open-minded and scientific explorations, of these often controversial subjects within the broader context of consciousness studies. Before joining the research staff at Ions in 2001, he held appointments at AT&T Bell Labs, Princeton University, the University of Edinburgh, and SRI International. Dr. Raiden is the author or co-author of hundreds of technical articles, some 125 peer-reviewed journal articles, four dozen book chapters, and four best selling popular books. Links are in the episode brief if you want to learn more. I'd also like to thank the Institute of Noetic Sciences for working with me on this episode, and on an upcoming series that I'm working on about the very strange anomalous experience

that changed my life and led me to start this podcast. That will be out in February. I have a strong affinity and respect for the man who found in ions, the late Apollo astronaut, Dr. Edgar Mitchell, born of a mystical experience of the overview effect that he has, had while in space, ions explains the guiding hypothesis of the work that they do as follows. Everything is interconnected. By embodying an awareness of this interconnection, we can tap into information and energy not limited by space and time, and profoundly amplify transformation, innovation, and well-being. As we've discussed in the waking up inside the cave series and elsewhere, the bleeding edge of scientific advancement seems to be indicating to us at every turn,

that there is a fundamental reality to the idea that everything is interconnected. And for the past 50 years, ions has been leading the way in advancing our understanding of that interconnectedness. Ion's scientific research and free programs are entirely funded by generous gifts from members and donors. If you would like to support this work, you can make a gift today at noetic.org slash give. The link is in the episode description. Now here is my interview with Dean rated. Can you talk about who Dr. Edgar Mitchell was and the experience that caused him to found the Institute of Noetic Sciences? Edgar Mitchell was an astronaut, of course, Apollo 14. He was the sixth man on the moon and the lunar module pilot.

Before that, he was a Navy pilot on jets, an MIT doctorate, and an explorer. Like many people, you can imagine that the kind of person who is comfortable flying jets, especially experimental aircraft or being an astronaut, their life is all about exploration. So he had come to the pinnacle of exploring outer space and all of its various ways of thinking about it. Outer space is anything outside of your head, essentially, the external world, but in a way the very few people have ever done, always from the moon and back. But because of an experience he had on the way back from the moon, he devoted much of the rest of his life to the exploration of inner space, as he put it. So the experience was that the way he put it is that when he was coming back to the earth, his main job was over. His job was to land on the moon and get off

the moon. So he had the window seat. And so in the capsule, as it rotates slowly as it's going through space to prevent one side from getting too hot, what you see out of the window is an image of the earth and then the moon and then the stars, and around it, around, and around. And he was simply looking out of the window and contemplating this and realizing, as we now call it, the overview effect, that when you can see part or all of the earth from space, it gives you a different perspective on who and what we are.

Because all of our history, all the people we've ever known, all of our conflicts, all of our triumphs have taken place on this tiny, tiny little blue ball in the middle of nowhere. And something about looking at that, he began to feel a kind of unity with all of life on Earth because everything we know is on that tiny ball. And the rest of space does not look that inviting. It's cold, it's dark, you know, it's out there.

And it wouldn't support life as we know it. In addition, the atmosphere of the Earth looks extremely fragile from space. It's very, very thin. And so you can see then how, while we don't think about it very often, it wouldn't take much of a cosmic event to rip the atmosphere away, and that would end all life on Earth. So I was thinking about this and the sense of unity with all life, and that sparked a classic mystical experience,

where the unity wasn't felt as an abstract, but as a palpable feeling of unity, not only with everything on Earth, but everything in the universe. And so not being an intellectual exercise, historically we know that if somebody has that kind of an enlightenment experience or a spiritual experience, that that can be transformative for them. They're a different person after that than they were before. And in some ways, that is probably true of what happened to Edgar. They came back to Earth and within a year had established the Institute of Noetic Sciences as a place to use the same tools and techniques that have gotten him to the moon. but in this case directed inwards rather than outwards.

So that was the origin of our Institute in 1973. I've been so fascinated by that story and by the overview effect in general. When I was at the Soul Foundation conference this last week, space psychologist Dr. E. Wightly was talking about Edgar Mitchell a little. And something she said that really struck me was that he was the astronaut who spoke most honestly about what that experience was like for astronauts. And it was fascinating to me to think that there have been other astronauts who have experienced something similar in space. Is that something that you've heard?

Yes. Edgar had mentioned that almost all, maybe even all astronauts and not even the ones who went into the moon, but just went into orbit, they come back transformed because they have something like the same experience that he had. It's true that he was more open than others and talking about this sort of thing because it's still somewhat taboo to talk about mystical experiences, especially by a scientist or a military person or an astronaut. But nevertheless, it does happen. So, yeah, it's a real transformative phenomenon. That's so fascinating. Can you talk a little bit about how Edgar Mitchell's experience in space went on to inform the guiding hypothesis, of ions? Well, his experience, which he ultimately called noetic, which referred to the phrase William James, perhaps made popular century ago, which refers to a deep kind of knowing.

Like any form of intuition, it's knowing without knowing how you know. But unlike forms of intuition, which are essentially forgotten knowledge, like you do something forever and you learn things, but you don't think about it anymore consciously. This, kind of intuition seems to drop out of the sky. It's things that can be surprising to you. You know you never knew it before. And it encompasses the entire range of psychic experience and mystical experience. So he had the mystical experience. He came back to Earth and wondering what in the world was that and then started looking into the literature and discovered that this is something that people have reported forever. And whole religions have begun as a result of such experiences.

And so since he knew that science and technology were so powerful in studying certain things, maybe the same kinds of tools and techniques could be used to look at interspace and not only outer space. So that was the general idea. And early on ions, as we call it, was one of the first funders of remote viewing research, which was happening at SRI International at the time. But we also pioneered a study of gratefulness and meditation and a whole bunch of things that are now taken for granted, taken as this is no longer even unusual like meditation. So one of the ways that we see this is that the study of positive thinking of gratefulness,

of forgiveness in terms of health outcomes is well understood and even used. So part of what of our themes was to try to look at. look ahead 30 years from where we currently are. That guarantees that you're going to be seen as an explorer and you'll be working out and blazing new trails. And so that would only really appeal to somebody who's interested in being an explorer. And as they often say that the explorers are the ones who are dodging arrows, essentially. I mean, people are always throwing things at you because it can be disturbing to challenge the status quo. And a lot of people would like the status quote, or remain stable? Well, it never does. And somebody has to be out there in front. So it appeals to

people like myself and my colleagues who are willing to put up with the challenges because we think the exploration is simply more interesting. As much as this is an exploration on sort of the bleeding edge of science, it seems like what's being implied through noetics is also that this, and I think you hinted at this a little bit, is that in some ways, this may be knowledge that we're recovering as much as we're discovering. Would you say that's accurate? Oh, yeah. Yeah. In many, many cases, we find that we look at the esoteric literature that includes any kind of literature, which has been somewhat suppressed over time. As back as far as we go, we see that people had ideas that they expressed generally not in terms that we would use today because language and

culture change. But the general ideas that were being expressed by indigenous societies, by shamans all the way up to the present are encapsulated by the term that Aldous Huxley used. It's a perennial philosophy. It's the same general theme that keeps repeating in cultures again and again among those who have dived deeply into inner space. The mystical experiences, there's a wide variety of ways that they're described. But if you look for the essence of all of them, it's the same experience that people have today. And so, as he said, in older times, other cultures, these experiences would evolve into religions. And sometimes the religion would embrace the mystical roots. And sometimes it would say, don't pay attention to that at all.

And it's something quite different. It becomes more like a social control construct. Yeah. So the things we study at Ions, we study psychic experience primarily. And these same experiences, you can find I mean, history is saturated with it. And it is also not the case that it has gone away as we've become more modern and sophisticated. All you need to do is look up books on affirmations and magic and other topics like that or look in our entertainment and see how these topics are just saturate the entertainment industry. And you'll see that the same kinds of experiences and phenomena have been around throughout history. So what we're doing, which is a little bit not all that new, is applying scientific methods to the study of these phenomena to see what of

the stories can we believe and which ones are probably explainable by other means. This is not to explain away the experiences because experience is what it is. The question is how do we interpret what it means? And so from a modern academic psychology perspective, what you can see from the point of view of articles that are published on belief in the paranormal, and there are hundreds of such articles. Almost all of those articles assume that when people have a psychic experience, it's a mistake, or it's a misinterpretation of something that's mundane, memory tricks and coincidence and things like that. And in fact, in many cases, it's probably correct. It's not And always the case that somebody hasn't experienced in their interpretation of the experience

is probably correct. Oftentimes we can be wrong. So that's valuable to know that. But of course, when we do a controlled experiment, it controls for all of the usual mundane explanations. So if we put somebody through a telepathy experiment and we exclude all of the mundane, and we still end up with evidence that somehow there's a mind-to-mind connection, well, then that's quite interesting.

That matches some people's experience where they spontaneously. just know what somebody else is thinking or feeling. And of course, even if that only happened five percent of the time, well, that's still remarkable. What are we not understanding from the rest of science that could allow that kind of phenomenon to occur? And up until the development of quantum mechanics, it was literally considered to be impossible. So there was nothing known in physics that would allow for that sort of correlation at a distance. But now we do have ways that could potentially explain that. I've found in my own research with UFOs that the question I ultimately keep asking myself is,

what is the nature of reality such that this phenomenon is possible? And as I've worked on answering that question for myself, it seems like if you also ask the question, what is the nature of reality such that sci phenomena are possible, you end up with kind of the same set of answers. Do you see that same kind of overlap between these two fields and the way they relate to each other and the nature of reality? Well, possibly. I mean, the biggest overlap that I see is that a lot of the stories about UFOs seem to imply that they are being communicated with in their mind.

They're not talking to. They're being talked to or communicated with somehow mentally. So that's probably the strongest overlap. The second one is that the craft or objects seem to be reactive to being observed or through intention in some cases. So, yes, there's some overlap there. Whether these are the same phenomena or similar or different, we really don't know at this point. I mean, the prevailing idea within Cy Research today is that we give labels to the different

ways that these experiences are manifest to people. like we use labels like telepathy or clairvoyance. But underneath it, I think there's a growing consensus that there's probably just one underlying phenomenon. It's something like interconnectedness, for want of a better term, that is connecting us in ways between people, between us and the environment, and in ways that are actually reminiscent of what mystics talk about. Like somebody has a mystical experience, it's all one, it's all connected, it's all perfectly

aligned, blah, blah, blah. it's kind of as though that it really is as close as we can get to the nature of reality. It's all connected all the time. There's only one thing. It's actually all of the separateness out there is an illusion. And so if that were true, then you can imagine that the kinds of spontaneous experiences that people have and maybe even UFO sightings are reflective of that in some way. And this kind of makes sense from a neuroscience perspective and even psychology, where

we know that we're effectively constructing our experience. When we perceive something, it's a mental construction, and it's easy to show that that's the case, not only through neuroscience, but through things like study of visual and auditory illusions, you can easily trick the brain to see something that's not there or to see things that are there, but you don't see it. So the construction of reality by the brain is pretty well set. What reality is, as sometimes called naked reality,

unfiltered reality. We don't know, but a mystic's experience seems to be about as close as we're going to get. And reflections of that seem to be related to psychic experience and maybe UFO sightings. Hey, you, feeling hungry? Run to Denny's Four. The new Etonia Everyday Value Slam. Heart of Denny's slam and meal deals. And see the new Masters of the Universe movie, only in theaters June 5th.

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That's fascinating. Can you talk a little bit more about the kind of side phenomena that you study at ions and what translates best to the lab? What sort of things are you able to study scientific? We study what is studyable. So that means listening to the kinds of experiences that people report and seeing if we can operationalize it in a way so that we can create an experiment to test that experience and exclude all of the usual mundane explanations for it. That's what we do.

And we've done it for distant healing, feeling of being stared at, telepathy, secretive. kinetic effects, moving into things like channeling and mediumship. So in all of these cases, they're either clinical methods or experimental methods that can be used using the same techniques used in other disciplines, but applied to these kinds of experiences to find out how do we best understand what's going on? And so basically, almost every experience that somebody describes can be studied in an operational or controlled way. The advantage of that is that if we see something interesting at the end, we have a much cleaner way of interpreting what's happening.

We know it wasn't coincidence. It's not a mistake. It's not sensory leakage. It's not all that stuff. What's left over then is it looks like it is what it appears to be. Somehow people got information from a distance or from the future or getting information from something that has no name yet, like a non-human entity, a spirit, or who knows what it is, or a psychokinetic effect. So that's what we do. This, of course, is part of the tradition of parapsychology, which goes back to the late 1800s

as a systematic area of study. And we're doing more or less the same lineage as that. Pay close attention to what our colleagues are doing and what history tells us in this field and doing as we do in any scientific area. We're continuing to advance beyond what we knew. and I would say less and less of our research and that of our colleagues is proof-oriented. We have enough proof to realize something interesting is going on. The next questions of interest is how do we explain it, which is about theory development,

and what are the underlying processes involved in making these things happen? And so there are all these three areas that are sort of wrapped around each other. You do proof-oriented experiments, process-oriented experiments, and then theory, and the theory helps you figure out new experiments and new ways of understanding what's happening, which leads to new theory, to experiments, and back and forth and back and forth. So that's how any science works. I think something that really shocked me when I started looking into sci phenomena was, like you said, just how much proof there is and that this is something that's been replicated and shown over and over again in a very controlled way. Why do you think it is that more mainstream science has such an

aversion to acknowledging that there's at least something interesting going on here? Well, it depends on what portion of history you're talking about. And a lot of it has to do with the nature of how science, it's hard to talk about mainstream science or even mainstream academia because it's not monolithic. There's some areas where people embrace these phenomena and they don't reject it at all, and others where they do. You learn as an academic that there are certain things you can talk about and certain things you can't, and because it's considered taboo. Well, where does the taboo come from?

It comes from people who have religious convictions, like if somebody is very religious, especially Catholic, and they go through the catechism, they're told in no uncertain terms, this is the work of the devil. I have been told that exactly to me, that colleagues in a very technical environment, I asked one time a person I know, would you like to do this experiment? It was a experiment on precognition. They said, no. I was a little surprised because everyone else had said yes. Well, why not? Because it's the work of the devil. And these are all highly educated

people, but it has a certain belief system that says you shouldn't do this. That is where some of the suppression comes from. Much of the rest of it comes from people who are inculcated throughout their entire professional life into a certain worldview where this sort of thing cannot happen. What's interesting, I would think, is that some of the people who are the most stringent skeptics are psychologists, academic psychologists. And I think it's because they have gone through an academic system, first of all, it either never mentioned this topic at all or simply dismissed it because that's what people have done forever. But more importantly, I think that the worldview is still very much, as most people's are, a classical worldview, classical physics. And within a classical physics

worldview, which is very materialistic, there's no opening in there. It's impossible to have these kinds of connections at a distance through space or time is just not conveyed by what we know about classical physics. It's a very different story for somebody who knows about quantum physics or even about relativity. I mean, there are all very ideas from everyday reality about space and time being absolutes and all of that. That's simply not true anymore. It's a constrained way, a special case kind of scenario, which we know is no longer true. It is also not the case, even among physicists working at the leading edge of physics where they know that quantum mechanics, as we know, has developed for the past 80 or 90 years, that's not the end of physics.

Every time we go deeper, deeper into the small or deeper into the large, in the cosmological sense, we are constantly looking at surprises. So orthodox quantum mechanics is a linear theory. Nothing in nature is linear. So there are suggestions at this point about how do you create the next version of quantum mechanics? Well, it's got to be nonlinear. As soon as you go into ideas like nonlinear forms of quantum mechanics where the mathematics becomes really difficult, you start encountering the possibility that information can be transferred instantaneously from here to there.

In other words, spooky action at a distance is no longer just correlations but information transfer. That's just one of many different directions that we can go. But unless you spend a fair amount of time in looking at these ideas at the edge of physics and psychology and the neurosciences, and that becomes your job in a sense to look at how is our worldview expanding as science? is continuing, I would say it's looking more and more like psychic phenomena will eventually be completely accommodated by science. But go back into the academic world, you spend your entire life in a very tiny little silo. It's very deep, but it's not connected to other disciplines. When I've been in the academic world, I saw this firsthand, this siloing business

and kind of shocked me. So I knew somebody when I was at Princeton, someone who was a social psychologist and another was a cognitive psychologist working in the same department and did not value each other's work. And so I remember hearing that word, I don't value that. Like I didn't want to go to a talk because I don't value that. And I thought, what do you mean by, what does that even mean? What he meant by after I deconstructed it a little bit was he didn't see the value of spending time going deep into things like cognitive psychology because his interest with social psychology. And the silo

is so big that you can spend your entire life in that silo to become an expert in it. But then you're not an expert in things that are adjacent to you and certainly not an expert and things that are far. So nobody has enough time to learn everything. And so I can't blame people for the problems that arise as a result of these silos. But nevertheless, if you're trying to study something at the leading hedge, you need to learn a little bit about everything to see how it actually all begins to fit together. With all that in mind, what do you think the future of science looks like? Well, to understand the future, you look at the past. So the history of science shows again and again that there are ideas that arise that counter that are seen as anomalous or the counter

current concepts, and there are subjects of ridicule and attack. some of the ideas are probably worth ridicule and attack, even though actually I don't agree with verticule at all. But some of the ideas will be wrong. Some of them will be right. It's very difficult to know when it's like right in front of you and you don't know yet how to evaluate it, which ones are right and which ones are wrong. But science, like any human enterprise, reacts in the way that mobs do.

They will attack things first and ask questions later. And many, many examples like this, and it's very unfortunate. but we're human too. So, you know, science has the same kinds of prejudices that you will find in any other area where humans try to do something together. The aspiration of science is that you question extensively and understand what you're talking about before you offer an opinion. That is not always the case. That doesn't always happen. So if we look to the past, we can say with some certainty that eventually some of the ideas that are at the leading edge now will become mainstream. Some of those, I believe, will be psychic phenomena, which will gain different terms

and different ways of explaining what's going on, but the fact of the experience will change, the way that we react to the experience will change because it'll no longer be denigrated or suppressed. People respond to it as, oh, yeah, that could happen. That happened sometimes, and it's because of fill in the blank reasons why we know that it happens. So how long will it take to get there. I don't know. It's the way I would, I like to describe that as somewhere between next Tuesday and a century from next Tuesday, because it could happen overnight, essentially, kind of in the same way that when to look back at when acupuncture first arose is a thing, back probably 40, 50 years ago, it was routinely dismissed as crazy. It doesn't make any sense at all.

until a person from Congress went to China and they needed an operation and the only anesthetics they got was acupuncture and it worked and they were astonished. And so that began to change opinions and one of the first suggestions then was, well, it's stimulating endorphins. It's stimulating the needles or creating a natural anesthetic. And then people say, oh, okay, I can sort of understand that. It turned out that that's probably wrong. but it gave a plausibility statement that's like plausible that maybe that's a way of understanding

this and that's not doesn't do too much violence to what we think we understand in terms of our worldview. So, okay, let's go with that. But that was important, even though it may be wrong, because it allowed the door to swing open a little bit, whereas before it was absolutely slam shut. So by the same token, psychic and mystical experience, somebody's going to come up with, and I've been predicting for years at a graduate student, it's going to say, well, maybe the brain operates in partially quantum ways,

which is more growing interest that may be the case. And if that were true, then maybe you could take a person and put another person at a distance and stimulate one, and you can see the other brain, like, sinking with it in an entanglement process. And then they do the experiment, and then it works, and then telepathy will be rediscovered for the umpteenth time. and if we're really lucky, all of the previous century of research will be visible at that point. Maybe it won't.

Like, you know, that's old stuff. We can dismiss it. But we're really lucky somebody will look back and say, oh, you know what? This is not a new thing. The people have been reporting this throughout history and science has been looking at this for a century. And all you've done is just found a new way of showing it. So I expect something like that is going to happen sooner rather than later. Oh, I sure hope so.

So what would you say are the types of siabilities that we have the best evidence for, where you feel like just case closed, we can prove it. We may not know how this is happening, but we can prove that it's happening. Yeah. So in science, we don't have proof. We only have proof in alcohol and logic. So what we can say is with increasing confidence, we have, we're going to have high confidence, middle confidence, and so on. With high confidence, I would say that telepathy is essentially demonstrated to an extent where we don't really need to do more proof-oriented research. People who just get into the field or don't believe that such a thing is possible, they will do proof-oriented research because they need to see it firsthand.

But there's already a gigantic amount of evidence and it's been discussed in the mainstream psychological journals for 20 years or more already. So that's one area. Another is remove viewing, a modern term for clairvoyance. That's pretty well demonstrated. Precognition, I would say yes. By the way, in each one of these classes are names that I'm talking about. There are multiple classes of experiments that are looking at the same thing. And this is important because now you have conceptual replication.

So it's not just telepathy in a conscious form, but unconscious forms of telepathy, EEG correlations at a distance, functional MRI correlations at a distance. distance and so on. There's a lot of different ways of looking at the same phenomenon. So it's true for precognition, for telepathy, for clairvoyance, and I would say close to being the same level of confidence for psychokinetic effects. So those are the four main experimental areas of parapsychology. A fifth can be considered survival after bodily death. And there, I would say that the best evidence that we have is probably in mediumship. So the case where a medium is the midway between spirit world and human world. And so the medium's experiences that are talking to

a dead person or communicating or getting messages from. And so even under double or triple-blind conditions where the medium doesn't know what the sitter, the person who wants to communicate with their departed loved one, they're not even with that person. He's a proxy sitter to somebody who sits in for that person, and nevertheless, the medium can get information that is later verified to be true. The question in mediumship is, where does the medium get that information? Well, medium's experience is that they're getting it from a dead person. But given that we know that precognition and clairvoyance are also possible, it's not 100% clear yet, at least not to me, that that is where the information actually comes from. Maybe that's the medium's experience.

So there are sometimes problems of interpretation here. So I would personally put evidence for survival after bodily death as somewhere in maybe medium confidence. The underline phenomena like near-death experiences and so when the experiences are there and they seem to be true, interpretation of the experience is another issue. I have colleagues who are completely convinced 100% that there is survival after bodily death, but I'm not one of them. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I always admire kind of conservatism in the face of the unknown. It's harder to be not sure than it is to go with an answer. Well, it's true. You have to be comfortable with ambiguity. And I've always been very comfortable with ambiguity because in most cases, somebody will

ask, how do you know this or what do you believe about this? And the truth is, and in most cases, my answer would be, I don't know. I really don't. I have pretty high confidence that some of these things are real because I've done many, many experiments. And I see results that are real, that happen. Then I have colleagues who will say, well, maybe it's a mistake. It could be a subtle mistake, which happens. There are subtle mistakes that happen. There be statistical mistakes.

There will be all kinds of things that could happen in experiment. And one of the challenges, and I think fun things about doing research in this domain, is that there's a million mistakes that could be made all the time. And so you trust your colleagues to do very careful scrutiny of what you've done to point out things that are mistakes. And if you're smart, you don't do those mistakes again. So if you look at a century of this kind of research and people have done these kinds of analyses, how careful are parapsychological tests as compared to in what we consider mainstream disciplines? Things like how many studies use actual double-blind methods or placebo

controls, way more in parapsychology, because we've learned through hard knocks. that there's a million ways we can fool ourselves. Who wants to waste time fooling ourselves? So we try then as a field not to keep making the same mistake over and over again. We fix things. We fix loopholes. So by the time you get to something like the Gonsfeld telepathy experiment, it's about as close to a loophole-free experiment as we know how to make.

I mean, we know that because skeptics, when asked about, you know, what are the methodological problems in these experiments, they come back and say, we don't know. We don't know them anymore. We can't find any. Well, that's a good indicator. Yeah, we probably have closed all of the loopholes that matter. When it comes to sci abilities, is this something that anyone can do?

And to what extent are these skills learned versus something that people are just boring with? I don't think they're magically falling out of the sky. I think these are reflective of some fundamental interconnectedness, something out there like that. But just like any talent, some people are more sensitive to it than others. And so would training allow you to become better at it? Yes. We have pretty good correlations at people who learn to meditate. We'll start to encounter these kinds of experiences more often.

So there is some indication that, yes, you can train yourself to become more sensitive to these kinds of connections. But nevertheless, there will always be some people who are very talented at this just naturally. They will either have these kinds of experiences more often, And in some cases, they can demonstrate it to some extent on demand. So it's kind of like there's only one LeBron James, but most people with a little effort can get a ball through a hoop. That sort of thing.

Yeah. Some can't, right? There are people who are sidelined, who as much as they try, they will not get there. And it may be through psychological means, it may be through something about their brain. We don't know exactly what it is. But I would say there's two ways of doing experiments, in this domain or in any domain. You can look for people who have the talent to begin with.

Usually not so much because you're interested in proof, but you're interested in learning something about the process, and you need people who are very good then, have the talent. And that involves a lot of time and effort to find such people. They're not rare, but they're also not every person on the street. But the other approach, which is probably more often done in the academic world, is unselected college sophomores. And the value of using those people as part of your experiment

is it tells you what's true on average in the population. Because that answers your question. Does everyone have it? Well, if you do it, Gonsfeld experiments and you're just picking up students because they need to do an experiment for credit, yeah, you still get results that are interesting. So that tells us that we're probably dealing

with something like a normal curve, a distribution of talent that is the same as you find in any other area of human performance. And that's important to know because we're not dealing with one-off super anomalies because then it becomes really difficult to figure out, well, why would these things exist in them and not other people? So we do know that we find it broadly distributed throughout the population. And if we want to learn something more about it,

you start picking people off the right end of that normal curve who have some natural talent. So I know you mentioned meditation was one way for people, who want to develop these skills and abilities in themselves. Do you have any other recommendations besides meditation? I know sometimes people try remote viewing because it has protocols. It's kind of a little more straightforward. Do you have any other thoughts on that? Well, remote viewing training is a kind of a meditation.

We think of meditation as being in the lotus position and quieting your mind like mindfulness. But there are many other kinds of focused mental activities that are not meditation. So a specific kind of training and in many ways a remote viewing class is training. It's training the mind to focus in certain ways. It's kind of a meditation. So martial artists could be good at this,

artists could be good at it, maybe computer programmers might be good at it. In other words, that anybody who can really get totally absorbed in a mental space and not be distracted by other things can probably learn to get. to be better at this. Again, natural talent will play a big role. The example I like to use is, and I got this from Ed May, that if we wanted to study high jumping as simply a thing that

humans can do, and so you pick people at random and you jump, you see, how high can you jump over this bar? You have to jump over this bar. Well, the average might be three feet, just because you're looking, you're picking people at random. Say, okay, well, what if we picked athletes to do this? You know, then you find it's like five feet, six feet maybe. Like you can jump higher than your head, which is pretty remarkable. But the world record is over eight feet, which sounds like that's crazy. How could somebody jump eight feet, which is probably two feet or more higher than their self?

Well, that is the world record. That's the record from the Olympics. It's been held since the mid-90s, so it's not that easy. It's a pretty rare person who can do it. Nevertheless, you go to the rarefied. end of the curve where people have truly remarkable skills, we're talking about things that from the average person's point of view would be impossible, and in fact, is impossible, and you can practice every single day for the rest of your life and never get there. So there are lots of ways

of training. There are tips and tricks that you can give people as ways of overcoming the natural psychological filters that get in the way. So a lot of remote viewing training is all about learning not to name something, right? You get a flash of a an impression and you want to say, oh, it's a banana because it was yellow. No, you have to learn not to do that. So it takes a while to train yourself to undo this natural tendency that we have, which is to make very fast snap assumptions about incoming stimuli and decide immediately what it is, because that's not the way that this works. And this is why artists often will do well, especially artists who specialize.

I'm kind of making this up, but it just occurred to me. An artist that specializes in painting the shadows. And if you paint shadows perfectly, you will end up with a really nice picture of somebody. That's learning not to see what we normally see, right? Like that famous book of drawing on the right side of the brain, where you take a picture and turn it upside down

so you're not being confused by what you know that it is. It's just lines and shapes. And if you do that, you'll find that you're much better, in that case, an illustrator, than you would have imagined because you're not trying to draw the thing that you think that it is. You're just looking at shapes and colors. And that's like in a nutshell, that's more or less what a lot of remote viewing training is about. And it's also relevant to what happens in meditation.

So meditation is when you get past the idea that your mind's constantly interrupting you and mind wandering, during those periods between the mind wandering, you get into a state where there's no thought anymore. Like you can bypass that filter that wants to name, wants to grasp something and name it immediately. You can learn to do that and that will help. And then there are those strange people out there who somehow do this automatically.

They can just turn it on and off. And I've met people like that. And it's amazing. Yeah, it is. Would you say that there are any risks associated with developing sciabilities? I ask because, you know, in the UFO community, people talk a lot about contact work. I get asked about it all the time. And I personally don't do contact work just because I'm not confident in what I'm contacting. And so I was wondering,

are there risks associated with developing some of this or things that people should watch out for? Absolutely. Something like 2 to 5% of people who learn to meditate will have a psychotic break. And in this domain, you are opening yourself up to things that, that, quote, normally you are filtering out because you don't need it. It's like irrelevant material. So you can imagine that you take a magic pill and you're suddenly clairvoyant, like completely clairvoyant. You may become paralyzed in the sense that you're now paying really close attention

to a supernova that's umpteen trillions of light years away because that's more interesting to the psychic eye than the tiger or car that's directly in front of you that's about to hit you. So one of the things you will hear them from people having a psychotic break where they can no longer tell what's real and what's not real, which is frightening and it's discombobulating to the point where it's debilitating. You can't operate like a normal person anymore. So opening your mind to the rest of the universe without a very disciplined way of doing that can't be dangerous for some people. For others, it's not a big deal because maybe their minds kind of work that way anyway. But for people especially, I would say, who have a pretty rigid way of thinking about the nature of reality,

even having something as relatively simple as a precognitive experience or telepathic experience, that can shatter their belief system. And it's shattering in the same way that a traumatic experience can be shattering. You could have the equivalent of PTSD. you can go through periods of days or weeks where you feel totally disconnected with the world. I mean, none of that is pleasant. None of that is what you want. I think fortunately it's probably a pretty small percentage of people who go through that.

But yeah, people are different and people will respond differently to these kinds of experiences. That's great to know. I think it's important to always put that out there because I see so many people in this work that I do who are new to the field and they're looking for that thing that's going to give them confirmation, that these things that they've maybe only experienced once or not at all, that there's some sort of real something to them. And I just, I understand that pull, but I also think it's important to let people know that there are some risks involved and that, you know, you want to protect yourself as much as you can. Right. So similar question is asked in psychedelic

experiences. So can you take a psychedelic and have an experience that will change your life? Yeah, it happens. So is it going to change it in a positive way or in a way? that you're prepared for, very difficult to know in advance. And also in psychedelic experiences, most people I know, I don't know anybody who has taken psychedelics more than once, who is now skeptical of psychic phenomena. And the reason is that they've had those experiences. They've had firsthand experiences of connected with others and at distances and so on. And once you've had the experience firsthand, unless, in a sense, you become completely paranoid and start disavowing your own experience, which is kind of a mental illness,

well, then you would accept it. I don't understand it better than anybody else, but I know what happened? So then what do you do with it? Which is a pretty strong overlap with the UFO experience as well, right? Somebody sees an alien come through the wall and they know they're not dreaming and they somehow verify that this is actually what happened, maybe because somebody else next door or next to them, had the same experience, well, what do you do with that? You learn pretty quickly, don't talk about it in public.

You find people who are safe to talk about it. And you'll learn after a while that actually a lot of people have had similar experiences. And then you all wonder, well, why are we talking about this thing? I'll say, well, there are taboos, social taboos that allow what you can talk about and what you can't. But where do those taboos come from? mostly are designed to keep society stable. It's like, what's the role of government in this? Well, government, just like a governor on an engine,

it is designed to keep it from overheating and exploding. So a lot of the behavior of government, the purpose of government, is to keep everything sort of quiet and stable so that the engine of society can work. So that means the government will immediately pounce on people or groups or whatever that might disrupt the status quo. And it'll push hard.

And if you happen to be one of those people who are doing the receiving end, it'll look like the government's a big bad thing. But it's doing what is designed to do. It's keeping everything stable. So the same happens in every domain. It happens within science too. There's kind of a governing thing that happens among editors at journals, whether they know it or not.

And this is simply part of what happens when you get two or more people who try to do something, right? Government. There's some form of governing that happens to keep everything calm. That's why most parents just want everything to be calm and quiet. Like that's it. That's all we need is calm and quiet. If you're going to scream, we have a special room for that. Go in there, scream for a while, and then come out, but then be calm and quiet. No one goes to Hank's for spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza.

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Someone on Deepop wants what you've got. Start selling now. Deepop where Taste recognizes taste. You love that. We all need a screaming room sometimes. Well, let's really ruffle some feathers because what I love to talk about, I loved your book on magic. And I would love if we could have a little conversation about that. And maybe we can start with what is the relationship between sci phenomena and magic?

Well, a year or two before I wrote that book, if somebody had asked me, would you think you would write a book on magic? I would have said, what are you talking about? I don't do magic. And then I started looking into it more detail. And this was after I wrote a book on the yoga cities, the special powers that arise in discipline, meditative practice. And it occurred to me while I was doing the research on that, that the cities, if we cast them into terms that we know today, are all of the same vanilla psychic phenomena that have been happening forever. And in that case, stimulated by really strict and diligent long-term meditative practices with a couple of additional pieces. ended in. But nevertheless, that's what it is. So it occurred to me, well, maybe I should look at

the Western esoteric tradition. So where they don't call it the cities, they call it magic. And after a while, it became clear that what an esoteric practitioner, a wikin, a pagan, somebody of a magical order, what they are doing is exactly what parapsychology has been studying. So that's why in my book, Real Magic, I talk about the three categories of magic are, first of all, all divination, so the classic looking into a crystal ball or equivalent. Divination is about seeing through space and time. Well, we call that precognition and clairvoyance and so on. The second is force of will, which is about the application of intention for interacting

with the physical world. We'd call that psychokinesis. Okay, that's basically the same thing. And then we have theurgy, which probably consumes more about magic than parapsychology does in sense of the hergy is Latin for God work, which means communicating with spirits or asking spirits to do things on your behalf. So in each case, the hergy would be studies of near-death experience and mediumship and that sort of thing. Force of will is psychokinetic stuff and the rest of it is clairvoyance and all the rest. So the only difference is from a scientific perspective,

we find ways of constraining what is done in magic. Like I have recently communicated. I've recently communicating with Peter Carroll, who's the developer of chaos magic, and with a number of other, you can say professional magicians, real magicians, the ones who have taken these old esoteric ideas and trying to bring them up to date. And among the different methods that are used, I would say that chaos magic is essentially is based on modern ideas, is based both on mathematical chaos theory and quantum mechanics, and is about as good a way of thinking about esoteric ideas of magic as we know. And interestingly then, if you look at the underlying theory of chaos magic, as Peter has described it, you come out with an equation of magic, which is the

equation that will let you know how well the magic will work in any given context. And so it includes a number of different categories. It includes categories like belief is a very strong predictor of whether or not the magic will work. Well, we know in parapsychology, the sheep goat effect is all about belief. You can take a group of people and separate them according to their belief and make a prediction that the ones who believe will be better than the ones who don't believe. So in magic, over many, many years, people have simply noticed that if you're coming into this thinking this is stupid and it won't work, don't even bother. It's not going to work. So you need to optimize belief. One of the terms that Peter uses is you need a magical link. The magical link

and the way I would interpret it is that you need a personal linkage to the thing that you're trying to influence if that's what the task is. So you want to do a magical spell to make something happen in the world. You need a personal relationship with that. So one of the traditions where we see this is voodoo, which is probably the easiest way of thinking of it. You need a piece of the person's hair or their clothes or something in order to have this strong relationship, like an association with the object of your magic. There's been a little bit of that done in the parapsychological world, but not as much as I think could be. And then several other categories like that, motivation has to be extremely high. That's difficult to do in a science test.

So you look then at the difference between magical practice, very high motivation, very strong linkage with the thing you're trying to influence, using ritual to boost your belief on and on on on. that is creating an optimized condition for the spell, if that's what it is, to work. Well, okay, that makes a lot of sense from the parapsychological perspective as well, because each of those little elements has been studied in various ways, and it turns out that they do matter. So each one of them matters. Optimizing all of them in an experiment is really, really hard.

Because sometimes we can't provide the motivation. Sometimes we can't provide the belief. We can't provide everything, but never. less, when a magician is doing what they're doing, they do optimize it if they want it to work. So the rest of the book was of that book in particular is talking about history and prevalence and what do we know from a scientific perspective that overlaps with what magicians have found historically through lots of practice. It turns out that there's a very, very strong overlap. That's fascinating. Something that I find really interesting in doing this work and that I

found I had to overcome in myself as well is that I think that there is this recognition that people can get to pretty early in their study of the UFO phenomenon where like it's about it's all about consciousness right and then they can get to from that place that a lot of people can then manage to get to when sci phenomena this looks like they're probably real like they should also be possible in this kind of understanding where everything is consciousness but as soon as you call it magic as soon as you kind of cross that line, people are just out. Like, people who are willing to entertain really kind of progressive ideas about the nature of reality and where all of this might be heading. As soon as you talk about magic, they're just done. Can you talk a little bit about, like,

what it is about the idea of magic? Do you think that people are so resistant to? They're thinking Harry Potter and entertainment. And of course, that magic is entertainment. It's an embellishment, just like all of the entertainment and fiction, is based on that. So one of the ways I try to get around it is the Arthur C. Clark's statement of any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable for magic. We're simply talking about go back 100 years ago and show someone your cell phone and ask them, you know, show them what it can do. That would be magic to them because they cannot conceive of how that can work.

Well, today we can make it because we have the technologies that do allow us. not only conceive, but actually make it. The history of the world is like that. You go back a thousand years ago, there are all kinds of ideas about the way things work, some of which turned out to probably be true. So the whole realm of herbal medicine, for example, which was definitely in the domain of witchcraft, mostly, for this is a pharmaceutical business. And the whole domain of alchemy has become the chemical business and so on. So these concepts have been around, but they have more and more power over time because we were able to understand it at a deeper level, and that turns into our technologies. So what we currently call magic,

and you'll even find scientists occasionally describing something, it's like magic happened, that this thing happened. All that means is we don't quite understand yet how this happened. Science is about understanding causal links between things and how things fit together and all that stop. We will eventually figure out how telepathy works. Well, then it won't be magical anymore. We'll figure out what is going on when somebody casts a spell using a magical method. Well, they don't really understand. Nobody understands at this point. What are all the causal links that cause my intention to do something in the world? Maybe we need a more sophisticated way of thinking about what cause means. Can there be a causal phenomena? Well, yeah, a lot of quantum mechanics.

is considered to be a causal. There is no cause in the everyday sense. And if you don't need to go beyond Aristotle to realize that there are at least four different kinds of cause, so when most people think about scientific cause, you're talking about what Aristotle would have called efficient cause. Another cause that he would talk about is final cause. That the cause, you know, you look at a table and the table, there it is. You don't know how it was made. You don't know where it came from. You know where the materials are, your goal is to get a table. Well, that's a final cause, right? You're jumping over all of the pieces of where that thing came from, but you still have a cause in mind. You're going to a store to get a table. There's a causal element there. And many, many examples like that.

In science today, talking about things like teleological effects, which is a goal-oriented effect, where you're going after the final cause. Well, there's inklings of that. I mean, it's sort of taboo to talk about that in science, but nevertheless, the law of least action, which is a very fundamental law in science, it kind of looks teleological. It means that you're using the least amount of energy in order to get something done. Well, how would you know that unless you've already done it? I kind of don't know. I mean, there are models of why that happened, but there's a lot of mysteries still at fundamental levels within science that we sort of jump over. So, like, we don't exactly know what charge is. is. Like, why does the magnet work? And why? All these really fundamental issues, like, why does

this happen? What is charge? What is a photon? Really? We don't know. So we have mathematical models to describe how it works quite well, which allows us to do technologies. And we may at some point get to a level of understanding what we currently call magic. Well, we don't really know, like, where is it arising out of? What is it? But we know how to use it. But we know how to use it. use it. And so I think that will happen way before we actually understand it at a fundamental level. That's so fascinating. It makes me think of the placebo effect. It's like we know the placebo effect is real to the point that we have to design our studies around it. And like that is very accepted, but the idea of faith healing would be considered just crazy. And granted, those two things are not

the same, but if one is possible, it seems as though the other should be possible. They are very, very close to the same. They're probably closer to the same. They're probably closer to the same. than people are willing to admit. But it's true that the mind-body connection is much, much stronger. And we kind of accept that today. That's what used to be called complementary and alternative medicine became integrative medicine because of the recognition that mind-body is not only mind and body now,

but mind, body, and concepts of spirituality now also are becoming stronger and stronger correlates of your, state of wellness and health. Well, these are all considered crazy taboos back when you weren't allowed to talk about in these terms, but nevertheless, that seems to be the way we're going. The more we learn about the nature of what is possible, even without understanding of fundamentals, many things that were once dismissed as new agey or as fantasy, we're finding, well, some of it, maybe a lot of it, actually is based in something that's real. So that in many ways, it's what the study of psychic phenomena is about too.

Like where their stories have been around forever and people keep having those experiences, well, some of that is probably real. And wouldn't that be interesting? It will tell us all sorts of interesting things that science is sort of dismissed prematurely. Absolutely. I think the other thing that's interesting and that you did point out in the book as well is that people have this real aversion to the idea of magic. And yet there are a lot of magical practices that people engage in either through their religious beliefs or, you know, rooting for their favorite sports team.

I wondered if you could speak to that a little bit about the ways that we use magic that we may not think of magic. Just look at the number of people who have one or more superstitions. It's very common in sports in particular. You see this. Every time somebody gets a touchdown and thanks Jesus, well, is that a superstition or what is that? But I mean, it is so common that it's considered standard practice at this point. It may not be called magic, but certainly a lot of religious ceremonies are not called magic because you're not supposed to, but they are explicitly magic. So I use the example in my book of the Catholic Eucharist, which is basically turning blood into wine or wine in the blood and vice versa.

and the piece of bread turns into Jesus. And, you know, these are all based on magical concept. And if you're really strict about it and believe 100%, this is not just a show. It's not just an association that's literally considered to be true. It's part of the ongoing miracle that is shown again and again that is useful for maintaining belief in a religion. I grew up in the Catholic Church.

and it was really interesting. I definitely almost got kicked out of school when I was in like eighth grade because they found me with some books of witchcraft. And it's so funny to me now to look back and kind of I had that recognition over the last year where I just, I was like, oh, the mass is ritual magic.

And I didn't recognize that. That's exactly what it is. And the right, but see, that's the thing about the catechism, which is so interesting that in certain contexts, this is perfectly fine. If you're a priest and you're anointed to do these kinds of things, then yes, this is good magic. But those other people's magic, that's not good magic.

Well, okay. And plenty of scientists are quite religious. And so they're okay. I mean, you need to be a little bit of schizophrenic in order to do this, but you need to split between your personal life and your personal beliefs and what is required in the scientific world and what you can talk about in the scientific world. what I find most fascinating is academics whose job is to study religion, so scholars of religion. When you look at what is written about so-called paranormal kinds of experiences and magic, very, very rarely will you see somebody saying, well, these are real. They'll talk about it in the same way that an anthropologist will talk about it,

that this is what people believed, and this may be what they practice, but you don't give a hint that you actually believe that any of the stuff is true. It is not allowed in the academic world. So I know some of these people, and I know privately they don't feel that way at all, but they do feel the constraint about what you can talk about. So it's a rare academic who has managed to craft out a viable living as an academic and actually is willing to admit in public that they think some of these things are real. Some of the UFOs are real.

Some of the psychic phenomena are real. Some things we call magic because we don't know what else to call it are real, because privately that's what most people say. Absolutely. Something I'd love to touch on because I think it's so good to get a different perspective, you know, you're talking about in academia, kind of the silos that are created.

I think it happens everywhere. And the UFO community is certainly guilty of it. I think sometimes we need to hear outside perspectives. When you're talking about theory and I think for a lot of people coming from this perspective would compare that to contact work or, you know, say, oh, they're communicating with a non-human intelligence. And a lot of times people will, like, ascribe very particular identities or characteristics to that non-human intelligence, whether it be a god or an ultraterrestrial or, you know,

a future human or whatever they decide that day. With someone who studied this as a scientist, like, what are your thoughts about theory and what is actually happening there? Which I know is not an easy question to answer. Yeah. So I'm agnostic when it comes to that issue. There was essay contests by Robert Bigelow for writing essays about the evidence for survival of bodily death. And so the group of us at IANs wrote one of the essays and we got one of the prizes.

And the approach that we took was we look at the eight or nine different categories of evidence for survival after bodily death, some of which involve entities. interacting with entities, apparitions, ghosts, and whatever. And then we did what you would do when you do a systematic review of evidence where you assign a letter grade based on various criteria to how convincing, how persuasive is this category. Well, nobody got an A. There was no level of evidence that gets an A. There were one got like a B plus and one got a B. And these are things like near-death experience with theoretical descriptions afterwards.

So just as a matter of how sure are we are that way these things happen, but then before you try to put an interpretation on it and mediumship and things like that, because they can be experimentally studied and we know we can exclude confabulation and mistakes and that sort of thing. The bottom line comes down, well, do we think after looking at all of this evidence? We've read a lot of the evidence, and I already knew a lot of the evidence. Can you then make a strong statement that, yes, their survival out to bodily death, and her conclusion was no, you can't. You can't because since we know independently that there are sci effects in the living, and ultimately, all of these experiences that people are reporting are from people who are living, there's no dead people who are

coming to the table giving us answers. All of it is coming from the living. And now you have to look at, okay, how good is the evidence for these kinds of phenomena from people who are then reporting it? Well, you take the experience at face value, like that you don't want to discount somebody's experience because nobody has the right to do that. But you can then say, well, maybe they're mistaken. Maybe they got the information psychically and they don't know it. Maybe, maybe, maybe. And then stir into the pot, very high motivation to want it to be true. And we concluded, no, we have to remain agnostic.

It might be true. Some of the evidence is pretty interesting and compelling. I have other colleagues who say, no, you're not interpreting this correctly, that the evidence is absolutely 100% proven. I'm someone who is not able to reach that level of confidence. So I don't know. So if somebody is communicating with non-human entities, I mean, we see this in channeling all the time that there are creatures from the nearby star systems and creatures that were never in any kind of embodied form. and all kinds of spirits and everything. The information that typically is reported are platitudes,

things you can predict pretty easily. And they're not giving new information that would give you at least some sense that the information that's being conveyed is maybe not completely psychic because it's too precise or something. But to me, most of it sounds like platitudes, which is fine.

I mean, sometimes the platitudes are even useful, but that doesn't mean it's coming from the Pleiades. So there's another element to this, which is that I see this happen for people, especially to take drugs like DMT and some other psychedelics. From those experiences, from that experiential base, we are saturated with non-human and visible intelligences everywhere all the time. When I see some medium sometimes, they'll look over my shoulder and say, oh, you know, there's 14 people over here. It's crowded with people that are telling you something or they're with you or they're supporting you or something. So I then do a thought experiment where I say, well, okay, what if I could turn a switch

or take a drug and witness that all the time? I couldn't operate. In my current form, I could not operate because I would freak out so much to have this notion that we're just totally saturated with these other intelligences around that may or may not be interacting with you or possessing you or who knows what's going on. there. So I can easily imagine that I have a filter in place, which is allowing me to completely not see any of that. Why? So that is an organism I can operate okay, because otherwise it, just like being too psychic, I would be distracted by all of these creatures all the time telling

me things. And so look then in the psychiatric literature, and this is one of the things you see as a indicator of psychiatric illness. All that said, some people who are diagnosed as having a psychiatric problem, like schizophrenia, maybe psychosis. I think they're actually, they're flagrantly psychic for reasons we don't understand, and they can't discriminate anymore between the reality that this organism needs to live in versus some other reality. So you take DMT and for 10 minutes, you're in the midst of endless creatures. Well, when you come out of DMT, you don't want those creatures around anymore because then you become paralyzed. So I have great sympathy for people like natural mediums who are still grounded because they can turn it on and off. If they could

not turn it on and off, they would be in a mental hospital. The same goes for psychic. If you can't turn it off, you'll be diagnosed as having a serious problem and have to take drugs to suppress it. The same thing could happen with UFOs. If you're communicating with things all the time out there, how do you hold down a job? How do you survive? How do you do anything? Because I can see how you can kind of open a filter. Maybe there is really something out there. And then it would become disruptive.

You'd be totally debilitated based on those experiences. So that's one of the cautions then that I, when people say, how would I train to become really, really psychic? My first question is, are you sure you want to do that? There's a downside to this. So be careful what you wish for. Yeah. No, I find that really fascinating. Thank you for that. I guess the last question with regard to magic is if people, you know, obviously we've given all these warnings about what people should look out for, but inevitably people are going to want to check it out for themselves. I found your book, Real Magic, to be extremely helpful for me and just understanding what it is. I know you mentioned Peter Carroll. I find chaos magic is being, for me, at least, an easier entry point to kind of understand the basic. but do you have any other recommendations for people who just want to get their mind around,

like, what magic actually is? Well, so one of the chapters in that book, I talk about practical magic. Like, what would you do? What is a magical practice? I talk about word magic and several others, but the one I focused on was sigil magic because it's a very easy quasi-modern form of magical ritual, which is easy to do. And the example I have in the book is that you create a sigil. SIGIL just means symbol.

You create a symbol of, I will find $10. I'll find a $10 bill. And then you make a little symbol of that, and this becomes your way of instantiating your intention. You get it out of your head, you put it on something physical in the real world, you do a little ritual, and then you release it and then see what happens.

So I've had a number of people come back afterwards, including in interviews like this. They said, well, they tried that sigil experiment, and sure enough, they found a $10 bill just lying there on the ground. And it freaked them out so much that that happened, they took the $10 bill. But it freaked them out because it was so close in time to their doing the siguel exercise, and they had not had that experience before that they got scared, saying,

holy crap, this stuff is, this is real, this stuff. So I'm actually in the beginning stages of writing another book, which is following up on lots of feedback that have gotten from real magic. which is, I really want to use magic. So what do I do? It's a book about practical magic. The thing about practical magic is anybody can learn to make a sigil. It's trivial.

You can even get an app for your phone that will make a sigil for you. Or there's a website where you can make a sigil. Doesn't have the same degree of personal import, but nevertheless you can do that. What I wanted to explain, there's lots of books out there and grimauders and other books of witchcraft and whatever. The different angle that I want to take on this is to recognize the various factors that come into play on why magic would work. So there's some theory underneath this. And this is what, even though we still don't understand the fundamentals, these things have to be in place in order for magic to work. So just one example is belief.

We have really good evidence of belief makes a big difference, at least for psychic phenomena. Does it make a difference in magic? Well, yeah, a lot of magicians say, you absolutely need to believe in this, though, to the point where a magician will never reveal to another person what they did. Because the moment you do that, doubt can be injected, and you can't have doubt in these. It's difficult to think about this. If you're coming into some of a skeptical perspective, which you should, how do you suspend your disbelief so that you can allow the belief factor and not get in the way? Well, you work on it. That's how you do it.

you do, that's what the rituals are for. So you can get to the point where you can suspend your disbelief and then you don't tell anybody what you did because it will immediately cause you to disbelieve. And these things do not work in normal time. So if you do the whole ritual and it's finished and it's over with and you're waiting for something to happen, and somebody comes along and said, that's bullshit. That's stupid that you're doing that. That could erase it backwards in time. And then it says you'd never did it before or worse, you get the opposite effect or you get some the fact that you really didn't want. So these are the kinds of things I'll be talking about besides saying, this is what you do. These are the things that you need to do in order for that

thing to work. And oh, by the way, don't do this. Don't do that. I mean, it's not quite as prescriptive as I'm describing, but nevertheless, it'll focus more on what would you do and how would you actually test? Because that's a real part of it too. How would you test if this actually work. And interestingly, in talking to lots of magicians, many of them don't want to do experiments. They don't want to put it to the test because that requires challenging your own beliefs. And as I said, belief is such a strong part of this that you don't want to challenge your belief. You have to maintain it at a level, which is kind of like what I would see in a person who's a fundamentalist. Don't ask questions because you can't have any doubt put into your belief because

the belief is like a balloon and a doubt will pop the balloon and then you've lost something. So I completely understand their perspective. And I realize then that the kind of work that I do, especially if I'm doing an experiment in psychokinesis, I do have a way of suspending disbelief. and I've worked on it for many years to be able to get to the point where there's doubt because otherwise I wouldn't be doing the experiment. But you also get into some strange position where it's like going to a movie. I'm not questioning that I'm only looking at a flat surface with little pixels that are doing it. I'm in the story. Well, similarly, you have to be in the story.

You have to allow the suspension of disbelief at least during the ritual. And then afterwards, in science, we publish everything that we do. So ideally, you could do it, convince yourself, and never talk to anybody else about it. But that's not the game that we're playing. So it means that future observation and skepticism will help, I think, squash the effect into a smaller piece than it would be otherwise if you had never told anybody. But, you know, science is all about sharing what you've learned and getting independent confirmation of it. And that's a power of it, too. And I accept that.

That's what I do. I think it is also one of the reasons why doing this kind of research is challenging and the results are not as strong as you would find from somebody who's doing it privately. So something I'd love to dive into a little bit. I know for skeptics, it can be so hard to believe that any of these things are true or that anyone serious takes them seriously. And yet, our government has made some significant investments in studying these kinds of phenomena and developing these kinds of abilities in people. And you, yourself, were a member of Project Stargate. And I was wondering if you would be willing to talk a little bit about your time at Stargate and what the program was and what you did. I was working at Bell Labs at the time, and we always had some time where we could do anything that we wanted at Bell Labs because who would work on projects usually had many people on it.

And so there would be periods where you're waiting for everybody else to finish whatever they're doing. So I decided I was interested in parapsychology and I started doing those experiments at Bell Labs, or my job, essentially. So some of them were precognition experiments and some psychokinetic experiments, using myself and my colleagues as the participants, including the one who said it was the work of the devil and he didn't want to do it. I went to a conference of the Parapsychological Association and talked about some of the work I was doing involving precognition. And I remember when I finished that talk and there was like a standing ovation. People were cheering and I was in, oh, what's happening? year because it's just a precognition test. They were so happy to see that somebody outside of the field at that point would be taking this seriously. That's all it was. And so I was, I felt,

okay, it was just precognition, settled down. But unbeknownst to me at the time, there was Ed May and Rustarg and people like that who were part of the Sargay program. And afterwards, after that talked, they pulled me aside and said, would you be interested in working on this program? Well, there were rumors at the time, this was the mid-80s, that the government was doing something, but it was classified. So all we knew were rumors. And we knew that SRI International was doing at least work on remote viewing because they had published a paper in nature on this. So the secret was sort of an open secret at the point, at that point. So I said, yeah, I mean, an offer you can't refuse because, yeah, who wouldn't want to do that?

So anyway, so I took a year leave of absence from Bell Labs for the calendar year, 1985. And I went there and took a long time to get all the clearances for everything. And then after I got the clearances, Hal Pudoff, who was the director at the time, gave me the briefing that everyone gets when they go through this process. And that blew my mind because the briefing was. now some of it was experimental work, but some of it was also operational work. Because I didn't know of that time that, I mean, hardly anybody knew that there was a program actually active where people were using this for operational purposes, these kinds of things. So I saw examples of those operational missions and the results of them

and saw for the first time that if you're dealing with people with high talent, that you can get almost veridical drawing, like photographic drawings, of things that nobody on our side of the pond knew and yet turn out to later be verified through human intelligence and satellites and so on. And then I also got a chance to meet Ingo Swan and Joe McMonigle and other people who are now well known for being quite good at this thing. And a bunch of other people who are still not very well known, but were about as good.

So there's a cadre of perhaps a dozen people who were remarkably skilled. And I was working on precognition tests. And I would say most of what I was doing was involved in threat analysis. If there's one thing that gets the government excited about something, just as with UFOs, as we're seeing now, if there's a potential threat, then people get nervous and start allocating money to study this thing. it can be classified for a very long time, as we know with UFOs now, too, that programs can have gone on for a very long time until something happens that outs the program. It could be somebody, a whistleblower, it could be something somebody comes along and says, this is what we've been doing for a long time, and we're kind of concerned about it for reasons,

X, Y, and Z. Well, there wasn't the case for Stargate program, because that was one of a whole bunch of programs. Stargate was just one code word. When I was on the program, it was called Grill Flame. That was the name of the code word at the time. And for your listeners who know about classification levels, this was T-S-S-C-I Special Access program. So this was way down in the deep black.

You had to sign a book to know that of the existence of this thing and even to know what the code order was and what it meant. So the reason for that is because there was overlap with the operational missions. And so many times you go into a top C. secret world when there are people and methods involved. And if they became publicly known, their lives would be in danger and the methods would no longer be useful. So one of the things I learned in that program was on the outside of the building at

SRI, all this talk about psychic whatever is nonsense. It doesn't exist. It's all fantasy. Inside the building and during a daily work, that's what we were studying. Well, why was that split? The split is because the value of such a program is that everybody else thinks it's nonsense. Because then they're not looking at it, right? So I kind of suspect that some of that has been going on in the UFO world, too.

People make fun of it and say, there's nothing here. It's all nonsense because it's a way of deflecting attention. So some of it's probably that. So anyway, so threat assessment was a big piece of it, and that meant looking at claims from publications that we, We would get out of China or out of Soviet Union at the time. And even claims that we saw from the open press or open literature, could we believe this or not? Is this a threat?

So sometimes it would advance to the point where we would try to replicate one of the claims, like redo the experiment. And sometimes we couldn't. Sometimes you couldn't. So I was one year as part of a very long program. and I people then say well is there still a program well that program doesn't exist anymore but are there other programs like that I would be surprised if there were not programs like that whether they have the same goals whether they they're where are they who's doing it I don't know I have no idea yeah absolutely because I mean to be clear the reason there would they would still exist is because

it sounds like it worked right so much of what you hear on the skeptical side of things is like, oh, maybe this program existed, but they got rid of it because it didn't really work. But obviously, it sounds like from what you're saying, it more than worked. It definitely works, yeah. And so for those who hold the opinion that they got rid of it because it didn't work, all you need to do is actually look at the formal report that was written for the CIA to evaluate it in which the conclusion was, well, maybe it doesn't work well for operational missions. But a phenomenon exists.

And this was, of course, by Jessica Outson and Ray Hyman, who were on two sides of the argument there. Ray Hyman even admitted this, the phenomenon looks like it's real. And Jessica, of course, said, yeah, I've looked at all the data. It is real. The question is, how useful is it, right? Do we want to spend what amounts to a million dollars a year to use something which is not as reliable as a spy satellite? And the answer to that is we absolutely should be doing that. because a spy satellite costs a billion dollars or more.

And here we're talking about 1,000th of that for an entire year to begin to learn more and more about the nature of this phenomenon to make it more reliable. So one of the thought experiments that we did back then was, well, what if we came up with a method, some sort of stimulation method or drug or something, that could turn an average person into a super psychic, a very reliable high accuracy psychic.

What would happen to that? And the answer was immediate. It would disappear and you'd never be able to talk about it again. Because then it would be so useful, it would go even further down that black hole that things disappear into. So I know at the time that a lot of effort was paid to try to figure out, why is Ingo Swan so good?

What is different about him or Joe McMonigle than anybody else? every method was used that we could think of and couldn't find any difference. He seemed perfectly normal. So many, many years later, at ions, we're doing this project called Cy genes, where we're saying, well, oftentimes talents have a genetic basis. Well, let's see if we can find it. So we did a very small scale study looking at comparing psychics from psychic families who we vetted to have some talent versus match controls. So age and gender match controls. who had no psychic experience in them or their families.

So one of the things we learned in this experiment was it's pretty easy to find people who are psychic from psychic families is really difficult to find people who never had anything psychic from no one in their family ever having anything psychic. So the unusual people here were the controls. And we had to find them for this experiment. So we then got their DNA, we got their genome. and it turns out that the controls are the mutants, not the other people.

Like the psychics and psychic families look like the wild type gene, like the average gene of everybody. The controls actually had an intron sequence, which was different. So the intron sequence in the DNA is a non-coding portion of the DNA. So it used to be called junk DNA because they didn't know what it was for. Well, we have better ideas now about what that's for. you can think of it in some ways as kind of an epigenetic switch, a portion of the DNA that could turn genes on and off depending on the needs of the environment. So the mutants, the controls,

had this mutation. They had something funny going on in their intron sequence. That gives me some idea about it may be possible in the future to take somebody who is not particularly talented in this domain and maybe make them more talented by first of all, finding out what's going on in that intron sequence, and we can twiddle that, change that. But more importantly, you need a very large contingent of people in order to find an actual genetic constellation of genes that are associated with traits. So, for example, we know that there are different forms of intelligence, crystalline intelligence or fluid intelligence, the different ways of expressing intelligence.

They have different sets of genes, something as relatively subtle as that. So it is extremely likely, I think, that people who are really talented psychically are a little bit different. They have different constellation of genes, perhaps hundreds of genes and different connect norms in the brains, but they're different somehow. They would be different in a form where we'd be able to engineer that. And so we'd have taken the side genes project as a kind of a case study of why do we think it would be valuable to spend millions of dollars to develop this? Well, because then we can create super psychics. Would that be a good thing or a bad thing? Well, that's an ethical question.

It's an important ethical question, and I don't have a good answer to it yet. But can we do it? I think the answer is yes, we can't. So that is why I co-founded a genetic engineering company, which has been going for a couple of years now, where we can address existing psychiatric disorders through a nasal spray, which has genetic edits in it. So we can do either DNA or RNA editing.

So DNA would be a permanent change. RNA would be a temporary change. It would significantly reduce chronic anxiety and would significantly increase memory deficits. So we're developing a product that would simultaneously improve memory and reduce anxiety. So there is a syndrome of that, mild cognitive impairment with anxiety.

So we have a treatment for that. And it would be temporary, be an RNA treatment, but we can do that. And so further down the line, we have in mind, well, once somebody figures out what kind of genetics are involved in being psychic, we could probably do that too. It's not during the question of whether we should, right? We're focusing on psychiatric disorders to begin with just to be able to, like a proof of principle, can we do this? Yeah, we're pretty sure we can do it.

We know we can do it in mice and rats, but we don't have approval yet. to try this in humans. If we can try it in humans and it works, which I expect it will, it'll be a safe and very effective way of treating real problems, anxiety and memory deficits. And we also have ways and means of affecting virtually any other neuronal receptor in the brain, very precisely. So we're thinking at this point of hiring as a consultant,

a person who specializes in bioethics to help us deal with knowledge is power, right? Is this a good thing? Is this not a good thing? If we wanted to go ahead and do it, how should we do it and keep it above board and safe and all that? Well, we don't know that yet. I mean, we're still at this basic science at this point, but I kind of suspect that we can get there. So imagine at some point we have that means of making somebody super psychic. I don't know.

So like every other day I think this would be the best thing ever because we'll be able to get much more creative solutions to real problems. And then the other alternative days, I'm thinking, ew, that may be not a good thing to do after all. And then on the next day, I'm thinking, but wait a minute, if we can do this, there will be people in the world who will definitely do it. that we'll follow it up because it provides a tool. And then I said, well, do we want to follow everything?

And the reason why I go back and forth on this is because one time I met the guy who developed trans fats. So he was a biochemist and he came out with trans fats as a way of saying, we could have all the deliciousness of fats without any of the bad sides of fats. So that became a real popular thing for a while until it discovered that this is really, really bad to eat trans fats. but he didn't know that when he started. He said, this could solve a major problem. We could solve all kinds of cardiovascular incidents and whatever. It turns out to be worse than regular fats.

Well, yeah, that's why I have pause in thinking about these things. And even if it wasn't a biomedical treatment, do we want everybody to be meditators? Well, maybe not. You know, it's a certain luxury to be able to do these sort of mind exploration things. So maybe it isn't for everyone. It's from leading edge. And maybe it needs to be suppressed to some extent, too. So I don't have good answers to this, but I think about it.

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See Associate at Lowe's.com for details. Yeah, no, that's absolutely fascinating. It seems to me like this would be a great time to be young and be deciding to be a scientist. Like, I kind of wish I could go back and take a different path. But talking through where science is heading and the kinds of work that you're talking about, where do you see as being kind of the most interesting places that are going to be opening up in terms of opportunities for younger people who might want to be getting involved in the sciences? Well, AI is the current push. And AI is advancing rapidly and will at some point go over the curve

and advance beyond our ability to keep up with it. That's going to happen. Biotech is the other area. So some elements of biotech, tech now, especially adding AI into it, we're able to develop models that are very, very close to the complexity of the human body. That means that some of the very intractable diseases that we've been dealt with forever will probably come up with pretty good solutions, purers, to all kinds of interesting things. That has a consequence to it. It means the population will explode even faster, or it means that only very wealthy people will be able to avoid these things, and that will only make the separation between the wealthy and the not wealthy

worse than ever. People who live essentially forever who are super billionaires, and then the rest of us don't get to have that. So again, ethical issues that come about as a result of new discoveries lead to new kinds of power. So I don't know what you do with that, right? I mean, in a scientist perspective is you want to know. You want to know how things work and that that's what the driver is. For me, the driver about psychic phenomena is that I'm curious about it.

I'm driven by the curiosity. Like, what is that? What does that mean? Does it have a philosophical twist to it? What are the ethics? All of that. I'm interested in all of that. I worry about knowledge is power because I can see that in some cases it will lead to a worse future

than the one that we currently have. Or maybe it could lead to a better future. I don't know. We need smarter people than me to figure out those kinds of elements to this. So AI and biotech definitely are areas that are exploding and rightly so. Probably it would be worthwhile to be somebody who's involved in an engineering of the power grid, better ways, much more efficient and better ways of getting power because the world runs on electrical power for now. and so better means of generating it that is not going to end up killing us with fossil fuels,

if that's what's going on. Probably spaceflight, too. At some point, you know, we are explorers naturally. It's hardwired into us. And there's certainly a lot of places on the Earth, especially under the oceans, that we don't really know what's going on. There's plenty of room for exploration there. But the rest of the universe is beckoning.

So if I were to do it again, I would probably stay in physics the whole way. But in retrospect, I think about that because I've spent a fair amount of time in physics too. I think one of the reasons why I'm more open to the psychic phenomena is because I also spent a fair amount of time in my earlier career as a musician who had nothing to do with science. So it had an art and music background, but then they went into psychology and I've also spent a lot of time in engineering and physics. So I was able to somehow jump over the science. silos that are very easy to drop into. As I've dabbled in many, many different fields and can start to see like a fabric that begins to connect them all. And from that larger view, you can see a lot of

things that we consider to be anomalous. They're really not so strange after all. It's just reminders that we don't really have everything wrapped up. We have a worldview that you could sort of dive into, like somebody who we would think of as being scientific, the science is the religion, like people who take over Wikipedia and trash certain topics because they don't like it. Well, that's a pity. They're simply ignorant. They don't know that they're ignorant, which is even worse. But they've so dropped into a kind of religious sense about a worldview that science has created that they don't realize there's all kinds of holes in it. It is a kind of a tapestry where a dog bit at it a lot and made all bunches of holes and tears in this thing.

it sort of holes together pretty good. But the holes in there, I mean, this is not an absolute fabric. It is our models about the way that we think about things work. And every time an anomaly pops up, whether it's a telepathy or UFO, people are very quick to say, no, the fabric won't hold that. No, I'm looking through a hole in the fabric and seeing it pretty clearly. It really is a real thing in there. And we just need to be better weavers.

in a sense. If we're going to tie up these little holes in this fabric, it has to accommodate that stuff because it happens to repeatedly. It's been happening forever or maybe misinterpreting it, but to throw it out because you think it's impossible because it doesn't fit the war view. That's a mistake. There's a new way to sweet greed. Meat, wraps, handheld, party, and made for life on the moon. With bold, chef-crafted flavors, fresh ingredients, and over 40 grams of protein, They're built to satisfy without slowing you down. Try wraps today in the app or at order. Sweetgreen.com, available at all participating locations.