Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Dolphins and LSD

Episode Date: September 15, 2026

With an email subject line of "Dolphins and LSD", Dr. Sydnee and Justin just HAD dive deeper. Enter John C. Lilly, a doctor, scientist, and psychonaut who became very interested in meditation and expanding the consciousness, eventually leading to using psychedelics to try and communicate with Flipper.Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers https://taxpayers.bandcamp.com/Midwest Food Bank: https://midwestfoodbank.org/disaster-relief/ Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinsawbones

Sawbones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. Hello everybody. Welcome to Sawbones.

I'm Marital Tour of Miss Guy to Medicine, and I'm your co-host, Justin Macon. And I'm Sydney McElroy. I didn't get a drink. You know, I realized. Yeah, I didn't either. Oh, boy. We're going to have, we're going to have rough.

Dry episode. And my voice is already rough. I'm really worried that I'm getting something, that I'm coming down with something. Oh my God. You said that, but like right before we started recording, I got that like, you know how sometimes you have a feeling in your throat that isn't like sick, but it's like pre-sick. You're like, whoa, is that the feeling of sickness coming? And this isn't a bit. I know it feels like since this is a medical history podcast that we're about like, it's a leading.

And it's like, ha-ha, joke. No, I... Sorry, my things are all. All of my patients this past week, well, not all of them, but quite a few of them, have had upper respiratory situations. There's something going around. And I feel like, I feel like it's coming. I feel like it's coming. I hope I'm wrong.

It's nature's way of saying, hey, take a break, friend. Take it easy. I've also had to talk a lot this week, so it could just be that. Maybe that's what it is. Yeah. I'm going to talk more now, though. Oh, no, but that's good because it's for educational purposes. It's for sawd bones.

So this week, I had an really interesting topic recommendation from listener, Samantha. Thank you, Samantha. Samantha said specifically, we could mention their name on the show. Thank you, Samantha. Thank you, Samantha. The email was titled Dolphins and LSD. So there's a little, let me give you this hint because I get so many emails, and that's where I get so many topics from. And I also never delete emails.

Justin can attest to this. So sometimes I'll just go scanning back pages and pages and pages. If you email me a subject line like Dolphins and LSD, I'm probably going to click on it because what? Yeah. Scammers have been getting Sydney for years that way. Like, whoa, I won how much from a Nigerian academy? That sounds incredible. Can I, listen, can I tell you the place where I work, my health care institution?

sends us fishing emails, like test fishing emails to see if we'll fall for them. She's good at it. And I have 100% fishing detection rate. I get like a little badge. It sends me like a little badge with confetti. Like, congratulations. She has a badge that she shows people, that she flashes at parties and stuff like. Check it out in case anything goes down.

I'm ready. I'm ready. I know if it's a fishing email. I'm prepared. This is not about fish. This is about dolphins. Oh, yeah. Ditch or not fish.

Sorry, kids. Sorry to break your hearts. Not this time. It's actually not just about dolphins. I want to talk about John C. Lilly. So the email started off, and John C. Lily was mentioned, but it was more about dolphins in LSD. But then I started researching this guy that I'd never heard of.

This was a name I was unfamiliar with. As I start to talk about what he did and what has come from his work, I think, Justin, you are going to recognize some stuff. Okay. But I did not. But it was such a fascinating life story of this doctor, scientist, psychonaut. Psychonaut. You know what a psychonaut is.

I do, yeah, but only because there was a very popular couple of video games called Psychonauts. There were like adventure games about people who delved into the inner psyche. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, explorers of the consciousness, usually using psychedelic substances to do so. So John Lilly did not start off on a track that you would have predicted he would become a psychonaut. He was born in 1915 to a wealthy Catholic family in St. Paul, Minnesota, wealthy, well-connected. His dad was a banker. His mom came for money.

He was born into a situation where he should have been a very like uptight, straight-laced sort of dude. Yeah. Right. his dad wanted him to be a banker just like him. His life was laid out for him. He had all the right connections, the trust fund, all in front of him. That was not what he wanted. Early on, and he writes about this, he wrote a book, The Scientist, which is kind of his autobiography.

The scientist? Oh, boy. It was his metaphysical autobiography. And so a lot of what I'm pulling from comes from his own account. Now, I will say as far, and I haven't read the book, but from the excerpts, that I've read, it sounds like he wrote about himself in third person, which is also kind of cool. I like that. So at 13, he became very interested in science.

He remembers, like, making his own laboratory in the basement and collecting chemicals and dumping stuff together to try to figure out what would come from it. He was given, even, like, throughout his early years of schooling, they would give him extra time in the school lab. He went to early Catholic schooling, and they would let him spend time doing his little science experience in the lab. Yeah. They used to call him Einstein Jr., even as a kid. Would have been a better name for the autobiography, to be honest. Than the scientist. Yeah. Einstein Jr., that would be sick. The Justin McElroy story, that would

be actually a good title for anybody's autobiography. Einstein Jr. And I don't think there's a Coldplay song called that. That's true. That I know. I don't know all of Coldplay's rough. One of the big advantages of that title is it's not a Coldplay song. It's something in publishing you're always looking for. He does talk about when he was 13, there was one experiment that did not go well. So you remember how we would try, or maybe you never tried, but a lot of people would drop Mentos into soda, a bottle of soda, to watch it like erupt like a volcano. So he sort of did that, except instead what he did is he took a bottle, a Coke bottle. It did not have Coke in it.

It had sulfur, sodium, chlorate, and charcoal, and then he dropped a match into it. Wow. Which is a different kind of thing, which resulted in. an injury to his brother. So he was very, like, from an early age, he was willing to push the boundaries of acceptable science. This is going to become a theme. Okay. A series of events will move him towards medicine. Initially, he's more interested in physics. He spent a lot of time studying physics and chemistry. He decided his dad very much wanted him to go to Harvard, had all the connections to get him into an Ivy League institution, wanted him to go into finance, become a banker.

He didn't want that. He ended up going to Caltech instead. He's the same. He's the science. scientist. He is the scientist. And while he was there, he was initially studying physics, he started moving into neurophysiology because he read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. And he was fascinated by what could the brain do? Well, the idea of a chemical that you could put into the brain to make it do other things, you know. Such a fascinating relationship between science and science fiction, how the two kind of inspire each other. I mean, the classic example is like Star Trek. You know, the flip phones used to be very common. That design was inspired by the tricorder from Star Trek because people like that idea of like flipping it out and like you're talking into it.

So the design was sourced from the sci-fi. It's an interesting virtuous circle too. A lot of sci-fi is derived from like new discoveries in science, then, you know, a whole new way of sci-fi. So it's interesting how those to feed each other. I know. And now, of course, we're all trying to make, like we're reconstructing ears to look more like Spock ears because we know that those. are. Right. That's why everybody's getting that spock hair surgery. The spockere surgery that is so popular now. The SES. Just another example. I got a BBL and an SES last week. You can only notice

one, but I still can't sit down. So he goes to Caltech. He's studying neuropysiology. Who wants to know more about, like I said, the human brain, how can chemical substances, what could it do, and kind of exploring that idea. And he, He also gets engaged at this time. And basically the story is he's overwhelmed. Life is stressful. So he decides to kind of take a break from learning. And he goes and works for a lumber company for a little while.

Mm-hmm. I feel like you find this kind of story often in these, like, academic science people who, like, want to go take a break and work with their hands for a period of time, do something that doesn't engage their brain in the same way. Just like at the end of the office space. Yeah. Yeah. I always to get out there, do something outside, work with his hands, mix up. So he goes to do that. We're animals.

So if you are in, if you're, you spend too long in the lab, eventually you go wild. You got to get outside. Yep. Run around, jump on rocks and stuff. So he does this and ends up getting his foot crushed, unfortunately. So that leads him to spend a lot of time in the hospital. And this, I think, is why he goes into medicine. There were a couple different stories that he told about what inspired him to go into medicine.

Sure. This was the most common one I found. He watched the doctors take care of him. And he had had a couple other experiences. He watched his dad was in a coma. at one point. And so that made him wonder about the brain turning on and off. And he watched doctors take care of his dad.

His brother died when he was younger. So there were all these experiences that kind of pushed him towards medicine. So, and there's this theme where like, I mean, his entire life, when he didn't have an institution that funded his research, his dad was there for them. There for him. Even if he didn't agree with, like, his track. I don't agree with science, but I'm here for you. But you want to go to med school. So I'm going to connect you to my friend, Charles Mayo.

That, yes, that may-o. The mayonnaise guy? No. Oh, the Mayo. The clinic guy. And he's going to advise you. And he advised him to go to Dartmouth, which feels weird. But he did.

So he went to Dartmouth for medical school, and while he was there, he became fascinated with research. So Dartmouth was very much focused on, at the time, creating physicians who would go practice, not necessarily who would go into research, which you can do. You know, I don't do that. Everybody always, all through your career in academics, they're always wanting you. you to do research. But it's not my thing. I like to do stuff. But you like to write it down. No, I hate having to write it down. If somebody could just follow me around and write down what I'm doing, that would be really great. They always tell you a med student will do that. That's not true. That's not true. They won't do it. See, for your new nurse, that's what you need. You need,

when they hire your new nurse, you need a nurse who's also kind of like a, like a bard. You know what I mean? Like a combo. I don't know if you can train as like a combo nurse. and Bard. So you're like doing all the incredible essential things, but you're also like doing some heraldry and stuff like that. It would be incredible if I had a nurse who was into research as well and could help me with that because I'm not. I'm just not.

It's not my strong suit. I like to do this stuff and I know there's stuff that we can publish, but I just am never going to take the time to write it down. I'm also looking for I need a nurse desperately if anybody is interested. You want to work with Sydney, a Sydney's nurse at Harmony House. M-A, LPN, RN. Get in touch. If you can draw blood and you'll be nice to my patience.

Sawbones and maximum fun.org. Let me know. Let us know. In desperate need. So anyway, he's interested in neurophidology. You don't have to be a scribe or a bard. Just a regular. No.

You actually don't have to be into research either. I really just, I need somebody who will be nice to people experiencing homelessness and also is great at drawing blood. That's really it. Yeah. So anyway, he decides he wants to go to med school. He goes to Dartmouth. While he's there, there's all these interesting accounts throughout his

life. A lot has been written about this guy, and he's inspired a lot, so it makes sense, where, like, at the same time, he dissected, like, a wild number of cadavers. It caught my attention because I went to med school. We are assigned a cadaver as a group. So myself, along with, I think I had six people total in my groups, and me and five other students had an assigned cadaver, and we spent our time in anatomy lab going through the different areas and dissecting it. he dissected 32 cadavers during his med school career, which feels like a lot, a lot. He also allegedly...

It's just us here. Seems like maybe too many. If I had to like, I mean, as a layman... I don't know where... I don't know how he had the opportunity. Well, it must have... It was a different time. It was a different time.

It was a different time. It was a different time. He once took the human intestine and stretched it all out into end across the whole room, allegedly, so that he could... together. No. So that you could measure it for real, like, not estimate, but like, anyway.

Got to have a long hallway, too. Man, I hope the hallway was really, really well cleaned after that, like, super well cleaned. He, while he was there, he developed an interest in self-experimentation, and this would, this is really where. The least surprising thing you've said about this cat in this entire episode, no way, no how. He believed very strongly. He would say my body is my laboratory that if you should not do something to a test subject that you haven't done on yourself first. I am not saying these are principles of research.

These were his personal beliefs. And so at one point, for instance, he wanted to see if this this thing called glycosiamin, which you have in your body, it's what it's made by other amino acids, stuff happens, it turns into creatin. You need it for muscles. This is what you need to know. You need it for muscles. You need it for muscles. He needed it for muscles. So he went on a diet with no protein whatsoever. He gave him small amounts of glycine and arginine. to try to make just a tiny amount of this and, like, basically see what would happen. And he got really sick and weak. And this was fascinating.

This was the first paper he ever had his name on. And because of this, he actually moved to University of Pennsylvania to finish his MD because that was a much more research-based organization. And there is where he started to study more about the brain. He had professors that were doing things with the circulatory system, and he was able to pull on his physics background to, like, make. a new blood pressure monitor. He made multiple products on his own.

I don't think he patented most of them. It's one of those things where he probably could have made a lot of money, but he never pursued that. He would create a new invention, something that would be better. For instance, this was recording blood pressure on test pilots in high altitude conditions. And so it had to be, whatever, physics is not my strong suit. it had to be different than your standard sphigmomenometer. And he was able to invent that.

When he graduated, he initially joined the faculty. And at the time, this was during World War II, there was a lot of research money coming from the military into places like the University of Pennsylvania, where they were doing work on like, okay, for the Air Force, if you're in a situation where, you know, oxygen is at a minimum. minimum, and what about decompression sickness? And so they were doing all this sort of really military-focused research on the human body. How can we maximize your performance in these extreme states?

How can we make sure people survive them? And he very quickly lost interest in doing research for the military. It was interesting because you see him do this work initially where he is helping, like he did a lot of neuro-mapping, the very very early efforts to map the human brain and figure out, like, where are the centers of your brain that do, like, memory or pleasure centers or whatever. He did a lot of research back in the late 40s and into the 50s around this and learned a lot from mapping monkey brains. And shelled monkey brains or just regular? Just regular, regular old monkey brains. And, you know, the implications of this, clearly now, if we think about it,

things like Parkinson's disease or epilepsy. You can see the connections, right, if we understand where these different areas of the brain. So this early neuro mapping was super important the things that he was doing, but he was still being funded a lot by the, or not directly by the military, but working for institutions that were. Sure, yeah. And he began to suspect that the interest on their end was more for brainwashing. as opposed to, yeah. So more like he started to feel a little bit uneasy. Yes.

So that is when you see this kind of break as we move from the mid to late 50s into the 60s, where he's being influenced a lot by like philosophers and thinkers and psychoanalysts of the time about, you know, not restricting your concept of reality, of consciousness. that maybe the mind is capable of stuff that we don't understand. Now we're talking. And he's done this really hard science. I mean, when I say hard science, I don't mean difficult. I mean, like, these are hard sciences. These are, he has studied physics.

He has studied anatomy. He's learned about brain mapping in a very, you know, evidence-based, rigorous way. And he's done some weird stuff with self-experimentation. But he's basically on the straight and narrow. But it was this moment where he kind of breaks with military funding for the most part that he decides he wants to explore human consciousness in a new and creative way. And this is really the work that I think has left the biggest legacy not just in science, but in our popular culture and concept of the human mind. So I'm going to tell you about it. Okay.

But first we have to go to the billing department. Let's go. So he decides at this point that we need to understand, like the brain is constantly taking in stimuli. Yes. God, yes. What he wants to know is if you remove all external stimuli. How nice does that sound? Is that the question? Well, what happens in the brain? He was very interested because, I mean, there's kind of two possibilities.

Either the brain kind of stops. And you have to imagine him sitting with his dad bedside during the, the period that his dad had a coma inspired this. Is the brain stopped? Yeah. Is it just off? Is it like a light switch? Hmm.

Or if you remove all external stimuli, does the brain continue to do something? And what does it do? Hmm. Well, wouldn't you already have, like, I mean, how is that different from like if you get the sensory deprivation tube and you just like think about stuff for a while? Well, honey, he's about to create a sensory deprivation tube. Oh, sheesh. This is before.

We are talking about. Oh, because we didn't have a way of removing the external stimuli. Oh, interesting. I'm talking about the inventor of the modern sensory deprivation tank. Ah, look at that. I didn't know. I promised. That was just a legitimate organic segue.

For my ignorance was once again, the fulcrum of which this whole operation turned. There had been attempts to do this before, but the controlling for temperature was difficult. He was not the first person to think about depriving oneself of all sensory input. He was the one that came up with the best way to do it. So he introduced the idea of flotation. If we're in water and we're floating, then we're not going to touch any other surfaces. If the water is basically the same temperature as our body, you're not sensing it anymore. Sure.

You know, it becomes a non-input at that point. And then, of course, you make it dark and quiet and all that other stuff that people probably had already figured out. A dark, quiet room was not revolutionary. The floating was. And non-dilicious. No. And not stinky. There were some tanks that he used that were from swimmer research that had been done during World War II by the Navy to better understand the metabolism of swimmers.

So there's some tanks. I think this is interesting. The initial use of water, they didn't put all the salt in it that they do because if you've ever, if you're familiar with a modern sensory deprivation tank, and they're popular now, like you can pay to go float in them. at places if you want to. And I think if you've ever watched, you know, fringe or stranger things, then you know exactly what I'm talking about. The modern use is we put tons and tons of salt in the water so that you'll float, right? So that it will be more dense and you'll float on the water. Initially, people would be submerged and wear these kind of helmet things that would allow you to breathe and only the top of your head would be a...

Idea being that the air still has some sort of sense. Or just we hadn't thought about floating yet. We hadn't thought like, oh, we could put a bunch of salt in there and make you float, which is better because then we don't have to worry about you accidentally suffocating. Yes. Right. So you don't fall asleep and then drown. So that's a better situation. So he was the one who came up with, let's dump a bunch of salt in this thing.

We'll control the temperature in the chamber. We'll control the – you'll still want to, you know, keep it as dark as possible. so if you have to put a mask over the eyes or whatever, but otherwise just no light, no sound, float in the tank. And he, of course, since he believed in self-experimentation, tried it on himself initially. So he would get in the tank and be in there for hours. Historically chill.

That's like a chill no one has been able to chill to before. He's like three hours later, like, guys, I've done it. I think we can stop with inventions. You just go in here and like chill. Well, and invent. I mean, this is the other thing is while he, first of all, he felt like he got his mind rested in a way that sleep had never been able to achieve. Two hours in the tank, he thought felt like eight hours of sleep. And not sleeping.

You're not sleeping in there. The next day, you were at your mother's house. That was like one regular night of sleep. But then you came back. And it was like two nights. Like two nights. So he, and while he was in the tank, and he writes about this, he found there were many, many states of consciousness of being. And you could have waking dreams, hallucinations, you could have total events in these inner realities.

And they would be so real that you might even get confused. Did that happen or not? I experienced it in such a real way. At times, this began to make him anxious because the question started to arise in his. his mind, are these hallucinations, are these like dreams, are these fantasies, are these just imaginings, am I receiving messages? Is there a greater force? He never renounced, as far as I can tell, he never fully renounced Catholicism.

I mean, remember, he was raised in a very devout Catholic family and he went to Catholic schooling. He just sort of laid on top of that sort of structure of religion, of the concept of a higher being, a new concept still dependent on there is something bigger out there. Sure. But with, and we'll get to it, different names and such. But he felt like there was something outside that he was beginning to connect with while he was in the tank.

Sure. And that maybe you could use it to communicate with people far away or with beings that we cannot see or detect. And again, as I'm saying this, if this sounds like, well, duh, I watch Stranger Things, this is where so much, I mean, as I was reading about this guy, I feel like so much of popular culture has come from this, and I didn't know who, I didn't know who he was. Yeah. It's really interesting. So at this point, LSD was a big thing, especially among these scientists who were kind of on the edge. Right, expanding there.

Right, right. It's a very fringe moment. And there were a lot of his peers who were like, you know, if you think you're getting in touch with the greater consciousness while you're in that tank right now, try it on LSD. He really held out for a long time. He did lots of research and experiments in the tank on his own before he finally decided to try LSD. And then that's when he really began to connect and write about and attract a lot of other psychonauts to come. enjoy the tank with him. And that was, I mean, really, this is where you begin to see a lot more people

engaging in this, building their own, other scientists, other people sort of on the fringe, copying what he's done, and then using it and then incorporating psychedelics especially to see how the consciousness can expand. Yeah. This is, I mean, and a lot of this is overlaid with, like, meditation and things like that, the idea of a cosmic consciousness that connects everything. And that is like that energy is part of what you're dialing into when you're pretty deep in meditation. So yeah, I think you're seeing some of like those ideas reflected here too.

It's very much as we move into the 60s and 70s all of it's a. Meditation is basically a way of a way of trying to do what the sensory deprivation tank would do. Right. You're giving your mind, you know, in a lot of cases, I mean, depending on the type of meditation. but you're giving your mind the simplest possible task, so it's not thinking about the sounds, the smells, all that stuff. So it's kind of the same purpose, different methods it feels like. Yeah.

And I think people use sensory deprivation tanks for a lot of different reasons. For him, it very much started to evolve into a connection to something that was real, a real external consciousness, not a greater understanding. of himself or his own mind or even the human mind, but the idea that it would allow you to connect with something that was real and external and could be communicated with if you just knew how. He had this, I found this interaction with Richard Feynman, the physicist, who was very interested in checking out these tanks, and so went and met him.

And he talks about how he's looking at the tank and the entire time Lily is telling him about all of his sort of mystic stuff, the way he calls it gorp. He says all kinds of wikiwack things, all kinds of gorp. And he said he didn't pay attention to any of that because he doesn't believe that, but he also didn't challenge it

because he really wanted to get in the tank. He wanted to try and see. And he took a little bit of ketamine and got in the tank. And afterwards he talked about, like, the only thing that bothered me is I don't know was I just dreamy. Did I just fall asleep?

Yeah. And I really love. that because I feel like that would be my very pragmatic reaction to this. Well, did I just fall asleep and dream? Because I can do that in a bed. Like, I don't need a whole big tank of salt water to do that. So anyway, he wrote, when he published his book, the next book he wrote, he sent Lily a copy and said thanks for the hallucinations. And Lily wrote back, thanks for the book, Dick, but you stopped being a scientist the instant you said that word hallucinations. And they would go back and forth for a long time because he did not believe these were hallucinations. He firmly believed we are

connecting to something real out there. I just can't prove it. And that's when he started playing with dolphins. So at the time, there was more interest from the military. Again, now it's the Navy. And actually from NASA. Great. And a lot of this is like we're moving into like MK Ultra time.

Okay. So there's all this interest now in how can we communicate without actually communicating and is there a consciousness we can tap into and men who stare at goats and blah, blah, blah. All of this is happening. And so one question is, could we communicate with a really smart animal here on Earth? And then if we understand that better, would it teach us how to communicate with maybe extraterrestrial life? Okay.

So dolphins became the thing. So he built a dolphinarium. He took a house on St. Thomas, and he flooded a part of it so that dolphins could be right there with you. Amazing. Yes. I mean, an amazing concept. Good job. I bet that that doesn't come to people who don't lie around in tanks on LSD, folks.

That's the kind of ideas you get. Yes. So he did this. And part of it was, and by the way, there were two female dolphins and one male dolphins, Sissy, Pamela, and Peter. They were bottle-nosed dolphins in case you're curious. And, Justin, you may also know these dolphins as Flipper. No kidding. Yes, because these were all dolphins that were used as Flipper.

Flipper was not just one dolphin. Flipper was, believe it or not, a TV show about an adventure dolphin. Yes. That's. And these three dolphins then went to live in a flooded house on St. Thomas with Lily and his team. And their communication was studied. And he had his own. Now, he also had a lot of other interests, and at the time he was getting well into LSD and ketamine, especially.

He would eventually become too into ketamine. And so he wasn't always there. No such thing is too into ketamine. Two into ketamine. So he spent a lot of time there doing his own research on trying to understand how dolphins communicate with each other. And then could he use that to create a dolphin language? Mm-hmm. Cool.

And he had other researchers. And then among them was a woman named Margaret Howell Love it. Margaret Howellovett was not a researcher. She was there on the island for other reasons. She became fascinated with dolphins. Somehow she got connected with Lily. And she just really liked being with the dolphins. So she became a major player in this story at this point.

This is where things are. But she's more dolphin focused. She just wants to be friends with the dolphins. Okay. And she had her own method of communicating with them and developed her own dolphin language. We were at a moment where both of them are talking to the dolphins in a language. in a language that they've made up, but they think the dolphins understand.

I will say from all this research, we did understand a lot more about how dolphins communicate with each other. Have to. So that did come from this. We have to learn something. We did not learn how to talk to dolphins because as it currently stands, humans and dolphins cannot talk to each other.

As far as we know. As far as we know, as far as I know, we have not cracked that nut. But we're communicating, right? Because I know that they know about doing flips for little fish because I see that at SeaWorld before. So we're bridging the gaps somehow. We can communicate.

He believed very strongly that dolphins may be able, that dolphins maybe were having deeper philosophical conversations than we were aware of. And they had knowledge, because they were very big brain smart animals, they had knowledge that humans didn't, which is, I mean, I think that's kind of a progressive view. Like maybe we're not the smartest animals on Earth. Maybe there are other animals who know things. and if we could just talk to them in a way. And I mean, I know that you can train a dolphin to do a trick,

but I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about sitting down with a dolphin and saying, like, what are your views on, you know, mortality? Is there a higher being? We get hung up, I think, on this idea that communication is necessarily because our mind does so much with language. And I think that meditation and stuff, you're brushing up against this.

I think that we lose patience with communication. education styles that are not language. And we forget that like we are beings that go that are beyond language, right? You can communicate and connect with things on a non-mind level. You know, I think that we think that if we're not using language, if we're not choosing speech, it's not communication. But like, there's a lot of different ways of connecting and communicating. You know what I mean? I think this is where some of this loses the plot is that if you start getting hung up on the distinction between was that a hallucination or was that, you know, something that my mind created? You're already like you're trying to bring the mind into something that maybe is beyond the mind.

Well, I think this is a really good, a good demonstration of you have this individual who clearly has his mind open to possibilities. And that's key to being, well, to being a good scientist, but it's also key, I think, to having an enjoyable experience as a human on Earth. So it's a good quality to have an open mind. But I think that in pursuit of that, he was willing to chase down every lead and to consider things without really like taking a step back. If you are having these experiences in an isolation tank under the influence of LSD, isn't it more likely it's a hallucination than a voice from an external being? Isn't it more likely? Don't you think it's more likely that you and the dolphin are not talking? You're just making a noise and the dolphins making a noise?

You really, you know, I mean, and I feel like it's good to be open, but when you do not have evidence that it's anything more than the dolphin made a noise at you. And things got really, I don't want to get too hung up. If you know this story, you know what I'm about to talk about. Margaret Howell love it. I don't want to get hung up on this. But the research, quote unquote, that she was doing went far beyond anything that is acceptable, reasonable, and into the realm of animal abuse. because of the intimate relationship she formed with Peter the male dolphin. Wow.

He gets to live in a house with three different ladies. Not to behead or a normative, but this dolphin is doing okay for himself. She says it was not sexual. It was pragmatic. She needed to keep his attention. And this was what she had to do to, anyway. So obviously the research was not upheld as this. look at all this great stuff we've learned because, I mean, it was, I think that an account was.

He might have liked the first part, but when they get to that page, when they get to the, yeah, I mean, it was, it was bad. Yeah, I bet you could tell. You think you hear a sound across the room like, you just got to 17, huh? Yeah, it's got to page 17. Woof. Never mind. It was like parodied and hustler. Send the science back. So this was not, we, we left science behind. And that definitely happened as Lily got older. He got really into ketamine. I mean, so much that at one point he had to admit himself to the hospital because he was injecting himself with ketamine like every hour. That's right. And I mean, some of this was in pursuit of I have to connect to this thing out there that I can't connect to. And that's the danger, right? If you have so convinced yourself, like. And if you start eating more and more substances to do that thing, it's like, do you really think it's a thing or you think it's the ketamine.

He did develop some other theories that I think, Justin and I ask. you before we started this, if you knew about a game, about a dolphin. Echo the dolphin. So his belief in a god kind of changed into, he believed in something called the Earth Coincidence Control Office or Echo, which is a higher intelligence that controls everything around us. Earth Coincidence Control Office? That's sick.

Yes. he also warned a lot there are rules there's you can read all about this he had all these rules that the echo makes you follow and he also was very worried about he thought that the big battle that might end humanity would be with solid state intelligence meaning i mean it kind of sounds like ai it has to do with like computers and us building technologies that will decide the earth that would best benefit them like the ecosystem, the world, the situation that would best benefit them is not the same as humans. And so humans become unnecessary and basically extraneous and in annoyance in sense. And then there would be a battle. Hey, don't get scared. This cat was probably super high on ketamine when he wrote this. Don't get all freaked out.

Like, he's not his profit. He just did a bunch of ketamine. He was. He was doing a lot of ketamine at the time. I mean, a lot of ketamine. And I mean, but even then, like, he was a friend to so many scientists. philosophers, thinkers, writers, science fiction. I mean, he was part of that.

You can see all of this, the influence it had, not just on the fun stuff that we engage with. I mean, obviously, stranger things, we wouldn't have that tank. We wouldn't have all that if we hadn't had this guy. We wouldn't have friends if we didn't have. And I mean, you can see all that. But it did expand people's ability to consider

what else could we look at. What else could these things be? I mean, I think it is important to have people who keep pushing that edge further and further out. That doesn't mean, right, that doesn't mean the answer is there. But if you don't push it that far out, you might miss where the answer is. So he did a lot of cool stuff. He was, and by all accounts, people really loved him. He was a very, like, he was like a PT Barnum-esque guy.

He was charming. He was amazing to be around. He was enthusiastic about everything he pursued. And again, he, think about. altered states. Have you heard of that movie? 1980 altered states? Yeah, sounds familiar. I think it's William Hurt. He connects to his primal being and turns into like a primate. Oh, wow. That was based on John Lilly. That was all, I mean, it was kind of a depiction of him. There's another movie that was made where a dolphin is trained to go, like, assassinate the president or something.

That was all based on John Lilly. And clearly, you know, there's a lot of popular. culture, the video game we talked about. You can see now why Echo is receiving communications from a higher power. It's because it's named after the higher power that John Lilly believed existed. That's awesome. So he's so much more than LSD and Dolphins. So much more than LSD and Dolphins. Just like us. Thank you so much for listening to our podcast. It's called Sal Bones. And we want to think to the taxpayers. Yes. The use of their song, Medicines, as the intro and outro of our program. And thanks to you for listening. We appreciate you so much. Thanks to the maximum Fun Network, also for having us on their extended podcasting family. And thanks to you for listening.

That's going to do for us for this week. Until next time, my name's Justin McRoy. I'm Sydney MacRoy. And as always, don't drill a hole in your head. Maximum Fun. A Worker Own Network of Artist-owned shows. Supported directly by you.