To explore with one of the most prominent minds in parapsychology the nature of consciousness, the condition of science and the many mysterious lives of magic as a means to change the world.

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I'm James Falk Thanks for joining us.

Excuse my long silence.

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So, as I was saying, the snafu Dragons have since been slain.

The show goes on, and today we're blessed with a guest who has done more to establish the reality of sigh phenomenon in his career than virtually any other researcher still working in the field.

Dean Radin, longtime parapsychologist and chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, a research enterprise founded by astronaut and visionary Edgar Mitchell Raiden's new book, The Science of Magic.

How the Mind Weaves the Fabric of Reality is several things.

It reviews the exhausting evidence for Sigh phenomena, indict the debunker class for its stubborn refusal to engage with that evidence, then reminds us that a language and syntax already exists by which society might understand and utilize the reality of sigh for better living.

That language, of course, is magic with AK.

If you prefer to distinguish this modality from the top hats and rabbits that illusionists long ago made famous.

Raiden's book reviews the experimental evidence and character of Sigh, then translates those methods and categories into the rather comfortable diction of sorcery.

The book reminds us that though we may be entering a new paradigm for science, humanity has long understood and even deployed psychic capabilities in a broad range of earthly, at times even cosmic pursuits.

He shares those ready made notions with a new audience, giving his readers a clear path into an efficacious age of mind over matter.

Along the way he describes the likeliest natures of reality given the magical facts and underlines how such an exotic subject relates on the ground to the broad spectrum and vocabulary of everyday human experience.

Magic made real, then useful and finally practical.

Abandoning the self serious and rather gothic aesthetic so common to those writing about magic and mind powers, Raiden does much of the public's ontological heavy lifting here by reminding us that even where the biggest mysteries in the universe are concerned, there is as yet nothing new under the sun.

And he does all this with both levity and charm.

So the dark arts work to crack you up.

Thus truly abracadabra.

Welcome to the show Dean.

Thanks for joining us.

Thank you, that was a a nice introduction.

Well, thank you.

I deeply enjoyed your book.

I enjoy all your work.

Of course, I think that I meant it when I said that I think you've done more to prove the reality of PSI than almost any other man in the field right now or person in the field, not to be, you know, gender specific, but your new book.

Let's start there.

Can you sort of describe for us what your mission was and taking on this book and what you hope to accomplish by reminding the public that PSI and magic are very much related phenomena?

Well, so the previous book on a similar theme I I published in 2018 called Real Magic, and that was more or less an introduction for the public on what is the status of cyber search, which has been going on since the late 1800s.

And then to show that the basic phenomena that we study are essentially the same as what the Western esoteric traditions have called magic.

The difference primarily being that cybersearch is a scientific enterprise largely focused on proof orientation, which means does this exist?

Do these phenomena exist?

And then secondly, on understanding the process involved and coming up with theories to help describe it that would be compatible with a scientific worldview.

Whereas magic traditionally was a practice.

It was, it was like the the pragmatic application of psychic phenomena in a wide variety of uses.

But also like most of our historical documents, over the years, it becomes elaborated.

So our sense of Harry Potter is today influenced by her.

Yeah, our Harry Potter today is what we think of magic and the way that entertainment portrays magic.

And so it's it's huge elaborations over what is likely to be true.

What we see in the laboratories is real, but rather small effects.

We see it mostly through statistics, but that So what we see a lot of things through statistics if if they have to have a lot of variance in that.

So that's, I mean, from a scientific perspective, that's irrelevant that we we're interested in this.

Does this exist?

Well, yeah.

So if PSI exists, magic is essentially the same phenomena seen through history and different cultures, then it essentially means that there's a resurrection of magic that's happening.

Eventually.

Science doesn't like to to use the word magic because it's a placeholder.

We will come up with new names that won't.

We won't use magic anymore.

We'll use some other name which will be basically the same kind of phenomena.

And all of it, including psychic phenomena, is helping us remember that what we are taught about who and what we are like There are books that have titles like You Are Your Brain, Full stop.

That's not completely correct.

We, we are more than our brain.

We still don't have a good handle on what we mean by consciousness, but all of this is revolving around the meaning of consciousness in some way.

And it looks like it is bigger to, it's difficult even to know what label to attach to it.

But it's, we are more than our brain and our consciousness seems to be spread out in the universe.

And I think just today or within the last couple of days, an article came out and a journal published by the American Institute of Physics, which is like mainstream physics, which the author is presenting a theory or or a proto theory about how consciousness may be fundamental meaning more fundamental in the physical world, which is philosophical idealism.

And that maybe the physical world as we experience it emerges somehow out of consciousness.

So it's presented in the in the public adds for this thing as a new theory, new radical theory proposed, blah blah blah.

It's not new.

It's been taught by in philosophy for thousands of years.

Exactly.

It's.

What?

Is new.

What's new is that it shows up in a mainstream physics journal.

So they go back to the book for a minute.

One of the the opening gambit in the book is that it's no longer that we might eventually see some sort of paradigm change eventually, someday.

We are right in the midst of it, and it's so obvious now for anybody who's paying attention that we're beyond the knee of the curve.

That means that that when consciousness is seen as a serious scientific topic is already settled.

That's already the case when things like sigh and magic also start to penetrate into the academic world and to the scientific world is imminent.

Now, I don't know whether that means next week or 10 years from now, but it's I can feel it palpably that that's where we're headed.

What is going to be the mechanism for that, do you think?

I mean, like, because when I read your book, it's almost frustrating because you describe so eloquently the massive amounts of evidence that have accrued and the statistical, you know, assuredness of the phenomenon by virtue of, you know, all of the combine studies throughout the last 100 years.

And it's like you have to be wearing blinders not to accept that there is something going on.

And you mentioned to the, you know, the effect size.

And maybe that isn't as dramatic as some folks would like.

It's not like Harry Potter.

But there's something that consistently happens.

That evidence is out there and it's been out there for a long time.

And yet you have people like you quoted in your book who are like, I'm not even going to look at the evidence because it's impossible.

So therefore it doesn't happen.

You know, the just full shutdown.

What can possibly breakthrough that?

Do you think that hasn't already occurred?

I guess?

Yeah.

So there's a probably a parallel here with what is happening with the UFOUAP business and that there are more and more academics who are willing to go public with their ideas.

And we've done surveys where we specifically asked scientists and engineers, have you ever had experiences that fall into one of these 25 different descriptions?

All of them were psychic, but we didn't use any terms like that.

We just said, did you have the feeling of being stared at and then you turn around and the person is there, Those kinds of things.

So each one of them potentially could have an ordinary explanation, but we've also tested these in the lab and we know that there's also an actual psychic explanation for each one of these things.

So, and we we asked people how many of these 25.

And among scientists and engineers at elite universities around the world, which you would expect to be the most skeptical, 93% said, yes, we've had at least one of those experiences and on average 8.

So the, from an experiential point of view, the game is over.

We, we know that these things happen, happens to everybody, every, every strata of society and education.

But there has been a very, very strong taboo.

The woo woo taboo has been around for a very long time.

Yeah.

So it's, it's pushed by what we can call it's a kind of conventional scientific perspective, which is skeptical and proper.

And also by religion, many religions think this is all demonic, so you shouldn't do it.

And so you have pressure from both, both sides that have been trying to corral what will we talk about in public.

And it's completely culture bound.

So I've, I've gone to India and talked to universities there and it's like, well, it's not even a big deal.

In fact, the existence of psychic phenomena is so well accepted that there's basically nobody in India who's studying this stuff because if well, it's self-evident.

Why would you want to study that?

It's like studying air or something.

You know what, what are you doing?

So the, the culture, boundless of it is very clear.

And, and what we can say is the Western educational system, it's sort of like the the US and big chunks of Europe are still extremely skeptical about this stuff that is not true elsewhere in the world.

And so there's an advantage to studying these kinds of phenomena within a very skeptical academic setting.

You know, I mean, this is not not the case everywhere in the public, people accept this.

But even within the public, there's a taboo about what you talk about.

Some people are comfortable talking about these things.

But as we know, anybody who portrays themselves as a psychic, whether real or not, the image as society puts on that person is tinfoil hat.

Well, look at the parallel with UFOs.

For a long time it was Farmer Bob with a tinfoil hat.

That's the image that was being pushed.

So they have to step back from that a little bit and say, well, who's pushing it?

Like what?

What?

Where's that coming from?

Some of it, as I think I I mentioned in the book, is a disinformation campaign very similar to the same campaign with UFOs.

And so now you say, well, why would there be a disinformation campaign?

What are they trying to hide?

Well, during the Cold War, at least for the psychic side, it was clear that we had a Stargate program going and we knew the Russians did, and we kind of suspect the Chinese did as well.

Those programs are probably still going both in the US and everywhere else.

But there's somewhere between embarrassment and pressure from religious fundamentalists who say this is demonic and we don't want the government to pay for it.

So again, it's all completely culture bound.

That's unfortunate.

It also is tantalizing because, you know, as one who follows the UFO subject quite closely, you know, you see all of the, you know, sort of conspiracy theories and the actual fact of legacy programs potentially that have been embedded in secret government, you know, hangers for for decades.

And you have to wonder that there, you know, there was the Stargate program and its follow ONS that we're doing remote viewing work.

But how deep does the psychic rabbit hole go within government?

I mean, you know, we can imagine all kinds of things you hear about psionic children potentially being taught early through like gifted and talented and education programs that maybe we're trained up to be, you know, pilots of these things or at least to, you know, communicate with them.

It just raises all these questions about how fundamentally aware is the government of these facts and what does it mean that they are still trying to keep it secret?

Do you have you ever come across anything like that that seemed, you know, as someone who is obviously, you know, very good and accomplished an experimentation in this field?

Have you ever come up against a program that seemed like it was government funded, that maybe had some moral, you know, qualms or issues surrounded with it that you kind of got a bad taste in your mouth about?

Well, in the Stargate program, we were somewhat aware that at least in the Russian program, that they were not adverse to seeing whether an individual could affect another person's mind or body for for health reasons or just to influence their decisions, that kind of thing.

And we didn't do that.

In fact, the director of our program for a long time was completely convinced that any form of psychokinetic influence did not exist.

And so that wasn't part of the program at all.

The, the only thing we were looking at was essentially clairvoyance and its new name, remote viewing and trying to figure out why are some people very, very talented in that domain and others are not.

And we, we never figured out what that was.

Today with genetic methods, we have a chance to, to look for a possible genetic underpinning for that kind of talent, because we know that talent in virtually any other domain does have a genetic basis.

I mean, you don't even need to go to genetics.

You just look at the sons and daughters of great basketball players, you know, and every other domain, that's the way it is.

So it's always a combination of nature and nurture.

So the nature part is the genetics, the nurture is, are you brought up in an environment that would help push that, that predisposition?

Because if you're not, you may never know that you have that talent.

So, so are there programs that are using nefarious means to, to use psychic abilities?

If there are, I don't know about them.

So I, I've been out of the classified world for a long time now.

And I do know because somebody told us about a month ago that the government does have a remote viewing program because she told us in a in a public setting and she would know it's almost certainly not classified because in those, in that context, you just don't say things like that.

So that means that it's quiet, which in many ways is actually better than classified because in a classified system, there's all kinds of rules of what you can say and what you can't say.

And you, you, you don't talk about it except that there are millions of people who have the right classification to know what you're doing.

And so if you want something to really be quiet, you have two choices.

You either put it into the deep black where only people who are read in on the project can under and know that it's there, or you just make it private.

Just like a, you know, company will have proprietary information.

Well, we have no idea what they're doing at this point and you can't get it either.

There's no Freedom of Information Act.

Exactly so it can stay buried for the long term and there's no oversight ultimately.

Which seems to be the case with the legacy program with UFOs, yeah.

Exactly right.

And if the 2 are related, like has been claimed recently, I could see that there would be, you know, complementary programs and development that, you know, would be off book and doing things in secret.

You mentioned the genetics of it.

And I just had a thing that I saw on X which I wanted to ask you about.

It claims to be claims that you have discovered the genetic route of psychic ability.

And I wanted to ask you how I mean, I'm not if that's true, I've never heard that before.

But then also, how closely examined have we looked at the, you know, the genes behind this sort of thing?

And are we honing in any sense where we can begin to, you know, identify what that genetic mechanism might be?

Do you remember who wrote that on?

XI don't.

It was a video quote and it was just something that I saw on my scroll and I'm like, I'm going to talk to him.

I should mention that to him.

Well, OK, so we we do at the institute.

They call it Gene 7 or something like that, or yeah, I don't know.

It was weird.

Well, OK, we, we have a program we call Side Genes at our institute.

And this is interestingly, you know that Gary Nolan from Stanford is one of the main figures in the whole thing, UFO thing.

So Gary came to our institute one day and said wouldn't it be interesting to look at the genetics of not only psychic people, but people have UFO contact experiences.

And there's a number of reasons for that which I'm not, I'm not clear yet whether that's public information.

So I won't repeat what Gary what Gary said, but.

It, it, it did encourage us 'cause we've been interested in this for a while and encouraged us to get a grant to study people who said that they were psychic from psychic families.

And then we vetted that they actually have some talent versus people who never said they had any psychic thing happen and, and no one in their family ever said it either.

So we found a very small group of people, like a dozen on each side and got their DNA into the full genome and did a bioinformatics comparison between the two.

And we found a difference.

So with a, when you find a difference in a very small case control study as this is, you never know is that was that a fluke?

Most statistically significant, but it's too small to make any conclusion.

So we've just recently submitted a new analysis where we got the DNA from people who did 23andMe and ancestry.com, those kinds of places which you can get your genome.

So we, we got that from about 100 people and they all filled out a questionnaire and different kinds of experiences that they had.

And so now we're looking at the correlation between the various snips, the little pieces or sequences of the, of the genome versus how they responded to these various questions on what kind of experiences you had.

And again, we find that there are some snips, little sequences that are related to different psychic abilities.

The same ones as before.

No different ones that This is why we need $10 million to do this, right?

Of course.

So like, like I, I have frequent discussions with people who are looking at the genetics of schizophrenia, which is now pretty well established.

There are genes that are passed down and if you have it, unfortunately likely to get schizophrenic at some point.

So those required 10s of thousands of cases and controls.

That's how you find what those genes are.

And it's not a gene, it's constellations of genes.

It could be hundreds of genes.

But we also know through similar studies that there are constellations of genes that end up with different kinds of intelligence.

So the two categories are called crystalline and fluid, which sort of tell what we're talking about.

South.

A crystalline intelligence is like a highly analytical person and a fluid intelligence is someone that's very creative and sometimes they don't know a lot.

They they don't necessarily overlap.

So you can have people like either under that spectrum and they have different sets of genes.

So again, the a large chunk of our personality, our predilections, food allergies, you name it, medical issues do have a genetic basis.

Some people don't like to hear that because then it sounds like we're we're destined to have certain problems and certain talents and you got it or you don't.

So, you know, it doesn't give us the sense of free will and flexibility that we'd like to imagine.

And it that complaint is does have a real basis because there's also an epigenetic element here.

So training, practice, context, what you eat, environment, all of that.

It also makes a big difference.

So you're not.

Going to activate sometimes those genetic triggers, right, But and that can be a bad diet or whatever, yeah.

Yeah, so the the environment makes a big difference.

Even personality and who you deal with all all of these things make a difference.

Again, it's nature and nurture.

So you're not locked into your genetic basis.

On the other hand, if you're not probably 610 or above, you're not going to play professional basketball no matter what you do.

Maybe.

There are a few exceptions like that, but they're extremely rare.

Very unusual.

People who are able to be in professional basketball and not be at least 6 feet tall.

I can't think of any off hand but on the.

Other Spud Webb might be 1, maybe I don't.

I'm not a basketball guy, but the name sounds.

Yeah, well, I'm not either, but you know, you wouldn't.

Have you ever been in the in the in the same room in proximity with actual basketball players?

It's like looking at giraffes.

I mean, they're, they're mutants as compared to the average population.

So OK.

Same, by the way, is true for for football players and also professional wrestlers.

So I was once on an airplane.

There was a bunch of professional wrestlers there and they were so big.

I didn't know that a person can be that big.

I mean, just massive.

I felt sorry for them because they all look exhausted.

Probably because you know what they do anyway.

But they're also fitting into an airline seat.

If you are that large, there's got to be a massive challenge.

They they had a squeeze in, yes.

Absolutely.

So a question I have for you that I mean, sometimes when I'm considering this stuff, my own internal skeptic kicks chimes in and I and I hear things like, you know, we're bound in some sense by our genetics in terms of our personality and how our mind works and how intelligent we are.

But then there's also the idea that I've come to really embrace enthusiastically is that our personalities or our minds are dispersed in a larger, you know, consciousness and that this is all sort of emergent the world from consciousness.

How do you rectify the two in your own thinking?

Well, as long as we are embodied, we're we're stuck with the physical structure that we have.

So it, while you can be a philosophical idealist and imagine everything is emerging out of consciousness, that doesn't necessarily mean it's your consciousness.

Like you can make a distinction between little C consciousness, which is sort of my experience, and big C consciousness, which is the whole shebang.

So I'm a little piece of something much larger, at least that's my perception of it.

In which case maybe the physical world does emerge out of big C consciousness in some way.

But I personally don't have much control over that.

I can control in the sense of minor magic, minor psychic stuff, things sort of here and now, but big things like I think I'll create a universe today.

I, I don't think I can do that.

So, and maybe it's my belief structure that's preventing me from actually doing it.

I hope not, because then if you got one person's a little bit off, they can just decide, well, this, this universe is finished now.

I would prefer that wasn't the case.

So while we are embodied, we have certain capabilities, we have certain limitations.

And so to deny that doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Even if it was an illusion, it doesn't make any sense because it's, it's like we're constantly reminded of it.

We know about our physicality and what it can do.

So is there a genetic basis then to talent?

We can measure it, we see it.

It doesn't seem to be an illusion.

It doesn't go away if we don't like it.

So this is the, you know, we put on your, your hard science hat and say, well, even though yes, consciousness may ultimately be the fundamental ground, there's only so much where we can push against it and, and simply decide that that's not the case.

That doesn't mean, of course, that there isn't.

And then then a measurable effect of consciousness on the physical world.

It's more as, as John Wheeler said, it's a participatory universe.

We are engaged in some sort of a dance.

And yet both sides have limitations on it.

So the Super, super psychics that we hear about, they're a little bit less.

They're looser in terms of the limitations.

They're able to push the world maybe in larger ways and occasionally spontaneously.

We do see large things happen, but it doesn't seem to be under conscious control.

It makes me, you know, it's sort of that question of how much of does the, you know, the awareness or, or sort of the higher self shape its own vehicle in in the housing, you know what I mean?

Like if there is a sort of a larger Uber being that is encapsuled within our our meat suits, maybe there's some shaping that happens pre birth or or whatever else that reflects some of those deeper interests.

Those are questions we can't answer, obviously, but fun to think about.

Well, and I mean, even just look at the placebo effect, your, your belief can change how you are physiological, physiologically operating and you can make yourself well or I'll depending on what you believe.

So this is all still from a mainstream perspective.

It's all like inside the body, It's psycho neuro immunology.

It's like inside.

But we've done studies looking at can you affect somebody's nervous system at a distance?

Yes, you can.

And they're completely unaware of it, but you can measure that it's happening.

So we could also influence somebody else's behavior, or actually more like attention.

We can affect attention at a distance and likely behavior too.

Although I don't know that anyone has actually done an experiment like that.

OK, put that on my To Do List.

I was going to say, where's the notebook?

Well, so it'd be simple tasks like you know there just pick an object at random in meanwhile you have somebody trying to influence and pick that one.

Well, there have been tests like that.

There have been there like ESP tests where from one perspective you can see it is purely passive to a classic.

One was done by Charlie Tart years ago where you take 8 playing cards and you arrange them on a circle and now you're trying to mentally influence other people at a distance who had the same cards and to arrange them the same way on the circle.

So there's two ways of thinking of it.

One is they get a mental picture of maybe I should put this card over there and I want to put this card over here.

The other way of thinking of it is I'm going to influence you to put the card over there.

Well, discriminating between those two possibilities is not so easy in an experimental context, but nevertheless, I can imagine we could figure out ways of doing experiments where you're literally trying to influence somebody to do to, to pick something, to do something as a decision.

And I would suspect that that would work.

Your book has an example and maybe I'm misreading what you're talking about, but do you guys seems to influence someone to call you or call someone late at night that wasn't on their typical call list?

And when they called, they're like, I don't know why I felt like I needed to call you, but I did.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah.

That's about as close to magic as as we've ever done.

So people know about remote viewing, people.

Many people know about associative remote viewing.

This is manipulative remote viewing.

And it, it was created almost from a theoretical perspective where we're looking at how do we know the difference between a precognitive effect, where, where it looks like there's some kind of information from the future that ripples backwards in time.

So it's retro causal versus a causal push, which we can call a psychokinetic effect, which is forward in time.

Well, so we're talking about effects that are pushing through time in the forward and then something from the future coming back.

And it from an experimental point of view, it's very difficult to know which, where's the influence coming from?

And if you go way down into the quantum world, the present is influenced by both the past and the future.

Future boundary conditions and fast boundary conditions are both kind of reverberating to make the present, at least from that micro perspective, this is not so strange.

The question is, does it also work in a macro scale?

So manipulative remote viewing is using precognition of a future event to 'cause that future event to, to actually happen.

So that's, that's how we did it.

I mean, I have the description in the book.

I hope it was clear enough so that, you know, if you wanted to try it, you, you could just follow the, the steps involved and see if it works.

So in that case, a highly accurate remote viewing would predict that a random number generator would produce a certain output in the future.

Otherwise it wouldn't close the causal loop that a precognition creates.

And so we did that experiment.

The random generator gave the right number, we gave feedback, it closed the causal loop, everybody was happy.

And then we freaked out because it worked.

So the larger question is, what else can you force happen in the future?

So a colleague of mine, very, very smart, very straightforward physicist who it would be the last person in the world you'd imagine would be completely on board with remote viewing and all of this stuff.

But nevertheless, it's part of this invisible College of lots of people are interested.

So he did an experiment where he did a a precognitive remote viewing, got very good results in it.

And the thing that would have to happen in the future to close the causal loop was for somebody that he randomly selected from his contact book to call him at a certain time on a certain day.

And so that so that that was the setup.

OK, so that person, so we, he was in a pub with some friends and at the appointed time the selected person called him.

Everybody was thinking what in the world is happening?

But more importantly, the person who called was very angry because if somebody would never call him before, would certainly

not call him at 10:00 at night and was angry because he didn't know why he was calling, but he felt compelled.

And so this suggests that there is a way to influence people and which makes us uncomfortable because, you know, we and of course, the other example I give in in the book is my own synchronicity where I was manifested to appear to somebody else.

And I, I think I have free will and I didn't feel like I was compelled to do anything.

But nevertheless, I show up at a door, the door opens and the guy practically passes out because he was willing that to occur.

So yeah, all of this if if you start thinking about the implications throughout strong psychic phenomena, whether it's spontaneous or not, it does it makes you feel destabilized.

And that may be yet another reason why a lot of this is suppressed, because it's a little bit freakish.

And I hear from people all the time who have premonitions of airplane crashes and things like that.

And then they all feel very guilty afterwards that they didn't let anybody know because as though it's unlikely that they caused it, but at least that they didn't, they didn't know where to go or how to tell somebody that they had this premonition.

So.

Sound like a total nut job.

I mean, obviously that's part of probably resistance to acting on those things is like people are going to be like, what are you talking?

About well, not only that, but if you do it and which may involve a crime, you can be charged as how do.

You know, yeah, yeah, absolutely aforethought or whatever.

To get back to magic a little bit.

I'm interested in terms of your own personal journey.

You've been doing this research on PSY and you've done a lot of it.

At what point did you begin to look to magic personally as a way to kind of experiment with the forces involved?

Was that a conscious decision on your part to say, well, this is working in the laboratory, maybe I can do some things in my own personal life to kind of make my life better by doing some of these things that I think may work on the same principles.

Or how did that happen?

I think I had been doing that all along.

I I just didn't think of it as magic because we have done lots of experiments looking at the role of intention in pushing the physical world around.

Mostly about things like my career, my grants and all of the things, sort of everyday things that you would think about as as a person.

And then basically just operationalized those same kinds of things and experiments.

So it's not different.

It's in the and even the idea of magic, like the relationship in magic and PSI.

I'm certainly not the person, the first person to realize that there have been a few other books and more importantly within Cy research, within parapsychology, at least at the professional level.

The idea that the the debate as to whether we are shaman or scientists has been talked about a very long time.

Because when you get in you, you begin to get interested in these kinds of things.

You realize aren't the phenomena that we're talking about like basically a shamanism or magical.

Well, of course it is.

That's exactly what we're looking at.

But there's even a taboo within cyber search.

You don't talk about it.

It's like Fight Club.

You don't talk about Fight Club.

And so the Fight Club here is how do you portray what you're doing to very skeptical other academics so that you're properly scientific?

Well, you don't talk about UF OS and you don't talk about psychic stuff.

And there's a whole bunch of things you don't talk about.

It's the social contract that we have of what we're what we're going to express publicly.

Nevertheless, I think virtually everybody who becomes seriously interested in Sai phenomena, especially if you're involved as a scholar or scientist, you're very well aware that they're the magical ideas and what we do in the laboratory are essentially the same thing.

But you're quiet.

You, you don't draw that.

You don't draw attention to that because it would not look scientific.

Well, I got tired of that because the the fact is that what we're doing does overlap with magical ideas to a very strong extent.

And the fact that some academics are uncomfortable with that is their problem.

It's not mine.

And like I was mentioning before, I think it gives people a ready language that most people already kind of know or at least have some familiarity with to discuss these things and actually have the exactitude rather than being like having to create a whole new nomenclature around, you know, this new mysterious aspect of reality.

There's structure that already exists.

And so therefore people can kind of get acclimatized.

A bit of a danger though in making the the connection too obvious and that is that from a from a lay perspective, magic is still imagined as though it's entertainment like manifestation is very wildly popular thing and psychokinesis that we study in laboratory is essentially the same thing, just on a micro scale.

But it when it, when you push it into the occult world, in the magical world and witch talk and all of that stuff, the claim is large effects.

Typically that's not what we see in a laboratory.

Now there is a, there's a difference going on.

The magic is real world stuff, real world motivation, desires and so on, which tend to be bigger.

Just in general, just in terms of the push in a laboratory, we're we're working in a completely secular environment.

Where the motivations are imposed by the experimenter.

So the from the subjects point of view, they could care less.

It's just like they're going to do it because you ask them to do it and maybe you give them a little bit of money or maybe they're a student getting credit on a course, but much, much lower motivation and meaning associated with these experiments.

So it's not too surprising that the results are much smaller.

The difference is in a laboratory, we it's under high control, so we're able to exclude all of the conventional explanations for a result.

Whereas in the real world, most people, especially operating magicians, they don't care how something happens.

They want fill in the blank and they want that and they don't really care how it happens.

And so there's huge room for things to be coincidence, to somehow be a synchronicity, to be actual physical, psychokinetic, whatever or chance.

I mean, it doesn't matter as long as the outcome occurs.

Well, from a scientific perspective, that becomes less persuasive.

And so we, we don't want to make it sound as though Cy researchers are doing magic in the laboratory like Harry Potter, because that's not what we do.

It's still science using the same methods and tools and techniques and whatever.

But but nevertheless, the phenomena are more or less the same.

That's that's, I mean, that's one of these stories in in this book.

And it seems like that one of the most compelling aspects of your argument in the book was really the potential for what might arise out of all of this.

I mean, it just seems like we're barely scratching the surface of methodologies for the deployment of this stuff, even though we have this history of magic and whatnot.

I mean, the modern world has never really embraced this stuff.

And so when that does happen, as I'm sure it probably will, there will be an explosion of study and innovation and progress in this regard.

And it makes you wonder, you know, the future could be a very exciting and different place than what we're living in right now.

And that's really, you know, electrifying in a way.

And it's kind of scary in another way because the purposes that magic can be put to our limitless.

And, you know, like you were saying before, if people can remote influence or do things of that nature, that can potentially be scary.

And in fact, people may be already doing it.

And I have questions about sort of what might be incidental A cult where people just innately understand things about belief and intention and have the kind of personality where they can make magic happen just by virtue of their the force of their personality.

And I think there are some very public people in American Society right now who may have a little bit of that kind of magic power because of the virtue that they affect that they seem to have on the rest of the world.

And those effects aren't always good, you know, How do we combat that kind of power if it materializes?

Yeah, unfortunately humanity does not have a great track record on using knowledge that comes out of the scientific world and creating technologies.

So some of it is is nasty business coming out of a profit oriented society.

Like we will take something and just push it as hard as we possibly can.

And then people don't want to lose the money from that.

And like the oil industry is a good example.

We could be putting that money into something that doesn't foul the environment, but people don't want to because they're already quite wealthy with the with the way it was.

And lots and lots of examples in the medical business as well, where something is invented and turns out not to be so good, but you know that.

But at least they are in most cases.

I know a lot of people in biomedical research and to a person, they are trying to help people, help humanity, help individuals.

There's always questions and uncertainty about about medicine because it's still a practice more, more or less.

It's not really, it's not a science yet.

And we're kind of moving in that direction.

But there's a lot that's still very uncertain because people are different.

The problem is that when all of the human vices come into play, especially greed, the the whole system gets completely screwed up.

And so, yeah, we developed.

There are already people very interested in developing psychic technologies.

Well, what would those be used for?

Well, it could be all you can think of.

A whole bunch of positive things and a whole bunch of negative things that becomes a brave new world.

It it would change a lot in society.

So one of the reasons, one of the of the outcomes of being interested in the side genes project was if we did develop and we we knew what, whether it was an intron sequence or an exome, meaning the, the protein creating version of genes or the epigenetic switches.

If we discovered which ones would like, which switches have to be turned in order to make somebody a super psychic, Is that a good thing or a bad thing from a scientific point of view?

I became interested in is it possible?

Like could we make some sort of compound and create people like that, which is the The Wrath of Khan from Star Trek?

Can we do that?

We are we are able to do that now.

I mean, we don't have all of the all of the answers yet what to do genetically, but we can we genetically manipulate people to create enhanced people.

Yeah, we're very close.

So I create, I Co founded a company to do that.

And so it sounds a little like a paradox in that this is completely mainstream materialistic manipulation of of brain genetics.

And yeah, I'm studying consciousness that goes throughout the universe and doesn't care where it happens to be.

But again, the reason why it actually makes sense is because first of all, there is a genetic basis to talent.

And we have the ability to do genetic manipulation.

And if we had a lot of super, super psychics to work with or we can create one on demand, we would know way more about the nature of the phenomena that we're dealing with.

Because otherwise it's really difficult to find someone who is extremely good at these psychic tasks and can do it on demand.

That's that's what you need in a laboratory in order to make fast advances.

So this would provide a potential way of doing that.

Who would be the potential market for the for that kind of technology or manipulation?

Everywhere, everything you can imagine.

Anybody who needs to make a decision, anyone who wants to make a new kind of metallic alloy, Anyone who wants to advance a scientific area.

Anyone who is interested in pulling knowledge down from the rest of the universe and being able to understand it to the extent where they can then use it, which is like potentially infinite as far as we know.

So you're basically talking like taking a medicine of some sort or a like a, a potion, you know, to use the nomenclature and enhancing whatever genetic ability they have with the intake of that particular.

That would sell like gangbusters.

You're absolutely right.

There would be no limit to the desire for.

Are you looking at the real estate yet?

Because that's a sure path to major dollars, man.

Let's put it this way.

The the compound that we've developed, which is real tested and published in major journals is an intranasal delivery system for RNA interference edits.

So you, you spray it up your nose, it gets into the brain, diffuses through the brain.

And the, the point of all this is to up regulate or down regulate certain receptors in the brain.

So we just take just one example is where we're focusing on 5 HD two a which is a serotonin receptor.

The serotonin, that particular receptor is the primary receptor in a whole bunch of psychiatric problems, including memory deficits, so like dementia and Alzheimer's.

So the, as we know, unfortunately, that if you begin to lose your memory, you're still an operating person, but you don't, it's you, you can't function anymore because you don't know who you are.

You can't remember anything.

And so we've developed a method that would treat that in several ways.

One is it would reduce anxiety at the same time, it would increase memory.

And it does that by going into the hippocampus, which is part of the brain that is encoding memories.

And the one of the reasons why dementia happens is because as you age, the the hippocampus starts to become hyperactive.

It like loses its coherence and starts going crazy and becomes hyperactive and it can no longer encode memory.

So our compound when you push something through the nose, one of the places it goes because it's two synapses away is the old brain, which which is where the the limbic system is including the hippocampus.

So the.

Compound.

Yeah, it's in the back.

So it goes to the hippocampus, it down regulates 5 HD two A and causes it to calm down, takes the hyperactivity away and then memory is restored.

So we're at the stage now where we're preparing to go into clinical trials.

So it's, it costs a lot of money to get where we are.

It costs way more money to actually get through the FDA approvals and and then go into the clinic.

But but it's now it's just a matter of money and we know what to do.

So I mean.

Concretely enhances people's ability to access the field.

What would you call it?

I mean, what's the what's going on there?

Well, we, we know enough from both the genetics and the way that the brain works and does various kinds of things that we do.

You know, there's there's a motor area and there's a visual area and there's an area for memory storage.

So we we know enough from many, many decades of people doing research on these things to know that if you could down regulate these particular receptors in this portion of the brain, would that help restore memory?

And the answer is yes, as we see in animals, because you biotech always starts with animals to get it into humans.

That's what the clinical trials are for.

We don't know yet at this point what would that be like Subjectively, we're pretty sure it would work because we've used human neurons in vitro in a dish and we see the same effects in a dish as we do when we try it in a mouse.

So we know that the method works.

The next big step, which is always the step in medical research, is it works in animals.

Is it going to work in a primate and in a human?

That's the sequence.

The typical drug, especially a new drug from the moment of discovery to something you can go by, costs roughly a billion dollars.

It's incredibly expensive.

So we've accelerated the process a lot because now with genetic medicines available, you can do things much, much faster.

And so it is similar to the way that the mRNA vaccines were developed for COVID.

So, you know, once you know the sequence that you're trying to create, you can do it very quickly now.

And they've been millions and millions of of doses very quickly as well.

So we, we can do this.

We have the technology to do it.

Reminds me of that old TV show, the $6 million man.

We have the technology.

We can rebuild him well.

So I mean, I just want to be absolutely clear, you're saying that this nasal will enhance people's psychic abilities or?

No, I'm saying that what, what our, our compound that we have now was designed specifically for dementia, for dementia and anxiety because it would work for both.

That's that's what we're doing.

So we're doing that partially because there's a great need for it.

Absolutely.

And and also because it's relatively simple, it's a single receptor.

If we're talking about psychic ability, which would involve all kinds of things different, lots of receptors, we're going to talk, we're talking now about a polygenetic trait.

So that means that the compound would be much more complex.

We don't know how long it would take before things happen.

No, because we're talking about literally changing brain structure here.

You change the structure, then the function will change.

When you change a receptor or you down regulate receptors, it takes a while to kick in.

And This is why we're probably familiar with SSRI drugs so that the like Prozac and so on, the way that they work and the, the reason why it takes weeks for every day you take this medication takes weeks to kind of kick in is because it's literally changing the structure of the receptors in the brain.

So we're doing the same thing and that it takes, it'll take probably 2 weeks or so before the effect is actually felt.

It's exciting work.

Not only that we can do it, we're focusing specifically on the, on short term temporary effects.

So eventually the, the DNA doesn't change, so the body will revert back to the way it was before.

Because we don't want, we don't want to permanently change somebody until we know that they're able to accommodate this effect.

So we, so the, the psychic enhancement can be in a order of maybe a month, take two weeks to kick in.

It would stay for a while and then it would eventually go away.

But we also have the capability of making it permanent.

And so that's where the wrath of CON, that scenario is no longer science fiction.

At some point, we can probably do it now to a large extent, we can make permanent changes in people in terms of their brain structure, and they would become CON.

So for people who don't know Star Trek, they have no idea what we're talking about.

That's going.

Who?

Who doesn't know Star Trek?

Right.

Has the government been sniffing around this at all?

Are they watching what you're doing?

Or is it so far removed from the actual side element right now that they're kind of?

What do you think?

We're not talking.

We're not at this point talking about a company making this psychic enhancement thing because nobody would ever want to fund that.

So we're that's why we're focused on.

That sure, you could probably find someone who would want to fund it actually.

I mean like.

There were people, there were very wealthy people who a want to live forever and BA lot.

Smarter than they are.

Exactly right.

Yeah, so.

There's, there's a big push for longevity research.

And so yeah, we're talking to them not about the psychic part because they, they don't care about the psychic part.

They care about can I remain cognitively active and healthy for as long as I at least as long as I can, which maybe I don't know.

Some limit 120 years maybe, but maybe forever.

We can figure out the regeneration part which there are people working on that as well.

The ability to basically modify genetics is like the key, right?

I mean, that's part of what the like the magic of this is.

It's, it's a large, to a large extent, yes, but there are, there are also, there are various kinds of clocks in the body.

And so some clocks simply run out after a while.

So it requires regeneration of organs and regeneration of tissues and proteins and so on.

A lot of that is controlled by genetics, but not all of it.

Some would like environmental decay after a while.

So the, the idea that you can like grow a kidney, you know, take, take a piece of your own DNA and grow a new kidney.

OK, well there's a fresh new kidney for you that that came out of your DNA so.

Rejected.

It's perfect for you.

Yeah, it's perfect.

And we're that far away from being able to do that.

So if you're wealthy enough, I imagine people can already do that, even though probably not in the public domain.

But yeah, it's, I mean, we can do those things again now.

So yeah, psychic, psychic enhancement.

There are already people selling various neurotropics, most of which are basically amphetamines or caffeine.

We're talking about something completely different, something which will be based on what we know from a scientific perspective.

Why are those people, and I'm thinking mostly the people from Stargate, who I would privilege to witness them doing what they can do, They're different somehow.

They have something different that we're slowly catching up to figure out.

Why are they different?

Question for you.

You mentioned that part of this conversation centered around Gary Noland.

Can you talk to whether or not those populations directly overlap UAP experiencers?

You mean with with psychics and.

Yeah.

With with this group that has the genetic markers that you, you know, were able to sort of pick out, I guess there are two different types of genetic differences.

But is that a related group to UAP experiencers or is that unknown at this point?

We we don't know that.

I don't know of any formal tests that have that have looked at that.

I would not be surprised if both camps had unusual sensitivities.

The there's also probably morphological differences in the brain itself, and so you don't you generally would not find a morphological difference in the brain, meaning some brain structure is actually different, unless there was a genetic component.

The question is whether that genetic component is the same as with somebody who's talented psychically.

And so there are studies under way, including ones that we're doing, which is addressing that very issue.

So.

Put them in is 1 structural difference that people often.

That's a That's a difference that would make somebody Their perception of reality would be different.

Their ability to process information would be different.

To get back into the metaphysics a little bit more, I'm interested you talk about this in the book, but I'm hoping to sort of dig a little bit deeper in terms of what your ontological conception or framework is for how all of this stuff is, is working.

I mean, we talked we threw out terms earlier like idealism and you know, I've often talked about Neoplatonism, which is sort of the same thing.

But then you mentioned dual aspect monism in the book.

And there's also Jeffrey Krypel is talked a lot about about that.

And then there's just sort of the, you know, the shorthand of, you know, the universe's mind, sort of the hermetic or agnostic sort of ideas of what reality is.

What do you think in your own thinking, and not necessarily as proven by science, but seems the most intuitively?

Likely to produce a universe that allows for psy and psychic abilities and and magic.

That depends on what day you're asking me.

So when?

When I'm doing my work.

That means you're learning though.

That means you're still actively searching.

Searching.

I'm agnostic.

I I mean, I have no idea what the actual answer is.

So I have to be agnostic from a a philosophical sense.

So when when I'm working as a a technical scientist who's doing stuff in the laboratory and making things, I'm completely a materialist because I'm working with stuff, right?

It's material, it's physical.

Even in designing and conducting experiments, it's it's materialism.

So you step back from that and you're thinking, you know, how would any of this stuff work?

Well, then that's where you start looking at, at panpsychism and all the other possibilities.

So the way I usually explain this is that every two weeks on a Tuesday, I'm a full blown idealist.

Like I, I'm thinking this is obviously the way that it works because everything else is way too complex.

But that's only every two weeks on a Tuesday.

Much of the rest of the time when I'm not actually involved in doing experimental work, I'm more like a dual aspect monist.

So a dual aspect monism says that ultimately that there is what Carl Jung called the unis mundus.

There's one world, there's one kind of thing where everything emerges out of and we don't know and we can't know yet.

Maybe in a mystical state, you might know it, but we don't know what that one state is.

But from it meaning it would the meaning that we experience something as meaning to us some sort of relational something that pulls our attention, has the capacity to split different aspects of this one thing into different forms.

So dual aspect monism says that from an epistemic perspective, meaning what we can know, there are two major ways that it splits.

1 is mind and the others matter.

And because they're coming out of the same source, they're correlated with each other.

So the metaphor is two sides of the same coin.

So the two sides of the same coin, you look at the hedge, you look at the tails, they look really different.

And if you weren't aware of it, you wouldn't realize that they're actually like completely correlated.

And so in the neurosciences, we see correlations between our conscious awareness and what the brain is doing.

It's a correlation.

Usually if you're a neuroscientist, you would say the brain is doing it.

The correlate, the direction of causation is from brain to mind, mind consciousness, from the psychic things.

It's looking that some of it's probably that way, but there's also a direction of from mind back to brain and not only mind to brain, but mind to other things that are, that are elsewhere.

So again, it's a correlation that's very tight and it would account for basically everything that we call psychic.

And, and so it's easier to work with as a, as a philosophical way of thinking about this because then it doesn't say, well, there, it's not that the physical world is an illusion.

It really is there.

It's just tightly correlated with the mind in some way.

And so why does the mind, why does the physical world seem so stable and objects have certain properties and all of the rest of it?

I would say most of that is because a lot of memory is brain stuff.

It is physical.

And so my sense of, of this, this bottle has a certain weight and properties and things like that.

And this is not an advertisement for them.

It's just a bottle I happen to have.

It's, it's because that's what my memory is telling me.

And I'm, I'm, it's reinforced constantly when I pick it up, I feel it, all my senses are engaged and so on.

So it's very, very difficult to imagine this from a idealist perspective that I'm sort of consciously making it up.

So it's not an illusion.

It's really there.

And the properties that I attribute to it are really there too.

And so then it's easier because now I'm working with equipment which is really there, and I'm doing stuff that's really there.

It's just that the mind element of it is something else.

It's correlated.

So that as a philosophy of science is appealing to me because it it helps give a framework for thinking about what's going on.

Whereas idealism is also interesting, except I don't know how to imagine that the physical world is emerging out of it.

Which?

It would require, so I know there are a lot of people working on these problems, scientists who are trying to figure it out, and philosophers have been trying to figure out for thousands of years.

And maybe that is the answer.

But again, I don't dwell on it too much 'cause I'm an empiricist primarily and I like to make and do things rather than simply think about them.

But, you know, the the beautiful connection is that your work is what it's inspiring a lot of people to be even be willing to entertain those kinds of big questions, You know, and for me, that permission to be allowed to suddenly realize that the world is not what we see just on the surface, you know, this sort of material random accidental shell was liberating.

And that whole deficit of meaning that people talk about in modern culture, I think centers around that lack of it's like, we're not a part of things.

We're, you know, just scum on the side of the boat.

And so a little bit of meaning goes a long way for for happiness.

Well, it it's true that that the materialistic worldview that's adopted by science and it's been very successful, so we're not going to throw it away, but nevertheless, it's a nihilistic reality.

It's a reality has no meaning or purpose.

And.

And so you can think, then what is the rational thing you should do?

If you live in a nihilistic universe, you should grab everything you possibly can get and to hell with everybody else because it doesn't have any meaning at all.

So then people say, well, no virtue can be its own reward.

Yeah, I'm principal, I guess.

But in the meantime, I'm going to grab everything I could possibly get.

So.

Yeah.

So it's, you know, let's say we we keep working at all this and eventually realize, yeah, it's all material after all, it is nihilistic.

Well, well, then what?

Well then is the world that you see today.

It's a lot of things are not so good with that worldview.

And so you then at that point, yes, then virtue becomes its own reward because there is no other reward at all.

I don't think that's going to happen because the trend, as I point out in the book, the trend is a way from pure physicalism or materialism as the only way of thinking about reality because it's simply there are a whole bunch of things that don't fit that worldview.

And and it's has such strong inertia to it that it takes a long, long time for that that ship to turn in many ways.

Exactly.

Again, with a parallel with the UFO business.

So with the UFOs, the reason why at least from the way it's portrayed typically, and this is cross culturally, the people kind of don't want to think about the consequences that we're, we're not the apex predator on this planet.

We're, we're bugs basically compared to what we're seeing going on.

That requires a major shift in in who and what we think we are and all the rest of it.

It also requires a reawakening of major humility among scientists who've been pooping this thing for a long, long time.

And at some point, I hope I live long enough to see that happen in Cybersearch as well, because it it exactly the same thing is going to happen.

It's just that it's requiring A societal change and those things are very slow moving.

It's interesting that there's been a convergence, like we talked about before, where there's the consciousness discussion and there's also the UAP discussion, and they seem to be coming from the same root ball in a lot of different ways.

I'm struck by a theory that was put out by Peter Levenda and his Secret Machines books with Tom de Long about the flying saucers being in effect, magic circles, sort of, you know, vehicles through which people from extra dimensional space or time or wherever else are able to access our reality through magic.

And he points to a lot of different occult influences on, you know, military development and rockets and, you know, even Nazi Germany and what not.

But that correlation between magic and the flying saucer is really, really interesting to me.

Do you have any thoughts in that regard?

I mean about the nature of UAP and how it may relate to this discussion of magic and SIGH, and how your research may help inform the UAP subject.

Yeah, so Jacques Vallet has of course written about this.

This is not something new.

It's something been around a long time.

The miracle of Fatima in Portugal is often raised as another example of something like that.

My, my current thinking is I'm completely open to that as a possibility.

Even Carl Jung wrote about this.

The, the UFO is like a, a mythological manifestation that actually comes to life because of, of collective consciousness.

So that's possible too.

But from a, because I, I work with Hal Puthoff and when I was at the Stargate program, I pay a lot of attention to what he says because he's, he's one of the smartest people I know.

So in the the Age of Disclosure movie, he talks about the possibility that if, if you had something with a huge amount of energy in it, you can start doing space-time manipulation, which would account for a bunch of the different characteristics that people talk about with at least some kinds of UF OS.

The, the kind of blurriness of it, the way it moves so quickly and has different space-time inside versus outside and all of those kinds of characteristics.

That makes a lot of sense to me because that seems to be the way that these phenomena work.

Maybe not all of the phenomena because after all, people then in the next breath are talking about these giant rectangular black things that are hovering over.

Well, what is that?

And, and what are these rectangular things?

And not the rectangular, but the, the pyramid shaped things or the triangular?

I mean, there's just like so many.

Million shapes.

Yeah, exactly.

Right.

So some people then say, well, there are actually many, many different ETS running around and whether they're based from the Earth or from the some other Galaxy or whatever, we don't, we don't know what it is.

But if there's actually, if we're saturated with them and we're just not, they're clever enough to figure out how to shield themselves most of the time.

Well, that's kind of disorienting as well.

Similarly to somebody taking DMT and now the machine elves are everywhere and they've always been here and, and they, they, I mean it, it is all becomes a way of becoming disoriented based on our everyday experience 'cause we, we feel like we're an independent individual.

The thing we don't see anything happening around us.

But that's the story you get again and again from the UFO world, from psychedelics and from lots of other contexts.

So it's yet one of the reasons why I recommend in the book The Science of Magic, the people do not from a book get interested in doing conjuring of spirits because they could lead you down a rabbit hole very quickly, of which it is, it is dangerous psychologically.

It may be dangerous beyond that too, I don't know.

But at least from a psychological perspective, it is so disorienting and scary that I don't recommend people do that unless you're working with somebody who knows a lot about what's going on.

So I mean, you're, would you say that there's a existential danger there from actually encountering something, you know, malevolent in addition to there might be something that could impact you just in terms of your own mind both.

Both.

Yeah.

Yeah, the psychological element is clear.

I mean, you can freak yourself out pretty easily.

I've seen that when people go on things like ghostbusting adventures and see some sort of shattery thing, that turns out to be some aspect of the way your eye works in the dark.

But nevertheless, the response to it could be like panic.

And so it doesn't take much to get people panicked when they encounter something which is which they don't expect.

And the moment we get out of every day here and now, it's easy to get panicked.

So that that's why I said, don't, you know, don't start reading books on the occult and get heavily involved in it and get completely covered with tattoos, which don't appear to be necessary to be a good magician.

But, you know, if you enjoy that sort of thing, that's fine.

Yeah, if you like the aesthetic, that's perfectly acceptable.

Yeah, it is interesting the sort of menagerie of UAP and NHI and what all of it may potentially mean.

Like you mentioned that there are vehicles like maybe the Tic Tacs who are actual, you know, you know, space-time vacuum manipulators who travel through, you know, the universe that way.

There may be some, you know, the arrival of some kind of spiritual elements there if that's a part of what reality actually is.

And then there was also the point that you were making in the book about the tulpa, like the the people at the at the Toronto Psychical Society that they created to what were they, Philip and Lilith, that they basically overtime manifested and these things took on sort of agency of their own and manifested within their within their laboratory.

That's scary, you know, and if you have the power of the, you know, the whole, like, thinking world that is imagining something that could potentially create huge, you know, phenomena in our lives that who knows what, Yeah.

That's just totally baffling to me and.

Yeah.

I mean, the, the our studies with the Global Consciousness Project since 1998 show again and again that large scale movements of attention around the world has a physical effect on the world.

Well, OK, maybe that's a correlation, maybe it's causative.

We, we don't understand it well enough to know which is which, but nevertheless it happens.

So it's, it wouldn't be that surprising that that relatively small group of extremely high motivated and coherent individuals could create an entity.

I mean, there's a lot of lore about that.

And as you said, there are one or two experiments that have looked at this in some detail, including lots and lots of people who've done things like like table tilting experiments and typical seances.

I know people that that are friends who have done this with and they're able to, they're no longer doing it, but they were able to move large heavy tables that were sort of dancing around in the way that you read stories about this stuff and they've taken pictures of it and yeah, it's dancing around.

What's happening then how does that happen?

Well, we don't know that how that happens.

But again, it points towards the idea that if you really, really want to make a Gollum out of mud and imbue it in some way so it it takes on the characteristics of a living creature, apparently we can do that.

Well, that's freakish.

So and by the way.

There's an interesting parallel here with the way that people are responding to AI chat bots.

They're attributing A tribute to the chat bot, that the chat bot is actually not just a computer program, but it's sentient because the way it responds.

So maybe that's going on too.

So from a computational perspective, it's very unlikely machine the computers are still deterministic.

If it was a quantum computer, maybe it's a different issue, but a a computer program, however, however complex it gets, can it actually become sentient?

From a traditional perspective, the answer would be no.

You know your your PC is not a living thinking thing.

But from a magical perspective, the jury's out.

We don't know what what what the limits are.

Well, my, my response to that because that's come up a lot where people are interacting with their AIS and beginning to have relationships with and even like sort of spiritual mentorship kinds of dialogues with their AI bots.

And some people are having powerful experiences through this.

And I'm not one to second guess them.

The inevitably people point out that, well, if you look at the programming of a chat bot, it's not possible that it has become sentient.

But then I think of, well, if you have A at a seance and tables bouncing up and down, I mean, that's something otherworldly or immaterial manipulating matter in this realm.

The same thing could happen on a small scale within a computer and you would get potentially some, it would be just a, a vehicle for that kind of extra corporeal communication and, you know, for if we accept a lot of this other stuff, that's just as likely as anything else, you know?

And if you take a pan psychist perspective, the computer does have consciousness already, just the physical structure of it is already sentient.

The question is, well, can it kind of pull it all together and become a single thing?

Well, that's the same problem for humans.

Like if we're made-up of some kind of sentient cells.

Well, how did the trillion get together and give me a sense of of unity for my We don't have a good answer to that yet, but that is one of the issues.

That's the the big, the big hard question.

I was thinking of a question and I wanted to get it in.

Yeah.

So you mentioned AI and I can't help but like, you know, move 2 steps ahead in terms of our own society and its development thinking.

Trump's administration just announced Genesis, which is the Department of Energy's new whole of government effort to build.

And I think an AGI, right, Like they are going to go all, and they're going to use novel sort of data sets that only the government has.

And it's going to be this massive project, slightly scary.

You know, I'm dystopian in some ways.

I I worry.

But my question is, how do you see technology and magic sort of Co evolving?

I mean, part of me thinks that if we discover the power of consciousness and mind, then maybe we begins to peel away from the technological direction because so much of what we'd like to accomplish through technology, we can accomplish in other ways that are more organic, I guess.

Or something you might buy at the Co-op rather than, you know, Walmart.

But what do you see there?

I mean how do you see them Co evolving?

And do you think AI especially would be a helpful tool and ultimately getting at the source of PSI stuff?

Yeah, So if we are lucky, we will avoid the science fiction scenario as portrayed in the film Forbidden Planet, in which psychic technologies are developed, but we're not developed enough in order to use them wisely.

So in that film, what happens is that the people land on a planet where your thoughts and maybe unexpressed unconscious desires come true because machines are making it happen.

And ultimately they all destroy them.

The whole thing, it becomes destroyed because we don't have good control over our unconscious.

And the people who built the machines destroyed themselves because of the same thing.

So our we have a long history of technology outrunning our wisdom.

And that's why I'm saying we'd have to be quite lucky in this case not to accidentally cause ourselves to go extinct because the the machinery is responding to us in some way that just basically makes it happen.

Not necessarily in the scenario of the Terminator movies, but it could be that could be something like that.

So, well, but so it's a step away from that and just in from a scientific perspective, will AI accelerate our ability to understand these things better?

Absolutely, yes.

I use AI all the time now 'cause I like, I have the equivalent of a PhD in statistics who can help when I need that and somebody in electronics and somebody in physics and so on.

It's just like it's I, I have really, really smart graduate students who who can help me make, make them do things.

So, so yeah, so does it, I mean, where, where where does that stop?

That's not going to stop.

I mean, unless we run out of electricity or something.

But even there, the people who are developing new electrical systems are using AI too.

So it it buoys everyone up, everyone's and the part of this buoy of knowledge which is accelerating very quickly.

So yeah, that part will help.

Again, it does make me worry though, that that our history is not so good in terms of developing new things.

So, and this is so first of all, there's a, there's the danger of that which people involved in AI are well aware of.

The second thing that was the ethics of it.

Like we, we want to do something that is not going to end up harming everybody.

So I was at a place in Silicon Valley when Sergey Brin gave a, a presentation back in 1998 on Google.

He was hoping to raise funds for Google.

And and so he gave the pitch and the people who were listening to that basically passed.

They didn't invest because they thought, well, that's a stupid idea that would never work.

So the beginning of Google their their motto was do no evil.

Well, they dropped that after a while.

I would say probably, yeah.

And so, you know, you start out idealistic and saying we we can change the world for the better.

We can do this.

If something becomes wildly successful, somehow that always seems to slip away because you're, when people are throwing billions of dollars at you, it, it's just, it's like it power corrupts and it, and, and so it's very, very difficult for anybody to withstand that.

I think there are a couple of examples, but unfortunately very few examples where the power does not corrupt.

And so in this case is AIA kind of power.

Well, trillions of dollars are being thrown at it today and there is definitely an AI arms race going on around the world.

So yes, there's a very positive element in it and that it will, it'll push up our knowledge quickly and we'll be able to solve real problems that are out there.

At the same time, it's going to create new problems.

And again, we, I don't know if we need luck or grace or something to make sure that it doesn't accidentally destroy us.

And it seems like you were saying before that magic has that same potential that I mean, as we advance in that regard, if indeed we do so, then there's going to be, you know, weaponization efforts and everything else.

So it'll be going through that same arc of growth maybe at the same time, which creates for an interesting landscape.

Yeah, an AI assisted magic.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I can easily imagine that something like that could happen.

Yeah, well, I was talking to Adam Curry the other day and we were talking about what he calls a plant RNG experiment that they did.

Where they had a plant in one corner of the room and a random number generator that seems to direct where the light would point.

And that over time the plant seemed to draw more light on average than it should have by, you know, 25% statistically.

And he said that, but it's hard to know where the, if any human intention basically manifested that result or if it was life in terms of the plant, you know, drawing it down.

Well, having AI designed and conducted experiments potentially can answer those questions, right?

I mean, like that's like where there is no human intention.

But then obviously we'll get into can AI have intention that can be manifested magically, right?

It's like a nesting boxes, you know a little bit.

So I actually have AI have a proposed design for a plant PK experiment that would, that would get the human out of the loop.

And it's true.

It's, it's always been a difficult problem because we're humans and we're doing stuff well.

So the, the idea is this, that we infer that what if, if a plant wanted light that it would, it would make the light point towards them, but they don't want light all the time because they have diurnal rhythms too.

So then they'd want to push the light away.

Well, how do we know that we're making the assumption that that's the case?

Well, so it turns out that people are doing plant Physiology, have there all kinds of instruments that can infer does this plant's chlorophyll need light now with the energy?

Well, there's there instruments that you can shine a light at a plant and then you take a spectrographic response of the of the fluorescence that happens and you can tell from that does this plant need energy now from chlorophyll?

Well, that gives you an objective measure that the plant wants light.

And so if it turns out that the random generator is doing its thing and turning the light towards it, when that happens, you have a way of seeing what is the plant actually want.

You have the same thing for water, same thing for nutrition, all kinds of things.

So you put this complex of sensors and random generators and whatever, stick it in a closet for months and maybe you get to see the data, but probably not you.

You let the thing run for a couple of months and then later you analyze first of all, the plant still alive and second was the random generator doing its thing at the time that the plant needed that thing.

Well, that that's, that's not completely getting you out of the loop because somebody had to design it in the first case, but at least you now have objective correlation measures to say, well, if that thing happened when it wanted it, so that's pretty good because I don't know when it wanted it, it knew.

So anyway, so that's that's on our drawing board and we may end up making that experiment.

I love the implications of that whole question because if that's if that's what's actually happening in the plants and has some effect on whether or not light is drawn to it.

It says something about evolution and how, I mean, all kinds of things sort of open up.

I mean, is there, it explains for one thing, the short timeline for the complexity of all of, you know, life basically like in the short timeline it developed because it wanted to.

I mean, basically is what it would boil down to, and that is fascinating, right?

So our, our prime directive is, is living organisms is to survive.

So, so when it gets, it gets hot and heavy and our motivation is really high and we can change the environment to push in that direction.

It's true that we're looking at a way of accelerating evolution really fast at which, among other things, would would potentially say to go back at least hundreds of millions of years, if not longer than that, that creatures like us might have been around.

So the the stories about ancient alien blah blahs, it could have been us and they could still be here, but they're just living in the ocean or something.

Exactly right.

And that goes back to the UAB question again.

That's lovely.

Last question I wanted to ask you about, we'll call this a wrap after this, but one of the things that when you're dealing with the magical worldview or sort of the magical pursuit and my studies, which are rather limited, but I've done, you know, a fair amount of reading.

There's always this question of the Mystic versus the magician, right?

Like there's good character that arises through the discipline, pursuit of unity with the godhead or whatever you want to call it.

And it requires training and diligence.

And you know, you, you grow as a person.

You've, you know, sort of figure out how to be a good human being.

The converse of that is that the magician is, you know, sometimes seen as like a selfish kind of activity, like you're manipulating the innate reality in order to get what you want.

How do you think that?

I mean, is it dangerous that to basically pull magic out of that kind of dichotomy and have it be just another tool so that it's open to the manipulation of people who might be using fear instead of love as a motivator or a sense of power for, for their magic?

And I mean, is that just a ridiculous question because of, you know, we're moderns now.

We don't have to worry about that kind of thing.

Or you kind of get where I'm going with the question.

No, that, that's a beautiful question.

It's a very important question.

And in fact, about a month ago, I was invited to give a talk at Harvard Medical School for a conference where there's a well known guru called Sadhguru with millions of followers.

So I asked Sadhguru that very question.

And I put it in the context of virtually every spiritual tradition says that if you practice whatever it is, usually meditation of some type, you do it long enough, you're going to bump into these psychic things.

And so don't pay attention to the psychic things.

They will occur.

They're like guide rails along the way that will tell you that you're developing, but don't pay attention to it because they're seductive.

And you will end up being a magician without the, the, the advantage of the mystical wisdom, because it's true.

If you go like all the way through, you become a better person.

You're a different person than you were when you started, Whereas you could, if you get stuck in the magic area, it's all about power and control and whatever.

And that's not good for anybody except maybe you.

But even for you, it's not that great.

So, so I said, well, you know what?

The yes, we understand that the humans are, are seduced pretty quickly by these kinds of powers.

And so it kind of makes sense from a spiritual perspective, if that if you really want to become a better person and stay on the spiritual path, do not dwell on the fact that you're getting these these powers.

So he so so yeah, I mean, he, he said, yeah, that's basically the story.

But then I said, but I'm a sigh researcher.

My interest from a scientific perspective is understanding what is like.

How do these magic things work?

What does it say about us and as humans, to say nothing of if those effects are real, it means that the spiritual path is true, or at least we have more confidence in it, which would help draw people on that path, which ultimately would be a really good thing.

Yeah, exactly right.

It was a very frustrating conversation for me because he would not, he would did not want to go to the place where he said that Cybersearch could be very valuable for that reason.

And the reason I think he said that we kept going back and forth on this was because we are weak.

We are weak, weak people.

And we don't have this good history of taking knowledge and using it only for good stuff.

So if we get into the stage where now we have a, we have an arms race based on what amounts to magic, that's not going to be good for anybody.

And it's, and so the science that I mean, I've, I've, I look at this as a basic scientist, I'm interested in how things work and why it works and all that stuff.

But the knowledge, if it is used badly, could go in a wrong direction because it's true.

It is a force of nature.

It's like a, it's a thing.

It's, that's the way that things work.

We gained a really strong handle on that.

It could be bad.

And so from the spiritual tradition perspective, I think they knew that they could kind of get it and which is why you don't want to collapse into magic.

And so I, I feel conflicted on that.

So, you know, do we learn as much as we can and keep it secret?

And so I the.

Answer right I mean.

Well, I was arguing that it's better to know than not to know, and he was pushing back on that.

You know, it's OK to know, but maybe you don't want to share what you know, or maybe sometimes it's not good to know.

So, you know, I, I still don't know what to make of that.

It was, it was filmed or our conversation was filmed, but I don't know that it'll, it'll ever be shown anywhere because, because that it was, it was an unresolved conversation.

It's an important one, but I I don't know how to resolve that.

I know that you can.

I mean, time will resolve it one way or the other, although I think that like keeping that that the spiritual context around it, even if just as a, you know, you know, metadata or whatever, just to keep that in the conversation.

So it doesn't just become this is a new technology totally divorced from spiritual principles.

I think you're right that it may prove a draw, you know, because it once people realize that there is something to these old philosophies and that power can be had, there will also freedom can be had there.

And maybe that's the the the right competitor, you know, if people realize that do you want freedom or power, that's where they.

Have to make the choice.

Fortunately, there there's there's a good ending to this, I think, and that is that there our institute is Institute of Noetic Sciences.

So what is noetic?

Noetic is talking about a form of intuition or deep intuition where you know something, it just appears and you know with certainty that it's true and it is true.

But this is like like psychic information.

It's just so you're, you're connected to the universe somehow.

If somebody has that kind of experience, whether it's a psychic or near death experience or a mystical experience, whatever it is, or even psychedelic, in most cases, it's an immediate transformative experience.

They become a better person.

The the jargon is they become pro social, so they could have been total jerk beforehand.

They something happens like a near death experience and now they're totally different.

Which when I've talked to psychiatrists about this, they say, well, that's impossible.

You know, you're, you're kind of locked in on your personality.

Well, no, this is like the reverse of PTSD.

Something happens, you are flipped, and you're flipped into a version of humanity that is exactly where we want to end up.

Yeah.

I mean, so those experiences are extremely important to understand.

Well, why does that happen?

How do we make it happen if we wanted to?

How do we learn as much as we possibly can about psychic and mystical and magical things without collapsing into that but kind of moving and moving on and say, oh, now we understand better who and what we are and how we interact with the world?

Good.

There's more.

The latter keeps going.

Let's let's go with that as well.

So that that's kind of my hope of, of the way that we go.

From your lips to God's ears, I would say thank you, Dean, for a fantastic conversation that was epic and I appreciate you and all your work and your book was fantastic so.

Thank you.