EVERY SPOKEN WORD
145 min read · 29,189 words- 0:00 – 0:02
Intro
- JRJoe Rogan
[upbeat music]
- 0:02 – 7:22
Dean Radin’s origin story: from violinist to scientist (and a genetic twist)
- JRJoe Rogan
Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. [upbeat music] Thank you for being here.
- DRDean Radin
Good to be here.
- JRJoe Rogan
I'm excited to talk to you. Did you maybe manifest this conversation somehow?
- DRDean Radin
Maybe.
- JRJoe Rogan
[laughs]
- DRDean Radin
[laughs]
- JRJoe Rogan
Um, I've seen a bunch of your talks online and, um, the ... First of all, let's start from the beginning. Like, what did, what is your background?
- DRDean Radin
Uh, I thought I'd give you a 40- 45-year arc-
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay
- DRDean Radin
... in about three minutes.
- JRJoe Rogan
Perfect.
- DRDean Radin
Because then there's a lot of places you can get into it. So I started out as a musician, violin, uh, up until about halfway through college and then I realized to be a musician means you have to be an athlete, 'cause you're making your living with your body. No one told me that up through until I finally decided, I don't think I wanna make my living with my body 'cause I've never been very strong, and more importantly, you also need to have a lot of stamina, and I didn't have that.
- JRJoe Rogan
And you weren't interested in gaining it?
- DRDean Radin
I c- I couldn't.
- JRJoe Rogan
[laughs]
- DRDean Radin
I, I have a genetic mutation that, that created, uh ... Like, most people when they exercise, you feel really good afterwards. I feel really exhausted, and I never understood why until m- many years later I realized that I have something called Gilbert syndrome-
- JRJoe Rogan
Uh-huh
- DRDean Radin
... which is a mutation of a liver enzyme, and y- you have no recovery time.
- JRJoe Rogan
Whoa.
- DRDean Radin
Yeah. So ...
- JRJoe Rogan
Is there anything they can do for that?
- DRDean Radin
Other than something like genetic engineering, which I've never heard anybody try yet, the answer is no.
- JRJoe Rogan
I've never heard of that condition before, I don't think.
- DRDean Radin
Yeah. It's, uh, there's some missing enzymes and more importantly, the bilirubin, which is unconjugated bilirubin. You have way too much of it. So there's an upside and a downside. The downside is that there, you, you can't recover from exercise quickly, and so there's a lot of fatigue that happens.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- DRDean Radin
The upside is that unconjugated bilirubin is an antioxidant. It's one of the n- most natural antioxidant, so my cardiovascular system is like a 20-year-old.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh. So you got your pros and your cons with this.
- DRDean Radin
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Have you ever tried exercising in very small doses, like, throughout the day?
- DRDean Radin
Well, I w- I walk every day, so that's, that's my primary exercise.
- 7:22 – 15:07
Finding “inner space”: noetics, intuition, and why science dismisses the weird
- DRDean Radin
Because, like, I, I would do this for a while and say, "I sort of understand that now. I want to do something different." Door number two. So in the, as a senior in college, uh, I learned about this place called The Institute of Noetic Sciences, which was started by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who was the sixth man on the moon, and on the way back to the Earth, he had a mystical experience. And so today, a lot of people who go into space talk about the overview effect, and he was one of the first to talk about it openly, even though all of the other astronauts had it. It expresses itself in different ways. So people generally will turn from whatever they were, it's a transformative experience, and they become different. And so in his way of expressing that after the mystical experience and thinking, "What in the world is that?" 'Cause he felt one with the universe, literally, he decided to create this institute that would study what he had been studying for outer space, but for inner space, to, to explore inner space. So I remember in college reading about this new institute, and their motto was, uh, the exploring the frontiers of consciousness. And I thought, "That sounds like something I wanna do." But there wasn't any place to do that other than this one institute. So I always had in the back of my mind that that's, that's where I wanna end up somehow.
- JRJoe Rogan
What is that term noetic? I've, I know I've heard it before, but I, I never looked it up.
- DRDean Radin
Noetic. So noetic is, uh, a feeling of intuition except that it carries a sense of certainty that the intuition is correct.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- DRDean Radin
So intuition is knowing something without knowing how you know it, just sort of arrives, but it's knowing with a, with certainty. And more often than not, the certainty is correct. So people talk about downloads in meditation and other places, that's what that is.
- JRJoe Rogan
This is a subject that up until, I would say, last couple decades was pretty openly dismissed by rational people, right? There's, there's almost, like, um, a desire to dismiss it, like a desire to define the world in much clearer terms where y- it's, it's maybe ego-driven. You're in control of your own destiny, and then there's certain factors that are out of your control, and just this is how it is, and this is life. Deal with it. And all this mystical woo-woo magic bullshit that people have been talking about for some strange reason for thousands of years, we just dismiss. And we dismiss it, um, under the narrative of science. We're talking about science. We're science people. We want data. But there is data. That's what's weird. And if you're willing to look a little preposterous, which I certainly am, uh, I think it's a good thing to do every now and then-
- DRDean Radin
Mm-hmm
- JRJoe Rogan
... take a fucking chance and try to figure out if the world is exactly constructed the way you've been told, because it might not be. There might be some weirdness to it all, and it seems like we all agree. We all agree there is some weirdness. You could chalk it off to coincidence when you think about a person and you haven't thought about them forever, and all of a sudden they call you. You- there's, there's some weirdness in the world. There's some weirdness in the world like knowing not to do something, and then something happens. There's some weirdness in knowing something's gonna happen, and you ignore that feeling, and then something terrible happens. You're like, "Fuck, I knew I shouldn't have gone there." There's, there's weirdness in the world, and it's not necessarily just pattern recognition and under- understanding scenarios 'cause you've experienced them before. There's something to that too. That's part of it too, but there's also something else. There's some weird connection that people have. There's a thing that y- when you know someone's mad at you and they don't say anything, you're like, "What is this fucking weird energy I'm getting off this guy?" There's some stuff we're, we're experiencing in the world that you can't put on a scale. You can't put a tape measure to it. You know, you can't, you can't measure its density, but it's there. There's something.
- DRDean Radin
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
And we have a very limited amount of senses in terms of our ability to see, feel, touch, smell. It's not enough. There's probably some other stuff out there j- we don't have the tools to measure, but it impacts us.
- DRDean Radin
But we do have the tools to measure. So that's what attracted me to the rest of my career because exactly for the same reason you just said, that people have experiences. Oftentimes they feel pretty strange, and so they start looking for, well, what, what is that? So if you go to a, uh, like a conventional science spokesperson, they will echo back exactly what you're saying. It's coincidence. It's a, it's-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right
- DRDean Radin
... frailty of memory, all of that stuff. But I learned e- early on, even in college, that there is a branch of science that has studied these things. I mean, it's been going on since the late 1800s, that the scientists have been interested in these kinds of phenomena, and science is really, really good at taking even strange subjective experiences and figuring out is that a coincidence or is that... What, what is that? Is it real? That attracted me. So, and it, it partially came out of reading a lot of science fiction. Science fiction is saturated with these kinds of stories, where the, the element of the story is revolving around some kind of psychic or noetic thing.
- JRJoe Rogan
The Force.
- DRDean Radin
Yeah. The-
- JRJoe Rogan
Classic
- DRDean Radin
... The Force, uh, in, in Dune, the series, Frank Herbert's Dune series, the whole thing about spice. Why did they have to take spice? Because that's the only way you can navigate when you're, you're jumping through wormholes. Like, you needed to know what you're about to expect on the other side. It just saturates novels and science fiction. It's there. And generally, if, if you have a topic that people are paying attention to like that and are very popular, it's because something is resonating. Like, if, if, if it was so strange that nobody even had a way of thinking about it, it, it wouldn't be popular. But it is, and it's perennially popular. So, so I took the science fiction interest, and as a even younger kid, about fairy tales, which is saturated with these things, too, and I thought, "Well, that, I wonder if that's real." But then you kind of get shuttled into a scientific career, and one thing that happens for fledgling engineers and scientists, and for a lot of other academics, is that you're being taught a set of assumptions about the way that the world works called materialism or physicalism, and the thing is, you're not taught that that is a set of assumptions. You take it for granted after a while, 'cause after you go through college for 20-plus years and no one ever mentions that we're working under a set of assumptions, a materialism, and no one ever talks about the philosophy of science, which is all about studying the assumptions and are they correct. Once you do start studying the philosophy of science, you find out that there's lots of different ways of understanding reality. And so there's the whole materialistic side, which is really, really good at explaining aspects of the physical world. It, it gives us these kinds of technologies. But it doesn't explain subjective experience at all. And so that's, that's like a existing number one mystery in science today because you have to challenge the idea that materialism is all there is. And so people have weird experiences. They're talking about a more comprehensive way of understanding reality. That's what's going on. And so that's, that's why I end up writing a book like this. So the magic here is not stage magic. It's, it's the real magic which we don't have a name for yet.
- 15:07 – 17:09
Psi research since the 1800s: controls, replication, and ‘don’t look’ skepticism
- JRJoe Rogan
When they first started studying this in the 1800s, what were they specifically trying to isolate or figure out?
- DRDean Radin
Well, just like today, people would see apparitions. They would have the sense that there were telepathic connections between people. Uh, they'd have precognitions, and there was the beginning of figuring out ways of using experimental science to be able to study these things under controlled conditions. And the, and the word control is important because it means you exclude coincidence by the design, and you exclude leakage of information. You exclude all kinds of things. So the only thing left over is if that telepathic thing was real, then we'd be able to see it in the lab. And the short story is, yeah, so we're now 150 years past that, and we have very, very strong evidence that telepathy does exist.
- JRJoe Rogan
So what was the first evidence that they, they were able to get out of these initial experiments?
- DRDean Radin
They used to call it thought transference. And so the methods they were using then would not pass muster today. They, they would have, like, two kids who say, "We c- we can, we can do telepathic transfer between us," and then many times they would find that the kids were using some kind of signal. And so that, that wouldn't work today. Today, people have to be strictly isolated. Uh, neither can know what the target is that they're trying to transfer to the other person, and we do lots and lots of replications with lots of people. And so that, that then forms a body of evidence where it becomes extremely difficult to think of what the flaw might be. And in fact, if you ask skeptics about it who know the literature, their usual response now is either, uh, there's no plausible flaw that they can identify, because a lot of time has been spent to figure out what might be a flaw, and the second response, which is more recent now, is, "We're not even gonna look at the evidence because we know it's impossible," which is no longer a scientific argument.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm. Yeah.
- DRDean Radin
But that's, that's the approach. "We're not gonna look at the data."
- JRJoe Rogan
That's silly.
- DRDean Radin
Yeah.
- 17:09 – 20:21
Remote viewing and intelligence agencies: why fund it if it’s nonsense?
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, it's really silly when you consider the intelligence agencies have spent an enormous amount of money and a considerable amount of time studying remote viewing. Like, why? Why would they invest that much time in nonsense?
- DRDean Radin
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
Why would they invest that much time in something where there's no evidence whatsoever and they've never achieved positive results? That doesn't seem to be correct.
- DRDean Radin
No.
- JRJoe Rogan
If you just, if you listen to the stories of the guy, like Hal Puthoff and all these different people that have been involved in these remote viewing experiments, they had actionable data that they, they, they derived specifically from remote viewing. I don't understand it. I can't... I've never done it. I've never attempted it. I don't know if I can do it. I did it once. Uh, we, we had an experiment on a television show that I did where we had this guy who claimed to be a remote viewer remote view this area, and it was, he was off. But it was also under duress, with cameras. Like, is that the state of mind that you want to be in when you're trying to remote view? No, that's not ideal at all. And that is a factor, a major factor in w- Whether or not you can understand intuition is wh- where, what is your state of mind? Are you in a place of complete anxiety and fear, or are you totally relaxed and focused on what you're doing? Is there any distractions? Is there a jackhammer nearby? Is there a dog barking? What... Is there something that could interrupt this state of mind that you're trying to achieve? Because there's different states of mind. We know this. We can measure this. We can measure the brainwaves. We can, we can... We understand that this state of mind, it's not a static thing like a toaster. You know, it's not on or off. There's a bunch of different shit going on in your brain, in your mind, at any given time. And so the idea that remote viewing, which is some very bizarre connection that some people have to reality that's nowhere near local, they can describe things in detail, talk about submarines that are being constructed in the, the Soviet Union. Like, it's, there's weird shit to that, and if you dis- if you just dismiss that, you're being a fool. There's something there, and i- the only way anybody figures out there's something there is if you study it, if, uh, actually intelligent people are willing to look a little foolish and spend some time studying it. This episode is brought to you by Visible. How many of you are currently listening to this podcast on your phone? If you are chronically online, like most of us are these days, your wireless network should be, too. With Visible, you get unlimited 5G and unlimited hotspot, all powered by Verizon's 5G network, the perks of big wireless for half the cost. Visible isn't just a wireless plan. It's unlimited wireless designed to keep you connected and no contract holding you back. Switch today at visible.com. Plans start at just $25 a month. Or get our premium Visible+ Pro plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code ROGAN, an exclusive offer for podcast listeners.
- 20:21 – 26:01
Inside STARGATE: clearances, goals, and the ‘superstar’ problem
- DRDean Radin
Right. So that brings us to my next job. So after I got my, my doctorate, I started working at Bell Laboratories.
- JRJoe Rogan
Ooh.
- DRDean Radin
So it was the, the biggest laboratory in the world at the time. It was still a Bell system. And because I was interested in these kinds of things, for some of my time at Bell Labs, I started doing little psychic experiments involving mind-matter interaction and also involving precognition. So there, there's a, an ongoing link here that goes back to the Institute of Noetic Sciences in a strange way. Edgar Mitchell was, gave the first money to SRI International, which is where Hal Puthoff and Russ Targ was, to do remote viewing studies. He also brought Uri Geller to the United States, and he brought SRI and a bunch of other places, including Bell Labs. So when I was working at the labs, I knew that there had been people who had seen some of the stuff that Geller did, and I was doing these little psychic things. So I asked for permission to be able to present some of the work I was doing at a annual conference of the Parapsychological Association, which is an affiliate of the largest scientific organization in the United States, the American Association for the Advancement of Science. So many people don't know that the Parapsychological Association is one of the 200-some affiliates of the AAAS. It's a legitimate scientific organization. So I did this precognition test. I asked for permission, and I got permission not only to give my presentation at the conference, but to use the Bell Labs imprimatur. So I was giving this as some guy from Bell Labs talking to this audience. Unbeknownst to me, there were a few people in the audience who came up afterwards, and one of them said, uh, "If there was an opening, would you, you be interested in joining the STARGATE program?"
- JRJoe Rogan
Whoa.
- DRDean Radin
And so that was an offer I couldn't refuse. That's one of these cases of you have this door or you have that door. Well, that door looked really interesting because it was known at the time that there were people at SRI doing this sort of thing, but the classified portions were a rumor. Like, nobody knew what was really going on.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- DRDean Radin
So I took a leave of absence.
- JRJoe Rogan
That must have been exciting.
- DRDean Radin
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
You get that offer?
- DRDean Radin
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
STARGATE?
- DRDean Radin
Yeah. Are you kidding?
- JRJoe Rogan
Holy shit.
- DRDean Radin
So, so I took a leave of absence for one year from Bell Labs, and so I went to SRI International. Hal Puthoff was my boss, and then, uh, Ed May, when Hal left in 1985, Ed May took over. He's, it may not be a name that is known as well, but he was the director for 10 years. Uh, and so I worked on that project, and it took a long time to get the clearances because first of all, I didn't know anything about classification or anything, but I figured, well, maybe it's just secret. No, it's just top secret. No, it's top secret SEI. No, it's top secret SEI special access program, which means there's literally a book that you have to sign, and you can see all the other people who have signed that book. Special access means e- even if you have a top secret clearance, you cannot know about this place. You cannot know about the code word. You can't, the code word was classified. So I mean, which seems kind of odd because if you have a code word, it's not saying anything. But nevertheless, that's how it worked.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- DRDean Radin
So we were the research side of people who talk about STARGATE. Mostly they're talking about the military side, the operational side. Well, we knew what they were doing, but our mission was different. Our mission was figure out those questions that you're asking. How does this stuff work? Like, is it real? Yes. Some people are very talented. Uh, what are the limits of it? Can you block it? Can you shield it? Can you do camouflage? And one of the main areas was what's the difference between someone like Joe McMoneagle, who's a superstar in this area- Why is he any different than anybody else? Because, like, when I first met the, Ingo Swann and Joe and a bunch of other people, they were the ki- they were so different than my stereotype of Madame Zodiac that, that-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm
- DRDean Radin
... they, like, I'd say, "You gotta be kidding. These people are remote viewers? They're just, like, guys and gals." And so every method was used to try to figure out is it psychological difference, is it physiological, is it medical? What, what is it? And the answer was we couldn't find anything. Now, there may be some background about the people themselves, but in terms of finding out something that we could use to select, because the, the Army and others were interested in getting lots of other people who would be talented, too.
- JRJoe Rogan
So was, there was no consistent factors?
- DRDean Radin
No. There wasn't, wasn't anything.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- DRDean Radin
So-
- JRJoe Rogan
That seems crazy
- DRDean Radin
... except maybe talent. Two things, talent and openness. So talent is natural talent. It's, it, the- partially based on genetics. And openness is a psychological trait where you're simply open to experience. So people who tend to be, to, to have, like, a certain way of thinking about things and are not, not open to other stuff, they block it. They could block it real good. People who are open to experience and willing to try new things, they in general tend to do better. So that brings us to talent, which I'll get to a little bit later, especially about the genetics of talent. So we didn't have the genetic tools at the time. Now we do have the genetic tools, and so we've done a couple of studies looking for what we call the psi gene.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- 26:01 – 34:04
Princeton, silos, and proving effects at scale: meta-analysis & mind–machine signatures
- DRDean Radin
So we've, we think we're onto something. Okay, so, so I work on Stargate for a year. Uh, the, go back to Bell Labs and almost immediately get another invitation. It's one of these doors open again. "How would you like to go to Princeton?" Because at Princeton at the time was the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory. It was the, a lab doing psi research that was headed by the dean of the School of Engineering. And so that lab went almost for 30 years doing mind-matter interaction, doing remote viewing, and a bunch of other stuff at Princeton. So my position was in the psych department, 'cause that's where I had my PhD, but to lead a program among many departments, one of which was the Pear Lab. And the idea was, uh, in order to have any chance at beginning to understand this stuff, you need to pull in every discipline, because it's way too big. It's, it's too complicated for a single discipline. So we had the d- philosophy department and the psychology department and civil engineering and the Pear Lab and a bunch of other departments. My job was to sort of corral it together to create multidisciplinary research projects. And I was told on day one, "That's impossible. You c- this is a job you cannot do." Well, why? I mean, we had the money for it. And the answer is that in the academic world, you succeed within silos. You know an enormous amount about a very particular kind of topic. Like, even in the psych department there, you have cognitive psychologists, perceptual psychologists, social psychologists, and on and on and on. They don't even talk to each other, because it's outside of your discipline, outside the little silo. My job was to sort of mash it together, and it was ridiculously complicated.
- JRJoe Rogan
Was there resistance?
- DRDean Radin
Oh my God. Resistance is not quite strong enough.
- JRJoe Rogan
[laughs]
- DRDean Radin
It's like, uh, each one of the departments was getting money from this big grant that we had, so they were willing to play the game. But when it actually came down to doing some kind of a cross-filtering mul- no.
- JRJoe Rogan
Why didn't they wanna collaborate?
- DRDean Radin
Because everything of value in the academic world is in your silo.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh.
- DRDean Radin
And so if you're trying to work across silos, again, even within the same department, social psychology and perceptual psychology might not even talk to each other. And they had, their offices are right next to each other. But that's simply the way the-
- JRJoe Rogan
That's insane.
- DRDean Radin
Yeah. But it also, it sort of makes sense when you think about it. To become an expert in something takes 20 years from, from the university and then the rest of your academic career just to keep up with it. So it kind of makes sense that you don't wanna start f- turning your attention off to something else because you're not in that department anymore. So it, it's a problem, and it's always been there. It's not getting any better either.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, it seems like there should be a way to fix that. The ultimate goal should be whatever we're all working on collectively should benefit mankind. And if you're in the psychology industry, which you are if you're teaching psychology, if you're working on psychology, you should wanna get involved in this. The, the fact that they're all siloed off like that seems insane.
- DRDean Radin
Yeah. So the, the approach that's sometimes taken in the academic world is to create a center, a center for the study of fill in the blank. That brings in people from different disciplines, and then they're kind of forced together.
- JRJoe Rogan
But these people from dis- different disciplines probably are already working on important stuff to them, and this is taking away from their time.
- DRDean Radin
It, it could be, except that, uh, depending on the nature of the work, it may be something that requires another discipline. So you might have somebody in computer science who's working on that, and then you have somebody in psychology who's interested in the human side, like how do you connect the computer and the people.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- DRDean Radin
Well, there's a sub-discipline called human factors. That, that's where I was working in Bell Labs, 'cause they had engineering and psychology. So you kind of mash those two together, and then you could actually learn, uh, some new stuff that's of value to both. And also, you, that's how you create new disciplines. That's how the discipline of neuroscience began. So you go back, now it's more like 60 to 70 years ago, somebody noticed that you have all these people in biology and all these people looking at cells and, uh, people looking at, at things having to do wi- with the nervous system that were all different disciplines. So a, a large foundation came along and said, "I think we need to create a discipline of the neurosciences." And they threw enough money at it to bring people together, and that formed a new discipline. So I work in the area of consciousness studies, which is only now starting to become its own discipline.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- DRDean Radin
Because before that, it was maybe a few philosophers interested in it and anesthesiologists, and that's it. But it's changing.
- JRJoe Rogan
So when you were at Princeton, what, what specifically did-- how did you start it? Like, what, what specifically were you working on initially?
- DRDean Radin
Well, besides trying to get people to talk to each other, which was frustrating.
- JRJoe Rogan
[laughs] A big task.
- DRDean Radin
Yeah. So one of the things I did was meta-analysis. So this is a way of taking results of individual experiments that are similar to each other, like telepathy experiments, and putting them all together with a statistical method to see whether independent people are able to replicate the same thing. It's called meta-analysis. Meta meaning it's like an analysis of analyses. And so it answers two questions. One is, if this is really real in a scientific sense, then other independent people ought to be able to do the same experiment and get the same result. So that's one part. The other part is, if you do have a lot of people doing the same experiment, then what is the overall result? It's like one gigantic experiment now. So I, I did a number of meta-analyses, ended up writing a book on it that nobody wanted to buy, so it just sat there. Uh, and then I was doing experiments on precognition as, as part of my job. And because of my engineering background, I was using the ver- the latest version of machine learning at the time, which was neural networks, and applying it to the data from the Pear Lab to see if, uh, you know, when you do an experiment involving mind-matter interaction, you usually use a random number generator and you ask somebody, this thing is-- You tell them, "This is gonna push out a whole bunch of bits, random bits, and I want you to make more one bits than zero bits. That's your task." So they press a button, and they get some kind of result. "And now make more zero bits." And now don't do anything. So this is a, uh, uh, three different kinds of tasks in one session. And so what, what they were finding was that in general, if you run a lot of people in this kind of task, yes, their intention makes the bits go in the direction that you want. So you aim high, it goes up. Aim low, it goes down, so on. So the question then is not everybody can do that. Some people get the opposite result. Some, some people get really good at making it go high, but they can't make it go low. So it-- the idea came about there's a cert- something like a signature that was from each person. People had a way of interacting with the machine that made it do certain things that was unique to them, but overall, it worked out. So I started using neural networks to see if I could train a neural network to tell who was doing the task based on how the random bits were working, and it turns out you can. So when I left Princeton, because it was getting way too frustrating, I took that idea-
- JRJoe Rogan
Just trying to get people to work together.
- DRDean Radin
Trying to, to do this multidisciplinary teams. It-- Yeah, and as I told you, the first day I was there for the job, I was told, "Y- y- by the way, you have, you have an impossible job. It's necessary, though, because this was part of the grant. What you're doing is part of the grant, so you have to do it anyway." And I, I did it for three years, and then I decided I d- I didn't want to do that anymore.
- JRJoe Rogan
[laughs]
- 34:04 – 35:43
Turning psi into tech (and getting shut down): patents, Navy interest, and disbelief
- DRDean Radin
But so I went back to, to industry, but I had p- I specifically told the people I was interviewing with, "I want to pursue this." Like, this is the beginning of a technology where-- that will have a machine identify who you are and your intention, kind of like Neuralink, except there's no connection. There's nothing going in the brain. It's purely intention. So I did end up working for a company outside of Washington, D.C., where part of my work was doing exactly that. We were using more advanced neural networks with random number generators and got to the point where, uh, we were about to set a patent for this device 'cause it worked, and the head of the organization at the time was a retired general who had a buddy who was an admiral, and he said the, the Navy's interested in this. For kind of, for obvious reasons. They want ways of communicating with submarines. So, uh, at that point, we're, like, right on the edge of doing that, and we get bought by another company, and the new company said, "You're not gonna work on that anymore." So the wheels internally started to-- It was like golden handcuffs. A lot of money. Let's-- I mean, it's a very good position, but I didn't really wanna do that anymore.
- JRJoe Rogan
Did they have a re-- Was it a profitable issue?
- DRDean Radin
The vice president in charge of the lab did not believe that it was possible.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, God.
- DRDean Radin
They also didn't look at the data.
- JRJoe Rogan
Of course.
- DRDean Radin
So he said, "No, we're not gonna do that."
- JRJoe Rogan
He doesn't wanna be silly.
- DRDean Radin
Yeah. So I-
- JRJoe Rogan
[laughs]
- DRDean Radin
I mean, it's so frustrating. You have th- the-- It worked. We have a thing here. It's working. No, he just, he didn't wanna do it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, that's so frustrating.
- DRDean Radin
Yeah. So a few years goes by.
- JRJoe Rogan
But wow.
- 35:43 – 43:38
Ganzfeld automation and ‘presentiment’: the body reacting to the future
- DRDean Radin
I kept doing all this stuff on the side now outsi- outside of work 'cause it was just too interesting to drop. Um, my-- There was a recession. This was 1992. There was a recession. Uh, part of my department was laid off, including myself. So unbeknownst to most people at the time, that the Stargate program, uh, and by the way, it wasn't called Stargate then. There's a lot of code words involved, but it's just known as Stargate, so I'll use that. That program was giving classified contracts to other people around the world, including at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. So we had a colleague at the University of Edinburgh who was creating an automated Ganzfeld testing system. This is a telepathy system where you press a button, and the people are involved, and everything is automated. It's kind of getting the human out of the loop except for the two people in the experiment. Well, the man who was developing that unfortunately died, and so this was an unfinished project. So I went to Ed May, who was director of Cart Stargate at the time, and I said, "Well, can I go there and finish the project?" Yeah, sure. Okay. So I went to the University of Edinburgh for about a year, and I worked on this project to finish the automated telepathy system, and they've run many, many, many people through that system by now. Um, and so while I was there, I finished that pretty quickly. I started to develop the presentiment experiment, and you had Julia Mossbridge on the show recently.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- DRDean Radin
So she was... I think she was talking about this experiment where you can see if somebody's body is reacting to something in the future that is unanticipated, that's random. Well, I d- I was developing that at the time. This would've been around '93 or so. And like, uh... And so l- let me, let me tell you a story about the kind of effect that gave me the idea to do this experiment. So the, the usual way that people talk about it is that you're, you drive to work the same way every, every day, thousands of times, and you have a, a traffic light that you're coming up to, and it's green. And normally you'd start accelerating towards it because you wanna get through the light. Something tells you today there's something wrong. I don't know what it is, but I'm gonna slow down. And you keep slowing down. The cars behind you are beeping. They're saying, "Well, what, what's going on?" You get almost up to the intersection and a truck blasts through the red light, and you would've been hit broadside if you didn't slow down. So you have this momentary shock of relief, realizing that you just saved your life by paying attention to that little voice inside your head. So I thought, "Okay, let's simulate that in the laboratory," where we can't put people in danger, but we can do emotional tests like that. So you wire somebody up looking at skin conductance or pupil dilation or brainwaves, all kinds of things in your nervous system, and then you just record that continually, tell them, "Press a button," and then they're gonna see something on a screen. So it could be a very calm picture or it could be a very emotional picture. So emotion can split in two ways. It could be a very negative picture like picture of surgery or an explosion or something, or it could be a positive like a smiling baby. So they're two different valences they're called. And you don't know which is gonna come up because a true random number generator is the thing that decides. After you press the button, then it decides what it's gonna show you. So nobody knows in advance, including the experimenter. So I set up an experiment to do that, uh, and by this time I already... I'd left Edinburgh. I had to make a decision then again, "Do you wanna go back into industry?" And I had an offer from Oak Ridge National Labs, which would've put me back in the classified world, or this other opportunity, which was to, uh, work at, at University of Nevada, funded by Robert Bigelow, who's probably best known for the OSAP program.
- JRJoe Rogan
He's been on here before.
- DRDean Radin
Yeah. So Bigelow has very generously said, "Yeah, I'll, I'll pay for your way to go into the university there," and I was able to run my own lab. So one of the very first things I set up then was, first of all, I wanna continue working on this neural network or machine learning method, uh, for making a technology of intention. That was one of the things. But the other one was this presentiment experiment. So I ran that experiment and it was unbelievably good. Like it's, it's... Normally you have little statistical effects. This is like in your face, holy smoke, this is a big thing. Big, big, uh, b- uh, pre- presentiment effects, like if skin conductance one and a half seconds before you p- Well, you press a button, you wait five seconds, then it selects a picture. So one and a half seconds before the picture is selected, if it's emotional, you start to become emotional. If it's calm, you remain calm. So that difference beforehand we call the presentiment effect. It's your body somehow or unconscious knowing what you're about to see, just like approaching a light and slowing down. Something is telling you something. So we did that experiment, and I told this to one of the guys at the, at the center I was working at, and he told me a story which is far more interesting than s- than not going through a, a red light. So the story is this. So he used to go hunting with his buddies, and they had a whole bunch of guns. His favorite gun was a six-shot revolver, a double action revolver. And so the way that he... He would take all the bullets out, he'd clean the whole thing out, and he put in one, two, three, four, five bullets and leave the hammer over the empty chamber so it wouldn't get jostled accidentally. So he, he's cleaning the gun, he's putting in bullet one, two, three, four. He picks up the fifth bullet and he has that feeling, "Something about this bullet isn't right." So he didn't put it in, left it aside, put the hammer over cylinder six, and then they went hunting. So this is now two weeks in advance. They, they come back from hunting. His pistol wasn't used, and a bunch of other guns weren't used, but they do what you should not do after you go hunting, which is starting to drink. So they're all getting a little bit too tipsy and drinking too much, and a fight breaks out between two people there. One of them picks up my friend's gun, points it point blank at somebody else, like right in their face, and my friend is now looking with horror because the f- trigger's getting pulled. The hammer's going back, the cylinder is turning, and he's trying to intervene now. He steps right in front of the gun and it goes click. Th- the hammer hit. It hit that fifth chamber because it rotated from six to five.
- JRJoe Rogan
Whoa.
- DRDean Radin
So he realized with horror at that moment that if he had not taken out that bullet, he would be shot in the head. And so the, afterwards he said, "Everyone has a bullet with their name on it, and mine is in a safety deposit box, and I know exactly where it is, and it is not coming out."
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- DRDean Radin
That's a real-life version of this, which is two weeks in advance. In the laboratory, we can only look seconds in advance.
- JRJoe Rogan
Also, you should have the intuition to not go hunting and drinking with psychos that are willing to shoot somebody in the face over an argument.
- DRDean Radin
Nevertheless, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
[laughs]
- DRDean Radin
So it happens. Uh, yeah. So-
- JRJoe Rogan
That's crazy, though
- DRDean Radin
... so that- but see, this is, this is where we wanna go in these kinds of experiments. You need, like, real-life stuff that you can actually test in a controlled way in the laboratory, but there's all kinds of ethical reasons, obviously, why you can't do that. But I'm pretty sure that if we're able to do, to get something at that level in the laboratory, we would have much, much stronger results than we currently do.
- 43:38 – 59:30
How remote viewing ‘works’ in practice: training, protocols, and nonlocal theories
- JRJoe Rogan
Now, when it comes to things like remote viewing and, uh, being able to be open and being able to actually pull it off and actually remote view things that you can prove, what, what is the state of mind these people are trying to achieve? Is-- And what is the protocol for achieving that state of mind?
- DRDean Radin
It depends on whether you're naturally talented or not. So, uh, Joe McMoneagle and a few others that, that I know, um, if, if you, uh, were to ask them at, uh, at breakfast, uh, "Could you remote view what I have in, I have a hidden folder over here?" They would continue eating and tell you the answer immediately. So for them, it doesn't take much at all. And in fact, what Joe would say, and I, I have, I have some pictures from what Joe had done. Joe would say that, uh, if he knows in the afternoon he's going to do a remote viewing, he'll get all the information in the morning, like instantly. It'll just, it'll just be there, and then he has to wait until the th- you know, the whole thing plays out. But it's like, bang, you got it. So it's a matter internally of simply knowing, "I need to get this information," and it happens immediately. For people who don't have that natural talent, you go through training where... And by, by the way, almost everybody can do this, but it does require some training now. So for a, an average person, the training typically is to not name an impression, which is really tough. So you have a target, which may, which may be somewhere in the world, may be a person somewhere, may be in an envelope, something like that. You're taught, uh, the f- you will have something come to mind. You know that that's a target. You have no idea what it is, but you know that there is a target you're gonna have to describe. So name the first thing that comes to mind, but not the, without naming it. So you start little scribbles, and then you have more complicated scribbles, and then you start adding feelings and senses that are associated with these scribbles. Eventually, you get to the point where it's kind of all gels together, and then you get a, a coherent image. The problem is that if you tell somebody, "I'm gonna show you a picture in 20 minutes," that you don't know what it is, and you say, "Okay, well, just imagine what you're gonna get," and you get a flash of yellow, you're instantly gonna start thinking of bananas. And once that happens, you can't not s- think of bananas anymore. So that's what I mean by not naming.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- DRDean Radin
So that's one of the very first things that you learn is anything that comes to mind that you have a name to is probably not it. It takes practice, but you can get there.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow. What was the most impressive thing that you ever saw anybody achieve with remote viewing?
- DRDean Radin
After I got the clearances, uh, Hal gave me the briefing that, that everyone gets, like in, in SCIFs and Congress and presidents, whatever. I got the same briefing. So, uh, o- o- one picture after the other of experiments by Joe and by a bunch of other people who are not as well-known, they basically give almost a veridical drawing of the target, and these are targets that are elsewhere in the world. These are targets that are in envelopes. These are targets that are in SCIFs. All of, all different kinds of targets where nothing about the target is known. Like, I will tell you a five-digit number which stands for the target, and so all you have is a five-digit number. Now give me a description of what I'm gonna show you in two hours. And they do it.
- JRJoe Rogan
So you're putting the number to the target? You're just saying, like, uh-
- DRDean Radin
Rand-
- JRJoe Rogan
... Moscow is number 654.
- DRDean Radin
A random number, yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
And just by you attributing that number to whatever this target is, there's a connection made.
- DRDean Radin
Yep.
- JRJoe Rogan
What's happening? How is that [laughs] ?
- DRDean Radin
Yeah. So w- w-
- JRJoe Rogan
What's that?
- DRDean Radin
Yeah. We, we don't know why that is. Uh, there are theories about it, and the theory requires probably stepping away from materialism as the only model of reality. So there are other models which allow for consciousness, whatever that is, 'cause we don't know that either, but consciousness seems to have a non-local quality. So it's the same kind of non-locality that you talk about in quantum mechanics.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- DRDean Radin
So quantum mechanics has entanglement, which are non-local connections between things. Uh, it is also through time, so connections through space and time. So we know that that's a real thing. That's what the physical world allows. It is as though consciousness, whatever that is, also has that property. It is non-local. So if you push it hard enough, you end up with something like the m- that movie, uh, Everything Everywhere All at the Same Time. That's basically what we're talking about. There's an aspect of reality which we don't ordinarily see, but nevertheless connects everything throughout space and time. And so if it, that were not true, then things like precognition wouldn't work so well, telepathy wouldn't work, remote viewing wouldn't work. None of that would work. But n- nevertheless, it does work, so that is, like, a more comprehensive way of understanding what reality's like.
- JRJoe Rogan
Do you think this is an emerging quality in human beings, or do you think this is an atrophied quality that we used to all have before the development of Written language, books, media, all these different things that sort of take away this quiet communication that people probably had with each other. We believe wolves have that with each other. Wolves coordinate somehow. They coordinate attacks on animals, and it could be through learned experience, but how do they, how do they remember it and know what to do, and how do each one have specific roles? Like, one wolf will chase the elk into, like, a certain corridor, and the other wolves will wait and be on a, like, a higher ground and come down and attack. They know that they do weird stuff that somehow or another requires some kind of communication.
- DRDean Radin
Yes. And they're way more intelligent than we have usually thought.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, think about how intelligent some dogs are.
- DRDean Radin
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
You know, like a Belgian Malinois or something like that, or one of those dogs they use for military training. Those do- those dogs are incredibly intelligent.
- DRDean Radin
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And they need actch- exercise. They need activities. They need things to stimulate them 'cause their brain is, like, firing all day long. A wolf is that times 100.
- DRDean Radin
Yeah. And so most animals, plants, insects maybe are, have consciousness in some form, and if that consciousness is similar to ours, it is non-local.
- JRJoe Rogan
Do you think it's an emerging thing?
- DRDean Radin
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Or do you think it's a thing that we've always had?
- DRDean Radin
I, I think that, uh, we are shaped as humans by evolution to not pay attention to the there and then. Because if we were paying attention to there and then a lot, then you may not notice that there's a tiger in front of you who's about to eat you. And so if you, like, look over the, the long span of development of whatever it is we are, people who are walking around thinking about Pluto a million years ago would have been pruned out of existence.
- 59:30 – 1:08:36
Operational highlight: Carter’s bomber recovery + military telepathy anecdotes
- JRJoe Rogan
I interrupted you when we were talking about numbers being associated with targets, and you were expanding on actionable data. Like real, like w- what, what was the most impressive thing to you that you saw that people achieve with remote viewing?
- DRDean Radin
Do, do you mean from an operational sense, or, or from-
- JRJoe Rogan
I mean, just, just for people listening, like what would be the most spectacular example of something that couldn't be achieved any other way?
- DRDean Radin
Well, one of the things was actually admitted by President Carter way back when, when they found a, a, a bomber, a nuclear bomber that, that landed somewhere in Africa, uh, which could not be seen from above because of the canopy of, of all the... And, and nobody knew where it actually landed.
- JRJoe Rogan
It crashed, right?
- DRDean Radin
It crashed. There was a, a bomb on board that they did not want anybody else to get. Um, and so they asked one of the remote viewers. In fact, this w- one of the... They, they asked several of them, but one of them specialized in location, which is very difficult for remote viewing. Like if you look at a map and you say, well, you know, put a dot on the map of where it is, that turns out to not, not be very easy, even for remote viewers. But this one lady was very, very good at that. She was a dowser. In fact, she was a map dowser. So you get a big piece of blank-
- JRJoe Rogan
You, you're saying dowser like those people that walk around with the, the stick to find water?
- DRDean Radin
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- DRDean Radin
Except map dowsing is you have a blank sheet of paper which is linked by association to an actual map somewhere. You don't, you know, you don't wanna give anything away, so you don't use a real map. You use a piece of paper which is, has little Xs on it that map onto an actual map.
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- DRDean Radin
So we asked this lady, her name was Fran, uh, "Put a mark on the map of where this bomber landed." And of course, she doesn't know it's Africa. She doesn't know anything. She does her thing. She puts a mark on the map and says, "I, I think it's there." So they go there and they find it within a couple of kilometers of that spot.
- JRJoe Rogan
Whoa.
- DRDean Radin
And so they, they originally go to that spot. They see natives nearby, so they ask the natives, you know, "The, was there anything crashing out of the sky recently?" They said, "Yeah, something happened over there. That's where it was."
- JRJoe Rogan
Now, what did Carter say when he, when he spoke about this publicly?
- DRDean Radin
Carter was asked a very similar question, that, "Did, did you ever encounter anything really weird?" So that's the example that he used.
- JRJoe Rogan
Didn't Carter have a UFO experience before?
- DRDean Radin
He did. He had that as well, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And Carter was, the, the folklore is that Carter was briefed about something having to do with alien life, and he was so upset that he, he started weeping.
- DRDean Radin
Yes, I have heard those stories, yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
What do you think about those stories?
- DRDean Radin
It could well be true, yeah. I mean, so here, there's actually-
- JRJoe Rogan
Did you ever hear a rumor of what he was told?
- DRDean Radin
Uh, no. I don't know what he was told. If I had to guess, given that he was a very religious person, it probably was pushing against his religious beliefs.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- DRDean Radin
That's what I would guess.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, you know, that was the, the giant rumor that was going around recently, that there was going to be some big disclosure by the White House, and that a bunch of pastors had been briefed about this to try to talk to their flock and, uh, and to, you know, get ahead of it.
- DRDean Radin
Yeah. Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
You heard that, right?
- DRDean Radin
Yeah, yeah.
- 1:08:36 – 1:11:14
Secrets vs. psi: classification absurdities and the threat of ‘no secrets’ society
- JRJoe Rogan
It's just interesting. It's just, uh, it's, it's fascinating when you find out that there are these very limited access programs that are beyond top secret, that even the president can't find out about them.
- DRDean Radin
Yeah. Yeah, and so the, one other disadvantage of a special access program is that you could be working next to somebody and are not allowed to talk about-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right
- DRDean Radin
... what they're doing, and that, that was happening a lot.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- DRDean Radin
So a lot of the Stargate program is now public. It's, uh, there's, like, four volumes that, that go through great gory detail on this called the Stargate Archives. Not all of it has been released. So a lot of the military stuff won't, will never be released because it involves people and methods and so on. Some of the research side is not released either, and so I know about that because I was, I was in there. I also, just by virtue of hanging around other people, you'll learn things that, that they talk about, so we know about some of those things too. And I, I know when you're talking to Hal Puthoff, and occasionally you would ask him something, and he'd say, "Well, I can't talk about that." "Well, I can't talk about this."
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. That's a problem. Does that frustrate you that you can't openly discuss some of these things?
- DRDean Radin
Yes. It was especially frustrating when I was working there because we go into the building, and we're doing all kinds of interesting psychic things, and you go out of the building, and it does, not only doesn't exist, that if it ever comes up in conversation, you don't say, "I can't talk about it," because that would mean they know this... You have to go along with the game and just agree with everybody else that it's all nonsense.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- DRDean Radin
So it's nonsense out there, and in here, we're working on it. So that kind of-
- JRJoe Rogan
What a weird psychological dilemma
- DRDean Radin
... well, even worse. The whole point about classification is to keep secrets. We were figuring out ways that you can't keep secrets, right? I mean, the whole thing about remote viewing and telepathy and all that stuff-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah
- DRDean Radin
... there are no secrets. With the right talented people, nothing can be shielded. Nothing. Uh, outside, everything is all about secrets. So one of the reasons, I think, that these topics are still c- have a stigma attached to them and why there's disinformation is because imagine how this society would work if there were no secrets.
- JRJoe Rogan
Do you, don't you think that technology is eventually taking us in that direction?
- DRDean Radin
Yes, but it's not gonna be Neuralink. It's, it's not gonna be brain computer stuff. It's gonna be the real thing.
- JRJoe Rogan
You, so you think technology will aid us in achieving the real thing?
- DRDean Radin
Yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
How so?
- 1:11:14 – 1:18:47
Psi genes, the Inquisition hypothesis, and why levitation disappeared
- DRDean Radin
Okay. So one day we're talking to Gary Nolan. Uh, Gary says, uh, "Have you ever looked at the genetics of, of highly talented people?" There's a lot of folklore out there that there are people who are psychic who come from psychic families, and then there are people who don't have anything psychic and don't have anybody talking about psychic stuff. That suggests genetics, so this was a couple years ago. We decided to do an experiment that we call psi genes. We're looking for the psychic gene. More likely a polygenetic trait, but nevertheless, something about genetics. So we do an experiment where we recruit 3,000 people using the internet who say that they're psychic from psychic families, and then we do all kinds of vetting to make sure that they are who they say they are, and they have some talent, and we get their DNA. Uh, we only had enough money to find, out of the 3,000 people, 13, 'cause we also did face-to-face interviews to make sure they weren't nuts. So we get their DNA, then we find match controls, and we do standard methods of comparing the two, the two sets of genomes. And so we found something that we didn't expect, which was that the psychics were all so-called wild type. They didn't have any unusual things happening in their, their DNA. The controls had a significant effect in an intron sequence. So when you, you have, you have DNA, it's billions of base pairs. Only about 50,000 of them produce proteins. It's the e- called the exome. It's a portion that creates our body. It's, it's that stuff. All of the rest of it used to be called junk DNA 'cause they didn't know what it w- it did. It's the intron sequence. It's the thing between the genes. That now we know is the epigenetic portion. It's the portion of the DNA that turns genes on and off. These controls had a mutation in their intron sequence, so they were turning something off. We still don't know exactly what it is, but something about their makeup was turning off psychic sensitivity. And so one of the people on our, our project was a specialist in the genetics of societies. Different societies have different genetic makeup. And he found that to our surprise there too, that countries that were exposed to Christianity, the longer they were exposed, the more this intron sequence was there, the mutation. We started thinking, "Well, well how does that make any sense?" And then suddenly we understood. The, uh, the Inquisition had systematically looked for people over hundreds of years who had these abilities, and then they killed them.
- JRJoe Rogan
[laughs] Jeez.
- DRDean Radin
And so y- you think about this is a, a non-evolutionary method, but nevertheless a pruning of a portion of humanity.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- DRDean Radin
So they were getting rid of people who had this, and what were left over were the people who had this no psychic stuff at all. So yeah. So it's like a, a, a eugenics in an opposite direction, where they weren't trying to pull people for talent, but get rid of the talent, and you could see it in the, in the genome.
- JRJoe Rogan
And this is directly connected the, to the Inquisition? Because so, so the Inquisition, this is ... What, what were they... Like who were they targeting specifically?
- DRDean Radin
They were targeting witches. So the witches were once ... I mean, an awful lot of in- innocent people were caught up in that as well.
- JRJoe Rogan
Of course.
- DRDean Radin
But people who were known as healers, or people who had precognition. And of course, the, the church at the time was just concerned that somebody's gonna come along that's going to attract our followers away from us. So magic was okay within the church. Within the bounds of the church, if a priest is anointed in a certain way, they can do magic. The whole ceremony of the Eucharist is a magical practice. It's okay. Outside of the church it was not okay. And so it was a very heavy-handed way of ensuring that the power would remain in the church.
- JRJoe Rogan
So by enforcing their Christian ideology, they eliminated anybody that had any alternative powers or visions or anything weird, any other kind of practices.
- DRDean Radin
Yeah. And so the, the case of the Catholic saints is very interesting. Like, uh, Joseph of Cupertino was said to have levitated, and also to do bilocation, very psychic things. He was very ... He, he was lucky in a sense that he was already a priest. Uh, lots of people, thousands of people saw him levitate. And he made, basically a deal was made with the Inquisition that you now need to go to this place out in the middle of nowhere and don't show this anymore to anybody, because we don't want-
- JRJoe Rogan
So when you say he could levitate, like how high?
- DRDean Radin
There are stories of him levitating 30 feet.
- JRJoe Rogan
Sometimes drifting into the rafters of churches in front of astonished crowds, and even Pope Urban VIII.
- DRDean Radin
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
You could read more about in his extraordinary life through Franciscan Media. Ha.
- DRDean Radin
Yeah, Saint Teresa lived-
- JRJoe Rogan
The patron saint. Go back, please. The, uh, often called the patron saint of air travelers. [laughs]
- DRDean Radin
Yeah. Why not? Right? We're all levitating.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, that is cra- the most famous levitator in Catholic history. So there's other levitators?
- DRDean Radin
Oh, yeah. Yeah. There, there's a book called-
- JRJoe Rogan
How come nobody can do that now?
- DRDean Radin
Uh, there are stories that people can do it now, but so far in the laboratory we haven't been able to see this.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- DRDean Radin
So there's a book called-
- JRJoe Rogan
Stop, stop, please. Oh. Go back. Sorry. Um, this one, Saint Teresa of Avila.
- DRDean Radin
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
A Spanish mystic who famously recorded that her levitations occurred unexpectedly during states of deep spiritual rapture. She described the sensation as a violent force lifting her up from beneath her feet, and was so embarrassed by it that she instructed fellow nuns to physically hold her down. Whoa.
- DRDean Radin
Yeah, dozens. Dozens of saints.
- JRJoe Rogan
Francis of Assisi. But it's like, do it now.
- 1:18:47 – 1:41:58
Micro-PK and ‘real magic’: Radin’s spoon-bending experience and the role of motivation
- DRDean Radin
Yes. It b- it also, I believe that it can act as a block for other people. So what one is ... So y- you haven't asked yet, uh, why as a scientist who worked at Princeton and Bell Labs, why am I writing about magic? It's because of a couple of experiences that told me that our understanding of psychic effects now is like in a box. We, we generally do experiments. We get relatively small effects. They're not gigantic effects. They're not levitation. Well, maybe it's the same thing. Somebody can make a random number generator do something. It's y- you need statistics to see it. They're really small, but we don't know the limits. So I've had a few experiences that told me I really don't know what the limits are. And so that, that brings up this. So bending a bowl of a spoon without force, which I did. And so I, I brought you a spoon. This is the same spoon from the, it's from 1961. It's this particular ... So I set up this. I, I went to a, a so-called spoon bending party because pe-
- JRJoe Rogan
You bent that spoon with your brain or your mind?
- DRDean Radin
Well, with my-
- JRJoe Rogan
Or your consciousness or whatever it is. Something, psychic spoon-
- DRDean Radin
I mentally did something, but I'll show you in a minute how we did this.
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- DRDean Radin
So I, the reason I did this, 'cause I was at Interval, and at the time Russ Targ was working for me, and Ed May too. And Russ came back from one of these parties and he said he had bent a, a rebar, q- a half-inch rebar, pshh, which that, I mean, some musclemen can do that, but you have to be pretty strong to bend a rebar and have it stay there. So I was thinking, "That is ridiculous." I didn't say that, but I was thinking, "That's impossible." And the same thing about this. If you bend the neck of a spoon, which is what typically people do, y- a, a person can do that just pshh and it's gone so fast that you, you can't see it, and then you hide it and you-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm
- DRDean Radin
... reveal it and it looks like you bent it. So I went to one of these parties and I heard that there was a woman there who was able to bend the bowl of the spoon just by touching it, not by itself, but sort of touching it and moving it over. And I said, "I wanna see that because it's ridiculous." So I'm standing in front of this woman and she's holding it like this. She has a, a thumb there and a finger here.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- DRDean Radin
And, and so she's ... I, I'm waiting for her to do it, and I'm mimicking her because I wanna d- I wanna see how she's doing it. You know-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right
- DRDean Radin
... is it a trick? So we're doing that and nothing is happening, and then somebody says, "Look what you did." And I'm looking, "Oh, oh, somebody did something?" "No, Dean, look what you did." I had bent it 90 degrees. And immediately look at my fingers. Did I do this by force? No. No, no indication, no indentation or anything. And so the person said, "Bend it all the way." So it was halfway and I, I literally went pshh and it went all the way. So I, I, so now I have this spoon and I'm sort of m- mind-boggled by it 'cause I know it wasn't force. I'm not strong enough to be able to do that. Very few people would be able to do it. So I have another spoon just like it, and I'm on the plane flying home, and I'm, I'm like trying to do it with the spoon, and I suddenly get a huge shock of fear because I'm in a metal tin can 30,000 feet up, and I don't know how I did it, and I don't want the wings to suddenly go pshh, because I'm, I'm-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right
- DRDean Radin
... I still don't know exactly how, but I know the metallurgy now. So it turns out that if, if you're holding it like that and you can do between 50 and 70 pounds of force suddenly, like a, like an impulse, you will cause the, the, the lattice that, that forms the grain boundary to momentarily soften. And then for about 20 seconds it will be really, really soft. And that- that's ... And, and at that point you can literally just take a thumb and f- finger like this, which is what I did, and squish it over. Instantly it tightens up again.
- JRJoe Rogan
But there's no explanation for what caused the initial force.
- DRDean Radin
No, because I, I was holding it like this, and I, I, I can't do it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Can you do that now?
- DRDean Radin
No. I don't, I don't know how I did it. I do know, however-
- JRJoe Rogan
Can I ... Is that the actual spoon that you did it with?
- DRDean Radin
Yeah. This, this is the spoon.
- JRJoe Rogan
Can I feel it?
- DRDean Radin
So what's-
- JRJoe Rogan
This is a regular spoon.
- DRDean Radin
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's, yep.
- DRDean Radin
I wanna show you this.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's pretty easy to bend.
- DRDean Radin
I wanna show you this other part here. This is the motivation. So I was told ... Well, more importantly than that is to take the full spoon that you have because it, this, this is what I was working on.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right, this one was already weakened, right?
- 1:41:58 – 1:55:26
Engineering consciousness: intranasal RNA, dementia treatment, and ethical guardrails
- DRDean Radin
So here's what I, I told Sadhguru. So one of the projects, because of our interest in this psi genes thing, uh, it's gonna be a very complicated series of genes and probably intron sequence and so on. But nevertheless, we have the tools, we can do it if we had enough money. Uh, setting aside issue about ethics, about whether or not it's a good thing to do, seven years ago, a couple of colleagues and I formed a company called Cognigenics to see if we could use genetic engineering methods to do something like that. Could we significantly enhance perception and cognition and memory and all of that stuff so that you don't need to be a monk going into a cave for 30 years, but you can take a genetic edit and kind of get there quickly? So again, setting aside for a moment the ethics and the power seduction and all that, is it possible? And we now think it's possible because we've developed an intranasal delivery method for RNA interference. You shove it up the nose, you snort it up the nose, it gets into the brain, and it down regulates certain receptors.
- JRJoe Rogan
Is it a one-time treatment?
- DRDean Radin
It's a multi-time treatment because it's RNA. So our RNA will last for a while, and then months later you'd have to re-up it. You can do it as a one-time.
- JRJoe Rogan
So you could literally blast something up your nose and it'll affect your ability to do this stuff.
- DRDean Radin
In principle for psychic things.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- DRDean Radin
But, but we see that that's far in the future. What we're doing now as a company is addressing dementia.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh.
- DRDean Radin
So we're looking for ways of how do you, how do you fix memory loss, especially short-term memory loss? It is related to certain receptors, turns out to be the same receptors as in psilocybin, 5-HT2A. We can down regulate them.
- JRJoe Rogan
You saw that study where that, where that, um, article recently about a woman who was, uh, she, I believe she had dementia, but she couldn't speak anymore. She took five grams of psilocybin mushrooms, and all of a sudden she could talk.
- DRDean Radin
Yeah. So this, this is doing that without the hallucinations and much, much longer. Psilocybin will get in and out of your body pretty quickly. The RNA interference will take, will, will come up and then stay for about a, we think, couple of months, and then slowly begin to de- to decline. And so you, you would need to take this, this treatment, a, the, this, uh, intranasal treatment probably every two or three months. And we don't know about the dosing yet. We've done studies with mice and rats and now with monkeys, so we know it works in a primate brain. The next couple of steps-
- JRJoe Rogan
When they do the studies with monkeys, what happens?
- DRDean Radin
Well, they-- There are two things that you look at. Well, first of all, you wanna make sure that it actually gets into the brain. So you do a radioactive tag on the compound itself and then use a PET scan, a positron emission tomography, and you can then see, does it actually get out of the nose and go into the brain? The answer is yes. We can track where in the brain it's going. We mainly want it to, it to get down to the limbic system because that's, that's where the hippocampus is and where memory is encoded. And we know from our studies with mice and rats, you get 100% improvement in memory in mice and rats that are either aged or normal. A normal mouse will get 100% improvement in memory. Exactly at the same time, they'll get a almost 100% reduction in anxiety. So as you think about a treatment for dementia, dementia patients get very anxious, so you want to calm them down and improve their memory. This does both in one shot.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- DRDean Radin
Yep.
- JRJoe Rogan
And what does it do to regular people-
- DRDean Radin
Um-
- JRJoe Rogan
... with no, no ailments?
- DRDean Radin
We don't know yet.
- JRJoe Rogan
No one's tried?
- DRDean Radin
Well, it-- we don't have permission from the FDA to do, you know, clinical trials yet.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wink, wink. [laughs]
- DRDean Radin
Uh, if you ask the people, if you ask the-
- JRJoe Rogan
Someone must have done it.
- DRDean Radin
No, we haven't tried it yet.
- JRJoe Rogan
Not, not a single person has said, "Shoot it up my nose"?
- DRDean Radin
That would admit it, no.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, that would admit it.
- DRDean Radin
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- 1:55:26 – 2:37:53
Telepathy, ego, and a post-propaganda society (plus a final synchronicity)
- DRDean Radin
Um, so if we have time, I would-- I'd like to explain one other, um, experience that I had, which led me into thinking more about magic. This is-
- JRJoe Rogan
Can I ask you one more question about this?
- DRDean Radin
Sure.
- JRJoe Rogan
If you developed some sort of a compound that gave real psychic ability, like some- something that was just undeniable, you, you could literally communicate with people, and you found out that this is something that you could g- give people as a supplement or some sort of a medication-
- DRDean Radin
Mm-hmm
- JRJoe Rogan
... what, what would you do with that information? I mean, would you pause?
- DRDean Radin
Yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- DRDean Radin
Yeah. I would pause for the same reason that Sadhguru said this is not a good idea. Because like I s- I told him we were doing this, this research on telepathy. We might be able to make people super telepathic. He said, "That would be a bad idea."
- JRJoe Rogan
Why?
- DRDean Radin
Because we ordily-- we no- normally think of being telepathic as r- as receiving other people's thoughts. But it's actually a two-way street. You could then inject thoughts-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right
- DRDean Radin
... and control people.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- DRDean Radin
And he said that that would be, that is, would be such a seductive power for most people that unless they were, had significant training beforehand, you don't wanna do that.
- JRJoe Rogan
Significant training like you were talking about the monks.
- DRDean Radin
Ego out of the way.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- DRDean Radin
Let, yeah, go through a meditation. And one of the things, one of the reasons why I'm interested in, in the noetic sciences in general, is that when somebody has an experience, whether it's psilocybin or some other method, oftentimes there's a personality transformation. The personality transformation is like the positive side of PTSD, like their mind is blown. They become pro-social, which is the fancy term meaning they suddenly become compassionate. They become more interested in service. They wanna help others. They could have been a complete jerk beforehand.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- DRDean Radin
Something changes, and it changes in a flash, and it sticks. Well, we probably ought to understand why that happens. What is it about simply getting an, like a larger picture of who and what we are and what the nature of the universe is, that becomes really, really important to understand. So we know it happens. We don't know why it happens.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, that's one of the most fascinating aspects of the psychedelic experience is the ego death, right?
- DRDean Radin
Right. Yeah. And so, and but it-
- JRJoe Rogan
So it's also like you, you would have to have the two of them together. If you had ego death induced by psychedelics along with some sort of supplemental medication that allowed you to achieve like legitimate psychic ability.
- DRDean Radin
Yeah. I, I see. You, you really wanna do this.
- JRJoe Rogan
I'm fascinated by it.
- DRDean Radin
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
I would be weird, I, I would be weirded out by it for sure. I, I mean, I don't know how I would function if I was the only one who had it. The, I, I don't think that would be a fun place to be.
- DRDean Radin
You would have to be prepared.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. I, I think it would be a real struggle.
Episode duration: 2:37:54
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Transcript of episode 4Uk0_1yqdJo
