 I got a native doing the funky chicken here. He's blocking my blade. Well, keep going, you know, Moe? These people have to learn that we don't stop. So what's up, high-tech future? When Jake is separated from the team, they have to scour the woods to try and find him. Tracking isn't that hard, even without a global network of satellites. That's a clip from a YouTube video I found titled, Dumb Things in Avatar That Everyone Just Ignored. Revence, of course, the movie Avatar, one of the top grossing films of all time, and it's a sci-fi film, has a lot of science stuff, which gets complicated at some points and you have to follow along, but then at some points it just gets really dumb. Kind of like science in general, as is so beautifully demonstrated by today's guest, the esteemed parapsychologist, scientist, philosopher, Dr. Stephen Browdy. For people who are skeptical about sci phenomena, it's almost as if a veil of stupidity descends over them and then they start going into kind of conceptual panic. And they panic more, I think, initially over PK than ESP, although ESP on the surface seems to threaten the idea of mental privacy. It's very easy to explain why people freak out over PK. You can move, let's say, a matchstick, a millimeter by thought alone. It's a very small step conceptually from doing that to making somebody drop dead. I tell the story in dangerous pursuits about what happened when I tried to give a talk on my PK investigations to my physics department at the University of Maryland. I was invited to do it and I thought they wanted me to talk about it. I was two minutes into the talk and the faculty shouted me down. I never got to give the talk. Welcome to Skeptico where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I'm your host, Alex Sicaris. And today we welcome back Dr. Stephen Browdy to Skeptico. You know, I've had the pleasure and really honor, I mean, that sincerely, of interviewing Steve several times. And as I was just chatting with him about a little bit, I went back and had to look at the records and know it's been a long time. The first one was 10 years ago, which, you know, if you're interested in parapsychology, if you're seriously interested in what's called Psy, but really consciousness. If you're really interested in science, which is all I was interested to begin with this, you are going to run across Stephen Browdy. And he has a new book out, Dangerous Pursuits, Mediumship, Mind, and Music, which you can pick up for just 10 bucks on Kindle, which is the way I got it. Amazing compilation, kind of capstone of a lot of work that he's done. And it's just super great to have this guy back. He's a super smart person just beyond this kind of narrowly defined little field. We're going to talk about a parapsychology, just somebody who's two things I think are really great. One, you'll recognize immediately that he's very, very, very smart about a lot of different things. But two, he has his warrior spirit. I mean, this is a guy that has kind of battled against the tide relentlessly for, I don't know. I'm not going to say how many years, but Steve, welcome back. Thanks so much for joining me. Thanks for having me. It's good to see you again. So tell folks, you know, who is who is Dr. Stephen Browdy? Wow. Well, I started out as professionally, at least as kind of a mainstream philosopher. I'd had an experience back in graduate school of seeing my table tilt in an impromptu sense with a couple of friends. But I was smart enough at the time not to talk to my mentors about that I was busy in those days I thought of myself as a kind of hard nose materialist, not for any particularly good reason it was just a kind of intellectual concede I was cultivating at the time. And I knew nothing about parapsychology. So I literally put it out of mind until I finished my dissertation on temporal logic, got a job, publish what I still think are some respectable papers in the field of temporal logic and the philosophy of time. Got tenure. And then I remembered what happened to me back in graduate school seeing this table rise in the air. And I figured if I was an honest philosopher and intellectual and needed to come to grips with that. And I knew it by that time that some very well known and great philosophers had taken parapsychological research seriously so I read what they had to say and I decided there was really something worth sinking my teeth into. And so I cranked out a book initially on the experimental evidence thinking like a lot of people that if there was good evidence for sci phenomena would come from the laboratory. And then I figured if I was an honest intellectual I needed to know the rest of the evidence at least so I could have a comprehensive context in which to place all this. And I was bowled over by the evidence from physical mediumship and what I realized at the time was that many of the parapsychologists not not just skeptics but parapsychologists themselves didn't know this evidence. They were skeptical about it. Steve quick physical mediumship tell people what that means. Sure. Well, people are familiar with the term mediumship no doubt, but there are two kinds of mediumship one is mental mediumship which is what we see most often depicted in film and TV. This is where people ostensibly challenge channel messages from the deceased physical mediumship is where mediums ostensibly facilitate or mediate the production of physical phenomena like materializations, table evitations wraps in the table and so forth. So it's where they seem to channel PK phenomena. Let me just interject here because I like your grumpiness and your gnarliness about some of this stuff I really appreciate it deeply and I mean that sincerely. And it kind of an interesting point slash distinction here that is kind of curious, you point out that even people who are completely skeptical and very anti psi parapsychology mediumship, they get extra offended by the idea of physical mediumship and I think you've challenged that in kind of an interesting way it's kind of a little subplot here but you're like, What are you doing I mean you're, you're, you're not accepting one but you're somehow showing an increased ability to reject the other in what logic space are you occupying there that that even makes any sense right. I mean, for people who are skeptical about side phenomena, it's almost as if a veil of stupidity to send over them and then they start going into kind of conceptual panic. And they panic more I think initially over PK than ESP, although ESP on the surface seems to threaten the idea of mental privacy. PK is particularly terrifying, and the reactions to my talking about PK or have been the most extreme I've seen, and it's very easy to explain why people freak out over PK. If I can move, let's say a matchstick a millimeter by thought alone. It's a very small step conceptually from doing that to making somebody drop dead by thought alone. The existence of any kind of PK forces us to take seriously a kind of magical worldview that most of us associate and usually condescendingly that only with so called primitive cultures. It's a worldview according to which our thoughts unintentional or intentional can have malevolent or lethal consequences. And in which we might have to take responsibility for a whole range of things we just assumed be bystanders for. And modern science has been trying its damnedest to make causation as impersonal as possible. And this is just the exact opposite of that. So this is a worldview and people in industrialized or developed countries aren't happy about this at all. I mean they're uncomfortable with the idea that if you have malevolent thought about somebody even just a passing vagrant thought, and that person has an accident. That our vagrant thought might have had something to do with it. You know there's a, I've made this point quite often and I apologize if I made it to you. There's an old Yiddish distinction between a schlemiel and a schlemazel. A schlemiel is someone who has soup spilled on him. And a schlemazel, sorry, a schlemiel is someone who spilled soup on himself and a schlemazel has it spilled on him. And the idea is that a schlemazel is an unlucky soul, a person that the universe is crapping on, a victim of impersonal forces of the universe at large. And schlemazels really exist. And the question is why. I mean I was married to a schlemazel at one point. I prefer not to discuss that case but I live next door to a couple of schlemazels. It seemed like they were living in consumer hell everything they bought was defective. Their cars were in the shop all the time even though they had brands noted for their reliability. Electronic equipment would fail to work right out of the box. Their infant son was placed in a brand new rocking solid wooden rocking chair which collapsed into the infant son. And my favorite example of their schlemazel is if that's even a word. The wife bought what she thought was a poster sized photograph of the Golden Gate Bridge. She had it framed and placed on her living room wall and I had to tell her Donna that's the Brooklyn Bridge. So here's a woman who both literally and figuratively bought the Brooklyn Bridge. Now, most of us are uncomfortable with the idea that these people this couple I wish I knew if they were schlemazels before they met and got married. Is this a kind of expression of their own self loathing their own self hatred or is it something that the weird philosopher next door to them was inflicting upon them. We don't know that. And there are parts of the world where that kind of thinking is taken for granted, but not in developed countries. Yeah, you know, I mean one of the problems we're going to have with this whole little chat is could spawn an hour's worth of discussion and we could we could take that and take the anthropological kind of look at it because we have serious deep thinking intellectual people in the west who've done their best to study that and have come about have come back and said, that's real by all accounts by every way we can measure it. That is not just a superstitious belief. It happens over and over again. But again, you know, I love that what I wrote down the phrase, we're working so hard to make causation in personal which is really the idea of materialism. So to what I'm going to kind of bounce around here. I want to talk about materialism, particularly about parapsychology because that is a field that you've been in for a long time. And it's a field that's just in shambles it's been decimated is no more it is not relevant anymore and anyone who says otherwise is just kind of playing pretend. But before we get there. Tell us about the book this latest book, dangerous pursuits, mediumship mind and music, which I pulled up here on an Amazon but tell us about that. Well thank you for that opportunity. The book before this was crimes of reason and when I wrote that it was a collection of essays that I had written over the years some old some and also some new essays that I thought I could do a better job on and when I wrote that book. I figured I was all booked out and I was done. And then I thought, well there are some other essays that I think, if I had a chance for a do over. I could do a better job I could state the issues more clearly or more compellingly. So a lot of these are expanded or otherwise revised essays that I've written before on a bunch of related themes one would be the fear of sigh. There could be the problems of studying mixed mediums like kind mooga or Carlos mirror belly. And then some problems in explaining why it's difficult to know what the evidence for survival of bodily death is all about. And then there's a little dessert chapter on jazz improvisation. Yeah, there's a lot to mine out of the book and again, you've had such an extensive career and I guess I want to circle back a little bit. Because the introduction you were doing is excellent, but as most people who've accomplished a lot do they kind of leave out a lot of important steps along the way because they don't want to sound like they're braggy or anything. But you've kind of seen it all done it all in the parapsychology community and more broadly in the, I don't know, scientific paranormal community. I always reference the Journal of Scientific Exploration because I think they've done a great job for a long time of trying to hold that space. You're an editor of the journal for how many years were you doing that since 2009 I think. And, you know, I mean that's just that what that means to people who are uninitiated is that Steve is not just comfortable and super qualified and competent to talk about all this stuff. But like the stuff that crosses his desk is everything imaginable that you can be not imagined to be scientific until you look at the data so ET abduction big foot. What else am I leaving out I mean everything the astrology you know I interviewed a woman who published in the JSE that did an extraordinarily competent job, looking at whether astrology shows an effect. So what else runs across your desk there that people should know about. Oh, gee, I don't even know how to answer that. Yeah. All right, I literally don't know how to answer that. Well, in general, because I think it does relate to this. Go back to this term I love, you know, trying to get away from causation as much as can try and make it as impersonal as we can. And so I know how I can answer. Okay, one of my big targets has been mechanistic explanations in science. I mean, looking psi phenomena and psychological phenomena as primitive in a sense. You know, there's most scientists would agree that explanation by analysis explanation of a phenomenon in terms of lower level processes is something that can't continue indefinitely. That sooner or later you're going to hit rock bottom you're going to hit some phenomena that are fundamental that are basic or primitive. At that point you can no longer profitably ask how they occur. That's just the way the universe works and no deeper explanation will explain why. Now that's fine. But what most scientists also assume is that wherever those primitive phenomena occur. They're always at the level of the very small microscopic the subatomic the atomic biochemical something like that. Never at the observable level. But that's just an article of faith that is not an empirically established fact. And it's a big topic in philosophy where explanation by analysis comes to an end. I happen to believe and have argued at length for saying that in the realm of psychology and by extension in the realm of parapsychology where intention plays in. In a limitable role patterns of peer first at the level of behavior at the level of the phenomena. That doesn't mean explanation comes to an end. It just means that vertical explanation explanation by analysis comes to an end. There's still covering law explanations explanation by analogy. There are many forms of explanation. In fact, explanation by analysis like explaining heat in terms of molecular motion. And of explanation can cannot help us in the realm of the mental. I always wonder, you know, that's such a great deconstruction analysis of the problem. But I almost feel I'm sometimes like you're analyzing it from within the paradigm that you're forced to operate in, you know, because like your philosopher. Take an idealism kind of view point and say consciousness is somehow fundamental and that's where the evidence really leads from the beginning from the double slit experiment on and really before that. You know, consciousness is fundamental. Everything is in consciousness and is a manifestation of consciousness not saying that's true. But I'm just saying, from that perspective, I'm not even sure we'd talk about things in that way. Well, there's a reason I do it the way I do. I mean, I'm in a kind of privileged position because I had a good reputation in philosophy before I got into parapsychology and polluted myself. And, you know, there were people at the time who were saying things to me a famous logician once said to me, if somebody has to do this, I'm glad it's you. I think you meant that as a compliment. So, because I have the status that I had in the academic community before I was corrupted. People are at least willing to listen to me and because I think I argue very convincingly for some things. I hope to shake certain mainstream academics out of their mainstream academic complacency. Once I can plant seeds of doubt in their mind about the way they've been doing things that softens them up for getting out of that way of thinking. And so that's the path that I think I've been particularly well qualified to follow. And I love your story, you know, are you, are they like they say about the pioneers? Yeah, you can always tell the pioneers because they don't just have arrows in their front side. They have arrows in their backside as well. So, you know, a few years ago, I had an opportunity to actually just had an email exchange with the well known atheist, Sam Harris, who isn't known as being particularly deep thinker or constructing very good solid logical arguments, at least in my opinion, and it all kind of falls away pretty quickly. But I was always struck by his very matter of fact in your face assessment of parapsychology and Psy, and he said it's in the backwater of science. And that was a few years ago. And as much as I, you know, don't think much of them intellectually, he's spot on. It's always been the backwater of science. And in the years since we've spoken, it's just worse. Objectively, if you measure how many of the search results you get, it's prominence, it's a published peer reviewed papers, the PhDs, there are none, you know. And so it's true. I mean, there is. But one of the years that was 50 years it's been true. Well, but it's especially true lately as because here's the point I guess that I was going to make is that that that really the best evidence has continued to pile up. You know, it's not like there's a few pioneer researchers out there like you and others who completely continue to put out more and better solid science that just gets, you know, further pushed, repressed, suppressed. And I wonder if there isn't more to that. I definitely think there's more to it. Well, there are a couple things. One is that most of the people doing sigh research don't have tenure. So they don't have the delicious protection that tenure can afford. And the other thing is a lot of the people who are doing studies in para psychology now are still just following conventional laboratory protocols. They haven't learned some important lessons and I've been arguing for decades now that laboratory research in para psychology is almost absurdly premature. Because we don't know what the natural history of sigh is we don't know exactly what it's doing out in the world. And until we have a firm grip on that. We have no idea what it is we're taking into the lab it might be as inappropriate to study it in the lab as will be to study courage or sensuality under laboratory conditions. You're only going to get straight jacketed manifestations of at best you're only going to get that in the laboratory. You know, that's a really interesting point, but I'm not even going to go there for a minute I'm not taking it in a couple of different directions because this is where my journey is going. So first question is invisible college. Does there exist quote unquote invisible college when it comes to parapsychology extended consciousness and this all these phenomena in general. I think there is what I'm not sure what you mean by invisible. Well, you know I recently interviewed. Dr Diana Walsh Posulka, who wrote a book called American Cosmic and her work. She's in religious studies. She's doing these work on like saints and in the Catholic tradition and some of the accounts and stuff like that and one of her colleagues reads one of those and goes, that's a UFO story. And she's like, What do you mean no it's it's an account of someone back 300 years ago who had this. So next thing you know she's in Maryland at a UFO conference. And she meets a gentleman named Chris Bledsoe, who is pretty amazing in terms of the contact experiences he's had, and he's been kind of well documented he's had these experiences not just himself, but with others, both in his family others, not related to him manifesting different phenomenon, you know, all this kind of stuff. So she gets really interested now and she goes to a conference in Silicon Valley and makes joc ballet. And he kind of tours her on Silicon Valley which is like a dream come true to her. So she goes to the desert in in Nevada, and finds this guy who actually reverse engineer space junk that he finds through this means of kind of this metal detector that he's rigged up. Again, this is, you know, Dr. Diana was besokka she's got all the credentials and she hasn't given up any of those credentials she's a sharp person she's not a wing nut here. But as part of her book what she reveals is this hidden college invisible college and joc ballet I think is responsible for, if not coining the term kind of popularizing it. And she says a matter of fact she's at a conference when somebody stands up and says, make some kind of question or something like that. And another person across rooms is hey, we're not supposed to talk about that. She's not, you know, allowed. And one of her colleagues who she directly knows is brought into the invisible college he receives a note he says okay, kind of a fight club thing first rule of fight fight club is we don't talk about fight club, but he becomes an insider and this has to do with the, you know, basically ET kind of stuff, but I think the same is true in in parapsychology in the sense of point I always point out is, you know the MK ultra project which a lot of people won't realize it's MK ultra, but Stargate the remote viewing project. You know if you go read, if you go and interviewed, interviewed Joe McMonicle secret spy number 0000 remote viewer, looking at Russian submarines. When he shows up and he meets Russell Targon how put off. They are not. They're not trying to hammer out whether materialism exists, whether there is an extended I mean they are so this is the 70s. They are so far past that. I mean they're light years up in front of that. And you want me to respond to that I mean, well, yes, I guess original question is invisible college. Do you believe there is such a thing. Well, there are certainly, there's a network of people who already have a fairly well defined set of assumptions and intellectual projects and questions that they're addressing. And sure there's, there's a subset of people, more or less officially in parapsychology or who have been over the past three or four or five or six decades. And there are projects they work on between them. If that's what you have in mind. And of course they're, they're not bound by the constraints of university life and university life has become increasingly rigid and unsavory in fact I would say. Okay, and you might not agree with us at all which is kind of fine, but I think we're talking about something different here. We're talking about how put off and Russell Targ and their, you know anyone I always remind people you can go watch the interviews of them testing quote unquote, early Geller, right and they're testing that Stanford Research Institute, and he's exhibiting incredible ESP powers or whatever you want to call it sigh abilities. So the point being that this is all denied right these guys are doing this in the 70s and Ted compels doing nightline news reports but in general, the response was that isn't happening. That isn't real. That couldn't possibly be true. And I don't think that's accidental I think that's again I think the parallels to the UFO community. I think there's disinformation there's co opting there's, you know criticizing and controlling the thing. But there's obviously people in our government who are interested in that we're pursuing it in a way that is in direct contradiction to what is being reported by academia whether they know it or not. And I don't know why it's being suppressed at the federal level of assuming that it is. I think the reasons may be a bit different for for the situation because I think a lot of people would argue that if word gets out about having been visited in contact with extra terrestrials that the public just wouldn't be able to handle it. I don't think that information about sci phenomena is being withheld because the public couldn't handle it, because it's been out there in the public for a long time. And maybe we ought to just move off that but I you know I won't move off of that completely because I'll show you another interview that I did that I thought was really, really interesting to me and it's guy I really pissed off but Ed May, who was the head of the Stargate program for 10 years, and very, very anti in my interview with an anti parapsychology anti it being anything other than materialistic science. And one of the most curious things about that interview for me is he wanted to correct me about the experience of Joe McMonichal. And I had to say, Ed, what are you talking about? I have the transcript of the interview the guy gave me. It was connected to his near death experience. That's what he was told his secret personnel file. They pulled the Raymond Moody book out of there and he was just like doesn't couldn't have anything to do with near death experience or anything quote unquote spiritual. This is all just solid materialistic science and we'll get to the bottom of it. Again, the optics to me, I don't know, but he just seems like a cut out figure. He doesn't seem like he's a genuine curious intellect. He seems like a guy who's doing a job and his job is to kind of bury this stuff. Otherwise there's it stands into a contradiction to everything that we now know of what was going on inside that program. I'm afraid I have to agree with you about it. I mean, I've known him for decades. And he's been a big disappointment to me. I've tried he denies the existence of any PK despite the overwhelming evidence and I've asked him at least to respond to my arguments and tell me what's wrong with them. And he's steadfastly refused to do that. He said fastly refused to look at the evidence that I've presented the arguments that I've presented. He just flatly denies it and trots out the usual skeptical thing. It's all hocus pocus or it's mal observation and so on. And that was my question, Steve, and I poked it poked you with it enough so then I'll leave it alone is what if he's just doing his job. What if that's what if that is really his job, whether he's in, whether he's instructed to do that kind of directly in a smoky dark room in the back, or a useful idiot thing where you just find somebody who's messaging what you want and you continue to feed the beast. I mean, there's no other way. I think it's the former because there's no other way to explain how this guy winds up running the Stargate programming. How would that be the most illogical kind of ineffective way to kind of run that program unless you didn't really want to get results. Yeah, I can't speculate about that. I mean, it may just be the fear of sigh and I've seen it demonstrated very dramatically with physicists. I tell the story and dangerous pursuits about what happened when I tried to give a talk on my PK investigations to my physics department University of Maryland. I was invited to do it and I thought they wanted me to talk about it. I was two minutes into the talk and the faculty shouted me down. I never got to give the talk. And they were trotting out the usual shit. Yeah, what do you mean they shouted you down? Well, they started shaking and standing up and saying, well, Randy has shown that it's all nonsense. Or they were just say, there's no evidence. There's no evidence. And I said, well, I can present the evidence and they didn't want to hear it. I think this is so relevant to where we're at now in culturally. I feel like we're rapidly moving to kind of a post scientific world if we haven't already been there where, you know, science, as we understand it as you said, you know, you described yourself as a curious intellectual who felt an obligation as a professional an ethical obligation to pursue things. That just seems to be out the window where it's now science is by edict science is by fake science of if I can fool you if I can convince you. Any thoughts on that and that's a broad question. Well, science today is so connected with money that it's hard to separate the good science from the science that's predestined by the people who are funding it. I mean, there's still a lot of pure science going on. I wouldn't want to reject the entire body of modern science because it's been abused anything can be used that can be used for the good can be used for the bad as well. Fair enough. You know, you were nice enough, Steve to kind of play along with the little survey that I sent you. Now you you kind of blocked at some of them in for ways that I totally respect you're not very tolerant of the kind of pigeon holding cut it down to a Twitter tweet to sum up deep philosophical and scientific questions. I'm not a soundbite guy. You're not a soundbite guy. Okay, good. I love it. That's that was a good soundbite, by the way, right. But, you know, one that you did answer that I think is the fundamental question in a way and that's, is there a moral imperative. First, we always got to remind people is, you know, we live in a scientific world that insists that consciousness is an illusion that you are a biological robot in a meaningless universe. And sure, we have some nice, well, well groomed dissenters like the one you're seeing in this interview, but they do have to report to their bosses who will tell them, ultimately, like they did when they shouted you down that nevermind consciousness is an illusion and there can't possibly be meaning. So, in my little survey you answered yes to there is a moral imperative yes there is good and evil. Do you want to explain that are you sure you mean that you really think there is a moral imperative there's good and evil. I won't pretend to have worked this out in the detail that I've worked out some of my positions in philosophy but if I had to be pushed right now I'd say I'm a kind of moral intuitionist. And that if you get people to agree on what the facts are more often than not you'll get them to agree on what's right and what's wrong. Let's suppose there's a culture in which people think that burying the elderly alive leads them to healthier and more profitable afterlife. And so they think it's okay to bury people while they're alive. And those of us who think that it's not okay to bury people while they're alive because there's no connection to an afterlife would disagree with that. But if you could get them to agree on the relationship, whether there is an afterlife first of all, and secondly whether there's any connection between the quality of one's afterlife and the condition in which they're buried. And secondly they would agree to whether or not it's the best thing to do to bury someone while alive. So you get people to agree on the facts, and you'll get them to agree more often than not on what's right and what's wrong. That's a more extreme example but I think it makes a point. And I'd like to hear your idea on that is as we collect more and more evidence about consciousness, about mediumship and again your evidence doesn't come down. You don't read the evidence on mediumship the same way that I do, which is fine. You mean mental mediumship mental mediumship but overwhelmingly the evidence suggests that there is a hierarchy to consciousness I think or a perceived hierarchy, which is all we can really go on as a perception, is that they're a perceived hierarchy, particularly if you take the near death experience science that is compiled the best that they can I mean it has limitations and what they can do but you know, we trust asking people whether or not they feel depressed, and then after a certain therapy whether they still feel depressed. So I think we're kind of within the realm of science to ask people what they experienced before and what they experienced now what are their beliefs, what are their feelings about God, you know, hierarchy of consciousness, and the data that we get back is overwhelmingly that there are people that have this particular kind of experience during a time when consciousness is not supposed to be available in their brain state. They have an understanding of a relationship with hierarchical consciousness as evidence for survival of bodily death I don't consider the near death experience to be particularly helpful. I think they're much more persuasive kinds of cases, which, and even those I'd say it's hard to know how to interpret, and particularly whether we need to explain them in terms of psychic functioning among the living, or some kind of postmortem existence. And even then, the most we get from the evidence for survival is not the conclusion that everybody survives the most we could ever conclude would be that some people survive, and even then only for a limited time. We don't have evidence that everybody survives much less that they survive forever. We could spend a lot of time going down that road. I'm interested in your comments and what I said in terms of what that data set suggests regarding this moral imperative. It seems to also be in line with what we find with entheogens what we find with out of body experience. I mean, these people are coming back and saying yeah there is good there is right or wrong and the intuitive sense you have of what it is is is reliable. It's a transformative experience and without doubt for most people some for some people are still a bad experience. You know, there are people who in indies confront the devil. But religious experiences generally are transformative in a similar kind of way and lead people to various ideas about the basic ethical imperatives from different perspectives, you know, the great religions. The religions tend to converge on certain general ideas about what's right and what's wrong. There are exceptions granted. Yeah, but I don't I don't really care what the religions converge on I'm not religious and I'm not Christian and I don't care what I care is some sort of independent data set on that. And again I'm not really interested in the ethical part you know because hey you talked to any any of these half wit you know Sam Harris atheist types and they'll give you you know it's a social construct right. I'm reluctant to comment on that because I don't feel I have a sufficiently well worked out position so I don't give half asked answers to deep questions. I'm not going to do that I'm sorry. Don't be sorry, but it is it's the. It's the space we're in everyone has a position on that isn't everyone's position half asked. Well probably so but I don't like to go on record with my half asked positions it's too easy to. So what positions do you have that aren't half asked what do you know for ones I write about. I think the moral imperative question make everything look half asked. Well I've given you. I've given you a kind of answer to that I mean I told you I believe you did. I'm an ethical intuitionist. I think that most people have the same kinds of intuitions about what's right and what's wrong, but they are likely to disagree about is what the facts are. You get them to agree about the facts. You'll find that their intuitions tend to converge. So I'll leave it go. I'm just always curious when people, you know are really excited about one data set and feel completely, you know, annoyed or not annoyed with another data set but you live in a different in a different world in terms of like I said you're the frontline I respect what you've had to go through and you got I'm not annoyed by the other data set I just I like to be cautious about putting myself forward on certain views. I don't think your work reflects that. I don't well if I cautious I don't think you're cautious in that in that way I think you're kind of the opposite of cautious and even your point about aggressive. Yes, you're extremely aggressive, and you make some great points like your point about the laboratory work which we can just kind of. We kind of breeze past but I think it's an incredibly significant insight you have there is that the science types even in these fringe areas if you will frontier areas if you will, they still have this. And as you said unexplainable leaning on the lab when that doesn't really make a lot of sense if we haven't first identified what we think are the what we would bring into the lab what we're what we're even controlling the skeptics CEM Hansel was interviewed for that nova program decades ago. And he said it's easy to tell if telepathy is real just tell me what I'm thinking. And I'm very sorry that his interlocutor didn't say to him, Oh, is that right Professor Hansel well let's see an erection. I'm sure Hansel would not have agreed that he's simply incapable of getting it up. Let me kind of switch gears a little bit another topic I'm super interested in. We're going to be I hope people can read through this that I so respect again I'll say the work that you've done the tremendous contribution you've made to science. I think it's almost like a disservice to say the field of parapsychology. Geez, if anything this discussion should let people understand that the intellectual community as a whole and science in particular is indebted to the brave work that you've done of being shouted off the stage and continue to continue to persist, continuing to be aggressive, continuing to not be bullied cajoled or co opted into saying anything that anybody wants you to say so I respect that Flattery will get you everywhere. Excellent. That will work then because I want to talk about chapter 11 multiple personality and the structure of self. Tell us where you're at what you think what you've discovered. I wrote a book about multiple personality initially because well for two reasons one it's just interesting as hell. And secondly, I knew I wanted to write a book on survival of death, especially when I was more chronologically challenged. And I knew also that the phenomenon of multiple personality looks suspiciously like the phenomenon of mental mediumship. And it's not that I thought that they were the same, but I felt it would be intellectually irresponsible to write about survival without having a firm grasp of the history of hypnosis and psychopathology and multiple personality in particular. And I was astounded and dismayed to discover that a lot of the people writing on survival hadn't a clue about multiple personality. So my work on that has been to try to explain and what respect alter identities are different from one another, and the kinds of inferences we can draw about the nature of the self. And the big point that I was arguing for in my book first person plural was that even though these distinctions between the alter identities are quite profound. There's an even deeper kind of underlying unity of consciousness. Okay, great. So we're going to talk about that for warned like we just said, I may not come down the same way that you did just interviewed a guy I really respect a lot of you ever encountered Dr. Bernardo Castro. Well, I know who he is. Okay. Have you ever spoken with him or read his. Okay, so Bernardo for people who don't know is a PhD in philosophy but also PhD in computer science, and has been kind of one of the leading intellectuals pushing idealism and really as a kind of direct contradiction to wacky materialism he's willing to be pretty out there in your face. So he just wrote an article published in Scientific American about dissociative identity and he referenced a couple of interesting experimental results that have come about one was from a woman from I want to get this right. She was from Holland, I believe, and she experienced the blind she was blind in one of her altered dissociative identity states under fmRI. She revealed that the fmRI looked to neurologists as a blind person. So, again, we wouldn't have a way of kind of explaining that how does that. How do those and you were aware of other experiences people who can make physiological changes to their body that are easily readily explainable inside of materialistic kind of paradigm. How does that fit into your model. Oh, I think it fits very comfortably. I mean when I talk about the unity of consciousness I'm talking about a kind of Kantian synthesizing of experience. The kinds of things that I gather Castro was talking about there have been experiments like that for some time. Right. I think he's basically in your camp but let me take it a couple steps further because here's where it gets interesting to me. You know, do you know, Whitley Strieber. I know of him. No of him. So I just interviewed Whitley recently and for people who don't know. Whitley Strieber is probably one of the best known. And alien contact ease kind of in history. And he's done it as best selling book communion was absolutely culture changing in terms of what it did in bringing awareness to that. And again, I want to put it in the context just so people always have to do this. We live now in a post disclosure world right so the New York Times has published the videos. Fox News, Fox News, Washington Post, everyone has now said yes. Those are videos released by the Department of Defense. Those are craft flying at a g forces that human beings can't handle flying at speeds that we have no even imagination of how we would achieve and I don't know if you are aware of this but are exhibiting again these side phenomenon in terms of meeting at a predetermined location that no one knows and their, you know, ET is showing up there in the craft. And again, I have to remind you this is not like alien hour at midnight. This is the reports of the Department of Defense, as published in the Journal of Record the New York Times, as I interviewed Leslie Cain on this show who was a co author of those papers. So, as a lot of people have suspected a long time. Maybe part of our interest in this extended consciousness has been that we have known for a long time that these non human intelligences are operating in that realm but we'll leave that to speculation. Back to Whitley. Whitley at that was like nine years old is recruited into a special gifted children's program. His, his dad is military intelligence, his uncle is military intelligence, he didn't really put all the pieces together. But he goes to this program and it's an MK ultra it's another MK ultra program because we now know MK ultra, you know the US mind control program, which we now know had like 150 different sub programs, one of which was stargate one of MK often where they brought in witches or, you know, other people that I can do a cult stuff whatever we can do to reach that extended consciousness realm. But what Whitney's claim is, I can give you two or three other interviews that do say the exact same thing. And we have the is that ritual abuse. There's a relationship between ritual abuse and the propensity to have a dissociative identity disorder that's given that's in the literature. So what Whitley says is that that's what they were trying to do. So as a kid they were putting these abusing these kids like they abused Whitley, and trying to crack them open in a way to create disassociative identity disorder in order to weaponize it in and exploit it in some way that we don't fully understand, but we have some ideas of how and why they may want to do that. That's a lot I kind of put on the table. Do you buy into any of that. Well, I know that Colin Ross has been writing about this for quite some time, and I respect Colin. I can't say I've studied this in the kind of depth that I've studied things that I go on record about, but I think there's something worth sinking one's teeth into here. So I don't find it incredible at all. Fair enough. What do you feel like saying about the potential that they're in these realms there are these other forces that we have to consider in a more authentic way. Well, there's so many realms we don't understand we don't understand prodigies and savants. I mean I find savants particularly interesting how somebody who's spastic until he sits down to play the piano can operate or how calendar savants can factor any number you give them but can't add the change in their pocket. So they've got deficits cognitive deficits that would seem to rule out their extraordinary abilities. I think there's a lot we don't understand about the extent of our mental capacities and what could be unleashed and dissociative context, if not a context, extreme danger. You know how people can suddenly find themselves much stronger than they would ordinarily be. There's a lot we don't know. And an appalling lack of curiosity. I'm not sure about that. I'm particularly interested in transplant cases and which to me looks like the part of spirits hovering around their vital organs. So as we go forward, take a big step back. You've been in the field of if we can still say parapsychology is a field and it is I kind of came down pretty hard on it just kind of elicit some kind of reaction. Where do you think we're headed in the next 1020 years what kind of progress can we make along the lines that you and some of your colleagues have been pursuing. Well, if they go along the lines I've been pursuing we'd get the hell out of the lab and start looking for exceptional subjects and try to get a feel for the natural history of sigh. If you want to know where I think we're actually going. I think that will be stuck in the same rut that we've been in for the past 120 30 years. And one of the reasons is that new people come into the field all the time with no background in the rich literature, just as I did. You know I had to find out after writing a book on the experimental evidence that there was much better evidence. And it's not as if there's a widely disseminated curriculum and parapsychology that people can progress through before they actually start doing research in the field. They start doing research in the field and try to reinvent the wheel it happens over and over every young generation of parapsychological researchers commits the same mistakes that their forebears did. So folks, our guest again has been the extraordinary Dr Stephen Brody. Check out his latest book. He's mentioned some of his other books. The latest is dangerous pursuits find it on Amazon again it's just 10 bucks. But all his other books which you can find on his website, you can easily Google him. And excellent website, all his former books and all that many great articles just a real real. I don't know, I don't like to say giant that sounds kind of hokey but such a significant person in this field and in science and general Steve thank you so so much for joining me it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me it's good to see you again. Thanks again to Dr Stephen Brody for joining me today on skeptical the one question I'd have to tear from this interview kind of an inside baseball question. What do you think the future is for parapsychology? Have they sufficiently backwatered it into insignificance? Or is it prime for a resurgence? Let me know your thoughts of course best place do it skeptical forum check it out let me hear from you. Good shows good shows good shows coming up stay with me for all of that until next time take care bye for now.