 I'm just going to stop you. Candice. OK, Candice, I don't do readings anymore. You did one last week, Mr. Andrews. I know. Well, he's an associate of my brother's. It was a one-time thing. I don't need it. Please, I give you my word. I won't tell anyone. I'm sorry. Listen, listen, listen. I brought money. I don't want you to. Everything I have, I lost my child, my only child. Just a baby. I just want to talk to her. Please, I want to talk to my baby. I can't help you. I don't do that. I don't do anything. Please. That's Matt Damon from the movie Here After, showing the other side of mediumship and how hard it can be on the mediums themselves. It's a topic that today's guest, the very, very excellent Tricia Robertson, has explored for, well, for decades now in her work with after-death communication experiments, writings, and just generally as an explorer of the topic. Here's a clip from my interview. So this will not offend your religious beliefs. And I thought, wow, why would you say that? Why do we know that? Why do we care? Why would we even care? I mean, I understand you're trying to meet people where they are. People are having questions about after-death communication. They're in a position. I understand that. But on a level, why would we possibly care if we're going to the next level of understanding what this stuff really is? Why would we care about someone's religious beliefs? Well, it's got nothing to do with it origin whatsoever. But if you take the hypothesis that a lot of people believe in God, a cosmic consciousness, and energy that they're going to go to, they need to try and understand it. And I do not know what the next level of testing would be. No, I don't want to offend anyone's religious belief. I mean, I would never take it away from them, because some people need that to hang on to. But whatever we show with our survival of consciousness and the evidence, it should fit anybody's religious beliefs. Welcome to Skeptico where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. You know, there's one topic that has always intrigued me. And you know, if you've listened to this show, and it's frontier science exploring the intersection between science and spirituality, because it always seems like there's a lot of potential that's untapped there in that, you know, what is less scientific about studying and measuring the hypothesized disincarnated spirit that may communicate with you through a medium? Why is that somehow less scientific than calculating the radius of a proton? Well, I think this is exactly the kind of approach that today's guest, Trisha Robertson, has taken through a collaboration with Professor Archie Roy of the University of Glasgow. And since his passing, she has continued that kind of research. She's really someone who's dived into, after death communication, she's written a couple of very interesting, terrific books. If you're at all in doubt about this phenomenon, then things you can do when you're dead, true accounts of after death communication, and her follow-up book, More Things You Can Do When You're Dead, will certainly convince you. So I thought this was a really cool opportunity to talk with Trisha, especially as she was suggested to me by my friend, Mark Ireland, who wrote the book Soul Shift. We had Mark on the show a long time ago and I've stayed in contact with Mark. And Trisha actually wrote the forward to that book as well. So Trisha, thanks so much for joining me on Skeptico. I'm glad you're here. You're welcome, you're welcome. So tell folks some more about your background in, so you're not a medium, right? I mean- No, not at all, no, no. So tell folks about your background, your interest in that. And then let's have this chat about the science of, as you guys in the UK call it, psychical research, we don't- That's it, that's it, you got it? That throws people off over here in the state. I know. What's psychical, what does that mean? Ghost hunting, no, not really. Some people call it parapsychology, parapsychology is normally done in the university. Psychical research was started really in 1892 or 1882 when the Society for Psychic Research in London was formed, whereby eminent people of the time, professors, all sorts of learned people were examining the claims of spiritualism, that there was a life after death and you could communicate with people who had passed. That's how it started. Now they took, well, all the details that are actually in the first book of how that started. I think most people are familiar with that history. It's a very intriguing history, particularly that all the leading scientists at the time were on board in terms of investigating this and some of them, you can even kind of throw stones at some of them, but several of them were of the highest caliber and certainly were capable, scientifically of doing that. So what about you? That's how it started. That's why it's called Psychical Research and as opposed to parapsychology. Now they did not start this to knock it. They started it to see, is there any truth? What is the evidence? That's what I'm all about. What is the evidence for any particular phenomenon? And my own particular interest at the moment is survival of consciousness after physical death. I taught maths and physics just as an ordinary school teacher in what you would call a high school. And I did that for years and I had no interest in religion. I had really no particular interest in life after death. I was too busy getting on with my life, enjoying myself. And then about 1983, for some reason unknown, took an intellectual interest in this. So I took myself to the nearest big spiritualist church to listen to what was going on. There if you will, is that something else that's gonna be this kind of culture difference? Spiritualist churches, we do have them here in the States and I've actually visited one. There's one that's pretty prominent that's relatively close to my house. But I get the feeling, I get the sense that they're different over here. I mean, they're really an odd ball, odd duck here. More so than they are. What are people gonna encounter and what is the whole idea of a spiritualist church? They've set it, it is a recognized religion now in the United Kingdom. And they have their principles like the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man and continuation of consciousness after physical death. I am not the spiritualist. I merely was interested in the idea and I don't know why because I was married at the time. We had two good jobs, two cars, two children, the usual thing and I was very happy. But for some reason, my friend and I decided to look into this, just a friend. And when I got there, I was intrigued intellectually about what was going on. And I used to listen to people getting messages as a column from the mediums. And then eventually I managed to accost people in the foyer and say, can you tell me what that was about? Was it meaningful to you? And so on and so forth. And as time went on, I was just gathering data not scientifically about what was going on. And that intrigued me even further. And then Professor Archie Roy and I met in 1987 and we were, he was interested in these things too. And we both began to go out to what you call spontaneous cases where people are reporting things and examining other aspects of paranormal phenomena. And then Archie and I, we used to give lectures at Glasgow University at nighttime on introduction to psychical research. And once you start these things, things come into your wake and that's really how it all started. And then one thing led to another. We had our own particular cases and Archie and I formed this group called Prism, Psychical Research Involving Selected Mediums. We used to meet in London with other professors and scientists and people from the spiritual community. And we tried to devise experiments to test various hypotheses. And that's what science does. Science says, let's look at this. How can we test it? Is there any truth in what that claim is? That's what science is. Well, maybe. I mean, you know, one of the things that I've kind of been led to in this show when I've been doing this show for a long time. And we really looked into after-death communication scientifically. You're familiar with the work of Dr. Julie Beischel? Julie, I'm working with Julie at the moment. Julie asked me to work with her. Anyway, the work that Archie and I did, we've got three published papers on the end, a pair of your journals. And these three papers are well accepted throughout the world. Julie Beischel knows my work and she's asked me to help her at the moment, along with other people with a project that they're doing, not similar, similar a bit different, if you know what I mean, using more parapsychological jargon in a university type setting. Yes, I'm very well aware of Julia and as I say, we had these three papers. So Archie and I devised this experiment. Archie and I really did it ourselves. And it took us five years study and we've got 1600 points on a graph at the end. It's not a thing of small numbers. It took us five years. Now, this type of thing to me is an observational science. You have to observe what is happening. What's the, it's an experiential science. What is happening to the people? So we set out to test a hypothesis that all medium statements are so general they can apply to anyone. And after five years work, long hard work, setting out real life settings, setting out the information is all there in the published paper. It's very boring. We would get someone else to fill a room with 40 people. We didn't know who these 40 people would be. I would bring a medium of some kind. Archie didn't know who the medium was going to be. And then we did blind readings. There were all blind readings where I would be in one room with the medium. They would never see the audience. Archie would never see the medium. And we did all these experimental things. And obviously the whole thing was recorded. So you had 40 people in the room. We got the medium to make six different statements to intended recipients. Now, how did we know the intended recipients? Archie would cut out seat numbers in the venue once we got there. He would be the only person that would know where the seat numbers were. I didn't know what the seat numbers were. I hadn't a clue what was going on. And then I would just get a knock at the door to say, give the first reading. So the medium would then I would say, can you tune in and see if you can find the first recipient that's been chosen by seat number? And this went on again and again. So lots and lots and lots of information. This went on for five years. And to our surprise, as much as anyone, it worked. Now you have to remember that I'm only using good mediums that I know are good mediums. The trouble with mediums, Chef Piss, there's so many mediums who are not good mediums. There are some flaky mediums. There are some people who are deluded, but using the best mediums that I would trust and using a scientific method of reduction of data, et cetera, et cetera, we nullified that hypothesis to, against chance to a million to one. Now, if we'd only used the very, very best mediums, it would have been a lot more than that, but we did use a mixture of mediums to see what result we're going to get. So as far as that goes, we were convinced that using good mediums, they do give relevant information to the relevant sitter. That's the boring stuff. The more interesting thing is, what are they telling the people? What are the nature of the statements? And they have to be specific statements that are either right or wrong, correct or not correct. There's nothing in the middle. And if the people weren't sure, well, it's kind of right, I would count that as no, not correct. So we're being very, very hard here on the mediums and with that scientific thing. Now, nobody in the world so far, and that was, the last paper was published in 2004, no one has seriously criticised our work. No one. And Professor Chris Rowe, who's head of parapsychology in Northampton University, he actually cites our work everywhere he goes. And so does Gary Schwartz, believe it or not. And so does Tudor, a whole lot of other people. Professor Bernard Carr, he's an astronomer. All of these people accept our work as genuine because they know the way that the work was done. So that was interesting in itself, but at the moment I'm really more interested in survival of consciousness. What do other cases show us and what might that survival of consciousness be like? You know, just to recap a little bit, because there's a good video out there that people can watch on YouTube. It does a nice job of demonstrating how this experiment was done and it's clever. It's simple as a lot of these experiments can be, you know, it's really not just earth shattering science, but it's solid. So the idea is you take a medium and again, you stated it quite perfectly and that there is this, one of the skeptical claims is, hey, these, and you've all heard it, you know, they're just saying general statements that it could apply to anyone. And that's what you saw to test. So easy way to test that is just to say, well, let's let the medium do their thing. And then blind it and as you said, there's a couple of different blindings. The medium does a reading and then that reading is distributed to 40 people and they have to say, does it fit or does it not fit? And that seems like a pretty fair test. And as you said, if you analyze that statistically, it comes out with a pretty strong result. So in case you're wondering how we did the statistics, once the mediums had made all their statements and I had sheets for every one of the statements, there would be a break in the proceedings. The medium was finished now and Archie and I would give the people a talk of some kind. I would go away somewhere and I would photocopy 41 copies of each statement. So you've got 41 copies of six statements to distribute to the populace in that audience. And when the people came in, the seat numbers were randomized. Archie did randomize, say you came in with your partner or your wife, anybody, you weren't particularly allowed to sit together. Archie had another randomized pack, numbers from one to 50 or something like that. And as they came in, they were asked to come forward randomly and they would have to take, the pack was shuffled three times by somebody else and they would have to take the number and they would have to sit on the seat they were given. If you were given 24, you had to keep your butt in seat 24 for all of the proceedings. And you will know as well as I do, it's quite difficult sometimes to get people to do what they're supposed to do. Oh, can I not sit with my friend? No, you can't. You're in seat 24, your friends and whatever other seat they get. So we're very strict with the audience, we had to keep them doing what they were doing. So after the break, when Archie had given a small talk, then I would have the six sets of papers. Everybody got the six sets of statements and then they were given time to go through each one and take if that applied to them. Your father's name was Bernard, it's either right or it's wrong. And each statement, each medium was told to make specific statements because they know me and they're afraid of me. And that's how we actually gathered the data. So there was no dubiety about it whatsoever. Right, right. Sounds solid, sounds like good science. So Trisha, one of the things that I guess I'm kind of interested in on the show and I've been pursuing for the last few years is this idea of, if you pound on the science angle like you have, then I think you get to what I call level one. You know, level one is your point, follow the data. So you follow the data and you say, this stands up, this stands up to the usual test that we would have in science, but it's peer reviewed that passes that test. It's typically significant, it passes that test. And that gets us to the level two question in my mind, which is, why isn't this more accepted? And I think we can go round and round on that. And I have on this show interviewed so many skeptics, leading skeptics in the UK, in the US who front having legitimate concerns and they'll tell you all their concerns in a very scientific way. But I've come to kind of question whether or not those concerns are as they seem, like legitimate concerns about the science, or whether they point to more fundamental structural problems in science in general in terms of science is very married, as we know, to a materialistic paradigm. And if you look behind, why were married to that materialistic paradigm? What that means in terms of the general population feeling isolated, feeling alone, feeling afraid and whether or not that might be a better way to divide and rule people than have people running out and considering their infinite possibilities that their soul might provide. It's never going to change. As I say, it was 1882, the society was formed in London and there is so much excellent information, evidence there, but conventional science, not all of them and other people, they will not accept it because the brain can't get into the head, this could be a possibility. Unless you've actually had an experience or read, in fact, books like mine, I keep it simple. I keep it down to what's actually happening. Don't fill it with jargon. I present the evidence and you can make up your own mind. It's like with two levels of proof in this world, we've got science, where two apples and two apples will always make four apples and then you have proof as in a court of law, beyond reasonable doubt. And that is the type of science that we do with psychical research. I think that misses the point because science, the fundamental question in science that science is still grappling with is, does consciousness exist? Right, so I can play your clips like I do on the show of Neil deGrasse Tyson, one of the most prominent scientists, public scientists in the United States, saying that consciousness is an illusion. Consciousness as an epiphenomenon in the brain is the standard working hypothesis that we have right now. Absolutely. But it's absurd. It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense experimentally. We've proven that for 100 years, not just with psychical research, but quantum physics stands in the way of that in terms of the observer effect. So I guess what I'm saying is, I don't, I think it's missing the point to think that, oh, you know, I've proven it this way and now I've proven it this way and gosh darn it, those skeptics, they're just not, you know, they don't have the mind for it. Taking one step back saying, no, they're doing it perfectly. They're doing it perfectly for a particular purpose. And even if that means that that individual who is causing, you know, if it's Richard Wiseman or whoever it is, you know, is standing in the way of it, whether it means that they are aware of the role they're playing or not, I think we have to take a step back and say, maybe there's something behind the agenda that they're pushing. And then I think that leads us to a more interesting discussion about where we go with, where we really want the frontier science to go, leaving behind science as we know it, to say we don't need their approval to start asking some, I don't know, next level questions, like I'll give you an example. That's a long rant, but I'll bring it home with this. You know, in one of the interviews I heard, you said, you know, now this will not bother your religious beliefs or this will not offend your religious beliefs. And I thought, wow, why would you say that? Why do we know that? Why do we care? Why would we even care? I mean, I understand you're trying to meet people where they are. People are having questions about after death communication, they're in a home condition. I understand that, but on a level, why would we possibly care if we're going to the next level of understanding what this stuff really is, why would we care about someone's religious beliefs? Well, it's got nothing to do with an origin whatsoever, but if you take the hypothesis that a lot of people believe in God, a cosmic consciousness and energy that they're going to go to, they need to try and understand it. And I do not know what the next level of testing would be. I just don't know. I mean, you're talking, and neuroscientists don't understand it either. Dr. Peter Fenwick's a friend of mine, and they will admit they do not know what consciousness is, that you don't even know where it lies. Does it lie in every cell of your body? Does it lie in your brain, which I don't think it does, because the evidence of the actual cases don't show that at all, because consciousness is very alive when there's no physical body. So I don't know what the next level of experimentation would be. I just don't... Maybe the purpose of your reading is to kind of shake you out of some of your religious beliefs. So I'll just start with that, to poke at you a little bit, Tricia. Why do we want to say that this won't offend your religious beliefs? Can we be so sure of that, and should we care about that? Well, I just say that do the pragmatic thing. I just show you what happens, and what you make of that. No, I don't want to offend anyone's religious belief. I mean, I would never take it away from them, because some people need that to hang on to. But whatever we show with our survival of consciousness and the evidence, it should fit anybody's religious beliefs, absolutely anyone, unless you... Why do we think... Why would we care if it fits anyone's religious beliefs? And clearly it's not... I mean, I've spoken to a lot of Christians on this show who will tell you directly that this does not fit their religious beliefs, and that it's satanic. So... Rubbish, nonsense. It's not rubbish to them. It's not nonsense to them. No, but you see, this is where you come into fundamentalism in any form of fundamentalism. It's like the super skeptic. Super skepticism is a religion as well. They firmly believe there's nothing but hard things, tables, chairs, and what's happening around about them. They believe that, like a religion, and they will not change their viewpoint. And I don't give a tupney toss. That is entirely up to them. They are not ready to change. And other are people with fundamentalist religion. But for example, saying near-death experience, when someone has a near-death experience, if they were a Christian, they interpret that lovely feeling as being Jesus. That's their interpretation. A Hindu would see some other God. Jewish people might see Moses, but that is their interpretation of what they believe, but it's interpreted in a different way. It doesn't make the experience any different. The experiences are the same. Just interpretation is different. I just think we have to be really careful when we say stuff like that, because I've studied that for tons, you know? I interviewed Gregory Shushan, who did a cross-cultural analysis of near-death experience across all these different cultures, across native cultures, pre-colonial cultures, and over time, which is probably the best way to get at that. But when we throw that out there, that if you saw Jesus, then that means that's your interpretation. It begs the question of what is really going on in these extended realms. And as soon as we start talking about extended realms, and see, this to me is like the problem when we talk about science, and you talk about fundamentalist religion, and like, we don't even know what that means. We don't know what fundamentalist science means, right? If we accept that perhaps the fundamental ground of all this is consciousness and that materialism fails, then most science, as we know it, is fundamentalist in a way that distorts all our results anyway. I mean, think about everything we're measuring now. Unless we're measuring consciousness in the equation, we can't really rely on our measurement. You can't measure consciousness. You can't measure love. You can't say, I'm gonna measure how much I love my wife or my children. You can't measure it. It's the same with consciousness. But you published three peer-reviewed papers. So I'm glad you measured it. I'm glad you measured it the way that you did. So I think we have to hold both of these things and hold them kind of loosely. And one is the fact that we do wanna nudge a little bit closer to the truth. Even if that truth is provisional and has subject to change and is never really gonna be right because we're looking at it from the wrong side of the telescope, it still does move us a little bit further down the path. Well, I hope so. I mean, I just look at the evidence and say, well, if this happened, which it did, how do you explain that? What other way can you explain? For example, I don't know if you read my murder case in one of my books where a woman came to me and her daughter had been murdered. I didn't know her at all. And so I suggested she bring me an envelope with something that belonged to her daughter and I took it to several mediums. Tell that story from the beginning, okay? So first of all, you're not a medium. You're a researcher of after-death communication and you've somehow connected with professor Archie Roy and he says, wow, Trisha, you are great. You're on the ball, you're really smart and you know how to do this stuff. Yeah, we worked well together. Yeah, we worked well together. So now people start finding you and they start coming to you, no doubt. People find me all the time. So now you run into this case that is like this psychic detective. You're kind of pulled into the psychic detective kind of thing. Yes, absolutely. Explain what happened, because again, you're not the medium, but you are the go-between here. I like to think I'm the common sense person in the middle because all of this does have some sense behind it, just that we don't know what the game is. We don't know how to play the game but we could only observe what happens. This woman got hold of me and she said that her daughter had been murdered six months previously and the police were not making any headway with it whatsoever. And obviously she wanted me to give her a reading with a medium, which I wasn't going to do because it's far too early. I've heard you tell this story before and I have a couple of questions that I haven't heard you talk before. So when the mother comes to you, do you know if she had any communication directly with her daughter or was there any like, you know, you hear electrical lights going on and off or a presence or she had nothing? She had nothing. Well, I think what she was looking for was information of our daughter's murder to be honest, more than anything else. So I said to her, I said, well, I'll meet you again in a couple of days, bring me something that belonged to your daughter in a sealed envelope. That was all I said was a sealed envelope. So I met the mother and she brought a brown A5 envelope with something in it that was lumpy. It just felt like lumpy things. It wasn't a watch, it wasn't a ring, it was just lumpy. So I said, leave it with me and I'll take this to a few mediums and see if we can get any information at all. So I took it to a couple of mediums who made a couple of random statements. One said, bizarrely, before this, they got the girl was murdered and they said before this girl was murdered, that very day should be into the dentist. Now I found that a most peculiar statement. So now when you, you're taking a huge leap here, right? Because this is a criminal investigation. Did you give any thought to what you were getting involved in when you did this? No, if people need help regarding these things, I try and offer the help where I can. Just going to do this on my computer, my publisher keeps texting me before we're working here. Anyway, mother came to me, if I've envelope, took it to two different mediums and there was nothing you could say much of at all. Then I thought- Other than the dentist thing, other than the dentist thing, which is quite amazing. I don't know if that's right or not. I'm having a clue. The other medium said a black taxi was involved and that turned out to be true as well. But it meant nothing to me. I don't know the mother. I don't know the murder case. It was six months earlier. You're nothing about it whatsoever, which is good. So I took it to a medium that I do know and I was able to walk into the house where the medium was sitting on the laptop at a big desk. And I threw the envelope on the table and I said, can you tell me what you get from this envelope? And the medium who knows me well said, do I have to? And I went, yeah, you have to. Didn't you say she was like playing a video game and smoking a cigarette and like totally disinterested? Cigarette in one hand, absolutely. Seriously, I was like, do I have to? And I went, yeah. Now the thing is, I have a very good reputation. So people know if I ask them something, it's not something silly. Now, so I said, nothing, just put it down and grudgingly, very grudgingly, the medium would put the hand on the thing and immediately, I would say a second or a half a second later, the cigarette was still in one hand and the medium said, I've got a girl here that was murdered and I just went, mm-hmm, as you do, mm-hmm. Of course, I've got taking notes, mm-hmm. And then described her, a girl with long brown hair down to here and once again she's telling me. And then the medium gave me 29 pieces of information, specific information about this girl. She misses her three. And real specific, give folks an example because some of the stuff that came out was... She misses her three cats. She lived up, we call it a close, I don't know what you call it in America. She lived up a close, one up on the right. The street she lived in was a cul-de-sac. She had a tattoos above her breast and described the colors and the shapes of the tattoos. Another tattoo on her arm described and colored as well. She said, we'll call her boyfriend, Gordon, that wasn't his name. She said that Gordon was the first one to know that I was dead and he phoned my mother. Which that's kind of an interesting detail there that, and I love the way you pulled this out in this one is either in the book or in an interview I heard you do. Cause that is post-mortem information, right? So sometimes people go, oh, they're just going, I love when doubters or skeptic people go, well, they're just accessing the Akashic records. Exactly. Because if that somehow explains something. This is what I absolutely love about this case and it happened to me and I know it. And then, I have to say, the girl said because it was like a three-week conversation, the medium said, she's telling me that today her mother, my mother, she said, my mother has moved my photograph from the top of the mantelpiece to the top of the television. And of course I'm writing this down. I have no clue if this is right or wrong. And then with a real cracker, she's telling me that when she was younger, she was in Caughtonville prison. And I thought, bloody hell. I mean, you cannot guess. Somebody you don't know was in Caughtonville prison. I don't know anyone who's been in prison, far less a younger girl. This girl was 26, by the way, but she was in prison when she was younger. And she also said that she had a pregnancy, that she had an abortion when she was younger. Oh, Andy, what else was there? There was, I'm trying to remember now, there was the cats, the cul-de-sac, the tattoos, the fact that she was in prison, the fact that Gordon was the first one to know if she died trying to remember the rest. So anyway, 29 pieces of information. And I wrote it all down. So I then made arrangements two days later to meet the mother in her own house, which had never been to before. So I walk into the house. And the first thing I see in the lounge is a photograph of a girl on top of the television. And I said, oh, I'm trying not to use her name. I said, oh, is this your daughter? She said, yes, that's her. She said, I moved a photograph there two days ago, which was the time I was speaking to the medium. So once again, you've got your post-mortem information. How would she know the photograph was moved from there to the top of the television? And anyway, there were 29 pieces of information, a specific individual piece of information, but I chickened out. I don't know if I did the wrong thing or not. I only read 22 pieces to the mother because the girl gave me an account of how she was murdered. She said it was two men that murdered her. And all her injuries were at her back. They put tea towels around her neck. I hope the mother doesn't see this, pulled her back. And she gave me very specific information about her murder. Now, I also didn't tell the mother about the girl having an abortion because I thought it's bad enough your daughter's been murdered. I don't want to tell you when she was younger, she had an abortion. I kind of chickened out. I think I would still do that again because you've got to be aware of the people's emotions. That's what it's all about. Anyway, the 22 pieces I did read out where every single one was totally and utterly correct, 100% correct down to the fact that the boyfriend knew she was dead and then he phoned the mother to tell that the girl was dead. So you have to say to yourself, as you have, well, the medium didn't know that information. He didn't know the information till I walked in the door. I didn't know the information. Oh, the other thing was it was very, very good was the girl said, the accounts of my murder in the newspapers were all wrong. They described the clothes I was wearing completely incorrectly. And she gave me the correct things that she was wearing when she was murdered. And that turned out to be absolutely correct as well. So it's not like, oh, you were sad last Christmas. You know, as a lot of mediums do know, this is specific information. And quite frankly, I was blown away by it as well. I couldn't believe it. Now, I know the next question you're going to ask me. The mother had been working with a woman detective inspector all during this, who was wonderful to her, giving her great support. So I was hoping that I'd be able to speak to the inspector. But just that very week, that inspector moved on and it was a new person on the case. And from experience, I knew there was no point in me trying to speak to the police because they would just say, here is a nutter. They don't know Trisha Roberts and they don't know my reputation. So she described her killers as well, you know what they looked like. And I thought, no, this is not right. And they never actually ever did get somebody for that girl's murder. But that was a real, that was a wow moment for me. That was bloody hell, you know. She was in Gordonville prison. Whoa, that's a cracker. You know, I've worked with a lot of, I shouldn't say a lot, but I've done several interviews with psychic detectives and worked on cases. I knew that was coming, you know, because really what I've found more often is that people in your situation will go to law enforcement and they immediately become a suspect. Yes, that's right, that's right. Yeah, that's true. Which, you know, it's just kind of part of the thing. But see. Well, it goes back to your original question actually about the world in general. Now I don't know about America. Some of the, I did a very good couple of documentaries for BBC One and I think it was Channel 4 years ago in which they gave a very fair assessment, you know, of what was going on at the time. But a lot of our channels like BBC Now and STV, they're all owned by people who are avid Christians and they will never show these things in a good light. They just will not do it. It's bias. I don't know about America, can't say. Oh man, don't pull us back into that. You kind of tidy it up at the end and say, wow, amazing. Isn't that great? When it's like, no, what does that mean? If we're going to talk about the extended consciousness realm, like is there a moral imperative? Is there a hierarchy to consciousness? Is there God, you know? You look at the near-death experience, it pretty clearly points to both a moral imperative, there is a right, there is a wrong. And then it also points to a hierarchy of consciousness. There is something like a God and there isn't. Well, I would call it a cosmic consciousness, yeah. Well, you can call it what you want. If there's a hierarchy of consciousness, if there's a hierarchy of consciousness, there's a hierarchy. Definitely a hierarchical, most definitely is. Yeah, most definitely. There's a lovely book I read which many years ago called On the Death of My Son by Jasper Swain, who was a lawyer, South African lawyer. And he didn't believe in anything and his son died when he was 19 in a car crash. And immediately the son had died, he was back in spirit form the next day sitting in the back of the car. Now Jasper Swain did not, he did not believe this or like at all, but he had to go where the facts were. And the book's a great dialogue between him and his son in other consciousness. And the interesting thing the son said was, gee, dad, there's no such thing as hell. He said, that's only in the minds of the people who live on earth. It's not like that. He said, it's at levels of darkness. He said, I can go up to a brighter light than where I am, but it becomes so bright, I have to come down again. He said, I can go to the darker realms, but I don't like it. And I scoot back up again to where I am. It's as if you gravitate to your own level of light, your 60 watt bulb or whatever you want. There is this level. I don't know what it means, but there does appear to be this level. Well, that's one account. And so I think that's an interesting one. I mean, there's lots more accounts than that. That's just one account that adds to all the huge amount of information that's actually there. But there's other, I mean, another sort of question that throws another span on the works is, I don't know if you know of the works of Gerard Quassie, the Dutch clairvoyant. Do you know Gerard? Gerard Quassie lived, he's dead now, obviously. Gerard Quassie worked with the Dutch police for 40 years, excuse me, frogging my throat. And he wasn't a very nice man, Gerard Quassie, when the police phoned him up, he would, you know, more or less do a half, too. But it didn't matter to Gerard Quassie if a person was missing, if they were alive or dead. He would simply get the information and say, it's actually in my third books at the publisher. And one of the things I expand on is the work of Gerard Quassie, which is fascinating for more than one reason. Because if somebody phones up and says, there's a nine-year-old boy missing in such and such a town, and Quassie just goes, he's still alive. And he can give you details of where the boy is while he's still alive, and where you will find him in that hams time after time. Or he can get somebody and say, I'm very sorry, they are dead and you'll find their body in the river under a bridge. And he can do all of that grudgingly. And he worked with the police for 40 years, never took a penny. Those of us who work, I would say correctly, I'm not knocking meetings that have to take money, we never take any, no money at all, because it keeps them, it's a Scottish thing, it's a Calvinistic honesty, you have to keep it real, you have to keep it honest, you don't make anything out of this. But the fact that Gerard Quassie treats people that are alive, the same as people who have passed over, is interesting. Experiments were done with Quassie by professors from Utrecht University. And you can read it later, it's far too long to explain. Quassie never missed, there were 400 experiments done with them all around the world, using the protocol, what kind of protocol that we used. And Gerard Quassie was never found to be wanting. So where does that leave it? And Quassie said, I don't know how I do it. I just ask the question and I get the answer. So that doesn't really help us either, does it? Yeah, well, but that's I think where we have to get to the bottom of, or not get to the bottom of it, because we're not supposed to get to the bottom of it. But I think we do have to have a more systematic way of kind of dealing with these accounts and then incorporating in the experiments. Because when Mark first contacted me, that's what he led with, because he knew that's what I'm interested in, is this intersection, can science, can the scientific method? I mean, science is hopelessly lost because it's wed to materialism and it thinks that consciousness is illusion and you're a biological robot in a meaningless universe. But there's tools there that we can pick up and use. So I'm always interested in the science. By the way, in terms of Mark, so Mark Ireland is an interesting guy. And do you know about his history? Do you know about his father, Richard Ireland? Yeah, I do, yes. I didn't know about him until Mark told me about it, yeah. I mean, Mark sends me all the proofs for his books before he publishes them. So I know all about that. But Mark, if you read between the lines, I mean, I met Mark last year in Edinburgh. And Mark, he really didn't like the fact his father was the phoenix oracle. He really, as a boy, he didn't like it. But he's now come, he's found his father through his own tragedy, actually, which is rather nice, yeah. Well, let's talk about that for a minute as we wrap things up, because I think it gets to this thing I keep hammering So just because I like doing that and because I like torturing people who don't know me, but for folks who don't know or don't remember. So Mark Ireland went through just about the worst thing that I can imagine as a parent you're going through. And that was the loss of his son. And that sent him on this journey of trying to connect with his son. And that's what he chronicles in this book that you wrote the forward to called Soul Shift that I just had up on the screen. As you just alluded to, one of the interesting things about Mark's story, and this is a strange coincidence or it's not a coincidence or it's part of the journey that everybody is on. Turns out that Mark's father was a stage magician or maybe more accurately a mentalist. And he would do his act basically involved him in doing this kind of thing where you, this is like a late night TV thing. He was on late night TV all the time. He was a huge celebrity. And then he did Las Vegas shows, but he'd be completely blindfolded. Like tape over the eyes. I mean, sincerely, completely blindfolded. And yet he could see things telepathically. So he'd tell audience members, like take a bill out of your wallet. I know, I saw that, yeah. The digits, right? Yeah, yeah. But here's the other part of Mark's story or I should really say Richard's story, his dad. His dad was not such a great father. His dad was an alcoholic and dealt with those kind of issues. And he also dealt with what this gift was that he was going out like a show pony and halfway worried that it would somehow escape him and that the act would be up. So this too gets it, we want to put all this meaning and attach it to what we observe going on with this communication. But that's the thing that really hooks me into Richard's story, Richard Ireland's story. Is it calls into question, where is the right and wrong in this? You know, the Calvinistic don't make any money. Is that need to be applied? I have a lot of friends who are in the magic. No, it doesn't make you know, it doesn't, no. Well, how do we know that? You know, I have a lot of friends in the magic community, the cult community. Hey, is that okay? Aren't we all trying to use this extended realm for our benefit in some way? Is that what we should do? What is the moral imperative for each of us? So, but you shake your head and you have quick answers. But don't you think we need to do the work on that? Don't you think we need to do this? Some kind of, we can put together a science project. We can put together you and Professor Roy did some great work. Don't you think there's an opportunity to nudge a little bit closer to the truth rather than just say, yes, no, I know, I heard it, I have this account, I have that account? Well, I don't know how you would do that. I can only speak for myself. And my raison d'etre is simply to let people who do not know that their loved ones survive in consciousness anyway. People are brokenhearted. And that's why I don't like skeptics because they take away hope from people that they've actually, their mothers die. They're never gonna hear or see them again. And I have so much evidence, so much experience with that. I know that's not true. And that is my only raison d'etre is to try and help people to understand death is not the end and to put two fingers up to the skeptics and say, you're not helping yourself. You're not helping anyone. That is, I can only speak for myself. There are some regions in it for money. Yes, certainly. Other than that, I have really no interest. I can only tell you what I do. Trisha, why don't you tell folks about, it sounds like you have a new book coming out. Tell folks about that and when it's gonna be out and what else you're doing and how they can stay in touch with you. Well, I've got a website. My website is www.trisharobertson.com. I think it's an American site actually. They can read more about it. I've also done healing studies. They can read that as well. You've put me off what I was going to say now. The new book, the new book, maybe. The book, the book, the book. Well, the third book is not following on from the first two in the same sense. Every book's a bit deeper than the last one. And the third book is called, I was going to call it, It's Life and Death, Jim. But not as you know it, but I thought, no, some people might not get the Star Trek inference in that. So I just called it, It's Life and Death, but not as you know it. And then it really is from the unbelievable to the bizarre because it's just, the stuff in there is just unbelievable. You know, I go into depth about Ted Sirius who could think pictures onto film. And Ted Sirius once again was not the nicest person, but he could definitely do it, but not to order, but he could do it. And then you've got bizarre people. Do you know about Jesse Shippard? Well, he's an American. He was a musical medium. And I'm not going to tell you because it's so bizarre and I wouldn't get all the right words just telling you because it's very, very in depth. It's all about weird things. It really is from the unbelievable to the bizarre. I talk about premonition. There's another one, retro cognition, what you can see in the past. I talk about Ted Sirius. I talk about Jesse Shippard. I also talk, I do some personal stuff about a few more cases and a few more things on mediumship that are totally and utterly bizarre. There's also a couple of swear words in the third book, but that's all right. It's life and death, but not as you know it. When is that going to be out? Well, it's at the publisher just now. You'd have to ask my publisher. As we were talking, he was sending me messages up on the screen here, asking me questions about the manuscripts. Okay, so folks can look for it. Folks can look for it on Amazon? Amazon, yes, on Amazon. Either Amazon.com or UK, you'll get them anywhere. And there's another outlook for, or any good bookshop will order them, pardon me, but it is totally bizarre. I mean, it's even bizarre to me and you probably with all the things that we've done already. But I like to keep the vibe, the happy vibe of, this is, it's normal, but it's bizarre. It's nothing to do with religion at all, nothing at all. The grass is green, the sky is blue. These things happen. We're trying to understand it, but it's like everything else. The more you go into these things, the less you understand it. And I don't go into jargon because I'm not a parapsychologist, I'm not a neurologist, I'm not a neuroscientist. So they go into the minutia of what your brain is like, but from what I have seen and 30 years experience, consciousness is not within the brain or the body. It definitely survives. Otherwise, how do you explain the murder case and all the cases like it? There's many, many hundreds of them. The truth is out there. The truth is out there. Okay, again, our guest has been true. Well, actually 100 years ago, the SPR in London wanted to try and clarify these matters and they thought that within 100 years, it would all be explained, but actually it's not, we're not any further on with the explanation. We just have more data. We have, well, in London, they're trying to work out how mediumship works by placing, you know, electrodes in the brain, which feed into a computer. But that only tells us what's happening in the brain. It doesn't really help us in our quest for what's consciousness. It doesn't. It does not. I would agree. So all we can say is the things, I mean, I just love it all. I just love it. I wouldn't do it if I didn't love it. And I still get people forenaming who have things happening in their house, who are spontaneous cases. And I just, I try to make sense of them. And if I can't make sense of them, I may call in a medium that I would trust to help. And from day one, I make it quite clear, I have a cross between a psychological investigator and Judge Judy. I don't take any shit. That's true. Once again, our guest has been Trisha Robertson. It's been a delight having you on. And congratulations. And on all this important work and research you've done, and obviously the energy you put behind it and you're a real people helper. I can tell that you're out there trying to meet people where they are in terms of questions that they have about people who've passed over. So Trisha, thanks again for joining me on Skeptico. Thank you. Thanks again to Trisha Robertson for joining me today on Skeptico. I realize I gave Trisha quite a hard time, but then one of the things I hear from Skeptico listeners at least the ones that I listen to is you gotta be an equal opportunity. I don't know, I hate to use the term skeptic, but skeptic, we gotta get to the level three questions. That's where I'm always going to be driving. And if it's uncomfortable for the person I'm interviewing or if it's uncomfortable for you, I'm not gonna really apologize about that. That's just part of the Skeptico drill. So, hey, you're still here. So that's all that matters. So the one question I tee up from this interview is the question that I was really pushing Trisha on and that's that how should we handle someone's religious beliefs when it comes to after death communication? How much respect should we give them on one hand and how much veracity should we give them if you know what I mean in terms of how evidential is that? Does it immediately blow somebody out of the water if they say I had an experience with Jesus? Does it cause us to say, oh, well, then that couldn't have been legitimate? Or that's ultimately legitimate. So you get the idea. Let me know your thoughts on that. I love when people interact any way you choose to do that. The Skeptico forum is my preferred way, but any way you wanna connect with me is great. I do have some great shows coming up. I hope you stick with me for all of that. Until next time, take care and bye for now.