 On this episode of Skeptico, a show about paradigm change and how when you get it, it isn't always what you think. I have an interview coming up with the fantastic Dean Raiden who I can assure you a hundred years from now. Students will be studying his work and in particular his experiments because Dr. Dean Raiden experimentally has destroyed, crushed, falsified, put it in scientific terms, the long-standing, dominant, soulless paradigm that we are biological robots in a meaningless universe. And if you think I'm laying it out a little too hard there, give a listen to none other than Joe Rogan who we can all agree, love him or hate him, is one of the most influential media sources in the world today. Higher than anyone you'll see on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC. I mean, from a number standpoint, many, many more viewers. Here's Joe yakking it up with our old friend of me, Michael Shermer. But if you think about it from a simple perspective, the entire universe is in your brain and when you cease to exist, the universe ceases to exist. It's just sort of true by definition. Now he goes a little bit further and says, you know, that consciousness is everything and that we bring into existence material stuff by thinking about or observing it or whatever. And here's some quantum physics experiments that are really spooky. It's like, okay, time out, you know, quantum physics is weird and spooky. Consciousness is weird and spooky. That doesn't mean they're connected. So you see it now, right? You see that Shermer is just wrong or put it in another way. His claims had been falsified experimentally by none other than the work of today's guest Dr. Dean Raiden. The spooky weird things with quantum physics are related to consciousness and we can show it experimentally. Here's a clip from the interview coming up with Dean. Well, so we're trying to connect it to quantum mechanics. And so we've done that in two ways. The first way is using a double slit optical system to see if you can gain which path information, which are the two slits of photon goes through. And so we've now done about two dozen such experiments. And some of them work, then some of them don't work. But if you do a meta analysis across the board, it looks like there's pretty good evidence that something is going on, that the consciousness is involved in some way in the quantum process. I also want to add in one other quantum oriented experiment that we more recently published which involves the use of entangled photons as the target of a mind-matter interaction because he wanted to look at non-local mind interacting with non-local matter and did it do anything? Part of the experiment was looking at could you increase the strength of entanglement and then intentionally decrease the strength of entanglement. The short answer is yeah, we were able to modulate it. But like I said at the top of the show, paradigm change never goes exactly the way you think. Take Dean's latest plan, his biotech venture that seeks to jab people in the arm in order to change their DNA, of course to fix their brain, which I thought were past the brain consciousness thing, but anyways to fix their brain so they're not depressed. So they don't have Alzheimer's and maybe they're a little bit more psychic than they were before. And maybe they're even a little bit more connected consciously, more like a hive mind kind of thing. So I wrote a story which is designed to be an antidote to the way that psychic phenomena are usually portrayed in entertainment. So think about the invasion of the body snatchers and the Borg and Star Trek and virtually every other example where you have a hive mind, which is presented as the most horrific thing that you can possibly do. And we're saying in the story, no, it is not only not horrific, it is the best possible thing that we can do to because it pulls together something which is already interconnected, but we sort of behave in an illusory way that we're separate and we're not really not connected. It is that disconnection that leads to the kind of madness that we're currently seeing in Ukraine. People are literally shooting at each other and not appreciating the fact that at a deeper level, everything it really is interconnected, including us. So this is part of the plot line in the story where there's a tension then between people who, in this case, take a genetic enhancement and become a group mind essentially. Everyone outside the group mind thinks that this is scary. We need to stop that. It's bad. From inside, this is the best thing that ever happened. This is like the difference between Homo sapiens and Homo superior. If we're going to survive, we need to advance as a species. And so the story is basically making the case that Homo sapiens is dying and we have to, we either die or we evolve. Well, the evolution is going towards a new kind of human and if it needs a little genetic push to get there, so be it. So the question about whether or not this biotech is going to happen is really not a question at all. Of course it's going to happen. Maybe the best we can do is hope that we have the right scientist with his hand at the switch. And in that way, maybe we should be glad that Dean Raiden is doing this work, but I can't help but feel we might want to study this one a little bit deeper. And fortunately, I can tell you I've done the research. Here it is. 112. It works on just the one primate. One is all we need. Full cognitive recovery. We're ready. Are you sure you're not rushing this? The date is clear. We're ready, Stephen. All I need is your approval for human trials. Yep, that's rise of the planet of the apes. And in this case, the scientists with the hand on a switch is James Franco. Think about that one for a minute. By the way, here's how that thing turns out. Donnie, you get it ready? She's got stage fright. Is that what it is? We're ready to move on to the next phase. Human trials. Been absolutely no side effects associated with 112. With one exception. Dean Raiden is an awesome scientist. We stand on the shoulders of giants like this. I'm very grateful that he came on. I'm very grateful that he was so open about answering all these questions. Who knows where any of this stuff is going to go? And who knows what our role is in directing it? Stick around. I have a monumental interview with Dr. Dean Raiden coming up next on Skeptico. Welcome to Skeptico where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I'm your host, Alex scarce. And today boy, oh boy, what a treat. What a treat for me. And hopefully I can do a good job and make it a treat for you as well. We have Dr. Dean Raiden back on Skeptico. I think almost everyone who's listening to this show who regularly listens to it knows who Dean Raiden is. But in case you don't, we are talking about one of the world's most respected and most famous parapsychologist, as in all time, most famous, all time, most respected, truly a groundbreaking career, paradigm shattering science. So it really has to be put in perspective. His day job is as chief scientist at Ion's Institute of Noetic Sciences. He has a very interesting biotech thing going on. Cognigenics, we're going to certainly want to talk about that. And we're going to want to talk about what they got that thought we would talk about. I was listening to an interview you recently did Dean. And at the end, the guy goes, Hey, he kind of apologizing goes, I'm sorry, you know, for asking you kind of the same questions that everyone asks you. And you were like, you know, that's okay. I take it as kind of a challenge, kind of as a performance challenge to see how I can bring this information, all this science that I've accumulated and bring it out in a new way or bring it out in a different way or shape it towards the audience I think I'm talking to. And I thought, you know, it's such a good, it was such an interesting response because certainly part of your career, early part of your life was about performance and was about, you know, how do I take what I'm doing and bring it forth? Did I get that right in terms of what you told that guy? Well, it is true that I've done now 650 years, some number like that of interviews. And it takes a fair amount of time. So I do it for two reasons. One is to be able to speak in a way that virtually anybody can understand what I'm talking about. So that it takes some effort to do that because most of the time my mind is inside some analysis somewhere and it's very technical stuff. So it's very important when you're speaking not only to the general public, but to other scientists that they can understand what you're talking about. And that means you can't use jargon. You can't go into heavy technical stuff because, you know, we can't know everything. So I enjoy that challenge. That's the same challenge that I have in writing books. I want the general public and everybody else to be able to read it and get something out of it. And the other thing is it keeps me sharp in terms of being able to talk about this. So sometimes even on national radio you hear somebody who's every other word is um and ah and you know and all that. And I try not to do that and try to make it sound like I actually know what I'm talking about. And the moment I do start to use the ums and the ahs, it's a signal to me that I actually don't know what I'm talking about. Great. I wish I could hold to that standard, but I don't always do it. So I thought, here's what I thought we might do is a little bit of a performance challenge for you. Most folks know you through these enormously successful books that you've had, The Conscious Universe, 1997, Harper Collins, Entangled Mind, 2006, Simon & Schuster, Super Normal, 2013, Random House, Real Magic, 2018, Random House. Amazing because they're science books by major publishers. That's amazing enough. They're in a field that more or less didn't exist before you started writing these books. Double amazing. And at the same time, even though these books are how a lot of people come across your work, you are essentially, what do you call it? An experimentalist. You are a scientist who observes the world and then can't resist the urge to say, well, how can I take that and bring it into my lab and see if I can make it work in here? So I thought your challenge would be to give us kind of a highlight reel of those four books and some of the most significant experiments that are somehow connected to those books. How's that for a highlight reel performance challenge? No, I could do that. But I first want to correct you that the field that I work in has been around since 1882 in a systematic way. And I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. Like anybody working in science, you're always standing on history and I am too. And there are plenty of books for my colleagues who are just as good as mine. I've taken a slightly different tack usually in writing it at a level which I hope most people can understand. And sometimes other books tend to be more technical or denser. So I'm definitely not the first person to be talking about this stuff. So the four books, the first one, The Conscious Universe, I actually wrote when I was at Princeton University many years ago and I wrote like 80% of it and no book publishers were interested in it. Probably because I wasn't an author at that point and nobody knew who I was and they didn't know what I was writing about. So some years go by and then I'm at the University of Nevada and Piece of Luck falls out of the sky and it was featured in an article in the New York Times magazine. And the next day I got multiple calls from a book publisher saying, oh, would you ever consider writing a book? And I said, oh, well, I got something actually. So that's how I got The Conscious Universe published. And the point of that book was that up until that time, a very common refrain that you'd hear from skeptics is there's not a shred of evidence that this stuff is real. And even for experiments that are done, they're flawed or they're fraud or more importantly, they're not replicated, which is the currency of truth in science. Well, I knew that wasn't true. So I felt I needed to write a book which I could not find in the shelves. That's how all of my books are actually, I don't want to write something that's just going to repeat what somebody else says. So that first book, The Conscious Universe was written as a way of introducing people and scientists that what is the history? What are the replications? How do we know that it's replicated? So it was introducing meta-analysis in not a very technical way, but appropriately for the time that I wrote it, the methods and presented one example after another of cases where we know that effects were repeated, that they are replicated and overall highly statistically significant, even though the magnitude of the results in each case is usually pretty small. So that was basically the point of that whole book. So Dean, let me ask you this. At that time, what would you say experimentally in your lab was driving you forward, was really catching your interest the most at that time when that book comes out? Back then, it would probably, the most interesting thing to me would have been the presentiment experiments, the unconscious physiological response to future events. Because it was relatively new. I was getting really good results and I already had some colleagues who were able to successfully replicate those effects. So that was new. And I always thought what was interesting about that work and you just related, you just referenced it. And that is, it pulled you deeper, deeper into kind of being on the forefront of advancing, I don't want to say advancing the scientific method because that's not true, but you were held to such a standard in terms of the procedures you're doing, controls you're doing. And in particular, when you get to the presentiment stuff, it was like, how do you do a good baseline? And then how do you measure these small changes against that good baseline? And then how do you do meta analysis? And then how do you work on it? You know, like the file drawer problem, all this kind of stuff that, you know, it was around and people were talking about in terms of science, but you just, it was forced into, I think more of public attention in a way that should have really been a good lesson for science at the time. Maybe it was a good lesson, I don't know, but speak to some of that because I think that's what you were alluding to before. Yeah, one thing you learn after a while is that people believe what they want to believe. And there's no evidence that you can get no data, no amount of charts and graphs, no amount of explanation that is going to change your mind. What does change people's mind is a single personal experience. So a book is never going to do that. So I'm appealing then to those of us who can apply rational thought to methods, which is of course what science is really good at. It's methods to get biases out of the way. And so some of the biases are we want to believe what we want to believe. And so how do you fix that? Well, there are pretty good ways of doing that. So that's partly what the story was in the conscious universe as well, to be able to describe how these experiments are done. And to among other things show that it's not like every so often somebody will write, say, well, did you think of this? You know, are you redoing this? And of course we thought of all of that. It's like the most elementary part of running an experiment is to make sure the controls are what you think they are and that the statistics are right and all of the rest of it. That doesn't mean that mistakes aren't made. I mean, we learn from mistakes and then we don't do it again. But when you look at the history, many, many decades of doing various kinds of experiments, there are very few loopholes left. In fact, in some cases, we don't have any loopholes that we're aware of. Of course, they're always the unknown unknowns that can bite you at some point. But in some cases here, we're not talking about weird laboratory anomalies that only show up when we do experiments. These experiments are devised in the first place to take what people report in their real life and find a way of operationalizing it in a controlled manner and then doing it in the laboratory. So you already have a lot of anecdotal evidence, which is not really the currency in science, but it does provide a way of saying, if those experiences as people describe are real, and we can put them into the lab and we get similar effects, well, then it probably is real. So some of those anecdotes are exactly the way that people describe them. Okay, so the conscious universe causes quite a stir, again, because you put it in very stark scientific terms and you got the goods and you deliver it. You wait a few years and then entangled minds, 2006, how does the story arc go from conscious universe to entangled minds? Because the question I did not answer in the conscious universe is how does this work? Like how do we take these kinds of effects and show that they're compatible with our current understanding of the physical world? Because prior to the development, especially of quantum mechanics, but also relativity, it was easy to dismiss these effects because we thought that space, time, matter, and energy were all absolutes, in which case, how could you perceive something that was far away from you? It was considered impossible and there's still people today, including academics, who say it's impossible because that's not the way the physical world works. Well, they're wrong and so the entangled minds, I wrote in response to questions I had gotten about how could this possibly fit with our current understanding of physics. That's what that book is about. So it goes moderately deeply into quantum mechanics and interpretations thereof and it addresses the interesting parallel between the same thing in quantum mechanics and in cyro-search that are both considered weird. So they both involve non-local connections through space and time and they both involve something about the active intention or observation in observing a system and having that a system change its behavior. And so some would say, well, this is a coincidence. It's a meaningless correlation and that would say no. I think actually what people report when they have these experiences is a reflection of what we know about the physical world because it does support those kinds of phenomena. Nevertheless, there are still papers being published regularly mostly by psychologists who say that these phenomena cannot be real because they violate basic scientific ideas about the way the world works which is utter nonsense because it doesn't violate anything. It's just that we don't understand how to put all the pieces together yet but we're no longer in a classical physical world. So experimentally in your lab what's going on, what are you doing that kind of relates to this entangled mind's idea? Well, so we're trying to connect it to quantum mechanics and so we've done that in two ways. The first way is using a double-slit optical system to see if you can gain which path information which is which of the two slits of photon goes through. If you can gain that information by any means, so-called, then you will not see an interference pattern. You reduce the wave-like nature of light and you make it particular. Look at that as a particle. So you can see the change very clearly by looking at the interference pattern that is produced by that kind of optical system. So we had people, many of whom were meditators, asked to use their mind's eye to see if they could tell where the photon was going or if they found that too difficult then just push the photon intentionally so it would only go through one. And so we've now done about two dozen such experiments and some of them work then some of them don't work but if you do a meta-analysis across the board it looks like there's pretty good evidence that something is going on, that the consciousness is involved in some way in the quantum process. So one of the things that kind of repeats itself here that is really smart the way you did this science is like you take the conscious universe and you take the pre-sentiment experiment where there's an image flashing up on the screen and you're measuring the human interaction with that and the ways that we can measure it eye dilation and all this different stuff. But the reason that you set up that experiment that way is because they've been doing that experiment for freshman psychology students for decades and decades so you said hey you guys are familiar with this experiment right? Well you never put the alligator clips on this part of it and if you do it kind of looks different and I think that's very very clever way to do it and then with the double slit experiment you just blow everything up because that is the experiment that has everyone has been danced around for a hundred years like no it can't really be consciousness is fundamental like mox-plank said I mean why can't really process that and you said okay well let's just freshen that baby up a little bit too if let's look at it this way and this way and is there an interference pattern and can meditators do it because you did you've done a number of kind of variations on the theme when it comes to bringing the double slit experiment and saying yes it really is about consciousness. What are some of the variations that on that theme that you've done? Well first of all we created a series of different kinds of double slit systems so we've used originally continuous beam helium neon laser which has certain advantages and certain disadvantages. We've used diode lasers continuous beam we've used single photon double slit systems each time a conceptual replication of the previous one saying if that worked and this probably ought to work and if this works that should work and so on. Each time a different kind of analysis is required given the nature of the data which is not completely optimal because before you do an experiment you're never quite sure what the analysis should be especially for this kind of experiment so that's that's a disadvantage for for doing these which is why I'm still waiting for more than one other person to do a replication because so far there's only one replication which for his pilot studies who are highly significant and in the same direction that I saw and for his formal studies were not significant from a directional perspective but from a bi-directional perspective it was and which is what we have seen in our own experiments too. What this means is that if you imagine that you're nobody's looking at the double slit system you see a wave-like pattern you see interference if somebody's looking at it you can predict that if you can gain which path information you will collapse so-called the collapse of wave function and it'll get apart particulate pattern a diffraction pattern. Well that's a directional hypothesis that's saying it will go from this to this. What my colleague had found was that he saw a significant result but sometimes it went in one direction and sometimes it went in a different direction in a different experiment so we've analyzed where it went back and analyzed our data as well and we find that too that between one person and the next person some people will make it go one way some will go the other way and if you use a variance measure as opposed to a mean shift you actually get pretty significant results that hold up. What this tells us is that as usual things are never quite as simple as you originally think it's not simply that consciousness collapses the wave function but the way I would put it rather is that it seems to steer what is going on it steers the wave function now where else do we see that well we see it as the quantum zeno effect you repeatedly measure a quantum system it will freeze its evolution and that sometimes it will freeze it in one direction sometimes it'll freeze it in the other direction depends a lot and how fast you are you're measuring it so maybe something like that is going on that it's we're steering though the way that the photons are behaving rather than simply collapsing something I was not upset with that kind of result because as I said that the reason you do an experiment is to see what kind of answer the universe will give you when you when you present a question and if you're lucky it will it will give you an answer which is even more interesting than the one that you originally asked and in this case that is seems to be what's happening that seems like yeah there's there's weird stuff going on which we wouldn't have known before unless we actually went ahead and did the experiment so super normal comes along 2013 and this is kind of a shift I'm all these are a shift but this is kind of a shift in a different direction what's that book about and then experimentally where you at 2010-2013 well I also want to add in before I go there one other quantum-oriented experiment that we more recently published which involves the use of entangled photons as the target of a mind-matter interaction because we wanted to look at non-local mind interacting with non-local matter and did it do anything the short answer is yeah we were able to modulate it part of the experiment was looking at could you increase the strength of entanglement and then intentionally decrease the strength of entanglement well you would think a priori that decreasing the strength of entanglement would be relatively easy because it's pretty fragile it doesn't take much to collapse it but what we found uniformly even with feedback that was designed to increase it and decrease it it only increased the fidelity of entanglement increased as a result of intention focused on it which is really interesting so again that was not expected I mean we we hope we'd see something interesting going on but we every time we get a nice surprise and a result like that then we think okay this is still worth pursuing because if we only ever show the results that we expect to get well that's not so interesting okay so no no no I'm sorry because you're you're on you're so on point with that it is so important so if you can back up and break that down a little bit fifth grade level what is entanglement we don't have to talk about non-local mind too much but the why are you making that connection between non-local mind and entanglement why does that resonate for you and then what is what is the experimental effect again break that down in more simple terms in terms of what you're seeing and why we can read the kind of excitement in your face and in your voice when you talk about how it kind of doesn't really go the way that you thought it really just goes in this one direction and I can see the wheels turning for you in terms of what that means and global consciousness project and all the rest of this stuff that we're doing so spend some time and break that down break that down for us if you would but all of the experiments involving mind and matter are essentially asking the question is mind is it causal or put it in broader sense is consciousness causal in the physical world does it play a role other than within the body and so one way of thinking whether it is that I can use my intention and make something happen with a hundred percent reliability so I should now demonstrate that right arm move up well I did that well if this is a mind-matter interaction my intention has made something happen the question here though is what else can it do is it purely something within the body or does it act at a distance so the non-local aspect of it is saying that at a distance my thoughts can influence something else and we can measure that it actually happened what makes it and that's that's non-local in space the other part of course is non-local in time and there's evidence that that is also possible but it makes people's brains explode and I don't want to go there right now so it's so the again the the simplest way of thinking of it is asking the question is consciousness actually causal you have billions of people out there who are praying that things in Ukraine will get better and so on does that do anything other than make you feel good well a lot of people believe it does do something either it's an accessory prayer with some deity or it's the focused attention or affirmations or whatever this is like in in the populace this is the way people think so these experiments are looking at that sometimes at a much more macroscopic level like seeing if we can affect the structure of water water molecule structure which we've done or many many other kinds of targets and the reason why you go down into the quantum scale is partially because there's a little door opened that says a there's a non-local things happening which is interesting sounds like psychic stuff and because of this this peculiarity which you don't see in classical physics which is that observation matters well of course from a physics perspective you said well no it's just about measurement well what is measurement is it about knowing what's happening or it's about an irreversible process there's lots of discussion about what that means for those of us who are interested in more and in large scale effects like I have here we have it here so I bent the spoon so here's a large spoon which somehow I bent and as other people have said that it feels like taffy momentarily and then you just squish it it didn't take any force really other than just sort of pushing it over well I've tried many ways then to see if I put it in boiling water will it revert well you know does it become soft all those questions no it's a hard piece of metal so that's a macroscopic demonstration of something going on which apparently it's something to do with the mind in some way because it does if you just have a spoon you leave it there it doesn't do that so why did it do that so in a laboratory we have yet to find people who can do this kind of thing on demand like take take a bar and metal like this one and just bend it well we know what the tensile force is and all the rest you can't do that at least not by human force but if somebody can do that and I've seen pictures of people taking things like rebars and just going well that should be impossible but it happened so we go into the lab and we we try to figure out what does this mean for our understanding of the physical world and quantum mechanics in particular for the entangled photons experiment here we're talking about one of the fundamental aspects maybe as Shortinger said v fundamental aspect of quantum mechanics is the idea that when you have two particles that interact and they go on the merry way that they share properties and independent of space and time so the it's not quite right to say that if you take two photons or two electrons and you separate them you twiddle one the other one will respond that's that's not quite right but it's close and and the idea is that they they're not independent anymore they share properties through space and through time so that has been first predicted and then after many years verified in the lab and now it's being used experimentally for communications and cryptography and things like that so it's it's a real thing in fact quantum computers would not work unless that was true so so you have a couple points I just want to make sure people understand so you can create this quantum modem kind of thing and you can do this thing and you can see demonstrations of it I think China is kind of maybe ahead of the game a little bit on that although who knows who's ahead of what game but there is you know for people who need the engineering kind of proof of it there it is it kind of works and it kind of doesn't and it's using these same principles so again what you do the trick that you do is you say okay you guys unknowingly have opened the door I like the way you said that before let me step all the way through and by the way I'm going to bring some of my friends here some of my friends who are meditators and say oh yeah we can do that and some of my friends who are just people off the street this is hey I'll give it a try and now they're getting into this thing at a level that just kind of blows everyone up right so kind of make connect some of those dots that I'm loosely throwing around there well it go all the way back to Max Planck who came up with the idea of the quantum and most of his contemporaries at the time they were idealists philosophical idealists so they they felt that consciousness was fundamental they came up with the idea of quantum mechanics so if you marry together the underlying philosophy of the founders of quantum mechanics with the phenomena themselves then it almost becomes obvious that if consciousness is really fundamental it should be able to do something with these quantum systems so that's I mean this is not genius here it's kind of it presents itself immediately and you do find occasionally some mainstream physicists saying oh wouldn't it be interesting to test these kinds of ideas maybe somebody somebody will do that maybe it has a 2% chance of working well you know okay we've already done that so the second reason then for doing an experiment involving entanglement in particular is because entanglement we we think of something as entangled or not entangled but it's not binary you have a whole bunch of classical systems where particles really are separate so they might be correlated but they're not connected at all and their properties are completely independent in the quantum world the properties are there and there's some kind of a correlation going on which is stronger than classical correlations so we can talk about this in terms of the strength of the correlation but that's not a constant it's it varies all over the place it goes from just barely above classical which is kind of a weak correlation to very strong but there's an upper limit and the upper limit according to orthodox quantum mechanics today is called the cyrelson bound so this is named after a russian mathematician called Boris cyrelson who came up with the idea that mathematically there should be an upper limit to how strong this entanglement can get so there were many experiments to see could you go past that because if you could it would mean that the current formulation of quantum mechanics is incomplete of course that would be that's earth shattering people getting very very close to it with very sensitive equipment but no one has surpassed it yet so we thought okay since it looks like maybe there's something going on with a double-sit system maybe we can modulate the strength of of entanglement and maybe even push it above the cyrelson bound if we could do that it would mean not only is orthodox quantum mechanics incomplete but that it requires consciousness in some way in order to modulate it above that mount so we thought okay experimentally it's interesting but if it worked it would be theoretically extremely important so we were not able to push it above the cyrelson bound and we think one of the reasons is maybe what we're dealing with is such a small a weak effect from the mind that it wasn't able to do it but the other thing is that the apparatus that we were using which is the commercial apparatus anybody could buy it it sits on your desktop when you look at how far we would have had to push it in order to go above the cyrelson bound it was somewhere between six and seven sigma so a massively statistically strong effect and we never saw anything that strong so it's simply the apparatus wasn't sensitive enough or we didn't try hard enough or something but we weren't able to do it in the description you just gave you're dancing back and forth between the woo woo aspect of this that people use to just kind of dismiss it and then the the hard science if you will like the mathematics of it do you want to speak to the fact that when you say orthodox quantum physics what that means to a scientist who is in that field well a minority of scientists are interested in what quantum mechanics means most people learning quantum mechanics are doing it as a mechanic right you learn certain tools certain mathematical tools you turn the crank and you're able to predict certain things and it's extremely useful our whole modern world is basically uses quantum mechanics to make predictions about how electronics work and a whole bunch of other things so only a minority typically people are more philosophically oriented perhaps are interested in well what in the world does this mean because quantum mechanics after all is a purely mathematical theory it's it's just it's math in fact the the there's one equation which you can use to show all the quantum mechanics it's not a long equation it takes a lot to unpack it in order to understand what it all means but or at least mathematically what it means but what it then means in terms of fundamentals in our understanding of reality that is still a completely open question so one of the ways of seeing that is every so often there's a survey taken among physicists on their interpretation of quantum mechanics and so they give a number of different questions like do you imagine quantum mechanics is this or this or this one of the questions is about the role of the observer which is about like does consciousness really matter or not well of the people answering the survey 22% said yeah it is fundamentally important to to understanding the nature of quantum mechanics well these are professional physicists who are working this problem so it's a minority but it's not that small of a minority one in five physicists out there think yeah there's something really important about consciousness the vast majority of research that goes on in quantum mechanics is not looking at the fundamentals in a sense that is what we're looking at we want to see whether uh why were all of these founders of quantum mechanics who are idealists which is not in favor very much within physics especially why did how could they have come up with something like this and yet hold a belief that consciousness really was fundamental did they know something we don't know well it's it comes down to a philosophical preference in some case but nevertheless it didn't stop them from revolutionizing physics so okay let's give their ideas a shot and see what happens okay super normal 2013 what's the story arc here and what's going on in the lab so after writing about the physics of this uh then people started saying yeah but but still the physics doesn't yet explain what's going on so you know is there something wrong with our worldview do we need some other way of looking at it and of course I already knew that the founders of quantum mechanics were idealists so I said well let's look actually in two parts at traditions that are not the current tradition within science so science rests upon the philosophical assumptions of materialism everything is made out of matter and energy and that's the end of it in which case your your brain and you are the same they're like consciousness for for I would say radical philosophers say that there is no consciousness it's just an illusion that somehow associated with something to do with brain activity and this is still a dogma within a neurosciences that the consciousness doesn't really do anything but it is an emergent property of brain activity they will admit that because you have close neural correlates of consciousness showing the relationship there I look at that correlation as the same way a statistician would and would say well just because you have a correlation it doesn't tell you the direction of the causation unless you have a really good reason to to think that you know the direction of causation so so super normal was the looking at eastern esoteric traditions to say well the modern way of viewing reality is relatively new it's only a few hundred years old this idea of materialism you can find instances of materialism even in eastern philosophy and you can find it everywhere but by by more much more of the proportion of the esoteric traditions were all about consciousness being fundamental and and so I used the the obesutras of potentially as a way of demonstrating that something about 2000 years or more before was the first written account of what happens when you do diligent meditative practice what happens well one of the things that potentially wrote about was this just happens and what is he talking about 25 different kinds of psychic abilities that come about as a result of this disciplined practice so I use that as a kind of a way of saying potentially was writing about these superpowers a long time ago is there any reason for us today to take any of that seriously and so it systematically went through each one of the cities they use special powers to say is there any laboratory evidence suggesting that meditation does anything like this some short answer is yes in which case potentially also talks about things like levitation and the visibility and other like comic book effects what about those well we don't know we know we can't bring that into the lab and we don't never see that into the lab except if he was right on these first set of phenomenal well was he just making up the rest of it you know that's a kind of a weird way to write a book so I kind of suspect that these super psychic effects like levitation they might be real and when you look at the literature including contemporary literature like in Tibetan meditation they would they will say yeah the cities are definitely real but the people who have been to these advanced cities extremely rare even among people who are life long practitioners so it's not only the practice there's some talent that seems to come into play that allows for these super abilities to to exist yeah you know yoga nanda the famous yogi wrote autobiography the yogi hasn't had an ashram that's right up the road for me I go up there look off to it and do yoga all the time just because I like to do yoga and it's a beautiful spot right there on the beach or overlooking the beach but anyone who picks up that book and reads the first 30 pages I mean in the way that you're talking about it he just talks about in a very matter-of-fact way of you know hey this is what happened to me this is my life and then my guru by located from here to there and you know shape shifted and you know it's just he's not talking about it like to shock you or anything he's just saying this is my life as my autobiography so yeah I think it is interesting to look at that culturally was there any I know some of the lab experiments overlap with this stuff but was is there anything you would kind of pull out as experimentally super normal where you thought maybe one extraordinary person you had in the lab or anything like that because that that's even something to talk about you know the super talented versus the just person off the street offers different insights as well as I've heard you talk about but anything in that room well are you talking about Swami Veda sure if you want to go there I think I might have mentioned about Swami Veda participating in an experiment Swami Veda is part out of a Himalayan tradition of meditation had been meditating since he was a child so that when I met him maybe 70 years at that point and part of his tradition was to develop or at least recognize the cities the cities would develop and so this was one of my in fact the very first experiment they did using a an optical system to see if it had if you can manipulate quantum properties in it and I described it to him as what he would do he would sit outside our shielded room and then mentally do something to a light beam inside the shielded room and so he didn't know if he'd be able to do that or not but he's just certainly willing to try so he sat down outside the the lab or outside our shielded room and then in one minute segments I would tell him okay now put your mind in that beam like send it in the beam over there or now withdraw and relax so one minute every minute we do that well about halfway through the experiment I mentally lost it like I kind of for a moment I forgot what we were doing I didn't know like what what is happening here and then I brought myself back somehow and kept going with the experiment so later when we analyzed the data we found that about halfway through the experiment we started to get a really big result like exactly the kind of thing I was hoping we would get it was as though he was able to block a light beam to put it in simple terms so I was talking about this to the two videographers we had filming the whole thing from two different directions at that time and they both gave me a kind of startled look because they they had compared notes among themselves and both of them had mentally gone away at the same time that I did this was halfway through the experiment it's like they kept filming but they they were just disoriented or something for a moment so I asked Swami Veda about that later I said well when you know when did you think you actually were able to do this because the data shows that you did pretty good and so it took a while maybe halfway through he figured out what was necessary in order to do this and it was a city it was it's a mind matter interaction city where you're controlling light itself and they said well how did you how did you jump into the room there because all you have is your mind to do that and he gave it an interesting result or answer which was I didn't go anywhere my mind didn't go anywhere it's all in here points point to his heart so the universe is inside from the point of view of these cities it's not outside that's in a sense why you're able to control it because you're you have much better control over your what's going on inside and we're talking about deep levels of consciousness now which you can think of as pointing to your heart it's not really in your heart but it's it's deep somehow and it's there is no outside at that point which is why I also like this quipped from Ramana Maharshi who has asked after listening to the guru talked for a while about how should people behave so somebody asked him how should we treat other people and his response is there are no other people it's all completely connected and it's all inside so I thought that was quite interesting so I don't often have the opportunity to to work with somebody who is such an adept and unfortunately Swami Vedas passed away now so you can't do anymore at least not in this form but when you do have the opportunity to work with somebody who has been meditating a very long time they can do not all of them because some of them are not interested in developing the cities I mean some of them explicitly avoid doing that like in the yogic tradition the usual way a teacher would say about the cities is if something arises just you know acknowledge it and just keep going because that's not the end goal okay this plays right into real magic 2018 but explain the the leap here well super normal is all about eastern philosophical ideas and the eastern esoteric traditions super normal is the western esoteric traditions so in the east you have the cities special powers on the west you have magic they are essentially exactly the same and even the methods of being able to produce magical effects you can map on to yogic methods directly it's all about intention it's about deep states of mind yogi would talk about samadhi a magician will talk about noses it's basically it's a parallel to each other and of course this is not too surprising because if you go back far enough in history there was no east and west per se there it all came out of one one source sorrow aster you know people plus or minus a couple of centuries so so the magical tradition I figured well I don't need to talk about yoga at all in this case I can talk about magic because of harry potter among other things people have learned enough about it through stories and mythology in our entertainment world to at least wonder is that based on anything there's a pure fantasy well it appears that it is based on something so just as they did for the yogic cities and showing that there is some science that we brought to bear for magical practices the same as true some magical practices map on very very nicely to the experimental work in parapsychology okay so here's the part that I think gets a little bit tricky so you're at that level you're pounding on this consciousness thing because it gets to the philosophical assumption underlying science and I've heard you talk about this before in a very very eloquent way in a very interesting way and because again it's it's obvious but it's not well understood or processed and that's that science is resting on philosophical assumptions the biggest one is that the world is out there and we can measure it which you kind of shattered that one with every experiment that you do but there's a bunch of other philosophical assumptions kind of the main ones I mean if you really kind of get to where people live it's like is there good and bad is there god what should I do with my life um why am I here kind of thing and so magic kind of answers that in a different way than I think most people are used to having it answered what are your thoughts about some of those really deep philosophical questions yeah you're talking about issues of morality and ethics and uh it's it might be related to all this but I'm I'm not sure I would go there except for with one proviso and that is if you completely adopt materialism as the your way that you'll understand reality then that leads to a picture of the world which is nihilism which means there there is no ultimate purpose to anything when when your body dies your dad that's the end of it and and is collected into this quip of he who dies with the most toys wins that's that gives rise to the modern world that we see today where essentially business is extractive it is it's taking things out of the natural world turning into something else and then selling it to you well that's not sustainable I mean maybe wind power might be or solar power but taking things out of the earth and and and assuming that it's going to go on forever well that's not the case it cannot go on forever and we're we're beginning to reap the consequences of that model especially when it comes to things like like oil so we have a like double whammy's we have a philosophy which is underlying a lot of modern civilization which says there's no purpose to anything you don't really matter ultimately nothing on earth matters and when the students go through especially a course in science they will they will absorb materialism without even being taught that it is a philosophy rather than it's a set of assumptions and assumptions by the very nature or something you can't prove it's something that you believe that this is a good answer to something one of the reasons why it continues to be taught and used and a lot of people defend it to their death is because it's very effective so you don't want to throw away something that is very effective materialism as a doctrine within science is extremely useful what I would say then though is is it sufficient to account for everything and the answer there from the kind of work I do in lots of other areas now it did no it is not able to explain everything what that tells me is that just as you see again and again throughout the history of science that at one point people said okay now we really understand what's going on we got it and then somebody comes along with a new idea and new experiments and say oh okay what we thought we knew was actually a special case and now we have a more expansive understanding of reality so I see materialism as a special case that pertains to certain aspects limited aspects of the world which is extremely powerful and a very good way of understanding it but it does not account for everything so what how do we expand it I would say one way to expand it is to assume that materialism is a subset of idealism so idealism and once you do that magic psychic stuff the cities all of that are become easy to understand without doing anything to materialism so here's where I'm here's where I'm kind of trying to go with that your work tell me if you agree with this or if you don't but is not inconsistent with what people are doing with the near death experience science the shared death experience science but just really interesting and it's some people say it's anecdotal but it's really not it's casework in the same way that medicine across the board is a combination of casework and and as well as kind of experimental laboratory work but what you're saying what your findings are are not inconsistent with saying there are these extended consciousness realms now let's go see what we might learn about those extended consciousness realms and I think you are making some of those same leaps whether you like to or not you are deciding that you won't do the spoon bending exercise on board a plane because you're like is this maybe going to make the wings of the plane kind of go down so yes we are in the game of trying to figure out what these what these extended consciousness realms are and how we fit into them and I think like the near death experience science and the reincarnation science and the shared death experience science not just towards there is a moral imperative I mean that's what they're just kind of saying consistently over and over again so I'm just wondering how we why would those experiences have a moral imperative that's what's that's what's reported like so if you start just compiling that data the best you can and you go pin von lommel and you go start doing medical surveys of people after they recover from their cardiac arrest and you ask them a series of questions and you do it no scientific way you can in terms of good medical survey that's what they report overwhelmingly like 90% you know these off the chart kind of things so that's just the data yeah so uh so there was this uh essay contest which you're aware of by the Bigelow Foundation and so we submitted uh one of the essays and we got uh one of the prizes and part of the upshot of what we were talking about is if you look at the eight or nine different classes of evidence for survival uh how how should we best interpret that does it mean that they're actually the consciousness in the body can be separate and it wants it separate it retains enough about your own memories and personality and so on so that when a medium reports talking to uncle bob it's like an invisible form of uncle bob so that I mean most people when they think about survival they're thinking about you survive in some other world somehow and you're still connected to this world that's that's sort of the a naive way of thinking about what survival is thought about like the idea of heaven you're exactly the same as now except maybe you're younger and you don't need to eat or something like that so what we're doing is is questioning there first of all if you do a systematic review of these various kinds of evidence and you assign a letter grade as to how good the evidence is from a scientific perspective none of them are a what about the best you get is a b plus so some of it's compelling I mean though you know the full package of of these stories are very impressive but does it mean that there is survival of any type or we concluded that we we don't know at this point and the main reason we don't know is because we all of the evidence a hundred percent of the evidence for survival comes from living people so this is in the jargon is is called living agent sigh it's the it's the lapped hypothesis that it's all based on psychic stuff and I give very vigorous debates going on from people saying this couldn't possibly be sighed because it's way too complicated if like it requires some sort of departed entity or something and I say well that assumes that we know everything about sigh at this point well we don't we don't have any idea what the limitations of sigh is something could look extremely complicated from one perspective but from another if you're really good at some kind of psychic perception you can bypass all the complexity in one shot so our argument was that the figuring out the answer to the question of is their survival is extremely important for everyone we're all going to encounter that thing at some point but can we answer it now given what we know I would say the answer is no we need to do a lot more research sure a lot more research is always a good answer but the little judo that you're doing that I never quite understand experimentally you've kind of falsified science you've brought us to the edge to the limit of it really in a way of saying well we really can't measure any of this stuff anyway how do you respond to someone who says well okay dean that's great you know what you've just proven what I already know is that there's demons in your room that are controlling all these experiments and you can't say gee I've falsified that that doesn't happen at all and you can't explain you know how the swami is different from the average person I have a friend sharily black amazing person has three near-death experiences always had a little bit of this pk thing going on but it's really woken up in her third near-death experience and now she can do she can spin a pinwheel under a class and she goes I'll go to the lab and she goes to three different labs major university university of Virginia ryan institute duke in canada I mean not like fake stuff she goes hey you want to study me put the wheel down there inside the glass and I can spin it so the whole pk thing is interesting but it's connected to this near-death experience at least in her mind it is and but I think your yeah but your work you can't your work I think puts us past the edge where we can kind of pull it back in and say oh wait a minute we have science to say this way or that way haven't you just kind of thrown us in this quandary of hey the world isn't out there and we can't measure it well I'm not quite sure what you mean but we can't measure it because all of our experiments do involve measurement so I mean maybe you don't know what you don't know exactly you don't know exactly what you're measuring there's an asterisk neither neither is that the case in most experiments any measurement is an indirect measurement of something it's a reflection of something so in the case of like say a gansfeld telepathy experiment we're getting an indirect measure of of what people are experiencing and the results of that suggests that what's going on in one person's head can show up any other person's head so that's this is the operational operationalization of people's experiences in real life about telepathy that somehow they're sharing thoughts well in a laboratory we can we can reproduce that the question underneath it is well how did the thoughts get from one person to the other and at this point the best metaphor that we can use is that there's something like entanglement it's it's probably not entanglement at least not as we see in a physics lab but it's certainly like it and but this this doesn't bother me very much that we don't know exactly what's going on because at the leading edge of knowledge you never know what's going on you're doing the best that you can to ask questions and hopefully get an answer back that will address a hypothesis and most hypotheses are not about what is the fundamentally thing going on that it's very difficult to do a an experiment looking at fundamentals at that level most of the time you're looking at various models of the way you imagine things are going on and that's through testing various models that you begin to develop a picture of what you think might be going on fundamentally but ultimately we really don't know and that goes for the fundamentals in most disciplines you have to start asking those annoying why questions again and again but we don't know yet now I hear you and believe me I'm 1000% how far you've kicked the can you know down the road it's tremendous I do think though you know like Cherie Lee in her near-death experiences if you go back and look at her near-death experiences they're amazingly consistent with these ones that are collected under the best medically controlled survey conditions by which we base all this other stuff and what they consistently tell us as part of that which would kind of turn this thing upside down is that our measurements are in this reality which is fundamentally a lesser reality and these extended consciousness rims are kind of a greater reality so we're kind of looking through the wrong end of the telescope these people are saying hey I in that mode all questions are answered you know and it's I get I know everything and then I'm forced down into this yeah but also keep in mind keep in mind that just as with mystics saying they say well the actual experience is ineffable therefore for me to talk about it I'm going to have to squash some amazing thing that happened to me into words that can only provide a pale expression of what actually happened and more importantly that the paper just came out within within the past month showing an unusual case where an epileptic I guess was having their brain monitored and they died and and they were able and remained at not a near-death experience an actual death experience while they're measuring the EEG and they found to their amazement that there's activity going on for a long time yeah I saw that this this immediately raises questions about what is going on with an ND is it a dream of the brain that that data isn't really consistent with explaining a way which they've been trying to do forever the near-death experience it's not in terms of the the patterns the EEG patterns that they're saying in the delta gamma range that it doesn't really match that way and it really doesn't match from a time perspective either and people who report the near-death experience a lot of times it's like this one woman who I had on the show you know she's like boom I got stabbed and immediately I'm outside of my body I'm not dead but I see the whole thing go to the amp I see the ambulance go to the hospital I see all this stuff going which is consistent with all these and then I leave my body and then I have this near-death experience so again if we were going to take that tiny little window that we get sometimes with some data like this EEG EEG data and we would really try and honestly apply it against the best evidence we have in the near-death experience I don't think it holds up well I want to be mindful of your time so I want to bounce on to a couple other things I want to see if we can hit in the final minutes we have Edgar Mitchell Dr. Edgar Mitchell but his 11th man or whatever sixth man walk on the moon six six man founder of ions passed just a few years ago did you have opportunity to interact with Dr. Mitchell much yeah he would in his later years he would come by for board meetings at ion so yeah I had many opportunities to talk to him because the interesting thing I think about his story is like he founds ions because he has this unity consciousness experience he's flying back and he sees the little blue marble that is earth and he has the unity consciousness experience but later in life he says what I really had was an et experience and he's and he's becomes very interested and he says I know it to be true that you know et is real contact has been going on for a long time I know people in the military I was sworn to secrecy on this I upheld the secrecy I don't think it's good to uphold the secrecy anymore now I'm telling the truth have you ever reflected on that in terms of because because that's interesting how we set up ions to say here's a safe little way to kind of partially explore what I really know I mean that's one way to read that that doesn't have to be your way of reading it but what do you any thoughts on that well the ions mission as described for many years was we explore the frontiers of consciousness which was in alignment with what Edgar was interested in after all he did have that experience he went on to have many other very strange psychic experiences he didn't talk about UFOs and ets for a very long time because he knew how people respond to to that and you're already recognizing that there's a credibility problem and you start talking psychic stuff to other people so we have tend to avoid the whole UFO et thing mainly because it's like a binary bomb you combine two things that are slightly explosive and you have a major problem on your hands so is there a relationship well maybe because a lot of UFO sightings and then ideas about contact with et it's about consciousness apparently because the communication typically is telepathic and the ets can do things that you shouldn't be able to do like walk through walls and stuff so whether and some point in the future we we start to pursue that at this point I would guess probably not and the reason is that much of what we do from a scientific perspective requires doing it in a laboratory environment or at least under some kind of control conditions and if we can find an et who can come to the lab and do stuff we'd be very happy to entertain that but it's very similar to like somebody who says well one time I I levitate it that's great can you do it now no I can't do it anymore sorry we you know we can't what we want to do is advance through science as best as we can and in the process maybe slightly change some of the ideas or the epistemology that's used in science but not to go off into what I would consider left field where all you have are stories and yes there are similarities among the stories there's some of them are very compelling people have transformative experiences as a result of the stories or the experience that they have and they're they come back different and that's certainly valuable work there are people who are studying these sorts of things but it's at this point not something that we want to look at tell us about cognogenics and particularly you know it relates back to the first part of this interview in that the origin story from this as I understand it comes directly out of experimental work so tell us what it is what it's about and that link the origin story if you would mean the origin of cognogenics yes yes because isn't it was I am I mistaken it it did it did seem to come out of this research like who can do this stuff better than other people could there possibly be a genetic link to that and then that go ahead it's related to that but it's not directly because this is the genetics of psychic ability or psychic talent that is a project that ions cognogenics is of course paying attention to that since I was involved in that too but it's a neuro genetic engineering company where eventually we go to a place where we might be able to enhance or suppress psychic abilities genetically and that we think it has something to do with connections in the brain so in order to get there though we have to start with something which is much simpler so what we're doing initially is looking at the mechanism of action for SSRI drugs selective serotonin uptake inhibitors re-uptake inhibitors so these are the are things like Prozac and Zoloft and all of the drugs out there that are used for anxiety and depression and a few other things well if you look at how those things work in the brain it involves a certain kind of neuronal receptor that it's modulating it's basically down regulating that receptor you down regulate it if it's too hyper excited you will become calm and depression also begins to lift so we figured with modern genetic tools especially CRISPR which is the the most recent version of a genetic editing tool you can very precisely target certain neurons and cause them to down regulate so we kind of bypass all of the problems which are huge problems of contraindications in SSRI drugs and most pharma because that goes all the way through your body and instead target just the places in the brain that you need to change so we've done experiments now that we're able to we provided proof of principle that the method works and our secret sauce in this is how do you get it in the brain without putting a six inch needle into your head because that's how a lot of these studies are being done and also not having to put it in your cerebral spinal fluid and not having to do IV and all those other methods we developed a method which will get it into your head and go to the right spot and we can show that it actually does down regulate just like an SSRI does but at this point we think we in fact even from the mouse studies we don't see any side effects so this this is part of a a big and very fast growing industry of what will become modern medicine and people today are still some people are afraid of of mRNA treatments they they were afraid of it in the same way that people used to be afraid of organ transplants and prosthetics and all kinds of stuff this is simply the way whether they like it or not this is where medicine is going because it's extremely effective so again is this have anything to do with psychic stuff not yet but down the road we think maybe we'll be able to use the platform that we've created to do some interesting things for psychic talent so i'm not a ludite and i get that what what you said is true this is going to happen someone's gonna do it get used to it and if we don't do it somebody else will why do you already happen okay why do you want to be that guy i mean there are a lot of legitimate concerns especially right now we're on the heels of what some scientists are calling you know the greatest medical crime against humanity and history and you know if you look at just you know just the other day who's the guy who presented in front of congress oh senator ron johnson and the the effects of the vaccine on the do d staggering 300 increase in miscarriages 500 increase of this 600 we have no idea what's going on with this gene therapy bio weapon kind of stuff i don't i know we have to push forward but how do we do it in a way that and or do we have to push forward what is what is going on here and and what do you think is the path forward for the legitimate concerns that a lot of people have and on the other hand the prospects of you know medical science advancing every advancement carries risk a enormous amount of medical problems can be traced to genetic origins and we're not talking about like single genes that are producing a problem like cystic fibrosis or sickle cell anemia many of like all of the whole process of neurodegeneration at least a dementia at least Alzheimer's all that these are very serious problems that have so far not been solved by anything so there is the the pharma that's available for example for Alzheimer's at best slows it down a tiny little bit but if you have Alzheimer's you're going to die from Alzheimer's so wouldn't it be nice if we figured out a way to prevent that or treat it or cure it even and not just that but all the like every organ has its own set of things that can go wrong would it be better to figure out a way to fix that or not yes every new treatment every every new advancement in science the development of the atomic bomb was a risk as a result of what Mary Curie was doing does that mean it's better not to know or to know and and part of the scientific creed at least the one that I follow is it's always better to know because at least then you're going to make decisions I know how mRNA works and whether the is the data that he's actually using something that other scientists will agree to I don't know but you know that I would have to go into this and look in detail this is actually the way it's working well well Dean I mean they have they they got their data from the defense medical epidemiology database they got it from the DOD's own database it's not like he cooked up these numbers you know and then and this is similar this could be similar to the other databases where people put in side effects that they say that they had as a result of getting a vaccine and that's just people reporting things and you have no way of knowing what's going on so I don't know whether this database is vetted maybe it is it's the DOD's database of like the number doesn't mean anything but hold on no when you talk about miscarriages you know there can be under reporting over reporting but you got to believe they're kind of pretty spot on with the number of miscarriages and then what the other thing he has is he has doctors that come forward and say hey yeah it's consistent with what I'm observing in working with soldiers there's a lot more cases of all the stuff that you guys are talking about so the DOD's response was good part of the problem in this is again we're dealing with correlations as opposed to causation so are people more stressed because of a pandemic yes would stress lead to more miscarriages yes so is that the causal thing or is it the vaccine or is it people who took the vaccine and their friends are telling them you're crazy for taking the vaccine which adds more stress which leads to miscarriages and other what I'm trying to say here is that unless I go and actually dive into this data and figure out what is it that's actually being said and what is the nature of the data so I mean we're part of this of science is being skeptical about everything and in this particular case there is so much politicization politics involved in the way that people are interpreting what's going on that I'm not I won't accept anything that people say on a pro or con right I mean I tend to pay more attention to things that end up in science and nature but something like this I would look at where's the source that's telling me this why is he saying this all of these other questions because now we're talking about socio politics and not just science okay I'll kind of wrap it up I just have to add I am apolitical I'm also kind of politically ignorant to be honest with you I didn't even know who the hell senator Ron Johnson is I don't pay any attention to it it just looks like theater to me what I'm interested in is the science and what I'm interested in is the per political interface to science and how it's just being science is in such a threat now and so you know what the DoD did the Department of Defense did in order to help you Dean vet this stuff and ferret out what the truth is they just took the database down they're no longer going to give anyone access to it and they said oh yeah that none of that data is it's it's all kind of flawed so we're going to take it down and then we're going to fix it and then we'll put it back up well I mean come on we've heard all well maybe it's true maybe it's true maybe it is true who knows that's a very different that puts a difference yeah of course we don't know yeah and so to yeah glitch in the system glitch in the system until somebody points out that it's wrong and then we find it out okay well so so again so on cognitive genetics the reason why I think it's very valuable is because again it's better to know than not to know it is also the case that I just this morning saw a talk on this that the ability to do genetic very precise editing at this point is coming along very fast and a lot of people who know a lot about this I'm kind of a newbie when it comes to this this kind of topic and it is amazing what can be done and so if it can if just like I mean people will take some kind of normal off the counter or over the counter of pharma drug and die as a result because people are different and any medication involves risk there certainly will be risk for some people with RNA or DNA edits it's for those people it's very unfortunate that something happened but for the vast majority people it actually will be very helpful well you know the light at the end of the tunnel for me is that I want you to be one of the guys with their hand on the switch because this is going to go forward this is going to be part of our future and as you keep pointing out whenever I say that you say quit talking about the future it's here now it's like when I talk to people say talk about the future of AI I like quit talking about the future of AI you're interfacing with AI all the time right now and it's just going to get more and more so the fact that that you've established a track record of being careful about understanding the the limits and opportunities of science and how to do science right and how to maintain the the beauty of the scientific method certainly gives me hope this I got to believe is occupying a lot of your time and attention right now Cognigenics is is super I mean how far it can go is amazing as you've alluded to what else are you what else are you working on is is this your main focus right now are you still doing the ions kind of stuff and are you going to continue to push that I'm Cognigenics is is not my day job it's it's my night job but the other thing I'm working on is I've written a science fiction tv series with with a writing partner and we're shopping it around now and the the idea is that just to the the same reason that we would write a popular book that narrative narratives are what convince people where we're used to sitting and listening to stories so I wrote a story which is designed to be an antidote to the way that psychic phenomena are usually portrayed in entertainment it's usually portrayed or linked with a horror story and that's not good for anybody I mean it works as a story but I honestly that way at all so the story that I wrote is actually has a very positive spin on it and challenges many of the tropes that are used in science fiction entertainment having to do with psychic phenomena give us a little taste of how that might play out story wise in a very snippet well so think about the invasion of the body snatchers and the Borg and Star Trek and virtually every other example where you have a hive mind which is presented as the most horrific thing that you can possibly do and we're saying in the story no it is not only not horrific it is the best possible thing that we can do to because it pulls together something which is already interconnected but we we sort of behave in an illusory way that we're separate and we're not really not connected it is that disconnection that leads to the kind of madness that we're currently seeing in Ukraine right you know people had literally shooting at each other and not appreciating the fact that at a deeper level everything it really is interconnected including us so this is part of the of the plot line in the story where there's a tension then between people who who in this case take a genetic enhancement and become a group mind essentially everyone outside the group mind thinks that this is scary we need to stop that it's bad from inside this is the best thing that ever happened this is like the difference between Homo sapiens and Homo superior if we if we're going to survive we need to advance as a species and so the story is basically making the case that Homo sapiens is dying and we have to we either die or we evolve well the evolution is going towards a new kind of human and if it needs a little genetic push to get there so be it you know an interesting connection to that I don't know if you know Whitley Streber but I'm sure you know of him probably know the most you know him his contact experience his ongoing contact experience includes an understanding of the hive mind an understanding of the others who are visiting him have a hive mind orientation worldview reality I guess you'd really have to say reality and that in Whitley's words and I'm not down with everything Whitley has to say but it is somewhat of a barrier in terms of understanding us because once you're in that mindset you're like why would you think that's real and it also has an interesting tieback doesn't it to the quote that you used earlier in that I don't think of others you know what are you how do you get along with it I don't think of there are no others yeah yeah so the one of the metaphors we use in this story is because initially people involved were very resistant to it but it's that it is as though you are a neuron in a brain well you as the neuron could have certain capabilities and neurons are pretty clever but a single neuron would have no concept of what 100 billion neurons with a trillion interconnections can do it's like totally different well the same is true here if we really are interconnected in consciousness in some way we feel like we're an individual but as a collective what we can do not I mean what we can take everything we know about being human our cognition perception all the rest of it and some little bits of psychic phenomena times eight billion that's that's the direction that the story takes and then it explores the notion of what would happen if that were true final question what do you think of the fuss over the transhumanism agenda what do they get right what do they get wrong I'm not deep enough into that to have a good opinion I think there's a lot of I need to go on to it I have another meeting coming up again with Dean you've been super generous with your time and uh super open yeah I always expect that you guys just answer everything knock them all out of the park terrific having you on thanks so much for being here thank you thanks again to Dean Raiden for joining me today on skeptical the one question I tip from this interview is what do you make of the DNA fiddling that is coming down the road and in particular what Dean really brings into focus here in this interview is what does that mean for consciousness however you understand consciousness however you understand your interface to consciousness whether it's a blob of consciousness or a hierarchy of consciousness what do you think there's a lot to discuss here and do stick around I have some more pretty good interviews coming up so stay with me for all of that until next time take care and bye for now