#0031 - Hal Puthoff

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On this episode, we cover the Joe Rogan Experience 2314 with guest Hal Puthoff.

Putoff.

Putoff.

The No Rogan Experience starts now.

Welcome back to the show.

This is a show where two podcasters who started out with No Previous Rogan Experience now have 92 hours of it.

And we get to know Joe Rogan.

It's the show for those who are curious about Joe Rogan, his guests, and their claims, as well as for anyone who just wants to understand Joe's ever-growing media influence, I'm Cecil Cicero.

I'm joined by Michael Marshall.

And today, we're going to be covering Joe's May 1st interview with Hal Putoff.

Putoff.

How do you say it, Marsh?

What's your take on this?

I think it's Hal Putoff.

I think it's Putoff.

I remember hearing about Putoff and Targ doing this kind of research.

Okay, so putoff.

Okay.

I don't want to do the TH if it doesn't need it.

So it's put off.

How did Joe introduce Hal in the show notes, Marsh?

Yeah, according to the show notes, Hal Putoff is a physicist researching energy generation, space propulsion, and other related topics.

He is the president and CEO of Earth Tech International, Inc.

and director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin.

Oh, okay.

Is there anything else we should know about?

Yeah,

I think there is.

And this is Hal Putoff was a name that was known to me because of the work he did with Putoff and TAG.

So in the 70s and the 80s, Putoff directed a program at Stanford, the Stanford Research Institute, where he collaborated with with a guy called Russell Targ to investigate paranormal activities, paranormal abilities in people, rather.

And so they were responsible at that institute for some of the most credulous studies into psi phenomena, the type of studies you will have heard of.

So when Uri Geller was being experimented upon by

scientists who took him seriously, mistaking his sleight of hand fakery for genuine paranormal skill, it was these guys.

It was Putoff and Targ.

And as he's going to talk about here, Putoff and Tog were pioneers of remote viewing, but their work was pretty much characterized almost entirely by hasty conclusions, pretty poor methodology, and just this overwhelming desire to discover that psi abilities were definitely real.

And that is a bias that massively compromised their findings.

Because if you try hard enough to find something you want to find, you'll find it, especially if you let your biases influence the way you're running your experiments.

Also, a little side note, in 2017, he co-founded the UFO dedicated company To the Stars with Tom DeLone from Blink One Hit 2.

Oh, no kidding.

Who I think has been on Rokan and who may well make it onto our shore in the future.

There is some other context that I think is going to be important, but to be honest, I want to sit on that because I think I want to kind of do the reveal on what I've found there when we get there.

When we get there,

I am putting a pin in that and it's going on the wall.

Okay, so what did they talk about?

So they talk about remote viewing, obviously.

They talked about the CIA and the funding for remote viewing.

They talked about the psychic Ingo Swan.

They talked about Russian submarines, really big ones.

They talked about UAPs, quantum physics, quantum energy, quantum communication, quantum gravity, quantum everything, essentially.

And they also talked about the time that Hal totally could have become a millionaire, but he chose not to, actually, because he didn't want the money.

What a virtuous human being.

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All right.

So here we go, Marsh.

We have an entire segment, an entire piece of this that's going to be about remote viewing.

So if people don't know what remote viewing is, can you give me like an elevator pitch on what remote viewing is?

Yeah, absolutely.

So remote viewing was the, or is the psychic belief or the paranormal belief that you can use psychic means to be able to see details, accurate details about something very far away.

And that might be in the next room or sealed in an envelope, or it might be as far away as a Russian military base.

And so remote viewers would often close their eyes, would often try to picture what they see in that far away place and would often do drawings of what they're seeing.

And then you'd have judges come along, which was in this case, Hal Putoff and his colleagues, who would try to match the drawings drawings up to details of the real thing to prove that, yeah, they're seeing the real thing.

It's not just coming from their imagination.

So that's remote viewing, essentially.

And in this experiment in particular, the judges know the place that they're, or the thing that they're looking at, correct?

Yeah, exactly.

And obviously, that introduces biases because if what you're doing is drawing relatively vague,

vague shapes, if you're drawing nothing too specific, and the person who really is is invested in making sure this is definitely true knows what it is that you're meant to be looking at, they're going to make some stuff fit.

And we'll actually see examples of that throughout the just even the description that Hal gives here of the experiments and the results, even from his incredibly sanitized best case scenario retelling of the events, it's pretty clear that this is essentially someone trying really hard to make the details fit.

Okay, well, so here's the first clip.

It's early on in the show.

He talks about a gentleman by the name of Inigo Swan, and this was at Stanford, where they got an opportunity to test this person.

So just in a lark, by this time I'd headed over to Stanford Research Institute to

do my laser work.

So anyway, I invited him for a weekend just to see what else he could do.

And of course, I talked to all my physics colleagues and they said, oh my God, these guys are all frauds and charlatans.

You better know what you're doing.

Well, it turns out that I had a great experiment for him because we had an experiment set up at Stanford that was a very sensitive quantum chip inside of electrical shielding, inside of magnetic shielding, inside of superconducting shielding, completely acoustically isolated from the environment.

No way anything on the outside could affect that little chip.

They were only looking for quarks and stuff like that.

So anyway, I brought him over to the lab.

I said, remember that thing you did with

the thermistors there at City College in New York?

Well, this is sort of that, like that on steroids.

And so he said, okay, well, I'll see what I can do.

Well, it turned out he generated all kinds of signals in that little quantum chip.

And of course, the graduate student whose life depended on this not being, you know, affected by anything outside, said,

maybe there's some bubbles in the hydrogen line or something, something.

But no, he was able to do it.

But what was most interesting was that I asked him, well, how'd you know what to do?

he said well i didn't know what to do so i just looked inside looked inside through all this shielding and and he drew a diagram of what was inside there that never been published and he said well this is when i put my attention on it that just happened by accident so he drew an accurate diagram of all the shielding that you had around this equipment and the little quantum chip and its circuitry deep inside

okay so i want to talk about the helium line for a second because there's a part of this.

There's this guy's interpretation of what happened, which is it messed with the helium thing.

I guess that there was a helium line that was shared between laboratories there.

And this is listed very specifically on the internet.

You can find it.

And it's a common occurrence that happened.

And this was, this is, I link to the Wikipedia for Inigo Swan.

It literally says that in this, in this Wikipedia, oh, by the way,

the thing he said he did was a common occurrence that happened all the time.

Yeah, absolutely.

And what we're seeing here is this incredibly charitable way of telling the story in a way that it's therefore really, really impressive.

You know, the guy hadn't seen this stuff before.

There was a tiny little chip and he was able to, there was inside of a shield, inside of a shield, inside of a shield.

It was highly classified.

And he drew an accurate diagram just by never seeing it before, just by looking inside of it.

And he was able to even influence it and make fluctuations about the frequencies going on in here, all sorts of this amazing stuff.

And that's really charitable.

And we might put that charitability down to there being a 60-year gap between this experiment happening and him telling Joel Rogan.

So maybe this is, he's polished the edges as he has talked about it.

Except he's been telling the story this way from the start.

These are really old school claims, like foundational claims in the genre of parapsychological research.

And because this is such an old school claim, I did some old school research.

I didn't just use the internet.

I didn't go to Wikipedia.

Any one of us can do Wikipedia.

Insanity.

yeah any one of us can use wikipedia currently in the uk until they age gate that with the online safety bill which it looks like they're going to do and we may not have access to wikipedia in the future so if we lose wikipedia i actually have a 1982 copy of james randy's flim flam where he actually explained these specific experiments so the the debunk of these experiments is in itself more than 40 years old and so i went through randy's uh randy's explanation here and so

with the when it came to this lab they cite some other people being in the lab who weren't that impressed.

That's kind of part of the story.

So someone else was there.

And weirdly, they weren't that impressed because it was a massively impressive thing.

So Randy looked up who else was in that lab at the time and actually phoned him to ask one of the people there, what did this look like?

So this is a guy called Dr.

Arthur Hebbard that Randy spoke to.

And Hebbard is the guy who designed the machine.

He actually made this machine.

And Hebbard told Randy that Puttoff and Russell Targ were overzealous in their work.

They made hasty connections constantly, and they never bothered asking Hebbard's opinion as to what was going on with the machine.

Despite the guy having made it and stood right next to them, they never said, what is going on here?

And it's perhaps with good reason they did that because he wasn't impressed.

What he said was, there's many things that could have caused what we saw.

A backup in the helium line, which, as you say, was used by many people in both buildings, could have done it because it had happened before.

So the guy who knew the machine inside out is non-plussed because he sees this all the time.

But the two guys who are looking for reasons to believe in psi phenomena think this is incredible.

And when you look at the claim in that, that put off and Targ make,

there's a claim that they basically said he sort of looked at it with his mind and he immediately changed it and immediately changed this thing.

It was, you know, cause was him concentrating really hard and effect was the helium went crazy, right?

Or something.

There was some sort of bubble or something.

And there's a huge timeframe discrepancy.

So they say it happened within seconds.

Other people who were in the room said, no, it took like 15 minutes for there to be a change in this.

And they still attributed it to him.

So like there's a timeframe discrepancy that nobody in the room can sort of

agree on.

And that also makes it feel like this claim is like really not something that we all can say is true.

Yeah, exactly that.

And also, it's not like Ingo Swan said, oh, you see that machine there?

I'm going to make it do X.

And then he focused on it.

And it did X.

He focused on the machine for 15 minutes or

however long.

And at some point during the time he was focusing, an anomaly happened with the machine, the one that Hebbard had seen happen lots of times.

And the researcher said, that was it.

That was you doing that.

They didn't try and get him to do it again.

In fact, as Hebbard told Randy, quote, the fact that Mr.

Swan was not able to produce the effect on subsequent attempts on a later date lends credence to the view that the initial event was accidental.

Randy asked, you mean it was misrepresented?

To which Hebbard told Randy, it was a lie.

You can say it any way you want, but that's what I call a lie.

So that's the influence of the machine kind of dealt with.

He was staring at it.

Either he was using his magical psychic ability to move the dials to alter the readouts on this machine at some point during the time he was staring at it.

or he stared at it for long enough that it anomaly happened and then claimed responsibility.

What about that diagram, though, of the chip?

You can't easily explain away that a guy was able to draw an incredibly accurate diagram of a highly classified chip that was hidden away and sealed in shield after shield after shield.

Well, again,

according to Hebbard, who was present at the time and again, who designed this machinery, it didn't go down like Putoff

is claiming.

Quote, Mr.

Swan was not able to describe the interior of the detector with great accuracy, nor did he produce an accurate drawing of the detector.

He did describe using colors and shapes and a little bit of poetic license what he thought the detector might look like.

Unquote.

So that is the quote from Hebert saying it wasn't a perfect accurate rendition of what this detector was like inside.

It was a general gist of what a detector might look like.

And okay, well, how did this psychic have any idea?

Well, as Hebert points out, Targan putoff gave Swan constant feedback during his diagram with comments like, that's right, and tell us more about that.

So essentially what happened here with Swan is that he 20 questioned his way to a diagram of what something like that might look like.

But okay, so we have here Putoff in particular telling this story, showing it to be in its absolute best light, that he's got this Swan guy who he didn't particularly know, who I think even as he tells it, another of his colleagues,

Cleve Bexter, who we'll come to, I think, in the gloves off segment, bumped into Swan at a cocktail party in New York.

And that's how, and Bexer said, oh, you should meet my guy, Putoff.

He's doing experiments in this area.

And that's how they came together.

And that's the story that Putoff is putting forward here.

I think there's some other interesting context, though, because

I don't think it's 100% unlikely that Putoff and Swan had met before.

I think it's relatively likely that they weren't total strangers to each other because Ingor Swan, this psychic, was a prominent Scientologist.

I looked this up.

He joined Scientology in 1966.

He became a Scientology celebrity or something of a celebrity during the 70s because he was using his psychic ability and because Scientology says if we get rid of all of our nasty thetans, we can develop psychic abilities.

So you've got a guy who, by the time of these 1972 experiments, had been a Scientologist for six years and was on his climb towards being a pretty well-known,

well-known Scientologist for the amazing things he can do.

And that's important because Putoff was also a Scientologist.

He joined in the late 60s.

He didn't leave until the late 70s.

In fact, Putoff achieved OT level 7, which was the highest level available

by 1971, the year before these experiments.

So Putoff was the highest sort of ranking or the highest level of clear, the highest qualified Scientologist possible.

He was in that kind of upper echelon of people who passed all of the various levels to get to the highest level possible when he was doing these experiments.

In fact, he actually wrote up all of his wins in remote remote viewing in a Scientology publication.

So all of the work he did to prove remote viewing was real, he wrote that up for Scientology to use it as evidence that remote viewing is possible if you do things the Scientology way, because Scientology believes in remote viewing.

They call it exteriorization.

If we rid ourselves of thetans, we can start to exteriorize and see things around.

So at the time of these experiments, these incredibly influential experiments, we're talking about one very prominent Scientologist showing off that another another very prominent Scientologist thinks he can do the things that Scientology claims it can make you capable of.

So yeah, maybe that does help us understand why Putoff was so overzealous to get results and why he didn't follow a good, robust protocol and why the non-Scientologist in the room was completely unfazed by what he was seeing here.

He definitely sounds invested when you explain it that way.

There's a final piece of this that I want to talk about very briefly.

When they're describing it, when Putoff is describing it to Joe, he's saying quantum chip, quantum chip, quantum chip.

And when the scientist explains it back,

everything you said said detector, right?

And I think that there's an important use of language, and this is going to come up in our toolbox section.

Quantum chip feels like something he's trying to say.

and sort of lay the groundwork for stuff that's going to come up later on.

So just remember that quantum chip and how the person who actually was doing this experiment referred to it as a detector.

And in fact, it's a magnetometer.

So it's an important distinction, I think,

that should be made now so you can find it later on.

Yeah, I think that's true.

I'm sure that was a good point, but my mind switched off when you said quantum because that's what the use of the word quantum in this episode is for.

I don't want you to think about what I'm saying.

So I'm going to say quantum a few times and you're going to go, yeah, probably.

All right.

So

why this guy on the show?

Well, it's because he also has connections to the CIA.

But anyway, the reason I'm trying to get around to answering your question was that I then wrote this up and circulated around to other physicists.

And pretty soon, the CIA came landing on my doorstep and said, oh, have we been looking for you?

And I said, you know, why?

Yeah.

Well, they looked in my background.

They saw that I had, between my master's degree and PhD, I'd been a naval intelligence officer at the National Security Agency.

I had lots of high-level clearances.

And he said, you know, we have a problem.

And they plopped a big report down on the desk about like that and said, look, the Russians have been spending millions of dollars at their best institutes trying to use ESP for espionage purposes.

We don't know how to evaluate it.

I mean, no scientist in America even believes there is such a thing.

And yet you did this experiment and it looked like this guy could actually get inside this device and describe it and affect it.

And here you're at SRI.

We have lots of black projects here anyway.

So

we'd like to check him out.

Can you bring him back and let us come and do some experiments with him?

And by the way, we're hoping that we'll find this is just all BS and we don't have to think about it.

And that'll be the end of that.

So anyway, brought him back.

They spent a day hiding things things in the boxes and envelopes, and he would describe what was inside.

And they were totally blown away.

So they said, okay, we'd like to give you a little project here.

I don't know, 50 or 60K

and see what else he can do.

So anyway, that's how I got started on doing, quote, weird stuff.

Okay, he says at the beginning that he had a paper.

and that he circulated it to other physicists.

He didn't peer review it.

It sounds like he peer-reviewed it, but he didn't.

Writing something up and circulating it to other physicists is as valid as passing around somebody's birthday card to sign.

It means nothing.

It's just you wrote something, handed it off, and then no one gave you any feedback that you changed it with.

Yeah, absolutely.

And we will come back to that for future points as well.

But you can see the problem that all this causes, because at best, you've got a government that is more likely to accept Russian propaganda because of the inaccurately reported experiments of a handful of guys heavily motivated to make make sure that their friends seem psychic.

You know, now the CIA is like, well, the Russians apparently have got such and such a thing, so we need to find it because we're scared.

But that thing that he circulated, he did actually try to get his paper published in other places.

He sent it to several journals in the US.

It was titled Information Transmission Under the Conditions of Sensory Shielding.

And it was rejected from those journals, essentially.

It was eventually published in Nature in 1974.

They'd held on to it for eight months while they were figuring out whether they would publish it or not.

Eventually they decided to publish.

It was a bit of a controversy at the time, kicked up a stink.

They published it essentially with an editorial that explained that it was being published there so that scientists could see the kind of, quote, weak, flawed, and disconcertingly vague material being published by parapsychologists at the SRI at the time.

But of course, now they had a paper in Nature and they didn't have to say to people, it came with an editorial saying we're full of shit.

Right.

So they could say, Look, we're publishing nature with this.

So it was a bit of an issue for

yeah, you're damned if you do, damned if you don't in that situation.

And I think what's so funny is being used, even being used as the

thing that people are saying, don't do this, they're still able to put it on their CV.

Yeah, publish me in nature, man.

Say what you like about me as long as you publish me.

This brings up when he starts saying this,

I immediately thought to myself, could it be one of our agencies, either our agency, the CIA, or the USSR, KGB, whatever, had this idea that let's pretend we're investing in a bunch of ESP stuff so the other side invests in a bunch of ESP and wastes their time.

I wonder if it initially started as like a goof to just get people to waste resources and time on something that is completely bullshit.

And then they

wound up, I don't know, maybe they wound up smelling their own farts enough that they believed it.

But I just, I don't know.

It's just an interesting thought experiment that popped into my head when he mentioned it.

Yeah, I think it's more likely that they came in already pre-farted because

this is the

back end of the, it's after the 60s.

You have the kind of the

psychedelic age.

You have the

turn on, tune in, drop out kind of thing.

And if you read things like the men who stare at gaults, there were parts of the US military who were looking into these kind of things, partly because they'd been led to believe them through people like Uri Gella, and also because if you think we're learning more about

the structure of atoms at the time, I think there's one part of the Menuseric Ghost where John Ronson writes about a general who'd learned about the fact that most atoms are made up of nothing and most atoms are incredibly small and matter is made up of these small atoms and that hypothetically there is a chance that as you walk towards something solid your atoms could miss each other and you could walk through it and that was enough to convince him that he would try that.

So I think these ideas are swimming around in the

consciousness of the sick, the expanded consciousness of the American 60s and 70s.

Okay, so next clip here is them talking about Ingo again.

So what other things did you do with Ingo?

So he was able to affect the oscillations.

He was able to affect the oscillations.

So there's some, he had some sort of an ability.

Did he describe, first of all, like what this ability was, how he perceived it?

He said that for some reason, starting when he was a little kid,

he would, you know, try to focus on some news item or whatever, and he'd suddenly get some kind of picture in his mind about what was going on, and later he would check it out, and it turned out to be correct.

So he just said, you know, I just

stumbled upon remote viewing.

Right.

But remote viewing and then being able to interact with the equipment.

and change the oscillation seems very different, right?

Aaron Powell, it is very different.

And

as we might discuss later, I've got some ideas about, you know, what some of the quantum mechanisms might be involved in that.

Quantum, quantum.

Don't ask questions like that, Joe.

Shh, quantum.

I think this shows the flaw in some of Joe's interviewing technique here, in his curiosity.

Like he's got some curiosity here, but he's presented with the story that someone has a magic brain.

And his questions aren't, well, how would you test that?

How would you control for it?

How could you be sure?

How could you tell if it wasn't true?

You know, what's the stress testing we can do in this?

Instead, his questions are, how did the magic brain man feel his magic brain worked?

He's got this immediate acceptance of the truth.

He can't have in his mind that maybe the person who's saying these things to him is wrong or is lying or is inaccurate or deluded or all these things.

But even then, he does have some curiosity and he asks a genuinely useful question.

Like seeing things remotely and being able to influence electronic equipment are two totally separate claims.

They are, they're not linked in any real way.

And so you have to treat them separately.

For me, that means for the same person to have both abilities, he's got both those abilities, that's worthy of a lot more follow-up questions and testing and verifying because being able to do one impossible thing is impressive and requires

a lot of reassessing and re-evaluating.

Being able to do two completely independent, completely different impossible things at the same time makes it way, way more likely that you're either mistaken or you're lying.

Okay, you keep saying they're two different things, but I don't think they're two different things.

I think they're one big thing.

I think it's the force.

And if you follow Star Wars, you know that one Jedi can do all those things.

Oh, that's true.

And this is 1972.

You know, we're not far away from.

You're really not space lasers.

You're right there.

So, all right.

Back to the CIA.

Anyway, as far as the CIA was concerned, they were most interested in this ability to see through shielding.

And they said, does that mean if we have all kinds of classified documents and a superconducting safe, the Russians might be able to reach in and see them?

And so that's what they were most worried about.

And so, anyway.

Did you find out to be true?

That started a whole program when we found out that

it was true.

We started out doing what you would think, you know, just hiding things in the next room.

And can you describe them and stuff like that?

But then he got bored.

He says, well, if you want to know what's in the next room, go look.

If you want to know what's in the envelope of the box, open it up.

So he said, well, you know, what do you have in mind?

He said, well, just send somebody out into the San Francisco Bay Area and I'll describe where they are.

And so that's how what we call remote viewing program got started.

Okay, so they had, Marsh, a very serious, rigorous experiment set up already.

And then the guy got bored and then changed the experiment to something that he suggested.

This sounds exactly like how science should work.

Yeah, it's not great.

It's not great.

Look, we can ask why he got bored here.

Okay.

Because maybe it would be boring to have people ask you to do things that are very easy for you to do and very low scale, very low stakes.

If you really were psychic and people keep saying, yeah, but like, what's in my hand?

Maybe you would get bored.

But maybe you should prove that you've definitely got it before you move up the higher stakes.

Yeah.

But the other option is that maybe it's much harder to convince someone that you have a magic brain when they're asking you to do very specific, very unambiguous things.

I have a thing in this envelope.

What is it?

It's very hard to wriggle out of that with vagueness.

You can't sort of go like, ah, I mean, it's kind of round square with a deal.

You're going to get it.

It's very easy to get that wrong.

However, go stand in the city and I'll describe something nearby.

That gives you a million uncontrolled parameters to play with.

Oh, I can see your near water.

Now, could you look around to see if you can see some water nearby?

Be that a sea, a river, or a bottle in your pocket.

You know, it doesn't matter.

Yeah, I'm seeing something green.

Yes, exactly.

Jesus, there's green everywhere.

Wherever you go, I don't even care if you're in the most urban hellscape there is.

There's going to be some green.

And so it's so easy to just say these things and just say some vagaries.

And someone is like, oh, I've connected the dots for you.

yeah my favorite example of that i ever saw was when i went to see a psychic uh in liverpool where i live and the psychic on stage got one of the volunteers up on stage and said okay so who was it in your life today who was using a computer

who wasn't like

find me a person who didn't use something that could be described as a computer in the 24

all right so now they're going to continue on they have other experiments more rigorous no other experiments.

Let's just leave it at that.

To give you an example,

along the way, there was a little bit of PR in the newsprint, newspapers about our experiments.

We began getting people calling in and saying, well, I have some of that ability too and whatever.

And so

one of the people that came along that way was Pat Price.

He was ex-police commissioner Burbank.

And he said, you know, when we were solving crimes, I would get an image of where the culprit might be hiding, and it would turn out to be correct.

So maybe I have some of this ability.

Well, I had no reason to necessarily believe that, but it turned out that right at that moment, we were being challenged by the CIA to prove this wasn't just some kind of a hoax between the experimenters and the subjects.

And so they came up with coordinates, because as it turns out, When we sent people out to a site and NGO or somebody else had to describe it, they would describe not only the site as being observed by the outbound person, but also what was inside the building and what was on top of the building.

So we suddenly realized, okay, that person is just a beacon.

It's not that he's sending something back telepathically.

So.

Oh man, this sounds super rigorous.

How could it possibly miss?

This is amazing.

Yeah, I mean, there's another amazing element to it as well, because put off explaining here that, you know, some of these experiments got written up in newspapers.

There was PR out there.

So people started to spot them and get in touch.

And one of the people that got in touch was Pat Price, who's an ex-police commissioner from Burbank, you know, in California, who just got in touch after seeing the experiment in the paper.

And according to Putoff, he had no reason to believe that Pat Price was psychic.

And I'm not saying that isn't true.

I'm not saying that isn't true.

What I am saying is that Pat Price was also a Scientologist in California, where Putoff was a Scientologist in California.

Now, the thing is, obviously, there were thousands, there may even have been tens of thousands of Scientologists in the area.

It was quite popular at the time, especially in California, where L.

Ron Hubbard kind of had started stuff, or certainly spent some time there.

So maybe they'd never crossed paths.

Except, as I mentioned, Putoff was an OT level seven, the highest level possible in the church.

So

I didn't look up, I couldn't see details on how many members of the church in 1972 would have been OT level seven in California.

I can't imagine it's in the hundreds.

It's certainly not thousands.

I can't imagine it's in the hundreds.

So this feels a bit like someone being a church attending Catholic saying that they didn't realize the person they were working with was their local bishop

on their program to try and prove the Bible true.

Maybe there's something else going on there.

And the thing is, the CIA were challenging them to prove this isn't a hoax.

So the Scientologists, Putoff and Swan, Ingo Swan, the two Scientologists here, happened to get help from another guy who just happened to be a Scientologist in Pat Price.

And Scientology, because it's got this idea that you can develop telepathy and other remarkable powers if you get rid of your body of all these nasty thetans, I can't say for certain.

And

I'm trying to be cautious to overstate this, but it feels like a layer of context that is worth us understanding when we hear Putoff talking about how everyone he seems to stumble into in these experiments is a Scientologist who, by their belief system, believe these things have to be true.

When I listen to Joe, sometimes I play a game in my own head, wondering whether or not the person person sitting across from is misleading knowingly or is just like a dupe themselves i try to wonder i my brain goes there immediately like is this person trying to con people or are they somebody who's just like mistaken right and i do this a lot as i listen to joe and when you explain it like that when you say that the person was a scientologist and they met another scientologist and they had this they all have this same similar belief system and then they all came up with this you know they all sort of performed in a way that you would expect if someone was incredibly biased.

And then I hear how he explains that story, how he tells that story.

What he says is he's like, you know, he doesn't say anything untrue, Marsh.

He says, people called in.

One of the people who came along was.

Both of those things are possibly true.

Even if he met that guy through Scientology, one of the people who came along was this.

And so he's not saying anything untrue, but is he saying something to mask it?

And so that always muddies the water for me.

It throws everything up because I'm not sure.

Is he actually trying to mislead by being purposely vague?

Or is he is he just so into this that he's just obviously mistaken?

Yeah.

And it's it's hard for us to know.

And I think the other thing we need to bear in mind is I think he left Scientology in, I think, 1978, 1979.

So he's been out of Scientology for 30 plus years.

And it may well be that he's not mentioning the Scientology because they don't particularly like it when you leave Scientology.

It may well be that the rest of his career has been in this field and he's just smoothed over over the details in his own memory about the Scientological element.

Or it may well be that I'm barking up the wrong tree and the fact that these guys are all Scientologists is just coincidence because California was teeming with Scientologists at the time.

It could be any of those things.

I just think it's an interesting extra wrinkle to consider.

Yeah, we're going to take a short break.

We'll be back right after this.

This is Bethany Frankl from Just Be with Bethany Frankl.

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All right, we're back.

Let's jump right back in.

All right, so now they're going to talk a little bit about the Soviets and a Soviet site.

And we had

a deputy director, John McMahon, said, okay, well, let's not waste it on our sites, for God's sakes.

Do a Soviet site.

And so they gave us coordinates of a Soviet site.

Turned out to be an R ⁇ D facility at Semipalatinsk in the Soviet Union.

And so we targeted Price on that.

He turned out to be a really good remote viewer, along with Ingo Swan.

And he described this giant crane that rolled over the top of a building.

And

I mean, it sounded like science fiction.

I've got some examples here of the drawings of that.

And so it turned out that from satellite imagery, what he drew was correct.

And so that finally started, okay, this stuff is real.

It can be used.

Let's go to work with it.

So that's what started the whole, you might say, espionage-oriented SRI program and remote viewing.

It went for, I don't know, like 23 years or so.

It can be used?

What are you talking about?

He told people about something that they could already see.

Like they could already, what is it used for?

We already have remote viewing.

It's called satellites.

we don't need a person to do it and also do it badly in comparison to what the satellites do yeah exactly and i love the way he says you know let's not waste that let's not spend our time doing it for our stuff so right don't waste your time checking if this is true on something verifiable let's check if it's true on something we can't verify yeah exactly you know they're just they're being asked to describe what a machine part vaguely looks like is what they're able to do here and it's vaguely looks like again as long as you're being guided by or interpreted by people who know something about that already.

I think when Putoff is describing this to Joe, when people think about remote viewing, they assume what you're getting are fairly technical schematics or, you know, complex drawings.

But we'll even see at some point they will show us one of the good, accurate drawings that

was brought through remote viewing.

And it's vague circles with some lines.

People don't remote view letters and numbers or things that are unambiguous.

They remote view vibes, essentially, and vibes are very shifting.

Or they don't remote view mechanical drawings or schematics, like you suggest.

This is like, like you say, this is like a Ouija board.

Yeah.

Okay, so now they're going to start to recruit other people into these experiments.

So, of course, CIA wanted to know: well, we'd like to find people in CIA who could do this.

So

give us a full medical roundup of these people.

So we get a full medical,

including seven-layer brain scans.

And they came back and said, well, these are just normal people.

So, oh, well, maybe it's psychological or neurological or whatever.

So they did all those experiments.

And they said, these are just normal people.

So we wondered, well, does that mean that normal people could do this even if they didn't know about it?

You know, the other option here is that it doesn't exist.

That's the other option.

It's great.

I was thinking about this.

It's kind of like the equivalent of seeing a magician saw a lady in half and then running lots of tests on the saw.

And you confirm, actually, no, this is just a normal saw.

Therefore, what we've learned is normal saws can't cut through magicians' assistance.

And it's really important before you come to that conclusion, you make sure there's not something else going on.

Otherwise, you're going to waste a lot of time and a lot of assistance.

Yeah, you're going to go through people like crazy.

I actually think this plays really well with Joe.

He says a couple of times in this episode and I think in others that he thinks that everyone has the ability to do this or we used to have the ability to do this.

And I think he's really invested in this story.

And just like how I think

we suspect that Hal put off was also invested.

So he helped confirm his own biases.

I think Joe listens to this and helps confirm his own biases and skips over the messy parts of asking how it works or trying to get to the bottom of it or even asking a single good question.

Instead, he just presumes it works and then asks the next sort of intriguing, fun question that you can come to after it's all over, not the messy stuff to sort of get it.

So I think he isn't even able to determine whether a test is good or bad.

Now they're going to talk again about another person,

what they suggest is a normal person who's coming in to do this sort of remote viewing.

So I remember we had a woman, Hella Hammond, and we asked her to come

volunteer for an experiment.

She said, What kind of experiment?

I said, Well, it's sort of like an ESP experiment.

And she said, Oh, give me a break.

I don't believe in that stuff.

And said, Okay,

but do it anyway.

And so

one of the first experiments we did with her, and we have a wonderful diagram of what she did.

We sent somebody out by our usual random protocol to an overpass over a freeway that's all fenced in with a very interesting structure.

And she made a drawing of all of that and said, you know, this kind of trough up in the air, but it's got holes in it, so it couldn't carry water.

There's something going by really fast.

I mean, she really nailed the place.

And so we got the idea, and that was the biggest discovery in this whole thing: was that apparently, as with, say, athletic ability or

musical ability, there's a bell curve.

And you got superstars at one end, you got duds at the other, but to some degree, anybody could do it.

Look, unless she says it's an overpass, this is just reading t-lives, right?

You can find patterns and connections with all a ton of places where something is going fast or something with holes in it.

You know,

those types of things are pretty common.

And unless she just comes right out and tells you exactly what it is, then what is it?

What's the, what's the use?

Why is it worthwhile even?

Yeah, exactly.

And this, if you ask me, this is essentially why Ingo Swan gets bored when you ask him what's in an envelope, because as I said, there's no space for interpretation.

So it's really harder.

It's so much harder to nudge someone into seeing something that seems like a hit.

But when it comes to these types of tests, you send someone out into the field.

There's just so much scope that we're seeing here for fudging the details.

And think as well, if you start off in the same building as someone and then they go out into the field to take a test, you've got a vague idea how long they've been gone and therefore how long they might have been able to get.

And that's going to set some parameters.

You know, that like if someone left my house and they were gone for half an hour, I'm not going to picture them in a desert, even if

anything deserty is going to be out of my brain.

I'm not even going to picture them in somewhere like London because I know that's not possible.

Like Cecil, you've never visited my house.

I don't think you've ever visited Liverpool.

No.

You've never seen out of my window because I've never angled the camera.

I reckon you could draw or describe something pretty much very quickly in a way that I could make fit to something I can see out of my window or that I know is nearby me, just because we know what the parameters of

our lives are.

Yes.

And so this bell curve that they're describing, I think there is kind of a bell curve.

At the far end, you've got the people who are going to get amazing results because they're going to actively cheat to get them.

And then across the rest of this bell curve, you've got people who will say vague things and rely entirely on the interpretation of the people around them.

Yeah, those are great points, Marsha.

I also think like when you think about this test, it really shows how bad the test is itself.

Because, you know, you're able to sit there and interpret it and think about what they're saying, but think about if you were just given.

that particular bit of description without knowing what the answer is.

Would you be able to come up with overpass if someone says, well, it's a place with a trough up in the air and it has holes in it so it won't carry water and something went by fast.

Would you be able to say, oh, that's an overpass if you didn't know it was an overpass?

I don't think you would from that description.

I think

you'd be trying to figure out what it is.

But if you already know what the answer is and someone starts picking these things, then you're like, oh my gosh,

they're so close because my brain made that connection.

Their brain didn't make a connection.

Their brain's just thinking things.

And then you're the one making the connection.

And so it's so easy to see this.

You can't make it work in reverse, which again, which is why I say it's so useless because if we don't know what the Russians have, what is the use?

You're just saying vague things about Russia for a half an hour.

Who cares?

Okay, so now we get into the process of this.

What is the process?

What is the process for a person to remote view?

Like, is there a state that you have to go into?

Is there a method to getting into that state?

There is a method, and it's different from what you might think.

You might think you would say to somebody, okay, we've got somebody to the site, kind of imagine where they are and see what it looks like and tell us what you find and all that kind of stuff.

They're usually wrong when they do that because their imagination comes into play and they make up something or whatever.

But what we found out in the research,

it took years and a lot of trials, was that you get a visceral response.

to a site.

It's not that you necessarily get an image.

So in fact, we told them, you know, if if you get an image, just put it down the right-hand side of the paper because it's probably wrong.

Instead, just kind of put down your feelings as you get into the site.

And so, you know, if it's like water, they might do waves, or if it's a mountain peak, they might,

as Jacques described in one of your previous broadcasts,

a mountain peak, and they just feel like drawing something like that.

So, bit by bit, the process is very much a visceral feeling process.

And so, the training procedure has them sitting with pads of paper and just making sketches and drawings and not trying to interpret what it is.

And also being very

not in a rush about it.

It's sort of like you've got a door and you drill a hole through and then drill another hole through and another hole through and then finally the door crumbles and then you've got a pretty good feeling for what the sign is.

So the process that we use to train people involves this multi-stage process where they're to go by feelings, colors, flashes of things.

You see a flash, a piece of metal, don't try to turn it into a car or a bicycle or whatever.

So anyway, there's a whole training procedure that we develop.

Yeah, so you basically describe vague things until you come up with something.

And the something is the person who already knows the answer is the one who comes up with it.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

And I think it's kind of even more interesting than that almost, because if you say something and it's not right, well, that's your imagination coming into play.

So great points.

But if you have someone guiding you who happens to have some of that information, you can tell a lot from the way that they dismiss, you know, what they're dismissing is your imagination.

So I'm seeing trees.

Okay, now you're imagining trees.

So just set that to the side.

In my head, I'm thinking, okay, it's not tree-based.

So I'm going to go away from trees to a more urban environment to a city or something without even necessarily trying to do that.

And so they're going to say to develop with your feelings, but what they're really saying is go the other way.

And then meanwhile, this whole training procedure is essentially a way of embedding strategic vagueness.

You know, don't let your imagination draw something specific.

Use your feeling to draw ambiguous shapes that could then be made to fit several possibilities.

So don't draw a merry-go-round with little horses on the side.

Draw a circle with some lines on it and let them interpret it.

Don't draw a bicycle.

Draw a flash of metal.

You know, let the people with the right answers work out what metal that is.

Yeah.

That's great because it has both a mechanism for throwing out misses and creating a vague description so anything could fit in it.

It's actually a pretty great con when you think about it.

Yeah, yeah.

And I don't think anyone involved in the con knows that it's a con at any level.

They're all just connecting.

It's even better.

It's an even better con because it conned the people who should know it's a con.

Yeah, yeah.

This next bit is about a guy named Joe McMonagall.

Joe McMonagall, who anyone who follows the literature is known to be really an excellent remote viewer.

And so

I'll give you an example.

One time he said, I mean, we trained them

and so they learned to do really well.

We set up a whole program.

And he said, okay,

there's this site in the Soviet Union and they're making this unbelievably giant submarine.

And it's made out of titanium or something.

I mean, it's bigger than any submarine that anybody's ever heard of.

And it's strange because the missile silos are on the top rather than along the sides.

And so I gave this whole description.

Of course, we had to, at that time, we were briefing all the way up to the National Security Council.

And so they looked at this.

This is nonsense.

But about a month later, out rolls this unbelievably giant submarine, the Typhoon-class submarine, the largest submarine ever made.

Indeed,

there are his sketches and a lot of description that went along with his sketches.

There's a submarine on the right.

And so finally, the people of the National Security Council said, okay, we better start taking this seriously.

So make a long story short, he eventually, Joe McMonagall got a National Merit Award

for over 200 great viewings he did for CIA, National Security Council, FBI, I mean, you name it.

So anyway, that grew into a whole industry.

He's such a great remote viewer.

He's even got a certificate, Marsh.

Yeah,

you know it's real.

He had 200 lovely pictures that the military pinned up on the fridge.

Push up on the fridge?

Amazing.

Okay, so let's just say here's a guy.

He says there's a giant sub and it's got holes on top.

What do you do with that information?

Like even if, let's just presume, because they passed it up and everybody said that, like according to Hal, they said, oh, that's bullshit.

And then later on, they were proven wrong.

But even if they had that information, what does that do for you, right?

Like, what does it do?

Also, he's just describing pretty mundane things that militaries have.

It's not, it doesn't sound, it just doesn't come off as a great superpower to me.

Yeah, it doesn't feel super useful.

His description is a submarine, but bigger.

All right.

Great insight.

I'm going to use my remote viewing to see that, oh, there's a country right now that's trying to, it's currently developing an attack drone, but smaller than the one that America uses, but just as deadly.

Do I get a certificate?

Can I have a merit award?

I will put your picture on them, Bridge, I promise.

And even when he comes to the picture, and Joe

just show up the pictures of submarines, this isn't a guy who'd not seen a submarine before.

This is someone who's from within

the administration.

I imagine it's not like you drawing a submarine and getting loads of details wrong.

This is a guy who knows submarines and is drawing a bigger version of that.

But just to be clear, like he says, oh, he's a brilliant, excellent remote viewer.

That's how Potoff describes him.

Well, from McGonagall's various books, as cited on Wikipedia with references to various claims he's made in his books, quote, McGonagall claims to have predicted the passing of a teenager's right to work bill, a new religion without the emphasis of Christianity, a science of the soul, a vaccine for AIDS, a movement to eliminate television, and a temporary tattoo craze that would replace the wearing of clothing, all of which was supposed to take place between 2002 and 2006.

And I don't think they did.

I don't think we stopped wearing clothes around about

2002 to 2006.

And the thing is, right, that all sounds kind of outlandish and things.

But if we were on the team judging his remote viewings here, we might say, well, there's been a patient that's been cured of HIV.

through a radical kind of medical breakthrough.

So that's what he meant by vaccine.

He didn't mean vaccine.

There was a cure.

And also, you know, streaming and and youtube that's moved ahead of tv so maybe that's the movement to eradicate to eliminate television and okay he was close with the timeline it wasn't 2002 2006 necessarily but he wasn't that far off so or maybe he's onto something none of those are a good fit i'm just doing that to illustrate that you can make them fit in retrospect if you're willing to squint and that's all we're looking at here is some highly invested highly motivated people squinting at evidence and finding proof

okay next up they're going to talk about skeptics.

We had some psychologists at SRI, and they said, you've got that stupid ESP experiment stuff going on, and, you know, this is going to ruin our reputation.

People think that we're, you know, we're a no-nonsense, we're a nonsense place, and so it's hurting our reputation.

Of course, they didn't know it was a highly classified CIA program.

So anyway.

So our director said, well, what do you think?

I mean, how would you know if this this is false or whatever?

And he said, look, make a list of all experiments, places that have been

gone to as targets, and then give us the transcripts that were generated for those viewings.

And don't tell us which ones go with which ones.

And we'll try to rank them for each place.

And so they did that.

Much to their chagrin, seven of the nine were first-place matches in a nine-experiment series.

Okay, so he's explaining, you know, what we were suggesting, which is, well, if you're if you're not invested in this, if you don't know anything about this and you got all this information, would you be able to put them together?

And that seems on its face like something.

Okay, well, hey, that sounds like something.

They're trying to do some sort of science there.

They're trying to hand it out.

They're trying to do a blind study of some sort at this point.

So I looked into this, and there's an article from the skeptical inquirer.

Psychologists David Marks and Richard Kammon, they tried to replicate these remote viewing experiments.

And here's from the article.

Most of the information in the transcripts is descriptive material, honest attempts by the subjects to describe their remote locations.

Examination of the transcripts supplied by Hastings, however, revealed an enormous array of extraneous information and cues.

Basically, these bits and pieces of information about the experiments that enable the judges to place the transcripts transcripts in their correct sequence.

Dates, times, references to places.

There are enough cues to place the transcripts in a perfect sequence, in order, right?

In the time that they happen.

And that's important because being able to place these transcripts series in a correct sequence is useful.

if the target sequence is also available to the judge.

And that's what happened.

So that the judge knew how what order they happened in.

And so then they were able to put these things together because there was dates on them, et cetera, et cetera.

So there's all this extraneous information that also your pattern make, pattern seeking and pattern creating brain can look at and figure out.

So again, it wasn't perfectly blind.

He's describing it as if it was blind, but it wasn't perfectly blind.

Yeah, exactly.

And once we get, once again, what we have here is a story that he's telling that sounds incredibly impressive.

But then when you examine the actual detail of what happened, the whole thing is just much more easily explained.

And this kind of happens when you get involved in these kind of tests.

I've been involved in testing people who think they're psychic.

I've run tests with three different psychics in my time.

I think possibly more than that.

I can remember

three psychics that I was testing.

And when you're doing these tests, you have to be really attentive to details and careful with all the possibilities.

You can't afford to be sloppy.

So in one of the tests, we had a psychic sat behind a panel in the room and we bring sitters in and the psychic would write down anything that they're getting psychically from the sitter without the sitter speaking.

And so there was no communication allowed because the psychic said I don't need to speak I don't need to hear the person I can just in like bring it in from their aura or whatever and so in order to get rid of any possibilities of leakage of information we had to take any mirrors out of the room in case you got a little flash of someone on the way in and said oh I can see how old somebody is or what gender or what they're wearing and things we had to we had to say to the sitters don't wear any perfume Because if you come in wearing what's quite a strong, expensive perfume, somebody who's looking to cheat might write down, you care a lot about your looks.

You

pay a lot of attention to getting prepared for things.

You care a lot about your appearance.

So those type of things can all come up as clues.

And you also have to have details of time steps.

So you can't have the psychic say, okay, well, I'm just warming up as they're writing down.

I'm warming up.

This is my first reading of the day.

So I'm not quite in my zone yet, but I think I've got this.

Because if the sitters know that they were the first person in the room, when they read the reading, they'll go like, well, none of these details match, but you said you're warming up.

I knew that I was the first one.

I can make these match up, and therefore that's me.

So, or, and we even have to take out things like if a police siren went past during the reading, you've got to take that out because if the psychic says, I'm suddenly being interrupted by a sense of emergency and I can't do my reading fully, then the person could go like, oh, I remember that police siren.

This must have been right.

So, you've got to take all this stuff out.

And they hadn't done that, which means

that

that's kind of how this was done.

This was this, the significant information information was doing this.

And in fact, in this case, in order to test how significant that extra information that was left in, that was leaky,

how significant that was, the researchers, Marx and Kaneman,

they gave these readings to people as judges.

who didn't actually know which locations they were because they'd not been to the locations in questions.

So obviously with a judge, you're looking at the reading and you know the location and you put the two together because you're supposed to be doing it off the details.

Marx and Kanman gave this to people who didn't know the locations and were only looking at the extraneous detail around the sequence.

And they were able to get it right as well.

So, and in fact, what they told, you know, people who weren't visiting locations, who didn't have the answers, who weren't remote viewing, they were able to put these in the right sequence.

And the researchers, Marks and Cameron, cheekly named this remote judging, where people are able to accurately judge the veracity of remote viewing without needing any of the information they would otherwise need to do that.

This is just continuing.

This is more on remote viewing.

Did you?

By the way, in the remote viewing program, one of the things they told us, look, you guys that are running this program, don't you ever think about remote viewing yourself?

We learned in the LSD days that if the experimenters get involved in the subject they're researching, they lose their objectivity.

And don't think you can sneak away and get away with it because we'll get you on the polygraph.

And so, so no,

never did that.

Don't remote view yourself.

What a bizarre thing to tell somebody.

That's the thing.

So Joe's just misunderstood here from the intonation completely.

He's misunderstood this as don't use remote viewing to have a look at yourself.

Which, yeah,

that would be a bizarre thing because you can't remote view yourself because you're not remote at that point.

You're local.

But what they're actually saying is...

Don't try and do the remote viewing for yourself.

Don't become remote viewers.

And Hal thinks this means that it's too powerful or something like that.

But I think what it's actually saying is you're more likely to fool yourself if you invest in believing it and you're less likely to be objective in your experiments.

It's the psych version of don't get high on your own supply is what they're saying.

And Hal is definitely both the pusher and the client in this case.

So now they're going to continue talking about more remote viewing stuff.

But this is a little different in this clip.

Now, one thing you may be surprised to learn, and you've asked me from time to time, well, you know, what did I think as I'm facing into all this stuff?

We obviously as physicists think about time going forward, a reasonable way.

And as I mentioned, the Princeton lab got involved.

Robert John at Princeton was very good in quantum theory and so on.

And he knows that in quantum theory, time is kind of a slippery slope.

You know, we have the space-time metric and the possibility of maybe seeing something in the future or something in the past.

And so he did a series of remote viewing experiments very much like what we were doing.

But sometimes he would have somebody go to a site and then wait a week and have somebody describe where the person went.

Or he might have somebody describe where a person went, but the person didn't go until a week later.

And so he did a lot of experiments, which, by the way, were good enough.

He also got it published in the proceedings of the IEEE, Institute of

Electronics Engineers, a couple years after our paper, like 78 or so.

And so it turned out that the results, either looking a bit into the future, a bit into the past, didn't

the results were just as good.

I mean, if you're getting the same results with all these different variables, perhaps the test itself sucks.

Maybe that's something you should consider.

Yeah, exactly.

Look, you can describe where someone is, and then they go there a week later after you've described it, and that counts as a hit.

You have to be very confident that no information has leaked.

Otherwise, what you're giving somebody is just directions of where to go.

That's all you're doing.

So yeah, if the thing that, but what we've got here is if the thing you're remote viewing doesn't turn out to be accurate, it's not wrong.

It's just that you're viewing it in the future.

or the past or, I don't know, in hell or a parallel dimension or just anything for you to

avoid admitting that it isn't real.

This is special pleading.

And I love that they say, oh, these experiments were, by the way, these experiments in psi phenomena were good enough to be published in the Institute of Electronics Engineers

journal.

I would argue that Psi Phenomena is maybe not part of the electronics engineers genre.

And maybe there's a reason you had that genre, that journal, and not a journal remotely related to the field at all.

Yeah.

Okay, so this next series of clips is going to require a little bit of backstory.

We're going to play three clips in a row.

Marsh, what's the backstory here to get people so that they understand

this next clip series?

Yeah.

So this is one of the anecdotes that Putoff tells about the remarkable successes that he's achieved with remote viewing.

And this is kind of done in a throwaway kind of way.

He said that he and his partners wanted to help fund a school.

Actually, it turns out it was a Waldorf school in particular.

I don't know if that's particularly important, but a school in California.

And this school needed $25,000 that it didn't have and that they didn't have.

But he was just chatting, Putoff, chatting to a rich guy at some party, and he mentioned mentioned that he does a remote viewing.

And the rich guy said, Well, I get involved in silver futures.

I can lend you $25,000.

And if you can grow that using your ability to use psychic insight, remote viewing insights to gamble on the silver futures market, if you get that to a high enough place, give me the returns and you can have 10% of it to get you 25 grand.

So this is the story he's about to tell here.

Okay, so we're going to start

the story.

He said, Tell you what, I do silver Silver Futures.

If you can get your ESP people to tell me what's happening each day, the next day, and Silver Futures, I will follow what you tell me and

I'll bet on it and see if I make money based on that.

And tell you what, whatever money I get, I'll give your school 10% of what I make.

And don't worry, if I lose money, I won't charge you.

So anyway, that was interesting.

Well, by now in the program, we recognized that, okay, there's the bell curve, sort of anybody can do it to some degree.

So I simply went to the board of directors of the school and said,

we're going to go into Silver Futures to make our missing $25,000.

Okay.

So this is money investing in this market.

I won't charge you.

What a weird thing to say.

Yeah, this is just like a very rich guy who's saying, like, you gambled my $25,000.

I can write $25,000 off, but if you can turn it into a huge amount of money, I'll give you $25,000 essentially.

And so to avoid having people using their trading knowledge, so like you've got remote viewers, but it's actually just that they keep track of silver futures generally and have some information, they use people who hadn't done remote viewing before, but they also came up with a system where they would kind of hide what the results were.

So when the remote viewers do a reading, they'd have judges assess whether the reading was more likely to be one of two randomly selected objects.

So what is it that they're drawing?

Is it one of these two randomly selected objects?

So for example, if what they were drawing looked like an apple, that meant the market was going to go up.

And if it looked like a pencil, that meant the market was going to go down.

Rather than saying, oh, I'm drawing an up arrow, so I reckon silver futures are going up because I do some trading on the side.

I have a mate who works in a silver mine or whatever, you know.

Okay, so here's the next bit of that clip.

And so

I had seven viewers, and on this particular day, five of them didn't turn out much.

But one of the viewers said, I've got something all squirreled up in a can, all wound around,

and I hear the words one, two, three said rhythmically.

Tape pressure.

Tape pressure.

The second guy, same thing.

A can, all something all around it.

So that's what I go with.

Interesting.

Anyway, make a long story short, 30 days in the market, we made $260,000 for the investor.

We got our 10%, which is $26,000.

So we got a bit of a bonus there for the school.

So first of all, you can hear him saying, of the seven remote viewers, five of them turned up nothing.

So this works two-sevenths of the time.

But I would take a two-seventh of the time chance to make a quarter of a million dollars in a single month just using remote viewers.

This is the equivalent of turning in today's money $190,000 into over $2 million in the space of 30 days.

You're essentially doubling your money every week, give or take, just less than doubling your money every week for a month.

So, that's impressive.

And it inspires a very obvious question in Joe here.

Why didn't you guys keep going and get rich?

Well, that I know.

Everybody asked me that.

The truth of the matter, it was almost a 24-hour day job to do this.

And meanwhile, we're back over at the lab training Army intelligence remote viewers how to remote view.

So

clearly that wasn't your ambition.

That's your ambition.

That wasn't my ambition.

But you proved your point.

I proved my point.

They can make $260,000 in 1972 or in that kind of era per month, but they decided that was too hard work because they'd have to work two long hours to do it.

If it was me and it was making the equivalent of $2 million

a month in today terms, and actually you could probably do it even higher than that because once you're pretty solid that you're doing well, the amounts that you're investing each day would go up,

not quite exponentially, but you'd have more resources.

So like I could take off six months and make myself $60, $70 million and be pretty comfortable doing that for a while.

Like you could, I would put the hours in, but they weren't interested in put the hours in.

But this is obviously a remarkable claim this is arguably one of the most remarkable claims ever made in the field of remote viewing and sci right so these are researchers you'd you'd imagine they'd written this up somewhere this is a classic turn this into a paper nobody could could could dispute this i went looking for a study on this and i found studies that referenced it There was a study I found from 2018 that said, quote, based on the description of the remote viewer, silver futures contracts were bought or sold and then liquidated at the end of the week.

And of the nine forecasts performed in this experiment, all nine were correct.

So we've got something referencing the thing here.

We got another thing which was referencing it about some of the trials that were successful.

And Putoff's experiments yielded two different, though, statistically significant results.

The first outcome was significant at a P of 0.00016, which is incredibly unlikely by chance.

That's hugely statistically significant.

Calculate on the basis of a percentage hit rate for all the individual remote viewings that happened here.

According to Putoff's results, by the way, 127 out of the 202 readings were correct on a binary choice of is it going to go up or is it go down.

There was later,

I found a reference in a paper saying that from his write-up in research in parapsychology in 1984, Putoff wrote that individual hit rates were for each different of the seven researchers 10 out of 12 for one remote viewer, 26 out of 36 for another, 19 out of 28 for another, 23 out of 36 for another, 18 out of 30 for another, 19 out of 32 for another, and 12 out of 28 for the last.

And it gives the

significance rate again there.

But that was referencing research in parapsychology 1984.

So I went looking for that.

That sounds like the paper that is actually talking about here.

1984, he wrote this up and talked about his hit rates.

I'll link it in the show notes.

It wasn't a peer-reviewed study.

It was as best as I could tell, a two A4 page write-up for a roundtable discussion on possible applications of remote viewing.

And the only things that look like results are basically the bit that I quoted there.

So it's mostly about kind of some of the setup.

It's not a paper at all.

There's certainly no detailed results in there.

There's no kind of

evidence as to what each of the readings look like.

It's just these are the, this is, trust me, I got this money out of it.

It's, it's obviously it's not peer-reviewed.

This all felt very strange.

It all felt very, very strange to me.

So I actually called up a guy that I know pretty well, Professor Chris French, who's a nominalistic psychology professor at Goldsmith University.

He's the emeritus professor for their anomalistic psychology department.

He's the former editor of the Skeptic magazine that I'm now the editor of.

I know him pretty well.

He spent his entire life in this field of the psi phenomena and what people are claiming in that area.

So I asked him what he made of these silver's futures predictions and the ability to make so much money by Putoff and his colleagues.

And what Chris told me was, if it really is the case that this experiment was never actually published in a peer-reviewed journal, it is simply impossible to assess it in terms of methodological rigor and so on.

But given the very spectacular results that are being claimed, I find it totally incomprehensible that the study details have never been published.

Furthermore, if the claims are actually true, surely this would be a great and entirely legal way to generate funding for further parapsychological research.

Why aren't all parapsychologists funding their research this way?

Good question.

Good question.

I'm not saying saying this didn't happen.

I'm not saying it didn't happen like he said it did.

I'm saying there is no way for us to tell because if it did, it would be his greatest achievement ever and he never bothered publishing it as best as we can tell.

And they never bothered repeating it, right?

Never tried to do it again.

They only did it once and they're like, okay, we dipped our hand in, now we're done.

And that's not quite true.

They did do a replication from one of the sources that I found.

The experiment was repeated the following year by TAG with the intention of making more money, but reportedly failed under a combination of botched protocol and greed.

That's why it didn't work the next time.

So it may well be that they just got lucky over a course of several days.

And when they tried it again, they stopped getting lucky.

So they stopped.

We're going to take a quick break and then move on to our toolbox section.

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Wow.

So that's the tool bag?

And something just fell out of the toolbag.

Okay, so this time we're talking about sort of the fallacy of jargon in this one.

Yeah, exactly.

And in particular, we're going to stick with quantum.

I mentioned it throughout the show in a few bits there.

There were times when Joe would ask a useful question, and Hal's response, Putoff's response, was to say, well, the thing about quantum is, and Joe didn't ask a follow-up question to that.

And this kind of happens a lot when it comes to somebody who, Putoff's got qualifications in physics.

He knows physics language.

But when people know the jargon and either aren't good at communicating science or aren't interested in being pushed on details, they can completely blind you to any follow-up questions by just rolling out the jargon.

And this comes up an awful

lot in quantum, the idea that quantum can explain everything.

People don't really know quantum that well.

We haven't got to the bottom of exactly what's happening in quantum physics.

And therefore, in that absence absence of knowledge, people throw everything in.

Well, you know that we don't know everything about quantum theory.

So maybe it does explain my pet thing that otherwise looks impossible.

And so we see Putoff bring up a lot of quantum chat in here to push his credentials in a way that I think is impenetrable to the audience and also to rebuff any potential follow-up questions that might get in the weeds of what he's claiming.

All right.

So here's the first clip.

This is about Jupiter.

So this is still kind of a mystery even to you.

Even someone who has studied this for this long, you know that it works, but you're not exactly sure how it's working.

Is that a fair assessment?

That's a fair assessment.

I mean, when we, as physicists, we hate to say, oh, don't have a clue.

So, well, we now know there's so-called quantum entanglement, which is that things seem to be connected at a quantum level across great distances.

And so the easy answer is, well, it must be quantum entanglement, but

that's just words.

It doesn't really tell us how it works.

But to give you an example, we wondered how far you could go.

So we did an experiment, again, with Ingo Swan, who is such a really top-level remote viewer,

to view Jupiter, planet Jupiter, before the flyby, before the NASA flyby.

And so he did.

And he described Jupiter the way anybody might, you know, Red Spot and all that kind of stuff.

But he said, but there's a thin ring around Jupiter.

I wonder if I went to Saturn by mistake, but I really see a ring around Jupiter.

Nobody knew about any ring around Jupiter.

Carl Sagan happened to come by in the lab.

He said, oh, what do you think of this?

We got this result.

And he said, ring around Jupiter.

That's nonsense.

But when the NASA flyby finally got there, it turned out there was a ring, a small ring around Jupiter.

And so we got that in publication in a book we wrote about all this stuff before

it was known in the scientific community.

So

I like that his little flyby involves just taking a detour to shit on Carl Sagan and come back.

Because Carl Sagan comes in for no reason in that

anecdote.

But he's right that he says, you know, quantum entanglement is just words.

But yeah, it is sort of just words when it comes to this kind of conversation.

But it's not going to stop him using those words as the explanation and it's sort of the thought-terminating cliche throughout part of this interview.

And he said, look, quantum tagment is just words, but I'll give you an example.

And he moves on to an example that isn't an example of how it works, which is what he was being asked.

He talks about what a remote viewer saw one day, but that's not a how.

It's another anecdote, a bad anecdote, as it turns out.

But it's there to, it distracts Joe from him asking, how is this working?

So, well, I'll tell you how it's working.

I'll give you an example.

Inigo Swan saw there was a ring around Jupiter and told Carl Sagan he was full of shit.

Example of quantum tagment.

What I wonder too is, did they tell them he was going to be looking at Jupiter that day, or did they tell him beforehand that he was going to come in and remote view Jupiter?

Because if he has an opportunity ahead of time to come in and remote view Jupiter, he can look up things about Jupiter that people had suspected.

I mean, you go back, we know, we knew sort of the composition of the upper atmosphere of Jupiter a long time ago because we could tell through spectral analysis what chemicals and what elements are in the atmosphere there because of how the light is reflected, et cetera.

So we can tell what's going on there.

We could tell a long time ago before any flyby of Jupiter, a lot of things about Jupiter.

And he, there is a small list that I got a chance to look at.

And they're counting the hits here, but he had some misses.

He said the rings were inside the atmosphere.

He didn't say the rings were outside the atmosphere.

He didn't say it was a ring planet.

He said the rings were inside the atmosphere.

That's a miss.

That's not a hit.

That's a miss.

And then he says, it looks like there's an enormous mountain range.

There's no, again, these are things that he's saying that people are just passing over.

And you're like, well, if you're going to count it all, let's count it all.

Let's look at everything he said, not just pick out and cherry-pick the things we want because that matches him actually doing it.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I'm going to return you again to my, to the old friend, the 1982 copy of Flim Flam by James Randy, because he does go through exactly what Ingo Swan said about Jupiter and produces that exact list of all the different claims that he's making.

And so

between Swan and there was another remote viewer at the time that he was friends with, Harold Sherman, who Putoff and Targ were doing these experiments with.

They make 65 identifiable claims about Jupiter.

One of those claims is true.

And it's true in a way that wasn't available in reference books at the time.

Okay, that one there is something that people didn't know, but turned out to be true.

Seven others were true, but obvious, like it's got a tornado on its surface, or that at one point, I think Swan says the sun looks smaller from Jupiter.

Yeah, it's further away from the sun, man.

We know that.

That's not amazing.

Um, 11 of them were true, but were just widely available in reference books.

So, yeah, if you knew as he did that he was going to be talking about Jupiter, suddenly he's able to recount the things that you could just read about Jupiter ahead of time.

Nine of them were just too vague to assess.

Two of them were probably wrong, and 30 of them were definitely wrong, including the things that you mentioned, but also that Jupiter has icebergs floating in liquids, that it's colder around the equator, and also that it has an orange sand-like surface that a man would just sink into should he stand on it.

All those things completely incorrect.

All right.

Next bit's about quantum energy.

And one of the things that I've looked into myself is, well,

what about vacuum energy, so-called?

As a quantum physicist,

we all know that,

you know, you push a kid in a swing and it, you know, it comes down and stops.

But at the quantum level, you get something going.

It doesn't stop.

It always comes down to a certain level and it's still there.

So it turns out that what we call empty space is not really empty.

It's full of quantum fluctuations.

And in fact, one of the difficulties of modern physics theory is that when we go by using our standard quantum theory to calculate, well, what's the

energy density, like right here, or way out in empty space?

What's the energy density of those quantum fluctuations?

It's 120 orders of magnitude greater than could possibly be according to all of our other theories.

I mean, it would collapse gravity and everything else.

So, we have this conundrum that that energy that is everywhere somehow all is random and cancels out.

So, you know, it's just not having an effect.

So, the idea is if you could somehow access that energy

and cohere it, so to speak, maybe you could get to the energy.

So again, who is this for?

Because it's not for Joel and it's not for his audience.

I'm getting nothing from it.

I can't follow this and I am trying.

It feels a little bit more, to me, it feels like, you see, I do know science.

I do know science and I'm going to talk about these things.

I can't tell if this is true.

I can't tell if this is untrue.

And, you know, maybe there are people who are way more invested in physics who are listening to this who are like, yeah, yeah, that's total truth.

Or yeah, that's total nonsense.

And maybe that's true for some of Joe's audience, but I can't imagine it's very accessible to 99% of the 20 million people in Joe's audience.

And it just goes on and on like this, especially in the last kind of hour, 45 minutes of the show.

Yeah, yeah, you're right.

It sort of drones on about quantum for a very long time.

I think driving and go like this goes a long way to give credibility to making a person seem like they're really knowledgeable.

It makes people sound sort of professorial, I guess, in a lot of ways, because they're saying these big words.

And then they can, they can, there's a couple of times in this where he just says something and you say, well, that didn't make any sense, really, but he's still using these big words.

So I don't really know if he's honest or not, of being honest.

Yeah, I agree.

And the thing is, bear all of that in mind.

He's talking about how, you know, if you could access the energy and coherent, you can get to the energy and you can, the, the energy that's everywhere is a conundrum that's random and cancels out.

He's talked all the way that through.

10 seconds later, he's saying this.

What would that look like?

Well, if I go off on a weird tangent,

I could tell you what it might look like.

Along the way in the

remote viewing program, where we're kind of looking at physical effects, we decided to take a look at

so-called levitating saints.

And so, you know, you think, okay, well, that's just, that's a Catholic Church trying to pretend it's got these magical people and whatever, whatever.

But when you dig into the data, you find

that isn't it.

It's that the church hated the idea that some individuals were levitating because they might be in the middle of giving mass and suddenly they, you know, float up or whatever.

So it turns out that even looking in the

deep literature of the Inquisition and so on, the evidence is really solid that there have been levitating saints.

And what the Catholic Church usually did is they squirreled them off into some monastery where nobody would see them.

When you say levitating, like, what do you mean

far off the ground?

Sometimes.

Jamie's got something here.

Notable example happened during a visit to Italy from the Spanish ambassador.

The ambassador had visited Joseph in his monastic cell.

and was so impressed that he wanted to return with his wife.

Joseph entered the church where the couple hoped to meet him and upon seeing the statue of Mary, elevated 10 feet into the air, flew over the crowd to the statue, prayed, flew back to the door, and returned home.

The church later took depositions from a number of people who were there that day and their stories were consistent.

And the year, what year was this?

1628.

1628.

So there are enough stories like that with lots of observers and the reporting under really excellent condition.

So I love the way he's like, maybe that's just the Catholic Church pretending it's got magical powers.

Like, yeah, because

there's only one church allowed to pretend its people have magic powers, a Hal.

But look, this followed straight on from the quantum stuff.

You give all that quantum conversation about like, you know, what you can do with the energy and the random energy.

And when Joe presses for just a little more information on what that means, Hal, or what it looks like, Hal goes straight to levitating saints in the 17th century.

So for all of his quantum talk and his look, I know the equations and Einstein and Maxwell, and you put this together, His examples are straight to other easily explained pseudosciences, aka.

It just didn't happen.

It didn't happen.

It's amazing.

Joe is reading.

He calls up on, and I was able to zoom in to see what he was reading, right?

Because he's reading from something clearly there.

And so I found the website and it's called Catholic Exchange.

And it says,

This is a new site for Catholics, by the way.

Catholic Exchange.

It sounds like a dating site for Catholics, but it's a news site.

Okay.

Yeah.

But here is the conclusion that this article that Joe is, Joe, Joe just reads part of it, but there's a conclusion at the end that I want to read.

Quote, there is a wonderful innocence, even childlikeness, in the stories of St.

Mary's levitations.

She would casually swing from branch to branch, all while singing God's love.

By the end of her life, witnesses reliably attested to each such episodes, all in a courtyard of her monastery.

We can see how a simple, faithful love of God can sometimes cause us to uncover our, overcome our limitations.

Usually this happens interiorly through the conversion of our souls by grace.

But sometimes in extraordinary circumstances, it can happen outwardly through our bodies.

So this source that Joe is using is a Catholic site that thinks Mary could swing through the trees like George of the Jungle.

Just think about that.

He read that aloud and he missed this amazing part of it that you don't get to hear as the listener, but it was clearly on that same article.

And he treats something that Jamie hastily found as fact.

Yeah, exactly.

Right down to when he's saying, and when did this happen?

And you expect to be like, oh, I'm getting going to get footage of this.

1628.

Yeah, 1628.

And Hal Putoff, the thick researcher, the parapsychological researcher, 60 years of experience in the field, he says there are enough stories like this with lots of observers and the reporting under really excellent conditions.

Is this a really excellent condition?

He's talking about 1628 and a bunch of Catholics saying that they saw someone who flew 10 feet into the air, flew over their heads, prayed at a statue, and then went back to where they started from.

Well, yeah, but enough of them have signed sworn affidavits that this 500 years later or 400 years later still hold.

There's no way they could be lying that someone Peter Panned their ways.

Yeah, exactly.

No wonder Hal Putoff found all these amazing things with his experiments.

If that's what he considers to be really excellent experimental conditions.

I know.

Yeah.

All right.

So here we go.

There's more about the saints.

Can you hear that?

Okay.

Now that guy didn't have a nuclear power pack on his back.

So how did that happen?

Well, the only

thing I can think of in terms of the physics we know today would be that somehow the vacuum energy, which can be very high if you cohered it.

and

if you made it non-random,

you know,

maybe that could do it.

So perhaps he was able to access this with states of consciousness because he was so devout in his faith that upon seeing this, the experience was so overwhelming that he was somehow able to access this energy.

Right.

And that ecstatic state is...

But it would take this extreme belief, this extreme commitment, this state of mind that's very rare.

Exactly.

That's what it would take.

And you would follow that when you did the experiments with the quantum chip.

You would say, well, if someone's able to control oscillations, you're doing something with your mind that shouldn't be possible.

Right.

And you're affecting a physical thing that shouldn't be possible.

And this is just someone who'd never thought of doing that before, someone who didn't know that they were going.

This is a physical manifestation of

the power of whatever

unknown ability of the human mind.

So since it's unknown,

you know, there's no way we would know how to tap it.

Right.

And if these are very unique moments where this is an extremely devout person who obviously was a monk, was probably meditating and achieving this insane state of consciousness that's almost impossible to get to unless you're committed as long as he was, unless you're as dedicated as he was, and then he has this overwhelming moment.

Right.

And I have no way to, you know, connect the physics to it.

But the idea is that if there is energy that's allowing a person using their mind to do this, that somehow or another, if this energy could be accessed through science, through physics, through engineering.

He says Joe makes this connection, right?

Joe makes the connection earlier from quantum chip.

to this quantum talk, right?

Here's this actual bridge from what we started the episode out with when he's talking about a quantum, it was a magnetometer, right?

It's not a quant, quant, it's not, when we think of quantum chip, we think of something totally different than what he is actually describing here.

And I think like there's a reason he used that very specific language.

And like you suggest, March, the guy, the guy who actually did the experiment called it a detector.

Yes, yeah, absolutely.

And we can see that accepting as true the that oscillation story in the detector, which we've shown was not as it was portrayed.

Once you do portray that as this way and it gets accepted as true, it opens up a world where saints can float because quantum and quantum is kind of like throughout all of this, you know.

And Hal says, well, the only explanation I can think of is this one, that he was so focused in his mind that he could make himself float.

And not maybe, for example, there was just an incentive for the Catholic Church to say that this was a real thing in 1628.

Well, and what's the incentive, right?

Here's Joe saying, oh man, like they would, like, why would they report it as a miracle if, you know, if, if they, you know, if they didn't believe it or whatever.

The reason why they do that is because if they have a miracle, then they can make a saint.

And if a place can make a saint, then that area can experience tons of tourism through pilgrimages and selling shit and like, you know, selling little scraps of their robe and like holy water that was blessed here, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

There's mad money in it for the church if there was a miracle, if there was a quote, verifiable miracle that happened there.

So of course it's in their best interest to do this.

And if somebody said that to Joe, he might think, well, gosh, maybe you should follow the money, you know, because he says that all the time, but he completely misses it here because he doesn't understand the context in which someone might say a miracle happened when a miracle didn't happen.

Yeah.

And the context, I think, goes beyond that because it's not just about money.

Remember, this is the 1630s.

So we had

in

Britain at the time, we had Charles I on the throne.

He was soon to be executed and overthrown with a Protestant,

you a Protestant republic, later to be overthrown itself, and

Charles II installed back on the throne, who was Catholic.

So we have this

war going on, very literal, very real war going on in Christianity between Catholicism and Protestantism.

It's not that long since, I forget the exact date that Luther pinned his protestations on the wall of the cathedral and started off like the Protestant movement.

We're in that period of time.

So yeah, maybe Catholicism does want to have some people write down that they totally swore that Catholic guy flawed because maybe they want to prove that they're the one true religion in the face of this threat from Protestantism.

All right.

So here's the last clip in our toolbox section.

This is talking about an experiment that he brings up in the beginning of the program.

Quantum entanglement, is that what you think was going on with the algae?

So if you were able to do something to the algae in one area,

this same same colony of algae, when you had separated by long distances, they instantaneously recognized that something was happening?

That's the only thing I can imagine at this point, based on the physics we know.

How far were they separated in distance?

Well, I was going to separate.

It was about five miles.

As it turns out, I never actually got to do that experiment because the CIA came and scooped me up and said, well, we've got to look at this remote viewing.

And so even though I proposed doing the experiment, the polygraph said that guys said this would be a great experiment, never got around to doing the experiment because along the way, Ingo Swan visited his lab, came out and perturbed the tiny quantum chip in the super shielded environment.

That brought the CIA on my doorstep.

And so then we went off in that direction.

So I never got to do the experiment.

So as you consider all these technologies.

Okay, so I want to mention, first, pay attention to how quickly Joe just throws that away.

What he says right away at the very end, he, as soon as he says, I never actually did this experiment, he's like, oh, okay, well, let's talk about something else.

When you consider these technologies, and he went on to another subject right away.

He didn't stop and say, wait a minute.

At the beginning of the episode, you talked about how there were these lie detectors attached to plants and how people use these lie detectors to do all kinds of crazy stuff.

And plants had readings on lie detectors.

And you said you were going to, that

there was an experiment that you did with algae that was separated and you wanted to see if it could communicate with each other.

And he explains it in detail at the beginning of the program.

And then he sort of gets off on this tangent with the CIA right away.

And then he asks a follow-up question about that particular thing.

And he says, well, I never actually did the experiment.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

He says that he was going to do the experiment.

And then Ingo Swan said, why are you doing that with algae when you can have like the real deal essentially without you?

But I love the idea that a 60-year-old experiment you didn't do is worth spending time talking to Joe Rogan about.

And it's a shame because I genuinely love the idea of quantumly entangled algae.

I think we need to go back and do that.

If what he needs to do is get himself an investor, head back to the silver futures market, get himself some money, and then spend it on quantum algae.

I'm the last person that thinks I'm smart.

Trust me.

Okay, Marsh.

Anything good in this episode?

Yeah, I think so.

I think Joe does,

for one thing, Joe asks some pretty good questions at times.

He doesn't follow them up, but I've got to give him credit.

He's asking the right question in some times, raising that the ability to affect an

oscilloscope is different from the ability to remote view and why would those things be the same.

These are good questions.

He just needs to spend more time asking them.

I think as well, nothing in this episode is killing anybody.

Nothing is encouraging bigotry.

Nothing is likely to make anybody vote for something like wildly counterproductive or against their interests.

I don't think like no animals were hurt in the making of this episode.

No algae was even hurt in the making of this episode.

And I also, I kind of have to admit, a slightly guilty secret in that I love hearing the tales about early psych research and the things people believed in.

And I'm jealous that I couldn't be a skeptic at that time.

I want to be a skeptic at the time when Uri Geller is going to sit in a room with researchers, knowing he's lying.

Like he knows he's lying, but he thinks he's smart enough to fool them.

I just love the, I'd love to be then.

And unfortunately, I've mentioned I've done psychic tests where I'm testing people who think they're psychic.

In my opinion, everybody I've tested genuinely thinks they were psychic.

And that you can tell from the way that they reacted to the results and things like that.

And the people who are trying to con you just aren't getting in the room with you anymore because they've realized they don't need to.

They don't need to do that.

So yeah.

I'm nostalgic for this golden time of psy research and skepticism because it just seems like such a charming time to be alive.

You're just going to have to settle for remote viewing yourself back then.

I think that's what you're going to do.

I can see myself in the 60s.

Yeah.

Big old, just big old mustache, like one big porn stash on you would look great.

It might be.

It would take longer than 60 years for me to call a functioning mustache Cecil.

Okay, so you know, I agree with you.

Low level on the danger scale, but I wonder too, like, and this is what I suggest in the book that I wrote with

a co-host of my other podcast.

It's called The Grand Unified Theory of Bullshit.

If this sort of low stakes, bad belief stuff is actually bad for us in general, right?

Like just being curious about Bigfoot may lead you to start believing other things.

Being curious, hey, they scattered.

It's also the foreword was also written by my other co-host, Michael Markle.

That is true.

That is true.

But yeah, like it's a, it's, it's one of these things that really strikes me as it could just be dangerous in general just to believe a bunch of bullshit.

And it also gives, in some ways, it makes people feel like Joe is sort of not a bad actor.

And we've seen Joe literally read.

Russian disinformation tweets on his show, right?

So we've seen him.

And does that make Joe more gullible to believing these things and then believing other bad actors who recognize his gullibility?

So I, you know, like, while I recognize that this particular one isn't hurting anybody, but is this planting the seeds so it can hurt other people?

All right, that's it for our show this week.

Remember, you can access more than a half hour of bonus content every week for as little as a dollar an episode by subscribing at patreon.com/slash no Rogan.

Meanwhile, you can hear more from me at Cognitive Dissonance and Citation Needed, and more from Marsh with Skeptics with a K and the Skeptic Podcast.

We're going to be back next week with a little more, the No Rogan experience.

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If you want to get in touch with us, become a patron, or check out the show notes, go to knowrogan.com.

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