FTP065: Dean Radin – Real Magic and The Future of Science

Mike: Dean, thank you so much for joining us on the show. We’ve been following your work for a long time, we just finished reading your new book.

Euvie: Real Magic.

Mike: It’s a pleasure to have you on the show, so we can hear more about these subjects directly from you. [00:02:00] Why don’t we start, you can give us a bit of an intro of who you are and what you’ve been focusing on for the last couple years.

Dean: I suppose I’ve spent now the majority of my professional career studying consciousness and the capacities of consciousness. Before that, I have a Masters in electrical engineering and a PhD in psychology. I worked at places like the Laboratories and Princeton University and the University of Edenborough. I spent a year [00:02:30] on the formerly classified program called Stargate, which was the US government’s program of psychic espionage. Which, we didn’t know at the time for sure, but later we learned that Russia had a similar program. We had two competing programs on remote viewing at the same time. Now we know that.

Mike: That’s a perfect place to start. Okay, can you tell us about these programs?

Dean: I think I mention that in the book. [00:03:00] Yeah, I’m sure I did. Anytime you have an organization, whether it’s business or government or whatever, that is charged with making decisions that you don’t have enough information to make a full decision, so you have to guess. Whenever you’re forced with guessing, you want the best information that you can possibly get in an impossible way. Namely, you have to use your intuition, your guessing. You hope that the guess is correct.

[00:03:30] Governments and businesses and wealthy people have always hired psychics who they hope will give them good information. The US government has done that, as well, as most governments around the world, whether they admit it or not, do have consultants with special skills. A little bit different than a consultant is a project that ran for about 20 years in the US sponsored by the defence intelligence agency, [00:04:00] the CIA, and a number of other agencies, to have a more formalized way of providing clairvoyance primarily for use in espionage. There was a research side to the program, which I was part of, and then there was an operational side, which was hosted by the US army.

There were hundreds of operational missions where the remote viewers – remote viewing, by the way, is just a euphemism [00:04:30] that was created for this program, but it really means clairvoyance. These people were selected out of the ranks of the army using questions that would filter out people who tended to be natural psychics, whether they knew it or not. Then they went through a training program which was developed by psychic Ingo Swann, he developed this program for the army. While the program persisted [00:05:00] for 20 years because it was useful, it provided useful information, it started roughly in 1972 and ended in 1995. At least, it officially ended in 1995, when it was made public.

At that point, from there to the next couple of years afterwards, much of the program became declassified. There are plenty of books out there now that are written by former members of that program and my journalists. Some of the information that you see in these [00:05:30] books is correct and some of it is not completely correct. There are also portions of the history that will probably remain classified forever, and it’s primarily about the individuals involved and the specifics of the missions that were involved.

Among other things, you can say that we know that, from laboratory studies, that the remote viewing as an activity works. They have high talented people, they can get real information from a distance in space [00:06:00] or time. From an operational perspective, another way of doing the statistics on it – because you don’t always know what the truth is in a given operational mission, the program would provide information that would be funnelled in with lots of other intelligence information and then somebody, an analyst, would make sense of it all. A little piece of the information would be psychic. Some would be satellite. Some would be humans on the ground and so on, and they’d have to make a decision. After hundreds of [00:06:30] missions, you start to get statistics on how often a given agency would come back for more.

They figured if someone was asking for information and what they were getting from this program was useless, they’re not going to come back again. There were a number of the agencies that came back, dozens to hundreds of times. It’s a secondary way of showing that the information was useful for their missions, otherwise they wouldn’t come back. One of the most successful uses was drug interdiction. [00:07:00] These were people doing drug smuggling coming in by boats or aeroplanes or whatever. Of course, the smugglers are very careful to try to avoid being detected when they’re coming in, yet the agencies tasked with finding them were using information from the remote viewers to successfully find them. They came back about 150 times for different missions. They must have been doing something good.

Mike: [00:07:30] What is actually involved in a remote viewing sessions?

Dean: The thing that discriminates between a clairvoyant doing whatever they do and remote viewing is the protocol that was developed as a way of helping to structure what information is going to be received. Remote viewing is always done blindly. You can’t give hints about the nature of the viewing to the viewer, otherwise they call it frontloading, that you’re going to be [00:08:00] primed to start fantasizing about it. All that the remote viewer’s told is typically something like a six-digit random number. Somebody knows what that six-digit random number refers to, but the remote viewer and the interviewer, the person who is speaking to the remote viewer, neither of them can know anything about what that is. It sounds already like an impossible task.

“I’ll give you a six-digit number and then you just start telling me about it.” Somebody else knows that that refers to a [00:08:30] specific target somewhere. That was part of the protocol, to keep the viewers blind. Then you’d have the viewer, who goes into this altered state to try to extract information from who knows where. You have an interviewer who acts as the analytical side of the conversation, so that the viewer doesn’t need to keep dipping in and out from an intuitive side to a rational side, they can remain intuitive. The interviewer and the remote viewer will take [00:09:00] audio recorders and sometimes a sketch of thing that are coming to mind.

Then all of that information is taken, given to a judge as to figure out how to interpret it. Then somewhere further down the line, with multiple viewers from multiple people in multiple times viewing, all of that is in a package which is sent up the line to some other analyst, who then figures, “How do I interpret this,” given lots of other pieces of information. [00:09:30] The difference between what I just described and what is done in the laboratory – because that was an operational mission – in the laboratory, it stops with the judge. The judge makes a decision did the person get the target, which the judge knows, or did they not get the target.

Euvie: I really liked the term that was used in this book, analytical overlay, where people were trained to distinguish between information that comes up from the analytical mind and that comes up intuitively. I think for, especially people in the modern world, [00:10:00] we are trained to operate almost entirely with our analytical mind and dismiss anything that comes in intuitively. The idea that you would want to shut off the analytical mind completely for extended periods of time just seems so preposterous to a lot of people.

Dean: Not only preposterous but very, very difficult to do.

Euvie: Yeah.

Dean: We’re not encouraged to do that anywhere. If you’re in school and a teacher sees that you’re daydreaming, staring of into nothing, [00:10:30] they immediately bring you back, you’re not allowed to not be analytical. This is one of the key aspects of training. You go to a variety of places for training as a residential program or online programs. Most of the training is to get your analytical mind out of the way, it’s to report what the raw experience is, your raw impressions without trying to immediately name what the impression [00:11:00] is. Most of the time, we find that somebody gets some kind of mental impression, they try to name it, they’re going off in the wrong direction.

Euvie: As soon as you name it, you’re done. It turns on the analytical mind and that link is broken.

Dean: Right.

Euvie: I really liked that in the book you try to connect the study of esoterism and meditation, that sort of thing, with the more modern [00:11:30] research in parapsychology. You mention that this link hasn’t been made very much in recent times and that it’s actually something that you realized also quite late in your career, that these two different fields were talking about the same thing. Can you talk about how you arrived at that conclusion?

Dean: I suppose part of me always knew that the esoteric ideas are more compatible with psychic phenomena, [00:12:00] because I’ve spent my career studying psychic phenomena in the lab. We know that but we also learn early on to not talk about it. For the same reason that a lot of people may have psychic experiences but they also learn not to talk about it. We have a taboo that prevents people from being open about their experiences. Not just psychic phenomena, there are all kinds of strange things that happen to people – and it happened. [00:12:30] If it’s not ordinary, then the moment you start telling other people about it, you can tell by their expression that they either don’t want to hear about it or they think you’re crazy. This becomes a damper in terms of what can be discussed in public.

As a traditionally trained scientist, I’m well aware of what is acceptable to talk about within the academic world. Yet, at the same time, I can describe this a little better by a study that we’re just about [00:13:00] to publish. We did a survey among the general population and also among scientists and engineers to find out which kinds of psychic experiences that they’ve had. Most of these surveys are asking about beliefs – what do you believe? We know that basically worldwide that the majority of the population believes in one or more psychic phenomena. Those surveys generally don’t ask, “Why do you believe?” We were asking [00:13:30] not about belief but what have you actually experienced yourself.

We hired a company that gave us names of people from the general population and also the subset of scientists and engineers who would answer surveys online. The list was a quarter of a million people or so. Of course, when you do an online survey anonymously out of the blue you get a pretty small return rate, but we figured out how many we would need in order to get a valid survey. [00:14:00] We developed a list of 25 different kinds of experiences that people would call psychic, then part of the survey was to say which one of these 25, or more than one, have you ever experienced yourself. Among the general population, 94 percent of the people said they had at least experienced one of the 25. 94 percent.

Euvie: Wow.

Dean: On average, about 7 of the 25 different [00:14:30] kinds of phenomena. This ranges from gut feelings and hunches, which may or may not be psychic, all the way up to clairvoyance and telepathy without using those terms. We never used the term psychic anywhere in this, we simply described experiences that people have. Then our main interest was what happens when you go to scientists and engineers who are not taught about this stuff at all? If they learned anything about it in school, they learn to dismiss it as superstition. [00:15:00] 93 percent responded that they had personally experienced at least one of the 25 and, on average, 8 of 25 experiences. This was a way for us to confirm what we’ve already suspected, that this is simply part of human experience.

How you interpret the experience then becomes an issue, because a scientist or an engineer may have one of these experiences and say, “Well, it’s a coincidence. It happened but it was a coincidence, or it’s a glitch somehow. It doesn’t have any meaning to it.” [00:15:30] That is what we initially thought but also took belief measures in our survey to see what role experience has in shaping belief. There’s a very strong positive correlation, as you would imagine. To somebody who experiences something, even if they’re thinking it might be a coincidence, their degree of belief increases that this might be real. That tells us that at least – and this was done within the United States – at least within the United States, that among academic scientists and engineers, [00:16:00] the vast majority of people both believe and have had experiences of this type.

At the same time, you cannot study this in the academic world. The taboo is still extremely strong, so we’re faced with one of many paradoxes about the supposed notion of academic freedom. Or, at least in this case, you’re not free to study these things. In the US today, there are two universities, [00:16:30] two residential universities that are accredited where one can go and find at least a couple of faculty members who are interested in this topic and maybe doing something about it. I know of two, maybe three other universities and colleges where there are faculty who are teaching occasional courses, usually in the context of critical thinking skills which touch on these topics. That’s it. [00:17:00] We’re talking about the possibility of thousands of institutions of higher learning and a handful that are actually looking at this. That’s crazy given that 90 percent of the population is interested.

Mike: It’s crazy the amount of scepticism you must be facing with this and that, I can really see with the book, how much you’ve had to dedicate to just trying to convince people that this is real by giving them study after study after study. In your study of this field have you found many [00:17:30] interesting theories about the evolutionary basis, the reasoning behind some of these abilities that people can develop and that is so commonly experienced?

Dean: That actually is the reason why I wrote Real Magic. If you come from a scientific worldview, which is what most educated people come from today, within that worldview it is exceedingly difficult to figure out why psychic phenomena can exist. The only reason why [00:18:00] these phenomena are considered strange is because they’re not constrained by the usual limitations of space and time. That’s why it’s considered weird. It is also the exactly the same reason which is why quantum mechanics is considered weird, the phenomena or not, locked in spacetime – at least conventional spacetime. Whenever we are faced with something that seems to violate common sense many people are going to be very sceptical about it, to the point where many will not accept [00:18:30] any data at all.

There are people who believe we didn’t go to the moon because they didn’t personally go there, and people who believe in all kinds of strange things that are objectively probably not real because they can’t wrap their mind, from a conventional perspective, into something which is not common sense to them. In fact, if we didn’t have telescopes and microscopes and any other instruments of modern science, we would be living in the middle ages because what we learn [00:19:00] from extending our senses is radically different than what common sense says. I don’t spend too much time worrying about sceptics other than when sceptics intervene in the ability to do this kind of research.

There are some who actively try to prevent research from taking place. They’re very vocal about it and emotional about it, which tells me, among others, that they’re not thinking rationally when it comes to these topics.

Mike: Not very [00:19:30] scientific of them, is it?

Dean: No. At least some sceptics will admit that it’s okay for somebody to study this as long as it doesn’t use any public funds, as long as it doesn’t rise to the level of anybody actually believing it, which is kind of funny. I think when you take a long view, you look at the historical view of why there’s resistance, especially to magical and psychic phenomena and the mix of it, there’s at least 1,000, maybe 2,000 years [00:20:00] of pressure from the religious side that you shouldn’t study this stuff. It’s either black magic or it’s heretical, or just don’t look at it.

Mike: Yeah, it’s the devil.

Dean: It’s the devil. Then the other side comes from science. There are two major ways of knowing the world: there’s the religious side, the scientific side. Both of them are saying in different ways, “Don’t look at this.” Which, for some people like myself, they’re thinking, “Why are there so many people saying, ‘Don’t look at this, [00:20:30] there’s probably something interesting to look at.’”

Mike: How punk rock of you.

Dean: For me, it’s a matter of curiosity, right? The curiosity is provoked by having people say, “No, that’s impossible, don’t look there.” I’m not that unusual as far as scientists go. A lot of scientists are drawn into the profession from curiosity. You learn very quickly, especially if you’re in the academic world, that you have to keep your curiosity at bay [00:21:00] because there’s certain areas that you should look at and others that you shouldn’t. There are also differences in different countries. In the UK, it’s okay to be considered eccentric as an academic. In fact, it’s sort of expected that academics are eccentric eggheads, it’s okay for them to do that. In the US, it is absolutely not acceptable to be eccentric. You have to fall inline in a certain way and express certain beliefs and so on, even though it creates a schizophrenic state in many people [00:21:30] because they have all kind of interesting interests but they can’t bring it into work.

Other countries flip the other way, for example, in India the idea of psychic phenomena is very broadly accepted and yet hardly any academics are studying it. When I was in India for a while and giving lectures on this, I asked the head of a department of cognitive neuro science at the University of Allahabad, which is one of the places I gave a talk. I gave a talk on the [00:22:00] evidence for telepathy and they were all very interested. The senior faculty and junior faculty and students asking lots of good questions. I asked the department head later, “Do you think you’d like to study these things?” The answer was immediately, “No,” which surprised me given they have all the right tools to do it.

I said, “Why not?” He have a statue of Ganesha on his desk and religious icons everywhere. He was completely believing that this was a real phenomenon. His answer was that [00:22:30] telepathy doesn’t fit within the academic discipline of cognitive neuroscience, it’s simply not something that is allowed to be done within the discipline. Even though there was no question that the phenomena were real, which hurt my brain trying to think about this because, obviously, from a cognitive neuroscience perspective, the idea of telepathy is quite a radical break. You’d think it would be interesting.

Mike: Yeah.

Dean: Yet, they feel the same constraint, which is so strange. [00:23:00] Culturally, it’s okay, except academically it’s not. The academic system around the world is always the same, based on a western model where the scientific world view does not admit that this is possible, except for maybe quantum mechanics. Coming out of that tradition I, of course, was wondering, “Where do I look for clues?” There are a lot of my own colleagues who have been developing theories for many years to try to shoehorn the nature of the data that we see into acceptable models. None of them [00:23:30] work very well, which is why from a mainstream science perspective people are not persuaded. They’ll look at the data and say, “How do you explain that?” Our answer is, “We don’t exactly know.” That’s not going to convince anybody.

Knowing about the esoteric decisions, I decided to take a deeper dive into that history to see if I could find clues within that tradition that might help explain what’s going on. The subtitle of the book is the Secret Power of the Universe. [00:24:00] Occasionally, somebody will read the book and write a disappointed review saying I never talked about the secret power of the universe, which I’m thinking, “Have you not actually read the book? Obviously, the secret power of the universe is consciousness, that’s the basis of the esoteric traditions.” The very different world view, in fact, is completely opposite world view and materialism which is the scientific world view. From that tradition, the esoteric traditions, all of them [00:24:30] are talking about consciousness as the fundamental in the universe.

From that arises physics and then from that arises biology and so on. Using that tradition, the esoteric ideas are as old as human history, maybe 50,000 years of recorded history. Science is roughly 300 to 400 years old. We have several thousand years of [00:25:00] experience leading to ideas and a couple hundred years leading to different kind of ideas. Clearly, science works, it gives us the technology to do this interview in this way, which is astonishing. Yet, it doesn’t explain everything. The main thing that science has a very strong problem with is the nature of consciousness itself, where it comes from what it can do, why it exists – all of those questions are outside of the domain of science [00:25:30] right now. What we do see are neural correlates of consciousness brain-oriented states that are associated with different states of consciousness.

That doesn’t tell us at all where it comes from in the first place. If you do take the esoteric tradition seriously. By the way, most of those traditions, in fact all of them, really come out of mystical experiences. It’s the experiences that gave rise to this notion that consciousness is fundamental. You do find clues as to why both magical practices [00:26:00] and psychic phenomena must be true, because then within those traditions it’s obviously true. You also find a way to make the case that the future of science, the leading edge of science now, try to understand the nature of reality itself becomes more and more compatible with the esoteric ideas. They’re not compatible with current science.

This tells me that we’re on a convergence course, that at some point [00:26:30] some of the ideas from esotericism and some of the ideas from present science will converge into something which is a mixture of both. At that stage, it won’t be seen as superstitious nonsense because we’ll understand it well enough to start having practical applications of it. We’re no there yet. We could be somewhere between 2 weeks and 200 years before that convergence happens. I think the historical evidence is very clear that that’s where we’re heading.

Euvie: [00:27:00] Yeah, it’s been really exciting to see the resurgence of psychedelic research among other things in the last few years. Obviously, it’s related as well. The practical applications that are reading it I think are really good to see the trauma therapy that is emerging from the new psychedelic research, as well as all the research on meditation that is happening. I was looking at the studies that they did of Buddhist monks in researching [00:27:30] nondual states of consciousness. Of course, they can only measure the external correlates.

They can put a person into an MRI and see how their brain activity is different from a regular person who doesn’t have 20, 30 years of meditation under their belt, and they can see real differences. It’s very exciting to see that they can actually measure what enlightenment looks like in an MRI, even if it’s just external. They obviously can’t really see what is happening inside the person’s head and outside of their head, as well. [00:28:00] I think it’s definitely very promising to see these studies being accepted and being done in a more public way.

Dean: Notice that for an entire generation, or almost two generations, it was essentially illegal to use psychedelics for any kind of research. What this tells me is that there’s always social pressure, which either accelerates or dampens interest in given topics. Psychic phenomena is one, psychedelics is another. [00:28:30] Any form of altered consciousness state is always been suspect by people in government, because you can’t control that very well unless you make it illegal. Of course, that doesn’t stop personal exploration but it does stop academic studies. Taboos, even long-standing taboos, can be broken. We now see that marijuana is legal in the US and Canada and many other countries.

Same sex marriage is becoming [00:29:00] legal everywhere. These, even 10 years ago, were so taboo that the idea that these would now suddenly be legal would have been considered laughable. The same is happening now with, as you said, the rise of interest in therapeutics and, for other reasons, for psychedelics. Eventually, the same thing will happen for a more open discussion of psychic phenomena. I think what we’re seeing now is a resurrection of the psychedelic 60s and 70s. [00:29:30] It was simply a cultural time that allowed it to happen. Much of the time these interests pop up when there’s pressure to make it happen. In the 60s and 70s, the Vietnam war in the United States was tearing the country apart.

There was pressure from a growing number of people, mostly young people, who said, “This has to stop.” Also, there was a large number of younger people because of the baby boom after the second world war. [00:30:00] I think now worldwide we’re seeing more of a pressure from not just younger people but everyone who’s paying attention to the state of the world. We’re getting a collective sense that we had better do something different because otherwise we’re not going to have a future. This may be an evolutionary pressure to open a whole bunch of doors and break a whole bunch of taboos that have held us back. I hope that is the case, [00:30:30] because we do need to think in different ways otherwise we’re sunk.

Euvie: It seems that some of these taboos have to do with upholding current paradigms and power structures. I know that, to many, that might sound like conspiracy theory stuff but historically, like you document in your book, the suppression of magic practices was mostly done by the church because the church figured that if people were doing this kind of stuff and realizing that they could potentially [00:31:00] affect the fabric of reality with their own thought and they didn’t need an intermediary like a priest then the church couldn’t have control over people.

Dean: No, you’re absolutely right. Many taboos are social control issues. Who is creating the taboo differs but it’s also correct that the status quo never wants to give up power, ever, ever. Anybody in power in any form never wants to give it up. [00:31:30] That also sustains some taboos. In fact, there’s enough disinformation that is projected by people on the status quo to keep people confused about what’s real and what’s not real and what should be studied and what should not be studied and so on. You’re right, a lot of it is about social control.

Mike: I’d like to maybe switch gears a bit and talk about some of the phenomenon themselves and get an idea of what is most interesting to you, [00:32:00] what has raised the most eyebrows, what is most promising or something that could be useful and integrated into society.

Dean: Those are all very different questions.

Mike: Okay. Let’s start off with what are some of the different sci phenomenon that you’ve studied?

Dean: I’ve studied everything that can be studied in a laboratory context. That includes conscious and unconscious forms of precognition, remote viewing, telepathy, psychokinetic effects ranging from [00:32:30] cell cultures to human physiology and behaviour and everything in between. The survival of consciousness [inaudible [0:32:39] mediumship and channelling, and even haunting cases. I used to do the occasional haunting investigation. I gave that up after a while when I realized that the yield of interesting information in those cases was a ratio of about 1,000 hours spent [00:33:00] for each hour of something interesting.

Mike: Wow.

Dean: When I was younger, like most young people you feel that you have an infinite amount of lifetime. Spending 1,000 hours didn’t seem like it was worth it. Now I’m a little bit older and I’m thinking, “Do I really want to spend 999 hours doing nothing?” Which is what happens in these cases. The answer is, “No, I don’t want to do that.” That’s a younger person’s sport I think. The laboratory for me has always [00:33:30] been much more interesting because you don’t need to wait around for something interesting to happen. You’re evoking it, essentially, in the laboratory. I can’t say that I’m blasé about the phenomena, because I’m still very interested in understanding how they work and making it practical and larger effects.

Because I’ve spent so much time working with the various phenomena, it doesn’t have the same amazement pull that it had when I originally started because you see it often enough, [00:34:00] it’s not a big deal anymore. Occasionally, we’ll do an experiment that does have a wildly strong result and that, of course, gets us all very excited. Sometimes it’s real, sometimes it’s an artefact. Of course, it’s disappointing to find an artefact but occasionally it’s also real. Then that’s exciting. A lot of the effort now is, besides the basic science where we’re trying to figure out not only that something exists but the processes [00:34:30] that tell us how it exists, why does it exist, what are the variables underneath it.

We’re also now working more on practical applications. One of the programs I’m working on now, which I actually started many years ago, maybe 30 years ago already, to make the equivalent of a psychic switch – technology of intention where, through intention, you could cause a switch to be thrown psychokinetically. [00:35:00] I’m a little bit more interested in that now than I have been in the past couple of years, because some effects that we’re seeing now are becoming more predictable and more robust. It’s a little bit, as an analogy, for many years we were Benjamin Franklin working with sparks of electricity and got a sense of how to generate it, a little bit about understanding it.

But Franklin, like for many things he was interested in, was at least a century ahead of his time. He could see the sparks, he knew it was real, [00:35:30] had some ideas about how to make it happen, which is what we do with psychic phenomena. We know it’s real, we could study it, but we don’t know how to capture it yet in a way to turn it into a gigawatt factory of electricity. It took a hundred years and it took thousands of experiments and it took geniuses like Maxwell and others to figure out – and in enough detail – how electricity works, so that we could use it. [00:36:00] We’re at the beginning stages now, more like faraday perhaps, of figuring out ways of creating what we might call psychic batteries, ways of not necessarily storing the phenomena, which is mostly humancentric, but of figuring out ways of amplifying it to the point where it can start to become practically useful. That’s one of my major interests right now.

Euvie: Is this the different exercises that people can do, or is it technology, or both?

Dean: [00:36:30] It’s both. All of these phenomena are psychophysical, the space in between physics and psyche. Part of the puzzle is how to get people in the right states. We find again and again that you could spend a huge amount of time trying to train people or teach them to meditate or do something, and that’s very inefficient. Generally, it’s much more efficient to test a whole bunch of people without any pretraining or anything, just say, “Do this task.” [00:37:00] The task might be to look at a computer and there’s a graph showing a line being drawn on it and your task is make that line go up mentally. You don’t even need to know what it’s connected to, but that’s your task. Just do it.

Some people have no problem with that. They say, “Okay,” they start thinking hard, make the line move up. Some people can do that. Those are the people that we want to work with, because they’re not limited by trying to figure it out or whatever, they simply [00:37:30] have a talent for manifesting essentially. That is a much more efficient way of proceeding with this kind of a task and what it says is unlike a light switch, which in principle everybody could throw, this is a kind of technology which would require a certain expertise to operate. It’s not going to be something sold in every street store, because not everybody can use it – at least not with our current understanding. I think probably never. [00:38:00] There will always be some people who can’t do this for one reason or another.

That puts it more into the category of something like a jet aircraft. Not everybody can fly a jet aircraft, they don’t have the skills to do it. Lots of other jobs are like that, too. Not everybody can be a computer programmer because they can’t figure it out. It’ll be something like that, a technology that’s for specialized technology for special reasons. We don’t need to make a psychic garage door opener because we already have things that do that [00:38:30] very reliably. Instead, we are looking at technologies that cannot be done by ordinary means. We’re talking about instant communication at very far distances, like a telegraph to Mars perhaps.

We’re looking at the telephone from tomorrow, in other words communication methods that transcend time. These two applications we don’t have any conventional way of doing them and yet, both would be very valuable. Then there are others. [00:39:00] There’s a possibility of, for example, certain kinds of modern materials require combining things into alloys, certain metals have to be combined with organics and so on. Within my iPhone, the kinds of material in this thing are extremely exotic and they’re difficult to make. Well, there’s some evidence that some catalytic processes can be accelerated even just a small percentage but accelerated so that you can make these [00:39:30] alloys faster and cheaper, with less energy.

Even a one percent change in terms of the efficiency of some of these processes turns into billions and billions of dollars saved. The same can be said for certain pharmaceuticals can be made more efficient through intention. It’s like taking the placebo affect and adding something onto that that is no longer part of the individual but has been put on by somebody else, like an imprint, that makes it more efficient. All of these [00:40:00] little improvements in efficiency, in terms of manufacturing all kinds of things, turns into very large savings. This is important not simply because it makes the companies more profitable, but it offers a possibility of producing less toxic consequences of producing materials, which is another reason why we’re killing ourselves.

I just read this story the other day about the toxicity of this thing. This is now accounting for a large percentage [00:40:30] of global warming problems, because of the difficulty in finding the materials and mining them, the amount of energy used to create it and so on. They say nothing of what happens when you put this in a land dump somewhere. It’s toxic. We’re interested in finding ways – not just us but a lot of people are interested in finding ways of helping us create a sustainable globe where we still have these kinds of toys but we’re not killing ourselves at the same time.

Euvie: [00:41:00] That sounds like real alchemy.

Dean: It is very much a kind of an alchemy. Yes, it is exactly putting back into chemistry what the alchemist knew. The alchemist knew that consciousness was part of the process, but that was left out of chemistry and basically we’re saying we’re putting it back in because it’s useful.

Euvie: Another example that you mentioned quite a bit in your book is blessing food, by experiments where experienced meditators would bless food or drinks [00:41:30] and then people would consume that food and then in double blind studies you would measure the effects that the food would have on their mood, controlling against people’s natural mood state. The results that you got were quite significant. That could be another application.

Dean: Yeah. I’ve been thinking of how do we an experiment on a very large scale to look at the role of intention. I know a lot of chefs [00:42:00] and when I talk to people who are cooks and chefs and ask them about the role of their own emotions and intention in terms of the way that people respond to the food. Almost all of them say, “It makes a big difference.” They’re happy and the whole kitchen is happy, people have a better eating experience than if people in the kitchen are not very happy at the time. I said, “Okay, let’s go to McDonalds and suggest an experiment. The experiment will be that all of the staff in a given McDonalds [00:42:30],” where, of course, the profit is very well understood in these fast food chains because they keep track of it all the time.

“We’ll go to a McDonalds, we’ll teach everybody to meditate, we’ll do everything we can to keep everyone happy who’s working there. Then we’ll have a couple of control McDonalds where we don’t do anything, we just keep them the way they were, then see how the profit changes. Will the customers respond better to the environment and the food itself if it’s coming from a happy McDonalds than [00:43:00] if it’s coming from one that is a normal McDonalds?” We can predict based on the few experiments that we did that there will be some quality difference in the food. It’s all completely regulated, so the food itself is not going to change but if people’s moods and emotions are somehow being absorbed by the food itself or people can feel that, then they’re going to have a better experience and we would predict that they’d end up buying more or more people would go there.

So far, McDonalds doesn’t seem to be interested [00:43:30] in this idea. There are other fast food places that might be and I haven’t given up hope that, eventually, somebody will try that experiment.

Mike: Imagine the training manual for implementing that.

Dean: Yes. First, you must meditate 15 minutes before every shift. The thing is, because the meditation studies – especially in schools, city schools – have such a dramatic affect in terms of everybody. Not just the students but even the neighbourhood changes. [00:44:00] It’s not too much of a speculation that a change of that sort, which would require some training of course and some support by management and everybody else, but there’s reason to believe that that would actually change the nature of the food experience in a way that is completely pragmatic and crass. Meaning, there would be more profit. At the same time, it actually might be healthier.

We don’t know that it would be healthier at this point. It might simply be that people’s moods are changed. [00:44:30] I think there’s reason to believe, as I also report in the book, that besides doing studies about changes in mood, we also did studies on plant growth with water that was blessed and saw a huge difference. That means that there’s something in the water that was causing an actual physical change in the plants. That, in turn, suggests that there’s some aspect of food that has changed, even though it may be very difficult to figure out exactly what it is but something changed. That suggests the happy McDonalds with the real [00:45:00] happy meal – not just the name but an actual happy meal – will make you happy because it’s actually better for you. I think that’s the approach I should take. Yeah. It’s the real happy meal.

Euvie: There’s your marketing campaign.

Dean: Just like real magic. We’re talking about real happy, not just the veneer of happy because you use that word.

Euvie: Anecdotally, a lot of people know that when you make something with love, it changes the experience of consuming that thing.

Dean: [00:45:30] Yeah, both sides. The creator and the person who’s taking it, yeah.

Euvie: Yeah. What are some of the other practical applications that you see of this kind of stuff?

Dean: A big one is precognition, because we can see precognition and conscious responses, but primarily the strong and most repeatable affects are unconscious. One, again, very crass application that we’ve seen reported not as precognition but it almost certainly is that [00:46:00] is in the futures trading market. Future traders very quickly self-select as to whether or not they can do it or not, because when you’re trading futures and commodities it’s like tossing a coin. They’re almost completely random because they’re trading very quickly and eve the baseline is designed in such a way that there’s no obvious way that you can tell which direction the future is going to go, future market.

There was a study that was done I believe [00:46:30] in London at a London-based trading teaching program, where people would come in that want to learn how to be traders. One of the things that they ask each individual was to measure their enteroception, which is talking about the ability to detect your own heartbeat and also the feelings in your viscera. The way to test this is you take an EKG and you ask somebody to press a button every time [00:47:00] that they feel their heartbeat. There’s a strong correlation between your actual heart beating and your perception of it, then you have strong enteroception. They separated people according to those who could feel a heartbeat and those who could not, there’s a spectrum because people also fall somewhere in the middle, they vaguely feel it.

What they found was that the students who had a much better sense of their internals much better in terms of the profit that they were making in futures [00:47:30] trading. This was also true on the floor when they’re actually trading, not just practicing it but real traders that have high enteroception and do much better in terms of profit. The ones who don’t generally will stop that as a profession, because they’re not doing very well. What this tells us is that because we see and not just precognition experiment, almost any kind of psychic experiment, that if we’re measuring physiology, that we’re looking at the unconscious part of the mind [00:48:00] it’s much more robust in terms of the affect that we actually end up seeing in experiment.

That tells us that, as we long suspected, that these phenomena are bubbling up from the unconscious. The more you aware of that – and by any means, whether you’re an advanced meditator who becomes consciously aware of more of the unconscious – or somebody who simply can feel what their body is trying to tell you through your heartbeat or skin conductance or whatever, [00:48:30] those people are much better at tasks which require some kind of intuitive or psychic. The pragmatics of this is that if you have people in any kind of position where they have to make a decision, if you train them even through biofeedback to pay better attention to what’s going on inside their body as a clue to what’s going on their performance is very likely to improve.

We have that as one of our many studies on paper at this point, which we actually haven’t done yet. [00:49:00] The study is very simple – you find out first from a baseline how good people are in terms of detecting their own viscera, whatever system that happens to be, then you do biofeedback to train them probably on heart rate. When they sit down and they’re quiet, they can feel their heart rate very clearly. They can feel it. Then you train them where you test them on various kinds of psychic tasks which would require that they can feel what’s going on. [00:49:30] The presentiment experiment is an example where you sit somebody down in front of a computer screen and you’re measuring their physiology and sometimes there’s an emotional picture and sometimes a calm picture.

We can see physiological differences before the two different kinds of emotions, even in people who don’t even know that it’s a psychic task. In fact, it’s better if they don’t know it’s a psychic task. You simply can see that heart rate and other physiological parameters change before emotional pictures. [00:50:00] Anywhere between 1 second to about 10 seconds in advance, depending on the physiology that you’re measuring. Now, if you take people who have been specifically trained for high enteroception, will they do better on that task? My guess is, yeah, they’ll do a lot better on that task because now there’s a feedback loop between psychic, between conscious and unconscious, which gives a person clue as to what’s coming up and their response then will be much stronger.

Euvie: Of course, there’s a lot of applications of this kind of stuff in the medical [00:50:30] sciences, too. One of the books that we also very much enjoy is One Mind by Larry Dossey. He’s a doctor and talks about his own experiences with the medical profession with the role that intuition plays and how it seems to be, in practice at least, an accepted thing that a lot of the time people who work especially in the emergency rooms, they just tend to know what’s going to happen to patients and they intuitively know [00:51:00] they can diagnose, for example, conditions without doing any medical tasks a lot of the time. Yeah, I think that’s the applications for healing and for diagnosis could be really significant, especially for disease that we don’t fully understand yet.

Dean: Yeah. That’s accepted primarily within the nursing domain. Doctors are taught generally not to pay too much attention [00:51:30] to their intuition, except in cases where the intuition is thought of as forgotten expertise. Of course, that is a form of intuition, as well. An example I’d like to use is a firefighter who looks at a burning house and they have to make a snap decision as to whether they should run in there and try to save somebody or not. Oftentimes, they’re correct and it’s because, through lots of experience, they learn that the state of the house is about to collapse or not collapse. [00:52:00] They’re making such a fast decision that it’s not conscious, they could just glance at it and immediately know. That’s now psychic, that’s experience.

We’ve done other experiments that have to be psychic. For example, the one where we have mediums looking at photographs of people and the people are either alive or dead. Of course, the photograph is while they were alive, so there’s no clue in the picture but mediums often will say that a very fast glance at a photograph will tell them all kinds of information. [00:52:30] The simplest one to get is the person alive or dead. We did that experiment and the mediums are correct. They’re not 100 percent correct but, statistically speaking, they can tell through a glance of a second or less. The same thing is also true among some people who are medical diagnosticians who, just at a glance of somebody, can get all kinds of information that can be useful. You’re right, the pragmatics for talented people…

One of the [00:53:00] problems with the whole psychic domain is everybody wants to be psychic and a magician. Not everybody can do it for the same reason that we all can’t go out and become sport stars or musical stars. You need a certain level of talent plus a huge amount of practice to be able to do it. We like to live in a society now where everybody is equal. Sorry, everyone is not equal.

Euvie: A lot of the training to develop these kinds of skills is extremely boring. [00:53:30] As a long-time meditator, I can say that it’s extremely boring. You just sit on your ass and do nothing for years and years and years and years until things start happening.

Dean: On the other hand, there are people who have a talent for meditation. They can start meditating within a week, they’re having all kind of strange experiences. Even to the point where they may stop meditating because it’s uncomfortable, they’re being thrown into some domain that they don’t know what it’s about. On average, you’re right. On average, [00:54:00] it takes months before you notice a significant change and sometimes years before you start bumping into the special yogic powers come out of the long-term practice. This, of course, now in the realm where we want everything instantaneously, there’s lots of new methods that are being used to see if you can jump start the average person into the equivalent of years of meditation in a matter of weeks or even days.

I’ll give one example. A transcranial [00:54:30] ultrasound is now the hot thing. It used to be a transcranial DCE stimulation and other forms of electrical stimulation, which is still being used. But transcranial ultrasound has the advantage in that it’s not electrical, purely sonic. It’s basically the same kind of tool that you’d use to look at a foetus in a pregnant woman. It’s very safe, it’s been tested up enormously in animal models to make sure that you’re not harming a foetus, for example, when you use the ultrasound. [00:55:00] The transcranial ultrasound is a little bit different because, rather than having the flat sensor which is used for most sonograms it’s a focused sensor, it’s like a parabola.

What it can do is with multiple transmitters you can focus down to a point deep inside the brain. You can get right to the centre of the brain with this thing that looks like an antenna almost, so that it can send sound deep inside. It doesn’t harm the tissue at all, but at the point where all [00:55:30] the sound is collecting you can stimulate those portions of the brain.

Mike: Wow.

Dean: A friend of mine – not a friend yet, I suppose, but a colleague – in Silicon Valley is one of the pioneers in this, making these deep brain stimulation techniques. He’s interested in meditation and psychedelic states and so on and was working with a famous meditation teacher called Shinzen young. Shinzen was [00:56:00] interested in being a long-term meditator, can achieve the state that he calls empty mind. This is a place where meditators try to get to, some can never get there. It’s where you completely turn off mind wandering and there’s nothing left other than awareness. It’s probably close to what a magician would call hypnosis and close to samadhi, as the yogi has tried to achieve.

He can get there and he knows what it feels like to get there. Use of a transcranial ultrasound focusing [00:56:30] on a particular portion of the brain causes that to happen. You zap it and, within seconds, mind wandering is gone. The so-called default network of the brain that is related to mind wandering is just gone. This is a way of jump starting 30 years of meditation practice. We don’t have any idea whether it’s safe. We know that it’s true, at least in Shinzen because he knows what it feels like. In a normal person, we don’t know yet. Is it safe to push somebody [00:57:00] 30 years ahead of where they are? Is it okay for the brain? Probably it’s okay for the brain, it’s not damaging anything but we don’t know the consequences yet.

We’re at the very earliest stages of developing new technologies, which would eventually look something like a helmet, a small helmet that you would wear where you could pinpoint locations in the brain to cause different mental states because of the close correlation between brain states and consciousness. It’s not consciousness itself but at least the perception of what’s happening.

Euvie: [00:57:30] Yeah.

Dean: [inaudible [0:57:31] psychedelics.

Euvie: Yes.

Dean: Psychedelics will blast you whether you want it or not into pretty exotic states. In most cases, if people can live in an ashram with no other responsibilities, it’s fine. But most of us can’t do that, in which case you don’t want to dramatically change somebody too quickly because then they become dependent on that state. More importantly, they can’t work, they can’t do their work.

Euvie: Yes.

Dean: [00:58:00] That’s not very good.

Euvie: Which, again, comes back to the idea that it’s not necessarily for everyone. In our egalitarian society we love to think that anyone can do anything they want, but, realistically, it’s more of a question of, first of all, do you have a proclivity for something and then, secondly, are you willing to dedicate the time and the difficulties that come with mastering these skills and the consequences and the brain change that comes with it and all of that.

Dean: [00:58:30] I think at a low-level or an elementary level, ideas are like affirmations. They’re all pretty positive and would probably work for most people, maybe even everyone. Just the idea of positive thinking makes a difference. If you adjust attitudes, it makes a difference. We’re not anywhere near magical properties at this point. Just from a way of being. If you approach that in a more positive way, your whole experience suddenly [00:59:00] becomes more positive. Affirmations are generally in that direction. I don’t want to give the impression that some people cannot do this – everyone can do something. The degree to which it works really is the underlying issue. Some people are very talented and can achieve all kinds of interesting things very quickly. Others might need 30 to 40 years. It’s true, not everybody has a discipline to be able to do that.

Mike: If someone has noticed a bit of a talent for these kind of [00:59:30] sci phenomenon, do you have any recommendations for books or practices that they could look into? Of course your own.

Dean: Real Magic is actually a book that is less about magic and more about the philosophy of science. I didn’t want to use those terms because nobody would ever pick up the book. It is about magic but you can only understand magic once you understand the context of science and the context of history and all the rest of it. I put everything together [01:00:00] in one book. A friend of mine has written a book that I was actually thinking of writing as a follow up to Real Magic. Still thinking of writing a book called Practical Magic, which would be what do you do. I’d give them a blurb here. This book, Miracle Club. This is by Mitch Horowitz. This just came out. Mitch is an expert on new thought basically and occult ideas that have turned into mainstream [01:00:30] ideas, part of the affirmations genre.

The Miracle Club, the subtitle is How Thoughts Become Reality. It basically is an instruction book at a pretty elementary level. It says, “If you wanted to do elementary forms of magic, this is what you would do.” I’d give one chapter giving some elementary ideas about writing magic and sigil magic in my book. This is now an entire book talking about stories where people use these kinds of things effectively and then [01:01:00] exercises you can do yourself. Now, I don’t need to write a book on practical magic because I’ll just tell people to go buy Mitch’s book.

Mike: What have you been working on lately, what’s most exciting to you now?

Dean: I have four experiments on various kinds of mind matter interaction. One of them involves entangled photons. I’m using entangled photons because we have the working hypothesis that mind is non-local, that’s why psychic stuff is strange. Entangled photons [01:01:30] are strange because they’re also non-local. In fact, it’s the primary form of matter that we can work with that is a non-local phenomenon. We’re basically seeing whether the non-locality of mind and the non-locality of matter are a better match as targets in a psychokinetic experiment by using entangled photons. The task is to manipulate the strength of entanglement between the photons.

This experiment would have been virtually impossible [01:02:00] to do 10 years ago, because it was so expensive to create entangled photons. Now, you can buy a machine that fits on your desktop, which produces about 1,000 entangled photons per second and very high quality, meaning that you could show to extreme levels of confidence that these are actually quantum entangled and not classically correlated. The machine generates the photons and we give feedback to people about the [01:02:30] entanglement strength. Your task is – sometimes people know this and sometimes they don’t, but the task always is make the little line in the graph go up. If that’s happening, then the entanglement strength is increasing.

Our pilot study shows that people can do that. They can modulate the entanglement strength. We have no idea in the world how that’s possible, but it’s happening nevertheless. It gives us maybe a clue that there is some relationship between non-local mind and non-local matter. That’s one experiment.

Euvie: [01:03:00] Where is this experiment taking place?

Dean: Actually, I had this online for about three months. Now, we’re doing it in the lab. It’s literally a desktop device that produces it and you just need a computer to monitor the output. That’s one experiment. The second experiment, along the same lines. I’m interested in unusual targets. You think about, in the domain of mind, matter interaction research, what have we actually looked [01:03:30] at in terms of the matter side. The answer is almost nothing. We’ve looked at tossing of dice, we’ve looked at things like electronic random number generators. Occasionally, we use bacteria and cell cultures and so on, but the range of possible things to look at compared to what we actually have looked at, we’ve just scratched the surface.

Entangled photons is a new domain. The next thing I’m looking at is plasma as a target. Plasma is not solid, liquid, or gas. It’s a forced state of matter. [01:04:00] Another state that we think is exquisitely sensitive to magnetic and electromagnetic field. All plasma is very sensitive to that. One thing you could do is you could use something like a squid detector, a super conducting interference device, these very, very sensitive magnetic sensors, as a target. Except they’re really expensive. You need liquid nitrogen. You need special equipment. [01:04:30] Which is why we don’t have one, so we can’t use that. I’d like to use that but we don’t have it. What you go for is an indirect way of looking at almost the same sensitivity, which is plasma streams.

What we’re using is a plasma ball – an eight-inch diameter glass ball that has plasm streams in it, used for direction. They also turn out to be extremely sensitive to basically everything, especially magnetic fields and electromagnetic fields. They’re really, really sensitive. [01:05:00] That’s what makes the ball interesting, because of the dynamic nature of the streams themselves – they’re always flitting all over the place. We’re using that as a mental target and with results so far that are really interesting. What’s the third one… The third one is we’re developing a next generation version of a double slit system. We’ve done lots of experiments with optical systems like that. This one is designed to be much more sensitive in terms of detecting that there’s a mental [01:05:30] effect on the so-called collapse of the wave function. That’s still on the expensive side that’ll end up costing probably $15,000 worth of stuff to make it happen.

Whereas, a plasma ball costs $40, plus a webcam. Cheap experiment but it looks like it’s working. The next one is I’m making what I think will be about $100 version of a double slit experiment. [01:06:00] To make the double slits, to do it properly in the physics way, is expensive. The low end is maybe $10,000 you might get away with it. Similar prototypes have cost $30,000. That means that nobody else can replicate it except people in physics labs, and they don’t want to do this sort of thing. I’m trying to make one that costs about $100 that will be sufficient to do the task. This involves using a diffraction grading [01:06:30] rather than a double slit. A double slit is two little slits, obviously. A diffraction grading is 10,000 slits per inch. If you look through a diffraction grading up at the sky, you see pretty colours because it separates white light into different colours.

If you sent a laser through a diffraction grading, unlike a double slit where you get the interference pattern where you get a dot in the centre and two dots on either side, [01:07:00] because of the geometry of the diffraction grading all of the interference patterns collect into a single dot. You have a dot in the centre which is the particle-like aspect. The two dots on either side, which is a wave-like aspect. This means you don’t need a highly complicated way of detecting the result, you simply need a photo detector at one dot and a photo detector at the other dot, and look at the ratio of light between the two. That’s something I’ve built a prototype, which maybe cost [01:07:30] $60.

It’s not quite sensitive enough for what I want, so I’m going to make another version of it and see if I can refine it to the point for about $100 to get a little box that has all of the apparatus in it, plug it into your computer, and then have an experiment. That could be something. This is essentially not only for replication but if people want to experiment with the effect of their mind on photons, with this $100 box you can do that.

Mike: [01:08:00] Very cool.

Dean: Those are the experiments that are underway.

Euvie: Are you planning to publish the plans and ingredients of these experiments, so that people can try them at home?

Dean: Yeah. Yeah, everything gets published. For the fraction box, I suppose we could publish a recipe on how to build it, but we might want to Build it ourselves and sell them. We can give the instructions, too, because anybody who’s going to do it as an [01:08:30] experiment needs to know exactly what’s inside the box but it’s very straightforward. It’s such a simple idea that something like use of micro controller that has… Do you know about the company called Adafruit? There’s lots of nice little micro controllers that cost about $30 or so, one’s called Arduino. You take the Arduino and you program it and it already has voltage regulators and all kinds of stuff that computers have in it.

It’s very sophisticated in terms of [01:09:00] what it can do. You just set it up with sensors that you can buy from this company called Adafruit, which are extremely sensitive light detectors. You need two of them for this experiment. You can buy a laser diode that costs a dollar, which is sufficient. That’s all you need: a laser, two sensors, and Arduino. Altogether, that’s roughly about $50. Then you plug it into USB in your computer. We’d have to provide a program to [01:09:30] receive the information but, in principle, it should be extremely simple. That’s why I’m interested in that because I want others to be able to replicate this.

Anything that we do in the laboratory I find interesting, of course, but the currency in science is replication. We have to find ways of getting other people to try the same experiment cheaply.

Euvie: Decentralizing the science. If you can get thousands of people around the world to do this.

Dean: That’s the idea.

Euvie: Yeah.

Dean: The same goes with the plasma [01:10:00] globe. The plasma globe would cost about $40, a webcam costs another $20 or so. That, along with the proper software, would allow people to do that as an experiment, too. I’m interested. This is similar to what Rupert Sheldrake has really specialized in, where you find very simple ideas that people can just try. Oftentimes, they’re not quite as rigorously controlled as we can do in the laboratory and usually not as sensitive either. It democratizes what’s going on here [01:10:30] and we know that people constantly say, “Can you test me in the laboratory?”

Usually the answer is, “No, we don’t like to test individuals in the lab, we like to go out and find people that we want to work with, especially if we’re doing studies in mediumship or studies on channelling.” I’m involved in those in a peripheral way. My colleagues are doing studies on that at the institute where I work. I used to be the one scientist who did most of the work and now we have seven of us. We have a multidisciplinary team [01:11:00] looking at all kinds of different phenomena in the psychic domain. We work with each other. That’s better for everyone, because you have other minds thinking about, “Is this designed correctly? Could that be a mistake?” So on.

Mike: This would be one of the most fascinating vlogs to watch in the world if you just video logged and published your findings in the lab, I think that would be super interesting.

Dean: We always try to publish everything [01:11:30] we do in the lab. What we have not done so much but what we should do is to take photos and videos of the experiments as they’re underway.

Euvie: Yes.

Dean: With this now in hand, this makes it a lot easier to do that. I don’t know why… We have taken some videos in the past but they generally don’t go anywhere because we don’t know what to do with it. Maybe I’ll show it occasionally, a clip when I’m doing a presentation. It’s true that we [01:12:00] haven’t systematically uploaded it to a vlog where it probably should be for historical purposes, to show what are we actually doing.

Euvie: For sure. If you just stick it on YouTube and put a simple explanation and then maybe write up a blog post on Medium or somewhere like that just explaining what you were doing, I’m sure lots of people would be interested and they would share it. I know that Ken Wilbur, among other people, has put up some stuff on YouTube and documented some [01:12:30] of his experiments with trying to control his own brain waves.

Mike: Yeah, the one he did where he meditated with the EEG machine and just showed the different waves he can produce at will. I think they had a couple hundred thousand or up to a million views on that and he didn’t do anything with it. It’s very amateur video just no descriptions, no standard practices, just uploaded and people shared it.

Dean: Ions, where I work, is having a new website which will start in January [01:13:00] and it will allow at least a blog. It’s true, even within a blog, I could put a link or maybe embed videos. That probably is something we should systematically do.

Mike: I think what you guys are doing is fascinating and more people need to hear about it. Going in the medium that people consume the most content is definitely the way to go. YouTube, Instagram, Reddit, those sort of places. That’s where the most eyeballs will be. Is funding an issue in this industry? Is it hard to get funding [01:13:30] for these kind of studies?

Dean: Yes. If funding were available, you wouldn’t find a handful of places doing this. I can guarantee that if the federal funding sources and large foundations were giving millions of dollars to do this stuff you would find scientists everywhere doing it. Part of the limitation is the taboo but the taboo is related to available funding. We have a development department that does nothing other than raise funds all the time. We spend probably a quarter of our time [01:14:00] writing grants.

Mike: I wonder if the private sector in cryptocurrency markets is the way to go for more funding. I know there’s a lot of philanthropists and people with very, very deep pockets in the cryptocurrency industries.

Euvie: What you mentioned with traders being interested in this kind of stuff, if that’s how you could frame it you could probably get some interest.

Dean: We talk to a lot of entrepreneurs in lots of different domains. They usually want results now.

Mike: Yup.

Dean: [01:14:30] They’re always asking about, “What’s the return on investment?” We don’t know yet. They’re doing basic science here about something that was mostly unknown, so they generally will lose interest pretty quickly because we can’t say what the ROI is and we’re not ready to launch a product yet.

Euvie: Right.

Dean: We haven’t even had discussions with patent lawyers about some of the things that we’ve been doing, saying, “These are ideas that have intellectual property that maybe should be protected.” Most of the time they recommend [01:15:00] that we don’t patent it, because it’s too far away from launching as a product. In which case, you will have all of the expenses of doing the patent and then, at some point when it does become viable, you’ll have people stealing it anyway and be spending even more money protecting the patent. Apparently – and we know lots of people in Silicon Valley who do this all the time – the patents are useful once you have a robust legal department and enough to be able to support it. [01:15:30] Before that, you just go with proprietary information. You just don’t tell anybody how you do it. That’s antithetical to science.

Euvie: Right.

Dean: Science, you would say everything. We’re in a funny spot here where if we end up with something like a technology that will really work, maybe we can’t publish it – at least until it’s protected in some way. I don’t know, I don’t think we’re that close to it yet but someday somebody will be.