The Rhine Institute: Extraordinary Evidence

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Remember, this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Astonishing Legends Network. Astonishing Legends. We'd like to thank CarGurus, Mint Mobile, Factor, our contributors at Patreon.com, and you, our listeners, for making tonight's show possible. For nearly a century, a North Carolina Institute has quietly explored the hidden frontiers of the human mind. It began in the 1930s with J.B. Rhyne, a pioneering botanist turned parapsychologist, and his wife, Louisa E. Rhyne, who together established a laboratory at Duke University dedicated to the scientific study of extrasensory perception. Their early experiments sought to quantify phenomena like telepathy and clairvoyance using controlled methodologies and statistical analysis. The Rhyne Research Center emerged from the Rhyne Research Center emerged from this groundbreaking work. Over the decades, researchers at the Rhyne have investigated a range of psychic phenomena, from precognition to psychokinesis, always striving to maintain rigorous scientific standards. Their work has often challenged conventional wisdom, sparking debate and controversy within the scientific community. It continues to do so to this day. A few weeks ago, a dear friend of the show, Allison Jordlin, tour developer for American Ghost Walks and creator of ParanormalWomen.com, invited our very own Scott Philberg on an adventure that would take him to the Rhyne Research Center for the first time in his life. She was traveling there to assist renowned paranormal researcher Dr. Nancy Zingroni in the donation of some materials from her and her late husband's considerable library to the Rhyne. Scott was thrilled not only to be a part of that, but to meet John G. Kruth, the current executive director of the Research Center and the founder and education director of the Rhyne Education Center. He is an expert in the scientific exploration of the paranormal. Mr. Kruth brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the study of consciousness and its potential. He's dedicated many years to understanding the complex relationship between the mind and the world around us, and has conducted some of the most fascinating research in the field that we've come across. And tonight, he's here to talk about not only the history of the Rhyne, but the startling results of some of the experiments that he's personally been conducting for decades. Welcome back to Astonishing Legends. I'm Scott Philbrook, and this is Forrest Burgess. These psychic discoveries by reputable scientists have opened up, literally, a new world. Dr. William Moulton Marston, American psychologist, inventor of the polygraph and Wonder Woman comics, on the work that J.B. and Louisa Rhyne conducted at Duke University. Join us tonight for an in-depth discussion about the Rhyne Research Center with its current executive director, John G. Kruth. And we're back. That we are, folks, and it's great to be back, as it always is. Thank you so much for joining us again. Just a quick note tonight to thank everyone for listening to our new weekly email show, The Astonishing Dead Letter Office. Yes, we're having a blast making it and hope you're enjoying it, which by the download numbers you seem to be, so thank you for that. Please note that our main show, the one you're listening to now, is still being produced 26 times a year, just as it has been for years now, and that's not going to change anytime soon. So if The Dead Letter Office isn't your cup of tea, the main show will always be in your feeds. Yes, so find and subscribe to Astonishing Legends and The Dead Letter Office, all in one feed, wherever you get your podcasts. Indeed. And we've mentioned this on The Dead Letter Office, but if you have a story of your own that you'd like to send in, we need them. So write it down and email it to us. Doing a show weekly means we're looking for 52 of those a year. Yeah, and a ton of you have already sent some in. We're still going through the latest ones, so thank you for that. But if you want to send one in yourself, email it to deadletterofficeatastonishinglegends.com. That's deadletterofficeatastonishinglegends.com. All right, let's get going on this show. This stuff is so fascinating. I couldn't agree more. Folks, if you're the type to ever take notes on episodes, tonight's is full of amazing information. John G. Kruth has been diving deep into the world of parapsychology for over 35 years, way before the internet decided to have a thousand podcasts about it. He's been a formal member of the Rhine Research Team since 2009, exploring everything from alternative healing and out-of-body experiences to poltergeists and how our minds might actually interact with matter. But that's not all. John is also the founder and education director of the Rhine Education Center and the executive director of the Rhine Research Center. He's basically on a mission to spread the word and create a global community where people can explore and discuss all things PSI. That's PSI. He's even going to explain that tonight. He noticed a need for accessible education in this field, and he's making it happen with online courses reaching students across six continents. It's a very cool thing to be able to sit down and talk with him, not only about the history of the world-famous Rhine Research Center, but some of the amazing experiments that have been conducted there over the years, including several fascinating ones done by him. All right, folks, we would like to welcome John G. Kruth to the show from the Rhine Institute, who I met just a few weeks ago and graciously agreed to join us tonight. John, thank you for coming on Astonishing Legends, and welcome. Thanks for inviting me. It's good to be here. It was a great experience meeting you when I went to the Rhine with Allison and Dr. Nancy Cingroni. That was really, really fun for me. And also, I had been feeling a bit guilty because I lived a little less than an hour away. And the fact that I hadn't been there, especially having done this show for 10 years. Now, I do have the excuse that the first five years I lived in Los Angeles, but then I got back here and I still didn't come by. So it was really great to get by and to meet you and to see that facility and the library. And just it was an overwhelmingly positive and fascinating experience for me. You know, you're going to have to come by for some of our events that we have at the Rhine because we have nice events that are quite regularly where we talk about these same topics we're going to be talking about today. I am absolutely interested in that. And in fact, I was looking at the website as we were preparing to talk to you and just, I was like, I need to go to this stuff. Like, why am I not going? So I'm very interested in doing that. And maybe Forrest and I can retire and I can volunteer for you. Great. So let's talk a little bit about your background. And how did you get involved with the Rhine Institute and how long have you been there? And what is your title? So I'm the executive director of the Rhine and I became the executive director out of default, I think. You know, I showed up around 2010. A little before then, I started to go to the Rhine research team meeting and I spent time working with the researchers. I went back to school whenever I was in my late 40s to learn research and analysis techniques. And the whole purpose of it was to study parapsychology. I had grown up with a strong interest and had spent many years learning about parapsychology, but I never had a place that I could really go to study it. So I moved to Durham and I'd been living in Durham where the Rhine Research Center is. And I just couldn't bring myself to go through the door for many years. But finally, in 2009, after I had gotten a little bit of background in education and analysis methods and research, I started going to the research team meetings and meeting with some of the researchers at the Rhine. Working with the researchers, I really was able to find what I had been planning to do my whole life. And that was do real research around these things that we oftentimes think are kind of crazy things that a lot of people don't believe in with ESP and PK and, you know, spirits and survival. So I went in, it was, and after being there for about a year and a half, I realized that their leader was Sally Rhinefeather, J.B. Rhine's daughter. Right. Who grew up within this field. She was at that time, 80 years old and she was leading the organization and she was really looking for someone to help out and take over. Well, it happened that I had some technology skills because I'd worked in technology for 20 years. I also had skills doing management work and a little bit of business background. And so I stepped in and I said, look, I'll help you guys out. Just kind of bridge things for a little bit. I'll help Sally and help her to get through this process of transitioning. As I started to do that, they never let me leave. I'm still there now. So it's been 15 years I've been the executive director of the Rhine. It involves a lot of different things. Everything from, I do research. I work in the lab and I do research, but there's also an educational aspect of the Rhine. We have the Rhine Education Center that we started back in 2011 and also a big part of it is our community and developing a community and building a community of people, a place where people can feel comfortable talking about these experiences where they may not be able to speak to other people about them. So these are the three pillars that we work with at the Rhine and this is how long I've been there for 15 years now. And it's my understanding that Sally still comes around sometimes. Yeah, Sally's 95 years old now and she still comes around. She sits in our research team meetings. She comes over and helps out whenever we need a hand. She even sometimes gets involved with presentations or tours. She's very active at 95 and she's not slowing down. That is amazing. That is so cool. I mean, that's the Rhine's daughter. It's just amazing because when you think about it, the Institute started in 1930, I believe, is that right or on campus at Duke? Yeah. The Duke Parapsychology Lab. Yes. Which was the original lab was started in 1935. 35. Okay, sure. And so we are the current evolution of that lab after J.B. Ryan left Duke and moved out. So we're celebrating our 90th anniversary this year. Wow. That's amazing. Happy anniversary. A lot of events around that. Being in Durham and Chapel Hill and around Duke and Carolina, you know, in a town that has multiple prestigious universities on site, but also just like the sort of, and I say this with love and affection, large parts of North Carolina have sort of a crunchy, open-minded vibe to them. Do you think maybe it's more convenient for people who are interested in this type of research and exploring these possibilities, being where it's located geographically? You know, you talk about this open-minded vibe and yes, I think the universities have drawn a lot of people in from other areas and, you know, in university environments where people are getting diverse educations, they oftentimes will stick around afterwards because they come to love the area. And that's definitely happened in Chapel Hill and it's happened in Durham. And so it definitely has contributed to the fact that we have an audience here. We have a local community. But on the other hand, I also have to think the fact that one of the reasons that I moved to Durham was because the Rhine was there. Right. It's famous. So I think that many people actually came to this area or stay around this area or get involved in these types of topics, get involved with things like energy healing, maybe get involved with meditation, start to learn about interpreting dreams. These sorts of things, they come to it because of the fact that the Rhine is in this area. So I think not only has the Rhine benefited from an educational environment here, but I think it's actually contributed to it by helping to grow the community and keeping more open-minded people in the area. That makes a lot of sense. Well, so speaking of which, and the fact that people are drawn to it, it's like, because I want to explain to our listeners, a lot of them will know of it and will have heard of it because of the nature of our show, but there'll be others that probably haven't. So why don't you talk a little bit about the history of it and what really put it on the map and how things started out at Duke and JB and Louise O'Rein and how it became what it is today and why it has such a reputation. Where I think I probably should start is talking a little bit about parapsychology and what it is. Sure. Because when people hear this term, parapsychology, we are the oldest operating parapsychology research center in the country. So the Ryan research center being 90 years old, no one has been operating as long as we have studying this area. But when people think about parapsychology, they think about many different things. They think about X-Files. They think about Ghostbusters. They think about Bigfoot and Loch Ness Monster. Some of these are really interesting topics, but parapsychology is actually a formal science and it's a very clearly defined science. There's essentially five different areas that we study. One of them being telepathy, mind-to-mind communication. When you often hear about mind reading, we don't discuss it as mind reading because it's not quite what you might see on Star Trek or in a Twilight Zone episode. Really, it's getting information, though, from another person without using physical means. A second area that we study is called clairvoyance. People often talk about clairaudience, clairsentience, and all of these different... They talk about the clairs now. And within the field of parapsychology, we use one term, clairvoyance. And clairvoyance relates to getting information about objects or events that are distant from you or hidden. For example, it might be something that's a photograph in an envelope that you can't see. It could be something in a drawer in another room or even something halfway around the world. And you're able to get information about these things from a distance. That's clairvoyance. The third area is precognition. This is getting information through time. Usually, it's from the future, getting information about things that haven't happened yet. But sometimes, it's also from the past. So, these three things together, telepathy, mind-to-mind communication, clairvoyance, getting information about objects or events that are hidden or distant, and precognition, getting information through time, those three things, we put them all together and call them extrasensory perception or ESP. Now, ESP is a term that J.B. Rine created. He created this term because he went to Duke University back in the 1920s with a man named William McDougal. William McDougal had been studying spiritualism and had been studying mediums back in the 1920s and the early part of the 20th century. He was up at Boston at Harvard University. J.B. J.B. got connected with him as a young man and was really interested in learning more about mediums, learning about the spiritual world, but doing it from a scientific perspective. So, he connected with McDougal, who was already doing this work. McDougal, in 1927, was appointed the psychology director at the new university of Duke University in Durham. Right. They invited J.B. Rine to come down and spend time with him at Duke University and work for him in the psychology department. He promised him, if you come and work for me in the psychology department, I'll let you study mediums there. So, J.B. came down and started to work in the psychology department, learning about mediums, and he wanted to know, are mediums actually getting information from spirits? Mediumship at that time was, it was something very different than it is today. Right. Back then, when people would go to a medium, they'd usually go like on a Friday or Saturday night, they'd go to the medium's house, and they'd be met at the front door by their medium's assistants, and they'd be led down a dark corridor with candlelight down to a big room that had a huge table in it, the seance room. Right. And they'd settle in, and they'd be in a darkened area, and the medium would come in and be shrouded in mystery. It's like Oda Mae Brown in Ghost. Yes, except darker. It would be a darker environment. Right, right. And then as soon as the lights went down and the session started, faces would start to appear. Objects would drop out of the sky. Music would start playing. It was essentially entertainment for people. They were trying to make connections with loved ones, but they were also doing this to entertain themselves back in the 1920s. It did seem, though, that some of these mediums were getting information that they shouldn't be able to get. And this is what McDougall and J.B. Ryan were interested in studying. So J.B. started to study this at Duke. And he quickly realized, before he could tell if the mediums were speaking to spirits and getting the information from spirits, he had to know what are the limits of human ability. And so, for example, if I were to come to you, Scott, and you were to tell me everything there is to know about my Uncle Bob who passed away a few years ago, is that because Uncle Bob's sitting on your shoulder and whispering things in your ear? Or are you getting that from me? Telepathy. Mind-to-mind communication. Right. Or maybe, at my house, I have Uncle Bob's library with a smoking jacket, all his bowling trophies, you know, and all his books, and you're able to see this from a distance. Clairvoyance. Being able to see objects or events from a distance. Or maybe, in about a half hour, I'm going to tell you everything there is to know about Uncle Bob. And you're able to get that information through time. Precognition. So, J.B. Rine knew before he started to attribute this to spirit communication, he had to know are telepathy and clairvoyance and precognition real? And so, he created, in 1935, the Duke Parapsychology Lab, where what they did is they started to use ESP cards to study these phenomena and determine whether ESP was real. Now, ESP cards are Zener cards because they were created by a man named Carl Zener. The ESP cards, you've seen them in shows like Ghostbusters. Right. Where they're like cards with a circle, wavy lines, a square. A couple wavy lines. Yeah. There's a number of different symbols on them. And using them, they were able to determine that some people were able to get information about the cards, sometimes from another person looking at them, sometimes directly from the cards being on the table. They were able to get information about the cards, clairvoyantly, or they were able to tell you what cards would turn up if you shuffled them. Now, at that time, back in 1935, there was also another area of science that was developing quickly, and that's statistics. Right. And probability. And what JB did is he combined his research methods with the newest statistical methods as well, and was able to demonstrate statistically that ESP existed. Telepathy happened. Precognition happened. Clairvoyance happened. So this is the beginning of his work at the lab. In 1935, he published a monograph called Extrasensory Perception. And that book, Extrasensory Perception, became a New York Times bestseller, got a lot of attention for the lab, and started to bring a lot of people to the area to learn more. People who were studying these things that people were experiencing in their whole life. Finally, it was being studied at a university. So people came from all over the country to come and visit. Well, as the story goes, one guy walks in one day, and he said, hey, I'm a gambler. I roll dice, and when I roll dice, I can make sure that the numbers seven don't come up. I can make sure if I don't want the number to come up, it won't come up. Well, JB, he's a scientist. He says, look, but we work with these cards. You're a gambler. You work with cards. He said, no, no, I don't do anything with cards, but I didn't do this with the dice. JB said, show me. So he starts rolling the dice, and he could, it seemed that he was avoiding the numbers that he wanted to avoid, that he could control the roll of the dice with his intention. Well, this is something that fascinated JB because it not only meant that people could get information about the world, but actually they could affect the world as well without using physical means with their intention. This is what they called psychokinesis or PK. Now, you might hear the term telekinesis as well. That's an old term that was used. We don't use that term anymore. Now we use psychokinesis or PK within the field. But these four things together now I just named, all the ESPs, telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and psychokinesis. Those four things together, we group under one heading and call it PSI. PSI is PSI. It doesn't stand for anything. It's not an abbreviation. It's just a term that we use that encompasses all of these phenomena because it seems that there's a similar underlying mechanism for it. We don't know exactly what it is, but we're studying it as a group to see if we can understand it better. So those are the four major things that they were studying at the Duke labs back in the 1930s. But I said there's five things that make up parapsychology, not just four. The fifth area includes what we call survival studies. This includes things like near-death experiences, people who have their hearts stop or their brain activity stops, and sometimes they'll feel like, I'm sure you've heard of it, they feel like they're going through a tunnel, they'll see a light at the end of the tunnel, sometimes they'll find themselves in a garden, and they have this incredible experience, and then they are back in their body, and they come back to life again. Otherwise, it would be a death experience, not a near-death experience, right? So near-death experience, out-of-body experiences. People who believe that they are physically, there's something leaving their body, traveling to another location, and they're having experiences, and then they're returning to their body. Also, people who believe that they've lived past lives. Oftentimes, it's children who remember past life, have past life memories. Reincarnation, essentially. Memories of previous lifetimes. People who have experiences with spirits or ghosts. Well, we all know what ghosts are, and who have experience with apparitions. They might see or feel like they're connecting with something that a deceased person, what we call a discarnate person. And then, finally, mediumship. People who say they're speaking to spirits, and then bring that information back to the living. So those five things all make up survival studies. They have one thing in common. That is, that they all indicate that there's something beyond the physical body that exists, at least for a period of time, outside of the physical form. So those are the five things that make up parapsychology. All the three ESPs, PK, and survival studies. Hello, hello. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Smart Talks with IBM. I recently sat down with IBM's chairman and CEO, Arvind Krishna. And I asked him, how can companies use AI to its fullest potential to create smarter business? My one advice to them, pick areas you can scale. Don't pick the shiny little toys on the side. For example? If anybody has more than 10% of what they had for customer service 10 years ago, they're already five years behind. If anybody is not using AI to make their developers who write software 30% more productive today, with the goal of being 70% more productive. Yeah. Wow. So we are not asking our clients to be the first experiment on it. We say, you can leverage what we did. 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Although not all people in danger will develop it, I suffered it. The painful eruption with an ampoule took weeks, making even the simplest tasks be a challenge. No aprendas sobre la culebrilla de la manera difícil. Habla hoy con tu doctor o farmacéutico. Patrocinado por GSK. Hi, I'm Marcin, and you're listening to Astonishing Legends with Scott Philbrook and Forrest Burgess. Now back to the show. A couple of very quick questions. Zener was actually a colleague of Ryan, also at Duke, right? Yes. So he developed the cards with Ryan specifically. It's not just that Ryan said, oh, these will work. That was part and parcel of what they were doing at Duke. When you play Creskin's ESP and you pull those cards out or you watch that scene in Ghostbusters, that stuff came from Zener and Ryan. Yes, exactly. And in fact, Carl Zener, who was one of the other, he was working at Duke as a psychologist as well in the psychology department. They were trying to use playing cards for testing initially. But the playing cards, when they used them, sometimes a heart and a spade can have a similar shape. And if you look at the face cards, you couldn't really very easily tell the jack from the king or the queen sometimes. And so they wanted something that was more unique. And Carl Zener, being a psychologist, knew about perception. And he was able to develop these very unique symbols. He wanted to use them not only for parapsychology. He developed them for J.B. Ryan to use. But he thought they could be used for other things as well. A quick little tangent, which is something we're kind of known for on our show, not to go too far off the deep end. So my great-grandparents had kids when they were very young, and then so did my grandmother. So I actually knew my great-grandmother. She was alive until 1993. And but when I was nine or 10, I would sometimes be put in her care while my mom, who had gone back to college. And this was in Raleigh, actually. And my mom was attending NC State University. I would go over to my great-grandparents' house, which is on Boylan Avenue near the char grill. And I would hang out in the house. My great-grandmother loved Wrigley gum and watching all my children. And so I would sit with her, and we would watch all my children, which I got super into. And she would get out a deck of cards, and she would sit with me and just sit with them and say, OK, what's the next one? What's the next one? And she believed. And I remember her telling me this when I was young at the time. But she believed that I needed to work on this while I was young because it was a passing skill, or it might be a passing skill. And I was OK. Never did a statistical analysis, but I was actually OK at it. And the more I did it, I got a little bit better. And I just remember doing that with her. And so the interesting thing about her is she was born in 1912 and from North Carolina. So I can't help but think she knew what was going on in Durham, and that had made its way over to her. But I used to love doing it. It's a very clear memory I have of hanging out with her. Oh, yeah. Scott, I think it's great that she was working with you and helping you to learn to trust your intuitions related to this. Because that's something that a lot of children are not encouraged in this way. And, you know, having grown up with a little bit of trust in your intuition, you carry that into your adult life as well. Oh, that's interesting. And that provides a fertile ground for you to have other experiences as well. Oh, I like thinking about it that way. OK, so let me ask you one other question, and it might be a little off the beaten path. But in terms of NDEs, and we've done several shows on them, and then we have another show that a friend of ours does. It's part of our very small network. His name's Richard Haddam. He's a screenwriter. He wrote the screenplay for The Mothman Prophecies. But he also is a collector of books. Like, when he heard a few weeks ago that I was there with you, he was joking. He was like, steal that shelf, you know? And I was like, I'll never make it out. But he was just, like, blown away because I took pictures of the library. But he has a show called Richard Haddam's Paranormal Bookshelf, and he talks about books from his collection and also how they relate to him interpersonally. But one of the books that he covered was Dancing Past the Dark by Nancy Evans Bush. Now, I don't know if you're familiar with it, but it's about distressing near-death experiences. I haven't read it, but I'm familiar with the topic, yes. Oh, just like, I haven't read it either, but he has told us a couple of the stories from it. They're just horrifying. You know, like most of the ones you hear, it's the tunnel of light. I came back. It's amazing. And, you know, all of that. But there were some where it's just like, this is all, there's nothing, you'll be back here in a few minutes kind of thing. Have you ever come across any of that in any kind of negative NDEs in your experiences at the Ryan? So I think you said the word correctly first, where you said distressing NDE. We tend not to use positive and negative, because those are value assessments. And some people can get a lot of benefit out of a distressing NDE. So I wouldn't consider it. They can. So I wouldn't consider it negative. But I've heard people having these experiences. You don't hear them as often as you hear the, you know, wonderful garden experiences where they meet their loved ones and they're having a wonderful time. But that could be because people would be a little bit more hesitant to share if they're having distressing NDE. You know, they might be more, more reluctant. Right. You don't want to come back and tell the world it's horrible. Or I'm horrible and I'm going to hell. Yeah. Oh, right. Right. Although that's not really the message that most of them get. Oftentimes they'll get messages where they're having these distressing experiences. But it'll kind of be a lesson to go back and they'll change their life with the understanding that, hey, there's something else coming and it can be different. Now, some people say, hey, this is, it's going to be distressing and they might become very depressed. They might have a hard time getting through it. But this is where there's an organization called IANS, the International Association of Near-Death Studies. They're in the same building with us in Durham at the Rhine. Right. And they help people who have any sorts of near-death experiences to integrate them into their lives and to help them to learn a little bit, to know that they're not alone. There's other people who have similar experiences. And to learn about how they can start to overcome the experience or use that information in their lives. You know, so many people who have near-death experiences, distressing or not, it changes their perspective on the world so much. You know, they might lose friendships. They might have relationships that start to change. There are people who have been very rationally minded, very business oriented, who come back from a near-death experience, and they can't do that anymore. That sort of life isn't right for them. And they change their whole perspective. So these life-changing experiences, people often need some guidance through them. Sure. Need someone to help them. And this is where the International Association of Near-Death Studies is one of the organizations that help people with that. What is the broad overview of statistical research that's gone into near-death studies in terms of it being an external or an internal experience? When people talk about near-death experiences, the people who experience it feel like they are definitely leaving their bodies. They feel like they are traveling to other locations. And a lot of times the experiences are happening at a time where their bodies are not able to receive any sensory input. In fact, there's certain cases that we call veridical cases. Cases that provide verifiable evidence that their experience was actually beyond what could have happened to them physically. For example, there was this woman who, she was going through a surgery where they were draining all of the blood from her body. She had an aneurysm. And they were draining all the blood from her brain and draining the blood from her body. And they put her on a recirculation machine to continue to let the blood be viable while they did the operation. During the operation, repairing the aneurysm, they had headphones on her that were providing loud clicks so they could monitor this on her EEG, her brainwaves. But there was no activity. There was no activity in her brainwaves. There's no way she could have heard anything. She was completely no blood in her brain. There's no way oxygen was allowing new memories to be created. And she had an experience that she left her body and was in the operating room and was able to see the doctor operating, was able to see the instruments that were being used and related to music that was playing while she was being operated on. There was no way she could have physically experienced this. And yet she related this when she came to, when she was revived. That's one experience. There's another one where a woman named Marie had left her body and she had the experience of traveling outside of the hospital room and outside of the hospital and seeing on a ledge outside the hospital, a tennis shoe. And she was able to describe what she saw. And whenever they went and looked for it, they couldn't see it because the only way you could get to it is if you really leaned all the way out the window and saw the ledge because it was around the corner. Nobody knew there was a tennis shoe there. But she recognized it from her near-death experience. So these veridical experiences provide evidence that help to support the idea that there is an experience actually occurring and it's not a hallucination. It's not someone who's just or some passive subconscious perception of the world around them at this time. Statistically, there are not a lot of veridical experiences. But when you have this sort of experience, it's what we call a white crow experience, right? Sure. You know, the idea that, you know, all crows are black. But if you say that there are white crows, you only need one to disprove that all crows are black. William James, I believe. Yes, exactly. So if you want to know that near-death experiences actually happen, you only need one example to demonstrate that something is possible in this realm. And these experiences are what we look at. But when you talk about the development of statistics and that rising up at the same time that they were starting the research at Duke, which I thought was interesting because I wanted to talk a little bit about the Pierce Pratt experiment, which is one of the most famous ones with Zener cards. And maybe you can talk to our audience a little bit about how that worked and what they did. But specifically, I'm interested in the statistical analysis because I believe it was stated that the likelihood of guessing based on the Zener card set and using math that is over my head. If I was in math, I'd be an engineer. But like essentially, there was a 20% likelihood of a correct guess and that Pierce was exceeding that significantly. And I just wondered, do those statistics still hold up now that statistical analysis has come so far since it was first being developed? And can you tell our audience a little bit about that specific experiment? Sure. Just starting with the ESP cards, a deck of ESP cards, there's five different symbols in the ESP card deck. And there's five of each within the deck. So there's 25 cards, five different symbols. If you were to randomly guess, you would expect to get one right out of every five. Like if you guessed over and over again, star, you'd get five of them right out of 25. Sure. That's 20% accuracy. So that's the likelihood that if you're just guessing. When you're dealing with probability and chance and statistics, we always look for what's the standard probability. And the standard probability is one out of five. If people were to get seven out of 25, we'd say, well, that's normal variance. There's really not much to it. As they get to nine, we're getting almost to a 90% probability that there's something else happening. They're not just guessing. When you get to 11 out of 25 correct, that's where we can see that there's a 99% probability that they're not guessing, that there's something happening. They're getting information at 11 out of 25. Now, if we were to go through a deck together, Scott, and we were to run this and you were to get 11 out of 25, I'd be like, that's great. Would I say you're psychic? Well, I would, but that's not why. I wouldn't be demonstrated being psychic. I'd say, do it again. Do it again. Because this is what it's all about in science, right? We have to have replication. And we want to look over a longer period of time. 11 out of 25 is good. If you were to do this repeatedly over a long period of time, over like, let's say 500 cards and consistently average 11 out of 25, that's when we say, okay, there's a demonstrated ability there. There's a demonstrated variance from what we'd expect from chance. Hubert Pierce, when J.B. Ryan started his lab at Duke in the 1930s, he was looking for people to come in and be part of his experiments. And he went to Duke students. Hubert Pierce was one of the Duke students. Well, his friends encouraged him to go to this lab. They said, you know, you're really lucky. When we play cards together, you're really good. You're able to get things. You're really good at these things. You ought to go over to that lab and try it out. Well, he went into the lab with J.B. Ryan and said, hey, my friends encouraged me to come here. And so they started to do a test together and he started to get extremely good results. He was getting the right cards more often than could possibly be determined from chance. He consistently did this for a two-year period working with the lab. He was able to consistently exceed what I was saying was 11 out of 25, a 99% probability that there was actually something going on there. Well, one of the questions at that time, when they worked with ESP cards, it would always be one person sitting on one side of the table, another person sitting on the other side of the table. And they'd be communicating right across the table to each other. But the question was, hey, could this work if we went from a longer distance? What if we were down the hall from each other where you couldn't see me when I was flipping the card? So there's no way you could cheat because you couldn't see me. And there was another man working in the lab with J.B. at the time named Gaither Pratt. So Gaither Pratt set up an experiment where he would be in his office pulling the ESP cards while Hubert Pierce was across the quad 100 yards away in the library on another part of campus. They synchronized their watches before they started the experiment. And Hubert Pierce went over to the library where Gaither could see him walk across the quad to the library. So I could see him out a window going over to the location. Yes, he could watch him walk across the quad and knew he was in the library. At the predetermined time, Gaither would pull the first card and set it on the table. And Hubert Pierce, clairvoyantly, was supposed to guess what the card was. This card is face up or face down for Gaither? It was face down. He did not see it. He didn't know what it was. If he was looking at it, then Gaither would know it. And we would consider it's possible it was telepathically getting the information. But because he wasn't looking at it, we consider it clairvoyance because it was getting information directly from the card. Meanwhile, in the other building, Hubert Pierce has a little score sheet, and he's writing down what he thinks the card is. And they do this continuously and go through an entire deck. The idea is, well, maybe there's a distance limit to ESP. If we go for a longer distance, maybe you won't be able to, it won't be as the same results. They did this over a series of a number of trials and found that Hubert Pierce was performing at the same rate as if they were in the same room. The results were so good that they said, hey, let's try it even further. So Hubert Pierce went all the way down to another building that was over 300 yards away. And they did the same experiment, no variance. Still, at the same time, he was getting significant results that are varying from chance. When he went further away, was he still able to see Pierce going to the library or not? He could see him walking down partially. Why did they leave that in the equation? Was that important for a reason? Why even see him going over there? Well, he wanted to know that he actually left a building. Okay. That he wasn't like hiding in a corner somewhere with binoculars or something. Right. Okay. Interesting. Oh, right. It confirms the separation and the distance and everything for him visually. Yes. What this study, this was a very significant study. And what it demonstrated is that there doesn't seem to be any distance limitation related to ESP. It doesn't seem that it degrades with distance. And this is important because the idea was that, hey, maybe there's some energy that's being sent from the person who has the card to the other person. And they're able to pick up this energy. When we talk about energies, and we talk about in physics, when we talk about energies, energies, they degrade with distance. As you move further and further away, the energy is reduced by the square of the distance. So every bit of energy that we know works like this, whether it be electricity, magnetism, all the energies that we know reduce as you get further away. But there was no reduction in the performance here. So it indicated that if there's an energy that's related to ESP, it's nothing like any of the other energies we know about in physics. Sure. So it's likely that there's something else going on. Hello, hello. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Smart Talks with IBM. I recently sat down with IBM's chairman and CEO, Arvind Krishna. And I asked him, how can companies use AI to its fullest potential to create smarter business? My one advice to them, pick areas you can scale. Don't pick the shiny little toys on the side. For example, if anybody has more than 10% of what they had for customer service 10 years ago, they're already five years behind. If anybody is not using AI to make their developers who write software 30% more productive today, with the goal of being 70% more productive. Yeah. Wow. So we are not asking our clients to be the first experiment on it. We say, you can leverage what we did. We are happy to bring out all our learnings, including what needs to change in the process, because the biggest change is not technology. It's getting people to accept that there's a different way to do things. To listen to the full conversation, visit ibm.com slash smart talks. Ever notice that feeling your worst also seems to happen at the worst time in the worst places? Like sudden nausea at 9 p.m. when you're out of town. Really? Now? Fortunately, with Hartford HealthCare's HHC 24-7 app, you can get answers, diagnosis, prescriptions, even speak live with clinicians anytime, anywhere. So maybe there's never a good time to be sick, but at least the best care is always there. Download the app at your app store or HHC 247.org. I didn't think the pain from the shingles rash would affect simple everyday tasks like bathing, getting dressed, or even walking around. I was wrong. Though not everyone at risk will develop it, 99% of people over the age of 50 already have the virus that causes shingles, and it could reactivate at any time. I developed it, and the blistering rash lasted for weeks. Don't learn the hard way, like I did. Talk to your doctor or pharmacist today. Sponsored by GSK. Hello, hello. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Smart Talks with IBM. I recently sat down with IBM's chairman and CEO, Arvind Krishna, and I asked him, how can companies use AI to its fullest potential to create smarter business? My one advice to them, pick areas you can scale. Don't pick the shiny little toys on the side. For example? If anybody has more than 10% of what they had for customer service 10 years ago, they're already five years behind. If anybody is not using AI to make their developers who write software 30% more productive today, with the goal of being 70% more productive. Yeah. Wow. So we are not asking our clients to be the first experiment on it. We say, you can leverage what we did. We're happy to bring out all our learnings, including what needs to change in the process, because the biggest change is not technology. It's getting people to accept that there's a different way to do things. To listen to the full conversation, visit IBM.com slash Smart Talks. Smart Talks. When you get to the 50, I had already learned some things, like the value of the family, the importance of the work, and that the 99% of the people of more than 50 already have the virus that causes the culebrilla. Although not all people in danger will develop it, I suffered it. The painful eruption with an ampoule took a few weeks, making even the simplest tasks be a challenge. Don't learn about the culebrilla in a difficult way. You mentioned the factor of time, which also, as we've covered the subject quite a bit, and it always raises some consternation. But you also mentioned time as being a factor, and it doesn't seem to matter if it's past or future. What's a theory on that? Distance is one thing, space. What is it about time that doesn't seem to matter? So when we're talking about time and we're talking about being able to get information from the future or information from the past, we're talking about precognition here. All of it's ESP. And the truth is, when we're working with ESP, we differentiate these different phenomena, but we can't tell whether it's telepathy or clairvoyance or precognition. In almost every experiment, it could be any of them. And so we'd usually talk about general ESP. So like I was saying before, it may be that I'm going to tell you what all the cards were in about two days. And you're able to see that from the past and able to get that information and use that in order to give me the answer. So it could be precognition. Listen, we haven't seen time limitations. It's really hard to say anything related to time because we don't know how far in the future someone can make a prediction. You know, you talk about things like Nostradamus or you might talk about Edgar Cayce making predictions, but a lot of them are so vague that they could be, you know, we're humans. One of the things about humans is we find patterns and we find connections and matches in a lot of our lives. That's what we're really good at evolutionarily. That's why we're so successful. So if we're looking for connections between things that were said 500 years ago or, you know, 800 years ago, we're probably going to find things that are similar. So it's hard for us to really use that sort of evidence to support long-term precognition. But we can see that, hey, it oftentimes happens sometimes within just a few seconds in our laboratory experiments. Sometimes within days, remote viewing uses a methodology called associative remote viewing. Someone will guess what the target is and the target's not picked for five days. Right. Or they might be trying to view and get information about or even dream about what's going to be the headline in the newspaper two days from now or the photograph on the cover of a certain magazine a few days from now. And this might not even have been chosen yet. It may be that the photograph hasn't even been taken. So we know that it can happen a few days. We know it can happen a few minutes. It's a question of how far in advance it goes, though. To make predictions long in advance, you need to get very specific. And then you have to remember to check up on it. And so that's a different experimental protocol that takes a bit more time to implement. Is there a theory on what kind of connection is made over time and distance? Is it things like, and you probably get to this, quantum entanglement, spooky action at a distance? These are all terms that we've discussed before. But is there any overriding theory on what is the nature of that connection between space and time and over distance and time? Yeah, I can speak a little bit about this. I'm not a physicist and I'm not a theoretical physicist. So some of my explanation might seem a little vague in places because, well, a lot of it is quantum physics. And quantum physics, I don't think anybody really understands it. No, even the professor. I just saw a clip on Instagram three days ago of a guy going, when this class is done, I hope you will be as confused as I am. Right. That's it. So when we're talking about space and time and getting information through space and time, one of the things that we recognize from 90 years of research, doing it at the Rhine, is that these events occur. Telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, they occur. Sometimes they occur spontaneously to people in their daily lives. Like, for example, there's a story about a woman who was washing her dishes at home and had an immediate image she needed to go out in her yard and get her child who was playing near the tree and bring them inside. And she did. And a few minutes later, a truck crashed right into that tree. So these spontaneous type of events or people having dreams about things that are going to happen in the future. Oftentimes, these are spontaneous events that occur, but they happen. They're recorded. We have also taken them into the lab using ESP cards, but actually moving forward into more complex and more sophisticated methods now. We are still finding that these events occur. Our question is, how does it happen? And this is what we've been exploring. So if you're trying to look to physics and looking at time and space, how does information travel across time? There are a number of different theories. One of them being that the timeline is not a progression, like a time arrow that we often visualize, but actually past, present, and future are all occurring at the same time. Right. Didn't Einstein suggest that himself? Yes. Einstein, one of the things he said is that time is an illusion, but a very persistent one. And so it's consistently used within. But one of the interesting things is when you're looking at physics equations that use time, time is always squared in the physics equations. You multiply time by itself. What that indicates is that time could be a positive number or it could be a negative number. Because when you square it, it's always going to come out to a positive number and it makes the physics equation work. So having time run forward or run backwards is consistent with our current understanding of physics. So it's possible that people are able to get information from things that have happened in the past. It's possible that certain events that are happening now can affect things that have happened in what we consider the past. That's not in conflict with physics. In fact, some of the physicists who are interested in parapsychology describe all ESP as a form of precognition because it's consistent with physics that it's not violating time. I want to bounce back just for a minute to the Pierce-Pratt experiment. And you talked about how they increased the distance. The other thing they did was they were super careful about the chain of custody, right? How did that work with the envelopes and what was given to Ryan for analysis? Right. So the researcher, Gaither Pratt and Hubert Pierce, they're in different locations. They're both recording the cards that are flipped and all of the impressions that Hubert Pierce is getting of which cards are there. They would then take the information from that session, they would steal it in an envelope, and they would bring it back to the lab and give it to J.B. Ryan. They never met each other after the session was over. They gave it to J.B. Ryan. J.B. Ryan, being an independent observer, would then take the information and compare it to score it at that point. This really made it so that there was no way that the researcher and the participant could cheat together. Right, right. And J.B. Ryan, having been in the field for a while, having done a number of experiments of this sort, had a credibility that helped him to establish that the distance didn't seem to have any impact on the results. How do you address the skepticism of, like, just, you know, the Wikipedia page on it is scathing, which, by the way, one of the things we've talked about on our show over the years, because we've been doing it almost 11 years now, is we watch Wikipedia change, how it covers all this stuff significantly. And we talked about that in the forest, what are they called, the Gorilla Skeptics of Wikipedia? Yes, the Gorilla Skeptics of Wikipedia is a group of basically volunteers, or they volunteer their time, but they're coordinated and they go through. And, you know, every page on Wikipedia that has something to do with what they consider to be pseudoscience in any field, medical, could be history, they'll basically go through and either just label that or wipe it. Just erase it. Yeah, just get rid of it. Remove the possibility of it. So, and obviously there's room for skepticism. This isn't an assault on skeptics. You've got to be open-minded. And, of course, in doing scientific research, you have to go in and say, we need to prove this, and I understand that. But what do you think about, you know, just like, I don't know if he even had one amazing, Randy's take on this experiment, or any of these other folks who were just like, oh, well, they're cheating, or this happened, or that happened. Because from when I looked at it, frankly, it seemed to me like they didn't have solid ground to rebuke what was coming out in terms of the results with that particular experiment. Because I don't remember his exact success rate, but was it like 32% or something? And honestly, I don't remember the specific results, but I know that it far exceeded chance and was consistently exceeding chance. You know, I have a lot of thoughts about the Gorilla Skeptics and the Wikipedia and things, but related to this specific experiment. You know, when they started doing research with the ESP cards, there was a lot of criticism, one of them being that the cards were see-through. This was a criticism that they've set. They said the cards must be see-through because there's no way that they could guess them otherwise. So they started putting a screen between the person who- The Kreskin's has the screen. My game, I have a Kreskin board game, but it has the screen. I didn't think about that. Yes. So they put a screen up so that one person can hold the card, and there's no way the other person can see it when it's happening. Right. Then they started to say, well, maybe there's something that they're able to see a reflection. And maybe they're seeing a reflection in somebody's glasses. They're able to see the card. And I've played card with people with glasses with my brothers and sisters, and yeah, that could happen. So when they put the screen up, they brought the screen up above their head so that they couldn't even see their face. And they progressed to say, well, maybe the person is actually, they called it, it was a subconscious whisper. Okay. As they would see the card, they would quietly to themselves mouth the card in the whisper. Like doing the other actor's lines in a scene unconsciously or whatever. Right. Yeah. And so this would communicate to the other person that there was what the card was. And so all of these things were things that people were criticizing. And JB was, you know, we're scientists. We're skeptical ourselves of what's going on. And so JB was addressing these and trying to say, how can we make it more likely or less likely that these criticisms are actually true? That's another aspect of the distance ESP test. Well, because Gaither was actually watching Hubert Pierce walk across the quad and go into the library, they knew he wasn't in the same building. But the skeptical explanation for this was that Gaither Pratt was actually sitting in the room and the cards were in the room. And when he was recording them, it's possible that Hubert Pierce snuck back across the quad, went out the back of the building, went all the way around. Went in the back of the laboratory building, went up the stairs and looked through the transom of the door. A transom. We don't even have transoms anymore. But back in those times, you know, they would have a window above the door that they could open up and let air circulate. That Hubert Pierce was actually going to climb and peer through the transom. It was able to see the cards as Gaither Pratt was recording them so that he could then quickly take his own form and fill it in to be the same and get beyond chance. Well, when the explanations start to get this complex, you have to start to consider whether the probability of that happening is greater than the probability of the actual event occurring. Sure. And even whenever they made it further apart. And if you look at the room where Gaither Pratt was, he was facing the door. There's no way that he could have seen the cards from behind him. These explanations really didn't work at that time. But, of course, the skeptics are going to continue to try to find ways to explain this away. But I agree with you, Scott, that for this specific experiment, there is nothing that really held up. And Hubert Pierce continued, like I said, for years to get good results. Did he have an ongoing relationship with the Rhine after this particular experiment? Probably about eight or ten years ago, I guess. His daughter contacted us, and there was an interview that they did related to her father's, Hubert Pierce's experiences. Essentially, she said that he'd been doing this his whole life, these sorts of things. And after working with Rhine in the lab for two years, all of a sudden it seemed like his abilities just evaporated and they were gone after two years. And his daughter said, he got bored. Right. He didn't want to be part of the experiments anymore, so he missed because he didn't want to do it. Right. But she said his entire life afterwards, he knew what was going to happen. He had psi experiences throughout his entire life before and after he worked in the lab. Oh, interesting. So it was an ongoing, but we didn't have an ongoing experimental relationship with parapsychology because, well, as I said, he got tired of it at a certain point. As you can understand, you know, if you start being tested, and he had his own life with his own family, his goal wasn't to be the top psychic in the world, you know? Yeah, yeah. He's not trying to get on Carson or whatever. I mean, he was in the School of Divinity, right? So, I mean, did he go on to be a minister or a pastor or something? To tell you the truth, I can't remember the details of that interview to tell you the details of his life. I think he passed away in 79, if I'm not mistaken. Right. I had this memory from when I was younger, and I can't remember if as a child I made this up or not, but I had, and I recall telling my mom this, I had a dream about a plane crash two nights before it happened. And it was the one into the Potomac River, not the one that just happened, but the one in 1982 of the airliner going down into the river, same airport, I believe. And the river was icy, and a lot of people, you know, perished, and people dove in the river and were rescued. And I had a dream about it. And I had, as I recall, I had told my mom about it, that I had a dream about a plane crash in water, in icy water. And then two days later, that plane crash, this only time anything like that's ever happened to me. And I don't even know if I've ever mentioned it on the show, Forrest. Have you heard me tell that before? I'm not sure if you've talked about it on the show. I feel like I forgot about it. I think you've mentioned it to me. Just weird. But that's the only time it's out. I wish, you know, I could figure that out on the regular. But when you mentioned the dreams and- One thing we've noticed is that it's often tied to trauma. As you were mentioning earlier, the truck crashing into the tree and the premonition is that something traumatic is going to happen. And it's, or the other phenomenon of the crisis apparition of people seeing somebody appear, even if they're not dead. It's not like you're seeing their spirit. They will appear as a reaching out psychically to warn somebody and not even wanting to do that or not being conscious of wanting to do that. So just to give credit, he taught us about that, who studied parapsychology in Edinburgh, and he came on our show. He's a friend of ours or whatever. But he talked about crisis apparitions. But is that something to do with the extreme heightened emotional energy that's pushing that through? So I was going to say, Forrest, you mentioned trauma, but I would attribute it to high emotions of any sort. Whether it be ecstasy or pain or trauma, high emotions tend to be something that is carried through. And if you consider our memories, our memories, from a psychological perspective, our memories, the ones that stick with us the longest, are the ones that are highly emotional. Trauma, of course, we talk about people carrying trauma through their whole lives, but the same is true of people having very strong, engaging emotional experiences that they feel are positive and good for them in their lives. So I would not only isolate it to trauma, but emotion does seem to be very tied to memory. So it makes sense that it may also be incorporated into ESP experiences. Quick follow-up question about Hubert Pierce. Was he the most successful or, let's say, the most talented that the institution has come across? And is there anybody in your experience while you're working there that was outstanding in their abilities? Hubert Pierce was one of, because of his early performance in the lab, I believe that his work probably was one of the reasons that JB said, hey, there is actually something here to study. Because he wasn't sure. You know, he was exploring this and trying to determine, hey, is this card thing going to work? Are statistics going to work out? Hubert Pierce gave them enough data and enough consistent data that they were able to say, okay, it looks like there's something worth studying. And they could explore it with other people. So he was extremely successful. And he was definitely a catalyst for the field to continue. Since then, of course, there are many people who have come into the lab. Many different people from different areas. Edgar Cayce came down at one point. He didn't really perform that well. There's a woman, Eileen Garrett, who was a very famous medium in the 20th century. Probably the most famous in the 20th century. Eileen Garrett came to the lab and she was tested. She did well in the ESP test, but she got really bored of the cards. She was used to doing things that were much more impactful, getting information about things that were going to happen, telling people about spirit. Because she was a medium. She would talk about spirits. She was not tested that way. She was tested for ESP at the lab. And that just wasn't enough for her. So she didn't come back very often to be tested like that. There have been a number of different people. There was a guy named Blue Harare who was famous back in the 1970s for doing out-of-body experiences and remote viewing type of work as well. And he was tested at the lab with an experiment they did that's very famous, is that he had a cat at his house and they sent people to his house to see if they could detect when he was going out of body and coming into his house. And what he did is he was at the lab, he projected himself out of body, this is what he described, he projected himself out of body and projected himself to a certain location in the house. The researchers at the house were watching where the cat went and they found that at the same time that he was projecting, the cat was going on alert and tended to go to the areas that he said he was at in the house. Wow. Where was his house? How far away was it from? The lab was in Durham. His home was in Durham. He was a studio. Okay, so it was in town, but it's still amazing, but I was just curious. Yes. And so these sorts of phenomena occur quite often with different people over the years. I would say the most successful person I've worked with in the lab, well, I've worked with a number in different areas, but the person I've worked with the most is a man named Ed Edwards. When I met him, he was describing himself as a healer, that he was helping people to heal. I've been working with him for almost 15 years now, but his work is different now. He tends to describe himself as an energy. He works with energies, he says, and it's specifically electricity. And what I find is when I work with him in the lab in different types of experiments, he tends to have effects on electronics. He can impact electronics. He does seem to be able to generate a static field that is separate from his body, up to a few meters away from himself. He's able to generate a static field, and we measure this. I mention Ed because he's so consistent. Nearly every time that I have him come into the lab, I see similar results. Almost every session, consistency is one of the things we look for in parapsychology. Well, in science in general, you look for repeatability and consistency. When you find someone who can consistently do something like affect an electronic device, affect random number generators, create static fields, and do this consistently, that gives us the opportunity to go from does it happen to how does it happen. We're able to then start looking at the mechanisms, because until you get a consistent process, you can't really test to see how it works. Hello, hello. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of Smart Talks with IBM. I recently spoke with IBM's new director of research, Jay Gambetta. We discussed his vision for the future of quantum computing. At IBM Research, what we always do is answer what is the future of computing, whether it's coming up with new algorithms, coming up with better AI, coming up with quantum, or coming up with just how do different accelerators go together. It's our DNA to answer the question of what is the future. Isn't it a perfect problem for IBM, because you kind of need to have a legacy of building stuff? Yes. Building actual physical machines. Yeah, it's why I came to IBM. I wanted the experience, the culture of building hard things that others have not done before. Where do you imagine we are in the timeline of this technology? There will come a point when it will mature, right? Yeah. My cell phone is a mature technology at this point. How far are we from that point with quantum? By 2029, we'll build the first fault-tolerant quantum computer. That is one that can run a very, very large, large problem. To learn how IBM is building the future of computing, visit ibm.com slash quantum. Ever notice that feeling your worst also seems to happen at the worst time in the worst places? Like sudden nausea at 9 p.m. when you're out of town. Really? Now? Fortunately, with Hartford HealthCare's HHC 24-7 app, you can get answers, diagnosis, prescriptions, even speak live with clinicians anytime, anywhere. So maybe there's never a good time to be sick, but at least the best care is always there. Download the app at your app store or hhc247.org. Al llegar a los 50, ya había aprendido algunas cosas, como el valor de la familia, la importancia del trabajo, y que el 99% de las personas de más de 50 ya tienen el virus que causa la culebrilla. Aunque no todas las personas en riesgo la desarrollarán, yo sí la sufrí. La erupción dolorosa con ampollas duró semanas, haciendo que incluso las tareas más simples sean todo un reto. No aprendas sobre la culebrilla de la manera difícil. Habla hoy con tu doctor o farmacéutico. Patrocinado por GSK. I'm Anna, and this is Astonishing Legends. Let's get back to the show. Soy Anna, y esto es Leyendas Asombrosas. Volvamos al show. When I was on site there a few weeks ago, and you were giving a tour, you had showed me this room, which I can't remember. It was like the super dark, dark room. What do you call that room? That's a double dark room. Double dark room, which, you know, and folks, you can imagine it's got black walls, but the door's got blocks on the bottom of the doors. And then the next room, you can turn the lights out. And we go in this room, and there are some devices on a table that I just had no idea what they were. And he let me sit in there for five or ten minutes with it in the pitch black, which I was excited to try, and I don't know why. But it is a very unnerving, you really got to adjust to it, because it's like a very unnerving experience. You know, people always say it's overwritten about, it's a cliche, you can't see your hand in front of your face. But in this room, you can't. But I want you to talk about the hardware that you have in there, if you don't mind, and the experiments that you've been conducting there related to photon detection. I don't know if Ed's been part of that. I'm thinking he probably was. But my mind was blown by this particular experiment, and I was wondering if you could share it with our listeners. Sure. And I'll start out by saying, Scott, when you were in that room, in the dark room, the double dark room is a dark room inside of another dark room. Yes. And so it really blocks the outside light. There's no light in the room. And you weren't in there five or 10 minutes. You were in there maybe a minute or two. I mean, yeah. But, you know, talking about time, you know, time gets really distorted when you have no sensory input. It really does. That's a super valid point. Yeah. The reason we have the room so dark is because we're looking at light. One of the things that I'm really interested in is healing. And when people talk about energy healing or they talk about psychic healing, these sorts of things, they often talk about the energies moving through the body. And they talk about manipulating the energies. They talk about increasing energy flows to certain areas or blocking energy flows. Also, when you talk to people who do martial arts, they talk about chi, life force energy, ki, prana. It's a life force energy within the body. When they use that, they manipulate it. They use it to increase their own strength and to project it if they're in a battle situation. And you also, you talk about meditators. When you talk to meditators, they often speak of kundalini energies moving through the body and how the kundalini rising can have increased their mystical experiences. All of them are talking about energies. Right. I'm really interested in what is this energy? We started looking at different sorts of energies. You know, the body, it's an electrical system. Our nervous system is electrical. All of our muscles, we all work through an electrical system. But when we try to measure electricity in the body, we have to be right against the body. We have to have the sensors right on the skin. If we start to move even a few centimeters away from the body, we lose that completely. And if you're measuring like the activity in the brain, the sensors have to be right pressed against the skull. You lose that completely if you start to move away at all. So a lot of these healers, a lot of the people who experience heat, they're not doing this work right with the person and touching them. Sometimes they're working from a distance. And yet they still feel this energy flow between them. And people who are having a healing experience also feel this energy. So it doesn't seem like it's electricity. Well, maybe it's magnetism. Because sometimes they talk about they're being, feel like they're being drawn to a certain area or being pushed away from a certain area, like repelled from a certain area. And anytime you have an electrical flow, a current, there is a magnetic field that goes around that current. So the body also has a magnetic field, magnetic system. But to measure it, we have to be pressed right against the body. We can measure it just slightly off the body. But as we get just even a few centimeters away, it gets lost, completely lost, drowned out by everything that's around us. And we can't measure it as we get further away. So it's not electricity. It's not magnetism. We start looking at different types of energies and we start trying to figure out what could it be? Well, we chanced upon the idea that it might be light. Light is an electromagnetic form of energy. But we don't see this energy. We don't see light around people when they're doing it. So it would have to be light in an invisible part of the spectrum, something we can't perceive. What we did is we started looking at infrared light initially. And we had an infrared camera in this dark room, this really dark room. And we were looking for very low levels of infrared light. Well, infrared light is a reflection of heat. Anytime you have an infrared camera, it's measuring heat. We brought in people who were healers, said they were healers. We didn't test them to see if they were healers. They said they were healers. Had them stand in the room. And we took like a baseline. Asked them just to stay there and not do anything. And we got a baseline of how the infrared light was projecting from their body. We then asked them, go ahead and start your healing work. Whether it be with another person in the room or doing remote healing from a distance. What we found with nearly every single person, as soon as we said, start your healing, the palms of their hands and their forehead started to get warm. We started seeing more infrared light from those areas. Now, this can happen for a lot of physical reasons. For example, increased blood flow will help more heat going there. There's a number of different physical reasons this could happen. But the interesting thing is, we didn't tell any of them, make your hands and your forehead warm. We just said, start your healing. And this is what occurred with nearly every single person. So we determined, well, when healers start their healing, their palms and their foreheads get warm. That's interesting. But what more can we learn? So we started looking at ultraviolet light. This is on the other end of the spectrum. Still invisible. It's beyond our visible range. But we have a device called a photomultiplier tube. This photomultiplier tube will measure a single photon of ultraviolet light every half second. It's an extremely sensitive piece of equipment. It's the most sensitive equipment we can get to measure this sort of light. I want to interject that I have pictures of this from my visit there. I'll put them up with this episode so people can look at it. It looks like a metal box, like nothing you've ever seen with a little aperture on the front of it. And John was scared to death I was going to touch it the whole time I was there. Well, the metal box is, the reason it looks like a metal box is because it is. It's a metal box because it's shielding the electronics of the system. It's a very high energy system. There's a lot of electricity flowing through that system. And how did you guys come across it? I thought this was interesting too. One of the people we were working with is Bill Joins. He was an electrical engineer at Duke for many, many years. For over 50 years, he worked at Duke as an electrical engineering department. And they use this in laser technology. They use it in medical applications. They use it to measure light. As I said, it's the most sensitive piece of equipment you can get to measure light. And we need that because we're measuring light coming from people. Does light come from people? Well, you know, this is what we found. Back in the 1970s, there was a man named Fritz Popp. And Fritz Popp was reviving some research that had been done in the 1920s by a man named Alan Gershwitz. And Fritz Popp was looking at fruits and vegetables that were grown organically or that were grown not organically to see if there was a difference in the light coming from them. And he found, yeah, there was a difference in the light. One of them had more light than the other. And he thought, well, that's interesting. And so he started looking at other organic matter, other vegetables, fruits, animals, even people. And he found that this light, this ultraviolet light emanated from anything that is organic, any living entity. We've done experiments even with single cells. If you take red blood cells, you put a little saline on them. When you put a little saline on them, they'll pop. As they popped, we could see light coming from these red blood cells. Now, back in the 1970s, this was crazy science. Everybody was like, okay, you know, there's Fritz over there. He's seeing light coming from his vegetables and fruits. Who cares? But, you know, go Fritz, you keep going with it. Now, this is 40, 50 years later, this work is upper-level biology. This light is recognized as something that comes from all organic matter. They don't exactly know what's creating it. You might be able to read in different places, like Wikipedia, explanations of exactly how it happens. But they truly don't know where it's coming from. And they don't know what it's used for. But it is studied. It's happening. And it's studied in Stanford, Japan, in Germany, Italy, all over the world in upper-level biology, trying to determine what this is, what these bio-photons or ultra-weak photon emissions that come from organic matter is. What we do is a little different at the ride. We bring people into this room who say they're healers, people who are martial artists, people who do a lot of meditation. And we ask them to sit in this room, this dark room, and we get a baseline of the amount of light that's in the room. Now, this piece of equipment, as I said, is really, really sensitive. And that room is so dark that when there's nobody in the room, I'll get about three to five photons a second in the room. And that's just ambient light that's almost nothing. It's like being in the bottom of a cave. You get no light there. Having been in there, it's hard to believe that there's even one photon in there. Well, there's some ambient light everywhere, I guess, because we're seeing it, right? But when we bring a person in, that level rises. It rises to about 12 to 20 photons a second. It varies for each person. But about 12 to 20 photons is the baseline that we'll see. That's still almost no light. Very, very, very dark. You can't see anything in there. It's invisible. What we then do, once we get a baseline with someone, we say, start your healing practice. Start your martial arts form. Do your meditation. Try to increase the energy in the room. Try to produce light in the room. Now, most of the people we bring in there, about 90% of the sessions I've done, I get zero change from the baseline. I just see the baseline continuously for about 10 minutes while they're in there. But with about 10% of the sessions, I see a variance. And when I'm talking about a variance, I'm talking about 12 to 20 photons as a baseline. I'll see it jump up to 80 photons. This is a huge difference from the baseline. Four times the biggest baseline we'll get. Statistically, it's phenomenal. But I'll see people go up to 200 photons, 3,000, into the hundreds of thousands of photons. And I even had two people go over a million photons a second. You don't need statistics to know when you see this. There's something unusual happening in this room. So these are big numbers. But as I was saying before, one of the things that's really interesting to me is consistency, being able to do this repeatedly. What I find oftentimes is people will go in and I'll get these spikes, like a single spike that might last for one second or two seconds. But when I work with martial artists, it's a little different. They tend to raise the energy in the room. They don't get as big a number. It doesn't go up to 3,000. But they'll raise the energy up to 60 or 80 and maintain it for 10 or 12 seconds. And then it'll come back down. And then they'll bring it back up. And it'll come back down. The consistency is something we're looking for. It's a show that these martial artists seem to have more control over the energy than the other people who are going in the room and just trying to meditate or produce light of some sort. I talked before about Ed Edwards. And whenever I met him and he first came into the lab, he was getting these huge numbers in the hundreds of thousands. Over the years, we've worked together. And now, instead of getting these huge spikes, Ed brings the energy up in the room to about 200 or 300 and maintains it for the full session. And then when the session's over, it drops right back down to the baseline and stops. So he's gaining a discipline from working with you, basically. We've worked together. Yeah. And yes, he's developed more of a discipline, more control. Yeah. And instead of throwing lightning bolts, now he's using the energy and bringing it up. And he's integrated this practice into his healing that he does now, where he'll work with people and bring their energy and their body up using the same techniques. And by bringing the energy and their body up, the way he describes it is it activates their immune system and allows their body to produce healing on its own. He's not actually doing the healing. Right. He talks about applying the environment. Go ahead. But he's not having to study anatomy and apply himself to a specific thing. He's essentially flipping a light switch for the people that need help that they can't turn on themselves. Exactly. And he's helping them to get out of their own way. Maybe overcome a resistance or a blockage that they might have that's not allowing them to heal themselves. Wow. And by raising the energy in their system, they're then able to heal themselves. This is how he describes it now. Now, this mechanism, it's a theoretical mechanism. Sure. You don't have a way to test it. But what I can test is, can he control this energy that's being produced? And it does seem that he can do it consistently. What did you tell me about the person who came in who had shrimp for lunch? Oh, yeah. One of the things we have to be careful about whenever we're working within the dark room, we have such sense of equipment that it'll pick up any low levels of light. I had one person who came in and they were wearing a sweater when they went into the lab. Well, their sweater had been washed in detergent that had phosphorus in it. They were out in the sunlight. They came in my lab and it threw my readings off the chart. But we found out that when he took the sweater off, it all went away. Because then the phosphorus was gone and it wasn't reflecting. For a brief moment, he thought he was a guru and then it was just the sweater. Well, I noticed that was wrong pretty quickly because we don't ever see that. But we also have to be careful because there are certain foods that glow. And one of the things that we mentioned is seafood, shellfish. Because of everything that's in our oceans now, shellfish will start to glow in the dark. If you have a bag of shrimp in a dark room, in a restaurant, you can find it because it glows. If someone were to go to lunch and eat shrimp or seafood or shellfish for lunch and be in that lab and open their mouth, we'll see the glow. Right. As a residue. I mean, maybe if they brush their teeth really well, maybe we wouldn't. But, you know, really, right after they eat. So we have to be cautious, not only of what people wear, but also what they eat. And we have them take everything reflective off anything that might cause any sort of light in that room so that we can see the very low levels of light. Is this connected to what would be called aura energy that some people can claim to see or detect? But, you know, that's often or famously picked up by Kirlian photography. Kirlian photography and aura are different things. They're similar, but they're different. And neither of them is what we're looking at. Allison asked this exact same question when we were there, Forrest. So that's interesting. No, it's a good question because people are always wondering, is this the aura that we're reading? You know, our human body, we have an aura. We give off heat. There's a vapor level around us. And, of course, then there is this light in the ultraviolet range that we're measuring as well. It's like a field that is around us. We carry it around. Reminds me of pig pen in Charlie Brown cartoons. Now there's always something around them all the time. But the aura that people talk about, usually it's in colors. When people describe it, they're able to detect it. They're able to see different health benefits from the aura when it's complete, when it's incomplete. They're able to describe it. That is not what we're measuring, though. When we have tried to look at the aura in research situations, one of the things people often say that it projects beyond their physical body. It goes outside of the physical form. So the experiments that have been done is they put people behind a wall that was just above their head. In essence, the aura should expand above the wall. And then they moved the person in different parts of the wall and had someone who said they could see auras say, where are they in the wall? It was not a successful experiment. They were not able to find the person and where they were standing. Now, this indicates to me that they're not actually seeing something physically. They're not using their eyes and visualizing where this aura. It seems that people who are experiencing an aura, they are getting information about the health and well-being of this person. And they're interpreting it in a visual manner. They're experiencing it as if it's visual and they're seeing colors, as if they're seeing an energy field that's complete or not. There are some people who are very, very adept at talking about the health of an individual, and they describe seeing the aura, but it's not a visual phenomenon. This light is actually measurable, though. What we're measuring is actually, we can actually measure it with equipment that detects the ultraviolet light. You also had a good explanation about Kirlian photography. Kirlian photography, the way that it's done is it's two pieces of glass. There's high levels of electricity placed on each pane of glass. And if there's an object placed between them or on the one level of glass, it's described as detecting the aura or something beyond the fingertips of somebody's hands there. Famous picture of the leaf that is on the surface, on the glass, and one where the leaf is cut away and you can still see the outline of the leaf. Well, what is actually being measured with Kirlian photography, it seems that what's being measured is the water vapor around our bodies, around different objects. And it is an aura, but it's an aura of water vapor. Now, that leaf, the interesting thing is that leaf, that portion of the leaf that was cut away still existed, as if that form was still there. Well, when that photo was actually taken, they put the leaf on the glass, did a reading with it, and they saw the aura of the leaf. Then they cut the leaf and took the piece off, but they didn't clean the glass between taking photographs. And so the second one still maintained the form, the water vapor form. Kirlian photography essentially measures water vapor. And so it's not an energy that might be used for healing or an energy that might be even interpreted as the aura. It's truly a water vapor field around people. With the photon detector, does it just sense their presence or does it actually, is it detecting them because they're landing on the device or in the device, like the direction they're going? The way the photomultiplier works is that inside of it, there's a glass tube. And that glass tube has these little, what they call, di-node points. They're places where the tube kind of pinches off, and it gets wide again, and it pinches off. And there's a few of them within this tube. On the front of the tube, the part that faces the room when you open up the shutter... Yes, that I wanted to touch. Yes, sure. That part has an extremely sensitive piece of metal on it. And when light, when photons hit that piece of metal, we filter it so that it will only, only ultraviolet light will get through. When that light hits that piece of metal, it knocks a couple of electrons off. Those electrons travel down the glass tube to the next di-node point. When it reaches that point, it knocks a few more electrons off. And it continues down the tube, getting more and more electrons until it gets to the back of the tube and we have a current. The strength of that current reflects how many photons hit the front of that tube. So if it's a very weak signal, it runs through our wires out to our computer where it's computed to count the number of photons that hit the tube in the first place. As that signal gets stronger, we know more photons have gone through. It's a continuous measurement. It's averaged out per half second is the way we have it set up. Being able to measure three photons per half second, this is an analog system, the way that it's set up. There are also digital systems that work more like a digital camera that's geared towards ultraviolet light. Those are much less sensitive. Because there's so much electricity needed to run these systems, you get quantum interference. You get an uncertainty within the electrical signal, which causes noise. It's called dark noise. Even when it's dark, you'll get some readings. Within our system, our dark noise is three to five photons. Within the digital cameras, the digital photo multiplier tubes, the best ones are usually 35 to 50 and usually up to 300 photons of dark noise. This means that with our system, with this analog system, we can measure things between five photons and 30 that would be lost for any other digital system. So that's why this system is so accurate and so sensitive. How are you figuring out where they're coming from? How do you know it's coming out of the hands and the forehead? So when we were talking about the hands and the forehead, we were talking about the infrared light. Oh, that was just specifically infrared light. Yeah. And the infrared light is actually more like a camera. Okay. But the ultraviolet light, we're really just measuring the light in the room. Okay. So it's coming off of the person as they're going through this process of healing or martial arts or... I wouldn't even go that far. You know, I'm a scientist. I got to be real careful with the language here, right? I would say that there is an increase in light in the room, which is an increase in energy in the room. Is it coming from that person or are they recruiting it and bringing it into that room? I can't answer that question specifically. But I can't say that with intention, with focus, it does seem that certain people can increase the amount of energy in the room. Have you seen a relationship, and even if it's anecdotal, between the folks that seem to be creating more output in this lab scenario and their success among the people that are coming to them for healing? I don't look at that at all. Yeah. I don't look at the healers and say, are you even doing healing? Right. That's not the area that I focus on. Okay. I would leave that to medical professionals and biologists who would work in that area. But what I can talk about is the fact that within parapsychology, the field in general, when we talk about healing, people, even the researchers, they look at it as kind of a monolithic thing. Healing is healing. People getting better from an illness. But it varies a great deal. There are different types of healing, whether it be physical healing, whether it be psychological healing, spiritual healing. I mean, there are so many different ways that you can describe healing. So we have to talk about the different types. There are different methods that people use as well. Like, for example, people use Reiki. They use healing touch. They use energy medicine. They have different names for it. Those are different ways that people can apply their healing process. But in addition, there's also an approach that people take, whether it be a holistic approach or whether it be a directed approach. And the difference here, you know, like, for example, if you go to a medical professional and you say your ankle is sprained or you have an issue with your ankle, they'll go directly to your ankle. And they'll treat your ankle, or maybe they might treat you with medicines to directly address either symptoms or address the biological issues. If you go to a holistic professional, medical professional, and you say, oh, I hurt my ankle, they're going to ask you, what were you doing? What do you usually do? Do you exercise? Start talking to you about your diet. They look at you as a whole person. When we're dealing with energy medicine, we have the same thing. Some people have a very directed approach. Other people have a more holistic approach, looking at the whole person. There are many different ways to approach it. And we have to consider these variances if we're going to understand healing. If we look at healing purely as it's monolithic, somebody's sick and they get better, we're missing the nuances. Right. And when I look in my lab at these different type of approaches, I can't say definitively yet, but it seems that people who are very focused and directed tend to be the ones that produce more light and more energy in my room. So that's the variance that I see, but it's not definitive yet. I really have to do more analysis before I can figure that out. This is something I mentioned to you when I was there, John, but I took American Kempo for a few years before I had to move away from Los Angeles. And my sensei, Sensei Donnie, the owner of Shaolin American Self-Defense Academy in North Hollywood, was just amazing. Unbelievable guy to spar with. It felt like he was from another planet. Even when he was demonstrating with you, you felt like you were – I mean, it gives me chills when I think about it, even now. So I'm curious for the differences between, say, Ed Edwards and your most proficient sensei that you got in there. What were the differences in what they produced? As I was mentioning before, there is quantity, the number of photons that are produced. Right, right. But I'm more interested in consistency. And when I was working with the martial artists, I saw much more consistency. I saw that they would be able to maintain a certain level of energy for a longer period of time, 9 to 12 seconds is what I was seeing, as opposed to just seeing a spike that lasted a second or two. Right. And so when Ed came in, it was initially I was seeing these spikes. I'd see groupings, but I'd see these big spikes. I'd see a number of them grouped together and then nothing, and then groups again like this. That I was seeing similar things with the martial artists, but not so big as spikes. They weren't spikes. They were more maintained at a higher level. More recently, as I've worked with Ed over the last couple years – like I said, it's been almost 15 years I've been working with him – he has developed the ability to come up to a specific level and maintain it the entire session. Okay, so he's got – it's like he's developed a discipline that – he was always higher in terms of output than the martial artists, but now he's developed a discipline to control it better. They weren't getting as high as he was, but they seemed to have more discipline. They did initially. Yeah. Now, he still doesn't go up to the high levels anymore. Right. He maintains it at a lower level, but consistent flow. And if you consider a treatment – if he were doing a treatment, and he talks about doing healing – if he was doing a treatment, you would consider this would be a better way to approach it. Because you don't want to throw lightning bolts at someone, you know, if you're trying to give them some sort of healing ability, you want to help them to feel comfortable with it and do it more gradually. He's developed a more subtle approach. I've had people who have long, long careers as healers, who have helped hundreds, if not thousands of people with the healing that they've done. And I've had them come to my lab, and I see no results from them. Wow. Zero. Yeah. That doesn't mean that these people are not doing healing. Okay. It means that what they're doing is not what I'm measuring. So I'm measuring something that is clearly a result of focus and, for some people, a result of healing intention. But other people are doing something else that we're not measuring in the light lab. And this is where we have the opportunity to learn more and explore more in these areas. So how many years have you been doing these experiments? Almost 15 years. Okay. And so you're interested in publishing your results, right? I've published results before. I haven't published my most recent study. Your most recent study. So you'll be doing that, I imagine, when you can. My next question for you is you had mentioned, again, when I was there a few weeks ago, the next step you wanted to take. And you mentioned that you had not just one photomultiplier, but another one. Right. In fact, I have two dark rooms. We have a duplicate of the exact equipment we have in one room. We have another room set up exactly the same way. And we're able to collect data from both of them simultaneously. The question that we have is we have brought these healers in. We've sometimes had the healers in the dark room with other people that they're treating. All we can measure is the amount of light in the room. We can't measure where it's coming from or where it's going. It's not like a photograph or a video. It's really just recording the amount of light, the quantity of light in the room. Well, my question is when someone is performing a healing or doing a treatment with another person, are they producing this light? And is the person who is receiving the healing or receiving the treatment, are they also producing light? Or will we see that light projected to them? Imagine you have two dark rooms that are in separate places. Light cannot travel from one to the other. Because in a dark room, light can't get in. It can't get out. So there's no light moving from one room to the other. But if we have a healer in one room, we have a patient in the other room, the question is will we see light in both places? If we do, then we know that the light is not traveling from one room to another in any physical form. It has to be a non-local effect. Which echoes almost perfectly the Pierce Pratt experiment. Well, it goes to that. It also goes to anything related to entanglement. Where we're talking about events happening in one place and events happening in another. But there doesn't seem to be a physical connection between them. We don't know what we're going to find. This is what we want to explore, though. This gives us the opportunity to explore this in two different locations. If we do demonstrate that healing is non-local and that we can actually measure this light in both places, that's an indication that energy is being transferred non-locally. That would be a pretty interesting finding if we were to get those results. What status are you in that research? Is it ongoing or do you hope to have any findings anytime soon? Or what is the status of that? We have both rooms set up. And we can run them simultaneously and record in both rooms. What my first step is, is to have somebody who is consistent. See if they can project light into one of the rooms from outside of the room. And then to have people in each room. We look for funding for this. It was not funded whenever we applied for grants. That's one of the things about this field. We have very little funding. It's always hard to find a research funding for parapsychology. But this is a very interesting topic. And I want to pursue it regardless of we have funding or not. Which means I have to find some volunteers who are willing to work with me. Who are able to do this. And so that's the stage I'm at now. And trying to coordinate the timing of it. I need someone who's able to produce the light in the room. And then one of the things we have to do is give them the confidence. Give them the idea that they can do this from a distance. Because a large part of it is belief. If people believe that these things can happen. Just like anything in your life. If you believe that it happens. It's more likely it's going to happen. I always use the metaphor of hitting a baseball. If I go up to bat and I think I'm not going to hit the ball. I'm not going to hit it. I'm going to miss it. I'm getting lucky. But if I believe I'm going to do it. I'm more likely to do it. And it's true not only in sports. But pretty much anything in your life. Does this have a connection to one of the popular buzzwords currently. Intention and manifestation. That we hear so much about these days. Yes. I definitely think so. Intention is just the desire to do something. We combine intention with expectation. Right. And then you have to put in the work to do it. So you can have an intention to do something. You can have an expectation it's going to happen. And then you actually give it the attention necessary to make it happen. If you combine those things. You're more likely to be successful. And you might say manifest the results that you're interested in. But I would not put this only related to PK or parapsychology. I would say pretty much any project that you do. Or anything that you decide to do. If you have the intention, the expectation, and you give it the attention that it needs. It's more likely to be successful. Is there any connection to Stanford Research Institute and Russell Targ and Hal Pudoff and their studies and research? I know, Russell. I've met Hal. Russell and I, our birthdays are just a couple days apart. So we talk about once a year, if not more often. They did a lot of work on remote viewing. Russell also was a physicist, a laser scientist, before he got into parapsychology, working with photomultiplier tubes. Right, right. Yeah. So Russell and I have had conversations about the physics and about the equipment as well. The work that they're doing, that they had done out there at SRI, a number of the people who were part of that program, including Joe McMonigle and Ed May and Paul Smith, have very close relationships with Orion. We are not currently doing any research in that area, but we have in the past. One thing that I always remembered Russell Targ saying, which I took to heart, and they also tried to employ the most scientific methodology in their studies and research. You know, there's been a lot of criticism about their approach and their methodology. You know, people saying it's not perfect and guarded a lot of criticism, but he said it wasn't so much the data they collected, at least what they heard back from their peers in this field. They said their methodology was as sound as it could be. They had a problem with the implications of the data and what it suggested, not so much the statistics and all that and the results. It's just, what does that imply? We're not ready to accept that. Is there any similar findings in your field and with your peers? Excellent question, Forrest. And, you know, we didn't really get into skepticism today. I would mention that if you're looking for information about parapsychology or Psy, instead go to the Psy encyclopedia. It provides more accurate information about these topics. When we approach the world from a materialistic paradigm, talking about particles hitting each other and this is how the world works. When we talk about consciousness as being derived from the brain and that it's an epiphenomena of brain activity, when we speak of things in this way, we can accomplish a lot in the world. We can build bridges. We can make trains, airplanes. We can do all kinds of things. Engineering works really well when we look at things from that perspective. But is it scientifically valid to describe the world in purely a materialistic way? This is what parapsychology is exploring. We are exploring phenomena that seems to violate the materialistic paradigm. Or it seems that we cannot determine a materialistic mechanism for it. So when we find phenomena like remote viewing, like people who are intentionally able to affect objects from a distance, energy healing occurring, or ESP of any sort, we cannot describe a physical mechanism that will make this happen. We can't describe a materialistic process that will cause these things to occur. That gives people problems who are stuck in the materialistic paradigm. I'm not denying the materialistic paradigm. You know, I come from a family of engineers. This is not, it's not unusual. It's very useful, very helpful. At the same time, it's not complete. Right. We have some phenomena that fall outside of it. And if we ignore that phenomena, we don't pay attention to it. We're never going to get a complete picture. We're never going to really know what's the underlying mechanism. This is where a lot of people are studying consciousness and manifestation. And for me, it's all about perception and our models, our psychological models that determine what we're going to perceive. We see things that we expect to see. And that's part of our modeling. Right, right. Jung talked about that quite a bit. As we've often talked about on the show, Scott and I, out of doing this 10 years and all the crazy topics and events, UFOs, dogmen, all these strange things that people have reported, even ghosts and Bigfoot, psy research, psychic ability, remote viewing seems to get probably the most pushback. Or certainly, it's one of the topics that gets the most pushback from people and criticism and disbelief. Why do you think that is? I think there's multiple reasons that this comes into play. One of them being the fact there are a lot of people who are faking it. Right. Who are pretending. And they're taking advantage of people who are vulnerable, oftentimes. In every field, you have people who are faking things. Yeah. In every field, you're going to have certain people who are pretending. And I mean, if you look at magicians, they're pretending magic is happening. They're not actually doing magic. They're pretending. And they're fooling people. They're fooling them using their perceptions. And so by looking at this, you can say, oh, well, people who take advantage of the vulnerable, giving them any legitimacy is going to hurt us as a people. People feel taken advantage of. And we don't want that. So that's one thing that people immediately say, oh, that's not real. I don't want to pay attention to it. On the other end, what I was just talking about a minute ago is that we're on the edges of science. People often will talk about what we study as edge science. Things that are beyond what the materialistic sciences can describe. And so because we can see these phenomena and we know that the human mind can fool itself really easily, psychologists are some of the people who object to parapsychology more than any other field. Theoretical physicists, they know that the world is uncertain and they know that they're trying to make sense of a big soup. And so they're more likely to accept parapsychology and the results we get. People in chemistry and biology, they're more likely because they understand the uncertainty. Psychologists, on the other hand, they know that we can fool ourselves and they believe that it's possible that what we're seeing is wishful thinking. They believe that we're fooling ourselves into believing something's real when it's not. But when they actually start to explore the data, psychologists who have come into the field and actually started to look at the data, skeptical, completely doubting that any of this is real, they see that there is legitimate science going on. This gives us a reason to continue. When we can see that we are doing good science, we're following the right protocol, I teach methodology. I teach analysis methods. This is the way that we continue to grow as a field, continuing to explore these phenomena that other people won't even acknowledge happens. John G. Kruth, we want to thank you so much for the time you spent with us today. I have loved this episode. I can already tell, even though we've done 300, this is going to be one of my favorites of all time. And I want to have you back. I don't want to take any more of your time, but I'm super interested in studying. I know in Dean Radin's book, he mentions, when you're mad at your computer, it's less likely to work. I want to know a whole lot more about that. I was really going to ask about that. But I think we have wrapped this up in a neat... Why don't you tell our listeners how they can maybe do online classes at the Rhine where they can find you guys, where they might also be able to participate in supporting the Rhine if they wanted to? The Rhine Research Center, we're a nonprofit organization. We're completely dependent upon donations and on memberships. And we provide research in the field. We also publish the Journal of Parapsychology, which is a peer-reviewed academic journal that's celebrating, I think it's 88 years now that we've been publishing this journal. We also have online courses. We don't teach people to be psyched, but we teach them about the field of parapsychology, teach them how to study these phenomena from a scientific perspective, how to explore it. Also, how to apply it, like, for example, with lucid dreaming, with field investigations, doing your own paranormal investigations, out-of-body experiences, remote viewing. And we explore them from different perspectives, from the liberal arts perspective, related to arts and nature, music and writing. So you can go to rhine.org, and you can see more about the Rhine and learn more about how you can help to support the Rhine and learn about the classes that we're teaching as well. We have courses running right now, and we run courses about four times a year, every quarter. Follow us on social media. You know, we're on Facebook, YouTube, X, and Blue Sky. We're in different places. You can find us. If you want, get on our mailing list at our website, and you'll see when we're offering new classes and when new things are happening. Please join us. Love to have you. Thank you guys for having me here today. I'm joining immediately. I feel guilty that I haven't done it already, so I'm going to take some classes. That's going to wrap up episode 310 of Astonishing Legends. A very special thanks to John G. Kruth. Visit rhine.org to get access to a ton of fascinating information on paranormal research and classes, or to help support the Institute with donations. That's R-H-I-N-E dot org. We're back next week with two more shows in a row. As always, look for new episodes of The Dead Letter Office weekly on Tuesdays. Astonishing Legends is edited by Sarah Voorhees-Wendell at VW Sound. Our co-producer is Tess Feifel, who also leads our research efforts and manages our social media. And we're grateful for the hard work of our technical producer, Ed Vakola, behind the scenes. Special thanks to our announcer, John Boland, for lending his voice to our shows. Hello, everyone. Hi, I'm Anna. Hi, I'm Frederick Steyer. And the name is Marcin. Hola, soy Anna. Entiendo que esto es sin una promesa implícita de compensación presente o futura. I live in Poland. This is with no implied promise of present or future compensation. Thank you guys for the show. I really love it. 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No part of this show may be reproduced anywhere without permission. Copyright Astonishing Legends Productions. Good night. Hello, hello. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of Smart Talks with IBM. I recently spoke with IBM's new director of research, Jake Embatta. We discussed his vision for the future of quantum computing. At IBM Research, what we always do is answer what is the future of computing. Whether it's coming up with new algorithms, coming up with better AI, coming up with quantum, or coming up with just how do different accelerators go together. It's our DNA to answer the question of what is the future. Isn't it a perfect problem for IBM because you kind of need to have a legacy of building stuff? Yes. Building actual physical machines. It's, yeah, it's why I came to IBM. I wanted the experience, the culture of building hard things that others have not done before. Where do you imagine we are in the timeline of this technology? There will come a point when it will mature, right? Yeah. My cell phone is a mature technology at this point. How far are we from that point with quantum? By 2029, we'll build the first fault-tolerant quantum computer. That is one that can run a very, very large, large problem. To learn how IBM is building the future of computing, visit ibm.com slash quantum. For delicious meals, you could go out to eat or spend hours in the kitchen. Or you could just make a Marie Callender's meal. Yeah, you heard me. Marie Callender's classic chicken parmigiana bowl is delicious with scratch-made marinara sauce, creamy mozzarella cheese, and no preservatives. It's high in protein with 30 grams per serving. Marie Callender's, what having it all tastes like. Ever notice that feeling your worst also seems to happen at the worst time in the worst places? Like sudden nausea at 9 p.m. when you're out of town. Really? Now? 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Before you get on the road for your next road trip, please put your phones on silent and take a mental note to focus on driving. Paid for by NHTSA. Hello, hello. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of Smart Talks with IBM. I recently spoke with IBM's new director of research, Jake Embatta. We discussed his vision for the future of quantum computing. At IBM Research, what we always do is answer what is the future of computing, whether it's coming up with new algorithms, coming up with better AI, coming up with quantum, or coming up with just how do different accelerators go together. It's our DNA to answer the question of what is the future. Isn't it a perfect problem for IBM because you kind of need to have a legacy of building stuff? Yes. Building actual physical machines. Yeah, it's why I came to IBM. I wanted the experience, the culture of building hard things that others have not done before. Where do you imagine we are in the timeline of this technology? There will come a point when it will mature, right? Yeah. My cell phone is a mature technology at this point. How far are we from that point with quantum? By 2029, we'll build the first fault-tolerant quantum computer. That is one that can run a very, very large, large problem. To learn how IBM is building the future of computing, visit ibm.com slash quantum. For delicious meals, you could go out to eat or spend hours in the kitchen. Or you could just make a Marie Callender's meal. Yeah, you heard me. Marie Callender's classic chicken parmigiana bowl is delicious with scratch-made marinara sauce, creamy mozzarella cheese, and no preservatives. It's high in protein with 30 grams per serving. Marie Callender's, what having it all tastes like. Ever notice that feeling your worst also seems to happen at the worst time in the worst places? Like sudden nausea at 9 p.m. when you're out of town. Really? Now? Fortunately, with Hartford HealthCare's HHC 24-7 app, you can get answers, diagnosis, prescriptions, even speak live with clinicians anytime, anywhere. So maybe there's never a good time to be sick, but at least the best care is always there. Download the app at your app store or hhc247.org. I didn't think the pain from the shingles rash would affect simple, everyday tasks like bathing, getting dressed, or even walking around. I was wrong. Though not everyone at risk will develop it, 99% of people over the age of 50 already have the virus that causes shingles, and it could reactivate at any time. I developed it, and the blistering rash lasted for weeks. Don't learn the hard way, like I did. Talk to your doctor or pharmacist today. Sponsored by GSK. I'm U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. We all seem to be in a rush these days, from work to driving our kids around. But when you're behind the wheel, please, do not speed. A few minutes saved by going faster is never worth the risk. So follow the speed limit, enjoy the drive, maybe bring some snacks for the kids, and know that along the way, you're getting quality time with your family. Paid for by NHTSA. Ever notice that feeling your worst also seems to happen at the worst time in the worst places? Like sudden nausea at 9 p.m. when you're out of town. Really? Now? Fortunately, with Hartford HealthCare's HHC 24-7 app, you can get answers, diagnosis, prescriptions, even speak live with clinicians anytime, anywhere. So maybe there's never a good time to be sick, but at least the best care is always there. Download the app at your app store or hhc247.org. Al llegar a los 50, ya había aprendido algunas cosas, como el valor de la familia, la importancia del trabajo y que el 99% de las personas de más de 50 ya tienen el virus que causa la culebrilla. Aunque no todas las personas en riesgo la desarrollarán, yo sí la sufrí. La erupción dolorosa con ampollas duró semanas, haciendo que incluso las tareas más simples sean todo un reto. No aprendas sobre la culebrilla de la manera difícil. Habla hoy con tu doctor o farmacéutico. Patrocinado por GSK. Hi, this is Danielle Robay, the host of Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club, a podcast by Hello Sunshine and iHeart Podcasts. I'm partnering with Simple Mills and I've just found my new go-to reading snack, Simple Mills Almond Flour Crackers. Think of this as a quick book style review because these crackers deserve it. The premise, a snack that feels light, not heavy, made with almond flour, sunflower seeds, and flax seeds. Nutrient-dense ingredients your body can use, not empty carbs. And the taste, crunchy classic flavors that leave you feeling energized. For a good plot twist, try Pop'em's. Cheesy, airy, poppable crackers packed with veggies. Final verdict, these are a shelf staple. Find Simple Mills at your grocery store.