Speaker 1: Hey everybody, today, we've got a special treat for you.
Speaker 1: This is a live episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
Speaker 1: recorded on Friday, October six that the Hudson Mercantile in
Speaker 1: New York. This was an event associated with New York
Speaker 1: Comic Con, not a part of the con, one of
Speaker 1: those adjacent happenings. We had a nice, friendly crowd come out.
Speaker 1: It was really good to see y'all. And uh so,
Speaker 1: without any further ado, here's the episode. Welcome to Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind from housetop work dot com. Hey everybody,
Speaker 1: how you doing? Hey, nice cozy crowd. Did everybody grab
Speaker 1: some some shirts or some buttons or shirts and buttons?
Speaker 1: Stuff is legit free. Yeah. In fact, we don't want
Speaker 1: to bring any of it back home, so grab more
Speaker 1: of it until there's none. You can't regift it for
Speaker 1: Christmas or Halloween. Car for Halloween. Yeah. So this is
Speaker 1: the Stuff to Blow your Own podcast. How many of
Speaker 1: you guys listen to this show? You know to expect Okay, cool,
Speaker 1: But who's a newbie here who's never heard us before?
Speaker 1: Get ready? The pressure is uncle I press you then,
Speaker 1: uh we're pretty weird. Um, we might make you uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: I hope you're who Who's Well, we'll get into this
Speaker 1: at the beginning. But yeah, so basically we're recording. This
Speaker 1: is gonna publish next week. Uh So we're gonna start
Speaker 1: the show like we normally do, and it's recording over there,
Speaker 1: and then we'll just proceed as normal and then hopefully
Speaker 1: afterwards we'll have a couple of minutes to hang out. Yeah, definitely, Okay, cool,
Speaker 1: all right, well let's kick it off. Hey, welcome to
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb,
Speaker 1: and I'm Christian Saga and I'm Joe McCormick. So if
Speaker 1: you are not familiar with us, if you're one of
Speaker 1: those newbies out there who raised your hand, we are
Speaker 1: the hosts of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast,
Speaker 1: which is a science podcast of the How Stuff Works
Speaker 1: office in Atlanta. The core of our show is science,
Speaker 1: but we take a pretty interdisciplinary approach, so we get
Speaker 1: into philosophy, religion, mythology, history, pop culture of course, and
Speaker 1: that's where we're going tonight. So, because we're here at
Speaker 1: the same time as New York Comic Con, how many
Speaker 1: of you are actually going to New York Comic Con?
Speaker 1: So a lot. Okay, we were worried. There was like
Speaker 1: confusion about whether or not you could come if you
Speaker 1: weren't a part of New York Comic Con. Yeah, were
Speaker 1: you confused? I was confused? All right, is anybody here
Speaker 1: in costume? No? Yeah? Okay, sort of okay, Um. So yeah,
Speaker 1: So we that we were doing this at the same
Speaker 1: times New York Comic Cons, So they were like, can
Speaker 1: you do something pop culture related? And we talked about
Speaker 1: it for a bit um and we decided, hey, how
Speaker 1: about the science of the show Stranger Things, because we
Speaker 1: have fans of Stranger Things out there. Yeah, let's dude,
Speaker 1: raise your hand if you have not seeing Stranger Things. Okay, Okay,
Speaker 1: we're gonna try. But we're gonna talk about how science
Speaker 1: relates to the show. We might drop a couple of things,
Speaker 1: because that's one of the really cool things about Stranger
Speaker 1: Things is that, you know, it's a fabulous show that's
Speaker 1: chock full of nostalgia, but they do a great job
Speaker 1: of bringing some science and some tantalizing pseudoscience, uh into
Speaker 1: the show, sometimes just as kind of window dressing, but
Speaker 1: but it adds to just the potency of the show. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we actually have a quote from a physics expert. Later
Speaker 1: on he spoke to them and basically said, those guys
Speaker 1: did their homework, so that that made it even more
Speaker 1: fun for us to cover this for an episode because
Speaker 1: there's a lot to dig into. Right. So season two
Speaker 1: is coming up. We're big fans of the show, so
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about a few subjects related to plot
Speaker 1: points in the show. We're going to be talking about
Speaker 1: Parallel Universe, is government psychic research, and the real life
Speaker 1: figure in the history of twentieth century science who we
Speaker 1: think inspired. Is it fair to say he's the favorite
Speaker 1: character of all three of us? Dr Brenner. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: played by the one and only Matthew Modine. Hey, do
Speaker 1: you guys remember when Matthew Modine used to follow us
Speaker 1: on Twitter? He did follow us on Twitter for like
Speaker 1: a week and a half and when that was like
Speaker 1: the highlight of our careers. Uh So, Matthew Modine followed us,
Speaker 1: and Robert and I did a high five, and then
Speaker 1: like maybe a month later he unfollowed us. And then
Speaker 1: a month after that, Stranger Things came out and we
Speaker 1: were like, what's going on here? We watched the show
Speaker 1: and we were like, wait a minute, Matthew Modine is
Speaker 1: playing John C. Lily in this and John C. Lily
Speaker 1: is one of our favorites, Like if you ever listened
Speaker 1: to the show, we bring him up pretty much every
Speaker 1: episode and we have a whole episode all about him. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we do. And some of you might be wondering who
Speaker 1: is John C. Lily? What does he look like? Well
Speaker 1: I'm gonna explain some of this, but also you all
Speaker 1: have tiny pocket computers in your possession. We will not
Speaker 1: be a finn did if you look up John C.
Speaker 1: Lily or if you need a refresher on what Doctor
Speaker 1: Brenner looks like, I will refresh you though. Uh. Doctor Brenner,
Speaker 1: of course, played by Matthew Mdeen. Silver hair, as you recall, glorious,
Speaker 1: glorious silver hair. Uh you know slim tank. Pardon his hair?
Speaker 1: Do you think it's natural? Oh? Yeah, silver, that's the
Speaker 1: actual color. Yeah. But Brenner, as he's uh presented in
Speaker 1: the show, he's obsessed with, I think, connecting with other minds.
Speaker 1: So for part of that show, it's connecting with human minds,
Speaker 1: and then it becomes more about connecting with these extra
Speaker 1: dimensional minds. Andy he initiates this contact with other people
Speaker 1: with extra dimensional beings through an isolation tank, a float
Speaker 1: tank and uh and and then uses that float tank
Speaker 1: to enhance Eleven's psychic powers. Okay, so give me the
Speaker 1: compare and contrast essay, how does that compare with the
Speaker 1: real John C. Lily? Okay, So for starters, John C.
Speaker 1: Lily invented the isolation tank. Everybody out there, if you've
Speaker 1: ever gone and floated somewhere, you can thank John C.
Speaker 1: Lily for bringing this into the world. In addition, he
Speaker 1: was a pioneer in the field of electronic brain and stimulation.
Speaker 1: He mapped the pain and pleasure pathways of the brain,
Speaker 1: and he founded an entire branch of science sixploring interspecies communication,
Speaker 1: mostly between humans and dolphins. He also got into a
Speaker 1: good bit of trouble with all that, but we'll touch
Speaker 1: on that a little bit later on. He also really
Speaker 1: dirty details, So you should you should listen to the
Speaker 1: episode that we did just right. We did an episode
Speaker 1: a year ago. I'll give you I'll give you a
Speaker 1: quick hint and then we'll just move on because we're
Speaker 1: not going to talk about this here. But it involves
Speaker 1: sexual relations with dolphins. And it's pretty great. Yeah, they're
Speaker 1: not really between Lily himself, but one of Lily at
Speaker 1: the time was too busy taking massive quantities that all
Speaker 1: us to be floating himself. He didn't have time for
Speaker 1: that stuff. Yeah, and and and using this experience to
Speaker 1: try and connect with the alien intelligence of dolphins. So
Speaker 1: we have these two, these two figures right and on
Speaker 1: again Brenner on the show is this, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: very well put together an old guy in the old
Speaker 1: fashioned suit. If you look up pictures of Lily, you
Speaker 1: will find images of a man and like an older
Speaker 1: man in brightly colored like loud shirts and sometimes the
Speaker 1: coon skin cap. He dresses up like he's like about
Speaker 1: to fight the Battle of the ALBUMO. Yeah. He he
Speaker 1: is dressed like you would expect a counter culture Timothy
Speaker 1: Leary esque figure to dress. And so you might say, well,
Speaker 1: Brenner doesn't look anything like that. What possible connection could
Speaker 1: there be? Well, I was looking at a two thousand
Speaker 1: sixteen interview with Observer dot Com, and Matthew Modine himself
Speaker 1: mentioned that the Duffer Brothers originally envisioned Brenner as quote,
Speaker 1: an unshaven man in jeans and plaid shirts. And then
Speaker 1: Modine worked with the Duffers to sort of flesh this
Speaker 1: out and change it. Uh. Modine says that he drew
Speaker 1: on elements from Anna Atome, Alfred Hitchcock, Carry Grant, and
Speaker 1: Lawrence Olivier and stuff to blow your mind. Well, he
Speaker 1: clearly clearly followed us on Twitter solely so that we
Speaker 1: could help him figure out how to dress for this
Speaker 1: TV show alleged. Allegedly, Uh, Matthew, are you here? No,
Speaker 1: I don't think he showed. Not yet. Well, hopefully by
Speaker 1: the help him in like him in might be late. Okay.
Speaker 1: The crazy part though, is that this this version of
Speaker 1: a lily S figure that we get on Stranger Things.
Speaker 1: He may not resemble that counterculture uh John C. Lily,
Speaker 1: but he definitely resembles the establishment John C. Lily that
Speaker 1: came before him. So there's like a John cy Lily
Speaker 1: arc where he first he's this buttoned up guy, and
Speaker 1: then later he becomes this cross between sort of like
Speaker 1: George Lucas in the seventies. And if you've ever seen
Speaker 1: the Mystery Science Theater episode Final Sacrifice, remember the old
Speaker 1: prospector Pepper Pepper. Yeah, yeah, he did kind of look
Speaker 1: like Pepper but when he was younger, he was just
Speaker 1: kind of this square looking but scary I will say,
Speaker 1: scary government scientists. Um, let me just take a minute
Speaker 1: to to roll through some of the uh, basically, the
Speaker 1: background of John C. Lily So. John C. Really earned
Speaker 1: his physics degree from cal Tech in ninety eight, his
Speaker 1: doctor in Medicine from the University of Pennsylvania nWo, and
Speaker 1: as a faculty member he studied biophysics and psychoanalysis at
Speaker 1: the University of Pennsylvania, and he was primarily interested in
Speaker 1: the physical structures of the brain and the seat of
Speaker 1: the conscious self. So even when he was before he
Speaker 1: got all um enlightened, uh, he was, he was still
Speaker 1: very interested in connecting with other minds. That was always
Speaker 1: this thing, whether it's physically or via the use of
Speaker 1: LSD later on. But despite the unorthodox nature of his research,
Speaker 1: he did do a fair amount of working for the man, right, Yes,
Speaker 1: a fair amount. Basically he wanted to pursue his own
Speaker 1: agenda and if the man was going to use him to,
Speaker 1: you know, to create ways to torment and and extract
Speaker 1: information from Cold World War spies, and he was on
Speaker 1: board until he started cutting up the brains of macaques
Speaker 1: and dolphins. Yeah. So he did this for about a
Speaker 1: decade working for the National Institutes of Mental Health or NIM. Uh.
Speaker 1: Did he make those really smart rats? Well, mostly he
Speaker 1: worked on maccaux uh. And he had he did a
Speaker 1: lot of invasive cortical visa section. So again, not already
Speaker 1: he's off to some kind of nefarious work. I think
Speaker 1: a lot of us would agree. He had a pretty
Speaker 1: high security clearance. J Edgar Hoover allegedly knew him by name,
Speaker 1: and his projects that he was involved with included reprogramming
Speaker 1: or brainwashing, sleep deprivation, and the operant control of animals
Speaker 1: via wires and planted in their brain. Yeah. So some
Speaker 1: pretty scary stuff. And according to de Graham Burnett's excellent
Speaker 1: O Ryan article A Mind and Water, Lily's unpublished paper
Speaker 1: Special Considerations of Modified Human Agents as reconnaiss sen and
Speaker 1: Intelligence Devices UH included this quote. Uh he wrote of
Speaker 1: quote A Coort Covort, he wrote a covert and relatively
Speaker 1: safe implantation of electrodes into the human brain for the
Speaker 1: quote push button control of the totality of motivation and
Speaker 1: of consciousness. So, but just to be clear here, he
Speaker 1: didn't put electrodes in the brain of eleven year old
Speaker 1: girls with shaped heads. Uh, there's no arts that he actually,
Speaker 1: you know, did any of this to human being, But
Speaker 1: he was he was up for it. If if I think,
Speaker 1: if he would have been given me okay, is like
Speaker 1: you feel like putting an implant in somebody's brain this weekend, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he would have been. He would have been game because
Speaker 1: you really get the impression that he was. He was
Speaker 1: all in on anything scary the government wanted him to
Speaker 1: do so long as it, you know, pursued his interest
Speaker 1: in connecting with other minds. This ended up leading him
Speaker 1: to conducting some experimentation with dolphins in Florida, and it
Speaker 1: was here where he began to have this empathic connection
Speaker 1: with dolphins. He began to like, he performed a vivisection
Speaker 1: on on a dolphin, and due to some of the
Speaker 1: quirks of dolphin physiology, you could not actually put the
Speaker 1: dolphin under for this, so it was like a live,
Speaker 1: conscious davisection of the dolphin's brain. And this this had
Speaker 1: a profound impact on Lily. He ended up going down
Speaker 1: this path um of promoting the welfare of dolphins, promoting
Speaker 1: the the higher intelligence of dolphins. So he really he
Speaker 1: really helped bring about a cultural shift in how we
Speaker 1: perceive this animal, that it's not just another dumb animal
Speaker 1: in the water, but it's something that we should we
Speaker 1: should value, that we should protect even and we wouldn't
Speaker 1: have we wouldn't have Flipper if it were not for
Speaker 1: John C. Lily. So actually, this is a good point.
Speaker 1: I probably should have brought this up earlier. But there
Speaker 1: are two movies that you've probably seen that are very
Speaker 1: heavily based on John C. Lily's life, the first of
Speaker 1: which is Altered States. Uh, and we'll talk more about
Speaker 1: that later when we get into the isolation to banks.
Speaker 1: But has anybody seen the film The Day of the
Speaker 1: Dolphin with George C. Scott? No one, Scotts all right,
Speaker 1: so this isn't you go find it. This is a
Speaker 1: movie where George C. Scott essentially plays John C. Lily
Speaker 1: and he teaches dolphins to talk and and to love
Speaker 1: and to love. Yeah, so like they call him fa
Speaker 1: he's their father and they say things like fall loves pa. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's great. Go watch it if you want to see
Speaker 1: George C. Scott just hanging out with dolphins. But the
Speaker 1: other thing that we wouldn't have without him. He didn't.
Speaker 1: He didn't influence this movie in terms of that it
Speaker 1: was about him. But the creature from the Black Lagoons, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the guy who played the creature worked on Flipper and
Speaker 1: worked with John C. Lily while he was down in Florida,
Speaker 1: So yeah we can. We can thank him for the creature.
Speaker 1: And I would argue that if if anyone ever gets
Speaker 1: around to actually remaking the creature from the Black Lagoon,
Speaker 1: they should. They should take inspiration from John C. Lily
Speaker 1: story and from Altered States and use that to bring
Speaker 1: us a proper creature film. Yeah, you get a creature
Speaker 1: from the lack Black Lagoon with LSD and isolation tanks
Speaker 1: and dolphins throwing some dolphins. I'm on board. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it'd be great Instead of like Tom Cruise running around,
Speaker 1: I want to just doing exposition for thirty minutes. Wait,
Speaker 1: so I have a question about y'all's predictions for Stranger Things.
Speaker 1: Do you think in upcoming seasons we're going to see
Speaker 1: Matthew Modine's character follow the same arc as John C.
Speaker 1: Lily throughout his life, So will he coming back? He'll
Speaker 1: come back in future seasons Hawaiian shirts, Beard long ponytail
Speaker 1: gained a significant amount of weight doing you know LSD
Speaker 1: orgies and stuff. Yeah, I hope, so, I hope by
Speaker 1: season four he is is wearing the coonskin hat and
Speaker 1: and helping the kids out. So I didn't think about this,
Speaker 1: but I mean, you know, this is a ending was
Speaker 1: left open. Let's put it that way. Maybe he's from
Speaker 1: a parallel universe, this other Matthew Modine. Oh my goodness,
Speaker 1: we could have multiple um doctor Brenners in one versions
Speaker 1: of Brenner and Lily together at once. I like it
Speaker 1: floating in a tank taking LSD. Thank So I want
Speaker 1: to shift now to explore a different element of stranger things,
Speaker 1: which is of course the government psychic research being conducted
Speaker 1: at Hawkins Laboratory, Hawkins National Lab. I think in the
Speaker 1: show that they say is being carried out by the
Speaker 1: Department of Energy. Uh so I want I'm gonna put
Speaker 1: you in a scenario. See if you can go into
Speaker 1: this place with your mind. Imagine you are a Defense
Speaker 1: Department analyst in about the spring of nineteen seventy and
Speaker 1: so you're just gonna be washed head to toe in
Speaker 1: cold war paranoia. You've heard these rumors about a secret
Speaker 1: electronic warfare device saimed at the American embassy in Moscow,
Speaker 1: And there are also these rumors about weird LSD mind
Speaker 1: control experiments going on over at c I A. You
Speaker 1: get the sense that we're in an age of unconventional
Speaker 1: war are fair, where these strange new technologies are going
Speaker 1: to change the balance of power across the globe and
Speaker 1: you don't want to fall behind. Sounds like right now, Yeah,
Speaker 1: except I guess a little less focused on like social media,
Speaker 1: and you know it's Facebook for drones and more on
Speaker 1: like controlling people's minds and killing people with electronics with
Speaker 1: electromagnetic beams. Well, the thing is in an age before
Speaker 1: social media, Like let me, social media is kind of
Speaker 1: this weird and sorcery that connects all of these minds together.
Speaker 1: And before you had that, you the only thing you
Speaker 1: had was the possibility, however distant of of psychic communication, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, why would we need to do psychic research
Speaker 1: now when you can just get in somebody's news feed? Yeah? Anyway,
Speaker 1: I mean sadly, I mean the research is it's remarkably
Speaker 1: cold alter someone's mind through I mean, not in a
Speaker 1: science fictional way, but in a very very scary real
Speaker 1: way that went to a scary place. Okay, now let's
Speaker 1: go back to the Cold War where it's fine. So
Speaker 1: you're this analyst in nineteen seventy. One of your superiors
Speaker 1: calls you in for a meeting in a secured room.
Speaker 1: There is a projector screen and somebody puts up. Somebody
Speaker 1: gets a film going, and a title card announces that
Speaker 1: the following experiment took place at the Oktomski Military Institute
Speaker 1: in Leningrad on March tenth of this year. Then you
Speaker 1: see a forty something woman, big bun of dark hair.
Speaker 1: She seated at a table, and next to her is
Speaker 1: a man identified as Ganadi Sergeyev, who is a military
Speaker 1: Soviet military physician, and seated uh so on the table
Speaker 1: in front of the woman. Somebody comes in and they
Speaker 1: set down a small jar containing a throbbing black lump.
Speaker 1: It's a frog's heart and it's still beating now. The
Speaker 1: film explains that the extracted amphibian heart has been placed
Speaker 1: in what's known as Ringer's solution. It's a solution of
Speaker 1: salts that can keep muscles pumping even after they've been
Speaker 1: separated from circulation. Uh, and from their electrical stimuli in
Speaker 1: the body. It's kind of like how if you if
Speaker 1: you ever seen the trick where you salt frog's legs,
Speaker 1: they'll start to twitch um. And it's known that the
Speaker 1: Ringer's solution can keep a frog's heart beating, usually for
Speaker 1: about an hour. The heart is connected by wires to
Speaker 1: an electro cardiogram and e KG and so is the
Speaker 1: woman seated at the table, and then Dr Sergeyev tells
Speaker 1: her to begin. So the woman puts her hands on
Speaker 1: the table and she glares at the beating frog heart,
Speaker 1: and her heart rate increases and her blood pressure increases.
Speaker 1: And the film also claims that quote heightened biological luminescence
Speaker 1: radiated from her eyes, which I can imagine that she
Speaker 1: was doing the like psychic powers thing, like holding her
Speaker 1: temples really heard and squinting, but you know, her eyes glowed,
Speaker 1: that's what they say. I mean, it's hard to tell
Speaker 1: in black and white, right, But anyway, after about seven
Speaker 1: minutes of this just staring at this throbbing black lump,
Speaker 1: the frog's heart abruptly seizes and stops beating. Then she
Speaker 1: does it with a second frog heart when yeah, so
Speaker 1: they bringing another. Somebody's got an ice cream scoop back there,
Speaker 1: and they're just going to town on the table. I
Speaker 1: think a melon baller would be more appropriate. I think
Speaker 1: you can really get him there with the Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so she's I don't know what frogs did to her,
Speaker 1: but she's she's killing the hearts and I guess the
Speaker 1: frogs probably don't mind at this point. But next she
Speaker 1: turns her attention to what's identified as a skeptical doctor
Speaker 1: in the room, and he doesn't believe any of this,
Speaker 1: but she concentrates on raising his heart rate telekinetically, and
Speaker 1: this goes on for about five minutes before Dr Sergeyev,
Speaker 1: the attending physician he steps in, says the experiments becoming
Speaker 1: too dangerous and he calls it to a halt. This
Speaker 1: sounds like scanners. It's going to scan everyone in this room. Yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: It also sounds like such an obvious trick. It's such
Speaker 1: an obvious performance. It seems a little over the top. Right,
Speaker 1: we're bringing so buddy who doesn't believe, will show him anyway.
Speaker 1: This woman didn't explode. Yeah, this woman really existed. Her
Speaker 1: name was Nil Coolaghina, also sometimes mistakenly known as Nina Coolaghina.
Speaker 1: Her life was truly remarkable in some ways. Cool Agana
Speaker 1: was born in Leningrad in nine She enlisted in the
Speaker 1: Red Army along with the rest of her family when
Speaker 1: she was fourteen, and she served as a tank radio
Speaker 1: operator on the Eastern Front of World War Two and
Speaker 1: was awarded the Soviet Military merit metal. Can you just imagine,
Speaker 1: It's like when you were fourteen, were you ready to
Speaker 1: get in a tank and fight Nazis? It's like, it's Nazis.
Speaker 1: You know your fourteen get in the tank, let's go. Yes,
Speaker 1: that is exactly how much held. No, No, I can't
Speaker 1: Did she drive the tank psychically? I don't think so.
Speaker 1: I think she operated the radio, But she did believe
Speaker 1: that she'd been psychic since childhood, so who knows if
Speaker 1: it played into her military career. But she only killed
Speaker 1: the hearts of German frogs. I don't know the answer
Speaker 1: to that. Christian uh so anyway, Uh yeah, So she
Speaker 1: she's had this career and in the nineteen sixties, after
Speaker 1: the war's over, cool againa She makes a name for
Speaker 1: herself again when she shows up on Russian state TV
Speaker 1: performing these demonstrations of psycho kinesis. Where they'd like, have
Speaker 1: a big glass box it's all sealed off, and somebody
Speaker 1: put a salt shaker or something inside it, and she'd
Speaker 1: stare at it and then move it with her mind,
Speaker 1: or so they claimed. Uh, Now, everything I just described
Speaker 1: to you cool Aghina, the frog Heart tape, that's all real. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's at some point the Defense Department really did have
Speaker 1: analysts investigate this psychic kill tape. The question is, of course,
Speaker 1: what's going on in the film. Uh, if you're this
Speaker 1: hypothetical analyst in nineteen seventy, what do you do? Obviously,
Speaker 1: if if you're like me and I think like us,
Speaker 1: generally you assume, well, this is probably some kind of hoax.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm not personally very keen on the existence
Speaker 1: of psychic powers. Either she's some kind of skilled illusionist
Speaker 1: hoaxing the Russians or the Russia and stage the whole
Speaker 1: thing as a hoax on us, trying to trick us
Speaker 1: into wasting money on parallel research. If that was the case,
Speaker 1: it worked, it worked. So yeah, if even if you
Speaker 1: are skeptical of what's going on, there are going to
Speaker 1: be people in the room with you who say, well,
Speaker 1: we can't be sure and we sure as hell can't
Speaker 1: allow us psychic assassin gap, So bring on the age
Speaker 1: of psychic research. Actually, the funny thing is some amount
Speaker 1: of paranormal research had already been being funded by the
Speaker 1: government of the United States since at least going back
Speaker 1: to the nineteen fifties. There had been interested in it
Speaker 1: at CIA and UH and in a few places here
Speaker 1: and there. But it was in the early nineteen seventies
Speaker 1: that the psychic research really got underway. Well, this, this
Speaker 1: is when we really got to the point where the
Speaker 1: government could throw just tons of cash down the well
Speaker 1: after it, right right, Yes, So yeah, rich country worried
Speaker 1: about weapons gaps, worried about falling behind in this technology
Speaker 1: race I described up at the beginning. Everybody's paranoid about
Speaker 1: the Russians getting an edge, so they're like, well, we
Speaker 1: might as well train some psychic spies and assassins and
Speaker 1: see if it works. Do you think we have something
Speaker 1: like that going on now? But it's like a social
Speaker 1: media assassination gap. I don't want to. But the crazy
Speaker 1: thing about the psychic research is we know it continued
Speaker 1: until at least the nineteen nineties and maybe even later.
Speaker 1: That's pretty cool. Right, like some people in here we're
Speaker 1: alive then yeah. Anyway, So in Stranger Things, we've got
Speaker 1: this plot element of the character played by Millie Bobby Brown.
Speaker 1: Of course eleven. She's the product of government psychic research.
Speaker 1: And if you want to know whether psychic powers are real,
Speaker 1: I can't answer that for you. If you're interested in
Speaker 1: my opinion, I'm extremely doubtful. But if you're interested in
Speaker 1: whether the US government really did psychic research projects like
Speaker 1: the kind we see in Stranger Things, the answer is
Speaker 1: pretty much absolutely yes. They did stuff like that, not
Speaker 1: so much with kidnapped children, and they did it with
Speaker 1: consenting adults who claimed to be psychics. But all all
Speaker 1: the types of experiments we see are mirrored by real,
Speaker 1: real life research. So um, I want to talk briefly
Speaker 1: about a couple kinds of science psychic research that we're
Speaker 1: done by the government. Research on psychokinesis, which of course
Speaker 1: was being able to move things with your mind, and
Speaker 1: then research on remote viewing, which is seeing without the eyes.
Speaker 1: And I should also mention a couple of books that,
Speaker 1: if you want to go deeper on this subject, were
Speaker 1: also important sources for me when I was working on this.
Speaker 1: If you just want to slim and hilarious investigation into
Speaker 1: a grab bag of government paranormal research. John Ronson's two
Speaker 1: thousand four book The Men Who Stare At Goats is
Speaker 1: excellent and full of really funny stuff. This is the
Speaker 1: one upon which the movie is based, right, yes, exactly. Uh,
Speaker 1: though there's a lot of stuff in the book. I
Speaker 1: think that doesn't make it into the movie. For a
Speaker 1: more detailed history of US government psychic research programs, you
Speaker 1: can check out a book just published this year called
Speaker 1: Phenomena by the journalist Annie Jacobson. This book is great
Speaker 1: for all the interviews and historical documents she pulls together. Uh,
Speaker 1: though I do want to warn you that she takes
Speaker 1: kind of a believers line on it. Like I think
Speaker 1: she is far too generous to the possible existence of
Speaker 1: psychic psychic phenomena and generally has the attitude that ESP
Speaker 1: is real and these experiments prove it. That's surprising given
Speaker 1: her her pedigree. Well, it's a good history either way.
Speaker 1: I mean, we all want to live in that world.
Speaker 1: But I mean, when it comes down to it, like,
Speaker 1: nobody has has taken James Randy up on his million
Speaker 1: dollar prize, right, and he gets kind of rough treatment
Speaker 1: in this book. James Randy, if you're not familiar with him,
Speaker 1: is a stage magician, illusion illusionist who is a big
Speaker 1: antagonist of all these people who claim to be real psychics.
Speaker 1: And he's like, for years he did this thing where
Speaker 1: he had lots of money set aside for anybody who
Speaker 1: could come demonstrate the reality of psychic powers or esp
Speaker 1: or telekinesis anything like that under controlled laboratory conditions, And
Speaker 1: a lot of times what people would say it was like, oh,
Speaker 1: oh wait a minute, if if there are skeptical scientists
Speaker 1: who don't believe in my powers present, they won't work.
Speaker 1: I wish I could use that superpower limitation. Can you
Speaker 1: imagine saying that in a job interview? Or or what
Speaker 1: if like of all X men can only use their
Speaker 1: powers in the positive environment? Yeah right, so yeah, man,
Speaker 1: school would be rough and they all live in a school.
Speaker 1: Uh So. A lot of the government funded psychic research
Speaker 1: of the kind like we see in Stranger Things. It
Speaker 1: took place at a think tank in northern California called
Speaker 1: the Stanford Research Institute or s r I, especially starting
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy two and in nineteen seventy two, s
Speaker 1: r I was the second largest research institute working for
Speaker 1: the Defense Department. Number one, of course, was the Rand Corporation.
Speaker 1: I found out not actually named after Iron Rand kind
Speaker 1: of a disappointment. Is named after Danny Rand from Iron
Speaker 1: Fist because everybody like that Netflix show. So did you
Speaker 1: say he actually has has a corporation? Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: we're talking about this earlier. Does anybody know if the
Speaker 1: guy who created iron Fist was just like a huge
Speaker 1: fan of Atlas Shrugged. We couldn't figure it out. We
Speaker 1: thought we maybe we'd ask around, Okay, anyways, without checking
Speaker 1: that out for us anyway. So yeah, So the the
Speaker 1: sr I was doing all this research, and it had
Speaker 1: been it had been founded right after World War two,
Speaker 1: so it had been around for a while before it
Speaker 1: got deep into the psychic research. But this was a
Speaker 1: serious government think tank that did real research. They got
Speaker 1: budgets reaching up to like seventy million dollars a year.
Speaker 1: That's in like nineteen seventies dollars, So some real money
Speaker 1: is going into this kind of stuff. And a major
Speaker 1: figure in this history, especially at s r I, is
Speaker 1: a guy named Harold how put Off. Now how put
Speaker 1: Off was an sr I reach researcher who had worked
Speaker 1: on laser physics, and he'd done these n s A
Speaker 1: supercomputer projects in the past, and the early nineteen seventies
Speaker 1: put Off really interested in research about psychic powers in plants.
Speaker 1: So there was this guy named Grover Cleveland Cleve Baxter.
Speaker 1: Grover Cleveland, Cleve Baxter, like Cleve. Did he rename himself
Speaker 1: or did his parents? Just like? I think it was
Speaker 1: just his name. What I love about this name is
Speaker 1: that it sounds like one of the fake NFL player
Speaker 1: or is it college football player names from the Keen
Speaker 1: Pel Peel sketch, you know where they all have ridiculous names. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Cleve Grover Cleveland Cleve Baxter that I'm going to just
Speaker 1: start adding Cleve Baxter after minor Well, it makes me
Speaker 1: think of Clive Barker, right, so it's like Clive Barker,
Speaker 1: Clive Barker. Yeah. So this guy was essentially he wanted
Speaker 1: to make psychic plants cineambites. Really not quite okay, so
Speaker 1: let me get there. Baxter was a former CIA employee
Speaker 1: who used to administer poly tests for the agency. He
Speaker 1: was not probably not a cool guy. He was the
Speaker 1: kind of guy who like hook up new agents to
Speaker 1: a polygraph and ask them questions like have you ever
Speaker 1: smoked the marijuana? Are you a homosexual? And stuff like that.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen fifties, um and so, one night, after
Speaker 1: hooking his lie detector machine up to a house plant,
Speaker 1: he became convinced that plants could read our minds. Do
Speaker 1: you think he was just bored and just sort of
Speaker 1: going around the house and hooking up various things like
Speaker 1: the nightstand and to punch bowl, and then oh, let's
Speaker 1: try the fern. See what happens. It's impossible to know
Speaker 1: for sure, but I think it's the opposite. I think
Speaker 1: he was more like manic and trying to find any
Speaker 1: kind of thing to do. And he just saw the
Speaker 1: lie detector machine, saw the house plant, put two and
Speaker 1: two together, and made and set a plant on fire
Speaker 1: to see if it would, you know, communicate with him psychically. Anyway,
Speaker 1: he did worse than set it on fire, right, Wait? What? No? No?
Speaker 1: Come next? Okay, So so this other guy from SR
Speaker 1: how put off, So he got interested in this guy
Speaker 1: Cleave call me Cleave Baxter's research, and put Off proposed
Speaker 1: an experiment where he would grow an allergy culture and
Speaker 1: then split it in half and then separate the two
Speaker 1: cultures by five miles and then torture one of the
Speaker 1: algae cultures with lasers to see if the other one
Speaker 1: would respond. This is the thing that blows my mind
Speaker 1: that he had lasers to do it with, Like he
Speaker 1: didn't just set it on fire, I don't know, punch
Speaker 1: the algae like. He was a laser researcher. He'd done
Speaker 1: lasers up and down, so he just had lasers laying
Speaker 1: around detecting machine. The lasers make it more science, I guess. Okay,
Speaker 1: I see because because his methodology section in the paper. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it ends. It lends a layer. Layer lends an air
Speaker 1: of credibility if you're doing defense research right well, you know,
Speaker 1: and if the lasers were not involved, it is. It
Speaker 1: is a lot like, for instance, the power the powder
Speaker 1: of sympathy, which we covered on the podcast. The supposed
Speaker 1: idea that that you could you could put a magic
Speaker 1: powder on a blade that it wounded a dog and
Speaker 1: it would make the dog yelp halfway around the world
Speaker 1: and you could use this to uh navigate your sailing vessel.
Speaker 1: This is a good thing to point out because a
Speaker 1: lot of this research that was actually done in these
Speaker 1: labs throughout the twentieth century sounds a lot like magical
Speaker 1: potions and occult beliefs from like the eighteenth and nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: except they've just sort of like put some science e
Speaker 1: sounding words in there, but the principles are the same. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so here's your science e sounding words. Pudof was
Speaker 1: interested in whether a hypothetical particle in physics called a
Speaker 1: tach eon could explain psychic communication between plants and humans.
Speaker 1: Take eon is a hypothetical particle. Nobody's ever seen it before.
Speaker 1: But if it existed, what it would be is a
Speaker 1: particle that always moves faster than light. So no particle
Speaker 1: with mass in our universe can move up, can accelerate
Speaker 1: up to the speed of light. Attack eon would be
Speaker 1: something that could never decelerate down to the speed of light. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so he thought, yeah, maybe that's involved in psychic
Speaker 1: phenomena anyway. Now this is where John Carpenter got the idea.
Speaker 1: I assumed to have tachians communicate with people's dreams in
Speaker 1: the past of darkness. What a great movie, the best
Speaker 1: movie ever to feature a jar of satan. Okay, so
Speaker 1: back to put Out put Off got in touch with Baxter,
Speaker 1: and through being in touch with Baxter, he got to
Speaker 1: know this guy who is an artist and a writer
Speaker 1: and a self proclaimed psychic named Ingo Swan. And this
Speaker 1: where are these names coming from? These are real names, man.
Speaker 1: This guy sounds like like a villain in a Ghostbusters movie. Ingo. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like he made the tower that will bring forth the
Speaker 1: giant slore. Yeah. Yeah. He has like a book all
Speaker 1: about like the book of Ingo Swan. Well, this guy
Speaker 1: apparently did he would like dress himself in old like
Speaker 1: religious clothes. He found it second hand stores and stuff
Speaker 1: like that. But I don't know, I kind of admire
Speaker 1: that part of him, and it's like, yeah, you just
Speaker 1: do you man well, And it sounds like you want
Speaker 1: to wear a priest outfit, go for it. He sounds
Speaker 1: like he was a showman too. And that's what we
Speaker 1: keep seeing time and time again with these examples. As
Speaker 1: you have you have scientists and some showman and uh,
Speaker 1: and the scientists don't realize that what they have as
Speaker 1: a showman exactly. So put Off in put Off in
Speaker 1: excuse me, Swan, Ingo Swan. They have this meeting, and
Speaker 1: this meeting kicks off this wave of paranormal research at
Speaker 1: the s r I that will continue throughout the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1: So Ingo Swan, he was this self proclaimed psychic. He
Speaker 1: said he had esp he said he could do psychokinesis,
Speaker 1: and put off In Collies claimed that Ingo Swan demonstrated
Speaker 1: all kinds of powers under test conditions that could not
Speaker 1: have been faked. For example, they claimed that he was
Speaker 1: able to demonstrate unexplainable psychokinesis, such as when he used
Speaker 1: his mind to perturb a magnetometer inside a quark detector
Speaker 1: buried under the basement of a research facility on Stanford
Speaker 1: University campus. And this led put On, I mean it,
Speaker 1: that's incredible. If he could actually do that, if the
Speaker 1: story is true, Wow, that's your mind. Yeah, I mean yeah.
Speaker 1: So in the show we see these these experiments where
Speaker 1: they're trying to get her to maybe kill a rabbit
Speaker 1: in a cage or crush a coke can, which she
Speaker 1: successfully does with the coke can. But yeah, this is
Speaker 1: something that you couldn't fake. It would be dealing with
Speaker 1: this thing deep underground, and the people at this experiment
Speaker 1: claimed that he did it. Now, as as I've implied before,
Speaker 1: I'm doubtful about the truth of these claims, but that's
Speaker 1: what they said. They said, Wow, he moved this thing
Speaker 1: and there's no way he could have faked it. So
Speaker 1: this lad put off in a colleague named Russell targ
Speaker 1: Uh and a list of other sort of revolving collaborators
Speaker 1: to work for years with defense and intelligence grants to
Speaker 1: study psychic phenomena through the sr I. And then later
Speaker 1: there were all these derivative programs in in the following decades, like,
Speaker 1: for example, there was a remote viewing program run out
Speaker 1: of the Army out of Fort Mead, Maryland. Now a
Speaker 1: lot of this research would end up focusing on the
Speaker 1: sp phenomenon known as remote viewing that we mentioned earlier.
Speaker 1: That's see stuff you wouldn't be able to see with
Speaker 1: your own eyes, and we see examples of this and
Speaker 1: stranger things exactly. That's exactly what they're trying to do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like go to Russia and look at this guy and
Speaker 1: tell us what he's saying. Those were the kinds of
Speaker 1: experiments people wanted to do. In general. The most common
Speaker 1: form through throughout the end of after the first year
Speaker 1: or so, if this was what came to be known
Speaker 1: as coordinate remote viewing experiments. So that would work like
Speaker 1: this psychic is given a set of map coordinates, then
Speaker 1: the psychic would say what they saw there at the map,
Speaker 1: at the at the place on the map. You can
Speaker 1: see maybe a few ways that this could be a
Speaker 1: little bit flawed as an experimental design, right, like if
Speaker 1: somebody went to go get a map and look and
Speaker 1: see what was there and then do some reading about it.
Speaker 1: But there are some cases where the researchers again insisted
Speaker 1: like no, no, no, there's no way they could have
Speaker 1: done that. Uh, it's absolutely real. But I want to
Speaker 1: give one example. So there was a remote viewer named
Speaker 1: Pat Price, who was kind of normal name here, right.
Speaker 1: He was famous for these amazingly detailed remote viewing results. Now,
Speaker 1: Price was born a Mormon, but he became a scientologist
Speaker 1: in the nineteen sixties and he claimed that it was
Speaker 1: in the Church of Scientology that his powers were brought forth.
Speaker 1: I guess he was having a session with the E
Speaker 1: meter and all that, and he gained the power to
Speaker 1: see things at long distances by radioactive E meter. How
Speaker 1: he got recruited as a pretty good story, but often
Speaker 1: Swan met him in the parking lot of a farm
Speaker 1: where they were buying the office Christmas tree. Price sold
Speaker 1: them a Christmas tree, and then they recruited him for
Speaker 1: c I A Remote viewing experiments UH. In one case,
Speaker 1: he supposedly was able to use remote viewing to give
Speaker 1: intricate detailed descriptions of the inside of a restricted n
Speaker 1: S A base called Sugar Grove in West Virginia. Price
Speaker 1: was also known for the remote viewing of details of
Speaker 1: the Soviet facility in Kazakhstan known as u r d
Speaker 1: F three for Unidentified Research and Development Facility three and
Speaker 1: UH Price he drew illustrations of this gantry gantry crane
Speaker 1: that were determined to be very similar to something that
Speaker 1: was actually photographed at the facility, and internal analysis concluded
Speaker 1: that he couldn't have done this. And I'm going to
Speaker 1: caveat this in a second, but they say he couldn't
Speaker 1: have done this unless either he actually saw it through
Speaker 1: remote viewing or he was informed of what to draw
Speaker 1: by someone knowledgeable of u r d F three. Now,
Speaker 1: I think maybe there could have been other possibilities. But
Speaker 1: even if you only accept those two possibilities, you've got
Speaker 1: to wonder about the second one. And many people in
Speaker 1: these research circles did start to wonder like, could his
Speaker 1: source of information be the disinformation arm of the KGB.
Speaker 1: Could some of these psychics giving us this information be
Speaker 1: feeding us disinformation running psy ops basically on our own programs.
Speaker 1: But they didn't They didn't consider like maybe that he
Speaker 1: was doing like a cold reading. Oh, I mean that
Speaker 1: that's a whole other question. Cold reading, of course, is
Speaker 1: the technique of you know, looking for Q who is
Speaker 1: in the person you're talking to. It's a mentalism trick
Speaker 1: and also playing you're also playing off their expectations of
Speaker 1: your knowledge too. Yes, uh yeah, So so that's a
Speaker 1: way of using people's reactions to the things you're saying
Speaker 1: to give the impression that you're getting information that that
Speaker 1: you couldn't possibly have. And really what you're doing is
Speaker 1: getting sort of hits and miss verification through their body
Speaker 1: language and their eyes and and little things they mentioned
Speaker 1: that they don't realize they've they've given up. Uh so, yeah,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of questions about what went on there,
Speaker 1: But I want to mention a couple other examples of
Speaker 1: government psychics who were doing this kind of stuff along
Speaker 1: the lines that we see eleven doing in the show.
Speaker 1: Have you ever seen the performer Uri Geller, who here
Speaker 1: is familiar with Uri Geller? Yeah, I think he didn't.
Speaker 1: He he's like a guy who would appear in Carson.
Speaker 1: He's the Israeli guy who's been spoons. So he claims
Speaker 1: to be a psychic, and he his biggest act in
Speaker 1: his career was he would get a spoon and he'd
Speaker 1: use psychokinesis, so he claimed to bend it. I don't
Speaker 1: know what spoons ever did him, why he hates spoons
Speaker 1: so much. She's been you know, thousands of spoons in
Speaker 1: his career, and people seem to think this is really impressive. Uh.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people who are only a
Speaker 1: little bit familiar with him don't realize that he he
Speaker 1: claims his powers are real. You know. He's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm a real psychic. I'm not an illusionist. This is
Speaker 1: not an act. But so, Ri Geller was tested extensively
Speaker 1: by the s r I in the nineteen seventies with
Speaker 1: these experiments like What's in the Box where they'd have
Speaker 1: a box and they'd roll a die in the Yeah.
Speaker 1: But here's the question. So Gwyneth Paltrow's head isn't there
Speaker 1: which side of it is facing up? Is it or
Speaker 1: left ear? Is it the bloody stump of the neck.
Speaker 1: And that's what he would have to get. Yeah, which
Speaker 1: side of the die is facing up? Another one would
Speaker 1: be like can you look inside sealed aluminum film canisters
Speaker 1: and say what's there? Is it ball bearings? Is it magnets?
Speaker 1: And uh? And of course again we have these stories
Speaker 1: by the people conducting the experiments, like put Off and
Speaker 1: targ that he was able to get these result that
Speaker 1: are just impossible for him to have gotten by chance,
Speaker 1: impossible for him to have cheated. It's just too amazing. Um. Again,
Speaker 1: you know all the all the asterisks about skepticism there,
Speaker 1: and this is consistent throughout a lot of the literature.
Speaker 1: Many of the people who worked on these recent research
Speaker 1: projects have remained adamant over the years that they were
Speaker 1: able to prove psychic powers were real. On the government's time,
Speaker 1: and even some internal reviews on the value of these
Speaker 1: programs seemed kind of optimistic, like to quote from one
Speaker 1: report for the CIA put together in nineteen seventy five,
Speaker 1: but the physicist J. A. Ball, who independently reviewed all
Speaker 1: the data, quote a large body of reliable experimental evidence
Speaker 1: points to the inescapable conclusion that extrasensory perception does exist
Speaker 1: as a real phenomenon, albeit characterized by rarity and lack
Speaker 1: of reliability. Just kind of that last part kind of
Speaker 1: undercuts everything, doesn't it. Yeah, Because I mean, if it's
Speaker 1: because if we were to take that on face value,
Speaker 1: and I mean, on one hand, yes, it's amazing if
Speaker 1: psychic phenomenal were real, but then if it were not
Speaker 1: dependable at all, I could be utterly useless for the government.
Speaker 1: You can't send in a psychic assassin and it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: there's like a ten percent chance he'll be able to
Speaker 1: blow somebody's head up with his mind. Uh, and then
Speaker 1: nine chance that he's just arrested and you know, executed
Speaker 1: on the spot, or even worse. I mean, how about
Speaker 1: you're doing the remote viewing, right, You're the person who's
Speaker 1: giving somebody the inside details of some Soviet research facility,
Speaker 1: and what you're trying to sell is, well, my my
Speaker 1: results are amazingly accurate about one out of a hundred times. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then and then it's not necessarily a situation where
Speaker 1: they would be It's like, oh, I know, I don't
Speaker 1: see anything. Sorry, it's you. You're They would be giving
Speaker 1: you false information, perhaps just made up information. Uh, it
Speaker 1: would be just completely unreliable for any government purposes. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So another problem with all this research, I think is that,
Speaker 1: based on my reading, it seems that while we keep
Speaker 1: getting all these people involved in this research who say, yeah,
Speaker 1: the phenomenon is real, psychics are real. We've shown it
Speaker 1: over and over again in these tests, this research and
Speaker 1: all of its administrative levels just seems crammed with people who,
Speaker 1: in uh, the parapsychologist Gertrudge Schmider Schmidler's terminology are sheep,
Speaker 1: meaning people who are committed in advance to the belief
Speaker 1: that psychic phenomena are real, as opposed to her term
Speaker 1: goats for people who believe in advance that it is
Speaker 1: not real. Uh. You know, as as I've said before,
Speaker 1: I think I'm kind of a goat. But if you
Speaker 1: have a whole lot of people who believe very strongly
Speaker 1: in a thing working on experiments to prove that thing,
Speaker 1: you're probably not going to get a lot of objectivity
Speaker 1: in your methodology. And so this is a criticism that's
Speaker 1: been leveled against this research for a long time. I
Speaker 1: want to give a couple of examples real quick, um
Speaker 1: of the kind of sheep thing going on. So a
Speaker 1: major figure in the remote viewing research conducted out of
Speaker 1: Fort Mead in Maryland was was like, they would give
Speaker 1: people these coordinates or these places to view and it
Speaker 1: might be a place of strategic importance. Right, So here's
Speaker 1: a Soviet So there's even one story that these psychic
Speaker 1: spies out of Fort Mead we're supposed to see what
Speaker 1: was happening inside Tehran during the Iranian hostage crisis. Now
Speaker 1: you can you can easily imagine though the situation there is,
Speaker 1: you know, we're trying to figure out how to how
Speaker 1: to handle the situation, and then someone says, well, do
Speaker 1: you want our psychics to take a crack at it?
Speaker 1: And why not? Yeah, we're paying for them. We might
Speaker 1: as well see what they got. And maybe they got nothing,
Speaker 1: but out I don't know if I believe it's true.
Speaker 1: I think I heard that Jimmy Carter was aware that
Speaker 1: this had taken place, but yeah, uh yeah. Anyway, So
Speaker 1: at Fort Mead, one of the major figures involved in
Speaker 1: the remote viewing projects there was this guy named Ed Dames.
Speaker 1: Have you ever heard of him before. He shows up
Speaker 1: sometimes on uh, what's that show art Bell Coast to
Speaker 1: Coast where they talk about UFOs and stuff. Uh. So
Speaker 1: he was a guy who who worked on this project
Speaker 1: for the Defense Department, and he was intensely interested not
Speaker 1: just in the strategic targets, but in having his remote
Speaker 1: viewing agents spy on stuff like the alien basis of
Speaker 1: the Galactic Federation scattered throughout the Solar system, which are
Speaker 1: the forward advanced posts of these aliens that are going
Speaker 1: to colonize our our solar system. Okay, sounds reasonable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is what happens when you when you build a
Speaker 1: team of government psychics, right, I mean right, you end
Speaker 1: up spying on the galactic impio. Yeah. And so there
Speaker 1: were some people, you know, in various ranks who were
Speaker 1: a little bit doubtful about whether that was a useful
Speaker 1: research project. Uh in uh. In the Sorry and John
Speaker 1: Ronson's The Men Who Sarah goatst Ronson claims that one
Speaker 1: of Dame's personal remote viewing projects was using ESP to
Speaker 1: determine the true nature of the Lockness Monster, which he
Speaker 1: eventually determined was the ghost of a dinosaur. Yes like that? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's better than any of the other ones I've heard,
Speaker 1: which is sadder that it's the ghost of a dinosaur,
Speaker 1: that it's the last living dinosaur and it's all alone.
Speaker 1: The last living dinosaur would have been would be far
Speaker 1: sadder because it would be just like a dead and
Speaker 1: hang out with its other dead ancestors. At least a ghost,
Speaker 1: you can imagine, has delight in haunting people. Has there
Speaker 1: ever been a ghost dinosaur movie. Oh, there's been a
Speaker 1: there's a ghost shark movie, and we need to get
Speaker 1: on that copyright that okay. One final anecdote also from
Speaker 1: Ronson's The Men who Stare at Goats, and this is
Speaker 1: I think exemplary of the kind of thing that may
Speaker 1: have been going on to give people who are working
Speaker 1: on these psychic experiments the impression that they were turning
Speaker 1: up real phenomenon. Ronson interviews this guy who worked at
Speaker 1: the Fort Meade project named Lynn Buchanan and uh. He
Speaker 1: also interviews another remote viewer named Joseph mc mcmonagle, and
Speaker 1: Buchanan tells Ronson the story about mcmonagle's amazing psychic powers.
Speaker 1: One time there was a locked door at the facility
Speaker 1: and at Fort Meade and mcmonagle used his psychic powers
Speaker 1: to remote view what the key to the door looked like,
Speaker 1: and then he made a sketch of the key from
Speaker 1: that psychic vision, and then took it to a locksmith
Speaker 1: and had the locksmith make a copy of the key
Speaker 1: from the drawing, and the key worked and he was
Speaker 1: able to open the door. If true, that would be amazing, right,
Speaker 1: But in his interview with Ronson, mcmonagle admits that what
Speaker 1: had actually done, what it actually happened there, was that
Speaker 1: he had picked the lock, and he didn't want to
Speaker 1: deflate morale among the other psychic spies, so he didn't
Speaker 1: tell them that. He just let them believe that it
Speaker 1: had been this psychic adventure and they have to be
Speaker 1: in a positive environment. But it's it's a it's a
Speaker 1: classic magician's trick here, right, I mean, it's it's you
Speaker 1: can't see what I'm doing at this hand because all
Speaker 1: the stuff this one's doing, this one's busy running to
Speaker 1: the locksmith, this one's picking the lock. Yeah. Uh So,
Speaker 1: in in final explanation, I mean, there are a lot
Speaker 1: of things that could have been going on in these
Speaker 1: experiments that people claimed. We're giving these amazingly accurate results
Speaker 1: and proving the truth of psychic powers. In some cases
Speaker 1: you have to assume there may have been fraud or trickery.
Speaker 1: It may have been disinformation at some level. It may
Speaker 1: have been intern old psy ops campaigns. There may have
Speaker 1: been hoaxers. I mean, plenty of skeptics alleged that the psychics,
Speaker 1: like Uri Geller, we're just doing slight of hand tricks
Speaker 1: and tricking the scientists. But also I think among the
Speaker 1: researchers themselves, there is probably a strong tendency towards what's
Speaker 1: known as cherry picking um, meaning that maybe sometimes the
Speaker 1: remote viewers did have some truly amazingly accurate descriptions of
Speaker 1: stuff they wouldn't be able to see. But what if
Speaker 1: these amazingly accurate hits were like four or five sessions
Speaker 1: out of thousands, So you think that's what Matthew Modine's
Speaker 1: up to and stranger things. He's just like like he
Speaker 1: every for a thousand days, he makes a leve and
Speaker 1: try to crush it. They just cut a lot of
Speaker 1: the scenes out. Well, that's that's the director's cut. That's
Speaker 1: one way remote viewing is different than psychogenesis. So if
Speaker 1: you make somebody try to crush a coat can with
Speaker 1: their mind without touching it a thousand times and they
Speaker 1: can only do it once. I'm still impressed. Like, if
Speaker 1: you can rule out some kind of intervention, like that's
Speaker 1: the kind of thing that would would would would have
Speaker 1: won the James Randy Prize. Could if you could without
Speaker 1: any without touching it, just crushed that can with your
Speaker 1: brain right with proper controls in place, and you can
Speaker 1: do that. There, boom, you've got the prize. Psychic phenomena
Speaker 1: are real. I'm still impressed. Even though you could only
Speaker 1: do it once. With remote viewing, you know, you could say,
Speaker 1: I've got a picture here that you can't see, describe
Speaker 1: it for me. If you do this hundreds of times
Speaker 1: and a few times you come up with a pretty
Speaker 1: accurate description, I'm not impressed. That's just I mean, you
Speaker 1: could do that randomly. You're just monkeys and a typewriter. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're bound to pound it out eventually anyway. So one
Speaker 1: difference between this type of government psychic research and the
Speaker 1: stuff we see in Stranger Things is that I never
Speaker 1: came across any examples. There may have been some some
Speaker 1: out there, because there's still some classified stuff. But I
Speaker 1: never came across any examples of psychics using an isolation
Speaker 1: tank to enhance their powers, which is one of my
Speaker 1: favorite set pieces on the show. That might be why
Speaker 1: they didn't have a positive environment all the time. You
Speaker 1: need an isolation tank to feel good about yourself. Well,
Speaker 1: it's interesting you say that, because, um, well let's just
Speaker 1: start with isolation tanks. Who here has has floated? Who
Speaker 1: raised your hand? If you have floated, if you've been
Speaker 1: in an isolation tank, should host the show. He's like, alright,
Speaker 1: so keep your hands up, all right, Now, keep your
Speaker 1: hand in the air. If you've been in one more
Speaker 1: than once, All right, Okay, did you hallucinate? Okay, so
Speaker 1: Robert has floated and I have floated, but only once.
Speaker 1: I would love to try it. I tried it once
Speaker 1: at home in the washing machine and no good. Well
Speaker 1: we all float down. I'll float with you someday. Well.
Speaker 1: I think that the show does a pretty great job
Speaker 1: of explaining how it works. I mean, it's it's it's soft,
Speaker 1: it's boy, and so you're you're floating in the in
Speaker 1: the water. Um, it's uh. If you've done it before,
Speaker 1: you know that the first time you float a lot
Speaker 1: of it is about just getting used to the fact
Speaker 1: that you're in this body temperature, you know, a high
Speaker 1: salt mixture, and it's it's like stinging every sensitive part
Speaker 1: of your body, like cuts and scrapes you didn't realize
Speaker 1: you had are crying out to you. No God, I
Speaker 1: mean that seems like with all the other deprivation, that
Speaker 1: would have the possibility of reducing your entire consciousness to
Speaker 1: a hangnail. Yeah. Yeah, because it does play with your consciousness.
Speaker 1: I mean that's why people climb into them, and that's
Speaker 1: why John C. Lily was I mean, that's why he
Speaker 1: invented it. That's why they were researching this at NIM.
Speaker 1: Now we should we should clarify the the isolation tanks
Speaker 1: that you see in altered states or in stranger things
Speaker 1: are usually different than what you would just go to
Speaker 1: it like a commercial place. So the ones that we've
Speaker 1: floated in at least or horizontal and you're kind of
Speaker 1: laying on your back so you can't smell. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: sort of see, Yeah, you definitely smell. Because that was
Speaker 1: like that distracted me from most of my first float,
Speaker 1: was my only float was that was that. Wow, it
Speaker 1: really smells salting in here. And I don't know why
Speaker 1: I was getting into double float. That's what that The
Speaker 1: thing they always say you need to float more than
Speaker 1: one is because that first float is just about getting
Speaker 1: used to bring and make it, will record it, Yeah
Speaker 1: we should but uh yeah. The now, the tanks that
Speaker 1: Lily was using at at NIM, they they were kind
Speaker 1: of uh, kind of like they were very and then
Speaker 1: they had a nightmare of quality to them. I guess
Speaker 1: you'd say that the individuals were dressed in something that
Speaker 1: kind of look like a gimp costume with these like
Speaker 1: big blackout goggles. Uh yeah, kind of like a really
Speaker 1: scary mask and uh and they were They found that
Speaker 1: it had a pretty severe effect on the subjects because
Speaker 1: you're essentially locking someone away with the inward facing mind
Speaker 1: and it doesn't take much of that to um to
Speaker 1: start playing with your your sensations and playing with your
Speaker 1: thought process. I mean, it's the it's the reason that
Speaker 1: solitary confinement it's such a hellacious thing to inflict on somebody. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I think that's widely considered a form of
Speaker 1: torture now, Yeah, and this is basically what they wanted though, Yeah,
Speaker 1: because they were researching quote a psychological stability of human
Speaker 1: beings that are sustained isolation and reduced sensory implicity. Little
Speaker 1: did they know, like forty years later people would pay
Speaker 1: money to do this. Well, I mean this, this is
Speaker 1: an area that parallels that. That duality with Lily of
Speaker 1: establishment really counterculturally. Establishment really was all about, let's get
Speaker 1: this thing and we're gonna take potential spies, will lock
Speaker 1: them away in there, and when they lose their mind,
Speaker 1: they'll tell us everything. And then counterculture Lily was like, no,
Speaker 1: you need to lose your mind in here on LSD
Speaker 1: maybe and then potentially talk to alien dolphins. Man. That
Speaker 1: Lily mentality of like the self experimentation is something I
Speaker 1: have this big conflict about because on one hand, it's
Speaker 1: like I like admire it, you know, I'm like, somebody
Speaker 1: wants to experiment on themselves. I'm like, that's confidence, that's courage.
Speaker 1: At the same time, that's usually not good science, right,
Speaker 1: because it's hard to be objective when you're experimenting on yourself.
Speaker 1: It tends to who suggest an impatience that is generally
Speaker 1: not compatible with scientific ricor right or trying to get
Speaker 1: around ethical boundaries that would exist if you were experimenting
Speaker 1: on others. Yeah, okay, so we can say Matthew Modine
Speaker 1: as far as we know so far. And I refused
Speaker 1: to refer to him by whatever. His character's name is
Speaker 1: Matthew Modine, R printer whatever. Matthew Modine is a patient
Speaker 1: doctor because he hasn't experimented on himself yet in this show.
Speaker 1: It's true, they're probably saving that first. Um. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: really really got into it. He he when he floated
Speaker 1: himself in this nightmarish contraption. Uh, he saw limitless possibility here. Uh,
Speaker 1: in a way to just like to get in touch
Speaker 1: with like the the the unaffected mind, like the mind
Speaker 1: without any of the the weights of sensation and uh
Speaker 1: and he ended up writing about it pretty much for
Speaker 1: the rest of his life. His his writings are really
Speaker 1: interesting if you ever give him a try, because the
Speaker 1: he kind of waffles back and forth between being like
Speaker 1: academic writing and being like stream of consciousness writing. But
Speaker 1: in a way he wrote while he was high and
Speaker 1: then I may also it's really hard to write. But
Speaker 1: I have a quick quote from him though. This is
Speaker 1: from Lily Tanks for the Memories Flotation Tank talks from
Speaker 1: the memories. Yeah, he had. He wore that coonskin cap, remember,
Speaker 1: and his favorite what were one of his favorite names
Speaker 1: for the tank itself was the womb to tomb wet box.
Speaker 1: So um, wow, we should we should all start incorporating
Speaker 1: track to our our daily conversation. Did Dad jokes from
Speaker 1: the plane? Yeah, but here's the quote he said, at
Speaker 1: the highest level of satory from which people return, the
Speaker 1: point of consciousness becomes a surface or a solid which
Speaker 1: extends throughout the whole known universe. This used to be
Speaker 1: called fusion with the universal mon end or God in
Speaker 1: more modern terms. Yeah, you have done a mathematical transformation
Speaker 1: in which your center of consciousness has ceased to be
Speaker 1: a traveling point and has become a surface or solid
Speaker 1: of consciousness. It was in this state that I experienced
Speaker 1: myself as melded and intertwined with hundreds of billions of
Speaker 1: other beings in a thin sheet of consciousness that was
Speaker 1: distributed around the galaxy a membrane. So it's fascinating about
Speaker 1: this to me. Where you give like a quick like
Speaker 1: uh foreshadowing, uh, is because my section is all about
Speaker 1: parallel universes, and he's essentially memorizing the language of parallel
Speaker 1: universes of the multiverse to describe this. Yeah, so um,
Speaker 1: that quote kind of sums up just how high minded
Speaker 1: and essentially mystical and magical, uh literally got with the
Speaker 1: isolation tank. Um, And we don't We're not gonna really
Speaker 1: go into the dolphin research, but uh, that becomes a
Speaker 1: whole area where he definitely kind of becomes a scientific pariah,
Speaker 1: certainly within dolphin research for are the rest of his career.
Speaker 1: So I'm curious what does rigorous research say about the
Speaker 1: real life effects of of using these isolation tanks. Well,
Speaker 1: we do have a fair amount of research to go
Speaker 1: on here and a lot of just personal antigoes from
Speaker 1: people who have floated a lot. Uh. Floaters often report hallucinations,
Speaker 1: out of body sensations, increased introspection because ultimately, you're you're
Speaker 1: locked in there, and you when you're not locked in there,
Speaker 1: but I mean you you're you feel doing you're right.
Speaker 1: If you're not locked in there, you do you feel
Speaker 1: as if the limits of your body are kind of
Speaker 1: harder to define because of the body tempature water you're
Speaker 1: floating in. Floaters, like sleepers, tend to experience decreased alpha
Speaker 1: waves and increased data waves in the brain. So this
Speaker 1: is the stuff of dreams, except you're still awake. Yes,
Speaker 1: uh yeah, you shouldn't fall asleep in There also sensory deprivation,
Speaker 1: even of a single sort, so just site or sound, etcetera,
Speaker 1: can produce hallucination. A voice or rumble heard in total silence,
Speaker 1: the light seen in total darkness, that sort of thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we've talked about this before with like the creepiness people
Speaker 1: report when they go in an antichoa chamber. This is
Speaker 1: like a room with acoustic properties, so that sound is
Speaker 1: really muffled, you know, nothing echoes. Everything's very very quiet.
Speaker 1: People feel like they're going crazy, and they're like they
Speaker 1: start to imagine they're hearing their own brain work and stuff.
Speaker 1: It troubles you. Yeah, And in fact, a two thousand
Speaker 1: and nine study publishing the Journal of Nervous and Mental
Speaker 1: Disease found that a near fifteen minutes of near total
Speaker 1: sensory deprivation was enough to trigger vivid hallucinations in many tests.
Speaker 1: Subjects now were those people who already had some kind
Speaker 1: of condition that would make them prone to hallucinations, but
Speaker 1: they were just normal people. I think these were just normal,
Speaker 1: you know, run of the mill, average, averagely you know,
Speaker 1: brought into the study people, but they were all psychic. No,
Speaker 1: not before the experiment. Yeah. Another two thousand and nine paper,
Speaker 1: this one from psychopharmacology, explore the possibility that sensory deprivation
Speaker 1: induces psychotic symptoms non pharmacologically, and the idea here is
Speaker 1: that sensory depth disturbs air dependent updating of one's worldview
Speaker 1: and leads to problems with top down perceptive constraints, resulting
Speaker 1: in hallucination. However, I do want to point out that
Speaker 1: this particular study, they used a sensory deprivation tank with
Speaker 1: a panic button, So they told people, are you're gonna
Speaker 1: get into this and you might start feeling it might
Speaker 1: just get too much for You're gonna feel kind of freaky,
Speaker 1: but you can panic and hit that panic button, whereas
Speaker 1: other studies have just had the scientists say, hey, when
Speaker 1: you've had enough, to tap on the lid and we'll
Speaker 1: let you out. So this is like if you went
Speaker 1: to yoga and they said here's a panic button just
Speaker 1: in case, Like you're probably not going to have that
Speaker 1: great a class. Yeah, It's like if you were going
Speaker 1: to yoga and you your your mom was talking to
Speaker 1: you before and said, now, hold on, I've heard that
Speaker 1: some people really hurt their neck doing that, or you know,
Speaker 1: or oh, I know a friend who hurt their risk
Speaker 1: doing yoga. Yeah, you're gonna go, and you're gonna be
Speaker 1: terrified that you're going to paralyze yourself on the mat. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like you're trying to figure out if your kid's gonna
Speaker 1: have nightmares for some reason. They're going to bed and
Speaker 1: you say, now, don't think about machete mimes. Don't just
Speaker 1: don't think about machete mimes and it will be fine.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is why priming is so important, uh,
Speaker 1: to you know, ancient traditions involving the use of psychedelic substances.
Speaker 1: It's important for modern practitioners who take a you know,
Speaker 1: a serious uh approach to the use of psychedelic substances,
Speaker 1: and and even even like meditative even yoga. It's it's
Speaker 1: about priming the individual for what's going to occur. And
Speaker 1: speaking of which, there's a nine seven study that I
Speaker 1: came across on prayer and mystic experience, and they found
Speaker 1: that when placed in an isolation tank, people with differing
Speaker 1: religious orientation sas related differing specific religious imagery, which is
Speaker 1: no surprise, but not in non religious imagery and other
Speaker 1: phenomenal experiences. So there's like more similarity among stuff not
Speaker 1: related to your particular beliefs. Yeah. Yeah, And I think
Speaker 1: this is interesting too in light of those of negative
Speaker 1: positive experiences in priming that we're talking about here. Uh,
Speaker 1: and even the aims of John C. Lily or fictional
Speaker 1: Dr Brenner even. I also think it's fascinating to think
Speaker 1: of isolation actulation chambers used as laboratory stand ins for prayer,
Speaker 1: because what is prayer but an attempt to communicate with
Speaker 1: an extra dimensional entity? And uh, and that's exactly what
Speaker 1: Dr Brenner is trying to do with eleven on on
Speaker 1: the show Stranger Things. Well, yes, it makes you think
Speaker 1: about how a lot of religious rituals are actually, you know,
Speaker 1: all throughout history, are used to bring about some form
Speaker 1: of an altered state of consciousness. I mean, you can
Speaker 1: think about even an act as simple as the repetitive
Speaker 1: activity of prayers, like the repetitive words you say in
Speaker 1: a prayer. If you've never tried this, just say the
Speaker 1: same sentence or the same word five hundred times in
Speaker 1: a row, you will probably achieve some kind of mildly
Speaker 1: altered state of consciousness, mainly because it starts to disrupt
Speaker 1: the part of your brain that automatically processes linguistic content.
Speaker 1: If you've ever like tried to not hear what a
Speaker 1: word means when somebody's saying words you, you can't do
Speaker 1: this on purpose. You can't help but hear what the
Speaker 1: words mean. But if you say the same word to
Speaker 1: yourself hundreds of times, you start to lose the connection
Speaker 1: between the sounds of the mouth and the meanings. And
Speaker 1: the beautiful thing about this is you do not need
Speaker 1: l s D or a swimming pool full assault, just
Speaker 1: repetition the way of the world. All right, Well, here's
Speaker 1: a question for you, Christian. Say you get into your
Speaker 1: flotation tank or your children swimming pool full of soli
Speaker 1: and you reach out to an extra dimensional entity. Where
Speaker 1: is that entity? Like, scientifically, where is the the you
Speaker 1: are here arrow for that being? Right? So, what we
Speaker 1: have to clarify here is the difference between you're talking
Speaker 1: about alternate dimensions or extra dimensions versus parallel universes and
Speaker 1: stranger things. Seems to be unclear on what's going on there? Right, Well,
Speaker 1: basically I guess what's going on with stranger things, and
Speaker 1: obviously is that this is this is a fairy realm.
Speaker 1: This is um this is a typical trope of a
Speaker 1: various you know, dimensional travel, uh, science fiction or fantasy.
Speaker 1: The upside down is is it's like they're the realm
Speaker 1: of shadows. As they draw that comparison, what is it
Speaker 1: in Zelda, It's like the Dark World or something? Man, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's a version of this world with slight.
Speaker 1: You know, it's dark and it's toxic and it's slight
Speaker 1: the altered Well, okay, so there's science fiction fans probably
Speaker 1: all in this room that are familiar with the idea
Speaker 1: of parallel universes or alternate dimensions. They've been in our fiction,
Speaker 1: our pop culture and comic books and TV and movement
Speaker 1: movies for decades now, right, what's your favorite fictional parallel
Speaker 1: universe of Mine's Crisis on Infinite Earths from TC comics.
Speaker 1: I like, because there's an infinite amount of them. I
Speaker 1: have to go with the Realm of the Goblin King
Speaker 1: and Labyrinth. Oh that's so good. I have to go
Speaker 1: with the Super Mario Brothers movie where they go to
Speaker 1: the other parallel dimension where Dennis Hopper is King Coopa.
Speaker 1: So but with all of those, it actually turns out
Speaker 1: that there is some basis in scientific theory for a multiverse.
Speaker 1: And I'm going to present you with three possibilities here
Speaker 1: and we can try to crack the nut of what's
Speaker 1: going on here in Stranger Things. So so, right after
Speaker 1: Stranger Things came out, Popular Science interviewed this theoretical physicist
Speaker 1: named Brian Green. Oh yeah, he's he's from New York City. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they asked him about Stranger Things. And the first
Speaker 1: distinction he made is what I was just talking about.
Speaker 1: He's like, whoa, there's a difference between alternate dimensions and
Speaker 1: parallel universes. Don't don't just use those interchangeably. We kind
Speaker 1: of do in pop fiction. But but he wanted to
Speaker 1: clarify that different. So here's the difference. An alternate dimension
Speaker 1: implies you've got one universe, right, and that universe has
Speaker 1: more dimensions to it than what we can perceive, so
Speaker 1: beyond the three dimensions of space and the one dimension
Speaker 1: of time. So yeah, it's like, if you imagine that
Speaker 1: we are squares or triangles, and suddenly we encounter a
Speaker 1: cube or a sphere or something we just like, wouldn't
Speaker 1: be able to perceive this extra dimension of it exactly, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't even be able to see it or cure
Speaker 1: any of your senses. Right. Whereas a parallel universe implies
Speaker 1: the whole multiversal proposal. This is that there are multiple universes,
Speaker 1: but each one of these universes has three dimensions of
Speaker 1: space and one dimension of time to them. Why should
Speaker 1: we trust this Green guy, Well, he's kind of a
Speaker 1: big deal in science. But remember the scene in Stranger
Speaker 1: Things when the teacher is using the analogy where he's
Speaker 1: talking about the tightrope walker on the tight rope and
Speaker 1: how there's a flea underneath it. That analogy originally comes
Speaker 1: from Green's book, which is called The Fabric of the Cosmos.
Speaker 1: So this guy that they basically researched him to figure
Speaker 1: out how to write this stuff about the upside down
Speaker 1: on the TV show, and in fact, Green himself says,
Speaker 1: whoever is writing this show is well versed in some
Speaker 1: of the popular descriptions of these ideas. Whether it's mine
Speaker 1: or not, it doesn't really matter. When he added, also,
Speaker 1: if there's a monster. Its head should open like a flower.
Speaker 1: His other book. If you've never seen a picture of
Speaker 1: the physicist Brian Green, he's a favorite virus on the show.
Speaker 1: He comes up a lot. You should look him up
Speaker 1: because I think he looks a lot like David DUCHOVNYA
Speaker 1: total tangent. Sorry, so all right, so let's stick with
Speaker 1: the three major theories though, and in Green out nzse.
Speaker 1: But some other people do as well. So the very
Speaker 1: first academic proposal of parallel universes came in nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: four by this guy named Hugh Everett the Third. And
Speaker 1: Hugh came up with what we now call many worlds theory.
Speaker 1: And he did this while he was a doctoral student,
Speaker 1: so he hadn't even graduated yet. And he's like, hey,
Speaker 1: this is my dissertation. There's parallel universes, and just like
Speaker 1: drops a big book and he says, look, they're they're
Speaker 1: related to ours, are branching off others branch off of them,
Speaker 1: YadA YadA. So to better understand this, though, I'm sorry everybody,
Speaker 1: We're gonna have to talk about some quantum physics for
Speaker 1: a little bit. It's it's a little painful, but I'm
Speaker 1: gonna try to boil it down and make it as
Speaker 1: easy for all of us as possible, because it does
Speaker 1: hurt my head a little bit. Come on positive thinking.
Speaker 1: It's not painful. It's everybody think positively in my psychic
Speaker 1: powers related to quantum physics. I do. But there is
Speaker 1: a famous quote about quantum physics where if it if
Speaker 1: it does not make your head hurt a little bit,
Speaker 1: you're you're not engaging with it properly, right, he said
Speaker 1: Richard I am and the famous physicist who said that
Speaker 1: if you think you understand quantum physics, you don't understand.
Speaker 1: I'm afraid I'm misquoting. I don't think so. So everytt
Speaker 1: was inspired by two scientists that were quantum physicists, and
Speaker 1: they were Werner Heisenberg and Neil's Bore. And Heisenberg suggested
Speaker 1: that if you just observe quantum matter, that we're affecting
Speaker 1: its behavior just looking at it. And he said subsequently,
Speaker 1: we can never be sure of what its attributes are.
Speaker 1: This is called the Heisenberg on certainty principle. So here
Speaker 1: here's an examswer. Here's an example. I cribbed from our
Speaker 1: colleague Josh Clark from stuff you should know. He has
Speaker 1: this great analogy and he says, imagine you're looking at Joe,
Speaker 1: specifically Joe, uh, and Joe is a human being who's solid. Okay,
Speaker 1: Now everybody look away from Joe, and then when you
Speaker 1: look back, all of a sudden, Joe is made out
Speaker 1: of gas. That hope it's right on gas. So that
Speaker 1: is essentially the idea behind the Heisenberg on certainty principle that,
Speaker 1: like the the attributes of the physical form change every
Speaker 1: time you stop looking at it and look at it again, right,
Speaker 1: And it's suggesting essentially that. And this is where Borer
Speaker 1: comes in. He's this Danish Danish physicist and he says, well,
Speaker 1: actually it doesn't exist in one state or the other.
Speaker 1: It exists in all states simultaneously. But like Heisenberg, he says,
Speaker 1: it's it's got to stay in one form as long
Speaker 1: as we're looking at it. So this is you've probably
Speaker 1: heard of. This is the Copenhagen interpretation. This is the
Speaker 1: idea that you know, a quantum event is both A
Speaker 1: and B at the same time until it interacts with
Speaker 1: something that forces it to collapse into one or the other.
Speaker 1: So ever comes along. He's working on his dissertation, and
Speaker 1: he argues, Okay, I agree with Bor on everything except
Speaker 1: for one respect. He says, measuring UH and observing quantum
Speaker 1: objects don't actually force it into a comprehensible state. What
Speaker 1: it does is it splits it into an entire other universe.
Speaker 1: And he says, this literally duplicates the universe every time
Speaker 1: you observe quantum matter, and then that subsequently splits every
Speaker 1: other time any action is taken or not taken related
Speaker 1: to it. So this is like the infamous stuff that
Speaker 1: you see in in you know, pop science, popular fiction,
Speaker 1: where there's a there's an altered universe where I'm a
Speaker 1: bank robber and not a podcast host, right, because I
Speaker 1: just didn't decide to rob that bank, And under many
Speaker 1: worlds there probably would be such a universe because there's
Speaker 1: an infinite number of quantum events to split the universe
Speaker 1: and infinite number of times. It's it's like the Library
Speaker 1: of Battle. It's the idea that it's a library that
Speaker 1: contains not only all books, but all possible books, right, right,
Speaker 1: So this is usually called daughter universe theory. Okay, now
Speaker 1: let's put it in stranger things terms. So let's say
Speaker 1: eleven is our quantum object. When you look at her
Speaker 1: once she appears to be a little girl, you turn away,
Speaker 1: you look again, maybe she looks like the demogorgon. That's
Speaker 1: Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. The new Bore was suggesting that a
Speaker 1: quantum eleven is both the little girl and the demogorgon
Speaker 1: at the same time, and all other other possible forms,
Speaker 1: like there's one where she's played by Carrie Fisher and
Speaker 1: she's she's that form simultaneously with the you know, infinite
Speaker 1: other ones. And then Everett comes along and he says,
Speaker 1: but wait, every time eleven is measured or looked at,
Speaker 1: say by Matthew Modine, then it causes a split in
Speaker 1: the universe, and this creates a daughter universe. And so
Speaker 1: subsequently there's just all these parallel universes that are based
Speaker 1: on the observation of the quantum eleven. Now it's crazy
Speaker 1: as this sounds, a lot of physicists actually do hold
Speaker 1: to the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. It's something
Speaker 1: that's popular. I know, recently on the show we talked
Speaker 1: about the Caltech physicist Sean Carroll. I know he favors
Speaker 1: the many worlds interpretations. So it is taken seriously by
Speaker 1: real physicist, and it's a good way of thinking that
Speaker 1: there's a lot of other universes is out there, but
Speaker 1: could you get between them? Yeah? Yeah, how does this?
Speaker 1: How does this? How do we get from here to
Speaker 1: demagorg Yeah? Many worlds doesn't really get into that as
Speaker 1: far as I could tell. But that's one possible explanation
Speaker 1: I guess for what the upside down is. Right. Another
Speaker 1: possibility is string theory. We've all probably heard this thrown around.
Speaker 1: It's related to Albert Einstein's theory of everything. It proposes
Speaker 1: that there's an even smaller level than quantum, uh, the
Speaker 1: quantum level, there's the sub quantum level. This is like
Speaker 1: an ant man where he shrinks down like so small
Speaker 1: that it just turns into the psychedelic nightmare, so small
Speaker 1: that the c g I budget for the entire film
Speaker 1: just implodes upon its approaches Infini. So the argument here
Speaker 1: is that all the essential building blocks of all matter
Speaker 1: and all physical forces exist on the sub quantum level.
Speaker 1: And here there are these things that are referred to
Speaker 1: as rubber bands basically that are strings, and they make
Speaker 1: up quantum particles. And then that makes up everything else,
Speaker 1: like everything in this room, every every force of nature
Speaker 1: is all made up of these strings. Well, it is
Speaker 1: the theory of everything exactly. That is exactly what it is.
Speaker 1: It is entirely theoretical, so there's no I should be
Speaker 1: clear about this. There is no evidence that this is true.
Speaker 1: Some scientists feel like this discredits it entirely, but it's
Speaker 1: worth bringing it up because string theory also ends up
Speaker 1: leading us into a theory of parallel universes. So this
Speaker 1: theory says, okay, they parallel universes exists like bubbles next
Speaker 1: to each other, and when they come in contact with
Speaker 1: one another, it's because gravity flows in and out of
Speaker 1: these bubbles back and forth to each other. But every
Speaker 1: time these universes interact, a big bang occurs, just like
Speaker 1: the one that created our universe. So every time they
Speaker 1: touch it creates another universe. But what we don't know
Speaker 1: is what happens when these you know, to to these
Speaker 1: actual bubbles themselves, like do do they explode? Is it
Speaker 1: really bad or is it totally benign? Well, this is
Speaker 1: it's worth of keeping in mind. Like and when it
Speaker 1: creates another universe, it's not it's not like a uh
Speaker 1: of a total fantasy universe where it's like, oh, here's
Speaker 1: the universe where everyone is a Nazi. Here's the universe
Speaker 1: where everyone has um you know, the sheep's head or
Speaker 1: something that sounds like a great universe. This is more like,
Speaker 1: here is a a new big bang in a new
Speaker 1: contained universe, and who knows what it it results in.
Speaker 1: It's very much like the Library of Babel where many
Speaker 1: of the books I mean, I guess the majority of
Speaker 1: the books in the Library of Babel are illegible, right,
Speaker 1: almost every single one. It's it's only the minority that
Speaker 1: makes sense. Yeah. So Brian Green, remember him. He actually
Speaker 1: argues that the recent discovery of gravitational waves make this
Speaker 1: slightly testable, so it might actually have some evidence in
Speaker 1: the next couple of years. Uh. You might have noticed this.
Speaker 1: This week the scientists who discovered gravitational waves won the
Speaker 1: Nobel Prize. So that's probably why it's a big I mean,
Speaker 1: there's lots of recent points, but that's one of them.
Speaker 1: Maybe we'll find parallel universes. Uh. So they're hoping that
Speaker 1: they can test string theory with that. And then the
Speaker 1: idea here is essentially that as the universe expands, each
Speaker 1: one of these strings is getting stretched out, and as
Speaker 1: they're stretching, it produces a crack. And it's not an
Speaker 1: audible crack. It's a crack that exists through gravitational waves.
Speaker 1: So the researchers are hoping that now that they've discovered
Speaker 1: gravitational waves, they can test them and subsequently maybe fine
Speaker 1: strings and or sub quantum reality. That's fascinating. I mean,
Speaker 1: we've talked about string theory on the show before and
Speaker 1: never never come across a good way to test it today.
Speaker 1: It's always sort of one of those things where they say,
Speaker 1: maybe on the very on the next high energy particle collider,
Speaker 1: we'll get too high enough energies that we can test.
Speaker 1: But I hadn't heard of this. So in terms of
Speaker 1: stranger things, okay, if we're using string theory here, maybe uh,
Speaker 1: the upside down is one of these bubbles, and then
Speaker 1: the stranger things like real world is another bubble and
Speaker 1: they touched, and then that means that while they could
Speaker 1: pass back and forth between one another, they would have
Speaker 1: created another being bad big bang, So we might see
Speaker 1: a third universe. Okay, that's a possibility, and the and
Speaker 1: this and the upside down is just a universe that
Speaker 1: happened to turn out just like ours, except a little
Speaker 1: ikey looking. Sure. Okay, Now, the final theory is called
Speaker 1: eternal inflation. I love that name, and it argues that
Speaker 1: if you could zoom back and look at all of
Speaker 1: spacetime simultaneously, you'd find that some areas of space stop
Speaker 1: inflating the way that the Big Bang did, and that
Speaker 1: others continue at like a rapid pace. So some some
Speaker 1: parts are inflating, some aren't. They're all at different rates.
Speaker 1: And guess what. They use the bubble metaphor too. They
Speaker 1: couldn't come up with their own thing, so they've got
Speaker 1: this bubble metaphor. Our universe is a bubble. It's in
Speaker 1: a network of other bubbles. But the big difference here
Speaker 1: is that the universes in these potentially have different laws
Speaker 1: of physics than ours do. So this is a combination
Speaker 1: idea of parallel universes with alternate dimensions, which makes it
Speaker 1: a little more complicated, but it's essentially asking, like, what's
Speaker 1: going to happen if these bubbles collide? Right now? Astrophysicist
Speaker 1: Ethan Siegel came along in and he added a limitation,
Speaker 1: or maybe a complexity to this theory that I think
Speaker 1: makes it more fun. He says, well, here's the thing.
Speaker 1: Spacetime could go on forever in theory, but our universe.
Speaker 1: We know our universe is measurable and that it's under
Speaker 1: fourteen billion years old, so it's not infinite. Therefore, it's
Speaker 1: subsequently has to have a limit to the number of
Speaker 1: ways that particles can arrange themselves in the universe. So again,
Speaker 1: this is all these different possibilities that lead to physics,
Speaker 1: but not an infinite amount of them. Okay, there's another
Speaker 1: theory though, that's kind of buried inside of eternal inflation theory,
Speaker 1: and it's called brains universe theory, and brains is suppelled
Speaker 1: b A B A Barnes B R A N E. S.
Speaker 1: This is what you're referring to when I read the
Speaker 1: Lily quote. What he's talking about membrane membranes exact late. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So he's using language it's you know, steeped in this stuff.
Speaker 1: It imagines this though, that these universes are all intersecting
Speaker 1: and overlapping. But instead of using the bubble metaphor they
Speaker 1: say in brains theory, they say, well, it's like bread,
Speaker 1: it's like a bunch of slices of bread and they're
Speaker 1: all stacked on top of each other. Uh. And they
Speaker 1: call these brains, and each one of these brains has
Speaker 1: three dimensions. But if you refine the idea, and maybe
Speaker 1: there's some more complex versions of these brains, some have
Speaker 1: three dimensions, maybe some of them have seventeen dimensions, and
Speaker 1: when they overlap, what we would experience is in three
Speaker 1: dimensions because we are our bodies are physically only able
Speaker 1: to perceive that many dimensions plus time. So maybe what's
Speaker 1: going on in Stranger Things is actually these two universes
Speaker 1: have overlapped, and what they're experiencing in the upside down
Speaker 1: is sort of like the in the middle of like
Speaker 1: a ven diagram, right that will that would I like
Speaker 1: this theory because this would explain why there's a swimming pool,
Speaker 1: why they see like it just a shadow version of
Speaker 1: their own world. It's just like slightly different because they're
Speaker 1: not able to perceive all of these other dimensions of
Speaker 1: reality that are occurring around them. So here's where it
Speaker 1: gets exciting, because this theory has a lot of evidence
Speaker 1: that seems to make it look like it's possible. Uh.
Speaker 1: In two thousand five, a paper was published in Physical
Speaker 1: Review Letters that said, oh, we just found this big
Speaker 1: cold spot in space, and we detected it with NASA's
Speaker 1: w M a P satellite. Then in two thousand eight,
Speaker 1: two more studies were conducted to try to detect this
Speaker 1: as well, and they did this by looking at cosmic microwaves.
Speaker 1: And the reason why is because cosmic microwaves are left
Speaker 1: over from the Big Bang, and if cooled down to
Speaker 1: about two point seven Kelvin's is it's like a thing
Speaker 1: that we know, we can kind of measure it. Sometimes
Speaker 1: throughout the universe it's a little hotter, sometimes they're a
Speaker 1: little cooler, and that corresponds to fluctuations in the density
Speaker 1: of the early universe as it was growing after the
Speaker 1: Big Bang and clumping like thing mass was clumping together
Speaker 1: and forming gap galaxies. Okay, so they thought, may thine,
Speaker 1: this cold spot that we've just found, this could be
Speaker 1: where another universe has overlapped with ours while ours was
Speaker 1: inflating during the Big Bang. Then in the cold spot
Speaker 1: was detected again by the European Space Agency's Plank mission,
Speaker 1: and then more recently it was detected yet again by
Speaker 1: the Very Large Array Radio Telescope and they found that
Speaker 1: the cold spot and get ready for this. It's this
Speaker 1: giant void that is one billion light years across. It
Speaker 1: is huge. It is largely empty of of everything we
Speaker 1: understand to be in space. There's no galaxies, there's no
Speaker 1: dark matter as far as they can tell. So maybe
Speaker 1: this is evidence of a bubble collision or I guess
Speaker 1: a bread collision. These these universes have have come together,
Speaker 1: and that's the vandire craun Man. Do you think they
Speaker 1: could call it the bread zone? That that great? Yeah?
Speaker 1: So okay, here's the Stranger Things like attempt at explaining this.
Speaker 1: So maybe the Stranger Things universe and the upside Down.
Speaker 1: They're part of all of space and time that's around us, right,
Speaker 1: but they inflated at different rates and you can either
Speaker 1: think of them as bubbles or bread whatever works for you. Subsequently,
Speaker 1: the upside Down could have different laws of physics than
Speaker 1: we do. However, based on what we've seen in the show,
Speaker 1: the laws of things that have to be fairly aligned
Speaker 1: with ours, and not just because we don't see people
Speaker 1: defying the laws of physics, but like the universe of
Speaker 1: the upside Down is held together because we or would
Speaker 1: not a writer and hell Boy can only experience the
Speaker 1: upside down three three dimensions and then the fourth dimension
Speaker 1: of time. So maybe what we've seen in this show,
Speaker 1: the idea of the upside down is actually not another universe,
Speaker 1: but it's where two universes are overlapping. Huh. Well, that
Speaker 1: that opens up all sorts of storytelling possibilities for future seasons. Totally.
Speaker 1: If when you're in the upside down you can defy
Speaker 1: the your expectations of physics. Uh, if you just believe
Speaker 1: in yourself so positive vibes. Man hypothetical question if there
Speaker 1: could be other universes with different laws of physics than
Speaker 1: our own maybe maybe not, and if we could go
Speaker 1: to them? Uh, that seems very unlikely. But let's just
Speaker 1: say we did. You went to another universe at different
Speaker 1: laws of physics, would that universe immediately kill you? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Because if if I depend on and I do depend
Speaker 1: on the laws of the physics of this universe to
Speaker 1: hold my body together, right, I mean, how am I
Speaker 1: gonna go into a universe that has a maybe a
Speaker 1: drastically different structure. Yeah, Like, say you go to a
Speaker 1: universe with your body made of atoms and suddenly one
Speaker 1: of the four fundamental forces. The nuclear force is weaker,
Speaker 1: and so the atoms in your body are just not
Speaker 1: quite as keen to hold together. That seems like maybe
Speaker 1: that wouldn't be great. Yeah, but this is so again
Speaker 1: this points to the idea that they're overlapping, so that
Speaker 1: you've still got the forces of our universe overlapping with
Speaker 1: all of their forces. But hey, it's a television show. Yeah. Uh,
Speaker 1: maybe that's another episode though. Yeah. Alright, guys, there you
Speaker 1: have it. We have We've rolled through some science, uh,
Speaker 1: a little culture, a little history, some pseudoscience, all all
Speaker 1: of which seems to flow out of stranger things. And
Speaker 1: uh so then hopefully this helps enrich your appreciation of
Speaker 1: a show you already dig and maybe prepares you for
Speaker 1: some of the twist and turns in the upcoming season,
Speaker 1: which what airs at the end of this month. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: thanks so much for joining us tonight. Y'all got a
Speaker 1: lot of fun and uh, once more, everything on the
Speaker 1: table has to go, so don't don't be shy about
Speaker 1: grabbing some T shirts and some buttons. Thanks everybody for
Speaker 1: more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it
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