The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #550 - Rupert Sheldrake

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00:09:21.000 Alright, Rupert Sheldrake is here.

00:09:23.000 Cue the music, young Jamie.

00:09:35.000 Thank you for your patience, Rupert.

00:09:37.000 Rupert Sheldrake, ladies and gentlemen.

00:09:39.000 I came to know of you through the trialogues that you did with Terence McKenna, who I'm a huge fan of, and Ralph Abraham.

00:09:47.000 And I thought they were some really fascinating conversations.

00:09:52.000 You know, all of Terence's MP3s are very thought-inspiring and made you really look at things from a very different and peculiar angle that he had.

00:10:03.000 He had a very unique way of looking at the world.

00:10:05.000 But I came to know of you from that, and I came to know of your ideas of morphic resonance, which I found to be really fascinating.

00:10:15.000 And if you don't mind, just explain to folks at home listening what the concept of morphic resonance is.

00:10:22.000 It's the idea of memory and nature, the idea that the whole universe has a kind of memory.

00:10:28.000 The so-called laws of nature are more like habits.

00:10:32.000 Each individual in a species draws on a collective memory and contributes to it.

00:10:39.000 It works on the basis of similarity.

00:10:41.000 Any pattern of activity that's similar to a later pattern of activity in a self-organizing system influences it across space and time.

00:10:51.000 So what it means in effect is that if you train rats to learn a new trick in Los Angeles, then rats in New York and Sydney and London will learn the same thing quicker straight away.

00:11:03.000 There's actually evidence that this surprising effect happens.

00:11:07.000 If you crystallize a new chemical that's never existed before, then after you've made it in one place, it should get easier to crystallize all over the world.

00:11:18.000 So it's really a theory of habit and memory, and it enables new patterns of learning to spread quicker than they might otherwise do.

00:11:28.000 And it means that it should get easier to learn things that other people have already learned.

00:11:32.000 So this has been proven, this concept of rats being able to learn one thing in New York quicker because they learned it already in San Francisco?

00:11:41.000 Yes.

00:11:42.000 I mean, it wasn't done to test morphic resonance, which is still very controversial.

00:11:46.000 It was done to test something else.

00:11:48.000 It was done years ago, before the Second World War.

00:11:52.000 A professor at Harvard called William McDougall wanted to find out if rats could learn quicker what their parents had learned.

00:12:00.000 So he trained these rats to escape from a water maze.

00:12:02.000 They had to swim.

00:12:04.000 If they went out the wrong exit, they got an electric shock.

00:12:07.000 And if they went out the right exit, which the wrong one was lit up with a light, the other one was dim.

00:12:13.000 If they went out the right exit, they just escaped from the maze.

00:12:17.000 And he tested them to see how many trials they made before they learned always go out of the dim exit.

00:12:24.000 And the first generation took about 250 trials before they cottoned on to what was happening.

00:12:30.000 The next generation, it was about 180 trials.

00:12:34.000 The next generation, about 150. They got better and better.

00:12:38.000 And he thought at first this was because there was something being passed on to the children, maybe through modifying the genes or something like that, an inheritance of acquired characters.

00:12:51.000 That was a kind of taboo in 20th century science.

00:12:56.000 And so people questioned his work, but because he was at Harvard and because he was a famous professor, they couldn't just dismiss it.

00:13:05.000 He showed a huge effect.

00:13:07.000 So people tried repeating his work in the University of Edinburgh, Scotland and Melbourne, Australia.

00:13:14.000 And they found that their rats started more or less where the Harvard rats had left off.

00:13:19.000 And in Melbourne they did an experiment that was particularly interesting.

00:13:24.000 They went on getting better, the ones that were descended from the trained parents in each generation, but they found that all rats of that breed, even if their parents had never been trained, were getting better too.

00:13:36.000 So whatever it was, it wasn't something to do with modifying the genes or what people would now call epigenetics.

00:13:43.000 There was something else much more mysterious going on.

00:13:46.000 And since no one knew what it was, it was just ignored and forgotten.

00:13:51.000 That is really fascinating.

00:13:53.000 So that would kind of make sense that if somehow or another...

00:14:00.000 The genes or whatever that is in the rat is able to communicate with other of the same species of the similar genetics of whatever it is that they're doing, whatever undefined thing that they're doing, connecting with them even across continents,

00:14:17.000 across the other side of the planet.

00:14:19.000 Yes.

00:14:20.000 Wow.

00:14:21.000 That's right.

00:14:22.000 And so the same would, I think the same happens in evolution naturally in nature.

00:14:28.000 There was a famous case with birds called blue tits in England.

00:14:32.000 In America you call them chickadees.

00:14:36.000 That in the 1920s started raiding milk bottles.

00:14:41.000 In Britain we had then, and we still have, a system where you get fresh milk delivered to your doorstep every day in a bottle.

00:14:47.000 And then they wash the bottles and use them.

00:14:49.000 It's a great system.

00:14:50.000 We have it right now in London.

00:14:54.000 So in the 1920s, they had cardboard tops on these bottles.

00:14:59.000 And someone noticed in Southampton that the cream at the top of their bottle had disappeared.

00:15:04.000 The top had been torn open and the cream had disappeared. 0.94

00:15:07.000 And when they watched, they saw that every morning these blue tits in Southampton had figured out they could tear off this cardboard strip and get free cream every morning. 1.00

00:15:18.000 Everyone was sort of interested in this. 0.93

00:15:20.000 Then it turned up many, many miles away in another part of Britain.

00:15:24.000 Then it turned up somewhere else. 0.90

00:15:25.000 Blue tits don't fly very far. 1.00

00:15:27.000 They're home-loving birds.

00:15:29.000 And they don't migrate.

00:15:31.000 So scientists got interested and they set up a network all over Britain of people to observe this habit and they got reports.

00:15:39.000 It was coordinated from Cambridge University.

00:15:42.000 And they mapped the spread of the habit, and it became clear that it was spreading faster and faster, and it was being independently invented in other parts of Britain.

00:15:53.000 So much so that the professor of biology at Oxford, Sir Alastair Hardy, suggested it must be happening by telepathy, that it was spreading too quickly.

00:16:03.000 The most interesting records are from Holland because this started happening in Holland as well.

00:16:09.000 And during the war, Holland was occupied by the Germans and milk deliveries stopped.

00:16:15.000 They didn't start again until about 1948, about seven or eight years after they stopped.

00:16:21.000 Blue tits only lived three or four years, so there would have been no blue tits after the war that remembered the golden age of free cream.

00:16:29.000 So when the milk deliveries began again in Holland, they started drinking the cream almost straight away all over Holland.

00:16:38.000 So I would say this is a kind of collective memory that spread by morphic resonance and was remembered by morphic resonance.

00:16:46.000 And that's another example of this going on in the real world.

00:16:51.000 Incidentally, they've now stopped doing it.

00:16:54.000 They used to steal our cream in London until about 10 years ago when we switched to semi-skimmed milk.

00:17:00.000 There isn't any cream in bottles of semi-skimmed milk and blue tits have more or less given up in Britain now because so many people have switched to semi-skimmed milk they don't get any cream.

00:17:09.000 It's not worth the effort.

00:17:11.000 So the habits died out.

00:17:14.000 That's pretty fascinating.

00:17:16.000 The idea that human beings start off as a blank slate has really been questioned quite a bit over the last generation.

00:17:27.000 And genetics in particular, they're starting to understand That there's certain particular traits and memories that you can actually learn from your parents.

00:17:36.000 Like there was one study they did with mice where they had taken mice and they had given them an electric shock and coincided that electric shock with the smell of citrus.

00:17:46.000 Like there was electric shock in their feet.

00:17:48.000 Are you aware of this test?

00:17:49.000 Yes, I am.

00:17:49.000 It was published in Nature with the provocative title Inheriting the Fears of Fathers.

00:17:56.000 It's a very, very fascinating study.

00:17:58.000 Yeah, amazing stuff.

00:18:00.000 I mean, that I think could be partly due to morphic resonance.

00:18:03.000 Have you explained it to people before?

00:18:05.000 No, please do.

00:18:06.000 I mean, I think I might have, but please do.

00:18:08.000 Well, what they did was they used a chemical, a synthetic chemical called acetophenone that smells sort of vaguely fruity, but it's something that mice would never have encountered in nature because it's a synthetic chemical.

00:18:21.000 And they took male mice and exposed them to the smell of acetophenone and they gave them a mild electric shock on their paw when they smelt this stuff.

00:18:33.000 And the result is classical Pavlovian conditioning, you know, a few times of that happening and as soon as they smelt acetophenone they were terrified.

00:18:43.000 It's perfectly standard stuff in science.

00:18:47.000 What wasn't standard was they then bred from these mice, and they did some of the experiments using artificial insemination so that the mothers never even met the fathers of the next generation.

00:18:59.000 And then they tested their children and their grandchildren, and whenever they smelt aceto for known, they were just paralyzed with fear.

00:19:06.000 So they inherited the fear of this chemical in a single generation in a way that regular science simply can't explain.

00:19:18.000 And this went far beyond anything anyone would have expected.

00:19:22.000 There's evidence from the details of the experiments that it involves some changes in the sperm, some change in the genes or the epigenetics, which is the packaging of the genes.

00:19:33.000 But no one can conceive how a mouse learning to avoid this smell and being frightened by it, no one knows how all that information could be transferred into genes in the sperm.

00:19:47.000 So I think at least part of the explanation of this is morphic resonance, that if you make some animals averse to something, then other animals of the same kind will be frightened of it.

00:20:03.000 I did a very similar experiment actually years ago with a skeptical scientist in Britain called Stephen Rose.

00:20:11.000 We had a controversy in the Guardian newspaper.

00:20:15.000 I used to write a column in the Guardian and I wrote a thing about the nature of memory and how morphic resonance helps to explain it.

00:20:23.000 We could discuss that later if you like.

00:20:26.000 Rose was outraged by this. 0.61

00:20:28.000 He'd spent his whole career working on memory, saying it must be inside the brain, and he worked with day-old chicks.

00:20:36.000 And in The Guardian, he wrote a response to my article and challenged me to do an experiment in his laboratory under his supervision to test what he called the seemingly absurd hypothesis.

00:20:49.000 Well, the experiment we did, we had day old chicks, and day old chicks peck at anything bright. 1.00

00:20:59.000 So we had them peck at a silvery bead.

00:21:03.000 And after the silver bead, they were injected with saline solution.

00:21:07.000 It was just a control.

00:21:09.000 They didn't feel ill.

00:21:11.000 Everything was fine.

00:21:12.000 We also had them peck at a yellow light-emitting diode.

00:21:18.000 And after they'd pecked at that, the chicks that had pecked at the yellow light-emitting diode were injected with something that made them feel sick.

00:21:26.000 Lithium chloride, I think it was.

00:21:28.000 It made them feel sick.

00:21:29.000 It didn't kill them.

00:21:30.000 It just made them feel ill.

00:21:32.000 And you know, if you ever eat anything and you feel sick after it, you never want to eat that thing again.

00:21:38.000 It's called conditioned aversion.

00:21:42.000 So these chicks, when you tested them a day or two later, they would avoid yellow lights, but they'd peck at the chrome bead, the silver bead, which hadn't made them sick. 1.00

00:21:54.000 And that's straightforward.

00:21:56.000 They learned to avoid it.

00:21:58.000 But what I predicted was that if we did the experiment over and over again, every day we get a new batch of fresh chicks and test them with the yellow light-emitting diode and the chrome bead.

00:22:11.000 I predicted that they'd start avoiding the yellow light-emitting diode, but not the chrome bead, because of the influence by morphic resonance from previous chicks. 0.97

00:22:23.000 They'd start avoiding it even before they'd been made averse to it.

00:22:26.000 For the first time they were exposed to it, they wouldn't go for it.

00:22:30.000 They'd be more wary of it.

00:22:33.000 And that's exactly what happened in this experiment.

00:22:39.000 This is actually something that's well known in the rat poison industry.

00:22:43.000 I mean, most people haven't spent much time looking into the rat poison industry and how it works, but one thing that happens to people who try to poison rats for a living Is that if you try some new kind of bait with a particular flavor,

00:22:59.000 rats eat it and they get sick and they die.

00:23:05.000 But it works for a while.

00:23:07.000 But after a while, rats start avoiding it.

00:23:09.000 They become what's called in the trade bait shy.

00:23:13.000 And not just in one place, but the bait stops working, you know, miles and miles away.

00:23:18.000 So they have to keep inventing new baits.

00:23:22.000 That's why most rat poison now is based on warfarin, which causes bleeding, thins the blood and causes bleeding, and it doesn't usually affect the rats for days after they've eaten it.

00:23:36.000 They don't associate it with any particular flavor because it's slow, slow acting.

00:23:41.000 That's why people have had to switch to warfarin as the main rat poison, because this aversion to things that poisoned them became so strong.

00:23:51.000 And there's something that actually some people who are listening to us might know about, which I heard about from a guy in America who fishes for bass.

00:24:00.000 And he was telling me there's a constant development of new lures for bass fishing.

00:24:07.000 Do you do bass fishing?

00:24:08.000 Yes, I have fished quite a bit.

00:24:10.000 Yes.

00:24:10.000 Well, apparently people are always inventing new lures that work very well for a while and apparently they stop working.

00:24:19.000 Not just in one place, but elsewhere, so there's a constant development of new lures.

00:24:24.000 Now, if that could be documented, that might be another very interesting case of morphic resonance.

00:24:31.000 If bass keep getting caught and they're in pain when they're caught by being fished with a particular kind of lure, then other bass later, even in different rivers or lakes, when they see that lure, would be more averse to biting it,

00:24:47.000 so it stops working.

00:24:48.000 So I think there could be many examples of this out there in the real world.

00:24:53.000 When did you come up with this concept?

00:24:55.000 Is this your concept, the concept of morphic resonance?

00:24:58.000 Yes, yes.

00:24:59.000 I came up with this in 1973, a long time ago.

00:25:03.000 I was doing research at Cambridge University on plant development, how plants grow, and I became convinced for a variety of reasons that the attempt to explain the whole thing just in terms of genes and molecules and proteins It wouldn't work.

00:25:22.000 I was at the very leading edge of this.

00:25:25.000 I mean, the main plant hormone is called auxin, A-U-X-I-N. And I figured out how it's made, and then I figured out how it's transported around the plant.

00:25:37.000 And this was a massive advance, and this is kind of textbook stuff now in university textbooks, the mechanism of polar auxin transport.

00:25:50.000 Having figured all that out, I then realized this wasn't enough to explain plants, because all plants have the same hormone, and it's moved in the same way in every plant, and it's moved the same way in petals and leaves and stems and roots, and it's moved the same way in palms and cabbages and roses,

00:26:09.000 and yet they're all different.

00:26:11.000 So I got interested in something in biology called morphogenetic fields, the idea of invisible fields that shape living organisms.

00:26:21.000 So there's like an invisible mold.

00:26:23.000 As a flower grows, it's kind of an invisible mold that shapes the way the petals develop and the flower develops.

00:26:30.000 Or as a leaf grows, there's a kind of invisible mold for that leaf called a morphogenetic field, like a kind of invisible plan.

00:26:38.000 This idea was not invented by me.

00:26:40.000 It had been around in biology since the 1920s.

00:26:43.000 But the key thing was to understand how these fields could be inherited.

00:26:47.000 And I was sure it wouldn't go through the genes.

00:26:50.000 The genes just code for proteins.

00:26:52.000 So there had to be some other kind of inheritance.

00:26:54.000 How could it work?

00:26:55.000 And I was wrestling with this idea in Cambridge.

00:26:59.000 And then the idea of morphic resonance came to me.

00:27:01.000 If you have a resonance across time between similar things, you could explain this inheritance of form and of instincts in animals in a non-genetic way, which would give a completely new way of understanding biology and inheritance.

00:27:16.000 I then realized that this would apply to learning and memory and many aspects of human behavior.

00:27:22.000 So I wrote this up in a book called A New Science of Life, which was published in 1981. It took me years to think this through.

00:27:30.000 I realized that it would be controversial.

00:27:33.000 So I had to be very sure of myself before I could write about it.

00:27:38.000 Then I wrote another book called The Presence of the Past, which puts the theory forward in its fullest form, and that's my main theoretical book.

00:27:48.000 And since then I've really been trying to develop these ideas, test them, do experiments and so on.

00:27:53.000 Anyway, it was my idea in the first place and since then it's become widely discussed in many areas.

00:27:59.000 Now when you say that you had to be sure of it, what did you do that made you sure of it?

00:28:06.000 I mean, what kind of testing have you done to sort of hammer out this concept of morphic resonance?

00:28:15.000 Well, there were two aspects to being sure about it.

00:28:18.000 The main objection that I got from my colleagues in the scientific world, especially in biology, was not what's the evidence.

00:28:29.000 They didn't say what's the evidence.

00:28:30.000 They just said this idea is unnecessary because we're going to figure everything out in terms of genes and molecular biology.

00:28:39.000 So one line of research I had to do was to see whether the conventional approach in biology was likely to work or not.

00:28:48.000 And so I had to think really deep about standard science.

00:28:53.000 Is this going to work?

00:28:55.000 They just said, give us time, we'll figure it all out.

00:28:57.000 We don't need new ideas.

00:28:59.000 Basically, everything's fine the way it is.

00:29:02.000 And that's what led in the 1980s to people formulating the Human Genome Project, which culminated in the year 2000 with the publication of the Human Genome Project.

00:29:14.000 So they thought that that was adequate to explain.

00:29:16.000 Once they got into the human genome, once they mapped it out, they were going to be able to explain pretty much everything about human beings.

00:29:22.000 That's right.

00:29:22.000 They actually thought that.

00:29:24.000 And that's why there was a huge investment.

00:29:26.000 Hundreds of billions of dollars were invested in genomics and biotechnology.

00:29:30.000 On the grounds that genes explain everything.

00:29:33.000 One gene, one characteristic.

00:29:35.000 There's a gene for everything.

00:29:37.000 If you can figure out the genes and manipulate the genes, basically you can control life.

00:29:42.000 And if you can own the genes or own patents on the genes, you can make billions of dollars.

00:29:46.000 That was the thinking and that was...

00:29:48.000 Almost everybody was into that.

00:29:50.000 But I was convinced that genes were grossly overrated, that they couldn't do most of these things that people thought they could.

00:29:58.000 Because what genes do is code for the sequence of amino acids in proteins, protein molecules which make up our muscles and, you know, the blood cells and the enzymes and so on, a major part of life.

00:30:13.000 are coded for by genes.

00:30:16.000 But there's a huge difference between making the right proteins and the shape of your nose, for example, or the instincts of a spider to spin a web.

00:30:24.000 I mean, it's like saying you could explain the structure of a building by knowing the chemistry of the bricks.

00:30:31.000 I mean, you have to have bricks and you have to have cement and timber and stuff to make a building.

00:30:36.000 And if you have defective bricks, you get a defective building.

00:30:39.000 But it doesn't explain the plan of the building, the shape of the building.

00:30:43.000 So I was convinced that these things would never be explained by genes, that we needed something like morphogenetic fields and morphic resonance to explain them.

00:30:54.000 So part of thinking about this was thinking hard about what regular science could and could not achieve.

00:31:01.000 And incidentally, I'll come to the evidence in a minute, but the...

00:31:07.000 One of my predictions is that this biotechnology thing would be a disaster.

00:31:12.000 It would mean people would lose huge amounts of money.

00:31:16.000 I advised my friends, if they were investors, just don't bother.

00:31:19.000 You know, the only way you make money in this is by getting in on the bubble and selling out in time because it's not really going to lead to that many useful products.

00:31:28.000 Why are you so convinced?

00:31:29.000 Because I thought that the role of genes was totally overrated.

00:31:32.000 And this is, in fact, what's happened.

00:31:36.000 Were you alone in this?

00:31:37.000 Or were there other scientists?

00:31:38.000 No, there were a few people.

00:31:38.000 There were a few people.

00:31:39.000 But most people went along with this.

00:31:42.000 It's interesting, you see, that the Human Genome Project, they expected they'd have about 100,000 genes.

00:31:48.000 It turned out when they finally announced it that there were only about 20,000 genes.

00:31:54.000 We have less genes than the sea urchin and about half as many as a rice plant.

00:32:00.000 That was a huge surprise to people and it soon became clear that it wasn't going to deliver on most of these promises.

00:32:08.000 Craig Venter, who had the private genome project, which was a rival of the publicly funded one, he's a very, very competitive guy, he got there first.

00:32:22.000 He saw it as a race and he was going to win, and he did.

00:32:28.000 Even though he was technically very successful and the publicly funded genome project was technically successful, once they'd done it, it became immediately apparent this information was almost useless.

00:32:41.000 And Craig Venter's, his company, Celera Genomics, the shares collapsed In a few days, from about $60 a share to about 12 cents a share.

00:32:52.000 And when he was interviewed after that, he said he's got a great sense of humor.

00:32:55.000 He said, I'm a guy who's made a million the hard way by working my way down from a billion.

00:33:05.000 So, the thing is, it didn't work.

00:33:08.000 And around four or five years ago, there was a development in science that most people haven't heard of yet, outside science, but it's really big within the scientific journals, called the Missing Heritability Problem.

00:33:22.000 What they did is they took the genomes of 30,000 different people, because it's quite cheap now to sequence genomes, sequenced about 30,000 genomes, and to figure out what genes do what.

00:33:36.000 You know, they looked at the people, 30,000 people, they knew everything about them, their height, their diseases, history, and so forth.

00:33:45.000 They started with height, because height's easy to measure.

00:33:48.000 You just need a tape measure.

00:33:49.000 And it's already known that tall parents tend to have tall children and short parents tend to have short children.

00:33:55.000 You can predict the height of children when they're grown on the basis of the parent's height with an accuracy of about 80%.

00:34:02.000 And in the technical language, they say height is 80% heritable.

00:34:09.000 Well, they'd figured out the gene's complete genome of 30,000 different people.

00:34:15.000 They knew their height.

00:34:17.000 So they then ran all these correlations and statistics to figure out which genes were involved in height.

00:34:23.000 They found about 50 genes were involved in controlling height.

00:34:27.000 Then they found some were more important than others, so they made their best models, weighting some more than others, and coming out with predictions.

00:34:36.000 And then they picked some people at random, the genomes.

00:34:39.000 They did all their sums, they'd identified the genes, they ran the computer simulations, and they predicted these people's height on the base of their genome.

00:34:47.000 And then they looked up the height to see how good this method was.

00:34:51.000 It turned out they could predict height with an accuracy of 5%.

00:34:54.000 Now you can do it with an accuracy of 80% just by using tape measures in a way that's billions of dollars cheaper.

00:35:02.000 So the gap between the 5% and the 80%, the 75% that's not explained by the genes, is called the missing heritability problem.

00:35:16.000 And it turned out that the same was true of most diseases.

00:35:20.000 There's a few diseases where a defective gene gives a defective protein and you get a clear predictive value.

00:35:26.000 Cystic fibrosis is one of them, sickle cell anemia is another.

00:35:29.000 So there's a few rare genetic diseases where this method works very well.

00:35:34.000 But for most diseases, breast cancer, cardiac problems, the predictive value of the genome turned out to be only 5 to 10%.

00:35:43.000 And all these companies sprang up that would offer to sequence people's genomes and predict their diseases.

00:35:51.000 And the last one, 23andMe, was put out of business by the FDA just a few months ago because their advertising was misleading.

00:36:02.000 You cannot predict.

00:36:04.000 With more than about 10% accuracy, the likelihood that you'll get a particular disease on the basis of the genome, except for these rare genetic disorders.

00:36:15.000 So this company, their entire business model was predicting people's vulnerability to certain diseases?

00:36:21.000 I think that was their main business model.

00:36:23.000 I mean, there are certain things where genome sequencing is still valuable and used.

00:36:28.000 You know, if you want to find out what your racial background is, you know, where did your ancestors come from?

00:36:33.000 It's really good for that.

00:36:34.000 And it has very useful information.

00:36:36.000 I'm not saying this is useless.

00:36:38.000 I'm saying it has limited uses, but nothing like the bonanza of profits that people were expecting.

00:36:45.000 I mean, there was a report by the Harvard Business School on this a few years ago On the biotech business, and they said no one had ever invented such a massive money-losing scheme in the history of humanity.

00:36:58.000 So I think that's because it was based on a false assumption of what genes do, you see.

00:37:03.000 That's fascinating.

00:37:05.000 When people hear about the experiment with the mice and the smell, what's the smell called again?

00:37:13.000 Acetophenone.

00:37:14.000 What's the conventional explanation for this memory being passed down into these animals that have never experienced that before through breeding?

00:37:23.000 Well, there isn't really one, you see, because the It's something that people are rightly surprised about because the idea that you could actually give off the brain or the nose or could actually give off influences that travel through the blood And selectively modify sperm,

00:37:44.000 changing genes or the packaging of genes.

00:37:47.000 Nothing like that had been contemplated before.

00:37:51.000 And this suggests something is going on that regular science doesn't know about.

00:37:56.000 And that's fine from the point of view of science.

00:37:58.000 I mean, if you discover something new, then you have to try and figure out how it works.

00:38:01.000 But no one really knows.

00:38:03.000 And this sort of pushes molecular biology beyond its limits, really.

00:38:08.000 People are working on this now and trying to figure out how it could happen.

00:38:11.000 What are the conventional theories?

00:38:14.000 Well, there aren't really.

00:38:15.000 I mean, no one knows how smelling something could affect genes or the packaging of genes.

00:38:25.000 And even if they could, even if you could say there would be a modification of the sperm to make people, the offspring, the mice that descend from those sperm, more sensitive to acetophenone, That doesn't necessarily explain why they'd be afraid of it.

00:38:40.000 I mean, if they'd trained them in a different way, acetophenone, they could have licked their lips and thought, oh, this means food.

00:38:47.000 So you've got quite a lot of explaining to do, and how these genes or the packaging of them could influence the brain is way beyond anything we can understand at present.

00:39:00.000 I think most people would say we just haven't figured it out yet.

00:39:03.000 And this is a fairly recent experiment, too.

00:39:05.000 Oh, this was only a few months ago, yes.

00:39:06.000 A few months ago, really?

00:39:07.000 Yes, it was published a few months ago.

00:39:09.000 How long did they work on this for, though?

00:39:11.000 Well, I suppose they must have been working on it for several years before they published it.

00:39:15.000 But what's exciting in biology at the moment is that the standard off-the-shelf explanations that people used to have, it's all genetically programmed and that kind of thing.

00:39:25.000 This is falling apart.

00:39:28.000 Until the year 2000, there was a huge taboo in biology against the The inheritance of acquired characteristics, which means, say, a father builds up his muscles and becomes stronger or learns particular skills, the idea that the children could inherit that was considered impossible.

00:39:48.000 They said, no, all inheritance is just genetic.

00:39:51.000 Of course, you get environmental influences.

00:39:53.000 If a dad takes his boys to weightlifting classes and stuff, then obviously they'll become more muscular.

00:40:00.000 But the idea that anything could be passed through the genes that had been learned or acquired It was absolutely taboo.

00:40:10.000 It was a heresy in 20th century biology in the West.

00:40:14.000 Interestingly, in the Soviet Union, they went the other way.

00:40:17.000 Stalin liked the idea that if people got better at things, their kids would be better at them automatically.

00:40:23.000 They'd inherit it.

00:40:24.000 And geneticists in the Soviet Union were persecuted, and people who did research on the inheritance of acquired characteristics were well-funded and prestigious.

00:40:34.000 And this polarized things even more.

00:40:36.000 There was a kind of cold war in biology as well as in everything else.

00:40:41.000 But around the year 2000, it became clear that there really is an inheritance of acquired characteristics and has been rebranded epigenetic inheritance.

00:40:52.000 And it's now a really hot topic in biology and these mice inheriting the fear of their father's experiments are part of this new wave of research on epigenetics.

00:41:04.000 And it turns out that a lot of things these Soviet biologists were claiming are actually true.

00:41:10.000 One of the things I think ought to happen is that somebody who knows Russian, preferably someone who's in Russia, It goes back through these archives of Soviet biology from the 1920s, 30s, 40s and 50s when tens of thousands of biologists in the Soviet Union were working on what we now call epigenetic inheritance.

00:41:31.000 And it's a gold mine of information that could be dusted off and could be really helpful to science.

00:41:39.000 But nobody's done that yet because it's usually assumed the whole of that's been discredited and even Russians don't want to talk about it.

00:41:47.000 That's so fascinating.

00:41:48.000 It's so fascinating that scientists are just now piecing together this new information, just start putting it together.

00:41:55.000 Yes.

00:41:55.000 And it's purely anecdotal evidence.

00:41:57.000 I have young daughters, and they wrestle around together.

00:42:00.000 They play in the bed and laugh and joke.

00:42:03.000 And I've been doing jujitsu since the 1990s, and my daughters assume jujitsu positions.

00:42:10.000 I see them do it.

00:42:11.000 I've taught them now.

00:42:12.000 Yeah.

00:42:12.000 But when they were little, like three and four years old, my youngest would do what's called an over-under control.

00:42:20.000 She would grab her back and grip like a certain way that you teach people to do. 0.98

00:42:25.000 And then she would throw her legs over. 0.99

00:42:26.000 It's called taking the back.

00:42:28.000 It's a position, a standard position in jujitsu.

00:42:31.000 But it's not a normal position for people.

00:42:33.000 But she would automatically go to it, pull my older daughter on top of her, and take her back. 1.00

00:42:38.000 And it was the craziest thing to watch as a martial arts commentator, someone who understands the correct way to do positions.

00:42:44.000 I would watch her do it.

00:42:45.000 I was like, she knows what she's doing.

00:42:47.000 I don't think she knows why she knows what she's doing, but she assumed a position that I've done countless times, thousands of times in my life.

00:42:55.000 It automatically came to her, and I'm like...

00:42:58.000 That has to be somehow or another in her code.

00:43:01.000 Somehow or another it's gone from my body into her.

00:43:04.000 Yes.

00:43:05.000 Well, exactly.

00:43:06.000 Well, that's a really, really interesting case.

00:43:08.000 And you see, I would call that morphic resonance, that she's resonating with you.

00:43:11.000 She's got your genes, she's got your proteins and those of her mother as well, of course.

00:43:17.000 But this similarity to you means she'd be in a particularly strong resonance with you and would pick up things that you've acquired.

00:43:26.000 I think it's interesting you see in many traditional societies children would follow in the footsteps of their parents.

00:43:32.000 You know, blacksmiths' sons have become blacksmiths.

00:43:35.000 And in India, the caste system, you know, if someone's a potter, their kids have become potters.

00:43:39.000 And if they're a weaver, their kids have become weavers.

00:43:43.000 And I think this is partly because people would have a special aptitude for doing things their parents had done, for skills their parents had acquired, not through the genes, but by a kind of resonance.

00:43:56.000 Obviously, training and growing up in a household where people know these things plays an important part.

00:44:02.000 But even before the regular training begins, you'd expect them to show these tendencies.

00:44:06.000 And so that's a particularly interesting example because you're able to observe these positions.

00:44:12.000 Most people wouldn't notice.

00:44:13.000 But that's the kind of thing that I think is likely to be going on all the time.

00:44:20.000 Yeah, there's been several of those positions.

00:44:23.000 I mean, sometimes it's just play, and I see them just rolling around, but then there's like these clear patterns.

00:44:29.000 Like one of them is knee to the belly to the mount.

00:44:32.000 There's this position that you do when you're in what's called side control.

00:44:35.000 You put your knee on someone's stomach, you slide it across, and you get on top of them, mounting them with your hips above their hips.

00:44:41.000 And she does it instinctively.

00:44:43.000 And it's not an instinctive move for most kids.

00:44:46.000 And I try to be objective when I watch it, like how much of this is just natural human movement and how much of this is her actually having some information.

00:44:55.000 And there's clear blips where I go, look at that.

00:44:59.000 That is normal, like in jujitsu class, but it's not normal for kids.

00:45:03.000 There are things that they've learned.

00:45:06.000 And then there's also, like, when I've taught them stuff, they pick things up like they already knew it.

00:45:11.000 It's like, I used to teach martial arts, so I've taught quite a few people.

00:45:15.000 And I know children are a little easier to teach than other folks, but there's children of people who are martial artists, and then there's children of people who have never studied martial arts, and the children of people who are martial artists were almost universally easier to teach.

00:45:30.000 And it sort of backs up that idea.

00:45:33.000 Yes.

00:45:33.000 I mean, one could even do experiments on this.

00:45:36.000 You know, actually, one could quantify it.

00:45:40.000 My own approach to science is that you have to start from what people have noticed, like your observations with kids of martial arts people, including your own.

00:45:49.000 And then, if you want to take it further, you could do more rigorous observations.

00:45:53.000 And the standard explanation people say, oh, well, they've seen their parents do it, or they've seen videos or pictures of it around the house, and that sort of thing.

00:46:01.000 That might play some part in it, but I think there's likely to be much more than that to this, and one would obviously have to do special experiments to check it out.

00:46:12.000 But I imagine, I think in many areas, it should be easier to teach kids whose parents have done something.

00:46:21.000 Like my own kids, my two sons are extremely musical, brilliantly musical.

00:46:27.000 One's a professional musician now.

00:46:30.000 Well, I play the piano.

00:46:33.000 My grandfather was a church organist.

00:46:35.000 My uncle was a church organist.

00:46:37.000 My father was very musical.

00:46:38.000 My mother played the piano and was very musical.

00:46:41.000 My wife's family were musical.

00:46:44.000 Her mother was a concert pianist.

00:46:46.000 Her father was a pianist and a singer.

00:46:48.000 And right from the age of four, they wanted to play the piano.

00:46:53.000 They wanted to learn music and they showed a tremendous amount of ability to assimilate it.

00:46:58.000 There are sometimes people who are very musical who come from non-musical families, but some of the greatest musical geniuses come out of musical dynasties like Bach.

00:47:07.000 I mean, he came from a dynasty of musicians.

00:47:10.000 And so I think that these things are probably easier to learn if parents have learned them.

00:47:17.000 It's so fascinating, just the concept of learning things and learning things from some really unknown source.

00:47:27.000 One of the things that you brought up in the trilogues I thought was particularly interesting and really resonated with me was you were talking about how children in New York City are afraid of monsters.

00:47:39.000 It's a natural inclination for children to be afraid of things in the dark with large teeth that are going to eat you.

00:47:46.000 And that this goes back to the time where we were, you know, regularly predators took babies, like big cats or monsters, as it were, in the night would steal people, would eat people,

00:48:02.000 would prey on human beings.

00:48:03.000 That it makes sense that these children have this intuitive instinct built into their genetics or whatever it is.

00:48:10.000 Well, exactly.

00:48:11.000 I mean, the standard sort of picture of the human prehistoric past is man the hunter striding out onto the savannas of Africa and stuff.

00:48:20.000 But it was much more, I think, the case of man the hunted.

00:48:25.000 I mean, humans are particularly defenseless against big predators.

00:48:30.000 Until recent times were very vulnerable to them, like tigers.

00:48:35.000 In India, under the British rule, even as late as the 1940s, there were thousands of people a year killed by man-eating tigers.

00:48:47.000 They usually go for the most vulnerable.

00:48:49.000 I mean, when predators are working in Africa, when lions are attacking herds of antelope or something, they go for the old and the sick, or they go for the young, because they're the ones that are the most vulnerable.

00:49:00.000 So, probably over huge amounts of human history, young children had indeed been eaten by predators.

00:49:12.000 And still were, and probably today in some parts of the world maybe still are.

00:49:17.000 These were the most realistic fears for huge periods of human history.

00:49:21.000 And so I think it's fascinating that young children...

00:49:26.000 Have these nightmares.

00:49:29.000 This study in New York looked at the nightmares of young children.

00:49:32.000 Nearly all of them were about being chased by monsters or scary animals.

00:49:38.000 And of course, we feed this imagination in children through fairy tales.

00:49:42.000 Think of Grimm's fairy tales, you know, like Little Red Riding Hood, where there's the big bad wolf, you know, that is going to eat up Little Red Riding Hood.

00:49:53.000 There's so many stories in fairy tales of wolves that could eat children, and although nowadays the image of wolves has been sanitized, and we're told they're basically fairy-loving creatures, etc., they are predators, and if they get the chance in the past,

00:50:10.000 I think they did eat children sometimes.

00:50:12.000 Well, not just in the past, it's in the present, if they have the right numbers.

00:50:25.000 Yes.

00:50:28.000 Yes.

00:50:33.000 Because so many of their troops were getting killed by wolves, they united together to take out a giant super pack of wolves in Russia.

00:50:41.000 Because, you know, there was hundreds of wolves that were just slaughtering soldiers.

00:50:45.000 Wolves are dangerous.

00:50:46.000 They're very tricky animals.

00:50:48.000 We eradicated them to very low numbers, and then when the numbers start to build up again, they start getting more and more dangerous again.

00:50:55.000 Well, I've seen this myself.

00:50:56.000 We spend our summers on a remote island in British Columbia, Cortez Island, BC. And about 10 years ago, the wolves came back.

00:51:06.000 They swam from other islands.

00:51:07.000 And at first, most people there are sort of liberal kind of people.

00:51:12.000 They thought it was great wildlife returns, etc.

00:51:15.000 But these wolves became increasingly bold.

00:51:18.000 And our family owns some land up there.

00:51:22.000 We have a forest.

00:51:23.000 We don't have a house.

00:51:24.000 We just have forest land.

00:51:25.000 And my sons were there on our land.

00:51:28.000 They'd been sleeping out.

00:51:29.000 When a big wolf suddenly appeared and looked very, very threatening.

00:51:34.000 And they'd been told, don't run if you see a wolf.

00:51:37.000 So they stood there and they faced it.

00:51:39.000 And then this wolf sort of puffed up its fur and charged them and it stopped a few yards away.

00:51:44.000 And they backed off slowly and they ran when they got round the corner.

00:51:49.000 But this wolf was clearly threatening.

00:51:52.000 Very, very scary.

00:51:53.000 Then they started eating people's dogs.

00:51:56.000 And there's nothing...

00:51:58.000 I've never seen a faster transition from someone who is a kind of...

00:52:02.000 Wolf-loving LeBron.

00:52:04.000 Once their dog got eaten, they wanted the guys with guns to come out and teach these wolves a lesson.

00:52:10.000 And they did.

00:52:11.000 Some of them were shot.

00:52:12.000 And now they're much more frightened of people.

00:52:15.000 They keep their distance.

00:52:16.000 They're still there.

00:52:17.000 But if there hadn't been a pushback from the people on the island, they would have got increasingly bold.

00:52:24.000 Yeah, there's an issue that's going on right now where people are resisting the idea of hunting wolves because they've reintroduced wolves to a lot of the western United States.

00:52:32.000 And in some places they've reached very large numbers, thousands of wolves, in Idaho and a couple of these areas where they've decimated elk and moose populations, or elk and deer populations, rather.

00:52:44.000 And there's a lot of people that are animal rights folks that aren't there.

00:52:49.000 They're not there.

00:52:50.000 And they resist it very strongly.

00:52:51.000 The idea of killing wolves is barbaric and evil.

00:52:54.000 But to the folks that live there, they're like, no, we love animals, but you have to deal with this.

00:52:59.000 You've got a real problem here.

00:53:01.000 Especially when they form large packs, they get very dangerous.

00:53:04.000 In Russia, they had these super packs of wolves in Siberia that were taking out horses.

00:53:10.000 They were showing up a hundred wolves at a time.

00:53:12.000 They were showing up at these horse stables and slaughtering a horse.

00:53:15.000 And, you know, there's not much you could do about a hundred wolves.

00:53:18.000 No.

00:53:20.000 Well, given all this background, I think that's so fascinating that for young children, especially urban young children who've actually never seen, they would never see a wolf in their life or any other scary animal.

00:53:31.000 These are the things that haunt their nightmares, and I think this is part of a kind of collective memory.

00:53:37.000 I mean, the more realistic dangers for young children are being run over by cars.

00:53:42.000 Or sexual predators.

00:53:43.000 Or sexual predators. 0.98

00:53:45.000 But that's not what their dreams are about.

00:53:47.000 It may be what their parents' nightmares are about, but not the children themselves.

00:53:51.000 There was a television show in America that I hosted called Fear Factor, and it was a game show.

00:53:57.000 They had to do these stunts, and different stunts had different things they had to do.

00:54:01.000 One of the things that I found incredibly fascinating was some people had irrational fears about certain animals, whether it's spiders, snakes, arachnophobia, aphidiophobia.

00:54:11.000 And those fears were undeniable.

00:54:14.000 They weren't just like...

00:54:15.000 People are nervous of heights.

00:54:17.000 Like, I'm nervous of heights.

00:54:18.000 I look over the side of a building and go, whoo!

00:54:19.000 But it's not an irrational fear.

00:54:21.000 It's a normal, natural fear of...

00:54:24.000 I don't want to fall.

00:54:25.000 Yes.

00:54:25.000 But there are some people, you would show them a snake and they would black out.

00:54:29.000 They couldn't stay conscious.

00:54:31.000 They would hyperventilate and they would faint.

00:54:34.000 And I couldn't believe it.

00:54:36.000 They were normal folks.

00:54:37.000 When I would talk to them, there would be nothing that it would indicate in any way that they were psychologically deranged or there was something missing in their, you know, whatever developmental period That they'd gone through something that got screwed up and they were just missing a giant chunk of what makes a person a normal person.

00:54:56.000 No, they seem completely normal.

00:54:57.000 But you show them a spider and they would...

00:54:59.000 And I always wondered, like, what is...

00:55:02.000 Is that maybe some...

00:55:03.000 Someone down the line in their history was bitten by a spider.

00:55:07.000 Someone down the line was poisoned by a snake and survived or...

00:55:10.000 They saw someone poisoned by a snake.

00:55:12.000 I mean, whatever it is, it's real.

00:55:15.000 And these are real psychological issues that people have to deal with.

00:55:21.000 Arachnophobia and affidiophobia in particular, they're very strong.

00:55:25.000 Yes.

00:55:26.000 Well, I think these could easily be inherited phobias.

00:55:30.000 I mean, it's well known in animals that you can have instinctive fear, and of course it makes sense for animals.

00:55:36.000 You probably know those experiments they do with day-old chicks or with ducklings.

00:55:40.000 You have them out in an enclosure outdoors, and then they do these experiments.

00:55:45.000 They have cardboard cutouts with silhouettes of birds, and you pull them across on wires.

00:55:52.000 And if you pull across things with a silhouette of a hawk, These ducklings just freeze.

00:55:59.000 You know, the fear response is to just freeze.

00:56:02.000 They freeze.

00:56:03.000 Whereas if you pull across something that looks like a silhouette of a pigeon or a red-winged blackbird or something, they don't.

00:56:13.000 So they have an inherited fear of things that could, in fact, be dangerous.

00:56:19.000 And it's perfectly, in terms of evolution, it makes perfect sense to see why that would work.

00:56:24.000 These baby ducklings don't have time to learn which birds are harmful and which are not, but an instinctive response of fear to something that is actually scary It may sometimes lead them to respond to something that isn't, like a cardboard cutout.

00:56:38.000 But I think these things make complete sense biologically.

00:56:43.000 Yeah, it does make sense if you stop and think about it.

00:56:46.000 If you really take into consideration all the things you have to learn to survive as any animal.

00:56:54.000 Just this idea that these mice would learn somehow or another through their parents to avoid that certain smell, because that smell was associated with electrical shock.

00:57:06.000 It only makes sense that somehow or another biological life would transmit information in as many ways as possible.

00:57:12.000 Yes, absolutely.

00:57:13.000 Your idea is so fascinating because you're not even talking about biological life transferring information through genetics.

00:57:20.000 You're talking about it through some unseen force that has yet to be defined.

00:57:26.000 And that's when things get really squirrely.

00:57:28.000 And that must be when you experience the most resistance to these ideas.

00:57:34.000 Because the resistance to these ideas, I'm sure before they proposed this idea that genetics or that these mice would somehow or another inherit the fear of this smell from their parents, that was probably not very well received before it was proven.

00:57:50.000 But then it was proven, so now it sort of has to be accepted and has to be taken into consideration.

00:57:56.000 But your idea is still very fringe.

00:57:59.000 Oh, yes.

00:58:02.000 The interesting thing is, you see, the response I get to this from some scientists is actually extremely emotional and irrational.

00:58:11.000 When my first book, A New Science of Life, came out, there was a very famous editorial in Nature, the leading science magazine, a few months after the book appeared.

00:58:22.000 To start with, Nature ignored it.

00:58:25.000 But then a lot of people got interested.

00:58:27.000 I was doing programs on the radio in Britain.

00:58:30.000 There was an article editorial in The Guardian saying what an interesting idea.

00:58:35.000 And there's a lot of serious discussion going on.

00:58:37.000 New Scientist magazine launched a competition for the best ideas for experiments to test morphic resonance.

00:58:45.000 And it was beginning to be widely discussed.

00:58:48.000 The editor of Nature, who was a reactionary figure in science, old style, materialist, mechanistic, hardcore scientist, wrote a famous editorial called A Book for Burning on the front page of Nature,

00:59:04.000 comparing my book unfavorably with Mein Kampf.

00:59:08.000 Hitler's book saying that this was a profoundly dangerous book.

00:59:12.000 And he said this is the best candidate for burning there has been for many years.

00:59:16.000 And it was completely irrational, this attack on my book.

00:59:20.000 It was emotional, irrational, polemical.

00:59:24.000 He didn't do it as a joke.

00:59:27.000 And this of course produced a backlash because quite a few scientists thought this was the wrong way to respond to a scientific hypothesis.

00:59:36.000 So a lot of letters in Nature for months afterwards were backing me up and saying, you know, this is something that should be seriously discussed, not simply denounced.

00:59:46.000 But the fact is that this started a kind of controversy which has been going on ever since.

00:59:55.000 But until the year 2000, most biologists thought genes did everything.

01:00:01.000 Now, the epigenetic thing has taken over and the missing heritability problem.

01:00:07.000 There's much more openness than there was because it's clear we haven't figured it all out.

01:00:13.000 Interestingly, Charles Darwin was not a neo-Darwinian.

01:00:20.000 Neo-Darwinian evolution theory says it's all done by the genes.

01:00:24.000 Evolution is just about random mutation and natural selection of gene frequencies.

01:00:29.000 This is the basis of Richard Dawkins' work, for example.

01:00:32.000 His book, The Selfish Gene, is based on that model.

01:00:36.000 Darwin actually believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

01:00:40.000 He thought that animals could inherit the fears of their fathers and that most of adaptation could actually be passed on to animals and plants descended from parents.

01:00:53.000 He thought that was how evolution worked.

01:00:56.000 He even proposed that when something had been learned, there could be movement of something through the bloodstream that could affect the sperm and the eggs.

01:01:05.000 Exactly the kind of things that's now being considered in this fear of the father's case.

01:01:11.000 So movement through the bloodstream.

01:01:13.000 So if you learn something, like say if you touch something, it's an electric fence and it shocks you, there's movement through the bloodstream that teaches your spermness?

01:01:22.000 Well, that's what Darwin thought.

01:01:24.000 He wrote a book called The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication.

01:01:29.000 It's less well known than his most famous book, The Origin of Species.

01:01:35.000 But in The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, he was so convinced That plants and animals could inherit what their parents had learned.

01:01:44.000 He tried to figure out how it might work, and the last chapter is called The Hypothesis of Pangenesis.

01:01:50.000 It's the name he gave to his theory that somehow little bits were detached from the brain and went through the blood and affected the sperm.

01:01:58.000 Now, that's more or less what people are saying, trying to explain the mice inheriting the fear of their fathers.

01:02:04.000 That aspect of Darwin's work has been airbrushed out of scientific history.

01:02:10.000 Darwin also wrote a paper in Nature about a dog that he came across, that whenever this dog got near to a butcher's shop, the dog was completely terrified of butchers.

01:02:23.000 And Darwin figured out that one of its parents had been kicked or badly mistreated by a butcher, and this dog had inherited a phobia of butchers.

01:02:33.000 Now, Darwin published that in Nature.

01:02:36.000 It shows you how very different Darwin's ideas on evolution were from his 20th century successors, and the reason that modern evolutionary theories called Neo-Darwinism is to distinguish it from Darwinism, which included the inheritance of habits.

01:02:53.000 Very similar to what I'm saying.

01:02:55.000 What I'm saying in terms of the inheritance of habits through morphic resonance is actually really close to what Darwin himself said.

01:03:03.000 But it's not what neo-Darwinians say, because they've tried to say all inheritances in genes and you can't have these other things.

01:03:10.000 But now they have to change their tune because, as I say, in the last few years epigenetic inheritance, the inheritance of acquired characteristics, is back in fashion.

01:03:20.000 Well, there's many people that haven't studied Darwin's ideas at all that aren't familiar with the amount of resistance that Darwin received when he was proposing these ideas.

01:03:29.000 Like, these weren't accepted ideas at all.

01:03:31.000 In fact, the majority of scientists at the time, they were more of a Christian faith, weren't they?

01:03:39.000 Yes, but the response to Darwin was particularly interesting, you see, because many Many Christians in England, after being surprised by his ideas, actually said,

01:03:55.000 well, that's fine.

01:03:56.000 If God's the creator of life, then why on earth can't God create through evolution, create life that can evolve under its own steam?

01:04:06.000 And his ideas were quite rapidly accepted by the Roman Catholic and the Anglican, the Episcopal churches and the Methodists and so on.

01:04:15.000 This fundamentalist creationist thing is a peculiar American phenomenon.

01:04:20.000 It didn't originate until the 20th century and it was started in America.

01:04:24.000 And it's virtually unknown in Britain.

01:04:27.000 I'm actually a practicing Christian.

01:04:29.000 I'm an Anglican.

01:04:30.000 And I never meet creationists in England.

01:04:33.000 I've never heard anyone deny...

01:04:35.000 What exactly is an Anglican?

01:04:37.000 A Church of England. 0.54

01:04:38.000 The Church of England is It's sort of halfway between Protestant and Catholic.

01:04:45.000 What happened in England under King Henry VIII in the 16th century was that he nationalized the church and he said, okay, the Pope's not head of the church anymore.

01:04:55.000 I am.

01:04:56.000 And the priests can marry.

01:04:59.000 We'll have the services in English and bishops can be married.

01:05:04.000 But the services remain much the same.

01:05:07.000 And the Church of England, if you go to an Anglican service, it's very like a Roman Catholic service, except that we have married priests.

01:05:15.000 We have women bishops and women priests. 0.70

01:05:18.000 Outrageous. 0.68

01:05:19.000 Outrageous from a Catholic point of view. 1.00

01:05:23.000 But anyway, the Church of England, it's never had the sort of extreme Protestant doctrines like Southern Baptists and so on.

01:05:34.000 It's very similar to the Catholic Church.

01:05:37.000 It's now one of the most liberal churches.

01:05:40.000 But Anglicans, on the whole, had no problem with evolution.

01:05:43.000 They still don't.

01:05:46.000 I've just been doing a workshop last weekend at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, which I was co-leading with the Bishop of California, whose cathedral is Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, a very beautiful cathedral on Nob Hill.

01:06:01.000 We were discussing the kinds of things you and I are discussing.

01:06:05.000 He was completely open to all this.

01:06:07.000 It was absolutely no problem discussing this with An Anglican and Episcopalian Bishop.

01:06:15.000 It's a very far cry from what many people's image of Christians is, opposing evolution.

01:06:20.000 The general view that many Christians have, and I'm one, is that the evolution of nature, if there's a creative power in nature, It may be God-given in the first place, but what God did was to endow nature with the power to create new forms of life,

01:06:38.000 that there's a kind of intelligent creativity in nature.

01:06:41.000 You don't have to have a kind of intelligent designing engineer outside nature tinkering with the machinery and manipulating genes, as the intelligent design people think.

01:06:54.000 And you don't have to deny evolution altogether to say God's involved in nature in some way.

01:07:00.000 It's perfectly possible to have a view where God is in nature and works through nature and there's a creativity in nature which doesn't require the universe to have been created in 6,000 or 6,000 years ago that completely accept the evolutionary history of the universe in cosmology and in evolution.

01:07:21.000 And just say, well, if there's a God, then that's the way that God works through this evolutionary process and through the creativity of evolution.

01:07:29.000 So the fundamentalist Christians and the New Earth Christians, that's a uniquely American thing, you think?

01:07:35.000 Yes.

01:07:36.000 I mean, they do have followers, a few followers in Britain, but they take their lead entirely from America.

01:07:41.000 And they've got a new batch of converts, to their point of view, in the Islamic world.

01:07:46.000 Creationism is...

01:07:47.000 Inspired by American creation is as big in Turkey and many other Arab countries and stuff.

01:07:53.000 But it's a peculiarly American phenomenon.

01:07:56.000 Well, you know how it all came about in America, right?

01:07:58.000 Where it really took off.

01:08:00.000 Well, it became a part of the political system, the Reagan administration.

01:08:02.000 They started recruiting the radical Christians and that became a part of his electoral base.

01:08:10.000 Yes, it's a very, very interesting history.

01:08:13.000 It had always been, for most foreigners, American politics is completely impossible to understand. 1.00

01:08:18.000 It's impossible to understand how people can be so polarized and so extreme in their views.

01:08:24.000 And I read a book recently which made it much clearer to me.

01:08:29.000 It's called The Sword of the Lord.

01:08:30.000 It's written by a guy called Andrew Himes, who was raised Southern Baptist.

01:08:35.000 Seven of his cousins are Southern Baptist ministers.

01:08:38.000 His grandfather, who was called Rice, was one of the inventors of American fundamentalism.

01:08:45.000 And it's a fascinating historical study of this phenomenon and why they were like that.

01:08:50.000 And it made a lot more sense to me.

01:08:53.000 I mean, it's still very bizarre and very American. 0.99

01:08:56.000 Yeah, we're very weird.

01:08:58.000 We're hard to understand, even for us.

01:09:01.000 Everyone's constantly trying to refocus our political system or sort of redefine it, calm it down.

01:09:09.000 Everyone's looking for a more moderate conservative or someone who is a more conservative moderate.

01:09:16.000 We're always looking for someone who meets...

01:09:18.000 The bridge, someone to join the two sides so we don't have these radical, polarizing, opposing forces, the left and the right.

01:09:27.000 It seems so childish to me.

01:09:29.000 But what this book made clear, and what was for me a huge revelation, was that how all of this is rooted in the American Civil War.

01:09:37.000 And there's a sense in which, in some people's minds, the Civil War is still going on.

01:09:41.000 It's just that the sides have switched.

01:09:43.000 In the Civil War, the South was Democrat.

01:09:45.000 The slave-owning South, their political party after the Civil War was the Democrats. 0.97

01:09:51.000 And the Republicans were the liberals who wanted to free the slaves.

01:09:54.000 And one of the most interesting switches that's happened is this switch.

01:09:59.000 So now it's gone the other way around.

01:10:00.000 The Democrats are now the liberals and stuff.

01:10:03.000 And the Republicans have become the more right-wing forces and powerful in the South, which was exactly the opposite.

01:10:12.000 Very bizarre.

01:10:13.000 So what this book does is trace the history of this fascinating movement.

01:10:17.000 But what's so interesting is that in the Civil War, both sides were using biblical texts to justify their position.

01:10:25.000 But the Southern Baptists... 0.72

01:10:29.000 And the religious people in the South actually had a much stronger biblical basis for slavery because the Bible's full of slaves. 0.95

01:10:36.000 The Old Testament's full of slaves. 0.71

01:10:38.000 The Israelites were slaves themselves. 0.73

01:10:40.000 They owned slaves.

01:10:41.000 In the New Testament, everyone owned slaves.

01:10:44.000 It was taken for granted.

01:10:45.000 There were no abolitionists in the Bible.

01:10:47.000 So if you base your faith on the Bible, you can make a much stronger case for slavery than you can for abolitionism.

01:10:56.000 But you have to take the Bible as literally true.

01:10:59.000 And that gave a strong incentive for people in the South to make the Bible literally true, because you could justify slavery much better than if you interpret it in a liberal way, saying, well, actually, the spirit of Jesus was to liberate people from bondage.

01:11:12.000 They say, okay, where's the text?

01:11:14.000 Jesus doesn't say anything about liberating slaves.

01:11:19.000 So fundamentalism gave a kind of impetus to this and it was very, very fascinating to see how that played out because on both sides in the Civil War they were both invoking the Bible.

01:11:31.000 Both sides were Protestant.

01:11:33.000 Both sides had ministers preaching to inspire the troops and get them to fight.

01:11:38.000 And after the Civil War, the way in which this tradition of fundamentalism that had developed in the American South to justify slavery gave a kind of ready-made way to use biblical texts to argue against all sorts of other things,

01:11:56.000 including evolutionary theory.

01:11:58.000 Whereas in Europe, in the traditional Catholic and in the more liberal Protestant churches, People hadn't taken the view of the Bible as the literal truth.

01:12:08.000 They'd taken the view that the Bible's a guide to what might happen, that a lot of its meaning is allegorical or symbolic.

01:12:14.000 But the kind of so-called liberal interpretation of the Bible goes back to, you know, the second century AD or something.

01:12:21.000 It's been the mainstream view for a long time.

01:12:25.000 You're a scientist.

01:12:27.000 What leads you to be a practicing Christian as a scientist? 0.73

01:12:32.000 Well, I spent years as an atheist.

01:12:34.000 I mean, when I was educated as a scientist, part of the package deal is atheism.

01:12:38.000 You know, I grew up with all the standard.

01:12:40.000 By the time I was 14, I was at a religious boarding school, a Christian boarding school.

01:12:47.000 I was the only boy in my year who refused to get confirmed because even at 14, I identified as an atheist.

01:12:54.000 And I thought science means science and reason, religion and superstition of things of the past, scientists are the vanguard of human progress, all that kind of thing.

01:13:06.000 I believed that.

01:13:07.000 But what made me...

01:13:10.000 What I began to doubt it was I began to doubt that this was the right way forward in science.

01:13:15.000 I began to think that this mechanistic molecular approach to treating animals and plants as just machines was an inadequate view of life.

01:13:26.000 I'd gone into biology because I was fascinated by animals and plants.

01:13:29.000 I kept lots of pets as a child.

01:13:31.000 My father was a herbalist.

01:13:33.000 I collected plants and he taught me about plants.

01:13:36.000 He had a microscope laboratory.

01:13:38.000 And so I sort of really got into science as a child.

01:13:43.000 And when I started studying science at school and university, the first thing we did with living organisms was to kill them and grind them up and then look at the enzymes in their liver or whatever.

01:13:57.000 It became clear to me we were not really studying life, we were studying death.

01:14:02.000 And when I was a child I kept homing pigeons.

01:14:05.000 I was fascinated with how do they find their home.

01:14:08.000 I asked everybody.

01:14:09.000 I knew men who kept homing pigeons.

01:14:11.000 It was a popular sport in Britain.

01:14:13.000 It still is.

01:14:14.000 I had some myself.

01:14:17.000 I used to put them in a box and cycle as far as I could on my bicycle and release them and then cycle home.

01:14:23.000 They always got home before I did.

01:14:26.000 However far I took them.

01:14:27.000 So this completely intrigued me.

01:14:30.000 And I thought we're never going to understand this by just grinding up their livers or looking at their genes.

01:14:36.000 So I began to doubt the mechanistic worldview.

01:14:42.000 Then I encountered psychedelics, and that was a huge change.

01:14:48.000 I mean, nothing in my scientific education had prepared me for the kind of mind-opening effects of LSD. This was in the 70s, early 70s.

01:15:02.000 I'd studied nerve impulses and hormones and that kind of thing which is what we got in our science course at Cambridge about the brain.

01:15:10.000 I knew about the anatomy of the brain and nerve impulses but These visionary experiences that psychedelics opened up showed me there was far more to the mind and indeed far more to reality than this very, very limited model.

01:15:24.000 Then I got interested in meditation because I thought, well, it'd be good to be able to explore the mind without drugs.

01:15:30.000 I mean, I'm not anti-psychedelic at all, but I think it'd be good to have different methods, not just drugs.

01:15:38.000 Then I took up transcendental meditation and yoga.

01:15:43.000 Then I got a job in India.

01:15:45.000 I lived in India for seven years.

01:15:47.000 And when I was in India I was really into yoga and meditation and at first I thought this is just changing my brain physiology.

01:15:55.000 You don't need to believe there's God out there or anything mysterious out there, it's just inside the body.

01:16:01.000 The chemicals affect the brain, the yoga and meditation affect blood flow etc.

01:16:07.000 So I saw it in a rather materialistic way.

01:16:11.000 But then I got more and more interest in Hindu philosophy and Hindu ideas and the idea that there's a greater consciousness within which our consciousness is embedded through some psychedelic experiences.

01:16:23.000 We contact other realms of consciousness that aren't just inside our brains through meditation and through prayer that one can actually contact other forms of consciousness bigger than our own.

01:16:36.000 I did all that within a kind of Hindu context, and then I had a Sufi teacher in India as well, and so I did a sort of Islamic mysticism for a while.

01:16:45.000 But after doing this for several years, I found that actually some of it didn't make sense to me.

01:16:52.000 The part that didn't make sense to me Well, the Islamic part, to be a Sufi in India, basically you had to be a Muslim and I didn't really want to get into being a Muslim and sort of fasting in Ramadan and all that.

01:17:07.000 And Hindus, their basic worldview was and for most of them still is the idea that we're just trapped in a world where things go on and on rebirth and cycles of life and death and we're trapped in this world of suffering and delusion and the way out is through a kind of spiritual vertical takeoff which you do individually through meditation you can liberate yourself from reincarnation and delusion 0.94

01:17:37.000 and so forth into absorption in the one the absolute But it's an individual vertical takeoff.

01:17:44.000 And I was working in an agricultural institute, the main international institute in India, for trying to improve crops for poor farmers.

01:17:54.000 And sometimes my Indian colleagues would say to me after work, they'd say, why do you do this?

01:18:00.000 I'd say, because I want to help these poor people.

01:18:04.000 You know, they haven't got enough to eat.

01:18:06.000 It'd be great if they had better farming methods and improved varieties, and science can help.

01:18:11.000 And I believe in trying to apply my knowledge to help these people.

01:18:14.000 And he said, it is none of your business.

01:18:16.000 If they are poor, if they are suffering, it is their karma.

01:18:20.000 It is not your business.

01:18:21.000 It is their problem, not your problem.

01:18:23.000 Your problem is to liberate yourself from this world of illusion.

01:18:28.000 So then I realized, actually, they have a completely different view, that the poor are suffering because, in a sense, they deserve to suffer because of what they've done in past lives.

01:18:39.000 Nothing I can do about it.

01:18:41.000 Then I realized actually I do care about other people.

01:18:43.000 I do think that a spiritual life is not just about individual liberation.

01:18:48.000 It's to do with collective things.

01:18:51.000 It affects community and how can other people be helped.

01:18:55.000 And as I argued with my Hindu friends, I realized the reason I was saying this is because I'm so deeply embedded in the Christian tradition.

01:19:03.000 Even secular humanism is a kind of secularized Christianity because it's about helping others.

01:19:09.000 That actually I was much more Christian than I actually had ever admitted.

01:19:14.000 So I was confirmed in the Church of South India, and I then found a fantastic ashram where I lived for two years, Father Bede Griffiths, who was an English Benedictine who had a Christian ashram in South India.

01:19:27.000 Which was exactly to my taste.

01:19:30.000 It was very simple.

01:19:31.000 We did yoga, we did meditation, we had Christian services, but we sang Indian chants and kirtans and things.

01:19:42.000 It didn't try and deny any of this.

01:19:45.000 And when I first went there, we started the Mass with the Gayatri Mantra, which is a Hindu mantra asking the sun to bless our meditation, the divine splendor of the sun to illuminate our meditation.

01:19:58.000 So I said to Father Bede when I first went there, you know, how can you have the Gayatri mantra at the beginning of a Catholic service?

01:20:07.000 And he said, precisely because it's Catholic.

01:20:09.000 He said Catholic means universal.

01:20:11.000 If it excludes anything which is a path to God, then it's just sectarian. 0.85

01:20:18.000 The word Catholic means universal?

01:20:20.000 Yes, that's what it means.

01:20:20.000 That's fascinating.

01:20:21.000 Yes.

01:20:22.000 So, I found a way of being Christian, which didn't deny yoga, meditation, Buddhism.

01:20:33.000 My wife is a practicing Tibetan Buddhist.

01:20:36.000 She follows a Zogchen tradition in Tibetan Buddhism.

01:20:41.000 So I found a way of reconnecting with the Christian tradition, which didn't violate my sense of reason.

01:20:48.000 It didn't conflict with the kind of science that I'm interested in.

01:20:52.000 But I found it liberating to reconnect.

01:20:54.000 So when I went back to England from India, I was able to go to those great cathedrals that we have in England, built in the Middle Ages, those fantastic buildings, stained glass, wonderful music, organs playing, amazing choirs singing the most beautiful music,

01:21:11.000 and feel that this is not just beautiful but meaningful and is a path to God, which I had not seen before.

01:21:19.000 That's fascinating.

01:21:22.000 In India, the concept of karma being that someone has done something in their past life, that's led them to where they are right now.

01:21:30.000 Boy, that seems real convenient for someone passing by homeless people or someone who's poor or suffering.

01:21:40.000 It's almost like the numbers of people that they have in India, because the numbers are so great, a billion people.

01:21:47.000 How much bigger is India than North America?

01:21:50.000 Oh, the size of the land is much smaller.

01:21:52.000 The population is now almost a billion.

01:21:56.000 How much smaller is the size of the land?

01:21:57.000 I don't know.

01:21:58.000 But it's crazy how overpopulated it is.

01:22:01.000 It's really densely populated, yes.

01:22:02.000 I wonder if that came about as just a way of just mitigating the pressure of helping people.

01:22:09.000 Like just the idea of karma.

01:22:10.000 Look, you can't help that guy.

01:22:12.000 That's his problem.

01:22:13.000 You've got to do it yourself.

01:22:14.000 Just the sheer numbers.

01:22:16.000 Well, I don't know.

01:22:17.000 I mean, at the time the British were ruling India, there were only about 200 million.

01:22:21.000 You know, when I was born, there were about 250 million.

01:22:23.000 What?

01:22:24.000 When you were born?

01:22:25.000 Yes, I was born in 1942. Damn, they did a lot. 0.99

01:22:28.000 It's a huge, huge increase. 0.99

01:22:30.000 It's a vast increase.

01:22:32.000 Wow.

01:22:33.000 Anyway, the thing is about the convenient, the karma thing in India, you see, it is convenient. 0.98

01:22:39.000 For centuries, India's had a caste system.

01:22:42.000 You know, the untouchables are treated like dirt. 0.70

01:22:46.000 I mean, they're considered to be polluting and dirty.

01:22:48.000 Even if the shadow of an untouchable fell on a Brahmin's house, this person could be punished very, very severely. 0.99

01:22:56.000 And there was no move within India until the 19th century to reform that.

01:23:02.000 What happened is Christian missionaries went there.

01:23:05.000 They were nice to untouchables and to lower castes and gave them food, education, healthcare, etc.

01:23:12.000 And some of them became Christians.

01:23:13.000 I mean, why not?

01:23:15.000 If you're at the bottom of the pile, you've not got anything to lose and you've got a lot to gain by becoming a Christian.

01:23:21.000 So, Hindu reformers felt that they had to counteract this, and so things like the Ramakrishna Mission, and Sri Aurobindo, and various Hindu philosophers, and Gandhi himself, who was a big influence in India, assimilated many of these ideas from Christianity,

01:23:38.000 and said, Look, we've got to reform Hinduism.

01:23:40.000 And they created a new kind of Hindu attitude, much influenced by Christianity.

01:23:45.000 And so there are now Indian movements to try and help the poor and, you know, provide health care for the sick and that kind of thing.

01:23:52.000 But that's not been part of their traditional way of doing things.

01:23:56.000 And it came about under Western influence.

01:23:58.000 That's really fascinating.

01:23:59.000 So, your desire to sort of help these people, help them grow more food, and help them live better lives, is what led you to become a Christian.

01:24:09.000 You realized that these are Christian ideas?

01:24:12.000 Yes.

01:24:13.000 That they're Christian, they're deeply embedded in our culture, even for secular humanists.

01:24:17.000 You see, secular humanists...

01:24:19.000 Usually atheists who believe in a philosophy of equal rights, equal opportunities, helping the poor and the sick, education for everyone, and uplifting people who are suffering, helping third world countries have running water and all that kind of thing.

01:24:38.000 Well, these are things that Christian missionaries have done as well, but you don't have to be a Christian to believe in those things.

01:24:44.000 But the fact that they're so deeply embedded in our culture, In our secular culture is because of the historical influence of Christianity.

01:24:53.000 So secular humanists are basically people who still have Christian ethics, but without a belief in God.

01:25:01.000 But that ethical system doesn't just come about automatically.

01:25:05.000 A much more default mode is to say, you know, the strong might is right.

01:25:10.000 You know, the strongest guy gets the girls and, you know, runs a kind of harem and then conquer people and have slaves.

01:25:18.000 That's how humanity has worked for much of human history.

01:25:21.000 Yeah, it most certainly has.

01:25:23.000 So, it sounds like you found a very cool sect of Christianity while you were in India.

01:25:30.000 I mean, that sounds very unique, that you were doing yoga and meditation and then these Indian chants, along with this concept of Christianity being like the generosity and the Helping your brothers and sisters.

01:25:46.000 That seems to be, like, that must have been very convenient to find that sect of Christianity while you were sort of exploring these ideas.

01:25:54.000 Well, it wasn't even a sect.

01:25:56.000 Father B. Griffiths was a Benedictine monk and he was a Roman Catholic.

01:26:00.000 Now, it's true that some people in the Catholic Church didn't approve of what he was doing, but...

01:26:06.000 It was really just him.

01:26:07.000 Well, him and a group of other people.

01:26:10.000 I mean, there was a whole movement in India of Catholics.

01:26:13.000 It was called inculturation.

01:26:16.000 It was the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s said that what people should do in the Catholic Church is put the Christian faith into the terms of that culture.

01:26:27.000 So, in India, Catholics who've been converted by Catholic missionaries from Ireland and places, bought pairs of shoes so they could put them on to go to church on Sundays because the missionaries dressed up in Western clothes and wore shoes in church.

01:26:42.000 These Indians would never wear shoes in a temple or a mask or even in their house, but they wore shoes in church because that's what the Catholic missionaries wore. 0.88

01:26:51.000 So that kind of thing is ridiculous. 0.72

01:26:53.000 And so at the simplest level, the inculturation movement, we say, well, it's the tradition of India to take your shoes off in homes and in temples and in mocks, so take them off in churches too. 0.85

01:27:04.000 And it was the tradition of holy men and women in India to be vegetarian, whereas Catholics and Protestants there were all eating lots of beef and stuff because that's what American and British missionaries are at.

01:27:18.000 And so he said, no, it's much more natural to be vegetarian.

01:27:21.000 You don't have to be, but it's more natural.

01:27:25.000 So this idea of yoga as a way of learning how to breathe and to chant and to be more healthy, why shouldn't Indian Christians do yoga?

01:27:34.000 Right.

01:27:34.000 So this is part of a movement.

01:27:36.000 Father Bede was part of a wider movement.

01:27:38.000 The last two popes have been rather reactionary and have tried to roll back that movement, but there are still people in India and South America and so on who are following this Second Vatican Council reform movement.

01:27:51.000 The new pope is fairly unique, isn't he?

01:27:53.000 He seems to be a much less polarizing figure.

01:27:58.000 He seems to be much more generous, much more open-minded to the idea of homosexuality, to a lot of the things that have been criticized in the past.

01:28:09.000 He's eschewing the ideas of monetary wealth.

01:28:12.000 He doesn't have that crazy throne anymore.

01:28:14.000 He has a reasonable chair.

01:28:15.000 He's a unique guy.

01:28:18.000 I think it's partly because he comes from South America, you see, and this kind of radical Catholic movement, the Second Vatican Council, liberation theology, which was about the church should be there not to serve the rich but to help the poor.

01:28:31.000 And this became a huge movement in South America.

01:28:35.000 But the previous pope, John Paul II, was against it because they were teaming up with communists and people who were also trying to help the poor for secular reasons and political reasons, not for Christian reasons.

01:28:49.000 So he said this is wrong because it's communistic.

01:28:52.000 But actually that movement, this radical Catholic movement, had a huge influence in South America.

01:28:58.000 And I think the present Pope is somebody who's come out of that world, who's been very much influenced by it.

01:29:05.000 It's so problematic, though, the suppressing of sexuality. 0.94

01:29:08.000 The number one thing that people associate Catholicism with is sexual assault, is sexually molesting children. 0.78

01:29:17.000 That's like a huge aspect. 0.97

01:29:19.000 I grew up a Catholic.

01:29:20.000 I was only in Catholicism.

01:29:22.000 I was only practicing Catholic when I was very young.

01:29:26.000 I went to Catholic school in New Jersey for first grade, and it was a very bad school.

01:29:32.000 It was like really dark and suppressing and just very nasty and mean, and the nuns were just horrific people.

01:29:39.000 And it essentially shied me away from all religion at a very young age.

01:29:44.000 Yeah, I can see why.

01:29:45.000 Yeah, it was terrible.

01:29:46.000 It was terrible.

01:29:47.000 But I have other friends that were also raised Catholic that literally had to fight off the priest's sexual attempts.

01:29:54.000 And this is like a standard thing.

01:29:57.000 It's a joke. 0.99

01:29:57.000 It's an on-running joke in America about priests being sexual predators. 0.99

01:30:02.000 It's a constant thing. 0.92

01:30:06.000 That seems to me like one of the number one issues with that particular brand of religion.

01:30:11.000 It's like this idea that you're going to take what is essentially just a natural part of being a human being.

01:30:17.000 You're not doing anything with the reproductive cycle.

01:30:20.000 You're just telling them to ignore it.

01:30:21.000 You have this consistent, constant...

01:30:25.000 Bodily function, your body's reproducing fluids on a regular basis, and you're living backed up all the time.

01:30:32.000 And also, you're not experiencing any romantic interaction with human beings.

01:30:37.000 No affection, no sexual affection, no nothing.

01:30:42.000 You're missing out on a huge part of what it is to be a person.

01:30:46.000 And these people grow up, and they live cradle to the grave in this sort of Weird, non-developed state. 0.76

01:30:56.000 They're not like the rest of the people.

01:30:57.000 They can barely even understand.

01:31:00.000 I had a friend that went to marriage counseling with a Catholic priest.

01:31:05.000 I'm like, that's hilarious.

01:31:07.000 That's like going to Hitler and asking how to have world peace. 0.89

01:31:11.000 It doesn't make any sense.

01:31:13.000 How are you going to a guy who not only does not have any sex, has never had a relationship, But he's drunk all the time.

01:31:21.000 He had gin blossoms all over his face.

01:31:23.000 And kids run away from him because they're afraid he's going to touch him.

01:31:26.000 And you're going to go to that guy and he's going to give you marriage advice.

01:31:29.000 I agree.

01:31:30.000 I think that's a terrible thing.

01:31:32.000 And I mean, there are a lot of good priests who don't do this.

01:31:36.000 And I met quite a few when I was in India and I have Roman Catholic priests as friends.

01:31:40.000 And so I think it's a minority.

01:31:43.000 It may have been quite a big minority in Ireland and in some countries.

01:31:47.000 But I think some people are called to a celibate life, and I think that's fine for people to go become monks or nuns if that's what they're called to.

01:31:55.000 But for regular priests, I think it's a serious mistake.

01:31:59.000 And in the Church of England, ever since 1540 or something, and in the Protestant churches in Europe, priests have been able to marry, and rabbis marry in Judaism, and I think it's much, much healthier. 0.56

01:32:13.000 To have priests as regular guys with love lives and kids and things.

01:32:18.000 So I think that side of Catholicism is a serious mistake and I think they should, sooner or later, it'll have to be reformed because repression of sexuality leads to all these extremely unhealthy I agree with you about it.

01:32:36.000 But, you know, there are reform movements within Catholicism, and in America, there are breakaway Catholic churches with women priests.

01:32:45.000 For example, there's one in Santa Barbara.

01:32:48.000 Of course it's in Santa Barbara.

01:32:49.000 A bunch of freaks up there getting loaded.

01:32:55.000 Anyway, I agree with you.

01:32:57.000 I think that's a very negative thing.

01:32:59.000 But, you see, I think that Some people reject the entire world of religion because of personal bad experiences with one particular brand.

01:33:09.000 I think it's rather like throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

01:33:12.000 It would be like saying, I'm against science because it gave us gas that Hitler used to kill people and it gave us the atomic bomb that killed people in Hiroshima.

01:33:21.000 So I'm against science.

01:33:23.000 I mean, science, everything human, there are really bad things that have been done by humans in the name of almost anything you care to mention.

01:33:31.000 Nationalism, science, religion, politics, ideology.

01:33:36.000 So when you decided to join this particular group of Christians and become a Christian officially, like to identify, was there resistance from your colleagues?

01:33:49.000 Was there resistance from other scientists?

01:33:51.000 Like, how old were you at the time?

01:33:52.000 Oh, I was...

01:33:53.000 I mean, I... 33, something like that.

01:33:59.000 Well, not among...

01:34:00.000 I was working in India at the time.

01:34:02.000 There's hardly any atheists in India.

01:34:04.000 There's a few, but among my scientific colleagues, I was working with Indian scientists.

01:34:09.000 Almost all Indians are Hindu or Muslim.

01:34:13.000 You know, when they went home from work, they'd be regular Hindus or Muslims.

01:34:17.000 Very few of them were atheists.

01:34:19.000 So, among my Indian colleagues...

01:34:23.000 Being a practicing Christian when I came from a Christian family in a Christian country seemed totally normal.

01:34:28.000 No one thought that was at all weird or strange.

01:34:31.000 When I got back to England, among many of my scientific friends, they thought this was completely weird and just couldn't understand it because they assumed that any Christian believes the world's made in 6,000 years ago and that God intervenes through suspending the laws of nature and miracles that are totally incredible.

01:34:53.000 I mean, they don't believe in the kind of God I don't believe in.

01:34:57.000 But they never actually, very few ever asked, what do you actually think or believe?

01:35:03.000 They just sort of treated it at best as some kind of personal eccentricity or A lot of my friends are atheists or agnostics,

01:35:19.000 but the problem I have with atheists and materialists is that most of them are much more dogmatic than the people I know within the religious world.

01:35:28.000 Well, I have a problem with anybody that's sure.

01:35:31.000 So do I, yes.

01:35:33.000 When I speak to some atheists, I have this issue where they're aggressively atheist.

01:35:41.000 I've talked to people who, they're not just atheists, but they get upset at anyone who's not.

01:35:49.000 And my question to them is always, like, have you ever had a psychedelic experience?

01:35:53.000 Whenever I speak with someone who's aggressively atheist. 0.72

01:35:56.000 And if they say no, I'm always like, well, what are you waiting for?

01:36:01.000 Because if you really want to question your whole idea of reality, there's no better method than a breakthrough psychedelic experience.

01:36:10.000 If you have a breakthrough psychedelic experience and you're like, pah, that was nothing. 0.98

01:36:15.000 Well, then you're a unique person.

01:36:17.000 Because everybody I've ever met that has a breakthrough psychedelic experience, like a DMT trip, they have to step back and go, okay, I didn't even know that was possible.

01:36:25.000 I've lived my whole life with this one worldview that, well, I see these people that are religious, and it seems to me that they're following this ridiculous ideology that is based on some ancient information that people...

01:36:37.000 Wrote down on animal skins. 0.90

01:36:38.000 It's all preposterous.

01:36:40.000 And what they're doing is they're just a bunch of scared children that are afraid of the light.

01:36:43.000 And what I'm doing is basing my life on science and rational thinking and logic.

01:36:48.000 But then you have a psychedelic trip and you're like, there's nothing rational about that.

01:36:52.000 There's nothing logical about that.

01:36:54.000 And how is that so close?

01:36:55.000 It's so nearby.

01:36:56.000 It's like someone telling you, A DMT trip is like someone telling you, hey, I want to show you something.

01:37:03.000 Let's go into this room real quick.

01:37:05.000 And you open that door, and there's a new universe there.

01:37:08.000 A completely different universe that's filled with life.

01:37:10.000 It's fractal.

01:37:11.000 It's never-ending.

01:37:13.000 And it occupies a very small space, but yet it's infinite. 0.99

01:37:18.000 And it's filled with conscious beings that can see through you, recognize all your bullshit, recognize all your insecurities and all your incorrect thinking and ego. 0.99

01:37:27.000 And then you shut the door and you go back to regular life. 1.00

01:37:31.000 And you're like, what the fuck is that room? 0.99

01:37:33.000 Like, oh, that room? 1.00

01:37:34.000 That's the God room.

01:37:35.000 It's right there.

01:37:36.000 If you don't go into that experience, your whole...

01:37:39.000 I think we live our lives...

01:37:42.000 Based on, we sort of calculate our worldview based on the experiences that we've accumulated, what we've learned from these experiences, and what we've learned from other people's experiences.

01:37:53.000 What we've read, what we've seen in documentaries and films, but when you have a really intense psychedelic experience particularly, and then for some people yoga and meditation, some people are able to achieve some pretty deep states, but The psychedelic experience in particular is shocking because it's so easy to get to.

01:38:14.000 It's just right there.

01:38:16.000 Four hits of the DMT and boom!

01:38:18.000 Blast off.

01:38:19.000 And then 15 minutes later, you're left with this new experience that you have to assimilate and figure out a way to make sense of it.

01:38:29.000 The atheists that I talk to that are super aggressive, they're just like religious people in a lot of ways. 0.79

01:38:35.000 It's a kind of scientific fundamentalism.

01:38:37.000 Yeah.

01:38:38.000 And it's also morphing.

01:38:40.000 Now, I don't know if you're aware of this in America.

01:38:41.000 It's morphing.

01:38:42.000 There's atheism, and then there's an even more aggressive group called Atheism Plus.

01:38:47.000 Oh, I don't know about that.

01:38:49.000 Yeah, and what they're doing is they're attaching a bunch of moral and ethical values to religion, essentially creating almost like another religion.

01:38:57.000 And I think with good intentions.

01:38:59.000 I think a lot of it is good intentions.

01:39:01.000 A lot of it is based on feminism. 1.00

01:39:04.000 A lot of it is based on the idea of...

01:39:08.000 Avoiding harassment, avoiding sexual harassment, avoiding that their ethics are to completely define what's acceptable behavior, like no racism, no sexual harassment,

01:39:25.000 no undeniable acceptance of women's rights, undeniable acceptance of, you know.

01:39:31.000 It's interesting.

01:39:33.000 Then, of course, once you define that, then you have aggressive members of that group that are attacking people that disagree with any of their propositions or anyone that supports men's rights, of course, now hates women and you get a lot of weirdness in that area because… There can only be feminism.

01:39:51.000 There can't be men's rights as well. 0.84

01:39:53.000 Men's rights are toxic, whereas women's rights, once they have achieved total equality, then there's no need for men's rights, because once feminism has been established, which is a pretty illogical assumption, especially when you consider divorce laws. 0.82

01:40:09.000 Exactly.

01:40:10.000 I agree with you.

01:40:12.000 No, I couldn't agree more about DMT and the opening that it can give.

01:40:17.000 I mean, I had the great advantage of taking it for the first time with Terence McKenna.

01:40:22.000 And he said, do you want to check this out?

01:40:27.000 And I said, okay.

01:40:30.000 That's pretty cool on the resume, by the way.

01:40:32.000 First time you did DMT, you did it with Terence McKenna.

01:40:34.000 Yes.

01:40:35.000 I won't say where or when because it could be put down on some record somewhere.

01:40:40.000 That's probably already there.

01:40:40.000 Don't worry about it.

01:40:44.000 But for me it corresponded in many ways with what people talk about near-death experiences because I went out through light into a realm of great bliss and beauty and Then I came back and it was like coming back from a million miles away and just coming back into my body and,

01:41:04.000 as it were, being born again.

01:41:06.000 So it was very much like a death and rebirth experience for me and was very, very transformative.

01:41:16.000 Incidentally, I think, you know, I've been trying to understand this American phenomenon of Southern Baptists, and one of the things that I think is the key to this is that I think when they talk about being born again, originally baptism was just that.

01:41:31.000 I mean, now you can get this through DMT in five minutes, but at the time of John the Baptist, you could get it in five minutes through being drowned.

01:41:39.000 People were lining up on the bank of the Jordan.

01:41:41.000 They go in.

01:41:42.000 He holds them under.

01:41:43.000 If he held them under just long enough, you could actually induce a near-death experience, you know, life review, the drowning man sees his life pass before him, you know, hold them under just long enough, and they'd have a near-death experience, almost guaranteed.

01:41:58.000 I mean, occasionally he might have done it too long, but that was before litigation.

01:42:02.000 You know, he might have lost a few...

01:42:04.000 Before litigation?

01:42:05.000 LAUGHTER Yeah, that's a good theory, actually.

01:42:10.000 And then you see, they come back and they say, I've died, I've seen the light, I've been born again, I'm no longer afraid of death, my life has been transformed, in five minutes.

01:42:21.000 And the Baptists were the people who revived baptism by total immersion in the 16th century.

01:42:27.000 And probably now in America, we don't hold them under that long, because this is post-litigation now.

01:42:34.000 You know, when the Baptist first got going, this idea of holding people under long enough, all their language, is the language that relates to near-death experiences. 0.96

01:42:44.000 And I don't think that, to start with, baptism by total immersion was just symbolic.

01:42:48.000 I think it was drowning.

01:42:50.000 Wow, that is quite fascinating.

01:42:52.000 And it makes sense if you think about ordeal poisoning.

01:42:55.000 Ordeal poisoning being the substitute for psychedelics in certain cultures where they don't have access to psychedelic plants.

01:43:01.000 They would take essentially a poison that didn't kill you.

01:43:04.000 It got you right to the door where you wish you were dead almost.

01:43:08.000 You were in horrible pain.

01:43:10.000 And even in some cultures they use ant venom.

01:43:12.000 Like those bullet ants, they use that for these ritualistic coming-of-age rituals.

01:43:19.000 These coming-of-age rituals where you take people through these intensely painful moments where they almost want to be dead just to end the suffering.

01:43:28.000 And then when they come through on the other side, they're a better person because of it.

01:43:31.000 They're more reflective.

01:43:33.000 They appreciate just the very breath that they're allowed to take.

01:43:38.000 They appreciate the sky seems bluer.

01:43:40.000 The grass seems greener.

01:43:42.000 The life has more vibrancy to it because they've gone through this ordeal poison or this toxic venom or what have you.

01:43:48.000 Yes, a rite of passage.

01:43:50.000 Almost all rites of passage for adolescents in traditional cultures involve something like a death and rebirth experience.

01:43:58.000 And I think you're right.

01:43:59.000 I think that's what's going on.

01:44:01.000 And actually I think that why the Baptists became so powerful and why for them the conversion experience was so real and why they talk about it so much is that because for many of them it was real.

01:44:11.000 It wasn't just a symbolic thing.

01:44:13.000 It wasn't signing up to some set of beliefs.

01:44:16.000 And I think that at the core of all religions is this direct experience of the divine.

01:44:22.000 And, you know, I think that's what they all come from.

01:44:24.000 They come from experience, not theories.

01:44:26.000 Well, it's quite shocking, too, that Jerusalem scholars, like mainstream scholars now, are considering that Moses was probably under the influence of DMT. They believe that the burning bush, you know, the guys who are not psychedelically based at all,

01:44:42.000 was quite probably the acacia bush, which was a very rich and DMT plant.

01:44:48.000 And that's the whole idea of the burning bush.

01:44:50.000 He sees God through a burning bush.

01:44:52.000 How much clearer does it have to be?

01:44:54.000 There's acacia trees all over that part of the world.

01:44:57.000 It's a very rich plant as far as the content of DMT in it.

01:45:01.000 And if you experience that, it's very much like...

01:45:05.000 I mean, I don't know if you're experiencing God, but it seems like...

01:45:10.000 It seems very divine when you have a DMT trip.

01:45:14.000 Yes.

01:45:15.000 Well, I mean, why not be experiencing God?

01:45:19.000 I mean, it seems an uneconomical theory to say that there's divine bliss as experienced by mystics, that part of the nature of God's mind is bliss.

01:45:28.000 I mean, the Hindu name, one of the names, Satchitananda, being, knowledge, bliss, as the fall in the nature of God.

01:45:36.000 If God's consciousness is a kind of bliss consciousness, Then, if you have this experience that seems like God and is blissful, why have a hypothesis that there's some other bliss consciousness that isn't divine, that's some kind of duplicate?

01:45:51.000 Why not it be the real thing?

01:45:53.000 I think it makes so much more sense.

01:45:55.000 Yeah, it totally makes sense.

01:45:56.000 I mean, it makes as much sense as anything else.

01:46:00.000 These plants are real.

01:46:01.000 I've always wondered if that, and many other people have speculated as well, if that's the reason why Hindus don't participate in eating cows, too, because of the psilocybin mushrooms growing on cows on a regular basis, and that being, for a lot of people, believe the basis of soma.

01:46:18.000 I don't know.

01:46:21.000 Terence's theory about stropharia and these mushrooms growing on cow dung is okay as far as it goes.

01:46:27.000 But in England, for example, the magic mushroom, the liberty cap, doesn't grow on cow dung.

01:46:34.000 It grows in sort of meadows and usually no cows in them.

01:46:37.000 If anything, there's sheep.

01:46:40.000 But I've seen them.

01:46:41.000 They grow wild in Wales, and I've encountered them on location, and it's nothing to do with piles of dung.

01:46:48.000 I mean, there's many different environments in which psychoactive mushrooms grow.

01:46:53.000 Some kinds rely on the cow dung, but I think he rather overemphasized the cow dung.

01:46:58.000 That's fascinating.

01:46:59.000 What do you think was the source of cattle worship, like Choctal Hiok and all these ancient civilizations that worshiped cattle and this connection that McKenna made with those people worshiping the cattle because the cattle didn't just provide life and food because they had milk and meat,

01:47:16.000 but also that there was this connection with psychedelic mushrooms?

01:47:22.000 I don't know.

01:47:22.000 I find that a bit far-fetched, personally.

01:47:24.000 I mean, in some cultures, like in England, there was a horse-worship.

01:47:28.000 In the Vedic age, there was a kind of horse-worship, sacred horses, too.

01:47:32.000 And there are many different kinds of sacred animals.

01:47:36.000 Even in India, it's not just cows that are sacred.

01:47:39.000 Elephants are sacred.

01:47:40.000 Ganesh is, you know, the elephant god.

01:47:42.000 But elephants are sacred.

01:47:43.000 Even rats are sacred.

01:47:45.000 In India, and monkeys. 1.00

01:47:48.000 So there's lots of sacred animals.

01:47:51.000 And I think that probably comes...

01:47:53.000 I think with the ones that are wild, basically wild, like elephants and rats and monkeys, this probably comes out of kind of shamanic roots.

01:48:02.000 But I think when people started domesticating animals, then, you know, how do you relate to domesticated animals?

01:48:10.000 Are they like slaves?

01:48:13.000 Or the cow is seen by most Hindus as the Divine Mother, the provider of milk.

01:48:19.000 Do you regard them as sacred or do you just regard them as cogs in a factory farming machine?

01:48:24.000 Well, that's the way they're regarded now in feedlots and so on in the United States and in Europe.

01:48:31.000 But I think in a religious culture, when you domesticate animals, there's a sense in which they take on a religious significance.

01:48:39.000 And, you know, for the Jewish people, then goats and sheep were the main ones that took on a religious significance.

01:48:48.000 You know, Jesus, Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, the Agnes Dei. 0.98

01:48:53.000 This is a sacrificial lamb, which is a sort of sacred lamb.

01:48:57.000 And so there's a sacralization of sheep in the Judeo-Christian and the Islamic tradition. 0.61

01:49:03.000 It completely makes sense that people would worship cows and even horses because they need the horses for transportation.

01:49:11.000 You know, in a lot of cultures they even used horses to stay alive.

01:49:15.000 Like they drank the blood of the horses.

01:49:17.000 That was a big thing with the Mongols. 0.98

01:49:19.000 It's one of the reasons why they brought, like, you know, each man had many horses that they would carry with them.

01:49:25.000 Yeah.

01:49:25.000 And they would mix it with milk, and it would be a way to stay alive.

01:49:28.000 They would take the blood of certain horses, the milk of other ones, and all that makes sense.

01:49:36.000 What I've always wondered, though, is how did they lose the meaning of soma?

01:49:43.000 How is that such an open thing, open to interpretation?

01:49:48.000 I mean, what...

01:49:48.000 What happened if it was such an amazing thing?

01:49:51.000 I mean, you read the descriptions of Soma, how fantastic it is and how huge a part of it was in their culture and their connection to the Divine.

01:50:01.000 How did they lose what it means?

01:50:04.000 Well, I agree.

01:50:04.000 I think it's a mystery.

01:50:05.000 And it's similar in Greece, the Eleusinian mysteries, this cave where they went in for these psychedelic rites of passage that Plato and people did.

01:50:14.000 It was a big part of life in ancient Greece.

01:50:16.000 What was that?

01:50:17.000 And the most common theories are ones where people see it as Amanita muscaria, the fly agaric.

01:50:24.000 I've never found those particularly plausible because whenever I've taken fly agaric only once or twice, all it did was give me a headache.

01:50:37.000 I've only spoken to people online that have.

01:50:41.000 I've only had it once, and I felt the same way.

01:50:44.000 It didn't do anything for me.

01:50:45.000 I don't know if it enhanced, but I did it, and then we did it for a couple hours, and it didn't seem to have any effect, and then we took psilocybin after that.

01:50:55.000 And it had a huge effect.

01:50:57.000 It was just a monster trip.

01:50:58.000 And I wonder if it was some sort of a combinatory experience.

01:51:03.000 Possibly.

01:51:04.000 But that was another thing that McKenna speculated about, whether it was variable genetically, variable seasonally, variable as far as geographically.

01:51:12.000 Yes.

01:51:13.000 And whether it's transformed, like reindeer, and you're transformed by the reindeer, and then where they drink the urine of reindeer after the reindeer have eaten it and stuff.

01:51:23.000 Right.

01:51:23.000 And the laps and people...

01:51:25.000 Well, it's also all the different connections to the Siberian shamans and the whole Christmas thing, the whole connection to Christmas and the Amanita muscaria mushroom.

01:51:37.000 It's very, very bizarre that elves are connected with this particular mushroom, which is connected with Christmas and gifts and symbiotic relationship to carniferous trees, like the whole deal.

01:51:49.000 It is.

01:51:50.000 It's mysterious.

01:51:50.000 But I've never found that area of speculation particularly satisfying.

01:51:54.000 I mean, if the evidence pointed towards Stropharia cubensis or Psilocybes semilancelata, you know, the Liberty Cap or our native psychedelic mushroom in England...

01:52:07.000 Then it might be more convincing.

01:52:09.000 Right.

01:52:10.000 I mean, the fact is we don't know and it's really a matter of speculation.

01:52:14.000 Yeah, I wonder if it's like, you know, like heirloom tomatoes.

01:52:17.000 You know, you eat an heirloom tomato, they're so delicious, they're fantastic, they're sweet, they're so rich and dark. 0.95

01:52:24.000 Or you can get one of these creepy tomatoes that they grow that last like a month on a shelf and they're pale and they're hard and they just taste like shit. 0.52

01:52:33.000 I mean there's nothing to them. 0.94

01:52:35.000 They look different, they taste different.

01:52:37.000 I wonder if that somehow or another happened to the Amanita where it lost its psychedelic properties.

01:52:44.000 Unlikely because it's never been cultivated and you know it grows in the wild.

01:52:48.000 Could it be maybe just the temperature variations like that maybe you have to have it in that incredibly cold environment of Siberia for it to be that it's geographically genetically variable?

01:52:58.000 Or what you said makes the most sense to me that it was mixed with something else.

01:53:02.000 It's like in ayahuasca, if you just took one of the components of the brew, if the historical data pointed towards this being there, you'd say, okay, this is what it was.

01:53:11.000 But actually, neither of the components would work on their own.

01:53:15.000 So it may well have been that it was part of a mixture.

01:53:18.000 That does kind of make sense for Soma, right? 0.97

01:53:20.000 Because wasn't Soma actually, it was described as some sort of a mixture.

01:53:24.000 Yeah, and so was the Eleusinian Mysteries.

01:53:27.000 You just don't know what the Eleusinian Mysteries are, huh?

01:53:29.000 Is there any speculation as to what that was?

01:53:31.000 Well, Graham Hancock has speculations, of course, but I don't know.

01:53:35.000 The ones I've seen would include opium and cannabis as part of the mix.

01:53:42.000 I mean cannabis was widely known in the ancient world and after all hemp ropes were used for thousands of years.

01:53:48.000 People were growing hemp.

01:53:50.000 Opium has been known for an awfully long time.

01:53:54.000 So what else might have been in there we don't know.

01:53:59.000 Well that's the other thing too, the consumption, the eating of cannabis, eating of hash has produced incredible psychedelic experiences for people.

01:54:09.000 They've eaten large enough quantities where it's been very mushroom-like.

01:54:14.000 Much more psychedelic when eaten, yes.

01:54:17.000 And it's traditional to take it by mouth in India as well as to smoke it.

01:54:22.000 I mean, it's a normal thing that the festival of Holi, H-O-L-I, it's a major Hindu festival.

01:54:29.000 When I was living in India, I was renting a wing of a crumbling palace in Hyderabad from a family of impoverished Rajas. 1.00

01:54:38.000 And they were very respectable, although impoverished.

01:54:42.000 And on Holi, this festival day, the Rajah's wife, the Rani, came to me and she said, Dr. Sahib, you must take our special drink.

01:54:52.000 She said, this is our special drink for Holi and stuff.

01:54:54.000 And I said, what is it?

01:54:56.000 She said, oh, I will tell you later, she said.

01:54:58.000 She's like the Joey Diaz of India. 0.82

01:55:00.000 He dosed you up.

01:55:02.000 So I drank this bung and she said, have some more.

01:55:06.000 And I seemed very stoned with this bung, this drink, this cannabis-containing drink.

01:55:11.000 And then everyone was sort of rushing around throwing colored water at each other.

01:55:16.000 But, I mean, this was a highly respectable, conservative Brahmin family.

01:55:20.000 And this was just part of their traditional way of life.

01:55:25.000 In the non-smoke, in the drunk form.

01:55:28.000 Wow.

01:55:29.000 As a liquid.

01:55:30.000 The edible form.

01:55:31.000 That's quite amazing.

01:55:33.000 I mean, I often wonder how much different our worldview would be if we had those sort of traditions here in America, because that's...

01:55:42.000 Traditions and just sort of these cultural norms that we accept, they shape so much of our behavior.

01:55:50.000 They shape so much of how we view the world.

01:55:52.000 And so much of it is just based on momentum.

01:55:55.000 It's just based on what did your grandparents do?

01:55:57.000 What did they teach your parents?

01:55:58.000 And what did your parents teach you?

01:56:00.000 And what's the collective culture of your neighborhood, your community?

01:56:05.000 Yes, exactly.

01:56:08.000 One thing that's just occurred to me, well, there's two things I'd like to ask you.

01:56:12.000 Well, one thing, let me ask you something.

01:56:14.000 You know I've done a lot of research on the sense of being stared at.

01:56:18.000 I think that this feeling that almost everyone's experienced of feeling you're being looked at, you turn around and someone's staring at you, or you can stare at someone and make them turn around.

01:56:30.000 This is something which is very widespread in the population.

01:56:35.000 There's been a kind of scientific taboo for years about it because it ought not to happen.

01:56:39.000 If your mind is nothing but your brain, looking at someone shouldn't affect them because everything is all inside your head.

01:56:44.000 Whereas if when you look at somebody, the image that you're seeing is projected out, as I suggest it is, when I look at you now, I don't think my image of you in three dimensions and full colour is inside my head.

01:56:57.000 I think it's where you are.

01:56:59.000 I think I'm projecting out my image of you.

01:57:02.000 Everything I'm seeing in this room is where it seems to be projected out.

01:57:06.000 My mind's extended beyond my brain.

01:57:08.000 Anyway, that is how we experience it.

01:57:11.000 The official theory is it's all inside the head.

01:57:15.000 And because the official theory says this is just a superstition, people can't really tell when they're being looked at, there'd been almost no scientific investigation till I took it up in the 1980s.

01:57:26.000 And now quite a number of people have done this research on the sense of being stared at to find out if people really can tell when they're being stared at from behind.

01:57:35.000 I've done lots of experiments in schools.

01:57:37.000 Kids are particularly sensitive to this, more so than grown-ups.

01:57:41.000 Really?

01:57:41.000 Yes.

01:57:42.000 And I then, to find out about it, I thought, well, look, I've done the experiments, but who are the professionals?

01:57:47.000 So I and my research assistant interviewed security guards, store detectives, the drug squad at Heathrow, police, and private detectives.

01:57:58.000 You know, have you ever had this experience?

01:58:01.000 Do people know when they're being watched?

01:58:03.000 Almost everyone who watches others for a living says, sure, of course they do.

01:58:06.000 And, you know, if you're being trained to be a private detective, trained how to follow somebody, you don't stare at their back because they're likely to turn around and catch your eye.

01:58:16.000 So, anyway, I wrote about this in my book, The Sense of Being Stared At, about this research and about its implications for the nature of our minds.

01:58:24.000 But I had recently somebody came to me from a British defence research laboratory, and he said to me, they've got very interest in this.

01:58:35.000 In the army, because some generals are worried that British troops in Afghanistan are now so laden down with kit, you know, GPS systems.

01:58:44.000 I mean, their whole body is covered with electronic kit, and they've found that when they're so top-heavy carrying all this kit, they have to look down at the ground all the time to avoid stumbling, because it's harder to walk with all this stuff.

01:58:57.000 And they can easily be picked off by guerrilla fighters behind rocks with rifles.

01:59:02.000 And so what they said is, do you think we could train people in threat awareness so they could actually become more sensitive?

01:59:10.000 Now in the martial arts, I know some martial arts do have threat awareness training so that people, when blindfolded, have to become more aware of when somebody's looking at them or going to attack them from behind.

01:59:23.000 So my question to you, since this is your world, not mine, is how easy do you think it would be to train people in threat awareness to become more sensitive to knowing when they're being looked at?

01:59:33.000 That's very interesting.

01:59:35.000 I have never been a part of any martial art that teaches people threat awareness.

01:59:41.000 The martial arts that I've been involved in have all been about acquiring very specific skills, For hand to hand combat against other trained adversaries.

01:59:52.000 There's a bunch of different types of martial arts that emphasize what you call self-defense type martial arts.

01:59:58.000 My issue with those guys and the practices of self-defense type martial arts is that almost everything that they're teaching would only work against a non-trained opponent.

02:00:11.000 They have all these ideas like if a guy comes at you and throws a punch, you grab his wrist, you do this, you do that.

02:00:17.000 All that stuff only works on someone who doesn't know how to fight.

02:00:20.000 And my thinking is always learn what works on trained killers.

02:00:26.000 Learn things that are undeniable against the most skilled martial artists.

02:00:30.000 Those are the things you want to learn.

02:00:31.000 And through this practice of very, very difficult to pull off techniques, very difficult training, pushing yourself, expanding the boundaries of your willingness to push your body and your mind, that's how you truly learn about yourself.

02:00:49.000 And Miyamoto Musashi had this expression.

02:00:53.000 That he wrote in the Book of Five Rings, that once you understand the way broadly, you will see it in all things.

02:01:00.000 And that way being in his world was the way of sword fighting.

02:01:04.000 And that you would understand this in this most incredible and intense way.

02:01:08.000 And you would see the same sort of path of the true path in calligraphy, in carpentry, in all sorts of expressive art forms.

02:01:19.000 And that this is...

02:01:22.000 In my opinion, what is the great benefit of martial arts, it's the developing of your human potential through this incredibly difficult endeavor. 0.99

02:01:30.000 And I've always found that these guys who blindfold and look out for it, it's all bullshit. 0.99

02:01:36.000 There's a tremendous amount of bullshit in martial arts. 1.00

02:01:38.000 It's one of the worst. 1.00

02:01:39.000 Oh is it?

02:01:40.000 Yeah, much less so now because of the new movement from 1993 on has been the movement of mixed martial arts and that's because of these things called Ultimate Fighting Championship and mixed martial arts competitions and what mixed martial arts competitions have done is there was always these ideas that different people had like death touches and this guy could just he could hit you in a certain place and use his chi and knock you back All those guys failed miserably in competition.

02:02:10.000 Not a single one was successful, not one.

02:02:12.000 Every single one was beaten down and it just showed there's no mysticism when it comes to martial arts.

02:02:18.000 The true mysticism is the conquering of your fears, the ability to understand how to remain calm during these incredibly stressful moments of competition.

02:02:27.000 And through repetition and intelligent development of technique.

02:02:33.000 That's what real martial arts training teaches people.

02:02:37.000 And that any divine feeling you get from a true master, you would get from a pianist as well.

02:02:43.000 You would get from a true, a brilliant painter.

02:02:46.000 You've met Alex Gray, right?

02:02:49.000 Yes.

02:02:49.000 Brilliant painter.

02:02:50.000 But you know how that feeling you get when you're around him?

02:02:52.000 He's a master.

02:02:53.000 You know what I mean?

02:02:54.000 He has this sense of...

02:02:57.000 You know you're in the presence of a very unique person.

02:03:01.000 And I have experienced that same feeling when I've been around martial artists and that same feeling when I've been around just great minds, great thinkers.

02:03:10.000 What you do is you're recognizing greatness.

02:03:13.000 You're recognizing what Musashi said.

02:03:15.000 You're recognizing someone who understands the way broadly.

02:03:17.000 Mm-hmm.

02:03:18.000 And I don't believe in a lot of these ideas of self-defense training.

02:03:25.000 You know, I think there's certain techniques that are very effective for soldiers, like disarmament techniques, like how to take someone's pistol away, how to defend against a knife attack, where it's very technique-oriented.

02:03:40.000 Krav Maga incorporates a lot of those, which is an Israeli martial art that takes a lot of the best aspects of many different martial arts and they train that.

02:03:48.000 There are definitely real techniques involved that have been taught to soldiers and by soldiers when it comes to disarmament, when it comes to how to deal with hand-to-hand combat in certain situations. 0.93

02:04:00.000 But I think overall, a lot of the quote-unquote self-defense styles are bullshit. 0.97

02:04:07.000 And a lot of the, you know, we're going to blindfold you and people are going to kick you. 1.00

02:04:11.000 If I blindfold you, you're going to get fucked up. 0.99

02:04:13.000 If I blindfold you, there's not a person alive that's going to stop me from punching them in the face if I blindfold them. 1.00

02:04:18.000 You're not going to know what's coming. 0.95

02:04:19.000 No.

02:04:20.000 The only thing that you can help is if you have control of a body.

02:04:23.000 If you're blindfolded, you can grapple very well.

02:04:27.000 I've grappled with my eyes closed before, but the reason being is that If I am holding on to your waist, if I have a hold of you, I know where everything else is.

02:04:37.000 It's just a pattern thing.

02:04:40.000 It's a pattern recognition.

02:04:42.000 I've been in that position so many times that I know where your neck is going to be. 0.87

02:04:47.000 I know where your arm is going to be.

02:04:48.000 If I isolate your shoulder, I know where your wrist is going to be.

02:04:51.000 I know how to isolate those joints without having to look at them.

02:04:54.000 So in that sense, you could do some things blindfolded, But not striking, not distance.

02:05:00.000 No.

02:05:00.000 Well, I think the threat awareness stuff was not so much that you could fight blindfolded, but training people to feel from which direction someone was looking at them from behind.

02:05:11.000 Now, it seems to me plausible that you could train that.

02:05:15.000 But, you know, it's not my world.

02:05:17.000 And so, really, I mean, this is an issue...

02:05:21.000 If they asked for my advice on experimental design, what I'd do for threat awareness is this.

02:05:26.000 I'd have, say, take a five-story building.

02:05:30.000 On one of the five stories selected at random, you'd do it at night.

02:05:35.000 Have guys hidden behind in offices that can look at people walking along corridors.

02:05:39.000 You'd have CCTV cameras and people watching them on that floor.

02:05:45.000 But on the other four floors, you'd switch off the TV cameras and there'd be nobody there.

02:05:49.000 And you'd have somebody...

02:05:50.000 Walk through each floor of this building and then they'd have to say which one they were being watched in.

02:05:55.000 And one out of five, if they got it right, you know, lots of times, there's a one in five chance of getting it right just by guessing.

02:06:03.000 But if you find results above chance, you could then say, well, these people are actually detecting potential threats.

02:06:11.000 And you might be able to train people to get better at it.

02:06:15.000 What you did, your study, correct me if I'm wrong, you had people sit down and then they hit a button when they felt someone looking at them?

02:06:26.000 No, what happened was this...

02:06:27.000 Well, there's two methods.

02:06:29.000 The method I've mainly used is the simplest one that you can do with kids in schools.

02:06:36.000 One person's blindfolded with an airline-style blindfold to cut out peripheral vision.

02:06:42.000 The other person sits behind them, and then in a random series of trials...

02:06:46.000 The simplest method is tossing a coin, but I have random sheets of instructions.

02:06:52.000 You'd look or you don't look.

02:06:54.000 So if it's a looking trial, the person behind stares at the back of their neck and thinks about them.

02:06:59.000 And then after 10 seconds, there's a click.

02:07:02.000 And so they hear a click or a beep.

02:07:05.000 They know the trial's begun.

02:07:07.000 And within 10 seconds, they have to say looking or not looking.

02:07:10.000 Are you being looked at or not?

02:07:11.000 Yes or no.

02:07:12.000 It's right or wrong.

02:07:14.000 And then the next trial at random would be looking or not looking.

02:07:17.000 And if it's not looking, they look away and think of something else.

02:07:20.000 And people have to guess.

02:07:22.000 We usually do 20 of these.

02:07:24.000 They're only 10 seconds each, so it doesn't take long.

02:07:26.000 And this gives results where most people score above chance, 50% chance, but many, if you take an average, it comes out around 55 to 60%.

02:07:36.000 So it's not a big effect, but over hundreds of thousands of trials, it shows something's going on.

02:07:42.000 Statistically significant.

02:07:43.000 Yes, very significant.

02:07:44.000 And if you do it through windows to eliminate smell or sound or one-way mirrors, it still works.

02:07:51.000 And in Amsterdam this has been running in the Science Museum for 20 years and it's one of the biggest experiments ever conducted.

02:07:59.000 The interesting thing there is the overall results are extremely positive, highly significant statistically.

02:08:05.000 But what they've shown is what I've already found in my own experiments.

02:08:08.000 The most sensitive subjects are children under the age of nine.

02:08:12.000 And I think most of us, when we're older, we go out into the world.

02:08:16.000 There's crowded streets.

02:08:17.000 Lots of people look at it.

02:08:18.000 We desensitize ourselves.

02:08:20.000 But children are much more sensitive.

02:08:22.000 I wonder if that case, I wonder if really attractive women would be the worst at it. 1.00

02:08:27.000 Because really attractive women are used to putting on blindfolds and walking past people staring at them all the time. 1.00

02:08:32.000 Yes.

02:08:33.000 Well, there is a slight difference in those who've experienced this.

02:08:36.000 More women than men have experienced being stared at when you do savvies, and more men than women have experienced turning at others and looking at others and making them turn around.

02:08:44.000 Men are leers.

02:08:45.000 Yes.

02:08:46.000 So attractive women do have to, as you say, they have to learn to avoid meeting people's gaze. 1.00

02:08:53.000 I have this photograph, American Girl in Italy.

02:08:56.000 It's from 1951. It's a fascinating photograph.

02:08:59.000 It's a famous photograph.

02:09:01.000 This American woman is walking down this street next to these Animals. 1.00

02:09:05.000 These men that are grabbing their crotch and they're staring. 0.93

02:09:09.000 And she has this look on her face like she's not looking at anyone in particular.

02:09:11.000 She's just going straight forward.

02:09:13.000 And that woman would be a perfect candidate. 0.99

02:09:18.000 Someone who's used to blocking off all these leering freaks.

02:09:24.000 They're staring at her.

02:09:27.000 Was there anyone that you'd ever done that study on that was really good at it?

02:09:31.000 Like 75%, 80%?

02:09:33.000 Oh, a hundred percent, yes.

02:09:34.000 A hundred percent?

02:09:35.000 Yes.

02:09:36.000 Someone got a hundred percent?

02:09:37.000 Yes, and that was my older son, Merlin.

02:09:39.000 Whoa, Merlin.

02:09:40.000 He's a wizard.

02:09:41.000 Got a son named Merlin?

02:09:42.000 Yes. 0.98

02:09:42.000 That's ridiculous. 0.98

02:09:44.000 He's a scientist. 0.99

02:09:45.000 I bet.

02:09:46.000 He's doing a PhD at the moment in tropical ecology.

02:09:49.000 Dr. Merlin.

02:09:50.000 Wow.

02:09:50.000 Dr. Merlin.

02:09:51.000 My younger son, who's 24, is a musician.

02:09:53.000 He gets a hundred percent.

02:09:55.000 Yes, when Merlin was four years old, I did this experiment with him, you know, blindfold him, he's sitting there.

02:10:01.000 I said, look, I'm going to look at you some of the time, the rest of the time not, and each time you hear this click, you have to say if you think you're being looked at.

02:10:09.000 He got it right 100% of the time.

02:10:11.000 So I couldn't believe this.

02:10:12.000 He wasn't cheating.

02:10:13.000 I mean, he didn't know about cheating.

02:10:15.000 He was four.

02:10:16.000 He was four.

02:10:16.000 Wow.

02:10:17.000 And so I did it again, and he was brilliant.

02:10:20.000 And he said, Daddy, you've done it.

02:10:21.000 Can we do it the other way around?

02:10:23.000 Can you tell when I'm looking at it?

02:10:25.000 You.

02:10:26.000 So I said, okay, we'll try that.

02:10:28.000 And we did it the other way around.

02:10:30.000 And I, you know, out of 20 trials, I got sort of 11 out of 20. It was above chance, but I was wrong quite a lot of the time.

02:10:38.000 Then he got the idea, wow, you can be wrong.

02:10:41.000 And I was wrong.

02:10:43.000 Sort of doubt entered his mind and after that when I tested him, it was still fairly high, 75%, but he never got 100% again after the first two times.

02:10:51.000 That's interesting.

02:10:52.000 And what were the numbers?

02:10:53.000 Like how many times did you do it?

02:10:55.000 Well, the first two times were 20 times each.

02:10:57.000 So normally I do these trials with 20 trials and most people would get, say, 11 out of 20. He was getting 20 out of 20. That's insane!

02:11:06.000 Which is hugely significant, of course.

02:11:09.000 And anyway, the thing is that young children are very, very sensitive to this.

02:11:14.000 And how old are yours?

02:11:16.000 Four and six are the youngest ones.

02:11:17.000 Well, you see, check it out.

02:11:18.000 I'm going to.

02:11:19.000 I've already got my plans for tonight.

02:11:21.000 LAUGHTER I'm going to go on the way home.

02:11:24.000 I'm going to pick up some blindfolds.

02:11:26.000 Yeah, that's brilliant.

02:11:28.000 It's really interesting, the idea that you introduce the possibility of failure, and then he was like, oh, and then doubt crept in.

02:11:36.000 Exactly.

02:11:37.000 And the problem with the kinds of tests, I do tests on the sense of being stared at telepathy.

02:11:42.000 I'm doing a lot on telephone telepathy.

02:11:44.000 Can you tell who's calling?

02:11:47.000 The problem with these kinds of experiments is that you have to set them up so that people can be right or wrong, and very few people are right all the time, but as soon as doubt creeps in, the mind interferes.

02:12:00.000 People think, Oh, maybe I guessed one way last time, it's statistical, it should be the other way this time.

02:12:07.000 And they start, as soon as that kind of thing goes on, people lose it.

02:12:11.000 Boy, that is life in a nutshell, isn't it?

02:12:14.000 Like, as soon as you have doubt, your whole world is just a mess.

02:12:18.000 And unfortunately, these experiments that I do introduce doubt because I have to do statistical experiments that will be credible to skeptics.

02:12:27.000 So there's a kind of skepticism built into the experiments.

02:12:31.000 I haven't yet found a way of doing these.

02:12:34.000 The holy grail would be to find ways of doing these tests where people don't realize that they're being tested and that there's doubt.

02:12:41.000 How could that be done, though?

02:12:44.000 Well I'm thinking of one kind of test that would be incorporated in a video game where say you have to choose between going through one door or another door and one door you go through it's absolutely awful and the other door you escape and you're on to sort of next stage.

02:13:02.000 You could have it where when people choose It hasn't been decided.

02:13:08.000 You'd have a random event thing that would determine which door you go through after you've made the choice to go through it.

02:13:15.000 This is then called presentiment or precognition.

02:13:18.000 It's like knowing the future.

02:13:19.000 And so if people were right more often than they were wrong, You'd know, because it's purely chance, it should be 50-50.

02:13:27.000 If some people were coming out 60-40, you wouldn't say, this is a psychological test.

02:13:33.000 You would say, you know, how lucky are you?

02:13:35.000 And can you be consistently lucky in this?

02:13:40.000 And it would be more like luck.

02:13:43.000 It would still involve an element of doubt, because you might start thinking, oh, I'm not very lucky today.

02:13:48.000 But it wouldn't be framed as a scientific experiment.

02:13:53.000 It would be framed as a way of training your ability to be lucky.

02:13:59.000 Training your ability to be lucky.

02:14:01.000 Yes.

02:14:02.000 Intuition is a very strange thing.

02:14:04.000 And some people believe in it and some people don't.

02:14:06.000 Some people believe that you make good choices like, you know, you'll hear people that are successful that are confident and like, hey, I've always been lucky.

02:14:12.000 I've got great instincts.

02:14:14.000 But there is something to instincts.

02:14:17.000 There's something to trusting certain folks and not trusting certain folks based on just immediately the feeling that you get when you meet them.

02:14:24.000 Yeah.

02:14:36.000 Well, I think intuition just means direct knowing, and some of it can be telepathic, some of it can be unconscious pattern recognition.

02:14:44.000 There's lots of components.

02:14:46.000 But some of them, I think, are what you could call parapsychological, you know, feeling the future or picking up things telepathically.

02:14:57.000 And, you know, these recent experiments of Darrell Bam at Cornell on feeling the future.

02:15:03.000 I don't know if you've looked into those.

02:15:05.000 No.

02:15:06.000 Let me just keep an eye on the time.

02:15:08.000 It's 1 o'clock.

02:15:09.000 Okay, well...

02:15:10.000 You have a pocket watch.

02:15:11.000 Old school, look at you.

02:15:12.000 With a chain on it.

02:15:14.000 Yes.

02:15:14.000 Wow.

02:15:15.000 I don't like wearing wristwatches.

02:15:17.000 Let me take that out?

02:15:17.000 What, do you have it connected to your belt or something?

02:15:19.000 Yes, it's over the trousers.

02:15:22.000 Wow, pretty slick.

02:15:25.000 Who wears a pocket watch?

02:15:27.000 Well, you know, you need to know the time sometimes.

02:15:30.000 Do you not like watches?

02:15:31.000 No, I don't like being manacled to time.

02:15:34.000 Ah, manacled.

02:15:35.000 Yeah.

02:15:37.000 But do you carry a cell phone?

02:15:38.000 No.

02:15:39.000 Ooh, you're one of those guys.

02:15:40.000 Yeah.

02:15:40.000 How come?

02:15:42.000 I hate being interrupted.

02:15:44.000 And, you know, I don't like the phone.

02:15:46.000 At home, I don't use phones much.

02:15:48.000 I use email.

02:15:49.000 That's fine.

02:15:50.000 You can always just shut your phone off.

02:15:52.000 I know, but I'd rather not have it.

02:15:54.000 I do have one because I'm doing experiments on cell phones, on telephone telepathy.

02:15:59.000 My friend Steve, who I was talking about from London, same thing.

02:16:02.000 He hates having a phone.

02:16:03.000 Drives his wife crazy. 0.65

02:16:05.000 Yes.

02:16:05.000 Well, that's a good reason for not having one.

02:16:08.000 I don't want to be interrupted all the time, and if I go for a walk or if I'm working or something, I find it really annoying if the phone rings.

02:16:18.000 Anyway, the pocket watch means I can know the time when I need to know.

02:16:22.000 I'm going to have to go fairly soon, but not quite yet.

02:16:27.000 Where were we?

02:16:30.000 Telepathy?

02:16:31.000 Telepathy tests and intuition.

02:16:35.000 Sometimes it's...

02:16:37.000 Daryl Bem's experiments are very simple, and it's called feeling the future.

02:16:44.000 And there's this phenomenon that Dean Radin at the Institute of Noetic Sciences has done a lot of research on, where it turns out that we can respond a few seconds before an emotionally arousing event.

02:16:55.000 Our body starts preparing for it before it happens.

02:16:59.000 This would be very relevant to fast sports, ping pong, tennis, cricket, downhill skiing, and probably martial arts as well.

02:17:07.000 And this research seems to me pretty convincing.

02:17:11.000 I've been a subject in some of these experiments myself.

02:17:15.000 And the Dean Radin version of it is this.

02:17:19.000 You sit there in front of a computer screen.

02:17:22.000 You're wearing electrodes that measure emotional arousal.

02:17:26.000 You know, adrenaline causes sweating and emotional arousal, like a lie detector.

02:17:30.000 So it's a standard way of measuring emotional arousal.

02:17:34.000 When you're ready, you press a button, and ten seconds later, a picture appears on the screen.

02:17:38.000 Most of the pictures are neutral, you know, landscapes, you know, bowl of flowers or something like that, vaguely pleasant.

02:17:46.000 Some of them are scenes that are emotionally arousing, hardcore pornography, or scenes of extreme violence.

02:17:53.000 Now, almost everybody, when they see hardcore pornography or scenes of violence, is emotionally aroused.

02:17:59.000 Even if they don't want to be, they are.

02:18:01.000 And the lie detector thing shows a huge emotional arousal.

02:18:05.000 The interesting thing in these experiments is the emotional arousal begins about five seconds before the picture appears on the screen.

02:18:13.000 Five seconds?

02:18:14.000 Five seconds.

02:18:14.000 That's a long time.

02:18:15.000 It's a long time.

02:18:16.000 For people ready, here's five seconds.

02:18:18.000 Go.

02:18:23.000 Five seconds.

02:18:24.000 That's a long time.

02:18:27.000 And so the heart keeps beating faster, the fight-or-flight response, you know, the adrenaline kind of response kicks in.

02:18:35.000 So when the stimulus occurs, the body's already sort of revved up with this emotional response.

02:18:41.000 Now, this is work that Dean Radin's done.

02:18:46.000 He's repeated it, and it's been replicated elsewhere.

02:18:48.000 It's called pre-sentiment, feeling in advance.

02:18:53.000 And the decision as to which picture appears on the screen is made by the computer a millisecond before it actually appears.

02:19:00.000 There's no one in the world knows what picture is going to appear.

02:19:03.000 Now, this is really interesting, you see, because it shows there's a kind of feeding back of emotion.

02:19:09.000 Now, Daryl Bem at Cornell, who is a very respected professor of psychology, has been doing a different kind of experiment which doesn't involve the lie detector.

02:19:20.000 His experiments, you sit in front of a computer screen and there's two curtains there.

02:19:25.000 Behind one of those curtains, there's a blank wall.

02:19:29.000 An image of a blank wall.

02:19:30.000 Behind the other one, there's a pornographic image.

02:19:34.000 Now most people, even if they don't normally watch pornography, are more interested in seeing a pornographic image than a blank wall.

02:19:41.000 And before you do the test, there's a simple questionnaire.

02:19:45.000 Are you gay, straight, etc.?

02:19:46.000 So people who are gay get gay pornographic images. 0.98

02:19:51.000 So those are emotionally arousing. 0.98

02:19:53.000 So what happens?

02:19:54.000 You sit down at the computer and you click on one of those two curtains.

02:19:59.000 Thank you.

02:20:00.000 Which one you want to click on, you choose which of the two.

02:20:03.000 It's random whether you'll get the wall or the pornographic image.

02:20:08.000 So you click on one, and most people would hope that they're going to see the pornographic image, a different one each time.

02:20:14.000 And the computer makes the decision which one to roll back, which curtain to roll back, after you've made the click.

02:20:23.000 People don't know that this decision is only made by the computer after they've decided.

02:20:28.000 They think it's already there.

02:20:31.000 So most people don't know that they're doing a pre-sentiment test.

02:20:36.000 So what happens is in these experiments, about 53 or 54% of the time, people get the pornographic image, whereas by pure chance, it would be 50%.

02:20:48.000 And if instead of a pornographic image, you have a sort of mildly pleasant landscape or something that's not emotionally arousing, it's down to 50%.

02:20:56.000 Whoa! 0.71

02:20:58.000 So this is telling us that something about emotional arousal can work back in time.

02:21:03.000 And when you think about fast sports, imagine, you know, tennis.

02:21:08.000 People are serving at 90 miles an hour.

02:21:10.000 There's not time.

02:21:12.000 For the eye to take in the angle of the ball, to process it in the brain through clunky brain processing, to send messages along nerves to muscles to get the whole body ready, or in a penalty shootout, the goalie has to, in a football soccer match, they have to react very quickly.

02:21:30.000 And in ping-pong you have to react quickly.

02:21:33.000 In cricket, Australian fast bowlers bowl at 100 miles an hour in cricket.

02:21:39.000 There's not long enough.

02:21:40.000 And in downhill skiing, you come round a corner.

02:21:44.000 It's too fast.

02:21:46.000 So I think that part of the way we're reacting, and I think this comes out most in sports, and it would also come out driving a car.

02:21:55.000 If you got the five-second in advance warning, some accident's about to happen, you could concentrate and perhaps avoid it better.

02:22:02.000 This is a fascinating field of research, which It's not yet been picked up by sports psychologists or by...

02:22:11.000 I've told several people in the military about it because I think it would be really interesting.

02:22:17.000 I don't think it's going to do any harm if they know this.

02:22:20.000 But say for example you had your physiology being monitored.

02:22:24.000 You're in a flight simulator or a driving simulator.

02:22:28.000 And say you had it so that when you got an otherwise inexplicable emotional arousal going on, you'd be unconscious of it to start with.

02:22:36.000 Say it was wired up so a red light went on in the cockpit of the flight simulator.

02:22:42.000 It might sometimes be a false alarm, but every time that light went on, The message would be concentrate on how something bad might happen.

02:22:51.000 This could be a useful technological gadget.

02:22:54.000 And so I think this is, you know, there's a lot of potential in this kind of research which is only just being begun to be explored.

02:23:05.000 And the reason I've encouraged people in the British Defence Research Establishment to do this is because they're more likely to take it up than people in universities, because in universities, you know, there's this kind of dogmatic skepticism that means people say, oh, it's rubbish, it's woo, it's pseudoscience,

02:23:22.000 etc. 0.99

02:23:22.000 I mean, stupid reactions, really. 0.99

02:23:25.000 The real, the most interesting, actually, yes, this is really interesting. 0.98

02:23:29.000 Can we find out more and can we apply it?

02:23:31.000 That's incredibly fascinating.

02:23:33.000 Do you think that these things, like this precognition ability or this instincts or the ability to recognize these patterns, do you think this is possibly some emerging thing in human beings, emerging aspect of the development of humans?

02:23:50.000 I mean, obviously, if you believe in evolution, we were one thing, now we are this.

02:23:56.000 We are what we are now, which is radically different from the Pre-human hominids of two million-plus years ago. 1.00

02:24:03.000 We're very, very different.

02:24:05.000 If you just extrapolate, a million years from now, we're going to be very different from what we are now.

02:24:10.000 Do you think that this aspect of human beings, of human life, is a developing thing?

02:24:17.000 This precognition ability, this ability to communicate with each other, do you think maybe that's what's manifesting itself when you think about someone and all of a sudden the phone rings and it's them, like instantaneously?

02:24:28.000 Well, I think that it's something in traditional societies that's actually better developed than in modern ones, where people don't talk about it on the whole, there's no training for it and stuff.

02:24:37.000 In traditional societies, people take these things for granted and they rely on them.

02:24:42.000 Now, the phone is an interesting case because this is a modern technology.

02:24:47.000 But I think that telepathy is a means of communication between people who know each other well.

02:24:53.000 It's actually always been going on.

02:24:55.000 Animals have it.

02:24:56.000 I've been doing research on telepathy in dogs.

02:24:58.000 I wrote a book called Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home.

02:25:01.000 I did lots of experiments on are dogs picking it up just by routine or car signs.

02:25:07.000 The answer is no.

02:25:08.000 We film them.

02:25:08.000 We have people come at random times in unfamiliar vehicles.

02:25:11.000 The dogs still know.

02:25:13.000 But why have people had such a hard time replicating those experiments?

02:25:16.000 The dog one's been replicated.

02:25:18.000 It was replicated by a skeptic who then pretended he hadn't replicated it.

02:25:23.000 But it's now generally agreed that his results agreed perfectly with my own.

02:25:28.000 And millions of people have dogs that do this.

02:25:30.000 So I don't think it's hard to replicate.

02:25:32.000 It's just that if you do this in a university, it's likely to end your career.

02:25:37.000 Yeah, well, is that what it is?

02:25:39.000 Because I've read online people that have disagreed with you saying that no one has ever replicated your results.

02:25:44.000 Oh, yes.

02:25:44.000 Well, that's the skeptics' disinformation.

02:25:48.000 It's been replicated by one of the leading skeptics in Britain who then pretended falsely that he hadn't replicated it.

02:25:55.000 And who is that?

02:25:56.000 Richard Wiseman.

02:25:58.000 And online on my website, you can see his data plotted on graphs showing exactly the same effect as I found it.

02:26:05.000 Is it statistically significant or is it 100%?

02:26:08.000 It's statistically significant.

02:26:10.000 His data and mine.

02:26:12.000 What is your data?

02:26:13.000 How often do they know and how often were they unaware?

02:26:16.000 About 80% of the time.

02:26:18.000 We did a series of 100 trials with one dog.

02:26:21.000 And on 80 of those occasions, the dog started waiting when the person was about to come home.

02:26:29.000 It was actually before she got in the car to come home or the taxi.

02:26:32.000 It picked up her intention.

02:26:34.000 And this was at random times.

02:26:36.000 On 20 occasions out of 100, it didn't.

02:26:39.000 On three or four of those, the dog was sick. 0.97

02:26:41.000 And on the other occasions, it was when there was a bitch on heat in the next apartment, which showed this dog could be distracted. 1.00

02:26:48.000 But even if you include all 100 events, including the ones where the dog was and do the statistics, it's still massively significant.

02:26:56.000 That's fascinating.

02:26:57.000 So you think that much like what you were talking about with your son, who was able to recognize 100% of the time when someone was staring at him, that dogs, because they don't have like a cultural context, they don't have all this doubt in their head.

02:27:10.000 That's right.

02:27:11.000 They do it and they have an emotional investment too.

02:27:13.000 It's not like a boring parapsychology experiment.

02:27:17.000 For a dog, it's immensely emotionally exciting when the owner comes home.

02:27:22.000 There's an emotional charge.

02:27:23.000 They do it over and over again.

02:27:24.000 They never get bored of their owners coming home.

02:27:27.000 So the telephone phenomenon, which I can briefly summarize, is one I do in my tests.

02:27:36.000 People who say this happens to them in real life, give me the names and numbers of four people it might happen with.

02:27:45.000 We pick, they sit at home being filmed, so we know they're not getting other phone calls or text messages or something.

02:27:52.000 And they are on a landline phone with no caller ID display.

02:27:56.000 We pick one of the four callers at random and call them up and say, if you were doing it, we'd say, please ring Joe now.

02:28:04.000 And they think about you for a bit.

02:28:08.000 They ring you.

02:28:08.000 Your phone rings.

02:28:10.000 And before you pick it up, you have to say who you think it is.

02:28:13.000 You know, I think it's John, and you pick it up and say, hi John, you're right or you're wrong.

02:28:18.000 You can't know from the normal patterns of life because it's randomly chosen.

02:28:25.000 And so by chance you'd be right one time in four, 25%.

02:28:28.000 In these experiments, the average score in our film test is 45%, massively significant statistically.

02:28:36.000 And this has now been replicated in other universities.

02:28:39.000 Even one of Britain's leading skeptics checked this out and he's getting positive results, much to his dismay.

02:28:47.000 And so I've now got an automated test.

02:28:51.000 I'm about to launch it in the US, but it's already launched in Britain, where people can do this on cell phones with their friends.

02:28:58.000 You don't have to be in a lab.

02:29:00.000 I think telephone telepathy is real, and I think what's happening is that when you want to call someone, if I wanted to call you, I'd form the intention to call you, I've got a motive to call you, I'd be thinking about Joe, and then I'd get my phone out, I'd dial the number or press the memory thing for you,

02:29:19.000 When I form the intention to call you, I think you could in some cases pick up that intention.

02:29:24.000 You might start thinking about me for no apparent reason, and then the call comes through, and you say, it's funny, I was just thinking about you.

02:29:33.000 So I think this is a genuinely telepathic phenomenon in many cases.

02:29:37.000 Sometimes it can be coincidence, but on average it seems to be a real effect.

02:29:43.000 And I think this is an example of where telepathy really is evolving along with technology.

02:29:49.000 It happens with emails and text messages as well.

02:29:52.000 Until recently, the only way you could get in touch with someone at a distance was telepathically, if you wanted a quick response.

02:30:00.000 Now you can do it by phone.

02:30:03.000 I've also done research on what I think is one of the basic biological forms of this, which is mothers and babies.

02:30:09.000 Many nursing mothers find that when they're away from their baby, for no apparent reason, their milk lets down, their breasts start squeezing out milk. 0.97

02:30:20.000 Normally that happens when the baby cries and they feel their breasts tinkle.

02:30:25.000 Say there was a nursing mother here now, and there was no baby crying here, and she felt her milk let down.

02:30:31.000 Most nursing mothers think, my baby needs me. 0.94

02:30:34.000 And until recently, they just went home to the baby.

02:30:37.000 Now they call home on a cell phone.

02:30:39.000 But I've done studies on nursing mothers in London, 20 of them over a two-month period each.

02:30:45.000 And we found that it was very, very highly significant.

02:30:48.000 It wasn't just synchronized rhythms.

02:30:50.000 They were responding when their baby needed them.

02:30:53.000 And before telephones were invented, any mother that could pick up when her baby needed her and went to the baby would have a baby that survived better than a mother that didn't pick it up. 0.77

02:31:05.000 So I think telephones, in a way, give us a technological way of doing something that in the past happened more unreliably by telepathy.

02:31:13.000 So do you think that these telephones connecting to telepathy is somehow or another related to this morphic field that is seemingly undefined?

02:31:23.000 We know, or rather you believe, that this is a real phenomenon, that it exists, but we don't know exactly what the mechanism is.

02:31:32.000 Yeah, I think what happens with social groups, any social group, is that the group as a whole has a field.

02:31:39.000 Like a magnetic field will arrange iron filings which are within its field of influence.

02:31:44.000 If you have a flock of birds, like starlings that are flying together, there's a kind of field that coordinates their movements so they can change direction rapidly without bumping into each other.

02:31:55.000 If you have a school of fish, you've got the same kind of thing.

02:31:58.000 If you have a pack of wolves and they leave the young, the cubs are left behind in the den with a babysitter while the adults go out hunting to bring food back for the young, the field that links them isn't broken, it stretches like an invisible elastic band.

02:32:13.000 I think that's the basis of telepathy.

02:32:15.000 I think it's to do with social bonds through social fields.

02:32:18.000 And a mother and the baby are very closely linked and it's as if there's this invisible elastic band between them.

02:32:25.000 And so, when you look at telephone telepathy, it typically only happens with people you know well.

02:32:31.000 It happens between mothers and children, husbands and wives, lovers, partners, therapists and clients if there's a kind of emotional charge, best friends.

02:32:43.000 It doesn't happen with insurance salesmen and people to whom you're not emotionally connected.

02:32:51.000 It depends on social bonds.

02:32:53.000 And so I think the morphic field of the social group is something that applies to any social group.

02:32:59.000 A family has a kind of morphic field.

02:33:02.000 A football team has one.

02:33:05.000 Michael Murphy, who founded the Esalen Institute, did a fascinating book called The Psychic Side of Sports.

02:33:11.000 I think?

02:33:34.000 They just somehow, they were working like a single organism.

02:33:37.000 I think that's an example of a morphic field of a social group.

02:33:41.000 And I think that's why team sports are so interesting to watch because it's not just about guys being brilliant.

02:33:48.000 It's about guys working together and in a way that's highly coordinated.

02:33:53.000 And the more effectively the team works together, the more effective it is.

02:33:57.000 That's fascinating stuff.

02:33:59.000 It's really interesting to consider how much of a factor that does play, what exactly it is, too.

02:34:06.000 Yes.

02:34:06.000 It's amazing.

02:34:08.000 You're out of time.

02:34:09.000 RupertSheldrake.org is your website.

02:34:12.000 No, Sheldrake.org.

02:34:14.000 Oh, Sheldrake.org.

02:34:15.000 I'm sorry, just Sheldrake.org.

02:34:16.000 And RupertSheldrake is your Twitter handle, correct?

02:34:20.000 Do you handle all that stuff yourself?

02:34:21.000 No, actually, I don't really use Twitter, so forget that.

02:34:25.000 Really?

02:34:25.000 I do have one, but I don't use it.

02:34:27.000 Someone set it up for me and I've never learned how.

02:34:29.000 Your last tweet was September 13th.

02:34:33.000 I posted a new photo to Facebook.

02:34:34.000 Oh, so you used Facebook.

02:34:36.000 Is that what it is?

02:34:36.000 I used Facebook, yes.

02:34:37.000 And it automatically posts to Twitter?

02:34:39.000 Yes, that's right.

02:34:39.000 It works onto that, yes.

02:34:40.000 Okay.

02:34:41.000 Thank you very much, man.

02:34:42.000 I really appreciate this.

02:34:42.000 It was really cool to have a conversation with you after listening to you in the trial logs.

02:34:46.000 I really appreciate it.

02:34:47.000 And we could do this anytime you're in town.

02:34:50.000 Okay.

02:34:50.000 Well, it's fun for me, too.

02:34:52.000 I've really enjoyed it, Jay.

02:34:53.000 How often are you in L.A.? The last time was 27 years ago, so it's not very often.

02:34:57.000 That's a long time.

02:34:57.000 Wow, I got lucky.

02:34:58.000 I got lucky.

02:35:00.000 All right, thank you very much.

02:35:01.000 I really, really appreciate it.

02:35:02.000 Rupert Sheldrake, ladies and gentlemen.

02:35:03.000 We'll see you Thursday with Graham Hancock.

02:35:06.000 Until then, much love.

02:35:07.000 Big kiss.

02:35:09.000 This podcast was brought to you by Blue Apron.

02:35:12.000 Go to blueapron.com forward slash Rogan for your first two meals for free.

02:35:17.000 That's blueapron.com forward slash Rogan.

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The Joe Rogan Experience - September 16, 2014

Joe Rogan Experience #550 - Rupert Sheldrake

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