[Music] we humans at least to the best of our knowledge are currently the only Universal explainers and Constructors part of our mission really needs to be to always be seeking better explanations a lot of these things that we in mainstream science take for granted we keep saying they're established they're
really not we don't have a mechanism to explain this so it's impossible so it can't be true which is really just a copout and not how science works at all science is actually just a bunch of stories when I run an experiment and I collect data people think it's objective but it's not because when I'm looking at
the results I have to come up with a story to write in the paper to convince the journal to publish it we need to be very very humble and think that we really don't know everything Mysteries are okay and it's okay to say that we don't know [Music] everything well hello everybody it's Jim
o shanesy with another episode of infinite Loops I am very excited about today's guest Modo soani is a cognitive neuroscientist and the co-founder of exploring Consciousness and author of proof of spiritual phenomena a neuroscientist discovery of inevitable Mysteries of the universe wow welcome
Mona oh thank you so much for having me so I am absolutely fascinated in the uh attempt of people who have been trained in traditional Sciences like yourself uh I've had rert sheldrake on as a guest as well um and I read a lot about this but tell me about your journey from being
kind of a scientific materialist to investigating what some would call Frontier science others would call pseudo science which is a term I'm going to ask you about whether we should even be using but but but if you don't mind take us take us uh on the journey from trained neuroscientist scientific materialist to
Frontier scientist absolutely my pleasure so I am a traditionally trained cognitive neuroscientist I got my PhD um from USC I studi psychopathic traits because I love Psychopaths and um I was very much a scientific materialist I um you know that's how they train us they train us to believe that the universe is random
it's dead it's meaningless and especially in Neuroscience they train you to believe that the brain creates all meaning that our brain looks for coincidences and then creates stories to explain the things that are happening in your life um and I totally bought into that um and I think when I went went
into grad school I was a bit more curious about the universe but by the time I graduated which was six years later um I joke now they don't call it indoctrination for nothing so by the time you leave they you know they've had their way with you and a lot of the magic that I thought could have existed
in the universe was definitely stamped out and I was never spiritual or religious uh to begin with but by the end of that I was arrogantly and condescendingly anti- religious and anti-spiritual um which is kind of common in science um and there's a great stigma to to not really talk about that
kind of stuff to the point where later in my life when I get to that point in the story when this started coming up for me I realized I did not know if any of my scientific colleagues were religious or spiritual or had experienced anything uh anomalous because we never talked about those things so
so I was living this typical scientific life and it was a series of events there wasn't like one thing that happened but um after I graduated and started working I sort of started having an existential crisis immediately because I think after you're working towards a PhD you know like you're so focused on that you have
a goal and then when you graduate and you're working and there's no clear goal and for someone who's like a type overachiever like me you know I thought I just suddenly felt like a void and the questions of existence that I never bothered with started to flood in like why are we here is this all we do we go
to work every day um we don't have time for anything I what is the point of all this you know and from my training the answer was there is no point to all this and it's your job to find meaning and make meaning out of it um and that was hard to do so I started having a crisis
um but I'm Persian and my my parents are from Iran they came for the Revolution and we um have a tradition in our culture of divination which is essentially using some sort of medium like tarot cards or in my um my grandmother and my mother's case they would use Turkish or Armenian um coffee
grinds it's like a thicker coffee it's not like American coffee you leave the grinds in the cup it creates pictures and then you can have somebody look at the pictures and tell you about your life past present and future and so my grandmother was trained in it and she was very good apparently I never got a
reading um because she lived in Iran and so my but my mom was trained in it and would this would happen all the time in the background of our family parties and it wasn't on my radar at all you know you you're a kid um and if it's something you grow up with you don't even notice it so I didn't notice but I
mean our family friends would line up to get readings from my mom and so when I was in graduate school I started to go home on the weekends to visit my parents and my mom started reading coffee for me not like it wasn't like a onp purpose thing it just started happening I would
drink coffee with her and then she would flip the cup over and start telling me things and of course at that time I I wasn't into it I didn't really believe in it but she would do it anyway and so I I noticed though over time that the things that she said started to come true and with with startling accuracy
and it was things that were really intimate things in my life things that were private that I would normally tell her like that I would actively actually try to keep from her you know um and she started to see those and I started to wonder about it but it would have shattered my world to to think about it
more deeply so I just ignored it and lived in cognitive dissonance um until I couldn't uh what happened was I had two big emotional events so one was my mom saw like one day she was reading and she just said I just have to tell you and she never said anything like this she's like I just have to tell
you I think you're going to get bad news and she's like I don't want to scare you and I don't want to say what it is because what if I'm wrong but she's like I've been seeing it for a while and I just feel like I have to warn you and so of course I like Panic like because at that point I had been getting the
readings for many years and I knew that she was more right than she was wrong and if she said something like that um you know I I was like I guess we'll see but I I lived on edge for six weeks because every week I went home she kept she was like uh yep it's still there she'd be like have you gotten any news
yet and I'm like it was terrible six weeks um and then I found out that one of our professors at USC um was killed by one of the students and it was someone I had worked with on one of my dissertation experiments sorry I still get emotional um and so it was a really unusual um thing that happened at USC and it was
very upsetting obviously just in and of itself but I think the fact that my mom had predicted it even though she wouldn't tell me what it was for six weeks in advance it really threw me into a bit of a crisis um cuz I I think before that everything she predicted were like little things like don't lose
money make sure you pay your bills you have a good opportunity coming but this is life or death and and I she had never said anything like this before so it really really rattled me but I was too fragile at the time to think about it and so I and I had started a new job and it was really busy I was moving through
the grief of that experience so I just kind of ignored it and then uh two years later uh I was in a relationship and my mom saw unfortunately like every aspect of our relationship and the coffee um and she but she kept saying it was like it was going to turn out well or it was
was going to be good and then we broke up and so then I was like what went wrong what happened I don't understand life trying to understand the universe and I felt like you know I was already having this existential crisis it was just like a number of things I guess I just wasn't happy and that was like the
last I think of it is the last leg of the stool that was knocked out and I just had a total crisis of like I felt despair for the first time I like lost hope for the future I I thought life was meaningless and and I had never experienced that before so I was it was like a double I was upset about
experiencing it and then also upset going through it and so it was just my first dark night um and what happened was my well I was just in that dark place for a while but then I'm from Los Angeles and my I have a group of girlfriends we grew up together so they were like let's go to a psychic um we
know this woman she's really good but she'll turn you away if she can't read your energy so I thought whatever I'm at the bottom of the barrel let's go I don't believe in this but let's just see so I went and long story short the woman blew me away um she knew things there's Jo way she could have known like she
would get things from my past and she was write a multiple variables and um she didn't know anything about me like you wouldn't even give your a name uh and so she kind of blew me away and that started my interest in this and I started thinking you know I guess at the time I wasn't ready to look at my life
yet or myself so I was more like let's look at these weird readings like what what do they mean about the universe and I started going with my friends we would get readings we would swap them because we're like if they're generic we should be able to swap them um and they should
be true for each of us but they weren't they were specific to each of us and so we did this for a few months for fun and I wasn't reading anything spiritual or reading anything at all I was just kind of living and it was percolating in my mind in the background um and then finally I was listening to um a podcast
Chelsea Handler the comedian had a podcast and she used to be a skeptic she had just written a book and on her podcast she had a psychic medium on named Laurel Ln Jackson and I was surprised because um because Chelsea was such a skeptic and so they start talking about reincarnation and soul lessons and
psychic phenomena and Laur and Jackson talked about how she lets scientists record her brain and of course I'm a neuroscientist so I got really excited about that and so they the you know it was like the podcast episode that changed my life um it really got me curious and they mentioned a book Many
Lives Many Masters on the book which is about past life regression I ordered it not knowing what it was about really um read it and then that was the book that changed my life because it's about a psychiatrist who's skeptical atheist Yale in Columbia trained and he ends up having this career in past life
progression because he's like it works and um there seems to be something here so that launched me on my like hold on I don't let me go order all the books I possibly can't and sit and read everything you know I went to research mode which I'm really good at um and just dove into everything and then my
world started to get really turned upside down from there so and I the whole time I just kept thinking you know I was resisting the whole way uh my my ego was like having a total meltdown um which would continue for years but I kept thinking you know if I just let me just I'm curious about this and if I if
I don't keep I'm always going to wonder you know and also it was the first thing in a long time that like fed my soul that made me feel like when I was reading these books like I had tingled up my spine you know and I hadn't felt that in so long so I thought this is the first thing in a long time that's made
me curious and excited and I just have to follow that so I did and then eventually I like read enough evidence that I thought it would be unscientific to consider alternate models like we don't I don't think and by the end of it I was like I don't think we have it all figured out like at
all I think there's a lot of mysteries and it took me a long time to accept that that's okay that Mysteries are okay and it's okay to say that we don't know everything wow amazing uh Arc there uh if I was going to play the role of the scientific materialist here I would simply say well this is a subjective
anecdotal uh individual experience that you've had uh you know I'm I started my uh career as a teenager as a professional magician and one of the things I got trained in was doing cold readings on people and uh so and and then I would also throw in where's the reproducibility where is the adherence
to the scientific method um if I'm sure you heard that directly from a a lot of your colleagues and and and I'm interested what was your response how did how did you sway them or get them to try to be a bit more open-minded about the fact that we probably need to have models that evolve and that
we don't know the answer to everything right now yeah well I never try to convince anybody because I know that if you're not ready you're not going to be convinced but um so I ended up writing the book on my experience and the only reason I wrote the book is because I found so much evidence so yes the story
I tell is my story and it is anecdotal but I also like to remind people that anecdotes even though science it is this kind of like Trend or automatic response we have now to say something is anecdotal but you know in the medical literature case histories are some of the biggest discoveries and
we publish those because they're important because even if one person has it it's something it's it may be an anomaly and may be one data point but it's not nothing so and it's usually hints and it opens doors to more Discovery so case studies anecdotes are important that's how we we explore
the other thing is I did find a ton of scientific evidence so when I started reading the research I was reading books and stuff but eventually I started reaching out to interview intuitives and Mystics myself and then interview my scientist colleagues to ask those questions finally of like do you guys
believe in a higher power has anything weird ever happened to you like it has to me um and they all had stories everybody had a story uh and they were all way more open-minded than I thought they would be and it was really nice you know it was like a nice bonding experience to see oh my gosh we're
actually human like we're not just scientists um and so I found I reached out to the scientists too that had done the studies so I connected with all these amazing people who've done this research and then I re read the research myself so it turns out that there's over a hundred years of research on Psychic
phenomena and it's been conducted in every continent all these countries hundreds of labs thousands of hundreds of thousands of participants and when I read the study I was blown away because they use some of the protocols that we use in neuroscience and psychology like literally the same ones and I read I
know statistics so I read the stats they were totally legitimate so I couldn't that was actually that was the turning point for me was reading the science and saying okay well now I really can't ignore this because this science is just as good as any of our other science if we ignore this then we have to throw out
a lot of our other science because it's the same standard so and psychic phenomena research gets really scrutinized you know it's it's um combed over with the comb like it's just people tear it apart and other Sciences too but not not as much because we have mechanisms to explain that um and so
their studies are actually better controlled than a lot of our our studies because our studies don't have to be as controlled as theirs so I found that uh the science was solid and I think the only reason people just it's not indexed on Google Scholars so that's something I found someone told me that and I didn't
believe it but it was true I had to type in in quotes exactly the name of an article to be able to find it on Google Scholar um if it was weird like if it was in the um Journal of the society for psychical research or something like that it was hard to find so it's hard to
find people don't know about it and then even if you force them to read it there's no physicalist mechanism that we are aware of uh so that's how some Skeptics will you know brush it off and say oh we we don't have a mechanism to explain this so we it's impossible we'll say it's impossible so uh it can't be
true which is really just a cop out and not how science works at all because there's a lot of things we don't understand or have mechanisms for and we don't just throw them we might put them on the side until we have a mechanism but you don't just ignore it right like a good scientist would say is an outlier
but it exists and how does it break our model and how how do we need to update our model to make this work but you know mainstream science isn't interested in doing that right now so it's and it's a shame so I'm a big fan of uh people who've looked into this uh in in depth many scientists one of the things that I
find really interesting is that you know from Einstein to uh David bone and on and on troden Jer uh you find that many of them especially in their later years became basically Mystics uh which I find really really fascinating I also I don't wonder if you've ever read the book by Robert
anthon Wilson called the new Inquisition irrational rationalism and the cital of science oh I haven't read that one but I'm definitely writing that down I think you might enjoy that and also just recently I was revisiting the work of Michael faini who was a polymath uh and scientist and and he had an idea uh
really two ideas one was that we all possess we humans all possess tacit knowledge uh that we are not necessarily aware of and and he further furthered that with the idea that maybe we should build into the scientific method which I distinguish from scientism right which is because you know any article you say
read that says according to science I really usually insert According to scientism which is it s kind of a form of a religion but he had this idea of uh that we should establish personal coefficients for scientists and and what he meant by that was every scientist goes into their research even using the
very rigid scientific method right with a with a package of beliefs biases intuitions personal experiences that that the individual scientists brings to um his or her research and and he felt that the fact that we weren't adjusting for that in some way was a very limiting uh uh
factor to the scientific method are have you have you established some protocols that you could easily share with even the most skeptical of scientists out there let's say a a colleague who's a neuroscientist um who was like Hey I love you dearly but boy I just don't believe this do have you come up with a
series of protocols that you could share with that uh individual where where they could run them and go oh my God like wow you mean like uh an experiment they could do themselves exactly that's interesting question I don't know that I I mean I do talk to a lot of them oh I mean I've
opened up a lot of my colleagues um you know like they we started off our conversations with them constantly uh you know I would be excited and share something and then they would knock it or whatever come back with an automatic response or some alternative explanation and then eventually a lot of them ended up going
to get readings from my intuitives and then they would call me to discuss so I think um I mean I've noticed the pattern is is that I mean the pattern is you you meet with their resistance their ego wall and I don't even take it personally I know everything is about them so if
anyone's aggressive I know it's not even at me even if it's being directed at me it's not about me it's about them and I understand that their ego is trying to protect them so I try not to take it personally but that's took a lot of self-work to be honest to to release my anger and my defenses because I was like
that so I know where it's coming from and I also know that you could tell me anything like at the beginning of the journey no matter what you said I wouldn't care I wouldn't listen um because it wasn't about that it was about keeping myself safe so I understand that um so when I interact
with people like scientists who are skeptical or resistant I intuitively just try to get a sense of where they are and try to meet them where they are and then based on where they are I might make suggestions um and a lot of it starts before you get to the really weird psychic stuff it'll be like when
you wake up in the morning start you know starting to get them in touch with their subconscious which is an easier way to talk about this stuff because it is tied into your subconscious a lot of this so just saying in the morning you know doing um juliia Cameron's artists way morning pages is a good way to um
see what's going on in your mind right when you wake up and you're in kind of a sleepy state so I start to talk to them about doing things like that or doing um maybe a meditation but a guided one where they ask for guidance and see what they receive so something like the Hemi syn from the Monroe Institute is a good
one to get them in touch because that one works pretty well for people even people who are not usually open if they do it a few times they start to they'll be like no I really got an answer to my question I like see and and it you know the thing with science and this was my problem in the beginning too but now
it's not now I understand it's a problem for people who are coming to this but they'll be like but is it my subconscious or is it a spirit guide and they like need to know the difference and there comes a point where you don't care it doesn't matter anymore but for a scientist that's hard and I try to
that's something tricky that's that's like a tricky thing to navigate with them um and I always just tell them it's whatever you want it to be whatever you is makes you feel better than just say that's what it is um because the truth is we can't take this into a lab and figure it out um at least not right
now I think ultimately maybe but not right now so it's like it doesn't matter so yeah I mean there's little things like that if I I have a huge bibliography that I can give them if they're interested in reading books I'll buy them books send them books um and I read tarot for now so I'll read
tarot for them and uh a lot of times they'll just be blown away by that and I mean I wouldn't say they're convinced but I do think that every little one of these things opens them a little bit more and more and kind of brings them you know back in touch with themselves which I think this is all about so um
one of my interests is in uh looking for oh sorry I just wanted to say one other thing before I forget that I um a thre thread you mentioned the filters that each of us bring to as scientists so I was having dinner with Alison Paradise or mutual friends last night and we were
talking about this we're talking about science is actually just a bunch of stories so anybody who does science like us like as scientists when I run an experiment and I collect data and then people think it's objective but it's not because when I'm looking at the results I have to come up with a story to write
in the paper to convince the journal to publish it and the story I choose even though scientists probably don't think about this and wouldn't admit it but that story that you choose is influenced by who you are and what lab you come from right and so it's like you have a million possibilities stories you could
write in that paper and the one you choose is is biased by who you are in your experiences well that would also feed into the quantum physics bindings that particles exist in a superposition of potentiality uh until they're observed and then they have definable characteristics right so you know from a
from an infinite group of stories you as the individual scientists are uh observing and picking one right that then has definition and everything else but back back to the the uh idea of establishing some sort of bridge I don't know whether you've read CP snow is the two cultures uh which looks at the uh
separation of philosophy and the arts and science uh that happened around the uh time of the Enlightenment and and also sort of Michael Pan's idea that you've Express that you know you you're telling me about your personal coefficient and and i' I find it really interesting if we could come up with a
set of protocols right that would be acceptable to both sides so for example um you're probably aware that Princeton for decades had a a unit that was they didn't talk about very much but it was essentially looking into all of the phenomenon that you are describing here and there are literally truckloads of
data uh from those Decades of the prison grow group um that investigate this and I'm just wondering if if I asked you to come up with a series of protocols that could somehow bridge the gap between scientific materialism I.E the world is dead out there the universe and you know our brains not our
minds uh uh account for all of the phenomenon that we uh understand like how would you go about that what what would you do yeah the first thing that comes to mind is um are you familiar with the spoon bending parties that used to happen I'm familiar with uh the magician who used to go on uh the old
Johnny Carson Show can't recall his name right now uh but that he he did the the spoon bending thing okay so this this so I don't know if I was down in attend one so I don't know but there was this engineer um his name was Jack hul h o c k I think um he used to work for one of the defense uh companies out here in
California but he was interested in all this mind matter this mind matter interaction he's passed away but he has this website which is pretty interesting so what he used to do was he would invite a bunch of people together to have a spoon bending party and he developed a protocol for it you can find
it on his website I tried it myself um it worked so uh but it's it he gets you get Bunch people together um give them a spoon and then he gave the instructions and I don't remember them exactly because I read a few years ago but it was something like you know you focus your energy here and you move it down
your shoulders to your arms to the fork and then you tell the fork to bend or the spoon sorry um you tell it to bend and you know Focus concentration da da and he these parties it works because people get distracted so like uh to the Mind matter the basic protocol is you
focus intently keep you know you have to have a kind of a good mind practice to keep your attention on something Focus concentrate give a command and then let go and the part that everyone has problems with is the letting go so he said the party environment allows that let letting go to happen where people
get distracted they'll be they'll see someone spoon Bend and they'll look over and be like oh my God their spoon is literally bending by itself in the air and then spoon will start to bend so he would have these parties all the time and they even had had it on a TV show once um I wish I could say I've been but
um it was in the 70s or 80s when I I was I was a baby so um he he used to do this and I think that's really interesting and I think Lauren and Jackson actually does that at some of her workshops for people to prove to them because then it's not somebody showing you it's you
doing it and um they even give you like the spoon you know you can Bend try to bend it beforehand and you can't it's impossible it's like really strong and then when you watch it melt in front of your eyes you know it kind of blows your mind and so the um us used to fund for 25 years a whole research program into
psychic phenomena and they used to do this exercise with highlevel government officials to prove to them and to show them what they were working on they started implementing this in high level meetings to be like here's an example of what we're working on and how net this is and because a lot of times um the
higher ups would not be on the same page they'd be like why are we spending millions of dollars on this program like what are they even doing so they would have these private closed door closed blind meetings um to be like this is what we're doing and then they would be blown away so that's one way I could
think of um oh another one actually that's interesting this is I saw this on a it was in a a workshop maybe from Lauren L Jackson maybe from someone else so all of us have these innate abilities and if for these workshops sometimes you can come with a personal item and there
stranger there no one knows you and you swap items with the person and um or just it doesn't even have to be an item but it can be an item and you kind of just you know they tell you close your eyes meditate for a while and jot down anything you see about the item or about the person and when you do something
like that in a group um or you're doing it with just two people facing each other you find that some people will see you know whole scenes um and they'll and that turn out to be related to the person's life so I'm trying to remember an example there was like an example um a woman was she was the the person gave
her um I do not remember the item but the images she saw she was like there's an older man there's a boat there's something about a birthday um you know like they're handing you something a key something it was like a whole scene and it turned oh and a wheelchair or something and it turned out like that
the woman's grandfather had been in a wheelchair came over like to America in a boat and like something that was significant about that was he brought a key with him from his home country or something and so it was like a whole story that was relevant to this person's life that this complete stranger picked
up out of literally thin air from an object so when you do these kinds of interactions with people you start to see uh you walk away with this personal experience of like how how did I know that how was I able to say you know like 10 variables of and build a story and tell it and and it's actually relevant
to this person's life and it's not you know a generic story that's common to everyone's life um so I think that kind of personal experience which I I I started with Allison doing science and spirituality Retreats because I wanted to you know it's like what convinced me was scientific evidence but the personal
experience it's both you know for I think people in this age it has to be both and so it's like one let's summarize some of the science for them so they don't have to do it or go look for it um and then second let's give them some personal experience so they can walk away you know understanding
that this we don't really understand reality the way we think we do well I can certainly endorse the statement that we don't understand reality the way we think that we do I I completely agree by the way the the name of the magician who did the spoon bending on Johnny Carson was Yuri Geller now he was famously
debunked and I wonder just taking that example and uh also again from the Princeton archives uh there was uh a lot of information if my memory serves about uh uh intelligence agencies here and elsewhere doing uh experiments with remote viewing uh where they would uh uh have people
who seem to be quite Adept at it uh uh do that for them and uh apparently according to my last checkin on this some of that was still classified information it is in terms of uh the science but let's let's let's stick with the let's pick with stick with the uh spoon bending parties isn't there a way
to uh create a protocol where you would do I don't know how many you're the scientist you tell me but like where it could be captured on video it could be uh looked at and done in a variety of locations so for example Bell serum of non-locality basically we it was a it was positive as a thought experiment
until they could actually test it using scientific instruments and proved it to be true which is trly interesting but what I'm trying to get at is a lot of people um who are are you you mentioned that you were fully indoctrinated there's a great line that is uh my indoctrinator were very convincing
because they themselves were fully indoctrinated um and and and I just wonder though if one of those bridges would be a creation of protocols that everyone could agree on right so we're going to have 100 spoon bending parties all around the world we'll have controlled uh uh environments where we
simply record what goes on in all hundred of those parties see what I'm getting at is yeah I'm wondering if there isn't some way to make it because when you're arguing from like yeah I was there and I saw people can easily especially M materialists right uh can can just say well sure yeah that
happened once you have no proof of it is there a way is there a way for for example we're working on developing uh testing if people can well if people have intuition and if they do have intuition can they improve that intuition we're working on that with uh Dr Rupert sheldrake who I admire greatly
because boy did they try to crucify him uh but he continues to publish even when he gets null hypothesis right he publishes that too and he follows a very disciplined scientific method approach and and that's what I'm trying to get at here do you think that yeah there could be a series of protocols that could be
more acceptable uh because they were done under um you know uniform conditions so I think we could try but there's I'm Jing notes cuz there's a few a few things you you hit on that I want to comment on so the first is this phenomena in my opinion um does not always lend well to the SC to being
measured by the scientific method but it may just be because we don't understand it that well but it may also be because it's not predictable and repeatable when you need it to be so Jeffrey kle who's a professor um actually the chair of religious thought and Phil opy at Rice University he writes about this a lot
that sometimes these abilities are Unleashed or enhanced when you experience trauma and sometimes when the craziest stories you hear are like you know someone wakes up at 3:00 a. and they see their you know child or like the ghost of their child in their bedroom um only to find out the next day
their child died at 3:00 a.m. and so it's like these really traumatic emotional events sometimes that cause these experiences to occur and you cannot replicate trauma ethically in a laboratory so that's one thing um I mean the fact that the remote viewing has been you know we've been able to study
it and replicate it and use have great statistics on it is is fantastic but all of the experiences may not be um may not be may not be able to measure them in that way but the other thing is whenever you have a human in an experiment and then when you have a lot of humans in an
experiment there are so many unknown variables about the dynamics of the interactions with each other that yes I think it would be great to do what you're saying um especially across space but and we and you could try it and the thing is if it's a large enough effect size you'll see you'll see it but if
it's a small effect size and it's influenced by different variables like people's personalities or their group dynamics it might be washed out and I WR I wrote about this in my book because that's this the tough thing about a human centered phenomena like this but the interesting thing is there's been
some research from uh Dr William tiller who used to work at Stanford he was a material scientist but he was super into this stuff so in his later years he like started doing all these experiments um and he had a whole model for it a physicalist I think is model um but yeah using intention so focused intention and
then measuring like uh the pH of water change in and then he would measure the whole environment um you know the temperature of the room um and ions The Institute for notic Sciences still does experiments like this because there you know the how much electromagnetic R radiation is in the room matters like
the temperature um if people have access to the room and can can come and go like all of those things matter so he started setting up these controlled experiments showing that if you do a focused intention and you can he even created a device that could record the intention
and you could put it in a room and they would measure like um the pH of water uh in the room versus one you know a separate room with no intention machine and they saw that it worked that it would ra increase the pH of water in the room with the intention machine and the other one didn't and they did it across
countries or across Labs also and found the same thing so there there's been some of that done in the research but not enough to convince anyone because this research is not funded and like um the protocols you know can probably be improved but the institute for noetic science is working on some of that and I
I agree though we do need more of that to convince people um especially more recent research and the the problem is I often tell people like you're working you know for scientists to to a lot of scientists want to study this they're interested in it but there's no money in it they're going to risk their
reputation their stigma they have to Grapple with their ego all the people in their social life um and then there's no funding so it's like you have multiple barriers to getting people to do this work which is extremely unfortunate because I think it's the most interesting yeah and I I I try to take
as pragmatic a view about uh these phenomenon as possible and so I'm I'm very interested in all of it but I'm also at the same time uh sort of naturally skeptical um and not not that I would like go out of my way to try to disprove it but I definitely think having a series of uh protocols that different scientists
right different uh people investigating the phenomenon could always use the same protocols right and then we could get some kind of meta analysis of okay do we have evidence for this or do we not do we have limited evidence Etc and and that's an area that I'm I I find really
interesting and compelling and look the the history of science is is littered with examples of people who uh well David B again right his implicate and explicate order uh I idea was actively suppressed by his mentor o Oppenheimer not because of the science involved but because of politics essentially there's
a great film on Bal uh in which letters that ophr had sent to people said basically if we cannot disprove David uh scientifically we must ignore him and so like that goes on all the time and and we we tend to the Layman at least like me tends to think of you know science and You Know It uh is absolutely uh uh
does not have any of these human biases or or whatnot whereas it's filled with them and people trying to actively suppress a theory by the way bomb's Theory went on to be proven correct yeah yeah um and again referencing Dr sheld uh many of his ideas they I found a BBC thing before recording his uh podcast
where the the um editor of nature the most vinent British scientific journal uh cmatic uh is on tape basically saying uh no this man's a heretic he should burn like literally my God he's on video saying that and then of course many of sheldrake's um hypotheses proved to be uh correct so I'm yeah I'm I'm always
very interested when I'm talking to people trained in The Sciences which I'm not I'm just have a Layman interest in them uh but like trying to find the protocols I think is is uh something that I I would certainly support that is here at oan ventures we give grants to people fellowships and uh like someone
trying to establish a series of uh protocols that anyone could use um to investigate these phenomena seems pretty interesting to me I wonder yeah oh no I was just gonna say um as a scientist so I was thinking about some of the blocks I had U when I was coming into this based on what you're saying and it was
that so it's funny you come in from the materialist perspective and you're like reality must fit in my materialist box like um this this phenomenon that is under question must these are you know it must be repeatable I must be able to measure it I must be able to um you know
describe it I have a mechanism for it and you know there there has to be an explanation in the physical Universe you put all these boundaries around it um and like this like you have to write a protocol that everyone can use um which is of course where we have to start because that's where we are but after
you start digging into this so especially from a neuroscience perspective you know in Neuroscience the biggest question the biggest mystery is consciousness and the the the thing that really open the door besides the scientific research for me like that opened my mind to cuz even when I read
the scientific research I kept coming up against a wall of but how but how but what's the mechanism what's the mechanism what's what is the method um and then it wasn't until I hit philosophy which um you mentioned pseudo science at the beginning so I actually wrote an article um a few months ago
because this controversy came up in Neuroscience um about Consciousness but I was arguing at pseudoscience to some EX is like the artificial boundary between philosophy and science because now in mainstream science they're like anything that's outside of materialism like anything it's pan psychist or anything
that falls into philosophy we ignore it and it's not science it's pseudo science um and that's a false dichotomy I mean that's new they've just decided that that's the case in the last few decades but that's not how science was before that you know Natural Sciences were philosophy and science um and so from a
neuroscience perspective you're like Consciousness um must be produced from the brain that's the materialist perspective and of course that's definitely the perspective I had coming into this and that's where I was like how could your brain like know someone else's thoughts or how could I know the
future um but then you hit philosophy and you're like oh wait no it's not settled scientific materialism is not the definitive answer it's just one that we have settled on for now because it's been the most useful but that it's possible that Consciousness is an energy that it's one of the foundational
principles of the Universe um and that maybe it you know bubbles down into world pools that turn into people and then goes back into the pool when we die you know there's all these other explanations that once you hit philosophy you're like oh the box of materialism is just blown open and you're like I don't have to be
bothered with these constraints this is ridiculous like why would I sit in this box I don't have to sit here there's so many other explanations um and so then when you go back to talk to a scientific materialist sometimes it's frustrating because they'll you know keep insisting on XY and z and
you're just like oh God please read the philosophy book like we don't have to do this but um yeah so I I but I agree that we also we just aren't there yet I mean that is something else that I'm working on is pushing Consciousness education into Neuroscience because they never teach you this they never say hey number
one day one of Neuroscience the assumption in our field is that we live in a physicalist universe but that has not been proven um and that is an assumption we make that's something they never tell you and they shed that's the classic example of the planted axium right uh Lewis Carroll who was trained
as a logician actually wrote a very short piece but very compelling called what the tortoise said to Achilles in which he basically proves that when you take a logical system that is based on axioms right that if you continue to say you know let's keep going down how do you know a
is true well because B is true okay well B is true how do you know B is true well because C is true and he he goes through this in the essay and and what he result what he ends up with is the assertion that at the bottom of all of these axiomatic uh logical uh constraints there is the the uh primary axum the the
base Axiom if you will that basically he maintains a human simply asserted this is true in other words with without any any proof but I'd like to move on to Consciousness because that is some that's an area that I am absolutely fascinated by and the idea that for example Tesla the scientist he he
believed that um our our brains were actually receivers not not the originator of uh the ideas but rather a receiver that collected or that connected with to what you would have called the collective unconscious right and and obviously the physics and metaphysics did get separated you're
right um but so I'm I'm not a traditionally religious person at all and yet as I investigated this idea of of Consciousness I I was struck by the ancient religious or spiritual traditions and and how they might actually all be saying the same thing so for example um if you look at uh Brahman
and Atman right so Brahman was infinite Consciousness who created Atman and then did a what a trick on him and cut his memory that he was in fact Brahman and then he created infinite atmans and uh to see if he could learn anything new but then you start going and you go w Wait a minute that that tradition is
very similar to Daoism which essentially says the unnamed Dao is the mother of all things you could definitely read that as Consciousness and then the one that kind of surprised me the most was going into Christian religion and the assertion of I am in the Bible both New and Old Testament in the Old Testament
Moses goes up and talks the burning bush right he goes hey man who are you and and the and the voice answers I am that I am and then I start looking at all of the I am statements in the Bible you know I am the light of the world I am the way of truth I am the Alpha and the
Omega these are all new testament typees things but if you start thinking about it as in not I am but I am Consciousness right you you can you can reconcile all of these things things to a degree that I would have thought were very very different and yet they're all kind of saying the same thing you know I am the
door I am the way is another quote from Jesus that that is what th ism is the way or the path and and I I wonder though like doesn't this just always land back in metaphysics I guess the the exception that I would like to discuss with you next is quantum physics right so uh David Deutsch in his book the
fabric of reality uh says there is a Unity of knowledge and that this Unity of knowledge uh informs all explanations for the world and that you know it's all interconnected right and and then again in in Quantum they actually have proven through through the scientific method that things are non-local that there is
an observer effect that there are particles existing in multiple States simultaneously until observed and then they take on defined characteristic quantum entanglement and information transfer right have you ever looked at have you ever looked at trying to borrow from some of these uh these hypotheses
that have been tested and proven out in quantum physics and bringing them over into uh neuro uh uh biology and other disciplines yeah there's for sure so I think um also when I was encountering this stuff I think before so Dean bradden's work really um when I read some of his books it started
to make a lot more sense everything started to click into place and because they're all related so you're like you start with psychic phenomena and you're like how could that possibly happen in a physicalist universe then you encounter the con you know philosophy that there's
other possible ways the universe could exist it could be physical and not physical you know Consciousness could be the foundation um and you think okay but you know that's philosophy like we can't test it but then you encounter quantum physics and you're like oh wait some of these ideas like you said that um sort
of like a perennial philosophy a thread of truth that's woven through many of the religions um and cultures of the world uh comes down to uh you know being like you said being proven in modern Labs with quantum physics so a lot of these ideas that you um they encounter in the spiritual and mystical and
religious texts suddenly in the 1900s starts being proven in a lab um and then you know but then we have people we just have impr proven it on the human level I mean although I beg to differ about that but if I'm just being scientific we haven't proven that on the human level um you know is it possible so there are
some mainstream scientists like um steuart hammer off and Roger Penrose he's Roger Penrose is a physicist and steuart Hammer off is a neuroscientist they have a a theory for Quantum Mind so proposing that there are parts of our brain um because the the general assumption is that Quantum effects uh
biological systems are too warm for Quantum effects because they usually require very cold environments um so that's been for a long time the argument that nothing quantum happens in biological systems but now that's being disproven in in multiple ways um I mentioned some of them in my book but
there's um but Hammer off and penos have proposed the theory saying no there's like these particle um these proteins in our brain called microtubules they have some sort of quantum um you know properties so they're able to interact with Quantum space and maybe that's how we're able to some of these psychic
phenomena stuff that we've been talking about maybe that's how we're able to access a a broader field maybe it is that the brain is some sort of some sort of filter um that filters in Consciousness like from a wider Consciousness and when you start to think of it from that perspective too it
it these phenomena don't seem impossible anymore as soon as you widen in your perspective and you think oh like no there's just like a there's a whole pool of information up here A whole field that contains everything and you can like tap into it tap out of it oh that makes sense now um and that's what yeah
quantum physics is showing you said things aren't non local that I mean there's even some um showing time right doesn't necessarily flow forward in One Direction like we thought that it does a lot of questions about time coming up oh as Donald Hoffman another neuroscientist
loves to say SpaceTime is doomed um so with the new physics coming out SpaceTime is doomed so a lot of these things that we you know in mainstream science or physicalism take for granted um we keep saying they're established they're really not um and it is a very odd thing to watch in science U because if you flip over to
a quantum physics journal it's like a different world versus when you flip over to like mainstream biology uh because they're living in two separate worlds with there is starting to be a crossover um you know like I said like the hammer off and penr Penrose is a good example uh but they're just one
there's there's a lot of research being done also with light so like there was this um really interesting proposal like a theory that was put forth that Consciousness is filtered in that there's a field um maybe an electromagnetic field or some other kind of field of Consciousness and that it
has different you know frequencies or um States and that when we put our brains in certain States It lines up with that and you can download um and the the person who wrote the paper his name is Kepler waim waim Kepler he wrote A Few papers on this to explain Consciousness and memory in humans and he kind of
describes it as like a read write system the brain's like a read right like read right put it back to the so it's a continuous back and flow between the brain and the field um and he's and he mentions being able to measure it possibly with biophotons so biophotons are also this like whole new field we
just there was just a discovery that neurons communicate with biophotons which we did not know we thought it was only with um Electro it's electrochemical it's both um but now it turns out it might be light so as well which is new and that there's I think some research with cardiac um also using light to heel
cells skin of course that's why you see those red light masks that all the women are wearing to regenerate so there's a lot that's coming up um and light of course is is a photon it's it and that's what's used a lot in a lot of quantum experiments so there it looks like there
there could be links it's just starting to happen I think the bridging of those fields is just starting to happen yeah penro is of course very famous for Penrose tiling which is a interesting phenomenon in and of itself and I I as I listened though I'm also reminded I I don't have it in front of me but uh
reading about the Zed point field uh in quantum physics where essentially if you if you uh take a a group of particles and and reduce the temperature to absolute zero you would think that there could be no motion but there is in fact motion and so that's what the field is from the theory the zero point field
yeah yeah yeah and uh the uh that that also informs Dr sheldrake's work of the morphogenic field in which he he basically posits that um that humans and all animals uh actually have uh a the this idea of a cloud much like we have the cloud uh that we send all of our uh electronic data to yeah uh he posits
that uh that these clouds exists um naturally in the universe and that we go back and forth my my uh interest is uh continually uh ignited when I read about this stuff but I'm I I always kind of come back to the idea gosh wouldn't it be cool if we could like uh come up with
protocols methodologies Etc that would Bridge these disperate ideas and claims because uh I I think that the challenge the way I see it at least the the challenge is that Orthodoxy has such a just iron grip on the way for example science gets funded the way uh a variety of these things happen that you you just
wonder could you see or could you contemplate a breakthrough that would that would even have the the uh as Wilson calls them the irrational rationalists in the Citadel of science go holy we better look into this yes so what the um what I was thinking of is there are I'm interested in technology so I mean I my some my
background is working with digital health so I'm interested in how technology can help us get into these Transcendent States in a more reliable way um and I'm interested in psychedelics too so I brought a whole sub on psychedelics publishing by the science just because it's like emerging
and related um but I think Tech and I think psychedelic is not going to be for everyone right it's they're like you never know what you're going to get so not everyone's willing to take that but I think Transcendent technology is really interesting and I think is one of the most likely ways that you'd be able
to as you're suggesting um reliably get into these states so there is a um there's all kinds of different technology but so one way to reliably put you in a really good uh deep meditative state is you wear these like glasses and it's like um light and sound entrainment so it puts you quickly into
um a deep meditative State and if you I think in those those kinds of conditions instead of leaving it up to the person to be like hey get into a like go do meditation go ask us something come back tell us what you saw um I think that kind of Technology the more that we can
fine-tune it for people too because I do think that everyone has different like uh Baseline brain States right that's what makes us who we are those are our personalities those are our thought you know patterns everything's different for different people so it will vary so I think that would be really interesting
to start doing that and studying that and like what do you need to put you into a deep meditative state or like the best meditative state to receive and maybe you know something like remote viewing that's very because remote viewing was I think they would give and you could do way better things now but
they the CIA would give them coordinates just literally like three numbers like they're just coordinates and they would have to say what they see and they would compare it and obviously we could come up with better um better items instead of like a broad location but it's some sort of better experiment to to do that
but then you'd be more like you'd probably be more likely to get better results if you can get people into that into that state instead of relying on natural Talent or their natural abilities which is highly variable um but if you could start to use technology and start to find tune it to make it
personalized that would be super interesting yeah we are actually investors in a company called prophetic which is uh developing they hope a technology that would put the mind in a state where lucid dreaming would become far more um uh common across as you as you put it people with different uh with
different uh states of mind I guess we put it and and it would allow it would allow just everyone uh using this device that they're developing uh to experience lucid dreaming not only experience it but potentially control it we find it very interesting one of the things that I find interesting is that as an
offshoot of their research they are finding all sorts of uh neurological implications for medical and other uses for this particular technology so I I definitely agree that uh pushing edge of tech couldn't lead to findings that would might be the Eureka moment as it were or even the most gued in the wool
materialist but you also bring up psychedelics another area that I'm deeply interested in because um I like everyone raised I'm 63 I was born in 1960 and uh in 1971 Nixon uh was in a lot of political uh uh trouble and so he decided he would uh distract people by launching a war on drugs and the drugs
that he really was launching the war on were psychedelics and like anyone else I I bought the propaganda I never tried a psychedelic I just I thought that they would fry your brain and everything until I read Michael pollen's book how to change your mind looking at psychedelics and I was completely
unaware that there was volumes you know warehouses full of research on psychedelics uh compounds and their efficacy in treating things from post-traumatic stress to addiction to depression to all of those things and and so that really opened my mind to the idea that here was scientific research
that was meticulously conducted by the way that was completely suppressed and and essentially burned and I commend Michael poen for um bringing uh this to at least to my attention and then I find that you know there are groups like Maps which is uh an organization which uh sponsors scientific investigation into
psychedelics and of course is sponsoring the not sponsoring but is supporting the John's Hopkins uh look at how psychedelic compounds can assist our veterans in the United States yes with post-traumatic stress syndrome and and and I I just I I'm fascinated by the idea that there are these huge bodies of
research that uh existed and for whatever reason we suppressed um and now we're kind of rediscovering them uh are are there others that I'm unaware of that that you could share with me okay well first of all I love psychedelics you can't tell for so I um but I I can use psychedelics
actually to tie everything that we talked about together so psychedelics um I was never interested in them either I was a type like control freak I'm like no there's no way I would touch that hallucinogenics and similar to you I never I wasn't familiar with the new research I didn't know they were
beneficial so but while I was interviewing people for the psychic phenomena stuff before I this is very very early on so before I hit any of the philosophy or Consciousness I was I was still a baby in this field um I interviewed some of the like I said the researchers who had worked for the
government program and they asked me they're like have you looked into psychedelics yet and I was like why would I look into psychedelics and they're like some really weird stuff happens on psychedelics like Paranormal stuff and I was like what so they're like just go read so I I went off and
started reading and they were right first like you I dug into to the modern day research and as a neuroscientist and someone who's interested in mental health treatments I was already blown away just by that I was like how on Earth could LSD help somebody get better from depression or anxiety but it did it does and it did
and there was a lot of research on this from the 1950s to the 70s before they were banned um but then I dug in deeper into the you know Aldos Huxley um the oh my gosh why are their names eluding me right now whatever that whole group there's like a whole group of them um uh what's his name Gorman Gordon wson
um so these these people who kind of brought con uh psychedelics to the Forefront of American Consciousness in the starting in the 50s and I it's kind of not talked about and I've noticed this because I've been in the Psychedelic scene for the last few years but it it is talked about in in certain
rooms but the transpersonal Paranormal aspect is kind of hush hushed cuz you know they're trying to make it a medical treatment they're like a yeah don't bring that and everybody will you know run out of the room screaming but at some point they can't ignore it because a lot of times the mystical experience
or the entity encounter is what um you know based on the data causes the highest amount of healing and so they can't ignore it for for forever and it's already starting to pop up in the literature but it's really fascinating so on psychedelics it you get people's you know saying actually similar to what you were
saying like we're all one it's all love we are an expression of Consciousness we're here to learn um and you know on these substances they can come back feeling like I I know the meaning of life I uh I met the Divine I felt the sacredness um that reality was more real than this reality and they they all say
very similar things um and a lot of weird things can happen they can have visions that again turn out to be true like they see you know a a let's say a spirit appear to them and it turns out that it's somebody that they know who passed away um that they didn't know was going to pass away you know they get messages
from people who've crossed over that turn out to be true um back in the 50s when the psychiatrists were using LSD they had actually wrote this whole protocol that I love uh it's very interesting um they talk about how common it is to feel like you are actually feeling the other person's
emotions or thoughts and they they call it I mean telepathy they're like basically it's enhanced on psychedelics and this is all to the point where I think it was um Andrea puger rich and like somebody else they they actually tried to do and this is anecdotal but they're like let's give you a psychic
phenomena test I forgot who took it and then we'll have well then we'll put you on CY and then we'll have you do it again that's an experiment I want to see today I want somebody to do that but they did that with only one subject and it was like not official but it was to
the point where they were like yeah this stuff is weird and puts you in a state where you you can get information so they're like let's test to see if it enhances psychic abilities which many people believe that it does um and so like that's something that that we could that we could test for sure but and now
there's being you know a lot of um DMT Quest is another organization that's focused on using the molecule of DMT um which is a psychedelic but which is also just a naturally occurring molecule in our body um kind of using that as a Lynch pin between materialism and these other worlds because it does seem like if you
DMT is a particularly potent psychedelic where if you inhale it it's it only lasts 15 to 30 minutes but you're somewhere else like you are in another dimension you're like with aliens elves fairies you're getting information you feel you know it's like geometric shapes fractals it's a whole it's a whole
another world um but what's interesting is people come back saying that world was the real world and this this is a dream um and so we can use DMT and you know actually well there's not that much known about DMT but my friends at the there's a Institute here in Santa Monica Institute for advanced Consciousness
studies they're raising money for a study to they do ultrasound um so you could do ultrasound to activate the pineal um and they they said it gives you like a DMT like experience um but they're trying to raise money to do a full-on study for that because there really hasn't been a lot of research on
DMT but people cite it as the link between spiritual uh dimensions and the physical Dimension but we should definitely look into that a little bit more I think yeah I that's the area where I'm actually most interested if we could organize catalog and demonstrate some empirical evidence
from these disperate studies and from the uh different experiences that like you've just described the DMT experience uh with I've read lots of interviews with people and they do in fact have very similar stories uh about that particular experience and then you look over and you know there's a
legitimate School of thinking in quantum physics that uh there are infinite universes the Multiverse Etc and then of course different levels of Dimensions right that we need to explore it's maybe just the Quant and me that would love uh because I'm I'm very open I'm very open
to these ideas and that's why I love having people like you on the podcast and and exploring them but there is that that qu part of me that is like okay all great but show me some empirical evidence that crosses a variety of uh these studies that that can lead us to evolving right the scientific method
because I completely agree and this is just speculation on my part because I don't have any uh you know not trained in science Etc but I would definitely be interested in funding those kinds of things where where you're trying to get empirical evidence that these things warrant further investigation right yeah
so so so what what's next for you Moda what what are you working on right now and and what are you excited about um currently in your endeavors well I wrote the book and I had a substack for a while publishing about psychedelics which was just like you said like when I found out how beneficial they were I
thought as a public service I'm just going to start writing summaries of the research in really easy to understand ways so people can understand why this is so significant and since I was coming from Neuroscience I was like I feel like I can explain why this is really important because there's very few other
mental health modalities that we're seeing um comparable effects with so I started doing that and then early this year I transitioned to um a new substack where I'm writing more about my personal experience um well first of all I'm summarizing more of the science of these anomalous things so like I want to do a
more comprehensive Deep dive and then summarize it and easy to understand ways so people can have access to it and understand the implications of what this means because I think sometimes that's lost on people um and then also talking about my experience so flipping from a scientific materialist to being
open-minded was hell was very hard I'm still working through it um it was the worst thing that has ever happened to me and so I writing about that now about how difficult it was there's some of that in my book but is actually sadly there there was much more to come after the book published so
I'm starting to write about all the challenges that I have encountered that were unexpected um and how I've had to work through them just because I really do believe that as the Psychedelic Renaissance takes off and as more people are doing contemplative practices more people are going to flip worldviews as I
call it and it is not easy it is not easy and they're going to need a lot of support my gosh I'm getting emotional again sorry but um it's hard and so I'm starting to write about that um and I'm also interested in as we were talking about looking into the research I'm really interested in healing like light
and sound and frequency healing because body is energy I mean every protein has a vibrates at some level um and I I just don't like I'm just constantly curious about is there any evidence for this has anyone even looked at this what are the gaps in the literature what do we need
to fund and study to get some of this going because uh material ass science has been very focused on chemicals hence the pharmaceutical industry but we don't have to be the body is electromagnetic and chemical so there's a lot of other things we can look into so I'm I'm interested in looking into that there's
you know a lot of people claim sound and light can heal you but I'm interested to know if that's true yeah that's absolutely fascinating and of course that goes all the way back to Pythagoras who believed that music could have healing properties um and so what I find fascinating about this this entire
discussion is that if you jump down the rabbit hole you'll see that we've been discussing these ideas again I mentioned Pythagoras heraclitis a presocratic uh Greek philosopher who essentially posited that the entire world was a and uh was was one thing and my interest of course is uh
like I again back to my kind of Quant like attitude I would love to provide financing to uh to studies that actually sort of take all of this and all these different points of view into account and then try to uh to look with an open mind uh at um the idea that of course we're we're not there with a in quotes
final Theory uh again uh heraclitis uh basically uh everything is in a state of becoming right the world is not stasis stasis is death movement is life and uh the the more that we can reconcile that with traditional science by the way which I'm a big fan of like traditional science has given us amazing
amazing things yeah and so I'm I'm not at all trying to oppose it I'm much more interested in enhancing it and I think that there are Pathways uh you know like uh your your notion of non-invasive therapies light therapy the red the red light therapy you referen well known um
you know uh I've listened to people talk about building harmonic wave re sequences where they are able to resequence DNA and again I I I I love the uh idea that we are really kind of just at the beginning right of understanding all of this and I think that just reminding everyone that we need to have uh as far
as the epistemology of it we need to be very very humble um and think that we really don't know everything absolutely and I would I would also say one thing that I I I don't want to make this point when I was when I was a hardcore material scientific materialist you know I lacked a lot of compassion because science kind
of honestly there's no Humanity in science I I I feel no qualms about saying this like becoming a scientist I think honestly strips away parts of your Humanity um and I've had to like reclaim those and I think which is and I with you though I love science I'm just saying like it's a cost for the
profession it doesn't have to be it just is right now um and I feel like what we lose um when we approach things from a skeptical um aggressive stance which I used to do by the way this is I'm basically talking about old me my old self is you lack that human component of this person who's sitting opposite me
has had an experience that um clearly has affected them deeply that they believe and who am I to tell them that they have not who am I to tell them that their experience is not valid because when it comes back to Consciousness all we really know is our own experiences um so for that person it's
true and I I always mention this to scientists like the one thing you could do you don't even have to be open to anything the one thing you could do is just be a little more open to listening to someone talk about their experience and being open to their experience you don't even have to believe it you just
have to be open to it yeah I I guess I subscribe to David Deutsch's idea that we humans putting the human being back in into the scientific process we humans at least to the best of our knowledge are currently the only Universal uh explainers and Constructors and that part of our
mission really needs to be to always be seeking better explanations and if you if you just look at it that way which I think is so brilliant uh a book that I always recommend my friends tease me about this all the time because um uh I I tell everyone they really need to read all of
David Deutsch's books uh but uh he in his books he he constructs a wonderful scaffolding for building these ideas and and understandings um into into the process um and you know Bravo for bringing Humanity back I'm I'm I'm all in favor of I I I often say that we need both Sparta and Athens right and sometimes we
we create these false dichotomies that you know very deterministic worldview and my point is we live in a probabilistic universe not a deterministic one and uh it we it is at our Peril when we try to reduce it down to uh through definitions as you mentioned earlier to kind of a Logic box that as long as you're subscribing to
all of those axams in that logic box you're not going to you're really kind of blinding yourself uh maybe out intentionally but blinding yourself nonetheless uh well this has been absolutely fascinating um I I think you might know that at the end of uh this our podcast infinite Loops uh we we wave
a magic W and we're going to make you the Empress of the world you you can't kill anyone you can't uh put them in re-education camps but we can give you a magic microphone magical microphone in which you can say two things and the effect it will have is that the next day or whenever the next day is for the
eight billion plus people living on the planet happens to be they're going to wake up and think I've just had two of the greatest ideas and unlike all the those other times that I woke up with these great ideas I'm actually going to act on both of these ideas what two things are you going to incept in the
world's population that you think might make it a better place I think this is just on my mind I think personally it's been on my mind this week um um it's this it's treat yourself the way that you would treat um one of your best friends like talk to yourself the way that you would talk to you know or
treat your actions like if you you had a friend who messed up what would you say to them like that's what you should say to yourself like every day I think that a lot of us don't realize how harsh and critical we are of ourselves um and when you're that way on yourself you're that
way with others too so I think that would solve a lot of problems so that's the first thing um and honestly this is so lame but it's honest but this has been my personal mantra for like even before I was a scientist was be kind because I just honestly feel like everyone is just
a little bit kinder to people um because every time that you're kind to somebody it opens your heart a little bit as well as theirs and I don't know I just think our world needs a a a lot more of that so kind of simple I love both of them the first is the Golden Rule do on to others as you would have them do on to
you and then be kind uh and it's so funny because in the United States at least in English at least I think that people conflate kindness with being nice and I think that they're two very separate things oh being being kind it costs you nothing and it can it can do such wonderful things in the world so I completely
subscribe to both of those inceptions Mona thank you so much for taking the time on a Saturday uh I really appreciate you adjusting your schedule to help me uh this is fascinating best dating stuff and I wish you the absolute best uh in your adventures going forward awesome thank you it's so nice to meet you for