Dean Radin

The conversation opens with a request for background, and the answer is framed as "a 45-year arc in about three minutes." The account starts with music: violin until about halfway through college. The speaker then decided against a career that depends on the body, saying that a musician has to be an athlete and needs a lot of stamina, which they did not have.

The lack of stamina is put down to a condition involving missing enzymes and too much unconjugated bilirubin (transcribed as "Billy Rubin"). The speaker presents it as a trade-off. The downside is slow recovery from exercise and a lot of fatigue. The upside, as they put it, is that "unconjugated Billy Rubin is an antioxidant." They link this to a cardiovascular system "like a 20-year-old" and to a cardiac calcium scan, described as running from zero up to 100, "where you're basically about to die." They also mention longevity as another claimed advantage of the mutation. These are personal claims made in conversation. No scan scores or other data are given, and walking daily and doing a few push-ups come up only as what the speaker personally does.

A side discussion covers violin versus fiddle. The answer is that violin is the classical track toward concert performance, and fiddle differs in the music, style and intonation. After giving up classical violin as a career, the speaker switched to bluegrass fiddle and banjo and played 25 years in total, the last five in bluegrass. Bluegrass, they say, meant learning "not to play that well," because being slightly off tune sounds more authentic. They recall losing "miserably" at the Illinois State Fiddler contest in graduate school, at about 25, to a teenage Alison Krauss (transcribed as "Allison Krause"). The discussion then turns to "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" as the song that brought the fiddle into popular culture. It is judged "good fiddling" and "a little bit like fiddle on steroids."

Midway through college, the speaker moved into electrical engineering because they liked taking things apart. They went on to a master's in the field, then decided against being an electrical engineer and took a PhD in experimental psychology. They describe the career as "a little bit like a game show": each time there was a choice between doing one thing indefinitely and "door number two," they "almost always chose door number two" once they felt they understood the current field.

As a college senior, the speaker learned about the Institute of Noetic Sciences. It was founded by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, described as the sixth man on the moon. On the way back to Earth, Mitchell had a mystical experience and "felt one with the universe, literally." The speaker links this to what space travelers now call the overview effect. They say Mitchell was one of the first to talk about it openly, "even though all of the other astronauts had it," and that it shows up in different ways but transforms people. Mitchell's response was to found an institute to explore "inner space." Its motto made a lasting impression:

exploring the frontiers of consciousness

Since this was the only place doing such work, the speaker says they always kept it in mind as where they wanted to end up. Asked about the word, they define noetic as a kind of intuition that comes with certainty. Intuition is "knowing something without knowing how you know it," and noetic knowing adds certainty that the intuition is right. They add that "more often than not, the certainty is correct," and connect this to what people call "downloads" in meditation. The claim about accuracy is stated without supporting figures here.

The discussion widens to how this subject has been treated. One side argues that until roughly the last couple of decades, rational people openly dismissed it, possibly from an ego-driven wish to define the world more clearly, and that the dismissal happens "under the narrative of science." The same voice then adds "but there is data that's what's weird," and argues that it is worth risking looking "a little preposterous" to test whether the world is built the way we have been told.

The everyday examples given are thinking of someone just before they call, having a bad feeling about something that then goes wrong, and sensing that someone is angry before they say anything. The argument grants that coincidence and pattern recognition from past experience explain part of this ("that's part of it too"), but holds that "there's also something else." It also argues that human senses are limited, so there may be influences "we don't have the tools to measure."

The reply pushes back on that last point: "But we do have the tools to measure." The speaker says conventional science spokespeople attribute such experiences to coincidence and "frailty of memory." Against that, they point to a branch of science that has studied these phenomena since the late 1800s, and argue that science is "really, really good" at testing whether even strange subjective experiences are coincidence or something real.

Science fiction is offered as part of the motivation and as cultural evidence. Examples include the Force and the spice in Frank Herbert's Dune, which is described as needed for navigation "because that's the only way you can navigate when you're jumping through wormholes." The argument is that a theme stays "perennially popular" only because "something is resonating." This is reasoning from popularity, not experimental evidence, and it is presented as what sparked the question "I wonder if that's real," along with childhood fairy tales.

The main philosophical claim follows. Scientists and engineers are trained under materialism, or physicalism, but are not told it is a set of assumptions. The philosophy of science, which examines those assumptions, is rarely taught, and studying it shows "there's lots of different ways of understanding reality." Materialism is credited with explaining the physical world and producing technology, but the speaker says it "doesn't explain subjective experience at all," which they call an "existing number one mystery in science today." This is the stated reason for writing their book:

So the magic here is not stage magic. It's the real magic, which we don't have a name for yet.

Asked what nineteenth-century researchers were trying to isolate, the speaker lists apparitions, apparent telepathic connections and precognition, the same experiences people report today. What was new was experimental method under controlled conditions. They stress that control means designing out coincidence and information leakage, "so the only thing left over is if that telepathic thing was real." After about 150 years of this, they conclude: "we have very, very strong evidence that telepathy does exist."

They are candid about early weaknesses. Work on "thought transference" used methods that "would not pass muster today." For example, two children would claim telepathy between them, and researchers "many times" found the children were signaling. Modern protocols, as described, strictly isolate participants, keep the target unknown to both people, and depend on "lots and lots of replications with lots of people."

According to the speaker, skeptics who know the literature now respond in one of two ways. One is that they cannot identify a plausible flaw, after a lot of time has gone into looking. The other, more recent, is a refusal to engage, which the speaker calls no longer a scientific argument:

we're not to be going to look at the evidence because we know it's impossible

This description of the skeptics comes from one side of the debate. No skeptic is named or quoted directly, and no specific studies or effect sizes are cited in this part of the conversation.

The conversation then turns to intelligence agencies' long investment in remote viewing. The question raised is why they would spend that much time and money on something with no evidence and no positive results. The same voice says people involved, including Hal Puthoff (transcribed as "Hal put off"), have described "actionable data" from remote viewing, but admits never having tried it personally.

A counterexample comes up: a television test with a self-described remote viewer whose results were "off." That failure is put down partly to the conditions, "under duress with cameras." The response agrees that "that's not ideal at all" and calls state of mind "a major factor." The argument is that anxiety, fear and distractions such as a jackhammer or a barking dog can disrupt the state needed, and that brain states can be measured and are not simply "on or off." Reports of describing submarines under construction in the Soviet Union are cited as the kind of result that should not be dismissed, ending with the claim that "the only way anybody figures out there's something there is if you study it." An advertisement break follows.

Back on the career account: after the doctorate, the speaker worked at Bell Laboratories, described as the largest laboratory in the world at the time, and ran small experiments there on mind-matter interaction and precognition. They trace a link back to the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Edgar Mitchell provided the first funding for remote viewing studies at SRI International, where Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ worked, and brought Uri Geller (transcribed as "Yuri Geller") to the United States and to places including SRI and Bell Labs.

With permission, the speaker presented a precognition test at the annual conference of the Parapsychological Association, and was allowed to use the Bell Labs name. They stress that the association is one of roughly 200 affiliates of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, calling it "a legitimate scientific organization." After the talk, audience members asked whether they would join the Stargate program if there were an opening. They took a one-year leave of absence from Bell Labs to work at SRI International, under Hal Puthoff and then under Ed May, who took over when Puthoff left in 1985 and was director for 10 years.

Getting clearance took a long time. The level escalated from secret to top secret, then TS/SCI, and finally a special access program, with a book to sign that lists everyone else who had signed it. Even the code word was classified, which the speaker found odd but describes as "how it worked." Their group was the research side, separate from the military operational side that most Stargate stories focus on. The research questions were: Is it real? What are its limits? Can it be blocked, shielded or camouflaged? Why do some people, such as Joe McMoneagle (transcribed as "McMonicle"), perform so much better than others? To the first question, the answer given is "Yes. Some people are very talented."

The search for what makes a talented viewer turned up little. The speaker says that remote viewers such as Ingo Swann and Joe McMoneagle defied the "Madame Zodiac" stereotype and were "just like guys and gals." Psychological, physiological and medical approaches were all tried, partly because the Army wanted a way to select more talented people. The answer was "we couldn't find anything," with two exceptions:

Talent: natural ability, described as "partially based on genetics." Openness: a psychological trait of being open to experience. People with fixed ways of thinking "block it," while open people "in general tend to do better."

The genetic side could not be studied then. With genetic tools now available, the speaker says they have done "a couple of studies" looking for what they call a "psi gene" (transcribed as "sci gene"). Their claim is hedged: "we think we're on to something." Details are left for later in the conversation.

Soon after returning to Bell Labs, another door opened: Princeton, home of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory. It was led by the dean of the School of Engineering and ran for almost 30 years, studying mind-matter interaction, remote viewing and other topics. The speaker was based in the psychology department and charged with running a program across many departments, including philosophy, psychology, civil engineering and PEAR. The reasoning was that the subject is too big and complicated for any single discipline.