Ep. 276: astral projection & other dream states

[00:00:04] Speaker A: A thing we know about you, Marco, and I don't think you'll be offended because you're well aware of this. [00:00:10] Speaker B: Don't take that for granted. I am very easily offended. [00:00:14] Speaker A: Well, this is true. Already I've almost offended you without even telling you. Thing that I was going to say to you earlier, just the mere idea of. [00:00:24] Speaker B: Very defensive comment, very. Always on my guard, very sensitive. [00:00:29] Speaker A: Mm. [00:00:32] Speaker B: Quite reactive. You know, I react badly to any criticism of me. [00:00:41] Speaker A: Not always, but, you know, some days. [00:00:45] Speaker B: Well, I. You'll know. You'll know that I enjoy kind of. I enjoy opportunities to loon. [00:00:52] Speaker A: You do. Exactly. [00:00:53] Speaker B: You'll know that I get kind of a thriller of being wrong in the right way. You know what I mean? I've got lots of feelings and lots of opinions, but I like to think that I hold them quite loosely and I'm open to challenges and that. [00:01:07] Speaker A: Yeah, that's what I'm about to sort of talk about here. [00:01:10] Speaker B: All right. [00:01:11] Speaker A: Yes, exactly. That's why I say I don't think you'll be offended by this because you're aware of this tendency. [00:01:16] Speaker B: My God, is a. [00:01:18] Speaker A: By the way, right now it is up. [00:01:20] Speaker B: Yes. [00:01:20] Speaker A: Your hackles. Your hackles are up. No, it's a. You have a tendency. No, you have a tendency to think that, like, bodily and psychological experiences other people have are. Until. And unless you have them yourself. See, you're. You're smiling. You. You know, that is. That is a thing you do. [00:01:43] Speaker B: It is difficult to argue against that. I do think a lot of things are bullshit. [00:01:50] Speaker A: Yes. So one of the examples of that that we've seen since the beginning of this podcast was dreams. Because you found, and rightfully, I'd say, the idea of dream interpretation. Bullshit. Yes. But you kind of interpreted that as thus. Dreams have no meaning at all and are not connected in any way to our mental states. [00:02:14] Speaker B: I still believe that they. Obviously, they're a thing, but I don't think the content of one's dreams can be in any way related to the lived experience of the waking person. [00:02:26] Speaker A: Okay, well, that's wrong, clearly. But also, you fell victim to the COVID stress dreams and at the time realized that, oh, shit, our mental state is connected to our dreams. And so that's not the same thing as being like, oh, you saw the color blue and that means you're destined [00:02:41] Speaker B: for career change or some nonsense. [00:02:43] Speaker A: Exactly. [00:02:43] Speaker B: My teeth are falling out. You know, things like that. [00:02:46] Speaker A: Right? Yeah, like, that's not the same thing. But, like, clearly, what happens to us in the real world does manifest as anxiety dreams or even good dreams or things like that all the time? [00:02:58] Speaker B: I think so. [00:03:00] Speaker A: Oh, my God. [00:03:02] Speaker B: I don't think it does. I don't think. [00:03:05] Speaker A: Oh, my God. [00:03:05] Speaker B: Okay. [00:03:06] Speaker A: Well, just know you're against science. I just need you to understand what [00:03:09] Speaker B: I'm going through in my life. What I'm going through in my life does not manifest as events in my dream state. Certainly not. It might. Any stress that I'm going through might lead to an increase in my perception of like, remembering my dreams or the vivacity. Is that the word of my dreams? But I don't believe that one's the actual kind of events and occurrences and people and circumstances of one's lived life, then go on to show up in your dreams in times of heightened stress. I don't believe that is. [00:03:45] Speaker A: Okay, well, I need you to understand. It's fine for you to believe that, but it's a belief and not a reality. Okay? So just understand. Neuroscience disagrees with you and you're doing feelings and not facts. And so we're not going to rehash this because you already figured this out years ago and you are regressing on having understood the science of dreams. And I am. I'm going to get into the science of dream science. But I'm not gonna argue with you over a thing you already knew was real. [00:04:16] Speaker B: I also don't believe that. Dream science. That sounds to me a lot like crystals. Reflexology, homeopathy. [00:04:27] Speaker A: Oh, my God. [00:04:27] Speaker B: Dream science. [00:04:28] Speaker A: Well, let's talk about it, Mark, because you're wrong. Obviously. [00:04:36] Speaker B: Science. [00:04:36] Speaker A: It's not up for debate. It's like that. You're just. [00:04:39] Speaker B: Even the word. Even the words. The word science indicates to me something repeatable and reviewable. [00:04:47] Speaker A: Exactly. [00:04:47] Speaker B: You know. [00:04:48] Speaker A: Yeah. And I don't very much is using all kinds of scientific technology. It very much is. [00:04:56] Speaker B: Not with dreams. It isn't. You can't repeat a dream. You can't generate a dream state. [00:05:01] Speaker A: Are you telling me dreams are hard [00:05:02] Speaker B: to do the science of right now again. [00:05:04] Speaker A: But that doesn't mean it's impossible. [00:05:06] Speaker B: You're all right. [00:05:07] Speaker A: I'll. [00:05:08] Speaker B: I'll hear you out. [00:05:09] Speaker A: Yes. Let me tell you about how we understand dreams. [00:05:14] Speaker B: I hear you out because it is [00:05:15] Speaker A: a fascinating topic to me. Have to start over on this thing that we've already talked about because on a thing we've done like four or five episodes on already. I didn't think we were going to have to start at the beginning of dream science. [00:05:28] Speaker B: It is. It is. Listen, don't get me wrong. It's interesting to me. It's very interesting to me and I'm going to entertain this. But if you can demonstrate to me that, you know, dreams hold up to lab conditions. [00:05:43] Speaker A: They do, yeah. [00:05:44] Speaker B: I'm very interested to hear it. [00:05:46] Speaker A: There at least is science surrounding that. It is difficult, don't get me wrong, but it's a very regressive view of signs to be like, if it's hard, you can't do it. You know, that's not. [00:05:59] Speaker B: Rewind the tape. Where did I say that? I. [00:06:02] Speaker A: This is what you just keep saying. [00:06:04] Speaker B: I. I don't. [00:06:05] Speaker A: You can't do this. You can. [00:06:07] Speaker B: All right, go on. [00:06:08] Speaker A: All right, let's. Let's talk about this. We talk a lot about the wild things that our brains do, from hallucinations and delusions to inability to feel fear or pain to addiction, neurodivergence and, and so on. And when it comes to any of this stuff, it's not a matter of whether the experience exists so much as how we've learned to understand those experiences. [00:06:30] Speaker B: That's why I enjoy the enigma of the dream state so much. [00:06:37] Speaker A: You can enjoy it and still be wrong about it. I mean, you know, because you have become attached to this idea that they're unknowable. [00:06:44] Speaker B: There are certain things about being human that, that there are no answers for. Yes. The hard problem of consciousness yawning. Why do we do any of these things? They're just. They're inscrutable facts that somehow have. Have arisen as. As part of our evolution that we just can't quite pinpoint why and how and wherefore they occur. And I think that's what, to a degree. [00:07:10] Speaker A: To a degree, yes. To another degree. You simply haven't read the neuroscience. [00:07:19] Speaker B: Is the issue, like we don't categorically know why we even need to sleep, do we? [00:07:25] Speaker A: I mean, we know the physical processes that your body goes through while you sleep that are necessary. Yes. [00:07:33] Speaker B: Yeah, but what is it specifically about us that means we've got a power down every fucking, you know, circadian rhythms, why we've got to do this. I don't think there's ever been categorically a reason why we have to do that. [00:07:48] Speaker A: Yeah. And obviously that's not the thing that I researched today. But I do think, you know, that's kind of a. That's a tricky question because how are we separating why we have to do that from the processes that occur when we do it? [00:08:03] Speaker B: Yes. [00:08:03] Speaker A: Right. Because we know, you know, the processes that occur that only happen when we sleep. So that's kind of the answer. Right? It's like that's why our body does it. [00:08:12] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:08:12] Speaker A: On like a larger, I don't, I mean everything has to do it, it's just how. [00:08:18] Speaker B: Yes, yeah, yeah. [00:08:20] Speaker A: You know, bodies have, have developed. So I don't know on that, but I see what you're saying here. But yeah, when it comes to like understanding experiences of things that happen in the brain, there are often kind of two different broad pathways when we take, when it comes to brain AB that we've done throughout time, there's spiritual explanations and there's scientific explanations and there is of course crossover between those paths which we'll get into. And I think often your hostility to these things, you have an experience, is that you kind of assume that there's like some sort of woo woo spiritual thing that people are assigning to the phenomenon or yeah. You think it's all in their head. [00:09:01] Speaker B: Yes. And I, I, I also take a little issue with your kind of deeming it hostility to these views. I'm not hostile towards them at all. I'm benign. I just don't believe it. [00:09:15] Speaker A: But regardless, as we've discussed many a time, everything is in our heads. [00:09:20] Speaker B: Yes. [00:09:21] Speaker A: It's all we have. [00:09:22] Speaker B: And I love that, I love that so much. [00:09:24] Speaker A: Yes. So even some of the most out there experiences can be real to us. Reality is subjective, as irritating as that is. And we were having a conversation about this in the screaming chat the other day with regard to what we look like, which interestingly came up again just now where we both were sitting here realizing our images were flipped, were mirrored, and it's kind of disconcerting to look at, but everything lies to us. Photos, mirrors, videos. We never get a fully undistorted picture of ourselves. And even a picture that provides the most verisimilitude possible is still filtered through our own brains. And so we don't all see things the same way. Becomes something clear that like, say if someone's colorblind, that's a really good way that we get that indication of like, oh fuck, like yeah, our perception is not all the same. [00:10:15] Speaker B: And that is, and that is so wonderful to me. [00:10:19] Speaker A: I hate it. That drives me crazy. [00:10:20] Speaker B: I love it. Again, maybe it's, it's a core difference in you and I, but I love that we all kind of live almost under a consensus. You know what I mean? [00:10:33] Speaker A: Right. [00:10:34] Speaker B: We're all kind of aware that maybe we're all seeing things differently, but we all agree that this means this. X means X, Y means Y. And we'll just agree to get on with it. And it works. [00:10:43] Speaker A: That's exactly what I was gonna say. Like, if we were looking at a photo of you, for example, we would both recognize it as you, and we could identify the characteristics. [00:10:52] Speaker B: Correct. [00:10:52] Speaker A: That make it you. Your eyes look like this. Your nose looks like this. That doesn't mean our brains are seeing the same things we're interpreting as. [00:11:01] Speaker B: But. But it's impossible to know. So why. Why fucking waste time worrying about it? It works. [00:11:08] Speaker A: Yeah. We've got a system here. [00:11:10] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:11:10] Speaker A: It is what it is. But my point is we have lots of evidence that perception affects what we identify as reality. And so today I wanted to dive into sort of a body of such experiences. A type of experience. [00:11:24] Speaker B: So what was with all of the dream talk then? What was with all of this slander of me that we started getting there? [00:11:30] Speaker A: You have to let me. You have to let me read the script. [00:11:36] Speaker B: I don't know, you came in kind of hot. You kind of felt like you were coming for me. Mark, you're kind of a dumbass, you know that? That was kind of how. [00:11:45] Speaker A: What happened was I addressed a thing that I thought we agreed upon because we've done so many episodes on it, and you changed your mind, and it threw me for a loop. [00:11:54] Speaker B: Forget what we did. [00:11:55] Speaker A: You went back to six years ago. [00:11:56] Speaker B: Mark, have you ever seen what's Memento? I'm that guy, right? All of those things, habit and routine, make my life possible. Right? That's truer than you know, actually. [00:12:11] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. So I didn't come in hot. I became hot because I was confused by the situation. But let me. [00:12:20] Speaker B: People would grow frustrated with Guy Pearce's character in Memento. They would. They would ask him, why can't you remember this? Are you fucking. It's just, I don't remember anything. You can. You can. You can grow frustrated with it, but it's not going to change anything. [00:12:37] Speaker A: Fair enough. I'll just explain it again then. I guess that's where we're going with this. So, Mark, are you familiar with the concept of astral projection? [00:12:48] Speaker B: Yes, I am. And I'll tell you where I first encountered it, if you like, because I have a very. [00:12:55] Speaker A: I was going to tell you where [00:12:56] Speaker B: I did specific memory attached to that term astral projection. When I was. I must have been maybe 16 years old. Right. I went to a palmist. Oh, okay. [00:13:12] Speaker A: Like a palm reader. [00:13:13] Speaker B: Palmistry. Yes. Palm reader. On the seafront at Barry Island Pleasure Beach. Right. And she was a she Was like a twisted, bodily kind of gnarled up woman in a. In a, in like a chair. And she told me that she. Have you ever heard of astral projection? I can do that. That's what she said. And she went on to talk. She looked at my palm and talked about colors and fucking auras and some nonsense. [00:13:51] Speaker A: Why did you, were you put up to this? Why did you do this? [00:13:55] Speaker B: I was just out for the day. I was out for the day with my then girlfriend and we passed by this booth. This would be a lock and in we went. [00:14:05] Speaker A: You both did this? [00:14:06] Speaker B: Yep. [00:14:07] Speaker A: What did your girlfriend think? [00:14:09] Speaker B: Oh, I mean, much the same as me really. Just gubbins. [00:14:17] Speaker A: Excellent. Well, yeah. So what your Madame Leota over there did was a form of what's called an out of body experience. [00:14:26] Speaker B: There you go. [00:14:27] Speaker A: Yes, and we hear a lot about these kinds of experiences when say someone dies on an operating table and is resuscitated, for example. [00:14:34] Speaker B: That's right. [00:14:35] Speaker A: They. They might talk about having floated above their body and seen themselves lying there and heard the conversations that were going on in the operating room. We talked about this in episode many, many moons ago about near death experiences when we watched dmt. Ridiculous. [00:14:50] Speaker B: People assign what some people believe is going on when you touch the spirit molecule. [00:14:56] Speaker A: Right? Yeah, exactly. So astral projection however is an intentional form of that. Sort of a subtype of lucid dreaming. And lucid dreaming is another thing that can sound like woo woo. But it's not entirely. And we have talked about this. No, it's not. But thankfully I am going to explain it again, even that we have talked about this before. Okay, now as in. [00:15:23] Speaker B: Yes, I'll let you carry on. Actually, I'll just, I'll let you establish specifically what you mean by lucid dreaming. [00:15:31] Speaker A: And I am going to do. [00:15:32] Speaker B: I know, I know, I know, I'll let you. [00:15:35] Speaker A: Thank you. I appreciate that. As an article in the journal Neuron put it, quote. In the absence of incoming sensory information, dreams offer a unique glimpse into the brain's intrinsic representations of the world. One of the most fascinating aspects of dreaming is that we are rarely aware of the nature of this experience while it is unfolding, holding even when it deviates in the most bizarre ways from our usual awake reality. [00:15:57] Speaker B: Such a wonderful sensation, isn't it? [00:16:00] Speaker A: Yeah, it depends on how that goes as we'll get into. But it can. [00:16:04] Speaker B: Yeah, of course at the time it can go. It can go either way. But this idea of it being like a folding inward experience that you cannot possibly determine until you're outside of it is right fucking brilliant. I love it. [00:16:20] Speaker A: The exception to this rule is the phenomenon of lucid dreaming. Becoming aware of the current dream state during ongoing sleep. And I think a lot of us have experienced this. I often do this when I'm close to waking up. I start to realize that I'm dreaming and I try to start sort of steering the dream. In fact, I had that happen this morning. I don't remember what I was dreaming about, but I eventually had to wake all the way up because I had to pee really bad. And I was annoyed because I was like, enjoying where I was moving that dream. And I was like, ah, fuck. All right, I gotta get up. As the study went on to explain. This is a phenomenon that's been talked about for millennia in all sorts of different cultures, from Aristotle to Tibetan dream yoga to various indigenous cultures and plenty of European ones as well. In fact, the first modern scientific description of the phenomenon was by a French sociologist named Marquis Dervay de St. Denis in 1867. And it was followed up by a Dutch psychiatrist named Frederick von Eeden in 1913. [00:17:21] Speaker B: I wonder if you could have given that French name a little bit more. [00:17:25] Speaker A: I considered it, and then I was like, no, no, we're not doing that. [00:17:29] Speaker B: I think could have. [00:17:34] Speaker A: See, my problem was that I was like, I can say the French one, but I don't know how to pronounce the Dutch one right. And then I'm just gonna sound like an asshole, so. So you just gotta go all in on Americanizing both of them. [00:17:46] Speaker B: You know, just for the record, I would have. [00:17:49] Speaker A: It's true. Well, and you would have gone for the Dutch one too. [00:17:51] Speaker B: I would have. [00:17:52] Speaker A: I know. In the 1970s, EEGs and EOGs, which is electro oculography, were used to study lucid dreaming for the first time by scientists out of Liverpool and California. They found that eye movements during sleep often follow dream gaze directions, rendering intentional eye movements within the dream objectively detectable. In this way, a sleeping subject can signal the experience, lucidity, and other information from the dream to the waking world. So basically, there is a distinct difference between the eye movements that are kind of automatic when you're sleeping and intentional eye movements which reflect more what you would do if you were awake. And that they could see this in these, you know, in what then people reported they had done in the dream. So they could connect that this person was like, oh, yeah, I did, you know, I did this, or whatever. And their eyes and I think said this. [00:18:53] Speaker B: This touches on why I Find it so difficult to buy completely that this, this idea of dream science because there is so much objectivity involved. Sorry. As in subjectivity. Sorry. There's so much. [00:19:10] Speaker A: Keep in mind though, this is 56 years ago that they did this. This is not the only thing that has ever been reported on this. But how this is the first study that they did on this with a, [00:19:25] Speaker B: you know, a chemical or an equation. It's. It's right or wrong. You get a result or you don't. Right. But yeah, I, yeah, I sort of started to dream. I was at my nan's house and then I was in space. I don't know if you can apply scientific rigor. [00:19:44] Speaker A: You can though. The problem is that you're going, you're not looking at this scientifically, you're going from a common sense perspective as opposed to the methodologies that scientists use. Use. So you're going off of a, like, I have trouble buying this. As opposed to people are reading these, you know, things and making these connections based on, you know, numerous people going through this stuff and seeing the same phenomena occur. So this is not, you know, this is not like them being like, oh, we saw this and then we just assumed, you know, they have methodology that they follow and of course that I am breaking down into its simplest parts instead of, you know, giving you a 40 page report with diagrams that I read to get to this broken down idea. So, you know, this is early research on this stuff. You know, as I always point out, like a lot of our medical science, things like that are extremely new. We've only been doing medical science for a little over a century in any meaningful way, any modern way. And so certainly things like this are, you know, newer. In the span of that, when we started doing medical science, we didn't immediately jump to dreams necessarily. And there were all sorts of things we'll get into that people thought before we got there. It is a hard thing to study though, as lucid dreaming is not a thing that happens every time someone goes to sleep. According to the study or ACE study, not this particular one. Lucid dreaming occurs in about half of all people. So it's not even uncommon. This is a thing that happens to half the population, but it doesn't happen regularly as a 20. [00:21:23] Speaker B: Can I just. I think it's fascinating. Very. Mmm. Isn't it fascinating your claim to be able to control your very dream state whereas you can't picture a cow right now? If I asked you to close your eyes and draw a cow from memory, you could not do that. [00:21:43] Speaker A: No. Yeah. And it's a thing that I always find fascinating. Yeah. Yeah. I think this is really fascinating because I try to think about it usually when I, like, wake up all the way. Like, did I see anything or was I doing it the same way that I read, which we talked about the other day, where it's like, I don't make images of what I'm reading, but at the same time, like, I understand, you know, what's going on in a book in the same way, like that someone who was picturing it would, you know, I will cringe at a gross description of something, even though I don't necessarily see the gross description. And so I don't fully know, you know, because my brain imagines things. It's just not in images, you know, what it looks like. [00:22:28] Speaker B: All right. [00:22:29] Speaker A: That's a whole other thing altogether. [00:22:31] Speaker B: Okay, this. [00:22:33] Speaker A: I don't know why you're trying to poke a hole. Poke so many holes in science here. [00:22:37] Speaker B: Maybe I'm not. Maybe. I think there's a couple of things going on here. Right. And this is off. This is. This is very much about. About us and not the topic. Right. I think there's a couple of things going on here. I think you've overestimated how hostile I am to the idea, because I'm not hostile to it at all. And I think I've maybe misunderstood what the measurables are here. [00:23:00] Speaker A: Right. Okay. [00:23:01] Speaker B: Right. [00:23:02] Speaker A: Yes. [00:23:02] Speaker B: I don't believe that with any, as I understand, scientific rigor, you can measure or quantify what is going on in a dream state, in someone's sleep. I don't believe you can because there's. There's so much personal. [00:23:22] Speaker A: Yeah, that's it. [00:23:26] Speaker B: The memory of a dream decays the second it ends. [00:23:29] Speaker A: That's not necessarily true. It may be true for you, but we know that's not true for all people and not for all dreams. So that's not. I mean, Right again, is just categorical. [00:23:39] Speaker B: Right at the top of this podcast, you spoke about how completely unreliable we are as witnesses to our own fucking life and our own perception. [00:23:48] Speaker A: That's true. That doesn't mean that thus everything we think is a lie. Like, that's different. And many times, you know, it often depends on how you sleep. You know, what the circumstances are around the way you sleep. Like, this is not disputed things. We know we can remember dreams. That's not. Again, that's not a thing that, like, is. Oh, we don't know whether people can do that. We know we can do that. So you're kind of. I think this is why I'm frustrated, is that you're starting at. Your experience is universal and thus no one experiences a different thing, which is not true just from an objective state. That is not true. And it's really hard to, like, get to answer your questions when you're starting at premises that are like, super so far back in the, like, understanding we have of these things that I'm like, how do I. I can't prove that to you. [00:24:45] Speaker B: All right, I, I will concede then that my experience of dreaming and dream states isn't universal. [00:24:57] Speaker A: Yes, yes. And that I know more about even [00:25:03] Speaker B: that is just confirming that if, if, if my experience is different to yours, which is different to anybody else's, which is different. Every 100 people have a hundred different experiences of, of dreaming and dream states. Then how can you apply laboratory methodology, [00:25:24] Speaker A: neuroscience, to understand these things? Right. Let me keep going. [00:25:29] Speaker B: We. We're gonna. Okay. [00:25:32] Speaker A: As a 2020 study by Benjamin Baird, Sergio Motor Rolim, and Martin Dressler put it, quote, despite having physiologically been validated for decades, the neurobiology of lucid dreaming is still incompletely category characterized. So that's what you were talking about, right? That they were able to see physiologically that this thing was happening neurobiologically, they weren't sure what the heck was going on. Right. [00:25:58] Speaker B: Okay. [00:25:59] Speaker A: So thus in the past decade or so, there's been a movement toward trying to figure out how to then induce lucid dreaming so that we can learn more about it. If we can make it happen like you're saying, then we can use repeatable lab conditions. Right. [00:26:15] Speaker B: I am so. You may certain I've had. I'm certain. I'm certain I've. I've workshopped a couple of Elm street reboots along this, along this line. Along this. [00:26:25] Speaker A: Right. I mean, at the end of the day, that's basically what Elm street is. Right. [00:26:29] Speaker B: It's just where Elm Street 3 is. Certainly it's all about lucid dreaming, but. [00:26:33] Speaker A: Exactly. Elm Street 3 is very much lucid dreaming. [00:26:35] Speaker B: I love the idea of, you know, that one of my favorite gimmicks in movies is like, applying scientific method to, like, spooky phenomena. [00:26:43] Speaker A: Yeah, totally. [00:26:44] Speaker B: And I love the idea of, of, you know, is there like an attempt to reproduce. Reproduce Freddy conditions in a lab setting and shit like that? [00:26:52] Speaker A: I love that. Totally. And that's essentially what they've been doing. Because for all of our research in neuroscience and whatnot, dreams are elusive that are difficult to study. [00:27:05] Speaker B: Yes. [00:27:07] Speaker A: And as that 2020 study pointed out, quote. Despite the fact that such personal accounts of lucid dreams have been described for centuries, the topic faced skepticism from some scientists and philosophers, in part due to the lack of objective evidence for the phenomenon. [00:27:19] Speaker B: This is it. This is it. This is exactly what I've been saying. [00:27:22] Speaker A: Yeah. And we can understand this because we didn't have the scientific methods required to even begin to study this. Lucid dreaming was assigned to the realm of the spiritual for thousands of years. That's how people interpreted it. It was seen as a belief rather than a thing that half of humans actually experience. It wasn't until we could hook folks up to machines that monitored their brain activity that we went, oh, fuck me, they're doing it. And we'll go into some of, like, the things that people use for this later on. [00:27:49] Speaker B: I even think that the term lucid dreaming is vague as fuck. Is there? Is there? [00:27:59] Speaker A: I think that's descriptive of exactly what's happening. Right? You're lucid and you are dreaming. You are aware that you are dreaming. [00:28:09] Speaker B: I don't think. I don't think that works as a way. I think it's just because it's been dreaming. What does that mean? I think. [00:28:16] Speaker A: Well, that's why they use the word lucid, because it describes the state. [00:28:19] Speaker B: I think it is. It is so open to degrees of interpretation that it just doesn't work for me as a description of a state. [00:28:27] Speaker A: Okay, well, it might not work for you, but it works for neuroscientists. And so that's just gonna have to be good enough, I think. You know, again, you're connecting this so much to, like, the, like, crunchy ideas. You're connecting it to your, like, Vanilla sky sci fi. You're connecting it to, like, things that, you know, have used the term and turned it into, like, this hippie idea. [00:28:51] Speaker B: I might be doing that to a degree. I might be doing a bit of that. But again, and I am also hung up on this, this. This notion of scientific method, scientific rigor. I don't think lucidity is an on or off condition. I'm lucid here, I'm not here, which [00:29:08] Speaker A: is not what they're saying. And we will get into some of the nuance of what is going on in dreams as we move forward. So, yeah, we tend to be skeptical of people who can claim that they can do this of their own volition. [00:29:26] Speaker B: Very skeptical things. Very skeptical. I don't believe them. [00:29:30] Speaker A: And we'll get into how they do it. But this is a thing that scientists are Actively trying to do. And that a lot of people who do it also happen to be RFK junior types doesn't inherently mean that they can't solve stumble into a real scientific concept. That's part of the history of science. Right? We look at indigenous practices of medicine, for example, and a lot of shit actually works. They didn't know the chemical compounds in plants or use double blind studies to arrive at their conclusion. They used observation. Something had an effect, they did it again, it had the same effect. Boom. That's science. So what conclusion someone draws about the source of these properties or experiences doesn't necessarily disqualify them from being real phenomena. So let's come back to astral projection, an admittedly much more controversial sub genre of lucid dreaming. Like I said, the idea is that you can consciously cause your awareness or your soul, if that's your jam, to exit your body and go elsewhere. And then from there you can control where it goes and report back the adventures it went on. When you call it back. [00:30:33] Speaker B: Now, I know you're not about to try and tell me that this is a real phenomenon. You're not going to do that. [00:30:37] Speaker A: I'm not thank gonna do that. I'm going to use it as a way of discussing other elements of the science of how we understand dreams. [00:30:45] Speaker B: Okay? Okay. Okay. Because I was starting to worry about you. [00:30:51] Speaker A: Yay. Yay. And as we were discussing your the way you first heard of this. I first heard of this on one of my childhood favorite shows, so Weird, in which a girl escapes from the demands her parents put on her by astral projecting away from her home. Although on so Weird, other people could see her projected body, which made Fi, the main character, initially think she was ghost. And we'll get to it. There was a time when people thought that was how it worked as well, and this is what ghosts were. But as of now, that's not how people think astral projection works. It's also a major plot line in the Sarah Penbrough novel Behind Her Eyes, which anyone in our book club knows pissed me the fuck off when we were reading that one. Boy, was I annoyed by that whole plot twist. But like lucid dreaming, people have reported the ability to do this for pretty much ever. And it's tied to various spiritual practices around the world. We also have talked before about the superpowers the CIA attempted to develop in people to create sort of super soldiers of sorts. And astral projection was one such superpower. Also remote viewing the idea, which is of course what Dr. Venkman is doing in the first Ghostbusters movie. So they wanted to train soldiers to astral project or use remote viewing so that they could then essentially psychically spy on enemies. This was part of a thing called Project Stargate. And the results of that can be found in a set of declassified documents and recordings called the Gateway Process, which is actually on the CIA website. Obviously, I've linked to that in the notes, so you can go ahead and take a look at that yourself. It's with the movie the Men who Stare at Goats is actually about, and there are a shit ton of documents, and the people who read them come out on both sides of this. On one side, it's a great big nothing burger, and all we get from this may be some interesting and useful meditation techniques. But on the other side, people say this is absolute proof that they were able to use remote viewing and astral projection in these research settings with some degree of success. [00:32:53] Speaker B: Yes. I don't and have never bothered myself to even scratch the surface of what is meant by Transcendental Meditation. [00:33:04] Speaker A: Oh, that's. Yeah, that's a little different. That's a. That's not necessarily connected to. To this whole thing. Although there's certainly overlap between practitioners of Transcendental Meditation and this kind of thing. But if I'm not mistaken, like, transcendental mentidation goes all the way back to, like, the time of, like, Walt Whitman and things like that, and which is similar to some of the things we'll talk about. But I don't believe astral projection is necessarily, okay, a part of that. [00:33:34] Speaker B: I could be wrong. Different boxes. [00:33:36] Speaker A: Different boxes, I believe. Yes. No, this. On the note of the CIA things in the link. You can see it for yourself. I'm not reading all that. I'm gonna look at other sources to talk about this. On the note of, like, Transcendental Meditation and this sort of time, like the late mid to late 19th century, was like a big time of a lot of, like, weird spiritual movements and things like that, which is where we get stuff like tm, as they call it. So while I noted that the idea of astral projection has been around in some form for ages, it was actually popularized in Western culture by the Theosophical Society, founded in New York in the 1870s by a woman. Last podcast, and the left listeners will be familiar with Madame Helena Blavatsky. According to Theosophy, quote, there are seven bodies of man, the third of which is the astral body. According to Dr. Susan Blackmore, quote, the astral body and this is nothing she's believing. She's just explaining, the astral body can leave the physical and etheric bodies behind, that is the body in the ether, and go traveling on the astral planes. In psychology today, she broke it down like this quote, every thought creates a form, and these forms have a life of their own, attracted by similar thoughts, repelled by opposites, making up our dream life, forming apparitions of the deceased, and facilitating telepathy and clairvoyance. By learning to concentrate deeply, we can produce powerful thought forms that leave the mind that created them and continue to exist on other planes. Again, this is not her belief. She's explaining the beliefs of theosophy. Also, according to theosophy, that's a hard word to say. We have a continuing self that is constantly going back and forth between different bodies in different regions of the universe. These seven vehicles of consciousness and the self exists on a separate mental plane which allows for this. So in the late 19th century, as this belief was developing, it was thought that we had an etheric double that transmitted energy between the physical body, which is constrained by the laws of time and space, and those other vehicles. And that ghosts were, like, in the middle of this. They were a replica of the physical body composed of ether. [00:35:55] Speaker B: See, not only do I obviously not believe any of that. [00:35:59] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:36:00] Speaker B: But I also don't believe that these people did either. [00:36:04] Speaker A: We'll get there. Because I know that's the thing that you're going to say, and they very much did, and we'll talk about that. But we know this is not a thing now, but at the time, ether was a thing that a lot of scientists believe was real. [00:36:21] Speaker B: Okay, Right. [00:36:22] Speaker A: So this was not a fringe belief. It was. I mean, this is what's so interesting about, like, the late 19th century, early 20th century when it comes to spiritual beliefs and scientific progress, is that they were in constant negotiation with each other. And scientists at the time who had, you know, been sort of steeped in spiritual belief were like, well, great, now that we have science, we can finally use it to understand the spiritual realm. And that kind of. As that wore on, a lot of those scientists, you know, by the 1920s were like, Ah, fuck, there's no spiritual realm, is there? Right. But there was this, like, for a time, like, science and ghosts and ether and all of this shit were deeply tied to each other, and they really thought they were going to prove it using the scientific method. [00:37:19] Speaker B: That's so wonderful to me. [00:37:20] Speaker A: Isn't that so interesting? [00:37:22] Speaker B: Absolutely. Great. And, you know, that is science doing Its job. Yeah. If there is a. If, you know, if there was a. If there was just a single moment when any scientific or medical practitioner realized. Closed the book on their calculations when. Yep, no ghosts. [00:37:41] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:37:41] Speaker B: Then it's not gonna happen. That is a wonderful, beautiful thing to me. [00:37:44] Speaker A: Yeah. And that's the process that we're always kind of going through. Right. Is like these, like testing these things out, seeing can we find some way to. To prove this? And, and it's really interesting when applied to like deeply held spiritual beliefs, you know, things that are. Have been taken for granted for as long as, like these particular spiritual traditions existed. Right. Anyone who's interested in more about that on the Ko Fi. If you watch our Fan Cave episode about the others, I go into detail about those late 19th century and early 20th century spiritual and scientific beliefs and had a fun time talking about all of that because it really plays into the others in some really fun ways. Anyway, the ether. Not a thing. An experiment called the Mickelson Morley experiment in 1887 disproved once and for all the concept of a luminiferous ether that was needed to create light, which is what they thought at the time, which marked a huge shift in the field of physics. That's not to say that theosophist gave up on the concept. And you see spiritualists being super into the concept of the ether and being able to photograph the ether in the early 20th century, but we know that that's, that's not a thing. You do not have a duplicate ether body. [00:39:00] Speaker B: No. [00:39:00] Speaker A: Simply doesn't exist. [00:39:01] Speaker B: Nope. [00:39:03] Speaker A: The idea of astral projection moved beyond the ether, though, and persists to this day with practitioners truly believing they are able to induce these out of body experiences. And like I said, I'll get to how we know they truly believe this in a scientific way. Like I said, you know, this is one of the places that we often differ because you tend to think that people who say they've had spiritual. Spiritual experiences don't really believe that. Right. That they're lying or grifting, you know, or there's something in it for them, you know, socially or whatever to say that they did. Whereas someone who is actually religious. I do strongly disagree with that. Like, there's certainly people who are lying and grifting, but the brain is complicated and we very sincerely believe things that don't make sense. Further, we can actually have the experiences that don't make sense. And that's where things get interesting. So one of the things that I've mentioned before that I Always thought was corny and absurd. When I was in college, was the prevalence of people being convinced that they woke in the middle of the night with a demon on their chests preventing them from moving. [00:40:05] Speaker B: Did this ever happen to you? [00:40:07] Speaker A: No. I have never in my life believed that demons physically existed. That was one place that I differed greatly from my evangelical counterparts. There's simply no part of me that believes or ever believed there was such thing as a demon. And this is one of the reasons why, like, I just find religious horror boring as, like, you bring a demon into something, that's the equivalent of bringing a dragon into something. For me, like, that's just so corny. That's not a real thing. [00:40:38] Speaker B: Okay. [00:40:40] Speaker A: But as such, I was absolutely tickled to find a Time magazine article while I was combing through things last night entitled why sleep paralysis makes you see ghosts, with the header image on this article a cartoon rendering of a demon sitting on a sleeping man's chest. I was like, yes, yes. Okay, yeah, let's get into this, because this is a thing that I heard all the time when I was in college. So why then is this something that is so common that this is on the header of a Time magazine article? It's because it's actually very common. Sleep paralysis affects around one in five people and is described as experience of feeling like you've woken up completely paralyzed. Often these sleep paralysis incidents are indeed accompanied by hallucinations, including figures like witches, demons, and vampires. [00:41:33] Speaker B: It's happened to everyone. The pile of clothes in the corner [00:41:35] Speaker A: of the room, It's a little different from that, though. Like, there's the. And we'll kind of get into that a little bit. But there's like, sort of the processing element, right? Of like you looking over and seeing something, but then it's like, not really it. The paralysis is the part that doesn't happen to everyone. Like, I've never experienced this. Have you? [00:41:54] Speaker B: No, I have not. Yeah. [00:41:55] Speaker A: I am not one of the one in five. [00:41:57] Speaker B: I've never experienced paralysis. [00:41:59] Speaker A: I. [00:41:59] Speaker B: Plenty of people have. I've talked about it with plenty of people who have, though. [00:42:03] Speaker A: Right. Duncan has sleep paralysis or experiences sleep paralysis. Not like a disease, but. But it is a thing people experience. But, yeah, sleep paralysis actually happens between REM sleep and waking. I find this whole thing really fascinating. It's a period during which you tend to also have your most realistic dreams. [00:42:23] Speaker B: Interestingly, I every night sleep next to someone who has the very opposite sleep jerkiness. [00:42:31] Speaker A: Yeah, Right. [00:42:33] Speaker B: And I believe it happens during the same kind of phase. [00:42:39] Speaker A: It Might. I'm. Well, probably not this one. And I'll explain to you why it's not during the same phase. Because this is. This is really fascinating to me. So because our brains and bodies are actually kind of magical in a lot of ways, your brain will temporarily paralyze you during this particular transition between sleeping and waking to make sure that you don't react to those dreams in real life and hurt yourself. [00:43:06] Speaker B: I see. [00:43:07] Speaker A: So we all actually experience this on a much less scary note. This is also why like you might have a dream that you went to the bathroom but you don't actually wet the bed. It's as your body is waking you up to actually get up and go. It's paralyzed. So you actually just like aren't doing anything. You're stuck perfectly motionless. [00:43:26] Speaker B: Yes. [00:43:28] Speaker A: So sleep for us is actually. [00:43:30] Speaker B: There is no more jarring. There's no. There is nothing to compare it to when that exact same circumstance happens. But the paralysis hasn't quite the paralysis. And you'd be pissing turns off this just the talk about your journey. A quick journey back from the ether. Let me tell you that. [00:43:53] Speaker A: Hell just. Yeah, I don't think that that has happened to me in my like adult life at all. But I can imagine. How horrible. [00:44:03] Speaker B: Straight back from the astral plane and. [00:44:09] Speaker A: Well, if it's working as it should. [00:44:11] Speaker B: Yes. [00:44:13] Speaker A: But the problem comes in when some folks wake up in the middle of that cycle. So as your mind tries to make sense of what the fuck is happening, you can end up having all kinds of hallucinations. Among these hallucinations is the sense of floating out of your body and looking down at yourself from the ceiling. As the article points out though, and this is what might interest you, this is fully reproducible. In a lab, scientists disrupt a brain region called the temporoparietal junction. An area that helps build your body image and is important for your ability to distinguish between self and other. This area gets turned off during REM sleep. So when you disrupt it, it can cause a feeling of seeing yourself from a third person perspective. It disrupts your sense of self versus [00:45:04] Speaker B: Just for clarity, just to say this out loud, sleep paralysis is a medically reproducible phenomenon. [00:45:13] Speaker A: Yes, it is. And the like hallucinations and out of body experiences, the astral projection associated with it. You can reproduce that in a lab by interrupting this particular part of the sleep process by disrupting the temporoparietal junction. [00:45:32] Speaker B: And. There are papers. [00:45:40] Speaker A: Yep. [00:45:40] Speaker B: All linked in the blog papers that you'll find in a. [00:45:45] Speaker A: From pubmed from medical journals, neuroscience journals [00:45:49] Speaker B: agreed on by the medical peer, reviewed in journals. Because I don't think you can. But that's my comfort. That's a meeting. That's a meeting. [00:46:00] Speaker A: Yes. That's a you thing. It's a. You got to work that out with you and your personal deity yourself. As for the demons and monsters and whatnot, I actually really like this description, so it's a little long, but I'm going to read all of this. So, during sleep paralysis, disturbances to your sense of self, or body image, as they call it, can occur. This idea was partially sparked by the observation that people who are born with a missing arm can experience phantom limbs, that is, feel a powerful presence. And we're going to get into that in a minute. But a powerful presence of their missing arm. Research on phantom limbs suggests we all have a hardwired body map in our brain. Put simply, when a person born with no arm experiences a phantom arm, they feel the presence of the arm that is part of their internal body template, or, and you'll like the term they use for that, homunculus. [00:46:50] Speaker B: I knew that was coming. I knew it. I've seen diagrams in school textbooks. [00:46:57] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:46:58] Speaker B: That kind of depict the scale that a human body would look like if your homunculus, your internal map of your body, was represented in the flesh. Massive hands. [00:47:14] Speaker A: Totally. Yes. So this map may be wired up with emotional and visual centers in your brain dictating your innate attraction to the human shape and not, say, to the form of a cat. [00:47:25] Speaker B: Now, and this is. This is interesting to me. So somebody with a congenital limb difference from birth. From birth would have the same internal homunculus to somebody with normative limb configuration interest. [00:47:41] Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah. Because you kind of. You know what you're supposed to look like in a normative body, and therefore you kind of react this way. [00:47:49] Speaker B: Right. [00:47:51] Speaker A: When you realize that you're paralyzed, the motor cortex in your brain involved in initiating movements fire signals to the body to move to escape the paralysis. It also sends additional messages to the parietal lobes, just like emails when we. [00:48:04] Speaker B: How did you know I would enjoy the term homunculus? [00:48:09] Speaker A: Pretty sure I've heard you use it on a few occasions. [00:48:11] Speaker B: I love it. I love it. [00:48:14] Speaker A: But this brain area monitors the neurons firing signals to move, but isn't detecting any actual movement in your limbs, which are temporarily paralyzed. Such mismatching messages impact how your brain generates your sense of sense. Hungry for input from your body, your brain will attempt to clear the confusion by constructing your body image for you. Fill in the blanks, sort of like Google Autocomplete. This can lead to eerie hallucinations, like seeing yourself rotating in the air like a tornado or sinking into the bed as if drowning in quicksand. Or your body may project out there in space. You have an out of body experience. Uh, so this is basically your brain being like, ah, my, my body isn't doing what it's supposed to do. I'm telling it to move. It's not able to do that. And so as it tries to process why, why it isn't responding, it might then sort of generate in this section of your brain. Yeah, a glitch, essentially. I like that idea of Google Autocomplete. You know, it's like a. Because Google Autocomplete isn't right all the time, right? [00:49:18] Speaker B: It's literally a hallucination, isn't it? [00:49:19] Speaker A: It's literally a hallucination, yeah. So it'll give you, you know, it might give you what an arm looks like, but your face may be a Picasso. Like you don't know what's going to happen here where you're spinning, you're out of the body. It's just trying to build a picture of you to like remind you of how your body's supposed to work. A far simpler way of putting all this though, is that your brain is a, quote, master storyteller. The sensation of sleep paralysis is super uncomfortable and can include things like the feeling of crushing chest pressure. And your brain is like, oh my God, what's doing that? That doesn't happen on its own and it fills in the gaps. So it goes, oh fuck, there's a demon on me. This is only helped by the fact that our visual processing takes shortcuts, according to researchers Dr. Ramachandran and Blakesley. And creating a crude cartoon sketch of the ghost or demon requires less costly brain computing power than hallucinating a detailed creature with minute fit facial features, color, depth and so on. So when people see some shadowy black demon on them, it's basically the visual processing in their brain being like, ow, I'm tired here, I don't know, try this essentially. And it's actually a really fascinating series of events. Our brains are never fully shut off, so we're taking in outside stimuli while also trying to reconcile the total discombobulation that comes from waking up where our bodies are still chemically asleep. Because that's what sleep paralysis is. It's chemical. [00:50:51] Speaker B: Super fascinating concept to me as well, this idea that outside of death, we're never completely turned off. [00:51:02] Speaker A: Yeah, right. Exactly. We're always. We're in sleep mode. Yeah, like. Like a computer, essentially. So we're doing that. We're in a constant state of interpretation of our surroundings. And sometimes our brains are just shooting off storylines as a result of that. Just like, let's try this, let's try this, let's try this. Let's make it make sense, you know. So my classmates told of those demons sitting on their chest upon waking. They weren't bullshitting for clout. They were having very real sleep paralysis. And because of their own understanding of the world, one in which they are constantly under attack by spiritual entities, demons, and their lazy visual processing centers and the feeling of pressure on their chest caused by the paralysis, they genuinely saw what they interpreted as a demon. That is the story their brain told them. And it was as real to them as the existence of their own mom and dad. It is, as far as they know, that is a thing that happened to them. Now, of course, they could learn what sleep paralysis is and, you know, reinterpret that through that frame. But in the time that this happened and with the understanding that they have of the world, this is what their [00:52:14] Speaker B: brain told them and add in layers of, you know, collective kind of group influence. Oh, they saw a demon. [00:52:23] Speaker A: I mean, it's. That's the thing. It's social for sure. Part of it is like, it's your understanding of the world. You live amongst people who believe that this is a thing that occurs. You've been told since you were a child, this is a thing that can occur when it happens to you. That is the frame by which you are interpreting this experience. And thus there's no part of you that goes, did I imagine that? You go, oh my God. I just. This actually happened to me. And it is in your brain firing off the same synapses as if you actively had a real live demon sitting on your chest. It's just wrong. It's just a wrong interpretation. Just like a cap graw delusion, just as any other delusion would be. It's wrong, but try telling your brain that, right? So again, these things are connected. Out of body experiences can happen in the state and further can be replicated in a lab setting by doing that disruption. According to Dr. Varchasvi Mudgal et al in the Curious Journal of Medical Science, and to be clear that C U R E U s not curious like curiosity, out of body experiences and astral projection have also been linked to things like brain lesions in the parietal and temporal regions, psychiatric disorders, severe Emotional states, substance use like your DMT, migraines and epilepsy. On howstuffworks.com, Dr. Jane Aspel explains to Nathan Chandler, quote, if the brain does not function as it should because of epilepsy, brain injury, lack of oxygen, then this model can give rise to an experience that differs from what we usually experience. Our self being located inside our bodies. [00:54:01] Speaker B: Oh, wow. [00:54:01] Speaker A: There's evidence. There is evidence from multiple scientific studies that obes out of body experiences arise because of abnormal functioning of an area of the brain called the temporal parietal junction. As I said, this is an area that combines signals from multiple senses to create the model of ourself in the world. I think this is so interesting, right? [00:54:23] Speaker B: We got there, right? We got there. [00:54:24] Speaker A: We got there. [00:54:25] Speaker B: Yeah, got me so fucked up. My myself was on the outside, right? [00:54:30] Speaker A: Exactly. That's exactly what's happening in this case. Something disrupts the temporal parietal junction and you suddenly are like, fuck, I'm outside [00:54:38] Speaker B: me in my, my. We got there. Fine, fine, we got there. [00:54:43] Speaker A: Great, wonderful. But as such, she explains these experience feel real to us, just like dreams do. But there is no evidence that our consciousness or self can exist outside of the body or be detached from it. To be clear, I'm not saying when it comes to intentionally doing this, right? Which is the idea behind astral projection. Oh, I can do this on command, right? Theoretically, you just have to figure out how to disrupt the temporoparietal junction in the transitional period between REM sleep and waking. And I don't know that. For all I know, that could be something you can teach yourself to do. Right? It's like people who can put themselves in trances or whatever, things like that. It's like you can convince your brain to do all kinds of weird shit. So theoretically, sure, maybe somehow people have figured this out. Right? I'm. And to be clear, I'm not saying you can. I'm not. That's not. [00:55:40] Speaker B: I am open to the notion that I can get so fucking I can vibe with my homunculus to the point where I can throw it. [00:55:49] Speaker A: Well, yeah, and especially like if, for example, like you said, you use a substance, right? Like that's one way you can absolutely disrupt this particular area of the brain is by using a substance that does. So, you know, these people who say they do it are saying they're doing it without anything like that. I don't, I don't know. I'm not, I'm not going to completely rule it out because we know the physical process that's required. And I think, you know, sure, maybe that is a thing you could do. I couldn't do it. But they are not by any stretch, you know, actually astropogicity, my. [00:56:29] Speaker B: I think if one person can do it, then everybody should be able to do it. I don't think that it's a rare gift which is reserved only for a few. I think if it's repeatable in one person, I think everybody should be able to do it. [00:56:42] Speaker A: So I don't think, I don't think that's true. Again, you're using the my experience is universal problem, which is not true, right? That's like, oh, if, if, you know, one person doesn't have depression, then nobody should have depression. Or like, you know, the way, like you think you're, like you think I'm messing with you, that I can't raise this eyebrow, but that muscle just doesn't work in that eyebrow, even though it does in this one. Like, like theoretically, yeah, physically I have the muscles that exist to do this. I just can't do it. Or yeah, if I have a psychiatric, you know, if someone has schizophrenia, they should be able to not have schizophrenia. Like, you know what I mean? People's brains doing different things is of the human experience. So I'm, and, and to be clear, I'm not saying that necessarily as a defense and saying people can definitely do this. I'm just saying that it's, let's keep [00:57:34] Speaker B: it on the table. Yeah. [00:57:36] Speaker A: That it is theoretically possible. We know the mechanism by which they would have to do that. And so I can't say as a non neuroscientist that that would be physically impossible to do. [00:57:49] Speaker B: All of the training in the world isn't gonna somehow activate your left eyebrow muscle. [00:57:58] Speaker A: My, I don't know. But yeah, I haven't figured it out. [00:58:01] Speaker B: I can't, I can't kind of train myself out of schizophrenia, to use your right analogy. [00:58:12] Speaker A: Nor could you train yourself into it, I suppose. But yeah, like, you know, brains have certain things they, you know, can and can't do. However, you know, we do know that we can do things to disrupt processes, right? Like, so one of the things that we talk about all the time is that like, as much as it, you know, sucks to acknowledge, exercise is a way of, you know, mitigating depression. Right? Like, so we know that you can change things about, you know, the impulses in your brain and stuff like that to mitigate some issues that are going on in the brain. So we have more control over what's going on up there. In some ways than we realize. [00:58:49] Speaker B: This is very. [00:58:50] Speaker A: That's why I just wouldn't. [00:58:51] Speaker B: Very high concept it is here. Corrigan. [00:58:55] Speaker A: Right. I don't think that. Well, let me just go on with the rest of this and then maybe we can just. [00:59:04] Speaker B: This. Let's take this idea of looking down at oneself, right. An out of body experience. How that is being interpreted by your body because you are in a dream state. Also it's having the paralysis. Your homunculus is three feet to the right and your dream state interprets you as looking at yourself. You aren't actually looking at yourself obviously because your eyes are pointed. [00:59:26] Speaker A: Yeah. And let me actually get, get into a little bit more of the like [00:59:30] Speaker B: what I'm asking, kind of thinking out loud is even if I were able to induce a homunculus throwing state in myself, how might I even interpret that? Because my eyes are still physically positioned in my head. So. [00:59:45] Speaker A: Which we'll get to as well. But yeah, let me, let me give you a little bit more here and we can kind of think on that. So. Canadian researchers used FMRI to see what the brain of someone who said they could astral project was doing during the process. [01:00:00] Speaker B: Beautiful. [01:00:01] Speaker A: And again, the comparison to a phantom limb was made as well to an illusion called the rubber hand illusion. In this illusion, quote, the vision based belief that a rubber hand is not part of the participant's body is considered, countered by the simultaneous touching of the rubber hand and the real hand and leads to a shift in the attribution of the localization of sensory stimulus stimulation from the real hand to the rubber hand. In other words, the brain can be convinced that one's own hand is feeling the sensations of a rubber hand that is being touched. Mark, I sent you a video. Will you just click on that and play like the first minute and a half of it? [01:00:36] Speaker B: I will by all means. And I'll narrate what I'm seeing. I will also say that there's a [01:00:41] Speaker A: little narration in it. [01:00:42] Speaker B: But yes, I, if it's what I think it's going to be, I kind of, I do, I am aware of what the rubber hand illusion entails. Just turn this volume down here. So we have a fairground looks like a carnival setting. And a punter has rocked up to the, to the, to the booth here. And what she has, here's a rubber hand in front of her. Like a fake hand, Like a joke hand. [01:01:13] Speaker A: Yes. [01:01:14] Speaker B: And the practitioner, there's like a div. [01:01:17] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:01:18] Speaker B: Has erected a. Almost like A screen in front of her where her real hand is placed out of her view, out of her line of sight. And the fake hand is placed in front of her where her real hand would be. The practitioner here is stroking with a little brush here, the rubber hand, whilst also stroking her real hand out of sight of her at the same time. So to the woman, it would feel as though the pressure of the brush on the fake hand corresponds with the movement of the brush on her real hand. Thus, I can imagine homunculus getting a little fucked up here inside she's looking, obviously this is a fake hand. Obviously this is not my real hand. And yet the input, the physical input that I'm seeing is corresponding with the sensory input I'm receiving, right? [01:02:12] Speaker A: Like eventually he takes that brush away from the fake fake hand. [01:02:16] Speaker B: He has only brushes smashed her fake hand in and she has jumped, yes, [01:02:22] Speaker A: thinking that it is her real hand that is in peril. So just by doing this, it is, this is this homunculus body, she has replaced like a phantom limb, her actual hand with this little rubber hand. So he starts brushing just that hand and she's like, I can feel it even though he's not brushing her real hand. And then he goes to, you know, smash it with this hammer or whatever and she jumps, you know, like, oh my God. So we see the way that this very quickly, right? Like this isn't a, oh, she was conditioned over months or anything like that. Over the course of, you know, 30 seconds, she is, her brain has swapped that rubber hand for her hand and made her experience it like that. So in essence, what they're seeing is in these fmris, these self described astral projectors doing a larger version of this. They're hallucinating a double. In these self reported astral projection experiences, the subject was almost always in a relaxed or borderline sleeping state. So what you were saying, it's like in, you know, a half dream state. Much like our lucid dreamers and our paralyzed sleepers, the subjects also often had more perceptual anomalies in general than folks [01:03:34] Speaker B: who do not astral project perceptional anomalies. [01:03:37] Speaker A: Perceptual anomalies, as in there are other things that they see or experience in their perception that other people don't as well. So that might be something like they're reporting like ESP or telekinesis or, you know, things like that. Other things that, you know, most people would not report in their perception. And they in general, quote, responded strongly to aversive visual patterns suggesting that the visual system of the participants are somehow different, at least functionally. And this led researchers to believe that these experiences are connected to temporal lobe anomalies. So the question of whether astral projection or any of these other experiences is real is almost the wrong one. Are we actually being awakened by demons and vampires sitting on our chests? No. Can our souls, or however you want to put it, leave our bodies and go on walkabout? No. There's no evidence that that is a thing that can happen. But in terms of perception, these things are absolutely real to the people who experience them, which I find fascinating. It's easy to chalk these things up to sort of the same impulses that drive people to tarot cards and astrology and so on. But from a neuroscience perspective, these are actually a very real combination of brain topography, chemical reactions, external stimuli, etc. And so that explains why these people have been having these experiences around the world pretty much since the dawn of time. But regarding astral projection, and to your point before, as Dr. Susan Blackmore wrote, quote, you're probably asking yourself the obvious questions. If the astral body can see without using physical eyes, why do we need to have eyes in the first place? And if we do need eyes, how is the astral body supposed to see without them? And I think that pretty much sums up how material real that particular activity is. [01:05:31] Speaker B: Okay, Listen, again, very high concept that. A lot to wrestle with there. Yes, a lot, a lot to wrestle with. A lot to interrogate. [01:05:45] Speaker A: Right. [01:05:46] Speaker B: For me personally, you know, I'm very, I think. Go on. [01:05:51] Speaker A: Yeah, go ahead. Oh, I was just gonna say, I think, like, that's what's so interesting about this is like, you know, if sort of the in between of these things that they're not getting, like, I mean, I don't know, I've heard of these kinds of things, but I don't know if there's ever actually been any movement on it. They're not, you know, you're dreaming and they are projecting your dream on a screen or something like that. Right. Like, they're not taking that, you know, and creating a one to one image or anything like that. I think, as far as I know, you know, I know that there have been attempts at doing those kinds of things, but that's not what we're talking about here. But in terms of understanding, like what exactly is like going on, the cool thing that we have now is that we can kind of figure out what kinds of anomalies and things like that in the brain cause certain things and we can look at like the connections between like what is happening when we dream, what is lighting up around our brain, things like that, that tell us things about like what is actively going on in there. And I think that's kind of a cool, like, because neuroscience is obviously the thing that we just like keep coming back around to. And I think that it's one of the cooler sciences because it is constantly sort of uncovering these things that seem undiscoverable. [01:07:03] Speaker B: Yes. [01:07:04] Speaker A: To us. And finding out like, what are the mechanisms by which this stuff works. [01:07:09] Speaker B: Anything that I, what I would love to see. Right. There are few things I'd love to see in my lifetime. Right. [01:07:17] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:07:17] Speaker B: Evidence of non terrestrial life is one of them. But, and like I've said plenty of times before, that doesn't mean necessarily sentient or conscious life, but microbial life would do it for me. [01:07:30] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:07:30] Speaker B: You know, we're getting there and it's, it's, you know, when, not if. But I, I would love to see that while I, while I'm still breathing. And another is some kind of measurable explanation for consciousness. Right. God, how fucking well. [01:07:55] Speaker A: And isn't that what everyone's been chasing forever? [01:07:58] Speaker B: I would love that. And look, I don't enrage you, right? I don't want to do that, but I am, I, I, I kind of think that experience is less complicated than maybe people make it out to be. I, I think there's so much is given to interpretation and culture and influence. I, I don't know, man. I, I think, I don't know. I don't know. I, I, I, I'm not articulating it brilliantly, but I, I really think that, I don't know if, if, if it was, if, if it were just, if it were as easy as working out which bits of your brain fire when you throw your homunculus and can somebody learn to do it? I think everybody should be able to do it if one person can do it. [01:09:06] Speaker A: Well. And yeah, I mean, I think this is one of those like things that, which is, it's what we were talking about at the beginning. Right. Like that I think you agree with is that you tend to take your experiences universal and that that to you makes sense as an idea. Like if I, if, you know, everybody can, if I can do it, everyone can and vice versa. [01:09:30] Speaker B: I don't even think maybe it's my, I don't think it's as simple as I think my experience of the world is universal to everyone. I think it's more, I work a lot on Intuition. I. I intuit a lot of my, My. My feelings about the world. And I intuitively feel as though I've got a really good handle on what is and isn't real. [01:09:56] Speaker A: And I think, you know what, that's a great way of putting it, and I think that's why we butt head so much on things like this, is because I. While I think that I have fairly good intuition about things, I also think that I see it as more faulty than you do. [01:10:15] Speaker B: Right. We're getting. We're making progress. [01:10:17] Speaker A: We're getting there. And so I think a lot of times this comes to stuff like, you know, I. I don't trust an intuition whether it's right or wrong. You know, I mean, I do to an extent. I'm not the kind of person who's like second guessing everything all the time. But when I do have an intuition about something, I think the first thing I do is check to see if I'm wrong about it. And that is why I get so frustrated, because I'm like, we're coming at it from different angles. Is that you trust that, like that intuitive feeling you have. [01:10:52] Speaker B: Very confident in my own. [01:10:54] Speaker A: And I have the opposite reaction where I'm like, ah. I should really. I should really look that up before assuming that that's correct. [01:11:01] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:11:02] Speaker A: This causes a lot of frustration between the two. [01:11:06] Speaker B: Listen, I'm not kidding. This is real progress. This is genuine insight. [01:11:11] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:11:12] Speaker B: When I have an intuition about something. When I have an intuition about something, my. I will follow it. My first instinct is to completely trust in it and use it to shape my worldview. [01:11:27] Speaker A: Oh, man. Cue the Odd Couple theme. [01:11:30] Speaker B: What is the Odd Couple theme? Would you care to. [01:11:32] Speaker A: I know. I don't know off the top of my head. [01:11:37] Speaker B: That's not it. What's that? [01:11:39] Speaker A: I Dream of Genie. [01:11:40] Speaker B: Okay, let me quote directly from my notes, if I may. [01:11:45] Speaker A: Yes, please do. [01:11:46] Speaker B: Fucking look at these nerds. Oh, mise en scene. [01:11:50] Speaker A: I don't think anyone has ever said mise en scene in such a horny way before. [01:11:54] Speaker B: The way I whispered the word. [01:11:55] Speaker A: Sex Clan Cannibal receiving worst comes to worst. Mark, I'm willing to guillotine you for science. [01:12:00] Speaker B: Thank you. That's really, really sweet. It's cold outside, but my pancreas is talking to me. I'm fucking. I'm gonna leg it. [01:12:07] Speaker A: You know how I feel about that, Mark? [01:12:09] Speaker B: I think you feel great about it. Good evening. Good evening, Corrigan. [01:12:17] Speaker A: Good evening, [01:12:20] Speaker B: Jack of all graves. This week you find. Let me see. You find Me particular, I can't describe what mood you're in, Corrigan. I don't know. You're on the other side of the world. But I mean what mood I'm in. Well, not for sure. Not. Not. [01:12:35] Speaker A: Okay. [01:12:36] Speaker B: Share in the same space as you. I thought I knew but you swerved me. [01:12:43] Speaker A: Hold up one of those little like autism like you know, charts and be like. Match facial expression to the emotion. [01:12:50] Speaker B: Yeah. But I'm, I'm. It's been a great weekend. I'm in a kind of a goofy mood. I'm in a kind of a quite a light hearted mood. Full of optimism for the weekend. [01:12:59] Speaker A: Light hearted and punchy in equal measure [01:13:01] Speaker B: but at the same time still suffused with dread. [01:13:05] Speaker A: You know, Sunday scaries. [01:13:08] Speaker B: And that's interesting to me. I was thinking about this earlier on today, right. Sunday evenings it's like society or maybe British society. I don't know if it's the same in the States, but British society has dedicated like a eight hour period of time dedicated solely to it. Not really feeling like it's much of it. It's not like a real Sunday afternoon. But after 4pm on a Sunday, it's not the weekend, it's not the working week. It's this. It's this. [01:13:44] Speaker A: You're in the back rooms of the week. [01:13:46] Speaker B: It's the back rooms of the week. That's what it is when you can't really do anything. You can't really start anything, you can't really sell. TV is fucking weird. [01:13:59] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:14:00] Speaker B: You can't really switch off because you know that soon you're gonna need to switch on. [01:14:06] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:14:06] Speaker B: And it's that I, I was wondering earlier on if maybe we should think about rescheduling Joag weekly our slot. [01:14:16] Speaker A: Okay. [01:14:17] Speaker B: Because it's not. [01:14:18] Speaker A: I find because of the Sunday anxiety. [01:14:21] Speaker B: I'm never like full of energy and raring to go on a Sunday evening, you know. [01:14:25] Speaker A: Right. [01:14:26] Speaker B: And I wonder if, I wonder if maybe maybe that's part of what gives Joag its je ne sais quoi, you know. [01:14:34] Speaker A: Right. A lot of manic energy, manic sun energy has sustained us for these six years. Maybe. Yeah. I have such like a. I think you're right about like that kind of being the societal thing about Sunday. I have like subverted that in my own personal life by like making Sunday a thing. It's because we do this and I enjoy, you know, hanging out with my bestie. [01:15:00] Speaker B: I love it. [01:15:00] Speaker A: And then I, you know, often have grading to do to finish up. But then I sort of settle in and I clean up everything that's like been left out and stuff like that. There's dishes to do, I do dishes, I clean up, put away laundry, if there's laundry to put away, you know, change my sheets, I take a nice shower, like a nice long shower, you know, not just my like clean off shower. And then you know, spend time like lotioning all that kind of stuff. And then I plan like my like week. So, so I do like a checklist in my, you know, Apple Notes or whatever of what I'm gonna do every day. And then I feel like I have everything like figured out for the rest of the week. And then I watch like a, there's usually on Food Network something on Sunday nights. So I will watch like a Food Network show and you know, then read and go to sleep and it's like a, it's like I end up, I end Sunday feeling very clean and prepared for the week, which is like what I want out of things. Right. [01:15:58] Speaker B: I, I've often felt clean, I've often felt prepared. I've never, I can't ever think of a time I felt both clean and [01:16:06] Speaker A: prepared at the same time on a Sunday night. [01:16:09] Speaker B: Just ever. I mean, I've been dirty and prepared. [01:16:12] Speaker A: Sure. [01:16:12] Speaker B: I've been clean and caught off guard, [01:16:17] Speaker A: you know, you should try it sometime. It's a really good feeling. Make yourself a really nice checklist. Take a cold shower, get yourself like just crisp and then, you know, feel the beauty of knowing your life is in order. [01:16:32] Speaker B: Oh God, [01:16:35] Speaker A: I recommend it. Anyone out there dealing with the Sunday scaries? Try it my way. See how, see how it works out for you. [01:16:43] Speaker B: So let me see what's going on. [01:16:46] Speaker A: We had book club yesterday. [01:16:49] Speaker B: Okay. I was going to talk about fires. I was going to talk about Britain. Still on fire. Still a lot of wildfires in Britain, I'm told. Oh, shouting to my dad. [01:16:57] Speaker A: Okay, we'll get to book club. [01:16:58] Speaker B: We'll get to book club. Shouting to my dad early and he tells me that Daois, which is a area, a ruler at the top of Merthyr Tydville is currently on fire. [01:17:08] Speaker A: Oh, cool. Neat. [01:17:11] Speaker B: Just, they really, they need to get that under control soon because the damage could run into tens of pounds. [01:17:22] Speaker A: But was that your dad's joke or did you. [01:17:27] Speaker B: No, that was mine. That was mine. Very proud of it. And I've, I've secretly been just dying to get onto. Waiting to do that. [01:17:35] Speaker A: Yeah, the three people who are gonna get that. [01:17:38] Speaker B: Yep. Listen to this. So anyway, book club now that's out of the way. [01:17:43] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, book club. We had book club yesterday. It was a delight. None of us liked the book. Alfie said he liked the book, didn't love the book. But we all had basically spent the whole time complaining about it with Silver Nitrina Garcia. [01:17:59] Speaker B: Okay. [01:18:00] Speaker A: And we've liked other of her books before, so it was a little bit of a surprise. This one didn't work as well for us, but we had a great time. The funniest thing, though, that during this book club, to me, was that we realized for the first time that basically everyone in book club is in some way hypermobile. That's crazy. There is a strong correlation between hypermobility and neurodivergence. Autism, adhd, things like that. Tons of research into that, that these things tend to be correlated with one another. Hypermobility and Ehlers Danlos syndrome are not synonymous. So you can be hypermobile and not have EDS like me. But it was the funniest thing that, like, I said something about some weird hypermobile thing I did. And then like, I think it was Alicia was like, oh, I like, I do this thing and it freaks people out. And, you know, bending her the top of her finger backwards. And then everyone started like bending their elbows backwards and stuff like that. And I was like, holy shit, everyone in here is hyper mobile. This is. Is bizarre. So if you're hyper mobile and you've been looking for a book club full of similarly similar mutants, come join us. We have a good time. We're reading the Eyes Are the Best Part next month. I believe Monica Kim is the author. Very excited about that is the best [01:19:29] Speaker B: novel I've ever read on the book club list yet Between Two Fires. [01:19:34] Speaker A: No, I also realized you were supposed to give that to me when I was over there and we forgot about it. [01:19:41] Speaker B: I'm glad I didn't actually, because I'm gonna read it again. Please put it on the book club list. [01:19:45] Speaker A: Okay. Is it a horror novel? [01:19:47] Speaker B: It is. Yeah, right. It is. [01:19:50] Speaker A: Well, listen, we're soliciting things for our next calendar, so, Marco, go on Discord and put it in the book club info channel there, because that's where we're taking all suggestions. If it doesn't go in there, I will forget about it immediately. [01:20:06] Speaker B: Can I not just tell you now to do it? [01:20:08] Speaker A: No. [01:20:10] Speaker B: You're making me go through the process. You're making me go through the fucking process. [01:20:13] Speaker A: Go through the process. [01:20:14] Speaker B: That's not petty. [01:20:16] Speaker A: That's not petty. I'm trying to make sure we read the book that you've chosen and I will not remember it after this conversation. [01:20:21] Speaker B: It is the best novel I have ever fucking read. And that's not Recency Bias. It actually is. [01:20:30] Speaker A: Okay, well, I'm willing to. I would like to read it. [01:20:33] Speaker B: So moving and so visceral and so fucking gripping and so eloquent. Oh, man. Staggeringly good. It's incredible that I think. I think about it every day. [01:20:44] Speaker A: Oh, wow. That's pretty impressive. [01:20:47] Speaker B: Even though I'm halfway through another book, I still think about Between Two Fires on a daily basis. I think of bits from it all the fucking time. God, it's good. [01:20:57] Speaker A: It's a good feeling. Oh, that good? Well, we'll. We'll do that. We also, I think we're gonna do a watch along on Saturday. [01:21:05] Speaker B: We are indeed. We'll do a watch along on Saturday. I haven't go. We don't have a theme yet. [01:21:13] Speaker A: No. [01:21:13] Speaker B: Or a movie yet. [01:21:15] Speaker A: Yeah, we'll see where the spirit moves Marco over the course. Maybe it'll come to him in a dream. [01:21:20] Speaker B: It might. If anyone's got any suggestions or anything, they'd like us to gather around and watch. [01:21:28] Speaker A: To watch. Remember, this is not the Scream and Chat. So maybe entertaining movies only. [01:21:34] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. [01:21:37] Speaker A: You know, we watched something this. Well, it was, it wasn't that that bad this week. But you know, the screaming chat often does like, just like any old thing that's on YouTube or whatever. And so sometimes we don't even watch it because it's like this. This is a nothing movie. But no, if there's something you've been itching to watch, you're like, the chat needs to. Needs to watch this. [01:21:57] Speaker B: Yeah. I'm open to suggestions. Obviously I am the arbiter of the final decision, but I'm wide open to any input or insight or guidance at this point. [01:22:08] Speaker A: Yes. This week Mark is also going to find us like a real deep cut foreign movie for us to do for our snack for this month. You want it to be. Last month's was. Was a very exciting film. We're gonna go easy. Yes. We're gonna go a little harder this time. [01:22:26] Speaker B: What? I. Yes. I, I just, I feel that there's maybe like an, like a Tibetan or like a fucking, you know, like a, like a Hindu horror movie. I think there's something challenging or inscrutable to our western fucking. Yeah. What's the word I'm looking for? [01:22:48] Speaker A: Yeah. Something that bears no resemblance to our myths and things like that. Yeah. So we'll, we'll come at you with that sometime in the coming week or so as well. A new installment maybe let you know [01:23:02] Speaker B: because listen, what it is. [01:23:03] Speaker A: Watch it too. [01:23:04] Speaker B: Now that Joy Glendon is in the. In the. In the books, it's bau, isn't it? It's back to business. [01:23:09] Speaker A: It is. Yep. Exactly. We're rolling into the fall. You know, it's that time. It's. It's nor. It's the school year and Joag is back in session, if you will. [01:23:21] Speaker B: I love that in the kind of wrap up of this episode, in the last few minutes we've got here, it occurred to me earlier on that as we are on a birthday with six. [01:23:34] Speaker A: We're six years next week. [01:23:36] Speaker B: Next week we're nearly six. Right. [01:23:39] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:23:43] Speaker B: Are we. Do we still need to fire our rubbish into space? You know, are we, Are we globally, are we culturally making any steps [01:23:59] Speaker A: even [01:24:00] Speaker B: vaguely in the right direction? [01:24:03] Speaker A: That's a good question. [01:24:04] Speaker B: Or not. [01:24:06] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:24:06] Speaker B: Well, what if. I mean, have you heard of. Obviously you'd have heard of. Reporters at Borders. Reporters sans frontier. No, have you not Doctors, much like medicine. Sans frontier. There's reporting about borders as well. [01:24:30] Speaker A: Okay. [01:24:30] Speaker B: Even before we talk about climate. Right. And we will. [01:24:33] Speaker A: Okay. [01:24:34] Speaker B: It's very fun to find that every year RSF compiles something known as the World Press Freedom Index. Right. [01:24:48] Speaker A: Oh, no. Yeah. [01:24:50] Speaker B: And this, this is not gonna be. Oh, it's awful. It's awful. This year's was published in April and you'd be delighted to hear that of the 180 countries that they rank in terms of press freedom, and their methodology is incredibly forensic. Right. They use political and legal and economic context. They index the numbers of abuses in a country against journalists, against media. And you will be delighted to hear that of the 180 countries that they rank, more than half now fall into the category of difficult or very serious press freedom. Less than 1% of the world's population, according to reporter Somme, Frontier now live in a place where press freedom is rated as good since. [01:25:56] Speaker A: Yikes. [01:25:56] Speaker B: That's incredible. Incredible, Incredible, incredible stuff. In 20. Where. [01:26:01] Speaker A: Where is good? [01:26:03] Speaker B: Where is good? [01:26:04] Speaker A: Who's in that 1%? [01:26:05] Speaker B: What if I said the number one is. Would you like to guess the freest press in the world? [01:26:15] Speaker A: Freest press in the world. [01:26:18] Speaker B: Take a stab at it. Take a stab at it. Take a stab. Think. [01:26:21] Speaker A: Gosh, this is really hard. [01:26:23] Speaker B: Think of population satisfaction. Think of, right. [01:26:27] Speaker A: Prisons, in fact, maybe like, say like, probably like Norway or Denmark. [01:26:32] Speaker B: Norway. [01:26:33] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay. [01:26:34] Speaker B: It is Norway, Netherlands, Estonia, Denmark. These are the top five. Sweden. [01:26:41] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:26:41] Speaker B: UK we come in at 18th the US 64th. 64th in terms of freedom, the press and let's talk about. [01:26:52] Speaker A: It's not good. [01:26:53] Speaker B: There's so many other indicators. Climate also. Right. The 23, 4 and 5 were the three warmest years ever. [01:27:02] Speaker A: Yeah. I feel that [01:27:06] Speaker B: it actually. It actually chilled out a little bit in 2025, but only in that it's gone. Got worse. A little less, you know. [01:27:16] Speaker A: Yeah, right. The increment was smaller, but I think this year probably blew that out of the water. [01:27:22] Speaker B: A three year period. 23 to 25. A three year period where 1.5 degrees above pre industrialization. The Paris threshold. [01:27:34] Speaker A: That I was gonna say, like we got to that so quickly. [01:27:38] Speaker B: Super quickly. [01:27:40] Speaker A: That is like that was, you know what, like six years ago that we were like, all right, we gotta make sure we don't hit one degree. [01:27:48] Speaker B: You'll enjoy this. [01:27:49] Speaker A: And we have already blown past that to the Paris agreement limit. [01:27:53] Speaker B: Hell, what if I said the word wealth Concentration. Right. [01:27:58] Speaker A: Okay. [01:27:58] Speaker B: You're gonna enjoy this. [01:28:00] Speaker A: I bet I won't. [01:28:02] Speaker B: This is according to Oxfam. Since 2020. Right. Within our lifespan. Within Joag's lifespan, yeah. Billionaire wealth globally is up 81%. Me, 81%. [01:28:25] Speaker A: Jesus Christ. [01:28:28] Speaker B: The. It's incredible. The 12 wealthiest people alive hold more combined wealth than the poorest half of humankind. Four billion other people. [01:28:38] Speaker A: So crazy. [01:28:38] Speaker B: Isn't that incredible? [01:28:41] Speaker A: And it feels. You can tell. [01:28:43] Speaker B: It feels like you can fucking feel it. You can feel it. Democracy also. There's an American institution known as Freedom House. Does that ring a bell to you? If you heard of those. [01:28:57] Speaker A: We got a lot of freedom things here. Blends together. [01:28:59] Speaker B: Yes, of course. Of their findings, 54 countries have seen just in 2025 seen deterioration in civil liberties, political rights. According to Freedom House, 21 of the population of the world, just 21% lives in a country that they rate as, quote, free. Right. [01:29:27] Speaker A: Guessing we're not one of them. [01:29:29] Speaker B: Ha. Other. There are so many other metrics. Displacement, representation, representation. Where's the fucking stat? [01:29:45] Speaker A: This is about to be very depressing, isn't it? [01:29:51] Speaker B: Where's the stat? There isn't a single national economy. Not one. There isn't a single national economy that gives complete parity in economic and legal rights to women. Not one. Not a single one. [01:30:09] Speaker A: Jesus. Oh man. Not even our northern pals? [01:30:13] Speaker B: Not even. Not. Not a single one. There are it. It's an interesting one. Globally, kind of like as in ruling powers, the gender and inequality has widened at local levels, local politicians, local politics and government. It's improved. But the, the on a, on a global kind of scale, there's still just ridiculous gaps in political empowerment. Health is fascinating as well. US health has actually weirdly improved. Your life expectancy is up. [01:30:55] Speaker A: Oh, finally. [01:30:56] Speaker B: To record high 2024. Your life expectancy hit 79. Right, okay. [01:31:02] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:31:02] Speaker B: What if I told you drug overdose deaths. This is incredible. Year on year, 24 to 25 overdose deaths went down by a quarter 24%. [01:31:16] Speaker A: I buy that. Yeah. [01:31:17] Speaker B: Isn't that fascinating? [01:31:18] Speaker A: See that? [01:31:20] Speaker B: However, suicide rates are up in the States. [01:31:24] Speaker A: That by that as well as they are. Both of those things make sense. [01:31:28] Speaker B: In the UK, there's a 4 to 1 male to female ratio in the States, 3 to 1 in the UK. And even though that, that rate of drug deaths has fallen so much, Incredibly, the number one cause of death in people in the states between 18 and 44 is overdose. Still more than heart disease, more than cancer. [01:31:58] Speaker A: Jeez Louise. [01:31:59] Speaker B: Overdose. Highest fucking killer of people between 18 and 44. [01:32:04] Speaker A: Society's fine. Don't worry about it. [01:32:06] Speaker B: The world. Listen, just in the six years, six years of us having weekly conversations, watching it all happen, it's just all happening quicker than you might have thought. [01:32:22] Speaker A: Yeah. I think that's really what kind of stands out here is like the, the rate of speed of all of this on the one hand. I mean, part of that is just time moving quickly in our eyes at this point too. Because if you think about like what like scientists have been saying about climate, for example, you know, they said we're basically going to be like by 2030 at the point of no return when it comes to the climate. And that will be looking at like, you know, 2 to 2.5 degrees by then, which we are very much on track for. But it feels very fast. But that is what they were telling us was going to happen if we don't make any changes. And instead of making changes, we started wars all over the place that, you know, are detrimental. We've built data centers everywhere that are killing the environment. [01:33:11] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:33:11] Speaker A: We've just like taken all of that and just speedrun it. [01:33:14] Speaker B: This point in our history, that's when we decide to do this. [01:33:17] Speaker A: Yeah, like when things were already at, like, this will be catastrophic for us. We came up with a couple extra ways to speed up that process. [01:33:27] Speaker B: Super fascinating to me that this piece about wealth, wealth distribution, press freedom. Super linked. Very, very fucking closely linked. Look who owns the media now. Recently, just in the last few years, there's the Washington Post, Twitter, the LA Times, Paramount, CBS, 60 Minutes. All owned by, like, six people. [01:33:58] Speaker A: Exactly, yeah. I mean, this is why even, like, being 64th on that list feels generous, you know, because it's very clear that our press is not free and is very much determined by those wealthy guys who own them and that we're getting, you know, when they're like, say, abc, for example, the channel that I watch the most, which definitely pushes back against, you know, the government and stuff like that more than other channels do, and even then so lightly, but they're, you know, accept less than other ones do. Has been constantly targeted by the FCC to the point of threatening to basically take them off the air. And, like, for the past several months, they've been running these things, you know, with like, a QR code, like, tell the FCC that, you know, you need this channel and all that kind of. Of stuff, because for political reasons, they're about to take this channel that has existed since, like, the dawn of broadcasting off the air because they're too critical of Trump. You know, like, that's. How is that not pushing us further down the list than 64 at this point, where. And it's, you know, it's tempting to [01:35:10] Speaker B: say that wait it out, you know, he's not going to be around forever, [01:35:15] Speaker A: but it still has a couple more years. [01:35:16] Speaker B: The. The precedent has been fucking set right now, and surely, you know, future candidates are gonna want to fucking build on that. Control are gonna want to build on that. [01:35:31] Speaker A: And, yeah, this is what becomes so important about these, like, you know, elections, these primaries and things like that, and them going to, you know, leftist candidates and whatnot who don't want to work with these rich people. And we have before, I mean, when it comes to, like, say in the 1980s, Reaganism did a lot to, like, deregulate things, you know, and the regulation of media has been like, a constant back and forth every time between Republicans, Democrats, Republican, Democrats. And there has never been enough protections put in place to make sure that this stuff doesn't happen again. And what's crazy is to watch, like, media consolidation and things like this happen, these big mergers which, like, it was decided probably 15 years ago that this shit shouldn't be allowed to happen. Right? But you get a different president and different courts and things like that, and all of a sudden, like, yeah, it's fine, and Democrats that don't push back against any of this stuff and ultimately roll over and let it happen. And it's like, this is when it becomes, you know, if we are ever to bounce back from this afterwards, like, it is important that we have a Congress that is like, no, break it up, break it up, break it up. Every one of these needs to be forcibly broken up with. No. You know, right now the billionaires just pay off someone in Congress. You know, you buy a congressman and you're fine, you know, and it has to be that we have people in place that go like, that cannot be how this shit is run. Break up these companies. [01:37:00] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:37:01] Speaker A: You know, make sure that they don't have this power over every element of the media that they have now. [01:37:07] Speaker B: But it's, it's. But they, but, but they do, you [01:37:11] Speaker A: know, but, but they do. Is the. Right now there are no guardrails. Even though this stuff has already been decided in US Law. Fifteen years ago, you could not do these mergers. This would have been immediately the FCC going, fuck off. There's just no way. [01:37:27] Speaker B: But they do. I mean, but back to, back to Oxfam, a tiny, tiny proportion, less than 30% of large scale news organizations are run by women. Even less than that, a non white, [01:37:46] Speaker A: you know, of course. [01:37:51] Speaker B: So I know that we need to sort out the problems with our environment on earth before we think about shooting the rubbish into space, but it ain't fucking happening. [01:38:05] Speaker A: Well, and the thing is that now these billionaires are trying to make space trash and whatnot anyway, so they're gonna fill it up with their own space trash before we can send ours there. [01:38:15] Speaker B: I, I use, I use that as a kind of a reference point for everything that we've been talking about this episode. Right. Obviously fucking. Obviously the goals are fucking vital, but it doesn't look like it's happening, you know? [01:38:41] Speaker A: Right. Yeah. Especially when we look at how quickly all of this went to shit. You know, from a. Hey, things are kind of bad to have. Can we. [01:38:52] Speaker B: Is it. [01:38:52] Speaker A: Do we come back from this? [01:38:54] Speaker B: Is it maybe idealism, I think that I have an issue with in the sense of overwhelming evidence. [01:39:02] Speaker A: Mm. Yeah. I think there's like a part of you that sees yourself as a realist and. [01:39:09] Speaker B: Sure. [01:39:09] Speaker A: You know, doesn't and feels like. And I want to say that like idealism, I don't think is what it is. I think there's like pragmatism. I think there's like a. There's more to it than just idealism. Right. It's not blind hope that people have. It's knowing that we have solutions and the main issue is the implementation of them. And I think people are pretty realistic about, you know, the roadblocks that are in the way while also trying to leave room for that means we work harder. And I think that's the thing, is that from, from certain perspectives it can look like there is no movement and no one's doing anything, which is not the case, that there are in fact lots of people, scientists, activists, politicians, all that kind of stuff who are doing things. And it's a matter of, you know, A, we don't see it necessarily, B, getting more people behind all this stuff and doing things as well, which I see elements of for sure in day to day life and increases in mutual aid. And I don't mean that in the like Internet way, but in like mutual aid organizations and communities, in, you know, people's tiring of consumerism. Right. And sort of like you see this pushback right now against like all the things that made TikTok big and these influencers selling you shit and stuff like that. And you see such fatigue with that and a realization of like the fact that we can't live like this. Pushbacks against fast fashion pushes towards, you know, all kinds of sort of habits in life that, you know, contribute to, you know, just sort of like activism and things of that nature. So I don't know, I think when I look at it, there's always a degree of idealism and it's necessary and I see why that can just be like a thing that, I don't know, you kind of have a instinct to push back against. But I do think that there is also a grounded idealism, a thing where there are actually people who are doing the boots on the ground work that, you know, is important in trying to actually fucking change things. But it's also, I mean, I think of like in terms of mindset. Right. Like again, to go back to Reagan and I talked about this on the fan cave this year, you know, Gen X is the most conservative generation. [01:41:36] Speaker B: Yep. [01:41:38] Speaker A: And that happened based on the social and political landscape around them. Right. Like what Reagan promised them in terms of like the outcome of consumerism and you know, deregulation and things like that. And the way that people who are like teenagers and young adults at that point bought in to what he was selling. And now those are extremely conservative, Trump supporting people. You know, at this point in time, Gen Xers more than boomers are largely Trump supporters. No other generation even comes closer. And then you see like millennials who are like the exact opposite and are very sort of anti consumerist, like, you know, a lot of communists among the millennials, things like that. And it came from the social landscape that we grew up in that was a response to Reagan. Right. All the media that we watched was very anti capitalist. You know, the things that we grew up on were very much pushing back against the kinds of things that were promoted. Homophobia and, you know, all these different things. And it changed things politically. So I think there's a sense that, like, we do have to account for the degree to which there is backlash against a world that sucks. [01:42:56] Speaker B: I. I hope it happens quicker. [01:43:03] Speaker A: Yeah, it needs to happen like really fast, though. Like, we don't have a lot of time to around with this, as it turns out. We don't have. We don't have decades new to turn this around. We got like a few minutes, so like, let's go. You know, tell me what to do. What do we, what do we do? Someone come up with a plan. I'm in. Just tell me where to put my boots on the ground. Let's go. [01:43:26] Speaker B: All right, let's call it. [01:43:28] Speaker A: It's been a good set of conversations, I believe. [01:43:32] Speaker B: As it always is. [01:43:34] Speaker A: As it always is. I enjoy your company greatly, Mark Lewis. [01:43:38] Speaker B: Likewise. All right. Stay spooky. [01:43:42] Speaker A: Yeah. Do.