One of my favorite subjects on this channel is text editors, and I've made a lot of videos about two text editors, Vim and Emacs, but I understand not everybody wants to use Vim or Emacs, because those two text editors obviously have steep learning curves, it's going to take a long time to learn how to use those particular text editors. Vim is a little weird in the fact that it has to be run in a terminal, right? Many people just want a traditional graphical text editor that they can jump right into and start getting work done in. And what I would recommend is the text editor that I actually used before I discovered Vim and Emacs, and that text editor was Genie. So let me switch over to my desktop, and I don't believe I have Genie installed if I do a search for it in the menu. Yeah, I don't have it installed here on my workstation. I haven't actually used Genie in a long time, but it was a program I'm pretty familiar with. Like I said, I used it for a while before discovering Vim, so I'm going to go ahead and install Genie from the Arch repositories, and very quick installation, right? It's a very small package. And now let me launch Genie. So let's actually open a file. Let me go up here to the menu system, and I'm going to go into my home directory. And why don't we just, well, let me control H to show hidden files here in the file picker, because I think what I'm going to do is I'm just going to grab my Bash RC. Yeah, that way we can see some syntax highlighting and some Bash scripting. Now Genie out of the box is already very powerful. Obviously, we have the built in syntax highlighting. We have the split down here at the bottom. And if I make the split bigger, let me see if I can grab the border so you can see all the tabs. You have the status. You have the compiler. If you're compiling software that you're working on, you have messages. You have Scribble, which is you can think of it as a scratch pad. You can write yourself notes. And then of course, you have a terminal, which is useful if you need to run terminal commands. For example, like a sudo make install, you know, to compile something. In the left hand column, you see we have symbols, and then we have functions, and then we have EX and up. And those are two functions that I've written into my Bash RC. So, you know, if I click on EX, that is the extract function here, which is just a case statement for TAR and BZ, GZ and ZIP and DEM, seven ZIP and things like that. This is an extraction function where if I do EX and then name a file, if it ends in .7 ZIP, for example, it will run the proper seven ZIP command to extract that file. If it's TAR.XZ, it will run the appropriate TAR command to extract that file. That way I don't have to remember, you know, like 15 different extraction commands. I've written a function that kind of takes care of that for me. So obviously, with the symbols on the side, the syntax highlighting, and then the tabs down here with the terminal and the compiler and all of that. Obviously, Genie is more of an IDE. It really is an IDE rather than just a plain text editor.  I use Genie for a long time, and I don't consider myself a programmer or developer. I don't use most of the functions that are available inside this program, but even just simple edits, you know, you just wanting to do a quick config file edit. Genie was really fun to use, intuitive. One of the things that I liked about it is it is extensible. There are plugins available. For example, we're going to have to adjust the theme because this blinding white background I don't like. If you want to change the colors, you can go into edit. Actually, it's not in edit. I believe it is in view. Yeah, change color schemes. And there's only two here by default. And neither one of them is a dark theme. Well, that's okay, because we can actually go grab some themes off the internet. So let me launch a browser here, launch Brave here. And I'm going to search for Genie color schemes. And right here from the genie.org website, you can download themes or what I would do is just go grab this this GitHub repository here. And what you want to do, does it have installation instructions? Yeah, so all we need to do is get clone this repository and then run the installation shell script that is included here. So let me grab the URL. So I'm just going to copy that URL. And then what I'm going to do, let me open a terminal. I'm going to do a get clone and then the location of that repository. And now let's CD into genie dash themes, because that's the directory that it created. If I do an LS, you will see there is an install.sh file that's the install script. And then do period slash and then name of script to run the script. And it just placed all of those various genie themes, wherever it needed to be on the system and in some directory on my system. So now when I go to view change color scheme, now I have a whole bunch of other color schemes like dark gula, which is essentially a variant of Dracula dark colors, dark fruit salad, dark. Let's see. One of my favorites is monikai. That's very nice. Solarized dark is very easy on the eyes. I may just go with that. I think what I'll do is I'm going to go ahead since I haven't used genie in a while, I might actually keep it on my system and play with it. I'm going to go into preferences. So if you go into edit, preferences, let's go ahead and set this up. I'm going to show you exactly how I would set this up for my use. I'm going to pick a better font than the default mono space font. I'm going to do mononoke nerd font. And I'm going to increase the size here for you guys so you guys can see on camera. If we go into editor line wrapping, yeah, I definitely want line wrapping line breaking column that after 72 characters. Yeah, so that's this this line here is letting us know that's the 72 character mark. I typically get rid of that line because it's not something that's part of my workflow or you know, something where I really need to stay under a certain character limit. But for those of you that do need that, that line is useful. Let me get back into edit preferences. Let me see what else needs to be set up here. So we had tools terminal. So if it needs to open an external terminal command, it's going to use X term dash E shell name of command. That's fine browser. I use brave. So I changed Firefox to brave the grip command is just plain good new grip. But a lot of people like to swap out grip with things like rip grip or the silver surfer, you know, other alternative grip kind of programs. So that's why that is there. Don't need to play with templates. I'm not going to play with key bindings. The terminal I am going to play with because by default, you really can't do much with the terminal as far as configuration. A lot of that's based on system settings, but it does allow you to change the font, the foreground color and the background color. So just to make things consistent with the terminal here, I'm going to do mononoke if I can spell it correctly mononoke nerd font. And once again, I'll do 14 point font for the foreground color, I'm going to choose a custom color. And I'll do one of the polarized colors. I'll do one of the light colors, believe the light color. I look this up by the way, that is like the light yellow color that is usually the default foreground color and solarized dark for the background color. I'll do let me see what is the default background color. Let's see if that matches. Let's hit apply. Yeah. So I'm going to make this bottom split a little larger since it's got larger text to work with. Now one of the cool things about Genie is if you go into tools, you have plugin manager because you can extend Genie with plugins and you have a plugin manager that's going to show you a whole bunch of plugins you can install. Well, it looks like by default, it's only going to show me about six or seven plugins I can install by default. And that's because we need to install an extra package. So here on arch what you want to install is genie dash plugins. So if I do, well, I'm in the bash RC. I'm missing up my bash RC I'm going to do down here in the terminal sudo pacman dash s genie dash plugins and then give it my sudo password. And now that is installed. If I go to tools plugin manager, I have a lot more plugins to take a look at some of the ones that I find kind of useful. I scroll down here. There is a tree browser plugin now that I've turned that on will have a little file system in the left hand column kind of like nerd tree and Vim or neotree and emacs. Of course, we got to get rid of the symbols. They scroll through the symbols and get to the tree browser tab. I'll make that a little bigger, but you can see now you've got basically your little file manager on the left hand column there. Those of you that want a mini map, there is a mini map here, but they don't call it a mini map. They call it the overview. If I turn that on, you see, I've got this little split over here that has a mini map. And you do have some customization options with the file tree and the mini map. There's a lot of plugins here. Most of them are geared toward developers. Most of these are not things that I would find useful like in my everyday work. Again, this is more of an IDE rather than just a plain text editor. There are some version control plugins that might be useful. You do have a spell check plugin. I'm going to go ahead and turn that on and a lot of HTML and XML stuff as well in there. Now, one thing I close the plugin manager a little too soon because there was actually one plugin I was interested in. Was there a VIM emulation? Yes, VIM mode. Now, I never used this back when I used Genie because I used Genie before I actually learned VIM, but let's actually turn this on and see if this works because now I'm assuming I'm in normal mode. Yeah, J moves down, K moves up, GG to the top, capital G. So that actually works. I for insert, this is a line of text, escape, DD to delete a line, P to paste, YY to copy a line, P to paste, U to undo, U to undo, U to undo. Let's see if we can actually do command mode. Can I do colon? Yes, but you get the prompt up here, but that's kind of cool. Colon and then if I do percent S for substitution and I substitute my name because I know it appears in the header and we'll change it to all caps and then slash G. Can I do a global substitution? It didn't give me any kind of confirmation on whether that actually worked or not, but let me go to the top header. Yes. So it did exactly what I asked it to do, if I U to undo. The VIM mode actually works pretty good, at least for very basic stuff. I mean, those are the VIM commands you're going to use pretty much all the time, probably with more advanced commands, especially a lot of the G commands, Z commands, anything that involves, you know, the leader keys, anything that involves the single quotes and things like that. Once you get into that kind of stuff, it probably falls apart, but for basic VIM emulation, that's pretty good. And really why I would want this turned on in this text editor, even though I use VIM and EvilMode and Emacs, is because many times I open up these other plain text editors on camera, and when I do, invariably, I try to quit with colon Q or I try to save a file with colon W. And it never works, right? And I actually mistakenly add colon Q into my bash or C, for example, or colon W. For example, right now, if I did escape to get into normal mode, colon W for right, yeah, it saved the file. It actually saved it. So I will never accidentally, you know, booger up some of my config files if I happen to be playing around in Genie. So I'm going to leave them mode definitely turned on. Now that we've got some of these plugins installed, if I go to edit and go to preferences like we did before, that's your standard preferences. But now you also have plugin preferences. And overview is the minimap and it's only 120 pixels wide. That's kind of a small minimap. I'm going to make it 200 just so we can actually see. Oh, let me hit apply. Okay. I don't like the scroll bar. Can I get rid of the scroll bar? I'd editor scroll bar. Hit apply. Oh, I like that. And we have spell check. I'm not going to play with that right now. The tree browser. We could change what terminal things open in. I mean, I could, of course, specify a Lackrity. I can show hidden files. I definitely want to do that. Let's hit apply on that. We could even turn on single click. I'm not going to do that, though. For those of you that want to see the minimap in action on a big file, yeah, I mean that it moves along rather smoothly. One interesting thing you can do with the interface. I mean, you can remove some of this stuff up here that you don't want, or you can move it from the top to the bottom and things like that. If you go into edit preferences and go into interface, you can show status bar or not show the status bar. If I hit apply, that bottom status bar goes away. I like the status bar because it does tell you line number, column number, and things like that. So it's actually kind of useful information. I'd probably leave that. If I go into toolbar, one of the cool things you can do here is show toolbar. If you don't need the toolbar, you can just turn it off. I hit apply. Now all the tools, you'd actually just have to go into the proper menu up here and look for things. But the toolbar, one thing you could do is show toolbar and also append a toolbar to the menu, hit apply, and now that toolbar, instead of being underneath the main menu, is off to the side. And that does save on space. And I find that actually rather pleasing. So I'm actually going to leave that. And if I really wanted to complete the look because it's kind of weird having the solarized theme everywhere, but then the GTK theme is this dark gray theme instead of like this blue aquamarine kind of theme. So there are solarized GTK themes. And Genie is a GTK application. So if I do Arch Linux and do solarized GTK, let's see, there is GTK3-theme-new mix-solarized in the AUR. So this package here, well let me open a terminal. And let me install this with Paru. So Paru and then name of package. And do we want to review the package build? No, not really. It's asking for sudo password because it's got to move that GTK theme that it's installing to a protected directory and user share theme. And now let me close the terminal. Let me close the browser. Let me open up LX appearance because that is a program I use to change GTK themes. And now I have new mix-solarized dark blue. Let me hit apply on that and see if those changes take place in Genie. Well, let me restart Genie. So close Genie and restart it. Yes, that looks amazing. Yeah, I could use this, right? And this is not just it's a good text editor because it's obviously a great text editor, but you can actually make it look kind of nice, right? You can actually rice it, right? This is something that you can't do with a lot of graphical applications. One thing I would miss in Vim and Emacs are splits. And I'm pretty sure they have some split plugins available for you. If I go into tools and go into plugin manager, let me do split. Yeah, split window. Yeah, let's turn that on. And now that I've installed that, go to tools. And this is where you're going to have some options for your plugins that you've installed. And we have this menu now for split window. So do we want to do a side by side split or top and bottom split? Let's do side by side. I kept the overview in the first one. So that's a little bit of a glitch. I wonder if I close Genie and reopen it. Yeah, well obviously the split goes away, but the minimap, the overview is still there as well. So I've gone on way too long here, theming and playing with Genie here, but I wanted to share with you guys this fantastic plain text editor. It's more than a text editor, right? It's obviously an IDE. It's really geared toward developers and programmers. And for those of you in that line of work and maybe looking for something, Genie is great. One of the reasons that I used Genie, what attracted me to it, is because for most text editors that have the kind of functionality that Genie has, which is a proper IDE, has got all these plugins and things, most of those editors that are out there are proprietary, you know, the IDE editors, you know, like sublime text, for example, to throw one out that's very popular that a lot of people use are all the IntelliJ IDEs and things like that. This is completely free and open source. Genie is actually licensed under the GPL. And for that, I respect that. It's one of the things that really attracted me to actually give it a try. And once I tried it, I fell in love with it. And I hope you guys that are looking for a new text editor give it a try too. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of the show, Devin Gabe James, Matt Michael Mitchell, Paul Scott West, Alan Armoredragon, Chuck Commander, Ingrid DiHillkide, Dylan George, Lee Lennox, Ninja, Maxim, Mike Irion, Alexander, Pete Larch, and Fedora Polytech, Red Prophet, Steven and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at the Genie text editor wouldn't have been possible. The show's also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. It's just me and you guys, the community. You want to see more great videos about Lennox, great free and open source software like Genie, please subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right guys, peace.


And welcome to your design field trip. I'm Tiffany, an educator at Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. Today we're going to be learning about design and how we might use design to solve problems and take action in your community. Before we can do that though, let's talk about what design is. When you hear the word design, what do you think it means? What are things that you think of when you hear the word design? Pause for a moment and look around the room that you're in. Can you find an example of design? Choose one object that you think is a good example of design. What did you choose?  There are so many examples of design because design is all around us. Everything that was made was designed. Many designers focus their work on solving problems in the world around them, whether it's where we live, how we get around, or making sure everyone is included. Designers work to come up with solutions that will meet the needs of the people who are using their designs. One very important problem that designers are working to solve right now is the problem of climate change.  Take a moment and consider what you think of when you hear the phrase climate change. Climate change affects everyone. The phrase climate change refers to long term changes in temperature. The Earth's surface is warming faster than it ever has before, causing changes in the Earth's climate. This affects things like fresh waterways, the oceans, glaciers, forests, and the atmosphere. These changes create a domino effect of problems that are putting at risk the survival of species of plants and animals. It also affects the availability of the Earth's natural resources. So I think you can see why it's a pretty big problem. That's why designers are joining teams all over the world to design solutions for a more sustainable Earth and to do everything that we can to reverse the effects of climate change. Let's take a look at a few designs that are helping to make the world a more sustainable place. Check out how designers in Ho Chi Minh City have designed for a greener city at F.P.T. University. Rapid urban development in Vietnamese cities has eclipsed urban greenways. Designed to suggest a growing mountain, this university building features staggered floors and closing a park filled with trees and plants. These green elements extend from the central courtyard to the balconies, terraces, and the circulation wells. These trees facilitate shade and cooling. They improve air quality and reduce the need for energy consuming air conditioning. Here's another example. Fresh Moves Mobile Markets. Designed to recycle decommission transit buses and convert them into mobile farm stands, Fresh Moves Mobile Markets brings healthy, affordable, and locally grown produce to underserved neighborhoods in Chicago. Not only does this design promote sustainable farming, recycling resources, and fostering health and wellness, but it's also meeting the needs of communities that are lacking in access to fresh food and groceries. Now that we've seen some inspiration on how designers are working to make the world a more sustainable and greener place, we're going to think like designers ourselves. Let's get started. To get going, all you need is something to write with, something to write on, and your best design creativity and imagination. The first thing that designers do is that they identify problems and decide what they're going to design. To help you to define your design challenge, we're going to give you a design mad lib. Using your writing tool and paper, write down the numbers one through four, like you see on the screen. You'll see a series of prompts next to each number. Respond to the prompts using one word, or in some cases, a letter. Number one, choose a letter between A through E. So next to number one, write down either A, B, C, D, or E. Choose one. Number two, write down the name of a person. This can be any person. It can be your friend, your neighbor, your teacher. It could also be a fictional character or someone you know of. Number three, write down the name of a place you haven't been. This could be anywhere. It could be a park that you've wanted to go to but haven't quite gotten there yet. It could be a different country that you haven't been to anywhere that you can think of that you haven't been. Next to number four, you're going to choose a different letter this time between A and D. So A, B, C, D. Choose one of those letters and write it down next to number four. Take a moment and write down your answers to these four prompts. Great. Now that you've finished writing those out, go back to number one where you wrote a letter A through E. Next to number one, replace the letter with the corresponding word that you see on the screen. For example, if you wrote down letter B, you would replace B next to number one with the words N apartment. If you chose letter D, you would write down next to number one a camper. Now go down to number four and do the same thing with whichever letter you chose for number four, replace it with the word that you see on the screen. So for example, if you wrote letter C next to number four, you would now write protects against rising sea levels, right? If you chose number A next to number one, you would say filters rainwater. Now for the big reveal, are you excited to see your design challenge? Here is your design challenge. Fill in the blanks with your answers to number one through four. So your design challenge should read like this. How might we design a type of home for a person to live in or on in a place you haven't been that helps to solve an environmental issue? We went through this design challenge too. So here's what our mad live looks like. Design a treehouse for baby Yoda to live in or on the moon that filters rain water. This is what we came up with. But yours will be different. Now that you have your design challenge, it's time to start designing. The next step in your design process will be brainstorming. To brainstorm, you come up with as many ideas as possible.  You can brainstorm by drawing pictures, writing down lists, or just talking it out using your piece of paper and writing utensil. Take a moment and come up with as many ideas as you can to solve your design challenge. Here's some questions to consider. As you brainstorm your ideas, who are you designing for? This will be the person that you chose and that will be your user. What does your user need? What are the things that might help or make more comfortable your user's experience of your design? What will your design look like? Does your design have any special features or functions? Great job brainstorming all of your design solutions. After designers brainstorm, they choose which of their ideas they like best. Then they build a prototype or a model, which will help them to show and test their ideas and designs. This can help to know which things need to be adjusted, fixed or reconsidered. It's an important step before launching your ideas into the world. We had so much fun today. And using a mad lid can be a great way to help us experiment and come up with wild ideas for our designs. But how can we take our design skills further? Once we get warmed up, it's important that we look at real world challenges that impact our communities and our world. Let's use design to make a difference. Take a moment and think about how you can use what you learned today to take action in your school, your home or your community to help protect the future of our planet. Design is empowering. And it's so important to share your ideas for change. We challenge you to share what you've learned and designed today, and then continue the conversation about designing for climate change with your teachers, families, friends and community. We would love to see what you designed and how you are thinking about making change. Your teacher can share your class's ideas on social media using the hashtag Smithsonian EDU. On the hashtag, you can also see how other students are designing for change and thinking about the future. For more design inspiration, you can head over to our website, kuprihuit.org or check out our page on the Smithsonian Learning Lab. Thank you so much for joining us today. Whether it's at our museum in New York City or over a virtual setting, we hope to see you again. Bye.


Today, we welcome Dr. Dean Raiden back to Skeptico. Dean is, of course, chief scientist at the Institute for Noetic Sciences, as well as a bestselling award-winning author. Dean has – I want to show you some of his books. Here's his current book. Here's some of the other fabulous books that he's written, really truly groundbreaking books. And in this field, to say that a guy has written bestselling books is really quite remarkable and then award-winning books as well.  And I have a little photo here of the video of him actually in a lab with a very, very interesting experiment that I think is just fundamental to how we understand consciousness and science. But it's not even an experiment we're going to talk about today, because today we're going to talk about Dean's new book, which is not even out now, but will be out probably when this interview is out. It's out, I think, April 10th. Is that right, Dean? That's right. Yeah. April 10th of 2018. It's titled Real Magic, Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe, a title only an agent or a publicist or a publisher could really come up with, right? You got it. Well, it's awesome to have you back and to reconnect with you. And you know, if we could, I obviously want to talk about the book a lot. But I really wanted to start with another subject and a subject that I don't know, you're a pretty humble guy, so I don't know how you're going to feel about this. But it's really the topic of legacy. I'm sure you've thought about this a little bit. You know, I remember way back to when I interviewed you many, many years ago when I was starting the show.  And the first chapter of the book opens with this little vignette of me talking to you. And I'm asking you about the scientists, two pretty respected scientists, Ray Hyman from University of Oregon and Steve Novella from Yale Neurology.   And I just can't help but think how interesting this history is going to look. Because when we write this history, there's no way you're not right in the middle of it. And if this paradigm change that is happening, we can't even say is about happening, it's happening. I mean, materialistic, dopey mind equals brain, there is no consciousness. I mean, that science is gone or is leaving the station for all except the very diehards. What's it going to look like, Dean? How do you think you are going to be viewed in the longer lens of science history? It's been said of Sebelius. I think actually Sebelius, the composer said this, that he was severely criticized during his musical career. And he simply responded that no one has ever erected a statue to a critic. So from a historical perspective, every advancement in every domain of human performance of any type has always attracted severe criticism. So I take some comfort in reading about the great figures of history and basically all of them are attacked. So it's simply par for the course. Some people can take it and others can't. I guess I can take it. How have you been able to take it? Because I think a lot of people looking from the outside, you keep a very calm demeanor about you. But there had to be moments when, you know, especially in this age where people freak out at any Twitter, post, or Facebook comment or anything like that. I mean, from your peers, this kind of stuff. And if the whole, you had the goods on these guys for 20 years, you've known that they're bullshitting. How have you maintained the ability to kind of keep your cool? Well, partially, it's by not reacting instantly. It's all about impulse control, right? So an adolescent has no impulse control and they just lash out immediately. And so I have, of course, had those same feelings when they read something that I know is false. But you just wait for a while. And then you can think about how do you want to respond? In some cases, I don't respond at all because what's being said is just nonsense. In other cases, I do respond, but typically in writing, I have given up on debates. People sometimes want a live debate between me and somebody who has a different opinion. And I don't do that because it's a false equivalency for one thing. And the debate is really just a matter of entertainment. And I'm not that interested in entertainment. Let's be clear. It's a false equivalency when you argue with someone who doesn't have any evidence, doesn't have a handle on the data and is just kind of expressing an opinion versus you who've replicated an experiment 50 times. I mean, that's not really a debate, is it? Right. And it might be fun for people to watch, but I have no interest in doing that. So yeah, it's a false equivalency in terms of the degree of confidence on each side of the debate. You know, one more question on this legacy thing. Let's speculate for a minute. Let's kind of project into the future because I think it's fun and I think it's valid to do so at this point. What do you think the writing of this chapter of history, this post materialism chapter, is going to look like? How are they, you know, I always think back a long, long time ago, you told me your version of the famous thing about how truth passes through three phases. First, it's ridiculed, then it's violently opposed. And then finally, and the way that you put it, which is a little bit different than the normal way here, but I love the spin, is that then everyone comes out of the closet and says, oh, well, if you just carefully read my paper, you'll see that that's what I was really saying all along kind of thing. I mean, do you want to expound on that a little bit? Well, actually, you see this repeated through history. Schopenhauer was probably one of the few who said it initially and it's been copied in many different ways. Yeah, the ending of that is that the former skeptics will then start saying, oh, well, I thought of it first. That's the end game. But again, in looking at the history, especially through the sociology of science lens, you see this again and again. So you can easily get caught up into the heat of the moment. But I tend to take a long view of everything. And from that perspective, I can then see myself as a player in a long game. So you asked about post-materialism. Post-materialism as a word actually isn't very good because it's a promissory note. So the way I would put it in that you have to see what's happening in historical context, that there's a prematerialism and then a materialism and then a post-materialism. So this evolutionary strand is that prematerialism we can think of as before the Middle Ages, where everything was considered supernatural and everything was created by gods and so on. That was before science. So there wasn't any way of grasping in any detail what was going on. So everything was supernatural. When science began in, I mean, it flourished, say, in the Enlightenment, between the 1500s and 1700s, say. In that period, a method was developed which allowed us to look in much more detail at the nature of nature. And that is materialism. It's both a philosophical stance and a set of tools to be able to understand things. And we know that it works really great because it allows us to make things like this, which has more computing power than any computer in the world 20 years ago. And that will continue. So it's become very seductive to imagine that everything can be explained using that philosophical basis. But what's happening now is that, and this is largely driven by puzzles about the nature of consciousness, that the materialism is really good at looking at the world from the outside. It's good at objectivity. But both from quantum mechanics and now also in philosophy and mathematics and in physics in general, is this puzzle of how does a material object give rise to an interiority? How does it, how does all of this objective stuff that we see and feel have an inside experience that doesn't seem to be physical? Well, there are people who are trying to come up with ideas that say how matter can turn into mind. But a growing number of scientists and scholars are saying maybe not. Then this is why ideas like panpsychism are becoming more popular now. It's very difficult to figure out how you, how a three pound lump of tissue in there is giving rise to what amounts to our entire experience, including all of our ideas about the way that the universe is. All of our laws, all of our physical laws, everything is due to the inside here that is somehow coming out of this matter. So post materialism is saying maybe we've jumped the gun a little bit and set aside consciousness as an epiphenomenon that wasn't very meaningful. And actually it looks like it might be way more meaningful than we originally thought. So post materialism is moving science and scholarship into the direction of consciousness is now seen as something that deserves a very serious look. That is not simply the neuroscience approach, but many different approaches. So that's a very long winded description of what post materialism is. But I think seeing it in context makes it easier to understand. Well, I think it does too. And I think it particularly makes it easier. Well, I don't know if it does make it easier because in typical Dean Raiden fashion, what you've done now is jumped way past that two or three steps and have published this new book, Real Magic. What you're saying in this book straight out is PSI. That is the ongoing investigation that you've done in trying to take this post materialistic understanding of consciousness that you're just talking about. And for the last 30, maybe 40 years, I don't want to date you too much. But what you've done is taken that alternative idea and brought it into the lab, put it under this thing called parapsychology under this umbrella we call PSI and have investigated it. And now in this book, you're saying PSI is really magic. I mean, we have to start there. What is this book about? What are you saying when you say PSI is magic? Well, when we use the word magic, people think of Harry Potter first and Harry Houdini second. And that's not what we're talking about. Both of those are fun and interesting and embellishments of the third kind of magic, which is the real magic. So real magic is talking about the esoteric traditions, most of which were pre-scientific and they go all the way back to shamanism. And we know them as hermeticism, as the Kabbalah, and then neoplatonism, more modern times, the Rasekrusians, the Freemasons, theosophy, on and on and on, all the way up to the present day. Figure out how do you explain PSI? Let's just simply assume that the laboratory evidence is strong enough that psychic phenomena exists, that we simply take that as a starting point. And now you're saying, well, how do we explain this in a scientific way? Well, to do it wearing the hat of a conventional scientist today, it has to be done within the scientific worldview, which is materialism. So many efforts have been taken to develop theories that would be called scientific based in materialism to describe how PSI works. And you see this again and again that somebody who hasn't been involved in parapsychology but is interested in the phenomena will say, well, you know, I have this theory about telepathy. It's because the brain is an electrical thing and the electromagnetics are broadcasting out and so somebody else is receiving those electromagnetic waves and decoding it somehow and that's how telepathy works. So this idea of mental radio has been around for a very long time and has been tested up the wazoo and it doesn't work. We know that it's not an electromagnetic phenomenon. And so other theories have either looked at the quantum mechanics as a possible way of thinking about it. Of course, quantum mechanics would be a big stretch to say that this is materialism in the classical sense. It's a very odd space that it describes. But nevertheless, it's taking something within the existing worldview and trying to shove PSI into it or shoehorn an explanation that way. And all of those theories don't work. If they worked, then people would be accepting PSI today and they generally don't work. So what else do we do? We're faced with a puzzle where we have phenomena that we can demonstrate in the laboratory and people talk about it and experience it all the time that our scientific worldview does not accommodate very well. So I decided to look for other clues about what's going on and the most obvious clue is the esoteric traditions. And when you start looking at that, and of course I had read a bunch of books about the various kinds of esoteric ideas for over many years, I never really seriously tried to synthesize what was going on. And so I took off about six months and read probably hundreds of books and thousands of articles on this to see if I could create a synthesis. And I did, which is what I write about in the book. And the bottom line comes down to essentially that consciousness is fundamental. Consciousness is more fundamental than the physical world. That's the philosophical stance of idealism. And there are now a number of contemporary philosophers and scientists who are beginning to think that idealism is actually a better worldview than materialism. And they have good reasons for that, which I also talk about in the book. If that is true, that idealism is a better way of thinking about the nature of reality, then suddenly all of the stories about magic and Psy make perfect sense. It's no longer difficult to figure out how those things would work. It's simply part of the mix. So the magic I'm talking about then, it falls into three categories. And this is all based on what you see again and again over thousands of years. One category of magic is divination. So we think of it as tarot cards, crystal ball gazing, and so on. That's exactly what we call precognition and clairvoyance in the Psy world. The other type is in the magical terms we call force of will, which in Psy terms we call psychokinesis. It's a mind over matter effects. And the third type in the magical tradition would be called theergy, which in the Psy world would be evidence for survival after bodily death. So in each of the traditional magical concepts, parapsychology has been studying these phenomena for over a century. It's verified that there's evidence that such things exist. In which case traditional magical ideas also exist. So again, along with an answer, and of course it took a book actually to flesh it out in enough detail to make what I just said to be crystal clear. But that's the essence of it. Well, I don't think it was long winded at all. As a matter of fact, I'm going to return to the topic we keep pounding on over and over again and that is consciousness.  As you just talked about, and this is the point of your book and the point that you just made there. But I want to give people a sense for just where mainstream science and then frontier science and the scientists that they're likely to encounter are on this topic. And you know, I ran across, I want to play for you this clip from my buddy. I think it's one of the great nitwit scientists of our time. Of course, Neil deGrasse Tyson. And here he is being interviewed by Larry King. Now, this is a recent interview. And here's what he has to say about consciousness. Let me play for this for you and see if you can hear it. Wow, but you're not conscious and that's for eternity, right? Yeah, that there's no evidence that I have any consciousness of anything. And by the way, is that so weird? Did you have consciousness before you were born?  My gosh, I need to be on earth or how come where am I? I mean, I know what Tyson says about this and he's not a nitwit. He's a articulate spokesman for the prevailing scientific worldview. No, no, I have to. I mean, nitwit is too strong and name calling never does anybody any good. And then it gets everyone off track. But what he's saying is just, it's just silliness.  And that's why I was going to play this next clip and I might have to send this one to you because as you can see on the screen, it's two people who really have studied consciousness, right? So the problem with Neil deGrasse Tyson, which is the problem with God of science in general, especially media scientists is they can't resist answering any question that's thrown their way, even if they have no qualifications for it. And certainly Neil deGrasse Tyson has zero qualifications in terms of consciousness. He just does it. He doesn't know anything about it. At least in this one, and it's a conversation between Sam Harris and David Chalmers, David Chalmers being one of the, I guess you say, foremost public consciousness researchers in the last 20 years. And Sam Harris is really just a neuroscience guy and kind of this public figure atheist guy who's been engaged at least in the consciousness kind of debate. And I'll play this for people. And then if you'll allow me, I'll tell you what they said. There is something seeming to happen. And that seeming is all you need to assert the absolute undeniable reality of consciousness. I mean, that is the fact of consciousness every bit as much as any other case in which you might assert its existence. So I just don't see how a claim that consciousness itself is an illusion can ever fly. Yeah, I think, yeah, I'm with you on this. I think Dan's views have actually evolved a bit. This is kind of a good arc, story arc of where we're going. So we still have Neil deGrasse Tyson and Larry King and holding the party line. Of course, consciousness is an illusion. And then we have people who are really on the cutting edge of consciousness research saying we can't really even pretend like that's whatever it is. It's not an illusion. So you've spoken already in this interview to that shift. What do you think of the players on the field and where they're going to stand now and in the future and how this thing is going to play out? And in particular, again, you know, put in the context of your book, Real Magic, where you're just jumping two steps ahead and going, hey, it's game over and we have to start looking beyond all this stuff we've been talking about. We have to start looking at the esoteric traditions. We have to start looking at things like magic. It's just no longer even makes any sense to talk about this stuff in terms of the way we've been talking about it. Well, I think it's important, first of all, to not view either consciousness or magic as a regression to the past. We're not moving backwards to a pre-scientific domain. We're instead advancing science into an area where it has stiff armed for many years and the notion that consciousness is an illusion is just as silly as behaviorism was. But it nevertheless held the academic world spellbound for 50 years where consciousness was denied. So how do we move forward? Well, one of the things I think that one of the reasons why academics are so resistant to this idea, and by the way, to anything about parapsychology is a phrase that I've heard many times, which is what you're doing can't be correct because if it is, we have to throw away all the textbooks and start over again. So that's an expression of fear. So I would say there's some merit to that argument because when you look at the way textbooks advance, pretty much from a textbook 20 years ago to today, there's some overlap, but a lot of it has changed because science is a dynamically moving target. So we're already throwing away the textbooks. So this is not a big issue, but there's underlying fear about maybe what I'm doing is not correct and it has to be correct because my whole career depends on it. So how do we prevent that fear from stopping further advancements? To say nothing of, we have very high confidence that some disciplines, especially engineering disciplines, must be correct because otherwise our technologies wouldn't work. So it doesn't make sense to start over again. So what I propose then that I talk about this in the book as a way out of it is to do what science has always done. It starts with a couple of core things that we have high confidence are correct and we simply expand it becomes more comprehensive just like classical physics became quantum physics. It's the same stuff. Quantum physics predicts the same stuff that classical physics does but it has a more comprehensive worldview. So we do the same for science overall. And rather than somehow mysteriously consciousness is arising out of matter in some way that nobody can explain, we simply start with a different philosophical base where instead of putting physics at the bottom of our knowledge pyramid, we put consciousness and this essentially is what idealism is all about anyway. And it's not idealism doesn't say that the world doesn't have certain lawful regularities that we call science. It's saying that our notion of what we think consciousness is is mistaken. So I then go through this exercise in the book where on the theory element where if you imagine that you carve up the world through scientific disciplines and you put it in the form of a pyramid where the base of the pyramid is physics and then on top of that is chemistry and then biology and then psychology and so on. According to the prevailing view, consciousness somehow pops out of the top of that pyramid which means it has to be made out of matter because everything in the pyramid is matter and an energy. Well, what if that's wrong and what if actually is going on which is what all of the esoteric traditions say is that the pyramid is actually sitting on a layer below which is awareness or consciousness that permeates everything and because it's below physics, it means it's prior to spacetime matter and energy before that. Everything we know about the physical world emerges out of awareness in some way. So from that perspective, just like electrons in the physical layer permeate everything above. We know that there are electrons in our brain. Well, if consciousness is at the bottom, then we know that awareness permeates everything above. This is essentially what panpsychism is all about. Consciousness is simply a part of the fabric of reality and it's in everything. Well, Dan, let me just interject because you have a couple of times kind of interchanged panpsychism and idealism. I mean, a lot of folks who've looked at this a long time like I do kind of feel like panpsychism is the kind of last bastion for kind of recovering materialists. I mean, it doesn't really make any sense any more than supersci makes any sense and now we're really talking inside baseball. But let's get back to that. I mean, panpsychism, does that really work? Like you said, idealism works, but does panpsychism really work? Well, it's a bridge, right? You don't want to push people. It's a bridge for people. I mean, it's a bridge for reluctant belief systems. Yes, it's a bridge because you don't want to push people's belief systems too fast because all they'll do is resist it. And the harder you push, the more they'll resist. So if we need to go through panpsychism for a while, so be it. But ultimately, it's about idealism. Well, okay, speaking of pushing and how far we push and how fast we push. I got to push on you a little bit. This is skeptical after all. Theorgy and this idea of spirits is something you deal with in the book quite a bit. But I feel like you're not really engaging with the esoteric literature and the esoteric traditions. I mean, Dean, they're saying spirits are at the core of all magic. They're saying this is what magic is. So you can break it into these categories however you want. They're saying we are marshaling the forces of the spirit world to do our bidding. That is their claim. And can we really just step away from that and go, well, you know, we're not really sure about that scientifically. But then how are we really engaging with the magical hypothesis, the magical paradigm, the magical worldview? What are your thoughts on that? Well, the theorgy actually is just one-third, approximately one-third of the magical traditions. It's all about evoking spirits and so on. But there is definitely a separate category of divination, which may or may not have anything to do with spirits at all. And the same goes for force of will. That you, from a magical ceremonial perspective, you can create spells and so on where you ask for spirits to intervene on your behalf, but it's not necessary and it's not found in all esoteric traditions. The reason that I mentioned it is because it's unavoidable within the esoteric literature that the whole idea about spirits is clearly there. And if you adopt an idealistic viewpoint where you see that the consciousness is simply out there and it can express itself in many different ways, then suddenly the notion of being human, like we're a body that's enlivened in some way by this primordial consciousness. So human awareness then becomes only one form in which awareness can express itself, in which case you could have an infinite number of forms. A giant gas bag could be conscious or an invisible hunk of energy could be conscious. And I can see very easily then for people who are sensitive to such things that they would then call it spirit. Yeah, but I still got to push on this a little bit because I feel like the same way when I talk to Buddhist atheists, you know, which I've done several times on this show, some of them are scholars, Harvard University professors who've written these books. And it's like, it's just craziness. I mean, you talk to people who are true Buddhist scholars. I mean, the Buddha, whether a real historical figure or not, was totally enmeshed in a culture and a belief system that believed in spirit beings, believed in a larger consciousness, believed in a hierarchy of consciousness. I mean, that was the belief system. And the saying goes here for magic. So even if you say, you know, divination or terror reading, you know, isn't directly trying to marshal the energy of a spirit. Yeah, but it's completely enmeshed in their belief system that there is this realm and there are these entities that exist that are running the show. Is it not? Well, remember, we're not doing a regression backwards. We're trying to take the best of the ideas from the esoteric traditions and actually use science as best as we can to refine our understanding of what was going on. So, for example, we know when we do something in the laboratory involving precognition, we're not inviting spirits to help us. We're doing it completely based on the individual doing an experimental laboratory and there's no discussion about spirits at all and yet it works. So we know right off the get go that divination does not require the concept of independent external spirits. Exactly the same could be said for psychokinesis, in which case force of will spells do not require spirits. This is, I think, one of the reasons why in the book I'm making a case that a resurrection of magical concepts is actually the frontier of science. Right, because magic is really just a synonym for we don't know why it worked. And so in some cases, well, maybe there are disembodied spirits that are helping in some way, but I don't think it's necessary. I think we need to take a more modern view of what's happening here, but also at exactly the same time to consider the possibility that what we're seeing in things like mediumship does involve some kind of independent entity. Okay, I love that answer. We're not aiming towards regression. We're aiming towards moving forward. Great. I do have to, again, let me play this clip. And again, I appreciate that you can't hear it. I'll figure out that technical problem. So it's about a one minute clip and then I'll have to explain it to you a little bit about what it says. But it's from Dr. Steven Skinner, who is a truly an academic published academic, but also a practicing magician. And I played this clip in an interview that I recently did with Gordon White, who is another practicing magician and some of you reference in the book. And I want to kind of try and find or refine our understanding of this worldview clash. So again, I apologize, but let me play this clip for the listeners. You need to get the implements that are needed, such as the sharp knife to draw the circle. Otherwise, you just a chalk circle, and it's not going to work. You need to get the most appropriate incense for what you plan to do. And you need to get them ready on a particular day. And on that particular day, you need to prepare yourself by ritually dispersing or preferably bathing beforehand. And most people are not prepared to do that. Or they take the view, I can just do this in my lounge room when the kids have gone to bed. OK, so let me jump in there. I'll cut Dr. Skinner off a little bit early. But I think you know where I'm going with this or you probably don't. Because I want to remind people of a little story that you tell many times. And it's a great story. Do you still have the bent spoon on your desk? OK, so Dr. Raiden has a spoon that is bent in a very unusual way that you can't normally bend. And you can probably imagine how that spoon is bent that way. He went to a spoon bending party. So this is psychokinesis, and we've seen it demonstrated many times. And I love the fact that you have that on your desk. Because it's like a reminder of not everything is explainable even though I investigate it. I'm sure you've had moments where you want to kind of move away from a particular mindset. But hey, that spoon on your desk is going to remind you of it. Well, Steven Skinner, who I just played the clip of, is a rather interesting guy, kind of a strange guy, in that he talks about these magical practices that he does. And he talks about how the knife needs to be sharpened a particular way. And the circle needs to be drawn carefully. I got to say, all the while I was listening to that Dean. I was thinking of you. I was thinking of your lab. And I was thinking, OK, Dean's going to get this guy in the lab. And he's go, OK, hey, let's just try it with a dull sword this time. OK, let's just try it with a dull sword, right? These are controls, and these are the kind of controls I could see you applying. But if you listen through to the end of Dr. Skinner's story, he talks about one such ceremonial magic session that he does with apparently a number of people observing it, where he summoned up these crows.   And so I'm listening to the story. And this is the bent spoon moment for me, even though I wasn't there, right? But it's like, what is Dean going to do with the crow shit? Because that's the bent spoon, right?   Have you thought about what that looks like in terms of bringing magic into the lab? And what kind of, what awaits you in terms of some, to believe any of the accounts, what awaits you are some extremely, extremely strange experiences. To which I say, bring it on, right? I mean, I'm not surprised that ritual, the ceremonial magic is all about ritual in theater. I'm not surprised that it has bigger results than we generally see in the laboratory because ritual is a way of focusing not only one mind typically, but a bunch of minds in a very emotional way. So we know just from the literature that large scale spontaneous sigh occurs with highly focused minds in an emotional state. Thus ritual, the question in it is, is the ritual literally evoking spirits who are making crows do things or bending spoons? Well, maybe, but that's why exactly why I want to use scientific methods to test if in fact that's what's going on. Because we have thousands of years of people doing the ceremonial magic and it worked, it worked well enough for the traditions to continue but they also didn't have very good ways or maybe they weren't interested in testing what works and what doesn't work. And by the way, this is what I'm saying is not a new idea. It's exactly what Aleister Crowley was saying, what Peter Carroll was saying. These are magicians in modern era who are basically saying, use scientific methods to begin to refine what we think is important in ceremonial magic, but maybe it isn't. Maybe 99% of it is simply ceremony and theater. So that's the way, that's the approach that I'm taking on this. And again, exactly why I'm saying that using science to begin to refine and actually understand what is going on here is important. Because again, if we assume that idealism is a better way of thinking about reality, then in some respects the refined mind can make anything happen that is imaginable. Like you really do become only limited by your imagination. So if the ceremony is all about getting crows to appear and so on, you can easily do that. That's not even that difficult. Will they take on a certain independence? You know, you don't want to crow pooping on you, but maybe when you evoke it, it has its own independent existence. You've literally manifested the thing. And of course, there's lots of stories in the literature, in the magic literature, about creating entities out of mud. The Buddhists have it. There's a long Jewish tradition about this, where they accidentally take on a life of their own. And then you may not have much control over it. So when I talk about theology in the book, I'm mainly talking about things like near-death experience and a few other areas of parapsychology that talk about the possibility of independent entities. But when it comes to actually doing theology, doing ceremonial magic, I, among other things, tell the reader that this is not something that you should start doing because you read something in a book. We're dealing right on the edge of something which can be extremely dangerous for an individual. So I tell people, don't say I didn't warn you. I do not recommend that you do this unless you know what you're doing. This is, by far, been the most difficult piece for me to begin to think about because it's so far away from the world that I was brought up in and even the parapsychology that I've done. But I kind of have been forced to accept the possibility that such things actually do exist. This is as a result of doing all this research and thinking about the consequences of an idealistic model. Fair enough. So let me poke you, again, one more time. And that's on NDE Science, Deer Death Experience Science. And you just mentioned it a minute ago. I just don't think you quite have it right in the book. And I think you're leaning a little bit in my investigation of it and talking to so many near-death experience researchers. You're kind of falling for the materialistic claptrap that's out there about NDE Science. And there's just too much good evidence of it. I'm gonna, again, play for people and then we'll talk about it a little bit. But if you'll allow me to play a one-minute clip from Dr. Jeffrey Long, who is from the Near Death Experience Research Foundation, but is a practicing radiologist, works with dying people, works with people under anesthesia all the time. And here's what he had to say about some of his research. When you're under general anesthesia, it should be impossible to have a lucid, organized remembrance at that time. In fact, under anesthesia, you're typically so far under. With general anesthesia, they often have to breathe for you.  And at that point in time, some people have a cardiac arrest, their heart stops. And of course, that's very well documented. They monitor people very carefully that are having general anesthesia. So I have dozens and dozens of near-death experiences that occurred under general anesthesia. And at this time, it should be, if you will, doubly impossible to have a conscious remembrance. And yet they do have near-death experiences at this time. And they're typical near-death experiences. They have the same elements and a period of having them in the same order as near-death experiences occurring under all others. You know, again, there's so much frustration from people who've really looked at near-death experience because every half-assed explanation that mainstream science comes up with, the rats at the University of Michigan or the coma patients are all this. Number one, they've never studied near-death experience and they don't even study near-death experience in their research. And yet they try and make all these leaps and conclusions. What Dr. Long is explaining here is let's go with what we already know. For example, when someone's under anesthesia, particularly really deep anesthesia, anesthesia is so deep sometimes that we have to manage the heartbeat of people because their heart literally stops breathing. They're so far that deep in anesthesia. Well, we have a long history of understanding brain activity, memories, and all the formation of thoughts and ideas under that medication. And we know it doesn't exist. Again, near-death experience is real. Consciousness survives death. It's the Occam's razor explanation for what's happening. If someone wants to invent an entirely new model of neurology, of how the brain works, I mean, if that's what we're doing, well, then great. But until you kind of flesh out that theory, you've got to kind of follow this data where it goes. And I kind of felt like you were giving a little bit too much credence to the skeptical view of near-death experience in terms of it not being the evidence for survival of consciousness that virtually every near-death experience researcher thinks it is. So what say you, Dr. Raiden? The problem is that we don't know when the near-death experience occurs. That's the problem. I'm not discounting that strange, perhaps psychic effects are going on. And I don't think a materialistic perspective explains those experiences. But what I do say is that when somebody reports that they're out of their body or that something happened and they later is verified, we don't know when. And because we know that precognition exists, we've crossed we know that side perception is very slippery in time. Well, maybe their entire experience occurs in a flash from our conventional perspective just before they go into anesthesia or just after they come out of coma. And until we have a way of knowing when the experience occurs. But Dean, let me interject there. I mean, I just interviewed again Dr. Penny Sartori and this is research that's been published for 20 years. I also interviewed Dr. Jan Holden from North Texas who just published a few years ago with Bruce Grayson, the definitive compilation of near-death experience research. And we do know, we do know. I mean, the very simple way we know is they do interviews with people and they ask them to recount their resuscitation procedure. And they have a control group of people who didn't have a near-death experience and then they have another group that did have a near-death experience. And when they go ask the control group, the control group goes, what do you mean? I was dead. I don't recall being resuscitated. And then you have the group that did have the near-death experience and they go, oh yeah, the cart was wheeled in and what about the paddles? No, there were no paddles.  Well, then they put paddles on me and she said, you know, that's one of the telltale signs is in this hospital that she was doing it in, paddles were very infrequently used. So, I mean, there's some detailed data points that they can collect and compare and say, clearly this group has a recollection of their resuscitation that is one, unexplainable, but two, answers this timeline question of at least the best we can. Yeah, but that's the rub, isn't it? We don't actually know when it occurs. We don't.  Well, the moment he knows that that's a task in the future, he has the answer already. So how did he, and he has it in full detail. I mean, he described the submarine nine months in advance in great gory detail. So, the idea that somebody can describe a sequence of events in the future that is vertically correct is well-established as a Psi phenomenon that people can do. And there's no better way of getting into a Psi conducive state than having your body go away for a while. So, I would say then that, yes, I completely understand the counterarguments, but I have not persuaded. I'm not persuaded until we get to a point where we have a way of communicating in some fashion to the person when they are in fact dead. And the only way I can think of doing that at this point and maybe through mediumship, but even in mediumship, we don't know where the information comes from. Yeah, but if we're gonna play this consensus reality game, which at some point, if consciousness is fundamental, if everything is, as you were alluding to before, if everything is a thought form, if we are creating our reality literally and creating some of the entities that we interact with, if we're creating those crows, well, then really all bets are off anyway. So, the idea of bringing any of this into the lab, what is a lab, measuring it, what is measuring, all that stuff goes out the window. No, no, no. See, it is very important not to do a regression to the past. We don't simply want to accept something because that may be the explanation that makes us feel good. I'd love to think that the consciousness persists in some way, as I think most people would, but I also aware of science is that- That's not the issue. No, just to make sure we're talking about the same thing. I'm saying every experiment in your lab can be explained by spirit intervention that you're not aware of that you will never be aware of because if spirits have this power to present themselves or not present themselves or for to believe the accounts, deceive or not deceive, then you will have no way of knowing. You're looking through the wrong end of the telescope. There's an order of intelligence that I'm just hypothesizing here, which is much greater. So, the idea that you're somehow going to be able to measure that is if we're going to go down that path, we can always pull that card out in the same way that you're pulling out that card with your depth experience science. I mean, at some point we have to say, okay, we're going to play this game of consensus reality, of science game that we can collect and we can measure. But at another level, we can't collect. We can't measure. That's the idea that consciousness is fundamental and everything is a thought form. So, the question then is can we approach magical concepts, let's say? Can we approach those ideas in a way which is not dependent on faith? Because the approach that you're saying, what I'm hearing what you're saying is basically we basically make a religion about it. That is a regression in my viewpoint. And that's, I don't know whether humans in our current form are clever enough to be able to figure out how to answer these questions. But if you asked people a thousand years ago, how are they going to make an iPhone? They wouldn't even know what you're talking about. So, we are clever. We need to figure out ways of assuming that there's a larger reality and figure out how to understand it in ways that have the same level of power that materialism has had to allow us to build the technologies that we have today. So, maybe it's true that Homo sapiens is not sufficiently intelligent to do it. It's possible. Maybe we need our artificial intelligence overlords who will be more intelligent than us that can figure out ways of probing that domain. But that's what I see as the future of science and I'm not interested in simply accepting things because we're not clever enough to figure out what to do with it. What a wonderful answer. You end the book with this. Magic is real. Let's deal with it. But I can't think of a better way to add to that than what you already said. I think it's wonderful. I don't quite agree with you, but I think it's absolute. The best answer I've heard. So, Dean, again, this book, and again, folks, our guest has been Dr. Dean Raiden. His new book, Real Magic, Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe is going to be out April 10th, right? What can people expect along with the book? What kind of appearances are you going to do? Are you putting out any videos? Is there any follow-up to the book that you have planned? I do have a videographer who is making a kind of cartoon graphic novel version of it. It'll be a video. Mostly, though, I'm doing lots of podcasts and radio shows and that sort of thing. Going to a number of conferences and talking about it. And if past history serves me, I'll probably end up doing about 50 talks in various forms per month for the remainder of this year. Well, great. Really glad you did this talk. It was great connecting with you again. And congratulations. Wish you, of course, all the best with Real Magic. But with your work in general, it's so awesome that you have come along during this time, during our time in history and have done what you've done. Again, as we started this show talking about the legacy, we won't fully appreciate it until maybe our kids or something looking back. But it's just amazing what you've done with your career. So, I mean that wholeheartedly. So, Dean, thanks for joining me today and best of luck with Real Magic. Thank you. So, thanks for watching this video. And if it wasn't really a video, but just an audio story as a video, I apologize. But there's more videos out there as well. But please check out the Skeptico website. You can see it here. We cover a lot of different stuff you might be interested in relating to controversial science and spirituality. A lot of shows up there. Over 350 of them are so all free, all available for download. So, do check it out.


Paul in Galatians chapter 2 verse 21 says if righteousness could come through following the Torah Then Christ died in vain as far as Paul is concerned It is not possible to follow the law. Well, what do we know from the Torah? We know from the Torah that we can keep it Due to Ronomy chapter 30 verse 11 through 14 it says now what I'm commanding you today This is Moses speaking is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. No, the word is very near to you It is in your mouth and in your heart that you may do it It is absurd to think that God would give a Torah that was impossible or too difficult to follow in many places the Bible says that the Torah was given forever it is Therefore impossible to say that it has been replaced by a new law or testament What is the Tanakh the Jewish Bible say about our obligation to keep the commandments? So you shall keep his statutes and his commandments which I am giving you today That it may go well with you and with your children after you that you may live long on the land Which the Lord your God is giving you for all time How long do we have to keep God's commandments saying here basically forever? Deuteronomy 12 1 these are the statutes and the judgments which you shall carefully observe in the land Which the Lord the God of your fathers has given you to possess as long as you live on the earth second king 17 and the statutes and the ordinances and the law and the commandment which he wrote for you You shall observe to do forever Right, we would say to Paul read my lips. What word don't you understand the Sabbath is an everlasting covenant With all its laws the Bible says the Jewish people shall keep the Sabbath To do the Sabbath for all their generations an everlasting covenant When was the Sabbath when Christianity started on Saturday a few hundred years later? They decided that was to Jewish and they changed it to Sunday How can you change God's Sabbath? From one day to another How can you do that and what they call the trinity is the father the son and the Holy Spirit and even though the Scriptures say that God is one hero Israel the Lord our God the Lord is only one But somehow three Equals one one equals three Christians claim that this three-part God that they worship is the same as the God worshiped by the Jews This is not True the Bible states here. Oh Israel the Lord is our God. The Lord is one


Hi, coffee time! This is a lovely morning and this is Chulip hoping you'll join me with your juice, tea and any other thing that we can sip on a beautiful day like this and enjoy some talks. Today what we are going to do is join you with honouring a great literary bird Rabindranath Thakur who was born in India called Khatta and he was born in 7th May, 1861 and he passed away with the immense treasure that he left for us in 7th August, 1941. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 and he was a writer, playwright, poet, songwriter, essayist, painter and whatnot. He was as in Bengali we say kaal joi which means one who is born in a century or even centuries such a very talented person that came to us and left all the semesters. His fields of contribution is vast, it's impossible to talk all about them but let's go to the creative forces that he talked about in many of his writing especially the songs he spoke he wanted to recognize the creative force that makes him write or compose the songs or paint or write the stories so of the the force that he speaks about is he calls it who sits behind my eyes and he says of this force creative force residing in the innermost me you snatch words from my lips with my words you utter your own speech mixing your own melody what i wish to say i seem to forget i only say what you want me to say in the stream of songs i lose sight of shores drifting into a far unknown i can see one definite rule in the universal law it does not allow the imminent the present ever to be dwarfed it does not allow the present to know what it is only a step in the series of sequences but make it believe that it is sufficient in itself when the tree bears blossom we are inclined to think that the flowers are its only aim so beautiful are they so sweet is their fragrance that they seem to be the highest realization of the ever-toiling and prospering woods but the facts they are instrumental in bearing fruit is hidden in obscurity and in the obscurity as we know lies the immense strength of the invisible forces forces that makes the wind the sea to rise and the air to be our oxygen it's the same forces that makes you or me find our own serenity in the work we do tulip art is not just about painting or writing or dancing or singing every moment is art the way we talk it's an every word makes a painting for the day is a part of that picture of the day of how we connect to everyone around us how we talk how we make them laugh we how we laugh and apart from the worldly things that surround us just for a moment if you lift the thoughts to that invisible level where actually everything is happening we are the translations or the outcomes of all that is meant to be the universe the law of the universe that comes through us to the world and let's get back to Rabindranath Thakur again here once more here out to this innermost strength which we all of us have you me they small children in their own big adults in their own but it has to be recognized so Rabindranath Thakur says oh innermost has all your thirst being quenched coming and residing within me in a thousand drifting streams of joy and sorrow I have failed my earn offering it to you I have massively rung out my heart a juice as from grapes started a worship with many a perfume many a song with different rhythm I have woven into garland to welcome you as a bridegroom making the gold of my desire I have composed each day for your moments pleasure an image ever new so this is where we find the literary giants in our most thoughts where he is the bridegroom who welcomes his Debbie or the goddess of creativity and he has made her into his things of worship and when we worship when we love we give that source our best so I'm reading from this book Thakur testament and here is a picture of Rabindranath Thakur on the flap this book has been a treasure for me of a long years I carried it around like a mantra wherever I went whether I flew whether I was in water or I was walking the last of the book has some more poetry from the literary giant Rabindranath Thakur of his thoughts like an ship anchoring on a shore it is for the union of you and me that there is light in the sky it is for the union of you and me that the earth is decked in dusky green it is for the union of you and me that night sits motionless it is for the union of you and me dawn appears opening the eastern door with sweet murmurs in her voice and so Thakur not only found his voice the enormous voice but he left that creative force and I must honor recognized it and share it with us and it helped me also to find my inner voice to give that an identity and that inner strength within us seems to reach up to the universe that gives us the rainy sky or the sunny sky and to believe in these days of coronavirus that indeed there is someone who sits behind the eyes who will definitely take all these days of pause and reflection upon how we live and we shall come back to what we call as a normal life and perhaps with lots of changes for the better of the universe for a better of our environment so why not sing a number today of Rabin and a Thakur I can do a small piece that is perfectly for the spring day today it's almost early summer isn't it and still we had a snow last year I mean last week but still we can still sing the song which is a mixture of Celtic tunes which Rabin and a Thakur did serve times and call them bhanga gun mixture of different tunes and this I love this honesty that when he mixes it's something foreign he did recognize them so this is a song which talks about the flowers butterflies and the blue sky thank you very much media special thanks to faith for putting it all together until we meet again stay safe stay healthy and enjoy the sunny skies thank you from tulip again


Here at Churchill Down, time to play horse name or sports nickname. All right, ladies, pressure's on. He hate me. Horse name. Sports name. That one would have got me too. Hot Rod Charlie. Horse name. Horse name. Sports name. Horse name. Smarty Jones. Horse name. Yes. Horse name. Yes, the Kentucky Derby winner. Stay in the man. Sports name. Sports name. Two for two. Can we get a little cheering from the crowd here? How about? Cool Papa Belle. I'll do sports name. Night Train Lane. Sports. Horse name. Sports name. I Broadway Joe. Sports. Horse name. Sports name. Ah! Lightning round. Ready? Sleepy Floyd. Horse name. Sports. Yes. Candy Boy. Horse name. Yes. Lemon Drop Kid. Horse name. Horse name. Judge Hyde. Horse name. Yes, horse name. Albert the Great. Horse name. Yes, horse name. Midnight Loots. Horse name. Horse name. Ding, ding, ding. Big truck. Sports name. Horse name. Ah!


Hi everyone, my name is Anne-Annsums and I will be your host for the session Access to Natural Resources, Conflict Regulation and Maritalization of Peripherized Actors in Short Poor Sock 5. What can you expect for our session? Well, we're going to bring together a group of scholars from the Great Lakes region in Africa and they're going to jointly reflect on the role and the strategies of peripherized actors in natural resource management and natural resource protection. We're going to shed light on how these actors try to navigate in extremely difficult circumstances and how they develop strategies for resilience and resistance. Our session will take place on Thursday from 11.20 to 12.50 and you're all very welcome.


This lecture is part of Berkeley Math 115, an introductory undergraduate course on number theory, and will be mostly about finding roots of polynomials modulo some prime number p. So the previous lecture we discussed polynomials of degree two and showed there was a reasonably fast algorithm to do this. In general if you want to solve fx as congruent to zero mod p for f and arbitrary function, this can be rather hard if p is large. For example if you want to solve the discrete logarithm problem, a to the power of x is congruent to b modulo p, that doesn't seem to be any particularly easy way of doing this. However it's easy for special functions p, it's easy if f is polynomial. And there are several ways of doing this. There's one found by Berler Kamp, and another found by Kantor and Zassenhaus, and I'm going to be describing the main idea of the Kantor-Zassenhaus algorithm for finding roots. In fact this is a special case of factorizing f into irreducible factors, so finding the roots is just the same as finding the linear factors, and I'll say a little bit more about this later. In order to do this we're going to need several other algorithms that we've discussed earlier, so I'll just briefly recall these. First of all we've got the Euclidean algorithm for finding the greatest common divisor of two numbers a and b, which is very fast. And what we're going to use is the fact this works for polynomials. If we've got two polynomials f and g then we can find the greatest common divisor for polynomials f and g, except these polynomials might have coefficients in the integers modulo modulo prime number. Well that's okay, it doesn't really make very much difference. Well this is fast if the degree of f and g is small, whatever small means, if the degree of f is large, say 10 to the 30 or something like that, then the obvious division by remainder of f by g, which you need a Euclidean algorithm, starts getting very very very slow because the number of steps it takes is going to be approximately equal to the degree of f. So we also want to be able to speed up division with remainder, and for this we recall the Russian peasant method of exponentiation, so you remember if we want to compute a to the n, we don't use n minus one multiplications, we write n in binary, in other words n is equal to two to the a zero plus two to the a one plus two to the a two for various integers a one and a two and so on, and then we work out a to the one, we square it to find a squared, we square it again to find a to the four and then we find a to the eight, and we work out say a to the 13 as that would be a to the eight times a to the four times a to the one, where we write 13 in binary as two cubed plus two squared plus two to the zero, so we recall we can do exponentiation fast, and we also recall that we should reduce modulo something or other at each step, so if we're working modulo a prime we should reduce modulo the prime at each step, and if we're trying to divide by a polynomial we should reduce modulo the polynomial at each step, and now we can do a fast division of polynomials, so we want to divide polynomials f by g and and what we should do is you think of g is having small degree, f might have very large degree, however most coefficients are zero and what what we want is a way of speeding up the division of f by g, well if f is say equal to x to the n plus lower terms with n very large, what we do instead of dividing f by g directly, we work out x to the n modulo the polynomial g, so i'm not taking modulo a number i'm taking actually taking modulo a polynomial which just means you throw away all multiples of this polynomial, and we can work out x to the n mod g using the russian peasant method, and this is a very fast method of working out exponentials, and if f is only a few non-zero coefficients we can do that with with each monomial that occurs in f, and so we get a fast way of dividing polynomials with remainder even if one of the polynomials has really large degree, okay having reviewed these fast algorithms let's go back to find the roots of f, where f is some polynomial of smallish degree, and we recall that x to the p minus x was equal to x times x minus 1 times x minus 2 all the way up to x minus p minus 1, okay that's by firmass theorem, because each of these numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, and so on is a root of this polynomial, that's just what firmass theorem says, so this must be divisible by all these, and then you can see they're the same because their degrees are equal, so the greatest common divisor x to the p minus x with f is equal to x minus r1 times x minus r2 and so on, where r1, r2 and so on are distinct roots of f, so if f is multiple roots we only get the multiple roots one each time, because you can see that these will be exactly the factors dividing both this expression here and the polynomial f, so we can find the number of roots is equal to the degree of x to the p minus x and f, so we can count the number of roots of f not counting multiplicity very fast, and you notice that this has might a very high degree, but only has very few non-zero coefficients, so we can work out the greatest common divisor very fast by working out x to the p modulo f using the russian peasant method, so this is indeed a fast algorithm even if p is very large with hundreds of digits, well we don't just want to know the number of roots, we want to know what the actual roots are and here's the clever idea that the point is we can actually factorize x to the p minus x as a product of polynomials with only a few coefficients, we can write it as x times x to the p minus one minus one and now we can write this as x to the p minus one over two minus one times x to the p minus one over two plus one, here we're assuming p is odd, if p is equal to two it's completely trivial to find the roots of f because you just try out the root x equals zero and x equals one, so assuming p is odd doesn't really matter, we need p being odd so we can divide p minus one by two and now you notice this will be a product of some of the roots of f and this will be a product of some of the roots of f but it won't be all of them, so what we can do is we can calculate f the greatest common divisor of f with x to the p minus one over two minus one and we can calculate the greatest common divisor of f with x to the p minus one over two plus one and this will be a product of x minus r i for some of the roots and this will be a product of x minus r i for others of the roots and if we are lucky we are lucky some roots of f are roots of x to the p minus one over two minus one and some are roots of x to the p minus one over two plus one and in that case when we take the greatest common divisor has degree less than the degree of f so we've broken f into a product of two polynomials of smaller degree and then we can just carry on so by induction we assume we can find all the roots of polynomials of smaller degree and so on well so that will sometimes work but what if all the roots of f are roots of say x to the p minus one over two minus one in that case taking the greatest common divisor of f in this polynomial here will just give us back f and we haven't made any progress so we haven't managed to reduce its degree well all you do now is we change f f to f of x plus one and this changes all the roots by plus one and then with any luck if we take the greatest common divisor of f of x plus one with x to the p minus one over two minus one this will probably have degree less than f of x plus one what if it doesn't well then we try f of x plus two with x to the p minus one over two minus one or we mean we don't have to add zero one and two we could just add random numbers here but usually there's no particular reason not to just keep on adding one to x so each of these has sort of at least a 50 chance of either finding a root or reducing the degree of f so this is a sort of probabilistic algorithm we just try changing f at random until we find something that breaks it down into into smaller factors so let's just do an example of this suppose we want to solve say x to the four minus x squared minus two is congruent to zero modulo five of course we could do just by trial and error but let's pretend that five is a really big number so we factor x to the five minus one as being x times x squared minus one times x squared plus one so this is x times x to the p minus one over two minus one times x to the p minus one over two plus one and we we probably ought to stop and check that zero isn't a root but that's pretty trivial I mean if the constant term vanishes then of course we notice the polynomial has zero as a root so what we do is we take the greatest common divisor of f with x to the we may as well take the greatest common divisor with x the five minus one and this will give us a polynomial which just has um um degree one factors and we find the greatest common divisor of this is x squared plus one so we know it's got two roots now we try and find the roots of x squared plus one pretending we haven't already noticed they're two and minus two so we take the greatest common divisor x squared plus one with x to the five minus one over two minus one and we compute this greatest common divisor well I mean we ought to use the Russian peasant method if two was a very large number but of course um we just find this is equal to one and this is no good it hasn't told us what any of the roots are so so now we change this to x plus one squared plus one so here we're just changing x to x plus one in this factor and we try again so we get x to the five minus one over two minus one and if we compute this greatest common divisor well this is just x squared plus two and if we compute the greatest common divisor of these two um um the greatest common divisor is now x plus one so we found a root x equals minus one of of this expression here so so um a root of x squared plus one is um minus one minus one which is minus two so we've managed to find a root of our original polynomial and then we can take out a root and continue and so on um so this will find um roots of um um polynomials we can also factor polynomials into irreducible factors and I'm not going to give the details of this I'll just just have the main idea so so the main idea the degree one the degree one factors is that x minus a divides x to the p minus x so so so this is any degree one factor um and then um any degree two irreducible polynomial divides x to the p squared minus x I'm not going to prove this it's a result you can um prove if you study finite fields so now instead of using x to the p minus x to pick out degree one factors we can do the same trick with x to the p squared minus x to produce degree two factors say right this is x times x to the p squared minus one over two minus one times x to the p squared minus one over two plus one and again we we now take f the greatest common divisor of f with x to the p squared minus one over two minus one and if we're lucky this will produce a factorization of f and if we're not lucky we can just try changing f to f plus one and so on more generally any degree n irreducible polynomial divides an x to the p to the n minus x so we can again do the same trick by the way we notice this only works if um p is not equal to two if p is equal to two then this method doesn't work directly and you need to try something a little bit more complicated and okay next lecture we'll be discussing how to um rewrite a lot of number theory in terms of abstract algebra like groups rings and fields and so on