Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2314 - Hal Puthoff
Uploaded: 2025-05-01T17:00:17.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2314 - Hal Puthoff' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-05-01. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2314 - Hal Puthoff' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-05-01. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2314 - Hal Puthoff

Hey, what's happening? Oh, that's happening. Thank you so much for being here.
I'm very excited to talk to you
I've been thinking about nothing but that since that dinner that we had a few
months ago. Oh, yeah, thinking about it a lot
Yeah, you told me a lot of crazy stuff. So
Yeah, well, it just seems like that that's been my my thing in life
Get involved in the crazy stuff no matter where it comes from. When did that
start?
What did you start getting involved in the crazy stuff?
Well, actually I began early on I was
You know a ham radio operator as a teenager and I went to a vocational school
I didn't think I'd ever go to college or whatever, but I got all involved in
learning about radio
Transmission and all that kind of stuff so I find something okay
I'm going to go to college and and
Really concentrate on electrical engineering and physics and all that kind of
stuff
But the weird stuff actually began
kind of by
Absolute accident at the time I was
Involved at Stanford University getting my PhD I was just doing cool things I
had invented a broadly tunable infrared laser
one of the first of its kind even got a patent as a graduate student and
Co-authored with my thesis advisor
Co-authored with my thesis advisor
A
textbook
Graduate level textbook fundamentals of quantum electronics published in
English, French, Russian, and Chinese
So I was I was on a cool roll just doing the normal physics kinds of things
But interestingly enough
once I was there writing a
Graduate level
Textbook realized, you know, there's something I don't know and that is what
about consciousness?
What about living things? I mean is it still just atoms and molecules all the
way down?
We just don't know about it or are there some additional fields or whatever?
So it turned out I came across
Some publications by a polygraph expert who taught polygraph to the cia and fbi
and so on
And one day on a lark he connected his polygraph up to his plants
And he saw signals coming out that look like what you see out of people
And then he decided to threaten the plant like he would a person and he got a
big response
And so he then went on to connect up a couple of plants to polygraphs
And he would find that if he affected one the other one would respond
So I thought okay, well, maybe this is some new fields that we don't include in
our physics
So I came up with what for me was just a pure physics experiment
I was going to grow some algae culture split it up put half of it at a laser
link site far away
And zap the local culture and see if it responded and I could measure velocity
propagation and so on
So I sent that off to this polygraph guy cleve baxter is his name
And so he said well that'd be a cool experiment
Well, here's one of these things where your life takes a left-hand turn
Totally at random he goes to a cocktail party in new york city
And there he runs into ingo swan who turned out to be so-called psychic famous
artist, but
fellow that
Did remote viewing so-called
And so he invited him over to his uh
To his uh lab and said see if he could affect the plants and so on while he was
there. He saw my
Uh write-up about the experiment I proposed which for me is just a pure physics
experiment
And so he then wrote me a letter
And said well if you're interested in the borderline between animate and inanimate
physics
Why deal with algae culture they can't tell you anything you should be dealing
with somebody like me
Well, I mean I couldn't care
Less about dealing with quote a psyche or whatever but attached to his letter
he had a big
Report that had been generated at city college in new york where he'd done some
experiments where he would raise and lower the temperatures
of
temperature sensitive temperature measuring devices across the lab
And so I read that and I said well that's
That's pretty interesting so just on a lark by this time
I headed over to stanford research institute to do my to do my laser work
So anyway, I invited him for you know a weekend just to see what else he could
do
And of course I talked to all my physics colleagues and said oh my god these
guys are all frauds and charlatans
You better you better know what you're doing
Well, it turns out that
I had a great experiment for him because we had an experiment set up at stanford
That was a very sensitive quantum chip
Inside of electrical shielding inside a magnetic shielding inside a superconducting
shielding
Completely acoustically isolated from the environment
No way anything on the outside could affect that little chip
They're only looking for quarks and stuff like that
So anyway, I brought him over the lab. I said remember that thing you did with
the with the thermistors there at city college in new york
Well, this is sort of that like that on steroids
And so I said okay, well, I'll see what I can do
Well, it turned out he generated all kinds of signals in
In that little quantum chip, and of course a graduate student whose life depended
on this not being
You know affected by anything outside
Maybe there's some bubbles in the hydrogen line or something something
But no he was able to do it, but what was most interesting
Was when I asked him well, how'd you know what to do?
He said well, I didn't know what to do so I just looked inside
Looked inside through all this shielding and and he drew a diagram of what was
inside there that never been published
And he said well, this is when I put my attention on it. That just happened by
accident
So he drew an accurate diagram of all the shielding that you had around this
equipment
And the little quantum chip and its circuitry deep inside
And when you say he was able to affect something what in particular was he able
to affect?
Well in general there was a big oscillating signal coming out of the thing that
ran about 30 seconds or so
And then when he affected it, it just stopped oscillating
And then and then he said you want me to do something else and then you made it
oscillate fast
And that's when the quantum and when the graduate students sort of went berserko
And uh, so I said wait, wait, let me see what's wrong here and he couldn't find
anything wrong
So I said well, I'm sure that was just some kind of coincidental glitch
And he did it again
And so he said
So he's doing it exactly when he's saying he's going to exactly when he said he's
going to do it
But anyway, the reason i'm trying to get get around to answering your question
was that
I then wrote this up and circulated around to other physicists
And pretty soon the cia come landing on my doorstep
And said oh have we been looking for you
And I said you know why yeah well they looked in my background they saw that I
had between my
Master's degree and phd. I'd been a naval intelligence officer at the national
security agency
I had lots of high-level clearances
And he said you know we have a problem and they plopped a big report down on
the desk
About like that and said look the russians has been spending millions of
dollars at their best institutes
Trying to use espionage purposes
And we don't know how to evaluate it. I mean no scientist in america even
believes there is such a thing
And yet you did this experiment
And it looked like this guy could actually get inside this device and describe
it and affect it
And here you're at sri we have lots of black projects here anyway, so
We'd like we'd like to check him out
Can you can you bring him back and let us come and do some experiments with
them and
By the way, we're hoping that we'll find this is just all bs
And we don't have to think about it and that'll be the end of that
So anyway brought him back
They spent a day hiding things in the boxes and envelopes and he would describe
what was inside
And they were totally blown away. So they said okay. We want we'd like to give
you a little project here
I don't know 50 or 60k
And see what else he could do. So anyway, that's how I got started on doing
quote weird stuff
And so as that many would know that project that ended up being very productive
and it went over
More than 20 years and so on highly classified level that well, maybe we'll get
to that separately
Because I think the uap stuff is kind of more interesting to to start with but
Anyway, that's that's how I got started in in weird physics
You might call it and then sort of like in ghostbusters. Well, if you got some
Difficult problem who you're gonna call
There I am
So what other things did you do with ingo so he was able to affect the oscillations
so able to affect the oscillations?
So there's some he had some sort of an ability to describe first of all like
what this ability was how he perceived it
He said that for some reason starting when he was a little kid
Um, he would you know try to focus on some news item or whatever and he'd
suddenly get
Some kind of picture in his mind about what was going on and later. He would
check it out and turn out to be
Correct. So he just said, you know, I just
He stumbled upon remote you on them, right?
remote viewing and then being able to interact with the equipment and change
the oscillation seems very different, right?
It is very different and
as we might discuss later
I've got some ideas about you know, what some of the quantum mechanisms might
be involved in that but anyway as far as the cia was concerned
they were most interested in this
Ability to see through shielding and they said does that mean if we have all
kinds of
classified documents and the superconducting safe
The russians might be able to you know reach in and see them and so that that
that's what they were most worried about
And so anyway, did you find that to be true?
That started a whole program when we found out that
it was true that
We started out doing what you would think you know just hiding things in the
next room and can you describe them and stuff like that and
but then
He got bored
He says well if you want to know what's in the next room go look
If you want to know what's in the envelope or the box open it up
So he said, well, you know, what do you have in mind?
He said well, just send somebody out into the san francisco bay area now
describe where they are
And so that's how what we call remote viewing program got started. We started
doing experiments
Which each I gotta I gotta say I I I resisted this stuff every inch along the
way because as a physicist
I had no idea how this could possibly be but nonetheless
We began working with him
Our lab director who's always concerned about was this some kind of hoax
between the subjects and the experimenters
He'd make up a long list and store them in his safe
And we'd go
Get the envelope out of the safe leave sri drive to wherever the envelope said
and he would give give a description
That's how that whole program got started
When you are experiencing this and you're initially very skeptical and you
start seeing these results
What kind of a shift does that have in your world view?
It was very challenging I gotta say
Because as a physicist and as a quantum physicist where I've you know written
equations for all kinds of interactions
I had no clue
How anything like this could possibly be and I'll be be honest?
I still don't really have a clue about
exactly what's what's going on other than
Consciousness seems to be
expandable out into the environment in a way that we don't usually
Consider it could possibly be the case
There are people who get into meditation and all that kind of stuff, but none
of that was in in in my background
So I just found this a challenge and
It was only that
The CIA was paying us to look into this that I kept going the next step
resisting every inch along the way
To give you an example
Along the way
There was a little bit of PR in the news print
Newspapers about our experience experiments. We began getting people calling in
and saying well
I have some of that ability to and whatever
And so
One of the people that came along that way was Pat price. He was
Ex-police commissioner Burbank
And he said you know when we wer