Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2259 - Thomas Campbell
Uploaded: 2025-01-17T18:00:46.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2259 - Thomas Campbell' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-01-17. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2259 - Thomas Campbell' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-01-17. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2259 - Thomas Campbell

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
How are you, sir?
I'm just fine, Joe.
How are you today?
I'm great. It's very nice to meet you.
Yeah. Well, it's great meeting you.
You know, I've been getting email over the last five years that says,
Hey, Tom, you need to be on The Joe Rogan Show.
Tom, why haven't you been on The Joe Rogan Show?
And I get that.
And I say, Hey, guys, you just don't walk into The Joe Rogan Show and say,
Hey, here I am. I want to talk to Joe.
You guys are going to have to write Joe and see if you can't get him to invite
me.
Well, something happened.
Either one of those got to you or you just found out about it on your own.
But I'm glad to be here.
I'm glad you're here, too.
I pretty much found it organically.
I think someone suggested it.
I think people have suggested it over the years, your books.
And then I started reading one and I got very interested in it.
I was like, wow, this is pretty crazy.
Like, well, let's just get people to the beginning of My Big Toe.
How did you first begin with the research?
Well, actually, it all started while I was in graduate school, working on my Ph.D.
And I passed all my tests and everything, so I was doing research.
And the research I did was experimental nuclear, but it was low-energy nuclear.
And we had this big, like, four- or five-story-tall Van de Graaff generator
that produced the high-speed particles.
Now, that's different from the high-energy particle, you know, which is hugely
expensive.
And you wait in line for long times to get on one of those accelerators.
But this was owned by the university.
And when that machine was working, you took data.
And if you were awake for three days in a row taking data, well, that was just
one of the prices you paid.
Because if you stopped, oh, I've got to go to bed, there's a good chance that
the machine would break and it wouldn't be working when you got back.
So if it was working, you stayed with it.
And I saw this ad on the door that said, learn how to meditate.
And it had a bullet point, bullet point.
And one of them jumped out at me and said, you can get by with less sleep.
I said, I need that.
So I went and took my banana and paid $25, a special student price, and learned
how to meditate.
And it turned out it was a natural for me.
The very first time I tried, I thought I had been sitting there for maybe 10,
15 minutes, got up when somebody tapped me and said, it's time to go.
And I thought, oh, you just started.
And it turned out I'd been there like an hour and a half.
And it's like, oh, I just lost part of my life.
You know, this is amazing.
And from then on, every time I meditated, it was sort of like that.
You know, I would get deep in it instantly and have a lot of interesting things
going on.
And one day, I was sitting there in a meditation.
And then I started thinking about the software I was writing.
And back in those days now, you know, those days are in like the middle of the
late 60s.
You know, in those days, the computer was one computer for a whole university.
And it took up probably, you know, 10,000 square feet.
And it was probably about 100th as powerful as the one that's in your cell
phone.
And there were no debug programs.
There was nothing.
You put in, you run, and they send it back with a message that says it bombed.
That's all the output you got.
You know, maybe you'd get part of a printout if it got to some of your print
statements.
So that was back in the old days when working with a computer was a lot more
problematic than it is then.
So I was just thinking about it.
I had had some things bomb and didn't know why.
And I was searching through my card deck.
You know, if you can think back that far when computers were fed by punch cards.
And it was really hard to debug because, you know, some of the problems weren't
even real problems with your code.
But the hole was a little off-center.
You know, the card punches were all mechanical things, and they wore out.
And, you know, they had cams and gears and stuff, and they could punch off a
little off-center.
And the machine would throw it out.
And all you'd get is a message that says your job didn't run, you know.
It bombed.
So I started thinking about it, and when I did, I saw in my mind, I saw this
roll just like it was coming off a roll.
And there was my programs coming down there.
And then I saw one that was red.
Most of them were black on white, like you'd expect.
It's like looking at a printout.
And it would go through my card deck, and I'd see one with red, and I'd stop it.
And I'd look at it and noted it.
And then I'd find the next one.
I found, like, three or four of them.
And then next time I got back in the lab, I looked at those cards, and I found
errors on them.
And I said, holy shit, what's going on?
Now, I'm a young 26-year-old physicist, and in my mind, reality can be defined
in an operational state.
If you can operate on it, if you can do something with it, if you can interact
with it, then it's real.
If you can't, it's not.
And that's, of course, a materialist viewpoint, that material stuff is real.
Stuff that's not material is either not real or irrelevant because you can't
interact with it.
So, what's the point?
So, when I got that, that startled me, and I started to play with it more.
And I found some errors that, indeed, were card punch errors.
And I thought, that's not even errors in code.
How do I know that that card has a punch error?
Because it's very hard to tell.
When you look at it, they all look fine.
You can't tell something that's a tenth of a millimeter, you know, out of line.
But I realized, jeez, there's a whole other part of reality that has to do with
consciousness that I don't know anything about.
I'm a physicist.
Physicists model reality.
That's what they do.
And here I was, right in my face.
There's another part to reality that's consciousness-centered.
So, that's really where it all started.
And then some years later, I left graduate school.
I take a job.
My boss tosses me a book called Journeys Out of the Body by Bob Monroe.
He said, hey, we found the, you know, read, first he said, read the book.
Tell me what you think.
So, I read the book.
And I said, eh, is the guy making it up to sell books?
Or is it real?
If it's real, wow.
Because I'd had this other experience and I knew things of the mind could be,
you know, were real.
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Can I bring you back to that experience?
So, you're meditating and in meditation you saw errors in the code that you
couldn't see physically with your eyes.
Right.
And you had been working on this for how long at this point?
Oh, I was probably in year, I don't know, year three or four in graduate school.
Deeply engrossed in this work.
This is occupying your mind all day long.
And some other area of consciousness had perceived errors that were indiscernible
through your eyes.
Yes.
The things that, you know, when you're looking for errors and you have to look
through one card at a time through 2,000 cards,
it's tedious and it's long.
So, I'm sitting there and in my mind I'm thinking, oh, man, my job, you know,
bombed.
What is it?
What card is it?
Which, you know, what's the problem?
So, I put that, it's kind of, I didn't intend to, but just thinking about it, I
put that intent out there.
And when I put that intent out there, I started seeing my lines of code.
And it's like, what's that?
Oh, I recognize that.
That's my code.
And was it all accurate?
Like, did you see anything that wasn't incorrect?
No.
It was always accurate.
And that was like hitting a hard-headed physicist with a sledgehammer.
It was always accurate.
Matter of fact, I got so good at it, people were asking me, Tom, could you look
at my code and help me debug it?
Because I was doing much better than the average guy.
Was that working with other people's code as well, things that you weren't
familiar with?
I didn't try that.
I always said no, because I had no idea.
Right.
You were working with magic.
I was working.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah.
I didn't want to do that.
I didn't want to break the spell.
What was the attitude around the other scientists when you were describing
these experiences that you were having?
I didn't describe those experiences I was having.
When you're a physicist, you don't tell people things like that.
It's impossible.
And everybody knows it's impossible.
So you don't go around talking about people about things that are impossible
happening to you because that's not good.
So I kept it to myself.
Not good for business.
No, not good for business.
So when other people say, well, can you help me, I really don't have time to
help you because I wasn't going to tell them what was going on.
That was –
So what did you tell them?
Did you come up with some sort of an excuse or how you were able to do this?
No.
No, I wasn't really in a group.
Each person is doing their own research in their own way at their own time,
writing their own software, writing their own programs.
So it's an individual thing.
I didn't really interact with it.
And you know how it is when something happens and you have no idea why or how?
You don't want to break it.
Right.
You don't want to mess with it.
You don't want to jinx it.
Right, right.
You don't want to do anything that makes it go away because this was the most
valuable tool that I'd ever run across.
And I could just do it in my mind.
And that got me wondering.
And like I say, I thought, well, there's another whole bunch of reality that's
out there.
And I didn't even know it was there.
But I want to learn about it.
I'm a physicist.
I want to model reality.
And I've been living in a subset of reality.
There's more.
And that stuck in my mind.
So when I got to this job and they mentioned Bob Monroe, I never heard of him.
But I read the book.
But I was thinking, wow, now that's interesting.
Because at that point, I knew the mind could do some very unusual things.
And I was lucky that they found out that he was only about a 45-minute drive
from where I was working.
And we all got in a car one day and went out to see Bob Monroe.
And my point was, is this guy nuts or what?
Is he making money by telling stories or is he real?
I found out he was real.
He was a very open kind of guy.
Matter of fact, he reminded me of engineers that I've been working with.
You know, matter of fact, you know, all, you know, left brain, logical process.
Had no idea how it worked or what was going on with him.
It just happened to him.
And how did Bob come across this?
Bob experienced it just, I guess, in a way, sort of like I did.
It just happened.
You know, he didn't try it.
He wasn't going for that.
He wasn't interested in psychic phenomena.
It wasn't anything like that.
It just happened to him.
And it terrified him.
What is this?
He thought maybe he was dying.
He thought maybe he was insane.
He found a psychiatrist, I think.
Charlie Tart maybe comes to mind.
He found somebody.
He went to them and they said, Bob, you're sane.
You're perfectly sane.
What was Bob's experience?
Like what was his particular revelation?
His experience was that he was taking a l