Joe Rogan - The Truth About Psychic Powers

But anyway, so here I am. I'm with Mike Edwards. We show up at the airport in St. Louis. First time we're gonna meet. We meet each other. We hit it off right away. I don't have my driver's license. I had some, what a former idea. I don't know what a former idea I had. I had some other former idea. And Mike, he had his and he could drive. He just got his at the time. So I wonder if I use my passport. I don't know. Anyway. This whole thing you do, this fast talking thing, this is part of the shuck and jive though. This is a little bit of a part of the thing. No, it's just me. But I understand. But it also is very effective. That's what a shuck and jive artist does. They talk very fast and they never pause. So you never get a chance to interject. And they're constantly going. So if they're reading your or saying something, you have to keep up with them. And part of the keeping up with them is you get a little bewildered. And then bewildered, you forget what you've said or they've said. And you're trying to sort of keep pace with them. And you can. And next thing you know, they're like, Oh my God, I can't believe you know that. How'd you figure that out? Well, we'll get to that later. And then you keep going and you keep that as part of the entertainment aspect of it. Yeah, it's not what I'm doing right now. Because when he was fighting, he would put a pace on you. You couldn't keep up with. Right. Right. Yeah. So you always analyze it with fighting, which is great. Yeah. Well, it's going to have things. Vulnerabilities. Yeah. Exploit vulnerabilities in the human mind. And one of them is that you talk and think faster than most people. So most people when you're talking, they don't have it like what you just did right there. You want to get a chance to interject because I'm going to let you because I'm going to keep talking. And as I keep talking, I talk quicker. You get bewildered. That's one of the things that you do to people, whether you realize it or not, you do it because you've done it that way for a long time. It's probably right. It's become a pattern. Yeah. It's become a pattern to make the other person feel insecure. So you don't know what you're trying to do for it. It's a pattern for me being able to think and not forget things as I'm saying them. Like, because so effective, though, as you said that there's another thing that popped in my eye. I've got it like all day long. I have songs in my head. It doesn't stop. Like I do this with my teeth all the time playing the song music in my head, like constantly. If I'm not thinking about anything else, I have songs in my head constantly. And I've even I went to the dentist and I said, Hey, you know, I've got this thing with my teeth and I'm tapping my teeth. I'm wearing them down. You know what's going on. And he says, Oh, musicians do that all the time. I go, well, I always have music 24 hours a day in my head. So, wow. But now I've gone off somewhere and there was, Oh, handwriting. So if you look at my hand, look my handwriting, how bad my handwriting, like it's really hard to freaking read, right? It's not that bad. Somebody just wrote me a letter the other day and I read the letter. Somebody, a friend of mine sent me something. He wrote me a letter and I read his letter. I was like, well, what the fuck is that? Because it's just scribble. Well, that's me. Right. Someone had to read it. This is me writing neat and slow, so slow. Normally when I write, I can't read it myself. I go back and I look, well, that's the thing. What you just said, you're trying to keep up with your thoughts. Yeah. And that's one of the things about bad handwriting. They say that you're trying to keep up with what you're thinking. Oh, that makes sense. It's always going a mile a minute. It's going a thousand different ways. And I think it's part of my problem solving is like when people give me ideas that they want, okay, this is what I'd like to do. It's a magic effect. How do I do it? I'm able to rattle off like 10, 15 different ways of doing it. But it's so effective, like as a mentalist, that way, that pattern of talking is so bewildering to people that they just sort of like, huh, what, what, what, huh? And you've got them on the ropes always. It is that thing of even in my stage show, and you'll have to come to a stage show sometime. I would love to. I would love you to come see it. Well, I saw the mini version of it when you did the television shows blown away. I mean, the first thing I do is I come out before I don't even introduce myself. Where do you do it? So if people can, what they want to see. I was just at Planet Hollywood, filling for the English. In Vegas? Yeah, I've got a thing coming up at Rochester, a fringe festival in Rochester, New York. I'm at a lot of different colleges. You can go to my website, www.manachik.com, and look up the dates. But the Rochester is going to be on the 13th, 7pm, 14th, 5pm. Then I'm on the 20th at 9pm, the 22nd, 3pm. I know. So you can find it on the website. So it is on the website. But you're in Vegas all the time, right? I'm in Vegas a lot. I don't work Vegas that much. I'm busy now, really, until the beginning of November. I'm going to be like different places, touring on the road. Some of it's corporate, some of it's college. It's a mismatch of different things. So go back to this whole James Randi, Yuri Geller. So here I am with Mike Edwards at the airport, and we're hitting it off and everything. Peter Phillips shows up, and he's the professor that I mentioned a minute ago who's going to be doing the investigating of us. And he has this wristband on, and I'm always asking questions, what's this, what's that? And I'm always noticing things. And he said it was a wristband that he got from a witch doctor in Africa that helps protect him. So I'm starting to think this might be a little easier than I thought it was going to be. But he's going in. I was like, I didn't know these guys skeptical. They could use one-way mirrors. Are they going to be trying to trick us, catch us? I had no clue. So we get into, we had Peter Phillips' car because Mike was too young to drive a rental. Peter Phillips has a rental. He's in front of us, so we're following him. And this is how it all starts, really. I'm sitting there and just kind of like me talking all the time. I'm looking around. I'm always doing something, always noticing something. I look in the back seat and I notice there's a briefcase. I reach in the back and I kind of pull it under the dash. It's locked. And to me, like if somebody locks something, it means they don't want you inside there, of course, right? But why doesn't anyone is in there? Old briefcase, easily he can just open the lock. So I pick the locks, open it up. Inside there's a whole bunch of silverware. So either this guy's a kleptomaniac or this is the silverware he's going to be using for the experiment. So I start bending it all up, lock the briefcase, put it in the back. Sit there for about two more minutes, open up the glove compartment. There's some extra keys and things in the glove compartment. I stop bending those up. You bent his fucking keys? Well, I'm a psychic, right? This stuff, this shit happens. What if he needed those keys and getting his house? Yeah, but I needed him to be convinced I was genuine. So I end up looking over at the car keys that are hanging out, the keys that are hanging out on the car key out of the ignition. I start to reach over to get them and Mike just looks at me and says, I think you've done enough. Stop. But there's this really interesting phenomenon, right? We knew that in the laboratory, everything we did at that point was going to be on a micro level. It's going to be very small because it had to be because we couldn't make it look like it's a trick. It had to look like minute. And not just that, we didn't know if they were going to be watching, as I said, through one way mirrors and things like that. So there's an interesting phenomenon at the time that was called spontaneous PK. And that is stuff that just happens. PK. Psychokinesis. PK is short for psychokinesis. Telekinesis, psychokinesis, the whole thing, all the same thing. So there's these things just supposedly happen around these psychics that can bend metal. Stuff moves, stuff breaks, stuff that. So those things were the things that would convince him and keep him holding on, even if we did a big bend out of the laboratory, but not on camera. That's the thing that would keep him going, I want to get that on film. I definitely want to get that on film. I'm going to document that someday. That's going to happen in the laboratory. When we ended up getting to the laboratory, all the students at the university were extremely skeptical, very, very skeptical, but they had heard about the spontaneous PK. So they hid things underneath the video recorders. There was a separate room and they hid all kinds of things everywhere around. I noticed there was stuff hidden. I mean, why is there a quarter hidden under that VCR? Why is there a fork hidden behind that cupboard? It doesn't belong there. So I started bending up all those things on lunchtime and that convinced all the students that we were genuine as well. Oh Christ. So this whole thing went on and on. It's as simple as... So what happened was immediately Randy sent them a list of 13 caveats of things that they shouldn't do. And it was common sense stuff, right? It was stuff like, don't let the subjects work at the same time because they could distract you. Don't let them work with more than one object at a time because they could confuse you with those objects as to which ones you're bending. And there was this whole list of different things. They showed the list to me and Mike and had a good laugh about it and said, this would make you guys so uncomfortable. We want you to be comfortable. Where in reality, they should have followed that list because... Oh, one of the things Randy said was mark everything on a micro and a macro level. So the subjects can see the macro mark, but won't realize there's a micro mark on there as well, which would have helped because their idea of doing a macro mark was on every fork, they took the fork or spoon, they measured it at both ends, like the height from the table, and they measured the middle of the fork from the height from the table. Then they put a label on it on a little string with a number on it. And that was their idea of keeping track of if something had bent or not because they would measure it after we concentrated on it. And they would then remeasure it again afterwards. And they would say, oh, okay, this is bent a millimeter or two millimeters. So we would do things like we would say, this tag's in my way. Can I take it off? Yeah, you can take it off. We'd put it down, concentrate on it. Didn't do anything. Put it down on the table, pick up another fork or a spoon. Say, do you mind if I remove this tag? Take it off, put it down, concentrate on it. Nothing happens. Switch the tags around on the one that was on the first one to the second one, the second one to the first one, and then put the two forks off to the side and then wait two, three hours later, pick up one of those forks, obviously not doing anything with it, concentrating on it. Say, why don't you measure it? And they would measure it. And the measurements had now changed. Not realizing because they never measured the other one again, because they remeasured everything consistently later on and put new tags on them every single time. Not realizing that we just simply switched forks. Or as we reached across the table, we would lean on one of the forks. And then hours again later, we would pretend like we actually bent that fork. So this went on. I mean, it went on for 180 hours over four years. I mean, we messed with these people bad. We did probably some things at the time that were probably illegal as well. Like what? Like leaving the window unlocked at the laboratory, going off to the club across the state line, coming back like about four, five o'clock in the morning, breaking into the building and bending up every single piece of metal that was in the laboratory. They had a fucking scientists were running this. Well, this is back in the 80s. So right now they had, they actually had this aquarium back in the 80s. Scientists were like 80s TV shows. No, it's true. Here's a sad thing, right? I went into this thinking these people were going to be the enemy. It was me against them. I had to do this. Turns out these are just really, really nice, nice people that are very naive when it comes to what psychic phenomena is. Right. Well, if you're a scientist, most likely you're not studying a whole lot of liars and mentalists and magicians and psychic phenomenon. And you really are probably trying to find out whether or not it's real. And maybe you believe a little bit too much. You don't know enough yet when it came to this type of phenomena. Absolutely. But you Gella was already doing that. Other psychics were already doing it in other countries and they will be invalidated as a genuine thing in other countries. Yeah. We know like Gisérato over in France, even North over in England, you know, there was a lot of research going on in England at the time on this type of phenomena as well. It was a really big thing back then. It was just people hosing people. It was little kids like that. Here's the weird thing, right? So over in England, there were, um, I can't think of what the guy's name is now. Uh, there was a scientist over there, a parapsychologist who was working with little kids and his thinking is that kids don't lie. Little kids don't lie. That's all they do is lie. They get to that point where they learn how to lie to get anything and everything. That's someone without kids. And these kids only got caught. The only reason they got caught was by accident because they were, the video cameras were left on. And soon as the parapsychologist left the room, the kids were taking forks and spoons and actually bending them underneath their feet and then putting them back up on the, on the table. So then they would come in. It was, they literally scientists went in with the premise that children don't lie. That is one of the dumbest fucking things I've ever heard in my life. I don't disagree with you, but this is how badly people wanted to believe in this phenomenon. Why do people want to believe in hidden powers? I think it's why people want to believe in most things, right? I mean, we want to find, we want to believe there's something more than just us. Like for most people, we're just, we're not enough. And I don't know if it's because we get so bored with our lives, we get depressed with our lives. We get, you know, we're in this everyday thing of going to work, coming home. And is this all there is? Is this it, you know, is there something else that that's a superpower that I could, I could actually have? Is there something I can discover that's bigger than me, better than me, you know, this is a universe much bigger than just this planet right here. Right. So, I mean, if you asked me, I would think that if you, if UFOs were coming here, if they were coming here, let's say, I don't believe they were, but if they were coming here, you don't believe they were? No, no, I don't. Why is that? I think if they were, I just don't, I don't, I think we would really have real evidence, 100% evidence of it by now. But here's the thing, right? Wouldn't it make much sense? Even like for us, okay, let's say we start going looking at other planets, are we going to send other humans out there? Or are we going to go ahead and send robots or something like that? They can last much. Like we do to Mars. Yeah, they can last much. And robots are getting better and better and better at. So if there's an advanced civilization, surely they would also have this advancement where they don't have to send themselves out. They could send something to represent them, right? What the real hardcore believers believe those grays are. Yeah. Gray aliens, the big black eyes, they think there's some sort of an Android or something. And it could be, but I don't believe, I don't believe we had them. I believed a lot more before I started doing that television show. Right. That television show cured me of Bigfoot, cured me of psychics, cured me of aliens, cured me of like almost everything. Well, this is the thing with me, right? When I was a young kid, I believed in that stuff. You know, when I was a young kid, I spoke in tongues, you know, thought I did. Did you really? Yeah. Yeah. I had the whole experience. I mean, it was like, you know, all the chemicals running through my body and me just going to get a music, but I'm about to get, you know, doing the whole damn thing, you know, and go into that. And I realized later what was going on. But at the time I was looking for answers. I was looking for answers in religion. Well, you had a very disturbed life and you were probably looking for some sort of security. I got shut down every single time I would ask questions. I was called a troublemaker.