#2314 - Hal Puthoff

**Joe Rogan** (0:03)
The Joe Rogan Experience. Trained by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

**Hal Puthoff** (0:12)
All right.

**Joe Rogan** (0:13)
Al, what's happening?

**Hal Puthoff** (0:15)
Oh, a lot's happening. A lot, a lot's happening.

**Joe Rogan** (0:17)
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.

**Hal Puthoff** (0:26)
Oh, yes.

**Joe Rogan** (0:27)
Thinking about it a lot.

**Hal Puthoff** (0:28)
Yeah.

**Joe Rogan** (0:28)
You told me a lot of crazy stuff. So. Yeah.

**Hal Puthoff** (0:31)
Well, it just seems like that's been my thing in life. Get involved in the crazy stuff no matter where it comes from.

**Joe Rogan** (0:39)
When did that start? When did you start getting involved in the crazy stuff?

**Hal Puthoff** (0:43)
Well, actually, I began early on. I was 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 finally said, okay, I'm going to go to college 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, graduate level textbook, Fundamentals of Quantum Electronics, published in English, French, Russian and Chinese. So I was on a cool role just doing the normal physics kinds of things. But interestingly enough, once I was there writing a graduate level textbook, I 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 looked 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-linked 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 would 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 Swann, 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 lab and said, see if he could affect the plants and so on. While he was there, he saw my 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. I mean, I couldn't care less about dealing with, quote, a psychic 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 pretty interesting. So just in a lark, by this time, I'd headed over to Stanford Research Institute to do my laser work. So I invited him for 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.