Talking with animals and aliens is the stuff of children’s stories and conspiracy theorists. But for John Cunningham Lilly, it was his life's work.
So, who on earth is John Cunningham Lilly?
At the age of 16, most of us can barely organise our way out of a paper bag, hold more than a grunting conversation with our friends, or ask anything intelligent of anyone.
But Lilly wasn't just anyone. See, at 16 he had a pretty profound question: whether the mind could render itself sufficiently objective to study itself.
Woah.
It became his life's work trying to answer that question. Where it took him may surprise you.
Early in Lilly’s career, it led him to become the first scientist to locate the pain and pleasure centres in the brain. And the first to... artificially stimulate them.
But, you don’t study techniques for stimulating pain and pleasure in the brain without the FBI, the CIA, Air Force Intelligence, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the National Security Agency, Army Intelligence, and the State Department all becoming interested.
So when Lilly realised that furthering this research meant the weaponisation of it, he abandoned the research and found another way to answer his question.
Flipping the script, Lilly decided that sensory deprivation might be a pathway to understanding the mind. His quest to be cut off from sight, sound, temperature and gravity led him to invent the first-ever isolation tank. Not only was it the most relaxing thing he had ever been in, his time in the quiet, wet darkness led him to find “other things”. He experienced presences, both known and unknown. He eventually began to see through to another reality.
At this point in his career, after guidance from some alien beings and a chance encounter with the gargantuan brain of a pilot whale, Lilly’s secret mission to study the human mind turned to the study of bottlenose dolphins.
Lilly was determined to bring humans and dolphins into close proximity, so they could learn from each other and humans could teach the dolphins English.
This work led him to believe that dolphins deserved a seat at the United Nations, and the creation of the little-known Order of the Dolphin.
But did Lilly actually manage to talk to animals? And did he ever actually answer that driving question - can we understand our own mind?
SOURCES:
Bruce Clarke’s John Lilly, The Mind of the Dolphin, and Communication Out of Bounds
Gerard A Houghton: John Lilly Obituary
Alex Leyman’s John C. Lilly: The Mad Scientist Who Gave LSD to Dolphins
John C Lilly’s Dolphins' Complex Communication
John C Lilly’s Autobiography The Scientist: A Metaphysical Autobiography [described by the New Age Journal as “at times naive and frustrating”]
John C Lilly / Ecco - Dolphin Voice, uploaded to Youtube by musick2138
Christopher Riley’s The dolphin who loved me: the Nasa funded project that went wrong.
Maria Temming and Anthony Crider’s The Order of the Dolphin: Origins of SETI
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Rod 00:00
You know, when he wants something a lot like he really wanted a lot and you want it so much that you believe and squeeze and drive for this thing as much as you possibly can. Scientists do this too. And in this episode, we made a couple of people who really, really want to find something maybe more than a couple of people. They reckon they maybe succeeded in talking to certain animals. But did they? You be the judge?
Will 00:31
Okay, first things first, I've just got to address the elephant in the room.
Rod 00:37
You know, I don't like it when you call me that sort of gained a few pounds, boom.
Will 00:42
Because if I don't get it out of the way, now, it's gonna it's going to come up to me and it's gonna start banging its snout into my leg. And until I solve the problem this is the story where the lady whacked off the dolphin. But you know what? That's the bit that everyone focuses on.
Rod 01:03
Just before you enter in you have to ask the question. Is that the sound? Or was it the sound of a dolphin being beaten off?
Will 01:08
To be honest, to be honest, it is not the most interesting thing in this tale, and I gotta say, there's a whole much more in this tale that is a lot more interesting.
Rod 01:50
She sounds like she's killing that fucking thing. If that's the sound of a dolphin climaxing no wonder they got angry.
Will 02:15
Welcome to The Wholesome Show,
Rod 02:18
The podcast that tries to open up holes in the universe of science.
Will 02:22
I'm Will Grant.
Rod 02:24
I'm formally innocent, Rod Lamberts until I just heard those noises. That sounds like torture and you've got to love no pronouns. English Peter English. Okay, you speak dolphin woman. Let's hear you. That's a horrifying. Thank you.
Will 02:39
Um, I got quick note on sources. Yeah, for this story. There's a whole bunch out there. And there's a whole bunch of small contradictions and small elements of this story that don't come across super clearly. I just want to point to two works that I've drawn on one is Christopher Riley's work on this topic. There's some great stuff there. But also, one of John Lilly himself's autobiographies is drawn into the dolphin. It's just a frickin cracking read just amazing. By the time he had his epiphany wandering along the beach in Massachusetts in 1949, John Cunningham, Lilly had already lived one hell of a goddamn life. He'd had, as he wrote about later, experienced himself as both a sperm and an egg, and directed the penetration of the sperm into the egg.
Rod 03:28
So to clarify, he was intellectually present at his conception and made sure it went the way he thought it should.
Will 03:35
Yes, he'd experienced again, he told the story later, the deep squeezy redness and purposefulness of the worm. The thrashing local catastrophe of his mother's birth canal opening, and his head getting stuck for several hours.
Rod 03:48
Well, we've all heard the last bit but the thrashing local catastrophe
Will 03:51
He remembers it, he remembers his head getting stuck for several hours.
Rod 03:55
It's the language that the threshing local catastrophe,
Will 03:59
it was a tearing of the whole of the local universe.
Rod 04:02
But birth is beautiful, man,
Will 04:03
I've heard that it is but it's it's quite, quite traumatic.
Rod 04:07
I've never done it. You have? No I've never had a birth I've been a birth. Yeah. You were there.
Will 04:13
In some way you were inside your mother, and then later you are out
Rod 04:17
Did we have to bring my mother into it.
Will 04:20
He also had also experienced soon after birth, suckling the warm milk from the soft, warm surface. And that made him happy. At three, he'd worked out how to turn off his emotions on an on. This is when his mother weaned him and he decided I no longer love my mother. And so he turned it off. I have an emotion chip and it can be clicked on or off at seven. He'd seen God directly while he was sitting on his Majestics throne. There was a little bit in the story. He was on the throne God or no, no God, no. He went and hid in the closet and saw God sitting on his throne. At 12 He had...
Rod 04:55
What's left?
Will 04:56
You've seen God. You've directed your own sperm into your own egg.
Rod 05:00
You've experienced the thrashing catastrophe. Now you're, you're 12. And you're like, what's the point? He put a gun in his mouth? And that was the end of it.
Will 05:07
No, he didn't. He didn't 12 and 12. Do you know, you know, back in the in the 50s, they had those? No, this must have been the 30s or so. Those exercise machines with the big the big belt, and you just stand there, and it wobbles you.
Rod 05:20
So let me tell you, we had one of those in our house. My parents rented one in the early 70s. Oh, my God. And we were fucking fascinated as kids because I was like, I was a five year old guy, and what are you doing mom? Mom was a larger lady. And they were sold as you get rid of fat. Because while you're fed away with no work, you just stand there, you turn on one of the two channels on television, and it goes. So we put it on and live our asses off because it's just hilarious and sort of tickled in a catastrophic and violent way. But it was, yeah, they existed in the 70s. They're all the rage. How far did you go? I look at me, I'm lean.
Will 05:55
Well, John Cunningham, Lilly, he put it on when I was 12. It made his whole body vibrate with pain and pleasure, incredible pleasure until his pants got all wet.
Rod 06:04
So no, I didn't get that experience. I think we got it. We got one of the lesser models. We got the entry level. This one didn't wank you off at the same time.
Will 06:13
But it wasn't all weird. It wasn't all weird.
Rod 06:15
What's what's weird so far?
Will 06:16
At 13 He was an avid chemistry hobbyist. And he supplemented his makeshift basement laboratory with chemicals he could get from his friend and the nearby pharmacist. So I thought that was cool. His friends at school called him Einstein Jr. Did they? At 16 At school, he made a documentary a video documentary at school. I don't know how exposing hazing practices this must have been in the 30s so it must have been some sort of old film sort of thing Welcome welcome. We're gonna wants to know and it led to it led to policy changes in his school, like his principal stood up and took notice of his documentary. That's intense. Okay, he wrote an essay for his student newspaper, that's too much exploring the, I gotta say, pretty advanced question. Can the mind render itself sufficiently objective to study itself?
Rod 07:02
How do you even ask that question, my brains hurting?
Will 07:04
It might be a theme throughout this is John Cunningham Lilly, got a question when he was 16 and spent a lot of time trying to answer that question. He'd gone to uni. His dad wanted to go to him to go to MIT and become a banker. What I know not quite what MIT is famous blue, that engineering school. Let's learn banking. John, John Lilly instead wanted to go to Caltech. He wanted to explore big become an artist. No, no, he did a Bachelor of Science. He was it was full science. He was Bachelor of Science. He did a lot of biology at the time, President of the ski club, he read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. He got half kicked out of uni because his dad was rich, which half the half that was paying the bills, he got a scholarship. If you can stay, he got a scholarship and the people in the running the halls said our Dude, we know your dad's rich, so you can't stay here on scholarship, it would look bad. And so there's a little bit of extortion where his dad had to had to pay some bills. He participated in a summer research project where he went on a completely protein free diet until he went delirious.
Rod 08:08
Imagine that no protein because who needs to keep their muscles functioning? Oh, that's for losers. Everyone knows if you're going to quit anything, just make sure you keep sugar, lots of sugar. That's that's, that's in all the diets.
Will 08:20
It was for it was for a research project. And that was his his first published paper.
Rod 08:23
My research has made me delirious at times, for much worse reasons,
Will 08:27
no doubt. After he finished at Caltech, he was like, Okay, where am I gonna go next? His dad said, Okay, you got to go to Harvard now. And he said, No, I want to go to Dartmouth. Anyway, weirdly, call the jumpers. His dad had a car crash at roughly that time, crashed his car off a bridge, like 100 feet in the air survived, landed in a coma. And first thing that his dad said the instant he woke up is you're going to Harvard and and John Lilly fought back and said, No, I'm going to Dartmouth, welcome back binary butcher, why just the idea of the instant that your dad wakes up from a coma, you start the fight again.
Rod 09:04
So he comes from a driven family. He did is very focused. Yeah.
Will 09:08
He went to Dartmouth and he studied medicine. He cut up heaps of cadavers, like 34 Different cadavers stretching out their intestines, to see how long they were, I don't know if that had been proved or not before, but he was the head length. But at this point, he was really starting to discover that research was the place for him. He he liked the idea of medicine, and and biophysics, but not in a therapeutic way. He absolutely wanted to do research,
Rod 09:34
We could always don't fight back like patients do with their opinions or
Will 09:39
if it's if it's solving people's health problems. It's big picture is a big picture guy, not a small picture guy.
Rod 09:45
I get it. It's just like when I work in a bar I'd rather be making the drinks and cleaning the tables. It's the same thing.
Will 09:50
Well, I thought you're gonna say like inventing the drinks. So you can see the parallels and analogies almost. And then when he wants to The War came World War Two. And he continued to investigate on himself, including exploring what happens when the body undergoes the process of explosive decompression. Great things basically if you're in an aircraft 38,000 feet side of the plane gets ripped off in something. What's it like for the people on the inside?
Rod 10:18
Unpleasant? You know what I feel? I feel uncomfortable. And I'd prefer this didn't happen. That's how I would imagine they would that would have been so but I think they needed more than that. They need some details. Have you got recordings of him screaming as he goes, I don't have those I don't have that was disappointed.
Will 10:33
And after the war, he published the first public facing book on how to build an atomic bomb. Cool. Yeah, philanthropist. He's done a whole bunch of things. But his original question always remained, could the mind render itself sufficiently objective to study itself? So after the war, working in various government and university research, he began, he began to apply the electronics, computer science and biophysics he learned at Caltech, Dartmouth and Pennsylvania to attempt to answer this question, but secretly secret course. And he wrote this in his his auto biography. The autobiography is called the scientist, a metaphysical journey.
Rod 11:16
With a side serving a dolphin torture
Will 11:19
With a side serving of a lot of wild a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of wild. But but but one thing he does in this autobiography, is he talks about his research career, both things he did, and I'll tell you some of the stuff that is concrete, you know, he had research projects, delivered results found out absolutely new things that people had never been done before. He's always like, given I was doing this to have a secret agenda of big question, the big question, big question. He started turning first to a bunch of things, using his biophysics knowledge, to try to understand the brain and the mind. That was his big question. Are they the same thing? Are they different things? Can we understand what the mind might be? In 1951? I think this is his first invention. He invented a method of portraying the electrical activity of the brain on a TV. So he puts on Netflix now, he found you could you could put electrodes into a monkey brain, and then you could show that electrical activity, okay. In the process, he discovered that the more skull that was removed from an experimental animal, the longer it took the animal to recover from an operation.
Rod 12:22
So the more you fuck up a body, the longer it takes to repair.
Will 12:25
It wasn't known before. What? I don't know. He did discover it, though.
Rod 12:29
Yeah, but you know, there were some things more, let's say, earth shattering than others. The bigger the hole, the length of the hill.
Will 12:36
Okay, his next discovery is 1953, he moved to the National Institutes of Health in Maryland, bring me his monkey brain electrode machine, and discovered that by sticking wires into the brains of male monkeys, he could on command and separately, I know this is going to make the monkey erect. ejaculate, yeah. And orgasm.
Rod 12:55
I've heard one of those machines for years now. So could he do it in a different order? Can you just make them ejectulate straightaway?
Will 13:03
Yes, I believe so. This is what he says he could separate each of those different functions. He was mainly interested in the orgasm function. Sure. I'll tell you why in a second.
Rod 13:12
I don't need to be told. Who isn't?
Will 13:14
Yeah, I get it. I get it. Who is who is there thinking? Draw who want to make a mess? Who?
Rod 13:21
Just want to get it out of me? Do you want to enjoy it? I don't care. I just want to get rid of it.
Will 13:26
Okay, fair enough. Not doing anything. They he showed that a male monkey rigged up to this that was allowing an orgasm once every three minutes. So there's a cap on that 24 hours a day, would press the button every three minutes to kill himself for 16 hours now then that fall asleep for eight hours and then start again? 16 hours, 16 hours. So
Rod 13:45
every three minutes for 16 hours? I'm going to need to sit down just thinking about that as exhausting. This organism without issuing forth? I believe so. Yes. Just Just push the climax button. Yes. I can't imagine there would be any issues of addiction?
Will 14:01
No, not at all. No, not at all, or any other issues as well because what he had found was pain and pleasure centres in the brain and found a way to stimulate them directly. And this actually was brand new at the time. So 1953 whilst people might have speculated on this the idea that you could reach into a brain particularly wired up brain and press a button and that point they have the orgasm hadn't been seen before.
Rod 14:29
This is a great so pornography and sex have driven so many technologies and like that, what are you gonna do with the brain? What do you want to find out? You know how you can switch off pain, you know, make people remember things better? Nup, come.
Will 14:39
You might be finding other things as well. This might be a simple thing.
Rod 14:42
I don't think so. I know this guy pretty well, I'm pretty sure and
Will 14:45
so as he says in his autobiography, this news travelled through the government.
Rod 14:50
How can we weaponize it, we found the pleasure button. Let's kill people with it.
Will 14:55
So John Lilly wrote this story is it's super stilted in his autobiography One day, John. And because of his auto biography, he steps out of himself a little bit and talks in the third person, proving the mind can rise. Yes. One day John was called to the telephone in his laboratory, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health was on the phone. John, I have a request for you to brief a meeting of the combined intelligence services of the United States government, the FBI, the CIA, Air Force, intelligence, Office of Naval Intelligence, NSA, Army Intelligence State Department, they would like us to make a presentation of your brain electrode techniques for stimulating motivations within the brain. John, Bob, this is a very dangerous area, and I'm very reluctant to do this briefing. What are the conditions under which it has to be done? I think he's just not a great writer. No, he's not the director, you have to set up those conditions before you give the briefing. I know your reluctance to work under secret auspices. John, it seems to me that there's very potent method of controlling human motivations, both positively and negatively. I did not want to do such briefing under security. He wanted to do it. He wanted to do it in public. He's like, Okay, I'll tell you about it. It's got to be public. Other people got to know
Rod 16:00
if I'm gonna make myself get off at a flick of a switch. I want as many people as possible to watch me,
Will 16:05
the director, despite the fact that you're an officer in the Commissioned Officer courts of the United States Public Health Service, this is not a conversation. No, it is not. This is a list. I will not order you to give a secret briefing, Dr. Kenny has told me that all the work in his laboratory and in yours is to be open not under security. I agree with this.
Rod 16:21
It just rolls off the tongue doesn't it's a natural conversation if ever I
Will 16:23
read it. John Lilly, Dr. Antoine Raimond, using our techniques in Paris has demonstrated that this method of stimulation of the brain can be applied to the human without the help of a neurosurgeon. He is doing it in his office in Paris without neurosurgical supervision. This means that anybody with the proper apparatus can carry this out on a human being covertly with no external science that electrodes have been used on the person, I don't believe him, I feel that this technique got into the hands of a secret agency that would have total control over a human being and be able to change his beliefs extremely quickly, leaving very little evidence of what they have done. It's a friggin long leap from I can make a monkey come to I can make you believe in stuff that you just don't really know that you change your politics. You get the communists and you put the hat on them but and you're a communist and and you're either de communism, you put an orgasm every time they think of the word capitalism. And the exactly one of the reverse organism. Exactly. You could do that or other way around. So he was he was he was quite worried about that. Particularly if you've got a hat sitting on your head the whole time.
Rod 17:25
Undetectable, let's not forget, you don't and you don't need a neurosurgeon for this that one of the bonuses.
Will 17:30
Anyway, Lily did the talk. He did the presentation on his brain electrode stimulation to all of those spy agencies sometime later. And it's unclear in his autobiography when a scientist from the Sandia Corporation, Sandia Sandia, I don't know if you've heard of them. They're a subsidiary of Honeywell. They're a corporation whose basic job they've been around in the US since the Second World War, whose basic job is to think about the delivery of nuclear weapons and other adjacent sorts of
Rod 18:00
Honeywell make safes and shit don't they, security business?
Will 18:03
No, Honeywell Honeywell, like, like one of the big defence contractors? That's what I meant. Yeah, yeah, make us safe. So Sandia Corporation, they're a private entity, and their job is to do super secret military research,
Rod 18:16
as all super secret military research should be conducted under conditions of the market.
Will 18:21
Indeed, definitely did. Indeed, scientists from the Sandia Corporation found Lilly and said, Hey, we use your work. I showed him a video of a mule, donkey horse hybrid, going across very mountainous steep slopes controlled by a sun compass and brain electrodes. Oh, the mule's course was maintained in a perfectly straight line, irrespective of terrain. The sun compass was hooked to the brain electrode. So the mule deviated from his course it was punished. And if you remained on course, he was rewarded by appropriate electrodes. So John was worried about people using his brain stimulation thing to mess with mess with equine related No, no, this is this is just simple. You their idea here was you put a small tactical nuclear weapon on a donkey. And you you put the brain electrodes on its brain and you just marched into the enemy camp
Rod 19:10
for the opening presentation. Okay, look, we got we got a technical nuclear device. Quite a small one. And we're going to put it Are you with me? On a donkey? And imagine all the generals going, I'm fucking out. This drunk clan is in here again. But whose son is this?
Will 19:25
But how long would it take you to realise you know, you're guarding your base or whatever. And you see a donkey walking slowly towards you. Yeah, at what point do you go that's a nuke? Like, I don't think I'm gone. That's a nuke?
Rod 19:36
Not quickly. Not at all. It doesn't look right, probably a nuclear weapon.
Will 19:43
But the incident that John saw this, he was like, I'm in this to answer the big questions. Yeah, I want to know about the brain and the mind want to I want to answer that. And my electrode work is just too readily corrupted by the government. He didn't want to do anything that would help out the...
Rod 19:59
because once it's out there, I'm gonna step out on a limb and guess maybe that it's not as effective as quite being portrayed by such folk, potentially. Because seriously, if they could, they wouldn't have done that. They don't need him to keep going.
Will 20:12
No, they don't. They don't? Well, what he's saying is, is maybe if I went further down this sort of work, I'll make it easier for them, it will be more weaponized will Yeah, like it like, you know, he's he saw this trajectory elephant. And for nukes, I want to step off, I don't want to be on this trajectory anymore. So he wanted to get back to his own secret mission. So he abandoned the idea of harmful electrodes. And he wanted to find a different way of answering his question about can the brain ever study the mind?
Will 20:53
So this is John Lily's favourite invention, but a dolphin, not the dolphin. He started with the idea that, okay, how can we study the mind? And he thought, well, how can we remove all stimulation from the brain? We poke out the eyes definitely ears if we could remove the brain from like, the stimulating environment, then maybe that's a pathway to understanding the mind. Okay, like you get rid of everything else.
Rod 21:15
So you got one of them tanks.
Will 21:17
One of them tanks. He was the inventor of one of them tanks. He decided, okay, I need some sort of way to get rid of all stimulation. It's got to be like, go in a dark room. Yep. So there's no light coming in soundproof. So I'm not hearing the outside traffic or anything like that. Yeah, I want to keep the body still neither too warm or too cold. Something that takes the force of gravity away from him. As he described it at this point he's calling himself the scientist is all about the scientists thus visualise the tank in which the body could be supported in water that would be maintained at the proper temperature, to take care of the generation of heat within the body. This tank should be in a soundproof chamber which could be blacked out. He's gets out the necessary apparatus and began to talk to his colleagues in the National Institutes of Health. They realised that in order to furnish air to the person, he realised, you'd need to have some sort of respiratory apparatus you want to breathe. And happily, within the institutes, it was possible to do the research both on and in isolation. There was no interference from the high levels of Ministry of control, he could just do this.
Rod 22:14
You're putting people in a bucket with a face mask on, we don't give a shit.
Will 22:18
I think and it's weird how little oversight anyone cared about do you want to deliver some results? Here's what happens. burnin one of the key things he noticed is that he could go in and use this tank whenever he wanted. And he set up his isolation tank, he worked for a while developing breathing apparatus, he made it as isolating as possible, getting rid of all the other sensations. And he started going in, he started using it. He's like, damn, this is the most relaxing thing I've ever been in. And then he was using it day and night. He'd sneak out out of his family home at midnight or something like that and sneak into go and use the isolation tank. He'd be doing it anytime there was a stressful meeting. Any social transaction necessities he didn't want to do. He'd say, I'm gonna go and do my isolation work by 1954. He was immersing himself in the darkness, the quiet the wetness for many hours at a time.
Rod 23:11
Have you been in a sensory deprivation tank? I have. I have to. I liked it. I didn't think I would. But I did.
Will 23:18
I thought it was quite nice. Yeah.
Rod 23:19
How do you go the old AD D H D D D?
Will 23:22
I think I was only in there for a while. Three minutes.
Rod 23:25
Three minutes. Relax. I'm relaxed enough.
Will 23:27
No, I felt nice and relaxed. But I think he was in there for a long, long session
Rod 23:32
I had I was in Byron Bay and I had a pommy backpacker massage me for it was supposed to be now but she decided to like chatting with me. So she gave me like an hour and 45 minutes. Hey. And then I went into one of these tanks for an hour and I came out of that and like I walk out my wife's in the in the waiting rooms like how are you? I'm like
Will 23:51
I gotta say, I gotta say one thing about John Lilly. Like throughout spoiler. He steps further and further away from mainstream science throughout his career. I can't imagine how this would happen. No, but my God, every picture of him. As he gets older and older, smiley smiley smiling. Like his young pictures. He doesn't look super Smiley. I mean, maybe it's just because it's the 30s or something like that. But by his 50s and 60s and 70s. Everyone is just beaming it looks, he looks like a super happy super chill guy. In this unique environment in the isolation tank, he says, freed from the usual sources of stimulation, he discovered that his mind and his central nervous system functioned in ways to which he had not yet accustomed himself. He became a bit anxious about these tank experiences. Or he realised this is John's words, that while he was discovering interesting things for the National Institute of Mental Health, he was also finding other things, things that he didn't tell his psychiatric group that he was working, because they would have said I was psychotic.
Rod 24:52
So it was a good sign. I'm not going to tell the psychiatrist
Will 24:55
for instance, when he'd go into the isolation for a tank for a while. There were apparent presences, which were either created in my imagination or programmed into my brain by unknown sources. It's one of the two. That's obviously one of the two that came in when he was in his isolation tank. He experienced the presence of persons who he knew where to distance from the facility. He experienced strange and alien presences with whom he had no previous experience. Okay. He thought that in some ways, the isolation tank was a hole in the universe. I gradually began to see through to another reality it scared me.
Rod 25:31
Okay, so by alien, he meant alien. Not like not people haven't met?
Will 25:35
Oh no, no, he meant he meant quite distant, quite, quite distant
Rod 25:40
further than the other side of the country. Maybe even the moon
Will 25:45
Not the guy outside the isolation tank and not even people like
Rod 25:51
He's connecting with things?
Will 25:52
He says he saw nothing that could account for his experience. But key thing here, he didn't tell anyone. He didn't tell him his fears or what he called his non consensus reality experience. He emphasised the deep relaxation and the benefits derived from his experience in the tank national terror. No, it's not. And he's stressed at this point, that he did not take any LSD at this time. In one of one of his autobiographies, he reported on a conversation with the alien beings.
Rod 26:17
Oh, god, did he write it? Alien, I am here.
Will 26:22
Now he calls them beings first being second being third being. One day in 1958, John entered the tanker and put on the mask and immersed himself in the water for the last time at the National Institutes of Health. He's moving on. Right, he had finally realised that within the government, it was impossible to do the research that he wished to do, inevitably, subtly, those in charge of research for the National Institute of Mental Health, were asking to control the isolation tank work is just going to happen again. Those in charge of brain research and the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blindness were beginning to exert controls on his work. In this session in the tank, he planned to review what he'd learned over the past five years, and see what future directions to go. He relaxed his mind and let go of the residues of the day's activities. Quite suddenly, he was in a new space, a new domain, he left his body behind, he left his human mind behind he became a point of consciousness of awareness in an empty infinite space filled with light, slowly to presents presences to beings began to approach him from a distance, there was a three way exchange of direct thought of direct meaning. First being, we are meeting at this particular spacetime juncture in order to review the evolution of a vehicle that we control on the planet Earth, that's him, or not a car. He's at another transition point in his training, we need to review what he's done, what he's thinking, what his motivations are, we must determine what the future of his mission can be within the evolutionary speed limits allowed to humans.
Rod 27:42
Ah, so he's he's a rule breaker, and they'd like whoa, dude,
Will 27:46
Yeah, what are you gonna do to help? He calls himself the third being here? Yeah, of course. Currently, my agent lets him back on Earth is in a quandary. I need this conference to know in what direction he is to move next. The vehicle that he inhabits is now in a deep trance state. And he's willing to share with us the sources of this quandary. As you both know, he has carefully constructed a cover story in which he has invested a good deal of time, effort and training. All three of us are well acquainted with the Roger arduous steps that he has taken in his human form.
Rod 28:14
So he's definitely set himself up. He's one of the beings he's driving a human body, but their body also has agency.
Will 28:21
Yes, yes. And he's, he's asking them what do I do next? You need some mentorship
Rod 28:25
and what does it do next slash mean,
Will 28:27
well, what does it what does what are we? Yeah,
Rod 28:29
what do me and my car do?
Will 28:31
He told the beings that he what he had learned how he'd abandoned his electrode work because the military, we're going to take it, I was concentrating on isolation tank a little bit worried people might take that as well and thinking about other options, they replied. I would like to suggest that we arrange for his education in more profound ways, he still needs to penetrate into his own mind deeply in areas of interest to us first Know thyself. When he leaves the government I suggest that we control the coincidence in the direction of encouraging the new strand of research with dolphins. We must also control the coincidence in regard to seeking a female partner for him. He's gonna get married again to a dolphin second being it is felt that coincidences must be regulated to help him continue the isolation tank work under better circumstances. We should also arrange for him to use LSD in the tank,
Rod 29:18
because they're reasonable high beings. I like he's not tripping.
Will 29:21
I just like the idea that you're looking for some sort of excuse and you're talking to some aliens and the aliens see, say you need to take LSD. I just got to put if you haven't taken LSD, and you've got alien presence is telling you to take LSD
Rod 29:35
You don't need LSD. You kind of got it. Although to be fair, my experiences are sorry acquaintances of mine experiences didn't see aliens they saw through space and time.
Will 29:45
Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough.
Rod 29:46
I love it. Why did you take it they slash I
Will 29:49
It was the aliens told me in advance in advance. So since the age of 16, lilead really wanted to understand the mind his electrode work his isolation. intank work had given him insights. But there was something else lingering under his work. And that was that epiphany he had back on the beach in Massachusetts. He'd been trying to study the brain and his wife and he had been wandering along the beach. And there was a beach pilot whale there. And he looked at it, and he just went,
Rod 30:18
let's look at the brain.
Will 30:19
Well, yes, and it's like, first of all, codeine. Fuck me. That is a big brain. Yeah. Now, a pilot whale is not the biggest brain. But I found a picture here. And they are, they are gargantuan brains compared to ours. So we have a brain that's like 1.3 litres to 1.5 litres. whales can get up to eight litres. They're just just gargantuan and you look at them. So they're like seven litres smarter than us. At least if we measure if we measure smartness by that's how we
Rod 30:47
That's how we should measure IQ, how many? How many litres of intelligence do you have?
Will 30:50
Well look it but if you're if you're looking at this, and you just see, that's a vast amount of brain, what is that brain doing? That is literally what?
Rod 30:58
That is unambiguously a set of balls with something growing beneath it. That shouldn't be? It really is. It's is that hell?
Will 31:07
No, to me, it looks like one of those aliens, like the big headed aliens sort of thing.
Rod 31:11
Yeah, that's because you're the you know, you're the you're the innocent
Will 31:12
But this is this is the thing, like for a lot of people back then they really thought the thing that was unique about human brains is just that they're bigger. And they hadn't really looked at any other animals that much. You know, they looked at Cows and dogs and things like that love puny brains. And then they saw whale brains and dolphin brains. And they were just bigger, bigger, bigger. Grant Burnett, Professor of the history of science at Princeton, and researcher on this topic. You're talking about a time in science when everyone's thinking about a correlation between brain size and what the brain can do. Yeah. And so here's our Lily, after he'd had his conference with the aliens, described it in his book, the mind of the dolphin. The main ideas and formulations of this book are a theory to scientifically penetrate into the area of at least one non human mind that of the bottlenose dolphin. So he's working on the idea that this is the place where he can study the mind. He's tried studying the mind through electrodes, he tried to study through isolation tanks. And now he's thinking, what if I can look at a nonhuman mind not a non human brain, but looking into the dolphin to see.
Will 31:13
Look at its mind? Yeah, well, obviously, it's still I'm trying to look at your mind, you know, you stupid fish
Will 31:19
In the years that followed his first encounter, John and his first wife would try to sail boats and cruise around the Caribbean, looking for marine mammals to observe their stories apparently, that once they were they would stick their heads in the water to try and listen to whales speaking. But in one trip in the late 1950s, the lilies came across marine studios in Miami. That's where they filmed flipper. And it was one of the first places to keep bottlenose dolphins in captivity. And this opened up a chance for John. He's like, okay, maybe I can, I can get me a study. He started with a small experiment with his electrodes again, perhaps to see how he could use them. But you can't really sedate a dolphin because they're deliberate breathers. So instead of like us, we automatically breathe. Dolphins don't they choose to breathe and they deliberately breed so if you sedate them, they just stopped breathing and they die.
Rod 33:14
That is wacky, though.
Will 33:15
I know. I know. Well, we'll come back to that. So things were a bit tricky on the operating table. And on one occasion in 1957, something happened that changed their life forever. His first wife, Mary was still there. She wasn't wife at the time, but told the story much later. I came in at the top of the operating theatre, and I heard John talking, and the dolphin would go it says what what what what?
Rod 33:39
Wah wah wah? No worries. Man who what I think dolphin.
Will 33:43
I heard John talking in the dolphin will go like John, and then Alice, his assistant will reply to high tone of voice and the dolphin would imitate her voice. Okay. I went down to where they are operating and told them what was going on. And they were quite startled. Perhaps John reasoned, this behaviour indicated an ambition on the dolphins part to communicate with the humans around them.
Rod 34:04
Yeah, get me off this fucking operating cycle and pulling back in the water you monsters. That's what it "eeeh" means. To have a desire to communicate with your captors and torturous. I do.
Will 34:15
But there is something in the fact and we'll come back to this in a second. The ways that the dolphin was perhaps responding if you had a charitable mind, as some people in this story might, then maybe maybe it's the door is open to hearing certain things that you want to
Rod 34:32
What are you saying there are certain anthropomorphism and maybe a few biases come into play? I think you are.
Will 34:41
So John knew what he needed to do. Rather than sticking his head underwater, and trying legs and trying to learn dolphin ease, rather than putting electrodes in them. He needs to teach dolphins English will obviously as he described it when he left his position at the National Institutes of Mental Health by a series of coincidences I found the means to buy some land in a suitable location on the island of St. Thomas in the Caribbean Sea, where I could build my new laboratory, the communication research institute or the dolphinarium? It's weird because this is this is one of the big contradictions here. I'm not sure where the money for it came. I've seen it had some national science foundation money. Others have said NASA, others have said military intelligence. Others have said the producers of flipper
Rod 35:26
and I think TV show The remake starring Paul Hogan, which was one hell of a movie
Will 35:30
not the remake not the remake it's great that the producers of flipper are putting money as well as military intelligence. And also probably John had his own money.
Rod 35:37
It would be in their interest we got dolphins would actually talk to us I know if you great
Will 35:41
Flipper Flipper Two now they talk yeah, I mean, it'd be way easier to trade
Rod 35:45
we're gonna go and get the bad guy so there's Russians we need to decode this thing so that you can drag the nuke away. Yeah, as opposed to this that just have that toy that they get in the water and flipper would go sit there that means come here.
Will 35:56
It's almost like they were basing it on something could be anything people were suspecting coincidence. Ah, so they started building a lab and you can find you can see the plans for the lab here. Basically, it was house a building where they wanted to bring humans and dolphins into close proximity so they could learn from each other and teach the dolphins English Okay, the upper floors it's got offices data processing rooms, electronics chemistry, histology labs
Rod 36:23
And a nice porch coming off data processing it's got porch Yes, yeah, you're in Trinidad
Will 36:27
I'm not I'm not saying the toilets there though. I that's what the balconies for and then the lower floors underneath as got a tidal pool and pool for the dolphins to live in. That three dolphins all of them they got from the Marine studios up in Miami. So former actors Yes, former actors former former flipper extras former flipper. I don't know what roles they played in fluids
Rod 36:50
Having a cigarette afterwards. What was a lawyer it was pretty rough. I was always going for the top spot but I was held back got the slide on one on
Will 36:57
one what I was wondering here is in flipper was there one flipper? That was the flipper like,
Rod 37:02
look you know, I especially as a kid I was very keen I could tell the difference between two dolphins and I can tell you with great confidence it was always the same dolphin no question in my mind. It's like yeah, what it was it babe how many pigs ate and
Will 37:16
No they didn't eat them. But you know a small pig only lasts as a small pig for a small time at a time and so they had to like it was like 24 different pigs.
Rod 37:25
I feel lied to.
Will 37:26
They had the three dolphins CC Pamela and enrol. Peter. Peter, one younger, younger male bottlenose dolphin
Rod 37:34
younger Pete who is a dolphin he goes That's a Pamela that's not a dolphin name. A cat I get budgerigar?
Will 37:41
A dolphin? What's your dolphin named Keith? Not a dolphin name? Neville. No, that's not a dolphin name either.
Rod 37:47
Janine. splashy,
Will 37:51
there you go. That's much better. flippers. A good name? Yeah. bit obvious. One of his first experiments, they set up a dolphin telephone.
Rod 38:01
Card speaking it's like a news of fun. Yeah, got it.
Will 38:04
So they put dolphins in two separate tanks, which were insulated and isolated from each other. And they put an underwater electric telephone, or electronic telephone going between them. So there was a trend, not just a tube. Yeah, not just a tube, a transmitter and a receiver. As soon as the telephone was turned on the dolphins exchange sounds. And they use this to show a few things. The first one is that dolphins are polite as a species. And this is I mean, there's our definition of polite. I don't know if they're being polite to each other. But they wait to take turns in speaking. So one will speak and then the other will reply afterwards, which might be something that might make you think, oh, it's mimicking me. But it can definitely you can definitely see moments where dolphin one would say Hello, yes. And often two would say something different or the same, but it's clearly a gap.
Rod 38:56
So that makes up for them being renowned gang rapists. I suppose. They're not supposed to be very pleasant to show the lady chumps or indeed anybody but they're polite on the phone. Redeeming features.
Will 39:09
Second thing they showed and you probably probably know this from what you've heard of dolphins, I've got two communication emitters both in the nose the right hand side. Yeah. Does the whistles on the left hand side does it clicks or not? No, no, you didn't. But now you do like click with their tongue like normal people.
Rod 39:24
I that's what I thought too quick with half their nose.
Will 39:27
And they can carry out two conversations completely separately with each of them.
Rod 39:31
So can I but I don't remember either of them.
Will 39:35
I like that. Yeah, it's that analogy he was saying it's like you're typing a conversation and talking to someone at the same time. I'm not doing either of those very well. But maybe maybe dolphins can
Rod 39:44
I can be barely to do one of those. Well, I'm trying to determine
Will 39:46
what he's saying that maybe dolphins can click to each other in one way and can whistle to each other.
Rod 39:51
And that's the news could be in theory on different topics with different copy different topics, colleagues,
Will 39:56
I'm going out for fish and did you see the latest flipper total bullshit I was robbed, those actors were no good. You can't even cry on cue, we can't figure out what that would be no. Or they also showed pattern of predictability and variation in the sound. When they turned the telephone off. Each dolphin would resort to what was called they called the signature whistle might not be its name or anything like that, but it would, it would have whistled, maybe it's looking for someone else. And they were unique and different, but consistent. And so that's sort of like their probing of the space, and then they would turn the telephone on, then they'd launch into a conversation. Please get me out here. Lily then wanted to expand on the idea. I thought, Okay. They, they seem to be echoing voices. Maybe they could understand the human voice. Maybe they could even mimic it.
Rod 40:46
Why wouldn't they? They can whistle and click and that's pretty much how languages work. Well, for that he needed Margaret.
Will 41:00
Margaret Howell.
Rod 41:02
It's that classic Monty Python joke. You know, how do you speak to the natives in English? Of course. And what if they don't understand you? Well, we speak louder.
Will 41:09
Oh Yes. Margaret Howell love it. Like most children have grown up with stories of talking animals. Sure. And a lot of this junk comes from Christopher Riley's work. There was this book that my mother gave to me called Miss Kelly. She remembers it was a story about a cat who could talk and understand humans. And it just stuck with me that maybe there is this possibility. Unlike most children, as Riley writes, love, it didn't leave these tales of talking animals behind she grew up in her early 20s. Living on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas, where Lily had his lab. They took on new significance. During Christmas, her brother in law mentioned there was a secret laboratory at the eastern end of the island where they are working with dolphins. So James Bond, just a quick aside, St. Thomas. It's a ridiculously beautiful place. It just like Caribbean and it just looks so nice. Like it looks like you're in the water any time of day.
Rod 42:01
Are you going to an island like that? And they say now we're going to set up a lab. I'm like, No, this is awesome.
Will 42:07
That's the thing. Here's the thing. So I brother told her this Christmas 1963 A secret lab run by either the flipper studios or or NASA or the US military. And she decides I'm just gonna go knock on the door. Or I'm Margaret. I was curious. Margaret recalls. Sure. I drove out there down a muddy Hill. And at the bottom was a cliff was a big white building. Love it was met by a toll man with tousled hair, wearing an open shirt and smoking a cigarette.
Rod 42:36
These are the important facts.
Will 42:37
Yeah, I know. The only reason I'm telling this bit is she was met by Gregory Bateson. Anthropologist. Yes, seriously. There you go. This is the thing. This is the thing. So. So Gregory Bateson was employed as the director of the lab. So Lily was sort of researcher at large, and Bateson was there to run it. Gregory Bateson was one of the biggest anthropologists of the 20th century was Margaret Mead.
Rod 43:00
Who's up there? Yeah. And they're all like wandering around being dapper getting tans and smoking cigarettes and hanging out and dolphin labs. What a time to be an anthropologist.
Will 43:09
It does riff off something else in this story. Yeah. People turn up in this it's a bit of a river. Yeah, in and I'm trying to isolate a bit of the all around it as so many other people that have got weird agendas, weird ideas. Why did you come here? He asked Margaret. Well, I heard you had dolphins love it replied and I thought I'd come and see if there was anything I could do. Or anyway, I could help unused to unannounced visitors and impressed by her bravado baits and invited her to meet the animals and asked her to watch them for a while and write down what she saw. Which stranger turns up and say I hear you got some dolphins like okay, come on in. I liked the cut of your jib young lady, please take some notes as well. Things were simpler than but despite no scientific training, love, it turned out to be an intuitive observer of animal behaviour. And beta told her she could come back whenever she wanted
Rod 43:54
A gifted language trainer by the sounds of things.
Will 43:59
Bateson and focused on another part of the lab where they were doing animal to animal communication. Lilly focused on other things we'll come to in a second
Rod 44:07
I think he did the thing with when you watch chimps play or fight if you don't have context, the behaviour looks exactly the same. He's quite famous for doing stuff. So like without context, a lot of these behaviours are completely ambiguous and fighting and playing was a classic one with chimps. I think there was Bateson
Will 44:23
Oh, that's awesome. That's awesome. The one that the one that I liked was he crafted sorry for the terrible jargon words excuse me, Genesis faqeer he did which is where two groups of people decide to be less and less like each other. One group will be like where they were in people we love hats and the other the other group people go well, fucking hats are the worst monsters and they just just separate like that. There were three dolphins remembers love it. Peter, Pamela and Sissy as I said, because it was the biggest reason ImageNet pushy, loud. She sort of ran the show. Pamela was very shy and fearful. And Peter was a young guy. He was coming of age or a bit naughty. Margaret had realised isn't even at this state of the art, Dolphin House. Barriers to communication remained. Every night, we'd all get in our cars and pull the garage door down and drive away. And I thought, well, there's this big brain floating around there all night. It amazed me that everybody kept leaving and I just thought it was wrong. So Margaret reason that if she could live with the dolphin around the clock nurturing its interest in making more human like sounds like like a mother teaching a child, then they'd have more success
Rod 45:29
I have no concerns about where this is going at all.
Will 45:32
Maybe it was because I was living so close to the land, it just seems so simple, why let the water get in the way. So I said to John, I want to plaster everything and fill this place with water I want to live here. So instead of having one not drag
Rod 45:42
them onto the water is inconvenient for me. So it really is under the dolphin.
Will 45:47
It used to be the dolphins on the bottom floor and the lab on up and she said no, let's waterproof the upper floors of the lab waters not that heavy. They waterproof the upper floors and flooded it to I think like a few feet deep like enough that. It's like three feet deep. wadeable Yeah, wadeable sort of water. And this would allow a dolphin to live comfortably in the building with her for three months,
Rod 46:08
comfortable's doing a lot of heavy lifting, but I see what they're saying.
Will 46:11
So at this point, Margaret is in the water the whole time. Sort of good for it. So there's a little desk that she's got set up that sort of out of the water. And I think there's a crawlspace like where she can crawl up and onto a mattress that's out of the water. But she's basically in this pool of water
Rod 46:27
With her skin slowly sloughing off her
Will 46:30
she selected Peter for her living experiment. I chose to work with Peter because he had not had any human like sound training and the other two had said she wanted to stop fracking Of course, clean slate Pete she would attempt to live in isolation with him six days a week sleeping on a makeshift bed on the elevator platform in the middle of the room and doing her paperwork on a desk suspended from the ceiling and hanging over the water. On the seventh day Peter would return to the Sea Pool downstairs to spend some time with the other dolphins play poker with this place. By the summer of 1965 Margaret's domestic dolphin situation was ready to go lying in bed surrounded by water that first night and listening to the pumps gurgling away. She remembers questioning what she was doing. Human people are out there having dinner or whatever. And here I am. There's moonlight reflecting on the water, this fin and this bright eye looking at you and I thought wow, why am I here? But then you get back into it. And it never occurred me not to do it. What I was doing there was to find out what Peter was doing there and what we could do together. That was the whole point nobody had done that. She continued for the next six weeks the next I think three months eventually they got paid visits by famous people Carl Sagan came down to pay a visit and see what was going on he was there would have been my first guest he was still an astronomer he will come back to him in a bit we thought it was an important to have dolphins teach us dolphinese if there is such a thing. Now audio recordings of love it's progress meticulously archived on those tapes. This is the euphemistic description capture the energy that love it brought to the experiment so those are the ones I've been playing throughout. Well she says M was particularly difficult Margaret was difficult, but Peter might have more success with some other things.
Rod 48:08
Like cooking
Will 48:10
no like other words like hello or ball
Rod 48:12
or help.
Will 48:15
Meanwhile, upstairs John Lilly was conducting his own experiments good. So while Margaret was teaching the dolphin English underneath he got a an isolation tank installed and he was concerned because he hadn't had one for domestic use before right he's only other ones were in scientific facilities. And so he used some of the Dolphin House budget to get himself a float tank and he's floating up above the dolphins seeing if he can listen into their communication with his mind with his mind.
Rod 48:43
We've all done that.
Will 48:44
Well he believed that because dolphins you know communicate through sonar and things like that. He's feeling that they might be able to get through walls or anything like that and hear him in the float tank and would be motivated to but it's also when he decided to level up his float tank and added in the LSD at this point. Fuck yes. He got some LSD under a proposal to see its effects on dolphins.
Rod 49:07
slow the process you got Neil is that yeah, I got money. No, no, this
Will 49:10
is when it's only for...
Rod 49:12
Oh he's' getting the dolphins high? Oh, that's cool.
Will 49:15
Well he did. He did write in his autobiography. He wasn't super interested in getting the dolphins. He wanted to talk to the dolphins. But he was like, I want it for my own use. But I need the only way I can get it is getting it for the dolphins. So
Rod 49:26
oh, that's fair. So he's bullshitting. I get that, you know, like under false pretences. That makes sense to me.
Will 49:30
He gave the dolphin some LSD that I feel less attracted to. didn't really do anything. Or really Yeah, as far as you know. Nothing seemed to seem to happen. It seemed like there might have been a bit more playful or something like that, but no, super meltdown. But then he got it. He took it himself and got into the tank. And yes, and this is where you know, he goes full on Yes, he goes. Yes, his conscious awareness of his of the bodily processes of the existence of his body. All of it disappeared. The knowledge of the self was all that was left. I'm a small point of consciousness in a vast domain beyond my understanding, vast forces of evolution of the stars are whipping me through coloured streams of light, becoming matter, matter becoming light, the atoms are forming from light light is forming from the atoms. A vast consciousness directs these huge transitions, there's a move forward. So it totally is, with difficulty, I maintain my identity myself, the surrounding processes interpenetrate my being and threatened to disrupt my own integrity, making continuity and time, there is no time No, this is an eternal place with eternal processes generated by beings far greater than I am becoming merely a small thought in that vast mind that is practically unaware of my existence. I have a small programme and a huge cosmic computer.
Rod 50:43
I really, really, really would like to LSD and get into one of those things.
Will 50:47
It's the super most cliched version of LSD ever. Yeah, like, like being a scientist and an in an isolation tank, get the LSD and it's like, I am a dot in the cosmos.
Rod 50:57
I am one with the universe and the universe is within me like who? Come on? Would you not want to do that?
Will 51:03
I know that sounds freaking awesome. Like,
Rod 51:05
I'll do it. Now. You've got a tank like that. That'd be just perfect. It gradually wore
Will 51:09
off. John lay in the tank, remembering his experience in the vast universe in the multi dimensions beyond his understanding. His discipline as a scientist slowly but surely reasserted itself, climbed out of the tank, took a shower and wrote his notes. He realised somehow that they were incomplete. There were instructions he could barely remember, which sounded somewhat as follows. This agent is not to remember all of this experience, it will be stored below his levels of awareness in his bio computer at the appropriate times in the future, he will remember more and more of this experience when he can integrate it without demolishing his role in the human consensus reality of the planet Earth. Well, that is a danger. In the end, I think, lilies dolphin research, the whole Dolphin House, the whole dolphin programme, was built on a contradiction that just couldn't hold
Rod 51:55
science and really, really, really being high.
Will 51:58
Yes. And there's another one, there's another one, the dolphin work progressed to a certain critical point beyond which he felt he should not go at that time, his own appreciation of the dolphins as intelligent sentient alien beings who wish to communicate with man led to his acceptance of new structures on dolphin research. Basically, he believed at all, he believed that the dolphins were trying to communicate Sure, and the dolphins had minds, and the dolphins were deserving of communication. And he in fact, started to advocate it around this time that dolphins should have a seat on the United Nations
Rod 52:31
Yeah because then you could say, what's your opinion? And they go, what
Will 52:37
He's believing deep down that dolphins are a worthy or perhaps more intelligent than us? Yes. And we shouldn't be doing research on them. So whilst whilst he's living close to them, and seeing this, he got got hotter and hotter. Same time, former employee of the institute sued them, I don't know what for they lost a whole bunch of money and are forced to sell Oh, and, and all of all of his friends that were funding it. And I don't know which one this is at NASA, or the army stopped funding the research. So support for the dolphin research was was withdrawn, and Lily decided to close the lab. I think it was only running for a few years. As the funding dried up, Margaret was put in charge of decommissioning the Dolphin House. The dolphins were shipped to a disused bank building in Miami. with little or no sunlight, smaller tanks and not much human contact. Things deteriorated pretty quickly.
Rod 53:26
What's the reasoning?
Will 53:27
I don't know. I don't I don't know why flipper studios wouldn't take them back or the ocean.
Rod 53:32
Anyway. I'm fresh. No, no,
Will 53:34
they're they're human talking dolphins that would want to waste that would corrupt. Who's going to take that UNC? Well, exactly. I mean, if we if we let the ones that can speak English back in, they'll teach all the others English and that
Rod 53:44
And then they'll listen in. Yeah, that's not what we're saying in our submarines.
Will 53:48
A few weeks after the dolphins had gone to that bank building. Margaret received a call from John Lilly telling her that Peter had suicided as I said before, Dolphin biologists a this is this is legit. Their breathing is conscious. And Peter chose not to breathe, and they found him dead at the bottom of the tank. Well, Margaret says she wasn't terribly unhappy about it. I was more unhappy about him being in those conditions at the Miami lab, the not being at all. Nobody was gonna hurt Peter. He wasn't gonna be unhappy. He was just gone. That was okay. Odd, but that's how it was. All right, Margaret stayed on the island marrying the photographer who captured pictures of the experiment. They moved back into the Dolphin House and eventually renovating it into a family house with a home where they brought up three daughters with a
Rod 54:30
swimming pool on the roof just because that's where you put it. Caribbean bungalow.
Will 54:35
It's fallen into disrepair now. But a lot of people locally still remember it and talk about the Dolphin House and people talk about the stories there. Lily continued on his quest to understand the mind. He left mainstream science a long way behind. Well then he continued to advocate for dolphins for cetaceans to have a seat on the United Nations
Rod 54:54
Cetaceans on the nation's I mean I get it that it rhymes. But beyond that, but if you believe that this smart sure But if you can't actually have some kind of a reasonable exchange of ideas,
Will 55:04
Well, John thought they could. But John thought they could. But he showed no evidence. The interesting thing for me is how much people love this shit at the time course, like one of that one of the biggest ones was, I mean, you can see isolation tank stuff pops up in Stranger Things, talking dolphins and seaQuest DSV mission to save the whales in Star Trek four. There was a SEGA MegaDrive Genesis game called Ecco the Dolphin, which was based on some of John's far out theories. My favourite one is the order of the dolphin. Some movie? No, it's not a movie.
Rod 55:41
So if you're going to talk movies, the one that this makes me think of immediately is altered states, which
Will 55:49
I saw that come up, but I haven't seen it.
Rod 55:50
It's it's exactly the whole trying to find the origin of humanity. And this guy, William Hurt, D evolves, as he goes into the isolation tank and it gets to the point where he periodically turns into this kind of crazy ape like creature as he does stronger dose of ketamine or something. And it's, it was a big splash in the late 70s.
Will 56:09
I saw I really haven't seen it. But I did see stuff talking about that.
Rod 56:13
It's all it's all it's all about. It has nothing to do with dolphins. Yeah. Other than that.
Will 56:17
Well this is the interesting thing that you could carve off bits of John Lily's career and go okay, just look at that. Or just look at that bit. But it clearly weaves together when he's on this quest to understand what is the mind you know, the order of the dolphin 1961. Sputnik wasn't so far off. But I think it was early on where a bunch of astronomers decided to start thinking about alien contact. What would we do if there was alien contact? How do we do start a search for extraterrestrial oil? And so there was a famous meeting where some of the luminaries in search for extraterrestrial life like Frank Drake, Carl Sagan, met at a farm not super secret, there was like 10 of them, just to sort of plan the research and think it all out. And John Lilly came along as well. At first, there might have been a bit of Why's he here, but pretty quickly, though, like, Fuck these guys, the girl like they listened really, they listen to him. And now and he was talking about the intelligence of dolphins. And, you know, he was saying, it's great to contact extraterrestrials. Awesome. But let's learn about the other minds that we have here on the planet. That is worth understanding. And so they they, I think it was a weekend long conference, they they loved everything he was saying. And so they decided that search for extraterrestrial life, the group that they were, was the order of the dolphin in his honour that they said was this is this is the first contact for non human life is dolphins.
Rod 57:43
And so the modern version of that is Octopooses.
Will 57:47
Look I came to this story, originally not through that bit that I don't really want to talk about, but I can if you want, but really, I came to this with this idea of how have people tried to talk to animals? And where are we up to in that? And, you know, there's, there's a whole bunch of projects now that are using a lot of AI sort of things, to try to understand what animal animals are saying, we seem to be having some movement in that direction. Sure. But I think it's John's John Lilly's project that sort of starts this whole
Rod 58:16
so he was pre Coco the sign languaging gorilla? Yes.
Will 58:20
Yes. Pre Alex, the parrot, Alex, the parent. And there's a couple of sign language in gorilla gorilla, as well.
Rod 58:26
I wonder, because I mean, we were in developmental psych. 1000 years ago when I was doing the 80s showing the sign language in chimp was all the rage. Yeah, it really was all the rage. And the amount of controversy you know, the anger instilled in some people that this is impossible and bullshitting they got no sense of self and then other people go You gotta be kidding me. Look at this look at that virtually talks about God. Look, this really incensed.
Will 58:48
This is the thing that I don't doubt there's absolutely legitimate science to be to be done in this area. But I do think, you know, when you listen to some of the things that Margaret and Peter's response, there's a lot of willful belief here.
Will 59:15
I think it was all noise. That's noise. It was all noise. I don't think there was ever a moment where they ever got something. Now, maybe they believe they did. That was actually some clear communication. But
Rod 59:29
why don't you even think they would. They're not lyer birds. Birds are not fucking cockatoos, like they don't mimic human speech sounds in any way that I'm aware. So let's try and yell at them until they do like it. It's that alone. Forget the science part. They don't seem all kinds of science. They don't have the vocal tract the shapes to make human speech sounds. It's close. It's because I have a tiny bit of tongues and noses. I want to talk to dolphins. I think it's a great Oh no before that I just put your right the willful hopefulness, you know where you listen to when you go. I think we made progress in
Will 1:00:05
I think it was. It's one dolphin one person it's like,
Rod 1:00:11
and the training method is really what No, that's wrong. You don't speak English What if I should yell? No, that's wrong you often.
Will 1:00:19
There you go
Will 1:00:20
I had teachers like that.
