Verbatim 55:06 transcript of the “Realm of the Strange” sideshow of FESTIVAL #1 with host Pete Davis. Randonautica co-founder Joshua Lengfelder walks through the origins of the Fatum Project, the promise of Noveltism, the latest on Mind-Matter Interaction — and announces Chronomancy, his “spiritual sequel” to Randonautica, or as Pete calls it, Randonauting for time.
If you found your way here searching for Randonautica, Joshua Lengfelder, the Fatum Project, Noveltism, or Mind-Matter Interaction, this is a primary source. In conversation with host Pete Davis, Lengfelder reveals how Randonauting — setting an intention and following a quantum random location — grew out of the Fatum Project’s experiments with genuine randomness, shares what the Randonautica dataset taught them about intention (0% effect size for MMI, but intention reliably changed what people found), and offers the first public preview of Chronomancy, the new app that applies the same method to time instead of space.
Okay, we're back and it's time for the sideshow. In the sideshow today on Festival, we enter the realm of the strange to learn about my favorite weird smartphone app, Randonautica. If you have not heard of Randonautica yet, here's how it works. You start by completely off of your phone, setting an intention in your head of what type of answer you are seeking in life. So it can be, you know, I want a message about money or I want a message about love or work or whatever. You just are seeking some answer to some question in your life, some message. And then you open the app and you tell the app a radius of how far you are willing to travel to find that answer. Then you hit a button on Randonautica and the app gives you a completely randomized location inside of that radius. And then you go there and see what you find and hopefully find a message there that will give you the answer that you are seeking. That is it. A very simple app. Randonautica is like a magic eight ball, but instead of giving you a randomized message with your answer, it gives you a randomized location that you can go to to find your answer. [01:00] Randonautica went viral right after it launched about six years ago, as people who were using it started sharing wild stories of the locations it led them to, strange scenes, miraculous coincidences, even in one dark case, a dead body. Now, why do I want to talk about Randonautica today? On the surface, it seems like a goofy trend, like Pokémon Go or the Ice Bucket Challenge, some millennial flash in the pan. But I have not experienced Randonautica that way at all. I've actually found it really profound and enlivening to use. When I've gone Randonauting, that is the phrase for using Randonautica, Randonauting, it's changed the way I look at the whole world around me. It's given me a sense of possibility and the new when I felt like the world is closed and overly scripted. It is like Randonautica is an antidepressant. And I've even had a really wild Randonauting coincidence myself. The last time I went Randonauting, my friend, who I took along with me, set the intention, totally in his head, not told to the app, of finding something about the meaning of life and death in our Randonauting journey. [02:00] And Randonautica led us a mile away to a totally random location where we found, exactly in the place they let us, a plaque dedicated to World War II veterans, etched with various poetic reflections about the meaning of life and death. And after I had all these profound experiences Randonauting, I dug into the app's origins and the story got weirder and weirder. It turns out that the founders of the app are part of a mysterious, ambitious initiative called the Fatum Project, which is influenced by various philosophies and esoteric traditions and sees Randonauting as a mix between, and this is their words, art, technology, folklore, and a worldwide science experiment. They even have a totally serious manifesto that explains what they are trying to do with Randonautica, in which they explain that they are attempting to increase novelty in the world by breaking us out of routines and revealing the blind spots that come from rigidly adhering to the habitual scripts of daily life, which is exactly what they succeeded at with me when I've experienced Randonauting myself. [03:00] As I dug deeper and deeper, it gets even trippier. With Randonautica, they wanted to test whether all these intentions being set while using the app, intentions not written into the app, but in people's minds, had any effect on the scientific field at the heart of the app, which is random number generation, which is a much more interesting and complex art than it appears on the surface. So, I knew I had to kick off Festival's first sideshow by talking to one of the app's creators. And when I did, I was not disappointed. Talking to Josh Lengfelder feels like talking to, I don't know, an itinerant 19th century folk scientist. So strap in for a trip that will take us from Russian circus acts to dual aspect monism and mind matter interaction, to the announcement on Festival today of the sequel to Randonauting, Chronomancy. One note before we take this trip with Josh. If you don't know the difference between the phrase phenomenology and ontology, which is mentioned a couple of times in this conversation, do not worry, I don't really know the difference either. [04:00] But as a rough definitional divide, phenomenology is roughly about our subjective experience of a phenomenon. What goes on in our conscious mind, in our conscious experience. And ontology is roughly about what's real, what exists out in the world, independent of any particular person's experience of it. So, phenomenology, when you hear that being used, think what's going on inside of our minds, what's going on inside of our experience, and ontology is what's going on out there in the world, regardless of our particular experience of it. So, with that tool in hand, let's step into the realm of the strange with Josh Lengfelder. Hello, Josh Lengfelder, thank you so much for coming on Festival.
Hi. Thank you very much for having me.
I wanted to have you on because you are the co-founder of my absolute favorite app in the App Store, which is called Randonautica. And I think your app in the mainstream press is misunderstood and underappreciated. I think it is underrated.
You think?
I was very surprised as I dug deep into the history and philosophy behind Randonautica, because I thought all of the woo-woo words that you had around the basic concept of giving people a random coordinate to go visit was kind of a twee millennial thing.
Yeah.
But then as I read your manifesto and lengthy explanation of what you were doing, I discovered this may be one of the most important insights about life and society. And what you're doing is actually an incredibly reasonable and profound intervention to achieve the outcome of your vision, which is also very rare. Having a vision is rare, and coming up with a quick mechanism for, you know, achieving your vision is rare. And so, before we get into all of those details, I just wanted to ask, do you feel underappreciated? Like, when you are called, you know, it's like Pokémon Go or something. This is so much bigger than Pokémon Go, Josh.
Well, I really appreciate it, you know. Like, do I feel underappreciated? Of course I do, every single day of my life. But do do do I feel like uh Randonauts has not gotten its due maybe and hasn't quite gotten the explanation that uh that it that it deserves? I I agree with you, actually. And so that's why I'm super glad to talk to you today because there's a lot that when I was promoting Randonautica really heavily that has changed. And in like, there's things about it that are different today than when we began. So, I'm excited to talk about this because when I was creating this in like 2019, 2018, I'm not the same person at all that that I am today. So, so it's interesting to talk about this. But I think you have a very interesting grasp on the concept, which is that, you know, you set your intention, you go out into the world, and you manifest your vision. And then you you try to make sure that the world matches your internal state. And this this kind of ritual where you, you know, face the the the world and you come back with something personally meaningful. And so that that was really my contribution to Randonauts was I tried to make it something about personal meaning. And if it's meaningful to you, then it's good, and it works, and it's phenomenologically true, right?
Yes, it yes, that is exactly the thing. Which is kind of like the capital R romantic insight that you go out and you engage in the world and you change your understanding of the world, but you also change your understanding of yourself.
Right, exactly. Exactly.
Yes. Okay, so before we get, I want to kind of walk through the timeline and then go deep into the philosophy here. And especially what you learned. But to start at the start of the timeline, what's your background that might have led to you being interested in this in the first place? You're from Texas originally. I read that you once were a circus performer. I I I have some senses of what this might be, you know, Texas is kind of weird. It's a place of UFOs. It has Marfa. It's close to New Mexico.
Let's do it.
And, you know, being a circus performer kind of connects you to the kind of Gnostic weirdness of American life and history. So tell us, tell me about this.
True. Absolutely. So, circus is very Americana. Like, you know, people people traveling across the United States on a train. It's very Americana from the Ringling Brothers. I'm glad you pointed this out because, you know, honestly, when I when I started this, people would tell me, my partners would tell me, hey, don't tell people you were in the circus. They would say, don't don't say that, you know. And I'm like, for me, it's it's such a circus is family. You know, it's passed down through generations. And so this is part of my story is that my family was in the circus and that we were we were performers, basically. And this is part of the reason that Randonautica did so well, I think, is because of my charisma. And and and that and that honestly is is part of it. Like, the circus, I mean, if you go back in the history, P.T. Barnum, everybody loves to be fooled. So, P.T. Barnum would put on kind of all of these weird sideshow gigs and stuff. It's not just like high-flying trapeze artists. It would they would also do these kind of weird pseudo-scientific experiments. And so I definitely tried to bring in that vibe. It's called festival dynamics. And it's like everybody has something to contribute in Randonauts. And and everybody who has, you know, gone out into the world and found something and shared that for the audience globally is part of my circus, and they always will be. And and that's part of what made it real and true. And now, I want to bring this up now is like the phenomenology is really cool. But we weren't just trying to do phenomenology. We're trying to capture that also materialistically in the science. And we were doing experiments to see if we could really capture this thing in the science. And and and and actually, this is something I want to report on this, uh, is is the results of that, because I never got a chance to actually report what we learned. And so, yes, it is my circus roots. I grew up in the theater with my my my parents are both artists. I grew up in the theater. My dad taught me trapeze when I was a kid. And then I know a circus gypsy named Fanny. And she does a circus here in Dallas called Lone Star Circus. And she saw me on the trapeze and said, hey, Josh, come learn how to be in the circus. And so I learned handstands from Pavel Karima.
So we know that name if you like the Michael Jordan of handstands.
He's just my teacher, and so I give my respects to my lineage.
Oh, that's wonderful. I love that. Okay, great.
And so like, uh, you know, Moscow Circus is like, it's an industrial circus paid for by the state. And like, it's it's on a different level than here. And so that guy taught me handstands. And so when I was making Randonauts, I was able to do a handstand for like three minutes at a time. Like, that's who's selling this product, of course. So like, that is a different mindset, of course, than now I work for a medical device company and I'm a programmer. So it's like a little bit like somewhere in between there, the circus artist tried to quantify some of this.
Yes, yes. Yeah, no, you mixed code with kind of the the bizarre and fantastical. But before we move on, and we're going to get to the the theory of Randonauts soon, you said festival dynamics. What is that an official phrase or is that a Josh original? What is what is festival dynamics?
Right. That's definitely something that was when we were creating the culture of Randonauts, previous to Randonauts. This is something that was like very much in the philosophy of what was going on is is like this idea of like a live action role play or a LARP that's very popular now. You know, this is six years ago, we were all saying, okay, life might be a LARP. Everything might be a LARP. So like, when you bring these festival dynamics in, this is like everyone gets to contribute. And and like, you you show up to the party and it's like kind of like a rave. Like, something can pop off all of a sudden and it wasn't the focus, wasn't supposed to be the focus, and all of a sudden, it's part of the show and it's part of the focus. And so like, this this part of the philosophy is like, it came from some of the Russian people that inspired Randonauts. They brought with them philosophy. And like, this is some of the things I learned.
Well, so are these like the Russian circus performers or like Russian theorists?
So this is this is two different, right? So this is this is part of my story is so as I'm learning from Russian circus performers, handstands in Dallas, I'm also meeting online with Russian people, and that's who I created Randonauts with. I mean, the Fatum Project, they were sending people to random places before Randonauts.
Wow. Okay.
And I hooked up with these people online in a chat room, and like, we said our hellos and they said, oh, you know, we have an algorithm that sends people to random locations. And I said, you know, I've been trying to make a game. That sounds a great idea. And and so the rest is history.
You know, last part of your background is, I I'd be interested in what reading you were kind of steeping in. So you mention in some of your writing, chaos theory. You mention a Debord's theory. Am I pronouncing this right? Theory of the Dérive.
Yes. Yes.
Okay, tell tell us tell the listener about that.
So that is the the it means to drift. And so like Debord was literally it's the same thing as Randonauting. It's like they would go out and they would just go randomly walking across the city and and try and figure out the flows and intensities of the city like that are outside of the deterministic sort of like grid-based, map-based perspective of what you would normally get. And so we kind of did a stars and stripes Dérive or Dérive. And uh, we definitely pulled on situationism. I consider myself a situationist, absolutely. And so we're pulling on French theory a lot as well. And like you said, chaos theory and like the butterfly effect. And then a lot of these quantum woo and uh, other kind of ideas, uh, especially about chaos magic and and ritual magic.
And how are you getting into this in the first place? Just on an individual journey level. Are you reading this stuff in high school? Are you discovering it on the internet like any millennial, just kind of finding yourself in different rabbit holes? What is what leads you to this? And what makes you be open to this in the first place?
I always had a uh interest in just anything that's countercultural. Anything that uh uh if someone would say like, oh, that's just too crazy. Like, that's just an insane schizophrenic theory that's comes from a psychotic mind. I just have this certain bent that I'm like, I have to understand like, and maybe it's not healthy all the time, but it's like, I have to understand what they're what their perspective is. I have to see it out of their mask. Like, I I have to put myself in their shoes. I had this curiosity. And this is how I built Randonautica also is that I I led this breadcrumb trail that exists. Like, and you just follow synchronicities. This is when a part of my life when you follow synchronicities where they lead and you end up changing the world.
Yeah, it's funny. You've built this app that is something that's supposed to train you in being more open to experience. And I should not be surprised that now that I meet you, the person who made the app that's supposed to train millions of people to be more open to experience is kind of on the extreme end of openness to experience.
Yeah, I'm I'm very I'm very open to experience.
Let's now get to the beginnings of this. First off, for those who don't know, who might know Randonautica, behind the Randonautica are the Randonauts, which started before Randonautica. And before the Randonauts, I believe there's this thing called the Fatum Project.
Right.
Fatum Project, like the word fate, I guess.
Fatum Project. Yes. Yes.
Tell me about the origins of that. How did you run into that or create that? What was the story of your engagement with the Fatum Project?
Yeah, I was I was learning about memetics. And so we had a uh chat. It was literally me and one other person who named themselves Eris, the the god of goddess of chaos, of course. So I'm sitting in a chat room with Eris. And uh, two two people pop into the chat room. It was Double Zero and Newton Winter. These two Russian guys. And they they actually used the algorithm that went on to become the Randonauts algorithm. They used that to search Telegram chats and find random Telegram chats, and that's how they found me. So, like, literally, like, the the algorithm itself kind of seeded itself into existence. That's just how it happened. Is is they used the randomness itself to find me. And then
So so Randonautica only exists because of a randomness algorithm as well?
Yeah, I mean, absolutely.
No wonder you believe in this. Okay.
In the in the causal chain, right? In the causal chain. And then belief is a strong word, because I don't know if I believe in it. I am skeptical, honestly.
Okay.
So we can get into that, but they found me from doing a random grid search of Telegram, because back then Telegram was like pretty open. You could you could search any chat that was open. And I had been planning on making a game in this alternative reality gaming genre. And so my mind was already there. I had already developed a community uh based on like parapsychology and alternate science and learning about some of these like luminiferous ether devices and kind of just weird alternative healing devices and stuff. It was just kind of an alternate countercultural vibe. And Russians are they're very countercultural. They needed someone to introduce this to the public because they're Russian and they believe that, you know, if they release this, the government may come and mess with them. They're oppressed, right? Like, uh,
Yeah.
So, as an American, those problems weren't as as big for me. And I never did have any problem with the government. Honestly, they all encouraged me.
Wait, the government encouraged you with Randonautica?
Yeah. I mean, like,
In what form?
Any well, okay. Well, we did get in trouble with the uh the Federal Railroad Commission because we were sending too many um, yeah, so I do have an FBI file. Uh, I do have an FBI file. I know that because the Federal Railroad Commission got a hold of us because we were sending too many people and you can get shot if you trespass into a federal railroad facility. So,
Yeah, don't mess with the trains. Okay.
Right. So we don't want people to go there, but anyway, the Federal Railroad Commission called me and I they just told me that Pokémon Go had a similar problem where they were sending people where they shouldn't go and that like, you just have to do like a geo-blocking. And I was like, okay, cool. And I'm, you know, talked to my lawyer and the lawyer was like, oh, you don't have to do anything. But like, other otherwise, like, uh, the CIA was doing a thing where they're like working with Julia Mossbridge and her um partner who's an ex-CIA analyst are trying to like get CIA agents to be more intuitive and stuff. And then and then like, and then they like had me talk at South by Southwest like before they went on like in 2022 or something. And so like, at one point, I was at dinner with these CIA and my girlfriend was like really freaked out about that.
Wow. What an adventure in itself. You know, every time I tell people, do projects because they at the very least are a personal adventure.
Yeah.
The Fatum Project. So it's there that you learn about the idea of just sending people to random locations as this exciting kind of experiment activity.
Right.
And then from that, do you start doing it on chats? You build like a chat app that lets people, you know, write to the chat app and we'll send you the location before it's an iPhone app.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, it was a Telegram bot and people were able to do it on Telegram. And we created a Reddit community and I mean, within three days, it went viral. I mean, just a couple days.
Amazing. And so this might be a good place to get to the philosophy behind this, because I assume the philosophy's there before you have the official app. And I want to talk about these two aspects of it. One of which is a little more grounded and one of which is a little more out there, at least in my read. So I want to talk about the grounded one, which I think for any listener out there who is not woo-woo at all, who is a capital S skeptic. The basic idea, and I want to say it for the listeners and then I'd love to hear it in your own words and how you think about it. This first idea is noveltism. And I just found this really fascinating. It's the idea that we each have habits of how we live our life. They create a reality tunnel, and you have all these great phrases, reality tunnel. It creates a stasis field. It creates causal viscosity. Like, we are stuck in the ways that we navigate through time and space. Like, we go to work the same way. We do the same things on weekends. We go to the same restaurants. And what that does, you say, is create blind spots. Things you will never see. Even things really close by to your house, you might never see. Or on the path that you take, but just at a different time of day that you might never see. And all truly new possibilities exist in those blind spots. But it's very hard to reach those blind spots yourself because our patterns of thought will lead us when we go search for something new, will actually also be on a reality tunnel of how we find new things when we're feeling bored. So the only thing that can really break through to those blind spots is randomness. Am I getting that right? Is that is that what your sense of novelty is?
Right. Absolutely. So like, this this noveltism is like, we're trying to get out of this stasis field or this set of predetermined probability attractors that kind of lock you in to certain tunnels or certain pathways, certain potentialities. And we were trying to open that up and, oh, man, this is this is a wild thinking about this because I'm fully on the other side of exiting the stasis field right now. Of course, you never exit the stasis field, but what we were trying to do is if one person uses randomness and, you know, opens this alternate set, there's still all the other people doing their predetermined things around them. But now if you get 10 million people, 20 million people exiting the stasis field at the same time, you have higher order uh emergent effects from this. And and and this is what we're testing now and trying to see is can we create like new opportunities and new modes of being and just ways that people can dream and new new ways of looking at the world. And so this is why we introduced this this aspect called Chronomancy. And and this
Chronomancy. Okay, I haven't read about that yet. What's that?
This is something I'm announcing on your show.
Okay, we we're breaking news today. Chronomancy.
So, Chronomancy is what we're going to be trying to do. So we're going to try and replicate the experiment that we did. And we're going to do everything pretty much exactly the same as Randonauts. So that's why now there's a group on Telegram that instead of randomizing space and going to a random place in space, now we're experimenting with time. And so you set your intention and you, you know, set your window of radius in time. And then Chronomancy will alert you at these random moments and it alerts you to look around and see what's going on. And we're hypothesizing that perhaps once we have millions of people using this and the Chronomancy pings are alerting people to random moments that they're now noticing, we may be able to notice, um, I don't know, something strange. So this is like sort of what we're we're going with is this deterministic, you know, probability field and we're trying to exit it now with Chronomancy using randomness.
I'm so happy that you're breaking news on Festival about that.
Absolutely.
The wonderful thing about this, you know, is that you really believe there will be like a societal change from this. And you know what it made me think that I'd love to hear your thoughts on. You know, there are two parts of the process of evolution, but one gets short shrift. So the basic two ideas of, you know, Darwinian evolution is that there is a random, you know, mutation in the process. And then among the random mutations, they compete and natural selection, whoever adapts best wins. We talk all the time about natural selection.
Right.
But we kind of hand wave at the mutation.
Right.
And the mutation needs kind of random newness to even have competitors in natural selection for what works. And so we've gotten very good at like, you know, honing among different things, but we're much worse at producing like the creative act that creates something new.
Yeah.
Do you feel like that's what you're getting at here too? You're you're giving the mutation uh uh its due.
Absolutely. We're we're this is a really good one. I'm actually just like kind of for a second going to think about that because that is a really interesting way to put it because I mean, let's think about this. When Randonautica went viral, I remember distinctively, it was during COVID lockdown. So like, it was literally during like the most tense moment I can remember on this planet. And me and Double Zero, the creator of Fatum Project, we have kind of reflected to each other like, you like you said, like, you really believe this may have societal changes. We kind of had scratched our head and said, did we? Because a lot of things have changed since that that kind of viral moment, which was also the height of the pandemic. So, you know, of course things are are changing, but like, yeah, we kind of like that was our intention. My first Randonaut trip, my intention was to create emergent connections across the globe and to create a sort of singularity of of people making new connections. Yeah, that was my intention and then I think it worked. So, phenomenologically, we can say that this was, you know, confirmed.
I kind of like what you're doing is also just like a metaphor of anything. You know, you guys kind of do it at the extreme. You try to create absolute randomness. And we're going to get into the like technical challenges of randomness. But, you know, I've been touring this film about the importance of joining clubs and um and civic life. It's called Join or Die. And one of the cases that I've made that has really resonated with people is joining a club will just bring the new into your life.
Absolutely.
Anytime we come together cooperatively and make something happen and don't act as a blueprint, and especially when we have more people working together, something new happens to your life. And then you start seeing blind spots. And people come home from club meetings and they say, oh my gosh, I met this guy named Gary. Like, this is what a party. This is why a party is exciting. A party as like a basic idea is you go somewhere and you don't know what's going to happen that night.
Right.
And you're driving there, maybe with your friend, and you're like, when we drive back tonight, our life will be different.
Yeah.
And it's because you get a bunch of random people popping into each other.
Absolutely.
Is that kind of is that part of this too? Just like the Randonautica as the metaphor for the new generally, even if you don't do perfect randomness.
Absolutely. Right. I mean, like, I think that this this idea that like novelty will help you psychologically is, I mean, it is scientifically studied of going to random locations that it generally improves people's mental health and happiness. This has been studied in peer-reviewed, replicated studies. It does make you happier to go to new places. And I think like, we'll talk more about like the ontology and the science with the quantum fields and how things are field-based instead of maybe purely substance metaphysics. And your body and your mind and your environment are all part of one field. And so when you're like modeling this random stuff, it helps to think about things ontologically as a field. And so when you think about it in that way, your body going to like a different location, like the mountains or something like that, you're experiencing a different field and and so like, you're you're now like mixing up all of these new novel elements and it you generally, I think, you feel better physically. when you go to a a new location. And there's something your mind's your mind's always trying to predict what's happening next. And that's always trying to predict what's trying to predict, what's trying to predict. And so then when you go somewhere completely random, it does something. And I'm not sure what, but this is what we were interested in. Is that when you go to a random location, it does something to your neurology. And either people start what's called the despair meme, they start going completely paranoid and uh having panic attacks, basically. And this and this is where you get more into like the the people saying that like stalking is happening and like the really weird stuff. It's because people start despairing. And this is a psychological defense mechanism that was, I mean, this is we considered like having to take measures to prevent like this despair meme because it some people would really freak out. They get their your body will have an unintended effect.
What you're doing is you're kind of participating in a counterculture to the certainty obsession of our time. Like, you know, if I'm just putting this in intellectual history. All romantic movements are a response to over certainty about attempts to control the future. That's what like technocracy is. It's it's technological colonization of certainty. Like, we can map everything. We can data everything. We can make sure tomorrow is good. We can make sure it doesn't rain. We can make sure, you know, you're happy. Like, the dream is like we have a pill that makes us happy. We have a thing that controls the weather. We have all the streets going.
Right.
The romantics always emerged. Great awakenings emerged. Kind of crazy things from the 60s romantics to the 18, you know, 60s romantics, you know, they all emerged as a way that said this too control actually makes us sad and what we need is a little bit of surrender to the spirit. But when we're at, you know, we're maybe a decade past the high point of like technocracy in this way.
Right.
Because people are interested in this in the first place because people are looking for something alternative. So I think we're past the peak. But we've been trained so much in this that you've kind of found this very acute way of getting people to just surrender to something else. And it's so new. Like, it might be one of the first times some people are exposed to this. Like,
Hopefully.
You are affirmatively not trying to control the future here.
Affirmatively. We're trying to.
Even for your paid customers. Pay me to help you not control the future.
Exactly. So like, okay, well like that's cybernetics is like this this idea of steering or idea of control. And like, second order cybernetics studied this idea that the observer and the observed are not separate. They're part of the same system. And that the observer affects the system through feedback mechanisms. And so technically, when we get into how quantum field technology and uh MMI, mind matter interaction, how it quantifiably is supposed to work, it has to do with these cybernetic feedback loops. And this is something really interesting because when I created Randonautica, I did not understand like the algorithms and how it was technically supposed to work, like theoretically. I did not even have a clue. And and and now that uh AI exists and can explain these things to me, and I'm working with a scientist named Scott Wilber, who invented the pulse oximeter. He he he has shown me that, you know, information is quantifiable. So Randonautica was uh phenomenal. It is subjective. You confirmed it because it felt confirming, right? But like, really, information is quantifiable. Effectively, we can measure the bits in the random number generator and we can tell to a statistically significant degree if those bits shifted. And so so this this phenomenology where it feels meaningful, and then there's a material science and quantifiable science. And this is this is what was the intent anyway, but I never got to get to that uh part until now. And so
Okay, so so let's get into that. So I was saying there were two big parts of the philosophy of Randonautica. One for people who are capital S skeptics, I think noveltism does make sense. You can imagine we have habits. There are blind spots. We access those blind spots.
Right.
And randomness can help with that because of human psychology. We're now getting a little more out there, but I'm on my way to being a believer. And so I'd love for you to explain this. You're saying you're also saying, this is the second part of the philosophy, this is from what I've read in your stuff, that your intentions, your subjective, internal to yourself intentions about what you want the randomness to be or what you're hoping for out of this random experience could affect the random numbers. So, could you walk our listeners through that theory and also like the literal technical aspects of how the random numbers are generated and how that could be connected in this kind of vanguard theory.
Okay. So I think I should preface this by saying, like, there is no scientific proof of mind matter interaction, mind machine interaction. There is no scientific reason for us to believe that this mechanism exists. There's no like Princeton engineering anomalies research lab did these studies and there are some meta-analyses that found this effect of these random number generators behaving differently under the influence of conscious intent. There was studies done, but they did not replicate. And so this idea that's is, like you said, it's way more kind of left field. And this is one of the things that we were supposed to be testing. So we wanted to see, can a human being influence a random number generator? And and it's important that your listeners understand, like, there is no proof of this. Like, if you're trying to say that like you can influence the random number generator, that's not something that is scientifically valid at this point in time. You know, you can study it, but there there's no reason to say that this mechanism exists. I I want to preface this because this is something that we studied and we we wanted to to tell, again, the phenomenology versus the physics. And I've been associated with pseudoscience because of this experiment. And so I want to announce on this show, Randonautica found 0% effect size for MMI or mind matter interaction.
Okay.
However, so it didn't matter if you used a quantum random number generator or a pseudo random number generator or didn't matter. However, what did matter is that the people who put an intention, they ended up finding things to a statistically significant degree.
So, wait, finding what do you mean finding things there?
They found something like that. So they found what they were looking for. They found um something interesting. They found something significant at their random location. If they set their intention, when they got there, they found. If if they didn't set an intention, they they didn't. So what we found is that setting an intention is extremely powerful. If you go out and you decide this is what I'm looking for, you're going to find something, right?
And when you said you studied this, was this on top of the app, you were able to do surveys and things like this?
Yes, so we so Randonauts is a massive data set on the internet. All the Reddit posts, all of the trip reports, Double Zero pours over this stuff and we do statistics on it. And also in the app, there is there's all these tests. And so we can see like, is this quantum random number generator? Is it so like, this theory of like, whether you can influence the random number generator. So like, if you could do that, it would be worth billions of dollars. And so this scientist, Scott Wilber, patented this idea like 30 years ago and has been studying this scientifically, not phenomenologically, but scientifically studying this idea for 30 years. And and so this means not that he we found an effect, but that we're studying this idea and studying the random number generators and and and seeing if such a thing could be done.
A few technical questions. So first off, generating a random number is sounds very easy, but it's actually very complicated, right? So what is your method? You don't need to go we don't have too technical an audience, but vaguely, what is your method of generating a random number for Randonauts?
So we use we use Comsire devices that are invented by Scott Wilber, this scientist named Scott Wilber. And he basically uses electron tunneling, which is like an electron goes across a junction and it basically is truly random. And and and we can test this with statistics. And so like, this isn't my specialty, but again, Scott Wilber has been studying this for for 30 years. And so I don't want to get too off base because I don't know too much about.
And so every every time someone hits that button in Randonautica to get a random location, there is an electron somewhere in a lab that's sending out over the internet.
Right. It's in a random number generator. Like, let me like, I'll show you what that it would look like. So it's like a literal black box. This is the black box. And so this is a random number generator from Comsire. So, Scott Wilber invented these and he spent 30 years and you can look he has papers published about this where he has created algorithms using random walks and other methods to if there is a bias in a random number generator, you want to be able to tell. And so like, since he sells random number generators, he has these very sensitive statistical methods for even if it's biased at the sub-bit level, you can tell these very small biases. And so I'm currently working with Scott Wilber just on the medical device side and the random number generator side, and that's what's been so uh kind of enriching and rewarding. And so that's what's kind of interesting is that this whole random number generator stuff actually did lead to me working with an actual scientist. And they like did manifest in me learning that, you know, information is quantifiable. And so we we did have an algorithm that we were using for Randonautica that was supposed to amplify the bias in these bits of numbers. And I can tell you, we sent 20 million people through that thing. If there was someone who could have influenced it, we would have seen it. No one budged one of those bits more than statistically we would have thought.
So as of right now, do you do you not believe, like, if you had to just guess, do you believe in mind matter interaction?
As of now, my priors would say, most likely, the probability of mind matter interaction being real, I would say, greater than 1%. Greater than 1%. So very small probability that it's real. There is no reason to suspect. I believe that the studies that were done previously were um basically motivated and like they they didn't replicate. Now, does this does that does that mean that we couldn't someday with the right hardware see an effect? I I have I have no reason to believe that it's not possible. I I I just I have no reason for. So in in that case, we need extraordinary evidence to spend significant resources doing this. Now, there are other mind matter interaction was was, you know, one set of hardware, one set of algorithms. And there are other ways and there are many paths to the metaphorical stone. So, do I believe that a MMI effect is real? I have I have absolutely no evidence for that except for Scott Wilber's credentials and his papers, which are right now not replicated. So, I am replicating this stuff.
And the reason that there might have been a thought in this at all. So tell me if I'm getting this right. I'm a non-scientist, but kind of just know some of these things. So, so like, for example, the double slit experiment is so bizarre that, you know, our sense of observing something affects things. And then further back in history, isn't this what am I getting this right that this is like Goethian science? Like, there was another path of science that wanted to say that was really emphasizing the subjective experience of observation. So those two precedents for this.
Yes. Yes. Goethian.
I I think this is an amazing topic because I think this is great that I get a chance to say this. Where I was in 2019, where I thought maybe this thing could be real. I am now after so much searching and hoping that it was real and all this, I am now a staunch materialist.
Okay. Like, just in general?
The most materialistic, skeptical materialist I can get. But the thing is, now I know that material is non-local, it's entangled, and that in the quantum realm, it's atemporal.
Okay, what do you mean by that? So what do you mean by that you're a materialist because of this? And what do you mean that it's non-local, atemporal?
So, so like, when some people will understand what I'm talking about is a technical thing I'm saying here is so like materialism is this idea that like there is a material substance that the substrate of reality kind of reduces to. And at this point, I am what is like called like a dual aspect monist. I believe that there is a neutral substrate. And and people like there's not a separation between the spirit realm and the material realm. Right. It's a dual aspect monist.
Like things are
Right. It's a dual aspect of one substrate, substance. And so this is like goes back to Descartes, the mind matter problem and uh you know, I think therefore I am and all of this is like they said like, you know, mind can never influence matter. And and this is like been a huge thing is that, you know, categorically we deny as materialists that mind can influence matter. Or there's a lot of theory of mind and like or like all kinds of arguments about this. And I had no idea about any of this when I created Randonauts. So it's like me creating a viral movement about one of the biggest arguments in human history. And I'm just like, have fun everybody. But there is no there's no like people like think have been studying for years that if you could influence a dice roll, right? Like, people scientists, if you look back, for thousands of years have been measuring probability and saying, okay, if I try and aim high, is it going to work? If I aim low, is it going to go low? And so what do we see? Kind of mixed results, you know, honestly, like, I want to believe, but as a materialist, skeptical materialist now, you know, it's not falsifiable to me. I I I understand that subjectively people find Randonautica meaningful, but when we measured and saw, does this thing budge the randomness? What we found was it was not possible.
That doesn't mean that other people can't, though. That's just what we found.
But okay, this other aspect, the the consolation prize, is that this these intentions do lead to people having subjective meaning.
That's right. Like, if you wanted to say that in a in a profound way, you could just say this is a profound discovery about, you know, adding to the literature about, you know, the the joy of intention and how your awareness can shift based on, you know, your thoughts. Is that where you land on this that there you you might have through this thing that you've always called an experiment or like a mix between experiment and art and technology and folklore.
Right.
You did discover something, but it wasn't in physics, it was in uh kind of human psychology.
Right. Exactly. Exactly. For sure in phenomenology. We we found something and is that intention really does matter. If you send people to a random location and they don't have an intention, they're going to go to that location and go, this is not meaningful to me. But if you send people to a random location and say, keep an intention in mind, when they get to that location, they're going to find it meaningful. So people may call this like confirmation bias, but I think just we don't want to terminate our thoughts, right? We want to we want to, you know, discover the world and and find out what's really going on. And so like, people go out and they and they find things when they're looking for it.
You know, this isn't just about kind of cute little finding things. This is affects like, if you have some attitude about how you're going to interact with a group, it might lead you to found an organization or start a new project or something like that.
Exactly. Exactly. So this is what we're trying to see. Like, in in Randonautica, if if someone went, okay, I want to find like, people were saying death and all these bad things, and then they found a dead body. And that had nothing to do with what we were doing on our side. Like, people were just putting that out there and then look what it what look what happened. Like, it really did skew negative and all of the intentions people were trying to like, oh, let's as a joke, do death. And then that's when they found the dead body. Like, so like, it really down to like semantics, what you what word you have, what word you have in your head when you're walking up to a group. And so this is what we're trying to see. Like, in Chronomancy. So because Chronomancy is is is now it's like more of a meditative, contemplative practice. When you're getting the Chronomancy pings, it's more of a reminder to kind of just check out your surroundings. And so we want to see like, you know, if you set your intention for money or set your intention for love, and then someone contemplates this and looks around, okay, look around, am I noticing my intention? We want to see, do people end up, you know, manifesting their vision? I mean, it really is that way. And you know, it can be woo or it could be science.
You know, looking towards the future in these final few minutes, you had a kind of a gut thing that you wanted to scratch an itch on of this like MMI stuff. Is there something today as you keep doing this that you have a hunch might be something? Like, do you have a hypothesis that is at least worth uh exploring that is strange or weird or unexpected? Like, you're still doing it, you know, after years of doing this, you're not saying I want to give up and be normal.
Right.
You're inventing Chronomancy and that's your today. So, what's the next, you know, in addition to that, what what is any questions that are you want to scratch the inch?
No, absolutely not. So, yeah. Well, besides Chronomancy, Chronomancy.app, which is Randonauting for time, which is pretty cut and dry, but I'm doing um quantum cognition with Scott Wilber. And so this is this is more quantum field technology is what it's called. And this is more of the the quantifiable aspect of information theory. And it's like the bits that are going through the instrument, the sensor. So we have a a sensor that's using the same sort of electron tunneling junction, but at a way higher bit rate, way more bandwidth. And we're using algorithms that, so this is where in in Randonautica, I could not explain how these algorithms were supposed to work. All I knew is I had a Russian guy who made one. Now, I intimately understand random walks, majority voting, and advanced processing methods that quantifiably, if there is such an effect, I have never measured such an effect. But if there is one, I have an instrument that will measure it.
And people don't appreciate this. So much of the advancement of science is not like theorizing what's actually happening. It's building instruments that can even read it. Like, like the development of lenses needed before, you know, microbiology or something.
Right.
Right. Like, when I like electricity, because like when people invented electricity, they were really kind of doing like trial and error type stuff. And like, there was different theories about what was going on. A lot like what's going on with Randonautica and everything. And and the the people who made electricity kind of like did a lot of stuff that they didn't know what was best until they modeled it. They were kind of doing trial and error. So like, I look to those scientists and and and I'm inspired. But like, really, now it's about what is quantifiable. And so this quantum cognition is like, can you actually statistically tell if there's an effect with statistics? It's not like Randonautica with phenomenology, right? Yeah.
So, so and just so people who are a little less scientific can understand this, including myself. Why is it so hard to be able to quantify information? Like, what is that what does that mean? Okay. So this is like this is information theory is is very basic. And this is Claude Shannon. And so like, this is very interesting stuff that like I didn't understand when I created Randonauts. And now I'm learning. And so like, these bits of information are are are quantifiable. And with Landauer's limit, they're actually physical because there is a physical cost to erasing information. So, so if information exists and there is a signal, it's quantifiable. And so Claude Shannon basically created information theory to be able to measure the amount of bits and information in a in a channel. But he would throw away a lot of information based as noise. So what we're trying to do is like these very tiny sub-bit biases in um the random number generators, we amplify them using algorithms to tell if there's a tiny tiny amplification effect because then if you could influence the random number generator, you could use it as a sensor. And you could then use it for medical applications such as,
Oh, wow. Okay.
Yeah. So if if something can affect a random number generator, then it's a sensor. That's that that is the piece that kind of makes it together. Okay, that that can read some other quality.
Exactly.
Exactly. So like, be it thoughts if MMI is real or cancer cells or a heartbeat.
Right.
Right. And we're not talking just about like a random number generator in some undisclosed location. We're talking about a physical sensor that someone wears on their body that could be used as a brain computer interface. Theoretically.
I see the high stakes of if you pull that off. That's amazing.
Exactly. And when you do that, there's not going to be hype like Randonautica.
Yeah. Okay, so final question, Josh. Just on a personal level outside of the science. You know, what drives you here? Like, what is the part of this that most motivates you? Is it art? Is it curiosity? Is it just creating or just randomly following random chapters of your life? What leads to you being you?
Well, like, um, yeah, it it it's art. It's changing the way that people dream and people interface with the world. You know, it's inspiring people. And, you know, with Randonautica, we were really trying to blow stuff up really big. And now we're really trying to kind of keep it more low-key. And so I'm kind of gatekeeping the Chronomancy more. Like, I'm kind of trying to make it more of a spiritual practice and more of a contemplative practice rather than something that you go out and show a bunch of people. It's more a personal thing. And so the contemplative practice, I think, is that. And I, you know, I'm just really into like Buddhism and, you know, uh emptiness, really, and dependent origination. And so that's kind of where my mind is at. And so like, if you would like to join the Chronomancy group, there's a Telegram group. You search the Chronomancy app. And then also just I would like to plug just my own email because I I, you know, I don't use social media these days. So, my my email is just [email protected]. So, anyone who has ever been Randonauting, like, please reach out to me. I would love to hear your stories. I love all of the meaningful stories. I mean, like, just the other day, I I was just scrolling on Twitter randomly and like on a burner account that should be not connected to anything Randonautica. I see somebody, oh, I I, you know, I I sent my intention for spirituality. And then I went and I saw a church. And they found that meaningful. And I was like, wow, people are still for all these years, like, just you still see that out there. So it's it's really amazing. I want to thank everyone who supported Randonautica while while I was involved. I want to thank everyone who has ever gone Randonauting because you're an amazing community. And the community is what made Randonautica so good. And so I want to say that Chronomancy, all the money that will ever go to Chronomancy is going to scientific research. That's that's just for me. I I am I am interested in giving back to the community in that way.
That's wonderful. Josh Lengfelder, you know, the spirit of your project is embodied in doing the project itself. Um and the way that you carry yourself in the world. So, thank you so much for coming on Festival.
So, anyone who's ever involved in Chronomancy, I want you to know the money is going to go back into research. I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much for having me on.