Rupert Isaacson: Thanks for joining us.
Welcome to Live Free, Ride Free.
I'm your host, Rupert Isaacson, New York Times bestselling author of
The Horseboy and The Long Ride Home.
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So now let's jump in.
Welcome back to Live Free, ride Free.
The process of self-actualization takes many forms and I am
happy to have Beverly Cain, Dr.
Beverly Cain from the University of Stanford, and she's also a doctor
and she's also a equine practitioner and she's also many things.
And she didn't start that way.
She came to California with 35 bucks in her pocket and living on her wits and
somehow ended up a professor of medicine at Stanford as well as other things.
So I think that is definitely a life story we need to hear.
And then a present day, what on earth are you up to with these amazing life
skills that have brought you this far?
So, stand by my friends for doctor.
Beverly Cain, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Please tell us who you are and what you do.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Thank you, Rupert.
We have a little bit of a history and it's, it's so nice to be on your program.
So as you said, I came out with $35.
I actually hitchhiked out here.
Rupert Isaacson: Where from, where did you start?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
I was based on the east coast basically in New York.
I had been doing, at the time I was doing a lot of anti-war activism that
it was the time of the Vietnam War.
So I was very active in the effort to end that war.
And I, I hitchhiked out here.
My, my boyfriend was out here and I had $35 and I had the
resources to stay for two weeks.
That was, I think 55 years ago, about 1972.
And what happened is while I was out here, I got really sick
and I ended up in the hospital
Rupert Isaacson: I had gone to.
What did you stick with?
What did you get?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
I had an ovarian abscess.
I had, yeah, I was very, I had a fever of 103.
And so how old were
Rupert Isaacson: you at this point?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
I was about 21.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Really young for that.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Okay.
20 20, 21.
Yeah.
And so I went to the Berkeley free Clinic with a temp of
103, ended up in the hospital.
And when I got out of the hospital, I wanted to repay the kindness
of the Berkeley Free Clinic.
So I became a volunteer, and then I was in their paramedic program, which
isn't the, as we think of paramedics, it's more kind of a barefoot doctor.
It's not the people that ride in ambulances and
through one thing in another.
I went back to school.
I had dropped out of, of college.
Dropped outta school.
I went to,
Rupert Isaacson: where were you at school and what were you doing?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
I was at, when I dropped out, well, I dropped out of Columbia University.
Okay.
Initially during that anti-war effort.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
And so based on the East Coast.
And what had you
Rupert Isaacson: been studying?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Well, I.
Started out thinking about medicine, but the chemistry, the couple that
taught chemistry were just these old bitties that made it so uninteresting
that I, I minored in art history and art and took Chinese, actually Chinese.
So you a poly brush painting a little checkered past pa
polymath, both in two ways.
Get, okay.
Okay.
So you drop out of much into history of art
Rupert Isaacson: and Chinese and, and hitchhike to be an anti-war protestor in
Berkeley and then get sick and then get healed at the free clinic in Berkeley so
you don't end up in hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt which can happen.
Of course, everyone gets sick in America as a young person with no insurance.
And then you decide you want to volunteer for them to repay the kindness,
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
right?
And then I got.
A little bit more serious about it and ended up in medical school.
Okay.
Just I, I was a little bit ambivalent about going to medical school, but it,
the time had come and I was actually interviewed by a man who went on to
win the Nobel Prize in biochemistry.
Great guy.
Who was that?
Who I did Michael Bishop.
I think he, I am not sure what year he won the Nobel Prize.
It was probably 20 years after my, okay.
Rupert Isaacson: I'm gonna Google him quickly while you talk.
Okay.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Yeah.
I think he's still alive.
Rupert Isaacson: Michael Bishop?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Michael Bishop.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
So,
Rupert Isaacson: and that was at which school?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
That was at UCSF, university of California.
San Francisco.
Okay.
Yeah.
Very good school.
And I, I stayed with them.
I had done a lot of.
My medical school work, I did an, a residency in family medicine, and
then I did a fellowship in ob, GYN.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
And a fellow and a fellowship in sports medicine in London.
At the London Hospital.
Rupert Isaacson: And why did you go to London?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Because there were very few, if any, sports medicine programs
for non-orthopedic surgeons.
There was a, a famous sports medicine program at the, at Cleveland.
I, I guess that would be case Western in Cleveland, but for orthopedic surgeons.
Okay.
But this fellowship in London was for general practitioners
and family medicine people.
There were two people from Australia, one from New Zealand,
one from Sudan and myself.
It was a wonderful, wonderful program.
We went all over the UK to various clinics.
And when I came back, I went into the practice of sports
medicine for a while and why
Rupert Isaacson: sports medicine, if you'd started with oh, women's
medicine, ob, GYN and so on.
And that's what's the jump across from there.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
I did the OB GYN fellowship because I thought I was going to go up to
Alaska and deliver babies and, and actually even do cesarean sections.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
And in American community, sorry, in Native American communities.
Was that the idea?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Yeah, and I ended up living for, in Alaska four year and doing a lot of
medicine at Native American clinics.
But I, I was in no way prepared to do cesarean sections at that time, you
know, by myself or and I was really at, in the dead of winter in Alaska.
I read a book that was absolutely life changing, and it was by Michael Murphy,
who's one of the founders of the Esson Institute here in Central California.
And it was called Jacob Abit, and it was sort of a novel version of his later
huge book called The Future of the Body.
And it was about human potentials in a somatic sense.
Not just the mind, but what the body would be capable of at, at the time.
I think the, the one mile, the limit was a four minute mile.
Mm-hmm.
By, I, I think a British guy actually.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
And that stood for decades.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Yeah.
And I don't know that it's been broken yet.
Roger and Roger Roger's, somebody I think from, from UK.
And I, I had just been always very, very athletic, very about the body.
And this will relate later, hopefully to how I got into horses and how I
relate to, okay, so sports medicine.
So you, okay, got it.
So through that, but I'm just looking at Michael
Rupert Isaacson: Bishop.
That is amazing.
He's best known for his Nobel winning work on retroviral basically oncology.
He was the first bloke to find out how malignant tumors are formed from
changes in the normal genes of a cell.
And it's funny, we take that for granted now, don't we?
But I guess back in the eighties that wasn't so well known, so.
Lucky you have someone like that to mentor you, so you Well,
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
yeah.
He, he, he actually didn't mentor me.
He interviewed me for medical school admission and he was the greatest guy.
I remember our conversation like it was yesterday and it was 1974.
Rupert Isaacson: What did he say?
What stands out in the memory?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
So he told me that one has to be really careful how we look at announcements of
medical breakthroughs and whether they're made in the public press in the news.
He was very good friends with the science writer for the San Francisco
Chronicle at the time, and that that name escapes me and that I know
that person has since passed away.
But.
If you're looking at medical breakthroughs that are announced by the people who
made them the researchers, you have to be take it with a grain of salt
because they're going to inflate their findings and their importance.
Yeah.
And one should trust more the reporting in the scientific press for accuracy
and context of any medical breakthrough.
I don't think that's an issue now with everything we're getting on the
internet, but in the pre-internet days, there was a lot of self-aggrandizement
by medical researchers in.
Even the medical journals, but, but also, yeah, now it's
Rupert Isaacson: almost flipped and it's like one, one is skeptical of
what one sees in the medical journals because half of what's more than
half of what's in there was funded by the pharmaceutical industry.
So, you know, but that, that's seems to have, you know, crept up on us a
little bit in the last 20, 25 years.
Yeah,
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
well there's a lot of fraud now.
Yeah.
And just this week in my newsfeed there was an article about fraudulent
reporting in medicine and AI coming up with falsified data and inaccurate data.
So yeah, it's a real problem.
Rupert Isaacson: What have I,
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
so yeah,
Rupert Isaacson: snake oil salesman and yeah, use an expression
even in the virtual world.
Okay, so you end up in London?
No,
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
I ended up in London and I had a wonderful, wonderful year there.
Just fantastic going down to.
Where is it that the, the Royal Navy is doing The 30 meter, 33 meter
breath hold dives as an exhibition?
Just amazing the, the Royal Navy came back to San Francisco and went
into a sports medicine practice.
I always say I was the token yuppie woman.
Doctor in a kind of, she she practice in downtown San Francisco.
Okay.
And that was run by an anesthesiologist who had no clue
how to manage the financial and administrative aspects of a clinic.
So that clinic tanked, and I worked a couple of other places, and then I
went to Stanford, taking the place of a guy who went off to do his fellowship.
So I ended up at Stanford.
In the, technically the division of cardiology, but it was the Stanford
Center for Research in Disease Prevention.
And a good part of my sports medicine fellowship was preventative
medicine, was exercise physiology.
So it was about a third orthopedics, about a third exercise physiology, and
a third of an assortment of different topics in sports medicine, like the
Chief Medical Officer of British Airways coming to lecture us on team, team flight
medicine, medicine for team flights.
So at Stanford, I worked on some studies in preventive medicine that there was
a very well known study called Mr.
Fit, multiple Risk Factor intervention Trials where we had people quit
smoking or their intake of cholesterol, start exercising stress management.
Which I'm very involved with now was a big part of that also.
Rupert Isaacson: Would that have been in the eighties?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
That was 87 I started there.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
And about a few years later.
Yes.
When,
Rupert Isaacson: yes.
Stress management was barely talked about back then.
It's true.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Well, it's interesting because in the uk, one of our, that miscellaneous third
that wasn't orthopedics or exercise physiology, it was sports psychology.
There was a, a fairly big section on sports psychology and dealing with stress
and performance anxiety in athletes.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
And especially top athletes.
I, I mean we worked with the, the British Olympic team when the
Russian Olympic team came there.
So, so when those grants work.
Ran out.
We, we were funded by grants, and when the grants ran out, I went
over and worked at Apple Computer.
Apple Computer was, had worked with us on, in some of our studies.
Rupert Isaacson: What had they done with you at that point?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
They, and
Rupert Isaacson: were they looking at stress?
Stress for their workers?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
They looked at stress, exercise.
It wasn't mostly stress, it was mostly aerobic exercise.
Aerobic and anaerobic.
So were, were they already
Rupert Isaacson: aware at that point, apple of people
sitting too long at computers?
Why were they, why were they into it?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
It was some of that, some of that was ergonomics and I, I ended up.
Making ergonomic house calls on some of the PE people in the cubicles in Apple
computer, which was kind of interesting.
They were interested because corporate fitness was just taking off.
Then the leader and pioneer in that area was Johnson and Johnson,
and Apple wasn't too far behind in building fitness centers.
My job there was to do a multiphasic physical on any employee was eligible
to have a, an annual multiphasic physical with, so they just
Rupert Isaacson: basically wanted fit healthy employees,
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
right?
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Right.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Because there's, there was data on productivity in healthy
employees, productivity in employees who were less stressed.
Lower blood pressure, fewer medical problems.
Big.
There was a big quit smoking program, one.
One, one story that stands out in my mind and my heart is there was a person there,
then he was then a guy who was very well known in the Pascal programming world,
and then he transitioned to a, she he had been a, was a two pack a day smoker.
And in transitioning he needed to go on hormones and the doctors wouldn't
prescribe hormones to somebody who smoked because there was a much higher risk
of stroke with estrogens and smoking.
And so he was highly motivated to quit.
And annually, every, every year in November, we had this event
called the Great American Smokeout.
It's a national event where smokers.
Take a non-smoker as a partner and the non-smoker gives up something
and the smoker gives up cigarettes.
Okay.
And so I became this person's, this, this person had been my patient
in the, in the clinic for annual physicals and a couple of other things.
And so I became this person's partner and he, she very successfully gave up smoking,
got their hormones, and ended up with long blonde hair and painted fingernails
and miniskirts and things like that.
Quite a fun story.
Rupert Isaacson: What did you give up?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Oh gosh.
Probably sugar.
Maybe sweets.
I don't remember.
I don't have a huge sweet tooth.
How long
Rupert Isaacson: were you supposed to give it up for?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
I think it was six weeks, 30 days, six weeks.
Okay.
So not that it's still going on, although, yeah, the Great American
Smokeout is still going on.
So I'm not sure how long, how long the commitment is, but yeah, that
was, that was, that was really sweet.
Yeah, so I worked at Apple for almost 10 years and was, had become very
interested in medical informatics, which is the use of computers in medicine.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Because to be a little tangential and do a little back flip.
In my teenage years I had been really interested in computers also.
I had gone to a summer program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
MIT, for computer programming with punch cards in those days.
Okay.
And so I was always interested in computers and I was at that
time particularly interested in artificial intelligence in medicine.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Were people even talking about it even back then?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
This is, yeah.
This is 1987 and, and people
Rupert Isaacson: were using the word artificial intelligence.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Oh, yeah.
Sure.
Well, well, well, Alan Touring used it.
He was probably a, a British guy in the fifties.
Yeah.
And yeah, very famous guy.
Played in the movie by I always call him Bander Snatch.
Cummerbund.
Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: Benedict.
You know
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
who I mean?
Yeah, I do.
The really good movie, he was talking about artificial intelligence back then.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
In the war.
Yeah.
He, he was definitely, I, I don't know who coined the term,
but it was, he was using it.
But so, so I was interested in artificial intelligence and medicine and Apple
had just started their AI group.
And the man who was to become my husband, I have to get this in was
the second hire in the Apple AI group, and we came together to plan a panel
discussion on AI in medicine in Macworld at Macworld, which is a huge annual
Macintosh conference in San Francisco.
So when I left Apple, I went to work for Phillips Medical Systems.
Rupert Isaacson: And why did you leave Apple?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Why did I leave Apple?
Because I got offered this really interesting job.
I, you know, I had been doing mostly physicals for 10 years.
We didn't have a clinic where I actually saw sick people.
It was just physicals and physicals and physicals.
Got it.
And I loved the group.
We recently had a big reunion, but I really, I wanted to do something a
little bit more challenging mentally.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
And at that point, the electronic medical record was coming into the
fore and particularly the electronic patient record, the, the patient view
into the electronic medical record.
So Philips Medical Systems had a group out here that was developing a patient
record and a a, actually, I think, yeah, it was a doctor and patient
record, both views into the system.
To integrate with their radiology suites.
Phillips was, and I think still is the leader in cardiac radiology,
radiology for cardiology.
And so that, that was a great group.
And then somehow I think Philip put the kibosh on that.
I don't exactly remember what happened, but then I went to a
company called WebMD, which probably a lot of people have heard of.
Yeah.
And that, that was a terrific experience also because we, we were also working
on the patient record, the view into patient data and designing.
Medical record, the internet
Rupert Isaacson: was alive and well by this point.
Right.
So you are.
Yes.
We,
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
this is, this is 2000.
Okay.
Yeah.
The e email, everything.
It wasn't like it is now.
There wasn't, right.
But
Rupert Isaacson: it was
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
a lot of the, the degree of, in fact, apple, apple was
just, it was the big takeoff.
It was the big, yeah, it was,
Rupert Isaacson: yeah.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
When I left Apple, so that was, I left Apple in 97.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
And Apple,
I was one of the people that had helped form the apple,
the internet interest group.
There were two people from the advanced technology group and and
my husband, who they had internet.
The, the, the American military had internet in the, in the seventies it
was called Arnet and Darpanet and had.
Internal emailing systems and kind of like what it is today at at least
technically tech technology wise.
So, yeah.
So at WebMD we had a little artist's colony on the floor where, you
know, we were all in cubes, but we had the facilities people unscrew
our fluorescent lights and we all brought these beautiful lamps.
And these were the very, very creative people from the
apple Human Interface group.
And we did designs for the medical record and it was just a real fun place to be.
And then WebMD, who was based mostly on the East coast, they
decided to close their Silicon Valley office and they moved.
They wanted to divide it up and move some to New York and some to Atlanta.
Rupert Isaacson: Why.
Why, why get out?
That's, that's where
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
they, well, they had been based there and I think they thought they
could do better in Silicon Valley.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
And then they found they couldn't.
Okay.
You know, especially with the internet growing up, it didn't matter where
you were and it just didn't make sense to keep that to keep that open.
Mm-hmm.
Just, you know, again, parenthetically that that collaboration was between a
company called Halon and, and WebMD.
And Halon was Clark Jim.
Jim Clark, I think, who was started Netscape and then Silicon Graphics.
You've heard now.
Yeah.
Now we're talking Netscape Silicon Graphics.
Had a, had a big ship in the Americas Cup.
I think he might even have won.
And, but, but anyway, so WebMD.
Decided to pull in its forces and consolidate on the East
coast and I wasn't gonna go move.
And so in 2002, oh, and, and the other thing that was happening at
that time was what's called the.com
bust, where a lot of the startups
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Went down.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
And that, so that was the.com
bust.
And so that economically wasn't a good time for Silicon Valley.
And I think that was another factor in WebMD deciding to move
its move, its playing pieces.
And I did not want to go to the East coast.
They gave us a humongous severance package.
Nobody, you know, I didn't really need to to work right away.
But I was a little bit nervous about not working and 'cause
I always have to be working
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Doing something and.
I, I remember this conversation in my backyard with my best
friend who's actually a, also a doctor and a yoga teacher.
And she said, cool.
It just, just cool it.
Sit back and think, what do you really want to do now that you have
all this free time and resources?
And I said, well, you know, I've always wanted to ride horses.
Rupert Isaacson: And you never had until that point.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Sorry?
Rupert Isaacson: You never had until that point?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
No, you know, I, I had the odd dude ride in Yosemite.
Okay.
But no, I had, I grew up on an island.
I had no consciousness of horses except perhaps for the sort of
Hoi Toi National Velvet set.
And there was harness racing just outside of Boston.
But no, I, I, which, which
Rupert Isaacson: island were you, were you brought up on?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
It's called Winthrop.
It's like 355 degrees water and there's a causeway out to Boston.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
And so we were all about swimming and boats and surfing and Right.
The beach.
Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: But you always had a hankering foot, the boats.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Well, I watched all the cowboy movies of the fifties.
Yeah.
Boy Rogers and have Gun Will Travel and Wagon Train and Bonanza.
Bonanza wasn't the fifties, but no, I used to watch the westerns
and get on my bed and make a horse out of my pillow and a belt.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Giddy up on the edge of the bed.
And put my pajamas over my head with the legs hanging down
so I could be Annie Oakley.
Okay.
So, so that was horses.
It was cowboys and,
Rupert Isaacson: and cowgirls
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
and cowgirls and western fantasies.
Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
So, so fast forward to 2002 and I always wanted to, I can't say
I always wanted to ride horses, but late lately, in those years,
'cause I was, I was 52 at that time.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
So, and I had once run a marathon, two half marathons.
I used to swim a mile a day and my body was kind of getting not
so able to do those things right.
I thought, well, you know, if I get on a horse, I will be
strong again and fast again and graceful again and tireless again.
So that was my fantasy at that point.
And so I started taking writing lessons.
Rupert Isaacson: It's surprising though that it took you that
long because have you been out in Silicon Valley all that time?
And Silicon Valley's actually, people often don't realize this, but
it's a very horsey place and people think of Silicon Valley as like a
valley of silicon, and it isn't.
It's like one of the most beautifully forested, you know,
rural, semi-rural parts of, you know, California and lots of horses.
So I'm surprised that within that culture you hadn't found your way
there, and until this point you'd always have to try to avoid it.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Well, it's not so obvious I commute
Rupert Isaacson: Especi at Stanford.
'cause Stanford has a big equestrian presence, right?
There's even Fox hunting going on on that campus.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
It was on, it was on a whole other side of.
Of campus from us.
So I, I really had no consciousness of the, the Stanford
Red Barn Equestrian Center
Rupert Isaacson: right
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
as it is.
And you can't really see horses from the road.
I commuted for years from San Francisco down through Silicon Valley to Sunnyvale
and Santa Clara for, you know, for WebMD.
And I never saw horses from that.
It's funny though.
Rupert Isaacson: I've driven that same road so many times, and I remember when
I used to live in Berkeley for a bit and I drove that road the first time,
the first thing that hit my eye in the fences around snap of work coops, you
know, the jumps that fox hunters put in the, in the wire fences that they
can jump over when they're following hands and think, I was thinking, oh,
someone's hunting here, you know?
So it's so interesting, isn't it?
If you're conditioned to see those things that leapt out at me from
the highway, you would drove past that a bazillion times and I guess
different conditioning, different.
Well,
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
and now I'm on a 300 acre ranch that.
Starts a hundred yards from the highway.
And I never knew there were horses there.
Right.
It just, you, you're right.
You, you've gotta be conditioned to see it.
It has to.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
There has to be something in your mind that gets triggered when, when it happens.
And I, you know, I always thought horses were beautiful animals.
But, but, so there I was in 2002 and I started taking writing lessons
and it, it, I, I really loved my instructor.
I, I kind of have her to this day.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
But writing at that point for me, and I don't fault my instructors, but it's
just kind, sort of the kind of person that I am, a little bit perfectionist.
So it was all about doing things right, being correct.
It wasn't even at that point so much the relationship with the horse,
although I love animals and you know, I feel very connected emotionally and
spiritually to animals and horses.
But at that point, riding was about being correct and I went to my lessons every
week for years with knots in my stomach,
afraid of how I was gonna mess up.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
I think, I think that's the story so many people have.
Yeah.
Right.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
So then fortuitously, what happened was a few years later, I think in
2004, six, something like that, I, no, it was later than that, but I
got bucked off a table in my kitchen.
Okay.
Naughty table.
Yeah, I was naughty table.
Very just.
I think
and I got a broken foot, a dislocated elbow
Rupert Isaacson: and a How does one get bucked off a table?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
I was putting wine glasses away on a high shelf and I was, it, it was a small table.
It wasn't really made as a step stool and it was on spindly legs and it, I just,
my, my foot placement was such that it flipped out under me just, and I ended up
on the kitchen floor and synchronistically and symbolically there was, in our
living room, a guy sitting there who was an adjuster from the insurance company
'cause we had had flooding in our garage.
So he was sitting there with his little laptop adjusting and.
That, that became very symbolic because that accident was this
huge adjustment in my life.
'Cause I went, the, the orthopedic surgeon that tended my foot
said, we can't ride anymore.
You, you can't ride right?
You, you bone heal.
Right?
And I said, well, you know,
I could, I was perfectly, it was my right foot that was fractured.
And so I was perfectly capable of mounting, you know, with my left
foot in the stir and swinging over.
But I, I got a little bit scared, I guess, or a little bit caught.
He, he instilled caution in me, a caution that isn't usually there.
But I said, okay, so what I did is I enrolled as a client in.
The Therapeutic Riding Center, our local then Path Premier
Therapeutic Riding Center.
And I had been volunteering there for a couple years with, with children mostly.
Rupert Isaacson: And why, what did join you to do that?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Because I wanted to learn everything I could about horses because I
admired the work that they were doing.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
I learned so much about horses in that program.
Mm-hmm.
Those, those horses were in some ways very different from the lesson
horses that we had at the ranch.
Just amazing horses, a lot of them.
And and I, and I wanted to do something of service.
Mm-hmm.
And there may have been other reasons, but, but it, anyway, after the
accident, I became a client in that center and I had the most fantastic.
Therapeutic riding instructor Corey Thompson, I have to say her name into the
video in Invoke Her 'cause she actually later became and, and still is a quite
a big part of my horsemanship life.
And for the first time it was just playful to be on horses.
It was so liberating.
Because, you know, it was bareback.
We rode bareback and it was a wonderful horse.
I can see him but I can't remember his name.
And we did airplane arms and we did around the world and we did
breathing and singing and everybody was just so cheerful and playful.
And I thought, wow, this is, this is what I really want.
Have for, for my horsemanship and there was a somatic aspect of feeling my body,
feeling my breathing in, in a playful way, not in a way that was meant to put myself
in the correct ear, hip axis position.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
Or, or, or run your marathon correctly or all the other things you've been trying
to do correctly with your body, I presume as well, which wasn't Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Had probably lack play, you know, had high achievement, but perhaps not quite
so not as we'd say in the UK or Ireland.
Not much crack.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Yeah.
Well, you know, I could swim before I could walk.
Yeah.
Almost.
Well, not quite, but two years old I was swimming in the ocean.
Mm-hmm.
And swimming wasn't about being perfect.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Or about, I, I mean, I did take swimming lessons and teach swimming
and learn technique and there's something to it, but it was always fun.
Yeah.
And, and horse riding lessons just weren't fun.
Right.
'cause you didn't get to grow
Rupert Isaacson: up on the back.
Right.
Just messing about like we did.
Yeah.
So I always associated it with fun.
Yeah.
Later when we Yeah, yeah.
Went to refine my technique.
Okay, fine.
But yeah, the, the base was always fun, but it it's so true, isn't
it, with a lot of these things that we start as adults mm-hmm.
We often come in, no matter what it is, with a such a desire to do it right.
That we don't come in with the same play, playful laity that children
come in, including learning by the way and studying, you know?
Mm-hmm.
So we want to be successful, we want to be diligent, we want to be
rigorous, we want to be all these things, and it's just no crack at all.
And no wonder everybody burns out and gets depressed.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Well, you know, we're just winding down our summer camp season, so
for 22 years at this ranch, we've had summer camps, Uhhuh, and the,
the kids start at seven years old.
And I see how, how they approach it in, in the ways that I never got to do as
a child or as a perfectionist adult.
And it's just fun for them.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
It's just a lot of fun.
So, alright,
Rupert Isaacson: so, so back up just a little bit.
So you end up though, at Stanford again, isn't that right?
Or how do you,
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
okay.
So that's your, your, your
Rupert Isaacson: academic thing seems to kick off at the same
time that you get this whole therapeutic equestrian thing going.
Just, just how do these things happen in parallel?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
It's, it's a little more sequential.
So, so that, that accident put me back in my fun body.
Mm.
With Corey and I, she, I eventually worked for her in a veteran's program
at that therapeutic writing center.
I'm, I'm a little hazy on the.
On the timeline here, so I'll just
Rupert Isaacson: kind of lay
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
it out.
It's, it's a little bit of a mosaic now.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
So I had always been interested in psychology and, and actually spirituality.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
From, from my mother was very interested in dreams and very
interested in extrasensory perception.
Rupert Isaacson: Was your mother Jung?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
No, she wasn't a psychologist.
She had a geology professor at Tufts University that I think was also
interested in extrasensory perception.
My mother was a very hardheaded woman.
Very logical.
Sure.
Very.
Rupert Isaacson: It's funny how one always feels the desire to say
this as soon as one says anything spiritual, as if being hardheaded
and scientific can't exist in direct parallel with the ex, you know, the.
The esoteric it's, it's so interesting, isn't it?
We almost find ourselves apologizing for the esoteric side of our as.
But, but you know, really, really, I'm, I'm a real rigorous scientist as well.
It's like, yeah, yeah, sure.
Absolutely.
But again, life without the esoteric is also no life at all.
And, well, we also, physics now is, you know, well, its way back to the
esoteric, but I can hear what you mean.
It's it.
Okay.
So, so, so your, your mother.
Okay.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Wait, I've gotta get a little tangential here.
What you just said is what brought me to work Schiller, from your podcast.
Ah, and my, my life's work now is bridging the scientific and the spiritual
through horses, through quantum physics.
Quantum theory.
So that, that's, maybe we'll get to the thing we want.
Now you're gonna have to bring us to quantum.
Now we're back in, right now we're back in like 2005, I think.
Okay.
So I became familiar somehow with the field of equine assisted
learning and psychotherapy.
My family medicine residency emphasized psychotherapy and the, the psychological,
and that was always an interest of mine.
Hmm.
And so I was going to go to a clinic with Barbara Rector, who will be known
to some of the people listening here.
She's quite well known in equine assisted learning, kind
of spirituality cycles circle.
Okay.
I'm gonna
Rupert Isaacson: look her up as you, as you talk, Barbara.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Yeah.
Adventures in awareness.
She's out of Tucson, Arizona.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
And I was supposed to go to a clinic of hers down by San Diego in California.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
And the clinic got canceled.
And in the cancellation email, there was an invitation to do the five
day version of her clinic in Tucson.
And I thought, well, do I really wanna commit to that amount of time?
And, and the, the resources and everything.
And, and at that point, as I was deciding, I had what Carl and calls a great dream.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
We had this magnificent technicolor dream of red.
Mustangs stallions dancing in the desert.
Okay.
And this dream was complete with a Native American shaman riding over the hill.
And I had no connection with deserts, and the horses were dancing in the dream.
They were dancing.
And I said, okay, I'm supposed to go to the desert and do this workshop,
which I did.
And Walter Zele was there.
Rupert Isaacson: Oh, I knew Walter Zele a little bit.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Those, for those listeners who didn't, he was a, a very, very Al
Austrian classical dressage dude.
Yeah.
What was he doing there out of, well, he
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
was doing a dressage clinic.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
We got to watch a little bit.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay, cool.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Amazing guy.
He's since over the Rainbow Bridge, but yeah,
Rupert Isaacson: yeah, yeah.
I have his book on the bookshelf behind me there.
Yeah.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So in Barbara's.
Syllabus.
She, she had a big three ring binder for us.
There was an article in the EG gala magazine about Alan Hamilton who was egal
Rupert Isaacson: again, for listeners who don't know what that is, was
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Oh, I'm sorry.
Yeah,
Rupert Isaacson: yeah.
One of the first models of equine facilitated psychotherapy effectively.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Equine assisted Growth in Learning Association.
Right, right.
So, there was an article from their magazine in Barbara
Rector's three ring binder
Rupert Isaacson: mm-hmm.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
On Alan Hamilton, who was then the chief, and, and may still be
actually the chief of neurosurgery at the University of Arizona.
And, and he was a horseman with a ranch, and he had developed a program
called Medicine and Horsemanship.
Where he taught workshops for medical students with his horses in
communication, teamwork basically that, and when I saw that, just this
light bulb went off in my head and I thought, this is what I want to do.
Hmm.
I can, I can work with horses and medical students and doctors and
nurses to improve communication because
doctor communication issues were, are, we're, and are a sore spot in.
In medical practice.
It's
Rupert Isaacson: so true.
Bedside manner, you know, people underestimate it.
But doc, there's doctors that kill their parents, parents, patients who Yeah.
And vice versa, just by being unpleasant and others who didn't
do so well in their degree.
All of these patients seem to get better just because the
doctor is more empathetic.
Yeah,
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
yeah, exactly.
And, you know, I would, I would always hear horror stories about how
badly people were treated by their doctors and Dismissed, misunderstood.
Mm-hmm.
And so with Alan, under Alan's mentorship, I established
that same program at Stanford.
Rupert Isaacson: As you know, if you followed any of my work, I'm
an autism dad and we have a whole career before this podcast in helping
people with neurodivergence, either who are professionals in the field.
Are you a therapist?
Are you a caregiver?
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When my son, Rowan, was diagnosed with autism in 2004,
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And she told me what to do.
And it's been working so amazingly for the last 20 years.
That not only is my son basically independent, but we've helped
countless, countless thousands of others reach the same goal.
Working in schools, working at home, working in therapy settings.
If you would like to learn this cutting edge, neuroscience backed
approach, it's called Movement Method.
You can learn it online, you can learn it very, very simply.
It's almost laughably simple.
The important thing is to begin.
Let yourself be mentored as I was by Dr.
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Go to this website, newtrailslearning.
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Take the online movement method course.
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Let us know how it goes for you.
We really want to know.
We really want to help people like me, people like you, out there
live their best life, to live free, ride free, see what happens.
Now, were you already back at Stanford at this time?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
No.
So how did
Rupert Isaacson: you establish this at Stanford?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Well first, let, let me just back up one quarter of a step.
We, we did the first program at the, at UCSF up in San Francisco.
And actually the clinic was two hours north of that, and that wasn't gonna fly.
Medical students weren't gonna drive two hours to this thing.
Okay.
And we had hoped there was supposed to be a resurgence of horses in
Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.
And that never happened in, in Golden Gate Park.
I
Rupert Isaacson: remember that.
Yes.
That, that beautiful stable, that's still standing empty there.
Yeah.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Yeah.
Well, there are police horses in the park, but the, the old
stables never got refurbished.
And the Ingo Park was right down the hill from UCSF medical school.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
It's like a five minute walk.
And, but that never happened.
And so I said, well, why don't I try making an elective at Stanford?
So I looked around on the internet for departments that I thought would
be amenable, you know, sympathetic to doctor patient communic, improving
doctor patient communication.
And the chief of family medicine at that time was a guy who had grown up
in Canada on the US border with horses.
And he was all for the program.
He, he was just very aware of the relationship with horses and how horses
can teach us to be better people.
So he was all for it.
And but the rule was in order to create an elective for medical students, you
had to get a medical student champion.
So we found this woman.
Who had two horses at the Stanford Red Barn Equestrian Center, and she
had had to drop out of Stanford.
She was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
Oh.
And she had to drop out of medical school for one or two years.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
And during those one or two years, her horses were her saviors.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
Did she then survive?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Yes.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
She's at Vanderbilt now.
Rupert Isaacson: Wow.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
And yeah, she did very well.
Good.
And yeah, I'm still in touch with her, and so she became our champion.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
And.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
So we have the Stanford program at the ranch at the 300 acre ranch that
I'm at, which is owned by Stanford.
Stanford owns 8,000 acres of land in the area, many of which are ranches, some of
which they've closed down, unfortunately.
Mm-hmm.
So that, that kind of brings us up to date except for one thing, which is the
jewel in the crown, so to speak which is the, the medicine and horsemanship
emphasizes communication, teamwork, leadership, which wasn't an issue
when I was in medical school, but it is now that medical care is delivered
in corporate structures, basically.
So it's got corporate hierarchies that demand leadership,
leadership and self-care.
At some point, I think, connected with this accident and working with
Corey, I realized that the real thing that I wanted to teach was the
somatic aspect of being with horses.
That just the total body connection, which becomes a energetic connection
and a spiritual connection.
Mm-hmm.
'Cause at this point I was also teaching Tai Chi at Stanford.
Rupert Isaacson: Of course you were
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
sorry.
Rupert Isaacson: Of course.
Of course you were.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Well, that, that happened in a weird way too.
This I, I kind of got roped into it, but but it worked out.
And there's another slightly gentler martial art called Qigong, which is
more of a health practice than Taiji, although they kind of both are.
And so that's what I'm doing now is mainly is teaching Qigong with horses.
Rupert Isaacson: And how do you do that?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
So we learn some traditional.
Qigong forms.
There's a, a basic traditional Qigong form called the Bad gin, which means the
eight pieces of silk, eight silk brocades.
And interestingly enough, the bad gin is being heavily studied by the
health ministry in Beijing for its ability to help people with cancer.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
So tell us about the, these silk and brocades.
Why that, why that name and how does it work?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
I, I've never been real clear why it's called this, this goes
back, you know, hundreds of years.
Longer.
Longer I to be, yeah.
I mean, Qigong itself is said to have been discovered.
We have a piece of pottery that's about 8,000 years old that
apparently a, according to some archeologists, shows the Woo shaman
Rupert Isaacson: mm-hmm.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
The, the shamans of those days in a Qigong pose.
And they are said to have learned Qigong by watching animals heal themselves.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Yeah.
So, so Qigong works with energy mostly Qi, but I also work with Reiki, which
I experience was different from Qi.
And so the, the name of the course is Equanimity Stress Reduction and Emotional
Self-Regulation in the Company of Horses.
Rupert Isaacson: What, just quickly back to Beijing, why, why are, why
is the health ministry there looking at this particular Qigong practice?
What's it finding that it does for cancer?
This is interesting.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
So there's some survival data.
Largely what it does is it eases depression.
It promotes mm-hmm.
Appetite.
'cause people with cancer tend to be really isolated, and so
it's a very social activity.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
And there, there may be other factors that, that we're looking at
in terms of the energy shifts that are salutatory for, for cancer.
They, they're actually looking at three different forms of Qigong.
One is the Bawan gin, the, the eight Silicon and Brocades.
Mm-hmm.
One is called Five Animals Qigong.
And the other is this practice called Guin, walking after
Guin, who was a cancer survivor.
She had ovarian cancer, lived 10 more years.
And her doctor said she would, by developing her form of Qigong,
which is now called Guian Walking.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay, I'm just going to, just, just so that those
who've never heard of this before, have a little bit of context.
I've just, I've just done my little Google while you were talking.
So it says, what are the eight brick brocades in Qigong, it says, the
eight brocades are a set of Qigong exercises that originated in China.
I've been practiced throughout the world for thousands of years.
Each movement focuses on a different meridian to improve
the flow of Q through the body.
If practiced routinely, the practice will improve your health significantly.
It is believed that after practicing the sequence, one feels like wearing a
dress made of a very rich, exquisite, hard to find precious soft silk fabric.
So that silk weaving the form, the forms name refers to how it's eight
movements characterized, and in part, a silken quality like that of
a brocade to the body and its energy.
But of course, you know, yeah.
There's been a major crossover between allopathic and Chinese medicine and Qigong
and Tai Chi of course, for a long time.
But again, a lot of people listening might not know that.
And so I find it very interesting that you're, you're involved in that.
Interestingly too, just one, one little side note one of our horse boy centers
in the uk a place called Move The Mind in outside Bristol also takes electives from
the medical school at Bristol University, which is, you know, our equivalent,
one of the Ivy Leagues who go out there to do their mental health electives.
And for movement method, which is, you know, a one-horse side.
Last year we got asked to do a conference at Eastern Virginia
Medical School which is part of Old Dominion University on the East coast.
A neuroscience conference specifically about.
Our method.
So it's interesting how these things are going from the hippie
margins now, you know, into the mainstream of allopathic medicine.
Whereas of course, yeah.
Even I think pre COVID it, it wasn't really so much of a, it
was, it was hovering there, but I think COVID somehow kicked it in.
Okay.
So you are teaching, you're teaching Qigong with horses.
How does one do that?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
So initially we learn the forms on the ground.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Each form is connected with an organ system, which aren't like the meridian.
Right.
Well, not just a meridian.
Okay.
The meridians are connected with the organs too.
I don't really work with the meridians 'cause it's a, gets a
little esoteric for people, but people can visualize their liver.
They can think of a lump of meat.
Yeah.
Renal gland.
And in Chinese medicine, the organs aren't.
Isolated organs, the way we envision them.
Yeah, their systems.
Yeah.
And they're, you know, five elements and five flavors and five emotions.
And it's a whole philosophical, biological system,
Rupert Isaacson: right?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
So we learn the emotion that the emotion connected with each of the
forms, and we learn to release the negative emotion as we do the form.
Okay.
So for instance shooting the hawk
has to do with fear.
And so we release fear and gather courage, and each, each move has a release
and a gather, gathering the positive.
So you
Rupert Isaacson: do this on the ground.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
So we do this on the ground first.
We do No horse, sorry.
Rupert Isaacson: No horse.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Not yet.
Not well.
We go in with the horses and we do other activities after we do that.
And, and the last just, just lemme say that the we call what we do, the wan
gin, you know, bomb bombing eight, eight pieces of brocade and ours is the woo.
'cause there are three forms in the bad gin that you can't do on horseback,
like bend over and touch your toes.
And they're
Rupert Isaacson: just, when you say the woo does woo mean five, we woo is five.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
So we do the five.
So someone says woo woo, that's five five.
Interesting.
Different, yeah, sure.
Different, different woos.
'Cause Chinese has tones.
So we do, each week we learn one of the, the five and we do
an activity with the horses.
You know, the first is just a meet and greet.
'cause most of these people have never been around horses ever.
And.
We learned the five forms.
And then the last class of equanimity and medicine and horsemanship as this
has come together is a meditation ride to music, bareback to music.
We use Nawa kgs, Tibetan flute.
It's a, it's an album called Music as Medicine.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Appropriately enough.
And there are three tracks where he's actually in duet with a
very wonderful Native American flute player, art Carlos Naka.
And so we sit at a, at a halt and do the forms that we've learned.
And then we do a little walkabout.
Mm-hmm.
And, and we, we do this in, teams of four, where we use a
therapeutic riding configuration.
So we have one rider, two sidewalks, one or one or two sidewalks,
and somebody leading the horse.
So yeah, it's very, it's, it's really, really nice.
Rupert Isaacson: And what results do you see with this?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Well, we're not very results oriented.
People give us, so what results do
Rupert Isaacson: you see?
Because you do, you're gonna see something, you're gonna see
change, so what do you think?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Well, you know, people get up there and cry and people write on their evaluations.
What a wonderful course it is.
And is it
Rupert Isaacson: about emotional release?
Is it about,
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
it's about emotional and release, but, you know, we don't do any testing.
I have never been in to do research on my courses, honestly.
I think as, as Warwick said in your, your podcast with him,
the, you don't need the science.
It's a phenomenon.
Logical.
Experience.
No,
Rupert Isaacson: I couldn't agree more.
Yeah.
You only need the science if you're having to fund, you know, through organizations
what you do for mental health or whatever.
But nonetheless, I'm just curious to see, you know, what kind of people come
in and what changes do they experience?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Well, what I notice is that people's stress levels go way down.
We have mm-hmm.
Let me just show you.
So we do a check-in every week with the Native American talking stick.
Mm-hmm.
Which is also our stress ome.
So people are asked to tell us what their stress level is from, you know,
down on the belly button, which is zero to shoulder level, which is 10, and
then some people are off the charts.
Mm-hmm.
And what we notice as the weeks go by is that people's.
Baseline stress level goes way down.
And they'll say that they were able to do some of the breathing
exercises and cope better.
'cause they're all Stanford employees.
Almost all we do.
Rupert Isaacson: So this is something that's done internally
within Stanford University?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
It is.
It's open, it's done through the Healthy Living program.
Okay.
And it's open to community members.
It feels very quickly and we have a waiting list.
And it seems that Stanford employee, I bet you do got the jump again.
Yeah.
How
Rupert Isaacson: many weeks does the program go over?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Four.
It's just.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay, so, so employees from within Stanford
who are stressed out mm-hmm.
Come to you.
You are, you are at, you know, at Stanford, at the stable that Stanford has.
So it's all internal.
Are you still teaching at Stanford?
Are you still practicing medicine as well?
Alongside?
I'm not
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
practicing medicine, no.
Rupert Isaacson: When, when did you quit practicing medicine in that way?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Oh, boy.
Probably 30 years ago.
Okay.
I was actually seeing patients like that.
Yeah.
And I just went on a retired license, medical license, I think four years ago.
Three, four years ago.
Okay.
So, and
Rupert Isaacson: teaching at Stanford, so,
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
so I teach the Tai Chi, I teach on campus.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
And it's called Medical Tai Chi, or actually it's called
Medical Tai Chi, which isn't.
Particularly accurate, but it, medical Thai chi, it's called
medical because for the first half hour we have a journal club mm-hmm.
That looks at the peer reviewed journal articles on the health
benefits of TT Chi and Chi Kong.
And as part of that, I teach scientific methodology, what is the gold standard
for scientific research and why things like Taiji fall outside that gold
standard methodology that they're not, you can't really apply the gold standard.
And that's true of, of studies.
And with horses too, there are too many variables.
It's very, very hard to study.
Anything with horses because you have different instructors,
different horses, different Yeah.
Clients or patients.
Very, very hard to study Mom and the horse
Rupert Isaacson: itself can't fill into, into questionnaire.
Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
It's exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, but, but it's important, especially now where scientific reasoning and
scientific, the philosophy of science is just being turned on its ear by certain
events going on in the United States.
It's important for people to understand how to judge traditional science
and how to say, we don't gotta show you no stinking badges when it
comes to proving that what we do.
Is valuable.
I mean, I, I don't know.
It's great that the
Rupert Isaacson: university values it on that, you know, because you think that the
university would have to justify through some sort of standardized model, you know?
I guess, but I guess it can fund what it wants to fund, right?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Right.
Well, the, the equanimity is funded through the, the each,
every Stanford employee has a continuing education allowance.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
I think
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
it's.
I don't know, 800, $900 a year.
And so they use that for equanimity and people from the community can just pay
whatever the, you know, the tuition is.
Yeah.
So it's,
Rupert Isaacson: and are you, you are offering this through one
of the departments or schools or faculties at Stanford and Right.
If so, which one?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
This is the Healthy Living Program, which used to be part of the medical school.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm.
And
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
it's now somehow part of Human Resources,
Rupert Isaacson: but Okay.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Yeah.
But it's the same program.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Yeah.
I'm very fortunate to be able so it's like you're a
Rupert Isaacson: tenured professor without having to go through the
hassle of being a tenured professor in terms of publishing and grant writing.
You, you can be, you, you get to play with ponies in a meaningful way.
Well
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
actually I'm an adjunct clinical professor.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
So, assistant professor actually.
And so we don't, we're not the tenure academic tenure track we're, I
Rupert Isaacson: understand, but it's, yeah, its a bit like
being, ones a whole different
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
set of Yeah.
It's like the benefits
Rupert Isaacson: of it in a funny way without the, the, the schlep.
It's good.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Yeah.
I I, I've really benefited from being at Stanford, going through Stanford
Rupert Isaacson: yeah.
And Stanford, you know, has, has led the way in so many things.
It's, it's so interesting.
I think that many of us in.
Other parts of the Western world don't know really how much of our modern life is
affected by what has gone on at Stanford University in the last, you know, 60, 70
years, you know, from the counterculture to, you know, the studies into compassion,
to the, you know, studies in computer science to birthing Silicon Valley,
which basically birthed out of Stanford.
It sort of is Stanford really.
It's just, yeah.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Fairchild, Stanford,
Rupert Isaacson: all boys club, you know, and it's, it's very, I I, I think
Stanford University has shaped modern thinking in a way that's disproportionate
in the way that say Oxford or Cambridge probably did in previous generations.
Mm-hmm.
Now, let me with, with that, bring something that.
Bring us back to something that you said just a few minutes ago.
You said that recent events in science in the USA has turned scientific philosophy
on its head, and my ears pricked up and went, Ooh, that sounds good.
Let's talk about that.
What do you mean by that?
Tell us about it.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Well, I really don't want to get into politics, but you know,
what's happened is that the Centers for Disease Control has been
Rupert Isaacson: the CDC.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
So the CDC, the National Institutes of Health have been,
there've been huge cutbacks.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Huge changes.
A lot of people who don't have medical or scientific backgrounds have been
installed in positions of leadership.
Rupert Isaacson: I think in, in other countries they call those commissars.
Yeah.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
So it's just, it's thrown everything into disruption in terms of
what we thought we knew about.
You know, vaccines and there's been a, a huge resurgence of measles outbreaks in
the United States, especially in Texas.
Mm.
As the anti-vaxxers have risen to ascendancy in the
national health institutions.
So it's just, you know, it, it, it's like a co I I, I look at it as co
capelli, you know, the trickster making us sit back and think about, well,
what do we really know about science?
What do we really believe?
What's really true?
Sh you know, how do we prove things to ourselves and to the scientific
community and to the public health Popul?
How do you think,
Rupert Isaacson: I mean, I, I think we could, we, we can certainly know what
the problems might be at this point, but.
And you know, it's easy to understand how the anti-vax thing got going
because you know, when big pharma just keeps throwing more and more
of them at you it's, you, it, it's going to create a counter movement.
It just is, you know?
And they should have seen that one coming, I think.
But if philosophy of science has been turned on its head, that also means
that must be, it must be happening in some really good, positive ways too.
What do you.
In the words of the Great Lou Reed it's easy enough to tell
what is wrong, but that's not what I want to hear all night long.
Let's talk about and take some
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
heroin in.
Rupert Isaacson: That's right.
I'm, I'm a, I'm, I'm the eternal optimist and I, I, I think a lot of what's
going on is, is actually very positive.
I'm also very optimistic about ai, you know, which a lot of people are not.
'Cause I feel that a lot of the really horrific things that have
been done that we're afraid that AI would do, we're sort of forgetting.
No, that's, that's us that do that.
When we've done about 10,000 years of genocide and atrocity.
So if, if AI is going to just do that again, that's actually business as usual.
That's no different.
But it might do something different, I feel, because we are
also a very loving species that's always forgotten and that we.
The people writing those programs are not, or are not evil.
There may be people who are evil who are trying to control them, but it's
rather like the horse, you can use it to commit a genocide and many genocides
have been committed on the backs of horses, or you can use it to heal the
horse will lend you its power either way.
But we seem to have arrived at a point where fewer genocides are being committed
on the backs of horses and more people are using, harnessing that power for healing.
Although it's taken us a few millennial to get there perhaps AI is going to
accelerate that and other walks of life.
But in back in terms of this sort of scientific philosophy, I'm, I'm
interested because this is all affected by you, you, you, you've referred,
you've used the word quantum a few times in this conversation, right?
Well, in quantum being potential.
Really?
Yeah.
So you must have thoughts on where all that is going.
Mm-hmm.
You've been involved in computer science, you've been involved in allopathic
medicine from various viewpoints.
You've been involved in Silicon Valley, you've been involved in the types of
companies that were beginning to, as, as you said, you know, the word artificial
intelligence which is deeply tied in with the whole quantum thing has been
around, you know, since World War ii, but of course has massively accelerated.
You've had a bit of a front row seat of all this.
What are your thoughts?
Where are we, where's it all going?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
I'm very hopeful that artificial intelligence will
be a, a, a positive force.
I, I think that can happen.
I think.
In the cycles of history that we've seen in the world, we've seen, you know, horses
used for war and horses used on farms.
And now horses are mostly very beloved animals that seem to have emerged.
They survived and they emerged in a very positive, in a very positive
way, at least for all of us.
One important facet we haven't touched on in my background is parapsychology.
Rupert Isaacson: Go on then.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
I have always been interested in and somewhat active in parapsychology.
We had a group called the San Francisco Parapsychology Research Group and.
People related to that group who are interested in consciousness.
And when you consider the subject of ai, you have to
consider consciousness and Okay.
And whether, okay, so
Rupert Isaacson: define parapsychology first.
So we know the terms that we're dealing with here.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Right.
Paras.
Oh, parapsychology is the field that studies, and this is a little bit
of a circular reasoning, circular definition, paranormal phenomenon
such as extrasensory perception,
telepathy animal communication.
Certainly.
Rupert Isaacson: Why did you become interested in this?
Were you interested in this before you got involved in horses, for example?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Oh, absolutely.
My mom was a big.
Believer in extrasensory perception.
And every time there was a synchronicity or we arrived at the same thought, somehow
she would say that's ESP also dreams.
We would sit around the table in the morning and talk about
our dreams every single day.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
So
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
there was, and there was an aspect of dreaming that was precognitive
and there was an aspect of dreaming that was metaphysical, spiritual.
And, and some, some just mundane.
So when you talk about ai, we have to consider consciousness
and what all the manifestations of consciousness are in humans and in
other animals and even plants and even possibly rocks and trees and.
Inanimate the
Rupert Isaacson: c the conscious universe, effectively
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
the conscious universe.
Yeah.
Ru put Dr.
Rupert Isaacson: Rupert Shel Drake's work and that
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Rupert Sheldrake.
Yeah.
And Ahed Ka Swami.
Mm-hmm.
The has a book called the, he's a, a quantum physicist and a Vedic
scholar who has a book called The Self-Aware Universe, how Consciousness
Creates the Material World.
One a, a life-changing book for me.
I'm reading it for the fourth time right now.
So, and, and it's interesting because Alan Touring, who was one of the fathers
of artificial intelligence, he wrote a paper in 1952, I believe it was that.
Countered all the objections to artificial intelligence being real.
You know, at the time people were dismissing the idea that machines
could be intelligent or that could show any form of intelligence.
And he countered all the objections except one.
And the, the objection that he couldn't counter was the objection from ESP,
it, it's called the ninth objection.
'cause it was the ninth one he dealt with.
And that was the idea that computers could demonstrate psychic abilities.
So, so that's, that's a question that I have.
I think you know, will they ever be able to communicate psychically with horses?
You know, will they ever be successful animal communicators?
Which I heartily believe in.
I've had wonderful experiences with animal communicators and.
Computers are now quantum systems.
And Quantum Theory offers models, and I, I wanna emphasize that
they're models, they're not proofs of how paranormal phenomena might
exist outside of space and time.
Because, you know, classical yeah, I, I won't get into a
technical discussion of all this.
Please do, but, okay.
So, so classical physics, that the Newtonian physics is based on the
idea that everything's predictable.
That the, the world functions like a machine.
If you know the initial conditions of a planet or a car or a ball,
then you can predict its behavior.
So, so, classical physics is deterministic in that way, and materialistic in that
it believes that everything is matter.
Quantum physics is not deterministic because due to certain principles
such as the the uncertainty principle, you can never know for sure the
initial conditions of a system.
So you can never predict where it's going to go.
And mathematically, at least, and functionally with subatomic
particles in experimental physics, time goes forward and backward.
There are quantum leaps between states with no,
Rupert Isaacson: interim process.
Yeah.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
No, no.
Pro, yeah, no intermediate states.
You don't know the electrons here and then it's there and you don't know
where it's been, and you only have probabilities of where things are.
So it's a very probabilistic
Rupert Isaacson: What is the uncertainty principle?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
The uncertainty principle says that you can determine with great
accuracy either the position or the momentum of a particle.
If you know a lot about the momentum, the position becomes
almost unknowable and vice versa.
So you can know one or the other, but not both.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Interesting.
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Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
So, so you cannot determine the initial conditions.
And in quantum mechanics, every, everything kind of exists outside of
space time, that especially Gus Swami's.
The thesis is that matter is not the primary substance.
Consciousness is.
Right.
And there's, there's a, a mystical, well, no, I, I wouldn't say mystical, but
there's a, a whole body of information called the Seth material where Seth,
who is a channeled entity that I believe has a high degree of accuracy from his
channeler says he kind of the same thing, that every, everything is conscious.
Everything is a consciousness unit.
Rupert Isaacson: There's a right and there's a growing body of physicists.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Yeah, yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: And computer people subscribing to this view, it seems.
That's what I was hoping we'd get to when you said philosophy's being turned
on its head because the political climate is something historical.
Those things ebb and flow, you know, what can you say?
But the f philosophical movements predict the future.
One could argue that Newton was not deterministic.
That, that there was a side of him that was very interested in determinism
and apples falling from trees.
And so he, but being a good polymath, you know, he was interested
in lots of other things too.
And it's often conveniently overlooked that the, there's a
vast body of his work on alchemy.
And of course, by the time, and some people would say he was
primarily an Al Al Alchemist.
I, I know certain scholars and historians who would say just based on
what he published, that he published more on that than he did on the other.
He was also deeply religious.
But he, so the esoteric and, and the scientific together were clearly no.
Mismatch for, for him.
And it's interesting that we now interpret with the kind of fundamentalism people
like him like it's, it's forgotten that, you know, all the people that
hate evolution, the, the Christian conservatives or, or forget that Darwin
was a very, very, very devout Christian.
You know, and you know, it's, it's very interesting what
people choose to, to dwell on.
That of course is political.
And of course with alchemy, by the time the chemical wedding, et cetera,
by, by the time Newton was writing about that sort of thing, it was
partly still looking for transation of led into gold and, and you know,
the philosopher stone and all that.
But it was, it had, it had already taken a leap in the decades before
that into a spiritual, psychological purification analogy that people like.
Newton, even as they fooled around with the experiments, trying to see if it
was possible to ub substantiate, were actually seemed primarily interested
in the philosophical side of it.
And went on to do determinism sort of in their spare time almost.
And and now the deterministic thing is, is what we remember them as.
But I think if he was sitting here in this room, he'd say, no, listen, you know,
I, I was interested in loads of things, you know, look, look at all that stuff
I published on all that woo woo stuff.
So I I I is it now though that we suddenly are able to somehow observe
and measure within the university peer review scientific context, this idea of
consciousness within machines and within micro states of matter, like neutrinos,
like things that we can't quite.
Grab, they're too small, but they seem to bend the laws or physics and exist between
them, or go from one state of being to another without, as you say, a sort of
in observable, interim, intermediate, think they disappear and disappear.
And that appears to be, they used to be a word for that, didn't there?
It used to be magic.
Mm-hmm.
And I guess there's, there's also this sort of old adage
that pseudoscience is just time.
That's my, there's the future coming into the room there and the and
you know, because everything is pseudoscience until someone comes
along and gets it accepted as science.
Right.
And every good scientist has been laughed at ridiculed as I'm being now.
And but.
I do think, do you not think that we have suddenly arrived at a point where
the determination purists, who would be like the scientific equivalent today
of the Spanish Inquisition in the past?
It's the new fundamentalism, isn't it?
Sciences is, as opposed to re religion are now finding their pers
shaken in the same way that the old church dudes were finding it, theirs
shaken around the time of Newton.
You know?
And Newton might say, well, it's the same old thing, you know, so
you have, you, you talk about this principle of uncertainty, right?
And then you've talked about states of matter that behave in, in ways
that are so unpredictable that and that they seem indistinguishable from.
Things that are indeterminate, like consciousness.
Mm-hmm.
Where are we going with all that?
How's this going to, how, how's this, what gonna, how's Stanford gonna
produce this tangibly in our, in our lives in the next 10, 20 years?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
I don't know.
There's certainly a lot written about consciousness now that
AI is being hyped so much.
Or not, not a lot.
There was an article I read just yesterday that I had high hopes for about whether,
you know, it asks that, the headline, that the title is, can Ai Ever Be Conscious?
And then you read the article and it's talking about experiments with.
People who have strokes or who are under anesthesia and they're looking at
consciousness as a function of the brain.
They're looking at magnetic resonance.
And they're looking at EEGs, and I'm like, no, you can't look at
consciousness using machines that way.
Rupert Isaacson: Well, that's the old approach, isn't it?
Saying that consciousness is a product of the mind rather than the mind
being a product of consciousness.
Yeah,
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
right.
There are two kinds of people in this world, the epiphenomenon, that say that
consciousness is an epiphenomenon or a product of the biochemical brain.
And people like Amit Sami, who are the consciousness primary people of
whom I'm one two, which is saying that consciousness is primary
and may even have created somehow through energetic manipulation.
All the things that we consider material.
Rupert Isaacson: Hmm.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
I I think that one, one really exciting development, which isn't all that recent,
was the Allen aspect an aspect Frenchman who basically is the father of quantum
entanglement, which is the phenomenon whereby two electrons that are once
together and then they're separated.
When you make a measurement on one electron, it changes the second one in
a way that's fa, where the, it's faster than light, and the speed of light
was the einsteinian limit on any kind of signaling or information transfer.
And so that limit has been violated and that's what I'm personally most excited
about because it would seem to explain.
Telepathy precognition you know, there were experiments.
The, one of the, the moonshots had an ES a a telepathy or a parent
A ESP experiment award, and it's
Rupert Isaacson: been shown.
What are the moonshots?
What's that?
The,
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
the, the space, space vehicles that went to the moon.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
They had, they had, as one of their experiments an ESP experiment that showed
that even as far away as the moon is, the ESP signal doesn't deteriorate the way,
say a magnetic field would deteriorate.
Rupert Isaacson: How do you measure the ESP signal?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Well, it's not a signal, it's just the phenomenon.
Can, can.
There were targets.
It's a, it's a a little bit complex to explain, but there are, there are
targets in, in the most simple form.
I'm in the spaceship.
I take a picture of a horse and I get to the moon and I look at the
picture and somebody on the earth is trying to see, see what I'm seeing.
And,
Rupert Isaacson: ah, you're talking about remote viewing?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Remote viewing, yeah.
Okay.
So just a little
Rupert Isaacson: aside for people who dunno what that is, right?
You heard of a little old organization called the CI or just mm-hmm.
Yeah.
The
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
CIA was involved Project
Rupert Isaacson: Gateway.
Right.
They, they put a lot of effort into this in the over, well probably still are but
only what we has been published Project Gateway where they were doing remote
viewing not only over large spaces of.
Space, but over time, and they seem to have been doing it quite successfully.
Of course.
Doing it for intelligence, that that's what you're talking about, right.
More or less, right?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Yeah.
I don't think the moon experiment was the CIA experiment.
'cause that person Russell Tar is right here, a couple of towns over
in Palo Alto, and that was done through the SRI, which was also
known as Stanford Research Institute.
But really, I don't think anything to do with Stanford.
But
Rupert Isaacson: how did they, how did they manage to remote view or,
or confirm, say whether they were remote viewing at the Stanford?
Well,
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
as I say, it's a, it's a little more complex because they, the
target is generated by a random number generator in a computer.
Mm-hmm.
And then there's a, a.
The, the, there's the, the target person, which is the person on the moon
and the viewer, which is the person on earth, and the viewer will draw what
she sees from the person on the moon.
And then that drawing is given to a separate panel of judges.
I'm just
Rupert Isaacson: wondering what the person on the moon is seeing, you know,
other than like, well, whatever the
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
target, whatever the, the and I, this is the, that's the the protocol
for the remote being experiments that Russell Targ did on earth.
I don't.
No, exactly what the protocol was for the ESP experiment
on the moon, but in general.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
The
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
remote viewing experiments, which is described, which are described
in a book called mind Reach and Mind Raise by target and put off
Russell Targe and Hal put off
Rupert Isaacson: Hal Poff.
Mm-hmm.
That's a great name.
Yeah.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Hog and put off.
Okay.
Yeah.
And Russell's still very, very active in in Parapsychology locally.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
So you, you are still involved in parapsychology, te te.
Tell us what your involvement is there.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
I'm not really anymore.
I'm not doing experiments or participating in experiments, but it's just kind
of having email discussions with my old buddies from the Parapsychology
research group and kind of tuning in.
But you
Rupert Isaacson: were part of the parapsychology research group at Stanford.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
You're this, this wasn't at Stanford.
This was an independent organization.
Okay.
In San Francisco, the parapsychology research group
had nothing to do with Stanford.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Okay.
So when, when you say you're not doing experiments anymore,
does that mean that you were
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
I participated in some experiments way back when, where they put me in
a Faraday cage and had me hold copper cylinders and things like that.
I did funny things like that.
Can you
Rupert Isaacson: tell us a little bit more, that sounds ing No, I don't
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
remember.
They, they, for one thing, they didn't tell me what I was doing at the time,
but, but one thing that's interesting, a Faraday cage is a wire construct that
filters out all electromagnetic signals.
So.
Whatever happens in a, in a Faraday cage and gets transmitted to the
outside world, is assumed not to be based on electromagnetic transmission.
And 'cause for a long time people thought ESP was a, an electromagnetic phenomenon.
Okay.
But the experiments in the Faraday cages proved that that wasn't so
that ESP happened from here to the moon and within Faraday cages.
So, so when the
Rupert Isaacson: so is ESP, in fact quantum entanglement
just on a human level?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
I don't know.
I mean, it could be, that's what exciting to me about the theories.
Right now, quantum entanglement has only been demonstrated in a laboratory for.
Subatomic particles, macro systems have not been shown to be quantum entangled.
So even though we feel quantum entangled with our spouses and
our horses and our cats, there's, there's no way to prove that.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
But, but if, if microparticles have been shown Measured, yeah.
We of course are composed of microparticles.
Right, right.
A macro system is, many tiny things come together to make a big thing.
So there must be bits of us that are entangling here and there.
No,
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
well, it could be, I mean, a lot of parapsychologists who, who I think are
sort of materialistic in nature and, and epiphenomenal is it's say that the,
that the quantum reactions happen in the microtubules of our brain cells.
Right.
Rupert Isaacson: This is what I was hoping you were gonna get to
these, these recent studies that were published last year and Yeah.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
The
Rupert Isaacson: work of, of Penrose, you know, 40 years ago, right here.
Yeah.
What, so tell us about this.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
I haven't studied it too much because on the surface it, it doesn't, I'm
not really interested in the material basis for paranormal phenomena.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
I don't, I don't see that empirically, it improves what we do because the idea
with all this is to get better at it.
Anybody can do it.
Anybody can do animal communication up to a point, just like anybody
can, you know, walk a mile.
But not everybody's going to win the Boston Marathon.
Anybody can, can learn to do animal communication and other, other
forms of paranormal activities.
It's something that we have in us.
It's, it's our, it's our birthright
Rupert Isaacson: right Now.
Some people would say, you know, it's very interesting, this one that, that
was born of indigenous communities especially working with psychotropic
plants that put you into an alter set of consciousness that allow you to have.
These trans dimensional relationships with the consciousness of
animals and plants and so on.
What's interesting for me is I, all my experiences with indigenous
people talking to animals and plants, were in the Kalahari
where no psychotropic stuff grows.
It's just not there.
So there is no ayahuasca, there is no magic mushroom, there is
no peyote, there is no fly arick.
It is not there.
There's no DMT.
So it's very interesting that these cultures without any drug also very,
very effectively seem to be able to figure out things like if you take this
particular lava of this particular form of beetle, when it's living under this
particular form of wild coffee tree.
And you heat it so that it's mucus melts into the shaft of your arrow.
Anything that you hit with that arrow will die, including a
giraffe, including your friend.
If you accidentally you know him, or if you put, you know,
if you absent accidentally rub your eye, you'll go blind.
But if you hit that animal with that poison, all you have to do to
neutralize the poison is cook the meat.
How now you couldn't get to there by a process of trial and error physically,
because everybody who failed it would die.
Like, and in those old, you know, people think, oh, there, you know, millions
and millions of people that, you know, they could have gone, no, there weren't,
you know, you're talking about places with handfuls of people by our standards
where if they were to engage in that sort of trial and error stuff with highly
toxic substances, they, not enough of them would live to tell the tale that,
that, you know, so it just, you know, so clearly there were other processes
going on and you know, of course I, like anyone who spent any time in
these parts of the world have seen many things where you just have to say, I'm
comfortable saying, I truly don't know how that happened, but I did see it.
Right.
Yeah.
Even away from the prosaic stuff, like just, you know,
punting technology like that.
Shapeshifting and all of these things that actually,
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
yeah, shapeshifting,
Rupert Isaacson: you know, one, I've been lucky enough to kind of be exposed to it.
And you, you, you begin to see why people do it and how they do it and
how they, but you, you know, they, they, they couldn't have come to these
conclusions through experimentally.
No, no.
There had to be somewhere bypassing that process.
And that's my question about quantum entanglement.
When you, when you look it up on Google, you can't find anything about alright,
then, you know, how'd you, how'd you, you know, entangle a, an electron then, you
know, or you know, if I'm having a, in the pub, you know, I've got is an electron
look, I've got an electron, there it is.
You've got an electron, let's entangle them in it.
And of course you can't, you know, and of course there's trillions of
electrons buzzing about in you and in me.
Why are they not all entangled?
How do we entangle one or two and not the trillion?
Others like,
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
well, there's your Nobel Prize, Rupert.
Rupert Isaacson: Oh yeah.
It'll be, it'll be me that proves that.
Right.
But I mean, so are there insights into that?
Like when, when they observe the quantum entanglement, did
they see how they got entangled?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
No.
NN no.
I mean, so far it's, like I say, it's just subatomic particles
and, and it's a big mystery.
But did
Rupert Isaacson: they see, was there any mechanical process
whereby they got entangle?
Did they trip over each other?
Did they bash into each other in a particular way?
What did they do?
The
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
inner workings are not known.
They, it, they just, it's been,
Rupert Isaacson: they just observed it permit
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
experimentally, which was a huge, huge discovery.
Alan aspect did win the Nobel Prize for, for quantum entanglement.
Yeah.
But no, we don't know how it happens.
It, we, we believe, or we.
I'm, I'm not a physicist, but they believe it happens outside of space time.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm.
That,
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
you know, you violated the einsteinian limit of the speed of light.
And so it's gotta be outside of space time.
It's some kind of geometric phenomenon.
See, geometric structure.
Why is it geometric
Rupert Isaacson: if it's violating
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
space time?
Rupert Isaacson: We think that, well that Yeah, that's true.
Becomes geometric
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
true.
Well I think there are geometries that don't involve space and time.
I, I, I don't know a better word.
'cause geometry implies dimensionality space time.
Right.
So something outside of space time.
And I think there are probably consciousnesses in the
universe that aren't melded.
That aren't seated in, in bodies and brains that function
like this all the time.
Yep.
And we're just, you know, think of where this is gonna
be a thousand years from now.
We're just at the very dawn of understanding that this happens,
but we know that it happens because of the aspect experiment.
Rupert Isaacson: So that answered the question that I was asking earlier,
which is where do you think the shifts in scientific philosophy are going?
And you know, you having had a bit of a front row seat of, of that in
Northern California over these years.
I think you just answered that, which is that, as you say, we're at
the dawn of understanding that the system that we live in is at once much
more complex and on another level.
Much simpler Yeah.
Than we ever could have imagined in that, when I say simpler, that we
can access these states and perhaps.
We'll realize that we always have been, and that many aspects of day-to-day
life actually are those, but that perhaps we could, rather than stumbling
over them inadvertently or not so much intentionally, we could more and more
make that a focus of attention and then do things which appear magical.
Now that, of course, you know, it is hilarious because, you know, any
self-respecting Native American or Kalahari healer would say, well, I
do that every or every day, mate.
Yeah, yeah.
As have my ancestors for the, but you lot us put all those people to the
stake for, you know, a thousand years.
And so you regard it as this huge deal.
But I think that what the difference is between that indigenous way of
doing it on a very effective way and training people in a spiritual
technology that accesses that c, marrying that with the deterministic.
M mechanically physical sciences, I think makes it accessible to the modern mind
and computing is the way that I think people can accept it best because we
are used to com computers doing magic.
I mean, if, if you, you and I sitting here on this zoom looking at each other, you
know, if that had been presented, that would've been something we would've seen
in like a Star Wars movie in 1977, right?
Yeah.
They'd have done something like that and we've gone, woo, you know, maybe
we'll be there in a thousand years.
I don't think we'd have quite thought we'd be here so casually in 40.
Right.
But it it is magical, isn't it?
I mean, I, we're effectively entangled here, aren't we?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Well, right, and quantum entanglement has moral implications too, because if
we understand that everybody is part of one consciousness outside of space
and time, you can't hate somebody.
You can't hate other people and kill other people.
Rupert Isaacson: Hmm.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Make war on other people.
It's, well, perhaps you still can, because you can just blind yourself.
Yeah.
The physics, sorry.
Rupert Isaacson: Perhaps you still can, because you can just blind yourself to it.
I mean,
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
well, that's what, yeah, it that, that, that part might take a thousand years
too, because, you know, all our, all our sci-fi movies like Star Wars and
Star Trek, they're still about evil forces all those years, conquest.
But, you know, quantum physics is the physics of love and the entanglement
as a philosophy is about that.
It's about connection.
Rupert Isaacson: Interesting that you say that because any, any healer
I've ever spoken to, whether it's been in the Kalahari where I know
them best, or other places where I've participated in those sorts of.
Things like little bits in the Australian rainforest, little bits on
the Navajo reservation, little bits in certain other areas of the world.
Whenever I've asked them the healer, you know, well, what is this force
that you're using this energy?
It's back to your Qigong thing, whether it's they say, oh, it's cheap, or
you know, the life force or whatever.
Yeah.
Or it's electricity, or it's what the bushman called norm, which is one of the
norm, which is one of those untranslatable words, but it it somewhere between life
force energy and wisdom and strength.
It sort of encompasses all those things.
But again, they all, they also, it's a sexual energy that lives at the
base of the spine and you can do things with it when you, when you ask
them, well, okay then what is norm?
What is key?
What is Kundalini?
You always get the same answer, which is.
What I've always gotten is, oh, well, Rupert, that's quite simple.
It's just love.
It's just that with a, with a certain training process,
you can learn to direct it.
Yeah.
So is is, is the quantum mechanics and quantum stuff like that
merely our post agricultural, post indigenous life culture.
Just coming back to the same conclusion that we actually had 300,000 years
ago and still did, which is that we can do things quite effectively in
dimensions outside of time and space as well as dimensions inside time and
space, and that these things are not so, you know, are not contradictory.
And it's interesting isn't it, that those early cultures who, which
are still around, don't make war as you say that they, they don't hate.
They don't.
And they're totally human.
They're not saints.
They just don't do that stuff.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Yeah.
We can hope, you know, we were all indigenous at one point
and then we kinda lost it.
But you know, there were, well, all children
Rupert Isaacson: are planet Earth, so we are still indigenous, even if we've
displaced others and being displaced.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
And the mystical traditions of our, particularly our three most common
religions, you know, Christian mystical Christianity, Sufism and
Kabbalah within, somewhat within the structure of traditional
religions, have that, that spiritual yearning toward love and connection.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
And, and are open to mystical experiences that we would call paranormal.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
It does, and it does seem that that's always nature's direction that.
Hmm.
No matter how much you mess it up, it will go back to harmony.
If you cut your skin, it will heal.
You can abuse your liver massively.
I know I have in the past, and it will still reconstitute itself.
You know, the, the it nature wants to go.
It seems always in that direction of, for want of a better word, love.
I mean, your body loves you, right.
Your immune system loves you.
It, it behaves in a loving way.
It doesn't, that's why an autoimmune disease is such a, an anomaly when there's
a disruption like that because, well, even
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
that, it's trying to protect you with love.
Indeed.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Inflammation is just a protection maker in guided, but
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
that's, you know, that's a condition of consciousness too.
Rupert Isaacson: Absolutely.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
But you know, you think of the, the trees that need forest fires to open up
their cones and regenerate the forest.
Mm.
Nature healing.
Rupert Isaacson: Absolutely.
So what's next for you?
You've got a nice equine therapy practice going there at or therapeutic
practice there going at Stanford.
And I'm gonna have you on the other podcast, so don't worry listeners,
don't stop jumping up and down.
We are going to ask her in much more detail about that over on Equine Assisted
World, and we'll do that in a few weeks.
So we will do that interview.
But where are you going now with your scientific life and your sort of
general, what, what's next for you?
You've led such an interesting self-determined climate so far.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
The, well, a big part of my joy is teaching college students
everything we've talked about.
Medical Tai Chi starts next month and I just love.
Love teaching the college students about, you know, in the context
Stanford University teaching.
You know, on one hand we, sorry.
Rupert Isaacson: I love that you're at Stanford University teaching
medical Tai Chi that just makes it feel like the hippies won.
And I I love that.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Yeah.
Well I used to be a hippie card carrying, yeah,
Rupert Isaacson: I still am mate.
Still am card carrying, flag waving.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Yeah.
Yeah, I see you get the ponytail.
Rupert Isaacson: Proud to be, yeah.
Well there's lots of people who aren't hip ponytails, but Yeah.
Yeah, so,
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
so what I've beco over the years you know, I'll be 76 in two weeks
I've become way more open about who I am and what I believe.
Rupert Isaacson: Hmm.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
So, you know, it's nice that the first half hour of medical tai chi is hardcore
science and scientific methodology and scientific reasoning and scientific logic.
'cause then I get to talk about how Tai Chi is.
Basically quantum somatics, I've come to call it.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
It's how that, when we cultivate those energies, then we relate to the cosmos,
we see our place in the universe, and I've become, I've refined how I teach that
and how open I am about expressing that.
So that's always a work in progress, is how to teach that, how to express it,
how to make it more real and more fun.
Rupert Isaacson: I'm not at Stanford, but can I come and attend that course?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Oh, please.
Yeah.
Well, you should.
You should come and do equanimity and do our meditation ride bareback.
I would love
Rupert Isaacson: to.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Well,
Rupert Isaacson: you know, we have a really, really good
horse boy practice very close to you there in in Half Moon Bay
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
with Joel.
Yes.
Yeah,
Rupert Isaacson: Joel, the, the Square Peg Foundation.
And we were just together in Ireland a couple of days ago for our big
conference that we have there.
So she's doing amazing work.
She's, you know, mental health provider now for San Mateo
County, which is Silicon Valley.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I've got lots of reasons to go.
So let's, let's do that.
I'd love to come attend and see it in more detail.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
That'll be in the spring.
Next class is in the spring, okay.
Okay.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Yeah.
Super.
Alright, well I look forward to more.
And in the meantime you've got books.
So if people want to read a little bit about your work and what you do, can you
tell people where the books are, what they're about and how they find them?
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
So they're all on Amazon.
The latest one is actually on Etsy as a downloadable PDF, the.
Book that I wrote for general people who aren't necessarily horse people
and aren't necessarily meditation people is just called equanimity,
stress reduction and emotional self-regulation in the company of Horses.
That's a paperback.
And it's also an ebook on Amazon and Etsy.
Just tell us the title again
Rupert Isaacson: a bit more slowly in case people have got their pens out.
Oh,
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
equanimity.
E-Q-U-I-N, een.
Imit, I-M-I-T-Y.
So you're
Rupert Isaacson: playing with the word e equine E playing with
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
equanimity, which is EQUA.
Yeah.
N-I-M-I-T-Y.
Okay.
And subtitle.
So that's, that's the general Stress Reduction and Emotional
Self-Regulation in the Company of Horses.
Okay.
And that's for the general readership.
And there's a manual to go with that called The Manual of
Somatic Horsemanship, which is an instructor's guide to equanimity.
And that's on, I had written a book called The Manual of Medicine and
Horsemanship, which teaches other people to replicate our Stanford program.
Mm-hmm.
And I was very gratified that about 20 other programs came out of that
all around the US and, and actually one in Belgium and Costa Rica.
So I'm hoping the same thing will happen with the Equanimity manual.
Rupert Isaacson: Super.
Well, we have our, you know, for those listeners who are
listening, this is August, 2025.
Next year, about the same time, September 26th, we'll be doing our
next neuroscience conference at, at Eastern Virginia Medical School.
So I think you need to come and be a speaker.
Be Beverly.
I think that'd be great.
Dr. Beverley Kane MD:
Yeah.
Yeah, that would be West Virginia was one of the places that did
medicine and horsemanship too, so.
Ah, there you go.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Alright.
Well, I think I, I think this is to be continued yeah.
Many threads to pick up, and we will go into your equanimity program in more
detail over there on the next podcast, but I, I'm so glad we got to look at what
has formed this and how you've gone from
hitchhiking with 35 bucks in your pocket to protest the Vietnam War,
to becoming a, a doctor, to becoming a professor, to becoming a computer
scientist, to becoming a corporate person there in Silicon Valley to eventually
the con the physics of consciousness.
I, I love it.
With horses thrown in the mix.
It's, I think it's fair to say you've, you are still living a
very, very self-actualized life and many of us are benefiting from it.
So thank you so much for coming on the show and I look forward to the next one.
Same.
Thank you, Rubert.
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