On June 2, 2026, Marina Rubina and incumbent David Cohen secured victory in the Democratic primary for two open seats on the council in Princeton. While local politics in the municipality shift toward new leadership, the town's namesake university is getting a very different kind of spotlight on the airwaves. On The Joe Rogan Experience, host Joe Rogan and guest Dean Radin revisited the Ivy League school's weirder academic history, diving into the controversial parapsychology research once conducted within municipal borders.
The discussion centered on Dean Radin's invitation to join the famous Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory. Radin explained that success in these fringe experiments required a psychological trait where "you're simply open to experience," noting that closed-minded people block the phenomena. Joe Rogan pressed for specifics on how this anomalous research actually got off the ground, asking, "So when you were at Princeton, what, what specifically did-- How did you start it? Like, what, what specifically were you working on initially?"
But the academic prestige of Princeton did not keep Dean Radin there forever; he ultimately left the university's multidisciplinary teams due to collaborative frustrations. Describing the micro-effects of mind-machine intention tasks they developed, Radin noted that "some people get really good on making it go high, but they can't make it go low" during the sessions, indicating that individual minds left distinct signatures on the machines.
As Princeton welcomes its newly elected council members, its dual reputation as an elite civic hub and a former hotbed for fringe science ensures it remains a point of fascination for both politicians and podcasters alike.