Speaker 1: Hey guys, it's Josh and for this week's select, I've
Speaker 1: chosen our twenty fifteen episode on ESP. It's a really
Speaker 1: good one. We talk about all sorts of things about ESP,
Speaker 1: including the science, and I know what you're thinking. You're
Speaker 1: thinking science and ESP. Yes, indeed, and that's one of
Speaker 1: the things that makes this episode so cool. So I
Speaker 1: hope you will open your mind, tune in, turn on,
Speaker 1: drop out, keep on trucking, and enjoy this episode.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's
Speaker 1: Charles w Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's over there. I didn't
Speaker 1: even have to look why, I just knew.
Speaker 2: Yes, and dudes and dudets. We are in our new studio.
Speaker 1: Yeah, can you tell its own different.
Speaker 2: It's the very first one and it's tiny.
Speaker 1: Wait what do you mean it's the very first one.
Speaker 2: Very very first podcast that we've recorded in here.
Speaker 1: Oh gotcha?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I was gonna say. I said tiny, but
Speaker 2: it's not tiny. It's cozy, but it is all all ours, Yeah,
Speaker 2: al ours.
Speaker 1: Everybody else at House Stuff Works doesn't really know that yet,
Speaker 1: but they will.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Because when we actually have butt detection and when
Speaker 2: someone sits down in these seats that aren't us to
Speaker 2: get a shock.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And plus an alarm goes off at our desks.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what's it called dmr TM? I how are you, sir?
Speaker 1: I'm pretty good.
Speaker 2: I feel like this is fancy. This is our first
Speaker 2: real like studio. That's not true.
Speaker 1: No, I'm trying to remember. The last one was.
Speaker 2: No, but it's not a utility closet. It's not a
Speaker 2: lactation room. It's not Yeah, it's not a murder room.
Speaker 1: It's not like an office with like desk for like
Speaker 1: office furniture. Yeah, it's a it's a studio that was
Speaker 1: built out for the specific purpose of recording podcasts.
Speaker 2: Yep. All we have to do is put up our
Speaker 2: Aaron Cooper originals. The artwork, got a couple of those
Speaker 2: waiting together, and we got to work on the lighting
Speaker 2: in here a little bit.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Jerry's said she's gonna hang some china balls for us. Yeah.
Speaker 1: She keeps pushing the china balls.
Speaker 2: So anyway, enough about that. We just wanted to say
Speaker 2: we're super excited to be in our new office, in
Speaker 2: our new studio.
Speaker 1: It does feel good. Yeah, kudos for that intro. I'm
Speaker 1: not going to say that. I knew you were going
Speaker 1: to say that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was going to say that too.
Speaker 1: I knew that you were thinking of saying that, Chuck.
Speaker 2: Yes, ESP.
Speaker 1: Do you believe in ESP?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 1: No, not at all. Do you what do you think
Speaker 1: it is? Because surely, I mean, just about anyone could
Speaker 1: agree that humans have some sort of ability somehow to
Speaker 1: make good guesses or to predict the future, or whatever
Speaker 1: you want to call it. Do you agree or do
Speaker 1: you think it's strictly just us selectively paying attention to
Speaker 1: random instances over others.
Speaker 2: I think it's that, and as we'll talk about, I
Speaker 2: think it's the just the nature of coincidence is going
Speaker 2: to happen because so many things happen every day that
Speaker 2: something is bound to seem like something you dreamed about
Speaker 2: the night before at some point in your life.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But the other millions of dreams you have that, don't
Speaker 2: I think those are the ones that are the the
Speaker 2: tell you know? Do you?
Speaker 1: I don't know? Like I want to. I spent so
Speaker 1: many years of my life believing in stuff like that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and wanting to go to Duke University to study at
Speaker 1: their parapsychology department. Did you really believe? Yeah, but you know,
Speaker 1: believing in ghosts and all this and just that's how
Speaker 1: I spent my childhood just reading about stuff like that.
Speaker 2: Very so Ghostbusters really did a number on you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. When that came along, I was like
Speaker 1: this for me, Yeah, but as an adult, it's not
Speaker 1: so much that I believe in ESP. It's more that
Speaker 1: I I refuse to just utterly disbelieve in the possibility
Speaker 1: of it. Sure, okay, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I got you there, because we don't know everything
Speaker 2: about everything yet, right, but uh yeah, I'm in the
Speaker 2: I'm the other camp. And I'm not even gonna say
Speaker 2: the sceptic camp because those people just plug me.
Speaker 1: Has a bad name, some due to some bad apples.
Speaker 1: Not all skeptics, No, but there are some that are
Speaker 1: horses asses. Can we say that?
Speaker 2: I don't know. We'll find out, all right, Well, let's
Speaker 2: talk about And I thought this was interesting because I
Speaker 2: never knew that ESP is just a big collective term
Speaker 2: for all manner of par paranormal phenomena. You could also
Speaker 2: call PSI.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so a dude named jb Ryan who will
Speaker 1: talk about later.
Speaker 2: He coined ESP the Granddaddy.
Speaker 1: And then in the forties another guy coined the term
Speaker 1: PSI and PSI is a Greek letter and it's equated
Speaker 1: with psyche or the soul ps i. And the reason
Speaker 1: that the guy chose PI is because he felt ESP
Speaker 1: suggested it was something supernatural. Yeah, sure, and SI he
Speaker 1: felt suggested that this is a normal part of humanity.
Speaker 1: We just don't understand it.
Speaker 2: It sounds like science, right. But there are several categories
Speaker 2: of ESP, and this is the one that I never
Speaker 2: knew the actual definitions for these. I sort of just
Speaker 2: threw them all in a bag together. You have telepathy,
Speaker 2: and that's when you can you know, you're over there
Speaker 2: reading my thoughts. Yes, like Chuck is really not happy
Speaker 2: to be in the new studio.
Speaker 1: That's not true.
Speaker 2: He'd rather be at home on the couch.
Speaker 1: I'm reading your thoughts right now, and I know that
Speaker 1: you like this place.
Speaker 2: Okay, Well, you're a telep right. Clairvoyance, which is the
Speaker 2: ability to see events or things objects happening somewhere else
Speaker 2: at the same time. So are you doing are you clairvoyant?
Speaker 1: I am. I'm seeing your couch right now and I'm
Speaker 1: seeing it's not that comfy. Yeah, so you're not missing
Speaker 1: that much at the moment.
Speaker 2: I know somewhere Jonathan Strickland is waxing his head, bald head.
Speaker 1: That's just a logical assumption.
Speaker 2: Okay. Then we have our pre cogs precognition, that's when
Speaker 2: you see into the future, retrocogs retro cognition. You can
Speaker 2: see into the distant past.
Speaker 1: That's there's another that's a widely accepted definition of retrocognition. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like seeing you know, cave like TikTok running around with
Speaker 1: the dinosaurs like you do, which I guess never would
Speaker 1: have happened. Yeah, But there's another term for retrocognition, whereas
Speaker 1: something in the future affects something in the past. So
Speaker 1: a decision you make in the future, yeah, affects your past.
Speaker 1: And an example given is that you have a dream
Speaker 1: about a dinosaur. Now, let's say a spotted dog, okay,
Speaker 1: and then the first thing the next morning, you go
Speaker 1: outside to water your lawn and this same spotted dog
Speaker 1: or a similar spotted dog walks by. The idea isn't
Speaker 1: that that was very coincidental or that you had esp
Speaker 1: in your dreams, Yeah, but that you seeing that dog
Speaker 1: in the morning affected your dream the night before. Oh okay,
Speaker 1: so that's another definition that's emerging for retrocognition. That's getting
Speaker 1: a lot of traction because of the stuff we're finding
Speaker 1: on the quantum scale, just weirdness like that.
Speaker 2: All right. Then you have your mediumship and that's miss
Speaker 2: Cleo who can channel dead spirits.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I forgot about her.
Speaker 2: And then you heard.
Speaker 1: How much money that woman grossed in the nineties.
Speaker 2: She made a lot of dough, I hope. So yeah, I.
Speaker 1: Mean she was working hard. She had a finite window
Speaker 1: of opportunity, and she worked that whole time. She didn't
Speaker 1: like buy a sailboat and sail around the world after
Speaker 1: like first million. You know, like she worked.
Speaker 2: So you're not in the camp of like she's taking
Speaker 2: people's money and taking advantage of people.
Speaker 1: I see that argument, sure, for sure. I also see
Speaker 1: like if people want to spend their money on that
Speaker 1: and they get something out of it, knock yourself out.
Speaker 2: All right. And then you have a psychometry, which is
Speaker 2: the ability to read info about a person place by
Speaker 2: touching the person no object. And that's what I like
Speaker 2: to call the dead zone. Right, Christopher Walkin, he would
Speaker 2: place his hands on you and he would see something.
Speaker 1: Man. I think we talked about it recently about how
Speaker 1: that movie holds up. Still. Yeah, that is such a
Speaker 1: good movie.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it really is good, Chris Walkin.
Speaker 1: There's another one, Chuck called telekinesis, which is like Uri
Speaker 1: Geller stroking a spoon in it bending right, like being
Speaker 1: able to manipulate matter just using a light touch of
Speaker 1: your mind.
Speaker 2: But there is no spoon. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Wasn't that from Matrix?
Speaker 2: All right? So basically, like you said, jb Ryan is
Speaker 2: the granddaddy of all this, and he actually started studying.
Speaker 2: I mean, he was a legitimate scientist. He wasn't some quack.
Speaker 2: And this was in the nineteen thirties where he started
Speaker 2: at Duke University studying para parapsychology basically.
Speaker 1: And he wasn't the first. He was one of the
Speaker 1: first laboratory experimenters in academia to really study SAI. Right
Speaker 1: before him, probably about forty or so years before him,
Speaker 1: William James and some of his pals at the Society
Speaker 1: for Psychical Research really laid the groundwork for applying the
Speaker 1: scientific method to the study of paranormal phenomenonah, and they
Speaker 1: did two things. They outed frauds, like fraudulent mediums, like
Speaker 1: very famously Madame Bleovartsky. But then they also investigated ones
Speaker 1: like the reach them typically with like an open mind. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and if they found somebody that they just couldn't explain,
Speaker 1: they would they studied them. So they were they were
Speaker 1: studying each one with an open mind. And the ones
Speaker 1: they figured out were frauds they outed as frauds. The
Speaker 1: ones they figured out it couldn't quite explain. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: sought to investigate scientifically rather than just saying, oh, they're
Speaker 1: frauds somehow, right, So that was the groundwork of the
Speaker 1: study of cy.
Speaker 2: What was Madame Blevartsky Steele of the Cony?
Speaker 1: She was she actually she was almost a cult leader,
Speaker 1: you could argue she was. She she created Oh man,
Speaker 1: it's called like theodism, I think, huh, which is it was?
Speaker 1: It was almost a cult. It was a huge movement
Speaker 1: in the nineteenth century where like you go to like
Speaker 1: a seance and there was a medium there and they
Speaker 1: would channel like the spirits of the dead relatives of
Speaker 1: people who were there, holding hands in the circle and
Speaker 1: stuff like that. And she gained a lot of power
Speaker 1: and wealth and prestige until she was outed as a fraud.
Speaker 1: And I don't remember the the it's theosophy, that's what
Speaker 1: it is. Theoism. Theoism has to do with theo Huxtable.
Speaker 2: Did you see The Source Family, by the way, that documentary. No,
Speaker 2: I haven't about the La cult in the seventies.
Speaker 1: I saw the icon on Netflix and never clicked as a.
Speaker 2: Good it's really good and it's it's awesome. Actually, I
Speaker 2: recommend everyone see. It's one of those where they interview
Speaker 2: a lot of them today and they weren't like, you know,
Speaker 2: they didn't commit suicide like everyone was like, it was
Speaker 2: pretty great.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: They're all fine. They're all just a bunch of hippies.
Speaker 2: Still they were out in La Yeah, yeah, right in Hollywood.
Speaker 1: There was one in There was a documentary I saw
Speaker 1: about a cult in Miami and they were like super
Speaker 1: fundamentalist Christian but they also were the basis of their
Speaker 1: religion was formed on pot too.
Speaker 2: Well, that's what the Source Family was.
Speaker 1: I wonder if they were related.
Speaker 2: Well, it was the seventies. Yeah, there were a lot
Speaker 2: of pot cults, I bet.
Speaker 1: But did they turn into like huge pot dealers.
Speaker 2: No, I don't think so this cult did. They had
Speaker 2: a band though, and.
Speaker 1: The called the Source M.
Speaker 2: You know, I can't remember the name of the band,
Speaker 2: but it's pretty interesting.
Speaker 1: To Manhattan Transfer.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was. It's a really good documentary that it's
Speaker 2: just funny to see how these people now they're like,
Speaker 2: it was awesome. Yeah, I had a lot of sex
Speaker 2: and smoked a lot of weed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's kind of what got hurt too. They these
Speaker 1: guys didn't seem to have a lot of sex though.
Speaker 1: They were like real like compartmentalized gender wise, like male
Speaker 1: dominance and all that. But they just smoked a ton
Speaker 1: of pot all the time, including their little kids. Oh well,
Speaker 1: that's not good, like like four year old smoking.
Speaker 2: Oh that's terrible.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was in the documentary. It's worse seeing I
Speaker 1: don't remember what you.
Speaker 2: Had me up. You lost me there.
Speaker 1: I lost everybody there in that documentary.
Speaker 2: Yeah. All right, So back to this ESP thing. Jb
Speaker 2: Ryan Yeah, jb Ryan, Well, basically, there's a there's a
Speaker 2: lot of different outlooks on what ESP might be. Some
Speaker 2: people think that everyone's got it, but some people it
Speaker 2: just pops up every now and then, like I might
Speaker 2: have a dream that comes true or whatever. Other people
Speaker 2: think that only certain people have it, they have the
Speaker 2: gift as they say, uh, and that they have to
Speaker 2: be in this special like you know, mental state to
Speaker 2: access it the shinn, yeah, the shinning. And then other
Speaker 2: folks say that everyone has that potential, but some people
Speaker 2: are just like in tune with it, and some people aren't.
Speaker 1: Right, and you fall into none of those three camp Yes,
Speaker 1: So we'll talk a little more about some ideas of
Speaker 1: what ESP is right after this. So, Chuck, you said
Speaker 1: that basically how people see ESP is either everyone has it,
Speaker 1: some people have it, or no one has it. Basically,
Speaker 1: whether you're a skeptic or a believer. If you are
Speaker 1: a believer in ESP and somebody comes to you and says, okay,
Speaker 1: explain ESP, like what is it, there's actually a couple
Speaker 1: of very common suggestions or proposals.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: One made sense for a while before we knew a
Speaker 1: little more about the brain, and that was that ESP
Speaker 1: was some form or fashion of the electromagnetic spectrum that
Speaker 1: we were receiving information from outside of our usual senses.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And like you said, it fell out of favor
Speaker 2: because basically it didn't explain anything about how it moves
Speaker 2: through time or there. It didn't pick up on some
Speaker 2: special part of your brain that receives this message.
Speaker 1: And there was a did you see that study I
Speaker 1: sent you? That was I think from twenty ten where
Speaker 1: they put people in an MRI and then showed them
Speaker 1: different pictures or whatever, and they did they showed like,
Speaker 1: I put you in the Wonder machine and now I'm
Speaker 1: showing you a picture of the flower and that's it.
Speaker 2: Okay, it's lovely, except it sounds like a German rave.
Speaker 1: Okay, a little bit. But that would be the non
Speaker 1: ESP stimuli the control group to test ESP and to
Speaker 1: see if the brain reacted differently, and then to see
Speaker 1: if there was a part of the brain that's picking
Speaker 1: up on ESP, I would show you the flower, and
Speaker 1: then in the other room, I would also show Emily
Speaker 1: that flower, I think about it and send you the
Speaker 1: thought of that flower. So you're getting ESP stimuli and
Speaker 1: then non ESP stimuli. And from the MRI they showed
Speaker 1: that the brain didn't react differently.
Speaker 2: Gotcha.
Speaker 1: So it suggests that there isn't a sensory organ or
Speaker 1: region of the brain that's responsible for picking up ESP,
Speaker 1: which doesn't debunk the possibility of ESP. It just undermines
Speaker 1: the idea that there's a region of our brain that
Speaker 1: would be responsible for picking that up.
Speaker 2: Plus, I Emily's over there, My first guess is gonna
Speaker 2: be dog every time, and it's flower.
Speaker 1: And then well, it wasn't about guessing. It was just
Speaker 1: to see, like showing you the ESP version, right, and
Speaker 1: then the non ESP version of the same thing. So
Speaker 1: you weren't guessing, do you understand?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I get it. No, I would have guessed dog
Speaker 2: or wine.
Speaker 1: There wasn't guessing, That's what I guessed.
Speaker 2: Emily thinks she has a gift a little bit, so
Speaker 2: she would have been disappointed. She's got the shin Yeah,
Speaker 2: a little, she thinks. Yeah, But I think she is
Speaker 2: just super observant and intuitive.
Speaker 1: But that's definitely one explanation for it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which we'll get to of course. So these days
Speaker 2: there are other theories, one of which is that it's
Speaker 2: called spillover, that there's basically another dimension that that doesn't
Speaker 2: you know, have our laws here and our dimension, and
Speaker 2: that sometimes stuff just sort of spills over from that
Speaker 2: and we see the future or the past.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And if you're a skeptic, you probably just pull
Speaker 1: the decent size clump of your hair out of the
Speaker 1: side of your head at that point.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because this is something you can't prove obviously, it's
Speaker 2: like completely and of course they'll say it exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I think I got the impression from this
Speaker 1: article that they were making that point, like science is
Speaker 1: just chasing its tail and trying to explain ESP because
Speaker 1: it's not currently capable and science goes doesn't work like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, at least with the electromagnetic spectrum explanation, it
Speaker 1: was pointing to something that we already know exists, right,
Speaker 1: It's just that there's no way to show that we
Speaker 1: would be getting how we would be getting information from it,
Speaker 1: because that electromagnetic explanation, Yeah, it basically says if you
Speaker 1: compare it to other findings from ESP, it makes even
Speaker 1: less sense. Right, Because with ESP, one of the hallmarks
Speaker 1: of it is that no matter whether you're out there
Speaker 1: outside of the studio thinking about wine or a dog
Speaker 1: or something and I'm picking up on it, or if
Speaker 1: you're in China and I'm here and we're doing the
Speaker 1: same thing, the signal doesn't weaken at all.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And that just flies in the face of all
Speaker 2: we know about electromagnetic.
Speaker 1: Rights exactly, no good, right, So there's a lot of
Speaker 1: things wrong with the proposals of what ESP is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but you know, the reason why still people still
Speaker 2: believe in this stuff is because of either hearing a
Speaker 2: story about their friend who said, you know, listen to
Speaker 2: this crazy thing happened, or experiencing it themselves in some
Speaker 2: way or another, having a dream that something similar happened,
Speaker 2: and all of a sudden you're like, I might at
Speaker 2: the gift exactly where it popped up in me, you know,
Speaker 2: briefly at least.
Speaker 1: And there's a I mean, there's a lot of evidence
Speaker 1: of a strange and unusual occurrences, sure that support the
Speaker 1: idea of ESP.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: This article gives a really good one about an eighteen
Speaker 1: ninety eight book called Futility.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was.
Speaker 1: Written by a guy named Morgan Robertson right, And in
Speaker 1: it the guy details this book or this boat called.
Speaker 2: The titan Ship.
Speaker 1: Yeah ship, the boat a big old boat, yeah, which
Speaker 1: is sailing across the Atlantic and hits an iceberg at
Speaker 1: night and sinks and a bunch of people die because
Speaker 1: they weren't enough lifeboats.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: This is eighteen ninety eight and if that sounds familiar.
Speaker 1: The Titanic did the same exact thing, the Titanic, not
Speaker 1: the titan Yeah, did the same exact thing fourteen years later.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if there are a bunch of similarities. The titan
Speaker 2: struck an iceberg in the book on the starboard side
Speaker 2: on an April night in the North Atlantic, off the
Speaker 2: coast of Newfoundland, and the real Titanic struck an iceberg
Speaker 2: on the starboard side in April in the North Atlantic,
Speaker 2: off the coast of Newfoundland.
Speaker 1: And the starless night.
Speaker 2: I don't know about that, Okay. They were both said
Speaker 2: to be unsinkable. More than half of the passengers of
Speaker 2: the Titanic perished, and more than half of the passengers
Speaker 2: and crew on the titan perished. So there's all these
Speaker 2: things in there. But you do a little more digging
Speaker 2: and you find out that Robertson was he was a seaman,
Speaker 2: and he knew a bunch of this stuff. And it's
Speaker 2: not unreasonable to think at the time they wanted to
Speaker 2: build the biggest ships, and the word titan would be
Speaker 2: a great name back then for a super big ship, right,
Speaker 2: And that sailing route was a common one, and there
Speaker 2: were icebergs and April might have been a common month
Speaker 2: for that kind of voyage, so all of it can
Speaker 2: be explained away kind of. But it is definitely something
Speaker 2: you look at and go, oh interesting.
Speaker 1: It is interesting and it's amazing coincidence, and it focuses
Speaker 1: the attention and captures the imagination. But then, yeah, once
Speaker 1: you hear about Robertson's background, it becomes slightly less impressive.
Speaker 1: So then kind of too over the years that little
Speaker 1: Colonel got erased and added to it was that this
Speaker 1: idea for this book came to him in a trance,
Speaker 1: which bolsters the.
Speaker 2: Esp th Yeah, is that true or is that just
Speaker 2: been added?
Speaker 1: I'm sure it was added over the years, Okay. Which
Speaker 1: is a big problem with this kind of anecdotal evidence
Speaker 1: is that you know, it gets embellished in urban Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: And it's just it's not enough that this is a
Speaker 1: really interesting, unique circumstance or coincidence or whatever. There has
Speaker 1: to be this extra layer of proof, like it came
Speaker 1: to him in a trance.
Speaker 2: Come on. Yeah. So back to Ryan, he did some
Speaker 2: like I said, in the nineteen thirties, he started studying
Speaker 2: the stuff with one of my favorite inventions by his
Speaker 2: colleague Carl Zenner. Of course, if you've seen Ghostbusters he
Speaker 2: was using. He was using a version of Zenner cards.
Speaker 2: The shapes weren't all exactly. I think there was one
Speaker 2: that was different in Ghostbusters, but the original Xenner cards were.
Speaker 2: It was a deck of twenty five plane white cards,
Speaker 2: with each of them had one of five symbols a circle,
Speaker 2: a plus sign, a square, a star, five pointed star,
Speaker 2: and the three wavy lines.
Speaker 1: Like water a river?
Speaker 2: Is that what that is?
Speaker 1: Maybe?
Speaker 2: Okay? And the idea is that, just like in Ghostbusters,
Speaker 2: you hold it up and asked the you know, not
Speaker 2: showing them the card at obviously not the symbol, and
Speaker 2: say what do you see? And they say what they see?
Speaker 2: And then you record after the deck how many they.
Speaker 1: Got right, right, But the person holding the card is
Speaker 1: supposed to be thinking about what they're seeing, sure, so
Speaker 1: that the other person, the target, the receiver, can pick
Speaker 1: it up telepathically.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I did they have these online. I took
Speaker 2: the test yesterday and I went through the twenty five
Speaker 2: deck and I only got six out of twenty five.
Speaker 2: And at the end it just said you are not
Speaker 2: a psychic.
Speaker 1: Oh really?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I thought it was kind of funny.
Speaker 1: Statistically speaking, for just one trial that is more than chance.
Speaker 1: You did better than chance. So maybe you do have
Speaker 1: a touch.
Speaker 2: Six of what would chance be?
Speaker 1: I guess chance would be if there's five different ones.
Speaker 2: To be twenty percent, and so this was six of
Speaker 2: twenty four would be it? No, that's less.
Speaker 1: Yeah, No, you did six of twenty four. So you
Speaker 1: did twenty four or twenty five twenty five, so five
Speaker 1: of twenty five would be chance.
Speaker 2: Okay, so I got one more? Yeah, well, and I
Speaker 2: think like three of the first eight or so or
Speaker 2: six I got And I was like.
Speaker 1: Oh, I've got the gift, right, but I.
Speaker 2: Didn't know, Like it's randomly generated, so it's not like
Speaker 2: someone was on the other side thinking of that card.
Speaker 2: So I literally I was like, what do I do?
Speaker 2: I was like, I'm just guessing.
Speaker 1: So that brings up some interesting stuff, like there's there's
Speaker 1: evidence that when a machine is involved, Yeah, there is
Speaker 1: no telepathy. There would only be clairvoyance, right, yeah, So
Speaker 1: I mean if telepathy is you picking up what's in
Speaker 1: someone else's mind and a computer is mindless, then you
Speaker 1: shouldn't be able what you were saying, like, you should
Speaker 1: it shouldn't you should not be able to know what
Speaker 1: zener card it's going to pick next, right, But there
Speaker 1: have been investigations using computers and using machines that show
Speaker 1: above chance, yeah, that there is some sort of weird interaction.
Speaker 2: Like a random number generators.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, So Princeton University has a department called the
Speaker 1: Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Department PAIR, right, of course, and
Speaker 1: Pair has been doing studies for a couple of decades.
Speaker 1: They've done millions of trials and basically they'll say, this
Speaker 1: is a random number generator or this this machine operates
Speaker 1: randomly or whatever. We want you to think of a number,
Speaker 1: and we want to see if you can influence the
Speaker 1: numbers that this computer spits out.
Speaker 2: Oh so you're thinking of the number, then the you're okay.
Speaker 1: That makes like the human is trying to affect the computer,
Speaker 1: the output the behavior of the computer. Of course, if
Speaker 1: you're sitting across the room or in another room thinking
Speaker 1: about a number that a random generator should put out,
Speaker 1: it should have zero effect whatsoever.
Speaker 2: It's a computer.
Speaker 1: The weird thing is is what Princeton has found is
Speaker 1: that yes, over enough trials, you there is a slight
Speaker 1: very slight but measurable effect that human has on a
Speaker 1: random number generator. Come on, it's on Princeton's website. And
Speaker 1: this is stuff that like is apparently accepted in the
Speaker 1: in the scientific community that the trials that they are
Speaker 1: running are so widespread and so repeatable and have been
Speaker 1: done so many times that the data that they're coming
Speaker 1: up with is it's significant.
Speaker 2: Well, Ryan with his inner card experiments in the thirties
Speaker 2: did find that some people got what they thought were
Speaker 2: pretty impressive results, like you know a few I can't
Speaker 2: remember their names, but Hubert Pierce was he one of them.
Speaker 1: He was the one how.
Speaker 2: Many what was his percentage?
Speaker 1: He had one where he got remember how you got
Speaker 1: three in a row and you were like, oh my god, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he got twenty five in a row once? What twenty five?
Speaker 1: Come on, No, I'm not kidding. He was also documented
Speaker 1: as selecting five hundred and fifty eight correct out of
Speaker 1: eighteen hundred and fifty which is the odds of that
Speaker 1: happening by chain. Yeah, we're twenty two billion to one.
Speaker 2: Now, were these the early experiments because okay, because I
Speaker 2: did read that and this seems like I can't believe
Speaker 2: he didn't check this, but apparently the early cards were
Speaker 2: a little translucent. Oh really, yeah, some of them were.
Speaker 2: And then he corrected for that and the and the
Speaker 2: percentages went down. And then they, I know, other scientists
Speaker 2: said that you are somehow influencing with your body tell right,
Speaker 2: like you basically you don't have a good enough poker vase.
Speaker 1: Yeah. In the earliest Ryan experiments with the xener cards,
Speaker 1: he would hold the card up and go and he'd
Speaker 1: be making eye contacts right the guy. Yeah, The guesser
Speaker 1: would be like, is it the wavy line? Yeah, he
Speaker 1: started shaking his head almost in perseent, but he uh he.
Speaker 1: That's called sensory leakage, where you the person who is
Speaker 1: holding the card and knows who the card is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: somehow there's some detail about your face that when you
Speaker 1: do a thousand trials with somebody, yeah, they start to
Speaker 1: pick up on and it affects their guests. It influences
Speaker 1: their guests. So to correct for that, to control for
Speaker 1: that sensory leakage, that cross, Yeah, they they came up
Speaker 1: with something called the gans Field experiment.
Speaker 2: Ah. Yes, as a German gunsfeld that means whole field
Speaker 2: in German, and that is when they started putting people,
Speaker 2: they would start depriving their other senses. Basically, right, they
Speaker 2: would be in a like a dimly lit room with
Speaker 2: red lighting, and they would have white noise, and they
Speaker 2: would have their eyes covered with these special glasses.
Speaker 1: Or ping pong balls cut in half like Kermit the Frog.
Speaker 2: I guess later on they said, we should just make
Speaker 2: some glasses.
Speaker 1: Exactly, We've got the funding.
Speaker 2: So basically the idea was, let's rule out any uh
Speaker 2: any of that gross sensory leakage.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which he so apparently. Later on in Ryan's experiments,
Speaker 1: after he started controlling for stuff, the percentages started to
Speaker 1: drop of correct guesses. He was also he's generally a
Speaker 1: respected researcher for a couple of reasons. One, whenever he
Speaker 1: did whenever evidence of like some sort of bias or
Speaker 1: fraud or something was brought to him, he corrected for it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he wore glasses and a white coat, right.
Speaker 1: That was another one. But also he was daring enough
Speaker 1: to stake his entire career on a field of study
Speaker 1: that will get anybody mocked publicly privately, can really shut
Speaker 1: down a lot of opportunities for you. This guy and
Speaker 1: his wife Louisa Ryan both dedicated their careers to establishing
Speaker 1: the field of parapsychology and really studying it rather than
Speaker 1: just walking away from it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't think he was like, I really want
Speaker 2: to prove this is true?
Speaker 1: Was he?
Speaker 2: Yes, he did that.
Speaker 1: That was a huge criticism of him. He got you
Speaker 1: was a definite believer. He was quoted by I don't
Speaker 1: know what the guy's steal was, but one day he
Speaker 1: was visited by one person and the interviewer who went
Speaker 1: on to write a paper I think in Scientific American
Speaker 1: to expose him. He said he kept a file of
Speaker 1: people of the results of tests where people he suspected
Speaker 1: were purposefully getting things wrong because they didn't like him
Speaker 1: to mess with his data. He just took those and
Speaker 1: never published them. He didn't include him in the results,
Speaker 1: which would definitely affect the number of correct hits.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: That was a huge criticism. That's not good science at all.
Speaker 1: But he was definitely a believer, which was another criticism.
Speaker 1: But he was daring and he did. There was another
Speaker 1: story where it's called the Levy affair, where a guy
Speaker 1: named Levy, who was an electrical engineer working in the
Speaker 1: lab unplugged I guess the sensor that would correct negative
Speaker 1: hits for a little while during a trial, so that
Speaker 1: all that were recorded for a little bit were positive hits,
Speaker 1: and then he plugged it back in. Well, this one
Speaker 1: guy saw what the guy was doing and went to Ryan,
Speaker 1: and Ryan went to the guy Levy and said, did
Speaker 1: you do this? And Levy said yes, he's like you're fired,
Speaker 1: and just like threw the results away and all that.
Speaker 1: So he wasn't like he was a true believer, but
Speaker 1: he wasn't just some like outright fraud right right, But
Speaker 1: he was and still is under the microscope as much
Speaker 1: as probably any researcher in all of academia ever has been.
Speaker 2: All right, Well, right after this break, we'll talk a
Speaker 2: little bit about what skeptics say about ESB. All right, Josh.
Speaker 2: One thing you'll hear skeptics say a lot is extraordinary
Speaker 2: claims require extraordinary evidence. And I have to agree with them. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And it is an extraordinary claim here, and so far
Speaker 2: there hasn't been extraordinary evidence. And one of the things
Speaker 2: I pointed to earlier that I think is what's going
Speaker 2: on if you look at statistics, you look at six
Speaker 2: billion people on planet Earth and them thinking a gazillion
Speaker 2: things each day, and that is scientific, by the way, gazillion.
Speaker 2: At some point somebody is going to think something that
Speaker 2: mirrors something that happens in the near future, and it's
Speaker 2: just chance and coincidence.
Speaker 1: I have a great example of that, man. Okay, it
Speaker 1: happened this very morning. What yeah, I did. I was
Speaker 1: at the printer. You know, we just moved offices, and
Speaker 1: I was at the printer and I had like an
Speaker 1: extra pizza paper that I didn't need, and I realized, like,
Speaker 1: we have no paper recycling here.
Speaker 2: So on my way back yet that is everyone out
Speaker 2: there is like, what kind of office would I.
Speaker 1: Right, we just said we have a fifty five gallon
Speaker 1: drum that we throw stuff into that it catches on fire.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then we send it out.
Speaker 1: We have a burning drum, that's what it's called.
Speaker 2: Now we're getting those soon.
Speaker 1: Right, And we are getting them soon. I know this
Speaker 1: because on my way back to my desk, I popped
Speaker 1: into Izzy, the it guy who's also the head of
Speaker 1: all recycling and stuff here. I was like, Izzy, we
Speaker 1: need a paper recycling bins by the printer, and he goes,
Speaker 1: I'm writing an email right now to everybody about that
Speaker 1: very thing.
Speaker 2: You almost did your Izzy impression.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was close, and so, like I thought about it,
Speaker 1: that's pretty amazing. Yeah, you know, but it was about
Speaker 1: nine in the morning, and this is a company wide email,
Speaker 1: so it would be something that Izzy would probably knock
Speaker 1: out about that time.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The reason I was thinking of is because I was
Speaker 1: just at the printer. We just moved into this office
Speaker 1: and we didn't have bins yet, so it was still
Speaker 1: a potential thing for somebody to be thinking about or
Speaker 1: doing or writing an email about. And so there's all
Speaker 1: these different, really overlooked variables or factors to this whole
Speaker 1: thing that you don't think of. Instead, it just seems
Speaker 1: like an amazing coincidence or ESP. To me, the really
Speaker 1: significant thing was that I happened to be researching ESP
Speaker 1: while this happened. That's what really kind of stood out
Speaker 1: to me. But if you really kind of look at it,
Speaker 1: like there's a finite amount of things that people could
Speaker 1: think about in any given day, in any given context
Speaker 1: in an office or something like that, Like had I
Speaker 1: been a goat at a petting zoo and I went
Speaker 1: over and talked to the cow and the cow was
Speaker 1: writing the email about recycling bins. Maybe, but we're in
Speaker 1: an office. I'm talking to the guy about recycling bins.
Speaker 1: There's just a lot of stuff that you kind of
Speaker 1: Once you take that into account, it becomes less amazing,
Speaker 1: Like like the guy writing the Titan Titanic book.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know what used to happen to me now
Speaker 2: that I think of it is I used to and
Speaker 2: this it's weird. It was only with phone landlines. It
Speaker 2: hadn't happened with the cell phone. But I used to
Speaker 2: like know the phone was going to ring right before
Speaker 2: it rang. Oh yeah, like almost go to reach for it.
Speaker 2: And I mean it's not like it happened all the time,
Speaker 2: but it happened enough times where I was like, oh,
Speaker 2: that's weird.
Speaker 1: Sure, I know what you're talking about.
Speaker 2: But that was all it was to me. I was
Speaker 2: not like I have the gift.
Speaker 1: Well think about it in that respect too. You know
Speaker 1: fifteen twenty people. So was it you knew who was
Speaker 1: calling or just that the phone was about.
Speaker 2: To run now just that it was about to ring.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that is weird. You definitely do have.
Speaker 2: Esp yeah, or maybe I don't know, maybe the phone
Speaker 2: made a little tick noise right before it rang that
Speaker 2: I didn't pick up on. Yeah, but only subconsciously, you know.
Speaker 1: Well, that's another explanation for it. That, right, that there
Speaker 1: is subliminal stuff in the environment that is just too
Speaker 1: weak in nature for us to pick up on consciously,
Speaker 1: but our unconscious does or subconscious does, which frankly opens
Speaker 1: up a whole other can of worms. You know, as
Speaker 1: far as you know, how real is that kind of
Speaker 1: thing there, But probably a little closer to reality is
Speaker 1: the idea that our attention isn't focused on everything that
Speaker 1: we're picking up at all times, like like I see
Speaker 1: your beard, and I see your shirt and everything, but
Speaker 1: I'm still also picking up like sensory information from like
Speaker 1: Jerry's computer that I can see in my peripheral vision
Speaker 1: or whatever. My attention isn't focused on it, but my
Speaker 1: brain is still receiving information. So the idea that our
Speaker 1: brains can put it together all this information that we're
Speaker 1: not aware consciously that we're receiving, but we're still getting
Speaker 1: impressions from it. That's that could be a great explanation
Speaker 1: for esp as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know what now to think about it,
Speaker 2: The fact that it's never happened with my cell phone.
Speaker 2: Sort of makes sense because maybe there it was a
Speaker 2: mechanical function a landline.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, like you said a click or a tick,
Speaker 1: But yeah, I think you meant like a click.
Speaker 2: And it wasn't even the newer model. This was back
Speaker 2: in the day when it was yeah, a ringing like bell. Sure,
Speaker 2: so maybe that does explain it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I've got another good example that I came across
Speaker 1: from researching this. Let's say that you and I are
Speaker 1: hanging out, yeah, and you're humming a Baby on the
Speaker 1: fire work, right, just over and over again. I don't
Speaker 1: know that song, but I'm reading Yes you do, No,
Speaker 1: I don't, Yeah you do it? Was it Katy Perry?
Speaker 1: I don't know Katy Perry anyway.
Speaker 2: Although I will have to say I did love that
Speaker 2: halftime show. It was great, well it was. It was hysterical.
Speaker 1: What's up with the sharks being a meme? Now?
Speaker 2: It was thin?
Speaker 1: They were really significant.
Speaker 2: She looked like she worked at corn Dog on a Stick.
Speaker 1: I don't know what that is that' thought all corn
Speaker 1: dogs are on sticks.
Speaker 2: It's that place in the Hot Dog on a stick,
Speaker 2: that place in the mall where they were those big
Speaker 2: giant Yeah. No, I don't know anything about Katy Perry,
Speaker 2: but it was the funniest most Like the crazy just
Speaker 2: kept coming and coming, and I was like, this is
Speaker 2: the best thing I've ever seen. So anyway, in.
Speaker 1: This universe, you're well aware of Katy Perry and her
Speaker 1: song Firework, and you're humming it to yourself. But I'm
Speaker 1: sitting there reading the New Yorker and I'm engrossed in it,
Speaker 1: and I don't notice that you get up to go
Speaker 1: make some nachos, and you come back in, and you
Speaker 1: catch my attention because you're coming back in with some
Speaker 1: nachos and they smell awesome, And now my attention is
Speaker 1: directed to you, and you're still humming Firework right right,
Speaker 1: And I'm like, I was just thinking about that song Firework.
Speaker 1: I had that in my head. How crazy we must
Speaker 1: be connected. I didn't realize that you had been humming
Speaker 1: it earlier, and beneath my awareness I picked it up.
Speaker 1: Although once I became aware that you were humming it,
Speaker 1: it seemed to me like I had well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And that ties into another explanation is that people
Speaker 2: who do seem to have that gift are just really,
Speaker 2: really hyper observant on minute details. Like the same people
Speaker 2: that can pick up on micro expressions. They might feel
Speaker 2: like they have the gift because they're just really in
Speaker 2: tune to what's going on around them or not just
Speaker 2: like a big lunkhead walking around.
Speaker 1: So a lot of people who believe in ESP say, yes,
Speaker 1: we agree with that, especially parapsychology researchers, and there are
Speaker 1: still plenty of respected ones out there. There's a guy
Speaker 1: named Darryl Bem.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I saw that thing you sent. He's been doing
Speaker 2: this for a while now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, legitimately we should talk about him. But to button
Speaker 1: up that point, there is a lot of parapsychologists or
Speaker 1: even just plain old psychologists who are researching ESP, yeah,
Speaker 1: who say, yes, that definitely most likely accounts for almost
Speaker 1: all of it, and that's good for us to be
Speaker 1: thinking about that, and that in and of it self
Speaker 1: deserves like academic inquiry and research. Right. Yeah, But there
Speaker 1: are still some experience experiments that are being produced by
Speaker 1: guys like Daryl Bem that are showing some weird results
Speaker 1: that go beyond this kind of explanation.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And one of the problems, well, we'll talk about
Speaker 2: the problems with even this research about it being reproducible
Speaker 2: in a second. But he did a couple of experiments.
Speaker 2: This is from NPR.
Speaker 1: Akroll which wrote this. Oh really, yeah, from from from
Speaker 1: Radio Lab.
Speaker 2: Nice. I didn't know that these are the two that
Speaker 2: he pointed out. He did nine different experiments, but the
Speaker 2: two that he highlighted was at Cornell, which is where
Speaker 2: bim is A does his work, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and he's again a very respected psychologist. And this study,
Speaker 1: that of these experiments was published in the Journal of
Speaker 1: Personality and Social Psychology, which is a respected journal.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So they The first one was a computer quiz.
Speaker 2: They took a hundred student it's fifty males and fifty women,
Speaker 2: and basically they showed a computer screen with two little
Speaker 2: curtains on it, side by side and said behind one
Speaker 2: is nothing a brick wall, and behind the other is
Speaker 2: something sexy. Yeah, some kind of you know, I was
Speaker 2: about to call it pornographic, but who knows. Maybe it's
Speaker 2: art nakednessism.
Speaker 1: Yeah, gross, This just make you feel like your dad
Speaker 1: saying it or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, this room's too small for you to say.
Speaker 2: So basically he would say, you tell me what you
Speaker 2: think you're going to see, and they were all hooked
Speaker 2: up two machines to read the you know, they're what's
Speaker 2: going on in their body, of course, and you would
Speaker 2: think it would be a fifty to fifty result, but
Speaker 2: they actually got a fifty three point one percent result
Speaker 2: for the what uh Crawlwitch calls erotic stimuli. And basically
Speaker 2: they they think, or at least that's what Bem thinks,
Speaker 2: is that one possibility is that if there is if
Speaker 2: they think they're going to see something erotically stimulating, then
Speaker 2: it got passed back through time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's kind of his position, is that retrocognition thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that they somehow their future selves who saw the erotic
Speaker 1: image was stimulated enough that that stimulation traveled backwards three
Speaker 1: seconds and influenced their choice.
Speaker 2: Because they were they would be slightly stimulated physiologically right
Speaker 2: before they guess. And he said, before the computer even
Speaker 2: chose which which one to.
Speaker 1: Show, right, they right, they were making their choices often correct,
Speaker 1: before the computer chose to show an erotic or non
Speaker 1: erotic image. And fifty three percent it doesn't sound like much,
Speaker 1: but Krolwitch points out a couple of things. One that
Speaker 1: when there was a control group that was shown non
Speaker 1: eurotic pictures. Yeah, they did forty nine point eight percent correct,
Speaker 1: which is chance.
Speaker 2: And they're fifty to fifty and they're all not happy, right,
Speaker 2: They're like, I don't want to be the control.
Speaker 1: They're like, can we get a little steamier in here?
Speaker 1: But and he also pointed out that fifty three fifty
Speaker 1: three point one, to be specific, doesn't sound like much,
Speaker 1: but apparently that's a point two percent chance where on
Speaker 1: a scale between zero and one, where zero is it's
Speaker 1: not going to happen, and one is that it's definitely
Speaker 1: gonna happen. Yeah, And apparently, as far as correlation goes,
Speaker 1: or links between two things something affecting another, a point
Speaker 1: two is about the same as the link between aspirin
Speaker 1: and heart attack prevention, the link between calcium intake and
Speaker 1: bone mass, the link between secondhand smoke and lung cancer.
Speaker 2: So things that are touted is like, pay attention to.
Speaker 1: This, yesh, yeah, yeah exactly. So stuff that we accept
Speaker 1: is like, yeah, yeah, if you're around second and smoke,
Speaker 1: you can get cancer from that. This is probably has
Speaker 1: the same exactly, yeah it is. And later on a
Speaker 1: meta analysis of Bem's experiments, some other experiments that were
Speaker 1: carried out afterward, and then some other experiments all grouped
Speaker 1: together a meta analysis showed that they weren't. It wasn't
Speaker 1: statistically significant if you took all of the existing body
Speaker 1: of literature of these experiments. But it was a New
Speaker 1: Scientist article and it was pretty cool. In the comment section,
Speaker 1: somebody said, yeah, it's not reproducible, but a lot of
Speaker 1: science isn't reproducible, And it reminded me of our scientific
Speaker 1: method episode, Yeah, where like apparently a lot of trials
Speaker 1: that like pharmaceuticals are based on aren't reproducible. Wasn't it
Speaker 1: like fifty percent of them?
Speaker 2: Yeah, which doesn't surprise me of course.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: All right, And then there was this other experiment that
Speaker 2: I need you to explain to me because I didn't
Speaker 2: understand it. Okay, you're ready, Like I got the first part,
Speaker 2: but I didn't. It didn't make sense to.
Speaker 1: Me because it's a little mind blowing.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So you know how like if you are studying something, sure,
Speaker 1: and you write it down, Yes, it gets in your
Speaker 1: brain a little more.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that when you're tested on it later, you
Speaker 1: will recall it more easily.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a common study method. Write something down okay.
Speaker 1: So Bem carried out a very simple experiment that did
Speaker 1: the opposite of that. First, he showed some people a
Speaker 1: bunch of a bunch of words, forty eight random words
Speaker 1: I think noun's like tree or something like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and he told them to visualize it though, right.
Speaker 1: Right, So they saw all forty eight words and thought about.
Speaker 2: Them, not visualized the letters, but visualized the thing, right,
Speaker 2: like see the tree and.
Speaker 1: You're yeah, just just to kind of try to memorize
Speaker 1: all forty eight words.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Then the computer randomly selected twenty four of those words,
Speaker 1: and then after they'd done that, Bem gave them a
Speaker 1: test of recall to see how many they recalled, right, Yes,
Speaker 1: So the people had to type out the words they recalled.
Speaker 1: Then after that, the computer randomly selected twenty four of
Speaker 1: the forty eight words for the people to type after
Speaker 1: they'd already taken the test of recall. And those twenty
Speaker 1: four words are the ones that people more consistently got
Speaker 1: right on the earlier tests.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, So.
Speaker 1: It's another example of that retrocognition that these people getting
Speaker 1: the words in their heads after the test somehow went
Speaker 1: backward and influenced their recall and memory. Gocha for the
Speaker 1: test that they took before they learned them.
Speaker 2: That makes more sense a little. Yeah, it is a little,
Speaker 2: but see time travel melts my brain too. Right.
Speaker 1: So this guy published this stuff in like twenty ten,
Speaker 1: and like it was, it made a huge, huge splash,
Speaker 1: huge criticism. The Act Demic Journal was criticized and bem
Speaker 1: was you know, pillar eat and all that. But he's
Speaker 1: still you know, put out these these very reproducible, understandable,
Speaker 1: simple exercises that still showed statistically speaking, there were some
Speaker 1: significant results that went beyond chance.
Speaker 2: So when it comes to debunking ESP one thing that
Speaker 2: you're not gonna you know, you said fraud, You're not
Speaker 2: going to see a lot of people call researchers outright
Speaker 2: frauds because that's just sort of a dangerous thing to say. Sure,
Speaker 2: it's not nice, but there are people out there who
Speaker 2: I guess are criticized for, you know, basically trying to
Speaker 2: call out and this is something completely different. But these
Speaker 2: these on stage psychic.
Speaker 1: Shows like crossing Over with John Edwards.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like it's easy to pick those people out and
Speaker 2: say you're a big fraud and this is not true
Speaker 2: of course, and all you're doing is cold reading. Cold
Speaker 2: reading we talked about in the Animal Pet Psychics episode, Right,
Speaker 2: that's basically when you get up on stage and you say, sir,
Speaker 2: I'm sensing someone there. You're having some trouble with another
Speaker 2: man in your life with a name of j or
Speaker 2: or is it h or O P or maybe it's P.
Speaker 2: Yes P, my boss Peter. Yes, yes, exactly. And that's
Speaker 2: all a could reading is. It's throwing out these really
Speaker 2: broad things that anyone can latch onto. So it's really
Speaker 2: easy to call those people out. And there's a guy,
Speaker 2: sort of a guy famous for doing that. His name
Speaker 2: is James Randy, and he's famous for his offer of
Speaker 2: one million dollars to anyone that can prove their psychic ability,
Speaker 2: which of course no one stepped up to do that.
Speaker 2: But then he gets poop pooed a little bit, like
Speaker 2: you're just making a mockery of trying to legitimately disprove something.
Speaker 1: And mockery is absolutely the right word. Yeah, And to me,
Speaker 1: the presence of mockery indicates the absence of objectivity.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So like what you're dealing with then, with a guy
Speaker 1: like that, is a set of beliefs a belief system
Speaker 1: running up against another belief system, just like a couple
Speaker 1: of religions or something like that. It's not objectivity against
Speaker 1: fraud or anything like that. It's belief against belief or something.
Speaker 1: And yeah, the idea of lumping together John Edwards with
Speaker 1: Darryl bem is just that's, you know, fraudulent in and
Speaker 1: of itself.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's just they call that theatrics, just like the
Speaker 2: on stage theatrics of a stage psychic. Yeah, so I
Speaker 2: totally agree.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, I do too. I think there's a
Speaker 1: definite room for a healthy scientific inquiry into just about anything,
Speaker 1: whether skeptics believe in it or not.
Speaker 2: Sure, if you can get some funding for it, who cares.
Speaker 2: That's my motto.
Speaker 1: You got anything else on ESP, let me think. No,
Speaker 1: I've got one more thing I found. I came across
Speaker 1: the nineteen ninety i think five Nightline with Ted Copple, Yeah,
Speaker 1: where the news broke that the CIA had been studying
Speaker 1: ESP and trying to do remote viewing what Ronson was
Speaker 1: talking about and the men who stare at goats?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, John.
Speaker 1: When it finally became declassified in nineteen ninety five, Ted
Speaker 1: Copple did like a twenty minute Nightline segment on it.
Speaker 1: Totally worth watching. It's some pretty softball questions.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Robert Gates, who would later become the head of Defense. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's on there just basically trying as politely as possible
Speaker 1: to show that he does not believe in any of this,
Speaker 1: even though he was the Formacia director. And it's just neat.
Speaker 2: Plus you get to watch Copple again, right, he was
Speaker 2: great news man. Yeah, I miss those dudes. I miss
Speaker 2: I was just thinking yesterday about Brokaw.
Speaker 1: Yeah, rather I was.
Speaker 2: I was always a Brokaw man.
Speaker 1: Did you I liked Peter Jennings he was great.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't even know all of them were great.
Speaker 2: I don't even have any idea who does nightly news
Speaker 2: now I don't watch it.
Speaker 1: It was Brian Williams until about a day ago.
Speaker 2: Did he get fired? He like got I know, the
Speaker 2: whole kerfuffle, but he didn't get fired for it.
Speaker 1: Did. I'm using my esp to predict that by the
Speaker 1: time this came this comes out, who will not be
Speaker 1: there anymore? Wow, I think this is getting big quick interesting.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Twitter's involved, man, the Twitter takedown.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Uh. If you want to know more about ESP.
Speaker 1: The internet was virtually set up for you to go
Speaker 1: find out more about it. You can start by typing
Speaker 1: ESP in the search bar at HowStuffWorks dot com. Since
Speaker 1: I said that it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 2: Yeah, before we do listener mail, I just want to
Speaker 2: give a quick shout out to my buddy Isaac McNairy.
Speaker 2: If you remember, I did a Judge John Hodgman episode
Speaker 2: with Emily in which I did a bad home renovation
Speaker 2: and this dude stuff you should know. Listener from Kansas
Speaker 2: carpenter Master Carpenter said hey, man, I'll come and stay
Speaker 2: with you and help you do your your project there
Speaker 2: right And I said this sounds crazy, and he actually
Speaker 2: came and did it and it looks awesome and he's
Speaker 2: a super cool guy. And if you're in Kansas near Eldoredo, Kansas,
Speaker 2: there's no better guy to hire, El Dorados. It's El Daredo. Actually, Okay,
Speaker 2: he has to point out, but not only is he
Speaker 2: a great carpenter and a cool guy, but he works
Speaker 2: with a nonprofit called Outreach Program And you can find
Speaker 2: it an Outreach Program dot org where they're basically feeding
Speaker 2: the world. They package food and they get people together
Speaker 2: in a room and package these mass quantities of food
Speaker 2: to send to other countries and feed the hungry. And
Speaker 2: he's just a really good dude. So thanks to Isaac
Speaker 2: for that. And my kitchen list is looking good. So
Speaker 2: again for his nonprofit that is Outreach Program dot org.
Speaker 2: And if you need a great carpenter and you're in Kansas,
Speaker 2: check out retro Fit Remodeling.
Speaker 1: Nice.
Speaker 2: All right, listener mail to call this pronunciation help. Hey guys,
Speaker 2: I'm a botanist and just wanted to throw throw you
Speaker 2: a rope to help you out with pronouncing plant family names.
Speaker 2: All plant family names end in A C.
Speaker 1: E A E. Oh yeah, I thought I got that wrong.
Speaker 2: It is a mess of vowels. Guys. When you read it,
Speaker 2: you should just imagine you were spelling ace as in acee.
Speaker 2: So when you read a plant family name, just break
Speaker 2: off A the acee and read the first part and
Speaker 2: then spell acee. So the plant family for poison oak
Speaker 2: is Anacardia anacardi a ce. So it's just Anna cardi
Speaker 2: a ce. I remember it by imagining the aneurysm and
Speaker 2: cardiac arrest I would have if I fell into it
Speaker 2: A N A C A R D I what well
Speaker 2: she spelled out anna CARDI, Oh gotcha the first two
Speaker 2: first letters from each of those words. Anyway, guys, I
Speaker 2: love your podcast. Find it endearing when you two puzzle
Speaker 2: out on pronunciations.
Speaker 1: Ace A, see, that's good to know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I love you, bunches and that is from Jane,
Speaker 2: and she said ps. In Europe they pronounce plant families
Speaker 2: completely differently other parts of see. Other parts of the
Speaker 2: US might have other conventions, but the above pronunciation is
Speaker 2: standard in California.
Speaker 1: Oh well, okay, what ac ac If you want to
Speaker 1: let us know something that we should have known before
Speaker 1: we even recorded, but you're generous enough with your time
Speaker 1: and effort to correct us, I guess there's a way
Speaker 1: to put it. Sure we That was very helpful. Thanks
Speaker 1: a lot, Jane. If you want to be like Jane
Speaker 1: in other words, you can send us an email to
Speaker 1: Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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Speaker 2: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.