Selects: How ESP Works (?)

7:58Chuck Bryant:Okay.

7:59Josh Clark:Then we have our precogs, precognition. That's when you see into the future. Retrocogs, retrocognition. You can see into the distant past.

8:08Chuck Bryant:That's a widely accepted definition of retrocognition. Yeah. Like seeing a cave, like tuk-tuk running around with the dinosaurs like you do, which I guess never would have happened. Yeah. But there's another term for retrocognition, whereas something in the future affects something in the past. So a decision you make in the future affects your past. An example given is that you have a dream about a dinosaur. Now, let's say a spotted dog. Okay. And then the first thing the next morning, you go outside to water your lawn, and the same spotted dog or a similar spotted dog walks by. The idea isn't that that was very coincidental or that you had ESP in your dreams, but that you seeing that dog in the morning affected your dream the night before.

9:00Josh Clark:Oh, okay.

9:00Chuck Bryant:So that's another definition that's emerging for retrocognition. Gotcha. That's getting a lot of traction because of the stuff we're finding on the quantum scale. Huh. Just weirdness like that. All right.

9:11Josh Clark:Then you have your mediumship, and that's Miss Cleo, who can channel dead spirits. Yeah, I forgot about her.

9:18Chuck Bryant:I wonder how much money that woman grossed in the 90s. She made a lot of dough. I hope so. Yeah. I mean, she was working hard. She had a finite window of opportunity, and she worked that whole time. She didn't buy a sailboat and sail around the world after her first million.

9:35Josh Clark:She worked. So you're not in the camp of she's taking people's money and taking advantage of people.

9:42Chuck Bryant:I see that argument. Sure. For sure. I also see if people want to spend their money on that and they get something out of it, knock yourself out.

9:50Josh Clark:All right. And then you have psychometry, which is the ability to read info about a person place by touching the person or object. And that's what I like to call the dead zone.

10:03Chuck Bryant:Right.

10:04Josh Clark:Christopher Walken, he would place his hands on you and he would see something.

10:07Chuck Bryant:Man, I think we talked about it recently, about how that movie holds up still.

10:11Josh Clark:Yeah.

10:12Chuck Bryant:That is such a good movie.

10:13Josh Clark:Yeah, it really is good. Chris Walken.

10:16Chuck Bryant:There's another one, Chuck, called telekinesis, which is like Uri Geller stroking a spoon and it bending. Right. Like being able to manipulate matter just using a light touch or your mind. But there is no spoon. Yeah, wasn't that from Matrix? Mm-hmm.

10:39Josh Clark:All right, so basically, like you said, J.B. Ryan is the granddaddy of all this. And he actually started studying. I mean, he was a legitimate scientist. He wasn't some quack. And this was in the 1930s where he started at Duke University studying parapsychology, basically.

10:58Chuck Bryant:And he wasn't the first. He was one of the first laboratory experimenters in academia to really study psi, right? Before him, probably about 40 or so years before him, William James and some of his pals at the Society for Psychical Research really laid the groundwork for applying the scientific method to the study of paranormal phenomenon. And they did two things. They outed frauds, like fraudulent mediums, like very famously Madame Blavardsky. But then they also investigated ones like they approached them typically with like an open mind. And if they found somebody that they just couldn't explain, they studied them.

11:43Chuck Bryant:So they were studying each one with an open mind, and the ones they figured out were frauds, they outed as frauds. The ones they figured out or couldn't quite explain, they sought to investigate scientifically rather than just saying, oh, they're a fraud somehow. So that was the groundwork of the study of Psy.

12:00Josh Clark:What was Madame Blavartsky's deal of the Coney Island Blavartsky's?

12:07Chuck Bryant:She was almost a cult leader. You could argue she was. She created, oh, man, it's called theodism, I think, which is almost a cult. It was a huge movement in the 19th century where you'd go to a seance, and there was a medium there, and they would channel the spirits of the dead, relatives of people who were there holding hands in the circle and stuff like that. And she gained a lot of power and wealth and prestige until she was outed as a fraud. And I don't remember the, it's theosophy. That's what it is. Not the, theoism. Theoism has to do with Theo Huxtable. Did you see The Source Family, by the way, that documentary?

12:55Josh Clark:No, I haven't. About the LA cult in the 70s? I saw the icon on Netflix and never clicked.

13:01Chuck Bryant:Is it good?

13:01Josh Clark:It's really good. And it's awesome, actually. I recommend everyone see it. It's one of those where they interview a lot of them today, and they didn't commit suicide. Everyone was like, it was pretty great. Oh, yeah? Yeah, they're all fine. They're all just a bunch of hippies still. They were out in L.A.? Yeah, right in Hollywood.

13:21Chuck Bryant:There was a documentary I saw about a cult in Miami, and they were super fundamentalist Christian.

13:31Josh Clark:Yeah.

13:32Chuck Bryant:But they also were, the basis of their religion was formed on pot, too. Well, that's what the Source family was. I wonder if they were related.

13:41Josh Clark:Well, it was the 70s. Yeah. There were a lot of pot cults, I bet.

13:44Chuck Bryant:But did they turn into, like, huge pot dealers?

13:47Josh Clark:No, I don't think so. This cult did. They had a band, though. Called The Source? You know, I can't remember the name of the band, but it's pretty interesting to listen to. Manhattan Transfer? Yeah, that was it. It's a really good documentary, though. It was just funny to see all these people now. They're like, it was awesome. Had a lot of sex and smoked a lot of weed.

14:06Chuck Bryant:Yeah, that's kind of what this one did, too. These guys didn't seem to have a lot of sex, though. They were real compartmentalized gender-wise and male dominance and all that, but they just smoked a ton of pot all the time, including their little kids. Oh, well, that's not good. Like four-year-olds smoking pot. Oh, that's terrible. Yeah, it was in the documentary. It's worth seeing. I don't remember what it's called. You had me up. You lost me there. I lost everybody there in that documentary. Yeah.

14:32Josh Clark:All right. So back to this ESP thing. J.B. Ryan? Yeah, J.B. Ryan. Well, basically, there's a lot of different outlooks on what ESP might be. Some people think that everyone's got it, but some people, it just pops up every now and then. Like, I might have a dream that comes true or whatever. Other people think that only certain people have it, the gift, as they say. and that they have to be in this special mental state to access it. The shinnin'? Yeah, the shinnin'. And then other folks say that everyone has that potential, but some people are just in tune with it, and some people aren't.

15:14Chuck Bryant:Right. And you fall into none of those three campers. Yes. So we'll talk a little more about some ideas of what ESP is right after this.

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16:39Josh Clark:Our listeners love puzzles, paradoxes, and hidden patterns almost as much as we do. On TikTok, those fascinations come to life. People are breaking down physics, exploring geology, and explaining why the world works the way it does. you'll see impressive experiments, explanations that finally make sense, and connections you didn't expect. It's like having a lab, a lecture hall, and science museum in your pocket. TikTok is where wonder is shared, where curiosity turns into discovery, and where millions learn something new every day.

17:13Chuck Bryant:We've all had the experience of calling a business and just wanting to talk to a real person. Not an automated voice pretending to be human, an actual person who can listen and understand and offer help.

17:23Josh Clark:That's exactly what you can do with Ruby. Ruby is the virtual receptionist company that takes care of your callers when you're unavailable in the middle of something or simply don't want to pick up.

17:33Chuck Bryant:That's right. They can answer, screen, transfer calls. They can take messages, collect payments, book appointments, and more, all while making the people you serve feel special.

17:41Josh Clark:And best of all, it can help you be more productive. For example, 9 out of 10 lawyers who use Ruby log more billable hours per day than the national average.

17:49Chuck Bryant:And other professionals like plumbers and technicians win more customers while being able to stay focused on the job. But whatever kind of small business you run, Ruby is built to save you time, earn you more customers or clients, and make meaningful connections with the people you serve.

18:04Josh Clark:It's available 24-7, 365 days a year, and 100 % based in the U.S. See why more than 15 ,000 small businesses use Ruby. Visit ruby.com or better yet, call them at 844-900-R-U-B-Y.

18:31Chuck Bryant:So Chuck, you said that basically how people see ESP is either everyone has it, some people have it, or no one has it basically. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer. Right. If you are a believer in ESP and somebody comes to you and says, okay, explain ESP. Like, what is it?

18:54Josh Clark:Right.

18:54Chuck Bryant:There's actually a couple of very common suggestions or proposals.

18:59Josh Clark:Yeah.

19:00Chuck Bryant:One made sense for a while before we knew a little more about the brain. And that was that ESP was some form or fashion of the electromagnetic spectrum that we were receiving information from outside of our usual senses. Yeah, and like you said, it fell out of favor because basically it didn't explain anything about how it moves through time

19:26Josh Clark:or it didn't pick up on some special part of your brain that receives this message.

19:33Chuck Bryant:Did you see that study I sent you that was, I think, from 2010 where they put people in an MRI and then showed them different pictures or whatever. And they did, they showed, like, I put you in the wonder machine. Okay. And now I'm showing you a picture of the flower. And that's it. Okay. It's lovely, except it sounds like a German rave. Okay. Yeah. A little bit. But that would be the non-ESP stimuli, the control group.

20:06Josh Clark:Yeah.

20:06Chuck Bryant:To test ESP and to see if the brain reacted differently and then to see if there was a part of the brain that's picking up on ESP, I would show you the flower. And then in the other room, I would also show Emily that flower and have her think about it and send you the thought of that flower. So you're getting ESP stimuli and then non-ESP stimuli. And from the MRI, they showed that the brain didn't react differently. Gotcha. So it suggests that there isn't a sensory organ or region of the brain that's responsible for picking up ESP, which doesn't debunk the possibility of ESP. Yeah. It just undermines the idea that there's a region of our brain that would be responsible for picking that up.

20:49Josh Clark:Plus, if Emily's over there, my first guess is going to be dog every time. And it's flower, and then it's not going to work.

20:56Chuck Bryant:Well, it wasn't about guessing. It was just to see, like, showing you the ESP version and then the non-ESP version of the same thing. So you weren't guessing. Do you understand? Yeah, I get it now. I would have guessed dog or wine.

21:09Josh Clark:There wasn't guessing. I still would have guessed. Emily thinks she has the gift a little bit, so she would have been disappointed.

21:16Chuck Bryant:She's got the shin?

21:17Josh Clark:Yeah, a little, she thinks.

21:19Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

21:20Josh Clark:But I think she's just super observant and intuitive.

21:23Chuck Bryant:Well, that's definitely one explanation for it.

21:26Josh Clark:Yeah, which we'll get to, of course. So these days There are other theories One of which is that It's called spillover That there's basically another dimension That doesn't have our laws here And our dimension And that sometimes stuff just sort of spills over from that And we see the future or the past And if you're a skeptic

21:50Chuck Bryant:You probably just pulled a decent sized clump of your hair Out of the side of your head At that point

21:55Josh Clark:Yeah, because this is something you can't prove, obviously. It's like completely, and of course they'll say exactly. Yeah. You know?

22:04Chuck Bryant:Yeah, and I think I got the impression from this article that they were making that point. Like science is just chasing its tail and trying to explain ESP because it's not currently capable. Yeah. And science goes, it doesn't work like that. Yeah. You know? At least with the electromagnetic spectrum explanation, it was pointing to something that we already know exists, right? It's just that there's no way to show that we would be getting, how we would be getting information from it. Because that electromagnetic explanation, it basically says, if you compare it to other findings from ESP, it makes even less sense.

22:48Josh Clark:Right.

22:48Chuck Bryant:Because with ESP, one of the hallmarks of it is that no matter whether you're out there outside of the studio thinking about wine or a dog or something, and I'm picking up on it, or if you're in China and I'm here and we're doing the same thing, the signal doesn't weaken at all.

23:07Josh Clark:Yeah, and that just flies in the face of all we know about electromagnetic waves. Right, exactly. No good.

23:11Chuck Bryant:Right. So there's a lot of things wrong with the proposals of what ESP is.

23:17Josh Clark:Yeah, but the reason why people still believe in this stuff is because of either hearing a story about their friend who said, listen, this crazy thing happened, or experiencing it themselves in some way or another, having a dream that something similar happened, and all of a sudden you're like, I might have the gift. Exactly. Or it popped up in me, briefly, at least.

23:38Chuck Bryant:And there's a lot of evidence of strange and unusual occurrences that support the idea of ESP. This article gives a really good one about an 1898 book called Futility that was written by a guy named Morgan Robertson, right? And in it, the guy details this boat called the Titan. A ship. Yeah, a ship. A boat. A big old boat. Yeah. which is sailing across the Atlantic and hits an iceberg at night and sinks, and a bunch of people die because there weren't enough lifeboats. Yeah. This is 1898, and if that sounds familiar, the Titanic did the same exact thing. The Titanic, not the Titan, did the same exact thing 14 years later.

24:27Josh Clark:Yeah. There are a bunch of similarities. The Titan struck an iceberg in the book on the starboard side on an April night in the North Atlantic off the coast of Newfoundland, and the real Titanic struck an iceberg on the starboard side in April in the North Atlantic off the coast of Newfoundland. On the Starless Night? I don't know about that. Okay. They were both said to be unsinkable. More than half of the passengers of the Titanic perished, and more than half of the passengers and crew on the Titan perished. So there's all these things in there, but you do a little more digging, and you find out that Robertson was a seaman, and he knew a bunch of this stuff, and it's not unreasonable to think at the time they wanted to build the biggest ships, and the word Titan would be a great name back then for a super big ship.

25:18Josh Clark:And that sailing route was a common one, and there were icebergs, and April might have been a common month for that kind of voyage. So all of it can be explained away kind of, But it is definitely something you look at and go, ooh, interesting.

25:34Chuck Bryant:It is interesting, and it's an amazing coincidence, and it focuses the attention and captures the imagination. But then, yeah, once you hear about Robertson's background, it becomes slightly less impressive. So then kind of to—over the years, that little kernel got erased and added to it was that this idea for this book came to him in a trance, which bolsters the ESP thing. Yeah, is that true or has that just been added? I'm sure it was added over the years. Okay. Which is a big problem with this kind of anecdotal evidence is that, you know, it gets embellished and there's flourishes added. Yeah, exactly.

26:11Chuck Bryant:And it's just, it's not enough that this is a really interesting, unique circumstance or coincidence or whatever. There has to be this extra layer of proof like it came to him in a trance. Come on. Yeah.

26:27Josh Clark:So back to Ryan He did some, like I said, in the 1930s He started studying this stuff With one of my favorite inventions By his colleague Carl Zinner Of course if you've seen Ghostbusters He was using He was using a version of Zinner cards The shapes weren't all exact I think there was one that was different In Ghostbusters But the original Zinner cards It was a deck of 25 plain white cards with each of them had one of five symbols, a circle, a plus sign, a square, a star, five-pointed star, and the three wavy lines. Like water, a river. Is that what that is?

27:09Chuck Bryant:Maybe. Okay.

27:11Josh Clark:And the idea is that just like in Ghostbusters, you hold it up and ask the, you know, not showing them the card, obviously, not the symbol, and say, what do you see? And they say what they see, and then you record after the deck how many they got right.

27:26Chuck Bryant:Right, but the person holding the card is supposed to be thinking about what they're seeing. Sure. So that the other person, the target, the receiver, can pick it up telepathically.

27:39Josh Clark:Yeah, and I did. They have these online. I took the test yesterday, and I went through the 25 deck, and I only got six out of 25, and at the end it just said, you are not a psychic. Oh, really? Yeah, I thought it was kind of funny.

27:52Chuck Bryant:Statistically speaking, for just one trial, That is more than chance. You did better than chance, so maybe you do have a touch.

28:01Josh Clark:What would chance be, I guess?

28:02Chuck Bryant:Chance would be if there's five different ones.

28:05Josh Clark:It would be 20 %? Uh-huh. And so this was 6 of 24 would be 25 %?

28:12Chuck Bryant:No, that's less. Yeah. No. You did 6 of 24? You did 24 or 25? 25. So 5 of 25 would be chance.

28:23Josh Clark:Okay, so I got one more. Yeah. Well, and I think like three of the first eight or so or six I got, and I was like, oh, I've got the gift. But I didn't know, like, it's randomly generated, so it's not like someone was on the other side thinking of that card. So I literally, I was like, what do I do? I was like, I'm just guessing.

28:42Chuck Bryant:So that brings up some interesting stuff. Like there's evidence that when a machine is involved, there is no telepathy. There would only be clairvoyance, right? Yeah. So, I mean, if telepathy is you picking up what's in someone else's mind and the computer is mindless, then you shouldn't be able, what you were saying, like you should not be able to know what Zenner card it's going to pick next, right? But there have been investigations using computers and using machines that show above chance that there is some sort of weird interaction.

29:21Josh Clark:Like random number generators. Yes.

29:23Chuck Bryant:So Princeton University has a department called the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Department, PEAR, right? Of course. And PEAR has been doing studies for a couple of decades. They've done millions of trials. And basically they'll say this is a random number generator or this machine operates randomly or whatever. We want you to think of a number and we want to see if you can influence the numbers that this computer spits out.

29:49Josh Clark:Oh, so you're thinking of the number then you're, okay, that makes sense.

29:53Chuck Bryant:The human is trying to affect the output, the behavior of the computer. Of course, if you're sitting across the room or in another room thinking about a number that a random generator should put out, it should have zero effect whatsoever. No, it's a computer. The weird thing is, is what Princeton has found is that, yes, over enough trials, there is a slight, very slight, but measurable effect that human thought has on a random number generator. Come on. It's on Princeton's website. This is stuff that is apparently accepted in the scientific community, that the trials that they are running are so widespread and so repeatable and have been done so many times that the data that they're coming up with is significant.

30:44Josh Clark:Well, Ryan, with his Zenercard experiments in the 30s, did find that some people got what they thought were pretty impressive results, like a few, I can't remember their names. Hubert Pierce. Was he one of them? He was the one. What was his percentage?

31:00Chuck Bryant:He had one where he got, remember how you got three in a row and you were like, oh, my God. Yeah. He got 25 in a row once. What? 25. Come on. No, I'm not kidding. He was also documented as selecting 558 correct out of 1 ,850. which is the odds of that happening by chance were$22 billion to one.

31:23Josh Clark:Now, were these the early experiments? Yes. Because I did read that, and this seems like, I can't believe he didn't check this, but apparently the early cards were a little translucent. Oh, really? Yeah, some of them were, and then he corrected for that, and the percentages went down. And then they, I know other scientists said that you are somehow influencing with your body tell. Right. Like basically you don't have a good enough poker face.

31:52Chuck Bryant:Yeah, in the earliest Ryan experiments with the Zenner cards, he would hold the card up. And go squirt. And he'd be making eye contact. Squirt. Right, the guy, yeah, the guesser would be like, is it the wavy line? Yeah, he'd start shaking his head almost imperceptibly. But that's called sensory leakage, where you, the person who is holding the card and knows what the card is, somehow there's some detail about your face that when you do a thousand trials with somebody, they start to pick up on, and it affects their guests. It influences their guests. So to correct for that, to control for that, What's it called?

32:34Chuck Bryant:A sensory leakage. Gross. Isn't that gross? Yeah. They came up with something called the Ganzfeld experiment.

32:42Josh Clark:Ah, yes, der German Ganzfeld. That means whole field in German, and that is when they started putting people, they would start depriving their other senses, basically. Right. They would be in a dimly lit room with red lighting, and they would have white noise, and they would have their eyes covered with these special glasses. Or ping pong balls cut in half. Like Kermit the Frog. I guess later on they said, we should just make some glasses. Exactly.

33:11Chuck Bryant:We've got the funding.

33:12Josh Clark:So basically the idea was let's rule out any of that gross sensory leakage. Right. Yeah. Which smells.

33:23Chuck Bryant:So, yeah, apparently later on in Ryan's experiments, after he started controlling for stuff, the percentages started to drop. Yeah. Correct guesses. He was also He's generally a respected Researcher for a couple of reasons One, whenever he did Whenever evidence of Some sort of Bias or fraud Or something was brought to him He corrected for it

33:51Josh Clark:He wore glasses and a white coat

33:53Chuck Bryant:Right, that was another one But also he was daring enough To stake his entire career On a field of study that will get anybody mocked.

34:07Josh Clark:Yeah, sure.

34:08Chuck Bryant:Publicly, privately, can really shut down a lot of opportunities for you. This guy and his wife, Louisa Ryan, both dedicated their careers to establishing the field of parapsychology and really studying it rather than just walking away from it.

34:24Josh Clark:Yeah, I don't think he was like, I really want to prove this is true, was he?

34:29Chuck Bryant:Yes, he did.

34:30Josh Clark:Oh.

34:30Chuck Bryant:That was a huge criticism of him. He wanted to believe in it. He was a definite believer. He was quoted by, I don't know what the guy's deal was, but one day he was visited by one person, and the interviewer who went on to write a paper, I think, in Scientific American to expose him, he said he kept a file of people, of the results of tests, where people he suspected were purposefully getting things wrong because they didn't like him to mess with his data. He just took those and never published them. He didn't include them in the results, which would definitely affect the number of correct hits.

35:14Chuck Bryant:That was a huge criticism. That's not good science at all. But he was definitely a believer, which was another criticism. But he was daring, and he did. There was another story where it's called the Levy Affair, where a guy named Levy, who was an electrical engineer working in the lab,

35:33Chuck Bryant:unplugged, I guess, a sensor that would correct negative hits for a little while during a trial so that all that were recorded for a little bit were positive hits. And then he plugged it back in. And, well, this one guy saw what the guy was doing and went to Ryan, and Ryan went to the guy, Levy, and said, did you do this? And Levine said, yes, he's like, you're fired. And just threw the results away and all that. So he wasn't like, he was a true believer, but he wasn't just some outright fraud. Right, right. But he was, and still is, under the microscope as much as probably any researcher in all of academia ever has been.

36:09Josh Clark:All right, well, right after this break, we'll talk a little bit about what skeptics say about ESB.

36:22Josh Clark:Our listeners love puzzles, paradoxes, and hidden patterns almost as much as we do. On TikTok, those fascinations come to life. People are breaking down physics, exploring geology, and explaining why the world works the way it does. You'll see impressive experiments, explanations that finally make sense, and connections you didn't expect. It's like having a lab, a lecture hall, and science museum in your pocket. TikTok is where wonder is shared, where curiosity turns into discovery, and where millions learn something new every day.

36:56Chuck Bryant:We've all had the experience of calling a business and just wanting to talk to a real person, not an automated voice pretending to be human, an actual person who can listen and understand and offer help.

37:06Josh Clark:That's exactly what you can do with Ruby. Ruby is the virtual receptionist company that takes care of your callers when you're unavailable in the middle of something or simply don't want to pick up.

37:16Chuck Bryant:That's right. They can answer, screen, transfer calls. They can take messages, collect payments, book appointments, and more, all while making the people you serve feel special.

37:24Josh Clark:Best of all, it can help you be more productive. For example, 9 out of 10 lawyers who use Ruby log more billable hours per day than the national average.

37:32Chuck Bryant:And other professionals like plumbers and technicians win more customers while being able to stay focused on the job. But whatever kind of small business you run, Ruby is built to save you time, earn you more customers or clients, and make meaningful connections with the people you serve.

37:47Josh Clark:It's available 24-7, 365 days a year, and 100 % based in the U.S. See why more than 15 ,000 small businesses use Ruby. Visit ruby.com or better yet, call them at 844-900-R-U-B-Y.

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38:47Josh Clark:It is not known if ZepBound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens or reuse needles. Don't take if allergic to it, or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer, or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop ZEP bound and call your doctor if you have severe stomach pain or a serious allergic reaction. Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia.

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39:44Josh Clark:All right, Josh. One thing you'll hear skeptics say a lot is extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

39:50Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

39:51Josh Clark:And I have to agree with them. Yeah. And it is an extraordinary claim here. And so far, there hasn't been extraordinary evidence. And one of the things I pointed to earlier that I think is what's going on, if you look at statistics, you look at 6 billion people on planet Earth and them thinking a gazillion things each day, and that is scientific, by the way. A gazillion? At some point, somebody is going to think something that mirrors something that happens in the near future, and it's just chance and coincidence.

40:25Chuck Bryant:I have a great example of that, man.

40:27Josh Clark:Okay.

40:28Chuck Bryant:It happened this very morning. What? Yeah, it did. I was at the printer. We just moved offices. And I was at the printer, and I had an extra piece of paper that I didn't need, and I realized we have no paper recycling here. So on my way back— Not yet, that is. Everyone out there is like,

40:45Josh Clark:what kind of office would not have a recycling?

40:47Chuck Bryant:Right, we have a 55-gallon drum that we throw stuff into that catches on fire. Yeah, and then we send it out to sea. We have a burning drum. That's what it's called. No, we're getting those soon. Right, and we are getting them soon. I know this because on my way back to my desk, I popped into Izzy, the IT guy who's also the head of all recycling and stuff here. I was like, Izzy, we need paper recycling bins by the printer. and he goes, I'm writing an email right now to everybody about that very thing. You almost did your Izzy impression. Yeah, it was close. And so I thought about it. That's pretty amazing.

41:26Chuck Bryant:Yeah. But it was about 9 in the morning, and this is a company-wide email, so it would be something that Izzy would probably knock out about that time. The reason I was thinking of it is because I was just at the printer.

41:38Josh Clark:Yeah.

41:38Chuck Bryant:We just moved into this office, and we didn't have bins yet, so it was still a potential thing for somebody to be thinking about or doing or writing an email about. And so there's all these different really overlooked variables or factors to this whole thing that you don't think of. Instead, it just seems like an amazing coincidence or ESP. Right. To me, the really significant thing was that I happened to be researching ESP while this happened. Right. That's what really kind of stood out to me. Yeah. But if you really kind of look at it like there's a finite amount of things that people could think about in any given day, in any given context, in an office or something like that.

42:17Chuck Bryant:Like had I been a goat at a petting zoo and I went over and talked to the cow and the cow was writing the email about recycling bins, maybe. But we're in an office. I'm talking to the guy about recycling bins. And there's just a lot of stuff that you kind of, once you take that into account, it becomes less amazing. Like the guy writing the Titan Titanic book.

42:42Josh Clark:Yeah, you know what used to happen to me now that I think of it? I used to, and it's weird, it was only with phone landlines. It hadn't happened with the cell phone. But I used to know the phone was going to ring right before it rang. Oh, yeah. Like almost go to reach for it. I mean, it's not like it happened all the time, but it happened enough times where I was like, huh, that's weird.

43:03Chuck Bryant:Sure, I know what you're talking about.

43:04Josh Clark:But that was all it was to me. I was not like, I have the gift.

43:08Chuck Bryant:But think about it in that respect, too. You know 15, 20 people. So was it you knew who was calling or just that the phone was about to ring?

43:17Josh Clark:No, just that it was about to ring.

43:18Chuck Bryant:Oh, yeah, that is weird. You definitely do have ESP.

43:20Josh Clark:Yeah.

43:24Josh Clark:Or maybe, I don't know, maybe the phone made a little tick noise right before it rang that I didn't pick up on. Yeah. But only subconsciously, you know.

43:32Chuck Bryant:Well, that's another explanation for it. I ticked noise out of that. Right. That there is subliminal stuff in the environment that is just too weak in nature for us to pick up on consciously, but our unconscious does or our subconscious does, which frankly opens up a whole other can of worms, you know, as far as, you know, how real is that kind of thing. But probably a little closer to reality is the idea that our attention isn't focused on everything that we're picking up at all times. Like I see your beard and I see your shirt and everything, but I'm still also picking up sensory information from Jerry's computer that I can see in my peripheral vision or whatever.

44:16Chuck Bryant:My attention isn't focused on it, but my brain is still receiving information. So the idea that our brains can put it together, all this information that we're not aware consciously that we're receiving, but we're still getting impressions from it, That could be a great explanation for ESP as well.

44:34Josh Clark:Yeah, and you know what? Now that I think about it, the fact that it's never happened with my cell phone sort of makes sense because maybe it was a mechanical function, a landline running.

44:44Chuck Bryant:Yeah, like you said, a click or a tick, but I think you meant like a click.

44:47Josh Clark:And it wasn't even the newer model. This was back in the day when it was like a ringing bell. Sure. So maybe that does explain it.

44:56Chuck Bryant:Yeah. I've got another good example that I came across in researching this. Let's say that you and I are hanging out. Yeah. And you're humming, baby, I'm a firework, right? Just over and over again. I don't know that song. But I'm reading... Yes, you do. No, I don't. Yeah, you do. Who is it? Katy Perry. I don't know Katy Perry.

45:17Josh Clark:Anyway... Although I will have to say I did love that halftime show. It was great. Well, it was hysterical.

45:23Chuck Bryant:What's up with the sharks being a meme now? I didn't think they were really significant.

45:28Josh Clark:Did she look like she worked at Corn Dog on a Stick?

45:31Chuck Bryant:I don't know what that is. I thought all corn dogs were on sticks.

45:33Josh Clark:No, it's that place in the—or Hot Dog on a Stick, maybe it was called. That place in the mall where they wore those big, giant pinwheel-colored hats. No, I don't know anything about Katy Perry, but it was the funniest, most—like, the crazy just kept coming and coming and coming. And I was like, this is the best thing I've ever seen.

45:50Chuck Bryant:So, in this universe, you're well aware of Katy Perry and her song Firework, and you're humming it to yourself. But I'm sitting there reading The New Yorker, and I'm engrossed in it. And I don't notice that you get up to go make some nachos, and you come back in, and you catch my attention because you're coming back in with some nachos, and they smell awesome. And now my attention is directed to you, and you're still humming Firework, right? Right. And I'm like, I was just thinking about that song Firework. I had that in my head. How crazy. We must be connected. I didn't realize that you had been humming it earlier, and beneath my awareness, I picked it up.

46:29Chuck Bryant:Although, once I became aware that you were humming it, it seemed to me like I had ESP.

46:35Josh Clark:Well, yeah, and that ties into another explanation is that people who do seem to have that gift are just really, really hyper-observant on minute details. Like the same people that can pick up on micro-expressions. they might feel like they have the gift because they're just really in tune to what's going on around them and not just a big lunkhead walking around.

46:57Chuck Bryant:So a lot of people who believe in ESP say, yes, we agree with that, especially parapsychology researchers. And there are still plenty of respected ones out there. There's a guy named Daryl Bem.

47:09Josh Clark:Yeah, I saw that thing you sent. He's been doing this for a while now, legitimately.

47:14Chuck Bryant:We should talk about him, but to button up that point, there is a lot of parapsychologists or even just plain old psychologists who are researching ESP who say, yes, that definitely most likely accounts for almost all of it. Right. And that's good for us to be thinking about that. And that in and of itself deserves like academic inquiry and research, right? Yeah. But there are still some experiments that are being produced by guys like Darrell Bum that are showing some weird results that go beyond this kind of explanation.

47:51Josh Clark:Yeah, and one of the problems, well, we'll talk about the problems with even this research, about it being reproducible in a second, but he did a couple of experiments. This is from NPR.

48:02Chuck Bryant:Yeah, Krolwich wrote this.

48:03Josh Clark:Oh, really?

48:04Chuck Bryant:Yeah, from Radiolab. Nice. I didn't know that.

48:08Josh Clark:these are the two that he pointed out he did nine different experiments but the two that he highlighted was at Cornell which is where BIM does his work

48:18Chuck Bryant:yeah and he's again a very respected psychologist and this study of these experiments was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology which is a respected journal

48:32Josh Clark:so the first one was a computer quiz they took 100 students It's 50 males and 50 women. And basically they showed a computer screen with two little curtains on it side by side and said behind one is nothing, a brick wall. And behind the other is something sexy.

48:51Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

48:52Josh Clark:Some kind of, you know, I was about to call it pornographic, but who knows? Maybe it's art. Nakedness. Eroticism. Eroticism. Yeah. Gross. Does this make you feel like your dad saying it or something? Yeah, well, this room's too small for you to say this. So basically he would say, you tell me what you think you're going to see. And they were all hooked up to machines to read what's going on in their body, of course. Right. And you would think it would be a 50-50 result, but they actually got a 53.1 % result for what Kralwich calls erotic stimuli. And basically they think, or at least that's what BIM thinks, is that one possibility is if they think they're going to see something erotically stimulating, then it got passed back through time.

49:52Chuck Bryant:Yeah, that's kind of his position is that retrocognition thing.

49:56Josh Clark:Yeah.

49:56Chuck Bryant:That somehow their future selves who saw the erotic image was stimulated enough that that stimulation traveled backwards three seconds and influenced their choice. Because they would be slightly stimulated physiologically, right, before they guessed. And he said before the computer even chose which one to show. Right. They were making their choices often correct. before the computer chose to show an erotic or non-erotic image. And 53%, it doesn't sound like much, but Crowe, which points out a couple of things. One, that when there was a control group that was shown just non-erotic pictures, they did 49.8 % correct, which is chance, 50-50.

50:41Chuck Bryant:And they were all not happy. Right. They were like, I don't want to be the control. They're like, can we get a little steamier in here? but he also pointed out that 53%, 53.1 to be specific, doesn't sound like much, but apparently that's a 0.2 % chance where on a scale between 0 and 1, where 0 is it's not going to happen and 1 is that it's definitely going to happen. And apparently as far as correlation goes or links between two things, something affecting another, a point two is about the same as the link between aspirin and heart attack prevention, the link between calcium intake and bone mass, the link between secondhand smoke and lung cancer.

51:31Josh Clark:So things that are touted is like, pay attention to this.

51:35Chuck Bryant:Yes. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So stuff that we accept is like, yeah, if you're around secondhand smoke, you can get cancer from that. This is probably poo-pooed. It's the same, exactly. Yeah. It is. And later on, a meta-analysis of BEMS experiments, some other experiments that were carried out afterward, and then some other experiments all grouped together, a meta-analysis showed that they weren't, it wasn't statistically significant if you took all of the existing body of literature of these experiments. Right. But it was a New Scientist article, and it was pretty cool. in the comment section, somebody said, yeah, it's not reproducible, but a lot of science isn't reproducible.

52:21Chuck Bryant:And it reminded me of our scientific method episode where apparently a lot of trials that pharmaceuticals are based on aren't reproducible. Wasn't it like 50 % of them or something like that? Yeah, which didn't surprise me, of course. Yeah.

52:35Josh Clark:All right, and then there was this other experiment that I need you to explain to me because I didn't understand it.

52:40Chuck Bryant:Okay, you ready?

52:40Josh Clark:Like, I got the first part, but it didn't make sense to me.

52:44Chuck Bryant:Because it's a little mind-blowing.

52:46Josh Clark:Yeah.

52:46Chuck Bryant:So you know how, like, if you are studying something and you write it down?

52:51Josh Clark:Yes.

52:52Chuck Bryant:It gets in your brain a little more?

52:53Josh Clark:Yeah, yeah. So that when you're tested on it later, you will recall it more easily. Yeah, that's a common study method. Write something down.

53:01Chuck Bryant:Okay, so Bem carried out a very simple experiment that did the opposite of that. First, he showed some people a bunch of words, 48 random words. I think nouns like tree or something like that.

53:13Josh Clark:Yeah, and he told them to visualize it though, right?

53:15Chuck Bryant:Right. So they saw all 48 words and thought about them.

53:18Josh Clark:Not visualize the letters, but visualize the thing. Right. Like see the tree in your head.

53:23Chuck Bryant:Just to kind of try to memorize all 48 words. Yeah. Then the computer randomly selected 24 of those words. Okay. And then after they'd done that, Bem gave them a test. of recall to see how many they recalled, right? Yes. So the people had to type out the words they recalled.

53:44Josh Clark:Yeah.

53:44Chuck Bryant:Then after that, the computer randomly selected 24 of the 48 words for the people to type after they'd already taken the test of recall. Yeah. And those 24 words are the ones that people more consistently got right on the earlier test.

54:03Josh Clark:Oh, okay.

54:04Chuck Bryant:So it's another example of that retrocognition that these people getting the words in their heads after the test somehow went backward and influenced their recall and memory for the test that they took before they learned them.

54:21Josh Clark:That makes more sense.

54:22Chuck Bryant:A little.

54:23Josh Clark:Yeah, it is a little. But see, time travel melts my brain too.

54:26Chuck Bryant:Right. So this guy published this stuff in like 2010. Yeah. And it made a huge, huge splash, huge criticism. The academic journal was criticized, and Ben was pilloried and all that, but he still put out these very reproducible, understandable, simple exercises that still showed, statistically speaking, there were some significant results that went beyond chance.

54:52Josh Clark:So when it comes to debunking ESP, one thing that you're not going to, you said fraud, you're not going to see a lot of people call researchers outright frauds because that's just sort of a dangerous thing to say. Sure. It's not nice. But there are people out there who I guess are criticized for basically trying to call out, and this is something completely different, but these onstage psychic shows.

55:20Chuck Bryant:Like crossing over with John Edwards.

55:21Josh Clark:Yeah, like it's easy to pick those people out and say, you're a big fraud and this is not true, of course, and all you're doing is cold reading. Cold reading we talked about in the animal pet psychics episode.

55:34Chuck Bryant:Right, right.

55:35Josh Clark:That's basically when you get up on stage and you say, sir, I'm sensing someone, you're having some trouble with another man in your life with the name of J or is it H or O? Maybe P. Or maybe it's P. Yes, P, my boss. Peter. Yes, yes, exactly. And that's all a cold reading is, is throwing out these really broad things that anyone can latch on to. Right. So it's really easy to call those people out. And there's a guy, sort of a guy famous for doing that. His name is James Randi. And he's famous for his offer of$1 million to anyone that can prove their psychic ability, which, of course, no one stepped up to do that.

56:18Josh Clark:But then he gets poo-pooed a little bit. But you're just making a mockery of trying to legitimately disprove something.

56:26Chuck Bryant:And mockery is absolutely the right word.

56:28Josh Clark:Yeah.

56:29Chuck Bryant:And to me, the presence of mockery indicates the absence of objectivity. Yeah. Right? So what you're dealing with then with a guy like that is a set of beliefs, a belief system running up against another belief system. Right. Just like a couple of religions or something like that. It's not objectivity against fraud or anything like that. It's belief against belief or something. And, yeah, the idea of lumping together John Edwards with Daryl Bem is just, that's fraudulent in and of itself.

57:04Josh Clark:Yeah, that's just, they call that theatrics just like the onstage theatrics of a stage psychic.

57:10Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

57:10Josh Clark:And I totally agree. Yeah. You know?

57:13Chuck Bryant:I do too. I think there's a definite room for a healthy scientific inquiry into just about anything, whether skeptics believe in it or not.

57:23Josh Clark:Sure. If you can get some funding for it, who cares? Nice. That's my motto.

57:28Chuck Bryant:You got anything else on ESP? Let me think. No. I've got one more thing I found. I came across a 1995 nightline with Ted Koppel where the news broke that the CIA had been studying ESP and trying to do remote viewing, what Ronson was talking about in The Men Who Stare at Goats.

57:51Josh Clark:Oh, yeah, John Ronson.

57:52Chuck Bryant:When it finally became declassified in 1995, Ted Koppel did a 20-minute nightline segment on it. Totally worth watching. It's some pretty softball questions, But Robert Gates, who would later become the head of defense, he's on there just basically trying as politely as possible to show that he does not believe in any of this, even though he was the former CIA director. It's just neat. Plus you get to watch Koppel again. Right. He was great newsman.

58:21Josh Clark:Yeah, I miss those dudes. I was just thinking yesterday about Brokaw.

58:26Chuck Bryant:Yeah, rather?

58:28Josh Clark:I was always a Brokaw man.

58:30Chuck Bryant:I liked Peter Jennings. He was great.

58:33Josh Clark:Yeah. All of them were great. I don't even have any idea who does Night in the News now. I don't watch it anymore.

58:38Chuck Bryant:It was Brian Williams until about a day ago. Did he get fired? He got...

58:44Josh Clark:I know the whole kerfuffle, but he didn't get fired for that, did he?

58:47Chuck Bryant:I'm using my ESP to predict that by the time this comes out, he will not be there anymore. Wow. I think this is getting big quick. Interesting. Yeah, Twitter's involved. Oh, man. the Twitter takedown. Yeah. If you want to know more about ESP, the internet was virtually set up for you to go find out more about it. You can start by typing ESP in the search bar at howstuffworks.com. Since I said that, it's time for listener mail.

59:16Josh Clark:Yeah, before we do listener mail, I just want to give a quick shout out to my buddy Isaac McNary. If you remember, I did a Judge John Hodgman episode with Emily in which I did a bad home renovation. and this dude, Stuff You Should Know listener from Kansas, carpenter, master carpenter, said, hey man, I'll come and stay with you and help you do your project there right. And I said, this sounds crazy. And he actually came and did it. And it looks awesome. And he's a super cool guy. And if you're in Kansas, near El Dorado, Kansas, there's no better guy to hire. The fabled city of El Dorado, Kansas?

59:54Josh Clark:It's El Dorado, actually. Okay. He has to point out. But not only is he a great carpenter and a cool guy, but he works with a nonprofit called Outreach Program. And you can find it at outreachprogram.org where they're basically feeding the world. They package food and they get people together in a room and package these mass quantities of food to send to other countries and feed the hungry. And he's just a really good dude. So thanks to Isaac for that. And my kitchen is looking good. So again, for his nonprofit, that is outreachprogram.org. And if you need a great carpenter and you're in Kansas, check out Retrofit Remodeling.

1:00:32Chuck Bryant:Nice.

1:00:33Josh Clark:All right. Listener mail. I'm going to call this pronunciation help. Hey, guys. I'm a botanist and just wanted to throw you a rope to help you out with pronouncing plant family names. All plant family names end in A-C-E-A-E.

1:00:49Chuck Bryant:Oh, yeah. I thought I got that wrong.

1:00:51Josh Clark:It is a mess of vowels, guys. When you read it, you should just imagine you were spelling A-C-E as in A-C-E. So when you read a plant, a family name, just break off the A-C-E and read the first part and then spell A-C-E. So the plant family for poison oak is Anacardia CE. So it's just Anacardia CE. I remember it by imagining the aneurysm and cardiac arrest I would have if I fell into it. A-N-A-C-A-R-D-I. What? Well, she spelled out Anacardi. Oh, gotcha. The first two first letters from each of those words. Anyway, guys, I love your podcast. Find it endearing when you two puzzle out on pronunciations.

1:01:40Josh Clark:A-C-E. A-C-E. That's good to know. Yeah. So, love you bunches. And that is from Jane. And she said, P.S. In Europe, they pronounce plant families completely differently. Other parts of the U.S. might have other conventions, but the above pronunciation is standard. And California.

1:01:59Chuck Bryant:Oh, well.

1:02:03Chuck Bryant:Okay. What? A.C. A.C. If you want to let us know something that we should have known before we even recorded, but you're generous enough with your time and effort to correct us, I guess is a way to put it. Sure. That was very helpful. Thanks a lot, Jane. If you want to be like Jane, in other words, you can send us an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.

1:02:30Josh Clark:Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

1:02:46Chuck Bryant:Stuff at Sea is a five-night, adults-only sailing trip that brings the Stuff Podcast universe to life on board. This voyage is a culture-soaked escape where pink sand paradise meets curious minds. Sailing round trip from New York City to Bermuda on October 2nd to 7th, 2026, this voyage drops you straight into the iHeart Podcast Stuff universe. On top of the adults-only experience you already love, you'll get live podcast episode recordings behind-the-scenes sessions, themed activations, and more unmissable onboard moments. Learn more at virginvoyages.com slash stuff.

1:03:20Josh Clark:If audiobooks are your thing and you've been meaning to listen to more of them, you should check out a podcast called Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audio Club, hosted by Cal Penn. Each episode spotlights standout audiobooks on Audible across all kinds of genres, sci-fi, comedy, romance, thrillers, and more, with Cal talking to guests who help break down what makes each story worth listening to. It's a fun, easy way to discover your next great audiobook. Check out Earsay on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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