1304: Remote Viewing | Skeptical Sunday

26:02And it's getting a little far afield, but like, it doesn't make it any less cool or impressive. No, I agree. It's actually more impressive because if it's magic, you just go, not that I would believe it. Oh, it's magic. But if you're like, I'm still like, how did he guess Tom Brady's pin number? What the hell? And then it's like, how did he know the girl I kissed when I was in preschool? Like that's just outright incredible. Absolutely insane. The fact that it's a trick keeps me and he admits it keeps me thinking about it much longer than if I were, let's say, a believer in magic. And I was like, well, it's magic.

26:34Nothing to think about here. I can't do it. And he can. The fact that it's a trick has me thinking about it. I'll be thinking about it for years. Like I was the guy who guessed North Korea. I'm like, where was, Was there a camera? Did he overhear me? Does he have secret mics? Was my friend in on the trick? I just don't understand how he did it. And I never will. And I'm going to think about it for 20 years. So I'm with it. That's the way you should handle it. But I would love to drop some links to Randy and the Carson thing in the show notes. Yeah, I'll make sure to drop links related to James Randy's expose and the Johnny Carson appearance in the show notes.

27:06And it's also awesome because it's from, I believe, the era when people smoked cigarettes on television. yeah so he's smoking a cigarette at the desk i know i just whenever i see those clips i'm like holy smokes i think larry king used to do that too although it might have been before he was on television he was just on radio but it was like yeah those guys were just popping down unfiltered camels live tv maybe slightly pre-recorded tv crazy that was my brand man so you're really making me miss cigarettes yeah we used to be a proper country so what came out after the publication in Nature was that precisely no scientist had ever seen Uri Geller bend a spoon that he hadn't touched.

27:45In fact, they were letting him disappear into the bathroom with spoons. And for the most part, they were just taking his word for it. Sure, that's science. So not totally related to remote viewing, but it does say a lot about the work that was coming out of the Institute at Stanford. Come on, man. Yeah, exactly. Were there any other studies in mainstream scientific journals about this supposedly psychic work that was taking place at the Stanford Institute? As for other major publications, in 1976, the Journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers ran a supportive paper by Targ and Puthoff.

28:24Much like the Nature article, there was massive pushback from the scientific community about their methodology. Okay, in what way? The scientific community figured out that they weren't following standard protocols that apply to experimental psychology, which is a real thing. One of the main things that they found was that despite claims of being double blind, there was tons of evidence that the viewers were being given cues about their targets. Eventually, external reviewers decided that what they were doing did not even meet the bar to qualify as science. which I'm sure was just confirmation to a lot of people that the man was trying to shut all this down that's a common theme that runs throughout this and I think it's kind of important to note that science is simply the scientific method it's simply applying a set of epistemic principles to your research to say that they're not meeting that bar is not to say well they found some kooky stuff so we're throwing it all out it's saying that they're not meeting the bar for what counts as the scientific method.

29:31The more the psychic researchers and remote viewers are discredited, though, the more people want to believe that there's some shadowy conspiracy to suppress the truth. My first reaction is that if the United States government spent tons of money on it, there has to be something to it. And I know that's not great logic. Sarcasm again. Again, I can't tell. You know, again, now that the words have come out of my mouth, I also cannot tell. I guess it's probably too hard for me to believe, even though I should, that the U.S. government would waste money on just something as dumb as this. But now, once again, as those words come out of my mouth, it should not surprise me in any way at all that the U.S.

30:12government is willing to light millions, tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on fire for something as obviously fake as this. Yeah, there's all kinds of government programs that are just on their face stupid. This was particularly true during the Cold War when anyone who promised a new way to get the drop on the Ruskies was almost certainly guaranteed an eight-figure budget to do so. I mean, and the other kind of like factor in terms of this is like money is absolutely falling out of the sky in general in the 50s and 60s and 70s, but especially for Cold War research, anything that's going to help get an edge in the Cold War.

30:54There's money for that. Specific examples in practice for people who just think, oh, Nick Pell's the guy who hates the government. Which you are. I am, but there's things that I just, they're like, yeah, I don't really know about that. And then there's stuff that's, come on, this is stupid. Project Blue Book, which was dedicated to UFOs. There were attempts to communicate with dolphins. There's this whole wave of interest in the paranormal and psychic phenomenon during the 60s. obviously there's the whole New Age movement and broader culture, but the United States government was not immune to this.

31:27Some people in the government were definitely convinced that you could train soldiers to be psychic spies. The government may have wasted millions of dollars on fake psychics, but you don't have to waste a dime thanks to the great deals on the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. This episode is also sponsored by Superpower. There's really nothing more important than your health. You can have success and a wonderful family, but if your health goes sideways, everything else gets a lot less important fast. What's frustrating is so much of the system is built around reacting once something goes wrong rather than getting ahead of it to make smarter decisions before things become a bigger issue.

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34:38Hire right the first time. Post your first job and get$100 off toward your job post at linkedin.com slash harbinger. That's linkedin.com slash harbinger. Terms and conditions apply. Thank you for listening to and supporting the show. All the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the podcast are searchable and clickable on the website at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Now for the rest of Skeptical Sunday. I knew about Project Blue Book, the dolphins thing I've not heard. That one's new to me. To be fair, some of it is less weird than you would think, like trying to train dolphins to find explosive underwater mines, which works, by the way.

35:15Yeah. So I think I have heard of it. That's definitely less crazier than I thought. Didn't they recently find a dolphin from the Russian military in the water near Norway or something like that? I mean, I think we still have these kinds of programs. That specific example, I'm not aware of, but I do know that, yes, they've had some success in training dolphins to find things, which is, yeah, that's not telling me that you can see what's going on Saturn. That's telling me that you've trained a mammal to perform a task, which like happens every day. Yes. This is the nautical equivalent of having your dog catch a Frisbee.

35:49It's not supernatural. It's just cool. Yeah. Or like I live in a tiny little town. We got police dogs. Like you can train smart mammals to do things like no kidding. I'm not surprised by this. Did they ever actually find anything to confirm that remote viewing had any merit at all, basically? Wow, this is going to be the shocker of the episode. I hope everybody's ready. Drumroll. They did not. Womp womp. And look, I know that this is so anticlimactic, but it's the most important part of the story because the United States government spent over 20 years, multiple programs with these fanciful code names, and they could not point to a single example where remote viewing produced actionable intelligence.

36:42So, why did it go on for so long? I think a lot of reasons, ranging from wishful thinking to government largesse to bad methodology. The line item for this on a budget compared to nukes is tiny. and everyone working on it wanted it to be real. The studies were often supposed to be double-blind, but in practice they were single-blind and that allows the monitor to suddenly cue the viewer. I know what you mean when you say double-blind and single-blind, but can you just briefly explain those for people who might not know? Double-blind study means that neither the viewer nor the monitor know what the target is or anything about it.

37:23Single-blind would mean that the monitor knows. Single blind studies have an inherent flaw in them, but that doesn't make them totally useless. Single blind studies are very helpful at getting us all kinds of information. But in this case, however, the concern is that the monitors eager to confirm that remote viewing worked were finding ways to cue the viewers consciously or otherwise. They could be doing it unconsciously just because they really want the guy to succeed. The other thing is, okay, the viewer described something and so what? It's cold? Okay, is that like absolute zero? Is that Chicago in January?

38:03Is that the Arctic Circle? Is it the inside of my fridge? Cold covers every temperature below 50 degrees. Right, yeah. Do we mean hoodie weather or the deepest reaches of outer space? Exactly. And you can apply this to so many vague adjectives. Big object. Okay, so is it a Mack truck, a skyscraper, a planet, a super cluster of black holes at the center of a galaxy? What exactly are you talking about? You could describe my son as being big. He's a large eight-year-old. This could be anything. What the hell is big? And a lot of descriptions were at that level of detail. It's a large, cold object.

38:43Cool, is that an iceberg or the planet Pluto? I don't know if Pluto's a planet this week or not, but... Yeah, not a planet anymore, I think. But yes, exactly. One actual example of a description was a windmill, the description of which was a large metallic object. That could be like a Costco-sized can of soup or an F-16. Yeah. What was the government response to spending all that money on something that turned out to be totally useless? Just finger pointing to other people? Look at the war on poverty, Jordan. The government can flush trillions of dollars completely down the toilet. There's no accountability.

39:21Yes, government bad. But still there has to be some kind of official response to the government spending nine figures on psychic super spies that turned out to be completely fake. The CIA hired the American Institutes for Research to look at the programs as a whole. The two main researchers were Jessica Utz, who was a pro-parapsychology statistician, and Ray Hyman, a skeptical psychologist. What they found was that the studies were, and I quote, statistically interesting, whatever that means, but they were operationally useless. There was absolutely nothing they could use. Remote viewers sometimes accurately described general features like a large building, something metallic or near water.

40:04Again, near water is like there could be a pool down the street. But there wasn't a single case where remote viewing gave unique, verifiable information. These studies were junk. What did they get that was, what was it statistically interesting or at the very least interesting? What did they find? One of the big things that the supporters of remote viewing point to is a man named Pat Price saying there was a crane near a Soviet nuclear facility. Okay, so was there a crane near a Soviet nuclear facility? There was, but pictures of it had already leaked. He could have seen them, and either way, cool, man.

40:48Crane near a Soviet nuclear facility. So what? How many Soviet nuclear facilities are there? How many of them have had a crane near them at some point? I would bet damn near close to all of them have had a crane by them at some point. So to give this a little extra color, Pat Price was a former police officer who claimed that he was seeing underground bases guarded by aliens. Oh, wow. I think I know the answer to this. But were there aliens guarding underground bases? Not that we ever found. Pat Price died of a heart attack in Las Vegas, which his supporters claim was a government hit. Yes, the government always uses cocaine and strippers to take their victims out in Vegas.

41:33Honestly, looking at all your examples, I could get that level of accuracy if I tried. Ah, there's a big piece of equipment near a big smokestack looking thing at a nuclear facility. And it's like, correct. Literally every single. Yeah. There's millions of dollars in government contracts just waiting for you. Sadly, they stopped handing them out in 1995. There's money in the banana stand. There are other examples that proponents will point to, like finding hostages or missing planes, but all of these broke down under closer scrutiny. There's several things at work making remote viewing have the veneer of legitimacy.

42:10First, there's what's called apophenia, a good word to know because it's the tendency of the human brain to want to find patterns. Okay. Seeing clouds that are shaped like things or seeing a face in a clock or something that's not really there, right? Is that what you're talking about? Your brain is just hardwired to find patterns. So if you look at any random data, you're going to start making connections. So what? Doesn't mean anything. Yeah. The guy, was his name John Nash in A Beautiful Mind? And he's got the string that are connecting all the things that aren't there on the corkboard. He was mentally ill and people found that.

42:47look i read william burroughs at too young of an age and he's got a whole thing that he calls the 23 enigma and how you're gonna see the number 23 everywhere and it's like yeah i'm gonna see it everywhere now because you told me to see it confirmation bias or whatever it's called yeah which is another thing that's involved in this which is retroactive confirmation so for example swan said that jupiter as in the planet had rings before the voyager saw that there were super faint rings there. And it's like, did he predict that? Maybe. He probably just got lucky. What a lot of remote viewers described could be considered Barnum statements.

43:26These are statements that are generic enough that they could be describing just about anything. And this was a lot of what remote viewing described. Experimental bias always impacts studies, and it's why double-blind protocols are so important, especially when you're studying something as bizarre as remote viewing. Finally, Occam's Razor, simple explanations were just better than fanciful ones. Random chance and lucky guessing are just simpler than having to believe in some elaborate mythos about how remote viewing supposedly works. The CIA said, and I'm quoting, begin the quote, no remote viewing report ever provided actionable intelligence, end quote.

44:08The few apparent hits were indistinguishable from chance or lucky guessing. So it's good work if you can get it, I suppose. For anyone wanting to know more, the CIA's 1995 Stargate documents, those are declassified and available online now, as is the report from the American Institutes for Research. Skeptical critiques by Ray Hyman and others are likewise available online. We can drop some of those in the show notes as well. Before we move on from this, I do want to just briefly say that there's also an authority halo these studies had. Real scientists are working on it and senior officers. While the anecdotes felt somewhat compelling to some people, it wasn't as if no one was complaining about it.

44:50One DIA memo complained that remote viewing reports produced excessive generalities and required too much interpretation to be of operational use. Yeah, you could say that again. There's definitely a lot of weird science projects that were going on in the military and intelligence communities during the Cold War. But this one just strikes me as especially odd because they they just got absolutely nothing in the way of results. Right. So at least MKUltra tells us you can psychically torture a promising young math student at Harvard into becoming the Unabomber. Wait, really? Oh, yeah, man. Uncle Ted was an MKUltra test subject.

45:29Wow. Wow. Man, you know a lot about the Unabomber. He's the most important thinker of post-war America, and you can fight me on that. Anyway, in any event, I guess I see your point that even MKUltra did something, even if the something that it did wasn't what they expected. This, on the other hand, though, this just seems like they just flushed that money down the toilet. So what happened after they closed up shop on Stargate and other projects? I get the sense these scientists, they didn't just go gently into the good night of normal private sector employment. They're not reformulating toothpaste or whatever, right?

46:03No, no, no. Like any government program that's been cut that has an actual private sector demand, they went commercial. So what? Training people how to do remote viewing from the comfort of their home and 12 easy lessons. You get a Zoom course from these guys. Yeah, that's basically it. Joseph McMonigle, who was one of the first people recruited for the Stargate program, he kept the faith. He said it totally worked. And not only that, you could use it to see the future of the past. He currently sells programs on mastering remote viewing, among other things. And some courses will tell you how to remote view the stock market.

46:39And I assume that that course is free because he's so rich himself from remote viewing the stock market that he doesn't need any money. So how much do these programs cost, actually? As an aside, anyone selling trading programs sucks at trading. And that's why they're selling programs and not trading. Of course. Yeah. Like if you have an in on the next Bitcoin, like what you're doing is bank borrow and steal money to invest in it, not teaching people a course on how to spot the next Bitcoin. Yeah. So the course is on how to, I don't know about hacking the stock market with remote viewing, but the courses range anywhere from$79 for three hours, all the way up to about 3000.

47:15But to take the master course, you have to buy all the lower level courses. So it adds up pretty quickly if you're fully invested in it. You can also pay for one-on-one training with senior instructors like Mick Monigle. That sounds somewhat lucrative. Other people were not quite so shameless. Russell Targ made documentaries about the subject that likewise said that remote viewing was very real, but they're not skeptical or critical and they do their best to dress the subject up with a veneer of science. John Ronson wrote the book The Men Who Stare at Goats, which is historically more accurate than the movie.

47:49The book at least purports to be nonfiction. He's just a writer, but I just wanted to include it here because I do think it's just part of the broader trend of people making money off of remote viewing. Yeah, you mentioned the Stanford Research Institute was kind of the hub for a lot of this. Are they still around today or did they get shut down with Stargate? No, they're still with us. They're called SRI International. And believe it or not, They gave us Siri. I thought that was Apple Siri. So that wasn't from Apple? No, it was SRI and Apple bought it off of them. The thing about SRI is that they're just generally engaged in various forms of research.

48:25The psychic stuff was always just one of many different things they were doing. I see. So they went from doing some of the most useless pseudoscientific research that has ever been conducted and moved into creating important and critical technology that I use literally every day of my life, mostly because I have no choice because Siri still completely sucks. But I digress. I don't use it enough, but I'll take your word for it. They were always doing real research at SRI. It's more just that the woo crept in because there was money to be made. Why not? I have to say, man, I'm a little bummed out at how much of a complete and total nothing burger this all is.

49:03I kind of expected it to be one of those episodes where we learn that there's something to it or even that it was like inconclusive, but it looks like we came up really short. It's not even inconclusive. It's just completely not a thing at all, full stop. Yeah, I believe in it if you like, but no science has ever been done to prove. Yeah, it's as real as the tooth fairy so far. Yeah, I definitely did want to find something for the listeners to grapple with in terms of is this real? Is there any truth to this that I can cling to and have some kind of doubt, but it's not real. It's totally not real.

49:40The really interesting story for me is how much money people were able to make off of something that is completely and unmistakably fake. I have to say, I wonder what my tax dollars are funding today that is taking the niche that remote viewing once occupied. Exactly. Do they rededicate the budget to some other kind of mind reading crap or whatever? Do you think they're still researching stuff like remote viewing? I think they're researching something equally stupid. Yeah, I wouldn't doubt it. I think there's a deeper lesson to be learned here. You can make a study say anything, and they did just that for years.

50:18Even if the claims made by a research paper seem sound on their face, you might have to dig deeper to find the problem, and knowing the most basic scientific principles can help you cut through quackery. Scientists, even well-meaning ones, can and do make mistakes, and in the case of remote viewing, some were true believers who saw what they wanted while others were probably just there for a check. Thanks to Nick for helping us get the 10 ,000-foot view of this nonsense. And thank you for listening. Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to me, Jordan at jordanharbinger.com.

50:47Advertisers, discounts, deals, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. I'm at jordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And this show, it's created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Tata Sidlowskis, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, Gabriel Mizrahi. Our advice and opinions are our own, and I am a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. Of course, we try to get these as right as we can, and not everything is gospel, even if it's fact-checked. So consult a professional before applying anything you hear on the show, especially if it's about your health and well-being.

51:19Remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love. If you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism and knowledge that we doled out today. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time. What if mind reading wasn't magic at all, but the result of empathy, psychology, and awareness? In this preview, world-renowned mentalist Ose Perlman reveals the real secrets of influence, charisma, and truly seeing others. I know how people think. A mentalist is kind of a subset of magic.

51:52Misdirection, influencing, deception. But it's not magic. The things you convey to me, your nonverbal communication, the way you pause, the way you enunciate, the way I move you in a certain direction by speaking very quick and then going very slow. All of that is my instrument on how I can entertain you, create memorable moments, but do things that appear to be psychic, appear to have no explanation that I can seemingly read your mind. But I can't read minds. I read people. It's not supernatural. It's not psychic. I want people to know that. I am not talking to dead people or trying to rip you off.

52:29I've spent almost 30 years reverse engineering the human mind. It's the skills of a mentalist used in your everyday world. Cold reading, learning all the skills, learning how to manage audiences, learning how people think. If you boil down what my real skill is, it's not fooling you. It's not entertaining you. It's creating memorable moments. And you have to define what that really means. Memorable moments are ones that people tell others about. And that's my secret to success. If you know how people think to create deeper bonds and better your relationships and increase your sales, it's going to help your life.

53:04Active listening and using your memory as your superpower, it's the ultimate cheat code in life. You can find something about anyone. To learn how small cues and genuine curiosity can make anyone more influential, confident, and connected, check out episode 1230 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. you