Podcast Summary: New Directions in Remote Viewing with Chase from Social-RV
Podcast: New Thinking Allowed Audio Podcast
Host: Jeffrey Mishlove
Guest: Chase McCarty, founder of Social-RV
Date: November 20, 2025
Theme: Exploring innovative, technology-forward directions in remote viewing, focusing on the development, data collection, and potentials of Social-RV—a new empirical platform for testing and practicing remote viewing.
Episode Overview
This episode delves into remote viewing's current frontiers, focusing on Social-RV—a new web platform offering large-scale, transparent, and AI-assisted remote viewing assessments. Host Jeffrey Mishlove interviews developer Chase McCarty, discussing Social-RV’s origins, features, statistical findings, and its broader impact on the study and practice of remote viewing and ESP. The conversation covers technology, methodology, and the prospects for training and validating psychic abilities.
Key Discussion Points and Insights
1. Chase’s Skeptical Beginnings and Platform Motivation
- Chase McCarty entered remote viewing with an open-minded skepticism, motivated to empirically determine its reality.
- He sees the world as more "fun and magical" if such phenomena are real but insisted on "hard data" before drawing conclusions.
"I'd like to say, to be clear, I would have more preferred it to be real than not... But I certainly didn't want to delude myself." (03:04)
- Inspired by renewed interest in psi-related phenomena in early 2025, he used a sabbatical to design experiments and eventually develop Social-RV (04:00–05:53).
2. Technical Foundations: AI and Blockchain
- Chase is a Silicon Valley software engineer with roots in AI and blockchain.
- AI: Social-RV uses advanced AI to score and analyze remote viewing transcripts, comparing session data to multiple possible targets.
- Blockchain: Provides transparency and guarantees sessions’ integrity, demonstrating they are blind and time-stamped; participants cannot see the target before submitting responses.
"We're just using this immutable public list of messages to show that like hey, this happened at X time and this is what happened and this can never be changed." (07:06)
3. Social-RV Platform Features
- Scale & Openness: Nearly 5,000 public remote viewing sessions, available for anyone to review, with around 1,000 precognitive trials and nearly 900 registered users.
"You don't even have to make an account to look through the sessions." (09:12)
- Free Practice: Users can practice daily without paid courses, judged against 10-image pools using both AI and user scoring (10:55–11:59).
"You can practice every day if people want on your system with practice targets that are then evaluated… And the user can also judge their own trial at the same time." (10:55)
- Judging Transparency: AI ranks target matches, provides reasoning, and collects user feedback to iteratively improve itself. Community consensus also plays a role (13:57–17:26).
- Category Analytics & Multimodal Judging (Coming Soon): Plans to identify users’ strengths in specific data categories (e.g., cars, buildings) and offer multimodal AI that understands both handwritten text and doodles.
4. Statistical Findings & Implications
- Above-Chance Results: The main metric—how often viewers’ sessions are ranked as among the top-fitting targets—shows statistically significant results above chance (1, 2, 3 out of 10).
"We see that they do tend to get ranked 1, 2 and 3 more often, which is very exciting." (12:01)
- Learning Curve: Data suggest users improve with practice, countering the “decline effect” sometimes found in parapsychology.
"Over time, per user, we're seeing them get better." (22:37)
- Judging Challenges: Both AI and human judges exhibit variability and bias; inter- and intra-judge correlations are lower than expected, a consistent challenge in remote viewing research (18:41–19:37).
5. Transparency, Replicability, and Community Impact
- Public Data: Unlike previous large-scale studies, Social-RV sessions and scoring are entirely open for inspection and replication.
"This is the largest collection of publicly explorable, publicly visible sessions in the world already." (20:58)
- Open Source Methods: Statistical techniques and AI code will be publicly available for independent verification (20:58–21:54).
- Competitions and Community: Social-RV holds prize competitions to stimulate participation and invites engagement through external forums on Reddit and Discord (36:01–37:26).
6. Future Directions
- Associative Remote Viewing (ARV): Plans to use Social-RV’s infrastructure for ARV experiments, exploring if group remote viewing can reliably predict events (e.g., sports, financial markets).
"We're going to see like what happens, you know, do we make money, do we not…" (27:01)
- Emotional Factors: Recognition that emotional involvement (especially around money in ARV) might disrupt accuracy; future experiments may seek to test this hypothesis (29:45–31:08).
- User Feedback and Expansion: Continuing to refine the platform with user-requested features, better analytics, and more robust community tools.
Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments
Skepticism meets magic:
"Even if they're just stories, then they're good science fiction stories because they might be true…" — Chase McCarty (03:04)
On transparency:
"Anybody, any open minded skeptic, any person forever, can come to the site, can see all of our sessions and can verify for themselves that they are 100% blind, unmodified…" — Chase McCarty (05:31)
On AI and Blockchain in research:
"We have one of the first non Ponzi use cases for blockchain... Ours is not at all about money." — Chase McCarty (07:06)
On user learning:
"We're seeing that the viewers are getting better the more that they practice…" — Chase McCarty (22:37)
On traditional judging:
"There was very low agreement among different judges… The interjudge correlation should be much higher than it actually is." — Jeffrey Mishlove (18:41)
On ARV and skepticism:
"...if you can predict the stock market, why aren't you rich, why aren't you exceedingly wealthy? And they are not exceedingly wealthy." — Chase McCarty (27:54)
On the emotional challenge of ARV:
"It seems to me that the strong emotions that we have associated with either the having money or not having money can interfere with the calm state of mind that is usually the state that is most conducive to ESP reception." — Jeffrey Mishlove (29:45)
Important Timestamps
- 03:04 — Chase describes his skeptical-yet-hopeful approach to remote viewing and the genesis of Social-RV.
- 07:06 — Discussion about blockchain and transparency in remote viewing data.
- 09:12 — Overview of the platform’s scope and user base.
- 12:01 — Detailed explanation of AI judging with 10-target pools.
- 16:04 — Multimodal AI analysis of both drawings and text in viewing transcripts.
- 18:41 — Discussion on the variability and reliability of both AI and human judging.
- 22:37 — Statistical findings about improvement and the learning curve.
- 27:01 — Plans to deploy ARV protocols and tackle the "why not rich?" question.
- 29:45 — The emotional pitfalls of applying ESP to money and future ARV experiments.
- 36:09 — Overview of competitions and prize-winning incentives for participation.
Conclusion & Takeaways
The conversation showcases Social-RV as a uniquely transparent, technology-driven experiment in remote viewing validation and training, combining robust scientific design with community and openness. Chase McCarty’s platform addresses many pitfalls in previous remote viewing research—such as lack of transparency, repeatability, and accessibility—and offers an evolving resource both for newcomers and serious psi researchers.
For listeners, Social-RV presents an unprecedented opportunity to explore remote viewing for themselves, test claims directly, and engage in an ambitious attempt to answer old questions with new tools.