1304: Remote Viewing | Skeptical Sunday

Summary

Remote Viewing | Skeptical Sunday

The Jordan Harbinger Show, Ep. 1304 (March 29, 2026)
With Jordan Harbinger & Nick Pell

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Episode Overview

In this Skeptical Sunday edition, Jordan Harbinger and researcher Nick Pell take a deep dive into "remote viewing" — the claim that people can perceive distant or hidden targets via extrasensory perception (ESP). They explore the wild history of government-funded psychic research, dissect the scientific claims, and unravel decades of pseudoscience, bureaucratic follies, and why the U.S. government spent millions trying to train psychic spies. The duo offers a skeptical, entertaining, and deeply informative breakdown for anyone curious about the stranger corners of Cold War science.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

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What is Remote Viewing?

• Definition: The ability to "see" distant, unseen targets (places, objects, events) using supposed psychic powers (ESP).
  • Nick Pell [03:08]: "The strictest definition of remote viewing is the ability to perceive distant and unseen targets using extrasensory perception, commonly known as ESP."
• Framed as a "scientized" version of clairvoyance, intending to sound more credible than "psychic" or "astral projection."

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Historical Context & Early Research

• Origin: U.S. government interest sparked in the 1960s/70s amid Cold War paranoia — partially in response to alleged Soviet ESP research.
• JB Rhine:
  • Parapsychology pioneer at Duke; tried to conduct scientific studies on ESP but with flawed methods and poor replicability.
  • Nick Pell [08:09]: "He's a serious scientist, but... he's kind of not a very good one. The general consensus is that he's not a fraud. He's just... He has really bad methodology."
• Rhine Research Center still active, focusing more on "explaining how ESP works" than on proving it exists.

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Remote Viewing, Project Stargate, and Cold War Weirdness

• Project Stargate (and predecessors: Grill Flame, Sun Streak, etc.): Military program at Fort Meade (formally consolidated in 1991, ended 1995) to test and operationalize remote viewing.
• Prompted by: Reports that the Soviets were spending vast sums on psychic research (~$125M/year in modern dollars).
• Nick Pell [10:56]: "You're going to think this is nuts. 1991... They actually closed this project in 1995."
• Jordan [11:01]: "So as recently as when I'm 11 years old, the government is still trying to figure out how to train soldiers to see things on the other side of the planet with their mind."

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Science or Pseudoscience?

• Protocols:
  • Sessions were supposedly “double-blind,” with a facilitator guiding a “viewer” unaware of the target (often just random coordinates or photos).
  • Derived from attempts to “make psychic phenomena scientific.”
• The field was largely shaped by Ingo Swann (artist, self-proclaimed psychic), and researchers Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff at Stanford Research Institute (SRI).
• SRI: Originally affiliated with Stanford University but independent since the 1970s.

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Famous Psychics (and Flimflam)

• Uri Geller:
  • Mentalist popularized "spoon bending." Studied at SRI, but exposed thoroughly as a magician using tricks — unable to perform under test conditions (famously humiliated on Johnny Carson's show with James Randi present).
  • Nick Pell [23:19]: "He was completely exposed by James Randi as not doing real magic."
• Notable magicians (Penn & Teller, Oz Perlman) regularly emphasize their acts are tricks, not magic — unlike many "psychics."

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Scientific Community Response

• Major papers in Nature and IEEE journals, but widely criticized for poor methodology; claims of double-blind protocols often false.
• Cueing Contamination: "Viewers" could be influenced by subtle or unconscious cues, destroying experiment integrity.
• Jordan [38:16]: "So many vague adjectives. Big object. Okay, so is it a Mack truck? A skyscraper, a planet?...A lot of descriptions were at that level of detail."
• Replication — crucial in science — never succeeded for Rhine, SRI, or military studies.
• Authority halo: Some credence was given because “real scientists” and “government officials” were involved.

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Why Did the Government Fund This For So Long?

• Nick Pell [36:51]: "A lot of reasons, ranging from wishful thinking to government largesse to bad methodology. The line item for this compared to nukes is tiny, and everyone working on it wanted it to be real."
• Cold War mindset: Spending on any potential advantage felt justified, no matter how unlikely. “If the Soviets are doing it, we can’t fall behind,” even if results were nil.

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Results: Was Anything Ever Found?

• No actionable intelligence was ever generated by remote viewing programs.
  • Nick Pell [36:11]: "They could not point to a single example where remote viewing produced actionable intelligence."
• Occasional "hits" (like spotting a crane near a Soviet facility) were explainable by chance, leaks, or the vagueness of descriptions.
  • Jordan [41:19]: "Pat Price was a former police officer who claimed he was seeing underground bases guarded by aliens."
• Final government review:
  • Statistically “interesting,” but "operationally useless."
  • Nick Pell [40:24]: "There wasn't a single case where remote viewing gave unique verifiable information. These studies were junk."
• Psychological explanations:
  • Apophenia: Pattern-seeking; brains connect unrelated data.
  • Confirmation bias: Cherry-picking hits after the fact.
  • Barnum statements: Vague enough to fit almost anything.
  • Experimenter bias: Facilitators unwittingly influencing outcomes.

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Where Did All the ‘Psychic Spies’ Go?

• Many transitioned to selling remote viewing courses to the public ($79 to $3,000+ for “master” classes).
  • Nick Pell [46:09]: "They went commercial. Joseph McMonagle... he currently sells programs on mastering remote viewing, among other things."
• SRI became SRI International, now famous for creating Siri (the Apple voice assistant).
• The psychic research was always a tiny component at SRI.
• Popular non-fiction/fiction continues to mine this material (e.g., The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On Pseudoscience in Serious Places

• Nick Pell [04:59]: “Parapsychology is, like, psychic stuff. So it’s like, bullshit. It’s a scientific field that studies something that is not real. So far, yeah.”

On Remote Viewing Protocols

• Nick Pell [19:57]: “Eventually the target just becomes a string of random numbers... The viewer goes through a series of steps or stages to determine what the target is. It’s a whole process that runs from basic vague impressions to detailed 3D modeling.”

On Mentalists vs. Psychics

• Jordan [25:10]: “It doesn’t make it any less cool or impressive. It’s actually more impressive because if it’s magic… But if you’re like, ‘How did he know the girl I kissed in preschool?’ That’s just outright incredible.”

On The Scientific Method (or Lack Thereof)

• Nick Pell [27:36]: “The scientific community figured out that they weren’t following standard protocols… despite claims of being double blind, there was tons of evidence that the viewers were being given cues about their targets.”
• Jordan [50:40]: “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.”

On Apophenia and Confirmation Bias

• Nick Pell [43:08]: “What a lot of remote viewers described could be considered Barnum statements. These are statements that are generic enough that they could be describing just about anything.”

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Notable Timestamps

• [02:15] — Introduction to Project Stargate and remote viewing as government project
• [04:53] — Founding of parapsychology and JB Rhine’s studies
• [07:30] — Classic ESP tests and failure to replicate
• [09:42] — Genesis of U.S. military psychic programs, Stargate consolidation
• [19:24] — “Remote viewing protocols” and how sessions were structured
• [22:07] — Origin of protocols, Ingo Swann, SRI, and Uri Geller’s involvement
• [27:15] — Pushback from scientific journals, methodological criticisms
• [36:11] — “They did not...” — finding: 0 intelligence produced by remote viewing
• [40:24] — Government’s official assessment: “operationally useless”
• [42:24] — Psychological explanations: apophenia, confirmation bias, etc.
• [46:22] — Emergence of commercial courses and ongoing “psychic” grift
• [48:14] — SRI today—post-remote viewing, creation of Siri

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Conclusion & Lessons

• After over 20 years and millions of dollars, the U.S. government confirmed there is no evidence that remote viewing works; no actionable intelligence was generated.
• The persistence of belief (and profit) in remote viewing is due to wishful thinking, Cold War paranoia, and the compelling allure of the “secret government program” narrative.
• The story is less about psychic powers and more about the importance of good scientific methods, skepticism, and the all-too-human tendency to see what we wish were true.

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Final Takeaway:
Remote viewing remains a textbook case of how easily science can be led astray when wishful thinking, poor methodology, and bureaucratic incentives collide. The real lesson: Learn basic scientific concepts like double-blind testing, and beware pseudoscience, even when it wears a badge or carries a hefty research grant.

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For Further Reading & Listening

• CIA’s declassified 1995 Stargate documents
• American Institutes for Research review (Utz & Hyman)
• James Randi’s exposé of Uri Geller
• “The Men Who Stare at Goats” by Jon Ronson

(See show notes for links.)

Transcript

[Jordan Harbinger]

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[Nick Pell]

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[Nick Pell]

you can use to impact your own life and those around you.

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Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker. And during the week we have long form conversations with a variety of amazing

[Nick Pell]

folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers.

[Jordan Harbinger]

On Sundays though, it's Skeptical Sunday. A rotating guest co host and I

[Nick Pell]

will break down a topic you may have never thought about and debunk common misconceptions about that topic.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Topics like why expiration dates on food are mostly nonsense, acupuncture, recycling, chemtrails, the lottery, Reiki healing, and more. And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion, negotiation, psychology, disinformation, junk science, crime and cults, and more that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. All right guys and girls, strap yourself in because this is going to be a weird one. Not that we ever give Nick Pell

[Nick Pell]

any Skeptical Sunday topic that's not weird, by the way.

[Jordan Harbinger]

This one though, this is like something out of Stranger Things or the X Files. But the United States government has put tons of money into something called remote viewing. The idea here is wild. Through what's basically a kind of meditation, you can supposedly see in your mind's

[Nick Pell]

eye something that's happening across the state, across the world, even across the galaxy.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Project Stargate. No, not the movie with Kurt Russell and James Spader. But a real government project sought to develop psychic super spies who could look into the most secure rooms of the Kremlin and then, I don't know, draft reports or whatever. And now, I know what you're thinking. This can't possibly be real.

[Nick Pell]

Right?

[Jordan Harbinger]

That would be a waste of taxpayer dollars. But here we are. I'll admit it sounds like nonsense, but here's the thing.

[Nick Pell]

The government spent millions of taxpayer dollars

[Jordan Harbinger]

and more than two decades trying to figure out if this could actually work. That alone makes it worth looking at, if only to understand how something this

[Nick Pell]

strange made it into serious military research.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Here today, to help me see things clearly is writer and researcher Nick Pell.

[Nick Pell]

James Bond with a crystal ball, people. That's what we're talking about today.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, that's basically what remote viewing is. But for those who aren't already aware. Yeah. Explain this, man. It's so bizarre.

[Nick Pell]

Honestly, James Bond with a crystal ball is really not the worst way of putting it, okay? But the strictest definition of remote viewing is the ability to perceive distant and unseen targets using extrasensory perception, commonly known as esp. So basically, the idea is that you either have this innate psychic ability to do this, or you can be trained to do so through a sort of meditation.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Can you explain what this is and where it comes from?

[Nick Pell]

Because it's so hard to believe. The United States government came up with this in the 60s based on something they saw on an episode of the Outer Limits or whatever.

Come on, that's a deep cut and a good show. Beyond just occultist kooks trying to train themselves in the art of clairvoyance. We have studies on this extending all the way back into the 19th century. These scientific tests examined people thought to be psychically gifted in extremely limited and controlled circumstances.

Did any of the tests say that people could remotely view things?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Like, was it real at all?

[Nick Pell]

Yes, but the problem is they generally weren't accepted by the scientific community or respected at all. It's a weird catch 22, because they're doing these studies, but the scientific community only cares about what they find. If they find that remote viewing isn't real, okay, they're not really in the best position. But there's more to it than that. There's a man named Joseph Banks Rhine, whose more googleable name is JB Rhine. He's the founder of parapsychology.

[Jordan Harbinger]

What's parapsychology?

[Nick Pell]

Parapsychology is, like, psychic stuff.

Okay? So it's like, bullshit. It's a scientific field that studies something that is not real. So far, yeah.

This isn't going to be the last Ghostbusters reference on this episode, but this ain't Ghostbusters. There's not like a department at NYU studying this. Of course. Like we're going to get the one professor of parapsychology at nyu.

Yeah. Okay. So as far as we know, the field is very small slash non existent, basically.

Yeah. He's a founder of this. He decides to do broader population tests, random people, instead of just the Amazing Criswell or some other swami.

Tell me the Amazing Criswell is a real guy.

The Amazing Criswell is absolutely a real guy. And you should go watch the film. Ed Wood, he was a confident of America's finest director, Edward D. Wood Jr. But yeah, Ed Wood's a great film about a amazing American icon who sadly was not a remote viewer. We could talk more about him. So JB Ryan tries really hard to look at this from a scientific perspective and make the tests as limited and falsifiable as he possibly can. He gets some results that support the notion of extrasensory perception, or esp, of which remote viewing is one kind. But he really doesn't want to release them to the broader scientific community because he knows they're going to be seen as weird and inherently flawed because they find some evidence of esp.

[Jordan Harbinger]

How good are his studies? Because as I'm aware and you're aware,

[Nick Pell]

you can make a study say, like, anything, provided you design the study in

the right way, which is clearly like. Because I know this is going to be a criticism, especially of me. We're not saying that all studies are nonsense. We're saying that some studies are nonsense and they say, you know what they're designed to say. None of Ryan's other studies have been reliably replicated. So for those of you playing at home, his studies are junk. And it's not for lack of trying or people actively trying to sabotage his legacy. People tried extremely hard to replicate his studies and they came up short. So Ghostbusters, you guys, Everybody here over the age of 35 probably remembers the scene in Ghostbusters with the cards, right?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yes.

[Nick Pell]

Where Bill Murray is torturing the male grad student and flirting with the female one while they try and guess what images are on the other side of playing cards. Yeah.

Yeah. So that's based on one of Ryan's experiments. Princeton university did over 25,000 trials with 132 subjects. They found zero evidence of ESP. And I feel like remote viewing is Already off to a bad start. Because if you can't see what's on the other side of a playing card three feet in front of you, I'm not really sure that you're going to be able to find the secret Nazi bases on the dark side of the moon.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Is Ryan a quack or just too credulous or what?

[Nick Pell]

You said he was a serious scientist, so why are his studies so bad?

Here's the thing. He's a serious scientist, but he's kind of not a very good one. The general consensus is that he's not a fraud. He's just. He has really bad methodology. And possibly because he was just bad at science, possibly because he really wanted to, he really wants ESP to be real. And it could also just be a combination of both. But we know his methodology is flawed. We know that he really wants ESP to be real, and we know his studies are junk because no one's ever replicated them. His research took place at Duke, which eventually spun off the Rhyme Research center, which is still active today.

It's funny to think of a serious institution like Duke doing kooky bad science like this. What is Ryan's lab up to these days?

They're researching a lot of the stuff that we're talking about here. Different forms of mind over matter, energy healing. They claim very emphatically that all of these different ESP phenomenon are real. They're focused less on proving that it's real, which that may provide some insight into what's wrong with their methodology. They consider this settled science. They just think it's all real, and now they just want to explain how it works. You could get online courses that will help you to hone your psychic abilities. They also act as a community hub for people who believe in esp, remote viewing, whatever you want to call it.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So how did the strange dark corner

[Nick Pell]

of Cold War research begin anyway? Where did all this come from?

It sounds like something out of the weirdness of the 60s, and it sort of is, in the sense that most of what people think of as the 60s actually took place in the 70s. The key government project here was the Stargate project, which took place at Fort Meade in Maryland.

Is this what that movie. Is it the Men who stare at goats? Is that what that's based on?

Sort of. The movie is fictional, but most of the characters are composites or just loosely based on someone else. It gives you a flavor of the kind of high weirdness that was going on at Fort Meade during that time. But it's not about Fort Meade in the same way that born on the 4th of July is about Ron Kovik. It's fictionalized.

Got it. So it's a sort of loose retelling of actual events without being beholden to anything specific.

Yes. Stargate Project was actually the name of the consolidated project. Originally, it was a whole bunch of different military intelligence programs with fanciful names like Gondola, Wish Grill, Flame Center Lane, Sunstreak, Scangate, and Stargate.

And then what? They eventually all got lumped together into an official government project. When was that?

Man, you're going to think this is nuts. 1991.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So.

[Nick Pell]

Wow.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So as recently as. When I'm 11 years old, the government is still trying to figure out how

[Nick Pell]

to train soldiers to see things on the other side of the planet with their mind.

Yeah. They actually closed this project in 1995. So either during my freshman or sophomore year of high school.

[Jordan Harbinger]

What I love about this story so

[Nick Pell]

far is that it's not just a bunch of weird acid burnouts in a basement in 1969.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's multiple arms of the military and intelligence community over a period of decades

[Nick Pell]

that ended when Dr. Dre was on the radio already. Geez, man.

[Jordan Harbinger]

What?

[Nick Pell]

Come on.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's just another day for Dre.

[Nick Pell]

So I begin like, let me ride, man. That's the one. It was actually run out of a leaky wooden barracks, apparently. But yes, you're correct. They did stuff other than remote viewing. But remote viewing was the primary focus of the project. This was the aspect of ESP they were most concerned about figuring out.

Because the thinking is that if you can master remote viewing, you have a massive edge on all of America's adversaries. You don't need to embed some dude into a fake life for a decade and hope that you get access to top secret documents. You can just have him project his mind halfway across the world and view the top secret microfiche and then report back what he saw, all from the comfort of his Cheeto stained bedroom or something.

Or leaky barracks or whatever.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. So how does this even start? Like, at what point is some general

[Nick Pell]

or whatever in the US army sitting around and he's like, you know what we need psychics.

They actually did this in response to a Soviet program that was spending 60 million rubles annually. That's about 12, 120.

Oh, yeah.

It's like $125 million in current US dollars. It's hard to actually accurately pinpoint how much it is. There's different ways of converting Soviet money from 1975 to US dollars today.

I've tried to do that recently where you're like. And it's like rubles.

[Jordan Harbinger]

No, no, no. Soviet rubles.

[Nick Pell]

And they're like, you can use this

[Jordan Harbinger]

number, which is like the number the

[Nick Pell]

government gives, or you can use this number, which is what it is actually worth on the free market, that it wasn't traded on. And you're like, OK, so yeah, it's a tricky calculation.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Somehow 125 million bucks in current money is. That doesn't seem like a lot for a defense project.

[Nick Pell]

I guess the technology is people's brains, though, which are in plentiful supply. Maybe it's a light lift. I don't know.

I can't tell if you're serious or not.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, neither can I. That's not a lot of money. 125 million, eh?

[Nick Pell]

OK, now I'm not sure if I'm joking either.

[Jordan Harbinger]

OK, so they learn the Soviets are doing this. The Soviets did a lot of stuff.

[Nick Pell]

A lot of it was obviously stupid. Perhaps that's a big reason why they're not around anymore.

The Soviets claimed that they were getting results from it.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Okay, but didn't we also claim we

[Nick Pell]

had like, laser satellites that could shoot down their missiles? So I don't know, were they getting results from it?

Yeah, the Duffman says a lot of things and the Soviets definitely said a lot of things, but there's no hard evidence that they ever got any kind of real results from this. There were a lot of anecdotes, but very little in the way of repeatable experiments. I think something to note about the Soviet Union in general. It's not like you were going to get fired. And in the 70s, you're probably not going to get gulagged either. There's a lot of bureaucratic pressure to just create bullshit reports so it looks like everything is great and nothing is going wrong. I'm sure this exists everywhere. Bureaucracy exists. But the Soviets took this to a new level of mastery. People should watch the HBO miniseries Chernobyl.

Yeah, I loved it.

Yeah, it's just great. But one of the things that's great about is portraying this extreme disbelief of Soviet bureaucracy that anything can go wrong. They're looking at an exploded reactor and being like that didn't explode because Soviet reactors don't explode. Case closed.

Yep, case closed. Reality disagrees with the bureaucratic forum that I'm looking at. So reality must be wrong.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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Get an exclusive 15% discount on Saily data plans. Use code Jordan Harbinger at checkout. Download the Salie app or go to saily.com jordanharbinger today don't forget about our newsletter, Wee Bit Wiser. It is a short two minute read every Wednesday from us to you. It's a tidbit from the episodes. It's very practical, something you can apply right away. And once again, a two minute read. We're not taking all morning for you. Jordanharbinger.com News is where you can find it. So back to the Americans finding out

[Nick Pell]

about Soviet remote viewing.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Why are the Americans so keen on doing this? Like he said, the Soviets threw money

[Nick Pell]

into researching all kinds of stuff.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Did no one stand up and go, hey, this is obviously crazy.

[Nick Pell]

Why are we throwing money at this?

Well, I'm sure somebody did at some point. But here's the thing. It didn't matter if the Soviets were having any success with remote viewing. It simply mattered that the Americans believe believed that they were having success with it. And the American program starts in the 70s when detente has ended. That's the period of time when there's better relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. The Cold War is ramping up again, and along with it is Cold War spending. So in one sense they're just throwing spaghetti at a wall and trying to see what will stick. The American government is absolutely fine with using taxpayer dollars to fund American remote viewing research if there's even a small possibility that they can get it to work. Especially if they think the Soviets are already getting it to work.

Yeah, that makes sense.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I have to say, remote viewing. It almost seems like a marketing term

[Nick Pell]

to avoid having to say clairvoyance or psychic.

So in a sense, this is just a scientized version of clairvoyance where you can sense or see things outside of your body. Astral projection is the alleged ability to project your consciousness out of your body, but people are generally claiming to visit other dimensions or worlds and go on these weird adventures when they claim to be astrally projecting. I think we can fairly say that remote viewing is just a way of framing clairvoyance in a more sciencey way. In the middle of the 20th century, there's a lot of different attempts to rebrand psychic phenomenon out of the world of woo and say that we can actually Study it. Hence why we have remote viewing protocols that allegedly make it possible to verify whether or not someone can actually do this.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So what are these protocols?

[Nick Pell]

That sounds sciency and advanced.

Yeah, so there are a whole lot. I'll try and make this as simple and straightforward as possible so that people can hopefully follow along without getting lost. First, they'd isolate the viewer in a quiet room and use a monitor or a facilitator to guide the session. The target, which is going to be a photograph, an object, a location, a set of coordinates, is unknown to both the viewer and the monitor.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So it's double blind.

[Nick Pell]

Eventually the target just becomes a string of random numbers. This is what they call coordinates. And the viewer goes through a series of steps or stages to determine what the target is. It's a whole process that runs from basic vague impressions to detailed 3D modeling. They would make clay models of the thing they were allegedly seeing. It sounds impressive that people are drawing things that are either really there or on a piece of paper. It's not though, because this is a very old carnival magician trick.

I was just going to say my friend Oz Perlman is a world famous mentalist magician guy. And this kind of just sounds like a less exciting version of what he does. And he's very straightforward. That this is a trick, it is not really magic. And it just didn't tell you how it's done.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I know there are psychic shows where

[Nick Pell]

people in the audience draw something or write a word on a card. And I've seen magicians do this, mentalists do this, and the alleged psychic can then duplicate it or something along those.

[Jordan Harbinger]

How does that work?

[Nick Pell]

Or does that work?

Actually, in that case, it works either because there's a plant in the audience, or they've just gotten really good at knowing that almost everyone is going to draw a stick figure or something. Or else they just describe the drawing rather than attempting to duplicate it. They use vague terms. There's all kinds of ways to pull this off. And all of them can be used to account for any degree of success with remote viewing research.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Who came up with these protocols? Was this a government thing or did

[Nick Pell]

they pick up something that was already around?

The protocols were actually formulated by a man named Ingo Swann, who was an artist and self proclaimed psychic. He was from New York. He got involved with physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff at the Stanford Research Institute, which has a lot of connections to the American military and government. Swann worked with Puthoff to develop coordinate remote viewing. In fact, Swann is Kind of the driver for all these attempts to make remote viewing into a science. If you want to credit or blame anyone for turning this from a fringe occult belief to something the United States government is studying. Swan is the guy.

Okay. So does Stanford Research Institute have anything to do with Stanford University? Because that would be a little surprising. It's a little too credible for me, sort of.

The Stanford Research Institute was founded by trustees of the university, but it's been fully independent since the 70s. Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff were originally physicists, and not everything that was happening at Stanford research was related to psychic phenomenon. In fact, very little of it was. But they got a lot of attention for what they were doing because they worked with Yuri Geller.

Ah. He's the guy who used to go on the Tonight show and be like, I'm gonna bend a spoon with my mind. He's obviously a very talented magician and mentalist or whatever it is.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And I could be wrong here.

[Nick Pell]

But if memory serves, he doesn't outright say these are tricks. And that's like most magicians will say, this is a trick.

[Jordan Harbinger]

When Penn and Teller shoot a gun

[Nick Pell]

and the Teller catches the bullet in his teeth, they tell you it's a trick. And I think Uri is like, I do real magic.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And it's like, part show. But then he's, like, willing to offer his services as a consultant for oil

[Nick Pell]

companies because he can divine where oil is in the ground.

[Jordan Harbinger]

There's a little sort of shade of like.

[Nick Pell]

Wait, wait, wait. You're not telling the whole truth here. Maybe in a way that's not quite kosher.

Yeah. And he's been pretty discredited more than once. We gotta be careful, because he's also very litigious. But his connection with Stanford research is actually really important because he was the main subject of a 1974 article in Nature. This is a really prestigious and serious science journal. And it's kind of the high watermark for the Institute's psychic research. But it also exposes their bad methodology to the broader scientific community. So Geller totally humiliates himself on the Tonight show where he can't perform anything but excuses for Johnny Carson in the audience. He was completely exposed by James Randi

as not doing real magic. Let's put it that way.

Yeah. James Randi is a stage magician who in his spare time liked discrediting frauds and quack science, which is, weirdly, a side hobby of a lot of stage magicians.

Yes, Penn and Teller as well.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And again, who better to do it

[Nick Pell]

right like my buddy Oz perlman. Again, episode 1224.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I've seen him do a lot of

[Nick Pell]

things, not just on my show, but it's always, this is a trick. This is not supernatural. And Penn and Teller, like, they catch

[Jordan Harbinger]

the bullet in their teeth or they'll say, this is a trick multiple times per show. I just feel like that's the way you do it. I mean, there was a guy who

[Nick Pell]

guessed that I was thinking about North Korea as a vacation spot in San Francisco. And I was like, wow, this is amazing. And he's like, yep, this is really cool. And he was just like, a nice guy. And I was like, yeah, you're pretty upfront. This is a trick. He's like, yeah, I think it's really important. I don't think I've met a magician in real life who won't readily tell you that this is a trick. It's like the white hat Jedi ethos of magicians to be like, this is not real magic. Just so everyone knows that's just part of their thing.

Yeah. And it's getting a little far afield. But, like, it doesn't make it any less cool or impressive.

[Jordan Harbinger]

No, I agree. It's actually more impressive because if it's magic, you just go, not that I would believe in it.

[Nick Pell]

Oh, it's magic.

You go, it's magic.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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.

[Nick Pell]

Absolutely insane.

[Jordan Harbinger]

The fact that it's a trick keeps me.

[Nick Pell]

And he admits it, keeps me thinking

[Jordan Harbinger]

about it much longer than if I were, let's say, a believer in magic.

[Nick Pell]

And I was like, well, it's magic. Nothing to think about here. I can't do it. And he can.

[Jordan Harbinger]

The fact that it's a trick has

[Nick Pell]

me thinking about it.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I'll be thinking about it for years.

[Nick Pell]

Like, I was the guy who guessed North Korea. I'm like, where was. Was there a camera? Did he overhear me?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Does he have secret mics?

[Nick Pell]

Was my friend in on the trick?

[Jordan Harbinger]

I just don't understand how he did

[Nick Pell]

it, and I never will.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And I'm going to think about it for 20 years.

[Nick Pell]

So I'm with it.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's the way you should handle it. But I would love to drop some

[Nick Pell]

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, the show notes. And 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I know. I just. Whenever I see those clips, I'm like, holy smokes.

[Nick Pell]

I think Larry King used to do that too. Although it might have been before he was on television. He was just on a radio, but it was like, yeah, those guys are just popping down unfiltered Camels. Live tv, maybe slightly pre recorded tv.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Crazy.

[Nick Pell]

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. In fact, they were letting him disappear into the bathroom with spoons. And for the most part, they were just taking his word for it.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Sure, that's science. So not totally related to remote viewing, but it does say a lot about

[Nick Pell]

the work that was coming out of the institute at Stanford.

[Sponsor Voice]

Come on, man.

[Nick Pell]

Yeah, exactly.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Were there any other studies in mainstream

[Nick Pell]

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. Much 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

[Jordan Harbinger]

to shut all this down.

[Nick Pell]

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. The 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 that's not great logic.

Sarcasm again, I. Again, I can't tell.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You know, again, now that the words

[Nick Pell]

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 US Government would waste money

[Jordan Harbinger]

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

[Nick Pell]

all that the US Government is willing to light millions, tens of millions of

[Jordan Harbinger]

taxpayer dollars on fire for something as

[Nick Pell]

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 for, but especially for Cold War research. Anything that's going to help get an edge in the Cold War, there'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. But I am, but there's things that I just are like, 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. Some people in the government were definitely convinced that you could train soldiers to be psychic spies.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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 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

[Nick Pell]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

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[Nick Pell]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

This episode is sponsored in part by Little Sleepies. If you got kids, you already know the truth. Bedtime can turn onto a full on negotiation. But one thing that's been a reliable win in our house is Little Sleepy's Pajamas, where fans of Little Sleepies for years before they even sponsored the show. Jen fell hard for the adorable prince, grabbed a couple pairs and then it

[Nick Pell]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

Now you got a whole drawer full of them.

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[Nick Pell]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

And the fabric is the real deal. Ridiculously soft, super stretchy. The kids like wearing them, which means fewer complaints when it's time to change. Plus we've had ours for years and

[Nick Pell]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

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[Nick Pell]

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[Nick Pell]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

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 [e-mail] deals now for the rest of Skeptical Sunday. I knew about Project Blue Book. The dolphins thing.

[Nick Pell]

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.

Yeah, so I think I have heard of it. That's definitely less crazier than I thought.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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

[Nick Pell]

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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yes, this is the nautical equivalent of

[Nick Pell]

having your dog catch a Frisbee. It'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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Did they ever actually find anything to

[Nick Pell]

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. Drum roll. They did not

[Jordan Harbinger]

want.

[Nick Pell]

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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So why did it go on for so long?

[Nick Pell]

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 subtly cue the viewer.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I know what you mean when you

[Nick Pell]

say double blind and single blind, but

[Jordan Harbinger]

can you just briefly explain those for

[Nick Pell]

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. Single 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 describes something, and so what? It's cold. Okay, Is that like absolute zero? Is that Chicago in January? Is that The Arctic Circle? Is it the inside of my fridge? Cold covers every temperature below 50 degrees, right?

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Do we mean hoodie weather or the deepest reaches of outer space?

[Nick Pell]

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 supercluster 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 8 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. Cool. Is that an iceberg or the planet Pluto? I don't know if Pluto is 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, which. The description of which was a large metallic object that could be like a Costco sized can of Soup or an F16.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. What was the government response to spending

[Nick Pell]

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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yes, government bad, but still, there has to be some kind of official response

[Nick Pell]

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. Again, 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

What did they get that was, what was it statistically interesting, or at the very least, interesting.

[Nick Pell]

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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Okay, so was there a crane near

[Nick Pell]

a Soviet nuclear facility?

There was, but pictures of it had already leaked. He could have seen them and either way, cool man. Crane 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

But were there aliens guarding underground bases?

[Nick Pell]

Not that we ever found. Pat Price died of a heart attack in Las Vegas, which is supporters claim was a government hit.

Yes, the government always uses cocaine and strippers to take their victims out in Vegas.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Honestly, looking at all your examples, I

[Nick Pell]

could get that level of accuracy if I tried.

[Jordan Harbinger]

There's a big piece of equipment near a big smokestack looking thing at a

[Nick Pell]

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. So 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. First, 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Okay.

[Nick Pell]

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 does it mean anything?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, like the guy was his name John Nash in A Beautiful Mind.

[Nick Pell]

And he's got the string that are connecting all the things that aren't there on the corkboard. He was like mentally ill and people found that.

Look, 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. These are statements that are generic enough that they could be describing just about anything. And this was a lot of what remote viewing Described experimenter 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. The few apparent hits were indistinguishable from chance or lucky guessing.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So it's good work if you can get it.

[Nick Pell]

I suppose.

[Jordan Harbinger]

For anyone wanting to know more, the

[Nick Pell]

CIA's 1995 Stargate documents. Those are declassified and available online now, as is the report from the American Institutes for Research.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Skeptical Critiques by Ray Hyman and others

[Nick Pell]

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. One DIA memo complained that remote viewing reports produced excessive generalities and require too much interpretation to be of operational use.

Yeah, you could say that again.

[Jordan Harbinger]

There's definitely a lot of weird science projects that were going on in the

[Nick Pell]

military and intelligence communities during the Cold

[Jordan Harbinger]

War, but this one just strikes me

[Nick Pell]

as especially odd because they. They just got absolutely nothing in the way of results, right?

So at least MK Ultra tells us you can psychically torture a promising young math student at Harvard into becoming the Unabomber.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Wait, really?

[Nick Pell]

Oh, yeah, man. Uncle Ted was an MK Ultra test subject?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Wow, man, you know a lot about the Unabomber.

[Nick Pell]

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 MK Ult

[Jordan Harbinger]

something, even if the something that it did wasn't what they expected.

[Nick Pell]

This, on the other hand, though, this just seems like they just flushed that money down the toilet.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So what happened after they closed up

[Nick Pell]

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?

No, no, no. Like any government program that's been cut that has an actual private sector demand, they went commercial.

So what is training people how to do remote viewing from the comfort of

[Jordan Harbinger]

their home and 12 easy lessons. You get a zoom course from these guys.

[Nick Pell]

Yeah, that's basically it. Joseph McMonagle, 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And I assume that that course is

[Nick Pell]

free because he's so rich himself from remote viewing the stock market that he doesn't need any money.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So how much do these programs cost?

[Nick Pell]

Actually, as an aside, anyone selling trading programs sucks at trading. And that's why they're selling programs and not trading.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Of course.

[Nick Pell]

Yeah, like if you have an in on the next bitcoin, like what you're

[Jordan Harbinger]

doing is beg, borrow and steal money

[Nick Pell]

to invest in it. Not teaching people a course on how to spot the next bitcoin.

Yeah, so the courses 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 3,000. But 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 McMonagle.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That sounds somewhat lucrative.

[Nick Pell]

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. The book at least purports to be non fiction. 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, you mentioned the Stanford Research Institute

[Nick Pell]

was kind of the hub for a lot of this.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Are they still around today or did

[Nick Pell]

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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Siri.

[Nick Pell]

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. The psychic stuff was always just one of many different things they were doing.

I see.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So they went from doing some of

[Nick Pell]

the most useless pseudo scientific research that has ever been conducted and moved into

[Jordan Harbinger]

creating important and critical technology that I

[Nick Pell]

use literally every day of my life.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Mostly because I have no choice because Siri still completely sucks. But I digress.

[Nick Pell]

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

[Jordan Harbinger]

little bummed out at how much of a complete and total nothing burger this all is. I kind of expected it to be

[Nick Pell]

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, believe it if you like, but that no science has ever been done to prove.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, it's as real as the Tooth fairy so far.

[Nick Pell]

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. The 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Exactly.

[Nick Pell]

Do they rededicate the budget to some other kind of mind reading crap or whatever?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Do you think they're still researching stuff like remote viewing?

[Nick Pell]

I think they're researching something equally stupid.

Yeah, I wouldn't doubt it.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I think there's a deeper lesson to be learned here.

[Nick Pell]

You can make a study say anything, and they did just that for years.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Even if the claims made by a research paper seem sound on their face,

[Nick Pell]

you might have to dig deeper to find the problem. And knowing the most basic scientific principles

[Jordan Harbinger]

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

[Nick Pell]

there for a check.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Thanks to Nick for helping us get

[Nick Pell]

the 10,000 foot view of this nonsense.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And thank you for listening. Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to me Jordanordanharbinger.com, advertisers, discounts, deals, ways to support the show, [e-mail] deals. I'm JordanHarbinger on Twitter and Instagram.

[Nick Pell]

You can also connect with me on

[Jordan Harbinger]

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. Remember, 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 Oz Perlman reveals the real secrets of influence, charisma, and truly seeing others.

[Oz Perlman]

I know how people think. A mentalist is kind of a subset of magic. Misdirection, 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, people to know that I am not talking to dead people or trying to rip you off. I'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. Active listening and using your memory as your superpower, it's the ultimate cheat code in life. You can find something about anyone.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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.