Stuff You Should Know - Selects: How ESP Works (?)

Episode Date: October 18, 2025

Even though almost half of Americans believe in it, ESP usually is treated as a load of bull by skeptics. But some respected researchers have dared to apply the scientific method to investigate ESP and a few have found some surprising results. Find out all about it with Josh and Chuck in this classic episode.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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And I know what you're thinking. You're thinking science and ESP? Yes, indeed. And that's one of the things that makes this episode so cool. So I hope you will open your mind, tune in, turn on, drop out, keep on trucking, and enjoy this episode. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of IHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry's over there. I didn't even have to look why i just knew uh yes and dudes and dudettes we are in our new studio yeah can you tell

does it sound different it's the very first one and um it's tiny wait what do you mean it's the very first one very first podcast that we recorded in here oh gotcha yeah yeah uh i was gonna say i said tiny but it's not tiny it's cozy but it is all uh all hours yeah all hours everybody else at house stuff works doesn't really know that Yeah, but they will. Yeah, because when we actually have butt detection, and when someone sits down on these seats that aren't us, they get a shock. Yeah, and plus an alarm goes off at our desks.

Yeah, what's that called, DMR? TMI. Oh. How are you, sir? I'm pretty good. I feel like this is fancy. This is our first real, like, studio. That's not true.

No, I'm trying to remember. The last one was, no. But it's not a utility closet. It's not a lactation room. it's not a murder room it's not an like an office with like desk for like office furniture yeah it's a it's a studio that was built out for the specific purpose of recording podcasts yep all we have to do uh is put up our aaron cooper originals the artwork got a couple of those waiting to come and uh we got to work on the lighting in here a little bit yeah jerry said she's gonna hang some china balls for us yeah she keeps pushing the china balls um so anyway enough about that we just wanted to to say we're super excited to be in our new office and our new studio it does feel good yeah kudos for that intro uh i'm not going to say that i knew you were going to say that yeah i was going to say that too i knew that you were thinking of saying that chuck yes uh ESP do you believe in

ESP no no not at all do you what do you think it is because surely i mean just about anyone could agree that humans have some sort of ability somehow to make good guesses or to predict the future or whatever you want to call it. Do you agree or do you think it's strictly just us selectively paying attention to random instances over others? I think it's that. And as we'll talk about, I think it's just the nature of coincidence is going to happen. because so many things happen every day that something is bound to

seem like something you dreamed about the night before at some point in your life but the other millions of dreams you have that don't I think those are the ones that are the tell I got to you know do you? I don't know like I want to I spent so many years of my life believing and stuff like that and wanting to go to Duke University

to study at their parapsychology department. Did you really? Yeah, and, you know, believing in ghosts and all this. And just that's how I spent my childhood, just reading about stuff like that voraciously. So Ghostbusters really did a number on you. Yeah. Yeah, when that came along, I was like,

this was made for me. Yeah. But as an adult, it's not so much that I believe in ESP. It's more that I refuse to just utter. disbelieved in the possibility of it sure okay you know what I mean yeah I got you there because we don't know everything about everything yet right but yeah I'm in the I'm the other camp and I'm not even going to say the skeptic camp because those people just bug me has bad name some due to some bad apples not all skeptics no but there are some that are

horses asses can we say that I don't know we'll find out all right well let's talk about and I thought this was interesting, because I never knew that ESP is just a big collective term for all manner of paranormal phenomena, which you could also call SI. Yeah, and so a dude named J.B. Rhine, who we'll talk about later, he coined ESP. The Granddaddy. And then in the 40s, another guy coined the term psi, and Cy is a Greek letter, and it's equated with Psy or the soul. Yeah, PSI. And the reason that the guy chose Sai is because he felt ESP suggested it was something supernatural. Yeah, sure.

And Sai, he felt, suggested that this is a normal part of humanity. We just don't understand it. It sounds like science. You're right. But there are several categories of ESP. And this is the one I never knew, the actual definitions for these. I sort of just threw them all in a bag together. You have telepathy.

and that's when you can, you know, you're over there reading my thoughts. Yes. Like, Chuck is really not happy to be in the new studio. That's not true. He'd rather be at home on the couch. I'm reading your thoughts right now, and I know that you like this place. Oh, okay. Well, you're a telepath.

Right. Clairvoyance, which is the ability to see events or things, objects, happening somewhere else at the same time. So, are you clairvoyant? I am. I'm seeing your couch right now, and I'm seeing it's not that comfy. Yeah. So you're not missing that much.

at the moment. I know somewhere Jonathan Strickland is waxing his head. His bald head. That's just a logical assumption. Okay. Then we have our precogs, precognition. That's when you see into the future. Retro cogs, retrognition, you can see into the distant past.

That's another, that's a widely accepted definition of retrocognition. Yeah. Like seeing, you know, a k-tok-took running around with the dinosaurs like you do. Which I guess never would have happened. Yeah. But there's another term for retro-cognition, whereas something in the future affects something in the past. So a decision you make in the future affects your past. And an example given is that you have a dream about a dinosaur.

Now, let's say a spotted dog. Okay. And then the first thing the next morning, you go outside to water your lawn, and the same spotted dog or a similar spotted dog walks by. the idea isn't that that was very coincidental or that you had ESP in your dreams but that you seeing that dog in the morning affected your dream the night before oh okay so that's another definition that's emerging for retrocognition

that's getting a lot of traction because of the stuff we're finding on the quantum scale just weirdness like that all right then you have your mediumship and that's um miss cleo who can channel dead spirits yeah i forgot about her I wonder how much money that woman grossed in the 90s. She made a lot of dough. I hope so. Yeah.

I mean, she was working hard. She had a finite window of opportunity, and she worked that whole time. She didn't, like, buy a sailboat and sail around the world after, like, her first million, you know? Like, she worked. So you're not in the camp of, like, she's taking people's money and taking advantage of people? I see that argument. Sure. For sure.

I also see, like, if people want to spend their money. money on that and they get something out of it knock yourself out all right uh and then you have psychometry which is the ability to read info about a person place uh by touching the uh person or object and that's uh what i like to call the dead zone right christopher walkin he would place his hands on you and he would see something man i think we talked about it recently about how that movie holds up still yeah it's such a good movie yeah it really is good Chris Walken. There's another one, Chuck, called telekinesis,

which is like Uri Geller stroking a spoon in it bending. Right. Like being able to manipulate matter, just using a light touch or your mind. But there is no spoon. Yeah, wasn't that from Matrix? Mm-hmm. All right, so basically, like you said,

J.B. Ryan is the granddaddy of all this, and he actually started studying. I mean, he was a legitimate scientist. He wasn't some quack. And this was in the 1930s where he started at Duke University studying parapsychology, basically. And he wasn't the first. He was one of the first laboratory experimenters in academia to really study shy, right? Before him, probably about 40 or so years before him, William James and some of the first. of his pals at the Society for Psychical Research really laid the groundwork for applying the scientific method to the study of paranormal phenomenon.

Yeah. And they did two things. They outed frauds, like fraudulent mediums, like very famously, Madame Blavatsky. Oh, yeah. But then they also investigated ones like, they approached them typically with like an open mind. Yeah.

And if they found somebody that they just couldn't explain, they studied them. So they were studying each one with an open mind, and the ones they figured out were frauds, they outed as frauds. The ones they figured out couldn't quite explain, they sought to investigate scientifically rather than just saying, oh, they're a fraud somehow. Right. So that was the groundwork of the study of Psi. What was Madame Blavardsky's deal of the Coney Island Blabartsky's eyes? She was actually, she was almost a cult leader.

You could argue she was. She created, oh man, it's called, like, Theodism, I think, which is, it was almost a cult. It was a huge movement in the 19th century where, like, you'd go to, like, a seance, and there was a medium there, and they would channel, like, the spirits of the dead, relatives of people who were there holding hands in the circle and stuff like that. And she gained a lot of power and wealth and prestige until she was outed as a fraud. And I don't remember the, it's theosophy. That's what it is. Not theoism.

Theoism has to do with Theo Hux to Ball. Did you see the source family, by the way, that documentary? No, I haven't. About the L.A. cult in the 70s? I saw the icon on Netflix. I never clicked. Is it good? It's really good.

And it's awesome, actually. I recommend everyone see it. It's one of those where, like, they interview a lot of them today, and they weren't like, you know, know they didn't commit suicide like everyone was like it was pretty great oh yeah yeah they're all fine they're all just a bunch of hippies still they were out in l.a yeah yeah right in hollywood there was one in um there was a documentary i saw about a cult in miami and they were like super fundamentalist christian yeah but they also were um the basis of their religion was was formed on pot too well that's what the source family was i wonder if they were related well it's

the 70s. Yeah. There were a lot of pot cults, I bet. But did they turn into, like, huge pot dealers? No, I don't think so. This cult did. They had a band, though. Called the source?

You know, I can't remember the name of the band, but it's pretty interesting to listen to. Manhattan Transfer? Yeah, that was it. It's a really good documentary, though. It was just funny to see all these people now. They're like, it was awesome. Yeah. Had a lot of sex and smoked a lot of weed.

Yeah, that's kind of what this one did, too. These guys didn't seem to have a lot of sex, though. they were like real like compartmentalized gender wise right male dominance and all that but they just smoked a ton of pot all the time including their little kids oh well that's not good like like four-year-old smoking pot oh that's terrible yeah it was in the documentary it's worth seeing i don't remember what it's good you had me up you lost me there it lost everybody there in that documentary yeah um all right so back to this ESP thing um jb rine yeah jb rine well basically there's a There's a lot of different outlooks on what ESP might be.

Some people think that everyone's got it, but some people, it just pops up every now and then, like, I might have a dream that comes true or whatever. Other people think that only certain people have it, the gift, as they say. And that they have to be in this special, like, you know, mental state to access it. The shunning? Yeah, the shunning. and then other folks say that everyone has that potential but some people are just like in tune with it and some people aren't right

and you fall in none of those three camps so we'll talk a little more about some ideas of what ESP is right after this We often think we know our type in dating, tall, funny, a certain job, but the research shows we're usually not the best predictors of who will actually make us the happiest. As we often say on the Happiness Lab, our minds lie to us about all kinds of stuff, and that definitely includes the kinds of things we need to be happy in a relationship. That's why it helps to stay curious.

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Hey, it's Ed Helms and welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode. 32 lost nuclear weapons. Wait, stop? What? Yeah. Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player. who still wore knee pads.

Yes. It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests. The great Paul Scheer made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow. Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched. You're here. What was that like for you to soft launch into the show? Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today.

I forgot whose podcast we were doing. Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. Let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of Snap-Fu with Ed Helms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Whenever I got through the window, I tried to pick him up, and his body was stiff. I'm Ben Westoff, and this is The Peacemaker, a true crime podcast investigating a string of mysterious deaths at a prestigious Missouri University, and the fraternity brother at the center.

of it all. A few years back, two fraternity brothers died by suicide, just weeks apart, in shockingly similar ways. Both were discovered by the same student, Brandon Grossheim. I laid him down, and proceeded, I tilted his head back, and proceeded to get him in mouth and CPR. At first, people gave Brandon the benefit of the doubt, but when three more acquaintances died the following year, the tide turned. The lawsuit says Grossheim was one of the last people to see each victim before their deaths was he profoundly unlucky or was something much darker at play listen to the peacemaker podcast on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcast so chuck you said that they're basically how people

see ESP is either everyone has it, some people have it or no one has it basically whether you're a skeptic or a believer. Right. If you are a believer in ESP and somebody comes to you and says, okay, explain

ESP, like what is it? Right. There's actually a couple of very common suggestions or proposals. Yeah. One made sense for a while before we knew a little more about the brain. And that was that ESP was some form or fashion of the electromagnetic spectrum that we were receiving information from outside of our usual senses.

Yeah, and like you said, it fell out of favor because basically it didn't explain anything about how it moves through time or they didn't pick up on some special part of your brain that like receives this message. And there was a, um, did you see that? study I sent you that was I think from 2010 where they put people in an MRI and then showed them different pictures or whatever and they did they showed like they I put you in the wonder machine okay and now I'm showing you a picture of the flower and that's it okay it's lovely except it sounds like a German rave okay a little bit but that would be the non-ESP stimuli they control

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

Plus, if Emily's over there, my first guess is going to be dog every time and it's flour and then it's not going to... Well, it wasn't about guessing, it was just to see, like, showing you the ESP version, and then the non-ESP version of the same thing. So you weren't guessing. Do you understand? Yeah, I get it now. I would have guessed dog or wine.

There wasn't guessing. I still would have guessed. Emily thinks she has a gift a little bit, so she would have been disappointed. She's got the shin? Yeah, a little she thinks. Yeah. But I think she's just super observant and intuitive. Well, that's definitely one explanation for it.

Yeah, which we'll get to, of course. So these days, there are other theories, one of which is that it's called spill. over, that there's basically another dimension that we, that doesn't, you know, have our laws here and our dimension, and that sometimes stuff just sort of spills over from that and we see the future or the past. Yeah. And if you're a skeptic, you'd probably just pull the decent size clump of your hair out of the side of your head at that one. Yeah, because this is something you can't prove, obviously. It's like completely, um, and of course they'll say it exactly. Yeah. You know? Yeah, and I think I got the impression from this article that they were making that point.

Like, science is just chasing its tail and trying to explain ESP because it's not currently capable. Yeah. And science goes, it doesn't work like that. Yeah. You know? At least with the electromagnetic spectrum explanation, it was pointing to something that we already know exists, right? It's just that there's no way to show that we would. be getting how we would be getting information from it because the electromagnetic explanation

yeah it basically says if you compare it to other findings from ESP it makes even less sense right because with ESP one of the hallmarks of it is that no matter whether you're out there outside of the studio sure thinking about wine or a dog or something yeah and I'm picking up on it or if you're in China and I'm here and we're doing the same thing that The signal doesn't weaken at all. Yeah, and that just flies in the face of all we know about electromagnetic waves. Right, exactly. No good.

Right. So there's a lot of things wrong with the proposals of what ESP is. Yeah, but, you know, the reason why people still believe in this stuff is because of either hearing a story about their friend who said, you know, listen to this crazy thing happened. Right. Or experiencing it themselves in some way or another, having a dream that something similar happened. And all of a sudden you're like, hmm, I might have the gift. exactly or it popped up in me you know briefly at least and there's a i mean there's a lot of um evidence of strange and unusual occurrences sure that support the idea of ESP yeah um this article

gives a really good one about um an 1898 book called futility yeah that was written by a guy named morgan robertson right and in it the guy details this book or this boat called the Titan. A ship. Yeah, a ship. A boat. A big old boat. Yeah. Which is sailing across the Atlantic and hits an iceberg at night and sinks and a bunch of people die because there weren't enough lifeboats. Yeah. This is 1898. And if that sounds familiar, the Titanic did the same exact thing. The Titanic, not the Titan, did the same exact thing 14 years later. Yeah. There are a bunch of similarities. the Titan struck an iceberg in the book on the starboard side on an April night

in the North Atlantic off the coast of Newfoundland and the real Titanic struck an iceberg on the starboard side in April in the North Atlantic off the coast of Newfoundland On the starless night? I don't know about that. Okay. They were both said to be unsinkable

more than half of the passengers of the Titanic perished and more than half of the passengers and crew on the Titan perished. So there's all these things in there, but you do a little more digging and you find out that Robertson was, he was a seaman

and he knew a bunch of this stuff, and it's not unreasonable to think at the time. They wanted to build the biggest ships, and the word Titan would be a great name back then for a super big ship. And that sailing route was a common one, and there were

icebergs, and April might have been a common month for that kind of voyage. So all of it can be explained away, kind of But it is definitely something you look at and go, ooh, interesting. It is interesting, and it's an amazing coincidence, and it focuses the attention and captures the imagination. But then, yeah, once you hear about Robertson's background,

it becomes slightly less impressive. So then kind of to, over the years, that little kernel got erased and added to it was that this idea for this book came to him in a trance, which bolsters the ESP. Yeah, is that true, or is that just, been added uh i'm sure it was added over the years okay which is a big problem with this kind of anecdotal evidence is that you know it gets embellished and urban legendized yeah exactly and

uh it's just it's not enough that this is a really interesting unique right circumstance or coincidence or whatever there has to be this extra layer of proof like it came to him in a trance come on yeah um so back to ryan he did some Like I said, in the 1930s, he started studying this stuff with one of my favorite inventions by his colleague, Carl Zinner. Of course, if you've seen Ghostbusters, he was using a version of Zinner cards. The shapes weren't all exact. I think there was one that was different in Ghostbusters. But the original Zinner cards were, it was a deck of 25 plain white cards with each of them had one of five symbols, a circle, a plus sign.

a square, a star, five-pointed star, and the three wavy lines. Like water, a river. Is that what that is? Maybe. Okay. And the idea is that just like in Ghostbusters, you hold it up and ask the, you know, not showing them the card, obviously, not the symbol, and say, what do you see? And they say what they see, and then you record after the deck how many they got right.

Right, but the person holding the card is supposed to be thinking about what they're seeing. sure so that the other person the target the receiver can pick it up telepathically yeah and i did they have these online i took the test yesterday um and i went through the 25 deck and i only got six out of 25 and at the end it just said you are not a psychic oh really yeah that was kind of funny statistically speaking for just one trial yeah that is more than chance you did better than chance, so maybe you do have a touch. Six of, what would chance be, I guess? Chance would be if there's five

different ones. It would be 20%? Uh-huh. And so this was, six of 24 would be uh, is that 25%? No, that's, uh, no, no, that's less. Yeah. No. You did six of 24? You did 24 or 25? 25?

So five of 25 would be chance. Okay, so I got one more. Yeah. Well, and I think like three of the first eight or so or six I got and I was like oh I've got the gift right but I didn't know like it's randomly generated and so it's not like someone was on the other side thinking of that card so I literally I was like what do I do I was like I'm just guessing so that brings up some interesting stuff like there's there's evidence that when a machine is involved yeah there is no telepathy there would

only be clairvoyance right yeah so I mean if if telepathy is you picking up what's in someone else's mind and a computer is mindless then you shouldn't be able what you were saying like you should it shouldn't you should not be able to know what Zenner card it's going to pick next right

but there have been investigations using computers and using machines that show above chance that there is some sort of weird interaction like a random number generators yes yeah so Princeton University has a department called the Princeton Engineering Anombal

family's research department pair right of course and pair has been doing studies for a couple of decades they've done millions of trials yeah and basically they'll say this is a random number generator or this this machine operates randomly or whatever we want you to think of a number and we want to see if you can influence the numbers that this computer spits out oh so you're thinking in the number then the you're okay that makes like the human is trying to affect the computer the output the behavior of the computer Of course, if you're sitting across the room or in another room thinking about a number that a random generator should put out, it should have zero effect whatsoever. Yeah, it's a computer.

The weird thing is, is what Princeton has found is that, yes, over enough trials, there is a slight, very slight but measurable effect that human thought has on a random number generator. Come on. It's on Princeton's website. This is stuff that, like, is apparently accepted in the scientific community that the trials that they are running are so widespread and so repeatable and have been done so many times that the data that they're coming up with is, it's significant. Well, Ryan, with his Zinnercard experiments in the 30s, did find that some people got what they thought were pretty impressive results. like you know a few i can't remember their names but hubert pierce was he one of them he was the one well how many what was his percentage he had one where he got um remember how you got three in a row and you were like oh my god yeah he got 25 in a row once what 25 come on no i'm not kidding

he was also documented as selecting 558 correct out of 1850 which is the odds of that happening by chance were 22 billion to one. Now were these the early experiments? Yes. Okay because I did read that and this seems like I can't believe he didn't check this but apparently the early cards were a little

translucent. Oh really? Yeah some of them were and then he corrected for that and the percentages went down and then they I know other scientists said that you are somehow influencing with your body tell. Right. Like you

Basically, you don't have a good enough poker face. Yeah, in the earliest Ryan experiments with the Xenner cards, he would hold the card up and he'd be making eye contact. Right, the guy, yeah, the guesser would be like, is it the wavy line? Yeah, he starts shaking his head, almost imperceptive. But he, that's called sensory leakage, where you, the person who is holding the card and knows what the car it is. Yeah.

Somehow there's some detail about your face that when you do a thousand trials with somebody, they start to pick up on, and it affects their guests. It influences their guests. So to correct for that, to control for that, a sensory leakage. Gross. Isn't that gross? Yeah. They came up with something called the Gansfield experiment.

Ah, yes, the German Gansfeld. That means whole field in... german and that is when they started putting people um they would start depriving their other senses basically right uh they would be in a like a dimly lit uh room with red lighting and they would have white noise and they would have their eyes covered with these uh special glasses or ping pong balls cut in half like kermit the frog i guess later on they said we should just make some glasses exactly we've got the funding so basically the idea was let's rule out any uh any of that gross sensory leakage

which smells so apparently later on in Ryan's experiments after he started controlling for stuff the percentages started to drop of correct guesses

he's he was also he's generally a respected researcher for a couple of reasons one whenever he did whenever evidence of like some sort of bias or fraud or something was brought to him, he corrected for it. Yeah, he wore glasses in a white coat.

Right, that was another one. But also, he was daring enough to stake his entire career on a field of study that will get anybody mocked. Yeah, sure. Publicly, privately can really shut down a lot of opportunities for you. This guy and his wife, Louisa Ryan, both dedicated their career. to establishing the field of parapsychology and really studying it rather than just walking away from it yeah i don't think he was like i really want to prove this is uh true was he uh yes he did oh that was a that was a huge

criticism of him got you he wanted to believe in it was a definite believer uh he was quoted by i don't know what the guy steal was but one day he was visited by one person and the interviewer who went on to write a paper i think in scientific american to expose him yeah he said he kept a file of people of the results of tests where um people he suspected were purposefully getting things wrong because they didn't like him to mess with his data yeah he just took those and never published them he didn't include them in the gotcha the results which would definitely affect the number of correct hits right that was a huge criticism that's not good science at all

but he was definitely a believer which was another criticism of him but he was daring and he did there was another story where it's called the Levy affair where a guy named Levy who was an electrical engineer working in the lab unplugged

I guess a sensor that would correct negative hits for a little while during a trial so that all that were recorded for a little bit were positive hits and so and then he plugged it back in well this one guy saw what the guy was doing and went to ryan and ryan went to the guy levy and said did you do this and levy said yes he's like you're fired and just like threw the results away and all that so he wasn't like he was a true believer

but he wasn't just some like outright fraud right right but he was and still is under the microscope as much as probably any researcher in all of academia ever has been all right well right after this break we'll talk a little bit about what skeptics say about ESB No one can resist a rule of culture So here's one for the dating files Rule of Culture number 72

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Renaissance, or compatibility is having the same hometown bodega. order, download Bumble, and turn those connections into something bigger. Download Bumble and start your love story. Hey, it's Ed Helms, and welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode. 32 lost nuclear weapons. Wait, stop? What? Yeah. Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player. Who still wore knee pads? Yes. It's going to be a whole lot of history a whole lot of funny and a whole lot of guests.

The great Paul Shear made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow. Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched. You're here. What was that like for you to soft launch into the show? Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today. I forgot whose podcast we were doing. Nick Kroll.

I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's see how it goes. Listen to Season 4 of Snafoo with Ed Helms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Whenever I got through the window, I tried to pick him up and his body was stiff. I'm Ben Westoff, and this is The Peacemaker, a true crime podcast investigating a string of mysterious deaths at a prestigious Missouri University and the fraternity brother at the center of it all. A few years back, two fraternity brothers died by suicide, just weeks apart, in shockingly similar ways. Both were discovered by the same student, Brandon Grossheim. I laid him down, and proceeded.

I tilted his head back and proceeded to get in the mouth and CPR. At first, people gave Brandon the benefit of the doubt. But when three more acquaintances died the following year, the tide turned. The lawsuit says Grossheim was one of the last people to see each victim before. their deaths. Was he profoundly unlucky, or was something much darker at play? Listen to The Peacemaker podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, Josh, one thing you'll hear skeptics say a lot is extraordinary claims require

extraordinary evidence yeah and I have to agree with them yeah and uh it is an extraordinary claim here and so far there hasn't been um extraordinary evidence and one of the things I pointed to earlier that I think is what's going on if you look at statistics you look at six billion people on planet earth and them thinking a gazillion things each day and that is scientific by the way right a gazillion um at some point Somebody is going to think something that it mirrors something that happens in the near future, and it's just chance and coincidence. I have a great example of that, man. Okay.

It happened this very morning. What? Yeah, I did. I was at the printer, and, you know, we just moved to offices, and I was at the printer, and I had, like, an extra piece of paper that I didn't need, and I realized, like, we have no paper recycling here. So on my way back... Not yet, that is. Everyone out there is, like, what kind of an office would not have recycling? Right.

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

thing you almost did your isy impression yeah it's close um and so like i thought about it that's pretty amazing yeah you know but it was about nine in the morning and this is a company-wide email so it'd be something that isy would probably knock out about that time yeah the reason i was thinking of is because i was just at the printer yeah we just moved into this office and we didn't have bins yet so it was still a potential thing for somebody to be thinking about or doing or writing an email about And so there's all these different really overlooked variables or factors to this whole thing that you don't think of. Instead, it just seems like an amazing coincidence or ESP. To me, the really significant thing was that I happened to be researching ESP while this happened.

That's what really kind of stood out to me. But if you really kind of look at it, like there's a finite amount of things that people could think about in any given day in any given context, in an office or something like that. Like, had I been a goat at a petting zoo, and I went over and talked to the cow, and the cow was writing the email about recycling bins, maybe. But we're in an office. I'm talking to the guy about recycling bins. There's just a lot of stuff that you kind of, once you take that into account, it becomes less amazing. Like the guy writing the Titan Titanic book.

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

Sure, I know what you're talking about. But that was all it was to me. I was not like, I have the gift. But think about it in that respect, too. You know 15, 20 people. So was it you knew who was calling or just that the phone was about to ring? just that it was about to ring. Oh, yeah, that is weird.

You definitely do have ESP. Yeah. Or maybe, I don't know, maybe the phone made a little tick noise right before it rang that I didn't pick up on, but only subconsciously, you know. Well, that's another explanation for it. A tick noise on. Right. That there is subliminal stuff in the environment that is just too weak in nature for us to pick up on consciously, but our unconscious does

or a subconscious does which frankly opens up a whole other can of worms as far as how real is that kind of thing but probably a little closer to reality is the idea that

our attention isn't focused on everything that we're picking up at all times like I see your beard and I see your shirt and everything but I'm still also picking up sensory information from like

Jerry's computer that I can see in my peripheral vision or whatever my attention isn't focused on it but my brain is still receiving information so the idea that our brains can put it together all this information that we're not aware consciously that we're receiving yeah um but we're still getting impressions from it that's that that could be a great explanation for ESP as well yeah and you know what now that I think about it the fact that it's never happened with my cell phone sort of makes sense because maybe there it was a mechanical function a landline right yeah like you said a click or a tick

But I think you meant like a click. And it wasn't even the newer model. This was back in the day when it was like a ringing like bell. Sure. So maybe that does explain it. Yeah. I've got another good example that I came across in researching this. Let's say that you and I are hanging out.

Yeah. And you're humming, baby, I'm a fire, you work, right? Just over and over again. I don't know that song. But I'm reading. Yes, you do. No, I don't. Yeah, you do.

Who is it? Katie Perry. I don't know Katie Perry. Anyway, although I will have to say I did love that halftime show. It was great. Well, it was hysterical. What's up with the sharks being a meme now? I didn't think they were really significant.

She looked like she worked at Corn Dog on a Stick. I don't know what that is. I thought all corn dogs were on sticks. No, it's that place in the... Or a hot dog on a stick, maybe it was called. That place in the mall where they wore those big giant pinwheel-fellered cats. No, I don't know anything about Katie Perry, but it was the funniest most, like the crazy, just kept coming and coming and I was like this is the best thing I've ever seen so anyway in

this universe you're well aware of Katie Perry and her song Firework and you're humming it to yourself but I'm sitting there reading the New Yorker yes and I'm engrossed in it and not I don't notice that you get up to go make some nachos and you come back in and you catch my attention because you're coming back in with some nachos and they smell awesome and now my attention is directed to you and you're still humming firework right right and And I'm like, I was just thinking about that song, Firework. I had that in my head. How crazy we must be connected.

I didn't realize that you had been humming it earlier. Sure. And beneath my awareness, I picked it up. Although, once I became aware that you were humming it, it seemed to me like I had ESP. Well, yeah, and that ties into another explanation is that people who do seem to have that gift are just really, really hyper-observant on minute details, like the same people. that can pick up on micro expressions, they might feel like they have the gift because they're just really in tune to what's going on around them and not just a, you know, like a big lunkhead walking around. So a lot of people who believe in the ESP say, yes, we agree with that, especially parapsychology researchers. And there are still plenty of respected ones out there.

There's a guy named Darryl Bem. Yeah, I saw that thing you sent. He's been doing this for a while now, legitimately. We should talk about him, but to button up that point, there is a lot of parapsychologists, or even just plain old psychologists who are researching ESP, who say, yes, that definitely most likely accounts for almost all of it. Right. And that's good for us to be thinking about that. And that in and of itself deserves, like, academic inquiry and research, right? But there are still some experiments that are being produced by guys like Darylbaum that are showing some weird results that go beyond this kind of explanation.

Yeah, and one of the problems, well, we'll talk about the problems with even this research about it being reproducible in a second. But he did a couple of experiments. This is from NPR. Yeah, Krollwitch wrote this. Oh, really? Yeah, from Radio Lab. Nice. I didn't know that.

these are the two that he pointed out he did nine different experiments but um the two that he highlighted was uh at cornell which is where bim is does his work right yeah and he's again a very respected psychologist that's right and this study that of these experiments was published in the journal of um personality and social psychology which is a respected journal yeah um so they the first one was a computer quiz they took 100 students 50 males and 50 women and basically they showed a computer screen with two little curtains on it side by side and said behind one is nothing a brick wall and behind the other is something sexy yeah some kind of you know I was about to call it pornographic but who knows maybe it's art nakedness eroticism

eroticism yeah gross um does that just make you feel like your dad saying it or something Yeah, well, this room's too small for you to see this. So basically, he would say, you tell me what you think you're going to see, and they were all hooked up to machines to read what's going on in their body, of course. Right. And you would think it would be a 50-50 result, but they actually got a 53.1% result for what Krollwich calls erotic stimuli. Right.

And basically they think, or at least that's what Bem thinks, is that one possibility is if they think they're going to see something erotically stimulating, then it got passed back through time. Yeah, that's kind of his position, is that retrocognition thing. Yeah. That somehow their future selves who saw the erotic image was stimulated enough that that stimulation traveled backwards three seconds and influence. their choice because they were they would be slightly stimulated physiologically right before they guessed and he said before the computer even chose which which one to show right they right they were making their choices often correct um before the computer chose to show an erotic or non erotic image and 53% it doesn't sound like much but crow which points out a couple

of things one that um when the there was a control group that was shown just non erotic pictures yeah They did 49.8% correct, which is chance, 50-50. And they were all not happy. Right. They were like, I don't want to be the control. They're like, can we get a little steamier in here? But he also pointed out that 53%, 53.1, to be specific, doesn't sound like much. But apparently that's a 0.2% chance where on a scale between 0.1, where zero and 1, where 0%

is it's not going to happen and one is that it's definitely going to happen. Yeah. And apparently as far as correlation goes, there are links between two things something affecting another. A point two is about the same as the link between

aspirin and heart attack prevention. The link between calcium intake and bone mass. The link between secondhand smoke and lung cancer. So things that are touted is like pay attention to this. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly.

So stuff that we accept is like, yeah, yeah, if you're around secondhand smoke, you can get cancer from that. Interesting. But this is probably poop-boot. It has the same, exactly. Yeah. It is. And later on, a meta-analysis of BEMs experiments, some other experiments that were carried out afterward, and then some other experiments all grouped together, a meta-analysis showed that they weren't, it wasn't statistically significant if you took all of the existing body of literature. of these experiments right but it was a new scientist article and um it it was pretty cool in the

comment section somebody said yeah it's not reproducible but a lot of science isn't reproducible and it reminded me of our scientific method episode yeah where like apparently a lot of um trials that that like pharmaceuticals are based on aren't reproducible isn't it like 50% of them yeah which doesn't surprise me of course yeah all right and then that was this other experiment that I need you to explain to me because I didn't understand it. Okay, you ready? Like, I got the first part, but I didn't, it didn't make sense to me. Because it's a little mind-blowing.

Yeah. So, you know how, like, if you are studying something? Sure. And you write it down. Yes. It gets in your brain a little more. Yeah, yeah. So that when you're tested on it later, you will recall it more easily.

Yeah, that's a common study method. Write something down. Okay. So, BEM carried out a very simple experiment that did the opposite of that. First, he showed some people a bunch of words, 48 random words, I think nouns, like tree or something like that. Yeah, and he told them to visualize it, though, right? Right, so they saw all 48 words and thought about them. Not visualized the letters, but visualized the thing.

Right. Like, see the tree in your head. Yeah, just to kind of try to memorize all 48 words. Yeah. Then the computer randomly selected 24 of those words. Okay. And then, after they'd done that, BEM gave them a test of, recall to see how many they recalled right yes so the people had to type out the the the um the words

they recalled yeah then after that the computer randomly selected 24 of the 48 words for the people to type after they'd already taken the test of recall yeah and those 24 words are the ones that people more consistently got right on the earlier test oh okay so it's it's another example of that retrocognition, that these people getting the words in their heads after the test somehow went backward and influenced their recall and memory for the test that they took before they learn them. That makes more sense. A little. Yeah, it is a little. But see, time travel melts my brain too.

Right. So this guy published this stuff in like 2010. Yeah. And like it made a huge, huge splash, huge criticism. The academic journal was criticized and Ben was, you know, pilloried and all that. But he still, you know, put out these very reproducible, understandable, simple exercises that still showed, statistically speaking, there were some significant results that went beyond chance. So when it comes to debunking ESP, one thing that you're not going to, you know, you said fraud, you're not going to see a lot of people call researchers outright fraud. because that's just sort of a dangerous thing to say.

Sure. It's not nice. But there are people out there who, I guess, are criticized for basically trying to call out. And this is something completely different, but these on-stage psychic shows. Like crossing over with John Edwards. Yeah, like, it's easy to pick those people out and say, you're a big fraud, and this is not true, of course. And all you're doing is cold reading. Cold reading we talked about in the animal pet psychics.

episode right that's basically when you get up on stage and you say sir i'm sensing um someone there you're having some trouble with with another man in your life uh with the name of of j or or is it h or oh maybe p or maybe it's p yes my boss uh peter yes yes exactly and that's all a cold reading is throwing out these really broad things and anyone can latch on to right so it's really easy to call uh those people out and there's a guy sort of a guy famous for doing that his name is James Randy and he's famous for his offer of

$1 million to anyone that can prove their psychic ability which of course no one stepped up to do that but then he gets poo-poot a little bit like you're just making a mockery of trying to legitimately disprove something and mockery is absolutely the right word and to me the presence of mockery

indicates the absence of objectivity yeah right so like what you're dealing with then with a guy like that is a set of beliefs a belief system running up against another belief system right just like a couple of religions or something like that it's not objectivity against fraud or anything like that it's belief against belief or something yeah and and yeah the idea of lumping together John Edwards with Daryl Bem Yeah It's just That's you know

Fraudulent in and of itself Yeah that's just They call that theatrics Just like the onstage theatrics Of a stage psychic Yeah So I believe

I totally agree Yeah You know I do too I think there's a Definite room For a healthy Scientific inquiry into just about anything Whether

skeptics believe in it or not Sure If you can get some funding for it Who cares Nice That's my mind You got anything else on ESP? Let me think.

No. I've got one more thing. I found I came across a 1995 nightline with Ted Koppel. Yeah. Where the news broke that the CIA had been studying ESP and trying to do remote viewing what Ronson was talking about and the men who stare at goats. Oh, yeah, John Ronson. When it finally became declassified in 1995, Ted Koppel did like a 20-minute nightline.

segment on it totally worth watching it's some pretty softball questions yeah robert gates who would later become the the um head of defense yeah he's on there just basically trying as politely as possible to show that he does not believe in any of this even though he was the former cia director and um it's just neat plus you get to watch coppel again right i miss he was great news man yeah i miss those dudes i miss uh i was just thinking yesterday about uh brocaw yeah right right I was always a brokaw man did you I liked Peter Jennings he was great yeah I don't even all of them were great I don't even have any idea who does night in the news now I don't watch it it was Brian Williams until about a day ago did he get fired he like got I know the whole

kerfuffle but he didn't get fired for it did he I I'm using my ESP to predict that by the time this came this comes out he will not be there anymore wow I think this is getting big quick interesting yeah Twitter's involved Oh, man. The Twitter take down. If you want to know more about ESP, the internet was virtually set up for you to go find out more about it. You can start by typing ESP in the search bar at How StuffWorks.com. Since I said that, it's time for listener mail.

Yeah, before we do listener mail, I just want to give a quick shout out to my buddy, Isaac McNary. If you remember, I did a Judge John Hodgman episode with Emily in which I did a bad home renovation. and this dude stuff you should know listener from Kansas carpenter master carpenter said hey man I'll come and stay with you and help you do your your project there right and I said this sounds crazy and he actually came and did it and it looks awesome yeah and he's a super cool guy and if you're in Kansas near El Dorado, Kansas there's no better guy to hire the favorite city of El Dorado Kansas it's Eldorado actually okay he has to point out but um not only is he a great carpenter and a cool guy, but he works with a non-profit called Outreach Program, and you can find it at OutreachProgram.org, where they're basically feeding the world. Oh. They package food, and they get people together in a room and package these mass quantities of food to send to other countries and feed the hungry. Gotcha.

And he's just a really good dude. So thanks to Isaac for that. And my kitchen is looking good. So again, for his nonprofit, that is Outreach Program.org. And if you need a great carpenter and you're in Kansas, check out retrofit remodeling. Nice. All right, listener mail. I'm going to call this pronunciation help.

Hey, guys, I'm a botanist and just wanted to throw you a rope to help you out with pronouncing plant family names. All plant family names end in A-C-E-A-E. Oh, yeah, I thought I got that wrong. It is a mess of vowels, guys. When you read it, you should just imagine you were spelling A-C-E, as in. A-C-E So when you read a plant Family name, just break off

A-C-E and read the first part and then spell A-C-E. So the plant family for Poison Oak is Anacardi-C-A-A-C-E. So it's just Anac-C-A-C-E. I remember it by imagining the aneurism and

cardiac arrest I would have if I fell into it. A-N-A-C-A-R. D. I. What? Well, she spelled out Anna Cardi. Oh, gotcha. The first two

first letters from each of those words. Anyway, guys, I love your podcast. Find it endearing when you two puzzle out on pronunciations. A.C.E. A.C. That's good to know. Yeah.

So I love you bunches. And that is from Jane. And she said, P.S. in Europe, they pronounce plant families completely differently. Other parts of the U.S. Other parts of the U.S. might have other conventions, but the above pronunciation is

standard in California. Oh, well. Okay. What? A.C. A.C. If you want to let us know something that we should have known before we even recorded, but you're generous enough with your time and effort to correct us, I guess,

as a way to put it. Sure. That was very helpful. Thanks a lot, Jane. If you want to be like Jane, in other words, you can send us an email to stuffpodcasts at Iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the IHeartRadio app.

Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Samihante, it's Anna Ortiz. And I'm Mark and Delicado. You might know us as Hilda and Justin from Ugly Betty. Welcome to our new podcast. Viva Betty! Yay! We're re-watching the series from start to finish.

And talking to iconic guests like Betty herself, America Ferreira. There was this moment when the glasses went on, and it was like, this is our Betty. Listen to Viva Betty on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The internet is something we make, not just something that happens to us. I'm Bridget Todd, host of the tech and culture podcast. There are no girls on the internet. In our new season, I'm talking to people like Anil Dash, an OG entrepreneur and writer who refuses to be cynical about the internet. I love tech.

You know, I've been a nerd my whole life, but it does have to be for something. Like, it's not just for its own sake. It's an inspiring story that focuses on people as the core building blocks of the internet. Listen to there are no girls on the internet on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, guys, it's Stephanie Beatriz. I'm Melissa Fumero, and this is more better. We are jumping right in and ready to hear. hear from you. Your thoughts, your questions, your feelings about socks with sandals. And we're ready

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