An Interview with Rob Palmer

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign. [00:00:06] Speaker B: Welcome back to Weird World Adventures, the podcast. I'm your host, Mallory, and I'm here to show you just how weird this world of ours really is. I'm very excited today. I have my friend Rob Palmer here with me. Me and Rob have known each other from the center for Inquiry, slash Skeptical Inquirer, slash. I think he meant it Cycon 2023 in Vegas. Is it 2023, 2024, something like that? [00:00:32] Speaker A: Yes. They didn't have 2024, so I think it was 2023 then. [00:00:35] Speaker B: Then that's the year. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Rob. [00:00:41] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm glad to be here. I watched a few of your adventures and this I was glad to get this invitation to, to talk on your podcast, which I frankly did not know you had a podcast. Have you been doing the podcast very long for? [00:00:57] Speaker B: Gosh, we have. We're pretty low key about it. It kind of just accompanies the show. But I think we've been doing it since 2023, early 2023. So a little decent amount of time. And I feel like, Rob, as many times as we've spoken, I've never heard much about your backs, your background and backstory. So I would love to. To hear more about that. Were you an aerospace engineer? [00:01:26] Speaker A: Yeah. I worked the first part of my career designing and testing spacecraft, satellites and such so that they could get launched into what flat Earthers do not believe exists, you know, orbit of the Earth. And I have listened to conversations where people. There are no satellites. No one's ever seen a satellite in real person. It's just all Photoshop. I touched them with my bare hands and I bolted things to them. And I want to strangle those people because I don't understand it. I don't understand a lot. Well, I don't understand a lot of beliefs that are out of this world, shall we say. And that's one of them, the Flat Earth crew. And what goes hand in hand with that is space denial. Because if the Earth is a flat plane, there is nothing in orbit, there's no satellites, we never went to the moon, yada, yada, yada, all that. But of course, the other thing is, what we're going to talk about is psychics, mediums and stuff like that. [00:02:25] Speaker B: Yes, I'm very excited to talk about that. It's one of my favorite things to talk about, actually. And it's weird that we haven't done much with that for the podcast because it is one of my favorite things to talk about. So before we Move into that. I just wanted to ask you, too, about your journey into skeptical activism and how you got involved with Skeptical Inquirer. [00:02:49] Speaker A: So, all right. The skeptical activism, I guess I would put that back to a childhood friend of mine that lost touch with after we both got married a couple years apart, went to each other's weddings, and then stopped communicating. This was before social media. And then social media came, and I, you know, as you do, you find people that you used to know. So I found her and started communicating, and she had turned into a conspiracy nut. And every single thing she believed in that, you know, science does not think is real. And I start like, how could you believe that, Christine? Like, what about this? What about this? And she was very popular, and she had a lot of friends, all of which would attack me whenever I tried to give the other side of something. And some of it was very personal. And this is. And this is the last. This was the last straw. I had to unfriend her because I couldn't take dealing with this anymore. Her father died of cancer, and she went on a rant that they have the cure for cancer, and my father died unnecessarily because they don't want to tell anybody. And when I tried to say how crazy that is, there'd be millions of people around the world and all medical professions who have to have this secret, you know, instead of like, oh, that's a good point. No. Attacked me. Her friends attacked me. And I said, I just can't deal watching this anymore. And not too long after that happened, I was listening to a podcast and I heard about this organization called the Guerrilla Skeptics on Wikipedia, which are able to edit Wikipedia in such a way that it adds scientific information. It fights conspiracy theories, alternative medicine, nonsense, psychic nonsense, stuff like that. And I figured, well, okay, if I do this, I'm not going to reach a person like my friend, but if somebody's on the fence and looking into something because, oh, I wonder if this is real. And if they look at Wikipedia, which is a common thing to do, gets suggested by Google searches, even, I will be able to have provided information that will save somebody else from falling down into one of these rabbit holes. So I've been doing that for quite a long time. I wrote an article for Skeptical Inquirer on the gorilla skeptics because I was so happy to be doing it and. And sent it in. You know, just, hey, random chance. I didn't know that they would publish it, but they did, and they liked it and offered me a spot to publish with a column name. And that's how I got. That's how I really got involved. So I can thank my friend who's into everything for getting me so frustrated that I went down that path. And then I became a Skeptical Enquirer author. And by the way, I used to believe a lot of that stuff, but, you know, I. I stopped after my teenage years. But in my teenage years, I believed in alien abductions and ghosts and Ouija boards and all that kind of stuff. And the thing that got me out of that was finding the Skeptical Inquirer magazine and a library, and now I write for them. So that's, like, absolutely amazing. [00:05:58] Speaker B: That's amazing. And, you know, everybody that I've talked to kind of in that world, I mean, Kenny Biddle to Ben Radford, everyone, Brian Dunning, they're all like, well, I used to believe. And I mean, I'm in the same boat, too. I used to believe. And then, you know, you start to invest. I mean, it's like, we're all very curious people. You start to investigate, you start to realize, well, surely I would have seen something or there'd be a different result here if this was actually true. [00:06:22] Speaker A: Yeah, it's quite amazing because you start reading the articles and say, oh, probably aliens really aren't. Oh, crop circles. Are people making them? Oh, this. But surely this other thing has to be real, because I haven't seen that. Oh, the next month. Yep, they wrote about that too. That also has an explanation. So it was like, wow. And then I learned the thing about critical thinking and not just to accept everything because it's in a book. [00:06:46] Speaker B: Right. [00:06:47] Speaker A: Or on television. And so. So I'm a bit older than you, so when I was doing this as a teenager, there was no Internet, there was no Google search to find the alternate explanation. There were four channels or so on my television and they had nonsense on it. Lennon Nimoy hosted the show about. I forgot the name of it, but like once a week about the Loch Ness monster, alien abductions or crop circles. And it was all presented like it was real. [00:07:12] Speaker B: Right. [00:07:13] Speaker A: So it was very hard to find alternate information. I remember getting a UFO book from, I believe, the science section of the public library, because that's where they would put it. We're also going to put stuff about spaceships and it was all about every chapter as. I wish I could find this book now. It was so long ago. I don't even have an idea where. Where it would. Where to look. [00:07:34] Speaker B: Who. [00:07:35] Speaker A: Who, if it's still you know, in print. But every chapter was this. The author's explanation for an alien race. He had met them all. He had been abducted or met them. I don't remember if it was, you know, probing or he had psychic experiences. But every chapter was the different race he met from different stars and their spaceships. Everyone. This was a. This was kind of an ovoid. This was a disk. This was a sphere, right? And I was in it hook, line and sinker. Wow. Why isn't this being talked about even more on the news? I don't understand it. And then I got to the last chapter and it was all about, where are they coming from? From the bases on the far side of the moon. Now, this book was written before anything had been launched into space by anybody. But I'm reading the book after we had sent vehicles to orbit the moon and we knew what the far side looked like. And there are no cities there, right? And. Oh my God, that's a lie. Everything in this book is a lie. It just opened me that. You don't have to believe what people say. [00:08:37] Speaker B: I feel like we. I know that exactly that feeling you're talking about too, because I feel like I've experienced it. And it's almost the same feeling when you get to a certain age and you realize that your parents aren't right about everything, right? There's just certain things you expect to be like. My parents are always right. There. There's, you know, there's never any gray and books are always right and everything I read is true. And then when you, when that breaks, it's, it's. It's hard to accept sometimes. [00:09:00] Speaker A: And, and Leonard Nimoy, my favorite logical Vulcan character, is on that TV show telling me that the Loch Ness monster is real. [00:09:08] Speaker B: Exactly right. So I definitely want to talk about. About psychics today. Let me, let me get your spiel first. What's your. What's your favorite thing to kind of deconstruct or talk about with. [00:09:29] Speaker A: Sorry, repeat that, please. [00:09:30] Speaker B: I was saying for. We should. We should talk. We should move into psychics. What's your kind of spiel? Like your favorite thing to kind of bring up when you're talking about critical thinking? [00:09:41] Speaker A: So I wasn't too concerned about that until. Let me think about this. I think I was in the guerrilla skeptics for a couple of years and one of the things we like to do is write brand new articles for people or concepts or books that don't have an article. And I was driving somewhere and I was listening to a Podcast called Skepticality, which is not on anymore. But the guest who was being interviewed was a private eye named Bob Nygaard. And he was a former New York City detective, retired, went to Florida thinking he was just going to spend his life on the beach. And he tells a long story about how he got pulled into this. But because of what happened with people talking to him about getting conned by psychic scammers, he became a private eye trying to get justice for people who've been scammed by psychic. And he told the story with millions of dollars collectively, and sometimes even individually, people lose to scammers because they believe they're psychic. So I wrote a Wikipedia article for him. And when I became an author, which was very soon after that for Skeptical Inquirer, I actually contacted him and I interviewed him. Actually, I've interviewed him like three or four times since then for Skeptical Enquirer. But it really got me to understand that this isn't just fun and games to a lot of people. People lose their livelihoods. People commit suicide because they are taken advantage of by people who will take them for everything they can because they have no morals, because they believe in psychics. Right, Right. I wrote an article, Skeptical Inquire, not too long after I interviewed Bob about all of this. And it began with a story. I got contacted by one of Bob Nygaard's victims. Because the article had been published, they could find my email address, and they emailed me, and it was, I've been. I've been taken for my life savings. Can you please help me? You know, I lost. I think it was $42,000, which is my life savings by this psychic, and I can't get any help for it. So I wrote her back, you know, okay, I'm not in the legal system, but I can give you Bob Nygaard's contact information. But that became like, wow, this woman's asking me for help, and there's nothing really I can do. And then what Bob told me was he gets four or five calls like that a day. I mean, he does. He's not an agency. It's just a person. And he's got to, you know, take them based upon his free time, possibly how much the person lost, but also possibly how much evidence there is that he could bring a case, that kind of thing. So most people in this country and around the world who are ripped off like this have no hope. And what else also I learned from Bob is that the legal system is not your friend, because first off, you go and try to file a complaint. They go, did they put a gun to your head? Why'd you give them all that money? Right, Right. No, you just gave him the money. And Bob knows that that is not the case. It's still fraud. Right? So he. What he does is because of his. His background and in policing, he will get them to take a case and take it and, you know, help the. Help the victim gather the right evidence and that sort of thing. But like I said, he can take so few people, so many people get scammed by these people for. For all that the person could possibly take. And, you know, that's the tip of the iceberg too, as Susan Gerbic knows. A lot of its emotional destruction, besides your financial losses. People, you know, are told that they're in contact with their deceased relatives. And then when they, if they find out that this is not true, it's like a double loss because they believe they're in contact with this person. And meanwhile, the. The grief vampire, as Susan says, you know, will just keep taking them and come back for another reading, come back from another reading, spend more money. And it's really a horrible thing. So it's one of the things that I try to push back on as much as I can amongst all the other crazy things out there, because I know people are being directly harmed. Most times the people believe that the government is hiding the truth about UFOs, right? No, I don't think so. But it's not a personal loss such as this is. [00:14:23] Speaker B: Right. It's tough too, because I feel like it's a topic that in. In pop culture and mainstream media at this point is. So it's treated like it's something fun. Like it's presented in a way that it almost. It almost makes it more dirty. Or, you know, Ouija boards, you could buy them from Mattel, right? It's like literally a child's toy. They have the pink ones from Toys R Us. [00:14:46] Speaker A: There's a Ouija board that says communicate directly with Jesus. I saw that advertised. [00:14:50] Speaker B: No, that is amazing. [00:14:54] Speaker A: Right? [00:14:55] Speaker B: But it almost makes it. It makes it so much harder because it's presented in such a fun way and people, you know, it obviously just take advantage. And there's this dark side that, that you don't even think about unless, you know, you become personal. [00:15:07] Speaker A: So there's a little bit of problem with editing Wikipedia pages for the famous psychics because editors who are experienced and generally skeptical about things don't want too much information on a psychic's bio that says that they're frauds because they say, well, Wikipedia's got these, these stringent rules about biographies of living people, articles. You can't put anything that's not verified or whatever. I think it's pretty easy to verify that somebody's a fraud if they're saying they're talking to dead people. But the other editors who aren't into the skepticism just say, nobody believes in that. Why do we have to go out of our way to take that risk and do that? It's like nobody believes in this. I'm looking at, let's see, Pew 2018 survey. That's the last one I've looked up, but I'm sure it's not gotten any better. This was New age beliefs common among both religious and non religious Americans. On average, 41% of Americans believe in psychics, right? Almost half. And amongst the religious faiths, let's see, Catholics are the highest at just a tear under 50%. And even atheists are 10. [00:16:17] Speaker B: How does that work? Wow. The Catholics make sense because they also have a whole sect on demonology. So I feel like you, you fall into the demonology, then you know, Ouija [00:16:29] Speaker A: boards are opening the gate to hell for absolutely sure. Yeah. [00:16:34] Speaker B: Well, that's fun to meet one of these atheists that believes in psychics. [00:16:41] Speaker A: Yeah, I. So there is, there's a movement called Humanism and this would sort of atheist. So the Venn diagram of humanism, atheism, right. That's one big circle. And the skeptic circle, there's an overlap, but it's not 100%. [00:17:01] Speaker B: Right? [00:17:02] Speaker A: Absolutely not. Yeah. I mean, I went, I was giving a talk about this topic. Well, it was Wikipedia and I mentioned psychics as part of it, but it was actually mostly about Wikipedia at a humanist meeting. So I was talking about Wikipedia's lists of pages ranked by frequency of viewing. So I had the paranormal page up, I had this skeptical page up, I had science list of science topics. And then I got to, I think it was a wellness category. And the number one was Jenny McCarthy. So I asked the group, why would she be number one? And someone raised a hand because she doesn't believe in vaccines. She thinks vaccines cause death and stuff, right? And I go, yes, that's right. That's why she's up there. And someone else in the group raised their hand and said, and she's right. Oh no, that's the first time I was ever heckled. So I, I just dropped the subject and moved on. But that would never happen in a skeptic conference. [00:18:08] Speaker B: Oh my gosh. You know, speaking of, of seance and the, in the history of seances. Houdini was, you know, very actively against mediums. And I, I think it's so ironic now, I'm just curious your thoughts that we have kind of annual Houdini seances all over and he was so anti seance. Yep. [00:18:32] Speaker A: It, Mark Edwards, who passed away a couple years ago, was a performer mentalist, and he infiltrated the whole psychic field. He was a psychic friends network. He was like the top performer. I interviewed him about this and he did, he did seances for fun. It was like, it was like a kind of a fun thing to do. But, you know, he wouldn't say it's real. He wouldn't say it's real. So that's kind of. Yeah, that's the thing. People, people enjoy this. It's weird, right? Yeah. And that's okay. Just like tarot card readers. Some people do that for fun. As long as you're not making your life decisions on these things. [00:19:12] Speaker B: Right. It's not like going to the Magic Castle and doing it. [00:19:14] Speaker A: Yes. [00:19:15] Speaker B: Seances. Yeah. [00:19:17] Speaker A: Right. [00:19:17] Speaker B: Definitely. [00:19:18] Speaker A: Right. Yeah. And one of the things that I learned from both Bob Nygaard and also Mark, you know, from the people who believe, people say, oh, they're stupid. No, they're not. And I got a quote here from Bob Nygard. It doesn't matter if you're a college professor, it doesn't matter if you're a lawyer, and it doesn't matter if you're a medical doctor. You're on their territory meeting the psychic medium. And they know how to take advantage of that. [00:19:45] Speaker B: Right. [00:19:45] Speaker A: So they're experts at psychological manipulation. And if you happen, no matter how smart you are, if you happen to be in a vulnerable, vulnerable state and also, you know, prone to thinking that this could be real, you are primed to be their victim. [00:20:04] Speaker B: Do you think there's a group of people there that genuinely believe that they can actually speak to the other side and are just very misinformed? Or do you think it's mostly con artists and people trying to kind of. [00:20:17] Speaker A: I, I, I have met individuals who think they're psychic, and I do believe that they're just misinterpreting, you know, what's happened in their life, confirmation bias and people reinforcing things like that. Like, and the people I'm talking about, they don't even charge money. They just do it for their friends when they, when they're feeling or whatever. Still could be harmful, depending what they're telling them. But I, I have a hard time Believing that these people who are on television and, you know, bestsellers and seminars or anything but scam, scammers and ours and know what they're doing. And that's been borne out by a lot of them having been stung and prove that they do hot reading. You know, it's. I don't see how you can believe you're doing it for real and still take the time to look at people's Facebook pages and then read them back the stuff that's on Facebook. You know, I suppose there's a possibility that maybe, well, you feel I'm off this day, and I'll do that because I'm not feeling it as much as I usually do. But, yeah, I. I would go with the other opinion that people like Matt Fraser and Thomas John and Teresa Caputo know exactly what they're doing. It's also evident when you've ever been in a studio where these things are recorded or, like, have heard stories of people relaying what happens. Like, what happens on television is heavily edited to drop all the bad things that all the misses and only show the hits and that kind of a thing. And even worse, stuff like that. You know, I've heard some of them go and they play with the audience before the recording starts and talk to them, and then they come back and act like, I've never met you, have I? And, you know, and the person is not going to say, oh, yeah, we talked about just five minutes ago. Don't you remember? Because they don't want to be embarrassed on television. [00:22:11] Speaker B: Right. I remember watching an episode of Penn and Teller's about it where they had the hot reading. They kind of went in and busted somebody, and it was great. [00:22:21] Speaker A: I think Mark Edwards was on that. I think so. [00:22:23] Speaker B: Really? [00:22:24] Speaker A: Yeah. And. And part of the problem here, too, is, as you kind of mentioned, it's, like, all over television. It's just like. It's like fun and games. Gwyneth Paltrow had a series on Netflix called the Goop Lab, and there was six or so episodes. Each one was about a different topic of wellness. And one of them was promoting her. Her favorite personal psychic medium, Laura Lynn Jackson. The episode's name was Are you into it? Not into it. In, like, intuition or. [00:23:02] Speaker B: Right. [00:23:03] Speaker A: And the whole point was, everybody's psychic. Everyone has these powers. I'm just a little bit better because I've learned how to do it. But I can teach you how to do it for money. And, you know, yes, you can talk to the dead and yada yada, and, wow, this is on a public, you know, show like that. And I. It amazes me how this goes on. So many people must be convinced when they see this because, like, why would. Why would they lie about this? [00:23:25] Speaker B: Right? [00:23:26] Speaker A: And in that episode, Dr. Julie Bachel, who's somebody who is a paranormalist who claims to have proven this and that people can levitate and all sorts of other things. You know, she's there as the science person to back up the fact that Laura Lynn Jackson really is a psychic medium, a paranormalist. [00:23:45] Speaker B: I've never even heard that. [00:23:46] Speaker A: Probably not the right word. [00:23:49] Speaker B: That's your scientist. Okay. [00:23:53] Speaker A: Everything paranormal having to do with extrasensory perception and that sort of thing, she def. She definitely believes. So I actually interviewed aforementioned Bob Nygaard asking what he thought about this. And, you know, he said something like, you know, probably Gwyneth Paltrow doesn't know the harm she's doing, but this is an awful thing to publish like that. [00:24:16] Speaker B: I think she got in legal trouble too, because she was. She was saying there was, like, health things that were provably not healthy for. [00:24:24] Speaker A: Yeah, the J Day. The J Day. [00:24:26] Speaker B: Yes. That's what it was. Yes. There were some legal repercussions so that it's okay. We have to censor. [00:24:33] Speaker A: I occasionally write for a place called AIPT Science, and I wrote two articles about Gwyneth, and one of them, yes, centered on the nonsense products that are very expensive that you can buy on her site, which even are sometimes dangerous. That was definitely one of them. [00:24:49] Speaker B: Yeah. It's crazy. And also with. With the ghost hunters. You know, I loved the ghost hunters back in the day because it was fun and gimmicky and it feels like nonsense, but, you know, it did. Me and Kenny talked about this. It started out very kind of debunky in a way where we're gonna. This isn't haunted because of this. They went to people's houses. It was very. It was more practical. And then somehow, as the ratings weren't doing well when it was presented like that, it became very cut. And, oh, there's something here. And, oh, we found this. And then all, like. You can see where the producers kind of, like, interfere. Like, we need more. We need more. And you can see where it starts becoming very storytelling, which, yeah, that doesn't surprise me. [00:25:26] Speaker A: And in all of the ghost shows I've ever watched, and this also goes for, like, hunting Bigfoot and whatever, they just keep going on and on and on because they never find them. If they just found one, that would be the end of the show. There we go. We've proved it. [00:25:37] Speaker B: Definitely, Definitely. The, yeah, the big. The Bigfoot ones, they didn't make me laugh because for me, I don't know why, Bigfoot is just so silly. [00:25:49] Speaker A: So one. One of the more interesting things I've done regarding psychics is Richard Saunders, who's from the Australian Skeptics and hosts the Skeptic Zone podcast. He did a project called the Great Australian Psychic Prediction Project. And I was one of the people helping with that. Over some number of years, I don't remember exactly, it was like maybe five years, he collected 3,800 predictions that were made over 20 years in Australia. They either had to be published in Australian magazine or on air there or by an Australian psychic and on YouTube or whatever. And he put a team together, which was six or seven people wrote some people rotating in and out, which lasted every week for a year and a half. We would score the predictions, whether or not they were, you know, looking at the result and trying to figure them out, were they or did they come true? Did they not come true? Were they too vague? Like, there will be earthquakes in California sometime this year. Like, I'm sorry, if there was one, you don't get a yes on that. That's vague. Right. So those kinds of things. And. And it turns out that after a year and a half looking at that, we published it. Richard published it in the Skeptic in Australia. I published it in Skeptical Inquirer, we've been on. Right. When it came out, we talked about this, different YouTube channels and podcasts, and it was quite fascinating because even being generous on scoring some of the things, they got 11%. Right. [00:27:28] Speaker B: Wow. [00:27:30] Speaker A: And being generous, I mean, if they said, you know, if there's a World Series between two teams and they picked one of the two teams to win. Yeah, 50, 50 shot, you're going to get that. So. And there was some number of things in there like that, and we counted that. Okay, you got that right. But still, I think if you subtracted the 50, 50 shots, they would have been like way down below, I don't know, something way under 10%. I don't even. Maybe a lot lower than that, but still, that's quite ridiculous. And then the other part of it is we highlighted the ridiculous things that they said, which in some cases they marked in their own media as that they got correct, one of which was science will finally develop artificial gravity and will be available for sale to make it easier to move things around. This was in 2001. Do you remember that? [00:28:23] Speaker B: Happening. [00:28:24] Speaker A: Do you remember that? Happening? That psychic marked that as correct on her own website. The following year, she got that prediction correct. That goes to my correct column. Like, what are you smoking? Like, and it's, it's amazing. [00:28:37] Speaker B: Oh, my gosh, I wish there was something like that. [00:28:42] Speaker A: But quite often they'll make very vague things that they say got correct. And you're, you know, retroactively rating yourself. Like, there will be earthquakes somewhere this year, and yes, some earthquake happens. Oh, I got that right. [00:28:56] Speaker B: That, that's crazy. And 11, I, I don't know, I would even expect it to be higher by accident. [00:29:04] Speaker A: Well, I think part of that is because they, they do reach for really odd things like the artificial gravity trying to, like, because if that came true and science had developed that, that person would be the most famous person in the world that's acting. Right. How could I have seen that coming? I got that right. [00:29:19] Speaker B: Right. [00:29:19] Speaker A: They always throw out these really, really oddball things that are extremely unlikely to happen. So if something does happen, look, I'm the only one who got that right. But if they get it wrong, nobody cares. Everybody forgets about it. Almost nobody ever looks at their previous predictions from the outside. [00:29:38] Speaker B: Right. [00:29:38] Speaker A: They're always published in magazines and in newspapers. Here's the predictions for the this coming year. You don't get the next year, which says, let's look back at all of those. People don't care because they just want to sell magazines and newspapers. The people who publish the stuff or put TV shows on the air or give Teresa Caputo a show and Match Fraser a show and Thomas John a show, they don't care if it's true or not. They're making money on it. Right. [00:30:04] Speaker B: They want to tell a good story. [00:30:06] Speaker A: Yeah. So, so regarding the harm that can come from this, when I, when I wrote that article about the, you know, what's, what's the problem of believing in psychics? It's like, why do people believe and what's the harm? I ended it with a line. I'm going to read this so I don't get it wrong. Any and all media outlets perpetrating the public's belief in psychic powers have substantial blood stains all over their hands. They, they don't realize what happens to people who believe this and then go to, you know, okay, I see, I see the psychic show on tv. Oh, Teresa Caputo. There are really psychic powers. And then you go into your neighborhood psychic and they take you for all you're worth. [00:30:49] Speaker B: Right. That's crazy. How, how frequently that happens. It's also, it's interesting, interesting because me and Michael were having this conversation the other day about, you know, certain, certain belief systems are sacred probably because they're so fresh and people still believe them because we're writing a book on medicine and mythology and you know, people don't believe in the Egyptian gods anymore, people don't believe in the Greek pantheon anymore. Things like that are so outdated that it's perfectly acceptable to talk about. It's not controversial. Everyone can kind of universally agree on it. Then you start getting into these areas with seances and ancestor communication. And it's, it's still prevalent in certain religions around the world and voodoos, spiritualism and, and, and it kind of. The more present something is and the more people believe in it, the more off limits it is and the harder it is to start those conversations, the more controversial it becomes. And I think it's because that people. It's a piece of someone's identity. Right. Some people believe this and it's like it's so important to them because you are not attacking the idea of what this is. When they feel attacked by it, they feel like you're attacking them personally. And it becomes a very difficult lane. [00:32:01] Speaker A: Yeah, I totally agree. There was, we have a local theater which is like maybe 50 seats. And during the intermission at one show we were at, they announced that coming months they were going to have this psychic medium. And I got pissed about it and I sent to the people my article about what's the harm in believing in psychics? You know, it didn't do any good of course, because they probably believed in it, which is why they invited her. [00:32:27] Speaker B: Right. [00:32:28] Speaker A: So I'm looking right now at a, a pamphlet I just got in the mail the other day from the State Theater of New Jersey. This is probably New Jersey's largest theater. And it's like the show's coming up. And on November 4th, Teresa Caputa. The experience. Through personal life stories, candid humor and intimate details about her gift to communicate with those who have passed on, the beloved television personality and best selling author delivers healing messages to her audience, reassuring them with a revelation that their deceased loved ones are still with them. Yada, yada, yada. That's nice. [00:33:05] Speaker B: It's interesting that the use of words, a healing beloved, it's so positive and uplifting and it's very, I want to say manipulative. But you know, the way that it's, it's written is very specific. [00:33:20] Speaker A: Absolutely. Yeah. And so one of the things is like, well, people, well, how do you know this isn't real? Right. All right. Don't know for a fact that no one can do this, but. But nobody's been able to show that they can do this under controlled circumstances. And this is one of the things, right. CFIIG center for Inquiries Group has one half of a million dollars to anyone who can show they can do this. Right. And it would be a test where the person claiming the powers would agree to what the test is and they would work it out. And anytime this has ever happened for not only psychic powers, but any kind of paranormal claims, they never can do it. Never. So, you know, it gets to a point where absence of evidence, you know, is evidence of absence. I'm sorry. I know some people say that that's not the case. Longer something like that goes on and the more absence there is when there should not be. If this was a true thing, Right. There should be evidence of this. [00:34:18] Speaker B: Yes. [00:34:19] Speaker A: Yeah. And one of the other things that indicates to me that this is an act is. I mean, you know how this all started with the Fox sisters, right? [00:34:28] Speaker B: Yes. [00:34:29] Speaker A: Right. Was like table wrapping in the dark. Right. Things like, that's how. That's how mediums did it. Then the room had to be dark. You had to be holding hands, and maybe the spirit would appear to them in that room. Well, now, fast forward, what is it, 100 years now? You can do it over zoom. If you're a psychic medium with a thousand people in your audience, and you could connect with the dead one of the person halfway around the planet in the broad daylight over technology. What, What? Like, why. Why do people not see that? That is bizarre. [00:34:59] Speaker B: Yes, definitely. And there's also. It's funny because I feel like there's so many people that prove that you can give a really good show. Like Banachek, you were. Yes. You watch Banachek's show and you're like, he's saying, I'm fooling you. And you. [00:35:14] Speaker A: I think I watched you up there. [00:35:16] Speaker B: Yes. Oh, my God. Yep. I've been to spoon with my mind on stage. [00:35:22] Speaker A: Amazing. Amazing. [00:35:25] Speaker B: I mean, me and Michael both looked at each other like, well, that's just it. Psychics are real. You know, obviously, like, making a joke. Like, I'm just. And I have no idea how he's doing any of this. [00:35:35] Speaker A: Almost had me fooled. [00:35:38] Speaker B: It's. It's wild. So. So knowing. Just knowing that there are. There are techniques out there that people can take advantage of and they are. They look that real. I mean, that's just another, you know, But People. [00:35:51] Speaker A: So, so this is the weird thing. I. I interviewed Penn Jillette about this for. Because he was going to be a speaker at the conference. And I get to interview the speakers before the conference, which is really cool. So I got to interview him. And one of the things I asked him was this kind of a thing, like, what makes people believe things. And I read the story somewhere and he confirmed it for me, said they stand out. He and Teller will stand outside their performance and meet all the people coming out, and they'll stand there as long as people want to talk to them. And every once in a while, somebody will come up to them and go, tell me how you really did that trick. I know it's not a trick. Tell me. [00:36:34] Speaker B: Come on. [00:36:34] Speaker A: You got powers and you don't want to admit it. So you're saying it's a trick. I can't tell you how I did it, but it is not powers. No. Come on. I know you don't want to tell me. Like, this is from the horse's mouth. And people who want to believe this stuff will go on wanting to believe this stuff. [00:36:51] Speaker B: Right. Sometimes there's nothing you can say to change someone. I mean, you're changing their worldview sometimes. Sometimes. So. [00:36:58] Speaker A: Right. [00:36:58] Speaker B: It's very hard. [00:36:59] Speaker A: Yeah. So. Yeah. So the other thing that I don't. I don't understand why people can't drop it is really because it seems obvious to me that if you're not willing to sit for a test by somebody who. You've agreed to a test that you shouldn't be believed anymore. But kind of like you said, people are so invested in this that they don't even care that their favorite psychic medium will not sit for a test. They. They'll take whatever excuse they give as to why they don't want to do that. And most recently, Skeptical Inquirer pushed this issue with forgetting her name. The woman who was missing, who was the mother of the on air personality. Do you know I'm talking about. [00:37:48] Speaker B: Yes. [00:37:49] Speaker A: Yeah. So, okay, she. She wasn't found dead. No one knew where she was. How about all these psychic mediums who claim to be able to, or just psychics, if she's still alive, find this person. And they. The skeptics, like, pinged the famous psychics and they all had excuses. No, I can't do that. I don't want to get in the way. You know, they didn't ask me to do this. They're not paying me to do this, or all different reasons. But, wow, if they really had the Power to do these kinds of things. You think somebody would have found the woman. And not only that woman, there are. There are people who go missing all the freaking time. [00:38:29] Speaker B: Right. [00:38:29] Speaker A: You get these people claiming they have these amazing powers. [00:38:37] Speaker B: You think you'd use your ability for good. [00:38:40] Speaker A: Yeah. So the people who. Who believed it themselves. So you asked me before, do people believe it, you know, who are doing it? So I interviewed the last person, I think, on the whole topic of psychics for Skeptical Fire, then it was a woman named Florio, and she has a YouTube channel. Florio's files used to be Flora's Phantom Files. And she grew up as a psychic. Her mother was a psychic. She believed she was a psychic. And then events in her life, which I won't go into here, but, like, started making her doubt it, but she thought for sure she was. And, you know, I have to give people like her credit because once she followed the evidence and realized, oh, I'm not psychic, it's confirmation bias and all the other biases we have that was making me think this. She now is on the side of, you know, revealing this truth as far as she can help to the world on her YouTube channel, that these people are frauds. [00:39:40] Speaker B: Yeah. That's amazing. I have respect for that. So what's one thing listeners should remember the next time someone offers to reach out for a loved one or to give them a reading? What's something that you think is important for them to hold on to in those situations? [00:40:00] Speaker A: Well, one of the things that I know is bad about this is it's very, very hard to properly grieve for someone if. If you have this feeling that you can reach out to them with the help of this other person, like anytime they'll talk to you or you give them money. And it basically is not letting you complete the grieving process appropriately. It's dangling this false hope in front of you. So I would just say, you know, as far as we can tell, none of this is real. And, you know, don't let them take you in on that. [00:40:39] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:40:40] Speaker A: And go to a proper grief counselor if that's the thing you're looking for. [00:40:46] Speaker B: Definitely. I feel like it's something that has to be explored and worked on in yourself and the part of your journey, [00:40:53] Speaker A: because these people do not care about you. They absolutely do not. [00:40:58] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, amazing. Is there anything else you'd like to cover on the topic? [00:41:06] Speaker A: Well, so we talked just a little bit about, you know, spoon bending. I'll go into that a little bit because it's not Psychic, but it's a telekinesis. Mind power again is another thing, right? And like I said about if, if mediumship were real, why has technology, the way they do it, change with technology so much? But the same thing could be said with ghost photography, right? Like the original ghost photography was Abraham Lincoln standing next to his wife right. When he was dead. So Mary Todd posed and ooh, he looks just like he does, but he's a little fuzzy, right? And then it became orbs, right? When there are certain cameras that would have the flash right next to the, to the lens and cause that. And then we know what it is. But no, actually my friend that I talked about was really into that photography. She was into orb photography because they're ghosts. She would go to all the spooky places where, you know, people are executed with cemeteries and prove that there were ghosts because they got orbs. So that's one thing that's evolved. And now because cameras got better and don't do that anymore, now they're not orbs anymore. [00:42:08] Speaker B: Right, right, right. I think orbs are the silliest avenue for that because clearly it's a ball of dust or it's a light flare. You know, there's so many things that could be where you're just like. Was just a wildlife. [00:42:19] Speaker A: I went to a party at a kind of a dimly lit room and my camera was such that it was doing that all the time. And I selected like five pictures where there was one guy who was followed around by this orb. No matter where he went, it was like, see, he's being haunted, [00:42:34] Speaker B: all right? [00:42:34] Speaker A: Because spoon bending, to get back to that. The other thing is that, you know, people are convinced that people can do that kind of thing with their mind. Yuri Geller, star of that trend. I believe he's still around. That's another thing that if that was real, the world would be a very different place, right? If psychics powers are real, the world would be a very different place. There wouldn't be anybody missing anymore. Casinos cannot stay open. The stock market would crash because certain people would just keep taking advantage. They know what's going to happen that doesn't happen. Guess what? Because psychic powers aren't real, spoon bending is not real. If Uri Geller could do that by his mind and by the way, it wasn't just spoons. I remember I'm young enough where I'm old enough where I remember as a young kid sitting in front of the TV where he would say, bring your broken watches up to the television and Concentrate and he's concentrating and your watch will start. So he was doing this remotely through the TV screen somehow. Right. So if somebody could do that with powers, would you ever want to get on an aircraft with them? Fall asleep somehow? Imagine metals bending and the turbofan would break in the engine and you would be going down. I mean, sorry, no, you can't bend metal and manipulate objects with your mind, people. Although I'm seeing this on Tick Tock all the time now. It's all over. Tick Tock, the paranormal thing of moving things. They have a pin with some tinfoil and band. They could do this. And it rotates. It's easy. This is how you learn to use psychic powers. More and more people are believing in this because of social media. It is sad, right? [00:44:09] Speaker B: Again, it goes back to making it fun and accessible for everybody. Right. It's always. It keeps, it keeps becoming relevant because it gets presented in a fun, exciting way for everybody else and in a new way. [00:44:22] Speaker A: Yes, everybody. That's the, that's one of the other benefits of the whole skeptical movement because people really have short. Human race has short memories. So things that are debunked in one generation, nobody knows about them. Probably most people don't know who Uri Geller is now with the spoon bending stuff. So another person comes up and does that kind of thing with telekinesis. Oh, wow, this is new. Yeah. [00:44:47] Speaker B: And it just keeps repeating in the cycle. [00:44:50] Speaker A: Right. So I actually had a conversation, name dropping with Neil Degrasse Tyson about this when he was about to come to Sci Con. And I said, why don't you usually come to skeptical conferences? And he said, well, there's a different, different job for scientists and skeptics. And it comes down to scientists are pushing the envelope of human knowledge, but skeptics have to remind people what we already know. [00:45:18] Speaker B: So true. I love him, by the way. He's so. He's. He could just talk for hours and I would be entranced. [00:45:25] Speaker A: I hope they get him back at [00:45:26] Speaker B: psycho and very funny. Oh, thank you so much for joining us today, Rob. That was amazing. It was very fun. [00:45:37] Speaker A: Fun. And yeah, I know you originally wanted to talk about UFOs and that's my other favorite topic because I used to be a big believer and now I don't even believe that's likely. There are extraterrestrial civilizations close enough to ever contact us. So I've gone full circle on that talk too. But one of these days, maybe we'll talk about that. [00:45:52] Speaker B: We'll come back on and do UFOs. Because I will say I, I thought of you because I remember you saying that was like your, your space. And I, I think it would be crazy to probably believe that we're the only living beings in the universe, but I also definitely don't think they're coming here and bothering us. And it's something that it's just so I don't, it's never interested me like in a way that I've pursued it like I've pursued the, the ghost stuff and the psychics, you know, but, but the UFO stuff, it's just so foreign. So I feel like I know nothing about it. [00:46:21] Speaker A: So I have, I have something that's going to join those for you. I've always wondered why people are so sure that ghosts, which we don't have any example of to test, are actually dead humans and not aliens who are observing us and their cloaking device fails temporarily and that's why we see them. [00:46:38] Speaker B: Oh, I like that, I like that, I like that. [00:46:42] Speaker A: Who says they're aliens? [00:46:44] Speaker B: It is true. Who. Who says that? Yeah, ghosts are dead. [00:46:48] Speaker A: I mean who says they're. Who says they're not aliens? Yes. Who says they're not time travelers? Also who says they're not interdimensional beings which have nothing to do with dead human beings. [00:46:59] Speaker B: Feel this whole interstellar thing happening. Yes. Oh my gosh. Well, it's lovely to kind of get to interview you for a change too. I feel like tables. Okay there. Sorry it went a little crazy for a second here with my Internet, but I'm back. [00:47:24] Speaker A: I heard you. It didn't break. I just turn about is fair play. [00:47:30] Speaker B: Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Rob. Please let people know where they can find you online too. [00:47:36] Speaker A: You can [email protected] and find my column or you can just probably google the well known skeptic and my name, Rob Palmer and that will come up with my column. Got 100 articles, something like that. Recent years I've been doing video interviews of people like Mallory and Neil Degrasse Tyson and Bill Nye and people who are either Sidecon speakers or Cycon adjacent. So yeah, and I've some written articles and a lot of videos that are on the CFI website. [00:48:11] Speaker B: Amazing. Thank you so much for joining me and thank you everyone for tuning in. And until next time. Time everybody stay weird.