Abhijit: Hello and welcome to another episode of Rationable, the Rationable Podcast and the Rationable YouTube channel. And today, we have a very interesting guest, somebody I met in Vegas when I went to the CSICon conference. His name is Rob Palmer. He's an activist when it comes to sceptic activism against psychics, et cetera, and he apparently, I just found out, used to be an aerospace engineer.

He used to design spacecraft. So, of course, we'll do a full deep dive on that, maybe in a different episode. But we are here to talk about something very special. But Rob, welcome, welcome to the show.

Rob Palmer: Oh, thank you so much for having me on . That's funny. Yes. Sorry for the listeners. I just told Abhijit that I was invited on a podcast a few years ago to talk about psychics, and when they found out I designed spacecraft for my official career, that's all we talked about the whole podcast,

Abhijit: unsurprisingly, as I retorted.

But that is very interesting. But we have got to get on with some very interesting work that you've been doing, especially something called the,

Rob Palmer: the Great Australian Psychic Prediction Project.

Abhijit: Yes, exactly. And that is actually G A P P P,

Rob Palmer: yeah. And I thought, Oh, so cleverly, I had to give a name to my presentation, so I called it Mind the GAPPP.

Which Americans didn't I ratify people. Do you know what that means? No. What are you talking about? But it's a British, at least expression elsewhere,

Abhijit: mind the gap before you step onto a subway

Rob Palmer: or, yes. Right. ..

Abhijit: So tell us more about what this is. What exactly are we doing here? What is the GAPPP?

Rob Palmer: So the Great Australian Psychic Prediction Project, as it was dubbed by Richard Saunders of the Skeptic Zone, yeah.

Abhijit: We've had on the show before.

Rob Palmer: And he, you didn't talk about this with him, did you?

Abhijit: No, not at that point of time. I think it was still just a twinkle in his eye.

Rob Palmer: Ah, okay.

He probably, he's been working on it for 20 years or so, so probably not quite a twinkle, but he wasn't ready to talk about it yet, maybe not quite that long. Maybe it was 10 years, but it has been a long time. Richard worked on this by collecting predictions from anything published in Australia by psychic people in Australia. And I'll have air quotes whenever I use the word psychic or medium in this presentation.

He collected data, gathering all of the predictions that were made, and he set a timeframe, it was gonna be any predictions from the year 2020 going forward. And when he started, he didn't know how long he would go, but it wound up. He ended it with predictions from 2020. So from 2000 to 2020. So he did 21 years actually of predictions gathered.

Abhijit: Wow.

Rob Palmer: And while he was collecting them, slowly trying to score them, okay, we'll put them in the database. How well did they come true? Did they not come true? But it's so much easier to just spout nonsense than to verify whether the nonsense is true. So you can say, so and so and so and so is gonna feel this way about something, or this is gonna happen to the economy and this place and whatever.

And now you have to go and try to figure out if that's true. And that's a hard thing to do. So he was making very slow progress in scoring all the predictions and the predictions wound up numbering close to 4,000.

Abhijit: Oh my goodness. And that's across how many psychics?

Rob Palmer: So 207 are in the database; 207 people claiming some kind of paranormal clairvoyant ability who are either Australians or they predicted it in Australian media. So his criteria was he had to be able to capture from Australian media, or it was Australians themselves. And initially, back in the days, pretty much when the internet had just gotten started, that meant going to national libraries, looking at microfilm, asking for copies of magazines they had collected, and making photocopies cuz he wanted a copy of everything in his own possession permanently so that once these were scored if people had a disagreement, you didn't have to go and find it again. So that was a lot of work for him to do. And then he also found recordings from a radio that were archived and TV shows, and then later YouTube. So he's got copies of everything.

But he started to do the scoring. He got some help from the Australian psychics’ group, which he was in, but it was going very slowly. Then the pandemic happened. That was a good thing regarding this because he was locked down, couldn't even leave his house or his neighbourhood, nothing much to do. Decided this was a good time to put his energies into finishing this project. And then he realized, oh, maybe other people could help. So he reached out to Susan Gerbic, who was a sceptical activist, who also spoke at CSICon this year. She was very good at organizing people and putting things together. And she was already using Zoom a lot, so she decided we can do this over Zoom.

And she asked other people to volunteer, and I volunteered. That's how I got involved. We, as a group of people, went at this for over a year and a half, I think it was. Every single week, almost without a miss, we met for two hours. We collectively looked at all of the predictions. We used Google and other sources that we had, finding information and trying to find out how each of these predictions went down. Were they true, or were they not? And as we worked on the database, the actual number in Richard Saunder's set of predictions grew because a lot of these psychics will make stream-of-consciousness predictions, this is gonna happen, and then this is gonna happen, and this might happen, and this is gonna happen, this is gonna happen. And it's all four or five separate things really. And so he originally had that listed as one thing cuz it was from one recording. So that would become, that one would become four or five or six. That's why the absolute number went up. And then, we would look at each of those independently. We probably spent something like a thousand hours. I did it back in the envelope calculation at one point, scoring all of these in an amazing amount of time.

And the idea was to score them all into certain categories. And a given prediction, the way Richard looked at it, was either correct, it was wrong, but it's more than just those two simple answers. It could also be expected, it could be too vague, or it could frankly just be unknown.

The unknown category is like something was predicted about somebody's private life. Even if it's a celebrity, you might. There's no recording of this. How do you know if that happened or not? So it just perpetually goes into the unknown. Another category is people might die at a certain time in the future, or they won't; they'll live into their nineties, and then you look up their age and then, oh, their nineties is 10 years from now. So we don't know if that's true or not yet, right? It could be right. It could be wrong. It's also a very big window to give a prediction, but sometimes that happens. By the way, most of the predictions that Richard collected were the kind that was given for the following year. So this happens a lot, right?

Magazines, newspapers to fill column inches, they'll invite somebody on in late December, make predictions for this coming year right now. But sometimes they would go beyond that in open-ended...

Abhijit: the Skeptics Guide podcast does this every year as well.

So they have a little baby version of this where they

Rob Palmer: Exactly. Other sceptics groups have done that. And generally, it's like for a few local predictions, they do maybe five or 10 or something like that and is in a giving you, yeah, so we, we think this is the largest set of data, close to 4,000, over two decades, that's ever been done at one time.

And when you're looking at data, the more you have, the better the ultimate result is. Any kind of tests, trials or anything. Yeah, we feel pretty good about this. So the other kind of categories that we could score predictions in are, I mentioned expected: so that's a lot of the predictions these people make are, eh, not quite as bad as this, but pretty close – the sun's gonna come up tomorrow morning, and they marked that as correct as, how great they are as a psychic. We didn't put that in the correct category even though the sun did come up tomorrow. So we put that into expected that's not even a prediction. Stop it. And then the other category was too vague. So this is stuff that you can read, and it's wishy-washy and might also be unknown. But sometimes it's just this is gonna be an earthquake somewhere in the world. Okay. And then there's a debate. Is that expected? Yes. Is it too vague? Yes. So we had to decide which of those categories, but basically those are a way of taking away obvious hits or retroactive hits where a psychic would say, yeah, see, look at that. I got that right. And really, no, that's not what you said. And only give them a score of Correct on ones that were, like, would be counted as, yeah, that's a true prediction. Right.

Abhijit: Wow. Okay. So you collected all of these, and you went through all the data. What did you find?

Rob Palmer: Unsurprisingly, they weren't too accurate. So when you take away the vague ones,

Abhijit: I didn't see that coming.

Rob Palmer: Yeah, that's cuz you're not psychic. Yeah. So you take away those wishy-washy ones and the really expected ones and coin-flip predictions. There were a lot of coin-flip predictions. So, by the way, if a psychic makes all 50-50 predictions, by chance, they're gonna be 50% correct. If you make all predictions on the World Series and the World Series is already running, and there are only two teams playing, you know you're gonna be 50%.

They didn't have a lot of those, but there were some in the database, which drove their percent up a little bit. But anyway, even counting all of those, the total number that we scored correct was 11%.

Abhijit: 11%.

Rob Palmer: A little tiny bit under 11%. So most predictions, almost 90 in a database were wrong, a few per cent were unknown, just 2, expected were 15%. The vague ones were a little more than that 18%. So, you combine expected, too vague and unknown, and you're up there in the numbers. And then wrong was 53% just flat out.

Abhijit: Oh my God! This is not even equivalent to Chance, which is around 40%.

Rob Palmer: Yeah. It depends on what kind of things you try to predict, right? Yes, if you try to predict sports events where there are only a few teams, you're gonna be pretty high. If you want to guess a specific thing like "this city will be hit by an earthquake this year", unless you're talking about Los Angeles, you also express the magnitude cuz little earthquakes happen all over every place.

So if you say there's gonna be above a seven in Los Angeles in 2010, alright, that would be a pretty on-target prediction if that happened. Although all the cities in the world would be one of the more likely ones that would happen. So one of the interesting things like that is, are we actually, of course, can look in our database and see the ones that they predicted that were just wrong and like how wrong they were. I can give you some examples if you'd like.

Abhijit: Yes. I was about to ask about that.

Rob Palmer: Yeah, just like poking through at some of them, this is 2000 predictions plus that we're just plain out wrong. So in Australia, they're a commonwealth country, and they're somewhat obsessed with the British royalty. So there's a lot in there about those people. So there's one prediction for the year 2000: Charles and Camilla will marry this year or the next. So they gave themselves two years. No, it happened five years later. So wrong. Talks about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. They're also obsessed with celebrities, by the way, all over the world. Their relationship won't last another year. And this was made in 2007. They did get divorced, but it was 11 years later. "I see Sydney being hit by a rather large earthquake will cause a lot of damage within the next few years". Somewhat open-ended, not just the one year, which was in 2013, but no, they've had no earthquake since 2013. So wrong.

Abhijit: They'd have a high chance of predicting somewhere in India because you get earthquakes.

Rob Palmer: Yeah. We'll get to that. Let's see if I can find that one. I'm not looking at the wrong ones now. So in the expected category was, "there will be an earthquake somewhere in either India, Los Angeles or Japan, somewhere in the next..." come on. It's not quite as bad as the sun will rise tomorrow, but it's almost So we're not giving you that as correct.

Abhijit: These are some of the most earthquake-active zones.

Rob Palmer: Exactly. They might have just well said, there's gonna be an earthquake in places where there are always earthquakes, but that's too obvious. So they don't put it that way.

Abhijit: There's gonna be volcanic activity in Hawaii.

Rob Palmer: Exactly. There was one, there, and actually, it was wrong because they said there would be a dramatic large volcano, and that did not happen. Like we've got minor. Alright, so one of the really wrong ones I love was, "I don't think authorities will catch Osama Bin Laden next year." This was in 2005. "I don't think they will ever catch him. I think it's likely he has had plastic surgery and is hiding his identity." So yeah, no, killed.

Abhijit: Coming back as John f. Kennedy Jr.

Rob Palmer: There are no predictions about it, I don't know why. Yeah, they could have done that, but they.

Abhijit: They're not the same group, right?

Rob Palmer: Joe Biden will be nominated but will drop out before the election. This was in 2020. Yeah. No. This is, and this is one of the most astounding ones. So often, these people have no understanding of science, physics specifically, and they make predictions that sound ludicrous if anyone knows any science and yet, they don't have any qualms about doing it.

What Kerry Kulkens from 2001 said, using anti-gravity to lift heavy objects will become a reality instead of a dream. Have you seen that on sale on Amazon yet that you could buy a device to help you move your furniture?

Abhijit: Not yet, but I have seen some other freaky stuff on Amazon.

Rob Palmer: Yeah. I am kind surprised they're not selling it as a snake oil product. Summarizing all of that, Richards Saunders' quote on this, was, "these people were appallingly bad at predicting future events and most of what was predicted did not happen. And most of what happened, was not predicted."

And I can tell you about that second part also. Yeah. So we decided okay, if these people can predict like what people are, who are celebrities or in the monarchy or whatever, feel like they're gonna have for lunch the next day, and what's gonna happen to someone who's a personal life regarding a divorce or not, you'd think they would be good at seeing huge, amazing things which are gonna rip the space time continuum and change history on Earth. That should be an easy thing. But we went through the database of the years, which was again 2000 to 2020, and we went to Wikipedia and for every single year there's a list of historic events. So we pulled out 10 for each year. So we have 210 the most significant historic events missed predictions that nobody in our database said anything about.

It's this is embarrassing. And they're international, they're from local, there in Australia, just all over the place in all different categories. So some examples, and starting with the first year of the database, 2000, there was a historic stalemate in the US presidential election, and the Supreme Court decided who was president for the first time ever. Nope. And they were always talking about the presidency. Didn't see that coming. Yeah. A local thing in Australia, there was a century wide longest 100 year, worse than a hundred years drought in Australia in 2002. They were always talking about a little bit of rain in Australia or this or whatever. They didn't see that one coming.

NASA's disaster, the spaceshuttle Columbia burns up on reentry. Only the second time astronauts were lost in flight. They didn't see that coming. The Indian ocean earthquake and tsunami from December 26th 2000 killing a quarter of a million people, 14 countries. Literally the largest natural disaster in recorded history besides Noah's arc.

Abhijit: You count that.

Rob Palmer: Yeah. No, nobody saw that one coming.

Abhijit: Oh my God.

Rob Palmer: Yeah. I, it just goes on and on. People dying, they're always talking about predicting people's death. Michael Jackson dying at age 50. Nope. Didn't see that coming. Largest earthquake ever recorded, 8.8 in Chile in 2010. No. And the double disaster the 2011 tsunami that triggered a nuclear disaster in Japan, Nope. Missed that. Yeah, it's astounding. And as, as I mentioned, they're obsessed with the British Royal family. They had prediction after prediction about Queen Elizabeth II. Cause you know she's getting on in years. Oh, she's gonna retire this year. She's gonna die this year. She's gonna pass it on to Charles this year. It went every year, they predicted it. And there's not

Abhijit: she made it until the end of the GAPP project .

Rob Palmer: There is not one prediction in the database about Queen Elizabeth II retiring a dying that got it right. Nobody predicted her correct year.

Abhijit: Oh man. That is a lot of egg on faces that we shouldn't really turn into omelet because that's, yeah, but

Rob Palmer: the interesting thing is that being the case this hasn't been presented in this degree before but still there are the other sources you mentioned, the Skeptics Guide goes through it, occasionally people will talk about this in local clubs.

Why do people still believe in these people?

Abhijit: That's what I don't understand. I think it's probably some innate sense of having control over chaos. I think that is, from my perspective, that seems to be like a core reason why a lot of people believe in a lot of supernatural things and being able to understand, say, even religion for that matter, making sense of the world.

We have the pagan religions, Hinduism being a polytheistic religion where we have a lot of elemental gods and a lot of gods that apply to practically every aspect of our lives. Because if we believe that, if we pray enough, if we give enough money at the temples, something will happen, something beneficial will happen. We will have control over the chaos. I think that is one primary reason, why a lot of people would believe stuff. A lot of these pseudoscientific superstitious things like fortune tellers and psychics, and being able to predict the future and even astrology. That kind of goes without saying.

We look up astrology trying to figure out what's gonna happen in our lives. What should we do, what should we not do over a completely uncertain future, which we have absolutely no control over. We humans hate not being able to control things.

Rob Palmer: Yeah. That makes sense. It's a, basically what you're saying, it's a just natural human tendency.

And then the problem is, in the regard of the psychic realm, it's reinforced by it being shown on TV and written in newspapers. And I don't know about India, but in America, a lot of cable stations have their own medium they promote and have shows every year, and they're not promoted as entertainment. They're promoted as these people can do these things. So it's wow, it's on television. How could this not be true? There's a, oh, I wouldn't say politician, but he just lost his race. So maybe that's done. Dr. Memet Oz ran for the US Senate in Pennsylvania and he's somebody who has his own show. He's a cardiac surgeon. Yeah. So he can't be too dumb to be a cardiac surgeon, but, he has own TV show for a very long time, promoted by Oprah Winfrey, which is what got him famous. Promotes all sorts of quack stuff. Yeah. And there's a clip of him promoting psychics on his show. He's introducing three or four women and he says the things they have in common, the thing these women all have in common is they're all psychic. Now, he doesn't say they'll claim to be psychic, let's explore this. This is a cardiac surgeon just saying, these women are all psychic. And then he gives them a sit down to talk about it and they show their powers, and he just eats it up and throws it out. Whether he personally believes it, I don't know, but he certainly knows it got him views cuz people like this.

Abhijit: Absolutely. And the thing that he has, he had such a level of power, so much influence and to be promoted by Oprah to such an extent and to be given that platform. If I had that kind of luck in my life, I would've used every ounce of my energy and the time that I had in the public eye promoting things that were true.

But he has completely gone over to the other side where he just, I honestly think that, somebody who's a cardiac surgeon can't possibly believe all the stuff that he's selling, but he's just, he got greedy and he is just making hay while he can, while he's still got it.

Rob Palmer: And it's hard to know. It's hard that a, to look into people's hearts. It from our side of the fence. It's hard to imagine that being the case, but in, in reality, even if you have a degree in a certain science, especially medicine, you're not really taught to be a critical thinker. You're learning facts.

This is what we understand about anatomy and the human body, and this is the kind of medicines that we know work for this and this, and not rational thinking and critical thinking and logical fallacies. What I understand now is it's, I don't necessarily assume somebody is being fraudulent if they have that mindset.

I I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and think they are a victim of bad thinking.

Abhijit: I honestly I agree with you and in most cases I have a feeling that maybe the case because I was, I recently had this conversation with Janyce Boynton.

Rob Palmer: Yes, I heard that. I heard that with facilitated communications.

Abhijit: Yes, exactly. And to think that she who is an otherwise perfectly good natured, well-intentioned person who could deceive herself into thinking that she could do facilitated communication and then understanding that she was wrong and taking the really the morally correct thing to do, that could have been done and not only owning up to it, but becoming an activist in the field of debunking that practice.

Rob Palmer: Absolutely.

Abhijit: I asked her a very similar question do you think there are people who knowingly are doing this just to mislead people? And I mentioned James Randy, and a lot of the debunking that he did of psychics, of fortune tellers, of tarot card readers and all sorts of things. I'm sure a lot of those people actually believe that they have these skills because I know people who genuinely think that they can read palms and tell the future, and they say that this is, it's an amazing skill that they've managed to pick up. They've learned about it. They've studied about it, and they've managed to do well. And I honestly believe that they believe, that to be true, even if they're using things like cold reading to be able to subconsciously understand where a person is and what could be plausibly true about their lives and about their futures, they honestly believe it.

But then there are still people who are knowingly, who have been in a position of understanding the evidence and of evaluating it and have seen the evidence and still promote it unequivocally like, who is the person in Syracuse's University that Janyce was talking about?

Rob Palmer: Yeah, I don't remember the name, but she did, I do remember her saying is she believes that people at some level at the university do realize it and they don't want to look at the data that disproves it cuz they don't wanna stop doing it.

Abhijit: Exactly. And they have been instructing facilitated communicators to not test it, to not question it. That's superstition in a box.

Rob Palmer: I know she's, yeah, I know Janyce so we've talked about this at length too and, I asked her about that. That's amazing. How can somebody say, I believe this is working, but you can't test it. Like, why would you do that? As you've talked about before, falsifiability is important to determine if something is true. Absolutely. So in, in their minds, they come up with a, the thing is cognitive dissonance right? They believe it works and therefore if you test it and it doesn't work, there has to be a reason for that. And their reason is, and they say it, you're stressing out the client, it's not the normal circumstances. They come up with reasons why that's a bad thing to do because they don't wanna do it. So that supports their goal of not doing it, but they think the reasons they're coming up with are reasonable.

Abhijit: Absolutely. And after a point, I think you just dig yourself into such a hole that you would become excommunicated from the community you've become a part of. And

Rob Palmer: Big deal. Right?

Big deal. I don't know if you've discussed flat Earth views on your on your podcast. But yeah, if you watch the documentary on the subject, which I highly recommend, Behind the Curve.

Abhijit: Oh, I really want to watch that. Yeah. Yeah. That's up on my list somewhere.

Rob Palmer: oh yeah that's the name in English. And other languages. It might be list in other names. I find it interest, behind the curve is an English idiomatic expression, which kind of means you're not up on things, if you're behind the curve. So it's a slap at the believers. But I found this out in the Spanish release, there is no such phrase equivalently as behind the curve.

So they couldn't use that cuz no one would know what it meant. And you know, it works perfectly in English cuz it's like a double entendre. It's talk cuz they're talking about there's no curve in the earth. So it's a great name, but it didn't work in Spanish. So they came up with... I can't say it in Spanish, but translating the Spanish back into English, it's something like as flat as an encephalogram.

And if people don't know what an encephalogram is it's the thing that measures your heartbeat. So if it's flat, it means you're dead. So they're saying they are brain dead. Yeah. In the title. I just find that interesting trivia.

Abhijit: Yeah. That, but very clever.

Rob Palmer: But that, that documentary explores why these people believe it.

And it shows, like you were talking about Abhijit, that it's become their reason for existence. It's their own social circle. And if someone has a revelation, oh, wait a minute, as boats go over the horizon, they do go down. And if you express that out loud, you're thrown out of the community and you've lost your friends, you've lost, in real life or on social media, wherever you have groups of friends, you're now the enemy.

So you turn a blind eye. Maybe even subconsciously to that kind of evidence. Exactly. One of the main proponents of Flat Earth is Mark Sergeant. He's one of the people who they follow in this documentary cuz he's somebody who really promoted this and grew its ranks

Abhijit: this is about the laser gyroscope.

Rob Palmer: That is in it. That's right. He didn't do that test, but yeah. Yeah. Mark Sergeant came up with the Flat Earth Clues videos, which were all over YouTube early on, and it grew this movement because as conspiracies work, somebody might not quite understand how one person, Lee Harvey Oswald, wall could take down US President. And you're watching videos saying, oh, that was a conspiracy on YouTube. And then YouTube's algorithm suggests, "Ooh, you watch this about the Kennedy assassination. How about watching Flat Earth Clues about a flat earth?" Yeah. And so people got who were not into it initially. And if you just told them on the street, oh, the earth is flat, they think you're crazy.

But then they come across a recommended series on YouTube that's very slickly produced by Mark Sergeant and others now, and wow, this is true. Look at this. There's all the science in here. It pulled them into the rabbit hole and it just made them believe this stuff.

Abhijit: Neil DeGrasse Tyson has been doing a lot of very good work and honestly, I'm a fan of SciMan Dan who's got a, he's absolutely fantastic at debunking these.

Rob Palmer: Is he the one who does Tin Foil Tuesdays?

Abhijit: Yeah. Yeah. Tin Foil Tuesday and Flat Earth Fridays. He's absolutely brilliant

Rob Palmer: So the other reason that people believe these people going back to the psychics, so it's personal belief, I wanna believe in this kind of thing, as you mentioned.

Abhijit: Yeah.

Rob Palmer: Cause it makes me feel good that there's this other worldly thing. Also you're special because people who don't believe this are wrong. I have special knowledge that yeah, this is real. Then there's the thing we're talking about, you don't wanna be thrown out the club cuz you know, a lot of people believe this and why shouldn't I?

And then it's on television, it's promoted in the media and maybe one of the other things. If you follow one of these psychics, they say they're accurate and you already believe them as a person, you trust them. Yeah. So Kerry Kulkens is in our database a lot and she's one of the psychics who has a her own website and she puts her predictions every year up there.

And you'd say well, that's brave of her. And I'm looking at, and I showed her my presentation predictions for 2001 as an example, and she's got about 20 on the screen and she checks off every single one of them. All but two on this page, I would say it's 19 or 18 of 20 that are checked off as correct.

And it's quite amazing because she's the one who predicted the using the antigravity was gonna become a reality in 2001. And that's checked off as correct.

Abhijit: How is that even like what

Rob Palmer: I know. And if you think, and if you think that's just as well, she made a mistake there. It's a kind of a typo. No. The one right above it is we may soon be able to get free energy from empty space by harnessing the electromagnetic fields.

Abhijit: Oh my God.

Rob Palmer: If you're a follower of hers and you look at this, wow, look at this, you're 98% right!

Abhijit: It's each one of those should point to point to a, some sort of evidence. But I'm sure they don't.

Rob Palmer: Oh yeah. I'm sure there's another page I don't have listed here with the citations. Yeah.

Abhijit: oh, I would've loved to have anti-gravity. Wouldn't we all? I would've, I would be a little lighter.

Rob Palmer: Star Trek and Star Wars in real life.

Abhijit: Oh, the dream come true. As we are all fans of that sort of stuff, aren't we?

Rob Palmer: So not only anti-gravity, but once we get to learn how to do that, you can make gravity and where there shouldn't be gravity and like in spaceships, right? And you can just walk around a Starship with no problem. Yeah.

Abhijit: Oh yeah. Oh, and Joe Rogan had this he brought this guy on on his podcast who worked in or near area 51 and apparently saw these UFOs with anti-gravity and that they figuring out how to use it and this negative gravity.

And I, I watched that entire, I don't know, it was about an hour and a half, couple of hours long, at least the section that I got sent over. But of course we have absolutely no evidence. And the more, and as Carl Sagans famously said, and we love this saying, is extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And we have seen absolutely none of it, and especially these psychics. This should be easy to really verify.

Rob Palmer: As I've said at the end of my presentations on the subject. Okay. Being an actual card carrying skeptic, and I yes, I do have a business card which says skeptic.

I have to have the caveat then. I have to say that maybe someone or some people are actually psychic out there that we didn't have the data for. You can't disprove something like this by looking at any particular set of data, but no one has ever proved they can do this.

There are ways to prove this as you're alluding to, and no one has ever stepped forward to do it. Any kind of paranormal powers are open to being proved by various paranormal challenges. They're all over the world. There's actually a page in Wikipedia called List of Prizes for Evidence of the Paranormal. You can look at that up. I added it up one day. It's about a million dollars. The largest individual one is for the organization that I write for the magazine for the CFI Center for inquiry. , they have a quarter of a million dollar prize if you can prove you have psychic or any other paranormal ability, and no one has ever claimed it.

Before this, there was a $1 million paranormal prize for decades by James Randy until James Randy died. People think they can, they apply for it. They agree to the test terms because they think they're psychic they think they can douse for water. They think they can bend items, they think they can, whatever.

And you put them to a test and wow, they can't do it. Amazing.

Abhijit: And I, I remember the Uri Geller video, which which is now up on YouTube. I'll see if I can find it and put a link in the description here of when uh, who was the doc, show host who had Uri Galler on?

Rob Palmer: So Johnny Carson. I actually added all of this information to four Wikipedia pages.

The Johnny Carson one, The Tonight Show, Uri Geller and James Randy cuz it was such a big event.

Abhijit: Yes, of course there is the Geurilla Skeptics. But I would talk to Susan about that so I can tell people about it because I have to have her on I, hopefully this week.

Rob Palmer: Yeah, absolutely. She'd be a great guest. So Johnny Carson was really a skeptical person a talkshow host for decades in the United States. One of, one of the most watched shows called A Tonight Show, and Yuri Geller was coming up as a mystic who could bend spoons and fix watches just by having people look at their TV sets when he was on and concentrate.

And he was gonna come on The Tonight Show, and Johnny Carson reached out to James Randy and said "I'm gonna have this guy. What do you think about him?" He said, oh okay. Set up a test for him this way. And James Randy gave him the insight and his team put the test apparatus in front of him when Keller came on and sat down, all the test stuff is on the desk in front of him and said, we're gonna do a little test tonight.

And I don't think he was expecting it. I've seen this video from his reaction. Oh, okay. And he had no insight into what was gonna be done. He hadn't touched any of this stuff. And after the commercial break he came back and he tried to do stuff and he couldn't do anything, and of course I have, oh, I have bad powers today. I'm tired. So this is all...

Abhijit: not feeling the energy flow. No

Rob Palmer: but the bad thing Abhijit is that this made his career. Most people don't know that.

Abhijit: Really? How the hell did that happen?

Rob Palmer: Yes. And this is documented in the Wikipedia article. So he was about to quit. He went home. He was almost suicidal, if I recall the way he put it.

Cuz he thought, oh, I put my foot in it. This is the end of me. And then very soon after that, I think it was the next day, he was invited on another show. And it was a bigger show. It was like a news show and he did his stuff, and so it was seen as well, if he was fake, he could do it all the time, but if he's real, you would have problems sometimes.

So he, he spun it that way, that this made it seem more like he was the real deal and his career took off after that.

Abhijit: That is so crazy that. How do you, that is some gymnastic

Rob Palmer: Yeah. So lemme give you a more modern gymnastic. There's this guy named Thomas John. His full name is Thomas John Flanigan.

He's a got Wikipedia article. You can look him up. Susan Gerbic that before mentioned grief Vampire Hunter. So Thomas John is a medium. He's had TV shows, so he's a famous person. He's had two different TV shows and two different US networks. And he, his thing is he can talk to dead people and they talk back to him and he, he's the channeler to, to give his the people he's reading what their dead relatives are saying.

So Susan and the Geurilla Skeptics team did a sting on him, which was so successful that it was written up in the New York Times. So she and Mark Edward went in under undercover. They had false names, they bought the tickets with false names. They pretended they were a married couple with different names.

And they had fake Facebook accounts with those names that other people had put together for them, giving them a whole background of people in their lives who died. And when they got into the studio, and luckily Thomas John called on them and gave them a reading. He was reading back all the fake stuff on the Facebook page, like it was from their dead relatives who didn't exist.

And this was recorded and reported on in the freaking New York Times Magazine. Tens of millions of readers, right? Within a year, Thomas John was the headline act at Caesar's Palace. Oh. With that in his past, Caesar's Palace still gave him the headline spot to be their show. The Thomas John experience, something like that.

And then he got another TV show. He had the first TV show before this happened, and then he got another TV show. So James Randy's comment on this was unsinkable rubber ducks.

Abhijit: Absolutely. I have a different term than rubber ducks, but I won't mention that here.

Rob Palmer: Oh, I'd like to hear why not?

Abhijit: Floaters.

Rob Palmer: Oh, scatalogical.

Abhijit: Okay. Yeah.

But that almost makes you feel like, why are we doing this? We're actually making people more famous but we can't give up, can we? And so how

Rob Palmer: Well, yeah, it's an interesting thing. If there was a, if there was a double blind experiment with another earth, that was exactly parallel and there was one earth with skeptics on it pushing back and another earth with no skeptics at all, which would be worse? Oh, this is one of those things where we don't have the data, cuz you can't have the data, but we just,

Abhijit: I can tell you in India, India is I think we do have a lot of skeptics. We have what are called, otherwise we call them rationalists.

One of the reasons why this channel is called Rationable but the, the problem is

Rob Palmer: I was gonna ask you about that. So now, since you brought it up, did you make that word up or is that a word that's common there?

Abhijit: I made it up and then I found on the free dictionary, which is the only dictionary that apparently lists this, that it is an archaic term, which means both rational and reasonable.

Rob Palmer: Nice.

Abhijit: But I had made it up thinking exactly that, and then I was like, wait a second. Let me check this out and see if this actually still exists. There's only one dictionary which actually says that it makes sense. But the weird thing is the rationable dot com website domain was already taken by someone and he's holding it and, I'm like, who the hell thought this up before me man? I thought I was the genius here. Come on.

Rob Palmer: Did you have to buy it from them? What happened?

Abhijit: No, I just said, screw that. I'm just gonna get, be rationable .

Rob Palmer: Okay.

Abhijit: That, that has stuck. So thank goodness for that. But whoever thought this up before me, he must be one hell of a genius if I don't say so myself

But as I was saying about India is, we've got a lot of pseudoscience. We've got a lot of supernatural belief pervading our population going across borders, across classes and castes and there have been very intrepid rationalists and skeptics who have done a lot of activity to counter that.

And in fact Richard Saunders came to India a while back, back in the eighties or nineties, and he was actually a part of that. And he came to one of the Indian conferences about these things, which I wish I'm gonna be a part of something I hope soon, or maybe I need to revive that. But, the skeptics conferences in this country.

But there were, there's a movie out actually, which unfortunately right now there isn't any legitimate streaming platform that one can find it on, but it's called Guru Busters. And I've watched that and it's absolutely fantastic. It's Indian skeptics who are going out into the villages, out into congregations where these gurus are performing, where they're performing miracles, where they're supposedly bringing dogs back from the dead and performing all sorts of these things.

And they go right ahead in front of these people and say that these people are absolutely fake. They're pulling the wool over your eyes, the tricks up. We can perform these tricks just as well as they can. And they actually demonstrate them. But unfortunately, we have such a massive population that it's, and we still have a relatively small number of skeptics doing this kind of activism out there.

We we definitely need more of us, getting out there and actually doing things to counter this kind of pseudoscience. And hopefully, you know me, there are a growing number of skeptics, especially creating content on YouTube, like Science is Dope, like Vimoh, who I have also interviewed, and there are some communities out there. So there is hope. We just want more people to join up.

Rob Palmer: So I would imagine one of the problems in India is all of the languages.

Abhijit: Yeah. And it's definitely a problem.

Rob Palmer: So you do it in English do these other people you're familiar with also do it in English or they do it in Hindi or some of the other languages?

Abhijit: A couple of people I know do it in English. There are a lot of atheists and skeptics in different groups who usually communicate in their local vernaculars. So far I haven't seen many Hindi content creators or people in more vernacular languages, promoting skepticism, which I think is very important to do.

If I could speak any of those languages half as well as I speak English, I would've loved to do that. And I honestly, so

Rob Palmer: What's the approximate percent of the population that would say speak Hindi but not English?

Abhijit: I honestly, I don't know because our percentage of educated, literate people has definitely grown.

But I presume the English speaking portion of India is still relatively limited.

Rob Palmer: So that is very important to get.

Abhijit: It is a minor, it is a minority group, but at the same time, because we have such a massive population, we also have one of the largest english speaking workforces in the world. Okay. So there is

Rob Palmer: but I think you started mentioning if that's connected with like degree of education, then you're gonna have the less educated people not speaking English, and therefore the only way to reach them is going to be in a different language and

Abhijit: Exactly.

So that's hopefully there'll be more people, coming out and I have met a few people who should be doing this and who are doing some sort of activism in their own fields. And writing like for example, there's Dr. Shantanu Abhyankar who spoke in 2018. He presented one of the white papers at the at CSICon Vegas. And,

Rob Palmer: sunday papers. Sunday papers, yes.

Abhijit: Yes. The sunday papers. And he has translated a couple of Richard Dawkins' books. So I think he, ah, so this time I actually brought a couple of copies of the Marathi translation of the Magic of Reality, and got that signed by Richard Dawkins.

He apparently has a copy of it home, so he didn't take one of them back, but we've got signed copies of that. So we have people like this who are turning really powerful works of literature into more vernacular languages, which are easier to consume and would be more popular, I feel. But yeah.

Rob Palmer: Very good.

Abhijit: A lot of activists out here for sure. And hopefully they are starting to grow.

Rob Palmer: Yeah. The situation in the United States is bad enough with how many people believe all of this nonsense. Oh. So one of the last thing I wanna get back to on the psychic is , why it matters that people believe this.

But as a segue for that is yeah. A lot of people believe this stuff and, at least because everyone in the US practically speaks English, right? It's not a segmented population regarding reaching them. And that situation is just so much worse in, in your country yeah. So the reason this matters is, so there was a survey by the Pew organization back in 2018 , looking at how many Americans believe in paranormal and other things like that. And, there's one particular piece I took out to show him in my presentation on psychics, and it's okay. How many believe in psychics?

So of all US adults, it's over 40%, 41 or 2%. , it's almost half. So almost half of any average person you talk to believes in it. And they broke it down by religiosity regarding Christian religions for some reason. I don't know why they didn't go into other ones. So it's all different forms of Christianity and like the highest one is Catholic, which is 46%, almost half.

And evangelical Christians are the least, cuz they're told it's from the devil. But they're at, they're just above 30. But this is the scary part. If someone reported in the survey that you were nothing in particular, it was 52%, higher than religious people. The only group, self-identified atheist, that was a low number was 10. Now that's disturbing to me that one outta 10 atheist believes this too, frankly, but at least it's not 40 or 50.

Abhijit: Yeah, absolutely. There are always people who have a, who haven't really distinguished rational thinking from at least the lack of religiosity with skepticism at this point in time, because the people who leave religion for other reasons as well, except I, other than, thinking oneselves out of it or actually thinking about the world around us.

We used, we, the basic belief is that the people in Europe are less susceptible to supernatural thinking, or not, at least, if not supernatural thinking, but non-skeptical thinking, non-critical thinking and

Rob Palmer: yeah, I need to see the data on that, Abhijit

Abhijit: No, because the level of religiosity in the more advanced European countries is far less in,

Rob Palmer: alright, so So that's the caveat. Yeah. So Europe isn't a monolith. There's so many countries there, and they go from extremely Catholic to the, maybe the more northern country Scandinavian countries are the ones I think more you're describing. But yeah, I mean there's some Eastern European countries, they're freaking so religious. They believe in all sorts of things. Italy is big in the Catholic church. Yeah. It's that's unfortunate, but it's true. So just. Finalizing my thought there. The reason it's important is because that many people believe in this and those are US numbers. I have no reason to believe it's a less percent anywhere else, including India.

And this, the problem is this leaves people open to being taken advantage of drastically. In my previous talk, to CSICon, which was the last conference, which was 2018 before the pandemic, talked about what's the harm in believing in psychics? And I talk about people who become victims of con artists who take them for literally their life savings.

And that could be tens of thousands of US dollars or millions in some cases. And it is so heartbreaking to hear this. These con artists, they have a street corner in your neighborhood. Psychic Maria, come, first reading is free. And if you believe this, you might go and do that.

And then they get you for everything that they can take you for. And if you're the kind of person who's desperate and you need help and these, and you believe in this, and this person does a magic trick that convinces you, they are in fact real or does a really good cold reading or even a hot reading cuz they had your name in advance, they can do anything they want to you and the stories are horrendous. If anyone wants to Google it or go to Wikipedia, you can look at the article for the private detective, Bob Nygaard, n y g a a r d. and he, his, he retired from the police force. And then by a series of happenstances you read about in the article, he got pulled into trying to help victims of psychic cons.

And this is what he does. And much of his page is taken up by the very newsworthy because they were big dollar figures victims that he's helped. And it's unbelievable what people will believe and how much money they will give these people because they believe in psychic powers. And that's the sad thing.

And I know Bob, I've interviewed him numerous times and I've heard details of his work and he gets more calls than he can handle. He's not in an agency, he's one individual and as far as he knows, no one else does this in the whole US; devotes themselves to helping victims of psychic con artists. And he gets, he tells me four or five calls a day that he has to turn away.

Abhijit: Goodness

Rob Palmer: Those are only the people who've contacted him. Many people who get taken don't reach out cuz they're embarrassed about it. Or they haven't found him or anyone else. And I don't know about in India, but the legal system in the US is horrendous for this because you'll go into a police office and try to file a grievance or whatever and say, oh, no one held a gun to your head. Why'd you give him the money. It's not a crime, even though it is. So you have, the police refusing to arrest if you get it to the point where that doesn't happen and they do arrest them. It's a question of whether a prosecutor is gonna prosecute it, whether you think they can win the case.

And then often, even if that happens, it's give 'em the money back and we'll let you go. And then the person goes right back to their store and keeps ripping people off. It's a horrendous situation in America, and I would just guess it's that way most of the world.

Abhijit: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, not only do we have psychics who are doing that sort of thing, but we have a lot of these gurus and yogis who are taking advantage of people's grief, who are taking part advantage of people's hopelessness and susceptibility and, vulnerability rather, and just milking it for everything that it's worth. When there are people like that, that are these parasites all over the world in every single country, and they're making a ton of money off people's grief, which is horrible.

Rob Palmer: Yeah. In the US there's a, there's an organization called the American Federation of Certified Psychics and Mediums.

If you're a psychic medium, you can, you could join them. I don't know what the perks are, it's like any organization like that, clearly not everyone who works in that practice is part of them, but in just their business they have their clients, their, the people registered tell them 2 billion dollars.

Abhijit: Wow.

Rob Palmer: And that's, if someone's gonna pay you in cash under the table, you probably didn't report it to your agency. It's probably just the things that went to a credit card. I would bet. So my guess is the $2 billion is the tip of a much bigger iceberg.

Abhijit: Absolutely.

Rob Palmer: And they also list what the average pay of these psychics are.

And I hate saying this, but I'm gonna say it anyway cuz it sounds like I'm giving career advice to people who don't know what to do with their lives. But the average psychic makes up to 150,000 US dollars a year. A reasonably successful psychic, one half of a million. And the names that you see on television all the time, 5 million plus.

Abhijit: Oh my god.

Rob Palmer: And these are not the people who are ripping people off of their life savings, right? These are people who just have an outfit in charge, a hundred dollars for a reading, whatever. The amount of money that's scammed must be astronomical, literally, because as I said, people don't report it.

It's often up to their life savings. And they certainly wouldn't be reporting it to this agency, the Certified Federation of Psychics and Mediums. And when these people get caught enough to go and they change their name and they open up in a different town. There's one case that Bob Nygaard had where he tracked this person for 10 years. Going a different states constantly being arrested and let go different names. It it's horrifying what goes on. And, we could put a stop to this if we could convince people that there's no reason to believe anybody has psychic powers, but, what's the chance of that?

Abhijit: We, that's what we are here for. That's what we,

Rob Palmer: that's what we to try to do.

Abhijit: So how can we help with the with the GAPPP. I feel like we should do something like this in India.

Rob Palmer: I think that would be a fantastic idea. So the problem is you'd have to find another way to limit it.

Like Richard was okay with saying, I will take every psychic prediction made in Australia by Australians, but the the population of Australia is something like, I'm gonna guess order magnitude of 38 million people, which is like Florida, one of our US states. And India's got how many billion people?

If you proportion a number of psychics and seers practicing, you'd have to find some other way of doing it. Otherwise, you would need a team of 10,000 skeptics working for a year to get –

Abhijit: I'm gonna put that idea out there, and if you are watching right now, and if you think you know a few psychics and you've got a few predictions down, let me know. Get in touch with me, put it in the comments, and let's start this thing. Let's like this candle as they like, as they say. And I'd love to start at least have something, maybe have a localized kind of thing, like maybe just in Delhi or just in Mumbai–

Rob Palmer: Yeah, that would be cool.

Abhijit: And see, just see what happens. I'm sure a lot of these psychics wouldn't have websites and have these predictions out in public. So maybe there's a shot. Maybe we can do this and I'll be in touch to figure out, how to get all the logistics and the numbers and the search.

Rob Palmer: Yeah.

When you have Susan on, you could talk about that. I'm sure she would be thrilled to help.

Abhijit: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. But this is an amazing initiative like when I was watching your presentation, I was blown away. I was like, this, every country needs to do this. Every single country needs to do this.

Rob Palmer: Wouldn't that be fantastic?

Abhijit: Absolutely. It'd be the global. Then you don't, you lose the A. Right. , it's not the Australian anymore, but the Global PPP, the Psychic Prediction Program. Is there anything else that you want to add on to this? Any funny, weird, quirky things that you might have found in this, in the process of this program?

Rob Palmer: No I, no I just want to thank you for having me on and helping spread the word to the other hemisphere.

Yeah, I've talked about this in the US on several places including and podcast. , if people there like the Thinking Atheist, by the way, Seth Andrews podcast.

Abhijit: Yeah. I'm a big fan.

Rob Palmer: Richard Saunders and I were interviewed about this on there earlier in the year, so you can check out that episode.

We didn't go into as much detail as I went today, but you might find a discussion interesting. Especially because Richard who ran the project is on that broadcast.

Abhijit: Ah, wonderful. And maybe I should have him on again as well, just for a quick update. I had him on a while back,

Rob Palmer: oh, What was the subject?

Abhijit: Oh, we were essentially talking about how he got into doing what he does. Nice. He he also did, he debunked an astrologer online? On, on live television. I think it was.

Rob Palmer: I never heard that.

Abhijit: Was it an astrologer? I think it was an astrologer, yeah.

And of course, a lot of his other stuff like origami and, those little extra things that he does in his life, but primarily about how he got it into becoming a skeptic and the kind of activism he's done. And I heard about the Power Balance, that little wrist strap, that rubber wrist strap with the sticker on it.

Rob Palmer: Wait, I think we cross streams. Just so you're talking about Richard Saunders? I was talking about Seth Andrews

Abhijit: oh, Seth andrews. Sorry about that. No. I would love to have Seth Andrews on this show. Like I've been trying to figure out how to meet him every time I come...

Rob Palmer: Oh, so he wasn't at the conference that you just went to?

Abhijit: No, unfortunately he wasn't. He, I think he goes to the American Atheist Conference, which is uh, I think on Easter weekend or something of that sort from what I heard. If he ends up watching this, I'll be, if you get in touch with him, tell him I wanna talk to him.

Rob Palmer: Well, wait, when you put this out, I will probably send him the link

Abhijit: yeah. Oh, please do. Please do. That'll be great. Yeah, I'd love to have him on, and especially because I've been trying to keep away from the whole religion conversation so far in the life of rationable but now I've just interviewed a couple of very prominent atheists in India and I'm trying to get into that conversation even though I'm, no, I don't know very much about religion per se, but I do have an atheistic perspective on life, morals.

Rob Palmer: Were you raised as a Hindu?

Abhijit: Not really. I was raised... my parents are basically a part of this thing called the Brahmo Samaj, which is a reformist sect of Hinduism, which doesn't do any of the rituals. And none of the statue worship, none of the image worship, none of the funny rituals or being vegetarian on a Tuesday or a Thursday or a Wednesday or whatever so it's very stripped down back to the basic beliefs. And it has more of a pantheistic kind of view on the world where God is in everything. God is life. So it makes a lot more sense plus a lot of the teachings and like my father and my mother both speak at these events quite frequently and my father does, wedding rituals and funeral rituals, and so he you could say he's a priest in a way, but they wouldn't call themselves that members of the community are free to make their own way through it and conduct whatever functions need to be done.

Rob Palmer: So it's interesting you're talking about the, atheist, secular humanist community and versus the scientific skeptical movement. I have given talks on my subjects of scientific skepticism at humanist clubs in the US and it's quite interesting that there is a Venn diagram that don't, is not too concentric circles. They're definitely an overlap Yeah. Of people who are in one organizational mindset in the other, but not a hundred percent.

It absolutely is not a hundred percent. And as I think you mentioned before Yeah. You can come out of a religion and not be a skeptic at all.

Abhijit: Yeah, exactly. So for fortunately, I was brought up without them forcing me to believe anything. There was no indoctrination. I was pretty much allowed to believe whatever I wanted to believe.

And most of my life was kind of an apatheist. I didn't really think of religion or think of a God except when it was two days before my exams and I had and I was like, please

Rob Palmer: couldnt hurt.

Abhijit: I believe in You

Rob Palmer: couldn't hurt to ask.

Abhijit: Yeah, fortunately, but then after being on the fence for most of my life and quite gullible as far as supernatural ideas were concerned when I was in my, when I just about turned 30, I was doing a writing project for my university where I was,

Rob Palmer: Let me think. It's coming to me. Science fiction technology.

Abhijit: Yeah.

Rob Palmer: Aliens,

Abhijit: you're watching my episodes

Rob Palmer: atlantis. What? You have episodes?

Abhijit: Yeah, so I, in fact,

Rob Palmer: that's a hot reading folks.

Abhijit: We will, oh, well done, . So now we'll have to explain what a hot reading is.

Rob Palmer: Oh. Yeah. It's when you have prior information on somebody, but you pretend you don't and release the information. And they're shocked about it. I have seen people do this. Skeptics do it in a group to demonstrate it, and other skeptics are blown away by that. How could he have known that? Where'd that come from? Oh my God.

Abhijit: And cold readings

Rob Palmer: And cold reading. Yeah. And the cold reading is a technique. I am not good at it, but it's basically a way of getting people to give up information and think you got it. That you said it correctly. Ah, yeah.

Abhijit: He yeah. It's one thing that Richard did talk about when he was on the podcast was Barnum statements. And, explaining how we can just make very general statements that seem to be very specific to a person. So it even though like you are,

Rob Palmer: I, I get the feeling that you maybe are concerned with your weight and diet and trying to understand what would help you be more healthy.

Abhijit: Yeah. My God, you're good at this! You should be a psychic. Did anybody tell you that?

Rob Palmer: and then to be a medium, which they get paid more because they're the ones that kind of TV concentrates on. All you have to say is, oh, that was one of your aunt whose name starts with a J or an M and R. Yeah, they told me that.

Abhijit: Oh we are definitely gonna have to dig into this. I guys, I promise I'll I'm gonna make some more content on psychics and probably I'll have you back on just to talk about, dig deep into the psychic mentality and. You know how people do,

Rob Palmer: we can talk about designing spacecraft if you want

Abhijit: right now that seems to be the furthest thing from my mind.

Rob Palmer: So I will give you a, an idea of someone else to have on Susan Gerbic

Abhijit: yes, for sure.

Rob Palmer: Boyfriend

Abhijit: Uhhuh

Rob Palmer: mark. Mark Edward.

Abhijit: Mark Edwards.

Rob Palmer: Edward. Singular.

Abhijit: Edward. Sorry.

Rob Palmer: Mark Edward. Yeah. Mentalist. He used to work the Psychic Friends Network. He wrote the book, Psychic Blues: Confessions of a Conflicted Medium. Ah, he's the person to talk about the inside story about how psychics do what they do.

Abhijit: Absolutely. I'll tell Susan to bring Mark on and he'll really get into this weeds on this one.

Rob Palmer: I met him at CSICon and yeah, I wound up interviewing him for my column and Skeptical Inquirer and fascinating. Then I read his book. Really fascinated to have somebody who was on the inside and understands how it all works from that perspective.

Abhijit: Oh, that is fascinating. I have met Mark a couple of times, but we never really in the middle of the conference, it's really hard to to really have a end up having a conversation. He's, anyways, he's running around being quite busy most of the time it seems. But anyway, thank you so much for this conversation. It was really enlightening and I think I'm definitely motivated that I wanna start something like GAPPP in India.

Rob Palmer: Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, if you do it, we're like 12 hours different or something, but if you do it at some reasonable time that I can help maybe I can join, that would be great.

Abhijit: Absolutely. I'll let you know for sure. Okay. To get Richard to join in as well, we'll have a pan, like a worldwide net.

Rob Palmer: Yeah. Yeah.

Abhijit: ,putting it all together and seeing if the psychics get anything right. Maybe we have a 1.3 billion people. Maybe We got a legit couple of people. I've heard that they have been, you can't debunk them.

Rob Palmer: Yeah. Yeah. Point them to the $250,000 challenge.

Abhijit: Absolutely,

Rob Palmer: and the common thing is, oh, I don't need the money. I find that as such a disingenuous statement because, all right, if you really don't and you're, making buck on something else, or maybe even because you're a psychic, Win the money and give it to charity.

Give it to children's cancer research. So you're denying children with cancer because you don't need the money, and you could easily prove your powers. It is such a ridiculous statement. And by the way, you would also win the Nobel Prize, right? You passed their test. Now you can have scientists looking at you, right?

Abhijit: Absolutely.

Rob Palmer: And you can have papers written, and you are going to be a historic figure who has changed the history of planet Earth. That yes, there really are these energies that we don't know about. Or if you're a medium that there's an afterlife that we have now proven like, isn't that freaking worth it? Rather than, oh, I don't need the money.

Abhijit: Absolutely. That's what's at stake here, psychics. Yeah. If anybody, any of you are watching, that's what's at stake. You can change the world for the better. Yeah. If you just prove your abilities in a scientifically controlled setting.

Rob Palmer: Right. And I would say the phrase is put up or shut up. Stop saying you can do this until you prove you can do this.

Abhijit: Absolutely. That's all we want. And we as skeptics we would love for this to be true.

Rob Palmer: Oh my God, that would be so amazing. I would get on and on the research and figure out how these energies work and what happens when you're dead and how you can come back and talk to people. Oh my God, that would be amazing.

Abhijit: Absolutely. But right now there's only one way you can find out, unfortunately. On that note, thank you so much, Rob, for coming on.

Rob Palmer: I thank you again. It was fun.

Abhijit: I had a great time. This was great fun and I love that wallpaper you've got happening. Psychic wanted, I love that bloodshot eye in the middle of the palm there. You know where to apply.

Rob Palmer: I got that idea from a billboard. Frankly, there's a big billboard somebody paid for and no one knows who did it. Down in on, in the Bible belt somewhere in south of America, which it says, that's what it says.

Abhijit: That's absolutely fantastic. Guys, thank you so much for joining us for this episode of Rationable. Thank you Rob Palmer for coming on. And I'm gonna put up a whole bunch of links where you can check out the GAPPP project, where you can check out Rob and what he does as well as the skeptic zone with the Richard Saunders.

Have a good night. Have a good week ahead of you and a good weekend. I'll catch you later. Thank you so much.

Rob Palmer: Thank you again.

Abhijit: And if you guys want to know more about Rationable go to www.berationable.com, I would greatly appreciate it. You can check out The Rationable Podcast and the YouTube channel, which is called Rationable very simply, where all these interviews are also put up in video form.

And if you want the transcripts, again, berationable.com. And if you have any questions you can send them, to me, at Abhijit that's A B H I J I T at berationable.com, or you can just go to the website and throw in a comment or fill out the form. So thanks again. See you guys in the next episode.

References and Links

Find out more at: https://skepticalinquirer.org/2022/02/the-great-australian-psychic-prediction-project-pondering-the-published-predictions-of-prominent-psychics/

Find Richard Saunders' podcast at: https://www.skepticzone.tv/ or search for The Skeptic Zone on your favourite podcast platform.

List of awards for evidence of paranormal activity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prizes_for_evidence_of_the_paranormal

Uri Geller fails on Johnny Carson: https://youtu.be/zD7OgAdCObs https://youtu.be/jLl9D9BBIlk

Bob Nygaard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Nygaard Uri Geller: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uri_Geller Johnny Carson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Carson