The Psychic Question
A writer finds out his mentors are seeing the same psychic. He decides to investigate.
Hello Search Engine Nation,
This is it! Our final episode of Search Engine’s second season.
A journalist finds out that many of his vaunted mentors are seeing a psychic. The same psychic. He decides to pay her a visit.
See more of Dan's work at the 10% Happier podcast, and find his guided meditations at DanHarris.com.
Further Reading
Laura Lynne Jackson’s homepage
Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart - Mark Epstein
This is our last episode with our wonderful intern :-(
We were very lucky to work with the brilliant and kind Oscar Noxon. And we are sad to see him go. Here’s a piece he published in June about campus protests at Columbia.
A summer programming note
Thank you to everyone who listened this year! We’re going to rebroadcast some classic episodes in July (unless you’re an Incognito Mode subscriber, no reruns for Incognito Mode listeners).
We’ll be back in August with new episodes for you.
Please have a nice summer, and find some sand for your toes if you can. Feel free to share this week your quiet, unprovable beliefs or intuitions, or stories about the beliefs your friends hold that you struggle with.
Thanks for listening,
PJ
I am generally skeptical of spiritual things, including psychics and mediums. However, Dan's preamble really made me open to Laura Lynne. So when we finally got to her reading of Dan, I was shocked to see blatant cold reading tactics and obviously broad horoscope-style descriptions. (For example, nearly every teenager in America cares about music.) I lost any sense of openness when Jackson said she was tapping into quantum mechanics. It sounded like Tony Stark taking the eigenvalue of a mobius strip in Avengers Endgame.
Mark was spot-on when he said, "Science doesn't know everything." Science doesn't claim to know everything. It proposes a method of testing claims and developing knowledge based on experimentation and evidence. I'm surprised that such a normal and unimpressive psychic reading aroused enough interest to seriously question an otherwise empirical worldview
"Once you start opening the door to things you can't prove, how do you decide which things to believe? Where do you set your level?" This line should have been the thesis of the episode! Why should we be any more open to believing in psychics than to believing in Greek mythology or believing in faith healers?
David's high schoolers approached La Fermiere's clay pots with more scrutiny than Search Engine's team used with the most normal and obvious psychic. How did this happen?
I do feel as though the skepticism of the interviewees (your interviewee and his) could have been bolstered by knowing more about cold readings. It was a very interesting episode.