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Transcript:
Back in 2008, one of the very first talks I started giving on speaking tours was about “Women’s Intuition,” and how that’s a made-up idea that allows society to continue to think of logic and rationality as inherently “male” traits that are beyond women’s mental abilities. And I noticed at the time that a lot of female “psychics” were rebranding themselves as “intuitives” in order to sell their bullshit to audiences that correctly identified psychics as made-up scam artists: Mona Lisa Schultz, for instance, called herself a “medical intuitive” who used old timey psychic tricks to diagnose people, like cold reading.
I haven’t talked about it in awhile so let me explain that to the new folks. I do what I do today because I was a magician in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, managing a magic shop in Boston and performing close-up magic around town to pay my way through college. That’s how I got to know people like James “The Amaz!ng” Randi, who was a talented escape artist who dedicated his life to exposing frauds, particularly those who claimed to have psychic powers but in fact were just using magic tricks. So I, too, learned how to do those magic tricks and would use them ethically to illustrate how psychics can be so convincing. One of the most common tricks is “cold reading,” in which a “psychic” tosses out bits of information and waits for the person they’re reading to tell them which ones are on the right track. This is shockingly easy to do with a true believer, because they really WANT the psychic to be in touch with their dead father. So a psychic may say something like “I’m getting an older man coming through and his name has an “F” in it.” A skeptic might say “Nope, my dad’s name was Henry.” A believer, though, will say “Oh, my dad’s middle name was “Phillip,” which does start with an “F” sound!”
From there, a psychic could toss out things that are nearly universal: there’s a watch or a ring that he gave you, or if not you then another family member; he mentions a dog that he loved; he’s showing me that there was something wrong with his heart.” Anything that misses is quickly dropped, while the hits are repeated and emphasized.
While it’s incredibly easy to do this with a single believer and even more so with a crowd of believers like those in the audience at a show (because any “misses” might be “hits” for someone else in the crowd), I’ve actually managed to do this even for skeptics who KNEW I didn’t have magical powers, knew that there’s no such thing as magical powers, but were still choked up because suddenly they were envisioning their own dead father standing there saying that he’s proud of them. It’s really convincing.
And that’s just “cold” reading. A “warm” reading incorporates extra information the “psychic” can gather: their age might narrow down the pool of names of their parents and grandparents; their clothing can indicate their relative wealth; their emotions can indicate what they hope to get out of a reading.
And a “hot” reading is the easiest of all: did you pay with a credit card when you booked your seat for the reading? Well, social media exists and that psychic already knows all about your life. That’s in part how this psycho Tyler Henry does his readings for celebrities, as I discussed in a video back in 2024.
And so those are some of the tricks that were put into use by a new generation of psychics who rebranded as intuitives. Side note, I looked up what Mona Lisa Schultz is doing today and she “died suddenly” in 2024, which is, to put it lightly, ironic for someone who claimed to have psychic powers about health.
Anyway, there were all sorts of “intuitives” popping up at the time, including “financial intuitives” who hoped to get their psychic powers into boardrooms. I was sure that some of them would succeed, because board rooms are not immune from bullshit, but I didn’t give it too much thought until I recently learned against my will that now, 15 years later, there’s a new generation of bullshit artists invading corporate America and they aren’t even bothering to hide the fact that they’re using psychic tricks.
As you may know, I live in the Bay Area, the home of Silicon Valley and a tech bro utopia. If you’ve ever seen the show Silicon Valley, it’s pretty accurate: there are lots and lots of people here who are desperate to found their own company and get launched into generational wealth. A friend of mine recently joined a “social club” for “founders” to network, which is apparently a common thing here: you pay a ton of money to get into a private club, where there are monthly events and hobnobbing and whatnot.
My friend invited me to an event last month that she was sure I’d be into: “Curious About
Psychic Abilities? An Evening with Elizabeth Rae, Psychic Detective.”
“Absoutely not,” I said immediately. Then she said that she has an open tab at the bar and so I begrudgingly agreed.
It was honestly EXCRUCIATING, you guys. Excruciating. The room was filled with 20- to 30-something tech people, and the intro to the psychic was delivered by a guy who speedran through a Powerpoint of studies that he claimed proved psychics are real. It was such an avalanche of bullshit that I had to pull out my phone and take photos to see what the hell he was talking about later. Like, here’s one study he cited called “Candidate genes related to spiritual mediumship: a whole-exome sequencing analysis of highly gifted mediums,” in which Brazilian scientists gave 50 psychics genetic tests and compared them to 50 of their relatives who claimed no psychic powers, in order to see if there was a psychic gene. That’s a real study that really got published. They identified several possible gene variants, so further testing is needed to determine exactly which one is the psychic gene. For some reason, they couldn’t just ask the psychics to tell them.
Anyway, once the man was finished matter-of-factly demonstrating that actually psychics ARE real, the psychic took the stage. She was billed as “Elizabeth Rae” so I had some trouble finding information about her afterwards because her name actually seems to be “Elizabeth Rea.” I’ll just call her “Elizabeth.”
Elizabeth began by defining the word “Skeptic” and asking if there were any in the crowd. One man raised his hand and she said she knew he was one. I did not raise my hand and she announced that there was only one skeptic in attendance but he was more than welcome.
She took no notice of me as she launched into her backstory. She informed us that she had worked as a psychic detective, helping US Special Agent Lopez solve a cold case murder. She said the agents first tested her by bringing her a locked box and asking her what was inside. She correctly said it was a baseball cap, and also that they had planned to put something else inside but changed their minds. So then they let Agent Lopez take her to the murder scene, where she immediately laid down in the spot the person was murdered, which really impressed Agent Lopez.
All of this is also detailed on Elizabeth’s website, “Insightful,” which is so much like Intuitive I did a double take. But on her site she has several videos and podcasts where she repeats this story word for word.
At the end of her talk, Elizabeth explained that she no longer does psychic detectiving, and now uses her powers exclusively for founders and investors like us.
When she finished, she asked if anyone had questions. I immediately raised my hand and asked “Who was the murderer in that case?” She said “I can’t say.” I asked “Why not?” She said, “Because it’s closed.” I said, “If the case is closed, then you should be able to say.” She said “No.” I asked if she could give an example of any case she had ever solved, and she said no, and stared at me. I asked if she could give any evidence at all that she had the psychic powers she claimed to have, and she said no. Someone else asked if she would be doing a reading for anyone that night, and she said no. It was extremely awkward.
What really struck me was how much stupider this all was EVEN COMPARED to the scam artists I dealt with back in the ‘90s and early 2000s. Like, Sylvia Browne was a horrible monster but at least she did readings. They were bad, but she did them, and they were convincing to the people who desperately wanted them to be real, who bought her books and paid tickets to see her show and lined up to ask her questions. Like, she did SOMETHING.
Here’s this woman who can’t do anything but tell stories about a case that I don’t even think she solved. Like, even her own completely unsupported story is lame and embarrassing. You psychically attuned a baseball cap?? And laid down on a sidewalk where a guy was murdered? Those are things the cops already knew! No one needed that! And she never even says she solved the case!
It was so frustrating to sit there and listen to this completely evidence-less fantasy that I wished I had gone in pretending to be a REAL psychic, because when she confirmed that she wasn’t doing a reading that night I could have jumped up on stage and done one for her. It’s honestly so easy, you lazy asshole.
The night only got worse from there, because one of the event’s hosts announced that she HAD given HIM a reading earlier that day and he found it quite impressive. He told this incredibly long, boring story that included every single thing she said that was even somewhat of a “hit,” with him noting that some of them, sure, anyone could have guessed, but others he would say “I don’t know how she could have known that.” He went on for so long in this pseudo-rational blather that by the third or fourth time he said “I don’t know how she knew that” I just said, “Cold reading.” He paused and turned and looked at me and I said “The way she ‘knew’ that was cold reading, I can explain it if you’d like.” And then he yelled at me to stop interrupting him, and I yelled back “Well you said you didn’t know so I thought that meant you wanted to know” and then my friend came back from the bathroom and I told her to grab her stuff because I could not take it anymore.
Afterward, I went on her website to see if she had ever in her life done anything where she even tried to provide evidence that she had psychic powers. I found the word-for-word retelling of the cold case “investigation” along with a few bonus “case studies,” with perhaps my favorite being an interview with one of her clients who recounted how Elizabeth had informed her that her mother’s boyfriend was POISONING HER MOTHER. The client was so grateful because she was able to tell her mother, who seems to still be dating the boyfriend. The proof that he was poisoning her? The client grabbed a drink he had made for her mother and dumped it out, noting a bit of sludge on the bottom. No word on whether the police were called to test the sludge so as far as we know, they threw a perfectly good Old Fashioned down the drain because he didn’t stir it enough.
This is exactly the sort of shit that inspired me to expose psychic grifters. So many of them claim to offer comfort to their clients by reassuring them that their loved ones are in a better place, or that good fortune is coming their way, or whatever. But inevitably they end up causing more pain, and stress, and anxiety, and making people think that their mothers are being POISONED with absolutely no evidence, like when Sylvia Browne told the mother of a missing girl that her daughter was dead, and that mother died with no hope despite the fact that the girl was alive and WATCHING SYLVIA BROWNE ON HER TV AT THE TIME.
All that said, I’m happy that Elizabeth says she’s given up being a psychic detective in order to focus exclusively on the business world. I mean, if she did have magical powers then that would be an absolutely disgusting thing to do: like, sure, fuck the families of murder victims, let’s help some stockbrokers instead! It’s like Superman saying, “You know what? I don’t feel like saving babies from burning buildings. I’m going to exclusively use my x-ray vision to make money playing poker.”
But it seems like even in that realm, Elizabeth is happy to fuck shit up. In another case study that I hope she made up, she describes how a client asked for help figuring out whether or not he should hire a particular man. She brilliantly intuited that the candidate was fat and “lacks integrity” and would ultimately suck as an employee, though she also says that the company would hire him anyway. Now, if I were a con artist making up a story about advising someone to specifically not hire a fat guy because he’s shady and has “fathered three kids without marrying,” I might throw in the fact that I knew the company would hire him anyway so that no one starts asking questions about the legality or ethical implications of all of this, but that’s just me. She says that the RIGHT candidate will be tall “with a neat haircut, deep side-part, brown hair.”
It’s unclear if the client in her “case study,” despite being told clearly that the fat guy sucks, hires him anyway as she psychically predicted, but sure enough, later on she finds the tall guy with the neat haircut and sends him along to the company. Again, no idea if THAT guy was then hired to replace the fat guy, or if either was any good, or anything.
This is all just so lazy and sloppy. It’s just uncorroborated stories. Where’s the theater? Where are the magic tricks? Where’s the Barnumesque flair? Anyone could spend half an hour on a Wordpress site and crank out more convincing and interesting stories than these with the exact same amount of evidence. It’s so depressing.
And the worst part? It worked! At least one high priced Bay Area social club hired this woman to do a Powerpoint.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, as these are probably the same guys who bought Bored Apes and Slurp Juice and shit. I’m just angry. Angry that it’s all making me nostalgic for THIS shit.
