This episode has been automatically transcribed by AI, please excuse any typos or grammatical errors.

Chris Glanden: Welcome to Barcode. I’m your host, Chris Glanden, and today I’m with Scotch Wichmann, an LA-based performance artist, writer, filmmaker, hacker, and parapsychologist. With over 30 years of experience in cybersecurity, Scotch has helped protect a wide array of organizations, including Meta, where he currently protects data for over four billion users. Combining his expertise in technology and paranormal phenomena, Scotch’s groundbreaking research on psychic hacking will make you recalibrate your perspective on the future of cybersecurity. Scotch, thanks so much for stopping by  Barcode.

Scotch: Hi Chris, thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Chris Glanden: Yeah, thanks for having you on, man. I’ve been looking forward to this one for a while. It’s going to be a good one. And I want to give credit to Julia Mossbridge, who is a friend of mine who I actually interviewed for my AI documentary human. And she had sent me a message on. LinkedIn with a link to webcast that I think you may have done. It may have been the SSE conference you were discussing, , what we will ultimately get into later into this conversation. But, , thank you, Julia, for initiating that that connection.

Scotch: Yeah, she is great.

Chris Glanden: Yeah, absolutely. Scotch, if you don’t mind, , I’d like to hear about your origin story. , I understand early on that you sort of escaped a situation which nearly involved FBI intervention. Obviously, this was prior to you deciding to use your powers for good. so, if you don’t mind, , walk us through that that pivotal moment in your life and.what triggered you to change your trajectory?

Scotch: Yeah, absolutely. So I guess it was the, it was about the mid 80s and I was a wannabe hacker. was a big fan of films like Tron and War Games. And at the time I was growing up in Fresno in central California. And I went to this science focused junior high school where they had tons of Apple IIEs. 

Scotch: Apple IIe computers in there and that’s where I first started how to type and do basic programming and I was totally hooked on coding pretty quickly. Like basic was my, I just loved it. I love that programming language. So I got a paper route I saved up and I bought myself an Apple IIe computer with a modem so that I could start talking to other computers over phone lines. I started visiting bulletin boards which were basically the websites of the day. and I’d trade information on hacking with other teenagers. I wrote myself a war dialer that would dial phone numbers in sequential order, hunting for other computers that I might try to hack. learned how to make toll-free phone calls, known as phone-freaking, which was not legal, but it was a lot of fun. I was also heavy into dumpster diving. I’m sneaking out of the house like at 3 a.m. because in those days you could find all sorts of interesting things in dumpsters from like old computer equipment, lists of passwords. So my whole bedroom closet was filled with discarded electronics that I’d try to get working again. And I only started a couple of fires.

Chris Glanden : Legit fires
 
Scotch : So I went off to high school, I was a freshman, and because of all my time doing electronics in my bedroom, I somehow qualified for the electronics three level class, which was, I was a freshman, everybody else in there were seniors, and it turned out that they were all hardcore hackers. I started hanging out with them, they were doing a lot more serious hacking than I was, and they were also into dumpster diving like I was. for them, it was to collect those credit card carbons that they used to use in the you take your credit card for anybody who hasn’t seen these, used to be able to take your credit card, a store clerk would put it into like this mechanical machine and clunk, clunk, they’d take an image of your card onto a paper that you would then sign. Plus they would get a carbon copy of it for their records and those carbons would often go into the trash without being shredded. So my senior friends would grab those and instead of using, they would basically use the credit card numbers to order computer equipment from mail order catalogs. which they then have, yeah, then they would ship that equipment to model homes, like freshly built model homes that had addresses, but nobody was actually living there yet. And then they’d just drive back there every day and wait for the equipment to be delivered by UPS. And then they would scoop it up and disappear and then sell the equipment back to the black market. So this went on and one of my friends eventually got extra greedy and he shipped a bunch of the equipment to himself.

Chris Glanden : Interesting.

Scotch : And so about a week later, FBI cars pulled up and arrested him with some of the other students. of whom were 18, unfortunately. I had not been involved in that credit card stuff, but I’d certainly been making the toll-free phone calls. And lucky for me, my friends did not rat me out, but they did send along a message from an FBI agent that the feds were investigating phone freaking in the area. So I was terrified. I was paranoid for months, like that I was going to get arrested, but fortunately they never showed up. of course, I never did the freaking again. I decided to use my powers for good. So I did keep up the programming. I thought I might want to do that as a career. So I went to the University of California at Irvine as a computer science major, discovered that I hated it. Spending hours trying to analyze the efficiency of algorithms and that kind of stuff. I like the creative problem solving of programming, but wanted to do something. I didn’t want to do anything with math.

Scotch : So I switched to literature and then eventually got into performance and film. I was so much happier. But even then I was still coding on the side. And when I finally landed my first tech job, that was in 93, it was at Linksys, the networking hardware manufacturer. of those years of self-taught coding came in super handy. And I was kind of off to the races as the company’s first webmaster, which is basically, you in those days that was the single person who kind of like built your website. maintain it. And that’s when I discovered that I really like the security aspects of the job because part of my job is also kind of doing the network security and DNS and things like that. and I eventually landed a job at Wells Fargo I went on to do crypto and other security stuff as a platform engineer. I moved up to being a security architect. And then I just kind of continued down that trajectory, working my way up as a security leader at different companies where I tried to keep out hackers and fraudsters while also on the side doing penetration testing as a contracted ethical hacker for extra money. I went back to school and I did a cybersecurity masters at the University of Maryland right around the time that Edward Snowden’s NSA leak happened. many of my school peers were working for three letter agencies just down the road, just very close to Maryland, some CIA, some FBI. it was a real learning experience seeing how horrified and embarrassed everybody was at such a flagrant data breach. I mean, it really affected them emotionally. kind of when it hit home for me, like how important this cybersecurity work is, that at the other end of all the work that we’re doing, there are real people who really are affected. So fast forward a decade or two and now after having worked for a bunch of different Fortune 500s and startups, I’m now at I’m an engineering security lead tackling security, privacy, compliance, things on a bunch of different surfaces that, as you said, are used by about four billion users. And it’s a totally different scale than any place I’ve worked in the past, that kind of reach. Because if something goes wrong and it affects, let’s say, just 1 % of users, that’s like what? 40 million people or something. So stability and scalability are constant challenges.

Chris Glanden : Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And those 4 billion are, are meta users, correct? And it, I’m sure that stretches way beyond just the Facebook platform, which everyone’s familiar with.

Scotch : Yeah. yeah, it’s Instagram, WhatsApp, Reality , it’s some like, think it’s, I think the last number I saw was 200 million businesses rely on Meta products to stay alive. Cause where they do their advertising. That’s where they connect with their user base. That’s where they do their social media. So it’s, you got a lot of employees, a lot of families who are relying on it, , it’s the media likes to blow things up and, , drag companies, give them a hard time and that sort of thing. but they’re also doing a lot of good in the world. So yeah, it’s, that’s kind of how I ended up where I am.

Chris Glanden : Yeah. Yeah, definitely man. Good story. Thanks for sharing that with us. know, I am curious to hear how your involvement with paranormal activity came to be. You you’ve experienced happenings that I’d say not many people can say they’ve experienced. So would you mind talking us through some of those experiences and how you developed an interest into that realm?

Scotch : Sure. I was six, six years old, I saw my first ghost. That’s how it started. was sick with the flu, was sweating like a dog, and I was wide awake in my bed when I saw a human-sized skeleton floating above my bed. It looked absolutely real, and then all of a sudden it screamed so loudly that I had to cover my ears. I know people are like, okay, this guy was on drugs, or he was obviously dreaming, but I made sure that I was not, because I could not believe what I was seeing. terrified, but I was also kind of, after I got over that, I was also super fascinated. And intuitively I felt like it wasn’t accidental, like it was something was reaching out to me. And to say hello to, I don’t know. initiate me, don’t know, something like that. And so I became sort of obsessed with the paranormal. I don’t even know if I knew what that word was right away, but over the years my mom, she used to take me to the local public library and I started bringing home stacks of books on ESP witchcraft. It raised an eyebrow with my mom, but she was like, oh, whatever. so I started practicing spells and other occulty things. I totally loved it. And I couldn’t tell if my magical successes were a coincidence.

Chris Glanden : Yeah.

Scotch : At some point, maybe around 1984, the movie Ghostbusters came out. And that’s when I had my first exposure to the idea of scientific study of the paranormal. If you’ve seen that, they do all sorts of experiments, on the side with in their headquarters with, volunteers and things. I thought that was the coolest. Today we call that sort of work parapsychology. And I just, I was in love with it. There was nothing more interesting to me except maybe like Indiana. and Jones and Knight Rider at the time. And the thought of studying it, , got lodged in my melon, I think, as something that I might want to do someday. 
 
Chris Glanden : Yeah It’s interesting that that movie, , aligned at a point in your life where you were young enough to, have interest in that, but it aligned with what you were experiencing as well.

Scotch : Right, yeah, it was a great coincidence. I think with the paranormal, at least my experience and… some of my paranormal peers have talked about this too. It’s like once you start doing it, I think it kind of, it removes some mental barriers and you start to have increasing numbers of paranormal activities and synchronicities and things like that. Carl Jung talked about this. He had lots of synchronicities and paranormal stuff when he was doing psychiatry I think it’s just something that happens. I think my first… My first sort of big sighting happened when I was in college. I was a freshman at Irvine our dorm was haunted. I was living in my dorm room with my roommate and we both saw this ghost that appeared in the doorway. It was a large shadow man with these glowing eyes. And I was so shocked when I was looking at this. I looked at my roommate. He was freaked out. He saw it too, obviously. And then I happened to glance down at the book that I was holding that I’d been reading. and I could see an outline of the figure, of the ghost, on the white of the page in my book, as if someone had just taken a photo flash and burned light onto my retinas. So it was like, and I looked up at the ceiling, I looked through the walls, and anywhere I looked, I could see the outline of this thing. So somehow energy had made its way from this thing into my retinas. And so this thing started hanging around. It’s like I was losing sleep. Every time it would come around, our room would get really cold and staticky. Like the hair on my arms would stand up.

Chris Glanden : You saw it again.

Scotch : Yeah, we saw it again and we could, my roommate and I, did experiments. we could, I would like write down where I thought this thing was in the building. Cause you could sense where it was. , like if you go outside with your eyes shut and the sun is shining on you, you can tell where it is just from the heat. And the same thing in the building, you could tell where it was just from the static electricity, vibes, weird energy that you were getting from that, from that area. And so it kept coming around. We were losing sleep.

Chris Glanden : Weird energy.

Scotch : and I was just getting frazzled and all these paranormal things were happening. I had my first out of body experience during this time. It happened while I was walking. Sure, yeah, so I was walking from class. You kind of had to walk up this hill to the dorm and I had my backpack on and all of a sudden, and I was completely frazzled because of the ghost thing. And all of a sudden I had like this big kind of burst of staticky electricity and my consciousness, like my vision, left my body. And the way I like to explain it is it’s like, have you ever seen like in a Chinese parade, there’s like the dragon, it’s like a big head with the tail? That’s what it was. Like my consciousness was the dragon head and it was still
connected to me by the tail. And my sort of head flew up the rest of the walkway into the building where I lived down the hallway, up to the second floor, zoomed around the living room, and I saw everybody who was there, and then I snapped back into my body, all between the time of taking like one step. That’s how fast that was. And I was like, what? And so I went running up there. I ran up there into the building, up to the second floor, and everybody was exactly as high as I seen them, except for one woman who was standing across the room now. But in my vision, I’d seen her sitting on this couch, which was very unusual because somebody had gotten drunk and peed on that couch. And so she refused to ever sit on it. And I said to her, I said, were you just sitting on this couch? And she looked at me really weird and she was like, yeah, why? So she had been there, this is the thing with, it’s like when you have these experiences, it’s one thing to have it, but it’s another thing to have someone kind of re- verify to you that what you saw was real.

Chris Glanden : Yeah, they provide that validation and then you’re like, okay, that happened.

Scotch : Exactly. So this ghost, it needed to go because it was driving us crazy. So I went to the library and I found some books shamanism, which probably arguably the world’s oldest spiritual It’s an animist way of working where you basically work with spirits, animal helpers, you power animals, things like that. I also got some books on exorcism and I sort of put together, because of all my sort of magical readings I’ve done, I had some idea of kind of how to put together a ritual. so reading these books, I put together something in order to take this entity and move it along and it worked. The entity was gone. My roommate confirmed it was gone and never came back. in the process of doing that, I discovered that I really liked shamanism. So around kind of, continued doing some things on my own, but around 2007, I began training formally at, there’s a place called the Foundation for Shamanic Studies. It was founded by Michael Harder, who wrote this famous book called Way of the Shaman. And he was kind of one of the first anthropologists to go to South America and take ayahuasca , study with shamans. So I started taking these classes and then I also did some genealogy and I was really into that. I discovered that I was related on my paternal side to the Sami, which are shamanic native people of northern Norway near the Arctic. So I guess you could say I had some, if there’s any genetic magical tendency, guess maybe that was part of my familial history. don’t know, maybe that’s why I’m so obsessed with it. and then I also went through hands-on training in exorcism, the secular kind, not the Catholic kind.

Chris Glanden : So what’s the difference there?

Scotch : The difference is that you don’t have to be a priest. I guess that would be the biggest thing. And then you are not necessarily, you are free. You don’t have to rely on sort of Catholicism as your system for doing the work. There are lots of other techniques my teacher was Betsy Bergstrom and she is, she’s a long time secular exorcist. She’s done so many and she’s taught for decades. 

Chris Glanden : Okay.

Scotch : It’s it basically it has a lot of sort of psychological and kind of ESP underpinnings rather than strictly religious underpinnings. But it’s effective. I’ve worked, I got a chance to work with clients it’s pretty wild. mean, someone who’s seems very meek, , but they definitely have something going on. You start working with them and all of a sudden their voice changes. becomes very, it may become very low. It’s unusual. I had one client who their eye color changed in the middle of it.

Chris Glanden : Got it.
 
Scotch : They got extremely dark and that’s something that you see a lot in, if you read it like exorcism literature, like one does, , like reports from priests who do this and that kind of thing. You will see that that’s kind of a common thing. I’d read about it, I hadn’t seen it, but like when you happen, again, when it happens in front of you and you see that it’s real, it’s pretty freaky.

Chris Glanden :How do you react to that? I mean, at this point, you’ve probably are used to it. tell me, how do you react to that? I’m sure you have to remain and focused to do what you need to do. I’m just curious how that affects you to this day, because is that something that you’re still doing?

Scotch : Yeah! Yeah. It is, yeah, I don’t do it a lot. It’s part of the training to expect that sort of thing. I haven’t worked with any high energy entities, which are the ones where you can get sort of psychokinetic things happening, like things moving in your office or your computer equipment breaking, things like that. Yeah, these have been pretty low energy. yeah, so I think the training prepares you. And the other thing is just you have this compassion for this person you’re trying to help. it’s somebody who walks into their doctor’s office or into their therapist’s office, they’re there for a reason. And so you want to do everything you can to help them. So even if it gets kind of scary, you just kind of push on.

Chris Glanden : Yeah. So those experiences ultimately led you to become more interested in clairvoyance and also an interest in specifically the U.S. government Stargate program, is not to be confused with the twenty five Stargate program that was just recently announced. But this Stargate program involved using remote viewing. where military and intelligence purposes in the 70s and 80s. since this government operation is something that you’ve studied, you’ve looked into, I’d love for you to explain it to our listeners if you could, and then also your personal take on it.

Scotch : Sure, yeah. I guess as early as the 1950s, Soviet Union, it was knee-deep in psychic research. They called it psychoenergetics with the idea of using telekinesis, clairvoyance, and other powers to aid in state control and also use it for spying purposes. And why wouldn’t you? I mean, if you could have a psychic see what the United States was doing from thousands of miles away, why not? And as the decades passed, the CIA and US Army intelligence got wind of these experiments. And this was during the… obviously a rough time between the US and USSR. so we decided that maybe the US needed to be getting into this field as well to stay competitive. And as it happened, there were two laser physicists, Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ, who were doing psychic research at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California during the 1970s. they were having successful results that were published in legit publications like Nature, the Proceedings of the IEEE. as their research unfolded, an area of special focus became remote viewing, which is basically clairvoyance, perceiving things that are far away, while also following a specialized protocol that they developed over time. In early experiments, the scientists would go to a remote location and wait there. the scientists served as a kind of like psychic beacon. And the psychic would then try to zero in on the remote location where the scientist was standing. And they would try to describe what was there. they would also often write things down. They would scribble on paper because these thoughts are so fleeting. And what you don’t want to do is try to analyze them. You want to just let them flow because the thing that will stop the flow is analysis.

Chris Glanden : Or if you’re trying to force it. 

Scotch : Exactly, exactly. And what was super interesting is that the psychic not only described what the scientists could see, , there’s a park bench or there’s a car or whatever, but they could also describe things that the scientist couldn’t see. Things hidden behind a bush, things over there behind a tree, something behind the scientist, which meant that this was not the same as telepathy, right? They were seeing things that were not in the scientist’s mind. And one thing we know about these experiments is that remote viewing, works over any distance and through any medium. So psychics and targets, they’ve been placed into shielded rooms and the Faraday cages. It doesn’t matter. The results were always the same. And there are a lot of theories about how this works. know, perhaps the universe is holographic, where all information is available at any given point and psychics are people who can read that information. Or it could be quantum. , if you go down, down deeply enough into subatomic scales where everything is basically just waves of energy. Time and distance don’t really mean anything like they do to us. also you have things like quantum entanglement, which allows connections between here and other places. And perhaps psychics have learned how to sort of tap into that non-local information. And also interesting in these experiments is that remote viewers did not need to be told much about their targets. Initially they were given things like map coordinates, but later on they were just given case numbers and then nothing and somehow they still managed to identify the correct targets just based on intention. this program Stargate, which also went by other names. It ran roughly from 1972 to the early 90s, and it was leveraged by all the three-letter agencies for a bunch of different missions, including locating lost aircraft, locating foreign leaders, locating hidden drugs during DEA operations, describing Soviet ICBM sites both inside and outside, and so on. with so many successes that one of the remote viewers, John McMonigal, who is the program’s kind of earliest psychic spy, He received the Legion of Merit honor in 1984 for participating in more than 200 missions that were used by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the DIA, NSA, CIA, DEA, and the Secret Service. There was another case where one of their super talented psychics, Ingo Swan, he used his remote viewing in 1973 to visit Jupiter psychically, and he described what he saw as these icy rings around the planet similar to Saturn’s. And this was documented in both audio and also in his drawings. And people thought, okay, rings around Jupiter, whatever. But sure enough, six years later, was Voyager 1 did a flyby of Jupiter and guess what they found? So obviously remote viewing was real on its face. You could look at the results. You can, , if you go and look at the CIA’s online archives that are declassified now, you can compare what the target was, what people drew back in the seventies. And it’s obviously real from an observational point of view, but it’s also proven to be real statistically. Stats PhDs, they’ve done their hardest to disprove it, but in the program’s final 1995 report, just before it was supposedly closed down, the report, it features luminaries of the statistics world, including Dr. Jessica Utz, was a Professor Emerita of Statistics at the University of California and a past Coastler Chair of Parapsychology at the University of Edinburgh. She concluded that the US government’s experiments met their burden absolutely of proving that this is a real anomalous phenomenon exists with statistical results that she said were overwhelming. So the program was supposedly shut down in 1995. and all of its docs were declassified in 2002 and made available on the CIA’s online archives. Anybody can go, just go to the CIA, Google it, you can find them. But my personal conspiracy theory is that absolutely no way is that this program was shut down. was shut down, there are various reasons given. One was that it was too weird, that the intelligence wasn’t quite useful enough, but… I mean, it was still working. That’s the thing. Like, their own stats experts said it was. So, with success, there’s no way. So, I think what happened is they published their documents to placate the public and then turned it into a special access program whose funding is shielded from Congress. That’s my guess. You heard it here first.

Chris Glanden : There’s no real reason why it would shut down. You believe it’s still happening. So, Scott, you’ve studied literature, film and performance at the University of California at Irvine. You mentioned you study cyber security at the University of Maryland and you hold a PhD in parapsychology from the University of Sedona, where you focused on areas such as ESP, occult practices and shamanic healing. doctoral dissertation psychic hacking using remote viewing to steal computed data Prove that psychics are able to describe information stored within computers that are located miles away and The  experiments results have been presented publicly at several conferences as well as other esteemed platforms and as a security professional This is truly fascinating to me because it’s an attack method that is never really within the scope of conversation, at least ones I’ve been in. So yeah, I’d love to hear how that experiment evolved and then ultimately what you feel the results were able to conclude.

Scotch: Got it, it came time for my dissertation, I wanted to find a way to combine my love of ESP with my love of cybersecurity. Since the dissertation takes years, I wanted to make sure it was something I was super passionate about. And so my big question was this, guess. Remote viewers can see missiles and people and planets from vast distances away. but can they also see into computers? Should we consider psychics to be analogous to traditional hackers, but instead of using like software and hardware tools to break into systems, they can just basically pass right through a computer security to access data directly in its circuitry or in its storage. Because if this were possible, I mean, think of the ramifications, it would be staggering. Like how can you protect… Any secret of a psychic can pass through your firewall, passwords, barbed wire, bunkers, just like a ghost. Not only would our personal secrets be at risk, but- So would national secrets, things like lists of people and witness protection, military plans, weapons designs, maybe even nuclear codes. And now with brain computer interfaces becoming more popular, like Elon Musk’s Neuralink that has access to your brain’s neurons. if a psychic hacker can access the computer that’s connected to your brain, who’s to say they couldn’t sort of ride those rails right into your thinking processes. So with all of this in mind, I went to the all my archives and I dug through thousands of documents on remote viewing and the paranormal. in search of evidence that the US government had performed this kind of experiment. And from what I could tell, it never had. not to say that computers were never part of psychic experiments during the Stargate years, they were. would be used to store  experiment data, for example, and they would also be used to test psychics. For example, you might have a researcher who uses a computer that picks a random number, and that in turn points to a particular picture or other target that the psychic then tries to But for me, the random number is the real crown jewel. That’s the real secret, not the target picture. And that’s what I wanted to test is could a psychic get to the secret data itself? So the reason that computers were not used in these experiments by the government is that they were still computers were relatively new, right? In the seventies and eighties, it took them years to get their first machine and it was massive and expensive and it was viewed as this very serious scientific tool, , so, and also it wasn’t the bearer of secrets like computers are today. So they just didn’t think of using it as a target because targeting it would have been like targeting a protractor, right? It was just a tool. So I set out to create this experiment to see if psychic hacking was a thing. Many psych experiments use trained and experienced psychics to hopefully achieve results as quickly as possible. But studies have shown that anybody has psychic potential. So my thought was, why not open up this experiment to the general public on the internet to get as many participants as possible. So in the experiment, Each participant was shown a live feed in their browser of a laptop that was sitting somewhere in Los Angeles. And on the laptop screen were three targets, a picture, a passphrase that’s sitting in a file, and an ATM pin number sitting in a file. All these were visible on the desktop. However, the laptop’s screen was angled down, so it was almost closed. So you could just see like blue glow, but you couldn’t see what was actually on the screen. And then the psychic was asked to zoom in psychically and describe the three targets. could write text, they could even submit a picture if they wanted, if they drew something. that’s how the experiment went. But not everything was as it seemed. Everything I just described is what they saw from their point of view. But in reality, some things were different. First, the live video feed of the laptop that they were looking at was actually staged. I wanted to show a laptop because I thought a lot of people were doing this for the first time. They’d never done anything psychic before. And I wanted to give them a lot of confidence. So they could just see on their screen, there’s the laptop. It’s right in front of me. All I have to do is just reach out and get it.

Scotch : So that was the idea. However, I didn’t want the targets to just be sitting on the screen because if somebody is a really good remote viewer, they might be able to just project themselves into like right in front of the screen and just read what’s on it. So then it’s just really shoulder surfing. They’re not actually going into the machine, right? They’re just seeing what’s there visually. So what in reality, the laptop, what I did is I darkened its screen to black.

Scotch : So it was still on, but it was completely black, zero lux. And then I took a cardboard shield, put that over the screen with black tape. So while the targets were on the screen, you would have to go into the computer basically to see what was on there.

Chris Glanden : Mm-hmm, right

Scotch : The second thing that visitors did not know is that besides the picture ATM pin and passphrase targets that was on the screen, there was a secret fourth target, which was a looping five second video clip chosen from a movie or TV show. I never told visitors about this because I wanted to see if psychics could pick up on the fact that there was a video there without even knowing it, would be sort of similar to a hacker who breaks into a system and then kind of roots around to see what’s there without knowing in advance, right?

Chris Glanden : Blackbox test.

Scotch : So the picture, ATN, pin, passphrase, and video targets were changed out nightly. They were randomly chosen. The randomness came from two physical sources of randomness. So it was not pseudo-randomness. And because the laptop screen was blacked out, each night I would have to load the new targets onto a USB stick, walk it over to the laptop, stick it in, and then automated scripts would basically delete the old targets, reboot the machine, install the new targets. display them on the screen, and we were off to the races for the next day. I should add too that that laptop was hardened against attack. So in addition to its screen being blacked out, all of its networking capabilities were disabled. So it was standalone. All unnecessary software was removed, and file monitoring was enabled so I could see if anybody touched any of the target files. It was running Ubuntu Linux. Once the experiment was over, results were judged by a pool of six judges and a referee, with those results then converted into statistics to calculate the probability of the results being chance or possibly a psychic effect. So this experiment, it ran for about two weeks and it attracted 146 people from around the world, results that were statistically significant. That is, for the picture, video, and some ATM pin rounds, psychics provided detail that was plainly obvious to any observer, with the probability of it being chance exceedingly low, with the p-value, for anybody who’s into statistics, being as low as .0006. But the real surprises, I mean that’s all exciting, but the real surprises for me were the submissions themselves that were received from participants. In many cases, the descriptions and the drawings submitted had a lot of matching details that were just mind-blowing. For a target picture of a glass cathedral dome, for example, a psychic correctly guessed sensing, they sensed that there was the color lilac, blue, green, and beige with a feeling of sandstone and open air in a circular shape with vertical lines or protrusions around it. And then they, very specific, and it absolutely described this dome. And then they also drew a picture of dome lines in a circular shape. 

Chris Glanden : Very specific.

Scotch : So obviously they were picking up on, I mean, that picture could have been anything in the world. And there are other examples like this, , another wild finding is While aiming for one target, people inadvertently would pick up on the details of an adjacent target that was on the screen at the same time. For example, while aiming for a passphrase target, one psychic described a desert pyramid. And this did not match the passphrase at all. However, the picture target that was on the screen at the time was a photo of an Egyptian pyramid. So they were getting that on accident.

Chris Glanden : wow.

Scotch : We also saw cases where a psychic seemed to be able to describe not just the target that was there, but also tangential details about the target that were not physically present. For example, one of the video clips was a famous scene from the movie The Shining. If you haven’t seen the movie, basically a writer, his wife, and their son spend the winter, spend a winter vacation in a massive and desolate hotel in the snowy Colorado mountains. And the clip that we use in the experiment is a famous moment in the film where the writer tries to break through a bathroom door with an axe. And while the video was on the screen, one psychic who, , they have no idea that the video was even there, they sensed, and I’m quoting here, that they could feel someone’s mother on vacation in a mountain location. I kid you not. And what’s wild is that none of those details were even used in the experiment. They weren’t part of the clip that we used, meaning the remote viewer appeared able to follow tangents from a target to other related information that is located someplace else. And we saw this a lot. So. What does this mean? It’s like, if you, say that you have some data in your computer and you decide that it’s too sensitive to stay there. So you move part of it, you print it out and you move part of it to a filing cabinet. Given these results, a psychic who targets the computer might in theory be able to follow that psychic tangent to the data that’s in the filing cabinet because they’re connected by meaning. So even storing information in cold storage offline, that might not even be safe. Another implication is that we have this psychic describing the video target even though they didn’t know that videos were there, meaning that psychics appear able to dig around to find information that they didn’t know was there, just like a standard hacker do that when they break into a system. Another interesting finding is the possibility of collusion. So we had ATM pin numbers, obviously we’re part of our targets. For a four digit ATM pin target, two psychics managed to get all of the digits correct between them. That is, one psychic got three of the four digits right. and the second psychic got a different three digits right. So if you combine their eight guessed digits together, you’d have all the digits needed to brute force the pin way faster than if you started guessing from zero, zero, zero, zero. Assuming that you had some way of like, if you remove duplicates and things like that. 

Psychics seem to have the ability to uncover hidden information they weren’t even aware of, much like how a hacker explores a system after breaking in. Share on X

Chris Glanden: Mm-hmm. It definitely wouldn’t take that long.

Scotch: Yeah, it wouldn’t take that long. And we saw this effect for four of the ATM pin targets where for each of these four pins, two psychics supplied all the necessary details for brute forcing. We also saw this for picture targets where two psychics would give you unique details from different perspectives about what the target was. And if you combine them, you get a super detailed description. it means that if you’re trying to do this kind of work, having psychics collude might get you to your target even faster. And then one more, super interesting finding was related to confidence. people would arrive at the website, they were asked to take a survey. whether they believed in clairvoyance, if they had psychic powers themselves, things like that. I then compared their answers to how they performed psychically, and for the question, do you have psychic powers yourself, people who answered yes or maybe had 21.8 times more accurate submissions than people who answered no. So the conclusion is that if you want to be more psychic, believe you’re psychic. It makes a big difference.

If you want to be more psychic, believe you're psychic. Share on X

Chris Glanden: And that goes back to something you said earlier in terms of anyone has psychic potential, right? would how would one develop that? Develop that ability? Is that just more along the lines of training or is that along the lines of, again, embracing that? Like, how would someone develop that even further If that’s something they wanted to tap into.
 
Scotch : Yeah, I would say there are lots of books on, in fact there’s one I think from the 70s on how to be psychic, I think that’s name of it. But I think just starting to read about the methods and things that work for people. when we took the survey, one of the questions that we asked we asked actually several questions about what makes a huge difference for people when they’re trying to be psychic what makes them more effective.

Chris Glanden : Because there’s levels, right? There’s levels of psychic ability and accuracy and things like that. Okay.

Scotch: Right, so, , sitting in a quiet room, learning how to meditate, how to quiet the mind, sort of paying attention to signs and symbols around you. , if you’re busy washing the dishes, kind of like tune in, because often when you’re busy doing something else, your unconscious mind is active and maybe has more access to information out of the universe because it’s not being distracted. Rhythmic drumming, which is very commonly used in shamanism at about four beats per second, kind of helps put the brain into an altered state of consciousness. And there so many things like these that some things work for some people, others don’t.

Chris Glanden : Got it. So it’s it could be personal how you how you tune into that.

Scotch : Right, and I would say just starting to experiment, know, get some books. There are also classes that you can take on sort of developing. psychic powers. And I do think that some people have a natural leaning towards certain powers versus others. know, some people may, be clairvoyant in the kind of more literal sense in that they really see things with the mind’s eye, or even their physical eyes. Then you have other people who may be clairaudience. So they hear things, it’s like they hear voices or even their like internal voice is telling them things. And, I think just exploring is just the way to go and there are exercises as you can do that these books will talk about

Chris Glanden : Interesting. So with that being said and taking into mind that anyone has psychic potential, if you have a bad actor that pursues that and is able to tap into being a remote viewer, that could be really dangerous. with those abilities in the hands of someone that has ill intent. Which may have happened. know, there’s plenty of unresolved cyber attacks that have taken place. who’s really to rule that out?

Scotch : Yeah! don’t think that we have really good detection for this kind of attack vector. I almost feel it might take a psychic to detect a psychic, know, which could be one potential defense avenue. Maybe you employ, , if you have really secret secrets, maybe you employ psychics 24 hours a day or other possible defenses but yeah it’s the psychic thing it’s unlike a sort of traditional hack where you have forensics you have log files that you can look at you can go check your router see who is doing what your log files and your machines don’t leave that kind of a trail Maybe in a quantum system, I don’t know that this has been rigorously tested, but in a quantum computer where everything is sort of depending on superposition, and it could be potentially, know, a la Heisenberg, altered just by the fact of, someone observing it, does that also apply to psychics? I think that’s maybe an unanswered question that I would love the answer for if anybody’s going to research that.
 
Chris Glanden : So you have remote viewing and you have other unorthodox attack vectors like that that are typically never considered. Like I said before, so from your perspective, considering that, does this mean that cybersecurity is now broken?

Scotch : I think in some ways it is. I think it depends on how much secrecy you need. For example, if you need total deniability, that certain information exists, you’re trying to hide a UFO, and you don’t want anybody to know about it, you might be in trouble because the experiment shows that psychics can describe details about target data, but more impressively, they can rummage around to uncover data they didn’t even know exists. Scotch : As we saw with the remote viewers who were able to describe videos, they didn’t even know were legitimate targets, , part of the experiment. So deniability may no longer be a sure thing. Secondly, if you need information compartmentalization, you might be in trouble because psychics can gather information not only about their targets, but also about adjacent and inadvertent targets on accident. And we saw that where people who were, , they were aiming for one target and they ended up describing a pyramid that happened to be on the screen at the same time. Psychics could also apparently follow tangents to other information that’s not physically present, as we saw in the example of the shining. So moving part of your data from a computer to a filing cabinet or to a bunker doesn’t necessarily protect it from a psychic who can follow that tangential line connecting those two locations. And then of course, it also depends too on your defenses. Based on the results of the experiment, know psychics are not stopped by increasing the distance to a target since we had participants around the world do this. shielding, since obviously these people are going through walls in order to get to the targets. Network air gaps, since the laptop was completely unnetworked. Data access permissions, all of the files were set as root only. System monitoring. was no detection of any activity, nobody touching any of the files during the entire experiment. And then obfuscation also is not really a defense because if you think about the data in the machine, like it’s at various times, depending on when you measure it, it’s in storage, , it’s maybe it’s stored as binary. Maybe it’s read into memory as hexadecimal or some other form of encoding. It’s passing through, CPUs and memory and other types of circuitry. It’s making its way. to the display electronics. So it’s not in one place. Like at any given time, it’s dispersed and dissentered and fragmented throughout the machine. And even on the screen, the machine doesn’t know that that’s a picture of a pyramid, right? It’s just a bunch of pixels. So somehow going into the machine, a psychic is still able to somehow reassemble all that into something meaningful. which to me is one of the most amazing things. But it’s also maybe not unlike someone who’s telepathic and they go into your mind, right? And they know what you’re thinking and they’re able to say it out loud. know, where in the mind does someone arrive in order to read your thoughts? And if your thoughts are really just, , brain matter and electricity, like, how does someone cobble that together? So I guess in that way, it’s not really that different from hacking a machine, right? You’re having to make sense of all this sort of material, but somehow magically, they’re able to do it.

If you need total deniability that certain information exists… you might be in trouble. Share on X

Chris Glanden : So what is the real countermeasure then? I know you said, could be psychic versus psychic. there ways that you can legitimately defend against this type of attack vector?

Scotch : I don’t know that we have strong answers for this because it’s still early days, but I would say there’s good news and bad news. One thing we did not test because we wanted to keep the experiment pretty simple was encryption of data, know, scrambling it while it’s in storage. So that might be a possibility. However, the bad news is that depending on which theory you believe about how remote viewing works, encryption may not be sufficient since there’s probably a point in the future or the past, in this universe or another one, where your data is unencrypted, either before you encrypted it or after you decrypted it. Even if it’s only a moment in the computer’s memory, or maybe you’re looking at a
decrypted version of the report five years from now. And if remote viewing works by psychic accessing that information outside of time, then encryption isn’t going to help you. They won’t access the encrypted data, they’ll access it when it’s its decrypted state elsewhere.

Encryption may not be sufficient since there's probably a point in the future or the past where your data is unencrypted Share on X

Chris Glanden: do they have access to a timeline where they can see, when data may have been encrypted and be able to pull it from there? Or is it a single point in time, real time type of approach? Or does it vary depending on who it is?

Scotch : we don’t really know. We do know from, you look at the government experiments in the past, we know that. that remote viewers have been able to work outside of time. and it’s, you also see this with clairvoyance, right? People who don’t get on the airplane, because they know something’s going to happen and then a really bad thing happens to the airplane. So we have examples of this all the time, of people getting future information. So it’s, I would say it falls into that category of, we’re not really sure, but at a quantum level, time doesn’t really have the same meaning that it has for you and me today, sitting here. I guess another good news bad news is that is that psychic direct hits on the targets were pretty rare. Like out of 146 submissions, only about 8 % were considered to be direct hits. So the chance of someone targeting you specifically, and then on top of that being successful, it’s pretty low. But I would say it depends on who you are, because even with 8%, like a single direct hit on your information could still be absolutely damaging if you are hiding a UFO in your basement, or you’ve got nuclear codes, right? 8 % is still kind of high if you’re talking about nuclear codes. Another consideration too is information is likely to be described by a psychic in abstractions and symbols rather than directly. So even if a psychic did target you, a lot of the detail would probably be lost as that information rises upward from the unconscious to the conscious mind and they try to make sense of it. But I would say that as brain computer interfaces get better and also AI engines that are connected to those, who’s to say that at some point you couldn’t… basically collaborates with a brain computer interface that looks at what you’re seeing even before maybe you’re conscious of it. , things that you’re seeing psychically and it prints out a picture of it with way higher resolution than maybe what you could achieve on your own because it’s hardwired into your cortex. Another good news, bad news is that the experiment results supporting past findings show that text and numbers are really difficult targets. Psychics have the hardest time with letters and numbers because I think they’re so fine. And also we have all the letters and numbers in our minds. So it’s very easy to second guess what you’re seeing. We know the alphabet. So your alphanumeric passwords are probably safe from psychics. However, we did see evidence of collusion, right? But if you put lots of psychics together, they can increase their speed, they can increase the accuracy of the readings. So it could be that passwords maybe aren’t safe as safe if you have multiple psychics colluding against you. But there are some defenses that we could consider. One of them, I think we talked about. briefly was the idea of switching to quantum computing, since computers that rely on superposition instead of binary values might inhibit a psychic’s ability to lock on, because even the act of observing… observing may, corrupt information. don’t know if that applies to psychic powers. That’s still something that we need to test. Also, we mentioned using psychics as defenders. Can a good psychic stop a bad psychic from executing an attack? There’s some research suggesting that some people can sense when others are staring at them. Like, you don’t even know. You can’t physically see who’s staring at you, but you can feel it.

Chris Glanden : You had that feeling though.

Scotch : Exactly. So maybe psychics can sense that too. Maybe they can sense other psychics looking and then maybe even develop the ability to jam that looking somehow. I don’t know how that would work, but it seems possible. And then talking about AI and robots, know, perhaps psychics could even be used to help battle weaponized drones. a psychic can remotely access the computer, , through psychic hacking that controls the automated weapons and tensions, or even sense the outcomes precognitively by just a few seconds of what that robot’s going to do. And you have a laser that can lock onto that based on your instructions. You have the psychic say, it’s going to go to the right or it’s going to do X, Y, Z, and boom, you lock on and take it out. But I would say overall, obviously don’t have these defenses yet. So I would be wary of anybody based on the experiment results claims that a system is 100 % secure against snooping.

Chris Glanden : Man, that’s crazy. it’s very fascinating. And again, I would urge the listeners to whether you believe this or not, , definitely do your own investigation, do your own research, look into, the studies that have been done. But I think there is one clear takeaway is that you should exercise your imagination in cybersecurity. Imagine or envision what kinds of cyber attacks are possible, especially cyber attacks that haven’t happened yet. So would you say our industry should approach that and be able to open our minds to these extreme possibilities that are essentially unheard of.

Scotch : Right, I think you’re spot on about needing imagination. Creativity is a critical skill for cybersecurity. know, when you’re doing pen testing, for example, you have to visualize a lot of details about your target in order to figure out how to link attack steps together to gain access to a system. And the same goes when you’re defending. , it takes a lot of imagination to envision what might be possible from a hacker’s point of view. I was working at a large org some years back. where I proposed an attack scenario that they thought was ridiculously unlikely. They were like, no way. they didn’t want to fix it because it was expensive. And when an attacker did finally do exactly what I predicted could happen, it costs 60 times more to fix the issue. This reminds me of there’s this performance artist in Russia named Pyotr… Pavlensky, in 2013 he undressed and then nailed himself to the cobblestone in Moscow’s Red Square to protest Russia’s crackdown on freedom. And when onlookers and the police approached him, mind you, this was unheard of in Russia, they looked scared.

Creativity is a critical skill for cybersecurity. Share on X

They looked bewildered because what they were seeing was unthinkable. and their society. It was unimaginable because it fell outside of what was deemed allowable by the state. Like it couldn’t possibly exist because the state didn’t allow it. Yet there it was. And so like Pawlinski, I think we in security, we have to think of the unthinkable. We’re basically futurists. have to, we need to be able to imagine the unimaginable no matter how absurd it might seem at first. And to do that, you have to become a student of the absurd. for me, I’ve chosen performance art and the paranormal when you see magical things happen for real, you’re not even sure what reality is. And then you’re like, this is absurd. This is crazy. But your dealings with the absurd don’t necessarily have to be these things. , any creative endeavor that exercises that muscle and forces you to see what others don’t can help develop that ability. It could be painting, meditation, being in nature, giving yourself plenty of space to daydream and play and be silly and to pursue fanciful ideas that seem maybe crazy to other people, but that’s where I’d recommend we go.
 
Chris Glanden : I love that man and a lot of people divide that creativity from. the four corporate walls that they go to and sort of stay in that lane, but that’s one thing that I try to do is erase that line right? You got to erase that line and. Definitely think outside of the box, so I love I love that approach that you have.
 
Scotch : Right. you’re doing it too. I with your podcasts and your films and, you I think that all of that is, , definitely these creative endeavors are exactly what I’m talking about.
 
Chris Glanden : I think you also go beyond the security sector. You’re able to hit and connect with anyone. And I think that’s important, especially for the message of security across be able to connect with them on a different level.
 
Scotch : Right, right, absolutely.
 
Chris Glanden : So, for those that would like to read more information on this specific experiment, know, where could you direct them to?
 
Scotch : So if they want to read more about it, I would say you could go to You’ll find links there to great books about ESP and remote viewing, and also a ton of information about the experiment, including all of the raw data. you want to compare what the targets were to what Psychic saw, you can definitely download that there and check it out.
 
Chris Glanden : Nice man. So what’s next for you? are you able to share any new ideas for future research that you have lined up?
 
Scotch : I’m hoping to conduct an experiment involving some little-known Norse magical techniques year to see how they do. Some old ways of working from the Sami people and others near the Arctic. Maybe expand the psychic hacking experiments to see some, to test some scenarios that I didn’t test the first time. I’m thinking about another bass experiment with the public to test psychokinetic powers. So the ability to move things. And then on the performance art front, I’m hoping to produce a performance art show in Los Angeles later this year. And I’ve got some short films and it works also. So if you follow me on socials, I’ll make sure that you hear about all that stuff, especially if you like your art weird. 

Chris Glanden: Definitely, man. I spent some time on your website, definitely. speaking of that, where can you direct our audience members to find out more about you, your upcoming initiatives, just connect with you online?
 
Scotch : Yeah, if you want to learn more about the experiment, you can go to psychexperiment.org. you want to connect with me about cybersecurity, you can find me on LinkedIn. And if you’re interested in like the art stuff, website is just my full name scotchwitchman.com, or you can Google me and you’ll find it. you can follow me on Instagram, and my handle again is just my name, scotch Wichmann.
 
Chris Glanden : Nice. Yeah. So you mentioned that that you’re a long time performance artist and you’re living in the performance Mecca of L.A. Right. And by the way, I’ve seen some of your comedy too on YouTube, which is which is funny shit, man. I want everyone to go online and check that out. But throughout your time in L.A. and beyond L.A. as a performance artist, I’m sure that you’ve experienced some very interesting and eclectic venues with a bar atmosphere. So since this is barcode, I need to ask you, bars or atmospheres have you come across that are differentiators have you ever encountered a haunted bar?
 
Scotch : Hahaha. wow. Okay, so I guess where I like to drink, love it if there’s a sense of, it kind of engages my senses. So there’s a sense of adventure or danger or history, mystery, beauty, something like So for like views, I love a place with views. So downtown LA, there’s a place called Perch. just has this gorgeous views of downtown. It’s a place I love to go. you like, I also like kind of divey feeling diners. Deli on Fairfax is just old school Hollywood diner. It’s amazing. Kind of heavy on the pores. I also like bars with character. In North Hollywood, there’s the Tomka Hutts, which is LA’s oldest tiki bar, highly recommended. If you ever are in Hollywood, I would definitely recommend trying to go to the Magic Castle, because they have an incredible bar and you get to see magic and your drink magically disappears. What? And then I also love an underground vibe that’s kind of gothy or divey or retro. There is at the Grand Stardom jazz club in Chinatown there’s a thing called club disintegration which is a it’s like a weekend goth club so you can dance to your joy division while you’re drinking your beer out of a can you can go to Hollywood and there’s a place called Sunset and Vinyl, which is like a fuzzy 70s vibe, and they spin vinyl there. And then when you’re done, you can walk over to the Museum of Death on Selma to learn all about like embalming and cannibalism. So it’s like a perfect date night.
 
Chris Glanden : Ha ha. Interesting yeah, yeah, no, that’s interesting man. So Scotch, I just heard last call here. If you decided to open a cybersecurity theme bar What would the name be and what would your signature drink be called?
 
Scotch : Oh, that’s a good one. I guess the bar, I’m going to go with Capture the Flag for the name of the bar. anybody not familiar, that’s a game at hacking conferences where hackers try to break into computers and steal the crown jewels. And the bar theme would be like 80s hacker, pirate, and phone freak themes. it’d be like Tron in War Games meets Goonies.
 
Chris Glanden : Okay. I love that.

Scotch : With like pirate and hacker booty for sale and the signature drink, I think it would be like a zombie spinoff. So at least three kinds of rum. However, when they make it, and this is the best part the bartender pours it over, , just into your glass, but keeps pouring until the drink spills over the top of the glass and into your lap because it’s called a buffer over rum. And I will now show myself out.
 
Chris Glanden : I love that man. Scotch, I want to thank you so much again for your time, for sharing your perspectives with us know, just talking us through your experience, It definitely was a great conversation and really appreciate you doing that.
  
Scotch: Thank you. Yeah, was an honor to be here. Thanks so much for your time, Chris. This was great. I had a great time.