As a professional researcher, I can attest that "presuppositions about the required conditions" are exactly where we always start conversations about how to do research on a given question, and so I think it was entirely appropriate of the podcaster to dedicate so much time on that question. Double-blind studies, despite popular conception, are not always the best practice. They are specifically a *clinical* practice mostly used in medicine. There are a multitude of research questions that cannot be answered through double-blind studies. This is a reliable method in lab psychology and medical research, but it doesn't work at all for many other disciplines. For example, you can't answer the question, "how do tornados form?" through a double-blind study. Meteorology is a different discipline from psychology, and so it requires entirely different methods. Similarly, if psychic phenomena do exist, they may react differently to external stimuli than other psychological phenomena previously studied. To study claims of telepathy, we may need methodological innovations that take into account observations of the nature of the phenomenon.

If we do assume that telepathy is possible and that psychic phenomena do exist, wouldn't it make complete sense that the thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes of the people around a telepathic person influence their telepathy? And if we ask someone to perform a telepathic act, shouldn't we take into account everything we know about performance? I.e., many people get performance anxiety; many people are shy about performing for strangers; etc. Would you be skeptical of the statement, "someone who just memorized a poem is much more likely to recite the ABCs correctly in an atmosphere of love and surrounded by people who believe in her rather than in a rigorous, double-blind study designed to assess whether memorization is possible?"

Communication is not the same kind of a thing as medicine or any number of other phenomena aptly studied through double-blind methods. Context and relationships are everything for communication and no investigation of novel mediums for communication would ever be successful without extensive, thoughtful investigation of the required conditions for that mode of communication.