I know what the experts will say. “No Rich, your phone cannot read your thoughts.” And logically, I believe that. We don’t have technology that can listen to the conversation going on inside my head.

But I have to admit, sometimes it makes me wonder.

Yesterday, I randomly thought about a pair of shoes I used to wear in my thirties. They were Sears DieHard Oxford-style shoes. I remember them being incredibly comfortable. I didn’t say anything about them out loud. I didn’t tell my wife. I didn’t search for them online. I didn’t look at old Sears catalogs. The thought simply popped into my head: I wonder if they still make those shoes?

The next morning, I’m scrolling through my feed, and there they are.

Sears DieHard shoes.

Now, before we call the men in white coats, there are probably logical explanations. Maybe it was a coincidence. Maybe the algorithms know that a 68-year-old man who likes old tools, old stores, classic products, and nostalgia would probably stop and look at a post about something from his younger years. Maybe I saw something somewhere that planted the idea in my mind without realizing it.

The truth is, our brains are incredible pattern-recognition machines. We have thousands of thoughts every day, and we forget 99.9% of them. But when one of those thoughts lines up perfectly with something we see online, it gets our attention.

And let’s be honest — the algorithms are scary good. They don’t have to read our minds when they already know our age, our interests, what we click on, what we pause and look at, and what people similar to us are interested in.

So no, I don’t think my phone is reading my mind.

But I’ll also tell you this: the next time I think about a long-forgotten product from 40 years ago and it magically appears in my feed the next day, I’m probably going to look over at my phone and say…

“Alright, what’s going on here?”

Sometimes the most amazing technology in the world isn’t mind reading. It’s simply a machine that knows us so well that it can predict what we’re thinking before we even realize we’re thinking it.