0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

0:00:11
Pascual Romero: So welcome back to Squaring the Strange. I’m Pascual Romero and with me is…

BR: I’m Ben Radford.

PR: And our special guest who we’ve had on once before at this point.

0:00:38
Celestia Ward: I’m not special anymore.

PR: Now you’re just a

CW: Regular old Celestia.

PR: I’d say above average because you know.

CW: I’ll go with above average.

PR: That’s a backhanded compliment.

0:01:03
BR: You’re a little special.

CW: Well it feels special to be here with you guys.

0:01:09
PR: Awesome. No it’s awesome having three people in the studio. It’s been a challenge figuring out how to configure the room, but I think we got it worked out. So this week, we’re going to be talking about our skeptical heroes, which is a pretty interesting topic. And I think that we all have some pretty curious picks, which I think is great, because it’s easy to go for the easy ones, but there are a couple that really stand out. So we’ll get right to that after this.

(MUSIC)

0:01:43
BR: So today we’re talking about skeptical heroes, unsung and otherwise. So I think we’ve all come up with a few who have touched us or jumped out at us in some way. Celestia, why don’t you start us off?

CW: Oh, well, I think I was a bit of an overachiever. I wrote down a whole lot of people but we all have you know when you’re an artist, they say what are your influences, right? And as a skeptic you also have influences people who formed your thinking early on or sometimes later on and I, yeah My earliest reference is probably James Randi and Penn and Teller, but I’m not gonna talk about them because they’re very well known. And they’re fantastic and I love them, but I’m gonna go right to George Carlin, he is not he was not he passed away a while ago. I have heard his daughter speak She sometimes speaks in the in the skeptic circles, but George Carlin was a comedian, obviously everybody hopefully knows that he was not a working scientist. He was not a philosopher or a writer per se he did write some books. But he had this way of encapsulating bull crap. I’m not supposed to say bad words on the…

0:03:20
BR: Bulldicky.

0:03:20
CW: Yes, he had a way of encapsulating hokum in just, he had this way of delivering it. He would just, I’ve got a couple of quotes from him, you know, religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do every minute of every day. You put that way with his delivery. It’s like, that’s ridiculous.

BR: Something’s fishy about that I gotta tell you. Yeah.

0:03:48
CW: And granted a lot of his skepticism was directly aimed at the church, at religion. Sometimes at the government. He had a lot of different targets but he had this common-sense approach and the way he expressed himself was reminded me a lot of the way a really good gag cartoon works. You see a really solid cartoon, you take it in, it’s just common sense like that’s funny because it’s ridiculous but at the same time a lot of people believe it or a lot of people follow it.

0:04:21
PR: Right, right.

CW: So, yeah, and skepticism I think is most effective when you apply it that way because if you say oh well actually the blah blah blah and the intake up hibitors and the bottle and you throw a lot of jargon in there people just gloss over but you get you get George Carlin look at you in the face going. This is ridiculous. Yeah very plain statement. Yeah, that works totally it’s a good way to communicate.

0:04:40
PR: He was a great great great comedian. He was actually one of my earliest introductions to stand-up comedy, really, because my father was a fan. And that kind of speaks a lot to his humor, because my father was a very big, he was really big in the Chicano revolution in the 60s. He was a very front-line civil rights kind of guy. And he always showed me George Carlin as examples of criticisms of the establishment and things like that. And like, you know, he makes really good points about that. And for my dad to use a white guy to make those points is pretty impressive.

0:05:24
CW: He broke through the barrier.

0:05:28
PR: Yeah. It was pretty much equal parts George Carlin and Richard Pryor in that sense. Pryor also had a pretty good streak of skeptical, you know, kind of poking fun at the system stuff, but but yeah, so I really I really like Carlin a lot. I think he was he made a lot of great points and and very rarely did I have even ever disagree with him and even when I did it was usually on just some personal political thing or something? Like he was very rarely wrong about you know Religion and the way people believe in nonsense and things like that

BR: And his delivery was just so deadpan. Oh, yeah. Like, really? Yeah. It was like, let me say that again with my Carl Ness inflection, just to be clear where the sarcasm was. And you got it. You’re like, yep, yep.

0:06:19
CW: Yeah. You know, maybe I shouldn’t read this quote because it would make a good fortune cookie, but, yeah, the God excuse, the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument. I mean that expresses right there, that’s the God of the gaps. It expresses a lot of skeptical thinking there. You don’t have an answer and you don’t have an argument, God did it. And let’s just stop looking.

0:06:43
BR: Conversations ended, God did it, moving on.

0:06:46
CW: Yes.

0:06:47
PR: Totally.

BR: And so I have two of the, one of my favorite ones is fictional character. Of course, oftentimes fictional characters influence us just as much as real life ones. Because we see them like, yes, this is the character saying what I’m thinking. In my case, I wrote about this before, but it’s not really well known. One of my favorites is Clara Peller.

0:07:13
CW: Who is Clara Peller, Ben?

0:07:15
BR: I’m glad you asked that, Celestia. Have you heard the phrase, where’s the beef?

0:07:20
CW: Why, of course. I’m a child of the 80s.

0:07:22
BR: Exactly, as am I. She was the actress that did the famous Where’s the Beef ads for Wendy’s back in 1984. And I love, the actress, of course, could have been any other actress, but she delivered it pretty clearly well. That’s why she’s known for it. It aired January 10th, 1984, and it was in response to… It was Wendy’s responding to McDonald’s and Burger King because their patties in the signature meal had more beef in it. It was specifically directed at McDonald’s and Burger King, but it quickly blew up. Where’s the Beef, of course, became a cultural catchphrase in the 1980s, and still here we are a third of a century later. And actually, honestly, just about two months ago, I saw another Where’s the Beef reference. Yeah, it’s become… It’s like a… In 2017.

CW: It’s a consumer catch-all flag wave of, what are you trying to pass off on me here? There’s no there there.

0:08:27
BR: Exactly. And that’s what I love about it is it’s such a well known phrase. People, the children of the 80s and 90s certainly recognize it. I’m guessing that again, just because it still has currency, kids today are still recognizing it. It is what I love. It’s so thoroughly skeptical.

0:08:45
CW: It’s observation based, right? You can do a homeopathic campaign that says where’s the medicine?

0:08:53
PR: Yeah, yeah.

BR: And it’s three simple words, where’s the beef? And it’s so clear. Like, you’re giving me something, you want me to accept this. I can see there’s no beef there. You’re not fooling me. I see the bun. I see the lower bun, I see some tomato and lettuce, where’s the beef? And it’s Wizard of Oz pulling back the curtain and saying, where’s the wizard? And I just love it that it’s been embraced by politicians, by skeptics, and it’s such a well-known, universally recognized phrase, and it’s so thoroughly skeptical. I can’t think of another phrase that has gotten such common currency that is so inherently skeptical and that’s what I love about it.

PR: Yeah, I very, very vividly remember those commercials and they were, and it was a commercial that you had like during prime time and you had Saturday mornings and like it just was everywhere and I remember it being kind of something people would just like say, you know, like they’d use it in jokes and they’d use it just like…

0:10:05
CW: It was funny too. If I’m remembering correctly, she’s hovering around going, where’s the beef? Where’s the beef? While other people are talking like, well, here we have the such and such burger and they’re trying to ignore her, but like any good skeptic, she’s being a gadfly. She’s like, no, no, no, no.

0:10:22
BR: Where is it? The character being an elderly female, it wasn’t some big husky, I demand to know where the beef is. It was this pestering, grandmotherly, sweet, where’s the beef? Like, don’t bullshit me, where’s the beef? Where’s your evidence? You’re trying to pull this over on me. I’m not stupid. Where’s the beef?

0:10:43
CW: Did any, were either of you reminded of a female relative of yours when you saw her, when you saw Clara Peller? Because, I mean, my mom pulls stuff like that. Oh really? I imagine you guys might have a grandmother or an aunt or something that that that is just as driven to not get ripped off.

0:10:58
BR: Both my grandmothers weren’t quite like that but I but I know people like that and yes.

PR: And what about you, Pascual? Who’s one of your skeptical heroes?

PR: So my first hero is also a fictional character, and that’s Velma Dinkley from Scooby-Doo.

BR: Is that her last name?

PR: Yep. Velma Dinkley.

0:11:30
BR: I did not know that.

PR: Yeah, so she, you know, especially as a kid, I watched a lot of Scooby-Doo, as most of us are Generation X and Y even, and actually it’s still on TV. So right. It’s a Z or Millennials now or well, I don’t know what my kid is, but He watches Scooby-Doo a lot, but no, but she really is Like the a perfect skeptic. I mean she every episode of Scooby-Doo I mean the show itself also had a really especially back then had a really strong skeptic arc to it because every time it was someone trying to pull one over on someone and they figured it out.

0:12:08
CW: There was never a very special episode where, oh, we actually found a real ghost on Scooby-Doo.

0:12:14
BR: Not until later. No, seriously.

0:12:16
CW: Actually, yeah.

0:12:17
BR: Later on, yeah. Later on, they did. About 20 years after the original, there were some ones where-

0:12:22
CW: That’s when it jumped the shark.

0:12:23
BR: That’s when the shark was jumped.

PR: But anyway. But I’m speaking of the original Velma and even later portrayals, she still is a pretty skeptical character. But she’s an intellectual, which, I mean, she’s the smart one of the group.

BR: I got to run up here. I had a thing for Velma. Now, I also had a thing for Kate Jackson, the smart angel of Charlie’s Angels. And also Emma Peel and Agent 99. So I just, when I was growing up, I saw beautiful, smart, sleuthing women, I’m like, that’s hot.

PR: Yeah, it is, I agree. I think that, I mean, that’s, you know, and that’s why I, I mean, I think she just is kind of one of the coolest skeptics. And the first one I can think of as a kid that just jumps to mind, like, teaching me skepticism without me realizing it, because, you know, she just, she always was the one that valued facts. Like she never, she, you know, she always would investigate, even if it was like, seemed like certain doom, she was the one who’d be like, okay, now I, you know.

0:13:23
CW: She didn’t get distracted by the danger. She just kind of like, well, go march into this house and see what’s going on.

0:13:28
PR: Totally. She was the most fearless member of the group by a long shot. And she was never scared to disagree with anyone in the group, you know, and then she just, she was always, you know, not always the one that figured it out. Fred also was a decent skeptic, but it was usually one or two, one or the other that figured out what was going on. But the thing I loved about it was just that she was always such a skeptic through the whole episode and it always paid off. Like in media, it’s very rare that you see the skeptic get treated with any kind of respect. Usually they’re like, I’m the skeptic, and then they’re the first one that gets killed by the chupacabra.

0:14:07
CW: Or they’re completely ignored, or they’re proven wrong because it really, you know, oh well that can’t be a ghost because blah blah blah. Oh well, yeah it is a ghost and it’s going to kill you, and that’s how the movie progresses.

PR: Yeah, take that for doubting people. So, and it’s, yeah, but, I mean it was especially, I mean, you know, Scooby-Doo goes back to the 60s, and that’s a pretty progressive character for cartoons because there really weren’t many characters like that in cartoons.

CW: Maybe it’s my own little echo chamber as they say, but most of the guys I know far prefer Velma to Daphne. They did a whole Gilligan’s Island type group there where they had the stoner, the jock, the cheerleader hot chick, and then Velma was kind of drawn a little more dowdy than the other. She was a little chunkier with the glasses and the bowl cut. But most of the guys I know in my little skeptic echo chamber thought she was the hot one.

0:15:05
BR: Oh yeah.

0:15:06
CW: Yeah, and I count Ben among that group. She’s been fetishized a little bit. If you ever go down the internet rabbit hole, I was looking for some drawing or other, I was just searching for Velma images and there are some fan pictures of her that have been drawn. That, oh, you’re gonna be…

0:15:24
BR: Hold on.

0:15:25
PR: We’ve referred to in internet culture as rule 34.

CW: Yeah, and Ben’s sitting here pretending he’s never looked these up.

BR: I don’t know what you speak of.

0:15:33
PR: Yeah, that’s, anyone who’s Googled anything I think has experienced rule 34. Yeah. Just rule 34, just tainting your child.

BR: Hopefully there’s none on Clara Peller.

CW: All right, yeah. I think there was actually an adult film titled Where’s the Beef, though.

BR: That would not shock sense.

0:15:58
PR: So, Celestia, what’s your next one?

0:16:03
CW: Well, it seems like we’re on a roll here of fictional female skeptics. My next one would be Hermione from the Harry Potter series. Sure, yeah. And I feel somewhat like I’m plagiarizing here because Sarah Mayhew, a cartoonist and skeptic, did a really nice presentation at TAM many years, four or five years ago, where she talked about Hermione’s skepticism, among other skeptics in fiction. And Hermione just has always stood out to me. I really enjoyed the book series. It’s probably – yeah, it’s – yeah, I did not read them as a child because I was not a child when they came out. But I poured through them as a young adult, middle-aged adult, whatever I am. And Hermione just reminded you of the kid that you were, for me. It reminded me of the kid, down to the bushy hair. They always described the bushy, bushy hair that Hermione had. And she was never afraid to raise her hand. She was never afraid, you know, there’s this vein of thinking that like, girls don’t want boys to know that they’re smart, so they hold back and they play dumb. Hermione will not put up with that. Hermione was out there giving the answers automatically. Nobody could mansplain to her. And she saw through so many things. And her first instinct, whenever she was presented with a mystery, was to go to the library and you get the facts. You go, you check out the facts around it, you do your research. You don’t just charge in with a wand willy nilly.

0:17:35
BR: You don’t just Google something and then assume that whatever you find in the top three returns is true.

0:17:40
CW: You do your research and she did a great job with that. And she also had, I think Sarah pointed out when Sarah Mayhew in her talk pointed out a specific quote, which I should have written down, but I’m trying to remember how to paraphrase it. One of the other characters was trying to say something like, oh well, blah, blah, blah. Well, you can’t disprove it.” And she’s like, well that’s ridiculous, you can’t believe something just because you can’t disprove it. Anything would go by that. She taught some logic in the way that she pushed back on ridiculous notions. Mind you, this is in the world of wizarding. Within the context of the Harry Potter world.

0:18:22
PR: I think that’s an exceptionally cool place for it to exist though because it’s still saying that even if magic exists, even if there’s trolls in the basement, even if there’s giant snakes trying to kill you, you still can’t just believe everything wholesale. It’s almost more inspiring in the fact that she lives in a world full of magic and where it seems that anything is possible, but at the same time she’s like, well, you know, this is impossible.

0:18:54
CW: There’s laws of nature to be followed here, yeah.

0:18:57
PR: And that to me is actually very respectable. You know, to be a skeptic in that world must be something.

BR: I love that. Good choice.

0:19:04
CW: Thank you. And what is your next one?

0:19:07
BR: I’m going to go for an obvious one that I have a personal connection to, which is Carl Sagan. A part of the reason that I got involved with the Center for Inquiry, and I’ve been there for 18 years now and doing investigations and this and that, was that at a conference here in Albuquerque, I got a chance to meet Carl Sagan. And it was, of course I knew who he was. I was very aware of who he was. I honestly wasn’t, I hadn’t seen all the Cosmos stuff. I mean, I’d seen some here and there, but it wasn’t until later that I really got an appreciation for just how important a person he was, certainly in science popularization.

0:19:52
CW: How old were you when you met him? Because, I mean, he passed away quite a while ago.

0:19:56
BR: Yeah, it would have been 20 years ago.

0:20:01
CW: So you’re in the early 20s?

BR: Yeah, yeah, it was before I began with the CFI. I mean, in fact, he’s part of the reason I joined CFI. Anyway, I won’t tell you the whole story. Basically, I had, he was giving a keynote talk and I was given a chance to be in the room and there was a line of people after a luncheon and people were looking around to you know meet Mr. Sagan and shake his hand or whatever else and and so I got in line and I just I just you know very I was very intimidated and and I just said Mr. Sagan, I just want to thank you for your work and your contribution to CFI I was like I blurted this out and I was like running away. And he said, no, sit down.

0:20:53
CW: Oh, wow.

0:20:54
BR: And I was like, me? I was like, well, there’s people behind me and they’re older than I am and they have more money than I have. And he’s like, no, sit down. And like everything stopped. I’m like, okay. And I sat down and he asked me who I was and what I liked about science and this and that. He had this way of just talking to you like an adult and just engaging with you. We talked for three or four minutes. It felt like I was frozen in time, but he was just engaging and he was sincerely wanting to engage with me. It’s like, who are you? What’s your interest? You know, what do you… And I remember feeling special and feeling like, wow, this is somebody who doesn’t know me from Adam, to borrow a phrase. And he’s engaging with me. And that’s one reason why today, when students and other people contact me, I make an effort to respond to them personally. You know, I’ll Skype with you if you have a question about chupacabras or ghosts, whoever else. I mean, I can’t answer everybody, but because of that experience with him, I know personally the value that just reaching out to a single person and acknowledging them as a person can have. And so that really inspired me. And he’s one of the reasons that I got into organized skepticism.

0:22:29
CW: Yeah, Carl Sagan was an inspiration to a lot of science communicators. I’m sure many people have heard the story that Neil deGrasse Tyson has about writing and looking for a school, applying as an undergraduate and Carl Sagan had him over to the house and showed him around and you know clapped him on the shoulder and and took him under his wing and Bill Nye talks about being inspired by his astronomy class and getting advice from him before he had this you know Bill Nye the science guy show.

0:23:05
BR: I would put myself in lofty company indeed.

0:23:09
CW: He’s been an inspiration to many who have wanted to spread the word of science and rationalism and skepticism.

0:23:16
BR: And really what more could you want? I mean that would be a beautiful legacy for any of us in this room, to be even a tenth as influential as Sagan was.

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0:23:29
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0:23:52
CW: So Pascual who’s who’s is on your skeptical hero radar?

PR: So this one is actually very close to me, and I decided to go with my grandfather, Eugene Romero, who was a judge for 30 years, or 30 plus years, actually, and he was on city council in Santa Fe, and he fought in World War II, he was in the Pacific and he was with the Flying Tigers actually. He wasn’t a Flying Tiger, but he was stationed with them. And anyway, he was, by virtue of being a judge for 30 years especially, was a very good skeptic and he always took things from an evidential standpoint. He had to weigh both sides. Yeah, you have to prove what you’re saying and you have to provide a reason for him to believe you. But he always kind of taught me to think that way always. He also, even before that, or between the war and being a judge, he was a car salesman. He actually ran a car lot in Santa Fe and knowing like salesmen and stuff like that. And he traveled all over the country. He would buy cars, you know, all over the country and resell them in Santa Fe back before auto transport was quite as big of an industry. And he, so he, you know, but he had, so he had all these experiences in life that really shaped him to become a really strong skeptic because he knew sales and he knew, you know, he knew.

0:25:38
CW: Yeah, he was buying used cars across the country.

0:25:41
PR: Yeah, exactly.

0:25:42
CW: And able to apply a judicial eye to it.

0:25:45
PR: So, but you know, and so he really, he really did a lot to kind of, to really instill a true kind of pure skepticism in me, not one that’s cynical or questioning everything. And also he was a very religious man, so it was kind of an interesting balance, because for one you have to understand that in Santa Fe, New Mexico in the 40s through the 80s, and in a Latino family Catholicism runs very deep.

0:26:17
CW: Not going to find a whole lot of atheists in that.

0:26:19
PR: No, it’s super uncommon. So being a man of faith was a whole different thing for him. But the ability, or what I’m trying to say is that he was a person who didn’t, he wasn’t a skeptic about the things that we usually talk about. And not that he believed things wholesale, but just that he wasn’t, he didn’t apply his skepticism at these things, but he applied it at interactions with other human beings and interactions in life and when people are telling you things, and which to me was actually a more useful tool than the broad skeptical sense, which is being skeptical of religion and being skeptical of new agey claims. And so, I mean, it was a very like human kind of skepticism that was when someone tells you something, like how do you parse that? And how do you figure out what to believe when people are trying to kind of throw these things at you in life?

0:27:22
CW: Yeah, and believing what somebody tells you wholesale and how it can get you in trouble. Tell me he went with you when you bought your first car. Did he do that?

0:27:32
PR: He actually didn’t.

BR: You’re on your own, Kid. Kick the tires.

PR: I was living down here in Albuquerque at the time. But I did take the first day I bought it, I was so proud of it and I drove it up to my grandma and grandpa’s house. They were actually the first two people that saw it after I got the car, which was kind of funny because my grandfather, knowing he was a big car guy and all that, I took it up there and he was very happy for me, but he’s like, why did you buy such an old car? It was a 66 Mustang, so it was a cool car.

0:28:06
CW: Oh, okay.

0:28:08
PR: But, so it wasn’t, I didn’t get too much approval from him.

0:28:13
CW: Because girls, grandpa, because girls.

0:28:16
PR: My God, I’m a teenager, what can I do?

0:28:18
CW: Yeah, I mean, to talk about a time and place when you have to apply practical skepticism is buying a used car. And the fact that your grandfather was a judge and dealt with used cars, that’s a great little confluence there.

0:28:30
PR: Yeah, I think that it really, it definitely, you know, made him a very hard guy to get one over on, that’s for sure.

BR: Which is exactly what you want in a judge.

PR: There’s a big legacy of him as a judge and in Santa Fe most people of a certain age, maybe 60s and older, pretty much know his name just across the board because he was so well known as being a good judge and he was in an elected position so he was re-elected that many times.

BR: Wow, that’s impressive.

0:29:10
PR: Yeah.

0:29:11
BR: That’s cool and a great model for skeptics. I mean, again, if there’s anywhere where you want skepticism, it’s in the judicial system.

0:29:22
PR: And it’s actually kind of in a broader sense that it sometimes seems on paper that, or in the media, that judges aren’t as skeptical as they should be, but we’re gonna have our friend Andrew Torres from the Opening Arguments podcast. Listening to that podcast, you kind of get a little more perspective on where judges maybe aren’t so unfair as we think. I mean, there are unfair ones out there, don’t get me wrong, but there’s a lot of, you have to apply skepticism to how you even view the legal system as well with lawyers and judges.

0:29:54
CW: I started listening to that podcast and it’s become one of my favorites very quickly. Opening arguments applies a lot of skepticism to the legal arena.

0:30:07
PR: Yeah. And it’s an interesting world to throw skepticism at because we have all these preconceived notions about how things work and what you can do and what you can’t do and what judges do and what, you know, right now the people in government can get away with. It’s surprisingly, actually starkly different than most media representations of it. It’s pretty cool.

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0:30:33
CW: Hey, Squares and hey, strangers. Celestia here with a palate-cleansing skeptical fortune cookie. Let’s see what we’ve got. The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. This comes to us from Carl Sagan, who is truly one of the pioneers of recent American science outreach and skepticism. His show Cosmos introduced an entire generation to the joys of scientific exploration. And the recent reboot of Cosmos, hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, has reached an entirely new generation. A common rejoinder from those defending crank ideas, whether their own or from others, is that great minds of the past were once deemed cranks. And while there is a bit of truth to that, Carl Sagan elegantly points out here that it’s not a two-way street. If A is true, then B is true does not mean that if B, then A. A logic professor would categorize this as a type of non sequitur known as affirming the consequent, also known as the fallacy of the converse. Although the Wright brothers were laughed at, Sagan reminds us that so was Bozo the Clown. Cranks who feel bullied will hold up that ridicule as a badge of honor sometimes, as if the world’s rejection of them actually validates their ideas as legitimate, if, for now, unrecognized. That can be a powerful motivator to some. So should we stop laughing at laughable notions? I’d say no. Just remember that the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. Thanks, Carl. Now, let’s get you back to Ben and Pascual.

(MUSIC)

0:32:44
CW: Alright, so now we’re going to go into a lightning round. And we’re going to just name a bunch of them, well maybe not a bunch, but some. My lightning round, I’m going to start with Isaac Asimov. Loved him as a kid, read a ton of his work, love the Foundation trilogy. He injected a lot of skepticism into his fiction and into his non-fiction. Of course, he wrote a ton of non-fiction stuff. He’s got some great quotes about, I’ll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it the wilder and more ridiculous something is however the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be and yeah he really got me into futurism and all sorts of stuff next Matt Dillahunty, podcaster on the atheist experience I’ve seen him debate live and I have listened to the Atheist experience for quite a while and And he has got such a grasp of logic and detecting logical fallacies and circular reasoning. And he really has a grasp of it. It takes me right back to the symbolic logic course I took in college, which I ate up. It’s like mixing mathematics with language. And it’s a lot of fun. And applying it correctly is not easy. It’s not intuitive. You have to be versed in it. And Matt Dillahunty, if you listen to him, it’s like getting an education on it each time. And sometimes there’s hilarious spats with creationists on the show. And last for me would be Margaret Downey. She is very active in the skeptic and humanist and atheist community. She does a lot of organizing. She connects people. She writes. She has fought legal battles that are not easy to do. She’s had threats on her life because of it. She has organized the skeptical parade at Dragon Con. Has she gotten you to wear a costume? I’ve worn costumes for her, Ben. Have you done that?

0:34:41
BR: I haven’t been in that parade. Maybe this year.

0:34:48
CW: I knew you were involved in Dragon Con. She has really spearheaded and gotten a ton of people to wear costumes of historical skeptics and march in the Dragon Con parade and Yeah, if you’re there go and let Margaret help you dress.

BR: It is a sight to see.

CW: Yes All right. Those are my three now to Ben.

BR: Well, there’s you know me many that I could name that jump to mine, of course, Randi the amazing Randi. I was first introduced to skepticism by stumbling across an article here on Nostradamus. I talk a little about that in one of my books and I’ve had the privilege of working with him and he’s now a colleague of mine. It’s always neat to be able to meet your heroes if they’re around long enough.

CW: Isn’t it nice you get to pinch yourself?

BR: Yeah. Like, oh, yeah, me and Randi are talking. Beth Loftus, both researchers, scientists. But the main three I’d jump to would be Harry Houdini, well known as a magician, less known as an investigator and skeptic. And of course, in the last half of his life, he was debunking spiritualists and going undercover as magicians do. And of course, Randi traces back, Penn and Teller, there’s a long tradition, DJ Grothie, many other people, Max Maven, Jamie and Swiss.

0:36:12
CW: Houdini fought that sort of fraud even after he died by putting out that challenge like, all right, I’ve got a secret word and any medium that could get in touch with my spirit and get the word and nobody could. So even post-mortem he was like yeah giving them the finger.

0:36:32
BR: Totally yeah and that’s why I love it is just you know just so such a well-known strong figure and he was so disgusted by the spiritualist and he’s like you know you’re you’re you know you’re manipulating you’re you’re you’re lying to people yeah and I know your tricks and I’m uniquely qualified to do that. So Harry Houdini also Eleanor Sidgwick many people don’t know who Eleanor Sidgwick is. She was sort of, you could call her the original female Ghostbuster. She was involved in the SPR, the Society for Psychical Research, in the 1800s. She served as both an investigator and later a president of SPR. I write about her in my upcoming book on ghosts. She did investigations, along with Harry Price and others, into ghosts, ghost hauntings, and these sorts of things. By modern standards, her skepticism isn’t quite as skeptical as I would like, but nonetheless, if you look at the work that she did, it is remarkably skeptical.

0:37:28
CW: She’s a pioneer.

0:37:29
BR: She really is a pioneer. So Eleanor Sidgwick. And the last one is Encyclopedia Brown. The books by Donald J. Sobol, he was reading the Encyclopedia Brown books when I was in elementary school. I loved all those books. You know, they were very formulaic once you’ve read five or six of them. But Encyclopedia Brown, along with his girlfriend Sally, I think it was, they would go investigate mysteries around the neighborhood. And they would usually hinge on knowing some sort of true science obscure fact, which is like, it’s a little bit cheating because if you don’t happen to know that. But nonetheless, it was like Encyclopedia Brown boy detective, he’s smart, he’s helped out by another smart girl there and going around. So I was impressed by Encyclopedia Brown.

0:38:21
CW: You know, we should write some fan fiction where Encyclopedia Brown and Velma meet and hook up. That’d be neat to ship them. We could totally ship them. Yeah, I agree

0:38:29
BR: What about you, Pascual? Who’s your who’s yours?

PR: Okay, so First that comes to mind is a Tim Minchin the comedian Musician yeah, he’s a brilliant guy Brilliant artist and poet and yeah, I shouldn’t have you comedian.

CW: Tell me you have seen his animated video for storm

0:38:45
PR: Oh, that’s yeah.

CW: The animation is beautiful, and it’s such a wonderful scene.

0:38:54
PR: And that’s, the way he delivers things, and the way he delivered that piece in particular, because it’s this great piece of poetry over a little bit of music, and then the animation is very, very cool with it. But just the way he kind of explains his situation or his position in this story at a dinner with a couple people and someone who’s a very credulous new agey person.

0:39:26
CW: Yeah, please listeners look it up, find it, it’s on YouTube, you can find it, you can find a lot of Tim Minchin stuff. Nowadays he’s directing huge things like you know doing the music for Matilda and Groundhog Day and going on to huge things, but he’s got a lot of skeptical stuff in his earlier songs. In particular, Look Up Storm, it’s like a nine minute beat poem with beautiful animation if you can find the animated one versus the live one. Yeah, take your time to watch that.

0:39:54
PR: Yeah, absolutely. Then my next one is, I decided to go with Agent Scully from the X-Files and because the thing that was so great about her was that she was always the skeptic. Now in the context of X-Files she was almost always wrong and she was almost always disproven or her skepticism was… you see that’s the thing though that she wasn’t necessarily disproven. She wasn’t making a claim. She was just doubting evidence and in the face of fantastic proof and things actually existing, she still maintained her skepticism. And I think that in a lot of ways, that’s actually really admirable that someone can still remain a skeptic in a world where these things keep happening. And kind of in the way Hermione has to be a skeptic in a world where magic exists. She’s a skeptic in a world where the supernatural and the aliens and stuff exist.

CW: But once she saw enough proof, she accepted. She wasn’t like a blind snake.

0:41:01
PR: Yeah, exactly.

0:41:02
CW: She’s like, well, I’m on an alien ship now. Hey, there’s aliens.

0:41:04
PR: Yeah, exactly.

0:41:05
CW: All right, well, now what do we do?

0:41:07
PR: And she’s almost like the perfect example of the quote, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Because she would get her extraordinary evidence that all of us would like, honestly. At the core of being at least a skeptic like me is there is that little iota of hope in the back of your head that one day Chupacabra is going to walk up to you.

0:41:29
CW: The first time I had ever heard of the word Chupacabra was on an X-Files episode. You covered X-Files in your book on the Chupacabras, didn’t you?

BR: Yeah, it was interesting because I was trying to trace back the pop culture history of the chupacabra, and what I found out was that the writers of the X-Files would have had to crank that. I mean, basically, between the time when the chupacabra emerged as the chupacabra from Puerto Rico in late 95, the X-Files writers had about a two-month window to crank out that episode.

0:42:01
CW: They were like the law and order of weird stuff because they grabbed whatever was in the culture right now Like oh, we’ve got this weird thing happening So they’d throw it in just like law and order if you have a particular like case where like let’s say, you know real life drama Yeah, they just changed the names and they put it into a law and order and X-Files seemed to do that with Paranormal weird things that were happening. So yeah, I guess they did jump on the chupacabra.

0:42:26
BR: They did.

0:42:27
PR: Yeah, yeah. And my last one is my grandmother, who I mentioned in a short little anecdote in a previous episode.

0:42:34
CW: Married to your grandfather?

0:42:35
PR: Different grandmother. I said my mother’s mom, so Eugene Romero was my father’s dad.

0:42:40
CW: Hitting both sides of the fence.

0:42:41
PR: All sides.

0:42:42
BR: That’s awesome. No wonder we have such a skeptic in the room.

0:42:44
PR: Both of my parents are fairly established scholars, and so I come from a long line of it.

CW: That’s what happens. You get two really, really brainy intellectuals and they have a heavy metal kid.

PR: Yeah go into a world of people punching each other in crowds. It’s the quote that I mentioned in the previous episode that when I admitted to my cousin that I just didn’t know the answer to something, she just pulled me aside and said she was proud of me for saying I don’t know.

0:43:19
CW: That’s very skeptical.

0:43:21
PR: Of, you know, and the thing is, you know, all in all, I don’t really think of her as being like someone who lived a very skeptic, you know, skeptically inclined life. But she was, I mean, she was, you know, a person who definitely demanded evidence for things. And, you know, but she wasn’t, you know, it was just the fact that she had such a practical view of it Which was like you have to be okay with saying I don’t know and and it was something that you know again as being Kind of a little smart aleck know-it-all kid, you know being able to say I don’t know it was like a big deal to her because you’re not you don’t know everything and you need to just admit when you don’t know. Yeah, I mean, I yeah, I I did horribly in school growing up. I never fit in and I never did very well academically, but I was a pretty smart kid. And I got a lot of that just from school when people just put me on the spot and I would just come up with something. And about half the time it worked. And so it was like, that’s, you know, I think that that bled into my personal life a little too much when I was a kid. And I seemed like, I felt like I always had to have the right answer to everything and so I just wing it and you know but but yeah again my grandmother was very very very strong about you know teaching us to be okay with not knowing the answer and being able to admit that to people.

0:44:43
CW: Yeah Matt Dillahunty actually brings that up a lot you know people are like well if you don’t know then God and he’s like well what about just leave it you don’t know.

0:44:51
PR: Yeah.

0:44:52
CW: It’s not God is not, you know, or whatever, whatever BS theory they have of some religious strain that they’re pushing on him. He’s always like, well, yeah, you can’t say that just because you don’t know. If you don’t know, that’s where the conversation ends.

0:45:08
PR: Yeah. Kind of reminded me of the on a little tangent here, since we have a little time. One time when I lived in LA, I came across Roy Comfort, the.. Ray Comfort.

0:45:24
CW: The banana man.

0:45:25
PR: Ray Comfort, the banana man, yeah, and he was on the 2nd Street Promenade with a film crew doing this ambush, kind of gotcha stuff.

BR: Creationist.

0:45:37
PR: And I fell for it. Now, I didn’t end up on camera because at the end of the debate I forbade him from, I literally said to the camera, you’re not allowed to put this on media, which gives me a legal.

0:45:52
CW: But you wasted some of their time and footage.

0:45:55
PR: Well, because I knew that anything I said would get cut up to me sounding stupid.

0:45:58
CW: You work in editing. You know how that can, yeah.

0:46:00
PR: So, but anyway, he confronted me with this question. It was so funny. He said, you know, how much of everything do you think you know? That’s a dumb question to ask a person who values knowledge because anyone who values knowledge knows that there’s literally no measure for how much there is because knowledge is just sort of this never-ending thing.

0:46:24
CW: The wise man knows how little he knows.

0:46:26
PR: Yeah, and it’s exponential. Every time you discover something, there’s about a billion other things you can learn about that. And so, I had to kind of play along. He posits this story, how much of everything do you think you know? 10%, 5%? And he’s like, 1%? And he’s like, what if I said you can do 20% of everything? Would you say that’s generous I’m like sure that’s generous and then he’s like ah but see there’s this giant 80% that you don’t know and you know and then basically long story short because God and you know and I was just like no that is I don’t know this is what I know this doesn’t mean there’s an answer for the other 80% and even if there is an answer I defer to someone who does know. But there’s no, you know, and that debate kind of like, you know, I was like, that’s where I kind of came out of. I’m like, first off, you can’t know everything there is to know. That’s a very relative, very strangely, subjectively worded thing. And you know, and second, not knowing something is not an answer. It doesn’t, like, it’s not like…

0:47:39
CW: God is not the null hypothesis.

0:47:44
PR: And that was a moment where I really was, you know, I, didn’t in the debate, I kind of tried to make it known that I’m like, it’s okay to not know because that’s where the spirit of this, this argument was coming from was that you, you have to, there has to be, you have to fill this with something and it’s like well, that’s you know, it’s it’s like pouring, you know, you’re like you know fill this jar with M&Ms and and then you know, you fill it up and they’re like see all those gaps in there I need to fill it with sand, you know, it’s like it’s like there’s no it’s just the gaps are the gaps So we need to go. Yeah, I’m comfortable with with the knowledge that you will never have all the knowledge Yeah, and and that’s a yeah, but that was a very leading question part of it And once they got to the end of that discussion I was just like don’t put this on TV.

0:48:26
CW: I would like to think you made some good points because Ray Comfort from the edited stuff from the stuff that he allows out there of his arguments he seems like a silly man.

0:48:40
PR:Yeah it’s funny  because I’ve noticed the way they kind of I think it’s a I don’t know if it was Eli Bosnick or one of the guys from the God Awful Movies podcast was they use the term jingly keys and it’s and it’s the thing they say yeah so jingly keys is the thing in that they when they’re talking about Christian cinema that they watch Christian movies and they just review them and he’s like jingly keys are like what happens with every time because people these Christian screenwriters will write a story with an atheist that asks a really good question or they’ll ask a question that’s a pretty common hard to beat question and they’ll do the equivalent of jingly keys to just get the attention.

CW: Distract the baby?

PR: They’re just like, yeah. They’re basically like, so that, you know, they’ll just be like, you know, the moral arguments or things like that or like, you know, or God must be either evil or nonexistent kind of questions and they’re just like, oh, look at that, a dog.

CW: Shiny, shiny object.

PR: That’s comforts. That is a very widely used tactic by Ray Comfort. The guy just jingles keys all the time.

0:49:52
CW: Yeah, the banana thing is pretty much a jingly key. Just look at this, look at this, look, look at this.

0:49:55
PR: And then science is like, that’s not a banana. I mean it is, we call it a banana. It’s right

0:50:01
BR: in your hand. I don’t think that banana means what you think it means.

0:50:03
CW: Maybe he was trying to just do some kind of ironic thing where he’s like you know believe it or not I’m actually a troll. Motioning the banana toward his mouth.

0:50:15
CW: We’re gonna have to edit that.

0:50:17
BR: No, no, I’m just saying keep rolling on this and I’ll use it for something. It’ll be funny. Yeah, he gets the banana and he’s like it fits perfectly in the mouth, and then he starts motioning the banana towards his mouth. Are you that dense or are you that… You’re either that dense or you are a fucking comedic genius. Because you’ve got us all going.

0:50:42
CW: Andy Kaufman would be proud.

PR: That’s what I’m saying. I mean, he is either a Kaufman character or he is… Incredibly stupid. Yeah, just spectacularly ignorant.

0:50:53
CW: Stupid in the right, there’s a certain genius to getting just the right amount of stupid. Because yeah, the right, like a poe. Yeah. What they call a poe, like I think that might be real, but wow, if it’s not real, they’re doing it so well.

0:51:06
PR: Yeah, yeah, I think that’s a sentiment most of us in this country can feel right now.

0:51:12
CW: Well, that was a lot of fun discussing our various skeptical influences and unsung heroes and sometimes sung heroes. I feel like I learned a little bit more about both of you.

PR: Hopefully all bad things.

BR: Yeah, all bad.

0:51:23
BR: And vice versa.

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0:51:52
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0:52:05
brings a smile to Pascual’s face.

0:52:28
Swearing Strange is a production of Kronos Creative LLC, copyright 2017. Theme music by Shriek Back. Additional music by Memory, Guitar’d and Feathered, and Pascual Romero. Content producer, Celestia Ward. Audio engineering, producing, and editing provided by Pascual Romero at Kronos Creative Studios. Additional support provided by Ashley Romero, and of course, our listeners and patrons. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of Swearing Strange and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Kronos Creative, Center for Inquiry, our advertisers, or any and opinions of Kronos Creative, Center for Inquiry, our advertisers, or any

0:52:59
affiliated organizations and employers.

Transcribed with Cockatoo