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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.

(MUSIC)

0:00:10
BR: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. I’m your co-host Benjamin Radford. Along with me is

Celestia Ward: Celestia Ward.  Hey everybody.

BR: Hey there.

CW: How you doing Ben?

BR: Doing good, doing good, keeping busy. That’s good. You just won something, didn’t you? I did. I won the 2018 New Mexico, Arizona Book Awards for the science category for my book Investigating Ghosts.

0:01:01
CW: Well, that’s fantastic. Does that still have a swimsuit competition part or is it just

0:01:06
BR: It does not. They phased that out a while ago. It got a little not PC.

0:01:12
CW: Lucky for you. I’m glad you still won.

0:01:15
BR: Well, there you go. It was pretty cool. I won a couple of book awards, but this is the first one for that particular award. It was cool in the science category and there’s also a nice review in Fortean Times magazine in the UK of my book. So I’m pleased that it’s getting some attention and if people are interested, they can get signed copies for a limited time for $21. If they want to contact me either through Facebook or my various social media or Gmail, I don’t even know what my email is. It’s jamminradford at gmail. It’s like Benjamin without the Ben. It’s very clever.

0:01:54
CW: All the kooky people who have seen Aliens and Ghosts somehow do get your email address.

0:01:59
BR: They do.

0:02:00
CW:  It must be out there. But yeah, that was fun plug away cuz yeah books make fantastic holiday presents everybody.

0:02:07
BR: They do indeed. They’re coming up coming up soon. And what what are you been up to?

0:02:11
CW: Well, I escaped from Bigfoot. It was really cool. I did do the as I mentioned last week I had plans lined up to do the escape from Bigfoot Escape room here in Las Vegas So I went with a bunch of friends and we escaped from Bigfoot, which wasn’t really escaping from Bigfoot. We actually ended up, the final little puzzle was a room where you were in a locked in a darkened sort of room with a Bigfoot or a mechanical animatronic Bigfoot strapped into some sort of government like iron lung machine and you had to, you had to find a way to, to sort of free yourselves and not, I was hoping we could free him too, but you just had to free yourselves. It was fun, but it encouraged me to go bigfoot hunting for real. I went up to northern Nevada and I spent days in the wilderness surviving on nothing but twigs and my own pee, and I nabbed a bigfoot. I brought him home in a giant bag. I stuffed him in the corner here. I’m waiting for some scientists to get here to analyze.

BR: Is he big and hairy?

0:03:08
CW: He’s huge and hairy and he smells a little funny here. Let me open up the bag for you.

0:03:18
Pascual Romero: Hey!

0:03:20
CW: Oh my god, it’s not a Bigfoot after all!

0:03:22
No, no, it’s me. It’s Pascual. Rumors of my death were greatly exaggerated.

0:03:28
CW: Oh, you’ve been living in the woods this whole time? Darn it, I thought I was going to be famous!

0:03:32
BR: Pretending to be a Bigfoot, look at you!

0:03:34
PR: Well, the beard has gotten a little long.

0:03:36
CW: So, Pascual, welcome back.

0:03:38
PR: Thank you. It’s good to be back. It’s nice to have found a moment to get here and make my presence known. I know people have not heard my voice in a while.

0:03:47
CW: So what has kept you away for so long? I know you’ve got a million things going on.

0:03:51
PR: So over the summer, a lot of things happened just in my personal life that kind of pulled me away, but then I went back to an old job and I’ve been working just an insane amount of hours and and ridiculous hours I’m working in opposite schedule from my wife right now. So we just literally have no free time right now. But we’re hoping that with the new year it’ll bring some changes that’ll allow me to be able to get in here, you know on the regular.

0:04:20
CW: Yeah, well the opposite schedules suck. It’s like living the movie Lady Hawk. I hope you guys get past that soon. Okay, well, for this episode, we’re going to be talking to Richard Saunders of the Skeptic Zone for our main segment. And Ben and I were lucky enough to sit down with him earlier. But Pascual, now that you’ve joined us, is there anything you’re skeptical of this week?

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0:04:48
PR: Yeah, it’s a story about a guy named Jared Threaten. And now this has made the rounds in social media. People who have been following the metal scene probably have already heard of this. But long story short, Jared Threaten, going by the name Threatin as his act, it’s T-H-R-E-A-T-I-N.

0:05:12
CW: Is that actually his real name? That sounds like a made up like horror movie name.

0:05:16
PR: Yeah, that’s the only name he’s known by. Everything I’ve read, including Wikipedia, has no other name for him. So, you know, if that is in fact his name, he is in the same lucky club as the Slaughter Brothers.

0:05:30
BR: If that’s really your name.

0:05:32
PR: If that’s in fact their name, I don’t know. But anyway, this guy, he started a solo act in 2012 and he began kind of building up a brand. Now this is a very common thing with musicians, especially solo artists. You just kind of build up your brand on social media and it’s not uncommon to kind of overinflate what you’re doing and sort of give the illusion of doing all kinds of professional things like going into the studio and making appearances and stuff. But he took this to a level that I’ve never seen before, which is really interesting. He actually created a series of fake websites, one for a booking agency called StageRite Bookings. He created a record label website called Superlative Music Recordings, a PR company, Magnified Media PR, a recording studio called Mindframe Studios, a film production company called Glass Castle Film and Photography, and probably a half dozen music press websites.

BR: Wow, he’s a multi-tasker.

0:06:47
PR: This is like a real Renaissance artist in that sense. He has, so he created all of this for the specific reason of creating the illusion that his solo project Threatin was a successful hugely popular band. So in just the last few weeks this all kind of came to light. So he spent several years kind of building this up and he actually secured a tour using his own money and booking through all these fake companies and management and stuff and actually managed to do an entire tour that was based on essentially a non-existent project. And he even hired a band. I mean it was pretty incredible. And eventually, I think things kind of fell apart because some of the backing band members had to leave mid-tour because they couldn’t afford to come home from Europe, or they weren’t going to be able to if they continued any longer.

BR: It sounds like when Trump was pretending to be his own PR agent.

PR: Yeah, I would argue this guy’s somewhat more successful at it than he was.

0:08:03
BR: Well, hold on. Trump’s right here. Hi, this is Trump.

0:08:10
CW: Wow. Well, this guy, this guy seems like he we’ve often talked about how a few trolls online can appear to be a giant segment of the population. If you allow yourself to just believe that those few sentences add up to a whole group of opinions. But this guy, he tried to create an entire audience that wasn’t there.

BR: So was this like a Fyre Island thing? Or I mean, what was his end game other than just sort of, I mean, it sounds like even given that some of these, you can create a website and make your own fake company anyway. It still takes a fair amount of time and effort, but I’m just trying to think of what, yeah, that still would probably cost a fair chunk of change. Do you know, was he wealthy before this? This was just sort of a sideline, or do you know any idea?

0:09:11
PR: You know, so far, there is very little information about this guy. This guy really is kind of like the Tommy Wiseau of music. He’s just this mystery guy who has money and makes his own success, you know. And one thing I will say, not to give him too much credit, is that he’s not doing anything that is unheard of in the music industry. A lot of artists do kind of weird, kind of funny sometimes sketchy things to sort of Generate a bit more of a presence back in the myspace days. It was real common. You could pay people to Generate clicks on your music so it would it would appear that you were getting tens of thousands of plays every single day you know and and you could pay to have Likes or follows, you know, you can still do that on Twitter and Facebook. So I mean, this isn’t something that’s completely outside the realm of possibility for a number of artists, including successful artists, but just the sheer sophistication and commitment to this illusion is pretty impressive. And to get to your question, the end game, I mean, I’m not really sure. I think that he probably just didn’t know much about the music industry and didn’t really learn much about the music industry before he went this far into it. Because I think that, in a sense, it’s possible that you can sort of fake it till you make it, so to speak. And you can kind of get yourself in positions where you’re kind of squeezing your way into tours and shows where bigger bands are. And if you can throw enough money at it, sometimes you can kind of get into that arena with the bands that can kind of lift you up to fame. And this is really how a lot of bands have become successful. But the big thing is, is because he has no industry savvy, other than being able to appear that he is several different elements of the industry, he missed some of the easiest ways to do it. First of which is what’s called buy-ons, which is you literally just pay a bigger band to open up for them. And this is very common practice in the music world. In order to kind of fund bigger tours, some bands will allow an artist to pay several thousand dollars to just play the opening slot for the whole tour. But this is something he didn’t know about apparently because he went really far not to get anywhere near that.

0:11:46
CW: It sounds like all the time that he invested in creating this giant octopus of different organizations should have just been put into practicing and getting better at music.

0:11:57
PR: And I will say this kid is actually a pretty good musician. His songwriting is a little dated. It’s very like 80s glam rock, but his his playing is is actually very good and I think that in a different set of circumstances he might have actually been able to become famous for the right reasons. But is it possible he’s one of the residents?

PR: Yeah.

BR: Basically he was just he was just doing what other people do but he took it.

PR: Yeah, exactly and I he took it to to 11 but sort of in the wrong direction He kind of went to like negative 11.

0:12:34
CW: Well is I mean has this completely ruined his chances in the music industry or you’ll have a he’ll have a chance to get back in someday?

0:12:44
PR: Well this is where my skepticism definitely comes in because Iactually think that he may have stumbled upon a little bit of commercial gold here by doing this. I don’t think his music is ever going to be that popular. It isn’t great. But I do think that just this whole stunt has elevated him to a point where people are now aware of him and I think that the right band might actually want a guy like that just for the sheer, you know, kind of humor of it or even just the publicity of it, you know, they may bring him in just because he’s hot right now and that will elevate the band in, you know, maybe a little more unconventional way, but, you know, like I said, the kid can play, so it’s not out of the question that he couldn’t be famous.

BR: That also reminds me of the Joaquin Phoenix hoax with Casey Affleck. I’m Still Here in 2010 when Joaquin had this shaggy beard, no offense, and dark glasses and was sort of like drugged out and meltdown and stuff. And then it turned out to be this sort performance art or not. It was like, and it was one of those things where if you have to explain it, then it’s really not that clever.

PR: I think that this kid probably should have had, have he had enough sense to go through, you know, so much effort to get to where he is. I just think he, maybe his ego just wouldn’t allow him to just be like, ah, gotcha. You know, because honestly I think that would have been hilarious if he was like if he if he really had like a Good out for this it would have been hey I’m just using this as a criticism for the industry at large and I’d be like, oh, that’s that’s pretty smart But no, he is as of this recording he is quoted as being unrepentant. So…

0:14:43
CW: And there’s no relation no relation to Andy Kaufman?

0:14:50
PR: Yeah, I know, I doubt it, but he almost could be a Kaufman character.

CW: Well, that is fascinating. Thank you for bringing us that little story about being skeptical of a band’s reported fan base, and PR company, and management services, and everything that goes along with it. So, Pascual, will we be hearing more of you in the future?

PR: Yeah, so my plan as of now is to try to hop in at least for Swaysos and then possibly a little extra segment that we’ve kind of gone over. I don’t want to give it away right now, but yeah, until the end of the year, I’ll try to just hop in as much as possible for little visits. And then in the new year, fingers crossed, things are going to work out. I’ll be back with you guys as the co-host again.

0:15:47
BR: Otherwise, Celestia is going to have to go back up into the woods and find you again.

0:15:50
CW: Yeah.

0:15:51
PR: And erase my face from the logo.

0:15:55
CW: You take up quite a bit of space you’re rather imposing there.

PR: I do.

CW: It would be a shame to erase you. Well, glad you’re doing well. Hope the family has a wonderful Thanksgiving. I hope all the listeners are having a great Thanksgiving right now because the episode’s coming out on Thanksgiving, if all goes well.

0:16:10
PR: Yes, happy Thanksgiving.

BR: On that note, I want to send a heartfelt thank you to our listeners. We’ve got listeners all over the world and lots of downloads and people paying attention to us. And I just on behalf of myself and the show, I want to recognize that people are busy and there are lots of things you could be spending your time on from binge watching shows to sitting around and playing with a cat. And I want to thank you for taking some time out of your day or evening to listen to us.

0:16:45
CW: Yes, and our patrons have been wonderful. We’ve had a nice handful of patrons who have continued supporting us financially. Thank you everybody, especially to our sponsor level patrons, Angie and Amy. You guys know who you are. And all the $5 per episode subscribers that are getting the Skepticrate once a month, which I just sent those out. Everybody should be having them already in their grubby little paws. Much thanks to all you guys, to everybody who’s listening, and we will continue to do what we can to bring you some fun content and on that note We’re gonna head to the main segment now and talk to mr. Richard Saunders, host of The Skeptic Zone.

(MUSIC)

0:17:46
CW: With us is a special guest, Richard Saunders!

Richard Saunders: Hello, hello.

0:17:47
Hello, Richard.

0:17:48
BR: Great to have you on.

0:17:49
CW: Thank you so much for joining us.

0:17:51
RS: My pleasure. Wonderful to be on Squaring the Strange. I think I’ve had both you, Celestia, and Ben on my program. I haven’t had Pascual yet, so it’s nice to be on your show.

0:18:00
CW: We’re going to be talking this week with Richard about something he has had a personal hand in, something that is a very famous part of skeptical outreach and paranormal testing, known as Randi’s Million Dollar Challenge. Now Richard, would you like to go ahead and give us your own description of this amazing 60-year adventure that has been the Randi Million Dollar Challenge?

0:18:26
RS: Yeah, absolutely. And when we talk about the Randi Million Dollar Challenge, we are in a sense also talking about many, many, many other challenges around the world, including one here in Australia for $100,000. The basic idea is that way back in 1964, James Randi on a radio program was irking some psychic, as we all irk psychics from time to time, and the psychic said to him, you should put your money where your mouth is, or words to that effect, and Randi did it on the spot. He said, okay, here’s a check for $1,000, it’s all he had at the time, I guess, and he said, I will pay this money if you can present proof of the paranormal or the supernatural. Now that challenge with Randi went up and down through various amounts and various incarnations for many years. The more famous aspect of that was when it became a million dollars sometime I think in the 2000s and that led to a series of live demonstrations or tests in Las Vegas at the amazing meeting and I was involved in about three or four of those directly in organization and preparation and being on stage when those things were carried out.

0:19:42
BR: Well, I have to say, I’m really excited to talk to you. Of course, we’ve known each other, it seems, forever, but I’ve been sort of only peripherally involved in the Million Dollar Challenge. I’ve done other testing of psychic claimants sort of in the field. And of course, I’ve been in the audience and I think I’ve worked with you on a couple of the challenges. Like, I seem to recall being bent around in odd Gumby ways, wearing a power bracelet if I’m not mistaken. But it’s neat to have some sort of insight into the crafting of it and stuff. So I’m looking forward to this.

0:20:17
RS: And that’s an interesting thing we’ll be discussing during the course of this conversation, is that it’s really hard. People think, oh, we’ll just test somebody paranormal, anybody can do that, you know, we’ll set up a test. But having been involved with tests in Las Vegas and tests here in Australia, the work, the background work you have to put in to make sure you have a good, solid, scientific test that is also agreeable to the claimant, it’s extraordinary. I was completely not prepared for how much sheer work that entails.

0:20:55
CW: Yeah, well, even just manning the floodgates, sadly, the JREF, the James Randi Educational Foundation, does not offer the million dollars anymore. They converted the prize or they converted their involvement with the whole thing into – they now just are a grant-making organization. making organizations. So they had to leave the challenges to other skeptic groups out there. But a quote that the JREF offered explaining some of the difficulties in offering the prize is, let me read it here from their website. Over the years, we have spent a great deal of time dealing with claims ranging from yet another dowsing claim to some very eccentric and untestable claims. The overwhelming majority refused to fill out the application or even state a claim that can be tested. Some of them show up in person and demand to be tested while they wait. We can no longer justify the resources to interact with these people. So you can perhaps speak for the Australian skeptics. Are you getting the same sort of deluge of people who want to bypass protocols or just be heard or just show up at the doorstep with an empty suitcase waiting for their money?

0:22:05
RS: Yes, it has happened. But a quick note on the million-dollar challenge is it’s actually still there. The JREF are not accepting what’s the word, nominations for it. You can’t apply for it anymore. It’s up to the board of the JREF such that it is to offer it if they so desire. So the money is simply not – the money is still there. Yeah, it’s still earmarked for the prize And and if in their wisdom one day they decide to offer it then that’s entirely up to them I I’m no longer part of that particular thing, but getting back to the other point, yeah in in Australia, and I’m not the guy who has to handle this luckily It’s Tim Mendham our executive officer and the editor of the skeptic magazine here in Australia Who is on the front line with phone calls and direct emails and things like that with people saying, you know, I can read my cat’s mind, where’s the money and things like that. So yes, that happens quite often. And he reports to the Central Committee of Australian Skeptics once a month on various people who’ve come along. And yeah, quite often they think they can just turn up and collect money because they’re not psychic enough to know that, well, there are a few conditions we have to meet first.

0:23:20
CW: Yeah.

0:23:21
BR: Exactly. Yeah, I can certainly attest to that aspect of it. I’ve gotten emails from people and if you haven’t dealt with these claimants, you don’t really appreciate just how difficult it is to get a straight answer out of these people. And it’s not necessarily because they’re trying to be evasive or because they’re lying or because they’re trying to pull a fast one. It’s that they don’t, they just don’t have any grasp of research design. They don’t understand what a control group is. They don’t, like basic, basic research design principles just are beyond them. And it’s not, it’s not that they’re stupid. They just, they just don’t have that background. So, as Richard said, and I’ve seen this myself, where it can be incredibly frustrating to say, okay, what exactly can you do? And they say, well, sometimes, and it’s just this rambling thing. It’s like, no, no, no, just, I’m not trying to be rude here, but just tell me in a couple sentences what can you do and under what conditions. And to skeptics and scientists, we can sort of narrow that down pretty quickly and say, okay, this is what I’m talking about. But the average person off the street, it could just be this incredibly frustrating experience just to get them to think within a framework to make a testable claim.

0:24:41
RS: Absolutely right. And we get the situation where people come along on somebody’s behalf and say, look, there’s this psychic I visit and she’s incredible. She reads me every time or he or whatever the case may be and it’s clear that these people have no understanding of basic cold reading and why the hell should they? I mean, this is something magicians and skeptics know because this is part of what we do, but to the average person in the population there’s no real reason why they should have studied the psychology involved in cold reading and it’s quite extensive. So, of course they’re blown away, of course they think the person is psychic, of course they say they knew something that they couldn’t have possibly have known. And it’s no wonder then they come to us all excited and expecting us to verify their particular psychic and full of confidence, of course this person will be shown to be real because they work for me.

0:25:38
CW: If they had any idea how cold reading works, they wouldn’t be going to a psychic in the first place. So it’s kind of already a division there. But you bring up a good point in another thing that Randi himself had mentioned was a big problem. He wrote an article for CSI back in 2005 where he described some of the more memorable participants up to that point. And he said one of the major problems was you had to describe your ability in two paragraphs or three paragraphs and he said we had paragraphs that would run on for pages and pages and pages and we had to make it very clear to people we don’t want anecdote. Don’t tell me what your grandmother used to be able to do. Your grandmother’s not here. I don’t care if your grandmother was psychic. Don’t tell me what this other person you knew could do. Tell me what you can do in a repeatable way to be tested and you can demonstrate it for us. Don’t tell me 10 years ago I did this or five years ago I did that. And people’s memories get overburdened with remembering all the hits and forgetting all the misses. And then they oftentimes, Randi said, the claimants would say absolutely confidently, I can do this 100% of the time.

0:26:54
RS: You make a really good point, and Randi makes a good point, because I have met especially water diviners, water dowsers, which I’ve tested quite a few with the Australian skeptics, they will say point blank, I’m always right, I get this 100% of the time, or they might even stoop as low as 90% or something like that, many of them. Of course there are the other water diviners who will be more modest in their claims, but yes, these people exist. And one of the things people will use to weasel out of being tested, if we go to a psychic in particular and say, look, here’s the money, and I did this to a woman about a year back on national TV here in Australia and she refused point blank to take the money. They’ll come up with all sorts of excuses like the money is not there, the skeptics aren’t real, you can’t test what I do, science doesn’t know everything and the classic is oh, but you can’t expect us to be 100% right all the time.

0:27:53
CW: They do.

0:27:54
RS: And we say some of you do but no, of course we don’t expect you to be 100% right all the time, but we expect you to come to an agreement with us on how right you are sometimes.

0:28:05
CW: Yeah, and it has to be better than chance. Yeah. Yeah, that is one of the criticisms of the challenges, the psychic challenges, is that, oh, well, they expect some outrageously successful hit rate, when in actuality, the hit rate is determined with the claimant beforehand and set out in a protocol that they both agree on and it’s always under what the claimant claims they can do. If they say, I can get this nine times out of ten, you know, Randy will say, okay, get it eight times out of ten and we’ll consider that moving you to the next, you know, round here.

0:28:44
RS: Yeah, as we progressed, as we progressed through the tests I was involved with in Las Vegas and with the many, many, many meetings that the little committee had during each meeting leading up to the test, we were aiming to progressively lower the benchmark because quite frankly, we would have been delighted if somebody had passed the preliminary test because that would have been a lot of publicity and a lot of interest and everything. But even lowering the benchmark didn’t make any difference. As soon as these people are confronted with a decent test of their powers, the powers disappear because it’s what we suspect, especially afterwards, is that the power is non-existent.

0:29:22
CW: Yeah, well, see, that’s the thing about, especially in Las Vegas, you do have the chance of somebody passing at least the preliminary test just by giving you a series of lucky guesses and Las Vegas has a number of large establishments which will give you a million dollars for a series of lucky guesses.

0:29:41
RS: In theory you’re right of course and this happens here in Australia We have a preliminary test for our $100,000 again agreed to by us and the applicant and that leads to the full-blown test of course there has never been a full Full-blown test because no one has ever passed the preliminary test, and I think that’s probably a foot reflected around the world.

0:30:02
BR: You know one thing that jumps out at me and this sort of ties in with what you were just saying is is And I’m sure you’ve encountered this as well There’s this sort of notion that well the the skeptics don’t want me to pass right there Yeah, you you all you all are you all want me to fail like no no no no no I I want you to succeed. I you know I want I want to verify it. So it’s not this matter of we’re trying to design it so you can’t pass it. That’s not what’s going on here. We’re trying to design it so that people aren’t mistaking it and you, the psychic, aren’t mistaking it for random chance. And so it’s not that we don’t want you to pass. We do want you to pass. We just want it to be a valid test. And that’s a nuance that seems to get lost a lot.

0:30:48
RS: And this has led to a very interesting problem that now confronts all psychic, or shall I say, skeptical groups around the world testing psychics, is there is such a history now of failed tests and failed attempts at passing tests presented by psychics and scientists and so forth, that people are now saying, of course the tests are rigged, otherwise by now one of us would have passed. And since I know psychic powers are real, and since every psychic fails your tests, your tests must be rigged.

0:31:24
CW: That’s unfortunate.

0:31:25
RS: Isn’t that interesting?

0:31:26
CW: Yeah.

RS: But from their point of view, especially the true believers, it’s a perfectly valid rationalization to that in their heads. The example I give in talks is I put up a piano keyboard on the screen and I say, how many people here can play the piano? And some hands go up. And I say, okay, if I was to give you a million dollars to play the piano, would you take the test? Yes, of course. Okay, so imagine I’m doing that. You front up, you sit down, you’re perfectly happy, good piano, you sit down and you start to play and you can’t do it. All the keys are wrong, the sound, it sounds terrible, it sounds like a child banging away on the keyboard, you would walk away saying, ah, he’s rigged the piano. Of course, because I know I can play the piano. This is what happens to many psychics we test. So it’s no surprise that when these people fail the test here in Australia or in Las Vegas or around the world, that their minds will race to come up with an excuse as to why they failed, because in their heart of hearts and in their head and in their mind, they know they can do it. They believe in their power. It’s like you and me driving a car. We know we can do it. The excuses are fascinating, absolutely fascinating and it’s a big part of psychology and I think it will make a good paper one day.

0:32:40
CW: Yeah, that’s a study all onto its own just what happens after they fail. Randi said in that article in one of the many remembrances he has about the the million-dollar challenge is he said give me a faker I Can take a faker anytime I can I can see what they do I can reveal it I can expose them for the world and get rid of them. That’s no problem. He seemed to love doing that He’s like but the true believers were the ones that just kind of wore on him. It was it was exhausting dealing with people who were so disappointed in something that they couldn’t understand why it wasn’t working. It always worked for them before. And would you hazard a guess with the people that you have worked with here at the amazing meeting during the challenges you worked with, or even in Australia, would you hazard a guess as to what percentage of people were true believers versus what percentage were hoaxing you?

0:33:34
RS: Whatever the percentage is, it’s high true believers. All the ones I dealt with directly in Las Vegas, and it wasn’t all of them, it was most of them, but it wasn’t all of them, in my opinion, were true believers, and that’s partially based on spending time with them, and partly based on the fact that they were, they fronted up to be tested, and a lot of fakers will never front up to be tested, because they know they’re fakes. They know they’re scamming and con artists. That’s why the big names don’t do it. They don’t have to. I mean, why would the big names, they’re making millions of dollars anyway, or whatever it is, who cares? They won’t. So when people come to be tested, especially the ones in Las Vegas, and one of the hints, the clues for me was the elaborate excuses and after the fact, they would come up with, because it’s their own mind trying to protect their claims, you see. Some cases, we can look at some cases now Connie Sung in way back in 2009 I wasn’t involved with that one that was one of the early ones I saw and she was using magic power as a pendulum to identify playing cards in little envelopes and she failed but later on she decided it was Banacheck the mentalist magician who was part of the committee who was using his magic slide of hand to rig the test. So that was sadly sort of expected something would come up like that. Another famous one was Andrew Needles and the power, his power balance, his bracelet. And that was a fascinating test. 2012. He had something similar to the famous power band bracelet. It had a little electronic component in it. So you wear this thing on your wrist, gives you more power, strength, flexibility. And we won’t go into the psychology behind that, but it’s easy for people to be fooled. And it took a long time, lots of emails between he and I, because he originally emailed me in Australia because I had already debunked power balance a few years before on national TV here in Australia. And he decided that his best avenue to show the world his invention worked was to convince me. And this was a clue to me that he was a true believer. So after lengthy emails between Banaszczuk and myself and Andrew Needles and on and on, we finally had a situation where he could turn up in Las Vegas and we designed a test which went on for a long time and which just came out as a random chance of course, so he failed but later on, and you can still look this up on his website, he published an extensive report showing how, in fact, he passed the test.

0:36:20
CW: Oh really?

0:36:21
RS: He didn’t fail after all. Yeah, and he’s got stills from the official video with little lines saying, look, see how this person is standing here and blah, blah, and on it goes. Again, which indicates to me he’s a true believer and he was just desperate to show the world that his product works, because he knows it works, it can’t fail. If it did fail, there’s something strange going on. Again, this is the psychology that would make an interesting scientific paper one day.

0:36:52
CW: Fascinating stuff. Well, and he’s also got a, well, the psychics as well have a business interest in keeping their pet powers real to them anyway. There is that.

0:37:04
RS: There’s, yeah, some undeniably it’s their livelihood. I guess that’s why, especially these days, the big names just won’t come to be tested. It’s just yeah. So what who you skeptics?

0:37:17
CW: Yeah, Randi famously tried to challenge Sylvia Brown on live TV she agreed to do it twice on the Larry King show and just never followed up and did it and Same with Uri Geller and James von Prague and John Edward, you know, none of the big names ever took him up on it. They all they all kind of indicated. Oh, yeah, I could pass it but then they just never bothered trying.

0:37:38
RS: Or they’ll say, I’ve got nothing to prove to the skeptics. And their believers say, yeah, you’re right.

0:37:43
BR: Well, Richard, let me ask you what the variety of claims that you’ve tested, either in association with the MDC or outside it. Most of the claims that I have personally investigated were either psychics or dowsers. Those are the sort of the – there’s a couple others, but those are the main two categories that I’ve had some hand in personally testing. But what, you have more experience than I do. So what’s some of the range of different claims?

0:38:13
RS: Psychics and dowsers.

0:38:14
BR: They’re the ones that show up.

0:38:17
RS: It’s just about sums it up. I mean, most, if you just pure numbers, it’s dowsers. And dowsing’s known all around the world. And we’ve had big dowsing competitions here in Australia or tests for our prize money Absolutely, and the other ones I’ve been involved with For the money would be psychics people palm readers and people who could talk to ghosts and things like that but we had Another experience and this wasn’t for the money But it was testing psychics was when I was the TV judge on the television show here called The One. Oh, that’s right, that’s right. And I was also a consultant on the show because when the producers approached me to appear to be on this TV show, many long meetings ensued where I pointed out to them that it’s not their fault, but you don’t know how to run a psychic test. You know, this is a very specialized field. It’s ridiculously specialized. You know, there’s not many people around the world who can really know all the ins and outs of testing many and varied psychic claims from psychometry to face reading to what have you. Randy is the master at it, of course, because he’s had other experiences too on TV and whatnot. But on that show, although none of the tests were truly scientific because they were run only once, and it was for a TV show anyway, it was more for entertainment purposes. I got to design many different tests, finding lost people to psychometry as we said before, to matching people to pictures and all this sort of stuff. And what really came into it heavily was mathematics, statistics, odds, chances, that sort of thing. And that took many hours of my time with pages and pages of calculations. So I could go to the producer and say, if you run this test with this many people, and it’s got this chance of being successful, this is how many people you can expect to pass and all that sort of stuff. And that’s another world unto its own odds and calculations like that.

0:40:20
CW: That doesn’t surprise me at all. The statistical innumeracy is a big problem in the world and especially in America. I don’t know if the Australians are a little bit more mathematically inclined than we are, but it doesn’t take much to convince somebody that there is some sort of effect going on. And randomness is clumpy. That’s one of the things I say all the time when somebody I know is saying, oh, this is weird that this is happening again. Randomness is clumpy.

0:40:51
RS: And it’s important too, for example, if somebody said that they could read the contents of an envelope, what’s important if you’re going to test that, is to do it in such a way that you’d get a statistically meaningful result at the end of the test. So you wouldn’t just say to another volunteer, look, you write a word or draw something, seal it in an envelope and we’ll see if the psychic can guess what it is. Because I’ve seen that happen where a friend of mine went on radio with a psychic and said, I’ve got something in this envelope here, if you’re psychic you can tell me what it is. And the psychic was sort of making many guesses and things, well I see something metallic and there’s something to do with space, you know, many things. And when they opened up the envelope it was a little lottery ticket, and part of the lottery ticket was silver, and he said, Aha! You see, I told you I saw something metallic, I was right. Now of course, this is an appalling way to run a test. What you do is you get, say, a series of 10 photographs, and you tell the psychic, one of these will be in the envelope, in this round, here are the 10, right? Here’s the envelope, you tell us which one of these 10, so they either get it or they don’t. And there’s none of this, well I thought I saw a guy with a beard and look this this, whatever the case may be. And that’s really important, a lot of people don’t realize that and when the psychic will make excuses or fuff around or say, look yes if you look at it this way upside down you say I was right, it’s just no way to run a test. And it’s a trap actually for people who think they can do this sort of psychic stuff, run tests.

CW: It makes sense. You got to have it pass fail. You can’t have the fuzzy edges. You’ll always be…

0:42:40
RS: Get rid of fuzzy edges. Absolutely. Yeah, because the fuzzy edges will always favor the side. Yeah. They’ll say, yes, that’s what I was really getting at. Oh, you see, that’s what I mean. Look, there’s blue. I told you I could see water look that the shirt of the guy is blue. That’s what I was seeing You need to eliminate all that.

0:42:54
BR: Well, the one would be remiss if we didn’t mention one good resource There’s a book by Richard Wiseman and Robert Morris titled guidelines for testing psychic claimants and that’s published by Prometheus books, I think maybe about 10 years or so ago and that has a good collection of, you know, sort of guidelines, exactly what it says. And some of the principles are generalizable to others as well. Richard, I’m wondering, are the protocols from past million-dollar challenges available for other people to emulate? I mean, obviously, you know, the claims and, you know, what the outcomes are known and they’re published and they’re made public. But if, for example, a group in Germany or a group in New Zealand or whatever else wants to try and learn about how to do this testing course, they can contact you or me or Randy or Ray Hyman or other people. But are the protocols available for other people to study if they want to learn how to do this?

0:43:59
RS: Yeah. All the ones that I was involved with, I was also given the task of writing the official report. And in the official report, it’s as detailed as I could make it about the lead up to it and the protocols involved and all the rest of it. And they’re still available online, I think, at the JREF website or if you just Google a million dollar challenge report, you’ll see a lot of those. It’s a good study and I would advise anybody who wants to conduct a test to study those, but when it comes to any test you have to take it as an individual example because every claimant will have different needs and concerns and conditions and claims, basically claims, so any of those tests may not suit the next person who comes along, but it’s certainly worth studying. And right in front of me, Ben, what’s this? Oh, guidelines for testing psychic claims. Richard Wiseman and Robert Morris. So snap. And I read this book many years ago before I was doing the tests for the JREF. So that’s a good grounding. I’ve got your books here too, of course.

BR: Well, thank you. I’m still cranking them out.

RS: Good. Also, many of those tests are on YouTube.

0:45:20
CW: Yes.

0:45:21
RS: And anybody wanting to do a test, look at as many as you can, read as much about it as you can, and if you’re still progressing, you still want to do it, then contact something like the Australian Skeptics, and we’re happy to help, you know, give you the benefit of that experience.

0:45:39
CW: And also on YouTube there is a wide variety of the older tests that James Randi ran on various TV programs and, you know, psychic challenges, you know, from the 1980s and 90s you’ll see these old shows where psychics go on and try to, you know, read auras or douse a bit of metal or underneath a box and you can see how he’s, you can see his hand in it. He’s clearly told the producers, okay, we need to have this many boxes on stage to make this statistically relevant here.

0:46:11
RS: Oh, absolutely. I’ll just say that the program from 1991 from the UK was called James Randi Psychic Investigator. Google that and you’ll see many examples of Randi testing people on TV. It’s fascinating. He’s been at it a long time.

CW: I think I think that first radio appearance where he offered the money was in 1964 and the whole his active involvement went through like to 2015 so that’s that’s an amazing run of putting work and sweat and tears into you know trying to offer offer this very educational prize for people and for anybody who could claim it and showing the world how you test these people.

0:46:54
RS: Oh, yes, and I’ll say one thing about Randi towards the end of the challenges in Las Vegas a lot of the work was handed over to the committee which was chip and grace deadman and myself and Banachek Jamie and Swiss some other people helping us out. We did the majority of the work, headed by Banachek, who’s a superb, superb showman and magician, as we know. But Randi would not be vacant from all this. He would always have an interest in what we were doing. He would point out flaws in our thinking and everything, and he would give everything the final look over. And that was invaluable to us. So because we knew, you know, we knew this is the man who’s had the most experience.

0:47:43
CW: Yeah. Talk about a resource.

0:47:46
RS: Yeah.

0:47:47
BR: Well, let me dig a little bit deeper into that because for those who I mean, some of our listeners may not have been to, you know, to the conference and been part of the MDC and been in the audience for the big reveal and all that. So it’s a several day event and there are certain challenges that are involved in trying to stage something that is Quasi live this isn’t something pre-recorded this you know There is an element of the testing that everyone can see and is being videotaped as evidence and yet it’s against It’s typically not something that just sort of happens. You know hey in this hour This is either proven or not proven usually it’s over the course of time. So can you, for those people who haven’t seen MDC, can you sort of give an overview of how that works?

0:48:31
RS: Yes, let’s look at one of the later ones, which was 2014. A man named Fee Wong, who was a Chinese student from Boston, if I remember correctly. And his claim was that he could send power feelings from his hand into somebody else’s hand. And all right, that’s a test we could look at. And so setting that up to get to a stage show was quite interesting because we met with him extensively during the few days leading up to it to discover exactly what he could do. We needed volunteers who would play along with it, and we had to get those from the Las Vegas area. That was interesting. And we also had to bear in mind that we’re presenting a stage show. We’re presenting a little bit of entertainment. People have to be told where to stand, why they’re standing there. There has to be a running order. Banaszczak had to describe things. We had to know after this point, and he sits down, who stands up and does what when. So it’s like there was lots of choreography involved, and procedure, and protocol. What do you do backstage? Where do the volunteers who are waiting to come up to be part of the show, where do they wait? Do we search them for things that might help this guy cheat if we suspect him of cheating, which we didn’t suspect him of cheating, but anyway. So, it’s like a stage manager’s job to get all this going for the final show, which also has to be reasonably scientifically valid. And then the curtains come up and Banacheck comes out and we have to stand where we’ve been told to stand and somebody has to show these people up on stage. So, this is something you can’t just say, well, let’s all get together at this hour and we’ll test this psychic. All right, we’ll see you then. aspect of me over the years never failed to impress me of how much work you need to do to get it to that stage. And then at the end of it, you had to have something which created a result, either pass or fail. And at what stage does this guy pass or fail, you know? And then do we give them a right of reply? What happens next? Usually after each test, we would be swamped by people from the audience with their criticisms of flaws in our testing procedure, which was always a lot of fun. But no, that’s their job. People are being skeptical. But when you’re presenting for an audience that used to go to TAM, every aspect they would scrutinize and as any tiny flaw in your reasoning or procedure, they would jump on and you think, well that’s fine, that’s good science, you’re supposed to do that, but after you’re exhausted doing the test, the last thing sometimes you wanted was some guy coming up to to berate you about the fact that you were standing in the wrong direction for the angle of the…

0:51:23
BR: The money money quarterbacking, right? They’ve been in the audience for 20 minutes, you spent the last 72 hours on it without sleep, and there you go.

0:51:32
RS: Well, and again, I have to give them all credit. And this is what you’re supposed to do. But sometimes when you’re exhausted and they tell you something that you’ve clearly gotten wrong or forgotten over the last 72 hours, and you think, oh, damn, they’re right. It’s like you grin and say, thanks for telling me that.

0:51:54
CW: Well, I remember that test. I was there in the audience. And one of the things that has impressed me with the few Amazing meeting challenges that I have seen is an aspect of doing anything live in front of an audience Especially an audience of a particular Persuasion it’s not like you were doing that in front of a bunch of psychics or psychic believers you’re doing it at a skeptics convention a concern is obviously having your participant be tested and and then deal with getting laughter or titters or people scoffing in the audience.I mean, I can imagine that would scare off future claimants if it were to happen. The claimant would say that it threw off his ability to have people laughing at him. But I never have found that to be a problem. How do you guys tackle that? Are you very careful to make sure the audience knows what’s expected of them? And do you find that generally the skeptics give the claimant the benefit of the doubt and the respect that they deserve for having the bravery to go participate in this?

0:52:58
RS: Absolutely. You could hear a pin drop and people in every test I conducted on behalf of the JRF with the others in the committee, every test and even the ones I wasn’t involved with earlier on with Connie Soong and so forth, the audience were just Brilliant they were so well-behaved not a laughter not a titter They were they were fascinated and they the audience wanted to give the psychic every fair and and reasonable chance to pass so nobody laughed nobody coughed nobody did anything wrong. They let the Tests run and they gave the claimant whoever it was a big applause at the end Because they all realized that these people had stuck their neck out. But again, it’s one of the reasons people would use not to be tested. Oh, you skeptics will just mock us and things like that. There’s only so many times you can tell people that it’s all above board, it’s all fair, it’s never rigged. Part of the reason it takes so long putting these together is that the claimant is involved in constructing the test to make sure it’s not rigged against the claimant or against the skeptics, you know. So the audience so well behaved, I was so impressed, and even when it came to question times with Andrew Needles, they weren’t mocking him when he stood, he stayed for questions. They were asking him interesting questions. So that was never been a problem in my experience.

0:54:24
BR: I’m really glad you brought that up because one of the criticisms of skeptics that I’ve heard over and over for years and years, and I think we all have as well, that really kind of grates on me and I think is really unfair in many cases, is this notion that skeptics routinely resort to mockery or ridicule of believers. And I will admit that there are some skeptics that can be very strident and mocking, but more skeptics than that tend to be respectful and diplomatic, not mocking people at all. And it really sort of irks me when I hear people making what I believe are generally sort of misleading and inaccurate generalizations about how, well, skeptics always ridicule, they mock, and blah, blah, blah. Well some of them do, but most of them are very respectful, and I think that it would be good for many of the audience members to know that, and maybe either attend one if there’s any future ones, or watch the videotapes of previous ones just to see just how respectful the skeptics are.

0:55:30
CW: And it’s true. There are some people who call themselves skeptics who make a big song and dance about all the lunatics or the idiots or these people are fools. We can’t control what everybody says. It’s ridiculous. You know, that’s just the way it is. But you make a good point. People can watch the videos of these tests and see how respectful not only we on stage were, but he does not berate or tease any true believers. He has all the empathy in the world for them.

RS: Well it’s not easy sometimes and sometimes you don’t know whether the next psychic you meet is genuinely deceiving themselves or a con artist. Experience can tell you usually which one it is and after especially seeing them in action and other psychological hints you can usually know. But ultimately you can’t really know what’s going on in the heads of people. It’s another paper. I’ll have to write all these papers when I retire, I think.

0:56:56
CW: Well, if you do figure out a way to know what’s going on in the heads of people, you might win some money. I can award myself, yes. Well, speaking of that, there are a huge number of prizes that have sprung up to award anyone successfully demonstrating evidence of a paranormal ability can cash in, not just on the JREF’s million dollars, but let me see here. For instance, the Czech Skeptics Club in the Czech Republic is offering a little over three million Czech korunas, which is the equivalent of about 160,000 US dollars. There’s a prize in China. There’s one in India. There’s the United States has got $100,000 up for claimants offered by the Independent Investigators Group. There’s the Australian Skeptics. There’s there’s one in New Zealand. There’s one in Italy. These are all thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars up for grabs. If you can demonstrate your ability in the paranormal to a statistically significant degree.

0:58:02
RS: Yeah, yeah. And it’s good that all these groups around the world are doing it and we can feed off each other and get ideas and see what the other groups are doing. The Australian skeptics have been going since 1981 and there has been a cash prize since then, but the whole idea in Australia of offering money was actually started by James Randi in 1980. He was flown out to conduct a series of water divining tests here in Sydney, and that more or less led to the formation of the Australian Skeptics. And if people want to see a classic, a classic test of paranormal power, just go to YouTube and look for James Randi in Australia. It goes for about 40 minutes, and it’s a wonderful example of testing paranormal powers.

0:58:51
BR: Well, Richard, let me ask, what about some follow-ups? Do you ever hear from those people again, either because they want to try again, or they’re in the news for another reason, or do they just sort of vanish back into the woodwork?

0:59:03
RS: Well, I mean, most of them are dowsers anyway, they vanish back into the woodworks, but as far as the ones going for the million-dollar challenge that I was involved with, the only one we really heard from again was Andrew Needles when he put up his website, his page, insisting that he actually passed the test after all. The others, I don’t think we heard back from them, so I’m not sure what they’re doing. And the other one which I wasn’t involved with in 2009, Connie Sung, she put up a webpage protesting that she thought she was cheated. But apart from that, no, I think that’s more or less go back into the woodwork.

0:59:41
BR: Well, you know, you can never test too many dowsers. They just that seems to be one of those abilities that just won’t go away.

0:59:48
CW: I’m sure you recall the big brouhaha earlier this year when a water company in the UK was found to be using dowsers to try and locate leaks.

0:59:58
RS: But I tell you one thing about it. I’m glad it’s not going away because it’s an excellent way for young skeptics to cut their teeth is to conduct or be part of a dowsing test. Because we’ve got so many ones now in the can, we’ve got a lot of experience. It can be statistically interesting, it can show you a lot of psychology and how people behave and react. and there are many examples online so in that respect I’m glad they keep coming along and I will always front up and I will always accept the offer to test a water diviner or a water dowser and in fact if listeners if you go to my own show the Skeptic Zone and look for episode 517 you’ll hear a report about a water diviner being tested in Germany, which is also, the video is online. So yeah, it’s not going to go away, but I’m sort of pleased about that.

CW: You heard it here, water dowsing is a good way to get your feet wet in the skeptic community. Go for it.

1:01:01
BR: No, I agree. I mean, that’s actually one of the examples that I do. I don’t give as many these days, but I used to give workshops and investigation. And I remember once about eight or 10 years ago, I was showing a group just sort of giving rough guidelines for testing claimants. And I figured, well, let’s just try some dowsing. And so we got 10 of those red Solo cups. They were all, of course, identical. One of them was filled with some water, and then there was a little piece of paper placed over the top of each of them. And then they wanted to test me. And so I said, okay, well go ahead. So I just said, you know, fill one of these, and then I came back in, and I sort of looked around and I was, I’m not a magician, I’m not a performer, but I was being suitably theatric. I dramatically pronounced that the, I think it was the third from the left, was filled with water. They were just astonished, and I, until I sort of pointed out that they had unfortunately used drinking fountain water, and there was a little line of condensation. If you know what to look for it’s right there and so it was a good lesson where it’s like you know it’s not rocket science but it takes a little bit of thought in terms of some of the some of the tells that wouldn’t be necessarily obvious to people.

1:02:20
RS: Oh yeah, it’s one of the reasons it takes so long to do a successful test. It’s all these little considerations you have to, all the bases I should say you have to cover. One of the excuses I remember, I made a documentary myself about water divining called the Mighty Mitamasa Water Divining Test. You can look that one up too. Very alliterative, I like it. Yeah, a little country town in Australia called Mitamita and there was a water divining test and I made a documentary about it and one of the water diviners decided that he failed was because the water in the test bottle was tap water, but he was divining for rainwater or river water or something like that.

1:02:58
BR: Oh, there you go. There you go, right?

1:03:01
RS: So how foolish were we?

1:03:05
BR: I can only divide a water with a very specific set of minerals in it, and this is the mineral profile that I need. Otherwise, I can’t tell one from another.

1:03:14
RS: But another thing about doing the tests, any tests of this nature, million-dollar tests and so on, is before the test begins, the applicant has to be happy and agree to the conditions. They always do, and then they always say, oh, no, it wasn’t quite right.

1:03:30
CW: Well, Richard, you have your hand in many, many skeptical pots in Australia. You are always doing a million things. And why don’t you tell us what you’re up to lately and what we can look forward to seeing, you know, come off your desk in the near future.

1:03:47
RS: Well, a project I’ve been involved with for coming up to two years is what I call the Great Prediction Project, where it started modestly enough where I was going to collate some psychic predictions made over the years here in Australia and analyzed them and just published a result saying out of so many predictions by these psychics, this is many have come right and this is the conclusions we can draw. And I did that for a series of predictions over the years and I thought, maybe I can find some more, you know, I’ll get some more predictions to make it more statistically interesting. Well, that turned into a monster and I ended up with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of published predictions from psychics in Australia made since the year 2000. I’m still cataloguing them. It’s meant many long hours in the library, the State Library of New South Wales here in Sydney, because they have physical copies of magazines published in all those years which aren’t digitized, so you have to borrow on the premises, you request that they bring them out in big sort of trolleys. Hundreds of magazines which you have to flip through and look for the psychic predictions. Then I had a special trip to Melbourne earlier this year because they have other editions of other magazines in the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne and I spent a week there my friend Steve Roberts pouring through hundreds of magazines and you’d go flip, flip, flip, ah here’s another prediction, take a photograph of it, catalogue it, then we have to transcribe all that, then we have to analyse it and the analysing of predictions is…

1:05:29
BR: Oh God, I’m getting exhausted just hearing about it.

1:05:32
RS: It’s a beast of a job because it can be rambling, it can be imprecise, you can think, well, what do they mean here? Did this really happen? And many of them revolve around celebrities. In fact, Nicole Kidman, I think, is probably the person who has come up most in Australia over the past 20 years in predictions. And it’s popular, because these trashy magazines, they appeal to people who love just gossip about celebrities, and they want to know what’s the future hold for Nicole and so on. And then you have to look it up. Did she fall over this day? Was the stock market up or down? Did this person really happen?

1:06:11
BR: She didn’t date me, I’ll tell you that.

1:06:13
RS: That’s odd, that was predicted too.

1:06:15
BR: Well, I was, I certainly hoped for it, but that did not pan out.

1:06:20
RS: However, I’m presenting various preliminary reports about this. I originally anticipated I would finish the end of last year, which was not even remotely possible. I’m not even going to finish by the end of this year, but I’ve had to put a limit on it, so I’ve capped it at the, so predictions from the year 2000 to the end of 2017. I had to put a cap on it because it’ll just keep growing if I don’t. And I’ve still got many to do, many many to analyze and say well okay was it true? Was it false? Was it partly true? Was it partly false? Is it a 50-50 shot? And then you have to write in your reasoning. You can’t just say oh this prediction is wrong. Here are my reasons why this prediction is wrong. This person is still alive. When the psychic said this person would die, for example.

1:07:20
CW: That would be clear cut.

1:07:21
RS: That would be clear cut. And most of them are not that clear cut. And some of them you just have to put in the column, the words, too vague. Many of them are simply just waffle and too vague. And you say, well, I don’t know. It’s just it could mean anything, this prediction. When I’m eventually finished, of course, people are going to pore over it themselves and try to analyze it, especially the psychics involved, and they’ll say, oh yeah, but I really meant this, and that’s going to be interesting.

1:07:50
BR: I was going to ask about that, sir. Are you going to contact them and ask them to explain why they were wrong?

1:07:56
RS: Possibly. I think what will happen is eventually it will simply be published as a huge work, and the press and anybody are free to look at everything that I’ve analyzed and criticize it or agree with it or not agree with it. And at that stage, I expect the psychics involved will say, will obviously look at their own and and complain to me that that I marked them wrong when obviously they were right or whatever the case may be. That’s going to be interesting.

1:08:21
CW: You know, that’d be interesting to to turn something like that into an ongoing crowdsourced project. Like there are far too many galaxy, you know, photographs of galaxies for astronomers to classify. So they’ve they’ve launched Galaxy Zoo where everybody could look at a galaxy picture and categorize it as a an elliptical or a spiral. And if we had some way of doing that where people of the world could classify whether or not psychic predictions came true or did not come true or were too vague, then we’d have a lot of data that could just get crunched.

1:08:53
RS: Well, it’d be bigger than the Galaxy Project, I think. I mean, how do you mark a prediction like Nicole Kidman for the year 2013? I feel Nicole’s in desperate love with a tall man, but she can’t express her feelings.

CW: There you go Ben.

1:09:19
BR: I am six feet tall.

1:09:22
CW: She just couldn’t express herself. Richard you’ve made the classical blunder of underestimating the public’s appetite for celebrity gossip and fortune telling.

1:09:31
RS: Maybe you’re right.

1:09:32
CW: I hope it doesn’t wear on your nerves too badly before it’s over.

BR: I did something sort of similar a while back and nothing nearly that that broad a scope but I there’s a local news magazine sort of weekly and then every year they would have predictions for the following year and I I usually just ignore it they have usually about four or five skeptic I wish they had skeptics you should have four or five psychics who each give you know a dozen or so predictions for what’s going to happen. It’s a pretty standard thing, it’s not uncommon, but I happened to come across one just sort of in my office underneath some other papers from around Christmas 2000. And I realized that something significant had happened in 2001, right around September 11th, actually. I was curious to see whether any of the psychics had actually predicted, you know, certainly what would be difficult to escape and certainly has a lasting impact. And as you can imagine, none of the psychics predicted 9-11. And when I tried to contact several of them, one of them had since died, two of them got back to me, one of them didn’t. And one of them said, I asked, I said, well, you know, Mr. Alexander, I’m just wondering how, how is it you could have failed to predict, you know, what is possibly the most important thing that happened that year, probably that decade. And he said, well, you know, I had an inkling that something like that was going to happen, but I didn’t want to scare anyone. I said, really? You, you, you, you had a sense that there might be a massive terrorist attack that would change the political nature and everything, certainly in the States and elsewhere, and you didn’t want to mention it?” And he never replied.

1:11:25
CW: Wow. Well, Richard, thank you so much for giving us so much of your time today and recounting some of your personal experiences with both the putting together of the big challenges at the amazing meeting and the testing of the claimants?

1:11:39
RS: Yes, it was a wonderful trip down memory lane and I’m so pleased that many of these things are documented and especially videoed so we can all learn from them.

1:11:48
CW: Yes, well we appreciate you very much coming on the show and we hope to talk to you again someday soon.

1:11:53
RS: Let’s do it, that’d be great.

1:11:54
BR: You’re just a national treasure and I hope people there in Oz and elsewhere appreciate it.

1:11:59
RS: A buried treasure maybe.

1:12:01
CW: Buried in psychic predictions from the early 2000s.

1:12:03
BR: We just need to have a dowser come find you. That’s all.

1:12:06
RS: Please send one.

1:12:06
CW: Well, and listeners, don’t forget to listen to Richard’s show every week, The Skeptic Zone, one of the longest running skeptical podcasts in the history of skeptical podcasts.

(MUSIC)

1:12:32
BR: Just one thing I was going to send a shout out to, there was a, as our listeners will recall in past episodes, I’ve talked about the Blue Whale Game, the alleged suicide game and all that urban legendy moral panic thing. And there was a recent piece on a podcast called BBC Trending and there’s a new episode that came out a couple weeks back called The Truth Behind the So-Called Suicide Game. And it’s like 20, 23 minutes or something and it’s a pretty good analysis. It has new information that I didn’t know, including some of the origins of the Blue Whale Game. I mostly focused on some of the American victims and some of their stuff. So it doesn’t there’s nothing that really contradicts what I said, but it sort of certainly adds to it. So if people are interested in getting a more sort of more of an overview of the Blue Whale game, and it also includes a couple of my folklore colleagues, my Russian folklore colleagues who I met in Brussels and quotes them in there. So it’s an interesting piece. Again, it’s BBC World Service trending the truth behind a so-called suicide game.

1:13:40
CW: Oh, cool. So next week, join us listeners for an interesting tour through end of days prophecies, specifically Harold Camping. And we’re gonna be joined again by our buddy, Erik Khristopher Myers, filmmaker extraordinaire. He’s still riding high, enjoying the success of Butterfly Kisses. It’s continuing to win awards, and it went to number one on the Amazon charts. So check out Butterfly Kisses if you haven’t already and join us in two weeks to discuss Harold Camping. You’ve looked into Harold Camping quite a bit, haven’t you?

1:14:15
BR: I have. He was one of a few dozen or so of the end times prophets who made a career out of talking about when the apocalypse was going to happen and then of course it didn’t happen and it goes on and on. But yes, it’s an interesting story and I believe Eric has a personal insight into it, so that will be interesting.

1:14:39
CW: Excellent. Well, provided we get no apocalypse happening in the next two weeks, we’ll talk to you then.

1:14:45
BR: Sounds like it.

1:14:46
Bye-bye.

1:14:47
Bye.

1:14:48
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1:15:21
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1:15:22
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1:15:53
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1:16:03
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1:16:04
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Transcribed with Cockatoo