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)

0:00:11
Pascual Romero: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. This is episode 224 and with me are…

BR: Ben Radford here.

0:00:33
Celestia Ward: And Celestia Ward. Welcome guys. We are into the month of April and this is a grab bag episode, meaning we can talk about whatever we want, sort of.

PR: Sweet. I’ve got a 90 minute piece on the Holly Smoot tariff of 1938. So…

CW: Oh, riveting.

PR: Be great. Yep.

0:01:07
CW: And normally we begin each episode by talking about housekeeping and a Swayso or two meeting. So what are you skeptical of? But really, a lot of our topics kind of are topical Swaysos. So this is sort of like if the Swaysos took over the whole episode. Does that make sense?

PR: It’s oops, all Swaysos

BR: Ominous.

0:01:28
CW: Yes, enjoy your box of cereal goodness skepticism here. Well, in current events, did you guys hear that Havana syndrome is now being reported in Lithuania?

0:01:39
PR: Yeah, I was actually just traveling over the weekend and CNN was on in the breakfast area and I was not sure what they were talking about, but there was a caption saying something about Havana Syndrome. I was kind of a little frustrated that it was on CNN, but you know, what can you do? It’s the news these days.

0:02:02
CW: Well, I saw a few reports, but I didn’t see any media outlets that were like, oh, and by the way, just, you know, two weeks ago, this was a, it was found that the brain changes that were touted that as part of this syndrome aren’t really there. And so it really does look like a mass sociogenic illness. They didn’t say any of that. They didn’t, they didn’t bring up our friend, Bob Bartholomew, they just said, oh, there appear to be reports that people in Lithuania, government workers are catching it.

0:02:29
BR: Yeah, they tend to sort of just jump on the latest thing and unfortunately abandon the context pretty quickly, partly because, of course, you know, if they were to, if they were to sort of unknown weapon or op or something, they would have to, you know, it would take them three, four, five minutes to do, whereas, you know, the given segment may be, you know, 15, 20 seconds. So, unfortunately, in the process of trying to be timely, they strip out all the context that would actually help people understand what’s going on.

0:03:11
CW: Again, I still want a folklorist in every newsroom. Need to make that happen.

0:03:18
BR: I’ll see what I can do.

0:03:19
CW: And then moving from Lithuania to Los Angeles, you guys see the video of the falling debris that freaked everybody out at about 1.30 in the morning?

PR: Yeah.

BR: No.

0:03:30
CW: We have a yes and a no.

0:03:32
BR: Some of us are paying more attention to falling debris than others, apparently.

0:03:36
CW: Tuesday morning, so it would have been like, well, as we record this about 36 hours ago, lights over Los Angeles appeared and people who were awake at 1.30 in the morning, which in LA, there were a lot of them. There were tons of TikTok videos going around about and though the people were like, oh my God, you know, because they first started out by going, oh, it’s the falling star. Oh, oh my, oh my, oh, holy crap. It’s an apocalypse, you know, because it did start out with like just a few little like little burny, you know, falling star looking things. And then it just tumbled and there was like a lot. I mean, find a video of this sighting over L.A. It was really wild. It would have freaked me out.

0:04:19
PR: Yeah, I have a lot of a lot of friends in L.A. as I lived there for many, many years. But I also have a lot of friends who are up at 1.30 on a Tuesday morning. I woke up to a lot of posts on Facebook about it from those friends, and a couple actually did get some very late in the event shots of it. But I went and looked it up, and it was pretty impressive. I mean, that’s definitely one that I, even I would have had to, you know, really think about what I was seeing because it was quite the show.

0:04:53
CW: Yes, and the late night hosts made something about it and said, hey, nobody’s talking about what this is. But, you know, the gears turns more, a little bit more slowly in scientific institutions than they do on TikTok.

BR: You think?

CW: So NASA didn’t like hop right out of bed and talk about it, but the Aerospace Corporation, an independent nonprofit that’s federally funded, they do some space research and they had information about a Chinese spacecraft that was predicted to reenter the planet’s atmosphere near LA around the time that the lights were spotted. So really what this appears to have been is the re-entry of the Shenzhou 15 orbital module. That’s according to Smithsonian astronomer Jonathan McDowell. So yay, space junk burning up. Better than staying up there.

0:05:49
BR: So where’s Shenzhou 1-14? Are they still up there?

0:05:53
CW: I don’t know. We’ll have to ask the Aerospace Corporation. And we just had Easter. The Easter holiday just happened. Did you guys have a good holiday? Did you find any eggs or eat any hams?

0:06:09
PR: For me, it was a Sunday that some things were inconveniently closed on and that was about it. Not that we’ve never celebrated Easter, some of my family does, but no, we were out of town. So we were not able to go to In-N-Out Burger, unfortunately.

0:06:28
CW: Oh, what a great tradition. I want to do that.

0:06:30
PR: Yeah.

0:06:32
CW: Ben, do you do anything Easter-y? Do you paint your head with colors or something like that?

0:06:36
BR: Not this year. I did go for a jog, and in that jog, I happened to notice that somebody, I’m not naming names because I don’t know who it was, but somebody had put a plastic Easter egg shell thingy nestled sort of on the corner of my property and I didn’t want to be those you know get off my lawn things and again I wasn’t there but I was curious about it and it sort of tucked away and it did blend in with the grass so I picked it up and you know I was thinking what could be inside of money anthrax I mean I had no idea in this case it was full of air it was empty which I was a bit disappointed in. But somebody, I was going to say some miscreant, but that’s a bit harsh. Somebody, somebody did put that there. So, you know, at least it wasn’t a raw egg.

0:07:26
CW: Yeah. Yeah. There’s plenty of more disappointing ways to find eggs on your property.

0:07:30
BR: Right. I did leave it there, by the way. So it’s still there until someone else, probably at some point is going to blow away. It’ll be garbage. And then I probably should pick it up actually now that I’m saying that out loud. But anyway.

0:07:43
CW: So neither one of you decided to climb up onto a wooden cross and have people nail you to the cross this Easter?

0:07:51
BR: Not on Easter Sunday, no.

0:07:53
PR: I was about fifth on my list, but I didn’t get that far.

0:07:57
CW: Well, there’s ten guys in the Philippines who decided to do that. This story is kind of gruesome, and I think we’ve even mentioned it on the podcast maybe five years ago. But on Good Friday, villagers in the Pampanga province north of Manila, I hope I said that right, performed what I can only really call a very extreme kind of ostention by nailing one guy who’s done it many many years and nine of his friends up on crosses To reenact Jesus’s suffering on Good Friday. This this sort of spectacle. It’s a big tourist event believe it or not it kind of reflects the brand of Catholicism that the Philippines has and A couple of the sources I found say it kind of merges the standard Catholic traditions with a lot of folk superstition, which is interesting. And this this whole thing was actually paused for three years due to the pandemic. And I was sitting here thinking, really, they’re nailing people to crosses and they’re worried about the pandemic.

BR: Some things are more dangerous than others.

0:09:09
CW: But, you know, it does create really big crowds. People can you announce that you’re going to nail a guy to a cross, people show up.

0:09:18
BR: I showed up for Zamora the Torture King. I mean, come on.

0:09:21
CW: You know, he crossed my mind. The one who sarted this, he’s, believe it or not, a carpenter and a sign painter. This is his 35th time being nailed up. And when I read that headline, I had to read it twice because I was like, 35th for 35th year villager, you know, nailed to cross. And I was like, oh, geez, do they pick a different one each year? But no, they’re talking about this one guy. He has been nailed up by his hands and his feet 35 times. And he’s become kind of a local celebrity. He stated he has been doing the ritual as a way to pray for peace in Gaza and Ukraine and the South China Sea.

BR: Well, I wish I could say that was effective.

0:10:17
PR: I respect it. I mean, I’ll give him that.

0:10:19
CW: Well, the way it went is there were other villagers who dressed up as Roman centurions and they hammered four inch stainless steel nails through the palms and the feet of Ruben and his nine companions, and then set them aloft on wooden crosses. took pictures and prayed. And I don’t know if you would have a snack or something, but you know, they did what people do when they’re watching a crucifixion. Now, as I read more about this, I’m like, okay, this person is very, very religiously motivated. I guess all 10 of them are really to do something like this. But it also struck me as, okay, this humble villager was quoted at length. I mean, like, like sentences and sentences and sentences of his thoughts about global politics and peace and society and the state of the world. And it’s in news stories around the world. And you can’t you I mean, there’s no way to buy PR like that. The ability to be heard by so many. It was on TV. It was I’m sure it was in TikTok. I’m sure people there in the crowd were filming it and putting it up that way, too. And in a way. This guy, I mean, it’s painful, but he has attained a type of power that he never would have had otherwise. And this this guy, he’s got a Wikipedia page. And if you search his name, you get four point five million hits on Google. He says that he first started doing this as a way to give thanks because he had a construction accident and people thought he wouldn’t make it but he did and so to thank his God for saving him, he decided to do this and he just kept doing it year after year and in a little telling quote, he admitted he’s kind of continuing because it’s good advertising for his business. I’ll read you the exact quote here from ABC News. In the 1980s, Inaje survived nearly unscathed when he accidentally fell from a three-story building, prompting him to undergo the crucifixion as a thanksgiving for what he considered a miracle. He extended the ritual after loved ones recovered from serious illnesses, one after another, and he landed more carpentry and sign painting job contracts. So, hey, PR makes the world go round.

0:12:58
PR: The important thing is that we all learned, you know, the lesson of capitalism at the end of it all.

CW: Yes. The reason for the season, I guess every season.

0:13:09
BR: Something vaguely similar came across my desk just a few weeks ago. There was a story titled, Churchgoers in Mexico claim to have witnessed a miracle after spotting a statue of the Virgin Mary that appeared to have real tears rolling down her cheeks.

CW: Oh, I’ve never heard of anything like that happening.

0:13:32
BR: That’s never occurred. It was the weirdest thing. So it was actually sent to me by somebody at Skeptical Inquirer as sort of like, hey, Ben, do you want to look into this or do you want to write something up on it? Maybe you need to leave a comment. A lot of times that’s what sort of prompts me to write something. And I don’t, I’m super busy. I don’t have time to sort of have random people emailing me. It’s like, hey, could you look into this? Or like, I have an idea for investigation, like, do you now? Okay, well, let me stop what I’m doing and spend weeks or months and thousands of dollars looking into whatever you need. But in this case, it was just, again, something that sort of came across. And so I looked into it, and I noticed that the first thing I noticed was that it was primarily on tabloids, right? So we’re talking like New York Post and things like that. That was sort of a giveaway like, all right, well, this is not CNN. This is the Post. And one thing I noticed pretty quickly was that this actually was not a new story. This happened in November 2023.

CW: Oh, so it’s being recycled around Easter.

0:14:40
BR: Right, exactly. So it was recycled and circulating again. So I’m like, okay, well, I didn’t really have time to do a whole investigation, but you know let me spend a couple hours I don’t see see if I can make something out of it so the story was accompanied by a couple links to some videos and In the videos that I watched it did look like there basically there was a there was a crowd in a church, and there was a figure behind glass of Mary and The the person was taking a video of it, and it did seem like there was some some crying, weeping, going down her cheeks. I looked at it a couple times and I thought, well, that’s, you know, that did seem weird. And so my first thought was actually that that somebody had had put some non-drying oil, which is often what you see in these cases, in the in the corner of her eye, but and then closed the closed the glass case because it was behind glass and that was sort of a Factor but it seemed odd to me. One thing I noticed when I was watching the videos was that the the crowd wasn’t reacting. It was like oh my god. This is Mary is weeping It was just sort of like oh, you know so the lack of reaction from both the the person that was was a was cell phone taping and others was kind of strange to me. But I’m looking anyway, this actually occurred in the place of El Chanal, which is south of Guadalajara. And the story went that basically a young boy… and again as a folklorist, I was seeing all sorts of like, “you don’t say.” So the story was that a young boy had happened to glance up, you know, the innocence of children happened to glance up and he saw the Virgin Mary crying and you know, all of a sudden everyone said, oh my God, and they came around and did the whole thing. So, I was reading the story and as I read it, I recognized a name, which is Luigi Garoscelli, who is a CSI fellow. So, I’m like, oh, Luigi already looked into this. That’s odd. I’ve known Luigi for many, many years. He lives in Italy along with Massimo Polidoro and he’s a fairly well-known, well-respected skeptic.

0:17:00
CW: And was he the young boy? Is this his origin story?

BR: No, but you’re getting closer.

0:17:06
CW: Okay.

0:17:06
BR: So it actually mentions, again, it mentions a prominent skeptic, who has, you know, Luigi has done stuff including on the Shroud of Turin and other things, so I was actually like, wow, the New York Post quoted a skeptic? I’m impressed.

0:17:24
CW: Well, did they quote him or did they say it baffled him?

0:17:27
BR: So, no, they quoted him. So here’s the quote from Luigi. It says, quote, you need a hollow statue made of plaster or ceramic, which must be covered on the outside with a waterproof layer. By filling the statue with water through an imperceptible hole at the top, the porous material will absorb it, but the outer layer will prevent it from coming out. The idea is that if the glaze near the eye were to be scratched, the water would leak and give the appearance of tears. The problem here was that I recognized that that couldn’t be the answer here. The Statue of Mary is not hollow. There’s no reason it would be hollow. It’s clearly not hollow and it’s behind glass So I’m thinking what the hell is going on here. The New York Post is quoting a prominent skeptic giving the wrong explanation.

CW: That makes skeptics look dumb.

BR: It does.

0:18:17
CW: Was Luigi even talking about this particular statue when he said that?

BR: Well, that’s that’s what I figured out, right?

0:18:28
CW: Oh.

0:18:29
BR: So I was looking more closely and I realized what had probably happened, and I later confirmed this with Luigi in an email later that day. What had happened was the New York Post writer was lazy, and instead of asking Luigi or me or Joe Nickell or Kenny Biddle or anybody else actually, what is your explanation, they they basically just cribbed from a generic explanation for other weeping statues.

0:18:54
CW: Like this is a way it can be done.

0:18:56
BR: Right. Exactly. The problem is that Luigi is quoted in this particular context referring to, it makes it sound like Luigi investigated this statue. And his explanation is that this is what’s going on.

0:19:12
CW: Was he pissed to find this out?

0:19:14
BR: I mean, I didn’t speak to him. It was via email, but he clearly was not happy. And he was surprised. I mean, again, I had correctly surmised just from a journalistic point of view, like how this whole thing had happened. But then the question is, OK, well, then what did happen? Right. So Luigi’s explanation, which, again, is misleadingly framed as applying to this case, but clearly wasn’t, that wasn’t it. But then what did happen, right? And so I looked at it again, and I was watching the video again, and I came across another news story that said the Catholic diocese was also skeptical. Priests from the Diocese of Colima examined the statue and determined that in fact, the weeping was silicone tears.

0:20:04
CW: Silicone Tears, that sounds like an 80s band.

0:20:07
BR: Silicon Tears. Opening for Steel Panther D-Day now.

0:20:10
CW: Well, go go Catholic Church for swinging in and debunking because they do that sometimes.

0:20:16
BR: So the diocese priest again had said, well, you know, this is not, basically saying that the statue was created that way. Like it’s not, it wasn’t weeping. And so, and at first, I’ll be honest with you, at first I thought that the Catholic diocese investigator was wrong as well, because I had looked at the video, as I mentioned, I watched the video a couple times, and the thing is, the camera’s moving all around. It’s not this very stable, it’s sort of, the light isn’t great, the camera’s moving, so it’s not clear, it’s hard to really gauge whether the tear on Mary’s cheek is moving or not. It kind of looks like it is, but when I look back, and I took a closer look, I realized that it was not moving, that it was in fact silicone.

0:21:01
CW: Part of the statue.

0:21:03
BR: Right, and that explains, so I’m piecing all this together, so that explains exactly why nobody at the time was saying, oh my God, Mary’s weeping.

0:21:12
CW: They just handed the camcorder to Patterson or Gimlin and it looked like something that wasn’t.

0:21:17
BR: Right, and so here, and this is one reason that I think this is an interesting story to talk about, is that it was the case of where, from what I could tell, and I spent a fair amount of time on this, is that the footage itself was non-remarkable. That is, it was ordinary footage of pilgrims in the church. They, at the time, again, nobody says either in English or Spanish, it’s a miracle. Oh my god, this is amazing. It’s like, oh look at that, here’s another statue. And so what they had done was they had taken this otherwise ordinary video of an ordinary statue that everybody in the room knew was not weeping and it was put in the context of people saying, oh my God, all these people are astonished by this.

0:22:07
CW: You think they would have at least gone through the trouble of like swapping out the soundtrack or erasing the soundtrack?

0:22:13
BR: Well, here’s what I think happened. I think that basically it was sensationalized and sort of misrepresented. I don’t think, I think that you’re giving them too much credit. I think basically what happened was that somebody wanted to get clicks, maybe the New York Post, a daily fail, take your pick, and they had heard about this weeping statue which was reported. I mean again, that part of the story was true. There actually was this mystery, but the video that accompanied the story was not, that was taken at a different time, that was not evidence of the miracle that was presented. So I don’t think that anybody, again, I can’t tell, but based upon my analysis, it wasn’t that somebody was intentionally trying to fool anybody. It was more a matter of, hey, here’s a weeping statue, here’s a video, and they just, oh, here’s somebody recording this tear on this thing. We’ll just throw them together. And they didn’t, or either didn’t know or didn’t care to recognize that in fact, the video if they if they took a closer look at it actually undermines the story.

0:23:22
CW: Yeah, that’s that sounds about right. Well, another topic I wanted to bring up in this grab bag was near and dear to my heart here because I lived in Baltimore for going on about 10 or 11 years. And the Francis Scott Key Bridge, which I have driven over a number of times myself, is no more. It collapsed after being struck by a huge container ship, as I’m sure everybody listening to this knows about, unless you have not turned on a television in the past two weeks. I’m not going to talk about the bridge collapsed but what’s happened afterwards. Did you hear it collapsed because of DEI practices?

0:24:07
BR: Yeah, I um… DEA? The Drug Enforcement Agency?

CW: No, it had nothing to do with drugs, although maybe it did. The investigation is ongoing and it was a Singaporean ship and Singaporeans are pretty tough on drugs. I’d be really surprised if anybody on that ship was high, but yeah, they lost power and crashed into one of the pylons and the bridge went down, taking with it, was it six construction workers?

PR: Yeah, I believe that was the number of people who died. A couple survived. But luckily, the warning coming from the ship did prompt authorities to stop traffic on the bridge.

CW: That was actually amazing. The ships pilot radioed the port authority. It was just immediately stop the traffic, stop the traffic, stop the traffic. And they you know, dozens of people were probably saved, maybe more because the bridge on that traffic, you can see it going on the video like zing, zing, zing, zing, zing, zing, and then it stops and the whole bridge goes down.

0:25:22
PR: Yeah, it’s pretty remarkable.

CW: Yeah. So of course, politicians are going to politician themselves over everything here. And there was one tweet that went out by a guy in Utah named Phil Lyman. He’s a Utah state legislator and he’s running for governor. And he tweeted out many things about this. One of them was DEI equals DIE. Did you see that?

0:25:54
PR: Wow, so, so funny.

0:25:56
CW: Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, he said, this is what happens when you have governors who prioritize diversity over the well-being and security of citizens, was one of his other posts. And he got a lot of criticism from other legislators over this and he started backpedaling and said tht his staff wrote the post. But  he wasn’t going to delete it or retract it or apologize.

0:26:28
BR: So, hold on, I don’t understand the premise. What connection is he making?

0:26:36
CW: Oh, I’d like to understand that, too. Yeah. He tried to clarify. Here’s what he said when he was trying to backpedal slash clarify. Correlation is not causation. I don’t think that I was saying DEI caused this bridge to collapse. I’m saying you’ve got this DEI initiative that’s going on in these places, and then you clearly have human failures that create a disaster like this,” Lyman said.

BR: OK, so just so I’m – so he’s referring to the captain and crew who were not American citizens anyway, is that right?

0:27:11
CW: I believe they were all Singaporeans, right? I mean, there have been some politicians of this camp that have pointed out the fact that two of the port commissioners are brown people, black people actually. There’s a black woman and a black man that serve as port commissioners. I believe there are six port commissioners and two of them are African-American. And in Baltimore, that is not an indication of DEI. If anything, it’s the opposite.

0:27:50
PR: Yeah, and it’s my understanding that in order to leave the harbor, they need a special harbor captain right that like it I feel like someone else was actually helping them get the boat it wasn’t even the Singapore crew that was moving the boat at that point or am I wrong about that?

0:28:22
CW: You know I didn’t look into that exactly I was I was just reading about legislators and getting angry.

PR: Okay we’ll move on I have some other things to say about DEI but I’m not sure about D.E. and I, but I want to hear this because this is very interesting.

CW: Well, the other target that that people seem to take aim at here, both politicians and random people on Twitter slash X, is Mayor Brandon Scott, who is mayor of Baltimore right now. Again, a black man, a youngish black man. He’s the DEI mayor, they said. And many commentators, I think rightly so, said, you know, people are saying he’s the DEI mayor because they don’t want to say a racial slur, but that’s what they mean. And having lived in Baltimore for 10 years, and I know people who are in Baltimore government. I went to college with the comptroller of Baltimore, wonderful, nice guy, also a black man. Baltimore is like 64% black, I looked it up. So if they happen to vote in a black person, I mean, how exactly does DEI apply there? How do you get a DEI mayor? Were people told who to vote for? Did the government tell people to vote for somebody because of a quota? That doesn’t work that way, it’s not a corporation, they’re not hiring people. So yeah, sorry, that’s all I have to say about that.

0:30:05
PR: No, it is interesting.

0:30:07
BR: Yeah. I mean, that, you know, one of the things that I kept seeing was that it was a planned event, a planned distraction in some cases.

0:30:14
CW: Yeah. Terrorism or inside job or, yeah, we’re going to have right. There’s about this. Yeah.

0:30:19
BR: And you had Alex Jones saying that you had the former 60 Minutes correspondent, Laura Logan, saying that others as well. And I challenged somebody, a woman who, by the way, she did happen to write Trump 2024 several times. So I don’t know that she’s a Trump supporter, but I’m guessing so. And I said, well, I’m just curious. I mean, she said it was a planned distraction. She actually wrote distraction three times. I was like, okay, what I’m again, in all seriousness, what exactly do you think the ship’s crew is trying to distract people from and why? What I mean, let’s just say you’re right. Let’s just say that this was an extremely well choreographed planned event, false flag, whatever it is. What exactly do you think that this Singaporean crew was trying to distract CNN from? Explain this to me. I mean, what exactly, you know…

0:31:25
CW: Hillary’s emails, Ben.

0:31:27
BR: Hillary’s email or Hunter Biden’s laptop. It just doesn’t make any sense. This crew, their lives are ruined, they will always be known as the crew that ran to this bridge, and they threw away their careers to distract from what?

0:31:45
CW: Yeah, and we’ll be enduring endless lawsuits that result from this, and insurance investigations, and everything else.

0:31:54
BR: Again, just to sort of circle back to this notion that it was somehow choreographed or planned. And again, I saw this several times, including people who were saying, well, isn’t it suspicious that the police were there right away and able to shut down the bridge? No, it’s not at all. In fact, they’d already shut down one of the lanes because they were repairing potholes. In fact, it’s really lucky that they were doing construction on the bridge. And in many cases, certainly here in New Mexico, there’s often if there’s lane closures, there are police on hand to to help Navigate traffic and especially on such an important bridge So there’s nothing remotely suspicious about the fact that police were already there and on either side of the bridge but the thing that really jumped out at me was the the notion of how this captain and crew could have so expertly guided this 116 ton ship with 4,600 containers at night, the currents and the wind and other factors, into just the right spot on that pylon at just the right time. I mean, this would require astonishing skill and precision.

CW: In fairness, I mean, with a ship that big, I don’t think you have to find the sweet spot funny bone. I think if you hit it, it’s gonna go down.

0:33:19
BR: Well, no, but you’d have to know where you have to be hitting it.

CW: Yeah, I mean because the pylons are not spaced every, you know, ten feet. They’re pretty far apart.

BR: Well, right, but it could have just had a glancing blow. It could have, I mean, you know…

0:33:34
CW: There’s any number of things that could have happened. It’s like they couldn’t have done this if they tried.

0:33:40
BR: And not only that, but they couldn’t have rehearsed it. Yeah. I mean, yeah, you couldn’t have. Yeah. I mean, their their job is to move cargoes, not to I mean, the idea that this this was somehow planned or choreographed or or intended to happen. If you look at the just the logistics of it and the practicalities is just absurd. Yeah.

0:33:58
CW: But before we leave this topic, I do want to say a couple more things about DEI. I read up on some stuff and as skeptics, you know, we can push back in some very traditionally skeptic ways. We can look at the numbers. If somebody says we’re all experiencing some DEI doomsday and look at what’s happening and the quality of everything is going down because all these brown people are getting involved. What you can do is you can point to numbers. You can say, OK, if DEI is changing everything, why is the airline pilot industry and the port commissioners and any other industry you want to look at that is trying to become more diverse? Why are they all still very majority white? A lot of them, very majority white male. So, I mean, the numbers don’t lie right now. We aren’t in some sort of weird, bizarro universe where, you know, oh, the poor white man can’t get a job because everything is 95 percent brown and female now. And these same, you know, again, mostly fed propaganda by certain political interests. made by DEI because they’re literally blind to it. Culture changes are slow, but they’re measurable and they have a net positive effect. And that’s why companies are doing DEI. They’re not doing it out of the kindness of their heart. Companies are like, you know, faceless, mindless creatures that just think about shareholders, but there are shareholder benefits to a lot of DEI initiatives. And I can’t speak on this as well as you can, Pascual. I mean, what am I missing here?

0:35:38
Yeah, I think the big kind of big picture here is, you know, what is DE&I? It’s not affirmative action, which seems to be what some people think it is. There was a time in the early days of affirmative action where there were these racial quotas that were part of the process. That was deemed illegal in the seventies. So we have not done that in most of any of our lifetimes. Since then, it was simply a way to make sure that places of employment and education reflected the minority makeup of their communities, and those organizations did nothing to impede or show bias against minority groups and women. Unfortunately, it was dealt a pretty lethal blow last year on the education side. It was actually functionally kind of removed from the equation for universities. But that isn’t DE&I, that’s Affirmative Action. So DE&I is a little more nebulous. It’s not a legal initiative, doesn’t have a set definition really. How it’s applied is determined by the organizations who implement these initiatives. For the most part, it’s just a framework for promoting the fair treatment and inclusion of all people, with a focus on groups who are underrepresented and have been subject to discrimination. So the way it looks in practice is mostly about educating people within an organization to kind of build a greater understanding, better cooperation between group members. Sometimes it’s done in the form of like presentations that talk about different cultures and groups.

CW: Oh no, learning.

0:37:25
PR: Right.

0:37:26
CW: We can’t have learning about other people.

0:37:29
PR: Yeah. And sometimes it’s talking about the ways we have built in biases. Other times we do actually breach difficult topics like racism, sexism, homophobia. The important thing to keep in mind is there’s no law that says DE&I has to be implemented. It’s not a government mandate. It’s just a voluntary practice that a lot of corporations and organizations have decided to invest in because it does bring a lot of value and positivity to workers’ experience, as well as set some expectations as to how a company should operate in consideration of minority groups. So the reality is DEI is not a law. There’s nobody making anyone do anything.

0:38:16
CW: It’s not a government boogeyman, people have the wrong understanding of what it is which is what it is.

PR: Yeah, and thatís kind of what drives me to be involved at the level I am with my employer. Iím on the national board for DEI and I try to be very clear about it to people that this isn’t like, I’m not checking boxes. I’m not here to force people into, you know, anything. We’re just here to educate people. We’re here to sort of spread a culture of inclusion, you know, or trying to be more diverse because the reality is that, you know, a lot of us from minority groups are historically kind of barred from a lot of these spaces and we’re just trying to get a foot in the door. And the reality is that DE&I just gives us a way for everyone to sort of understand where those those barriers are and sort of help break them down. I don’t see why that’s controversial but of course, you know, certain people have turned it into a political thing and unfortunately it’s not much I can do about that but you know, it’s here and I know it’s become kind of the new CRT on Fox News, but it’s not going to go away. I mean, even Fox has DEI initiatives.

0:39:48
CW: Yeah, and it’s been a net positive for these companies. I do some writing that explains DEI initiatives and offers courses and stuff for various of my corporate clients that I do PR work for. And, you know, sometimes it’s as simple as making sure you have a decent porta potty at a construction site, because guess what? Some construction workers are ladies and they don’t just relieve themselves in a ditch.

0:40:13
PR: Yeah, exactly.

0:40:14
CW: It could be something as simple as that. And people are making it out to like it’s the end all of American culture is going down the tubes. But anyway, that’s all we have to say about that. Ben, what do you have that’s interesting out of the grab bag next?

0:40:31
BR: Well, I recently saw a film titled Late Night with the Devil. Have you heard of this?

0:40:37
CW: I have heard of it. I had several people send me like a little snippet of it, and I have not watched it yet. So I’m glad you have for me. Tell me what you thought.

0:40:46
BR: I thought it was pretty good. It’s ostensibly a found footage film, which is not my favorite genre. Butterfly Kisses I will make an exception for. Like time travel films, I have a low tolerance. I think what it was is that Blair Witch just burned it for me.

0:41:05
CW: Blair Witch was a little hard to sit through. Now is Late Night with the Devil, is that available on Netflix or Hulu? Where do you watch it?

0:41:13
BR: It’s currently in theaters, which is where I saw it. It’ll probably be in Netflix and streaming soon, but certainly as of right now, early, the first week of April, it is in theaters.

0:41:26
CW: I forgot movies can go to theaters still.

0:41:28
PR:  I believe it’s produced by Shudder, so Shudder will be the streaming service. Horror fans, if you don’t have Shudder, you should have it. It’s amazing.

0:41:37
BR: Check it out. So I won’t give a whole review of it. I don’t want to give anything away but I’ll just sort of give you an overview. So basically it’s set in the mid 70s like 1977 on Halloween night and there is a talk show host who sort of always and also ran. He was gonna be the next Johnny Carson but didn’t quite make it. He was just this this guy he keeps trying to you know do this this late night talk show called Night Owls. Finally he has this one last ditch effort. What if we had an exorcism live on the show?

CW: What could go wrong?

0:42:14
BR: What could go wrong, exactly. And so yeah, so the aesthetic, I mean, for those of us who remember the 70s at least, in some extent, the tone is there, the polyester, for those who used to watch the time show Johnny Carson, there would be the cards, you know, Be Right Back, and More to Come, that sort of thing. So it has all that, and then one thing that really jumped out at me was that James Randi is, well, he’s not there. He is called Carmichael the Conjurer.

0:42:54
CW: OK.

0:42:55
BR: It is clearly Randi. It is. It could not be anybody but Randi.

CW: Who plays this Carmichael?

BR: It is a guy named Ian Bliss.

CW: I haven’t heard of him.

BR: So for skeptics, it’s an interesting little… Again, there’s lots of reasons to like it from this kind of sleazy 70s genre, when of course you had Jenny Jones, you had Jerry Springer, you had Geraldo. And keep in mind, as we’ve talked about often on the show, this was the precursor to the Satanic Panic. More in the 80s, of course, but in 77, of course, you had the Exorcist come out a couple years earlier. So a lot of this was bouncing around. And so Randi, I mean Carmichael the Conjurer, shows up and he’s sort of an abrasive skeptic. Again, it is unmistakably Randi. And they actually mention my organization, CSICOP, although by a slightly different name. Again, unmistakably our organization. And he’s brought on to basically debunk a mentalist or a guy who claims to be psychic. And of course, this obviously echoes Randi being on The Tonight Show, exposing Irregular’s tricks and things like that. But that was a fun little twist. And at one point, actually, Randi, I’m sorry, Carmichael, pulls out his check, right? He offers, he waves around his check that he keeps in his pocket for, I think it was a half a million dollars for anybody that can prove. So again, this is the writers and directors clearly I think it was a duo, Australian brothers if I’m not mistaken. They clearly are familiar with CSICOP and Randi and all that.

0:44:42
CW: I wonder if our friend Richard Saunders did any consulting on this. I’d have to ask him.

0:44:49
BR: I’d be curious. Again, I don’t want to give too much away, but basically it is found footage and that’s how the story is framed. So it’s like, you know, on this one Halloween night in 77, he’s trying to do this whole thing and then, you know, Randi’s there or Carmichael’s there and this guy. And it’s interesting because, you know, you do see, you know, Randi or Carmichael exposing, you know, some of the cold reading stuff. So in that regard, it does have a couple lessons for skeptics, as for example, did Nightmare Alley, for those who saw that. But then the the actions shift to this young girl who is allegedly possessed and her guardian figure, this woman, is, you know, at first reluctant to have her do this live exorcism, but she sort of pressured into it, and hey, we could do this for ratings, and then all hell breaks loose. But anyway, it’s a hoot. It has a couple of flaws, but on the whole, I would recommend Late Night with the Devil.

0:45:45
CW: Noted.

0:45:46
PR: I’m excited to see it. I’ve been excited since I first saw a trailer a while back. And, and, uh, I I’m actually very encouraged to hear you, uh, uh, recommend it that much, cause I think, uh, you’re, you’re probably the best person to hear that from.

0:46:05
CW: Yeah.

0:46:06
BR: Yeah, I will add one thing that jumped out at me was that, and again, I don’t want to give too much away, but at one point, Randi is seen, he’s being challenged. It’s the typical case where, you know, you’re on stage, something amazing happens, and then the host turns to the skeptic and says, explain that, sir. And unfortunately, at one point in the film, Randi Carmichael is asked to explain this and his explanation is clearly wrong. I mean, it’s wrong in a way that nobody in the audience seems to recognize it. In other words, that’s what was frustrating to me was that the skeptic, the token skeptic, is shown giving a self-evidently wrong answer to something that everybody just saw, and the script treats it like it was a plausible explanation. So again, I’m coming at it as an investigator, and I have my own groove to it, I get that. But that was annoying to me that in much way, you know, Garlicelli, Luigi, I talked about the case earlier with the weeping statue. He’s quoted as giving the wrong explanation for this phenomena. In the same way in this film, Randi/Carmichael is seen giving the wrong explanation for the phenomena and it passes by unremarked. It’s not like anyone says, you got that wrong. It’s like, oh, wow, OK.

0:47:32
CW: That is that is the the fate of pretty much all skeptics in horror movies.

0:47:36
BR: Yeah.

0:47:37
CW: Ghost movies, horror movies, supernatural movies. Was Carmichael eaten or devoured or killed viciously by some demonic spirit in this? Can you?

0:47:50
BR: Yes, but…

CW: Yes, but?

0:47:51
BR: No, but, but, but, so how it happens is beautifully done. So what happens is, and I have to tell you this just because it was so great so so yes again slight spoiler Randi/Carmichael is on stage and he’s being confronted by this thing again you can probably guess from the name from the title of the film I literally laughed out loud I’m not a lol kind of guy but I literally laughed out loud when I saw this so Randi/Carmichael is being confronted with this obviously genuinely supernatural, demonic, scary thing. And just before he gets fried, he holds up his check. Like, here you go!

CW: Oh my gosh!

0:48:35
BR: It’s like, okay, here’s a check for half a million. So I have to say that was a brilliant touch.

CW: In the spirit of a fictional piece, I think Randi would have liked that.

BR: I give kudos. That was just the icing on the cake for that scene. So even the, so yeah, the film was worth it for me just for that scene.

CW: Oh, okay. All right. Well, well, moving on. We also, in addition to having Easter, we had April Fool’s Day. Did you guys suffer through any pranks or see any particularly amazing pranks on April Fool’s Day?

PR: I usually wake up April 1st every year with with my skeptic hat on already so I feel like most of it was kind of the same stuff where it was like companies announcing kind of outlandish ideas or people announcing they were pregnant or something but yeah so it wasn’t super exciting but I did I always warn everyone at the beginning of the day. I hope nothing really cool happens to you today because I’m not believing anything you say.

0:49:44
CW: I had a number of atheist friends find God on April 1st.

0:49:48
PR: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I’m sure some of them were mutual friends because I saw those.

0:49:52
CW: Yeah. April Fool’s is kind of a mixed bag because on the one hand, skeptics like it. You know, I like it because it’s the one day that everybody is more skeptical. They don’t just read some garbage on Facebook and swallow it hook, line or sinker. Now, there are also some truly artful hoaxes that some years you see from creative people who have clearly given it a lot of thought and were waiting for April Fool’s Day to release this. And also, sometimes these are professionally crafted marketing efforts by companies, which is an interesting, you know, more recent development, but it goes back further than you might think. It’s also, as a skeptic, it’s also April Fool’s is a day that kind of lives on forever because many of the joke, the ha-ha posts or social media things you see, or companies or individuals, they get recycled forever and ever and screen capped or turned into something else. Then when they show up later, not in the context of April 1st, people tend to believe them a bit more. So, yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, when you’re look when you’re trying to debunk some sort of urban legend thing that stems from some kind of social media post or photographic proof, one of the number one questions is, okay, let’s look for this, was this an April 1st thing that somebody posted? And oftentimes it does, oftentimes you track it down or you find out on Snopes, you’re like, oh, and such and such thing, you know, really did come out with this on April 1st, does an April 1st joke, you’re like, oh, well, that explains that. But these April 1st things do tend to sort of live on as little zombies on the internet. The Museum of Hoaxes online has got a top 100 April 1st prank list. You guys care to take a guess as to what time frame, like what year the number one April Fools prank was pulled off?

0:51:52
BR: This is one that is specifically tied to April Fools.

0:51:58
CW: Specifically tied to April Fools. It’s not just a generic prank.

0:52:01
BR: Okay, so I don’t think War of the World was, was, um, that’s exactly where my brain was.

0:52:06
CW: Oh, a brilliant kind of a hoax, yeah, but not, not an April 1st hoax.

PR: Oh man, I would say probably, my, I want to say 80s. I feel like 80s were a very gullible time.

CW: There were a lot of them in the 80s, Yes, yes. Their number one, though, was actually for April 1st, 1957, is what the Museum of Hoaxes chose. And it was called the Swiss Spaghetti Harvest.

0:52:38
BR: Oh, I remember something about that.

0:52:40
The respected BBC news show, Panorama, announced that thanks to a very mild winter and the virtual elimination of the dreaded spaghetti weevil, Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crock. And they accompanied this announcement with footage of Swiss peasants pulling strands of spaghetti down from trees. Huge numbers of viewers were taken in. And I’m going to have to track down that footage. That sounds delightful. I also wanted to mention something a bit scarier. For their number three, they chose the eruption of Mount Edgecumbe. April 1st, 1974, so like 20 years later, the residents of Sitka, Alaska, woke to a very disturbing sight. Clouds of black smoke were rising from the crater of Mount Edgecumbe. E-D-G-E-C-U-M-B-E. That sounds like a dirty word.

PR: Yeah, I was gonna say, are we gonna have to bleep this one out?

CW: It’s got a B in it, so it rhymes with crumb. Now this is a long dormant volcano that’s near Sitka. What had actually happened was there was a guy named Porky Bicker. Again.

0:54:17
BR: I don’t know. I’m skeptical already. Porky Bicker.

0:54:21
CW: It also sounds dirty.

0:54:22
BR: I call it bullshit.

0:54:23
CW: Porky Bicker.

0:54:24
PR: That’s a name you could set your watch by.

0:54:27
CW: Well, I guess having this name gave him a very resilient sense of humor because he had flown hundreds of old tires into the volcano’s crater and lit them on fire that morning, all in an attempt to fool the city dwellers, a successful attempt at that, to fool the people in the city into believing that the volcano was stirring back to life. Now this is 1974, just six years later you’ll remember that Mount St. Helens erupted and when that happened apparently a Sitka resident wrote to Porky Bicker and said, this time you’ve gone too far.

0:55:05
BR: So was that perhaps a a pseudonym of Carlos Danger?

CW: Carlos Danger, Porky Bicker, I don’t know.

BR: That would be my assumption, but I don’t know.

0:55:18
CW: All right, but there’s a whole gallery of April Fool’s efforts. There’s one to 100. And then there’s also a number of corporate ones which have been going on for quite a while. We were just mentioning our friend Richard Saunders. I wonder if he remembers a Sydney businessman named Dick Smith.

0:55:37
BR: I’m sure he knows Dick is famous.

PR: I feel like these are just all made up names at this point.

0:55:43
CW: We’ve got it. We’ve got a guy in the Senate for a while named Dick Buttons. I’ll believe anything. So Dick Smith, who was sort of like a Richard Branson of the 70s, I guess. He towed a giant iceberg or he appeared to be towing a giant iceberg up from Antarctica. He wanted to tow it into Sydney Harbour, and he claimed that he was going to cut it into small ice cubes that would, you know, I guess they’re bespoke, specially flavoured ice cubes from Antarctica, and everybody would want to buy these ice cubes. So he had been promoting this for quite a while, and then he showed up on April 1st with the giant iceberg behind a boat. And, uh, it did sort of fizzle quite literally when it rained. And, uh, once the tarp and everything got wet, it, it became clear that it wasn’t an iceberg, it was a bunch of like firefighting foam and shaving cream and such under, under some white sheets. So that kind of fizzled. Um, but Hey, good on him. He, he, he fooled people for a while.

0:56:51
BR: Well, speaking of these sort of pranks being whitewashed, a couple years back, I’m going to say maybe four or five years ago, there was an article that was submitted to Skeptical Inquirer magazine. It was a group effort. I think there were four or five authors. One And one of the authors had written to some extent on Bigfoot. And she had mentioned this one Bigfoot study that was, again, it was a, ostensibly it was an actual legitimate Bigfoot study on, I think it was like common relations and this and that. And I happened, just because of what I do, I happen to have remembered that was a prank.

0:57:34
CW: Oh, did it come out on April 1st?

0:57:36
BR: It did. And so I very delicately emailed the author. I said, just so you know, you should check the date on this. This is an April Fool’s joke. I never got thanked for it, but I saved her some face because she took it seriously and literally and she was about to spend two paragraphs talking about this.

0:58:03
CW: Well, this bigfoot said you saved her some face like that, you know, in terms of she didn’t publish that. But I bet it was embarrassing to have your editor point that out.

0:58:13
BR: Probably so. Yeah.

0:58:15
CW: Oh, now, some of these April Fool’s pranks by companies backfire. There’s a ton of storied April Fool’s pranks. These days, it’s mostly on social media, but back in the day, you actually had to take out an ad in a newspaper to pull a prank. Like Taco Bell announced that it was going to be buying the Liberty Bell or renaming it or something. BMW, like throughout the 80s and 90s, for some reason, BMW always did something for April 1st. Like they announced some feature, like your car would have a weight sensor. So if somebody heavier than you or lighter than you tried to drive your car away, it would be an anti-theft device, meaning you wouldn’t be allowed to gain five pounds or lose five pounds, or a special like mini windshield wiper just to keep your BMW logo clean, stuff like that. But sometimes in an effort to do something outlandish for April Fool’s Day, a marketing team or sometimes an individual in a company just does something boneheaded and dumb. And so then you have to do crisis control and backpedal. And one example was in 2018, Elon Musk announced that Tesla was bankrupt. And I guess in his mind, he thought, well, I’m so far from bankrupt. Nobody will believe this. Well, the stock plummeted, so enough people believed it. You know, it’s sort of like the reverse of like the secret, like if you envision it, it will happen. I wouldn’t say Tesla’s bankrupt, but he certainly didn’t do the company any favors that day. And you guys might remember this one. This one was one of those anger, anger inducing ones. In 2001, as an April 1st thing, there was a Florida waitress at a Hooters bar was promised a huge prize because she had, they had announced this competition for whoever sells the most beer and she had won. And on April 1st, she was the winner. She sold the most beer that day and she was going to receive a new Toyota. Do you know where I’m going with this?

PR: I do remember this one. Yeah.

CW: So they took her out, they blindfolded her and took her out to the parking lot. And they filmed it all, of course, as a like prank. And they gave her a toy. Yoda, like, you know, the little green guy from Star Wars. And yeah, that was just so mean. And it of course, backfired. And Hooters got a tremendous amount of bad press from this. There was, there was also like a radio station that did something similar and it was like a toy car they gave away. And both of those tremendously bad press. They had to do damage control and she quit her job and got herself a lawyer. And they ended up settling out of court. And according to her lawyer, it was an undisclosed amount. But she did win enough from her previous employer to pick any Toyota on the lot, according to her lawyer.

1:01:16
PR: So good.

1:01:17
CW: These days I think marketers and companies are getting a little bit more savvy, at least the big, the big companies that have professional marketing teams are getting a bit more savvy about what they should post or do or promote for April 1st. And I took note of, there was one locally here, Green Valley Ranch. It’s like a resort hotel casino type thing off the strip. And they had a cute little like social media post that showed their property with what was clearly a badly photoshopped like horse ranch put in front of their property with like dirt and a corral and a bunch of horses like frolicking around and some rainbows and some rabbits and stuff. And they said you know we’re putting the ranch back in Green Valley Ranch. Come play, you know, come to our petting zoo, blah, blah, blah. Or, you know, there was the National Park Service took the St. Louis arch and moved it to the arches park in Utah. Stuff that is clearly, obviously fake. Um, the bad photo shopping helps. I think honestly, if Green Valley Ranch had used AI to create something, people would have fallen for it. People would have been like, oh, I’ll bring my kid there tonight and then they get all mad. So it’s not that people are getting more gullible. I think that just that a lot of weird stuff is more believable now. You know, satire is dead. Bizarre things are happening all the time. I think it’s harder to to craft something that’s a marketing message that is also clearly a hoax or enough of a hoax where if people fall for it, it’s all ha ha still good-natured. You know what I mean?

1:02:52
PR: Yeah, yeah, definitely.

BR: Well, there’s a lateral move from marketing crafted hoaxes to media manufactured relationship tests. You guys know what I’m talking about?

1:03:02
CW: Oh, God, I swear it’s just because I’m a woman I probably get pitched like a hundred of those a day.

1:03:06
BR: For this Grab Bag episode, we talked about, you know, little things that we wanted to discuss, have a skeptical angle on, but weren’t really robust enough to have their own thing. So I’ve been having this on my clothesline of ideas, which I have behind me in the office, for a while now. These have been around forever, for a long time, but probably one of the most prominent cases recently was the Barbie movie. I saw a whole bunch of click-baity news articles talking about how there were all these women who were using Barbie as litmus to determine whether or not they should break up with her boyfriend or husband or see if another and the idea was that if the man their lives or I guess woman their lives you know either way didn’t like it or didn’t like it as much or had criticisms or anything. But there was some… The idea, if there was some mismatch, that this was a red flag, that, well, obviously, you know, things aren’t going to work out.

1:04:10
CW: Hey, honey, I know we just survived the pandemic together, but if you don’t like this movie, I have to divorce you.

1:04:18
BR: You know, and then there was also… Do you guys see the orange peel theory?

1:04:27
CW: No. Does this have anything to do with Trump?

1:04:29
BR: No. It doesn’t. This is much more benign than Trump.

1:04:33
CW: I’ve also seen Trump and the pandemic. I have legit seen breakup relationships.

1:04:38
BR: Yeah. Well, you know, so, you know, the germ of truth here is that, of course, you know, and one thing when I was researching these, one thing that often comes up is that a lot of the expert will say, yes, this is silly or this is overblown, but if this prompts a conversation, and of course, yeah, obviously. Sure, if any topic you talk about, whether it’s kids or ice cream or politics, prompts a conversation about, that tells you that you’re going in different directions, then sure. But, you know, the other example I saw was on TikTok. There was this idea that this thing called orange peel theory.

1:05:21
CW: Yeah. What is this?

1:05:21
So the idea is that if a woman, and it’s usually a woman, sometimes a man, but in most of these cases on TikTok, it’s a woman. The idea is that you would ask your significant other to do something like, for example, peel an orange. Depending on the partner’s reaction, that would tell you whether you should be with them or not. So the idea is that, well, you know, if you say, hey honey, could you peel this orange for me? And the guy says, no, screw you, I hate oranges, you know, you can go back to your mother. That’s red flag. Or if the person says, yes, honey, let me peel the orange exactly how you like it. So that was the notion, was that this is a, again, another litmus test for whether your partner is worthy is how they react to doing a simple task.

1:06:16
CW: See, I can’t do that in my household because if I ask my husband to peel me an orange, every orange I get till the end of time will be peeled. I will never be allowed to peel my own oranges again and I will not give up my orange peeling independence.

BR: No, no, you don’t want to do that. But again, it was a case of where this is the problem that I see with it, is that it’s reading so much into this, right? So if you ask someone to, it could be anything, it could be, you know, can you take out the garbage? I mean, take your pick. But in this case, it was just this orange peel. But again, this notion that if they don’t react to your request in a way that you envision they should or that, you know, if they don’t immediately say yeah, I mean, there’s just all these reasons why somebody could say, oh my god, this is red flag. Whereas, of course, you know, maybe they’re not feeling well or Yeah, there’s so many context things here. I mean, are you asking them, you know, in the morning when you’re getting a kid ready for school and like, you know, who the hell has time for that in the middle of a hustle bustle time? Are you know, are you asking because you’ve just gotten your nails done and you’re going to jank them up and wreck a $50 manicure? Are you asking?

CW: There’s like so many other it’s it’s like, like any playwright would say, it’s never just about the orange.

1:07:38
BR: Right, right. And it’s, I mean, I think, again, that’s one of the things I see wrong with it is that it sort of, it sets the other person up to fail, right?

CW: Oh, yeah.

BR: Because this is a test. Well, do you want to be in a relationship with someone who’s always testing you with the latest thing they saw on TikTok? I mean, you know, I don’t. I mean, it’s like, oh, well, you know, according to this, you know, this Cosmopol or, you know, TikTok, I know it just it seems sort of mean spirited and narrow minded. And again, just just like you’re you you have this thing. Well, this is how they should react. Well, they could react in a number of ways. Maybe the person doesn’t like to peel oranges, but they’ll do any number of things for you. So that that just sort of struck me as, you know, typically click baity stuff. There’s usually little or no validity to them. Well, you know, if you talk to relationship people.

1:08:32
CW: Well that kind of content really floats to the top at Tik TOK because people want life solutions boiled down to a piece of video. That’s what people like watching.

BR: Right.

CW: So it, it, it just kind of, it boils down to stuff. That’s not really worth the paper it’s not printed on. When you’re looking for psychological or relationship advice on TikTok or something. Now that said, I’ve seen some really interesting stuff from legitimate licensed therapists who do bundle up some information and like life coaching stuff on TikTok. But I wouldn’t count the orange test as one of those.

1:09:14
BR: Well, and then, of course, the other one that we’re all familiar with is, you know, we all see people on Facebook or elsewhere on social media where they’ll post this obviously cut and pasted thing. It’ll be this sort of generic, you know, I’m not tagging anybody, I’m calling on my peeps, you know, I need four people to post this message, you know, share, don’t comment.

1:09:36
CW: Oh, God, the chain letter of the new millennium.

1:09:40
BR: Yeah, it’s just like, you know, this is to see who cares, who’s listening, right? Like, like, you have to prove that I’m your friend in order to cut. No, screw you. I’m not doing this.

1:09:52
CW: It’s hijacking legitimate things like like suicide awareness or cancer or domestic abuse and so it’s, I don’t know if there’s a word for it, it’s like the opposite of glurge. It’s like a guilt thing, like not only is this a chain letter that I just want you to react with, pass along and propagate like a freaking virus, but I’m going to put something on here that makes you feel like a bad person if you ignore this one, then you’re, you’re being callous to all these people who are depressed and want to take their lives.

1:10:32
PR: Yeah. And as a, as a neurodivergent person, and as a person who’s dealt with depression his entire life, um, I find that stuff really offensive. So just speaking from, uh, the perspective of someone who’s, who’s dealt with this his whole life. Um, I really, I really just please like don’t share this stuff. I will not react to it. I don’t. In fact, it can be a little triggering to me.

1:10:59
CW: You’re giving us all permission to just ignore that crap.

1:11:02
PR: Yeah, please.

1:11:03
CW: Okay.

PR: Please ignore it. Please don’t share it. If you want to say a heartfelt thing, come up with it yourself and say it and tag the people. I mean, please, like I just, I don’t, I don’t like being made to feel guilty for something like that. I don’t play games. I’m not going to interact with it. And, and I am speaking as a person who’s affected by some of that stuff that people mention it doesn’t help me. It’s not you know, I if I’m your friend I care about you and I would hope that’s implied. So don’t share that stuff. I really I don’t like seeing it.

CW: The real question is Pascual. Can you peel this orange for me?

1:11:57
PR: No

1:12:00
CW: Okay.

1:12:01
BR: Ouch.

1:12:02
CW: Correct answer. He was listening when I said I wanted to maintain my orange peel independence.

1:12:09
PR: Yes.

1:12:10
CW: Okay.

(MUSIC)

1:12:11
CW: All right, everybody, that has been our Grab Bag episode, which I know it’s the only Grab Bag episode we’ve done for 2024. Did we do one in 2023?

BR: I don’t recall.

CW: Yeah, I’ll check. I’ll check the archives. In the meantime, if there’s a Grab Bag topic that you think we missed or one that you’d like to hear in a future episode, on the Squaring the Strange Facebook discussion group. Knock on our door and we’ll let you in if you give the right answers. And until then everybody, have a great day. Take care. Bye-bye. See ya.

1:13:04
We would like to extend heartfelt thanks to our top tier sponsor level patrons

1:13:09
sponsor-level patrons Amy Fruchauer-Kelley, Dr. Angela Matkey, Elizabeth Leggett, and Laura Ellis. Thank you for your continued support of our podcast. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor, or just throwing us a buck or two, please visit squaringthestrange on patreon.com and browse our selection of patron rewards. Every bit helps us keep the lights on here, and we are grateful to our generous friends who help us bring you quality content. If you are short on cash and want to just give us moral support, remember to recommend us to a friend, mention us on social media, or give us a review on your favorite podcast dispenser. If you have comments or topics you’d like to see covered, come join our community

1:13:54
on the Squaring the Strange podcast discussion group on Facebook. Squaring the Strange is is a production of Two Heads Studio, LLC. Copyright 2021. Theme music provided by Shriek Back. Additional music by Memory, Keytard and Feathered, and Pasquale Romero. Additional support by Ashley Romero, Robert Sandin, and Alicia Jarvis.

1:14:17
The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of Squaring the Strange, and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Two Heads Studio, Kronos Creative, Center for Inquiry, our advertisers or any other affiliated organizations Center for Inquiry, our advertisers or any other affiliated organizations and employers.

Transcribed with Cockatoo