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.

Pascula Romero: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. I am here with my two co-hosts this week, Celestia and Ben. How are you guys doing?

BR: Doing good, doing good.

Celestia Ward: Pretty well. Awesome, awesome. So we’re going to be doing a little chat about John Edward. Not John Edwards, the guy that ran for vice president, but John Edward, the guy who probably wishes he was vice president, I don’t know. But anyway, you guys went into a John Edward event together a while back, and I’ve already heard some stories about it, quite an entertaining tale.

0:01:12
So we’ll go ahead and get into that in just a minute and but first I’m gonna step out and I’m gonna have you guys do the SwaySo together because it’s something that you both researched this week and I have a baby to take care of.

CW: Well, a couple things came down the pipeline that I’m skeptical of. One of them, I don’t know if you saw this, Ben, there was a waitress named Samantha Heaton who was stiffed for not loving Jesus. Did you hear about that?

BR: I did hear about that.

CW: Ah, yes.

0:01:52
It was just, I’m not saying that it didn’t happen, but it fits a pattern of a number of stories I have found. This one right here, it says that a waitress, Samantha Heaton, was stiffed for not loving Jesus and having a pride tattoo. And she was left a mean note by her patrons who spelled the word tattoo wrong. And a BBC article I found said that the server’s friend, someone named Joelle Mayesh, actually posted it on her Facebook page.

0:02:25
And then a local social media producer, Emily Sotokun, then retweeted it and then a radio station, 97ZOK Online, picked it up after that and suffice it to say it went viral. There was a photo you can see of the girl’s pride tattoo, it’s just like a little stripe of the rainbow colors on her wrist. And then a picture, the picture you see over and over again, these stories of the credit card receipt with a signature. And then instead of a tip, just a mean, nasty little note, criticizing some aspect of the server that is not their ability to serve.

BR: Not relevant to their professional service.

0:03:05
CW: Yes. So this one took an interesting angle in that the defense of Samantha was not, well, religion should never take, should never play a factor in how much you tip. You shouldn’t say, I’m going to tip this person or hire this person or anything based on their religion.

BR: But let’s just take a step back here. Even if that were, how would you know? I mean, let’s just say for a moment that you got the sense that your server was a Baptist instead of an atheist?

0:03:39
Or I mean, how would you even know that?

CW: Unless it came up in conversation or, and many people wear necklaces with crosses on them or Atars of David or a little A or something. But according to the reports that I’ve been reading, she said nothing like that ever came up. And the angle on this wasn’t a defense of, well, you shouldn’t discriminate about religion. It was more like, I am Christian, I do love Jesus. These people were wrong to judge me and think that I don’t love Jesus, where me, just my own myself, I would have far preferred to see some of these stories take an angle of, well, it shouldn’t matter, but instead it kind of seemed like the angle was, oh, she should have been tipped because she wasn’t an evil atheist, she was a good Christian lesbian, so she really should have been tipped.

0:04:25
BR: She’s one of the good ones.

CW: Yeah, but the other stories, it seems like they all follow a pattern. And I’ve got like a litany of ones I’ve found just over the past two years. They tell the story from the server’s point of view. It’s often based only on their Facebook post about the situation or a friend of theirs posted it on Facebook. It emphasizes what a wonderful, caring person they are, how they’re good at their job and they’re friendly to everybody and they’re hurt by this bullying and getting stiffed on a large bill. Actually some of them weren’t even large bills, there was one I found where a waitress got tipped on a $13 bill.

0:05:01
It’s like literally like two or three dollars of a tip she didn’t get and it made the news. This one was significantly higher but anyway, they scold the customer in absentia and say this is really wrong, people please don’t do this, don’t be awful like these people. And then they say, well, we’re kind of, I’m kind of used to it, it does happen all the time because I’m a member of X group. And they, they, they’re not going to let it bring them down, though, they’re going to continue to provide good service and love all people. And sometimes there’s a statement from the restaurant chain or the restaurant, you know, the mom and pop shop, if it’s one of the smaller ones, and they just say, well, we love all of our employees, we’re big on diversity here, it’s wrong to judge people, and a very vague statement.

0:05:44
They don’t say anything like, we’re following this up, and we’re calling the customer, and there’s never any follow-up.

BR: We’re gonna track this down for you.

CW: Or tracking down, or filing a complaint, or banning the person, it’s just, well, we don’t think it’s nice to write notes like this. And then of course, the last part of any one of these stories is the groundswell of support for the server. There’s tweets and comments from people saying, hey, here’s my pride tattoo too, I’m standing in solidarity with you and it’s wrong that people are doing this.

0:06:16
And it’s just that.

BR: I’m with you, don’t feel down, chin up, we’re all in this together.

CW: Yes. There’s a lot of online virtual back patting that goes on. And this story was a little bit different in that the BBC was the only outlet I found that even mentioned there was a little bit of skepticism about this story as to whether or not it really happened. And even they didn’t mention the one glaring thing that I found, a commenter had mentioned this, and it was kind of hard to tell from the small versions of the photo But I went and found some larger versions of the photo. What do you think I found Ben?

0:06:56
BR: I’m guessing that there was some that there was something in the photograph that Pointed to a discrepancy in the in the waitresses a story.

CW: Yes. Well handwriting can differ You can have a signature that’s wildly different from your handwriting. That’s fine in this case on it. If you look at the distractify version of the article, they have a very large photo of the credit card receipt. And the signature is in black ink, and the nasty note is in blue ink. Does that ring a little bit of a bell for you?

BR: Well, it’s just to me that there were two different pens that were used to write that. One of them was – now here’s where it gets interesting, right? The, yeah, the signature, if you forge a signature, you’ve committed a crime that will end you in jail. And that’s fraud. That can, that’s a criminal act. Writing a nasty note on a receipt is not a crime. It could be a prank. It could be a harmless, it could be a hoax. It could be, it could be any number of things.

0:08:01
There’s an unequal weight in how severe the consequences are for one or the other.

CW: Yeah. I don’t know many people who forge signatures, but I do know people who would write a silly note. Well, it’s not silly, it’s hateful and awful, but people do a lot of things to prank their coworkers. Or people do a lot of things to put something on social media to get a groundswell of support. Or for whatever reason, things happen.

0:08:32
And again, on the photograph, it did not look like somebody ran out of ink midway through. It did not look like the signature had, oh, well, that’s where the pen ran out of ink and they had to pick up this other pen. No, they were both fine, just totally different ink colors. But it fits the pattern. I looked at other ones. If you just Google waitress stiffed, you will find a litany of these stories. In April, there was a waitress stiffed by a newlywed couple. The bride left a nasty note scolding her for flirting with her new husband. And then in January of this year, a waitress was stiffed and the couple wrote, we don’t tip black people on the receipt. Last year in Iowa, CNN reported that a waitress was stiffed for quote, not looking normal because she had pink hair and a nose piercing. And last year, about like exactly one year ago in August, a Latina waitress was stiffed and somebody scrawled, we only tip citizens on the receipt. This one caught my eye because I read, you know, I read through all of these. And one of the articles about it by David Moy in HuffPost, he deviated a little bit from the standard way of telling the story in that he there was a there was a part that I highlighted here and it clearly was put in after the fact because there’s a little note that says update August 19th again of 2016.

0:09:46
This story has been updated to include information about the woman accused of signing the receipt – and here’s the inserted paragraph that doesn’t seem to go along with any of, if you read it without the paragraph, it reads exactly like all the other stories.

BR: Typical outrage cycle story.

CW: Point of view, good server, good heart, wonderful lady, very hurt by this hurtful thing, but it happens all the time. We’re standing by her. Anyway, this paragraph stands out. Apparently her grandfather was a guy named John Elledge, and he got involved because he’s a lawyer. It says, as a result, John Elledge said, the incident has become a cause celebre in Harrisonburg. The way I understand it, the woman who signed the receipt is at the restaurant this very second with the police, he said Thursday afternoon. She’s angry and the police are there. Apparently she just signed the receipt. She didn’t write the comment. And that’s where it ends. That’s all that’s said about it. It’s just that two sentences right there. And it doesn’t say, it doesn’t have any follow-up of, well, it has been determined, there’s been an investigation, and it has been determined that she was framed.

0:10:50
And because the reason why this happened is because unlike many of the other Facebook posts, they had her name. Her name was, let me see here, Ada M. Doriot. And they just, they just put the, the credit card receipt with her signature, which was legible. You could read her name. And so of course it got back to this woman. I guess Harrisonburg is small enough where that happened and it resulted in that.

0:11:21
I have always been a little bit paranoid whenever I leave a tip when I leave a tip on the table, which is the thing you do. Oftentimes I’ve heard that the servers get a better percentage of their tips if you just leave cash rather than writing it on the credit card. I put a zero and a slash through it and then I say, tip left in cash on table.

0:11:45
And then I sign my name. And I suppose that…

BR: And you sign your name with the same color ink, presumably.

CW: Yes, I do. Yes, yes, I do.

BR: That’s a smart move on your part.

CW: I know this has been a thing for you too. You’ve had a couple of these pop up on your radar.

BR: Yeah, you know, what’s interesting is, you know, when you look at these stories from a folkloric perspective, it’s what you often see in urban legends, right?

0:12:11
There are certain motifs that recur over and over again. It’s these stories where once you’ve seen enough of these as a folklorist and as an urban legend, it’s like they pop out at you because you see the same thing over and over in different variations.

CW: You mentioned the word glurge one time, right? Except this isn’t like a happy like, you know chicken soup for the soul type glurge. This is like Angry like spicy glurge, right?

BR: I mean look I can understand if you’re you know, there are a couple things jump out at me One is as we talk, you know, how how would you even know that? You know, we don’t tip citizens. Did she mention her citizenship really like, you know, I I don’t have citizenship in this country, but here’s your tacos.

CW: Well, she was a citizen, actually. Her parents were immigrants, but she has been a lifelong citizen of the country.

0:12:58
But again, how would anyone even know that? Unless you brought it up, right? You know, like, oh, you know, you’re an atheist. Well, yeah. Sorry your food’s late. I was eating a baby and sacrifice in the back. Here’s your lunch. How would this even come up?

CW: Then you don’t tip. If you get spare baby parts on their meal because you were eating your lunch over their lunch as an atheist, then yeah, don’t. Don’t tip any atheist servers that do that.

0:13:24
BR: Right. That’s just not worth a tip. I’m always fascinated, as I’ve talked about on the show before, about deception and hoaxes. I find it fascinating the ways that humans invent ways to deceive other people, whether it’s hoaxes, lies, Ponzi schemes. I just.

CW: Well, and sometimes it’s not even a purposeful hoax. I, one thing that happened shortly after, actually it was the same week of this, I had mentioned something to a friend of mine who, he’s a Sommelier in Las Vegas, and he’s worked in the restaurant business for like 14, 15 years.

0:13:57
And he happened to text me a photograph. I have it on my phone, I can show it to you. He texted me a seat and said, well, look what apparently just happened. And it was a, it was a photo of a receipt that had a zero for tip. And it said, get a better job. Somebody just wrote, get a better job on it. And he had just started, he had just told me, yeah, I’ve never seen anything like that happen in any of the restaurants I’ve worked in ever. And then he’s like, whoa, look what apparently just happened. And then within three minutes he texted me back and he said, LOL, nevermind, that was another server pranking one of the other servers, totally fake. But what if I had taken that photograph and crafted something and thrown it up, or let’s say I lost my phone after that or I didn’t get the second text and I never found out, oh, by the way, this was totally fake.

0:14:46
I could see somebody crafting something saying, people shouldn’t do this. And I would be doing that with good intentions. But it would be totally wrong.

BR: This is part of what bothers me about it is there’s this, it feeds into this really dark side of people. We don’t tip black people. Who would write that?

0:15:06
Even if you don’t tip black people, you don’t write that.

CW: Yeah, my friend actually pointed out, he’s like, yeah, people get stiffed. Getting stiffed happens. He’s like, what doesn’t happen is I’ve never seen anybody write something inflammatory or political as a result of stiffing. Usually it’s something you do quietly, quickly, and you get out of there because you’re a cheap bastard or you just want to make a statement about the service, but you don’t want to actually confront anybody because if you were that type of person, you would have talked to the manager about it.

0:15:32
You just run out.

BR: I worked as food service for four or five restaurants over the years. And not, again, I’m not going from anecdote here, I’m not saying that my experience reflects everyone else’s, but not once in all my time in different restaurants did I ever see a tip like that or a message like that, nor did I hear of anybody else having.

CW: Nobody ever like stiffed you for not loving Jesus?

BR: No, no, no. I can tell you because I did this myself, I would write stupid shit on other people’s like, you know, like, you know, nice hair, you know, sad face, you know, but you’re right. I mean, like in this day, I mean, that was, that was, you know, 15, 20 years ago, but in this day and age, you know, if I pulled a prank like that, which I might, um, I could totally see it.

0:16:20
So like, well, you know what? I’d be like, Oh my God, like, like I didn’t, I had no idea that person was going to go crazy over it. But no, the case that it reminds me of is the case back in 2013. It was a woman named Dana Morales. I remember I actually wrote about this. I think it was for Discovery or something. It was a woman in New Jersey, again…

CW: A waitress, yeah.

BR: Oh, yeah, sorry. A waitress in New Jersey.

0:16:57
And she had, again, exactly the, you know, fits exactly the pattern you’re talking about.

CW: From her point of view, the story makes headlines on social media, yeah.

BR: And so she left a note saying, the receipt said, “sorry, I cannot tip because I do not agree with your lifestyle and the way you live your life.” End quote. Again, what does that even mean? I don’t know what that means.

CW: Only somebody who was her roommate or family member would be able to say, I don’t like the way you live your life, which I observe every day.

0:17:28
BR: Right, right, exactly, right. It’s just on a superficial of like, well, clearly it means that they recognize you as gay. No, no, not necessarily. So a lot of times if you look at the linguistic construction of these phrases, it doesn’t reflect how people actually talk. It reflects this sort of caricatured idea of how a racist or homophobe might say it. It doesn’t really reflect how they would actually talk. And that’s one of the clues to me.

0:17:58
But anyway, so this woman, Dana Morales, she said that she got this nasty note. And as often happens, she received an outpouring of public support and she received thousands of dollars in donations. And the pattern that comes across here, and we mentioned it, is that you don’t see anyone agreeing with the hateful content. When these things are public, you don’t see people saying, well, of course you wouldn’t tip a waitress who’s gay. You never hear that.

CW: Maybe on 4chan. There might be a little bit of that going on.

0:18:35
BR: Populated by trolls, of course. But again, you don’t hear anyone saying, yeah, of course you shouldn’t tip someone whose life you disagree with. That just doesn’t happen.

CW: The very fact that they’re throwing up this boogeyman kind of brings all this evidence forth that if the boogeyman exists, it’s not something that people run into every minute of every day.

BR: One of my concerns is that it just adds to this perception that prejudice is more prevalent than it is.

0:19:02
I mean, don’t get me wrong, prejudice exists. No one disputes that. That’s not the question. The question is, are these events happening with regularity? And this is what they say. They say, it’s like, this happens all the time. I just happened to notice this one.

0:19:14
And the fact is that from all the evidence we see, it’s not routinely happening that, you know, people across the country are refusing to tip gay waitresses or Latino waitresses. It’s just, it’s not a, does it happen on occasion? I’m sure it does. It’s not a like a capital T thing.

CW: Well, I read, I remember reading one of the things in one of these stories. I don’t have it written down, but it was an activist who was, you know, a gay rights activist, and he was angry at this thing, at a hoax being perpetrated, saying, when you wrongfully try to make somebody look homophobic who isn’t, it weakens your cause.

0:19:55
And yeah, I fully agree with that. You’ve got to assess the problem. Otherwise, everybody’s going to be like, oh, crying wolf again. Whichis not what we’re trying to do here.

BR: Well, here’s what happened with this case, is she posted this, and actually it’s interesting because again, there’s a common theme here, which is that in this case, Dana Morales, she didn’t contact the media directly with her story, she showed other people, and this is often the case, is that usually the person, the waitress, as you said, it’s sort of like, they tell one or two other people.

0:20:24
CW: Yeah, they want sympathy from their friend group.

BR: Yeah, they’re from the oh my god Isn’t this horrible and then someone else gets outraged on their behalf? So you should not to put up with this. Let me put this on Facebook So the whole world knows how badly were treated. But by that point is too late, right

CW: Well yeah, they have a choice there they can own up to the fact that they exaggerated or lied or they can just let it take its course, right?

BR: Right and you know in its snowballs and oftentimes it’s not intended to be a huge thing and the hoaxer would actually prefer They basically stay local or among friends Because of course, you know when when you have when it when it blows up and goes viral, there’s a spotlight and that that tends to increase the amount of scrutiny because then you’re also either implicitly or explicitly accusing other people This is an accusation. It may or may not be anonymous, but you are accusing other people of really hideous attitude and belief system.

0:21:20
CW: And often they’re nameless people, except for that one that I mentioned. Did she name somebody? Was there anything that, yeah.

BR: Well, here’s the thing. So here’s the thing. So Morales, the details are a bit vague, but in this case, because it did get so much attention, the family that left her the tip saw that and they’re like, hold on, I was there that day, I know, I was at a restaurant.

CW: The family that allegedly stiffed her.

0:21:40
BR: Right, the family that allegedly stiffed her. And again, I don’t think they were named, but they weren’t named in this case.

CW: But they recognized their order and the credit card receipt.

BR: Yeah, and it turned out that in fact, they left an $18 tip on a bill of $93.55.

CW: I’d be so pissed.

BR: And furthermore, they had a credit card statement that with the same value, which is $111.55 to back it up.

CW: So they had a paper trail.

BR: They had a paper trail that totally disproved this woman’s claim and they’re like look I mean I’m not and I’m sure this family is not in any way homophobic.

0:22:15
They may or may not have recognized her as being a lesbian and frankly they didn’t care because obviously they were 18 bucks on $100.

CW: There’s no there there. There’s no there there exactly it was completely fabricated it looks like yeah

BR: And so and that was the case where you know so in the case of Morales the receipt was posted on a website called Have a gay day. And so that’s really where it went viral and exactly as you mentioned the the founder a guy named Michael Knote or not. I’m not sure how you pronounce it K and O T E he says he feels betrayed by the whole thing because as you said it undermines the real reports.

CW: Yeah, it undermines the people doing the real work.

0:22:55
BR: And so anyway, so I don’t want to go too far on it, but it was, you know, it just basically just piled on and piled on. So at some point she was like, okay, well, I don’t want the money for myself, because again, what happened was like, you know, thousands of dollars, oh, this poor waitress, let me prove to you that, you know, not everyone’s like that, let me give you extra mone-

CW: So now does that become fraud in that point where somebody says look at me I’m this horrible thing happened to me that is and people choose to give their money but they’re choosing to…

BR: well based on false information that I’ve actually researched that to some degree and it depends on this particular situation for example I’ve written about in research cases where people have faked cancers and so there there’s a really interesting distinction there.

0:23:37
It’s like whether you actually ask for donations or whether you just say, Oh, poor me. You know, if you, if you wanted to give me money, you know, I wouldn’t turn it down. In this case, uh, Dana Morales, she was in the military, uh, in the, uh, former military, uh, she had, she said that they were, she was donating all the money to the Wounded Warriors project. So spoiler, uh, wounded warrior said they had no record of any money being donated by Morales to the project. And it turns out that she was actually dishonorably discharged from the Marines for failing to show up at monthly reserve drills.

0:24:16
And it later came out that many people who knew Morales said that she’s a pathological liar and she had actually faked having brain cancer. So it’s like the…

CW: So she’s got like a rap sheet of pulling things for money. Now tell me she got fired, did she get fired?

BR: She did get fired. Oh good, okay. Eventually, when it became clear, I mean, again, the customer showed up and said, here’s the paper trail, I mean, this did not happen.

0:24:46
And eventually, I think it was a Mexican restaurant, it was in New Jersey. Eventually they’re just like, you know what, we parted ways. But yeah, I mean, it’s just, you know, and…

CW: Well, yeah, well, creating a huge social media blow up over a homophobic incident in a restaurant that never happened, that’s grounds for firing. I would not want an employee that started fires like that.

BR: And not only, I mean, not only doesn’t reflect badly on the restaurant, also their customers. I mean, what does that say about people who, do you want your restaurant being associated with people who hate immigrants?

0:25:24
There’s no good side to this.

CW: Yeah, if I were that family, I can’t see going back to that restaurant.

BR: No, no, just no matter what. And I’m sure there was no apology. In fact, Morales, who was certainly happy to go online and social media to talk about how badly she was treated, once it came out that she lied, all of a sudden, no comment, doesn’t answer phone calls, and she goes away. And so, you know, it just, I think part of the reason that it took so long for this to come out was there’s a sort of victim halo.

0:25:57
CW: Is that an actual term, victim halo?

BR: I think it is.

CW: Okay. Yeah, there’s this- Like an urban legend or psychology term?

BR: Yeah, it’s like a sociological term. It’s like when people claim to be victims of whatever it is, we see them as victims, right? And we don’t want to be mean to victims. We don’t want to doubt them. We don’t want to-

CW: Yeah, you don’t want to be seen as adding to their misery.

0:26:18
BR: Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I mean, my position is, I mean, if someone claims to be a victim of anything, the default assumption should be that they’re telling the truth. All things being equal, if someone claims that something happened to them, whatever it is, whether it’s an accident or someone did something bad to them, you should assume it’s true. But that should not preclude you from asking questions about it.

0:26:46
CW: Or putting on your blinders when you see things like, oh, this is black ink and this is blue ink. But I’m just going to assume everything’s kosher. And again, I don’t need, I’m not stating for a fact that I think any of these people are lying, except for that one. Your story from, what year was that?

BR: That was 2013. That’s conclusive proof that that person is lying.

0:27:09
I’m just saying that I’m skeptical of stories that fit a certain pattern that are being reported without any sort of digging into anything. This is a failure of journalism when they take a Facebook post and that becomes the source. A Facebook post, I have known many people to exaggerate on Facebook.

0:27:34
Or misrepresent things on Facebook. And if you’re a journalist, you should know that. If you’re a human being, you should know that. If you’ve been on Facebook for longer than a week, you should know that.

BR: Yeah, it reminds me that that case we talked about, I think, in one of the early episodes, we talked about there was the woman that she claimed that she was at a Target, I think it was, and her young daughter was trying to buy a black doll.

CW: Oh, yeah, the Caucasian family.

BR: Yeah, and yeah, and allegedly the the clerk who was never named this was no – Nothing ever came from that but it was like, you know, she said oh well, you know Oh little girl, wouldn’t you rather have one that’s your own skin color, which I’ll just I’m just gonna say it – No, I I don’t believe that for a second.

CW: You don’t believe a clerk argue with a three-year-old over what color doll she bought?

BR: I don’t know I could be wrong on this one.

0:28:25
I’m often wrong. I am virtually certain this did not happen.

CW: Actually, as somebody who, and I’m not calling out any of my friends, please. Friends, don’t think I’m calling you out specifically, but I see a lot of friends of friends feeds and the mom thing, there’s a lot of moms who are like, my child just did this wonderful thing. And I’ve seen things where like, oh, no, no, your kid maybe did 75% of that.

0:28:51
You’re gilding the lily there a little bit. Yes, okay, I realize your kid is really good at the balance beam, but no, that was not an Olympic level performance, as you’re claiming. And I could see the mom in that situation. Maybe the clerk said, oh, is this for your friend’s birthday or something? Or maybe said something a little bit more, not directly harsh saying, you little white girl should not get a black doll.

0:29:13
That’s bad. I’m imagining she maybe said something that could raise a slight eyebrow.

BR: Something that may have been interpreted in an odd way…

CW: And then by the time you stew over it a little bit on the drive home, you type out a Facebook post saying, my child stood up to this mean cashier. And then unless she had a recorder with her, she’s not going to remember word for word. She’s going to phrase it in her own mental language. Anyway, we’re getting on a totally different tangent here. But, yeah.

BR: No, it’s a fascinating topic and I think these cases are worth discussing because you know, they’re real-world practical skepticism.

0:29:51
CW: And the bottom line is, look at how stories are crafted. Is it crafted along the lines of a very common folkloric trope, urban legend trope, story you read all the time trope, and what has the journalist sourced? Is it just a Facebook post? If you’re reading a story that only cites a Facebook post, tear it up, it’s not worth anything.

BR: According to a Facebook post I read, oh, we’re done here. No, no, we’re done.

0:30:19
Anything beyond that, unless you quoted an actual expert, if you’re a source of the Facebook post, then just turn in your journalism badge at the desk and go home.

CW: I’m trying to imagine the corollary here. If you were a journalist in the 1950s or 1980s before the World Wide Web, and you turned in a story to your editor and said, I found this thing written on a bathroom wall. Apparently Joey has a small penis. We need to write about that because it was on a bathroom wall. Or I found this written on somebody’s locker or I found this pinned to a bulletin board.

BR: Right. Someone wrote this.

CW: That’s not a source.

BR: Someone wrote this. It’s in English. I can read it. Someone wrote this. Especially for topics that are ready made to go viral.

0:31:07
And that’s the thing. I mean again there’s so many of them. I mean there was a guy who said that he was an Arab and he said that he was kicked off a plane for speaking Arabic to someone else on the plane. And there was this huge outrage, oh my God, this is racism against Muslims and just because someone’s speaking Arabic.

CW: There was like a video too, right?

BR: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And there was some suspicion about it because the guy that did it was known to have pulled race-based pranks before.

0:31:36
CW: Oh, like a YouTube hoaxer.

BR: Yeah, exactly. He’s a YouTube celebrity. And he does, there’s a record of that. You can go back and you look at his previous ones, like, oh, you’re making fun of me because I’m Muslim. And he’s intentionally antagonizing people, intentionally making it seem like he’s doing something suspicious. And it’s like, whoa, why are you targeting me because I’m Muslim? He’s like, no, because you just said Arabic words and mentioned bomb, you idiot.

0:32:01
It’s like, you, you, so I mean, it’s really, really disingenuous. But what happened in that case was that there were other passengers on the plane who, who, who denied the story. Like, no, I was there. I was sitting two seats behind him. The video clip you saw on YouTube where he’s being kicked off the plane, that’s carefully edited to leave out the part where he’s intentionally trying to make it seem like he’s doing something, something suspicious.

CW: So he’s baiting people.

BR: Yeah, he’s absolutely baiting people.

0:32:27
And, you know, and this is, again, it undermines real cases. And this is why I always encourage people to not share information that they don’t have some good reason to believe is true. I mean, I know it hits your outrage button. None of us wants, you know, a gay waitress or black waitress or anyone else to be discriminated against. No one wants that. We all want to share that and tamp it down and stamp it out.

0:32:53
But the way to do that is to make an effort to distinguish the real cases from the fake ones.

CW: And do a little bit of informed Googling to where you aren’t just looking up angry tweets by other people. You’re looking up some sort of fact based accounting of what really happened. The fact that, again, going back to the original thing that we started yarping on here, the the waitress is getting stiff, waiters and waitresses getting stiff is there any statement from other workers at the restaurant?

0:33:16
Is there any effort to track down the customer? Is there anything besides an angry Facebook post?

BR: And usually there’s not because it doesn’t benefit anyone. The goal of the hoax is to outrage people and to get sympathy and attention. That’s the goal. The goal is not to solve a mystery. The goal is not to identify and shame these people. This is why so many of these end in no answer, is because the restaurant doesn’t benefit from tracking down the customer and demanding they get on the phone explaining why they said this nasty thing to their server. That doesn’t benefit anybody.

0:33:53
At the point in which the hoaxer gets their attention and their sympathy, they’re happy. They’re like, okay, let’s just move on.

CW: Yeah, well, you know, that was actually a little thought experiment I did with this particular one that is blown up this month. The pride tattoo, lesbian waitress getting stiffed because she doesn’t love Jesus. Now, I’ve seen enough of the propaganda that comes out of the evangelical, super judgmental Pat Robertson variety of Christians. And I tell you what, you call you call one of them up and say, hey, I’m a reporter, I’m looking into this, you know, thing, apparently you stiffed this waitress because she was gay. If they were a real version of that boogeyman who absolutely believes that God is on their side, they would be more than pleased to issue a statement saying, yes, I am a true Christian, and I condone, you know, we should not be supporting any sort of lifestyle like that, and da da da da da, because they view it as a platform.

0:34:52
They would say, here’s a platform for me to get my evangelical views out about how wrong homosexuality is.

BR: Thank you for giving me the opportunity to explain to you why gay waitresses shouldn’t be tipped. They don’t do that.

CW: That never happened. But yeah, any reporter calling up a real instance of that would probably get a statement from a Christian who would be happy. And I’m not saying all Christians are like that, thank goodness.

0:35:15
But one that would leave a nasty note like that would probably be willing to also put it into words because it’s part of the persecution myth like, well, I’m going to be persecuted for this view, but I owe it to Jesus to tell everybody what I think God thinks.

BR: But again, it’s one of those things where even if you believe that, you walk out, you don’t leave a tip. It doesn’t, none of this makes sense. Anyway, we beat this one to death, but that’s a good thing to be skeptical of. And again, as we said before, no one’s suggesting that racism doesn’t exist or homophobia absolutely does and it is a pervasive problem. That’s not the question.

0:35:53
The question is, in these specific cases, are these claims true? And I would guess that in many of them, they’re not true, particularly ones that, again, as you said, have a recurring template. And motif.

CW: If a story pushes your buttons, there’s probably some reasons why. Look into yourself, look into the story, look into patterns, and you start seeing things in a whole new light.

BR: Confirmation bias.

0:36:17
Look it up. All right.

PR: Hey strangers, we love sharing our podcast with you, but it takes substantial time and money to produce and release each episode. If you think our podcast is worth a buck or two, please head over to patreon.com forward slash squaring the strange and consider becoming a patron. Not only will you be helping us, but you’ll also receive some cool perks. Again, that’s patreon.com forward slash squaring the strange. Enjoy the show.

PR: So John Edward is a psychic medium, at least self-proclaimed psychic.

0:36:53
There’s an asterisk, a visual asterisk.

CW: Actually, I checked and Wikipedia, probably thanks to Susan Gerbic, who is one of my heroes, Wikipedia announces him as TV personality, author, and alleged psychic.

PR: Alleged, yeah.

CW: I love that word, alleged. Thank you, Susan, if you put that on there.

PR: Yeah, that’s perfect. And, you know, that’s a an accurate statement. So anyway, so you guys got together one day and and decided to go to one of his events here in Albuquerque, right? So let’s just let’s go ahead and walk us into this. What happened. How did this end up happening in the first place?

BR: Well, I had I had of course Edward has come across my radar many times. Both myself and Joe Nickell have written about him on and off for 12 years, 15 years.

0:37:47
At some point, it’s like, my old nemesis, Sherlock and Moriarty, I guess, Professor Moriarty. I’ve, of course, researched psychics, alleged psychics in various capacities, ranging from psychic detectives to going to Lillydale, which is a spiritualist community in western New York, where basically the entire town is spiritualist people who claim to talk to the dead and stuff. I’ve always been fascinated by the…

CW: You’ve gone into the dragon’s den.

BR: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s fascinating from a psychological perspective, in terms of not only why the sitter or the audience thinks that someone is talking to them, why they come to believe that the person is actually talking to the dead, and also why often the psychics themselves can genuinely believe it.

0:38:42
We should do a show on that, but this is not that show. So anyway, part of it was that, again, I had written about many of these folks ranging from Sylvia Brown and of course John Edward and James Van Praagh and many others.

CW: Had you seen John Edward prior to this or was this your first live thing?

BR: This was the first live one. And to be honest, I went undercover in this case, partly because I was genuinely somewhat concerned that he would recognize me. I know that-

CW: Bald white guys all look alike.

BR: Thanks.

0:39:21
No, but it’s, you know, it’s, I know for example with Sylvia Brown, because I was, I and others protested Sylvia Brown’s appearances in various places, including here in Albuquerque, also in Las Vegas. And we sort of helped.

CW: Hey, didn’t you have a banner that said, convicted felon?

BR: Convicted felon Sylvia Brown. That was one of my comments.

0:39:40
CW: And she was.

BR: And she was. But what happened was that, not to go too far into that story, but Brown’s helpers went out and photographed and videotaped her protesters, myself included. And I mean, I wasn’t concerned about it, but Sylvia Brown knew who I was, because part You know, when the pool of people that routinely criticize psychics is pretty small. There are lots of people who doubt psychics, a lot of people believe in psychics, but the number of people who like regularly debunk psychics. Yeah, there’s about a dozen of us.

0:40:17
CW: So you’re worried that you’re pinned to some wall somewhere in some secret clubhouse. Yeah, but again, of course, at that point I already bought my ticket. I mean, he can’t, he legally can’t refuse me ticket or maybe he can’t I’ve already bought it I mean I guess he could revoke it…

PR: I mean yeah he could he could probably you know it depends on the promoter really.

CW: And he didn’t let us in he kicked us out that’s the end of the podcast guys. But anyway so again I wasn’t really concerned about it but I intentionally was vague on who exactly I was. I didn’t lie to anybody, I was just vague on what I was. So anyway, so I wanted to go see if John Edward was up to his old tricks, as it were.

0:41:01
And having studied how psychics can mislead people into believing that they actually have these abilities, I contacted New Mexicans for Science and Reason, one of the oldest local skeptics groups in the country.

CW: NMSR?

BR: NMSR. Okay. And they very kindly paid for my ticket to go, including an extra, I think, 70 bucks to get my photo with him.

CW: Oh, wow.

0:41:23
BR: It’s nice. Just because I-

CW: They wanted you to suffer. Exactly. So, anyway, that’s sort of what happened. And I was going anyway, and I think you were going to be in town.

CW: Well, yeah, I was planning on being in town, and you were like, well, I got a thing that night. I got to go see John Edward. You could sit at my house and read a book or you can come. And I was like, why the hell not? I have never seen a live psychic show. I’ve read about them, heard about them, criticized them, but I, you know, why not show up, get some hands-on experience, and maybe I can pull a good comic strip out of it or something. And, and I might still someday, I’ve got a lot of material out of just this one event.

0:42:03
BR: Well, I just want to add, I think that is important. It’s one thing for skeptics to understand the principles behind it. It’s a very different experience to be in the room. I mean, you do learn a lot from actually seeing it being performed, I use the word advisedly, in front of you. I mean, there’s different techniques that, again, you can read about them, but until you see them, see the drinks being made, you don’t really get it.

0:42:31
CW: And talking to audience members. Yes, absolutely. The women sitting next to me, I mean, you were worried about being picked out. Me, as a middle-aged fat woman, I looked and I was like, this is just a sea of people who look just like me. I fit in perfectly. His whole audience was older, middle-aged, overweight, often white women who had had some losses in their life. And I identified with a lot of these ladies and I felt really bad for them because they were forking over a lot of money for this guy. Some of them over and over again following him like the dead. I meant like the Grateful Dead, but in this case I suppose it has a double meaning.

0:43:09
BR: So anyway, this was held at a downtown hotel, actually turned out to be the same hotel where they’re holding Bubonicon. I was actually surprised at how small the venue was. At the height of his popularity, back when he was memorably described by the South Park guys as the biggest douche in the universe, he would hold court to thousands of people. He was one of the main touring psychics among others. So he was in the little ballroom there and it was interesting he had a helper.

CW: The cheerleader who told everybody how to react before he came on?

BR: Yeah. Please do this. If John does this, please do this. Anyway, so you know as he was performing, you know he would throw out a lot of numbers. Five.

0:44:04
Eighteen, forty. Does that mean anything to you? And it was always the sort of ambiguous, it’s like just throwing random numbers out. And again, this is often what you see with psychic detectives who claim, like for example, I’m sensing a missing person, there’s like a seven involved. Like a seven and a zero. It’s not necessarily a seventy, but there’s a seven and a zero. What is the police officer supposed to do with that? There’s nothing you do about it.

0:44:30
And then if and when someone’s found, like well, that was like 20 miles from Highway 70. Well, you didn’t say that. That’s not what you said.

CW: Yeah, I recall reading on Wikipedia that James Underdown describes him not just as a cold reader, but as a bad cold reader. And so honestly, I was expecting him to be a little bit more accurate a little bit better a little bit quicker in getting to where he was getting some hits but I’ve seen mentalists that were far better yeah than what John Edward gave everybody.

BR: Yeah he would go to rose colors you reference roses a lot and flowers in general flowers in general and I was later realizing why he does it and it’s because of course flowers are suggestive of special occasions, funerals, weddings, births, I mean just there’s…

0:45:19
CW: Everybody’s got associations in big parts of their life and everybody’s got like a grandmother who really liked calla lilies or something like that. And it’s a nice easy generic thing. It’s a good bet.

BR: Yeah, yeah. Who doesn’t like flowers? I hate flowers! Okay, alright you sir, you sit down. Everyone else here has some association with flowers, even if it’s just remembering to when you saw your grandmother in her casket and she had a flower, you remember it?

0:45:49
It’s such an easy association.

CW: Do you remember the way he was able, this is actually a carny trick I picked out, and I don’t want to jump ahead of anything you’ve got here, but can I mention the birthday thing that you segwayed? Now one of the reasons why we counted, we tried to estimate accurately the number of people in the room is because one of the things he threw out was I’m getting a sense that somebody in this room is having a birthday today and if you’re in a room of 300 people the odds of somebody in that room having a birthday today are pretty dang good Yeah, well he actually missed nobody in there was having a birthday and again carny trick. He segwayed it. Oh you think I’m wrong I’m not really wrong. He’s like oh well the reason I thought somebody was having a birthday today is because the spirits, they’re showing me a white flower and usually when they do that it means a birthday. Now why on earth? I mean, they’re showing me a cake with candles on it and usually that means a birthday.

0:46:41
Yeah, I get that. Yeah, a white flower, I don’t think birthday. Yeah, but apparently he does. He’s come to realize that when the spirits show him a white flower it means birthday, but audience, it might mean something else. Does anybody have an association with white flowers? It could be lilies, it could be white roses, it could be anybody who had a recent funeral with lots of white flowers or a wedding.

BR: Do you live in a place that has flowers?

CW: Does anybody have allergies to flowers?

0:47:09
But he segwayed it right to talking about a white flower and then of course somebody’s grandmother had just died and she really liked white lilies or something. And so he had a hit, but it was not a hit. The original question was, does anybody have a birthday and nobody did.

PR: Yeah, well and the thing, it’s crazy to me because just when you said that and he missed it, like my first thought right after that was like, okay, go to someone who’s dead that you know that’s their birthday because then it’s like you’ve got 300 people in the room and then you have 3,000 possibilities there and like somehow he didn’t take the easiest route out of that corner. That is pretty, that’s not not great technique.

CW: Well I took some notes and you know unless he said that real quick and also missed yeah I recall him going right to the flower.

BR: And I have to say that that there is skill there.

0:48:01
I’m pretty sure he knows what he’s doing. It does take being on the ball. I mean, it is a performance. You can interpret that however you want. But you know, essentially, all the different techniques. One of them was, he would say this several times, he would say, well, I’m just the medium. And I’m sure he just meant that as sort of a pun. But what he was getting at, and the way he steered it was, you know, no one’s perfect.

0:48:24
I don’t always understand exactly what the spirit of telling me uh… you know if it’s wrong it doesn’t make sense don’t blame me i’m not going to have a lot of this i’m just telling you what i’m getting in the course there’s no way to conclusively debunk that if you tell me you’re hearing the voice of some disembodied spirit in your head i can’t prove you’re not. Again that the the subtext is like this is ridiculous to me and we are we’re all skeptics here, right?

0:48:50
But this is going to sound crazy, but I’m getting this, I’m getting someone who wants, he wants to tell you that don’t worry about the thing he owes you. And we’re like, what? He’s like, no, no, but again, it’s all framed in this like subtly skeptical, you know, I know this sounds, this is wacky, wacky stuff here. But I’m going to tell you this. And people are like, oh, okay, yeah.

CW: Well, he was, one of the things I noticed he was skilled at was getting the, it’s audience steerage and getting them to put themselves in the mind frame of you’re gonna get hit with a lot of abstract things tonight, and you’re gonna find value in them.

0:49:29
I’m a cartoonist. Sometimes it’s my job to make people think in abstract ways and get messages out of it. I thought it was actually kind of brilliant of him when he started his show talking about emojis, which are kind of little cartoons in their own way. And he’s like, now I’ve been seeing this thing, you know, with a frog and like a frog emoji and then a glass a cup of coffee emoji. And I didn’t know what it meant. And of course a lot, all these grandparents and older ladies in the room, a lot of them are probably mystified by a lot of emoji strings as well. And he’s like, it took me forever and he’s like, and then somebody finally told me it was a frog drinking tea like Kermit is drinking tea and it says none of my business and I wouldn’t have known that because of that string of connections unless somebody told me and that’s the way the spirits communicate with me sometimes it’s just frog coffee and you won’t even get it and sometimes you won’t get it until next week so if you go home wondering what the heck I was talking about you might figure it out two weeks from now when somebody says something and it clicks and right there he’s setting up like, I can babble complete, I can read the book of Revelation to you idiots, and you won’t understand it now, but it’ll be worth something because you’ll understand later. Nobody’s going to be walking out of there going, I have grounds for demanding a refund. They’ll be like, well he told me I’d understand later.

0:50:39
BR: Or not. And of course by the time you think about it, it’s like, well, I mean sure eventually if you wrote down what he said, if you wait long enough, a couple months later, oh, I guess that kind of fits. I mean, it’s just retrofitting. It’s people, they pick things like, oh, well, you know, she said that, you know, I would have a problem with my mom. And sure enough, we had a fight like four months later. You know, but no, but you’re exactly right. He was very, he was very affable, very self-deprecating.

0:51:10
He was like, oh, I’m just an ordinary guy. I just have to talk to the dead, it was all this sort of, hey look at me guys, isn’t this crazy thing that I can do? That you’re all paying 130 bucks to hear me talk about it for an hour and a half?

CW: He definitely took the humble, working-class guy from Jersey kind of approach, he wasn’t wearing a giant turban encrusted with jewels with a feather on it going, I am Mysterioso and I know all. He was like, I’m just a regular guy, frog coffee. I don’t know what it means either. What else did you notice about techniques that you, that you spotted that other, other mediums have relied on?

0:51:46
BR: Well, you know, he would, um, you know, there’s the usual stuff like, you know, making general predictions and just sort of general, you know, a father figure. Now I’m not saying a father, father figure, which could be a father, stepfather, grandfather…

PR: George Michael.

CW: An aunt you had with a short haircut.

BR: There’s no wrong answer to that, especially when again keep in mind that the sitters, the audience, they have a vested interest in making it fit. They believe this. You and I were there to research and investigate. I guarantee you the other 99.8% of people were there because, I mean, this is the thing, skeptics generally don’t go to psychics.

0:52:34
Unless you’re doing research and investigation, so it’s a self-selecting group. And that group, they want to believe. They’re emotionally and financially vested in believing this person is doing the best job.

CW: I was surprised at how similar it kind of felt to being in a game show audience, where people were hoping, oh, oh, he’s saying something that’s kind of like, that kind of relates to me.

0:52:58
There were some people that he had to quiet down because he was like, well, I’m seeing da, da, da, and one woman was like, oh, that’s me, that was my friend, da, da, da, da, da. He’s like, no, no, no, not you, not you. And she was like, no, no, it’s gotta be me. And there was a desperation to be the one that he picked.

BR: The other thing that was interesting was he would use these random specific images.

0:53:18
And that’s a clever technique because it seems like something, again, it’s sort of the opposite of what I was saying before, the sort of general father figure that could be anything. So in addition to that, not in contrast to it, but in addition to it, he would use very specific things. For example, he mentioned a pirate ship. He very specifically was like, no, it’s a pirate ship. I know this is a pirate ship. I’m not wrong about this. You figure it out. And it’s like, that’s such a random thing. Like who would ever think that that would fit? Like, actually, actually, if you sort of broaden it a bit, then I remember my, my grandfather’s mantle, uh, it was a ship.

0:53:58
It wasn’t a pirate ship, but it was a ship in a bottle. Sure. And maybe to you, even though it wasn’t actually a pirate ship, it was a ship, and so you just make all these free association connections that then.

CW: I must have a very particular set of friends because when you say, who on earth would have a connection to a pirate ship, I’m like, I know like 15 people who regularly dress as pirates. What are you talking about?

0:54:22
BR: There you go.

CW: I know one who has a pirate ship. I know one who’s building a pirate ship and I know one who has one on wheels.

CW: Hey Squares and hey strangers. Celestia here again, ready to crack open a skeptical fortune cookie with you. Believing everybody is dangerous, but believing nobody is more dangerous. This is a really valuable thing to remember that skepticism is not a one-way street of simply doubting everything that comes your way. Indeed, people who call themselves skeptics because they trust no one tarnish the word. I’m looking at you climate change skeptics and 9-11 truthers.

0:54:58
There lies a healthy middle ground where one does not simply accept every wild claim, but at the same time, where one values the consensus of experts and puts trust in proper methodology and repeated results. No one person has the time to check into every purported fact and test every claim, so we must rely on our fellow humans, scientists and researchers and academics who have done the work. None of us has time to become an expert in every field, but we do have time to learn basic critical thinking skills and assemble a skeptical toolkit that can help us determine who is believable and who isn’t. Anyone who distrusts all of science because scientists have been wrong before is overshooting skepticism. Believing everybody is dangerous but believing nobody is more dangerous. Now, who said this? Well, it’s listed in hundreds of places online and in quotation books as a bit of advice from Abraham Lincoln, but I wasn’t able to find reference to where and when he allegedly said it. I’m not sure I can put my trust in anything on the Internet that is attributed to Lincoln these days, unless it starts with four score and seven years ago, but this still makes a great skeptical fortune cookie. If there are any Lincoln scholars out there who know the provenance of this quote, message me. If it’s your field and if you have good evidence, I’ll believe you. Because believing everybody is dangerous, but believing nobody is more dangerous. Now, let’s get back to squaring the strange.

0:56:44
CW: It’s really easy to make yourself think that something is about you. And one of the women right next to me actually, she said something that struck me. I said, well, so why do you… Because she had been to multiple ones of these. And she had a number of people she was trying to get in touch with. And I said, well, have you ever had anything to just strike you that was like, he picked on you? And she’s like, no, but I find that even if it’s not about you, it’s about you.

PR: It’s kind of like a like a it’s almost like throwing a Rorschach test out, you know, like yeah you’re just like here’s this this vague you know nebulous image that I’m I’m putting in your head and then you’re you’re responsible for interpreting it so it’s like it’s just all feedback you know and like and it seems like you know from what you’ve described here he’s maybe maybe not even that great at it.

0:57:41
CW: The audience does shoulder a lot of the work.

PR: Yeah, which is to me, I mean again, and I think that’s why you’ve got your captive audience and the people who are already biased towards what you’re doing. Because from an outside perspective, I look at them and I’m just like, it’s not even, it doesn’t even raise an eyebrow. Pirate ship, you know, it’s like, you’re just doing these like, visual psychological tests on people, you know, and said, but you’re just creating a mental image.

0:58:06
You’re just a white flower, you know, here’s a date. So it’s like you’re just letting people give you the answers, which I mean, you know, that’s what cold reading is, but it’s almost kind of, you know, a little, it’s like he managed to get so successful on mediocre cold reading, allegedly mediocre.

CW: I think the personality helps a lot. As Ben said, he’s very down to earth. I’m just a regular guy. He’s kind of got that shtick going. Did you notice how great he was at pivoting? If he ever went into politics, he could answer questions from the press expertly.

0:58:44
Because you were talking about the one where he was trying to tell that woman what her grandmother was like.

BR: That’s right, yeah.

CW: And he’s like, I get the sense that your mother was, your grandmother was very stern, very austere, like she walked into a room and the party just stopped. And the woman said, no, no, not at all. I mean that was her exact words. She said, no, not at all. My grandmother was a party animal and everybody loved her. She was just the life of the party. He goes, well yeah, that’s what I mean. The party stopped when she walked in the room and it shifted over towards her. Oh my god! Do people not realize what he just did?

BR: I’m like, really? Really dude? Really? I just saw this. I’m looking around like, I’m like, okay, no one else is reacting to that except for Celestia. I can’t even see her.

0:59:33
CW: Yeah, we sat far apart.

PR: As the God Awful Movies guys say, that was his jingly keys moment. He’s shaking some keys off to the side there and getting their attention.

CW: I too, I did the same thing. I was across the auditorium for…

BR: What’s that? What’s that?

CW: I knew a light bulb or some kind of little flash had gone off in Ben’s head, but I’m looking around, the people seated right around me, and nobody was raising an eyebrow I even kind of cuz you know if you’ve ever been to a play or some sort of movie where something really outrageous happens you turn to the person next to you and even if you don’t know them you kind of exchange to look like what the WTF was that you know and yeah, I had nobody to exchange looks with it was all just it was they were rapidly eating it up.

BR: That was that was the most egregious example that I saw.

1:00:25
There were, there are many others that were very much like that, where he’d go in one direction and, and you know, sometimes he would just get no reaction. I mean, oftentimes, of course the audience is playing around with like, yeah, you there, cause they’re trying to help him out, like it’s a dynamic there. They’re trying to work together. They want it to work. And, but sometimes it’s just like, no, there’s no, there’s no, we’re trying dude, you’re giving us bad information.

1:00:51
CW: And there were a couple times where he went down that wrong pathway and found himself at a dead end and he’s like, well I don’t know, I don’t know, it’ll come to you later, it’ll come to you later. And there was one that was like practically just a, you know, the hand of God coming and saving him for one thing because he was going off of something and he like threw out the name Julia Roberts. Do you remember that? And this woman had no idea. No, I have absolutely no connection to her whatsoever And this is another great way to pivot because you have 200 300 people in that room. This woman had no idea what he was talking about with Julia Roberts and then eventually meandering throughout the crowd like an hour later he got to some other group of people completely on the other side of the room and he was asking that group of people about something completely different and one of the women in that group said well no but I’ve met Julia Roberts and the whole crowd the whole audience is like there it is! That’s what he was getting and…

BR: That’s what he meant talking to the other woman who doesn’t even know her an hour ago on a totally different topic that’s what he’s talking about!

CW: And I don’t know this would be something to throw out to you know the odds must be crazy, but I wonder what the odds are if you throw out any celebrity name with a room full of 300 people, any celebrity name, see if somebody in there has met them or seen them.

1:02:12
I mean, I didn’t volunteer this information, but I went to a taping of David Letterman that Julia Roberts was on. I’ve been in the same room with Julia Roberts. But I didn’t immediately say, oh, he must be getting a vibration from me because I’ve been in the same room with Julia Roberts. No, he was just wrong.

BR: And actually that guest is particularly, had a particularly high chance of working here in New Mexico because she lives here. She lives here sometimes.

PR: Yeah, so he probably just does a little research.

He’s like a Bryan Cranston. I’m getting Bryan Cranston.

BR: I don’t watch TV, but I hear he’s on a show.

PR: Yeah, I’m in Albuquerque, right?

CW: I’m sensing someone here has eaten green chili in the past week, and they were good.

PR: Honestly, I’m kind of surprised he doesn’t just have like half a dozen ringers in the audience at all times. That part I’m like, that’d be worth the investment. Just have someone claim your misses every once in a while. When you get crickets, you can just have a lady be like, my name is Julia Roberts, you know?

1:03:17
It’s like, I mean, why not? Like, who’s gonna say it’s not, right?

CW: I was snooping around, kind of talking to people prior to the event, you know, just, you know, because I’m friendly, I chat with people, and so it wasn’t much of a stretch for me to be friendly to other people and chat with them. And, you know, I kind of, you know, I didn’t like go to any elaborate links, I didn’t make up a fake Facebook page for myself or anything like that, but I was just kind of throwing out some information.

1:03:39
Oh, I’m here because I lost so-and-so and da-da-da-da, just in case there was anybody listening writing stuff down. And that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t use that technique, but certainly none of the things that I threw out were used by him.

BR: I don’t think he needs it.

PR: Yeah, I feel it because Crowd’s pretty credulous.

BR: Even you know I think he’s he’s good enough at it that virtually everybody in the crowd believes in him at least to some extent right there were three men there who who paid their money to be there and they were like I don’t think that was very good at all the con their their discussion was not I think he’s a fraud it was just this one particular time this isn’t as good as they usually are oh yeah so yeah they weren’t skeptical that that he’s talking to the dead.

1:04:28
CW: He was off his game.

BR: He was off tonight.

CW: There’s probably a skeptic in the room. He’s throwing everything off. Putting up a psychic wall. Maybe even two.

BR: That’s my guess, is that he just doesn’t need it.

CW: Well, why don’t we talk about the audience specifically when we come back.

BR: So, Pascual, word around the campfire is there’s something called a skeptic crate. Do you know anything about that?

1:05:06
PR: I do, as a matter of fact. We are going to be putting out a monthly crate. A monthly crate? Called the Skepti-Crate. And it will be a crate with a few goodies relating to our show, relating to science, skepticism, show topics, maybe some little bonus items that have to do with us as individuals relating to our own work or things that Celestia has done.

1:05:36
BR: Tell me more.

PR: So any patron above $5 an episode and you will get a Skepticrate once every month. We ship them on the 15th of every month.

1:05:55
So once you are within a month of good standing at the $5 or more per episode level, you’ll be receiving a SkeptiCrate every month as a regular thank you for your continued support.

BR: And where do we find out more about that?

PR: What you want to do is go over to patreon.com forward slash squaring the strange and you can see all the bonuses, you can see how to sign up, and you can see all the different perks because not only do you get the SkeptiCrate, but $5 and up have their own bonus VIP level content and episodes that we put out every month.

1:06:32
CW: The audience definitely does a lot of work for John Edwards. John Edward. John Edward, sorry I’m confusing him with the politician.

PR: Former vice presidential nominee, psychic John Edwards.

CW: If he had been able to pivot as well as John Edwards, then he’d be president now. He might have had a chance.

BR: But no, the crowd, we didn’t survey everybody there, but I would guess it was 90 to 95 percent women.

1:07:15
Yeah, a lot of women. Mostly Caucasians, a couple of Hispanics, but I think that was mostly who was there.

CW: And you know, it makes me uncomfortable as a woman to to try and explore why that is. Whether or not women just tend to be more quote-unquote open-minded to the spiritual and want to go find answers that way, whether women are more emotionally distraught over losing people so they seek out this sort of thing, or whether or not they just have more spare time to just go do this stuff. I was actually talking to my auto mechanic and he was complaining to me that his wife is big into John Edward.

1:07:55
I was like, oh yeah, she’s gone to like several shows. She totally believes that guy. I was like, something tells me you don’t. He’s like, oh God, no. But the wife spends a lot of money going to see and and I you know, I just said well, you know…

PR: I would call that an irreconcilable difference. That would go into the i’d be calling a lawyer.

CW: I told him just keep an eye on how much she spends on it because there are people that have been taken for thousands Oh, yeah thousands and thousands of dollars.

PR: I had a family member actually who in the psychic hotline days there was a divorce over it and everything.

1:08:32
Several thousand dollars of phone bills for psychics and that actually was the cause for the divorce.

BR: There’s actually pretty good demographic information about who believes what and there’s a book called Paranormal America which is quite good. There’s actually recently a second edition. And in there they break down belief by demographic. And you’re exactly right. What you find is that women tend to believe more in psychics. And that sort of thing.

1:09:05
Men tend to believe more in sort of more tangible things like UFOs.

CW: Conspiracy theories.

BR: Conspiracy theories, right. But there are interesting gender differences. And you’re exactly right is that women do tend to believe more in in psychic and sort of empathy and intuition you know…

CW: I don’t even like the way that that’s phrased I don’t like the way you said that I don’t like you saying women tend to believe I like you saying in the gender of you know it women there’s a higher percentage of women that tend to believe that you may be spinning it in believers the higher percentage are yeah yeah oh don’t tell me what women believe.

1:09:39
PR: Quit mansplaining.

BR: I’m just telling you what the data shows.

CW: Not all men and not all women. Anyway, but one of the things that I have heard from women, from a lot of people, is that psychics can be, can perform a positive function. A lot of psychics add some sort of otherworldly credential to some sort of like life coach advice. Like, oh, my friend quit smoking because the psychic told her that her grandmother was around her all the time wanting her to quit smoking. And he did this, and I’m gonna talk for a little while about this particular reading he gave a woman.

1:10:17
And I identified with this woman. She was about my age, she was standing up there, she was a little bit shy, her friend was standing with her, and she was plump, but seemed really sweet. She just struck me as like, yeah, that looks like she could be my sister or my friend or me, just average looking. And he was asking her, he says, I’m getting messages from people who have passed on who know you and love you, and they’re very happy about, you’ve just recently started changing your diet or changing your lifestyle and trying to live more healthy.

1:10:54
And again, it was not a hit, but it turned into a hit. Because she’s like, well, no, but my friend and I were just talking about starting a diet. And I’m sorry, as somebody in that demographic, we’re always talking about just starting a diet.

PR: Every morning, that is the first thought in my head.

CW: We’re always, always talking about, talking about or thinking about that diet we’re gonna start and we’re gonna start living healthy. It’s always tomorrow.

1:11:19
And so John Edwards started just congratulating her on that direction change and you’re gonna see results and it’s gonna be great and really da, da, da. And I’m sitting here thinking, okay, well, so he’s being like a Weight Watchers meeting host. And then it took a dark turn and he started saying the person I’m getting, I’m getting, you know, I think he asked her some questions, she had lost her fiance or something. And and then he started getting something from somebody else he said and he’s like there’s somebody and and you need to forgive somebody, somebody did something wrong to you. And she started like very, you know, openly crying like like a lot of tears and having problems with it and I got this really uncomfortable feeling because they never touched on she never admitted what had been done wrong to her but he was getting an older man or something and she was kind of giving him the signals that yes, there was an older man who had passed on who did something very wrong to her. And now what’s going through your head? You’re wondering. Okay, was this woman sexually abused as a child?

1:12:26
Did somebody commit a crime against her? Did she have a deadbeat dad that ran off with the secretary? What has clearly caused this woman to break down into tears? He just said, I’m getting the message, you just need to forgive him. He’s asking for forgiveness, you need to forgive him and move on. I’m like, no, no, if she was molested or something like that, you just don’t tell her that.

1:12:52
You’re not a licensed therapist. You can’t fix somebody by just saying, get over it and move on. I was sitting there thinking, okay, if this was a therapist, this would be something you could bring a therapist. This is malpractice. Right there, I had a moment of like, oh, maybe psychics can do some good, and it’s gone.

1:13:16
Completely gone. Now I’m like, nope, this is irredeemable. This needs to stop. People are getting ripped off. And bad advice.

BR: Yeah, I mean, of course, the basic problem there is that, you know, it’s like Mad Libs. I mean, he’s giving someone else a template to fill in the blanks.

1:13:31
It’s like, you know, here’s a script. You should forgive. You know, you need to make this change in life or whatever else. And he’s giving this to people, to 200, 300 people.

CW: Like it’s one size fits all.

BR: Yeah, and it’s like, and keep in mind, exactly what you said, is that even for people who he’s not specifically talking to, many of them, the message is for all of us.

1:13:53
And that’s why, that’s for example, why you go to one of these, because you can get a private reading with John Edwards for like 500 bucks or something. But people go to these communal events with 300 people exactly because of that. It’s because there is that dynamic. You’re hearing about all these different people and the message is coming through for you. And so there’s absolutely this notion of a sort of collective answers being told through him by his spirit guides. But again, the problem there is that he’s providing a template and saying, I’m looking at you and we both know that there’s, but the Spirits are telling me there’s something you need to work through.

1:14:35
I’m not going to say this out loud. I don’t want to embarrass you in front of people, but we both have this connection and you know what I’m talking about, wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Of course, they’re like, well, yeah, they can fill in the blanks, but again, he doesn’t know what there is.

CW: Yeah, it’s very similar to a lot of cons. And there’s a sense of power. You could tell by the way, again, he had the persona of I’m just the messenger and I’m just a local, you know, I’m just a regular guy, but there was a sense of power that he had over everybody in there.

1:15:08
He could slam some people down, he could elevate some other people, and he was conducting it like a game show host. And I really got the sense that he enjoyed the power. And I had a thing, I’m going to confess here, I did something in college where I got a taste of that power, and it felt really freaking dangerous. I was super uncomfortable afterwards. But I dressed up for a Halloween party in college as a fortune teller, because it’s what I had. I had some scarves and crap around the dorm room. I dressed up, and I went to a dorm, I went to a frat party and it was a frat where I knew some of the guys but not all of them and they knew the sorority that other people in college knew and there was this one guy there who I knew. He had tried to hit on my friend Jeannie like three weeks ago when he was drunk and he didn’t remember it and he was harping on her saying oh, well, I would never work anyway, cuz my mother’s name is Jeannie and I just happened to remember that.

1:16:03
So when I shook his hand or whatever, I pretended, I said, Oh, I’m getting a vision of your, I’m seeing you as a child in the kitchen and your mother, your mother’s name is Jeannie. And he turned white. He freaked out. He said, how, how the hell do you know my mother’s name? I was like, it just came to me. And then he ran around the place asking he’s like nobody here knows my mother’s name he went he called his mother of course she didn’t know anything about it he freaked out and I was like okay this is gone on long enough I was like look look I heard you hitting on my friend Jeannie three weeks ago when you were drunk and I just happened to remember your friends name was your mother’s name was Jeannie and he was like oh my god he’s like well all right I was like – now don’t believe everything you hear if somebody knows something it’s just a little factoid, it doesn’t mean anything.

1:16:53
And he’s like, you just gave me the best Halloween freakout I have ever had. But it was like this sense of power but nervousness, like okay, am I really screwing with this guy’s head here? I just knew his mother’s name, that’s all I knew. You couch it with a little imagery and then the story writes itself in their own head.

BR: And like you were saying, the audience, people go to him because they’re seeking answers. We’re going there for information in terms of his techniques, but most people are there because they have some unsolved problem. I know that the woman that sat next to me, she was there with her daughter, and they had both come in from Texas.

1:17:31
I think it was maybe El Paso. And I was just asking her, so who are you hoping to connect with? I mean, just being polite and all that. And she said that her other daughter, who I believe was autistic, had died suddenly. And this was like 15 years earlier. And there was some sort of circumstance where it wasn’t mysterious, but they didn’t quite know exactly what had happened, why she was found. She wasn’t murdered, but something was unsolved about exactly what happened. She said, yeah, that’s why we’re coming. She had gone to see John Edward several times. She’d driven up from El Paso, which is a pretty long drive, with her daughter, her other daughter.

1:18:22
They were both there hoping to connect with the sibling that was dead and sort of get answers. And you know, I was thinking about that, like, you know, these are vulnerable people. I mean, you know, they weren’t sobbing on my shoulder because it had happened a long time ago, but this was clearly an ongoing issue with them. So, but you know, what if he’d happened to call on her and they had some dialogue and what if he said something that made it seem like he, like she had done this to herself or she was partially to blame. I mean, I don’t know, but he doesn’t know their situation. And whatever random ambiguous stuff that he’s throwing out there could be potentially damaging to somebody.

1:19:04
CW: Yeah. It’s very cavalier to think that, that he’s just helping people. It’s very cavalier because you don’t know how much harm you’re doing in addition to that help that happens I’m sure right once in a while but yeah, it was it was depressing it was enlightening I’m glad I went I will never go again. In other words I’ll never I’ll never pay for a ticket to go to John Edward again it opened my eyes to a lot of things.

BR: I’m I was glad that someone else was there to help me you know

CW: To at least raise an eyebrow when he said your your grandmother was a real party pooper. Oh no, I mean she was a party.

1:19:42
BR: No, but anyway, we’ll do other shows on psychics and different techniques and talking to it. There’s lots of different angles into it. I think it was good to sort of talk about this one and if it’s the case again, we’ll we both have some personal experience and of course a skitical bench.

PR: We would like to thank our sponsor level patrons Amy Freshour-Kelly and Dr. Angela Mattke. If you’d like to find out what that is and how to become one, head over to patreon.com forward slash squaring the strange patronage starts at just a buck and there are a lot of perks and bonus content just for our patrons.

BR: If you’d like to lend your moral support you can head over to itunes and give us a review every five star review gets us a little more visibility on the itunes podcast charts and brings a smile to Pascual’s face.

PR: Hey friends, Pascual here.

1:20:54
As you may have noticed, we were MIA for a week and we’re a little late on getting the last episode out. Being the co-host slash writer slash recording engineer slash producer slash editor of this podcast, I’ve found myself extremely pressed for time to get things done. My life is very dynamic and unpredictable with trying to run a company that goes from zero to a hundred and back at a moment’s notice while trying to maintain my family life and maybe fit in a little time for myself. What I mean to say is that it can be hard to get this podcast out at times. It’s already a lot of work before I even get to the editing and the editing is the most challenging step of the process for me. That said, we’ve enlisted the help of my good friend and fellow musician Alex Monasterio, a very capable sound engineer in Southern California. He’s going to be editing the show going forward, thus taking it off my plate to give me a little more time to focus on content and delivery and hopefully a lot more time to focus on keeping my family and work life on track.

1:22:02
Now here’s the part where I reach out to you guys. I know we always hit you with the Patreon pitch, especially now that we offer the Skepticrate subscriptions at the $5 and up level. But we believe it’s the best way to keep the lights on here at Squaring the Strange while offering a little something extra to those of you who can contribute. For this next step in our evolution, we’re going to keep pushing to earn every extra dime we can to get this content out consistently and with increasing quality of content every little bit helps. Check out patreon.com forward slash squaring the strange to see what we have to offer or if you just want to throw a buck or two at us in solidarity. For those of you who prefer the moral support route find us on iTunes and leave us a review. The better we rank on the podcast list the more listeners we’ll get.

1:22:51
Or just tell your friends. So that about does it for us this week. Next week, we’ll be exploring copycat crimes, a mysterious and very misunderstood topic that Ben has really done his homework on. Thanks for listening. See you next week. Squaring Strange is a production of Kronos Creative LLC, copyright 2017.

1:23:13
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