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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.

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Pascual Romero: Welcome back to Squaring Strange. This is Pascual Romero and we are on episode 199. And with me as always are…

BR: Ben Radford’s here

CW: And Celestia Ward. How are you guys doing this week?

PR: Very well. How are you?

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CW: I’m great and I have a little housekeeping to announce. On May 5th and 6th, which is about two weeks from now, I will be speaking at the We Can Reason conference. Put on by We Can Reason stands for Western Canadian Reason Conference. And it’s put on by the Rocky Mountain Atheists and a bunch of other skeptical critical thinkers. Adrian Hill, thank you. Big shout out to you for roping me in to be one of the speakers, along with Richard Saunders, friend of the podcast, who happens to be our guest this week.

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BR: How fortuitous. And what’s your talk about?

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CW: Well, I’ll be doing a little talk called PR 101 for Skeptics, which I think will benefit everybody if we can get more grassroots involvement in terms of publicizing certain skeptical victories and skeptical growth. I think it would be a good thing for everybody. So we’ll be going into that. Luckily, I’ve learned a lot in my three years as a PR coordinator, and I would love to bring that to the skeptical masses.

BR: Very cool and much needed.

CW: Yes, and, you know, Richard goes into some of his PR efforts in terms of the psychic prediction project that he’s going to be speaking with us about here on the show. But before we get to him, I’ve got a couple of things I’m skeptical of this week.

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BR: So yeah, there’s a little bit of breaking news here.

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I just found this out literally moments ago just before we started recording and I figured I’d throw it out there.

CW: Right off the wire. Do do do do do do do do.

BR: So this is in the Washington Post. The headline is Mike Lindell’s firm told to pay five million dollars in Prove Mike Wrong election fraud challenge.

CW: Oh somebody proved the my pillow guy wrong about what there’s so much

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What was he wrong about?

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BR: Fishing the barrel here. So as you guys know, he’s—along with Fox News who of course recently settled the lawsuit by Dominion voting systems—he is also being accused of perpetuating this this totally bogus notion that was election fraud and as you said, yeah, he’s for years, he’s been insisted that he’s got all this evidence and people just won’t look at it, blah, blah, blah. So apparently in August 2021, at a symposium, he issued a bold challenge, as he has want to do, called Prove Mike Wrong. And he claimed that he had data showing that Chinese interference had stolen the election on behalf of Biden. So a 63 year old Trump voter. Sorry. So a 63 year old Trump voter from Nevada took him up on it.

CW: Oh, this fella is a Trump voter.

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BR: Yes. And he’s from Nevada. OK, he’s from Nevada. The guy’s name is Robert Zeidman.

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And he examined the data included that not only did not prove voter fraud, but it had no connection whatsoever to the 2020 election.

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CW: And what data did what data was Lindell showing? Was this like, was this like somebody’s school records from the local elementary school? What was the data if it wasn’t actually probably related to the election?

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BR: So so Mike Lindell, Mr. MyPillow, of course, said that that was totally wrong. And Mr. Zeidman said, no, you made a public challenge. So this went to arbitration and a private arbitration panel ruled that in fact Zyedman was right and he is owed five million dollars.

CW: Now will that stick? Do we know?

BR: It says here in their 23-page decision, the arbitrator said Zyedman proved that Lindell’s material quote, unequivocally did not reflect November 2020 election data. They directed Lindell’s firm to pay Zeidman within 30 days.

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CW: Well, I mean, talk about surprisingly low hanging fruit. You can’t disprove that this data doesn’t show X and when somebody with expertise in the matter looks at it, they’re like, this data isn’t even about that. You’re not even wrong.

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BR: He wasn’t even wrong. He’s not even wrong, but he now owes five million dollars. Now, will he collect? I imagine he will. I mean, this is if you issue these challenge, I mean, it’s not. Yeah.

CW: I hasten to point out that in all the many years James Randi issued his public

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challenge, an arbitration firm never, never came to the conclusion that he owed somebody the money?

BR: No and I’m just

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hoping he gets paid before the the 1.3 billion dollar defamation by a Dominion.

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Get that money fast, Mr. Zeidman.

CW: Well we shall see what happens. I’m curious, I’m skeptic curious about this. Have you guys heard of a new show that’s going to be premeiring on Peacock that’s called Hysteria.

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BR: Hysteria. No, I remember a sort of spoof, satire, horror film in the 80s I think was called Hysteria. Maybe it was Hysterical.

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CW: I don’t think it’s that. Nor is this about female orgasms, the Hysteria thing about the 1800s treatments.

BR: Wandering uterus.

CW: Yes, the wandering uterus thing this show is set during the satanic panic in the 1980s and It is a it is it’s not sadly it’s not a comedy I was kind of hoping it was it is being called part thriller and part coming-of-age drama It follows a heavy metal band who are also a bunch of high school Outcasts so Pascual they’ve written a show about your childhood.

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PR: Awesome.

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CW: I hope you’re getting royalties from this.

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PR: Yeah, I’m going to have to call my agent.

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CW: Yeah, they did wrangle some pretty impressive talent. One of the stars will be Julie Bowen, who’s the blonde one from Modern Family, if you’ve seen that. And executive producers are John Francis Daly and Jonathan Goldstein. They did a little movie you may have heard of that’s out this week called Dungeons and Dragons, the one with Chris Pine. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m kind of dying to.

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PR: I’m looking forward to it. And John Francis Daly’s great. He was in Freaks and Geeks, which was one of my favorite shows of the late 90s, early

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2000s.

CW: Oh, yeah.

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Yeah, I liked Freaks and Geeks a lot. Yeah.

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Well, the review of Hysteria kind of made it seem like there will be some possibly supernatural occurrences on the show. So it might not be treating the satanic panic with the skepticism that we would hope would be there. But maybe it’ll be skeptical about the satanic panic. But then there will also be these other monsters of the week that they deal with. Who knows?

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PR: As long as the monsters disprove the satanic panic, I’m fine.

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CW: Skeptical monsters. I like it. Well also speaking of pop culture. A show that I adore has me a little bit upset lately. Spoilers for anybody who watches Ted Lasso. Anybody, do you guys, have you heard of Ted Lasso? Do you watch it?

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PR: It is one of my current favorite shows. I adore that show.

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CW: Ah, me too. Ben, have you heard of Ted Lasso?

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BR: I’ve heard of it. As I recall, it’s a Western set in the 1800s, the lasso part.

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CW: No, no. You’re thinking of the Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

BR: Oh, OK, then.

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Then then the answer is I have heard of it, but I’ve not seen it. So continue.

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CW: Ted Lasso. And if you haven’t seen season three of Ted Lasso yet, then you want to be completely surprised. Just fast forward for like a minute and a half or something. I love I love so much of what Ted Lasso is, but they’ve brought in a subplot involving a psychic.

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PR: Yeah, yeah.

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BR: A fake psychic or a real psychic or a real fake psychic?

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CW: Remains to be seen as yet. I have not seen this week’s episode, but they’ve been leading up to it in terms where the psychic was something that one of the main characters was sort of sneering at and being like, oh, that’s a bunch of rubbish. And then, aha, after their reading, and after a few almost miraculous occurrences that matched up exactly with what the psychic predicted, a skeptical character is now turning into a believer.

BR: Great.

CW: And how many times have you seen that happen on a show?

PR: It’s a really overused and boring trope for me.

CW: Yeah. Really annoying. Especially for the character.

PR: I really admired the character of Rebecca and they’ve just kind of like flip-flopped that you know some of the stuff I admired her for. Yeah, it’s disappointing because Rebecca and a lot of characters in this show have

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these sort of you know dynamic changes in who they are over the seasons and Rebecca is a great character because she started out as kind of this bristly, maybe a little bit petty character who became this very strong female lead who’s gone through this full redemption arc and she’s just the most lovely and likable character now. And she still has her sharp edge and she’s very mean. I see her kind of being presented as being too skeptical and being kind of, I guess, maybe a little cynical. I really think that there’s nothing wrong with the way she reacted to, you know, maybe she could have been more polite, I suppose, but I would react the same way if I were sitting in front of someone claiming to be a psychic. It’s disappointing to see that and I only hope maybe somehow they figure out some way to kind of take that

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Back, but you know, it doesn’t look like it so far.

CW: Yeah, I just I don’t like seeing the regularization in popular you know mainstream TV of a an older woman psychic who sets up a little you know has a little parlor and takes in clients because I mean that’s essentially free advertising for every huckster and con person out there who does that sort of thing. And if it’s made to seem like, oh, well, there’s something to it, yeah, and the characters on Ted Lasso seem to think it’s okay. And granted, it’s a fictional show. We all know it’s fiction. But I mean, it’s gotten me more interested in soccer than I was before.

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PR: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

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CW: So anyway, we’re lamenting that, and we’ll see what happens. I mean, the season is not over. Things could take a turn. We could find out that the miraculous occurrences were perhaps staged or set up in some way, but I don’t think they’re going to go that route, so we’ll see what happens.

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PR: And just a side recommendation for those of you who prefer seeing psychics in a skeptical light in pop culture, I recommend the show Shuteye, which I think had a couple of seasons. And it’s about storefront psychics who are hamming people and kind of the crime syndicates behind them in L.A. Of course, it’s a fictional show, but it’s an interesting show and it

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psychics are not actually psychic in it, which I like.

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CW: Where can one find this show?

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PR: I think it’s on Hulu now. I want to say maybe it was an FX show, but I believe it’s streaming on Hulu.

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CW: Shuteye. Okay, I’ll take a look for that.

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Thanks.

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PR: Sure.

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CW: Now, Ben, you had something that perked up your eyes and ears that came across your desk, right?

BR: Two things, in fact. I finally saw Chupa.

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CW: Oh, how was it?

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BR: Well, it’s a little too easy and facile to say it sucked, but it was not very good. And I don’t say that because I’m complaining about its lack of historical accuracy like that. It just like on its own merits. I’m like, this is not… the creature effects were this sort of Ewok, sort of cutesy, scary, but not really, I don’t know, just… it didn’t work on a lot of levels. And I kind of feel bad about that because it was intended to be a sort of a heartwarming story and it was, you know, had lots of nice Mexican cultural family things, and Mexican wrestlers, and the chupalibras, and things like that, but it just… Christian Slater plays the evil corporate guy out there to shoot the chupacabra hunter. Slight spoilers, but he’s trying to find the chupacabra because it apparently has healing powers in its blood, or at least he believes it does. And one of the things that bugged me about this film is that the kids are told this, and they’re like, no, don’t take our chupacabra. It’s cute and furry and kind of flies or kind of doesn’t, I don’t know. I’m like, well, you could actually save people’s lives here. I know the Christian Slayer is supposed to be the bad guy, but…

CW: There comes a point where you stop seeing movies from the kids point of view and you start you start identifying with the adults who are often the villains

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like like, yeah, yeah, if that can cure cancer, then definitely kill that cute animal get

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all of its blood. Yeah!

BR: Right. Or even like, you know, the kid’s grandfather has Alzheimer’s and this or some form of dementia and we sort of see this, he’s regressing to his days as a fighter. And again, the, you know, the more skeptical me is thinking, well, the chupacabra could actually sort of in this twist, in this twisting turn, may actually cure that. Anyway, it’s just, again, it’s heart was in the right place. It was very ET like, as I think we touched on before, but sad to say not a winner on this one.

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CW: So it’s not a watch it, it’s a skip it.

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BR: I was obligated to watch it either way.

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CW: Well, yeah, not for you. You’re the Chupacabra guy. You have to watch it, but nobody else has to.

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BR: Yeah, I mean, again, I could tell what they were trying to do. It just wasn’t well executed. I mean, the actors were doing okay and it was, everybody meant well. I just think that the, that’s the best I could say about it.

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CW: That’s a great movie review when you start out,

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well, everybody meant well.

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Oh, damning with faint praise.

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BR: But yes, the other thing that came across my radar was,

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do you guys remember Melba Ketchum?

CW: I do. Yes. That her her her name always reminds me of food. I think of Melba Toast and ketchup. That might just be me.

BR: It’s not just you. That same thing happened to me.

CW: But she was the would be geneticist who was making up stuff about Bigfoot, right?

BR: More or less. That’s that’s a that’s not an unfair characterization. She yeah. So she was a Texas veterinarian who is a self-styled genetics expert, which is a little problematic right there. She does have a doctorate in veterinary sciences, which is, you know, a perfectly legitimate field. It just doesn’t necessarily qualify you to do genetic analysis. But yeah, so we actually had Sharon Hill on a while back and we talked about her. And anyway, long story short, I won’t recap the episode, it’s worth watching. Anyway, so in 2012, she claimed to have found evidence for Bigfoot through genetic analysis. There was a whole fiasco and she couldn’t get her research published because it was garbage. So she made up her own journal and published it there. And it was just a whole big thing. Anyway, so I thought that she was sort of, not dead and gone, but I figured, you know, she had her moment in the sun of infamy 10 years ago.

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CW: You thought she’d be retired by now.

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BR: I thought she’d be retired. So sure enough, she’s like a bad penny, Melba Ketchum is back, even after being disciplined for professional misconduct by the Harris County Public Defender’s Office. So her latest thing is she set up a GoFundMe page wanting to basically complete analysis on not only Bigfoot, but also Dogman, Giants, and other unknown creatures.

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CW: Huh?

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BR: Yeah, so Dogman is, well, it’s kind of what you would expect. It’s this alleged half-dog, half-human creature. Giants, yeah. So apparently not satisfied with her complete and utter failure 10 years ago on Bigfoot, she’s like, well, you know, let’s, let’s, let’s just broaden this. Why don’t we just expand it to other unknown creatures? And why don’t you raise, why don’t you give us the money and we will, we’re going to do some analysis on it.

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CW: Did you read, does she have anything in the GoFundMe description on like how she’s going to do this research? Like, hey, I’m just going to solicit, you know, DNA from anybody who wants to send me DNA or does she have samples that she thinks are dogman hairs?

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BR: The description is very, very concise. I’ll just read it here because it’s all right there. She’s raising research funding for genetic research. Samples include Bigfoot, dogman, giants, and others. Object is to prove relatedness and origin of the species. This fundraiser is to complete the study. Massive amounts of data have already been obtained. All right. Donors will be kept abreast of progress with a signed NDA, thanks much in advance. That is the extent of the information that’s available. If people want to donate, and I would not suggest you do, but if people do want to donate, presumably you may be given more information about her quote massive amounts of data. So yeah, there you go.

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CW: All right, well I’ve lived long enough to hear Ben Radford plug a GoFundMe for Melba Ketchum. Never would have thought.

BR: Well, you know, I wouldn’t say plug.

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I will just note that at the bottom of the donations page, there is a reference to if people want a full refund for fraud. Just to be crystal clear, I’m not saying that this is a fraudulent fundraiser. I’m just saying that if it is, there are ways to get your money back.

CW: Oh, well, knowledge is power.

BR: There you go.

0:20:04
Adrienne Hill: Hello everyone, Adrienne Hill from Canada here. For those of you who would love an excuse to visit Calgary, besides the maple syrup and mountains, the Western Canadian Reason or We Can Reason conference is happening May 5th and 6th. We have a great lineup of both local and international speakers. We have science communicator and secular activist, Aron Raw, host of the QDROPT podcast, Courtney Hurd, host of the Divorcing Religion podcast, Janice Selby, co-host of the Squaring the Strange podcast and clever caricaturist, Celestia Ward. Host of the Thinking Atheist podcast, Seth Andrews. Noted pancake eating expert, Richard Saunders. I’m so excited he’s coming. And me, Adrienne Hill. And now Richard, besides eating pancakes and real Canadian maple syrup,

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what do you plan to do at the conference?

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Richard Saunders: Well, if I’m not too full from pancakes, we might be at the Hotel Clique Friday, May 5 at 6pm, that’s Calgary time, for registration and fun. Celestia will be drawing all your beautiful faces. Lois Edwards and Adrian will be holding a trivia competition and I might be bending a spoon or three, because good things happen in threes, and folding some paper into Pegasus and

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magic rabbits.

AH: Check out the website at www.weekendreason.com for more information on speakers, hotel and activities. Hope to see you there or you might be, you know, sorry.

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CW: And today we have Richard Saunders with us, the host of the Skeptic Zone, one of the longest running skeptical podcasts in skeptical history. Richard, hello.

0:22:18
RS: Well, great to be with Squaring the Strange always. And yes, it is one of the longest running podcasts in skeptical history apart from all the other longer running ones.

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Well, okay. So, SGU, Skeptoid, Geo, all those podcasts, the geologic podcasts, all predate me, but we’re all within a couple of years of each other. So there’s not much in it, you know.

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BR: Fair enough.

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CW: It’s a small, small field, yes.

0:22:49
Well, we have you on today to tell us about the Great Australian Psychic Prediction Project. And you’ve been on a couple of other shows, and I’ve seen some write-ups about this project. It makes me tired just thinking about it. So in the interest of making our listeners also amazed at the amount of work you’ve put in, can you tell us what the Great Australian Psychic Prediction Project is, and how did it originate?

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RS: Well, it was an effort on my part to do an analysis of psychic predictions made in Australia. And it began something like 12 years ago, where I started to collect a magazine called the International Psychics Directory, which is published in Australia. And every year they would have a page or two of predictions. And I thought, after a couple of years, I thought, I know, if I collate some of these predictions from this one magazine, I can write an article about predictions and see how many of them came true. Well, I gathered them. I wrote a short article, I did a bit on the Skeptic’s Own podcast. And I kept collecting, and I kept collecting, and I kept promising myself I’ll stop at three or four hundred predictions. That’s a good database.

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CW: I just kept telling myself I can quit when I want to.

0:24:16
RS: That’s right. Anytime I want, I can quit. And as the years went on and I just kept collecting more and more, it was like a self-perpetuating machine because the more predictions I collected and archived, the longer it took to complete the project because you have to analyze all these predictions. So months turned into years, turned into years and years and years. So it took all up 12 or 13 years in that general order to finish this whole project. But at the core, the idea was to do a proper big database analysis of psychic predictions. Not to disprove them, although no one was surprised at the results, but to see where the evidence led, to see what happened when I collated all these. I was very interested in the stats. You know, what would the statistics say when you gather enough? And in the end, we had 3,811 predictions.

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CW: So this wasn’t a project where you set out a scope and a protocol and boundaries ahead of time. It started kind of small and just snowballed and took over your life a little bit.

0:25:34
RS: It did a little bit, but it was okay because every time I would reach a certain year, I remember in 2017 thinking, that’s it, I’ll round it off now, that’s enough. Then in the back of my mind, I suddenly realized I could make this project over a 20-year period. By that, what I mean by that is the predictions that ended up in the database start in the year 2000. And so I collected everything I could in Australian media, published in magazines, newspapers, that sort of thing, or on television programs where psychics appeared making predictions, or on radio programs where psychics appeared making predictions, or their own YouTube channels. And the scope, the boundaries I set was anything from the year 2000 to the year 2020. And I thought that’s a nice round number.

BR: That’s a huge data set. I’m exhausted just hearing about it. Having followed some predictions, you know, and psychic predictions in my time, this by far, by exponential measures, exceeds anything I’ve done. So kudos to you on that.

0:26:49
RS: Well, thank you, Ben, and thank you personally because you helped us for a short time. I did.

0:26:57
BR: I wasn’t even going to mention it because it was such a small role. But yes, and you were inspired by Randi, if I’m not mistaken.

0:27:05
RS: Well, what can I say? I mean, how many of us can say that we wouldn’t be a skeptic if it wasn’t for James Randi? I mean, I had many conversations with James Randi over the years about every skeptical topic you can imagine. And although I can’t say it was this conversation or that suggestion or that idea led me to do this, I could say, you know, absolutely in general, it was James Randi’s example, and his dedication and the work he produced that certainly inspired me to do things like the Great Australian Psychic Prediction Project. In fact, I’m just rereading at the moment one of his books, The Mask of Nostradamus, because I’m doing a little bit of research on various Nostradamus things at the moment. And I read this book, well, who knows, 10, 12, 13 years ago, or how long ago it was. And reading it again, I’m just marveling at the man’s research and dedication. It’s a great book. If you haven’t read The Mask of Nostradamus It just shows that the the length Randi went to to do research. So, you know, we can only try to emulate that.

0:28:10
BR: And in fact, I mean and I think listeners and I think both of you heard heard the story before but it was actually Randi’s article on Nostradamus in skeptical inquirer that introduced me to the magazine.

RS: Wow Wow, okay.

0:28:23
BR: It was literally that.

0:28:24
I was in a used bookstore in Utah and I’d never seen SI before, never heard of skepticism. And I saw his front cover review and I bought it and I’m like, I was just blown away, like, wow, who’s this James Randi guy and what does he have against Nostradamus? Well, he’s got nothing against him. He’s questioning his claims.

0:28:47
RS: Yes, it’s not really. If listeners haven’t read anything by James Randi, well, I don’t know which way you’d start. I mean, Flim Flam is the obvious starting point, but you make sure you read The Mask of Nostradamus. It’s a great book.

0:29:02
CW: Now, Richard, you mentioned that Ben helped you in some small part with the Great Australian Psychic Prediction Project. I’m going to just abbreviate that to the GAPPP.

0:29:14
G-G-A-P-Triple-G-A-Triple-P.

RS: You can call it the prediction project. That’s what I normally call it.

0:29:22
CW: You mentioned that Ben helped. You had other team members, so maybe you could give a shout-out to some of the other team members that did many more things than Ben and helped way more than he did.

0:29:35
RS: I’ll tell you what, I’ll mention a few, but it’s a bit unfair to mention a few because everybody. But what I will say, that if you go, if anybody goes to skepticzone.tv, which is my podcast, the Skeptic Zone, right at the top of the page there is a link to the Great Australian Psychic Prediction Project or the Prediction Project, where you can not only hear my full report read to you, but you can read it from the pages of our magazine, The Skeptic from Australian Skeptics, and read all the credits and see who was involved. But, you know, people like Rob Palmer, the well-known skeptic, a friend of ours, had a great deal to do with it. Susan Gerbic, I probably have to give her a lot of credit for putting the team together that helped me eventually with this project after years and years and years and years. And when the pandemic hit, Susan Gerbic helped me put an international team together. And we met every week on Zoom for well over a year,

0:30:39
maybe close to two years.

CW: I got to say, Susan is remarkable at herding cats.

RS: She certainly is.

BR: Force of nature.

CW: Yes, she can put teams together like nobody’s business. I halfway believe she works for the CIA and manages a spy network of like thousands of agents.

0:30:57
We just don’t know.

RS: I think she probably does in her sleep. Have you ever visited Susan? She’s incredible. She’s just amazing. But I mean, people like our dear friend and reporter on the Skeptic Zone, Michelle Biggersma or Adrianne Hill, another reporter on the Skeptic Zone. Again, it’s unfair to me to just name a few, not everybody, so I encourage people to go to skepticzone.tv and have the whole thing read to you. Just sit back, shut your eyes, you’ll hear me and Adrianne Hill explain the whole project and our conclusions.

0:31:33
CW: Fantastic.

0:31:34
Well, did you actually keep track of how many man hours went into this project or or could you even estimate how many hours went into the Production project?

RS: The short answer is no

0:31:45
I mean if I sat down and I thought of all the hours that the team met I could come up with a ballpark figure but then How do you…  when I didn’t Catalog or count my hours over a decade, you know, pouring through library archives, doing my own research. I sound like a conspiracy theorist now.

0:32:11
BR: I did my own research.

0:32:12
RS: I did my own research.

0:32:13
Because, I mean, for many hours, for many months, I would go to the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney, down to the vaults, and order magazines from the past. And I would flip through decades of magazines page by page. And I had to do it page by page, because these magazines, famous tabloid magazines in Australia, frequently had psychics. But it’s not like I could go to an index of everything and just go straight to the page. I had to turn each page and look for the psychics when they came along with their predictions. When I discovered it, I would mark it down, you know, note it, take a photograph. That’s why every prediction, every one of the 3,811 predictions in the project has the original prediction. In other words, in my archives, I’ve got every copy as printed in the magazine. So, a photograph of every magazine page, a copy of every audio file, and a copy of every video file where these people appeared on television, radio, what have you. So I guess I really, it’s a bit academic and it’s not really important to me how many hours I spent personally, because it’s just something I did. So it’s only a passing interest to me. Just say lots.

0:33:31
CW: Okay. Well, that description of what you were doing gives us some idea of the scope of your dedication to, you know, just doing the original boots on the ground, sitting in the library you know, working on this.

0:33:44
RS: And yeah, and hats off to my friend, Dr. Steve Roberts in Melbourne, a longtime skeptic, because one glorious week before the pandemic, I guess, in twenty eighteen or twenty seventeen, I traveled to Melbourne, spent a week with Dr. Steve Roberts, and every day he and I would travel to the State Library of Victoria in the city of Melbourne, where another magazine is kept, every copy. And page by page we went through that magazine. And that was one of the happiest weeks of my life. You know, we would pour through magazines all day looking for psychic predictions, break for lunch, which would take about two hours down the local Korean restaurant, where we’d have a really good time, head back to his place and drink red wine and eat cheese. And I’m thinking, this is good to be a skeptic.

0:34:32
BR: Well, one thing that really jumps out at me and one thing that I hope the listeners are appreciating, and I don’t think the average person does, is how much work goes into this. I mean, it’s easy to sort of sit back and think, okay, well, people make predictions and people make predictions all the time, it’s easy to do. It’s easy to create a UFO sighting. It’s easy to create a Bigfoot sighting. It’s easy to create a mystery. But to actually methodically and accurately investigate this is an enormous amount of work and there’s just such a lack of follow-up. And you know, we all know this, this is not a secret. But I think it’s just, it’s a point that I think is often missed is just how much work goes into doing quality skeptical research. And it’s a uniquely skeptical role because, you know, other than the occasional journalist who might be badgered into or curious about following up with some, you know, last year’s psychic claims or whatever else, it’s only skeptics that care about this and they’re like, no, this is, they’re making these claims somebody has to mark them down and to evaluate them. And it’s just I’m forgetting the name but there’s some rule where it takes exponential amounts of effort to debunk the bullshit that they’re saying.

RS: There is and you know what I wrote about this very rule in the final report which was published in our magazine. And for the life of me, I cannot remember the name of this. But it’s really important. It takes a lot more effort and time, time and effort and process to undo something than to simply make up something.

0:36:15
CW: Well, we’ve just touched the tip of the iceberg here in talking about your gathering all the data. As far as methodology and what you do with the data afterwards, let’s get into that. With psychic predictions, I mean, it’s not like a simple, straightforward plant study where some of the seeds grow and some of them don’t. Or lab rats, some of the lab rats die, some of them don’t. With psychic predictions, you have a lot of wiggle room. There’s different predictions with varying odds of whether or not that’ll come true. There’s vague predictions that only really seem to make sense when the psychic looks at them in hindsight and say, oh, well, that’s really what I meant, that thing that actually happened.

0:36:56
How do you how do you navigate that?

RS: That’s a good question. And it really occurred to me quite early on when I started doing this, because I I soon realized that I needed to put predictions in various categories. So eventually I came to the following categories. We’ll start with the one that came up most wrong. All right. So here’s a… with any prediction, you name a prediction, we’ve read it, we’ve looked at it, and say it was something very simple, like there seem to be a lot of predictions about Queen Elizabeth II and a lot of predictions about her abdicating over the last 20 years, in various different years. Now when a prediction like that comes along, that’s very easy. It was wrong. So Fred, the astrologer, says that I see in the year 2013, the Queen will abdicate in favor of Prince Charles or something like that. That’s easy. There’s no need to research it. There’s no need to double, you know, whatever. It’s wrong. We all know it’s wrong.

0:38:03
CW: Did you look into whether or not Charles was paying these astrologers?

0:38:07
RS: That’s next year. I have to look into that. Again, that’s it. And there are many like that. Surprisingly, there are many which are easy. This person will win the election. No, it was the other person. Okay. What should I say? They’re uncontentious. They’re just easy. And some are in the correct file. You know, they can’t get everything wrong. So many were obviously correct, as it happens. When you’re having a look at thousands of predictions, you’ll get many that are correct. This sporting team will win this competition. Let’s look at the research. Oh, they did. Okay, great. Lots of things were easy. Okay. Then we get to another category. So there’s right, there’s wrong, I mean, there’s correct. But then we get to too vague. Too vague. And that was a surprising amount of the predictions. In fact, if I have a quick look at the statistics here, that made up 18% of all predictions were too vague.

0:39:16
CW: I’m actually surprised it was that low.

0:39:19
RS: Well, that’s interesting because we have a counterpart or another slice of the pie, you might say, which sort of goes along with that. We have expected and the expected predictions were 15%. Now, by expected, I mean things like people predicting that next year we expect to see lots of earthquakes in California.

0:39:43
CW: Yeah, I saw you actually had that.

RS: That’s a true prediction.

0:39:46
I mean, you look at that and you think, well, yeah.

0:39:52
CW: In fact, if I recall the exact wording, it wasn’t even that narrow. It was like, there will be earthquakes in various parts of the world, including California.

0:40:00
RS: Yeah, you’re way ahead of me. I think that was absolutely right. So, we had to…

0:40:06
You know, well, yeah, I mean, of course. Another I mean, I’ve got a little list here of some earthquakes were popular. In fact, I think I found the very one Celestia this was from 2009 Lady by the name of Joy Arena, writing in the International Psychics Directory, said tremors will be felt along the USA Western coastline in the California area mid-2009. Yeah, things like that. And, oh, and Japan. Somebody else predicted earthquakes in Japan.

0:40:40
CW: Oh, who’d have thought?

0:40:41
RS: Somebody predicted cyclones for Australia, which we get every year. Someone predicted health issues for the members of the royal family. Now, this was made in 2015.

0:40:57
Okay, let me say I can predict for any family listening to this podcast, in the next year there will be health issues. Now, so things like that, we thought, well, of course, of course. So we put those under the broad category of expected. These are hardly predictions at all. These are things that of course are going to happen, you know, everyone would be flabbergasted if they didn’t happen. They’re truly to be expected predictions. So, yes, too vague, expected, and a very tiny percentage, hardly any at all, but they were there, just over 2% were predictions we simply couldn’t get to the bottom of. From memory, I think somebody predicted a famous actress would have various health problems in the year, and without actually going to her and asking her very personal questions about this part of her anatomy, you know. And there were very few questions that we simply couldn’t get to the bottom of, so we put those in the unknown. So, broadly speaking, at the end of the day, according to our analysis, 53.5% of all predictions were flat out wrong, simply wrong.

0:42:14
CW: They couldn’t even get half.

0:42:17
RS: No.

0:42:18
CW: Wow.

0:42:19
CW: The rest were, as I say, were too vague, expect or unknown, which leaves the correct file, the correct where they got it right, was 10.9 round up to 11 percent. Eleven percent. That 11 percent emerged very early on, interestingly enough, and maintained throughout the whole process, wavering only a few percentage points up and down and finally settling on the 10.9 or 11 percent. So I came up with the Saunders number of predictions, the Saunders law, 11 percent. If you get enough predictions, 11 percent will probably be correct.

0:42:58
CW: Richard, you’re sending the numerologists into a tither here. They’re all because 11 is a very important number in numerology. 1111, blah, blah, blah.

0:43:08
RS: And in bingo, apparently.

0:43:09
BR: Well, Richard, to be fair, I mean, we all know what the response is, which is, of course, it doesn’t work that way.

RS: You know what, Ben? It doesn’t work that way.

0:43:19
BR: Which my response is, it doesn’t work at all.

0:43:26
RS: Look, as I said, we didn’t – we – I – when this project started, I didn’t set out to have a project. I’m going to show how wrong psychics are with predictions. I set out to start to with the idea, I want to know the statistics, how many are right, how many are wrong, because we always hear this claim that many psychics say, oh, I’m 75% accurate or I’m 80% accurate or whatever the case is. Well, I wanted to know when it came to psychic, you know, looking into the future and I’ve always been interested in things like future and past and time travel and prophecies and all that sort of thing. So at the end of the day, all I can say is I’m not surprised by the results but I’ve got the results.

0:44:18
CW: How surprising would it have been if it was a much higher number? You would have been blown away. That would have been very newsworthy.

0:44:32
RS: Oh, absolutely. I would have been surprised, no doubt, but the results speak for themselves. I didn’t know when I started there would be these huge chunks of the pie called expected and too vague. They came along out of necessity, but they’re very interesting in themselves. And incidentally the expected is 15% roughly and the two vague

0:44:53
18% both of those are bigger than the correct percentage. And of course you would expect that this is exactly the sort of research that genuine true psychics would welcome. Right? They should be like, they should be giving you money, they should be donating their time.

RS: I agree with that, they should be giving me money.

BR: Yeah, I mean, well, think about it, right? I mean, if you’re going into this genuinely trying with an open mind, like, well, I don’t know, let’s find out, let’s see how these break down. And all these psychics, and as we all know on the show, many of them genuinely believe it, you would think they would welcome this and be cooperating in saying, yes, let’s parse this out.

0:45:35
CW: Even if they think everybody else is only a pretender and they’ve got the real psychic powers. Well, a database like this would show a huge spike for them and prove them right.

0:45:45
RS: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I was willing to publish the results no matter what they were. As I said, I was interested to see what the breakdown was. So if it turned out that the results were just just the opposite, that fifty five percent or fifty three percent of their predictions were just correct, then that would be, yes, newsworthy and something we’d truly have to investigate even more. But I must tell you that when we publish this, we fully… and in the report, I’ve got a whole list of what I call expected criticisms, I think I called it or something like that. I said, when this is published, I expect this is what the psychics will say. And I am a case in point about predicting the future, because not one psychic has come back and said, oh, you’ve got me wrong, or this is wrong, or I don’t get, you know.

0:46:39
CW: That was going to be my next question is, yeah, have you heard from any of these people?

0:46:44
RS: Radio silence.

0:46:45
CW: Wow.

0:46:46
RS: Nothing. Yeah. I guess maybe after all these decades, some of them have actually learned something and just kept their mouth shut. Who knows? Who knows? But the results are out there. And when it was published at the end of 2021, I think it was, you know, the pandemic makes everything crazy. You can’t remember when things happen. But no, it was actually published in our magazine, which went out, you know, the pandemic, you lose your all the years go down the funnel somehow. It came out at the end of twenty twenty one. And yet since then, as I say, we haven’t heard a peep out of them. Any psychic who’s come back and said you’ve misquoted me or this is wrong or whatever the case may be. So that’s very interesting.

0:47:37
CW: Well, now, as far as getting the word out, because, you know, we’re interviewing you after some time has passed. After it’s had some time to percolate in the popular culture boiling pot here. What was your strategy with getting the word out about your database and your report? Did you seek out publication in any sort of academic journals or did you go right to the mainstream press and run with it.

0:48:02
RS: It’s mainstream stuff. So I mean I wrote the final report. It’s written. I started to write it in a very academic way. Then the editor of my magazine, The Skeptic in Australia, said, let’s just make it an interesting full report rather than an academic report. And I thought, yeah, that’s fair enough. So we put it in the magazine and then we sent out a press release. And then it was picked up and I was interviewed on radio and my editor was interviewed on radio. We picked up in some magazines and newspapers. And then it went quiet for a little while. And some months later, one of the major newspapers in Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald, picked it up. And then we were just swamped with media.

0:48:47
CW: Oh, that’s fantastic.

0:48:48
RS: Yeah, it was great. It was more radio, more newspapers, and it was the hot issue for a week or so. You know how the press is. They’ll have a big issue and then the next shiny thing comes along. And I was interviewed by our colleagues and friends in the UK for the Skeptic magazine in the UK. So it was great.

0:49:08
I got on many radio programs all across Australia because all the local announcers and their producers, that this is a fun story and they all picked it up. It was great.

0:49:20
So yeah, a lot of press, a lot of interest. But again, even that didn’t spark the local psychics to write in with this I wish to complain letters or something like that.

CW: Now, did you did you see any reverberations internationally or get any pickups in the US? I know you were written up in the Skeptical Inquirer, of course. Any other any other interest from non-skeptical publications out here?

0:49:47
RS: Good question. Not that it’s been brought to my attention, although our friend Rob Palmer has done an awful lot of work talking about the project since its publication. He’s written articles, as you say, for the Skeptical Inquirer. He’s done many interviews and given presentations, so I’ve got to take my hat off to Rob for really keeping this going in that sense. But as far as other international publications or things here in the United States, nothing springs to mind. So again, you know how fickle it is. Sometimes something is hot and it’s interesting. I think if the same thing was done here in the United States, it would get a lot more attention because this was very based in Australia. But, you know, you can really extrapolate that for worldwide, I think.

0:50:35
CW: It would be… I mean, I’m thinking here all sorts of thoughts, like it would be interesting to find out if we also had an 11 percent success rate in the US.

0:50:44
RS: Well, you couldn’t do it. You know, in all seriousness, you couldn’t repeat the same thing here simply because of the stupefying amount of predictions you would have to wade through over a 20-year period. If you say, I’m going to collect every psychic prediction published in the United States over a 20-year period, forget it.

0:51:06
BR: I mean, you’d have to come up with very stringent criteria to narrow it down.

0:51:09
RS: Or you would have to say, let’s pick, because I happen to be here at the moment, California. Every psychic prediction made in California. That might be a bit tricky, you know. So I think, and I wrote at length in the project about our reasoning and justification and everything for the figures we reached. But I would encourage anybody around the world, any skeptical group to do a similar project, maybe on a more modest scale, maybe pick a 10-year period or a 5-year period, maybe collect a thousand predictions. That will keep you busy for a couple of years.

0:51:47
CW: Or it would be a great project to have anybody who teaches critical thinking or has a rotating roster of students, put them to work.

0:51:55
RS: It’s not a bad idea. maybe a set of 20 predictions, collated, and ask them to do their research, these media reports, archival, newspapers, all the rest of it, and see what their conclusions were. Now, it’s a fascinating prediction. The statistics you can then squeeze out of the database, equally as fascinating. So it might interest you to know that most the biggest chunk of the pie, I should say – so all the predictions were also put into various categories like predictions about the royal family, predictions about celebrities, prediction about politics, sports, economy, society, natural disasters and so on. The biggest chunk of that pie is celebrities at 32 percent, nearly 33 percent.

0:52:49
CW: So, yeah, this is like a little snapshot of society and pop culture. And if aliens came to the earth and wanted to find out what makes humans tick, this would be a study that would tell them a little bit about that.

0:53:05
RS: It would. It would. That’s a very good point. But you can tell that… and this is an interesting, as you say, look at society, because most psychic predictions published in Australia concern or a big chunk, I should say, concern celebrities.

0:53:20
CW: Yeah.

0:53:21
RS: This is the magazines they write for. This is the newspapers. This is the radio show. Oh, we’ve got our weekly astrologer on. What’s in the stars for that great film star Hugh Jackman or something like that? Because that’s what people want to know.

0:53:35
CW: I’m pretty sure that’s not a unique thing to Australia.

0:53:39
RS: I’m pretty sure you’re right. I would be not surprised if the roughly the same figures were true of this country.

0:53:48
CW: Well, now speaking about teasing out different things from the data, you mentioned earlier that people could go to skepticzone.tv to see the report and even your list of expected criticisms. Is there a place that they can see the actual database with every single entry?

0:54:06
RS: Well, that’s a good point. We’re working on that because after it was all finished, I had a mental breakdown and hid under a rock.

0:54:14
When it was all finished and I did all the media and wrote about it, I really needed to stop thinking about it for a little while. I really, and I’m still getting over that, you know, because it’s no good just to fill your head with one big thing like that. So we are now looking at the best way to make the whole thing public. And the thought occurred to us, well, shouldn’t we just make all the predictions public? And then people may draw their own conclusions, but then that would be ridiculous because then people would have to spend years like we did doing it. We got the other interesting aspect of we have to check copyright because if we published all the predictions and we’re republishing other people’s copyright work, it’s a bit of a minefield. If anybody was seriously, you know, an academic or something like that for research purposes, I think we could come up with something. I would hope one day we could make the whole thing available, but we have to just you know be careful with various Copyright and legal issues and the best way to present it. It’s not a secret. I mean, we’re not hiding…

0:55:19
CW: Yeah here in the US that would definitely fall under fair use on that.

0:55:23
RS: I think you’re right, but we just have to make sure that yeah, everything’s about board.

BR: Well, here we go then right so does Australia have a their own version of the fair use doctrine.

RS: I believe so again. This is something that we’ll look seriously at when we come to Deciding how to put this out.

BR: Well, we’re going with this you could probably figure out is that we do have a fair use document, of course, and I’m actually pretty familiar with it And if it was published in the US, then it would be in a US law.

RS: Yeah, well, does that mean that things that were originally published in Australia then republished in the US?

BR: I think so. I mean, because the question is where is it published? So, but I’m not a lawyer, but…

0:56:11
RS: Yeah, again, these are interesting questions that we have to sort out. Again, it would be fascinating for another group around the world to look at the whole database without our conclusions and then come to their own conclusions. That would be a good test, but practically, I don’t know how people would do that because as I discovered, it took 12 years. So, well, it’s an interesting conundrum.

0:56:36
CW: Well, it’s important that you have memorialized this and put it out there for people to see and understand. Look, we ran the numbers and here’s what we got. Now, I did notice that it hasn’t shown up on its own on Wikipedia, but if you look under Richard Saunders on Wikipedia, you will find a little section titled the Great Australian Psychic Prediction Project. Do you think in the future there might be a Wikipedia page devoted entirely to the the GAPPP?

0:57:05
RS: I think so. I think so. It’s not foremost in my mind at the moment. As I said I’m still coming down and taking a decent break from thinking about it too much because I think I needed to. I would hope so and I would be happy to help anybody interested in that maybe in next year or something like that. It’s simply not foremost in my mind. I’m sort of trying to think now of my next adventure or my next goal or my next skeptical activity. Because I sort of feel like that’s been done, you know? It’s done, it’s part of history, and I hope people can benefit from it and skeptical groups can benefit from it for decades to come. But I want to leave some more things.

0:58:00
BR: As if you haven’t done enough.

0:58:01
CW: Yeah, I’m thinking of all the things Richard has tackled. You’ve worked with water diviners, you did a serious favor to everybody everywhere when you debunked the power balance bracelets. I remember that was a huge thing. And the latest and greatest is the great Australian psychic prediction project. Now, before you leave it entirely, would you maybe be making this a recurring little PR opportunity, sort of adding anything to this data assembly and putting it out every December just to sort of coincide with all the releases of

0:58:43
psychic predictions?

RS: Yeah, I see what you’re getting at. My answer probably is no because it’s there, it’s done. I don’t see the point in doing it again and again and again and again. Because the psychics won’t change their mind. The media might find it interesting every now and then. But what I will do and what I said in the report, if anything in the report is shown to be an error, then it’ll be amended. You know, it’s simple. It’s the scientific method, right? If you’ve got something wrong and something, someone can show you that you’ve made a mistake, then you fix it, you change it. But what I said in the report too, even with a margin of error in the report, even if the margin of error was shown to be not in the favor of the final report, I can’t see how possibly there would be enough error in the report to change the conclusions.

0:59:37
It would have to be dramatic. But as for doing it, updates every year, it’s an interesting idea, but again, that’s sitting down and trying to find the time and the team and the – gathering this stuff is time-consuming.

0:59:53
BR: Maybe you could just limit it to the year-end predictions. I mean, that’s an annual ritual. Instead of trying to comb through entire year’s worth, you could just say, any predictions made in Australia between December 15th and the 30th or something.

1:00:10
RS: But then again, I would think, well, that’s sort of doing it, you know, a cut price version of what I did.

1:00:16
CW: I can hear the weariness in your voice as you contemplate jumping back into this in any form here.

1:00:22
RS: Well, I don’t discourage any other group from doing it, but just know it’s a big job. I guess it’s part of the reason why I took my time, so to speak, it took 12 years, because in that respect, I could just do it methodically and not be overwhelmed and try to get it done in six months.

1:00:42
CW: Now, over that 12 year period, as you look through these one by one, I wanna ask you, was there any one or two predictions that you were reading over and you realized they came true that were just like, wow, that wasn’t a very likely hit. But there it is. Were there any that, you know, 11 percent of them were deemed correct. Some of these are obviously going to be correct. But were there any that seemed a little bit bizarrely correct?

1:01:12
RS: You know, it sounds terrible or predictable to say, not really.

1:01:17
CW: Yeah, that’s what I thought.

1:01:19
RS: You would think, you would think, wouldn’t you? But the correct ones were somebody predicted the death of a celebrity who happened to die. All right, celebrities die every year.

1:01:29
CW: They were all mundanely correct.

1:01:31
RS: Most of them, yeah. This sporting team won this event. Someone was heading for a divorce and it happened, none really stood out as us as a team or me going, oh my goodness, how could they have possibly known that? But then again, we must think within thousands of predictions, there will be some which were, oh, that’s, well, they got that. That’s amazing, you know, because it has to happen, right? But nothing that was gobsmacking out of the question.

1:02:03
BR: Well, when you have a dataset that big, were you able to break it down into different categories? For example, did you find some psychics were actually had a much higher percentage than others?

1:02:15
RS: Yeah, that’s a very interesting question too. We were able, and it’s in the final report, we published every psychics name who’s in the database and their accuracy. And again, none really stand out simply because the ones that had lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of predictions, the margin of their correct predictions went down and down and down and down. Where we got psychics which appeared to have, you know, lots of correct, like for example, I’ve got, I’m looking at that database now, and we’ve got a psychic here, and I look at the correct percentage and it’s 40%. That’s 40% wholly mackrel. But we’ve only got, for example, for that person, we’ve only got 10 predictions.

1:03:03
The more predictions we collate from any one person, the smaller the correct predictions, the percentage went.

1:03:13
CW: So if somebody had made one prediction and gotten that right, they’d have had 100% according

1:03:18
to it.

RS: Exactly. Now look, just scanning down here, I’m seeing numbers like 50%, but when I go to there, how many predictions, there’s a grand total of four predictions in our database. So what you do then is you say, well, that’s why we look at it collectively. And these are people who apparently make money out of predicting the future because they’re psychic. So not really. I mean we’ve got many who have got a zero percent.

1:03:46
BR: Ouch.

1:03:47
RS: But they’re all over the place simply because the ground total of any predictions for any one person. Here’s somebody, we’ve got 87 predictions. Their total percentage correct is 5.75.

1:04:03
CW: Wow.

1:04:04
RS: But they range. There’s a huge range, depending on how many predictions we have for any one person.

1:04:10
CW: And there’s so many different ways you can parse this data in terms of like, OK, well, that means the people who didn’t make that many predictions are holding, they’re bringing the percentage up for the whole thing. Maybe those particular psychics only went for easy ones that were fairly predictable, not predictable enough to end up in the expected category.

1:04:34
So and I’m just as somebody who, you know, is surrounded by the betting culture and sports betting and different types of wagering. I’m like, OK, how many of these psychics were making predictions about sports teams? That were aligned with what the odds makers were predicting.

1:04:51
RS: Again, that’s very true. We’re talking about sports. Some of the predictions in the database were 50-50 because a lot of them had to do with an upcoming sporting match. And they would ask the psychic, oh, the big game is this weekend, which team’s going to win? It’s a 50-50 shot, right?

1:05:11
CW: Any odds maker in Vegas will tell you it’s never a 50-50. There’s an over-under. There’s always a team that’s favored.

1:05:19
RS: But get this, when I looked at all the sporting predictions where there was a 50-50 shot, let’s call it broadly 50-50, meaning there were two teams.

1:05:30
CW: Oh, yeah. I suppose it means, yes, there’s two teams.

1:05:33
RS: Well, of all the predictions that were a 50-50 shot, at the end of the day, 50% were right and 50% were wrong.

1:05:42
CW: Wow. See, that shows you exactly how many you collected, because for it to actually approach the 50% mark is, wow.

1:05:55
RS: So that’s another thing we’ve found a huge benefit from this database is when we’re writing now for the magazine, The Skeptic Magazine in Australia, subscribe today at skeptics.com.au. And there’s a particular story about sports, for example, we can go to the database and say, oh, and by the way, in regards to this particular issue, here’s what the psychics predicted and how they went.

1:06:19
CW: Yeah, I love the ability to use content in multiple ways. You, for a long time, you have had a segment on the Skeptic Zone called The Trove, where you’ve pulled bits from these old magazines and read them for the enjoyment of viewers. And does this mean that’s going to stop? You’re not going to be doing those anymore?

1:06:37
RS: I do those every week. I do one every now and then on some form of alternative medicine. What I do is I pick a topic of interest to skeptics. I go back to Trove, which is the archive of Australian newspapers and magazines going back centuries. And I look for references in history, and they can come from any year, you know, 1847 to 1972 to 2020 or whatever it is. And I say, well, here’s one from 1973. What did they say? Ah, acupuncture. And I’ll read the story as printed in the news reports of the day. It’s a really fascinating section of the Skeptic Zone podcast. People write in and really enjoy it. And if anybody wants to peruse and spend many happy hours looking at the Australian newspaper archives fully searchable. If they go to trove.nla.gov.au, knock yourself out. It’s a wonderful resource.

1:07:45
BR: I was just gonna add that one reason I really love this project is not only because it was such a huge task and just so much time and effort put into it, and it’s valuable just because of that. I sort of see it as sort of both the micro and the macro levels, right? So any of us can and we have investigated specific psychics. For example, you know, on the show we’ve done specific missing persons cases and follow those in real time. We did a couple of shows on that. So you know, in those cases we have one very specific psychic or one very specific missing person and various psychics. But it’s a very detail-oriented micro level. And we can sort of point to these things and say, okay, well, in these cases, the Harley Dilley case that I looked at or various other ones, we found nothing. And someone could say, okay, yeah, but you need to look at the bigger picture. Okay, it just so happened the ones that you selected, they didn’t find the person. So this project really fills in that gap. Say, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We can also look at the bigger picture, look at all these, and there’s still nothing there.

1:08:53
RS: Yeah, this is the bigger picture. It really is. If psychics say, oh, you skeptics, you cherry-pick and you only choose the predictions that went wrong, well, I can say, hand on heart, with every effort possible, we collected every prediction published. Not the ones we like, not the ones that look good, not the ones that we thought would fail. It didn’t matter. We collected them, we archived them, then we went through to analyze them. Every single one of them ended up in the database. So if anyone wants to accuse us of cherry picking, I’ll show them the archives, you know, thousands and thousands of clips.

BR: Dig in.

RS: Yeah, go for it. Knock yourself out.

1:09:36
CW: Well, Richard, thank you so much for all the time you spent and the time you spent just now talking to us about it.

1:09:43
RS: Always a pleasure to be with my friends on Squaring the Strange, one of my favorite podcasts.

1:09:48
CW: And before you go, although you have mentioned a couple of sites along the way, summarize for listeners where they can find you, where they can see your most recent goings on and where they can get in touch with you when they want to volunteer to pick up the task and do it for the US. I tell you what, it can’t be me. I do not have the time.

1:10:10
RS: Good luck. Well, the one stop is skepticzone.tv, not as in you go to your television. It’s actually a URL. Instead of.com, it’s.tv. But I would also sincerely recommend people go to skeptics.com.au, which is the Australian Skeptics website, because apart from anything else, all our magazines going back over 40 years, apart from the last four, are free and downloadable. So you can read 40 plus years of Australian Skeptics investigations and, you know, looking and looking for hoaxes and frauds and ghosts and monsters and alt-med, it’s staggering

1:10:57
how much information is there, so I can recommend that.

CW: And an option ivitation to psuchichs to go through that database.

1:11:17
CW: Well, that was great having Richard Saunders join us and go over his painstaking efforts burner for next episode, which is Drumroll, Episode 200.

BR: That’s significant in a

1:11:50
arbitrary way, yes. It’s kind of special, whatever, you know, mock us if you like, but we actually do have a special episode and we have two special guests. We have Zamora the Torture King and Matt the Tube Crowley.

1:12:10
CW: Sideshow legends from the Lollapalooza era. These are two of the original four marvels from the Jim Rose Sideshow. And they’re going to be talking a little bit about a brand new movie that is making the right now called The Circus of the Scars, S-C-A-R-S, all about the Jim Rose sideshow.

1:12:32
BR: Yeah, it’s a great topic. I’ve known both these guys for a long time, and of course, Matt has been on the show at least once. And yeah, there’s all sorts of fascinating angles from skepticism to magic to gaffes to, anyway, I don’t wanna spoil it, tune in next time. You won’t be disappointed.

1:12:53
Until then, listeners, take care.

1:12:55
Bye-bye.

1:12:56
See ya.

1:12:57
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1:14:24
Cheers.