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

0:00:11
Celestia Ward: Hello, and welcome to Squaring the Strange. This is episode 194. I am your co-host, Celestia Ward, and with me is…

BR: Ben Radford here.

0:00:35
CW: Hey, today we’re talking about the missing 411. We will be bringing on a special guest, Kyle Polich, who is host of the Data Skeptic podcast. And if you don’t know what the missing 411 is, don’t worry, not many people do, including the author David Paulides, who writes about it. It’s all very vague, but we’re going to get into it and sort of parse it apart with our little skeptical magnifying glass here. And with the help of Kyle who has a little data skeptic magnifying glass. So many magnifying glasses will be brought to bear.

BR: As they should be. As regular listeners know that that’s sort of our thing.

CW: Yes, we’re going to burn this puppy down like an anthill. But before we do that, Ben, you’ve got some appearances coming up.

BR: Yes, for those who are interested or even those who aren’t, I’ll be giving a talk for the Atlanta Free Thought Society on mass hysterias, a subject which of course we covered many times on this on this show. It will be a virtual event, not that it’s not actually happening, but it’s happening over the interwebs. It’ll be Sunday, February 12th at 1 p.m. Eastern Time and you can find out more at meetup.com Atlanta Free Thought Society. The event is free just register and check it out. And that’s about all I’ve got. Celestia, anything you’re skeptical of this week?

0:02:27
CW: Boy, yes, these past couple of weeks were very interesting, just like in terms of pop culture, skeptic stuff that came my way. The first thing I wanted to mention was just a cute little local thing. For those of you who are in or around Las Vegas, you might have noticed that the old Bally’s Hotel Casino is refurbishing, turning into Binion’s Horseshoe. And Binion’s Horseshoe has been around forever. It’s a very old, local Las Vegas casino resort, one of the early original Las Vegas resorts.

BR: Are you talking about Binion’s or Bunion’s?

0:03:04
CW: No, Binion’s. Binion’s, although if you have a problem with your horseshoe, you might get a Bunion. But, yeah, the Binion’s are an old, established family in Las Vegas. I was actually privileged to be able to work at one of their events with the actual Binion family for a number of years. They’re nice people, but the progenitor of this establishment, Benny Binion, who has long since passed away. I heard a rumor about him involving superstition when I went to the Neon Boneyard tour, which have you been on that Ben? I know you’ve visited a couple of times. I don’t recall if, have you been to the Neon Museum here in Las Vegas?

0:03:44
BR: Is that the one that’s outdoors?

CW: Yes.

BR: Yes, yes, I think yes. I have been there and it’s cool seeing all the old time signs and it’s pretty cool.

0:03:56
CW: Yes, one of the, now again, we’re not sure exactly how factual the information you get on any given tour is going to be. But the Neon Museum is pretty into vintage Vegas history and I would trust them more than I would a ghost tour, I’ll put it that way. But he said when we saw some of the old Binion’s signage, the tour guide pointed out that if you look at the horseshoe on the Binion’s logo, it is turned, well you can’t really say whether a horseshoe is upside down or right side up, because I mean, it goes on a horse’s foot. It’s not like it has a certain way it’s supposed to be presented on a wall. But apparently, if you hang the horseshoe with the U side down, like the two ends are pointing downward, that’s actually bad luck.

BR: Yeah, that makes sense.

CW: Does it make sense? How does that make sense?

0:04:50
BR: Well, if you consider, if you think of the shape as being like a cup, for example, then it would be holding in, you know, good luck, for example. And this is assuming, of course, that luck has weight and mass, which I don’t think it does. But if it did, then, you know, in the context, work with it.

0:05:11
CW: Something tells me you’ve looked up a little bit of stuff about horseshoes and superstition.

0:05:15
BR: Oh, now and then.

0:05:17
CW: So that’s exactly it. The folklore states that if you hang it over your door, it’s going to catch all the good luck and, and, you know, bring bring good stuff into your house. But if you hang it upside down, where it’s not a U shape, but it’s like, the ends are pointed downward, then it kind of dumps it all out. And you have bad luck. And if you look at the Binion’s logo, the horseshoe is in the bad luck position. And there were horseshoes all over the horseshoe casino, and they were all pointed downward. And according to this tour guide, Benny Binion knew that, and he did it on purpose. And there was one, exactly one horseshoe that was right side up, or luck side pointed upward, in the whole Binion’s establishment, and that was one horseshoe on the wall of his office.

0:06:05
BR: Well, see, I’m a little skeptical here, because-

0:06:08
CW: Oh, no, don’t ruin this for me. I love, this is glurgy to me. I thought it was very cute.

0:06:13
BR: Well, a long, long time ago, many moons ago, of course, you did a segment on this. And what occurs to me is that, you know, the horseshoe luck thing is, it’s not super commonly known, but it’s not uncommon. And if gamblers are superstitious a lot, and many of them are, then that would discourage superstitious people from gambling there.

CW: I think he found the sweet spot because, I mean, we’ve looked up the lore ourselves. It is in fact part of the superstition that the inside up is the lucky way to hang it. But the logo and all of the interior design of the Binion’s Horseshoe is also readily available. You can tell that it was indeed the opposite way on all of Binion’s Horseshoe stuff. Are you skeptical of whether or not Benny Binion knew he was doing this?

0:07:16
BR: No, I’m skeptical of whether that was the reason for it. Because again, just to be clear, and full disclosure, I do not own any casinos. I just want to get that out of the way.

0:07:26
CW: You wouldn’t be wasting your time doing podcasts.

BR: I would not. But if I did I would do everything I could to to not discourage any superstitious people from from gambling in my casino. And that would include having anything that smacks of bad luck. So I would not have, you know, black cats, ladders.

0:07:55
CW: That’s a fair point. You would need to be some kind of megalomaniacal narcissist to think that, you know, you would know that the bad luck was bad luck, but everybody else would be too stupid to realize it. You’d have to be on the level of P.T. Barnum to, actually, I’m describing Benny Binion. So, it could be. Okay, the next thing I came across was going from Benny Binion, a long dead casino magnate to Matthew McConaughey, often a shirtless Texan dude and star of many movies. It’s in the news this week that he apparently owes his career to a mysterious fortune teller. Did you hear anything about this? Have you been watching the daytime talk shows?

0:08:43
BR: I have not. A long, long time ago, I was a fan of Days of Our Lives and I used to watch that.

0:08:48
CW: Oh no, no, that’s not a talk show, that’s a soap opera. I’m talking like…

BR: It’s a daytime thing, right?

CW: Well, yeah, in addition to the soap operas, there are talk shows that talk about things like shirtless movie stars.

0:09:02
You may have heard this news there or you may have read it on some tabloid-ish site.

0:09:08
BR: I have not. This is news to me, and by news I mean lowercase news.

0:09:15
CW: They broke the news in Vanity Fair. They did a write-up for the 20th anniversary of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. That’s actually a rom-com I’ve never seen. Have you seen it?

0:09:29
BR: I’m virtually certain the answer is no.

0:09:33
CW: You’re just not a rom-com guy. I think I’ve understood that about you over the years. Documentary or go home?

0:09:40
BR: I wouldn’t say I’m quite that strict, but that I will just say that is not a genre that I see in sports movies to be honest.

0:09:50
CW: I think Matthew McConaughey has done his share of sports movies, too. So anyway, apparently, during this interview for Vanity Fair, he said that his decision to appear in that romantic comedy, which was kind of a breakout thing for him, it led to a bunch of other romantic comedies until he finally broke free of that genre and got into some serious roles like Dallas Buyers Club and Interstellar.

0:10:20
BR: I recommend Frailty.

0:10:22
CW: Yeah. Matthew McConaughey, he’s done a lot of stuff since then, but during this time, like again, 20 years ago, he was walking down Sunset Boulevard. He ran into a mysterious stranger who just kind of popped out in front of him, and I’ll quote from the article here. He was a fortune-teller guru and goes, can I tell you your fortune real quick? I was like, yeah, man, sure. He immediately goes, there’s a movie you’re considering right now. It’s a romantic comedy. You have to do this or it will be one of the biggest regrets of your life It’s gonna be a blast and it’s gonna be an incredible experience and it’s going to make a bunch of money the actor recalled so, well, yeah, a lot of movies make a ton of money… And now McConaughey initially he said he thought maybe the studio hired this guy because he had just been pitched How to lose a guy in ten days with Kate Hudson. And so, but I guess his skepticism melted away and he decided to do the movie. And it’s interesting because he doesn’t have the name of this fortune teller. Nobody knows who the fortune teller is. And I’m just kind of like tapping my fingers on my desk waiting for a thousand fortune tellers or psychics to stand up and say, oh, it was me.

0:11:39
BR: Yeah, I mean, it strikes me that if that happened to me, and I was a bit less skeptical, and I genuinely thought that a fortune teller had that amazingly accurate specific information, I would do everything I could if I were a multimillionaire actor to track this person down because it’d be like, oh my God, I mean, this is, if what just happened actually happened, you need to be working for me, buddy. You know, I’ll set you up in the spare room. I’ll pay you. Yeah. I mean, if I really thought that the psychic had been that accurate, that amazingly accurate, I would have done everything I could to find the person again.

0:12:18
CW: Yeah. And who knows, this might turn into a yet another way to woo a big star into a studio contract. You just have to hire an unknown actor to have them jump out in front of somebody on Sunset Boulevard and tell them that, I have a prediction for you. You know, can’t hurt. Stranger things have happened. Last of all, I wanted to, this is kind of a tired, old, rehashed topic to bring up on a Sway Sew, but trust me, it goes other places here. Have you heard that Simon Cowell died?

0:12:52
BR: Ummmm, which time?

0:12:54
CW: Again, yes, Simon Cowell has been the subject of a death hoax more than once and It’s a recurring thing It popped up again on on my feed and I’ll tell you how here I of course, you know looked it up. Snopes has a section on it from December of 2022. So it’s pretty recent that Snopes wrote about it. They warn people that the links that are offering to read more about his death are actually going to install malware on your computer. So beware, don’t click on anything. And this past week, like I said, there were a bunch more stories popping up that weren’t necessarily of that vein, but they were based on the reaction that his on again, off again lover had to the news of his death. So it was it was a bunch of news stories that were literally headlined Simon Cowell death hoax. So I see the word hoax and I want to see what’s going on. Now, these hoax stories all revolved around quotes from the singer Sinitta. I think that’s how you pronounce her name. Have you heard of Sinitta? I have not. Neither have I. But apparently she’s a singer that Simon Cowell used to date or on again off again has dated and the stories appeared in the mirror and the Sun, you know legitimate outlets or legitimate quotation marks, you know, like not Not scam outlets.

BR: No, no, no, not like the Daily Fail

CW: They appeared in mid-january and Those stories said that the singer, you know was absolutely devastated. And she talked about what it was like to wake up to all these messages that Simon Cowell had died, and then it was all fake. And the story got echoed by dozens and dozens, or maybe even hundreds and hundreds, I didn’t go all the way down the line, of other news sites. And I use news in quotation marks here. Now, these sites have a business model of just regurgitating a story, especially about a Hollywood thing. And they slap on a bunch of ads, and you must click to keep reading. And it’s, you know, it’s the clickbait ad sites. And you guys know the ones I’m talking about here. They also echoed the news in a not so great English. It tells me it’s either put together by AI, or by an actual human that perhaps does not speak English as a first language. It’s hard to tell at this point. But the thing I noticed was the Simon Cowell thing. It didn’t pop up like as a side thing on ads or in my little newsfeed. It popped up as a thing that a member of a group had posted to a group I belong to. And I say member, it could be a robot that managed to become a member. It could be a member whose Facebook account was hacked, but they decided to throw this story on the main feed for a Facebook group. And then just today, the same thing happened with Sylvester Stallone. A bogus story claiming that Stallone was dead and the world bids him a fond farewell, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It posted to a Facebook group again as coming from a member of that Facebook group. So and it also showed a photo of Bill Clinton looking into a casket. And there was like a photo in an ornate frame next to him. And that little photo, that little frame provided a perfect spot to clip in a new image using Photoshop badly. In this case, it was Stallone. And in the earlier story, you know, that had been done exactly the same image, but with Simon Cowell. This is like a template people are using. Now, out of curiosity, I clicked on the story about Stallone. No, I did not have any malware installed on my computer. I didn’t go down those routes, but I wanted to see what it said. And it was ads, and the headline text just repeated dozens of times. Like, it made absolutely no sense. It was just, you know, you know, the world bids Fawn farewell to Stallone. The world bids Fawn farewell to Stallone. I can’t say it that many times, it’s like a tongue twister. But it was like lorem ipsum, if any designers out there know that, that just, you know, repeated nonsense text.

0:17:02
BR: Well, at least Bob Denver is still with us.

0:17:06
CW: Yes, I knew you were going to mention Bob Denver. It further stated that Sylvester Stallone is very much alive. And they posted the story Snopes did in December of 2022. Apparently, there’s a whole string of celebrities that were reported dead the end of 2022. In November. This includes Bruce Willis, Clint Eastwood, Julia Roberts, and the country music star Alan Jackson. So it definitely seems like a little minor wave of celebrity death hoaxes, and they’re popping up in new ways on Facebook. So keep your eyes open. And when you see any headline about a celebrity death, you know, be skeptical.

0:17:50
BR: Exactly.

0:17:51
CW: All right, then. And even though Pasquale hasn’t been with us for the opener here, he’s going to join us for our interview with Kyle Pulich, which is happening right…

BR: Now!

0:18:17
BR: So for this episode we have a fellow skeptic and a researcher and a guy that I’ve known for a while, Kyle Polich. And the reason I wanted to have him on, well, there’s a couple reasons, but he pitched to me an article for Skeptical Inquirer in the olden days, back in 2017, in the before times of the pandemic. And he’s like, so have you heard about the missing 411? I have, but I don’t know much about it. And he’s like, well, I’m, he’s like, well, I have it. And I was like, yes, you do it. How are you finished that sentence? Yes, please, please write something up on it. And he did. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. So Kyle, are you there?

0:18:55
Kyle Polich: I am indeed. Thanks for having me.

0:18:57
BR: Awesome. So give us a little bit of your background. If you would, I know you, Celestia knows you and others, but, you know, it’s a, it’s a medium sized community. So for those who don’t, don’t know your background, enlighten us. Will do.

0:19:09
KP: So my academic backgrounds in computer science, specifically with a focus in artificial intelligence. And that led me into a career as something called a data scientist, which is a popular thing you can look up if you haven’t heard of it already. Largely, I work with large data sets and machine learning and AI and helping companies use those tools. But in the skeptical world, I may be known, if I’m known for the Data Skeptic podcast that I host where we cover topics in skepticism, but really with a bend on the data and the AI and statistics and things like that.

0:19:42
BR: So I’ll just jump in here. So what was your first encounter with the missing 411? I think I know the answer, and I think we both may have come to this from sort of a different angle, which is Bigfoot, but jump into it for us.

0:19:58
KP: For sure. So I listen to a lot of science and skeptical podcasts and for whatever weird reason, I tend to balance that out with equal parts paranormal podcasts. I don’t necessarily find them compelling but I enjoy the folklore and the mystery and sometimes trying to tell who I think is lying or not. And so this topic, things come and go. Sometimes there’ll be a topic that floats around the paranormal sphere and doesn’t really bounce out of it but the missing 411 became this rather persistent and sort of widely talked about topic in which the main researcher, David Palaides, has put forward this idea that people are disappearing at alarming rates from, first it was national parks and now it’s just rural areas, and that these disappearances fit a very mysterious and confusing pattern. So that was enough for me to take at least an initial interest. Also, David talks quite a bit about having clusters, or he finds clusters where these disappearances keep happening. And that appealed to me as someone who does analytics and knows about clustering algorithms and things like that. Could I look at this data and find that there was anything to it? Turns out, looking at it from a clustering angle doesn’t matter so much because I don’t think David knows the mathematical definition of a cluster. He means it more informally. But what was kind of interesting is to pursue this and say, like, could there be something here? Unlike saying, like, you were abducted by Venutions, where I’m going to doubt you from first principles, it is entirely plausible to me that there could be something nefarious or mysterious going on, albeit, you know, probably not supernatural, but like a serial killer could be loose in a national park. And this could be the first independent investigator uncovering that. That’s a possible thing. I don’t think that’s what’s happening but could be. So that was my initial interest in the topic.

0:21:47
CW: Now just so the listeners have some background here with the missing 411, there’s a lot of confusion with that name if you haven’t actually read about it already. It’s not a plane flight that was number 411. It’s not 411 people. It’s not an area code. What does he mean by that? What’s the moniker 411 for?

0:22:08
KP: I have heard two conflicting stories. The first is that his initial book has 411 missing people in it, which I have right here. I guess I could count them. That seems about right. The other thing I’ve heard is that it was missing information. And that was kind of just like his style of I’m going to name it this. But yeah, given that there are now hundreds and over thousands of people, David Catalogues is being mysteriously missing. Not quite the best name, but that’s what stuck.

CW: Yeah, the first one, the first book came out. What was it like, 2011?

KP: That sounds about right. I’ll look for a print year while we chat here.

0:22:42
CW: And if I recall correctly, when that usage started coming into common parlance, people saying, hey, give me the 411. It seems to have been about 10 or 15 years ago. So he probably was trying to give it a snazzy sort of name that the kids would recognize.

0:23:03
BR: Very good.

0:23:04
KP: 2011, you were right. Along the time when people put I or E in front of stuff. I skeptic, E skeptic, stuff like that.

0:23:14
CW: All right, so we know that this David Pelaides has come out with books and videos, and I’m embarrassed to say local journalist George Knapp is on a couple of those. He shows up to also wonder what has happened to these people mysteriously. So between the books and the videos, in a nutshell, what’s the whole premise? Does he have a theory he puts forth, because I’m noticing a lot of different titles. There’s hunted, there’s the UFO connection, there’s geographical regions.

0:23:44
KP: Yeah, that’s something that’s evolved initially and in most of the printed books. David puts this forward with like the absence of a hypothesis. What I like to refer to is the USB stick of conspiracy theories, that there’s something mysterious here and maybe it’s UFOs, maybe it’s Bigfoot, could be anything, but they all fit this mysterious pattern and they’re so surprising that people go disappear in places. So he does list some of those criteria. They are things like dogs were unable to pick up a scent, or people were found strangely missing clothes, or even they disappear often when there are berries nearby.

0:24:23
CW: Berries.

0:24:24
KP: Berries.

0:24:25
BR: Whoa, that’s wild.

CW: In the North American forested area, there’s berries?

0:24:38
All right, well, it seems like there’s a bit of anomaly hunting going on there, but I mean, were there anomalies? That’s the other question you looked into.

0:24:47
KP: Yeah, and it’s an interesting thing because in the modern era, I feel like any disappearance, there are going to be anomalous things, mainly where is the person? So you’ll find things that are strange. One thing that was kind of surprising to me initially was how many of these cases people were found, even though it was cold, in states of undress. And I thought that is super weird. But later on, I found out there’s something called paradoxical undressing. When you’re in the worst states of hypothermia, your body is like confused and you feel hot when actually you’re very, very cold and people have been known to undress. So with an understanding of that medical condition, not so mysterious.

CW: That still freaks me out. That’s the type of strange crap that freaks me out, knowing that if I ever become hypothermic, I might end up also shedding all my clothing right before I die. That’s that I don’t like thinking about that.

KP: Yeah scary, but true.

PR: So what do we know about the background of David Paulides? His bio says he’s a former police detective.

0:25:50
KP: I Believe that’s the case I did some basic level confirmation not the way like a professional journalist would to verify employment But as far as I know, he definitely worked at the San Jose Police Department. I don’t know the exact capacities, but I have no reason to doubt that. I’ve never found that David lies about anything. He’ll get a little fact wrong here or there that’s more like a typo than anything. But yeah, I imagine he was indeed a police officer. Whether or not that makes him, you know, gives him automatic credibility, I’m not sure, but I believe that part’s true.

0:26:20
BR: And let me just jump in because I, the missing 411 in the Paulides case, he sort of surfaces now and then almost like a bad penny. I’ll be on some Facebook page on Bigfoot or something and all of a sudden someone will bring this up and I’ll be like, there’s this collective sigh where those of us who have heard about it, there’s some newcomer like, oh, have you seen this? And I always give them a link to your piece, Kyle. It’s like save yourself lots of hassle and embarrassment, read his piece first, and then come back to us. But my understanding is that he was actually accused of fraud and fired from his job. I think it was the San Jose Police Department. So there was some minor scandal. I think it’s a matter of public record. If he wants to sue us, then all the better. But that was my understanding is that there was… he didn’t just sort of retire after 20 years and go into the sunset, he was, my understanding, it was basically he’s like, well, quit or be fired because he was in trouble for some sort of fraudulent activity.

0:27:22
KP: I have a similar understanding and I dropped it because honestly, I don’t know that I just, it feels like to bring it up impugn… what’s the right word, impuges him or sort of accuses him of something that I don’t know that it has to be there. He could be, you know, as you’d mentioned, he believes very strongly that Bigfoot is real, whereas I do not. But I’m also reminded how Linus Pauling, despite his contributions to science, has some wacky beliefs about vitamin C. So people can be off in one area but right on in another.

0:27:51
BR: Yeah, that’s certainly the case. I mean, I wasn’t bringing that up in punitive. The issue was, if he’s going to trade on his background as a police officer and detective, which he clearly does, that opens the door, in my opinion.

0:28:05
KP: Yeah, that’s very true.

0:28:06
PR: Totally.

BR: You know, if you want to open that door and talk about it, then let’s talk about this. So under what circumstances, you know, did you leave? And so anyway, we can move on. I just wanted to throw that bit in there.

PR: You know, it is hard for me sometimes when I’m trying to be skeptical about something but be properly skeptical and not dismissive, which with Paulides, it’s it’s kind of interesting because he did start with like Bigfoot And and so, you know when someone starts with Bigfoot and then ends with missing people You know, you my tendency is to kind of be a little a little extra doubtful from the outset.

KP: Good instincts I would say.

PR: Yeah, so but he seems to have included UFOs in his latest videos as well.

KP: That’s the newest one, yeah.

0:28:55
PR: Yeah, so this kitchen sink approach is common in paranormal communities, but do you think he’s just going for clicks or is he really thinking it’s all connected?

KP: It’s very hard to say. I think this definitely is a business for him at this point, given the books and the films and how much time he’s putting into it. So it’s going to get colored by that. You need to keep putting out content. But I also have the impression that he’s sincere in all these things. Now it’s dangerous to try and assume you know what’s in somebody else’s head. But I think, you know, when David investigates these things, he truly thinks something is mysterious and he’s doing good work here. And while he may not be uncovering a mystery, it’s possible he does do good work like helping to organize search parties. I don’t know if he’s affiliated with that, but you know, could be.

0:29:41
CW: Yeah, well, I mean, has anybody checked and seen if he was a fan of the six million dollar man? Because this is not the first time Bigfoot has led to aliens.

0:29:50
KP: Good point. But the UFO stuff, yeah, that’s the newest movie, and it seems to be that’s the direction he’s pushing towards, at least in one area where there are a number of key cases he’s drawing and trying to collect under one umbrella and say, it’s something mysterious related to the presence of a UFO.

0:30:06
BR: You know, this whole thing smacks to me of having a truly Fortean approach. And by that, of course, in the original Charles Fort method, where, you know, he’s widely regarded in many circles these days. Of course, there’s a British magazine named after him. But Charles Fort, he was the collector of strange things, right? Strange news items, fish falls, weird things, this and that. And some people sort of misunderstand that as being an investigator. Charles Fort was not an investigator. He collected data, didn’t do much analysis per se, just like, hey, look at this weird thing. Hey, look at this other weird thing. And then try to sort of draw connections to them. And in some ways I’m reminded of, I mean, the obvious parallel would be the Bermuda Triangle, right? Where you have an alleged area or geographical region where supposedly a higher than expected, we can get into expected and chances and later – of disappearance of routes. There’s also, there’s the Bridgewater Triangle, Lauren Coleman has written about that. And so there’s different regions around the world. Again, the Bermuda Triangle being the most prominent. There’s also, I think, the Alaskan Triangle. There’s all sorts of different spin-offs. But again, it’s this notion that weird things happen over there in these regions. And one of the common aspects, as I mentioned, is a lack of good data analysis, right? It’s lots of anomaly hunting. It’s cherry-picking. Isn’t it strange that these two people disappeared and they were both 35. Well, yeah, I mean, they’re more likely to be 35 than 135.

0:31:44
KP: Of course.

0:31:45
BR: I mean, so there’s that sort of aspect to it. This is why I think you’re the perfect person to look into this, right? Because big data sets is what you do. So can you talk about some of that?

0:31:58
KP: Yeah, that’s where I think you have to kind of bring all the cases and compare them to some statistics you can get in some baseline. Just because you have a bunch of half-truths, there’s no way to sum those to a whole truth. So you can find a bunch of kind of mysteries, find me an actual one, was one of my first approaches like can I find a case that’s genuinely befuddling to me and I had trouble with that. But when you think about like how many people go missing in a major city, I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but it’s startlingly high. We might not think of it because we don’t often know people who go missing, but we live, or at least I live, in a city of millions of people. So if there are, I don’t know, maybe a thousand disappearances, I wouldn’t necessarily hear about most of them, maybe an amber alert once in a while. But a surprising fact I learned is that most people who are missing are actually found. It’s cases of someone was lost or sometimes confusing or illegal things related to like parents, divorced parents and kids looking after the kids and whatnot. They tend to be more banal. When you look into the cases David covers, they’re always in these rural areas under often harsh weather conditions. In fact, that’s one of his key criteria that often before or right after the disappearance, there’s a major weather event preventing searchers from going out and looking.

0:33:15
BR: But hold on, how does that not, I mean…

0:33:21
CW: And that makes it unusual that somebody disappeared?

0:33:24
KP: And isn’t found, right? When there’s no search, it’s rather obvious that someone won’t be found.

0:33:29
CW: I’m curious about the parameters here. In order for David Paulides to be including somebody or a missing case person in his data set, what are the parameters he used? I mean, do they have to, if a body shows up, are they included? If, is it only people who nobody has found, a trace of them is found? Do they have to be missing forever? What if they turn up later?

0:33:52
KP: All of the above. Most of them stay missing. In fact, the latest film features one person who was apparently abducted by aliens and they were going to keep him but rejected him because he had had a vasectomy.

CW: Oh!

KP: So he became un-missing.

CW: Wow! Okay.

BR: I’m not sure if I’d find that insulting or not but okay.

CW: Right? Wow.

KP: In fact that’s a great case you guys could do a whole episode on. It’s the, let me find his name here, it’s a UFO case I hadn’t heard of.

BR: That wasn’t one on Lake Michigan was it? Because somebody tried to get me to look into that and that was…

KP: No, it wasn’t Lake Michigan. Well, getting back to the case where I’m trying to guess if people are lying or not, this is one of the rare ones where I think he’s just fibbing a little bit and has run with it, because as well his abduction story has a very 1950s sci-fi aesthetic to it, like the ship that got him is a glass cube and, you know, they were also abducting elk, because apparently the ship comes down once in a while to pick up elk. And this just really had all the telltale trappings of a good tall tale to me. Yet David has pulled it into the missing 411 milieu. It’s part of the canon the same way I guess anything George wrote for Star Wars is canon. There’s D-canon. You have to be blessed in by David. Not everyone fits his profile. Some, you know, it’s a loose set of criteria that he gets to arbitrate. Oh, and it was Carl Higdon, that is the elk hunter who was abducted by the glass box and returned for lack of vasectomy.

0:35:26
CW: We’re skipping around here as you seem to be fact checking in real time. I love it. I’m just picturing this giant glass cube filled with elk and like virile men, I guess.

0:35:39
KP: Yeah, it’d be a great photo if only such a thing existed.

0:35:42
CW: He’s either thinking the aliens want him for his reproductive capacity or playing on that trope and fibbing, as you said, using that line of thought.

KP: Yeah. Trying to assume, I guess, what you would think an alien would want with people in that scenario. And I guess that’s an obvious one to go for.

CW: I guess so. Stranger things have, well, no, no stranger things have not happened. Nothing that strange has ever happened. Well, I did a little bit of searching on what people thought of The Missing 411, and I did want to read this. It’s a comment by somebody called TrailAngel4 on Reddit, and people were asking, is this movie worth $20 to watch the missing 411 UFO connection? They said, no, it’s really not. A few guys and myself watched it together in between our shifts in the parks and forests. These guys are park rangers or people who work in the US Park Service here and let me continue. Let’s just say that between the 11 of us who gathered, there were 46 note pages of people calling BS, questioning DP’s methodology and experts, and keeping track of how many times Palites committed logical fallacies. Oof. Wait for it to be free.

0:37:01
KP: That’d be a rough drinking game, yeah.

0:37:03
CW: Wait for it to be free on Prime. So yeah, it does sound like a drinking game. If you’re in the park service yourself, consider it a fun evening if you can find a free copy.

0:37:14
KP: I don’t know if this is much of a review, but I enjoyed it more than Out of the Blue.

CW: Okay, all right. So back in your article in 2017, you dug into a few of these cases. You said they were kind of all over the place, but you spot-checked some of these claims of disappearances. Can you summarize what you found there when you looked?

KP: Yeah, I found a lot of sad, unfortunate situations that largely lacked a mystery for me. I remember one that I looked deep into. I wanted to do at least three or four of these thoroughly rather than just kind of surface level Googling them, go in and see if I could find newspaper articles and things like that. One was a 78-year-old outdoorsman lost on a hike in very frigid and frozen weather. And there’s an interesting aspect about David’s writing. He always tells you how fit and active this person was and how people would trust them in the wilderness and all that. While that all may be true, it seems sadly easy for someone to have an accident out in the wilderness, not have help, not have cell signal and to end up being lost or not found for quite some time in that regard. There were other cases I looked into. One was a small boy who was lost for I think over a day and they found him further than as David reports he could possibly have walked on his own. He was something like 11 miles away from where they thought he would be after a day. Again you know that is a little unusual that a child could get that far but nothing you know is beyond belief here for me and that was the consistent theme of all the cases I looked into. They were sad unfortunate circumstances.

BR: It sounds like he’s using a lot of argument from personal incredulity, right? Like, I don’t think that’s plausible, therefore, it’s a mystery, right?

0:39:00
KP: Sure. Or people who, you know, they were widely known in the area for being rugged and survivalists, yet still this happened to them.

0:39:08
CW: Now, Paulides, you said he’s definitely not aware of the mathematical aspect here, what constitutes a cluster and how to analyze large sets of data. Is he knowledgeable in the outdoorsman side of it? Does he, do you know if he is an avid hiker himself? Does he regularly go out and do outdoorsy, you know, trail things?

0:39:28
KP: I’ve seen a lot of footage of him outdoors on trails and stuff like that, so it would seem so, and that part seems genuine. I think if I was lost in the forest alone, I would die. If he was there, maybe we’d survive.

0:39:41
CW: Okay. All right. Well, that’s saying something for the guy.

0:39:44
BR: Well, let me circle back a second to what’s going on, because again, before I made the comparison to the Bermuda Triangle and of course, the seminal book by Larry Kush called the Bermuda Triangle Mystery Solved, he did extensive and in some cases, original pioneering research found, for example, that in many of the cases, the ship or plane didn’t go down at all, or it went down, but it was actually in the South Atlantic, nowhere near the Bermuda Triangle. In some cases, again, they were in the middle of a storm. So there was clearly a lot of mystery mongering, especially by people like Charles Berlitz, who wrote about it. But in these cases, if I’m understanding correctly, in the ones you looked at, Paulides, he is, he’s not making it up. He’s, he is, from what you can tell, he’s generally reporting cases, but that he just sort of glossing over or unaware of the statistics around it.

0:40:43
KP: Yeah, it’s that these are, they are true missing persons cases. They’re not made up or misreported, but just the idea that there’s something mysterious about them. If we collect enough of them in a bucket, maybe we can see the mystery. When actually I think it would be weirder if there were no disappearances. Imagine if we found out tomorrow there were no deaths in one whole day. That would be so strange. And I think the same is true of missing people. So it’s worth looking into, you know, maybe there’s a place where lots of people go missing because the trails are poorly marked. Although I think we would discover that sooner than a bunch of missing people.

0:41:19
BR: Well, hold on here, let’s back up for a second because again, you’ve dug into the data behind this. How many national parks are there and how many square miles or acreage are we talking about?

0:41:32
KP: So this is hard to give a good answer with numbers on. National Park Service oversees a lot of land and then some of it is Bureau of Land Management, so the exact jurisdictions… There’s a whole science to that, not a science exactly, but there’s an expertise to be gained in speaking to that volume that I don’t have. But there are some questions David raises around the tracking of missing persons cases. He has quite a beef with the National Park Service, thinking that they’re hiding information from him, that they don’t track enough data. For example, when he would file a FOIA and say, I want to know the number of missing persons for these many years, they would say, we don’t have that information. And he found it outrageous that they wouldn’t be tracking this exact statistic. When I think the exact needs of the Rangers versus the local police and sometimes ambiguous issues about jurisdiction, it’s no surprise to me that there’s no centralized database here.

0:42:28
BR: Oh yeah, I mean, and I can go to National Parks without giving my name. So, I mean, why would there be? Why would he think that there would be anywhere near a complete data set about people who visited the parks, much less disappeared in the parks?

0:42:43
KP: Yeah, but if you start from the premise that there is something going on and the information you think they have that adds to the conspiracy in his mind, I imagine.

0:42:54
CW: Now, does he ever give any anything beyond a, hmm, this is strange in terms of the conspiracy? Does he believe that the Park Service is in cahoots with Bigfoot colonies or alien visitors to provide a fertile ground to sweep people off unawares? Or does he just kind of leave it unsaid?

0:43:17
KP: David really survives on vagueness. It’s leaving it open for you to draw your own conclusion. In the second film, there’s kind of a twist where it almost implies there’s a cryptid involved, but as we’ve mentioned, the latest film has this UFO angle. I think if you were to take everything at face value, you would have to assume that all of these things are going on and it’s the sort of a nexus of paranormal activity.

BR: Who knows what could happen, right? You’re scaring me, right? I mean, it could be serial killers, it could be Bigfoot, it could be aliens.

0:43:47
KP: Well, George Knapp says in the latest film that he spoke to people from Skinwalker Ranch and they think it could be related to missing 411, what they’re observing. So, kind of like when, you know, comic book worlds cross over.

0:43:59
CW: George Knapp loves Skinwalker Ranch and he will inject it any way possible.

0:44:07
BR: So just to cover our bases, so what are a few of the reasons that would, I mean, accidents are an obvious reason, right? I mean, it’s national parks, especially if you have weekend warriors, you know, they spend most of their time in an office and suddenly they’re going to go hike the, you know, hike the Appalachian Trail. But so other than accidents, suicides, I know there’s a forest I think in Japan that’s known for people going to kill themselves there. Serial killers, I mean what are the reasons that might plausibly explain the disappearances?

0:44:37
KP: I expect that accidents and suicides are probably the number one and number two cases. As I’ve done some research on this, I’ve been in touch with a few people from the National Park Service and there are actually some rabbit holes that you could go down there of a couple of weird cases, not weird in the paranormal sense but like looks like it could have been a murder but unclear details and unclear jurisdictions. So murder is on the list, I don’t know that that’s too high. I mean that’s almost a pretty planned thing. I think most murders are more murders of passion, they call them, I guess. So some of that, but I think it’s really accidents and suicides that probably are the predominant reason people end up going missing, or since a lot of these are children, well, I guess, yeah, that file’s under accident.

0:45:27
CW: Yeah, Buffalo’s got to be on the list somewhere. Causes death in Buffalo, I think, in the national parks.

0:45:32
KP: Yeah, for sure. Animal attack, let’s say, that would definitely make top 10, I would think.

0:45:40
BR: And I just realized something. Here in New Mexico, we have several pretty remote regions, including the Bisti Badlands, which I’ve been to several times, and the Malpais. And some of these regions have karst land. Because I’ve done some hiking in New Mexico, I was looking into it, and there have been people who have disappeared out on the Malpais, which is this very rural, rugged, harsh, I mean there’s no water out there, it’s basically sort of volcanic rocks, and there are pits where you can fall in. I mean I’m not talking bottomless pits, but I mean the earth can swallow people up, it does happen. Abandoned mines, you know, I just want to remind people that it may not be as anomalous as it may sound, if someone’s, how can someone just disappear without being found? Well, it does happen.

0:46:30
KP: Yeah, and I think most people, at least I consider myself a city slicker, and I think we lose touch with like how violent nature can be and unforgiving. I had never seen or been in the ocean until I was in my mid-20s, and the first time I went swimming, I was just shocked at how much it was throwing me around, and if I had been near some rocks, I could have just been rag-dolled onto them.

0:46:51
CW: Yeah, I think our ancestors had a better understanding of giving nature the proper respect in how easily it can kill you. I remember reading stories about people in the Victorian age would tie ropes around their waists before they would get into the ocean. So that somebody on shore would be able to pull them out if they found themselves…

0:47:10
KP: I wish I had done that at the time I’m talking about.

0:47:12
BR: That’s actually a pretty good idea.

0:47:13
CW: Well, now speaking of a historical perspective on all of this, did did Paulides look at these missing cases and say, look at this. This is so anomalous. This is strange because it’s only been happening in the past 5 years, or it’s only been happening in the past 5 years, or is this a normal amount of people to disappear because there have been some in the 70s and the 60s and the 50s and the 1910s, you know, did he do any of that?

0:47:53
KP: Here’s one, I flipped a random page from 1909, someone in Happy Isles, California disappeared. So I did chart out some of the years, at least from the first book, and there are some rare turn of the century ones, and it starts to speed up in the late 90s, but I think that has more to do with what’s easy to find online rather than, you know, his sort of rigorous work to look historically.

0:48:30
CW: So he just he just skimmed. I mean, one of the promos I found about these books is, you know, over 9000 hours of research. And, and he was just spending those 9000 hours just skimming the surface looking for people who disappeared in the turn of the century or the turn of the 20th century. It didn’t matter just as long as there were, I don’t know, berries nearby.

0:48:53
KP: Right, yeah, there’s really no methodology. It was pretty much a fishing expedition as best I can tell.

0:48:58
CW: David, if you’re out there listening, we’d love to hear your methodology if you had one. You can write us in and tell us the parameters you used to decide to count somebody as part of the missing or not and, you know, how you went about this exactly?

KP: Oh, he would tell you it’s his profile, but that profile is a kind of evolving and thing and you don’t always have to get all the criteria.

0:49:21
CW: So shooting an arrow at the barn door and then painting a circle around it.

0:49:25
KP: Very much so, yes.

0:49:26
CW: OK.

0:49:27
BR: Before we move on too far, I do want to point out and I think Kyle may know this. I don’t I don’t think you other two do. You other two podcasts go home. podcast. Civilians. But Paulides actually played a role in a fairly prominent or infamous Bigfoot fiasco. I’m sure Kyle knows what I’m talking about but he was he was part of the Melba Ketchum story.

CW: I knew that you!

0:50:01
BR: Oh, whatever. So yes, so this is again a little wrinkle here. So astute listeners may remember a while back we did a show on Melba Ketchum. I think we had Sharon Hill on talking about that whole fiasco. Paulides was a long-time friend and supporter of Ketchum’s. And he’s actually, I double-checked because I have her study, I’m using air quotes here, on the Bigfoot DNA case, and he’s mentioned and thanked in the dataset and in the piece, I just saw parallels there, right? Because you have this high-profile case, this woman talking about how, well, you know, we’ve proven Bigfoot exists and here’s the DNA and there’s all this hard science behind it and there’s these patterns and the whole thing just is a house of cards and just, you know, scientists look at it and this whole thing is garbage. And yet, sort of through power of personality and, you know, bluster, it got a lot of attention. And I sort of see parallels with with the missing 411, where at first glance, it’s like, wow, look, look at all these all these, you know, books and DVDs and all the sort and, you know, and then when you start digging into it as Kyle has, it’s like, hold on here. That doesn’t fit.

0:51:09
KP: What’s going on here? Yeah, it’s a interesting place to be that I see a lot of people on the edge of getting to being a skeptic falling into. They’ll see this big pile of evidence, like I said earlier, a bunch of half-truths that don’t add up to a whole truth. But there’s such a volume of it. Surely there’s something in there somewhere. And that’s a tantalizing hole to fall into, I can say.

BR: Yeah, I’ll just wrap that up with saying I took a quick look at his Twitter feed. And as you might imagine, it’s full of conspiracies and conspiracy theories. He’s retweeting right-wing stuff about election fraud. Jordan Peterson makes more than one appearance. Retweeted some stuff, some anti-vax stuff by RF Kennedy Jr. So yeah, he’s a… at the same time, you know, he also sends out tweets about suicides and it was interesting because he sort of he’ll comment on stories about suicide.

0:52:04
KP: And he lost a family member to suicide.

0:52:07
BR: Yeah. And he and he may I mean, he he the way he phrases it, it almost sounds like, you know, he’s there’s just a hint of opportunism to me where it’s sort of like, isn’t this tied into the suicides? And, you know, by the way, you know, check out the book and I don’t know, the whole thing just seemed a little sketch to me.

0:52:29
KP: I hear that, yeah. There was one person who contacted me that was, you know, upset that I had done some investigation because they were close to a father who had lost a child and was very close to David with the hope that the child was still out there. And that was the first time I felt like there was some grief vampire activity going on here. Overall, I think it’s, you know, on the what’s the harm scale, missing 411 is not the biggest fight skeptics need to take on in terms of doing the most good, but in terms of examining reality and using our critical thinking skills, it’s an example, it’s a really useful tool, I think.

0:53:06
CW: Well, it seems like a great introduction to data science and examining large sets of material without falling into the pattern of just anomaly hunting and not really knowing what you’re doing.

0:53:19
KP: Yeah, a lot of it is putting things into context. So any amount of disappearances is sad. So how many were there last year? How many ten years ago? What’s our baseline? Can we augment that by the number of visitors per year? And when you start really kind of sectioning out data in the right ways, often what looks like a mystery just becomes a trend.

0:53:40
CW: Yeah, I noticed one, I forget which one of the movies, I read a quick blurb about it. I hasten to admit I have not seen his movies, but the way it was described, he took five cases, and he introduced you to like the five cases that you should pay attention to. And whenever you’re looking at a large set of data and you decide to pick out five and make it very personal, that’s a marketing technique. It creates empathy and it creates outsized importance.

0:54:08
KP: Yeah, and really does tug on some heartstrings. These are some very sad stories. But at the same time, if you present the five best cases and they’re uncompelling, that’s a shortcut to looking at the rest of the thousands of cases.

0:54:21
CW: Hypothetically, what would have been compelling to you when you started looking through these case by case things that you look through in all of his missing 411 information, if you had found one that was a certain way and would have made you sit up and go, oh my goodness, what kind of things would have would have fit the bill for you?

0:54:40
I would have been looking for something truly anomalous like someone found with a severe radiation infection. You know, that’s impossible in the woods, but that’s why there’s no cases with that. You know, so something that’s really defies explanation would have fit with the, you know, paranormal milieu David’s trying to create around this. On the more banal side, could you have proven there was a serial killer? I’m not an expert in that area, but I think a pattern of, you know, they did this, they did this ritualistic thing, and it’s repeated and there was some detail the police didn’t share that you know was able to connect them. Those types of things might have convinced me as well.

0:55:21
CW: Yeah, well I’m a bit of an expert in serial killers because I watched all of Dexter and I do believe he ended up, spoiler, he ended up in a national park I think.

0:55:30
KP: So it’s all fitting together, see? All roads lead in.

0:55:34
BR: And just while I’m thinking about that, there was also the case of Cary Stainer, who was a serial killer who killed four women in Yosemite National Park. And there’s also a Bigfoot connection there.

0:55:47
CW: Oh, did he blame it on Bigfoot or something? I think he mentioned something about this.

0:55:51
BR: Yeah, there was a series, I don’t want to spoil it, but there was a documentary series thing on Netflix called Sasquatch, I think it was. I didn’t think I was going to like the show and then I recommend it. It’s actually pretty good. So anyway, if people are interested, there’s that. But it is a connection between missing people in the park service, in National Parks and Bigfoot. So I’m sure Paulides has made lots and lots of hay of that one.

0:56:22
KP: I assume so. I can’t confirm off the top of my head, but yeah, that’s right in his wheelhouse.

0:56:26
CW: So, Kyle, you’ve you’ve mentioned that in little bits, you’ve you’ve peeked under here that he’s not making stuff up out of whole cloth. He’s presenting real cases that really happened. He’s not making up evidence. But is he doing so in service of sort of mystery mongering or trying to be a little fraudulent? Or do you think he’s 100% sincere? I mean, surely people have challenged him. What does he say? Does he ever admit mistakes or does he have that coy little like, well, you know, I’m not going to avoid any criticism because it will make the house of cards fall down.

0:57:06
KP: Well, I’ve engaged not with him directly, but some of the people who follow him pretty closely. And, you know, the thing I bring up when I’ve engaged with a couple of these people is let’s pick the best case and let’s look at that one because if we can take that apart, then I don’t need to look at the second best case. But invariably when we get to that point and they say, alright, well maybe you’re right that this one isn’t weird, but look at this other one. It’s just kind of this like not quite a gish gallop but rolling along to the next point and I think David would react the same. I would never call him a fraud. Nothing’s made up I think he is sincere in his beliefs but for sure mystery monger is a label we should apply and I think one that is very fitting.

0:57:49
CW: Okay, that makes sense. I think I think that’s a category that a lot of people who are into the paranormal kind of fall into.

0:57:55
KP: Sure, and I mean there’s a little bit of grieve vampiry going on and a lot of time spent on cases that I think are unconnected.

0:58:09
BR: Just following up on that, I mean, in some ways it reminds me of a lot of people that I encounter who are either ghost hunters or cryptozoologists, whoever else, and in some cases they’ve spent years or decades and tens of thousands of dollars on equipment and just, you know, their time, and they just have this fervent belief that they’re just sure the next time they go out to look for Bigfoot or look for lake monster, look for a ghost or a relative, they’re gonna find it. And I try to explain, like, your methodology is flawed. It’s fundamentally flawed, and that’s, therein lies the problem. I’m not being mean. I’m trying to help you do quality research. And they just sort of like, yeah, whatever, Mr. Skeptic. I get the impression that’s the same with Paulides, is that, you know, I mean, whatever, if he’s making money off it and he’s making a name for himself and, you know, I guess more power to him in some regards. But it just, just for all the effort that he’s put into it by his own account, I would just for like, if only you two had teamed up, of course, I guess there wouldn’t be a whole series of books then, but very true.

0:59:14
CW: I’d watch that on cable TV though.

0:59:17
BR: Me too, that’d be awesome.

0:59:18
CW: It could be paired up on like National Geographic or something. TV executives, pay attention, get dead in the works.

PR: So in the five years since you wrote about the missing 411, have you continued to see it pop up as like a vague and persistent paranormal theory?

0:59:36
KP: It does seem to have some legs and some lasting power. It’s hard to measure. I looked on Google Trends and it’s not ranked there, so it’s a rare enough keyword in Google that they’re not going to tell us the search volume. I looked at Wikipedia page views and there’s an average of eight pages, eight times per day, the missing 411 pages looked at. Not a lot, but not zero. Of course, some spikes in there when it makes the news or is covered by some sort of paranormal outlet. But as far as I can tell, it’s sort of remaining this consistent volume, hasn’t grown, hasn’t shrunk. So I guess we’ll be hearing about it for years to come.

1:00:11
CW: Yeah, a little metric that I looked into was how many reviews his missing 411 books have, and there’s a lot. I mean, I wish my favorite skeptical books had nearly a thousand reviews, but they don’t.

1:00:24
KP: There is a very active and rabid fan base out there quick to support David. It’s surprising.

1:00:30
BR: I think it just speaks to the appealing nature of conspiracy theories, which is basically at the end is what it is. He can sort of tiptoe around it or sort of say, oh, it’s aliens, it’s Bigfoot, it’s just that. But at the end of the day, he’s positing a quasi-conspiracy about the park service who won’t give him the information or refuses to or what have you. And there’s you know, he’s sort of looking for this this underlying grand design or cause or something. And it’s just, you know, and that’s tantalizing.

KP: Absolutely.

1:01:02
CW: I feel like the park rangers at least deserve an apology here. At the when it’s all said and done, if David could apologize to the park rangers for what? Well, he’s way he’s taking a lot of their time up demanding information that they don’t have, and they don’t have enough people to do the jobs that they have to do let alone cater to conspiracy mongerers who are claiming that they’re covering stuff up, you know. And plus they’ve got a you know, they’ve got to keep farming and feeding the big feet You know the big foots out there and they’ve got a lot on their plate.

1:01:33
KP: Yeah a slight correction on that David has spoken very clearly that the Rangers are good people. These are the salt of the earth people that are working hard for the parks and he and I agree on that. I think that’s an underthanked job. It’s the mysterious behind-the-curtain that’s to blame.

1:01:51
BR: Well, that’s good to know I have I have a cousin I have a cousin is a park ranger and he’ll he’ll appreciate that.

CW: So Kyle, thanks so much for giving us some of your time today and talking about the missing 411. If people want to hear more of what you have to say about this or other data interesting mysteries, where

1:02:14
can they find you?

KP: You can follow me on Twitter it’s at Dataskeptic. That’s the official account for my podcast and if you want to check that out we’re at Dataskeptic.com. We talk about stats, AI, and machine learning. And right now we’re investigating surveys and survey responses.

1:02:29
CW: Cool, cool. Well, thanks again.

1:02:32
KP: My pleasure.

1:02:33
BR: Thanks for coming on, Kyle. This has been super interesting, and we want to have you on again sometime.

1:02:37
KP: I’m definitely looking forward to it.

1:02:39
BR: Well, that was great talking to Kyle. I met with him a couple of times and chatted with him and we had a couple of correspondences here and there and it’s neat to finally get a chance to pin him down and have us navigate this weirdness that is the missing 411.

CW: Yes, yes. And if listeners want to go check out Kyle’s podcast, you will find me on there from last year. I can’t remember the exact date, but it was a while ago. I was a guest talking about A.I. and art and writing,

1:03:13
which was a fun episode. And things certainly have changed about the A.I. landscape there. And we’ll probably be bringing Kyle back sometime in the future to discuss some aspect of AI, you know, before the robots take over.

1:03:40
BR: Yes. Well, the sooner the better then.

1:03:43
CW: Okay. All right, everybody, take care.

1:03:47
BR: Bye-bye.

1:03:48
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1:05:14
organizations and employers.