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

(MUSIC)

0:00:11
Pascual Romero: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. I’m Pascual and with me is Celestia and Ben. How are you guys doing?

CW: Pretty good.

BR: Doing great.

0:00:34
PR: So this is our official first year anniversary. This is episode 52. 52 weeks straight we have put out an episode which is no small feat for a skeptical podcast.

0:00:55
CW: Happy pod day to us. Happy pod day to us.

0:00:59
PR: So you can go straight over to patreon.com forward slash squaringstrange if you’d like to contribute any presents for our birthday.

0:01:07
CW: If we get enough contributions I will not sing again. I promise.

0:01:10
BR: Please everyone, please.

0:01:14
PR: So, yeah, this is going to be kind of a cool episode. We’ve got a few things going on. We’re going to hit a swayso, and then we’re going to do a quick kind of rundown of some of the questions and comments that we got in. I’m excited. There’s a couple of really good ones.

BR: All our delightful listeners and supporters and all that.

PR: No bad ones.

BR: Not a single one. I was surprised nobody said anything negative.

BR: Well, they just don’t write in.

PR: Yeah, continue your silence

0:01:40
BR: They do what I do when when I happen to come across like the ghost hunters on TV I just yell loudly at the TV. I don’t bother to…

CW: And then you spend yers of your life writing a book about it.

BR:  That’s one thing but otherwise I just you know, it’s the angry get off my line So I I imagine there’s probably several dozen Screaming strange listeners who who hate all three of us probably especially me And and they just don’t bother to you. They’d rather seethe…

0:02:14
CW: They just they just rage listen out of some sort of masochistic tendency.

0:02:20
BR: We haven’t done in a while, but we get the fan mail. We do. We do. And fan is in scare quotes, so, you know.

PR: Yeah. I mean, officially, legally, it’s just listener mail. Right, right. We make no claims as to what people think of us, because it’s not always perfect.

BR: Duly noted.

0:02:41
CW: But thank you for thinking at all, listeners. We want to encourage thinking at all times.

0:02:44
PR: Yes, please think. Think always.

(MUSIC)

PR: This week I am skeptical of a little news piece that I came across that’s actually, it’s blown up quite a bit. It’s regarding Proposition 65 in California and that a court or a judge ordered that it be applied to coffee retailers.

CW: Ah, the coffee thing.

PR: Yeah, so for those who don’t know, Proposition 65 is called the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Environment Act. It was enacted 30 years ago, 1986, well 32 years ago for being specific, and it was designed to keep California residents informed of possible health risks from being exposed to any of more than 900 chemicals on a list compiled by the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment.

0:03:42
CW: Yeah, because when you’re drinking your wine in Napa and smoking your legal weed, you don’t want any toxins entering your body.

0:03:48
PR: Exactly. No carcinogens. That’s the important thing. Essentially, the three risks that they’re looking for are, can it cause cancer or can it cause reproductive harm or birth defects? So those are kind of the criteria. The list is made up of chemicals that have at least a one in 100,000 chance of causing cancer over a 70-year period. So it’s not one in a hundred thousand actually is not a small number from when it comes to medical statistics, but when it comes to cancer causing things it is debatable.

0:04:20
CW: Well out of 70 years, I mean if I live to be 70, there’s a lot of things that I’m gonna get afflicted with.

0:04:27
PR: Right.

BR: Well, walking in sunlight will. Sunlight is a carcinogen, so.

0:04:32
PR: Yeah, the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment will look at something that is reported to be a possible carcinogen, and they’ll take everything, all the information they can gather in, and then make a decision on that. Now, this chemical that we’re talking about in coffee is called acrylamide. It’s a chemical compound that was used in molecular biology labs beginning in the 50s.

0:05:00
CW: Acrylamide? I think I have that put on my nails.

0:05:04
BR: Is this naturally occurring?

PR: The form that they used in molecular biology is not. They synthesized it for separating charged molecules. So I only got just skim the surface on the science there.

BR: Okay.

PR: I could be wrong on exactly how they do it, but it was also discovered that acrylamide could be created in the heating of certain starchy foods, like bread. When you toast it above a certain temperature, I believe it’s 120 degrees, it begins to create acrylamide on the surface of the bread.

0:05:39
CW: So if you have your morning coffee along with some slightly browned or burnt toast, you’re having a double dose of carcinogens.

0:05:46
PR: Yes. Now, basically what ended up happening was it prompted when, now this was discovered in 2002. This, it was a very recent discovery and it was, the concerns obviously were brought up and there was actually a good amount of research done. They did find that in rodents exposure did elevate the risk for several types of cancer. So the rodent tests did kind of prompt the definition of carcinogen. It converts to a compound called glycidamide which causes mutations in DNA. So now however a large number of case control and cohort studies found no consistent evidence that dietary acrylamide exposure was associated with the risk of any type of cancer in humans.

0:06:37
CW:So it’s one of those things where it shows up in the rat studies but does not transfer over to the human side.

0:06:43
PR: Yeah, yeah. A lot of studies have done this where you can get it to happen in animals and not in humans. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t pose a risk to humans, but it also doesn’t mean that it does. So it’s kind of a, it’s a tricky conclusion to come to with this study. It’s like, it is important to know that it can cause it with mammals, but does it translate to humans? That’s always questionable. The biggest issue is that we have to keep in mind that it can be difficult to be consistent with anything that includes self-reporting. So, you know, we may not have all the information.

0:07:18
CW: And coffee is just, I don’t think I know a person who has not drank coffee in their life.

0:07:24
PR: No, I’m literally drinking coffee right now.

0:07:26
CW: Yeah, actually both of you guys are. I’m in the studio this week and I’ve got tea and both of these guys are drinking coffee. But I’m gonna live longer than you guys.

PR: Well, and you’re a woman.

CW: I mean self-reporting a study like that, everybody who gets cancer probably says yes, I have been a coffee drinker. At some point in or my entire life. That’s tricky.

PR: It is really tricky and there were actually were some workplace studies that showed that high levels of inhaled acrylamide can actually cause neurological damage. They still have not found a link with cancer even in breathing it in, but they did find that that it can cause neurological issues.

0:08:12
CW: Now this explains why half the baristas I have to deal with seem like they’re a little bit brain dead. They can’t spell my name right on the coffee.

0:08:18
BR: What is the link between with the coffee? I must have missed that part.  So what it is… Is it specific to Starbucks?

PR: No, no, it’s the roasting process. So when I mentioned that certain foods, when they’re heated up, it creates it. This also applies to coffee beans. Now-

BR: So all coffee beans that are roasted by definition contain this?

PR: Yes. And it’s only going to be applied to retailers because that’s how the law works. It’s not gonna be like a grocery store has to put it on it or they have to put it on the packaging for the coffee.

0:08:49
CW: Now, so Prop 65 pretty much says that they have to label this as a cancer-causing item.

0:08:54
PR: Yeah, well, the way it works, the wording usually isn’t specific to what is on the premises, but it’ll say that Prop 65 warning, this premises, you could die. It says contains chemicals that are known to the state of California that contain this thing. Everywhere in California, because everything does.

0:09:13
PR: Yeah, and it’s very, you see it everywhere I mean there’s apartment buildings every apartment building I’ve ever been in in Los Angeles had a prop 65 warning somewhere because somewhere on the premises is you know chlorine or you know something that that paints yeah I mean it’s and then you know it’s older than you know buildings older than the 1950s it probably has asbestos tile somewhere in it. And it’s really difficult to avoid.

0:09:41
CW: Can I tell you, I’ve got a friend of mine, I’m not gonna identify this person, but they thought California was sort of radioactive. They were like, have you noticed there’s all these things that cause, I mean, there’s all these warnings. All this stuff in California causes cancer and I don’t like going there, because I mean, in Nevada, I feel safer because there’s not that much stuff that causes cancer and I’m like no oh that’s not exactly the way that you shouldn’t be looking at it that way. I disabused her of that notion but but but yeah this is kind of I mean what do you think of all that you lived out there forever what do you think of it?

0:10:14
PR: Well first off those signs are pretty much universally ignored nobody cares nobody like the fire alarm that goes off every day at 2 p.m. you just never pay attention. And th e oblem is there’s you can’t avoid going into places that have that warning. I mean so no matter how holistic you’re trying to live your life you’re by being in in California especially in the cities you’re exposed to these signs not necessarily the chemicals but the signs is itself toxic? Probably. Well, see, now here you go. So the very nature of having the sign there threatens you. Yeah, so the sign is, yeah, it covers itself.

0:11:04
CW: You might need to put a sign on the sign and then a sign over that sign. And then laminate it. That sign, yeah.

PR: then laminate it.

0:11:10
BR: Maybe have it blessed. Before you know it, it’s signs all the way down. But Prop 65 started with some very good intentions. It mentions water in the title, and that’s an important thing. When it was enacted, these chemicals were banned from any type of introduction to the water supply. And that was important because there were things like lead pipes and things like that leaching into the water supply. And that was part of the kind of important thought behind it.

0:11:41
BR: Right.

PR: And the retailer or public space warning thing was at the time you know because you got to think in 1986 I mean we knew that a number of things were carcinogenic but it was much more cut and dry. You remember it was like cigarette smoke and alcohol and I mean we knew the things it seemed very intuitive and that caused cancer.

0:12:02
CW: After 30 years of research, we’ve pinpointed infinitesimal cancer-causing things that run a risk of, like you said, 1 in 100,000 over 70 years.

0:12:12
PR: Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, 1 in 100,000, like if you take a human lifespan over 70 years, the chance of cancer is, I want to say, close to almost like 1 in 3.

0:12:23
CW: Yeah, it’s like 40%.

0:12:24
PR: Yeah, and so on a long enough timeline, every human probably would get it if they could live long enough. And so you kind of have to keep that in mind. And so one in a hundred thousand, while it is medically significant, like if you’re talking about diseases and things like that, carcinogens, I mean, it’s debatable, especially with a carcinogen that’s so, it’s so questionable that it even causes cancer in humans or any kind of reproductive harm.

0:12:50
CW: You have the whole issue of statistical significance versus practical significance. Yes. I mean neither of you has stopped drinking your coffee. Nor will you.

0:13:03
BR: To my mind that’s sort of one of the central issues is is why people like the food babe need to be addressed. It is because they I mean they trade exactly on that sort of fear.

PR: Sure, sure.

BR: And they make their money, in some cases lots of money, peddling this sort of, well, did you know that, you know, how could you go to the subway? It’s made of yoga mats.

0:13:25
PR: Right, right.

0:13:26
BR: Like, well, no, not really. But I mean, at the end of the day, the fact is that something is going to kill you sooner or later. This is one of the issues that I have with a lot of the food warnings, is, oh, well, let’s just label everything. Oh yeah, let’s make sure that the public knows that a double whopper isn’t good for you. Really? Is there anybody who doesn’t know that? Is there? I mean, who exactly is unclear as to whether a double whopper is good for you? I’m not saying it’s bad for you. To whom is there some confusion? The fact is that most people don’t care. And that people ride in cars without safety belts. People do quasi-dangerous things all the time and don’t care.

0:14:10
CW: Well, as a whole though, the population does benefit from knowing what’s safe and what’s not. I mean, I wear my safety belt all the time and it’s because I know it’s effective. The food babe though, you mentioned her, I’m really curious to know what she had to say about coffee causing cancer.

0:14:28
PR: Yeah, I’d be really interested.

0:14:29
CW: Because, you know, chemicals, toxins, blah, blah, blah. And I can’t believe I’ve just said I’m curious to know what food is.

0:14:36
PR: Well, it would be interesting because I believe that according to the way we’ve discovered how it’s formed in heating food items, I’m certain that unless you’re talking about like a raw food diet…

0:14:49
CW: Oh, you guys are drinking iced coffee. You’re okay.

0:14:50
PR: Yeah, yeah, no, the temperature, yeah, it’s so the roast, it negates the fact that it was roasted before it was cooled down.

BR: I don’t think it works that way.

PR: But in the end, you know, I don’t feel bad for Starbucks. And I mean, they will still continue to make their money. And I don’t think any retailer is going to get completely shut down by this?

BR: Well my bigger issue is what is this going to cost the taxpayers? Yeah. I mean there are other consequences besides whether Starbucks has to put these labels.

0:15:22
PR: I agree.

CW: Well and do you think there might ever be a hope in the future for some legislative reform where they roll back on all the warnings they’ve had to place everywhere? Once they run out of room, maybe they’ll consider that.

PR: I think they will and I think cases like this will probably be the kind of thing that that prompt it because it had it comes up pretty regularly in the legislature I mean they’ve they there are always people trying to redefine things a little or change the law or or even strike it down completely. And I think the biggest thing is the danger in doing this the way they that it’s happening now is the cost of the taxpayers, one thing, but the other thing is that warnings are important. Warnings are very important. And when you trivialize warnings, it just, the beaches in California, there are beaches that are more prone to shark attacks and they will put signs up and they are very effective because these are areas where it is known that there are a lot of sharks and there are areas that warn about riptide and about dangerous reefs and they’re sporadic. There are not a lot of beaches that have those warnings. There are beaches that are somewhat dangerous and don’t have those warnings.

BR: But when you see them, you know, you’re not screwing around.

PR: You know there’s a death toll behind every one of those signs.

0:16:41
CW: Now that’s interesting. When I spent some time in Florida and we’d go out to Lake South Beach and stuff, they always had the warning flags up for dangerous wildlife, jellyfish and sharks and stuff. But they always had them up. And so I turned to my friends and said, should I worry about that? And they were like, nah, they’re always up.

0:16:55
CW: And so we went swimming.

PR: And my wife has actually been stung by a jellyfish in Florida.

0:17:02
CW: Well, Florida is where the magic happens.

0:17:05
PR: I think they just are always there. So I don’t know, they might have to figure out a better way.

0:17:09
CW: I propose this, if any intrepid listeners would like to do some sort of study involving shark and jellyfish attacks in California versus Florida and compare that to how many warnings are up how often. I’d be curious to know that would be sort of a any sort of correlation.

0:17:25
PR: But like I said I I just really think that above all else we need to treat warnings as warnings and not as slight cautions about things that maybe might do something and I don’t think it’s beneficial to the public. In fact, I think it’s detrimental to the public to constantly tell everyone everything causes cancer because then how do we know like, you know, if there’s a chemical that’s in a drink that causes cancer one in 200 times versus one in 100,000 times, I mean, I think we need to focus a little more attention on the things that are really very dangerous.

0:18:05
BR: Or maybe just develop sort of a color-coded system.

0:18:07
CW: Yeah.

0:18:11
BR: Well, yeah, or the threat level, of course. But no, seriously, I mean, no, it would help the public to have, say, four or five levels of threat. Yeah. This is your risk, and of course, it varies by person and genetics and overalls, but just sort of green, yellow, red, whatever, because the average person, my risk is one in 100,000 over 70 years, what does that even mean?

0:18:35
CW: Well, that’s actually a really good idea, because there are going to be people who want to cut everything out, as much as possible, they might be carcinogenic. Maybe somebody’s got cancer in their family and they’re just trying to limit every risk they can, and they want that ability to control everything that they consume. And then there’s going to be people, quite frankly, like us, who have really thought that the warnings have become trivial, and we might want to know, oh, is this warning label a red warning, or is it a blue warning that’s practically no risk at all?

0:19:06
BR: Just something to help clarify. I think that would really be good.

CW: Starbucks and all you other coffee retailers who have tons of money, who I’m sure are listening to this, tell your lobbyists when they go in and fight for the reform on this bill, that’s what they need to do.

PR: Yeah, exactly. I think that that would actually be really useful. I mean, much like the restaurant health rating system in LA, you have A through D and anything, I think D is failing.

BR: D is dead roaches, right?

PR: Yeah, exactly. I think those are live roaches. Dead roaches will get you a C if there aren’t too many of them. But I think ABC is, that’s all I’ve ever seen personally. But the thing is, is that, I mean, those ratings help people make informed decisions, like the best Mexican foods get Bs. And you just know that going in. But no, it’s kind of helpful because I’ve never eaten in a place that had a C displayed in the window, and they have to display it clearly.  And those ratings also encourage the businesses to pick up their game. And it’s fair, I mean, because people don’t just fail because they left a fork out or something and it’s a gradient, so it’s not like you’re either passing or failing. It’s like, you know, okay I mean, no one’s gonna die from eating here, but you know, they don’t clean the kitchen well enough.

0:20:32
CW: Well, there we go. We’ve just solved one of the world’s problems or at least one of California’s problems. You’re welcome. Ben did Ben solved it. So California if you’re listening…

0:20:40
BR: If you want to thank me throw us a couple bucks on Pateron.

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0:20:42
BR: All right, now let’s turn to some questions and comments that were submitted to us from our listeners.

0:20:59
CW: Yeah, we’re doing this as a special part of our little one-year anniversary self-congratulatory roundtable.

0:21:05
PR: We only picked the most ass-kissing…

0:21:15
BR: So the top ass kisser No, no, I’m I’m joking. No, we we have a comment from our dear friend Richard Saunders over in skeptic zone in Austrailia. Long time veteran skeptic one of the top guys out there if you’re not listening to his show do it.

0:21:31
CW: He was one of the first podcasts I ever listened to and I would be willing to bet Richard is sitting back laughing at us going ha ha ha, a year those babies.

0:21:47
PR: In fact we have him to thank for probably half of our listener base. Australia is a huge portion of our listener base. There are a bright lot out there. For the most part. So Richard says, I enjoyed the interview with Sharon Hill. We too in Australia have problems with the word skeptic, with many people thinking it means, quote, one who will not believe in whatever you’re claiming, no matter what. Of course, this characterization far better fits the believer. Nevertheless, are we wasting our time trying to find another label for ourselves?

0:22:19
CW: That’s a good question.

0:22:20
PR: That’s a great question.

BR: Intriguing question. What do you think, Pascual?

PR: What’s your take on that? Well, that is, yeah, I mean, I did voice kind of my frustration with the title during that episode and I’m at the point now where between the terms atheist and skeptic, it’s been very difficult to avoid a lot of what comes with it and I don’t know that redefining it really helps. I think that we’ve tried to do that several times before, but you know, the Brights and all it does is just kind of divide us into subgroups that don’t really help identify anyone, you know, outside of the groups. I mean, we might be able to identify the subgroups, but anyone outside of it won’t. So it becomes hard to use as a title. But at the same time, I mean, that view of skeptic is also really hard to get around. People always think that, you know, it means I’m being cynical about things.

0:23:13
CW: Yeah, that is a tough recurring problem and redefining, which, you know, rebranding yourself seems like a solution, but I don’t really think it is. I’m more for the one of just reclaiming the title, redefining it for people on a one-to-one basis. Oh, you think skepticism means that? Oh, well, where did you get that from? Let me tell you what it actually is. I attended a really neat talk by David Silverman, who again, to blend atheism with skepticism. I know that’s not always the case. There’s plenty of religious people who are good skeptics. But in terms of terminology, David Silverman was talking about how using the word atheist was very important. And then he went through all the terms that had been re-branding of the word atheist. Oh, free thinkers, secularists, humanists, secular humanists, you know, brights, I went through all these terms, and he said, yeah, people are more accepting of those terms, and let’s look at why. They don’t know what they f**king mean. Pardon me, you’re going to have to bleep that. And most of my life has been geared toward making people understand something. If you’re working in editing, if you’re working in communications of any kind, you want to be clear, you want people to understand what you’re saying. So I don’t want to come up with a frou-frou term that means skeptic. I want to use the term skeptic and if they have the wrong idea of what the term skeptic means, that’s my opportunity to tell them what it actually means. I’ll get off my soapbox now.

0:24:47
BR: Yeah, I think that, you know, Rich raises an important point and I think that the answer is, is it a waste of time? Probably. If you look at the history of people rebranding themselves, I think of, for example, the way that the gay community sort of co-opted queer, which was originally a sort of thing you brought back and then co-opted and made it part of their own. That’s all well and good, but I don’t think that would work or could work for the skeptical community for a couple reasons. One is that there isn’t that urgency. The co-opting of that phrase for the gay community was important because a lot of it was part of a whole resurgence in their recognizability and their prominence in the culture.

PR: And the word was quantifiably oppressive.

0:25:36
BR: And we don’t have that in the skeptical community.

0:25:40
CW: Although I wouldn’t be opposed to having a parade once a year.

0:25:43
BR: Yeah, well, we do it with the Dragon Con parade.

0:25:46
CW: Skeptical parade. We do, actually we do, oh my gosh, we do have a skeptical parade every year. I forgot.

0:25:50
BR: I was in the Dragon Con parade organized by Margaret Downey.

0:25:54
CW: I know, I was marching next to you.

0:25:56
BR: Who were you? You were the…

0:25:59
CW: I have been Princess Bubblegum, and I was also Tila from Futurama.

0:26:05
BR: I was Clarence Darrow, the lawyer from the Skeptics’ Trial.

0:26:10
CW: Yeah, that required a hat from what I recall. And suspenders, it required a hat and suspenders.

0:26:21
BR: The point is that for the Skeptics, I mean, we talked about this on the show, I think it’s one of those cases where you can’t, I mean, language is inherently tricky and forcing other people to accept your definition is often pointless and fruitless. I mean, I think of the perpetual controversy or controversies, depending on how you look at it, of embracing the word feminism. I have people who are clearly feminists who don’t like to use the phrase for their own reasons. I’m not going to impose my… I’m never going to tell someone else how to self-identify. I just… that’s the… you call yourself what you want to call yourself, I’m not going to tell… no, no, you are this. No, no, no, no, no. That’s not for you to choose. And so I think what Celestia was talking about, and I think, you know, Sharon talked about this a bit as well, is the approach that I have is just when I’m introduced as a skeptic on a show or whatever, I make it a point to have a little 20-second, now let me explain what that is. It doesn’t mean I doubt everything, it just means I ask for evidence and just a little bit of context is like, oh, okay, all right, well, this is, it helps sort of get people in the right frame of mind.

PR: Yeah, that makes sense.

PR: I do like embracing the term. I mean this this show is kind of the you know epitome of that for us. We are branded as skeptics and and that’s important you know and I think it’s important that people know it’s a skeptic podcast. I do use atheism in the tags a lot just because there’s a lot of crossover obviously but I find that like David Silverman was saying you know it’s hard if you’re using a bunch of different terms for something, people accept them because they don’t understand what they are and it becomes a big issue. Another thing is that people also need to identify when they are an atheist. I think we really need to take the strength out of the word a little bit because it sounds really scary to religious people and to even non-religious people. People who say they’re agnostic and they’re really scared of the word atheist, they’re like, oh, I wouldn’t say I was an atheist. They think that it’s like making a positive claim and they’re putting their, you know, drawing the line in the sand for belief.

0:28:35
CW: You know, I did that for years. Growing up, I always identified as an agnostic just because it didn’t start arguments with people.

0:28:42
PR: Sure, yeah.

0:28:43
CW: And it was actually Penn Jillette who convinced me in one short statement. I was talking with him on a fan chat thing and he said, you’re using the word agnostic because you’re being a pussy. And I thought about it and I was like, damn, he’s right. So from that moment on I took on the word atheist and just said, if somebody wants to ask me what that means, I will tell them what it means. And if they want to think I’m an a**hole because I’m an atheist or a skeptic, well, that might happen, but if they get to know me before they learn my label then that might change the image of both of those labels.

PR: Yeah absolutely.

0:29:20
BR: Or are you spiritual but not religious?

PR: That’s a funny thing because atheist you know is a term that when you break it down it’s an innocuous term it’s just it’s you know theist meaning making a positive claim about God or God’s and then A meaning the absence of. So a lot of people, I would say probably half the people in this country would probably fall under that definition if they’d be willing to admit it. Because it truly is just a matter of not holding a positive belief. People, I mean in my own family, will say, well you know I’m Catholic but they don’t go to church, they don’t make any claims about religion, they don’t pray, you know, it’s like…

0:30:05
CW: We need to make people okay with being skeptic and atheist as proud as they would be to admit that they are A-Nickelback.

0:30:14
BR: Well, and the other, I mean, not to beat a dead horse, but, you know, the other aspect of this is that there is a proud tradition of people who have stood up for atheism. Not too long ago, atheists were persecuted.

PR: Sure.

0:30:33
CW: Oh, they still are.

0:30:34
PR: They still are, depending on where you are.

0:30:35
BR: Well, I mean, persecuted in terms of being strung up and killed.

0:30:39
CW: In some countries, they still are.

0:30:40
BR: Yeah. I was sort of, yes, it exists. That wasn’t my point.

0:30:45
CW: Well, actually.

0:30:46
BR: But no, there’s a whole tradition of people who it took courage to call themselves that.

0:30:55
PR: Definitely.

CW: And by continuing to use the term, you mean you’re honoring them rather than pissing on their graves.

0:31:02
PR: Yeah. I think skeptics should be treated the same way. I mean, skeptic as a title doesn’t get you nearly as much pushback in the threats to your life sense, but it certainly does…

0:31:15
CW: Oh, I’ve had my days.

0:31:17
PR: I think it’s just one of those things where it’s so misunderstood that it is good to define it for people.

0:31:25
CW: Yeah, and as Sharon mentioned when she was on, there are some times where it might be strategically beneficial to avoid the word, depending on the audience you’re walking out in front of.

0:31:35
PR: Yeah, oh yeah. And yet, last I just, the thing that I mentioned when I was talking to Sharon about it was that one of my issues is also that there is a very public face of both Atheism and skepticism that has a lot kind of brewing in it that seems to,

CW: Yeah, sometimes political overtones…

PR: Yeah, and that that gets really troublesome for me right now a lot of the skeptic community is very you know You know, they’ve got that anti-SJW, anti-PC thing going on. And I think that a lot of that, while there are perfectly valid arguments in that area, a lot of it just seems so political and so personal to these people that I, it’s hard for me to want to say that I’m in their camp because they’re misunderstanding things like free speech and they’re cherry picking what their heroes are saying.

0:32:23
PR: And it’s, it gets really hard for me because it’s like when certain, I’m not going to name names, but when certain people say very biased, very specifically opinion-based things, and under the guise of being skeptical about the topic, it’s very difficult for me to say, yeah, I’m a skeptic, when the person who’s the loudest is really not being a good skeptic. It’s tricky to navigate that.

0:32:52
CW: You have to decide if you’re going to stand up for the term at that particular point at the risk of being ignored because you’ve been lumped into that category.

0:33:02
BR: Well, I mean, Christians have the same problem. I know lots of wonderful Christians, and of course there’s the Inquisition. I mean, there are really horrible Christians and so they… there’s certainly nothing unique to it.

0:33:18
PR: Well, and I think that if I were a Christian, I would certainly feel the same way. It’s like I’d have a hard time using that title because of how it’s being presented to the world.

0:33:28
CW: Again, you could always identify as spiritual, but not religious.

0:33:32
PR: I’m skeptical, but not…

0:33:34
CW: I’m skeptical, but not an a**hole. You know, I actually had that conversation with a group of people I had never met. I was walking down the hall at DragonCon. There were probably about five people, friends, who I’d never met before, and they were reading the program guide, and they’re like, huh, the skeptic track. I don’t know if I kind of want to go to this and this, but I don’t know if they’re going to be skeptics. What kind of people are those? And I stopped and I wheeled around and I just said, we’re not a**holes. All that word means is it means we look into stuff that’s like frauds and hoaxes, and we look into psychology, we look at bogus advertising, we look at all sorts of stuff that’s important, and we look for evidence, and we try and fight nonsense, but we’re really fun, and we’re nice people, and you should come to the Skeptic Room.

0:34:20
PR: Yeah, and we don’t usually spend most of our time just making UFO fans mad. As much as we’ve done that, it’s that that horse has been beaten for so long that you know we’ve actually focused most of our attention on very important topics, and and it’s fun. You know I mean this show is definitely in the spirit of taking jabs at some of the the more silly things in the world, but it’s not what skepticism is as a whole. We don’t we don’t spend all day worrying about Bigfoot and Loch Ness Monster and UFOs. I mean, sure, there’s an element of that. Ben, obviously, is at the forefront of that. Yeah, he’s wearing a Bigfoot shirt right now, ladies and gentleme! But I just, you know, skepticism is broader than that. And there are very important life applications that people should understand before they start assuming that we’re just being naysayers and trying to take all the fun out of chasing ghosts.

0:35:12
BR: Yeah, I think that’s important to note is that that’s one of the reasons that I personally don’t spend much time in the atheist sphere is I just don’t find it that productive. I don’t, if someone, whatever someone believes, I don’t care. I don’t care. I’m not going to try to argue with someone else’s beliefs or whatever else. I mean, when it comes to testable claims, if you tell me that your aunt was healed by a faith healer or that your statue of Jesus is weeping blood or whatever, that’s a testable claim, I’ll be happy to look at it.

0:35:50
PR: Sure.

BR: But to my mind, the topics, as you pointed out, that the fruitfulness of skepticism is self-evident and it’s everywhere. It’s science. And, you know, whereas, I mean, I’ve been to a couple meetings for, you know, I go into some places, like, it turns out it’s sort of an atheist meeting, and it’s like, there’s usually like five or six old, usually old white guys, and it’s like, I hate God. And then one’s like, I hate God too. And then it’s like, alright, see you next month. I’m like, okay, well, um…

0:36:26
CW: We’re gonna get letters!

0:36:28
BR: I’m just saying, those are the ones that I’ve been to. And it’s like, and it’s just, and it’s a caricature, but it’s like, okay, well, that’s all well and good, I, you know, and… have fun, guys!

0:36:42
PR: Yeah, yeah.

0:36:43
CW: Well, the best definition I recall hearing of what skepticism is, and I can’t remember who said it, so if you said it, tell me, and I’ll give you credit next week. But the best definition I’ve heard of skepticism is it is the intersection of science education and consumer watchdogging.

0:36:59
PR: Oh, wow, that is a really good definition.

0:37:02
CW: And those are two very important things, very honorable things. And so, yeah, if we can keep that, if we can keep reminding people that that is the purpose we’re serving in society, then hopefully they won’t come to just see us as people who are just, I like to poo poo people’s ideas and nothing will ever convince me that the climate is changing and I hate God.

0:37:23
PR: So what else did we get?

0:37:24
CW: Yeah, that was a great question from Richard.

0:37:26
PR: That was amazing.

BR: Thank you, Richard.

0:37:27
CW: And another question we got was from Kelly in Las Vegas.

BR: Hey, Kelly.

CW: My hometown. Shout out to Kelly. Shout out to Kelly. She asks about how many times there has been the we could do a whole episode on that ding sound. Well, there’s one right there. And how many have we done since we started doing that? Oh, man. I came up with I’m going to put my hand over my estimate. What would your estimate be, Pascual? Because you know we did not go back and count these, Kelly. We love you dearly, but I’m not going to go listen to every episode and count them.

0:38:06
PR: I do know we, I mean, I have, the DING is on its own track in the Pro Tools session.

BR: It’s a dedicated track.

PR: Yeah, so I do have a visual representation of it, but I really have not gone over it. I would think that, I don’t remember when we implemented the DING.

0:38:24
CW: Give me a number, give me a number.

PR: I’m gonna say probably 40.

CW: Okay, Ben, what do you think?

BR: I would say about 42.

CW: Okay, I was estimating a little higher than that because I’ve the way that I figured out what my educated guess would be here is we started doing that a couple of months in and we have some episodes that just have one a lot of them have two the highest we ever had I Pretty sure the highest we ever had was four dings because that was a couple weeks ago.

PR: Yeah, I do remember that.

CW: Yeah, I think they were all Ben too. Well, it started it started because I had no I noticed as content producer I was listening to everything you guys were doing and making notes and saying okay next time mention this and blah blah… But I noticed Ben kept saying, oh, and then you go off on a little tangent. He’d say, yeah, we could do a whole show on that. And I’m like, you know, Pasquale, you guys should really get like a little bell in there and just hit that bell every time Ben says we could do a whole show on that. And I said, that’ll actually help me because I keep a list. I keep a Google document of possible future topics. And every time I hear that ding, I just put the topic on the list and and and estimating there’s been like 40 episodes since we introduced it I was thinking we’re probably at around 60 dings by now. And I checked our our Google list of how many future topics we have, potential future topics, and actually guess guys how many do you think we have? Give me a number, Pascual and Ben.

0:40:03
BR: Future topics that we’ve come up with?

0:40:04
PR: See, if I actually did my job and looked at the document, I’d probably know…

BR: Mr. Producer.

0:40:09
CW: That’s my other job, trying to get them to look at the document.

0:40:13
BR: Just to be clear, I do not have a producer credit on this. I’m like, so it is not my responsibility to read up what the hell the future topics are. I would say they’re 60.

0:40:24
PR: I feel like it couldn’t be more than 50

CW: We’re at 62.

BR: Well Part of it is that that is that I we love this stuff This is these yeah, and so like I when we’re talking and you know we’re making associations, and I’m thinking we’re talking about something of the satanic panic. There’s cultural aspects or psychological aspects so like any given topic that we’re talking about I’m thinking of four or five other angles into it that we don’t have two hours to go into. I’m like, oh, Celestia, we should do a show on that. Make a note, we’ll come back to that.

0:40:59
CW: And he doesn’t stop. This is not something that his brain does only during the hour that he records. I will get a text message at like, you know, whatever hour of the morning, well before I’m awake, hey, we should do a show on blah blah blah. Yeah, here’s a link to blah blah blah And so I’ll put them in the in and there’s yeah, there’s 62 items on there now, but I know I’ve got three or four that I haven’t I haven’t typed up yet.

0:41:25
PR: Do a show on things we should do a show on. Thanks for the question though, that’s that really got me thinking and now I feel like we are kind of beholden to continuing this show. I was going to quit today.

0:41:41
CW: We’re not paroled yet. We’ve got at least another year’s worth of topics.

0:41:46
BR: Okay, I have a question here. This is from a listener named Erastus Murgatroyd.

PR: Wow, that’s a name.

0:41:53
BR: I know.

0:41:54
CW: Is that a real name?

0:41:56
BR: I think so.

0:41:57
CW: I’m skeptical.

BR: The question is this. The question is, for each of you, what are your favorite past shows? Thank you Erastus for that thought there. Celestia, do you have any favorites you want to talk about?

0:42:12
CW: Well, just thinking here, I know the one that we did about Allegedly Psychic, the John Edwards show that we talked about. That was one of my favorites because it was an experience that made quite an impression on me, and it was almost therapeutic to just glarge about it afterwards. I heard back from a listener who said that it hit him really close to home. His mother and his sister were heavily involved in psychic stuff. Gosh, maybe he can get them to listen. I also like the one we did on logical fallacies.

0:42:46
PR: That was a fun one.

0:42:47
CW: That was a fun roundtable. And the nostalgia one, uphill both ways

0:42:51
PR: Yeah

0:42:51
CW: I like that one because I one of the things that I I get a kick out of with Planning and helping and listening to this podcast is that you guys are totally game for tackling topics That you would not hear on a standard skeptical podcast It’s not like what’s in the news this week, and we’re gonna talk about blah blah blah There’s stuff that you’re like oh, I never would have thought of that. Yeah, nostalgia. Just treat nostalgia as a whole topic. Talk about what it does to your brain.

0:43:18
PR: Yeah, I had a lot of fun with that, especially because I’ve always had that opinion about my music talk in that and I really… It’s like you can’t do a whole show about how I don’t think music is quantifiably worse. Or can you? This is our show, damn it. Let’s just make the rest of the show about that. But it was a lot of fun to be able to work it into a broader topic and have a little more of a varied discussion about it. That was a total blast to do.

CW: What were some of your favorites, Pascual?

PR: I think my number one would be episode 17, Legal Skepticism with Andrew Torres. He is a brilliant lawyer, in fact, becoming a very famous lawyer these days because of the Trump and Stormy Daniels debacle.

0:44:06
CW: He dissected that so well. Pascual has made me a fan. I did not listen to opening arguments before I met Pascual, and I started listening, and when he did that Stormy Daniels is a legal genius episode, it blew my mind how well he dissected it. And now, weeks and weeks later, I’m reading articles by experts who are just now hitting on what Andrew broke right away.

0:44:28
PR: Yeah, yeah, the first week that that was filed, in fact, Ben, we have a little podcast conversation and you messaged the link that she, you know, and you were just like, what do you think of this? And because it was kind of a, it was a very general little piece that didn’t really say much about that. I looked at the legal, yeah, the legal filing and I read it the way Andrew taught me to do it. You read it from the end and now granted there’s a lot in there that I couldn’t really make heads or tails of, but I kind of understood it as the face value version that you see in the media. Well, two days later, I think, Andrew had a breakdown that was calling her a legal genius genius because of how it was filed. Not to get too into it, but it was just that she created a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation for the president, which is playing out as we speak and actually has begun to unravel. So fascinating stuff. Andrew is a brilliant lawyer and I’m really glad we got to get him on and you know before he got too big for us.

CW: He gave some great thoughts on the the legal angles of skepticism and how you should always, as you did, you did your due diligence, you didn’t just read a story with a legal aspect to it and say, oh, I guess that’s that. You sought information on what the legal aspects are.

0:45:53
PR: He talked about how to apply legal skepticism to things that are claimed in the media because the media if there’s somewhere where they are consistently Wrong or just incomplete or besides science besides But it’s law, you know, they have these reporters who are not legal experts, but they understand the language. This is this and that and and it was amazing to see the predictable reaction to the Sormy Daniels filing Which was oh, it’s a publicity stunt. But then when you get an actual, a skeptic who, I mean I suppose every lawyer should be a skeptic but unfortunately not all of them are because they would not be representing Donald Trump right now but the way he kind of shows you how to look at those things it makes it much more, you get a lot more out of what you’re seeing and immediately even the day before he said anything about it, when I first saw that document, I was like, I don’t think that’s a publicity stunt. And sure enough, Andrew came back with a great takedown. And that episode is my very favorite.

0:47:01
CW: Not to drag this out and make the whole episode about Stormy Daniels and Andrew Torres, but the cool thing about that was his skeptical approach, his nuanced understanding of parsing it out and saying this is what this legally means it took what looked like Something some sort of piffle on the surface and it opens up this much bigger thing, like this is so much more exciting than it appears on the yeah, it’s like the coelacanth of a legal briefing, and what we do as skeptics so so much more often as we look at something that looks big and exciting – we’re like this really isn’t all that exciting. There’s nothing here, there’s nothing. Oh, the Prop 65’s really not gonna give you cancer. We take something that is, ballyhooed is this great big, gigantic hurricane of a subject, and you’re like, no, it’s been blown up, it’s been overblown. And the exact opposite happened with this thing.

PR: That’s the great thing about skepticism. Once in a while, you peel back the surface of it and unlock just the most fascinating, exciting things ever, which in that case was certainly one of those. But my next favorite episode was Until the Light Takes Us, the one that we did.

0:48:16
BR: Yeah, that was a good one.

0:48:17
PR: About the satanic panic, but more importantly about the Scandinavian black metal scene and you know the murders that occurred and all that fallout and how it kind of Lent to the satanic panic stateside and I had a lot of fun with that I think usually been kind of leads the topics because he has the most experience investigating things And it was kind of fun to to you know dip into my world a little bit in in a very dark topic that you know involved people that I’ve had professional and personal dealings with, and it was very fascinating to kind of dig into it deeper than I ever had to. And that was a really fun topic. I highly suggest people check it out. Not just if you’re interested in heavy metal, but just the whole satanic angle of it and everything was a lot of fun to dig into.

0:49:09
BR: Well, I had somebody complimenting our discussion afterwards as you may recall. I I was always curious about band names And I’d always wondered like you see ads in the paper and I can’t read that And she’s like I love you when Pascual broke that down. It was so.

0:49:30
CW: Letting us in on the the secrets of the the metal scene.

0:49:33
PR: And I would say my third and well not final I mean I love everything we do but my third favorite one I think was the colecanth episode which is episode 48 just a couple episodes ago. I really enjoyed the history of the topic and I think that that was one of our more complete topics in terms of you know we weren’t just talking about an angle of the story, we really took down the whole story. And I just, I learned a lot from it and I, you know, I mean there’s a lot that I couldn’t even find on the internet that, you know, collectively through you guys and your research kind of came in. I was like, oh wow, you know, there’s just so many fascinating things about that story that you don’t really hear about, especially like how fishermen had been catching them for a long time. You know, think about that. It’s kind of this very Eurocentric look of it was discovered by the, you know, instead of fishermen have been pulling these things out of the ocean forever and they hate them.

CW: For the rest of my life, whenever I see a coelacanth, my first thought is going to be, if you eat that, it will give you diarrhea. The things you learn.

0:50:50
BR: There you go.

0:50:52
CW: What are your favorites, Ben?

0:50:54
BR: I had a couple of them. As Pascual noted, it’s sort of like which is your favorite child. I love all of them.

0:51:02
CW: Out of your 52 children, Ben.

0:51:04
BR: Out of my 52. One of my favorites was The Emperor’s New Clothes.

PR: That was a great one.

BR: Episode number 10. I enjoyed that one because it was taking a classic story that everybody knows, or everyone thinks they know, and sort of digging a little deeper and peeling off like, no, there’s some really interesting nuances to it. And of course, coming from a folkloric point of view and fairy tales and all that, but it was just like, it was a much more meaty topic than you might immediately think.

0:51:32
CW: Yeah, when you first mentioned that, I was like, I gotta do a whole episode on one fairy tale? And then when you started breaking it down I was like we could totally do a whole episode on one fairy tale.

0:51:39
PR: Yeah, that was a really good one because it was so, it did not seem intuitive to me that it would be like a perfect topic and instead it became like this really great big topic that applied to a lot more than just the fairy tale and that’s what was important about it.

CW: Yeah, we’ve even talked for a little while about doing a skeptical little coloring book of that fairy tale.

0:52:05
BR: We did. We did.

0:52:06
CW: Putting little skeptical notes and, you know, annotating it that way with some little puzzles and stuff inside. We still might. Who knows?

0:52:13
BR: Yeah, not like we don’t have enough to do with our time.

PR: Just stack a little bit more on the pile.

0:52:19
CW: Too many projects.

0:52:20
BR: There are a couple of episodes that I liked because they were not obviously a skeptical topic, we talked about that a little bit before, is part of the fun of the show is going into topics that aren’t self-evidently skeptical topics. Bigfoot, ghosts, the latest cold fusion, homeopathy, that’s all well and good, these are all valid topics, but when you apply skepticism more broadly, such as to the death metals, there’s so many really interesting angles into it. And so I like, for example, we talked about in episode 34, we talked about the outrage industry. And again, it’s not something that would be self-evidently a skeptical take, but there’s clearly a skeptical angle to the…

0:53:02
CW: Yeah, how seriously you take any outrage.

0:53:05
BR: Right. And then also a little bit of the same thing on being believed. One thing I liked about that one was that we sort of gave practical information that’s helpful in the real world. It’s not just like, you know, well, you can look a big foot this way. It’s like, this is a real problem and, you know, people’s accusations coming up and these are things that deserve to be closely examined and so I was glad that you talked about it.

0:53:34
CW: Well, that actually made me pretty nervous to prepare and which fueled my desire to research it as well as I could in the time allotted. And it’s a touchy topic. I was talking about how accurate the claim is that women are routinely disbelieved when they report a rape or an assault to the police. And we got a very kind listener note back from somebody who is a police officer. And he said, as I listened to that, a whole lot of questions kept entering my head. And you guys knocked off each question and answered it very well and good job, and that was that that made my week, to not get hate mail, but instead get a letter from a police officer saying yes. Thank you.

0:54:13
PR: Yeah, I was very apprehensive about that topic and you know and when it first came up I was like I don’t know if I want to do that and I think that you know I mean especially having you on the show and now that you’re you’re on the show and not just occasionally on the show Celestia. We You know, not just I mean the female perspective is incredibly important in that topic.

CW: That one especially.

PR: Two guys talking in a room about I mean Let’s just say this is like that’s par for the course and that’s kind of a problem with the whole situation.

0:54:41
CW: So that goes back to why people don’t like being called skeptics, it calls to mind a room of two guys discussing women issues.

PR: Exactly.

CW: Two white guys discussing women issues.

0:54:54
BR: I’m whiter than he is.

PR: I’m a little of everything. I’m tan, but light tan. So, but yeah, it was it was a tricky topic and once I saw the notes on it I was like, yeah, we can we can do this. You know, we’re not coming in with that like facts don’t care about your feelings thing and we didn’t have to wear kid gloves either. We just approached it rationally and had a good talk about it and were able to address everything from where the numbers are wrong and where the information is being fed wrong.

0:55:30
CW: And the harm that it actually does to victims to have those numbers repeated in the media as wrong.

0:55:37
PR: Yeah, yeah.

0:55:38
CW: We’re not talking about a situation where it’s like, oh, the ratings for this TV show were wrongly reported or exaggerated.

BR: Right.

CW: Nobody cares about that. But the numbers of women who are disbelieved when they go in to report a rape, that’s incredibly important.

0:55:51
PR: Yeah, absolutely.

0:55:52
BR: We all recognize this was a fraught topic. Yeah. And we all did the research. I did tons of research. So we all, we all brought something to it. And it wasn’t just sort of like us riffing. It’s like, no, we know what we’re talking about. And also a lot of credit goes to the listeners. It’s the sort of topic that if one wanted to, one could twist. I’ve had this happen to me personally. But where people say, no, whether you agree or disagree with this, we came to the topic with sincerity and a genuine attempt to explain and understand it. And I think that really came through. And I appreciate our listeners having the intellectual fortitude to sort of recognize what we’re trying to do and not sort of go for some cheap, like, well, are you trying to say, no, no, we’re not.

0:56:38
CW: Not trying to minimize anything here. But yeah, well, that said, you know, we try to be on the ball about everything, but we’re going to do a show in the future where we talk about everything we’ve been wrong about.

0:56:49
PR: Yeah, yeah.

0:56:50
CW: Because I realize talking about our personal favorite shows here is getting awfully self-congratulatory. Sure.

0:56:59
BR: Well, speaking of congratulating ourselves, which I think we should, is, no, on that topic, as far as I know, we’re the only people that have talked about that.

0:57:09
CW: I have not seen it anywhere else.

0:57:11
PR: I mean, it’s not in the way that we broke it down with statistics and real skepticism. I’ve heard it talked about in a more social commentary several times, but I certainly haven’t heard anyone break down the numbers like that. I think that was important.

BR: Yeah, my point is we weren’t like Johnny come lately, like everyone else has talked about this, let’s put it in. There’s like, no, let’s put this out there and do that. And the last one I want to touch on in terms of my favorites is the Blue Whale. We didn’t do a whole show on that.

0:57:44
CW: It seems like we did.

0:57:45
BR: It seems like we did.

0:57:46
PR: Well, collectively, Blue Whale mentions over that period of time. Yeah. It could have been a whole…

0:57:52
CW: I was doing the summaries, the little long summaries I type up for these, and for weeks in a row I was like, and Ben talked about the Blue Whale game because another thing happened.

0:58:01
BR: Well what I liked about it was that it was we were essentially identifying and describing a moral panic in real time.

CW: Yeah.

BR: Which usually it’s there’s a months or years looking back oh that happened there was this pink slime scare this and that. But we were looking like this is you know we were talking about stories that happened like the week before. So there was not this lag it’s like okay well this is here’s the context to it, these are why it sounds like a moral panic, here’s the writing about it, and in fact, I may be giving a talk on the Blue Whale Game at a conference on folklore in Brussels later this year.

0:58:39
PR: Oh, wow.

0:58:39
BR: So drawing upon my research there.

0:58:42
CW: Congratulations.

0:58:43
BR: Well, thank you, it’s been fun.

0:58:44
CW: And I think you’re cited on the Wikipedia page for the Blue Whale Game.

0:58:47
BR: We should ask Susan.

0:58:49
CW: Now to move on to the next question here, I’ve got a question from Renee and her skeptical dog Scully in Los Angeles.

PR: That’s a good name for a skeptical dog.

CW: I know, I’ve seen the dog, it’s very skeptical looking. I think this is particularly for Ben. When researching stories, has there been anything so bizarre that you thought, wow, no wonder they thought it was blank or whatever myth or paranormal or peculiar thing?

0:59:22
BR: The one that jumps to mind, and I think I’ve talked about it on the show once or twice, was the time when I investigated a haunted house in Buffalo, New York, and there was the guy that said he was attacked by a ghost. He was kicked by a ghost as he was going to sleep at night. It was a weird, weird story. At the time, I hadn’t interviewed that many people who had actually personally claimed to have been attacked by ghosts. That’s relatively rare. That was a case where I’m like, wow, there’s something weird going on here. I later figured it out, but that was one where I was getting stumped. There were about six or seven different other aspects to that ghost story that I had sort of explained one by one, but that was sort of one of the key, like, oh, what about that, Mr. Skeptic? And so that’s probably the one that jumps to my mind.

1:00:16
CW: And yeah, I remember you said that you had no notions that he was lying to you or hoaxing. No. So that leaves you with…

1:00:23
BR: Yeah.

1:00:24
CW: Okay, this guy’s getting kicked in the butt by a ghost or kicked in the leg by a ghost

1:00:28
BR: Yes every night or many nights right and that’s often the case you know where as we talked about before often the people you’re dealing with are sincere people. They’re not you know there for the most part they’re just like you and me they they really believe they saw something and and so just because they think they saw that doesn’t mean that they did of course. But that’s always the position you start from.

1:00:55
CW: Yeah, well I think Rene’s question is pretty thoughtful in that it brings up the point that not all the things skeptics debunk or look into are like, wow, this crazy person believes this dumb ass thing, that how could anybody reasonable think this? There’s a lot of reasonable people out there who just read the situation a little bit wrong and it’s often a situation that you or I might read incorrectly if we were the ones there watching it.

1:01:21
BR: Absolutely.

PR: Yeah. In my experience, I think that now I’m not as experienced in investigating claims as Ben, but in the Satanic Panic, there were a lot of times that I would be going through trying to figure out like, okay, where did they get this notion from? Or, you know, when you had like Geraldo doing his special on it and, you know, going around with these, these cops who are like pointing out, you know, graffiti and saying this means this, and this means that. And, and on the face, you know, the skeptic looks at it and says, oh, that just seems like it’s mostly people kind of assigning their own beliefs to things. But there are, here and there, there’s some little outlier stories that popped up. The black metal scene and the church burnings and all that were one very huge example of when it wasn’t motivated by Satanism necessarily, but it was involved in that whole scare and they kind of capitalized on the fear and used it to make these things seem even worse than they were. I mean, burning a church, regardless of what you believe, is not a nice thing to do.

1:02:31
BR: Not cool, man.

1:02:32
PR: There are a bunch of sociopaths out there.

BR: Guys, don’t do that.

PR: But there were times when these things came up and there were even some, when we were talking about evidence for the ritual abuse and things like that. Almost everything got completely… There was the preschool one where the… The Martin case. Yeah, and we found a lot of horrible accusations floating around and stuff, but then some of these cases did discover that there was abuse, not necessarily satanic ritual abuse, but abuse did occur and they were able to parse that out. It was mostly sexual abuse and this is not an uncommon thing and…

1:03:10
CW: It’s human nature to believe accusations. When you hear them, even if you you’re like, okay I’m gonna reserve a little bit of doubt for you know, make sure the person’s accurately being accused here But for the most part you get this visceral response of how dare they do that to a child, you know And and you know, you want to protect that person. Yeah, so your your gut instinct is to believe. And so, yeah, when wondering if there’s situations where, wow, it sure seems logical that that happened, a lot of moral panics and like the satanic panic.

1:03:48
BR: And also the Pizzagate case.

1:03:50
PR; Sure.

BR: Thinking that the Pong pizza in DC is affiliated with pedophile rings associated with Hillary Clinton.

1:03:59
PR: Yeah.

1:04:00
CW: Well, that kind of seemed ridiculous, but I could see how if you were deep enough into that rabbit hole, it would seem logical to me.

1:04:09
PR: So Emily from Delaware writes, since Harry is commingling the British royal family with an American soon, I’d love to hear your takes on all the weird conspiracy theories concerning the House of Windsor, Diana’s tragic death as an assassination, the Duchess of Windsor being a Nazi hermaphrodite?

CW: A Nazi hermaphrodite?

PR: I’m skeptical. Prince Andrew’s close friendship with a convicted millionaire pedophile pimp say that five times fast but he’s completely innocent. Are they all shape-shifting lizard members of the Illuminati?

1:04:44
CW: Yes.

1:04:45
PR: Yeah, well that’s easy. Why do they fascinate us so when we dumped them in 1776.

1:04:50
CW: Because they’re lizards! And they’re fascinating!

1:04:52
PR: That last question can be answered by people on Facebook stalking their exes. It’s just a thing we do.

1:04:58
BR: That’s how that works.

1:04:59
PR: We stalk our exes, man. This is America. But anyway, the other stuff. Ben, you probably have a little more insight to this than I do. I know the names of some of the British royalty and that’s about it.

1:05:13
CW: They’re the pasty ones over in Buckingham Palace.

1:05:16
PR: I saw the one about the king that couldn’t talk right. He couldn’t talk good.

1:05:21
BR: The stutters, yes. That was a good movie.

PR: It was a great movie. Fascinating.

BR: Yeah, I think I’ve done a little bit on royal conspiracy theories. I think there’s a couple of quick answers to that. One of them is that certainly to Americans, the idea of royalty is sort of this weird anachronism. And even to Brits. I remember talking to a British friend of mine and she was talking about Disney princesses and about how Brits thought that was weird. I said, you know you have a queen.

1:05:57
CW: And a princess now.

1:05:58
BR: And a princess, yeah.

1:06:00
BR: To us, that’s weird. We’re like, you know you have a real one, right? Well, yeah, but we don’t really think of her as like, okay. So I think there’s a sort of a weird cultural anachronism that’s inherent in the American mindset.

CW: Did she think it was weird because they consider them a real thing? Like, that’s weird. Like Disney congressmen?

BR: No, I was the one that thought that was weird. It was this compartmentalization. There’s the Disney princesses, and then of course there’s one at Buckingham Palace. I think, yeah, that’s what… anyway.

PR: Oh, you should see Disney City Council. Lots of long meetings.

1:06:42
BR: Oh, man, it’s so boring.

1:06:43
CW: Would you like to pass a law?

1:06:47
PR: No, not in my backyard.

BR: You need to send money now. Send money quick or she’s going to start again.

1:06:54
CW: So yeah, Emily covered a bunch of different stuff about the the royal family.

BR: Yes, she’s quite knowledgeable of the royal family.

CW: I think we have an Anglophile on our hands.

1:07:02
BR: Yeah, well I think part of the fascination is that it’s a group of people that have inherited power and we don’t have that in the States. But you know me it will for example you know that they had the state we have for for a years and then they sort of you know shift over over up and down in these cases and and to be very course with with the brits it’s sort of power-esque. I mean, they’re essentially figureheads. I mean, so it’s not like the Queen is, you know, enacting legislation. But so I think that there’s a part of a part of the interest is the lasting institution. The British monarchy and royalty has been for centuries. I mean, that’s, yeah, that’s what they do.

1:07:57
CW:Seems like it should have died out years ago. It’s like the coelacanth. It’s fascinating because it’s a living fossil.

1:08:05
BR: And so, you know, so here in America, we don’t have that type of dynasties. I mean, you can argue, like, well, the Clinton dynasty, but it’s not really the same. And I think that that’s part of why people sort of like, it’s ripe for, you know, for conspiracy theories and reptilian, you know, overlords.

1:08:24
CW: Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, we, okay, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say we could do several episodes about that. Because you’ve got all the conspiracy theories about Diana’s death.

1:08:33
PR: Yeah, and even I’m familiar with some of those, sure.

1:08:37
CW: Yeah, and oh, she was pregnant with Dodi Fayed’s child, and this and that, and then you’ve also got the somewhat less kooky topic of Prince Charles and how he’s super anti-GMO and very kind of woohish and he’s instituted all these, even in his limited seat of power as the figurehead, he’s instituted all these changes and done all these things with his land which are, and I’m just talking kind of off the top of my head here, I would have to do research before I did any sort of episode on it.

1:09:11
BR: If I may, in the current issue of Skeptical Inquirer magazine there’s an article on Prince Charles and his Wu.

1:09:15
CW: Oh, as you can tell, I have not read that yet.

1:09:17
BR: It’s just out.

1:09:18
PR: Wow.

1:09:19
BR: Yeah, I didn’t mean to interrupt.

1:09:21
CW: Oh, no, plug SI as often as you can.

1:09:25
PR: Most of what I know about Prince Charles is pictures and his giant ears.

1:09:30
BR: Talk about caricaturing Charles.

1:09:32
CW: Now, that’s a topic I could go off on as a professional for quite some time and I wouldn’t have to do any research.

1:09:38
PR: Yeah, I think, you know, it’s interesting, you know, because I mean, I honestly, I admit that I know so little about them. I mean, I understand that the monarchy is more symbolic these days than anything and that they aren’t the people that run the country per se. But Prince Charles is one of those people that I’ve always been aware of because mostly because of Princess Diana and who was by all accounts a pretty great human being and as far as as those conspiracies go they obviously were pretty prominent especially in the the months and couple years after she passed away and as far as Charles goes though it’s like once she was out of the picture I really did not follow anything the only thing I’ve I think he might be older than his mom now. Somehow that happens. I don’t know how.

1:10:27
BR: He’s a reptilian, so the reptilian…

1:10:28
CW: We did do an episode on time travel. Yeah.

1:10:34
PT: I don’t know what it is, but he looks older than his mom.

1:10:38
CW: Well, his mom is kind of an OG. She’s kind of badass.

1:10:41
PR: Yeah, she’s the Betty White of Britain, I think. Just never gonna die. Mark my words, neither of them are ever going to die. I’m sorry if Betty White dies this week or the Queen.

1:10:56
CW: Correlation does not imply causation.

PR: Yeah, I had nothing to do with it.

CW: Well that about wraps up our questions. Do we have any more? I did have another question sent in and we just touch on this quickly. The question was looking at a year out, what are your thoughts on having done this for a year? Any surprises? Was it more fun, less fun?

PR: Both?

BR: Well, from a technical point of view, the technology has changed.

PR: It has been a pretty interesting year for me. It’s pretty widely known to our listeners that I’m not just a guy that records a podcast, but I spend a lot of time recording other things. and we are in a space that is a studio when it’s not being used for podcasting.

CW: I’m staring at seven guitars, no six.

1:11:49
PR: Yeah, the rest are actually in cases in the closet. Yeah, so this is where I do all my music stuff, or most of it, and where I do a lot of other things like record audio books.

BR: Yeah, all sorts of cool stuff.

PR: So the podcast is actually, one big thing is that it’s greatly improved my abilities as a sound engineer because I was not so used to dealing with just hours of dialogue. That was not my thing. I’m doing guitars and drums and instruments and the dynamics and those things are very different. So first off, I had to learn a lot more about producing just people talking and it’s a lot more complex than you would think.

1:12:28
CW: Nothing like learning by just jumping into the fire with a frying pan.

1:12:31
PR: Let’s just do it, hit record, you know. And thankfully, one of the first reviews of the show on the Facebook page was complimenting the audio quality. And I was really happy to hear that because I was like, I have no idea if this is going to work.

1:12:46
BR: I don’t know what I’m doing.

1:12:47
PR: How it’s going to sound to people.

1:12:49
BR: What does this button do?

1:12:50
PR: I don’t listen to it through every kind of speaker so I mean for all I know it sounds terrible on your phone or terrible in your car. So we’ve made a lot of improvements. I’ve gone from, not to get too technical, but we had a very small basic interface that I was using to do our recording because I figured that we didn’t need too much and then we started hitting the little technical snags with having limited inputs and things like that. And this is to say that I had other ways to do this, but the studio is wired for music. So then I had to expand on that, and then we ended up with a larger interface. We ended up, right now, we’re actually talking through a compressor gate rack mount system.

1:13:34
BR: A compressor gate? What the hell are you talking about?

1:13:36
PR: It’s a noise gate, which means that we can have this. So this is a momentous occasion, not only because it’s our one year anniversary, but the air conditioner is on right now. And this is a…

1:13:47
BR: People don’t know, people don’t understand why that’s so significant.

1:13:50
PR: So this room is relatively small. It’s about 12 feet, maybe to the door, 10 feet across the wall. And it is a…

1:14:01
CW: Cozy.

1:14:02
PR: Yeah, it’s cozy. And this house has great central air conditioning, except that this room has a bunch of equipment that makes it very hot. And we have a window unit to supplement the cooling, and so between takes or anytime we take a break, I’d have to blast the air conditioner to push some of this hot air out of it.

CW: I remember there… usually when you hear my voice, dear listeners, I’m Skyping from hundreds of miles away. But today I happen to be in studio and the last time I was actually in Strange Studios was last summer or something like July.

PR: It was a while ago.

CW: Something like that but I remember it was summer. Yeah. Because we came in here we cranked the AC and he’s got a window unit.

BR: And I think we Pascual and I were both in shorts.

CW: I cannot communicate to you guys the smell of three skeptics making their own gravy in this little room. But we’d turn off the air conditioner and we’d record for like 20 minutes and then we’d be like, okay turn it on again and we’d like pause and turn on the AC for another 20 minutes and then turn it off and record for a while.

1:15:07
PR: Yeah, it was pretty daunting. So this noise gate function on this unit, it cuts out anything that’s below a certain volume, so you are not hearing the AC right now, even though we all can hear it even with the headphones on. And so that was one big thing. Another big thing when we started this, I was recording on rather good Rode condenser microphones, which are phenomenal for voiceover work and for any, you know, audiobooks and things like that, but they are actually awful for having more than one person talk in the room because it picks up so much of the other person’s voice because it’s not very directional. I mean it’ll pick up a lot of the ambient noise. So I switched to what’s called a Shure SM58. Now musicians will definitely be familiar with this mic. It is the absolute industry standard for live performance. These mics are used on every stage in the world pretty much.

1:16:05
BR: I think I saw Axl Rose throwing one of these into the garbage after our show one time.

PR: You can hammer nails with these things and they won’t break. That’s the great thing about them. But I had a talk with a business partner of mine, Augustine Ortiz, he’s a record producer and does a bunch of other stuff. You know, he said maybe you should use some dynamic microphones. And so I was like, well I do have SM58s, I mostly use them for live applications But he’s like use those because he won’t pick up each other’s voices and sure enough the quality It didn’t necessarily improve in the sense that you’ll hear it on your end because I spent a lot of time taking Echoes out of tracks before this so it may have sounded perfect to you, but trust me the the session was a mess. It was just echo echo echo I’d always hear Ben in my microphone and you’d always hear me in his so if I had to cut something like me coughing it would be in the background anyway while he was talking and it was just very tricky and so that was a big change and actually was was pretty easy to implement because I already had the microphone.

1:17:03
CW: Yeah, the little the little things that end up causing Hours and hours of work.

1:17:08
PR: Yeah, that’s the thing I think to me is like the biggest thing as far as you know getting to where we are now is just the ever-evolving Technical in end of things and I mean our editing workflow is still evolving. It’s better than it’s ever been It used to take me pretty tremendous amount of time to edit partially because I’m a little nitpicky about making sure the tracks are all perfect and partially because it’s just I do this in Pro Tools. This isn’t one track with all of us. I really spend time editing and mixing and mastering these even.

BR: I want to talk about your evolution in the project.

1:17:46
CW: I do what I can. I really don’t want to spend too much time on how the sausage is made. But I, well.

1:17:52
BR: Is that a dig at me?

1:17:53
CW: My job has evolved from writing up summaries and telling the guys, hey, you did too much of this and listeners are gonna I would recommend doing more of this and less of this and there’s a banter blah blah blah blah blah instead of doing that I just listen and I cut out. Oh, yeah, Ben said, you know 25 times in a row to cut those out said this is really interesting So it’s Wow, it’s like a power trip. I wish I could do that like real-life lifetime just like I don’t like that what that person said, cut.

1:18:26
PR: But what do you think about, you know, how the podcast has gone in general?

1:18:28
CW: I think making it a little bit more of a streamlined end product for listeners. Listeners, I know you don’t have any idea that it goes on, but trust me, it’s less annoying that way for you. Our job is to make the podcast less annoying for you.

BR: That’s our goal, to make it as painless to listen to us as possible. And let me just say all credit to you two. I’m not a tech dude. I know some about stuff, but for the listeners who are wondering who to give credit to for how this podcast sounds, it’s Pascual and Celestia. I just show up and say a couple things, and it’s really those guys that put together.

1:19:15
BR: Just sit there and look pretty. Actually, Ben brings all the, Ben is the heavy lifter when it comes to research because he’s been doing it his whole freaking life. And he, yeah, just today bringing for a production meeting after this, he brought a box, not a file, not a folder, not a little portfolio, a box of skeptical inquirers and notes and pads of paper. And so he’s gonna be schooling us on the future topics.

PR: Yeah, and that’s I think that’s one of the bet things, I can show up and Ben hands me these notes of us in the room

CW: And he can read his notes I don’t know if you’ve seen his handwriting, but it’s yeah, I that is a feat in and of itself.

PR: Yeah listeners I have to tell you occasionally we’ll we’ll jot little notes down to each other while we’re talking While we’re recording and then we’ll you know say, you know, it’ll be like this You bring this up and and I’ll look and it will take me like a minute to figure and then sometimes I’ll just be like okay Ben what are you doing?

BR: I’ll slide it over to him and then he’ll so it he’s trying to like keep his train of thought and talking yeah looking down is like and I can see in his eyes like what the hell is that and I’m like pointing to it like urgently I’m like like say this he’s like I is like what dude!

CW: It I used to pride myself on being able to understand really abstract handwriting. I was the personal assistant for the managing editor of a large university press and she had really bizarre handwriting and I was the only one in the press who could read it. And that was a point of pride with me. And so I saw Ben’s handwriting, it was like, no, I need a Rosetta Stone for this. I thought I was good at that, but I’m not.

1:21:20
BR: Well, we do have a good division of labor, and I think it’s a well-oiled machine, and I’m proud to have spent the past year working on the show with you guys.

PR: Yeah, I can’t say I’m surprised we made it a year. I always did have a lot of, well, faith that we would be able to take this on the long haul because I always felt like there was enough to talk about. And there is something, and again, I don’t want to do too much back padding, but we really do cover a lot of topics that you don’t hear podcasts covering. And sure, I mean, we’ve had a lot of podcasts in the past that dealt with, specifically with monsters, monster talk and stuff like that. But we cover so many topics and we try to stay kind of halfway between hitting things that you’ve done a lot of research on and staying current with things that are developing and our segment Swayso, I mean, that started as an entire episode. I mean, I think episode two was what I was skeptical about. And it turned out that it really fit the format for us.

1:22:27
CW: Now we have a jingle, which I just have to thank. Yeah. FroYogSoftServe, thank you again.

1:22:30
PR: Yeah, that was an amazing jingle, which I’m so happy that we have. Just where we sit now, I’m feeling so comfortable with what we’re doing and where we’ve gotten. There’s a lot of good listener engagement. We really have a great listener base, and it’s worldwide. We have great numbers from all over the world and not just the English speaking world, all over Europe and there’s even listeners in the Middle East and Russia and it’s fascinating to see how many people are listening to this show every week. It’s pretty surreal. I’m just happy that anyone listens.

1:23:10
CW: Thank you. Gracias. Spasibo. I don’t know how to say thank you in any other languages. But we’ll try.

PR: Danke.

CW: Merci.

(MUSIC)

1:23:21
PR: We would like to thank our sponsor level patrons, Amy Freshour-Kelly and Dr. Angela Mattke. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor or just throwing us a buck or two per episode, check out patreon.com forward slash squaring the strange. Every bit helps us keep the lights on here in Strange Studios and we could not keep bringing you content without the support of our generous friends. If you’re looking to provide moral support, head on over to iTunes and give us a five-star review. Every positive review helps us move up the podcast charts. Thanks again, strangers.

(MUSIC)

PR: So that about does it for this week. It was a lot of fun doing something a little different. This one went a little longer, so hopefully you guys appreciate that and didn’t just like turn it off at 45 minutes.

1:24:14
CW: We promise that future episodes will not be quite so straining ourselves to pat ourselves on the back. But we have some great listener questions. Thank you for writing in.

1:24:23
PR: Yeah, and we actually had a few that didn’t make the episode, a couple that just came in like today and we haven’t had a chance to really look over and some others that we plan to definitely address, you know, coming up here pretty soon, I’m sure.

1:24:41
CW: So if you didn’t hear your email today, that doesn’t mean you’ll never hear it. It might pop up when you least expect it.

1:24:47
BR: I just wanted to send a note out that Sandy Mancy had passed away. We mentioned her on the last episode.

PR: Our Lake Champlain, she was the woman who took the famous picture. And she seemed like a really great lady. And it’s always nice to hear such nice things about a person who is presenting something that the world is taking as evidence of woo. And she was so nice and gracious to just have you look it over and figure out the truth behind the picture.

1:25:19
CW: The world of Woo is filled with some very nice, honest, earnest people and some charlatans and horrible people and Sandy was one of the former.

1:25:27
BR: Yes, absolutely.

1:25:29
PR: So next week we are going to have our friend Susan Gervick on.

1:25:34
CW: Yay, Susan!

1:25:35
PR: I’m sure a lot of you have heard that name. For those of you who haven’t, she is…

BR: What rock are you living under?

PR: You probably have seen her work and not even realized that she runs Gorilla Skeptics on Wikipedia and their mission is basically to make sure that Wikipedia pages are accurate and especially ones that have to do with skeptic topics and there’s a lot of stuff where you get like psychics and stuff and their fans come in and start embellishing their stories and and Susan’s at the forefront of keeping those people in check and also keeping my Wikipedia page in check. I don’t look at it, and I actually don’t like it. But I fed her some more accurate information. It seems to reflect what is actually going on.

1:26:25
CW: As long as there’s sources to back it up, it will stay up there. Wikipedia itself is a pretty amazing project and Susan, she was a visionary, is a visionary in recognizing this as a skeptical outreach opportunity that has just, I mean, she got in on the ground floor and has just been cranking and working her tail off.

1:26:49
BR: And she was recently elected a fellow at CSI in fact. Oh, wow just recently well-deserved Accolade

CW: She’s the nicest lady fellow.

BR: I know yeah, she’s great, and she’s also a professional photographer I mean she just she doesn’t amazing. I mean she and I have done protests together protesting Sylvia Brown I mean she she’s hardcore.

CW: She’s a force to be reckoned with

PR: Renaissance woman If she’s coming your way, get out of her way.

1:27:15
CW: Yeah, are you guys going to be in the studio that night or just going to put Susan in here?

1:27:19
PR: She is actually going to be Yeah, sitting here with us. So we’re going to definitely have a good time just chatting with her in person. I’ve never met her in person. I’ve talked to her a lot online and I’m really excited to have her in the studio.

1:27:33
Definitely.

1:27:34
Cool.

1:27:35
So until next week, we’ll see you. Bye bye. Take care. Swearing Strange is a production of Kronos Creative LLC. Copyright 2017. Theme music by Shriek Back. Additional music by Memory, Guitar and Feathered, and Pascual Romero. Content producer, Celeste Jawara. Audio engineering, producing, and editing provided by Pascual Romero at Kronos Creative Studios. Additional support provided by Ashley Romero and of course our listeners and patrons. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of Squaring the Strange and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of are those of Squaring the Strange and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Cronus Creative, Center for Inquiry, our advertisers or any affiliated organizations and employers.

Transcribed with Cockatoo