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)

0:00:10
Pascual Romero: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange, this is Pascual, and in the studio with us this week is Ben Radford, as usual, and a friend of ours, a real rock star in our world because she has done some amazing work. We already teased her last week, but Susan Gerbic’s in the house today. Actually in the flesh to it’s one of we rarely get guests actually in the studio with us.

0:00:56
Susan Gerbic: I’m in Squaring the Strange Studios. I came to New Mexico so I could do this. I kind of did time it this way I said I want to come to New Mexico. Can I be on the podcast?

0:01:06
PR: Can you?

BR: Well and the thing about Susan she’s not just a rock star she’s not just a recently elected fellow, she has been called, and I hope you don’t mind me saying this, an energizer bunny of skepticism. I tell you, I’m productive, you’re productive, Celestia is productive, and then there’s like orders of magnitude, and then there’s Susan.

SG: He’s making this up.

BR: No, I’m not making this up. You do more like in the average week than like anyone else does in like several years.

0:01:40
SG: I have teams of people who do that. I just make it look like I’m doing it but they are doing all the work. I’m just managing people.

0:01:47
BR: There’s an art to that too.

0:01:50
SG: Yeah, I like people. I like managing people and they’re awesome. I have an awesome team.

0:01:54
BR: Well, before we talk to Susan, we’re going to have an extra special guest. Not that you’re not special, but we have an extra special. An extra.

PR: An additional.

BR: Right. An additional. There’s a comma there. I don’t mean special in that way, just special. I’ll just shut up.

(MUSIC)

0:02:10
BR: All right, well, welcome back to Squaring the Strange. We have a special guest on today. We actually have a couple of special guests, not just one. But we are, how do we say, our pre-special guest, the first special guest, is a man that I’ve known for a long time, a handsome man, a handsome bald man that I’ve known for many, many years. I won’t go into the story of how I first became aware of him. It does involve autoerotic asphyxiation. That’s a story for another time. I’m talking about Matt Crowley, also known as Matt the Tube, and he used to be a sideshow performer with the Jim Rose Circus, if I’m not mistaken, and we have him on the line to talk about something weird that’s been going on in the last couple weeks, and it’s something that, well, it’s snorting. Pascual, how would you describe this?

PR: So you know how there was that kid in middle school who could like snort spaghetti up his nose and then spit it out and kind of floss his face with it? You ever know that kid?

BR: Yeah.

PR: There’s kids doing it with condoms right now.

BR: Like intentionally?

PR: Yeah, intentionally. And at first I thought this was something new, but then you kind of got me hip to Matt, and I realized that this man was a trailblazer in this department.

BR: He is a pioneer. The man knows his stuff. So yeah, Matt, why don’t you come into the conversation and tell us a little bit about what exactly what role you have in this bizarre stunt.

0:04:09
Matt Crowley: Well, I’ll just lay my cards down right now. I am the creator of the Condom Challenge. The context of this stunt is different from what you would see in the media because the stunt that I created was a sideshow stunt and is actually a three-part stunt. So what you’re seeing in the media now is just part one of the stunt that I created. So the origin story, if you want to hear it, was I was a pharmacist up until 1991, and I left my job as a pharmacist to run away with the circus, literally, which I did from 1991 until 1994 when I returned to pharmacy. So from 1991 to 1994, I was a member of the General Circus Sideshow based here in Seattle. You referenced me as Matt the Tube Crowley. That was the first Sideshow stunt that I worked up. It’s actually a medical procedure called gavage, which is so-called tube feeding. That’s a legitimate medical procedure. So I was the individual who took that medical procedure and put it into a sideshow context.

0:05:25
BR: So what made you decide that that was the thing to do? I mean, trying to be delicate about it. I mean, of all the possible sideshow acts that you’ve had, what made you think, you know, I should put that there?

0:05:40
MC: Well, it had to do with consuming beer, because a lot of so-called bar bets have to do with drinking, right? So I thought it would be an amusing bar bet to make a claim that, well, I can drink a beer without it passing my lips. And so what you would do is you would put a cork stopper in a beer bottle and the end of the cork stopper would have a tube on it. You’d put the tube into your nose and snake it down to your stomach and then shake up the beer bottle and the pressure of the shaken beer would cause it to flow into the stomach. Because as I say, I was already familiar with gavage, tube feeding, through medical education as a pharmacy student. So I thought, well, this is a bar bet that I could win. And so it essentially started out as a bar bet. Then I quickly realized, well, the bottle is not working. I could just use the actual same syringe that’s used in gavage. And I was actually given a genuine gavage unit when I was in college. I knew a nursing student who would grab stuff on the way to the garbage in medical, I don’t know, I think he was in a hospital, so he would get this stuff on the way to the garbage and he gave me one of these actual gavage units. So that is the origin of the tube act. So from there it segues into the condom stunt because once you start putting soft things into your sinuses, that is different from something like the human blockhead act, which is putting a nail into the sinuses. That’s a rigid object. I realized, well, there’s got to be this whole class of putting flexible things. As Pascual mentioned, putting spaghetti or a dog tag chain, I’ve heard. I never did that as a child. That actually is missing from my childhood, of putting spaghetti. But in the early 90s, there was such an emphasis on condoms because of the emphasis on safe sex, I realized, well, a person could put a condom in their nose and make it come out of their mouth. Because once you start inhaling the condom into the nose, you see it appear in the back of your mouth. So you could just reach in with your fingers and grab it.

0:07:58
BR: So let me ask you this. So obviously, you tested this on yourself. I assume you didn’t wander the streets asking people if they would try this. So can you describe the first couple of times that you tried this out?

0:08:11
MC: Well, this was in 1991, which is some time ago. And so the honest answer is I can’t remember specifically the thought process of the specific events. As I say, I’ve been putting tubes in my nose and that I got figured out pretty well. The difficult part of putting a tube in your nose to your throat is swallowing it. That can be gagging, right? But I wasn’t even gagging on the condom. I was pulling it out of my mouth. So you’re not actually hitting the area that will make you gag in your throat. I was pulling it out of my mouth. But I felt proud of having done this and I started thinking about how can you make it even better. Because that stunt, as you know, only takes about a minute. So I thought, well, I wonder if I can put it in my mouth and make it come out of my nose. So remember, it’s already unrolled. It’s already inhaled in the nose and out of the mouth. So I would put the condom, the tip of the condom, on my soft palate and then start blowing and then it would come out of my nose from my mouth. So that’s part two of the stunt that I invented. And then part three was taking it out of my nose, putting my hands inside of it, and then putting my hands over my head and then inflating it with my nose, nasal pressure, over my head until it popped.

0:09:47
BR: Yeah, you know, if I’m not mistaken, I’ve seen you perform that act. I forgot exactly where it was. It was some skeptics conference. Maybe it was in Seattle or maybe it was New York or something. Las Vegas?

0:09:58
MC: 1013.

0:10:00
BR: Yeah, that’s right.

0:10:01
MC: Yeah, Las Vegas.

0:10:02
BR: And I have to say, I knew about your reputation and your, shall we say, unique skill set, and I was pretty damn impressed.

0:10:10
MC: Well, thank you. Yeah, it’s because by the time you’d seen it, I had been a sideshow performer and I’d done the stunt many, many, many times, so it was a practiced act.

0:10:21
BR: So when you saw the con challenge going viral on social media over the past few weeks. What did you think?

0:10:28
MC: Well, I had several thoughts. One thought was purely egotistical, like, well, I should be getting credit for this, because none of these news stories, these news outlets are giving me credit. Some of them allude to the origin. Some of them would go as far as saying, well, we first saw this on YouTube in 2007. So it was frustrating that…

BR: You’re like, yeah, right.

MC: Exactly. I was so there’s part of that’s just ego. I would I would like to be credited. The part of it is is kind of the nature of the historical record. I saw what I thought was kind of sloppy journalism. That’s like, well, if you really want to figure out where this is coming from, I know the answer. This this came out several years ago. My recollection is there was another viral story that came out several years ago about the condom challenge. And at the time I looked on Wikipedia and lo and behold there is a Wikipedia entry for condom challenge. And it did not mention me and I also realized well it’s probably uncouth to edit your own name into Wikipedia. So I thought, well, I’m not going to do that. So I kind of threw up my hands in frustration several years ago. But recently on my Facebook page, I was complaining about this. And a guy I know a little bit in real life and a Facebook friend, just went in and edited Wikipedia. He found an online resource that had local journalism. Because when we toured as a sideshow, we got an enormous amount of local press. So someone had uploaded this press clipping to the Internet, and so it was a legitimate reference for which to base the Wikipedia entry on. So we edited in that I had been doing this stunt since the early 90s. So to their credit, Vice apparently read Wikipedia and picked up on this and mentioned me. So Vice was the only one of these news outlets that mentioned me as the creator of the stunt.

0:12:36
BR: Well, it’s nice to see credit given where credit’s due there.

PR: Now, Matt, I was actually curious because I look at this challenge and I think intuitively, there’s probably some danger to it if done incorrectly. Like if you inhale too hard, it could end up in your windpipe or, you know, any number of things could happen. It could break in your sinus or something. Now is there some – did you see that? I mean, I imagine you probably have a better knowledge of how to do this than a 16-year-old. And do you see any real immediate dangers of kids doing this?

0:13:09
MC: Well, I should caution that every this nature of sideshow is intrinsically dangerous. I mean that’s part of the appeal of sideshow. It is watching people do intrinsically dangerous edgy acts on stage and they’re not illusions, they’re not magic acts, they’re real acts, right? So it’s intrinsically dangerous. But I would say that the condom stunt is fairly low on the scale of danger. I did it dozens and dozens, if not hundreds of times professionally, and I had zero problems. Part of the reason is that I worked up the stunt by discovering what condoms worked best for me. When I created the stunt in 1991, I was living in an apartment in Wallingford, a neighborhood of Seattle, and about two blocks away from me, there was a business called The Rubber Tree. They were associated with an organization called Zero Population Growth. They had a very small shop. It was a very esoteric shop. I would go in there and I would buy different brands of condoms from all around the world. A lot of the rubber comes from Malaya, but they differ in their size, their shape, the kind that they use. And so eventually, and I also go to Planned Parenthood, back in the 90s, I presume today as well, they were giving them away free. And so I eventually found brands that worked. When we were on Lollapalooza, there was an outfit that was supplying these promotional condoms for Lollapalooza. It was called Blackjack. I had a box of more than a hundred of these condoms. That’s what I used professionally. These days, I use Magnum. It’s not a urethane. It’s a rubber. The urethane don’t expand properly over the head. So I just found brands that I like. The long-winded answer to is it dangerous is – I’m sure it is. However, you’ve also got to consider that when you unroll a condom, it’s quite long. So by the time it gets to your throat, there’s still rubber sticking out of your nose. So you could even, if all of a sudden something horrible happened, you could pull it out of your nose, and by the time you get your fingers on it in your mouth, you know, it’s properly lubricated, it’s slimy and gross, but so my assessment of the risk is that I think it’s a very low risk activity.

0:15:49
BR: Well, nonetheless, we don’t encourage our listeners to do this. Despite our talented friends and their skills, the standard disclaimers apply.

0:15:59
MC: Yeah, I agree.

0:16:00
BR: Cool. Anything else you want to touch on?

0:16:04
MC: I would like to throw out a metaphor for the frustration I felt when watching this latest iteration of the challenge. I felt kind of like the kid in grade school who knows the right answer, and the teacher asks a question, a bunch of kids throw up their hands, I throw up my hands, and the teacher asks every other student in class, and they give the wrong answer but I know the answer. So all this time I knew it was me but I felt frustrated about how do I get this knowledge out. So I’m very pleased to appear on your podcast so it’ll do some good as far as setting the record straight.

0:16:43
BR: We’re happy to have you on. Again, we like to get the real dirt…

PR: And strange is in our title for a reason. Exactly.

0:16:54
MC: Excellent.

0:16:55
BR: And for those who don’t know, you’ve done a lot of other research. You and I are probably most familiar to people as a team, so to speak, in cryptosology. Of course, you and I have done a lot of stuff on Bigfoot, and you’ve done some original stuff on Cast. So maybe one day we’ll have you back on to talk about that.

0:17:15
MC: Oh, love to. Thank you.

0:17:16
BR: Awesome. Thanks a lot, Matt.

0:17:18
MC: All right. Thank you, Ben. Thank you, Pascual. I’ll see you later.

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0:17:20
PR: So we’re here with our friend Susan Gerbic, who is in the studio with us this week and we’re going to be talking about guerrilla skeptics on Wikipedia among other things. We’ll ask you some personal questions.

SG: Okay.

PR: Maybe some super personal questions.

SG: That’d be great.

PR: As awkward as possible.

SG: Yeah, you know, that’d be great. Nobody ever does that. That’d be fine. I’m cool with that.

BR: It may involve condoms and noses.

0:17:55
SG: Yeah. That is very personal.

0:17:58
PR: And now five minutes of awkward silence while we just avoid eye contact. So Susan, what brought you into the world of skepticism? Give us a little background about yourself.

0:18:14
Well, I am 55, and the reason why I mention that is because back in the day, we didn’t have the Internet. And so if you wanted to know something you had to get it at the library and almost all books at the library were pro paranormal. You know or you could see it on TV But you know we had two channels and my dad always ran the TV so you know is Lawrence Welk There whoever and so there wasn’t much you could get so if you wanted to know anything about the paranormal there really wasn’t a way to find out a critical angle of it. So I became an atheist at well, I discovered I was an atheist, I was raised Southern Baptist. And at about 17, when my homeroom teacher did not salute the flag, I mean, he saluted the flag, but he didn’t say the under god part. And I said, Well, wait, Mr. Foreman, what what are you? What’s up with that? And he says, Oh, I’m an atheist. And I’d never heard the word before is as far as I know, I’d never heard the word, or I didn’t know what it meant. And so I was very curious about how you could not believe in God, that is an option. And so I started learning a lot about atheism by going to the library, and we were very Christian, my mom was very Christian, and so the idea of not knowing, learning about atheism was very frightening. It was a big deal. So I went to the library and I checked out the book, Madeline Murray O’Hara’s book, and I had to distract the librarian as I checked it out because I was afraid she was going to see me checking the book out and tell my mom. So when it got to her point, and I went in the library in those days, the book would come and they would open up the front cover and they’d stamp the inside. And so as soon as it got to my book, I’d wedge it in between other books. And when she got to the point where she was going to reach for the atheist book, I would distract the librarian and say, you know, oh, hey, so great weather, you know, or something. So she’d look up at me and she would look at the book. And so I got into I literally had to hide the book in the closet. I really had to read it under their bedsheets. And that’s the atheism angle. Okay, after a while, you kind of get tired of the atheism stuff. There’s no God. Okay, yeah, now what? And somehow I found a skeptical Inquirer magazine. And I was blown away. I looked at that. And I said, is I looked at some of the pages, I would say, Oh, come on, people believe this stuff? And then other pages, I’d look at and go, wait, that’s not a thing. Seriously, this is okay. And so it made me become, I got much more interested in the skeptic angle because I liked the claims, the paranormal. I loved, I mean, we used to, there was a movie called Sasquatch in the 1970s and my dad and I hardly ever went to the movies, but he took me to see Sasquatch and we called him Sasquatch, not Bigfoot because we found, we thought that was scholarly. You know, I felt like, oh, well, we’re really into the good stuff because we’re calling him by that. So that’s kind of what happened. And then I started attending conferences. The first one I went to was the Skeptic Toolbox in Eugene. And I became friends with Harriet Hall there. That’s where I met her.

0:21:27
BR: The Skep-Doc.

0:21:28
SG: Yes, and Ray Hyman and-

0:21:30
BR: Jim Alcock.

0:21:31
SG: Jim Alcock, Barry Beierstein, Lauren Pankrus. Amazing group of people. Oh, they are brilliant people. So I attended that and then got onto the JREF forum, the James Randi Educational Foundation forum. And I’m a baby photographer, so I have no training in science, nothing at all. And I kept hanging around and I kept listening. And eventually I said, you know, I really should kind of do something because I have that kind of personality, wants to do things and I’m organized and I like people and managing people and being around people. And I just kind of stumbled onto the GSOW idea of editing Wikipedia because Tim Farley mentioned it on a cruise, a JREF cruise. He says, you know what, we really should be taking care of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is something we really should have as skeptics. And I just started doing it.

0:22:20
BR: And I didn’t know that. I’ve known Tim for many years. I didn’t realize that his suggestions were spurred at this school.

0:22:27
SG: Yeah, he started it. He had a little skeptic camp on the cruise and he was talking about it and I took a lot of notes and I took a photograph of Ben, not Ben, of Brian Dunning. And I took a photograph of him and I figured out how to upload it to Wikimedia Commons and then I looked at Brian Dunning’s Wikipedia page and I said, this page is just crap, how embarrassing this is. You know, this is this guy who’s done all these things and what an interesting person and I uploaded the photo, it looks great, but you know the page is crap and I just started fumbling my way through and I eventually figured it out. I also discovered that it’s horribly hard to edit Wikipedia when you don’t have people to talk to and help you through and I was constantly sending emails to Tim Farley and I was really embarrassed that I kept having to ask him these simple questions and I don’t really understand things written. I’m one of those people that needs to have it explained. And written directions are very difficult for me, so, especially if it’s complicated. So I just started editing Wikipedia, and I mentioned on Facebook that I was doing this, and people said, hey, what are you doing? What are you doing next? How did you do that? And I had an email group, and then I had, I started lecturing on it and then the next thing I know we’re a thing. And that’s the story.

0:23:44
BR: I think the point that you made about the generational gap is really vitally important.

0:23:53
PR: Kids, kids today!

0:23:54
BR: No, but it’s true. I mean, you know, you talk to people, you know, teenagers, people even in their 20s And they’ve never known a world where you couldn’t just get online and just type in anything into Google or another search engine and get something out of it. And the three of us grew up in an era where it didn’t exist. And I remember very clearly wanting to learn something. And you could either go ask your teacher, who may or may not know the answer. Or you go to the local library and here in New Mexico, the library system is okay, it’s good, but not everything is everywhere. We all sort of grew up in an era where information was not nearly as accessible as it is now. I really give to you and Tim for recognizing the importance and the value in that. We all sort of knew, oh, here’s this Wikipedia thing. There’s this thing they’re doing. It’s like a project. I don’t know if people write about it. I don’t know. But even when that was emerging, I didn’t say, oh, well, obviously this is a skeptical tool. That wasn’t clear to me.

0:25:05
SG: Yeah, Tim had the brains. He’s a great idea man, and he’s a very busy man, he just comes up with brilliant ideas and I would listen to him and say, that’s great, that’s wonderful, I like that. And that I picked up on the Wikipedia angle and just, you know, and he said, go for it, you know, you have my blessing, and he’s part of our team. And going back to what you said about people growing up in that era where you have no way of getting information, one of the things that scared me a lot as a child was spontaneous human combustion.

0:25:37
PR: Same here.

SG: Oh my God, that was so frightening. The idea that you could just blow up and die. You can’t stop, drop, roll. You know, you can’t put out the flames. They’re inside you. Oh my God, how terrifying. And how are you going to, you know, you hear about this on sensationalized TV or someplace. What are you going to do? As a kid, how are you going to know that information?

0:26:03
PR: Yeah, and I remember very distinctly there was a book I read, one of those, there’s always that whole section in the library that had all the, you know, cryptozoology and all that other stuff, and it had amazing stories, kind of like, you know, insane things that have happened, and there was a big section on spontaneous human combustion, and we had encyclopedias at home, so I was like, okay, well, let me go see if it’s in, wasn’t in the encyclopedia at all. So it was like, I was like, you know, I found spontaneous combustion. And so I just applied human to it. And I was like, wow, I guess it is possible because things can spontaneously combust and there’s stories of humans doing it. And so I couldn’t, there was no resource for me to vet this outside of that. And my parents, you know, were like, I don’t know you know I mean people didn’t think about that stuff unless they read about it so it was like it was really a challenge to get to the bottom of anything back then especially as a kid.

SG: You know what I’m so glad you brought that up because I did an article for Skeptical Inquirer on this topic of spontaneous human combustion and knowledge you know back before the internet I have a lot of Encyclopedia Britannica’s and different kinds of encyclopedias. My parents collected them, well my dad did. And I went through looking at various encyclopedia Britannica specifically, specifically to see what the entries were for spontaneous human combustion. You just verified it. I looked at several editions and the only one had an entry on it and it said spontaneous combustion, just like you said. But nothing about humans the entry is maybe three sentences long. Yeah, and I thought you know How could I have known and it’s it’s a shame you know the how could people possibly? How come people don’t believe more in the paranormal that are in their 50s? I don’t get it because there was no way for us to know and if you ask another kid. What are they gonna say?

BR: They’re gonna repeat what they saw on TV.

0:28:01
PR: They’re going to be like, oh yeah, that totally happened.

0:28:03
BR: Yeah, my cousin’s best friend had it.

0:28:05
SG: Exactly, they’re going to say…

0:28:06
BR: He exploded last week.

0:28:07
SG: They’re going to say, see that shoe over there? Susan, that was a kid in the neighborhood before you. That’s all that’s left of her.

0:28:15
BR: Don’t look at it too closely, it might blow up.

0:28:18
SG: No, seriously, I don’t know how we are not more believers in the paranormal.

0:28:23
BR: No, you guys raise a really vital point, you know, in terms of the information vacuum. And exactly as you were talking about, Pascual, with so many of these topics, they’re not legitimate topics insofar as, well, they’re not real. They’re literally not real, right? And so this is the problem, right? Is that for mainstream references, mainstream references don’t generally talk about things that aren’t real. The almanacs and these sorts of things, they don’t discuss unicorns except maybe if you go to an encyclopedia of fantasy, you’ll find it there. But in terms of mainstream references, the majority of these things that we’re all fascinated by and the unexplained, mysterious and all that, they’re not real and so they’re not in there. And so that leaves this gap that all three of us recognize in which it’s like, well, it’s probably real. There is a spontaneous thing. And then of course, as we’ve all done, if you look there and there’s nothing there, then where are you, let’s say, you know, 20, 30, 40 years ago, where are you gonna find this stuff? You’re gonna find it in a mystery mongering book of woo.

0:29:39
PR: Yeah.

0:29:40
SG: Exactly.

PR: And the vast majority of examples you’ll ever find are in these pseudo, kind of, I mean it’s like…

BR: Mysteries of the unknown.

PR: Yeah, it’s like, and it was hard because none of them ever made a hard claim as to like, I mean some did claim things as factual. However, even if they didn’t, it was never like, you know, this is just fantasy. It was always like, hey, it might have happened, like unsolved mysteries.

0:30:03
SG: It was on Spinal Tap. Remember?

0:30:07
BR: The drummer, yeah. And it kept exploding. Now, Pascual, you spent a lot of time in the music industry. How many exploding drummers have you? I mean, you work a lot of bands, right?

PR: Not without the aid of pyrotechnics.

0:30:20
SG: So my Wikipedia project in 2013 rewrote the Wikipedia page for spontaneous human combustion, partly as a joke, because Joe Nickell, who was always talking about how it wasn’t correct, and somebody needs to correct it. And also because they knew that that was kind of a topic that I was always afraid of. So we rewrote that Wikipedia page. I get people all the time who are trying to tell me that Bigfoot skepticism, you know, since September of 2013, that Wikipedia page, Spontaneous Human Combustion, is one of our most popular Wikipedia pages that’s viewed. It’s got over a million and a half views already.

0:31:01
BR: Wow.

0:31:02
SG: So people are still interested in these topics. They still want to know.

0:31:05
BR: Yeah, no, I’m glad you brought that up. It’s a perfect response to, no one believes in it. No, no, they do. They do. And Wikipedia is where oftentimes they’re going to go. They may or may not find work by me or Randi or Joe, but they might have not even heard of us, but they’ve heard of Wikipedia because that’s how they get their homework done. And Susan’s work is right there.

0:31:30
SG: And they follow the citations if they’re more curious, and they’re going to find about you guys because you’re in the citations. I’m using all your work. All the work that I can find that is scholarly from notable people like yourself are going to be used on Wikipedia articles so I need you guys to do more writing. Thank you.

PR: So now it kind of you know Wikipedia is a is a crowdsourced kind of way of creating articles that are going to have citations and presumably be as factual as possible, but anyone can edit them unless they’re like specifically locked or something. Now, what do you do to deal with that? Like if you have like a controversial page that a lot of woo people are always bombarding with edits, like what do you do to keep that in check or is it just a constant battle?

0:32:22
SG: It’s not a constant battle. I get this question a lot. The GSOW project usually writes or completely rewrites pages that are not in great shape. A lot of them are pages you wouldn’t even think of, like the chemo theater here in Albuquerque or something a little more obscure. A lot of the time our project will work on the Wikipedia page in their user space, so it’s not public. It will completely rewrite it or write it without anybody in the Wikipedia world knowing that it’s happening. And then when we make it live, it’s done. So most people are not likely to go in and try to change that. So that’s one way of keeping people from going back and forth and constantly trying to edit. One of the mistakes a lot of Wikipedia editors make is that they try to make live edits. They go in in real time and try to make the changes and somebody else comes in and says, no I don’t like where you’re going with that and then they change it. And so we don’t have a lot of problem with that. We did have some problem with the Blue Whale game page because we were live editing that. We’ve had some, but for the most part, any problems we’re having are regular Wikipedia editors who usually kind of know what they’re doing. We have very little problems with the paranormal world because they usually do not follow the rules. They don’t understand what is needed and they most likely will make a mistake. They’ll do something completely wrong and then other Wikipedia editors will come in and say, you know, they usually start off nicely. You’re not doing that right and then they leap on to the, this is a giant conspiracy. You guys are trying to get your baby out of here. They start raving at them, you know, they’re drooling and that kind of troll behavior.

0:34:06
BR: Frothing at the keyboard.

0:34:07
SG: Yeah, frothing at the keyboard. And so then they get banned. So we don’t have a lot of problems with the paranormal world, believe it or not. They’re often ranting somewhere in a paper bag or something, I don’t know, but we really don’t have a lot of problem with the technology on Wikipedia it’s harder to get away with that kind of thing.

0:34:35
PR: So with that in mind, how accurate would you say that Wikipedia is in general in your experience? I mean, I know that you focus mostly on fixing things, but when I, I had the unique experience of growing up in a world without the internet and then going to college with the internet. So it was like all of a sudden this was a resource and and this when I went back to college when I was about 25 and Wikipedia was a thing at that point and professors constantly would say don’t go to Wikipedia it’s not a reliable place. Now in the back of my head I was like I think part of it was that they just don’t want us just being lazy and using Wikipedia but on the other hand I occasionally did come across some more obscure stuff that was really badly written or just didn’t have any citations. How accurate would you say it is nowadays in general?

0:35:25
SG: Well, if we’re talking about a science page, maybe about math or a page on chemistry or something that has to do with the technical or about a butterfly and it’s, anything that has to do with that, my team doesn’t work on those kinds of pages because that is something that requires more like a PhD in that area to be able to do that. And those pages are actually really good. I’ve been told by the medical community that they use Wikipedia all the time for when somebody is trying to explain something to somebody, that those pages are very well written. We’re finding that, as I said, there’s kind of old Wikipedia and there’s new Wikipedia. Old Wikipedia was before all the technology came in and they had, it was more sophisticated. So there’s a lot of pages that exist, probably Spontaneous Human Combustion was one of those that existed back in the day. It was written and it didn’t have a lot of criticism on it and it’s kind of old. The new pages that are being created are generally really good because there’s an algorithm set up that when a page is created new, it’s immediately flagged and somebody has to look at it. There are pages that are written that were written by people, like a psychic wrote their own page. Obviously, that’s completely a mess. We’ve been working on lately, been doing a lot of more of alternative medicine pages. We’ve been trying to look at maybe 50 alternative medicine pages that really need to be made sure they’re in great shape, like that bee pollen one that just came out, the guy who was with the acupuncture. So we just rewrote that, and you know, different kinds of things like that. So we’re looking at it in different languages as well. So the one thing about GSOW that’s very different from everything else is that we edit in multiple languages. We’re the only group that I know of that is training outside of the world of English. We’re really trying to embrace languages other than English. Because guess what? Lots of people don’t speak English, and they need to read these pages in languages that they’re native to. So I would say that most Wikipedia pages are pretty accurate, if they’re current. And generally, we find, even on these other pages and other languages, they may not be complete, but they are trying to have a skeptical viewpoint to some extent. They might mention pseudoscience or there’s no science behind it but the page is incomplete. So they’re pretty good. I would say they’re pretty darn good.

0:37:50
PR: It’s good to hear.

0:37:52
BR: Let me ask about how we know what effect we’re having. Obviously just because the information is there and free to anybody with an internet connection doesn’t necessarily mean that people are you know looking into it and so how do you quantify whether it’s actually making a difference?

0:38:10
SG: Well that’s a really great question. One of the things that I do is we keep track of all the Wikipedia pages that we’ve written or completely rewritten and I’m not talking about stubs, we won’t put up a stub and we can’t keep track obviously of just the regular edits we do, because that would be impossible to manage that. As of yesterday, when I looked at our numbers, the GSOW project is responsible for 577 Wikipedia pages, mostly in English. Some are in other languages, a lot of Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, and so on. And we keep track of how many page views that Wikipedia page has since we made it live and kind of claimed it as ours. Of course, it’s not ours. We know that. Once it’s live, anybody could edit it. But from the time we’ve made this huge transition to it, I mean, we really, really took control of it, we are seeing about 35,000 page views a day on those 577 pages. And we’re almost at 100,000 page views a month.

0:39:16
SG: And now this is a number, this is two days old. So in total, those 577 pages are at 24,938,069 page views.

BR: 24…. wow.

SG: And so if I was to look right now, I’m sure we hit 25 million.

0:39:29
PR: Wow.

0:39:30
SG: So that’s how we know we’re doing something. And then I have something else. I don’t know if you want me to mention this right now, but this is something that just happened today.

0:39:43
BR: Yeah, absolutely.

0:39:46
PR: Breaking news.

0:39:47
SG: So one of the things I do is I work a lot on research on psychics. We call them grief vampires, those people who claim that they can communicate with the dead.

0:39:56
PR: Oh, yes. We’ve talked about them on this show.

0:39:58
SG: Yes, I know. I love it. Those are some of my favorite episodes. So what I do is I write a lot for Skeptical Inquirer magazine and because I’m notable and that sounds really vain, but that means I have a Wikipedia page I’m able to have any article that I write in a scholarly place Which would be Skeptical Inquirer that means that it’s free game to put up on a Wikipedia page So anything I write can go on to a Wikipedia page if it’s in my expertise. My expertise is grief vampires and a few little things. So Tyler Henry is the Hollywood medium and he’s one of my favorite people. I think I’m on Article 8 about him. The latest one I just wrote and it hasn’t published yet is he’s giving a reading to Nancy Grace from CNN fame and I call it “You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself, Nancy Grace.” So what happened today is this MMA guy, I’m told that this guy who wrote it writes also for USA Today, and he has 43,000 followers on Twitter, and maybe 5,000 people read his articles, something like that. He just published a blog about, now this is somebody I don’t know anything about, somebody named Rhonda Rosley, R-O-U-S-E. Rhonda Rosley.

0:41:13
BR: Rhonda Rosley.

SG: Yeah, I have no idea who that is, but does she have something to do with the MMA community?

0:41:16
PR: She was the top female UFC fighter until our local girl Holly Holm took her out.

0:41:24
BR: She’s in pro wrestling now.

0:41:26
SG: Okay, so this person, Ronda, she had a reading from Tyler Henry, the Greek vampire. I don’t like where this is going. So apparently she has talked about her father’s death and how he died in a car and that’s a public thing that she talks about often. Well, Tyler Henry happened to get in touch with and throughout, you know, I’m seeing a death in the car. So this guy who writes an MMA blog, he and he posted on his Twitter page, his name is Ben Fowlkes, F-O-W-L-K-E-S. Any idea how to pronounce that?

BR: Yeah sounds right.

SG: Ben folks okay so somebody named ben folks writing for the blue corner just produced an article saying i’ve never heard of this Tyler Henry person but because he did an interview um a reading with ronda i know who he is and he starts slamming on him saying well duh you know she she uh has a connection to somebody who died in a car. Well, she only talks about that all the time, so it wouldn’t be very hard for this Tyler Henry person to have some information.

0:42:32
BR: Do you suppose he has internet access?

0:42:36
SG: So what really makes this relevant is that in this blog, he starts talking about who Tyler Henry is, and he starts pretty much quoting the Wikipedia page.

0:42:48
BR: That’s awesome.

0:42:49
SG: He pulls up, yeah, he starts talking about some things that are definitely from the Wikipedia page and I know he didn’t get that from anywhere else because he starts talking about him being a grief vampire. He also talks about the truly terrible television award that he got from the Independent Investigations Group and there’s no way he’s going to have got that information and the term grief vampire and these other things unless he was reading the Wikipedia page for Tyler Henry. So in other words, the Wikipedia page that is there for Tyler Henry, which has tons of criticism on him, great, great citations that people can follow, if they want more, has just this media person in the MMA community has used it as a source. And now he’s educated all his 43,000 Twitter followers about it, using the Wikipedia page as the example. And it’s like, you know, it just, it just escalates, because we know the media is getting their information from Wikipedia.

0:43:42
PR: Right.

0:43:43
BR: That is awesome.

PR: That’s great.

BR: Congratulations. I mean, that’s, and no, and it’s a perfect example because, again, you could trace it right back. I mean, that’s where he got it. I mean, he didn’t contact Jim Underdown at the IIG to get that.

0:43:54
SG: No.

0:43:55
BR: He got that from what you wrote.

SG: And I’m not named or anything like that, and that’s fine because, and I would never have stumbled on this except one of my editors is really into MMA. So this could possibly happen all the time in all kinds of roles, you know, car racing and who knows what. They could be reading the Wikipedia articles on all these different people and we won’t know. That is one of the problems with our group is that you can’t be a celebrity. I mean, you’ll never know if you change minds necessarily.

0:44:21
BR: Well, I can tell you that there’s been a couple times when I’ve read a piece on the Chupacabra, and I can tell from the way it’s phrased that they got that from Wikipedia. I mean, they may have read my book but more likely than they read what Wikipedia put on there. And that’s great. Whether they reference me or not, or my work or not, the point is that somebody understands the topic. And so, yeah, I mean, I’ve seen cases where I know flat out they got that and they were correctly informed through your efforts.

0:44:55
SG: And if they are interested, they can continue following the citations and they can learn so much more. We know in, for example, the Tyler Henry page, we know that people go to the Tyler Henry page and then click on the Critic’s Wikipedia page, which is me. Maybe he gets a thousand views and I get a hundred views, but you can see that they’re going from one hyperlink to another hyperlink. So we know that they are accessing the criticism. We do know that. So, you know, it’s all we can do to keep our heads above water because there’s so much to do. But we do know we’re having an effect.

0:45:28
BR: So have you been threatened with lawsuits by any of your subjects?

0:45:34
SG: No, I’ve had a psychic or two come after me and say they were going to sue me or they’re going to, I don’t know, come after me or something like that, but it’s gone. You know, it’s like, okay, bring it on, you know, I’d love to have you to go to court and prove that you can speak to the dead. We have an article supposedly coming out really soon on this, an investigation that Mark Edward and I and some other people did, a psychic, two psychics actually. So that is being written up by a notable big name source and it should be out hopefully in a month and we’re worried that it, not worried, I’m anticipating that we may be given some kind of lawsuit or something but that’s fine they can go after the news organization who’s writing the article.

BR: There you go.

PR: Has there ever been a time that you corrected an article and then you became like part of the conspiracy or you know or thought seen as like the shields that are like behind the scenes, you know, quote unquote, fixing the conspiracy or the, you know, hiding the truth, so to speak.

0:46:35
SG: Oh, gosh, that’s a great question. I’m not sure that I can answer that in that way. But I do have examples where we have not touched an article. And then we’ve been attacked by the skeptic community, or people who claim to be skeptics and saying that we are the problem because we did not allow something on the Wikipedia page or we didn’t consult with the paranormal community or we are hiding evidence. So we’ve had a few times this happened but they’re not pages we’ve edited which is really interesting. Rupert Sheldrick, Deepak Chopra, Lawrence Krauss. These are all pages we didn’t have any involvement in, but we were accused, I mean blatantly accused, foaming at the mouth, kind of get the pitchforks out, that we edited those pages or kept something off the page. Nobody asked me. Nobody reached out and said, hey, Susan, could you explain this? Well, actually, one person did ask me. It was Himmet Metta from the Friendly Atheist blog, he asked me about the Lawrence Krauss thing and when I explained it to him he said, oh I understand now. You can’t just put anything up on a Wikipedia page? Oh wow, okay, thank you for explaining that to me. But there were other people in the community who attacked us, I mean literally attacked us for it. So we became part of the conspiracy but how can I prove that myself or one of my editors did not edit a Wikipedia page. I can’t disprove a negative. So, you know, they’re like, you did this. I’m like, really, how do I know? How do you know I did this?

0:48:10
BR: And you can track, you can see the track changes on that.

0:48:13
SG: Yes, but if I have 122 editors, how do they know who they are? And how do you keep tell that I didn’t allow it on there? I don’t run Wikipedia, there’s hundreds of thousands of editors. Sorry, guys, you know?

0:48:27
PR: Yeah.

0:48:28
SG: So, yeah, I do become part of the conspiracy. So Deepak Chopra and Rupert Sheldrake are absolutely, just cannot stand us.

0:48:34
PR: Oh, sure, I imagine.

0:48:36
SG: And Natural News, too. What’s his name?

0:48:38
BR: Oh, Natural News, David Wolf.

0:48:40
SG: Yeah, he’s, oh, he’s written at least three blogs about me and David Gorski. Yeah, he says David Gorski’s the leader of the skeptics and runs Wikipedia and I’m like his minion.

0:48:51
PR: The leader of the skeptics.

BR: That phrase right there shows he has no clue what he’s talking about.

0:48:58
SG: So we did become part of a conspiracy and so I did get that every once in a while. But it’s because of our inaction and it’s because our name is Guerilla Skeptics and they think that anything that has to do with Wikipedia must be coming out of that Susan Gerbic group. So we have to take credit for it because that’s fine, but you know, it’s like you could ask and I would tell you, I might be making it up. I’m, you know, I don’t know. It’s just silly.

0:49:22
BR: David Avocado Wolf and Deepak Chopra probably think that you literally hire gorillas. You’re like, they have gorillas banging out on the keyboard somewhere in Africa like,

0:49:32
PR: Yeah, they have that metaphor about you put enough monkeys in front of typewriters.

0:49:37
SG: So the criticism doesn’t bother me when it comes from the paranormal community. It bothers me when it comes from people who should know better. And they don’t even reach out to ask. I mean, it’s just like, I can’t be any more public than I am, you can reach me anywhere. I answer all kinds of questions. They don’t even have anything to do with skepticism. I’ve worked on so many pages, but they, you know, just ask, I will explain.

0:50:05
BR: And you don’t sleep. You don’t sleep, you’re constantly online, you’re everywhere, so it’s not like you’re hard to find.

0:50:11
SG: Well, the group is 24-7, because I have editors all over the world, and so I am online all the time, it feels like I really am, because, okay, I have to admit this publicly, we do have a secret cabal, and everything runs from the secret cabal on Facebook so I have a hundred and twenty two people all over the world in the secret cabal so public everybody on the strange now knows that if you wanna join the secret cabal let me know and you can be one of my editors of course you’re gonna have to go through training but um…

BR: Learn the secret handshake…

SG: You know we can’t talk about that or the magic underwear.

0:50:45
BR: Well let me ask about this, because you mentioned that there’s a handful of misconceptions about what people have about Wikipedia, for example, that anybody can put it on there, what the sources are. What are two or three really primary, main misconceptions that people have about Wikipedia and how it works?

0:51:05
SG: Okay, so one of the main ones, I get this from the skeptic community, from the science community, from the paranormal community all the time, is that there’s some sort of agenda that Wikipedia, they, who I don’t know who this they is, I get that all the time, is that they will not allow my edit to go on the page, they erased it, they won’t allow it, or they’ll say, well, who gives you permission to edit Wikipedia? Who gives you the right to be able to change it? And so I answer that by saying, they is you. You know, we are they. It’s everybody is they, you don’t have to have an account, anybody can edit Wikipedia. So that’s one of the biggest problems we get. And the other one is that, you know, that there is a conspiracy, somebody’s out there trying to take their, their stuff off. They don’t understand, we don’t allow primary sources. We don’t allow sites that are not reputable. You have to have some sort of journalistic integrity if you’re going to cite. You can’t just cite Daily News or Breitbart or something like that. What was that one that had the Rolling Stones magazine? Rolling Stones. I mean, they had that problem with the campus.

0:52:25
BR: With the rape on campus.

0:52:26
SG: Yeah. Yeah. So that’s the kind of thing is you have to have journalistic integrity. And so you can’t be just putting anything up. We need secondary sources. Everything is secondary, number one, which people do not understand. And so what really what happens is that people don’t understand how Wikipedia works. I’ll be happy to explain it.

0:52:48
SG: Lots of people edit Wikipedia and they’d be happy to explain it to you, but the rules of Wikipedia are not the rules of a website or social media. If you want to complain about something or you want to go back and write a blog, you can’t just put your opinion on Wikipedia. It just doesn’t work that way.

0:53:08
PR: Yeah, I think that it’s very interesting how that works and I think that Wikipedia kind of in general that the way the spirit that everything is done on Wikipedia is very much in line with the skeptic experience. I mean primary sources don’t count, anecdotes don’t count. You can’t just say things you know and then the other thing I’ve noticed about it is that sure you can pull biographical information off of an interview or something but information off of an interview or something. But the more controversial or more complex the claims get, the more information has to be parsed out and the more second and third party accounts of it there need to be in order to see that. And I think that just the work you guys are doing really kind of shows that Wikipedia is a good power for skeptical thinking and for getting to the bottom of things because even if you do look at a page and you have your doubts about it, there’s always a way to check that. You’ve got the citations and things like that. I can appreciate that it is pretty ironclad in terms of how you have to present the information and what you need, what qualifies as a source because like you said, you can’t just do any old wooey article from natural news or daily mail and you have to have concrete reputable journalism to back up your story.

0:54:29
SG: And if it’s a biography of a living person, the rules are even more strident because everything that happens on Wikipedia, it’s their public. You can see every edit there is and we can’t have slander on Wikipedia pages and going back to the Lawrence Krauss drama that I guess is now going on. But at the time, people were trying to get this BuzzFeed article into the Wikipedia page for Lawrence Krauss, and they were they were screaming at me. And we had nothing to do with it. I mean, we’re working on spontaneous human combustion. You know, we’re busy on something completely different. We’re not usually working on pages like that. And what people were trying to do is they were trying to shove this on the page. And all the editors, there’s a talk page on the upper left-hand corner of every Wikipedia page. You do not have to have an account. You can read the talk page, and that is where editors are talking to each other. And other editors that are not a part of my team were actually on there discussing the page, and they were saying, okay, we have this accusation. It’s coming from BuzzFeed, which is, you know, we’ve had some problems with that in the past. The reporters who are reporting this may or may not have credibility themselves but they are not notable they do not have Wikipedia pages themselves personally. So where do we go with this? And they said we wait, we pause, we wait for another secondary source to come out from someplace more notable because we can’t just put anything on a Wikipedia page especially something like that and it’s a biography of a living person so we have to wait. So they’re trying to wait and they’re waiting and they’re talking and they got pressured.

BR: But meanwhile you’re being accused of why aren’t you doing this?

SG: Yes and they were getting the same thing on social media themselves. They were getting attacked. Everybody was getting attacked for not putting it on because nobody understood the rules and they were saying how dare you you’re just trying to protect a scientist because he’s a scientist and he’s the leader of your group and I’m like oh you obviously definitely don’t know. You know who I definitely admire David Gorski, but you know it’s like no, no we have to wait, we have to wait until there’s a secondary source, another one, we got to have some backup. If somebody dies, we cannot just put up on the page that he died, we have to wait until we have at least a couple sources to say the person is dead, it’s being reported by Twitter, it’s being reported by his family and friends on Facebook. We still have to wait until we get something else. We just can’t do it.

0:56:54
BR: And that’s especially true for celebrity deaths. I mean, the fake celebrity deaths are a thing.

0:56:59
SG: How many times has Betty White died in, you know, Gober Pyle or whoever?

0:57:04
PR: Or Bob Denver.

0:57:05
BR: One of these days, Bob Denver’s going to die. And when he does, we’re all going to be pretty upset about it.

SG: That’s true. We have to wait. You know, I’m sorry. It’s just the way the rules are so get over it

0:57:16
BR: Well we have a uh… we have a question from Celestia. If you were to look at GSOW through the eyes of a critic, not a woo peddler or psychic, but a skeptical critic, what would you say is the biggest weakness or flaw in the system, and is that flaw fixable with time and volunteers?

0:57:55
SG: Okay, so I would probably go back to kind of where, what I was saying before, that even skeptics just do not understand how Wikipedia works. It’s too much bother for them to figure out. They think you can just go and make an edit. They have this idea that they are controlling stuff.

0:58:10
BR: But in terms of like if there was a legitimate criticism of Wikipedia, what would it be and how would you fix it?

0:58:23
SG: Well you know even my project, the GSOW project, I’m so close to it because of course I’m on it 24-7 and I have all this team. I think that they have to almost trust me and that would be something that I wouldn’t put up within the paranormal world, you know, if somebody said, well, you’re just going to have to trust me that we know what we’re doing, that we’re not trying to nefariously take over the world or something. I don’t know how I would feel about another group like mine that I had no way of watching or reading their secret cabal.

BR: Vetting or assuring their integrity.

SG: I think that I would be suspicious of a group like mine of sorts, especially in multiple languages that I don’t know, and not knowing where they are and what they’re doing. I think that would be something that would be a bit scary to people who are interested in the real world and they’re interested in science and they’re interested in making sure these Wikipedia pages are in great shape. I mean maybe I had a bias. What if I absolutely could not stand somebody in the skeptic world and I’m here slandering them on Wikipedia making sure the Wikipedia page is a mess or something. Yeah and there’s no way of really checking that because we make everything public as we do it and we’re as public as we can. Every time we rewrite a page, we brag about it on Facebook. But what if I’m doing something and not talking about it? So it’s the things that are not said that I think that maybe would be kind of frightening. Of course, you could, if somebody really wanted to figure it out, they could sit down and figure out every one of my editors’ names, usernames. I mean, it would be tedious, and it would be a pain in the ass and it would require hours and hours of watching their their accounts to see what they’re doing but then again what if there’s shadow accounts so I guess they just have to trust that we’re doingwhat we say we’re doing but I don’t think there’s any way because we’ve talked about this before having a secret cabal that’s not public, it’s a secret Facebook group. You know, we’ve talked about becoming more public, but you know what, we spend a lot of our time just going back and forth on the correct spelling, should we use English or Australian or Canadian, you know, grammar, I mean, it would bore the pants off of people right away. And then, but even if we made everything public, how do you know that we don’t have a shadow group on top of that? How do you know we’re not communicating by email? So we’ve had this discussion within our group many times and the end result was, I can’t, there’s nothing I can do about it. There’s always a possibility there could be another group, another email chat, there could be another public thing, this is not a government where they can do a freedom of information on me or anything like that. So we just gave up and just said, we’ll just have to let our work stand for itself. And if people have problems with it, once the page is live, well guess what? You can edit it.

1:01:19
BR: Yeah, well at the end of the day, that’s the answer, right? Is that if people are concerned about what you do, you can fix it.

1:01:27
SG: Exactly, and they do all the time.

1:01:28
BR: Yeah, you can change it, you can challenge it. Anybody can do that.

1:01:32
SG: Right, we’ve moved on to another page already. I mean, we don’t have, I teach my editors, in fact, what I tell people when they come to my project is, you’re here because you need to spend less time on social media arguing with the trolls. They’re not reading your stuff. Your blood pressure is going up. You’re just aggravating yourself. You’re not training. You’re not learning. Get away from social media and arguing and come and do something reliable and train with me. And if they do that, when they start to get in some little bit of a war of sorts with other editors and there’s a little pushback, we answer it correctly and we try to do it. But if there’s a big problem, let’s say somebody’s really kind of trolling and really wants to make sure that we’re not getting the edit on there, then we back off. I teach each of my editors, you know what, there’s thousands of pages still that you need to move on to because that page is not that important. And usually what happens is if you leave the page for a week or two, you come back, that person’s trolling somewhere else now, and you can make the edit you wanted to make after all, and it’s done, it’s over. And it’s not that important, there’s always another page to be working on.

1:02:42
BR: Well, so now that we’ve talked some about all the great stuff that GSOW does, how can people join up? Hopefully, many of our listeners are like, this is really cool. Susan’s awesome. How can I join in?

1:02:56
SG: Okay, so you have to be on Facebook. You can always be a Wikipedia editor. Anybody can be a Wikipedia editor and have nothing to do with my project, obviously. But we train from day one. You have no experience whatsoever. I can make you an editor, you just have to be able to use Facebook and be able to use the internet and have some kind of computer skills and maybe finish a project from beginning to the end. You need to also be kind of a self-starter. I can’t be kicking you in the ass all the time. But I usually tell everybody to come to Facebook, send me a private message. I need your username, so you’d obviously have to open up a Wikipedia account, and I need your email. If you send me a private message, that’s I love messenger and I will communicate right back with you. There is a lot of information on our website. We have a website now. It’s called About Time and now we are a non-profit so we take donations and that allows me to be able to go to different communities and talk and try to get editors. That’s why I’m in New Mexico is I’m going to be speaking to the New Mexicans for Science and Reason here. And I just was in Colorado and I’ll be in Arizona next in May. But my point is, is that if you go to About Time, that’s the website, you will find all about the everything that has to do with Susan Gerbig as far as Monterey County skeptics. I run that in Salinas, California area, Monterey County, and about the GSOW project, all the articles I’ve written about grief vampires, all the news, the tours, there’s so much information over on that on that page so please come and visit us on About Time but if you want to join the project approach me on Facebook.

1:04:38
BR: So Susan you you mentioned in passing the Blue Whale Game and the Wikipedia page for that what was what have you done on that?

1:04:43
SG: Well I’m a big fan of the Square and Strange podcast and one of the things that happened is you mentioned the Blue Whale game many times. I didn’t know what that was. And one of the things you did was you mentioned a lot of citations. And I thought, well, he’s just giving me a whole bunch of citations for this Wikipedia page. I’m sure it exists, so it couldn’t be that hard. Let’s just take all those citations that Ben’s already done and I gave it to a couple of my editors and they went in and they found the Blue Whale page and it was a mess. It had a lot of children who have committed suicide listed on there, maybe not necessarily their names, but it talks a lot about it and gave credit to their suicide from the Blue Well game. Now, anybody who’s listening to this probably already knows that the Blue Well game is an urban legend. It’s not real, but parents and the news agencies were picking up on the story and running with it instead of blaming bullying or, you know, who knows what mental illness or whatever the reason is that the child is actually killing themselves, they decided they would use and blame it on the blue whale, I guess it might be easier to blame it on some something that’s happening in school or something like that, instead of bad parenting, or I don’t know why. But the point is, is that the Wikipedia page is in really bad shape. So two of my editors went in and started cleaning it out. One of my editors, Ruth, she went in and she said that she had to read all those articles about those children committing suicide and she said that she had to take a couple days off of social media. It was really intense.

1:06:16
PR: Yeah, that sounds awful.

1:06:17
SG: It was horrible. So anyway, we rewrote the Wikipedia page. We had a lot of back and forth on that and got challenged on a lot. We had to have a lot of discussions in the secret cabal about it. But we made the page live, we consider we wrote that page in September of 2017, so we’re not even at a year, right? Okay, so since that day, now I don’t know how many people out there know what the Blue Well is, but guess what, it is extremely popular. So the English version, just the English page, since we made that page live September of 2017 has already had 3,490,263 page views.

PR: Wow.

SG: So 3 million plus people have or you know, they could be multiple people looking or one person looking at them multiple times, but you know, that’s the gauge we have. So that has made a huge impact. And that page would never have been found, we would have never even thought of it, if I hadn’t been listening to Squaring of the Strange and been talking about it and the work he’s done on it. And if you’ll look, you’ll see that Ben is quoted on there and he’s cited. We’re starting to work on the Wikipedia page for the Russian page, and I believe that we’ll be able to use your names and your articles as well on the Russian page. But it is quite, we found that it was kind of a, I think it came out of India, and I believe it was a bit of a conspiracy. A lot of it seems to be coming from Russia, which is kind of interesting. It ties into a lot of the things that have been happening. Possibly Russians used it to confuse things and make panic. We don’t know. We don’t know. But all I know is that because of Squaring the Strange, we were able to make a huge impact with that page and probably educating people all over the world and we’ll never know.

1:08:02
BR: Well, thank you. I’m glad that you brought that up. I think it’s a really good example of synergy and skepticism. Where one aspect of skepticism, I mean, I did a couple articles about it and of course we talked about it on the show, but what you all have done on Wikipedia has far amplified that to the news media and to hopefully the average person to get a better idea of it. I think it’s a great example of how different skeptical outlets doing different things can work together and really amplify skepticism.

1:08:33
SG: Right. You think about it, Ben, you’re a great writer. You write for a lot of different places. You’ve written for multiple areas, but just think about how that one topic you did is maybe affected three million people. That’s more than…

BR: Well, it’s mostly due to you.

SG: Well, you know what I mean.

PR: It’s just that’s more than the population of New Mexico.

SG: I’m not doing this myself. My team works it, but we need to work together. The skeptical community, there’s a lot of people listening to this who cannot do what you do. And there’s only a small percentage of people who can write these books and do this work that you do. But there’s thousands of us out there who are listening who could be doing what I’m doing and work on my team and they can make so much more impact in the world by taking the things you’ve done and the other people have written and so on and using that as citations and inspiring them. We’ve rewritten so many pages and are very inspired by the work that you and others have done.

BR: Well I am in turn inspired by what you do and I want to thank you for all the stuff you do.

1:09:43
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.

1:10:16
PR: So that about does it for this week. Next week we’re going to be doing a little bit of a dive back into the world of conspiracy theory specifically around school shootings we’re going to be talking a little bit about the Sandy Hook shooting and Also touch in on some of the conspiracies that have extended past that into some of the more recent ones in the news Parkland, Florida, and yeah, it is a really Serious topic, but we we’re focusing on ideas like crisis actors and some of the other weird ideas that people are coming up with so so definitely tune in next week for that one and thank you Susan for being on it was a lot of fun having you and until next week we’ll see ya

1:11:06
bye bye

1:11:08
Squaring the Strange is a production of Chronos Creative LLC copyright 2017

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Copyright 2017.

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Theme music by Shriekback. Additional music by Memory, Guitared and Feathered, and Pascual Romero. Content producer, Celestia Warren. Audio engineering, producing, and editing provided by Pascual Romero and Acronis 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 Acronis Creative, Center for Inquiry, our advertisers, or any

1:11:36
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Transcribed with Cockatoo