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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.

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0:00:11
BR: All right, well, welcome back to Squaring the Strange. As some of our astute listeners may know or if they’re paying attention, and I don’t assume that they are, but if you are paying attention, you might have noticed that we were teasing interview with Eric Kristopher Myers, the writer-director of a recent film called Butterfly Kisses, which the three of us have seen. It’s a really cool sort of urban legend inspired film. It’s currently at film festivals. It may be at one near you. Unfortunately, at the last minute we heard from Eric from his deathbed. At least that’s how it seemed.

Celestia Ward: Well, the urban legend angle has just gotten a little scarier then.

BR: It has. There’s a curse afoot, I tell you. He has something about the walking dead, the walking flu, whatever it was.

CW: Walking pneumonia. He has walking pneumonia.

BR: Right, so rather than having to clean sputum off your listening devices, we thought that we would postpone it a week. But meanwhile, we thought we would sort of do a little potpourri episode. The last few episodes of Squaring the Strange have been sort of a little heavier material, and we thought that we would sort of mix up a little bit and do a couple smaller things.

0:01:44
CW: Yeah, and listeners who are a little bit weary of hearing us go on for like an hour and 15 minutes on one topic and get really into it might be mentally relieved to hear the gobbets we have of smaller, smaller compact topics.

0:01:59
BR: Yeah, so if you get tired of my bloviation and you’re tired of listening to me at twice the speed, then this will be a relief for you.

0:02:07
CW: And Pascual, unfortunately, he’s kind of letting Ben and I just kind of run with this one, because he’s got kids to wrangle today. So, we’re doing what we can, everybody. Bear with us.

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0:02:18
CW: All right, well, first we have, for those of you who might remember him, the friend of the podcast, very quickly becoming nemesis of the podcast, Kenny Biddle is with us.

BR: He is indeed.

Kenny Biddle:  How’s it going, guys?

BR: It’s going great. Thanks for coming on, man. It’s always great to have you. And every time I turn around, you’re solving some mystery and doing some crazy stuff. It’s fun.

0:02:58
KB: Well, that’s one of the objectives of an arch-nemesis is to constantly flaunt his superior intellect.

0:03:07
CW: Yeah, you seem to have run out of your own mysteries, and you’re definitely glomming onto ours here. We threw out a little joking, oh, maybe we can figure out this particular movie mystery if that darned Biddle doesn’t beat us to it. And our link to our new show is up for, I kid you not, like 10 hours before, do, do, do, Keddy Biddle here.

0:03:23
BR: Damn!

KB: It wasn’t even my fault. I actually got a text from a friend of mine, Christopher Justice, who I turned on to your show, by the way, so there you go. I’m not such a bad guy. I’m bringing people to your show. But he sent me a text and said, hey, you just got called out on Squaring the Strange. I was like, what? No, no, no. And he told me, hey, you know, they challenged you to do something, something about some movie myth. And I pulled up the show. I hadn’t listened to it yet. So I started, I popped in the headphones and I’m listening to it. And he sent me another text saying, yeah, something about Elvis and Home Alone. I was like, oh, oh, I know this. I know. Here we go. Here we go. And I had, I had solved it before you even challenged me on the show.

0:04:26
BR: Oh, see, see, I should have known. At this point, I should have known. You know, before I say anything about it, let me check with Kenny. So yes, for those listeners who don’t remember, one of the movie myths that we talked about an episode or two back was on the question of whether Elvis Presley is in fact an extra on the film Home Alone. This is actually a question that was posed to me and I wrote an Inquiree column about it, about I think a year or so ago. And to be fair, I didn’t do an in-depth investigation on it. I didn’t, you know, when we talked about it, I was like, well, there’s different things we could do. You know, I get people asking-slash-demanding that I investigate stuff all the time. So I’m like, you know, some things I can do, some things I can’t. But so we talked about it on the show and then sure enough, Ken looked into it. So Kenny, take it away.

0:05:23
KB: Well, I know that feeling of people constantly saying, hey, you should look into this. I get that. I’m getting that more and more now. But this was actually fun because I had heard you talk about this before. And I love Home Alone. I think it’s a great movie and I was like, all right, let me see what I can do.

CW: As if we didn’t hate you enough, Kenny.

KB: Yeah. Oh, you love me and you know it! Don’t even try that.

0:05:52
CW: Now we have to question your taste in movies too.

0:05:54
KB: Well, I’m not going to reveal everything because I am writing it up and I have some surprises that I don’t want to spoil yet.

0:06:03
CW: Oh.

0:06:04
KB: But, basically what I did was, I did a search, first of all, for Elvis Home Alone, which I’m sure you guys have come across this before. It was a bad decision because it came back with 17 million results.

0:06:17
CW: Oh!

0:06:18
BR: Knock yourself out, man. Have fun.

0:06:20
KB: I was like, damn. All right, how long is this show?

0:06:25
BR: Put the coffee on.

KB: Yeah, but I went through a few of them and I did come across a video on YouTube by John Stiller and it was entitled Elvis Presley and Home Alone Debunked and he actually spotted a comment on a previous blog post which dealt with this conspiracy theory by someone that said, hey, you know, this is a friend of mine. I’m still friends with his wife and his name is Gary Grott and he was the actor in the film and we laugh about this all the time. Well, I actually I read that quote and then I started reading the responses to it and to be honest, I mean a little bit of seriousness here, I was appalled at the responses that this woman got. It was some of it was nasty comments just saying how she was a disgusting human being for spreading propaganda and crap and all I mean it was horrible some of the comments that were made to her just because she actually said you know this is this is a friend of mine

0:07:24
CW: And it’s not Elvis and people didn’t want to accept that.

KB: Exactly It’s not Elvis, and it was stereotypical Conspiracy theorist you know that we have something we have an answer a possible answer. They don’t want to hear it.

0:07:41
CW: Wow. You know, it’s frustrating when you see conspiracy theorists get really nasty when they’re trying to defend their theory about false flag operations or crisis actors. But to hear that they’ll do it about Elvis in a crappy 90s movie, too, that’s disheartening.

0:08:00
KB: Right. So I followed up with it and looked into it some more and I actually found Gary Groth’s Facebook page. Sadly, he passed away in 2016. And I did some digging with some of the comments, all the public comments that were there. I actually tracked down his son. And I reached out to him and said, hey, you know, this is what I’m doing. Somebody challenged me to figure out who Elvis was in this movie, Home Alone, to find the actor, and my research has led to your father, this man that I believe is your father, and I would like to talk to you, if possible, so that you can either confirm or deny this rumor, and maybe we can chat about it. And on Sunday, the gentleman got back to me and he said he had talked to his mother and they said, hey, we decided that since he’s gone, we feel comfortable confirming that, yes, this was my father.

0:09:06
CW: His father was Elvis?

0:09:08
KB: His father was Elvis. Yes. Apparently his father, his name is Gary Richard Grott. He was an extra. He actually knew Chris Columbus. It’s a funny story. Apparently Chris Columbus approached Gary and said, hey, you have this certain look. I think you would look good in films as like a background character, you know, like an extra, if you’re interested. Gary didn’t believe him at first, but eventually after talking, gave him his number, and over the years, apparently, Chris Columbus called him a few times, and he’s been in a couple of his movies. Most of the time his scenes were cut but Home Alone was apparently his big claim to fame because he was in it. He didn’t even know he was in it.

CW: Oh.

BR: What?

KB: The family got together so Gary’s family had gotten together over the Christmas holiday, go figure, and they’re watching the movie when it came out and Gary’s sister actually screamed like, hey, that’s Gary. Holy crap, that’s Gary. And the whole family was like, no, no, no, wait, are you kidding? What are you talking about? And they took a closer look and confirmed, yes, it was Gary. And then called him up and said, hey, you’re in this movie. And Gary’s like-

0:10:45
BR: By the way, you should be getting a royalty check.

0:10:47
KB: Gary’s like, which one? Cause he’d been in a couple over the years.

0:10:53
CW: So he wasn’t just a random extra, he happened to be kind of a special extra that Chris Columbus took a special interest in and put in a bunch of scenes. Even though a lot of them didn’t make it to the final movies.

0:11:05
KB: Yeah, there was one scene that he told me about that his son, his son’s name is Roman. There was a movie shoes Curly Sue it didn’t do well but apparently it was a movie that he was in he did a railroad scene in it. But the the main actress the little girl that played Curly Sue got injured during the scene, so they cut the entire scene and he was in a couple other films in the background but they didn’t have a list ready for me. I’m hoping to get that later and look at my house.

CW: When you approached his son, Roman, about this, was this the first the family had heard of the Elvis theory, or had they heard so much of it they were sick of it?

0:11:44
KB: No, they actually heard it before. He said that a few years ago, somebody sent him a link to a YouTube video, and it went into the whole conspiracy theory about Elvis, and they laughed about it. They thought it was funny. They thought it was really hysterical. His philosophy was, I’m not going to ruin this for them. You know let them have their fun let them have their fun. Let them believe in something. He thought it was hysterical his wife thought it was hysterical and it came up in family gatherings all the time and he just thought it was funny, and he let it go.

CW: Oh, that’s great.

0:12:17
BR: So he so he could have debunked it, but he just figured it was more fun if you didn’t.

0:12:26
KB: Yeah, yeah, he was more of a, he was a really good man. Like, aside from his starring role as Elvis in Home Alone, I mean, I got to know the actual guy and found out that he was a really devoted father, he was a devoted husband. I mean, his son said he was the kind of guy that he worked 80 hours a week. He basically worked himself to death to provide for his wife and child or children. Because there’s more to the family story that I won’t go into here, but he was a very dedicated and loving man. And I wanted to express some of that in the article that I am preparing for this. But a really, really good guy and not one to be a showboat and brag to his friends about it.

0:13:17
BR: Well that’s cool, you know, it raises the question because you know in the research that I did there was a quote, because somebody had asked Chris Columbus about that, and he had a quote, I’m going from memory here, but it was something along the lines of, I would have known if Elvis was on the set. Now you mentioned that Columbus and Grott knew each other and were friends. It wasn’t just sort of like, you know, here’s the director and here’s one of 3,000 extras in a baseball scene. So I’m wondering, you know, if Columbus knew that Grott, I mean, he could have, I mean, if Columbus was aware, I mean, obviously Columbus had been shown, you know, hey, here’s this scene, we think this is Elvis. And if he knew Grott, then presumably he could have said, yeah, that’s Gary Grott. He’s a friend of mine. He’s been in several movies. But it sounds like, I mean, we’re just speculating here, but it sounds like he knew that Gary didn’t really want to make a big deal about it and it was more fun to just sort of, you know, let the legend lie.

0:14:14
KB: I would be confident agreeing with that. That, you know, he was just one of them guys that just did it and there was no need to bring him into the spotlight because he really didn’t crave that. He was just doing his job. He did it. And one of the funny quotes from his son was that, he said, Gary would tell this story often, when family members asked about it. And he said that, during filming, Chris told me to act frustrated with the wait that was caused by Kevin’s mom while they were in the airport scene and he’s like yeah by the eighth take I was no longer acting. I just wanted to be done and get out of there so all the frustration that you see in the film is is real it’s not acting.

CW: That sounds like the movie business.

0:15:05
KB: Yes.

BR: Well tell you what so why don’t we do that I love the investigation I can’t wait to hear hear more about it and like you said you have a surprise or two. I have the email of the guy that originally asked me about this, so why don’t you and I coordinate and cause he’s like, well, I’m not gonna be satisfied until I know the actor’s name. So like, okay, so how about Kenny, you and I will coordinate and we’ll craft a perfect response to him and I’ll send it to him and we’ll see what he says.

0:15:33
KB: Absolutely.

0:15:35
CW: Perfect.

0:15:36
KB: The little surprise that I have, it definitely solidifies that this is the actor. There is no question that it’s not Elvis, definitely not Elvis. It’s no question that it’s this guy. And it’s something that’s been hanging on their wall since the film was released. So I’ll leave it at that.

BR: Awesome.

KB: Very great teaser. So you’ll have to wait for the article to come out to see the picture.

0:16:02
CW: Well, it sounds like you did a great job of digging and had some fortuitous results and discovered more of a legacy than you planned on. Sounds like this guy was a pretty cool chap.

0:16:13
KB: He was, and his son was absolutely amazing. He was a great guy. It was actually a little emotional. I felt a little bad because it’s still fresh. You could tell when I was talking to him, he was getting a little choked up with some of the stuff, talking about him, because he only passed away two years ago. And we were actually talking on Father’s Day. I was feeling, I felt really bad, but I also felt really good because I was like, I’m getting this information, and I’m gonna be able to tell people about this great man. And I think that’s what uh Roman was he was proud of it.

BR: And what better way than to honor him and to say yeah this is him and it’s cool and it’s you know it’s not exploiting it it’s it’s telling the truth about it and frankly the truth is the truth is pretty cool

KB: And yeah the man is at the center of one of the most famous movie myths of all time!

0:17:11
BR: And debunked by Kenny Austin Biddle.

0:17:15
KB: We were going up and then boom, shot me dead. It’s all good.

0:17:20
CW: Well, thanks so much for coming on and for stumbling into that mystery with just the slightest provocation from our part. That’s right.

0:17:28
KB: Anytime you guys feel like challenging me, go right ahead. We’ll see what happens.

0:17:33
CW: We ought to challenge you to do all the research for our show.

0:17:36
BR: Yeah, really. I got some work in the backyard that I can challenge you to do.

0:17:41
KB: Point me. Love you guys.

0:17:46
BR: All right, see you guys later.

0:17:49
KB: Take care, buddy.

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0:17:59
BR: Celestia, what are you skeptical of recently?

0:18:02
CW:   Well, I’m skeptical of something that I believed in for quite some time. Like many people out there, I heard of this pretty famous social science experiment called the marshmallow test that was done back in the 1990s. It actually started in the 1960s and 70s by Stanford University psychologist, Walter Mischel. He took children between the ages of three and five years old, and he gave them a marshmallow and said that if you eat the marshmallow right away, that’s all you get. But if you have willpower and you can wait ten minutes, you’ll get two marshmallows. And then, lo and behold, in the 1990s, they did a follow-up, and all the kids who had waited and resisted the temptation for ten minutes were doing much better in all the indicators of success, their adolescent behavior, their intelligence scores, a number of markers. Well, we were just talking about the importance of replication and also kind of pseudo experiments. Now, I’m not going to say that this psychologist is not a real scientist, but this kind of had the markers of a pseudo experiment in that the results speak for themselves. It was a very easily understood, digested message here. If your kid has willpower at age four, they’re going to be way more successful. It certainly seemed to make sense. It was a topic that I brought up with my stepkids. We were talking about academic success. I told them all about the marshmallow test. At a graduation I went to just a couple of weeks ago, one of the valedictorian speakers brought up the marshmallow test and told all the kids graduating that you should have patience and work hard and it will show that you will be one of the more successful people if you can be one of the people that waits for your marshmallow.

0:19:54
BR: It is sort of a sweet little modern Aesop’s fable. And I remember hearing about that, of course, as during my undergrad studies in psychology that came up on more than one occasion. Of course, we were thinking about marshmallows at that point. It was sort of like, oh, I see your point, but really I’m hungry for a marshmallow.

0:20:17
CW: Yes. Well, the study has been replicated. In reading about the replication, I learned that the original study had some real flaws in sampling. In the original Marshmallow study done by Michelle, it used around 90 kids, all culled from the children of Stanford University staff members. And the follow-up study included fewer than 50 of those children. So we are not looking at a large sample size, and if they’re all culled from people who work at Stanford, they’re all kind of this homogenous group of people who are working in an academic setting with a pretty good job. It did not grab from different economic tiers here.

0:21:01
BR: Not necessarily a representative sample.

0:21:03
CW: Yes. The updated study was recently released around the beginning of June here. This new research by Tyler Watts, Greg Duncan, and Honan Kuen was published in Psychological Science, and it found that there were still benefits for the children who were able to hold out for a larger reward, but it was nowhere near as significant as what had been found by Michelle. And those few little markers disappeared around age 15, once you factored in family and parental education. So this new test had used 900 children, and the sample was adjusted to make it more reflective of U.S. society. So, 500 kids were included whose mothers had not gone on to higher education. And a little, you know, side note here, the children were also allowed to pick their own treats. So, they could pick a marshmallow or chocolate or something else. So, for kids who didn’t give a crap about marshmallows, it also brought some rewards to the table for them. Now, there’s been a couple of write-ups about this. I’m reading from one here by Richard Adams in The Guardian, and then a very interesting take by Jessica McRory Calarco in The Atlantic titled, Why Rich Kids Are So Good at the Marshmallow Test. And she really brings some points out about how kids in different socioeconomic categories here look at life differently. The affluent kids have a much easier time holding out for 10 minutes because they know the marshmallow is still gonna be there. Their parents have taught them over time, hey, if I say we’re gonna go out to ice cream, we’re gonna go out to ice cream. You know, you might have to wait an hour or a day, but they’re used to being told the truth when it comes to risk and rewards and waiting times.

0:22:50
BR: And they’re also aware that the resources are available, even if they may not be given them right then, there’s a sort of background underlying assumption and belief that, you know, that it will be available sooner or later. It’s not something that they’ll never get.

0:23:07
CW: Yes, yeah, I’m quoting from the Atlantic article now here. And even if these children don’t delay gratification, they can trust that things will all work out in the end, that even if they don’t get the second marshmallow, they can probably count on their parents to take them out for ice cream instead. And boy, that rung with me because the yeah, there’s a there’s a term a friend of mine uses called carny rich. And that’s when you’ve just finished a long stint at a festival or a fair somewhere, you have money in your pocket, and you know, it’s not really going to last, so you run out and you buy something big and you enjoy your money while you have it because you know it won’t be there tomorrow. And that’s a terrible mindset, but that is a mindset you get into from a young age if you’re growing up impoverished. In fact, a UNLV, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, researcher, Renita Ray, wrote a book recently describing how teenagers who are in poverty and they work long hours, despite the fact that they are working hard for their money and sometimes they can’t even afford food, they still on payday will splurge on things like expensive fast food or new clothes or hair dye. Multiple books and studies have come out on spending habits like this. So the Marshmallow Test, it turns out, shows a lot more about trust and what you do with resources when they’re put in front of you, rather than willpower and the ability to achieve academic or later financial success.

0:24:37
BR: Interesting, interesting.

0:24:39
CW: Yeah, and in fact, just thinking about the marshmallow test from a trust point of view, it reminded me of another test involving chocolate bars, which wasn’t really a test. I’m gonna need to find something about graham crackers for the end of this episode so we can just complete the whole s’more theme here. But there was a viral video that went around by a guy claiming to be a media analyst named Mark Dice, where again, this was fully a pseudo experiment. It was an edited edited video on YouTube where he has a stack of Hershey bars and a bar of silver. And I saw it thrown up on my Facebook feed a couple of times recently, where he asks people walking the street, would you like to have a free Hershey bar or this free silver bar? And he claimed it measured people’s knowledge of value. And of course, everybody reposting it was like, this is how we ended up with Trump in office. Look how dumb Americans are. And no, if you look at the people’s faces, the only thing he’s really showing is that people don’t trust what he’s offering.

BR: Right.

CW: Nobody wants to touch the silver bar and honestly, the way the guy presented himself, holding out the silver bar and holding out a stack of Hershey’s bars, half of them wouldn’t even put their hands near it. I think they were expecting an electric shock.

BR: Or some sort of candid camera prank or something that’s insincere.

CW: Some sort of gotcha moment if they touch the metal bar and they ask a few tentative questions like well how do I know that’s real and boy that looks fake and they just grabbed the Hershey’s bar because it was easy, it was wrapped up, it appeared to be right out of the store and they could kind of trust it just like a kid doing the marshmallow test could trust that, okay, there’s a marshmallow in front of me, you’re gonna hand it to me, cool.

0:26:34
BR: Right.

0:26:35
CW: So yeah, anyway, like many psychological experiments, it’s complicated. And especially with the replication crisis, that I think we went into the replication crisis many episodes ago, there just needs to be a repetition. And when a repeated test, especially one as ingrained in the public’s consciousness as the marshmallow test, is repeated and fails, well, we need to bring that up. We need more people to write about it. I was happy to see the marshmallow test written about in a few places, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to bring it up on our show.

0:27:12
BR: Absolutely. And I think it just sort of highlights the, as you mentioned, the importance of replication and it makes you wonder how many of the other sort of landmark studies that we grew up knowing about either are totally untrue or heavily qualified. I’m thinking, for example, the Stanley Milgram experiments. And also even the Kitty Genovese case, where it was a very famous case that is well known certainly among psychology students of the murder of Kay Genovese who was killed, stabbed to death in New York. And it’s sort of taught, at least it certainly was taught as an example of people not caring and this poor woman, people heard her screams and no one called the police because it was sort of this lesson about shared responsibility and that if other people know that other people are listening, then they don’t feel like they have to do it. In recent years, it’s turned out that in fact several people did call the police. And so it wasn’t nearly as clear cut about, you know, the story of the uncaring New Yorkers who would, who didn’t, wouldn’t lift a finger, call 911 to help this, this poor lady being stabbed turned out not to be quite, quite so accurate. So again, it just sort of makes you wonder how many of those other sort of hallmark studies maybe aren’t quite what they’re said to be.

0:28:32
CW: Well, yeah, and I’ve just recently seen the Milgram study quoted a few times, you know, in making a point about how callous and heartless people can be if they’re given a task. And obviously that’s come up recently with the children being held in detention camps and separated from their parents. And I’ve seen the Milgram experiment held up a few times when in actuality, I remember seeing updates to that and some new information coming out about how there was a bunch of stuff that just went onto the cutting room floor where Americans did resist saying, oh, I certainly do have a choice. I’m not doing this. And that wasn’t released when the original study was published. And I did not have a chance to look that up, but readers, if you want to look into the Milgram study, there’s some interesting updates to that.

0:29:20
BR: Absolutely.

0:29:21
CW: But the marshmallow test, well, this update does provide some disheartening information about where you came from, your background, your socioeconomic status. think, you know, it’s, it certainly knocks down that American ideal of pulling yourself up by the, by your bootstraps, and no matter where you came from, with hard work and willpower, you can attain success. It kind of puts that into a more realistic light, unfortunately. But on the fortunate side of things is that it does show that in children’s minds, the whole category of willpower is not set at age four. If you have a kid at age four who grabs that marshmallow, that doesn’t mean they’re going to end up penniless and, you know, without any sort of direction. It just means that when they’re four, they grabbed a marshmallow for whatever reason.

BR: Don’t read too much into it.

0:30:18
CW: Yeah. Don’t read too much into it is really the moral of the story.

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0:30:22
Pascual Romero: Hey strangers, we love sharing our podcast with you, but it takes substantial time and money to produce and release each episode. If you think our podcast is worth a buck or two, please head over to patreon.com forward slash squaring the strange and consider becoming a patron. Not only will you be helping us, but you’ll also receive some cool perks. Again, that’s patreon.com forward slash squaring the strange. Enjoy the show.

(MUSIC)

0:30:52
BR: I came across something in fact just earlier today that I thought that it sort of piqued my interest and I thought it might be worth discussing briefly. It was a video that showed up on a friend’s Facebook feed and I glanced at it and it said the title is Bill Clinton, you are not the victim. And it was a video posted by someone named Andrew Wilco. And it was shared, apparently, seen, let’s see, seen 1.4 million times, 16,000 shares, 2.1 thousand comments. The subheading was, Bill Clinton is claiming that he’s the victim of the affair he had with Monica Lewinsky. Let that sink in.

0:31:31
CW: OK.

0:31:32
BR: I’m like, all right, I guess I can let that sink in a little bit. OK, it sunk in. And then I was like, well, all right, let me. So I know don’t click on the video. Right. So I watched the video. And so so it’s this guy, this sort of tough guy. He’s got a little hat on American flag behind him, blah, blah, blah. I assume this is this Andrew Wilco fellow. And he’s he goes off on this rant about how Bill Clinton was claiming that he, in fact, was the victim instead of Monica Lewinsky. And I didn’t watch the whole thing, but I watched enough of it to, I kept waiting for, well, let me, let me see. So where, so where, where exactly is this claim at? So I kept waiting for a video clip of him being interviewed on audio clip, something else. I get to the end of the video. I’m like, hold on here. You know, he’s, there’s this huge rant about it. So all the comments are, he made a decision to take a risk. So did Monica, both had experience, blah, blah, blah. Hypocrisy in office, he ruined that girl’s life. Why is it that people in authority never take responsibility? Clinton owes an apology not only to Monica, blah, blah, blah. Where’s the women’s movement? Just this huge cascade of complaints. And I was like, but but but are you sure that this is actually a thing?

CW: Yeah, like it seems like he’s put the cart before the horse there. Where’s the video of or any sort of mention of Bill Clinton saying he was a victim?

0:33:00
BR: Right, right. And so on my friend’s Facebook page, I said, well, you know, I said maybe I missed it, but I didn’t see it in the video where where is Bill Clinton saying I’m the victim? And I got a couple of responses. One of them was, you know, Google’s your friend. Like, OK, challenge accepted. So I did a Google search. I looked online. I found no audio or video recordings of Clinton saying that. I did see a few people paraphrasing what they interpreted Clinton saying, including one by Donald Trump Jr. So I was like, well, hold on here.

CW: Well the Trump family is not really prone to lying.

0:33:42
BR: Yeah that that in itself was a shocker. So I posted back and I don’t have time to get in arguments with people about this. But I was like, from what I can tell, the premise of this entire post is false. Bill Clinton never said he was, quote, a victim of the Lewinsky affair. The guy in the video above is either lying or misrepresenting the truth. And I said, you can hate on Clinton all you want, but criticizing for something he never said is pointless. It’s a perfect example of the need to check your assumptions. And so so I challenged a couple of people on it and I said, where where is this? And a couple of people grudgingly admitted, well, you know, he never said it, but he insinuated. I was like, well, hold on here. Hold on.

0:34:28
CW: Like Jimmy Carter, he said it in his heart.

0:34:31
BR: Right, right, right. And my answer is no. Just no. It’s intellectually dishonest to attack somebody for someone’s sort of summary or interpretation of what someone else said. You know, I’m not the world’s biggest Bill Clinton fan. I have no particular ax to grind one way or the other. But regardless of whether you agree or disagree with somebody, you should engage in and react to something they actually said, instead of something that someone else sort of summarized that they said.

CW: And with politicians, it’s not that hard to find some real stuff that you can be outraged about.

0:35:14
BR: Right, absolutely.

0:35:15
CW: Politicians are doing wrong things left and right. Even the best president we’ve ever had did some things that I guarantee would outrage you or me or anybody else. Pick on those things. Pick on an actual policy position they’ve committed to having. Pick on an actual thing they said and were recorded saying in front of other people. There’s tons of stuff that you can look at for that. Don’t try and insinuate something was said or happened that didn’t happen. I mean, the guy had an affair with a much younger intern. Yes, you can pick on that all you want. That actually happened. But don’t try and metastasize it into something even worse.

0:36:00
BR: And of course, a lot of the people that I was responding to, they immediately changed the subject. Oh, you think it’s okay what Clinton did. Like no, no, let’s be very clear about what I just said. I pointed out that the phrase that’s seen in the video and constantly repeated, I am a victim or I am the victim of the Lewinsky affair, apparently was not said. Like he literally didn’t say that. Now you can you can sort of say, well you know that was the gist or this is what I took from it. Well that’s that that’s not what he said. And as somebody who is as you know certainly a semi-public figure I’ve been excluded at times and I don’t mind if someone criticizes me for something that I wrote or something that I said. I expect that because I expect to own what I say and have some justification behind it. I do, however, object to people mischaracterizing what I said and basically creating a straw man argument and then trying to attack me for that.

0:37:00
CW: Hmm. Well, I guess I should take down that post where I say Benjamin Radford says David Avocado Wolf is totally on the line and you can believe anything he says.

0:37:08
BR: Please do.

(MUSIC)

0:37:09
CW: So, Benjamin, one of the reasons why we kind of have a grab bag this week is that I have not been able to pin you and Pascual down to some definite topics because one of us has been far, far away and unreachable for a while. You care to explain your absence, sir?

0:37:40
BR: Wow, a challenge! Yes, I was gone for a good chunk of the previous week or so. I was in Brussels, Belgium for a folklore conference.

0:37:52
CW: Ooh!

0:37:53
BR: Yeah, so a little talk of it will be a little bit of a Tales from the Road type situation. I thought it might be kind of fun to sort of… Folktale from the road, exactly. So the conference was held, as I mentioned, in Brussels, and it was held by the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research. And it’s one of the sort of subgroups of folklore, probably the best known is the American Folklore Society, the AFS. And I’ve been associated with them for about four or five years now. And I previously spoke for their conference in San Antonio, Texas about three years ago. As I recall, yeah, I was talking about the evil clown panic. And so that was a…

0:38:43
CW: You do know a thing or two about that.

0:38:45
BR: I do know a thing or two about that. And oddly enough, when I arrived at the conference and I looked at the program, I found out that the organizers had actually found a second evil clown expert. I know! I’m like, wow, this is cool. So it was a woman named Aurora van de Winkle, a Belgian folklorist. In fact, she’s the one that arranged the most recent conference in Brussels. So it was kind of cool to see her again.

0:39:12
CW: I don’t know her. I’ve never met her, but I’ve just decided you have to marry her.

0:39:17
BR: She’s very cool and interesting and delightful and stuff. And so we hit it off because, of course, you know, the two main evil clown experts, hey, what’s not to love? And she focused on the evil clown panic in France. There was a whole sort of summer of the scary clown that sort of coincided with some of the phantom clown panics here in the States.

CW: Now, was the phantom clown panic in France different in that they were all silent and had like black striped shirts and were hitting people with baguettes?

0:39:50
BR: Smoking cigarettes and getting indignant over coffee? No, no. It was slightly more violent than that, but not terribly violent.

0:40:00
CW: It wasn’t like a Marcel Marceau panic?

0:40:03
BR: Sort of, yeah. It’s hard to get too exercised about that. But she had arranged that, and it was actually a really cool conference. You know, as I said, I’ve been to several folklore conferences, and I just, I love being around folklorists. They’re a really diverse, interesting group of people from all over the world, and oftentimes they’re sharing their research on the most obscure things you can imagine. Like someone like, oh yes, I’m researching phrases carved into hardwood in Sweden, 1801 to 1815.

CW: Okay. Wow.

0:40:37
BR: There you go.

0:40:40
CW: These are not things you can just Google.

0:40:43
BR: They are not, they are not. And that’s one of the great things about it. So we had a nice diverse group. We had people from China, we had many from Russia, several from Holland, Spain and so on. And just these fascinating diverse topics. I spoke on the Blue Whale Game, which of course I’ve talked about here on the show before. You’ve had a couple of bones to pick with that game, yeah. I have, I have. And my title was The Blue Whale Game, Moral Panic or Public Threat? And if you listen to the show, you probably can figure out which side of that I fall on. But it was interesting because when people were asking me if I was going to go to the conference, there’s a handful of things that I know pretty well. I’m not a professional folklorist. I don’t have a PhD in folklore, but I’m certainly pretty well versed in those fields. But if I’m going to present in front of a room of folklorists, then this has got to be something that I know well. And as it happened, I was sort of one of the main people that was sort of writing about the Blue Whale game sort of as it emerged. And so by default, I’m like, well, hell, I guess I’ll do that.

0:41:58
CW: Cool. Now, you kind of have your feet in a couple of different camps, so to speak. I know, you know, you’ve spoken on panels with paranormal believers and bigfoot hunters that take it seriously. As far as the group of folklore researchers go, how many are skeptics? Is, are things looked at with a touch of skepticism or is it all over the place?

BR: That’s actually a really good question. You know, it’s, there’s a fair number that are skeptics because the nature of folklore is such that you’re researching rumors and things that aren’t true. Folklore is very broad. I don’t want to sort of pigeonhole it, but oftentimes you’re talking about urban legends, rumors, panics, these sorts of things. At the end of the day, we’re discussing things that may be real, but oftentimes are not real, or certainly have been greatly embellished, shall we say, online and through this sort of game of telephone. You know, there’s some really great folklorists who have appeared in Skeptical Choir magazine, in books and whatnot. Probably, the one that’s probably best known to most skeptics is, of course, Jan Brunewandt, the great urban legend expert. It was nice on the last day of the conference, we awarded a lifetime achievement award to Jan Bruunvand. And we Skyped Jan in from his house in Utah.

0:43:22
CW: Oh, nice. You went all the way to Belgium and I mean, New Mexico borders Utah.

0:43:26
BR: I know, I know. And it’s actually interesting because, so, you know, we had it on the laptop. And so I think it was like eight o’clock his time and it was, I don’t know, six o’clock at night our time. And so we all sort of waved hi and congratulated him. And it just so happened that the way the laptop was facing that he could see me and he actually called me out. I was like, is that Ben Radford in the back? It’s like, hi, I said, I’m here partly because of you. And so it was kind of a, it was kind of, it was a nice little moment. In fact, in his introduction, he was introduced as the Carl Sagan of urban legends or folklore.

CW: Yeah. Even I’ve, I’ve, I’ve heard his name.

BR: Yeah. And so, that’s probably the way that people sort of latch onto it. And folklore, to be clear, it’s very diverse. It’s riddles, it’s legends, it’s songs. There’s lots of things that people wouldn’t necessarily immediately recognize as folklore. And so there’s quite a broad array. I, of course, mostly deal with things such as ghost lore, urban legend, and things like that. There were actually four days of presentations and far more than I could ever encapsulate. But let me, I just want to sort of touch on a few of them that sort of give you a flavor of what was talked about.

0:44:46
CW: Okay. And give us your top five folklore conference moments so that we don’t have to spend thousands of dollars traveling there.

0:44:52
BR: Yes, well, I’ll save you the time. So there were many, many presentations. Each of them was about a half hour long and there were four days of them. So you can imagine the diversity of stuff all over the map. I’ll rattle off some, like, five or six of my favorite stories and legends in the presentations that I came across.

0:45:12
CW: Sounds good. We can probably use some of these as springboards for future shows.

0:45:16
BR: Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, one of the presentations was about the Poe Toaster.

0:45:21
CW: The Poe Toaster.

0:45:22
BR: The Poe Toaster, exactly. So when I saw that, I was thinking, like, what is a Poe Toaster? Well, the Poe Toaster, this is the Edgar Allen Poe Toaster, the mysterious figure in Baltimore that would show up on the anniversary of Poe’s birth, I believe.

0:45:37
CW: Oh, I know about this guy.

0:45:39
BR: Yes, yes.

0:45:40
CW: Yeah, on Halloween, oh, it was a bit, people used to wait out and try and catch him leaving stuff on the grave.

0:45:46
BR: Exactly. And so…

0:45:48
CW: I lived in Baltimore for like 10 years, you realize.

0:45:50
BR: There was the Poe Toaster and then there was the Faux Toaster.

0:45:54
CW: Oh.

0:45:55
BR: So, yeah, interesting stuff. So what happened was that the original Poe Toaster stopped doing his thing. And so the city of Baltimore decided they wanted to sort of capitalize on it. And so they actually put out a call and they hired an actor to sort of take the place of the original Poe toaster, again, the faux FAUX toaster. And it was just this fascinating story of how the city of Baltimore decided they were going to have this guy come out and do this little ritual. And they sort of-

0:46:23
CW: That sounds like something they would be spending time and money on too.

BR: Of course.

0:46:28
CW: Oh my God.

0:46:29
BR: And they actually moved where it would happen. So the original grave is sort of deeper in the cemetery. It’s hard to get to, but they sort of changed the place so it was much more camera friendly. So it’s right near a fence where the press…

CW: They’ve got two different grave sites for Edgar Allan Poe in Baltimore. I’ve been to both of them because there was one where he was at for a while and then they moved him. So there’s actually two grave sites you can visit.

0:46:53
BR: Exactly. So anyway, that was a fun little random story hearing about the poe toaster and the faux toaster.

0:47:01
CW: Oh, we can definitely do a show on that someday.

0:47:04
BR: We should totally do a show on that. And then there was a presentation based on one of my favorite investigations by a guy named David Clark. And Clark is a journalist and folklorist in the UK. And I first, he’s done quite a bit of work, but he’s probably best known for his research into the crying boy curse. Do you know what that is?

0:47:27
CW: Crying boy curse. I think most of my friends who are moms have to deal with that.

0:47:31
BR: This is a little different. I first read about it in 40 and Times Magazine. Basically, there were all these prints of artwork of a crying boy. There were several of them, actually. And they were sort of loosely modeled after the big eyes artist.

CW: Margaret Keene?

BR: Yes. They didn’t have big eyes, but they were sort of along those lines. Very, very kitschy, very cheap. I’ll spare you the story, because it’s a fascinating story in its own right. I don’t want to sort of give the thunder away, but basically a curse or legend of a curse developed around these crying boy paintings. It all sort of began with a firefighter who noticed that in several of the buildings that he had gone to put out fires, this crying boy portrait had not burned, whereas other parts of the building had. And a journalist that David worked with sort of latched onto that and said, I can make a story out of that. Anyway, it’s a brilliant piece of detective work. And if you want to, if anyone would like to check it out on the Folklore podcast, which I recommend, and I’ve been a guest on once or twice, it’s a wonderful podcast by Mark Norman. If you look for The Curse of the Crying Boy or David Clark, David talks about that. But anyway, so David gave a great presentation on the crying boy case.

0:48:53
CW: We could probably do a show on that too.

BR: We should totally do a show on that. It would be great to have David on to talk about it. It’s a recent case. This is just in the last, say, 20-30 years.

0:49:04
CW: I’m already developing theories in my head that involve flame retardants used at a Chinese factory.

BR: No spoilers, no spoilers. And another interesting presentation I saw was by Mr. Sandy Hobbs. And I had come across Hobbs’ work several times, primarily in researching the Phantom and Clown Panics. He’s written about that pretty extensively, particularly—

CW: How many of you are there, exactly?

0:49:28
BR: Well, there’s—you can count them on one hand, basically. He’s primarily the folklorist on the Phantom and Clown Panic, along with Loren Coleman, of course, who’s done some important work there. But Mr. Hobbs was writing about dog suicides in a place called Dumbarton.

0:49:46
CW: Dog suicides?

0:49:48
BR: Yeah, so I had vaguely recalled hearing about this, but sort of just sort of offhand. There’s so many weird things that I research, just to sort of, you know, add to the pile. But apparently, is that there’s one particular bridge in which dogs feel compelled to kill themselves. Yeah, I just said that. So, the story is that there have been at least a handful, I don’t think there’s been dozens, but I think maybe a dozen or so, cases in which dogs who were being walked across this bridge would suddenly decide that they wanted to end their life, or more accurately, they would jump over the side.

0:50:32
CW: Now, were these really fluffy dogs? And is this bridge in an area where there’s a lot of wind?

0:50:38
BR:No.

CW: I’m just spitballing.

0:50:40
BR: No, no, but I like where you’re going with that. Many of these stories were reported in the Daily Mail, and of course Britain sensationalized story and and so Hobbes went through some of these just just utterly absurd sensationalist tabloid things that dogs who suddenly became depressed for whatever reason and Hobbes makes a very good observation in terms of because apparently so long story short apparently there actually have been at least a few cases probably not as many as widely reported by the Daily Fail But at least a few cases where dogs have in fact jumped over this low stone hedge to their deaths. And now, if you could really call that a suicide, it’s sort of a different matter. But it’s important to recognize that in that particular area, the trees sort of go up to about eye level where a dog would be. And it is very plausible that the dogs don’t recognize that they’re actually on an elevated bridge and they think it’s just sort of a low hedge and there’s a brush on their side and it’s not that far. So it’s actually much more likely that the dogs, sort of in their excitement, jump over expecting just to land three or four feet instead of the much higher space that it is.

CW: Dogs are not always incredibly graceful creatures. I was just watching a couple videos online the other day of dogs accidentally falling off of piers, falling into pools by accident. They’re not nature’s most perfect creatures.

0:52:19
BR: They are not. Where’s your intelligent design now, sir, Mr. Ham? I’ll just touch on a couple other ones. There was a presentation by a woman named Patricia Turner of UCLA who talked about the designated boogeyman, Obama Legends in the Trump era. I have one of her books on my shelf. I’d read her stuff. I was delighted to sort of be in the company of all these people who had actually written and researched about and quoted in my own books. And she’d previously written about anti-Obama conspiracies and legends and rumors back during his first and second terms.

0:52:53
CW: You really could make a whole career out of that there are so many.

0:52:57
Well it was interesting because she said you know that that she had assumed that when she first was talking about this that after Obama left the presidency that she wouldn’t be talking about it again because oh he’s no longer president so why would you circulate these things?

0:53:18
CW: I suppose if the current president brings him up every day on Twitter to blame him for stuff.

BR: And there you go So so yes, she was she was sort of bemused and lamenting the fact that that her research into racist anti Obama conspiracies rumors Had not in fact, still circulating to this day. And due in large part to Trump. And she hit on a couple of them, including the Alex Jones and Infowars conspiracies. And there was a rumor that circulated that after the Obamas left the White House, that they had trashed it. And there was this rumor that somewhere in the Obamas’ closet, they had found drug paraphernalia and it was all covered up, this sort of thing.

0:54:03
CW: I hear when Obama goes on vacation, he pushes dogs off of bridges, too.

0:54:07
BR: That’s, you know, leave it up to him to do that.

0:54:10
CW: Well, that would be a great topic for a future episode.

0:54:13
BR: It would.

0:54:13
CW: Mark that down.

0:54:14
BR: It would. I’ll make a note. I’ll just hit on two other quick ones. There was a discussion on the Dakota Pipeline virtual check-ins. Do you remember the protest there?

0:54:27
CW: I was asked to check in. Several of my friends checked in there. Wasn’t it to help protect the people who were protesting there?

0:54:36
BR: Yes. So this was November 2016 and it was at Standing Rock, North Dakota. And there was the widely seen protest against the oil pipeline going through there. And there was lots of really nasty stuff going on. There were abuses and firing water cannons and freezing cold. And one of the rumors that circulated was that the police and the FBI or others were carefully monitoring social media, particularly Facebook, to see who was there and who wasn’t there. This was somehow in ways that weren’t entirely clear, helping the government to arrest people or keep track of people or to sort of control the groups. So you and I and many people got a request to check in at Standing Rock, the idea being that it would sort of confuse people and, you know, the FBI who’s watching us wouldn’t be able to tell whether you’re actually at Standing Rock or not.

0:55:34
CW: Are you telling me that the extremely easy way to help people with a cause by clicking two buttons on your computer wasn’t actually helping?

BR: Well, hot to be diplomatic about this. There’s no evidence that it was helping. You know, it was certainly well-intentioned, but according to the researcher and from what I can tell, there was no clear evidence that the FBI or the local police were in fact monitoring Facebook check-ins. And even if they were, I don’t know what that would tell you. They can’t arrest you if you’re not there. It’s just, it’s not clear what that would do. And so the woman that gave the presentation, she had a couple of informants that were talking to her about why they checked in. And it was interesting sort of hearing their reasons. And there was an element of sort of virtue signaling. There was some sense that maybe it wasn’t really true, that the rumors weren’t actually true, but nonetheless they wanted to sort of participate, symbolically support them.

0:56:43
CW: It’s armchair activism, yeah.

0:56:45
BR: It certainly partly is. And so anyway, it was just an interesting look at this social movement that I had heard about and many people had heard about, but that, again, was in fact folklore. That is absolutely folklore and rumors. And so it was just an interesting look at why people were persuaded to participate and what their motivations were. And then last but not least, there was a piece on the Bowling Green Massacre. And it was presented by someone at Bowling Green.

0:57:15
CW: Oh, I’m glad to hear they survived.

0:57:19
BR: He did have a limp.

CW: Oh, God.

BR: I offered to help him carry stuff from his horrible wounds at Bowling Green Massacre. In fact, it was great because one of the folklorists who was in attendance there at the conference, a guy named Stephen Winnick. He had actually composed the ballad of the Bowling Green Massacre. And you can find it on YouTube. And it’s just this brilliant satire of the hardy soldiers and those who survived the massacre. Anyway, and Stephen, being the delightful ham that he is, stood up and sang the song for the whole crowd, and it was great. Anyway.

0:58:02
CW: Oh, that’s great. I think I recognize Stephen Winnick’s name just from Facebook stuff. We’ll throw a link to that YouTube video up on our Facebook page at Squaring the Strange so everybody can share in the sad tale of the Bowling Green Massacre and all the things that didn’t actually happen.

0:58:16
BR: Anyway, it’s a brilliant satirical song. Anyway, so the presenter, Tim Evans, was sort of giving a perspective of somebody who actually was at Bowling Green and the local community reaction during the whole time when Kellyanne Conway was talking about this horrible massacre that didn’t really happen and what the local reactions were and the memes and stories that sort of circulated around it and one of the things he noted was that the the people actually in Bowling Green, whether they were Democrat or Republican, they all more or less sort of made fun of it. So even the Republicans who you might otherwise support Trump and Conway, they sort of grudgingly with a wink and a nod said, yeah, I’m a survivor, too. Yeah, that’s an interesting way to get your little talent on the map. So there’s so there’s that. Anyway, there were there were lots of other lots of other presentations. There were rumors, rumors during wartime. There was rumors about Anastasia, Romanov, all sorts of different stuff. So I’ve only given sort of a rough flavor, but that’s sort of a sampling of some of the great folklore legends and stories that I saw. And if people are interested, they can check out the group’s Facebook page, or you can also find them at contemporarylegend.org.

0:59:36
CW: Well, thank you, Ben. That was a great roundup of all the great talks you went to see and the one that you went to go deliver. I think there is a great crossover between folklore and skepticism, and it’s good that you bridge that little connection for us.

0:59:50
BR: Well, thank you. It’s one of the more interesting parts of what I do, and it’s just fascinating. Again, I love hanging around with folklorists, and we had a nighttime dinner, which I guess is when dinners are. And it was just cool being in this, we had this huge long table, and I would just look around the room at this table and was like, oh, there’s the expert on Slenderman. Oh, there’s Stephen, the expert on this. And I’m sitting across from Sandy Hobbs, and I’m right across from Patricia Turner, who’s the expert on Obama lore, and I’m chatting with David Clark and his wife. And it was just cool sort of, it’s a small community and there’s lots of support and it’s a great bunch of people.

1:00:33
CW: You are so nerd gushing right now, it’s adorable.

1:00:37
BR: Well, there you go.

(MUSIC)

1:00:38
CW: And to wrap up, I have, you know, since I began this potpourri with stories about marshmallows and chocolate bars, we’re going to go, something that will go very well with both of those. I’m going to talk about milk.

BR: Oh, I was wondering where that was going.

CW: Not raw milk. You may have seen some controversies over that. Although it is raw milk. I’m going to talk about breastfeeding and the outrage that can cause.

1:01:16
BR: Yes, I was breastfed and look what happened to me.

1:01:20
CW: Oh yeah, oh geez, don’t even get me started here. Well, this all started when a very well-meaning, skeptical friend of mine posted a video that was right up the alley of our last episode on on pseudo experiments. This video purported to be a quote unquote social experiment by Joey Salads, a fellow who’s gained some fame on YouTube by doing many other social experiments I found out. And in the two minute video, you see two women compared, one has a sexy low cut top on and showing a lot of cleavage, and the other is purportedly breastfeeding. And he just measures the different reactions that these women get. One article I read said that each woman sat on a public bench in a mall for about an hour. Now in this space of an hour, and I know newborns can’t nurse for a whole hour, so in however long this woman with her infant was sitting, I counted like five or six different people or groups of people walked up to her and accosted her directly. Four of them used the same word, disgusting. That’s disgusting. Oh my God, you’re so disgusting. Don’t do that here. Blah, blah, blah. And it’s a lot of red flags. For me, as I watch this video, I’m like, this really sounds like people are just delivering lines and not even all that well.

1:02:50
BR: So you’re suggesting it’s staged in some way?

1:02:53
CW: I was very skeptical of exactly how real this video was. And it led me down a very long rabbit hole, a very long rabbit hole, about breastfeeding and this particular video and this guy Joey Salads. This video came out in 2016 and it was actually at part two, he had done another video about breastfeeding, which had the same woman and the same baby, which I found out was a plastic doll.

1:03:20
BR: Well, now hold on here. Plastic dolls don’t need to be breastfed. There’s something fishy going on here.

1:03:27
CW: So yeah, so going down this rabbit hole, it seemed that he got a lot of attention, Joey Salads did, for the first video he did, which just had him and this woman sitting on a park bench, a bench in some public area, and they just counted all these people walking by saying it was disgusting. That led to a brouhaha in the news. Many news outlets picked it up and talked about, wow, look at how backwards our view is of breastfeeding still. There’s been absolutely no progress at all, and America’s full of prudes, and breastfeeding is natural. And in all this outrage on behalf of the mother, nobody seemed to question whether or not this video was real. And those that did, there were a couple that said some of the scenes seemed a little bit staged, but it brings attention to a real problem. This really happens, this really happens every day. And it just sort of struck me as the same sort of but you know, it gives people comfort.

1:04:31
BR: Yeah, yeah. Or, you know, maybe, maybe Bill Clinton didn’t actually say he was a victim, but that’s, that’s, that’s sort of what he meant.

1:04:39
CW: Yes, I’m, I’m hoaxing something for the greater good. And of course, as a skeptic, I have a problem with that, but it required some research. Sure enough, there’s a million YouTube videos that debunk many of Joey Salads’ quote unquote social experiments. There’s one that’s very anti-transgender, where he puts on a terrible wig and goes into a bathroom and records all these shocked women who are clearly, you know, oh, well, clearly we can’t just let, you know, transgender women use bathrooms, because look at what an uproar it causes when I go into a bathroom, and there were so many problems with this video, including the fact that the bathroom in question, the lights were turned off, you could tell. It was a single occupancy bathroom. If some guy in a wig, not a transgender woman, but some guy in a wig follows you into a single occupancy bathroom, hell yes, you’re going to scream.

1:05:34
BR: Yep.

1:05:35
CW: Yeah. So that was just one of the questionable and to read some of the takedowns, clearly staged videos he has. And then he has some others that are, that have got racist overtones.

1:05:45
BR: Oh, great. This is a video that a friend of yours shared.

1:05:48
CW: Yes. And this is, this is a nice guy who has, who is otherwise a skeptic in many scientific areas. He’s a skeptic and I was just kind of surprised to see him share this after I watched it and started going down this rabbit hole. But yeah, he’s got some racist, clearly racist videos where he’s he was photographed by somebody who posted photos on Twitter of him talking to a group of black actors that he had hired, or at least rounded up, to vandalize a car. Oh, I think I remember that one, yeah. Very conveniently, you they’re all bashing this car saying, how dare you come into our neighborhood with a Trump sticker, you know, fuck Trump, blah, blah, blah. And they’re beating this. And then Joey Salads, as the astute social scientist he is, says, this clearly proves that black men are very emotional about Trump and will go to great lengths to, you know, destroy any evidence of Trump even being popular, blah, blah, blah. And of course, this type of controversial and faked video gets repeated and reposted by alt-right sites that claim it’s real. And you end up with tons of racist comments, tons of inflammatory comments going back and forth. And all it results in is hits and clicks and shares for him, which provides advertising revenue.

1:07:15
BR: Sure. And, you know, and keep in mind, of course, there’s also, there’s also the backfire effect, right? And so we see this all the time where even the people that are criticizing the videos and debunking them in order to it’s called the familiarity backfire effect. In order to criticize something, you have to tell people what it is you’re criticizing. But in the process of telling people what you’re criticizing, it can make people more familiar with it and therefore more likely to accept it as true, even if in the process you’re debunking it.

1:07:40
CW: Yeah, you’re absolutely correct. And to go back to the original video that was shared, which seems a lot less inflammatory than trans people, you know, creating an uproar in a bathroom or a racist video about how hateful black people are to Trump supporters, this video about breastfeeding just shows this young woman getting accosted multiple times in the space of an hour over the fact that she was breastfeeding. And I read the comments on both the repost and then the original video, and a common battle cry I kept reading was, this is terrible. If this had ever happened to me while I was breastfeeding in public, I would have gone off on those jerks, blah, blah, blah. And I’m reading this from multiple mothers, some of them with multiple children who clearly breastfed in public, and they’re enraged that this goes on, but at the same time, they’re admitting that it has never happened to them.

1:08:41
BR: Interesting.

1:08:42
CW: And so I’m thinking, wow, what kind of really backwater, conservative, breast-fearing environment was this thing filmed in, if he got it to happen multiple times in the space of an hour, if it wasn’t staged that is, but it clearly was. Where did he film this? Well, I showed it to Pasquale, who as you know has a background in man on the street segments and different things that producers do, and he saw, just as I had seen, he saw a number of markers where he’s like, yeah, everybody walks right up to her. It’s like, they’re standing on a mark, badly delivered lines. This has a lot of hallmarks. He’s like, and they’re blurring out people’s faces who say this stuff. He’s like, you blur out a face if you can’t get a release form from the person, but it’s also a convenient way to just protect the identity of somebody who’s volunteered to come do something controversial and, you know, they don’t want to be seen. So, yeah, if they’re just pretending, they’ll get their face blurred out. Well, I also found an interview online from another YouTuber where they tracked down one of the guys who walked up to her and called her disgusting. And he said that he had been told by the people, you know, by Joey Salads and the women involved, that, oh, yeah, we’re just doing a project here, would you help us out? And so they gave him lines to say. He walked up and said it and he said he assumed it was just a student project. He’s like, I’ve had to do videos like that for my psychology class, so I just assumed it was that. And so he was shocked a few months later when it started going viral. And even though his face had been blurred, he had friends who recognized him by his posture and his voice and the clothing he was wearing. And they were like, dude, what the hell? You had a problem with that girl breastfeeding? That’s not like you. And he was like, wow, it’s being passed off as legitimate. This is not what I signed up for.

1:10:36
BR: Interesting, interesting.

1:10:38
CW: So, and he said he was not paying anything. They just solicited volunteers. So Joey Salads is pretty much an outraged vampire who does things for, in fact, he admitted it. There was an interview I found on YouTube where this fellow named Ethan Klein, who runs a little production thing called H3H3 Productions, he interviewed Joey Salads soon after that racist Trump car experiment was exposed as fake. And he got Salads to admit to faking a lot of other videos. He shrugged and minimized and was like, oh, it’s just my job. And it’s all about seeing the numbers come in. And Klein said, why do you feel the need to fake an experiment to do this? And Salads admitted, well, it’s just laziness. And I’m just trying to make something shocking and create controversy. Like there’s nothing morally wrong about that. It’s just his job. So thinking about the harm that this does do, for, I mean, let’s set aside all the other terrible videos, the breastfeeding one. I did an informal poll among my Facebook friends. Now this is in no way scientific, it’s just a group of women who happen to be my Facebook friends. I said, hey, ladies out there, moms who have breastfed, tell me something, have you ever been called disgusting, specifically disgusting for breastfeeding in public, or have you had any bad…

1:12:02
BR: Reactions.

1:12:02
CW: Have you had any bad reactions? And 22 females responded. Some of them had breastfed in public 20 something years ago. Some of them had breastfed in public a couple months ago. So it was a wide array. No, none of those women reported being attacked with the word disgusting. Although one of them said that an old guy in a restaurant said, ah, she’s put me off my food. And then when he said that, the waitress came up and lectured him about how awful he was being and how a baby needs to eat and it’s natural and get the hell away. And that was like 20 years ago. So yeah, now there are polls out there that exist that show Americans in general, some of us aren’t comfortable seeing a woman breastfeed and I think it was about 19 or 20 percent responded to a CDC poll and they responded by saying that they do not feel comfortable with a woman breastfeeding in public near them. But not feeling comfortable with somebody doing something near you is leagues away from walking up to a woman and calling her disgusting to her face.

1:13:12
BR: Well, and keep in mind that it’s not clear what that means. I mean, you could be uncomfortable because not because the woman’s breastfeeding, because you’re a man with a strange woman with exposed breasts. So it’s not that you think it’s disgusting, it’s that you might be slightly embarrassed that you can see her boob, in which case, of course, just turn your head 20 degrees. Or you might think that she wants privacy so it makes you uncomfortable to be there because you’re inferring that she wants to be alone.

1:13:41
CW: Exactly.

BR: So I mean there’s, it’s not clear what that would even mean. And as you pointed out, even if you are uncomfortable with it happening right next to you, that doesn’t mean you’re going to go up and lecture them loudly about it being disgusting.

1:13:59
CW: Now one thing my little informal poll did make me aware of, and this is key I think, is several of the women said, well, I tried to find a secluded place at first. And why is that? Many of them said, well, it’s because, they said, out of fear, I tried to nurse privately at first, like for the first month or something. They said, but it just was untenable. The baby needs to eat when the baby needs to eat. You can’t always find a place that’s tucked away. You can’t always find a restroom that has enough space or has a bench or something. And so out of fear, specifically they used those words, and just because they were worried about what other people would think, that’s why they sought out a secluded place. And one woman, this is again, this is from 20 years ago, she said she was afraid to nurse in public. So she was nursing at one point while sitting on the floor of a Memphis bathroom. And she said while she was sitting there by herself, another woman tried to abduct her child.

BR: Wow.

CW: You know, that was horrifying. It was, you know, her sister came in and was able to snatch the baby back and the police were unable to find the woman who had been trying to do this. But she said after that happened, I got over my fear of nursing in public because I realized it was a lot safer than just finding a secluded little space and putting yourself in that vulnerable position. That rung with me. You want to talk about what the harm is in presenting a video that leads women to falsely believe that you’re going to get attacked four or five times by people in the space of an hour for breastfeeding. That’s what the harm can do. If you give people this idea.

1:15:40
BR: It explicitly tells them that. I mean, that’s what’s so offensive. It doesn’t just sort of hint, well, some people might like it. It’s, hey, look at this secret experiment. Oh my God, all these people are disgusted by what you would do. Well, of course women are going to be self-conscious about it if idiots like this Joey salad tosser is doing these things.

1:15:59
CW: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Women are self-censoring themselves based on what they think other people are going to say or how they’re going to feel. And that’s not normalizing breastfeeding. The really ironic thing is I found an article in The Independent that claimed that Joey Salads’ video was produced in conjunction with the Normalized Breastfeeding Campaign. And what he’s doing, this video has been seen by more than 20 million people. It’s not normalizing breastfeeding, it is helping to ostracize breastfeeding and making women more fearful of doing that activity. That’s the opposite of normalizing it.

1:16:40
BR: I’m glad you dug into that. I had seen that video going around a bit. I didn’t watch it. I got a sense that there was something not quite right about it, but I was too busy to look into it, but I’m really glad you dug into it. I think this is a real problem. We’ve talked about this on the show before, with not just with outrage, but also the pseudo experiments. And it brings up what we were talking about before, about the so-called third-person effect, where if you ask people, like, are you concerned about this? People say, well, I’m not, but they are. I’m personally not, but I’m pretty sure that other people around me are. But if you talk to other people around you, they will say, well, I’m not, but I think other people are. And so you get this effect where there’s this assumption that people around you think differently and are gonna attack and criticize you, when in fact that might not be true at all.

1:17:35
CW: Yeah, like I said, it’s sort of hit my spidey senses a little bit in terms of like, wait, I’ve been around women as they breastfed, I’ve never seen any problem happen. That’s not to say it doesn’t. There are absolutely some people out there that will raise a fuss or an eyebrow or passive aggressively tell you, oh, there’s a bathroom down the hall. That’s the other thing. Seeing a video like this is actually gonna contribute to the type of shaming that I have heard women complain about. Like the whole, oh, there’s a restroom down the hall. If you honestly believe that a woman breastfeeding in public faces the danger of repeated verbal harassment from people, then you might as a good citizen, as an advocate for breastfeeding, might be like, oh, honey, there’s a restroom down here. You might be looking out for her safety and her peace of mind in urging her to find a private place. Again, that’s the opposite of normalizing.

1:18:27
BR: That will be interpreted as negative. It’ll be interpreted as, oh, well, you know, I started breastfeeding and the person rushed over to me and said, oh, maybe, you know, maybe you should do it somewhere else.

1:18:36
CW: Yeah. That is something that multiple women, in fact, in my little informal poll out of like the 22 women, I think three or four of them said that they got some negative interactions, but they were all like side eye and like disapproving glances, which can really, you know, that’s up to interpretation. And then a few people got reported getting, again, the passive aggressive, you know, there’s a restroom down there you can be more comfortable in or just kind of trying to, you know, go into the box woman. But yeah, that’s the opposite of normalizing. And if you think about what a bully does, the most effective bullies, they don’t tell their target, I hate you. They go up to their target and they say, you know, everybody hates you. And that’s what Joey Salas is doing. He’s telling all these breastfeeding women, everybody hates you. This is what you can expect to encounter. And sadly, he was widely believed from what I saw. I found like six or seven mainstream articles, People magazine, Huffington Post, Mommy blogs everywhere, repeating, linking to his video, talking about this great social experiment he did. Nobody questioned anything about it. And yeah, again, you go down the YouTube rabbit hole, you find the people who were volunteer actors admitting it was all faked.

1:19:58
BR: One of the sad parts, as you mentioned, is this is shared by people who are ostensibly skeptical, trying to do good. You know, this is not shared by misogynists. This is shared by people who want to, you know, empower women and say, oh, isn’t this horrible? But they’re actually doing the opposite.

1:20:16
CW: Yeah, that is a real shame. There’s a real virtue signal element to this whole industry, and I am going to call it an industry. I’ve decided what I’m going to call Joey Salads and people like him are outrage vampires, much like Susan Gerbic and Mark Edward call all the charlatans talking to the dead. They’re grief vampires and they’re making a living off of grief. Joey Salads and people of his ilk are making their living off of outrage. They grow it like a crop. They fertilize it and the hits and the clicks and the likes. One of the things that makes the outrage grow is people want to set themselves apart from that terrible segment of society that they’re complaining about. People didn’t share this going, all right, damn straight, I’m glad they told that woman to put her tatas away. That’s disgusting. They weren’t sharing it with comments like that. They were all sharing it and saying, this is outrageous. I can’t believe people are still like this. What sort of horrible society do we live in? If this had ever happened to me during the time I breastfed my four kids, I would have told them so and so. Well, yeah, think about that. Think about it.

BR: Absolutely.

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1:21:31
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.

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1:21:59
BR: All right. Well, there’s another show, Episode 63 in the can, as they say.

1:22:11
CW: I hope listeners enjoyed our little potpourri and go get yourself a chocolate bar and some marshmallows and a glass of milk and enjoy the rest of your day.

1:22:20
BR: We will be back next week as per usual. usual and we expect to have Eric Christopher Myers talking about his film Butterfly Kisses. I’ve seen, I think we’ve all seen it and it’s a it’s a fun urban legendy spooky thriller thing and it’ll be fun to have him on so tune in next week.

1:22:39
Take care. Bye bye. Squaring the Strange is a production of Kronos Creative LLC. Copyright 2017. Theme music by Shriek Back. Additional music by Memory, Guitard and Feathered, and Pasquale Romero. Content producer, Celestia Ward. Audio engineering, producing, and editing provided by Pasquale Romero at 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 Swearing Strange and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Kronos Creative, Center for Inquiry, our advertisers, or any affiliated organizations are those of Swearing Strange and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Kronos Creative, Center for Inquiry, our advertisers, or any affiliated organizations

1:23:17
and employers.

Transcribed with Cockatoo