Click each image to enlarge.

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
BR: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. This is Episode 75 and I am your host, Ben Radford. And with me is…

Celestia Ward: Celestia Ward. Hello, everybody. How’s it going?

0:00:33
BR: Not too bad. What are we chatting about this episode?

CW: Well, we’ve both had some stuff go on. I squeezed out a baby about six days ago.

0:00:58
BR: I heard that. That’s awesome. You experienced the miracle of birth.

0:01:02
CW: Yes. Well, actually, I didn’t. I shouldn’t say I squeezed it out. The very kind doctors helped me remove the baby. I ended up going with a C-section, which is a very wise choice if there’s a number of factors lining up to make it better for your baby and better for you if you get a move on there. But all’s well, I got a happy, healthy little six and a half pound baby boy and he’s sleeping in the other room with his dad watching over to make sure I have 20 minutes to record really quick with you here.

0:01:31
BR: Congratulations! I’m very excited.

0:01:33
CW: Yeah, so we’re going to have episode 75 kick off here with a little discussion of just a woo in the field. What do you think is it kind of make your skeptical radar go off in the field? We’ve both had a couple of instances that have popped off our skeptical radar. You want to go ahead first, Ben, and talk about stuff you may have seen this week?

0:01:56
BR: Sure. I recently got back from a long weekend trip to Sedona, Arizona.

0:02:02
CW: There is some woo there.

0:02:03
BR: There is some woo there. I’d been there about, I think, I think in 2012, if I’m not mistaken, and it was, I was there just for a couple of days. And in fact, in one of my books, I think it’s Mysterious New Mexico, I have a chapter on crystal skulls, and there’s a photo of a crystal skull that I saw in some of the woo shops there. It’s a beautiful place, I have to say. Again, I’ve only been there twice, but it’s just every turn is just these picturesque valleys and peaks and the red rocks, and it’s just gorgeous. Lots of pizza places, lots of new agey stuff, lots of psychics, crystals, vortex tours.

0:02:45
CW: That whole culture tends to sort of gravitate towards the more picturesque landscapes. I mean, it sort of makes you sort of believe in ethereal type things when you’re looking at gorgeous sunsets and beautiful vistas, I think.

0:02:59
BR: Yeah, there’s something about the Southwest and Arizona that sort of lends itself to that. I mean, even over, you know, Nevada where you are and stuff, you get a certain mystique, either sort of real or imagined of the landscape and the mysteries that may lurk therein.

0:03:17
CW: I mostly imagined, I would guess.

0:03:20
BR: Well, in this case, you know, again, there’s lots and lots of woo there. I was, as you know, often when I go on vacation or I travel, I end up doing kind of investigation. I try not to because it seems like that there’s no matter where I go, there’s some weirdness or folklore or legend or story or BS that I kind of feel faintly nudged or compelled to look into. But I, I was intentionally not, you know, I was turning off my work mode, but nonetheless, I, I had to do, I had to make some nominal, uh, look into what one of the most prominent, uh, supernatural things there, which is the Sedona vortexes or vortices.

0:03:58
CW: I’ve heard of those.

0:03:59
BR: Yeah. I, uh, I heard of that when I was, when I was there last time. This past time, I did a little more digging. You know, Sedona isn’t the only place that’s claimed to have the vortices, although there’s four ones in particular that are sort of notable. And there’s one by the airport, there’s one in a place called Boynton Canyon. I stayed at a place called Bell Rock, which was apparently only about a half mile from one of the vortices. And there’s another one near a place called Cathedral Rock. So one thing I did while I was there is I just sort of played dumb, which I’m actually pretty good at, as you know. And so I would go and I would just talk to people and I would say, so, you know, what’s this vortex I’m hearing about? I asked probably three or four people just to sort of see what, I didn’t want to impose what I had heard about or what I thought about it, or certainly my skepticism. I was more interested in eliciting what they were organically going to tell me, whether it was some sort of a generally agreed upon line about what they were or whatever else.

0:05:04
CW: A tour guide type answer.

0:05:07
Exactly, exactly. It was interesting because in most of the cases, again I talked to three or four people, but in most cases, there was a veneer of tourism. Like, oh, yeah, there’s energy, this and that. But when I sort of indicated a sort of subtle skepticism, they often sort of shifted back to like, well, you know, some say. It was interesting. And I think that’s probably the case a lot of times when you have local mysteries or mysteries in air quotes where, you know, the official line is, well, there’s something weird here, you know, come take the tour, come buy the t-shirts. But if you sort of gently take them aside, say, now, is this, is this imaginary? They’re like, well, you know, some people think… that’s where some of the skepticism sort of comes out.

0:06:01
CW: It sounds like they kind of want to play to their audience. And especially if you’re in the hospitality business in a tourist place like that, if you get somebody who’s super into it, you might sort of turn up the volume on how super into it you seem to be, because it will help to sell a t-shirt or a crystal or a skull or something.

0:06:20
BR: Exactly. Yeah.

0:06:20
CW: You can sort of let your skepticism show a little bit more if you get the same vibe from them.

0:06:26
BR: Yeah, yeah. And so I’ll just give you two quick examples. The first one I talked to was a guide who was associated with the hotel timeshare I was at. He was desperate to get me to agree to it, you know, hear a sales pitch, you know, oh, just listen to her, her two hour sales pitch and you know, you’ll get a voucher for whatever the hell. And so the he was flogging that pretty good. And I wasn’t buying what he was selling. But one of the things that they offered was helicopter tours. And of course, you know, again, beautiful area, picturesque views, no matter which, which way you look.

0:06:59
CW: Isn’t it dangerous to fly a helicopter that close to a vortex bend?

BR: That’s what I asked him. That’s exactly what I asked him.

CW: Oh! I didn’t mean to jump on your line there. Really? Oh wow.

0:07:07
BR: So yeah, so I, so I began by asking, okay, so you know, I can do the Jeep tours. I can do this and that. And I said, so what are these vortexes? Oh, well, you know, it’s like these places where there’s like, you know, magnetic energy and electricity sort of in the air. And then he proceeds to show me the points of the brochure and talk about how I can do a helicopter tour. And I said, well, that sounds dangerous. And he says, what do you mean? I said, well, in aircraft and helicopters, there’s lots of, you know, delicate equipment. I mean, that’s why they make you turn your cell phones off. If there really are these mysterious, unknown electromagnetic fields and vortices that science can’t explain in the air over Sedona, I don’t want to be flying there. I mean, that’s a recipe for disaster.

CW: What did he say?

0:07:57
BR: He sort of looked at me for a second and then he pointed to the brochures as well. They have 100% safety record. I said, so that kind of suggests that the vortices aren’t real. He’s like, well… anyway. He quickly glossed over that. And yeah, but it was apparently he hadn’t heard anyone sort of put those two together in terms of suggesting why maybe flying through these vortices, real or imagined, was not a good idea.

0:08:22
CW: Sir, these vortices are real enough for us to safely extract your money.

0:08:27
BR: Exactly, exactly. And then I stepped out the door and walked past the ice cream shop that was selling $8 ice cream cones and talked to a local, there are actually two guys, they are probably in their 60s, early 70s and just sort of old timers and wore a hat and this and that. They were just sort of goodwill ambassadors and just asked me a type of question type thing. And I went over and I said, so what’s with this Vortex thing? And we talked for a little bit and he could sort of tell that I was not fully buying what they were selling. And so I said, well, what does it do? I mean, you have these four places around town that do something. And he says, well, some people say that it enhances your masculine or feminine energy. And I said, what does that mean? He’s like, well, he’s like, um, and he just sort of stumbled through the answer. And again, he wasn’t vouching for it. He was just sort of giving the official line. And then I said, I said, in your experience, how long have you been here? So, Oh, I’ve been here, I think 20 years or 30 years or something. And I said, well, what, what did the energies do? And he said, well, honestly, it makes everybody an artist. And I said, well, what do you mean by that? And he reached back and in the dirt, he made sort of an S-shaped pattern in the dirt with a shoe and he says, now I’m an artist. And this is what Sedona does. If you come to Sedona, you feel the energies and anything you throw on a piece of paper or put on an amulet or, you know, paint on a crystal is magical in art.

0:10:06
CW: Yeah. I’m a **** artist. Look at me.

0:10:09
BR: So anyway, that was my attempt at looking into the Sedona Vortices. However, I did go and spend some time at one of the prominent ones, again, Bell Rock, just because it was fairly close to where I was staying. And I did hike to what, according to these maps, are the place where there’s a vortex. I went to a second one as well, but I decided that I would try and capture any particular energies there. And so there may or may not be something in the future skeptic rate for our listeners.

0:10:39
CW: Excellent. Well, I look forward to seeing what you brought back.

0:10:43
BR: Speaking of bringing things back, as you mentioned, you recently brought back a baby.

0:10:48
CW: I did. I handcrafted myself and everything. So I just can’t tell you. It was a little earlier than we expected, so we were still kind of readying things. I came about like 10 days early and man, it emotionally bowls you over. I feel like we got the best baby in the whole universe. And I realize that that’s clouded by the geysers of bonding hormone that are flooding my brain right now. But I’m like Joey Pants in the Matrix eating that steak. I’m like, I don’t care, give me more, this is great. I’m okay with this, this is wonderful. So I’m subsisting on a very little sleep and happy motherhood hormones and I’m having a good time. And the kid so far is just wonderful. Everything checks out and yeah, having a lot of fun with the kid. Now, now my little woo from the field is obviously going to be sort of the things I observed while we were in the whole birthing hospital procedure thing. Needless to say, I did not eat my placenta. I did get to see it. It was they showed it to me. It was a little, you know, those white buckets that you could buy chicken livers in. They plop your placenta right into one of those. And so I got to see how big it was. Apparently, my placenta was on the small side, so it would not have made a good meal anyway. I would have felt ripped off. But oddly enough, one of the things they say about the placenta is if you eat it over the course of the first week after you’ve given birth, it helps your milk production. As far as that goes, it has increased exponentially each day. So it’s like, oh, wow, this is not really working. Oh, it’s working more. Oh, this is twice as good as yesterday. Oh, this is four times as good as it was two days ago. So had I actually taken placenta capsules or done any sort of other wooey sort of thing, I could totally see myself thinking, wow, ever since I started doing X, my milk production is up 400%. I could totally see how people fall for that. So just saying I haven’t done anything -getting the same sort of effect just from birth happening.

0:12:56
BR: But it’s like we discussed a couple of weeks back with the, uh, the woman that psychically encouraged a cougar, a mountain lion to, to leave her apartment. She just, she, you know, gave it psychic directions and told it where to go and it left. And we don’t know what would have happened had she not done that.

0:13:16
CW: Yes. Sometimes things aren’t really correlated. So, yeah. So. So, yeah. Anyway, so things are going good in that direction. It’s just been like I said, I’m sleep deprived. I’m covered with all sorts of different bodily fluids. I’ve got vomit and pee on me. And and then, of course, your own self, you’re dealing with mucus and blood. And it’s like all the bodily fluids, except for the fun ones that would get us an explicit tag. I’ve been swimming in those all week. Speaking of fluid, you do retain a whole lot of fluid after a caesarean. They pump you full of so much saline to get everything safely out. Then you just waddle home like this giant turgid monster full of water. I did have one of the nurses recommend alkaline water to me as a means to help dewater my body. She said alkaline water helps because it changes your pH. And I’m not so sure about that. I have not had time, obviously, over the past few days to thoroughly research it. But everything I’ve heard about alkaline water is, no, it does not change your pH level because that would kill you. And this lovely lady, she was one of the postpartum nurses, she was so sweet in every other way and she helped me so much and I was certainly not in the mood to pick any sort of “well actually” fight with her. So I just let the alkaline water thing go and I was like okay what else, yeah okay, all right, walking, walking, I’ll do a lot of walking, okay. An interesting thing that kind of will relate to our main topic is, you know, we’re going to be talking to Mick West about his new book, Escaping the Rabbit Hole, and that’s all about how people find little things that confirm a conspiracy theory to them. And boy, do I have a good example from the whole birthing experience. I took home all my paperwork and opened it up just like yesterday. and behold, according to my discharge papers, I’ve had twins.

BR: You had twins? According to the paperwork, yes. Somebody in medical records goofed and put in that I gave birth to twins. So I’m showing this to the pediatrician. He’s like, huh, something isn’t right here. So now I’ve called the hospital and I’m going to have to jump through a few hoops. You have to go in person, you have to do this and that to change the medical record.

0:15:45
BR: How do you prove you didn’t have twins? How would one prove that?

0:15:48
CW: You know, that’s a good question because during a cesarean, they put up a little shield and then they like a little puppet show. Your baby comes over that shield when it’s out. So if there was another one that came out, I don’t know. It could have it could have been snuck under the table and out. I don’t know. Maybe both of my twins have the force and so they wanted one to be raised by adoptive parents off-world, just for safety’s sake.

0:16:12
BR: Yeah, this sounds like an intriguing film. Maybe our friend Eric Christopher Myers wants to take a stab at the screenplay.

0:16:18
CW: I have a feeling that film has been done before. It was kind of popular, too.

BR: Dead Ringers?

CW: Anyway, so my point is there’s a typo or a clerical error that says I’ve had twins and I’m gonna have to go through some trouble to rectify it. And fast forward to the future, let’s say I don’t rectify it. I actually have heard from some friends on Facebook as we were chatting about this, oh that happened to a friend of mine and they never changed it because it was gonna cost them a hundred dollars. Well, it’s not going to cost me $100. I will… There’s a number of things I will do in retribution if they actually try to charge me money to fix this. But let’s say for whatever reason, I don’t fix the error and decades go by. Let’s say I pass away. My husband passes away. You pass away. This this podcast, you know, disappears off the face of the earth. And there’s no evidence that I never had twins. Let’s say my son, who’s maybe in his 30s and applying to be a top-ranking CIA official and he needs top-ranking security clearance and so he has to dig up his hospital records and he sees, oh my gosh, my mother had twins. He might assume that’s gotta be correct, it’s a medical record. That means my mother had twins. I have a dead brother that she never told me about.

0:17:39
BR: Or maybe not dead.

0:17:40
CW: Maybe just maybe an evil twin. There could be a soap opera in his future. But the point is much ado can be made about nothing. This is a clerical error. I will get it fixed. But if I weren’t going to get it fixed, can you imagine the possibilities? People would assume it’s correct. It’s a medical record. It’s happened before.

0:18:01
BR: Yeah, absolutely. I’m reminded of the time I got a query from somebody about the Adam Lanza case, the guy that shot up the Newtown school, and apparently there was an error about his death date. I’m not remembering the details right in front of me, but there was some sort of error in terms of what day he was said to have died because, of course, he was killed in the process.

0:18:27
CW: That was a social security or something?

0:18:30
BR: Yeah, there was some odd thing where there was a publicly available database which was based on official government records. The database wasn’t itself government records, but it was based on government records. The person contacted me with a slightly snide, challenging tone, if I recall correctly. Well, Mr. Skeptic had explained this. Isn’t it weird? It says that he died on this date, but we all know, according to the official story, if you believe that, he died the next day.

0:19:00
CW: Well, yeah, their logic is that he couldn’t have shot up the school because he had died the day before. Instead of using the logic, he couldn’t have been dead the day before because he shot up the school.

0:19:14
BR: Go figure, right?

0:19:16
CW: So, yeah.

0:19:16
BR: And it was a case where, and eventually I had to explain to this guy, I said, look, you know, and I didn’t do a huge deep dive into it, didn’t have time to do the guy’s research for him, but I, I spent some time looking at it and I said, look, you appear to be correct that this, this website that you consulted, which was not the official government records, although it may have been derived from it, has the wrong, has the wrong information on it. And so what? Government records are not known for being inerrant. There’s so many opportunities for medical records, driving records, social security, there’s so many places where a government drone who’s just counting the minutes until he can retire, he doesn’t care whether he puts your information in right or not, and something slips up, it’s the wrong date, nobody thinks anything about it until at some point it becomes evidence of something.

0:20:09
CW: Yeah, yeah. And oddly enough, when the information is coming from the government and somebody is using it to show that the government is lying, it’s just, it’s a tangled web. But we’re going to be talking with Mick West about that sort of tangled web web that conspiracy theorists weave for themselves. And he’s got a book that’s just come out, Escaping the Rabbit Hole. When we come back, we will chat with him.

0:20:34
Awesome.

(MUSIC)

0:20:35
BR: So let’s talk to Mick West. Mick, are you there?

Mick West: I am here. Good to be here. I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad you’re here.

0:20:57
CW: Welcome. Thanks for coming on.

MW: Thank you.

BR: So let me say I first came across your work, God it’s been years now, but I think you were doing some stuff on chemtrails and then you’ve also done some really good video debunkings of UFOs and stuff and I think that was sort of where I first came across your work.

0:21:14
MW: Yeah, I did the chemtrails stuff starting around over 10 years ago now. I thought it was going to be a quick debunk when I started working on chemtrails, but it’s still going strong. It was not to be. Yeah, stronger than ever, in fact. It’s, hope I’m doing the right thing. Sometimes I wonder if, you know, if you actually are having an effect with these debunkings when the conspiracy theory is still going years later.

0:21:40
CW: Well, you’re certainly reaching many people, the believers and the skeptics alike. I came across your work on the Morgellons disease ages ago when I was just kind of poking around online for things that seemed weird.

0:21:54
MW: Yeah, that predates even the chemtrails stuff. I don’t really consider it a conspiracy theory so much. It’s just kind of a strange kind of medical oddity that was going around around that time. I think I was doing that back in maybe 2004, 2005 or something like that. But yeah, that was one of my first blogs, the Morgellons Watch.

0:22:14
CW: Well, you’ve called all of your experience and you’ve written a wonderful book called Escaping the Rabbit Hole, which has just been released and people can get it on Amazon and we’re going to talk to you about it. We’ve got questions for you.

0:22:28
MW: Excellent.

BR: You may be best known to our audiences anyway, and you should be globally known, as the force behind Metabunk. Can you talk some about that?

0:22:39
MW: Yeah, Metabunk’s a forum that I started after kind of running Contrail Science for a while. Contrail Science was really focused on the chemtrails stuff and it was just a WordPress blog and people started coming and bringing up other topics like 9-11 and things like that and it really wasn’t a good format for discussing them. So I decided to start a forum and Metabunk was born and it took a while to start going. I think there was only about 30 users or so for the first few months but it’s actually doing quite well now and this is where I spend most of my time debunking.

0:23:17
BR: So, you know, as you know, in the skeptic community, there’s the perpetual sort of controversy, and I use the word very loosely, about people and skeptics either calling themselves skeptics. As you know, Sharon Hill wrote a piece recently talking about how she didn’t want to be called a skeptic anymore. I’ve sort of shared my feelings on the matter previously as well and of course debunker is another one of those loaded terms. I know that the amazing Randy doesn’t like debunker. I occasionally am a debunker. I explained in fact just today I was talking to a TV producer. I was explaining that I often debunk things but I don’t go into them trying to debunk them. I don’t know whether that distinction was lost on them, they were TV producers after all But what what’s your take on that?

0:24:09
MW: Well, I think you know the opposition to the word debunker comes a lot from people who are interested in things like paranormal investigations Where you really don’t want to go into something like that prejudging it and saying this is definitely not a ghost and all I’m going to do is come in and prove that it’s not a ghost. You want to go in with an open mind and try to figure out what’s actually going on. But when I’m talking about debunking in what I’m doing, it’s generally in communicating things that have already been investigated and they’ve already found to be false. And a lot of the time I am just explaining why they are false. Like with chemtrails for example, you know, one of the things about the chemtrail conspiracy theory is that they say normal contrails cannot persist and this is a claim that they’ve been making since it began in 1999 around then and there’s no need for me to investigate that claim anymore. I investigated it when I first heard about it back in 2006 and I found it was false and I wrote several articles explaining why it’s false. So all I’m doing now is debunking that claim because I have done the investigation already. So I feel pretty comfortable calling myself a debunker when most of the time what I’m doing is explaining things. I also like debunker rather than skeptic because debunker is, or debunking rather, is a verb. You can say it’s something that you are doing. I am debunking. You can’t say I am skeptic-ing. You can say I am applying the principles of skepticism. That’s a bit of a mouthful.

0:25:49
CW: I wonder if your previous work as a video game programmer, having to debug all the programs you worked on, now makes you more amenable toward the idea of debunking all the bugs.

0:26:00
MW: I think so. I think so. And there’s actually a lot of parallels between what you do in debunking extraordinary claims and debugging a flaw in a program. You need to investigate what is the root cause of what is going on. And with a lot of the claims that are made in the conspiracy culture, you’re doing the same thing. You’re digging down to find out what really is the real explanation for whatever phenomena it is that we are observing, like for example, the collapse of the Twin Towers. There’s a lot of physics and a lot of detailed science that goes into what’s actually happening there. That really does actually remind me of some of the debugging I did on video games. So there’s definitely some parallels there.

0:26:51
CW: Yeah, see, your whole life you’ve been preparing for this and you just didn’t realize it.

0:26:55
MW: That’s right. I think actually computer programmers make good debunkers and good skeptics because I think that mindset of not getting stuck with the wrong assumptions. With programming, you learn very early on that the first idea that you think of is quite often not going to be the correct one, and that you need to be very open to changing your mind when new information arises, or to entertaining alternative hypotheses, even if you think they seem ridiculous at first. And this is all with computer programming, and that just translates directly to debunking and skepticism.

0:27:33
BR: Interesting parallels there.

0:27:35
CW: Yeah. Well, I found your book to be remarkably compassionate more than condescending. You really take this tone of I’m trying to help people get out of the rabbit hole and I’m trying to help people help their loved ones get out of the rabbit hole of conspiracy theory belief. In the opening of the book, you profile a former conspiracy believer named Willie. It was informative in that we find out through Willie that a lot of people who go on who go in for conspiracy theories Stay relatively quiet about it. Whereas skeptics like us or certainly like Ben who deals in the public forums, we only really tangle with the super outspoken Conspiracy believers how big of a hidden problem do you think these quiet conspiracy minded people are how big is the underside of that iceberg? Do you think?

0:28:28
MW: I think that the kind of silent majority really? represents the larger the larger portion of conspiracy theorists the people you see on Facebook or on YouTube Really aren’t that representative of the general population like most people Who go on Facebook who are interested in conspiracy theories, they are basically just consumers. They are the people who watch all these YouTube videos or they read through the the Facebook pages. So people like Willie who, you know, didn’t really do much in the way of promoting his ideas to other people, I think probably are very much the majority. And it’s really to those people that I focus my debunkings, even when I’m talking to people who are either the loudmouths or the people who are posting videos on Facebook, on YouTube, what I really have in mind there is the other people who might be listening to what’s going on and the people are just simply listening or watching the conversation and those are the ones you can reach.

CW: They might be more on the fence than somebody who is perhaps, you know, full-on Alex Jones drank the Kool-Aid and is now, you know, reposting it angrily.

0:29:46
MW: Yeah, that’s true. And even if they’re not on the fence, you still have the possibility of moving them a little bit more so than the people that you are having perhaps like an argument or a discussion with because those people are focusing on creating opposing arguments to use against you. They’re not simply listening. So if someone is simply listening to what you are saying, then I think you’ve got a better chance of moving them than if you are arguing with them.

0:30:16
BR: Yeah, that’s absolutely true. That’s one of the reasons I really like your approach. And you know, in the subtitle, the subtitle is, we gave the title, we didn’t get the subtitle, which is How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect. And that’s, that respect line I think is important and it certainly distinguishes your book from many others on conspiracies, even skeptical ones, because of the emphasis that you place on respect. I think it’s an important aspect that I hope people latch onto because, you know, especially in today’s polarizing society when it’s so easy to create our own echo chambers and to shout down those who disagree with us. And, you know, there’s the perpetual, you know, do you punch Nazis in the nose or do you try and understand where they’re thinking it wrong and all that? Talk a little bit about why you chose that angle. I mean, I know why I would have chosen that angle and why I think it’s important, but why specifically did you choose to use that approach?

0:31:15
MW: Well there’s a couple of reasons really, I’m just you know I’m just a nice guy and I like talking to people politely and but you know a more fundamental reason is I think this is the approach that works. I think that if you don’t respect someone that you’re having an argument with then they are going to feel angry at what you are doing and they’re not going to listen to it they’re just going to see you as belittling them and the reason that you need to use respect when you’re talking to people is that if you don’t you’re not going to have real communication you can’t get actual good communication with somebody if if basically you’re mocking them I mean you can be explaining things to them still but if you’re just like you’re saying you’re an idiot, you’re a tinfoil hat wearer and you are wrong because of this, then you know they’re going to fight against you. But if you can say you know I respect where you’re coming from and I can understand why you think these things and even that there might be something to some of your concerns even though you’ve got some of the facts wrong, then I think you’re going to get a lot further with the conversation.

0:32:32
CW: So in other words, you’re giving them a completely different experience than what they’re probably getting in online discussions with other people in the comments section.

0:32:41
MW: Yeah, I think so, but there are quite a few other people who do this approach. You know, there was the famous don’t be a dick speech by Phil Plait a long time ago, which that was something that partially informed like the way I do things now. If you are being a dick, that means that you, you know, you’re putting these obstacles in the way of communication. And Phil recognized this and recommended to everybody that they try to be polite and I think a lot of people agreed with that but also some people railed against it some people said why do I have to be polite and you know the bottom line really is that this is the best way of getting through to people.

0:33:27
BR: Yeah no I as both of you know I wholeheartedly agree with that and in my in in my time as a skeptic, I have over and over found that the most productive times, the times when I’ve actually changed people’s minds, are when I’m engaging with them honestly. And I’m not being condescending. I’m not saying, well, I’m the smartest skeptic and you just need to listen. It’s like, hey, you know, you experience something you can’t explain. You’re not, you know, there’s something weird going on. Help me figure out what’s going on and let me propose alternative explanations. And when you do that, then people feel like you’re on, you’re either on their on their same page, but at least you’re listening to them. They’re feeling that they’re being respected instead of mocked. And so now I think that’s a really important approach.

0:34:19
CW: And well, I like that you bring up the practicality of such an approach because and you do touch on the backfire effect in your book and how that can completely undermine any efforts of a skeptic to talk to a conspiracy theorist believer if you’re just further ingraining them in their position because they don’t trust your tone, they don’t trust your approach, they don’t even really think that you’re listening to them.

0:34:44
MW: Yeah, the backfire effect, you know, there’s been a few papers written about the backfire effect which is that if you expose people to information that contradicts their beliefs then sometimes they become more entrenched in those those beliefs and you know there’s some dispute as to whether that backfire effect actually exists but we’ve all had anecdotal but often repeated experiences of trying to persuade somebody of something and then basically becoming more entrenched in their positions. And over the years, you know, I’ve tried different approaches, and I find that the approach of being polite to them gives less of a backfire effect than being impolite. Like focusing on trying, first of all, to understand where they are coming from, and establishing basically some common ground is really what you need to do. And you know that the respect aspect comes into that because you’ve got to be willing to actually listen to what they’re saying and you’ve got to be willing to try to understand why they believe what they do and go as far as showing that to them, showing that you understand what their reasoning is. And then working from there gradually rather than jumping straight in and saying you are wrong because of this or you are wrong because of that. You try to understand exactly what the problem is and then incrementally build from that base and figure out some kind of true discussion that way you can actually move forward.

0:36:24
BR: Celestia’s favorite story as you mentioned was with Willie, although one of my favorites was the fellow whose journey down the rabbit hole took him into the Sandy Hook conspiracies and I thought that was an especially powerful section. Can you talk about how that came up?

0:36:38
MW: Yeah, that was Richard. He was a young guy and he went down the typical route that conspiracy theorists go down. They start watching some YouTube videos on one topic or another and then they just watch another one and another and another and they eventually kind of accumulate this mindset where they start believing pretty much everything. And Richard kind of went down that rabbit hole. He started with things like 9-11, but then he went into chemtrails and the New World Order conspiracy theory. And he had a very interesting experience kind of in the middle of his conspiracy theory journey where his sister was going to medical school. And he, being a big conspiracy theorist, he obviously believed that vaccines were causing all kinds of diseases because that’s a very low level conspiracy theory, which all conspiracy theorists believe pretty much. Now his sister went to medical school and he brought up the vaccine conspiracy theory at some point and she basically just shut him down and explained it to him in great detail. Now because she was his sister, he had this relationship with her already and he could have this conversation with her, which you or I couldn’t do. So his sister actually got through to him on the vaccine part of the conspiracy theory. Now this didn’t really take in all the other areas of the conspiracy theories like 9-11, but I think it kind of planted a little seed. And I think this is an example of how people can help other people and it might not work out for a long time. But then what really turned him around was the Sandy Hook conspiracy theories. He started hearing the people around him talking about how Sandy Hook was a false flag and how that the shootings at Sandy Hook were staged. And he started looking into some of those claims and he found fairly quickly that they were false. And the fact that he started to find things being false in the conspiracy theory world just basically started things to unravel backwards. First of all, he found that the Sandy Hook stuff wasn’t true. Then he found out that chemtrails were probably pretty dubious. And then he hung on to 9-11 for a while, but then eventually he had a kind of a realization that that wasn’t really true either when he started looking at all the debunking information about those and everything just completely unraveled on the conspiracy side of things. And now he’s basically a skeptic who doesn’t really believe in any of those conspiracy theorists, theories, and he actually enjoys debunking them. So he’s got all the way back out of the rabbit hole.

0:39:45
CW: That’s great. That’s like, that’s like finally realizing that the emperor has no shoe on the left foot and then slowly working your way up from there and…

MW: Raising your gaze to see the true reality.

CW: Yeah, yeah. Well, you actually mentioned two different debunking techniques. You talk about Carl Sagan’s metaphor for science, how it can be a candle in the dark. And if I can quote you, candles are great, but we need more than candles. We need flashlights, we need spotlights, we need floodlights, we need emergency exit row lighting, night vision goggles, flares, flashbangs, and flaming torches. There’s a lot of people down a lot of rabbit holes and lighting a few candles isn’t going to cut it. And then you outline what you call a spotlight technique and a floodlight technique for helping people out of the dark. Now, can you, you know, especially in light of the gentleman you were just talking about with his Sandy Hook conspiracies and how discussing vaccines helped get him out of everything, can you illuminate those two options for us?

0:40:43
MW: Yeah, the spotlight debunking is really focusing on one or two very specific claims and going into those in a lot of detail. For example, if someone believed in the Sandy Hook, you could pick any one of the claims that they believe in and look at that in great detail. Try to show them that that one particular claim is completely false and you can have used that as a wedge in the same way that with Richard you know things started to unravel once he realized Sandy Hook wasn’t correct. That actually started with a small aspect of Sandy Hook. He was just looking into a claim about houses being sold or the death not being registered in some state registry. It was just one small thing but because there was a very detailed debunking of that particular aspect, that really hit home to him. Now, the floodlight technique is more about giving people perspective on things. And instead of focusing on just one thing, you focus on a lot of different things. And you try to, you try to figure out not so much like, you know, what they’ve got wrong, but really what information are they missing? What context are they missing? What perspective are they missing? And you try to fill in, you try to illuminate these gaps in their knowledge, because it can be kind of counterproductive to just simply go bang, bang, bang, like knocking down things that are false, when really the problem isn’t so much that they believe these false things, it’s that they don’t believe enough things that are true. They’re missing the actual context of how things actually work. And these two techniques, they’re kind of complementary, but you’ve also got to kind of tailor them to the individual. Some people will get out of the rabbit hole based on a few small bits of information that are very high quality because these were things that were key to their understanding of the situation and some people they require a large amount of new information, a large amount of new context and you know you can try both of these two things but you kind of want to want to watch the individual and see how they react to the different types of approaches and kind of tailor it to what works best for that individual.

0:43:12
CW: It really does strike me how it’s both of your approaches that you’re talking about there Remind me of like the opposite of the Gish Gallop. You don’t hit them with a bunch of just random stuff that they can’t even think about you tailor you tailor it to just focusing on one thing that you can go in depth with or changing their perspective so that they don’t add up that so that they don’t do the mental calculus completely incorrectly.

0:43:30
MW: Yeah and if you look at the say the 9-11 chapter in the book you know it’s very easy to write a enormously long book going over every single 9-11 conspiracy theory claim but I just focus on a few that I see as being kind of core fundamental beliefs that people have believed for a long time and if you can just show them that these things are wrong, these few core beliefs are wrong, then it’s going to start a process. Something else to do with this approach is you have to be careful when you’re talking about tailoring your approach to the individual because as I was saying it, I realized that it kind of sounds like I’m talking about how to brainwash people, how do I kind of change this person’s mind, how do I get him to come over to my way of thinking and you really have to constantly check yourself that you don’t actually start trying to do that. You want to always make sure that you’re doing it with honesty and you always do, that you always tell people are always things that I personally believe to be true and I don’t think there’s anything to be gained from telling people things that are kind of fudging with the truth just to try to get them out of the rabbit hole because it’s just not going to work. As soon as you know someone sees that you are trying to pull something over over them then really got to focus on being genuinely honest and genuinely truthful when you’re talking to people who are very suspicious.

0:45:20
BR: Yeah, I think that your discussion of the floodlight technique, I think, is especially a useful idea because, as you know, these conspiracy theories, it’s not just one theory. There’s a whole web or constellation of beliefs that are all And so if you just sort of poke at one, it won’t necessarily do anything because it will quickly sort of – it’s like a self-sealing balloon or something, right? Instead of it popping and the truth exploding into the atmosphere, it’s like, oh, well, never mind. I’ll just forget about that. But if you can – I found that if you can identify people’s sort of anchor beliefs and sort of identify two or three like main things that they would have to admit that if that weren’t true, then the whole thing would fall apart. And you sort of work with that sort of within the floodlight technique.

0:46:10
MW: Yeah, yeah, very much so. You can, you know, that’s, you know, what you described there is kind of more the spotlight technique because you’re focusing on one or two key things, but you’re focusing on them very, very well. That’s why I prefer the term spotlight or floodlight rather than the candle, because you’re shining a very bright light. You’re not just simply showing someone a science book and saying, hey, look at this. You’re actually saying, look at this in great detail. Here’s every single thing that’s wrong with that particular claim, and here’s a detailed explanation of what’s really going on, and here’s a whole bunch of references, and here’s an easy explanation that’s easy for you to understand. Like with the chemtrail thing, you know, contrails don’t persist. I did this very effective video, this is a three-minute video, where I take my collection of books on clouds, which go back to the 1940s, and I go back through them one at a time, and I go into each book on the video and show the section in the book where it says that contrails can persist. And this has been very, very effective. A lot of people have actually been convinced by this one video. And I see that video as being an example of a spotlight because it’s a very detailed, very convincing explanation of this one thing, which is a core belief.

0:47:27
BR: Yeah. In fact, in your Chemtrail chapter, one of the things I really enjoyed about it was you dig a bit into bad statistics, particularly I think you were talking about a 2010 documentary on especially, apparently alarming levels of aluminum attributed to chemtrails. Can you talk a little about that?

0:47:47
MW: Yeah, well, aluminum is something that crops up in conspiracy culture because of its connection with Alzheimer’s disease and also its use in vaccines. So it’s kind of a natural fit for people when they heard about aluminum showing up in certain tests to think that it was something nefarious. But what people don’t understand is that aluminum is actually one of the most common elements in the earth. It’s actually the most common metal in the earth’s crust. In California, for example, comprises nearly 10% of the earth’s crust. If you dig a hole in the ground and stick all that dirt into a bucket and analyze it, you’ll find it contains between 5 and 10 percent of aluminum in the form of aluminum oxide or alumino silicate, which are rocks. And so when people do these tests, they find aluminum because it’s literally everywhere. I mean you are right now

0:48:52
BR: What are they doing to me, man?  I need a tinfoil hat.

0:48:56
MW: That won’t work.

BR: Oh my God.

0:48:58
MW: Because tinfoil hats are made of aluminum.

0:49:01
BR: Oh my God, it gets worse.

0:49:04
MW: So, and you know, soda cans are made of aluminum. It’s everywhere in its metallic form and it’s also everywhere in its aluminum oxide form. You’re breathing in a couple of specks of it right now. The food you eat has it because it comes from the ground and it’s in the water supply. So they do these tests and they find aluminum and they say this is evidence of aluminum being sprayed from planes, but it’s not. It’s just evidence of dirt in the air or in whatever they’re testing.

0:49:31
CW: That’s a very good point to make, and I hope it does convince a number of believers that that’s not something to hang your hat on.

0:49:39
MW: It does convince them that there’s a problem there in that a lot of people don’t understand even the simplest forms of chemistry. And it creates issues like if you don’t understand the difference between a molecule and an atom, for example, an atom of aluminum, the metal aluminum is formed just of molecules of the single atom, aluminum. Whereas aluminum oxide, which is like sand and things like that, is aluminum and oxygen chemically bonded together. And these are things that are very simple for most people with a simple background in science, but a lot of people don’t understand it at all. They don’t understand that just because you find aluminum in the test, that doesn’t mean it’s aluminum the metal. It could be aluminum bonded with oxygen in aluminum oxide. And because they don’t understand this distinction, when you try to explain the whole situation to them, it can be very difficult. So in some ways I actually avoid that particular thing unless they bring it up as something they particularly are very invested in. And I try to focus in on the other things such as the persistence of contrails. You have to tailor your explanation to your audience’s understanding level.

0:50:57
CW: That should also encourage all the chemistry teachers out there in middle school and high school that you’re doing important work, chemistry teachers.

0:51:05
MW: You certainly are.

0:51:07
CW: People who are confusing mercury that can be deadly with mercury that’s been altered and bonded with other things to form a perfectly good preservative. That leads to people being more understanding of what goes into a vaccine, just as you’re saying the aluminum compounding, understanding how atoms bond together and how they’re found in the natural world can help a lot of people not form these wrong-headed opinions.

0:51:35
MW: Yes, although I think, no matter how good the chemistry teacher is I think most people are still going to forget their chemistry quite soon after leaving high school regardless, so that’s always going to be something you have to work around.

0:51:47
CW: Well in reading over the chemtrails chapter. I was delighted to find that you spend some time on patents. My brother is actually a patent attorney and he’s he also worked as a patent agent and he was a valuable source to me when I was talking to a Chemtrail believer who was bringing out all these patents that he saw as proof that this is going on. I was like, Dude, you know how many weird patents are out there? You point out that there are plenty of patents that they donít have to be proven to work. They dont have to be ever built or ever used and they’ll make it through the system to get a patent. That’s not what the patent office relies on to grant a patent And one of the devices you bring into play I found both hilarious and horrifying the one that that harnesses a centrifugal force to aid Childbirth and I can only describe it as strapping a pregnant woman down to a spinning bed with a net set up between her legs.

0:52:53
MW: That’s exactly what it is, yes. It’s a quite ridiculous looking thing. It might actually work, but it seems like an awful lot to go through.

0:53:04
CW: I’m sure you have a nightmare about this tonight, you realize.

0:53:08
MW: Yes, I think anybody who looked at it would actually have second thoughts about it and the whole process. But yeah, that’s a ridiculous patent. There are actually patents for things that are not ridiculous and that might actually come to pass, like a house on the moon. There’s a patent for a house on the moon built from a used fuel capsule from a rocket ship. And yeah, that’s something that might actually happen but we know that there are currently no houses on the moon.

BR: Or do we?

MW: Well, we can’t see any. We have a fairly good understanding that there are probably not houses on the moon.

BR: Okay, I was being Alex Jones-facetious.

0:53:49
MW: Yeah, well, it’s a valid point actually for some conspiracy theorists, because a lot of conspiracy theorists think that no one has ever been to the moon, so you could kind of tie that in as well. But the point is that there are patents for things that could exist in the future, like space elevators or houses on the moon, which don’t actually exist right now. And so even though there are patents for geoengineering and various other things, like spraying things out of planes to do certain things, it doesn’t mean that anyone’s actually doing those things. It just means that somebody patented it like they patented the space elevator or the house on the moon.

0:54:28
BR: Yeah, well optimism springs eternal indeed. Obviously you’ve looked into many many conspiracy theories and your book is only a couple hundred pages long and you certainly couldn’t cover everything So and as you pointed out it would be sort of a fool’s errand to you know do You know a book on 9-11 conspiracies. It would require, you just go in so deep and there’s so many, it would just be a nightmare. But what are two or three of your favorite conspiracies? Not necessarily ones that you’ve wrote about in the book, but just sort of in general, just the ones that you find especially amusing or endearing or just your favorite for some reason.

0:55:12
MW: Well, yeah, I’m quite interested in this theory about the Cuban embassy and the Russians or the Cubans using some kind of energy weapon to zap people in the embassy. And this is something that is interesting because it’s kind of an inverted conspiracy theory in a way, in that it’s being suggested by the US State Department and yet it sounds like some kind of ridiculous conspiracy theory thing that the energy weapons are being used by the Russians to harass people in the Cuban embassy. And my personal feeling is that I don’t think the Russians are using energy weapons and I think, you know, I would actually put money on it being all some kind of mass hysteria. People easily fall into this mindset of what’s called a sick building syndrome, where if they think their environment is making them sick, then they feel sick. And if they’re told that it’s possible that the Russians are zapping them with energy beams that might be giving them headaches, then they’re going to start having headaches. And people who work in embassies, they are you know they’re in their whatever 30s, 40s and 50s, they’re getting older a bit and they’re going to be, their vision is going to be changing, their hearing is going to be changing, their hairline is going to be changing, their joints are going to start to be aching and they’re going to start feeling ill and if they start focusing on their bodies they’re going to realize that they’re not as fit as they were when they were 20, but they might not make that connection and instead start believing that the Russians are zapping them with with space rays.

0:56:58
CW: Mass Hysterias, now you’re talking Ben’s language.

0:57:02
BR: Yeah, yeah, I know. I think you’re exactly right. That’s that’s my take on it as well. Bob Bartholomew, who as you know, wrote some on Morgellons, and he and I did a couple books together. He’s an expert on mass hysteria or mass sociogenic illness and he lives in New Zealand and he’s written about that case and I agree with him and you that it’s very likely a case of mass hysteria. And I’m glad you brought up the sort of the subtle signs that one might mistake for some sort of sonic attack. And you’re exactly right. I think that the suggestibility is there, right? I mean, it just aches and you know, not sleeping well and just these sorts of things that aren’t explicit or obvious that could easily be mistaken for some sort of unknown low-level attacks or something or or might just be, you know, mass hysteria.

0:57:57
MW: I have two practical bits of experience that relate to this. I have tinnitus and that I have ringing in my ears which I generally don’t notice unless I’m thinking about it. I also have cicadas in my backyard. The cicadas make this very weird high-pitched noise that you can’t tell where it’s coming from.

CW: That sounds awful.

MW: And it actually sounds very similar to my tinnitus. So when I was researching this, you know, one of the theories was that it was cicadas. So I spent some time in my backyard trying to track down these cicadas and the only thing when it’s very, very hot, which I think is why the noises stopped during the winter down in Cuba. And when I was tracking them down, the noises triggered my tinnitus.

BR: Interesting.

MW: And when I tracked down their noises and listened to them, my tinnitus got worse when I was back inside and it kind of lasted for some time afterwards. I think this was just because I was trying to listen for a particular sound that sounded like my tinnitus and so my brain started listening to my tinnitus and I realized it was there. I think people is singing outside and the horrible things really nasty noise and it triggered some tinnitus or some kind of weird hearing change or perceived hearing change in them. But yeah, I can understand how it could happen from my personal experience. My joints ache as well because I’m getting old so if I think about that I recognize that my joints are aching.

0:59:39
CW: Well, selective attention can be a hell of a thing.

0:59:42
MW: Exactly.

0:59:43
CW: And I can personally just, I’m thinking more of a, I’m thinking more from a humorous point of view here. I can imagine a whole bunch of aging guys working in Cuba, working, you know, ex-spies and such working in an embassy, and they’re full of machismo, and suddenly they’re needing perhaps erectile dysfunction drugs, hearing aids or bifocal glasses and they’re like, I’m either getting old or the Russians are attacking me. What sounds much sexier to complain about?

1:00:17
MW: Yeah, I think that’s exactly what’s happening in some cases. And the thing is there’s like 30 or 40 different cases and they’re all probably very different. I think they even said that, that all the symptoms are different which is another clue that you know it’s not some kind of specific energy beam zapping them. Yeah maybe it is actually an energy beam in one or two cases but I think the vast majority of people that the doctors are talking to, they’re just asking them, how do you feel and they say oh well you know I’ve got a headache.

1:00:53
CW: Well, who knew we’d be calling back to the Pokemon panic? But here we are.

1:00:57
BR: That’s right. Well, in the past few weeks, there’s been, of course, some news about Alex Jones, who, of course, you mentioned in the book. How could you not write a book about conspiracies and have Alex Jones and his removal from social media? And he seems to be thinking he seems to think he’s being censored. I think he has a shaky grasp of the First Amendment. But what do you think of the role of social media and what role it should play in not giving people like Jones a platform for their views?

1:01:28
MW: I have mixed feelings about the whole Alex Jones thing. I think it is going to give his base a lot of fuel because he said that you know they are going to come and try and shut me down and then someone did shut him down. Now of course the reason he’s been shut down is because of you know specific things he said. I’m not sure exactly which things it was that triggered it but you know he’s done a lot of things specifically with harassing the people, the those people by accusing them of being actors. So I think there’s solid ground for removing him, but it is problematic in that if you start censoring people, where do you draw the line? It is essentially censorship. He’s saying things that they think shouldn’t be out there. And people think that conspiracy theories are bad, and so they want to limit people like Alex Jones. And I think it’s very difficult to be able to draw a clear line as to who you’re going to allow and who you are not going to allow. And when we start not allowing people, it could well be a slippery slope to people, maybe in a couple of years’ time, maybe even sooner, denying that platform to people just because their politics are skewing in a certain direction. We’re not there yet, but I’m a little bit worried about the development, and I’m not entirely behind what’s gone. I really do have mixed feelings about it.

1:03:15
CW: Well, you do point out in the book that rather than censoring people or blocking them from Facebook, you do wholly advocate the understanding, compassionate approach to talking things through with people. And you do mention the harm that conspiracy theories can do. Right before we leave, can you just walk us through some of the harm that you see that results directly from people getting into these rabbit holes?

1:03:39
MW: Yeah, I think the first harm that people often see is one of social isolation. When people start going down a rabbit hole, they become obsessed with it and they start doing nothing but watching these YouTube videos or thinking about these conspiracy theories. And then they start trying to, you know, some of them start trying to talk to their their friends about them and if their friends don’t respond very well they can lose those friends and they can even lose relatives. I know there’s quite a few people who end up getting divorced because one of the people in the relationship becomes a conspiracy theorist and the other one does not and it ends in divorce purely because of this obsession with a conspiracy theory which you know could have been averted.

1:04:29
CW: It almost sounds like drugs or alcohol to some degree.

1:04:33
MW: It does, and I think there very much is a kind of an addiction problem. And that addiction problem, I think, extends to other things like the use of social media or gaming or things like that. But I think it becomes more harmful when the addiction is an alternative view of how the world works, it really kind of takes you out of reality and it makes it difficult for you to to operate in a normal social situation. And I think there’s a broader areas in which harm can occur. We know with alternative medicine conspiracy theories that obviously there can be medical harm that can happen to people, there can be financial harm as well where people spend money on these remedies for what they think of as chemtrail spraying or things like that. But I think there’s also a broader harm to society if a substantial portion of society is basing their opinions upon falsehoods and eventually it trickles into the political arena. We already have these low-level conspiracy theories like global warming denialism and even you know anti-vax conspiracy theories like infecting the public discourse and affecting policy and with climate denial. But you know it could be we’re going to get things like chemtrails and 9-11 conspiracy theories entering more of the mainstream. You know we’re already seeing these these pizza gates and QAnon starting to tangentially impact the political scene and we really have to fight against that type of thing.

1:06:12
CW: Well thank you for fighting the good fight, Mick, and thank you for writing this amazing book.

1:06:15
MW: Thank you very much.

1:06:17
BR: Yes, Escaping the Rabbit Hole, I recommend it highly and I think it’s certainly one of the better books from a skeptical point of view that is very user-friendly. That is, it’s really written and meant for not the sort of the abstract, you know, upper level, you know, what are conspiracies and, you know, sort of the moon landing hoax and, you know, Paul is dead, that sort of thing, but more sort of real world. Your friend or your loved one or your cousin or somebody is into this and how do you help get them out? I don’t know of any other books that are like this and I think it’s well-timed.

1:06:52
CW: And it’s written in such an open, friendly manner that, I mean, you state right in the beginning of the book, if you’re the conspiracy believer and you’re reading this book to see what sort of tricks we’re going to use on you, keep reading. I welcome your examination of this book will provide him with the only time he’s ever earned money from debunking anything.

1:07:22
MW: That’s right. It’s my first installment of shill bucks.

1:07:27
CW: Yes. So you’ve missed out on all those shill bucks for all those years. It’s only fair people buy your book and give it to somebody for Christmas or something or have it on your shelves as a good resource.

1:07:39
MW: Yeah, hopefully I can pay for my web hosting costs, but we’ll see.

1:07:43
BR: Well, it’s been great talking to you. Thanks again for coming on and working on the book, and we hope to see a lot more from you soon. Thank you very much.

1:07:51
MW: It’s been a very interesting conversation. Cheers.

1:07:53
CW: Wonderful.

1:07:54
Pascual Romero: We would like to thank our sponsor-level patrons, Amy Freshour-Kelly and Dr. Angela Mattke. If you are interested in becoming a sponsor, or just throwing us a buck or two per episode, check out patreon.com forward slash squaringthestrange. 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 are 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.

1:08:29
Thanks again, strangers.

1:08:30
♪♪

1:08:38
CW: Well, that was really cool. Ben, thank you for whatever blackmail material you had on Mick West to get him to do our show. I appreciate you using it.

1:08:45
BR: Well, you know, there’s, I know things

1:08:50
CW: And you’ll leave it at that exactly well That was awesome and next week or actually I should say two weeks from now because we are still on a bi-weekly schedule Which I greatly appreciate We’re gonna be talking about kind of a not really a cryptid not really an urban legend How would you describe what we’re gonna be talking about Ben?

BR: Well sort of a urban legend, media criticism, plastic, ideal thing. I don’t know.

1:09:23
CW: A human oddity, as the sideshow might say.

1:09:26
BR: Step right this way. Yes, we’ll be talking about the human Barbie and its various incarnations and everything The woman that allegedly was so enamored with her Barbie doll, her idealistic Barbie doll, that she had plastic surgery to change herself into a Barbie doll, as well as some Ken dolls, which I was surprised to hear about. And a little more on the Barbie theme, so it’ll be fun.

1:09:57
CW: Yes, there’s a, plastic surgery is its own weird little rabbit hole, if I may say so. And there’s, yeah, it tweaks a whole lot of aesthetic little buttons in my head to see what can be done to the human body, what is done, and the psychological reasoning that people come up with for why this person is doing this to themselves.

1:10:19
Cool.

1:10:20
All right.

1:10:21
See you soon.

1:10:22
Bye bye.

1:10:23
the world.

1:10:24
I’m going to be a good guy. I’m going to be a good guy. I’m going to be a good guy. I’m going to be a good guy.

1:10:52
and the world.

Transcribed with Cockatoo