Our guest this week is Susan Gerbic. Susan is a skeptical activist involved in many activities, the one we focus on most in this episode is Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia, an organization working to improve the content and citations of Wikipedia. During the episode, Kyle recommended Susan's talk a The Amazing Meeting 9 which can be found here. Some noteworthy topics mentioned during the podcast were Neil deGrasse Tyson's endorsement of the Penny for NASA project. As well as the Web of Trust and Rebutr browser plug ins, as well as how following the Skeptic Action project on Twitter provides recommendations of sites to visit and rate as you see fit via these tools. For her benevolent reference, Susan suggested The Odds Must Be Crazy, a fun website that explores the statistical likelihoods of seemingly unlikely situations. For all else, Susan and her various activities can be found via SusanGerbic.com.
Data Skeptic
Guerilla Skepticism on Wikipedia with Susan Gerbic
(upbeat music) - Welcome back to the Data Skeptic Podcast. I'm here this week with my guest, Susan Gerbick. How you doing, Susan? - I'm hot, but I'm doing great. - I guess us Californians have to expect that once in a while. - Yeah, it's just hot outside for some reason today. - So I'm especially glad to have you on because I think you're my first official card-carrying skeptic. And by that, I mean, not only someone who knows about and has been to TAM, but you in fact have spoken at TAM. And a lot of my guests before this while being, you know, practicing scientific skepticism and critical thinking don't necessarily affiliate with that, the word the same way I think you and I do. So I'm especially glad you've helped me break that bubble. - Oh, well, I'm always happy to be the first of anything. - So I've been admiring a lot of your skeptical activism from afar for a while now, most notably what we'll talk about today, which is guerrilla skepticism on Wikipedia. And I've heard you at a number of places on YouTube videos and your great TAM talk that I would refer listeners to and I'll put in the show notes if they wanna get some more deep details. But perhaps you could give us a quick summary in your own words of what the group is and what service it performs to the Wikipedia community. - Well, you probably would probably do more justice to it than I would because you would give me the elevator speech and I tend to ramble. But I'll try. We are trying to change Wikipedia to make it more, I don't wanna say the word legitimate 'cause that sounds kind of bad, but we wanna try to make its reputation stronger, at least when it comes to scientific skepticism, pseudoscience, and our spokespeople. We're really, really concerned about making sure that the scientific skepticism personalities, the people who do our podcasts, the people who write our books, the people who do all the research, that their Wikipedia pages are in terrific shape and so that they look more respectable, which they are, we're just trying to make sure that it's reflected well and because those people represent us. So I'm trying to see the big picture, the worldview and by improving Wikipedia, we're raising the bar and improving knowledge generally because Wikipedia is the fifth or sixth, depending on which, how you're going about looking at, the fifth or sixth, most trafficked websites. It's Yahoo, Google, YouTube, Facebook, and then there's a site in India that's a social media site, some people count it, some people don't because it's hard to get really good numbers on it and then there's Wikipedia. So those are the most trafficked pages, I mean websites in the Gnome universe. We're trying to improve those pages. So we work on a lot of different things but that's what our goal is. Oh, and we're trying to do it in all languages. So it's not English, we're not an English only place, we are trying to do it in many languages. - So it seems like you can both simultaneously improve Wikipedia and also spread skeptical messages. So we talked about improving the pages of a lot of the figureheads. Do you guys author articles and improve articles and monitor things? What are some of the other services the group does? - Oh, we do, gosh, everything. Yeah, we do monitor pages to some extent. Usually we work on the pages and monitor the pages that we've already worked on, pages that we have added. You can put it on a watch list. It's just a little box you check and every time you sign on to Wikipedia, you can look at your watch list and it'll tell you what has changed. So lots of people monitor pages in that way but that's not so important because generally Wikipedia as a whole and all the bots, they handle that for us. It's not our main function. Our main function is usually to find pages that are in not great shape. We've been really focusing on our skeptical spokespeople at the moment, our conferences and we spent a lot of time working on anything they had to do with Cosmos. We did that for, oh, nine months. So we were ready when Cosmos came out in March. We were good to go with a lot of great pages already written about Neil deGrasse Tyson in many languages and so on. So that when he was in the media's eye, his Wikipedia pages, we knew his Wikipedia page is gonna get a lot of hits. So he went from 130 views a month to a little over 350,000 views a month during the time that Cosmos was on. And every time he mentioned something, the stats on that page went skyrocketed. Maybe it'd get like a hundred hits a month and it went to like 6,000 that night. So we know that every time he mentioned something, somebody somewhere was gonna look it up and they went to Wikipedia was the main place that they went. And so we wanna make sure that when people are looking for information, that they're getting great information. - Yeah, so not only did we find a great page about Neil deGrasse Tyson, but also I presume some references to Randy and his cronies or those types. - Yep, we did a thing, I don't know if you're aware of, maybe your listeners would be interested in finding out about a group called Penny for NASA. Neil deGrasse Tyson, okay, well Penny for NASA is, Neil deGrasse Tyson talks a lot about the budget of NASA. A lot of astronomers do. And he feels, and a lot of people feel, that if we were to raise the budget of NASA, we could fix the economy, we could create jobs like crazy, we could get to Mars in a reasonable time, lots of things would happen, lots of things would change. And right now, America's budget is just a little under a half a penny. So he says if we took a full penny and gave it to NASA of every dollar in taxes, we would have enough money to, oh my gosh, just do amazing things. He's got this long list of stuff that he thinks that he could do and he talks to Congress about this and so on. So somebody, this person who was, you know, listening to Neil deGrasse Tyson and talking about it, said, "I'm gonna create a campaign called Penny for NASA." So I found out about it. I listened to, I don't know, a podcast probably somewhere, and I said, "Wouldn't it be nice if Penny for NASA "got a little more publicity?" So I had one of my editors, Nathan Miller, who's really into astronomy. He made a Wikipedia page for Penny for NASA, and he sat on it for a year because we couldn't really, you can't put up a page on Wikipedia unless it's noteworthy in that, you just can't do that. It has to have certain criteria have to be met. So for about six months, we had a paragraph on Neil deGrasse Tyson's page that just mentioned Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about Penny for NASA. And so what was happening is every time, you know, somebody would go down onto the Wikipedia page for Neil deGrasse Tyson, they'd see this entry about this website and they'd go to the website. So it was bringing views to their website, their actual main website. And now the page is live because Penny for NASA has enough to be noteworthy. It's on Wikipedia now. So it has its own Wikipedia page and it receives about a thousand views a month. It's coming from Neil deGrasse Tyson over to there and that's how they're able to do it. So we're generating about a thousand views a month to this really noteworthy cause, you know? And it's all because we just were thinking it through, we went from Tyson to them. But if they were just to be a page summer and nobody would care, absolutely not. - Yeah, and there was no page before. It seems like you guys had the forethought to not only know that it would have its day, but to know that Neil himself would get the big bump as Cosmos rolled out and that that would give a halo effect to the Penny for NASA page. How do you guys keep on top of that? 'Cause it seems like Wikipedia grows so fast. There's, that was a rather clever foresight in my opinion. - Well, you had to be like blind and deaf to not know that Cosmos was coming out. (laughing) - You're okay about that. So to think not only should we be ready for Cosmos, but that let's get this Penny for NASA up knowing that it'll get some downhill benefit. - Well, you know, I think that I just keep my ear to the ground. Now I'm kind of getting more known and people will come to me and say, hey this, hey that, this is a good idea. I love to support projects. I love it when people are, you know, excited about something and passionate and they feel like this is something I can do. I love that kind of thing. I want to support anybody who's out there doing anything that's going to help our community out that isn't drama blogging or tweet blogging, whatever it is calling they're doing now. If they're doing something positive, I don't care if it's collecting newspapers and, you know, whatever it is. If they feel good about it, I'm for it. So, you know, I have a huge team. People think about these things and they say, hey what about this? Hey, what about that? And we just kind of talk about it. But the Penny for NASA thing was just something that came to me one day whenever I was listening to a podcast. I just said, you know, why don't we, why don't we do something about that? Well, I think what it is, Kyle, is I do not have the intelligence that most people that work for me do. Well, all the people who work for me, for G, S, O, W. I am, I don't, I'm not a tech person. I don't know the capabilities. I don't know that there's restrictions. I don't know that you can't do these things. So, I just say to myself, well, let's figure out how we can do this. And, you know, most people go, are you daft? You're gonna try to change Wikipedia. I mean, do you have a clue? Do you have any idea how insane that is? Or you're gonna write Wikipedia pages in other languages and you're gonna try to run a group of people who all speak different languages and try to get them all coordinated. I mean, Susan, you're insane. That's ridiculous. So, I don't know that's ridiculous 'cause I'm not smart enough to know that that's stupid. So, I just gotta go, can we do this? And there's people who go, well, yeah, I guess if we did this, if we did that, I'm like, well, okay, let's do that, you know? So, I think that's how it works. - Excellent. So, it seems like even though you guys are making great progress, there's probably endless things of what comes next. How do you guys decide what to focus on and how do you measure the success and the impact that you've had? - Oh, that's a great question. How do we focus, how do we decide what to focus on? Well, Susan, when she's training people, that's me. I'm Susan. When I'm training people, I tell you what to do. I put you through, you know, I say, I need this done. I want you to do this. I want you to listen to that and put this here. I'm totally one-on-one training people. So, once they leave training, which is maybe a few weeks to a month or two, you know, you could go longer if you want to take your time doing it. Then, once they've left training, they do what they want to do. Whatever passion they have, whatever is their thing. Some people are into UFOs. Some people are into scientists. Some are into astronomers. Some are into medical quackery. And, you know, and then we've got all, you know, the whole sphere. There's tons of things that they like to do. So, they'll pick something that they want. I will, from time to time, say, "Hey, you guys, this is a good idea. "I'd like this page done because of this reason." Or, "I'd like this looked at." And then people will say, "You know, that's fine. "I'll take a look at it. "I can finish it. "They're game for most things." So, if I have ideas or if somebody else has an idea, they'll say, "I can't finish this project. "Can somebody else work on it?" You know, they hear podcasts, they read books, and they say, "I really am impressed with this person." Or, "I just heard this podcast about this person, "and I really am interested in it." And so, that's kind of how they fit it. But, I have a to-do list, and we're constantly adding things to the to-do list. It's got hundreds of names of pages that already exist, and people and places and things that need to be done that don't have pages. And then, the spreadsheet, the massive spreadsheet, it has all the languages that we edit in. And so, once it's done, and it's written well in one language, then it can be taken off and put into another language. Like, for example, I just had a brand new editor who lives in Brazil, and he just released his very first page rewrite, and his name is Valero. Valero Melo. Andrade Melo, I'm gonna say it really wrong, I'm sure. But he just released a newly translated Richard Weizmann page. Absolutely beautiful. I know, and I can't wait to tweet about it and everything, and tell everybody in Bragg. And he's so excited, and I'm excited for him, 'cause it's his first page. And you know, you always remember your first. We fall, it is something that people don't realize. We fall kind of in love with each page we do. And the person we work on, they become a person, a part of us, in a way that you just really can't, oh, understand, you almost feel like they're stalkers. You're their stalker, to some extent. I mean, we could go into a trivia contest about these people that we write about. We know a lot about 'em in ways that you can't imagine, and in ways that most of their family doesn't even probably know about 'em, because we spend hours. One of my editors is working on the Brian Brushwood, Wikipedia page rewrite, and he just sent him an email. I just saw it, and he says, "I feel like I'm your stalker. I had spent hours and hours and hours watching your videos and reading everything that you've written, and it's just, I'm like, you know, that's crazy. You don't have to do that much." So anybody listening who wants to edit for me, you really don't have to do quite that much, but some people just fall into it. You're like, "Well, and what else did he do?" And well, that's great, let me do this. And so you just, it's hard to believe that you are so in love with the project, that's so in love with whatever you're working on. There's too many things, absolutely too many things. - Yeah, you'd mentioned helping out new people with training, which I think sounds great, because I haven't done much in editing a Wikipedia myself, but I can get the feel that there's quite a learning curve, and you kind of have to get the rope. So having a mentor or a group sponsor, you sounds like a great plan. How would someone who wants to get involved, reach out, or best reach out to go through a training process and start making contributions where they have some passion about something? - Okay, well, you would write to me at G-S-O-W, team@gmail.com, and then you would say, I've heard your interview on this podcast, and I'm inspired by it, or I speak another language, and I would love to edit, or translate, or do research, or whatever, and I would say, open a Wikipedia account first, and then I might talk to you a little bit about it to make sure that you understand that there is training involved that can take weeks. You have to join a private forum, and this can possibly take over your life. (laughs) Because once you learn, the learning process is, well, to you, somebody like you, Kyle, or your listeners, they're probably not gonna have any trouble whatsoever, understanding how to do the actual editing. I mean, I think that's gonna be second nature to most people who are computer literate. I'm not, I'm a baby photographer. This was a huge learning curve for me to learn how to do anything tech-wise, but the things that you need to learn how to do are something that we can teach you. It's a unique thing. We're teaching you how to find quotes, and how to write it in such a way that it's interesting to the reader. It sticks on the page, it doesn't get deleted. How, what pages to work on that are not so controversial that somebody's gonna attack you. Who whose page should be worked on? What should be done? When should these be, there's so much that we teach you, and it is all hands-on, very hands-on. We don't let them make any live edits, hardly any live edits, until we've looked at the edit. So they make it on a user page. I look at it, I say, go for it, publish it. And then the next person comes in and then I say, okay, now I need you to do this. I want you to move a picture from place A to place B, or I want you to add this audio to this one, or I want you to listen to this podcast interview. Like the interview we're doing right now, or the interview did, the last interview you did, I just heard it. Let's say she had a Wikipedia page. We could take her interview that you did, and I would have one of my editors listen to the interview, and they would try to glean some kind of information from it. Maybe she would give us some personal stuff, maybe she would say, you know, where she went to college, what her upbringing was like, what was her, who were her mentors, things about her that would be good on a Wikipedia page. And then we could try to find some things about the interview you said, some of the data she talked about. And then we could turn around and take those quotes, put them on her Wikipedia page, site your podcast, and boom, we've got, it's called a backwards edit. That's what I call it, I call it a backwards edit, 'cause they don't know, they didn't know who she was, they're able to just take the page, take the interview, and they're going to a page. So you've got a wonderful citation, now you gotta find a page to put it on. Whereas most people, most editors, they find a page and then they look for a citation that's good. I teach people to do it backwards. And that way the edit stays, it stays in really good shape, the edit they make is gonna stay because the citation is great. And also that gives more publicity to the podcast. It also improves the Wikipedia page because we've got some, you know, great quotes. And it gives more, it improves Wikipedia overall. So this is one of the things I teach. That's not something you're gonna find anywhere on Wikipedia, that's a Susan Gurbick thought. So it's backwards. So I don't know if that made any sense to anybody. (laughs) - Yeah, no, I like that strategy on it. It's a way that you can get people from the skeptical community mentioned in places that the author of that page might not necessarily think to put them, I would guess. - Exactly. - You might end up with a James Randy quote on, let's say, you know, some president's page, perhaps. I don't know if they ever interacted with Bill Clinton, but perhaps something there could show it. - It could possibly, it could possibly. I have a, actually I do have a edit from James Randy on a Senator, Clayborn Pell. I think you might have heard of Pell grants. - Yes, of course. - Okay, well Clayborn Pell apparently was a believer in Urie Geller and a huge believer in the paranormal. So on a JREF cruise that I was on, I recorded James Randy talking, not knowing that I would ever do anything with that interview. He talks about Clayborn Pell, and he talks about his belief in Urie Geller. And then what I was able to do is take the quotes off of there because it's Randy's opinion. And I was able to put it on Clayborn Pell's Wikipedia page. So you're absolutely right. It's boom, boom. And it improves the page, Clayborn Pell's page. Well, sadly, sadly it is, you know, not a pleasant thing we're saying about Clayborn Pell, but it is an honest thing and it's cited. And it is Randy's opinion and it makes the page much more interesting. - Yeah, definitely. - Yeah. - So there must be some threshold there for what's significant and worth contributing. For example, it would be pretty silly to edit Bill Cosby's Wikipedia page to mention that he wants set next to DJ Grothe on a flight, or that, you know, Brian Dunning ate a Big Mac once. So he's on the McDonald's page. So where does that line live? How do you know when it's something that's worth a citation? - Gosh, that's a really good question. You know, it's just common sense, I think. I had Lamar Odom. I think he's a basketball player in LA. You probably know who he is. I think I didn't know he was. He promoted power balance bracelets for a while back there. I don't know if your listeners know what power talents is, but they thankfully have pretty much run their course, but it's supposed to improve your balance. It's a piece of plastic that you wear on your wrist and you pay $30. - But don't forget the 5 cent hologram that's on it. - Oh, there you go. So Lamar Odom and, uh, Lamar Odom, Lamar Odom and several other sports figures would endorse these. And so I wanted to, he did a video, he did like a commercial promoting them. So I said, I'm gonna put that up on his page 'cause Lamar Odom was receiving like 50,000 views a month or something, some ridiculous amount. Maybe even more than that. I can't even remember it's been so long. So I said, I want this mention of power balance on his page. I put it up on the page and I got taken down and they said, this is not important. This is not something that should be on his page. And I said, let's look at his page as it stands right now. There is a mention of him liking a certain type of ice cream. There's a mention of him liking a certain, you know, a certain his favorite candy. So if you're saying that that's okay to put on his Wikipedia page, then damn it, we could put this endorsement of power balance on the page. And so we went back and forth and it finally, it took a while. I finally managed to get the edit to stick. I haven't looked, it might be gone by now, but it was our way of saying this guy is promoting this thing, would you believe power balance gets like 20,000 views a month still? - Sadly, I would believe it. - But the page, if you look at power balance, it is almost a hundred percent negative. It's like the opposite of positive. So in a way, it's really great because, you know, anybody who goes there is going to go, oh, it's just a piece of plastic. Oh, it doesn't do anything. Oh, oh, I've been ripped off. I like the stats. You mentioned earlier about how effective are we? And it's really hard to actually know. I can look and see how many views Wikipedia page has received. I cannot see if they're unique viewers. I can't see how long they stayed on the page. I can't see how many, you know, how much of the page they read. I can't see any of that. I can only see how many times the page has been viewed on a certain day. We can see that if somebody's in the news that in the media anywhere, that there's usually a spike in a Wikipedia page for that day. We know that happens. Like when Fred Phelps died, Fred Phelps from the Westboro Baptist Church, he, we ended up, I mean, his views on his Wikipedia page went into the hundreds of thousands for like a week. So, you know, we know that when it normally hits like four or 500 views a day. So it was, you know, thousands of views. So it's really, really important to make sure that we have that page in great shape with the things on it that need to be on it in time for the media to hit it. So we don't know. We can't know exactly how effective we are. We only know that millions of people read our edits. And it's far more effective than somebody writing a blog because we could write a blog about homeopathy and it's gonna be read by our choir or we can get some, we can go to the homeopathy Wikipedia page and we can find some really great citations written by the people who are notable, David Goresky, Steven Novella, you know, you could, you want to get those opinions that are great. They're, you know, they're doctors and you can put them on the homeopathy page. And now homeopathy always gets over 100,000 views a month, always and that's just English. Every Wikipedia page and every language gets a tiny hits but the English page keeps over 100,000 views. So now instead of me writing a blog about homeopathy that's only gonna be read by my friends, now I put a post up on a page that's gonna get about 100,000 views every month. Whether it's read or not, I don't know, but it's in a place where it's gonna get millions of views eventually. - Yeah, I would suspect there's great data on a site like Science Based Medicine as well, but it's not as generally or well trafficked as Wikipedia nor even though I perceive that as an authoritative for stores, not necessarily everyone else in the world knows about it to think of it that way. And it seems like Wikipedia is becoming that. So having good high quality factual information on a high traffic page is at least getting good data in front of people. - That's right, and then they can follow the links because we say, don't believe what you read on Wikipedia, but go to the citations that we have at the bottom and follow those citations and go to the actual original sources. Wikipedia is just a place to start. It's a place to get an overview. Don't believe everything you read, but follow the citations and see where they lead you. So if somebody goes to the homeopathy page, they're going to find Science Based Medicine. And they're also going to find hyperlinks to the people who write that because we've, well, Tim Farley wrote the page for Harriet Hall. We just finished writing the page for David Gorsky. And we just finished rewriting the Wikipedia page for Stephen Novella. So those people would be mentioned on the homeopathy page and the link would go to their Wikipedia page. So they're getting views to their Wikipedia page because they're mentioned on the homeopathy page. And it's just link, link love. That's what I call it. I don't know what it really is, but you're following the links like you're leaving little breadcrumbs. And then once you get on to Stephen Novella or Harriet Hall or David Gorsky's page, then you're going to say, this is interesting. And you're going to follow and you're going to see that they attended something called the amazing meeting. And you're going to find something about James Randy or the Center for Inquiry, or what is the skeptical and choir magazine? And then they're going to go to that page and so on. You know, there's games you can play that show how you just go from one page to another and you end up in Ethiopia or something. Or, you know, you never know how you get there. But that's what we're trying to do is we're trying to make sure that anybody who goes on to Wikipedia finds a page and just goes to the next. And then they go to the next, your listeners know this. I can see them all nodding their head right now going, God, I hate that when that happens. I do that all the time. You just fall into the hole. The Wikipedia, the Wikipedia well, that's what it's called, you need to fall in there. - Then you emerge a few hours later, hungry. - Yeah, and you go, wait, wait, what was that looking for? (laughing) - This is truly my only, you know, big complaint about Wikipedia. - If it's well written, yeah, it can be a bit of a problem. You just go, oh my gosh, I can't believe I'm here now. What in the world? - Yeah. - But, you know. - So we were talking a little bit about the, I don't know if it technically qualifies as an edit war, but the back and forth, the talk page stuff you had going on getting the power balance bracelet mentioned on the page, around like the early 2000s, it was like the standard Hackney joke of every open mic comedian to say like, oh, you know, Wikipedia is so accurate because anybody can edit it. But the truth is it actually seems to be incredibly edit, despite this counterintuitive aspect that is supposedly anyone can edit, and not supposedly anyone can. Although when I've gone to pages where I think, oh, this will be controversial, I've always seen two watermarks on those pages. One is that every sentence has multiple very good sightings, or citations, and often the pages will be locked. Can you tell us a little bit about your experience with number one, how Wikipedia stays in general, so well groomed, and how some of those features like locking come into play? - Right, okay. Well, Wikipedia works because people volunteer to edit Wikipedia, whether they work for me, which I would teach them very hands-on, like I say, anybody could go to Wikipedia, open an account, or not even open an account. You can edit anonymously. There is nothing keeping anybody from doing this. And that's why Wikipedia works, is 'cause people care. Skeptics tend to be very factual, and we're very concerned about the citation being there, and we're real concerned about it. So we're hyper-vigilant about it, I should say, the skeptic community. You have watchlists, where people, like I mentioned earlier, maybe the David Gorsky page is on my watchlist. If somebody comes in and tries to make an edit to his page, I will know as soon as I sign into Wikipedia, and I'll go, "Wait a minute, it takes two clicks "to take the vandalism off of there." We can lock a page down if we feel that there's a troll or there's vandalism being done repeatedly. We would apply to an admin of Wikipedia and say, "Here's the legitimate reasons "why we think this page needs to be locked." In the cases of somebody who maybe has recently died, like Fred Phelps, they will tend to guard the page. It goes on a special watchlist for admins of Wikipedia, and people, like I said, are more hyper-vigilant about making sure that nothing gets on that page. Because what will happen, what's happened with Paul Kurtz, founder of Cinefer & Quarry. When he died in 2010, the GSOW team went on major alert because we wanted to make sure that when the media said, "Who's this guy who just died?" They went to, we knew they were gonna go to his Wikipedia page, and we didn't want people to have vandalized the page and say something like on his death bed, he converted to Judaism or something like that. We didn't want that on this Wikipedia page because we knew a media outlet would just copy that and put it up, and it would be who knows where, and we could never get it corrected. If it hit page five for the death of Paul Kurtz, we knew it hit page 14 in Tiny's print that there was a correction. So we wanted to make sure that the page stayed in really great shape for several days. We had it on a watch list, and we were really watching it. That's the great thing about GSOWs. We have people all over the world, so I can have people watching this 24 hours a day because they're in Puerto Rico, they're in Brazil, they're in Russia, they're in Australia. So what we did find out, what I did discover is that we managed to take good care of that page. But if you took a sentence out of the Paul Kurtz page, just copy and paste and then put it into Google, we found that several newspapers and several blogs were verbatimally taking the Wikipedia page and just pasting it into their blog because we could see the page. It was exactly the quote. So we knew that you have to be careful because that is exactly what is going on. The media is just taking the quote, just taking Wikipedia and quoting it. And so you gotta be careful that what's on there is correct 'cause it'll haunt you. - Yeah, it's an interesting form of plagiarism. And if that correction, even if you go back and revert some inappropriate edit, if New York Times or some other news audiences picked it up, they're not gonna go and grab the edit for you, so. - Nope, that's right. - That sort of monitoring is very important to the whole process. - Right, so we need lots more people, but Wikipedia as a whole does a pretty darn good job on it. It is run by us. It's volunteers, whether they're with the GSOW project or they're just out there, we need you. And we need you, not necessarily like I say, on the project. We just need you on the ball and helping us out. Anybody could fix anything if they're just browsing around with Wikipedia and going, wait a minute, that don't sound right, you know? What? They could go in and just remove it. - Yeah, it's impressive to me in fact that it's of such high quality. I guess it's a commendation for people like you and your team who aren't associated with it, who are out there investing their time for free and maintaining pages and keeping things as accurate as we can. - And there's a lot of very smart people out there who are maybe retired and they have found this as a new hobby and they were experts in a certain field. So now they can go in and use their expertise in a way that maybe they were professors. And now they're retired from lecturing to students, students. Now they're reaching worldwide people. They've actually not retired, they're reaching more people than they did when they were students. But it's in an anonymous way. They're making these edits, but they're not getting applause and they're not getting a high five. They're just doing the right thing because it is the right thing to do. - So how does the community work out something when there is a, let's call it for a moment, legitimate controversy or maybe it's a matter of opinion. So perhaps we could go back to the power balance example or if you've got a similar but better one. I would imagine there are more fans of whomever that basketball star was than there are of even some of the bigger names in skepticism. So I'm glad to see that that mention can stay on his page and it's not just that a million of his fans come and say, "No, we vote it down." It's that you can justify its legitimacy in comparison to other things on the page. But how does the community work that out if there's a back and forth sort of edit war? - Right, it's kind of, it's very patient. You have to be on Wikipedia, we have rules. I mean, if Wikipedia could just run the skeptic community, we would be in so much better shape because you have to assume good faith. That's one of the rules of Wikipedia. You have to assume that the person who's putting the edits up on the page means, "Well, they just don't know better." So you can't accuse them of something. So on every Wikipedia page, maybe your listeners don't realize this or not, but on the left-hand side of every top page, the left-hand top side of the page, there's a talk button, and you push that tab and you will be on a talk page. And this is where the editors have a conversation about how to edit the page. Controversial pages, that's where there's a lot of discussion going on. Some of the other pages where we're working on pages that are almost forgotten, there's nobody's talking. It's just, it depends on the popularity. So with Lamar, Odom, and the power balance thing, I went in and made the edit, and then somebody came in and took it out, and then I went to the talk page and said, "What are you doing? Why are you taking this out?" And they said, "Well, it's not noteworthy. It's just a little mention." And I said, "No, it's a 10-minute commercial." And if you think that it's not noteworthy enough, then why is his ice cream flavors and his favorite candy on there? And they're come back and we have a discussion. And then it's not voting. There's no voting allowed, I mean you vote, but it's not weighed in how many people who come in, it's who makes the best arguments kind of thing. And then sometimes we bring in an admin who will come in and kind of neutrally see it. It's really not that big a deal. Most of the time, it's worked out just fine because we're adults because we don't care that much. I mean, if I lost the battle with Lamar Odom and the power balance, it would not ring my day. I would move on to something else. Maybe I would try it in a different way. Maybe I would word it differently. And a lot of times you make the edit and then somebody comes in and just improves the edit. They change it so that it reads more correctly it's worded better, it's that kind of thing. So you can't take it personally when you edit Wikipedia. You have to just move on. It's you're changing the world, but you can't change the role and stress yourself out over some of these things. Just move on. - I would guess that a lot of the more high traffic to pages, the more people are looking at it. So almost certainly the better quality content you'll get and maybe even the longer of a talk page with back and forth figuring that out, which is probably healthy for the overall accuracy of Wikipedia. So if we went to like the Roswell incidents page, I imagine we'd have a very skeptical message that's highly cited and well referenced, but what about more obscure forms of quackery? Like I was thinking of spontaneous human combustion. This isn't something I think the average person says, oh, I'm gonna go and Google that. It's probably a page that a true believer goes too often. So how does Wikipedia in general maintain high quality on that long tail of increasingly obscure things? And then what is the GSOW specific role in looking at those more fringe type claims? - Well, I'm really glad you picked spontaneous human combustion 'cause that's one of my favorite pseudosciences. As I was growing up, I mean, I totally believed it and it scared the crap out of me. I really thought that it was possible I could be walking down the street and all of a sudden combust into flames and it was terrifying as a kid. So kind of as a joke, well, not really as a joke, but I asked one of my editors and it was Nathan Miller who stepped up and said, "I'll rewrite the spontaneous human combustion page." I dabbled on it before and added references from Joe Nickel, Ben Radford and some other people who had made some posts in the past. I had done that mainly backwards editing. I'd found an article that was written in skeptical inquire magazine, said it's really good. It's written really well. I'm gonna quote it on the page. So Nathan, about September, October of last year, 2014, went in and rewrote the page and did a fabulous job and it is obscure. You wouldn't think there'd be a lot of views on that page. So Kyle, what do you think? I've got the stats in front of me right now. How many views do you think people would go to spontaneous human combustion? Readers, people out there listening right now make your mental guess. Send it to me telepathically. What do you think? I mean in a month, what do you think? - Well as a reference, I think you said before cosmos, Neil deGrasse Tyson was about 100 a day, which I wish it was more. - No, it's 100,000, 100,000 a month. - That's what he went to after the show. - No, 350,000 when the show-- - Oh, okay. - A month. - So then I would guess maybe 5,000 a month for spontaneous human combustion. - Okay, I'm receiving all your listeners are sending me messages right now. I'm tabulating. There's somebody that's listening right now in Nebraska who is really close. You're almost on it. I'm sending the message back to him. Good job. It's actually for the month of July and we're not quite done, 26,136. - Wow, that's surprisingly high. - Yeah, so one day they hit 1,800. So maybe it was in the news somewhere or it was somebody referred to it in a blog someplace. So 26,000 people have gone to the Wikipedia page in English for spontaneous human combustion in July already and we've got a few days left to go with it. It's totally shocking. I mean, people will tell me, oh, who cares about Bigfoot? Nobody believes in Bigfoot. Well, there's over 80,000 views to a Wikipedia page for Bigfoot each month. So somebody cares about this. Somebody's interested. Loch Ness Monster, the same kind of thing. It's some pages though. Kyle, some of these pages get two or 300 views a month. So don't get me wrong. They're not all in the thousands. But as obscure as you think spontaneous human combustion is, it's still getting a lot of views. - So I know you're also involved in the IIG or I should spell it out just in case not all of my guests know. It's the Independent Investigations Group, which is a, I'm pretty sure, affiliated with CFI. I think most people will be vaguely aware of Randy's $1 million challenge, but not necessarily the IIG's similar or other similar prize. Like I know the Australian skeptics have something going as well. Could you give us a quick overview of what the IIG does? We have a $100,000 reward for anyone who can prove paranormal powers with in testable conditions. We are affiliated completely with Center for Inquiry. They supplied the $100,000 for us. And the money isn't that big a deal because if anybody was to be able to prove under testable conditions that they have, you know, paranormal powers or to some extent, they could prove it to some extent. You know, they could pass these tests. They would be, you know, $100,000 would be penny change to them. They'd be on CNN, they'd be, you know, they maybe they'd even be able to win a Nobel Prize for physics and, you know, it would be a massive thing. So we have, we put out the challenge that if somebody can pass our tests, then, you know, we'll reward them the money and give them national attention and we'll publicize it everywhere. And we would love to see it happen because that would be freaking awesome. I mean, can you imagine if we could prove life after death or, you know, the people fly or you could read somebody's minds? That would be incredible. But what we do is we have people who will come to us, applicants come to us and they write and they say, you know, I can talk to my cat and I'm like, yeah, so can I. But I can understand what my cat's saying and you're like, okay. So what we do is we have a team of people and we have affiliates in different places. The main hub is in Los Angeles. We do have a very active group in San Francisco, which is closer to me. I'm in Salinas, California. So I'm a couple hours south of San Francisco and about six hours north of LA. We have a group in Portland, Oregon. We have affiliates, we've had groups in Denver, Atlanta, Georgia, Washington, D.C. And we were gonna have one in Canada that kind of fell through. But we are the largest paranormal investigations group. We are the most active and the biggest as far as amount of people who are involved with our group. And we are also affiliated with because we're with CFI, we have the best minds because we can pull on if we have a UFO question, we can pull on some of the best UFOologists out there, like Robert Schaeffer, paranormal investigators. We have Ben Radford and we have Joe Nickel. I mean, you don't get better than that. And plus we have others, Sharon Hill and all kinds of people we could ask them things if we needed to. Ray Hyman, one of the greatest statisticians in the skeptical movement. Plus we have other people like Barbara Drescher, who's also a statistician. And I believe that Ed Plint is also a statistician. He's part of the IIG. So statisticians are real important. So let me just go back really quick and say, so somebody comes to us and says, "I can hear what my cat says. "I know what he says." So, okay, that's nice, it's a claim. And what we wanna do is we wanna say, okay, how can we, how can you prove that? How can you prove that to us? So we go back and forth through, you know, I could take days, I could take years, I could take, you know, who knows. And we gotta come up with a way of making sure it's not chance and it's some way of proving it. So maybe they would say, okay, if we had the cat, can the cat differentiate between toy A and toy D, for example? And the person would say, yeah, he knows this toy from that toy. He can definitely tell the difference. He tells me he can see the difference. So we can say, okay, so if we put your cat in a room where you're not at and we videotape the whole thing from several different angles and we put that toy in front of that cat and then we pull you in the room and we say, all right, ask your cat what toy he just saw. And the cat says to the human, I saw the bell, the blue one with the bell inside or something. And the owner would say, he said, he saw the little plastic mouse with the catnip in it or something. And we'd say, okay, well, that's a wrong. He didn't, 'cause we have it on videotape that he didn't see that. And there's, it's more to this than that. But in a, you run it statistically wise, you have to go through so many times, the, you know, the cycle to prove that it's not chance. You forgot what it is for chance and we wanna have our stats at like 5,000 to one. And then if they pass that test, that's a preliminary, then we will go for the big dogs, which is probably gonna be like 100,000 to one or a million to one or something like that. But so far, no one has ever passed even the smaller challenge of like 5,000 to one. Whereas most people say, I can do this 100% of the time. I have, you know, I can do it every time, all the time. Before we do the test, we'll say something like, how are we doing? Is your cat, is your cat talking to you now? Can you hear him? Oh yes, I can hear him, everything's great. We're like, how do you feel? Do you need some water? You know, do you need a rest? You know, how do you feel about this? How confident are you that you're gonna be able to pass this test? Oh yes, I'm very confident. Everything's gonna go great. My cat's just talking away to me right now. And then when the test happens and usually they fail, suddenly the excuses come out. Oh, well, he's just playing with me. He doesn't want me to have $100,000. Oh, you know, on and on, you know, the excuses come up. But... Don't forget the bad energy brought in by the experimenters. Well, yeah, that happens too. Except that the cat was talking to him when they were there a minute ago and the experimenters were there too. So why is he not talking now? And so this is what we do. It's a lot of fun. It is an absolute blast. But, and he really gets down to the core of why people believe these things. And it's fascinating. We're very kind, we're very open to the idea that people maybe have some sort of extrasensory perception or whatever. But so far, we've never found anything. We've never even seen anything that makes us go hmm. We haven't even had a hmm, it's nothing. We can usually say it's probably this. It's probably that, even if we can't. If we say, "I don't know what the reason is," but it is definitely not what you think it is because it's not, you know, your cat's not talking to you. Or if he's talking to you, you can't perceive it. And you think you can, but you're... At least some of these testable conditions that you said were perfect. No. So they have to agree to the protocol. We're not making it up. It's a back and forth between the claimant, the applicant, and us to make sure that it is something that's fair for both sides. I mean, we're giving away $100,000. So, you know, come on, you gotta have some strict controls here. Yeah, of the tests that I've either read about or seen videos of and the couple I've witnessed from Tam, which I don't know if you guys are directly involved in or not, but they've all been very respectful. There's nothing smug about it. And yet they have very sound protocols for double blinding or whatever is the most appropriate technique to use. And I think it's a great opportunity. Number one, to say that of those individuals who might claim, "Oh, no scientist wants to deal with me or test me." Well, okay, there is an organization. And maybe they're not affiliated with Harvard or wherever, but if you get their $100,000, that's gonna raise someone's attention. So that's definitely a preliminary step towards that. Exactly. And I've also admired... Yeah, there's nothing ridicule about it, even to say like one might, even who's monitoring it, say that this sounds like an absurd claim. But at the end of the day, we're gonna put that cat in that room and you have a 50% chance of guessing. So our no hypothesis says that you're gonna get about half right by chance. And if you can do demonstrably better than that, then perhaps I don't understand or believe in what you're doing, but you show me the evidence that you have something that's quite extraordinary. Right. It's a great exercise too in stats and protocols and scientific experiments for people, especially in some kind of odd way that they probably wouldn't do in a laboratory that's a normal laboratory, dealing with E. coli or DNA or something like that. This is something that's different and it's exciting, it's fun. And it's kind of, I think the same reason that they had the million dollar challenge is that it's kind of like a put up or shut up. So you can say to the psychic or I call them grief vampires, if you could say to them, look, if you can really find a dead body and you say you work with a place all the time and you solve all these crimes all the time, then you should be able to look at two different pictures of two different people and tell me which picture is of a person who's alive and which picture is the person's dead. That's a no brainer. And they'll say, yes, of course I can tell that. Okay, let's test you. Oh no, it doesn't work like that. I don't wanna be tested because, you know, they're probably a fraud, you know, suddenly it doesn't work. When you take away all the ability to guess, to give feedback, you know, where they're getting feedback from people or idiomotor effect, it's just fascinating. I love, I absolutely love this whole project, being able to work with people and really, and you know what else, Kyle, it sometimes gives relief to the person that you're working with. I mean, somebody writes to you and I think that skeptics, we need to really remember this. To some of these people, to most of the people we hear from, they are a lot of them are really frightened by what happens to them. They really believe this is happening to them. So I mean, they may think they're being abducted by aliens. And can you imagine how frightening that might be if you really believe that you could not sleep at night knowing that you were gonna be abducted or maybe your child is gonna be abducted and on and on. That's a very frightening thing. But possibly, maybe we could help them by saying that, you know, we wanna rule out mental illness or we want to rule out your prescriptions that sometimes people take a prescription medication and they don't tell their doctor that they're taking supplements or another prescription medication and sometimes those work together to create things like sleep apnea or hallucinations and so on. And possibly we could say to them very kindly, we wanna rule this out. So can you sit down and write down a list of all your medications or take all your medications and we want you to go to your doctor and say, here's everything I'm taking, include all the vitamins, supplements and all that other stuff that you're doing. And I want you to have the doctor look it over and just rule out the possibility it could be something else. You know, and to a lot of people, they're not gonna even dawn on them to do that. And can you imagine the relief when they find out that, you know, oh, (laughs) I feel so much better. I thought that it was my, you know, I was having hallucinations of people visiting me at night that was not a pleasant hallucination. And now I find out that it's because I was taking X, Y, Z and I was also taking this other thing and I was taking this other thing and now it's, oh, okay, just slowly, but I feel better. (laughs) You know, so this is a service to people too. You know, not think that we do this all the time because most people would never take our advice and say, I'll go to my doctor and look it over, but it's possible and it has happened, so, you know. - Yeah, another service you guys do that I hope any of the researchers listening take target and in particular the more physical science researchers that it's easy, I think the classic case was Project Alpha back in like the '60s or the '70s. Someone was testing for psychic powers at a legitimate laboratory type experiments and the guys they had in testing were just, you know, tricksters, they were bending spoons when the researchers weren't looking and they were just really getting one over on the scientists because in general, scientists don't spend a lot of time being deceived yet skeptics have the eye for looking for that. So if there is a scenario where you're investigating something where someone might be motivated to deceive or misguide results, having a skeptic alongside someone who understands experimental protocols and that sort of thing can often bring a huge value to the overall knowledge you're gonna get out of the testing. - You're 100% right, we have a lot of magicians. You'll notice there's an awful lot of magicians in the skeptic community. Randy himself is a magician and there's a lot of others. My boyfriend Mark Edward is also a magician and a mentalist and he's on the IIG and it's very important to have him there. You've got your, you know, your scientists. Of course, we have on our crew, we also have like a policeman. We also have a psychiatrist. We have people with just general knowledge who are really, you know, just there. You never know what expertise is gonna actually help. Having a magician there who's watching for something completely different is probably a good thing to have around because like you say, some of these things that people have tried to pass off are just mentalist tricks or, you know, old psychic tricks. But a scientist is not wanting to look, I mean, since when does cell structure try to fool you? You know? (laughs) I mean, come on. It's, yeah, there's type one errors and all these other kinds of things, but it's not intentionally trying to deceive you. They're not used to that kind of thing and I believe Randy is writing a book. God, it should be out any time now called Magician in the Laboratory and his time working with the scientists and how easily fooled they are. You know, a PhD does not give you an expertise in as a magician, you know. You're just as easily fooled as anybody else. I'm waiting for that book to come out. It should be great. And I am dying to do a Wikipedia page for the Alpha Project. I love that. And I, it's got to mention on the JREF page, I believe, but I want a whole page on that. I'm dying to do that. It's just like one of my things that some day I will do, but, you know, that doesn't mean anything else. - Well, that's one of our listeners is up for it. They can get involved and that would be, you know, one of the ways you can get involved in GSOW as we talked about earlier. Could you maybe hit on some of the other points that I would hypothesize you need translators especially? What are some of the other ways someone might get involved? - Well, with GSOW, we need everybody to do everything all the time and even things I don't even know that I need yet because we're only been around three years. I badly need translators, people who can translate a page from one language to another, obviously. You don't even need to have great skills in language necessarily because we have other people who will look over the page before you make it live. But it's more of a, how do I say this? It's more, we're looking for a personality type. We're looking for a type of person that maybe has some time on their hands that is willing to go through the training. And as I said, it's okay with the idea that this is probably something that I'm entering into that is gonna be around for, I'm gonna be doing this for a few years. You're gonna join a community of people who are like-minded, we're very friendly, it's a lot of fun. You know, we get together when we can at different conferences and it's a blast. And we're looking for people who are good at finishing projects. We're looking for that kind of personality. And people who are okay with criticism 'cause we give tons of constructive criticism. You can't have, you can't take it too seriously. And busy people are actually the best for this because they say if you want something done, give it to somebody who's busy because they know how to better manage their time and so on. So we're looking for people who are, you know, just looking for an avenue of a way of relaxing. This is better than doing crossword puzzles. Trust me, it's far better than sitting and watching TV. You're gonna expand your mind. You're gonna get this deep feeling of satisfaction. It's a powerful feeling too. When you write these pages and you make these edits, it feels wonderful. I put up a page, I put up a quote on Walmart's page about their homeopathy and I felt so empowered. Here I am, Susan Gervik and Salinas, California. Nobody here and just absolutely no one who just went to Walmart's page and put up a post about their involvement with homeopathy and it felt so good. - Yeah, it's really neat. One of the biggest retailers out there and a little edit can help educate everyone. - Yeah, yeah, it's a great feeling, absolutely great feeling. And I mean, I totally encourage anybody to get involved or if you have more questions, I mean, goodness gracious. There's so many things to do. And I totally support anybody who's willing to do anything as I said at the beginning. I have lots of projects. I have Skeptic Action, which is we use Rebutter and Web of Trust to rate paranormal websites. You can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and you're following Skeptic Action. And I have tons of things that people could do. I have ideas of things that I would love to see done, that if somebody's looking for a project and they wanted to make it their own, they don't want to join mine, they want to have their own. I have lots of ideas of things that need to be done. I don't know how to do them or I don't have time to do them, but they need to be done. And you can come to me and I will advise you, I will tell you, oh, that's a great idea that you have, but someone is already doing it right now. So why don't you join their project? Why don't you work with them? And I'm like a hub. I have my finger in every pie in the skeptical community. And so you come to me and you say, Susan, I have this idea or I have this talent or I have this or this or this. And we say, well, how about this? You can go to that person or you can hear this or I'm going to put you in contact with this person over here who would love to work with you and so on. - Yeah, you, a web of trust and rebutter are both great tools I have installed. I'll link to in the show notes for anyone who wants to check those out. And is it the daily Skeptic is the account from which you tweet a recommended site to go and review with those tools every day? - It's called Skeptic Action. And it is every day you receive, if you sign up on Twitter, you'll receive one tweet a day that gives you a URL, you go to it and you rate it. You look it over and you say, hmm, what is this? And then you rate it positive. Is it trustworthy? Is it not trustworthy? That's about as simple as it is. And you rate it on a scale, you say, it's very trustworthy. I would love to have my kids go over here and read this page on homeopathy. What a great idea. Or colon cleansing or enemas or, I mean, you know, there's all kinds of stuff, Bigfoot, UFOs, 911 conspiracies. We do tons of different topics and it's mixed up. And you rate it. And when we as a collective group, we can make changes to those pages by rating them every day. And it makes the scores change. And what it can do is it can scare away people from pages that they probably have no business going to. Because they'll go to it and they'll see this web of trust or they'll see this rebuttal. And it's a great way of just being active in the skeptic community. Takes about 30 seconds a day once you've installed the plug-in web of trust or the plug-in rebutter. It's very simple to use. And I think that everybody should be able to do that. It's on Facebook, Google Play, so Twitter. So unless you're not on one of those three, what the hell are you doing, you know? Well, Susan, this has been great. Is there anything you think we've missed in covering that you'd like to make sure the listeners know about? Oh, I could go on for a couple of months. Anything that you want to do is the right thing to do. Please know Slack Division. No liking pages and signing petitions, please, people. Don't be going out there and thinking you're doing anything by liking a video on YouTube. Because you aren't doing anything. It's called Slack Division. So don't do that. Please don't vote in polls and all that stuff. That's a waste of your time. Instead, go to a podcast like this when you're listening to on iTunes and rate them. That's far more important, write a review and say, this podcast is really great. I loved this interview because not only does it inspire you to keep up the project and keep you feel motivated. And if they give constructive feedback, I'm sure that's not just slamming you for something. But if they give you constructive feedback. So I did something wrong. Yeah, sure. They could say maybe you could do this or you could do that. But what it does is it also brings your rating up to a higher level and it'll make this podcast, another podcast out there, reach a larger audience outside of our choir. So it's improving scientific skepticism all over the world by you rating a podcast today. So when you hang up and whenever you guys finish listening, I want you all to go to iTunes and rate a podcast, please. It's also good I did to go to Amazon and rate a book and so on and so on and so on. Because that is actually doing something, even though it's a very small thing. But when it's a lot of people together doing something, we really can make a huge difference. We really can. - I can say from being not only someone who works on them, but who's seen the benefit of using them, all those ratings and reviews play heavily into rankings, especially on iTunes. You rate a podcast or if enough people do, that's what gets it to the top and gets other people to find it. - And we want to get outside of our choir. That's the whole idea, really. You know, let's make scientific skepticism fun, let's make it cool, let's change this attitude that people have towards skeptics as being curmudgeons and stuff. That's another reason why we're working on these like the PDF pages that we do. I don't want it to read like a resume. And we take these pages that are, look like they've been written like a resume. In fact, I'm sure they probably written by somebody's grad student, you know? And they're horrible. We want to put color. We don't want it to look like they spring from the loins of some Ivy League parents. You know, we want them, we want the page to be truthful, but you know, we want to put on there that yeah, their parents were a shoe salesman and, you know, they struggled in high school. They had dyslexia or maybe they, you know, they finally found a math teacher that really explained math to them correctly. And now they went on and they got a degree in math. Or, you know, or maybe they were born and raised in some little town somewhere where they didn't even have TV or, I don't know. I want, I want true stories. I don't want them embellished, but I wanted people to be able to read it and go, that could be me, that I can do that. I'm, I could, you know, I'm from a town just like that and look at this person was able to do and now they have a Wikipedia page. So I want true stories not embellished, but I don't want it to be a resume. I want it to be interesting and I want people to understand that we're just human beings too. We just maybe have a little slant that's a little different. We're very into logic and numbers and, you know, just love us anyway, we're not bad people. We have cats and parrots and things we're really lovable people. We might be kind of hard to talk to sometimes because we're, you know, very interested in the logic and the numbers of things, but we're good people. We don't, yeah, we don't kick our cats, no, never. - So to end my podcast, I like to ask all my guests to share two recommendations with listeners. Could be, you know, website, a book, anything that makes sense to you. The first I ask is what I call the benevolent recommendation, which is for something you support and appreciate, but have no particular affiliation with. And, but, you know, you think it could get some good publicity out of it. And the second is the self-serving recommendation, which I hope you'll push to something that completely benefits you in what you're trying to achieve directly, maybe even in addition to some of the stuff we've mentioned today. - Oh, and I knew this question was coming. It is really hard for me to pick a website or something that doesn't get a lot of attention that I'm not affiliated with in any way, really, because I'm affiliated with just about everything that's out there that's, you know, I'm contacting the person saying I love this. This is great. Let me put it on my social networks. But I thought about it. And the only one that I can think of that your listeners would be really probably interested in is called the odds must be crazy. And I don't even need to give you the website because of course, everybody out there knows how to write the odds must be crazy in a web browser. And you could find it. This is an IIG project and it is run by a very good friend of mine, Wendy Hughes and John Rail and Brian Hart and Barbara Drescher and different people. But it is a site that I think your listeners would really, really enjoy. It's about coincidences. The real stories that people have coincidences, they write to the odds must be crazy and they pick a few of those stories and they go through with a statistician who evaluates what are the odds of this thing happening. And they love it when you write in and you give them stories that seem really bizarre and odd. And oh my gosh, they've got some crazy things. But once you start listening to how actually it isn't that crazy and how likely it really is, it makes people really think about members and coincidences and odds and it's fascinating. I think your listeners are gonna love. The odds must be crazy. - Yeah, great one. - And then the self-serving one. You know, you could read my blog on Girl of Skepticism on Wikipedia if you're interested in like voyeurism and looking and seeing what we do and how we improve pages. The IIG's website, you could go to, oh my gosh, there's, you know, I'm Susan Gerbick.com. If you want to come to my website and you can see all kinds of ideas, I am involved in many, many projects and I like it that way 'cause I like to keep busy. So, Susan Gerbick.com is kind of like a hub for being able to go from there. You can get ahold of me, you can follow me on all the social media. You can look at my YouTube site. You can go to my Picasso site and see all kinds of thousands of photos have taken at different skeptic conferences. I have lots of interviews and things like that I've done on YouTube. You can look at, you can go from there, you can go to a lot of places. So, I guess, Susan Gerbick.com. And it's spelled G. - Yeah, that's a great starting point. - G-E-R-P-I-C, Gerbick. - Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Susan, for doing this. This is really great. I'm glad I got a chance to talk to you. I think you're coming on. - Well, thank you, Kyle. I really appreciate it. I think it's a lot of fun kind of talking from more of a numbers. Kind of, I kind of faked it pretty good, you know? - Sure. (laughing) - Well, thank you so much. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]