Cover art for the single that will soon be on iTunes. A nickel for anyone who can identify the inspiration for the design.

Two weeks ago I gave my perspective on the production of Skeptoid #250, The History of Knowledge; which wasn’t perhaps the most insightful because I’m not a musician. I was just the dude standing behind the microphone trying to do what he was told. Some of the comments on the web transcript of the episode were asking for more information about some of the dozen tracks specifically, and so Peter Zachos, who composed and produced the piece, answered. Here are Peter’s remarks, which should interest the musically inclined among you, with [my comments]:

Some people have expressed interest in the behind-the-scenes production of “The History Of Knowledge”.  I’m happy to shed some light on how it was done.  I work primarily in Pro Tools, using an extensive library of sounds and plug-ins to produce each genre of music.  I work out of my studio, ClickClack, in Culver City.  This is where we recorded Brian’s vocals, as well as all the guitars and backup vocals.

I’ll go through each track and briefly describe the process:

1. Caveman – This I just made up. Needed to give two feelings here: 1) tribal, and 2) dumb. So I tracked maybe 20 overdubbed takes of me grunting as different characters (I even went so far as to choose certain voices that sounded like more “leaders” of the tribe and others that were the sheepish “followers”.)  Native Instruments “Battery” provided the one or two drums. Then it was just a matter of tracking Brian.  When Liz came in to record her vocals for the opera and swing, she heard the Caveman track and started laughing, and we put her in the tracking room just for fun; the result is the naive virgin going “yeah!” Total spontaneous addition.

2. Gregorian Chant: I wrote this around an aeolian mode with a sharp-VI scale degree. The half-step really gives it an ancient quality. Brian did all his vocals live with NO AUTOTUNING…  I only needed to track his lines with my voice first.  He had a much easier time singing to an already existing track than going it alone.  I loaded a nice cathedral impulse response into Altiverb 6 to give us a nice sounding hall.

3. Renaissance – I dug into my Norton Anthology of Early Music, listened to a ton of this stuff, and settled on these chords. Very standard for the era. Native Instruments Kontakt has a nice harpsichord, though I eq’ed it a bit to make it sound just right. Also used a soprano and alto recorder.

4. Opera – Most of these orchestral sounds come from The Vienna Symphony Library; Brian provided some great lyrics for this, and I just read them over and over to myself until I began to hear them musically.  It starts as Queen Of The Night, from Mozart’s “Die Zauberflot”, and ends with Wagner’s Overture to “Tannhauser”. The recitatives in between is just me messing around with some classical western tonality. [It's cool that this actually includes a perfectly serviceable little libretto, even in its brevity - BD]

5. It is O, Susanna! the original by Stephen Foster, and our first track to feature the amazing and multi-talented Kenton Youngstrom on guitars. I always underestimate Kenton; I ask him to bring three guitars to the session; two acoustic and one electric… and I don’t even think about a banjo. Meanwhile, we get to this track, and he says “Aw, man, I should have brought my banjo!”  And I feel like an idiot for not asking him to just go ahead and bring all eight hundred of his guitars.  Kenton improvised all the acoustic on this track and lent it a wonderfully authentic flavor.

6. This is an Al Bowlly-type ditty that was most influenced by “You Took Advantage Of Me.”  There are dozens of lo-fi, gritty audio emulators, but in the end, the freeware Izotope Vinyl was just what I needed to get that crackling sound of an early 78 platter, though I did need some liberal EQing.  Listening to Al Bowlly recordings, it’s amazing how much low frequency remains in spite of the age of the original masters. I used Waves Renaissance EQ to emulate the curve.  Brian had the style down from the beginning, and tracked his vocals in just two takes. I found a beautiful celeste in the Vienna Symphony library that fit well into the track. [The "Mammy" tacked onto the end is an homage to a character created by the great Al Jolson, to which Al Bowlly sometimes gave such a nod. I liked it so threw it in there, even though it doesn't mean anything in this context - BD]

7. You can’t do WWII Swing without a nod to the Andrews Sisters, but believe it or not, the inspiration came from this incredible and disturbing video of the Ross Sisters: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DJVSP3N5a4 There’s a great misdirection in this production: strip away Elizabeth from the track and it sounds cheap and amateur. Her work is what makes it sound like the real thing.  I worked with her to get the unique intonation, note-sliding and bending inherent in this style of singing, and we did each harmony overdub one by one. Izotope Vinyl once again provided the lo-fi sound, though I let more mid-high frequencies in since it’s from a later decade. Brian did his lines in one take. [The part was named "Bing" in the score, but I won't make that claim. This piece poked fun at the martini-swizzling chauvinism of the day, as well as a quick shot at segregation - BD]

8. So…  James Taylor?  J/K….  This is probably my personal favorite from a production standpoint. Elvis recordings have a really difficult snare drum sound to emulate.  This was the best I could do.  Abbey Road 60′s drum kit, and the Waves API EQ.  I tried every compressor known to man, and in the end realized that it just sounded better without one, but it still wasn’t quite right.  Finally and quite by random accident, I placed the digidesign Lo-Fi plug on there and added just a tiny bit of distortion, and it worked.  The rest is all Kenton who really shines here and got that classic 50′s guitar tone just right. Brian did a fantastic Elvis as I knew he would. As before, I tracked my own version of the vocal for him to sing to, and erased it later when mixing.  But I’d left my “thankyouverymuch” at the end and it sounded more natural.  Brian kept querying me about his own “thankyouverymuch”; I think at some point I’ll need to mixdown another mix with his intact. [What some interpreted as "America bashing" in this piece was actually McCarthyism bashing - BD]

9. I can hear some Boston in there; also the four-part harmonies I did are from my love for Crosby, Stills and Nash (as well as America.) This was the only part of the whole episode that I had no initial idea of where to start musically.  I love prog rock and I would have liked to explore that territory, but hey, each of these segments had to be around a minute long.  Brevity is not one of prog rock’s strong suits.  Kenton did a great job with the guitars, though again I wished I’d asked him to bring a sitar. In the end I played a sampled sitar, as well as the Native Instruments B4 organ plug w/Leslie speaker. Brian came up with these great lyrics that mean absolutely nothing, and I muddled through something of a melody and tracked it for him.  Then he replaced my vocal with his and I overdubbed all the harmonies.

10. Since I grew up in the 80′s, this came easy to me. This resembles any corporate-80s AOR rock, but I liked the idea of combining Giorgio Morodor’s score to Top Gun with Sisters-of-Mercy-sounding vocals. (think the casino scene from Rain Man.) I found this great drum loop from Zennheiser samples; it sounded like a Phil Collins drum track, all compressed and gated and corporate. Then I layered it with Korg synth stabs and Kenton did a fantastic “Starship” corporate guitar solo.  In order to make it as slick and overproduced and annoying as possible, I chorused the guitar and then applied a doubler and then a stereo-spreader. Some of the drum beats come from classic drum machines that were in great use at the time, like the Oberheim DMX and the LinnDrum.

11. I confess. It’s Green Day, though the last couplet line is more Ramones than Green Day.  Native Instruments’ Guitar Rig has a built-in preset that’s a dead ringer for Billie Armstrong, so Kenton patched into that and overdubbed two identical guitar tracks, which I panned left and right.  The drums are a drum program called BFD, compressed with the Kramer PIE plug.  Brian tries hard to sound young, naive and stupid, and as he is none of these things, fails spectacularly. [I dispute that, I think the smell of hemp is palpable in my performance - BD]

12. Energy – I don’t know what I can say, really. This is the easiest music in the world to make. It’s the musical equivalent of making toast or a PB&J sandwich; hard to screw up. I just listened to a few Black Eyed Peas and Lady Gaga songs and followed suit, which is what those acts are doing anyway.  Brian wrote some great lyrics and I kept hearing the word “Energy” in my head and tried to feel its natural rhythm.  That’s how I came up with the chorus. From early one when we were brainstorming about the episode, I told him I had to include a part in this song where we list an assortment of woo.  So when it came down to it I wrote and performed the mini-rap in the bridge. But Brian jumps back in for the “Baby you balance my CHI”.  The delight on Brian’s face when he heard himself autotuned for the first time should have been videotaped.

It was a splendid time all around, and I can only hope to work on some great music with Brian again in the future. I hope this has been an interesting read; if you have even more detailed questions, I love tech talk, so feel free to email me.

Peter Zachos
peterzachos@me.com

The art at the top of this post will soon appear as the cover art for a full single of Energy which will be available on iTunes very soon. We hope you have as much fun listening to it as we had making it.

Skeptoid has a long-standing tradition of making every 50th episode a lavish musical production. This tradition began last year at episode 150, which established the lavish musical employing a host of talented professionals; and crumbled all to hell this week at episode 200, when I applied my own unassisted imbecility toward the construction of a musical piece. The result is a parody of marketing efforts from purveyors of pseudoscience in the form of a song entitled Buy It!

–>> Click here to listen now (3 minutes) <<–

Being an experienced non-musician, and quite impressively talented on no musical instruments, I elected to make this piece an a cappella. This allowed me to leverage my deep gifts for not singing. Critics have already praised the performance as one of the great voices made for blogging.

My background in not composing music helped to cunningly construct chord progressions as provocative and complex as those from The Wiggles.

And so armed with the needed talents, I proceeded. Among those talents are not the abilities to count beats, keep rhythm, or hold a note, so I had to cheat a bit. Contrary to suppositions I’ve already heard, no sampling or pitch correction was used in Buy It! But there is a lot of looping. This meant I had to record each loop, usually 4 measures long, in the correct pitch and timing. So I played each vocal part separately on a keyboard into Garageband, each on its own track. I listened to each track solo, as a guide, as I sang each line. There are thirteen separate vocal tracks, plus ten handclap tracks and one finger snap track. Put them all together, mute out the keyboard guide tracks, and presto, we have a multitrack vocal performance that’s actually in sync and reasonably close to being on key. Pretty good, I thought, for someone who has no clue and little hope of ever obtaining a clue.

Yes, I know there is some clipping in a couple parts. The clipping provoked much colorful language. It’s not in the original recordings, so perhaps some future engineering will get rid of it.

The crowd-shouted “Buy it!” line caused a lot of headaches. Richard Saunders gathered a crew together in Australia and did some takes. I thought it would be fun to make this a bi-continental piece, but unfortunately I ended up being unable to use that clip; it just didn’t sound right when I mixed it in. I also gathered my family around the mic and we all shouted it too, but it came out unintelligible. So I ended up reverting to my original concept of a Village People style chorus: a combination of basses and falsettos. I doubt any listeners were able to divine that inspiration, but that’s what I was going for. Regardless, it was the only one of my three options that worked.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it. It was fun to make, and I think its message is a worthy addition to the Skeptoid body of work.

Therefore, the only way to produce inFact is to take time away from my regular professional career as a consulting computer scientist. This is the kind of career change that I’m looking to make anyway, to become of a full-time science journalist and skeptical outreach professional. But being the family breadwinner, I can only make such a change when there is sufficient money in the game.

So I’ve been studying the web video landscape for some time, seeing what models are making money. It’s an easy answer. None of them are making money. There are exceptions to every rule – every financial model for web video has a few standouts who make good money – but the rule for each is that it must be done at your own risk and at your own expense. Most sponsors are not seeing a worthwhile return. Investors have shifted their venture dollars from content to infrastructure. On the plus side, it’s a dynamic arena, so much so that this paragraph will very likely be outdated very soon. But that doesn’t offer much practical assistance to those like myself, who have good content and just want to get it out there.

The default offering for such content producers is ad revenue. Video sharing sites, of which YouTube is just one of many (albeit by far the most important), offer you a pittance. Ads are overlaid, or placed in front of, your video, and you receive a small share of any ad revenue. Unless you have huge traffic because you’re a celebrity or are driven by a popular television show, you’re unlikely to get enough traffic for the ad revenue to cover your costs. I’m neither, so that does not bode well.

Skeptoid is listener supported. About one half of one percent of listeners make a voluntary 99 cent per episode recurring payment. This covers the out-of-pocket expenses for Skeptoid and some of the travel and related costs. It certainly doesn’t cover my time, but then I never expected it to; Skeptoid is done strictly outside of business hours. I’ll ask the same for subscribers to inFact, most of whom I expect to come from outside the Skeptoid listenership. inFact will be enrolled in all the ad revenue programs, but it will also be offered as a video podcast so it can be downloaded through iTunes. As of this writing, those downloads are ad-free (and thus revenue-free); so it’s that market from whom I hope to get some viewer support.

You’ll see the new first season of 13 episodes of inFact appear early in the first quarter of 2010, unless something changes between now and then. When you do, it will be most widely distributed through ad supported channels. It will also be available for ad-free distribution as a video podcast. I fully expect that the first season will be produced at a near-total loss, but these are the kind of first steps that everyone needs to take if we’re going to find a profitable model. Yes, this was a difficult decision to make, and yes, I do have domestic support, if you know what I mean.

When inFact appears, I hope you’ll subscribe and enjoy it, but mostly I hope you’ll share it with others. It should be ideal for schools for all ages, and I promise there won’t be a single episode that you wouldn’t show to your mother. Listen to Skeptoid, or watch SkepticBlog, for further announcements. As I always say, supportive viewers and listeners are the critical link in the chain for spreading the value of critical thinking to those out there who need it most.

As you may know, Skeptoid has been my labor of love for over three years. Unlike most other nominated podcasts, I do it almost entirely on my own: I have no co-hosts, producers, company, or sponsors behind me, like most. So I make my pitch that (if you like Skeptoid) it deserves your vote through all my hard work, even if there are other shows also nominated that you also like.

You may note that there are several of your favorite skeptical podcasts nominated in various categories, including the excellent SGU from our fellow SkepticBlogger Steven Novella. I encourage you to vote carefully: If skeptics split our votes, we may have a Ross Perot effect and some totally random podcast will beat us all. So I’m asking you to choose Skeptoid in the Education category, which is the category in which it has a plausible chance to win.

To vote, go to http://www.podcastawards.com/, and vote for Skeptoid in the Peoples Choice category (they misspelled it, but don’t be thrown off), and also the Education category. Then fill in your name and submit the form.

Heads up that there are two annoying things about the voting process. First, you have to enter your email in a form (don’t worry, no spam) and click a link in your email to confirm your vote. Second, you can vote once per day through November 30. While you don’t have to, other podcast listeners will, so your vote diminishes if you don’t also.

So please vote for me, and please set yourself an alarm to do it every day through the rest of the month. Show that you appreciate a good podcast, and that you like to see it recognized. Thanks!

I have an upcoming Skeptoid podcast episode for which I want to include some informal survey data (it’s the September 29 episode, #173, and I’ll update this page when it’s available. The topic and the results will all be revealed on that day). I’ve also been thinking a lot about Twitter for its potential to virally spread information. So I thought it would be a clever idea to combine my survey with Twitter, which (I thought) would be a lot of fun for everyone and would accomplish two goals:

1. Virally spread awareness of my podcast, Skeptoid
2. Get a huge number of respondents to my survey

Well, it worked. The good parts worked better than I hoped, and unfortunately, undesired side effects were just as potent. Now, before I describe what happened, let me state outright that it was shockingly naive of me not to foresee what would happen. It was dumb, it annoyed a lot of people, and I have no excuse other than failure to think it through very well. So, my apologies, and I offer no defense of what turned out to be a giant mess.

Here’s how it worked. I posted questions to Twitter in this form:

Skeptoid Twitter Experiment, Question 7, is now live. Get it now at http://skeptoid.com/twitter

If you followed the link, it would take you to a page where you would answer some questions, and it would give you a code to post your response back onto Twitter, like this:

I’m doing the Skeptoid Twitter Experiment (http://skeptoid.com/twitter) – My answer is #skep_4_4 – Follow @BrianDunning to join

The effect was twofold. First, people unknown to me who follow my followers saw these posts, were intrigued, and followed me, boosting the numbers of my Twitter followers, and reaching a larger and larger number of people with the question announcements. Second, among groups of people who follow each other (like many of my followers who know me from Skeptoid and know each other from JREF, TAM, etc.), great colliding volumes of redundant answer messages from everyone they follow clogged their Twitter inboxes and made it virtually impossible to see normal messages. I heard from one guy who shares 80 Twitter friends with me, and if they each answered the 8 survey questions, that made 640 tweets.

Many called my attention to other less intrusive ways the survey could have been given, including a number of free web survey tools. Having a web development background, I’m aware of these, and even built a languishing one myself – http://GroovySurveys.com (a day’s work over Christmas break a few years ago) – but there’s a reason I didn’t do it that way. It wouldn’t have been a Twitter survey. And the whole point of my experiment was to see how well a survey worked where the entire thing – questions and answers – were sent via Twitter; and particularly to evaluate its viral effect.

There were some interesting observations to be made. Three times, before the survey started, I made one daily post to Twitter like this:

Please RT: Be a part of the Skeptoid Twitter Experiment: http://skeptoid.com/twitter

And, predictably, this enticing message began to spread. I started seeing it being retweeted (Twitterese for “repeated”) among people who did not follow me. My follower count began to increase. By Monday morning, when I posted the first question, the rise was on a very solid trend.

The first half of the questions were posted throughout Monday, and if things grew before, they exploded now. I use Tweetdeck to view Twitter, and I have columns to view mentions of my name (@BrianDunning) and the podcast (#Skeptoid). Both were absolutely clogged. I thought this was wonderful; but since nobody else is likely to follow either of those search words, it never occurred to me that anyone else was having the same problem.

Tuesday morning I awoke to a barrage of emails, direct messages, and public replies. Obviously, all was not well. Accusations of spam were flying everywhere – which hurt, I’ll admit, because I hate spam as much as the next person and it’s the last thing I’d ever want to be associated with. The growth in my follower count had stopped.

What it reminded me of was junior high school, when a few Kool Kidz wore Izod Lacoste shirts. Soon everyone had to have one. And then, once they became popular, the Kool Kidz wouldn’t be caught dead in them. My survey grew quickly when it sounded like fun, swamped the market, and everyone wanted out.

I posted some hasty apologies and did what little I could to reduce any perceived spamminess. I took my name and the site name out of all the messages, killed the invitation to follow me, and put instructions on the landing page for economizing posts. But then I made things worse: I publicly offered to terminate the experiment if 10 people asked me to do so, but I suggested that they do so by Twitter direct message. I was unaware that direct messages can only be exchanged between people who follow each other, and the handful of personal acquaintances whom I follow did not happen to be the same people as those out in the real world that I’d annoyed. Oops. At least I can boast to having received no such direct message requests, but it’s a pretty thin boast.  ;-)

My stuffing of fingers into the dike seemed to help a lot. Adoption rose again, and through the end of Tuesday, my follower count resumed its growth (though I can’t figure out why, since there was no mention of my account anymore), and answers continued flooding in.

So, as far as providing the survey data I wanted, it was a massive success. As far as being user friendly, it was a massive failure, and would probably get my account banned if I did it again. So take what lessons you can from this – I certainly have.

If you don’t know him, Chuck Baldwin is one of the more legitimate faces of the “Government is out to kill us all” conspiracy theorist crowd. Chuck was the 2008 Presidential candidate for the hardcore conservative Guns-n-Bibles Constitution Party. Chuck wrote:

Even Mr. Skeptoid himself, Brian Dunning, grudgingly acknowledges the probability of the existence of internment camps on U.S. soil. As with the retired Air Force colonel referred to above, Dunning senses nothing sinister about the existence of the camps, and he doesn’t address the numbers part of the story, but he does admit the plausibility of their existence.

Dunning wrote, “When I first heard the FEMA Prison Camp conspiracy story, it seemed ridiculous and paranoid at face value. But when I finally dug in to research it, I started by searching for the origins of the rumors, and found to my surprise that nearly all of the legal foundation and precedent for such a plan does in fact exist.”

I did say that in my episode. The legal precedent does in fact exist that would permit the President to erect prison camps and throw in American citizens. It’s surprising when you read the details, but it shouldn’t be when you connect the dots and see how it’s used, both in intent and in practice. These acts (which are matters of public record) are what permitted the National Guard to step in during the LA Riots, and I didn’t hear the conspiracy theorists complaining about it when it was saving their asses from wild mobs. It also permitted the military to be deployed to assist in Hurricane Katrina, though it need not be reiterated here what a clusterfucked travesty of incompetence that turned out to be.

Where Chuck jumps the tracks is his analysis that I “acknowledged the probability of (the camps’) existence”. Meaning, I said there probably are such camps. This is basically the opposite of what I concluded, so I figure Chuck either quoted mined without listening to the full episode, or didn’t care and simply used my name to add credibility to his position. Wrong, Chuck. I was pretty clear that I thought those who believe the government has such camps are delusional. Here are a few of my actual conclusions from the episode:

To a responsible skeptic, the other examples of government behavior that we have constitute pretty poor support for the existence of domestic concentration camps.

Times change. (The WWII internment of Japanese Americans) would never happen today, and although the government technically has the same powers to do it now as it did then, it’s not realistic to be concerned about it recurring.

I don’t remember anyone electing a politician who wants to throw millions of Americans into prison camps.

To make effective electoral decisions, you need to maintain a healthy skepticism, and not go off the deep end and suppose that every Halliburton contract is a slippery slope leading to Americans being gassed in military concentration camps.

If you see barbed wire around a train yard, consider the possibility of other explanations (like the train company doesn’t need stuff being stolen) before you conclude that the Illuminati are out to kill you.

Chuck, for the record, I’ve seen no plausible evidence and don’t believe for a moment that FEMA maintains a single prison camp in readiness with the intent of locking up and/or executing law-abiding American citizens. We all agree that they shouldn’t, including lefties, righties, cats, and redwood knurls. I hope that’s clear enough, so please don’t use my name anymore to promote your, or Alex Jones’, sensationalized paranoia. Thank you.

Later in the show, after “Shirley” had been “thrown out and escorted from the grounds” (so I believed), Michael and I were having our discussion, on camera, about my findings with the psychics. Suddenly the studio doors slammed open, and in ran Shirley, pushing a cart holding a bodybag! I knew that Shirley was unbalanced and belligerent, so I stood the hell back and expected that security was going to tackle him and get him out of there. No such thing happened. In fact, the film crew hardly reacted at all. Michael had not had my previous experience with Shirley, so he stepped up cheerfully and asked to see what was in the bag. After some tussling, they got it open, and there’s some guy with a desk calculator or something taped to his chest, and another to his arm: The Six Million Dollar Man. Shirley was right: Lee Majors had died, and here was the body to prove it.

At this point, Michael (clearly less naive than I) asked if he was being punked, if this whole day was a setup and a joke on him. I told him no, this was real, and this guy was just a nut. This is why Michael is the publisher of Skeptic Magazine, and I’m just some guy.

I was aware the crew was short on time, and I know that time costs money, nowhere more than on a production set. So I had no patience for Shirley’s hijinks, and refused to play, standing over against the wall like a curmudgeon. I damn near called the police, because Shirley was as belligerent as ever demanding that I give him the $50,000 he claimed to have just won, and nobody on set seemed to take any interest in getting him out of there or in calling security. Michael was much more fun than I.

Long story short, they eventually put on a show that looked like they were wrestling him and his Six Million Dollar Man out the door, and Michael and I gave a brief 5-minute conclusion and wrap-up for their show.

So I would like to take this opportunity to illuminate for you just how big of an idiot I am. All day long I noticed red flags about the production, but it never occurred to me to heed them.

• The first red flag came when they told me I was going to be the host of the segment for their big show on Showtime. This is without ever meeting me, or having any conversation about the format of the show, or anything. But I hadn’t met them yet either, so I just figured they must really know what they’re doing. Pretty much always a bad assumption to make, class.
• Their web site was a default iWeb template. Perhaps 10 minutes of work had gone into it.
• The next red flag waved when I arrived at the studio. One of the producers, a friendly guy calling himself Steve, told me they’d secured a $50,000 prize to award to any psychics who could pass my tests today. That’s a fair amount of money to fool away, given that they’d paid very little attention to the tests, and hadn’t really even asked what I was going to do. It was extraordinarily half-assed.
• Next, I saw the set. They’d told me this was for Showtime, but the set looked like it was made from whatever random crap furniture happened to be in the adjoining office. Most pitiful was the show’s logo, “Versus”, which appeared to be hand drawn with a Magic Marker on foamcore. Steve probably noticed that I practically fell over when I saw the set. But, trusting fellow that I am, I just figured, well, their show is really going to suck; but they’d paid me so I resolved to give them the benefit of the doubt and do my best as their host.
• The makeup girl was the most lackadaisical person I’ve ever met, and I even brought an assortment of extremely obvious pimples with which to challenge her. She left me to mop sweat off my face by the gallon all day long — it was about 120 degrees under the lights, with no A/C, and I was there all day. I’m sure they got plenty of footage of that.
• Throughout the day, the director, Misha, couldn’t have cared less what happened. He never gave me any meaningful direction, he never spoke to me or to the psychics about what he wanted to see, and he was completely unfazed by the absurd direction Shirley took his show. (Like all these red flags, this one makes perfect sense in retrospect – but at the time I took it as merely sad, rather than as a tipoff.)
• Part of what they wanted me to do was have a conversation with Michael Shermer. Two skeptics chatting away like old pals? Makes for some real wild television. I even brought that up to Misha and Steve, but they shrugged and acted like they didn’t care.
• All day long, the crew and a few extra random guys sat around like wooden statues. They were completely uninterested in Shirley and his Six Million Dollar Man, as if they’d seen it all a hundred times before. Even when I asked them for help, they might as well have been asleep.

So, obviously something was wrong. It was painfully obvious from the minute I got there. But, fool that I am, I never caught on. I will publicly admit here and now that it never occurred to me that the show was a setup, and I could not possibly have been given more obvious hints. You’d think I would have been at least slightly skeptical. Nope. They got me good: hook, line, and sinker.

But even though I knew something wasn’t right, they’d paid me to “host their show”, so I gave it my level best all day long. Even when I stood off set being a curmudgeon, it was because I did not wish to contribute to their time being wasted.

After the fact, Michael searched online and found that for some weeks, people had been Twittering and posting warnings about their production company, saying that it’s fake, and to stay away. Even Daryl Hannah was sucked in by them within the past couple of weeks, though we’re not certain if it’s for the same show or not (probably, given the time frame and the same ambush format). We’ll never know, because she saw the fake right away and dumped them.

And, as more than one person has already emailed me, anyone who attended The Amazing Meeting 6 in Las Vegas last year even watched Shirley Ghostman do the same sort of ambush to Chris French in the UK. Chris played the YouTube video on the big screen. How did Michael and I miss that? Well, I spoke right after Chris, so I was probably out of the room preparing my talk. Anyway that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

So I’ll conclude by giving a simple word of advice, and as always, do as I say and not as I do. Be skeptical.

Why, getting to experience it all for FREE, of course!

How can you win 2 free tickets? A winner will be drawn at random on March 25, 2009 from all who do the following:

1. Make a YouTube video, stating why you think critical thinking and skepticism are important.
2. Mention the Skeptoid podcast.

3. Once your video is live, email lisa[at]skeptoid.com and give her the URL along with your name.

Deadline for entries is March 24. The winner will be announced right here on March 26. Complete rules are here.

I’m certainly not the first, or even the most articulate, to challenge his mission of promoting belief in alien visitation. Writing about Roswell last year, I referred to him as an obsessed UFO wacko, but he’s been called worse by others. Anyway he called me petty, ignorant, cavalier, lazy, biased, and an anti-UFO fanatic, so I guess we’re…even?

In his piece titled “Brian Dunning Running for Top UFO Debunker” this week, he called me “a skilled liar…. He deserves “Debunker of the Year” award.” (Why are conspiracy and paranormal web sites ALWAYS white text on a black background? I guess they don’t want them to be easily read by people whose eyes are older than 40 years.) Like Friedman, I do have a mission, but UFOs are hardly an interest of mine. Debunking, as I often say, has little value when done for its own sake. Frankly I don’t much care if someone prefers to think that every light in the sky is an alien spaceship. Debunking is only important, and valuable, when a belief is harmful or stands in the way of real scientific, technological, or humanitarian progress.

Believing that UFOs are aliens is not a particularly harmful belief. Indeed, it may even stimulate interest in aerospace development. But it can be part of a pattern of inability to distinguish useful evidence from poor evidence, and when that spreads to other aspects of believers’ lives, harm can be widespread as they start making important decisions based on bad information.

Everyone lies somewhere along the spectrum of what quality of evidence they’ll accept. Friedman and I seem to be pretty far apart on that spectrum. If I think he is too quick to accept ambiguous or anecdotal evidence as indisputable proof of something as extraordinary as alien visitation, I’ll admit I’m probably extraordinarily hard to be moved from the null hypothesis.

Interestingly, both ends of the spectrum accuse each other of similar irrationality. True believers accuse skeptics of ignoring evidence. Skeptics accuse true believers of believing anything they hear. If I have to be in one crazy end of the spectrum or another, I’ll happily stay in the “null hypothesis” camp. I’m open to any evidence you want to present, but if it’s ambiguous, explainable by known or natural phenomena, anecdotal or otherwise of poor quality, don’t expect me to adopt your beliefs. Even if you have lots of such evidence, mountains of such evidence: As I often say, you can stack cowpies as high as you want, they won’t turn into a bar of gold. Good evidence is composed of good evidence, not lots of bad evidence.

If the evidence is good, I’m easy to convince. Over the decades, I’ve absolutely changed my mind and accepted phenomena that I was certain were baloney. I didn’t believe in diamagnetism until I saw water suspended in a magnetic field at the Lawrence Berkeley labs. I didn’t believe the Judica-Cordiglia brothers could have made some of the space recordings they claimed until I learned about the controls that were in place during their recordings, and learned of some plausible explanations for the recordings. I spent 10 years fighting time dilation, claiming that there was no such thing, simply because I didn’t understand it, until I was finally illuminated. I’m not even ashamed to admit that NORAD’s Santa Claus radar reports had me reconsidering into my early teens.

But so far, I haven’t heard anything from Stan Friedman or any other true believer to encourage me to reconsider the null hypothesis on the Betty and Barney Hill story, or any other alien visitation claim. When something is real, it has properties that can be measured and detected. Even today, we can prove that the 1876 Battle of Little Big Horn took place, because we have the testable archeological proof; there is no reliance on anecdotal stories or hypnotic regression needed. I still await the first such testable shred of evidence of any alien visitation.

Well, a lot.  As our production team quietly works towards doing just that, the rest of the world is unfortunately left in the dark, at least as it pertains to “The Skeptologists.” I, and  a handful of others are blessed (or cursed) with the knowledge of the what could be in store for our dutiful production.  That knowledge comes with a price. (And I’m not talking about exorbitant production costs)  We know because we are the ones that are actively doing the work to make this happen. We keep the details of the production quiet for many reasons, among those are the fact that the show is evolving, and we’ve got the right amount of cooks at this point.  The other biggie is that we want to protect the hard work that our entire cast and crew has given to this project by making sure that some other company doesn’t come along and grab our format. (Though even if they did, good luck! We’ve got the Skeptical Dream Team so neener neener neener!)

It’s a strange thing, TV.  First you have to come up with an idea that’s exciting fresh and different.  But, yet, not too out of the box, because on-one want’s to take a BIG risk on a show. It has to be like something that’s currently on the air and working …that’s code for getting good ratings and making the advertisers happy.  If you put together this “new fresh idea” The next thing you are going to hear is “Well how do you differentiate your show from XYZ show currently on the air?”  It’s seems you just can’t win.

We must tread a thin balancing rope between being different, but yet being bankable.

We know what sells, It’s what’s on TV now.  The themes and styles of the shows that you are currently watching however, are already old news to the TV production environment though.  Many of us are already onto the new things, they just haven’t aired yet.

As we move into the jingly cheery month of December, virtually all of Hollywood shuts down, save the small glowing screens of a handful of skeptics who are gearing up to write the first eight episodes of the TV series.  While everyone else is bringing on the holiday cheer and ringing in the New Year, Brian Dunning, David Vienna and myself have our work cut out for ourselves.  Powerful forces in the industry have asked us to prepare more detailed information about the show and it’s future.  This is great news folks! We’ve made it past the first several hurdles. And you know what? We’ve found a group of people who really see the merit of the show and are genuinely interested in taking this ball and running with it! Come January 3rd, when the big slick and over-styled wheels of the entertainment industry spin back up, we’ll be there, outlines in-hand ready to fight the battle of mediocracy with our show that aims to bring intellect, science and just plain old common sense to the common TV viewers. Do we have a snowball’s chance in he…  Ah, in er. Well.  Yeah, we do.