 It's Sunday, July 11th, and this is For Good Reason. Welcome to For Good Reason, I'm DJ Grothi. For Good Reason is the radio show and the podcast produced in association with the James Randy Educational Foundation, an international non-profit whose mission is to advance critical thinking about the paranormal, pseudoscience, and the supernatural. I'm happy that my guest this week is Joe Nicol. He's Senior Research Fellow for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He's really considered one of the world's leading paranormal investigators, a formal professional stage magician and private investigator. He taught at the University of Kentucky before joining the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and he's used his varied background to become widely known as the investigator of myths and mysteries, frauds, forgeries, hoaxes. He's been called the modern Sherlock Holmes, the original Ghost Buster, and in quotes the real-life Skully after that character in X-Files. He's investigated scores of paranormal occurrences and haunted house cases, including the Amneville Horror and the Mackenzie House in Toronto, Canada. He's a veteran of literally hundreds of TV and radio appearances and the author of over 20 books, including Inquest of the Shroud of Turin, Secrets of the Supernatural, Looking for a Miracle, Entities, Psychic Sleuths, Real Life X-Files, The UFO Invasion, and Secrets of the Sideshows. Welcome to For Good Reason, Joe Nicol. My pleasure, DJ. Always good to be with you. Yeah, we've had some fun conversations in the past. This is the first time you've been on For Good Reason, and it's great to have you on. I figured today we'd, since you're really the founding figure, one of the founding figures along with James Randy of the Scientific Investigation of the Paranormal, as opposed to what might just be described as armchair skepticism, I thought we might spend our time today talking about why you do it. Well, exactly. For one thing, when I was eight years old, I knew I was a detective. And I've not wavered in that belief too much. I had a fingerprint kid at an early age and was given to a forensic approach to life. Well, so you're emphasizing detective work, kind of, you know, the analogous crime-scene investigation, going in the field, being a detective, looking at evidence, sleuthing things out, not just doing research in a library, right? Exactly. Of course, research in a library may be a very good part of an investigation. But my background is, as a detective, I was, as you know, I was a magician at the Fudini Hall of Fame, and I was a detective for a world-famous detective agency. So I've actually, you know, investigated all manner of things, from grand theft to cold homicide cases. And in those endeavors, you couldn't get by with being a debunker. I mean... Or just an academic researcher. You have to go in the field and look at evidence. You do. And I learned that as early as 1972. You know, my early case where I went to McKinsey House in Toronto. Indeed. And found that people really were hearing footsteps on the stairs. Only they were coming from the building next door. And that's when I realized, this is what you do. You really have to go on scene. You have to actually investigate. And I thought, if you do, people will believe you and they will love you for it. And how wrong you were on that point, right, Joe? Yes, I found that people didn't want to hear my explanation in some cases. And didn't love me at all. We're quite annoyed with me. So, just as background, before we get into the two main issues I want to explore with you, just cover this distinction you just made between debunking and investigating. You end up debunking, but you're not a debunker, you say. Right. I think we need not to start with the answer. This is actually a principle that PsyCOP, now CSI, came up with, that we would not judge things they priori. That is, we would not, and as the inquiry, decide on something just the same way. We don't want our homicide detectives to just dismiss a shooting as another suicide, even if we find out the guy was shot three times in the back. No, no, a bad case of suicide. No, no, we want actual investigation because we want to know what really happened. And so, I decry, alike, the too credulous believer and the dismissive know-it-all debunker, who from his armchair seems to know everything without ever going to a scene that actually investigated. But after going to all of these scenes and investigating, you end up debunking because you end up coming to the place where the armchair debunker was already at. Well, not exactly. And here's the difference. The armchair debunker, when faced with something like McKenzie House, often says, oh, yeah, those people are probably, they're probably crazy. Now, they probably made that up. They're probably liars. Maybe they were drinking. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Because for them, the issue is just, are there ghosts or not? And they already know the answer to everything. So of course, there are no ghosts. So that's that. But what I'm doing is trying to reach an informed opinion. I'm saying, well, yes, I think there are probably no ghosts. But let's just put that aside for the purpose of investigation and let's see what's actually going on. Because we want to know, in this particular case, we want to know what's actually happening. And it was the printing press next door, the footsteps there. That's what's actually happening. But you and the armchair debunker both arrive at the same place that McKenzie House was not haunted. Right, but let me clarify a point. There was no printing press next door. And some armchair debunkers thought that the sounds of the printing press when they found that the building next door was a publishing house, they said, aha, aha, must be a printing press next door. Turns out there wasn't. So it was only a warehouse in an office building. So armchair debunking isn't going to be very accurate much of the time. It turned out they were hearing something else next door that made a rumbling and clattering sound. But the point is that you can't just guess and the devil is in the details. You need, if you want to know what's actually happening, then you have to investigate. And I would maintain that when people have a question, then they want a real answer. Not just, well, whatever it is, I don't know what it is, but it's not a ghost. That's not a complete answer. They want to know what could cause the sound to put steps on the stairs when there's no one in the house and the house is locked. In one case, it came from the building next door. I do not want to get off onto another important topic, which is how I think your approach is deeply humanistic. You say these claimants, these believers, these people who have this haunted house experience, they are sincere and they want to find out what's really going on. And you can only actually find out what's going on by going to the scene and investigating, not just being a cynical skeptic, a kind of knee-jerk skeptic or debunker saying, oh, there ain't no such thing as ghosts and those people are diluted case closed. Exactly. And it's not just, I mean, I am a humanist skeptic and I do want to be respectful of people. They may be hoaxing in some cases. They may be quite silly, but still if people, if sincere people have claim to see an apparition or claim that something happened, it should behoove us in order to be credible to actually investigate so that we know whereof we speak. I mean, I think that the question, I say this all the time to the debunker type, the question isn't just are there ghosts or not, which is pretty much what they, their answer is, well, there are no ghosts. But the real answer is that there are phenomena that can be investigated and explained. Do people report mysterious phenomena? They do in large numbers. Do they believe it? Even larger numbers. And so if you want to convince people other than just fellow debunkers, you can put together a small group of fellow debunkers and they can all make fun, hoot down others, make fun of them, mutually assure each other that they're just smarter than everybody else in the world and so forth. But if they want to actually convince anybody else, they need to be, if not respectful, they need at least to look at the evidence and to be seen to be fair and to be able to address the real questions. So I think it's not just a matter of are there ghosts or are there not? Yes, yes, there probably are no ghosts, but what exactly is causing this phenomenon? And that's the way that I believe that you get some credibility and that's the way you're able to influence others on radio and television shows. If you just hoot people down and are just making fun of people and clearly don't know the answer. And I've seen that with the Shroud of Turin, for example, before I really got into investigating the Shroud of Turin and I saw lots of skeptics just dismissing it as the silly old relic and so forth. No, actually the Shroud of Turin really had some real mysteries about it and those mysteries needed to be investigated and explained. Not that the act of investigating or explaining whether it's ghosts or the Shroud of Turin is just a marketing strategy in order to not be poo-pooed in a radio interview. That's not your only agenda, but that is one good side benefit of your approach. I have an agenda that has many aspects to it. One is that I believe that we should actually look at mysteries in order to learn about ourselves and the world we live in. Forty years of work that I've done have told me a lot about how quickly we jumped to conclusions, what an illusory world we live in, what kinds of psychological states can produce things that will fool us and so on. I've been richly rewarded for my years of study. And I feel rather sad for the people who aren't concerned about those issues who think they already just know everything and that it's just a simple issue of going, you would only go into a haunted house to see if there's a ghost or not since they already know there aren't any ghosts. That's just a waste of, they think maybe I've wasted 40 years of my life. Not at all. I've learned many things about myself and about others and about our world. Things about our culture, things about science, the human mind, all manner of things. I could go on for hours about things that I've learned and I've had an interesting time doing it and I believe made myself more credible when I talk about such things because I have enemies who may dismiss me as a debunker but if they do, they really obviously haven't read my works, haven't really read my books. The people who have know whatever my faults are, they know I've been there and spent a lot of time actually out in the boat trying to figure out what people were seeing when they reported a lake monster for example. So Joe, you just talked about doing this for 40 years and that helps me concentrate on the two things I really want to get into with you. One, why you keep doing this. Why you keep investigating the paranormal when you've pretty much already done all of it before. And second, why you concentrate on the paranormal in particular and not on so many other things that might deserve skepticism in our society. So over the years, you've looked into hundreds and hundreds of paranormal cases really more than any other living human being, depending on how you define it, maybe Randy has done as many but he doesn't really go in the field like you do. You've done it firsthand. You've actually gone in the field, looked at the evidence on both sides. You've cracked these cases, you've solved them. So let's get at it this way. Do you ever think you've done enough, say ghost busting or lake monster investigating that the question is no longer open to you? In other words, do you feel like you've ever just conclusively solved one of these paranormal subjects for all time? Well, not, maybe not really because again, if the issue was are there ghosts or not? Are there UFOs or not? Or actually, of course there are UFOs. Are there flying saucers or not? Right. On other planets and so on. Then I have to say that from my experience, I think there probably are not. Let me just clarify for our new listeners, by UFOs you don't mean alien spacecraft, you mean unidentified flying objects and by definition something you see in the sky, you don't know what it is, it's a UFO. It is a UFO and so UFOs absolutely exist in huge numbers. I have seen UFOs, of course I usually turn them into high UFOs that is identified flying objects. Okay, so the point you were making, yeah. So what I'm saying is that I'm not just interested in the bottom line. New statues weep, do ghosts exist? Are there extraterrestrial craft? Is Bigfoot running a muck in New Jersey? I have to say that provisionally, I think those things don't exist. I've certainly not been able to find evidence of them. But I'm willing to look at the next case because again it isn't just do they exist or not? As long as this question remains, I will investigate, do people believe in such things? And if so, do they deserve an answer and just the public want and deserve an answer? So if we just keep saying to ourselves, well look, I've been in 100 haunted houses, I could do better things than go into 100 more, been there, done that, end discussion. Well, yes, end of discussion provisionally as far as doesn't look very good for ghosts. But there are other important questions you still think are worth investigating in the process of the investigation of ghosts. You're getting at other topics, like why people believe what they believe and all these other interesting subjects to you. Yes, and some new mystery comes along ever so often and the public is wildly curious of these things. Some statue, you know, weeping oil in Windsor, Ontario recently. Or I was just in your old town of the St. Louis where in the end had a ghostly piano player. And the question is, some teenager said he had spent the night there and he heard ghostly piano music from his room and as far as he knew there was no piano in the premises. Well, how do we explain that, you see? So I happened to be in said lodge and I happened to know that there was a piano in the bar and I happened to get a floor plan and check out where the guy's room was and then I got a passkey to make a long story short. His window was pretty much above the bar's piano. I don't think that was too mysterious and I know what you're thinking right now DJ, concentrate, concentrate. Little psychic test for our listeners. Psychic test, tell me the truth now. You were thinking, that's just too damn easy. What you thinking, man? So, but hey, that's why I get the big buck. Oh, okay, I don't get big bucks. But that's why I do this. It was an easy one, but only because I was troubled to be there and go to a little trouble to check it out. But you still think it was worth it. Let me just ask it this way. Would you at least concede that some of these topics seem more open to further investigation than others? Ghosts, for example, you may never get tired of going into one more kind of haunted house like a crime scene, being all open-minded as you've described. You actually suspend your disbelief. You think it may actually be possible even though you think it's unlikely that this hotel or that house is haunted, you tend to only find creaking doors or this piano coming through the open window, the room, or you find these kind of mundane explanations. It never gets boring or tiresome or tedious to you. But do you think some of these merit more attention than others? In other words, haven't some been done to death? I don't really think so. I think this is the test. If next week, there's a big brouhaha and CNN over, I mean, just pick the most mundane sounding thing you'd like, you know, another creaking door in a haunted house, the existence of God. You're being cheeky there, hardly mundane, yeah. I mean, there are things that we've looked into endlessly, but yes, yes, next week on CNN, we have a statue weeping supernatural tears, and I've looked at many of these, you and I have looked at such things together. Then it behooves me particularly if there was some aspect of it that was a little different. But even if not, I am willing to address that phenomenon. Now I can't go everywhere and give everything my full attention and the Windsor One, which is an ongoing right now, the Windsor, Ontario, I was able to talk with some people and do some research, and I haven't actually gone there. It looks to me, I said I could not distinguish it from a pious deception, and nothing really very astonishing about it. But some years ago, I had a glowing statue, and I had never heard of a glowing statue, and I wanted to find out what on earth is a glowing statue. So I went to Campbell, Ohio, and I investigated a glowing statue. Yeah, you know, I hate to psychologize about this, but one thing that distinguishes you from some other skeptics that I know, if I wanna be uncharitable, I'd call them debunkers and you an investigator, is that you're at a very basic level, you're just a curious person. You, it's not enough, it's dissatisfying to you to say, oh, that's fraud, or there ain't no such thing as ghosts, and leave it at that. You're so curious, you wanna go and actually look at it. You have this kind of youthful curiosity. I don't know if it's youthful, but you know what I mean. Well, exactly, and I take that as a high compliment. I was so curious, I know I was a challenge to my parents. But the curiosity, I would say, is a good and a natural thing. Don't we want, if we have, again, to use an analogy with CSI case, if we have a shooting death or a death reported, don't we want our homicide commander to not just say, oh, well, it's just another dead body? Been there, done that. We've had lots of dead bodies. Oh, sure, we could spend a lot of time investigating and so forth, we'll still just have another dead body. The issue here is whether the body's dead or not. Pathologist says it's dead, it's all accurate. No, we want to know all the details. How the person died, was it a homicide? If so, who did it? Did he really do it? By what evidence do we really know this? And I can understand that there are people who are not very curious and who would not make good homicide detectives because after a dozen or so homicides, they may be saying, oh, well, just another dead body, good grief, how many more of these do we have to investigate to know that there's no homicide, gremlin? Yeah, I must say that's a damned persuasive analogy. Okay, let's try it the second aspect of this thing that I mentioned. So you just answered why you keep investigating the paranormal, it never gets old, you were thinking maybe it's just a difference in personality, you're curious. It's also this philosophical commitment that you explained at the beginning of the show. But the second way of getting at why investigate the paranormal is really just asking the question, why the paranormal and not all the other nonsense in our society. Michael Shermer, also Paul Kurtz, they both said in interviews with me that some of these topics in skepticism, the investigation of the paranormal can sometimes get to being rather trivial, they've said. So stuff like UFOs, ghosts, Bigfoot, aren't these views just fringe views? The thinking goes that there are bigger fish to fry, I mean more pressing issues that deserve our attention than all these goofy beliefs folks have. So that's a kind of criticism of why people investigate the paranormal. Well, some things may be more important than others. I would say that ghost claims are very, very important because they tell us whether we live on after we die. It's a pretty big, a pretty important question. I wouldn't want to dismiss that too quickly. So it's not trivial, it touches on the central aspects of who we think we are in this universe, right? Well, exactly, I mean most of the paranormal promise is pretty big thing. Now I know that some people, I mean if someone were raised a devout Christian and someone were, you know the type I'm talking about, they're raised a devout Christian. They've been burned by religion, now they're secular and they just want to rail against God-belief or something. Well, they often may have only sort of a monomaniacal view of things and be interested in just one topic so that no matter what you discuss, ladies' fashions, food choice, whatever, we'll eventually, two or three or four steps down, we'll get to the question of God. It's all they think about. They're kind of one note, Johnny's. Now I want to be maybe a little more generous with that ilk. I know exactly the kind of call it skeptic that you're talking about, but some of them actually just say what's causing the most harm in society? It's not belief in lake monsters, it's belief in God. That's the argument. Here's the different issue, I think. One is what we do in terms of inquiry and then what we do in terms of action. I don't know how much more time we need to spend on the God question. How many more ways can you argue God does not exist in other words? How can God lift a rock big enough? Can God make a rock big enough that he can't lift it? Right, how many angels don't dance on the head of a pen? I got it. Yeah, some of that, I was done with by my sophomore year and I don't need to go on and on and on and on about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's no God and so forth. What I do, and I do this more than maybe just about anybody, I investigate religious claims. It's a long list of manifestations of the alleged supernatural. You know, the glowing statues, the miraculous in quotation marks shroud of turret, the miracle healings at Lourdes. I don't in the least shy away from religion, but I'm trying to get somewhere other than, okay, I'm an atheist, therefore I know in advance of inquiry that all of this stuff is nonsense. This is just another form of debunking. It's maybe the big debunking, but it's still just debunking. It's done by debunkers. It's done by people who, especially bright, and they know everything, they're smarter than everyone else. They may be right, it's not that I disagree with them. I am not a theist, I am not. But I don't start out by saying, and it would be very, very wrong to say, I'm an atheist, therefore I know the shroud of turret is some kind of fake. No, because first of all, we don't know that the shroud necessarily couldn't be a non-supernatural, ordinary artifact. And so we just need to suspend all this no-it-allism. We need to suspend it, put it aside. What Coleridge called the willing suspension of disbelief. And just free yourselves up so we can go to the scene of the crime and say, well look here, here's a fingerprint. Here's some blood traces. And what does this mean? And see what it means. So when somebody is postulating that they have proof of a deity in the form of a supernaturally weeping statue, because you and I know that statues don't actually weep oil. And it's a pretty good hypothesis that the next oil weeping statue that we come across may be a pious deception. But we can find out whether it is or not. And in the process, yes, you learn other interesting things, but you've just recounted how you've investigated more religious claims than just about anybody. Yes, Randy's gone after the faith healers, but you have been in this field. Well, Randy's right up there too. Randy and I are doing very similar things. Right. But you're not going out there just sticking it to believers. You're investigating claims. Exactly, I am. And I'm often respectful of believers because while I think they're mistaken, I just don't see a lot of motivation to go make fun of some poor lady who thinks that she's got the image of the Virgin Mary on her door or something. I mean, people are mistaken, but I just happen to have had enough experience to find out that some of the people are really, really nice folk. And okay, they're simple. They're not very educated. They haven't thought about a lot of things. They're maybe blighted by religious dogma and so forth. Yes, yes, yes. But the question is what is going on here? And some of these you can spot pretty quickly. And one other reason to care to investigate is because once you do investigate and once you know that something is... Once you've solved a case. Once you've solved a case, then you know whereup you speak. And now you can see it not as so many debunkers do, rolling their eyes and saying, oh, whoa, it's me yet another silly thing that I have to talk about. Oh, whoa. I say quite often, oh, another wonderful opportunity to explain how science works. Let's just use this. Hey, boys and girls, come here. Here's a big foot track. Let's think about this. Okay, so not a whole lot there to disagree with. Let me take it this other way. Let's talk about Loch Ness Monster. It's just one of dozens, literally dozens of topics you're a worldwide expert in. So Lake Monster. I'm gonna quote you, DJ, on all of these great sound lights. Well, you know, I'm saying it all as we rehearsed and I should get some kudos for that. I'll send you your check. Don't you worry that you're in the mail. Perfect. So the Lake Monster thing. It's not just in Loch Ness. There are a number in the US and Canada as you've illustrated in your writings. Let me ask you directly, do you think that the energy you and others in the skeptics community spend on such seemingly trivial claims could be better spent in the public interest on topics, other topics even in just in skepticism like dowsing bomb detection devices where people actually die as a result of their belief in dowsing or faith healing or some of these harmful complementary and alternative medicine claims. And in other words, there seems to be like a ranking of more important to less important paranormal topics or do you think they should all get equal treatment? Well, I don't look at it that way. If I were doing that, I of course probably put the investigating God question way at the bottom because we really have just that's been exhausted. So we don't need to do that anymore. But certainly the issue of medical clackery is very dangerous. In fact, maybe we ought to be investigating any of this stuff and we ought, if we're gonna actually decide what needs really doing, what's more important and that governs our activity, we maybe ought to get out of the whole skeptical business and go to Haiti and see if we can make a difference. I mean, that would be maybe the logical place where that ends up. But look, what I do, what I do is I investigate claims. Now, I'm not a propagandist. I'm not a, you know, any of a number of things that I maybe could be, but for now I happen to be pretty good at investigating. And so I'm looking at the things that need investigating. I'm not saying that everybody ought to drop everything and become a paranormal investigator. And it doesn't sound like you're saying the skeptics movement should have the same scope that you have. Your scope is the scope of a paranormal investigator, not of skepticism in general. Exactly, because once the investigator has solved something, now we need, and this is where I, if I may speak frankly, in case anybody's listening, I'm not suggesting that everybody go out and investigate. In fact, they could quickly get it in each other's way. And I'm not necessarily saying that skepticism ought to be just a social club where everybody talks about things endlessly among themselves. No, no, I think that actually what we maybe really, really need is we need more people to put out more information and do something about trying to change people's dogmas and attitudes. So it's a public education work. It's not just some insular club for a besieged cognitive minority, nor is it just a kind of career track for investigators. It's this broader public education mission you're talking about. Right, I mean, I investigate because that's what I like to do and I'm good at. And it helps a whole lot if you find out what you're good at and what you like. This is, Sherlock Holmes discovered this, you know. Sherlock Holmes, oh, no way, he was fictional. Well, anyway, let's pretend he was real because in the first story he sort of explains how he became the world's only full-time consulting detective. And so we find that which we're good at. I might think it would be the best thing to be done would be brain surgery, but I don't think I'm trained for that, so maybe I'm not gonna retool there. So I think we should find out what we're good at. I know there are skeptics who want to be famous and they wanna investigate if that'll make them famous. They're lusting after television, but I would suggest that they stop that and only be investigators if they're really good at it and not just out to make a name for themselves and get some attention with some stunt to get on TV. So you've opened the can of worms leading right up to my last question and that's where paranormal investigation, scientific paranormal investigation is headed. There are these groups of amateur investigators, skeptical paranormal investigators cropping up in a few cities in the United States, even around the world. They don't necessarily have any background in investigative methods and there are actually more specialized paranormal investigators, scientific paranormal investigators than ever before, not just you and Randy but folks like Karen Stollsnow, Ben Radford, there are a number of new up and comers. So is this a good thing for skepticism? Are we actually going to be able to say, oh, there are so many of us now doing this paranormal investigation work in the field that we'll be able to just finish this business of investigating the paranormal, move on to other important issues because now there's almost like a class, a professional class of scientific paranormal investigators. Well, that remains to be seen. I don't think there are too many that I'm really impressed with but the fact is that we ought to have investigators and I'm happy if we have more investigators. Certainly I shouldn't be the only one or there shouldn't be just a handful. We need plenty because this is really a never-ending job and I've always wanted local groups. I've done workshops for different groups. Many of the people who are doing investigations now, I taught at some level. You've done regional workshops teaching people how to investigate the paranormal but you're not so optimistic that you think someone going to a couple hour workshop by you kind of gives them a Joe Nickel imprimatur that says now they are bona fide paranormal investigators. Doesn't it take more than that? It does but everybody has to start somewhere. I didn't just wake up one day and investigating with. I had to work hard and other people may be willing to do that. I have been occasionally disappointed because I thought that some investigator wasn't really willing to put in the hard work and to try to grow but look, if somebody wants to just go out and look around at a haunted house or something and get his feet wet and then he finds out it's not for him, there's no harm done really. I'm not opposed to that. I would rather see people go out and become in their area at least familiar with the paranormal places around their area so that when the newspaper calls for the obligatory Halloween story, they could say yes, I know the haunted mansion over on whatever street and yes, I've been there and here's some information about it. But that's not the same thing as saying I'm skilled in investigative methods and here's my take on the scene. Right, vacuums get filled and at least I hope they get filled. That is everywhere, there are ghost hunting clubs and so forth. So we need skeptical investigators to go out and learn something about that whole phenomenon. What's happening with haunted places? What are people getting when they're getting photographing orbs and so forth? And look, some investigations are fairly easy. I think many haunted house investigations are not very difficult. A lot of lake monster cases are not very difficult. If what you do is you go on the scene and you look around, you say, well, I went and I didn't find anything and so I don't think there's a ghost there. Well, at least you went on scene, you have at least a little credibility. You went there and gave the phenomenon a chance. That may not be very deep. It may not be the most genius thing to do. Some cases may require years and years of work. The Shroud of Turin is incredibly challenging and I've spent many, many years on it and... Right, you come at it from many different lines of evidence, radiocarbon dating, the historical record, the... It's complicated. Complicated because there are a lot of conflicting claims and very difficult, they won't let me actually examine it so I have to read tons of other... That's not the kind of thing that a local skeptic investigations club will get into but they might get into the area hotel that has maybe a mystery mongering owner who's hyping up some claim in order to get some press. So how far people go is a lot of that's up to them. When I started, I had no particular knowledge or training or anything except an insatiable curiosity and people told me I was bright. But I just decided to go and I was, as you know, inspired a lot by James Randy who's always encouraged me every step of the way over 40 years of doing this. I decided to go have a look. I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't have any great training or background. I was just a young magician and, you know, but I knew a thing or two and I learned something and then I built on that and I read more and eventually I decided to be really credible. I needed to be a detective and I went and became one on its own merits to some extent but also to further my paranormal investigation. I went back to school and got a master's of talk. I am constantly trying to gain new skills but. So we agree on this last point regarding the future of skepticism in general. It's a good thing that there's this proliferation of clubs of amateurs who want to do scientific paranormal investigation. Obviously that's a great contrast to these mystery mongering clubs, these ghost hunter clubs, you know, these regional paranormal societies or whatever that are everywhere. But on the other hand, it sounds like you're also saying cultivating some expertise is preferred. So it's not enough to just be a well-meaning amateur. You should actually learn something about investigative methods. You should actually invest in yourself as a paranormal investigator. Not just be, not just let it be your version of poker night or your comic book collection. In other words, not just a hobby. Right, I would hope that people would really want to do this because they feel they might be good at it because they think it's something it is worth doing. I've noticed that the debunkers over time, I have known many debunkers, many, many, many debunkers over my 40 years. I've watched them come and go. Eventually they become more and more frustrated, they eventually become angry and bitter, and they give it up. It's called skeptical burnout. They just burn out because they've never found the material interesting. I mean, I practically had people say to me, gee, I'd really like to be a famous investigator like you and be on television. You say, well, what have you tried to do? What have you been, oh, I haven't investigated anything yet. I don't know, I just, but I'd really like to be on television and be famous. I mean, they've almost said it like that. Yeah, I've actually heard exactly the same sentence out of well-meaning, aspiring skeptics. Yeah, I on the other hand, don't like being on television. Right, it takes you away from the work. Yeah, I do it because it needs to be done. And I know sometimes I've been able to do pretty good work and, you know, but I've been discouraged because they've left a lot of my stuff on the cutting room floor as frustrating stuff. But I love investigating and solving a mystery. And I've solved a few recently and it's in a case or two where these have gone unsolved for many, many years. It's very rewarding, not because somebody's gonna give me a plaque next week, but I don't get a lot of money. I get a lot of everything from sniping and backstabbing even from public skeptics. So the rewards are very, very few, except the genuine reward of just feeling like, by golly, that wasn't that great to solve that. You get the psychological or the intellectual payoff of saying, I figured that out. Yeah, I love that because I really wanna know. And I find that there is a level at which investigative work can be very demanding. Some cases are not easy. They're cold, others have tried for years, and you have to be creative sometimes, find a new way to go at something. And then when you do, you risk, because I've had this happen, I don't know how many times, instead of somebody saying something complimentary, they'll say, well, that was pretty obvious. You think, right, but remember what Sherlock said, everything's obvious once it's explained. In retrospect, it all seems so crystal clear, right? Well, Joe, I feel that every time we talk, I feel like we should end each conversation with the word, et cetera, because it could go on and on. I've enjoyed spending long hours with you, and I feel like every time, we've only just scratched the surface. So I look forward to you being back on the show. Thank you for your time today on For Good Reason. Always a pleasure, DJ, thank you. Thank you for listening to this episode of For Good Reason. To get involved with an online conversation about today's show, join the discussion at ForGoodReason.org. Views expressed on the show aren't necessarily the JREF's views. Questions and comments on today's show can be sent to info at ForGoodReason.org. For Good Reason is produced by Thomas Donnelly and recorded from St. Louis, Missouri. For Good Reason's music is composed for us by Emmy Award-nominated Gary Stockdale. Christina Stevens contributed to today's show. I'm your host, DJ Grothi.