 So, thanks for having me. We decided that I will take five minutes and tell you about the situation of unskepticism in Russia. And it's always interesting to know what pseudoscience is popular around the world. And each country has its own thing. Like, for example, Australia has dowsing. And the United States probably has... The big thing is probably talking to the dead, right? And so in Russia we have other things like Randy mentioned. Remember his closing remarks about the charging the water? Yeah, louder, right? Okay. So he was talking about some psychics in Russia charging the water, so you turn on TV and you see them charging the water. That was a long time ago. I mean, they're not there. We're living in the internet age. And nowadays it's tough because we don't have big names to tackle. They're all now on the internet and became very local. So it's tough. And of course, but there are certain directions that are very popular. And so I'm going to tell you about those. I just will have to make a remark that whenever somebody asks you about, like, a country or can you tell me, like, what's going on in Russia? It's always like a burden, like, and then somebody will say, you know, I don't agree with what you're saying. So this is just my opinion. I think that I'm in a good position to judge what is what is popular there in terms of pseudoscience. But nevertheless, I could be wrong. But anyway, so the biggest thing I'll tell you today about that just two things which are which are very important. So the biggest thing in Russia right now is water. And I think that many of you know how water can be pseudoscience, right? So homeopathy, and not just any homeopathy, homeopathy 2.0, you know, like web 2.0, so that's homeopathy 2.0. So whenever, when everybody now understands that there's no active ingredient in water, then the next logical thing is to say, OK, but water has memory. And so, right, so in Russia there's a TV channel that does pseudoscientific movies. And they're not just movies, they're blockbusters. They're really well made. You're like, I wish we had scientific movies like that. And so they made two movies about water. And you know, one of the movies I really want to tell you the scene from the movie. So the movie starts with a really beautifully filmed scene. It's like a desert. And many people, like a group of crowd of people is walking the desert and they're dying. There's no water anywhere. And they have like these cool shots of older people just falling down into the sand, you know, like the dust that said he's dead, no water. And so they're walking, walking. And then somebody in that crowd just looks forward like that and his face lifts up. Water. And then the next frame shows a shot of a beach and sea waves towards that beach. And they're like, okay, so they're carrying a lab to get salt out of the water. How unscientific can you get on the first scene of the movie? And so it goes downwards from there and they show that like stories are very colorful about experiments that sort of prove that water does have memory and that reacts to emotion. And one of the last scenes of the movie, they're showing an Indian river and children are playing there in the water. But the river is very dirty and there's like corpses of animals actually like swimming by. You're like, all right. Yes, water memory. All right. Should remember everything, right? And so those movies were very big. And because everything is local now, what happens is that we sometimes attend local screenings. Of those movies just to see what's going on. And I went to one of those and that's where it gets kind of sad because there were many different people there. And there was a woman with a child was like four or five years old girl. And she was watching that movie and actually writing things down. It was like, wow. And I'm looking at that girl and understand that she's not in very good position. In fact, who knows, maybe she's not vaccinated because these movies usually they talk, for example, about water, but they touch upon all the other things like GMO and anti-vaccination stuff. So people actually watch that and homeopathy is pretty big in Russia. Russia has support of acupuncture in law. So you can be officially an acupuncturist. Homeopathy doesn't have that support. As far as I know, they're trying hard. I don't know if they will succeed. But that would be like, so that's ideology. The actual business model, they have a website. You can actually go and see. I think they have an English version. It's newpharma.ru. Maybe they have newpharma.com. So here's what they do. They have virtual drugs. So let's say you want aspirin. You download aspirin. So you have to put CD into your CD-ROM if you still have one. And then you have to press the button, load, and it says loading, and you have to wait for 12 minutes. Then you have to take out the CD. Nothing is burned there. But you have to take out the CD. You have to put it on the table, then have a glass of water, put it on the CD, and then wait for 30 minutes and drink it, and that's aspirin. And actually, when I tell this to people, they ask, maybe does the site actually burn something to CD? Is there anything going on? And you know that in the web browser, you can look at the source of the page. And so I looked at the source of the page. And I mean, anybody who even had school programming courses will see that what it does, it has a loop. And it says, until you're within 12 minutes, show the word loading. That's all it does. But the website is actually, I think it's very dangerous because it's a killer for a non-skeptical person. In fact, it's difficult to digest even if you're skeptical because it has a whole huge section on science, how science supports this. And half of the articles are genuine. That's real science. But the thing is that it contains, it has nothing to do with what they're doing, but it has like the word water in it and like something else like charge. You have to go and actually read it to understand that it has nothing to do with it. And the other half is homeopathy journals. And a person who does, I don't know, an old lady goes onto the website. She won't know. She will just start downloading the drugs. And they of course say, well, you don't have, you have to take the real drug as well. But as time goes on, you have to lower the dose. C is a clever. But of course, the problem is that I've mentioned aspirin. They actually have a lot of very serious drugs there. So if somebody will really do that, that can be very dangerous and that can lead to death in some cases. So this is a big thing. And the other big thing is something that I've investigated and I've seen, I see this in all countries but somehow in Russia it's right now like very popular. This is like pseudo history plus pseudo linguistics. When they take like words and they start taking them apart and saying that you see this is, this is like, like if some words have other words within them. And very often that's just a coincidence. So they use that to argue that that means that history is wrong and, you know, that country didn't invade that country and that king never existed. And Russians are the best, you know, that kind of stuff. And it all, it all's about, it's in this society of people who think that you should be closer to nature and that ancient people were wiser and modern science doesn't get it. And so this is very, very, very big. So yeah, so these are the things that we're up against. Of course we have the background of all the other stuff that everybody else has, anti-vaccination. And I have to be very careful saying that, but so far I don't think it's that bad. For example, as in the United States, it's people seem to vaccinate at least the usual child programs. Generally I don't see any big situations where people would deny that. But the anti-vaccination sentiment is there just like everywhere else and we'll see if this changes. And religion is on the rise, so we're still optimistic. So yeah, thanks. Oh yeah, yeah, people, Susan asked me if I actually said who I am. I'm the founder of Skeptic Society in Russia and we started like a year and several months ago, so we're very new. We're not the only ones who do this, but we're the only organization that actually does skepticism as opposed to, for example, just science. And we're the ones who go offline, so we have weekly meetings in several cities right now. We're doing a weekly podcast, which is crazy if you are doing a weekly podcast, you know. And we do some other stuff and we're planning to do a conference this year, so we'll see how it goes. And your name? Oh, my name! Right, right. My name is Kirill, Kirill Alferov. So I was just used that. I have the name here, so I just didn't give it a second thought. Yeah, thanks for having me. A question? A question, no? They're free the first month, then you have to pay a subscription fee. But you can go and try and sign up for the newsletter. Well, thank you. Now, my name is Bob Blazkowicz. I'm a skeptic who is working out of Wisconsin. I'm formerly of Atlanta and St. Louis and all over the place. I'm an English teacher and I'm involved with all of these projects up here. And I wanted to talk a little bit about skeptical activism and some of the stuff that seems to have worked, the stuff that has really left an impression on me as I've moved along to work on a number of projects. But the big one is the Stanislav Brzezinski issue. Yeah, so I wanted to start with suggesting that there are two important principles of good activism and they both come from women who I admire very much. The first one is Dr. Pamela Gay. A couple of years ago she said, don't ask for permission to do something awesome. And I thought that was wonderful and that kind of got me kind of charged up to do something big about Brzezinski. And the second bit of advice comes from Barbara Drescher and it's an important caveat to be added to that first one. And I paraphrase, make sure that you know your stuff first. Because if you're a loose cannon, you can cause more damage than... If you are, you know, one of the reasons why Fraser Cain does so well with promoting, say, astronomy because he really knows, you know, his technology. You might hurt your own cause if you didn't exactly know what you were doing. The first project that I wanted to mention that I've always been impressed by was Robert Lancaster's Stop Sylvia. I think that it's kind of like an archetype of what online skeptical activism can look like. And it covers a classic paranormal skeptical claim. It's just right down our... What's the word I'm looking for? Our alley. Alley? Okay, yeah. Our niche? Yeah. It's just the type of thing that we do. It's paranormal. It's psychics. And one of the things, he does one thing, and he does that really, really well. He collects the predictions of Sylvia Brown are collected. I guess there aren't any more. I mean, unless Chris picks them up. They are... He breaks them down into testable, falsifiable claims, and then goes through and just ticks the box. Did they get this, say, this abduction case? Did they find the body where she said they'd find the body? Yes or no? Was the perpetrator a blonde 30-year-old man? Yes or no? And overwhelmingly, we find out that she's wrong. So keeping a scorecard. It's straightforward. Sylvia... Yes! There's one! That's... Awesome! We marked it up to clean livin'. Yeah. So Sylvia Brown was a notoriously bad psychic who was on Montel Williams' show. No, just notoriously. She kind of started even a church around herself, yeah. And she was just one of the highest-profile psychics for a number of years because of her prominence on the Montel Williams show. He promoted her almost completely uncritically, as far as I can tell, if not completely uncritically. That's right, yeah. I mean, even... Her last prediction was how long she was going to live, and she got that wrong, too. So, yeah. She died about a year ago, maybe? Maybe a little bit more? During the spring. During the spring? Okay. So, I guess now it's stopped Sylvia Brown. But, yeah. So, Robert Lancaster maintained this item. He really did become the go-to person, the authority, really, on Sylvia Brown and her scam. Another important thing that he did was he built up context for her failures. You can say, well, this psychic got this one important thing wrong. But when you start piling up another important case, they were completely wrong. Another important case. Another important case until you find out that something like 10% of her wild guesses happened to be right, and that is pretty compelling stuff there. And it's really important in terms of tone that he kept himself out of it as much as possible. Lancaster kept himself out of his calling the balls and strikes here. He kind of intuited or took to heart Ray Hyman's warning that you should let the evidence speak for itself. Editorializing would just look like bias, and that opens them up to additional charges. So, it was very straightforward, very clearly laid out, and it was an excellent site. The next one would be Snopes. And this is one I hesitate to include because I don't know if I see them as necessarily being activists or if they consider themselves to be activists. They're actually professionals. The San Fernando Valley Folklore Society was founded in 1993 by David and Barbara Mickelson, primarily to boost the responses to letters that David was sending out. It turned out that having an official letterhead got a lot more cooperation from say the corporations that say like from Coca-Cola that he has an entire section of Coke Lore. He saw that he was getting more responses when he had a professional letterhead than we was just cold writing to these people. The website Snopes.com is now kind of that which keeps Facebook in check, right? Yeah. And I think the things that make this site work so well is that it's carried out. It's executed by trained folklorists who, again, they keep their opinions separate. They're accused of being funded by the Republicans and by the Democrats, which is a good sign you're probably doing something right. It also seems to be a labor of love for them. They do love the subject and that sustains them for decades as they build up a community. And it still seems to be guided by the principles, by the founders. And so just a shout out to Snopes. Now, a few weeks ago, I was in Los Angeles talking about the Brzezinski campaign at the Center for Inquiry. And I briefly mentioned the role that Tim Farley had played, helping us devise search SEO strategies to help boost good information into the Google searches that Brzezinski ranked well in. And when I asked the crowd if they knew who Tim Farley was, I got mostly stares, which prompt, I said, really? Yeah, I know, I know. And which prompted John Rayl to tweet this. I'm in a theater filled with skeptics who don't know the name Tim Farley. So, Tim Farley... Okay, so I'm going to talk a little bit about the Tim Farley skeptical activism complex. He's the founder of What'sTheHarm.net and Skeptools. He's kind of the Johnny Appleseed of Skeptical Activism, as far as I can tell. He is an idea guy and he's very capable in his... This is what he looks like as a cartoon, right? But actually, he is that tall. Yeah, yeah. That's very accurate. He is one of the white hats in computer network security during the day. But by night, he is a skeptical Avenger and database maintainer. He's the founder of a couple of important websites, What'sTheHarm.net and Skeptools. What's The Harm is a searchable repository of stories that document the real consequences of abandoning critical thinking. It came out of a talk that he heard at TAM5, which seems to... Is that where Skeptocamp came out of TAM5 too, right? That's right. So, it was one to go to. Apparently, it was the idea one. Oh, really? Oh, wow. Okay, so that was a hell of a TAM. Yeah, so he knew that he wanted to somehow promote critical thinking. Skeptools is a blog devoted to issues in technology of interest to skeptical activism. Whether he's analyzing, say, the Wikipedia habits of Deepak Chopra and his friends, or introducing us to a technology tool that can be used to promote skeptical thinking, such as DoNotLink, which doesn't give people Google juice when you use it. So, you can refer people to a site that you don't agree with without boosting their ranking or rebutter, which is Shane Greenup's Chrome, I guess it's a variety of plugins now, which adds a layer of meta commentary to the internet. So, if you have rebutter installed on Chrome or whatever, a little window pops up and lets you know when you go to a questionable site, hey, there are some rebuttals to this you might want to look at as well. But Tim kind of introduces people to these tools. And he is... I think that his websites really do kind of reflect his personality. To pilfer a phrase, he wears a size 32 hat, eats loads of fish, and moves in mysterious ways. He's very clever. He's a reliably hard worker. He's detail-oriented with a very good sense of his own strengths. And he puts those strengths to use when the engineers got together to build Tim. They had two goals, a database curating machine and to defend the internet from evil. And he's very good at that. He sent me a note a couple days ago. He said, quote, one thing I do with both of these websites is specialize. What's the harm does one type of story, and that's it. And it sticks to its rules. I don't try to be everything to everyone. Actually, if I had to do it over, I would drop a number of the categories that I have there. So he details stories that appear in the press about, say, the harm of homeopathy. And he collects them all in one place. Or the harm in alt-med or in psychics, believing in psychics and that sort of thing. Skeptool is the same way he says, quote, I know there are too many topics and skepticism for me to know them all. So I focus the blog on things I know well and have talents to bring to bear. And what's the harm's case? That's my good research in curation skills and ability to present information. Skeptool's case, it's my technology expertise in writing. He's a creative and productive mind and tries to put new technologies to the service of critical thinking. I believe he was advocating the type of stuff that Gorilla skepticism on Wikipedia was doing. And then it took Susan to get that off the ground. So again, he's kind of like the Johnny Apple seed of skepticism. At the same time, his database curation skills have led to a massive database on skeptical history and a lot of things that have appeared on Lanyard over the last several years. So yeah, the next group who's done a really good job, in my opinion, is Stop the AVN. In fact, just all of freaking Australia is really effective, as far as I can tell. Stop the AVN is a Facebook group that was established in 2009 to fight the influence of anti-vaccine activists in Australia. What they're trying to do is to deny, specifically it was Meryl Dory, to deny her, the founder of the Australian Vaccination Network, which is an anti-vax group, to deny her the opportunity to speak unchallenged in the media. And they sought to change the perception of her in the media from being a vaccine safety watchdog to being the anti-vax activist that she is. And so they promote the safety of vaccines, advise the media, and put them in touch with real experts on the science of vaccines. They achieve this primarily through social media, and this is important. They complain to the regulatory agencies in Australia when they notice that things are wrong. And this is very important. The authorities can't take action unless they know that something is going on. So that's an important role that skeptics can play. They did have an especially awesome action, and I just love this one because it was so audacious. In December 2011 when Meryl Dory appeared at the Woodford Folk Festival, they were unwilling to have her tripe promoted to such a huge audience without any check. So stop the AVN. Hired an airplane to fly above the fairgrounds towing the message, vaccination saves lives. Which is just so wonderful. Unlike a lot of the other groups, they've tried to measure their success rate. By looking at, I think, the financials of the AVN and a survey of the news coverage that they've received. And what they have found is that the proportion of unfavorable mentions has gone up since the founding of the AVN for Meryl Dory and for the AVN. So they seem to have had some sort of effect. At the same time they've made sure that every misstep that she's made, and she's made a lot of missteps, has received a lot of coverage in the press. So congratulations to them. Next is the 1023 campaign. Yeah, that was a good one. This one I included because it was a global campaign that managed to harness the Internet for skeptical purposes. A large coordinated intercontinental campaign. They even had someone in Antarctica. So they got someone on every continent to participate. Originally the 1023 campaign started as a letter writing, an open letter to Boots, a pharmacy chain in the UK. But over time they decided to try to draw some additional attention to that letter by staging an overdose. The idea for which came from a Belgian skeptic protest, according to Michael Marshall, who I corresponded with preparing for this, he said that the idea was to have as many people as possible to do it the first time around. In the second year they wanted to recruit as many cities as possible. And their most important goals, he said, were to raise awareness amongst the general amongst because they're from the UK. Amongst the general public that homeopathy is not herbal but has nothing in it at all. To raise the profile of skepticism and skeptical groups and to create networks between skeptical groups and to encourage new ones to form. And some groups coalesced around this cause and still exist today. What they said were their most important lessons to impart to future skeptical protest. One is to allow the, well, how do I do this? They had tremendous organization. They were extremely prepared. They anticipated everything that could possibly go wrong. They analyzed their first overdose and the response to it. And then prepared stock answers for the objections that were raised the first time around. And used those stock answers to put into their carefully prepared press releases that they then sent out to all of the, and packets that they sent out to all of these participating cities that would be easy to translate. So that everybody would have all the answers that they were likely to need at their fingertips. They also were very careful about what exactly they were saying. Because what happens if you say something and invariably it's going to end up being used somehow as propaganda for the other side. So they're very aware of crafting their messages so that they wouldn't be as useful to the other side. Also, this one I thought was very interesting was they only gave out 10-23 t-shirts to people who they thought were trustworthy. And it was really a heck of a thing that they did. The last bit was they attributed a lot of their success to asking people for help. Instead of telling them that they should be doing this on, what day was it? On February 6th, right? So letting each city draw on its own strengths and carry out its activism in its own way was very important too. Next is, yes sir? Yeah, let's go to the end. Next is Skepticamp, which is the brainchild of Reed Esau. Yeah, there he is. And it was conceived following his experiences at TAM5, as we said. He realized that a large amount of expertise in the skeptical world was untapped when you have kind of a, in the typical conference. There's a lot more expertise out here than there is up here. And he was looking for a way that, you know, maybe we could mobilize this and turn this into a way to maintain active participation in the skeptical community by giving people something important to do at the same time bringing down barriers to participation. So, let me see. So in recent correspondence, and I feel like I should have you read this out loud because that would be really interesting. No, but I figured, quote, I figured I couldn't start something that would rely on my drum beating as I will quickly burn out. Not crazy about doing promotion either. It would need to run on its own. It would need to offer multiple facets of value to appeal broadly. So he knew what he was willing to do. He took stock of his capabilities and his preferences and then he ran with it. He adopted the, a distributed model of conferencing that originated in the tech community, the bar camp model, in which every attendee of a conference is also a participant and a producer. By putting participants on stage, it gets newcomers involved with the hope of improving retention in the skeptical community. It also, you know, this is important, developed the public speaking skills of the rank and file skeptic, an immediate benefit for local groups. It showcases research that taps participants' enthusiasm and distributes the cost associated with putting on a conference among participants. Lastly, it serves, I think one of the interesting things about skeptic camp is how the various groups that put them on have kind of developed their own identities. So there is a strong sense of bonding and even some rivalries that have grown out of it. Yeah, Colorado, Denver and Atlanta are friendly competition. So there have been over 80 skeptic camps at this point and hopefully more in the future. And then I want to talk about the one that I'm most familiar with, the project that I've been involved with. And this is the, well, the Brzezinski birthday bash and assorted Brzezinski activities. This, Brzezinski came to the attention of the skeptical community in a big way. When Reese Morgan, a teenager from Wales was threatened and other bloggers, was threatened with legal action by somebody who didn't have a law degree or a licensed practice law. And they tried to shut him down. This guy had been hired by the Brzezinski clinic, which has been operating in Houston for about 40 years, treating patients with fractions of human urine that are now produced in a factory that he owns. Stanislaw Brzezinski owns. He had been hired by the clinic to improve his web reputation, Brzezinski's web reputation. That didn't work out so well because as soon as people heard that Reese and these other bloggers had been threatened, the backlash was enormous and his ongoing. A number of, one of the first things that we did in a big way was to have the birthday bash, which was kind of a, you know, I'm extremely proud of what skeptics were able to do. There was a lot of tumult in the skeptical community at the time and nonetheless we were able to bring together a wide variety of people to participate in the birthday bash. What we decided to do as a group was to start a fundraising campaign. We would raise $30,000 for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. And then we would donate it in Dr. Brzezinski's name and then challenge him to match our donation, thereby once and for all showing that he did something to further cancer research. He declined to meet that challenge. But we did raise about $15,000 and it was, you know, it was a crazy couple of weeks. And in the run-up to that, there were, well, there were a couple of other things that were going on at the same time. In the run-up to that, I started the other Brzezinski patient group. One of the most effective ways that the Brzezinski Clinic recruits and retains believers and patients and victims is through the testimonies of the patients who have gone and for some reason have survived. There were a lot more, there are a lot more stories of people who have gone and who haven't survived. And we started collecting those very early and started putting them on a website, the other Brzezinski patient group, which you'll see at the upper right. Skeptics were also, and that actually now ranks very well in Brzezinski's searches. So it is, it doesn't prove whether or not the treatment works, but it just shows that it's not a, it's not the miracle cure for these incurable childhood brain tumors that he supposedly specializes in. The only thing that I see him really being good at is a wallet biopsy. But another important movement, a moment was the BBC Panorama, which is kind of like the UK's 60 Minutes. They got interested after Simon Singh contacted them and let them know that UK children were streaming into Houston in order to get this quack cancer treatment. The response to this on the Twitter feed for the show was uniform horror. And so that was a big skeptical win. We've also been monitoring the Brzezinski clinics attempts to publish and, you know, kind of use the trappings of science to promote their goof. So recently there were two articles that were, you know, the patient group was trumpeting these two new articles that were published. The first one, we found the journal that published it was on Beal's list, which is a librarian's rather authoritative list of suspect journals, corrupt pay-to-play or scams. So that one, you know, take that for what you will. The next one, Child's Nervous System, I wrote to the editor after they published this. You know, this guy is about as trustworthy as Wakefield. Why did you publish this horrible, tiny fragment of a trial? And he said that unfortunately the reviewers of the journal failed to provide their promised evaluation so that after several months there were no negative comments to justify rejection, which is staggering. So it wasn't peer reviewed like the patients were promoting. And recently, you know, just the other night I got confirmation that I will have a note appended to this article when it's published discussing some of the ethical problems surrounding the trial. So hurrah. And then one last thing that's very important I think was, happened in November, which was Liz Zebo's, Expo Zay, her investigative work on the Brzezinski Clinic, skeptics, physicians, and other activists all contributed into making an amazing story that brought the skeptical version of Brzezinski's story to something like three and a half million people. If you look at the online and print numbers, that was a major, that was a major win for us. Let me see. And then lastly, this just happened. Yeah, so there's a complaint. The Texas Medical Board released a 202 page complaint or a list of charges basically against Stanislav Brzezinski. A lot of the charges that they're bringing up are things that we've seen in the patient stories, things that we've suspected. Everything from financial shenanigans to treating people who haven't had a firm diagnosis. That's probably where the survivors come from. But so we are very optimistic at this point, even though he seems to have gotten his clinical trials back by means that baffle us. And the skeptics have been so persistent that in a recent movie that was made by one of his supporters, and this just cracked me up, that we were portrayed skeptics, and this is a screenshot. We were portrayed as like evil masterminds behind the scene who were paid by Big Pharma to bust up Brzezinski. And I take that type of insult as a badge of honor, honestly. You know you're doing a good job when you make the right enemies. And I wanted to use this opportunity to ask you for some assistance. Two things. Recently a young woman by the name of Abra Hall died. She was one of Brzezinski's patients. She had a really bad brain tumor. And the family went from Washington State down to Houston for treatment where $36,000 of there, something like that, $34,000, $36,000, where they lost that money to Brzezinski and felt like they were put back. They ended up in the USA Today article. And I know that the mother, Stacey Huntington, has gone to the Texas Medical Board to complain and intends to see this complaint through. Abra died on the 3rd. And I was hoping that I could make an appeal. They're raising money for burial. And I would really appreciate it if you would consider going to the Bitly link down there at the bottom. Skeptics help. If you could see it in your heart to perhaps donate and help take care of one of Brzezinski's patients. The other thing that I'd like to ask you to do, so skeptics help at Bitly, is to go to another Bitly link, let's end this, and go to Senator Claire McCaskill's submit a scam page and thank her office. I met with them about two weeks ago. And they seem to take the issue of Brzezinski seriously. They were asking questions about, so who's on board? Who have you talked to? So if you could thank them for taking an interest and assure them that this is worth their time and worth the time of the staff. If you could go to Bitly, let's end this. I would greatly appreciate it. And next, leave it up. Left up. Cool. All right. Everybody got that? All right, we're good. And with that, I would like to go to Susan and these people. So now I'm going to have to use your computer. Yep. Or do you want me to just? Oh, you can just tell me. I'll advance it. Yeah, whack me under the table. Okay, is that on? Well, first off, I really want to thank you all for being here today. I think that one of the things that Bob said was how important him Farley and Robert Lancaster and others have been to our movement. And I think that we really need to give more kudos than he has taken to Bob Blaskowitz here for all the work he's done. He has given up hours and hours, if not weeks and weeks of labor to this Brzezinski whatever you want to call it. And I am always inspired by him. I don't know how he finds the time to do this. And I'm always overwhelmed with the things he does and with such passion. So I want to just applaud to Bob here for all the work he's done. Totally inspired. And so, all right, I would I am so glad you're here. This is the end of Tam. You guys are should be all fired up. I know you're tired as we all are and not getting a lot of sleep. Has this been an awesome Tam or what? I mean, yeah. Great lectures, lots of stuff. What you're not seeing a lot of is, in my opinion, is enough activism, enough workshops that are teaching you how to do these things. And Bob and I talked about this. Oh, by the way, my name is Susan Gerbeck. And Bob and I talked about how we were going to do this workshop. And I should mention Bob and I, Tim Farley, Mark Edward, Jim Underdown and I will be doing a workshop for CFI in October in LA. And hopefully if it's successful, we're going to be doing more workshops in the future at different places. And we will come to your town if you can get enough skeptics together who will actually pay so that they'll pay for our room and board. We're cheap, you know, and you know, we can sleep on whatever they can sleep on couches and things. And airfare. We will come and we'll do an activism workshop, which is, this is kind of an idea of what we're going to do. But it's much more hands-on. So Bob and I talked about having you guys break out in groups, having you guys start working on problems, and do some real activism today, but we just do not have the time. But this is what we want to do, and I think this is what is needed. Because a lot of these lectures and conferences you go to, it's very passive. You sit in the audience, you are listening, and it's wonderful and great, and that's what I did for many years. And finally, after listening to Tim Farley, I said it is time for me to stand up and do something because I am done. It is, we are need to get this done and it's, and we're just been preaching the choir for far too long. So now is our time. So this lecture that I'm about to give you is going to be very quick because I only have so much time. All the information I'm giving you is going to be on my website, and so you're not going to be able to take notes quick enough, and I'm not going to be able to have time to explain everything. So I apologize in advance. What we're doing is Bob gave you kind of what we have done, what projects have done that were successful. What I'm going to do is I'm hoping to inspire you to take on something. So close the doors because, lock them. No, I'm only kidding. You're not getting away from me because I am a skeptical activist and I feel very passionate about the fact that we need to stop preaching to the choir and start doing something to get rid of this nonsense that's out there. I'm really tired of it. Now my main project is Grilla Skepticism on Wikipedia, and I don't have time to go into detail explaining it about it to you. I want to join my Wikipedia project. We need you, especially if you speak other languages, but it is work. My teammates, my peers are amazing, the stuff they do. It is incredible, and I train, and I train, and I train, and it is a lot of work. But some people find it fun work, you know, I mean it's work, but it's fun work to some people. So it's not made for everybody. So I'm not going to be lecturing on GSOW today. Sorry. Because we're going to talk about the things that are probably, you know, you guys can find something that fits your lifestyle, something that maybe is something that's going to take a lot of time or something that's very, very quick. And as I said, I'm going to go through these fairly quickly. We had, we've been here together for a few days now, and you might have seen that some of my friends thought it would be embarrassing to me to, you might have seen, to hold the sign up over my head when I sat down that said, Susan Gerbig is the most powerful woman in skepticism. And I laugh because I don't embarrass, but, and it's been kind of fun, and it's a joke. Okay, you know, I know I'm not the most powerful woman in skepticism, but I wanted to kind of just bring that back out to you all. You all are the most powerful people in skepticism. We are together, especially with crowdsourced projects. There's no stopping to us, stopping us. All these wonderful things that Bob mentioned and more we can achieve and do if we just kind of find our passion, and you guys match up to the things that are probably the things that are your, that you feel passionate about. Okay, and so, so here's where we go from here. So this is kind of what I'm talking about. This is Daniel Lockston, one of my favorite people who started off with a blog and talking about, and see you're going to find all these links. You'll be able to go to these links when you go to my website that will have, you know, so you can find all this information. So like I said, try not to write it down. Just try to absorb all the information I'm going to give you. It's quickly and just go, leave this room going. Wow, I feel inspired. I want to do something. I want to do something. I think there's something for me to do. And maybe it's not exactly what I mentioned, but maybe it's going to inspire you to think of something else that is very similar to it, that you have the special skills to be able to do. So, all right, here we go. Where do we go from here? As you can see what it says up there. One of the things you should do is follow Tim Farley's blog, Skeptical Software Tools. He has the tools that are going to make whatever project you want to do easier for you to do, if that makes any sense whatsoever. So he's just got the software and the... There's all kinds of things out there that are being invented all the time that Tim writes about. So this is my website, SusanGerbick.com. You are going to find these slides on SusanGerbick.com, hopefully today. And then you'll be able to go through these. So here we go. So GSOW is a project that is three years old. Happy birthday to us. We just had our third birthday. And many of my teammates are here. A lot of them have the gorilla shirts on that I'm wearing. See? Thank you. Thank you, Kyle, from Carbon Dating. Oh my gosh, I went right over my head. Carbon Dating for giving us this awesome logo. And for free, he's just an awesome guy for doing everything he can. This is something that he has done for Skepticism. He's given us a better logo and really inspired us to be more of a team. You can buy these by the way on Evolve Fish. All right, Skeptic Action. Some of you have my little business cards for Skeptic Action. Some follower said it's one action a day will help keep pseudoscience at bay. You can follow this project on Facebook, Twitter, or Google+. And this is something that once you're signed up for, and by signing up I mean you've downloaded Web of Trust or Rebutter, it will take you maybe 30 seconds a day. This is a project I started because nobody was doing it, and I thought how wonderful Web of Trust is and Rebutter is. And I do not have time to go into detail what those two are, but there are amazing Skeptical projects that, well, Web of Trust wasn't meant to be a Skeptic project, but it is, just like Wikipedia. It's dominated by Skeptical rules of evidence and so on. So Web of Trust and Rebutter are both on my website with videos that Shane Greenup, who is the owner of Rebutter, he made a video just for the Skeptic Action followers to show you how to do it and that kind of thing. But this is a project that will take maybe 30 seconds every day once you've got the plug-in installed on your computer. Easy, easy, easy stuff to do. Fun, fun stuff. Fish Barrel is another program, another thing that we aren't using very much. We started to use it. This is a site that allows you to be able to go to a website that's making medical claims. Once you fill out all the information on the website, then the next time you do it, it just takes two or three minutes. You're able to copy and paste and put into Fish Barrel all the information that a website is making a medical claim. So like a homeopath or whatever, if they're saying that they can fight cancer, you copy it, you hit a few other buttons, and it sends an alert to the FDA that there is a website making a medical claim. So that's something that's really awesome. We just need to start using it a lot more. And these are other ideas of things that people have done and maybe you can assist with. This is a very, very good friend of mine and a very great friend of the J-Ref, Kitty, and she had a website called badaliens.org, and this was a website that she had run for a while, I think it's kind of gone now. If this is something that inspires you, you can contact her. She's easy to find and start working on this. It's a website for people who think they've been abducted. She's very kind, just like Robert Lancaster was. People could come to you and talk about the fact that they think they've been abducted by aliens. We have to remember as skeptics that regardless of the fact that we think that's nonsense, but to these people, they feel it is real. This is a real experience and it must be terrifying to think that you can't sleep at night because you may be abducted by aliens. So it's a terrifying thing and I think we need to be kind and she's helped so many people by talking to them about things and trying to encourage them to go to the doctor and that kind of stuff. Here's a book she wrote with a very talented artist named Noah Whipple, I believe. He was at TAM last year and this is a book on fairy tales, children's fairy tales and the proceeds usually go to the J-REF. So this is something that can be done if you have an artistic nature. She's just taken fairy tales and just changed them around a little bit. Jeff Wagg, who is an older, he's a friend of mine from years ago. He has a project called College of Curiosity and he's always looking for people who are interested in that. I'll just take a picture of that screen or just go to my website. The 1023 campaign, which Bob has already mentioned, is another one of those... I don't know what it is with the Australians and the people in the UK. Maybe they're just really detailed or something, but they just come up with some of the most awesome things. This is Skeptic Cal in California, Berkeley, it's held every year around May and this is the largest overdose of people taking a suicide. I photographed this. I think there was 200 and something people taking overdose. How many fatalities? Well, the numbers aren't in. None? Yeah, Greg says none. Here's another project that somebody had suggested to me. I think it was Bob was talking about this, like what's the harm site that Tim Farley does? This is what's the harm Dr. Oz. Maybe this would be something where somebody could kindly collect ideas, I mean, you know, possible things that he has done and collect it in a way that's readable, well-written, and, you know, so that it would come up in the search engines when people are looking for Dr. Oz. Lanyard, this is another wonderful site that I hope that every single one of you is going to be using when you go home. Everything that is about a conference, every blog, every podcast, every video, your Facebook portraits, as you put them up on Facebook, you're going to take the URL and just stick it into Lanyard. That way, everybody can see everybody's photos. Everybody can see everybody's blog, podcast, and you don't have to own it. It doesn't have to be your blog or your video. This is something you find. Like this lecture right now that's being recorded will go on Lanyard, so you'll be able to find it. My slides will go on Lanyard and so on, and this way we can all kind of network together. GSOW uses this site all the time. Skepticality, all right. I'm on Skepticality every two weeks. I love a lot of podcasts. There's so many great podcasts out there. This is a winner of the Ockham Award from the UK this year. I was very honored to be there to accept the award, but I'm not speaking just about Skepticality. You know how you listen to these podcasts and they say to you at the end, if you like our podcast, could you please go and rate us? You know what? They mean it. We need you to go rate these podcasts. If you take just a few minutes a day or every so often, rate a podcast. Every time you rate it, it brings up their notoriety. It helps out, it branches out, and it's getting beyond the choir when you're able to do something like this because there are people out there who still haven't heard about scientific skepticism and so on. How many people in this room have come to TAM or whatever because of a podcast? Thank you. All right. So we need to rate these podcasts to get them out to others and continue. So rate a podcast. Maybe every time you change your light bulbs in your house, you know how you change your time in your clocks twice a year, or those who change your time. That might be a good idea. Here's a project that is done by Pamela Gay, and I know she needs help. She needs support. She needs help in this. This is a really great thing to look into. Penny for NASA. This is something kind of from Neil deGrasse Tyson who has talked about if we could just get a full penny for NASA's budget instead of the half a penny that they're getting right now, we could change the world. But so... So Nathan Miller over here sitting down is one of my great editors, a leader of one of my English Wikipedia teams who's just totally embarrassed right now. He wrote the Wikipedia page for Penny for NASA that we first put a mention on Neil deGrasse Tyson's Wikipedia page when he came out in cosmos. Neil deGrasse Tyson's Wikipedia page views went from 100,000 a month to 330,000 views a month. And so Penny for NASA is now receiving about 1,000 views a month because it's on his page. But first Nathan had to create the page. It took a year, but we got it. So this is a program, look into it if you're interested in astronomy and increasing NASA's budget. I know they need your help. Franklin's List. Ah, love this. This is a friend of mine, Shane Trimmer and friends. Eugene Scott, I think, is also involved. So you know it's awesome. So Franklin's List is an action what they're trying to do is get, check this out. What an idea. Let's raise some funds and help support people who are STEM, you know, science, medicine, and all that kind of stuff into office. What a concept, okay? So this is something else. If you got a few dollars you want to donate or if you want to run for office yourself which would be really great. Odds must be crazy. If you guys have not seen this site you need to go here. This is an IIG project. John Rale and Wendy Hughes have come up with this idea and Jared Kaufman was the originator of this. Odds must be crazy. This site is a back door to getting people thinking about odds and coincidences and you need to get this and have your co-workers look at the site and so on because this is a very easy way to talk to people who are perhaps a little not thinking the way we would probably like them to think in the critical thinking area but you can have conversations, really great conversations about coincidences and what does it really mean when you have a coincidence. They break it down, they tell it in a fun, entertaining way. You have to check out the site. This is definitely the one you showed your friends and family. Here's a friend of mine, Brad Levin in the UK. I met when I was lecturing QED this last year which if you can't if you can get to QED go to QED. It's in Manchester every April. Skeptival is just that. It's a free thinker's in a field. This is a man who has run conferences for years and he's going to try to put on one and he's looking for volunteers and people to help out with that. Doubtful news, what a great idea. Sharon Hill, I'm sure always needs some help and if you can help her out with this, this is also getting out beyond the choir. Edinburgh Skeptics, here's an idea that they did ghost busted tours in their town of Edinburgh which we were just in which is an amazing place. You should go if you can. Edinburgh Skeptics, I'm very, very impressed with them. They did their own ghost tours but they're ghost busted tours. Creative idea. And does anybody get the reference down with this sort of thing? Okay, cool. Sterling introduced me. My son Sterling introduced me to Scientology and Anon kind of activities. This is really powerful. Apparently in Germany, well in Berlin, Scientology is almost done. They've almost closed up shop. They've only got like 100 members or something like that. And part of the reason is because of Anon protests. So you know, Logical Fallacy tarot, this is Trekkie Lynch. He is coming up with some beautiful tarot cards that you can use for Logical Fallacies. He's been working on this project for a year or more. He could definitely use some encouragement to finish because everybody's like, I can't wait until we get these cards out. You'll be able to use them in a lot of different ways. Maybe using the beautiful artwork in your online discussions every time somebody does a Logical Fallacy. It's better than saying that's a straw man. It's like, ooh, you can give this beautiful card. So Trekkie Lynch, you can see his name on there. Here's a couple more things. A good friend of mine in Salinas area at Monterey County Skeptics. He has a Christmas tree farm. He's going to be doing school lectures talking about, you know, evolution and bringing in the school kids to talk about, you know, the growth of trees and all that kind of stuff. So maybe somebody in this audience has some kind of niche where that is something that might inspire you to think of how you can get school kids to and talk about biology and so on. Science festivals like the Edinburgh Science Festival Dragon Con. They were doing, and several other cons, they were doing kind of fun stuff and then they added on the science stuff. So Edinburgh Festival every August runs for the entire month. It's an arts and crafts kind of thing. Well, they did a science. They went and did a skepticism thing and just latched on to it. It's impossible your town may do some kind of festival that's science related or whatever. If you can bring skepticism in there, bring it in. The library show the movie Cosmos. Invite the public. Easy thing to do if you are so inclined to do that. Get involved with science classes. You can mentor for science camps. The judge, if you're into astronomy and you have a nice telescope, it doesn't have to be super fancy. It's not the Hubble. We don't expect that, but if you can volunteer with children and groups and say, hey, I have a telescope, can I bring it in? We can show the kids Saturn and so on and Venus. Please do so. I mean, that's really appreciated. Vaccine clinics. I think this is so important. You can contact your local vaccination areas and ask them, do you have any need? Do you have literature that I can just hand out? Blood drive, same thing. Sponsor speakers to events. If you have money, this is what the screen is for. If you have money or access to money, you can. Some people do. There are people, I'm told. Sponsor of people to go to events. You could give micropayments to a podcast or video cast or things that means a lot. A $10 donation a month, $5 donation a month means a lot to these people to keep their projects going. Frequent flyer miles. Good Lord. Let's donate them to different conferences and see if they can fly in speakers, especially if it's a speaker you really want to see. Scholarships to conferences. There's all kinds of these different things. People have great web skills. You donate them to help people out. Audio expertise. I am not an audio person and I'm learning as I go. People are constantly helping me. If you're listening to a podcast and you just think, ah, it would be so much better if they just did this. Well, you know what? The person who's speaking may not have those skills and somebody out here in this audience may be the one who could approach them and say kindly. Let me give you some advice about how to get rid of this, that or the other. Artwork, like I talked about with Kyle Saunders and Noah Whipple. If you are an artist, we can use you in many ways in the skeptical music. Same thing. Here's a friend of mine, Gary Goldberg, that I met at a Mensa conference that I went to. I spoke at. He had, was receiving in red plum advertisements in your local newspaper. I think you've probably seen these red plum. They were advertising, I can't say the word, it's a homeopathic drug for flu. It starts with an O and it's about that long and he wrote to them and said, look, it's flu season. You're advertising on sale. It was some sale having on this homeopathic drug and that's not a cool thing. They said you know what? You're absolutely right. I'm going to forward your message to the advertising people or whatever it was. They stopped plugging this homeopathic flu medicine because this one man wrote one letter and followed up. And then here's another thing. There was a website, a newspaper article. I think this is the Washington Post. You might be able to see down in the corner. There's several doctors that are mentioned for this diabetic study. He contacted those doctors and said, did you realize that your name is being used? And they were like, whoa, we did not know that. So then that was able to get that change. This is something he just did on his own. Mark Edward and Teresa Caputo, he oh my God, I don't even know where to start with activism this man does. But he was hired by Inside Edition to go to out her in ways and he's wearing on his he took this with an iPhone and it was an early great colleague, sorry. But on his lapel, Mark is wearing a picture of his son who has died and Teresa had told him quite a bit about what a kind soul his son was and so on. Of course, she was not able to pick up that her son is very well much alive and that Mark is a skeptic with a big s. Thank you very much. So one of the things that Mark Edward advocates to you all is that if you are so inclined, you may have to spend some money. You may have to put some money in these people's pockets, but what you can do is so powerful. You go, you sit in the audience and when they make a mistake, you laugh and you laugh heartily and you laugh loudly. He says these psychics are entertainers. That's what they're doing up on stage. They are entertainers and if you mess with them a little bit and you bring the mood of the audience, it will set off all the other people in the audience and they can't throw you out and they can't do anything to harm you and it's just you're just laughing so practice your laughter. Or something beforehand and just be like, you know, get your get it going. Oh, the sky is so what you're going to do is you're going to try and you get in the audience and you laugh like I said you can sit in the cheap seats in the back too. So whatever you can do to get on their nerves and make it so these people don't want to come back and it ruins the whole mood of the thing and then they are thrown off the whole rest of the time. Oh my gosh. I think the Mark Edward did there was a medium that's on ABC's website and he called him up over and over this medium was giving evidence, giving help and stuff and all that stuff. So he kept calling him up, you know, they said, oh, we've got an expert on stuff, we've got an expert on stuff. It's this medium. And so he kept calling him up saying he went and talked to the medium. He pretended he was an old man saying that he had just lost his wife and then he'd say, then he called back into the day saying that he was, you know, on health, he needed health experts and they kept, you know, like they'd hang up on him or they'd put him on hold for like an hour. So this man Ramon V-O-L-Z, I'm sorry I'm not going to pronounce that, who read Mark's blog, he just a school teacher, elementary school teacher in that area, he wrote to that station and said that he's an elementary school teacher and that he would love to have this psychic take the million dollar challenge because the school district needed the million dollars so bad and so he asked and he talked to them as if it was his child, he says, my kids, you know, it would be so wonderful she could prove her abilities and we could get this money and we wouldn't have to, you know, lay off all these teachers and we could do all this and he talks like in that way and guess what, she was removed from that website they said and every time we contact them afterwards, they said you're just going to have to contact her herself we don't have any, we don't have anything to do with this woman you know, when Mark said, well what's her contact, they just have to google it so they were really upset that these, we just made trouble for them is what Mark and Ramon did. Are you local to a conference? You know what? 15 years. Yeah, if you're local to a conference, can you please maybe help out the other people who are going to be attending conferences with a blog, with some ideas, with you know, places to eat, where to go, things to do, I'd love to see a skeptic tour map of people who like to travel, things to see in areas, historical sites, Jeanine here in the front row, also here, this is the Gerry Andrews site, they got this, this building his home put on the national register of Oregon, preserving this home and all his artifacts the Robert Ingersoll birthplace was the same thing was done, we have conference, we have a conference, CFIs have a conference I believe in August that's going on, talking about Robert Ingersoll and how important he is to our history here is what I said about laughing, Amazon donations Nathan Miller was starting up, you didn't know you were in this did you, was starting up a site whenever you're going to go to Amazon and buy something, if you go through a skeptics website first, you just click on the skeptic website of your choice that has an Amazon link and then go make your purchases on Amazon, they get a few pennies of your purchase each time and Nathan was trying to come up with a way of doing that so that you would if you forgot it would remind you or something like that so see Nathan Miller right there independent investigations group oh my gosh I can't even go there because we're going to run out of time, fundraisers knitters for skepticism crafts and items donated for scholarships, we need donations for all kinds of things if you're being sued by Woo what we would like to have is somebody to come up with some kind of way of funding a fund set up for people to donate to that in case you're being attacked, the JREF and the CFI also have teacher guides we need to find a way of getting that best to our teachers and maybe a central site to kind of get this out there, donate your magazines science magazines, skeptic magazines to the waiting areas of your doctor's office, your oncologist, your local Woo, skeptics in the pub event, if there isn't one locally in your area, start one if there is one, attend it and always thank your organizer, buy them a meal once in a while, say thank you we're trying to get outside the choir so please review our books and thank our authors they don't know, and also on the podcast run for office on your local school board, that's where you're going to have the most effect or just to support them become an expert on something, the other Brzezinski patient group, we've already talked about that book review project, this is Kathy Moyd, whose hand is going to right there in the front row this is something that she's going to be running it is, we are coming with names, we came up with the idea of Amazonian skeptics what the idea is, and we're not sure of that what we're, and that kind of fits the gorilla stuff, but what the idea is, is that we're going to what she's going to coordinate is people who are interested in writing reviews of paranormal books, probably before they come out she has a way of getting the books thank you skeptic magazine, and they're going to get the books and you can, and free, and then you would read the book and write a very nice review I mean not a nice review, but I mean a well written review, not like a full of ad homonyms and all that, but a well written review and then we can put it up on Amazon and other places like Barnes & Noble and so on, so that whenever the book comes out there's already some really well done reviews about the book and that can help a lot as well so she's coordinating that effort and you know if you're interested in reading books you know somebody's got to do it so I believe I am done if let me see was that everything, gosh I did that faster than I thought, so I'm really apologize I had to do that so fast and I believe we are ready for Q&A? Questions? So get up there and ask suggestions. The answer is F. Scott Fitzgerald always is Is this on? Yes So but the first thing I wanted to say just real quick was Bob you mentioned the 1023 campaign I just wanted to caution everybody especially here in the US if you're ever tempted to repeat what they did repeat that demonstration be very very careful especially in the US because there are many products that are labeled homeopathic which are not that do have active ingredients and one of the things that they put in their packet was instructions on how to make your own homeopathy because you can't trust what's actually in the package so that's absolutely true so the the other thing I wanted to ask about was some of the the sites that you mentioned especially those that are that are specifically dedicated to fighting particular brands of like Stop Sylvia Brown or the 1023 campaign or the other Brzezinski patient group and you mentioned Stop the AVN as well the question I have is you know those those sound great I agree with you it sounds like they're really doing the right thing it sounds like they really have done it well and it makes us feel great and really gets us feeling raw raw but how do we know that I mean we're skeptics how do we know that it's making a difference you know what let me finish the other half of this is you mentioned the Stop the AVN they actually have metrics demonstrating their success and so the in addition to that question I also wanted to implore everyone as you're embarking on new projects like this in the future it would be best if you think like a think as skeptics think as scientists it would be best if we from the very beginning you plan from the beginning how am I going to measure success because as you know Susan we have good resources and manpower and we want to be as effective as possible it's true and that's the Stop the AVN they had interested people who were in the social sciences who were able to evaluate the work that they did for something like the other Brazilian patient group I'm just an English teacher who's writing stories but the way that we've kind of we figure that we're doing alright is by looking at our Google rankings the the way in which people have volunteered their own time and talents to translate for instance the Brzezinski page into Polish just taking it to his native language yes and you know we hear that the Brzezinski clinic seems to be firing a lot of people laying them off so we think that there has been a change but you're absolutely right if you want to convince people if you want to convince skeptics that what you're doing is worth doing find a way to measure it not only convince people that what we're doing is worth doing but also we don't want to be doing things that aren't effective because that's a waste of our limited resources but we can't get them as hard as we can if I may one last thing we don't have a lot of time I know we're living on time just CIFAR, the Center for Applied Rationality they have a lot of great suggestions on how to do this kind of metric cool thanks hi guys nobody wants people to get involved more than I do and you guys went through a long list of different things that people can do some of the expertise that you guys are best known for are things that you spent a lot of time diving into and landing Bob in the case of the Brzezinski stuff you spent two years doing this stuff Susan you spent what three years four years three years on GSOW and I mean those have been in most skeptical metrics immensely successful some of the most successful things we've done I applaud you guys for that but I want to take a second to talk about being effective and get your take on this because you both talked about the 1023 campaign and how effective it was well I ended up writing the Q&A for that because the communication was so terrible and so could you spend a minute talking about how people can actually dig in do things like I don't know press training adding whatever it is that their level of expertise is and picking one and really diving into it versus doing a lot of things at a very shallow level well Jay I see your hand going up there for somebody as an expert who would love to run a website or something to volunteer Jay Dimon for reason for reason is his name well and you know I already do about 47 different things yes you know but that's three shy of 50 so you're you know we got a little more room so we need people to find that there is a problem as you have just done and as the gentleman said that we need better ways of measuring things we need people to step up and say this is a problem I think we could do this better here's maybe a solution for it and I'm taking it on it's my baby so that's how I would throw it right back at you Jay it's a great idea so yes we need people who can probably look at things like the 1023 campaign and say this wasn't quite we're not talking necessarily the British one you know I'm not sure but maybe one of us done the American version I think well actually when that went to go worldwide I mean they had done something that was very tailored to Britain they really hadn't thought through the Q&A I've seen this in a lot of skeptical activist events where people just haven't quite thought through how to take all that stuff out there and I had the advantage of being trained by a Fortune 50 company I see his hand going up higher thank you very much but just this idea of adding some value where you have expertise there would be a lot of value and professionalization of this sort of thing I would love to see money behind this I'd love to see some lawyers behind this I'd love to see some trained press people behind this you know CFI and JREF have done a great job supporting a lot of the skeptical activism but we still don't have that core activist foundation upon which to build those edifices we'd like to see go up and if you know ways of doing that or you know lawyers who are willing to devote some time to this type of thing please let us know we'd love to see it so absolutely professionalization is key last question I guess we can always continue the discussion later just find us somewhere else my question builds upon the previous two you spoke about a bunch of the successful activism projects I am as interested in the failures big and small of the skeptical activism projects in part because I think we have a lot to learn from them to understand what causes a particular activism project to crash and burn is to avoid making those same mistakes in the future and I was wondering if you could give some examples that you know of where projects have struggled and why they have struggled and what we can learn from it I think the first one that comes to my mind is where I met Susan we were doing a trying to coordinate something to kind of expose chip coffee and we were trying to use the global network of skeptics in order chip coffee he's a psychic who tells children that the voices in their heads are real so he's psychic kids demons, ghosts he tours and he does his really not a great cold reader but he has a lot of fervent fans and we got a number of groups around the country to show up at his book signing and shows to take notes and to kind of survey him but we didn't really have an end game we didn't like really have a plan and so we had all this information but nothing it wasn't tailored we have since done something similar with the the Brzezinski group when they were showing the new movie where the skeptics are portrayed as an evil cabal and we wanted to know everything that was said during the Q&A with the filmmaker because we would send those to people who would be able to put those statements in context and that actually led to things like once very early on during the when the movie was making the circuit of pre-release screenings we heard that the patient group was going to start a website A&P for All and so we decided to grab the Facebook page the Twitter handle and everything that we could in order to delay that and make sure that that didn't get off the ground and we did hobble them and that was because we had a plan and we specifically knew that we wanted that type of information so, yeah, Jeva? Well, I was just thinking that chip coffee thing that was something else. We were really working on that and like you said, I think most Mark Edward and James Hunter-Jan and some of the IIG people went through that Mark Edward got thrown out for some of the things he was doing I remember this very clearly, it was pretty funny You're absolutely right, Reed we need to know where we're fail and the problem with it is is that we just do not have the time we could do a whole workshop on things that failed and when Bob and I talk in October maybe that's something we we'll be talking about with our audience and hopefully coming to your town or your country or city, just get your skeptics together, get your piggy banks out and help us pay for the airfare, we'll go and we can talk about the failures and then as a discussion the group of people will discuss why it failed and how maybe we could have fixed that and moved on but in my experience and this is just my opinion I think most projects fail because a lack of leadership the person who decided they wanted to do the project didn't understand the encompassing enormous amounts of time and energy that's going to end up having to take over you it's going to rule your life, you're going to dream about it and you can't get away from it because you become so passionate about it and a lot of people do not have the time and energy or just the personality to handle some of those things I think about the IIG starting up in many areas and their intention is good but they just don't have either the skills, the support or the time to follow it through it fails and then everybody gets discouraged and nobody else wants to start anything else up again it's the people it's all about the people, it's all about you having the passion falling through, Bob and I and many other people are always here for you for support until of course we totally burn out and so then we'll need to come back and go back to you the next skeptical activist to step up I'm hoping that there's people out there today to step up, I did want to mention really quick I do have some editing Wikipedia brochures if anybody wanted those just generically you don't have to join my project you want to take them home so I don't have to take them on the airplane home but you can always talk to us later Bob and I are very approachable we're very easy to find the action list for Brzezinski stuff contact me at skepticsprotect at gmail.com that's the best way to get on that list okay one question Kathy cool yeah the not quite named Amazonian skeptics not for sure positive that's the name but Kathy we have our information on there so that you guys this is a project where to start here most projects start at TAM most projects are inspired by TAM I have been and TAM and the other workshops other conferences at CFI when you leave a conference like this conferences are amazing things go to a conference if that's the first thing you do go if you don't have one in your area start a skeptic camp or a meetup or something absolutely alright well thank you very much folks now get out there and do some skepticism