Guest: Greg Taylor, blogger and creator of the popular paranormal website The Daily Grail. Here’s the link to Greg’s article on the Million Dollar Challenge:
http://www.dailygrail.com/features/the-myth-of-james-randis-million-dollar-challenge

Download MP3 (34:08min, 16MB)

[audio:http://content.blubrry.com/skeptiko/skeptiko-2009-03-16-60254.mp3]

Alex: Welcome to skeptiko where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris.

On this episode of skeptiko, I have a very interesting interview with Greg Taylor, the founder and main blogger over at The Daily Grail, a paranormal website that I think many of you are familiar with or maybe should be familiar with.

It’s a very, very interesting website. It does a great job of balanced reporting on strange anomalous stuff, and also some skeptical stuff, with a real, intelligent edge to it.  I’ve always enjoyed it, and I really enjoyed the chance to get to know Greg a little bit and speak with him on this interview. We talked a lot about skepticism and what it’s like trying to be kind of a counterweight to that skeptical voice that is out there in so many places. It’s a very interesting chat. I think you’ll enjoy it. Coming up: my dialogue with Greg Taylor, of the Daily Grail:

 

Basically, Greg, I want to keep it pretty casual and have a chat. We’re obviously both interested in a lot of the same topics and are covering them. I though a lot of folks would like to know about the site, because I’ve tried in the past to dig up information on who is the Daily Grail and what’s it all about, and I don’t know if it’s just me, but I haven’t been able to find a lot of that information. So, tell me!  Tell me the story: The Daily Grail.

Greg:  It sort of came about around 1998. There were a lot of websites – as you know, less than now – but still it took a lot of my time to go through each day and visit all these different websites I was interested in, because I’m interested in lots of various topics. It just came to me that it would be nice to have a central resource where people could see the latest news on all these things.

That was basically the birth of The Daily Grail. At the start, it was back in the old days of updating the page by hand, FTP-ing it up everyday…it was very work intensive. The hits went from 10 people a day, to 100 people a day, to 1000 people a day. Now, we’re up around 15,000 people a day. It obviously serves a purpose, and I’m glad so many people enjoy it.

Alex:  Go ahead and give us the thirty-second summary of what you cover, and what you’re particularly interested in at any given time.

Greg:  Thirty seconds, huh? [Laughter] That could be tough. Basically, the quick explanation would be anything outside the paradigm. I like knowledge right on the edge, so that’s what excites me. Generally, skeptics think it means you’re a “woowoo” or a strange person, but I like it. It’s UFOs; its afterlife; its parapsychology; its little bits of history that you don’t know about that might change the way you view history or even view the present. It’s all those sorts of things.

Most people call those Fortean subjects, so that’s probably the best description. I think where I still have a little problem with The Daily Grail is that, one, I’m interested in all these topics, and, I just love reading this strange stuff. Even if it’s a little bit fringe-ish, I still really enjoy reading it. I just read it with a bit of humor to it. I don’t take it too seriously, which again, skeptics don’t seem to grasp that you can look at these things and not be falling off the edge of the earth.

On the other hand, I also like the really hard evidence that’s coming out: some of the stuff you’re doing with the afterlife research, and parapsychology research, some of the really good UFO cases, some of the evidence in there. I think sometimes it’s hard to mesh both of them on The Daily Grail, because sometimes people want to see it as a place where you go to get the really hard evidence about all of these fringe topics. Other times I just like to put some strange stuff up there, which to a skeptic would devaluate us, as being respectable.

Anyway, that’s what I like. I like the Fortean and stuff, but I also like exploring things scientifically as well.

Alex:  You know, I think that’s really, really an interesting point. Now, I don’t talk much about UFO stuff, but I have to say over the last year or so, I find more and more of that data out there, and I just don’t know what to do with it because it kind of butts up against what I thought I knew, and yet some of it is just very, very hard to dismiss, but that’s a whole other tangent.

But, as you get to the fringe – and I kind of hate that term, but as you get to the fringe – of science or the fringe of these anomalies, I think your point is really interesting. When you delve into it and then you realize that, “Hey, I’m not really that far from taking that other step to something else that is way past what I believe in or I already know is pure fantasy”. It really starts blending together in a way that does challenge us – doesn’t it? To know where to draw that line between these ideas and that very tenuous thing that we call reality.

Greg:  Exactly, and that’s the value of real skepticism, I think, that every day you check yourself. You say, “Do I have evidence here?” or “If I don’t have evidence, is it worthy of further investigation”, and things like that.  Its things like, what might be called instant [6:18] visitation, like people getting visited by aliens, fairies, or leprechauns, or whatever you want to have, and try bringing that up in a conversation with someone who’s not familiar with it. It’s crazy stuff. It’s “You are loopy, full-on loopy,” and I recognize that fully.

One of my little research areas is all these commonalities that happen in these experiences. I wrote an essay in our anthology, Darklore, a little while back, about how all these various things – alien abductions, fairy sightings, all that sort of stuff – have commonalities that are there. There’s this bubbling sound or musical sound that’s at the beginning of it.  Then sometimes, quite often there’s a fog, and it turns into the instant [7:02] and stuff like that. There are commonalities that there shouldn’t be, across all these extremes. Even though I don’t view it as a reality, there is something going on here. It’s not like people are just making stuff up; there’s something going on and it’s going to need further investigation. That’s one of the things for me, to just keep looking for these things that I think Margaret Mead called “recurrent regularities”, that you find in these anomalies. It’s the same for afterlife research too. You get these recurrent regularities that make you say, “There’s something more here that needs investigation and that shouldn’t be ignored by science.”

Alex:  Yes, and one step further, I think that natural history is really the basis and has been the basis all along for good science. It all starts with an observation, and when we start observing those patterns, then we have to dig deeper. The problem has been – as I have talked about on this show and as I think you’ve explored in The Daily Grail – when we hit these boundaries that become the taboo that you’re not supposed to cross over.  Yet, somebody has to cross over them, and I think that’s partly what you’re trying to do in melding these different areas together.

Greg:  Yes, and I think it should be partly taboo. You’re right on the fringe, so there should be some caution about it. There should be that taboo. I spoke to Debra Blum about her book, Ghost Hunters, and she sort of reinforced that. She said that perhaps there should be that taboo that just stops people and goes, “Hold on a second.  I need to be very skeptical here.” On the other hand, as you and I well know, there are skeptics that go full the other way, and as soon as you take a step, it’s more than taboo. You just become an outcast, and that’s just completely off limits. So, that’s taking it too far. It takes finding that little space where you’re comfortable doing it, but it’s not right off the chart.

Alex:  It’s funny that you say that, and it’s funny when we talk about skeptics, because I talk about skeptics on my show a lot, and I think it comes up in the stuff that you produce as well. I have to wonder, what role do you see the skeptical community play in this dialogue that’s going on, and this changing, evolving view that we have of consciousness and the paranormal? What do you see of the role of the skeptical community as being, and do you see that role changing or being in a process of change over the last four or five years?

Greg:  That’s a good question. I think the whole modern skeptical movement, as it is, isn’t going to contribute a lot, because it’s just that mentality of crowds. No one is going to be game and try to step forward to engage, too much. I think, what you’re doing with Steven Novella is a step in the right direction. Steven is probably one of the more open skeptics. He still has his moments, but he also has some really good moments of saying, “Let’s look at the evidence here”. Then you compare it to some of the others out there – people like Randi – who basically earn their living off it, and have to act a certain way.

The changing of the guard is happening, I think, with Steven Novella and Phil Plait. I have a few problems with Phil. I really enjoy his blog and I think he’s doing a great job educating people and things like that, but then he talks authoritatively about all these things. Then the subject of UFOs or the afterlife comes up, and he speaks the same way about them as if he knows: “There’s no such thing… blah blah blah”. Quite obviously he has not read the research at all. I think we’ve got room to move Phil Plait. If you keep presenting evidence to him, he’s going to move. Steven Novella was saying that if you could show some good evidence, he might move. Maybe there are some leaders in the movement that can progress things a little bit.

Alex:  That’s really interesting, and we just don’t know. It’s a little bit of an inside baseball here, but I think it’s kind of a fascinating topic. I get the same impression from Steve Novella, and I think that’s part of his popularity, that there is this open-mindedness – or at least apparently open-mindedness. You say the same, I think, of D.J. Grothe at Point of Inquiry. I don’t know, I’ve never talked to Plait. Isn’t he the creator of the Bad Astronomer?

Greg:  Yes, the Bad Astronomer.

Alex:  I’ve of heard him, and yes, he’s definitely knowledgeable and has a great little niche there. You know, though, what kind of makes me give a second thought to that is because the person I’ve probably had the most encounters with in that regard is Steven Novella. I have to say that the couple times where I feel like we’ve really gotten to the cusp of saying, “Okay, now can we say that Ray Hyman really did drop the ball with that critique of Dean Raden?” Then you have to go through three hours of every, “he said, she said” and “this is the paper…”  There’s no movement! In the end, it’s a Dick Cheney kind of, “No, I don’t regret anything”, kind of thing.

Greg:  Yeah, he sort of engages and then teases you up to the end, but when it comes down to it, you can’t bridge that gap.

Alex:  Yes, and I wonder if it’s any different. I wonder if Michael Shermer – who I find speaks really well, has a good style, and I enjoy hearing him speak – is the same way.  How can you explain,  misinterpreting the Pim van Lommel study of near-death experience, which he completely gets wrong, and then never retracts, never goes back and says, “Oh yeah, I did get that completely wrong.” So, I don’t know. Are these guys really a new opening for the skeptical community, or is it just a rehashing and a polishing of the old guard that is going to hold on tooth and nail to a paradigm that’s slowly slipping away?

Greg:  I do feel Plait and Novella do seem like really good guys, so I hold out hope, but again, it’s the same thing. I’ve brought up a couple of problems with Phil Plait’s things on UFOs, and he just ignored them. I pointed out “You are completely wrong here,” but there’s been nothing about that. He’s called me the Goofy Anti-Science Guy basically, even though I gave a positive review of his book [Laughter]. So, there’s still that antipathy between skeptics and us, I guess, people who are interested in the strange and paranormal.

Although, I don’t think we should generalize. One of my pet hates are guys like Fule [13:34] go, “Those crazy UFO-logists,” when really he’s talking about people who have no idea of UFOs. They just have this belief in UFOs and haven’t really investigated it. Real UFO-logists have some great things to say, so that generalization of just saying, “Skeptics! All those skeptics are so closed-minded.” There are a lot of great skeptics out there, so we have to be careful to not do the same, as we hate them doing it to us.

Alex:  Who Greg? Who is a great skeptic?

Greg:  You know, if you go on message boards there are some great guys that are really tough on me. You can really hone your skills against them in terms of debating with them, but they will give. I think there are lot of those guys out there, and just because you have some of them that aren’t going to move, then you shouldn’t say all skeptics are like that.

Alex:  I agree with that, of course. In general, I agree with that, but I have to tell you that when I do a bunch of message board posting and lurking – mainly posting on mine because it takes a while to get the podcasts out and the experiments off the ground – but, I have to say I’m pretty unimpressed in general with the skeptical collective mind, there.  I don’t know. You have to tell me where you go and where you find these hardnosed skeptics that really do have a handle on the data and are able to play both sides and see both sides. I have to say, I haven’t seen it. I really haven’t.

Greg:  I think you’re right on many counts. I just don’t like the generalizing, and there are some good skeptics out there, but again, in terms of speaking of the future of skepticism, there’s another point. I think the modern skeptical movement, as it is, is growing quite a lot, and I think that’s probably because the real appeal of skepticism is to the intellectual ego. On one level, it says we as humans know so much that we don’t really need to know any more – not really don’t need to, but rather we’ve got it all sorted.

Alex:  Right, right.

Greg:  On a lower level it gives that boost to the intellectual ego of saying, “Look at those crazy woowoos  I’m glad I’m so much smarter than them.” So, it has that attraction.  You know, that really is attractive to geeks, people online, all that sort of stuff. Now, I call myself a geek, so I’m not trying to put down the word “geek.” Anyway, it has that attraction to the geeks, the online population, because that’s their big thing.  They are intellectual and they are smart, so skepticism has this great appeal to them. I see skepticism really growing over the next few years, although probably for the wrong reasons.

Alex:  You know, you could be right, and I definitely think you’re on to something in describing that intellectual kind of snobbery, but it almost sometimes has that feel to me of someone who’s read half the book, or read the Cliff Notes, and is out talking about their ideas. So many times I hear these guys espousing critical thinking and they’ll recite these logical fallacies over and over again. How about applying some of that critical thinking and some of that logic and looking at the data?

Greg:  Oh, yeah. I’ve had very long message board discussions, where basically they’re hitting their head up against a brick wall. If you could take them outside the situation and say, “Are you applying critical thinking here?” It would be good. I agree, wholeheartedly. There are some real tough moments.

Again, though, another thing is why we are so committed to engaging skeptics.  Perhaps we should just be doing our research and putting results out there and letting them speak for themselves.

Alex:  On one hand I agree with you, but the subplot is that I think the biggest mistake that’s been made is by not engaging with the skeptics enough. One of the first things that really surprised me when I really stumbled into skeptiko and started talking with Dean Raden and Rupert Sheldrake and the likes – people that are really topnotch researchers in parapsychology and PSI phenomena – is that they’re just worn out. They’ve just been worn down by these skeptics.

You know, as hard as we’ve been in this conversation here, we’ve really been kind of easy on the fact that there is this fringe in there that is really made up of pretty nasty people that will go out of their way to really cause a lot of trouble for folks. I think, no, I know, because I’ve spoken to these researchers, and that a lot of these guys were totally caught off guard by just the kind of grief that a relatively few number of these people could cause. I don’t know how we get around that problem, either, that “evil” side of the skeptical community, that skeptical drive to be superior and to show off.

Greg:  I guess it’s probably just about educating the public. You’ve got a pretty good platform with skeptiko, and on The Daily Grail, I do the same.  I posted an article a while back: The Myth of the Million Dollar Challenge, which I think is a pretty rational look at how the Million Dollar Challenge means nothing really. It’s always quoted by skeptics as disproving the existence of anything. It means nothing. I did this rational thing, and that’s hard, I think, thirty thousand readers online, so that’s a lot of people getting that information and maybe thinking about it a bit harder – even if Randi did call it a tirade [Laughter]. At least it was a rational look and I think I educated a few people, so that’s the goal, to keep spreading information. That’s what the internet gives us, a chance to educate people a bit more about the truth behind a lot of these claims.

Alex:  Right. Very well said, and I think that’s great. I haven’t come across that article, so you’ve just motivated me to go read it. Although, I’ve certainly read enough about the Randi challenge that I don’t even want to talk about that, but there’s the thing. I mean that’s what we wind up with, people like me saying, “Gee, I don’t even want to talk about it. I’m worn out.” There are a lot of other people, who are coming into the whole debate, or the whole topic, and they’re new to it, and the Randi challenge is foremost on their minds. To that end, I don’t think we can do enough to hash it out over and over again, and I’m going to make a note here to point folks to that article that you posted.

Greg:  If you just Google “Myth of the Million Dollar Challenge,” I think it’s pretty much the top hit on Google.

Alex:  Great! You know, your other point is definitely something that’s near and dear to my heart. About a year into skeptiko, what I really saw was that we do need to generate more research. It’s funny because when I talk to researchers, one of the things I hear is that we need to move beyond the basic research, that we need to start exploring the subtleties of these phenomena and, for example, with the afterlife, ask the follow on questions. I keep hearing that we can’t just keep repeating the same experiment over and over again and show the fundamental existence of the phenomena; we’re past that.

I think that’s a mistake. I think that’s just a big mistake, and again, coming at this thing from the outside, I thought, “Hey, where’s the disconnection here, guys?” You guys can say that we’re past this and we already know that reincarnations is real, or that near death experience suggests survival of consciousness, but we haven’t converted very many. We certainly haven’t converted very many mainstream academics, so don’t we really need to go back. However many times we have to prove it again, and again, and again, then we need to do that until we get past that. Then we can start looking at the follow on questions in terms of what form it takes, or what’s necessary to make it do this or do that. Do you know what I mean?

Greg:  Yes, I can understand the fatigue of researchers. You know, you look at the Piper case from 110 years ago, say. To me, you look at the Piper case, and you cannot walk away from that and say anything but “Wow! There’s something major going on here.”  It proves that something is going on, the Piper case. There are thousands of pages of documentation, transcripts, everything, so to come around a hundred years later and say that we need to prove that something’s going on here…well, it’s very fatiguing. I mean, hasn’t this all been done before in detail?

On the other hand, its a hundred years gone, and it’s a new generation. The first thing when you bring the Piper case up to skeptics is that they go, “It was a hundred years ago.  They weren’t as smart as us, back then.”  But, if you read the documentation, it’s quite clear they were very skeptical. They knew all the tricks and all that sort of stuff.

Alex:  No, I agree. With the Leanora Piper case, all that stuff is really good. Moreover, what I was going to try and interject there is that this stuff isn’t hard. We’re talking about science that doesn’t require really any kind of advanced technology, right? I mean, they were just as capable of doing it a hundred years ago as anyone would be today. There isn’t any technological breakthrough. You don’t need an FMRI. You don’t need any of that stuff.

Greg:  Yes, the problem is that these days, everyone wants results to a certain degree of significance and things like that, whereas the Piper case is just transcripts. You read a thousand pages and it’s just time after time of “anonymous sitter comes in.” Mrs. Piper knows nothing about them. There’s no cold reading. They don’t talk. She just sits there and goes bang, bang…name after name, detail after detail. You see a hundred of those cases and by the end you’re going, “Well, it’s pretty obvious that something’s going on here.” For a skeptic, though, can you say to the odds of one in a million that she’s doing that? No, they didn’t, because it wasn’t that hard analytical study. That’s also a problem with trying to prove anything these days. You’ve got to come up with that significance.

Alex:  Yes, although I really don’t think that’s as hard as we sometimes make it out. We’ve let the skeptics’ kind of control that narrative, and part of the narrative is just that: these experiments are very difficult to do, and have to be controlled down to this level of precision, and all that’s bull.  If you look at what’s published in the social sciences, what we accept on a daily basis – from getting published in the major newspapers or major magazines, the stuff that makes news and is real science – doesn’t have any of that degree of precision that they’re asking for there. It’s just another smokescreen. You know, though, that’s an interplay where we’re really going on and on about the skeptical community, but that’s good. It’s probably a pretty good place to drive this dialogue.

In that vein, the other thing I’d like to explore with you is the relationship between the skeptical community and the scientific community. What I’ve come to see, I think, in the skeptical community, is really a great tool for providing cover for academics who are really glad to not look at this stuff.

Greg:  Again, you have the situation where modern skepticism has just reached a point where they have such a high profile – you know, Chalmers in Scientific American or stuff like that – that they now have this ability to castigate scientists who do work on things like that. That’s something that really needs to be addressed by the fringe researchers or otherwise. They have this platform. For example, Randi – he’s a magician.  He’s a self-promoter. He regularly just deceives people when he talks. He basically makes things up. Yet, he has this great scientific standing where people listen to what he says.

Somehow, I think the real battle, if you like, between fringe people and skeptics is trying to lessen how much importance is given to skeptical writings, because, as you know, you go through Chalmers’ stuff or Randi’s stuff, Phil Plait’s stuff – I’ve gone through some of that myself – and it’s misinformed; it’s wrong. Sometimes it’s purely misleading and it should not be held in any great esteem by the scientific community.

Alex:  Yeah. It’s really disappointing. The lack of scholarship, to me, is stunning. As you’re pointing out, there are two kinds of scholarship. One, there’s the skeptical scholarship in terms of digging through their stuff and say, “Gee, this really doesn’t hold water,” or “This Richard Wiseman study doesn’t really prove anything. This is a debunking exercise; it shouldn’t be passed off as science.”  There’s that level of scholarship of just being on top of the skeptical writings, but there are some folks who are plowing ahead and publishing interesting results on PSI, or afterlife, or even UFOs. When you talk to the folks who you really would expect to know this stuff, they don’t, and that, to me, is really surprising.

Greg:  Yes. There was that example a couple of years ago with Rupert Sheldrake at a science conference. Basically, a guy was standing there, berating him, saying that PSI shouldn’t be at this science conference, because obviously there are no results in PSI.  Rupert was standing around and said, “Well, can I just ask you if you’ve read my research,” and he said, “No, but I’d be very suspicious of it, if I did.” It’s ridiculous. It just makes me laugh out loud [Laughter].

Alex:  Right! I wouldn’t believe it even if it was true.

Greg:  Yes, and he hasn’t read anything, but says it shouldn’t be at a science conference.  You know, what other field a scientist would be able to say that about: “That medical stuff shouldn’t be at this conference, because its absolute crap, but I haven’t read the research.” They’d be laughed out of town, but they get to say it when it comes to paranormal, parapsychology, and that sort of stuff. It’s crazy, really. Again, how do you change that perception? It’s that perception that PSI can be ridiculed to start with that lets people get away with that sort of nonsense.

Alex:  What do you think that’s all about? There are these questions that are really the most basic, fundamental questions that we all have – that if you went and asked someone, they would be it…if you asked them at church or on the street – like who am I really, where did I come from, where am I going. How did these questions become – I don’t know – giggle questions?

Greg:  Yeah, there’s a great quote from Michael Grossman, one of my favorite researchers on the afterlife, where he says, “The current budget in America for the technology of death, the military budget is in the billions or hundred billion dollars. We ought to compare that to the budget for researching whether there’s an afterlife.” “Did I hear an amused snicker?” Michael says.

There’s probably two things: One, there’s the fringe that’s populated by a lot of strange people, and so people start associating those people who are making really whacky claims with the subject in general. Maybe we need to reclaim that area, ourselves.  Maybe there needs to be a bit of self-regulation, pushing people aside when they’re making crazy claims?

The other thing is maybe people like to live in that ignorance. You know, they like to live in that material word of not thinking about thinking deeper. Sometimes it might be scary to think about your own mortality, to think about whether you’re going to live on after you die. There are a lot of people I know that would call themselves Christians, who don’t think at all about the actual teachings. They don’t think about what it all means. They’re just happy to call themselves Christian, and I think there’s just this thing atthe back of their minds that they’ll probably live on in Heaven after they die and that’s as far as they want to go with it. So, there’s probably a bit of fear there in confronting some of these issues, that might be at the heart of the issue.

Alex:  Well, I think you’re right, and it’s funny you should mention that. I just completed an interview with Denise O’Leary, who’s one of the co-authors of “The Spiritual Brain”, and she’s a Christian Science writer in Canada. We had this kind of frustrating debate where I was saying basically exactly what you’re saying. Why not just follow the data wherever it goes? You believe, like I do, that the materialistic paradigm falls apart, but are you willing to go wherever that data might take you? I just heard echoes in this conversation of talking to a skeptic, talking to a hardcore, dogmatic skeptic who doesn’t even realize the extent to which they’ve grown accustomed to having this wall of comfort around their paradigm, and will do anything to prevent any breaches in that wall that they’ve built.

Greg:  Yes, and that’s probably one of the things I really like about sitting on the edge of science. Some of the people you meet that, as you said, are just willing to follow the data.  It could mean something very strange or it could mean something very boring. They’re just going to follow the data, whereas with religious fundamentalists right through to the skeptical fundamentalists there’s this closed-mindedness where you just can’t discuss anything with them. You cannot point out interesting data and say let’s see where this goes. They’re just closed-minded about it, so I think that’s why I like hanging around the edge here. You do meet some interesting people who are willing to follow the data.

Alex:  Where do you see things going for yourself and for The Daily Grail in the future?

Greg:  I’m right in the middle of trying to redesign the site at the moment. Again, every couple of years I try to update it to the latest technologies and things like that, so I’m trying to make it even more interactive than it is. You know, currently we have blogs for members. They can post their own thoughts and things like that. I’m just trying to set up some groups now, so we can look at certain topics. You can join a group and on just one page, everyone in that group can discuss that one certain topic. It’s just some new technologies and the new page that we’re designing. Beyond that, I’d like to eventually build up an income source so that I can devote full-time work on it. Then you can go into the video side of things. The Daily Grail could become a center point, I think, for a lot of fringe stuff, if we can get it to that stage. I don’t think it’s at that stage, but I’m slowly trying to build it. There are more interesting times ahead for it.  I’m sure of that.

Alex:  Well great!  I certainly enjoy checking it out whenever I get a chance. I just pulled it up right here, and I see a very interesting video with Michael Shermer and his…

Greg:  Yeah, the Spoon Bending one. I try and put the skeptical stuff on there as well sometimes.

Alex:  That’s great. Well, Greg, thanks a lot for joining us today on skeptiko. I’m going to have a couple of links up to both The Daily Grail and maybe to that article on Randi.  Any last thoughts before we wrap it up?

Greg:  No, this was a fun discussion. I think at the core that we just need to keep on plugging along and just keep educating the public. Keep following the data wherever it leads, as you said. That’s the most important thing. It’s science – following the data wherever it leads. People can call you anti-science, or as Randi has called me, “a grubby,” but if you follow the data then you’re doing science. We should not worry too much about what other people call us.

Alex:  Thanks again to Greg for joining us today on skeptiko. If you’d like more information, a link to The Daily Grail, a link to that article he did on the Amazing Randi, check out the skeptiko website. You’ll also find links to all our previous shows as well, an email link to me, and a link to our forums.

That’s going to do it for today. Much, much more is coming up. Many things are happening around here, and I hope to have some more news to report real soon. So, until next time bye for now.