Understand the thinking atheist. It's not a person, it's a symbol, an
idea. The population of atheist this country is going through the rule, rejecting
faith, pursuing knowledge, challenging the sacred. If I tell the truth,
it's because I tell the truth, not because I put my hand on a
book and made a wish and working together for a more rational world. Take
the risk of thinking. Feel so much more happiness, truth, beauty,
and wisdom will come to you that way. Assume nothing, question everything,
and start thinking. This is the Thinking Atheist podcast hosted by Seth Andrews.
My special guest was featured back in twenty nineteen in The New York Times.
She was featured as part of an online sting operation. In fact, they
called her a vigilante. That's my kind of guest. She is a skepticism
activist. She writes for Skeptical Inquirer. She's a co founder of the Monterey
County Skeptics. She has been awarded the James Randy Award for Skepticism in the
Public Interest. She is founder of the About Time project, which we'll get
into, and that's an umbrella for guerrilla skepticism. On Wikipedia, she is
an ambassador for the Center for Inquiry, and she can be heard on the
Skeptic Zone podcast. Not enough credits for you, my friend, Susan Gerbick,
So good to have you. It's great to be here. It's nice
as se sa. So you're dangling psychic bait. I guess we'll just start
with this whole sting operation. What are we talking about. Well, we
put together a whole series of investigations even before the New York Times article came
out. We always call them something operations, something something. So we've had
Operation ice Cream Cone, Operation peach Pit, Operation Tater Taught, Operation Onion
Ring, and so on, and so we put together all kinds of various
stings to expose people who claim to be able to communicate with the dead.
We mostly focus on those people who have some some sort of notoriety, maybe
enough to be able to have a Wikipedia page or have a TV and have
a TV show. Not necessarily the psychic that's down in the corner, you
know, the corner of your street that has you know, does readings there?
Not that one. We're looking at the more prominent psychics, and we
do interchange the word psychic with medium, with grief vampire, because it's all
kind of one and the same to some extent. But I specialize mostly in
hot readings, and that is a unique how should I say? Most psychics
use cold reading and editing if they're on TV to make themselves appear to be
real, but a very small subset of them use hot readings, which is
where they go in. They investigate the client beforehand, and then they appear
to know a lot of information about them. So when you have somebody you
suspect of being a hot readers, it's a you can sting am easier once
you know the ways they come about getting the information. You can plant information
that no way they could know unless they were reading your social media or whatever.
And so that's what we've done various times. Okay, well, let's
sort of unlayered that those onions real fast cold reading is this audience is going
to be well versed in much of this, but I know it might be
new material for some. So let's do our due diligence. Where cold reading
is what reading your clothing, your retire, your cadence, your gesture,
the way you smell, what's in your background on a zoom screen. And
then there are warm readings and hot readings. I know that some have actually
used Q cards. I know that there were some psychics who before you give
them audience, you know, especially some of the celebrities, you're filling out
Q cards and they're picking those up, and so they're already sort of pre
informed about the things that they're supposed to know psychically. Would that qualify as
a hot reading? I mean, help me out. Oh absolutely. Back
in the days of faith readers, faith healers and so on, the audience
would come in and they would fill out prayer cards, and there's various ways
that they would be able to get ahold of those prayer cards. Even Peter
pop Off back in James Randy's day, they would get a basket of these
prayer cards and he would just have his wife read one of the prayer cards
to people, and then he would cast it out to the audience. I'm
getting Elizabeth Morgan who's at one five six North Seventh Street, who has arthritis
all over her body. Well, she wrote that on the prayer card right
before she came in. That's hot reading also. And then once he gets
her up on stage or she stands up and the cameras are on her or
whatever. Then he just does his speel you know of like, oh God,
it is saving you. So faith faith healing has done hot readings,
and a hot reading could also be just as simple of my like maybe your
sister saying, hey, you've got to see this medium. She's great,
and so you go see the medium and this medium knows all about you.
Well, yeah, your sister just told you all about about you know,
the problems you're having a work and so on. So that's a hot reading.
Anytime you have information about a person ahead of time is a hot read.
I was interested too. Some of the psychics have a team of researchers.
They go out and comb the Internet for information about someone in advance of
the visit. By the way, Peter Popaf for those who aren't of that
gen ration or familiar, he's still around. I think he's still a millionaire,
which is just a travesty, but he would do these faith healing services.
And James Randy and another gentleman whose name escapes me were they're scanning radio
frequencies and they realized he had a receiver in one of his ears, and
his wife was backstage and she would read into his ear so that he could
hear it from God miraculously. Hello, Pete, can you here me?
If you can't, you're in trouble. Junk pop Off was being prompted by
his wife through a wireless earpiece Dearly Johnson. She'd gotten her information from prayer
cards filled out by the faithful before the show began to get You want to
get rid of this walker, sister, Oh glory, how long have you
been walking on that walk? Two years? Three years? She was sixteen
twenty seventh tenth Street, sixteen twenty seven tenth Street. That right, burning
this athritus bread out of your body. And this is how gullible people are,
or at least how much they want to believe maybe yeah, maybe,
how much they can't abide the idea that it was all a hoax. They've
already emotionally married themselves to the hope is that when he came forward afterwards and
said it wasn't an ear piece, it was a hearing aid, no one
stopped to ask why a faith healer would have hearing loss. I thought that
was a big omission. Um, tell me about grief vampires. That's a
term that you use often. Let's flesh it out well Mark Edward, my
partner, came up with that term. It is kind of to distinguish between
a person who communicates with who says they communicate with the dead, from a
person who's doing tarot readings or astrology or you know, tea readings or whatever.
It's somebody who's going to try to find your grief and try to latch
onto the grief, and your grief could be somebody who has died, or
it could be maybe you know that you you have in some sort of inferior
complex that you that they can use as a grief they can manipulate to get
you to do more readings and to take your money out of you, or
to get power over you. It's not always about the money. A lot
of it is about power, a lot of it is about manipulation. So
a grief empire is somebody who would be trying to find your grief, trying
to find a hook into you so that they can manipulate you for whatever reason
that they're manipulating you. So beyond the John Edwards types who are shilling these
psychic powers for cash, somebody a spouse, a life partner who is maybe
a malignant narcissist might be a grief vampire, sort of sucking you dry in
that way. Possibly. Yeah, I hadn't thought of it that way,
but I suppose so, yeah, I mean, I don't know. I
find that manipulators find people when they are vulnerable, or they find their vulnerabilities
and prey upon them. Right, The sociopathic part of them does not empathize,
and so it really becomes about control and serving the self. That's probably
a whole other conversation. You and I could go out for coffee and talk
about that, Susan forever. Okay, So you're creating fake social media accounts
as bait for the psychics, do I understand that? Yes, we've done
it in many different forms. We've done it using email, We've used Facebook.
You can do it also just in person to some extent, there's different
forms of doing it, depending on which way you think that it will bait
the psychic. And also sometimes I've done these stings to the same individual and
I don't want them to you know, I would think they'd be wary of
Facebook again, but no, we can catch them again using Facebook. I
don't quite know why they haven't caught on there. They're fully aware of what
I'm doing, but I think they haven't had enough repercussions, and I think
that's why they're just continuing because it's very successful for them financially, and there's
always another person who's willing to throw money at them. So if you and
I are having this very public conversation a burning the undercover agents, you know,
by talking about this. No, everything's hidden away, and I don't
think it's a problem at all. But people should be wary of what you
do. Not that you shouldn't put things on social media, but just be
aware that anything on social media can be held against you. Don't assume that
you have some privacy controls, because we can find out almost anything about anybody.
Anybody who's been alive has had been in the newspaper. Either you mentioned
in an obituary for a family member, or you were in a choir in
elementary school, or you know, we can find information about you. So
don't be so complacent that you can't. Oh, you know, the internet
already freaks me out. We were talking about a specific recipe the other day.
We were just talking. I wasn't on my phone, we were just
in the kitchen, and then I logged onto something and there was an ad
for the very type of food we were just talking about, and I was
like, yes, Lord, or yes Google or Facebook or somebody's watching or
listing. You know. When I brought in our Amazon Echo, I told
Natalie, I said, I can't believe I purposefully brought in an active listening
device into the walls of my home. But at the same time, I
love it, you know. So when you say there is no privacy,
sometimes I wonder about the things I don't know about. Do you ever wonder?
Do you think maybe it's the stuff we aren't aware of that should be
the most terrifying. No, I'm not too terrified. Should be aware that
there is no I mean, there's always a way of finding out something or
and just pure chance I mean, or coincidence. Well, what's the again,
Share only as much as you can or wish to about your methodology.
But what is a fake social media account doing? Are you acting like a
Mark? Well? Possibly? Okay, So our most recent sting is called
Operation Onion Ring, and we infiltrated a social spirit It's called a spirit circle
with eight people involved, four hundred dollars per person, and the psychic was
Thomas John and I've written about this so I can reveal whatever whatever would be
of interest to you. But what we did is I only have four days
to pull it off. What he was doing is he was going to the
spirit circle was focused on children from five to twelve, So we were kind
of not too keen on that idea at all. That was pretty pretty bad.
So what he would do is he was you know, they paid four
hundred dollars. The parent had to be there with them, and then they
came out to a zoom call and then they had he read them. And
what he was reading was their social media, their mother's social media presence.
Okay, forgive me, I don't mean to interrupt you, but I want
to be clear. A spirit circle where the medium was targeting young children.
Did I hear that right? Yeah? Well, they the parents paid four
hundred dollars for the child to have a reading from the medium. What's the
attitude of a parent, Oh, they totally buy it. They want their
child to be special. This, this particular spirit circle that we attended was
to help the child to understand that they may have mediumship qualities themselves, if
they saw spirit people or shadow people or whatever circumstances. Thomas John was explaining
to them that they possibly have powers themselves. So the parents were all into
it. They loved it, and in a lot of ways, the parent
was getting a reading because of course the children don't have social media presence,
so what he would do was he would just say your grandmother or your great
grandmother when referring to the child. But really what he was doing was he
was just reading the parents, the mother's social media and just regurgitating it so
it was aimed towards the child. Oh yeah, this is absolutely happening.
The parents were all for it. They were sitting right there next to them
and proud as heck that their child was getting a reading. Our little timmy
seems to have a gift kind of thing. Well, there was more that
it was explaining that a couple of the children we're saying that they no longer
could, were dreaming about their family member who had died, and they felt
egregious, you know, sad about that because the parent obviously is pushing them
is you know, the children are growing up and moving on and they don't
remember grandma like they did before. But the mothers, and it's always mothers
were pushing them again and saying, well, you know what about you know
when Grandma used to call you this, or grandma you know, you can
feel that the mother is still filling the grief, so they're they're laying it
on the child, and the child in at least two of the circumstances.
And I mean, I have this all recorded, and it was really hard
to watch. These children are crying when they're called on, and they you
just want to reach out and hug them. They just feels awful. They're
they're feeling like, you know, they're moving on, but the parent wants
them to stay in the place where they were, where they're connected to their
parents, the grandparents or whatever. It's it's really difficult to watch one twelve
year old she was she was she was saying that she couldn't connect like she
had in the past, and she felt you could feel that she felt so
much guilt about that. And the mother was, you know, kind of
like it'll happen again kind of thing, and Thomas down is saying, oh,
yeah, you're growing up. You'll move past the stage and then you'll
be able to get back to where you're connecting with dead people again. It
was It was excruciating to watch Seth. It was really hard. You feel
for these children. They're they're easily being manipulated and the parents are buying into
it. They loved it. This is great. In one case, one
of the parents was a medium herself, and we found her on social media.
Because it's on zoom, you could see her name right there. So
we just did a quick look on social media and there she was. She
had shut up with her six year old. She had an eight year old
son who refused to be on the call and so she showed up with the
other child instead because he's like, I don't want anything to do with this.
But the mother was a medium. While she claims to be a medium,
she has a business some known name psychic medium that out there, but
she truly believes this is for the best of her children. Interesting. I
read an article years ago talking about how children trained to think in magical terms
grow up and often have a much more difficult time navigating the real world,
differentiating fact from fiction, truth claims that are false from actual truth. You
know, I don't know, have you developed an opinion about conditioning young people
for this sort of I don't know, for looking for supernatural or magical solutions
in the natural world. You know, I really don't know. I was
raised in a religious household, totally credulous, totally believing in astrology and all
kinds of weird things. But you know, I turned out all right.
I think that, Well, I'm glad for that. People say so,
but I think that we really don't. We really don't know. I think
it just depends in the environment. These kids may rebel completely against their parents.
In the long run, we don't know. I think that it's not
healthy. I think in there, in there, this childhood, in this
time when they're just starting to form their opinions about things, I think it's
I think it's dangerous. But I mean, the argument could also be made
that Santa Claus is telling them Santa Claus is real. Is dangerous. At
the very least, it made me a late bloomer. It took me,
you know, an extra few decades to realize that maybe, you know,
maybe that a lot of these outlandish, outrageous claims might not be substantiated.
But you know, there's hope. I got there. I mean, I
got there, so if I can figure it out, maybe someone else can.
Um all right, Well, let's say you have experienced grief hypothetical I've
lost a child. And I only use that because it is an example.
I think of the type of raw grief that people experience when they are preyed
upon. And so somebody hangs a shingle and says, I speak to the
debt, I can connect you with your lost child. And I go in
and pay whatever the fee is, and I sit down. What kind of
thing might I experience if a grief vampire targets me? What might I be
in for? Well, if it's a local, you know, psychic and
so on, they're probably just going to try to keep How do you come
in regularly, maybe every month or every week or a few times a year,
to come in and get a terror reading or a or whatever and say
they're communicating with your child. It could be just that simple that you know
it's it's It depends on how you want to evaluate that is, if that's
harm or not. I think anytime anybody's lying to you, especially about something
as personal and intimate as a death, those people, I don't think necessarily
you're going to do hot readings other than once you've gone to a medium,
and you go to them again, it's a hot reading because they've already seen
you, right, so they can just make a few votes and say,
oh, the last time she was here, she talked about her sister who
had died, you know, And then the next time you come in,
they just say, oh, your sister wasn't she's here again, and now
she's wearing a blue coat and she's out in the garden. I mean,
that's a hot read obviously when you have it multiple times. But if you
are one of these victims that is had lost a child, and I see
this all the time on Facebook, where you can see how people are posting
over and over. They're posting years even after the death of their child or
their other family member, and it's just the posts are very emotional, you
know, they're talking about happy times they had with them and so on,
and then how much they miss them, and it's it's it's painful to see
that. They probably should see a grief counselor of some sort, but not
a psychic medium, because what happens is we manipulate the memories. Right.
So a lot of these people say they're helping the grief vampires say they're helping
out somehow manipulating the grief, you know, helping them to the grief.
I don't. I don't think lying to somebody is ever going to be helpful.
I think that there are experts who are licensed and trained to be able
to do this, to be able to help you with through your grief.
And we all grief differently, so it may take a very long time for
some people to get over their grief. But when somebody's manipulating it saying,
you know, oh, your dad was a really happy guy. He just
loved you so much, and you know, these could be very complex emotions.
You don't know what actually is behind that. The father may be abusive,
and now you feel this a massive amount of guilt over how you spoke
to your dad towards the end of his life, when you've always thought he
was this, you know, not too great guy, and now the psychic
saying, oh, he's he was actually a really good guy. You know,
I don't know. It's just wrong for somebody to be telling you a
lie about something and reformatting your memories. You know, you're thinking differently now
because a memory is apparently, as science tells us, it's not like putting
a VCR back in the day, putting a VCR in and it plays at
the same time. Every time you listen to that, you access that memory.
You tend to rewrite your memories over time, so if somebody is telling
you a new memory, then it could be just as real as the real
memory. So you know, we really shouldn't be manipulating people like this.
Talking here with activist and skeptic Susan Gerbick, who has done a lot of
work dealing with learning about and exposing psychics, especially at the celebrity level,
do you think they're wrong grifters or do you think some people, some of
these readers, psychics, mediums are just deluded, they really believe the bullshit.
Well, when you get into the higher levels where they're on TV and
they're hot reading, then there's no doubt in my mind that they know darnwell
what they're doing, because you cannot go on to somebody's social media account and
get some tidbits that you repeat later as if they came from the hereafter or
the spirit world and not know that you are totally making this up and that
you're grifting them. So a hot reader knows darnwell what they're doing. Same
with it when they get into the editing process where you can make things happen
and change things around. The real magic happens in the editing room, as
you probably know, Seth, So you can make people sound better or you
know, take things out or change things around. It's not that difficult,
and people have been doing it for a long time since we've been able to
do this with TV shows. But there are a few people, and my
partner Mark Edward says that probably two point five percent of the population are actually
good people who have talked themselves into this and believe that they really are helping.
Another two and a half percent, he says, are probably not.
They're having some sort of mental problems. They think they're communicating with the dead.
But he says, and he's been around a lot longer than I am
in this world, ninety five percent are just they know darn well they're fooling.
Though some too believe their own bit, you know, they think that
sometimes they get sometimes a coincidence happens, or people are gushing all over them
about, Oh, what an amazing person you are, Oh my gosh,
your gift is amazing, And I think that probably SI they think, you
know, maybe I do have a gift here, but we tend to count
the hits and ignore the misses, right. I mean, you walk into
the grocery store one hundred times, not without incident, and then on one
hundred and first time you bump into someone you haven't seen in thirty years,
and wow, the universe must have coordinated this encounter. It's everything happens for
a reason. You've heard that one, right, So yeah, and you
did just earlier in the in the call, you said that maybe the echo
was you were in the kitchen and you heard a rest and you were talking
about a recipe and then then used to get an ad. That's remembering the
hits and forgetting the misses right there, because you've probably see ads all the
time for food products that have nothing to do with the conversation you've had earlier.
There was a study that was referenced in the New York Times article from
twenty eighteen. Nearly ninety five thousand psychic quote businesses exist in this country right
now, to the tune of two billion dollars in a well revenue big business.
You want to speak to the money. Oh my gosh, that is
only what we know about. So a lot of the psychics use cash or
they use cash apps, so I'm sure that's not being reported. So just
you know, expand that tenfold, and that's probably more what we're talking about
as far as finances. And then the pandemic happened and with the lockdown,
people have become a lot more insecure. They you know, you had a
lot more death, You had a lot of people not able to say goodbye
to their family members. They're taking them to the hospital and then you know,
maybe you could FaceTime them and that was it. So during the pandemic,
psychics moved to zoom and as people lost their jobs and so on and
they needed an employment, they would turn to just putting up a Facebook page
and doing readings. So it's been really prolific during the last few years that
we even have more people who are their psychic and able to do these readings
on TikTok. Oh my gosh, you can't. You you can't go five
feet without bumping into somebody who's doing terror readings or horoscopes or or that kind
of thing. So I'm sure they're not reporting most of that income. So
that what was a two billion dollars or yeah, that's probably nothing. I'm
sure it's far more than that. By the way, that's the plot of
one of my favorite horror movies. It's on Shutter it's called Host, and
it's about an online seyance that goes horribly wrong. That of course being fiction,
and we know all about it. The whole idea of a zoom I
guess the word seyance, you know, the reading whatever. You know,
you're supposedly connecting to the spirit world from long distance. You know, what
a wild twenty first century phenomenon. Have you been involved? Have you watched
in the wings an online zoom thing? What's it look like? What does
it feel like? Oh? Absolutely, it's quite emotional. You feel very
badly for the parents, for the people in the event. It's it's I
mean, they're crying and they're just reaching for anything. If you're in a
one of these events, and I've been a many of these events, like
you have three hundred people on the zoom screen and the psychicists calling on one
or two people in the chat area. You can see people calling out for
anything, like maybe the psychic will say I'm getting a Michael and he's got
a connection in New York and something about fishing. Well, you can imagine
how many people that would, you know, relate to thinking about how many
people we actually know. And you see people in the chat going, I
have a Michael, I have he fished? Oh my gosh, and yes,
he lived in New York or whatever, and they're they're clinging onto anything
to try to get the psychic's attention. Me me, me, me,
that's my guy, that's my guy, you know, and it's just it's
so emotional and they're you know, but you had mentioned or the young child
with the the online meeting, and I wondered, had you ever submitted yourself?
Have you ever in some way relatively anonymously engaged the medium? Oh yeah,
Well that's the whole New York Times article, is that. Mark Edward
and myself myself went in Operation I'm setting you up, Susan, I want
to hear the story. Oh oh my gosh, I'm full of story.
So Operation Pizza role Mark Edward and myself we went to the reading as different
characters. We went as Susannah Forsyth Wilson and Mark Wilson because we had id
in those names and we my team had created social media. Over ten days,
they created social media for the characters of Susannah Forsyth Wilson and Mark Wilson,
and in those Facebook pages that told a story about our lives. It
was totally fictional and we did not have access to those Facebook pages, so
we didn't know what was on those Facebook pages. And when we walked into
the venue and we sat down, we know what we did is I texted
the team and said I'm in the building, I'm sitting here, and then
my team went onto those fake Facebook pages, tagging the psychic saying, Oh,
I'm here, I'm so excited to be here, and so on.
I really hope to get into contact with my dear twin brother Andy, who
died of pancreatic cancer and so on. So they just continued the story.
Now, Mark and I were given a little bit of information to attend because
we had to know when to raise our hand. When the psychic is up
on the stage and he says I'm getting a twin brother who wants to reach
out to his sister, I have to know when I'm going to put my
hand up. So we were given a basic amount of information him and I
for two different stories. And so when the psychic and it was Thomas John
again, I mentioned an operation onon ring. He gets up and he says,
I'm getting when who wants to reach out to his sister? I raised
my hand, and then he says, and then I think he died of
something in the stomach area. I think it was pancreatic cancer. And then
I said yes, And then I pretend to cry. You know, I'm
dabbing at my eyes and so on, and then he went on reading Mark
and myself for fifteen minutes about characters we had no idea any information on,
and he went in depth, and he kept reading and reading about our family,
and we kept pretending to cry, and we didn't have the answers.
So sometimes he would say things to us and we would just pretend, Oh,
that was my father, No, I think it was my brother.
Oh yes, we did live in Michigan for a while. I don't know
what's on the Facebook pages. The psychic obviously does. I don't. So
how do you reconcile that? Whenever you're all done? And he says,
you know, we don't expose yourself at the event. We wait until we're
outside of the event, and we do our research and we look at the
Facebook pages to see what was recorded and what was actually on the Facebook pages,
and he's he's basically reading the Facebook pages back to us that we had
no idea what was on those Facebook pages. So that was pretty much the
plot of Operation Pizza Role right there. Boo boom. So you he's supposed
to have an immediate psychic connection to you the person, but the profile is
somebody else, somebody, and he never reads me or Mark. So now
I have obviously real dead people in my life. Well that sounded really weird.
No, I understand say there are people in my life. I was
gonna say, I understood this spirit of what you were saying. But that
made it even worse. Susan, go ahead, go ahead, s But
he never once said that. He never said anything about my real parents who
have died. He never said anything about my sister who has died, or
Mark's family. It was it was. He never said, you know,
I'm getting something nefarious about you, that you're here under false pretenses, that
the money that paid for these readings, which was one hundred and sixty dollars
a person, was came out of a fund given to you by James Randy.
I mean, my gosh, that should have really alerted him, you
would think, But no, he didn't read me, he didn't read the
person who was sitting in front of him. He read the Facebook profiles that
we had planted as bait for him to find. And so it was so
obvious he's hot reading and this isn't the only circumstances. And Operation Onion ring
with the children. We planted children in there. We brought children in and
he did. It was over zoomed. So he's got eight children there and
two of them are from our team. One of them is Bailey Harris that
your audience may know her and her mother sat there. She was twelve,
well she was fourteen, but played a twelve year old and she sat there
the whole time, for two hours with these other students. And then we
had a team in New Zealand and they're there and all they were given was
I made fake emails and I made the accounts as generic as possible of the
email so you wouldn't be able to search for him Joe Martin, and then
I gave him a story in the email. I sent them the email and
it said just some basic information about the child who was attending. And then
he read them, and all he read was what was on those Facebook I
mean the emails that I had sent twice, and he went through and just
gave them all the information that was on there, just changed a little bit
to make it sound like it was coming from the dead, I guess,
and then he added a little bit of color. Because what I did is
I made it so impossible for him to google those persons, because it was
it was a very very narrow amount of information I gave him. And because
I'd given him four hundred dollars and were you know, two people out of
the other out of a group of eight, he had to he didn't have
a lot of information. So he just read that little bit and at no
time did he read them personally, like he didn't say, you know,
something about the dead persons that would be in their actual lives. He just
made generic statements about students, you know, do well in school and all
that kind of stuff. And then what information we gave him and that was
Operation Onion Ring. Was the four hundred dollars the standard ticket or did you
pay extra in the hopes of getting their attention? Well, it was an
eight person event, so everybody was going to be read so okay, all
right, So it was like a flat fee for the whole crew. I'm
trying to I'm trying to understand, like the monetary benefits. You don't blow
the whistle. Then you go back, you assemble the info, you organize
your thoughts, you get it ready. What's a whistle blowing look like?
When you leave a session like that, what do you do? Well?
We go back and we make sure that everything that we were recording recorded,
because we're recording everything, and we're taking photos, and we interact with the
people at the events, trying to talk to them about, you know,
their history with the psychic we play. We play the characters, you know,
we get in line at the bathroom and talk about how excited we are
to be there and who are you here to see? So we're fully in
the role, and we do pay the top price because we want to get
into the VIP events and schmooz with people. So we're totally in character the
whole time. And when we leave the event or if it's a zoom event
or whatever, we're in character from the moment you know, you get out
of your car necessarily because you never know who's going to be watching You could
get in an elevator with somebody and it would be somebody who's who's doing the
you know, it was going to follow you to the to the event,
and you're talking about your trip to Hawaii and how your daughter just told you
she was pregnant, you know, and you're telling your friend. So,
I mean, hot reading could happen at any time. I always knew Susan
Gerbick was a method actor. You know, she inhabits the character, inhabits
the character as all great thespians do. More with Susan Gerbick in just a
second, we're going to talk about the Psychic Friends Network. Anybody remember that
those nine hundred numbers. We got to talk about that. That and more
coming up next. Your support on Patreon so very appreciated. You get the
show commercial free, and you get it two days early patreon dot com.
Slash Seth Andrews continuing with my special guest Skeptic and de Bunker Susan Gerbick,
as we discussed the grief vampires and those who are exposing them. You've mentioned
Mark Edward's name several times. Mentalist magician to me, sounds like a Darren
Brown type. Can you tell me about the man. Oh well, Mark
Edward, he's just a wonderful guy. He's here in the other room.
Well, I mean other than he's a sweet fella. But the fire in
his belly comes from Since he's not here to defend himself, let's talk about
him as as kind of a co skeptic and co exposer of the Charlatan's,
you know, like Darren B. Penn Jalette is a great example. Right.
He knows how the sausage is made, he knows what's going on behind
the scenes. He knows that the tricks and he leads with hey, everybody,
these are tricks, and then he does the trick in the audience.
All they're all in on it. He never uses this stuff in a disingenuous
way. And Darren Brown is great at going out and doing mentalism and specific
things that look supernatural. And he will flat out tell you, you know,
this is all like I'm messing with you. It sounds like Marked as
much of the same stuff. Right, So he's a mentalist. He has
performed at the Magic Castle for years and years and years. He is his
expertise is in the seance room. He is an expert on the Houdini seance.
And he has been doing this and working as a psychic infiltrating the world
of psychics. And he wrote a book called Psychic Blues. It's an audio
book as well as a print book. It's called Psychic Blues, Confessions of
a Conflicted Medium. And so he knows a lot about the business of the
psychic world. You know, what's going on probably in the nineteen nineties,
nineteen eighties, what was happening in the spirit world businesses. So that's his
world of expertise in his book is mainly about that era. The nine hundred
lines, the dialis psychic, kind of like the Miss Cleo kind of stuff
on the Friends Network. I think he's Actually they did infomercials that played it
like two in the morning. So here, no, I forgive me,
we are showing our age. I hate to keep interrupting, but I want
to make sure that people are tracking as we move forward before I forget the
nine hundred phenomenon. For those who are too young to know what that is
is you used to dial from a landline, and I think it was maybe
you could do it from your cell as well, where you would be charged
like a dollar ninety nine a minute, and you would three ninety nine for
someone like Miss Cleo. And so they set the hook and they keep you
on the freaking phone for as long as they can. HI. This is
Lynda George and with a quick reminder about how simple it is to get your
own personal psychic reeting on the Psychic Friends Network. By calling the number on
your screen, you'll be connected to the home or office of a professional psychic
who cares about your future. All calls to the Psychic Friends Network are personal
and confidential. So whether you have a question about love, romance, success
or money, call the Psychic Friends Network today. All it takes is a
telephone and an open mind per minute. But the nine hundred phenomenon, and
that was also the Satanic panic, right, So now you've got people worried
about the devil, or they're at least they're engaged in these sort of spiritism
type conversations. With the Satanic Panic part of Mark's story as well. No,
no, he never got involved in that. He was He stayed mainly
with the psychic world and dealt with that. So whenever I met up with
him in two thousand and nine, I was already interested in psychics, in
the psychic world, but we became a lot more involved in doing something about
it, trying to expose it and trying to show how it works and the
idea of um they call it, which you said with Darren Brown and Pindal,
let do where they say a disclaimer, I mean that doesn't necessarily work.
You can say to you can say to you're blue in the face that
this is all a trick, and people will come up afterwards and they'll still
say, I know you said it was a trick, but I want to
know how you really did it. So, so a disclaimer of saying it
is, it's kind of nonsense. You have to have as far as disclaimers
go. Your venue is pretty much your disclaimer. And if you do psychic
readings or you do something that looks like you're playing an actor, you're playing
a role. If you do seances and they do feel like you're real,
well then within thirty seconds they've got your business card or they go onto your
website. It's clear that you're a magician. Is somebody who could be hired
as a as an actor, you know. So disclaimers are kind of wiggly
wobbly dependent. I see people get very upset because people mentalists don't disclaim because
but then an actor doesn't disclaim either. If somebody's playing Shakespeare, they don't
get up at the end of the movie and say, oh, by the
way, I'm an actor just like you. But the human desire to believe,
you know, I'm we see it's so often and I totally understand.
One of the reason that I'm that I don't go so hard on everyday Christians
for being Christians because I were one, but I had a tremendous desire to
hold onto it. You know, it was a cherished part of me,
my identity, and it's it served me. You can understand, even evolutionarily,
how religions in that way may have you know, you understand why people
can latch onto them. And I feel the same must be true for the
psychic world, the spirit world. You know, we want to believe,
right, Do you feel like that's innate? Susan, Absolutely well. I
think that we all have something that we hold on too. We can't.
You know, people were busy with their lives, were raising our children,
were trying to make a living, We're keeping our house clean, we're you
know, there's so much that's going on in our lives. We don't have
time to be also diving into some of the things in our life that we
thought were just natural, like ghosts or you know, going to the moon
or pyramid power. You just assume that your parents told you the right thing
and you just believe it. Religion, so on. It's part of your
culture in a lot of ways, it's your It's just part of you being
you. And until you're finally challenged with some of these things, you know,
does Bigfoot exist? You know, maybe you always believed, of course
bigfoot exists, but why would you even why would you even think that you
should challenge it? If until somebody kind of comes head to head and you
go, wait a minute, are you telling me that when we used to
go out into the woods that was a big foot out there that we could
hear knocking on trees or whatever. So people need to believe in something.
I think it's it's it's philosophical. I don't really do philosophy that much,
as my friends always tell me more of a fact fact the kind of person
than this hypothetical world. But I really they do believe that we should probably
give and this is problem of one of the problems in the skeptic community.
We don't give enough, We don't sympathize enough with the people who are in
these situations. It's a very vulnerable situation that you find yourself in at times
in your life. And when the medium enters during that moment of time where
you're grieving, you're confused about life, your you know somebody your significant partner
has left you, or your job, or you know your family's health or
whatever it is. When they enter at that moment, that's when you're vulnerable
and your your critical thinking skills may not be at the height that they should
be. I think we need to be a lot more sympathetic. These are
people who are being preyed on, and I use that to mean prey pr
e y, not pr a y. And so I think that if we
were to look at ourselves as being vulnerable too, maybe not for the specific
con but others like it, we can fall for this. It could be
a multilevel marketing scheme, you know, for one of us, totally completely
different from the psychic role. But again it's somebody manipulating somebody else. I
would like to see us turn up the empathy factor you know, I see
especially online. I mean, I think in real life it's a little softer,
but online it's you know, they're all stupid. Who would be so
much of an idiot to fall for this? And we see this in cults,
all right, this myth that only dumb people would ever believe what a
cult member says or what a cult claims. And then you see people who
extricate themselves and talk about what it was like, and they're highly often highly
intelligent, thoughtful people who are simply victims, you know, who are brainwashed.
And I'm a I'm a fan of your empathetic approach, you know,
where we're so reductive online instead to see the whole person and see them as
victims first and start there. Let's finish here. How do we I mean,
this is your subjective answer. I'm sure a lot of skeptics would answer
differently. How do I bullshit proof myself out there? Somebody wants to prey
on me. There's a grief vampire or a bank account vampire or whatever,
and they relate it to the spirit world. How do I tool myself up?
Well, you know, I don't think there's really a great way of
doing that because these things happen to people in vulnerable moments, And how do
you keep yourself from being vulnerable? I don't know, because you know,
right next to the cousin, the kissing cousin of psychics is like these romance
scams. So I mean, I think we're all going to be vulnerable to
something. Hang on, Susan, I'm sorry. What is a romance scam?
Oh my gosh. You know these sweetheart scams where they, oh,
everybody out there is getting on social media, somebody approaching you saying that they
have a nice smile and I know you better, and then you know,
then you enter into conversation with them, and then they have some kind of
crisis and then you have to send money to him again, like you're called.
There's nobody joined a called. I mean they're joining some movement, right.
There's a documentary about a guy like that. It's on Netflix. I
want to say, it's like the Worst Person in though I'm trying to think
of what the title was. But it was this guy who would come up
with this idea. He would claim to be rich and famous, and he
would go and find people who were looking for a man who was rich and
famous and then he would have some sort of a financial crisis or somebody was
coming after him. He was a victim in some way. His bank accounts
were locked. I need thousands to get myself out of it. And these
people got sucked in, they were groomed right well, absolutely, and only
in vulnerable So only some people are going to fall for this. I think
you're talking about the tinder swindler. Yeah, yeah, the tinder swindler.
Yes, thank people have talked about it, and I've seen catfishing catfish.
There's a documentary about that too, Oh of course. And it's only going
to happen in vulnerable times. I think the best way people can keep themselves
from falling for these kinds of frauds or is to keep good people around you,
people who you can talk to, who are you know, legitimately your
friends, who are going to tell you to your face that this looks dangerous.
You're starting to go down a path that looks like a pyramid scam,
or somebody is trying to manipulate your emotions. They're trying to isolate you from
your friendships and your past and your family. I think that keeping good people
around you, having a great, strong social network around you, and if
you don't have this already, you should try to find it. And I
think that that's probably the best way of keeping yourself from being vulner vulnerable and
falling for these horrible cons that can just devastate to and ring you financially.
Rather not to distill it down to a bumper sticker, but I have to
think knowledge being power. If I knew the tactic of a faith healer,
you know, the lengthening the leg miracle, or you know the crutch is
being thrown and all those types of things, if I knew how all of
that was done before I was presented with an example of it, I would
be looking for the cracks in that facade, right, I'd be looking,
and I would think, maybe knowledge is power in the scenario of the psychics
and the mediums. If you know to look for it, maybe then you
might be looking for it. That's fair and which you think absolutely. We
call this pre bunking, or I used to call it an oculation. Innoculation
theory is that if you give people the concepts of how people are conned,
how things are not what they appear, then you're giving people some sort of
skills so that like a toolbox, so that whenever they approach something like this,
it may not be the exact same scenario, but they'll be able to
feel like, you know, this does seem a lot like a romance scam,
but it's not romance. It seems to be connected to something else.
You know, maybe you know some other way. So they Because there's so
many ways of conning people out there, we can't explain every single way.
You know, if it's this, then it's that we can't do that.
But I do think that we need to innoculate people with great information, so
how they could find information, How do you evaluate a source? How do
you trust that? But again, if you surround yourself with people who will
help you through this time, then their expertise also will help, because learning
about cold reading, learning about hot reading, learning how a video is edited
to make it look a certain way, how it's manipulating your emotions as you
go through, how the music plays on these TV shows at a certain moment,
or they cut right there on a commercial at a time that you will
hook you. If we know all that information, that's great. But also
sometimes people think they're too smart to be fooled. We see this all the
time, James Randy was writing a book called The Magician in a Laboratory about
how scientists are some of the easiest people to fool because they think in some
cases, they think they're so smart that they're not looking at it in the
way that somebody who's got street smarts would probably look at it. So having
too much knowledge and thinking that you're just too smart to fall for it is
probably a bad way of going about your life. I still think that the
best way of doing this is, of course, be curious and to learn
all about the world around you, and as we all should for all kinds
of reasons. But having a really strong friend family network out there around you
that is out there for the best interests of you. Also that means you
have to have the best interests of that family member. So we all have
to have each other's back. I've got your back, You've got my back.
All right, Well, we got each other's back. That's good news.
So let's finish with what is the about time project? And how can
people connect with your work? Right? So you can find more information about
all the things that I'm involved in at about time project dot org. And
that's about Time. But what does it mean, what's the project? The
project is it's about time we started taking the stuff seriously and started looking into
it and bonding together and seeing each other in person and hanging out and all
those kinds of things, just getting to know and grow our community. Adamant
about let's growing our community. But the about time project. We have our
Wikipedia group that is rewriting Wikipedia pages concerning science, scientific skepticism, and claims
of the paranormal. We've written over We've written two thousand, one hundred and
thirty eight pages. Forty five percent of that is in languages outside of English,
and those two thousand, one hundred and thirty eight pages have been read
one hundred and thirty two million times. They've been accessed. Are you correcting
bad information? What's the work you're doing. Yes, we're creating bad information.
We're creating great information. We're translating pages into other languages. You're correcting
bad information? Right, I think creating came out, but I want to
make sure that the pedantic types don't come into the comment section and say they're
creating bad You're correcting bad information, all right? Yes, I have a
team of about one hundred people. We're on Facebook, so you have to
be on Facebook. The training processes at least four months and it is an
extensive fun project. That's the Girls Skepticism on Wikipedia project. I also dabble
in a lot of other things. Facilitated communication is in my wheelhouse and with
a very really powerful group of people who are bounded together to try to combat
facilitated communication. Do you want to explain what that is? Go ahead?
Facilitated communication. It's a communication device, they say. I have air quotes
around the word communication, mainly affecting people who have difficulty communicating, who've never
been able to communicate. I'm talking about people are severely how do I say
this, they're severely unable to communicate since birth, you know, since they
can't read and write, they've not been able to be educated. And what
happens is people there is a small group of people in the world who think
they're helping them communicate by holding their hand and placing it over the top of
a keyboard, or they hold a letterboard in the air and the person points
to the letters, so they're not communicating. The facilitators holding their hand and
moving it towards the correct letters. It's it's it's incredible. You can find
it on Wikipedia, and there's also a website called Facilitated Communication dot org.
It's it's taking the voice away from this person who cannot communicate in writing or
speak like that's a whole other show. Oh my gosh, so you and
I could, I'm not I've got I'm gonna stop because otherwise it will be
here till next Tuesday. What's the website about time project dot org? Susan
Gerbick, you are a damn superhero. I just I'm such a fan of
you and your work. I'm thankful for your friendship, and I'm sure we'll
bump into each other on the road out there, but I'm gonna send everybody
to you and your work, and I guess we leave everybody, including ourselves,
you know, and the encouragement to stay skeptical. We may not be
as invulnerable as we think. Susan, thanks again for talking to me.
Thank you so much, Sath. Follow The Thinking Atheist on Facebook and Twitter
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