[Music] oh [Music] my name is massimo polidoro i am from italy and i am the head of the italian committee for the scientific investigation of claims on pseudoscience i've been very lucky to be gen trendy's apprentice when i was younger james randy was the prominent investigator of psychic claims and everybody was also a magician so he had used his expertise in magic and debunking fraudulent phenomena like spoonbenders psychic surgeons healers of every kind but it was also instrumental in introducing me to using scientific method in investigating extraordinary claims when i was a kid i was
fascinated by all that was magic and paranormal and i was intrigued by the idea of extraterrestrial ghosts and all the kinds of normal claims that were very popular when i was growing up so i was interested also in how people were easily deceived i was so intrigued by the whole thing because it really helped me understand how science worked and it allowed me to understand how to approach extraordinary claims asking for facts asking for proof and not believing things that just because they are nice to be believed in today my main mission i see as
spreading critical thinking and scientific mentality aside from debunking extraordinary claims fake news frauds of every kind the most important thing is to help especially young people develop a critical approach to life and help them learn how to ask the right questions and learn how not to be deceived themselves so this is what we do all through italy and we do it in various ways we have of course a social presence but we go into school we have a an agreement with the italian ministry of education during the lockdown months here in italy there was constantly
crazy idea coming out some conspiracy theory and so i was constantly explaining investigating debunking all these absurd ideas especially when they try to diffuse the idea that it was not a real virus that that it was not necessary to take precautions that there were already uh solutions to it for example one of the most absurd ideas is that of the flat earth of course but uh incredibly there's people who believe in this or today is the q and on conspiracy theory even here there are many believing that there is this hidden war behind the scenes
where president trump is battling with the kabbalah politicians and who are all devil worshipers and so on it's an absurd idea but many believe it and as well as those who do not believe that we've ever been to the moon it's a way of trying to understand a complex world and try to think that they have the instruments to understand what is going on when in reality they don't at the moment i am conducting actually a series on the kennedy assassination [Music] which is a very lengthy investigation a very detailed one because you have to
discuss and go very very deep into each claim and they have to show how you get to the facts because it is very easy to get trapped into fascinating conspiracy theories they say that the disparity of shadows a straight no shadow from the nose and an angled body shadow proves without a doubt that this head was superimposed on this body the murder of president john f kennedy remains after nearly 30 years the crime of the century most americans did not believe or support the verdict of the warren commission initially and now more than three in
four according to all recent samplings of public opinion think some conspiracy was involved when you start going deeper and you start to examine the facts and get to the real documents and autographs and the films and so on you find that reality is quite different from the conspiracy theorists first of all look at the inside the wells of the eyes you see the same type of darkness under the lower lip you see the the darkness from the shadow of course the nose is almost perfect it's a very long shadow which is really surprising by the
way and my favorite part which is on the neck you see the shadow cutting in like exactly like you have here so everything in this photograph is exactly consistent if this was a fake it would have been almost unimaginable how they could have done this in 1963. and showing this in the video i find that it is very helpful to many people [Music] all claims that pertain to health present threats to people in the case of covid there are people claiming they have solutions to health problems and usually those are fraudulent solutions but when one
is desperate when one has tried everything in medicine and cannot find a solution even the absurd proposition appears to be hopeful so these predators actually speculate on the need of hope that sick people usually normally have so these are the worst time of course because they usually lead these people to death without them even realizing it and with their family distressed by what what is going to happen magic is a very interesting approach to this claim because it teaches us that everybody can be fooled even scientists even very intelligent persons because we all want to
believe certain things for one thing and the second thing is that if you are not trained in deception our mind leads us to believe absurd things that you're probably going to be deceived yourself i have a strong interest in popularizing science because this is one of the main tools that we have in order to understand the world around us and i don't mean that you have to become a scientist but to understand the scientific method this is the what is important if you do it when you're a kid this will stay with you forever i
have a series on my youtube channel which is called stranger stories and it's a series investigating famous cases fake the loch ness monster king arthur ufos ghosts strange stories in the end we come out having understood something a little more what appeared to be unexplainable was actually unexplained and we gave an explanation the beauty of science is that it's always bettering itself it's always learning from mistakes but the research if it is done in a proper way and it is described in a proper way it's possible for other scientists around the world to obtain the
same results and help us understand a little better the world [Music] my name is amadio sharma i live in germany i was born here grew up in india and now lived here since about 40 years professionally i'm an engineer but what i've been doing is voluntary work which is creating skeptics group in germany was growing spread of paranormal myths i was fascinated by the books by charles about the bermuda triangle and then after getting presents the bermuda triangle solved by larry kushi brought me to understand that a lot of these claims that are being made
don't really stand up if they're tested so i felt cheated in a way so we started a group to provide counter information the central mission of our work is to promote science and critical thinking our focus has been always on cringe claims that usually scientists do not take up because they don't have the time for it paranormal claims that come up we started off doing our own experiments on dowsing in which we could show that the dowsers could do just as well if they would be flipping a coin and not better than that we offered
anyone who was able to prove that they had powers of housing 10 000 us dollars so far nobody has been able to show that they have paranormal power under normal test conditions since the kovic 19 outbreak have been number of conspiracy theories and many of them are pretty crazy but they just follow a line that has existed for a long time some of the 5g conspiracy theories are really crazy because they claim that they are used to influence people and change the way they think so it goes way off the scale one of the things
we did was brought out a special issue on conspiracy theories of our magazine skeptical which is the virus of conspiracy theory this is it and the idea was that's our expertise prepare for the end of time we do have a couple of people who specialize in just taking up these series and it takes a lot of work because the claims are made very easily and then trying to find out what's really behind that is a very painstaking task for example the effect moon landing the 911 conspiracy theories that were also being spread worldwide even in
germany one of the myths that we are most proud of busting in germany is the myth of homeopathy because that has had such a strong standing in germany over decades fringe medicine we call pseudomedicine were creating a lot of trouble in germany and the critical to this was a doctor dr natalie grant who was through changing her mind she was able to bring a much better story into the public debate as to why homeopathy is wrong she believed in it and because of the science looked into the evidence she changed her mind we have been
able to turn the tables on home in germany and i think that's a major success for us epidemic is something that is becoming more and more relevant today the amount of information that's available is like authentic and it's one thing that we've probably not devolved to be independent it's going to be the problem of the century i would say how are we going to deal with the blood of information that's coming across us and put them into boxes what i think we should avoid in science is weaponizing it in the wrong way that is science
is a wonderful instrument to tell you the way things are but it is not in a position to tell you what you are supposed to do we stand in danger of making science what it isn't that is a kind of instrument of politics i think one of the things we should learn from the pandemic is to improve the way we are in a position to communicate uncertainty in the future [Music] i was explaining amardeo randy's role is actually the founder of the whole movement that we call skeptical yeah exactly the icon of the whole movement
right like yuri geller and his own bending capabilities i mean that's what brought james randy onto the scene well euro geller was an interesting personality back in the 1970s he came out as sort of a paranormal rock star he was invited to every tv talk show was young and was flamboyant and he claimed he had psychic powers and even convinced a few scientists that he really did ben spoons or guess the content of sealed envelopes thanks to some magical powers but eventually it turned out that he was not really able to perform those feats under
control conditions and he quickly disappeared from view he came back 10 or 15 years ago and appeared on tv again and i was asked come to explain what he's been doing so one of the things that he had been doing was getting watchers to work again i explained that well if you take a lot of watches and you put them together in your hands or shaking them in the wands some of them starts working again they distributed about 50 watches and i was sweating blood i tell you but in the end five of those watches
did start working again so the explanation didn't work i mean if you have a lot of watches some of them will start working again because of shaking them even if they've been in the cupboard for decades you you only need a few dozens of people to create the illusion that everybody's experiencing something mysterious geller knew this very well and exploited it to the end and i hope that more and more kids will learn how to think critically and be less sway by illusions and deceptions that their parents fall into with both feet one of the
big challenges is going to be and massimo mentioned that before is teaching children to think critically much more than teaching them facts so the next generations are going to be i would say we know each other since uh what was in 1989 so even we don't meet that often but we do luckily meet now and then and we always find that i think amadeo yeah we are the same wavelength yes exactly i think going out and eating spaghetti with a beer or something that's probably something i'd like to do with massimo who are in the
same place next time that we meet for a convention in las vegas we may go and watch some magic show like every time i went there with for randy or for a skeptical inquiry and go to a place that has good pasta not easy but we can try in america what kind of sauce would you like in your spaghetti [Music] [Music] you
