Board of Directors

Treasurer

Gwenn Olson

Directors

Bill Patterson

Herb Masters
Bay Area Science, SciSchmooze Newsletter, ExplOratorium

Rick Thomas

Josh Rosenau
Mountain Lion Foundation

11 May – Skeptics in a Real Pub
14 May – SkepTalk
27 May – Virtual Skeptics in the Pub
27 June – SkeptiCal 2026

Skeptics in a Real Pub

WHAT: Skeptics in a REAL Pub

Enjoy an evening of socializing and feasting with fellow Bay Area science-forward folk in an Irish Pub on the Peninsula with great food. < Menu >

Join us! This is a free event brought to you by Bay Area Skeptics. All are welcome.

WHEN: Tuesday 11 May 7 – 9:30 PM

WHERE: Fiddlers Green, 333 El Camino Real, Millbrae. Accessible by Caltrain, BART, Bus, & Bicycle

HOW: Just walk on through to the back of the pub. Click HERE if you can offer a ride or if you would like a ride to & from Fiddlers Green.

SkepTalk

Quico Toro

WHAT: A Field Guide to Getting Swindled: Why Your Brain Is a Charlatan’s Best Friend
Quico Toro draws on his book Charlatans to trace the grifter’s playbook from Renaissance Venice to the algorithmic age. Starting with Mamugnà — a 16th-century fake alchemist who persuaded the Venetian Senate to bankroll his lavish lifestyle for nearly a decade — Toro shows that the basic mechanics of charlatanry haven’t changed in 450 years: capture the imagination, earn the trust, exploit it. What has changed is the technology. From Edir Macedo’s megachurch empire in Brazil to Arif Naqvi’s billion-dollar impact-investing fraud, from Baba Ramdev’s ayurvedic wellness empire to Bentinho Massaro’s algorithm-recruited spiritual cult and Trump University’s wealth-dream grift, Toro maps each case onto a cognitive framework — confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, social proof, identity, and commitment ladders — to argue that the mental mechanisms that make us fall for charlatans aren’t a character flaw, they’re a fundamental feature of how every human mind works. Those features can be hacked, and Charlatans have more tools than ever to hack them. When we rewarded tech platforms for getting better at capturing attention, he argues, we inadvertently activated an evolutionary engine for identifying and amplifying a wild proliferation of charlatans.

WHO: Quico Toro is the writer behind One Percent Brighter, a leading climate substack in the Ecomodernist space. A journalist by training, he founded Caracas Chronicles, an independent outlet covering Venezuelan news. His journalistic work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and many other publications, where he’s covered a full range of topics from politics, energy, agricultural development and next generation climate techniques. He is Director of Anthropocene Institutes’s Climate Repair effort, where his focus is on developing new gigaton-scale phytoplankton carbon solutions. He is currently a Contributing Editor at Persuasion, based in Tokyo. His book Charlatans, co-authored with Moisés Naím, appeared in 2025.

Join us! This is a free event brought to you by Bay Area Skeptics. All are welcome.

WHEN: Thursday 14 May 7:30pm Pacific (GMT-7)

HOW: Online HERE.

Virtual Skeptics in the Pub

WHAT: Virtual Skeptics in the Pub

This is a casual evening of socializing with fellow science-forward skeptics and with others inhabiting our oblate spheroidal planet.

Please join us! This is a free event brought to you by Bay Area Skeptics. All are welcome.

WHEN: Wednesday 27 May 7-9pm Pacific, GMT-7 (4th Wednesday)

HOW: Online HERE. Passcode: 1023

SkeptiCal is BACK

Get your tickets now for the lowest price of the year for the 2026 SkeptiCal Conference, northern California’s meeting on science and critical thinking. We’re back at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center on Saturday June 27, 2026.

We’re planning a slate of amazing speakers (which we’ll announce in April), with a central theme of dis/mis-information. Tickets are limited, so grab them early.

We’re also planning a LIVE Skeptics-in-the-Pub on the night before – Friday – in Oakland, with the online Global Skeptics in the Pub moving to its own date later in the year (stay tuned for more information).

Tickets and more information at https://SkepticalCon.com.

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