Lauren Lane is the Founder and Executive Director of Skepticon, a national conference located annually in Springfield, Missouri that promotes skepticism, science education, and community building.

I spoke with Lauren about how her team runs a free conference for more than a thousand people, how they improve the event every year, and what goes on behind the scenes.

If you’d like to donate to Skepticon, you can do that right here.

(Disclosure: I’ve spoken at Skepticon multiple times, though I won’t be able to attend this year. It’s a wonderful event and you should all attend if you can!)

We’re thrilled to speak with the team behind YouTube sensation Mrs. Betty Bowers.

Andrew Bradley is the creator and writer for BettyBowers.com. If you haven’t seen the videos, Betty is American’s Best Christian, and she has a lot to say about traditional marriage, abortion, the upcoming elections, and so much more. She’s a hilarious parody of right-wing extremists. Andrew was also one of the main writers for Landover Baptist Church, a parody of a fundamentalist Christian church that featured articles that people still believe are real. He’s also the author of Welcome to JesusLand.

Deven Green plays Mrs. Betty Bowers. She’s a comedian, musician, and performer. She was also a comedy judge on RuPaul’s Drag Race.

We spoke with Andrew and Deven about how they collaborate, the kind of hate mail they receive, and the origins of Landover Baptist Church.

By the way, this is our first time trying to host four people on the same phone call, so the audio’s not always ideal, but hopefully it’s all still audible!

Notes:

Here is a link to the Goodwill video referenced in the conversation.

You can read more of Betty’s wisdom in What Would Betty Do?: How to Succeed at the Expense of Others in this World-and the Next.

And don’t forget to follow Mrs. Betty Bowers on Twitter!

Dr. Keith Devlin is a mathematician who’s also known as The Math Guy on NPR’s Weekend Edition. He has written several books explaining math to the masses. And he’s also the co-founder and Executive Director of Stanford University’s Human-Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute (H-Star).

We spoke with Dr. Devlin about why math is difficult to understand and explain, how we tend to know more about mathematicians’ lives than their work, and whether programs like Khan Academy help or hurt students.

Notes:

My favorite books by Dr. Devlin are The Millennium Problems: The Seven Greatest Unsolved Mathematical Puzzles Of Our Time and The Man of Numbers: Fibonacci’s Arithmetic Revolution.

Here’s a link to information about Fermat’s Last Theorem (and an excellent BBC documentary about the problem).

This New York Times article about math genius Terry Tao was also discussed in the episode. You can find his blog here.

Leah Vincent is a former Orthodox Jew and the author of Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation After My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood. She’s the first person in her family to attend college and she earned her Masters degree in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

We spoke with Leah about her life growing up in the culture, what fundamentalist faiths have in common, and what she plans to teach her daughter about her religious background.

Notes:

We also spoke recently with Shulem Deen, who comes from the same general culture.