Here's what I'm trying to accomplish

The freedom of being mission-driven rather than profit-driven allows one to keep their eye on the ball.

A Skeptoid film crew strikes out across the desert, hoping to do some good in the world. (I’m not in it, because I took it!)

If I were working independently rather than as an employee of a nonprofit, I might well be producing very different stuff. In a nutshell, I would probably have had to sell out and create what the majority of the market wants: Movies and videos that confirm audiences’ anecdotally-derived anti-science preferences, things like “My Googling makes me smarter than doctors” and “The world actually is the way my biases prefer it to be.”

Instead of helping to make the world worse like that, I get to do the opposite. I get to start with “What kind of content would benefit the world the most?” —and, for as long as I’ve been doing this, the answer to that has been For people to be more open to science and rationality, and to what we can learn from them.

• Imagine if nearly everyone accepted vaccine science.

• Imagine if nearly everyone accepted the facts of what CO₂ does in the atmosphere.

• Imagine if nearly everyone accepted agricultural science, instead of the fear-based marketing messages blitzed all over their food packaging.

• Imagine if nearly everyone accepted economics instead of what their Facebook feeds said about immigrants, billionaires, inflation, and zero-sum games.

OK, that last one is perhaps a bit too abstruse. But take an everyday example: organic produce. If you stop the average person on the street today and ask them if organic produce is healthier than regular “factory farmed” stuff, chances are high that they’ll agree enthusiastically: organic is healthier, organic is less contaminated with “chemicals.” Both of those are categorically false — ask any farmer. But I was at Trader Joe’s today, and it’s as if their marketing people are on the payroll of Big Organic (aka the Organic Producers Consumers Association). Just about every food package in Trader Joe’s proudly boasts of being organic; not a single one boasts of containing GMOs or having been Roundup Ready — even though such products are demonstrably better for the market and for the environment in every way. Do I blame Trader Joe’s? No; to be profitable, they have to pander to consumer demand. Do I blame consumers? No; they’ve never been given a reason to doubt the marketing hype blasted at them all day.

I blame a general lack of science literacy. People who care what they eat look into it, but since they are mostly science illiterate, their “looking into it” consists of following influencers on social media. And so they come away with a lot of misinformation.

Now, “fighting misinformation through encouraging science literacy” is a pretty broad task. Where to focus?

Well, right now we’re making a movie — so we focus on what people are searching for on streaming apps.

That’s easier said than done. Most of that is proprietary; HBO Max won’t just publish what their most popular queries are. But there are ways to learn. You must differentiate between consumer fetch, find, and explore behavior. There are public tools that are excellent proxies. There are public lists of what’s trending and hot this week. There are clues given by autocomplete. There are keyword comparison tools for AVOD and SVOD content. There is what people also ask and related searches. There are analyses of what JustWatch and ReelGood are serving. And there is also a ton of published research on all of these things, including from industry publications: articles on collaborative filtering, content‑based, and knowledge‑based recommenders.

Etc., etc., etc.

The short answer for our purpose is the same now as it was in 2023 when we made The UFO Movie THEY Don’t Want You to See. Drum roll please? It is aliens and UFOs.

While that film was mostly about the UFO phenomenon, Alien Echoes — our current project — focuses on aliens; more specifically, on hypothetical alien civilizations, and our hypothetical ability to get in touch with one. We are leveraging the general public’s misinformation-driven tendency to search for content on that, into teaching them the real sciences involved. Whatever their thoughts on aliens, Alien Echoes will leave them better informed with real science.

The point is to make our best presentation on the importance of science literacy and push it out to the largest possible audience, and that audience (right now) is the people searching for information about aliens.

Do I have any particular affinity for making movies about aliens & UFOs? No.

Do I have any particular affinity for making movies that I hope might make the world just a little bit better of a place, for everyone? Yes.

And that’s the whole idea.