The Skeptics Guide #1037 - May 24 2025

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You're listening to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

Hello, and welcome to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe.

Today is Friday, May 16th, 2025, and this is your host, Stephen Ovelev.

We are live from the the second Nauticon, the conference that's not a conference, but it is a conference because it's awesome.

I am joined today by Bob Novella.

Hello, everybody.

Hello, hey.

Hey, everybody.

Kara Santa Maria.

Howdy.

Jay Novella.

Hey, guys.

Evan Bernstein.

Beautiful White Plains, New York.

And we have a special guest, Adam Russell.

Alan, welcome to the SGM.

Hello there.

Adam, you are two things that I love.

You're a musician and a big fan of Star Wars.

Tell me about that.

Yes, I'm a bass player in a band called Story of the Year.

We've been around for 20, almost 25 years now.

You started when you were five?

Yeah, I was only five.

You should have seen me play bass at five.

It was sick.

No,

I'm aging rapidly.

And are we all?

My other job, my paid hobby, is my podcast, Thank the Maker, a Star Wars podcast.

Star Wars is like my religion.

I say that half, honestly, half just tongue-in-cheek, you know.

But Kara was talking earlier about not understanding fandoms, and a lot of it is like the community, you know.

And

if there's one positive thing you could probably pull out of religion, it's community, you know.

So Star Wars in a lot of ways is that for me.

What did you think of Andor?

Loved it.

Loved it, it, right?

Some of the best Star Wars of all time.

My favorite.

It's also,

we've been having this conversation about how the one potential downside is that it's making adult Star Wars fans so happy that a new bar has been set.

So now anything that's sort of made for kids, it seems like it has more potential for getting hate because it's like, if it's not Andor, it's shit.

Then maybe they need two brands.

They need like Star Wars Kids and Star Wars Adults.

Star Wars Zero Show.

It never was.

So, what you're looking at on the screen is a very unusual creature.

Any of you guys have a guess of what that creature is from?

What kind of creature is it?

I just read it off your thing.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

So that is a Mosura Fentona.

I wrote in my notes a radiodont, because that's what it is, a radiodont, and it corrected to radio don't.

But it's a radiodont.

You may be familiar with Anomala Karis.

Does that sound more familiar?

Anomala Karis, I love it.

Yeah, so this is related to Anomalocharis.

This is from the Burgess shale.

Does that ring any bells?

So that's from the Cambrian explosion.

It's one of the most important finds.

It was the first find that really

told us what the Cambrian explosion was.

So we're going back 500 plus million years.

This is the first time that multicellular life explodes into the fossil record, right?

This is when

life created hard parts that could fossilize.

Then suddenly the fossil record turns on and we're seeing basically every existing phyla, plus a few that don't exist anymore, were all in existence over a fairly geologically short period of time.

We now know from further evidence that there's a long history there.

Again, it was just when they started actually fossilizing that they

creates the illusion in the fossil record that they suddenly appeared.

But Anomalokaris is one of those no longer existing phyla, the radiodonts, and that thing was a beast.

It was a predator.

So this is a newly discovered specimen, very well preserved.

These are all in the Burgess Shale, so they're kind of flattened two-dimensionally, you know, between pieces of rock, and then paleontologists have to painstakingly reconstruct them three-dimensionally.

But this creature had better three-dimensional detail than older specimens.

Also, our techniques are getting better.

You know, they can examine fossils with x-rays and CT scans and other things to help reconstruct them three-dimensionally.

How big is it?

It's big.

It's several feet.

It has three eyes.

Three.

And you can see it's got a third eye in the middle there.

It's got these two sort of claw things.

That's cool.

And it does exist.

I don't know.

And it's got

a bunch of fins down the side.

It kind of looks like wings.

So what would it eat?

It was whatever was else's when the

predator.

Are they actual eyes or are they just eye spots?

spots?

No, they're eyes.

They're actual like.

I mean, I think they're fairly primitive eyes, but they're eyes.

They're not, I think they're not eye spots.

Yeah, from 506 million years ago, this particular fossil.

Gorgeous fossil.

If you don't know about the Burgess Shale, it's worth reading about.

Stephen Jay Gould wrote a whole book about it.

So

really amazing, amazing fossil discovery.

There's another fossil I'm going to talk about really quickly.

Anybody recognize this?

Any of you guys up here?

I know Kara knows what this is.

Archaeopteryx.

It is an Archaeopteryx.

It's like a death pose with the neck curled back.

That is the latest

Archaeopteryx specimen.

Guess how many carinos is?

How many do you think we have now?

How many different specific specimens of Archaeopteryx?

One and a half.

This is number 14.

You wave a lot.

And they're complete because they're in the, like, is it sandstone, limestone?

Yeah, usually in lithographica.

Lithographica.

So this is found in China.

Interesting how this was obtained.

We actually don't know where it came from specifically.

It was sold from one private collector to another private collector, to another private collector, and then to the Chicago Museum.

When they bought it,

it didn't look like what it looks like now.

It was basically completely encased with rock, and just the wings were peeking out.

Oh, my God.

So they knew that it was probably an Archaeopteryx, but they thought it was crap.

And they're like, should we even buy this?

This is probably going to be the worst Archaeopteryx specimen in existence.

Got a good deal, then.

But, you know, it's an archaeopteryx specimen.

So they, but they bought it.

Then they spent, it said, 13,000 hours

reconstructing it.

And that's a lot.

Well, good on all those collectors not destroying it as it was passed around.

I mean,

it was in case.

But that's what I'm saying.

Good on them not being like, let me.

Oh, no, they didn't touch it.

Yeah, fortunately, it turned out to be the single best archaeoptery specimen.

Why?

I mean, I'm partial to the Berlin specimen, but

I hear you.

The Berlin specimen is gorgeous, and I think this is beautiful too, but it's just more complete.

It's almost 100% complete.

Like, it's almost 100% complete specimen, and it's not crushed.

So it preserved three-dimensional anatomy better than any other Archaeopteryx

specimen.

It's the best one.

Wow.

Yeah.

Is it partly the best one because they had awesome techniques to extract it?

Well, yeah, yes, partly.

It was just a good specimen, but also we benefit from having the good techniques

for exposing it and preserving it.

And again, CT scanning and doing other kind of examinations.

We were at a museum once, and the guy was working on a whale fossil.

Remember that?

Nick Pyanson.

Yeah, Smithsonian.

I remember looking at him working on it through the window, right?

I was like two feet away from him.

And there was like the parts that he had already cleared, and then there were the parts that he had not cleared.

And they were exactly the same.

Same color, same shape, and everything.

And I'm like,

a part of me was like, what the hell's going on here?

Because I don't see the difference, and how is anybody seeing the difference?

Because they do it all day, every day.

How does he know when to stop chipping away if it looks exactly the same?

Because it doesn't look exactly the same to him.

They're different.

Use techniques that will take away the stone.

That's why it's so painstaking.

You can, you can taste it.

Yeah.

So, one of the things they discovered here was that they suspected Archaeopteryx had this, but they didn't know from any of the previous specimens.

So, Archaeopteryx is the first bird, meaning that it's the oldest specimen of a dinosaur that was also a bird, right?

Birds are dinosaurs.

So, Archaeopteryx is a dinosaur, but it's also a bird.

What's proto-avis that pops to mind?

Yeah, so there are all the other ones that

if they're over the line to bird, they are younger than Archaeopteryx, right?

Now, Archaeopteryx probably was not on the line to modern birds.

It was because

bird-like dinosaurs were radiated madly, right?

So there's lots of evolutionary radiations, and it would be very almost impossible to find something that was on the direct line that happened to lead to modern birds.

So everything's going to be an offshoot, right?

So it is also an offshoot.

Are they sure of that?

Pretty much, yeah.

But it is a bird, and

it's the oldest bird.

Now we have 14 specimens.

So one of the things that they found was it has these secondary flight feathers under the primary flight feathers, which all flying birds have.

And again, we thought it flew, so it probably had them.

So it's interesting that it does.

All feathered dinosaurs who didn't fly do not have these feathers.

How big was it?

Secondaries.

It's pretty small.

It's like

a couple feet high or something,

18 inches, two feet.

This is the smallest specimen.

Oh, really?

Is it even smaller?

This is the smallest one.

Do they think it was young?

I don't know.

The thing is, so right now they're considering

all 14 as the same genus, Archaeopteryx,

but they're probably different species, right?

So it may be

age, but it may also just be this is a slightly smaller species.

Because, you know, they're once found in Germany and China.

They're not the same species, probably.

So, anyway, gorgeous specimen, just really getting a look at it.

This is just coming out now.

So cool.

Yeah.

And new information, very, very well preserved.

Aren't they speculating that they think it flew like a chicken?

I've been reading that a lot.

Yeah, like a chicken.

It was a core flyer.

It was a core flyer.

Certainly

doesn't have the modern adaptations of modern birds.

It's like specifically its sternum.

You know how a bird sternum is.

And they have an anatomy that allows them to do something that's called a wing flip maneuver.

That's how they take off from the ground.

Archaeopteryx does not have that.

So it probably would have a lot of trouble and maybe couldn't even take off from the ground.

But it had claws that would have allowed it to climb trees.

So it probably still was spending a lot of time walking on the ground and probably also could climb trees and then could fly or glide from there.

It's a beautiful intermediary.

It's perfect.

It's got like a beak and teeth.

It's got teeth, it's got a bony tail, but it has feathers and it flew.

It is pretty much as close to halfway between a theropod dinosaur and a bird dinosaur as you can get.

It's my go-to example of a transitional fossil for that reason.

That's why it's tattooed on my arm.

Yeah.

Love it.

So, Steve, it's trans.

Yeah, it's absolutely trans.

It's a transitional dinosaur.

So, does Archaeopteryx also have sort of like the few fingers that are at the end of the wings kind of thing?

Yes,

and cloud to its finger.

It does.

And so, you know, a couple of them are kind of fixed

for the wing purposes, but one of them is loose, and that's the one it probably was using to climb trees with.

So, yeah, it has that combination anatomy.

It was land dwelling, but also flying and probably climbing, and it was

halfway between a theropod and a bird.

Don't we know that at least some of its feathers were also black?

Or is that still contested?

But I think there's some pretty good evidence.

We have evidence

of the colors, because of, I'm not sure about what the color of the archaeopteryx is without checking, you know, just to update myself.

But I know we have

pigments for black, for red, and for blue.

And so there are some birds where we can say, yeah, look, I mean, this had really good soft tissue preservation, too.

It's very cool.

This is going to be studied for years.

We're just getting started.

It had both skin and feathers, really good soft tissue preservation.

But it's the proteins that allow them to tell the colors.

The proteins are,

they react to light in such a way we could say this would bestow the color red or whatever.

It's so cool.

To have any genetic material.

Oh, yeah.

That sucks, man.

Long ago.

It's rock.

Oh, it's like 150 million years ago.

Yeah, that's a rock.

Yeah.

All right, let's move on.

Kara, what are these chimpanzees doing?

They're so cute.

Okay, so I came across

a new

study, a new publication that reminded me of an episode of my podcast, Talk Nerdy, that I recorded in 2017.

Oh, my God, I'm doing this way too long, you guys.

So in 2017, I interviewed a woman named Rebecca Atencia, who is a Spanish veterinarian and scientist who at the time was the manager and the head veterinarian at Chimpanga, which is a chimp rehab center, a Jane Goodall Institute chimp rehab center in the Congo.

And we talked about her experience with orphaned chimpanzees.

The model at Chimpaunga was that they were open to the forest.

So a lot of these chimpanzees didn't have chimpanzee parents.

They were, again, orphans.

So they were hand-raised and fed, which means that they weren't quite comfortable going back into the wild, but they also didn't want to keep them captive.

So they left them open to the forest with their own choice, whether they wanted to come back for food or for shelter.

And one of the things that she told me, which blew my mind back in 2017, was that as their veterinarian, they developed a relationship.

And these chimps would go out into the wild.

They would get injured.

They were juveniles.

They would be, you know, play fighting and doing whatever.

They would get injured.

And they would come back to her and they would show her their wounds, like offer their wounds to her for

health care.

And at the time, I mean, this is

anecdotal, but it was like incredible to hear about.

And you did periodically kind of hear these chatters of different animals like self-medicating, whether we're talking about using substances, psychoactive substances, like the elephants that drink the

marula or just different organisms doing that.

We also hear about animals self-medicating sometimes with bugs or tinctures.

But in this new study, which was published,

I have it open here, which was published in Frontiers

in Ecological Evolution.

The study was called Self-Directed and Pro-Social Wound Care, Snare Removal, and Hygiene Behaviors Amongst the Budongo chimpanzees.

So these researchers looked at two groups of chimpanzees in the Budongo forest in Uganda over the course of four months, the Sonso and the Waibera chimpanzee communities.

And they observed a couple interesting findings.

And they were were like, oh, this is cool.

Like I want to dig deeper into this.

What they saw that really blew their minds were individual chimpanzees

administering first aid to other chimpanzees.

Wow.

So there had been some examples of chimpanzees doing their own wound care.

And there had been some examples of chimpanzees doing kind of like hygiene, like tool-oriented hygiene behaviors.

But when these researchers noticed that the chimpanzees were administering first aid to one another, they decided to go back and like comb over all of these observations and document all of the different sort of medical observations that they could make over the four-month period.

And they found some really interesting things.

So they found self-directed wound care, like wound licking, leaf dabbing, pressing fingers into wounds, and applying chewed plant material into wounds.

They also found self-directed snare removal, and these were human-laid, sadly, like poacher snares or snares for other animals that the chimpanzees found themselves injured by.

So they would remove the snares on their own.

They also found self-directed hygiene behaviors, which every article I've seen is like, damn, hygiene, and then they like move on.

But in the article, they dig deep into it.

They were literally wiping their asses.

So they were using leaves to wipe after defecating, and they were also using leaves to clean themselves after sex.

So like genital wiping after sex.

And then they also found licking, finger pressing, and applying chewed plant material to the wounds of others.

So one chimpanzee is injured, another chimpanzee licks their wounds, or they press on their wounds, or they chew up plant material and they make a tincture and they would pat it onto their wounds.

Kara, did they say that they actually discovered like a plant that actually has some medicinal properties?

No, I mean they have gone back at some of the examples of self-medication and looked for what could be an antimicrobial or antibiotic property within their wounds.

But in this study, because it was observational, they can't say, and they're explicit about this, we cannot say if their wounds would have healed faster with or without these behaviors.

They might have naturally healed on their own.

Do they prefer some plants over others to use?

They absolutely prefer.

They do seem to preferentially choose plants.

And historically, you know, there's a good introduction, like all good papers have like a deep literature review.

Historically, specific plants have been identified as good candidates for those kinds of things.

They also did find one case of pro-social snare removal.

So one chimpanzee is stuck in the snare and another chimpanzee is helping them to be removed from the snare.

And so, you know, not only is this an important finding just because it's like really interesting, but as the authors argue, when we talk about like the,

I guess, the predecessor or like early modern medicine, we often are attributing that to human behavior.

But quite quite possibly, before we were even Homo sapiens, our ancestors, our hominid ancestors, were engaging in medicinal practices for wound healing.

I mean, it makes perfect sense.

I mean,

the anothals were intelligent enough.

I mean, you know, you have a pain respond in pain.

Something, look, you know, everybody gets a cut or whatever.

Of course, you're going to go to someone in your tribe and ask for help.

Well, and

we know that this happened in hominid species because we have examples of organisms with healed wounds, right?

So we know that either they naturally were able to heal those things or they were engaging in some sort of medical care or first aid.

But to see this in extant chimpanzees, obviously we know they're good with tools.

Obviously, we know that they are,

we already know that they're self-medicating, or I had this anecdotal story of them asking a human being for help with a wound that was either causing them distress or that they were concerned about.

But then you add to it pro-social wound care within a speech.

We're not talking about bonobos.

We're talking about chimpanzees.

And these are

genetically unrelated chimps, right?

They were within in peer groups.

So I don't know if the one was.

I think one article I read said that at least one of these.

At least

one example.

Genetically unrelated chimp.

Yeah.

Kara, didn't they also observe one monkey giving an IV to the other one?

They're not monkeys.

Chimpanzees.

Come on, you were just a joke.

Where are you going, John?

Jay, I got a better joke.

My God, Kara, that's

Kara, have they observed any chimpanzees engaging in medical pseudoscience yet?

Well, we don't know yet if this is pseudoscience, right?

Pseudoscience may be the last human behavior that we don't find a precedent in.

Right, right.

But we also have to remember that some things that we consider pseudoscience now were precursors to legitimate science then, right?

So even phrenology led to important things.

Bloodletting at the time, it was the best we had based on what we know.

You're saying chimps are doing phrenology?

Well, they may be chewing up a plant that actually has no medicinal purpose.

They don't know, but they're throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, and that's really incredible.

I mean, that shows good problem solving.

It probably feels better, if nothing else.

Yeah, like packing a wound.

Packing a wound is reasonable.

Yeah, it helps with getting secondary infections and everything.

Lots of antibiotics.

Keeps it moist.

Lick wounds, too.

I mean, I guess the licking thing is like.

There are antimicrobial, like antibodies and stuff.

Saliva is actually not bad for that sort of thing.

Yeah.

But we have better medicine than wounds.

We have better medicines.

Don't lick your wounds.

We can do better.

Yeah, don't lick your wounds.

Now that's where Dr.

Zayas came from.

So speaking of licking wounds,

I didn't get the licking wounds of others.

You think about dogs who will come, you know, anytime there's any kind of scratch or anything on me, one of our dogs is licking it.

I mean, that seems like the same behavior.

And clearly, like an animal that co-evolved with us that, you know, kind of self-domesticated, like we were talking about earlier.

That makes a lot of sense.

And dogs, we know, are social animals, like deeply, deeply social animals.

Chimpanzees are really complicated, right?

Because they do have hierarchies, they do have societies.

By definition, they are social, but they are also often seen as very conflict-oriented animals.

And so, like you mentioned, Steve, if this is an animal that I'm not directly related to, or I don't know that I'm directly, and I see you as a potential, I don't know, threat, or I might be fighting with you for food or for resources or for mates, but I see that you're injured and I want to help you.

That's like a pretty incredible finding.

Instead of just like, I'm going to let you die, you know.

Well, there's probably a lot of reciprocal altruism.

Yeah, and we see that with grooming behaviors.

Apes and monkeys in general.

And that's the thing.

When I saw hygiene behaviors in here, and I was like, they only observe like a handful of hygiene behaviors.

In the articles, they don't say what those are.

And I'm like, well, aren't they constantly grooming each other?

And then I recognize, no, they're literally talking about cleaning up after going to the bathroom or after engaging in sex.

Flossing.

Yeah, flossing.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's a pretty incredible hygiene as well.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jay,

have they finally cured baldness?

Well, before we go.

This is like almost a cliche.

I want to talk to people.

Tabloid kind of talk to people out there.

Yeah.

First of all, you know, if you guys, Bob, your hair is standing, my hair is standing, Steve, yours is standing.

What?

I'm going to put them on blast.

Is there any social thing that's happened?

Do you feel self-conscious in any way?

Anything?

Only when I'm walking away from people.

Because I used to have hair like Adam, and I don't anymore.

Jay, don't you dare complain.

Stop it.

Look at your hair.

I can't.

George.

George, help me out here.

Oh, what do you need me for, Jay?

Where can I buy a coat like that?

No, but, George, I want to know.

It's not a coincidence you have that microphone in your hand because I asked Ann to give it to you.

I'm going to impose on you a little bit to answer a couple of questions.

You went through the whole thing.

You had a beautiful head of hair.

I did.

I had lanyard-like hair.

It was like sailors would look at me pining that they could use it.

They still do, George.

How old were you when it started to go?

I was about 30.

I lost about 40 pounds when I was 30 years old.

Like, consciously, really went for it.

And it worked.

It was great.

Let's care about my hair fell.

So,

what did it do to you emotionally?

Like, what was that like?

It was the worst.

It was the worst.

It was, yeah, I mean, it really affected me.

I mean, I was dying it blonde for a long time to kind of hide it, and then shorter and shorter and shorter, and then just thought, all right, I'll start shaving it.

When I first shaved it, I just, I hate it.

I still hate it.

I hate it.

We talked about it.

So, you which is ironic because everyone thinks you look fabulous.

Yeah.

Well, that's all we know.

We don't know.

I'm just saying.

We all see something very different in the mirror.

Yeah, yeah,

it's interesting.

Because of this news item, I was doing some research and just reading, reading, and there's a massive emotional response to almost everybody.

That's why it's such a common target.

Well, and I experience, and not to interject too much, but when I'm doing therapy with individuals going through chemo, whether we're talking about men or women, even though

it's not always temporary, but even though it is often temporary, sometimes the emotional reaction to losing their hair is like more intense than the reaction to having like you know, violent emesis or like violent, like being very, very ill from the chemo.

And people will go to these, I've thought about it.

What would I do if when I had cancer I had to have chemo?

I don't think I would cold cap.

Like, and cold capping, if you don't know, is you're wearing this freezing cold, like helmet thing on your head the whole time you're going through chemo in an effort to try and save some of the follicles.

And there's some evidence that shows it works.

It's not complete.

It's oftentimes people still lose some of their hair, but the violent pain, you're already so so sick from the chemo, and it's so uncomfortable to sit there with the cold cap on, but it's worth it to a lot of people because the idea of losing their hair and the idea of going bald during that experience, even temporarily, is so emotionally.

My wife just shaved, just shaved.

That's what I would do, too.

I want a warm blanket.

I want to be able to take baths.

Connection to this, I experienced a variation of this whole scenario.

I was using Rogaine Foam to just maintain what I had and maybe not lose a little more.

And I had an cosmically ironic reaction to it, that it caused an area this big, palm of my hand, in the back of my head, to fall out in a month.

In like 30 days, this was basically gone back there.

And I didn't know what it was.

My doctor's like, oh, it's male pattern baldness.

Well, it didn't seem like it because it doesn't happen in a month.

You know, over years is one thing, but in a month, it really affected me.

I considered every conceivable way, you name it, I thought about, I'm going to do this, I'll try this, I'll try that, I'll try that.

And my realization was just embrace it.

People don't notice or care that you're bald, but they will notice that you are trying to hide it.

That's the key realization right there.

And after a year and a half, two years, it grew back.

I found out it was alopecia areata, it was some weird immune reaction to it.

I didn't know at the time it was ever going to come back, and it mostly came back, but it was like a weird experience.

Yeah, that was you approached me, you were like, Dude, look at this, look at this.

What's going on?

I'm like, I don't know, I should have this, but I don't know what it's like.

And my stupid doctor,

my doctor's like, oh, male pattern.

Your primary care doctor.

He was a put.

I said, all right, fine, fine, but why is it, why is what hair is there like white?

What's going on with that?

You know, I wasn't gray like I am now.

And he's like, I don't know, go to a specialist.

And the specialist looked at me for three seconds.

Yeah, alopecia areata.

What's the specialist?

That's what specialists are for.

But also,

seriously,

it's night and day sometimes.

But also, to be fair, physicians have a steady stream of people people whose complaint is, I'm getting older.

They're having symptoms that are age-related.

I'm not buying it.

And so I'm just saying, yes, there's that 1% where, or 2%, or 3%, whatever, where it's something else, and we have to sniff that out.

But it's easy sometimes for that to get lost in the background of why aren't I 20 anymore?

No.

So I'm not buying that.

I'm not buying that.

When somebody can't complain to our doctor.

I'm not excusing it.

I'm just saying for context.

I can't go to my doctor and bitch about what I don't like about being

Steve, I'm just giving you some.

Let's get back on topic.

Another point of view.

I got to click back to George.

All right.

Now,

I've already pushed you, but I'm going to push you further.

Did you try anything really stupid to get out here?

No, I investigated everything.

I knew everything about Harry Dean to know.

I knew that Rogane does what Rogane does, but Rogan's only for the crown of that.

So there's no point.

Except in my case.

Right, right.

I knew that stuff that was being recommended to me by hair salon people, I knew it was all bunk.

I knew it was nonsense.

So I didn't invest any money.

I think,

apart from dying it blob just to kind of hide it, yeah, I knew that this was just where it's at.

But no interest in like a transplant?

Because that is a thing.

That's the only potential

something that could really make an interest until now.

All right, so I was going to read off a bunch of weird things that people did.

There's just a couple here.

Yeah, we covered some of them.

I mean, it's funny when we, you know, in modern times, we look back, the Egyptians used to make a mixture of dates, donkey hooves, and dog paws, and they'd rub it on their heads.

Trying to do anything.

You know what I mean?

It was all pseudoscience.

It was all, you know, people like, I bet there was a lot of lying and a lot of people spending a lot of money.

The baldness cures in the Middle Ages,

they would boil nettles in vinegar.

What are nettles?

Let's go to the boiling plants.

Parts of plants.

And they would use onion juice, salt, and bear grease.

Bear grease, right?

I want to know.

And today.

And today.

You thought that was weird.

People use urine today to regrow hair.

They use cayenne pepper and garlic paste.

Now, I know a freaking recipe that that would be awesome.

Cayenne pepper.

Ooh.

But you want to put pepper on your head?

Anyway, onion juice, cow dung, and banana mix.

A little bit of onion.

Really?

Onion?

Cayenne pepper.

What's actually happening, and this is the first time I've actually been a little encouraged by anything hair-related.

There was a team at UCLA, William Lowry, Heather Chris Folk, and Michael Jung, and they identified a molecule called PP405.

So there is P in it.

It's PP45.

Golden shower treatment.

Yeah, PP therapy.

Come on, that was good, Jay.

That was good.

It's like an 80s thug.

I'll use P4 therapy.

Damn.

Damn.

I hate when I miss the obvious ones.

Come on.

So it's a molecule.

I could not find whether or not they found it or made it.

I would imagine that they found it.

Now, this is not a hormone.

This has nothing to do with hormone intervention.

So the hormone interventions that are out there, you know, Rogane and Oxidil, and they come with side effects.

And some people don't get them.

And some people get them, and they could be really bad.

Like, the side effects could be really intense because it messes with your hormone levels.

And a lot of the reasons why people go bald is because of hormones.

You know, when you get older and your hormone levels change and all that, you know, it's so

the older I get, the more I'm like, I don't want to mess with my hormones.

It's one of those things that I think we should leave alone.

Well, and also, don't a lot of the drugs like propecian stuff, they sort of prevent future hair loss or slow it.

They don't actually make you grow a lot of hormone levels.

Some can make you grow.

A reasonable expectation is maintenance.

Maintaining what you have.

So you start it young.

The basic info on going bald, we have hair follicles, right?

And these hair follicles, it's common, it's totally typical.

Everybody's hair goes through a growth cycle and a rest cycle.

And when a rest cycle happens, the hair falls out.

So as we get older, like I said, we have hormone changes.

Stress can also be a factor in this, where what happens is the hair follicles stop reactivating.

They just, you know, they take their rest period and then they go on permanent vacation.

So the fact is, though, those hair follicles aren't dead.

They're getting a blood supply.

They're still viable.

They just are kind of, they're basically hormonally turned off.

And PP405

can't say

right there, Jay.

Right there.

Sometimes you're just too close to it.

I literally have the word urine one paragraph above PP.

He's so mad.

Jay, I get jealous.

And if you didn't hear the private show today

right george holy shit i'm i'm who was whoever was there please it was an adult woman that's all

that was great

regarding the pee-pee i got your back i got your back thanks bob

so

the the uh this chemical you guys know what the name of it is the mechanism targets a particular and very specific cellular component known as mitochondrial pyruvate carrier, MPC, and I will refer to MPC in a minute.

So they say it's a protein complex that regulates metabolic activity in stem cells, right?

So there is a stem cell component to this, which is pretty cool.

So the chemical that they're using, it inhibits MPC.

It shifts the cell's metabolism in a way that triggers the follicle to...

to re-exit dormancy, which is perfectly normal, right?

And it will begin producing terminal hairs.

Now, terminal hairs sound like the hair that's about to fall out, but for some reason they picked terminal to mean pigmented, strong, healthy hair, not peach fuzz.

So this is like your best hair, right?

The best version of the hair that you can.

Wait, did this reverse gray, too?

It's a pigment.

It says pigmented.

Wow.

So this is a heavy hitter here.

They spent a decade developing this one chemical.

or working with it.

Again, I haven't found out if they cleaned it or not.

And guess what, guys?

And this is the part that blew my mind.

Doesn't work.

In 2023, they completed the phase one human trials in California.

And the participants that applied the topical cream, I think they did it for a week, for one week before bedtime, and the results were described by researchers as statistically significant.

And I want you to realize that statistically significant means good.

It's not just, oh,

it sounds like it was 50%, you know, it was a small percent.

No, statistic.

But for context, a phase one trial is a safety trial.

It's not an efficacy trial.

So it means it probably wasn't blinded, and

it wasn't powered to show that there was an actual effect.

It just means it was safe.

And statistically significant means it is more likely than chance alone to have that effect.

What was it valid?

I missed all of that.

Okay, we got you, man.

Why we're here.

So wait, so there was more because I was not satisfied with statistically significant.

So they said...

What was the effect size?

I went to the study.

How did I miss P-VAC?

And then I used ChatGPT to read the original study, but I used the research one, which does a huge analysis and actually does a lot of other checking and everything, and then it gave me a wonderful summary.

So what they found was that there were absolute signs of follicle reactivation, which means they were seeing the hair follicles.

There was growth growth happening, and there were no signs of toxicity or follicle damage, which was something that they were like being extraordinarily aware about.

Because anytime you do this, they want to know: is there side effects?

Are we actually damaging the hair follicles?

Is there anything entering the bloodstream?

They didn't detect any of that, which is good.

This is all really nice to hear.

And on top of that, Steve, phase one, they're in phase two A now.

You know what phase two A is?

Yeah, it's the month after phase one.

So, phase two,

it's a preliminary.

I actually, true story,

very quick courtroom drama thing.

I was getting sued.

I'm in a courtroom, and

the other side had a researcher

being an expert witness for them, and I knew they knew nothing about clinical medicine.

So, I told my lawyer, ask them what a phase three clinical trial is.

And their answer was, it's the one after phase two.

Awesome.

Anyway, it's a preliminary episode.

Was he right?

Was he right?

So

they're doing it now.

They have 60 participants, and this is the part that I knew Kara was going to do a backflip for.

They deliberately picked various genders, hair types, and ethnic backgrounds.

They need to, yeah.

It can't be a study on white men.

Because everybody goes bald.

There's people of all.

Well, and women, yeah, women experience hair loss, like a lot of women experience hair.

Just because we don't have male pattern baldness necessarily doesn't mean that our hair doesn't thin significantly as we age.

And some women are especially devastating because they're not supposed to lose anything.

Right, right, right, yeah, yeah.

Culture.

A lot of women do have pattern baldness, not the same as men, but they wear wigs because we don't see it.

You don't see it as much as you would with a menu.

Well, I have a statistic on that.

So 50% of men experience some type of pattern hair loss.

25% of women by age 50 experience some type of hair loss.

Those are not insignificant numbers.

And then it goes into the, they were talking about the psychological distress and everything.

I think we covered that.

So to give you the overview, phase one trials were completed in 2023.

Phase two trials are underway, and they're going to be ending this year.

They have more people and more diversity going on.

And then if the phase two results are good, then they're going to move forward into phase three, which is the one that I think is like that's what we're doing.

That's the one you need to get FDA approval.

And then they're saying the best case scenario, if everything goes great and they did find something that really works, it could be out around 2027.

Worst case scenario, 2029.

So I'm thinking, like, man, I might actually make the curve.

Yeah.

I think

I just might say it.

Here's the question.

It works.

It's safe.

Are you rocking a new head of hair?

No question.

Right?

Really?

I mean, if it's again, the problem is something like this,

they will literally be able to name their price.

Yes.

It probably will not be able to afford what it is in the first 10 years of its existence because

this is the moon landing.

It's like boners.

George, go fund it.

Boners, they took care of 20 years ago.

And that is an almost trillion-dollar industry in terms of what it was.

This will be the same.

This will be the same, if not even bigger.

But there's a, I mean, I don't want to get into the nuances of the way that our very broken health care system works, but if it is an FDA, if it becomes an FDA-approved pharmaceutical drug, physicians can

prescribe it, right?

It's a problem.

But that's only going to be an The insurance company would have to pay for it.

True, true.

Who owns the patent on it, though?

That's the thing.

Well, UCLA is doing it, but who knows?

It's going to end up in some pharmaceutical

catalog.

But if you can find a physician that deems it medically necessary and that argues for it, there may be a chance that an insurance company will cover it and that it may be affordable

necessary.

No, no, what it is is if your job counts out, we all need to get jobs where you need hair.

All right, one more quick thing, Steve, before we change.

If you're comfortable, you don't have to involve yourself yourself in this, but if you're experiencing any hair loss, raise your hand.

Or clap, because this is a podcast.

Here we go.

One big clap.

All right, fellow baldies.

Here we go.

There it is.

Which of you that are experiencing hair?

That was them hitting their foreheads, by the way.

Which of you, if you're experiencing it, does it make you sad and uncomfortable?

Wow.

All right.

The opposite.

Which of you that have some type of baldness don't care and you're cool with it?

That's fantastic.

There you go.

That is fantastic, guys.

Smart.

I don't like it.

What I want to see, I want to see all these phase one, two, whatever.

I want to see the number one, before and after, the best response anybody had.

I want to see before and after.

Wouldn't that tell you, if you're going from bald to something that's got some hair, the answer, that's the answer.

We would know now.

You want to see a space?

Yeah, you want a Bosley commercial for this.

Yeah.

A guy coming out of the pool.

Right.

That's really good.

I'm not just a president.

I'm also a boss.

So, George, what's the first hairstyle that you get once you have the full head of hair back?

Are you just going to go fucking wild or what?

Yeah, I mean, I don't care.

Like, it literally could be anything.

It could be a crew cut, it could be like tiger stripes.

I don't care.

It could be a bad haircut.

I wouldn't give for like a bad bullet.

For like a bowl cut.

All right, there it is.

It's a mullet.

It's a mullet.

Case closed.

Sun in orange mullet.

George, I'm a coxcomb.

But you're so handsome right now.

George, to me, you are beautiful and dancing, and I love you the way you are.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I appreciate it.

I really appreciate it.

But it's like, I'm like 10 years into no relationship, right?

So it's like, obviously, I'm an asshole, or like, it's like the no-hair thing.

Well, we know which one it is.

So that's what I'm going to say.

All right.

We don't want to burst your bubble there, George.

George, we've got to talk after the back end.

I appreciate it.

All right, Bob, what color is this?

What color am I looking at right now?

I have no idea.

I'm not going to answer that question.

I'm going to do my.

All right.

Let me just start by saying this.

I'm going to address that, but I got an opener.

Go ahead.

Then I'm going to check.

All right, Bob, give me your opener.

Wait, what are you trying to say?

All right, reduce your setup.

Researchers at UC Berkeley and University of Washington have developed a machine called Oz

that can kind of hijack a person's visual system to see something that is otherwise unseeable, the color Olo.

This,

Steve,

is a representation of

the color OLO.

It's not real OLO.

It's fake OLO.

It's a representation of the color O.

If you're listening and not seeing this, it's basically blue-green or teal.

If you're a real geek, it's light at a wavelength of 540 nanometers.

Well, more like 542, right?

Wouldn't you say it's more 542?

But make no mistake.

541, 542, whatever it is.

But make no mistake, that is not OLO.

It's not even close to OLO.

One way to look at it is the creation of a three-dimensional object as a shadow.

of a four-dimensional object.

So to try to understand that four-dimensional object, scientists will often look at its shadow, a three-dimensional object that is really a shadow of it.

That is not helpful.

I bet it's helpful to some people.

Is this like how when we, like, we can't see ultraviolet light, so we make it purple?

And then we go, oh, there's a UV light on it.

Yeah, it's kind of like a representation.

It's a representation of something that you can't see or imagine, but that helps give you, it's a shadow of the real thing.

It gives you a hint of the real object, an object that you can't appreciate.

And this is just an attempt to do that.

So there is no printer conceivable that can print OLO.

There is no digital display that can display OLO.

It's not a limitation of what's coming into your eyes.

It's a limitation within the eyes.

The redna itself does not have the evolved hardware to see OLO.

Would a bird be able to see it?

Or birds or other animals?

Do you think they would be able to possibly see it?

I think it would be difficult.

You would not have trichromatic vision like a human and see it, I don't think.

It is, it is, but it's not just specifically, and this is exactly what I'm going to cover.

So there are, yet, despite all of this, there are five people that have seen Olo.

And that gets us to Oz.

This is the device that they created.

Of course, the inspiration was the Wizard of Oz.

And it was hard to find out exactly what they meant, but in the books,

you had to put on green filters, glasses,

to downgrade the utter brilliance of the green color of Oz.

The other obvious connection is that if you watch The Wizard of Oz, they go from black and white to color, right?

That's another connection.

So, to better understand this, though, you need to understand photoreceptors to a certain degree to really appreciate this.

Photoreceptors are the specialized cells in our retinas, right?

We've got the rods and cones.

The rods are for low light, but they don't deal with color.

It's the cones that produce the color vision for us, but there's three types of cones: there's the short wavelength, there's the medium wavelength, and then there's the long wavelength.

So, blue, green, red, basically.

So there's S cones, M cones, and L cones.

Now, so all the million colors, we could all see approximately about a million colors.

And those colors come from the activation of two or three of these cones together.

They always activate together.

The key point here is that

they are never stimulated by themselves.

It's always either an S and M cone, and oh boy,

an M and L cone.

It's never a BP cone.

It's never a single type of cone.

Could I get the next one?

Can you stimulate an L and an S?

Like the two ends but not the middle?

The long one?

Well, let's take a look at this chart then, shall we, Steve?

Okay.

So what the key takeaway here is that

you've got this overlap.

And because you have this overlap, you cannot stimulate one cone type.

without stimulating at least one other one.

So what that means is that you can never purely isolate, say if you could see the peak of the M cone there at like 400 and whatever, or 500 whatever nanometers, it can never be stimulated by itself because you're going to always have a little bit of stimulation of the other cones.

So when you see a color like say green,

it's basically attenuated because there's other colors thrown in the mix because the other receptors are being stimulated.

Can I ask a question?

Yeah, please, please do.

I was under the impression, it's kind of like the LEDs in TV, where the combination of the three color groups make the color.

It fashions the color, right?

Right, exactly.

I thought that was by design, that we want them to be stimulated at, you know what I mean.

I thought that's how we evolve.

That we want them to be stimulated at the same time because they have to in order to create the color that you're seeing.

Right, right.

That's part of it.

And that's why we can see so many colors because there's so much overlap that you're having various amounts of the receptors being stimulated.

So you got all the million, literally like a million potential colors that we can see.

So the overlap is important, but it also means that we can't, you cannot see a pure color, a pure hue, without having some other colors in the mix.

And because of that, that color will never be as vivid as possible.

Got it.

Okay?

Now, the way that Oz deals with this is that it literally, keeping your head very still, it literally will map these M cones in your retina.

It maps them individually.

It says, here's an M cone cell, here's an M cone cell, and it finds a thousand or so of these, and it it maps them.

It knows exactly where they are, because this is like a fingerprint.

Everybody's retina here will have a different distribution of these M-cones on their retina.

And this machine can actually stimulate every M cone cell, and no other cell is being stimulated.

So, OLO is the color of pure M cone stimulation.

And that's where OLO comes from, because on the left, S is zero because it's not stimulated.

The M is stimulated, so that's a one.

And then the L is not stimulated, that's another zero, so O one zero O L O.

That's where OLO comes from.

Is it sorry, sorry to interject, but like please do.

From what I understand, colorblindness is caused by one or more cone deficiencies.

So somebody who's red, green, colorblind has either a deficiency, like an anomaly, or a

difficulty with like just their L cone, for example.

I don't know which cone it is, but with one cone.

And then there's deuterobia, and then there's tri.

It's like the

what are the words?

Yeah.

The dichromatic, monochromatic.

Tritinopia, yeah,

deuteranopia and protinopia.

So are there not people in the population who can do this because they have deficits in specific cones but not others?

No, I didn't specifically study colorblindness for this talk, but no,

I can confidently say that they're not seeing OLO.

I feel like there's got to be people who just don't have one of the types of cones.

But you would have to not have L or S and have only a constant.

That's the difference.

It has to be just the M cone

to be OLO.

Everything's green there.

You would only see green?

Like blue, this teal, various.

Yeah.

We have a hell of a lot more of those in our eyes than a thousand.

Right, right.

So, yeah, so that there, there's, this is very, imagine you're looking into the retina and you're identifying specific cells that you then stimulate.

They can only map out, say, a thousand or two thousand of them, but there's two million.

There's two million of them.

So they're stimulating a subset of these M-cones.

So that's what it does, though.

What they do is they look at your red data, they say, all right, here's a thousand M cone receptors, and they stimulate them.

So the short and long wavelengths are not stimulated at all.

That never happens.

No matter what you're looking at,

anywhere, you will never reproduce that because you always have some of the other

receptors being stimulated.

So it makes any color you see paler than it potentially can be.

So what you end up seeing is a blue-green or a teal that is so ridiculously vivid that you cannot really imagine it right now.

My big question is: if you've seen it, can you really reimagine it faithfully?

And

you probably could.

So, here's some quotes.

You're probably wondering: well, what do these people say?

These five lucky bastards that saw Olo, what do they say?

One person said that it was a profoundly saturated teal.

Somebody said it's blue-green, but with an unprecedented saturation.

Saturation means that it's vivid.

It's just like more of that color.

Did you know that pink is essentially a light red?

We treat it colloquially as another color.

It's not technically another color.

It's just a pale version of red.

Red is a super saturated pink, in a sense.

So, Kier, you wanted another analogy.

It's like having somebody look at pink, somebody who has never seen red ever, and saying, here's pink.

I want to show you a supersaturated version of it called red.

Do you think you could extrapolate in your mind what deep red looks like by only knowing pink?

You probably couldn't do it justice, right?

But I also wonder, are the five people who saw this color researchers?

Are they these researchers?

A couple of them were the researchers themselves.

Only a couple?

No, yeah.

Not all of them.

Because I would think that there would be a percentage of the population who like, yes, this is so cool scientifically, but you show them and they go, Yeah, it's bluish green.

No, no.

I don't think they had any of that reaction at all.

But were they primed to think this is freaking awesome?

You know what I mean?

Like, you sound so excited, but I feel like there have got to be people who are like, yeah, it's like color.

There are people that watch Star Wars and basically were like, yeah, I saw it.

I doubt

what we learned is they don't get to see the movies anymore, and we're never going to ask them to see Olo.

That's it.

I doubt they were as excited as me, but I would bet that the researchers that partook

were very excited.

I'm sure they're very excited.

I wonder if this would ultimately be leveraged in virtual reality, where you actually have goggles that are fixed to your head and they map out your retina, and then they're stimulating your rods and carbon individual lasers.

Yeah, it's interesting to contemplate.

I feel like this is the solution to a problem we didn't have.

Those are the best ones to solve.

I disagree.

I disagree, but I'll give you some other ideas on that care.

Let me finish with my favorite quote.

Favorite quote: significantly more

vivid than a green laser light.

You've all seen laser light.

It's like ridiculously vivid.

They're saying it made laser light look pale.

That's how intense this was.

In the future, it could help with color vision research, color blindness treatment, and retina disease modeling.

This could be extremely helpful.

I want to see this.

I don't want to see OLO.

I want to see...

ooh, O-O-L.

I want to see this with red light.

A hyper-vivid, a hypersaturated red, I think, would be a lot more interesting than teal.

teal.

You know, that's just my opinion.

All right, question for just a quick discussion: Is this a new color or is it not a new color?

My opinion is, this is not a new color.

This is blue-green.

We know blue-green.

We know teal.

This is just a hypersaturated teal that's beyond the mechanisms of our retina, but it's not a new color.

Everyone here is saying it's a new color.

It's an technically new colour.

It is a new color.

I don't think it's a colour.

It's all colors or just different versions of the three colors.

I was going to say, like, more fundamental question: what is a color in terms of how you divide up this continuum of light?

You know, isn't it arbitrary to some degree to say we can see a million colors?

Couldn't you divide that in half again and now we can see two million colors?

Yeah.

There are physiological measurements of what is the least noticeable difference.

Like, that's an actual measurement in physiology.

So, that's what we're doing.

So, it could be that there's a least noticeable noticeable noticeable difference between

a million colors.

All right, let's move on.

Wasn't that cool?

I love it.

I know, I hear you.

That's why I'm moving on.

Here she is.

Who's that?

All right, Evan.

Yeah.

This is Elizabeth Holmes.

Yeah, that's Elizabeth Holmes.

Yes, a nefarious character.

The former chief executive officer of Theranos.

Isn't she in the Huscow?

Why is our news related to her?

She's in the Huscow.

But that's right, she is in the news.

So Theranos, we have covered this before on the show.

The now-defunct

technology company that once soared in valuation, 9 billion, I think, at its crazy peak valuation, however, they did that.

This was after the company claimed to have revolutionized blood testing by developing methods that could use a very small volume of blood, such as from a fingerprint.

That's it.

One little drop of blood, Steve.

Figure it all out, right?

Yep, which I instantly knew was bullshit.

Right.

It took you about a second to smell that one out.

So yeah, she's in jail.

Back in early 2022, she was found guilty of defrauding investors.

out of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud for lying to investors about the devices developed by Theranos.

But no counts of harming patients, only investors.

She was guilty.

Because that's what's more important, not guilty on the fourth charges related to

the allegations that she duped patients

who received false or faulty results from the tests

conducted by Theranos.

11 years in prison, and she has to give back over the course of her life, if she can, $452 million.

Her quote is, failure is not fraud.

And she stands by that still to this day.

She believes that she's innocent, that

everything she did was with correct and good intentions.

And yeah,

it just didn't work.

And that's not fraud shock.

But she also exaggerated the accuracy and reliability of the testing technology.

She falsely claimed partnerships with pharmaceutical companies and the United States military.

And, you know, she kind of made up these fake demonstrations and altered lab reports.

Yeah, she straight up used other people's machines and put her logo on it and was like, look, it works.

Right.

So I think she needs to go back to school to figure out what the real definition of fraud here is.

But the reason she's in the news is because, well, she's married.

Before she went off to jail, she married a person by the name of Billy Evans.

Billy Evans is one of the heirs to the Evans Hotel fortune.

People in the San Diego area are familiar with this.

Apparently, it's a family-owned group of hotels.

His background is that primarily he was with a company called Luminar Technologies, a company specializing in self-driving car technology.

He, this is Elizabeth Holmes' husband, Billy Evans, has founded a new blood testing startup called Hemanthemus.

Hemanthus, H-A-E-M-A-N-T-H-U-S, which means what, blood flower,

blood lily, I believe, is what it is.

The company aims to develop diagnostic technology that analyzes small samples of blood, saliva, or urine using artificial intelligence.

And they have so far raised $20 million

in price.

$20 million.

I mean, hold on a second.

So you got this woman who the world knows who she is.

You know, it was a huge scandal.

She gets married,

goes to prison.

Her husband basically says, I'm going to make the same thing she did.

That's pretty much what's happening here.

And people

save money.

This has AI, though.

Ah, now with artificial intelligence.

Do you think the first thing you would do if you're about to hand over?

I don't know how many investors there are, but let's say one person gave them a million bucks.

Would you at least do an internet search on who they are?

I mean, they have to know.

How can you not?

This is a whole thing, but sometimes investors have...

you know, the

FOMO, right?

The fear of missing out.

And they invest a lot of money knowing that 19 are going to fail, but one is going to hit and so if they're open with open eyes saying all right i this rolling the dice they're rolling the dice that's on them you know what i mean as long as they're not being lied to right as long as they're not isn't there also like and i i don't know what her settlement or her her court outcome was i mean clearly they're able to do this but you often do see in these like fraud cases you know some some sort of Ponzi scheme banker it's like and you are banned from practicing banking you and your immediate family, you know, but they clearly.

But I don't know if this is her husband.

This is her husband.

I don't know if he was included in it.

It should have been.

It should have been you and your immediate family, but it clearly wasn't.

She's not allowed to hold a corporate position until like the year 2037 or something.

It is part of.

But it wasn't like

no more blood companies in your core.

But again,

I didn't really know what that was.

Yeah, clearly not.

Oh, my God.

I mean,

to me, it's like this is the husband of the woman who had a $9 billion fake company.

And people are going to throw money.

Even with that, Steve,

I'll just pick one of the other 3,000 venture things that are happening.

I'm not defending the decision.

Fully twice.

Fool me once, Shaman.

I'm trying to put some context in there.

I appreciate it.

You?

Fool me twice.

The company tweeted the other day, sort of in response to the very question you're asking about, you know, how and why is this happening?

And here's what the tweet says: Yes, our CEO, Billy Evans, is Elizabeth Holmes' partner.

Skepticism is rational.

We must clear a higher bar.

We prefer to build first, talk later.

The science, when ready, will stand on its own.

Does that sound like, oh my gosh, we want peaceful coexistence?

It's like, no, you don't.

You want to eat us.

Here's the next tweet.

This is not Theranos 2.0.

Theranos attempted to miniaturize existing tests.

Our approach is fundamentally different.

We use light to read the complete molecular story in biological fluids.

Same patterns, current tests can't detect.

Not an improvement, a different paradigm.

We've heard before.

Superficially, it's fine.

Yeah.

And if it weren't coming from

the partner of Elizabeth Holmes, it would be like, all right, just show me the data, show me the science behind it.

But sure, we could use light to invent to see what stuff is made of.

And sure, we could use AI to look for patterns.

That's mass spec.

That's funny.

Yeah, we have to do it.

Superficially, it sounds fine.

And maybe, maybe we're being too harsh.

Maybe this will eventually work out.

But at the end of the day, they're right in that the science will speak for itself, both positive and negative.

But the way that we have structured startup culture in this country is: give us money now, you know, ask questions later.

And so,

where's the line with fraud?

You know what I mean?

Like, if this is a nothing burger.

That's her point.

Exactly.

She's like, this is the fake it till you make it culture is is just inherent.

Her point was that this is what everybody does.

You're only coming after me because I'm a woman.

That was her point.

There may be an element of truth to that, but I do think that she was way over the line to actual fraud.

Not just hype or

doing the thing that they do.

We have a guy in a costume pretending to be the robot.

Everyone does that.

So why wasn't that fraud?

Like, why is you know what I mean?

So there's, there's a lot of people.

Because when you finally have a prototype and your prototype is fake.

Yeah, it's a fake prototype, but it's just a demonstration, though, Clark.

Exactly.

It's always just a demonstration.

Because they were already in Walgreens.

I mean, yeah, they were already using consumers.

Apple was doing it.

You know, Steve Jobs, when he demoed the first iPhone,

it was on Rails, at least.

It was like totally on Rails, and it crashed.

You know what I mean?

That almost didn't happen.

But when he sold the first iPhone, he wasn't selling an iPhone on Rails.

That's the difference.

He wasn't selling a black barrel and putting an iPhone on it.

A product that didn't work.

They knew they were going to get there, but I don't know.

I don't trust this.

And I think that the whole conversation about where's the line between a demo and fraud or whatever

can just be avoided by just creating a clear demarcation between something that's health-related, where the fake it till you make it equals death, and on this side, the fake it till you make it equals you got a shitty phone.

Exactly, which is why it's so interesting to me.

And again, but for investors, you could say, as long as you're not committing, you're not doing certain things like lying, outright lying, or misrepresenting to investors or whatever, then it is like buyer-beware kind of thing.

You're just, it's all a gamble, and they're gambling on something.

You're saying, I don't have it now.

This is just my plan to do this.

Because we do have an FDA, right?

But the patients who were harmed by fraudulent actual medical care.

Well, and that's a different thing.

Like, if we have ostensibly a food and drug administration that has to approve certain types of devices or certain types of procedures, anything before it receives approval is research.

Is research.

And once it receives approval and it's open to the public, at that point, you're committing fraud.

Evan, anything else to wrap this up with?

Yes, here's the wrap-up line.

You mentioned the prototype, right?

The prototype of the machine, the one.

This company, this new company, also released a photo of their prototype.

And according to the NPR article, I'll quote, it looks suspiciously like Theranos' defunctive testing machine.

But Evan, this is not Theranos 2.0.

This is not Theranos 2.0, as long as you get that straight.

As long as you keep saying that, you're good.

That's right.

All right.

All right.

Look at this cute little guy.

So this is KJ.

This is KJ.

He has a genetic disorder.

CPS1 deficiency, carbamyl phosphate synthase I deficiency.

This is a urea cycle disorder.

So you know we break down proteins into ammonia, then the ammonia gets converted to urea, and then you pee the urea out.

That's normal metabolism.

This enzyme is what turns ammonia into and gets ammonia into the urea cycle, right?

So it eventually spits out urea.

So if this enzyme isn't working, you don't make urea, ammonia builds up, ammonia is a toxin, it can damage the brain, it could damage the liver, and it can cause permanent brain damage, and it can cause death.

50% of children born with this disorder die.

They don't, so 50% mortality.

The ones who survive most mainly survive because they get liver transplants.

The idea, so you have to keep them alive until they're old old enough to get a liver transplant.

What age?

It depends on how fast they grow and how much they thrive, but they have to be like one, two years old.

But is that where the problem is?

It's in the liver?

It's that enzyme.

It's a genetic mutation of that enzyme.

In the liver.

Yeah, it's a liver.

It's in the liver.

It's in the liver, yeah.

And one of the treatments to keep them alive is you have to reduce their protein intake, which, you know, you kind of need protein to grow.

So

you're giving them the least amount of protein we can to have them kind of survive long enough to get a liver transplant.

You also have to give them drugs that scavenge the nitrogen, right, that scavenge the ammonia to try to get rid of that as much as possible.

It's expensive, it's dodgy, again, 50% mortality rate.

And the thing is, with an enzyme like that, there could be hundreds of mutations that inactivate that enzyme.

So

it's not one specific genetic mutation.

It's just anything which makes that enzyme not work.

It could be hundreds of different mutations.

All right, so KJ was born with this disease.

He has his own unique mutation that is inactivating this enzyme.

When he was born, his pediatricians who had been working with CRISPR and genetic treatment were like, maybe we can design a CRISPR to treat KJ's specific mutation.

But we'd have to do it fast, because he's not going to live that long, or he's not going to live that long without a liver transplant.

It took them six months to basically make the CRISPR.

Oh, my God.

Wow.

They then gave him three infusions of the CRISPR.

Remember, CRISPR is a genetic engineering tool.

Yeah, then it.

Yep.

Remember what it stands for, Paul?

Shut up.

Clustered.

Clustered.

Repeating.

Palindromic repeats.

Oh, no, not repeating.

Clustered.

Interspace palindromic repeats.

Okay.

Oh, Cluster.

I knew two of the letters.

CRISPR.

Go ahead.

What's the R?

Keep going.

Okay.

Repeat.

Repeat.

Yeah.

So, anyway,

so they did it.

They packaged them in these liposomes, right?

We talked about that before as well.

They got it to the liver.

I suspect, I couldn't find this, but I think the liver has its own venous system, blood supply through the, because it's a

portal system because it drains the everything you absorb in your gut goes to your liver first so the liver can detoxify it.

So, but anyway, they got it to the liver.

They did it three times over like from February to April of this year,

and basically to try to fix this mutation in as many of of the liver cells as possible, and it freaking worked.

Wow.

Now,

it's not 100% cure because it didn't fix every cell, but it did enough that, at least so far, he is able to eat more protein, so he's growing better, he's thriving, and they were able to cut the dose of his medication in half.

And so it's probably, I don't know if this is going to be enough to keep him from getting a liver transplant or if it'll just really maximize his chance of surviving long enough to get one.

And again, this was the first treatment.

This is the first one.

And he, I mean, it was only three infusions.

Like, he could get more.

He can get more infusions.

Right.

Keep doing it until you had enough of those cells.

They didn't give the parents a bill for $30 million.

The parents agreed to do it.

And of course, this is research, right?

Basically, this is a milestone.

This is a milestone, just like the first IBF baby was a milestone.

This is the first time we've done bespoke genetic therapy to treat a genetic disorder.

And we did it again, we was done within a time frame.

One kid, I mean,

there might not be any other kid that has that specific.

And

it's not just the first time we've done a bespoke version.

It's the first time we've done it in a vivo, in a living, in a living child, not in utero.

This is a game changer.

This is the first, this is opening the door to potentially treating any genetic disease.

This is an absolute game changer.

I think we will look back on this one case as like the seminal case, the first case

in this.

But this had a good vector, though, right?

I mean, that's not all of these.

But the liposome, yeah, you're right.

I don't know if this would work in the brain, for example, but

this is the vector technology.

So you have like the CRISPR is the genetic engineering technology.

The vector is how you get it to the cells you need to get it to.

With the FDA-approved treatment, stalasmia and sickle cell, we take the cells out and then we do it

in vitro.

This is doing it in vivo in a living organism.

And again, it depends on where in the body it is.

And as I said, the liver is kind of convenient to get access to.

But still, this is an absolute game changer.

The vector worked, the CRISPR worked,

the targeting worked,

and it worked.

And it improved this child's life and their chance of success.

And whether they do it in the body or they take the cells out, CRISPR them, and then re-infuse them doesn't really, for all intents and purposes, it doesn't matter.

Like CAR T cell therapy, we're doing these things outside.

It doesn't matter.

You're still reinfusing these things into the body.

Whatever works for whatever specific thing you're trying to achieve.

Anyway,

we had to talk about this.

This is an absolute game changer.

Let's move on with science or fiction.

It's time for science or fiction.

Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real, one fake, and then I challenge like a pen or expert skeptic to tell me which one is the fake and you guys can play two.

All right, but first we're going to ask the rogues to give their answers, then we'll see how the audience decides voted.

Are you guys ready?

So there's the theme.

The theme is,

we had to prep four shows in basically eight days.

I couldn't do all news items.

All right, here's the theme.

The theme is

dwarf planets.

Here we go.

Dwarf planets are cool.

Number one, the most massive dwarf planet is Pluto, about 27% more than the next most massive, Eris.

I number two, Haumea is the fastest rotating planet or dwarf planet in the solar system, resulting in an equatorial diameter about twice as long as its polar diameter.

And I number three, of the five official dwarf planets, four have one or more moons while one has a ring.

Okay, Adam, as our guest, you get the privilege of going first.

I was so quiet.

I didn't make a single sound.

You did very well.

Okay, everything works sometimes.

All right.

Okay, so the last one, number three,

one of the five official dwarf planets, of the five official dwarf planets, four have one or more moons, while one has a ring.

That sounds very familiar.

That sounds.

I don't see why that couldn't be possible.

The middle one, I have no idea.

I'm so completely confused on what this means at all.

And the first one.

So I'll tell you what it means.

So, Haumea is one of the dwarf planets.

So it's spinning so fast that it's squashed, right?

So that the equatorial diameter is twice the polar diameter.

So like an oblate spheroid.

Really oblate.

It's like.

Polar diameter being like.

So the north pole to south pole

is oblique.

Gotcha, gotcha.

Or the equatorial diameter.

So it's twice as wide as it is high.

It's short and fat.

Yeah.

It's a chode.

Okay.

That seems like a pretty crazy fast rotation.

Almost too much to be possible.

But the top one seems so familiar, and it seems familiar in the way that that makes me feel like

the opposite is true.

Like it's,

I don't know, the one seems like fiction to me.

I think I've heard that it is absolutely not the largest dwarf planet.

It just happened to be the first one that we categorized that way after we started to find other things in the Kuiper Belt and so on.

I'm going to say number one is fiction.

The Pluto being the most massive dwarf planet.

Correct.

All right, we're going to skip over to Evan.

Because I am the lord of science or fiction.

It's one, two, or three.

There's no letters here.

Yeah, I don't recall

Pluto's relative size to the other ones.

It may be bigger.

I don't know if it's

27% more.

So that one could be the fiction.

Also

Halmea,

it's the fastest rotating planet.

I'd never heard that before.

I have a feeling that one will be science.

And five dwarf planets.

Four have one or more moons while one has a ring.

I don't remember a ring.

One had a ring?

I don't recall that being the case.

Doesn't mean it's not right, but I'll say the

one dwarf planet with a ring, that's the fiction.

Okay, Kara.

Yeah, so the thing that I'm noticing is that you're saying Pluto

is the most massive dwarf planet, not the largest, right?

And I think that's an important distinction.

I don't know if Pluto's the largest in terms of size, but it may be the densest, right?

Or the most massive.

So that one might still be true, even though it's not true if you read it like quickly.

So Haumea being so, like spinning so quickly that it squished it, would it squish it in that direction or would it squish it in this direction if it was spinning really, or sorry, so fast.

Squish it this way?

Something spinning fast?

Or squish it this way?

I'm not good at physics.

I know, but I can't tell you.

It says equatorial.

No, I know.

I'm saying, but would that happen if it was spinning really fast?

Would it flatten into a pancake?

Or would it, I mean, yeah, probably.

It's like a spirally like a thing.

But that would have to happen after it formed, that it would be squished, right?

Unless it was spinning while it was forming and

congealing.

That's not the right word.

Aggregating?

I don't know.

So five official.

I don't even know if there are five official dwarf planets.

Four with, so moons on dwarf planets.

Moons on dwarf planets.

Or are they moons of other moons?

Maybe it's the moon thing that's getting me.

Could they be moons of other moons?

I think I'm going to go with Evan and say this one is the fiction, because there are so many details in that one that could be wrong.

Okay, Jay.

Yeah, the second one about Hameya, I mean, I'm fairly confident that that one is science.

I mean, I definitely remember reading about this, something like this happening, and I'm just going to say that that was what I was reading.

The one about the, so we have five official dwarf planets, right?

So one of them being Pluto.

Four have one or more moons, okay?

And while one has a ring, now to be specific, Steve, you're talking about the dwarf planet has a ring, not one of the moons.

Yes,

one of the five dwarf planets has a ring.

I have absolutely no reason to doubt that a dwarf planet could have a ring.

I mean, at one point, I think our moon had a ring.

Hey, slow down there, Jay.

Jay, hurry up.

You got 10 minutes.

Yeah, I think number one is

All right, Bob, go ahead.

Oh, man.

I'm embarrassed.

I haven't really looked at dwarf planets in so long.

I focus on deep space and not that close, so it's like cracking.

Right, whatever.

Oh, yeah, whatever.

Just setting a stage here, Steve.

So for me, just lowering the expectations.

Yes, a little bit.

Got to do it in this case, you bastard.

So, yeah, number one here with Pluto, it sounds right.

I forget some of the later discoveries, though.

I could be wrong on that, but that sounds pretty good.

For the third one,

dwarf planets having moons and a ring

kind of rings a bell.

Oh.

And so that could work.

The one that just struck me viscerally was the second one.

I think a rocky planet spinning that fast and

making it so that it's twice the equatorial diameter is twice the polar diameter, that's a hell of a of

a spin, of a rotation there

to make such a dramatic, oblate shape there.

So that one's rubbing me a little bit.

I mean,

I'm not very, very competent here, so it's annoying the hell out of me.

But I'm going to say that one, number two, there is Haumea spinning is the

fiction.

All right, so good.

So we have a good spread.

So the rogues were not very helpful to all of you.

What did you pick?

I picked the Haumea.

Oh, you picked

without.

You picked Pluto.

So Pluto, Pluto, Pluto, Haumea, and then the.

No, you picked Pluto.

No, it's Pluto, Pluto, Haumea, and then we picked.

Moons and Rings.

Moons and Rings.

Moons and Rings, Pluto, Pluto, Haumea.

All right.

So we're going to do the George Hobbes single clap method.

George, you want to do what do you want me to just do it?

All right, I'll do it.

So, in the audience, if you think that number one about Pluto being the most massive dwarf planet is the fiction CLAP,

if you think that Haumea spinning fast is the fiction CLAP,

and if you think that the moons and ring one is the fiction clap,

so I'm hearing two, one, then three.

Two, one, and then three.

All right.

You sound happy with that, Evan.

So let's

start with the one that got the least amount of moods.

The moon three.

Of the five official dwarf planets, four have one or more moons, while one has a ring.

Evan and Kara think this one is the fiction.

A minority of the audience thinks this one is the fiction.

And this one is

science.

Yeah.

This is science.

Cool.

So Pluto has five moons.

Wow.

Yeah, five.

Haumea has two moons.

There's no moon.

Eris and Makimaki have one moon.

Each?

Or they share each.

Okay.

And Ceres,

which is the only one, only dwarf planet that's in the inner solar system, right?

It's in the asteroid belt.

It is not a trans-Neptunian Plutoid dwarf planet.

Plutoid.

It has no moons.

So four have moons, one has a ring, Haumea has a ring.

That's cool.

That's cool.

That might be telling.

This may be related to other things happening

here.

Let's go back to number two: Haumea is the fastest rotating planet or a dwarf planet in the solar system, resulting in an equatorial diameter about twice as long as its polar diameter.

Bob, you think this one is the fiction?

The clear majority of the audience thinks this one is the fiction.

Stop smiling, bastard.

Unt.

That is Haumea.

What the hell?

But that's rotating like...

That is Haumea.

So

the upper left-hand picture...

So this is

science.

This is science.

The upper left-hand picture here is

an edge-on view, like an equatorial view of Haumea.

Look at that thing.

That is nuts.

Really squashed.

How could I not see that before?

The second picture is a polar view.

My question is, and I could not find an answer to this question, so if there's an astronomer who can answer, let me know.

Why is that not circular from the polar?

Why is it also ovoid in that direction?

Because it's all screwed up.

Something's pulling on it.

Now, what's interesting is every single site I went to described Haumea as either egg-shaped or oval.

But it's not egg-shaped.

It's not.

It's a flattened egg.

Right?

I don't know why it's not just a flattened sphere.

I don't know why it's a flattened egg, but it is.

It might have mass anomalies.

Yeah, there could be, it's got to be some other kind of material.

Some density anomalies within the crust.

Yeah, interesting.

Or the mantle, probably.

But it's spinning super four hours.

That's with one rotation every four hours, which is fast for something that.

What's the long diameter?

I think it's like 2,000 kilometers or 1,000 kilometers, something like that, about that.

Okay.

Which means that

the most massive dwarf planet is Pluto, about 27% more than the next most massive Eris is the fiction.

So, congratulations, Jay and Adam.

Nice.

The smartest man alive!

Good cat, man.

All right, it's a perfect record.

Kara, you hit upon the magic word, the massive word, but you have a magic.

Yeah, damn it.

So, Pluto is the largest.

That's what I was thinking.

I was thinking, that's what I was thinking.

But it's not the most massive.

The most massive is Eris, which is 20% more massive than Pluto.

But it's a little smaller, because Eris is a lot denser than Pluto.

So sometimes

these turn on one key technical word.

And you did hit upon that, so congratulations.

I attribute this win and me and Adam both winning to the fact that we're both bass players.

I thought it was because you're both Star Wars fans.

And Star Wars fans.

Yeah, you have both those things.

You don't fail.

Both those reasons are valid, yes.

Yeah, okay.

I'm just really sick of being right for the wrong reasons and wrong for the right reasons.

That's your existence, Carol.

You have the best record almost every year, though.

That's your mojo.

Yeah, yeah, that's true.

All right.

Evan, give us a quote.

The true function of reason is not to find beliefs, but to eliminate false ones.

Julianne Bagini.

Julian Baghini.

Who is that?

Buccini.

English philosopher, journalist, author of 20 books about philosophy written for general audiences.

He's written extensively on philosophy and books on atheism, secularism, and the nature of national identity.

Is he alive today?

I'm sorry?

You live today?

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

I like it.

He's a patron of the Humanists UK and organization promoting secular humanism.

So, Julianne Baggini.

I like it.

That's true.

That's what science is all about: eliminating the false stuff.

Not proving yourself right.

All right.

Well, thank you guys all for joining me this week.

Thanks, Steve.

Thank you, Steve.

Thank you all for coming.

Good job.

And

until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

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