The Skeptics Guide #1032 - Apr 19 2025

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hello and welcome to the skeptic's guide to the universe today is wednesday april 16th 2025 and this is your host stephen novella joining me this week are bob novella hey everybody kara santa maria howdy jay novella hey guys and the recently not doing taxes evan bernstein oh so this is what sunlight is yeah you forgot right april 16th is one day after tax day.

So now you get a little bit of a breather, right?

I know you still have like other stuff to do, but.

Yeah, now we enter the second season, right?

The extensions.

It's fascinating because I become very immersed in the work.

I mean, just the volume itself takes up all of my time.

For example, I will get up

and be out of the house at 7 in the morning every morning, if not earlier.

And in these later days leading up to April 15th, I'd be getting home at 2 in the morning.

I kid you not.

Going right to sleep and then waking up and doing it again.

And that's really how my last couple of weeks of the season was this year.

So,

there is really not much else.

It's amazing I've actually made the podcast as often as I had because that's the only other thing I've been able to kind of squeeze in here.

Haven't been doing Witch Game First, I had to put that to the side for a little while, but I'm just coming out of the space now, and it does take a little while to adjust.

It's quite a feeling.

Yeah, it's hard maintaining a day job and doing the skeptical thing.

Just, you know, this seasonal work can be brutal.

It can be.

But

I'm glad it's over and very happy for April 16, one of my favorite days of the year.

And Kara, you are in Hong Kong now.

Yeah, I'm still in Hong Kong.

I was in Hong Kong last week, and now I'm in Hong Kong until Monday, and then I'm going to mainland China, and then I'm going to Vietnam after that.

Have you been to Vietnam before?

No, Vietnam will be new.

I've been to Hong Kong and mainland China.

I was here seven years ago, actually, with some of the skeptic organizations out here, doing some events, some skeptics in the pub, you know, getting to know people.

And I made some kind of lifelong friends.

So now I'm back, but it's been great.

My friends are so kind.

They've like taken off of work to hang out with me and show me the sites, been doing a lot of big hikes, going to really beautiful beaches, kind of exploring the natural side of Hong Kong.

So it's very cool, that juxtaposition between the intense, intense city, amazing food, really kind people, lots to do.

Kara, we talk every now and then about the SGU going out to either Hong Kong or Japan or just somewhere in Asia, but it's hard to get a read on how big the skeptical movement is out there.

What's your experience with that?

You know, when I was here last time, it was

strong and mighty but small.

But it's hard to know, especially because, you know, how many people listen to SGU but wouldn't consider themselves part of some sort of movement where they're going to skeptical meetups, for example, but they like the podcast and they would want to come see the show.

Obviously, Hong Kong is a massive melting pot and it's got a huge expat community as well.

There's a very large English-speaking portion of the region.

And I think we could say the same thing for a lot of places throughout the world.

Like I think about the European skeptics, I think about the upcoming eclipse, you know, places where we could travel to, because it does seem to be the case that we've done most of our shows domestically in the U.S.

or where do we go typically?

Australia, Australia, English-speaking countries, but not even all of them, primarily English.

Yeah, but not even all of them.

Not only just UK and Australia and Canada, yeah.

But what about South Africa?

What about other parts of Europe?

You know, there was like one time where somebody from the South African skeptics contacted me and said, Hey, can we bring the SGU down here?

We could get 20 people to show up to a meeting.

Yeah, and that's the issue, right?

That's the issue.

We need to know that we can get it.

What are we looking at?

200, 300, 500?

Oh, hundreds.

Yeah.

It should be hundreds.

I mean, to get us to travel internationally, we'd like to see two to three hundred people show up at our event.

At least.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Otherwise, that makes it worse.

Way too expensive.

Yeah.

But again, but I agree with you.

Probably like a skeptics in the pub may not be the full measure of who we would get to show up at an event.

And I think what folks might not realize is it's not just the five of us.

It's also Ian.

It's also all of the logistics that are involved in it.

And George.

And George, of course, and maybe Brian or anybody else who might be involved.

But most of us do have jobs.

And so the thing that we have to realize, too, is that when we do an event like that, and we, it's one thing to go like, oh, we're going on vacation.

We can't take weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks off every single year.

We have to be really strategic about how we travel.

And it's also work for us.

Right.

I used almost all of my vacation time over the last 15 years at least on SGU events.

Exactly.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Very few, like just straight straight-up vacations.

Yeah.

Two or three events a year.

That's it.

That eats up all of our vacation time.

And that's really, really hard if we are also paying out of pocket to travel.

And yeah, it just gets very expensive.

So that's the hardest part of all of this is figuring out how to make it financially feasible because it's something we'd love to do.

Yeah, no, we love we love traveling and meeting our listeners from around the world.

We love holding events.

It's great.

But yeah, we're kind of like right on that edge in terms of it being financially feasible.

Yeah.

So if you do want us to come to your part of the world, having said all that, then talk to us, but we also need to

know that

there's enough people are going to want to come out and see us.

For sure.

All right.

Well, let's get started with the news items.

Actually, Evan, you're going to start us off with the dumbest thing of the week.

I am going to.

And for the sake of brevity, I'll spare everyone the song this time, and I'll break it out next time.

I'm going to put one or more of you on the spot, though, with a question

to start this one.

Kara, name a story or a TV show or a movie or some other medium of fiction where a person was turned to stone.

You pick the person who doesn't watch fantasy.

Wait, Medusa?

Did Medusa turn people to stone?

There you go.

Bango.

Thank you.

Very good.

Medusa.

Yes, Perseus.

And

Medusa would look at people and turn them to stone.

Very good.

Bob, do you have one?

She took mine.

And I was going to spit that.

And I was going to say Sodom and Gomorrah, but that's a pillar of salt.

That's not stone.

Yes, you can.

I will accept that, though, because salt is sort of a form of mineral very good.

Jay or Steve, you want to make sure that you're going to be able to do gargoyles.

Yes, but which

cartoon series is called gargoyles, yeah.

Cartoon series.

Well, they're the gargoyles turning into stone.

I could back Steve up on that.

He's right.

Very cool.

Very cool.

Yeah, but I think somebody turned to stone in the original Star Trek series.

Oh, right.

Or the Kelvin.

The mineral cubes, you mean?

Somebody turned to stone.

Yeah, the D20.

They turned into like a salty D20.

The Dodecahedron, I believe.

That's right.

Oh, boy.

Well, I mean, look, you can,

and those are great examples.

And I think we can all agree that people or live creatures being turned to stone is 100% pure fantasy.

It is fiction.

It is 100% implausible, a physical impossibility.

No connection to reality whatsoever.

But you are all incorrect, because once again, thanks to the recent declassification and release to the public of all sorts of government information that was once kept secret by United States' agencies, our clandestine services, we not only have things like psychics looking for Arks of the Covenant, like I talked about two weeks ago, but we now know that the ability to turn living things into stone almost instantaneously is a fact.

And not only is it a fact, but it's a power not of this world, because extraterrestrial beings and their amazing technology have the capability of turning people to stone.

I did not know what to do.

Yep.

Thanks all to a declassified CIA report brought to light,

in which there was one such incident reported where Russian soldiers in the 1980s fought off a UFO and got turned to stone by the aliens that they were fighting.

What?

Joe Rogan.

Yeah, no, no.

Joe Rogan told us.

He shared the details of this 250-page report that was allegedly written by the CIA.

The original report was apparently provided initially, the source of it, KGB agents, late 1980s, and later covered by Ukrainian media.

And the incident was also documented in a classified intelligence file in 1993, according to the Jerusalem Post.

But obviously, it has become brought to light again because of all the declassification that's been recently going on.

I'll read you a couple of highlights directly from the report so you can hear it yourself.

According to the KGB,

this is the report.

According to the KGB materials, materials, a quite low-flying spaceship in the shape of a saucer appeared above a military unit that was conducting routine training maneuvers.

For unknown reasons, somebody unexpectedly launched a surface-to-air missile and hit the UFO.

It fell to Earth not far away, and five short humanoids with large heads and large black eyes emerged from it.

It's stated in the testimonies by the two soldiers who remained alive that after freeing themselves from the debris, the aliens came close together and then merged into a single object that acquired a spherical shape.

That object began to buzz and hiss sharply and then became brilliant white.

In a few seconds, the spheres grew much bigger and exploded by flaring up with an extremely bright light.

At that instant, 23 soldiers who had watched the phenomenon turned to stone.

Only two soldiers in the shade were less exposed and they survived.

What?

Okay, you're right.

And then it goes on.

First of all, a couple points here.

First of all, Joe Rogan.

All right, second of all, second point, Soviet KGB.

And third point, perhaps most important, a report that said something happened, therefore it is true.

This reads like a children's book at best, and it's not even that good of a children's book, frankly.

All you have to do is go to prior works of fiction, and, you know, forgive me, I'm not attacking religion here, but the Bible, for example, is filled to the brim with stories about metamorphosis, polymorphing, and Bob's favorite transmogrification.

Of course, you know, you mentioned Lot's wife, Pillar of Salt, but there are so many examples of things like this.

And look, throughout history, these kinds of stories have been told.

But here's what Joe Rogan said.

Because I listened to this section of his podcast.

He said, it's really interesting what's going on with these disclosures, and it's hard to know what's true and what's not true.

No, Joe Rogan, it's actually not hard at all.

And then he goes on to reference like the FLIR video and the GoFast video.

These are those UFO videos

captured by the pilots, the Navy pilots, as the best evidence of inexplicable UFO events.

And of course, those have been pretty thoroughly debunked by Mick West and others.

So there you go.

You have the Joe Rogan crowd, the UFO, UAP crowd, all going, yep, this is real because of a made-up Soviet-era throwback in what was likely deliberately fabricated nonsense that wound up eventually in a CIA report.

And there you have it.

That is your dumbest thing of the week.

How bad is that?

I mean, really, that's it.

They reported it on Fox News.

That's pretty bad.

All right.

Thanks, Evan.

Jay, where did Earth's water come from?

Well, before we get into that, Steve,

guys, I'm going to ask you a question.

I want you to be honest.

Do you drink enough water?

I try to.

Who gets to determine what enough is?

I will determine that.

I don't drink eight, eight-ounce glasses.

Oh, that's BS.

That's a myth, yeah.

Yeah.

Well, okay, since that was a hard question, I don't know if you guys are even going to be able to come close to answering this one, but do you know where the Earth's water came from, or at least what the

current theories are?

Comets is comets as one.

Yes, comets delivered them in the early, what, proto-Earth?

During the bombardment, have you been there?

Yeah, there's four common theories that you'll hear.

You know, that one of them, yeah, comets, like icy comets that bombarded the Earth.

This was about four billion years ago.

Solar nebula capture, right?

Hydrogen from the solar nebula was captured by the

hydrogen by the early Earth, and that combined with oxygen to form water.

And then

asteroids, people, you know, scientists have theorized that, you know, water-rich asteroids collided with the early Earth, and, you know, that's where a lot of water came from.

Now, the one I always thought it was was the concept of outgassing from Earth's interior.

Yeah.

And I think I got this from going to Walt Disney World when we were a lot younger.

And I watched some video and it stuck with me.

Oh, yeah.

It's a wet world after all.

But there has been some new research that may very well change what scientists around the world think the real source of water was.

So, like I was saying, you know, for many decades, scientists thought that the water

simply just wasn't there when our planet formed, right?

The belief was that water was, like you said, guys, was delivered by what, water-rich asteroids or comets during like the first 100 to 200 million years after the Earth formed.

And, you know, that made sense.

You know, there, it does make sense.

It's kind of like a happy-happen stance, right?

It wasn't like a planned thing, of course.

Like, you know, these asteroids or and/or comets had to, you know, had to hit the Earth in order for the Earth to have water, going under that theory.

But the early solar system was dry and it was violent, right?

It was very hot.

It was not a nice place to be.

And this this was particularly true in the inner region where the Earth took shape, you know, the inner planets.

And the minerals making up Earth's early building blocks appeared to be bone-dry after

doing the best research that we can on

anything that we can find that would shed some light on what it was like back then.

So the prevailing equation for our oceans was that their water came from collisions with icy comets and water-rich asteroids that came from the outer solar system.

But there's a big but.

So, there's a new study published in the journal Icarus, and it came to a different conclusion, and it's really compelling.

The study was led by a research team at the University of Oxford, and the study focused on a mineral.

It's called enstatite chondrites.

Have you guys heard of this?

Heard of chondrites.

Chondrites are in meteorites.

Chondrites.

Yeah, so this is a particular,

it's a silicate mineral.

And the research focused on a meteorite called LAR12252.

Again, why don't they give them cooler names?

I don't know.

So

this meteorite was chemically similar to the material that built Earth about

4.5 billion years ago.

They used a really powerful technique called sulfur X-ray absorption spectrophyl

spectroscopy.

Thank you.

And

I get that wrong, too.

I'm not even

twists me.

If you watched the live stream last Wednesday, but today's Wednesday, and I'm sick, and I just, my mouth is not getting around words right now.

That's fair.

That one's tough, too, because we mix it up with spectrometer, spectroscopy.

Yeah, it's all.

They examined, using this new machine, they were able to examine on a microscopic level what is actually going on.

in this mineral.

So what they found was very surprising to the researchers, the meteorite contained a large amount of hydrogen, and it wasn't from Earth's contamination.

The hydrogen was chemically bonded to sulfur, meaning it was part of the meteorite's original composition.

Why is this significant?

Well, this directly challenges the long-standing assumption that that mineral, enstatite krondite, right, or a klondike bar, right?

So this discovery directly challenges the long-standing assumption that the mineral was too dry to supply any hydrogen and therefore water to the early earth.

So past studies have only found tiny amounts of hydrogen in these rocks, but they hadn't looked in the right places or in the right form.

And that's a mind-bender right there.

They looked for hydrogen, they didn't find it, but with this new tool, they found it.

The new research shows that most of the hydrogen is stored as hydrogen sulfide.

And this is in the meteorite's fine-grained matrix, which is a part of the rock that has completely been ignored.

That region turned out to contain almost 10 times more hydrogen than other parts of the meteorite.

So the implications of this are astounding.

Earth's primary building material, which is that mineral, contained, you know, they had no idea that it contained that much hydrogen from the start, and it dramatically changes our understanding of the origins of Earth's water, or potentially where the origin was from.

So in this model, water isn't,

it is not like a

you know, a galactic lucky afterthought.

It was a predictable outcome of the materials and the conditions at the time our planet formed, which is huge.

That's a really impressive find that they did, and it's a game changer.

And the study also offers a likely explanation for how the hydrogen got into the rock in the first place.

The researchers found that areas rich in hydrogen were also full of pyritite, which is a mineral made of iron and sulfur.

These grains probably formed when hydrogen gas from the early solar system reacted with iron sulfide in a cloud of sulfur-rich dust.

That reaction created hydrogen sulfide, and that's a gas, which then mixed into nearby molten rock.

As the molten material cooled quickly into glass, right?

That's what they're calling it.

The hydrogen was sealed inside.

So, in other words, the hydrogen became part of the rock when it first formed.

It wasn't added later by any outside sources.

Yeah, and these chondrites, right, when we think about chondrites, do you guys collect meteorites at all?

Yeah.

Anyone?

Yeah.

I wish.

No, I've never seen it.

So I have like a bowl of them.

You do?

Yeah.

Chondrites are the non-metallic, like non-lodules.

Non-ferrous.

Yeah, yeah.

They're the ones that look

like rocks that are kind of variegated because the way that they formed was in the early solar system, right?

They were primitive asteroids and they have all these little speckles in them because the idea is that all that dust.

and those little grains all like coalesced and they haven't changed since then.

Yep.

Like they're cool.

Like these are billions of years old.

You have them?

Yeah, of course.

I mean, of course, not everybody.

You don't collect Steve.

Yeah.

I assume Steve had a little collection too.

Maybe not.

Yeah.

Steve.

I have a couple that I bought.

I don't have any that I found.

I've been given a couple, but.

Yeah, yeah.

So this process, Kara, it would have occurred in the inner solar system.

And again, like I was saying, it was hot.

It was a sulfur-rich environment.

And this is where Earth and probably Mars and Venus formed.

And if that's the case, then it's not just Earth that could have started out wet.

The mechanism, you know, they're saying it could apply to any planet that formed from similar material under similar conditions, which is largely the inner planets.

And the significance of this work lies in what it removes from the equation, which is chance.

Remember, I was saying, like, you know, we're just lucky that these water-rich comets and asteroids came to Earth.

You know, it's nothing.

The asteroid delivery hypothesis depends on a series of, you know, super low probability events.

But if the hydrogen, and, you know, of of course, when I'm saying that, by extension, I also mean water, if that was inherent to Earth's formation, then the presence of oceans becomes much, much less surprising.

And water and the potential for it to create life and everything may be a default condition for rocky planets that are formed in these right zones and not by some crazy

cosmic accident that is the the previous prevailing theory.

So I think that is um you know, it's pretty profound.

You know, of course,

there's going to be other studies and they're going to further try to find more evidence and try to see if this holds up to scrutiny.

But the bottom line is it was a major, major find, major significant perspective on where water likely came from.

Yeah, of course, this doesn't mean that there weren't comets or later meteorites that brought more water to the Earth, but it's just a matter of where the bulk of it came from.

Yeah, definitely.

Sure.

I mean, one theory, Steve, is that it's all of these things.

It's all of these things.

Yeah, it's all about a proportion.

You know, what I wanted to find out, and I could not find anything, and I went to the original study, was how much could they have calculated?

Like, it seems that there's implying that there would have been enough hydrogen to make this amount of water that's on the planet.

You know, they didn't confirm or deny that, but I think that's pretty implied in the study.

All right.

Thanks, Jay.

Kara.

Yeah.

So tell me how much emissions is the United States putting out every year?

Like of greenhouse gases.

Nobody knows, Steve.

Nobody knows.

How is one to know the answer to this question?

Except by a federal regulation, Title 40, from the Environmental Protection Agency, especially part

98, the GHGRP,

which is, ooh, let me read right here.

Greenhouse.

Yep.

Good job.

More?

Any more?

Greenhouse.

Gas reporting program.

Yeah.

Super important.

Codified by Congress that required

about 8,000 facilities every year to report their emissions to the EPA, right?

So we're talking a lot of data here.

And specifically, emissions that are direct, so reported at the individual facility level, but also upstream suppliers.

GHGRP did not include historically emissions from agriculture or lower emitting sources, like direct emissions that had annual emissions of less than 25,000 metric tons of CO two,

or sinks of greenhouse gases.

But any other, what would you call it, like facility, I guess they use that term a lot, any other individual facility or upstream facility that produced methane or other climate warming gases was required by law, has been required by law to report their annual emissions.

And guess what's going to happen to that?

Gonna go bye-bye.

Goodbye.

So, yeah, unfortunately, Trump has plans to stop collecting that greenhouse gas data.

And we know this basically from some reporting by ProPublica, which has been reposted here in Undark.

Two of Trump's officials, Tardiff and Sabo, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly.

So political appointee Abigail Tardiff, who is now the principal deputy assistant administrator of the EPA's Office of Air and Radiation, recently, as of I think just a couple days ago, about a week ago now, instructed EPA staff to draft up a rule that would eliminate reporting requirements for 40 of the 41 sectors of that federal regulation

that are now required to submit that data.

She has not made any further comment on that.

And then another political appointee, Aaron Sabo, he is awaiting confirmation as assistant administrator to the EPA.

He also

has

been directed to affect change in this area.

Neither of them have obviously responded to comment from reporters.

Both Tardiff and Sabo previously worked as lobbyists.

Sabo or Sabo represented the American Chemistry Council and Duke Energy and a bunch of different companies and trade groups.

And Tardiff worked for Marathon Petroleum and the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers Association.

So these are two individuals basically now working with or at EPA directing policy about emissions reporting who previously were lobbyists for

energy sector jobs.

So let's talk about what this means.

We know that we have to design policy around what's happening to our climate.

And it's very, very difficult to write policy if we don't have data, right?

Like, how do we affect change when it comes to climate emissions if we don't know what those climate emissions are?

Does that make sense?

It makes perfect.

Yeah.

I mean, we're talking, again, oil refineries, power plants, coal mines, petrochemical manufacturers, cement, glass, iron, steel manufacturers.

And we're talking about carbon dioxide, methane, all these other different greenhouse gases.

Oh, not agriculture.

Agriculture is not included in it.

Oh, not agriculture?

Not in this specific legislation.

Interesting.

Okay.

Yeah.

So obviously, not every bill can do everything.

This specific legislation is not targeted towards agriculture, the greenhouse gas reporting program.

Edward Maybach, who is a professor at George Mason University, said in response to this decision to obviously stop collecting all of this vital information, he said, quote, it would be a bit like unplugging the equipment that monitors the vital signs of a patient that is critically ill.

How in the world can we possibly manage this incredible threat to America's well-being and humanity's well-being if we're not actually monitoring what we're doing to exacerbate the problem?

Another important quote here is by Rachel Cletus, who is a senior policy director with the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

She said, the bottom line is this is a giveaway to emitters, just letting them off the hook entirely.

Not tracking the data does not make the climate crisis any less real.

This is just putting our heads in the sand.

It's very disconcerting.

Sounds about right.

Yeah.

We don't know where we're going to net out with this, obviously, because these policy changes are happening really, really fast and loose.

They're happening very often through executive action and not through legislative action.

And there's still a lot of questions.

We are not legal scholars here on the SGU.

I am definitely not a legal scholar.

There's still a lot of questions about whether the ordering and then the implementation of these policy changes, which were legislative policies, is even legal to do, right, at an executive level.

So we don't know how this will net out, but we do know that we have already started to see some changes from within the agency.

So like last month, they announced that they were reconsidering the program.

EPA on March 12th sent out this kind of like

suite of bulletins celebrated.

They said that, quote, it was the most consequential day of deregulation in U.S.

history.

You can read it right there on the EPA website where Administrator Zeldin talks about all these things that they call quote historic actions to power the great American comeback.

So they bullet point them in there.

Basically, the argument here is that this reporting program is burdensome and it costs American businesses and manufacturing millions of dollars.

I love how they hide under that.

It hurts small businesses and the ability to achieve the American dream.

We're talking about like the largest polluters across the country.

It's 85 to 90 percent of all greenhouse gases which are reported by this program.

85 to 90 percent.

And we're just not going to have access to that data.

And the thing is, it's that's really devastating because the data itself helps these companies function.

It helps American businesses.

They don't have to do their own, you know, individual data collection and forecasting because they have access to federal data that's mandated that everybody can use unfettered because our tax dollars pay for it.

But now that's not going to be the case.

And here's another quote, which I think is an important one by Andrew Light.

He was the Assistant Secretary of Energy for International Affairs during the Biden administration.

He said, We will not get to the kinds of temperature stabilization needed to protect Americans against the worst climate impacts unless we get the cooperation of developing countries.

If the United States won't even measure and report our own emissions, how in the world can we expect China, India, Indonesia, and other major growing developing countries to do the same?

So we know that when Trump first took office, the portal where companies could share their data was closed by the Trump administration and stayed closed for several weeks.

So already admissions reporting has been really, really delayed.

And then, you know, through these series of bulletins, the fate of this program is not looking good.

Even if these programs aren't shuttered, or if they are shuttered, let's say via executive action, but then brought back through legislative, I guess, saving,

the damage is already done, right?

That move fast and break things attitude actually gets what they want to get accomplished, even if later on it has to be reinstated.

Because when the data are lost, the data are lost.

It's just faster to tear things down than it is to way easier.

Exactly.

And to make it harder to report and to close down a portal and now you can't log in and now you can't do your job.

So maybe even if everything gets back online in six months or, hell, four years, you know, who knows?

What do we do about that massive hiccup where the whole machine ground to a halt?

This seems to be a pattern, though, of

essentially, let's just stop collecting information.

Or whatever.

And then maybe it won't be real.

Let's just not report information.

Let's just not report COVID cases.

This is like a pattern.

This is not an isolated incident.

While we're at it, let's delete a lot of information, too.

Yeah, totally.

Yeah.

Let's rewrite history.

Absolutely.

Yeah, this is like just control the information, limit it.

Let's not research the effects of gun violence, you know, or the effectiveness of gun safety regulation.

Let's just not study it.

Let's just not collect the data.

Let's just not report the data.

The CDC, we're not going to report measles numbers anymore.

Why alarm people?

It's, yeah, this is a very disturbing pattern because they say information,

facts, data is the beginning, right?

This is a crucial thing that feeds into our ability to have science-based policy, science-based discussion.

100%.

That's the point.

And it goes far beyond partisan politics.

This regulation to report this climate data was a congressional regulation.

This is law.

Clearly, there may have been people in the past you know, on certain sides of the aisle who pushed back, but this past, this is bipartisan policy, and it's held for quite some time.

This new idea of just not getting any information goes far beyond partisan politics.

It's heartbreaking to see so much hard work, so much collective strategy, so much science being just dismantled in front of our eyes.

Yep.

Well,

if there's no objective information, then you can create whatever political narrative you wish.

Right.

And that substitutes for reality.

Exactly.

But that has never, ever been the policy of the left or the right in this country.

It's never been, let's just not have information and let's fill it with a vacuum.

Not like that.

That's what's so heartbreaking.

Not like this.

Yeah, exactly.

That's what's so heartbreaking.

Terrible.

And again, I know we're trying awfully hard not to be like partisan or political on this show, but this is about data.

This is about science.

You know what I mean?

They're just trying to win the whole global warming thing by fiat, by just like, oh, we're just not going to attract data.

So, right?

That's what that's what it is.

And it's not specific even to global warming.

That's a really scary thing.

This isn't political per se.

I mean, it is political, but it's not partisan.

Yeah.

It's not a typical left-right

conservative-liberal issue.

This is a democracy issue, really.

Yeah.

All right.

Let's move on.

So let me ask you guys a question.

This is

totally a late night college dorm room stoner type of question.

Okay, go ahead.

Dude.

Is my red your red?

Wow.

I hate these questions.

We've talked about this.

I know.

We have talked about this.

Is this the blue dress?

The gold dress?

No, there is a difference between subjective downstream interpretation, but no, there are wavelengths of light that we all observe similarly because we have the same architecture.

Whether you interpret red as having a specific feeling or

it feels different to you, or I don't know, even like the way that you talk about red is different.

Well, how you perceive it.

But the red that you see is the same red that I see.

Yeah, but

it's ultimately an unanswerable question because we're talking about a fully subjective experience.

That's a quality of that.

Yeah.

But I think we often forget that first half of it.

But we don't, but we have deficits too, and that varies from perspective.

That's true.

Yeah,

but those are observable.

Those are demonstrable.

We understand exactly how those deficits work.

Well, there are certainly hardcore deficits like various types of colorblindness that can be objectively determined.

I have a red-green, I think, diffusion, you call it, colorblindness.

Yeah, it's red-green or red-green-yellow.

Like, there's very specific types.

Like, I can't see certain numbers in those little boxes of bubbles, you know, of circles.

I just can't see the numbers.

Yeah, so you can't determine sometimes the difference between.

But we're not talking about that.

They're just talking about, is your experience of a color the same as, you know, or at least similar to there's probably everyone will see, even I see different shades at different times depending on conditions and whatever.

You know, even if I'm sleep deprived, things might look a little bit different to me or whatever.

But basically, red always looks red, you know, to me, my subjective experience of it.

And I have no way of knowing what your subjective experience of it is.

But scientists are interested in that question and trying to figure out: is there any way that we can infer what the probable answer is?

There's you know one way that we can that we can argue it is to say as you were saying kara we all have the same brains we have mammalian brains we have human brains and there's no reason to think that anyone's experience of something as fundamental as just color would be fundamentally different than anyone else's yeah also another inference is and but this is this is again not rock solid but there's generally agreement about like yeah, blue is a common color, and red is an exciting color.

You know, like there are certain emotions that go along with it, but you could argue that's completely learned and it's

association of experiences, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's just association.

All right, so this gets us to this what this study where this is the approach that they took, and that's what I'm fascinated in like how they approached the question, not so much like the data that came out of it.

But what they did was they created a network of color associations, right?

That's the framework that they created.

In other words, is red, is this color, right, showing somebody red without labels, so they didn't communicate in labels, just is this color more similar to this color over here or that color over there?

So you would show them red, pink, and green.

And somebody might say, yeah, the red is closer to the pink than it is to the green.

And they just keep doing that to build up this network of associations.

Wait, red is closer to pink than green?

Wait a second.

Oh, never mind.

Yeah.

Like, oh, God, no, Bob.

He had me for a third of a second.

Now, what did they use as a control?

I can.

People who are colorblind, people who are colorblind.

And they had them.

So it's a negative control.

People can't tell the difference.

So they went through the same process.

Well, again, there's different kinds of colorblind.

It's not like people just seeing in black and white.

They just have to create a color.

No, it's red-green, it's the most common.

Yeah, so

they have a limited color palette so the question the the the hypothesis was that if we see colors the same then neurotypical people in terms of their color vision would all build the same network of color relationships but people who are colorblind would build a different network of color relationships that make sense and that's what they found

that's what they found i like it so again this is not ironclad rock solid, but it is just like, this is what we would predict if this thing that we think is probably true were true.

And that's what they found.

Yeah.

And that kind of makes sense, you know, that if we're seeing colors the same way, then we would think, yeah, lavender is more like purple than it is like green or whatever.

Like you would, you would make those associations would be the same.

as well, even when they're discrete frequencies, right?

They are different frequencies.

They are different mixtures of

your cones, right?

So you could, if people saw colors differently, you could experience completely different relationships among those colors, too.

You don't have to, but you could.

So at least this is consistent with the conclusion that people see color the same way.

All right.

That's encouraging.

Yeah, it's a new little wrinkle in this sort of old, again, kind of like college dorm room question.

It's a good idea, though.

I like the way they approached it.

Like you said, it was a cool idea.

Yeah, that was the point.

All right.

That was just a quick one for me this week.

Oh, boy.

Holy crap.

Bob, tell us about the evolution of complex life.

What, you're done?

I was just settling in.

Jesus.

I gotta like, wait, I gotta like.

I cede my time to you, Bob.

I yield my time.

Yeah, I might need it.

Okay.

All right.

All right, guys.

This was fun.

The iconic tree of life may be changing near its root.

A recent discovery could force the topmost domains of all life, bacteria, archaea, eukaryote, to reduce down to just two domains, maybe.

Which domains survive intact?

And

what did they discover?

This is from the journal Cell.

The name of the study is Microtubules in Asgard Archaea.

Settle in, people.

And it will be a quiz.

Pay attention.

I've been especially interested in this iconic tree of life and microorganisms ever since.

I remember, ever since I read Stephen Jay Gould's book, Full House, The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin.

Wonderful book, especially when narrated by Ephraim Zimblis Jr.

What a wonderful voice that guy has.

No spoilers, please.

Yeah.

So he described there, and initially he starts with the, he describes the old five-kingdom classification of life.

Remember those guys?

Oh, you know, plants.

I learned that

fungi.

Protists and monera.

I remember those guys.

Now, the plants, animals, and fungi, we know those.

Protista, protists are a group of all the eukaryotes that are not fungi animals or plants.

So protozoans, slime molds, stuff like that.

Then Monera, it's kind of a weird, I haven't heard that word in a while, but Monera was like a catch-all category that grouped single-celled organisms, bacteria and archaea together, prokaryotic cells.

So that's what that was.

So many of us grew up with those classifications.

And yes, we are slowly dying off.

So they were the top dogs, right?

All life on Earth fit under one of those five kingdoms.

Maybe not beautifully neatly, but they fit in there somewhere.

To quote the animatrix, and for a time, it was good.

And then microbiology.

Oh, I just love that damn.

All right.

And then microbiology happened.

This elucidated the hidden genetic relationships between organisms with unprecedented accuracy.

And we learned that five kingdoms just didn't cut it anymore.

They did not properly reflect Earth's evolutionary history and the diversity of life.

Yep, just didn't cut it anymore.

They lied to us.

We needed

the Earth, you know, gets a little bit less round as we learn more about it.

That's right.

But we needed a broader classification.

Okay, so then Gould then described in his book how that forced the removal of the five kingdoms at the top, and they needed to be replaced with the three domains.

These domains were bacteria, archaea, and eukarya.

Bacteria, we all know bacteria, right?

They're our buddies.

Bacteria, single-celled organisms that have prokaryotic cells that have no nuclei.

It's one of the main differentiators between these cells and other cells.

Prokaryotic cells, bacteria.

Then there was archaea.

These have prokaryotic cells as well, but there's also major biochemical differences and other interesting differences between the bacterial prokaryotic cells.

And the final domain, eukarya, that's us, and other things.

And the rest, these organisms have eukaryotic cells that have a nucleus and other membraned organelles.

Okay, animals, plants, fungi, protists are in here.

That's four.

Think about that.

That's four out of the five kingdoms that I just mentioned a minute ago in this one domain.

Four out of the five are like put in there because they belong in there.

All multicellular life is in there.

Protists, of course, are single-celled, but all the rest are basically multicellular.

So we have three domains to rule them all.

And for a time, it was good.

Now, has anyone ever fused Lord of the Rings and the Matrix before?

I don't remember ever hearing that, but I doubt I'm the first.

Okay, and for a time, it was good.

So, what's new now?

All right, what's changed?

Right?

I'm obviously going to talk about some change here.

So, the researchers have been studying a recently found subgroup of archaea with probably the best name ever.

They are called Asgard Archaea.

I just loved it.

Oh, here we go.

Marvel.

The nanosecond I heard Asgard Archaea, I loved it.

So that was basically one website described it as a superphylum of Archaea.

Now, they use that name, as you know, from Norse mythology because they found it near a formation

in a mid-Atlantic ridge called Loki's Castle.

So, of course, you see the connection between Loki and Asgard.

But when I first read Asgard Arcea, I didn't think about Norse mythology.

My first thought was the cool aliens from Stargate, the Asgard.

I don't suppose any of you also thought of Stargate first.

Kara, did you think of Stargate first when I said

Asgard Arcea?

Probably not.

But yeah, I'm weird that way.

So let's see.

So, yeah, they were cool aliens, but so tragic.

All right, the new bit here for this news item has to do with the cytoskeleton.

Did you guys know that cells have a skeleton, essentially?

No.

Sort of.

Yeah, so

cytoskeleton, that's the framework of proteins in a cell that give it shape and support, and it enables even movement.

All three domains have cytoskeletons in their cells, but in bacteria and archaea, they are simple structures.

Eukarya cells, on the other hand, have very complex cytoskeletons, including very specialized structures called microtubules.

And these things help the cells organize internally.

They help with division, with cell division, and they also help moving materials around inside the cell, kind of like a cellular conveyor belt.

Or, oh, wait, also,

a better analogy would be those bank drive-through vacuum tube thingies.

That maybe that's a better analogy.

What do you even call those stupid things?

Pneumatic tubes.

Yes, pneumatic tubes.

So, these complex structures weren't supposed to exist in simpler organisms, just

the eukaryotic cells, until they actually do, though.

When they studied some of these Asgard archaea, they found not only a more complex cytoskeleton in general, but they also found microtubules as well.

Now, they weren't quite as complex as eukaryotic cells, but these archaean cells had microtubules that shouldn't have been there.

They should not have been in there.

They've never been found in there before.

And even in other Archean cells, they never saw microtubules before.

Now, the researchers' takeaway is that there appears to be less of a distinction between archaea and eukarya, which then, of course, suggests that perhaps the eukaryotic cytoskeleton evolved directly from archaea ancestors.

You got that?

So you don't have these three domains branching out separately, but you have, well, I'll continue, we'll get to that point.

So if this is correct, then eukaryotes evolved from within archaea and not separately from it.

That's what I was trying to say.

The tree then doesn't branch cleanly into three domains anymore.

If this is true, that clean branching isn't valid anymore.

Instead, it looks like there's just two major branches, bacteria and archaea, with eukarya kind of like nested inside of archaea, maybe as some superphyllum.

I'm not sure,

but it's no longer, it no longer would have its own domain.

So the next question is, is the cytoskeleton critical for the evolution of complex life?

That's one of the big questions that they're going to be working on.

Perhaps it is.

The researchers think that a complex cytoskeleton was clearly important for the evolution of eukaryotes.

And get this.

This was really cool.

Some Asgards have tentacle-like appendages that are moved by the cytoskeleton, right?

So that might help them actually grab or interact with their environment in complex ways.

Professor Martin Pilhoffer

at ETH Zurich said, this remarkable cytoskeleton was probably at the beginning of this development.

It could have enabled Asgard archaea to form appendages, thereby allowing them to interact with and then seize and engulf a bacterium.

Now, what bacterium do you think he was referring to?

He was referring to a bacterium being absorbed into

the cell and becoming mitochondria.

This is basically the beginning.

I mean, mitochondria, you know, it's like taking a kind of a crappy car and throwing in like a jet engine.

That's why, you know, complex cell life took off.

I mean, the mitochondria, these amazing powerhouses, I mean, basically, evolution on Earth changed when that happened.

So, all right, so who knows what they're going to find?

But

this cytoskeleton, the fact that these cells have this complex cytoskeleton could have meant that this complexity existed far earlier than

we thought.

So, in the meantime, though, until this happens, I think we should prepare for the possibility that we'll have only two high-level domains.

So, what do you guys think that they're going to do with this, with the domain names?

They better not be a bunch of series of numbers and letters, that's for sure.

Yeah,

right, Jay?

4.357.

So, what I think they're going to do is,

I think they're just going to be boring, and it's going to be like, okay,

the two top-level domains now are bacteria and archaea.

And Eukarya will just be kind of underneath Archaea, and that'll be probably what they're going to do, right?

Because that makes sense.

But I think they should fuse.

It does make sense.

But I think they should fuse the Archaea designation with the eukarya and call it archaria.

But they'll never do that because that's way, way too interesting.

So either way, though, either way, stay tuned for a potentially interesting minor tweak to our family tree, and who knows when that's going to happen.

But it could, you know, if this pans out, you know,

the two domains could go from three to two, you know, in a few years.

Who knows if it's really going to happen?

But this

looks pretty solid with this study that I read.

So we'll see what happens.

And it's weird to think that we are Archaea, basically.

Yeah, but yeah,

I'd rather be from Archaea, though, than bacteria.

Really?

Because Archaea, oh, yeah.

I mean,

when you think about it, archaea have most of the extremophiles.

I mean, a lot of archaea are extremophiles.

Archaea, yeah, I think they're definitely the OG.

They are so metabolically diverse.

So many of them are

extremophiles that could survive crazy, crazy crap that I'd rather be descended from Archaea than a bacteria.

I'll just look at that.

But didn't we used to call them Archaeobacteria?

Yeah, we used to think that they were basically, yeah, like I said earlier, they were Monera, right?

Like, yeah.

Bacteria and archaea.

They were single-celled, they were prokaryotic.

They're so close, they've got to be basically the same thing.

But once, you know, microbiology took off, and they're like, holy crap, look at the biochemistry of this damn single-cell.

They deserve their own domain.

They're not going anywhere.

All right, thanks, Bob.

All right, Evan, tell us about Crow's mad math skills.

Yes, I am going to do that.

To prepare for this particular news item, here's what I plugged into ChatGPT:

What was the monkey vs.

birds debate about on the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe podcast?

You want to hear the answer?

What are you doing?

How great is this?

The monkey vs.

Birds debate on the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe podcast was a humorous, long-running discussion among the show's hosts, particularly involving Perry DeAngelis, who staunchly defended monkeys as superior to birds.

This light-hearted rivalry became a recurring theme on the podcast.

In episode 53, Perry recounted a news story about a man caught smuggling animals through customs.

When confronted, the man admitted, I have monkeys in my pants.

The incident involved two Loris monkeys surviving a transcontinental flight concealed in the man's underwear, while

birds of paradise he was also smuggling perished during the journey.

Perry used this story to argue that monkeys are tougher and more resilient than birds, humorously stating that surviving such condition proved monkeys' superiority.

The debate continued in subsequent episodes, with listeners contributing their own arguments and anecdotes.

For example, in episode 64, a listener corrected a previous misclassification of Aloris, noting that it is a prosimian, not a monkey, adding a layer of scientific accuracy to the ongoing jest.

This playful banter became a beloved inside joke among fans of the podcast, showcasing the host's camaraderie and the show's blend of science with humor.

That's what you get when you plug that in.

What the hell?

Isn't that cool that it can pick out that little aspect basically?

It's incredibly accurate.

That is accurate.

From transcripts?

That was it.

That's what it got, Bob.

That's exactly.

It didn't have to go through iterations, just one question, and that's what it poured out.

And it's surprisingly accurate.

Wow, that's cool.

So let's continue the debate, shall we?

Because a recent study published in Science Advances reveals that carrion crows possess the ability to recognize geometric shapes, a cognitive skill previously attributed primarily to humans.

Researchers tested how these crows perceive visual shapes, particularly quadrilaterals,

right?

Quadrilaterals, such as squares, rectangles, and parallelograms, using methodologies similar to those employed in studies with humans and monkeys.

The birds' work involved basically playing computer games that are designed to tease out how much they know about math.

And for this study, the birds would look at a computer screen and they would see a group of six shapes.

They would be rewarded with a tasty mealworm, yum,

if they can peck on the one shape that was different from the five others.

This study was performed at the University of Tübingen, sorry if I'm mispronouncing that, in Germany, and Andreas Nider, who is a cognitive neurobiologist, was

the lead researcher for this particular project.

He said, initially we presented some very obvious different figures.

For instance, five moons and one flower.

So the crow would peck on the flower shape and they got a snack.

But after the birds understood the game and got used to it, the researchers started showing them sets of shapes that included squares and parallelograms or irregular quadrilaterals.

And the crows, for example, could see five perfect squares.

along with one four-sided figure that was just slightly off.

And the researchers wanted to know whether or not with these quadrilaterals they could still continue to find the outlier, even though the outlier was looking perceptually similar to the other five shapes.

The findings suggest that crows can spontaneously discern key geometric properties such as length, parallelism, perpendicularity, and symmetry, indicating an advanced level of visual processing.

Wow.

And then it even goes further because a similar test has been done with

primates.

Baboons, apparently, in a recent study, did this as well.

They could not achieve the same results that the crows achieved.

Wow.

Yep.

So, where does it come from and why crows?

That's a good question.

And that's going to be the next, sort of the next phase.

They're going to start to go into that level of research as to figure out

why this happens with crows specifically.

specifically.

There really hasn't been a lot of work on this aspect of mathematics for species other than humans, so there's not really much to compare it to.

But definitely, definitely it suggests that they have the capacity to understand geometric irregularities, and that that capacity is not unique to humans.

Definitely challenging notions that cognitive abilities are solely a product of human culture and education.

Nope.

Understanding how crows and other animals perceive and interpret geometric information could provide deeper insights into the evolution of visual and cognitive processing in the animal kingdom.

Do you find those results surprising, Steve?

Not at all.

I believe this is a much delayed point in my column on the bird versus monkey debate.

What it brings up, though, is something that we've known for a while, but this is like more evidence of that, is that, first of all, crows are as evolved as humans, as chimpanzees, right, as primates.

Every creature alive today has as long an evolutionary history behind it as every other creature alive today.

But also, it's kind of hard to answer the question, like, which animal is quote-unquote smarter.

Like, they evolved a different intelligence than primates did, right?

Than mammals did, and specifically primates.

Primates evolved a different intelligence than, say, dolphins.

Well, and even primates

intelligence.

Like, are humans smarter than apes?

Pro maybe, yes, but if you drop me off in an eight habitat right now without tools, I don't think I would fare very well.

Right.

You know, I didn't because I'm not evolved.

I didn't adapt to that habitat.

Certainly humans have some extreme intellectual capabilities not shared by other animals.

But yeah, but it makes perfect sense that, you know, corvids, you know, the group that contains crows, do have a lot of cognitive ability.

And it doesn't surprise me at all that there are some things that they could do better than primates.

I don't find that surprising.

Haven't they been shown also to have tool using capabilities?

Yep.

So, yeah, there is definitely, you know, we have to reanalyze the whole monkey versus bird.

I know that's not entirely accurate, but that's what we're calling it.

The monkey versus bird debate.

And you're right.

We continue to see more studies add up into the bird column on things.

And, you know, certainly as primates ourselves, we have a certain bias, perhaps, but time to shed those biases.

All right.

Thanks, Evan.

Thanks.

Jay, it's who's that noisy time.

All right, guys, last week I played This Noisy.

Assess our social requirements and what we can do about them through our present machinery

or other similar to it.

Gordon

stressed the need for a

reconstruction of society as a basic cause.

So a big clue in there was that noise in the background.

Like the clattering, the clicking.

Yeah, that repetitive noise.

I'm assuming that's the recording device.

That is correct, Steve.

Uh-huh.

Which implies that it's very primitive.

You're also correct.

Wow, you are like, it's like you're a trained skeptic.

Wax cylinder?

So let's get into it.

Listener named Andy Roche said

it sounds a little like some dialogue out of Half-Life 2 with a motor from one of the game's vehicles running in the background.

It sounds like the name Gordon is mentioned, Gordon Freeman, perhaps.

Well, I am a a huge fan of Half-Life, too.

So is Steve.

And I'm ashamed to tell you that that is not from Half-Life, but that was a cool reference you brought to us.

Thank you.

Cindy Kane Shiro wrote in and said, this is the first time that I've ever made a guess.

Is this a recording of L.

Ron Hubbard, the founder of the cult Scientology?

It sounds similar to his nonsense.

And I have to apologize to you, Cindy, because I didn't make it crystal clear what I was looking for in this noisy.

I wasn't looking for who said it, but I've done this before where I have played

people talking.

So, you know that that's not L.

Ron Hubbard because the guy's not drunk.

That's true, Steve.

Good point.

There you go.

So, anyway, but thanks for writing in.

It was my bad.

I should have made it more clear.

So, next time, I promise you, it won't happen again.

So, I'm going to jump right to the winner because we had so many people guess correctly, because apparently, this was taken from a popular YouTube channel.

So, Howard Bletcher said, first time guesser, a couple weeks ago, I watched a YouTube vid of someone testing with the intent to repair a recorder that uses stainless wire.

I've never seen or heard of such a device.

That's what this sounds like to me.

And then he says a YouTuber said something about these recordings being used mainly by psychiatrists.

So this is actually correct.

Let me give you more details on what this is.

This noisy is playback from something called a wire recorder.

And a wire recorder machine uses a reel-to-reel system.

You know, if you've ever seen like an old film projector, right?

it rolls off one reel and collects on the other reel.

The wire is made of steel.

It's very thin.

It looked to me about the thickness of a human hair.

And the sound information is stored on the wire magnetically.

So as the wire is moving past the right and playhead,

it's encoding it magnetically.

And then

as it plays back, they're able to translate that back into sound.

The machine was originally developed in the late 1800s, and they were widely used from the 1930s to the 1950s.

I'm very surprised that I had never heard this before.

And then somebody else wrote in and gave even more information.

So this recording is from the 1940s.

It's played on a Pierce wire recorder Model 55B by Paul Carlson of the YouTube channel Mr.

Carlson's Lab.

And I did watch some of that and it was very cool, very technical, but a lot of fun to watch.

So that is a wire recorder.

I'll play a little bit for you.

Listen in the background for the noise of the machine.

We assess our social

Not bad quality for what they were using as a medium.

Yeah, it's totally understandable.

Yep.

I have a new noisy for you guys.

This was sent in by a listener named Vladimar Bjorn Asgerson.

I got that name damn close, I promise you.

And here it is.

Pretty strange and eerie sounding.

If you think you know what this week's noisy is, you can email me at wtn at the skepticsguide.org.

And don't forget, if you heard something cool this week, you can also send that to me at

wtn at the skepticsguide.org.

Steve, quick announcements here.

Yeah.

You could give our show a rating on whatever podcast player you're using, or you can use iTunes to give us a rating.

It helps new people find the show.

We have a huge conference coming up in less than a month, as you hear this.

It's called Noticon 2025.

We have a Beatles theme this year for the conference.

We will be having lots of different things going on, like a live

Boomer vs.

Zoomer,

which is a game that we came up with with live contestants.

It's a ton of fun.

We will also be doing a live sing-along hosted by George Hobb.

Last year, the theme was the 80s.

This year, of course, it's going to be the Beatles.

It's going to be a ton of fun.

If you want to socialize, if you want to have a good time, if you want to meet new people and make some friends, then go to notaconcon.com for more information.

Tickets are still available.

And Jay, we should mention that we have new events available for Nottacon because we sold out on a lot of the special stuff, the VIP and the board game.

We've got a lot of people asking for stuff.

We added two separate ticketed events, one-hour private SGU recordings on Friday over the lunch period and Saturday over the lunch period.

These are separate one-hour ticketed events, so check that out.

Those are now active on the website.

Guys, we are coming to Kansas in September of this year.

This is happening in mid-September.

You can go to the skepticsguide.org and on the homepage, we have buttons there for the extravaganza that we'll be doing in Kansas and also for an SGU private show, which we will also be doing in Kansas.

We should be,

I think, about 40 minutes outside of Kansas City in a town called Lawrence, which I hear is a really, really fun town.

It's a college town.

So if you're interested, please join us.

Go check out our website.

Thank you, Jay.

A couple emails.

Let's see if we can get to both of them.

The first one comes from Nathan, who writes, been a fan of the show for a number of years and now have enjoyed learning and engaging in the community and the ideas discussed each week.

I was hoping to ask your opinions on how skepticism can inform the way we view certain industries and institutions when individuals can cause conflict within core ideologies.

The example I'm thinking of is how to view Tesla in the current political landscape.

For background, I'm in the market for a new car to replace one that's recently hit end of life, and I was hoping to get something electric.

This is driven both by the impressive technology and the reduced emissions and costs, especially attractive in my state where our power is almost entirely hydro.

The Tesla Model 3 is in my price range and is by all accounts a fantastic car with sound engineering behind it.

I come unstuck through grappling with what I believe is a logical environmental financial choice.

The crinkle though is the ties to Musk who I would have picked as my skeptical jackass of the year.

This goes back to my original subject matter of whether we can separate art from the artist in the technological and political landscapes.

For consideration, how much of current Tesla is driven by Elon, and how much does that matter if the product at the end is still efficient, safe, reliable, and just well-designed?

How should we, as skeptics or individuals, be tackling these decisions, and should this weigh in strongly to the final decision?

Interested in your thoughts.

So, what do you guys think?

Is it reasonable to

boycott Tesla?

I think we could say categorically, right, that any kind of violence or vandalism is not justified and shouldn't be done, and we condemn that, right?

But

yeah, but because just in case there's any confusion about that, but certainly

your purchasing decision is a type of political speech.

100%.

Absolutely, yeah.

And not just monetarily.

I mean, it is monetarily because you're monetarily supporting something, but it's also, you have to accept the fact that if you drive around in this car, you are making a statement.

Yeah, I mean, I think partly, but

the problem there is a lot of people, like me, bought their Teslas

years ago.

That's why they put the stickers on the back.

I know you have to have the standard, but that's kind of

his favorite sticker.

So, all right, so this is my personal take on it.

So, first of all, I get the notion of separating the art from the artist, and you have to do that to some degree.

I don't care about the political opinions or whatever of every step.

Everyone driving the Volkswagen, everyone driving an Audi.

What are you going to do?

Say this was Hitler's idea or something?

I mean, come on, you got to separate.

Or even just like you have an actor or a musician or whatever who has questionable behavior or beliefs or whatever,

you can get lost in the weeds there.

Yeah, but don't say you can't, because some people are not saying you can't.

I'm saying it's

it becomes silly at some point, in my opinion.

But that line is different for everybody.

I agree.

And just because it can become silly, like

you know, what I said to him is, like, I don't think the separating art from the artist applies here.

And again, you can choose to do that, but it's a a choice.

Also, this isn't just art.

It's a consumer.

It's a consumer good.

This is a big purchase.

Not just like buying a loaf of bread.

This is a 35,000, whatever, 40,000, even more

purchase.

It's big,

and it is absolutely speech, you know, and it can, it is one of the few levers we have to affect the world, you know, at the current time.

And so what I wrote back to him was, I don't think that you can hide behind the notion of separating art from the artist here because you are making a statement.

You are making a political decision.

Unfortunately,

we didn't do that.

He did it.

He tied his brand and his empire to a very, in my opinion, extreme political position.

And that made purchasing his car political.

He did that.

And it's not just what it represents either.

It's also he is actively benefiting financially.

Hugely.

Deeply from his relationship to our government.

It's the machine.

No shame, but you'd have to make whatever decision you think is best for you

with your eyes open.

I just wouldn't hide behind this notion of, well, you separate the art from the artist.

Like, well, you choose to do that when you think it's not that important,

but you can't really, I think, in this case.

You are making a decision.

And you may still decide to get the Tesla because you think that the benefits outweigh the downside politically, whatever.

That's a personal choice you are making.

Don't Don't hide from it.

For me personally, I don't know that I could do it.

I'm in the market for an EV right now, and I love my Tesla that we bought whatever it was five, six years ago.

But I would have a hard time doing it now because just given what he has done and what he represents.

Would not do it.

But it's a personal decision.

I get that.

The good news is, though, there's lots of other options out there.

There's lots of very good EVs out there.

So it's not like

it's the only game in town.

Or China's got a good one.

Or even just South Korea.

I mean, there's a lot of, you know, the Kia Electric is very good.

There's other choices.

So you're not, you know, six years ago or longer, it was tougher.

The Tesla really did stand out in the industry significantly, especially because of the recharging infrastructure.

But now it's not as true anymore,

especially since they're essentially allowing other companies to use the Tesla chargers with adapters.

So it makes it more, I I think, feasible to have another EV.

It's an interesting question.

It's a horrible question, you know, decision dilemma that is being foisted upon us, but I don't think we can hide from it as the bottom line.

I mean, Steve, I agree.

It's one of those things.

I mean, this is so unbelievably politically charged.

I mean, if you are

a conservative and, you know, you're reading

do different news and have a different perception on everything, then it's a no-brainer.

I mean,

a lot of the Tesla vehicles, you know, reading reviews on them other than the Cybertruck, they're good cars.

They're great cars.

It just sucks that they're so great.

Honestly, I just wish that the board of Tesla would just fire him as CEO.

Right now, he's a drag.

He's a drag on the company.

Now, personally, I wouldn't get one largely because I would be afraid that it would get vandalized.

Yeah, but that shouldn't be the reason.

I think it's so unfortunate because there's a legitimate ban protest that you can do here.

And because a small, tiny, small subset of people are choosing to do vandalism and violence, it taints politically the whole thing, or at least it becomes a convenient talking point.

Yeah, that I mean, dismissively on the other side, not legitimately.

Yeah, but there's always been violence.

But there's always been vandalism.

There's always going to be the fringe.

I know, I know, but it just sucks.

I just wish people would realize that.

It does.

I agree.

But, like, we, we, we can't let that talking point take over the narrative.

We have to point to that.

Most people are protesting peacefully, and then there's a couple of vandals who come out at night.

That's what's happening.

But they try to make it seem like that's the whole thing.

Is this crazy?

Yeah, that was massively the rhetoric during all the Black Lives Matter protests when people were like, it's terrorism, and these people are rioting in the streets.

Like, oh my god, it's all propaganda.

Yeah, exactly.

All right, let's go on to the next one really quick.

This one is about the moon rotating.

And this is, I hadn't, this is another kind of crank email.

I had

a number of backs and forths with this person.

I'll just read you his initial email.

Oh, is he a flat mooner?

No.

No, it's weird.

It's so weird.

I just couldn't wrap my head around what his problem was.

So he says the moon does not rotate on its axis, which is kind of a weird belief to hold on to.

Okay.

He said, rotation in orbit, an object moving in a 360-degree orbit will, by the end of that orbit, have returned to its original position relative to the body it's orbiting.

In that sense,

its overall orientation has rotated 360 degrees relative to an external viewpoint.

Rotation on its axis, this requires a change in which part of the object leads its motion.

A tidally locked body, by definition, maintains the same face forward, the object it orbits.

Therefore, the same part of the object consistently leads its motion in that relationship.

The one-to-one orbital period to rotational period of tidally locked moons, like our moon and 20 plus others, is a consequence of their orbit and the gravitational forces involved.

It results in a consistent face towards the primary body.

According to the definition of rotation on its axis, this consistent facing means that these tidy-locked moons are not rotating on their axis in the sense that different parts of them are taking the lead in their motion.

The rotation that completes one cycle per orbit is a rotation of their orientation in space due to their orbital movement, not a spin around an internal axis that changes which part leads the way.

He had a lot of other sort of things.

He has this teddy bear experiment where you hold a teddy bear in front of you and you spin around, and the teddy bear is always facing you, therefore, it's not rotating.

So, I try to figure out: all right, obviously, this is ridiculous, right?

I mean, the moon rotates on its axis, but it's always interesting to try to deconstruct it and figure out where's his major malfunction?

What mental mistake is he making?

Wait, he's holding a teddy bear and he turns around in a big circle, and the teddy bear's not rotating.

Yes, it is rotating.

Of course, it is.

So,

that's like his big experiment.

It's like the teddy bear hypothesis.

Like, he really focuses on it.

You can put a laser on the teddy bear's forehead, and you'll paint a circle around the room.

But that is an external thing that doesn't count, apparently.

So

I said, yeah, what about the moon in relation to the sun?

It clearly is rotating.

Well, he said, that doesn't matter.

It only matters because it's local to the earth.

So clearly, the problem here is one of frame of reference, right?

He is choosing...

a rather bizarre frame of reference in order to make his point.

And in fact, he's he's choosing a non-inertial frame, which is always a bad frame of reference to choose.

If you choose an inertial frame, meaning one in is, you know, where there's no other local movement, you know what I mean?

Like if you're a point in space.

Yeah, right, exactly, like a point in space.

Or, you know, for our solar system, you could use the Sun.

That's a good sort of...

non-inertial frame within the context of our solar system.

And it's absolutely rotating.

Now, of course, there's an objective way according to physics to tell how did we figure out or one of the what's one of the ways in which we prove the word the Earth is rotating on its axis.

Foucault's pendulum.

Yeah, the pendulum,

it rotates once every 24 hours as the Earth spins.

So you could do that on the moon.

I don't think we've ever done it.

Oh, interesting.

Let's do that.

But we could take a month, you know, 28 days

to go around.

It's too long.

But yeah, I don't think anyone's constructed such a pendulum on the moon, but that would be interesting interesting to do that.

But the question is, would it rotate around?

And the answer is definitely yes, it would.

So by definition, objectively, it is rotating, and you can't just choose some bizarre frame of reference to argue that it isn't.

But he's just so mentally locked in this, I couldn't break him out of it.

Anyway, very interesting.

He was staring into the teddy bear eyes too much, I guess,

as he spins around.

But the teddy bear is not moving.

But the teddy bear.

But again, he just thinks that

everyone else is wrong.

Again, it always comes down to, too, like the people who are acting like cranks, is there's always that element of I'm right and everyone else is wrong.

You know, there's a little bit of hubris involved.

Yeah,

it is a flat lunar.

And what you should be doing is

he should be trying to figure out why am I wrong.

Break it.

Right.

Break it.

Not let me convince you that I'm right, that I've sort of reinvented physics or I've figured this thing out that hundreds of years of astronomers haven't figured out.

But explain to me why I'm wrong.

What mental error am I making?

That's the approach.

I always assume that's what they're asking anyway, and then that's how I answer it.

There's no shame in asking people to help you with that, you know, especially people who have a

more robust understanding of these kinds of things.

And that's also fundamental to the scientific process.

I think a thing, how do I break it?

Right.

Remember the guys who figured, who discovered that faster-than-light neutrinos, you know,

they were like, guys,

what mistake are we making?

Tell us how we're wrong.

Right, you have to assume you're wrong.

See that plug over there?

Yeah,

that cable over there.

I think you should double check that.

That's a healthy, healthy way of approaching it.

Yeah, I know.

I end up spending a lot of time on my response TikTok videos, like built into every one.

It's like, you know,

this could be solved with just a tiny little, little, itty-bitty bit of humility on your part, which would fix this issue that you're having of thinking that you figured something out that the world got wrong.

All right.

Anyway, let's go 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 and one fake, except this week I have facts and there are four of them.

Now these all have the theme.

The theme is extinct genomes.

Uh-oh.

Okay, and the preface to all of them are: we have fully sequenced nuclear genomes from the following extinct animals.

Right, so I'm going to list you four animals, three of which we have sequenced the nuclear genomes for, and one we do not.

You have to tell me which one is not true.

Okay.

Got it?

All right.

Here we go.

Item number one: the dodo,

famous extinct bird of the Mauritius Island.

Two, the blue buck, a blue antelope and the first large African mammal to go extinct in modern times.

Item number three, the giant moa, both North Island and South Island dinornus species of New Zealand.

And item number four,

Denisovans, a close relative of humans and Neanderthals.

Evan, to celebrate tax season being over, you get to go first.

This is crazy, Steve.

I've heard of dodos.

I've heard of the giant MOA.

I have definitely heard of Denisovans.

A blue buck?

I've never heard of that.

So I'm already kind of biased in my own head, like thinking, okay, well, didn't hear a blue buck, so maybe that's the one that's the fiction.

At the same time, my gosh, the

genome sequence for the

Denisovans,

that seems, whoa.

Really?

The whole thing?

That seems extreme.

Like, wouldn't that be difficult?

Isn't that enormous?

So I'm having multiple issues here with this.

It ultimately just comes down to a guess, though.

Why?

Which one?

Why?

You know, I want to say Denisevins as the fiction, because I think that would seem to be the obvious one of these four.

But then I, you know, come back to kind of the game itself and it's like, okay, that's the one you definitely want me to pick.

And then my mind goes back to Blue Buck because I don't never heard of the Blue Buck.

A Blue Antelope.

That's made up.

That's something out of Willy Wonka or something.

So I don't know.

I'll say

the

giant MOA for no particular reason, Steve.

It is strictly a guest.

This is really puzzling me.

Okay, Bob.

I think maybe the Denisovans are meant to be like, oh no, can't be that.

But they didn't go extinct that long ago.

Something about the MOA,

I think that I don't know when they went extinct, but I think it was quite, you know, longer than you would think.

So

I'm not sure it's huge.

Yeah, I'm not sure.

I've seen pictures of those, right?

The drawings.

Oh, yeah.

I'm not sure

about any of these, but I'm going to go with the MOA.

Okay, Tara.

I just don't agree with the guys, I don't think.

I barely agree with myself.

You probably can't tell us this this late, but

the Denise events went extinct like tens of thousands, maybe

hundreds of thousands of years ago.

These other things went extinct like a few hundred years ago, right?

Like we probably.

I thought the Moas were.

Like I said,

this is something that Kara, I think, has to handle on her own.

Yeah, maybe, but like, I think that these things did not go extinct.

They were modern.

They were contemporaneous.

I know Denisevins were also contemporaneous with modern humans, but we're talking ancient modern humans.

I think that these things were around during like

big civilizations.

So

it just feels like we probably have museum specimens of these other three organisms that we could extract whole DNA from, whereas the Denisovan DNA is going to be from like fossils.

And that's why it just seems less likely.

Granted, there's probably more of a push, like because humans are egocentric and

we would love to have a full sequence of a hominid species, but I think that's way more work.

And so maybe we did it, and maybe we just haven't gotten around to one of the other ones.

But in terms of what's most feasible, I think the Denisovans would be the least feasible to sequence.

So I've got to say that's the fiction.

I happen to agree.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I agree with Kara.

I mean, I think of all of these, you know, I've never heard of the blue buck before either.

I mean, I would think because

I've heard the term Denisovans before, and I have a very, very vague feeling about how old it is.

And I think it's a, they're very, very, they existed a long time ago.

So I'm just going to go with Kara on that.

Good.

So we have a nice even split.

Yeah.

So let's start with the first one, the dodo, since you guys all agree upon this.

The dodo, famous extinct bird of the Mauritius Island.

Do we have the fully sequenced nuclear genome of this creature?

So, just for some details, why do I say qualify it as nuclear genome?

That's obviously like the DNA in the nucleus of the cell, as opposed to what's the other option?

Mitochondrial.

Mitochondrial DNA.

Mitochondrial DNA, yeah.

But with mitochondrial DNA, you wouldn't be able to reconstruct an organism.

No, but it's really good for

figuring out branch evolutionary relationships.

Yeah, it's great for evolution.

It's great for forensics.

It's great for all those things, like understanding.

So that's why sometimes we do that.

Sometimes, like, there are lots of creatures where we've sequenced the mitochondrial DNA specifically so that we could tell its evolutionary relationships.

It's also you could tell a lot about

how much genetic diversity there is in the population, for example.

So it's very useful, but not for geneticism.

Yeah, nuclear DNA, we're talking about like de-extinction.

We're talking about like we need a fully sequenced genome to be able to make this thing again.

All right.

So this one, the dodo, is

science.

We have completely sequenced it.

When I say fully sequenced, that means some creatures we have, for example, a we have a partial genome of a lot of creatures, but it has to get to a certain, you know, saying like fully sequenced doesn't mean that we know 100% about it.

It just means that they have the whole genome, but there still may be some.

It's like the question is how many errors are there?

It doesn't mean error-free.

Let me just put it that way.

Saying that we have fully sequenced the genome doesn't mean that it's highly detailed and error-free.

So there's different quality, different resolution, but you still count as being fully sequenced if you basically have the full genome.

Does that make sense?

But this was that same company who did the dire wolf, right?

This is the same company.

This is the Colossal Biosciences.

They did that.

All right, you guys also agree on the blue buck, a blue antelope, and the first large African mammal to go extinct in modern times.

You guys

all think this one is science.

And this one is

science.

This is also science.

Very cool.

Okay.

Yeah, I've been, I've known about the blue buck for a long time,

just because I'm interested in extinct large mammal fauna and stuff like that.

And it's the some of the artists'

drawings of it, and also we have some skins, I think, still intact from it.

Beautiful, beautiful antelope.

These gorgeous curved horns, this blue-tinted coat, kind of a

large antelope.

And it was hunted for its fur, for its coat, you know, to extinction

about 200 years ago.

Yeah, so it's been extinct for about 200 years.

We have coats.

We have

the coats left?

Yeah, that's the thing we do.

So that's where we got the DNA from.

Well, at least we maintain it.

We got the coats.

Did it maintain its balloon for all that time?

So

they got DNA from 25 different fossils.

And so that was,

you know, that

improves the ability to get sequencing.

Although there was one that was really high quality, that is, most of the sequencing was done from this one well-preserved genome.

So we got lucky with this one fossil.

Without that one, we wouldn't have been able to do it, basically, from what I understand.

So, yeah, so that's nice.

So, that and that's absolutely, I think, should be on the short list for de-extinction if we're going to do that.

Because, first of all, it's not a predator or anything.

It's an antelope.

Its ecosystem is there.

You know, we just have to reintroduce it.

It's just another antelope.

And it's gorgeous.

So, and it went extinct because of people, right?

So, those are kind of my criteria for why you should be on the short list.

So, Dodo, blue buck, definitely should bring them back.

Okay, I guess we'll keep going in order.

The giant moa, both North Island and South Island dinorna species of New Zealand.

Evan, you kind of were bouncing back and forth between blue buck and denisovans, and you just suddenly jumped over to the giant moa

for no reason.

Right.

We saw some giant MOA skeletons

when we were in New Zealand.

It went extinct relatively rapidly between 1380 and 1440.

So it has to be at least about 500, 600 years old.

It's not that long.

I thought they were a lot older.

Okay.

No, no.

Yeah,

500 to 600 years old.

So this one, and so Evan and

Jay.

And

Kara.

Evan and Kara.

Anyone but Bob?

No, No, no, no.

Evan and Bob.

Didn't Bob?

Yes, he's pulling your legs.

He's working with you.

So Evan and Bob said the giant MOA.

And again, for this to be true, we need to have

both species in the genus Dinornis, both the North Island giant MOA and the South Island.

That's right.

Double your chance.

And this one

is the fiction.

Wow.

We have nothing.

I totally guess you.

Yeah, I knew it, dude.

I didn't doubt it for a second.

We do not have the complete genome of either of them, of either the North Island or the South Island.

Now, we do have the complete genome of the little bush moa, which is a different genus, Anomalopteryx.

Doesn't count.

It doesn't count.

That's why

I threw in the genus just to be 100% because there is another MOA that we do have the genome for.

But it's a different genus.

Anomalopteris did it format.

Anomalopteris?

Yeah.

Anomaly.

It's a little bush moa.

Apparently, it was about the size of a turkey.

So not the big boys, you know, like the

Dinoridus, yeah.

But we do have the complete genome for that guy, but not the other two.

So that is the fiction.

So that means that we do have a complete sequenced nuclear genome of the Denisovans.

How?

How?

We also have it for the Neanderthals.

Now, the reason why I chose Denisovans over Neanderthals is because I thought everybody knew that we have completely sequenced the Neanderthal.

And I thought you might think, oh, but I don't know if they did the Denisovans, but we have.

Yeah, and

we had a fossil specimen that yielded up a DNA sample sufficient to do a high, pretty good resolution.

sequencing of the Denisovans.

And

we have been able to, as a result, do a pretty genome-wide comparison between Neanderthals, Neanderthals, humans, and Denisovans.

And that was how they were able to determine that the genetic diversity within the Denisovans lies outside of the range of the genetic diversity within the Neanderthals, and it is a different species by those criteria.

So that's how we know that, because they were able to sequence the genome.

Wow.

Oh, cool, cool.

Yeah.

I mean, they went extinct, what, only like, what, 50,000 years ago?

So

30,000, 30,000?

Yeah, well, I think more.

No, it's 30,000.

I'm telling you, I'm not guessing it's 30,000.

I just looked it up.

Yeah, but so did I.

Between 30,000 and 50,000 years.

Yeah, this story says around 50,000 years ago.

You're right.

I'm seeing here on Wikipedia 25,000 years.

Who, well,

there's a range.

Then this one says 40,000.

Yeah, they're all over.

Yeah, so let's say 30 to 50,000 years ago is when they went extinct.

We'll have to do a deeper dive to see if there's more tighter consensus there.

But yeah, around there.

And again, I think the Neanderthal was talking like 35,000 is the number I have in my head for when they went extinct.

It's around that same time.

Still seems kind of impressive.

That's

very impressive.

That's like, they did a lot of work to do that.

Yeah, thousands of years is impressive.

They must have had a lot of specimens.

Now, that doesn't mean that the DNA is of sufficient quality that you could use it to make a clone.

Right.

That takes really high-quality DNA.

And if it's too degraded, even if we could say we have a complete genome, quote-unquote, complete, there might be too many errors and whatever for it to function

for cloning purposes.

But it could be used for the genetic engineering purposes, although I don't think anyone's going to do that.

I mean, that's, you know, no one's going to make a,

you know, try to de-extinct Neanderthals or Denisovans or Homo erectus or something like that.

That would be crazy unethical, I think.

No, you're nuts.

How cool would that be?

I mean, come on.

I just have a hard time seeing ethical approval for that.

That doesn't mean that

it won't happen sometime in the future when the technology becomes, you know, proliferates and everybody.

Right, press this button.

Yeah, really, basically.

But I suspect there'll be laws against that sort of thing.

Laws Laws are made to be

obeyed at all times.

Obeyed.

Yes.

Follow.

Yes.

Please obey the laws.

Undebated.

All right.

Well, good job.

Evan and Bob.

Yeah.

Yeah, Scott.

Get lucky.

Surprisingly.

Nice work, boys.

Kara and I, we're not angry.

We're not going to hold a grudge.

We know you cheated.

Yeah, right.

We know you threw a dart at a dartboard for that one.

Evan's like, I don't know anything.

No, no, no.

Saturn was rising in Taurus, so

the luck of it was emanated down to me.

Bob literally tried to do a

confuse Steve at the last.

Yes, the old shell game kind of thing.

Where's the P?

Okay, move it around.

Was it here?

Well, you know,

don't matter.

Still got a win.

I have a little bit of sad news before I give the quote, Steve.

Who died?

We have to announce the passing of Wink Martindale.

Oh, yeah, I saw that.

Wait a second.

Bob, I know you cite him more than anyone else on the SGU.

Yeah, I didn't know.

Actually, I didn't even know he was still alive.

I'll be honest with you.

How old was he?

91.

91.

Good for him.

Whoa.

Yeah.

Yeah, so Wink Martindale, just for context, is, and I think we've done this on the show a number of times.

Whenever someone asks you to guess a name, there's a few funny-sounding names, or like really non-sequitur, whimsical-sounding names that we throw out there.

And Wink Martina.

Joey Bagadonas.

Joey Bagadonas.

Wink Martindale is one of them.

This is one of our go-to fake guesses when people say

asking for a name.

Because, yeah, Wink Martindale, I mean, you know, it's a great name.

It's just a great name.

It is.

It is so TV game show-wise.

I know, absolutely.

And he was 91.

91.

Wow.

I can't believe.

I just Googled it because I saw a quote.

Sorry, this is going to feel a little bit like a non-sequitur, but I saw a quote from David Attenborough because he's doing a new show, and he said something like, in my nearly 100 years on this earth, and I was like, wait, what?

And I just googled it.

And David Attenborough is 98.

Oh, my gosh.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

And still working regularly.

For their entire childhood, my daughters didn't know that Wink Martindale was a real person.

Yeah, that's awesome.

See, it's a novella thing, right?

It's true.

It's because, like, I guess he was in his prime so long ago.

Yeah, like we don't know.

In the 70s now, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's definitely a 70s throwback.

Our love and respect for the entire Martindale family.

All right, the quote this week: The ease with which we believe things that flatter us or confirm our prejudices should always be suspect.

The wise words of Christopher Hitchens.

Yo, man.

Very pithy.

Love it.

Definitely.

Yep.

Oh, yeah.

Always pithy.

And little gems from him.

Be most suspicious of beliefs that either flatter you or confirm what you want to.

believe.

Absolutely.

Yes.

Enjoy them for a few moments, but then

enjoy the dopamine release, but then get to work.

You know, again, we all know people who like just jump on anything that supports what they want to believe.

Like, that's it.

That's an ironclad fact.

Yeah, it's in their way.

If it's in their worldview, we know some people like, oh, yeah.

Hook line and sinker.

But everyone does it to some degree, but there are people at one end of the spectrum.

Your goal should be to be at the other end of the spectrum.

To be like, I don't want to say something, especially if it is right in my sweet spot and supports something I want to be true.

It's like, I better, before I start start throwing this out there, I better carefully that thing.

Right.

Especially if you're going to throw it out there.

Yeah.

Right, right.

Oh, absolutely.

You know, you hate to like include things in your list of facts that you think you know that are not true, you know.

But good life lesson and very, very pithily put by Chris.

But I hate when I find the opposite, when I find something that I've been saying, telling people like a cool fact, then I found out that it's bullshit.

I'm like, oh my God, who did I tell the past 20 years?

This awesome fact.

I got to find them and tell them, hey, wait a second, that was wrong.

That's like you have herpes and like, who did I have sex with in the last

season?

No, you don't need to make that connection.

Jesus.

Just reminded me of that.

You need to reconstruct all of your connections.

All right.

Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

Thank you.

You got it, brother.

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