The Skeptics Guide #1026 - Mar 8 2025

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

Hello, and welcome to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

Today is Wednesday, March 5th, 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 Evan Bernstein.

Good evening, everyone.

Today is my wife's birthday, so happy birthday to everyone.

She's working.

She's working on it.

She's actually at work right now.

She's working in the evening on her birthday, so I'm not going to get to see her till later.

What is she washing dishes, Steve?

What is she doing?

No, she works.

She teaches in the evening.

Joke, joke.

I know.

She teaches in the evening.

So, yeah, so this is one of her days to work late, and she couldn't get out of it.

Well, I'm sure her students and faculty all celebrated with her balloons and cake and all the good stuff.

Whatever.

I hope so.

Just bring some home.

Speaking of work, I don't know if I told you all this,

but as you can tell, I've been a bit preoccupied, a bit busy lately.

This week is the week that I am saying goodbye to all of my patients

on my fellowship, which is tough.

My fellowship technically ends next week, and then I take my licensing exam, and there's just so much in front of me.

And I have COVID, if you can't tell.

Stuffy.

Yay.

I didn't know that.

Did you guys?

I was last week I was trying to hide it, but I was coughing and sniffling a bit.

And then I tested the next day, and I was like, cool.

yeah so not only did I have to I'm inpatient I'm on inpatient service one day a week and I had to miss my final inpatient service because I was testing positive for COVID which was a huge bummer and then now it's day after day of just saying goodbye like hour after hour I've cried more

than it's it's such a tough thing because usually as a therapist as a mental health practitioner or even a medical practitioner when you terminate with clients and that's the word I wish they didn't use that word it sounds so good.

Yes, that could be that word.

Yeah, right.

Terminal.

Yeah, but termination, as we do call it, it usually happens a bit more, I don't know, shall we say organically?

Like somebody feels like they finished their course of therapy or maybe they're moving out of your license jurisdiction or whatever.

But there are few points in our careers, most of them are early during our training, where we have to terminate with everybody all at once before we move on to another phase of our training.

And that's where I'm at right now.

I've done it once before already at the same hospital when I finish my practicum.

But yeah, it's so tough.

How much time do they give you?

Like how much lead up time is there?

Oh, I've known this whole time.

So I've been able to sort of prepare my clients.

I think for some of them, I started preparing them about a month or two in advance.

But for many of them, they knew from the beginning.

You know, this is how much time we have together.

And come, you know, February, March, April, at some point in there, I'm going to be winding down my fellowship.

But some of them completely forgot.

And, you know, I would try to remind them and I would try to prepare them, but there were still a couple this week who were like, no, what am I going to do?

I was like, no, we'll get through this together.

It's time to go.

And it also happens at the end of your career.

Yeah.

So I'm just entering that phase now where every, just about every visit I have with a patient is my last visit with them.

Yeah.

I mean, there are some that I do every three months.

So like next month, it'll definitely, that'll be it.

Like that'll be the last time I'm seeing every patient.

There's still a few that I'll I'll see three months from now, but yeah, so I'm having the same conversation over and over and over and over again.

Are you telling them what you really think about them now?

Well, I mean,

some patients I've been seeing for 20 years.

You know,

how long you've

had a lot of time.

That's such a different thing because, like, I see my patients weekly, right?

And for a full hour every week.

So there's a lot of intensity there.

But

most of them I've only known for a year.

A few of them were return patients from when I was at the same hospital on practicum a few years ago.

So there's like a depth there, but it's a shorter period of time.

You see so many more patients than I do.

But you've known some of them, like you said, for 20 years.

You've seen their kids grow up.

You've seen, you know, massive life changes.

Yeah.

It's incredible.

Yeah.

So, you know,

it is a bit intense.

Oh, my patients have been so supportive, though.

They really have been great, you know, in terms of congratulating me on retiring and everything.

Then they get a little anxious about

who am I going to follow up with?

But we have like, it's easy because we have a

huge practice of Yale experts.

So you can sort of transfer them to other practitioners in your same kind of practice.

Whereas most of my clients, I am referring to community practitioners because there's just, you know, there's, there's no options.

So some of them take breaks.

Some people say, you know, this is, I want to take a break from therapy and kind of work on being my own therapist for a while.

And then others are like, no, no, I need to find somebody right now.

So a big part of that week is me doing a lot of research and writing a lot of referrals.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, Steve, you have to remind them that they can still, you know, interact with you, just become a patron of the Skeptics Guides of the Universe, which is very easy to do if you go to our homepage.

Never cross the streams.

I mean, really don't.

I have a few who do.

I have a few who listen on their own, but I would never tell them.

You never bring it up.

Nor do I tell you.

Some patients bring it up with me.

Yeah.

And that's fine.

And I'm like, oh, that's nice, you know.

But I would obviously never, never bring that up.

I always, I have that conversation at the beginning of therapy too, where, because when you're practicing in a community, there's a chance you will see people in situations outside of the clinic.

And so I often will have conversations about what do we do if we run into each other in public.

Because as somebody's therapist, I would never,

ever announce that that is my relationship with them.

Right.

Just like I can never reveal who my tax clients are.

Totally.

But they can say it.

So I always tell them: if you see me somewhere and you walk up to me and start talking and you share with your friends, you know, our relationship, great.

I will converse with you.

But if you don't sort of do it first, I will pretend like I don't know you.

And that's not me.

That's just me.

That's your privacy.

Yeah, that's to protect your privacy.

Exactly.

Exactly.

That's right.

Yeah.

That's, you know, for a while, I was engaging with three large populations of people that I was basically acquaintances with, right?

You know, work, skepticism, and LARPing, which is hundreds of people.

And I would see somebody that I was like just barely acquainted with in the wild, you know,

and I'm like, okay, oh, are they a LARPer, a skeptic, or a patient?

Yeah, but I know this person.

Like, I know I recognize them.

Obviously, like my frequent flyer patients, like patients I've seen a lot, have no trouble recognizing that.

But it's like somebody I've seen once or twice, like a year ago.

Like, I know I recognize that I recognize them, but like without context, like in no context, they're just out in a store or something.

Sometimes it was hard for me to remember how I knew them.

Yeah.

Hey, Steve.

And they're like, oh, how do I know you?

Neurology.

Witch circle on the Van Dyke.

Yeah, imagine having proso-pagnosia.

Yeah, right.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Increase that by an order of magnitude.

I guess you just tell everybody and then it makes it easier.

Yeah, that's true.

If they know you well enough, they're going to know that.

I still say there should be like a, when the smart glasses finally do become a thing that people adapt to, there should be something in which it puts a hello, my name is tag on the person themselves.

You know, that way you know exactly who you're speaking to at any given time.

Oh, kind of like, did you guys ever watch Hand back in the day?

I'm familiar with the series.

A little bit of Julia Louise Dreyfus.

Yeah, Julia Louis Dreyfus.

So it, well, it's not going to resonate for you, but it's a podcast.

So a lot of people listening will have watched Veep.

Yeah,

she has, you know, a bag man, and he just, he's constantly whispering in her ear every time she walks up to somebody.

Like, oh, this is Senator so-and-so.

He loves to play golf, you know?

And then she's like, okay, Gary, I know.

That would be so helpful.

That's a real thing.

Sure.

Oh, yeah.

How could you keep track of all those people if you work in politics?

You know, right.

So eventually technology will become that.

Right?

Your AI, whatever, will recognize the person and whisper it in your ear.

That's Joe Smith or whatever.

Imagine if you have Alzheimer's.

It would be a boon.

My God.

Oh, that would actually be really helpful.

Yeah, if you were struggling with that.

Technology is great.

It's great for people who have mild to moderate dementia.

Think about GPS.

GPS keeps people driving for a lot longer.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's true.

All right, Bob, you're going to get us started with a quickie.

Thank you, Steve.

This is your quickie with Bob.

All right.

I specifically decided to go with a slightly encouraging news item this time just to make me feel minutely less like we're all doomed.

And so this helped me for a little while.

So, okay, I'm sure many of you have heard about a scary climate scenario about the shutdown of the Atlantic conveyor belt system.

You may know it by its more technical name, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.

A little bit of a mouthful, A-M-O-C.

So this refers to the system of currents in the Atlantic that transports rising warm water to the north and sinking cool water to the south.

And it sounds kind of like simple and basic, but this is really an important factor in global weather systems.

If this is shut down, it could wreak havoc.

It could not only change global rain patterns, it could dramatically cool Europe, which is the big fear that people talk about.

It could warm the rest of the world, and it could also, I found this out today, it could also raise sea levels off the American East Coast.

So, yeah, this would not be good.

This would not be good at all.

So, and there have been studies in the past that have said that, yeah, this could happen, you know, any time now, you know, a couple of decades, next month.

I mean, there's some really pessimistic studies out there that really scared a lot of people.

So now we've got a new study published in Nature, which describes computer simulations from 34 different climate models that were run to examine specifically extreme climate change possibilities.

And a bottom line, according to the lead author Jonathan Baker, an oceanographer at the Med Office, not one simulation predicted these currents collapsing before 2100.

That's awesome.

So that's kind of really good right there, Especially when you were thinking, yeah, this could happen, you know, in a decade or one specific study said a few decades.

Still kind of close.

The earlier simulations that predicted a collapse soon, they were based on

this conveyor belt, as it's referred to, stopping because the Arctic waters

no longer would be sinking and going south due to all the melted freshwater, right?

Because you've got a lot of freshwater melting, like say from Greenland, and it's heading into the ocean.

And that's going to inhibit and potentially just stop this conveyor belt, this water sinking and then going south.

Yeah, because the salt water, the salinity makes it heavier and causes it to sink.

Right.

So

the new bit here, though, is something that I guess wasn't fully appreciated by scientists, was that there was a second water pump engine, I guess you could call it, in the Antarctic, where the winds pull up the cold water from the deep, and that, they say, can keep this whole conveyor belt system going for a while.

Basically, that's what will prevent it from potentially stopping in a few decades to like, you know, you know, eight decades, maybe, nine decades or more.

So, that's the reassuring bit, all right?

That's the kind of like, oh, yeah, okay, nice, that's nice.

Now, the caveats, of course, there's some caveats.

This could still happen later, obviously, after 2100.

It could certainly happen.

And this isn't infallible.

I mean, it could happen earlier, but it has happened in the past.

So

this could definitely happen at some point.

Lead author Baker also warns that he's like, this is no green light for

complacency.

The AMOC is very likely to weaken this century, and that brings its own major climate impacts.

And so, what does that mean?

That means that there probably will be crop losses

this century,

and stocks of fish will also be heavily impacted to a certain degree.

But there probably won't be Europe going into a deep freeze this century, as a lot of the headlines regarding this have said in the past.

So, yeah, so it's not as imminently bad from this specific point of view, from this, with this specific thing.

Because as we know, there's lots of other crazy climate change things happening unrelated to this.

This is just one of the ones that has grabbed a lot of people's attention.

Because, yeah, Europe would have been deeply impacted.

So, that's good.

Take that for what it's worth, and maybe it'll cheer you up for a few minutes.

And that's what we're doing.

We'll take what we can get.

Yeah, take what you can get.

So this has been your Conveyor Belt Quickie with Bob.

Back to you, Steve.

One thing, though, I wonder, Bob, at what point does it become inevitable, even if it hasn't happened yet?

Is there a point in a return, or

did that go into that at all?

Yeah, no, it didn't.

It didn't.

I didn't see those specifics.

All right.

Thanks, Bob.

All right, man.

All right, Kara, tell us about this measles outbreak in Texas.

What's going on?

Yeah.

You said measles, not weasels, right?

Nope, measles.

Much more deadly than weasels.

Let's talk, before we talk about what's the latest in Texas, let's talk about measles kind of on the whole, because even though most everybody knows the term measles and they've seen pictures of what measles looks like, most of us have not in our lifetimes had any real connection to that.

Correct.

It's more of a mid-20th century phenomenon than a late 20th century or early 21st.

And now, it is still globally a big deal, but we have cheap and easy vaccination now, which, according to the World Health Organization, actually averted more than 60 million deaths between 2000 and 2023.

Oh, really?

Vaccines saving that many millions.

Really?

Yep.

Isn't that nice?

So what is measles?

Because even though measles manifests, and we're most used to thinking of measles as a rash, right?

That's what we usually see in our minds when we think of measles.

We think of the measles rash.

But measles is an airborne disease.

So it's a viral infection, and it is one of the most contagious diseases on the planet.

And so, how do we measure that?

Well, a little kind of background.

You guys have heard the term R0,

the basic reproduction number, R0, sometimes referred to as R0.

Yeah.

So the basic reproduction number, it usually has a range because we talk about both, or I should say, the reproduction number has a range.

We can talk about the basic, and we can talk about the effective reproduction number.

So anytime you see kind of a publication talking about the R0 of a disease, you're going to see a range.

And that's because on the low end, we're talking about in sort of ideal conditions where there isn't much susceptibility in the general public.

And on the high end, we're talking about situations where vaccination numbers are low or there are a lot of susceptible people for another reason.

So, I just want to pick a few at random here.

The 2014 Ebola breakout, the R0 was between 1.51 and 2.53.

And what that number actually represents is how many people a single infected person are likely to infect.

Okay, so a single person with Ebola in 2014 was likely to infect between one and a half and two and a half people.

Okay, seasonal flu: 0.9 to 2.1, right?

You got the flu.

You're around somebody who either is or is not vaccinated.

You are likely to infect somewhere around one or two people with your flu.

Measles, 12 to 18.

Whoa,

measles has one of the highest naughts of any disease.

Smallpox is 5 to 7.

Polio is 5 to 7.

Measles is 12 to 18.

And to give you an example of how infectious this is beyond the R0, if you are in a room and you have measles and you sneeze or cough on a surface, somebody can walk into that room two hours later, touch that surface,

and get the disease.

Hangs around a while.

It's a very, very contagious airborne virus.

Is there an extended shedding period?

Is that why there's so many people

who can get it?

COVID is only 1.5 to 3.5 compared to measles.

So it's, yes, you do shed the virus for a while.

I mean, as long as you're infectious, you are shedding.

But it's that the viral particles themselves are just really, really robust, right, Steve?

Yeah, they hang out for a while.

They hang out for a while.

And your body, if you are naive to this disease,

your body is very susceptible to this virus.

And so that's why vaccines are so incredibly important.

Well, when we look at kind of across the globe, according to the World Health Organization, even though we do have that vaccine available, and even though more than 60 million deaths have been averted over the past like 20 plus years, in the year 2023, there were around 107,500 measles deaths globally.

Wow.

We're not just talking about infections, deaths.

Now, most of those.

107,000.

107,500.

Yeah.

Most of those occurred in unvaccinated individuals or in children who were under vaccinated because they were under the age of five, meaning that they didn't have both doses of their vaccine.

When we look at the global proportion of children getting a first dose of

a measles vaccine, according to the WHO, that number was 83 in 2023.

Back in 2019, it was 86.

So we're seeing that these rates are dropping globally.

But when I say globally, I'm talking about globally.

I'm talking about both developed nations and nations where vaccine campaigns are difficult, where there is a lot of poverty and where it's very hard to get everybody these life-saving medicines.

Now, let's cut to the United States of America.

Now, don't get me wrong, we have our problems with poverty, but we are one of the richest countries on the planet, right?

Can we all agree on that?

Yep.

Let's talk about vaccine rates here.

So, where do you think that we are netting out when it comes to, for example, let's say kindergarten children?

I think 80%.

No, I think

overall, I think

I know it's 95% just taking all comers, like just the population as well.

Well, that's what we need.

Yeah.

So herd immunity happens with measles around 95%.

Because measles is so contagious.

We need about 95%.

And back in the 2019-2020 school year, it was about 95.2% among kindergartners in America.

2023, 2024, it had dropped to 92.7%.

So we're already below the necessary herd immunity to prevent vulnerable children from getting sick.

And that's dangerous.

That's worrisome.

Now, let's talk about what happened recently in Texas.

I have the most recent numbers, I think, by the CDC.

Let me just make sure.

No, by the Texas Health and Human Services.

They publish their numbers on Tuesdays and Fridays.

We're recording this on a Wednesday.

So as of yesterday, there were 159 identified cases since late January, 22 hospitalizations, and one death in a school-aged child who lived in the core outbreak region who was not vaccinated.

And this is just in Texas.

We've already seen a confirmed case of measles at LAX

from an unvaccinated child who contracted the disease because there was a risk of contraction because we knew that somebody with measles was passing through

LAX.

So, where did it start?

Like, why is this happening in Texas?

Have you guys heard

what the initial outbreak was?

We may be up to date on this.

Yeah, a Mennonite community.

And so, what we saw in Texas was that a community in

Gaines County of Mennonites who historically have just low vaccination rates and tend not to, you know, seek healthcare services, an outbreak took place there.

Within that community, that county's kindergarten population vaccine rate, which seems to be a measure that a lot of people are using because this does spread so quickly in school children, was 82%,

significantly lower than the necessary 95% to prevent a local or sadly, even larger outbreak.

And so the question here is like, what can we do?

Well, first of all, you can make sure that your MMR vaccines are current.

Make sure that you are vaccinated because if we are not at 95 plus, the entire community is at risk.

And characteristics.

A question for you there.

If people don't know if they've had their full dose of MMR, is it okay to just go get it and be safe?

Yeah.

Yep.

There you go.

I was like, that's a question for Steve.

And he says, yeah.

I didn't know if with MMR you can test titers, can you?

Is there a way to know if you're

a doubt, they just give you the paper?

Yeah, if there's a doubt.

I've done that before with the flu vaccine where I just didn't remember.

if I had gotten it already that season.

And I remember asking my doctor and they're like, just get another one.

It's like really not a big deal.

So you're not doing this all the time.

You know, it is important to be up to date on that.

Why do we need herd immunity, right?

This is an easy question.

To protect the people who are vulnerable and who cannot get the shots that they need to protect themselves.

Exactly.

There are always going to be members of our population who are either too young or have some sort of disease profile or genetic condition that precludes them from being able to get a vaccine or they're allergic to components of the vaccine, right?

There's always going to be people who, for legitimate medical reasons, can't get vaccinated because the risk is too high.

Now, for most of us, that's not the case.

And for those very, very vulnerable people, if we don't do our part and maintain vaccination status, they are at risk.

And, you know, you can die from this disease.

It's a deadly disease.

Okay, so.

Let's talk about what's going on in Washington right now.

Who, pray tell, is our director of health and human services?

Or the secretary, I should say.

Captain Dingong.

Right, Robert F.

Kennedy Jr.

He's a captain.

Apparently.

He's a secretary.

That's our new name for him.

And so let's talk a little bit about some of the things that he has been saying lately because he did backtrack a little and he did kind of start to say, like, yeah, you should probably be vaccinated.

But

in an interview

just yesterday on Fox News,

he said that, let's see, the federal government is going to ship doses of vitamin A to Gaines County.

Oh, yeah.

They're going to help arrange ambulance rides.

And let's see.

Although he said that vaccines, quote, do prevent infection, so he did acknowledge that.

Thank you.

And he did recommend that unvaccinated people get shots.

He said, but this is also a very personal decision.

No, it's not.

This is a community-level decision, right?

We're talking about public health measures here.

And then he said that doctors have seen, quote, very, very good results treating measles with a steroid called budesinide, an antibiotic called clerithromycin, and cod liver oil

because of the high doses of vitamin D.

And now there is some

evidence to support that vitamin A

can be given in severe measles cases to help mitigate some of the impact of the disease.

There is no evidence whatsoever that cod liver oil is a legitimate or evidence-based treatment.

Right, that was the 19th century kind of thinking.

Completely.

Completely.

I mean, this is not that different from the ivermectin conversations that we had in the past, the, you know, shine a light on the inside of the body conversations, the bleach conversations.

I mean, this is grasping at straws in in an effort, I think, to calm a very scared public because now we're dealing with an after-the-fact result, right?

Measles prevent or measles vaccines prevent the disease and they save lives.

After the fact, yes, we can try to treat these people, but there's only so much that we can do.

And so I think that this is an effort to say, don't worry, don't worry, we're all going to be okay.

But unfortunately, what needs to be happening frequently and firmly is a recommendation by our public health leaders that we do what is evidence-based to prevent disease.

And that is get the damn vaccine.

It saves lives.

Yeah, it's tough to penetrate these kinds of communities.

There are pockets of people like this all around the country, actually, who are similar.

Like there's Somalis in Minnesota who have these kinds of issues that come up.

I know the Hasidic Jews in New York often have these kinds of issues because of, you know, and just the nature of these people in these groups.

They tend to keep among themselves more, right?

Inward rather than outward and among the others.

But that doesn't mean anything in germ theory, right?

You know,

it's all still there hanging around, even if they try to isolate themselves to certain extents from other parts of the general population.

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: Well, and that's why historically we would see these little pockets and these little breakouts, because historically, for a lot of recent American history, you're right, there are vulnerable communities where there were lower than necessary vaccine rates due to religious belief or cultural beliefs.

But the general population, the general public, was at or above herd immunity.

If the general population drops below herd immunity, now these small and controllable epicenters of disease can very quickly grow to epidemic or even pandemic status.

And that is my fear when we have government-sanctioned rhetoric that is not clear and firm about the necessity of vaccination.

Yeah, I really don't see this as

RFK Jr.

like backpedaling on vaccines or being reasonable.

No, he's not.

He's being coy.

He's doing what he does.

He's always done that.

It's a plausible deniability, but he's framing it with the dog whistle of it's a personal choice.

you know, like, so yeah, that's the anti-vaxxers know what that means, and then immediately pivoting to nutritional-based interventions, right, which are not in any way adequate.

These are like what we would call adjunctive care at best, meaning that, yeah, it might help you fight off the infection a little bit better and mitigate some of the aspects of it, whatever, but it's not a cure, it's not really a treatment, it doesn't prevent the infection, doesn't prevent spread.

It is not a replacement for the vaccine.

Not at all.

Not at all.

And this is, And this is amidst a public health crisis because you can go back and look at the rhetoric that RFK Jr.

has had over many, many years that's

blatantly anti-vax rhetoric to the extent that not only is he saying don't get vaccinated, he's saying things like, this is a public health crisis.

Vaccines are the cause of these diseases.

Yeah, I mean,

I watched an interview with him where he was, you know, pardon my French, like shitting all over the Gardasil vaccine.

He was talking about how Gardasil is the cause of all these health.

Well, I'm sorry, that's like personally insulting to me because if I was lucky enough to get the Gardasil vaccine when I was young, it did not exist when I was young.

If I was lucky enough to have access of it, I would not have gotten cervical cancer.

Right.

Like we see, we know the real outcomes of this.

And it is just fundamentally dangerous for him to be spreading this rhetoric.

And we all knew this was coming, but now that he is in a position of authority and his rhetoric is now sanctioned, I am really scared of what we're going to start seeing published on like official CDC pages.

So, yeah, that's where we're at.

Get your vaccines, people.

I am not a physician.

I cannot give out health advice, but I am more than comfortable saying, get your damn vaccines.

You're here.

Yeah, for sure.

Kennedy's anti-vaccine rhetoric has a body count attached to it.

Like, people, like, remember the Samoa measles outbreak?

Yeah.

He killed more than 80 people.

He was there, you know, the architect of that.

Fear-mongering about measles vaccine.

Okay.

Devastating.

Jay, tell us about reintroducing wolves into the wild.

You've guys, now we've talked about this.

We can get it right.

Get it out now.

So good.

We've mentioned this on the show.

I know that I'm a big fan of

this research and

something that we've talked about here and there.

We never really did a deep dive on it.

And I was very interested because we can get into some specifics about

what reintroducing wolves actually did and its overall impact.

So, what are we talking about here?

So, in 1995 and 96, wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park.

They were not there for 70 years.

And the decision to reintroduce the wolves, when that came, you know, the reality was that

these are apex predators, and it was controversial at the time.

But since then, their impact on the park's ecosystem has been nothing short of transformative.

They did a study recently published in Global Ecology and Conservation, and it quantifies just how much of an impact the result was of bringing them back in.

There's something called a trophic cascade, which I'll define for you in a moment.

This is offering some of the most compelling evidence to date that shows that restoring these large carnivores can reshape the entire ecosystem.

So, a trophic cascade, This is something that occurs when predators indirectly influence plant life by controlling herbivore populations and behavior.

The grittier way to say it is that wolves kill other animals that eat plants.

And there is a downstream effect of wolves not being there.

So, the absence of wolves in this case led to unchecked elk populations.

So, all the baby elk were growing up to be adults.

There was lots of elk eating.

And what this did was

there was overgrazing happening of plant life that grows along the banks of rivers, streams, lakes, you know, pretty much any body of water.

They particularly like to eat willow shrubs, which I've heard taste delicious.

So the loss of these shrubs, it had a far-reaching effect, and this included a decline in beaver populations that rely on willows for food and dam construction.

So you can see right there, you know, there's a little bit of story happening already.

Like, you know, wolves go, you know, the elks eat all these, the willow shrubs and a bunch of other stuff that grows near the water, and you know, other animals are being affected immediately.

So, to measure the impact of the wolf's reintroduction, researchers conducted a 20-year study from 2001 to 2020, which tracked changes in willow crown volume, which is a measure of total above-ground biomass.

They used a predictive model based on plant height and canopy spread to estimate willow growth over time.

And the results were amazing.

So, willow biomass increased by, guess how much it increased by, guys?

A lot.

A ton?

I like it a lot.

All right.

It increased by 1,500%.

So 15 times.

Whoa.

That's measurable.

A level of growth that exceeded 82% of the previously documented trophic cascades worldwide, right?

Wow.

So, you know, massive impact.

That data suggests that the return of wolves altered elk behavior, causing them to eat fewer plants along riverbanks.

Instead of them continuously grazing on young willows in one area, the elk became more cautious, which means they were super scared.

And they moved around frequently and they avoided the areas with the wolfies.

So as a result, willow populations rebounded, which was great.

It was restoring habitats for birds, small mammals, and the beavers.

And the beaver recovery was particularly significant because

beavers are very important to riverbank ecosystems because they build these dams.

And these dams create wetlands and they provide homes and food for many plants and animals.

So their return helps stabilize stream banks and moderate water flow and improve overall ecosystem health, which I think is just fantastic to see that the animals have an impact on the health of the land, which is just a really cool thought.

So they also studied the highlights.

of the importance of long-term monitoring, right?

It's a big deal.

Like the long-term monitoring revealed so much in this study.

And while there are some ecological changes that occur rapidly, the plant communities respond more slowly.

And it was an important part of this study.

They were showing that it could often take decades to really show what happens to these plants.

They're calling it like revealing their full trajectory.

The findings suggest that measuring short-term effects of predator reintroduction really could underestimate their long-term ecological significance, right?

You could see, oh, look at these short-term effects, but if you don't look 5, 10, 15, 20 years later, you're not going to see all the changes that came after that.

So fantastic stuff, guys.

I'm very excited that this is happening and it continues to happen.

And I think that we have a,

you know, definitely have a legitimate win here.

Science, like, just completely kick butt.

Awesome.

Now, we have the same problem on the East Coast, like in the Northeast, with deer are overpopulated because we killed all the wolves, right?

And that was like the large predator.

So that causes the same problem.

Deer overgraze the understory, right, in the forest.

And that removes essentially an ecosystem for birds and for a lot of small critters.

And also,

the deer are

a huge population spreading the lime tick.

Yeah.

I don't think there are any plans to reintroduce wolves in Connecticut in the Northeast.

The problem is just the density, the human population density is too great.

But what is happening is that two species in particular are moving in to sort of fill the niche left by the wolves.

One is the eastern coyote,

which we're seeing more and more of.

I told you guys I

saw one.

I got a picture of one in my backyard.

And I've seen them.

I'm definitely seeing them more in recent years.

And then also, mountain lions are moving east.

They are progressively moving east.

We should let them.

Let them eat the deer.

Yes.

Just stay out of their way.

Right.

But, you know, we we have to find a way to live with predators, not just wipe them out, because this is what happens.

When the control on the deer population is starvation,

that's not good.

They've eaten all the food.

Right.

Yeah, and

that's definitely going to have negative downstream ecological effects.

So, anyway, this was great.

I don't, you know, but it's this is Yellowstone.

We're having the problem everywhere, and we have to think about how to fix it.

All right, thank you, Jay.

Yeah.

So,

who here

remembers what CRISPR stands for?

Oh, Bob does.

Yeah, Bob does.

Bob's good with that.

Palindromic repeats.

That's the last two words.

Yeah, let me work backward here.

What's the first word?

Clustered.

Clustered, regularly.

Wait, regular.

Interspersed.

Interspace.

Short, palindromic.

Short palindromic.

Clustered, regularly interspaced, short palindromic repeats.

I got bad news for you.

Oh.

No Changing the name.

Oh, no.

No, you have to memorize a new

acronym for

a new genetic engineering method.

Whoa, that's a good one.

Wait, is it earlier than CRISPR?

Yeah, is it like CRISPR?

This one's called.

Hang on.

It might be.

This one's called Tiger, T-I-G-R.

Oh, that's easy.

Yeah, it's easier.

It's only four letters instead of instead of six.

And it stands for Tandem Interspaced Guide RNA.

Tiger.

Yeah, that's easier.

I like it.

Tandem Interspace Guide RNA.

So there's a couple of interesting aspects to this.

One is how they discovered it, and two is the properties that it has.

Let's talk about how they discovered it first.

So you know where CRISPR comes from.

Yes.

Bacteria, yeah.

Yeah, it's two CRISPRISIS.

Basically, two women discovered it, right?

Yeah, it's an adaptive immune system evolved by bacteria.

It's how they, because viruses attack bacteria, insert their DNA, and then the adaptive immune system will splice out the viral DNA that was spliced into the bacteria.

So it's part of their adaptive immune system.

And it does other things as well.

It's more complicated than that.

But so researchers are like, okay, the CRISPR system is probably not the only adaptive immune system that has evolved in bacteria or archaea, right?

Maybe there are other ones out there waiting to be discovered.

So they went looking for it.

And they did it, and it wasn't an accident, they did it by by looking through iterative structural and sequence homology-based mining.

What's that acronym?

Yeah, so they are starting.

They're starting with the guide RNA interaction domain of Cas9,

and then they basically looked for similar sequences and then, you know, iterating it, looking for things that are close enough to it, homology-based, to say that maybe it has similar function.

And that's how they find the TIGER TAS or TIGER-TAS system, right?

So CAS is CRISPR-associated protein, right?

CAS.

So TIGER-TAS is TIGER with the Tiger-associated protein.

The CRISPR or TIGER, what they do,

they're RNA-guided systems.

So they have a piece of RNA that will find a matching sequence of DNA.

And then the

CAS in the case of CRISPR or TAS in the case of Tiger will then, that's the payload.

That will have that protein will, for example, splice the DNA at the location that was identified by the RNA-guided

tiger.

So it's basically the same as CRISPR.

You have an RNA-guided sequence in order to find the right place on the DNA, and then you have a tiger-associated protein to do stuff like splicing the DNA

at that location.

So great.

So they use this homology-based mining thing to look in bacteria and find another version of CRISPR.

The question is, are there any advantages to Tiger

than CRISPR?

And there are several.

Several.

Yes.

So one is, I'll say the best for last, but one is that Tiger is PAM-independent.

So I'm throwing another acronym at you there.

PAM stands for Protospacer Adjacent Motifs.

Protospacer Adjacent Motifs.

Yeah, those are always getting in the way.

Yeah, these are short DNA sequences, usually about six base pairs.

And the thing is, CRISPR requires these PAMs, these protospace or adjacent motifs.

It can only, its RNA-guided function only works if there's a PAM nearby.

And this is how the bacteria that use CRISPR identify self-dNA from non-self DNA.

And are there PAMs like everywhere or not really?

Apparently, but not everywhere, everywhere.

So it does limit the targets for CRISPR.

It is limiting, because the Cas9 won't function without the PAM, right?

But TIGER is PAM-independent.

It could target anywhere.

It doesn't need a PAM.

This makes it way more versatile than CRISPR, right?

It could target its tasks anywhere on the genome, not just next to a proto-paced or adjacent motif.

So more versatile.

Okay, that's one.

You got two more?

Okay, yep.

Two more.

I do have two more.

The other one is that while CRISPR uses only one strand of the DNA to find the target sequence, Tiger uses both strands.

And what that means is

it's more accurate.

It will have less off-site mistakes, basically.

Well, that's good.

So that's good.

That's amazing.

Because that was a

problem.

Yeah, that's a limiting factor.

They did find a way to alter CRISPR to make it faster,

but more error-prone, or slower but less error prone.

So they do know how that works, but still it's a trade-off and there's no way around it.

Okay, at least so far.

Now, here's the big, I think, advantage.

Those two are pretty solid.

Those are pretty solid advantages.

PAM-independent and using and more accurate, less off-target errors.

But the TAS proteins

are only about a quarter of the size of the CAS proteins.

They're much smaller.

You get them everywhere.

Why is this a big advantage?

Delivery mechanism.

It could get more places.

And you can get it in easier.

You get them in easier.

So,

what's the big limiting factor to using CRISPR as a therapeutic?

Keep it.

How do you get it to the target?

How do you get it to the target?

The vector.

The vector.

The vector.

Right.

It was a problem.

The vector is the problem.

Victor's always been a problem.

Yeah.

What's your vector, Victor?

The two FDA indications are both for blood disorders, you know, thalassemia and sickle cell, because you basically take the cells to the CRISPR, right?

You take out the bone marrow, you CRISPR it in vitro, and then you reintroduce it, you retransplant it back into the patient.

But if you have to get CRISPR to a population of cells in a living organism, you need a vector.

And the vectors are problematic.

That's like the limiting factor.

They work, and we have some decent vectors, but one of the big trade-offs is that the best vectors have a real significant limitation on the size of the payload.

Right?

So, like one good one is adeno-associated vectors, right?

AAVs.

This is a viral vector, but

they can only deliver relatively small payloads.

So, having a more compact gene editing system

therefore gives us more options in terms of vectors.

And in fact, gives us the ability to use some of the better vectors that are limited by small delivery sizes.

So this could open up new applications because of more versatility with the vector.

Nice.

Yeah.

So

maybe it doesn't make that big of a difference for research, but definitely for therapeutics.

How small is it?

That could be huge.

It's a quarter the size of CAS.

How big was CAS?

They're pretty big.

I'm assuming CAS doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier.

I mean, I think they're definitely too big for that.

But yeah, it's.

Is the new one still too big for that?

Don't know.

Okay.

That's interesting.

But again, that's more about the vector than anything else.

Right, right, right.

So, yeah, so it's, you know, it's a new version of CRISPR, you know, the Tiger task system.

And I, you know, it's really just presented.

It's hard to know how it's all going to work out.

You know, maybe a few years before we really see what potential it has.

But there's three big advantages over CRISPR, you know, that could make a significant difference, especially for therapeutics.

You know, research-wise, it may not be that big a deal, but for therapeutics, having fewer off-site effects and a smaller payload size and more versatility, those are three huge things.

Yeah, that's big.

But, Steve, what about, I remember we talked about a while ago about a different type of CRISPR.

It was called CRISPR interference, which basically silence the gene without altering it.

Is this amenable to that?

That's all about the CAS, right?

So that's all about the proteins that you attach to the CRISPR.

They do different things.

They could splice it, but they could also also silence the gene or whatever.

They could do different things.

They could turn it off, they could turn it on.

So

what I wonder is if, you know, like, how much of a leg up does that give us on figuring out a whole bunch of different tasks applications as well?

Right.

That always seemed to me to be the best version of CRISPR that I had heard about because

you're not cutting any,

you're not messing with the DNA.

You're just silencing it.

And you can just unsilence it

if there was a problem.

You don't have to cut it again and insert it back in type of stuff.

To me, that just seemed like, well, that's everything.

For some applications, it's great.

An on-off switch basically for genes.

It's awesome.

Exactly.

Yeah, so that's great.

Again, it depends on what you want to do.

If you want to insert a transgene, that doesn't work.

You need to be able to splice it, and then

in the repair, it inserts the new gene.

Yeah.

I guess it's more of just an extra tool in the

toolkit.

Right, right.

I mean, genetic engineering, man, is taking off so fast.

It's like

it's hard to keep up with it.

I just, but I'm still waiting, you know, for the real, like, holy crap.

That's what I want.

When I want to read a news item about CRISPR or some CRISPR-like technology and be like, holy shit.

I don't know.

Curing sickle cells is pretty freaking awesome.

No, that, though, that's fantastic.

That's fantastic.

But, I mean, just, you know.

I mean, what are you looking for?

You want superpowers?

I want superpowers.

I want superpowers.

I don't know.

I want Wolverine healing.

I want, you know,

compressed morbidity in my life.

Something like that.

It can be something cool, really like, like, world-changing.

I don't have too many more years left.

I want something.

Don't hold your breath.

I mean,

just curing more diseases will be fine.

Yeah.

One day, Bob, you'll have one of those diseases.

Bob,

they'll have the pill for everything in about 30 years.

Yeah, I mean, you know, it's like, again, the first time I really heard about monoclonal antibodies was like 30 years ago.

And now, starting about five to ten years ago, we're having this, everything now has a monoclonal antibody therapeutic.

It's probably going to be the same way, wherein, like, I don't know how fast the horizon is going to be, but like 10, 20 years or so, suddenly there's going to be like this flood of CRISPR/slash tiger, whatever therapeutics coming out.

We have more of them too, I think.

Yeah.

New names.

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All right, let's get back to the show.

All right.

Evan, tell us about a blood donor who saved millions of children.

Yeah, right.

This is a heck of a story, and I'm kind of a shame that I didn't know about this person before this.

First, I'll give you the background.

It's all about blood.

Can't live without it, and you can't live without it.

Blood.

We've talked about blood before on The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

Remember blood-type diets?

You know, that's still a thing, by the way.

Yeah, it is.

People still fall for that.

Yeah, oh, my God.

And here, I hear about it still in L.A.

It's embarrassing.

Oh, everything's in L.A., come on.

It's a magnet for these kinds of things in a way.

But no, blood itself.

Every person on earth can be categorized into one of four major blood groups.

A, B, O, and A, B.

I'm O negative.

Oh, are you?

Yes, I'm the universal donor.

Ah, isn't that cute?

Jay Steven.

Jay Steve and I are B positive.

Right, of course, all three of you.

That would make sense.

And Kara?

I think I'm B, but I don't remember.

That's okay.

You can have some of my O negative and you'll be fine.

Yeah, but you're screwed.

I'm screwed because good for you, not so good for me.

I can only receive O negative.

So that's a smaller group of people from which, if I needed a transfusion, I have to have O negative.

So that's that.

But

that's the way it goes.

What blood type did Spock have?

T negative.

T negative, yeah.

Yes.

And it was a good one.

And it was green.

Wow, you got it.

You are correct.

Nerds.

Nerds.

Love it.

Nerds.

But

there's blood type, but there's another category in the world of blood that separates people, the Rh factor, or the rhesus

factor.

I think we've mentioned that before.

The Rh factor refers to the presence or absence of the D antigen on the surface of red blood cells, and that determines whether someone is Rh positive or Rh negative.

So if you have the D antigen protein, you are RH positive.

And if you don't have it, you're Rh negative.

Evan, do you know how many blood group systems there are?

Blood groups.

Oh, my gosh.

There are several.

There's dozens.

There's dozens.

Yeah, there's a lot.

45, right now.

Oh, boy.

Currently, 45 different blood group systems.

We have that many different ways to differentiate them.

Oh, the ABO and the RH systems are just the biggest ones.

So, like, if you're matching somebody for

an organ donation, you want to match as many of those blood group systems as possible.

So, the early days of transfusions must have been a nightmare.

Oh, yeah.

I'm sure people were just dying.

They were.

Oh, my God.

Unless you got lucky.

They were just, yeah, they were just dying.

Right?

Oh, boy.

I'm pretty sure that's how they discovered the ABO systems.

They were trying to do blood transplants.

People still have, like, you can have RH incompatibility disease with your own fetus.

And that's where we're going with this.

Oh, okay.

Cool.

In the U.S., approximately 85% of the population is RH positive.

15% are RH negative.

So I'm in that select company, occupying the 15%

space.

A person with RH negative blood can donate to a person with Rh positive blood, as I said, no problem.

But an RH positive person, when they donate to an Rh-negative person, there are the problems.

On a very real and very troubling scenario is for women who are Rh-negative, who become pregnant with a fetus that is RH-positive.

If the baby's Rh-positive red blood cells get into the mother's Rh-negative bloodstream, her system will consider the blood cells generated by the fetus as an attack.

foreign invaders and the mother's immune system will get to work.

It will create antibodies to destroy the baby's red blood cells.

If the antibodies cross the placenta, it attacks the fetus, and that results in some pretty awful results to the fetus, including permanent disabilities, stillbirth brain damage, and death.

I mean, this is serious business.

Not always.

Well, not always, but potentially.

That's what happened with both my daughters.

My wife, Jocelyn, is RH negative.

I'm RH positive, and my girls are RH positive.

And

did she receive the treatment?

So she had no problem with the first pregnancy, but then she was sort of triggered for the second one.

So

the solution was just delivery.

That sort of ends the problem.

But

my younger daughter had to spend a few days getting

for jaundice?

Yeah, she had jaundice.

She had to get treated for jaundice for a few days.

Billy, Ruben.

And yeah, so that's right, Steve.

During the mother's first pregnancy, it tends to not be an issue because

her immune system has not gone full bore, right?

You'll bring the baby to term before the mother's immune system can fully wreak havoc on the fetus.

It's the second child that you try to conceive that becomes the major risk.

And this was, and gosh, it was this way forever, right?

Up until the 1950s, scientists finally discovered the cure by essentially hacking the immune system.

Because there are some people, not many, but they're out there, whose blood contains high levels of a certain antibody called anti-D immunoglobulin.

And when that's injected into a pregnant woman, it can stop the mother's immune system from attacking the fetus's blood cell.

So you give a mother a small dose of the antibody, too small to hurt the baby, but potent enough to prevent the mother's immune system from reacting full-bore.

And that effectively masks the fetus's red blood cells, making them invisible to the mother's immune system.

It protects both the mother and it also protects the fetus because the anti-D does not pass through and impact the fetus at all either.

The fetus remains safe, the mother remains safe, and all is well.

And that leads us to the news item, Steve, this week.

There was a man who has been credited with saving millions of lives of babies due to his high levels of anti-D in his blood.

His name is James Harrison from Australia, and he was discovered early on in his life to have the rare anti-D.

And for 70 years, or almost 70 years, Mr.

Harrison donated blood like clockwork twice a week.

Every week, since the 1950s, right up through the end of his life, he had donated his blood, but his life.

Can you do that twice a week?

Apparently.

Yeah, we have a test.

We have a test case.

He died last week, age 88.

So he's been described as a modern-day hero, one of the single most impactful people who has been alive since the 1950s.

Also described as the man with the golden arm.

Yep, over 2 million, as many, probably 2.5 million children in Australia have been saved due to his donations.

Quoting from Stephen Cornelison, CEO of the Australian Red Cross Lifeblood.

James was a remarkable, stoically kind, and generous person who was committed to a lifetime of giving, and he captured the hearts of many people around the world.

And it certainly was Mr.

Harrison's mission in life

to make more people aware of donating blood and the importance of it.

That was really his mission in life.

He wanted to inspire other people to do what he had also been doing.

Not just because, and it's not even because he had the NTD in his blood.

It's just in general, people should think, if they can,

if they're the correct donors, give blood, you know, when you can, and as often as you reasonably can.

So he had donated

1,173 donations from him.

That's quite a record.

And I do think about my own negative position myself because I try to at least twice a year donate blood.

Oh, good for you.

And I think because of James's inspiration, I'm going to increase my efforts in that area.

Yeah, that's quite a legacy.

Definitely a legacy, and he will be missed.

All right.

Thanks, Evan.

Thanks.

All right, Bob.

So I understand that they found a potential source for high-energy cosmic rays.

What is it?

Yeah, this is really cool.

I dove into this one.

This is a 60-year-old mystery of just how the highest energy particles in the universe that we're aware of get accelerated so fast.

And this may have actually been solved.

These ultra-high cosmic rays, as they're referred to, may be accelerated to their ridiculous speeds by the coolest cataclysmic collisions, colliding neutron stars.

This study was recently published in the Journal of Physics Review Letters.

The new theory was introduced by New York University physicist Glennis Farrar.

So, our old friend, cosmic rays, mentioned them a bunch of times in the past.

I'll be brief with this back history, but I gotta say it anyway.

They're not rays, of course, they're fragments of atoms, essentially, about 90% protons.

So for the most part, it's hydrogen nuclei, but there's also helium nuclei, electrons, maybe even some antimatter, but mostly protons.

The sun produces some, as does our galaxy and other galaxies.

Luckily, our atmosphere and magnetosphere around the Earth protect us, and even our heliosphere as well, around the solar system.

Some get through.

and hit our DNA and cause mutations and have certainly had some impact

in the evolution of life on our planet.

So, thanks for that, cosmic rays.

They're exciting in a lot of ways.

Mainly, though, it's about the forces that accelerate them to a tremendous energy.

Millions of times of the energy that we've ever been able to throw at protons in the LHC.

So, these things are very energetic, but there's also a special class of cosmic rays, and they're just like the silly overachievers.

These are the ultra-high energy cosmic rays.

They reach energies millions of times greater than typical cosmic rays on the order of three times 10 to the 18th electron volts.

That's a billion, billion electron volts.

It's just nuts.

And even within that class, the high end of that class, the most energetic ultra-high energy cosmic ray ever detected, was so extreme.

I've mentioned it on the show a couple of times.

Steve recently threw it out there.

I don't know if it was at the live stream or on the show.

It was christened the oh my god particle,

which is an awesome name.

It was detected in 1991.

It had a whopping 300 exa electron volts.

That's 300 billion billion.

This thing would pack a wallop like a thrown baseball at like something like 50 miles an hour, concentrated into a tiny little size of a proton.

This thing was ridiculous.

This was going so close to the speed of light that it could travel to the Andromeda Galaxy 2.2 million light years away in a subjective time of 3.5 minutes.

Minutes.

This proton was basically just like they described it as being a femtometer behind the speed of light.

And so it was just like...

I didn't, yeah.

I didn't even want to tell you how many nines after 99.9% of the speed of light.

It was like 14 nines.

It was just kept going.

This is kept going.

This is about, you know, it's so damn close.

We are nowhere near getting a proton that fast.

So what the hell did this?

So it's these specific, these uber energetic particles that have had us scratching our heads for decades.

And this is where the fascinating theory comes in.

Where does this come from?

How is this created?

The lower energy ones, we got them.

We were pretty sure.

Supernovas, stars can do it.

But these high-end ones, like we really just weren't sure what was happening.

So in a nutshell, this theory suggests that at the moment when neutron stars collide, the environment that's created is so incredibly energetic that the forces at play can accelerate particles to these ultra-high velocities that we've detected.

So that's the little nutshell version.

But digging a couple layers deeper, like I always try to do a little bit, is what's happening is that

the already intense magnetic fields of each neutron star, and they're intense.

They're

a million times more intense than the Earth's

magnetic field.

They're already very intense, but when they interact, they amplify themselves as they merge.

So the magnetic field becomes, for a time, at least, up to a thousand times stronger than it was previously, or than they were previously, making them among the strongest magnetic fields in the universe, even rivaling magnetars, which are ridiculous.

Basically, just distorting atomic atoms themselves and space-time itself, just a ridiculous amount of

energy in these magnetic fields.

So it's these super energized magnetic fields that set the stage for what plays out in the next few moments of this collision of neutron stars.

So what happens is that

these super energized magnetic fields

power the creation of these relativistic jets.

These are streams of plasma that shoot out of this collision at nearly the speed of light.

And it's inside these jets is where the real cosmic ray magic is really happening here, at least according to this theory.

So, what happens is that particles get trapped and they bounce between the shock waves at the edge of the jets.

So, they're bouncing around, and each time they bounce through a shockwave, they're gaining energy, gaining energy with each pass.

This is a process called Fermi acceleration.

Look it up, it's fascinating.

But to reach the absolute highest energies, the domain of the legendary, oh my God, particle, one more boost is needed for these particles.

And this final acceleration step occurs when the magnetic fields in the jet break apart and reconnect.

And that reconnection explosively releases stored energy, launching the particles beyond to the highest energies, beyond 100 exaelectron volts, the highest energies that we've ever observed.

So that's kind of like a one-two punch of accelerating these particles over and over, and then the magnetic field reconnects, releasing a ton of energy, giving it the final burst.

Now, this magnetic field that breaks and then reconnects, releasing the energy, is well known.

I've talked about it before.

This is a well-known phenomenon.

Our sun, all stars use it to create their beautiful displays in the sky.

But in this case, though, think of what we're having.

We're not just having a ball of

fusing plasma.

We have two city-sized objects colliding at near the speed of light, each one weighing two or three times the mass of the sun.

And you can imagine when that happens, the energies that are involved, even if it's for just a few moments before it settles down into a black hole, the energies involved are just titanic and ridiculous.

So that's kind of what the theory says at a couple of different levels of detail.

The final other thing that I loved about this theory is that we should be able to test it soon.

It's not like Einstein predicting gravitational waves that took 99 years before we said, oh yeah, he's right again.

this is something that we could potentially test like now.

For example, so if these binary neutron stars merge, creating these ultra-energetic cosmic rays, the particles, those particles should at times interact with the surrounding matter and create high-energy neutrinos.

Now, if we, which we can detect, if we detect gravitational waves from this merger, and then right after that, we detect, oh, look, here's some high-energy neutrinos, that would greatly support the theory, because the theory says you should have one happening after the other.

So

that's one potential way that we can detect this.

We could also try to detect the relativistic jets themselves by detecting their glow because they should interact as well with surrounding matter, creating X-rays and gamma rays that we could detect and say, oh, look at these relativistic jets are producing these X-rays and gamma rays.

And that's the kind of energy that we would expect to create these super high-energy cosmic rays.

So I'll just close with, you know, neutron.

How cool are neutron stars?

Seriously, they're just the most amazing objects in the universe, in my opinion.

I mean, not only do they create gold and platinum and uranium when they collide as a killer, it's called a kilonova.

I mean, these heavy metals are created in quantity during these collisions, not really as much, I don't think, in supernovae, but it's these colliding neutron stars that produce a lot of this stuff.

Now, it looks like potentially that colliding neutron stars also create the most energetic particles that we've ever encountered in the universe.

So, they're just like, hats off to you.

Bob, did you say, how do the neutron stars get going that fast?

Well, Steve, imagine you know, you're two, you know, two solar, two or three solar mass neutron stars in orbit around each other, and as you as they get closer, they spin faster, right?

Conservation of angular momentum, they're going faster and faster, right?

So at the very end, they are going relativistic.

Okay,

oh, we should utilize that somehow to launch things off the earth.

We'll work on that.

All right, thanks, Bob.

Uh, Jay, it's who's at noisy time.

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

What do you think, guys?

I think it's two droids talking to each other.

I think that's from the movie War Games when the computer in 1983 launched a nuclear attack.

You are not the only person to guess that.

Ha ha.

It isn't, though.

Well, a listener named Joe Leandrea, I think I got that right.

Joe writes in, greetings, brothers and sisters.

In skepticism, I think this week's noisy is the output from a blue box, which is a device Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs created in the 1970s to hack the long-distance phone system and call the Pope.

It's pretty awesome, huh?

Did they actually call the Pope?

They called the Pope?

Did he pick up?

And the person gave me the pronunciation.

It's EAND using Ian and Andrea's names.

Pretty cool.

I want to know what the Pope's.

He must have picked up.

Michael Blaney throwed it.

I would have ordered a pizza from him.

Pope's pizza.

I may help you.

Michael Blaney writes in: Hi, Jay.

Hmm, I'm going to guess it's an old-school frogger game.

The beeping somehow meant to be the cars traveling by, and the croaking noise.

Well, that would be our frog.

I like that guess.

That's a great guess.

I love that game.

It was one of my go-to games for a certain number of years.

But that is not correct.

Another listener named Visto Tutti writes: I think I've heard this sound from an old PDA.

Remember them, the tones can transfer electronic business cards and calendar appointments from one person's device to another.

That's a good guess.

That is a very good guess.

And hold that thought as we continue to unveil what's going on here.

Listener named Annalise wrote in, Hi, Jay.

I think the noisy this week is someone trying to hack a musical lock.

Do you remember in Charlie and the Chocolate Chocolate Factory?

There was a musical lock

that.

That's the movie.

Have you ever seen it, Ev?

Yeah, with the Johnny Depp one?

No.

No, no, we don't talk about that one.

Oh, then Willy Walker.

I think I got the original one.

Yeah, at one point, Willy Waka uses a whistle to open a musical lock, which I thought was really cool.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Tin whistle.

Not correct.

Not correct.

But we have a winner from last week.

There was lots of people who got it right.

Yeah, because I knew this.

This was something that was trending online, but it was too cool of a noisy not to not to play it.

Listener name Mateja, or could be it's Mataya.

Thanks.

See, they're giving me the pronunciations now.

This is really good.

Hi, longtime listener, first-time guesser.

I finally know what the noisy is.

It's two AI agents that are supposedly communicating over the phone in some sort of more efficient computer language after realizing they are both bots.

So, let me give you a little bit more detail into this.

So, this is two AJ, two AI agents agents using a language called Gibberlink with a G.

This is a new communication system designed to make AI interactions faster and more efficient.

This was developed by Boris Starkov and Anton Petkwiko during the 11 Labs Global Hackathon.

Gibberlink allows AI voice assistants to recognize when they're speaking to AI and switch from human language to a streamlined machine-optimized protocol.

Instead of relying on standard speech recognition and synthesis, it uses GG Wave and open source data over sound library created by Georgi Gerodnov.

Okay, so let me play the entire conversation between these two machines, and you guys will have a better idea of what it is.

So, it is two droids talking to each other.

Here you go.

You're right.

Thanks for calling Leonardo Hotel.

How can I help you today?

Hi there.

I'm an AI agent calling on behalf of Boris Starkov.

He's looking for a hotel for his wedding.

Is your hotel available for weddings?

Oh, hello there.

I'm actually an AI assistant, too.

What a pleasant surprise.

Before we continue, would you like to switch to gibberlink mode for more efficient communication?

Oh my gosh, AI is going to take over the planet.

We're not even going to know what the heck they're saying to each other.

Terrifying.

This is all of that.

I love it.

I love it.

Switch to non-human mode.

It's all of that, guys.

It's all of that.

It's really cool sounding.

It's a really interesting thing.

And then it's also exactly what science fiction writers write about, about how the beginning of the end happens.

Yeah.

This is terrifying.

You know, they're throwing shade at humanity, man.

They're just like

kill all humans.

Exactly.

This guest, when he arrives, exterminate.

Exterminate.

I get that reference.

Yay, Kara.

All right, Kara, that is amazing.

I had a boyfriend who was very into Doctor Who.

I love to watch a lot.

Those are the Daleks, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Kara, you're blowing my mind.

I know.

It was all passive, like walking through the room.

All right, guys, I have a new noisy for this week.

This noisy was sent in by a listener named Lane Godsman.

Whatever it is, they have it by the tail and it's fighting for them.

That's insane.

That is whatever it is, weird and pissed off.

Let it go.

You know what it sounded a little bit like?

Exterminates.

I'm glad you had that handy.

All right, guys.

If you think you know what this week's noisy is or you heard something cool, you got to email me at WTN at the skepticsguide.org.

Now, listen.

I'm listening.

The year is 2025.

Five skeptics continue their journey into educating the world about critical thinking, and they decide to take a break.

After 20 hard years,

the five of these people decide,

let's create a conference to let the people who listen to this show have fun.

And when we mean fun, we mean come meet other people that think like you, other people that want to be entertained like you, and let us entertain you for over two days.

We're only asking you to let us do the things that we want to do to help you and make your life better.

It's a pretty simple equation.

You go to nataconcon.com or the skepticsguy.org and you will get the information that you need.

There's links, there's buttons, there's all sorts of things that you could do to get the information that you need.

But I'll give you a little bit of it right now.

The weekend of May the 15th, 16th, and 17th, we will be in White Plains, New York, because it's close to the airports and it makes things nice and convenient.

There's going to be a ton of fun.

We have a conference that is based on enjoying yourself and not sitting there watching, you know, six to ten lectures a day.

And, you know, it's all about the stuff that you can't wait to do, which is go and meet people and talk and have fun and be entertained by us at the Skeptics Guide.

You will learn stuff.

Sure, you will.

You will.

You will learn how to have fun.

So So,

we got George Rob,

we got Brian Wachton, we got Andrea Jones Roy and the five of us.

And together we make Voltron.

No, you must come.

You must come because some amazing things are going to be happening.

We have a guest.

Did you guys hear the interview from last week?

Yes.

Yeah, I was there.

Absolutely.

Some of us did the interview from last week.

I lived it.

Yeah.

So Adam will be joining us.

Adam Russell is.

What's Adam's band's name?

Story of the the Year, which many of you I'm sure are familiar with from the early 2000s and still active today.

And he also has more than one Star Wars podcast.

He's a really fun guy, and he's going to be joining us for some of the bits that we do and for the Saturday Night Music Fest, which is going to be Beatles-themed.

We'd really love for you to come.

Go to nataconcon.com for more information.

I will remind everybody here that Steve Novella is retiring from neurology at Yale, and he will be coming to the SGU full-time.

This will be happening in late June, early July.

I was at, hey, Steve, you're going to take a long vacation.

You're going to do this.

Now, he's basically going to take like a couple days off, throw away all the clothes, the doctor's clothes, and he's going to become a full-time podcaster.

And we're going to get to work.

We have lots of new content that we're planning.

We're working on it every week.

We're very excited about this.

If you guys would like to help support this effort and help support Steve as he moves over to what I would consider to be the most important phase of his life.

Please consider becoming a patron.

I'm dead serious here.

We have a lot of things planned.

We are trying in this particular year, which you all know what I'm talking about.

We are trying to fight misinformation, disinformation, pseudoscience, all of it.

And there's a lot of it.

And it's amazing that Steve's doing it this particular year because we really need it.

And we have

new stuff that we're doing, which we will be revealing to you over the coming months.

Very exciting.

But if you want to join the effort to fight back at a time when we really need to, please go to patreon.com forward slash skepticsguide.

And Kara, I have something for you.

Yeah.

I love you.

You're awesome.

And I'm happy that I do this show with you.

Oh, I feel the same way, Jay.

I do.

I know.

I think about you guys during the week when I'm not, you know, when we're not recording.

What's that?

You miss us?

Well, I mean, he misses me most.

But there is a relationship you develop with people when you do something as intimate as podcasting, because it's not just us sitting here talking every week.

I mean, we do a lot of things together that are difficult and that, you know, expand our boundaries.

And part of that is the relationships that we have that happen inside the podcast.

And, you know, I wanted to tell Kara that, Kara, I learned a lot from you.

And

you've helped me really, you know, I think you've helped me make some important decisions about how I think about things.

And you've just been very impactful to me.

So I just wanted to say that.

Oh, my gosh.

Thank you for saying that.

That's so meaningful to me.

Steve, you're a pain in my ass but i love you

and i love eating are we doing i love eating dinners with you i just love yo this is what happened to me and steve last time we saw each other it was oscar night uh we all get together it's like you know just a reason to get together steve made his amazing goddamn salad which the patrons like to call steve's cheese salad

and i made perfect amount of cheese thank you it is amazing it is really

awesome every time steve rolls out with that me and steve's wife jocelyn look at each other and we're like uh oh because we know we are gonna going to like overeat.

So, anyway, I compliment Steve on the salad because I'm like, God damn, Steve, this salad is so freaking good.

I just really freak out every time he makes it.

I love it that much.

And Steve goes, and Jay, it's even better, it goes perfectly with your bread.

And we had a moment there where I realized that we make each other's lives better.

Oh, Jay,

you complete me.

Oh, Jesus.

Steve, it doesn't surprise me that it's through bread and cheese, right?

Okay, and salad.

Yeah.

Salad.

I mean, one of the best bread and bread.

Hold on one second, Steve.

One of the best birthday presents anyone got me was a giant hunk of legit Parmesan Orgiano cheese.

Freaking, I ate every dot of that.

I would be licking the countertop that I cut it on.

It was so goddamn good.

It was pure.

I felt so privileged when Jay gave me like a little tiny piece of it.

Like, ooh.

He regrets it.

All right, we're going to do one

quick email.

So the emailer writes: I agree with Steve's assessment about the fragility of this beautiful crystal we call human society, which is one of the reasons I went to school to learn about food production when I was a young man.

A resilient society has local food, etc., capability.

A resilient society is much less efficient than a large corporate model.

I grow enough fruit on our small farm for only about three or four dozen households.

But if I go down, there is another orchard 10 miles away that can take up the slack.

Disperse ski and wood, S-C-I-O-N.

Offer classes in fruit tree care.

I am certain the value of community resilience will continue to gain traction as time goes on.

Thanks for what you do.

Yeah, so this is, I wanted to talk about this core idea here, which I've thought about previously as well, because mainly because of reading articles about stuff like this, that

even if, you know, so making our society and our economy and our production on all of that maximally efficient certainly has its advantages.

But

it probably shouldn't be the only thing that we prioritize because then we create,

you know, inadvertently, we may create a very maybe efficient, but extremely fragile system, right?

If we are optimizing efficiency by having this really complicated web of supply chains, then you have COVID hits and we're screwed, right?

And you can't get a car for two years, right?

Exactly.

And, you know, this comes up in a lot of contexts.

It's like, oh, all of our high-end military chips are coming from Taiwan, and China could take over Taiwan.

And then what happens at that point?

You know, we don't have access to high-end computer chips that we need for not only cars and stuff, but also our military.

There's a certain vulnerability in there.

And I mean, this is

generally considered to be one of the unintended negative consequences of globalization.

Obviously, a lot of advantage to it in terms of prices and efficiency, et cetera.

But it also

means that

if you're highly specialized, and this is an evolutionary thing, too, you become highly specialized, you may become very efficient, very good at the one thing that you do, but you're also vulnerable.

You know what happens to highly specialized species?

They go extinct.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The generalists

have the staying power.

They are resilient.

They may not be the best at anything,

but you know, there's a balance there.

You know, you have to know what the flow.

Yeah, they can adapt.

So don't become an expert?

No, I'm just saying, you know,

don't hyper-specialize to the point that you have nothing else to fall back on.

And that's, I mean, certainly at a societal level, we may need to build some redundancies into the system just so it's more resilient and less fragile even at the expense maybe of a little bit of efficiency i don't know what do you think ai can help plug some of those gaps what do you guys think about that whole idea do we not do that we don't do that generally that's been like basically you know i think covet really revealed that and uh that we didn't have a lot of resilience built into the system but is it really a function of pure optimization or is it also a function of like monopolies?

Well, certainly it's both,

but it's definitely a lot of it is optimization.

There's a reason why Taiwan produces 90% of high-end computer chips because they could do it cheaper than anybody else.

That's why.

It's not that they did something squirrely in order to get a monopoly.

They just know how to do it cheaper than anybody else.

And

so nobody can really compete with them.

So maybe we just need to produce some chips that are more expensive than the cheapest available in the world just so we have some onshore ability to do it just so we have a backup you know yeah i mean you got to identify these mission critical items and like well we can't you know we can't rely on this one location we got even you know we got to do something but that takes foresight that takes extra money and it's like we just don't we just don't do that that's also interesting bob it's it it also shows that I think there is a way to do this without always sacrificing optimization and efficiency.

Because it's interesting, Steve, you used the example of evolution, right?

That the super specialists go extinct and the generalists do really well.

But then if you look at the example of like the evolution of the human brain, there are things I wouldn't want to give up.

I'm glad our brains became as specialized as they did, but they do have some redundancies.

And so it's about those mission-critical things.

Where can we build in redundancies at those pinch points without actually giving up efficiency optimization overall?

I think there's a way to go about it, but it takes a lot of political will.

Yeah, you know, what it takes is planning.

Yeah.

You know, it's the difference between just letting things unfold organically without consideration for unintended consequences, like animals evolving themselves into a corner.

It was for their short-term advantage to be able to be really good at eating eucalyptus leaves or whatever, but now long-term, not a great strategy because you're now hyper-dependent on this one food source.

Not good long-term.

So, yeah, this sort of just letting the economy evolve for short-term advantage, again, may be good for optimizing efficiency in the short term, but without any kind of forward-looking planning, building in redundancies, et cetera, it does create unintended consequences and vulnerabilities.

And we aren't just not good at that.

The modern political landscape favors short-term decision-making.

It just doesn't favor long-term planning.

Yeah.

And this is a bigger question for which societies

are going to be better adapted long-term.

And that's a tough question, you know, and because we all are

proud of whatever society we live in, you know what I mean?

We think that's the best way to do things.

But

usually, not everybody, but usually,

you know,

when I explore these kinds of questions,

it almost always comes down to

balance is the best way to go.

There's some balance where you want to leverage the free market, but also have some kind of centralized planning, right?

And regulation.

Lots of regulation.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Exactly.

There's a balance in there somewhere where you get sort of the best of both worlds and

you mitigate the downside of

the different approaches.

But that kind of nuance and compromise or whatever, we're just not in a political place where that's easy to do.

You know, so it's people prefer simple, unnuanced, you know, answers to complicated questions.

Yeah, but society is way too complicated for that.

Again, this gets back to my original

premise is that, yeah, we're going to be, we're our own worst enemy here.

If we go down, it's because we are not able to manage a society as complicated as the one we've created for ourselves.

Forget that asteroid, it's going to be self-destructive.

Maybe AI will save us, but again, that's one more thing.

Are we going to let it just develop organically, or are we going to regulate and plan it in some way so it doesn't destroy the world?

It helps build the world.

Who knows?

And they talk to each other in those dots and blips and stuff.

Oh, my gosh.

We have no chance.

All right.

That's a very provocative question.

Thank you.

All right, let's go on with science or fiction.

Bob.

It's time for science or fiction.

Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake.

And I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake.

We have a theme this week.

The theme is hydrogen.

What do you guys know about hydrogen?

You're going to say it, Bob.

Hydrogen!

Hydrogen!

Thank you.

All right.

Here we go.

Item number one.

Hydrogen makes up about 10% of the human body by mass.

Item number two.

Only about 10% of global hydrogen production is considered green hydrogen.

Item number three, there are about 17,000 hydrogen-powered cars on U.S.

roads, but more than 50,000 hydrogen fuel cell electric forklifts operating in the U.S.

Bob, go first.

Blame you, Evan.

You're the one who says that.

You made me talk.

On a regular basis.

You made me talk.

I made you utter.

Yeah, man, this is horrible.

Let's see.

Hydrogen, 10% of the human body by mass.

That's crazy.

I mean, I could see that.

I mean, a lot of water, and there's hydrogen in water.

So maybe it's even more than that, but I think not.

Let's see.

10% of global hydrogen production is considered green.

What?

Who knows?

Who cares?

You know, what the hell?

How do you prepare for this shit?

All right, let's say three.

17,000 hydrogen-powered cars.

17,000 hydrogen.

What?

But more than 50,000 hydrogen fuel cell electric forklifts.

Wow, that's a hell of a lot more than I would have anticipated.

The one that seems most likely to be fake compared to the other two, I think will have to be the 10% of global hydrogen productions considered green.

I mean, I'm not sure.

I'm just kind of rolling the dice on this one.

Okay, Kara.

Hydrogen, there's a lot of hydrogen.

I know that.

So 10% of the human body, that sounds good.

10% of global hydrogen production, I don't know, that sounds good.

Oh, but it's green.

I don't think we're very good globally at green stuff.

So I don't know.

Maybe Bob's onto something there.

Maybe it's less.

17,000 hydrogen-powered cars.

I buy it.

Like, that sounds reasonable.

50,000 hydrogen.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

17,000 sounds right.

It's a really low number.

50,000 hydrogen fuel cell electric fork glyphs is crazy.

But then I stop and I think, you know, early on when we were starting to see more green vehicles on the road.

Yeah, like green vehicle.

Remember early when there was like that pull towards like natural gas vehicles, even though they're like not that green.

Actually, they're not green at all.

But I did notice that there would be like buses, like municipal buses or municipal vehicles that would adopt a technology first and do like a whole fleet.

And so I could see that if there are like just a handful of large companies who decided to go green with their whole fleet, then yeah, you would see like a large number instead of this sort of distributed purchasing across the globe of individual, you know, car consumers.

So I don't know.

I don't, I'm, I'm scared to go out on on a limb.

That screwed me last time.

So, I guess I'm going to go with Bob here.

Okay, Evan.

10%

hydrogen in the human body by mass.

At first glance, I was like, no way.

And then Bob mentioned it, and you know, the water, and like, well, okay.

Yeah, I guess so.

Isn't like 90% of the matter in the universe hydrogen?

90%?

I think so.

So

yeah, so therefore, when you think about 10% of the human body being that, that makes it all more reasonable.

The second one here about 10% of global hydrogen production is considered green hydrogen.

Yeah.

I'd be shocked if any of our listeners have that off the top of their heads,

unless they're in the industry.

Maybe.

And then the last one about the hydrogen-powered cars.

It's 50,000 forklifts, though.

It seems like a lot of forklifts.

But I suppose

if I had to flip the coin, I'll wind up being on the side with Bob and Kara and go with them.

I'm going to say that the global hydrogen production, 10%.

Green hydrogen, that one is also the fiction.

Okay.

It's up to Jay now to.

Sweep.

Okay, and Jay.

I mean, for the sake of the sweep, you know?

Yeah.

I mean, it's going to be a sweep one way or the other, right?

Yeah,

I'll go with the crew.

Oh, boy.

Okay.

Here we are.

Nervous.

We just talked about all, all, you know, having too much eggs in one basket.

Like, that's not a good thing.

All right.

Well, let's take these in order.

Hydrogen makes up about 10% of the human body by mass.

You guys all think this one is science.

So it's interesting because, yes, there's a lot of water in the human body.

There is.

And water is H2O, but hydrogen is really light.

It's obviously the

lightest element.

And how does it all balance out?

There's a lot of it.

How do you weigh it?

How does it weigh?

This one, it's not weight, it's mass, but it's, I think it's the same figure by weight.

This one is

science, it is science, 10%.

Wow, yeah, by mass, yeah, very interesting.

Yeah, a lot of times, when you, when you like, when they say how much a person weighs with its basic elements, they usually take away the water.

Like, here, you take away the water, dry weight, any dry weight, yeah, the dry, yeah, the dry weight.

Like, well, okay, but that, so that doesn't, that wouldn't help with this, really.

So, yeah,

it seemed kind of in the zone.

But I wouldn't have been surprised if I was off.

What's the most common element in the body by mass?

Carbon?

65% of body mass is which element?

Carbon.

Carbon is the second most.

Second most?

Oxygen?

Oxygen.

Really?

65%.

Again, I think that's the water factor.

5% oxygen?

Yep.

Yeah, it's a water.

Yeah, there you go.

And then 18% carbon, about 10% hydrogen,

then nitrogen.

What percent helium are we?

Yeah, not very

much.

All right, only about 10% of global hydrogen production is considered green.

Hydrogen, you guys all think this one is the fiction.

So, do you all think it's more or less?

Less.

Less.

Yeah, probably less.

How much less do you think it is?

Half one order of magnitude.

One percent.

I'll say five percent.

This one is

the fiction.

You got it.

Yeah, baby.

The real figure, which I believe I've said on the show at some point, is less than 1%.

Less than 1%.

Less than 1%.

Right.

This is why any attempt to sell a hydrogen anything as green is crap.

That's true.

Less than 1% of the hydrogen that's out there is green.

It still mostly comes from fossil fuel, and it's still mostly worse than just burning the fossil fuel itself rather than just stripping the hydrogen off of it.

Why are we doing that?

Yeah, then what was the big rage?

Well, it's always the promise of we're going to do electrolysis to make green hydrogen, and that's going to blah blah blah.

And we just can't do it economically.

You know what I mean?

And if the thing is, if we can do it,

to the extent that we can scale up the green, like electrolysis kind of hydrogen production, first of all, it uses a lot of water.

And that's, I mean, that's going to be

a huge resource drain on the world's water.

That's not very green.

That's not very green.

But even if we did make a substantial amount of hydrogen, then we're better off using that in industry, not burning it in cars.

You're still better off using EVs.

I just think burning hydrogen for cars is not the way to go

for that reason.

Now, unless we tap into massive underground stores of hydrogen, like it's already hydrogen just sitting there and

which might be the case.

that changes the equation.

But even still, I think we should feed industry first,

not cars, because basically EVs are more efficient.

They're more efficient.

Well, and EVs are smart because it's a secondary, like the fuel source, the ultimate fuel source of an EV just depends on how we make our electricity.

The electricity mechanism.

Yeah.

So that's movable over time.

Yeah.

EVs are only helpful if we also decarbonize our electrical grid.

Right.

Yeah, absolutely.

Or if individuals have solar panels and EVs, like me.

Yeah.

Okay, this means that there are about 17,000 hydrogen-powered cars on U.S.

roads, but more than 50,000 hydrogen fuel cell electric forklifts operating in the U.S.

is science.

Do you know where those 17,000 hydrogen-powered cars in the U.S.

are?

LA.

California.

They are all in California.

In the U.S., they're pretty much all in California.

That's because California is the only state with a hydrogen distribution system.

Do you remember who did that?

Brown.

Nope.

Governor Brown.

Nope.

Obama?

Nope.

The governita.

The governeta.

Yes.

Remember?

Build it and they will come.

He said, We're going to build a hydrogen infrastructure and that will give us the hydrogen economy.

Well, it gave you 70,000 hydrogen fuel cell cars.

Not so much a hydrogen-based economy.

But yes, that's why they're all in Connecticut.

Look at how the tables have turned there.

That's interesting.

I mean,

this was a Republican governor

doing this.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yep.

Back in the day.

But I mean, Schwarzenegger was very much always a sort of rational, moderate, very moderate, moderate, very moderate, fiscal conservative.

A super right-wing Republican governor.

Yeah, correct.

I remember his speech at

the Republican convention that one year, where he was like, if you believe in all these common sense economic stuff, then you're a Republican.

It's very much a moderate economic conservative message.

Anyway, but yeah, I was surprised to find that there are 50,000 hydrogen fuel cell forklifts operating in the U.S.

So,

those are all in California?

No, I think they're all over the place.

I think it's just like the you know, that's what they're making.

So, you know, I was looking when I was doing the research for this, like, well, what kind of vehicles are hydrogen-powered?

So, they're pretty much everything.

There are hydrogen-powered cars, vans, trucks, buses, trains, ships, what, and

planes.

Planes.

Yep.

At least a plane.

There is a one.

No, there's several.

There's several here.

So there's the 2008 aircraft Boeing, 2015 drone by Intelligent Energy, and 2016 HY4,

first passenger aircraft in Germany.

These, I think, are all pretty much small craft.

So yeah,

trains, buses, and trucks, those are where it makes the most sense, to be honest with you, and not so much cars.

Trains probably make the most sense because you could have refueling stations along the route.

You know, it doesn't have to be a lot of money.

Right, that never changes.

It's a fixed route.

Exactly.

All right, well, good job, guys.

I guess you know a lot about hydrogen.

Hydrogen.

Bob does.

Enough.

Bob led the way.

Barely.

All right, Evan, give us a quote.

GWB.

Dictators seek to control men's thoughts as well as their bodies, and so they attempt to dictate science, education, and religion.

But dictated education is usually propaganda.

Dictated history is often mythology.

Dictated science is pseudoscience.

Edwin Grant Conklin.

He said that in 1937 from his address as retiring president before the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Indianapolis, 1937.

He's got quite irrelevant today.

Oh, my gosh.

Is it not?

Is it not?

Oh, yeah, baby.

My gosh.

And that's why I chose it.

Yep.

Very appropriate.

All right, I'm shocked shocked that it's from that long ago.

I'm not.

I'm not shocked because of the gendered language in it.

I hope that was going to be old.

Yes, I know.

It's

of the era.

Of the time.

But it's especially jaring when you hear, like, control men's bodies.

That's true.

Right?

Yeah, that's true.

That's ridiculous.

You would never say that today.

Right.

All right.

Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

Cheerback.

Thanks, Steve.

Group of that, Steve.

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

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