The Skeptics Guide #1018 - Jan 11 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, January 8th, 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.

Kara, how are you doing out there?

I hear your whole world is on fire.

Oh, my God.

Absolutely.

What's happening?

Yeah, it's rough in LA today.

I think I had a little too much confidence yesterday when I went to sleep, but I live in a part of LA.

I live in LA proper, the city and the county, in a neighborhood called Eagle Rock, which is northeast LA.

It's very, very close to Glendale, Pasadena.

There is a raging fire in Altadena, which is just north of Pasadena, called the Eaton Fire, named after Eaton, I think Eaton Canyon, which is one of my favorite hikes that I used to go on.

Probably won't be able to go on it again.

That fire is now at 10,600 acres, and there are EVAC borders in place for all of like Altadena, La Cañada, Flint Ridge, parts of Glendale and Pasadena, and a couple other places, Monrovia.

And then there are EVAC warnings in place.

I'd say the closest to me is about a mile away.

I'm in a weird position where the perimeter of the area is actually covered in warnings, but there's sort of a B line straight towards me that are orders.

And that's just because the wind is blowing right in my direction right now and has been all day.

And then to the southwest of me is the even larger Palisades fire, which right now is at 15,832 acres.

And it's burnt.

Both of these fires, by the way, are 0% controlled.

They're just burning uncontrollably right now.

And there's a lot of suppression on the ground, but there's not much air suppression right now because the smoke is too thick.

So they can't do what usually you would do during a wildfire, which is attack it from the sky.

And right now I have a lot of friends, a lot of people that I know that either have lost everything or are evacuated and just hoping that when they come home, they won't have lost everything.

The entire Pacific Palisades is on fire and so is a fair amount of Topanga.

Santa Monica has a lot of evac orders.

These are major population centers.

You know, these are places where people, hundreds of thousands of structures are probably going to be destroyed.

There are also small fires popping up, like the Woodley fire is 30 acres.

They may have actually put that one out.

They did.

They put that one out.

That's good.

The Hearst Fire is 700 acres just north in the San Fernando Valley, like Sylmar area.

So if you look at a map of LA right now and you lived in central LA, you would be surrounded on the northeast and the southwest by two massive infernos.

I took a video from my roof and the smoke is everywhere because it's coming from all directions.

Like outside right now, I have to wear an N95.

The inside of my house smells like a campfire.

Yeah.

My Dyson air purifiers are working overtime.

I had to replace the filter in one of them today because it, it said it was completely full.

And there's ash all over the ground.

And I'm not even in an evac zone.

The thing that I think we forget too about LA, I forget a lot of times, is like the Palisades is like an hour away.

Oh, it's really far away because that's how we measure.

We measure in LA, we measure by time and traffic, but it's only like 20 miles away.

Right.

You know, it's like LA is big.

It's really, really big, but these, these areas are not that far from from each other.

A lot of people have been asking me: like, is it, how is this happening?

It's not fire season.

But I think the thing to remember too is that in LA, fire season is different.

Yes, technically fire season is spring, summer, fall, but in LA, Santa Ana wind season is fall, winter, spring.

And so historically, in my experience living here, the worst fires that I saw were like October, November.

And yes, it's very odd that this is happening in January, but it's warm and it's dry and the wind.

I hate love love that some of the articles were using this language because I think it really sends it home.

Hurricane force winds.

Yeah.

That's why this fire

is spreading out of control.

Yeah.

Because these Santa Ana winds are gusting so hard and so fast.

Well, even though it's late in the year, now you know, it's the new year, but it's late in the season, I should say.

You guys still haven't had rain, so it's still dry.

No, yeah.

And we don't have to do that.

Basically, fire season has not ended yet.

It ends when it rains and it hasn't rained.

Yeah.

And it almost never rains enough here in LA to stay wet enough.

You know what I mean?

So we can, I like to say fire, yeah, fire season is when the Santa Annas are blowing.

If the wind is blowing, it's fire season here, unless it's actively raining.

But we knew it, right?

Like we, we all got the warnings and the chatter a couple of days ago, like things are going to look bad.

Start to think about this.

It could get bad.

It could get bad.

All the conditions are right.

Yeah.

I mean, there were no fires yet, but we knew it was going to be red flag warning.

It was absent very quickly.

Yeah, we knew it was going to be red flag warning, right?

We're used to that living in LA, like red flag days, get ready, you know, don't be stupid.

And there were some preemptive power cutoffs.

A lot of people in LA don't have power right now.

I don't know why I have power.

I've been very lucky.

The lights have flickered quite a bit, but I've been really lucky that I've maintained power.

But yeah, we knew the conditions were going to be right, but you never know what's going to happen.

I went to bed last night and the Eaton fire was 800 acres.

So I was like, okay, there's a big fire pretty close to me, but it's, it's, you know, that's not that big.

And the Palisades fire was about 3,000 acres when I went to bed last night.

I woke up this morning and the Eaton fire was about 3,000 acres.

And I was like, oh, God, it tripled overnight.

And the Palisades fire was holding.

Then the Palisades fire went up to 10,000.

Then the Eaton fire just exploded to 10,000 plus.

And now the Palisades fire is over 15,000.

You just never know.

You know, we keep an eye out.

I have my go bag packed, my truck ready to go, trying not to use water, trying to maintain, because that's the other thing that we have to remember.

These are wildfires happening in an urban center.

And urban water supplies are not built for wildfire suppression.

Right.

They're just not.

We're running out of water.

The hydrants can't handle it.

We've got people on, you know, boil recommendations because they don't have pressure or the water that's coming out isn't safe to drink.

So I'm just trying to do what I can, not use water, not clog up the road, stay put until I absolutely know that it's unsafe to stay put anymore.

Then I'll get out there in my truck and I'll drive to where I can breathe and

I'll camp.

You know, I won't take up a hotel room.

And I thank goodness I have a big stash of N95s, you know, from that other horrible thing that we all went through.

Yeah.

It's apocalyptic.

Save some of those for the bird flu.

Right, exactly.

So, yeah, I mean, people who are listening right now can't see it, but I did post on my Insta some videos from my roof and, you know, just some of the air quality.

When I woke up up this morning the aqi was 375.

i've never seen it that high in my life

like a bad day in la is like 80 90 maybe 110 but that's like unhealthy for sensitive groups right like 80 90 is just like okay the air quality is bad today it's pretty smoggy 375 is like very dangerous so fun times great open to the show huh well let's let's pivot to some some good news Did you guys hear that Bill Nye was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom?

I did.

That was wonderful.

We need to send him congratulations for the SGU.

Yeah, that's nice to see.

Biden presented it to him for obviously for his, because he is a beloved science communicator.

Yeah, an environmental actor.

Yes, which I, of course, totally agree with.

So it's good to see science educators be recognized.

Yeah, for sure.

I mean, Bill is out there relentlessly communicating science, teaching people about what reality is.

I mean, he's one of the very few that have broken through and have a global presence.

And we, you know, I couldn't encourage him more to keep going.

He always makes critical thinking a centerpiece of anything he's talking about.

He always incorporates it.

That's so important.

All right, well, I'm going to start us off with a quickie.

This is an interesting question.

So, most primates give birth to singletons, right?

To one child at a time.

Not just humans.

Most primates do that.

There are a few species of primates which tend to give birth to twins, some lemurs, marmosets, for example.

Now, it was believed that since most primates give birth to one child at a time, that that's the rule, and that the

marmosets and lemurs giving birth to twins or multiple births, that that was the exception, that they evolved that after

the common ancestor of primates.

It turns out, though, that it may be the opposite, that giving birth to twins was a feature of the primate common ancestor, and that most primates independently evolved, giving birth to only one child at a time.

You might be thinking, how do we know how many children our primate ancestors have had?

Right.

That's not something that typically fossilizes.

Right.

Unless we happen to catch

a pregnant

family

fossilized together, which is not typical.

We have no idea.

How do you guys think they did it?

How do they do it?

No idea.

So

they just surveyed, they gathered all the information about extant mammal species, mammal groups, and they can figure out from that how likely it is that the last common ancestor of all primates, whether they likely gave birth to single or multiple children.

So based upon that analysis, basically mapping it out, the changes in the mammalian line, they said, yeah, the common ancestor probably gave birth to twins or to multiple births, and then different lines within primates later developed, only giving single birth.

Now, why do you think that is?

So therefore, if it evolved multiple times independently, there probably was some evolutionary, some selective pressure for that.

So what do you think that is?

Mortality rate?

Yeah, but why, and you could also think about the marmosets and why they might be the exception.

You mean of having fewer?

Well, marmosets still have twins.

Oh, okay.

Most other primates will have a single birth.

But, like, I'm sorry, what are you asking about?

Why did evolving only one, giving birth to only one child at a time evolve independently so many times within primates?

Well,

resources, scarce resources.

You don't want to have to feed two kids.

Health of the bearer

of the mother.

Yeah, Evan's closer.

So the idea is

this is the thinking, because based upon the species that still give birth to multiple kids and those that give birth to one, it's basically head size, right?

The bigger primates with the bigger heads all give birth to one child at a time.

Only the tiny ones still give birth, like parmesan give birth to multiple offspring at a time.

Right, because how often when a human has triplets, are they able to, like, you couldn't do a home birth with triplets?

Like, that's a hospital emergency.

There's also a huge risk of being premature.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

I think the number one cause of premature birth is twins, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm a twin, and I was a month premature.

So

that tracks.

Well, that's anecdotal, but yeah, statistically, yes, that's true.

It is statistically true.

So that's the idea.

Yeah, so primates got bigger, we got big-brained, we started giving birth to only one child at a time, even though probably our common ancestor gave birth to twins or multiple offspring.

And that still persisted among the smaller primates, some of the smaller primates, because they didn't have the same issue, the same selective pressure of having to squeeze out a huge kid.

But I find, well, the thing I found most interesting about that is that they were able to figure out that our common ancestor probably typically had twins just from mapping out extant species.

All right, Jay, tell us about NASA's plans to return samples from Mars.

I don't quite remember when we talked about this.

It might have been over a year ago, but I do remember us discussing the idea that NASA is right now and has been collecting regolith samples on Mars, and they're putting those samples into tubes for later pickup.

Yeah, we did talk about this.

Yeah, like what does that mean?

So there was a plan, but it turned out it was too expensive.

So NASA announced that they made a significant revision to its Mars sample return program, which is also called MSR, right?

Mars sample return.

The goal in the revision was simply to reduce costs and to actually make the mission happen sooner.

You know, like the original thing was 2040 and they said, you know, we could we could do it cheaper and we could do it faster.

They think that they could do it in the 2030s now.

The original plan was estimated at 11 billion with a projected return date, like I said, somewhere in the 2040s.

This was eventually considered way too expensive and much too much time to wait for these samples.

So what they did was they went back to the drawing board and came up with a completely different strategy on how to do it.

So I think you can't really appreciate this unless you know what the original mission was.

And pay attention to how complicated this is.

So they had to create a retrieval lander.

That retrieval lander, and I mean this thing lands on the surface of Mars.

It had to be equipped with two small helicopters to go and collect the sealed sample tubes left by Perseverance.

Then it needed a robotic arm to load the sample tubes into a rocket on board the lander.

The lander was also going to carry the Mars Ascent Vehicle, MAV, which launches the samples up into you know, into orbit around the planet.

Now, that's a big deal right there.

So the revised plan is that they absolutely abandon the helicopters and the sample retrieval lander.

They're going to focus on two alternative approaches for the lander.

So one is a sky crane, which we, again, we've talked about this on the show before for other missions.

So what they would do is they would adapt a landing system similar to the Curiosity and Perseverance rover missions, where a rocket slows down the descent and the Sky Crane lowers the payload to the surface.

So the private sector collaboration here would be that they'd partner with commercial companies to design and develop a new lander, potentially using a

SpaceX Starship or a similar heavy lift vehicle.

And then the sample handling would be they want to investigate cleaning the sample tubes on the Martian surface to simplify the return process.

I'm not exactly sure what that means.

What do you guys think that means?

Well, as opposed to doing it within the vehicle that's picking it up, right?

To avoid, is it a contamination issue?

So they want to clean those tubes because there's going to be particles and dust and everything on the outside of the tubes and that could contaminate the return capsule or interfere with the analysis that's going to happen later when it is returned to Earth.

So those tubes actually need to be cleaned.

So the proposal would be to clean the tubes on the surface of Mars before they're shuttled back to Earth.

Now the power source here, they would switch from solar power to nuclear power, which would ensure reliability and resilience against any Martian dust storms, which I didn't realize how significant that was, you know, because the atmosphere on Mars, as Bob likes to say, is unbelievably thin.

You know, even a major, major, major like weather event on Mars is, it's just, there's just not a lot of atmosphere there to push.

It's like a thousandth the pressure.

Yeah.

No, it's a little bit less than 1%.

I don't think it's 0.1%.

Okay, so a hundredth.

It's less than 100th.

Less than 100%.

But it's very dry.

It's very order of magnitude.

But it's very dry, and there are dust storms that engulf the planet.

And every time you get a dust storm, it completely covers any solar panels.

Yeah, but it's not going to knock your ship over, preventing you from leaving.

Probably not.

Oh, here we go.

The Martian.

The only major mistake in the entire book.

So to summarize the new plan, they'd have a sky crane that would lower the lander.

They would have, instead of the helicopters to retrieve the samples, they would have a lander.

would be a direct mechanism from a lander, which seems a lot simpler, right, than these two helicopters.

I mean, it's cool.

It's cool that they'd have helicopters there, but it just makes more sense for it to be a vehicle, I guess, unless they're super far away.

I guess that's a big consideration.

So the original plan was solar powered.

Now the new one, we have nuclear power, $11 billion versus $6 to $7 billion.

Still sounds like a lot, but you know, saving $4 or $5 billion,

that's a very nice amount of money to save.

The timeline was 2040, with the new one being in the 2030s.

So, I mean, you know,

it could be up to 10 years time saving.

You know, even if it was five years, it's still a significant amount of time.

And then,

you know, there would be a, instead of minimal or no private sector role, there would be a significant role in the lander development, which is, it's always good to farm out, you know, to the private sector.

That is the way that things are going at NASA, big time.

So that's a priority for them.

So I think this is exciting.

I mean, first of all, to have the nerve to say we're going to re-engineer this.

You know, we already sussed this thing out and spent an enormous amount of time and energy figuring it out.

And it's good to know that they're in a position now where they could say, nope, we're not doing that.

Let's start over again.

We could do better.

And that's what they did here.

It's 2025.

I mean, you know, they could be retrieving these samples.

You know, five years sounds really short when you think about it, but it could be.

They could do it in five years, possibly.

I would say 10 years on the outside, but that would be amazing.

I mean, we get those samples.

You know, this is going to be our first real deep investigation of the regolith on Mars.

And man, what will they find?

Boy, you know, the evidence of the former life.

I know.

It could be.

Life that used to live there.

That'd be incredible.

That would be

amazing.

Sure.

We live in an exciting time for space travel.

We really do.

I think it's really cool.

I mean, thinking that we're going to have a spacecraft try to fly through

the ejecta from one of Jupiter's moons to see if there's life there.

You know, that is so cool.

Yeah.

All right.

Thanks, Jay.

Yep.

Bob, tell us about this unique microbiome.

Surely, researchers have studied in detail for the first time the microbial ecosystems that exist in mountaintop glacier-fed streams.

These microbiomes are not only different than they expected, they're also among Earth's most vulnerable ecosystems in the face of climate change.

Really, truly.

These two papers were published in Nature and Nature Microbiology.

A lot of this research was led by Tom Batten, professor in environmental science and the head of one of Switzerland's federal institutes of technology called the River Lab, which in turn is part of the Vanishing Glaciers project.

Now, these researchers decided to look into these ecosystems because these glacier-fed streams are obviously very important.

Think about it.

They're essentially water towers for downstream ecosystems.

This includes bringing fresh water to, from what I read, billions of people.

That's crazy.

Billions of people benefit from this water.

But it also acts as a buffer during seasonal variations, right?

Because if you're experiencing dry seasons, then this could help buffer, you know, buffer that water availability by still having them exist.

I mean, they're critically important, not only for water consumption, but also there's agriculture, hydropower, fisheries, et cetera, et cetera.

Glacier-fed streams also play important roles in carbon cycling and nutrient cycling and more.

So yeah, these are these are really critically important.

And they're also probably the most extreme freshwater ecosystems on the planet.

Think about it.

You've got this fresh water coming from glaciers that so it's near freezing.

They also have very low nutrient concentrations.

And in addition to that, there's also no sunlight during the winter.

And even when the summer comes around and the light will make a reappearance or be more, you know, or be stronger, there's also strong UV rays.

So good luck eking out an existence in one of these.

And that's why it's probably one of, they say it's one of the most extreme freshwater ecosystems on the planet.

But nobody had seriously looked at the microbial life that was part of that water.

You may be thinking of bacteria and you'd be right, but they've also found bacterial biofilms, archaea, fungi, algae, and viruses.

So it's just chock full of these microbes, these important microbes, and fascinating and complex.

They spent five years going to 170 different separate glacier-fed streams to collect and analyze these samples.

They focused, it seems, a lot on the abundant biofilms because they're just the most prevalent form of life there that they could focus on.

But so they focus on them to a certain extent more than the others.

But they found, when they look closely at everything, they found unique microbiomes, unlike anything that's been seen in other of these so-called cryosphere systems.

Now, the cryosphere, I love that word.

It's part of the Earth that are frozen, right?

Snow, ice sheets, icebergs, permafrost.

It's all over the planet.

And these specific microbiomes are different than all of the other ones.

They found typically almost half of the bacteria that they analyzed were specific to just the one mountain range that they were on, or in some cases, it was unique to that particular glacier-fed stream, just not found anywhere else on the planet.

Most interesting, though, that I found was that these microbes had a high degree of adaptability.

Researcher Greg McCaud said, It's fascinating to see the broad range of adaptive strategies that microorganisms have developed to survive in this extreme environment.

So, these organisms are best described, it seems, as metabolic generalists.

They could metabolize organic carbon, solar energy, minerals, and possibly they think even gases.

And all that's quite extraordinary.

Jay, that would be like you living off of not only meatballs, but you could also photosynthesize like plants, and you could also eat methane or hydrogen gas.

And if you're still hungry, you go in the backyard and eat some rocks.

That's kind of like what they can do.

And of course,

this level of adaptability is important, is especially important if you live where they live in such an ecosystem that's so sparsely filled with things that they can use.

Or there's lots of different things that they could use, but they had to evolve to take advantage of all the different types of sparse nutrition that was actually available to them.

So incredible.

Now, the very sad angle to this interesting discovery, of course, is that glacier shrinkage from climate change is putting these unique microbiomes at incredible risk.

Professor Batten said, having spent the past few years traveling across the Earth's mountaintops, I can say we're clearly losing a unique microbiome as glaciers shrink.

Let's get so mad at this stuff.

The United Nations has declared 2025 the International Year of Glaciers Preservation.

And this is obviously critically important for these scientists because saving glaciers not only saves all their innumerable

downstream benefits that I listed, but also, of course, saving these priceless biomes.

Batten has also called for a biobank to be created to protect these and other microbiomes in danger.

So even if we lose them in the natural world, which to be honest, to me seems almost inevitable at this point, I'm just throwing that down.

At least future scientists will be able to see what their genomes were like and who knows what they might be able to do using the biotechnology of the future.

I really hope we don't lose these and

the other impacts, the other benefits that we have from them, like, you know, like drinking water for billions of people.

I mean, that also, I can't even imagine what would happen if these glaciers went so, you know, disappeared to such a degree that these streams were no longer being fed primarily you know by them uh that's not the only place they get water but i mean it would be pretty bad i i would guess bob how genetically unique are they they have a lot of unique abilities but are they do they fit within known groups half of them the other half that they found were they described as more cosmopolitan so you would find them in a lot of different in you know in different places over the earth but these these were these mountaintops though where they they um they compared them to islands you know these are kind of like isolated, and so you can get some unusual, you know, unusual genomes that never evolved anywhere else.

And so, a good chunk of that was stuff that is only found on that, like I said, only on that mountain range, or even specifically in the

glacier-fed stream that they founded in.

Okay, Evan, are we going to build a tunnel from New York to London?

What a great question.

And a lot of factors go into that equation.

Perhaps 20 trillion of them.

How could you even do that?

I mean, let's go.

Let's put cost aside.

We'll get to cost.

How could you even do that?

Do you remember we talked years ago about point-to-point rocket travel?

Yeah.

Which could potentially allow for suborbital flights between, you know, like Los Angeles to Sydney, right?

Much faster than airplanes.

Do you remember the rocket?

I would specifically remember the rocket that

they were thinking of using for that point-to-point uh and it was i remember it was a beautiful rocket i forget the i forget the name of it but it was ah that would have been so cool can you imagine yeah i could have sworn it was uh elon and space'that were designing something like that.

I have no idea what happened to it, though.

There doesn't seem to be much news about that lately.

It was, this is almost 10 years ago that they started talking about that.

Maybe they're still more than that, dude.

I literally remember this being discussed probably in the late 1990s when I first heard about it.

This is before the concept itself.

Sure.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Because NASA wasn't going to do that.

It would have had to have been a private company that would have gone ahead and built something like that.

However, the news is not about how to get

from there in a rocket, but rather getting from New York to London,

traveling below the Atlantic Ocean in the form of a tunnel.

Oh my gosh.

Now, you remember the chunnel?

Yeah.

When that first opened in what, 1994, I think it was?

They have gone through the table.

That was like the engineering masterpiece

of the 1990s, perhaps.

I mean, this, but a tunnel from, say, New York to London, that would make the chunnel look like a high school science project by comparison.

Here's what you would have to do

if this project were to happen.

You would use trains, and they would be what?

The magnetic levitation trains, the mag levs, and they would be built, or

they would travel within these vacuum tubes, right?

Reaching speeds of up to 5,000 miles per hour.

And at that pace, you could get from New York to London or back, or London to New York in less than an hour, just under an hour, which would be freaking just incredible to think about.

I guess if you're going to dream, you dream big, right?

Three miles beneath the Atlantic Ocean was probably what they're thinking about, where this would have to be built.

Some were perhaps speculating you could do it on the ocean surface, but more of what I've read said, no, this would have to be submerged in that vacuum-sealed environment.

The magnetic levitation system reduces friction, maximizes energy efficiency for the trains as they travel within this closed system.

Now, are we talking beneath the seafloor or suspended within the ocean?

Well, at depths of up to three miles, it would be where parts of it would lie.

So, I mean, that is the seafloor, right?

For a good chunk of the Atlantic, I believe, is three miles.

I can't imagine there being too much variation in the elevation.

You wouldn't necessarily want to be going up and down.

You'd probably want to go pretty straight for as long as you possibly could, except for heading on down and heading on back up to the surface.

Yeah, so the cost, right?

$20 trillion is the estimated price tag for this.

And, you know, that's just the estimated price tag.

I mean, how many times do projects go over budget?

They always

go over budget.

Over $50 trillion.

$50 trillion, I said.

Sure.

Remember the big dig in Boston?

I mean, that alone.

I would say, yeah, it's a $4 billion project three years later.

Oh, it's $8 billion.

It's four years later.

$16 billion.

That thing kept doubling and doubling until it was like, oh, gosh.

In fact, they spent so much money on it, they had to sort of not really have an opening ceremony for it.

They couldn't afford it because they used to

build it.

Where would you get these materials capable of withstanding that level of severe ocean pressure?

I mean, you would have to come up with,

right?

I mean, just, and

you're building it in the face of seismic activity as well.

It's not a static concern.

Sure, you know, structural failures, the natural disasters, the earthquakes, how would the maintenance on this thing, the heat that it would generate?

They said these hypersonic speeds would generate so much heat, you would have to have advanced systems that don't even exist yet to dissipate that heat.

Well, heat from what, though?

Because there's no friction because it's an evacuated tube, partial vacuum.

So the heat from the

engines?

From what I read, it's just the speed of the trains themselves generate the heat, even without the friction.

It's got to be from the

pressure of the environment.

The magnetic field?

Yeah, it could be.

I didn't read that deeply into it, but

they said there's a heat problem with this and you would have to perhaps invent some new technology on how to deal with that alone.

So you're not only dealing with a project that is so immense in scale, but you're talking about having to introduce new technologies that have not even been invented yet.

Which makes this an even more massive project.

And what is this?

And then what?

The environmental impact on this?

What will this do to

sea life?

How do you know?

How could you forecast that, the damage

that would take?

And then, of course, the big factor,

what's the economic viability of something like this?

You know, it takes, I looked it up, your bridge, you know, like a bridge built in New York or wherever, you know, Baltimore or Tampa, wherever.

It takes decades to recoup the cost.

of building that one bridge, right?

Which in some cases is what, like a half mile or three quarters of a mile or something like that.

So how long before the companies or the governments combined would invest in this thing would be before they saw their money back?

That could be hundreds of years, hundreds of years.

And

how could companies exist with that sort of return on investment time?

Countries would have to do it.

Companies would do it.

It would be.

It would have to become a real cooperation of all the major countries on the planet to do this.

There's so many obstacles.

There definitely would be some benefits, though, in new technology, new patents, new new ideas that then you could then apply to other things and make money.

So that definitely would walk away with some interesting data to apply and industries potentially even to apply elsewhere.

But still, yeah,

like $40 trillion,

whatever they end up spending is kind of, yeah, it's ridiculous.

I mean, who could risk that?

It's all theory, obviously, now, and just for discussion.

It has been making rounds in the news lately.

It made also a couple of weeks ago it popped up, but lately it's been rediscussed.

I I don't know what the

convention happening, what is it, the technology convention that happens every January.

I don't know if that's part of this sort of looking into this again or

why it's coming up in the news again now.

But

it's interesting to think about.

I see this as pure science fiction, though,

for the most part, really.

And think about it.

Even if it...

If you were to undertake this, it would take so long, probably maybe a century or more to actually build.

What other technology

would otherwise come along in the century that would perhaps mitigate that?

Like you could

perhaps go back to the rocket technology.

Hypersonic airlines, first of all, would be far, far cheaper.

And we're approaching closer to that possibility every day.

That money could accelerate that whole process greatly right there.

I mean, geez.

I mean, they've got great designs now for

supersonic planes that don't produce the crazy sonic booms that limit their viability over going over land.

I mean, that seems like a no-brainer to just put the money in far less money into that.

I'm going to predict this is never going to happen.

I would agree.

I'll put my nickel down there.

The risks, the expense are not going to be worth it.

And I said, by the time...

We even just started this project, we could be having supersonic jets flying back and forth.

Right.

The advantage is not the advantage.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's not to say there aren't other tunnel, there are other tunnel projects that are in the works in Europe and other places.

They are very expensive, and they are going to use this technology, the magnetic levitation system technology to do it.

But, you know, I mean, we're just talking about, you know, maybe 10 miles as opposed to, you know.

But there are already maglev trains.

Ocean.

Yeah.

There are, yeah, China.

How fast did that one in China go?

It says here, 623 miles per hour.

That was the record speed achieved last year.

Wow.

With its T-flight system.

I don't think that's its operating speed, but yeah, that's.

And there's another one called the European Hyperloop Hub, which completed a test in 2024, and apparently it achieved some very fast speeds as well.

So

the top operating speed, I think, is 268 miles per hour, from what I'm reading, for the Shanghai Magwave.

That's what we're talking about, which is fast for a train.

And it's great for that kind of medium city to medium city travel.

You know, we're not far enough to need a plane, but still far.

But getting back to the channel, remember the point of the channel was that you could drive from mainland Europe to

Great Britain and back, right?

There's no point in

taking a train, you could be taking a plane to go across.

Right.

I don't think anyone's going to be driving their car from New York to London.

Not on any regular basis or for anything other than publicity.

You're right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, this is a 22nd century technology.

Yeah, maybe.

Yeah,

feasibility zero, I would say.

Yep.

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

All right, guys, did you hear about the Surgeon General's new advisory on alcohol?

I did.

I did as well.

I didn't even realize

that

cancer from alcohol was that much of a thing.

Yeah, so it's interesting.

So the quick story is that the Surgeon General, anybody guys know his name?

Oh, no.

Dr.

Something.

Yeah.

I should.

See Everett Cooper.

Vivek Murthy.

Vivek Murthy.

He's the current

surgeon general, yeah.

A little outdated there, I mean.

Released a new advisory

warning about the links between alcohol use and cancer.

So this is just an advisory.

And there are policy recommendations in here, but it doesn't have any legislative power.

Of course, that would require Congress to actually pass laws.

But they're advising a few things.

One is that warning labels on alcohol be updated to reflect the latest data on the risk of alcohol to certain types of cancer.

And that you know, we try to educate the public about these risks.

Most people don't really know.

And also just specifically to to lower the recommended amounts of what is considered safe alcohol.

So right now, the standard sort of public health recommendation is for moderate alcohol use is no more than one drink per day for women and two drinks per day for men, just based upon the evidence.

But they're saying that even at that level, even at that level, there's a significant increased risk of certain cancers, and therefore that we probably should be lowering that level of what is considered the recommended safe amounts of alcohol to drink.

So, let me throw some stats at you.

So, uh, it is estimated that

alcohol use causes is responsible for an excess 100,000 cases of cancer per year in the United States, leading to

100,000, leading to 20,000 excess cancer deaths.

That is greater than the 13,500 alcohol-associated traffic crash fatalities per year.

So, that's oh, oh, if you, oh,

you would have gotten me on a science restriction with that one, probably.

That would have been a good one.

Yeah, so we had a huge campaign to limit

drinking while driving, and yet that

was mad.

But of course, this is

the 13,500 now, after we successfully sort of reduced those numbers.

But still, deaths from cancer is a bigger problem.

I did liken this to the,

you know what year?

What year the U.S.

Surgeon General released their first report on the health risks of smoking and tobacco use?

The first year.

It must have been 1965.

Close, 64, 64.

And what do you think this, do you, how, what percentage of Americans smoked in 1964?

Adults?

70.

This is just all Americans.

They didn't say adults, the stats are looking at it.

Oh.

But I don't know if they count babies.

Probably not 70%.

30%?

50%?

42%.

Oh.

Can you imagine?

There was everywhere.

Did I tell you, I don't know if I said this on a show or not.

I mean, you know, my father was a smoker most of his life, two packs a day.

I mean, to the point where not only was there ashtrays kind of everywhere in the house, it was normal in the 70s, but he had a musical box, a dispenser, a cigarette dispenser.

You'd press a button, a tune would play, and

a bear would hand you a cigarette, almost like a cuckoo clock.

Oh my gosh.

That was the culture.

That was the smoking culture.

It was all like,

yeah, it's interesting that you mentioned that there was a smoking culture, basically.

It was accepted.

It was baked in.

Now the numbers down to what?

What do you think is the percentage of Americans who smoke?

Less than 10.

15%?

11.5.

Oh, well, that's great, guys.

That's great.

From 42% to 11.5%.

That is great.

So, the question is: are we seeing the beginning?

Of course, that took decades to bring that about, and it did require a cultural shift, which took place over time.

You remember the whole secondhand smoke thing?

That was a huge amount of pressure on

banning smoking in public places, etc.

So, anyway, you know, are we are we going to see this similar kind of cultural shift?

A lot of people are skeptical about that.

I mean, drinking is so baked into American culture, that's not going to be an easy change.

Um,

but it this could this could have an effect, you know, just raising public awareness.

So, a recent

Gallup poll found that only 45% of people

surveyed said that one to two drinks per day is bad for one's health.

43% made no difference.

8% actually said it was good for your health.

These numbers are improved from 2016, where they were 26% said it was bad, 51% said neutral, 19% said good.

That's a pretty rapid shift over the last eight, nine years.

Well, for years, Steve, weren't they saying like a drink or two a day is actually beneficial?

I mean, I remember hearing that for years.

A glass of wine, good for your heart, those kinds of things.

Yeah, that data's been largely.

Well,

it's not clear

if there is.

There's the red wine thing, but there's also just small amounts of alcohol may lower your cholesterol.

The recent stuff I've been reading say there are new zero benefits to alcohol zero.

That has not held up.

The part of the problem was, part of the problem was, very interesting aside, like if you ask people, do you drink or not,

and how much do you drink, you have the teetotalers who don't drink at all, and they have a slightly higher death rate than people who drink a little bit.

So it's like, oh, people who drinking a little bit is protective.

But you know what they found?

That the

non-drinking group included ex-drinkers who already wrecked their health by

basically ex-alcoholics.

If you remove them, the alleged benefits of drinking alcohol goes away.

So anyway, it's very hard to answer these questions because you can't do the experiment, right?

You cannot do an experiment where you force people to drink a certain amount or not to drink or whatever.

Same thing with like eating salt or with you know, smoking or whatever.

You just can't do that kind of experiment.

So, you have to do observational studies, which are correlational.

They can't establish in and of themselves cause and effect.

And there's a lot of confounding factors.

And so, it takes years, decades, to kind of build a case for this sort of thing.

And it's often disputed for a long period of time, et cetera, et et cetera.

But where we are now is that it's pretty clear that there is a linear relationship, you know, whereas the more you drink, the higher your risk for certain kinds of cancers.

Let's see, those include breast, colorectal, esophageal liver, mouth, pharynx, and larynx.

So some of those kind of make sense.

You know, the mouth, pharynx, larynx, esophagus, that's where the alcohol goes.

We know alcohol has negative effects on the liver.

The question is, like, how big is that risk and when does it kick in?

Right.

And that's where, you know, again, because this is all observational data, you can sort of argue about the exact number.

But the surgeon general is basing this new recommendations on systematic reviews of the literature showing that, yeah, we could say now

there is a significant increase in alcohol risk, even in cancer risk, even with these moderate levels of alcohol.

And goes, the lower the risk, the harder it is to prove, right?

The harder it is to statistically establish it.

The greater the risk, the easier it is to establish.

So it's always like, yeah, it's very clear at the high end.

It gets increasingly muddy as you go to more and more moderate levels of alcohol.

And then it's which

has to be the case.

It doesn't mean that the effects are less real.

It just means that they're harder to document statistically because they're smaller.

You need bigger numbers, etc.

Right.

They estimate in their release, they estimated that alcohol causes 3.5% of all cancers, which is interesting.

Wow.

So not insignificant.

3.5%.

That's not insignificant.

So,

how many premature deaths per year do you think there are from all causes, from alcohol, in the U.S.?

Oh,

the number of premature

people who die prematurely.

And alcohol was a significant contributing factor to their death.

That's number as an outcome number.

Oh, my God.

I mean,

above a million.

No, not in the U.S., it's 178,000 premature deaths per year, which is huge.

That's a huge number.

Worldwide, the figure is estimated to be 2.6 million, or 5% of deaths, which is a lot.

The average reduction in lifespan is 24 years.

So people who die early from alcohol lose 24 years of life on average.

That's a lot.

Like smoking.

It is.

Smoking does to people.

And now the causes include cancer, as we said, direct alcohol poisoning, car accidents, heart failure, and liver damage.

But also,

it's estimated that 40% of violent crimes in the U.S.

are committed while under the influence of alcohol, and 48% of homicides are committed while under the influence.

I mean, the negative basket fills up so much faster than anything in the positive basket.

It's not even close.

I mean, it's worse than all other recreational drugs combined.

Even at the peak of the opioid epidemic, it was much less than alcohol-related.

I think the U.S.

But, you know, I mean, a government has experimented before with trying to ban it on a legal system.

Yeah, so no one's calling for prohibition to come back, right?

I mean, that obviously was a failed social experiment.

It's not going to work.

And just as a public health measure, those kind of things generally don't work.

But just like we need more smoking labels,

we didn't really ban smoking.

We just said, okay, well, you can't advertise to kids.

And then we're going to ban it in places where people would be forced to be exposed to second-hand smoke, et cetera.

So you know, we can't think about ways, like even if it's just informational at first, think about ways to start to shift the culture a little bit.

Just making people aware.

It's like, yeah, you know, having one to two drinks a day is not safe, you know, and

you could factor that into your decision making about your habits in terms of how much you're drinking.

Remember synthahol?

Yeah, synthahol.

Just thinking about that.

Does alcohol work the same way that sort of cigarettes work, in which it changes brain chemistry and like is feeds the addiction in the same way.

It's absolutely

absolutely addictive.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's not addictive in the same mechanism as tobacco, as nicotine is, but it is addictive like cocaine and

opiates are addictive.

Can it be tweaked so that the addictive nature of it is taken away and you have a different product?

Or is that it goes with the territory you get?

It kind of goes with the territory.

So I guess that's the whole thing.

The mind-altering aspect of it is

why people do it.

Well, it's psychologically addictive, behaviorally addictive, but also it is

chemically addictive.

And

I don't know if it'd be possible to make an addiction, a non-addictive alcohol.

I doubt.

I don't even know if that's possible just in terms of

just biologically, but I've never even heard anybody even attempting to do that.

What we do have are drugs that

combine with alcohol to make you feel sick so that you won't drink.

How effective is that, Steve?

It's very effective.

Imagine if you took a drink and you get violently nauseated.

It sounds like a clockwork orange almost.

Without the ultraviolence thing.

It sounds like a great idea because all you need is willpower for three seconds

to take that drug and then bam.

Well, they could also give you long acting versions as well.

So this ant abuse is the brand name of the drug.

They're not saying

not to have occasional alcohol,

but just think about the overall.

So the two risky behaviors seem to be like regular daily alcohol use and binge drinking, you know, seem to be relatively equivalent.

Yeah, just moderate your alcohol use.

It's, it's like a, it's

a totally preventable cause of cancer and premature death, which is, of course, you know, what, where, where public health campaigns focus their efforts, right, on the totally preventable stuff.

But it is, it is remarkably hard to change people's behavior.

It does take a cultural shift.

You know, just putting out like PSAs doesn't cut it, doesn't have much of an effect.

Although, having said that, even small effects can have huge, absolute magnitude of effects, right?

In other words, even if it's like, oh, we reduced it by 5%, that doesn't sound like a lot, that's still a lot of people, right?

It's a lot of hospitalizations.

That's a lot of morbidity we're avoiding, a lot of premature deaths, a lot of healthcare costs, et cetera, et cetera, societal costs

in absolute numbers.

So, you know we take what we can get but um yeah it's really hard

it's hard to change people

tough one with alcohol yeah yeah more warning labels though i'm all in favor of that but yeah we did it with tobacco to a huge extent you know 42 to 11.5 percent is huge that's a huge change yeah but imagine if we use the extreme labeling requirements that that other countries use with cigarettes yeah I mean, like this, like showing like, you know,

cancerous lumps, you know, on the label, really,

you can't make them, you can't make cute packaging for them in so many countries.

The thing is, though, that that's the so-called scared straight approach, right?

It doesn't

really work.

It doesn't really work.

And we know that doesn't work.

It's all about your peers.

It's about your peers.

It's about the culture.

Again, you've got to change the culture.

Change the culture.

And also just like

there are limited bans, right?

There are bans in certain places, and it just becomes culturally unacceptable.

Like you'd like,

at the beginning of my career, you could smoke in the hospital.

It was disgusting.

It's crazy.

You think about that.

And now, like, you just can't do it.

Like, there is no, I know, there's zero smoking in the hospital.

That was a cultural change.

You know, in the, in the early 90s, we would still defer to a patient, you know.

And now it's like, nope, it's just not done.

Because it's a good movie.

I love this movie.

It's called The Serious Man.

It's one of the Cohen Brothers movies.

It's one of their

less well-known movies.

But the opening scene, the guy's in the doctor's office going through, it's 1969, and he's in a doctor's office, 1969.

He's going through a physical exam and then, you know, going getting, you know, pressed and looking in his eyes and his ears.

And then they're sitting at, he's at, the doctor's at the desk, and the patient's the other side of the desk, and they're talking to talk about, they're about to talk about what the doctor's found.

And the doctor lights up a cigarette and then offers the patient a cigarette.

It's like, oh my gosh, that really happened in the 1960s.

That's crazy.

Yeah, absolutely.

Your doctor offered you a cigarette.

I mean, it was hilarious and terrifying at the same time.

Yeah, that's all part of the cultural shift that took place.

All right, Jay, it's who's that noisy time?

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

You don't hear that every day.

Can I guess?

Sure.

Jiffy pop popcorn.

Yeah, somebody guessed.

Yeah, what's that guy?

Did you guys ever?

I never made it.

Did you ever have an experience making Jiffy pop popcorn?

Yeah, I did it.

Yeah, we did it.

Did it work?

It always seemed like the kind of thing.

I was like,

yeah, it works.

It did work.

Okay, because I always felt it was like a bit scammy.

Like, okay, it's going to pop 51% of the kernels or something.

No, I mean, it's not,

it's fine, and it didn't taste horrible, but it was by, you could just make homemade popcorn.

That blows away any of those pre-bads.

Yeah, the air at once, the air blowers, I guess, became the way to go.

That was the end of the Jiffy Pop era.

And another way to do it, too, which is if you take coconut oil and you do it in a pot on the stove, it has the best freaking flavor.

Anyway, so a listener named William Steele wrote in, said, hi, Jay, this episode's noisy, sounds a lot like when I would go looking for shells under the waves at the beach.

I'll guess this is an underwater recording of shells churning under the waves.

I thought that was a really awesome guess.

I could even hear.

what he was saying about that.

That's not correct, but thank you for sending that in.

Marsh Wildman took a guess.

He said, hi, Jay, listening to the January 4th, who's that noisy?

The bulk of it sounds like a WeFax, which is a weather fax radio transmission.

But there are some other unfamiliar artifacts mixed in.

Not sure what those may be, but I still think that this is a digital radio transmission of some sort.

That is incorrect.

Thank you for that guess.

Michael Stoisu.

This guy's name is S-T-O-I-C-E-S-C-U.

Good luck anybody pronouncing that guy's last name.

Stoisescu.

I don't know.

Stochescu.

Stochescu.

Michael Stochescu.

Okay, so this

Michael guesses, ice skating on the smooth, thin, clear ice of a lake.

I hear some of that in there as well, but that is not correct kathy taylor guessed is it a rainstick it is not a rain stick but there is a rainstick sound in there tinkling of a rainstick and matthew morrison guessed he says hey jay my daughter uh nev thinks that it sounds like a pot of water that's boiling i'm going to say it sounds like a big 50 cup coffee maker percolating not bad guesses guys unfortunately there was no winner nobody guessed it

yeah so let's go back and listen to it real quick after i I tell you what it is.

But

this is a cool one, guys.

This is the sound that wood makes when it's burning on the inside.

So this is the sound of what's happening inside the wood, not the sound of fire, the sound of what's happening inside the wood.

Now, what is actually happening is the heat is making the wood go from a solid to a gas.

And that gas is expanding the wood, right?

That's why you hear those pops and crackling noises.

the wood is fracturing.

It's funny because you know, we think

that's the fire, but that is not the sound of the fire.

That is the sound of the wood actually gassing and cracking open.

Yeah, the crackling, I think, is.

I always thought, yeah, that was like gas being released.

Yeah, I guess all of it is the sound of fire, but it isn't like the actual flames itself.

So, here it is again.

Hmm.

I think that's so cool.

A fireproof microphone.

They shoved it in there.

They did.

They had a microphone inside the wood.

It was inserted into it.

Crazy.

I have a new noisy for you guys this week that was sent in by a listener named Michael Habitschit.

H-A-P-I-C-H-T.

Habitshit.

Habitshit.

Michael.

His last name is a sneeze.

Habitshit.

So, anyway, Michael, I'm sorry.

Everyone that listens to the show just has to, you know, everyone has to uniformly understand that you give me some crazy ass foreign last name when I can't pronounce it.

Sorry.

Everyone change your name to Smith.

All right, guys.

And here's the noisy.

Here it is again.

Oh my gosh.

Lots of weird things going on in there.

That's not an easy one.

I'll tell you that much.

Not an easy noisy at all.

But if you think you know what it is or if you heard something cool, you can email me at wtn at the skepticsguide.org.

Steve, the number one way that people who listen to this show can help support the show is by becoming a patron of the Skeptics Guide.

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And there are other things in there that are offered to people at that level and higher.

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It really does help us produce the show.

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And, you know, in a world where things seem like they're going off the cliff.

Not speaking about specifics, but if you feel like rational thinking is important, Steve, what should people do?

They should become patrons.

You are so energetic, Steve.

It blows my mind.

So there's a few more things, guys.

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We have

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This is called Naticon.

It's Naticon 2025, and we are doing something really awesome at this conference.

We are going to have a Beatles sing-along on Saturday night.

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Yeah.

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Thank you.

That's notaconcon.com, right?

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Well, everyone, we're going to take a quick break from our show to talk about one of our sponsors this week, Quince.

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

All right, guys, we're going to do a couple of emails.

First one comes from Joshua Banta from Tyler, Texas, and he writes: I have a basic question.

If we already know bird flu is so dangerous and that it only takes one mutation to begin to spread person to person, then what are we waiting for?

Why not sequence the dominant strains in livestock and spin up mRNA vaccines or old-fashioned egg-based vaccines and start a mass vaccination program?

Sure, the vaccine may not be an exact match for the strains.

That does leap to humans, but it should be close.

Heck, the COVID vaccines we receive are never an exact match for the strains that are circulating.

They're always mutating and therefore are always different, even ever so slightly, from the vaccine targets at a point in time.

So why not head off this bird flu threat and nip it in the bud with vaccines?

Thanks for all the great work.

Best wishes for 2025.

That's a fair question, Joshua.

What do you guys have any immediate thoughts about?

Money.

Money.

Yeah, it's a bit one thing is cost.

It would cost a lot of money to roll out a vaccine, to, first of all, develop develop an H5N1 vaccine even from

and mass produce it, which we're not doing right now.

There isn't one we're going to roll that.

We do have like a national stockpile of vaccines, not enough to go around.

That would be just for people at high risk of exposure, right?

Hospital workers.

Farm workers, whatever, wherever the spillovers are happening, whoever's going to be at high risk of contracting it, that's what the vaccines are for.

But even now, what they're doing is they're using other methods, right?

So it's not just

should we vaccinate or not?

It's like, what are the methods we have of limiting exposure, limiting infections?

And of all the options, what are the best ones?

So a mass vaccination program right now isn't cost-effective.

It's not really necessary.

So the other thing is, why do it prematurely

when that would that means it's not not that it's not an exact match it'd be a worse match and right so the and the effectiveness is pretty much related to how close the match is.

So, and even with the regular annual flu vaccine, if we're a little bit off, you know, on predicting the strain, the effectiveness could be 20, 30%.

You know, this

right.

Imagine if we roll out this mass vaccination program and it's 5% effective or whatever.

That's, you know, it's just not, it's not effective.

It's not an effective method.

There is a related question of why aren't we vaccinating birds, you know, chickens, turkeys, or even cows to protect them.

Now, some countries do vaccinate.

I thought they did.

They do vaccinate them.

We are not doing it.

Basically, you have some countries only vaccinate.

Some countries, like Japan, not very effective, actually.

Some countries like the U.S.

only use other methods, what they call the, I think it's called the stomp method, where you basically kill every animal that's exposed.

You just do a mass culling, and then you put them on lockdown, like try to limit spread so that's the method that we use and then there's other countries like european countries that do both they do some vaccination and they do some mass cullings and other methods of limiting exposure you know so whether or not we should be adding some vaccinations to the mix is is a difficult question uh and again expense is a huge factor it has to be worth it you know it's just easier just to kill everything everything that gets infected uh then that's what they're going to do.

But that does raise ethical questions about

the culling.

And if we get a big outbreak in cattle,

it becomes less feasible to just do mass cullings.

So this is an evolving strategy, right?

You know,

vaccines are being used.

They're going to probably be increasingly used in animals, as well as other methods of trying to limit the spread.

When and if it spills over into humans,

then again, we'll have the existing vaccines as sort of a first line of defense for high-risk people.

There'll be whatever other methods are necessary to try to limit exposure, limit the spread.

And if it starts to get to like outbreak level, epidemic level, that's when we could make a vaccine to that strain, right?

The question is, how quickly will we be able to do that?

You know, it could take months, you know, a few months to

even though we have proven flu vaccines, you have to make it to the strain that's that's out now.

And that takes time.

Oh, when the first case, when the first human does get it, I mean, is it going to be treated almost like someone with Ebola, in which they go and they isolate that person and try to

take every, you know, go through all those precautions.

You know, I've seen footage of that.

It's quite an undertaking.

Yeah.

All right.

One more email.

This one comes from Joe Streckert.

And he writes, on a recent segment about Bigfoot, I've been divided people who perpetuate the existence of cryptids into two groups, true believers and people who profit off of the myth.

But I'm hesitant to think in such stark, binary terms.

Here in Portland, Bigfoot is very much a mascot or symbol of the Pacific Northwest

regional identity.

I don't believe he's literally real, and I don't know anyone who does, but the forest ape shows up again and again in local art on t-shirts and as a Portland Trailblazers mascot.

My more outdoorsy friends will describe less traveled trails as camping areas as Bigfoot country, even though they don't actually believe in Bigfoot at all.

He's a symbol of the wilderness, but not a literal inhabitant of it.

What are your thoughts on cryptids as local mascots and regional symbols by people who don't believe they're real?

Do you think that practice is wholly negative, or is it okay for a guy in a Bigfoot costume to perform during halftime during Blazer games?

Big fan of the show.

You're far and away, my favorite podcast.

Well, thank you, Joe.

Thank you.

Awesome.

Thanks.

Yeah, that's a good.

What do you guys think about that?

Is like a cultural icon

making a cryptid into a cultural icon, a regional icon?

How do you feel about that?

Is that okay?

You think it contributes to belief in pseudoscience or is it benign?

I think it contributes to belief in pseudoscience.

I do.

We've seen it in not just, you know, things like Bigfoot, you know, with Loch Ness Monster, obviously.

There's whole industries entirely built around that, and certainly plenty of people who definitely believe in that

as well.

Certainly look what UFOs and aliens have done to our culture and Western many other cultures around the planet and how far that's kind of gotten out of control.

I don't know that you can necessarily game these things and know exactly the extent, but I don't think there's much in the way of a positive

aspect to it.

I think it only hurts.

Well, one angle I could see is that if you make that image part of your brand, make it funny,

make fun of it, make it look silly,

I think that could turn off people into actually believing it by making it seem like we know this is ridiculous, you know, making that part of the brand might help a certain amount.

I kind of agree with Bob that I do think it could,

if it's like this is clearly a mythical creature, not a real creature, and nobody takes it seriously,

I don't think it would necessarily contribute to people really believing in it.

So I don't know if we have a lot of examples out there, but maybe leprechauns.

Leprechauns.

That's what I thought as well.

Maybe unicorn.

Yeah, so like

Ireland sort of has leprechauns as some kind of unofficial mascot sort of thing, but nobody believes in leprechauns, right?

Unless I'm wrong about that.

There are not throngs of people or

hunting for actual leprechauns.

It's recognized as, or dragons.

Like nobody thinks dragons really exist.

Correct.

Dragons,

but dragons are an icon, especially in like Chinese culture.

Or, as Bob said, unicorns.

Nobody thinks unicorns exist.

So

if Bigfoot evolves into that kind of role where it's like unicorns and leprechauns, then that's fine.

That actually might be a good thing.

Yeah, you know, it could be.

Yeah, but unfortunately, we have forces working against in the other direction,

trying

to perpetuate it.

And frankly, you know, because there are people who are trying to profit off of this.

Television shows.

I mean, that's where I go to.

Yeah, I agree.

It's in the gray zone now, or maybe it's transitional.

It's also like Loch Ness, the Nessie in Scotland, right?

I mean, when we were there, and I think the locals, they think it's a joke, but it's like, it's a joke, but it brings in the tourist dollars.

So play along, wink, wink, nod, nod.

Yeah, let's go see Nessie.

You know, come on.

It's like, nobody really thinks it's real.

I remember our tour tour guide was so happy when we said, we have no interest in seeing Loch Ness.

We want to see the pretty one.

And she was like, oh, thank goodness.

Every shop is a ghost to Loch Ness.

Right.

You know, see Nessie.

Right.

And it's like, yeah, if you live in Roswell, you're going to have a UFO themed whatever diner because that's, you're in Roswell.

You know, I don't know.

I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if most people who live in Roswell think that there was actually a crashed saucer there.

So there's a whole spectrum, you know, from,

you know, I think you can be a cultural icon without people really believing in it.

You can do both.

People can do the sort of the winking, oh yeah, you know, we're a Bigfoot country out here.

Yeah.

Just try to goose tourism or whatever.

Or just because it's a fun mascot.

I agree.

But we don't need the sheriff's office over offering thousand uh you know, saying thousand dollar fines for injuring Bigfo Bigfoot.

I don't think that helps.

Well, again, I think that you know, you you said that that rule is there so people won't shoot fellow hunters who happen to be burly, you know.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah.

bearded woodsmen.

They don't

know.

You think so?

I mean,

there's a big difference between a burly person and a you know, a giant hair-covered creature.

Jay, well, people with guns and they're hunting.

Yeah, if you're hunting in the woods, you see a shadowy shape, you know, rustling the bushes.

Absolutely, people will shoot hunters thinking that it's Bigfoot.

I would wear orange if I go out anywhere like that.

That's why you have to wear hunter orange, yeah.

All right, thank you for those emails, guys.

it's time for science or fiction

it's time for science or fiction

each week i come up with three science news items or facts two real and one fake and i challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake except this week i have a theme and i have four items haven't done that in a while oh

okay.

Yeah, I don't think we had a in 2024.

I don't think we had a four item.

But these are quick.

That's why I did four.

So the theme is the Consumer Electronics Show 2025.

That's what I was trying to think of when I was doing my segment.

Yeah, the Consumer Electronics Show.

Is that going on now?

It is, yeah.

Crap.

Missed it.

So these are four products that were showed at CBS 2025.

Although one of them wasn't.

Oh, gosh.

See if you can tell which one is the fake.

You guys ready?

Yeah.

Yes.

All right.

Item number one, the EcoFlow is a solar-powered hat capable of charging two devices at once.

Number two, the Spicer is an automatic spice dispenser that holds up to six spices in proprietary sealed, unrefillable capsules.

Item number three, a Japanese manufacturer introduced an electric spoon that it claims will make food taste more salty and savory.

And item number four, Swipet is about the size and shape of a toaster into which you place a smartphone to swap out its internal battery for a fresh one.

That makes no sense.

The phone one.

So, Steve,

is this a specific type of phone that has hot swappable batteries?

Or is it meant like for an iPhone or

Pixel or something?

Sounds like Bob's going first, by the way.

Or mainstream phone.

Bob, why don't you go first?

Yeah, fuck.

Answer my question.

Answer me.

You get the information you have.

Oh, yeah.

So now, so when I ask questions, I get the information I have.

For this one, just because of the nature of this science or fiction.

No questions.

So who's going first?

Bobby's first.

Bob is first.

It's me.

All right.

Well,

the thing is, this is perfect for this because there's so many crazy things out there that they would absolutely try to sell.

Like, for example, the solar-powered hat.

Now, there's no way that you're going to be doing any significant charging of your phone with a hat.

I mean, you probably, you know, have to do hours just to get a few percentage points, something like that.

Solar-powered hat.

But if you're going to,

they do make solar-powered.

console solar-powered devices devices that you could hook your phone to to charge it and in the apocalypse it would be awesome.

And if you're walking around on the beach all day, yeah, you might as well trickle charge if you can.

So that's, yeah, it's kind of okay.

Kind of makes sense that somebody would do that.

The spice dispenser makes a that seems like a great item.

I mean, you can't, so it's if I'm reading right, it's meant that you can't mess with it in terms of like replacing a spice with another spice.

But um, but yeah, I mean, think of all the spices you have in your cabinet.

You probably use three or four 90% of the time.

So that'd be great just for the ones that you would use all the time.

So that sounds pretty good to me from reading this, right?

Let me see.

Sometimes I miss a word that's just like critical.

The spice er.

All right.

Let's see.

The electric spoon.

to make food taste more salty and savory.

That's ridiculous.

But let me think about it, though.

I mean, could you could you electric spoon I mean a little so what you get a little shock could that but is that their angle that they're doing a little shock which of course would be horrible

So what other angle could they use besides just purely like like you know putting a nine volt to your tongue?

I don't know.

Could there be some subtle effect that could actually impact taste?

Remember those pills that you would eat that would basically change, literally just change flavors for various foods for periods of time.

Block your butter receptors, right?

Yeah, yeah, change flavor.

It just, yeah, it stops you from tasting lockers.

Yeah, but I mean,

it's from a plant.

Yeah, the effect, though, was that things tasted differently.

Yeah, they made it in a plant.

That doesn't sound likely at all, but I'm trying to think of what could be a workaround.

All right, so let's go with this last one: the toaster and the stupid phone.

That's ridiculous.

But you know, I think Steve, I don't think Steve, I think he's counting on this one

because it just sounds utterly ridiculous.

Unless it was, no, that's just so stupid.

It's too stupid to be fake.

Let's just put it that way.

So I'm going to go with,

I'll go with the spoon.

Okay.

Okay.

The Echo Flow, the solar-powered hat.

They say here it's capable of charging two devices at once.

I mean, I see, I think that one is real because there's no mention of how long it would take to charge those devices.

You know, I suppose if you're walking out on a sunny day day,

you could charge two devices.

It doesn't mean charge to full either.

Yeah, I'd say sure.

Someone came up with that.

The spicer.

The spicer is an automatic spice dispenser that holds up to six spices and it's proprietarily sealed.

Automatic spice.

So, what do you hold this over your plate and press a button and it puts out what it thinks it needs to put out, I guess, Steve?

Yeah, huh?

I said, Yeah.

Right, Steve?

I mean, sure, that doesn't, that's not hard.

You know, I don't know.

I shouldn't say it's not hard.

I mean, the mechanism doesn't seem that hard.

If there's AI involved in it, which I'm thinking it is,

really?

Everything.

Evan, come on.

Your shoelaces are going to have AI at some point.

Even the aglets.

The third one, a Japanese manufacturer, introduced an electric spoon.

They claim that it will make food taste more salty and savory.

That sounds very bizarre.

And also, an electric spoon doesn't sound that comfortable, if you know what I mean.

Like, I don't want electricity happening in my mouth.

So, that one, that one, okay.

I'll put that one on a sub list here as maybe.

Let me go to the last one, the swip it, about the size and shape of a toaster, into which you place a smartphone to swap out its internal battery for a fresh one.

I mean, unless they're talking about a proprietary phone that lets you swap out the internal battery, there is absolutely no way that that's happening to an iPhone.

I can't imagine that happening to a Google phone either.

There is no swapping of the internal battery for a fresh one.

So I don't know what the hell this is about.

Yeah, I don't think that one is it.

I think that one is the fiction because you can't swap out universally swap out batteries and cell phones.

I mean, there's a lot more to this than we're hearing.

And if anything, I would think that there's another mechanism involved that we don't know about.

Okay, and Evan.

Well, Jay, I'm inclined a bit to agree with you on the Swippet.

You're right.

It's not like take whatever phone and throw it in there and we'll swap the battery out.

Obviously, the majority of the phones we have now can't do that.

Even a person can't do it, let alone a machine.

So therefore, the Swippet would be its own phone.

Built specific, you know, a Swippit phone that goes in your Swippit toaster to swap your Swippit battery.

All proprietary, right?

All its own system.

It's a closed system, right?

You're not going to put your Apple in there or your iPhone, whatever.

That leads me to believe if it is its own system,

does not have the, can't handle the other devices and other manufacturers and stuff, then it could be possible.

Which is why I think it is possible

that that is true.

Also, Swippet, notice, S-W-I-P-P-I-T-T.

T-T.

Okay.

Now I'm going to go back to the spicer, spelt S-P-I-C-E-R-R.

I think Steve made this up.

I think he took the Swippet idea, you know, because, and threw the extra R on there for spicer.

I think that's a bit of a tell.

Holds up to six spices in a proprietary sealed unfillable capsule.

I just don't think that thing exists.

I have a feeling Steve made this one up entirely.

EcoFlow Solar Power Hat makes sense to me, and the Japanese spoon one makes sense to me because it says it claims it will make food taste more salty and savory.

And I believe it's not a spoon that you eat with.

I think it's a cooking spoon, right?

So it infuses somehow into the food.

And maybe even not.

It could just be a placebo effect.

You think that it's happening, therefore you think it's more salty than it actually is because it's a claim.

It's not really even been proven.

I have a feeling the spicer is the fiction.

All right.

So you guys are all spread out.

Kara, you'll notice, is not with us.

She know, is too busy dealing with her.

Her city being on fire.

Yeah.

So she had to bail.

But let's go to number one, I guess, since you guys all agree on this one.

The EcoFlow is a solar-powered hat capable of charging two devices at once.

You all think this one is science.

And this one is ridiculously science.

Why is it ridiculous?

Well, the hat, first of all, you have to see the hat, right?

I mean,

it looks ridiculous.

It's got a huge rim, and that's where the solar panels are.

They're kind of like sewn into it.

Like a sombrero?

Like a sombrero, yeah.

And they must be very light panels as well.

They're not like, they're like woven into the fabric.

You know what I mean?

It's not like a panel stuck on the outside.

It's more integrated into the fabric.

Well, that's something.

Yeah, and it has a USB-A and USB-C

connector under the brim.

It produces a maximum of five volts and 2.4 amps.

So that's basically nothing.

So it like maybe will

pop off your phone, but it's not going to

be able to recharge your phone.

It looks ridiculous.

Yeah.

It's as a fashion statement, you know, it's right up there with chair pants.

You know, there are things, Steve, like

people who are out hiking, you know, they have solar panels that they like to put on their backpack.

Yeah, that's a difference.

Yeah, I mean, this has solar panels.

I mean, it's kind of similar.

You know, it's like it's just

a minor trickle flow to charge a phone if you don't have whatever.

It's not, it's not a horrible thing, but I think it's been done much better with other

higher quality products.

Yeah, there's just no reason to put it on your hat.

Um, all right, let's, I guess we'll take these in order.

The spicer is an automatic spice dispenser that holds up to six spices and proprietary sealed, unrefillable capsules.

Evan, you think this one is the fiction?

Jay and Bob, you think this one is science.

And this one is

science.

Sorry, Evan.

Bob, you actually want this thing.

Maybe I'll get it to you for your birthday or something.

Right.

I mean,

this makes sense that you use some spices much more than others.

It'd be great to have them just right there.

Click.

I assume you just do a click, click, and you can get like is it for the chef or the

eater?

Whatever.

Either way, it's more for cooking.

I mean, I think it's more for cooking.

And it doesn't decide how much spice to put in.

You tell it, like, I want one tablespoon of this.

I want one, whatever.

Yeah.

You tell it how much to put in.

You just press the buttons and you hit go and it drops all the spices pre-measured into your pot or whatever.

I don't like this, and I'll tell you what.

Yeah, I don't like it either.

First of all, you know, you're limited to the spices you could load into.

I'm looking it up on the website.

Yeah, you have to buy their spices.

That sucks.

I don't like that.

Well, that's crazy.

That's the capsules.

If their spices suck, that'd be one thing.

But what if they were decent?

What if they were like, well, fairly good quality spices?

But you're locked in.

Like, you don't have a choice.

You can't buy anything you want.

It's not like if you could refill the capsules, if they were not sealed, then

that would be much better.

Sure.

Wait, so what happens when they run out?

You've got to replace them.

With a new capsule?

Yeah.

So

there's a new capsule that you would get, but you can't get a different type of spice.

You could.

You could swap them out.

But then the whole point is that this is supposed to be more convenient.

If you're

swapping out capsules into this device, there's no way that it's more convenient than just dashing your spice into your pot.

You know what I mean?

It's ridiculous.

The whole premise is ridiculous.

First of all, if you're cooking, you know, if you cook on a regular and all that, like you, you have a drawer filled with spices.

Dozens of spices.

Yeah.

That I use on a regular spices.

But I could go through a short list right now off the top of why this is ridiculous.

One, you know, spices don't last forever, right?

Yeah, that's true.

They do have a shelf life once you buy them and you open them.

Like you got to be mindful of that.

Like it's good to have the dates written on there.

First off, I guarantee you that their spices are more expensive than what they cost in the store.

I could almost guarantee it because it's all

you know.

And then I have questions like, well, what if I use a lot of one spice?

Can you just buy that one thing or do you have to buy a whole pack of them?

Like, you know, it just gets, I don't know.

Three of your six chambers.

Yeah, it does sound annoying.

You know, then you'll have a whole freaking drawer full of, you know, of like some wacko spice that you don't use.

It's solving a non-problem and introducing a bunch of new ones.

It's Rube Goldberg-ish in a way.

I mean, just we've got a spice little mini closet thing in my kitchen.

How long does it take to just go in there and grab the damn spice you want?

True.

That's true.

It is not much of a problem that's being solved here.

And for the salt and pepper, which are like the ones you use all the time, you have a dedicated salt shaker and pepper grinder right there.

Anyway, let's go on.

Number three,

a Japanese manufacturer introduced an electric spoon that it claims will make food taste more salty and savory.

Bob, you think this one is the fiction?

Could be.

Jay and Evan think this one is science.

Not anymore.

And this one is

science.

Sorry about it.

Really?

Yep.

The company is Kirin, K-I-R-I-N, Kieran, Kiran.

That's a beer company.

Yep.

And they made this electric spoon.

It is for eating, Evan, not for cooking.

Okay.

And it does give you electrical charge.

It's an electrical current that's supposed to concentrate the sodium ions to amplify the salty and umami taste.

Savory sounds.

Savior suspect.

And so you have to hold the spoon.

You have to put your fingers on the conducting plates to activate it.

And then you have to hold it in your mouth for a few seconds to get the effect.

The whole thing seems ridiculous.

And then it has to give you a 20-amp jolt to the tongue.

And then a mechanism makes you chew your food.

And you have to have a ground shoe, a shoe that is grounding.

So, I mean, look, let's say that this thing works really well.

Who gives you shit?

I'll tell you.

Salt, but salt, baby.

People love salt, and a lot of people have to avoid it because of

medical conditions.

And you know what country has the worst salt overuse problem in the world?

Sure, it's Japan.

Japan.

100%.

Well, there there you go.

Yeah.

No, we eat more fat, they eat more salt.

So they all have hypertension and they die of heart attacks and strokes from their hypertension.

I thought that we said on the show that salt doesn't give you hypertension.

That's not true.

Yeah.

That is not true.

So

we're back to limiting salt intake.

I just did a TikTok on this today.

Well, hello.

The evidence is pretty clear that if you have hypertension, there is a pretty linear relationship between your salt intake and your blood pressure.

And lowering your salt intake will lower your blood pressure.

The only question is, in people who do not have hypertension, is that

there is a controversy over what the recommendations should be for people who do not have high blood pressure at baseline.

Should they still keep their salt low or are they fine?

And the American Heart Association says keep your salt low anyway.

And other people say, no,

that's overkill.

You don't need to do that.

But if you have hypertension, well, that's true.

A lot of people get iodine from their salt.

But there's no question that if you have hypertension, salt's a problem.

Right.

And there's also no question that in Japan, they eat a lot of salt and they have a lot of hypertension, they have a lot of strokes.

That's also not

contested.

So even though I think this is ridiculous, I understand why you would think of like why a Japanese company would say, hey, how could we satisfy people's desire for salty food without having them put a lot of salt in their context?

Matters.

Yeah.

All right.

But does it work?

You know, who knows?

That's why it's a claim.

It's not a proof.

Swip it is about the size and shape of a toaster into which you place a smartphone to swap out its internal battery for a fresh one.

Is the fiction.

Did you make it up entirely?

Nope.

The Swip It exists.

It is a toaster-sized device.

You do put your phone in, but you are swapping out an external battery that goes into its proprietary phone case.

Oh, case.

Yeah, so it's an external.

You're not swapping out the internal battery.

You're swapping out an external battery that goes in its case.

So you have to get their proprietary case and their proprietary battery.

And it's an extra battery that gives you and extends your.

You should have thought of that.

Yeah, you extend your battery life.

Internal, yeah.

And

you could swap it out by just putting it in this ridiculous toaster size.

I was right saying it's entirely proprietary, but I didn't think about an external battery.

The internal battery is just not, that's just not feasible.

It's not very good.

Well, they could design for

that, but they won't.

I guess, but they won't, yeah.

It's not happening.

They used to.

If you want the form factor and everything, whatever.

So, yeah, but this is an external battery.

That's the detail that I changed.

That was fun.

It is meant for use like with iPhones or whatever, because you just have to put their case on it, which apparently is not very attractive.

But I just said smartphone to make it ambiguous so that people might think, oh, you have to use their proprietary phone in order to make this work.

Yeah.

Yeah.

To make it a little bit more challenging.

All right, that was good.

You guys were all over the place.

I like that.

It was fun.

All right, Evan, give us a quote.

Those among us who are unwilling to expose their ideas to the hazard of refutation do not take part in the scientific game.

Carl Popper

from the book The Logic of Scientific Discovery, on which apparently this is the premise of the book.

Yes, that is the seminal work, and that is basically the unfalsifiable.

And shame on me for not having read this book.

Why don't I know about this book?

It was written in 1959.

By the way,

by now, I should have picked this one up.

The list of

scientific discovery.

It is, again, a seminal work.

It is

established this idea that falsifiability is a necessary feature of any truly scientific hypothesis or endeavor.

Oh, so true.

Karl Popper.

Guys, remember what movie referenced Popper?

Oh, I vaguely remember that.

It was a science fiction.

A popular science fiction movie that threw in Popper as

Sounds of the Lambs?

No.

2001.

The Matrix.

The Cartoon Matrix.

What was that called?

Oh, yeah.

Revolutions or something?

Yeah, Revolutions.

The Matrix Revolutions.

Renaissance 1 and 2.

The best Matrix animated or one of the not best?

No, no, the good one.

That was like 10 or so little animated shorts.

Yeah, that's what I mean.

But which short was it?

It was the kids.

It's the animatrix.

The animatrix.

That's what it was.

The animatrix.

It was was the kid who spontaneously, you know, like he jumped out the window and spontaneously got his consciousness back into his body.

That one.

I'm skeptical.

Oh, wow.

I don't remember that.

Yeah.

Shout out to Popper in that one.

All right.

Thank you, Evan.

Thank you.

So thank you guys for joining me this week.

You guys have a good week, man.

Hopefully everything will go well with the LA fires.

We're keeping an eye on that.

We'll probably give you a little update next week.

And until next week, this is your Skeptics Guide to the Universe.

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