The Skeptics Guide #1014 - Dec 14 2024

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You're listening to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

Your escape to reality.

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

Today is Wednesday, December 11th, 2024, and this is your host, Stephen Novella.

Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

Hey, everybody.

Tara Santa Maria.

Howdy.

Jay Novella.

Hey, guys.

And Evan Bernstein.

Good evening, folks.

So guys, this is the last regular SGU episode we will be recording for the year.

For the year.

Okay, good.

We're at the end of the year.

Next week, we're using the episode we recorded in D.C.

last weekend.

And then the week after that will be the year in review show.

Speaking of which, all of our listeners out there, we need you to send us at info at the skepticsguy.org.

Every year we do this vote for your favorite episode, your favorite moment, favorite quote, favorite guest, science news item of the year, and the skeptical hero of the year, skeptical jackass of the year.

And just anything else, any other feedback you want to give us, anything you want us to talk about in the year-end review show.

It's always fun.

A lot to review.

Yeah, there always is.

And Ian, Ian always joins us for that episode.

That's right.

The man, the myth, the legend.

The man, the myth, the watermelon.

Did you guys have a good time in D.C.?

Oh, I love DC.

A good time in DC.

Oh, yeah.

Beautiful.

Yeah, it was really good.

It's always time to be back back there.

Yeah, I lived there for six years.

It's a beautiful city.

I always enjoy going back.

My one regret is that we didn't make it to the Lebanese Taverna.

Yep, me too.

Oh, it's so good.

And we didn't, yeah, I didn't make it because that just took too long to get there.

Yeah, we were going to go Friday night, but it was a pretty tight schedule to be running.

Do you have a turnaround and everything?

So much fun.

A lot of fun.

Great, you know, just the audiences are always so much fun to be around.

They elevate the whole experience.

Oh, definitely.

I mean, you know, when we do the extravaganza, I mean, we're looking at the audience the whole time.

Yep.

From where I sit, there is a ton of interaction because I'm just seeing everybody's faces and, you know, their experience as we go through all the crazy things that we do on that stage.

Yeah, I do that sometimes too.

Like, like there are segments of the show where, like, I'm not doing anything for a few minutes.

And I just look at the audience and just see what they're laughing at.

Partly, it's a good way to tell what's landing, what's not landing, what's working.

But they're pretty much laughing continuously

throughout the show.

They definitely are.

They're engaged.

I rarely ever see them checking their their cell phones

during the show, which means we're doing something right.

And we're being more entertaining than the internet at that particular moment.

So we have a great interview coming up later in the show with No Illusions.

That's Noah.

Not Noah Illusions.

Yeah.

From God Awful Movies and The Scathing Atheist.

But let's get on to some news items.

Jay,

have we achieved artificial general intelligence yet?

Oh boy.

Oh no.

Well,

that is the thousand-dollar question.

You know, the answer is no, we have not.

So OpenAI introduced us to Sora, you know, I think it was almost a year ago, Bob.

I don't remember exactly how long ago it was, but I remember seeing video of what this application can generate.

It's their video generation tool, and it was opened to the public on Monday of this week.

So, you know, just a few days ago on the 9th.

And I think it's only available in the United States.

And because I had an existing account with OpenAI, I was able to actually get in and use the tool.

So to be honest, it worked as I expected it to.

It's like all the other AI tools I currently use.

Like, you know, I use Midjourney, ChatGPT, I use 11 labs.

You know, there's a lot of them out there.

I was impressed with what it can do, right?

Right out of the gate.

Like, yes, it can create video.

It can create very high-quality video, but you do have to learn how to use it.

But the real elephant in the room here isn't that, you know, it's a cool thing to use.

the elephant in the room though is you know what will the future bring us what's it going to be like and what are the implications here so right now sora is capable of creating really lifelike imagery and that imagery can be absolutely stunning and i noticed that the lighting was super dramatic and beautiful that it really is powerful and some people feel like you know this is all positive and amazing and really cool and it opens all of us up to being able to you know to use these tools for for cool things and i agree with that there's there is a lot of potential great things that can come out of this but that that is kind of part of my concern though right so google has their video generation tool which is vo and meta has their movie gen um the ai tools

they're spilling out there's so many of them out there right now and there's so many more i mean i wanted to do some photo editing and i i found you know a half a dozen without even blinking an eye a half a dozen really good ai you know upscale um apps that worked really well i mean they're good at, they're all good at different things.

This is great.

And yes, it does increase everybody's power to create and gives us reach that we wouldn't have had just a handful of years ago.

But there is a massive negativity to this whole thing.

You know, the world has shifted to a place where we're not going to be able to know what's real and what was created by someone.

And it's happening right now.

We've all been predicting it.

It's super obvious that this was coming, but it is happening right now.

The web is already filled with AI images, which, which, you know, as they get better and better, we're not going to be able to know which images are real and which are fake.

You know, I feel like, you know, it could be the two-pay fallacy, but I do feel like I can spot them.

Now that video can be created, the stakes are way higher than just image generation.

And skepticism and critical thinking are going to be, I think, the primary tool that should be used in order to navigate through this stuff.

Now, you think public opinion is affected today by disinformation on social media.

Yeah, it's true.

And there is quite a bit of it but the future of fake content is going to explode and it's going to make the the past recent years look like elementary school now let me clarify something jay like for the sora videos or for other things i mean experts can tell that these are ai generated right the finger of the digital fingerprints of their creation is still on there correct yeah they watermark it i'm sure that all three of them are i i'm i'm you know I know that OpenAI is watermarking their stuff, and it's in a way that isn't super obvious, right?

But they do have a way of,

but that, Steve, that could be easily gotten around.

You know,

once you've downloaded the video and if somebody figures out like what their watermark algorithm is, it would be pretty damn easy to undo it.

Prepare yourself for the idea of someone scamming you by calling you as someone you know, right?

Voice could be duplicated very easily.

You know, we're going to have to change our society because we're going to have to come up with safe words as families,

ways to get around this super high-level attempts to hack us and to get, you know, to get money from us, right?

You should be doing that now, right?

Absolutely.

We should do it right now.

Like everybody that's listening to this should really think about a family strategy.

Maybe

talk to you.

What's our safe word?

Yeah, come up with multiple safe words.

Come up with ways of doing like if somebody calls you and says, I need money, you say, okay, I'll call you right back.

You know, even something as simple as that.

You know, so there is a huge potential here for misuse for scams, disinformation, extortion, abusive content creation.

I mean,

the list just goes on there.

When and if a news outlet that you currently trust, imagine

this happens, they get duped into believing that a fake video is real and they report on it like real news.

That's going to be a turning point for a lot of people.

That's when the light bulb's going to go on and they're going to go, damn, I can't.

Yeah, but worse than that, because sure, that could happen.

But then hopefully, you know, news out like mainstream responsible news outlets are trying to like vet any video before they would show it and claim that it's real.

And that should hopefully not be that difficult.

But what's what's worse is not responsible news outlets that are basically propaganda outlets pretending to be news outlets who will happily share fake video.

Absolutely.

Or, you know, government agents.

Well, yeah, if you have an authoritarian government,

if you can control the perception of truth, you can control people significantly.

And once you have like a generation that goes by where that's the case, you lose all of the cultural knowledge of being able to vet your own information or like not trusting the government.

Like the government propaganda is trust the government.

And that's how people get raised.

And then you have complete information control.

And that's the perfect recipe for authoritarianism.

That's always my biggest fear.

Like I think as an open democracy, assuming that we will continue to be an open democracy going forward, that these are problems and we will have to adjust our lifestyle to deal with them, but we'll deal with them.

But for even semi-authoritarian governments, this is going to be like springtime, right?

This is going to make it so much easier to control the flow of information in a society.

This already happened during the entire election.

Oh, yeah.

There's a ton of AI-generated...

abject bullshit that was propagated by individuals running or individuals stumping for those who are running that people bought hookline and sinker you know look for example guys uh you know kamala harris had you know she got off of uh i'm not sure what plane she got off of and they were saying like it wasn't real with all the people that were there because it was a huge crowd there it wasn't real because of the reflection in the airplane and all that

that was just one picture you that they made a huge think over like think about what people can do like the the the ability to to to make false videos it it's going yeah that's just sowing distrust but yeah it's easier to sow trust that was real.

It was real.

Yeah, that was a real picture that they were sowing distrust about.

Yeah, but that's the existence of the ability to make fake images like this means that you could dismiss real pictures and videos by saying, well, that's fake that was generated.

And that sows at least enough doubt that if anybody wants to believe that plausible deniability, it's there for them.

Yeah, if you have a narrative that suits people and you can either create evidence or you can reject legitimate evidence for that narrative, these tools are the tools to do it.

And they're being used that way already.

And my experience has taught me that

your average person isn't going to do the things that a trained skeptic would do.

They're just not going to do it.

They're not going to continue.

I think there's a, you know,

we have to increase this.

There's a ton of people, though, that won't do anything.

It's one of the pillars of...

what we do,

of skepticism.

It's media savvy, right?

It's scientific literacy, critical thinking, and media savvy.

You need to understand how information flows through our society, how it is created, how it is vetted, et cetera.

And yeah, I agree.

We have to do this, but it can't just be us.

This has to be woven into education, has to be woven into information ecosystems.

This is something that as a society, we need to mature to the point where

we

can.

vet our own information because

society is always way behind the curve, Steve.

Catch up is going to, that's going to be a dangerous time.

I think the government regulations are way behind the curve, too.

They don't know how to deal with this, it's changing too fast for the infrastructure to deal with it.

But we also need to be voting in representatives who care about this stuff,

you know.

Yeah, this and are knowledgeable about it.

Yeah, this needs to be a platform that we support.

I totally agree.

So, there's one more thing we got to talk about, guys, because another thing happened in this whole vein here.

Someone named Vahid Kazemi, who is a staff member at OpenAI, apparently, this person said

on X that, quote, we have already achieved AGI.

And then he clarified what he said later by saying that OpenAI systems might not outperform humans in every conceivable task, but it is, and I quote, better than most humans at most tasks.

That's his stance on that.

Yeah,

there's an implication here that OpenAI views AGI as a spectrum rather than a singular thing that's going to happen, right?

But it's even more interesting because, and I will reduce this down to word on the street, but I am reading about this idea that OpenAI is trying to convince the public that they achieved AGI.

And the question is, why?

And I think it's very likely that they're doing this because of their deal with Microsoft.

Their deal is that OpenAI needs to create safe AGI with this $100 million that they were given, right?

And once they create it, though, then a check mark will be checked on their contract with Microsoft.

And once they do that, they will be able to go into contract with other companies and make other deals, other business deals.

And a lot of people are surmising that they're pushing this AGI story, which, again, I will very confidently tell you right now, it's complete nonsense.

They don't have AGI, not to any operational definition that we would all agree on, right?

You know, if we're saying that ChatGPT is a narrow AI that can do very specific things and it's really powerful at doing these very specific things, and a general AI is much more the way that a human brain works and a way, you know, a human thinks and interacts with the environment and everything, right?

We can go into that definition for quite a while.

But the idea is that AGI is and has always been this idea that is much harder to achieve.

And we always project that out into the future.

We don't know how long it's going to take, but I'm certain we don't have it now.

And it's very unlikely that we're going to have it in the short term.

But as you say,

the definition does change over time.

And at first, it's just this like ideal that is not very operationally defined.

So it's like, yeah, like human-like human-level intelligence is we'll call that artificial general intelligence, an intelligence that is all purpose and can do and can think and therefore do anything potentially.

You know, I've read a good example, a good analogy of like to self-driving cars.

We were, you know, 20 years ago or 10 years ago talking about self-driving cars, it was this kind of vague concept of a car that can drive itself.

But now that we're actually developing the technology, like, oh, actually, there's five different levels of self-driving.

You know, then you could go, you could, you could delve down and parse out the different levels of autonomy of a self-driving car.

And there are these like five categories.

So I think we're getting to the point where the same thing is happening with artificial intelligence, where AGI is like an all-purpose, top-down sort of understanding, thinking intelligence rather than an artificial, narrow intelligence that like plays chess or is a chat bot or whatever, does this one thing.

The word you use that I think works best is thinking, right?

But if you

define AGI that way, the thing is,

we may need to now, just like with those five levels of self-driving cars, we may need to say, well, there's five levels of AGI, and we may have achieved one of those, which is more of a multi-purpose, narrow intelligence, I would say, than a real truly general purpose intelligence.

But, you know, I think it's we're getting on this sort of continuum to an AGI.

I don't think we're there yet.

I agree, not by any reasonable definition.

Isn't the question like, does it do the thing we want it to do?

Like, we were talking about the five levels of cars, and that's all good and great, but like there are Waymos all over LA driving around without drivers.

Yeah.

So like ultimately,

there are self-driving cars.

Yeah, but those are level four or something, I think.

Yeah, they're not level five.

They may not be level five, but they're in traffic and they're doing the thing.

Yeah, but again, even though they're there doing that, Kara, and I agree with you, like they've been trained on that city like exquisitely.

But the idea is like a level five car would be able to drive on a road that it knows nothing about.

Yeah.

Which is great, but if we're splitting hairs and go, yeah, but it's not quite general AI, then it's not quite, well, but it's doing the thing.

Yeah, but I think it's more like a two than a four.

I don't think we're quite there yet.

I think I would characterize it more as a multi-purpose, sort of narrow AI rather than a truly general general AI.

It's still very brute force, bottom-up.

You know, like we're training it on massive data.

It's really good at pattern recognition and it could duplicate, regenerate those patterns, but it's not, you can't throw it curveballs.

It's still brittle, which that brittleness is kind of the hallmark of a narrow AI.

And by brittleness, I mean like you can easily break it by throwing it a curveball, right?

That's outside of its programming, outside of its training data or whatever.

Like one of the examples that Jay and I were talking about earlier was that

like the art generation AIs, they are really good at regenerating art in the style of something that already exists or combining styles that already exist.

But tell it to create your own unique style.

You know, do, you know, that kind of thing, it can't do that.

It could, you know, it could only, you know, generate things from data that it has been explicitly trained on, which also, to me, makes it problematic to conclude that it's better than humans.

You know, because, well, is it really better than humans when it can't do what it's doing without humans in the first place?

It could never have generated the art that it's now trained on to generate art.

It makes that conclusion problematic.

So that's why, and that's part of the reason why I don't think we're at a general AI.

It can't do that sort of thing.

And that's a real qualitative difference, not just an incremental difference.

I wanted to add one little bit of context, though.

That specific version of ChatGPT that was being commented on was one that has not been released yet fully.

So it's an unknown.

Nobody in the public is using it right now.

So this is the one that's in general release now.

I think it was 1.0.

But he's referring to what the company has access to, full-powered.

So no one has really used this except if you work at OpenAI.

But still, I don't think it's AGI.

All right, Kara, tell us about the bird flu.

How long do we have before this next pandemic hits?

The bird flu.

What a big topic.

I'm going to narrow it down just a tiny bit, and I'm going to focus on a subtype called H5N1, influenza A virus, subtype H5N1.

That is a, as I said, subtype of the influenza A virus, and it causes the flu.

in birds.

Well, there's a lot of interesting stuff to talk about.

I'm going to try not to get all doom and gloom right here at the top, but I want to tell you a little bit more about what we know currently, that this is this flu this year 2014 and specifically I'm going to focus sorry everyone across the globe on United States numbers because the CDC is keeping this sort of day by day and it's very difficult to get the latest surveillance numbers across the world.

H5N1 is widespread in wild birds all over the world.

They are an endemic carrier and there are zoonotic outbreaks all the time.

There are outbreaks in poultry and in dairy cows right now in the U.S.

And there have been several recent human cases, many of which have occurred in California.

I'm gonna look at those numbers.

And this is straight from the CDC, the current public health risk is low.

The CDC is watching the situation carefully, and they're monitoring people with animal exposures, and they do have flu surveillance systems to monitor specifically H5N1 bird flu activity in people.

So there have been so far in 2024, as of their most recent update, 58 confirmed total reported human cases.

32 32 of them came from California alone.

10 of them came from Colorado, two from Michigan, one from Missouri, Oregon, and Texas each, and 11 from Washington.

35 of them came from cattle, 21 from poultry, two cases.

Researchers still don't know where those came from.

So if you notice, of those 58, these were direct spillover transmissions from a cow or a bird, or we're not sure, but probably a cow or a bird, to a person.

There are no human to human confirmed cases, and there's a reason for that.

But if we look at what's kind of just out there in the

bird and cow populations, As of 2024 in the U.S., 10,718 wild birds have been detected.

Now, obviously, the number is much higher than that.

That's just how many birds have actually been tested and found to be positive for the flu.

So that's 51 different jurisdictions across the U.S., 121,022,746 poultry, 49 states with outbreaks in poultry, and 774 dairy herds affected.

So that's 16 states where there are outbreaks in cows.

As I mentioned, a lot of those are in California.

So

bird flu, highly, highly

transmissible from bird to bird.

Bird flu is not going to go away, right?

It's out there in wild bird populations.

We now know that bird flu can cross over clearly into cows.

And so the question is, why can we get it from these animals, but why can't we get it from each other?

And that has to do with specificity of a very specific protein.

So researchers, and this is the new bit, researchers published a new article on the 5th of December in Science Magazine.

A single mutation in bovine influenza H5N1 hemagglutinin switches specificity to human receptors.

So what they did is they looked at the first event that they knew of in the U.S.

in 2024 where a human being caught bird flu from a dairy cow in Texas.

And they dug deep into

the actual pathogenesis of what was going on here.

They decided to focus in on hemagglutinin.

And hemagglutinin, of course, is a, of course, it's a protein, it's a glycoprotein that is found on the surface of these different flu viruses, and they help the virus, like kind of cling to and infect the cell of the organism that's being infected.

They decided to zero in here on the hemagglutinin, and they found that a single substitution So they were swapping here a single glutamine to leucine mutation at residue 226.

So it's named for that, GLN226LEU, gluten, or sorry, glutamine to leucine at 226, was sufficient to change the specificity from overwhelmingly avian, meaning that it clings really well to avian cells, to pretty okay human.

As of right now, it sort of sucks at infecting human cells.

And that's why a person who has bird flu can't really give it to another person.

The virus is just not that good at kind of connecting to, binding to what it needs to on a cell and entering.

But it's really good at doing that to birds.

So you might ask, well, how come you can catch it directly from a dairy cow?

Well, if you're working with a dairy cow that has a really overwhelming infection and a lot of virus is actually dumped into your body, that's good enough to overwhelm it.

But no human-to-human transition.

transmission would be that intense.

The viral load just wouldn't be that high.

So in a human to human transmission where where we're looking at a lower viral load, the virus just can't get into the human cells very well, so we don't get sick.

But a single mutation at this one site is enough where, yes, it's still better at infecting bird cells and cow cells, but it's good enough at infecting human cells that it would be likely that human to human transition.

transmission would start.

They further looked at a different mutation at a different glycoprotein there, and they found that if there were two,

we're probably looking at a pandemic.

So single mutation point, and this could change the game from 58 confirmed cases to hundreds, thousands, millions.

Now, talking about this in the context of a few things, first one is that on December 6th, the USDA said, listen, up until now, we have been on a volunteer basis offering to test milk samples from different dairy herds and also in places where there where we knew that there was transmission occurring we've been going in and we've been looking at these dairy herds to try to contain any outbreaks but as of december 6th they said okay no more everyone needs to send us their milk it's really really important that we start looking at milk in its raw form so that we can test it for bird flu now do not despair milk drinkers Pasteurization works.

Thank goodness.

If you are buying milk in the grocery store that has been pasteurized, you're not going to be drinking active bird flu, even if that bird, even if that milk in its raw form did have some H5N1.

Pasteurization kills the virus.

It is no longer active.

You will not catch it from that.

The problem is there are a lot of people in this country who think it's okay to drink raw milk.

But Kara, RFK Jr.

tells me that we should be drinking raw milk and the government is evil for suppressing our ability to drink raw milk.

So not only are there a lot of people right now who drink raw milk just because, soon there will be more people drinking raw milk because the head of the health and human services department is telling them it's okay.

The potential will be, possibly, hopefully not.

There's a lot of pushback right now, which is great.

But, yeah, when you have people in positions of power who are saying it's okay

to engage in a deeply risky behavior that, I mean,

how far back, when did we discover pasteurization?

How long and how much data do we have to show that it is 100% necessary to prevent disease?

Like, did anybody read the jungle?

Yeah.

Like, what year is it?

So, this is, this is worrisome for a lot of reasons, right?

We know that the milk gets bird flu in it.

We know that a lot of dairy cows are catching this infection.

And so, we've got two points of potential spillover here.

Like a direct zoonotic spillover, where a person is right in the face of a dairy cow or bird, or they're drinking the milk that they produced that hasn't been pasteurized.

And right there, people are going to get sick and people are going to die.

I think I read somewhere, and I'd love some confirmation of this, Steve.

Maybe you know, based on like your writing, that certain H5N1s can have a fatality rate of like 30%.

It can be pretty deadly.

Zoonotic spillovers are the main source of like these epidemic, you know, pandemic infections.

Well, they run, they run rampant when they they can then switch to person to person.

Yeah, once they get to person to person,

yeah, all bets are off.

And we're talking a single mutation based on the research that

these scientists did.

That's inevitable, right?

I mean, a single mutation.

A single mutation?

Right.

And they were only focusing on one specific part.

They didn't look at every possible mutation.

So not only can many people become sickened now, not just farm workers, if they drink milk that has not been appropriately pasteurized, But in the future, many more people who are actually doing their due diligence and practicing, you know, safe kind of food handling practices and public safety practices will still be at risk if that event occurs and that mutation takes place.

And will we have an appropriate pandemic response?

Based on all available evidence, I'm going to say probably not.

I would be worried.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So stock up on toilet paper, everyone.

Oh, you heard it from the doctor.

Yeah.

Above all else.

Okay.

Toilet paper.

I'm going to give you some good news.

Oh, thanks,

potentially.

Yeah.

Yes.

But I'm going to ask you a question.

So do you think that if you get most of your exercise on the weekend, is that as good as spreading out your exercise throughout the week?

Like getting five days of exercise a week or cramming more than half of it into the weekend?

Do you think there's a difference?

Spreading it out is probably better.

I bet.

My guess would be spreading it out is probably better, but not really perceptibly.

It's probably good enough.

It develops a better routine, right?

And less chance of missing a weekend.

My guess is that if so long as you're getting those minutes in, whenever you get them in, it doesn't matter.

A week is fungible.

I don't know, man.

Five days of being sedentary, it's hard to get.

Well, but Steve just said more than half of it on the weekend.

So most of it coming on the weekend.

He didn't say absolutely sedentary for five days straight.

Then

In that case, then, if I had actually listened to this,

then I think half, you know, 50, 55,

I think that should be fine.

I think even probably 75% is fine.

So long as you're somewhat active during the week and then you're going hard on the weekends, I bet you that's good enough to be, you know, cardio protective.

80%.

All right.

So there was a study.

And the study looked at a lot of people, 89,573 participants.

This is a retrospective study, but they were piggybacking on the UK Biobank Prospective Cohort study.

And during that study, many of the subjects wore a Fitbit for one week, sometime between June 2013 and December 2015.

And so they looked at that Fitbit data, right, an accelerometer, to see how much activity were people getting and what was the distribution throughout the week.

Then they broke the data up into three groups.

So the one group were people who got less than 150 minutes of moderate or greater physical activity per week.

What's moderate physical activity?

Walking, doing vigorous housework like vacuuming, basically anything other than sitting and doing nothing, right, is moderate physical activity.

All right, so less than 150 minutes, more than 150 minutes, but with 50% or more concentrated in two days on the weekend, and greater than 150 minutes, but spread out more evenly throughout the week.

And they're calling the greater than 50% on the weekend group the weekend warriors, right?

That's of course now, of course, in all of the write-ups, all of the reporting on this.

So the question is, how do those three groups compare to each other?

So unsurprisingly, both of the groups that had more than 150 minutes of exercise fared better than those that had less than 150 minutes of exercise.

And what they were doing is they were looking at...

Fewer than?

That had fewer than 150 minutes.

Yeah.

And what they were doing is they were looking at greater than 200 different conditions, diseases and

hypertension, diabetes, all kinds of obesity,

including a lot of cardiovascular ones, but a lot of non-cardiovascular ones too, you know, cancer, all that stuff.

So what do you guys think they found, right?

It's between those three groups.

Obviously, the people who didn't work out at all were sicker.

Well, less than 150, right?

Yeah.

Right.

So the two groups that had greater than 150 minutes per week, regardless of how it was spread out, did better than the group that had fewer than 150 minutes per week, right?

In like over 200 conditions, like pretty much across the board, not in every single one, but

they were improved in health outcomes from

more than 200 conditions.

But the effect size was greatest in the cardiovascular conditions, which

makes perfect sense.

But the real question was, when you compare the weekend warrior to the spread out throughout the week groups, was there any difference there?

And the answer was

no difference.

Absolutely pretty much.

No difference.

But they're still getting their exercise.

Yes.

And they're resting.

Yeah.

So

the thing is, when you think about it, a week is an artificial construct.

It's not a biological construct, right?

So that's how we break up our time and how we think about things.

But, you know, going four or five days with not much activity and then doing a lot more activity over two days.

And I think Kara is right.

At least over that time period, it doesn't really seem to matter.

The advantages, pretty much all the advantages were there, even for the weekend warrior.

So to me, this is good news, right?

Because it means that you don't have to obsess about your schedule and about how you should just get the 150 minutes in.

you know or more during the week and the other thing is it doesn't have to be athletic exercise you know olympic level exercise you don't have have to be killing yourself.

You should even just moderate exercise.

Go for your evening walk of 30 minutes and that gets you covered.

Or, you know, if you do have time on the weekend, go for a longer walk on the weekend, like on a Saturday and the weather's good, go out and walk for two hours or whatever.

You know, get most of your weekly exercise when you have the time to do it.

And again, it doesn't have to be significant, just, you know, just even moderate exercise.

I think what this data is telling us is that being really sedentary is very unhealthy.

Yeah.

And that not being sedentary is healthy and you get most of the benefits pretty easily, you know, without having

and that something is better than nothing.

But what's interesting is there's a logical fallacy hiding in here, in my opinion, called the linearity bias.

You guys are familiar with the linearity bias?

Oh, yeah.

Of course we are.

Yeah, cognitive bias.

Where we tend to that systems are, we tend to make linear assumptions, right?

That things progress in a linear fashion.

We see this in healthcare all the time.

I'm sure you encounter this a lot too, Kara, where it's the whole idea that, well, if a little is good, more is better.

More is better.

Yeah, I see this all the time.

And yeah, and then

with no limit, really.

So this is like we see this with vitamins.

We've talked about this a lot where, oh, if I take a little bit of vitamins, that improves my nutrition.

If I take more vitamins, I'll even be more healthier.

And if I take mega doses of vitamins, I'll be super healthy.

Yeah, and I see this with patients.

So I work with cancer patients, which means that a lot of my patients go through things like chemo radiation, nuclear medicine surgery.

And very often I'll see, you know, different types of personality structures with patients post-surgery.

And there are some patients who don't get up and walk and they need to get up and walk.

But there are other patients who are like, I'm fine and they overdo it.

They overdo it.

And it's like, no, all you should be doing right now is walking.

Do not push yourself any harder than that because it's no longer healthy.

It's now detrimental.

And I think that tracks to people I've known in my own life who are so obsessive about working out that they're actually, you know, sacrificing sleep.

Well, how do you get healthy?

So, yeah, so you're right.

And so for a lot of things, especially like biological things, there is sort of a steep part of the curve.

You know, the S-curve,

so many things, there's a steep part of the curve where you get most of the benefit.

And then it sort of levels off.

You start to get diminishing returns.

And in medicine, not only do you get diminishing returns, it may start to turn down again if you go to extreme lengths.

Like for like vitamins, right?

A little bit's good.

More is not necessarily better.

Too much, and you start to get into toxicity.

You actually start to get negative effects if you do too much.

Same thing with exercise.

I see that a lot too, Kara, like people recovering from a stroke or whatever, some neurological thing.

And there are that subset of people who think, and I think this is partly just wishful thinking.

They think, I'm going to like exercise the crap out of this and I'm going to get better just through sheer will and just, you know what I mean?

Yep.

Or people who just were so high energy beforehand that they're trying to get back to baseline way too fast.

And they want a sense of control.

And I get that.

And it's, and you're right, you can overexercise.

You could actually injure yourself.

So one thing about the weekend warrior thing, what we don't like to see is people who are sedentary for most of the time and then do extreme physical activity occasionally.

Yeah, that's how you like break things.

Not only that, like we talk about, like I remember like working in the emergency room.

In the summer, we have the 50-year-old guy or 60-year-old guy who comes in because they were gardening.

And in the winter, it's because they were shoveling snow.

So it's basically somebody who is sedentary, not in great shape, and then they do a sudden, extreme physical activity.

Like shoveling snow is hard.

You know, oh, yeah, man.

Wet snow forget

to kill you.

Heart attack stuff.

The other thing to point out, by the way, that in this cohort, the average age was 62.

So this is in older people, right?

So, and which is great to know that even like in your 60s, just walking was great.

You're on that steep part of the curve.

It's the low-hanging fruit.

That's what you want to do.

Don't feel like you have to have some ridiculous or inconvenient schedule.

Don't feel like there has to be some extreme workout.

Just you don't want to be at the sedentary end of that spectrum.

And don't sacrifice other things because.

Yes, don't sacrifice sleep or yeah, health is not just exercise.

It's it's interpersonal connection.

It's sleep.

It's well-rounded work.

And I see when people become obsessive about one aspect of it and they really give up quality of life in other areas, which kind of defeats the purpose.

Right.

I know we see that so much.

People who are like, I want to have a clean diet, they actually generally end up worsening their diet.

Oh, yeah, because it's way less varied.

Right.

Right.

They get restrictive.

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

Okay, let's move on.

Bob,

this is an interesting one.

You know, a theoretical techno signature.

Tell us about this.

Yeah, I always love when techno signatures are in the news.

A new study recently published suggests a new paradigm for detecting extraterrestrial civilizations.

Instead of detecting the conventional, you know, ET radio signals, a la CETI, you know, that they might be broadcasting, or even the alien atmospheric pollution that we can look for in the atmospheres potentially.

The researchers contend that they might be found by looking at their very long-term use of fusion technology.

This study was led by Dr.

David C.

Kettling, professor of earth and space sciences at the University of Washington.

The name of the paper is Potential Technosignature from Anomalously Low Deuterium Hydrogen in Planetary Water.

depleted by nuclear fusion technology.

That says it, but that does, that's so awesomely concise.

I love it.

The first argument these researchers make is that even really advanced aliens might use fusion technology as a primary source of on-planet power for not only millennia, but perhaps even over geologic time scales, millions of years.

That to me, that's just like, wow.

Okay, yeah, here's a really cool technology.

Maybe some aliens are going to use it for millions of years.

I mean, it's just like, what?

Millions?

All right, whatever.

Other primary power sources have problems in their estimation over that much time.

They say nuclear fission is not viable long-term because uranium and thorium sources will be depleted eventually, and that's reasonable.

Wind, tidal, and geothermal sources, they say, are fine for current and near-term power generation, but they say that maintaining it beyond something like an arbitrary 1,000 terawatts of annually average power could not work.

And that number comes up a lot in the paper.

That number is 10 times what our power usage utilization is expected to be in the year 2100.

Okay, you got that?

So they're just extrapolating.

So that's 50 times our current power usage now for some advanced civilization.

Now, solar power, I was waiting for them to get to this one in the paper.

They said that solar power could reach 1,000 terawatts, but eventually they say it would cause intolerable disruption to ecosystems from from the huge land use.

So just as I started mentally shouting at them, they did say this quickly afterwards.

They said, it is possible to generate large amounts of power using off-world solar power.

Okay, that's fine.

That's true.

The land use, though, struck me as odd.

Like, well, so what?

We don't need it.

It doesn't need to be on the land.

I mean, the oceans are pretty big.

I can imagine futuristic society.

putting solar panels over water, whatever.

It doesn't matter.

So then they said this, and they said that it is possible to generate large amounts of power off-world, okay, but reliably and safely transferring a thousand terawatts or more to a planetary surface from space presents engineering challenges.

So that's their problem with solar, is that even off-world, it's going to create engineering challenges.

Now, I thought that was silly as well.

You know, if you're a hundred...

hundreds or thousands of years more advanced than us and having engineering issues transferring thousands of terawatts that that's going to be a problem but then they immediately they get to the crux of their their their power argument they say this they say in any case we see no rational justification for an extraterrestrial society to stop using nuclear fusion once developed given its exceptionally high energy density its small aerial footprint and reliability as a continuous source so that i think is more more defensible but what's interesting is we made that exact argument in our skeptic's guide to the future book that once once a civilization achieves fusion, that's going to be their power source forever, basically.

Yeah.

Until you get to like really exotic things like black holes or whatever that are not even sure if it's even feasible or plausible.

But from that point, and I mean, millions of years is stretching it a bit, but I mean, but we basically

said that's going to be for indefinitely because why would you ever stop using fusion?

It's so awesome.

Right.

We do make that point.

I agree with it.

And And for centuries, you can make

reasonable

projections like that.

I think you can, based on what we know about science, we could say that for centuries, we will probably be really going to be able to do that.

Crazy for thousands of years.

Definitely on a time scale of thousands, even maybe tens of thousands of years.

And

I wouldn't be shocked, but when you go into millions of years, it's just like, whoa, wait a second.

It just seems kind of nuts.

But so let's go into a little bit more detail, though.

They are arguing specifically here that deuterium fusion makes a lot of sense in this context not only because it's nuclear and therefore there's an inherent you know energy density to it and it also has a small footprint as well as much you think about it think of you know nuclear react reactors compared to you know uh solar solar panel farms i mean yes much smaller but primarily though here's this is important primarily uh we've got oceans filled with deuterium or or heavy hydrogen, right?

Most of that water is made with regular hydrogen, and that's called protium, which is such a great word that you just don't hear very often.

But one out of every 6,400 of those hydrogen atoms is a deuterium atom.

That's got an extra neutron, essentially.

So there's a lot of that here on Earth.

There's so much water that when you say that there's one deuterium atom per 6,400 hydrogen atoms, do you know how much deuterium that is?

It's so much, in fact, that deuterium fusion on Earth represents a total energy of just about just under two times 10 to the 31 joules.

That's a thousand quadrillion, quadrillion joules.

That's the energy that could be extracted using all the deuterium in the world's oceans, using it for fusion, for a deuterium-deuterium fusion.

That is such, think about that number just blew me away.

10 to the 31 joules, that is such a big number that it's actually only an order of magnitude smaller than the gravitational binding energy of the entire Earth.

That means that that much energy could basically blow up every small component of the earth out to infinity with no gravitational interaction with the pieces at all.

So bottom line, there's enough deuterium around the earth to use as fusion fodder for millions of years, a tremendous amount there.

So now assuming that an advanced civilization would use deuterium fusion tech on their homeworld for so long, which is a big assumption, I know, but they would be very slowly depleting the

deuterium in their water, right?

Because you're using all this deuterium.

Over time, it's going going to get the ratio of deuterium to hydrogen.

It's going to get smaller and smaller.

And that is what these scientists say would be detectable by our technology now.

So use, and in their equations, they used Earth as a model.

So they calculated that a civilization using about 50 times the power we use today,

that's that thousand terawatts I mentioned earlier.

So a civilization using 50 times the power we use today would reduce their deuterium-hydrogen ratio to below what is found in interstellar space.

And that's the marker right there, because if it's below the interstellar, the average in interstellar space, then something is out of whack.

Something is anomalous.

And that would point to a techno-signature by an advanced, extremely long-lived civilization.

So that's the crux of their argument right there.

Is it a total assumption that their deuterium concentration is the same as that on Earth?

Oh, no, that's just their starting point.

That's just their starting point, just to see, just to get a baseline.

And they fully understand.

Well, yeah, but everything is built around that baseline in their model.

No, well, yes, but I addressed that specifically in just a moment here.

So how long would it take for such a planet to drive their deuterium-hydrogen ratio lower than interstellar space?

The Earth example that they used said that it would take 170 million years.

And I just laughed out loud when I read that.

So you have an advanced civilization on an Earth-like planet, and if they used deuterium fusion for 170 million years,

the ratio ratio of deuterium to hydrogen would be so low that we could detect it from many, many light years away.

So that's what they're saying.

Basically, we're never going to detect this.

Right, but then,

but what if they have far less deuterium than us?

Say it's a land planet.

It's not a water planet like Earth.

It's a land planet.

They've got 3% of the water that we have.

And also, I think when they say that their estimate of 50 times our current power demands, I think that's just laughable for such a civilization.

I think a more reasonable number, probably more accurate number in my estimation, would be having power needs 10,000 times greater than ours or even a million times.

In that case, that might drive their ratio low enough for us to notice a planet like that only after a million years.

Now, all right, it's a million years.

That's still a tremendous amount of time.

I mean, damn, I just want us to survive the next four years, let alone millions of years.

So it's still a tremendous amount of time, but a million years, having the idea that a civilization could survive a million years is a lot more palatable than having one last 170 million years.

So it all depends.

It depends on your power usage.

It depends how much deuterium are you starting with.

all that stuff.

So using the Earth as a baseline, that's fine.

And they do say that those numbers will vary depending on the specific situation that you're trying to

determine.

Now, the big benefit here, can any of you think of the benefit?

What's What's the benefit of

this technology over, say, SETI or detecting extraterrestrial industrial pollution?

Yeah,

that's

the big takeaway benefit of this.

If aliens somehow use super-deuterium fusion on their planet for millions of years and then say the entire civilization dies, or say that they all move to the more fashionable end of the universe, it doesn't matter.

It wouldn't matter if they disappear.

We could still detect their depleted deuterium-hydrogen ratio millions of years after they stopped.

That's not necessarily the case, the authors argue, for SETI-like radio communications or industrial pollution for certain

wouldn't stay polluted for millions of years.

So it wouldn't matter as long, even if they transferred to antimatter or black hole-powered power sources, it wouldn't matter because it would still, the water vapor, you know, the hydrogen or the lack of deuterium in the water vapor in their atmosphere would be detectable using telescopes that we could use and build today.

It would be detectable by us.

So, there you go.

That's their idea.

It was an interesting read.

I recommend looking it up online because

it's eminently readable.

There's not a tremendous amount of jargon in there, so you can definitely read the intro and the conclusions.

Very easy to read, very interesting stuff.

And it's such an interesting approach to this entire topic.

Like, hey, you know, why not give it a try?

You You know, looking at a planet, you're like, oh my God, where's the deuterium?

The ratio is way off.

You know, maybe

they were using some super deuterium fusion for the past million years on that planet.

I don't know.

This is basically this is a thought experiment, but the idea is that

you could...

do the experiment, like observe planets that have a water atmosphere, you know, water vapor in the atmosphere to see if they, what their ratio is.

Certainly if it all worked, it would be amazing.

It would, but right now, the only exoplanets that we can observe, we already have other ways to look at their signatures that are more feasible.

It's just, it's so far-fetched.

You know what I mean?

Well, I'll tell you what I think is the weakest part of the chain of reasoning here.

Bob, so you're saying over those millions of years that they're burning deuterium in their fusion reactors, they didn't figure out a way to make deuterium exactly.

They had to like mine it from the ocean.

Why would you make, Steve, why would you make deuterium?

Why?

You've got a million years supply right

in your backyard.

Why the hell would you make it?

Maybe it's eventually more convenient than

standing in the middle of the middle.

But

why do we make diamonds?

Because it's expensive.

It's expensive to dig it out, and it's got many other uses than having on your finger.

It's not just because it's expensive, because there are geopolitical reasons, and these are supposed to be complex, intelligent societies.

The point is, all the fuel is right there.

That's the entire point of this whole thing.

Yeah, but it's not, is it easy to get?

Just because it's right there.

I think that a civilization about 10 times more advanced than us will have no trouble taking deuterium out of their ocean.

And they also may have no trouble just making it.

Easier to just make it out of water.

Yeah.

We just don't know, right?

That's a huge unknown.

Yeah, we don't know.

That's just one of the.

There's so many assumptions in this thought experiment.

Well, in that case, then they would make, then they wouldn't even use deuterium.

They'd use tritium.

Yeah, you're right.

Tritium.

That would be better.

That would be better.

They talk about that in this in this in this paper they they tritium actually would be a little bit better but um it's got uh it's got a half-life and it's also it depends on how much lithium you have and uh there's not enough lithium on you know accessible lithium on the planet so that's why deuterium is a is a better candidate it's abundance but uh but whatever i think it's a it's a real fun thought experiment to to think that you can determine the you know the amount of the diffusion technology that they use based on what we could detect that their their water is just it's interesting huge long shot but but interesting yeah huge all right let's move on all right Evan are we living in a simulation or perhaps 52 million simulation?

It all depends on what you read on the internet, I suppose.

On our drive from Connecticut to Washington, D.C.

this past weekend, and I'm Carrie, you are not among us.

Sorry about that.

No, I was on an aeroplane.

Yeah, I know.

And I'm about to bring up Star Trek too, so I'll apologize for that.

So bear with me here.

Because on the the write down, I brought up a Star Trek, the Next Generation episode called The Inner Light.

Do you gentlemen remember that?

Sure.

Discuss.

Absolutely.

It's often considered one of the best episodes.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

For those who don't know, in that particular episode, The Enterprise rendezvous with a probe.

Real quick, the probe emits an energy beam at Captain Picard.

Picard falls unconscious.

When he awakens, he's on a strange planet and he's assuming the life of a person.

He thinks he's he, but he's actually another person.

He's not changed changed at all, but it turns out he's someone else on this planet, and he goes on to live for 30 or 40 more years.

All right, spoiler alert, it's all in his head.

He actually wakes up on the Enterprise shortly after the beam had actually hit him, and only 25 minutes of real time had passed.

So in his head, Picard was able to live a simulated life on a different world for decades.

At the same time, he only lived for 25 minutes in his real life.

That's crazy science fiction, right?

Great story, Bob.

Great episode, and totally implausible, right?

Yes, right?

Well, what's this headline that I'm reading?

When we just got back from Washington, D.C., a scientist theorizes we may be living 52 million lives in the current simulation.

This was over at Popular Mechanics.

I think we're all familiar with that magazine and that website.

The author's name is Caroline Delbert, and she writes about a particular chap named Melvin Vopson.

Vopson works at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom as an associate professor of physics, but he also started his own physics institute, and he self-published a book in 2023 through that institute.

The 2023 paper he released to coincide with that book was published in an open access mega journal called AIP Advances.

Now, what he's claiming is that through his scientific observations and measurements, they support his theory, a theory that he calls the second law of infodynamics.

That people can potentially live millions of lifetimes by spending each minute in a simulated life.

Yep.

Carolyn, the author of this article, to her credit, states up front and within the first three sentences of her article, she says, he may be a good professor and even a good scientist, but this work makes errors and wild claims.

Good for Carolyn to point that out.

She also writes that she delved into this more because of a revitalized story on the Daily Mail's Mail Online science section that appeared about a week prior to her writing the piece.

And, you know, Daily Mail is

a science section.

There are better places to go.

Let's just say that.

But in any case, some guru over at Daily Mail ran the math, as they say, on Volpson's theory that time dilation seems possible in a simulation.

And according to that idea, it's sort of in the same ways that our dreams can feel days long but only last minutes in real life.

Well, an entire lifetime in a simulated universe could take just one minute in the real world.

And what that means is that a person could become virtually immortal by stacking up these one-minute simulated lives across their entire human lifetime, leaving 52 million chained lifetimes behind.

Now, 52 million minutes being roughly 99 years.

So if you're lucky enough to be able to live for that long, I smell a cult.

Ah, well.

So I'm still not sure what the claim is.

Like, how, what kind of simulation are we talking about?

Yeah, how's time dilation being impacted?

She writes that his theory is the way that information is organized seems to violate the second law of thermodynamics, that everything in the world experiences rising entropy, right?

Meaning that, what, the level of overall disorder is always increasing.

Totality, though.

Oh, yes.

Right.

And that's what directs, say, time's arrow, pushes events in our universe in a forward direction.

Bupsen believes that information experiences less entropy over time rather than more.

And his work supposedly can prove that.

Sorry, I didn't have time to read his papers or go back and listen to everything that he's talked about on the various podcasts and other places that he's been.

But he concludes that this, and she writes, he concludes that this is a way in which we could verify that the data portion of our world is being simulated and organized.

If it's breaking physical laws, he postulates it could be the smoking gun for a simulation.

Because he says so.

Right, basically, yeah.

She calls this circular reasoning, cherry picking one very specific measurement with terms he has extrapolated.

She writes like a dead reckoning navigator and counting it as evidence of his theory.

And it doesn't even really make sense in its own context.

And she writes, think about it.

Some higher intelligence that could manufacture the entire universe wouldn't be so foolish as to leave a giant footprint in the way that they handled the data load for us to find.

And, you know, there's a lot of talk about simulation late.

I know Elon Musk is a

what?

He's on the proponent side of there being a simulation.

I believe he has spoken about it.

And there are other very, what, you know, wealthy tech-oriented people out there who kind of ascribe to this as well.

There's plenty of people out there, though, you know, of real scientific mind that, you know, basically say this is impossible.

Oh, and by the way, Vopson, and Kara, you brought it up.

Vopson basically, what is he doing?

He's trying to match this to, in a way, to the Bible.

Here we go.

For those who say they question our assumptions, including at least one show where he went on and he talked about finding evidence for his simulation theory in the Bible.

So he's trying to make this whole, I don't know, sort of metaphysical connection between it all.

And, you know, I mean, when you start invoking the Bible and trying to make that retrofit your ideas and stuff, I mean, it sounds like

you're reaching for something here.

It doesn't surprise me, right?

Because I'm hearing two themes that you see over and over when it comes to religiosity and cult-like social control, which are

some means to break mortality, right?

Like, oh, through this, I get to live forever.

That is a very appealing thing.

I want that.

I'm going to join this cult.

And also, this idea of there being a maker, this idea of there being a greater intelligence more than us, which gives some people comfort.

Oh, there's somebody pulling the strings.

And you see this over and over with this sort of like solipsistic,

it's fundamentally, I think, kind of narcissistic to believe that there is like some thing or idea or person or being out there that so gave a shit to create all of this for us.

Yeah.

And how much does that diminish the real human experience at the same time?

Absolutely.

Like, I don't want to be a puppet.

Like,

that doesn't bring me comfort.

But for some people, it does.

And I suppose if you're going to, well, I mean, and if you're going to cross this Rubicon or go into this threshold, sure, why not say, yeah, 54 million lifetimes, you know, instead of even just saying two or three lifetimes.

Because that's how his math worked out.

Yeah, yeah.

What's up with his math?

I'll leave you with this thought, though.

There's another person out there, James Anderson, who has written a lot in recent years about the simulation and basically asked all the time, are we living in a computer simulation?

His blog is called Analogical Thoughts.

Let me read this paragraph for you.

I think he sums it up nicely.

The simulation hypothesis itself is based on a...

is based on scientific theories and concepts derived from our experiences of the world.

It's predicated, at least in part, on what we take to be empirical scientific knowledge.

But if we accept the simulation hypothesis, then we acquire a defeater for all of our empirical beliefs and thus for all of our scientific beliefs.

Simply put, if the simulation hypothesis is true, we can't trust the science on which the simulation hypothesis is based, in which case, it would be irrational to believe the simulation hypothesis.

It looks like

the simulation hypothesis has a deeply self-defeating character to it.

Seems like a reasonable conclusion to me.

Hard to argue with that.

Only an insane person would go to war.

All right.

Thanks, Heaven.

Yep.

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

All right, guys.

Last week I played This Noisy.

What is that?

Every parent's nightmare.

Every airplane passenger's nightmare.

Well, some dude named Visto Tutti wrote in.

Never heard of him.

And

he first was like thinking maybe it's a plastic party trumpet, but then his true guess is it's a juvenile bird.

Maybe a gala.

It is not a juvenile bird.

Thank you for guessing, my friend.

Next one, Matthew Morrison.

Hi, Jay.

My daughter, Nev, thinks that it's a kitten.

I think it sounds like a human child whining for cake at a birthday party.

Or something like that.

So these are both two good guesses.

Absolutely, both of them good.

It is not a kitten and it is not a human child whining for cake at a birthday party.

I can guarantee you of that.

Dan Jackson wrote in and said, hi rogues, it's my daughter's first guess at who's that noisy.

She guessed a chicken and she's her name is Celeste and she's five from the UK.

And I thought that's, you know, that's a good guess.

It is not a chicken, but, you know, I bet you there is a chicken out there making that noise right now.

Listener named Jesse Babonis.

Hi, I think this week's noisy is a nestling crow begging for food, maybe a fish crow.

That is incorrect.

And then I have a close guest here, Benjamin Greenberg, said, hi, Jay.

This week's noisy sounds like something whimpering and the chatter of people makes me think maybe it's an animal at a veterinary office or a recovery center.

Going to throw it out there and say an alpaca because I've heard similar sounds.

You hit on a couple of things there, Benjamin, but it is not an alpaca.

I have a winner from last week.

This is Trina Diaz.

And Trina said, Hi, skeptics.

My partner and I are longtime listeners and first-time guessers.

I truly believe this noise is from a cute little

anybody?

Nobody?

A baby beaver.

Aww.

Listen again.

This is a baby beaver.

Wow.

Very human sounding, huh?

It's very cute.

And there was a lot more of it, but there was people talking over it, so I didn't want to add that in.

But you should check it out, go listen to that.

They are really adorable.

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

Now, Steve, this is the last noisy of 2024

that everyone's going to hear.

And we will not be

talking about this.

It'll be what, two weeks or three weeks, three weeks until we talk about it again.

All right.

I just thought I should say that just to clarify any confusion.

I have a listener named Hamish Guthrie, who sent in this week's noisy.

Check it out.

All right, there's lots of sounds in there, lots of different things going on.

I will give you a hint.

The hint is that listen to all the different types of sounds you're hearing and let that affect your, what would you call it?

Decision making?

Let that affect your decision making.

Thank you.

All right, guys.

So, every week I tell you, if you heard something cool or you have a guess, you can email me at wtn at the skepticsguide.org.

That is not changing, by the way, in 2025.

We will not be changing that.

As far as you know.

So, Steve, we have done all of our shows for 2024.

Yep, we're done.

That's it.

And I am fully focused on 2025 and beyond.

And I would like to say that we have a wonderful show on its way up for May.

It's a weekend of May 15th of 2025.

That is not a con.

We are all very excited about it because we know all the things that are going into it, all the different stuff that's going to happen at the conference.

I will be giving a formal announcement at some point in January with more of a schedule idea of what's going to be happening.

But I do believe that if you are a listener of this show and you are capable of coming, that you will have a wonderful time because I have data.

And that data is...

The 240 people that came last year, they were very, very satisfied with what we did.

And it's a lot of fun.

Basically, you'll meet people, you'll have a great time, we'll make you laugh for two and a half days, two in point two days, Kara.

Yep.

And we would just like it if you would consider coming.

And I would like to tell everyone out there, have a wonderful holiday if you're celebrating anything over the next month and have a wonderful new year.

And let's all look towards a happy and safe future.

And Jay, you know what, you know what's happening the week before Natakon?

Yes, I do.

Did anybody else know?

I think I'm getting a haircut.

The week before.

Oh, it's 20

years.

Years.

It's our 20th anniversary.

Oh, I think we have to buy each other clocks.

Yeah, we're going to plan something.

We're going to plan a 20th year something.

Yeah, so we're going to do a 20-hour live stream.

Carrie, you're going to have to do that from China.

No, we're not doing that.

If I'm there.

No, we're not doing that.

We're not doing that?

40 hours?

Thank fuck.

20 minutes.

But, Steve,

we talked about this.

There is a milestone with the number of patrons that we have.

If we get to 5,500 patrons, we do a 24-hour.

We will do a heavily extended

heavily extended.

I love it.

Not only will it be 24 hours, we're going to do it on Daylight Savings Switchover, so it'll be a 25th hour.

We'll do it at Antarctica.

Oh,

what time?

What time is it there?

We will reenact the movie The Thing, scene for scene, shot for shot.

That would be fun.

We're going to be doing some 20-year celebration in May.

We have to coordinate that with Nauticon.

It may have to wait until after that, just you know what I mean, for the dust to settle on Nauticon.

But we'll see.

Sometime around then,

we'll be celebrating the fact that we crossed that 20-year mark.

All right, we're going to do one semi-quick email.

A bunch of people emailed us on this.

This has to do with the saying, blood is thicker than water.

And if you recall, this came up on the show, and I think I brought up that, or we were talking about sayings

where their meaning gets changed over time

and there's many many references that say that you know the blood is thicker than water which means that basically family ties are more important than other commitments that you may have or other relationships but that the original saying was the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb which means the opposite that the the blood of the covenant that alliances and whatever that whether it's with the church or the blood brotherhood of battle or whatever is more important than the water of the womb meaning your kin but it turns out that that's probably not true that that seems to be a not too distantly invented uh myth so i did you know independently look as look this up as much as i could yeah it so it turns out I do think this is the kind of thing that requires some actual academic research.

I think like just doing Google type of research is not going to be enough to definitively resolve this.

But even on like linguistics forums and whatever, we have people who know what they're talking about debating it.

It seems that the reference to the blood of the covenant and the sticks of the water of the room only goes back to like the 1990s.

Maybe it's based upon something from the late 1890s, although it's not clear if that reference is valid or not.

Meaning that

you're always looking for earlier incidences, but you don't know necessarily if there's a direct cultural connection between it.

But there's certainly no ancient

or medieval even

use of like the blood of the covenant thing.

That's recent, either completely invented in the 90s or maybe based upon a misinterpretation of something that was written in the late to late 1800s.

Whereas references to blood is thicker than water, meaning what the modern meaning, you know, that blood ties are stronger than other ties, it goes back into

medieval times.

Again, it's always hard to say exactly what the first thing was.

Many people give like a Scottish reference from the 1200s, but it's not clear if that, you know, is interpreted the exact same way.

That quote says something like that the blood is not tainted by water or something.

But in the context, it does seem that in context, it means that family ties are more important than other ties.

So I do.

Yeah, so it does seem that that meaning, that whatever the exact verbiage is, that meaning of family ties are more important does have precedence, is the older interpretation.

And that this sort of idea that it originally meant something that was the opposite seems to be a more recent misunderstanding that I think then just got perpetuated.

And again, if you just look it up, you still see references to that

all over the internet.

I think just because it

seems like a nice story, you know, it's like, oh, this is one of those things that got reversed.

So people like to say it, but actually, if you track it back, it's probably not real.

But I would like to see a more academic treatment of this, you know, to say

just, you know, what really is the etymology of this phrase.

And there might be other references that.

that people are not aware of.

All right, so thanks everybody who wrote in to alert us to that.

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.

Well, guys, we have a great interview coming up.

So let's go to our interview now.

We are joined now by Noah Lusions.

Noah, welcome to the Skeptics Guide.

Awesome to be here.

Thank you.

So, Noah, you are the producer of The Scathing Atheist and other podcasts.

Why don't you tell us about all the stuff that you're doing in the social media verse?

Our first podcast was The Scathing Atheist.

We started that one back in 2013, which seems old when I compare myself to anybody but you guys.

We've got another show called God Awful Movies, where we break down Christian cinema.

We often have our mutual friend Kara as a guest on that one.

Right.

We also do a DD podcast called DD Minus, a politics podcast called the skepticrat and we team up with our buddies from citation needed to do a just general trivia podcast i guess called citation needed so we've got it we got a lot of irons in the fire at any given time how long ago did you start the scathing atheist uh started it in january of 2013 and uh it was uh it was you guys that inspired us to start you were our first podcast love oh is that right that's awesome it helped that you guys were like the third podcast that we're i know i mean i don't know if you were the third third, but we were, yeah,

we started podcasting before podcasting really existed, before it was a thing on iTunes.

Like, iTunes didn't have a podcasting category yet.

It was just an idea.

The word existed, but proto-caching.

Yeah, the infrastructure was not yet there.

Yeah.

I mean, nothing, when we started, we were like just hosting it on our own website.

And, you know, like we had, like, we, we had no idea what we were doing.

Because nobody did that.

Well, yeah, right.

Yeah, you were inventing it as you went.

Yeah.

Yep.

Build the airplane as you fly it.

So that's basically it.

So tell us about your experience with the scathing atheist in terms of how, you know, how well it's been received and the kind of stuff that you talk about on that show.

Well, yeah.

So when we first started that, there were a number of atheist podcasts in the podcasting universe.

And by a number, like back then, you know, 14, there was quite a few.

But most of them were designed as outreach where atheists were trying to present themselves as,

non-frightening to Christians.

And that was great.

I was glad that there were people out there doing it, but there really wasn't at that time much in the way of atheists talking to atheists.

So we started a show to

sort of help atheists keep abreast of the important news of the day.

Now, this was back in the Obama administration.

We couldn't imagine how important secular news would become shortly thereafter, right?

But yeah, we talk a lot about what's going on in the Christian blogosphere, specifically the sort of right-wing evangelical blogosphere.

That's the kind of thing that

I think most people don't want to have to dig that deep into and would kind of rather somebody else look into for them.

So we're providing that service to the secular community.

And so

tell us a little bit about the content.

Like, you do interviews or is it mainly just a roundtable discussion?

It's pre-scripted, comedy-based stuff.

So we try to keep it light and airy, even though the stuff we're talking about is terrifying.

We've been doing a long-term thing where we're going through the Bible book by book, reenacting it for everybody because that's a hard read, right?

But you kind of need to know what's in there.

Yeah, it's a much bigger task than we realized it was going to be when we started digging in.

But we're already into the gospels, though.

So we're most of the way through.

We've done quite a bit.

So are you dramatizing it with audio and stuff?

Like, what does that sound like?

Yeah, it is a a lot of wacky sound effects.

We brought in a voice actor because we needed to do

more voices.

But

it's obviously a comedy thing more than anything.

But it is kind of a fun way to learn what's actually in the book without actually having to read a thousand pages of it.

I mean, I think I've read the entire Bible at some point.

But

we went to a Catholic prep school and I took four years of theology.

So did I, man.

Doing this just to get through those courses.

And there's some wacky shit in there.

Yeah.

Yeah, you know, like, I thought I knew a lot about the Bible when I first, or not a lot, but I thought I knew like an average amount about the Bible.

When we first started doing the show, we started doing a section called The Holy Baby where we read through it chapter by chapter.

I'm a couple of chapters in.

I'm like, there's a talking donkey in this thing?

Why aren't we talking about this?

Why aren't we talking about it?

I know, but the thing is, it's so absurd, but you know, it's so generally accepted that

people aren't really bringing it up because

it's widely loved and worshipped.

You know what I mean?

What are we going to do?

There's a million people out there to put it down, but there's 10 million people for every million people that believe it and love it.

More than that.

It's true, but I think just.

what you're doing, like, here's what's actually in the Bible.

I mean, you could believe whatever you want about it, but here, let's just, you know, not whitewash this, right?

Let's quote unquote sainwash the Bible.

Because I do, and

there have actually been studies that show that atheists know more about the Bible than Christians do, generally speaking.

Generally speaking, yeah.

Yeah.

Well, and it becomes incredibly important when you start looking at other, you know, comparative religion, right?

Because you very often hear Christians denigrate the Quran and say, oh, you know, the Quran is this very violent book, and it is.

I've read the Quran as well.

But it's not more violent than the Bible.

Definitely not.

But of course,

if you sort of sainwash the Bible beforehand and then you look at the Quran honestly, you're going to see a much more violent book.

So yeah, I think it offers an important balance there as well.

Yeah, exactly.

So, you know, again, we also, having been, you know, to church many times, being, you know, being confirmed, as it ever sort of got exposed to the Bible through all of that.

And they don't really emphasize.

all the

crazy interesting stuff that's in there.

Like, I don't remember ever learning in church that at some point God sent a couple of bears out to kill 40 kids because they called this prophet Baldy.

You know, but that's in there.

That's like objectively in there.

Like there's no way to interpret that any other way than God killed children for being children.

Yep.

That'll learn those kids.

Yeah.

No, there's a part where God moons Moses and

it's fascinating stuff.

And that's really the saddest part of it, right?

Because the Bible is a genuinely fascinating book.

Absolutely.

But you have to be honest about what's in there to see why.

I find it really interesting.

Like when I first found out how much the Bible and Christianity took from other religions,

as far as it being unique, it's not.

So much of it is borrowed and stolen.

It's like a mishmash of different beliefs.

Right.

Yeah.

It's just, you know, just like every other.

story, it's borrowing from the stories before it,

and those are borrowing from the stories before them, right?

It's just these same motifs that show up again and again.

And, you know, the Bible offered sort of the, you know, the best honed version of a lot of those stories because we had, you know, this sort of natural selection,

you know, they don't like to believe in regular evolution, let alone the evolution of the Bible, but natural selection within sort of the editing of the Bible has sort of honed it into this very poetic and very like, you know, beautifully written version of this, again, same story that we've heard over and over.

How much do you get into like more of the academic end of theology, like talking about non-biblical sources of information, like the Gnostic Gospels and the Gospel of Judah, like that sort of thing?

That's that source.

What was that one?

The Gnostic Gospels and the

Gospel according to Judas.

Have you heard about that one?

Yeah, yeah.

So there's a ton of really interesting stuff there.

And we did cover a lot of that stuff early on in our show.

We actually read through the Bible and then we went through a lot of the Apocrypha and then we went through the Quran and the Book of Mormon.

Cause you're, you know, obviously you guys have been podcasting long enough to know you're always looking looking for new sources of content.

But now that we're this sort of like second go-round on the Bible, we're really just sticking to the canonized stuff.

Yeah, but which is great, but you know, again, to me,

if you want to know

what the origin of the Bible is, you can't just look at what has emerged as the canon.

You have to look at everything that was being written at that time.

Because

there are many different versions of Jesus in the other gospels that, you know, once Rome decided this is Christianity, then they actively destroyed any non-canon books that were out there.

A few squeaked through.

And it's just amazing how completely different they are, like utterly and completely different.

It's as if like, you know, DC Comics destroyed every non-canon comic book out there or whatever once they decide, oh, this is the story we're going to stick with.

And any other versions, like there's no multiverse, we're just going to destroy every other version of these stories.

Jesus had a talking crucifix sidekick in one of those gospels.

It's like Freddy the Flute.

Yeah, yeah.

Freddy the Flute.

Let's talk a little bit about God-awful movies because that's a fun show.

Yeah, you know, it started as a segment within The Scathing Atheist.

We were doing movie reviews.

This was about the time that the first God's Not Dead movie came out.

In case you're not keeping up, I think we're at five now going on the sixth one.

Still Not Dead.

If you could believe that, you know, he's like Freddie.

He keeps coming back at the end of every movie.

But we used to do just movie reviews on that show.

It became a hugely popular segment with my friend Eli Bozdik, who you guys know, you've got him

on your show as well.

He used to show up on Scathing Atheists once a month or so to do these movie reviews.

He lost his job at a very opportune moment for us, so we decided to spin that off as its own show.

And we thought to ourselves, well, you know, surely we'll run out of Christian movies eventually.

So we just got to, I believe, episode 487 of that, and they're not slowing down on those at all.

And this is another thing where, like, I think it's actually very important, genuinely important, that the secular community, that the atheist community is keeping track of what's going on in Christian cinema.

What are they showing their kids?

What political ideals are they infusing in their movies?

And of course, nobody wants to watch these movies because they're just objectively horrible.

So

that's another service we're providing for the community.

We're going in and watching all the Kirk Cameron's newest and best

Ray Comforts films.

What's the absolute worst one you've reviewed so far?

Well, so that's a huge question.

Worse in terms of like the message behind it or worse in terms of like the actual production quality.

So I would say the worst movie we've ever reviewed is a movie called Loving the Bad Man about learning to forgive your rapist.

So yeah, sorry, you should have probably put a trigger warning on the beginning of that, but about how rape victims should carry the baby to term rather than get an abortion.

Oh my God.

I think that might be.

the worst or maybe that or there was a we did a movie a long time ago called right to believe that was about a Christian local news reporter who was being forced to cover a gay pride parade without telling his readers how sinful gayness was.

So that was that was also a really fun one.

No, how do you dig these movies up?

Like where what's your resource?

Well, so early on, we got a lot of recommendations from people who came out of the Christian faith, you know, and were subjected to these movies when they were kids.

But eventually, man, your YouTube algorithm and your Netflix algorithm just get ruined.

It's just wrecked in there.

And everything it recommends to you is another terrible movie that, you know, fortunately is great for the show.

Will Battlefield Earth ever be part of that lineup?

We did a live show for Battlefield Earth, actually, in Detroit, Michigan.

Yeah, we'd been saving that one for a while.

Can I tell you something?

I saw Battlefield Earth.

Not a horrible movie.

It's a pretty horrible movie, Steve.

Wait a second.

Wait a second.

Steve, I saw it too.

It's like, I don't know, five years ago.

Now, granted, my expectations were supremely

super low.

It was super low.

So I was like, you know, that wasn't as horrific as I was anticipating.

It wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be.

So for everybody listening at home that doesn't agree with this, who hasn't seen this movie, I want to point out that like about 80% of this movie is shot at a Dutch angle, which is like where that camera is like 30% off tilt to try to make you a little bit more.

Like the boat is

listing to one side.

Yeah, yeah a lot of curious choices in that one well i'll tell you what if if you like that one i've got a lot of great ones for you guys i didn't say i liked it

they liked it they'll send you the whole vhs collection wasn't as horrible as i thought all right well yeah i guess that's a much lower bar to figure yeah i i watched like about a half an hour of it and it made me so uncomfortable it like actually made me freak out a little bit i was weirded out by it it was that's how bad that movie is so i don't know what you're talking about, Steve.

I think it's always compared to your expectations going in.

Yeah, I mean, I've seen, hey, listen to this, Jay.

I saw The Nightmare Before Christmas in 1991, and I was a little disappointed.

Why?

Because that movie is a classic cult.

It's

legendary.

I watch it every year, but my expectations were so stupidly high for that movie that I was actually a little bit disappointed.

Of course, on the second, third, fourth, fourth, and 100th viewing, I absolutely am in love with that.

One of the best movies ever.

But you know how expectations can mess with your head.

Sure.

Yeah, that same thing happened to me with Rogue One because everybody went so crazy for that.

And it's a fantastic movie.

It's such a great movie, but it had been built up so big that the first time I saw it, I was like, meh.

Oh, my God.

I feel bad for you because, but I could absolutely see that happening.

No, especially in the context of all the other Star Wars movies, it's definitely one of the better Star Wars movies out there, no doubt about it.

Oh, yeah.

So let me ask you this question then.

Were there any god-awful movies that you reviewed?

You're like, you know what?

As a movie, that wasn't half bad.

That it had some virtue to it, you know, as a film.

Yeah, there's a couple of them.

They slip out of my mind, so I can't really name one of them right off the bat.

But there's definitely been a couple of movies that we're reviewing.

Like right before we start the record, we're like, oh, crap, this is going to be a little trickier than usual.

Listen,

no softballs there.

Normally, though, there's at least,

you know, the movies that we choose tend to at least have a few poisonous ideas that we can latch onto, right?

Because, you know,

I don't necessarily want to just make fun of a person trying to make a movie and fail, right?

There's a lot of podcasts that do that and power to them.

A lot of them are very funny.

But we want to focus on movies that either send...

you know, poisonous messages, like be they, you know, misogynistic messages or anti-LGBTQ messages, or another real common one is anti-psychiatric messages.

They really love to jump into that.

And then also we dive into pseudoscience documentaries as well.

You know, these movies that,

of course, COVID gave us a rash of these, but there's a ton of them, vaxed and those types of movies.

We dive into those kinds of things as well.

So even if the production value is high, even if the movie itself is fairly good, there's usually something poisonous enough at the heart of it for us to latch on to.

Noah, as a fellow podcaster, do you have any stories of dealing with people that listen to the show?

So, okay, so honestly, yes, and I'm afraid maybe she's listening now, but we did a live show in Seattle, Washington one time.

And at the end of the show, we took questions from the audience.

And we've learned our lesson.

We don't do that anymore.

Oh, no.

So, this girl who's sitting up front, she's like, Hey, I have a gift for you guys.

And she handed us three skulls that she had painted.

They weren't human.

They were like animal skulls that upon

questions she had found in the woods.

Quote, found.

And yeah, right, right.

She found dead things in the woods and painted them for us.

And that creeped me right on out.

So

there was that.

So do I, because I was holding them when I found out she found them.

Did you clean them up a little bit?

I mean, yeah.

I cleaned me up a little bit.

I think I may have forgotten to put those in my luggage and bring them back across the country.

No, when you take questions, you don't have people ask the questions live.

You have them write down.

Nope, you write them down and then you read them, which means now you tell me.

It's great timing.

No, you can choose the good questions and you don't get people who stand up and pontificate for 20 minutes.

We just did a live show.

We did that method.

It works really well.

So for a future reference.

Yeah, yeah.

No, I'll keep that in mind.

Actually, I took a podcasting course from you, a lesson from you many, many moons ago, Steve, right?

When I first started the podcast, you and George Hobb did one at Nexus.

Oh, yes.

I remember that.

I think I was like three months into it.

And it was great.

And I was learning a lot of stuff.

And at one point, George says, hey, does anybody here actually have a podcast?

And I raised my hand and like one other person did.

And there's like 40 people in the room.

And they're like, what the hell are we even doing here then, guys?

Well, they were thinking of maybe starting a podcast.

Yeah, right, right.

Yeah, I guess.

Everyone seemed to have a ton of fun.

And hey, 50% at least of the podcasters that were in that went on to do it for a living.

There you go.

Wow, that's pretty high rate.

That's a pretty good hit rate.

Yeah.

No, you're one of the full-time gig, right?

Yeah.

No, this is a full-time gig for you, right?

Yes, yeah.

We've been doing it for a living now for, well, I guess a little over 10 years.

That's awesome, man.

That's actually pretty rare for podcasters.

Well, you know, honestly, you were talking earlier about how you guys had to sort of build the infrastructure as you went.

I think one of the big advantages that we had is we kind of got into it right before Patreon became a thing, right before the infrastructure for podcast advertising became pretty accessible to even a smaller show.

So the ability to monetize sort of came about right after we started or the ability to easily monetize, right?

You guys, like I said, were already sort of building your own infrastructure for monetization at that point, which made it a hell of a lot harder.

Totally.

Well, first of all, we did this for many years with no monetization, right?

So that was the first

third of our career.

And then we started to do it on our own.

And then the more prefab ones like Patreon and advertising came into play.

But yeah,

it was a nice transition.

But we did this for many years before there was any monetization.

Yeah.

People often ask, what's the secret to success in podcasts?

I say, start in 2014.

Yeah.

Well, I've had people over the years ask me for advice so many times.

You know, my number one thing I say is, you've got to come up with something.

It's got to have a unique angle or perspective.

You know, it could be, you know, there's a million movie review shows out there, but you've got to have your own kind of angle of attack.

And on top of that, you have to be willing to do it for a year before you even begin to judge what's going on.

Yes.

What I often tell people is, you know, that somewhere out at some point in your life, you're going to say to yourself as you're looking for podcasts, I wish there was a podcast that was X, right?

That's the podcast you should make.

Right.

Right.

There's obviously a hole in the market.

If you've noticed it, somebody else has too.

And there's probably a reason.

Find those gaps.

Yeah.

Right, right.

But it's also, it's kind of like asking, oh, what's your advice on starting a successful rock band?

You know, it's like, well, I could tell you how to form a band, you know, but being successful, there's no guarantee.

I could tell you how to buy a lottery ticket, basically, but there's no way to guarantee that you're going to win.

But the common element, Steve, is that whether you make it or not in any of these ventures, you have to put the time in and you have to develop a skill set and you have to have a massive commitment.

I mean,

we did it for 10 years on raw passion.

We just loved doing it.

Right.

You know what I mean?

And it really takes that in order to build it up to your chances of building it up slightly increase when you have that level of commitment.

All right.

Well, Noah, thank you so much for joining us.

We definitely highly recommend all of your podcasts to our listeners out there.

Excellent, man.

Well, thanks again for having me on.

It has been a real pleasure.

So what's the easiest way for people to find you?

Just find us anywhere you get podcasts.

Look for the scathing atheist or god-awful movies, and we'll get you to all the rest of them from there.

Sounds good.

All right.

Take care.

Thanks now.

Bye.

Adios.

It's time for science or fiction.

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

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

You have three news items.

This is the last science or fiction of the year with just regular news items.

Next week's show, again, is the show that we recorded in DC, and then we have the year-end review.

So just three more opportunities to affect your science or fiction record for the year.

You guys ready for the news items?

Yep.

Here we go.

Item number one.

A new analysis finds that if existing plans to achieve worldwide net zero carbon emissions were implemented, it would use an area of land larger than the United States.

I number two, scientists have discovered a new class of magnetism called alter magnetism and find that it can potentially increase the speed of memory devices up to a thousand times.

And item number three, paleontologists describe a species of flying reptile that is not a pterosaur and is 15 million years older than the oldest pterosaur, making it the oldest known flying vertebrate.

Evan, go first.

The first one.

Existing plans to achieve worldwide net zero carbon emissions, if they were implemented, it would use an area of land larger than the United States.

The United States is large.

It's very large.

It is, I believe, the fourth largest country on the planet.

That's a lot of area, boy.

And that kind of would be sad if this one, in a way, I think, is

science.

Oh, boy.

Tough to see.

What does that exactly mean that it would use land larger than the U.S.?

Using land in what capacity?

For all of our solar and wind and...

Did you have to plant more trees, all that stuff?

If you look at every country's plan to achieve net zero and how much land it would take to execute their plan and you add it all together, it's a land area greater than the United States.

Meaning it's

close to implausible.

Not good.

Number two, the new class of magnetism.

Alter magnetism.

This sounds like something right out of the 18th or 19th century, right?

And they find that it can potentially increase the speed of memory devices up to a thousand times.

Thousand-fold increase?

Holy crow.

That's, you know, here's one of these items where, you know, you can either increase that by a factor of 10, reduce it by a factor of 10 by 100.

I don't know about this one.

And the last one, paleontologists describe a species of flying reptile that is not a pterosaur and is 15 million years older than the oldest pterosaur.

And this makes it the oldest known flying vertebrate.

Yikes.

I don't know.

The United States is big.

I mean, Alaska

is part of the United States, and that's a huge chunk as well you have to consider.

I think that one's fiction.

Okay, Jay.

The first one about the plans to achieve net zero and it would need the land mass of the United States.

I mean, I think that's science.

I mean, I think that taking the entire world into account, that's, you know, that's about how much land we would need.

I would think a lot of that would be, you know, planting trees and stuff like that.

But sure, I mean, I know the United States is huge, but the world is really big.

That's science.

The second one, scientists have discovered a new class of magnetism, and it could potentially increase the speed of memory devices up to a thousand times.

Oh my god, that's amazing.

I mean, this seems unlikely, but I don't know.

I still think that

it's in the realm of possible.

Yeah, that's tough.

All right, and going down a third one, the paleontologists have described the species.

It's a flying reptile.

Oh, boy, 15 million years older than the oldest pterosaur.

Wow.

I mean, this goes against things that I've read, making it the oldest known flying vertebrate.

Steve, is this a recent find?

Yeah, of course.

15 million years older than...

I've been sitting down it for 10 years.

I don't know.

Well, I had to be sure.

I mean...

Yeah, these are all recent news items.

Okay.

So the first one, definite, yes.

The second one, the magnetism one, you know, new class of magnetism.

I don't know how profound that is.

You know, maybe it's like an offshoot of other types of magnetism that, of course, we understand.

You know, I don't know.

I just don't think that, I don't think that that one is...

That one doesn't seem that crazy to me.

And this last one here, now, last time Steve gave us one of these,

you know, about basically dragons.

Oh, wait.

Steve believes in dragons like Joe Rorgan now?

Last time

I said that I thought it was

science and I was wrong.

I'm going to say this one is the fiction.

Okay, Kara.

Class of magnetism sounds kooky.

Yes.

Magnets are also a little bit magical.

Still.

So

still.

They are.

I don't know.

Increase the speed of memory devices.

Oh, potentially.

I love all the qualifiers.

That That always makes things that sound fantastic.

Well, until you do it, you haven't done it.

Exactly.

So, eh, I'm on the fence about that one.

I agree with Jay about the land mass.

Like, the United States is big, but if we're talking solar panels on all these roofs and we're talking planting trees and all this stuff, like, yeah, I think that could easily fill the land mass of the United States.

They're not saying it has to all be in one place, right?

It's distributed across the world.

So, yeah, that the pterosaur one bugs me.

Those are flying reptiles and they are old.

And there's a whole new

class of flying reptiles that are not pterosaurs or types of pterosaurs that are older.

That one bothers me.

I feel like I would have heard about this.

So I'm going to say that's the fiction.

Yeah, Bob.

Yeah, the United States is big, but I mean, well, then again, how many countries actually have plans?

Four?

Three?

I don't know.

It seems like a lot, but yeah, it adds up.

And I'm sure there's a bunch of countries that have plans.

The memory device,

we need a new class of magnetism.

That's just too awesome for me to be pessimistic about it.

So I've got to just say that

that's science.

Yeah, the flying reptile, I don't think so.

I've got to put that in the class of would have heard about it.

You know, the would have heard about it class.

That's huge.

I went through news items today earlier.

I didn't see that.

That's just too good.

Steve's got a wet dream here that he wants us to buy into.

So I'm going to to shatter that dream and say fiction.

All right, so you guys

all agree

on the middle one, right?

The magnetism one.

So we'll start there.

Scientists have discovered a new class of magnetism called alter magnetism and find that it can potentially increase the speed of memory devices up to a thousand times.

You all think this one is science and this one is

science.

This is science.

This is cool.

It better be science.

Yeah, so what do you think it is?

What do you think ultramagnetism is, Bob?

Have you read this one?

I briefly scanned it real quick, and that's why if you said this was fiction, I was already planning driving to your house

and basically

flattening all of your tires.

Something about something about the

magnetic moment and the spin.

Yeah, so

there are different magnetic materials.

Magnetism is magnetism, but this is about magnetic materials.

There are ferromagnets and antiferromagnets and diamagnets.

you know, diamagnetism.

This is ant, this is alter magnets.

So this is basically materials that when a little piece, like a little magnetic moment heading in one direction next to it, there'll be a magnetic moment in the opposite direction, right?

So they're anti-parallel.

But then each little piece of the material that has a bunch of these

moments pointing in opposite directions, they are twisted a little bit relative to their neighbors.

So they say it's kind of like, so an anti-ferromagnet is one where each neighboring moment is in the opposite direction, right?

Yeah.

This is like an anti-ferromagnet, but also with the added twist that each little, that the pieces of it are rotated with respect to their neighbors.

So they said the result is

it's a subtle difference, but there's a profound effect that you end up getting the best of both worlds, of ferromagnets and anti-ferromagnets.

Nice, man.

Yeah.

So the end result is that we might be able to make, you know, magnetic memory devices out of cheaper material, like you won't have to use so many rare earths and stuff.

And also, it could potentially be a thousand times faster than existing technology.

That's wicked.

I hope that works.

Yeah, I hope that works.

That is awesome.

All right, let's go back to the first one.

A new analysis finds that if existing plans to achieve worldwide net zero carbon emissions were implemented, it would use an area of land larger than the United States.

Evan, you think this one is the fiction?

Everyone else thinks this one is science.

And this one

is

science.

Sorry, Evan.

This is very bad news.

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

They looked at many countries.

What was it, 140 countries?

And they went through all of their climate plans between now and like 2060.

So, what are you going to do to get to net zero?

So, this is what we're going to do, right?

And it involves planting a lot of trees, doing a lot of carbon capture and sequestration, repurposing a lot of land.

So, they said, so they added it all together.

So, okay, if everyone does what they say they're going to do, what would be the net effect?

And it would be a repurposing of land from current use equal to 990 million hectares.

The United States is 983 million hectares.

So it's greater than the area of the United States.

But also it's an area equivalent to two-thirds of global cropland, which is 1,561 million hectares as of 2020.

Now the problem here is that

we don't have the land to do this.

And we're going to need more cropland, not less.

And so that, right, so there's some start going upward.

if you so a lot of the times this this involves reforesting farmland

think about the problem the problem there like if everyone does what they say they're going to do we're not going to be able to grow enough crops can't do it and also it's a lot of it is saying well we're going to have biofuels it's like okay what land are you going to use to grow the biofuels when you're also reforesting land and also doing carbon capture and and also doing other things so they said basically this would be a disaster it would come up it would cause problems for our global food production.

It would actually cause a decrease in biodiversity and it would be an economic disaster for many people.

So this is the problem is everyone is has is doing is in their little bubble coming up with plans for their little slice of the world.

And unless you coordinate this all together, you know what I mean?

Like do you have things like, okay, well, we're not growing enough food for everybody if everyone does this.

So yeah, they're basically saying we're over-relying on carbon capture.

We're over-relying on a lot of this repurposing of land.

This cannot be the approach that we take.

Again, if we're coordinating all of our approaches across the world, we have to think more globally.

You know, we have to coordinate this.

But it also, I mean, I think the bigger picture here is that changing our civilization so that we're not emitting carbon is a massive undertaking.

And no matter how we do it, no matter how we get there, it's massive.

We are shifting over, transitioning entire industries, transportation, steel making, you know, aviation, obviously energy production.

We have to build a massive infrastructure.

Part of the challenge is that it takes energy and therefore carbon to build the infrastructure we need to make the transition.

But another part of the problem is we have, we, you know, we're basically using all the land that there is, right?

There's anything we do with land is taking it away from something else that's already happening.

The people are living there or we're growing food there or there's already a forest there or there's animals living there or whatever.

You can't just say, we're going to use this land for this new purpose now on this scale.

Anything you do to mitigate climate change is on a massive scale.

This is part of the problem with saying, I think any one simple solution in terms of like transitioning to green energy, saying, oh, we're just going to build.

solar panels everywhere.

It's like, okay, where are you going to put them all?

Even in the desert, you're going to be disrupting that ecosystem, which is why I think the same thing with growing food.

You know, we do really need to prioritize minimizing land use in our solutions, whether that's feeding the world or mitigating climate change.

Because that's why having dual purpose or tri-purpose.

Yeah, because, yeah, that's why any things that, especially if they like, we're going to have hydroponic food where we're going to be growing it on a very little land, but we're going to go tall.

You know, like anything that shifts to a strategy that uses less land is huge, is very beneficial.

That's why I live in a small lot house.

It honestly is.

Like, it's a huge reason why I chose to live the way that I live because I'm utilizing

the square footage of my house is higher than the square footage of the land I own.

Yeah.

Because it's built up.

Yeah.

So, yeah, that's nice.

Yeah.

Right.

The land is the one finite resource that we cannot make more of.

Right.

So we go to Mars or whatever.

But for now, we're pretty much the Earth is it.

This is also why I think, and the more I've been studying this and reading opinions about it and whatever, the stronger I believe this, is that there's no way, there is no way we're going to get to net zero.

No way.

No way, Wade.

Without nuclear power.

It's just not going to happen.

Nuclear has the advantage of producing the most energy per acre, you know what I mean, per bit of land.

It also has the advantage of you can plug it into existing connections to the grid.

You don't need to build new grid infrastructure.

I've also been reading recently: not only is land use a huge issue, but raw material.

You realize we don't have enough copper to make the green energy transition.

We just don't have it.

That's right, Gabbert.

It's not going to, it doesn't exist.

Maybe alchemy can take care of that.

Right.

I mean, we would have to open up so many, I mean, probably somewhere in the world, but I mean, you know,

the ability to mine and everything, enough copper to feed, to make all the batteries we need to make, all the wind turbines, everything, upgrade the grid.

You know,

just we don't have it.

That's going to become a limiting factor.

So solutions that don't require stressing our natural resources and using a lot of land are going to be the most valuable.

And when it comes to energy production, I don't know, nuclear energy just has the, you know, beats everything else in those features.

You know, so anyway, I believe that more strongly.

The more I read about it, the more I think that's there's just no way we're going to get to net zero without, we should be somewhere between 30 and 40 percent nuclear energy, you know, in terms of the mix world.

And similarly, similarly, we're not going to feed everybody without GMO.

Without going to feed everybody without GMOs, right?

Oh, yeah, for sure.

Right, unless you want to cut down more forests, right?

Which we don't want to do, which then that exacerbates the global warming end of the spectrum.

You know, totally.

And not just GMO, but yeah, like a lot of more kind of technologically oriented temperatures.

Get rid of save water.

Get rid of organic farming.

Organic farming uses up 20% more land than average than conventional farming.

And that difference is probably going to get greater because organic farming does not use the modern tools.

Like

farm indoors, farm in shipping containers or in enclosed spaces where the light and the water and the humidity are all controlled.

Yeah.

And you can make any climate anywhere in the world.

Yeah.

So this is a bigger problem than I think many people realize.

And we can't just be, we've sort of been doing the like, let's just build solar panels and

that's all good.

But the phase where we could just do anything green and it's good, we're kind of coming to the end of that phase.

It's good.

It's just not enough.

It's just not enough.

We're getting to the phase now where we need global coordination and strategic planning.

And that scares the living shit out of me.

And that's hard to do.

Yeah.

Look,

we don't even have country coordination.

I know.

We're hardened up doing it on the level of a single country.

Eventually, all of you will be as pessimistic as me.

We are not doomists.

We are not doomists.

We can do it.

All right.

Just on the

side of doomists.

Which means that paleontologists describe a species of flying reptile that is not a pterosaur and is 15 million

older pterosaur, make it the oldest low-flying vertebrate is complete and utter bollocks fiction.

Cool.

Too good.

Too good to me.

I made it up.

I made it up too.

Yeah.

But I believe my own malarkey.

It is based upon a real study.

They did,

paleontologists did present a new flying reptile from the Queso Relato locality.

The cheese what now?

In Patagonia.

And it is,

you know, not the, it's not the oldest flying vertebrate.

It's just older for that branch than we knew previously.

But it is a pterosaur.

Yeah, so pterosaurs are the oldest flying vertebrates.

There's only so many vertebrates that fly.

You have pterosaurs, birds, and bats, right?

And then you have insects.

But pterosaurs are first.

Do you know how far back they go, Kara?

Ooh, 180?

The oldest is probably 220 million years old.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, so far.

But yeah, but they really took off, you know, 180 to 200 million years ago is when they started to have adaptive radiation.

Yeah, and of course, that could get pushed back if we find still older specimens, but that's currently the record holder, around 220 million years old.

All right, good job, everyone.

Evan, give us a quote.

Being ignorant is not so much a shame as being unwilling to learn.

Ignorance is a completely fixable state.

Yep.

That one was written in 1755.

It appeared in Poor Richard's Almanac.

Therefore, it's attributed to Benjamin Franklin.

Benjamin Franklin.

Pseudonym Richard Saunders.

That's right.

No way.

Yeah.

And no illusions was on today.

What's going on with these names?

Yeah, I remember when I realized that Richard Saunders, I know that name.

He's not even Australian.

Yeah, attributed to Benjamin Franklin.

Close enough.

Close enough.

And I did check it out at some quote Czech websites, and they didn't say this was attributed to someone else.

Yeah, okay.

So it's not contested, but it doesn't seem to be contested.

Okay, sounds good.

Good enough.

Yep.

All right.

Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

You got it, brother.

Don't forget, listeners, to send in your votes for all the best of, worst of for 2024.

We're going to record that episode next week.

That'll be our Christmas week episode.

The Saturday after Christmas, that will come out.

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

Skeptics Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking.

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