The Skeptics Guide #1062 - Nov 15 2025

Speaker 1 You're listening to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

Speaker 1 Hello, and welcome to The Skeptics Guide to the Universe.

Speaker 1 Today is Saturday, September 20th, and this is your host, Stephen Novella.

Speaker 1 Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

Speaker 2 Hey, everybody.

Speaker 1 Evan Bernstein.

Speaker 3 Hello, Kansas.

Speaker 1 Jay Novella. Hey, guys.

Speaker 1 Kara Santa Maria. Howdy.

Speaker 1 Yeah, baby.

Speaker 1 And George Robb. Anti-M, AntiM!

Speaker 2 Yay, George.

Speaker 1 We are live from Lawrence, Kansas. This is my first time in Kansas.
How about you guys? Yeah, first time? Yep.

Speaker 3 Third time.

Speaker 1 Third time? Yes. How do you drop it? Yeah, you drove through it twice.

Speaker 3 I've driven through it twice, once north-south and once east-west, and that was it. We may have stopped for lunch or something while we were moving around the country, but that's it.

Speaker 3 Never had a whole day in Kansas.

Speaker 1 When we were driving from the airport, George said, you know, if we didn't know we were in Kansas, could you tell from just looking around? And other than being flatter than we're used to, not really.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It's pretty.
It looks a lot like Texas. Yeah.
Honestly. Yeah.
But they're not a hill country, but like North Texas. Parts look like Jersey or like Pennsylvania, too.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's the problem with, you know, Raymond Raymond and Flanagan being everywhere. That's the thing.

Speaker 1 That's how it works. It's just America.
America, yeah. Yeah, it's chilies and

Speaker 1 basically it's all the same thing. Yeah.

Speaker 1 We're going to start off with a little bit of a discussion about nightmares.

Speaker 1 Evan suggested this as a possible news item.

Speaker 1 The item itself is pretty simple. It's like, hey, you can control your nightmares and it makes you healthier.
It's like, okay, well, not so much.

Speaker 1 But there is this issue of, Bob and I have talked about this for a while, about lucid dreaming or trying to develop the ability to control, like to be aware that you're dreaming and to control your dream, which is a really difficult and a very unstable state.

Speaker 1 You tend to either dream, you wake up,

Speaker 1 which means you're back into the dream, or you actually wake up. It's very hard to maintain that knife's edge of being dreaming, but know that you're dreaming.

Speaker 1 But we thought we would use this as a jumping-off point to talk about our common recurring nightmares. And interestingly, I had my recurring nightmare last night.

Speaker 1 Do terrible.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 I think this happens more often to me when I'm sleep-deprived. And just because of travel and everything and being in a hotel room, I usually don't sleep as well.

Speaker 1 So I woke up at like 4 o'clock in the morning and then

Speaker 1 went back to sleep. And it was hard to get back to sleep.
And then I slept for four more hours. And that was the period where

Speaker 1 that was my sleep-deprived sleep that I have. So I had a little bit of sleep paralysis, which happens sometimes.
I did that thing where I dreamt that I woke up, but I was still dreaming.

Speaker 1 And like I'm getting out of bed and going to the bathroom. I knew I had to meet these guys and I'm like, am I awake? Yeah, I'm awake.
I'm awake. I'm walking around.

Speaker 1 I'm looking at things and everything.

Speaker 1 Your dreaming self can't tell that you're not really awake.

Speaker 1 Then I walk back to the bed. And I see myself sleeping in the bed.
Like, shit, I'm still sleeping. Wow.

Speaker 1 But the nightmare, the recurring nightmare had some point in there. Jay, you were in it.
And you were there, and you were there.

Speaker 1 Put him up, put him up. Oh my God, that was awesome.

Speaker 1 Jay was there. And there was some other person.
It might have been Ian, but I'm not really sure. So we were being chased, and that's my recurring nightmares.
I'm being chased by some malevolent force.

Speaker 1 This time it was the authorities, like whatever that means.

Speaker 1 And you know how you just know things in dreams?

Speaker 1 They were chasing us because they thought that we were criminals, but it was a misunderstanding. But still, we felt like we had to run away from them.
And Jay had a portal gun from the Portal game.

Speaker 1 You guys know that? Wow. Wow.
So

Speaker 1 we're using the portal gun to escape into the Rocky Mountains or something.

Speaker 1 But they still managed to track us down. And then the guy had me at gunpoint.
I had to wrestle the gun from him and I shot him in the ass. Still didn't.

Speaker 1 Which was surprising because the guns almost never work in my dreams. Right? Like, you can't pull the trigger or something.
Or swords are wobbly. Or

Speaker 1 phasers. Phasers never shoot in.

Speaker 1 Why is that?

Speaker 1 Well, Freud had something to say to wobble swords.

Speaker 1 There's no answer to that question.

Speaker 1 The thing that bothers me is: like, dreams are just happening, you know, and one part of your brain's making it up, and another part of your brain is experiencing it.

Speaker 1 And why is it a universal, like, big F you? Why couldn't it be ultra-successful and ultra-fun? Like, I don't think it's universal. Sometimes that can happen.

Speaker 1 So, so, what's interesting to me, and I don't know if there's like gender differences with this, but I've dated, I had an ex who was male who had night terrors, and almost always he would be like, ah, no, get away.

Speaker 1 And I'll be like, what were you dreaming? And he was always being chased or people were breaking it. That literally never happened to me.
I've never had those kinds of like I'm being hunted dreams.

Speaker 1 But I had a recurring dream when I was little. And it's like, fucked up, you guys.
Like, honestly, I think this is why my parents put me in therapy like really early on.

Speaker 1 I don't dream anymore that I know of because I'm on like sleep medication that keep me in Delta and I just don't think I dream or I don't remember. But you have to be experiencing REM at some point.

Speaker 1 I don't get much REM at all.

Speaker 1 You just don't remember that. You don't remember that.
Yeah, but I also, the drugs I take prevent me from getting a lot of REM.

Speaker 2 But you've got to get some or you've got to go slowly crazy.

Speaker 2 You'd go slowly crazy without REM.

Speaker 1 You do have to have REM. You have to.
You have to. Even if you're in Delta all night? Yeah.

Speaker 2 You would not last long.

Speaker 1 I don't think that's true. I think you can't not have Delta.
Yeah, Delta.

Speaker 1 I think you can avoid paradoxes. My understanding is that you really need a good sleep architecture.
You need to go through all the stages of sleep

Speaker 1 with a certain pattern. There could be variations.

Speaker 1 Carol, you're actually dreaming right now.

Speaker 1 Wake up, wake up. This is your nightmare.
Anyway, as an aside, anybody out there who has narcolepsy or narcolepsy-type sleep disorder, I have IH, which is similar to narcolepsy.

Speaker 1 There's a medication we take, which is like GHB. It's Zywave.
And it just forces you into Delta all night, and you're like awake during the day.

Speaker 1 And without that, I I am sleepy girl my whole life been sleepy anyway when I was young I had this recurring dream and I'm talking like kindergarten first second grade where I would go to sleep and I would wake up just like you did and I would be like oh it's time for school and I'd go to my parents room to wake them up for school and they were dead in their beds and I was like holy shit so I went to find my sister and she was dead in her bed and so I left the house and went around the neighborhood knocking on doors some of them were open went in everybody was dead all the animals were dead and I was the only living soul and it was terrifying.

Speaker 1 This is a good TV show watch. Right? And it was like everything was dead but me.
And I spent the whole nightmare trying to search for something that was alive. Do you ever find it in the kids?

Speaker 1 And I never could. No, I would just be searching, searching, and then I'd wake up.
And I had that a lot, and I haven't since I was a child.

Speaker 1 As an adult, the only things I have are like stress dreams about going to file for my graduation, and I still owe like a whole credit.

Speaker 1 What? When do I end up?

Speaker 1 I have to take a final dream. Yeah, when do those end? Yeah, never, apparently.

Speaker 1 No, stressors do it.

Speaker 1 So my kid nightmare was: anybody, when I was a kid, my dad used to let all of us watch all the science fiction movies and everything.

Speaker 1 So there's one thing where some dude reanimates an arm from the elbow. Remember that? And I remember one scene, it grabs the guy, scared the shit out of me.

Speaker 1 So my semi-reoccurring dream was that there was a gauntlet, you know, like an armored hand crawling after me.

Speaker 1 And then I stopped having it when I finally picked it up and I scooped out the mustard that it was that filled it. And that how that broke the chain because mustard wasn't scary to me.
But my real.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 1 The arm was full of mustard. It was a gauntlet.
It was like armor. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 And that was how my brain transferred it from like a human hand to a more terrifying gauntlet hand crawling after me.

Speaker 1 I explained to him that it was full of mustard. Like, well, yeah, because it was a gauntlet.
It wasn't a real arm.

Speaker 1 The other arm had ketchup. Gauntlets are always special.

Speaker 1 I was in my parents' closet, and they had a deep closet when we were kids. My dad had his safe right there.
I remember I was sitting next to it, and the thing came in. Where's the mustard coming?

Speaker 1 I don't understand. I have no idea.
I don't know. Did you have a catch of mustard? Was it brown or yellow? It was yellow.
It's a good yellow mustard? Yeah. George, you like yellow mustard?

Speaker 1 I hate mustard, but the mustard is scary. That would make it scary.
So gross. A gauntlet of mustard? Oh, my God.
Yeah, it was gross.

Speaker 1 I mean, now that I'm thinking about it, it's pretty messed up. So, anyway, my adult dream.
So, really quick, I got to give you a little background.

Speaker 1 I have been looking my entire life to have a proper love relationship. And I mean, like many people, just failure after failure after failure.

Speaker 1 And I got into my 30s, got into my 40s, and I'm like, you know, nothing was working.

Speaker 1 And I finally was at the point where I'm like, it's not going to happen, you know, because statistically, it was getting less and less likely.

Speaker 1 I meet my wife, who's my best friend, and is the freaking sunshine of everything that's good in my life. She's unbelievable.
And I've never been loved like this.

Speaker 1 I've never felt loved like this before.

Speaker 1 You know, I can go on. This is my nightmare, by the way.

Speaker 1 With you. My nightmare is that I don't know.
I know that the idea of her, like, I found someone. She's my wife, but I don't know who she is.
I don't know her name. I don't know what she looks like.

Speaker 1 And I don't know where she is. So it's like that whole veil thing.
Like, something's wrong. Why am I with this weird person? There's this, I'm not supposed to be here.

Speaker 1 This is not what's supposed to be. It's a Twilight Zone kind of dream.
Yeah, and it totally upends me. Like, I wake up freaking out when I, because I, because you really feel it.

Speaker 1 And that's like a real neurological disorder. Like, when people, the invasion of the body snatchers thing, where they don't recognize, like, there's people that they know, but they don't recognize it.

Speaker 1 Capgrass syndrome. Yeah, that's scary as shit.
Like, if I ever had, there is a, yeah, imagine having that.

Speaker 1 Like, in the dream, everything's normal, except I know that I'm supposed to be with somebody else, and I have no other idea of who that person is.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's kind of like a dream about having capgrass syndrome. Like, this is not my wife.
Yeah. It's interesting.
Yep. George, about you? I had one

Speaker 1 very influential dream when I was a kid. It wasn't recurring, but I was probably four, four or five, and I was in bed.
And to me, it wasn't a dream. I was awake.

Speaker 1 I mean, in my mind, I was awake in my bed. And subsequently, most of my dreams do take place like in my bedroom.
Like, literally, I'll be in bed.

Speaker 1 I'm aware that I'm in bed and something is happening in the room. But I was a very, very young youngster, and it was morning.

Speaker 1 And I looked up, and at the foot of my bed was a closet that had the door open. and at the top of the closet was sort of like a shelf at the top, and it was a dark sort of shelf.

Speaker 1 And there were two hands, sort of these wispy, not quite bone, not quite smoke, hands just sort of doing this waving motion, just independent. There was no body, there was no whatever.

Speaker 1 And I remember just sort of looking at it and like being scared, but sort of, but not really doing anything about it, and just being terrified.

Speaker 1 I told my mom the next day that this had happened, and she was like, oh, it was probably a dream. And for probably

Speaker 1 10 to 15 years after that, I couldn't have a door open. Like, if I was in a bedroom somewhere, like my dorm, the closet couldn't be open.
It had to be shut. And it never happened again.

Speaker 1 It was just that one time. Do you remember, like, you said you didn't do anything about it? Could you move? You might have been having a hypnopump at all.
It might have been, yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't think that was a dream. I think that was a hypnopum.
It felt so unbelievable. Like, I knew what dreams were.

Speaker 1 I knew what dreams were at that point, but it was just, and it was just

Speaker 1 because you said it was morning, you were in bed, you you didn't do anything yet. Yeah, so that, and to this day, I can sort of still picture it.

Speaker 1 I'm sure I've modified it in my head over time, and now it's technical or whatever. But, and it wasn't, you know, there was no blood, there was no, it was just

Speaker 1 that ain't right, that ain't right.

Speaker 3 Yeah, when I was a kid, also, my dreams have changed.

Speaker 3 I think a lot of people have had that experience as well. You don't dream about the things you used to when you dream about new things.

Speaker 3 But when I was a kid, the reoccurring dream I would have that would frighten me is that I could not control myself from falling. It's the falling dream, right?

Speaker 3 I think we've all experienced that, that sort of,

Speaker 1 you're dropping,

Speaker 3 death is coming, you have that sinking sensation in your body.

Speaker 3 But I would have the dream where I would try to remain on the ground, yet something was nefarious or otherwise, was pulling me up into the sky. and would drop me.

Speaker 3 I would constantly get dropped as a kid.

Speaker 3 Now, as an adult, though, I don't really have nightmares per se, but my reoccurrence is that it's this level of frustration that I can't seem to get something done. I need to be over there now.

Speaker 3 I know I need to be over there now. Why aren't I over there now?

Speaker 1 I'm trying to walk.

Speaker 3 I'm not walking. Why?

Speaker 3 So I get very frustrated.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's called a stress dream. Yeah.
Oh, totally.

Speaker 3 And it's true of all sorts of scenarios. Like, I know I have to write this thing.
Why aren't I writing it? What is going on? I have to write this. Why aren't I writing? So I can't make sense of it.

Speaker 3 And I wind up getting really angry with myself in those dreams. And that takes on many forms and many,

Speaker 3 various kinds of scenarios.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I've had plenty of nightmares. I can't really remember any that are like really like, oh, listen to this one.

Speaker 2 I've had the stressed dreams are common, everyone, but there's one nightmare that I remember that was really fascinating. And it was a nightmare of a movie nightmare.

Speaker 2 American Werewolf in London. There's a dream sequence where

Speaker 2 David Norton's attacked by these weird creatures with weird faces. So in my dream, I'm in my kitchen

Speaker 2 where we grew up, and they come in the house with machine guns and start killing everybody.

Speaker 2 So, yeah, pretty bad, right? But I was also experimenting with lucid dreams at that time, and I said, This is not real.

Speaker 2 These aren't real bullets. This is all bullshit.
So I walked right up to them, like, you're not even real. And they start shooting me.
I'm like, see, nothing, guys.

Speaker 2 So then I'm like, all right, I'm done with you. I walked out of the house and I tried to fly, which is what I would do.
Whenever I had a lucid dream, I tried to fly.

Speaker 2 And I would almost invariably fail because it's so hard. You know, you try to leap in the air like Superman, it just fall flat.
It doesn't work. It's so frustrating.

Speaker 2 But the few times it actually worked, it was magical. It was just like, holy crap, you feel like Superman.
If you ever tried to lucid dream, try to fly because it's like amazing.

Speaker 1 Bob, when you fly in your dreams, so when I fly in my dreams, I'm like doing the breaststroke amazing. I have an animalized.
Is that how everybody or do you like it? Sometimes I have both, but

Speaker 1 that's the only way I've ever been. And it sucks, which is silly, right? It requires a lot of mental effort, and it's hard to sustain.
Ah, interesting. Even in my dreams, but you can.

Speaker 1 I can do it in my dreams, but like it's this is how you get up a level and you're aloft, and I'm always the only one, and everybody's going, whoa, that's so badass. Yeah, it would be.

Speaker 1 Is there any evolutionary advantage to not just dreaming, but nightmares in particular? Is there some kind of... Can we think of anything? Well, we still don't even understand 100%

Speaker 1 what dreams are and why we dream. So I think it's hard to make that leap.

Speaker 1 You know that dreams, the REM sleep is important for consolidation of memory, for your brain is sort of recalibrating itself and desktop clearing. Does the dream actually have to happen? Or

Speaker 1 maybe you need to be conscious enough for your brain to do the work that needs to happen during REM sleep. Well, you're not.

Speaker 1 Maybe it's a byproduct.

Speaker 2 I thought it's like your brain is just firing in a much more random sequence than normal, and your mind is trying to make sense of all of that static.

Speaker 1 That's kind of how I see

Speaker 2 dream imagery.

Speaker 1 When you're dreaming, the part of your brain that does reality testing is not functioning. Which is why

Speaker 1 things make sense to you in dreams that don't make sense to you when you wake up. Because you're a different person when you're dreaming.
You're not the same. You're not your waking self.

Speaker 2 And the key with lucid dreaming, I think, is that there's a critical threshold of activation in

Speaker 2 that lobe of your brain where you can do reality testing. You're like, whoa, this isn't real.
This must be a dream. So that's the idea, I think.

Speaker 1 So, Bob, you mentioned that in that dream you were in our childhood home. What's interesting is that when I remember my dreams, it's either in a place that's not real,

Speaker 1 if it is in a place that I'm familiar with, it's almost always in our childhood home.

Speaker 1 I don't think I've ever had a dream where it was in my current home that I'm living in that I remember. Is that the same for you guys as well?

Speaker 1 That's true.

Speaker 1 My dreams are usually pretty typical.

Speaker 1 Did you guys ever, Bob and Steve, growing up, when mom and dad put the extension, like put the

Speaker 1 party room in, did you ever dream that you were being pulled in there? Did you ever dream that, Bob? Because that, I don't know why. Like, I remember being dragged into wireless.

Speaker 1 They're having a shared dream. Yeah, that's the one that's in one part of the house.

Speaker 1 Wait, wait, wait. Explain what this is.
What do you mean? My dream was. Was there mustard? What's going on? Well, it was always, like, the lights were always off, right?

Speaker 1 So when we all went up to bed, it was like that room and then the new room that they were putting on off of it.

Speaker 1 It was pitch black.

Speaker 1 And I always be being creeped out, going quick. I got to go quick.
There's a kitchen there, and I got to run and turn the corner and get up the stairs before that room gets in there.

Speaker 1 And the light switch doesn't work. So

Speaker 1 I had a dream that I got pulled into that darkness.

Speaker 1 And I still get a little creeped out when I think about it.

Speaker 1 You know what I love

Speaker 1 when pets dream? Oh, yeah. Like when you're puppy.
They're like, you're a little bit closet

Speaker 1 and they're chasing bunnies. We used to call it chasing bunnies.
That's just the coolest thing. Because it's just like, oh, they're dreaming too.

Speaker 1 So there is some evolutionary purpose for it to reprogram, whatever. But yeah, but like, do dogs have nightmares too? Like, is there a.
Sure. Wow.
Like, some mailman that's got a machine gun?

Speaker 1 Or, like, what's the

Speaker 2 thing? Here's one more. I think we had nightmare cross-fertilization when we were growing up because I remember my sister telling us that her nightmare, I think, infected some of our nightmares.

Speaker 2 She had a dream where she called this monster the beep beep eye.

Speaker 1 The beep beep eye. Oh my gosh.
Yes.

Speaker 1 So that's where that came from.

Speaker 2 In her mind, in her dream, the beep beep eye was an eye, right? But it would draw eyes all over you, right? That's my memory. In my version of it, it was a robot, because beep beep, to me, is a robot.

Speaker 2 So it was a robot that would draw eyes on you.

Speaker 1 And that's where my memory ends.

Speaker 2 What's your memory end?

Speaker 1 It's a giant floating eye. Yeah, all right.
But that was chasing you. That was, again, just a chase dream.
That's kind of creepy. Yeah.
In my dream, I ate the eyes and they were meatballs. Yeah?

Speaker 1 Not surprising. So that tracks.

Speaker 1 All right. Have you guys heard of the brain worm? Not the brain worm.
Of course we have.

Speaker 1 Do you guys know where that quote comes from, by the way, in the eyes? Not the ball worm. Yeah.
Anyone know where that? Yeah. Wait.
Anyone know where it comes from? It sounds like Lord Farquhat.

Speaker 1 Flash Gordon. Flash Gordon.
Nice. Flash Job.
Nice. That's the one.

Speaker 1 2 SGU geek points. Okay.
Wow.

Speaker 1 The 1980 version. So we have spoken about the brain-machine interface before, and do you guys remember what the biggest technological limitation of the brain-machine interface is? Yes.

Speaker 1 Fidelity.

Speaker 2 The electrodes staying.

Speaker 1 Electrodes. It's the electrodes.
But that's what I mean. It's part of it.
But it's really the. So with the software,

Speaker 1 kicking butt, right? We can make sense of the skin. They move, they don't stay in place.
They what? So, yeah, so the problem with the electrodes. So we have multiple choices with electrodes.

Speaker 1 You could put them on the scalp surface, which is not invasive, but there's a lot of attenuation with the skull, right? So you lose a lot of information.

Speaker 1 You could put brain surface electrodes, and they're much higher fidelity, but they fibrose over. They form scar tissue and and inflammation and whatever, so it's not good.

Speaker 1 Deep brain electrodes, same thing. They eventually will scar over.
And then there's the stentrodes, which you put inside veins, which are still experimental, but those have a lot of promise.

Speaker 1 But so what we're missing, like the next step would be to make flexible electrodes that flex with the brain, so it doesn't cause the scar tissue.

Speaker 1 So that's so that is, you know, there are a lot of groups working on that.

Speaker 1 So now there's a study not only doing that but taking it even a step further and this is this is the the brain worm so what they've done is they've designed a series of electrodes right to look like an earthworm.

Speaker 1 So if you imagine an earthworm

Speaker 1 and the bands are each electrodes right yep and they the in the head of the worm is a magnet So they could actually

Speaker 1 have the worm sort of crawl through your brain by moving the magnetic from external magnets. Oh, wow.
So they could reposition it as desired.

Speaker 1 And because it's flexible and movable, they tested it in, well, they tested it in, because it also could be used for muscle, like you could use this to monitor muscle activity or brain activity.

Speaker 1 They tested it in the muscles of rats, and they went a year with minimal scar tissue, which is, that's the key right there. So you move it to minimize the scar tissue.

Speaker 1 Well, but yeah, the fact that it moves, it's not rigid and not fixed in place, then that's where the scar tissue forms. How long is it not destroying tissue as it moves, though? Like,

Speaker 1 why would it be? It must be weaker than the surrounding tissue. So, it's going through the surface.
So, it's going to take the path of least resistance, right?

Speaker 1 In the muscles, it's going through the fascia. The fascia is the connective tissue.
It's not boring through muscle cells. Okay, so it's like moving through the planes between muscles.

Speaker 1 In the brain, you know, it would be going through your folds, the gyri and the valleys. I don't know what that is.

Speaker 1 You're talking about the surface of your brain. Yeah, it'd be outside of your sword.
Oh, so these are superfluous. The contours? They would be on the surface.
This would be brain surface electricity.

Speaker 1 And also, just to clarify, they're modeling it after an earthworm, but they're not the size of an earthworm. No.

Speaker 1 They're actually

Speaker 1 smaller and they're flatter.

Speaker 1 Flatworms. So would you feel that?

Speaker 1 Your brain does not feel anything. I know, but it's not your brain.
It's on the surface of your... Could the bottom of your skull has any sensation? Well, so it would be the dura, right?

Speaker 1 It would be the lining around your brain. Is it underneath the dura? Yeah, the whole point would be be to put it on the surface of the brain, right? So we could crawl along the surface of the brain.

Speaker 1 So the advantage here is what, so the primary thing is if they could get these electrodes to last for years,

Speaker 1 that would be amazing, right? That would make it much more viable as a technology. Alright, so it's not like a prong that's stuck into your brain.
It's just touching the surface.

Speaker 1 It's a skimming on the surface. All right, that's it.
So what diseases are they? Because I don't know. I think about like DBS, that's by definition deep brain.
Yeah. So how helpful is that for DBS?

Speaker 1 What kinds of things can this help with? So first of all, just for studying the brain, right? So if somebody has epilepsy, let's say, so

Speaker 1 we could do EEGs, electroencephalograms from the brain surface. Sometimes we do them from the skull surface.

Speaker 1 But then if we're planning on cutting out a chunk of your brain to stop your seizures, we need to know exactly where the seizure is coming from, which means we need to capture it. right as it starts.

Speaker 1 But you still aren't going to know depth. You're only going to know.
Well, yeah, but the thing is, if you could, once you put the electrodes in place, then that's it. You're getting one spot.

Speaker 1 This would say, let's see what's happening over there. Let's move it.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's in real time. They're just moving it with magnets.
Yeah, but I mean, like, could you move it from here to here in like three seconds?

Speaker 1 I don't know exactly how long it takes, but it's not a limiting factor. It doesn't take long to move it.
No, could this theoretically

Speaker 1 be non-invasive? Like the bug in Raths? It's minimally invasive. They don't call it non-invasive.
Put it in the ear or put it up your nose or something, and it finds its way. That's a good point.

Speaker 1 It's considered minimally invasive because

Speaker 1 if you're laying electrodes along the brain surface, you've got to open up the brain to do that. But here, you could literally bore a hole, bore, right?

Speaker 1 Put the worm in there, and then get it to the place where

Speaker 1 it's got to go. So it's less invasive for that reason.
You only have to bore a small little hole. And then for brain-machine interface,

Speaker 1 the thing, because it's dynamic and flexible at the same time, you could calibrate it, get it to the right part of the brain to have the functionality that you want, right?

Speaker 1 So there's more flexibility there rather than putting it someplace, hoping it's the right place and seeing how well it works.

Speaker 1 Like, if this isn't working out, let's move it a millimeter to the left and see if that works better, whatever. It'd be just more of a dynamic

Speaker 1 relationship. So I know it's super small.
Yeah. But like, let's say here's the head.
Like, my thumb is the head. It's long.
I mean, you should think it's not short.

Speaker 1 You want it to be long. So it could go.

Speaker 1 The whole thing is electrodes, like 60 electrodes.

Speaker 1 And so you want them spaced out for a reasonable distance. How do they control where the tail is? So I just think because of the way it moves.

Speaker 1 But there's only a magnet on one side.

Speaker 1 On the head, yeah. That's correct.
Okay. Is this built, or this is theoretical here? They published a paper where they showed that it works in the muscles of rats.
In the muscles of rats. Yeah.
Wow.

Speaker 1 Kara, tell us about these ants. Yeah, this is a really interesting story.
It was actually published earlier this month in Nature. It was a big deal.

Speaker 1 So these ants, this is a picture of queens of a Mediterranean harvester ant. The species here is called Messer ibericus.
They're in Spain.

Speaker 1 So we're going to have to hold two different species in our heads in explaining this story because it's a little bit complicated. So there's M.
ibericus, Messer ibericus, and then there's M.

Speaker 1 structor or messer structer. So two different species, same genus, right? M.
ibericus, M. structor.
So researchers were observing these M. ibericus colonies, and they realized that there were some M.

Speaker 1 structor drones hanging out within the M. ibericus colony.
They also realized that there were some hybrids of these ants within the colony. It's a hybrid.

Speaker 1 I'm going to say that word so many times during this past.

Speaker 1 Be cute for a minute.

Speaker 1 And so the researchers were like, okay, it's not that uncommon to see hybrid species within some kind of colonies or structural organizations of animals, right?

Speaker 1 We've seen hybrids of different dog species or different marine animals. Animals are always getting busy.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and if they're close enough, like if they're the same genus and the species is close enough, they can often make offspring, but the offspring might be sterile.

Speaker 1 So in an ant colony, it doesn't really matter if the drones are sterile because, as a general rule, the drones aren't there to mate. They're there to do jobs.

Speaker 1 But what the researchers noticed was that there were drones that were from a different species within the colony, but the species in question, M.

Speaker 1 structor, sometimes was like hundreds of miles away geographically. And they're like, how did these ants come across these other ants?

Speaker 1 Also, bear in mind that these ants diverged about as long ago in evolutionary history as we did from chimpanzees. This will be important for the analogy that the researchers make later.

Speaker 1 So they're trying to to figure out where did they come across these? How did they make these hybrids?

Speaker 1 And at the beginning, they were all joking, like, what if they were giving birth to a different species? That's ridiculous.

Speaker 1 And then the more they dug in, they were like, shit, I think that's what happened. So they start observing

Speaker 1 these queen ants, and they're noticing that they're laying eggs and they have offspring that are a different species. And so they look at the offspring and they're like, how did they get there?

Speaker 1 Maybe they came across some drones somewhere. What's going on? They looked at both the M.
structor and the M. ibaricus ants, and they found that they all had M.
ibaricus. Was it M.
ibaricus or M.

Speaker 1 structor? So now I'm confusing myself. Doesn't matter.
They all have the same mitochondrial DNA. And they were like, well, that's weird.
What is going on here?

Speaker 1 As they dug a little bit deeper and they were able to actually watch these queens lay and then look at the genetics of the eggs that they laid, they realized that without any exposure to the other species, these queen mothers were laying a different species of ant, which is the first time that's ever been observed in any animal anywhere on the planet.

Speaker 1 They're calling it xenoparity foreign birth. So it's just a coincidence? No.
No.

Speaker 1 So it seems to be an evolutionary quirk that's helpful because if you can increase the diversity of your colony, because what often happens is that a queen will mate with a fertile drone to produce offspring, but they're all genetically the same, which is bad.

Speaker 1 Queens also tend to have something they call selfish genes. So sometimes when a queen mates, she just makes more queens over and over and over.

Speaker 1 And you need to have a balance of different roles in the colony. So, one way to prevent that is to mate with a different species, and then the queen is less likely to make more queens.

Speaker 1 So, what ends up happening, and this is the analogy that they use, because one of the journalists on this was like, Wait, so is this like if a human woman mated with a chimpanzee and then produced a hybrid offspring, it's a hybrid, that was sterile and couldn't produce more, and they were like, no, it's even weirder than that.

Speaker 1 It's if a woman, a human woman, mated with a chimpanzee in an effort to produce hybrid offspring so that they could have workers

Speaker 1 continuing to make the colony run.

Speaker 1 I'm so afraid that someone's going to try to do this. This is amazing.
Well, the thing is, we didn't even think this was possible.

Speaker 1 And so it's funny, I I was telling Bob about it earlier and he was like but how does it work? And I was like I don't know they didn't tell us that. I think they're still trying to figure that out.

Speaker 1 They figured out that it does work. They were able to observe the outcome.
To clarify though, they're giving birth not to just hybrids but to the others of the species.

Speaker 1 They're giving birth to the full other species so then they can mate with the full other species and produce hybrids. But they must have the genes then for that other species.

Speaker 1 They all have it in their mitochondria. But that's is that enough though? I guess we'll figure out how that mitochondrial DNA is making its way into the gametes.
I don't know.

Speaker 1 Or maybe there's some other, they still don't understand how it works. Yeah, I think I'm missing something.
Well, I think they are too. Like, they were like, this isn't possible.

Speaker 1 But then they observed it, and they were like, this is the only explanation. Is it possible they made it in the past, like they're saving the sperm from the other species

Speaker 1 for later use? Hundreds of miles away, and they're ants. Well,

Speaker 1 I don't think it is possible. Yeah.
Yeah. But maybe, maybe.
But once you've eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable

Speaker 1 must be.

Speaker 1 Because the truth of the matter is this seems impossible, right? So it could be. Could be.

Speaker 1 But either way, they are giving birth to a different species, whether they're holding on to that sperm, and they call it sometimes like sperm

Speaker 1 paratism or something like that, parasitism, or whether

Speaker 1 they have the genetic code somewhere in them and they're able to kind of like drum it up. That's what's happening.
It's the first time it's ever been observed.

Speaker 1 So this kills like every creationist argument about not having another species come from

Speaker 1 that transition.

Speaker 1 We just add it to the list.

Speaker 1 They don't care. It's right there.

Speaker 1 That's astonishing. It's phenomenal, right? But it also isn't, it's not like a deliberate choice.
It's all happening automatically.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, we never know what does deliberate mean.

Speaker 1 Are they

Speaker 1 having philosophical debates about it? No. But are there certain environmental pressures that force them to be able to do that?

Speaker 1 What must have failed previously to lead to this being successful and then be reproducible?

Speaker 1 Well, it doesn't always mean mean that something has to fail. Sometimes it's just that something is more successful.

Speaker 1 Right. So, yeah.
I mean, either way, there are environmental pressures that are allowing for this to happen. That's freaking cool.
Evolution. Very cool.
All right.

Speaker 1 Bob, you're going to tell us even more about black holes.

Speaker 2 This one's cool. I love this news item so much.
So new research seems to suggest that there could be a 90% chance that in the next 10 years we could see an exploding black hole.

Speaker 1 There could be a 90% chance? Yes. What's the percentage chance that there is a 90% chance?

Speaker 1 Sex Panther could explode.

Speaker 1 80% of the time it will be.

Speaker 1 You can't.

Speaker 2 It's unknowable at this current time.

Speaker 1 If this is true,

Speaker 2 this would be the biggest gift to astrophysics physicists in our lifetimes. The upside is so good that it's fun talking about, even though it might be unlikely, but it's fascinating.

Speaker 2 And I learned a bunch of things that are actually

Speaker 2 probably 100% true.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 2 So, all right, so to appreciate this, we got to just talk a little bit about just black holes and Hawking radiation. Black holes,

Speaker 2 we have all heard of black holes, right?

Speaker 1 You've got a couple of varieties.

Speaker 2 We've got supermassive black holes, millions to billions of solar masses, right? They're amazing. Other fantastic objects.
There's stellar mass black holes, a lot smaller, maybe

Speaker 2 three solar masses to perhaps 150 solar masses. Okay, but there's also a hypothetical black hole called primordial black holes.

Speaker 1 Now, these, if they exist,

Speaker 2 they would have formed in the first second after the Big Bang.

Speaker 2 After the Big Bang, there were so many density fluctuations happening that they think that these black holes could have formed not by an imploding star, but by just

Speaker 2 these density fluctuations.

Speaker 2 Enough mass was in one space, enough mass energy was in one space that a black hole forms.

Speaker 2 These black holes, when they're talked about today, they typically say, yeah, they probably have the mass of maybe Earth mass or down to an asteroid or even, you know, much even smaller than that. So

Speaker 2 if you were a primordial black hole with a mass of, say, an asteroid,

Speaker 2 your event horizon would be about as big as a dime.

Speaker 2 Very tiny. These are obviously very, very small.
black holes. So the next critical component here is Hawking radiation.
Now we've talked about Hawking radiation.

Speaker 2 Stephen Hawking, of course, came up with the idea. Hawking radiation, let me just set the table for this a little bit.

Speaker 2 Hawking radiation is a result of black holes losing their immortality and becoming

Speaker 2 objects that won't live forever.

Speaker 2 When Stephen Hawking looked at black holes through a quantum lens, he realized that they have a temperature. They actually have a temperature.

Speaker 2 And because of quantum effects, then if they have a temperature, then they're emitting thermal radiation.

Speaker 2 And if they're emitting thermal radiation, that means that they're going to be losing mass, which means they have a finite lifetime. So, that's what his conclusion was.

Speaker 2 So, what happens was the idea is that black holes would emit radiation and shrink and get hotter, and then emit more radiation and then shrink and get hotter, and that cycle would continue.

Speaker 2 So, Hawking radiation, though, is probably not being emitted from the big boys, the supermassive black holes and the solar mass black holes, because they're colder than the universe is.

Speaker 2 So, they're not really going to be emitting. There's no net loss of mass from these big guys.

Speaker 2 But the primordial black holes, if they're still around and they're small enough, they're going to be small enough and hot enough to be emitting something that we could potentially detect.

Speaker 2 The problem is, nobody thinks they've been emitting radiation or gamma rays these years because we would have seen that glow in the universe. We would have seen this gamma radiation glow.

Speaker 2 So here's the new bit now. The new bit is that they're trying to incorporate some new theories and models of dark matter into these primordial black holes.

Speaker 2 So the end result would be that these primordial black holes perhaps have a charge, like a

Speaker 2 static charge, very, very small charge.

Speaker 2 But if it has that charge, and some models seem compelling, if these black holes have the charge, then they would basically have been in kind of like a slow motion stasis for the past, you know,

Speaker 2 billions of years. They would not have been emitting anything.
They would not have been shrinking.

Speaker 2 But according to this theory, they they could be doing that now. They could be releasing this in this,

Speaker 2 they could be exploding in the near future. So that's where the 90%

Speaker 2 comes from. If their model is correct, then there's a 90% chance in the next 10 years we could see an exploding black hole.

Speaker 1 Bob, can I ask you a question? Yeah. So, which black holes could potentially explode? The super small ones? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Only the small ones, because the bigger ones are too big. They're not going to be releasing any real radiation for, oh, about 10 to the 67 years.

Speaker 1 All right. So, is it a big deal if it explodes? Like, what happens?

Speaker 2 It's going to be so awesome, and that's what I'm getting into right now.

Speaker 1 Wait, wait, wait.

Speaker 1 Okay, never mind. Go ahead.
Sorry. Yeah, we want that.
You're going to cover it. You're going to cover it.
And it's a good thing.

Speaker 1 Tell us why.

Speaker 2 All right, so say we see the explosion.

Speaker 2 What does that mean? On its face, it's fantastic because it proves so many things, it's ridiculous. It proves that Hawking radiation is real.

Speaker 2 If we see a gamma radiation burst that disappears very quickly with

Speaker 2 no delayed afterglow that gets smaller and smaller and other things. If we see that, and we've got detectors that can detect that, then we know that Hawking radiation exists.

Speaker 2 Huge coup right just there. We would also prove that primordial black holes exist.
Another huge coup right there.

Speaker 2 We would also have evidence for this dark electromagnetism that's related to dark matter. That would also maybe even be the biggest discovery right there,

Speaker 2 finding some link to dark matter in this.

Speaker 2 But the other thing, and the thing that really caught my attention and blew my mind, is that the particle explosion, when this tiny black hole exploded, it would emit essentially an inventory of all possible particles that could exist.

Speaker 2 Think about that. It would emit everything that we have been looking for, that we have theorized about, that we've already found.

Speaker 2 Everything that that black hole could create could be emitted, and we could detect it.

Speaker 1 Now, Bob, you're not talking about...

Speaker 1 You're not talking about elements, right? You're not talking about particles, different kind of particles. Particles, quarks, electrons, protons, quarks, axions, neutrinos.

Speaker 1 I mean, all of those things are out there.

Speaker 1 Well, no, but see, there are very high, high-energy particles that we've never detected and we can't create even in a large

Speaker 1 collider. So this would basically be like a super, super, super, super collider with energies orders of magnitude beyond what we could ever create.
I hear you.

Speaker 1 Sending out high-energy particles that otherwise we would never see. Well, but that's the question, right? So are you saying that we would need some sort of detector near this? No, no, on Earth.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but then aren't all of those particles have been created at some point in the universe, so they are out there. We're just not able to detect them.
But it's just an event.

Speaker 1 We have to capture that. We have to capture the event.
Right. So, when a black hole sucks something in, right? Yeah.
Like, you know, this is.

Speaker 1 Black holes don't suck.

Speaker 1 Pull.

Speaker 1 They pull. It's just gravity.
Pull.

Speaker 1 Whatever. Yeah.
When a thing goes into a black hole

Speaker 1 and it's made out of matter,

Speaker 1 it automatically strips that down and turns all that matter, which we're talking about, you know, elements. To singularity.

Speaker 1 Well, wait, no, it doesn't turn them into these particles or the.

Speaker 1 They're already made of those particles. I know, I don't know.

Speaker 1 It takes them all apart and makes them spaghettifies itself.

Speaker 2 When something enters the event horizon of a black hole, we don't know what happens. Our physics breaks down.
Singularity is just a placeholder for we don't know what the hell is going on.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 you can't speculate. Wait till we come up with quantum gravity, then we might have a better idea, But

Speaker 2 we don't know what's going on. But the thing is, it's not like the particles are in there waiting to leap out.

Speaker 2 What's happening is that this black hole that's exploding is releasing, when it gets hot enough, it releases one particle, say a photon.

Speaker 2 When it gets a little bit hotter, right, it shrinks and it gets hotter.

Speaker 2 Then it releases electrons. Then it gets smaller and hotter.

Speaker 2 Then it releases protons. And then it goes through the inventory of all the possible particles that are related to the temperature of the black hole at that time.
And it goes through all of them.

Speaker 2 And so we're getting what we can detect from this is gamma radiation. So we're looking at this gamma radiation, and when a new particle is emitted, it changes.

Speaker 2 It changes the slope, it changes the energy spectrum, and we can see that little step. And then, oh, here's another step.
Here's another step. Here's another particle.

Speaker 2 And when we look at it, we could say, here's the standard model of physics. I see the electron, I see the protons, I see quarks, I see all of these things that we know that we've already discovered.

Speaker 2 But then you keep looking at this gamma ray signal, and you're like, well, what the hell is that? What the hell's that? We don't know what that stuff is.

Speaker 2 It could give us a roadmap to all these particles that we probably never would have found maybe in a thousand years of technological advancement.

Speaker 2 It could give us just a roadmap for all these particles beyond standard physics, which we've been waiting for for so long. And it would be just an amazing occurrence that

Speaker 2 I really hope this is true, because if it's not true, then we would have to wait. And I calculated how long we would have to wait for a small black hole, like a stellar mass black hole.

Speaker 2 Say the smallest black hole is about probably three solar masses, the small stellar mass, three masses.

Speaker 2 We would have to wait, I calculated, 10 billion octodacillion years in order for that thing to evaporate. And I don't think we're going to be around.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 because the universe is so old, isn't there things that are kind of positioned to do that right now? It's only 13 billion. He's talking about octo-gazillion or something.

Speaker 1 Oh, I don't even know what you meant.

Speaker 2 I'm talking about the evaporation of a black hole that's more massive than the sun, not the primordial level.

Speaker 1 That would take so long that

Speaker 1 the primordial ones could happen, or happening now, apparently. And if we keep looking for them, maybe we'll see one.

Speaker 1 And as Bob said here, here's the catalog of every possible particle that exists in the universe, even the ones you haven't discovered yet. And that will give us

Speaker 1 a roadmap to complete the standard model.

Speaker 1 Two quick questions. The first one is, how do we detect that? I was going to say, how visible?

Speaker 1 What instruments?

Speaker 2 Camera-ray detectors.

Speaker 1 We have to do that.

Speaker 1 How do we detect the event? I mean, how do we detect all of those really visible? Just the energy of the particles.

Speaker 2 We would detect the easiest way to detect this is through gamma radiation because there's going to be a lot of gamma radiation coming out of this thing.

Speaker 2 Even particles that come out, we would never detect them because they decay too quickly.

Speaker 1 That's what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 But they decay into gamma radiation. So that would be part of the gamma ray signal

Speaker 2 that we could interpret.

Speaker 1 We could interpret that to know the high-energy particles? The higher. Because that's the part that I was confused about.
I know we can do this in a collider, but that's a closed system.

Speaker 1 When all this stuff is just flying through space, how do we even know? And it's decaying so quickly.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it would all it would by looking at the gamma radiation, we can detect what's going on. The signature inside it.

Speaker 2 Because the fingerprints of all these articles are embedded within the gamma radiation that's changing the energy signature, the spectrum, the energy spectrum, all that stuff is being affected by

Speaker 2 the new particle that has just been created and released.

Speaker 1 And so the other question is: if it's such a high-energy explosion, right,

Speaker 1 would it also cause a ripple in space-time? Like, would we be able to detect it with gravitational wave detectors? LIGO. Not necessarily, not necessarily a gravitational.

Speaker 2 Yeah, LIGO and gravitational waves are all about mass, accelerating mass, like two neutron stars or something.

Speaker 1 Remember, it has the mass of an asteroid, and it's way too small. Yeah, but what about the explosion itself?

Speaker 2 But even explosions, I don't think is optimized for a gravitational wave detector.

Speaker 1 Would it be at all visible? Or we're just talking purely like a gamma radius.

Speaker 2 If you could see gamma radiation,

Speaker 2 it'll be visible to you. Yeah, our telescope, we wouldn't see anything.
It would be a gamma radiation telescope.

Speaker 1 It would be purely a radiation kind of thing. It wouldn't be like, oh, you got that cool dot that all of a sudden appeared kind of thing.
Yeah, right. So it's not big enough.

Speaker 2 A couple of caveats. This was a simple test model that they created.
It was a proof of concept to show that their idea could work. And also, we don't know how many of these black holes formed.

Speaker 2 We don't know how much hidden charge they may have had. And so those questions are open.
And the answers to those questions can make this be a non-even issue, a non-issue that might not even happen.

Speaker 2 But if it did happen, what I love about this is that

Speaker 2 it would be like a genie came to an astrophysicist and said, what do you want?

Speaker 2 Give me a roadmap, every particle that's possible in the universe, and you could get it from this type of explosion that may happen. 90% chance, if this is true, within 10 years.

Speaker 1 So it's a 20% chance. And the genie's like, really? We'll be doing that follow-up 10 years from now.
That's what we're doing. Hopefully.

Speaker 1 But at least it's falsifiable, right? I mean,

Speaker 1 if this is true, we should see this happen.

Speaker 1 So basically, three people are excited about this.

Speaker 1 I hope maybe we're up to with this audience, maybe four or five of us.

Speaker 1 It sounds cool to me. They're excited.
Good job, Bob.

Speaker 1 Thank you. Thank you.
Tell them, Bob.

Speaker 2 I love this news item.

Speaker 1 Bob, you really,

Speaker 1 I learned a couple of things about black holes that I didn't quite wrap my head around in what you just said, so I thank you for that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, because I've heard about Hawking radiation for decades, and I never really thought, well, what the hell is Hawking radiation? I thought it was just maybe some particles, some type of radiation.

Speaker 2 I didn't know that it was potentially everything.

Speaker 1 Just all the particles, all of them. All energy dependent.

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Speaker 1 All right, guys, let's get back to the show.

Speaker 1 All right, George, you've been reading this book, Cultish, we were talking about it. Tell us what's going on.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I love when you read a book or you see a show or you get some piece of information that sort of rechallenges sort of beliefs that you may have or makes you kind of re-examine what you may think or how you've acted in the past.

Speaker 1 The whole sort of skeptical experience of, you know, the hardest thing to be skeptical about is stuff that you believe in, you know, things that confirm what you believe, and you have to kind of take a second sometimes to stop.

Speaker 1 And this was a nice sort of

Speaker 1 journey in reading this book. It's called Cultish.
It's by Amanda Montel. And in essence,

Speaker 1 Ms. Montel writes about this idea that the language of cults is very specific.

Speaker 1 What people that sort of control other people do it in multiple ways, and one of the ways they do it is by modulating and using language in a particular way, which isn't surprising.

Speaker 1 We sort of all know that. You kind of get that, you know, the Tom Cruise mild stare kind of like thing.

Speaker 1 But what was interesting is that her approach to this book, she talked about how it's not just Scientology or the Jim Jones cult, that things like CrossFit and Soul Cycle, you know, Etsy

Speaker 1 workers and stuff, people that do a lot of beauty products, you know, like makeup and Amway and things like that, use

Speaker 1 very, very similar language.

Speaker 1 It's sort of, it's an idea of expressing an intense ideology, creating a community, and then controlling that community. And so what you do is you essentially create this language that is exclusive.

Speaker 1 So in Scientology, there's these great, you know, someone is suppressive, right? There's a suppressive person, and that's like the worst kind of person you can be.

Speaker 1 Interbulate, that's a great Scientology word.

Speaker 1 Decludge.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you decludge something. It's basically like declutter or sort of figure out, you know, unravel, but you decludge it.
And so non-Scientologists don't decludge. Scientologists decludge.

Speaker 1 It's a great word. Occlude.
And you start having similar words like that that,

Speaker 1 and this is the part that I sort of realized my own experience. Years ago, a couple years ago, I did CrossFit for a while.
And CrossFit, in an odd way, is almost proud of itself being a cult.

Speaker 1 You know, they sort of embrace this idea that, yeah, we're a good kind of cult because we make you healthy and strong and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 And I started realizing they had all these key words and phrases and stuff, you know, things like WOD, the workout of the day. or AMRAP.
Anybody know what an AMRAP is?

Speaker 1 As many rounds as possible, right?

Speaker 1 So you do this thing where you try to, you know, you have 30 seconds and you have to lift the kettlebell until it smashes your face and do it as many times as you can in a minute or whatever it is, many rounds as possible.

Speaker 1 You don't go to the, you know, it's not a gym that you go to, it's an affiliate. You know, it's a or box.
You go, I'll see you at the box.

Speaker 1 You know, the other interesting thing was that just struck me was they have workouts that are named after women. They call them the girls.

Speaker 1 And there's the, there's the Annie, there's the Grace, there's the Chelsea. And there's certain kinds of exercises that you have sort of put together.
So like

Speaker 1 Amy, I know is one, which is like you do five pull-ups, 10 push-ups, and 15 squats. That's an Amy, you do that five times.

Speaker 1 And I thought, like, oh, you name it like a female to, well, of course you can do that because it's named after a girl.

Speaker 1 You know, this idea of like this kind of cult programming of like, yeah, strong male, pseudo, you know, strong guy, jump into this thing and do it.

Speaker 1 And then I started thinking about my musical experiences and how jazz has this sort of particular language that's associated with it that hasn't changed since the 40s. You know, a gig, right?

Speaker 1 You have to go to a gig. Is it jazz thing? That's, I mean, that's like music.
Music is sort of, you go, yeah, oh, I got a gig. That's where that's from.
Clams. You know, what's a clam? Money?

Speaker 1 Anybody know what a clam is? No, a clam is a mistake. Oh.
So, like, if you're playing, if you're playing and you make a mistake, it's like, oh, man, the clams tonight.

Speaker 1 Oh, it was a seafood buffet tonight. Oh, my God, the clams.

Speaker 1 Head, like, is the top of the song, you know, or

Speaker 1 rushing, dragging, all that. All these like little expressions.
And it just made me start to think about, like, have I been adding to this kind of cultish language?

Speaker 1 But isn't the difference then that if an in-group evolves organically, and so there's in-group status and it's a way for everybody to feel like a familiarity versus an out-group, or when there's a intentionality and a leadership that says think this way, talk this way.

Speaker 1 That's the difference. That's what she addresses.
She talks about soul cycle. And soul cycle, for those of you that that aren't aware, it's sort of a Peloton cycling thing.

Speaker 1 You sign up and you do these classes online. And again, they're very specific.
They have very specific language. You pick your instructor.

Speaker 1 The instructors have sort of things about them that certain people like to do.

Speaker 1 And what the author of the book talks about, she says, the difference between soul cycle and Scientology is when the soul cycle class is over, no one is saying you can't leave the class.

Speaker 1 And no one is insisting that you use those soul cycle terms in the rest of your life. And that if you don't use those soul cycle terms, you're being suppressive or you're being whatever.

Speaker 1 And that there is an agreement, a tacit agreement that, like, we're coming here to this soul cycle class or maybe this makeup tutorial or whatever it may be. And we understand that we're kind of

Speaker 1 winking. We're doing cult-like,

Speaker 1 cult-ish, cult-light maybe even.

Speaker 1 But we understand we can leave at any time. And that's sort of, yeah, that main difference.

Speaker 1 Whereas if you're at the Jim Jones compound or you're in Scientology, they're going to do everything they possibly can to make you not leave. They want to maintain you.
Amway.

Speaker 1 They don't want you to stop selling their garbage to your friends,

Speaker 1 a bunch of other sort of multi-level marketing thing that used it.

Speaker 1 The one example

Speaker 1 that made me think that CrossFit started to cross over into this kind of dangerous cult was

Speaker 1 there's a thing called Uncle Rhabdo,

Speaker 1 which the more I thought about this, the more this disturbed me. So

Speaker 1 rhabdomyolysis. Rhabdomyolysis.
Rhabdomyolysis is where if you work a muscle too much, if you exercise a muscle too much,

Speaker 1 it releases portions of itself into your bloodstream. It breaks down.
It basically breaks down

Speaker 1 too much. Any exercise does that.
It does.

Speaker 1 If you actually, you're doing it now,

Speaker 1 it's just a matter of degree.

Speaker 1 If you have a good workout and then I tested your blood, you would look like you have a mild rhabdomyelisis.

Speaker 1 And in fact, we often have to, I've had to ask patients, have you done any exercise in the last few days? Because I have to adjust how to

Speaker 1 interpret the number based upon the data. But it means you can get to that point of like where you actually have liver damage.
Yeah, when you have Coca-Cola colored ears. Kidney damage.

Speaker 1 Okay, kidney damage. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So to take this rhabdomyolysis, and they created this character called Uncle Rhabdo. The idea of like, it's actually kind of a badge of honor to get that.
It's awful. Yeah, it's awful.
It's awful.

Speaker 1 You didn't die from that.

Speaker 1 I had read an article about, you know, what, you know, someone had referenced Uncle Rhabdo, and I just didn't get a chance to ask what it was.

Speaker 1 I looked it up, and I'm like, wait a minute, that's terrible. So I went to the sort of main training guy, and I said, what's the deal with this Uncle Rhabdo and

Speaker 1 Rhabdomyolysis? And he was like, well, yeah, you know, I mean, I'm like, because people have gotten really ill and,

Speaker 1 you know, they aren't aware of how hard they're working. And he's like, well, yeah, I mean, you could cross the street and get hit by a bus.
Yeah, that's a great answer.

Speaker 1 I'm done. Thank you much.

Speaker 1 Bye.

Speaker 1 And that was the justification. Like, yeah, no, you're not working hard enough until you're literally like your peek.
You're destroying the whole cake.

Speaker 1 And so I thought, okay,

Speaker 1 that's where it's crossed over. So it just made me think about what else in my life that maybe has on that borderline.
It's important to recognize, and we've spoken about this before.

Speaker 1 We were really involved with anti-cult activity early on,

Speaker 1 pre-SGU, and we were doing it with just the New England Skeptical Society, because there's a lot of that based in Connecticut around us. But anyway, so

Speaker 1 a cult is, first of all, the belief system is irrelevant. Right.
It's just the behavior. Right.
And the behavior is a continuum.

Speaker 1 It's not a black or white. And there's what we call a demarcation problem.
There's no sharp line that divides something that isn't a cult from something that is a cult.

Speaker 1 It's just a continuum. And so, yeah, a lot of things have, we have a jargon and we have a community and we have commonality or whatever.

Speaker 1 But the more of these features of cult-like activity that you build up, at some point you do cross over this fuzzy boundary where it's like, all right, now this is really operating like a full-blown cult.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And of course, there's a lot of things that are just blatant cults.
Like they're doing it, they're doing it all. And it's top-down, it's deliberate, it's not organic or cultural.

Speaker 1 It's not jargon for

Speaker 1 pragmatic reasons. It's just, it's meant to separate you from other people, to get you inside the community, to make you dependent on the community.
Yeah, that's the main thing.

Speaker 1 Like as a psychologist, when I see people who are trying to heal from having been in a cult, it's no different than a woman who was in a coercive

Speaker 1 relationship.

Speaker 1 So whether it's one person or whether it's 50 people,

Speaker 1 what I think of as definitional is that it's a high-control environment that takes your volition away from you.

Speaker 1 Sometimes they deliberately try to break down your resistance. Yeah, and they'll still sleep deprive you.
Yeah. They will starve you.
And the ones that are the

Speaker 1 best at it it are the ones that make you think it was your choice all along. That's when it starts with that.
Which starts with the language, which starts with this, which she writes about.

Speaker 1 It starts with these, you know, these subtle memes they put into your brain, these little portions of it.

Speaker 1 You know, it's funny as you mentioned Amanda Montel, and I was like, that name sounds familiar. And I just looked.
She was on my podcast

Speaker 1 last year. She had another book called.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 it's called The Age of Magical Overthinking.

Speaker 1 Notes on Modern Irrationality. And we did a live recording for the Toronto Toronto Public Library.
Oh, cool. And, like, yeah, so I was like, I know her.
Oh, cool. We didn't talk about cultish.

Speaker 1 We should have. That's something of last year.
I think it just came out. So,

Speaker 1 I highly recommend it. It's nice.
It's very conversational, too. So it just sticks with you.
Thanks, George.

Speaker 1 All right, so we're going to talk about

Speaker 1 common myths, common misconceptions that are being spread around social media. There was just an article that went through like 15 of them.
We can't go through all of them

Speaker 1 very deep. We don't have to.
Most of these we've talked about before,

Speaker 1 and some are very quick hits. Evan, you sent this to me.
What was the first thing on the list? I'm actually going to pull it up.

Speaker 3 And again, the question that triggered all this is

Speaker 3 someone wrote about this who says, I came across a post on their popular Ask Reddit page from user whoever who said, what are some things that are actually pseudoscience that people don't realize?

Speaker 3 And the list was extensive.

Speaker 1 A, alpha-based dog training. I don't know that we've actually covered that on the show.
The idea that there's an alpha male in a dog pack is that's been pretty debunked, right?

Speaker 1 So anything derived from that is also well, yeah. And the idea that your dog thinks that you're his alpha is ridiculous.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Can we have that like in skywriting across every other podcast?

Speaker 1 Like every comedian's podcast. Can we just make it like there's no such thing as the alpha? Please stop talking about it.
What about like wolves don't have kind of like a de facto leader? What's that?

Speaker 1 No. I mean, there are more and less dominant dogs in the pack, but there's no beta.
to that's the alpha, and everyone else is a beta. That doesn't exist.
It's not that simple.

Speaker 1 It was a flawed study that a guy did, like whatever that was, 100 plus years ago.

Speaker 1 And while there are some animals where there are, yeah, like leaders within the group, that doesn't translate to like domestication of dogs to us.

Speaker 1 Even if there were an alpha in the pack, they wouldn't go like human alpha, now follow you.

Speaker 1 It doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 3 Astrology was on the list. We've covered that quite extensively.
Here's one. They call it Barnes and Noble Science.
So these are books published by people who can't get peer-reviewed papers published.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And that's a pretty wide category of things.

Speaker 1 We talked about that a lot, too. Like, basically, if you're bypassing peer review and going right to the public with your wacky idea, you're a crank.

Speaker 1 Again, that's one of the things that cranks do. But now, of course, you don't have to publish a book.
You could just make a website or you can make a YouTube

Speaker 1 channel. You can get like TikTok PDFs on Amazon, too.
Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 2 Or worse than that,

Speaker 2 you have a fake journal, a bullshit journal, and submit to that. Like, see, unpublished, peer-reviewed.
It's like, oh, my God, that's nasty.

Speaker 1 Journal of bullshit research.

Speaker 3 Biorhythms, mood rings.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. Remember other things? Biorrhythms.
Mood rings? God, how old were we? Two? Four? Yeah. I totally believed that when we were younger.
You did? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 It was a fun thing, you know, like most of these, when you're kids, they impress you, but they also impress adults sometimes.

Speaker 3 Blood type astrology.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 3 we've talked about that. Blood type diets.

Speaker 1 That's so common in Japan, right?

Speaker 3 Yeah, very common in Japan.

Speaker 1 The blood-type diet thing, there's nothing to that. It's zero.
Zero. Absolutely zero.
Because I started debating someone about this, and they were so vehement. And I was trying to be nice,

Speaker 1 and I was like, okay, maybe I totally missed something, but there's nothing to do. It's only good to question yourself if you're not 100% sure.
I mean,

Speaker 1 do I really, am I sure? Because it sounds like bullshit, but maybe there's something to it. But in this case, there's zero to it.
There's absolutely.

Speaker 1 I mean, this is just the immune proteins on your blood cells. It says nothing about any other aspect of your physiology, your biochemistry.
It is complete nonsense.

Speaker 1 So you could be confident about that with your body. So basically, there's a bunch of people out there who believe in this who are basically not eating certain foods because it's not their blood type.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 they're eating to their blood type. That's like eating to your astrological type.
Yeah, I was going to say, it's like eating to your eye color. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Blue-eyed people really shouldn't be eating too much meat. Exactly.
That's a good way to put it.

Speaker 3 How about this one? This is one I've heard of in the past, but I never thought of it.

Speaker 3 Your brain is continually developing until you're on an average of age 25.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I've heard that over and over again.
I've heard that a lot.

Speaker 1 It's zero to that.

Speaker 1 Really? Yeah, there's nothing to it. There's another one.

Speaker 1 I have to think about it for a while.

Speaker 1 The study that kind of kicked that off, they only looked at people up to 25.

Speaker 1 Seriously. And I said, look,

Speaker 1 the brain is developing until you're 25. Oh, that's so funny.

Speaker 1 But they didn't look at people after 25.

Speaker 1 And here's the other thing there. What's the difference between developing, maturing, and learning? Right? And rapid pruning.
Right. So there's one of them is about growth.

Speaker 1 Like you're a kid and your brain doesn't get any bigger. Well, it's not just about size.
It's also not to you, but to a lot of people. Like the strength of connections.

Speaker 1 It's myelination, it's connections. It's a problem.

Speaker 1 Let me ask you from a person who doesn't know as well as you. At what point on average does a child into an adult until their brain stops growing bigger?

Speaker 1 That just depends on when they stop growing bigger. Okay, so it's rando, but what is it? What's the age range? So upper teenagers, typical, something like that.

Speaker 1 But just

Speaker 1 the brain getting bigger doesn't mean that it's necessarily developing more. So I think, again, this is a definitional thing.
Also, the brain-to-body ratio is different. It's not linear.

Speaker 1 Like, little kids can't put their arms over their heads because their heads are so big. But they're adorable.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 the ratio is different. Yeah, the ratio is off.

Speaker 1 So, like, if you're like, we know,

Speaker 1 we've raised kids. At some point, like, you could see different circuits kicking in place in their brain.
They couldn't put words together, now they can. Whatever.

Speaker 1 And also, just even with coordination, we used to joke about, oh, their cerebellum was not fully myelinated yet. That's development.

Speaker 1 My actually, my son's video game circuit turned on two years ago, and it's powerful. Oh my God.

Speaker 1 So there's that kind of just you actually getting the basic nuts and bolts of how the brain functions in in place. You have that by the time you're through puberty, right?

Speaker 1 But then teenagers don't have the mental discipline that adults have. But what is that? Is that just maturity? Is it because their brain hasn't fully developed yet? Does it ever really stop?

Speaker 1 Is it just, and if you look at people who are 50, 60, their brains function differently than people who are 20, 30, too. They're conflating, I think, the nature-nurture of executive function

Speaker 1 with overall brain development, which we should really only be talking about frontal, like prefrontal cortex, anyway. Yeah, but even if you're just talking about that, it's still

Speaker 1 a continuum, and you know, there's different ideas mixed in here, like development bleeds into maturing, bleeds into just learning stuff and getting better at moderating your emotions or whatever.

Speaker 1 I think the thing is, the courts want to be able to say there's a one-to-one ratio problem.

Speaker 1 They want to be able to say, you know the difference between right and wrong, you are an adult, and you should not be responsible. It's actually being used in sentencing and in policy.

Speaker 1 It's like, oh, we can't, like, you know, you can't drink until your brain's fully formed or whatever. And it's just pseudoscience.
It's this black and white, again, like, there's no demarcation.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the demarcation is a problem. Because it's very easy to say a five-year-old may not understand with a gun the outcome of their actions.
It's much harder to say that about a 14-year-old.

Speaker 1 Speaking of drinking, how's this one?

Speaker 3 Breast milk. pump and dump after alcohol.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 3 these are mothers who are breastfeeding.

Speaker 3 They'll have a drink, but then they'll go ahead and pump out the breast milk that they've got because that was contaminated with the alcohol that they just drank.

Speaker 3 That way they're not giving alcohol to their children.

Speaker 1 Hadn't heard of that one before? Of course. You had heard about it? Yeah, but I don't like the way they're debunking it either.
They're saying they're being very all-or-nothing about it.

Speaker 1 You should pump and dump if you drink way too much, or you shouldn't.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 some drugs pass through breast milk and some don't. And we have to know that.

Speaker 1 Like, if I'm prescribing to a breastfeeding mother, I got to know, is this something that gets passed through the breast milk or not? I actually don't know off the top of my head about alcohol.

Speaker 1 Alcohol does, but in small quantities.

Speaker 1 So, in small quantities. Only if you're like really.
That's what I'm saying. I don't like that they're saying

Speaker 1 drunk in a drug.

Speaker 3 The site that they sourced that debunked it said, no,

Speaker 3 it would have to be a lot of alcohol.

Speaker 1 But for some people, they are drinking a lot of alcohol. So, again, I wouldn't say that that's 100%.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's more a matter of degree. It's a matter of degree.

Speaker 3 I'll go quickly through some of these other ones. A lot of them we touched.
Chiropractic, conversion therapy, detox, the general detox.

Speaker 1 Feed a cold, starve a fever. At Old Wives' jail.

Speaker 1 No, no good.

Speaker 3 Fingerprints, unique fingerprints.

Speaker 3 It's undetermined. They don't have good science on this as to determine whether a person's fingerprints are unique or not.

Speaker 1 And also, the whole fingerprint analysis is way more art than science.

Speaker 1 Like on television shows and movies, they pretend like, oh, I've got a partial here. The computers flash through the images and you make a match.

Speaker 1 That's not what's happening. That's not reality.
It is more of this, oh, yeah, I could kind of see, you know, it's really, it's very subjective. It's not a database.
But there is a database.

Speaker 1 There is a database. There are a code of database.
There are fingerprints. And then maybe you can be.

Speaker 1 That's the other thing is, and there's a couple of things coming up on this list that are like this. It's not as black and white as TV pretends.

Speaker 1 It's way more subjective, but that does not equal useless.

Speaker 1 It doesn't mean you can't maybe rule some people out because of fingerprints. Same thing with, we can jump to the lie detector.

Speaker 1 The lie detectors are not detecting lies. Like we talked about this.
They're stressed. They're stressed and stressed.

Speaker 1 And people get stressed for different reasons, and people have different ability to hide their stress. And so what you're detecting is...

Speaker 3 Well, I think you're taking a test could be stressful.

Speaker 1 But that doesn't mean they're worthless. True.

Speaker 1 It may not be like, you can't say, well, he failed the lie detector, therefore he was lying one-to-one.

Speaker 1 It could be that, well, or he passed the lie detector, therefore he wasn't lying. You can't say that.

Speaker 1 It's just possible that he is really good at hiding his stress, or he was stressed out over being interrogated by an authority figure.

Speaker 1 Psychologists use these tests all the time. They just don't call them lie detectors.

Speaker 1 Where they're useful is basically just intimidating the person into telling the truth because they think you can tell the truth. Oh, okay.
Oh, that's excessive. That's how they're really used.

Speaker 1 I also think with the fingerprint thing, what the list is saying is that

Speaker 1 whether or not no other person on the planet has the same fingerprint pattern, we can't know that because nobody's ever done it. It's almost unknowable.

Speaker 1 But for the most part, fingerprints are relatively unique. The The same way that zebra stripes are relatively unique.

Speaker 2 If they find your fingerprint at an emergency and you got some spleening to do, that's right.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 2 You can't just say, oh, it's not unique, so I'm free.

Speaker 1 Koalas have very human-like fingerprints,

Speaker 1 apparently.

Speaker 1 It's thwarted

Speaker 1 some police investigations, apparently.

Speaker 1 Speaking of police. Yeah, that's like a lot of people.
Speaking of police.

Speaker 1 Right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, the koala, yeah, had some kind of a bunch of people.

Speaker 3 Speaking of police investigation,

Speaker 3 certain forensics, bite analysis, ballistics analysis, and blood splatter analysis.

Speaker 1 What?

Speaker 1 They're all subjective. That's all wrong.
Not that they're not

Speaker 1 worth it. Yeah, it's not all or not.

Speaker 3 They're not a slam dunk.

Speaker 1 Not the slam dunk.

Speaker 1 That's the bottom of my show. Well, you're interpreting data.
As soon as you interpret data, it's like, yeah. The biting analysis, I think, is the worst of the worst.

Speaker 1 That's the one where

Speaker 1 completely different. What are they testing for?

Speaker 1 They're looking at, does the bite mark match your, like, if you do a test bite mark, does it match?

Speaker 1 And very often people have been let go when they realized, oh, that was made by a tool. Like, that wasn't even a bite.
Like, they'll assume it's a bite based on the shape.

Speaker 1 And very often, when you see a criminal proceeding, the prosecution and the defense are going to bring in their own spatter analysts, and they're going to say opposite things.

Speaker 1 You're just dueling action. You'd think, though, that a bite would be kind of consistent because your teeth typically stay in the same position.

Speaker 1 Well, it depends on what conditions were you doing the bite under? You know, there's so many other variables in there. Also, how unique is your bite? And also, is it a bite?

Speaker 1 What we're talking about is actually when there's an analysis of a bite on skin. Yeah.
Like, is it even a bite? Or was that from an animal? Or was it, you know? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like, if you bite into like a mold thing, it's going to be your teeth. If you bite into the surface of an orange, it doesn't.
Right. And if you bite somebody's leg, it might just look like a bruise.

Speaker 1 If you have Charlie from the Chocolate Factory teeth, then it's very different. Oh, come on.

Speaker 1 Are you doing this?

Speaker 1 Explain the character.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. You guys have seen.

Speaker 1 Does anybody know what I'm talking about? Yeah, there's like memes.

Speaker 1 The kid who played Charlie and Willy Wonka, like his teeth are dark.

Speaker 2 First movie. The first movie.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the original. And not just jacked, like, I think there was some sort of physiologic problem.
Like, you were explaining.

Speaker 1 All right. Let's go on.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Continuing. Sigmund Freud.
Apparently everything Sigmund Freud did was.

Speaker 1 Preliminary and early on in a very new and different way. Yeah, there's a big difference.
I mean, I'll soapbox this for a second. I am not a psychodynamic psychologist.

Speaker 1 I'm an existential psychologist, but I have colleagues who are psychodynamic. Generally speaking, we all learn about Freud.

Speaker 1 And I think what they're saying in this listicle is that a lot of people just stop there and they go, okay, that's just how things are.

Speaker 1 But the reason we learn about it is from a historical perspective, to know where the field was early on.

Speaker 1 There is a field now called psychodynamic psychotherapy, which is based on actually like object relations. Like it's very, very different.

Speaker 1 But there are some things that Freud talked about about that now have evolved into understandings that we have. It's kind of like saying Darwin was wrong about a lot of things.
Of course, he was.

Speaker 1 He was whipping up a whole new scientific discipline. It was amazing how much he got right, but we've pretty much everything he said, we've evolved into different versions of what he said.

Speaker 1 But we have actually had to just be like, well, let's ignore that thing. Yeah, there's something.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's like, I mean, he was like giving his patients Coke, and like, you know, all the women were hysterical.

Speaker 1 Psychiatry is way more wishy-washy, wibbly-wobbly than that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, you can, I don't, my take is that he's not very relevant today.

Speaker 1 He's not. Is that true, right?

Speaker 2 It's not.

Speaker 1 But every psychology student learns about him, and that is a problem with how we teach psychology, because if you get a 101 course, you get a bunch of history, but you don't get a lot of like modern lens.

Speaker 1 And so a lot of people think that that's how we're all fucking now.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Handwriting analysis, graphology, we've talked about that.
Immune system boosting. No, no, we've talked about that.

Speaker 1 You don't want to boost your immune system. Right, exactly.
It's bad. Terrible.
Unless you're immune, you know.

Speaker 1 So either with the immune boosting thing, what I find is either the snake oil supplements, whatever, that claim that they boost the immune system do nothing, or they're bad for you because they actually, you know, can cause autoimmune disease.

Speaker 1 Like your immune system needs to be tightly regulated. Just

Speaker 1 suppressing it or boosting it or increasing it is not necessarily an inherently good or bad thing.

Speaker 1 Oh, you should only do that under the, like with medication or with a physician because you have a diagnosis that requires a specific reason. If it aren't vaccines,

Speaker 1 aren't vaccines and immune-boosting technologies?

Speaker 1 They're a way of targeting your immune system against a very specific target. Right.
So if you can,

Speaker 1 the word boosting is very vague. So if that's what you consider boosting, sure.
But that's not what people are talking about when you're in the middle of the past.

Speaker 1 But that's not the same as taking away from vitamin A. Vitamins.

Speaker 1 It'll just be more robust in just a vague.

Speaker 1 Sleep will do that.

Speaker 1 Sleep will keep you.

Speaker 1 Anything that keeps you healthy makes your immune system function better, just like your muscles function better and your brain functions better. Your stress levels.
But you don't want your health.

Speaker 1 You're well-nourished and well-rested and hydrated. All your systems operate better.

Speaker 1 But there is a, and this is not a demarcation problem, there is a point where your immune system is over-functioning, and that is bad because it starts attacking your own body.

Speaker 1 Correct.

Speaker 3 We all know about that. Natural and organic.
We've talked about that. Ad nauseum.
The Myers-Briggs personality.

Speaker 1 Yes. Man.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we don't use that at all in psychology.

Speaker 3 That's like a wind-up toy that just won't stop.

Speaker 1 And, I mean, Ev, that's culty. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 Right, George? Totally cult.

Speaker 3 Quantum, anything non-physics.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. Poor quantum.

Speaker 3 Stay in your lane, quantum. Rain-based illnesses, like catching a cold from being out in the rain.
That's been disproven.

Speaker 1 So we can go beyond that even. There's an open question about whether being cold can make you sick.

Speaker 1 Well, it's not really. I mean, it's pretty much been debunked.
I don't know that the final nail is in the coffin on that one.

Speaker 1 Because the question is, are some viruses, do they spread more easily in the cold weather or things like that? But

Speaker 1 certainly you can't catch a cold by being out in the wet rain. Yeah, because you need a virus.
You need it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and that's like an, people always conflate like epidemiological data with individual data. Yeah.
It's like it might be a problem. And mostly, it's mostly, that's when the kids are at school.

Speaker 1 That's mostly what the winter viruses are about.

Speaker 2 Plus, yeah, when it's cold out, you're amongst people

Speaker 2 in a building

Speaker 2 and it's spreading that way.

Speaker 1 What about the bones, bones? Like, you can tell the storm's coming because your hip hurts. Oh, yeah,

Speaker 1 that's humidity.

Speaker 1 That's real. There's barometric pressure for migraines.
There's a humidity for arthritis. So some people, they know when a storm's coming because they get a migraine.
Yeah, that's what I thought.

Speaker 1 That's real. That's real.
Cool.

Speaker 3 Three more. Oh, two more.
Taste map of the tongue.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 I wrote a song. Raise your hand if you believed it.
I was taught to believe it. Everybody believed that.
I'm shocked to see it. Like when I was a kid,

Speaker 1 that was the thing.

Speaker 1 And I did it. I tested it, and I tricked myself into thinking that

Speaker 1 once you put something in your mouth, your saliva dissolves it and it goes all over your tongue.

Speaker 1 So you can't, it's really hard. You can't localize it.
And we do, this is part of a neurological exam.

Speaker 1 And if someone has Bell's palsy, I want to know where the lesion is. And there's one specific place where you also pick off

Speaker 1 taste to half of your tongue. So

Speaker 1 if that's where it is, then it's in the facial canal.

Speaker 1 If they have retained taste, then something else could be going on. It could be a stroke.
It could be something else. So that's a very important thing to do.
I have to learn the technique to do that.

Speaker 1 You have to really make sure that they're not, they can't close their mouth. They can't swish it around.
You've got to just touch it with a... You know, what do you cute?

Speaker 1 You're going to have a lemon juice or something? No, sugar. You eat sugar water, and you go to the very side of the tongue without letting them swish it around at all.
Can you taste that?

Speaker 1 What does that taste like? They should immediately be able to know that it's sweet. If they don't, if they go, I can't tell, then they close their mouth and go, oh, it's sweet.

Speaker 1 It's like, yeah, that's because you just, now you got it washed over the other side of the tongue. So that's probably what was going on.
Yep.

Speaker 3 And the last one's what they call the troubled teen industry, like wilderness survival, you know, throwing these kids who are having problems.

Speaker 1 Not just pseudoscience. Extreme scenarios.
Harmful scenarios. Yeah.
There's a great book by Maya Salovitz about that. She kind of blew the doors off of that.

Speaker 1 All right, Evan, you're also going to tell us about this. What is this? This looks like a nightmare.
This is the beepee pie. Jeez.

Speaker 3 You've heard the expression, the truth shall set you free, right? We're familiar with that. Well, this one is the tooth shall let you see.

Speaker 3 That's a tooth. No, sorry, a little

Speaker 3 extreme graphic here. Yeah, so tooth in eye surgery, also known by its medical name, osteo-odontokeratoprosthisthisis.

Speaker 1 Yes, prosthesis. O-O-K-P for very short.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so this is a legitimate procedure.

Speaker 3 In fact, I shared it with Steve. I said, Steve, you know, this looks like one we should talk about.

Speaker 1 He's like, are you sure about this?

Speaker 1 And we had to look it up. We had to look it up.
We wanted to multi-source it. It's real.

Speaker 3 Specialized surgical technique used when the cornea is so badly damaged by either scarring, chemical burns, or autoimmune disease, which we just talked about,

Speaker 3 that regular transplants won't work. So

Speaker 3 this is where they go next.

Speaker 3 A patient will extract a tooth, usually a canine tooth, from the patient itself.

Speaker 3 They'll include small amounts of bone to serve as a structural support for a tiny lens.

Speaker 3 So, then they drill a hole right through it. They implant the tooth lens piece under the patient's cheek somewhere.
So, they take this, they put it into their cheek,

Speaker 3 somewhere where it allows

Speaker 3 blood and tissue growth to secure, I guess, you know,

Speaker 3 keep it all in place. The body also builds up support and integration for it.
Then what they'll do is they'll prepare the eye.

Speaker 3 They'll remove the scar tissue, graft mucosal lining from the inner cheek over the corneal surface.

Speaker 3 And then after the toothpiece has matured while it's in your cheek, they'll take it, remove it, and implant it into the eye, replacing the damaged cornea, allowing light through the optical lens.

Speaker 3 That is the procedure. Wow.
And yeah, it's legit.

Speaker 3 You don't get 20-20 vision, though, out of it, but

Speaker 3 in about a quarter of the cases,

Speaker 3 you get 20-30 to 20-40.

Speaker 3 The majority of cases, about 60% of patients, are somewhere between 20-40 and 2100.

Speaker 3 Much better than

Speaker 1 blind.

Speaker 1 Do you have to brush that tooth?

Speaker 1 I think that's why they put the membrane over it and everything. Yeah, so the thing is, the cornea is a really hard structure to mimic, right? It's got to be rigid, hard, and transparent.

Speaker 1 So this is the, like a one, and this is from the 60s, right? And this has been around for a long time. I'd never heard of it.

Speaker 1 It's only been a few hundred cases since the 60s where they've actually done it. So it's a pretty rare procedure.

Speaker 1 This guy, the patient that they were talking about, had like five or six cornea transplants, and they just only lasted for a few months and then they would degrade. So they just wasn't working.

Speaker 1 That's why he was one of the cases where like, well, we could try this really rare thing. I'm sure the surgeons haven't done many of them because there's only so many that have ever been done.

Speaker 1 We don't have something that's like not, you know, like glass or plastic.

Speaker 1 I guess because the body rejects it.

Speaker 1 That's why the own bone is because people can wear contacts, so you would think that you can change it. But you have to change them every day and clean them and everything.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Okay.
Some can go a couple of days. You can change your cornea.

Speaker 3 And that is kind of the key. These are your own body parts, anyway, so the rejection, your body won't reject this.
It's not like you can grow it somewhere else and try to bring it in.

Speaker 1 Yeah, just a weird but true kind of thing. Tooth eye.
All right, Jay, tell us about the history of snake oil. Yeah, so this one caught my tooth eye because

Speaker 1 I knew what snake oil means to us as critical thinkers, but I didn't know the history of it. I was just curious to know more details about it.
And I really found a cool story here.

Speaker 1 So where did it come from? Where did the phrase come from? And

Speaker 1 why do people today use it to say that things are BS, that it's a scam or whatever? So originally what happened was there were Chinese railroad workers that came over to work in the United States.

Speaker 1 This was like early to mid-1800s. And they brought this snake oil remedy with them, but it was real.
It was actually real. Like they had.
Well, real in quotes. I mean, the thing is,

Speaker 1 it's not like it's a pharmaceutical. Like it was really effective.
It was one of their

Speaker 1 herbal type of remedies. Yeah, it probably had some.
It did have some effects. Some effects, but

Speaker 1 it was real in the sense that it was an oil of snake. Doesn't mean that all the things they used it for was effective or not.

Speaker 1 Well, basically, this is what I read, that they only used it for inflammation.

Speaker 1 And let me get into the details here. So, first of all, they only took oil from a water snake.

Speaker 1 And the way that they would extract the oil from the snake is first that they would boil like snake fat, of course, and and that's where the oil is coming from.

Speaker 1 They'd skim off the oil that rises to the top when they boil it, and they would just simply bottle it. And then, when they needed it, now the history says that

Speaker 1 these people were working incredibly long hours. It was a really, really hard life to be a railroad worker like that.
And that they'd rub it on the exterior of their body, and that there would be,

Speaker 1 you know, help joint muscle pains, inflammation, things like that. So, that oil from that snake is rich in omega-3 fatty acids, and it's also rich in EPA, which is another type of fatty acid.

Speaker 1 And it has been proven to have anti-inflammatory effects, and Scientific American actually verified that it works. It actually has a, it does do something of the like Steve's right.

Speaker 1 It's not like, oh my god, it's like anacea, but it's like

Speaker 1 a liniment. But it did something, and it was real in that effect.
So, specifically, we say, why did it work? Well, EPA,

Speaker 1 that type of amino acid, it reduces inflammation,

Speaker 1 like modern pain relief creams or whatever, but not as strong or whatever. And again, they just rubbed it on themselves, and

Speaker 1 it was widely used in that community. So then, of course, what happened is

Speaker 1 people found out that they were using this, and some guy in particular named Clark Stanley, he called himself the Rattlesnake King. And he became the most famous snake oil salesman.

Speaker 1 So this was in the late 1800s. Okay, so it says 1893.
He was at the Chicago World's Fair, and he completely won over a very large crowd of people.

Speaker 1 He would pull out a live rattlesnake, you know, he would extract the

Speaker 1 fatty tissue from it. This is all on stage.
He'd boil it right there, he'd bottle it right there, and he would be selling it.

Speaker 1 And, of course, this was the type of person that would say, This can cure anything. You know, we know the whole that story.
You know, a very common idea is that it's a panacea.

Speaker 1 What do you got? It'll cure that. Did he call it snake oil? Apparently, he did.
Okay. And his product became a national sensation.
He became very famous.

Speaker 1 The problem is that American rattlesnakes, they have almost no omega-3s and none of the other fatty acid that actually was the active ingredient, which, of course, doesn't matter because he was making money.

Speaker 1 So in 1916, the government actually did something, which doesn't happen anymore.

Speaker 1 So they had the Pure Food and Drug Act. This is in 1906, and this gave the government authority to regulate these false medications that were.
Beginning of the FDA. Yeah, it was.

Speaker 1 So bring you back snake oil because I think it's going to be a good thing.

Speaker 1 Don't think I haven't been biting my tongue this entire podcast with that brainworm shit. I was about to explode.

Speaker 1 Anyway.

Speaker 1 Stop the brainworm.

Speaker 1 So they take his stuff, they test it, the U.S. Bureau of Chemistry, which Steve said the precursor to the FDA.
They got lab results and they revealed that the snake oil had the following.

Speaker 1 It had baby oil, which is mineral oil.

Speaker 1 It had less than 1% of beef fat. It had red pepper, turpentine, and trace amounts of camphor.
So this guy, Stanley, he pleaded guilty. He pleaded no contest.
And he was fined. Anyway, just guess.

Speaker 1 How much was he fined?

Speaker 3 $10.

Speaker 1 $20.

Speaker 1 What year was it, though? 1916? It was the early 1900s. So, what was that worth now? About like 600 bucks.
Oh, nothing.

Speaker 1 This is less than a slap on a wrist. He probably made hundreds of thousands of dollars selling this crap.

Speaker 1 But what did happen was there was the newspapers reported it, and he, you know, it cemented the snake oil is BS name, and that's where it came from.

Speaker 1 So this goes back, you know,

Speaker 1 over 100 years ago. And of course, you know, again, like the last thing to say is, you know, now snake oil means everything.

Speaker 1 anything that particularly us skeptics think is bs you know but most people use snake oil if they want to talk like oh it's fake it's snake oil and that's where it comes from i like this now as a critical thinker i didn't know any of that i've been using snake oil the whole time you know we've been doing the podcast probably you know many many years even before that was just you know phrase that that was put into my head and there's a legitimate story and the fact that it started off as something that actually worked not great but worked blows my mind but it's not always how pseudoscience is.

Speaker 1 There's like that little kernel of truth, and then they just expand it and expand it and expand it until it no longer even exists. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But also very common at the time, and still today, was taking something that was

Speaker 1 used by some either foreign culture, exotic culture, or indigenous culture, right? There was a huge industry of remedies that were taken from American Indians.

Speaker 1 And again, it was not the American Indians who were promoting it. It was some snake oil salesman, some, you know, some con artist who hit upon it.

Speaker 1 It's like, oh, you know, the echinacea falls into this. Like, oh, they use echinasia.
It's like, okay, this is a, and even if they didn't, they just said they did anyway.

Speaker 1 But some, they, the echinasia was actually used by some, you know, American. Quinine tried.
Right, also, quinine was a bark.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so, right? Well, yeah, but quinine actually can do do stuff.

Speaker 1 Right, but but wasn't it used, or was that coincidental that it's I thought it was used by South American cultures? Yeah, yeah, but they didn't know what it was doing. Oh, okay.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, I think some cultures did hit upon certain things that were obvious. Of course.
I mean, there are like things that will make you fall asleep.

Speaker 1 There are indigenous practices that come from things that we ultimately made into pharmaceuticals.

Speaker 1 There are animals in the wild that use certain remedies. Yeah, that's true.
But here's the thing: they were using Achinasia for a whole bunch of different stuff, but not flu.

Speaker 1 Not the thing that it was currently being marketed for. They would use it for snake bites and leg injuries, whatever.
There's like random stuff. And it was not based on anything.

Speaker 1 But the idea was this is an ancient remedy used by this natural people

Speaker 1 was the marketing thing. And I'm sure the snake oil thing was the same, where it's like, oh, yeah, there's some ancient Chinese remedy, right?

Speaker 1 I don't know if that comes from there, too, but that's the same kind of thing. Usually,

Speaker 1 when there's something specific, like snake oil means generically a fraudulent treatment, there's a specific source to it.

Speaker 1 We often will use things that have a specific reference and then we generalize it to mean that type of thing.

Speaker 1 But that's also fun because then you can be that asshole who watches movies and somebody says the word snake oil, but it's anachronistic because it was too early.

Speaker 1 It wasn't.

Speaker 1 They didn't use that for them.

Speaker 3 They didn't have snake oil in 1874.

Speaker 1 The proper way to evoke that is actually.

Speaker 1 Actually. Actually.

Speaker 1 all right one more news item one more news item one more yeah all right then we're gonna do science or fiction sounds like a plan all right all right so this I don't know if this is high I think this is Hayabusa remember that Hayabusa this is the asteroid that

Speaker 1 the Hayabusa was the satellite right oh yes yeah this is the Ryubi or something asteroid and they collect they managed to rendezvous with an asteroid, collect samples, do some science right there, and they brought samples back to Earth.

Speaker 1 So, this is a news item based upon a recent analysis of some of the samples from this asteroid. And they found something very interesting.
I'm going to save the conclusion until the end.

Speaker 1 So, they were looking at.

Speaker 1 Isn't that what the end is, though? Well,

Speaker 1 you could sometimes lead with the answer and say this is how they found it. But then you don't have a conclusion.

Speaker 1 Anyway,

Speaker 1 they were looking at, again, this is something very, very technical and wonky, but it's very interesting. They were looking at the ratio of letrium and hafnium.
These are two elements.

Speaker 1 The thing is, lutetium decays into hafnium. And so

Speaker 1 we know how old the asteroid is, right? So they say, well, the ratio of hafnium to lutetium in the sample should be this much.

Speaker 1 Right?

Speaker 1 Physics doesn't change, right? The half-lives are one of the, you know, you could hang your hat on that. That it doesn't change throughout the history of the universe.

Speaker 1 So, unless you're a creationist, then they say, oh, it changes by whatever amount it has to have changed in order for the Earth to be as old as I want it to be. But

Speaker 1 real scientists say you can use it as a constant, right?

Speaker 1 So the problem is,

Speaker 1 there was far less hafnium in the sample than there should have been.

Speaker 1 So when there's less hafnium, is it quarterum?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, I'm trying.

Speaker 1 I wake up with the intent to entertain the people that spend money to come see us.

Speaker 1 Steve's all like science and shit over here. Like, I just want you guys to have fun.
All right, go back. So that means it's younger?

Speaker 1 So you would think that. It means it's younger, but it can't, because it's an asteroid.
We know when it formed. We know where it formed.

Speaker 1 You know what I mean? So we know those things.

Speaker 1 Could that hit a younger? asteroid. Well, you're close to the answer.

Speaker 3 So with contamination.

Speaker 1 It's not contamination. It's not contamination, if that's your thought.
So, but it's good. This is what the conversation I want to have.
What could have happened?

Speaker 1 Why is there less hafnium than there should be? It's not because it's younger, because we know it isn't. It's not contamination from another body.
Can I have a guess? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Could it have been evaporated off by going too close to a sun or something? You're getting close. Okay.
Getting closer to the answer.

Speaker 1 There's not a third element that has affected the other previous one. It's not a chemical or

Speaker 1 no,

Speaker 1 it's not it.

Speaker 1 Something washed away some of the hafnium.

Speaker 1 So it did undergo the change, and then it somehow went away. Right.
Okay.

Speaker 1 And this is, again, they don't know that this is what happened, but this is what they're left with.

Speaker 1 Again, they've eliminated every other possibility they could think of, and this is what they're left with. Solar wind.
No. It would have had to have been something liquid.

Speaker 1 So therefore, there was flowing water inside this asteroid. But why wouldn't it freeze? Well, it did freeze.
It refroze. Whoa.

Speaker 1 So they're saying, but it would have had to have been much later than they thought it should have been. Because, you know,

Speaker 1 the solar system formed out of the cloud of gas and dust. Everything is hot, and then it cools down.

Speaker 1 And we know where asteroids form based upon its constituents, because there are different constituents at different places, distances from the sun.

Speaker 1 And you can say, oh, this formed in the outer solar system and then came inside or whatever. They can tell these kind of things.
And

Speaker 1 a lot of it is by by the volatiles, right? Things that would evaporate if it gets too close to the sun or if it goes too hot.

Speaker 1 So, this, you know, we know there's ice in the asteroid, and we know where it's from.

Speaker 1 But at some point, that ice must have melted, washed away the hafnium, and then refroze or evaporated. So, but if it washed away the stuff, some of it, where did it actually go, though?

Speaker 1 Well, then it washed it away from the asteroid, so it evaporated out into space.

Speaker 2 How much gravity is required to wash something away? On the surface? Are we talking about this happening on the surface?

Speaker 1 This is deep within the asteroid. But if the water evaporates, it doesn't take the hafnium with it.
It did, though.

Speaker 1 I mean, no, that's why it had to be liquid water that literally physically washed it away.

Speaker 1 So they're saying

Speaker 1 the only answer they're left with. Is this the conclusion? This is the conclusion.
Okay, here we go.

Speaker 1 This is why

Speaker 1 I wanted you to tell me what you thought first.

Speaker 1 I agree.

Speaker 1 What could have done it? So they said the only thing that's left on our list of possibilities is that there was liquid water percolating through this asteroid much later than it should have been.

Speaker 1 Why water? Well, liquid. So, yeah, it's liquid, liquid.
Probably water liquid.

Speaker 1 Other liquid stuff, too, but different solids. Probably mostly water.
Bay solvent.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Some liquid solvent.
So

Speaker 1 what if the regolith had frozen water and then it got near a sun and then it liquefied? But we kind of know about where it was in the solar system based upon what it's made of and it's considered.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 does it just not have enough of its own gravity for the water to stay on it? Like, how does the water just

Speaker 1 this is inside? Yeah, but then you said it had to wash away. So, what do they think happened? So, it percolates through.
It washed away from wherever they got the sample.

Speaker 1 It doesn't necessarily mean it washed away from the asteroid, but it could have if it got to the if it percolated to the surface, it would have gone away. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.

Speaker 1 They're sampling deep in the asteroid, and there should be hafnium there, and there's a lot less of it than there should be.

Speaker 1 Something so maybe they'll see like a band if they actually did a core or something like that. Well, but again, we have the samples we have, we We don't have the whole asteroid.

Speaker 1 So this is what they're thinking. At some point, after a lot of the hafnium already was created through radioactive decay, another asteroid impacted it, melted the ice.

Speaker 1 washed away the hafnium, and then it refroze. The liquid that had the hafnium in it just whisked off into space.
Or again, just

Speaker 1 away from the sample. Yeah, just to a different part of the asteroid.

Speaker 1 So that's their current hypothesis. Something hit this thing, melted the ice from the heat of the impact, and then it eventually refroze, but some of the hafnium went away.

Speaker 1 Is that cool that we have that? But water should have been percolating through that sample way later than the history, the life history of that asteroid should have

Speaker 1 made it possible. Is that cool?

Speaker 1 But the chain of logic is interesting. How they can infer.
They have these little pieces of the asteroid, and they're figuring all this stuff out.

Speaker 1 Again, that radioactive decay thing is always such an important piece of information because, again, it is something that we could say, this is physics. This is what had to have happened.

Speaker 1 Where did they get the piece?

Speaker 1 This is for them. This was recovered from the high abuse of the pressure.
Yeah. So they sent a probe and they brought it back.

Speaker 2 In the future, they get another sample, and there's too much hafnium. Like, this is where it went.

Speaker 1 It went over here.

Speaker 1 Maybe, yeah.

Speaker 1 All right, cool.

Speaker 1 Well, everyone, it's time for science or fiction.

Speaker 1 It's time for science or fiction.

Speaker 1 We should make an SGU snake oil. Yeah?

Speaker 1 I could be careful.

Speaker 1 No, no, no. Wait, let me just do it.
Is this like your homeopops idea? For cooking? No, that was actually Evan's idea. Homeopops?

Speaker 1 You came up with evaporative therapy. Evan came up with homeopops.
No, just it'd be a cool decorative bottle. It looks like a

Speaker 1 cool snake oil bottle. But then we have like an SGU logo, or maybe you're the barker or or something.
It'd be cool. There's an idea in

Speaker 1 swag. Yeah, bookshelf item.

Speaker 1 Fake snake oil. Doc Novella's old-timey remedy.

Speaker 1 Evan, Evan, you see me. I appreciate that.
Thank you.

Speaker 3 I got you, Jay.

Speaker 2 But we'd have to, you know, you have to write on it like a 100% bullshit.

Speaker 1 Well, yeah, it's got to be used with.

Speaker 1 Well, Jay,

Speaker 1 Jay, what would it cure?

Speaker 1 What would the SGU?

Speaker 1 What would it be? What would it be?

Speaker 1 Vic or what ills you could stay out of politics. Let me see.

Speaker 1 Some kind of, yeah, like

Speaker 1 remote control ennui.

Speaker 1 Where it says something like this cures.

Speaker 1 It'll keep you from

Speaker 1 getting this with the scabies, the scabies.

Speaker 1 What's like a kid's? TBGBs, TBGBs or something like that. It cures all TBGs.

Speaker 1 Scabies is a real thing.

Speaker 1 Oh, scabies are real. Yeah.
Yeah, okay. Sorry.
I don't know. I love the old-timey diagnosis too.
It treats consumption. Yeah, it's a dropsy.
Nervous condition. Dropsy, yeah.
Nervous condition.

Speaker 1 Nervous penile dropsy. Nervous penile dropsy.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. Can we call it a liniment? Is that what they used to say? It was a liniment? Liniment, yeah.
Liniment.

Speaker 1 My favorite one as a neurologist, of course, is neurasthenia. Oh, neurasthenia.
Neurasthenia. Ooh, it can calm the nerves.
If I made the snake oil, who would like it? Who would like it?

Speaker 1 Just have to see. All right, forget it.
I'm not doing it. No, no, no.

Speaker 1 Percussive melancholy.

Speaker 1 Cures percussive melancholy. Percussive melancholy.
Nice. Nice.

Speaker 1 Guaranteed. 100%.
George, you have percussion. This This is not a guarantee.

Speaker 1 Okay. Each week I come up with three science news items or facts too real and one fictitious.
And then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake.

Speaker 1 We have a live audience, which means you all get to play along. We're going to do this very specifically.
I'm going to ask the panel to give me their answers first. Then we'll ask you to weigh in.

Speaker 1 And you have to be sure not to give away the answer before

Speaker 1 they vote.

Speaker 1 Right?

Speaker 1 Meaning, you don't want them to say, hey, I know the answer. I don't want them to indicate in any way what they think the answer is.

Speaker 1 How many people here, by the way, you can do the one-clap thing or whatever. How many people here are from Kansas?

Speaker 1 A lot. That's good.
Right. Wow.
The theme of the science or fiction this week is Kansas.

Speaker 1 I didn't do the research.

Speaker 1 Evan asked me yesterday, is the theme going to be Kansas? I'm like, shut up.

Speaker 3 I said you should have thrown us a curveball, say it's Oklahoma.

Speaker 1 Sometimes I don't always do the place we're in, but we've never been here.

Speaker 1 So sometimes I do the place that we're in, but

Speaker 1 that they can't know for sure. What's that? Cures Quizzical Bernstein.

Speaker 1 All right. So keep it cool.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Poker face in the audience out there.
You won't necessarily know the answer, but I don't know. Sometimes I think, I have to think to myself, like, would a local know this absolutely?

Speaker 1 How much do you really know about Connecticut? That's the question. That's part of what I ask myself.
So, I'm not going to do the state bird. You know, I mean, you guys should know what state bird is.

Speaker 1 The meadowlark. Thank you.
You guys are all going to know that, right? Meadowlark. Would you know that about your state?

Speaker 1 I think it's the construction crane.

Speaker 1 Come on,

Speaker 1 you know what Pennsylvania is? No. No? The bird? You don't know what it is? Where's California the bird?

Speaker 1 The Bethlehem bird is the swift. I know that.
The swift? Is California the condor?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Okay.
Connecticut is

Speaker 1 the American Robin. That Robin is.

Speaker 1 This has been your birding moment with Steve. It's not going to address birds.
I almost said Kansas birds was going to be my theme, and I found a couple of good ones, like just describing birds.

Speaker 1 Did you know there's a bird in Kansas called the dicksickle?

Speaker 1 That one. That's fiction.

Speaker 1 All right. How the hell is the quail? The California bird is the quail.
I would not have a bad thing. What the hell is that?

Speaker 1 Some person who found the birds like dicksicle.

Speaker 1 Like, so they had to know exactly what they were doing. Is there a reason? Is there an operational reason? Yeah, yeah, I don't know what it is for that one, but there is.

Speaker 1 Some of them have really funny names, but if you break it, if you deconstruct it, it changes this. Oh, yeah, Jay, it cures Dicksicle.
Yeah, that's it. Right.
Write that down. Wow.
George,

Speaker 1 I like it. I wish more than three people raised their hands.
I really like it. Like, there's the tit mouse, but we know that we have tit mice in Connecticut.
All right. Here we go.
Item number one:

Speaker 1 there is a large population of bison in Kansas, and while they may appear docile,

Speaker 1 there are a score of reported attacks and injuries per year. Item number two, wind accounts for 52% of electricity production in Kansas, the third highest state in the U.S.

Speaker 1 And item number three, the incorrectly named Spanish flu of 1918 started in Fort Riley, Kansas, from which it spread to the rest of the world.

Speaker 1 Okay, should I start with Bob or should I start with George? All right, George, go first. It's their fault, George.
Thank you.

Speaker 1 Large population of bison. I like that.

Speaker 1 I like that being true. Winding, winding.
Wind accounting for 52% seems awfully high. Seems awfully high, which makes it feel like that's probably true because it's like it's being deceptive.

Speaker 1 So I bet that's true. And

Speaker 1 the Spanish flu did not start in Spain. I know it did start here somewhere, I guess, in the United States.

Speaker 1 But would they would, okay, would Steve know that the audience knows this?

Speaker 1 What does Steve think the audience is going to know? You can't play these head games, man. No, I know.
It always gets us.

Speaker 1 To clarify, George, I tried to find ones I thought they wouldn't. That they wouldn't know that.
But I'm not good at doing that. Oh, okay.
Which is why I wanted them to not chime in. So I think.

Speaker 1 Okay, I'm going to say the bison is the fiction. The bison's fiction.
Okay, Kara.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so

Speaker 1 we know Spanish flu started in the U.S. We also know Spanish flu was spread around the world by soldiers.
And so if it originated at Fort Riley, I don't know.

Speaker 1 I don't know like the main place where they were getting it, but maybe that was a port or something where a lot of training was happening for

Speaker 1 the war.

Speaker 1 I agree with

Speaker 1 George that 52% feels high, because I think about wind, where are we doing a lot of wind, like offshore? Maybe not. I don't know.

Speaker 1 Is it windy here? Was it windy? Do you guys remember? Was it windy today? They're not supposed to say anything. I know.
But it is like it's flat here, so plains, I don't know, maybe. And then,

Speaker 1 yeah, bison. Bison.
I mean, they used to be everywhere.

Speaker 1 I think about them in like Montana, but I do think about them in like American Grasslands, Prairie. Good.
I'm going to go with George on this. I'm not sure.
Maybe it's Buffalo.

Speaker 1 Maybe he's being sneaky and it's actually Buffalo and not. I don't think he would do that.
I think that's too similar. Yeah, I don't think he would do that.

Speaker 1 I'm going to go with George on that. Okay.

Speaker 1 Okay, Jay. Yeah, I did.

Speaker 1 I know that the Spanish flu did not start in Spain. It started here.

Speaker 1 I don't think of my years of having Steve do science or fiction, I don't think that he would assign it to

Speaker 1 a local, you know, like a place in Kansas.

Speaker 1 So I think that one is science. I'm going to pop over to now the

Speaker 1 murder bison.

Speaker 1 I mean, look, you know, there's a lot of people who are growing bison for the meat. You know, then I would think, okay, it's perfectly fine if they grow them here.
It's a ton of flat land.

Speaker 1 Seems like a really good state to grow bison and do all that. And they're dangerous.
Of course they are. They're wild animals.

Speaker 1 I don't know if they're like particularly feisty bison, but I think if people like are

Speaker 1 going to be a band name, feisty bison,

Speaker 1 if they go onto other people's property, teenagers and stuff, people can get injured. Sure.
You don't want to be around giant animals like that.

Speaker 1 So I think that's science.

Speaker 1 I think what George says was the 52% seemed too high. And I think that's where Steve likes to be tricky in those areas.
I'm going to say that one's a fiction.

Speaker 1 Okay, Evan.

Speaker 3 The bison of Kansas.

Speaker 3 I just don't know about these reported attacks and and injuries per year.

Speaker 3 I mean, you know, anytime you get people and animals together, there are going to be some injuries. Scores of reported attacks and injuries per year.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that would be the reason why I would go with that one as fiction.

Speaker 1 Now, the wind one,

Speaker 3 52%, and the third highest state in the U.S.

Speaker 2 So the other two would what be coastal. And,

Speaker 3 you know, hey, when I landed yesterday off the plane

Speaker 3 here in Kansas City, and we went to pick up our rental car and noticed signs by the bathrooms, tornado shelter. And I started seeing tornado shelter, tornado, shelter, tornado.

Speaker 1 So, you know, yeah, there's a lot of wind in Kansas,

Speaker 3 actually.

Speaker 1 So, um,

Speaker 1 tornadoes? Well, sure.

Speaker 1 It just, you know, we're from Connecticut.

Speaker 3 We don't have those things. So we come to a state where we're not familiar with, and just odd to see tornado shelter signs on a regular basis in a lot of places.

Speaker 1 Not in Texas.

Speaker 3 So I'm leaning towards that one being science. The last one about Fort Riley, Kansas.

Speaker 3 No,

Speaker 3 I don't know that for certain.

Speaker 3 So I guess I'm going to have to go with George and Kara and say it's the bison one.

Speaker 1 All right, and Bob.

Speaker 2 I was so happy when I saw that Spanish flu because I'm like, yes, I know it's not from Spain. It's from some other country.

Speaker 2 And then everybody seemed to say, oh, we all know it's from the United States. I'm like, it is? I didn't know that.
I told you, so thanks for the info.

Speaker 2 And thanks to you guys for picking George first.

Speaker 2 So that's good. So the other thing, I'm kind of really bummed now that I wasn't looking out that plane window because I think Jay was glued to the window and he saw that there was a lot.

Speaker 2 He saw a bison. So he's like, all right, that's science.

Speaker 2 I think he didn't see a lot of windmills. So

Speaker 1 that's why he picked

Speaker 2 the windmill. So I'm going to go with that.

Speaker 1 How could I not go with that? So that's fiction. Oh, boy.
They're wind turbines.

Speaker 1 Turbines.

Speaker 2 Windmills, turbines.

Speaker 1 Let's start with the third one. Well, first we have to follow the audience.

Speaker 1 Ah, yes. All right, so I'm going to do the George thing.
Are you going to go? You're going to follow me.

Speaker 1 Look at my eyes only.

Speaker 1 All right. If you think that the bison is the fiction, clap.

Speaker 1 If you think that the wind is the fiction, clap.

Speaker 1 And if you think that the Spanish flu is the fiction, clap.

Speaker 1 Okay. So the audience thinks

Speaker 1 the wind turbines are. The audience is going Jay and

Speaker 1 the battery. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So let's take these in reverse order since nobody went for the third one on the panel, a very minority of the audience.

Speaker 1 The incorrectly named Spanish flu of 1918 started in Fort Riley, Kansas, from which it spread to the rest of the world.

Speaker 2 Would you be pissed if you were in Spain and they named this deadly

Speaker 2 scourge after the country you lived in?

Speaker 1 It is true that it did not come from Spain. Do you know why it was called the Spanish flu?

Speaker 2 Nobody else was reporting, right?

Speaker 1 Right, because

Speaker 1 no country wanted to report

Speaker 1 mortality numbers because that would make them look weak. And Spain didn't care.
So they accurately, they were the only ones to accurately report their numbers.

Speaker 1 So it looked like there were a lot of cases in Spain and not so much everywhere else, but it was a total lie. So it got called the Spanish flu for that reason.

Speaker 1 It did originate in the United States, but where in the United States could have come from anywhere in the United States, right? That's the question.

Speaker 1 That's what I pointed out. It's very easy just to say, okay, I'll make it Kansas, right?

Speaker 1 This one is

Speaker 1 science.

Speaker 1 It did come from Kansas. Did you guys, did everybody here know? Now,

Speaker 1 my understanding is that Fort Riley is a town, right? It's not a fort. It probably was a fort at some point.

Speaker 1 So it came from Camp Something. I actually forgot the name, Camp Something in Fort Riley.
And yes, it was primarily spread through soldiers because it was World War I. That's what made it so bad.

Speaker 1 So that one is true. Let's go back to number two.
Wind accounts for 52% of electricity production in Kansas, the third highest state in the U.S.

Speaker 1 Bob and Jay, and the majority, the vast majority of the audience who are from Kansas, apparently,

Speaker 1 think this one is the fiction.

Speaker 1 And this one is

Speaker 1 science. Oh,

Speaker 1 dang.

Speaker 1 Wow, I thought we had it, man.

Speaker 1 52%.

Speaker 1 What are the two states that are higher? Iowa, North Dakota. Those are the two that are higher.
But yeah, Iowa is number one. Yeah, there was a lot of wind in Kansas.
Oh, well.

Speaker 1 To answer Everett's question, you can't use wind turbines during a tornado. I didn't think so.
No, no.

Speaker 1 Nor in just, if the wind gets too brisk, you have to shut them down. You can use them once.

Speaker 1 You can use them once.

Speaker 1 You've got to shut those things down if the wind gets too hot. So hurricane, any kind of really stormy kind of weather, no, they've got to shut them down.
All those Kansas hurricanes. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I wasn't implying that you'd, you know, yay, a lot of electricity.

Speaker 3 Let's get more tornadoes going. I was just saying that.

Speaker 1 you don't realize how

Speaker 1 the conditions of the place are going. You also realize tornadoes aren't just a function of like lots of wind, right? It doesn't just get so windy it becomes a tornado.
I get that.

Speaker 1 It doesn't work for that. But yeah, there are a lot of flat states in the Midwest that have a lot of wind turbines.
You know, Oklahoma.

Speaker 1 I was in Oklahoma.

Speaker 1 I was in Oklahoma and giving a lecture, and there's wind turbines everywhere. Now, of course, Oklahoma is a very red state.

Speaker 1 So the, not in the cities, when you're in a city, it's like any other city anywhere else, right?

Speaker 1 But it's the rural areas that are very regional in terms of their beliefs and culture and politics and stuff. The population in Oklahoma believes

Speaker 1 that their dramatic increase in earthquake frequency is due to the wind turbines.

Speaker 1 Sure. Not due to the fracking, which is actually what's causing it, because that's what they were told.
And then there's damn wind turbine. All right.

Speaker 3 You should go attack them.

Speaker 1 That means that there is a large population of bison in Kansas, and while they may appear docile, there are a score of reported attacks and injuries per year. Is the fiction?

Speaker 1 Now, what about it is fiction?

Speaker 1 Are there a lot of bison in Kansas? Yes, there are. But a lot, what's a lot?

Speaker 1 The population is 5,000 to 6,000 bison. So a lot.
That's a sizable herd.

Speaker 1 A lot of them are in private herds, but some of them are not.

Speaker 1 And they are not docile. They are dangerous wild animals.
Anyone here play the game Medieval Dynasty? Yeah, so there are medieval bison, not bicep there, I could what they call them.

Speaker 1 There are similar creatures in there. They will run at you and kill you.
They are really dangerous in the game, and that's very accurate. In Oregon Trail, they help you cross the river.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, my gosh, Oregon Trail.

Speaker 3 I almost forgot about that game.

Speaker 1 That's a great game. Defining a child.
So are these just like protected somehow?

Speaker 1 Yeah, there probably just isn't that much human conflict with them. So

Speaker 1 there's zero injuries per year.

Speaker 1 I think, I guess, because people who are around them know not to get near them. The last reported injury was from 2022, so three years ago.
So not score per year. Okay.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 But again, that kind of number,

Speaker 1 it could sound reasonable. And particularly if they're on private farms and all that.
Yeah, like the people who work there know what they're doing. They know what they're doing.

Speaker 1 Are there any bison in the audience? Is there?

Speaker 1 Do we have any? Does anybody here see a bison in Kansas? Do bison moo?

Speaker 1 Maybe. I don't know.
Do bison. Don't they make some

Speaker 1 moo? No. Somebody mooed in the honor.
I'm just saying. They must have some kind of

Speaker 1 noise.

Speaker 1 But it's not moo. I wouldn't call it a moo.
Not mooing. No.
They licked yourself off your car. Get too close.
All right, so good job to the non-novellas up here and like three people in the audience.

Speaker 1 Yay.

Speaker 1 Evan, give us a quote.

Speaker 3 I may have discovered a planet, but the real achievement is the inspiration it provides to future generations. Clyde Tombaugh, who is the discoverer of planet Pluto.

Speaker 1 The dwarf planet, Pluto.

Speaker 3 The dwarf planet.

Speaker 1 I'm going to put that in brackets now in the quote.

Speaker 1 The

Speaker 1 planet, scare quotes.

Speaker 3 Who studied here at the University of Kansas, University of Kansas alumnus.

Speaker 1 So that is why we chose the quote to honor him. Thank you, Evan.
Well, thank you all for joining me this week. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Thank you all for coming, and thanks to all the Kansans.

Speaker 1 Is it Kansans? Is that correct? Good. We're Kineticutians.
I love that. Yeah.
Thanks to all the Kansans for your wonderful hospitality since we've been here.

Speaker 1 And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

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