The Skeptics Guide #1062 - Nov 15 2025

You're listening to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality. Hello and welcome to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Today is Saturday, September 20th, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey everybody. Evan Bernstein. Hello, Kansas. Jane Novella. Hey guys. Sarah Santa Maria. Howdy. Yeah, baby. Wow. And George Rubb. And Tiam, and Tiam. Yay George. We are live from Lawrence, Kansas. This is my first time in Kansas. How about you guys? Yeah, first time. Third time. Third time? Yes. How do you do that? You drove through it twice. I've driven through it twice. Once North South and once East West, and that was it. We may stop for lunch or something while we were moving around the country, but that's it. We never had a whole day in Kansas. 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. Yeah, it's pretty. It looks a lot like Texas. Yeah. Honestly, yeah. Not part of the Hill Country, but like North Texas. Parts look like Jersey or like Pennsylvania too. Like, I mean, that's the problem with, you know, Raymore and Flanagan being everywhere. That's the thing. That's how it works. That's just America. America, yeah. Yeah, it's the Chilesens. It's basically it's all the same thing. Yeah. We're going to start with off with a little bit of a discussion about nightmares. This, you know, Evan suggested this as a possible news item. The item itself is pretty simple. It's like, how you can control your nightmares and it makes you healthier. It's like, okay, well, not so much. But there is this issue of, Bob and I, you know, talked about this a while about like 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. You tend to either dream you wake up or you, which means you're back into the dream where you actually wake up. It's very hard to maintain that knife's edge of being dreaming, but know that you're dreaming. But we thought we would use this as a jumping off part point to talk about our common recurring nightmares. And interestingly, I had my recurring nightmare last night. Oh, do tell. Because so this, I think this happens more often to me when I'm sleep deprived and just, you know, because of travel and everything and being in a hotel room. I usually don't sleep as well. So I woke up at like four o'clock in the morning and then, you know, 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 that was that was very, that was my sleep deprived sleep that 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. I'm like, I'm getting out of bed and going to the bath. I knew I was had to meet these guys. And I'm like, am I awake? Yeah, I'm awake. I'm awake. I'm walking around. I'm looking at things and everything. You're dreaming self can't tell that you're not really awake. Then I go, then I walk back to the bed and I see myself sleeping in the bed like, shit, I'm still sleeping. Wow. But the nightmare, the recurring nightmare had some point in there. Jay, you were in it and you were there. And you were there. Put him up. Put him up. Oh my God. That was awesome. Jay was there. And there was some other person might have been Ian, but I'm not really sure. So we were being chased and that's my recurring nightmares of being chased by some malevolent force. So this time it was the authorities, like whatever that means. And you know how you just know things and dreams. 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. You guys know that. Wow. Wow. So we're using the portal gun to like escape into the Rocky Mountains or something. And but they still managed to track us down. And then the guy had me a gunpoint. I had to wrestle the gun from him and I shot him in the ass. He still didn't. Which was surprising because the guns almost never work in my dreams. Right? Like you can't pull the trigger or swords or wobbly or faggers. Faggers never work. So why is that? Well Freud, that's a sense of that. There's no answer to that. The thing that bothers me is like dreams are just happening. And you point a part of your brain's making it up and another part of your brain is experiencing it. And why is it a universal like big FU? Why couldn't it be ultra successful and ultra fun? I don't think it's universal. Sometimes that can happen. So what's interesting to me and I don't know if there's like gender differences with this. But I dated. I had an ex who was male, who had a night terrors. And almost always you'd be like, ah, no, get away. And I was like, what were you dreaming? And he was always being chased or people were breaking it. That literally never happened to me. Those kinds of like I'm being hunted dreams. But I had a recurring dream when I was little. And it's like, fuck up you guys. Like honestly, I think this is why my parents put me in therapy like really early on. 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. You have to be experiencing RAM at some point. I don't get much RAM at all. But you just don't remember that. Yeah, but I also the drugs I take prevent me from getting a lot of RAM. But you've got to get some where you go slowly crazy. I don't think you have to have to have to have. You do have to have RAM. You have to. Even if you're in delta all night. Yeah. You were you were not last long. I don't think that's true. I think you can't not have delta. I think you can I think you can avoid paradigm. My understanding is that you really need a good sleep architecture. Yeah. You need to go through all the stages of sleep, you know, with a certain pattern. There could be variations. Yeah, I don't. If you have the same board, but if you have the same board, the carrier actually dreaming right now. 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. There's the medication we take, which is like GHB. It's a zy-wave. And it just forces you into delta all night, and you're like, awake during the day. And without that, I am sleepy girl, my whole life, and sleepy. Anyway, when I was young, I had this recurring dream. I'm talking like kindergarten for 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 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's dead. All the animals were dead. And I was the only living soul. And it was terrifying. This is a good TV show plot. This is how you get it. Everything was dead but me. And I spent the whole nightmare trying to search for something that was alive. You ever find it in the neighborhood? 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. 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. What, when did those? I still have the, I have to take a final dream. Yeah, when do those end? Yeah, never. Apparently. No, stressors do it. 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. So there's one thing where some dude reanimates an arm from the hell. Remember that? And I remember one seeing like it grabs the guy, scared the shit out of me. So my semi-reoccurring dream was that there was a gauntlet, you know, like an armored hand crawling after me. 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 broke the chain because mustard wasn't scary to me. But my real, wow. I should have that back up. Back up, back up. The arm was full of mustard. It was a gauntlet. It was like an armor, you know what I mean? OK. And that was how my brain transferred it from like a human hand to like a more terrifying gauntlet hand crawling after me. Warped terrifying. Lain to him that it was full of mustard. Like, well, yeah, because it was a gauntlet. It wasn't a real arm. The other arm had ketchup. Gauntlets are always special. I was in my parents' closet. And they had a deep closet when we were kids. My dad had his safe right there. I was sitting next to it. And the thing came in, where's the mustard coming? I don't understand. I have no idea. I don't know. Did you have a mustard? Like mustard? Was it brown or yellow? It was yellow. Yellow mustard? Yeah. George, you like yellow mustard? I hate mustard. I mean, it was just scary to me. That would make it scary. So gruntlet of mustard? Oh my god. Yeah, it was. Yeah. I mean, now that I'm thinking about it, it's pretty messed up. So anyway, my don't dream. So really quick, I could give you a little background. 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. And I got into my 30s, got into my 40s. And I'm like, nothing was working. And I finally was at the point where I'm like, it's not going to happen. Because statistically, it was getting less and less likely. I meet my wife, who is 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. I've never felt loved like this before. I can go on like that. This is my nightmare, by the way. So 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. 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. This is not what's supposed to be happening. It's like a weird zone kind of dream. Yeah, and it totally upends me. Like I wake up freaking out when I, because you really feel it. And that's like a real neurological disorder. Like when people, the invasion of the body snatchers thing, where they don't wreck it. Like there's people that they know, but they don't recognize them. Cap grass and grass. That's scary. Like if I ever had, there is a, yeah, imagine having that. 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. Yeah, that's kind of like a dream about having Cap grass. This is not my wife. Yeah, it's interesting. Yep. George, about you. I had one 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 nobody. There was nobody. And I remember just sort of looking at it. And like being scared, but not really doing anything about it and just being terrified. I told my mom the next day that this had happened. And she was like, I was probably a dream. And for probably 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 never happened again. It was just that one time. Do you remember, like you said, you didn't do anything about? Could you move? You might have been having a hypnopompid population. That's right. It might have been, yeah. I don't think that was a dream. I don't know. I think that was a hypnopompid population. I knew what dreams were. That's not what we were. I knew what dreams were at that point. But it was just, it was just. If you said it was morning, you were in bed. If you didn't do anything yet. So to this day, I can sort of still picture it. I'm sure I've modified it in my head over time. And now it's technical or whatever. But it wasn't, you know, there was no blood. There was no, it was just, that's creepy. That ain't right. That ain't right. Yeah. When I was a kid, also, my dreams have changed. I think a lot of people have had that experience as well. You don't dream about the things you used to and you dream about new things. 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? I think we've all experienced that. That's sort of, you're dropping. It's death is coming. You have that sinking sensation in your body. 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. I would constantly get dropped as a kid. 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. I know I need to be over there. Now why aren't I over there now? I'm trying to walk. I'm not walking. Why? So I get very frustrated. Yeah, that's called a stress dream. Yeah, totally. And it's true of all sorts of scenarios. I know I have to write this thing. Why are I writing it? What is going on? I have to write this. Why are I writing? So I can't make sense of it. I want to be getting really angry with myself in those dreams. And that takes on many forms and various kinds of scenarios. You have had plenty of nightmares. I can't really remember any that are really like, oh, listen to this one. I've had the stress dreams are common. But there's one nightmare that I remember that was really fascinating. And it was a nightmare of a movie nightmare. American Werewolf in London. There's a dream sequence where David Norton's attacked by these weird creatures with weird faces. So in my dream, I'm in my kitchen and where we grew up. And they come in the house with machine guns and start killing everybody. So yeah, pretty bad, right? But I was also experimenting with lucid dreams at that time. And I said, this is not real. 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. 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. And I would almost invariably fail because it's so hard. You know, you try to leap in the air like Superman. It just just fall flat. It doesn't work. It's so frustrating. But the few times it actually worked, it was magical. It was just like holy crap. You feel like Superman. If you ever try to lucid dream, try to fly. Because it's like amazing. Bob, when you fly in your dream, so when I fly in my dreams, I'm like doing the breaststroke in the air. Yeah, I'm a lot. Is that how everybody, Lord, do you like? Sometimes. I have both, but only way I've ever been able to do it. And I just silly. It requires a lot of mental effort. And it's hard to sustain. Interesting. I mean, I'm not in my dreams, but you can do it. I can do it in my dreams. But this is how you get up a level and you're a loft. And I'm always the only one. And everybody's going, whoa, that's so badass. Is there any evolutionary advantage to not just dreaming, but nightmares in particular? Is there some kind of, can we think of any of any? Well, we still don't even understand 100% what dreams are and why we dream. So I think it's hard to make that leap. I mean, you know that dreams, the REM sleep is important for consolidation of memory, for your brain to sort of recalibrate. Like the desktop clearing. If the dream actually have to happen, or maybe you need to be conscious enough for your brain to do the work that needs to happen during REM, I mean, it's a buy product. Maybe it's a buy product. 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. That's kind of how I see the dream imagery. When you're dreaming, the part of your brain that does reality testing is not functioning. Which is why I think makes 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 your, to say, you're not your waking self. And the key with lucid dreaming, I think, is that there's a critical threshold of activation in that, that lobe of your brain, where you can do reality testing. And like, whoa, this isn't real, this must be a dream. So that's the idea I think. But Bob, you mentioned that dream you were in our childhood at home. What's interesting is that when I remember my dreams, it's either in a place that's not real. If it isn't a place that I'm familiar with, it's almost always in our childhood home. I don't think I've ever had a dream where it's in my current home that I'm living in. That I remember. That's the same for you guys as well. That's true. No, my dreams are usually pretty typical. Did you guys ever, Bob and Steve, growing up, when mom and dad put the extension, like put the 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 wouldn't be dragged out into a war zone. Do they're having a share? Yeah. Part of the house. Wait, explain what this is. What did the whole dream was? Was it mustard? What's going on? It was always, like, the lights were always off, right? 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. It was pitch black. Yeah. And I always be, we increased out, going quick. I got to go quick. The light, there's a kitchen there. And I got to run and turn the corner, and get up the stairs before that room gets me. And the light switch doesn't work. So I had a dream. I got pulled into that darkness. And I still get a little creeped out when I think about it. You know what? I love when when when pets dream. Oh, yeah. Like when you're when you're a puppy and they're chasing bunnies, we call it, yeah, chasing bunnies. That's just the coolest thing. Because it's just like, oh, they're dreaming too. So there, you know, there is some evolutionary purpose for it to reprogram whatever. But do you, yeah, but like, do dogs have nightmares too? Like, is there a, wow, like some mail man that's got a machine gun? Or like, what's the, yeah, it could be anything. Here's one more. I think we had nightmare cross fertilization when we were growing up. Because I remember my sister telling us that she, her nightmare, I think in fact, that some of our nightmares, she had a dream where she called this monster the beep beep eye. The beep beep eye. Oh my god. Yes. So it's where that came from. 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. So it was a robot that would draw eyes on you. And that's where my memory ends. What's your memory? Just giant floating eye. Yeah, all right. But that was chasing you. That was going to just a chase dream. That's kind of creepy. Yeah. In my dream, I ate the eyes and they were meatballs. Yeah. That's a prize. So that tracks. All right. Have you guys heard of the brain worm? Not the brain worm. Of course we have. Yeah, because that was where that quote comes from, by the way, in the eyes. Not the ball worm. Yeah. Anybody know what it is? Yeah. Anyone know where it comes from? It sounds like Lord Farquat. Flash Gordon. Flash Gordon. Nice. Flash Gordon. Flash Gordon. Flash Gordon. OK. Wow. So we have spoken about brain machine interface before. And you guys remember what the biggest technological limitation of the brain machine interface is? Yes. Fidelity. The electrodes. The electrodes. It's the electrode. That's what I mean. It's part of it. But it's really the software kicking butt, right? We can make sense. They move. They don't stay in place. So yeah. So the problem with it is we have multiple choices with electrodes. You can put them on the scalp service, which is not invasive. But there's a lot of attenuation with the skull, right? So you lose a lot of information. You can put brain surface electrodes, and they're much higher fidelity. But they fibro-sover. They form scar tissue and inflammation and whatever. So it's not good. Deep brain electrodes, same thing. They eventually will scar over. And then there's the stent roads which you put inside veins, which are still experimental. But those have a lot of promise. 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. So that is, there are a lot of groups working on that. So now there's a study not only doing that, but taking it even a step further. And this is the brain worm. So what they've done is they've designed a series of electrodes to look like an earthworm. So if you imagine an earthworm, and the bands are each electrodes, right? And they, in the head of the worm, is a magnet. So they can actually have the worm crawl through your brain by moving from external magnets. So they could reposition it as desired. And because it's flexible and movable, they tested it in, because it also could be used for muscle, like you could use this to monitor muscle activity or brain activity. 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. Well, yeah, the fact that it moves, it's not rigid and not fixed in place, then that's where the scar tissue forms. Because it's not destroying tissue as it moves, though. Like, why would it, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's going to take the path of least resistance, right? And the muscles that's going through the fascia, the fascia is the connective tissue. It's not boring through muscle cell. OK, OK, OK. Moving through the, the planes between muscles, in the brain, you know, it would be going through your folds, the, the, the gyrry in the valleys. I don't know what that is. You're talking about the surface of your, yeah, it'd be outside. So these are super fit. They're the contours. They would be on the surface. These would be brain surface. And also just to clarify, they're modeling it after an earthworm, but they're not the size of an earthworm. No, they're, they're actually, they're, they're smaller and they're flatter. OK. So, so, would you feel that? Could you feel, your brain does not feel anything? But I know, but it's not your brain is on the surface, could the, could the bottom of your skull has any sensation? Well, so it would be the dura, right? It would be the lining around your brain. Is it underneath the dura? Yeah, that's what it would be to put it on the surface of the brain, right? So we could crawl along the surface of the brain. So the, the advantage here is once, so the, the primary thing is if they could get these electrodes to last for years, that would be amazing, right? That would, that would, that makes it much more viable as a tech out. So it's not like a, a prong that stuck into your brain. It's just touching the surface. It's just skimming on the surface. All right. That's cool. What, what diseases are that? Because I don't know, I think about like DBS, but that's by definition deep brain. Yeah. So how helpful it is. What, what kinds of things can this help with? So, first of all, just for studying the brain, right? So if you have, somebody has epilepsy, let's say. So one, you know, we could do EEGs, you know, electrode and cephalograms from the brain's surface. Sometimes we do, we don't, from the skull surface. But then for, if we're planning on cutting out a chunkier brain to stop your seizures, we need to know exactly where the seizures coming from, which means we need to capture it, right? As it starts. 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. Yeah. This would say, let's see what's happening over there. Let's move it along. How long can you move it? I mean, 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, or you have to do it? 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, could this be not invasive? Like, like the bug in Rathacom? It's minimally invasive. They don't call it not- Put it in the ear or put up your nose or something, and it like finds its way. That's a good point. It's minimally, it's considered minimally invasive, because like with the, if you're laying electrodes along this, the brain surface, you've got to open up the brain to do that. But here you could literally bore a hole. Bore, right? Yeah. Put the worm in there and then get it to the place where it's going 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, 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? So there's more flexibility there, rather than putting it someplace, hoping it's the right place and seeing how well it works. Like, if this is a 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 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. The whole point you want it to be long. So it could go through the whole thing. The whole thing is electrodes, like 60 electrodes. 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. But there is only a magnet on one side. On the head. Yeah. OK. Is this built or this is theoretically heard? It's a published a paper where they showed that it works in the muscles of rats. In the muscles. Yeah. Harry, 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. So these ants, this is a picture of queens of a Mediterranean harvester ant. The species here is called Messer Ibericus, in Spain. 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 structure, or Messer structure. So two different species, same genus, right? M Ibericus, M structure. So researchers were observing these M Ibericus colonies. And they realized that there were some M structure 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. I'm going to say that with so many times. Be cute for a minute. And so the researchers were like, OK, it's not that uncommon to see hybrid species within some kind of colonies or structural organizations of animals, right? We've seen hybrids of different dog species or different marine animals. Animals rose getting busy. 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. 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. 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 structure, sometimes was like hundreds of miles away geographically. And they're like, how did these ants come across these other ants? Also bear in mind that these ants diverge about as long and ago in evolutionary history as we did from chimpanzees. This will be important for the analogy that the researchers make later. So they're trying to figure out, where do they come across these? How did they make these hybrids? And at the beginning, they were all joking. What if they were giving birth to a different species? That's ridiculous. And then the more they dug in, they were like, shit, I think that's what happened. So they start observing these queen ants and they are 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? Maybe they came across some drone somewhere, what's going on? They looked at both the M structure and the M Ibaricus ants and they found that they all had M Ibaricus. Was it M Ibaricus or M structure? So now I'm confusing myself. Doesn't matter. They all had the same mitochondrial DNA. And they were like, well, that's weird. What is going on here? 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 lay, 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. They're calling it xenoparity, a foreign bird. So it's just a coincidence? No. 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. 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 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. 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 can produce more, and they were like, no, it's even weirder than that. 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 continuing to make the colony run. 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. And so it's funny, 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. Oh, okay. 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 other, the full other species. They're giving birth to the full other species so then they can mate with the full other species and produce hybrid. So, but they must have the genes then for that other species. 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, 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. But then they observed it and they were like, this is the only explanation. Is it possible that they made it in the past like they're saving the sperm from the other species for later use? Hundreds of miles away and their ants. So it doesn't, I don't think it is possible. Yeah. But maybe, maybe. But once you've eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable. Exactly. Because the truth of the matter, this seems impossible, right? So it could be, could be. But either way, they are giving birth to a different species, whether they're holding onto that sperm, and they call it sometimes like sperm paratism, or something like that, paracetism, or whether they have the genetic code somewhere in them and they're able to kind of like drum it up. That's what's happening. So first time's ever been observed. So this kills like every creationist argument about not having another species come from, you know, that transition. They don't care. They don't care. That's right there. That's astonishing. They think it's phenomenal, right? But it also, it's not like a deliberate choice. It's all happening automatically. Yeah, I mean, we never know, like what does deliberate mean? Are they, are they, you know, having philosophical debates about it? No, but are there certain environmental pressures that force it to happen? Yeah, what must have failed previously to lead to this being successful and then be reproducible? Well, it doesn't always mean that something has to fail. Sometimes it's just that something is more successful. Right, right, right. So yeah, I mean, there either way, there are environmental pressures that are allowing for the staff. That's freaking cool. Evolution. Very cool. All right. Bob, you're going to tell us even more about black holes. This one's cool. I love this news end 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. There could be a 90% chance? Yes. What's the percentage chance that there is a 90% chance? Sex panther? It's going to be 80% of the time. If so, you can't. It's unknowable at this current time. If this is true, this would be the biggest gift to astrophysic 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. And I learned a bunch of things that are actually 100%, probably 100% true. So to appreciate this, we got to just talk a little bit about just black holes and Hawking radiation. Black holes, we have all heard of black holes, right? You've got a couple of varieties. 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 three solar masses to perhaps 150 solar masses. OK. But there's also a hypothetical black hole called primordial black holes. Now, if they exist, they would have formed in the first second after the big bang. After the big bang, there was so many density fluctuations happening that they think that these black holes could have formed not by an imploding star, but by just these density fluctuations. That enough mass was in one space. Enough mass energy was in one space that black hole forms. 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 much even smaller than that. So if you had a, if you were a super primordial black hole with a mass of say an asteroid, your event horizon would be about as big as a dime. Very tiny. These are obviously very, very small black holes. So the next critical component here is Hawking radiation. We've talked about hockey radiation. Stephen Hawking, of course, came up with the idea. Hawking radiation, let me just set the table for this a little bit. Hockey radiation is a result of black holes losing their immortality and becoming objects that won't live forever. When Stephen Hawking looked at black holes through a quantum lens, he realized that they have a temperature. They actually have a temperature because of quantum effects. Then if they have a temperature, then they're emitting thermal radiation. 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. 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. 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. So they're not really going to be emitting. There's no net loss of mass from these big guys. 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. 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. 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. So the end result would be that these primordial black holes perhaps have a charge, like a static charge, very, very small charge. But if it has that charge and some models seem compelling, if these whole black holes have the charge, then they would basically have been in kind of like a slow motion stasis for the past billions of years. They would not have been emitting anything. They would not have been shrinking. But according to the theory, they could be doing that now. They could be releasing this, they could be exploding in the near future. So that's where the 90% 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. Bob, can I ask you a question? Yeah. So which black holes could potentially explode the super small ones? Yeah. Only the smaller ones, because the bigger ones are too big, they're not going to be releasing any real radiation for about 10 to the 67 years. All right. So is it a big deal if it explodes? Like what happens? It's going to be so awesome. And that's what I'm getting into right now. So wait, wait, wait. OK. Never mind. Go ahead. Sorry. We want the two to explode. You're going to cover it. It's a good thing. Oh, it's going to tell us why. All right. So say we see the explosion. What does that mean? On its face, it's fantastic, because it proves so many things it's ridiculous. It proves that hot and hot radiation is real. If we see a gamma radiation burst that disappears very quickly with 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 hockey radiations exist. Huge coup, right? Just there. We would also prove that primordial black holes exist. Another huge coup right there. 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, having some link to dark matter in this. 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. Think about that. It would emit everything that we have been looking for, that we have theorized about, that we've already found, everything that that black hole could create. It could be emitted and we could detect it. About that. You're not talking about... Just blew me away. You're not talking about elements, right? You're not talking about particles. Different kind of particles. Particles, particles. Yeah, but isn't... Quarks, axions, neutrinos. But, I mean, all of those things are out there. Higgs. Well, they'll be... See, there are very high, high energy particles that we've never detected, and we can't create even in a large height, right? Right. 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. Spending out high energy particles, that we otherwise we would never say. Well, but that's the question, right? So, are you saying that we would need some sort of detector near this? No, no, we're on Earth. Yeah, but then aren't all of those particles, they've been created at some point in the universe. So they are out there. We're just not able to detect that. But it's just an event. We have to capture the event. We have to capture the event. Right. So when a black hole sucks something in, right? Yeah. Like, you know, this is... Black holes don't suck. Pull. They pull. It's just gravity. Pull, whatever. Yeah. When a thing goes into a black hole, yeah. And it's made out of matter. Yeah. It automatically strips that down and turns all that matter, which we're talking about, you know, elements of singularity. It's singularity. Well, wait, no, it doesn't turn them into these particles. Or the... They're already made of those particles. I know. I know. It takes them all apart and makes them... Spinitifies it. Yeah. When something enters the event horizon or 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's going on. So you can't speculate. Where do we come up with quantum gravity? Then we might have a better idea, but 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. 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. It gets a little bit hotter. You write it shrinks and it gets hotter. Then it releases electrons. Then it gets smaller and hotter. 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. 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. 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. 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. But then you keep looking at this gamma rays signal and you're like, what the hell's that? What the hell's that? We don't know what that stuff is. It could be... It could give us a roadmap to all these particles that we probably never would have found and maybe in 1,000 years of technological advancement. It could give us... It's 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 I hope... 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. Say, the smallest black hole is about probably three solar masses, the small stellar mass, three mass. We would have to wait. I calculated 10 billion octode-disillion years in order for that thing to evaporate. And I don't think we're going to be around it. But 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. You're talking to an octode-disillion. Oh, I don't even know what you're meant. I'm talking about the evaporation of a black hole that's more massive than the Sun, not the primordial little black hole. That would take so long that... So long. Yeah, but the primordial ones could happen or happening now, apparently, and if we keep looking for them, maybe we'll see one. And Bob said, here's the catalog of every possible particle that exists in the universe. You've been one you haven't discovered yet. And that will give us the roadmap to complete the standard model. So two quick questions. The first one is, how do we detect that? I was going to say, how visit? Let me ask you what instrument. Camera ray detectors, we have on that. I mean, how do we detect the event? I mean, how do we detect all of those really high-degrees? It's just the energy of the particles. 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. Even particles that come out, we would never detect them because they decay too quickly. That's what I'm saying. But they decay into gamma radiation. So that would be part of the gamma ray signal and that we could interpret. We could interpret that to know the high-energy particles. The higher. That's a part that I was confused about. I know we can do this in a collider, but that's a closed system. When all this stuff is just flying through space, how do we even know? And it's decaying so quickly. Yeah, it would all, by looking at the gamma radiation, we can detect what's going on. The signature inside of it. 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 the new article that has just been created and released. OK, and so the other question is, if it's such a high-energy explosion, right, would it also cause a ripple in space? Like, would we be able to detect it with gravitational wave detectors? LIGO. Not necessarily. Not necessarily gravitational events. Yeah, LIGO and gravitational waves are all about mass, accelerating mass, like two neutron stars. Remember, it has the mass of an asteroid and it's way too small. Yeah, but what about the explosion itself? Even, but even explosions, I don't think is optimal for a gravitational wave detector. Would it be at all visible? Or we're just talking purely like gamma radiation? If you can see gamma radiation, it'll be visible to you. Yeah, our tele... We wouldn't see anything. It would be a gamma radiation telescope. It would be a purely radiation kind of thing. It wouldn't be like, oh, that cool dot that all of a sudden appeared kind of thing. Yeah, right. So it's not big enough. 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. 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. But if it did happen, what I love about this is that it would be like a genie came to astrophysicism and said, what do you want? Like, 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. So there's a 20% chance. And the genie's like, really? Well, we do a math follow-up 10 years from now. That's very true. But at least it's falsifiable, right? I mean, in that, we... If this is true, we should see this. Right. And if we do... Basically, like three people are excited about this. I hope maybe, maybe we'll have to... With this audience maybe four or five of us. I think it sounds cool to me. They're excited. Good job, Bob. Thank you. Thank you. You tell them, Bob. I love this news end. Bob, you really... 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. Yeah, because I've heard about hockey radiation for decades. And I never really thought, well, what the hell is hockey radiation? I thought it was just maybe some particles, some type of radiation. I didn't know that it was potentially everything. Yeah, that's great. All the particles, all of... All energy dependent. Well, let me one. We're going to take a quick break from our show to talk about our sponsor this week, Quince. It's getting cold outside. And when it's cold, I like to have great layers. One of my favorite pieces is from Quince. It's a $50 Mongolian Kashmir sweater. I have this amazing zip up hoodie. It's so warm, it's so cozy. And it's so much less expensive than the other guys, but even better quality. Yeah, I think I talked about this sweater last year. And I got another one. It's the Mongolian Kashmir fisherman pullover hoodie. That's a lot of words. All it means is it's a super comfortable, awesome hooded sweater. I wear it all the time, Kara, and I am not afraid to tell you I look awesome. So give and get timeless holiday staples that last the season with Quince. Go to quince.com slash SGU for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's q-u-n-c-e.com slash SGU, free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash SGU. All right, guys, let's get back to the show. All right, George, you've been reading this book cult as you were talking about. I tell us what's going on. 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. 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. And this was a nice sort of journey in reading this book it's called Cult-ish. It's by Amanda Montel. And in essence, Ms. Montel writes about this idea that the language of cults is very specific. 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. We sort of all know that. You kind of get that, you know, the Tom Cruise mile stare kind of like thing. 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 Soulcycle, you know, Etsy, workers and stuff that people that do a lot of beauty products, you know, like makeup and AM way and things like that use very, very similar language. 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, you know. So in Scientology, there's these great, you know, someone is suppressive, right? There's a suppressive person, that's like the worst kind of person you can be, interpolate, that's a great Scientology word, you know, decludge, other one of these, 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. It's a great word, a clue. And you start having similar words like that that this is the part that I sort of realized my own experience a year ago, a couple of years ago, I did CrossFit for a while and CrossFit in an odd way is almost proud of itself being a cult. 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. And I started realizing they had all these key words and phrases and stuff and those things like WOD, the workout of the day or AMRAP. I mean, what an AMRAP is, as many rounds as possible, right? 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 as many times as you can in a minute or whatever it is, many rounds as possible. 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 an, or box, you go, yeah, I'm gonna see you with the box, 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 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, Amy, I know is one, which is like you do five, pull ups, 10 push ups and 15 squats, that's an Amy do that five times. And I thought like, oh, you name it like a female to, of course you can do that because it's named after a girl. 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. 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? You have a go to a gig. A gig, that's a jazz thing? That's, I mean, that's like music, music and sort of, you go, yeah, I got a gig, that's where that's from. Clams, you know, what's a clam? Money? You 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. Oh, it was a seafood buffet tonight. Oh my God, the clams head, like, is the top of the song, you know, or rushing, dragging all that, all these little expressions. And it just made me start to think about like, have I been adding to this kind of cultish language? 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. That's the difference, right? That's what she addresses. She talks about soul cycle and soul cycle. For those of you that aren't aware, it's sort of a peloton cycling thing. You sign up and you do these classes online. And again, they're very specific. They have very specific language. You pick your instructor. The instructors have sort of things about them that certain people like to do. 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. And no one is insisting that you use those soul cycle terms in the rest of your life. And if you don't use those soul cycle terms, you're being suppressive or you're being whatever. And that there is a, and a dream, 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 winking. We're doing cult-like, cult-ish, cult-light maybe even. But we understand we can leave it anytime. And that's sort of, yeah, that main difference. Whereas if you're at the Jim Jones compound or you're from Scientology, they're gonna do everything they possibly can to make you not leave. They want to maintain you. And way, they don't want you to stop selling their garbage to your friends. A bunch of other sort of multi-level marketing thing that used it. The one example that made me think that CrossFit started to cross over into this kind of dangerous cult was there's a thing called Uncle Rabdo, which the more I thought about this, the more this disturbed me. So, Rabdo Myolysis? Rabdo Myolysis. Rabdo Myolysis is where if you work a muscle too much, if you exercise a muscle too much, it releases portions of itself into your bloodstream. It breaks down. It basically breaks down. Yeah, it releases. It's not as much, it's any exercise done that. It does that. If you actually, you're doing it now, it's just a matter of degree. If you work, if you have a good workout and then I tested your blood, you would look like you have a mild, Rabdo Myolysis. Oh, right, right. And in fact, we often have to, I've had to ask patients have done any exercise in the last few days because that, I have to just, how do I... Okay, so it's a bit stings. But it kind of stings. It can get to that point of like where you actually have liver damage. Yeah, when you have Coca-Cola colored urine. Kidney damage. Kidney damage, yeah. So, to take this, Rabdo Myolysis, and they created this character called Uncle Rabdo. The idea of like, it's actually kind of a badge of honor. That's awful. Yeah, it's awful. It's awful. Yeah, you can die from it. Yeah. I had read an article about, you know, someone had referenced Uncle Rabdo and I just didn't get a chance to ask what it was. I looked it up and I'm like, wait a minute, that's terrible. So I went to this sort of main training guy. And I said, what's the deal like with this Uncle Rabdo and Rabdo Myolysis? And he was like, well, yeah, you know, I mean, it's like, because like people have gotten really ill and 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 you hit by a bus. Yeah, that's a great answer. I'm done. Thank you much. Wow. Okay, bye. And that was the justification. Like, yeah, no, you're not working hard enough until you're literally like your, your pee or your cake. You're just drawing your cake. And so I thought, okay, that's where it's crossed over. So it just made me think about what else in my life that maybe has been that borderline. It's a point of recognize. And we've, we've spoken about this before. We got, we were really involved with anti-cult activity early on. Pre-SGU and we were doing the active, the doing the skeptical society because there's a lot of that based in Connecticut around us. But anyway, so the, you know, a cult is, first of all, the belief system is irrelevant, right? It's just the behavior. And the behavior is a continuum. It's not a black or white. And there's a what we call a demarcation problem. There's no sharp line that divides something that isn't occult from something that is occult. 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. 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, all right, now this is really operating like a full-blown cult. And of course, there's a lot of things that are just blatant cults. They're doing it, they're doing it all. And it's top down, it's deliberate, it's not organic or cultural. It's not a jargon for pragmatic reasons. It's just, it's meant to separate you from other people to get you inside the community. You can depend it on the kids. That's, yeah, that's the main thing. Like as a psychologist, when I see people who are trying to like heal from having been an occult, it's no different than a woman who was in a coercive relationship. So whether it's one person or whether it's 50 people, what I think of as definitional is that it's a high control environment that takes like your volition away from you. And so, If somebody's deliberately trying to break down your resistance, and they'll still sleep to pry you, they will starvue, and the ones that are the best at it are the ones that make you think it was your choice all along. Like that's what it's really the thing. Which starts with this, which she writes about, it starts with these, you know, they subtle memes they put into your brain, these little like portions of it. 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. Oh, there you go. Last year. She had another book called, The Age of Magical Overthinking. Okay. Notes on modern irrationality, and we did like a live recording for the Toronto Public Library. Oh, cool. And like, yeah, so I was like, I know her. Oh, cool. Nice. But we didn't talk about culture. We should have. That's the last year, I think it just came out. So we had highly recommended. It's nice. It's very conversational too, just sticks with you. Thanks George. All right, so we're going to talk about miscommon myths, common misconceptions that are being spread around social media. There's just an article that went through like 15 of them. We can't go through all of them, you know, very deep. We don't have to. Most of these we've talked about before. And some are very quick hits. Evan, you sent this to me. What was the first thing on the list? I'm not going to pull it up. And again, the question that triggered all this is someone wrote about this who says, I came across a post on a popular ask Reddit page from user, whoever, who said, what are some things that are actually pseudoscience that people don't realize? And the list was extensive. A, alpha-based dog training. I don't know that we've actually covered that on the show. The idea that there is an alpha male in a dog pack is that's been pretty debunked, right? So anything derived from that is also. Well, yeah, and the idea that your dog thinks that you're his alpha is ridiculous. Yeah. Can we have that like a skywriting across every other podcast? 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? No, there are more and less dominant dogs in a pack. And it varies too. That's the alpha and everyone else is abated. That doesn't exist. It's not that simple. It was a flawed study that a guy did, like whatever that was 100 plus years ago. 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. Even if there were an alpha in the pack, they wouldn't go like human alpha, now follow you. Like, it doesn't make any sense. 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. Yeah. And that's a pretty wide category of things. We talked about that a lot too. Basically, if you're bypassing peer review and going right to the public with your wacky idea, you're a crank, right? That's one of the things that cranks do. But now of course, you don't have to publish a book. You can just make a website or you can make a YouTube. Or get a TikTok video on Amazon. Yeah. Or worse than that, you have a fake journal, a bullshit journal, and submit to that. Like, see, I'm published peer review. They're like, oh my god, that's nasty. Journal of bullshit research. Biodythms, mood rings. My god, remember, other things. Biodythms. And mood rings, God, how old were we? Two or four? Yeah, I totally believe that when we were younger. You did? Oh, yeah. That was one thing, like most of these, and when your kids, they impress you. But they also impress adults sometimes. Blood type astrology? No, that's not fair. We've talked about that. Blood type diets. That's just common in Japan, right? Yeah, very common in Japan. The blood type diet thing, there's nothing to that. Correct. Zero. Absolutely zero. Because I started debating someone about this and like, they were so vehement. And I was just, I was trying to be nice. I was trying to just, and I was like, OK, maybe I totally missed something. But there's nothing. I'm talking to question yourself. I'm not 100% sure. I mean, to be honest, I really, it might, because it sounds like bullshit, but maybe there's something to it. But in this case, there is zero to it. Zero. OK. 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. So you could be confident about that when you're... 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. They're eating to their blood type. But it's like eating to your astrological side. Yeah, it's like eating to your eye color. Yeah, blue eyepiece. Blue eyepiece. It's like eating too much meat. That's a good way to play. How about this one? This is one I've heard of in the past, but I never thought of it. Your brain development is continually developing until you're on an average of age 25. Yeah. I've heard that over and over. I've heard that a lot. It's zero to that. So really, yeah, there's nothing to that. There's another one. Let's try to think about it for a while. The study that kind of kicked that off, they only looked at people up to 25. Seriously. As I look, the brain is developing until you're 25. Oh, that's so fun. But then they didn't look at people after 25. And here's the other thing there. What's the difference between developing, maturing, and learning? And rapid pruning. Right. One of the things about growth, like your kid, 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. It's myelination and connections. Wait, let me just add a little bit. Let me ask you from a person who doesn't know as well as you. At what point on average does a child into adult till their brain stops growing bigger? That just depends on when they stop growing bigger. OK. It's rando, but what is the age range? So our upper teenagers typical, something like that. But just that 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. It's not linear. Like little kids can't put their arms over their heads. Because their heads are so big. But they're adorable. Yeah, the ratio is different. Yeah, the ratio is off as well. So like, we've raised raised kids. At some point, you could see different circuits kicking in place in the brain. Like they couldn't put words together now they can. Whatever. And also, just even with coordination, and we used to joke about, oh, their cerebellum is not fully malinated yet. That's developing. My son's video game circuit turned on two years ago. It's powerful. Oh, my God. So there's that kind of just you actually getting the basic nuts and bolts of how the brain functions in place. You have that by the time you're through puberty, right? 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? 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 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, yeah, it's really. It's a continuum. And there's different ideas mixed in here. Like developing leads into maturing, to leads into just learning stuff and getting better at moderating your emotions or whatever. I think the thing is the courts want to be able to say there's a one-to-one ratio. Right. 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. It's like, oh, 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. Yeah, the demarcation is a part. 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. Speaking of drinking, how's this one? Breast milk pump and dump after alcohol. So these are mothers who are breastfeeding. 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. That way, they're not giving alcohol to their children. 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. You should pump and dump if you drink way too much or you shouldn't. So some drugs pass through breast milk and some don't. And we have to know that. 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. Alcohol does, but in small quantities. It's all in small quantities. It's all only if you're like really. That's what I'm saying. I don't like that they're saying. If you're breastfeeding from the side, that they source that debunked it said, no, it would have to be a lot of alcohol. But for some people, they are drinking a lot of alcohol. So again, I wouldn't say that that's 100%. Yeah, it's more a matter of degree. It's a matter of degree. I'll go quickly through some of these other ones. A lot of them we touched chiropractic, conversion therapy, detox, the general detox. Feed a cold star of a fever. At old wives' tail. That's not fair. No good. Fingerprints, a unique fingerprints, it's undetermined. They don't have good science on this as determined whether a person's fingerprints are unique or not. And also the whole fingerprint analysis is way more art than science. On television shows and movies that pretend like, oh, you've got a partial here. I met the computers flashed through the images and you make a match. That's not what's happening. That's not reality. It is more this, oh yeah, I could kind of see. It's really, it's very subjective. It's not a new. But there is a database. There is a code of data. There is a fingerprint. And then maybe you can be, that's anything. 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. It's way more subjective. But that does not equal useless. 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. The lie detector's not detecting lies. We talked about this. There's a different stress. There's a different stress. And people get stressed for different reasons. And people have different ability to hide their stress. And so what you're detecting, you're taking a test could be stressed. But that doesn't mean they're worthless. True. It may not be like, you can't say, well, he failed a lie detector. Therefore he was lying one to one. It could be that, well, or he passed a lie detector. Therefore he wasn't lying. I can't say that. It's just possible that he was really good at hiding his stress or he was stressed out over being interrogated by an authority figure. You don't know. So collegeists use these tests all the time. They just don't call them lie detectors. Where they're used to. Is basically just intimidating the person into telling the truth because they think you can tell that that's awesome. That's how they're really used. I also think with the fingerprint thing, what the list is saying is that whether or not no other person on the planet has the same fingerprint pattern, we can't know that because nobody's that tested that. It's almost unknowable. Yeah. But for the most part, fingerprints are relatively unique. The same way that zebra stripes are relatively unique. If they find your fingerprint at a emergency and you got some splint in it to do that, yeah, well, that's right. You can't just say, oh, it's not unique. So I'm pretty not. The coales have very human-like fingerprints, apparently. It's thwarted some police investigations apparently. Speaking of police investigations. Spitting of police. Yeah, right? Yeah, the coales, yeah, had some kind of police investigations. For certain forensics, bite analysis, ballistics analysis, and blood splatter analysis. What? The detective is not true. They're all objective. That's all wrong. Not that they're not. It's not all or nothing. It's not a slam dunk. Not a slam dunk. That's the bottom line. That's the bottom line. Well, you're interpreting data. As soon as you interpret data, it's like, yeah, it's the biting analysis, I think, is the worst of the worst. Really? Yeah. That's the one where I think it's been being being bumped to a point. What are they testing for? Yeah, the shape. They're looking at, does the bite mark match your, like, if you do a test bite mark, doesn't match. 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. Right. Like, they'll assume it's a bite based on the shape. And very often, when you see a criminal proceeding, the prosecution and the defense are going to bring in their own spatter analysis. And they're going to say opposite things. The fact you're just just dueling it again. You think, though, that a bite would be kind of consistent because your teeth typically stay in the same position. Well, what conditions were you doing the bite under? You know, there's so many other variables in there. Also, how do you think is your bite? And also, is it a bite? 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? 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. If you have Charlie from the chocolate factory teeth, then it's very, Oh, come on. You know what it is? You can't verify. You can't verify. Explain the story. Explain the story. Oh, like, you guys have seen, was anybody, does anybody know what I'm talking? Yeah, there's like memes. Okay. The kid who played Charlie and Willy Wonka, like his teeth are. First movie, the first movie. Yeah, the original. And not just Jack, like, I think there was some sort of physiologic problem. Like, you were explaining a thing with him. They're like, Yeah, right. Let's go on. Yeah. Continuing, Sigmund Freud, apparently everything Sigmund Freud did was preliminary and early on in a very new and difficult discipline. Yeah, there's a big different, I mean, I also box this for a second. I am not a psycho dynamics psychologist. I'm an existential psychologist, but I have, you know, colleagues who are psycho dynamic. Generally speaking, we all learn about Freud. 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. But the reason we learn about it is from a historical perspective to know where the field was early on. There is a field now called psychodynamic psychotherapy, which is based on actually like object relations. Like it's, it's very, very different. But there are some things that Freud talked 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. Yeah. He was whipping up a whole new scientific discipline. He 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. But we have actually had to just be like, well, it's ignored that thing. Yeah, there's like, I mean, he was like given his patient's coke and like, you know, all the women were his parents. So psychiatry's way more, wish he was, you wibbly, wobbly than you know. My take is that he's not very relevant today. He's not really, right? It's not. But every psychology student learns about him and that is a problem with how we teach psychology. Because if you get a one-on-one course, you get a bunch of history, but you don't get a lot of like modern lens. And so a lot of people think that that's how we're all thinking now. Hand-writing analysis, graphology, we've talked about that. Immune system boosting. No, no, no. We've talked about that. We've talked about booster immune system. Right, exactly. That's bad. Terrible. Unless you're immune, you know. So either with the immune-beaut 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. Yeah. Yeah. Immune system needs to be tightly regulated. Just make it, suppressing it or boosting it or increasing it is not necessarily inherently good or bad then. So you should only do that under the, like with medication, with the physician because you have a diagnosis that requires it. It's a very specific reason. Yeah, but are you just generically just boosting your immune system now? Are you vaccines and immune boosting technology? There are a way of targeting your immune system against a very specific target. Right. So if you could, the word boosting is very vague. So if that's what you consider boosting, sure. But that's not what people are talking about. But that's not the same thing. I'm not saying it's taking too much. I'm not saying it's taking too much. I'm not saying it's taking too much. I'm not saying it's taking too much. I'm not saying it's taking too much. I'm not saying it's taking too much. Sleep will do that. Sleep will, sleep will keep you, you know, anything that keeps you healthy makes your immune system function better. Just like your muscles work function better and your brain functions better. But you don't want your immune system well rested and hydrated. All your systems operate better. 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. Correct. We all know about that. Natural and organic. We've talked about that ad nauseam. The Myers-Briggs personality. Yes. Matt. We don't use that at all in psychology. That's like a wind up toy that just won't stop. And that's Coltie. Oh yeah. Yeah. Make George totally called. Quantum, anything non-physics. Yes. Oh my God. Poor Quantum. Stay in your lane, Quantum. Rain based illnesses like catching a cold from being out in the rain. That's been disproven. So we can go beyond that even. And there's an open question about whether being cold can make you sick. You know, it's been all I get. Well, it's not really. It's been pretty much been debunked. I don't know that the final nails in the coffin on that one, because the question is, are some viruses, do they spread more easily in the cold weather or things like that? But it's certainly you can't catch a cold by being out in the wet rain. Yeah. You need a virus. Yeah. And that's like it. People always conflate like epidemiological data with individual data. Right. Yeah. It might be cold. And mostly it's mostly that's when the kids are at school. That's mostly what the winter, the winter virus is. And George, yeah. Plus, yeah, when it's cold out, you're amongst people in a building. And that's in it spreading that way. What about the bones? Bones like you can tell the storms coming because your hip hurts. Oh, yeah. That's pretty. That's real. There's barometric pressure for migraines. There's humidity for arthritis. So some people like they know when the storms coming because they got a migraines. That's what I thought. That's real. That's real. Oh, two more. Taste map of the tongue. Oh, yeah. I mean, I heard a song. Raise your hand if you believed it. I was a hot dog. I was a hot dog. I was a hot dog. Everybody believed that. I'm not shocked to see it. Like when I was a kid, that was the thing. And like, and I did it. I tested it. And I tricked myself into thinking that that. Once you put something in your mouth, your saliva dissolves it and it goes all over your tongue. Right. So you can't. It's really hard. And we do. This is part of a neurological exam. And if someone has Bell's palsy, I want to know if where the lesion is. And there's one specific place where you also pick off. Taste to half of your tongue. So if they have that's where it is, then it's in the facial canal. If they have retained taste, then something else could be gone. 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. You have to like really make sure that they're not. They can't close their mouth. They can't swish it around. You got to just touch it with a, you know, what are you two, lemon juice or something? No, sugar. Sugar water. And you go to this very side of the tongue without letting it swish it around at all. Can you taste that? What does that taste like? You mean, you should immediately be able to know that it's sweet. If they don't, if they go, I can't tell, then they close it. They're like, oh, it's sweet. Again, that's because you just now you got to wash it over the other side of the tongue. So that's probably what was going on. And the last ones, what they call the troubled teen industry, like wilderness survival, you know, throwing these kids were having problems. Not just pseudoscience, but extreme scenario. There's a great book by Maya Salovitz about that. She kind of blew the doors off of that. All right. Evan, you're also going to tell us about this. What is this looks like a nightmare? This is the B.P. by. Jeez. You 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. That's a tooth. No, sorry, little, a little extreme graphic here. Yes. So tooth in eye surgery, also known by its medical name, osteodontocarato prosthesis. Yes, prosthesis. O-OK-P for very short. Yeah, so this is a legitimate procedure. In fact, I shared it with Steve. I said, Steve, what do you know? This looks like a one we should talk about. He's like, are you sure about this? And we had to look it up. We had to look it up. And the other one that are both these sorts, that's real. Specialized surgical technique used when the cornea is so badly damaged by either scarring chemical burns or autoimmune disease, which you just talked about. That regular transplants won't work. So this is where they go next. A patient will extract a tooth, usually a canine tooth, from the patient itself. They'll include small amounts of bone to serve as a structural support for a tiny lens. 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. Somewhere it allows blood tissue, blood and tissue growth to secure, I guess, you know, 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. They'll remove the scar tissue, graft, mucusole, lining from the inner cheek over the corneal surface. And then after the tooth piece 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. That is the procedure. And yeah, it's legit. You don't get 2020 vision, though, out of it. But in about a quarter of the cases, you get 20, 30, 20, 40. The majority of cases, about 60% of patients are somewhere between 20, 20, 20, and 20, 100. That much better than, you know, blind. Do you have to brush that tooth? I think that's why they put the membrane over and everything. So the cornea is a really hard structure to mimic, right? It's got to be rigid, hard, and transparent. So this is from the 60s, right? This has been around for a long time. I'd never heard of it. It's only been a few hundred cases, like, since the 60s, where they've actually done it. So it's a pretty rare procedure. The 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 were degrade. So this wasn't working. 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. We don't have something that's like not, you know, like, plastic. I guess because the body rejects it. And it's just one that's why the own bone is... Because people can wear contacts, so you think they can... They can change it every day and clean them and everything. Some go a couple of days. And they change your cornea. And that is kind of the key. These are your own body parts, anyways. So your body won't reject this. It's not like you grow it somewhere else and try to bring it in. Yeah. Just a weird but true kind of thing. Too thigh. All right, Jay. Tell us about the history of snake oil. Yeah. So this one caught my tooth eye, because... Because 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. So where did it come from? Where did the phrase come from? And why did 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. It 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... It's not like it's a pharmaceutical. Like it was really effective. It was one of their, you know, herbal type of remedies that probably had some... It did have some effects. Some effects that they had tested it. It was real in the sense that it was oil of snake. Doesn't mean that they, all the things they used before it was effective. But basically this is what I read. That they only used it for inflammation. And let me get into the details here. So first of all, they only took oil from a water snake. And the way that they would extract the oil from the snake is first that they would, they would boil like snake fat. Of course, and that's where the oil is coming from. 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, you know, 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, 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. 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. It's not like, oh my god, it's like, I had to see it. But it's like a liniment. But it did something. And it was real in that effect. So specifically, we say, why did it work? Well, EPA, you know, that type of amino acid, it reduces inflammation. Muscle, like modern pain relief creams or whatever, but not as strong or whatever. And again, they just rubbed it on themselves. And, you know, it was widely used in that community. So then, of course, what happened is 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. So this was in the late 1800s. Okay, somebody says 1893. He was at the Chicago World's Fair. And he completely won over a very large crowd of people. He would pull out a live rattlesnake. You know, he would extract the 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. 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. 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. 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. So in 1916, the government actually did something, which doesn't happen anymore. 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. So bringing back snake oil because I think it's going to be a good thing. I don't think I haven't been biting my tongue this entire podcast with that brainworm shit. I was about to explode. Anyway. Stop the brainwrap. So they take his stuff. They test it. The US Bureau of Chemistry, which you said, the precursor to the FDA, they got lab results and they revealed that the snake oil had the following. It had baby oil, which is mineral oil. 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. Anybody just guess how much was he fined? $10. $20. $20. What year was it though? It was in 1916. It was early 1900s. So what was that worth now? About like $600. Oh. Nothing. It's less than a slap on a wrist. He probably made hundreds of thousands of dollars selling this crap. But what did happen was there was the newspapers reported it and he, you know, it cemented the snake oil as BS name. And that's where it came from. So this goes back, you know, 100 over 100 years ago. And of course, you know, again, like the last thing to say is, you know, now snake oil means everything. Anything that particularly a 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, it was just, you know, phrase 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 isn't that always how pseudoscience is? There's like that little kernel of truth. Yeah. And then they just expand it and expand it and expand it until it no longer even exists. Yeah. But there's also very common at the time. Still today was taking something that was used by some either foreign culture, exotic culture or indigenous culture. Right. There's a huge industry of remedies that were taken from American Indians. 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. It's like, oh, you know, the echin Asia falls into this. Like, oh, they use, they use echin Asia. It's like, okay, this is a, and even if they didn't, they just said they did anyway. But some, the echin Asia was actually used by some, you know, American Indians. Right. Also, quinine was a bark. Quine, yeah. So, well, yeah, but quinine actually can do stuff. Right. But, but wasn't it used or was that, or was that coincidental that it's, I thought it was used by South American. Yeah. Yeah, but I don't, they didn't know what it was doing. Oh, okay. I mean, I think, you know, some cultures that hit upon certain things that were obvious. Of course. I mean, there are, there are like things that will make you fall asleep. Yeah, there are indigenous practices that come from things that we ultimately made into pharmaceuticals. Right. There are animals in the wild that use certain remedies. Yeah, that's true. But here's the thing. They were using echin Asia for a whole bunch of different stuff, but not flu. Not the thing that it was currently being marketed for. They were using for snake bites and later injuries, whatever. There's like random stuff and it was not based on anything. But the idea was this is an ancient remedy used by this natural people. There you go. Was the marketing thing and I'm sure the snake oil thing was the same where it's like, oh, yeah, there's from ancient Chinese remedy. Right. I don't know if that comes from there too, but that's the same kind of thing. Usually when there's something specific like snake oil means generically a fraudulent treatment, there's a specific source to it. We often will use things that have a specific reference and then we generalize it to mean that type of thing. 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 inachronistic because it was too early. It wasn't that good. They didn't use that for you. They didn't have snake oil in 1874. The proper way to evoke that is actually actually. All right. One more news item. One more news item. One more. Yeah. Then we're going to do science fiction. Sounds like a plan. All right. So this, I don't know if this is high, I think this is a high abusa. Remember that high abusa? This is the asteroid that, but no, I think the high abusa was the satellite. Right. Oh, yes. Yeah. This is the Riyubi or something asteroid. And they managed to rendezvous with an asteroid, collect samples, do some science right there, and they brought samples back to Earth. 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 till the end. So they were looking at what isn't that what the end is though. Well, you could, you could sometimes lead with the answer and say this is how they found it. But then you don't have a conclusion. Anyway, 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. The thing is, the T-Shium was decays into hafnium. And so they could, they, we know how old the asteroid is, right? So they said, well, this, the ratio of hafnium to lutecium in the sample should be this much, right? That's physics doesn't change, right? The half-life sort of one of the, you know, you could hang your hat on that. That it doesn't change throughout the history of the universe. So let's see what creationists, 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 real scientists say they can, you can use it as a constant, right? So the problem is the, there was far less hafnium in the sample than there should have been. So when there's less hafnium, is it quarter-room? Yeah. You know, I'm trying. I wake up with the intent to entertain the people that spend money to come see us. Steve's all like science and shit over here, like, I just want you guys to have fun. All right, go back. So that, that means it's younger? 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 in the solar, you know, we know those things. Could that hit a younger asteroid? Well, you're close to the answer. Some sort of contamination. It's not contamination. It's not contamination if that's your thought. So, but it's good. This is the conversation that we'll have. What could have happened? 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. Could I have a guess? Could it have been like evaporated off by going too close to a sun or something? You're getting closer to the end. There's not a third element that has affected the other previous one. It's not a chemical or, or, no, it's not, it's not it. Yeah. Something washed away some of the hafnium. Oh, so it did undergo the change and then it somehow went away. Right. Okay. And this is something, again, they don't know that this is what happened, this is what they're left with. 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. So, look there for, there was flowing water inside this asteroid. Why wouldn't it freeze? Well, it did freeze and refroze. Yes. But the, so they're saying, but it would have had to have been much later than they thought it should have been. Because, you know, we, solar system formed out of a cloud of gas and dust, everything is hot and then it cools down. And, you know, we know where asteroids form based upon its constituents because there are different constituents at different places, distances from the sun. And you can tell this formed in the outer solar system that came inside or whatever. They can tell these kind of things. And a lot of it, a lot of it is by the volatiles, right? Things that would evaporate if it gets too close to the sun or if it goes too hot. But this, you know, we know there's ice in the asteroid and we know where it's from. But at some point, that ice must have melted, washed away the half-themed and then refroze or evaporate. So, but if it washed away the stuff, some of it. Where did it actually go, though? Well, then it washed away away from the asteroid, so it evaporated out into space. How much gravity is required to wash something away? Are we talking about this happening on the surface? No, this is deep within the asteroid. But if the water evaporates, it doesn't take the haphanyum with it. It did, though. I mean, no, that's why it had to be liquid water that literally physically washed it away. Like, so they're saying that it's the only answer they're left with. Is this the conclusion? This is the conclusion. Okay, here we go. This is why I wanted you to tell me what you thought first. I agree. But 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. Why water? Well, liquid, liquid, liquid. It probably would have been a lot of other liquid stuff, too. But it probably mostly washed it. It probably would have been liquid a month. Yeah, some liquid solvent. So what if it was, what if the regolith had frozen water and then it got nearer sun and then it liquidified? But we kind of know about where it was and the solar system based upon what it's made of and its consistence. And so does it just not have enough of its own gravity for the water to like stay on it? Like how does the water just, this is inside. Yeah, but then we said it had to wash away. So what do they think happened? So it's washed away from whatever they've got the sample. Doesn't necessarily been a washed away for I asked for it, but it could have if it got to they've percolated to the surface of what had gone away. Gotcha. But they're sampling deep in the asteroid and there should be half-neum there and there's a lot less of it than there should be something. So maybe they'll see like a band if they actually did a core. Well, but again, we have the samples we have. We don't have the whole asteroid. So this is what they're thinking. At some point, after a lot of the half-neum already was created through radioactive decay, another asteroid impacted it, melted the ice, washed away the half-neum and then it re-frozed. The liquid that had the half-neum and it just whisked off into space. Or again, just away from the sample that they had. Yeah, just through a different part of the asteroid. So that's their current hypothesis. Something hit this thing, melted the ice from the heat of the impact and then it eventually re-frozed, but some of the half-neum went away. 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 made it possible. Is that cool? That is cool. But the chain of lodges is interesting. How they can infer these little pieces of the asteroid and they're figuring all this stuff out. The 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 happened. Yeah, where did they get the pieces? This was recovered from the high-abuse. Okay, yeah. The center probe. Yeah, yeah. Like the compound also. In the future, they get another sample and there's too much half-neum. Like this is where it went. It went over here. I mean, maybe. Yeah. All right, cool. Well, everyone, it's time for science or fiction. It's time for science or fiction. What, you should make an S.D.U. snow globe. Yeah? I can be careful. No, no, no, wait. I mean, just, it's like your homeop opside. For cooking. That was actually my own idea. Homeop opside. You came up with a vapour of therapy. Evan came up with homeop opside. No, I just said be a cool decorative bottle. It looks like an old, cool, snow globe bottle. But then we have an S.D.U. logo. Or maybe you're the barker or something. Yeah, there's an idea. There's some. As a bookshelf item. Yeah, bookshelf item. Fakes, fake snow globe. No, Vel is old-timey remedy. Evan, Evan, you see me. I appreciate that. Thank you. I got you, Jay. But we have to, you know, you have to write on it, like, 100% bullshit. Well, yeah, it's got a few out of it. Well, Jay, what would it cure? What would that, what would the S.D.U. The KQRB? Yeah, what would it be? Everything. What would it be? The KQRB? Everything. The KQRB? Yeah. Like, let me see. Some kind of, yeah, like, remote control on Wii. Or something like this, KQR's, what? Keep you from getting this, it was the skis, the skabies. What's like a kid's? The KBGB's. The KQRB's all the skis. Skabies is a real thing. Skabies are real. Yeah. Okay, sorry. I love the old-timey diagnosis. It treats consumption. Yeah. It's got something old. It drops. It drops. It drops. It drops. It drops. It drops. It drops. Oh my god. Can we call it a liniment? Is that what they used to say? There was a liniment? liniment. Yeah. Or when I favor one as an neurologist, of course, is Neurosthenia. Neurosthenia. Neurosthenia. Ooh, it can call it the nerves. If I made the snake oil, who would like it? Who would like it? I forgot it. I'm not doing it. No, no, no. Ah, yes. Ah, yes. Ah, yes. Ah, yes. Ah, yes. Ah, yes. Ah, yes. Ah, yes. Ah, yes. Ah, yes. Ah, yes. Ah, yes. Ah, yes. Ah, yes. Ah, yes. That's too real and one fictitious. And then I challenge my panelists, skeptics, tell me, which one is the fake? 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. And you have to be sure not to give away the answer before they vote. Right? 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. How many people here, by the way, you can do the one clap thing or whatever? How many people here are from Kansas? A lot. That's good. Right. Wow. The theme of the science or fiction this week is Kansas. I don't think it will be a search. Oh, no. Evan asked me, yes, it is. The theme is going to be Kansas, like shut up. I think you should have thrown us a curveball, say it's Oklahoma. I sometimes I don't always do the place we're in, but we've never been here. Sometimes I do the place that we're in. Cures, quizzical Bernstein. That they can't know for sure. What's that? Cures, quizzical Bernstein. Yeah. All right. So keep it cool. Poker face about any 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 what a local know this episode. How much do you really know about Connecticut? That's the question. That's part of what I asked. Because I'm not going to do the state bird. I mean, you guys should know. The state bird is the metal arc. Thank you. You guys are all going to know that. Metal arc. Would you know that about your state? I think it's the construction crane, is it? What? Come on. You know what Pennsylvania is? No. No. The bird? You don't know what it is? It's California. The Bethlehem bird is the Swift. I know that. The Swift? Is California the condor? Yeah. Okay. Robin. The American Robin. Thank you. Oh. This has been your birding moment with Steve. It's not going to add it to over. I almost said Kansas birds was going to be my theme. And I found a couple of good ones, like just describing birds. Did you know there's a bird in Kansas called the Dixicle? Not one of them. Not one of them. A fiction. All right. The Calcutta bird is the quail. What the hell was that? Some person who found the birds like Dixicle. Like so many birds. Exactly what they were. Is there a reason? Is there an operational reason? Yeah. I don't know what that is for that one. But there is. Some have really funny names. But if you deconstruct it, it's names. Oh, yeah. Jay, it cures Dixicle. Right. Wow. I wish more than three people raised their hands. I really like it. There's the tit mask. But we have titmice in Connecticut. All right. Here we go. Item number one. There is a large population of bison in Kansas. And while they may appear docile, they are. There are score of reported attacks and injuries per year. Item number two. Wind accounts for a 52% of electricity production in Kansas. The third highest state in the US. 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. Okay. Should I start with Bob or should I start with George? All right. George, go first. There are fall George. Thank you. Large population of bison. I like that. I like that. That's 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. So I bet that's true. And the Spanish food did not start in Spain. I know it did start here somewhere in the United States. But would they would okay, would Steve know that the audience knows this? What is Steve think the audience is going to know? Can't play these head games, man. No, I know. It always gets us. I tried to find ones I thought they wouldn't. That they wouldn't. But they still could have doing that. So I think I think. Okay, I'm going to say the bison is is the fiction. The bison's fiction. Okay, Cara. Yeah, so we know Spanish, we started in the US. We also know Spanish flu was spread around the world by soldiers. And so if it originated at Fort Riley, I don't know. I don't know like the main place where they were getting it. Maybe that was a port or something where a lot of training was happening for the war. I agree with with a George that 52% feels high. Because I think about when do we doing a lot of wind like offshore? Maybe not. I don't know. 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 planes, I don't know, maybe. Yeah, bison. Bison. I mean, they used to be everywhere. 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. 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 know. Steve. I'm going to go to George on that. Okay. Okay, Jay. Yeah, I did. I know that the Spanish flu did not start in Spain. It started here. I don't know. I don't think of my years of having Steve do science or fiction. I don't think that he would assign it to, you know, a local, you know, like a place in Kansas. So I think that one is science. I'm going to pop over to now the, where we got the murder bison. 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 on a flat land. It 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. I don't know if they're like particularly feisty bison. But I think if you, if people like are, you know, going band name feisty bison. Yeah. Ooh. If they go on to other people's property, you know, teenagers and stuff, people can get injured. Sure. You don't want to be around giant animals like that. So I think that's science. I, you know, I don't think, I think what George says was the 52% seem too high. And I think that's where Steve, Steve likes to be tricky in those areas. I'm going to say that one's a fiction. Okay, Evan. The bison of Kansas. I just don't know about these reported attacks and injuries per year. I mean, you know, anytime you get people and animals together, there are going to be some injuries. Scores have reported attacks and injuries per year. Yeah, that would be the reason why I would go with that one is fiction. Now the wind won 52% and the third highest state in the US. So the other two would what be coastal and, you know, hey, when I landed yesterday off the plane in 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. So, you know, yeah, there's a lot of wind in Kansas, actually. So, um... Do you think it feels work in tornadoes? Well, sure. We're from Connecticut. 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 and a lot of places. Not in Texas. So I'm leaning towards that one being science. Uh, the last one about Fort Riley, Kansas. No, I don't know that for certain. Um, so I guess I'm going to have to go with Georgian carer and say it's the Bison one. All right, and Bob. I was so happy when I saw that Spanish flu. I'm like, yes, I know it's not from Spain. I took some from some other country and then everybody seemed to say, oh, we all know it's from the United States. And I didn't know that. I told it to all of thanks for the info. And thanks to you guys for picking George first. Um, so that's good. So the other thing. I'm kind of really bummed out that I wasn't looking out that plane window because I think J was glued to the window. And he saw that there was a lot. He saw a bison. So he's like, all right, that's science. I think he didn't see a lot of windmills. So that's why he picked the windmills. So I'm going to go with that. How could I... Not go with that. So that's fixing. I'm going to go with that. I'm going to go with that. I'm going to go with that. I'm going to go with that. I'm going to go with that. So that's fixing. Oh boy. They're wind turbines. Turbines. Windmills turbines. Let's start with the third one. Well, first we have to hold it. Hold it. Oh my god, it's high. All right. So I'm going to do the George thing. Are you going to go... You're going to follow me. I'm going to look at my eyes only. All right. If you think that the bison is the fiction clap. Oh no. If you think that the wind is the fiction clap. And if you think that the Spanish flu is the fiction clap. Okay. So the audience thinks the wind turbines out there. Audience is going J and both. Oh boy. Yeah. So let's take these in reverse award. Or just nobody went for the third one. Yeah. On the panel, very minority of the audience. The incorrectly named Spanish flu of 1918 started in Fort Riley, Kansas, from which it spread to the rest of the world. Would you be pissed if you weren't sprained and they named this deadly... Oh yeah. Now... Scourge after the country you lived in. It is true that it did not come from Spain. Do you know why they was called the Spanish flu? Nobody else is reporting, right? Because it's like I'm not going to... I'm not going to fess out. No country wanted to report their 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. 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. It did originate in the United States, but where in the United States could have come from anywhere in the United States? That's the question. That's the answer I pointed out. Very easy just to say, okay I'll make it Kansas, right? This one is... Sight. Did come from Kansas. Did you guys... Did everybody hear no? No. My understanding is that Fort Riley is a town, right? It's not... It probably was a fort. It probably was a fort. It's a fort. So it came from camp something. I mean, actually if you got there, 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. 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. Bob and Jay and the majority, the vast majority of the audience, who are from Kansas, apparently. I think this one is the fiction. And this one is... Science. Oh, dang! Wow, I thought we had it, man. 52% of the audience. 52% of the audience. 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's a lot of wind in Kansas. Oh, well. To answer every question, yo, you can't use wind turbines during a tornado. I didn't think so. No. No, nor in just... If the wind gets too brisk, you have to shut them down. You can use them once. You've got to shut those things down if the wind gets too high. So, hurricane, any kind of really stormy weathered, no, they got to shut them down. All those Kansas hurricanes, yeah. I wasn't implying that you... Yeah, a lot of electricity, let's get more tornadoes going. I was just saying that. You don't realize how... Oh, damn. ...the conditions of the place are going. You also realize tornadoes aren't just a function of like lots of wind, right? Doesn't just get so windy it becomes a tornado. I get that. Doesn't work. But there are a lot of flat states in the Midwest that have a lot of wind turbines. You know, Oklahoma. I was in Oklahoma. I was in Oklahoma. I was in Oklahoma. I was in Oklahoma and giving a lecture and there's wind turbines everywhere. Now, of course, Oklahoma is a very red state. So, not... In the cities, when you're in a city, it's like any other city anywhere else, right? 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 that their dramatic increase in earthquake frequency is due to the wind turbines. Sure. Not due to the fracking, which is actually what's causing it. Because that's what they were told. And then it's those damn wind turbines. All right. You should go attack them. That means that there is a large population of bison in Kansas. And while they may appear docile, there are score of reported attacks and injuries per year is the fiction. Now, what about it is fiction? Are there a lot of bison in Kansas? Yes, there are. But a lot, what's a lot? The population is 5,000 to 6,000 bison. Sure, a lot. That's a size we'll heard. A lot of them are in private heard. But some of them are not. But, and they are not docile. They are dangerous wild animals. Anybody here play the game, medieval dynasty? Yeah, so there are medieval bison, not bison there. I could what they call them. 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. Oh, my gosh. Oregon Trail. Almost forgot about that game. Great. What about defining my childhood? What about sort of these just like protected somehow or there? Yeah, there probably just isn't that much human conflict with them. So there are zero injuries per year. 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. But again, that kind of number, like you 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. Yeah. Are there any bison in the audience? Is there? Do we have anybody here to see a bison in Kansas? Do bison move? No. Maybe. They have to make some noise. Do bison move? No. Somebody moved in the arm. I'm just saying. They must have some kind of noise. Some kind of noise. But it's not, I wouldn't call it a move. Not moving. They lick your salt off your car. Get too close. All right, so good job to the non novellas up here and like three people in the audience. Yay. Evan, give us a quote. 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 the planet Pluto? The dwarf planet Pluto. No, the dwarf planet. Put that in brackets now in the quote. The planet scare quotes. Who studied here at the University of Kansas, University of Kansas, alumnus. So that is why we chose the quote to honor him. Thank you, Evan. Well, thank you all for joining me this week. Yeah. Thank you all for coming. And thanks to all the canzans. Is that a canzans? Is that correct? We're kinetic cutions. I love that. Yeah. Thanks to all the canzans for your wonderful hospitality since we've been here. And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Nice. Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is wonderful. Nice. 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