The Skeptics Guide #1066 - Dec 13 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 Tuesday, December 9th, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Nevella. Joining me this week are Bob Nevella. Hey everybody. Cara Santa Maria. Howdy. Jenovela. Hey guys. And Evan Bernstein. Good evening everyone. How's everyone doing? You guys ready for the holidays? Good, they're there. Yeah. That's a lot of work man. That's a lot of work man. You guys decorate? I did that last year. Oh yeah man. That's sure. Oh yeah you guys are kids. Oh yeah you guys are kids. So that I get. But you guys, everybody else decorate? My kids in the last command, I still decorate the craft out of this house. I got you in the holiday spirit I guess. You look decorating at all. Bob we're talking about, Chris and Kendall the window, put a gift on the door. I do something minimal. I always get like a little tree from Trader Joe's. Like a little tabletop tree. Yeah. And I put it on my dining table and then that's where I throw all the gifts that I'm giving to people. But that's basically the extent of my decoration. And that's okay. And then I don't have to do much cleanup. That is the point. The cleanup. Do you like even like watch holiday movies or anything? No. Really? What was the last holiday movie you think you bought? I'd say Elf is the only holiday movie I really watch. But you don't watch food off the Red Nose Rain deer or. Miracle on 30. Or at street the old classics. Heat Miser. I mean come on. Heat Miser. Christmas Carol. Wow. Santa Claus is coming to town. Wait the heat Miser. Yeah, but you have really cultural weird Miser and the heat Miser. Wasn't it freeze Miser? Snow Miser. Cold Miser. One of those. Ice Miser. What is happening? It's one of those shows like Rudolph the Red Nose Rain deer where they have puppets and they animate them. Oh, oh, do you guys remember? It is the snow Miser. It is snow Miser. I don't know. Yeah, you see, that's how long it's been for me. I thought it was freeze Miser. That's my idea. That's my idea. Remember when we did one of our skeptical extravaganza's and there was a reference to some character from those old claymation movies and I was like, what is this word? It was. I don't like it when we're playing those games and I'm like, that is a completely foreign car. It's like Quidditch one time was one of the references. And I was like, I don't know what that is. The burger Miser Miser Burger. Is that it? You know what Quidditch is now though, right? Now I do. I've been educated. But you know what a Charlie in the boxes? What? What is happening? I don't know. Oh, careful. Did you have a child that cared or were you deprived because you were Mormon? They just wouldn't let you watch any of these. I think I had a childhood a little later than you. Yeah, that's right. That's exactly what it is. We had a childhood where there was a television set that had three channels that functioned all the time and maybe five that you could get. And this was on television. You had no other real choice to watch something other than this in the 70s. Right. I showed these kids. I showed these shows to my kids. Right, but my parents didn't. Yeah, so you just had to collect all parents. It's a matter of scarcity of resources as it were. It was the year without a Santa Claus, 1974. Oh, the burger Miser Burger. Boys by the iconic Paul Freeze, who you may know from the Disney's haunted mansion, Host Boys. Yeah, that's right. Paul Freeze is wonderful. Wait, his last name is Freeze? That's crazy. Yeah, yeah. Oh, okay. Well, Die Hard is still the best Christmas movie out there, perhaps. It's a good one. Yeah. Wait, does this mean that next week is our year review already? Yes. We are recording the year in review on the 17th. So if you're listening to the show soon after it comes out, you still have a few days to email us. You are votes for best of favorite this year as a typical Jackass favorite inside of Inemorium. Anything you want us to talk about that reviews, 2025, the SGU, et cetera. So many to choose from this year. Jackass is that it? I mean, there's a clear winner, which we'll talk about. But we have to talk about runner-ups because otherwise it's only one of the ones. There's plenty of runner-ups. For which category? It's got to go Jackass of the year. Oh my. That's not going to head of ourselves. No, we're teasing. We're encouraging the audience. Before we have any review show. Yeah. All right. Let's get down to this episode. Carol, you're going to start. I started off talking about a light-hearted topic. Childhood cancer. No, it's not childhood. Sorry. It's young people, but maybe it's like not childhood. Okay. Young people, not children. That's okay then. No, actually this is slightly lighter-hearted than you would expect. So there's a new article in the New York Times. It was just published yesterday as of this recording. And the title really caught me. And so I was like, oh, what's going on here? And then I was like, oh, yes, this debate. It's an important debate that I've been hearing a lot about. So the title of this article is, why some doctors say they're cancers that shouldn't be treated? Which like, that's a big, gotcha headline for an article. So statistic show and there's a clear and kind of irrefutable trend. Now we don't, we can argue and actually I want to have a conversation about why the numbers look like this. But statistics are showing that across eight different cancers, there is a massive increase among younger people. The question now is, A, what is causing this and B, should we be doing something about it? Which sounds like a duh question, especially if you're a person who is dealing with a cancer diagnosis. Like it can be really hard to hear somebody say, I wonder if we should have even caught that or I wonder if we should actually try and treat that. If you're somebody who has faced cancer before, but let's hear out the experts. So these eight diagnoses are these eight different cancers, thyroid cancer, kidney cancer, cancer of the anus, the small intestine, colorectal, endometrial cancer, and pancreatic cancer. So those are solid cancers and then also myeloma, which is a blood cancer, are on the rise since 1992 in a pretty significant way. We're also seeing other types like breast cancer that are increasing, but we're not talking about breast cancer in this particular conversation. We're talking about those eight previous that I mentioned. There's been this sharp uptick and specifically for people under the age of 50. So that's what they mean by young Steve or younger. And so why are we seeing a sharp uptick? Well, you're seeing a big division among the experts, but I will say that when you sort of dig into it, what I'm seeing is that a lot of the people who are concerned from an environmental perspective tend to have more epidemiological expertise, but a lot of people who are in the trenches, oncologists who are in the trenches, treating cancer have a different view altogether. So I don't want to say there's this like false dichotomy or this war out there, like these people are saying, this is the reason and these people are saying, that's the reason. It's both probably and there are plenty of rational people who are saying, yes, it's both. But what do you think the two main camps are right now? What do you think is the reason that we're seeing a very sharp uptick in eight different cancers among patients under 50? Better, no worries. No worries detecting it. There you go. That's like what everybody said for a strike like because we are checking for them and we are doing that in a better way. So that's what a lot of oncologists are saying. No, no, we're just detecting these things better. We have better resolution. We're doing more screenings than we ever used to do. But there are epidemiologists and oncologists and other experts who are saying, but even beyond that, what if there is an environmental factor? We do see obesity on the rise. We are seeing more obviously environmental pollutants than we've ever seen before. Climate changes on the rise, like more kind of, you know, some people are blaming like processed food, which I don't think there's a lot of good evidence to support that. But, you know, a lot of people are saying, we don't know, but we need to figure this out and we need to research this more. But let's now get down into the trend. So this is the bulk of the reporting here is based on an article that was published in JAMA Internal Medicine by a team out of Harvard and Brigham and Women's Hospital, which is affiliated with Harvard and then Dell Medical School in Austin, Texas. And so they wrote a special communication entitled The Rise in Early Onset Cancer in the US population more apparent than real. So right there, that gives a little bit of a way. And they are saying that these eight cancers with the fastest rising incidence, the ones that I mentioned previously, they seem to have doubled in incidence since 1992, but what hasn't gone up? So more people are being diagnosed, but what are more people not doing? Death rate. Dying. Yeah. And so they argue because the incidence rate has increased, but the death rate has stayed flat. This is probably a diagnostic issue more than anything else. More things are being uncovered, but that doesn't necessarily mean that these cancers were deadly or even dangerous. Now there are people who are still counter-arguing with that within the, you know, population of experts saying, well, we also have better treatment than we ever had before. So of course mortality is not going to rise in lockstep with incidence because as we're finding more cancers, we're also getting better at people not dying from cancer. And there is an argument to be said there. That's why this is really, really complicated. But here's an example they discussed in the right up in the New York Times. They said, for example, colorectal deaths are up by 0.5% a year, but their incidence is increasing by 2%. So there's a mismatch there. Whereas endometrial cancer is in lockstep. We're actually seeing a 2% increase in both the incidence rate and the death rate. So it's very likely the case that we can't lump all these eight cancers together either. We might be seeing different things happening with these different cancers. But one of the big questions is, and this is a question that a lot of, oncologists are asking, should we be doing the screenings that we're doing as intensely, especially since we're using CT ultrasound and MRIs that are increasingly more sensitive. We're using them more frequently. We're doing a lot of blood tests and we're finding a lot of cancers via happenstance that previously were not part of routine cancer screening. They say in this article that there are cancers that will spontaneously go away. There are cancers that will start growing and then just stop and never become a problem. There are a lot of early, early stage cancers that are never symptomatic. And I remember, and I don't know if you guys have ever heard this, but when my dad got prostate cancer and he had pretty early stage prostate cancer, so he was able to undergo aggressive treatment. But he was, I think in his early 70s when he had the treatment. So it may not even be considered aggressive early on, catch it before it's spread. There doesn't appear to be any risk. But I remember his physician said to him at the time, a lot of people will not die from prostate cancer some will, but a lot won't. But I will tell you that a lot of people who die will have prostate cancer on autopsy. Does that make sense to you guys? Yeah, but so does that mean we should continue to screen at the levels we have been screening or we are over screening? Well, I think my, I don't think that's either of those questions, is the conclusion based on what I'm saying, what I'm saying is that in people, my father's age, a lot of men have prostate cancer and they will die from something else first because it's so slow growing. But there are other people who will get prostate cancer. It will grow very quickly and it will be the cause of a lot of disability and pain and potentially death. And the problem is right now we don't know. We just don't know who is going to have a cancer that grows really quickly and who is going to have a cancer that actually never causes them a problem. Is family history a determinant there? hugely. Yeah, but the thing is you almost have to set that aside because people who have heavy family histories are already getting screened usually. I see. The recommendation is to screen those individuals. So now there's this question, right? Are we at this tipping point with diagnostic medicine where an asymptomatic patient who has a small abnormality that has no previously identified clinical relevance, something is caught on a screen. We might go in and biopsy it. We might end up doing aggressive treatment on this patient that can be painful, that can cause disability. And should we have done that? Would this patient, because there's no way to know after the fact, right? There's a huge bias. After the fact, the cancer might be gone. Well, is it gone because of the treatment or is it become because it was going to go away anyway? Or because it wasn't ever going to grow? Yeah. And so this is a big, I think, conundrum in clinical oncology right now. We are seeing certain physicians. I mean, really respected physicians. Timothy Rebick is an epidemiologist and geneticist at Dana Farber, which is a really reputable cancer center and a co-chair of the American Association of Cancer Research and or of the conference of the American Association of Cancer Research. And he said something very interesting is going on here and it's not good. And another doctor who is the chief medical officer at the American Society of Clinical Oncology that's Dr. Julie Grallow, I think is how you pronounce it. She said, the surge in cases is a grave concern. I'm saying this is real and it is dangerous or I'm sorry, and it is serious and we need to understand why. But then you have other researchers saying, I don't want to treat a patient that doesn't need to be treated. And I am really concerned about the level of screening that we're doing right now and the level of cancers that we're finding that they may lead to over treatment. We have examples of when this happened in the past. Do you remember when PSA tests came on the scene? Yeah, there's been a huge, you know, first they did them and prostate cancer incidents jumped because now we're testing, we're screening for it. Then they decided we're screening for too much, doing unnecessary procedures. Let's stop doing it. And then the incidents plummeted because they stopped doing this screening test, again in asymptomatic individuals. And that's the thing during that time a lot of men had their prostate taken out and had to undergo some treatments that probably really affected their quality of lives. But then they wouldn't have needed to. The burden of actual prostate cancer increased. So now they kind of found a middle ground. Middle ground, exactly. So it's again, it's something you got a tweak. You got to find the sweet spot, because it's all again risk versus benefit. So if you screen too much, you end up causing more harm than good. You find cases that are too benign that don't need to be treated and you end up causing unnecessary procedures. If you don't screen enough, you miss early treatable serious illness that progresses. So there's always, there's lines across at some point. You always look for that point. The question is where is that sweet spot? And I think one of the ways to approach this that I didn't really think about, I mean, I guess I thought about it, but not in this clear of a way until after I read up on this, is that you've got sort of that, you know, under screening, over screening question. You've got that incidence versus, you know, mortality question. But you've also got the question of individual patients and epidemiological population-wide measurements. And I think that is a question that we're really juggling with here, right? Because as an individual, I can tell you, you find a cancer in my body, I want it out of me, right? And like, there's a screening test available to me that I could find something early. I want that. But at the population, and it's so hard for an individual to think at a population level, because they know that at the population level, any measure we're talking about means some people died. And so it's, it's where is that balance between the two, right? Between what is best for the everyone without leaving out the few, but also we have to remember when it comes to risk and benefit, it's not just about a surgery you might not have needed. Some chemos can cause other cancers, right? Radiation is not without its risks. Cancer treatment can be very aggressive and it is 100% necessary when it is 100% necessary. But if it is not necessary, I do not want to undergo chemotherapy or radiation. And that's the question. And I think we don't really know the answer yet of that line in the sand of when it's necessary and when it's not. And that's what we're trying to figure out. Right. But it's just good to be thoughtful about it. Absolutely. And that's where things have in like family history, genetic testing. You know, there are a lot of other parts of the algorithm that you can bring into play. But what we don't want to do is cast such a wide net that we pick up something and then say, oh, look at this thing we picked up that we never would have picked up before. Just to be safe, let's do a pretty aggressive treatment that could have negative consequences downstream for somebody's health and wellness. Okay. Thanks, Cara. Jay, so tell me about this study into how humans are adapting to modern life. Let me ask you a question. How attached are you to your toilet? I'm not attached to it at the moment. Yeah. But it's something you like, right? I would find life without it challenging. All right. So obviously I'm kidding. But the question is not totally irrelevant. A better question is how much do you guys think the modern world is relatively healthy for humans? Oh, compared to the modern world. Like in some ways, it's way more healthy because we have modern medicine and we have all these tools that allow us to help. Yeah, right. But in other ways, it's way worse because we have climate change and pollution and, you know, forever chemicals and vaccines. Yeah. You've seen, you've seen them going to be kind of illegal before too long. Yeah. There's stuff in our blood right now that didn't exist 50 years ago. A lot of plastic. That's right. Yeah. The one that got me is the plastic, the microplastic in my brain. That blows my mind. All right. Let's get into this. You're right. We'll look back on human history and, you know, people lived in the natural world among natural materials and features, landscapes that were shaped by geology or the climate and ecology. They were using tools made out of stone, wood and bone. You know, their shelters were super simple, probably temporary and of course, dependent on whatever local materials that they can find. An analysis by evolutionary anthropologist Colin Shaw at the University of Zurich in Daniel Longman at Laudboro University, they asked a very simple, but, you know, I think a lot of people who read this found it to be a little uncomfortable. They questioned that they put up. They said, have humans changed their habits so fast that our biology can't keep up with it? And is that now eroding our ability to survive and reproduce over the long run? And that is a question that, you know, I think is a legitimate one to ask because there's lots of things that we can point at that, you know, potentially could be doing us harm. And what is that harm and what does that harm, you know, long term, what would it do? So they, the authors created the timeline and they said, you know, about five million years ago, hominins lived in environments like I was saying before, made a soil, plants, animals, water, rock. Even after the agricultural revolution, people were still mostly in, you know, what we'd call these classic natural settings. But when industrialization started in the late 1700s and then particularly this crazy rapid acceleration in the mid, you know, the 20th century, human environments have obviously changed and they've changed significantly. Now we have fossil fuel use, we have industrial agriculture, we have plastics and microplastics, we have an explosive urban growth. And what we've done is we've turned much of the planet into what they call an industrial continuum where even like the most natural places now contain microplastic fragments and other pollutes by 2018 more than half of humanity already lives in cities, right? If you look at, if you look at where the population centers are, it's in the cities, of course, and people in other countries like the United States and Canada and United Kingdom, they spend about 93% of their time in doors. That's really when you hear that number and you compare it to your lifestyle, I'm sure a lot of you out there would say, no, that's not me. I'm sure a lot of you guys out there would say, yeah, that sounds about right. How much time do you guys spend outdoors when you have a full time job and you have kids and you have to make dinner and you have to get them up in the morning? And then a weekend's, you're super busy because you got to visit people like, you know, like are we really spending as much time outdoors as we should be? I try so hard to get outside because of those things, Jay, I make a concerted effort to do it as opposed to being locked in my office at a desk, especially during long hours. I try to get outside as much as possible. Well, of course, I mean, I think inherently most people would just agree with that. Yeah, I should be out more. I should get some sunlight. You know, I need some exercise. But that's not what's happening. And it's not just happening in the country that you happen to live in. It's happening pretty much everywhere. So in effect, we've become these indoor urban creatures, right? And you know, we are daily experience is utterly dominated by artificial materials, artificial light, industrial noises, you know, all these things, you know, interacting with our computers. And a big one here, guys, is just polluted air. Like, you know, most houses that we all live in, like, you know, the air inside of our houses isn't a great thing to breathe in. Like you need to air out your house. You know, if you have a gas stove, you're definitely putting a lot of pollutants into the air that could cause you harm. You know, there's just a lot of reasons why living in the structures that we do and in the environments that we've constructed over the last, you know, 100 years, they're not healthy for us. As, as Hokey is, this sounds, you know, we truly did evolve to live in outdoor environments, not in the indoor environments that we are completely surrounded by today. The core of the paper asks whether this new environment that I'm talking about is undermining these four biological systems that directly support evolutionary fitness. And here's what they had to say about this. They said reproductive function comes first. So global fertility is falling and social factors clearly matter here. The authors point to a long list of industrial contaminants that plausibly impair the ability to produce an abundance of offspring. Their pollution is associated with lower sperm concentration and total sperm number. You know, they have poor mobility. There's a higher risk of pregnancy loss. Pesticides and herbicides can reduce sperm quality and testosterone in our link to pre-term birth and birth defects, microplastics and nanoplastics accumulate and tissue triggering oxidative stress, DNA damage, epigenetic changes that can harm male and female fertility. Endocrine disrupting chemicals like thalates. These are chemicals that are added to plastics to make them flexible and softer or durable. And some flame retardants interfere with hormone systems that regulate reproduction. So all of these things in combination with each other, you know, there is a measurable effect and lots of scientists are finding, you know, finding that they're seeing trends now that weren't there or weren't as obvious, you know, going back even 30 years. The authors, they tie all of this to two mechanisms. One is reduced exposure to the diverse environmental microbes that help train our immune systems. The other is direct damage from air, noise and light pollution that disrupts immune cell function and circadian rhythms, right? So it seems to be that they found some legitimate evidence and patterns here that we can no longer ignore and we have to we have to pay some real consideration to it. It depends on where you live. I mean, if you live in a city that has bad air quality going outside, it's not going to help. That's not going to do much for you. I mean, there's a lot of speculation mixed in here, like not everything they're talking about is like there has been any clear research showing that there's a specific health effect. There are the ones that I think are the most solid. I mean, clearly air pollution has a massive negative health effect, especially for respiratory illnesses, but for other illnesses as well. And that's, again, that's one of the biggest things about burning fossil fuels. I mean, it costs in the US alone. I think it's, I think, is like $100 million a year and increased health care costs just from, you know, burning fossil fuels itself. The light, the light is interesting as well because I treat a lot of patients with poor sleep in modern life. A lot of people, they go all day with the same light level right up to the moment they want to go to sleep. Wow. Right? Because they're, they're, they're bright lights on. They're looking at electronic devices, you know, and they, they're, they never get any variability in their light level exposure. Like, well, we, we did not evolve in that environment. You know, you should get outside during the day and then turn down the lights, get some, to dim light at night time. The brain knows that it's night. Steve, I think I told you guys this, you know, I was at, in a physical with my doctor a few years ago and he's like, you know, after dinner, you got, you know, you, you, you six o'clock, seven o'clock, you turn the lights down, you sit down, you start to slow down your relax and everything. And I'm, as I'm listening to him, I'm like, I'm shaking my head like, okay, sounds great. And I go, Hey, I have two kids. They are bouncing off the walls after bedtime. Not even like it's not like, Hey, guys, it's bedtime. Go to bed. Yeah. The way for 20 minutes before we both pass out from exhaustion, like there is no winding down in our culture, Steve. Yeah, particularly if you should be. Yeah, well, right, they're supposed to be, they were working on the farm all day, they'd be exhausted, but that's the problem. That's the problem. It's a systemic problem. You can't just fix it. Yeah, no, you can't. And like you have to make, like there are cultural issues that you're not going to change, right? If you go out to dinner at night, maybe if you're lucky and you have money and you're in a nice restaurant, the lights are going to be low. But if you are at McDonald's for dinner, because that's what you can afford, you're going to be in like fluorescent lighting. Like there are like systemic things. But like in my home, my lights are dim after the sun sets. I never have bright lights on in my house after the sunset. Yeah, I try to dim them as well here. Yeah, it's partially because we know it's good for us, but partially because it feels cosier. Yeah, I don't ever have the big light on. You know, the big light is evil. It's always like the little lights around the house. And that's the thing I'm not saying turning on dimmer lights is going to cure any of your kids like, you know, ADHD or bouncing off the walls, but like starting to kind of curate or foster a calmer environment at home, your kids might calm down a little. They may not, but it can't hurt. But you know, they crave screens and you know, that stimulation as well. The kids are you, I can as an adult control myself to a certain degree of a kid's, you know, not not so much. And I just think, you know, we're training them too, you know, generationally, like they're screen users. Yeah. And it's coming apart the way they interact with reality. That's a hard thing too, because that's like a foot down, like learn good at home hygiene now because you're not going to get it in your school training or your work training. You're only going to get it at home, you know, rules about when the screens are off. And you know, all my screens are preloaded with, with software that darkens them over the course of the night and turns them more and more red. But I think part of it is there's only so much you do is you're saying on an individual level. It's also just being, you know, politically active advocating for better air quality laws, better light pollution laws, better, you know, decibel level, noise laws, things like that to make the environment a little bit more wholesome, a little bit less stressful with less pollution. That's really the only big solution here. You're only so much could do around the edges. Well, and so much of this is a function of income inequality too. Like study after study shows that there's more tree cover in rich neighborhoods. Yeah. Yeah. And just like when you're when you're poorer, you're more inner city, it's more hot, hot concrete, you know, that acts as like a heat sink and also like bounces it back to you and less tree cover. And it's just, yeah, it's, it's devastating. All right. Thanks, Jay. Yep. Well, if you want me to go take a quick break from our show to talk about one of our sponsors this week or frames, if you're hoping to find a great present and you haven't found it yet, or frames has the gift you're looking for it. Trust me. We got an or frame for my mom. This was like three years ago. She's constantly commenting on the pictures that come up and she still loves it after three years. How many presents did you give somebody that you think they're still using after three years? Yeah. And this is what's so great about it. Let's say your mom's not very tech savvy. It doesn't matter because you can preload photos before it even ships. And then you can keep adding them from anywhere. And also it comes in a really beautiful premium gift box with no price tag. So it's just the best gift possible. 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It's a maybe to, you know, what's there's been again, there's been an anti vaccine movement as long as it's been vaccines, but what COVID did in the United States at least was turn the anti vaccine movement because it used to be very bipartisan. We track a lot of these issues like which ones are left, which ones are right, which ones are bipartisan. And sort of both sides kind of had their reasons, well, you know, if you were an anti-vaxxer and you happen to be liberal, you would find liberal reasons to be anti-vaxxer and then same thing with conservative. But with COVID, it really made it into a right-wing issue, you know, and it had, and so it became very political. It became very, you know, left, right. And so that, and we're still dealing with that. So what I want to talk about is a new study. This comes out of France, which was published. And it, so this is a post marketing, like what we would call in the US, a phase four study, right? Very quickly, you know, when we look at the safety and efficacy of treatments like vaccines, you do the basic science research, right? The preclinical stuff, animal studies, et cetera. And then you do preliminary studies like just, you want to look at healthy individuals just to screen for any potential risk. Then you do some preliminary efficacy trials. Those are face true. Then you do, if everything's looking fine, you do the definitive phase three trials, which are the ones that you used to get FDA approval, right? But then there is something that's, there's a post marketing phase four trial where you want to look at what's happening out in the real world, you know, once the drug is, is getting used. And that's important because while the double blind placebo controlled trial is absolutely necessary to establish efficacy, it also has its weakness, right? That kind of read the problem with that kind of research. One, it's hard to get big, big numbers of people, you know, like doing a big study could be hundreds of people, maybe a thousand, two thousand, that's a massive clinical trial, right? But even then, if you, let's say you do a clinical trial, three or four clinical trials that cumulatively have a thousand subjects in it, that would be, that's way more than enough to get like FDA approval. So what if there's a side effect that's one in 10,000 people, right? Changes are you going to miss it in a study only looking at 1,000 people. But also the control trials are very controlled, right? So you're controlling for as many confounding factors as possible and you're randomizing, you know, people to either treat or not being treated. And therefore, you're, there's a lot of inclusionary and exclusionary criteria. So you want to look at, you know, a fairly uncomplicated group of people to make sure that nothing is going to interfere with the signal that you're looking for. So that means it may not be, it may be difficult to then generalize from that study to the general population. So that's why it's good to, you know, there's a complementary type of research where now you're looking, it's observational, but you could look at tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people out in the real world and where there are factors that don't come in with a clinical trial. Like are people not taking the drug because it's too expensive or are they deciding that it's too inconvenient or whatever? There are things that can come into play that usually be controlled for in a controlled clinical trial. All right. So this is basically a post marketing phase four trial of the MRN, any MRNA vaccine for COVID-19 based upon France's public health database, right? So one of the advantages of, you know, having socialized medicine or living in, you know, one of those countries is that they have these complete databases. So this is the French national health data system, right? They looked for the French population aged 18 to 59 who were alive on November 1, 2021, and they divided them into two groups, people who had received at least one dose of an MRNA that, you know, COVID-19 vaccine and those who had not. Guess how many people were included in this study? All of them. Yeah, I mean hundreds of thousands. 28 million. 28 million. Oh my God. So this is a... This is a robust study, 28 plus million people. 22 million plus vaccinated, 5.9 million unvaccinated individuals. So that's statistically massively robust, right? That's the advantage of this kind of observational study. Again, the downside is it's not controlled, right? People are deciding whether or not to get vaccinated. You're not randomizing them to be vaccinated or not. So this is the whole population, not the whole population, but this is a huge sample of what country? France. I'm surprised there are that many unvaccinated people. Yeah, it's a lot. But this is over that period of time, you know. So there are what we call confounding factors. Confounding factors are things other than the variables that you're interested in that could be affecting the outcome. So they control for the obvious ones, the ones that you have to control for in a study like those otherwise it's worthless, right? So one is socio-demographic characteristics. You can't compare 20-year-old, healthy people to 60-year-old unhealthy people, right? That would be a not-be-immunical comparison. So they control for the age, sex, race, all that stuff. And then also 41 comorbidities. If you have diabetes, or do you not have diabetes, or you're obese, or you're not obese? So they control for all of that. Now that doesn't mean that we're not still missing something. And the thing that's the hardest to control for, what would you guys think? In a study like this, people who choose to get vaccinated versus people who chose not to get vaccinated, what do you think might be a confounding factor? That's not a comorbidity, meaning it's not a disease, and it's not a demographic feature. That's something that's more behavioral that might be influencing the outcome. Why they chose to get... Yeah, I mean... Yeah, why they chose not to? Was it a religious exemption? Was it a... Yeah, there's something called the healthy user effect, right? Which means that people who choose to do this are also choosing other healthy things to do. Of course. Yeah, we see that a lot. Yeah, a style. It's a generic healthy user effect here. So people, there's something different about people who chose to get vaccinated and chose not to get vaccinated in terms of how well they take care of themselves, right? People who choose to get vaccinated may just basically take better care of themselves than people who did not. Again, we don't know that, but I'm saying that's certainly a possibility here that there's no way to really control for. But given that, the best job they could to control for comorbidities, they wanted to see what was... Was there any difference in mortality over a four-year period? So this is the longest duration observational study now, and also it's just a very massive one. So what they found, unsurprisingly, they found that in the vaccinated group, over that four-year period, they were 74% less likely to die from severe COVID-19 than the unvaccinated group. That is probably due to a direct protective effect of the vaccine, right? That is the most plausible. Because let's do to a specific cause, and there's a mechanism there, the vaccine would protect you from that cause, and we know from other research that the vaccine does prevent, reduce your risk of dying from COVID, right? That's the primary benefit of the vaccine. It was designed to do that, and it's been proven to do that. And it does have other signs. This further supports that. You were 74% less likely to die from COVID if you were vaccinated than unvaccinated. But they also found, over that four-year period, the vaccinated group had a 25% lower risk of all cause mortality. Yeah, I could see that. Even when you will eliminate death from COVID, so that's not just just not dying from COVID. Yeah, but they didn't eliminate COVID infection, did they? Because if somebody gets sick from COVID, and then they later die of pneumonia, correct? Yeah. So one of the possible causes here, you, I think, hit upon probably the most likely one. So one is what I've said already. There could be a healthy user effect going on here. Sure. Two are easier people. Yeah. Having less severe COVID, even if you don't die from COVID, right? Having severe COVID that you don't die from may set you up for long COVID, or for other infections, or for having a heart attack more, you know, any younger age, whatever. So it's possible that severe COVID causes other ways of increasing your mortality, other than dying from COVID, right? But there also may be other protective effects of getting vaccinated that are go beyond COVID. That's another possibility. Yeah, like we know that one of the common colds is caused by a coronavirus. Like I wonder if there's any transferable protection to other coronavirus. So that's one or one possibility that maybe you may be providing just other, you across over protection, you know, probably marginal, but it might be in the numbers there. But also there was a recent study that we wrote about on science-based medicine where they found that the COVID vaccines actually made cancer treatment more effective. And actually, you're immune system against cancer. Again, that's preliminary evidence. We can't say that that's absolutely established at this point. But it raises that possible mechanism there. There may be again other benefits to your immune system that even go beyond infections, right? That might even be helping things like cancer. So yeah, it might quote unquote sensitize cancer to immunotherapy. So we'll say, you know, if that's, if that pans out, but that's another, you know, potential, potential mechanism. And there may be other benefits as well. The thing is we just can't say about that group, that 25% lower risk of all cars, mortality, there's lots of possibilities and this data because it's not controlled, does not allow for us to disentangle, you know, those potential effects. But the researchers didn't really even, you know, focus on that because they were, the purpose of the study was to see was the COVID vaccine safe and effective. So what they concluded was it was effective in preventing death from COVID-19. And there's no evidence of any increased risk, right? So unlike what many of the anti-vaxxers are saying, or they're trying to argue that like people are more likely to die if they get vaccinated, this showed that that was not the case. You know, there was a 25% lower mortality, all cause mortality if you were vaccinated. So that just shows that there's no increase. And we can't say the vaccine caused the decrease, it was associated with the decrease, but it was not, it doesn't appear to be any signal in here that there was any increase in mortality from the vaccine. And I'm curious, my, my guess is that they didn't look at this and my guess is that even if they did look at this, they wouldn't find it. But was there an attempt to see if in the vaccinated group, there was an increased risk of something, anything like did the vaccinated group have more of some negative health consequence than the unvaccinated group? They did look at that because they looked at all, they looked at, you know, they looked at all cause. Yeah, they did look at specific causes as well. That's good. There was no signal there as well. So good. And we're seeing that over and over again, even for the things that we know the COVID vaccine caused, you know, so for some causes it more. That's exactly correct. So like we know that like, okay, there was some cases of myocarditis, you know, yeah, it was cardiomyod, yeah, you had some, some people got inflammation of the heart with after the vaccine. It's still very rare, 101 and 100,000 to 1 and a million, something like that. But the thing is your risk of having that was much higher from COVID if you were not vaccinated. So again, the risk versus benefits still massively favors the vaccine. And that makes sense too when you think about it, anything that the vaccine would cause, the infection would cause worse, you know, having an actual infection raging throughout your body rather than a controlled immune response specifically targeted, you know, against one of the proteins. Well, and from a statistical perspective now, Steve, I feel like you can no longer be one of these denialists who claims, yeah, but the risk is even lower if I just don't get vaccinated or get COVID, but I don't know if statistically anybody has not had COVID. You know what I mean? Like at this point, it's so prevalent that you have, if you've never had COVID, either you just didn't detect it or you have some sort of genetic anomaly that allowed you to like, I don't know, be immune to it because most people at this point have been exposed to COVID. Yeah, you've fed a certain clinical infection. It's hard to see what you're living in the woods, like if you've never exposed to it. So there's not even an argument there. It's like, there's basically only two groups, either you're vaccinated and exposed or you're unvaccinated and exposed. You can't be unvaccinated and outrun this disease. At this point, it's very likely. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's probably some people out there, but it's not enough to worry about. But not statistically important, yeah, yeah. That's just the importance. Good way to put it. Here's the one last thing observation here because the only real wiggle room for anti-vax users here is to say, well, it could be all the healthy user effect, right? I mean, they really can't argue about the reduced death from COVID. That's I think is pretty solid in this study. But the other 25% lower all cause mortality. But okay, you're right. It could all be the healthy user effect. But why are they healthy? That's a thing. Why are they healthier? Why are the people who, that's not a good argument for being an anti-vaxer. They're saying that anti-vaxers are make bad health choices overall. That's a pretty weak device. Right, because it's probably the case across all vaccines. Yes, right. Right. That's just kind of awesome right there. Yeah, that's the other thing that people who get the COVID vaccine are probably more likely to be compliant with other vaccines. And that's the exact type of logic they won't understand. Right. Because they're healthy user effect equals the unhealthy non-user effect. Yeah. That's another part of that equation. Yeah. Hey. It's not dark when the lights go on. All right, Bob, tell us how cosmic rays grounded aircraft. Yes. This is really cool. 6,000. Yes. 6,000 aircraft, about half the global A320 Airbus family fleet had to be held on the ground for an urgent software fix because of get this space radiation. So this, of course, I dove into this. I got to get more details on this. So this started the day before Halloween, which is, I guess, what, one, two, three, October 30th. This year, this year, I went in Airbus A320 suddenly dropped an altitude while flying from Cancun, which is in Mexico to Newark, New Jersey, in the United States. Some people, one to three people, and some clear how many had headlacerations, and at least 15 people were taken to the hospital after the flight, which had to land in Tampa, I believe, with non-life threatening injuries. That's an important one. No major injuries, but they still felt, somebody felt it was prudent for these 15 people to go to the hospital after this. So Airbus fairly quickly determined that one of the Airbus computers that controlled the movable parts of the wings, right, and then the tail caused the problem, right? They further concluded that the malfunction was likely triggered by cosmic radiation that often interacts with our atmosphere. So that's what they concluded fairly quickly, I think. So let's see then, the next big point here was that the European Union's Aviation Safety Agency, which is Issa, EASA, released an emergency airworthiness directive on November 28, 2025, this year, an emergency airworthiness directive. So here's a quote from that directive, an Airbus A320 airplane recently experienced an uncommanned and limited pitched down event, a limited pitched down event. The autopilot remained engaged throughout the event with a brief and limited loss of altitude and the rest of the flight was uneventful. Preliminary technical assessment done by Airbus identified a malfunction of the affected ELAC as possible contributing factor. Now ELAC stands for elevator, aileron computer. So that's the computer that controls the aileron. So if you look at, if you like looking out of the window when flying like me, you've probably seen ailerons many times. There are those hinged flaps on the trailing edge of an airplane's wing, right? So the computer that controls them had a problem and that's what caused this was their conclusion as they are now saying or they said in the emergency airworthiness directive. The directive concluded, well, at least my collection of quotes concludes here with, this condition, if not corrected, could lead in the worst case scenario to an uncommanned elevator movement that may result in exceeding the aircraft's structural capability. That's not good. Clearly not good and that's really saying something though, isn't it? Because modern commercial aircraft, they have amazing structural capability. I've seen, you know, like I granted it was many years ago, but it was in 747 with its wings flapping like a bird essentially under like the extreme stress and it was still holding the gather. So I got to imagine that, you know, structurally they're pretty solid, but man, this thing could fail given a worst case scenario here. The United States, FAA or Federal Aviation Administration, they also released a similarly worded emergency airworthiness directive. So luckily though, the delays and the cancel flights weren't as horrible as they could have been. Some airports had basically negligible impact. Other ones had definitely more than negligible. There were flight cancellations and delays and stuff, but it could have been far, far worse than that. And I think this is mainly due to the fact that about over 5,000 of those planes, all they needed was just a softer update and that can happen pretty fast. I think many planes were completed within hours. I wasn't sure how many planes they had done in just a few hours, but yeah, this can be done fairly quick as evidenced by the fact that there weren't that many delays and cancellations. The rest of the planes though, close to 1,000, they used older elacs, you know, these computers and they had, they have to be manually replaced. And I'm not even sure if that's even done at this point. But that's obviously much more time consuming to manually replace these specific computers. So how did this happen? The most likely culprit here is almost certainly cosmic rays. We remember those guys, right? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Okay, wait, let me explain them again. Cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are energetic particles emitted by the sun and they're also extremely energetic particles emitted from supernovae and even more energetic events that are out there. These cosmic rays aren't rays, but are for the most part accelerated cores of atoms that have had their electron stripped away, right? So such are these atomic cores. For the most part, protons, but you can also get, you know, multi particle nuclear, atomic cores as well. But that's, that's the 90, 99% or, you know, is these cores and primarily protons in that group. So the atmosphere protects us from these, but when they hit our atmosphere, some stuff happens, right? And it's fascinating what happens. So these cosmic rays come flying in at, you know, near the speed of light and they obliterate atoms. So which two atoms in the atmosphere do you think are hit the most? Nitrogen. Nitrogen. Oxygen. Very good. Well done, well done guys. Why don't we know how we knew that? Now I'm just so, I'm just ecstatic that you're paying attention to that question. I gotcha, I gotcha, Bob. This obliteration creates secondary energetic particles that rain downwards and one, one, one website was telling me that some of them go back out into space. But so if that's true, some of them go down, some of them go, go back out into space, but we're concerned about what's going down here, right? So these secondary energetic particles rain downwards and they're further interacting with the atmosphere. They're interacting with each other. Some of these are also decaying into other particles. So all of this creates a zoo of secondary and even tertiary generations of particles and electromagnetic radiation that this initial impact from the cosmic, the energetic cosmic rays causes when it hits the upper atmosphere, okay? They call this an air shower. This is an air shower and it continues until the atmosphere absorbs all of it, right? Because you're losing energy as you're going through the atmosphere and stages right, creating these first generation of particles, second generation of particles, third generation. So you're losing energy as it's being absorbed. So sometimes it's fully absorbed by the atmosphere, but other times some of these secondary particles and tertiary or whatever make it to the ground. And I think muons are the one that I'm aware of that actually makes it to the ground. But it's still very safe to fly through all this crazy crap that's happening in the atmosphere with this air shower. It's still safe to fly through this. In fact, at cruising altitude, you are basically constantly flying through overlapping air showers. So you're going through it the entire time as far as I could tell. You're going through these air showers. It's just a normal part of the radiation background, not a huge deal. Even crews that have been studied, these are crews that that's their job. They're on a plane at high altitude for hours and hours like every day, right? That's how it works. And when they have been studied, typically the increase in lifetime risk of cancer is just a little bit. It's not that big of a deal. I mean, sure, any increase sucks, but it's a minimal, it's a minimal increase, right? So it's not like you're just being irradiated horribly every time you're flying in a plane. It's pretty small. Okay. But the thing is with airline altitudes where these commercial jets fly, it also happens to be near the sweet spot for some of these secondary particles, particularly like neutrons. That's where you're going to run into a lot of neutrons at these airline altitudes. Maybe a little bit higher than what's typical, but there's still a high neutron flux where airlines consistently travel when they're cruising. And it's because of this high neutron flux from these air showers that cause many scientists to think that neutrons are likely the ultimate culprit here of the secondary particle, part of the air shower created by the cosmic rays. It's the neutrons. And that's what they think caused a problem with this air bus that left from Cancun. Now so ultimately though, ultimately, ultimately a neutron is likely to have caused what they say is they describe it as a single event upset. And that showed up as a bit flip in a critical memory cell. So that's the bottom line right there. So let's unpack that a little bit. You guys have heard of bit flips, right? That's when a binary digit in a computer memory sometimes unexpectedly flips from a 1, 2, 0 or a 0 to a 1. And of course that could be very problematic, especially if it's a critical bit, right, in the critical part of your hardware. So yeah, so that's a bit flip. And that's, I'm not even sure if we even mentioned that more than once or twice on this show over the years. But it's a common term that a lot of people are aware of. But now a bit flip though can be caused by many different things. It could be radiation, but it could also be electrical noise. It can be manufacturing defects. So it's kind of a generic term for this bit flip that could be caused by many different things. But when experts describe what happened here in this scenario with the air bus, they typically will use a better term. And that's a single event upset or a single event error. This term is used by engineers that work with radiation effects, right? Their job is to work with radiation and the effects of radiation. They will often use that term of a single event upset or a single event error. But also you hear that term a lot when experts, anyway, when experts are discussing avionics reliability, you'll hear about this. So a single event upset means specifically that a charge from radiation caused the bit flip, right? Single event upset, you immediately think, oh, it's radiation that caused it. It's not, it's not electrical noise. It's not a manufacturing defect. This is specifically caused by radiation. So now if you're paying attention and I know there's at least a few of you out there that actually are, you might be thinking, you might be thinking, how can a neutron deposit a charge if it's neutral? And that was, that was, right, that was, I was thinking, well, wait a second, how does this work? Because this, by smashing into an atom, right, you have the, you have the, the cosmic ray, causes secondary particles, creates neutrons that smash into the atom of the computer and the silicon, right, in the chip. So it crashes into an atom in the computer and that collision releases charged particles like protons. And it's that charge. It's the secondary charge caused by the neutron hitting part of the computer. It's that charge that gets dumped into this tiny region of the computer chip and that causes the single event upset, which causes the bit flip. Now, as our dad used to say, James, Steve, you follow me? Yeah. Yeah. So we need planes that can filter out the neutrons. Yes. Filter neutrons, baby. So you guys, you guys remember, and of course, this news item, maybe think of the time Rebecca was trying to make a, a state show with us and her flight got canceled due to a volcano, which at the time, at the time I said was an awesome reason to, to miss your flight because of a volcano. So getting, getting your flight canceled stinks. But I'd love to be able to say in this case, yep, my flight got canceled because of cosmic rays. I think that might be even better than a volcano, but I hope it still hope it never happens. They're both kind of cool. Yes, both are. As long as you're flight. Yeah, I might actually, yeah, I don't want a headlesseration in a plane. But the big takeaway though from that is if you're seated on a plane, buckle up. Yep. buckle up because you ever see those videos of people basically flying up into the ceiling because of a wicked turbulence or maybe a, or maybe maybe a cosmic ray induced elevation loss. Yeah, that doesn't look like fun. So always buckle up, please. All right, thanks, Bob. All right, Evan, tell us about Simon Cowell's claim that he is aging backwards. What? The curious case of Simon Cowell. That was just fun. Nice. Um, boy, does anyone not know who Simon Cowell is? I guess I have to give you two sentences on him. A British television producer and talent show judge best known for his, well, sharp and often blunt critiques on shows like American Idol, the X Factor, and Britain's Got Talent. He's pretty widely recognized as one of the most influential figures in modern reality TV and the music industry. So he's, he's big time. Simon Cowell is 66 years old. Any claims he is aging backwards. Hmm. Now this was a, I read this over at an AOL article, AOL. I'm on. Uh, where Cowell tributes his rejuvenation to a treatment he's been getting at a high end wellness clinic. Loof. He will not specify exactly the clinic that I just threw up in my mouth. The, the procedure involves removing his blood, quote, cleansing it and then putting it back into his body. Nope. Well, let me read the quote. Let me, let me say it and should I affect an accent? No, I'll, I'll save you first. I go to this place, this wellness clinic where they actually take your blood. They rinse it. They filter it and then they put it back in your body. And you do all these tests and they tell you your age. So I've actually aged backwards by eating better, more exercise, less stress and certain supplements. He adds. He said they, they, they rinse it. They rinse your blood. Yeah, that's look out to me too. Right. And, and, oh gosh. So okay. Quarrained to the celebrities with their anti aging hacks. I mean, my gosh, how many of these do we really need? But they happen and they happen with high profile people like this, blood removal. What's this all about? What exactly is he describing? Well, Simon doesn't name the exact procedure, but based on how it's described, you know, blood being taken out filtered and re-infused, it is likely he is referring to aphoresis or one of its wellness branded derivatives. Aphoresis, that is, well, it's not new. It's not mysterious. It's a legitimate medical procedure that is used for very specific conditions, including removing harmful antibodies in autoimmune diseases, treating certain blood disorders, or removing excess cholesterol in people with familial hyper-cholesterolemia. Right. So too much cholesterol that you otherwise can't get rid of. Yeah, but they're not just rinsing the blood. No, no, no. And this is where I, so the first thing I can to my mind is like, is this a form of dialysis? Because isn't that really what dialysis is? But dialysis and aphoresis are two different things I looked. But in the case, this is how he just, this is how Cal describes it. Right. Take the blood, take the blood, circulate it outside the body. You pass it through a machine that separates plasma from the blood cells. It removes whatever targeted components, you know, your doctors are going after. And then you return the remaining blood to the patient. But they're probably doing literally nothing at this clinic. They're probably just taking out his blood and putting it right back in it. I would think so. They could be. But even if they are doing what they're saying they're doing, it's all bullshit, right? So they're just, they're oxygenating it, which is ridiculous, because your blood has the maximum amount of oxygen it can possibly have. That, you know, I mean, like when you get supposed to oxygen, it absorbs up to its maximum capacity to absorb oxygen. And then they're exposing it to ozone, which is... It's not good. Right, which is supposed to induce oxidative stress. Yeah, you don't want that. Yeah, but they say, yeah, but that's, it's like hormesis, right? It's, it'll make your body defend itself from oxidative stress. You don't have to pump your blood full of free radicals. Yeah. That's a terrible idea. And the filtering it, like, you know, what, what are they filtering it of? You know, if your kidneys are working, you don't need your blood filter. Well, and here's the thing, like, it's not just that it's like, oh, you don't need it because everything works. It's harmful to take out too many minerals. It's harmful. It's harmful. Yeah. It's a lot of risk-free. No, and the risks that are there are a little scary. They're, you know, it's like this could be bad for like organ failure type stuff. For sure. Because your body has the right amount of like salt and the right pH and the right amount of water. You go messing with somebody's osmolarity or their, you know, pH, like you can kill them. We're also going to be taking out proteins. So when we do like this kind of ferrisis, you have to put back albumin, right? Because then you're taking out all the antibodies. That's the main primary reason why we use this kind of, I don't know if they're doing that kind of ferrisis, but if they, if they are filtering out the proteins, that would suppress your immune system. Yeah. You wouldn't want to do that. That's why I think they're just taking his blood out and putting it right back in him. Yeah. They might. And they're going, it's better. We wave to magnet over it. But I think it's all bullshit too. I think they're just saying stuff. Yeah, but I mean, physically he's watching his blood go into a tube and then come back in. So it's literally like they're just taking his blood out to turn around and put it back inside of it. Yeah. And even that is not without risk. You guys, I get iron infusions because I'm anemic. I got a blood clot from an iron infusion. Like, and it's likely that it wasn't the iron itself, just the physical act of getting an IV place. Like don't, I'm not saying be scared of getting an IV. Like if you need an IV, get an IV, but don't get one if you don't need one. But Kara, he claims it's reversing his aging though. Because they're taking because they're giving him tests that tell him that. Yeah, test that tell him. Look how healthy you look. You're 66, but you have whatever metabolism or whatever markers of a 50 year old person. Well, this quote though, but this quote in isolation here actually caught my attention. This is the quote from the article. It's he says Evan, you, it says you do all these tests and they tell you your age. So I've actually aged backwards by eating better, more exercise and less stress. And of course, any, the supplement says, but wait a second. Yes. That would actually work by, by less stress, more exercise in eating better. Yes, you will, by many measures, be aging backwards because that's what you should be God doing anyway. No, it's like, it's like, exactly whatever. Helped to charm. Part of a nutritious breakfast will take in with part of a new, when taken with a nutritious breakfast. Right. Exactly. So forget all the crazy shit. Just eat better exercise and reduce your stress and that will, that will do more than almost anything else you can possibly do. So he's paying for potential risk of, you know, an injection, an IV puncture site and, you know, contamination because he's not doing this in a hospital. And, and I mean, those risks exist anyway. So he's paying a lot of money for potential risk and for someone to literally say, ooh, lookie, your output is that you are. You have a blood age of 50. Like that's like, that's bullshit too. Yeah. A Ouija board. Right. There's something I was thinking. One of those booze where the, where the, there's a statue of, you know, a fortune teller and spit out a card to tell you, the, the, the, the, the dummy told me my fortune. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. Look, this is a, we've, we've seen this before. There's a lot of what, like billionaires that go through these kinds of procedures and stuff. So it's a very trendy high end, wealthy person, fat kind of thing that sounds good. Oh, if you have money to burn, crap. And you're afraid because you're old. You are prime target for this kind of thing. But if you're going to get your blood taken out of you, at least get like the blood of, you know, the youth put back into you. Well, come on. Oh, geez. And then you start doing that. Oh, I, I, I, I, I wasn't there. So interesting test results from that. From that. I mean, I'm not kidding. I'm saying mice, mice results. But, yeah, may not, it may or may not work, but at least there's like some plausible reasons to, this is just straight up. Okay. Where does the myth come from? Part of the hype comes from a parabiosis studies in mice where young and old mice share blood circulation. And some experiments showed partial rejuvenation effects of the older mice. But, yeah, that's what I'm saying. I'm not saying it works. I'm just saying, if you're going to go through the process, get some baby mouse blood. But, yeah, there's even problems with the mice studies that don't even, you know, I mean, please, before you even start to talk about humans with this stuff, you'd have more luck getting Borg nanoprobes in fun. Do that then instead. Come on, rich people. Let's get more creative than this. At least, right? Something that lights up and it's flashy. Well, everyone, we're going to take a quick break from our show to talk about one of our sponsors this week, Quince. 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Don't wait, go to quince.com slash SGU for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too, that's qunce.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, Jay, it's who's that noisy time. All right, guys, last week I played this noisy. What do you think? Yes, I have a guess. I think it is the audio representation of the air showers that Bob was talking about on board an airplane. Thank you. Exactly. It just sounds like a creepy soundtrack to like a Steven Soderberg film or something. That's legit. It's like, it's like, oop, it's like creepy walking down a hallway. But what makes that noise? The middle spaces, Cara. Oh, like a, like a digery do. No, you're so cute. You could, I bet you, you could get something kind of like that with enough effects. You could get something similar to that, not completely, but yeah, I can see that. All right, well, a lot of people guessed a listener named Matt Soskin said it's a water-powered organ and definitely not a bird. Yeah, this is, there is no bird that makes that noise. We all have to establish that amongst ourselves. It's not a water-powered organ. And now I want to hear what one of those sounds like, but that's definitely not it. Andy Barrett, Ronin, said, hey, Jay, Andy from Cheshire in the UK here, second time guessing, hopefully better than the first. I believe this is the sound of lightning being captured on the surface of Mars. That's not correct, but that's cool. He brought that up, Jay, I think because there's recent footage captured by one of the rovers of lightning strikes striking the ground on Mars. It was pretty darn cool. Yeah, I read about that too. Yeah. I don't know what that was, but I think it was a really good guess, but not correct. Cooper Parrish, Ronin said, how do you think we're hearing elevator hoist ropes being played by someone in the machine room or shaft? Oh, weird. Yes, so shaft. It seems a lot. It's dangerous or uncertain. It seems a lot. It's dangerous or uncertain. And you can vibrate them and they can get that echoey sound in there and it's quite a bit of space to reverberate. That's a really, really interesting and fun guess, but you are not correct. A listener named Stephen Badam wrote in said, I think this is a bowed metal plate being played in a reverberation chamber. Sometimes these sounds are used in soundscapes for theater or in movies to create a creepy atmosphere. This was a close guess, not completely there. And then we will move on to a couple of winners. A listener named Matthew Bush was the first one to guess correctly. He said, hi folks, I think this week's noisy is a large orchestral gong or tam tam being bowed by a percussionist. He's mostly correct and we have another listener named Ben Romney who wrote in hey guys love your show you bringing sand and reason to an increasingly insane world. Keep up the good work. I think I've heard this week's noisy from a video circulating online. It sounds like the 60 inch Sean is set oh gong in this plate. In this case played by the amazing skill of bear love. Flume. So Matthew guessed first and it was a really good guess. He was a little bit off because it's not being bowed. It's being hammered by like a gong hammer. So Ben did get it completely correct. So this is a 60 inch Sean as set oh gong. Like I said, there's a woman playing it who's wearing a black shirt. And she has the word gong in large print on her t-shirt which is pretty funny. Let me play for you again. Now this isn't like someone smashing it with the hammer, right? This is someone who's like rubbing it kind of. It's a very, very large gong. How cool is that? Cool. Very cool. For the record J if you exposed a lyre bird to that sound they could make that sound. If you think so? Yeah, I do. They don't have the hardware to make that bassy. I don't know. It's amazing what they could do. We'll have to find one of those bird steve and we'll see what we could do. Alright, so this noisy was sent in by me and I'm going to play for you immediately. If you think you know what this week's noisy is or you heard something cool, email me at WTNatthescepticsguy.org. Steve, Jay, we have tickets still available for our show in Seattle, right? We'll be in Seattle, Washington. This will be on the January 10th. We're going to be doing a private show. This is a live podcast recording with all five of us there and your tribe. And if you care, Ian will also be there, but he won't be performing. He'll be working, which is him performing, I guess, in a way. Anyway, we'll be doing a private show. Plus, this is a three hour show. So we do a live recording of the show. And then for at least an hour mixed in, we do other fun things with the audience. If you've been to one, you know, what we different types of things that we do, but no two shows are the same. We just keep changing it up. And also that night, this is also on January 10th. We will be doing a skeptical extravagant just stage show. This is our show where we have a theme in this. This show, which is you cannot trust your senses. And we will show you all the ways that you cannot trust your senses. It's also very fun. Lots of laughter, lots of crazy stuff going on hosted by George Robb. If you're interested in either of these, you can go to the skeptic sky dot org. There's buttons on there for those shows. We also have shows that are going to happen in Wisconsin. So if you're interested, we'll be in Madison, Wisconsin on May 15, 16. So go to the website. So Jay, people are asking about Australia next year. I guess the tickets are not up yet. They're not on the website yet. They will be up probably within the next few days. Ian and I are working with the web developer for the Australian skeptics. And we're finalizing everything. Okay. But it is official. So we will be in LA on July 18th, 2026 for an extravagant and private show. And we'll be in Sydney, Australia, July 22nd, 2026 for an extravagant and then not a con Australia, July 23rd to 25th. And then we'll be in Christchurch, New Zealand on July 30th for an extravagant and then for the New Zealand skeptical conference on July 31st and August 1st. Cool. Right. But those tickets will be up sometime. They're there. They're coming. They're coming. Those Christmas. We're with Christmas coming at home. There it is. All right. Let's do a couple of questions and email. So I was corrected by a few people on the pronunciation of Ralph Fines. He did it wrong again. His name is spelled R-A-L-P-A. That's Ralph. But it's Ralph. But it's pronounced in the old English way, Ralph. Yeah. According to who though. According to him. According to him. Although he said he kind of gave up correcting people because it's a lost cause because it's people are pronouncing it the way it's spelled. But the old English pronunciation is Rafe. So his name is Rafe Fines, which is interesting because I always either thought he was Rae Fines or Ralph Fines. And I think for a long time, until now really I didn't realize that I was remembering both versions of his name, but just at different times. I don't think about him that often. And sometimes he's Rae Fines. Sometimes he's Ralph Fines. And I don't really remember. But now he only took a couple of things on the planet. Yeah, both times you're all on the planet calling him Rafe is himself and his mother. That's not true. Everyone calls him Rae Fines. Oh shit. They do. Every reporter, every time you hear anybody talk about him on TV, every time he's referred to him. So is his last name, Inez? No. Is it Rafe Inez? No, this is the problem with having a name that ends in it and a name that starts in it. But how many of those people in their heads are saying Rae Fines? And this sounds like Rae Fines. Yeah. There's no difference between Rae Fines and Rae Fines. There's no difference. Yeah. You know, he must be called Rae that's fine. My question is, that's a good one. Who, is this something that his parents gave him, Ralph Rafe or did he like, stings come to the conclusion during his life? I want to be called, right. My name is now pronounced this way. Bob is basically asking who's to blame here. Well, you could think of it that way. But I'm just curious, like where that came from. It's middle name is 5'5 by the way. Right. Right. Well, it's not as bad as what? That guy named Nvidia, right? Well, let's know the thing. Kara. What you were doing on like its Nvidia, but I just didn't bother correcting you. And in my head, like I'll tell you this, I knew this. Like I knew that I had done a story on them previously and I was like, I think I pronounced that name wrong. I need to look it up. So I looked it up. It's a wrong. I said Nvidia because it spelled NVIDIA. So I was like, okay, Nvidia. And then I looked it up and it was like, it's pronounced NVIDIA. And I was like, Nvidia, Nvidia, Nvidia. So NVIDIA, like, and I don't, it's because if they want it to be pronounced NVIDIA, they should spell it NVIDIA. Right, right. Yeah. That's different. They just made this name up whole cloth. Race parents just went back to the old way that that name was always said. I don't like any of it. I don't either. I don't either. But here's the thing. I can't pronounce it anyway. So you throw a name like race at you and his last name is fine. What the hell? Who thinks that this is going to work out? But here's the thing, right? Like there are names from other cultures and other languages that are hard for English speakers to pronounce and that's fine. Yeah, but this is an English name. This is, yes, okay, but it's old English. That's not actually old English. But like if you just make up a name, just spell it in a way that people aren't going to have a hard time pronouncing it. Yeah. Like that's the annoying thing because I looked it up and apparently in video, which I'm going to say in video is based on the Latin word in video, which is spelled with a freaking eye at the beginning. Oh, there you go. That's what they're basing it on. Oh, just call your company in video. No, it has to be Nvidia. Because that's not even the same thing. If you have to explain how your name is pronounced, that's a fail in my opinion. And again, it's fine if it's because it's culturally or linguistically from something else going on. But if you're like, oh, if I capitalize this one letter and then I hyphenate this, it's like Elon's kids. Like nobody's ever going to be pronounced their names, right? Yeah, I agree with you. It gets to the point where it gets to be a little too much. It's annoying. But it's fine that we got literally, okay, not literally. I'm exaggerating, but a million emails about this that were all like, Kara, somebody needs to tell Kara that it's pronounced envy. It's the most important tech company on the planet. And it's for the Nvidia. But God email that says, here's the thing. How come when somebody has feedback for any of the guys, they say, Jay, this is the situation or Bob, you made this mistake. The one is Kara. They say, guys, tell Kara. Tell Kara. Tell Kara. Why do they do that? It's so sweet. It's so sweet. That's because everybody knows that until Kara has been with us for 15 years, she won't get a direct email. That's it. Yeah, that's the most terrible. It's because my lady brain couldn't handle the responsibility of also be, here's the thing. When you guys email us, it goes to all of us. We don't get by the way. I read all of those emails about me and the third person. Don't write emails to all of us talking about Kara in the third person. Yeah, don't write emails to any of us. Because it's a big thing. The name. It's like every once in a while on Reddit or whatever. I'm just like, oh my God. The life of a woman on the internet. But going back to the Nvidia, while I agree that it is a very short company. That is important for us at whatever. It's not a B2B company. They do make consumer products. I hear you. But it's not a company that a lot of people, like they make things that go in things. Does that make sense? It's a part. It's a part. Yeah. So unless you're like building your own computer or you're involved, which you guys do, yeah, or you're involved in the tech industry. And yes, I think increasingly we are going to need to be aware of this company because it is very important in the sector. I'll try my damnedest to get it right. But I'm sorry every time I read the word, the word is screaming to be pronounced. Nvidia. Do it. Do it, Kara. Isn't it? You guys look at that word and tell me. I think I heard the name before I saw it spell to I just never even have a problem. Yeah. It's uncomfortable not having a valid between the end and the V. It just is. Yeah. So you want to put one in there? Yes. I would say Nvidia not Nvidia. All right. Ash Gray, that's hard. Ask Gray. Come on. We got another email. This one comes from Barry Appleman. I love that name, Barry. Yeah, but Steve deliberately pronounced it. It could be a palman. I don't know. It's a-b-p-l-l-n-a-n. Oh, like Dr. Spachemman and Bertie are. Dr. Spachemman. But if I were Barry, I would be Appleman. All right. Yes. This European Union negotiators reached a deal on new rules for gene editing to help farmers produce healthier animals and crops. The new rules exempt gene edited plants and animals from the blocks, regulations, covering genetically modified organisms because gene editing mimics the natural breeding process. Yes. So Losto needs to be formally approved for the European Parliament and the EU Council to take effect. Okay. So it goes into a little more detail there. We'll have that in the show notes. Yeah, this is true. I've been following this and I looked at that just to see what the update is. That sounds awesome, right? Yeah. So they made a new designation called new genomic techniques and GTs. Oh. And they're going to regulate them more like regular crops, not like GMO crops because their GMO regulations are ridiculous and onerous. But they're saying, okay. So for things like, you know, CRISPR and other newer techniques, we'll just consider them not GMOs. They're genetic, they're new genomic techniques. It's gene editing, but not genetic modification. And what's the difference? The difference is, well, the GMOs make like significant changes to the genes, like introducing genes that couldn't happen with breeding. Whereas the gene editing is making the kind of gene edits that could happen potentially with traditional breeding techniques. Yeah, it's just like a faster version of traditional techniques, right? Yeah. But it's a distinction without a difference in my opinion. They're splitting hair. I hear you, but we've long made the distinction. I mean, this is what's always bothered me. I hear you if you want to say this is a transgenic organism versus a non-transgenic organism. Like if you want to make that distinction in genetic research, fine. But like we already have a way to make that distinction. This is a transgene that doesn't have a transgene. Yeah, but I would argue that there's nothing inherently risky about putting a transgene into an organism. Right. No, I agree. It's based on this sort of essence appealed to nature kind of nonsense where it's like, oh, a tomato gene is tomato-y and it doesn't belong in a banana plant, whatever. It's like they're all the same. Which is like every single fruit, not every single, but most of the fruits you're eating and vegetables you're eating have already been bred with not the same species. Right. And plants, all plants are going to share 70 plus percent of their genes already. We share 60 percent of our genes with bananas humans do. And bacteria swapping DNA in and out of us all the time. So it's whatever. But the reason for this is pretty obvious because they realize that their ownerous anti-GMO regulations are causing a competitive disadvantage for EU farmers. And there's lots of cool gene modifications coming down the pike that are necessary to increase production, adapt plants to a warming climate, et cetera, et cetera. And like, well, yeah, we have to find some way to allow these new gene-edited crops while still not looking to the public like we're caving on GMOs. But this is their, to compromise, they come up with, which is fine. I still think it's like they're making this pseudo-scientific distinction splitting hairs between gene-edited and GMOs. But at least they're allowing, they're making the exceptions for the newer technologies. Which basically, obviously, it's a lot of their anti-GMO regulations, which is good. All right. Evan. Yeah. Evan, you got a game for us called Who Said That? Yes. We played this before. We have played this before. Hey, Steve, is it too late to change the name of the game? No. To your game, call it a word. The game is called Who Am I? No. Because when I told you the name earlier, I had forgotten what the name of the game was, and I went back and looked it up. Who am I? This is how you burn steam. Thank you. Next one. In which I am going to read a paragraph to you of somebody describing themselves. And you have to guess who that person is. The person could be real or fictitious, but definitely has something to do with science or skepticism. Okay. So it's not like going to be a baseball player, you know, like that. Here's how it will work. I will start to read. Each of you, for each of these, are allowed a guess. One guess. Okay. If you know it, you will interrupt me by saying, I know I will stop reading where I am and you will give your guess. I will tell you if you're right or wrong. If you're wrong, we keep going so that the other players can play. Does everyone understand the rules of this? So we don't blur it out the answer yourself. Correct. You're not blur it out the answer. I would like to hear an I know, nice and simple. Okay. Here we go. For most of my life, I've tried to make sense of a universe that refuses to give up its secrets easily. Singularities, the origins of time and the strange fact that even a black hole isn't truly black if you look closely enough. Carl's taking. Hey, Jake gets my as one for the break in the rule. I have to interrupt you. Yeah, you interrupt by saying, I know you don't put up the answer. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I said. Jay, you're incorrect. I will continue to read and you're out of this and you're out of this one. Oh, Steve. Can I guess? Yes. I think it's Stephen Hawking's. It is Stephen Hawking. There we go. Yep. Okay. I'll read the rest of it. This eventually came the world through a synthetic companion that never has learned to answer the biggest cosmological questions. I spent decades perched in a motorized wheelchair moving through the lecture halls instead of galaxies, but always with the same mission to show that the cosmos is not just the domain of mathematicians and physicists, but something everyone can understand even in a brief history. I get it, Evan. So like the longer you talk, the more the more it gets it away. I guess I'll have more. All right. Let's move on to the second one. I've spent my life listening to minds that behave a little differently. Patients who taste words hear colored. I know. I know. Oh, I know. That was Kara. Oliver Sacks. Oliver Sacks. I knew it just after you did. You can find nanosecond here. Or lose any sense of their own body. It still reveals something profound about what it means to be human. I've chronicled these neurological adventures in books that blend science with storytelling, whether following a drummer who keeps time despite amnesia or a man who mistook one very unexpected thing for his wife's hat. When I wasn't writing, I was often on my motorcycle. I didn't know that. Swimming long distances or diving into music, which I consider as diagnostic as any medical test. So there you go. Oliver Sacks. Moving on. My life's work has revolved around understanding how the smallest forces in the universe can trigger outsized consequences. Gamma interactions, energy thresholds, cellular cascades. These were once purely academic curiosities until an unexpected accident tied my physiology to them in ways I'm still trying to unravel. Since then, I've kept to the margins offering my expertise discreetly, careful to avoid distressors that could complicate things. Let's just say, I've learned that emotional equilibrium is not merely a state of mind, but a matter of public safety. I prefer calm, because the alternative can be overwhelmingly disruptive. Could these be fantasy-cut people? I did say yes, these could be either real or fictitious, but having to do with science or skepticism. Is that... Or I'll take a guess I know. No, head, Steve. Is that Bruce Banner? That is Bruce Banner, very good. Yeah, that was a tricky one. Gamma interactions. Oh, Jesus. Careful to avoid stressors that could complicate things. Yeah, that was a tough one, but that was good. No, it wasn't. I would have helped me. And hindsight is god damn easy. Is it Bob? Is it easy? In hindsight, there are two more. I would say hindsight is 2010. Here's the time to catch up, Bob. Two more. Most people come to me only after everyone else has failed, which is just the way I like it. Patterns hide inside symptoms, the way secrets hide in people, and I've made a career out of prying both open, usually while limping through the hospital with a cane in one hand. I know. Bob? House? Can I get a first name? Doctor House is my aunt. Doctor House. Doctor House. Doctor House. Yes. Yes. Doctor House has a first name too if you want full credit. Hugh Laurie. He gets the actor who portrayed the doctor house. No one knows the first name. I don't know his first name. All right. Then Bob's going to get it. Bob will get it. Wait, wait, hold on a second. Oh, Jay, do you think I got dinged for doing something wrong, and Bob, he doesn't? Why did he do anything wrong? He just gave a partial answer. He gave the last name. That's wrong. That's funny. When you first said I'm thinking, that's Sherlock Holmes. I was too. Then you did the medical thing. I'm like, no, it's the other guy who's supposed to be sure I call him Bob chimed in first. I think like in other games shows, I think that is plenty. Doctor Gregory is not a partial. I never knew that. I never knew that. No, didn't know that. I didn't know that he had. Okay, well Bob was unreasonable to expect the free. Give it to him. Yes, I'm giving it to you, Bob. I'm taking it. You don't have to give it to me. I don't know how you're going to read the rest of it. I'm going to go to the last one. Here we go one more. For years I wrestled with the heavens, convinced that the cosmos must be governed by elegant mathematical principles rather than perfect circles drawn to Bob. Is it Newton? It is not Newton. No. Okay. What the hell is this? I think I know that. Rather than perfect circles drawn by ancient authority. Starting with meticulous observations from my colleagues, I found myself chasing patterns in the wanderings of Mars until its path finally surrendered its secrets. The planets travel in stretched curves, not circles. I know. Steve. Johannes Kepler. Yeah, nice. Yeah, well done. Good job everyone. That was a lot of fun. That's good. I like how they get more of what is going on. Yeah, yeah. The reveal. Yes. The fact layers as we continue. So well played everyone. Jay, you played well too. Hey, you know, I try. All right. Well, let's go on with another game. Science or fiction? It's time for science or fiction. Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake challenge my panel and skeptics. Tell me which one is the fake. We have a theme this week. To him. Anyone have a guess as to what the theme is? Christmas. Yeah, it's going to be a couple of hints. Rain deer. One is I've been waiting years for this. Oh. Okay. And two is which episode number is this? Oh, gosh. Yeah. No. No. No. No. Huh. It's an episode 1066. Oh, 1066 is the Battle of Hastings. Exactly. That's the key. There we go. Battle of Hastings, everyone. 1066. Why have you been waiting years for this? Well, I realize at some point that at some point we're going to have episode 1066, I have to make that the theme of science or fiction. And Cara, this illustrates just how boring. No, no. You go back to me. For me, it was episode 666. I got knee excited. Yeah, well, after that, what's the next big thing coming up? This is it. All right. 100 years. That's what this has flagged. Even the battle of Hastings. Sure. Okay. Here we go. I know nothing about this. I don't know. Hastings. After the Norman Conquest of 1066, French became the official language of England and remained so until 1362. Item number two, the decisive technology of the Battle of Hastings was the stirrup used effectively by the Norman cavalry, but not yet in use by their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. And item number three, Halley's comet appeared in the skies in 1066 and was thought to be a significant omen by both sides and is even depicted in the famed Bayou tapestry depicting the Norman Conquest. Evan, go first. Do I get credit for knowing that this was the topic based on that? Yeah, you get to go first. That counts as credit, okay, I'll take. It feels like a penalty. All right. So the first one, did French become the official language of England and remained until 1362? First of all, I don't definitively know the answers to any of these. So it's his total guesswork. I am not drawing on any knowledge that I have. This one could be, you know, this is sort of the binary one. So this has a 50% chance, you know, it's in a sense of being the fiction. So statistically, in a sense, without knowing really these facts, this very well could be the fiction. Became the official language of England. Did it? Did it really? I have no recollection of it. I'm leaning towards that being the fiction. The second one about the technology, the Battle of Hastings, was the stirrup considered, well, you know, the technology, the size of technology. We think of the weapons that they use to define sort of the technology anytime there's a battle. But the stirrup could have definitely been something that may have made a difference here. So, you know, whereas my mind goes to armaments and stuff, this could wind up really being kind of the trick one that winds up being correct. And then the last one about Haley's comment appearing in the skies and the tapestry, Haley's comment has been depicted in art and tapestries in, you know, paintings and many other things. And across, you know, across many cultures, I believe as well. Did it happen in 1066? Was it the Battle of Hastings? I think it is. I'm going to go with my initial thought saying French did not become the official language of England. That one's the fiction. I'm going to agree with Evan and say French did become the official language of England. No, he said that's the fiction. That's the fact. Correct. I'm going to agree with Evan that that is the fiction. Okay. Just like that. I believe that, yes, some crazy stuff happened back then. I think French did become the official language of England. It was a crazy, it was a crazy time. And let's see. The third one, Haley's comment appeared in the skies in 1066. I'm not sure of all the dates it appeared, but I think that's true as well. The second one though, the stirrup as this new invention. I think there was something new that was used for the first time around that time, but I don't think it was the stirrup. So I'll say that that one is fiction. Okay. And Kara. Okay. So it's either that French was not the official language of England, which that one is so bizarre that I feel like that's probably science. Or that the stirrup was not the decisive technology of the battle of Hastings. Or that Haley's comment did not actually appear in the skies and was not a significant omen and not depicted in a famous tapestry. I would think that if Haley's comment did appear in the skies, it would be thought of as like a pretty big deal. And they probably would be art. So it's really a question of did it actually appear. I think the other stuff seems reasonable enough. And then the stirrup one, I don't know, like Evan, I thought you were going to pick this one because you were like, we usually think of it as like weapons. I think the decisive technology of any battle is whatever the weapons were. Or maybe the defense, you know, like maybe a shield or something that would either kill more people or prevent more people from being killed. And yes, I guess there could be an argument that a stirrup would help people stay on their horses better. And therefore be more effective killers. But I also, it's possible, but I also feel like that kind of technology, it's a loop. Like really one side had it and the other side didn't. I feel like they could see and go, that seems to be working. Let's make a bunch right now. Oh, wait, we're dead now. It's true. But like, come on. I don't know. I feel like that one's the one that's bothered me because it's like, yeah, maybe the other side had some loops to put their feet in. So that's your friction? Yeah, I'm going to go with Bob on that one. All right, Steve, before you do the reveal, if I'm wrong, if I'm wrong, I think the technology, if it wasn't the stirrup, I think with the technology of been the longbow, maybe we'll find out. That's Steve, not a bad guess. Steve, if I'm wrong, yeah, I want you to know I'm going to completely blame Evan. All right. Note it. All right. So you all go around the third one. So start there, Haley's common appeared in the skies in 1066 and was thought to be a significant omen by both sides and is even depicted in the famed value tapestry depicting the Norman conquest. You all think this one is science and this one is science. That is correct. It was there. They saw it. The, the, the, the, the, the, the angle sections are like, this is bad. And the Normans are like, this is good. They've been, we especially after the fact that, yes, of course, it's, of course, for saw our great victory or, you know, humbling defeat means whatever I wanted to mean. Okay. So you're saying the Normans won. So maybe French was the official language. The North, yes, you didn't know the Normans won. I know about this battle. It's called, it's why it's called the Norman conquest. I don't know if you just made all of this up. Steve, oh my God. I am, I am not an English war history. There is a game of phones, Karen. There's a little drama on TV right now about the Norman conquest. All right. So, but here's something. Almost. The run. So I was kind of, I was assuming you guys had a basic knowledge of the battle of Hastings and. I did. I did. And clearly that was incorrect. So have you ever seen the Bayou tapestry though? Like it's, no, I probably have, but don't recognize it as such. Yeah. I'll, I'll go with it. Here's that one is the fiction big in that the Bayou tapestry is not a tapestry. It's an embroidery. Bayou tapestry. Oh, that's technically not a tapestry. It is an embroidery. Does that mean it was knitted? Knitted. Knitted. Knitted. No, it means it's a embroidered evidence. Stitch. I know. Okay. All right. Come on. Or ring. Move on. Wow. All right. So go, go, go, I guess backwards order. The Battle of Hastings was the stirrup used effectively by the Norma Cavalry, but not yet in use by their Anglo-Saxon counterparts Bob and Kerry. You think this one is the fiction? Evan and Jay, you think this one is science? Now again, I was calibrating this to people who have some basic knowledge about a pattern. It is common knowledge in my opinion that the stirrup was the decisive technology of the Battle of Hastings. Aha. But. Yeah, the Norma Cavalry, they were able to stand up in the stirrups and brace themselves, put all their weight behind their lances, and they stayed in the saddles. They were more stable. They were able to stay in the south. Two knights in horses going against each other, the one using the stirrup effectively, has a massive advantage over the other one. Well, Steve, you actually thought I had this knowledge in my head. Total idea. I did. I did. Yes. You play poker with somebody who doesn't know what they're doing and then they win. And it pisses you off because they should have never been in the hand. A better example would be Kirk beating Spock at three dimensional chess, but we get your example. Okay. Okay. There are examples better. So, I like this, you're great. But, this is the fiction for two. Jay, don't hate me. Yeah, Bob. Thank you. One. Nice. The stirrup was in use for 300 years by the time. 300. The Anglo-Saxons absolutely had stirrups. It just never occurred to them to use it in this way in combat. So, the Normans used the stirrup way more effectively than the Anglo-Saxons. But they had, they were using stirrups. They had stirrups. That's extra dumb then. So, not only did they see them with stirrups and not have to make their own, they saw them stand up and didn't think to do that too. It was a technique. Well, again, this is when they learned that, oh wow, they were really effective at using those stirrups. We hadn't thought of using them in that way. They were obviously trained to use them in a certain way that gave them a massive advantage. But it's also, well, that's the conventional wisdom. It is a controversial one role that actually played in the battle. Was it decisive? It probably not. The will in the concert. Was anything actually decisive? Yeah, the thing that probably did at that, like, changed the battle was that what William the conqueror did was he, they feigned a retreat. Because you basically had the Anglo-Saxons were relying on their shield wall and the Normans couldn't break through the shield wall even with their stirrups, right? They couldn't break through. So then they feigned a retreat, some of the people in the shield wall broke ranks to chase them and then they wheeled around and attacked the weak point in the wall and broke through. That was the entire battle right there. Yeah, I mean, this is what we think, right? Well, because this was an era of people literally just lining up in rows, right? Well, you've marked the shield wall. The shield wall was a huge, yeah. The shield wall was a huge, Steve technique. Steve, you're going to say, I'm mainly from the Romans, by the way. So I'm familiar with this battle mainly because I listened to an audiobook by David Mitchell of Mitchell and Webb called Unruly, the Ridiculous History of England, England's Kings and Queens. Yeah. I mean, I'm not big. I don't read history books really. I'm focused more on whatever science and geeky stuff, but I'm not a big science nerd, but I listened to it. Didn't think I was going to like it, but this is David Mitchell. He made it hilarious and entertaining, which is so hard to pull off. And if I didn't listen to that book, I might not have done as well tonight. So I mean, I'm just recommending it if anyone likes David Mitchell. I mean, you just have to be like a human. He is absolutely. And I'm not a big history guy. And I loved it. So if you like or love history, I think you'll be not over this book Unruly by David Mitchell. I'm just going to throw that out there. I loved it. He's trying to throw it as well. There it is. Thank you. All right. Which means that after the Norman Conquest in 1066, French became the official language of England. It remains so until 1362. And science, almost 300 years. And what that means is French was spoken by nobility. It was spoken in the court. It was crazy. And it was a spoke in courtrooms, not only the noble court, but in any legal proceeding. Latin was still spoken by the church and the common folk spoke English. But if everybody who was anybody spoke French for 300 years, and there was a law passed in 1362 saying that all legal procedures had to be done in English. That's what ended that era. So there must have been like a few decades after 1066 where people were like, I have no idea what anybody is saying. But it was the nobility that took over England. That's like we're speaking French. Right. That makes sense. Right. And it was, you know, they say it was Norman Angle of French, whatever, but it was still French. Was that whatever version of French? And in French was actually the language of aristocracy in Europe into the like the early, into the late 1800s, I think, ran that time. It survived a long time as the language of aristocracy. All right. Well, good job, Bob, and Cara, despite your relative lack of knowledge about the hate things. Bob. I know this is one of those things like I just grew up knowing this, right? To me, this is just like everyone knows this, right? It's just hard to. Yeah. Very, very short-sighted abuse. It was. But still it was. I wanted to talk about the battle of hate things. I'm glad you had fun. You waited 20 plus years. I'm agonizing over what I should make. I almost, the other thing I almost made at the fiction was the battle of Hastings, of course, didn't take place in Hastings, right? That's true. Did not take place in Hastings. Of course, yeah. It took place seven miles away on a hill. Hill, yeah. Yeah. Near a town, and the town today is called Battle. That's the name of the town. Yeah, it's really interesting shit. It was named that after, of course, the battle. But by some guy named Rafe. Initially, it was the battle near Hastings. Near Hastings. Yeah. And then it morphed into the battle of Hastings. It's really cool if you actually care about it. It is. I'm like, I could say the battle of Hastings took place in York. But they realize how far away Hastings is from York and how implausible it is. Yeah, I'm probably going to be a moron to not know how far Hastings is. I don't know if I would have known it was in England before you started getting sick. Norman is French. So if I said to you, I think I know what I'm getting you punks for Christ Mercy, you have no idea what Mercy is. Londonium. Londonium. Londonium. I love that. Londonium. It's a way. Why did you say Londonium? Where did you get that from? I got that from the movie, the Guy Richie movie of King Arthur, what was it called? Because they called it Londonium in that movie. That's hard because I... The legend of the legend of Excalibur, or legend of the sword, I think it's called. I heard it from a short audio story that has the best opening sentence of any short story I have ever read. And that line is, I knew when he walked into the barbershop that his beard was evil. And that's the opening line. And then the narration and the story are wonderful. I wish I remember that. That's a pretty good opening line. That's a great opening line. And he makes it work. And then the narrator is basically a god in this short story. He doesn't care. His voice is an instrument like few narrators I have ever, ever heard before. And that's the story. Yeah. I googled it. And now I know what it is. Can you name all seven kingdoms? Oh, I don't like Northumbria, Westix, Mercia. That's pretty freaking good. He's looking at Chad G. I'm not. He's anglia. I watch the last King Westero's, which is about also in the same era. And he roleplayed this battle like 2000 times. And he played, he played Call to Hastings part two. So you probably know that they called it the heptarchy. No way, the heptarchy. The thing you need to know about Steve is that he remembers almost everything that he reads. Well, but here's the name. That's not really true. I remember a lot of things I read too. I would never choose to read about it. Oh, I love this kind of history. That's the history. I love history too. But I think I am just not an anglify. Like I could care less about all the. Are you a frank? A lot of dudes fighting over land. Oh, okay. Yeah, that's just not my area of history that interests me. Okay. I found the name of that awesome short story. It's from the podcast called podcast. So episode 229, the name of the short story is the Tonser's son. Wonderful short story and narration. Cool. All right. I think it was a quote. Before I do that, I want to note that we just set the record for the longest post. Yeah. Oh, science or fiction. This action you're right, man. History. I only took to episode 1066. Well, this, this was an extra fun episode that I think might go on my list for next week. This is a fun episode. We just let you know. Yeah, that's true. Absolutely. He's just happy that we want science or fiction. Yeah, too. That too. But I think we're laughing more than usual. Here's the quote. We are all flawed in creatures of our times. Is it fair to judge us by the unknown standards of the future? So wrote Carl Sagan in his book, The Demon Haunted World. Science is a candle in the dark. I remember that one. And this is a question we talk about on the show. It does come up. Yeah. It's a very interesting question. You know, to what extent do we judge people by the standards of their time versus our current standards? And it's complicated. Not as often as we shared. Yeah, it's definitely very complicated. And also to what extent do we give people a pat like do we assume that the worst in people of the time was the standard of the time because there are always the people who weren't doing that. Right. Like anytime we look in the past, there were always progressive and inclusive and like the center of gravity and other standards. If you lived in that time, how would you be? Right. We all think, of course, we would be the progressives of that time, or we would be the people, the more modern thinking of that time. No, chances are you, as Seinfeld said, you would have been goose stepping right along with all the other Nazis. Oh, yeah. I disagree because we're living in this time. We're living in this time and I know where I stand on this political spectrum. That's true. I'm, you know, so I think we are living in one of those times. I mean, you specifically care. I'm just saying like the general like people. Especially it's a bell curve. I mean, it's a bell curve and if you're in the middle of the bell curve of your time, you know, how responsible are you for that? How much are we going to fault people for that versus the stuff one, the language our care and shoes doing. Yeah. Well, easy to be where we are, especially if you're in the middle of the bell curve now and you're, you know, hating on people who were in the middle of the bell curve 200 years ago. That's where I'm saying there's a little hypocrisy there. Absolutely. Yeah. There's always a norm and we're always in history. Yeah. So how do you, where are you relative to the norm right now? Yeah. Yeah. Ask yourself that. But it is interesting. I often think about like how hard it is to get out of history and to look at something objectively. It is. Like people don't know that they're in history. You know what I mean? I mean, if you look back at people like don't they know they're in the middle of the revolution, whatever. They don't know that. Yeah. And just watched Ken Burns, American Revolution. I'm watching that right now. It's fantastic. It is. But he's really good at continually reminding you that these people didn't know they were in the middle of the American revolution. They were just living their lives in the man. It's getting violent. Yeah. They're just doing what they're doing and even playing on. But the way it, the way it on, on, on, on rebels is just really interesting. It's like, yeah, they weren't planned. The thing was planned. They just sort of happened in a lot of ways. It's very interesting. All right. Enough of that. Don't forget to send us your choice for the best of everything for the next four years. Your end of the episode. Please. And until next week, this is your SkepticSky to the Universe. SkepticSky to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theSkepticSkyed.org. 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