SGU Episode 975

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SGU Episode 975
March 16th 2024
The conclusion of All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office: "To date, AARO has not discovered any empirical evidence that any sighting of a UAP represented off-world technology or the existence a classified program that had not been properly reported to Congress."  Click for image details Credit: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
SGU 974                      SGU 976
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
If you want to do seismic analysis, it's ideal if you check with a seismologist first.
Benj. Fernando, planetary seismologist
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Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction, Boeing's missteps; moral courage

Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, March 13^th, 2024, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Cara Santa Maria...

C: Howdy.

S: Jay Novella...

J: mimicks airplane crashing

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Okay. Hi. Everyone okay?

J: If you don't laugh, you'll cry. You know what I'm saying? I'm talking about Boeing and their inability to build safe planes. What the hell?

C: I mean, no. They have the ability.

J: I guess so.

C: They're choosing not to follow that path.

B: Was there something new in the news recently or what?

C: No, it's just more and more investigation is uncovering more and more stuff that we used to just think was negligence or incompetence, and now we realize it's criminal negligence kind of bordering on intentional fraud, and that's just really scary. The people who had the power to put the brakes on this plane knew the things that were wrong with it and let people fly it anyway without telling them how the planes had been altered, and people died. Lots of people died. And now I'm booking a flight to do our live shows in Chicago, and they put me on a freaking 747 MAX 8, and I don't know if I can do this.

E: Oh, my gosh.

B: Not your laptop.

J: Oh, my God Bob.

C: It's the only option.

E: No, she lost her laptop in a Boeing a year ago.

C: I did lose my laptop in a plane a few years ago, if you guys remember.

J: Yeah, I mean, Cara, that's –

C: It's really depressing.

E: I remember that. I know. Planes are not cool.

J: This is the thing that we think about, right?

C: Yes.

J: You know, first of all, this is consumer protection. We all need to be aware of this because a lot of us travel and a lot of us have to travel for work. We're going to travel a lot this year for work. The thing that bothers me, and we were talking about this a few minutes ago, is this probably boils down to money. Just greed.

C: It 100% boils down to money.

B: It always does.

C: It's not a probably. We know for a fact it boils down to money. These guys did not want to have to train pilots on a new simulator. It's very expensive. When a new plane is released and you have to train pilots on a whole new simulation, it's like super, super expensive. They tried to finagle the system to make it look like it was changed only so much. Don't worry. These changes are so insignificant. You don't even have to be retrained. You can still fly this because you already know how to fly this plane, which was bullshit. Early on, they did a flight sim with one of their really, really – like their test pilots. One of the people that they work with really knows how to fly a plane, and it had critical failures. He was like, if this had been a real plane, it would have crashed, and they buried that. It's super scary.

E: Oh, gosh. One of the other news items related to this this week is that the United States Federal Aviation Administration, the FAA, they had a report and it came out, 89 product audits from Boeing, only 56 of them passed, 33 failed. That is an abysmal result, absolutely abysmal. That's company-wide. I mean we're not talking about only a very specific airplane here, like one of their models.

C: Yeah. That's an important point to make is like I think we put a lot of attention on the MAX 8. They've tried to push it out too fast. They cut a lot of corners, blah, blah, blah. But we forget that the culture that did that is running the entire company and is making all of the planes.

J: Unfortunately, the US government isn't funding the FAA and these regulatory bodies to actually do a really good job of making sure that these things are safe. They just don't have the funding, and they don't have the employees and the bandwidth to do it.

C: No, and they're allowing sort of self-regulation here. Like most of the regulators on these previous Boeing cases worked at Boeing. I think that's a conflict of interest.

J: Yeah. I mean you can't –

C: Yeah.

S: But it's also a good example of how powerful leadership is even in a large organization. So you had Boeing which had a culture of excellence, a long history and reputation of excellence. They merged with McDonnell Douglas and then that leadership basically took over and introduced a new culture that was not dedicated to excellence and quality control and all that. It was more about, as you say, making profits. That just corrupted the whole company from the top down. Then you have the people working in the trenches who know things are wrong. They feel very uncomfortable but they keep their head down or they don't really know what to do. Sometimes they may try to do something but they get fired or they get silenced or whatever. That can happen at any institution. The leadership is so powerful and so important, right? It would be better obviously if a company was organized in such a way like that no one person could gum up the works. But it's hard. It's hard to build in that kind of resiliency because you know what? Here's the other thing and this has become painfully obvious over the last eight years or so is that there's no substitution for moral courage. At some point, people just have to display a certain amount of moral courage and just to say, no, this is not right, I'm not going to let this happen rather than going along with it. Then you understand how Nazi Germany happens. I hate to pull the Hitler card but that's like the historic example of when an entire population can be captured by a radical nut job. It's just human nature unfortunately. It's so easy for that to happen.

C: Well, I think the thing that's so depressing too is that very often in these scenarios, the moral courage is coming from the people who have the most to lose. The people, for example, at the C-suite who could very easily say, this is not okay, we need to take more time. Yes, we know we're going to take a hit with our profits and the shareholders are going to take a hit but we don't want people to die. They're not the ones doing it. They're the ones who are in this situation greedy, covering things up, pushing forward. The people that you see in every investigation I've watched of this and all of the really good critical coverage, the people who have the moral courage are those people working on the floor with a wrench in their hand saying, I don't in good conscience feel comfortable sending people to their deaths in this machine. I need to make a report to the FAA. Those people have a lot to lose.

S: Yeah, but why weren't they protected by like whistle-blower laws?

C: They probably are. They probably were. I think that there were a fair amount of people who were able to make anonymous complaints but then that's where you see the system break down. It's not like people weren't talking about this. There's a massive paper trail on this. That's why it's so infuriating.

E: Yeah, and criminal. I think ultimately it will result in criminal charges of some kind coming against someone or ones.

J: Well, but it's also the thing that throws, this is the gasoline on this problem. One bad bolt can kill hundreds of people. This isn't like pretending that you're not putting as much sugar into a cereal. This is massively important regulation that needs to be flawless, pretty damn near flawless. It has to follow the rigidity of the standards that they've set forward. It has to because one freaking bolt can kill hundreds of people.

E: Yeah, this industry demands the highest possible level of oversight regulation and adherence.

C: But that goes back.

E: There's no excuse.

C: That goes back to what Steve was saying. Like a con man, a slippery person, a person who only cares about their profits will be able to figure out how to navigate even strict regulation if they're witty enough. It really takes the person who is at the helm giving a shit about those things.

E: Yeah, like the Sacklers..

C: Exactly. Like we've seen examples of this over and over. The system is not flawless. The system has enough nooks and crannies that people, bad actors can navigate them appropriately. The issue here is that why are there bad actors in these roles? Why do they have so much power?

E: Yeah, that's a multifaceted and probably very complex question to answer.

S: Any institution, any system is made of people, you know what I mean? And if those people don't do their jobs or don't adhere to the basic principles, it doesn't mean anything.

C: But like, why don't we have corporate, like, Steve, you're a physician, I'm a psychologist, I have to adhere to the APA's ethical standards in order to maintain my license. You have to adhere to ethical standards to maintain your license. Why doesn't corporate America have to do that?

S: I think that we need to have more of that. I'm not saying that, I don't think I could categorically say there is no such system in any industry.

C: Right, right. But I don't think it's nearly as strict as people in...

S: Yeah, certainly there are some industries where we need to take another look at not only like, what are the ethical guidelines, but how are they enforced? Because without enforcement, again, it's just a handshake, you know? It doesn't really mean anything. It's only as good as the weakest link, unfortunately. But these problems are fixable too, like they're totally fixable.

C: A hundred percent they're fixable.

Special Segment: Tax Scams (9:43)

S: All right, Evan, not to change topics too much, you're going to tell us about recent IRS warnings about tax scams.

E: Yeah, so a little bit more of a public service announcement. Tis the season, I guess. Listeners of the show, you can't help know that while I'm a crime-fighting skeptic crusader by night, I'm actually a very mild-mannered tax return preparer by day. And in the tax season, it's been underway for a month for most people. But for us in the profession, we've really been hard at it since January, I would say. There have been a lot of articles and, kind of brief little newscasts. They come out early in February, like the first couple of days in February, when they open up the system and they allow people to file for their first initial refunds. And you get the little news warnings and things. But I think it's good to remind people, now that we're in the halfway point basically of the season, about these scams. There are still scams going on. The scammers never take a break. It is 24-7, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And they know right now there are tons of documents and files and data floating around everywhere in all kinds of directions right now. And there's also a lot of tax-sensitive people. And all these things can be ripe for the taking of thieves. I coined the phrase myself, tax-sensitive people. From my own experience, some of my clients have legitimate fears, if not outright dysfunctions, when it comes to matters of taxes. And this goes into matters of security for themselves as well. They sometimes will have a disposition to do anything they can to make an apparent tax-related problem just go away as fast as possible. In other words, someone will get a letter from the tax agency in the mail saying, hey, you owe us this amount for taxes. All right, I'll just write the check or I'll just hand over my credit card number. Make it go away. And the scammers know that there's a good chunk of people out there that exist that they can prey upon these people to do this against them. So a couple of things to remember when it comes to these things. First of all, the federal government will never ask you to pay for taxes, speaking of asking for taxes, via gift cards or third-party vendor checks or wire transfers, which are commonplace sort of means of transactions for people nowadays. So you have to remember that. So if anybody comes asking and wants any of these, that is a never. IRS will never do that. Also, the IRS will never threaten you. They will never demand payment. They will never ask for financial information in any of their mediums. And so you have to be very careful about that, especially if you get the phone call or the text message or the email or whatever it is. And then there are others who say, for example, they'll receive an email or a text message about those tax refunds or your e-statement is ready. It all looks very official. Go ahead. Open up that attachment. Yeah. Guess what? You've got a malware nightmare now. And at that point, who knows what kind of things they're putting onto your phone, into your computers and your hard drives and other places. Who knows what kind of chaos they've unleashed on you at that point. Don't do it. It's just general good hygiene, electronic hygiene. Be cautious also of those, especially making promises of larger and faster refunds. No, there are not separate agencies or third party agencies that can guarantee those things for you. It does not exist. Instant scam if anyone's promising that. If you ever want to check the status of your refund, if you're due a refund, there's an official IRS website to go to. It's called Where's My Refund at IRS.gov. And that's it. States also have similar websites about checking for refunds. Check with your state specifically. Check with your tax agency to see exactly which one. I can't go through all 50 of them right now. So remember, never open links from a tax claiming to be from the IRS or any tax authority at any level, IRS, state or whatever. Caller IDs. You get in a phone call. The ID says tax agent, IRS agent, some other official looking name. Do not answer it. The IRS agencies, they will never initiate a call with you. Now, that's not to say that people don't have phone calls back and forth with IRS agents and other tax agency professionals. But only after something has already been established in writing with them first. That is how it happens. There's never an initiation over electronic devices, including phones. They will also never leave you voicemails requesting any personal information, social media, direct messaging, insta-chatting, Facebooking, TikToking, all that stuff. Anyone reaching out to you through those channels, they are not IRS representatives. That screams scam as well. And you know, you do have to remind people about some of these things didn't exist 10 years ago, 20 years ago. So especially kind of the older generations of people kind of can sometimes get caught off guard with this. It's in some cases, new to them, different. They didn't have it before in their life. And now it's a new medium by which they can come into younger people. This is how they grew up with these things. So it's good to kind of remember all generations about the social media scams that go on as well. And finally, what about the good old mail system? That's the official line of communication between tax filing agencies and tax filers. Snail mail. You can't beat that.

C: I hate it.

E: Well, but that is that that is what it is that you have to use the snail mail. But that's perfectly 100 percent secure. Right? Wrong. Lots of problems with the mail as well, because the scammers know this. They will forge letters that look like official IRS notifications and they will ask for things that are kind of unusual, like, hey, fill this out because we need a tax transcript from you. Or we understand that you applied for an employer identification number, kind of the out of the ordinary requests that come in. You have to assume first that it's a scam because they know they'll go. They'll sometimes. How about this? They'll generate fake W2s. Those are income and tax reporting statements for employees. They will generate fake ones and send them to people, OK? And then maybe put a phone number on there, send things to call about information about this. There it is. Now they've got they got you hooked. They're going to try to get information from you. All kinds of different notices from IRS and other tax agencies. Be careful. The ones that you are receiving in the mail scrutinize them. And also, finally, be sure to talk to other people about this. If you're in a household, don't just look at the letter and write a check and send it off. Speak with your spouse. Speak with other people in your household. Speak with relatives who, someone who may have a little bit more experience in having dealt with these matters. Good to communicate before you respond to any of these things. Consult a tax professional, obviously, if you need to. Not everyone has the means to do that. But there are also taxpayer advocacy services out there that are that that we actually fund through our tax dollars, both at the state level and the federal level. And you can look up those agencies online if you ever get a letter or something's out of question and you don't have the money to hire somebody to help you out. These are free systems for you that are out there. Taxpayer advocates, always remember that. And if you have elderly family members kind of on their own, kind of fending for themselves, please take an interest in what they're doing also with their tax returns, try to help them out whenever possible, because they tend to be the most vulnerable of everyone in our society, especially for these kinds of scams. And I know that from personal experience. I have had to help out several of my clients who are in this in certain cases, elderly and alone. They don't have a spouse. They don't have family members living around them. And they are literally on their own. And they can get very confused about these things. Unfortunately, they call me to ask me for help on these things. So reach out to your neighbours and your other family members if they're alone to see if they need help with any of this. So there you go. A good reminder of a tax season. And April 15th can't come fast enough.

J: Evan, have you had some of your clients like have a fraud happen to them?

E: Yeah, I had a client this year's another scam that happened is that he sent in his checks for on January 15th, which is the day that you have to make any estimated tax payments that are due for the prior year. They're due by January 15th. He sent the checks in. What had happened is that somebody, they think maybe at the post office, they're not sure, took the envelopes and recognized it for what it was because it was addressed to the IRS and took the checks out and tried to whitewash them and then try to fill in other names and get them cashed. Fortunately, in this instance, the bank caught wind of what was going on when the when the check tried to clear and they denied the transaction. But that's something that has happened to at least one of our clients. And I have an unofficial unofficial that it happened to another client. I haven't had my appointment with them yet this year, but I'm about to find out.

S: Yeah, I think a good general rule is don't react to anything, anyone that contacts you by any means. Don't panic. Don't let anybody make you feel rushed or alarmed. Most things are just scans and you can just filter them right out. If you're not sure, just take down the information, say thank you, hang up, and then you make all the contacts yourself investigated, as Evan says, and get independently determined like what the number is of the agency and call them and check it out. Don't take any information that comes to you unsolicited at face value. It's almost certainly a scam. You have to basically assume everything is a scam until you prove it isn't.

E: Yeah, it's sad. It's a sad commentary again.

S: It's the world we're living in.

E: We're not on a theme this week. But really, I mean, you have to do your best to protect yourselves and protect the ones you love who can't necessarily defend themselves against these kinds of predators.

S: Right. All right. Thanks, Evan.

News Items

Pentagon UFO Report (19:58)

• Pentagon Report – No UFOs 

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S: Jay, tell us about this Pentagon UFO report.

J: Have you guys been waiting for this?

B: Oh my God.

S: Oh yeah.

B: I was so happy when I read that.

E: Baited. My brain is so baited.

J: I honestly don't think that this is going to change a lot of minds. I think that it'll help straighten out maybe a few people, but the people who really are enthusiasts about believing in UFOs or UAPs, I don't think this report's going to do much. But let's dig into a little bit about what the report said. So this has been a long anticipated report that people were hoping that the Pentagon was going to put this report out. Its focus was on the UAPs, these unidentified aerial phenomena.

S: Or anomalous phenomena.

J: Or anomalous. Hama-anomal.

E: Yeah. Right. They made that tweak.

J: So the report came out in February of 24, and it covers classified documents from the years 1945 to 2023. So that's basically the lifespan of UFOs, right, Steve?

S: The modern UFO phenomenon, sure, yeah.

J: So they firmly state that there is no verifiable evidence that the U.S. government encountered during those years about alien life, or the U.S. government has not engaged in concealing any evidence whatsoever. So the report was delivered to the U.S. Congress, and it thoroughly, thoroughly invalidates various conspiracy theories that claim the U.S. government had interactions with extraterrestrial beings or technology. I mean, no surprise to critical thinkers out there, but again, there's a lot of people who, this is one of their talking points, that the U.S. government, Area 42, all that stuff.

S: Area 51.

J: Sorry. Whatever. 42, 51, doesn't matter.

C: All the same. Whatever.

E: There's a whole bunch of areas.

J: Yeah. Area 51. What came before that, Steve? Right? The report dismisses the idea that the U.S. government, get this, right? We have to pay adults to do this. The U.S. government had to put out a paper that said, we don't possess alien spacecraft. We have not been involved in reverse engineering extraterrestrial technology, right? We have to actually spend massive tax dollars so people can do this research and conclude that we haven't done this. So the report clarifies multiple misunderstandings surrounding all of these UFO sightings throughout the years, particularly sightings from the 1960s. That was a hotbed of UFO activity, according to the enthusiasts. Sightings from that time, they were actually seeing, the report says this, they were actually seeing American testing of spy planes and spacecraft. That was the, largely that's what people were seeing and that makes perfect sense. So a proposal from the 2010s to reverse engineer any found alien technology, now this was legit. People put forward a proposal that was saying we should reverse engineer any of this alien technology. That proposal was rejected flat out because it lacked merit, right? We don't have alien technology to reverse engineer. So the proposal was useless. Major General Pat Ryder, who is the Pentagon's press secretary, he had to reinforce what the report's findings said by saying that no U.S. government investigations or academic sponsored research has confirmed extraterrestrial technology in UAP sightings. So this report just absolutely destroys, legitimately destroys any possible idea that we've seen, come in contact with, acquired technology of any sort. It just, none of it has happened. And the report was conducted at the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO. It included classified and unclassified evidence, full access to secretive government programs related to UFOs. There were 30 interviews with intelligence personnel. And the goal of the report was to demonstrate that the government's transparency and their overall seriousness in addressing this as a public concern, is there. And they just want, they want the public to know this is not legitimate in any way. So you know, it's a pretty powerful document, like, and again, I honestly don't think, I don't know what you guys think, I just don't think this is going to like change much. You know, what's it going to do? You think that people who believed in UFOs their whole life or, they think they're going to be like, oh, okay, never mind, that's, that doesn't happen.

E: Well, and the fact that it's coming from the Pentagon, which is already a distrusted agency by a lot of people in the UFO community, is going to possibly even throw some more gas on the fire and it'll allow them to say, oh, sure, that's the Department of Defence saying that. What else do you expect them to say? It was absolutely predictable that this was going to be the response. So you're right, Jay. I think it will not have a positive.

S: Yeah, it's the government saying the government's not hiding any information. So if you're already believing conspiracy theories, this is of no value. But there's a lot of details in there that are very interesting. You mentioned, some of them, Jay, the fact that, if you, as you investigate individual eyewitness accounts, they're either, they fall into two categories. One's that they can identify as a terrestrial mundane phenomenon. It was a plane, a bird, an insect or whatever. The other ones are crappy evidence or too crappy to, there's not enough evidence or it's too low quality to make any identification. That's it. There's two possibilities. There's no third category where you have high grade evidence, but you still can't identify what it is. It's something that's so unusual. We don't know what it is. And certainly there's nothing where you're like, yeah, that's an alien spacecraft. It's just either it's identified or the evidence is crap. But I think even more damning was their report on the UFO, peddlers who were giving testimony to Congress and were giving a lot of the. So there's a couple of things to note here. One is they basically said, all right, here's your chance. If you have any evidence, if you have anything, bring it forward now. You have total immunity. This is total anonymity, total secrecy. Just give us the evidence. Nobody came forward with anything. Number two, when they investigated the ufologists, they basically said it's a circle jerk, right? It's like one person is referring to evidence from another one who's referring to evidence from the third person who's referring to the first person again, right? There was just this circular evidence. There was no external validity at all. And then the other type of evidence was people who were on like the periphery of intelligence or military organizations or operations who misinterpreted what they were hearing. They were hearing people talking about some secret program and they put it through their UFO filter and they heard, oh, they must be talking about UFOs. But they weren't. They just completely misunderstood what they were hearing.

B: Right.

S: But they completely, because that's what they do. We see this all the time. You take something out of context, you like wilfully interpret it in the context of your preferred narrative, in this case UFOs. But that's not really what they were saying. So that was it. It was really basically all just a UFO circle jerk without any actual evidence or eyewitness testimony or anybody coming forward with any firsthand account, nothing. As we predicted.

J: Well, the one thing, this guy named Grouch, have you heard him?

S: Oh, yeah. Yeah. We talked about him a little bit.

E: Oh, yes. Oh, yeah.

J: In 2023, Grouch, who was an officer in the United States Air Force, he spoke to reporters and gave firm testimony during a hearing held in the U.S. House of Representatives. During that discussion or those discussions that they had, Grouch allegedly alleged that the U.S. federal government operates a covert program dedicated to the recovery and reverse engineering of UFOs. When that happens, for whatever reason this guy did that, that sets fires in people's imaginations.

B: Oh, God. Yeah.

J: We can only theorize what his motivation is, but it is powerful testimony coming from someone who supposedly would have access and everything. But even still, I mean, there's so many people out there with different temperaments and motivations and reasoning and whatever, whatever pushes this guy's buttons. He decided that he wanted to say that and it could damage public opinion for a generation.

E: I've looked into some people when I've prepared news items and articles and other things about people who are these officials, Jay, who do have seats of power at some, and respect at some levels and are very knowledgeable about certain things. And it comes up that, yeah, they feel that there is sufficient evidence for UFO or extraterrestrial activity or something else like that. And if you look back, kind of maybe a history of kind of the things that they've talked about, they've written, the conferences they've attended, the books that they are, have influenced them. A lot of them come from a predisposition to believe in this kind of stuff to begin with. They were either part of, affiliated with an organization, gave a talk to MUFON, right? Had some connections with a cable television series that did, a special on UFOs. So they, even though they achieve these kinds of ranks and positions in a lot of times, the seeds were already planted much earlier on at some point in their life. And it's just kind of blossoming through as part of their career as they go, as they go along these paths.

S: All right. Thanks, Jay.

Microplastic Risks (29:38)

• Landmark study links microplastics to serious health problems 

S: So, Cara, we were talking about microplastics quite a bit, and now we have a study to tell us what, we've said the risks are unknown, but maybe now we know a little bit more about what the risks actually are.

C: Yeah. So there's a pretty large study that was just published in the New England Journal of Medicine, and it's a pretty kind of ingenious study. What these surgeons basically did is people who came to the hospital for what are called atheromas. So they're these plaques that can develop in your arteries, usually from accumulated fatty deposits, which leads oftentimes to a blockage. So these individuals come to the hospital and what the surgeons did, or what the physicians did and the researchers, it's actually a really big group of people who worked on this study, is that they looked across multiple centers after the fact. So this is an observational, a prospective observational study. They looked at these individuals who had specimens that were excised from their carotid arteries. So they had these plaques and they were taken out. They were able to look at these in a bunch of different ways, using techniques like pyrolysis gas chromatography mass spec, also stable isotope analysis and looking at them just under the electron microscope. They also looked for inflammatory biomarkers along with sort of, trying to understand what was the composition of these plaques. And what they found was that of the 304 patients who were enrolled in the study and the 257 who did a follow-up, they found that in 58.4% of the patients, there was polyethylene in their plaque. So they were looking for what they called microplastics and nanoplastics. And in doing this investigation and being able to use these different tools to figure out exactly what was in there, the microplastics that they found in, 58.4% of the patients was polyethylene. The microplastic polyvinyl chloride, which we just usually know as vinyl, was in 12.1% of the patients. So polyethylene is probably one of the most common sort of like consumer single-use plastics, also multi-use because you'll see it in like medical tubing and things like that too. But you definitely see it in takeout containers, like styrofoam containers, things like that. Interestingly, that means then that like a whole 41 and some odd percent of these patients didn't have any microplastics detected in their plaques. And it's kind of a sad state of affairs when we're like, hmm, that's interesting. That's a low number when it was more than half. Because I think our expectations are that we just all have microplastics like packed in our bodies all the time. But the researchers have some hypotheses about that. So basically, when they looked under the electron microscope, they could see these microplastics. They were like these foreign particles that were about the size of a cell, and they've got pictures in the study, but they have jagged edges and they're not biological in nature. And then when they did the further analysis, they were able to say, okay, this is what the actual composition of these molecules are.

B: Could they be alien implants?

C: Probably not. I think probably the most likely explanation is that we are like bathing in plastic all the time and that those little pieces of plastic make their way into your body, probably through multiple routes. But here's the big takeaway, patients who had carotid artery plaques where there were micro and nanoplastics present had a higher risk of heart attack, stroke, or death from any cause at 34 months follow-up than those who did not have microplastics. So these patients were all sick. They all were in the hospital for a cardiovascular reason. And the cardiovascular reason was the same across all the patients. In those who had plastic in their plaques, they were more likely to die within the next 34 months than those who did not have plastic in their plaques. That said, this is a prospective observational study. There is no way to know if it was the plastic itself that was increasing the risk of death.

S: Right. It could just be a marker for some other process.

C: Could be a marker for poverty. You know what I mean? It could be a marker for a lot of different things.

S: Well, I wonder if just certain kinds of plaque are more likely to cause a heart attack and more likely to incorporate microplastics in the arteries.

C: Yeah. We haven't figured that out medically yet how to distinguish between those two. You know? I mean, if that were the case, that's actually a really great outcome of this study. You know, like that's very telling. And so there are a lot of other contributions to this that need to be teased apart. So you know, we do know that it does seem to be the case that there is a pretty strong correlation between microplastics being present and inflammatory factors because they search for inflammatory factors and they found that those two were correlated. So maybe if the microplastics are actually triggering the inflammation, that's increasing the risk that that plaque is going to rupture and that then you end up with a clot that could ultimately lead to a heart attack or a stroke. But maybe not. You know, compared to those who did not have microplastics, the participants who did were interestingly younger. They were more likely to be male. They were more likely to smoke. And they were more likely to have diabetes or cardiovascular disease. So you know, why are all of these things seemingly correlated? And how are we going to ultimately tease that apart? I think it's important. But regardless, this is, I think, a really, really important study because we have not seen very firm evidence for potential downstream effects of aggregating microplastics. And here we're seeing not just a clinical, an important clinical effect, but one that is able to be observed both on imaging and also using different assays. And so it could lead to, potential diagnostic techniques and to a better understanding of how this type of cardiovascular disease might change throughout the lifetime as it relates to plastic and bioaccumulation of plastic. So there's a lot to uncover here. But this is one of those kind of early, like, we have seen plenty of studies that are more, I'd say, epidemiological in nature, where we know that individuals who work near petroleum, individuals who work near plants where plastic is purified or where plastic consumer products are being made, individuals who live near these plants, especially plants that are putting pollution into nearby rivers and streams, there's a lot of evidence to show higher rates of cancer among those individuals. There's actually a really big report that I came across that was published in the Annals of Global Health called the Minduru-Monaco Commission on Plastics and Human Health. And this is like, again, a multinational, multi-researcher, huge report that talks about, it kind of breaks it up into what is the lifecycle of plastic? What are the environmental findings like, where are plastics in the environment? And how are they bioaccumulating? And then what does that mean for human health? And so they detail a lot of those epidemiological, the outcomes of those epidemiological studies, prematurity, stillbirth, low birth weight, increased risk of cancer. You know, these are also very correlational in nature, and they're sort of grand scale environmental or epidemiological studies. So this more biomedical study, I think, is helping us finally start to drill down. And it could lead to even more specific and like studies with higher resolution as well. So I do think this is an important one. That's why a lot of people are referring to it as a "landmark study".

S: And it's probably just the beginning. But I'd say there's a lot of, we have to dig deep down to the details, like what is the role of the microplastics in disease?

C: Right. Is the microplastic actually doing something or is it an inert thing that's clinging to something that's already happening in these, a biological process that's already happening? But either way, that will be very informative if we can get to the bottom of it.

S: And of course, we can never do the control trial we would really need to do because obviously you can't expose somebody to a potential risk factor to see how much it harms them. You know, it's completely unethical.

C: Even if we could, it may not tell us much. It reminds me a lot of the studies that have been done and a lot of the kind of investigative journalistic work that's been done on the main ingredient in Teflon. And how, like, I don't think we have a proper dose response curve for this sort of forever chemical yet. But we do know that, like, it's in everyone. So it's super hard to study, well, what does it do? Because everyone has it. And so then you're saying, okay, well, if it bioaccumulates more over here versus more over there, but is that a function of the person's biology or is it a function of exposure? It's super hard to know. And that was one thing that I referenced is that the researchers were like, it's weird that like 40% of the people in this study didn't have plastic in their plaques. And so they're curious. It's probably not an exposure issue. It's probably has something to do with the nature of their plaques themselves or their own metabolisms. Like, the plastic probably just didn't stick.

S: Which is why the plastic may just be a marker and not a cause because there's something else different about it. Yeah. All right. Thanks.

C: Yeah.

B: Steve, you mentioned we can't do those unethical tests, but can we do those unethical tests on people who still believe in UFOs after this government report came out?

S: No. All right. Just checking?

E: And that didn't change either.

Parasite Cleanse (40:32)

• Parasite Cleanse 

S: So let me ask you guys a question. Have you had your parasite cleanse yet this year?

C: My what what?

E: Oh, gosh.

S: You got your flu vaccine.

E: Let's see. My aura's been fluffed.

S: You've got your COVID vaccine. And you've got your parasite cleanse. You got all that taken care of.

C: Oh, please tell me you're going to talk about the dude who got a parasite in his brain from eating undercooked bacon. You're not, are you?

S: Well, that's part of the phenomenon that I'm going to talk about because—

C: I was like, yeah.

E: Oh, gosh.

J: You can't eat bacon anymore?

E: Oh, pork-related worms are disgusting.

C: In your brain. Anyway.

S: So yeah, don't eat undercooked pork. Absolutely. But here's—so, but that case— Which is a rare case, but, for a developed nation, but it happens—is being used by the parasite cleanse wellness influencers to say, see, you need to get your parasite cleanses.

C: Of course.

S: So, yeah.

E: See, I've been saying.

S: Parasites are obviously organisms that cause a persistent infection. It's not like a bacterial infection where you get sick, right? It's more that part of its life cycle includes another organism, either on the outside or on the inside of another organism. Like malaria is a parasite, or Giardia, or Helminthic worms, GI worms. Those are parasites. They can often exist chronically, like GI worms, for example, can cause bloating and stomach pains and diarrhea and unintended, unexplained weight loss and fatigue, right? So of course, a lot of things can cause, just bloated gassiness and diarrhea and fatigue. So not everybody who has diarrhea has a parasitic infection. But these kind of common symptoms and these isolated, unusual cases of like people getting parasites from undercooked pork are used to fear monger about. Maybe everybody has parasites, you know? And in some extreme cases, like some wellness gurus even go as far as saying like most disease are caused by parasites. There's even like someone published a book basically saying cancer is caused by parasites. It's all caused by parasites. Now the parasite cleanse is an extension of the whole cleanse idea, like the detox, the idea that you've got poisons in you and you have to get them out, it's not based on any solid science or evidence or even logic. If you live in a Western developed wealthy nation, right, you are not at risk of parasitic infections. It's just not one of the things that's likely to happen. In fact, like if somebody in our hospital, came down with a parasitic infection, the first question we would ask them is, have you had any recent travel, right? Have you traveled to any, underdeveloped countries recently? Places where parasitic infections are endemic. They're just not endemic in like Europe or the United States. The other way to get it is if you engage in seriously risky behavior. So that includes eating undercooked meat, specifically certain kinds of meat, but also like hunters who kill their own meat and maybe they didn't inspect it carefully enough. Like when you kill an animal for food, you're supposed to like do a little bit of an exam to make sure like it doesn't have infected liver or whatever. It doesn't have signs of parasites, things that you don't want to ingest, right? So if you do that improperly or not at all, then you're putting yourself at risk, especially if you don't really thoroughly, cook the meat. But also drinking contaminated water or sewer water or just unprocessed water, right? Like if you drink water straight out of a stream, there's a chance that you might pick up a Giardia infection or some parasite.

C: Or I can imagine, Steve, if you're one of those people who's like trying to drink raw milk.

S: Yeah. That's the other thing. There's also the raw water movement, like drinking unprocessed, unpurified water. That's bad. Don't do that. So but that's like you have to be engaging in specific risky behavior, right? So again, for most people who don't engage in risky behavior and don't travel to undeveloped countries or places where parasitic infections are endemic, your risk of getting a parasite is extremely low. In the case that it does happen, that's a serious medical condition that requires a visit to your physician, maybe even the hospital and real medicine, right? That is not something to mess around with. For most of us, just as a health wellness thing, there is zero role for a routine parasite cleanse. What do parasite cleanses generally consist of? It's anyone's guess, right? But I'll say this. The most common ingredient is wormwood because that does contain a compound.

C: Oh, like absinthe? Isn't that what absinthe is made out of? It's wormwood?

J: Yeah. It is. What would you do with the wormwood, Steve?

S: You could include it in an herbal concoction, right? So there is an ingredient in wormwood called artemesia, and so one of the most common species is artemesia absinthium, right, absinthium. There's over 500 species of wormwood, right? So which one specifically are you getting?

B: Damn, 500.

S: Yeah. And like with all herbal concoctions, it's like when was it harvested? What part of the plant are you using? How is it prepared? What's the concentration? You know, et cetera. And so in a Petri dish, there's definitely anti-helminthic activity for artemesia. But in studies in actual animals, they haven't really been able to replicate it, which is very common for herbal products because they mostly suffer from poor absorption, poor bioavailability. Not only, the bioavailability can be very low, but also the concentration of active ingredients could vary by orders of magnitude. We don't know what the half-life is often and how it's eliminated. And so you have no idea what dose you're getting and what the dosing schedule should be like, et cetera. So you're—and with infections, like having an accurate dose at an accurate time intervals over a sufficient length of time is critical, right? It's like you have to take this at the full dose for this many days, otherwise you're probably not going to clear the infection. And so just like doing a cleanse, like with some rando herbal concoction, which may have wormwood in it, is very unlikely to be helpful. Also wormwood is a drug, right? Like remember, herbs are drugs. And it has liver toxicity. So if you took a lot of it because you're like saying, oh, I want to make sure I get enough in my system, you run the risk of causing liver damage. So again, unless you're precisely dosing it, you're more likely to cause harm than good by taking it. Now, some of the herbal like parasite cleanses deliberately include something in there that is likely to cause diarrhea, right? Because then they say, yeah, whatever's coming out, that's the parasites, right?

C: Right.

E: Oh, gosh. Oh, that's like the people who drink bleach, and they throw it up and, oh, that's good. Oh, that's good.

S: Exactly.

E: Yes. Look at this. It's working.

S: So, but that's not good, right? You know, causing diarrhea has its own risks. And, if you actually did have an intestinal parasite, you're probably fighting against diarrhea. And so taking something that would cause it even more, it would be a bad thing.

C: That would make you really sick and like dehydrated.

S: So again, medicine is all about risk versus benefit. For a healthy person who lives in a developed nation, your risk of parasites is very low and the efficacy of an herbal parasite cleanse also very low and therefore the potential benefit approach is zero, right? But the risk is real, whether it's just wasting your time and money, distracting you, maybe delaying care because you think, oh, I'll try this parasite cleanse and see if it works or direct toxicity depending on what they're putting in there. So it's not worth it. You know, it's just a TikTok fad at this point. Yep.

E: Yep. Spreading misinformation.

S: And it doesn't make any medical sense. So don't buy it.

Gut Microbe Communication (49:05)

• "Molecular Rosetta Stone" Reveals How our Microbiome Talks to Us 

S: All right, Bob. Speaking of gut microbes, tell us about how they communicate with their hosts.

B: So here's a topic I never thought I'd talk about. Bile acids. Yep. Bile acids. So a new research collaboration and new tool has revealed the surprising breadth and depth of the languages our own gut microbes use to influence our metabolism, immune system, diseases, even our personality. And so what we learned could revolutionize disease management. This was fascinating even though it has to do with bile acids. This paper, some researchers from Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. The title of the paper was great, The Underappreciated Diversity of Bile Acid Modifications. You're just like flipping through titles of papers. You would just go right by that one. Couldn't blame you.

E: Well, if I was a bilelogist, I would have stopped.

B: Bile. Nice. So what the hell does bile have to do with any of this? Now I'm actually going to talk about what bile is.

E: Bob's going to humor us.

B: Oh, nice. That's all that one was. Nice. Nice. So bile acids come from the liver and are stored in your gallbladder. Now I just had a thought. Our mom had her gallbladder removed decades ago. So now I'm wondering, where the hell does she store her bile? Steve, where does mom store her bile?

S: Well, the bile is made by the liver and secreted into the intestine.

B: But the gallbladder is a waste station.

S: Yeah. It just gives you like an extra little dose of it when you have a fatty meal. But bile is still being made and still secreting into the intestine.

B: Okay. Mystery solved. So bile, as Steve said, is released into our intestines after a meal to aid in digestion. Our microbiome, specifically our gut microbes like bacteria, archaea, fungi, et cetera, change these bile acids into candy. Now that's a lie. Just saying if anyone is listening. They actually change the bile acids into an array of different molecules called secondary bile acids. And that's essentially easier for us to absorb. They're helping us out. Like, here's some nasty bile acids, but it's going to help with digestion a little bit. That was the only thing that bile acids did, is to help us digest food. This would be quite a boring news item. But they do have a second job. They're used as signaling molecules to regulate not only our immune system, but also influence metabolic functions like fat and sugar metabolism. It reminds me of a mob takeover, doesn't it? Millions of years ago, you've got some microbes, and these microbes said to a pre-human primate, they said, now, I can't do a mob guy voice. Who wants to do this? Who wants to read this? Steve, I always loved your mob guy.

S: All right. This is your text?

B: Yep.

S: Yeah. So just so you know, we're going to change your bile so digestion is even better. But we're also going to take some control of your immune system. Oh, and while we're at it, we want a piece of the action of your lipid and glucose metabolism.

E: Oh my gosh.

B: Yeah. There's no way I could have pulled that off. Good job, Steve. So yeah. So it's just like, what a deal. So this is how our microbes in our gut can use signaling molecules of their secondary bile acids to signal and influence distant regions far beyond our gut, all over the place, anywhere in your body, essentially. And so with that in mind, it makes sense, right? It makes a lot of sense how gut microbes can have a huge impact on a wide range of diseases. Co-author and postdoctoral researcher Helena Minocchio-Russo said, because of their interaction with our microbiome, the influence of bile acids spread far beyond the digestive system and so could the disease we treat with them. The list of diseases related to bile acids is a mile long and there are several FDA approvals for these kinds of acids as treatments. I wasn't aware of that. I had no idea that bile acids is related to diseases in that way. So this is where this new tool comes in. It's an amazing new tool called MicrobeMAST, M-A-S-T, and I have no idea what that acronym stands for uncharacteristically. This was developed by a scientist at UC San Diego's Collaborative Microbial Metabolite Center. So using a vast microbial database that they put together, this tool can look at a biological sample and within seconds, tell you exactly which microbes have created which signaling molecules and there's no other tool that can do that. It might sound like, oh, that's cool. That's nice. But this really is quite a breakthrough. It was when they used this MicrobeMAST tool that they realized that microbes were creating far more of these signaling molecules than they anticipated, right? They thought there was only – well, let me go to a quote that says it better than I could. Senior author Pieter Dorsten, Professor of Pharmacology and Pediatrics at the UC San Diego School of Medicine said, biolassids are a key component of the language of the gut microbiome and finding this many new types radically expands our vocabulary for understanding what our gut microbes do and how they do it. It's like going from C-Spot Run to Shakespeare. Study co-author Ipsita Mohanty, love that name, postdoctoral researcher said, when I started working in the lab, there were about a few hundred known biolassids. Now we've discovered thousands more and we're also working toward realizing that these biolassids do so much more than just help us with digestion. So you get the idea. You've got these – you've got the microbiome that is taking these biolassids from the liver and they're essentially taking them and changing them into a better form of biolassid that does a better job, a little bit better job of digestion. But they also can signal the far reaches of your body to impact your metabolism, your immune system and all that. And that language, that language of communication of those secondary biolassids, that language doesn't have 10 words. It's got 100,000 words in it. And now because of that discovery, they can find out what those words are saying, what the communication is and what the functions are and potentially have a dramatic impact on disease management and many other things. All right. So what does the future hold for this advance? Now that we know the extent of the signaling language, the obvious next step is to find out what are these specific functions? What are they actually doing? And they could also use this technique for other types of biomolecules like lipids and other acid types. They say that they can also potentially apply this technology into other fields of biology like aquaculture, aquaculture, agriculture, biotechnology and more. So I'll end with a final quote from senior author, Pieter Dorsten, we're rewriting the textbook of human metabolism. If you'd have spoken to me a few years ago, I would have said we were decades away from solving this puzzle, but now it could happen within five years. It's really a remarkable change in our capabilities and we believe it's going to revolutionize the way we approach disease. Bam, pretty slick. I mean, I love when a researcher says that, yeah, we were decades away, now it's only five years. I mean, a lot of people can say that, but I tend to think that this advance is worthy of such an optimistic statement and I hope it's true. I mean, he knows this intimately and sure, he wrote the paper and it was involved, he's a senior author, so sure, he's biased to a certain extent, but still it's a remarkable statement that this scientist has made and I hope he's true and who knows the next 5 or 10 years is going to hold as this microbial database gets bigger and it applies to other areas of science. Who knows what we may be able to do to deal with all immune-related and metabolism-related diseases. So very encouraging.

S: I don't buy it.

E: Healthy skepticism is good.

S: Meaning, the guy's statement about how it might change our whole approach to disease and metabolism, blah, blah, blah, that sounds so much like a researcher overstating the scope and implications of his own research. And also, it also sounds like statements from 10 and 20 years ago about so many things in medicine that turned out not to be true. Stem cells or gut bacteria itself, the whole idea of, oh, we're going to figure out, like, we're going to alter the microbiome and treat these chronic diseases, that research is ongoing and it's interesting, but it hasn't transformed medicine in the way people were hoping it was going to 20 years ago. So I think if I had to guess, again, hopefully it's true, but that sounds like it's on the hype end of the spectrum.

B: Yeah, I totally don't disagree with that. But I see this, I mean, this tool seems so groundbreaking.

S: Just like all the other things did 20 years ago.

B: Yeah, exactly. But you know that a tool like CRISPR, I mean, sure, CRISPR is rare, but if you have the right tool, then you can make these dramatic advances. And it was this discovery, I mean, going from, like, not knowing much about the language of this microbiome in our gut, and then all of a sudden finding, oh my God, I mean, look at all of this, the language as a metaphor that they use, it's so much bigger than we thought.

S: Yeah.

B: I mean, there's some solid promise here.

S: The science is great. I'm just talking about, like, it's downstream implications for healthcare. That's what I would take with a huge grain of salt.

E: Got to go with your gut.

C: Oh, no.

Interstellar Meteorite (59:02)

• They Thought It Was an Interstellar Meteorite Strike. Turns Out It Was a Truck. 

S: All right, Evan.

E: Jay, why'd you say that?

S: I understand. Talk about hype. Tell us about interstellar meteorites.

E: Yes. I have to do that. Hey, do you guys remember back on January 8th, 2014, a space rock exploded over the Western Pacific Ocean? Likely, it's believed to have exploded somewhere in the area off the northeast coast of Papua New Guinea. And its designation is CNEOS 2014-01-08. Of course, that's the date. And CNEOS stands for Center for Near-Earth Object Studies. So that's its designation. However, it is also known as Interstellar Meteor-1, or IM-1. And those more familiar with the research that has been conducted by astronomers Amir Siraj and Avi Loeb are familiar with this name.

B: Oh, God.

E: Yep, Avi Loeb. He's written quite a bit about this online for many years, posting mostly at Medium.com. We'll get back to him in just a moment. This exploding rock is believed to be rather special based on the calculated speed of the meteor. It was traveling at 60 kilometers per second, apparently, which is very high. It was deemed highly probable that it was from interstellar origins. And if that was the case, it was going to be the first ever detected strike of a meteorite from beyond our own sun's influence, right? And this actually was confirmed to be the case by astronomers later in 2022 when they announced it. On the science merits alone, it's really newsworthy. I think it's definitely worthy of recognition and admiration. But what really turned the story into an attention-grabbing headline for clickbaiters, and unfortunately it worked on me, damn you, is when Avi Loeb put his fingerprints on the event and did some early analysis back in 2019 that speculated that this had come from outside the solar system, which ultimately did turn out to be true. Now Loeb, unfortunately, believes there's evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence. And most famously, in 2017, when the space object ʻOumuamua was detected in our solar system, he posited that it was possibly an alien space probe with a propulsion system disguising itself as a comet. And he wrote a book about it called Extraterrestrial, The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth. Now, Loeb, he posted, this was now in June of 2023, here's what his headline is, we have discovered spherules from the path of the first recognized interstellar meteor, IM1. And I don't know if you guys remember this from last year, because we did report on it, that Loeb and his team decided to hunt for pieces of the meteor. And back in June 2023, they dragged a magnetic sled across the seafloor of the Pacific, in a certain part of the Pacific Ocean, the presumed drop zone near Papua New Guinea, and they were hunting for metallic pieces, fragments of the meteorite. And Eureka, it was a success, right? They came up with a bunch of these metallic sphericules from the floor of the Pacific Ocean. And the analysis began almost immediately. And before you could turn around, Loeb and his team said that, yep, these are the recovered fragments from IM1. We did it. We discovered it. Now, there were a lot of other scientists who really weren't convinced that what he picked up off the ocean floor were the fragments of an exploded meteorite, let alone this one specifically. But in his post, this is in his 2023 post, Loeb wrote this important sentence. It, meaning the sphere samples or that particular collection of sphere samples, was collected in Run 8 that went along the upper envelope of the most likely path for IM1 based on the analysis of seismometer data. Okay, well, where was that seismometer data recorded? It was recorded by a seismic station on Papua New Guinea's Manus Island. So relatively, close, as close, I guess, as you can be to the vicinity of where they were searching for it. The equipment picked up the vibration that seemed to be generated by IM1's blazing speed through the Earth's atmosphere. Fair enough. But did Loeb and his team really ever try to confirm the authenticity of that data? In other words, did IM1 really cause those detected vibrations? I wasn't able to find anywhere where Loeb expressed that he and his team made efforts to rule out sort of other possible sources for the signal. So I think I can assume that they decided that it had to be authentic to their satisfaction and they went on the hunt. But what if, what if the seismometer data was something like, oh, for example, a microwave oven in a kitchen near the detectors, right? Because we know microwave ovens have never interfered with scientific data. What else? What if, for example, what if something very mundane caused the signal at the same date and time that the meteorite impacted? That would be embarrassing. I mean, to have conducted a whole expedition to a place in the Pacific Ocean where you're highly confident the meteor must have exploded, you collected samples, declared them to be fragments of this historic chunk of space metal, and only to find out you were looking maybe in the wrong place the whole time. That would be humiliating. Which finally leads us to the headline this week, the latest news in the saga. And this was reported over at Johns Hopkins University at their online newsletter, courtesy of Roberto Mollar Candenosa, where he wrote, I think my favorite science headline so far this year, Interstellar signal linked to aliens was actually just a truck.

B: Wow.

E: Love it.

B: That's even better than the underappreciated diversity of bio-data.

E: Here's what he said, I'll sum it up. Sound waves thought to be from a 2014 meteor fireball north of Papua New Guinea were almost certainly vibrations from a truck rumbling along a nearby road.

J: Pathetic.

E: The findings raised doubts, further doubts I should say, that materials pulled last year from the ocean are alien materials from the meteor, as was widely reported. They spoke with Benjamin Fernando, who's a planetary seismologist at Johns Hopkins. He led this particular research because they did an official paper on this. He said the signal changed directions over time, exactly matching a road that runs past the seismometer. It's really difficult to take a signal and confirm it's not from something, but what we can do is show that there are lots of signals like this and show that they have all the characteristics we'd expect from a truck and none of the characteristics we'd expect from a meteor. In fact, the fireball location was actually very far away from where the oceanographic expedition went to retrieve the meteor fragments. So not only did they use the wrong signal, they were looking in the wrong place. Sorry. What? How can you, you just have to laugh, I think. Oh my gosh.

S: All right. Thanks, Evan.

Who's That Noisy? (1:06:28)

Answer to previous Noisy:

Manualist Cecil Dill plays "Let Me Call You Sweetheart"
YouTube: Cecil Dill and His Musical Hands (1935)

S: Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time.

J: All right, guys, last week I played this noisy.

[Warbly, old-time recording of a piano tune interlaced with kazoo-like instrument]

What do you guys think?

E: A player piano and some kind of bird is sitting on top of it making those noises, singing along with the tune.

J: Anybody else?

S: Is that somebody like letting air out of a balloon?

J: That's a good guess, but that is not correct.

C: Is it a kazoo?

J: It is not. Oh my God. It does sound a lot like a kazoo.

E: Yeah, it's kazoo-ish.

J: That's a great guess. So a listener named Jameson Malick wrote in and said, hey all, my four-year-old daughter Addison thinks this is a bird. She pronounces it board.

E: Oh, that's what I said, bird.

J: Likely a duck singing to music.

E: There you go.

J: And her equally childish dad, which is the person writing, thinks this is someone letting the air squeak out of balloons. Right, Steve? He said because that's what I would do. So it is definitely not that, but those were all good guesses. Good guess, Addison. Keep listening and keep guessing. That's how you get smart. Another listener named Jim Staheli, Jim, you know I wasn't going to pronounce that right. He said, hi, Jay. Is that a daxophone? And I didn't know what a daxophone was, so I looked it up.

B: So he was wrong then.

J: And he is wrong, but here's what a daxophone sounds like. [plays daxophone noises] You have to look this one up. It's a really strange instrument where you're rubbing a couple of things together. I'm not even sure how it works, but never heard of it. Very interesting looking thing. You should take a look. The next guess is from a listener named William Patterson. He said, dear Jay, longtime listener, utter failure at Who's That Noisy. This week's noisy is Let Me Call You Sweetheart played on one of those rubber chickens. The song is correct. It is not the rubber chicken, but we are kind of, we're getting closer to the guess here. A listener named MTJ O'Donnell said, hey, Jay, first time guest, longtime listener, this sounds like an American crow singing Let Me Call You Sweetheart. Again, you get the song right. I don't hear a crow sound in there, but let me tell you what the winning answer is. This came in from Glenn Ellert, and he said this week's noisy is a manualist. Guys, have you ever heard of a manualist?

B: No.

C: I don't even know what you're saying.

J: I know, right? I didn't know what this is either, but this is essentially a person who makes fart noises with their hands. It's called a manualist, and I got to give it to this guy. He had two emojis, one of two hands together like they're praying, and then another one of wind, and it freaking works. Yeah, I mean, as silly as this is, it is a difficult thing to do to make a noise with your hands like that.

E: Yeah, to control it in a musical way.

J: Exactly. God, to control that.

E: We have to have George do this.

J: I don't understand how you can control the tone that well, so let me just play it again. I mean, I know it's ridiculous, but the skill here, this guy put time into this. By the way, this is from 1935.

E: Whoa.

J: [plays Noisy] I mean, it's crazy.

C: So is that why the piano sounds so like shitty and detuned?

J: Absolutely.

C: It's just a really old recording.

J: Absolutely, yeah.

E: Cool.

J: The name of the person who did this back in 1935 was Cecil Dill, and his act was called Cecil Dill and His Musical Hands. I want to point out here, boy, are we lucky to live in modern times. I know, it's funny. It is funny, but it's true because people would be so bored that they would put the time in to develop these skills, like, wow. I don't know. Maybe it made a lot of people happy, but it's just a very strange thing that people used to do, and there's a name for it. I mean, it's very hard to come up with something new these days. Anyway, thank you for playing the game this week, so let's move on to this week's noisy that you haven't heard.

New Noisy (1:11:23)

J: This noisy was sent in by a listener named Brett Newton.

[popping sound like a jackhammer]

E: What body part made that noise?

J: If you think you know what this week's Noisy is or you heard something cool, email me, all that info at WTN@theskepticsguide.org.

Announcements (1:11:46)

J: Steve, I have late breaking SGU news.

S: Yeah, let's hear it.

J: What we decided to do was we had so many requests for people wanting to come to the SGU private show, and I know we're only a few weeks out, but it doesn't matter. I already rented the room. I had the space. We decided to add a second show. So if you're interested, if you feel like you missed out on coming to the show, because so many people did, you could go to theskepticsguide.org, and there'll be a button on there which will allow you to attend the 12 noon show, right? The original show was 5 p.m. This show will start at 12 noon. It's not going to be the same exact show because it'll be a completely different podcast episode, but it will be a private show plus, meaning there's an extra hour of fun content and whatever we decide to do, audience interaction, George Hrabb will be joining us, again, it's going to be a ton of fun. Same exact location.

S: But we'll say this. The two shows will be completely different.

J: Yeah. They will be different.

S: Because it's possible that there are some people who might want to go to both shows.

J: Oh, yeah. There are going to be two completely different experiences.

S: So they will be two totally different shows.

J:' Yeah. We will repeat nothing. Absolutely nothing.

B: Didn't even think of that.

E: I won't even use the same name.

J: So, again, go to-

S: We're going to change our clothes, you know.

J: The only difference will be that we will have had a meal in between those two shows. So go to theskepticsguide.org if you're interested in coming to those shows. These are in Dallas, by the way. We also have a skeptical extravaganza happening the night before. So these are happening on April 6th is the extravaganza, and April 7th we'll have our two private shows. So if you're there, join us. And, of course, we're going to be there for the eclipse.

B: Join us.

J: I feel I need to clarify this. There's been a lot of emails and people talking on Reddit and other social media. We are not- Unfortunately, we cannot do a group meeting anywhere with the SGU during the eclipse, specifically because I could not rent an outdoor space that had adequate parking. I was guesstimating somewhere around 100 people. We just couldn't pull it off. There was absolutely no place. I talked to multiple state parks and venues and all sorts of things, and if they weren't booked up, they were saying, basically, don't come here. We're expecting an order of magnitude more capacity than we can handle. They said the roads are going to be gridlocked.

S: Try to travel as little as possible.

J: Yeah. So I just want to give you guys a little advice from everything I've collected from trying to find a venue and talking to people. The eclipse is happening at noon, Evan?

S: Two, I think.

E: The exact time?

S: Two. Two p.m.

J: All right. So roughly 2 p.m. So if you're going to be driving anywhere, if you're in Dallas, in the greater Dallas area and you're staying somewhere and you're going to be driving to the eclipse venue wherever you're going, you have to leave early, very early. Pack some food just in case your-

C: Make sure your car is gassed up.

J: Right. Gas your car completely up. Get some beverages. Just be prepared because anything can happen. This is like ... I think the world basically knows this is the last time that we're going to get a chance to see this level of eclipse happen in the United States. So just please be prepared. Go early. Plan to get home really late. Traffic is going to be insane. I recommend you get to your venue area the night before if you can pull that off. So guys, be safe. Wear your eye protection or whatever. I don't want to get into that can of worms again, but just-

C: Don't be a Trump.

J: Yeah.

C: Don't look directly into the sun.

J: Yeah. Be careful.

S: Yeah. 1:40 apparently in Dallas is when it's going to start.

E: When totality starts.

S: When totality starts. The eclipse itself will start at 12:23.

J: The Chicago shows, we have Skeptical Extravaganza. That's happening the weekend of August 17th. That'll be that Saturday, whatever that Saturday is on that weekend. And then we're doing our private show. That should be on the 18th of August. That private show is our 1000th episode and you can join us for a live performance, a live podcast recording. This is going to be an extended show. I'm not exactly sure, but it's going to be in the range of three to five hours. We'll have people that will be guests that we'll be bringing in via the internet. We'll be interviewing them that way. It's going to be one hell of a show. Again, George Hrab will be attending with us. Tickets are now available. You can go to the SGU website to purchase tickets there. And I'll tell you right now, the Extravaganza is already almost sold out. So if you want to go to that, you got to move quickly.

S: All right. Thanks, Jay.

Emails/Follow-ups

Email #1: Thou/You (1:16:18)

S: A couple of quick emails. First one comes from Helen who writes, I'm just wrapping up listening to episode 974 when you're discussing how English doesn't have a plural second person. I have to share this story because that same question of why it doesn't used to bug me. English does have a plural second person. It's you. The singular second person in English is thou.

C: Can we say did? Because we got so many emails like this.

S: It's in the past.

C: Nobody says thou anymore.

S: It doesn't anymore, but it did in the past.

C: It did. Yeah. But we don't have a second, like you is not the first person plural, or sorry, the second person plural anymore.

S: All right. So she goes on, but I'll give you the upshot. And yeah, a number of people emailed us. So in the 1600s, right, if you go back that far, the subjective singular was thou, right? The subject form singular. So thou did something. The subject form plural was ye, Y-E. The object form singular was thee. So you do something to thee. And the object-

C: T-H-E-E, right?

S: T-H-E-E. And the object form plural was you, right?

C: Yeah. Think Bible.

S: Yeah. And then, exactly. This is from the 1611 Bible. And then possessive singular, thy, thine, possessive plural, you're, yours. Today, present day in English, it's you, you, you, you, you're yours, you're yours, right? So everything got basically became you. Now many of the Romantic languages have an informal and a formal version of you, right?

C: Like tu and usted.

S: Yeah, tu and usted, tu and vous in French. These are called the TV distinction based upon the Latin, tu and vos. How would you pronounce that in Latin? Vos?

C: In Latin? I don't know. Vos?

S: So, but English is, it's not unique, but it's, unusual in that it lacks that. But what happened was, apparently this is what happened. You, which used to be an object plural, started to get used as formal, right? So it would be thou is what like a lord would say to a peasant, and you is what a peasant would say to a lord. And then, so you therefore became singular because when it was used in a formal greeting, formal discussion, then we didn't like the distinction between formal and informal because I guess it was not egalitarian. And also the Quakers did it and we didn't like them, right? So there's a couple of reasons why people didn't like making that distinction anymore. So then we just started using you for everything. Does that make sense? So at first it became formal singular, then it just became singular and it was already plural and so it just thou, ye, thee just all went away. Thy, thine.

C: Yeah, but then eventually it stopped sounding right for it to be plural.

S: Yeah.

C: That's like, that is like a much more modern change is that we stopped using you to refer to lots of-

S: You can still use you.

C: We still kind of do.

S: You still can, but I think we still do use you in the plural, but there's a lot of vernacular where people have created a you plural, like y'all or yous or you guys or whatever.

C: I think it, yeah, it asks for distinction. Like you can be giving a talk in front of a large audience and you can say, thank you for coming here and everybody knows you're talking to everyone. But there's also kind of that feeling of like, me? Are you thinking me specifically? Or are you thinking that person over there?

S: Yeah.

C: Because it does sound strange to say you to a group of people.

S: Yeah, I think it depends, to be honest with you. But yeah, you're right. You just said, thank you. Yeah, you might say, thank you all for coming here.

C: Exactly. Like you might want to specify that you're referring to all the yous in the audience. Language is interesting and it evolves. And I guess it's like that thing that I always struggle with when we get those kinds, because they're super interesting. And I appreciate all of those emails that are like, oh, this is a really cool story. But when it's like, well, technically, it's like, no, not technically.

S: I don't think we really had a lot of that with this one.

C: Yeah, we did.

S: Most of them were like this, where it's like, this is interesting little tidbit of history.

C: Yeah, we did get quite a few that were like this. But we got a bunch that were like, Cara's incorrect, that you is, that there is no second person. And it's like, no, I'm going to use past tense.

S: That's silly.

C: We don't talk like that anymore. Yeah. Thou.

S: 400 years.

C: I mean, I grew up Mormon. And when they talk, they talk like that.

S: Oh, yeah?

C: But that's like when they're putting on their churchy voices.

S: The churchy voice. They could revert to the 1611 Bible.

C: The churchy voice. Yeah, like when they pray, they'll say thou and thine and stuff like that.

S: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

C: Yeah.

S: All right.

Email #2: Mach Effect Drive (1:21:15)

S: One more email. The emailer writes, hi, Rogues. Long time listener. Love the work you do. Here's a question you may have covered in the past, but I saw a video about a mock effect drive and immediately thought it was a scam. A space drive with no propellant? Impossible, I thought. I then Googled it to get more info and came across the NASA website saying it was credible? WTF? All right. So what do you guys know about the mock effect drive? Anything?

C: Nothing.

B: Yeah. The idea is that it's tapping into the gravitational potential of the universe.

S: Yeah.

B: Right?

S: Sort of. Yeah. So it's actually.

B: No, kind of exactly.

S: It's very similar. I would say that a little bit differently. Yes, you're correct. But I think the more important thing is that it's premised on speculative physics. And that speculative physics has to do with the source of inertial frames of reference. Right? So how do we know is object A moving with respect to object B? Or is object B moving with respect to object A? Right? What's the frame? What's the proper frame of reference? And this is a currently unsolved question in physics. But the one speculative answer is that, well, the inertial frame of reference derives from all of the gravity in the universe. Right? So it's one object's interaction with the collective gravitational fields of everything else in the universe, which is what Bob's referring to. And therefore, if that's true, you can somehow exploit that in order to change your inertia without expelling propellant. So it becomes an exception to the conservation of momentum.

B: Yeah. And it does that by changing the mass, right? Changing the amount of mass to change inertia.

S: Yeah. It's all pure speculation at this point. It's like, string theory. You know what I mean? There's no real evidence that this is the case. So there's a lot of ifs there. And so this came up at a similar time to the EM drive, which we did talk about. Remember the EM drive?

B: Yeah.

E: For sure.

S: Yeah. We're going to bounce microwaves around in a specially designed cone that's going to push more in one direction than the other direction. You'll get, yeah, this again, acceleration without expelling propellant. That one is more obviously pseudoscience. Like that violates the laws of physics. Where this one only sort of violates the laws of physics. But you have to speculate on this special case. It's like, we can't say for 100% that artificial gravity is improbable. It is not possible. It just is almost certainly not possible. But the door is cracked open a little bit. If there's one special resolution of quantum gravity, just whatever. I think we could say the EM drive is impossible. Whereas the Mach effect drive is just so speculative, we should probably treat it like it's impossible. But, there may be an exception, depending on how physics works out over the next 100 years. But both were tested by NASA, right? And that's what this guy's referring to. NASA wasn't saying this is "credible". They just are saying, all right, we're going to do some really precise tests to see if either of these drives, the EM drive or the Mach effect drive that people were proposing and were saying were producing anomalous thrust, they'll say, all right, we'll see if they're really producing anomalous thrust by doing a very careful experimental design. They did it, and neither of them are producing anomalous thrust, right? So they failed the empiric test of whether or not there's an actual effect there. So the physics is, regardless of what you think about the physics, they're not producing thrust. This is one of those things where I really, really hope it would be possible to have propellantless drive.

B: Oh, my God.

S: Because that would give us the universe, like our ability to travel around space and travel even interstellar. It's a total game changer for space travel and even just travel in general. If you could create acceleration, create thrust without having to expel propellant, that would be massive. You just directly turn energy into velocity. Amazing. The Millennium Falcon becomes possible, right? All that, it just completely changes the game.

B: Well, not faster than light, but yeah.

S: Not faster than light, but I mean like just being able to like take off from a planet without having—like, how does the Millennium Falcon get into orbit without the exhaust of the space shuttle? You know what I mean? Like it should not be possible unless there's new physics going on, either anti-gravity and or propellantless, acceleration. But unfortunately, it's just probably not true, you know? Same thing with free energy claims. There's always this—well, there's this tiny, itty-bitty little anomalous thing happening.

B: It's an artifact. It's an artifact.

S: Yeah, it's like all we got to do is scale it up. It's like, all right, scale it up and then come talk to me, right? Because these things always fail when they try to scale it up because what they're really seeing is a teeny tiny error, not a teeny tiny effect.

B: Right.

S: And yeah, so that doesn't scale up by definition. So that's a really good filter, you know? So I don't take any of these things seriously until they're producing a phenomenon at a macroscopic scale. Like they're actually producing real energy, not just this little tiny little round-off error. You know what I mean? All right, let's move on with science or fiction.

[top]                        

Science or Fiction (1:26:58)

Theme: Equinoxes Item #1: On the day of each equinox, day and night are of equal length. Item #2: During the equinoxes, solar declination is 0°. Item #3: So-called solar outages, or equinoctial disruptions, refer to the fact that communication satellites are often partially or totally blocked for a few days either before or after the equinoxes.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Day & night equal length
Science	Solar declination is 0°
Science	Equinoctial disruptions

Host	Result
Steve	win

Rogue	Guess
Cara	Equinoctial disruptions
Jay	Day & night equal length
Bob	Day & night equal length
Evan	Day & night equal length

Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.

S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fictitious. And then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. There's a theme this week in honour of the upcoming spring equinox. The theme is equinoxes. See how much you guys know about equinoxes. Are you ready?

C: Yeah.

S: Love your enthusiasm. Here we go. Item number one. On the day of each equinox, day and night are of equal length. Item number two. During the equinoxes, solar declination is zero degrees. And item number three. So-called solar outages or equinoctial disruptions refer to the fact that communication satellites are often partially or totally blocked for a few days either before or after the equinoxes. Cara, you're so enthusiastic. Why don't you go first?

Cara's Response

C: Sure. On the day of each equinox, day and night are of equal length. Okay. Yeah. Isn't that sort of kind of what it is? I thought. I've been looking. I think we're getting close to that, right? So the sun comes up at 7 a.m. here and sets around 7 p.m. During the equinoxes, solar declination. Oh, God. I used to know what these words meant. Okay. Like where it is relative, I guess, to the horizon maybe. Not so much the horizon, but like where it is on the earth relative to the bands of the earth would be zero. So would that be at the equator for the equinox? I think maybe. So-called solar outages or equinoctial disruptions refer to the fact that communications. I just have to read it. Satellites are partially or totally blocked for a few days. No. Why would that happen? I'm going to call that one the fiction.

S: Okay, Jay.

Jay's Response

J: Well.

S: Well.

J: I'll start by saying that I realize I don't know much about this type of thing.

C: Right?

J: Okay. So on the day of each equinox, I understand that sentence, day and night are of equal length. That makes perfect sense to me. Is it true or not? I mean, I would tend to think that it wouldn't fit that neatly. You know, like that's the way we'd like it to work. But we have weird things like leap years and stuff like that. So I can't see that perfectly lining up like that. Number two. During the equinoxes, solar declination is zero percent.

S: Zero degrees.

J: Zero degrees. Sorry. I have actually heard that word before, but I don't remember what it means. Probably something. Well, zero degrees. All right. Angle. All right. So let me try it again. During the equinoxes, solar declination is zero degrees. Isn't that right above his head? Okay. All right. That seems to make some sense there. So-called solar outages or equinotical disruptions refer to the fact that communication satellites are often partially or totally blocked for a few days either before or after the equinoxes. Now, I would imagine this only affects satellites that are in a certain orbit and position. I guess that could happen too. I don't know. I mean, there's something about the first one that I don't think is legit. But I don't know. You went for the third one, Cara?

C: But I don't know what the hell I'm talking about.

J: Yeah. I mean, I guess it doesn't matter. I'll take the first one.

S: The equal day and night.

J: Correct.

S: Yeah. Remember.

J: Yeah. I know. I know.

S: Identify the thing. 19 years. Okay. Bob?

C: Wait. So is that what you're going with?

J: Yes. I'm going with that.

C: Okay. All right. Spread out.

Bob's Response

B: I'm going to say that the day of each equinox, day and night are not of equal length. So that number one equinox day and night is fiction.

S: Okay. And Evan?

Evan's Response

E: Holy crow. Yeah. So that's kind of the assumption that the day and night are of equal length. But I believe that this is technically false because it would have to occur – like the moment would have to occur at noon of the exact – wherever noon is, I guess. Right? So my point is I think it's off by a very small amount of time. They're not exactly equal.

C: How much time would they need to be off for this to actually be fiction?

E: Well, a picosecond.

C: No. He would never do something that's less than an order of magnitude. So a picosecond off.

S: It would definitely have to be more than a picosecond.

C: Yeah, I would think.

E: But I think – because I recall when they announced these things, like at 2.22 PM today, it will technically be the equinox, right? Like, okay. So if that's the case, then no, it wouldn't necessarily be equal. Although this last one about the solar outages and equinoctial–

S: Equinoctial. Equinoctial disruptions.

E: Not a word I've ever seen before. Equinoctial disruptions.

S: Kind of like nocturnal enuresis but different.

B: I'm glad I didn't even have to deal with number three.

E: Right? So I've never heard of that before. And the second one about declination, right ascension and declination is how you map things in a sky, right? But solar would have to do with the sun. So that being at zero on the equinox makes sense. I guess I'll go with the day and night one of equal length being the fiction. I think it's technically wrong.

Steve Explains Item #2

S: All right. So you all agree on the second one, during the equinoxes solar declination is zero degrees. You all think that one is science. And that one is science. That is true. And what that means is what the solar declination being zero means that at noon the sun is directly over the equator. Right? So yeah, it drifts north during the spring and summer and comes back down to the equator for the autumnal equinox and then goes, drifts south and then comes back. Right? So that's how the solar declination varies throughout the year. But at each equinox it's at zero degrees. So that one is correct. I guess we'll go back to the first one.

Steve Explains Item #1

S: On the day of each equinox, day and night are of equal length. The boys think this one is the fiction. Cara, you think this one is science. Now, of course, equinox means equal night. Right?

E: Right.

S: Sort of based on the idea that day and night are of equal length.

B: Don't matter.

S: But this one is.

B: He said but.

S: The fiction. This is the fiction.

C: I wish you had written the word exactly.

S: I thought that was implied. But it's actually pretty significantly off. I mean, by minutes.

C: Oh, really?

S: It's by minutes. So it's not like seconds or microseconds or anything. It's like. Now, there's two reasons. There's two big reasons why they are.

B: The bending of light? Something about the bending of light.

S: That's one of them.

B: Yeah.

S: So one is because the atmosphere bends the light a little bit. So actually, the sun is already below the horizon, even when you could still see it, because that light is sort of bending a little bit around the curvature of the earth because of the atmosphere. So that extends day. But there's another reason why the day is also extended, which compounds that. And that is how it's an artifact of how we count what the beginning and the end of the day. Right? So the sunrise technically occurs the moment the upper part of the sun comes above the horizon. Right?

E: Mm-hmm.

S: And day ends at sunset when the upper last little crescent of the sun dips below the horizon.

E: And you get the green flash.

S: So that means that the day is. Now, if we counted the day from the middle of the sun to the middle of the sun, that would be equal. But we do it from the top of the sun to the top of the sun. So the day actually has that extra couple of minutes because of the time it takes for the sun to fully rise and fully set. Right? So it's actually.

C: So when are they equal?

S: Well, it's not on the equinox. It might be days either later or before.

C: Right. Because there's got to be a point where they are equal.

B: I think it's a couple of days before or after.

S: But not on the equinox because of those two factors. But yeah. And so the artifact of how we count sunrise and sunset adds a couple of minutes to the day on the equinoxes. And the bending of the light adds a few more minutes. And so it's, yeah, it's decidedly unequal on the equinox. OK.

Steve Explains Item #3

S: Which means that so-called solar outages or equinoctial disruptions refer to the fact that communication satellites are often partially or totally blocked for a few days either before or after the equinoxes is science.

E: Never heard of that.

S: Jay, you hit upon it. It's satellites in a particular orbit. But of course, communication satellites often have a particular kind of orbit. And what kind of orbit is that?

J: That's got to be low Earth orbit.

S: Nope. You want a satellite.

E: Geostationary.

S: Geosynchronically.

E: Not polar.

S: Either geosynchronous or geostationary.

B: Or geostationary.

S: A lot of them. So if you're in a geostationary orbit, by definition, you're above the equator. Right?

J: Yep.

B: Yeah.

S: So if the sun's above the equator, there's a time when it's right behind the communication satellite. And it basically completely swamps all the frequencies, including the ones that the communication satellite's using. And it either partially or completely obscures the signal from those satellites.

C: Well, it must be really short. Or they must have redundancies. Because my entire life, I've never noticed this.

S: Yeah. It depends on if you're living in a location that has a lot of redundancies. Right? But those satellites go out. And for a time, it was very common to get a lot of TV snow when that was still a thing. Or to get bad signals or just to lose a lot of communication during the equinoxes because of the solar outage. But now they take care of it mainly through redundancy. But yeah. Because you'd think the sun is putting out white light. But it's actually putting out a lot of frequencies, including the ones that satellites use for communication.

C: And this happens on solar and vernal?

S: Yep. It happens. And it's either a little before or a little after, depending on which equinox and which hemisphere you're in.

C: Interesting.

S: Yeah. All right. Good job, guys.

E: Thanks.

C: There's a first time for everything.

S: Yeah. No, it's a rare. This is a rare solo Cara loss.

E: Yeah. Boy, I couldn't tell you the last time that happened.

S: All right.

B: That's about fucking time.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:38:08)

If you want to do seismic analysis, it's ideal if you check with a seismologist first.  – Benjamin Fernando, American planetary seismologist and postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University

S: All right, Evan, give us a quote.

E: "If you want to do seismic analysis, it's ideal if you check with a seismologist first." Yeah. Benjamin Fernando, planetary seismologist at Johns Hopkins University, who I referred to in my news item. And I like this quote that he gave to the New York Times in an article recently, basically driving home the fact that, yeah, there's a reason why we have specialists. And if you're going to go investigate something and you're not of that specialty, you might want to consult with the specialists.

S: Right. That applies to every specialty, not just seismologists, of course.

E: Yes.

S: Yeah. That assumes that you are not one yourself. And then even still, even if you are a seismologist, it's good to check with your colleagues, make sure that everything's kosher because that's kind of the strength, I think, of a robust scientific community is that no one person's going to be perfect or think of everything or be error free. But the more people you have to sort of look over each other's shoulders and check each other's work and everything, the more likely you crowdsource it, basically, the more likely it is to be correct or for your errors to be detected. So-

E: There you go.

S: Even if you are an expert, I would check with other experts, right?

J: Yeah. We've talked about this before. I mean-

S: Oh, yeah.

J: If you picture a triangle, the very, very, very tippy, tippy top of the triangle, right, that tiny little hair at the very top-

S: One pixel.

J: That's where the experts are.

S: Yeah.

J: Anybody below that, their opinion is meaningless.

S: Mm-hmm.

J: We are all just consumers of the expert's information, right? And you could just, I was talking about this with Steve on TikTok a few weeks ago. Like, just pick any expertise. I picked something completely random. The guy, the people that come up with the chemistry behind concrete, right?

S: Right.

J: There's not many of them. There's not that many people that are, like, on the cutting edge of creating, like, the latest and greatest concrete formulas.

E: They're a solid group of scientists, though.

J: Yeah, but legit. But what I'm saying is, like, if you just, instead of, like, thinking of UFOs, or whatever, like, whatever your conspiracy theory is or your pseudoscience is, do you know enough to research concrete and think you could be as good as the experts that do that, a particularly mundane thing that's out there?

E: Not even close.

J: Why would you think that you've nailed physics better than the experts? Not even close. Why would you think that you know anything, anything better than the experts? So few of us get to actually be a true expert in anything. We're largely just consumers that benefit from other people's knowledge.

E: And we rely on the expertise. Oh, we rely on the expertise of others.

C: All the time.

E: Constantly. We couldn't survive without it.

C: We have to.

E: We couldn't survive without it.

J: In my work that I do for the SGU, I ask people who know better than me all the time to help me solve problems and do things. Like, I don't consider myself an expert in production work.

S: Our job is to understand and communicate what the experts think about something.

J: Right.

S: Right? Not to substitute our own expertise. Although I do think that we do have an area of expertise, and that is in scientific skepticism, which includes things like the difference between science and pseudoscience, right? Which scientists don't necessarily have that expertise.

J: That's true. But Steve, the humility that has to go along with-

S: Oh, it's massive. It's got to be massive.

J: Any knowledge base that you have or think you have. I work with you, Steve, and Cara, right? I work with two people with PhDs who are incredibly intelligent skeptics.

S: I have an MD, not a PhD, but yeah.

J: But the point being that-

C: Dr.

J: I've been doing-

S: Don't mistake my degrees, Jay.

E: That's right.

J: I have been-

E: I have a degree in homeopathy.

J: You have a degree in baloney.

S: You have a degree in baloney.

J: So the point is, I've been doing this for how long? 25 years now, guys? We've been studying this and learning about it.

S: More.

C: Wow.

B: Too damn long.

J: And I am humbled all they time by other people's knowledge of critical thinking that I don't know. Because it's a huge spectrum of information that I can't possibly cram into my head. So the fact is, the humility factor here is absolutely essential in order to live a life free of thinking that you know what shit you don't know. You have to be humble about your intelligence and your capacity to understand things.

S: Yeah. Humility is a necessary component of critical thinking. Because what's the opposite of that? It's hubris. It's thinking you know more than you do. It's the Dunning-Kruger effect.

J: And you've got to be okay with it, too. You've just got to be like, yeah, it's okay.

S: Just think about it. There's so much knowledge out there. Even if you spend your whole life studying, you still would only know a tiny fraction of all the things that could be known, of all the things that are known by other people.

J: That's why we're perfectly okay with we try to cover every news item that crosses our plate. We try to cover it as best we can with the time that we have and the current knowledge that we have of that thing. And then an expert emails us and humbles us.

S: Well, there's always nuance. There's always deeper layers, right?

J: Yeah.

E: Always.

J: And we don't go, oh, they don't know. We're like, wow, this is awesome. Did you guys see that email from whatever about this topic that we just talked about? We just find it all interesting.

S: I love it when the people who did the study email us.

B: That's the best.

S: I'm a co-author of that study. Because there's always insight into the backroom discussions. There's always these other deeper layers that you're never going to understand unless you're in that very small community of researchers or experts or whatever.

E: Things the media miss all the time. Some important details. Absolutely.

J: So when you see that flat earther on TikTok talking with authority. Like they have a clue about what's going on, right? That person, very likely that they really do think they figured it out.

S: Think about the hubris involved in thinking that you figured something out that 8 billion people couldn't figure out, including the hundreds of years of people that are the smartest human beings to ever live who are dedicated their lives to figuring this kind of stuff out.You must think you're a freaking genius.

C: Look at it this way. There was a YouGov survey in 2021.

J: The car?

C: And in it, a full 8% of Americans said that they think that they can beat a lion in a fistfight.

J: Oh my god.

E: That's like 30 million Americans or something.

C: Like if they were unarmed, they think that they would come out of a cage match with a lion alive and the lion would be dead.

J: I mean, Cara, if you told me this before 2016, I wouldn't have believed it.

C: 8%!

E: Okay, how many of these people could correctly identify what a lion is?

C: Exactly. I think they might be thinking of a cheetah, but they said lion.

S: Even a cheetah.

C: Yeah, it's scary.

S: I mean, obviously, you would have such a 0% chance of defeating a lion.

C: Unarmed. In a fight, unarmed. Have you ever seen a lion up close?

E: You become the food, my friend.

S: But I have to wonder, 8% of men believe they can beat a lion in a fistfight, according to a new survey. But I wonder if they really, really believe that. You know what I mean?

C: I don't know, man. It was a survey where they asked about a lot of different animals. And 72% of people said that they could beat a rat if they were unarmed.

J: I know people who wouldn't survive a fight with a five-pound dog.

C: Oh yeah, that's in there. Medium-sized dog, only 49% of people think that they could. So about half. That's fair. But come on, 8% think they could beat a lion?

S: 8% thought they could beat a gorilla.

J: A gorilla would rip your face off.

C: Honestly, a lion to me is way scarier. I mean, they're both really scary.

'S: Yeah, a gorilla would just rip your arms out of their socket. They're so much stronger than humans.

B: Like 900 pounds. I mean, come on.

E: All muscle.

J: They don't walk funny because they want to. That's muscle. That's the muscle. You ever see a bodybuilder swing their arms and go out in a weird way? That's a gorilla.

E: Wow.

C: Have you ever seen a lion? They're so scary. I saw a lion eating a giraffe. Just fully eating.

S: Yeah. That's grossly underestimating how powerful these creatures are. Plus, they have claws. I mean, they would just rip you apart.

C: That is hilarious to me.

J: You know, I was in the Bronx Zoo and I was about-

E: Oh, I saw you there.

J: God damn. I mean, I was like not even close to the cat building that they had. You know, the lions. They had everything in there.

E: The cat house.

J: I heard a lion roar and I felt it in my chest. I felt it.

S: It's awesome.

J: I felt it.

S: Love it.

J: You know, I mean, it was fantastic, but man, my mammalian instinct to shit my pants happened.

C: Yeah. Yeah.

J: Like, in that moment, I swear to God, you take any of those people that say, and you know, this is all men, by the way. No woman can say that.

C: I know. I'm just like, how many of that are you?

J: You take any of those people that said that, Cara, and if you put them right where I was, not even in the enclosure, outside, I'm getting ice cream for Christ's sake. You put them with me standing next to that ice cream booth, they would have shit their pants too.

C: Yeah. Yeah.

S: Oh, boy.

E: Wow. One little quote unleashed all that.

C: It did.

E: That was remarkable.

S: By the way, Evan, you said cat house. I'm sure-

E: Well, yeah. I mean, you know.

S: Everyone here knows-

E: Yes, that has multiple meanings.

S: Cat house is a euphemism, for a house of ill repute.

E: House of ill repute.

C: House of ill repute.

S: That came up. I was having a conversation with my daughter, who's in her 20s, and that came up. She had absolutely no idea what a cat house was.

E: Oh, it's a term from antiquity.

S: And, when I told her what it was, she's like, I'd never heard that before. Like, totally absent from her vernacular. And then she asked all of her friends and her peers, age. None of them. Not a single one knew what it was.

E: Wow.

B: I don't even hear that word anymore.

E: Wow. I feel older.

J: Yeah. We are up there, man.

E: I aged with that.

J: And, Cara, you know what the other sad thing is?

C: What?

J: Is if one of these guys actually put themselves up against a lion, and the lion ended up killing them, they would have to put the lion down.

C: The lion would kill them.

J: You know what I mean?

C: Yeah. Yeah. We're not going to sponsor that fight. We know how it's going to end.

J: That's crazy talk, man.

S: Oh, boy.

J: Well, hey, guys.

S: That is funny, though.

J: Guys, yo.

B: Yeah.

J: We're very fortunate to live in a world where we actually think, some of us actually think we could take a lion, because 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 300 years ago, 1,000 years ago, we actually had to deal with stuff like that. You know, you have to get the whole tribe together to take down one. There was a lion that was-

C: Some people still deal with lions. Yeah, it's hubris, for sure.

J: Cara, there was a tribe, I think, what was this? It must have been in Africa.

C: Well, there are only lions in Africa.

J: There was two lions that were hunting this town. They were hunting a town.

S: Yeah, yeah. There were two lions that decided to team up, and they killed a lot of people. Yeah.

J: A whole town couldn't take them out.

E: Oh, they'll follow walkers on trails, right? They'll just walk right behind them and wait until they feel like it's-

C: On trails?

E: Haven't you heard stories about that?

C: I think you might be thinking of mountain lions.

E: Maybe mountain lions.

C: Maybe that's what those 8% were thinking of.

S: Oh, yeah.

C: We're not talking about African lions.

J: This is starting to make sense. They played Red Dead Redemption, and they think that they can take a mountain lion. Right, Steve?

S: Yeah, but the thing is, those mountain lions, unless if they see you before you see them, you're dead.

J: Yeah, you're done.

S: You never win. You never win against those lions. You have to shoot them before they know you exist. That's your only chance.

C: I would much rather go into a cage match with a mountain lion than an African lion, though.

S: Sure, but even then-

E: Yeah.

C: Even then, you're right, but it is a big difference.

E: Go from terrible to worse.

S: All right.

J: Wait, wait. Steve, hold on.

S: Okay.

E: Wait, wait. We're just getting started.

J: I got to take this to the next level, because I just-

E: Holy moly.

J: I just visualized, what do they think their inherent weapon would be against a lion? You couldn't hit a lion hard enough with your hand to even get through its fur. What's the weapon?

S: Are they going to put it in a headlock? I mean, what do you think?

J: Yeah. What do they- Oh, my God.

B: Kick them in the nuts.

E: Use the Demac power.

C: An adult mountain lion male weighs about 53 kilograms, and an adult female African lion weighs 150 kilograms.

B: What?

E: Forget it.

S: It's a totally different story.

C: Yeah.

E: It's paw is bigger than your whole head.

C: I know. I don't think a lot of people have been up close and really understand the power. Anyway.

J: Go to the zoo. You'll learn.

E: We went to the zoo in Australia.

J: Remember that?

E: The first time trip to Australia, 2010. We went right up to those lions behind that glass. That was impressive.

C: When you see one on safari, and it's right there, and you're just in an uncovered vehicle, you are trusting that that guide is really well-trained, can drive very well, and it's scary.

S: All right.

Signoff (1:51:35)

S: Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

J: We love it.

C: Thanks, Steve.

E: We ain't lying.

C: Oh, no.

S: —and until next week, this is your Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.

S: Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to info@theskepticsguide.org. And, if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com/SkepticsGuide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.

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