SGU Episode 974

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SGU Episode 974
March 9th 2024
"Sinking ground and rising sea levels will put more than half a million people at risk of repeated flooding across 32 U.S. coastal cities, new research shows."  Click for image details Flooding in the neighborhood of Freeport, Long Island, on Jan. 13, 2024. (Image credit: Getty Images)
SGU 973                      SGU 975
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
Most deadly errors arise from obsolete assumptions.
Frank Herbert, American sci-fi author
Links
Download Podcast
Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction, food delivery problems

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 6th, 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: Hey guys.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening, everyone.

S: So it's March, which means this is the month in the Northern Hemisphere where spring comes in. Yay! Yes, yes.

J: Which means in New England, it's nonstop raining.

E: But it also means daylight saving ends.

S: And it gets muddy and slippery everywhere.

J: Yeah, talking about that, oh my God, guys. So my wife is at work and she's away. Like, I'm not going to see her for two weeks, right? Aww. So I'm prepping for the show, and Steve and I are in the studio on Wednesday, so I get home, and I'm always scrambling on Wednesday. So I'm like, all right, I'm not making dinner tonight. I'm going to order the kids some hamburgers. So, you know, I do door dash. It's raining. Guy pulls up on the street and parks his car on the road right in front of my house, and he gets out, and he's coming straight to my door, and my front yard has a slope in it. And the guy took a header and slid down my front yard on his ass.

S: You're just coming down the grass. You don't do that.

J: Oh, he was running. I'm like, don't do it. Don't do it. And then

S: when his ass

E: hit the

J: ground, I

B: went, whoa!

E: You know, I was like... Like a sound effect from a movie almost.

C: So you're like standing at the window just watching this?

J: I have the door open because I usually wave to those guys to let them know I'm here. You know, like, come here, you know?

E: Oh, boy.

J: So he, like a champ, this guy had the bag of hamburgers above his head the whole way down. Yes.

E: Yes.

J: And as soon as he gets to the door, I'm like, two things. I wanted to grab those hamburgers out of his hand quick because it's raining. And two, I didn't want interaction with the guy. I'm just like, dude, are you okay? And I'm like, wait a second. Just wait there, right? I go and I get him a roll of paper towels and a garbage bag so he could dry himself off and he could sit on the garbage bag in his car, not get his seat wet. But I'm like – Oh, my gosh. So I go upstairs. I give the kids their hamburgers. I go upstairs. I'm prepping. About 10 minutes later, I look out the window. He's still parked in front of my house.

B: Oh. Oh, what's – He's drying off.

J: Yeah. He's just like drying – and like. I saw him like in the car and I could see his face. The guy looked very shaken, you know, like – He was a young teenager. He was like 17 years old.

C: Don't run down wet lawns.

E: Don't dash down wet lawns for DoorDash.

J: I tipped him an extra $2. I felt bad for him.

S: $2? That reminds me of the movie Young Frankenstein when he knees the guy in the balls during the demonstration and he whispers to his guy, give him an extra dollar. Yeah.

E: Pain and suffering.

S: You went to two, Jay.

J: I would have tipped him more, but no exaggeration. If you guys have ever done this, five guys, it was going to cost over $60 to get two hamburgers and two fries.

E: Oh, my gosh.

C: This is the story of my life living in L.A.

J: because – I order in too much so but I ordered from way back and it was only 40. so hey 20 bucks a kid for a hamburger and fries like I'm like sitting there like am I doing this? am I doing this like?

C: yeah because they it's like you've got the fees you've got the the service fee the gas fee the everything and all of the prices on the menus are like whatever percent higher on the delivery apps.

S: yeah otherwise they lose money from what I understand.

E: yeah they can't make money otherwise and it's marginal anyways.

C: And so when you say you tipped him too, you meant on top of the tip you already gave him in the app.

J: On top of like the extra. Yeah. Like eight or nine bucks.

S: Wow, Jay. So I had a food delivery snafu recently as well. We were ordering.

J: Oh, boy.

S: I can't remember which one of the food delivery things it was. So we ordered from a local restaurant that we've been going to for 20 years. And the guy comes to the house to deliver the food. And so we looked at it, and it was the wrong order. So we called the guy and told him, you have to go back to the restaurant. So we had to come back, get the food that he gave to us, and bring that to the restaurant, then get our food and bring it back to us.

C: did it, that would never fly here.

E: Why did you have to call?

S: So he grabbed the food to bring it back. He dropped off the food. Meanwhile, so we're waiting for our food. We know exactly how long it takes to get to this restaurant, right? It's like six minutes down the road. It's not coming. So we call the restaurant and they said, all right, so the guy came and dropped off the food that he incorrectly picked up previously, but then he didn't pick up your food. He just left.

C: Yeah.

E: Yeah, he ditched.

S: So we called the delivery place. They said, well, they're not allowed to go to a house twice.

C: So you have to reorder it?

S: I had to go pick up. I had to get out of my own house, drive down. Can you imagine the horror I had to pick up my own food?

C: How terrible.

S: I hope that they refunded you.

E: I hope you're seeing someone for this, Steve, to talk about it.

S: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was very traumatic. But here's the thing. The guy, he was pissed, but it was his problem, right? It's not our problem. But if he had no intention of bringing us our food... Tell us.

C: Right, yeah.

S: Because we wasted the 20 minutes that we were waiting for him to not bring our food back. And when he knew he had never had any intention of doing that, he just wasted time with our food sitting there. Just tell us. Listen, by the way, policy, we can't re-deliver the food, so you're going to have to get it yourself.

J: He doesn't want to deal with you saying that. He doesn't want to take the heat for that.

S: right yeah but now what do you? you know? whatever. we gave the worst possible review we can you know.

C: and yeah and also you guys live in a. I mean it's not a small town but like he may be your driver again at some point. so it's not like like here. things are just so different. like a that would never happen. like if you got the wrong food you would just go in the app and be like I got the wrong food and they would be like here's your money back. you just need to reorder. Like you're screwed. Like it is what it is. Eat that other person's food. All the time people misdeliver because they can't find my address. because for whatever reason in my development, we have three different streets and they decided to number all the houses the same. So people always drop it at the wrong house on the wrong street.

E: Get someone else's mail.

C: All the time. And so the problem is I'm deep in the development, but the main street, the one at the very front, is a very busy public street. And so delivery drivers will just drop it there because it's easier. They don't want to go into the development. They see the number and they drop it basically at the wrong house. And by the time you walk out to get it, it's been picked up by somebody who's unhoused.

S: Yeah.

C: Because where I live is just a very urban center. So it's like free food on the street. Right. It happens all the time. How? So you got to be on it. You got to be on it. And I'm always like Amazon's always delivering my mail to my neighbor and I have to go get it off her porch. And I always make a point to like wave to her ring camera so she knows I'm not a package thief. Like this is mine.

S: Yeah. Yeah, you have to name streets within developments intelligently, right?

C: It's so stupid. It's like we've got three different streets and they're named different things, but the numbers line up. Don't make number 800 right behind number 800.

E: And you're not allowed to put some number on your own house and say, hey, it's 80 now and come to 80.

C: No, you can't do that. But I did get a literal doormat printed. I paid money to get a doormat custom made that has the number and name of my street on it.

S: Yeah.

E: Oh, my gosh.

C: Because they'll drop it off at another street with that number. And it says in every delivery app, I live on this street, not that street. You'll know you're at the right house because the doormats.

S: Yeah.

C: They still don't get it.

S: Bob, didn't you live in a development that had like a Huntington Court and Huntington Drive or something in the same development?

C: So annoying.

B: Yeah, it was crazy. Then they actually changed the name of it.

C: Oh, really? That's nice.

B: But even better than that, there was a road, a series of roads, connected roads not far from my house that had, you know, I forget the name of it, but it had the same name, but Court Lane Street and I think one other one. And I was like, what? Who was on crack when they named these streets right next to each other? Can you imagine these poor people getting their mail and all the problems? Wait, 15 blah blah lane? But I'm on 15 blah blah street.

S: I'm like, come on.

C: That was actually – when I lived in New York, probably a lot of New Yorkers who are listening to this right now are like nodding feverishly. I lived on Queens Boulevard, but I lived by 67th Ave. And in New York City – or this is Queens – there's like a road, a street, and an ave for all those numbers. But they're miles away. So if they misdeliver, you can't even just walk over and go get your mail. Like you get off at the wrong subway stop or something, you're in the completely wrong neighborhood.

E: If I ever run a food delivery service, I'm going to call it Dine and Dash. Oh, wait. Maybe I shouldn't do that.

C: No, don't do that.

S: All right, Bob, you're going to start us off with a quickie.

Quickie with Bob: Colliding Neutron Stars (9:28)

• Colliding neutron stars hint at new physics that could explain dark matter
   (Note: this article is not from the SGU show notes page)

B: Thank you, Steve. This is your Quickie with Bob, people. All right. Can we find new physics in the debris from neutron star mergers? That is the topic for this Quickie with Bob. Yes, good guess there, Steve. Neutron star mergers may give us the clues we need to finally find out what the hell dark matter is. Now, that's the matter, if you've never listened to the show before, that's the matter that we can't detect at all except for gravitationally. Yet, there's six times as much of it as there is all the matter, all that immense amount of matter that we can see. Multiply that times six. That's how much dark matter we think there is. Now, when neutron stars collide, before becoming either – what do they become? Either a bigger neutron star or they become a black hole, right? Those are basically the two options. Right. Before that happens, there's a brief amount of time where it creates, they believe, a hot remnant, which is essentially like a huge physics experiment creating these exotic particles. The researchers think that the collision might create theoretical particles called axions, which have never been seen, but they're actually one of the more promising theoretical candidate particles for dark matter itself. So it's believed that these particles can move far enough away from the amazing collision that had just happened. They think they can go far enough away and have time enough to decay into particles that we know and can really easily detect, like photons, for example. So this new research shows that these electromagnetic signals caused by the decay should be detectable by gamma-ray telescopes, such as NASA's Fermilat telescope and future such telescopes. So in the future, when we detect neutron star collisions using gravitational wave astronomy, we may then quickly point our gamma ray telescopes at them and hopefully not only reveal brand new physics, but finally shed some light on mysterious dark matter at the same time. Cross your fingers. This has been your Quickie with Bob. Back to you, Steve.

E: I like how you said shedding light on dark matter.

B: Yes, thank you.

E: Very clever, Bob.

B: Thank you, Evan.

E: I noticed.

S: Jay, let me ask you a question. Yeah. What are you thinking of?

J: Exactly.

E: Guys, that's still funny.

S: It is still funny.

News Items

S:

B:

C:

J:

E:

(laughs) (laughter) (applause) [inaudible]

Sinking Cities (11:29)

• 32 U.S. cities, including New York and San Francisco, are sinking into the ocean and face major flood risks by 2050, new study reveals 

(click to create redirect page)

J: All right, guys. You know in The Expanse where – Yeah. If you remember the show, in New York City, they had to put a concrete barrier around the city to keep ocean water from flooding the city. Do you remember that visual?

S: Yeah.

E: Oh, sure.

J: Well, that's what was hitting me when I'm reading about this. So there was a recent study that was published in Journal Nature, and this was done by Virginia Tech. So the study points out that rising sea levels and sinking land threatens 30 freaking two U.S. cities along the Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf Coast. Now, they just studied those coastlines. This is happening globally, by the way, but this is just an idea of what's to come. So this includes highly populated cities like New York, Boston, San Francisco, and the cities that are the most at risk in the U.S. are Miami, New Orleans, Port Arthur, Texas, Foster City, California, Savannah, Georgia. I mean it's like just tons and tons of cities here are going to be at risk from what's going to happen. Yeah. From the measurements that they took, it seems like it's definitely going to happen. So these findings, they estimated with these findings that they put over half a million people at risk of recurrent flooding. And if nothing is done to basically remediate the situation, the damages could reach over $107 billion by 2050. Now, we throw around billion a lot and it's a number that people have gotten very used to. $107 billion is an unbelievable amount of money, right? We got to keep that in mind. Even though our governments around the world throw around money like it's nothing, it is a huge amount of money that taxpayers have to absorb. So there's several other increases that they estimated out. They were saying between 500 and 700 square miles of land will be flooded. There'll be up to 518,000 people affected and there'll be up to 288,000 more properties that were exposed. To the water, an estimated value of another $32 billion has to be taken seriously here because 30% of the US population lives where? In coastal cities, right? These are some of the first cities that – when settlers come, they make cities right near the ocean, right?

E: And places like Australia, I mean aren't they entirely coastal? For the most part, like 98% of their people live in the interior of the desert.

C: It's not that that's all. the land is not coastal.

E: No, no. But this is where the people are. They are on coasts.

J: So the study projected that the sea level will rise up to one foot or 0.3 meters by 2050. How much is a foot when it comes to where the ocean is? That is significant.

C: Oh, yeah. That's enough to decimate a city.

J: Yep. So previous forecasts, they didn't account for a few things here, which I think you guys will find interesting. There's a rapid rate in which these cities are actually sinking too, right? They're going down, like the ground is sinking down and compressing underneath them. The study used data from a radar system that was used to map sinking areas in these cities. Now, the data shows that coastal cities could sink by as much as 0.2 inches or 5 millimeters each year. So that's going to add up quick. So this significantly increases the relative sea level, right? So these flood risks are getting worse not just because ocean levels are rising but because the ground is sinking.

E: Two things are combining to make it a bigger problem than just – Just the rising water.

J: Absolutely. And what the hell? Why is the ground sinking, right? Well, there's a few factors here. The overall weight of cities increases as they build more buildings and everything. Hey, and it adds up. You might not think it, but when you put that much stone and cities use a lot of stone to build and everything and a lot of paving, a lot of concrete sidewalks and all that stuff, like the weight can become astronomical. Right. We also have post-ice age shifts in coastal land, right? So the land is shifting around. And the big one here is the extraction of gas, water, and other resources. So what they're basically doing is they're hollowing out huge parts of, you know, internally, they're hollowing out all this stuff. They're taking out oil. They're taking out gas. So the land has actually a place to go. Like it needs to go down, right? Because gravity is just going to continuously be pulling that land down, right? So we have a recipe for a real disaster here. So it's estimated that more than 90% of the ocean is also absorbing atmospheric greenhouse gases. And this expands the seawater. So like the volume of seawater is increasing as well. So we have all these different factors here that are leading to this inevitability that these coastal cities are going to get smacked with seawater. The sinking land and climate-driven melting of glaciers and ice sheets, that's where predominantly a lot of this water is coming from. This triples the change in relative sea levels around these areas. That's very significant. I mean I'm pretty worried about this. I mean my children's generation is going to be living – they're going to be in the middle of their lives in the 50s. How many years away are we from the 50s at this point? Almost 25 years, right?

C: 26, yeah.

J: Not that long. The researchers identified these regions that are most at risk and estimated the potential human and economic impacts of the future flooding. So they found that without taking any preventative actions, one in 50 people living in these 280,000 properties along the U.S. coast will likely be affected by this. And unfortunately, it says that minority and low-income groups will bear most of the damages. The study also suggested that limiting the extraction of natural gas and groundwater, you know, this will help reduce further landmass sinking. You know, how likely is that going to be? Not. You know, by the time the government gets around to slowing down or stopping natural gas extraction, there won't be any more gas, right? That's the way I look at it. The cost to mitigate these issues will be, of course, much less if we start dealing with them now. Like we need to bend money towards these problems, start figuring out how to protect these cities. I don't know. I mean is there ever a situation where they say, OK, forget it? Like we're going to abandon the city and just repopulate these people? I can't imagine.

E: Can we look to Europe to some of the models they've used to protect their cities? Because they've had to deal with this as well.

J: I mean I'm sure if anyone is doing anything about it, I'm sure that they're going to take all the information that they can get. But it's going to be expensive.

E: Absolutely. There's always cost.

J: Prevention is harder than dealing with something after the fact because a lot of people could just say, we don't need to do that right now. It's easy to put off. Like global warming, this is something that like, you know, we can't quickly solve these problems. Like we need to really start talking about it and getting the money lined up that we're going to need to solve these problems. And again, this is global. This is happening everywhere.

C: This is not theoretical. And we know on paper it's not theoretical, but we've lived it. Like, we know what happened in New Orleans. We know what happened in Houston. We should be learning from these experiences. And we're, I mean, we are to some extent, but not nearly as dramatically.

E: Slow to react. Slow. Too slow.

J: I agree.

S: Yeah, I mean, yeah. From what I've been reading, it's mainly on the east coast of the U.S., at least. It's mainly groundwater pumping, like we're pumping water for use. But also, I had one question because we've talked previously about the fact that the receding ice sheets from the glacial period actually is causing the ground to rebound a little bit, right? Yeah. The land was sinking down under all that ice and then the ice – Yeah, it's still coming up.

B: It's so cool after so long.

S: But New York City, for example, was just outside of the most recent ice sheet. Ah. So it actually increased. It was pushed up. Like the land next to it was pushed down. It was pushed up. And then when the ice melted, it's now sinking back down to where it was before.

E: Oh, I see.

B: Interesting.

S: Yeah.

E: Like a ridge formed and now it's going back to where it was before.

C: I also think this is such a problem, Steve, and I – Yeah. Yeah. And so it's like, oh, on average, we've got, you know, temperatures and, you know, at 1.5 C or on average, we've got, you know, one foot or whatever. That means that there are places that have two and three and four times that.

S: Yeah, exactly. And so the difference between the worst and the best could be pretty extreme. And this is no difference. Like, yeah, the average sea levels may be rising like by centimeters, but that doesn't mean in some places it could be significant much earlier. Yeah.

Hypervaccination (20:42)

• Hypervaccination

S: All right, let me ask you guys a question. You know I like to start with questions. What do you think would happen to somebody if they got 217 COVID vaccinations over the last two years?

B: I know.

E: I call that acupuncture. 217 points on the body.

J: I read about this, Steve. I'm shocked. Yeah.

C: Was he called for a psych consult? Did that happen to him?

S: Yeah, so we don't have a lot of personal information about the guy or why he did it. That wasn't explored. There's an article in The Lancet recently. It's a case report. 62-year-old gentleman in Germany who decided for whatever personal reasons that he needed to get 217 COVID vaccines. God, it's just incredible. Yeah, mostly the mRNA ones. So this is an interesting opportunity to say, well, we would never deliberately do this, right? But in medicine, we often will gather safety information.

B: Take advantage of eccentric people, say?

S: From outlier cases. For example, sometimes people do weird things, right? Sometimes it's like a deliberate overdose, for example. Or it could have been an accidental overdose. Or it could have just been somebody really not listening to medical advice. Right.

C: A friend of mine got snake venom in his eye for a TV show and he ended up in a case study. Yeah.

E: There you go. But you don't want to be a case study.

C: No, you don't want to be a case study.

S: As I often tell students, you never want to be an interesting case. That's not what you want to be. But, you know, so this is just one of those cases where somebody did something weird, you know, and then we say, okay, well, let's at least take a look and see, you know, what happened to the guy. And so there's a number of questions that they had. One was, is there any toxicity with that many doses? Two was, what was his immune reaction like? You know, did he get, how much super immunity did he get? And the third was, and this is an interesting one, did this basically exhaust his immune system?

B: Yeah, that was a big question.

J: What does that mean, Steve?

C: Or did it induce any autoimmune issues or anything like that?

S: Well, yeah, it could have overstimulated the immune system. That's the thing I would most worry about. But the exhaustion is what if he doesn't respond to new immune challenges as robustly as a healthy person? because his immune system has just been depleted of whatever because it's been so stimulated. Like every two weeks he's getting another or whatever, every week he's getting another vaccine. He just doesn't have a chance to recover. So they said, all right, we'll take a look at all these things. So first, let's look at the safety issue. The short answer is the guy has apparently suffered no ill effects from getting 217 COVID vaccines. I got sick even after each vaccine.

C: Only for like a day. Do you know if he felt like crap?

S: They don't go into that. He probably had the normal sore arm and all that stuff, but he had no medical complications from doing this. No illness, no diseases happened. They also did, they said, 62 routine clinical chemistry parameters which showed no abnormalities. So that means they looked at his kidney function. His kidneys were fine. His liver function was fine. He wasn't breaking down muscle tissue. Didn't show any signs of autoimmunity. Wow. Because all that you would have seen in like a 62, that's a lot of blood parameters.

E: Could they measure this concentration of medicine in it?

S: Well, the medicine is just the mRNA, which would be gone by now, right?

E: Oh, okay. So, yeah, yeah.

S: But what they can measure is the second thing is looking at, well, how much immunity does the guy have, right?

C: How much immunity can you get? I mean, it's got a plateau at some point.

S: That's what you would think, right?

E: Well, have they done this to animals in prior studies? Not this much.

C: Nothing like this.

S: Why would they? It's like it's way beyond what you would ever do. So what they found was that his neutralizing antibodies was 5.4 times the control group. They had a control group of people who were – they call vaccinees, right? So these are people – who had the normal vaccine schedule, right? So he had 5.4 times like the antibody capacity against the spike proteins for the wild type and 11.5 times for the Omicron B1.1.529 spike proteins. So that's because most of the vaccines probably were targeting Omicron. those proteins. So yeah, five to 10 times, 11 times the amount of neutralizing capacity as people who just got the normal vaccine schedule.

B: Oh, my God.

C: But not 650 times.

S: No, no. But that's still a lot.

C: It is. It is.

S: Now, here's an interesting thing. During the period where they were evaluating this guy for the study, he continued to get more vaccines.

J: Shocker. Shocker. Oh, God.

C: I hope they got him a cycle.

B: Of course he did.

C: Because there's got to be something going on there. It's expensive.

E: We were just talking about the price of vaccines.

S: Who knows?

E: This is not cheap either.

C: Well, I don't know what the German health care system is like.

E: No, they're not going to give a person 200 free vaccinations.

C: Yeah, they're like, your card is real full, my friend.

E: I mean, unless the German health system is willing to do something.

S: I don't know how he evaded any tracking system that they have going on there, but he did. Yeah. But it probably evolved a lot of cash payments, would be my guess.

E: Oh, I see.

S: His T-cell immunity was also higher, by the way, than the standard vaccine people. Yeah. And the control group. So then for the vaccine to receive during the evaluation period, he continued to have a bump in his antibodies. But it was muted, right? Because he already was so high. Like, again, you get diminishing returns at some point. But he did have an increase when he got vaccinated. But then the third thing they wanted to know is he never had COVID, by the way. That's the other thing. He didn't have the kind of antibodies you would expect to have if you've ever been infected. Wow. So he was never infected, which doesn't mean this is why because you can't know from a single case. Right.

C: He might never leave his house other than to go back.

S: He's an isolated person. He may be a germaphobe. Who knows? Yeah.

B: But he also – it may be directly because of this.

S: It could be. We just can't know.

E: How many different facilities did he visit to get this done?

S: It makes you wonder.

J: Steve, what would the medical profession expect someone – what would they expect the outcome of this to be?

S: Like wouldn't they – I would imagine that – This is all pretty much in line with what I would expect to be honest with you. Right.

C: Like improved immunity to a point.

S: That's not – 200 times, that's about the safety margins we build in. I wouldn't expect the vaccine itself would have caused a problem. Again, the one thing I would worry about is that it triggered an autoimmune reaction.

C: I guess I'm not surprised, but it's interesting because you think about those rare cases where people get Guillain-Barre or they get some sort of... And he's really pushing the...

S: Yeah, but that's literally a million to one, Cara.

C: It is, but he's at 650,000. But there's no way to know if he was like – 217. Genetically predisposed or something like that.

B: Don't forget the upside here, the real upside. This is showing that these vaccines are ridiculously safe. Ridiculously. That is a key takeaway here.

S: There is not any necessary toxicity that kicks in with higher doses, right? So here's the other thing is the exhaustion question, right? So this is probably the most interesting question. Did his ability to respond to further antigenic challenges, were that intact? Or has he just wiped out his immune system because he's constantly overstimulating?

E: Yeah, let's expose him to a bunch of stuff.

S: So what that found is that his ability to respond to stimuli was intact. No apparent exhaustion at all in the ways that they measured it.

E: Yeah, chalk one up to the human immune system.

S: We've actually been writing about this for quite some time, this kind of question, because this blows a pretty big hole in some of the anti-vaccine rhetoric, the whole too many too soon kind of thing. They've been saying this kind of thing for years, not based on evidence, just based upon – they're just trying to think of anything negative. they can say about vaccines that, oh, you're basically using up the immune system. They're going to be vulnerable for other things. The immunity isn't good, all these things. Nope. Part of our response was, you know, the antigenic stimulation that you get from a vaccine is pretty much insignificant compared to your daily antigenic stimulation.

C: Just from exposure to life.

S: Yeah, life is exposing you to hundreds of antigens a day. And we're just adding one more or a few at a time. It's nothing. It's nothing compared to what your immune system goes through on a regular basis. So there really wasn't a good reason to think that this would be a problem, right? So this kind of reinforces what we had said. suspected was that vaccines – it's not that vaccines are like massively stimulating your immune system. It's that they're targeting it against something very specific. But still you're getting tons of antigenic stimulation just by going through life.

C: I remember the first time I discovered because this is me being – how do you put this? Not terribly organized is that I get a flu. shot every year like everybody does, right? Or like we hopefully do. I'm not always great. I have a yellow card that has like my hepatitis vaccines and my yellow fever vaccines and typhoid and all those good things that I've had over the years from all my travels. I don't usually document when I get my flu shot unless I'm doing it through work. And so there have been multiple years where I was like Did I get one already? And I remember having to ask the pharmacist or call my doctor or look it up and be like, is it dangerous to get? And they're like, no, you can just get another one.

S: Yeah, right. What's going to happen?

C: Better safe than sorry.

S: The other thing I was thinking about with this is that, again, if there is anything to be worried about, it would be the adjuvants. that's part of the vaccine, not the vaccine itself, but the other stuff that they give to help stimulate your immune system. What did you call it? Adjuvants.

C: Adjuvants.

B: Gesundheit.

S: Yeah. And so there you might think, all right, that's a lot of these other things that they put in the vaccine, you know, two times 217. But apparently that wasn't a problem either because it didn't show any – this is a pretty extensive evaluation that they did of this guy and he didn't seem to be any worse for wear.

E: And did he give a reason why he did this? Yeah. To prove the point?

S: Not discussed in the article. We need to find him and interview him. They respected his privacy. No, it's H-I-M. That's all we know about him. Just those initials. So yeah, fascinating little case report there. I'm not sure how generalizable this information is, but... If anything, it's reassuring that somebody can do this and with no ill effects. It doesn't mean that everybody can do it or that this is a good idea. We should do it. Yeah, we should do it. And to be clear, we're not recommending this. Just get the vaccines that are recommended, no more, no less.

C: Also, I wonder when – like I wonder if this ramped up later in the pandemic or if early on he was like – because like that means he was taking vaccines away from people who needed them.

S: Yeah, yeah.

C: Like do you remember how hard it was early on? There was like waiting lists and phases.

S: No, apparently this was early on.

E: But then there was – That's what I mean.

S: This was the whole time. This was not just all recently. Yeah.

C: Yeah. So early on, like he's like, get out of the way, old man. I'm getting my 17th vaccine. That's terrible.

S: Hopefully when the study was over, they had a serious talking to.

C: That's when they had the psych consult.

S: Yeah, that's when they had the psych consult.

C: I hope so.

Conspiracy Theorists and Disease X (32:53)

• Conspiracy Theorists Are Profiting Off a Disease That Doesn't Exist Yet

S: All right. Cara, tell us about conspiracy theories about diseases that, you know, may or may not exist.

C: So I love this. Every week I send Steve multiple articles that I think are interesting. And I'm like, which one will fit best in the show? And he picks the one, you know, based on what other people are doing. And he goes, you had me at conspiracy theories. That's his response this week.

E: Thanks.

C: So how many of you have heard of Disease X?

E: Is that a musical artist?

B: I know Chemical X that created the Powerpuff Girls.

E: I've heard of Planet X.

S: I've heard of Malcolm X.

C: Anybody? Yes. But Disease X. I mean, this is some scary stuff, guys. Like, are you prepared for Disease X? Have you?

B: Oh, yeah, yeah.

E: I got my X shot, so I'm good.

S: Is there a vaccine X?

C: Yeah, right? So the World Health Organization at the World Economic Forum earlier this year decided to speak about disease X. And this was – a fake or a theoretical pandemic, right? So this is not a real disease. This is just a what if something happened, wherein this disease, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So they talked about disease X in a panel, I think, at the World Economic Forum. And people took that and ran with it. So what do you think that they – what do you think that happened after this fake disease? Oh, it was a panel in January.

E: They started selling fake cures for disease X.

C: Mm-hmm.

S: Yeah, they claimed it was real. It's a conspiracy. The usual conspiracy is they want to either make people dumb so they're easier to control or they want to depopulate the earth. Man, these conspiracy theorists must be terrible because they are doing an awful job of depopulating the earth.

C: Right, yeah. So, yeah, it's going to depopulate the earth. It's going to make us docile. It's going to make us easier to control. And AFP, which is one of the big three news organizations, there's AP, Reuters, and AFP. They're like the big wire services. AFP did a deep dive on this, and their fact checkers believe that the conspiracies started in the United States. Thank you very much. But quickly spread over the globe and have become quite popular in Asia in a lot of different local languages. One of the big pushers of this conspiracy, can you guys guess who it would be? Alex Jones. Alex Jones. I'm surprised he's still doing this. Isn't he like – Why? No. He cannot be muzzled.

E: Well, he has to work to pay his bills, doesn't he?

C: Yeah, I know. I just didn't know how much they – I don't know, all these lawsuits. Anyway, so – He is pushing this as a, quote, genocidal kill weapon. That's what – so Disease X is going to be deployed globally. I'm not sure by whom, by the powers that be, as a genocidal – The Illuminati. Yeah, the Illuminati. They. We don't need to know who that is.

E: They.

C: We've also got some, as it got to China, then we start seeing a lot of conspiracies around the Chinese government opening up mobile cremation ovens to cope with the mass deaths from disease X, which, by the way, again, does not exist. And there were photos that were often linked to these posts shared on TikTok and Twitter. Turns out they were all fake. Pet cremation services. Those were the photos that were being used. But of course, we're no longer in a situation where you even have to misattribute a vague photo to push your conspiracy. Now we can just AI them, right? We can make them.

E: And it can be even more convincing than rehashing some old photo from five years ago.

C: Yeah, it can have a sign on it that says disease X cremations this way. I mean, it's ridiculous, right? So we're seeing that, yeah, people are pushing calls for taking vaccines for disease X. Disease X does not exist. So the vaccine for disease X does not exist. These things being engineered in a bio lab. Oh, and then we've got basically people, as you would expect, selling vaccines. Cures.

E: Yeah, there you go. That's there it is. Ching ching.

C: Yep. So these medical emergency kits, often including ivermectin, often including drugs that we already have debunked against COVID-19.

E: I'm sure some herbal remedies are in there too.

C: Oh, yeah. All the things you would expect for the low, low price of however much they're asking. Yeah, we've got – let's see. There's a right-wing website called The Gateway Pundit, which is promoting these kits and sponsored posts. So if you are online and you're seeing sponsored posts that are targeted to you, if you've looked up this kind of content before, the titles are Disease X, Are the Globalists Planning Another Pandemic? Don't Be Caught Unprepared. Yeah. And so obviously we see that this is a huge problem. The AFP, again, who did most of the reporting on this is showing that these conspiracies do in this situation at least tend to be somewhat partisan. We tend to see them on the severe right wing, like the most kind of extreme side of the right wing, obviously not anywhere in the kind of moderate partisan politics area. And that sadly, over the past several months to years, we've seen mass cuts to content moderation across social media platforms, especially things like – I know I keep saying Twitter because I just refuse to call it X, but X is not moderating the content the way that they used to. And we're seeing that these conspiracy theories are just being pushed, pushed, pushed. The disinformation then, of course, as we know – starts to get hyped and hyped and hyped. And then before you know it, somebody heard something about a thing, about a thing, about a thing. And it becomes part of the mainstream rhetoric. You know, it doesn't always stay siloed in the extreme conspiracy theory world. The little chatters, the little niblets of misinformation get sort of washed over and After enough exposure and after enough kind of games of telephone, what ends up happening is, oh, yeah, I've heard of disease. Yeah, that's a worrisome one. That's the next one, right? It's like, no, this isn't even – this was a panel basically urging world leaders to make sure that their pandemic readiness was where it needs to be. It was a placeholder. Yeah.

E: It's it's it's crazy. It's a hijacking. And it's and once and kind of once it's out of the barn, you can't chase it down with the truth or with the evidence.

C: Yeah, the genie is out of the bottle. Yeah, you can't you can't recork it. And I think the hard thing I mean, here's a good quote from Chunai Chi, who's a professor at Oregon State. And I so apologize if I pronounce that name wrong. So that's the other really scary thing. This important exercise in urging world leaders to be prepared for what's next. Saying, you know, what did we learn from COVID and how can we be better prepared next time? The people who take that information, who run with it in a pseudoscientific way, are actually undoing the good work, right? They're actually negatively impacting the important proactive, preparative work and preventive work. For these global pandemics, because the thing is, it will happen. Disease X will happen. It'll be called something else. We don't know what type of virus it'll be. It might be a coronavirus. It might be a fungus. It might be, you know, a type of influenza or something else. It will happen. And if just like in the movie, which one was it? Was it Contagion? I remember rewatching that during COVID. Was it Jude Law's character in Contagion? Yeah. Yeah. He's such a perfect example of this conspiracy. I mean they did such a great job kind of showing what happens. This conspiracy theorist walking around and basically undoing the good public health work that's being done because people look at those very loud voices as somehow equal and opposite to legitimate evidence-based public health.

E: And history bears this out. This is not – certainly by no means the first time this has happened. It's just more amplified now with internet coverage.

S: But this is what the conspiracy theorists do. They take the normal functioning of whatever government institutions would have you and then partly out of ignorance, partly out of just the desire to see the conspiracy, they interpret anything in a sinister way. Cell phone, right? Cell phone, 5G and all that. It's like, yeah, see those crematoria over there? That's for the mass murdering that they're going to do.

C: Yeah, it's not a pet crematoria.

S: Or like FEMA preparing for disasters. They're preparing for the culling, you know, whatever. You just turn anything sinister. And I'm not making those up, by the way. These are things I've heard from actual human beings who believe this. Anyway, it's – yeah, that's the world we're living in. And Evan, it's even – here we go.

E: It gets worse, folks.

Celebrities and Flat Earth (41:29)

• "A planet in the sky gave a rat’s a** about anything in your life": Even Neil deGrasse Tyson Lost it after Amber Rose's Dumb Pseudoscience Question
• NFL Draft Prospect Tyler Owens Says He Doesn't 'Believe in Space' and 'Other Planets'

S: It gets worse. Tell us about how celebrities contribute to this sort of thing.

E: All right. Well, OK. Maybe not worse. I don't want to – I really don't want to equate this to health directly. But we do have to address this. I saw two headlines this week that offer a peek into celebrity culture intersecting with pseudoscience. And I don't know, maybe this headline hit your news feed catchers today because it came out today. I saw it at the website Fandom Wire. And here's the headline. Even Neil deGrasse Tyson lost it after Amber Rose's dumb pseudoscience question. Neil deGrasse Tyson's criticism has angered many supporters of astrology and star-related sciences worldwide. What? Oh, my gosh. All right. So first thing, I will admit, perhaps the biggest news in this to me is that there's a person named Amber Rose. Oh, you don't know Amber Rose? No. Shame on me, I guess. But I'm just not into celebrity culture really that much these days. So apologies for that. According to Wikipedia, she's an American model, rapper, and television personality. She initially rose to fame by having a business relationship with Kanye West, I guess, the two of them, and they were hooked up for a little while. But then she got her own show on a channel here, a music channel called VH1. I think people around the world might know of that. That was in 2016. But now she has a podcast, and it's called I Hope They're Not Listening, which is kind of a clever title. So she's a celebrity, yeah, of some note. And about a month ago, and I'm not really sure why it's only making a headline today, literally today, but that aside, about a month ago, the special guest on her podcast was Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. And I don't think I have to explain to this audience who he is. It was an hour-long interview. And here is – one part of the interview had to come – came to the topic of astrology and specifically Mercury in retrograde. All right. And here is what Amber said. Depending on where the planets are, can that affect us physically? Like mercury and retrograde. Everyone says it's mercury and retrograde. You're going to have arguments with your significant other or it will affect your body or it will give you pain. Is that a real thing and do you believe in that? That's what she asked Neil.

C: So she was asking it like genuinely and just curiously.

E: Yes.

C: Okay.

E: Yes, but there's more. Neil answers, the good thing about science is when it's true, it's not a matter of whether you believe in it. It's true at all times. And he goes on to explain why the apparent motion of the planet Mercury appears to move backwards in the sky and was not understood at a time when people thought the Earth was the center of everything. Right. And then she replies to that. So you're saying there's no truth to that. It's just made-up astrology? And Neil answers, it's complete BS. Left over from a time when people's egos were so large that they actually believed that a planet in the sky gave a rat's ass about anything in your life. Which is a very funny line, but that's the line that I guess made everyone in the world of astrology not too happy. But Amber Rose then laughs and says, I just want to say that question was from Wiz Khalifa, I believe. And that's a name I have heard of, another musical artist. She said, not me. And then she said – she acknowledged that she's a Libra. And they go on to talk about the horoscope a little bit. So are horoscopes for just entertainment purposes, she asks. And he basically says, Neil confirms that, and she says, yeah, I'm with you on that. All right. So by this interview, at least this segment, because it's an hour-long interview, this is about an eight-minute segment I watched of the interview, it would seem to say, like, okay, she seems, you know, kind of reasonable approach, asking questions about it, right? And basically saying, I'm with you, you know, I don't understand. But guess what happened a week later? Amber Rose has another guest on her show. Tarot card reader Ryan Liu. Yeah. One week later, she has a tarot card reader on the show and apparently learned nothing from the Neil deGrasse Tyson interview on the show. Because in this interview with Ryan Liu, she reveals that she goes to psychics and has been going for years. She's had tarot card readings done in the past. And she might be a little bit more familiar with astrology than she probably let on in that Neil deGrasse Tyson interview. So she says, let's talk about Mercury in retrograde with – with uh ryan liu and she says I have no idea what that is okay. why? so this came after the neil degrasse tyson interview. why she said she has no idea what this is is a bit of a disconnect at least for me. she okay. so maybe she said it to stir up conversation but oh my gosh come on. a week ago you had just spoken to one of the premier science communicators on the planet and now you're asking a tarot card reader to explain mercury and retrograde jesus. I mean, this would have been a better question. She should have said to him, I had Neil deGrasse Tyson on my show last week. He gave the explanation of Mercury in retrograde. He says all astrology is BS. What is your thoughts on that? That would have been an infinitely better way of striking up that particular conversation. So come on. The takeaway here is that, look, any glimmer of real science that tried to penetrate this particular celebrity bubble in which Amber Rose and her fans exist in, that was washed away seven days later when the tarot card reader came on to spell gobbledygook and nonsense for the better part of an hour. Now, in conjunction with that, there was another article that came out this week. And this news was shared with me by one of our longtime listeners. And he's a good friend of the show, Adam Russell. You may know him as the bass player for the band Story of the Year. And if you haven't listened to their music, I highly recommend it. Adam shared this with me. NFL draft prospect. That's the National Football League. National Football League draft prospect. His name's Tyler Owens. Says he doesn't believe in space and other planets. That's how that headline read. So Tyler Owens is considered one of the fastest prospects in the 2024 NFL draft class. So he's going to be a rookie this year coming up. He's highly, highly touted. Brilliant athlete. But he was speaking to reporters at what's called the NFL Combine. And that's a place where you go basically to show off your skills so that the teams kind of get an idea of where they want to draft you in their draft. that comes up every April. And he revealed that he doesn't believe in space or other planets and he subscribes to flat earth theories that he believes are interesting and have valid points. And by the way, he has five years of college that he attended. Yeah. So here's the exact thing. It was like a 30-second clip. I'll give it to you. Here's exactly what he said. I don't believe in space. You know, I'm religious, so I think like we're on our own right now. I don't think there's other planets and stuff like that. I used to believe in the heliocentric thing. Like we used to revolve around the sun and stuff. But then I started seeing flat Earth stuff. And I was like, that's kind of interesting. They started bringing up some valid points. I mean, I don't know. It could be real. It could be bull. I just don't know. And I'll give you this to chew on before we talk about it a little bit. There's another football player, Travis Kelsey, and maybe you've heard of him from the Kansas City Chiefs. He's with – Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift. The two of them are popular together, whatever. So maybe that's – and he has a brother who also played in the NFL, Jason Kelsey. Yeah. who in a recent interview, I guess they have a podcast as well. Everybody's got a podcast. So on the Kelsey's podcast, Jason said this. He said he came out saying that people would not believe the number of NFL players who believe that the earth is flat. Here's what he said. I was once on the practice field last year. This is last year, 2023. One of our coaches was walking by saying, And I said to him, man, how many people do you think on this field believe the earth is flat? And his coach said to him, I don't think anybody out here believes that. And he corrected him and said, you'd be surprised. If you start polling, you would be totally surprised. And before I even finished that, somebody else, another player, said right next to me, I mean, how do you know that it isn't flat? A conversation struck up. And this is something that I've been assuming for quite a while. is that because there have been incidents of other athletes coming out and speaking specifically about Flat Earth comes up. Shaquille O'Neal is probably a popular name. you've heard that has talked about it before and that got covered. Another basketball player named Kylie Irving also came out and said this a couple of years ago. I think we may have even talked about it on the show. But for some reason, Flat Earth has a bit of a grip on the professional athlete community to a deeper degree than even the media is probably aware of. So, you know, celebrity culture, athlete culture, I kind of, in a way, lump them together, you know, because of the popularity and, you know, exposure that they all get to so many people. But, oh, my gosh. It's just – it just is remarkable that these things have – He gave you a pause, too. Thank you. Yeah. But that it's – there's a cultural aspect to it. I mean, in the culture of these businesses almost, that these are accepted ideas that roam around these circles. Certainly, we know this. We've experienced this ourselves and have done some research certainly into this. And we get some glimpses through the media of it. But it's probably more pervasive than we even realize.

C: Why do you think that is? What do you think it is about professional athletics that has that draw? Or do you think it's the same as in the general population from a percentage perspective?

E: That's a fair point. And the other day, what was I looking up? I was looking up some recent polling on flat earth and how many people believe really that an earth is flat. I looked at two different polls. I found one that was taken last year. In which in that particular poll – and again, polls – an individual poll is an individual poll. So take it for what it is. But that 10 percent of people in that poll of U.S. people in the United States at least. believe that there's something to a flat Earth, that some aspect of flat Earth is correct. And then I also found one. This was back in 2019, so it's a little old. But only 66% of people in that survey stated that the Earth was round, right? Maybe some of them thought it was flat or a cube or a triangle or something else, but something other than that, right? Only two out of three people believe that the Earth is some roundish shape.

S: Those are the polls I'm seeing.

C: This was like a Gallup poll or was this like a flat Earth friends and family poll? These are – I mean if you – Like they were like – it was like a legitimate polling organization.

E: Carsey School of Public Policy had one of these polls. That's the 10 percent of respondents agreed with conspiracy claims that the Earth is flat. Oh, NASA also faked the moon landing. And then the other one – let's see if I can find the other one here. Why do some people believe – University of Melbourne. Apparently. Gosh, that's so scary. Out of that one. So, you know, universities and schools are conducting these. There's, you know, that gives it some weight, I think.

C: Yeah. I mean, it at least means they're not actively seeking out flat earthers for their poll. You know what I mean? Right. I don't know how random the sample is, but. That's right.

E: They didn't go to the flat earth convention to take this poll or something like that. But yeah, these things, even though they're probably more ingrained than we even realize. And I don't know how you get that out. It's so tough. It's so tough to change it.

S: Yeah, it's hard to even know what to make of that. So on the one hand, you've got to believe it's a pretty massive failure of our public educational system. But on the other hand, I think it's also just the misinformation on the internet. It's the combination, I think, of those two things primarily. That people – that 10% of people know so little about basic science that they cannot defend themselves from this sort of blatant childish misinformation on the internet, right? That has to be happening. I mean how ignorant of science do you have to be to say, well, who knows? How do we know that the earth isn't flat? I mean, well, because of stuff you should have learned when you were in third grade.

C: I mean – That's the thing that's so frustrating too is like these professional athletes generally, at least in the US, have college degrees.

E: Right.

C: Most professional athletes are expected and some required to go to universities. That's where they play. That's where they get recruited from.

B: Yeah, but the upper echelon, I mean how much do they really make sure that they're buckling down with their studies? I mean I know it's a – I get that.

E: I get that. But it's not like the environment that they're in is fostering some kind of pseudoscience culture to begin with, right? Yeah.

C: Exactly.

E: So you would think there would be some – something working against them coming to these kinds of conclusions just because of their surroundings that they're steeped in for four or five years in some cases.

Superconducting Magnets and Fusion (57:09)

• Tests show high-temperature superconducting magnets are ready for fusion

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S: All right. Thanks, Evan. Yep. All right, Bob. Now, come on. You're really telling me now that the magnets are good enough for fusion reactors? What's going on here?

B: Okay. Sure, Steve. You may have missed a huge fusion milestone recently. Engineers have signed off on a revolutionary new superconducting magnet that created the most powerful high-temperature magnetic field ever created on Earth, 20 Teslas. Now, this magnet was created with the express purpose of bringing commercial fusion to the world. How did they do this? and could this actually get us real fusion before all of us on this podcast are dead? They released six peer-reviewed papers in a special edition of the March issue of IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity. So, okay, first Tesla in this context is obviously right, a measure of the strength of a magnetic field. One Tesla equals 10,000 gauss, a 20 Tesla magnetic field. It doesn't sound big, but it's pretty huge. Earth's entire magnetic field is about 50 microtesla. That's 0.0005 Tesla. Yeah. Let's start with the birth of this amazing magnet or perhaps its conception. It might be a better word. It was only as recent as 2015 when – this is a fun story. The MIT physicists were just thinking about – about fusion and superconductivity, and they ran some numbers on how powerful a magnetic field could be if it were created using the latest commercially available superconductors, right? And they were so impressed with the results, they looked at the numbers and said, wow, Look at what's now possible. that they then formed a company called Commonwealth Fusion Systems to make it happen. Amazing story. Now, their goal was to create a commercial fusion reactor that they call a SPARC reactor. Now, ARC may sound familiar. ARC stands for – affordable, robust, and compact, but it's obviously a blatant homage to Iron Man, right? Tony Stark's, his arc reactor, and Tony did go to MIT after all, which is why I think they're so enamored. SPARC stands for Smallest Possible Arc Reactor. And that's what they're building here. So this is a Takamak. And Takamak mainly means that you're trying to create fusion energy using magnetic fields in a donut shape, a toroidal shape to contain this ridiculously hot burning plasma to create more energy than is put in, right? That's what fusion is trying to do. Now, you may have heard on this podcast and elsewhere, if you're into this at all, ITER, I-T-E-R, I believe that's how it's pronounced, International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. That's the biggest fusion project in the world. Thirty-five countries are involved, and that's a TACOMAC design as well. The other big design player in this field is inertial confinement as opposed to magnetic confinement, and that uses lasers to compress fuel pellets to initiate the fusion. We've talked about that on the podcast many times, and that's had some major successes recently, which we don't need to go into right now. This MIT approach, though, is the most exciting to me. This is using the latest technology to do what no other approach really may be able to do, and that is to be commercially viable and do it fairly quickly. The linchpin for this goal is making that all-important magnetic field. not only making it the most powerful ever, but also making it cheaper and simpler at the same time. And that sounds kind of silly, right? Usually those attributes are diametrically opposed, right? But I'm looking at all their results and their testing, and it really seems that they have achieved that goal. I mean, based on their papers and what I've read, it seems they obviously have achieved that goal. The question then becomes, of course, where can they go from here? But let's get back to some of these details. This magnetic field, this really is the hero of the story. What was the key to this field? And it really was this new material called – it's got a nickname. It's called REBCO. And that stands for – it's a rare earth barium copper oxide that was added to the design of these fusion magnets. So now this is what allows them to reach a working superconducting temperature of 20 kelvins. That's 20 degrees above absolute zero. Now that doesn't – that sounds pretty damn chilly, right? It's only – it's still 20 degrees away from absolute zero. So that's mighty cold. But before REBCO though, such a superconducting fusion magnet like ITER uses by the way would have to be cooled to 4 Kelvin. That's 16 degrees colder and it's only 4 degrees above absolute zero. So I mean you might say, well, so what? That's still very close. It's only 16 degrees hotter, right, in Kelvin, but that is what the major significance is because that difference, even though it's only 16 degrees, it allows them to call – what they call it is – they call it high-temperature superconducting. because it's such a dramatic change. That increase allows for all new material properties and practical engineering. The biggest thing that I could find that disallowed is that REBCO allows the engineers to remove all the insulation that the old superconducting wires needed, right? You're wrapping all these wires that are wrapped in insulation to prevent shorts. This new design allows them to remove all that insulation. And a lot of scientists said that can't possibly be a good idea. But that one change made a dramatic difference. Dennis White, professor of engineering, he's also the former director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center said, he said, eliminating the layers of insulation has the advantage of being a low voltage system. It greatly simplifies the fabrication processes and schedule. It also leaves more room for other elements such as more cooling and more structure for strength. Oh, and there's one other thing I wanted to mention that this power-up milestone that I'm talking about, that was not recent. That happened September 5th, 2021. So that was – that's a few years ago. That was the day of the big test when they booted up their new device. And did you know how long it takes? How long do you think it takes to get down to 20 Kelvin to run this thing at maximum?

J: Days probably.

E: A week. Two weeks.

B: Two weeks to get it. It's a very slow process. But they did it and it hit 20 Teslas. But that was in September 5th, 2021. Why is this in the news again? Because I actually forgot that it happened. It was so long ago. I forgot it happened. I had to reacquaint myself with what they were actually doing here. And you may say, hey, Bob, what the hell took them so long? That's a long time. Only now they're writing papers. Well, I went through what they actually have been doing all that time, and it kind of – Makes sense that it would take this long. First off, they had to wait until their hangovers were gone, right? Because they were celebrating big time because that was a major achievement. But after – once they were ready to get back to work, they actually tore the whole magnet assembly apart and inspected all the components. Then they analyzed the data from hundreds of instruments that recorded all of this stuff, probably petabytes of data. They put it back together and then they ran it really hard and then shut it down. They like turned off the switch. Boop. Turn off the power and that is a worst-case scenario for this type of magnet. It's called a quench. It could have literally destroyed all of their equipment. But they needed to – once they did all the previous tests, they needed to say, let's do worst-case scenario and then we'll study what happens. And it turns out that it didn't destroy the equipment. It only melted some of the magnet, a very tiny – like 5% of its volume was actually melted, which was pretty small. So then they looked at all of their models, and they had a bunch of models predicting what happens at each stage getting up to 20 Tesla. And all of their models agreed on what they found when they went to 20 Tesla. But when they quenched it and shut it down and created this catastrophic failure, they found that some of their models did not predict what would happen. So they threw those models away, and they kept only the models that correctly predicted the entire – the entire process from beginning to end. And they knew that these were the ones that were the most accurate. And then, of course, they documented everything in the form of these six reports that are online. I recommend you checking them out and also going through some of the more details. There's so much to this that I'm just not even covering. So the bottom line assessment of the engineers after all of this research is that their predictions and computer modeling were incredibly accurate. And they confirmed that the magnet's new design could absolutely serve as the foundation for for a future fusion power plant. And it really is quite an achievement. It's the first large scale, high temperature, high field superconducting magnet. And they brought it together with supply lines and efficiencies in mind. It's amazing what they accomplished. Professor White described this as the most significant thing, in my opinion, in the last 30 years of fusion research. Sure, okay, the guy is a little biased, but that's a powerful statement. He says that essentially – this was interesting. He says that – this isn't a direct quote. This is basically what he was saying was that previously, before this, the best fusion magnets of the world – He believes that they could have potentially achieved fusion energy but only as something like a showcase, like a one-off, if they even could have gotten that far. He thinks that using magnetic confinement with only a moderate field – and moderate density would never make practical sense or be reasonably economical. So he says that they could have done this. They could have actually said, look, we've achieved significant fusion and there's lots of ways you can characterize that. But he thinks they could have potentially have done that but it never would have been anything that would have been economical or practical to pull off. I think he would also include ITER by the way. I really feel sorry for Eder because when they designed this Takamak that they put billions of dollars into and all this research, they locked in the superconducting magnets. They locked in that design. And after these improvements, they could not change their design. And I think that they're looking and they're saying, oh my god, we should have waited a few years until we could have used this new superconducting technology to have these much smaller and much more intense magnetic fields, superconducting fields connected. magnetic fields because that's what would make it so much more less expensive and actually more simple. So White also says regarding that test from September 5th, he says, overnight, it basically changed the cost per watt of a fusion reactor by a factor of almost 40 in one day. He said now fusion has a chance. That's kind of the – my assessment of what they did. But of course I got to end this and I got to – you got to keep in mind this is fusion research. It's ridiculously complex and just because MIT has had this major success, they still could be and probably will be – There probably will be major delays. I believe they're expecting a working test reactor like this decade and a full-scale commercial reactor like an arc reactor or spark reactor in the 2030s. I think that's probably still optimistic. But having this type of reactor and simplifying as they have done and creating these – basically, they've got these recipes where here's how you can create – These magnets and here's how – here's the supply lines and here's the efficiencies that we've achieved. They really have I think an amazing foundation for a new type of tokamak reactor using these high field superconducting magnetic fields that could really make a difference. Whenever the time does come, I think this could give it a really good shot at being really commercially viable.

S: Yeah, it's still really hard. I mean, this makes it slightly more likely, I think, to happen, but I don't know. You said reduce the cost by 40 times, but aren't we like orders of magnitude away from producing enough energy that the whole thing works? We reached that point where in the moment that we're creating fusion, it's putting out more energy than went into it. But it's still only 1% of the total energy that got to that point. We have to generate 100 times more energy to get to net energy.

B: Yeah, but don't confuse the inertial confinement with the magnetic confinement. The inertial confinement that – was it the slack? That they had done a couple of years ago was an amazing milestone. They've reached – what were some of the things that they've reached? Like ignition and one of the types of ignition. They really made some great milestones and you're right. The energy that they created was far in excess of what they actually put on that – That pellet, that hulkrum. So yeah. And they're very slick. They're very sly because they characterize it in a way that you don't know. You don't really realize that, oh, no way. They created so much. Their lasers were so powerful and only a tiny fraction of it ever got onto that hulkrum. So they're a different beast. I want to see – I want to see a Takamak, a serious Takamak like this one actually working before. I'm really as pessimistic as I am with the inertial confinement fusion. And this looks like a wonderful foundation. And if it's going to happen, I think you clearly need – A reactor like this one that is – the more powerful it is, the less power you need for everything else and the cheaper everything is. If it's going to work, this is going to do it. This is the only one that even has a shot because I think – I don't think any other technique – especially other tokamaks like ITER and inertial confinement. I don't think they really have a shot to be commercially viable. They may create a test bed. Oh, look, it works, but there's no way we're going to make this commercial and create plants all over the world. That's not going to happen, I don't think, with these other technologies. This one's got a shot. Like White says, now fusion has a chance. It didn't have a chance before this. Now it does. I hope he's right.

S: All right, thanks, Bob. Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time.

Who's That Noisy? (1:11:37)

Answer to previous Noisy:

Balloon popping in sound-enhancing room then one popping in a sound-dampening room: "Balloon pop: reverb room vs. anechoic chamber"

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

E: Remember they used to have those little toy cannons on the desk or something? You'd pull the string back and fire the cannon. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A little pellet or something would come out. All right, so I had a lot of people. Little cannon and pellet.

J: Yeah, I remember that. I remember that thing. All right, so I had a lot of guesses. A lot of people were in the right place, but I did get one correct answer on this one. So let's get through these. So a listener named Chris said, Hi, Jay. This week, I think the noisy is first the sound of an explosion. Then the second part is the shockwave reaching the camera and knocking it over. That's interesting. I mean, I absolutely think that if the shockwave hit the camera, it probably would be more of a noise. But I get what you're aiming at there. Jim Kelly said, Hi, Jay. I think the answer to this week's noisy is the following. Sound one, a potato gun being fired. Sound two, the potato hitting its target off in the distance. For some reason, that one made me laugh. It is not a potato gun.

S: It's because potatoes are funny.

J: Yes. I had two close guesses. Well, I had many close guesses, but these were the first two I got in. This is from Tim Welsh. He said, Hey, Jay, I think I know what this one is. I think it's someone doing a single hard clap first in an echo chamber, second in an anechoic chamber. I'm definitely confident. if it's not a clap, it's at least two of those scenarios. And the second guesser said, his name is Eddie Anthony, and he said, Hi, Jay, I bet you get a lot of correct guesses on this one. Thank you for watching. Okay, so these two were on track here. The winning answer came in from Harley Hunt. And Harley said, g'day, my guess for who's that noisy is a balloon. Specifically, a balloon being popped in a sound enhancing room for the first time and then a sound dampening room for the second time around. So this is correct. So what I saw was a video of someone popping a balloon and they popped it in basically a room that has a lot of acoustic surfaces. So there was a lot of reverb. And the second one was popped in a sound reinforced room where if you've seen them, basically there's an incredibly large, like it looks like foam, but there's these really long like pyramid-like shapes in there that absorb most of the sound. And that same exact sound was made in these two different rooms. I mean, what the hell with that second one? So there's no reverberation, which means the sound waves that are being created are not bouncing off of anything, which significantly lowers the volume and the length of the reverb or the decay of the sound. Just a super interesting idea when you think that those are the exact two same sounds with the same distance from the camera and everything. Just amazing. I think that those rooms must be – first off, I'm sure they cost an incredible amount of money to make. But I've heard people say that when they go in that it's actually uncomfortable to be in there because – We're so trained to – we're used to hearing the sounds that we make and sounds around us like bouncing off the surfaces and there's like room noise. We're just acquainted with that. But when you're in a room where there isn't any of that, people report that they can hear their heartbeat inside those rooms. Very strange. Anyway, that was a great. Who's That Noisy? I really thought that was cool. I have a new one for this week, guys, and this one was sent in by a listener named Nat.

S: Thank you.

J: You get the idea.

E: Oh, yeah.

J: So if you think you know what this noisy is or you heard something cool this week, you can email me at WTN at TheSkepticSky.org. Steve, we have a few shows planned right now. So the private show in Dallas is sold out. The extravaganza in Dallas is still available. And if you're interested, if you're going to be down there to see the eclipse, try to join us at that extravaganza. You can go to TheSkepticSky.org to buy tickets for that. Now, we're also making plans for shows in Chicago in August. We're going to have an extravaganza, which tickets are available now for. We're going to have a private show, which tickets will be available very soon, maybe by the time that this recording comes up. I'm just crunching a few more details. But those tickets, if not this week, will probably be available next week. All of this can be found on the skepticsguide.org website.

New Noisy (1:15:32)

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

what this Noisy is

Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups

Correction #1: IVF details (1:17:02)

S: All right. Thank you, Jay. Just a little bit of feedback from last week's show. We talked, remember, about in vitro fertilization and frozen fertilized eggs being considered a child based upon Alabama Supreme Court precedents now. And we talked a little bit about IVF itself in the process. And a few people pointed out, and I looked into this, that as IVF procedures have gotten better, they are able to implant a single fertilized embryo. rather than doing multiple.

C: Wow, so even more goes to waste.

S: This is what they do. So they'll try to get like 10 to 20 eggs donated. Then they do the in vitro fertilization. And then the eggs, well, it's either successful or it's not successful. And then the successful ones are either like high quality or medium quality. So then they implant one high quality fertilized egg. So they've just gotten a lot better at the technology and the success rates a lot higher even with an individual egg because, again, they're picking the high-quality one. But it still gives you the same situation. In order to do that, you need to waste all of the not high-quality embryos, right? Like there's no way to do that without there being embryos that are going to be discarded at some point. We predicted that the Alabama legislature would carve out an exception for IVF, and they're in the process of doing that, pretty much exactly as predicted. They're not reversing any aspect of the Supreme Court decision. that child means unborn child, which means embryo, which means frozen embryo. They're just saying, yeah, once you're fertilized, you're a person, you're a child, no matter where you are or what the situation is. So they're not reversing that or undoing that or softening that. They're just saying, yeah, this doesn't apply to IVF. That's it. Just carving out an exception for IVF. Because they just don't want to deal with that. But even if that was controversial within the Republicans in Alabama – Oh, boy. Well, there was an interview that I saw today with one of them that was saying, well, they just shouldn't make any more than they use, right? Oh, come on. They should just make a single one and plant a single one and that's it. And he's like, I know it's expensive.

C: Did he say, I'm not a scientist, but before saying that...

S: But of course that doesn't work. It's not how the process works. You need to make a bunch of them because they're not all successful and they're not all high quality. And what if you want to have multiple pregnancies and blah, blah, blah? It's just a terrible idea all around.

B: It's a terrible idea. Oh, sorry.

E: All together now.

Follow-up #1: Moon's orbit (1:19:50)

S: All together now. Another email comes from Hugh Phillip, and Hugh writes, I believe you said the moon's path around the sun is always concave. I think this implies a very particular condition that the moon-Earth distance is approximately 1 13th the distance to the sun, which it clearly is not. The velocity of the moon in Earth's reference frame never comes close to velocity of the Earth-moon system around the sun. So the path of the moon around the sun must be like a distorted sine wave, meaning there are concave and convex parts of the orbit with redirect to the sun. Maybe I misheard, but I'm busy and it's only in the middle of the night when I wake up that I remember these things from my community podcast.

E: I've done that. Yeah.

S: So, all right. So, you know, I... I knew this was absolutely correct and I also found some references, some recent references, astronomy.com. Everyone has these. All the astronomy places have this. So what I said was correct. If you map out the orbit of the moon around the sun, it never is concave away from the sun. It's always concave towards the sun. It's hard to imagine because it's hard to get the scale in your head. You know what I mean? But if you do the math or if you actually map out the orbit, we'll have links to sites that go over it in detail. That's true. The moon is always – you know what I mean by concave to the sun? It's always sort of bending towards the sun. Its orbital pathway never curves away from the sun. So that's objectively non-controversially true. And I sent him the links and he agrees with that. He just said he just wasn't thinking about it mathematically correctly. But there's another interesting – I brought this up as just kind of – I was being funny because Bob was talking about the orbit of the moon. And I said, yeah, but does the moon orbit around the earth or does it orbit around the sun? It's an interesting question, and this is only one piece of information that is relevant to that question. The answer actually sounds like circular logic, but it isn't. The answer is the moon revolves around the earth because the moon revolves around the earth. Let me explain that. There is something called the Hill Limit or the Hill Sphere. So that is the zone within which something is captured by the gravitational pull of an object, right? So within the Earth's Hill Sphere, something is in the orbit around the Earth. The thing is, if it weren't within the Hill Sphere, it would drift away into its own orbit around the sun, right? So the fact that it is in orbit around the Earth means that it's within the Hill Sphere, and therefore it's within orbit around the Earth. It sounds circular, but it means if it wasn't orbiting the Earth, it would not be a consistent distance from the Earth and captured by the Earth. It would drift off and just orbit the sun. Does that make sense? Right. Yeah. Which is why Venus and Mercury don't have moons. Because they don't have basically any hill sphere. No moon could be captured.

E: Can't overcome it.

S: Yeah, they could over...

E: Can't overcome the sun. Exactly.

S: Those that are too close to the sun to overcome the gravity of the sun.

E: Wow, we're even more Goldilocks zone than we thought.

S: So that was an interesting little follow-up. All right, guys, it's time for Science or Fiction.

[top]                        

Science or Fiction (1:23:20)

Theme: Daylight Saving Time Item #1: A study of over 200 thousand malpractice claims finds that daylight saving time is associated with worse severity of incidents and higher average payments than standard time. Item #2: Credit for the first serious proposal of daylight saving time goes to entomologist, George Vernon Hudson, who presented the idea in 1895 because he wanted more time in the evening for bug collection. Item #3: Among its many detrimental effects, daylight saving time is associated with an increase in overall crime compared to standard time.

Answer	Item
Fiction	DST increases crime
Science	DST = worse malpractice
Science	Credited to entomologist

Host	Result
Steve	win

Rogue	Guess
Bob	Credited to entomologist
Evan	DST increases crime
Cara	DST increases crime
Jay	DST increases crime

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 fake, and then I'll challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. We have a theme this week. The theme is relevant because it is almost daylight saving time.

E: Ooh, Bob. You and I. Uh-oh. We love our long summer days, don't we?

C: Who doesn't? Yeah.

S: You guys ready? Yep. Three items related to daylight savings time. Sure. Item number one, a study of over 200,000 malpractice claims finds that daylight saving time is associated with worse severity of incidents and higher average payments than standard time. Item number two, credit for the first serious proposal of daylight saving time goes to entomologist George Vernon Hudson, who presented the idea in 1895 because he wanted more time in the evening for bug collection. And item number three, among its many detrimental effects, daylight saving time is associated with an increase in overall crime compared to standard time. And yes, it is daylight saving time, singular, not daylight savings time.

C: Yeah, there's no S.

S: But that's a very common...

C: But we still say savings.

E: Yeah, daylight saving.

S: A lot of people say savings. When I was doing research, a lot of people write daylight savings time, but it's saving time.

C: Okay, I know this is a – so are we on daylight saving right now or are we on standard?

S: No, we're about to.

E: No, we're about to go on it.

C: Okay, so daylight saving is when you're – yeah, it's when you save daylight.

S: We're on standard time now.

C: There's more sun.

S: Okay. Yeah, daylight saving time is over the summer, the way I think about it. Bob, go first.

Bob's Response

B: All right. So going through malpractice claims, daylight saving is associated with worse severity of incidents and higher average payment – wait, payment?

S: Yeah, the award for the payment of how much you get paid for losing your malpractice suit.

B: Okay. Wow. Standard time. Who knows? Nobody knows the answer to this stuff. Something about this entomologist. Sounds wacky. I'm going to say that's fiction. That's all I got. I can't think right now.

Evan's Response

S: Okay, Evan.

E: I get to go second. All right. In a way, I think I may agree with Bob here even though he didn't really give us some – really any insight as to his decision. All right. The first one, about 200,000 malpractice claims. Wow. They found that daylight savings time associated with – is associated. with worse severity of incidents, severity of incidents. Well, maybe not. And higher average payments than standard time. It has to meet both those criteria. So, I mean, this kind of gives it some wiggle room for it to be the fiction. There's several components here that could knock it out from being science. But in a way, it kind of makes sense because more daylight, more human activity, more incidents... happen overall and therefore more malpractice results due to the heightened activity that goes hand in hand with the extra time. Maybe. I'm going to jump to the third one. Detrimental effects. There are apparently many. Daylight savings time is associated with an increase in overall crime compared to standard time. Overall crime. Okay. So – I mean we kind of think of crime as more of a nighttime activity, right? The cloak of night as opposed to the broad daylight. You would think that that would be the opposite then, right? But the second one about the first serious proposal of daylight saving time. Okay, serious proposal. I mean, how do you quantify that? And George Vernon Hudson presented the idea. I know Ben Franklin at some point had an idea about daylight savings time or something close to it. But was it considered a serious proposal? That I don't know. And that's why I was leaning towards that one being the fiction proposal. Now that I've had a chance to talk it through, and thank you all for listening to me talk it through, I think I'll go ahead and change my answer. I think it's going to be the increase in overall crime compared to standard time. I think the opposite is correct there.

S: Okay, Cara.

Cara's Response

C: Yeah, so I agree with Evan about some things. I disagree with him about others. Bob, you didn't give me a lot to agree with or disagree with.

E: Kind of like real life.

C: So the malpractice claims one I think is probably science. I don't think it has anything to do with there being more daylight. I think it's because when we shift – Our circadian clocks are screwy. Like, we know that people get in more car wrecks. We know that, you know, we just were... We have more accidents when our sleep is messed with. And daylight saving messes with our sleep in both directions. So anytime there's a clock shift, I think that you're going to see a change. I do agree with you, Evan, about the crime. I think you're going to...

E: You think that one's the fiction?

C: I think it's opposite. Yeah, I think probably... daylight the standard time is probably associated with or you just made this one up but I would think that maybe standard time would be associated with more crime because same thing because more crime especially violent crimes um car car theft things like that are going to occur in the dark. And then I had the exact same thought about Ben Franklin. I 100% remember that Ben Franklin did muse about daylight saving, but maybe that's the thing. Maybe it was – he was a muser. You read a lot of his old stuff. There's lots of musings, lots of the almanac. What was it? The Poor Richard's Almanac. He wrote a lot of things like that. Yeah, so I bet you he did riff on the idea, but I bet you it wasn't a serious proposal, and that's the kicker there. So I'm going to go with what Evan said and say the crime one is the fiction.

S: Okay, and Jay?

Jay's Response

J: Yeah, out of all these, I mean, when I read the third one, I felt like, you know, the one about the crime, I just feel like it would, I don't know, there doesn't seem to be a reason for that to happen. So I think I agree with what Evan said. I think that's the opposite.

Steve Explains Item #1

S: So you all agree with the first one, so we'll start there. A study of over 200,000 malpractice claims finds that daylight saving time is associated with worse severity of incidents and higher average payments than standard time. We'll all think that one is science, and that one is science. Science. That one is correct. So the two hypotheses they were testing is, one, will people make worse mistakes, leading to more and more severe malpractice suits? And the other one was, are jurors cranky? And so are they going to get more money even for the same crimes?

E: I didn't even think of that. I didn't even think of juries.

S: Interestingly, if you look at just the week following the changeover, The severity of incidents are not worse, but the awards are still higher. And so they think that's the cranky juror effect because everyone's sleep deprived.

E: So don't have your decision day. come down on the opposite side.

S: Yeah, after you switch the clocks.

E: I'm switching clocks.

S: Oh, my gosh. But the whole – like the many months of daylight saving time had more malpractice than the –. Again, the cause and effect there is a little bit hard to sort out, but that was interesting. That's what they found. All right, let's go to number two. credit for the first serious proposal of daylight saving time goes to entomologist George Vernon Hudson, who presented the idea in 1895 because he wanted more time in the evening for bug collection. Bob, you think this one is the fiction. Everyone else thinks this one is science. And this one is science. Sorry, Bob.

B: I knew it. I knew it.

S: So, yeah, this guy presented it to the Royal Society of New Zealand and was initially mocked for the idea. But his ideas, that was in 1895. But by 1927, they were starting to become massively adopted in many nations.

C: Did New Zealand adopt first?

E: Well, that's interesting.

S: No, not necessarily. No.

C: That's so interesting because I think a lot of people kind of mistake this for like an American invention.

E: A World War I artifact. An outcrumbing of World War I.

S: Germany was the first country. Germany was the first country.

E: Yeah.

S: And Evan, you're correct. Benjamin Franklin did have some musings about it, but he was joking. He sent a letter to France where he joked about maybe you could get up earlier in order to burn less candles or something. Like it was not a serious proposal. But it was the first time somebody said anything about like getting up earlier or whatever, like changing the relationship to the circadian rhythm. But it wasn't like – I'm formally proposing that we move the clock. He didn't do that. That was this guy to the Royal Society in New Zealand. So that's why I threw serious in there because – yeah. There it is. Ben doesn't get credit because it was only joking.

E: Oh, Ben, you rascal.

Steve Explains Item #3

S: All right. This means that among as many detrimental effects, daylight saving time is associated with an increase in overall crime compared to standard time. Is the fiction? Because you're right. It goes down. Why does it go down? Because there's more light in the evening. But specifically, they think that the reason why there's a significant effect here is It's because it makes the difference between being light or dark when people are going back home from work. Which means when you're going out into the parking lot and getting into your car, it's either dark or it's light out. And if it's in the dark, that creates a huge opportunity for crime. Whereas if it's light out, that is a huge disincentive. Obviously, nobody wants to commit crimes in broad daylight. So at least it goes down, right? Obviously, it still happens. So that's the thinking there, whether it's light or dark out when people are driving, getting into their cars and driving home from work or traveling on the subway or the trains or whatever, it reduces. And it's a significant effect that pretty much lasts for the entire duration of daylight saving time. So that's one good thing that happens from daylight saving time. I personally think they should make daylight saving time permanent, right? Right, yes. The time that is – yeah, that should just be – don't switch the clock twice a year, but don't have it. be permanent standard time, be permanent daylight saving time.

E: We talked about this, I think. Didn't we talk about this last year? And Bob, you and I were on the side arguing that if you're going to lock it in, lock it into savings time, daylight savings time.

S: Saving singular.

E: Oh, shoot. Did I do that? Oh, my gosh.

C: We all do.

E: Daylight saving time.

J: Why can't we just say it the way? we've been always saying it our whole lives? Yeah, right.

S: Because it's not correct, Jay. No, because I agree with you. I don't care about that. It's just one of the things I came across when I was doing research on it. I think people say it that way because it just rolls off the tongue a little bit easier. It's like why do people say whole nother? It's easier to say. Shut up. Because it's the infix. Yeah. Yeah.

C: There's a whole grammatical thing. But I hate it and it makes me crazy and I actively say a whole other.

E: A whole nother.

C: Or I say another. Because I do think it makes us sound a bit dense. A whole nother.

S: A whole nother. I think I said that for years and wasn't even aware of it.

C: Most people aren't.

S: Yeah. Just because it rolls off the tongue.

C: A friend of mine who is not from the U.S. pointed it out to me. And was like, you guys sound like yokels. And then I was like, damn it. Now that's all I can hear.

S: You're right. Once it's pointed out to you, though, then it's like it gets great. You have to retrain yourself to ignore it.

E: Y'all is not a word either, really.

C: But it should be because every other language has a plural second person.

E: You all, y'all.

C: Yeah, there's first person singular, first person plural, second person singular, second person plural, and third person singular, third person plural.

S: Oh, it's interesting.

C: For some reason in English, we don't have a second person plural.

S: So y'all initially was second person plural, but then it started to get used as just singular. So then they had to add all. So now it's all y'all if it's more than one person.

C: Yeah, but that's regional.

B: Oh, my God.

E: That's right. In New York, it's use.

C: Yeah, that's super regional. I still say y'all for more than one. I would never say y'all for one person. That's you.

S: But some people do.

E: Yeah.

C: No, I don't think they say y'all for one person. I think it's that y'all is a small group and all y'all is a big group.

S: Oh, really?

E: Degrees. Yeah.

C: So let's say there's like, let's say you're teaching a full classroom. There's like 30 kids in your class and you point, okay, y'all are going to work on this, but all y'all together are going to make sure that you work on that.

B: I totally get it.

C: Yeah, it makes sense.

E: I told you so bad.

J: I didn't even perceive the difference.

C: That's right. Yeah.

E: Oh, stupid northerners we are.

C: You yanks. You have no idea.

J: Cara, so what does –?

B: well, what does that mean?

C: That is an indication that we're about to switch tasks. Or that you have been here for too long and it's time for you to get up.

E: Jay, do you remember where Wilt originated from and why we picked it up and haven't been able to drop it?

J: I don't know. I mean, something tells me I made it up along the way. I mean, I must have heard it somewhere, right? I mean, somebody said that before me.

C: I'm sure you heard it. I'm sure you heard somebody say, well.

J: Yeah, it's an affectation.

C: And when we're there, when we're in Dallas, you guys are going to hear Fixin' 2. Oh, yes. So get ready for it.

E: Oh, I haven't been to Texas in so long.

J: Cara, how good is the barbecue?

C: Oh, it's the best in the country. Don't write me in. You're right.

E: Here we go.

C: Unless you agree with me and then you can write all you want. There's something about Texas barbecue. It's smoky. It's a little sweet. It's spicy. It's sticky. It's my favorite. I mean, granted, I was born in it. I'm biased, but it's my favorite. But I will tell you, it's not just the barbecue. It's the Tex-Mex. It's the queso. You guys, we're going to eat like champs.

J: I can't wait.

E: Here I am trying to lose weight for it. All of it.

C: Yeah, and in that weekend, nothing counts. Just look at it that way.

E: Yeah, I know.

C: I'm just going to go crazy.

E: Oh, boy. Oh, boy.

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

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:38:11)

Most deadly errors arise from obsolete assumptions.  – Frank Herbert (1920-1986), American science-fiction author, best known for his 1965 novel Dune and its five sequels

E: This week's quote was suggested by a listener, Corey from Diggins, Missouri. I didn't know there was a Diggins, Missouri.

C: Love it.

E: He wrote in the subject, Frank Herbert quote. Cool. Most deadly errors arise from obsolete assumptions. And that's from The Children of Dune, of course, written by Frank Herbert. Dune! Did anyone seen Dune 2?

S: Not yet. It was awesome.

E: So no spoilers, right? Because all of us have not seen it yet.

J: No spoilers. Definitely not. Definitely not.

E: Thank you, Jay. Hear, hear.

S: I mean, what do you want to not get spoiled? The plot of a 50-year-old book or a movie that came out 30 years ago? Don't you dare, Steve.

E: Don't go there.

C: Don't piss people off on a technicality, Steve.

E: Some of us have never read the books or seen the original.

J: You're going to love it, Ev.

B: Yeah, I can't wait.

S: All right, well, thank you all for joining me this week.

B: Sure, man.

E: It was nice to be joined, too.

J: My pleasure, sir.

Signoff

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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Today I Learned

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• Fact/Description
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References