SGU Episode 977

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SGU Episode 977
March 30th 2024
"Iridology: Unlocking genetic clues through the eye. Can analyzing the iris and pupil of the eye see illnesses in the body?"
SGU 976                      SGU 978
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
The shameful thing is not ignorance — on the contrary, that is the natural thing. The really shameful thing is not to want to know, to resist finding out when the occasion offers. It is never the ignorant who offer that resistance, but the ones who think they know. That is the shameful thing — to think you know. He who thinks he knows something, but is in fact ignorant of it, closes the door of his mind through which authentic truth could enter.
José Ortega y Gasset, Spanish philosopher
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Show Notes
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Introduction, Bob in Alaska

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 27th 2024, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Cara Santa Maria...

C: Howdy.

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: good evening everyone.

S: Bob is away. I believe he's in alaska right now.

J: what? yes he's visiting his daughter.

S: oh yeah his daughter basically lives and works in alaska and he's visiting. wow Why didn't I know that?

C: I don't know. That's cool.

S: Yeah, she works with wolves and bears and stuff.

E: What?

S: Seriously.

J: Yeah, she works in an animal conservatory.

C: Why is it that any time we talk about wolves and bears and stuff, Bob doesn't seem to know more?

E: Well, that's why he went to Alaska to brush up on his studies.

J: Bob doesn't know. He doesn't know anything about water.

E: Because there's no nano in it.

C: There's no – Yeah, that's fair. Yeah, that's fair.

S: It's a little terrestrial for Bob. Yeah.

E: A little too earthy.

S: She saw lots of pictures and video of her working directly with these animals. Obviously, the really dangerous ones are behind a fence. It is Alaskan wildlife. It's really cool. That's awesome. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, that's something, man. She spent her winter up in Alaska. That's dedication. I understand it gets rather nippy up there.

C: Yeah, can do.

J: They got a ton of snow. They got snow off the charts.

Special Segment: AI-created music (1:36)

• Make a song about anything
   (Note: this article is not from the SGU show notes page)

S: So last week, guys, Ian sent us a link to the latest AI phenomenon. Uh-oh. I know I just sent you guys an example. This is a suno.ai, S-U-N-O. And basically it makes songs. So you put in, you can either manually put in lyrics or you could put in topics and have it make you lyrics. And then you type in a description of the type of music. it could be a genre name could be just a description of what you want it to sound like a style. it doesn't do artists. so you can't say in the style of john williams or whatever you know it doesn't. for obvious reasons it won't do that. but you could describe it just describe what the music is like and then you hit create literally 30 seconds and you get a full song two minutes.

C: Sorry, once again, what are all the parameters you can give it?

S: I just said. So it's lyrics and you can do instrumental or not instrumental.

C: So you actually feed it the exact lyrics or you give it like ideas?

S: Either way. Either way. You could write your own lyrics or you could do what I did, which is have ChatGPT make the lyrics just because I think it does a slightly better job than their lyrics generator. And then I still would tweak it for punctuation. You learn like how it reads what you write. You know what I mean?

E: So it makes correct breaks.

S: So if you want it to say SGU, you have to do S period, G period, U period. If you put in SGU, it says SCA. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And then instrumental or with singing. And then, again, style of music, which could be a genre name or it could be more of just a natural language description. Or you could say use random style and then create. That's it.

J: Did you say Gangdom style?

S: Random.

C: So how many did you go through before you got those two? 30, 30 or so. I have a question. And this is not this is there's no bias here. How were they all male singers?

S: No, nope.

C: Okay. You just really it's just these two songs were the most like, like they made the most sense. That's why you picked them. Like they were the most coherent.

S: They were, I thought, a little bit tighter than some of the other ones. And I was just playing around.

C: I mean, they sound real.

S: They sound like real songs. So if this were five years ago and somebody played these songs for you, we'll play one in the show and you'll hear what we're talking about. We'll play an actually full song. I don't think you would question for a moment that this was a real person playing the music and singing the songs. Yeah. And even now, if you heard it, if you weren't alerted to the fact that these might be AI, I don't think you would necessarily assume that they're AI. You know what I mean? Yeah. Right. It's pretty good.

E: That's really good.

S: When I mean pretty good, I mean technically good. You know, Jay and I were talking about this earlier, trying to find, what's the perfect word to describe this? They are all a bit soulless, right?

C: Oh, completely soulless.

S: Yeah. Yeah. They're not artistic.

C: But the rock opera song literally goes like, this is a rock opera.

S: Well, I think that's – See, for the lyrics, I told ChatGPT to make lyrics for a rock opera song and it incorporated rock opera into the lyrics. I think that's just ChatGPT being stupid.

C: It said that my insights – what was the lyric?

S: Like a pearl.

C: Yeah, my insights are like a pearl. Yeah.

E: Like a pearl of wisdom. Yes.

C: That's why I laughed when I was wondering about the lyrics. Like if you actually told it what to say.

S: No, no. I mean you can. If you want to write your own. If you can write lyrics, you can write your entire own lyrics and then it will set them to music and you can just keep reiterating it until you get something you like and playing around with different genres. And you can do combinations too. You know what I mean? You could combine different styles of music as well.

C: I definitely like the hip hop song.

S: better yeah I think that's a little bit easier for and also when I made those lyrics I told chat GPT to make me hip-hop rap lyrics about the SGU. that's all it was my entire set of instructions I just said about the skeptic guide to the universe and then it came up with everything.

E: hmm Minimal effort and far-ranging results, really, in a short amount of time.

C: How long did it take you with all the iterations and things that you had to do to get it where it was?

S: Right out of the box. Those were among the first ones that I made. That's awesome. Yeah. I tried a couple with its lyrics. So let me see how ChatGPT does. I tried some with them and then I realized, oh, I got to tweak them a little bit for length and for punctuation. Sometimes I would run a couple of iterations and then combine the best verses from a couple of different ones from ChatGPT. And then I just was playing around with a bunch of different styles, barbershop, but just to see what would come up, you know, like I said, heavy metal, transcendental fantasy rock, just to see what would happen. You know what I mean? It's, you know, it's, it's pretty much what it sounds like. It's, you know, I guess it's just another domino falls, you know, I just think this is, and it's exactly like every other, in my opinion, every other large language model, narrow AI, you know? Technically impressive, but creatively soulless. Creatively. I love it.

C: Creatively soulless. I was combining two words there.

S: What's that? Onomatopoeia? Steve, will you make me a stomp and holler song? Yeah, I could do it right now.

E: I love that genre. Or a hiccup.

C: No, no, Stompin' Holler is like one of my favorite genres.

S: And with what lyrics?

C: With like the SGU lyrics.

S: All right, so I'm going to say, I'll just put the Skeptics Guide to the Universe.

C: It's going to be hard because it will be extra soulless because you really kind of need soul for those, but it'll be interesting to hear. I have to ask, like, you know, like the SKU thing, like whenever I listen to a PDF reader, like a bad PDF reader, like a native PDF reader. And it says like EG instead of EG. Were there any other examples other than SKU of just like bad reads?

S: Well, when I put in pseudoscience as one word, it said pseudoscience. And so I had to put a hyphen and then it said pseudoscience. Just weird things like that. Yeah.

E: It's fascinating. That will get better. Those are tweaks that they can make.

S: So you can play with this now. You get 10 free songs a day. Oh, cool. That's all? I paid $10 so I could play with 500 of them, but if you just want 10...

E: But if you're on a budget.

S: I figured we would be doing this segment. I need more space. I need a little space here to play around.

J: To me, the bottom line is that like most of the AI that people are using today, like a lot of AI stuff has come out over the last couple of years. This is just going to get dramatically better in a short amount of time.

C: Oh, yeah.

J: And I was telling Steve this like – I could see a reality where people, like they have AI make the song, then they just kind of copy it, record it themselves and say it's theirs, right? Because if you have it make you a song and then you don't use that recording, no one would ever know that it was written by AI, right?

S: Yeah, of course you could just do the same thing with ChatGPT to write the lyrics or – but yeah, this creates the – but again, it's so derivative. Do you really – if you're like that – if you're the kind of person who could play your own music, you probably don't need this to do that for you. But this is for people who have zero talent. Right.

E: I can't play a note.

S: Yeah. All right, so it's done. That was in real time. Oh.

C: Oh, wow. No way.

S: And it gives me two versions. It gives you two versions.

E: Oh, interesting.

C: It's so cool.

E: Cara.

C: Yes.

E: You should feed it a few sentences from your dissertation.

J: and see what it would come back with.

C: See if they can make something emotional. Actually, my dissertation is pretty emotional, but I could find like the wonkiest part, like the data analysis part or something like that.

J: Right.

C: Yeah.

E: See what it can do. Oh, that would be fun.

C: It would. But it would also be interesting to feed it the portions that are like the discussion section where there is actually quite a lot of kind of meaningful personal stuff. Interesting. And make art out of it.

S: Yeah. Yeah, right. Like for personal use, this is great. Yeah, it would be really interesting.

E: Yeah, instead of giving someone a birthday card like they get from everyone every year, you made a song for them, which they would, you know, be blown over by most likely.

S: Mm-hmm.

C: But again, it's like the ethics of this kind of stuff starts to get really funky, right? Because what are they pulling from to make this music? Music. Copyrighted music.

S: Right.

C: That people, artists worked really hard to make.

S: But I think it is like so generic to the genre and not a specific person.

C: No, of course. But it's still amalgamating all of the art.

S: Yeah. In order to do that. How is that different than a person who's listened to all that art than making a song in a genre?

E: They have to have a frame of reference.

C: It's not, but that person would be getting paid to do that.

S: That's the complication. If you were doing it for your personal use. And again, like you can't use this and you can't produce an album for this and sell it, right?

C: You can't, but you can probably – let's say you're like a podcaster who's starting out and you want to put like music at the top of your show.

S: What's wrong with that?

C: You probably could do that, right? Because historically you might have hired a musician to produce that music for you.

S: Yeah, but you know what? Yes, maybe. But you know what we did 15 or whatever it was, 19 years ago? We went to Podsafe Music and downloaded a free MP3 file and used that.

C: And I had my boyfriend at the time write something for me.

S: There was thousands of free songs to choose from. So I don't think it's much different.

C: Right. There have always been sort of like workarounds and options that way.

S: I sent you guys those two songs. Oh, you did?

E: I'm listening to one of them right now.

S: They're pretty good actually. Let's see. I'm listening to them too.

C: Okay.

S: In a world full of questions and doubt, we seek the truth, we hear the call.

J: From the depths of curiosity, a rise above will never fall.

S: With open minds and a thirst for knowledge, we seek the facts, we'll never sway.

E: Through skepticism and critical thinking, we'll find a way, brighten up the day.

C: We're the skeptics reaching for the stars. The first one's terrible.

E: It has a...

C: It sounds like country music. It has a gospel feel to it almost. Yeah, the first one's awful. Hate it. Hate it. Nope, don't like either of them.

E: Second one's a little twangy.

C: Hate them.

E: Well, I mean... Hate them. Is that this genre?

C: Is it correct? It's a version of it. No, it's not the version of it that I like. I like... I don't know how to describe it.

E: Well, who's an artist?

C: Lord Huron is one that I listen to a lot.

E: Okay.

C: So it's much more sad, like the style of Stompin' Holler that I really like. And this feels very country.

S: So these were lyrics made by the music app. They're not as specific as the ChatGPT lyrics that I made.

C: Right. Oh, interesting.

S: Yeah, these are more generally about skepticism, whereas the ChatGPT had a lot of details about the SGU specifically.

E: Right, naming us.

S: Naming us, yeah, etc., etc.

E: So would you call this a rabbit hole, Steve?

C: Yeah, I think so. Oh, yeah. This was supposed to be our opening banter.

S: Well, I guess we can move on to some news items. What do you think? Sure.

E: Makes sense.

S: While we're still writing these ourselves. Yeah.

E: Good point.

News Items

S:

B:

C:

J:

E:

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

Sweetened Drinks and Atrial Fibrillation (14:24)

• Sweetened Drinks and Risk of A-Fib

S: So this is the latest iteration of preliminary study being completely gullibly reported by the mainstream media to scare everybody into not eating or drinking something which is perfectly healthy. A few weeks ago, we talked about oats. I had this patient who asked me about it. I'm like, oh, don't worry about that. That's nothing. It's like, oh, thank goodness. What am I going to do without my oats? I eat them every day as a health food, and now suddenly it's going to kill me. It's like, yeah, that's the whole problem with this. You take these preliminary studies, and then you fearmonger based upon them without any context. Most of them don't turn out to be anything actionable. So it's really frustrating. Okay, but this time the target is sweetened drinks, right? Like soft drinks, which is a popular target for this kind of research. And this includes sweetened with sugar. Or with artificial sweeteners, right? Either one, which is pretty odd when you think about it. But what they found was that there is an increased risk of atrial fibrillation among people who report drinking two liters a week or more of sweetened soft drinks or sweetened drinks. This was a prospective cohort study, which means it's observational, right? It is part of the UK Biobank, and it was over 10 years, and it involved 200,000 participants. So like many of these observational studies, especially ones that use like a national database, you can get a lot of numbers, right? So it could be very robust. But the downside is it's observational, so it's uncontrolled, which means you can't control for confounding factors, right? which further means you can't make cause and effect conclusions based solely on this data. So they found a 20% increased risk if you drink drinks that are artificially sweetened, 10% if they were sweetened with sugar, and an 8% lower risk among people who drink fruit juice on a regular basis. So that's pretty much it. But what can we say about this? So the authors correctly and almost mechanically point out this is an observational study. You can't make specific conclusions based upon this. But then they go on to say, this is a quote in the press release. However, based on these findings, we recommend that people reduce or even avoid artificially sweetened and sugar sweetened beverages whenever possible. Do not take it for granted that drinking low sugar and low calorie artificially sweetened beverages is healthy. It may pose potential health risks. So that's where I really strongly disagree with the framing of this study because you cannot make that recommendation as a public health recommendation based upon this data. Absolutely, you cannot. And telling people not to drink low-calorie beverages can have potential downsides, right? Right. Especially people who are relying upon them to reduce their sugar intake. And there's clear evidence that there's an advantage to not drinking hundreds of calories of sugar every day, right? Right. So let's talk about the caveats. And most of these hopefully will be reflexive by now for regular listeners of the show, right? What are the potential confounding factors here? So first of all, this is self-report. And people notoriously self-report inaccurately, especially when you're going back years, like, you know. And so that means the data itself is unreliable. But even if we take the data itself at face value, because this is uncontrolled observational data, we don't know what all the confounding factors are. And they were able to show that there were lots of confounding factors that they did not control for. The only thing they really tried to control for was genetic predisposition to AFib. People who drank more sweetened drinks tended to be more overweight, tended to have other cardiac risk factors, and this is like almost a universal risk factor, were of lower socioeconomic status.

C: They didn't control for any of that?

S: They did not, no.

C: Did they control for lifestyle factors like smoking?

S: Well, they did independently look at that, and what they found was that if you smoked, the negative effect was worse, but it was still there even when you removed that factor.

C: And what about how much you exercised?

S: Yeah, so they didn't control for any of that. Interesting.

C: Because all those things are going to be correlated.

S: All of that. Yeah, so there's so many different ways you can draw the arrow of causation here that other than drinking sweetened drinks causes atrial fibrillation. Our diets are complicated, first of all, and even saying something about people's diets is complicated. And they correlate with so many other things in terms of that impact our health. So for me, I'm reading this and I'm waiting for this one particular piece of information. And it didn't drop until the very end. To me, I was shocked that they didn't even look at this. But at the end of the press release, and it's buried in the study, they say, it is also unknown if sugar and artificially sweetened drinks contained caffeine. So they didn't even assess for the amount of caffeine in the drinks. Now, when I was writing about this for science-based medicine, I did some background research on, okay, well, what's the association between caffeine and AFib? And it's really complicated, actually. And it doesn't necessarily increase the risk of AFib. But I don't think we really know the answer at this time. Interesting.

C: Even at really high doses?

S: So unfortunately, well, probably yes at high doses. So part of the problem is most of the caffeine and AFib research looked specifically at coffee intake. And that's very complicated because coffee contains about 1,000 compounds, and some of them are known to be cardioprotective. And in fact, if you drink like one or two cups of coffee per day, it seems to be protective against AFib.

C: And there's probably nothing cardioprotective in soda.

S: Yeah, but it's hard to know if that's really the case. Not everybody buys that data, right? Because, again, it's complicated. And there have been meta-analyses that basically say, yeah, it's basically a wash. But that's looking at coffee. And then they say, yes, we actually need to actually study this in a controlled manner because we don't really have the high-quality data that we would need. I could not find any data looking at caffeine from soft drinks specifically. I could find data from caffeine from energy drinks, and they do have a higher risk of AFib. So the question is would soft drinks be more like energy drinks or more like coffee? My bet is on energy drinks but not as bad because they don't contain as much caffeine and sugar. But they still contain – but they look more like that than coffee, which is a much more complicated combination of factors there. So that wasn't an easy answer in terms of the background research. But this study would have been a great opportunity to look at the association of caffeine from soft drinks and AFib, but they didn't even look at it. So at the end of the day, I think that this study is essentially uninterpretable in terms of what it means for public health. We can't say the data is too uncontrolled. They didn't control for so many obvious variables. They didn't even look at caffeine. And here's the other thing. And this is true of any study where you're just looking at what people eat. There's always a flip side to that question, right? Because in many ways, what we consume is a bit of a zero sum game. You can only drink or eat so much. And if you drink a lot of something, you are not eating or drinking a lot of something else. For example, people who eat a lot of meat probably don't get enough vegetables. And so is it really the meat? that's the risk factor. or is it the, well, I'm not eating any vegetables, that's the risk factor. So here, is it that you're drinking a lot of sweetened drinks or that you're not getting your fruit and veg for the day? Because the people who weren't drinking a lot of sweetened drinks either were drinking water or they were drinking fruit juice or they were drinking something else. And that something else could be something that in and of itself has a protective effect or is healthy or has more electrolytes or minerals or whatever.

C: And so – It's also like you just can't lump together people who are drinking – I mean you already said this. But like people who are drinking high sugar sodas with people who are drinking diet sodas.

S: Right. That's the other thing I found just generically – They're two wildly different things. Yeah. It's weird about this study. Why would they be the same? They would have to mechanistically be entirely different.

C: Yeah.

S: The fact that they're both sweet is a very superficial commonality there. They're different chemicals. They get different calories.

C: The biochemistry is so different in your body.

S: It's completely different. Yeah. So that to me made the results a bit odd as well. Yeah. At the end of the day, this is a preliminary study. It is the kind of study that we could use to generate hypotheses but not draw firm conclusions. You can't make any recommendations based upon this. It was irresponsible to make public health recommendations based upon this kind of data. And I do think that in general, we need to raise the threshold of when we trumpet these kind of results to the public with warnings or scary headlines or whatever. This creates so much of this noise that it confuses the public and it reduces their confidence in the system. Oh, completely. I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say, one week you're not supposed to drink this and then the next week it's fine. They just get so overwhelmed with the noise.

C: And then they stop trusting their doctors. Exactly.

S: Then when you say, oh, vaccines are good for you, then they don't know what to believe. It sort of contributes to that as well.

J: It's all those little snippets of misinformation that people hear over and over and over again until like one day they wake up and they don't realize that it's become a fact in their head.

E: Yeah, and they're making life decisions based on it.

C: Yeah, which is, not to skip ahead, going to be deeply relevant to the topic that I'm going to talk about in a minute. Oh, boy.

S: Another

C: thing that's – sorry, Steve, but another thing that's super frustrating about this is because when you look at these observational studies that are just taking a cross-section of a huge group of people, it gives you no information about, for example – Most people, when you look at their behavioral decisions, while it may be true that some people their whole lives have drank diet soda because it was a choice that they made. They were like, I don't want to drink high sugar drinks. Diet soda seems like it might be a healthier choice. I'm going to start off drinking Diet Coke. A lot of people, I'm going to use people from my own family, for example, found out that they were pre-diabetic or diabetic and switched to diet soda. And because they switched to diet soda, they are now making healthier decisions. But they are, you know, in some ways trying to undo a lifetime of sugar intake. And so you're sort of looking just at a cross-section of time, but you don't know how much of that biochemistry is from before versus now.

S: Exactly. Also, again, because with observational data, you don't know. Like you could say there's a correlation between drinking diet drinks and diabetes, but is that because they're drinking the drinks because they have diabetes?

C: Exactly, that they just switched over because of the diagnosis.

S: That's like there's a huge correlation between dieting and being overweight. Yeah.

C: Right. It's like we're switching. Yeah, exactly. It's like the arrow goes in the other direction.

S: Yeah, there's like a healthy user effect and there's also like an unhealthy user effect, right? Yeah. And either of those can happen depending on the context. That's why observational data is so tricky. And you know, Cara, how many times, like in your profession and my profession, where some correlation has been in the literature for years, maybe decades, and then somebody comes along and flips it on its head because they thought of one confounding factor nobody else had controlled for before. Completely.

C: Completely, because sometimes it's obvious, right? Because there's face validity, and you can make a mockery of the whole thing. But sometimes, you know, you can't, it's like saying that there's a core, you know, it's like saying there's a correlation between depression and antidepressants. It's like, well, clearly, because we're treating depression with antidepressants. But if it's, you know, if we didn't know that already, then it wouldn't be so obvious.

S: Yeah, one of my favorite examples when I read about it, I was like, oh, yeah, this really is a good example to use to demonstrate this is the association between alcohol and longevity. And it turns out that the people who drink a little bit of alcohol tend to be healthier than people who drink no alcohol. And this led to the, well, alcohol in small amounts is actually protective. It makes you live longer. But it turns out that the no alcohol group included a lot of ex-alcoholics who had already destroyed their health. And once you remove that as a confounding factor, the beneficial effect of alcohol goes away. But that was like a decade in the making before that got sorted out. Yeah.

C: It's like, oh, yeah, what about all the sober people?

S: Oh, yeah. Yeah, all right. Wow. But, of course, everyone's just going to remember, oh, yeah, the sweetened drinks are not good for you.

E: Yeah, but don't worry. The media will sort it out for us, right?

One Degree (28:52)

• How much difference can one degree of warming make?

S: All right, Jay, tell us how big a difference one degree can make.

J: Let me turn that around on you, Steve. Do you think or do any of you guys think that you could detect a one-degree temperature change?

E: Yes, I believe I can. Fahrenheit.

J: Cara?

C: Celsius.

J: Doesn't matter.

E: Oh, that's a wider range.

C: Exactly. One degree. It depends. Are you talking about like in water, with food? You think if you were in a room in your house. Oh, in my room in my house, one degree.

J: If I turned up the temperature by one degree, do you think you could feel it?

C: Probably not. Honestly, probably not.

J: Yeah, like I don't.

E: I believe I can.

J: Well, you're a mutant. Largely, you know, it's something that is pretty undetectable, right? Temperature fluctuations happen literally when you walk from room to room in your house. You're not like, you know, dramatically like, oh, my God, you know, one degree isn't really that much. But it's profound when it comes to our climate. And it's a really concerning situation. because let me jump right into this. Like a recent study by an ecologist named Andrew Richardson said, He he's at the Northern Arizona University and he published something in the Journal of Geophysical Research. And he went into detail about the severe consequences of slight temperature increases on snowpack in boreal forests, you know, northern forests. Right. So this is a really serious problem, and the research that they did was fantastic. It really, really cut down to the bone here on what's happening. So the forests that span the northern regions of three continents, these play a pivotal role in our planet's ecosystem. Basically, most forests around the world have a very large impact on local ecosystems, if not all of them. I would imagine that they all do because of how many animals and different types of plants that live in those areas. So their research indicated that even a minimal warming like one degree Fahrenheit can lead to a substantial decrease in snowpack. So why should we care about snowpack? Well, snowpack does a lot of different things.

E: It reflects that sun away.

J: Yeah, like it's very effective from keeping heat out of going down into the ground. It's like an insulator of the cold. And when this happens, when that cycle is broken, when the snowpack lessens or if it disappears, this creates a cycle of warming. So the less snowpack we have, more sunlight and heat are absorbed by the ground. And then that leads to an increase in soil temperature. And then that leads to the air temperatures increasing. And then this speeds up this process of snow melt, right? So even a little breach inside that snowpack cycle that we have. can have a profound downriver impact on the way that these forests operate. So the process is happening faster than scientists originally predicted, which is another thing to worry about because most of global warming is happening faster than many of these climatologists predicted going back 20 years ago. And we're not ready for it. That's the problem. If we had more accurate estimates back then, we probably would have – hopefully would have been further down the road of trying to counteract some of it. So there was something called the Spruce Experiment and this was done in northern Minnesota by the US Department of Energy. And that study that they did was the basis for the study that I'm actually reporting on right now. But let me tell you a little bit about the spruce experiment because I thought this was really interesting. what they did. So first off, it was an extensive experiment. They used a 30-foot by 20-foot enclosure or multiple 30-foot by 20-foot enclosures. And they equipped these with fans and heaters to mimic future climate conditions. And they did this specifically to observe the effects of temperature changes on particular ecosystems. So they took a time-lapse photography. Every 30 minutes, they take a picture. And what they were able to do was to just see what changes take place. And this helped them monitor the conditions inside each of these different enclosures. And they were able to estimate that snow depth and snow cover allowed the researchers to draw comparisons with historical snow depth and precipitation data. And they clearly saw with minimal temperature change just how much the snowpack could be affected by, just by a minor temperature change. You would think one degree, what would that do? It actually does a lot. One degree is actually profound when it comes to snowpack. So any degree of warming resulted in this dramatic reduction of snow cover, which, again, it affects the plant life, the soil ecosystems, all of the animals that live there, whether they're insects or larger mammals or whatever they are. Even very small temperature changes started this decreasing and steady amount of snow. So the temperature changes that they observed didn't just stress out the ecosystems, but it also increased the mortality rates of the animals that were living there, including the plants. And these new observations are critical in refining current climate models. So they give us a window into what's happening and what the potential future is. And soon, this is going to happen soon, guys. We're living in it right now. So what's happening, this study is really cool because it zooms in on a very specific region. We're talking about snowpack here. We're not talking about the ocean. We're not talking about weather patterns. Just what the changes in snowpack does in these forests that exist in a very small part of the world.

S: Yeah, unfortunately, the last few years of climate research has been finding that our predictions about maybe it's how much warming we're going to get isn't as bad as we thought, but the effects of the warming we are going to get is going to be worse earlier. Yeah. Right?

E: Yeah, exactly a consolation.

S: We're kind of seeing that now. This is worse than they thought it was going to be at the current level of warming in terms of negative effects.

J: At that point, Steve, it's so obvious. This isn't like – we're not back in the 80s where we really weren't seeing it. There wasn't a lot of – there was proof but it wasn't like as tangible it is today. Like it is happening. It's happening everywhere. It's affecting every ecosystem in our world, right? I mean it's having an effect on weather. It's having an effect on forests. It's having an effect on people even having access to drinking water or having way too much water, the flooding that's been going on. This is just the absolute very, very, very, very beginning of things that are going to take place. that might largely be unpredictable, but we know that they're going to be severe and we know that things are going to change very quickly.

S: Yeah, I think the most unpredictable part of it is the tipping point. It's like when exactly are they going to happen? The amount of warming has been pretty much in between like the two standard deviations that the models have been predicting. It's been actually very accurate. I know a lot of what I would call the climate change deniers argue that the climate models have not been accurate, but that's just not true. It's just factually correct that the models have been very accurate. They are predicting the amount of warming that we have seen over the last 20 years. So we should have a pretty high level of confidence in them, but we don't know what the tipping points are going to be. And by tipping points, we mean like When are the ice sheets going to collapse into the ocean? Things like that. We don't know exactly when those things are going to happen, although we have a range of when that's going to happen. And it's a little bit harder to predict what the feedback loops and the negative climate consequences are going to be. And that's, unfortunately, we're discovering that it's worse than we thought it was going to be. It's going to get worse earlier.

J: These studies are rolling in. I'm seeing them all the time now. As the funds were allocated for these different organizations to do deeper research into these issues, we're seeing the information. It's there. It's clear. We're seeing it manifest globally. And I don't understand for the life of me, guys. I don't get it. What the hell is the lack of effort?

S: Why aren't we – We shouldn't underestimate the task ahead of us. We have a global technological civilization that is built around fossil fuel. And we shouldn't expect that to change easily. But it is unfortunate that there are some political ends of the spectrum are pushing back against doing anything about it. And That, you know, even I think people who want to do the right thing often don't know what the best path is. But the bottom line is we have to invest a ton of money into this in order to accelerate the transition to a low carbon economy. It's happening. We have the technology. We really just need the political will to invest the resources to make it happen as fast as possible. And that is hard to do. It is unfortunately hard to do. So it seems to me that what's been happening and what I think is probably going to happen is is that it's going to happen at its own pace just based on the technology itself. Maybe we can make a tiny little difference on the margins, but I don't think that anything political is going to make a huge difference just because we don't have the political will, unfortunately.

E: Yeah, a lot of damage in the meantime.

S: Yeah, that's the only variable is how much damage will be done in the meantime. And our kids will know, and our grandkids will know.

Birth Control Misinformation (38:57)

• Women are getting off birth control amid misinformation explosion

S: All right, Cara, tell us about birth control misinformation.

C: Oh, there's so much. So the Washington Post has done kind of a series of articles over the past several months. So props to a couple of reporters on there, Lauren Weber and Sabrina Molle, who have been writing about this topic, misconceptions around birth control. Basically, there is a big movement on social media and especially TikTok, also to some extent Instagram, where we see a lot of kind of repurposing of TikToks, where there are these social media content creators who are making quite a bit of money doing telling young women to get off the pill and ditch your IUD, ditch your birth control, and here's why and here's how. And it would be one thing if the reasons behind this new push were legitimate, and it would be one thing if if the outcomes of these pushes were safe. The problem is this is mostly misinformation to a pretty potentially devastating consequence because I'm not sure if you remember what's been happening in the world lately, but abortion is now banned or restricted in about half the states in the United States. Right. So if young women are choosing to ditch their birth control and are choosing instead to utilize, quote, natural alternatives to birth control that have high rates of failure, what many doctors are anecdotally, I have to say that, anecdotally saying, telling reporters that they're seeing is a lot of young women coming in with unwanted pregnancies. We don't have the numbers yet about upticks because this is a pretty new phenomenon. But many of the doctors that are being interviewed for some of this coverage are saying that Their patients are telling them that social media influencers are fueling their choices to get off of birth control and that their reasoning is very often due to things that the doctors are then having to counter. because they are not evidence-based.

S: Should we call them TikTok babies? Is it too early to do that?

C: It's probably going to have to start happening, sadly. What do you think is motivating this misinformation? Where do you think the bulk of the commentation... The commentation? That's not a word.

S: The wellness.

E: Write that down, too.

C: Right. And when we think of wellness influencers, what do we think of? usually is the political alignment of that? We usually think of that as like a kind of a like Libby left wingy kind of a thing, right?

S: I think it's both.

C: Sadly, this is this is coming out as a very conservative movement. Yeah. So it's a whole new wilderness out there. We're seeing more and more conservative commentators and influencers. There are a few names that are specifically being cited here. There's someone named, let me find her first name. Her last name is Bendayan. She's actually a Spanish commentator. She's 29 years old. Nicole Bendayan, who has a million followers across Instagram and TikTok. She's a holistic health coach. She is not a licensed medical specialist at all. She calls herself a cycle-sinking nutritionist.

S: Oh. Yeah. Okay.

C: Uh-huh. That's – She herself stopped using hormonal birth control because she was concerned about weight gain, low libido, and intermittent bleeding, which she claims were side effects of her birth control. after going to several doctors who she says dismissed her symptoms. She stopped using birth control. She says her symptoms went away. She told her followers that birth control – and again, none of this is clearly medical advice nor backed up by any legitimate research. She told her followers that birth control depletes magnesium, vitamin B, vitamin C, vitamin E, zinc levels. She charges money for virtual programs that include analyses of blood panels.

S: See, why isn't that practicing medicine without a license? Why isn't she in jail?

C: I do not know because she's in Spain possibly because she puts a disclaimer. She makes it clear. She says, quote, I always make it clear in a disclaimer that I'm not a medical professional and I would happily work with their health care team.

S: If you're taking money to give health advice, that's not enough.

E: So is reading a blood panel like what? Taking some blood, putting it on one of those glass things, putting it under a microscope?

C: No, I think she's probably just getting the readout. The lab has already analyzed it.

E: Oh, I see. Right. So they come back with the numbers and the figures.

C: And then she gives them a regimen. Exactly.

E: And recommend a course.

C: She's actually had, I think, some of her videos removed. Yeah, TikTok recently removed five videos linking birth control to mental health issues after the Washington Post reached out to TikTok specifically and saying, hey, TikTok, how are you preventing the spread of misinformation?

S: They're not. Mm-hmm.

C: They're not.

E: They're waiting for the Washington Post to contact them.

J: And then they'll react.

C: So TikTok took down the video saying that they violated company policies, quote, prohibiting inaccurate, misleading, or false content that may cause significant harm to individuals or society. And then, of course, Ben Dayen's statement was that she, quote, fully supports the removal of any content that may inadvertently perpetuate misinformation. Yeah. And then said, quote, as I often remind my audience, it's essential for individuals to conduct their own research and see comprehensive understanding, especially considering the limitations of short form content. I mean, this is so dangerous. And what we're seeing also, we've got Brett Cooper, who is a commentator for The Daily Wire, which is a conservative publication, who is claiming this has been debunked time and time again, that birth control impacts fertility. Right. We know that this isn't true. This has been debunked over and over. We've got Candace Owens denouncing birth control, both pills and IUDs as unnatural and impacting fertility. And of course, Ben Shapiro talking about birth control side effects, claiming that birth control pills, that women on birth control pills are attracted to men who are less traditionally masculine. Okay, so here is something that... Here's a really, really interesting one. So there's a woman named Brittany Martinez who founded a magazine called Evie. And her magazine has been questioning birth control quite a lot. And she actually has started another company. She co-founded an app, like a tech company called 28. And that is backed by Peter Thiel. I don't know if you guys remember Peter Thiel, but he was one of PayPal's original founders. So 28 is a menstrual cycle tracking app. And it's really kind of pushing to stop using hormonal birth control and start kind of using the rhythm method basically to prevent pregnancy. And there are interviews in this WAPO article with a sociologist from the University of Colorado, Amanda Stevenson. And it's pretty interesting the sort of connection between these sort of conservative pushes, these anti-abortion activists and legislative pushes to restrict birth control and these appeals on social media to sort of Right. Right. They fail if somebody is peri or premenopausal. They fail if their basal body temperature is off. They fail if somebody has recently had an abortion. They fail if somebody's hormones are not easily measured.

E: So they're recommending one solution for all of it. basically? Yeah.

C: Yeah, they're basically recommending no hormones and also no medical insertions like IUDs. And they're saying that all of those medical options cause side effects. And now what we do need to be clear about is that some of these side effects are real. There is a very, very, very low risk of blood clots in hormonal birth control. And it's the estrogen, not the progesterone that causes these blood clots. There will be a new birth control that's over the counter that's going to be on the market soon, but it's progesterone only. So that risk of blood clots won't be involved in the over-the-counter pill. Mm-hmm. Most of the hormonal birth controls that are available now are combined estrogen, progesterone, and they do have a risk of blood clots. It's very low. I think it's something like three to nine women out of 10,000 women who are on the pill. So that's still lower than the risk of developing a blood clot during pregnancy. So if you got pregnant, you have a higher risk of getting a blood clot. than if you're on the pill, right? So it's like risk management. We have to think about these things.

S: Risk versus benefit, right?

C: Exactly, yeah.

S: Probably all things considered, you're at lower risk than the risk of an unwanted pregnancy and everything that goes along with that.

C: Totally. And there are other side effects. There are side effects of some women have nausea, some women have breast tenderness, but usually those side effects can be mitigated by switching forms of birth control. For me, for example, this is purely anecdotal. I had, as listeners know who have been following the show, I had a hysterectomy in 2021. Is that 2021? 2022. Yes, 2022. I no longer need birth control. I cannot get pregnant. I do not have a uterus. But I still take the ring because when I went off of it, I had just like acne explode. And so for me, the side effects of not being on birth control are higher. So I worked with my gynecologist and we decided I'm going to stay on birth control because I would prefer the positive side effects of birth control. And for a lot of young women, that's also the case. I got on birth control long before I was sexually active because it made my periods lighter and less intense. And I felt less ill when I was on birth control than off. And so there are a lot of different reasons that women take hormonal birth control. When you look at some of this misinformation, that it can affect your fertility, that it— Yeah, non-doctors basically scaring people with no right to do so. Totally, that it's affecting, yeah, your different vitamin loads, these things that they're just— making up or they're pulling, they're cherry picking from poorly controlled studies or from debunked studies, you know, just from bad research. And that's really, really dangerous because very often not only are these individuals who are not licensed medical professionals, they're individuals who don't have any scientific training. Right. So they don't know how to read these studies.

E: They're about as unqualified as you can get.

C: But what ends up happening, which is very dangerous that we don't often think about, is that the algorithms in these social media platforms work to the advantage of the videos. You watch one video that says birth control is dangerous and then you go, well, that's interesting. That worries me. And then it links to another one. And then it links to another one. And before you know it, that's all you're being fed. So of Of course, now you have this bias. So then when you go to your doctor, you're like, I want to get off my birth control. And they go, why? And it's like, well, because clearly it's bad for me. And they go, why do you say that? Well, because every video on TikTok is telling me that. Even if every video on TikTok doesn't say that, every video you see on TikTok says that.

E: TikTok clinic. Great. Just what we need.

C: It's really dangerous. And it's not just a TikTok problem. It's an Instagram problem. It's a YouTube problem. And for some people, that is the news. That is the internet. That is reality.

E: Right. Younger generation of people.

C: Terrible. That's who's on birth control. You know what I mean? It's people who are menstruating.

E: They're the people who are going to be impacted by this.

C: And we also – I think we have to remember as well that just like we were talking about before because I think sometimes it's really easy to sort of blame the victim. Yeah. We in the health care profession, we kind of as a whole in sort of the institution also share a lot of the blame. Like individuals have good reason to be distrustful, especially women, especially people of color. who don't always have good relationships with the healthcare system, who haven't always been listened to, believed, treated well. And so now is the time that we need to be bridging these gaps that we need to be building trust. You know, when people are coming in, we don't need to be talking down to these women, making them feel stupid, you know, rolling our eyes when they come in and they say, but TikTok told me. This is the time to be listening, to be spending time with them, to be educating in a real kind of respectful way because we don't want to make this rift grow. We could be doing real kind of lasting damage to vulnerable young women by not listening and by furthering their distrust.

S: Well, as a clinician, you are supposed to give information to your patients in a nonjudgmental manner, right? Of course. You should never come off as being negative or judgmental towards your patient because this is why.

C: There's a big difference between theory and practice. Yeah.

S: I know. I know that. I know that. But that is the standard. And you are correct in that we do need to be reminded of that frequently. And physicians today have to be aware of what's going on out there on social media. They have to be aware of it. It's part of the profession now. You can't just ignore it.

C: Absolutely.

Iridology (54:47)

• Iridology: Using alternative medicine to unlock genetic clues through the eye 

S: All right, Evan, tell us about iridology.

E: Yeah, iridology. Something that doesn't come up all that much. And there are a lot of pseudoscience topics that we have covered over the year, but some of them come up more frequently than others. And some remain either, I don't know, untouched, lightly discussed by us. And I think it has to do with the fact that some notions, some of those pseudosciences, they're so steeped in antiquity. Yeah, it's just extra stupid.

J: Right.

E: And they've kind of even lost their luster over time, but somehow they still kind of can pop up. even in the year 2024. One of those pseudosciences is iridology. That's the belief that looking at the features of a person's iris can yield information on what might be ailing that person. And this is a type of homunculus theory of medicine, which we've talked about before. Homunculus means little man. In other words, there's a little entire you to be observed within a certain part of your body, or in some cases, a bodily fluid. which I've read about as well. Now, reflexology, the homunculus that exists on the sole of a person's foot. Palmistry suggests a homunculus within the palm of a person's hand. And iridology, the homunculus in a person's iris. And yeah, the subject doesn't pop up a lot these days. It's an anti-scientific way of thinking about diagnosing the health of a person. A total throwback to a time when, what, other health theories like chiropractic and animal magnetism were getting started. All 19th century kind of stuff that was coming along, really before we got a better grasp on scientific approach to medicine. Who was it? Ingatz von Prexley? Hungarian physician? He was the one who came up with this? You know the story, Steve.

S: Oh, yeah. The owl.

E: Yeah, 11-year-old boy. He noticed – this was in 1861. There's an 11-year-old boy. He noticed an owl in a tree in his backyard. He tried to catch the owl and the owl had a broken leg or he broke one of its legs accidentally. And there was – and he looked into its eye. There was a dark stripe that had developed in the lower part of the owl's iris. But then he healed – he tended to the owl, to the injury, nursed it back to health. The owl became kind of, I don't know, like a – A pet, in a sense. But he later noticed that the appearance of white and crooked lines in the part of the iris where the dark stripe had been had taken over. And there you have it. An entire pseudoscience born in the mind of an 11-year-old child in the middle of the 19th century. So it's in the news. And here was the headline I read. Using alternative medicine to unlock genetic clues through the eye. Yep. The article is a puff piece. And if you think about it, that's a very clever pun. It's a puff piece from an Orlando, Florida news outlet. You know, when they puff the eyeball with treatments, right? Yeah. Orlando, Florida, news outlet featuring holistic iridologist Jessica Halpern. Now, she had learned about iridology about 20 years ago when she went to see actual doctors about a condition which she was experiencing, and she was clearly unsatisfied with the result. So a friend suggested, hey, go see this iridologist instead. And she was so impressed by that iridologist, she became an iridologist. And to become an iridologist, you don't have to have any formal medical training, which, you know, would frankly only get in the way with things like double-blinded clinical trials, you know, that annoying kind of stuff. But Jessica says iridology can help see if someone has an increased likelihood to develop a particular disease based on their genetic makeup. Here's a quote. I can see predispositions. I can tell someone I see a genetic predisposition. Everything going on in the body registers through the brain and the brain sends the signal to the eye. So through the iris of the eye, which is the colored part, we can see the health of the body's systems. Steve and Cara, did you know this?

S: Oh, yeah.

E: I mean, right. They taught you this in medical school care. I'm sure you learned about this during your study of neurology. I mean, yeah. And there's a whole bunch of well-designed research to support it. Right. Yeah. So, of course, the vast majority of doctors in general reject these claims. But Halpern has an answer to that. when she was confronted in the interview. She said, well, a lot of them, a lot of doctors don't want to interfere with what they're doing. Don't forget they make a lot of money prescribing medications.

S: That's so lazy.

E: I mean – That is lazy conspiracy nonsense.

S: Like you don't spend two seconds even thinking about that. You know what I mean? That's like such a hand-waving defense.

E: My gosh, it is so base and the excuse. And so everybody uses that excuse.

S: Insulting.

E: Doctors like, oh, big money. Yeah, you're only in it for the medication. Making money off. Right. They also interviewed a patient. His name is Roland Pankowicz. He's gone to iridologists for years, and he uses this as an assessment tool to gauge his overall health. He says it has helped him manage his family's mental health history, Cara. He says, I have some mental health issues going on in my family, so I feel iridology can help predetermine if I may have to deal with something like that down the road. For me, it's been scary accurate to the point where I've had pain on one side of my body. And it's been obvious in my eye without me telling the practitioner that there was something going on. Yeah. It's a form of fortune telling. Yeah, probably.

C: He's like, it's so obvious because I'm limping. Right. But I didn't have to tell him.

S: It's a cold reading.

C: Yeah, exactly.

S: The iridology diagnosis basically is doing a cold reading.

E: But people going to see an iridologist for mental health reasons, that struck me as kind of new. I don't usually come across that when I'm reading stories about this.

C: That's true, actually. It's never come across my desk.

E: Iridology does have – obviously, there have been studies done. The ones that have the tightest controls obviously show no effect whatsoever. It absolutely does not predict anything and there's tons of horrible results. studies out there in which obviously the proponents of iridology cling on to as a possible threat of legitimacy as to what they are doing. And then also be careful because in the modern age now with iridology, it's about utilizing modern technology in the practice. And I read, this was published in, this was December of 2023. So only a few months ago, the Journal of Engineering Proceedings They posted a study titled A Methodological Review of Iridology-Based Computer-Aided Organ Status Assessment Techniques. So what they're basically talking about here is that – I'll read it from the abstract. Define patterns that are connected to particular medical conditions. Computerized iris analysis software – may need to examine thousands of iris images. A method of iridology known as computer-aided iridology, or CAI, uses software to study the iris. Oh my gosh, so they're obviously taking advantage of modern ideas, modern software, programs, technology. Who knows if they'll try to incorporate AI at some point. into all of this to try to help further substantiate what they're trying to do. However, this paper obviously came to the conclusion that iridology is a pseudoscience. It makes unsubstantiated claims that can identify medical disorders by examining the iris, and it does not provide any reliable means of diagnosis. There is no scientific proof to back up its claims, even with this technology.

S: Yeah, it's like using sensitive EM detectors to detect ghosts. It's still pseudoscience. Right. I don't care how much gadgetry you have. But again, it makes it seem superficially more plausible to people with, as we like to say, more money than sense.

E: But you don't – and something like phrenology, that's not something that is widely – I don't think accepted by people these days. and even if there are a few fringe people out there who might – it doesn't have it.

S: A few fringe people is a good way to say it.

E: But hey, look. With TikTok and something, I wouldn't be surprised if there is some phrenologist out there who has half a million people listening to what he has to say on a social media platform. Yeah.

S: TikTok is a cesspool of misinformation.

E: Unfortunately.

J: It seems like it's getting worse.

S: Yeah, it's getting worse. All right, Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time.

Who's That Noisy? (1:03:30)

Answer to previous Noisy:

melting snow sliding off vinyl carport

J: All right, guys, last week I played This Noisy. Well, I got a lot of guesses. This was an odd one for sure. This answer was sent in by a listener named Colin Von Huring. He said, hello, Jay. I think I recognize this week's noisy and it would be really nice if I could win something today. He was saying he's having a bad day. Okay, well, let's see what happens here. That sounds to me like the marble digital clock that a maniac on YouTube built. so I looked it up and I found it and I agree I agree with Colin the guy's a maniac. he made this machine that made a hell of a racket. it was like lifting up all of these different black and white marbles and kind of sorting them And then it would shoot them down these like alleyways and it would spell out the time. Oh, neat. Like with different colored marbles. Very complicated. I don't know where people find the time or the money to do stuff like this. But yeah. But that's not it. But it was a very cool guess. So I have a listener named Rich who wrote in and said, Hi, Jay. That sounds like the Phalanx Weapon System, better known as CIWS, or he says CIWS, in the Navy and CRAM, CRAM, in the Army. I mispronounced it right there. How about that? It is not those weapon systems, but I totally understand why you picked that because there is a sound of things kind of launching in there, which I agree. So I think that was also a good guess. Michael Blaney wrote in and said, hi, Jay, it's coming in waves, which makes me think it's actual waves as in the beach. So I'm guessing it's waves flowing into some kind of electricity generator. I thought this one was interesting as well because I totally did not hear like a water type effect here. And then when I re-listened to it, I kind of could see where that's coming from. Someone named Scuba Steve wrote in, said, hey, guys, and Cara, this is Steven. His last name is Borsi, like horsey. I think everyone gives me like phonetics to help.

C: I love that.

J: He's from Petal, Mississippi, and he's going to guess the Noisy is a plasma cutter with a conveyor belt running material under it. That is not correct. And Simon Michaelmore said, Hi Jay, this week's noisy sounds like a vent or some sort of high pressure system. Like an air compressor that makes a loud hiss and vents excess air. That is also not correct. There was no winner this week. And I'm not surprised. I picked this noisy because I just thought it was a very interesting sound. But what you're actually hearing here, have you guys ever seen one of those vinyl or plastic carports that some people have out in their driveways, right?

E: Okay, yeah.

J: It's kind of like a tent that has a semicircular top to it, like a curve to it that a car can fit into. And what this noisy is, is somebody put a heater in one of those and there was snow on top of it. And the snow is melting and then all of it is kind of sliding off this vinyl, right? So it's snow sliding on vinyl.

E: Oh, boy.

J: That makes that noise. Just thought it was a cool sound. Sometimes I'll just include a noisy that I think, you know, you should hear because it's just an interesting sound. I have a new noisy this week. And this one was sent in by a listener named Austin Vosier. Thank you. All right. So if you think you know this week's noisy or you heard something cool, email me at wtn at theskepticsguide.org.

New Noisy (1:06:57)

[deep musical warbling and pulsating, with light background percussion ]

this week's Noisy

Announcements (1:07:37)

J: So Steve, if you happen to go to theskepticsguide.org homepage, there are lots of buttons on there, all of them leading to shows that are coming up. Now, as you hear this, this show is going to come out on today. We're recording this on the 27th. It's going to Come out on the 30th. Most of you are going to be hearing this early next week, the 1st, 2nd of April. It's not too late to buy tickets. We have tickets left for the extravaganza that's happening in Dallas on the weekend, Friday the 5th. Then we have the sixth is the extravaganza. And then we have the seventh, which is the two private shows. So there is a noon private show that also has seats available that you can get tickets for. And then we have two shows happening in Chicago in August. And we are going to be doing an extravaganza. And then we will be doing our 1,000th SGU episode.

E: Oh, my gosh.

J: That is the recording of the 1,000th episode. It will actually come out the following Saturday. Mm-hmm. But that is indeed the 1,000th SGU episode. The only person that recorded every single one of those episodes was Steve, of course. Steve has never missed an episode. I probably missed – I don't know. I don't even know. We have to figure it out. Yeah. We all have missed a handful. Yeah.

E: I've missed probably one a year on average.

J: But it's all going to happen. So if you're interested in seeing the SGU live, please go to our website and check it out. We have the Dallas and then we have Chicago. Just so you guys know, we will all be appearing at PsyCon in October. That's going to be in Las Vegas. And we are even talking about maybe doing yet another live performance maybe in November, December, January.

S: Early December, yeah, I think.

E: We're looking. TBD, right? To be announced. Yeah, it's coming up.

J: We've got lots of talking to do, but we're still... Our dance card's pretty full, guys.

E: Yeah, we're getting around.

J: So do me a favor, guys. If you're enjoying this show, there's a couple of things that you can do. One is really easy. Just give us a review anywhere. You can go on iTunes, whatever. It just helps people find us. Just be honest and let other people know what you think about the show. And another thing you could do, if you really want to help us, you could become a patron. You can go to patreon.com forward slash skepticsguide. We have a wonderful group of patrons. We have an awesome Discord channel. The patrons have gotten to know each other, and that's why we started Notacon, to give them all a place to go and congregate. Lots of friendships are being made. It's really awesome, and I'm very proud of it. I feel very lucky that we have such a wonderful group of people. If you'd like to join this wonderful group of people, just go to patreon.com forward slash skeptics guide and help support this podcast.

Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups

Email #1: Mel's Mystery Hole (1:10:19)

S: Thank you, Jay. All right, we have a couple of emails. The first one's actually a TikTok video that was tagged to us. Have you guys ever heard of Mel's Mystery Hole? What?

C: Do I want to have heard of that? No, you can't. I didn't think so.

S: What do you think it is? Ugh.

E: What, one of these bottomless pits?

S: Yes, one of these bottomless pits.

E: One of the many bottomless pits that are not bottomless.

S: Yeah, it's supposed to be near Ellensburg, Washington. First popularized by the radio show, Evan...

E: Oh, it would be Coast to Coast, Art Bell.

S: Coast to Coast in 1997. There you go. The guest calling himself Mel Waters, you know, talked about the hole. That's how it became known as Mel's Hole. And it's supposed to be this bottomless sinkhole, you know. Or at least it's extremely, extremely deep. The caller claimed that... It was at least 80,000 feet deep, which ain't possible. You know, just stuff would not hold itself open to that depth. You know, dirt, rocks would just collapse in on itself. But that was the claim. And this spawned a lot of local modern legends, right? Just urban legends in the area. Here's the thing. There are sinkholes around the world. That's not that unusual. Right. And it is common for there to be, you know, urban legends surrounding it. But I don't know that this one even exists because in 2002, a group of 30 investigators led by one Gerald Osborne went on an expedition to investigate the hole and they couldn't even find it. Yeah. They couldn't find the thing. So I don't know that it exists. So the TikTok video in question, which we will link to, is just – it's ridiculous. It's just ridiculous because it's saying like what scientists found at the bottom of this hole will shock the world. It's like the most – shameless sensationalism you can imagine. and then meanwhile it's showing in. you know it's this is the voiceover. it's showing pictures of these of like 20 different sinkholes right like pick one. you know it's Because it doesn't exist. They don't have a picture of actual Mel's holes. They just show different sinkholes. Of course, you wouldn't do that if you had a picture of Mel's hole, right? You wouldn't need to do that. But yeah, it's just complete nonsense. All right.

E: Oh, gosh.

Email #2: Positive Thinking (1:13:07)

S: That's a fun one. Next, we have an email that comes from Kai, and Kai writes, to me it seems akin to the so-called power of prayer you can't pray cancer away. so why should I believe that a positive attitude will make a difference? in recent years I knew a woman who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. no one had a more positive outlook than this woman and she took on the challenge with a strong I can do this attitude. she died six months later. so my question again is what's the mode of efficacy exactly? how is it that a positive attitude helps and has it been scientifically tested? Well, thank you so much for writing in. I am so sorry to hear about your husband. Of course, we wish him the best. And it sounds like you're doing the right thing, standard medical care, which I would heartily endorse. And listen, there's nothing wrong with keeping positive, trying to find the silver lining and not give up, et cetera. But there's no wrong way to have cancer. Whatever your emotional reaction is to having cancer, that's fine. That's there's. no one could tell you that it's right or wrong. And Carrie, you and I have talked about this, I think, several times on the show. The whole problem with the positive attitude thing is that it basically puts the blame on the patient. And if things don't go well, it's like, well, you clearly didn't have the right attitude. Because if your attitude can cure you, a bad attitude can kill you. And that's not fair and it's not true. Has it been researched? Yes. You know what the effect of a positive attitude is on cancer survival? Nothing.

C: Nothing.

S: It has no effect on survival, right?

C: It has effect on some things but not on survival.

S: Yeah, whatever. Your mood, your experience of the thing or whatever. But does it affect your survival? No. Cancer is cancer and your attitude does not affect the cancer.

C: No, it doesn't. And you're 100% right. What it can affect is your quality of life during your experience of cancer treatment, because it puts inordinate pressure on somebody who's already trying to juggle so much. Work with people on is the burden that they feel trying to kind of calibrate their mood for other people.

S: Sure.

E: Not upset their family members to try and keep them because they're – yeah.

C: They feel so much pressure to stay positive or to stay happy or to put on a brave face because they feel like that's what they're supposed to do. And it's exhausting. It's soul crushing. And so I try to stay away from the word positive and move towards the word authentic. You know, I often ask them, you know, how do you want to be right now? What are you feeling? What's true to you in this moment? And try to work towards that. A great book that I would recommend to the listener, if she's interested in reading it, would be Bright Sighted by Barbara Ehrenreich. How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. Sure. Yeah. It talks about lots of different examples, but she does specifically talk about cancer and how difficult it is on cancer patients and how it can actually undermine their experience. One of the first things I do when I sit down with the patients that I work with is I ask them, How do you identify? Like, are you a fighter? Are you a survivor? Are you a, you know, excuse my French, but a cancer kind of a person? Are you? And everybody has a different view of their relationship to cancer. Some people don't want to even think of themselves as cancer patients. Mm-hmm.

S: It's not their identity.

C: It's not their identity. For some people, it's their whole life. And there's no right way to be in it. And that's what's really important, I think, more than anything else, is to be true to your own experience.

S: Yeah. Yeah. You know, my wife had breast cancer and she did very, very well, luckily. But she so we went through that together. And one of the things that she experienced was like as soon as you get the diagnosis, it's like you're on the other side of this wall from everybody else. Like there's you and then there's everybody else who doesn't have cancer. You know, I mean, it's not staring this in the face. It can be isolating and it just alters your perspective of everything, of reality, of your life. You can't understand it unless you're there. If you're somebody who is like the loved one of somebody with cancer, don't assume you know what they're going through. Don't assume you know what it feels like and certainly don't put any pressure on them to be a certain way or to have a positive attitude. It's like if you want to cry cry whatever you want to do. it's like you're going.

C: you want to scream scream. you want to not feel anything. today you don't have to feel that's fine yeah that. but that whole thing of like you just you gotta. you gotta keep hope alive you gotta stay as if somehow if you stop hoping your body like your cells will be like well no more hope just let the cancer win like it's the weirdest mentality for

E: people who have a uh a predisposition say to that attitude religious or otherwise. I mean if they may not know any other coping strategy and if that works for you that's great.

C: the problem is it doesn't. your thoughts don't translate to your like white cells And I think that's the thing that we have to remember because really all you're setting yourself up for is a lot of guilt and shame.

S: Yeah, and I think the religious version of it is even worse. When you tell people you could pray your cancer away and then they don't – well, you didn't pray hard enough. God doesn't love you. I mean the whole didn't pray hard enough is just – what else are you going to say?

J: What does that actually mean? Like that you're not praying long enough?

S: You're not really deep and mean it or whatever. It's just silly. But here's the thing, Carrie. Tell me what you think about this. My sense is – and I know because I've been there a million times, right? It's like when you're the person who doesn't have the terminal illness or the horrible diagnosis and you're facing somebody who does. It's hard to know what to say. Oh, 100%. It's very difficult to be in a situation where you can't think of anything genuinely positive to say because it's just horrible.

C: It's because there isn't anything you can say.

S: Because there isn't anything positive. So I think most people say that because they're desperate to find something not horribly negative to say. So they say, well, be positive.

C: But it's okay to say something like, this sucks.

S: Yeah, it's okay.

C: That's an okay to say thing.

S: Just say it. This sucks. I'm here for you. Totally.

C: And I think one of the things that I've found that is really frustrating for a lot of the patients that I've worked with, one of the most annoying things, one of the things that they say is the most annoying to hear is when people go, I don't know how you do it. They say that that is by far the most irritating. They're like, I don't know how you get up every day. And they go, what is the alternative?

S: Right.

C: I do it because they're like, that's just what you do.

S: There's no alternative.

C: There is no alternative. They're like, because they always go, I don't know. I would just, it's like, the alternative is not to roll over and die. Because let me let you in on a little secret. When you roll over, you don't just die. Yeah, right.

S: Right. You just lie there. You still got to face the day.

C: And eventually you got to pee and eventually you get hungry. You know what I mean? It's like, yeah, you don't, it doesn't, you're still alive and you still have to take your meds and drink your water and that's just how life is.

S: But I think it's probably a good idea to think about what you should say in situations like that. so you have something ready to go because otherwise you're going to panic and say something stupid that makes it worse because that's what most people do.

C: Yeah, and I think that's a good idea in life. In life in general. It's a good idea with your partner, with your friends. It's a good idea when somebody's going through a breakup or when somebody's depressed. It's a good idea to ask them, do you want me to help you solve your problem or do you just want to sit here? Or do you want me to help validate what you're going through? All of these are great ways to address somebody who's going through some shit. You know, it's not about solving their problem. It's not about giving them platitudes. It's about reminding them that they're awesome and you love them and you are a person in their life. Yeah. Who's there.

S: That's it. Yeah. That's a good default. Start there. Totally. Don't think you have to say something positive or you have to fix the problem or whatever because that's usually counterproductive.

C: And really all that is reflective of is your own anxiety. Yes.

S: Right. Exactly. Yeah.

C: A little bit of your narcissism if I'm being 100% honest.

S: It's your discomfort with not knowing what to say.

C: It is. It's your discomfort. Yeah, absolutely.

S: Sure. All right. Let's move on. It's time for Science or Fiction.

[top]                        

Science or Fiction (1:22:41)

Theme: Power & Energy News Items Item #1: Researchers have developed an implantable battery that is powered by oxygen in the body and capable of producing continuous electricity at 1.3 V. Item #2: Toyota reports its latest hydrogen fuel cell car will average 845 miles on a single tank of hydrogen. Item #3: Engineers have created flexible perovskite solar cells with a power conversion efficiency of 25%, and maintaining 90% of this efficiency after 10,000 bending cycles.

Answer	Item
Fiction	FCEV 845mi on a single tank
Science	Implantable battery
Science	Flexible perovskite solar cells

Host	Result
Steve	sweep

Rogue	Guess
Evan	Implantable battery
Cara	Flexible perovskite solar cells
Jay	Flexible perovskite solar cells

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

S: Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine and one fake, and then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. Cara has a lot to prove. This week is bouncing back from a double solo failure. No pressure. All right.

C: None whatsoever.

S: But I should point out a very rare... True.

C: This is why it's so novel.

S: First time that's ever happened. All right. So these are three news items, but there is a theme to the news items. They are all about power, right? These are about energy and...

C: Oh, great.

S: There's happened to be a lot of energy news, so I just clustered them. Okay, here we go. Item number one. Researchers have developed an implantable battery that is powered by oxygen in the body and capable of producing continuous electricity at 1.3 volts. Item number two. Toyota reports its latest hydrogen fuel cell car will average 845 miles on a single tank of hydrogen. And item number three, engineers have created flexible perovskite solar cells with a power conversion efficiency of 25% and maintaining 90% of this efficiency after 10,000 bending cycles. Ooh, I heard a little groan from Evan there. I think Evan wants to go first.

Evan's Response

E: I think it was Cara.

S: Cara, your voice just dropped a few octaves. This third one, the flexible purpose-guided solar cells.

E: I mean, can't you express this in like – Words. Okay. For example – maintaining 90% of this efficiency after 10,000 bending cycles. I mean, can I have that in like a calendar or something, like years or something? I mean, what's a bending cycle?

S: Well, that's obviously an engineering term. I'm assuming they had some kind of standardized bending of the material. Okay. And then they did that 10,000 times, probably had a machine do it.

E: Bending the material.

S: And then they tested it again and it worked. It had 90% of its original efficiency. Okay. Because it's supposed to be flexible, right? Flexible, right. So if it breaks down, then it's not flexible, right?

E: Gee whiz. Okay. Bending cycles. Fine. All right. Power conversion efficiency of 25%, which is what? See, I'm relying on information I have in my head and I have no idea if it's correct or current. Are we at like 18, 20 percent, 22 percent?

S: About for silicon-rigid solar cells.

E: OK. All right. Commercial. Thank you. I appreciate you giving me that at least. OK. So higher efficiency plus this maintaining most of its integrity. even after 10,000 bending cycles. That's impressive. Now, these tend to, I don't know. Don't we overstate the whole power thing when it comes to efficiency increases and these kinds of things? So that one has markers of it being fiction. I'll say that. I have no idea. I'll go backwards. Then Toyota reporting its latest hydrogen fuel cell car will average 845 miles an on a single tank of hydrogen. I read something not too recently, but kind of recently. Was it Toyota? And was it about this specifically? But I don't remember the 845 miles on a single tank of hydrogen, but I knew that they were doing something with the hydrogen fuel cell car. Or was it Honda? I think that one's science. And then the first one... Oh, an implantable battery powered by oxygen in the body... Oxygen is delivered through the blood all over the body, so it's blood-based, capable of producing continuous electricity at 1.3 volts. Maybe that's the trick there, is that this continuous electricity, how does it maintain that? Powered by oxygen in the body, but producing continuous electricity at 1.3? All right. I'll say that that one is the fiction. And I think the part that's wrong here is that continuous electricity part.

S: Okay, Cara.

Cara's Response

C: No.

S: You went last last week.

C: Where's Bob?

S: It's almost as if I designed this for Bob not being here.

C: I know. Yeah, right? I do think the hydrogen fuel cell one is science. 845 miles, though it seems bananas, is reasonable given that we're pushing 300, 400 miles on electric charges right now. So, you know, double that for hydrogen fuel cell. That's OK, because hydrogen fuel cell is significantly more efficient. We know that we're just still struggling with transport, storage, all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, I think that that, you know, we've always known. that's, I do think, a more efficient source. So go Toyota. Yeah. Flexible perovskite? I don't know. Okay, power conversion efficiency of 25% and maintaining 90% of it after 10,000 bending cycles. I feel like this is high. I don't know, though. But this feels high to me, like very high. Maintaining 90% efficiency after 10,000 cycles. Yeah. That feels very high to me. 1.3 volts, though, also feels high. Is that like supposed to be millivolts?

E: Milli-vanilli volts.

C: So this, okay. Okay, so implantable battery, that works for me. Implantable battery, I'm not mad at. Powered by oxygen, I'm not mad at. Because like you said, so long as it's someplace that's bathed in blood, which is like the whole body. It's going to be able to get that fuel, that power that it needs. And continuous electricity. I don't think that voltage is making me too mad. So I kind of think that one is going to be science. I think the solar cells are too high. So I'm sorry, Evan.

E: No, that's okay. I was close, Cara.

C: Yeah, that's true. Because you were still questioning that. So I think I'm going to say that the solar cells are the fiction.

S: Okay. And Jay?

Jay's Response

J: Well, yeah, I mean, to cut to the chase, I just don't – I agree with Cara. I don't see how – Thank God.

S: I'm the Lone Ranger this week.

J: I don't think anything would maintain 90% after that many cycles. I mean, it just sounds way too good. It's just too good of a scenario.

C: I wonder if it's even 25% at the beginning.

J: I hope it's legit, but I think that one is probably. I mean, the oxygen-powered battery, like, okay. I mean, sure. I mean, I don't think if somebody got there with this, it's probably like in super early stages. It's not like they're doing it. And then Toyota, I see no reason why anybody would have a problem getting 845 miles out of a hydrogen-based car. Wow.

E: If that one turns out to be the fiction, Steve really pulled a fast one on us.

C: Yeah, I'm 100% with Cara.

E: I'm going with that.

C: Thank you.

Steve Explains Item #2

S: All right. So you guys are divided between the first and third one. So we'll start with the second one. Toyota reports its latest hydrogen fuel. So car will average 845 miles on a single tank of hydrogen. You guys all think that one is science. And that one is the fiction.

E: You got us. What? You got us? good, Steve.

S: What?

E: We were so convinced that that – oh, that's wrong.

S: That one's right. Sure. So now what is true – and I didn't know if I was going to get somebody on being familiar with this. Toyota was able a couple of years ago to get one of their cars, their hydrogen fuel cell cars to go 845 miles on a single tank of hydrogen. But it was completely fake because they like overinflated the tires. They turned off all the electrical stuff in the car and they drove very slowly the whole way. Right.

E: A scenario in which

J: nobody would ever

S: actually use this vehicle. That's about twice what you would actually get with average driving. The hydrogen fuel cell cars are running 350, like 250 So just like electric cars. Yeah, pretty much right in the same range with electric cars. I thought they were more efficient. They're not. They're one-third as efficient. Battery electric vehicles are three times as efficient as hydrogen.

C: Then why are we even talking about hydrogen fuel cell cars?

S: That's right. That's exactly why are we. And they will always be lower efficiency because you have to – first of all, you have to make the hydrogen and you have to – Hydrogen. You have to compress the hydrogen, which takes a lot of energy.

C: Yeah, and then you have to store it someplace where it's not going to blow up.

S: Right, which limits how much you can carry around. And freezing it, not freezing it, but liquefying it also takes a lot of energy, but it only gets you so far. You know what I mean? That's basically the maximum density of hydrogen you're going to get, and that's even less than gasoline. The most efficient BEVs that we will get to will be more efficient than that, will be more energy dense than that. So I just don't think that hydrogen is a good fuel for cars, maybe for trains or maybe even trucks or something. But there's too many advantages to the battery. electric vehicles and the batteries are just advancing too quickly. And it's just it's too late. You know, maybe if they were 10 years ahead of where they are now. Keep in mind, less than 1% of the hydrogen we make in the world is green. Less than 1%. Most of it is made from fossil fuels.

E: That's not going to work.

S: Until we get to the point where we're mass-producing green hydrogen, it's all nonsense anyway, right?

E: Extracted from the ocean.

S: Yeah, this one is fiction. But if you had just read the headline, you might have been fooled. Without reading the detail, but the word average in there makes it 100% fiction.

Steve Explains Item #1

S: All right. Let's go back to number one. Researchers have developed an implantable battery that is powered by oxygen in the body and capable of producing continuous electricity at 1.3 volts. That one is science. I did leave out a little detail, though. So the 1.3 volts is correct. But it only produces 2.6 microwatts per centimeter squared. So that's too little to even run like a pacemaker. So it just doesn't produce enough current.

C: So what do they think it could be helpful for?

S: Right now, it's just a proof of concept. Oh, okay. So it basically combines sodium and oxygen to produce the current. And so it's a viable proof of concept. The question will be is can you get it efficient enough so that something that's biocompatible that you can implant in a human would produce enough electricity to power something useful like a pacemaker, right? So I don't know if we'll get to that point. It would be a great option if you could because you're just running off of an energy source in the body. You don't have to recharge it or replace it or whatever. That would be nice. But this one isn't going to get us there. This one doesn't have the energy density.

Steve Explains Item #3

S: All right, and that also means that engineers have created flexible perovskite solar cells with a power conversion efficiency of 25% and maintaining 90% of this efficiency after 10,000 bending cycles is science. And this is a nice little breakthrough. This is a good incremental advance. That 25% is about where the best silicon solar cells are right now, where the rigid, you know, crystalline solar cells are. The average one that you would get commercially would be 20%, 22%. So it's actually a little bit above that. I don't know what the upper limit is. The perovskite are supposed to have a higher ceiling than silicon. And so one of the big problems, of course, with perovskite is getting it to be stable. And so this seems like it's – this formulation, this flexible formulation is very, very stable. Again, I don't know if we're quite to a commercial product yet, but we're getting very, very close. And, you know, in the next certainly five years or so, we should be seeing not just these incremental improvements in the silicon solar cells, but a nice shift to a new technology, either organic or perovskite or some combination. Yeah. And with flexible solar cells that can really, you know, accomplish a couple of things. One is just make it easier to install it in a lot of places. And two, to bring the cost per kilowatt hour down. It's already very, very cheap, but we want to make it cheaper than fossil fuel, cheaper than any other facility. than any other option. Let me ask you guys a question. If every residential home in the United States had solar panels on the roofs, what percentage of the country's energy demand, I should say electricity demand, not to confuse it with cars or whatever, of electricity demand would be met by that rooftop? residential solar?

C: Every single family home?

S: If every single one did it, we maximized residential solar. 100%.

C: Oh, no. 100% of the single family.

S: Half would have it. 100% of residential.

C: Of residential would be met.

S: Of homes, not apartment buildings, not business, obviously, not industry. I think we'd hit almost 100%.

J: No, it'd be about 30%, 35%.

S: Right. 35%, that's what I said.

C: Well, yeah, because to be clear, like, All of those homes' energy demand would be met, but all of the other...

S: Yes. So that's about the same amount that residential electricity demand is. Exactly, yeah. Which is good. That would be great. That, in my opinion, is one of the low-hanging fruit in terms of the transition to zero-carbon electricity because it's green energy, right? You're producing it from sunshine, and it's local. It doesn't have to go anywhere but your house, right?

C: Especially because we could also put them on commercial buildings and apartment buildings.

S: You could do that too. Right. But if we just did the residential ones, especially if you pair it with a battery, even a small battery, one that you could use to peak shape and to basically use the electricity you generate during the day to give you some electricity at night. If you're just shifting it even by just a few hours, that combination, if that were ubiquitous, That would take us a long way to decarbonizing the grid. Plus, it takes a lot of stress off the grid because that electricity is all used locally. And here's the other thing. Currently, if you have solar panels without a battery, you send about 20% to 40% of the electricity that you generate to the grid. You're basically using the grid like a battery. Right. But most of that goes to your neighbors. So it doesn't travel far. So it's still a pretty good deal. But if you had a battery, it's even way better. It's much, much better because then you're using it all in the location where it's being generated or most of it. And there might be some seasonal shifting that you'd have to use the grid for. But here's the other thing. Most electricity is used for heating and cooling. In Connecticut, most of my electricity is used for air conditioning, which is over the summer, which is when I produce most of my energy for my solar panels. It matches up nicely. That is, I think, the lowest hanging fruit of our low-carbon energy production is residential solar with battery backup. That's one place where we need to subsidize the hell out of it. That should happen as fast as possible. And if that gets us even just 30% of our energy, then you get another 10, 20% from wind, you know, grid wind power. And then the rest is nuclear, hydrothermal, and geothermal, hydroelectric and geothermal. And that's one plausible path. And if we could get even more like some grid solar going or whatever, that's great too. But whatever. But that's kind of, I think, what we're going to have to do. And that's going to be the quickest, shortest path to get there.

E: Yeah, and making use of available current technology.

S: That's all with current technology. It's only going to get better.

E: Improvements, right? It doesn't even account for the improvements.

S: But it is only going to get better. The solar and battery options are so steadily improving. It's only going to get better. It's just silly that some people have decided to resist that really good option. And it's totally affordable. because here's the thing. If you have money, you should just buy them outright. Your payback period is like 8 to 12 years depending on variables, like where you live, et cetera. But that's not bad. 8 to 12 years and then you get free electricity. But if you can't afford the upfront costs, you could do what I did, which is just contract. I had zero money upfront. The only financial impact on me was that my electricity bills dropped by 20%. That was it. That was the only effect.

C: What would you do if you were in my position? I'm super curious. I had somebody come out to look at my – because I live in a small lot house, right? So it's like skinny and tall. And because my roof – has a roof deck on it half of my roof is living space. the other half of my roof is like industrial space where like my air conditioner is and stuff and they looked and they looked at my ac bills and things like that my house is very very efficient. so my bills for you know I live alone I pay about 250 every two months for my energy bills they're quite low. they basically said, it is not worth it for us to put solar panels on your roof.

S: It's not worth it for them to do it. Right.

C: No, for anybody to do it. They were like, for you, it is not worth it. Your ROI is not good enough. You need to wait until we have higher efficiency panels.

S: Yeah, absolutely. Because if you wait a couple of years, they're going to be even better. They'll be cheaper. They'll be more efficient.

C: They were basically like, you're going to pay for panels that will not offset your bills enough. Because the amount of space that we need to put in these panels, like they're not efficient enough.

S: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. But I would get a second opinion because I don't know if they just think it's not really worth it for them. So they're saying it's not worth it for you. Yeah. Especially if you can afford to buy them yourself, however much electricity you make. Even if it's only 20% of your bill, it's 20% of your electricity.

C: Right. It's still offsetting something.

S: It's still offsetting something. So that's what I was curious about. The payback period is still the same. So I don't know. I don't know about that. And you get a lot of sunshine, right?

C: We do get a lot of sunshine. I'll give you that.

S: You're all sunshine and air conditioning. So that's like a perfect scenario for solar panels. So I don't know. I'd get a second opinion on that.

C: Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

S: But yeah, I generate 100% of my electricity on my roof, and I live in Connecticut. It's just all about- You should have more roof. I know. I have a lot of roof, and I have no trees shading my roof. Right.

E: Yeah, I do as well. Yeah. It was a no-brainer for me.

S: Right. Yeah.

C: Right.

S: Right. Okay. Evan, give us a quote.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:43:07)

The shameful thing is not ignorance — on the contrary, that is the natural thing. The really shameful thing is not to want to know, to resist finding out when the occasion offers. It is never the ignorant who offer that resistance, but the ones who think they know. That is the shameful thing — to think you know. He who thinks he knows something, but is in fact ignorant of it, closes the door of his mind through which authentic truth could enter.  – José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955), Spanish philosopher and essayist

E: This week's quote was suggested by a listener, Andrew from Toronto. Thank you, Andrew. The shameful thing is not ignorance. On the contrary, that is the natural thing. The really shameful thing is not to want to know, to resist finding out when the occasion offers. It is never the ignorant who offers that resistance, but the one who thinks they know. That is the shameful thing, to think you know. He who thinks he knows something, but is in fact ignorant of it, closes the door of his mind through which authentic truth could enter. There's a quote from José Ortega y Gasset, who was a Spanish philosopher, born in 1883, died in 1955, worked in the first half of the 20th century as a philosopher. He's been characterized as having a philosophy of life that compromised a long-hidden beginning in a pragmatist metaphysics inspired by William James. Some other things here, proto-extensionalism and some other things I don't know about in the world of philosophy, realist historicism. But it sounds like a very interesting person whom I've not been introduced to before this quote. So I appreciate that, Andrew. Thank you for introducing me to Gessé.

S: Yeah, I like the last line. He who thinks he knows something but is in fact ignorant of it closes the door of his mind through which authentic truth could enter. Yeah. Yeah. It's a flowery way of saying, yeah, yeah, be humble. Don't prematurely think you know something. Yeah, good quote. Thanks, Evan.

E: Thank you.

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

E: All right.

S: Thanks for sweeping us. We have one more show before we go.

J: I know. I know. It's happening. Eclipse is coming.

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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