The Skeptics Guide #1015 - Dec 21 2024

Live from Washington DC; News Items: The Science of Tipping, JonBenet Ramsey Case, Primordial Black Holes, Oldest Alphabet, Food Distribution, Goop Spiral; Live Q&A Science or Fiction

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:42Speaker 01

  You're listening to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  Today is Saturday, December 7th, 2024, and this is your host, Stephen Novella.

• 1:07Speaker 02

  It was a little weak.

• 1:10Jay Novella?

  Somebody didn't really win. It's unclear. A little unclear, if you should.

• 1:16Speaker 02

  Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey, everybody.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  Kara Santa Maria.

• 1:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Howdy.

• 1:26Speaker 02

  Jay Novella. Hey, guys.

• 1:30Speaker 02

  Evan Bernstein.

• 1:31Jay Novella?

  Hello, Washington, DC.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  And George Robb. Chestnuts roasting.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  So, yeah, we are in Washington, DC, our nation's capital. I actually lived here for five years. It's a very nice city. We came back to do a, to record our live show here. So we are going to get into some news items. We're going to do a little bit of a Q and A, like halfway through the show. Have you guys all submitted your questions? So Kara.

• 2:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Ooh, yes.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  How do we get, how do, if you live off tips, how do you get people to tip more?

• 2:07Cara Santa Maria?

  So I'm going to answer not that question today, but I thought I was going to be answering that question, but it turns out it's much more complicated than that. So a recent study that was published in the Journal of Business Research. I love these online publications because it says it was published in January 2025. I'm not sure how that.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  They do usually date the publication the month after it comes out. So it's relevant longer.

• 2:32Cara Santa Maria?

  It's so weird.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  It doesn't seem dated the moment it hits the shelves.

• 2:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's like, what? What? Yeah, cheaters. So these researchers who actually focus their research, they're marketing professors, and they study digital tipping, which is really interesting. We started to talk about this amongst ourselves last night at dinner, and there were feelings. There were lots of feelings about tipping. They wanted to understand how customers respond to what they call tip surveillance. So there are quite a few studies looking at when and how customers are more likely to tip more or to tip less. And what's interesting is that the research is sort of all over the place. But they were interested in not just tipping, but what they call non-tip measures.

• 3:19Cara Santa Maria?

  So how does it impact a customer, let's say, coming back to this place again in the future or recommending this place to friends or family members, but also tipping? And they were interested specifically in something that they call tipping privacy. So they ran a few different experiments. They looked at 36,000 kind of field transactions, and then they did four controlled experiments with 1,100 participants. And they compared setups that they kind of deemed had different levels of privacy. So handheld versus countertop payment systems, point-of-sale POS systems. They looked at times when employees like look at you while you're tipping, or when they turn away or walk away.

• 4:03Cara Santa Maria?

  And they also looked at point-of-sale systems that either show the tips to employees, and like you were asking about this just last night, right away, because you were like, do they know? Like, what it's facing me? Do they know?

• 4:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I bought my kids hamburgers this week. My wife is away, long story. I'm like, okay, Wednesday night, I'm super busy, I get the kids hamburgers, right? So I go to Five Guys.

• 4:21Jay Novella?

  You're a terrible father.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  I know.

• 4:25Jay Novella?

  Well, I did not get them milkshakes, so I am a total

• 4:27Speaker 02

  Alright, your routine.

• 4:28Jay Novella?

  So I'm like there, and I'm like, you know, typical scene, I'm buying them, I'm paying, and then the tip thing comes up. And I have that thing where I'm like, shit, like, she's standing right there, I'm like, I don't usually tip people like this. This is not where I tip people.

• 4:41Speaker 02

  At a counter, yeah.

• 4:42Jay Novella?

  At a counter, at a fast food restaurant. Like, they're getting paid a wage, you know, it's not like they're not like underpaid.

• 4:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, you don't tip the person at McDonald's.

• 4:49Jay Novella?

  But the thing I didn't like, and I told the carer, was like, I felt like she knew I didn't tip, because she gave me, I probably thought-

• 4:55Speaker 02

  She gave you the stink eye?

• 4:56Jay Novella?

  She gave me some type of stink eye that was there or not, it could have been produced in my head, but I felt guilty, and that moment, I'm like, that sucks. It really is, it was uncomfortable for me.

• 5:06Speaker 02

  So, I do think tipping should be basically anonymous, but I have to tell you about Perry's Tip-O-Meter. Have you ever heard about that story? I'll take half credit for that. Alright, everyone gets half credit. Perry had this idea, he wanted to do, to create this product, where it called, he called it the Tip-O-Meter. He talked about it every time he went to a restaurant. And it's basically like, imagine a little cardboard thing, you put it on the table, it's got a dial that goes from zero percent to whatever, thirty percent, and you set it, and as the service throughout the meal, you raise or lower the Tip-O-Meter based on their performance.

• 5:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so it's flipping the script back on them, they're watching.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  You want to tell, yeah, like, you're being transparent about how much tip they're getting, and you will change it. So if they're late, like, the Tip-O-Meter's going down, so since then, we always, like, whenever there's any bad service at a meal, we're always like, oh, there goes the Tip-O-Meter, it's going down.

• 6:02Bob Novella?

  I could see Perry actually waiting for them to come, and in front of them, while looking at them, moving the Tip-O-Meter back down.

• 6:09Cara Santa Maria?

  And so this would have been an era where the most common place to tip was at a full-service restaurant, and now you tip for everything.

• 6:18Jay Novella?

  I know, it's ridiculous.

• 6:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Everything. And that's really what these researchers were interested in, is the fact that this kind of like tipping economy has become really large. And they were looking at it from a psychological perspective, so they were looking at different constructs, things that they called perceived control and perceived-

• 6:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Generosity and they found that when somebody had diminished perceived control. So when they felt like they had less control over the situation, they actually tended to tip more. But when they had diminished perceived generosity, they tended to tip less. But overall, they found that less privacy means better non-tip responses. So the impact on how much people tipped was actually kind of wiggly because as you can imagine, if somebody's staring at you, you might feel guilted into tipping more or you might be angry and tip less. But you're less likely to come back. You're less likely to be a repeat customer. You're less likely to tell people that they should go to this place.

• 7:18Cara Santa Maria?

  And so they looked at all of these non-tip responses that actually haven't really been researched in the literature. And they found that overall, from a business perspective, if you don't give somebody privacy while they tip, it's bad for business.

• 7:31Jay Novella?

  That's good.

• 7:33Cara Santa Maria?

  But, but the industry generally thinks and, and has been operating under a principle that reducing privacy increases tips. But just because that's sometimes the case, in the long run, it probably will reduce business. So it's an interesting phenomenon, right? Do you want somebody to tip because they feel guilty?

• 7:52Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, I would think as a rule of thumb, anytime you're knowingly letting your customer feel uncomfortable during the process of dealing with that business, that's bad. Because again, that moment I had at Five Guys, again, I have a lot of hamburger joints I can go to. Like I'm, I don't want to stand there and feel weird buying a hamburger for my kid.

• 8:10Cara Santa Maria?

  And to be fair, the employees in this study, they talk about how employees feel weird about that, too. Like they don't enjoy it. It's uncomfortable for them. And they, in asking a lot of employees in previous studies, a lot of employees don't really know what the policy is or how they're supposed to act during that point of sale process. But just as for a little bit of context, because I didn't mention this at the top, digital tipping is practiced in over 100 countries. And in the United States alone, just tips $153.4 billion a year and $54.2 billion of that via, via like a digital point of sale. So lots of, lots of money there.

• 8:47Jay Novella?

  You know what the tipping?

• 8:48Speaker 02

  That's important.

• 8:48Cara Santa Maria?

  That's reported, yeah.

• 8:49Speaker 06

  Right, there's all kinds of cash tips that goes on record. Probably double, I would think, almost.

• 8:54Jay Novella?

  I don't know if other people feel this way, but I'm never in a, I'm being tipped situation, right? So I feel kinda, that sucks.

• 9:02Cara Santa Maria?

  But we are tipped through Patreon.

• 9:04Jay Novella?

  But you don't have an answer for that.

• 9:05Cara Santa Maria?

  But isn't Patreon, like, tipping?

• 9:08Jay Novella?

  No, they're getting a service for them.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  Well, we get tipped when we do our live stream. People literally tip us.

• 9:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Should we put a win sale out?

• 9:14Jay Novella?

  Have you ever seen any of that money?

• 9:15Speaker 02

  No.

• 9:16Jay Novella?

  Yeah, because Ian is in charge of that money.

• 9:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Ian, did you add a tip line to, no, anyone?

• 9:20Speaker 02

  I would be happy if just all tipping got eliminated.

• 9:24Jay Novella?

  Just pay people a little bit more.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  Does it really serve a purpose at this point, other than to...

• 9:28Jay Novella?

  It saves the employer money.

• 9:30Speaker 02

  It saves the employer money, that's what I'm saying.

• 9:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, it allows them to hire people at minimum wage or less.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  Ostensibly, the idea is, like, with the tipper meter, like, you are improving your quality of service because that is directly tied to how much money the server's gonna make. Have any of you guys ever, like, deliberately left a really low tip as an F you to the server? Because of really, really bad service.

• 9:51Speaker 06

  I've never done it, but I've seen it happen.

• 9:52Cara Santa Maria?

  I can't do it.

• 9:53Jay Novella?

  I can't remember, yeah.

• 9:54Speaker 06

  It's a statement.

• 9:54Jay Novella?

  I can't remember ever doing that.

• 9:55Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm just at a place now where I just tip flat every single day. I tip 20% on everything, no matter what it is. I just feel...

• 10:01Jay Novella?

  Do you ever go above that? Do you ever go above that?

• 10:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I've definitely gone above that. But it would be nice to be in a culture where everybody is paid an appropriate living wage and a tip is never expected, but it's welcome when somebody has, does something exceptional. Like, that would be lovely.

• 10:17Speaker 06

  And most of Europe has this. I think this is primarily an American phenomenon.

• 10:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, 100 countries.

• 10:21Speaker 06

  That's the electric tip. That's the e-tipping.

• 10:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 10:24Speaker 06

  That we talked about.

• 10:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but e-tipping is not...

• 10:26Speaker 06

  But customary, my understanding, is that most European countries did not have this tipping culture even before the e-tip or anything else.

• 10:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, some do, some don't, and they have different levels of what's an expected tip, but it's increasingly expected across the globe. Like, that's the thing. We're only seeing this ticking up.

• 10:41Jay Novella?

  There's lots of unanswered questions here. Well, first of all, we're not informed. Like, when I went into that Five Guys, I don't know how much that person's making. I honestly don't know if, like, you're supposed to tip now, you know, like, it's complicated.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  Like, when I went to the EAU, I'd never been there before, right? I went to Dubai, and my first encounter with a potentially tip-able situation was, you know, the driver running from the airport. I'm like, "Do people tip in this country?" You know, he said, "Yes." I don't know if it's true or not. It's like, "Oh, yes, we get tipped."

• 11:08Cara Santa Maria?

  We get 70% tips.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  I asked.

• 11:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, you can ask and you can do that research beforehand. You know, I am seeing, I live in LA, so I live in a large metropolitan city like DC. And at some like nicer restaurants, I do notice that there will be on the ticket. In order to provide a living wage or blah, blah, blah, we have this set fee. Anything additional, you can pay above it. Sometimes I kind of like that clarity, you know what I mean? Like this is just how much it is for you to dine here. It would be nice though, if it was like, just pay them more. But I guess they can't afford to.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  And sometimes like both of our meals at our hotel so far this weekend, they added the tip automatically. Like it's not even a choice, they just add it in.

• 11:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's the same thing, it just added to the price.

• 11:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, no, totally. And we're one of the only country, countries in the world where we have to calculate our own tax. Like most countries, the price on the thing includes the VAT. It's super weird that we, when people come here, they're like, why did it cost more than it said it would cost?

• 12:06Speaker 02

  It wasn't well into the price, yeah, yeah.

• 12:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, sorry.

• 12:09Speaker 07

  There was a great Simpsons episode where part of Springfield got rid of tipping. And Homer like moved there and, wow.

• 12:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 12:16Speaker 07

  And there's a whole thing about, it actually addressed all these issues. It was really.

• 12:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, my, I have like some really dear friends that live in Oregon. I went there for the Thanksgiving holiday and I sometimes visit up there. And I do like to buy like upgrades for my truck while I'm there because they don't have sales tax.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:30Cara Santa Maria?

  And it's like a huge difference, yeah.

• 12:32Speaker 02

  Does know who this person is on the screen? Anybody know who that is? Yeah. JonBenet Ramsey, so she, she was murdered in 1996 at around Christmas, so around this time of year. I deliberately used a picture of her not made up for, you know, the.

• 12:50Speaker 07

  Pageant.

• 12:51Speaker 02

  The pageant, yeah, because that's always the picture. Like this is a brief, you know, portion, you know, small slice of her life, that's all everyone knows about her. But anyway, there's a renewed interest in this case. This is like one of the most famous murders in America, still unsolved. And it's really, there's a lot of interesting skeptical lessons in this case that I thought would be fun to go over. But first, I want to survey the audience about their attitudes. So based upon what you know about this case, and you may not have thought about this for 20 years. Based upon your memory and your knowledge, George, you can do the one thing.

• 13:26Speaker 07

  Sure.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  So if you think the family was in any way involved with her murder, then clap when George says the clap thing.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  If you think that the family was not in any way involved, clap. If you think that there was an intruder unrelated to the family that murdered her, clap. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, clap.

• 13:52Speaker 07

  And if you murdered John Benet, clap.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  No one, no one, alright.

• 13:57Speaker 06

  It's been a while.

• 13:59Speaker 02

  So. Worth a shot.

• 14:00Speaker 07

  Worth a shot.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  Have you, I mean, do you guys have any strong opinions on the panel about this case?

• 14:04Cara Santa Maria?

  I haven't really followed it. There's like some new documentaries and stuff.

• 14:08Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. At the time, the family just seemed so creepy and weird at the time. I remember thinking like, okay, don't, just because someone's creepy and weird, doesn't mean they're capable.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  The family seemed creepy and weird. It was weird stuff.

• 14:18Speaker 07

  But it doesn't mean that they're capable of that kind of a crime. And you had to keep like reminding yourself like.

• 14:23Cara Santa Maria?

  But also, isn't it usually.

• 14:24Speaker 07

  Creepy weird people don't necessarily automatically kill their children.

• 14:26Cara Santa Maria?

  But it's usually the family, right?

• 14:28Speaker 06

  Well, right, yes, the family's the closest.

• 14:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Statistically, yes.

• 14:30Speaker 06

  You have to investigate the family, you have to.

• 14:32Cara Santa Maria?

  I think I actually was just reading a, an article that like statistically, the home is the most dangerous place for a woman, right? Like, by leaps and bounds.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  Why is that?

• 14:41Speaker 06

  Well, because they're homeless for the time.

• 14:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Intimate partner violence. No, like it's the most, the most violence perpetrated against women are perpetrated by fathers, husbands, cousins, things like that.

• 14:51Speaker 07

  Rather than strangers.

• 14:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  That's terrible, I didn't know that.

• 14:54Cara Santa Maria?

  It is terrible, and most people don't know that.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  Having lived through this, definitely, if you read the, even just the mainstream news reporting about this case, there was this sense that there was something going on in the family, there was something weird going on here, and there was a lot of details that were dropped by the police to the media to indicate that. It's all complete bullshit. The interesting thing was this, this whole controversy was generated by the police, who were grossly incompetent in their investigation of the case, and the tabloid media. So they basically fed the tabloid media. And interestingly, again, I don't know if you remember this at the time, but this is the late 1990s.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  This was a time in American culture where daytime TV was just going crazy, right? This is a, could have been before social media hit. And there was this competition for shock daytime television, right? And so this mainstream media trend sort of, it basically took the tabloid reporting of the misinformation coming from the police and just ranked speculation by amateurs and parlayed that into this whole story. But it was vapor. It was nothing. And now, like, looking back on it, you could say, well, look, what are the actual facts of the case? And George, you're right, you have to remind yourself to be skeptical about this sort of stuff.

• 16:18Speaker 02

  So to quickly review the details, you know, the night of Christmas, her family was out, you know, for dinner, they came back, everyone went to bed. You know, the, uh, the mother, Patsy Ramsey, was the first to get up the next morning. She's coming down the stairs and there's pieces of paper on the staircase. Turns out it was a ransom note. It was a really weird ransom note. It was genuinely a weird ransom note. Very long, kinda rambling, asking for a very weird, specific amount of money, a hundred and eighteen thousand dollars. There were lots of themes in there that kind of echo movie themes. So, you know, the mother reads this, panics, runs up to her daughter's room, she's not there, she calls 911, says there's been a kidnapping, you know. You know, the family searches the house, they don't find her, the police come and they're

• 17:03Speaker 02

  treating it like a kidnapping, right? But they're immediately suspicious of the, of the parents, for whatever reason. Again, just statistically speaking. There's also, this is in Boulder, Colorado, they get about one murder per year there.

• 17:16Cara Santa Maria?

  That's it in Boulder?

• 17:16Speaker 02

  That's it.

• 17:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow, safe place.

• 17:18Speaker 02

  So, they don't have a lot of experience with these kinds of situations. And so they're treating it like a kidnapping, they allow, you know, people are coming and going inside the house, their friends, you know, the priest come over. And like the timeframe of the, when they're supposed to be getting, hearing from the kidnappers is approaching. At one point, a few hours later, there's just one police officer left in the house with the father and a friend. And like, just to keep them busy, she says, why don't you guys search the house again? So the father, John Ramsey, and a friend go, they start in the basement. They notice a few things that are odd. There's a window that's broken.

• 18:01Speaker 02

  It's another window to the outside that's open. There's a suitcase under the window that doesn't belong there, as if somebody used it as a stepping, you know, platform to get up to the window. They go to a closed door in the back of the basement and she, her body's behind that door, right? So the father's the one to find her. He panics, because of course he did, pulled off the, like, the tape from her mouth, you know, and grabbed her, brought her up, completely destroyed the crime scene, right? And brought her upstairs. So now it's a murder investigation. So that's, that's the basic facts of the case. Now, the police officers, the Boulder, the Boulder police officers immediately think, oh, this is, you know, like, most of the cases, it's the family, right? So they, they start trying to build this case against the family, that it was either

• 18:45Speaker 02

  the mother or the father. The, the real skeptical lesson, you know, this happens over and over again with high-profile cases. And it's really, it's always interesting to watch really well-done documentaries after the fact where you have, like, when, like, actual professionals finally come on the scene and do actual investigation and you look at the hard evidence. And you see that they're, you know, these police officers basically just had a conspiracy theory and they were using, they were violating every law of skepticism, critical thinking, and good investigation to, to shoehorn the evidence into their pet theory. So we have, like, this incredible speculation and we have some hard evidence where we could

• 19:28Speaker 02

  say pretty confidently some pieces to this puzzle. So one piece of very hard evidence is the autopsy, right? So that's pretty solid evidence. The autopsy showed that-

• 19:41Jay Novella?

  This is gonna be harsh, by the way.

• 19:43Speaker 02

  It's, it's harsh. Yeah, you know, you guys, you know the case, this is a terrible, terrible case. I won't necessarily have to tell you the worst details, but basically she was strangled while she was alive. And she had a head wound, either one of which could have killed her, right? The strangulation could have killed her, the head wound could have killed her. So the pathologist has said they both contributed to her death. But it's critical that she was being strangled while she was alive, right? That's critical to understanding the case. They also found that, you know, she was sexually assaulted and that there, and there was samples. There was saliva, DNA on multiple parts of her clothing, you know, whatever. So there's basically two theories of this case, two broad theories of this case.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  One is that someone in the family did this. And not, they don't, the police didn't think that she, it was somebody in the family sexually abused her necessarily. The theory was that someone in the family killed her and then staged the whole scene to cover up an accidental killing or a killing in rage or whatever. The other theory is that there was, there was an intruder that came in the house, kidnapped her, you know.

• 20:55Jay Novella?

  But it was a premeditated ransom note there, though, like, is that correct?

• 20:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:00Jay Novella?

  And, and, you know, I'm sure that they did like the handwriting thing or?

• 21:03Speaker 02

  There's, there's so many details to this case though. So the handwriting doesn't match anybody in the house. There was, one of the things the tabloids ran with was that, again, there's a lot of fake experts came out of the woodwork to make lots of just BS kind of pronouncements. So Patsy Ramsey was ruled out multiple times by forensic analysis, analysis of the handwriting. But then you have somebody who's not really an expert says, well, there's features in there that she could have been disguising her handwriting. So it's this special pleading, right? It's like, well, it doesn't match her handwriting. Well, she was disguising her handwriting and maybe she wrote it with her left hand or whatever. That gets out in the tabloid as they've matched the handwriting to Patsy Ramsey.

• 21:41Jay Novella?

  Yep.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  Right? But it was, it was nonsense. It was always nonsense.

• 21:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, why don't we start with the DNA evidence?

• 21:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the DNA evidence is incredibly important. So they found DNA and using the technology at the time, they were able to, to type it. And it's a male DNA, male Caucasian DNA was their conclusion. But it didn't match anybody in the family, didn't match anybody associated in any of the neighbors, anybody on their long list of potential people associated with the crime. The Boulder police said, eh, it's, you know, could have been just contamination. Unfortunately, their own incompetence makes that not unlikely.

• 22:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, I thought it was a semen sample.

• 22:20Speaker 02

  No semen. There was no semen, but there were fluids, but no semen.

• 22:24Jay Novella?

  Wait, they think a sailor killed her?

• 22:28Speaker 02

  So, so think about this. They dismiss one of the most ironclad pieces of evidence in the case.

• 22:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like that's what the Innocence Project uses now to exonerate people who are falsely.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  So, that was in 2003, they got the DNA analysis. In 2008, they did further DNA analysis using a new technique called trace DNA or touch DNA, where you could use even just a few skin cells to get DNA, right? And they found DNA on the, on her pajamas, matching the DNA that was found in the crotch of her underwear, which, as one researcher put it, "There is no innocent explanation," right? For your DNA being in the crotch of a six-year-old's underwear. There's no innocent explanation for that.

• 23:15Cara Santa Maria?

  And it was all from an unknown male?

• 23:16Speaker 02

  From an unknown male, but that matched the DNA on the pajama. They have two independent DNA samples from the same person.

• 23:24Jay Novella?

  See, but I know, I know, not to really try to focus on something irrelevant, but like, you know, like I fold my kids' laundry.

• 23:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:31Jay Novella?

  Like, would my DNA-

• 23:31Speaker 02

  But you're, but you're the father.

• 23:32Cara Santa Maria?

  But you're the father. This is an unknown male.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  Unknown. The family was excluded.

• 23:37Jay Novella?

  Right, okay.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  If it was the father, he would say, "I, you know, I dressed her," and then whatever. You could, you could, you could say maybe the-

• 23:43Jay Novella?

  So no foreign person, their DNA shouldn't be in the house, let alone in her underwear?

• 23:48Speaker 02

  And on her clothes.

• 23:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Assuming it didn't match anything in a database.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  Didn't match anything in the database either. So again, so that led the, the Colorado DA to write a letter of apology to the Ramses for ever putting suspicion on them. Like, you're excluded 100%.

• 24:05Jay Novella?

  And this was 20 years later?

• 24:06Speaker 02

  No, this is 2008.

• 24:08Jay Novella?

  So 30 years later.

• 24:09Cara Santa Maria?

  10 years later.

• 24:10Speaker 02

  That was 12 years.

• 24:11Jay Novella?

  Oh, I thought it happened in the 80s.

• 24:12Speaker 02

  96, 96.

• 24:13Jay Novella?

  I'm off by a decade, sorry.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  So, but the police were relentless in their theory that one of the Ramses did it. So one of the, the police officers, his theory was, this is just ridiculous, that the mother, you know, in a fit of rage, which is in no part of her history as a human being, right? In a fit of rage, killed her daughter because she wet the bed. And then they staged everything to cover it up. So they say, "Well, the staging theory fails because," what did I say? "She was strangulated while she was alive." Right, so if your theory is that she was hit in the head, either, there was that theory, and then there was a theory that the brother, Burke, hit her in the head with a flashlight because she stole his snacks.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  Again, these are ridiculous theories, and if you have a theory that there was some fatal, violent act, that usually happens in the context of other physical abuse, right? There was no history of physical abuse in this family, in this girl's life, there was no history of violence in the mother, in the brother, nothing, there's nothing, this is an ice, completely would be an isolated incident. So they say, "Well, if she was alive while she was strangulated," and they did the strangulation to cover up an act, whatever, the blow to the head, how did that work out? So they said, "Well, maybe she didn't realize she was still alive when she strangulated her to stage the outside predator."

• 25:36Jay Novella?

  Do I have a question?

• 25:37Speaker 02

  That, so that's like the mother of all special pleas.

• 25:39Jay Novella?

  Is strangulated a real word?

• 25:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, strangulated.

• 25:43Jay Novella?

  Does it sound weird to anybody else?

• 25:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Strangled?

• 25:46Jay Novella?

  Strangulated, it sounds like something like Bugs Bunny would say, seriously. I strangulate, it's like, is that real?

• 25:51Speaker 02

  It's real.

• 25:52Jay Novella?

  Okay.

• 25:53Speaker 02

  Strangulation.

• 25:54Jay Novella?

  Strangulated, though, sounds weird, I don't think you should say it anymore.

• 25:57Cara Santa Maria?

  It's because we usually say strangled, yeah, but, but...

• 25:59Speaker 02

  It's a technical medical term, Jay.

• 26:01Jay Novella?

  All right.

• 26:02Cara Santa Maria?

  What I'm hearing, though, is kind of a larger sociologic issue, which is very American, or maybe we can even say very Western, which is this tendency for individuals in positions of authority to not be willing to change course.

• 26:19Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 26:20Cara Santa Maria?

  That somehow that leads to blowback or feedback that they are incompetent, or that they aren't strong, or, you know, these other sort of like toxic. But ultimately, these kinds of tendencies are bigger than the police, right? And they're bigger than politicians, and they're bigger than you and me, but it's like an American ethos that sort of poisons everything.

• 26:44Speaker 07

  Why is it so appealing, and appealing is the wrong word, but there is this...

• 26:48Jay Novella?

  Fascination?

• 26:49Speaker 07

  Fascination with the idea that like a mother could do this. I mean, there's entire networks on television that are dedicated to murder, you know, these weird murder stories, like, what is it about us?

• 26:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, mothers can do this.

• 27:01Speaker 07

  Absolutely, no question.

• 27:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Fathers do it more often, but mothers can do it.

• 27:03Speaker 07

  No question, I'm saying a relative, that like, that you wanna, you wanna hear that... The story of a random person kind of breaking in and that's a horrible thing that you'd be interested in. When it turns out it's this perfect family.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:15Speaker 07

  And the father was actually this, like, why is that?

• 27:18Speaker 02

  Cause we watch the movies, right? This is a movie.

• 27:19Cara Santa Maria?

  But that's interesting, cause I see it the other way around. It is most often the family, but people tend to be really obsessed and they tend to assume that random violence is more common. And they're more afraid of strangers, but that's not the case usually. I think people are just morbidly curious about, like, people watch murder shows before they go to sleep. My view is it's, it's, it's about mortality salience, right? Like, we're a very death denying culture and so we're, but everybody's fascinated with death, cause we're all gonna die. And it's like really existentially threatening. And so we find safe ways to exercise that curiosity. And weirdly, true crime has become like a very lucrative.

• 27:58Speaker 07

  Is it a, is it a, is it a desire for justice too on some part? Like, where you feel like, okay, when these monsters are caught.

• 28:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, hugely.

• 28:06Speaker 07

  And then it's like, okay, someone's in charge, someone's taking care of this.

• 28:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:10Speaker 07

  However, they get caught, I wonder if that's part of it.

• 28:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and it's also, again, an American ethic of like stranger danger. Like, we, not a lot of other cultures really dig into this the way that we do. So if we can keep everybody scared of their neighbors.

• 28:23Speaker 07

  Of course.

• 28:24Cara Santa Maria?

  And then, you know, everybody's on kind of high alert, but then, ooh, the bad guy went away. Um, oh, justice has been restored and now I can sleep well at night. I think there's a.

• 28:33Speaker 02

  But I think in this case, there was, there was pressure to like play down the intruder. And like even the mayor of Boulder was like, we have no intruder wandering around the streets of Boulder.

• 28:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, yeah, cause they don't want public.

• 28:42Speaker 02

  Right, so like the idea that.

• 28:44Speaker 07

  The beaches are safe.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, the beaches are safe. So she threw the family under the bus in order to say, our city is safe, basically. So.

• 28:51Speaker 07

  Wow.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was.

• 28:53Speaker 07

  That's infuriating.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  It was infuriating, you watched it. And I was infuriated by the fact that it's like, oh shit, I bought into this thirty, whatever, twenty, something years ago.

• 29:00Speaker 07

  It's a really good, I mean, look, I mean, half the audience clapped at the, at the.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 29:04Speaker 07

  And it's not your fault, it's just.

• 29:05Speaker 02

  That was, and the thing is, because the information was coming from the police. And the, and not the tabloids, but like actual mainstream media. And the, then, at the time, you know, I didn't, I would, had not, insufficient awareness of how absolutely incompetent police can be. Especially when they're not, this is not what they do, right? This is unused, this was, they were all out of their depth. I mean, again, they blew it from the get-go. You tell the father to go search the house. One of the police officers went down into the basement, saw the broken window. Went over to that door, saw that the door was locked from the inside and didn't open it. Cause he's like, well, the, if there were an intruder, he didn't get out this way. Didn't, didn't open the door that she, that her body was behind, just incompetence, just gross incompetence.

• 29:50Cara Santa Maria?

  But also the media, you know, the, the media response to that is the reason. It's like, yes, there's gross incompetence and that's the reason that everything failed here. But the media response is the reason that you, looking back are like, oh, I bought it hook, line and sinker.

• 30:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I totally. Oh, gosh. But the thing is, even, even if you were trying to be like, again, dismissing the tabloids and going, well, what are the police saying? The police were feeding misinformation to the media deliberately to point a finger at the family because they were frustrated that the DA wasn't, wasn't pursuing the case. Cause the DA was like, you have nothing, I can't. In fact, there was a, um, a grand jury indicted them. The parents? The parents indicted, indicted them, but the DA was like, the DA just said, we're not going forward with the case. And it didn't come out till like five years later that they actually voted to indict the parents.

• 30:36Cara Santa Maria?

  That's interesting.

• 30:37Speaker 02

  But the DA said, it would be unethical to pursue a case I know I can't win.

• 30:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 30:42Speaker 02

  We do not have the evidence here.

• 30:43Cara Santa Maria?

  But, but, what's interesting to me, I mean, that, that is an interesting phenomenon. It's a huge bummer and worrisome that it probably happens a lot more often than we'd like to admit. But the media narrative, I think about the, and like however you feel about it, fine, I'm not going to open that can of worms, but the Johnny Depp Amber Heard trials and watching the documentary special where they literally just showed transcripts and they showed what happened in court. And they showed kind of his perspective and her perspective. And she was eaten by the media, like just ruined by the media. And then when you watch what actually transpired, you're like, oh my God, that was all narrative.

• 31:23Speaker 02

  It was all narrative.

• 31:24Cara Santa Maria?

  It was all narrative.

• 31:25Speaker 02

  So here, part of the layer, one of the layers of this case is that was the pageant thing. And so the tabloids ran with endless pictures of her, you know, dolled up in a, in a little girl pageant. And then everyone got judgy about that. Everyone was like, oh, what kind of parents would, would sex up their daughter like that? It's like, you know, first of all, They had a normal life. This was, the mother was, was into pageantry when she was younger. Natural, you know, to have the same thing with your daughter. The, in the audience, we're all family members. You, anybody who's parents here, you know, you go to an event where your kid's doing anything performative. It's all parents in the audience. That's what was going on.

• 32:03Jay Novella?

  Yep.

• 32:03Speaker 02

  Right? And they, they, but they parlayed that into, there's something sick going on here, but it was really ridiculous.

• 32:09Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  But, but it was great tabloid pictures, great tabloid headlines.

• 32:13Jay Novella?

  Did the police ever get called out on this?

• 32:15Speaker 02

  Totally. Well, first of all, there were two lawsuits, at least, you know, in this case. Uh, one, so one of the investigating detectives had the theory that Patsy Ramsey killed her and then staged everything. Then dismissed the DNA, dismissed a lot of evidence. And, um, they also, I mean, they threw out so much, like, there was no tracks in the snow. This is, I'll get, I'll circle back to your point. And it turns out, so what's interesting was that the, the DA, the DA and the police did not get a law. Right? The DA said, you guys are screwing this up. You know, I don't agree with your theory of the case. The police were frustrated that the DA wasn't pursuing their theory of the case, which is that the family did it. So the DA called in, out of retirement, a really highly respected investigator.

• 33:00Speaker 02

  And, um, this was Lou Smith. And, and he completely investigated the case and is like, this was an outside intruder. Hello. There was so many signs of an outside intruder, but one of the things was the police said, there's no tracks in the snow. They looked at pictures of the house. There's no snow around the house.

• 33:16Jay Novella?

  Well, they weren't lying.

• 33:18Speaker 02

  There was no snow. There was like a dusting somewhere on like one side, whatever, but you could easily get to and from the house without ever passing through snow. That was the level of incompetence that we were dealing with. But they fed that to the, the media. Police say no tracks means an inside, it was an inside job.

• 33:34Jay Novella?

  And they, you know, I, I believe that if they were competent, they could have caught the killer.

• 33:39Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, maybe. The only way to really catch the killer is through DNA. We'll get to that when I finish up. But so the, uh, there was a lawsuit against that detective who, who wrote a whole book saying Patsy Ramsey did it, basically. That was settled for undisclosed amount, but almost certainly in the millions. And then, um, then Geraldo Rivera did a mock trial where they basically said that the son, the brother Burke did it, which is ridiculous.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  He got sued, CBS got sued, like whatever else, the producers got sued, again, settled for undisclosed amount, again, almost certainly in the millions. Um, so that, so they, there was, there were successful lawsuits, successful, settled, you know, lawsuits. Cause the family was, they were destroyed.

• 34:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, how sad that they had to do that.

• 34:22Speaker 02

  They were destroyed in the media.

• 34:23Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm sure they didn't wanna have to sue, like that's not...

• 34:25Speaker 02

  Of course not, they were just, they were, you know, they spent all their money defending themselves on private investigator, everything, it was just, they were completely destroyed by the media.

• 34:33Cara Santa Maria?

  They never got to appropriately mourn the loss of their daughter.

• 34:35Speaker 02

  No.

• 34:36Cara Santa Maria?

  It was immediate.

• 34:37Speaker 07

  It's the tail end of the whole satanic panic thing.

• 34:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like the satanic panic.

• 34:40Speaker 07

  Late eighties into the early nineties and this was like a, a, a way to maintain that craziness of this Satan thing, but these are like real Satan people.

• 34:49Speaker 02

  So, there's a, there's a big push to, the case is open, but there's a big push, push to try to close this case using modern DNA techniques.

• 34:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 35:00Speaker 02

  They actually have DNA evidence that they've never typed. They have additional DNA evidence and we could use modern techniques in order to get more, basically more samples of DNA typed and we can do something that's called DNA genealogy and they have captured criminals in this way. So, yeah, they, whoever did this is not in the database.

• 35:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Which is so surprising to me, that if somebody committed a child rape, that they never did it again, or they...

• 35:29Speaker 02

  They probably went out of country.

• 35:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Could be, yeah, yeah.

• 35:32Speaker 02

  Um, there was one car, there was one suspect who, man, this guy, I mean, if, you know, clinically, just like based upon like his story and everything, he would, they caught him in Taiwan, in Bangkok, and he had a really good story to tell about how he killed her. And he apparently like knew details of the case that were not generally known, but he was cleared by the DNA. Um, so, but what, what...

• 35:58Speaker 07

  The hell's that lead?

• 35:59Speaker 02

  The car case shows though, I think he just fantasized about being the person who killed her.

• 36:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 36:05Speaker 07

  He liked to think...

• 36:06Speaker 02

  Either that or the DNA, you know, was contamination, right? But the, um, if the, if he was really excluded by the DNA, and then they basically let him go, he just... Left the country to go rape more kids. I mean, this guy was found at a girls' elementary school like creeping on girls when they picked him up. This guy is a pedophile, right? This guy Carr. And he was like, one of the investigators was talking to him and emailing to him for years before they picked him up. So, and he had a, you know, he told a very convincing story, laying out everything that happened. He was just gonna kidnap her, that's why he left the kidnapping note. And then he, she, he didn't intend for her to die, but he got too enthusiastic about the strangulation and, you know, didn't realize

• 36:50Speaker 02

  it. And then, you know, and then he did hit her in the head to make sure that she was dead. But, you know, and he sounded, sounded very convincing. But, but what that shows is even if he's not the person who did it, it's like you can make a story out of all those weird details of the case. Like, the intruder hypothesis is perfectly plausible. Because some weird creepo like this could have absolutely done that. This guy may have just been fantasizing about it.

• 37:11Cara Santa Maria?

  So, you started to mention that they can use DNA genealogy?

• 37:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, DNA genealogy is essentially, you find people related to the killer. And you just, you build a genealogy and then you eventually lead your way back to close to the killer.

• 37:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  And then you go, you know, interrogate their-

• 37:30Speaker 07

  That's how they got the Golden State Killer.

• 37:31Speaker 02

  People who are ready, yeah. They caught killers doing it.

• 37:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I interviewed the woman who, the researcher, yeah, on my podcast who-

• 37:37Speaker 02

  So, it is, how old is that technique?

• 37:39Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't think it's that. I mean, hmm, a few decades. I mean, she's older now, but-

• 37:44Speaker 02

  So, it's possible that in a few years, you know, we may-

• 37:46Cara Santa Maria?

  I think there are like ethical questions about using it and, you know, because without other people's consent and stuff.

• 37:51Speaker 07

  They use the genealogy databases from like, you know, uh-

• 37:55Speaker 02

  Twenty-one and twenty-three.

• 37:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Twenty-three and twenty-two, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so it's really nebulous, but-

• 37:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 37:59Speaker 07

  Any other nice Christmas stories, Steve, you got?

• 38:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, Steve, what the fuck?

• 38:03Speaker 02

  Well, I think they, I mean, you know, re-emerging, immersing myself in this case, I'm like, damn, this was like, there were so many skeptical red flags here. So much special pleading, the investigators. Essentially, they violate like rule number one of investigation, is you don't get married to your pet hypothesis and then, you know, start to marshal all of the evidence and reasoning and motivated reasoning and confirmation bias, all in that one direction. It's like Sherlock Holmes said, right, if you hypothesize before you have facts, you end up twisting the facts to meet the hypothesis, rather than the hypothesis to meet the facts.

• 38:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  And that's 100% what they were doing in this case. And, you know, it is not the only big public case. For those of you who are interested, you know, watch the recent documentaries on the Menendez brothers. That's another one that the media completely blew and created a completely false narrative. And they were treated harshly. We even talked about, this is not a murder case, but we talked about Yoko Ono, right? The fact that like, the world owes her an apology for completely creating this false narrative. Oh, that she broke up the Beatles?

• 39:06Cara Santa Maria?

  It's always a woman's fault.

• 39:08Speaker 07

  Foreigner woman especially.

• 39:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. These stories also highlight, I think, one of the things that as skeptics, we probably should cover more, we cover it on the show sometimes, but it's just the rank pseudoscience in forensic investigation.

• 39:24Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:25Cara Santa Maria?

  And how often things that we thought really held water just don't stand up to good scrutiny. So, got to be really careful about.

• 39:33Speaker 07

  Television ruining the expectations too, like all those CSI shows ruining the expectations of what people think.

• 39:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Enhance.

• 39:40Speaker 07

  Yep, right, enhance.

• 39:41Speaker 06

  Zoom in.

• 39:42Speaker 02

  I wanted to talk about primordial black holes, Bob.

• 39:46Bob Novella?

  All right, go ahead.

• 39:47Speaker 06

  You've got three minutes, Bob, go ahead.

• 39:48Speaker 02

  I can talk about it if you want me to.

• 39:50Bob Novella?

  No. Don't need you, Steve.

• 39:52Speaker 02

  All right, go ahead.

• 39:53Speaker 07

  60 seconds, Bob, go.

• 39:54Bob Novella?

  60 seconds. Primordial black holes in the news. Scientists have been coming up with a wacky idea, it seems a little wacky when I read about it, to find primordial black holes by looking for hollow planets and microscopic tunnels in asteroids and planets and things. This is in a journal Physics of the Dark Universe, the title is "Searching for Small Primordial Black Holes in Planets, Asteroids, and Here on Earth." All right, so what are primordial black holes? These are black holes. They're just like any other black hole that we've talked about on the show, except the origin is different. Conventional black holes are created by gravitational collapse of stars, right? Stars are exploding and collapsing, creating black holes, and they're merging.

• 40:35Bob Novella?

  Making even bigger black holes, but primordial ones are created before stars even existed. They existed, some people think perhaps, now these are hypothetical, remember, these are purely hypothetical. There's no real evidence that they exist, but they believe they could have been formed in a few seconds after the big bang, which seemed a little early to me, Steve, right? I didn't think, I don't know, it just seemed like it would wait.

• 40:56Jay Novella?

  A lot of stuff happening in those first few seconds.

• 40:59Bob Novella?

  Oh, I know, they track it by like milliseconds, milliseconds, you have these major things happening. But essentially, intense energy densities in the early universe can create enough energy in one spot, right? Because you don't just need mass, energy can can create something like a black hole if you have enough energy in one spot. And so they think that's what happened. During that time, it created innumerable primordial black holes, some big, some small, right? Some that probably have already evaporated, right? Because it's been like thirteen and a half billion years. So if it was small enough, it could have potentially already evaporated. But other ones could still be around. Now, the primordial black holes that we're concerned about here are on the small side, not big ones.

• 41:40Bob Novella?

  So we're talking about something like with the mass of a small planet or an asteroid. But if you have that mass and you squeeze it down into a black hole, we're talking tiny black holes, like the size of an atom, the event horizon, you couldn't even see it.

• 41:55Jay Novella?

  They could be that small?

• 41:56Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

• 41:58Jay Novella?

  I had no idea that that could happen.

• 41:59Bob Novella?

  If you collapse the earth into a black hole, it would be about as big as a marble. But if you do less than that, it's going to be so small that you couldn't even see it.

• 42:07Jay Novella?

  Yeah, but subatomic?

• 42:09Bob Novella?

  Not subatomic, I mean, size of an atom, atomic size, I mean, sure. Or even smaller, they wouldn't let, Jay, remember, the smaller you go, the less mass there is. They wouldn't last very long, they would just evaporate in a puff of walking radio.

• 42:20Jay Novella?

  Yeah, but I mean, the reason why I'm not understanding it is like, if it was the size of an atom, how many atoms could be in that space at the same time?

• 42:27Bob Novella?

  Jay, infinite density, man, I mean, we're talking, you know, I mean, not really infinite, we just, our math breaks down. We don't know what the hell's going on in this.

• 42:34Jay Novella?

  Okay, at least you gave an honest answer.

• 42:37Bob Novella?

  Yeah. Now, the thing is that these primordial black holes could have tremendous utility. I thought that, oh, they couldn't find them, they've looked really hard, they haven't been able to find them, oh, well, but there's, they could have so much potential utility. The most important one, in my mind, is they could, it could be dark matter, potentially. Some scientists think that black, these black holes could account for the dark matter that makes up the majority of the matter, the mass in the universe. We have no idea what this stuff is. That would be amazing, but, what?

• 43:06Jay Novella?

  That's a cookie ball.

• 43:07Bob Novella?

  Stop touching my knee. But these primordial black holes could also be responsible for primordial gravitational waves, the magnetic monopole problems, you know, those problems, but they could also be the seeds for supermassive black holes, because some black holes are so big, we're like, how did it get that big? The universe is not old enough to have a supermassive black hole that big.

• 43:28Jay Novella?

  How big is the black hole? So big!

• 43:31Bob Novella?

  So, it could be responsible for the creation of supermassive black holes that got their start the early of the universe, before stars even existed, and even intermediate mass black holes could have a seed of a primordial black hole in its origin.

• 43:45Cara Santa Maria?

  So gravitational waves, which the ones that we've measured, come from these supermassive black holes, right?

• 43:52Speaker 02

  No, not supermassive.

• 43:54Bob Novella?

  Not supermassive.

• 43:55Speaker 02

  Just big ones.

• 43:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Just big ones, okay.

• 43:57Bob Novella?

  Yeah, just big ones. So, like, but they're, but they're surprising, though, because they're, because they're intermediate mass, like, where do these intermediate mass black holes? We could explain the big ones kind of, and the small ones kind of, but the mid-mass ones, like, well, how does that happen? So, these might explain some, some of that.

• 44:10Jay Novella?

  I think it makes sense that, that some of the today's black holes date back all the way to the, the original ones that were created. Makes sense.

• 44:18Bob Novella?

  Right, right, but we just don't have any evidence, and that's the big problem, Jay.

• 44:21Jay Novella?

  So how can we find them?

• 44:22Bob Novella?

  We can't find them, yeah, pushing me along, Steve. So, all right, so the paper's premise, the premise of the paper, before they even get into the meat of it, is that some scientists believe that primordial black holes can, are inhabiting stars, they're, they're in some main sequence stars, neutron stars, dwarf stars, they're potentially inside of it.

• 44:44Jay Novella?

  In a star?

• 44:45Bob Novella?

  In the middle of a star. I remember, though, if you've got a small event horizon, that's not a lot of surface area, so you slowly will suck in stuff. It's not going to be like, boom, everything going in.

• 44:54Jay Novella?

  That doesn't make any sense to me.

• 44:55Bob Novella?

  Jay, think about it, the, the surface area is so tiny.

• 44:58Jay Novella?

  How tiny is it?

• 45:00Bob Novella?

  Atomic size, that you can't suck in stuff, a lot of stuff. Wait, they don't suck. The surface area is not there, huh? They don't suck.

• 45:06Jay Novella?

  Metaphorically.

• 45:07Bob Novella?

  Okay. Yeah.

• 45:08Jay Novella?

  Yeah, but it would be like, how slow are we talking about? Like, would it happen over a month?

• 45:12Bob Novella?

  No, I mean, I guess potentially millions of years. It wouldn't, it wouldn't suck in an entire star. I, you know, that's...

• 45:19Jay Novella?

  I don't know.

• 45:19Bob Novella?

  That's, that's what they're saying.

• 45:20Jay Novella?

  I don't know if I believe that.

• 45:22Bob Novella?

  The star would fall. So the pre, oh yeah, well then you disagree with Stephen Hawking, Jay? Because Stephen Hawking believed...

• 45:27Jay Novella?

  Yo, screw him. He still owes me money, Bob. All right? Until he pays that debt, he's skewed in my book.

• 45:33Bob Novella?

  So he believed, he believed that there might be, might be a black hole in, in our sun. That would be pretty cool. So that, so that's the premise. So what these authors did is they took that premise and they ran with it and said that, well, maybe these super, these primordial black holes could be in other things, not just a star, but potentially small planets or, or, or other things. Or even, they might even create these microscopic tunnels as they go flying through things.

• 45:57Jay Novella?

  I mean, if they're that slow, they could be in you right now, theoretically.

• 46:00Bob Novella?

  Ah, but we'll get there, Jay, we'll get there. I was kidding. So, uh, so that's what their paper, they're, they're extending it to things like planetoids and moons and a, and asteroids, where you can potentially see the impact that a primordial black hole had with these objects. So the two big things I mentioned is, they could potentially hollow out a small planet. It, if it gets captured by the planet somehow, or it somehow has the planet grow around it and slowly, it also needs liquid. It's gotta have, it's gotta have some sort of viscous liquid, not rocky material, but like our core is not really liquid. It's like, you know, it's very dense material, iron and stuff.

• 46:39Jay Novella?

  Magma.

• 46:39Bob Novella?

  So they think that it would, it would slowly, it would slowly take in the, the interior, the liquid interior of this small rocky planet and you would have a hollow planet. The other thing that they talk about is microscopic tunnels being created in, in material like in, in asteroids or even in the earth. If you look in some of the ancient rock on earth, if you look closely, maybe you will find some of these microscopic tunnels. They said that 110 quadrillion ton primordial black hole would leave behind a tunnel 0.1 microns thick. So this would be super, super tiny. But potentially, potentially discoverable that would, that would point to evidence.

• 47:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Would it, would it appreciably increase the gravity on that planet?

• 47:19Bob Novella?

  If it's, no, not really, because if it's, if it's got the mass of an asteroid, eh, you know.

• 47:24Cara Santa Maria?

  But isn't that the point that black holes?

• 47:25Speaker 02

  So, all right, if I might.

• 47:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh huh.

• 47:27Speaker 02

  Well, what Bob's talking about is imagine like our moon.

• 47:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm hmm.

• 47:31Speaker 02

  It captures, gravitationally captures a tiny primordial black hole with sinks to its center. It then sucks out all of, anything that can move, even if it's very viscous.

• 47:40Jay Novella?

  Right.

• 47:41Speaker 02

  Leaving behind anything that can't move, like a solid rocky shell. Now, if we were observing that moon, it would look the same. Because it has the same mass, it's just, we don't know that some of that mass has moved to a black hole.

• 47:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 47:53Bob Novella?

  But, but it would be, their, their big thing, their big thing is that this is something that would be detectable and it would be very cheap.

• 48:00Speaker 02

  Wait, wait, wait.

• 48:01Bob Novella?

  Those are two very important considerations.

• 48:03Speaker 02

  But you're missing the, the one piece.

• 48:05Bob Novella?

  I'm not missing anything, go ahead.

• 48:07Speaker 02

  If, if in some way that black hole gets knocked out of it.

• 48:11Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 48:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. Then you have a hollow moon.

• 48:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 48:15Speaker 02

  Which will have the size of a moon, but be way less dense than it should be.

• 48:21Jay Novella?

  Now, could you live on the inside of that moon?

• 48:23Speaker 02

  That's not the point.

• 48:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Wait, they, they. Quick, and I know this might sound like a, like a squabble, but would the moon have, you, you used a specific term. Did you say attracted the black hole or?

• 48:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, gravitationally, you know, basically.

• 48:37Bob Novella?

  It somehow gets captured, but I think.

• 48:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Gravitationally captured is what you said. Would the moon have gravitationally captured the black hole or would the black hole have gravitationally captured the moon?

• 48:45Jay Novella?

  Who's ever bigger?

• 48:47Speaker 02

  It's whoever has.

• 48:47Cara Santa Maria?

  It's not who's bigger, it's who has a.

• 48:49Jay Novella?

  More mass.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  Depends on the size of the primordial black hole.

• 48:51Bob Novella?

  I think, yeah, I think it would, I think it would depend. It would have to also be a relatively slow moving, slow moving capture for that, for that to really happen.

• 48:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 48:59Bob Novella?

  Because, because that's, that's part of it, because if you have a very, very fast moving primordial black hole, that's what's going to leave those tunnels. And it's, they compared it to having a, a glass, a window, and if you throw a rock at it, it's going relatively slow, it's going to shatter everything. But if it's going fast enough like a bullet, it's going to make a nice little hole. And that's, and that ties into what. People have said, oh, could this be happening? Could I have a primordial black hole going through me? Or my cat, they said. And they said that this is that they said it wouldn't be fatal if that happened. So what does that mean? Because, you know, it could be devastating, but I think it would be such a tiny, it would be so fast and leave such a tiny hole that we would maybe not even know that it happened.

• 49:40Jay Novella?

  How long until pseudoscientists like turn this into like, you've got black holes in your butt? You know, they try to sell some products.

• 49:49Bob Novella?

  You just say, well, what's the evidence? Is there a microscopic?

• 49:52Jay Novella?

  No, we're talking about stupid people that buy stupid products. That's what I'm talking about.

• 49:56Speaker 07

  Could you theoretically use this as a tool, though? Could you like, is there something preventing technology from either creating, like, is there some physical rules that we would break where you wanted to use a primordial black hole for construction, let's say?

• 50:12Bob Novella?

  The, if you look at some potential advanced technologies, the main application for tiny black holes is for a rocket engine.

• 50:20Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 50:21Bob Novella?

  Because you could actually, if you can somehow, now, we're talking very, very small, it could be amazing power sources, but obviously the technical problems are are.

• 50:30Speaker 07

  But there's no rules of physics we have to break.

• 50:31Bob Novella?

  No, no, right now, yeah, a black hole rocket engine is possible.

• 50:35Speaker 07

  Wow. That's pretty cool.

• 50:37Bob Novella?

  It's fascinating, and it may be something that we will.

• 50:40Speaker 07

  But even for planetary mining or something? Like planetary mining, like, if you wanted to create, like, habitable, habitable?

• 50:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Habitable.

• 50:48Speaker 07

  Habitable.

• 50:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Habitable.

• 50:50Speaker 07

  Habitable, let's say, inner cores of planets where you would, you would get this construction company that uses little black holes to empty out.

• 50:57Jay Novella?

  Black hole construction.

• 50:58Cara Santa Maria?

  First, they're gonna make them.

• 50:59Speaker 07

  There's no rules of physics, that's, that's, we can't do that.

• 51:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but using them that way would be much tougher. Okay, this is a theory, though, right? This is all theoretical. So, we live on a planet, and is there any reason to believe that there are any tunnels that are unaccounted for here?

• 51:12Bob Novella?

  Well, that's just it, they, they recommend that we, it would be inexpensive to actually look, and we could definitively, or fairly definitively, say, hey, this looks like a primordial black hole went through the earth, left this tunnel that we can detect, or we detected multiple hollow planets that make no sense, except...

• 51:30Bob Novella?

  In the light of a primordial black hole, interacting with it.

• 51:33Cara Santa Maria?

  And not just the physical shape of the tunnel, but is there a way to measure the gravitational effect on like the alignment of atoms or something as it tunneled through?

• 51:42Bob Novella?

  I think it's so fast, you may would have a straight tunnel.

• 51:46Speaker 02

  The feature that they're looking for is that it's a very long, completely perfectly straight hole, right? Because it would have to be something that's going in a straight line that would not be bothered by anything, that would not be deflected by the granite or whatever it's going through. So it leaves a super-long, but super-thin track.

• 52:07Bob Novella?

  The gravitational after-effects would not really be anything that they're think would be detectable, except for the hollow earth scenario, but the hole, no.

• 52:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Wouldn't that just over billions of years close in?

• 52:20Speaker 02

  It'd have to be the material, a hard material that could hold it.

• 52:23Bob Novella?

  So say like plates of metal, or, but even that, if this metal plate was created 100 years ago, or 50 years ago, chances are it hadn't interacted with a black hole. But if it was like a planet or an asteroid that's been around, even the Earth, even around for billions of years.

• 52:38Speaker 02

  Four billion-year-old rock.

• 52:39Cara Santa Maria?

  This just seems like it's going to stay theoretical to me.

• 52:42Speaker 02

  I agree.

• 52:43Bob Novella?

  They say this one, like, they have actually said it could be a one-in-a-million shot of actually finding this, but if it did, if we had proof, it could potentially solve all those other problems. Dark matter, I mean, that's a huge, huge mystery in physics.

• 52:55Speaker 02

  This is all very speculative. They're just basically saying, all right, is there any possible way we could practically look for evidence that these primordial black holes actually exist? And these are the two things that they came up with, and they're technically true, but the idea that this unlikely scenario, it had to get, it has to be captured by a planet that's big enough that it won't collapse in on itself, that has a liquid core, and then it gets ejected from it, so we could find just the right size planetoid that's hollow, that used to have a primordial black hole in it. It's like, okay, that's possible. The chances of us finding something like that is pretty, pretty low. Same thing, finding a microscopic little hole, you know, through an ancient material.

• 53:35Bob Novella?

  A tenth of a micron.

• 53:36Speaker 02

  Even if it's four billion years old, there was still like a point oh oh oh. One chance that they were gonna find it.

• 53:41Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 53:42Speaker 02

  They're just counting on the fact that it's technically cheap to do this, so you could do a lot of it. But I doubt this is ever gonna bear fruit.

• 53:48Bob Novella?

  True.

• 53:49Speaker 02

  It's really just very, but it's interesting thought experiment.

• 53:51Bob Novella?

  But the other angle to this is that, because I had written off primordial black holes, because they just, they looked and looked and could not find them. I wrote them off. I wrote them off. I'm done with them. Yeah. But the recent findings from gravitational wave astronomy, LIGO, and James Webb Space Telescope, they are making discoveries now that are kinda pointing towards these primordial black holes. So that makes it even more interesting, fascinating with a potential payoff, because they're actually saying, nah, maybe they do exist based on what they're observing, so.

• 54:19Speaker 02

  So what could be updated? George.

• 54:21Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 54:22Speaker 02

  Nine of them. Tell us about the oldest writing.

• 54:24Speaker 07

  So this, this is two stories that I found sort of together, and this is one of these wonderful things that reveals archaeologically. The oldest thing we know is the oldest thing we know until we find something older. And it's kinda cool how there isn't this dogma that's involved with archaeology, like, nope, this is the oldest thing, anything older, we're gonna explain away. No, we change as, as new evidence comes along.

• 54:47Bob Novella?

  As long as it lines up with the Bible, we're good.

• 54:48Speaker 07

  As long as it lines up with the Bible, exactly, exactly. Well, in Syria, they found these, in a, in a city called Umm El Mara, at a dig at the ancient city of Umm El Mara in Syria, they found these little tiny clay, like finger-shaped little tubes that has what now is being assumed to be the earliest alphabet. And it's 500 years older than what was considered to be the oldest alphabet coming up to it, which is really, really cool. They had this site, archaeologists uncovered this tomb, goes back to the early Bronze Age, and in this site, they had six skeletons, gold and silver jewelry, cookware, a spearhead, and intact pottery vessels.

• 55:33Speaker 02

  Where was the spearhead made out of?

• 55:35Speaker 07

  What was the what?

• 55:36Speaker 02

  What was the spearhead made out of?

• 55:37Speaker 07

  I don't know, it doesn't say.

• 55:38Speaker 02

  How old are we talking?

• 55:39Speaker 07

  This is twenty-four hundred B.C. Twenty-four hundred B.C.E. Next to the pottery, the researchers found four lightly baked clay cylinders with what seemed to be alphabetic writing on them. And so they're not sure what the language is, but previously, the oldest alphabet was thought to be in Egypt around nineteen hundred B.C.E. So this is like five hundred years, five centuries older.

• 56:02Speaker 02

  In a different part, in a different country.

• 56:04Speaker 07

  In a different country, a different sort of system of writing. And it's, it's pretty, pretty fascinating and exciting because it extends this idea of what language is to the human animal. Now concurrent with that was another story that I found that says, you know, culture, language is a very ancient human thing. And they just dated some stencils in a cave. Yeah, in Spain. So basically cave art. And this cave art is older than they thought. The oldest cave art is this, this cave art is, it was thought to be the oldest cave art was forty thousand years old. This now is sixty-six thousand years.

• 56:42Speaker 02

  That's a big jump.

• 56:43Speaker 07

  It's a big jump, twenty thousand years older. They found.

• 56:46Speaker 02

  Do they know what, how many it was there? Was it Neanderthal or?

• 56:50Speaker 07

  They're saying Neanderthal, yes. So this is Neanderthal, and it's the first example of Neanderthal doing cave art.

• 56:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:56Speaker 07

  And it's stencils. So they're, they're projecting some kind of, either their hand or some kind of, some kind of design onto the wall, and they're covering it in a pigment. Now, the pigment that they use is mineral, is, is, yeah, it's a mineral-based pigment. So you can't carbon date that.

• 57:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:12Speaker 07

  But what they do, what they figured out is because there are striations and growth on top of it, mineral deposits that happen on top of these drawings, they can take the stuff on top of it, you age that, and because it's on top of the ink or the, or the, whatever they use to draw, it's gonna be. Yeah, older than what's on top of it.

• 57:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:33Speaker 07

  So the stuff on top of it, they see is about sixty-six thousand seven hundred years old. It's gotta at least be that old.

• 57:37Speaker 02

  Yep, yeah.

• 57:38Speaker 07

  If not even older.

• 57:39Speaker 02

  Right.

• 57:39Speaker 07

  So i- it's just so cool that like we we have this modern bias of like, you know, cavemen were were cavemen, you know? And here they are with art and and other stuff. These results suggest that the tradition of making hand stencils in Europe began long before they appeared in any other part of the world. The oldest known hand stencil art previous to this was in uh the Lian Timposan Cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. That was about forty thousand. Now, this one in Spain is a sixty-six thousand.

• 58:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:14Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 58:14Speaker 02

  Isn't that amazing?

• 58:15Speaker 07

  It's amazing, yeah. It's just so cool, and I love that process of like, how can we date this stuff? Oh, yeah, we'll get the stuff that's on top of it. And what's nice is when they scrape the stuff on top of the art, they don't have to ruin the art at all. They don't affect it whatsoever.

• 58:27Speaker 02

  Did you see the art?

• 58:28Speaker 07

  I did not see any images of it.

• 58:29Speaker 02

  I would love to see that.

• 58:30Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's they're very simple. They're very simple, and it's from from what they were saying, it's it's you wouldn't necessarily be able to tell right away that that is a stencil, but once they research and find out that's what it is, so.

• 58:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:40Speaker 07

  I just love that like artists were, you know, sixty-six thousand years ago, you know, there's one guy in the village who's, oh, that's Fred. Yeah, he does these cave paintings. Yeah, he's cool.

• 58:48Speaker 02

  But also, he's quirky.

• 58:50Speaker 07

  He's quirky. He's quirky. He's a little quirky. He's a little, yeah, a little focused, you know?

• 58:53Speaker 02

  But you said it's Fred the Neanderthal. I mean, the first is the first.

• 58:56Speaker 07

  This is, yeah, the first examples of Neanderthal doing cave painting.

• 58:59Speaker 02

  That's huge.

• 58:59Speaker 07

  Yeah, so the the whole image of Neanderthals being these brutes is like completely wrong.

• 59:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:03Speaker 07

  Yeah, they're just they're just.

• 59:04Speaker 02

  You know the history of that, George?

• 59:05Speaker 07

  Yeah, I'm sure there there what what what racism is involved in in.

• 59:09Speaker 02

  Well, it's it was just scientific malpractice. I mean, it wasn't, I mean, I do agree that it was just general idea that, well, older humans had to be primitive, but the very first Neanderthal skeleton. Was like. Was had. A bad back. It had crippling arthritis, probably rickets or something. Oh, that's right. So it was hunched over little skeleton. They said, well, they were these hunched-back little cavemen, you know, that were dragging their knuckles along the ground.

• 59:33Speaker 07

  Problem with one sample.

• 59:33Speaker 02

  But it was completely a sampling bias, you know, that that happened to be the first one that they found. Um, Neanderthals were.

• 59:40Bob Novella?

  Robust.

• 59:41Speaker 02

  They were, they were, yeah, they were physically, you know, bigger and stronger than we were. Probably because they were adapted to the Ice Age. That was a cold adaptation. But cognitively, it's still an open question, like how close they were to modern humans. They were very close. But, you know, were they just like the same but different? Or did Homo sapiens really have a cognitive advantage over Neanderthals?

• 1:00:04Bob Novella?

  Well, how big were their brains?

• 1:00:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, brain size.

• 1:00:05Speaker 02

  They were bigger than ours, but they were, everything was, you know, they were just robust.

• 1:00:08Speaker 06

  Oh, just.

• 1:00:08Speaker 02

  So they actually had bigger brains than Homo sapiens. That's interesting. But it's, but that had to do probably more to do with just their overall robustness. And one of the key pieces of evidence to say, well. Was art. Like, did, did Neanderthals, Neanderthals have art as sophisticated and as early or whatever as Homo sapiens? Or not? And like, there's a whole debate still going on about whether they buried their dead and how that, that data was interpreted. And that was kind of overinterpreted and it's not really as ironclad as we thought it was. You know, they said, oh, we found flowers in the grave. It turns out, maybe not, you know, that that evidence is actually dubious. Yeah. So there's a lot of open questions about that. You know, we definitely had a more sophisticated tool set eventually than they did.

• 1:00:51Speaker 02

  But that could be culture, right? Doesn't necessarily mean that we were inherently smarter than they were.

• 1:00:56Bob Novella?

  Maybe their tools didn't fossilize.

• 1:00:58Speaker 02

  Oh, no, well, that's again, it's hard to make that argument, and especially we're basically in the Stone Age. But they, our stone tools were better than their stone tools, right? Just like with Nazis, our Nazis are better than their Nazis. Our, our stone tools, remember that from the right stuff?

• 1:01:13Bob Novella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:14Speaker 02

  Anyway, our stone tools are better than their stone tools. And we, you start to see like really finely crafted tools and tools that probably partly for artistic purposes. And not purely utilitarian, like decorative, you know, kind of things. All in, in Homo sapiens. But again, how much of that is culture? And even if like we had more of an artistic kind of bent than Neanderthals, that doesn't necessarily mean that we were smarter than them in every way. It's just, we just don't know. You know, they're so close, it's hard to tell. But something like this, like pushing back Neanderthal art, you know, 20,000 years, whatever, that's gonna be a huge piece to this puzzle.

• 1:01:50Speaker 07

  Yeah, over the years, I've learned to lean into like, think, appreciating and thinking that primitive quote unquote cultures or people are way more, way more interesting and way more, and, and they have the same exact concerns and fears that we all do.

• 1:02:02Speaker 02

  I'm sure.

• 1:02:03Speaker 07

  Like, day to day living is not that different from like, from our day to day, you know, concern about family, concern about whatever politics are they at that time, you know?

• 1:02:12Speaker 02

  Well, even calling them primitive now is not accepted. Because it's like, it's a judgmental, you're assuming something that may not be true. They're pre-technological. That's not the same thing as primitive.

• 1:02:23Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:02:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Is, is there an assumption that technology for like hunting and gathering came before technology for aesthetics?

• 1:02:31Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:02:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Why is the, I mean, I'm saying, is that a base assumption, or is that what the evidence plays out?

• 1:02:36Speaker 02

  Well, there are, there are stone spear points that are, you know, millions of years old, and they go way before any evidence of any artistic expression.

• 1:02:44Cara Santa Maria?

  But is that because of the...

• 1:02:46Speaker 07

  Millions? Wait, millions?

• 1:02:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:47Speaker 07

  Australobithecus was using?

• 1:02:49Speaker 02

  Our Homo habilis ancestors had, had weapons. Homo erectus, they hunted, Homo erectus goes back to what, 2.5 million years? They conquered the world because they were killing and hunting and cooking their food. Absolutely.

• 1:03:03Cara Santa Maria?

  But is that because the things that would have been aesthetic maybe didn't keep?

• 1:03:07Speaker 02

  Well, that's a huge debate.

• 1:03:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:09Speaker 02

  Is how much can we invoke this idea that, well, maybe they had wooden tools that didn't fossilize? Like, it's, the problem with that is that there's no evidence for it. Either find a way to, to find evidence for that, or you can't hypothesize things for which there can't possibly be evidence. We can't rule it out.

• 1:03:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, you can hypothesize.

• 1:03:26Speaker 02

  I mean, it's just not useful to speculate about things that we can't have evidence for.

• 1:03:31Cara Santa Maria?

  But it's also not useful to say, by definition, they hunted before they made beauty. Because we don't know that.

• 1:03:35Speaker 02

  We don't know.

• 1:03:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:03:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. All right.

• 1:03:38Cara Santa Maria?

  That they didn't happen simultaneously.

• 1:03:39Speaker 02

  I think we're gonna take a little break from the news items to do the Q and A. And George, you've been collecting... Fascinating, unique, and insightful questions from our audience.

• 1:03:49Speaker 07

  We got some fun ones, we got some good ones here. I'm gonna try to go through a couple of these that are, that are, that are quick answers to start with. So we can just burn through those, and there's a couple that are maybe a little bit more, more in-depth. This was easy, this is for Jay. Do you play the guitar right-handed or left-handed?

• 1:04:01Jay Novella?

  I play the bass and the guitar left-handed.

• 1:04:03Speaker 07

  Left-handed?

• 1:04:04Jay Novella?

  Yes.

• 1:04:04Speaker 07

  Correct.

• 1:04:05Jay Novella?

  I am.

• 1:04:07Speaker 07

  Five points. Point. This is for Bob. If you could observe any object with the WebSpace Telescope, and this is from someone who works on Web, what would you look at?

• 1:04:17Jay Novella?

  Ooh, Bob, don't...

• 1:04:18Speaker 07

  Someone here works?

• 1:04:19Bob Novella?

  No, wha- wait, what?

• 1:04:23Speaker 07

  This is for anybody, I just wanted to...

• 1:04:24Jay Novella?

  How about a primordial black hole?

• 1:04:26Speaker 07

  There you go.

• 1:04:27Bob Novella?

  I don't, but I don't know, I guess, yeah, primordial, no, you can't, it's not like you can see it. I mean, I would say a neutron star, but I don't think, I'm not sure, James Webb, it would have to be probably an exoplanet.

• 1:04:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:38Bob Novella?

  An exoplanet.

• 1:04:39Speaker 02

  An exoplanet that might have an atmosphere.

• 1:04:40Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:41Cara Santa Maria?

  So is it about finding something new, or is it about seeing something cool? Because remember, we're talking about the James Webb, so it's pretty.

• 1:04:49Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:49Cara Santa Maria?

  What would you pick because it's pretty?

• 1:04:50Bob Novella?

  Probably cool because finding something new, I'm not gonna, I doubt I could find something new.

• 1:04:53Cara Santa Maria?

  So what do you want to see that's pretty?

• 1:04:55Bob Novella?

  Like an exoplanet atmosphere.

• 1:04:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. How about techno-signatures?

• 1:04:59Bob Novella?

  Oh.

• 1:05:02Bob Novella?

  Yeah, techno-signatures.

• 1:05:03Speaker 02

  If we could, if we had a candidate.

• 1:05:04Bob Novella?

  That would be fantastic.

• 1:05:05Speaker 07

  Okay, we'll make a list, and we'll make that happen. We'll email, yeah. See, yeah. Okay, now, let's do this quick if we can. So, I'm gonna go down the line here, and it's gonna be a little bit challenging, but this is actually a really good question. So we're gonna start at the far end, start with Evan. So pick a favorite historical figure and show them something from today.

• 1:05:27Speaker 06

  What do you mean, "show them"?

• 1:05:28Speaker 07

  Like, like, like, you can, you can show an invention to, you know, Da Vinci, or like, pick a historical figure, and like, what would you show that person? Yes, pick a favorite historical figure, what would you most like to show them from the present?

• 1:05:41Jay Novella?

  Anybody that's dead?

• 1:05:43Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't know how we're gonna do this fast.

• 1:05:44Jay Novella?

  Yeah, if they're not dead, you could just show them. No, but I mean, what if they died like five years ago? Whatever.

• 1:05:52Cara Santa Maria?

  But is that really histori... I mean, yeah, technically it's historical.

• 1:05:55Speaker 07

  I think you could reframe it as... Yeah, go ahead.

• 1:05:58Speaker 06

  Mark Twain invented, right, a... Wow, what the heck was it? Like a special musical instrument. And I think there's one on display at... If you get to West Hartford, Connecticut, the Mark Twain House there, there's a museum next to the house, and among the things in there is this, like, one machine that was made. It's attributed to him, like so many other things. Uh, but it's this incredible device. I'd have to look it up.

• 1:06:27Speaker 06

  And that's kind of just what sprung into my head, but if you want to move on, I'll try to find it in the meantime.

• 1:06:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Can you describe it?

• 1:06:32Speaker 07

  To show him, to show him that it's like in the museum?

• 1:06:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, hang on. I will look it up if you want to move on and I'll come back to it.

• 1:06:38Cara Santa Maria?

  I'll go.

• 1:06:39Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:06:39Cara Santa Maria?

  I would show, like, a Ray Bradbury or a George Orwell the things that they said were gonna happen, happening.

• 1:06:48Speaker 07

  Wow.

• 1:06:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, the VELT, I would, like, show, I don't know, like, a VR kind of situation. Or, yeah, I would show the Big Brother surveillance that's, like, actually happening. And then I'd probably also show them the things that they didn't think of, like the cellphone.

• 1:07:01Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:07:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, the iPhone.

• 1:07:02Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 1:07:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:03Speaker 07

  Cool. Steve?

• 1:07:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would... How about I would get Ada Lovelace and show her a modern computer? I'd show her my cellphone.

• 1:07:12Speaker 07

  Oh, that'd be cool.

• 1:07:13Speaker 06

  Very good answer.

• 1:07:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:15Speaker 07

  Jay, what do you got?

• 1:07:16Jay Novella?

  I mean, I think, um, I think I'd want Michelangelo to see that David is still unbelievably revered. And I'd like to tell him, like, it's probably the best piece of art that's ever been created.

• 1:07:28Speaker 07

  Excellent answer.

• 1:07:29Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I saw it just a couple of months ago. It's amazing. But I would, I would show Michelangelo a 3D printer.

• 1:07:37Bob Novella?

  That's great.

• 1:07:38Cara Santa Maria?

  You'd be like, "I can do that too."

• 1:07:41Jay Novella?

  I'm like, "I'm cracking out one of those things every hour."

• 1:07:44Speaker 07

  As a Doctor Who fan, I would love to have that scene happen where Van Gogh sees...

• 1:07:51Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I thought of that too.

• 1:07:52Speaker 07

  The, you know, Doctor Who takes him to the museum and he asks the art expert, "Explain how important Van Gogh was," and he explains it to Van Gogh.

• 1:08:00Bob Novella?

  You gotta watch that again.

• 1:08:00Speaker 07

  It's so good. I would, I would do that. I would do, to let this, know this tormented guy, like, "Oh, man, you're amazing." Very good question. That's a fun one.

• 1:08:08Jay Novella?

  That's cool.

• 1:08:08Speaker 07

  Someone said, "Jay, will you sign my forehead?"

• 1:08:11Jay Novella?

  I mean, yeah.

• 1:08:12Speaker 07

  Okay, good.

• 1:08:13Jay Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:08:14Bob Novella?

  And what though? Blood?

• 1:08:17Speaker 07

  This was asked a couple times in a couple different ways, and I wanna, I wanna ask it. It's about, it's basically, "How can you make your memory better?" Are there practices? So, yeah, one says...

• 1:08:28Jay Novella?

  Write things down.

• 1:08:29Speaker 07

  There's so many things to learn. How do you, how do you fit so much knowledge in your brain? And is it all possible to increase one long-term memory capacity? Like, three people asked a very similar question.

• 1:08:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I have, I have a good answer to that question.

• 1:08:42Cara Santa Maria?

  And I have probably a very different answer.

• 1:08:43Speaker 07

  You might not remember writing that question, but you wrote that question down, so, yeah.

• 1:08:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, very quickly, this...

• 1:08:48Bob Novella?

  Mnemonics is one way. Mnemonics is a technique.

• 1:08:49Speaker 02

  Well, you could use mnemonics. That's kind of, you know, basically using techniques to remember, specific things that you have to remember. But if you just wanna improve your overall memory, actually, the number one thing you could do is exercise. Use it. Is physically exercise. Your brain health, your brain function is, how, that's the biggest determining factor, is your overall brain function. Wow. Good sleep is close second. Oh, yeah. Especially with memory. People who don't sleep well, they're like, they always complain about their memory. It actually causes what we call pseudo-dementia. You have really bad sleep. I mean, they think they're demented. They're not. But they just say, "I can't remember anything." It's like, "Well, you're not sleeping, that's why." But in terms of, it's like a telling, a learning, a studying technique, I think I heard that in those questions as well.

• 1:09:30Speaker 02

  What the evidence shows is that repetition is key, but you want to do repetition at increasing intervals.

• 1:09:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:40Speaker 02

  So you study it, then you look at it again in a few hours, then you look at it again in a day, then two days after that, then a week after that. You keep coming back to the material at prolonged intervals, and then that really locks it in.

• 1:09:52Jay Novella?

  I wish I remembered to do that.

• 1:09:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:55Cara Santa Maria?

  And I, I'm gonna read the question probably differently than the, but you said there were multiple people who asked about memory.

• 1:10:01Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:10:01Cara Santa Maria?

  So I think that there's this sort of, how we're taking it, which is like, how do I increase my cognitive capacity? Like, how do I do memory better? And then, a different take on it, which is colored by my experiences with my work, is how do I remember the things that matter to me in a more vivid way? And I think that the best practice for that is literally practicing like mindfulness throughout the day. It's being present when things are happening. It's trying to avoid allowing yourself to be distracted, and really noticing what's coming in through all your senses, what your body experiences like, because memory is a multi-streamed function.

• 1:10:43Cara Santa Maria?

  And so if you can tie it to both your visual memory, but also your emotional memory, your sense memory, like your smell, your taste, your touch, those memories are gonna be more vivid for you as you pull them back later. Yeah.

• 1:10:56Speaker 06

  Excellent.

• 1:10:56Bob Novella?

  Another idea, another idea is to, is the way you organize information. Like, for example, if I, if I come across a really interesting scientific tidbit, a really great explanation of some scientific fact that's kind of difficult, I take a screenshot and I put it in a special folder, and I got a folder filled with that, so I can go back and refresh my memory of these things that I, that I found, such a aha moment, that I want to save them and have access to them, and that's, and I, but I struggle with that, saving and organizing information so that I can quickly get to it. Like, the classic example, I got thirty thousand pictures on my phone, and, and Evan was just doing it. Wait, I want to show you a picture. Twenty minutes later, I can't find that damn picture. And if AI doesn't help me solve that, I'm gonna be really pissed.

• 1:11:37Jay Novella?

  They will, that's gonna happen.

• 1:11:38Cara Santa Maria?

  But I also think that stopping and taking a picture of the thing actually takes you out of the experience, so it may backfire for you.

• 1:11:45Speaker 06

  Well, it depends on the experience.

• 1:11:46Bob Novella?

  But, but still, though, sometimes, there's nothing like having that picture.

• 1:11:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Sure. But if you want to remember a concert, don't videotape it the whole time.

• 1:11:52Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:11:52Jay Novella?

  Oh, right.

• 1:11:53Speaker 06

  That's true. Or the eclipse, if you're gonna go watch the solar eclipse.

• 1:11:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Don't try and get that.

• 1:11:56Speaker 06

  Don't worry about the pictures.

• 1:11:57Jay Novella?

  Something you should just experience, absolutely.

• 1:11:59Speaker 07

  Did I ever talk about my smemory idea?

• 1:12:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Smemory?

• 1:12:02Speaker 07

  Smemory.

• 1:12:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Love it. I already love it.

• 1:12:05Speaker 07

  Did we talk about it?

• 1:12:05Jay Novella?

  You talked about it with me. I don't know if you did it on your own.

• 1:12:08Speaker 07

  Okay, yeah, just like the idea that, you know, sometimes you open up a closet in your parents' house, and it's like, oh, ski trip. Because it just instantly hits you with that smell, or whatever that is, with the Christmas ornaments, whatever, and you're just like, oh, my God, and the memory comes flooding into your brain. I want to have a product that are all these different odors, right? And it's called a can of smemory. And you have it, and you go to a concert, or you go to the eclipse, and you pop open a can, and you associate that with the event that's happening, right? And then in the future, way down the road, you buy another can of like smemory 1, 1B, and you pop it open, and like, would it trigger the same

• 1:12:39Jay Novella?

  That's interesting.

• 1:12:40Speaker 07

  memory of the thing? I don't know if it would work, but I think it's a, it's a potential product we could all have.

• 1:12:45Jay Novella?

  I think it would work, because, you know, we know that those two, you know, the sense of smell and memory are tied.

• 1:12:49Speaker 07

  Right, in an interesting way.

• 1:12:51Speaker 02

  But how many times that'd have to happen before it really gets entrenched?

• 1:12:53Cara Santa Maria?

  That's the, that's the question. Yeah, is it a flashbulb memory?

• 1:12:56Speaker 07

  For how pungent does it have to, how nasty does it have to sort of be? To like, you know, like smemory.

• 1:13:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Or like, yeah, if you're grandma's house you've been to like 500 times versus one concert one time, yeah.

• 1:13:07Speaker 07

  There's, there's two more, if we have time. I think these are really fun. Have two of you ever been in an argument and not been talking to each other and had to record a show?

• 1:13:15Speaker 02

  We had to record a show, no.

• 1:13:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, we had a show where Bob left.

• 1:13:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, Bob rage quit.

• 1:13:21Cara Santa Maria?

  He rage quit in the middle of an episode.

• 1:13:22Bob Novella?

  I did it for a fact.

• 1:13:23Jay Novella?

  No, that was my fault.

• 1:13:24Speaker 06

  Was that in the middle of the episode or at the beginning of the episode?

• 1:13:25Jay Novella?

  Bob was pissed at me, and, you'll love it. Basically, we were arguing about something, and I hate to bring it up again, but I called Bob Trump.

• 1:13:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, he was like, alright, Trump.

• 1:13:33Jay Novella?

  And he said, F you, and he, he just turned off his mic. I don't know.

• 1:13:36Cara Santa Maria?

  And this was the last time.

• 1:13:38Jay Novella?

  Because I was definitely trying to say something to piss him off.

• 1:13:40Bob Novella?

  That's crossing a line.

• 1:13:42Jay Novella?

  But we don't.

• 1:13:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Did he come back?

• 1:13:44Speaker 06

  Still cracks me up.

• 1:13:44Jay Novella?

  Yeah, yeah. Bob, Steve and I don't, don't, as brothers, we don't stay at a party.

• 1:13:49Cara Santa Maria?

  There's some negotiation, I think.

• 1:13:50Jay Novella?

  We just don't. It just goes away immediately.

• 1:13:51Speaker 06

  Bob had to go walk it off.

• 1:13:53Jay Novella?

  We can get, Steve and I can get into a superheated, semi pissed off discussion about something.

• 1:13:57Cara Santa Maria?

  We know. We all know.

• 1:13:59Jay Novella?

  But I mean, yeah, I've been super angry, but like my, the love I have for Steve and Bob outweighs, amazingly outweighs any anger that could possibly come up.

• 1:14:08Cara Santa Maria?

  And it hasn't happened much, I feel like lately. There was definitely a time when we were in the studio that was not comfortable.

• 1:14:14Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:15Cara Santa Maria?

  For us. I don't remember. It was a while back.

• 1:14:19Jay Novella?

  But Kara and I are testing each other. Kara, this is weird.

• 1:14:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Always. Brothers, am I right?

• 1:14:24Speaker 06

  It's happening again.

• 1:14:25Speaker 02

  All right, now Evan.

• 1:14:28Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:14:29Speaker 02

  How is Goop doing?

• 1:14:30Speaker 06

  Well, if you've read any headlines recently, you may have come across one that reads, well, what I read the other day, is Goop nearing its end?

• 1:14:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Ooh.

• 1:14:40Speaker 06

  And I was like, yay!

• 1:14:42Speaker 02

  Shot and fried.

• 1:14:43Speaker 06

  Had to read that. What is Goop? In case anyone in our audience does not know, they are a wellness and lifestyle brand company, this is their official thing, founded by Gwyneth Paltrow, American actress, launched in September 2008 as a weekly email newsletter providing new age advice such as police your thoughts and eliminate white foods, and the slogan nourish the inner aspect. Okay, fine. They expanded into an e-commerce, collaborating with fashion brands, launching pop-up shops, wellness summits, print magazine, podcast, docu-series for Netflix, which maybe some of us, Kara, I know you watched that one, didn't you? Did you watch it?

• 1:15:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Which one?

• 1:15:24Speaker 06

  The Goop Netflix docu-series?

• 1:15:27Cara Santa Maria?

  No, I don't think I did.

• 1:15:28Speaker 06

  About Goop? You didn't? Oh, okay. I thought you had.

• 1:15:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Is it, is it a Goop series, or is it a series taking down Goop?

• 1:15:35Speaker 06

  It's, it's a combination.

• 1:15:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:15:38Speaker 06

  So it's kind of a, it's a hybrid, right, Jen?

• 1:15:40Cara Santa Maria?

  It's a hybrid.

• 1:15:41Speaker 06

  I call, Gwyneth, I've told her, called her in the past, the queen of quackery, the duchess of dubiousness, and the matriarch of malarkey. And I think that holds true. Among the things, in case you don't know, that Goop promotes, sells their products, the people that they endorse. Well, we'll go through a couple of them, just so you can kind of get some background, and we'll get into the actual news for the week. They have perfumes and candles that will treat anxiety, depression, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, OCD. They have an author who writes for them, who is a chiropractor, who does energy exorcisms in people.

• 1:16:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, so chiropractor and exorcism, two of my least favorite things. They have articles about underwire bras causing what?

• 1:16:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Cancer.

• 1:16:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, which is very...

• 1:16:35Cara Santa Maria?

  It's not a thing you can...

• 1:16:35Speaker 06

  It's actually a pre-group Goop idea, but they kind of just use their celebrity to elevate that idea.

• 1:16:42Speaker 02

  My favorite is the Jade vagina...

• 1:16:44Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, I'm getting to that. I'm coming, I am coming up to that.

• 1:16:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm sure you didn't miss that one.

• 1:16:50Speaker 06

  Bio-frequency stickers, remember?

• 1:16:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:52Speaker 06

  Using electronic, energetic frequency to address imbalances. That's not vague in any way. Earthing how walking barefoot could cure your insomnia and more. Oh, negative words can change the structure of water, according to, according to the experts at Goop.

• 1:17:11Speaker 02

  Oh, my god.

• 1:17:12Speaker 06

  A guru who, I don't know what his name is, but in, oh, spirit, his name is, a spirit using wisdom passed on to him from a divine, from a divine voice, so they're basically a, what, a channeler. They have a channeler, apparently, that they use as well. But they also make some specific, you know, instead of these kinds of things, they, they talk about vitamins, among other things, and they actually promote their own brands, and they'll sell you vitamins with, oh, you know, things like, well, this particular one had biotin in it, but 8,300 times the daily recommended allowance of biotin, among other things. This is common among supplements, they have all kinds of elevated levels of this stuff.

• 1:17:55Speaker 06

  But now, yeah, of course, they're, I think Steve brought up, their most well-known, or the most, some of the most press they've gotten, were things having to do with vaginal eggs, which will, according to them, enhance your orgasm and improve bladder control. They say nothing about the risk of a bacterial infection increase, and also, what, the V steam, the vaginal steam, also to balance your hormones, but they also don't tell you that it will also burn your... Your skin down there and also is a risk for bacterial infections. For these last two things, you know, they suffered, they were, they were taken to court by a bunch of district attorneys from around the country and they had to settle court case, uh, one hundred forty five thousand dollars in fines that they, that they had to pay in

• 1:18:39Speaker 02

  Price of doing business.

• 1:18:40Speaker 06

  Right. It's just, it's, it's basically, you know, like a rounding error for them. Uh, but there have also been some other cases in which they've run afoul, uh, with legal issues.

• 1:18:50Speaker 02

  It's hard to do that. It's so permissive.

• 1:18:53Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:18:54Speaker 02

  You know, running afoul of the law for practicing pseudoscience. I mean, you have to be really bad.

• 1:18:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, egregious.

• 1:19:00Speaker 06

  Just this year, twenty four, uh, twenty twenty four, and this is why the article is saying like, is this the end, is this the end of the group, of Goop? Earlier in the year, they were, uh, had a new lawsuit brought against them by a company called Good Clean Love, which is a trademarked brand, but Goop went ahead and introduced something called Good Clean Goop.

• 1:19:24Speaker 06

  And so Good Clean Love, for, for what, you know, for whatever their flag in the sand is, they took their take, they took them to court this year. They, uh, for many months, uh, that was pursued and they only recently settled this case. Although this, this particular news report, I said, said the case is still ongoing, but Bloomberg reported that the case just settled a couple, a couple of weeks ago. Undisclosed amount. However, from the time that the lawsuit took place between, between now and then, they've had two rounds of layoffs at Goop. They had, they, at their peak, they had two hundred sixteen employees at this company. They cut eighteen percent of their workforce in August of this past year. And now just recently, a couple of weeks ago, they laid off another six percent of their workforce on top of that.

• 1:20:08Speaker 06

  So they're, they are cutting, cutting, cutting.

• 1:20:11Cara Santa Maria?

  But don't, don't you think it's just gonna bounce right back with RFK in office or not in office doing whatever the fuck he's gonna be doing?

• 1:20:18Speaker 06

  I don't know. Let me read, let me read you a couple of paragraphs from the article because I think this is kind of the crux of the thing. Um, one of the company's challenges has been its, uh, excessive diversification. Until now, Goop has been a newsletter, podcast and beauty line products. They also talked about the Netflix shows, their stores, Goop Kitchen and a, which is a takeout chain in Southern California. Uh, and they launched a wellness conference and luxury cruise, but these That cuts that are occurring have been targeted to prioritize the emphasis maintaining what's left of Goop in three areas: beauty, fashion, and food.

• 1:21:00Speaker 06

  They are primarily abandoning initiatives based on wellness. That's not insignificant. I don't think it's going to be the end of Goop, in my opinion. These things rarely die out. However, for whatever the external pressures are, the market essentially is hopefully changing, and I hope it's driven by the consumer behavior, is that fewer people are buying into this crap. And as a result, they're taking a look finally, kind of making some hard financial decisions over at Goop and deciding, yeah, we gotta cut it, basically what's not working, what's not selling. And it's all the garbage stuff that we've been taking on to task for for many years.

• 1:21:42Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm not hopeful about that. I think it just ebbs and flows. I think this is just a trend. They're gonna go with the trends. But I don't know, I'm really not hopeful that sort of the wellness industry is doing pretty well. I don't think Goop is a metric for the entire industry, do you?

• 1:21:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, it could be bad management, you never know.

• 1:21:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and I think it's just gonna get worse. I'm really nervous about this next administration.

• 1:22:03Speaker 06

  I agree, Kara. We've got lined up ahead of us.

• 1:22:05Cara Santa Maria?

  It's gonna be rampant.

• 1:22:06Speaker 06

  One idiot after the next. I mean, pseudoscience is gonna be in the front seat.

• 1:22:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Glorified, yeah, and celebrated in a way that I don't think in this country it ever has been sanctioned in that way. Maybe there was a historical era when snake oil was like, government officials were promoting snake oil.

• 1:22:23Speaker 06

  And again, it never fully goes away. The pseudoscience will always be there, and there will be the next Goop, or whatever it is that ultimately comes out. However, Goop and Gwyneth Paltrow do get a lot of publicity, probably more than other companies out there that are doing it, because they don't have the celebrity name behind them, or whatever reason. And to see this specifically, though, that they're gonna do what they have to do with the, basically make a corporate decision here, and as a result of that, they'll phase out a lot of the crap that they've been doing.

• 1:22:56Speaker 02

  Are they just being outcompeted by other? Yeah, it could be.

• 1:22:59Speaker 06

  And there are more, yeah, so certainly there are more players in the market, in the marketplace, in the marketplace as well, and I'm sure that has an impact on things. But they're going to continue their beauty, fashion, and food items.

• 1:23:09Speaker 02

  But it is a good thing that, you know, such an upfront brand is going to be moving away from that.

• 1:23:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, I agree.

• 1:23:16Speaker 02

  But I agree with Kara, I'm not terribly optimistic.

• 1:23:20Speaker 02

  All right, Jay, you're going to finish us off by talking about food distribution around the world.

• 1:23:26Jay Novella?

  Yes, I have a question for everyone, so just throw, name some things you had for breakfast today. Eggs, parfait.

• 1:23:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Coffee.

• 1:23:33Jay Novella?

  Pizza. Donuts, somebody had donuts for breakfast, that's pretty awesome. Okay, so I, I find this fascinating, the, the global food trade industry is bigger, much bigger than I originally thought, and to give you an idea, I'll read, you know, a list of food items that people would have for breakfast in the US and where they came from. So oatmeal from Ireland, a banana from Costa Rica, sugar from Brazil, coffee made from beans grown in Ethiopia, Colombia, Sumatra, and Honduras, and if you fed your dog, they likely had kibble that was made from seaweed that came from China, and fish oil that came from Peru. Yeah, a lot of these items could come from the US, but the fact is, a lot of them, you know, come from outside of the US, and from most countries, a lot of the

• 1:24:17Jay Novella?

  food items come from outside that country as well. So about 25% of all food crosses international borders, 25%.

• 1:24:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Of all food globally?

• 1:24:25Jay Novella?

  Pretty much globally, I mean, you know, we, this article and my resources didn't dig into like specific nations, you know, it's just in general, like.

• 1:24:33Cara Santa Maria?

  But you're not saying like in America, 25% of our food comes from international sources?

• 1:24:36Jay Novella?

  Yes.

• 1:24:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, I thought you were saying around the world, 25% of food.

• 1:24:39Jay Novella?

  That's pretty, I think it's pretty, pretty universal, that a quarter of the food supply is coming from somewhere else. And there's, they're speculating that by 2050, half the world's population could depend on calories that were, are produced outside, right? So what is the scale of the global food trade? So first of all, it's, it's a huge system, it's worth about $2 trillion that were measured in 2023, which quadrupled since the year 2000. So it's trending in that direction in a strong way to, to increase. Nine countries export 80% of the world's wheat, corn, rice, and soybeans. 134 countries rely on these nine exporters for more than half of their imports for these staple crops.

• 1:25:21Jay Novella?

  China consumes seventy percent of the world's soybean exports. What's that for?

• 1:25:26Speaker 02

  Soy sauce.

• 1:25:27Jay Novella?

  I thought soy sauce, right? For animal feed.

• 1:25:30Speaker 07

  Everything.

• 1:25:31Jay Novella?

  I'm like, oh yeah, the soy sauce. No, it's animal feed. I thought that was pretty funny.

• 1:25:34Speaker 02

  That's a lot. Seventy percent of the world's soy was going to soy sauce? That would be...

• 1:25:41Speaker 02

  That would be something.

• 1:25:42Jay Novella?

  Yeah, but there's a lot of people...

• 1:25:43Speaker 07

  Because those bottles are so tiny.

• 1:25:46Jay Novella?

  Go to Costco, man. I have like a gallon one. It's awesome. Alright, so the US exports about twenty-five percent of the food traded globally, which much of that's coming from California, Oregon, Washington, and Texas. So keep in mind, like, when I say that, just remember that like most of that food is coming from, you know, those four states. What are the benefits of the global food trade? So there are some very strong standouts here, like Peru, for example. That's where most quinoa exports are not... They make up forty percent of the global market comes from Peru, right? Just for quinoa. And what happened was, when this, when, you know, sales started to go up, right? Because quinoa hasn't been around forever.

• 1:26:27Jay Novella?

  The farmers in the Andes, they turned this traditional crop literally into a lifeline for them. And it services a lot of people now economically.

• 1:26:37Speaker 07

  Is that traditionally Peruvian quinoa?

• 1:26:39Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:39Speaker 07

  Is that like where it's from?

• 1:26:40Jay Novella?

  From what I understand, like, that's where it is from. They might be growing it in other places now.

• 1:26:44Speaker 07

  You could have held a gun to my head. I would have never been able to say where quinoa is from. That's amazing.

• 1:26:49Jay Novella?

  Yeah. So the global trade that's happening right now diversifies global diets. It brings foods like bananas and pineapples and red chilies to countries worldwide. Costa Rica produces half the world's pineapples. India accounts for forty percent of the global dried red chili production.

• 1:27:06Speaker 02

  It's an interesting question of like, is this a good thing or a bad thing?

• 1:27:09Jay Novella?

  Well, let me get to that, because I'll tell you.

• 1:27:11Speaker 02

  Alright.

• 1:27:11Jay Novella?

  I'll tell you.

• 1:27:12Cara Santa Maria?

  He's got the answer.

• 1:27:13Jay Novella?

  It's both at the same time.

• 1:27:16Speaker 07

  Maybe it's

• 1:27:17Speaker 06

  It's complicated.

• 1:27:18Jay Novella?

  Maybe it's complicated. So here are some benefits and costs here. So Brazil has, they've cleared huge areas of the Amazon rainforest. Not good, right? To make beef and soybean production. It's, that scares me. And we've talked about this on the show many times. You know, there's a lot of unfound medicines that could be pulled out of the Amazon forest, right? Costa Rica uses more pesticides per hectare than any other country to meet the global pineapple demand. Now, I know Evan probably doesn't care about that. He just wants his pineapples.

• 1:27:52Speaker 06

  Yes. Never have thought about where my pineapples come from, but I love my favorite fruit, pineapple.

• 1:27:58Jay Novella?

  Yeah, pineapple is magical. But the point is, you know, in order to meet the demand, like, things have to change. You know, the farmland has to either be optimized or they need more farmland. Spain's Mar de Plastico generates 30,000 tons of plastic waste annually. You know, that's horrifying. We have to think about these things. We have to think about the fact that we're going to, you know, as the population increases, it's not just increasing, you know, in a linear fashion. It's exponential. Like, you know, we have eight billion people today, right? And that number is going to rise much faster now, the world population, because we have more people. And there are vulnerabilities also in the global food system. And this is kind of scary. I'll give you some real world

• 1:28:41Jay Novella?

  examples here. So disruptions can come from literally anything, right? So a war, a drought, COVID, and even that ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal. That was bad.

• 1:28:51Speaker 02

  Well, Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

• 1:28:54Jay Novella?

  That's the first on my list.

• 1:28:55Speaker 02

  Massively disrupted their wheat exports.

• 1:28:57Jay Novella?

  Yeah, the war disrupted 30 to 40% of global wheat exports. But, you know, the thing, you know, Ukraine, they said it was the breadbasket, you know, of Europe, right? It's, that is not an exaggeration, you know, that, you know, you have 30 or 40% of the global wheat exports that are coming from one country, and that country goes to friggin' war. I can't bake bread anymore, and I won't have that. You know, I mean, all joking aside, though, that's scary because people depend on that. Like, in the United States, I feel like, yeah, if we went away... We'd probably be okay.

• 1:29:27Speaker 02

  It would be inconvenient, but we wouldn't starve to death. But there are people around the world who will starve to death.

• 1:29:31Jay Novella?

  Absolutely.

• 1:29:32Speaker 02

  If that kind of disruption happens.

• 1:29:33Jay Novella?

  So the global food production is highly concentrated in a few regions, obviously, because of, you know, how arid the land is and all that. Did I use that word correctly?

• 1:29:41Speaker 02

  Arable.

• 1:29:42Jay Novella?

  I always screw those two up. Okay, arable, sorry. At least I remember to remember to do it. California produces eighty percent of the celery in the U.S. and is a major global supplier. So when a drought hits California, you know, celery can go down. And there is massive future challenges here because global demand, like I said, is rising and the climate change is having a huge impact on the, you know, the land that's being, that's producing right now and it's going to shift, right? Literally, probably in our lifetime, we're going to see some major changes in where they're growing food because like this can't grow it here anymore, but hey, this is working over here now. So, and that's not going to be easy because what if there's housing there? And we need that land to grow the staple food.

• 1:30:24Jay Novella?

  The bottom line here is that we need to build some global infrastructure. I'm not so sure how much countries would work together on this. I mean, being that it's a two trillion dollar industry, there probably is a lot of, you know, people are motivated to do it. But they're saying things like we have to build ports that can handle massive grain storage, storage to keep, you know, if we could have like, you know, like we have in the United States, we have a backup of gasoline, right? In case something happens. We need backups of food in case a pandemic happens or a war breaks out and that type of thing. Just interesting to think though, I mean, I had no idea that when I'm eating oatmeal, that a huge percentage of it could just be coming from Ireland, you know?

• 1:31:03Speaker 02

  But I think you didn't really talk a lot about the good aspects of it. I also think a lot of the negative aspects are a little overblown in that they're sort of not really related to the fact that we're exporting food, it's just that we're producing a lot of food, like using a lot of pesticides or whatever. That's more of a farming issue, not really an exporting issue. If you do an analysis of efficiency in the system, right? Which is very critical. We're at a point where like how efficient our big worldwide systems are makes a huge difference. Growing the food that is Is optimal for the land it's grown on is way more important than how far you have to ship it to the person who's gonna eat it, right? The whole local for a thing is kind of pseudoscience.

• 1:31:47Speaker 02

  It doesn't really matter how far your food has to travel as long as the food was grown in a, in the most efficient way. So, for example, you're far better off buying potatoes from Idaho shipped to Connecticut than trying to grow potatoes in Connecticut, because the soil is not ideal for it. You get, the efficiency of that is way better. That's what, the good thing about this worldwide food web is there's a reason we're growing so much food in these locations, because that's the best place to grow that food. Yeah, they're optimized. It's adapted to it, the soil is the best for it, the system's the best for it, whatever. And we're better off just doing that and shipping it around.

• 1:32:25Cara Santa Maria?

  But aren't you then also better off eating seasonal food that does grow in your area?

• 1:32:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, you could do that too. I mean, so you, I mean.

• 1:32:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, do you have to have that one fruit from that one country?

• 1:32:34Speaker 02

  So it is, yeah, yeah. So I do think that there's a balance here where you want to eat seasonally as good. You know, we always shop at all the local farms, you know, when, when their stuff is growing, that's great too. But having a varied diet is hugely important for nutrition and, you know, especially globally. Again, we're kind of, we're privileged because we, we have a, you know, incredible diet, but in terms of availability of different kinds of foods, other parts of the country, of the world, it's not as much. But the availability of a varied diet is massively important to human health.

• 1:33:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but like, at a certain point, it's excessive.

• 1:33:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's all about balance. It's all about balance.

• 1:33:10Jay Novella?

  Yeah, but there are people that like, ninety percent of what they eat are plantains.

• 1:33:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:33:14Jay Novella?

  You know, like they, nutritionally, that, you know, you could live off of potatoes, but that would not be health, a healthy thing to do.

• 1:33:19Speaker 02

  But potatoes are kind of a staple food, and, and, you know what I mean? So that is not just like a luxury food, like a pineapple, where it's, you know, it is something that people are living off of, and growing that in the most efficient way is important. So, and I don't think we should like, try to, you know, discourage or downgrade the sort of global food market, because we all wanna like, eat only food that's grown locally. I think that's kind of a myth. You're better off letting these systems evolve. The way they should evolve, like growing it most efficiently. Also, if you talk about distribution, having centralized distribution is also more, you know, efficient than having like every farm distribute it themselves. So again, like the sort of local network, there's a reason why we have the systems that we have now, because it is efficient.

• 1:34:04Speaker 02

  What we do need to do, in my opinion, is make sure that we are using each piece of land for its optimal use, because that's the factor that seems to be the most important in terms of agricultural efficiency, and that we continue to advance our technology like GMOs.

• 1:34:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:34:18Speaker 02

  So that, you know, we are optimizing the whole agricultural industry, and that will do things like reduce pesticide use and increase yield, et cetera.

• 1:34:28Speaker 07

  Do you all think that seasonality or the availability of certain items at only certain times of the year enhances the enjoyment of those items?

• 1:34:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely.

• 1:34:36Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 1:34:36Speaker 02

  To some extent.

• 1:34:37Jay Novella?

  I don't know about that.

• 1:34:38Cara Santa Maria?

  I think so.

• 1:34:39Speaker 07

  I wonder. Because like, okay, you only have eggnog at Christmas. Like, if you're gonna have it, you only have it at Christmas. If you like it, you can get it year round, but like, I would never have eggnog at 4th of July.

• 1:34:50Jay Novella?

  Yeah, but that's very different than eating a really nice apple, which is a healthy thing, you know.

• 1:34:54Speaker 07

  Right, sure.

• 1:34:55Jay Novella?

  Eggnog's bad for you.

• 1:34:55Speaker 07

  But, no, I'm sure, yeah, that was just a seasonal example that popped in my head, but like, do you, not having some access to something?

• 1:35:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:02Speaker 07

  Increases the enjoyment of it when you have it?

• 1:35:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Constantly having access to every available option is not good for you psychologically.

• 1:35:10Speaker 07

  Okay, right.

• 1:35:11Cara Santa Maria?

  It's not.

• 1:35:11Speaker 02

  But even the system that we have now, like...

• 1:35:14Jay Novella?

  I don't know about that.

• 1:35:15Speaker 02

  It's...

• 1:35:15Cara Santa Maria?

  100% it's true.

• 1:35:16Speaker 02

  We kind of have both, because, like, there are still seasonal fruits and vegetables that we get. Like, there's this one, two to three week period a year where you get the really good peaches, you know what I mean? Like, every, the rest of the year, you get crappy peaches. There are still peaches, they're fine.

• 1:35:31Speaker 06

  Corn is the same.

• 1:35:32Speaker 02

  Right. Or like this, yeah, local sweet corn, when it's, when that's ready, it's just better. It's just better than the stuff that is shipped around.

• 1:35:38Speaker 06

  Corn in August is the best.

• 1:35:39Speaker 02

  Um, so, you know, the, uh, there's a certain time of year when the Honeycrisp apples are great, you know, when you get the local stuff. The rest of the year, you can get them, but they're like, just okay. You know, they're not the stuff that is ripe off the tree. So you still get that limited window for... For really high quality, good produce.

• 1:35:59Speaker 07

  I love it. I think, I think it's so cool to like, look forward to.

• 1:36:02Speaker 02

  It's peach season.

• 1:36:02Speaker 07

  Yeah, or it's pumpkin season. It's like for the pumpkin soup and whatever, whatever.

• 1:36:06Jay Novella?

  The only thing I look forward to, I love chestnuts.

• 1:36:08Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:36:08Jay Novella?

  And literally, there's like a three week window where they're available.

• 1:36:11Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:36:11Jay Novella?

  And I, and I celebrate.

• 1:36:12Speaker 07

  So do you think you would enjoy them as much if you had them year round?

• 1:36:14Jay Novella?

  I would enjoy them more because I'd eat them more. Right? You understand what I'm saying?

• 1:36:19Speaker 07

  Tara's saying no. Tara's saying no.

• 1:36:20Cara Santa Maria?

  We put, there's a fundamental difference on this panel about like, this very existential dialectic. Like, I believe that the only reason life matters the way it does is because we die and they don't think that. So it's, it's a more philosophical argument.

• 1:36:35Speaker 02

  What I think.

• 1:36:36Cara Santa Maria?

  I know.

• 1:36:37Speaker 02

  I think it's time for science fiction.

• 1:36:40Speaker 07

  It was just getting good.

• 1:36:44Speaker 01

  It's time for science or fiction.

• 1:36:53Speaker 02

  Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fictitious. Then I will challenge my panel of skeptics and the live audience to tell me which one that you all think is the fake. Now, in honor of December 7th, which is Pearl Harbor Day.

• 1:37:10Jay Novella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:37:12Speaker 02

  The theme for this science or fiction is winter.

• 1:37:18Speaker 07

  It's not winter. I was gonna say.

• 1:37:22Cara Santa Maria?

  When is winter?

• 1:37:23Speaker 02

  This is 21st.

• 1:37:24Cara Santa Maria?

  21st.

• 1:37:25Speaker 02

  Will be coming out in winter.

• 1:37:27Jay Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:37:28Cara Santa Maria?

  In honor of.

• 1:37:28Jay Novella?

  Oh, that's kinda like with the journal with the January 2025. Okay, I get it now. Yeah.

• 1:37:33Speaker 02

  Will be going, will be going live in the end of December, so we will be there.

• 1:37:37Jay Novella?

  Okay, Evan?

• 1:37:38Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:37:38Jay Novella?

  Yeah, you pulled that out of the fire, Steve. Good job.

• 1:37:40Speaker 02

  I know who's going first on this panel. All right.

• 1:37:46Speaker 02

  Item number one, lightning is just as common during snowstorms as rainstorms, but is harder to see and hear due to the dense snow. Item number two, although rare, snow has fallen in recent times near sea level in the Sahara Desert and the Atacama Desert. And three, Eomori City in Japan is the snowiest city in the world with an average annual snowfall of about 26 feet.

• 1:38:13Speaker 07

  That's a lot of snow.

• 1:38:14Speaker 02

  Okay. Evan, why don't you go first?

• 1:38:17Speaker 06

  Number one about lightning being just as common during snowstorms as rainstorms, harder to see and hear due to the dense snow. No doubt about it that I've witnessed many times lightning during snowstorms. When you're in New England, I think we've all had that experience.

• 1:38:36Speaker 02

  I haven't.

• 1:38:37Speaker 06

  Is it as, is it as common though? That's the question here. Is it only because it's harder to see and hear due to the dense snow? I've never really thought about that. If I knew more about lightning and its properties, perhaps I would be able to better determine if there, if it has an impact during, regardless of the precipitation or the temperature or the, you know, or that temperature difference. The second one about the snow in the Sahara Desert and the Atacama Desert? I'm sorry, where's the Atacama Desert, Steve?

• 1:39:11Speaker 02

  So, the Sahara Desert is, Sahara Desert is northern Africa.

• 1:39:14Speaker 06

  I know where that is.

• 1:39:15Speaker 02

  It's in the tropical zone above the equator. The Atacama Desert is in the southern hemisphere, below the equator, about as far below the equator as the Sahara Desert is above the equator.

• 1:39:23Speaker 06

  I have a feeling that one's science. The last one about Japan being the snowiest city in the world, 26 feet. Yeah, you don't, I don't know that you really think of Japan as a place where, you know, where you, the snow, you think snow, you think Siberia, you think Canada, you know, you think maybe Norway. You don't really think of Japan as being that. It could be, you know, this could be, oh, it's a city. It's not really a mountain peak. You have a mountain, you have a city and a mountain peak? That would be, that would be kind of unusual. Boy, I've never heard. It's either this one or the first one. I will say the city in Japan is not the snowiest in the world. That one is fiction.

• 1:40:05Speaker 02

  Okay, Kara?

• 1:40:07Cara Santa Maria?

  No, I don't, I grew up in Texas and I live in LA. I should go last. I have no idea. Snowstorms and lightning, I've, I've been in like one snowstorm in my life, so I, yeah, I have no idea.

• 1:40:21Speaker 02

  Oh my God, Kara.

• 1:40:22Cara Santa Maria?

  What? What? I chose wisely.

• 1:40:25Speaker 02

  What?

• 1:40:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:27Speaker 02

  One? You should move to Eomori.

• 1:40:30Cara Santa Maria?

  No.

• 1:40:33Cara Santa Maria?

  So, the Atacama Desert is the driest place in the world, right? So it has the least precipitation of anywhere else in the world measurably. So that's interesting that it would also have snow, which is a form of precipitation. So although rare, though, like that's, he caveats all of these all the time. It has fallen in recent times near sea level. Does that mean it's stuck? Not necessarily. So, could have fallen and then immediately evaporated. And then the city in Japan, it's a snowy city. I mean, I definitely feel like there's imagery in my mind of a lot of snow in Japan. And I do think that it's quite mountainous and obviously anywhere, you know, I live in LA, but you can go to the mountains and that's where all the snow is, right? It's at elevation.

• 1:41:16Cara Santa Maria?

  So if it's a city at elevation, maybe. So I don't know, that one doesn't bother me as much, but that's the one you picked, right? Yes. Like, maybe it's a city like somewhere on Mount Fiji or something, I don't know. So, I don't know, that one could be science. I don't know, did, did snow fall in the Atacama? Did snow fall in the Sahara? It just has to have happened once, and that would be science. So maybe it's the lightning one? That's one I know the least about, so I'll say the lightning one is fiction.

• 1:41:45Jay Novella?

  Okay, Jay. I'm gonna just get right to it. I think that the one about lightning in the snowstorm and it's supposed to be as much as rain versus snow, I, I think that one is fiction because largely anecdotal, but you know, I'm getting up in years and I've been experiencing both snow and rain a lot in my life. Like, I have never, ever seen or heard lightning during a snowstorm. Not saying it doesn't happen, but I mean statistically, you know, when it's, when it's a thunderstorm and lightning is happening and all that, like, it is super prevalent. It's not like, oh, I kinda hear it. Like, you could hear it from 20 miles away, you know what I mean? So, that one's gotta be fiction. There's just no way that lightning is like landing a half a mile from me and I'm not hearing it. Done.

• 1:42:26Speaker 02

  Okay, Bob.

• 1:42:27Bob Novella?

  Um, yeah, it's hard to disagree. Uh, I was thinking the same thing as Cara, though. The, the snow in the desert. Yeah, you say it's fallen, but I don't think it landed. I could see potentially you'd have some, you know, upper atmospheric chill that can create the snow, but it's not getting on the ground or, or lasting for long. I kind of see that. City in Japan, I could, yeah, I could see it in a, in a mountainous region. I would have thought, I would have heard of it. It's the snowiest place. It's a lot of snow. Uh, but the lightning one, I totally agree. Not only have I never remember experiencing, hearing, or anything, I've never even seen pictures of lightning in a snowstorm. You'd think there'd be one picture out there that would be something that you'd recognize. So, yeah, I'll say that one. And that, Steve's gonna screw us on this.

• 1:43:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I think so, too.

• 1:43:06Speaker 02

  Okay, and George?

• 1:43:08Speaker 07

  I would answer this, but I don't think this is either the time or the place.

• 1:43:14Speaker 06

  Uh, how about now?

• 1:43:15Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:43:16Speaker 07

  Okay, now. Um, so I actually, I've, I've heard lightning in a, I mean, from my recollection as a child, all those ski trips I used to take, I remember hearing lightning during a snowstorm, being like, wow, this is amazing. The question is, just as common, which is such a Steve thing to throw in there.

• 1:43:32Cara Santa Maria?

  You heard thunder.

• 1:43:33Speaker 07

  I know for sure it has snowed in the Sahara.

• 1:43:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Right?

• 1:43:35Speaker 07

  What's that?

• 1:43:36Cara Santa Maria?

  You heard thunder.

• 1:43:37Speaker 07

  Oh, sorry, yes, sorry. Yeah. I mean, both, like, yeah, no, I remember, like, like.

• 1:43:41Speaker 06

  One big ass.

• 1:43:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Saw the light.

• 1:43:43Speaker 07

  Sorry, sorry.

• 1:43:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Same, same, but different.

• 1:43:44Speaker 02

  Somebody had to say.

• 1:43:45Speaker 07

  Sahara, there has been snow. I don't know the other, the, the Atakama. It's, I don't know about that. And Japan, 26 feet of snow seems excessive. So, I am gonna say the Japanese, the Japanese snow one.

• 1:43:59Speaker 02

  All right, so you guys will split between one and three. We're gonna poll the audience. If you think that the lightning and snowstorms is the fiction, clap.

• 1:44:08Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:44:09Speaker 02

  If you think that snow in the Sahara and Atakama is the fiction, clap. And if you think that the Amori city is the fiction, clap. Okay, so definitely skewed towards the first one. Very few of you think that the second one is fiction, so we'll start there. Although rare, snow has fallen in recent times near sea level. Near sea level, that's interesting, I threw that in there. In the Sahara Desert and the Atacama Desert. The entire panel thinks this one is science. Most of the audience thinks this one is science.

• 1:44:40Speaker 07

  Wait, wait, wait, wait. Is Atacama like a pun? Like it's like it's not a real thing?

• 1:44:44Speaker 02

  No, it's a real thing.

• 1:44:45Speaker 07

  It's a real, okay.

• 1:44:46Speaker 02

  It is, Kara's correct. It's the driest place in the world. Atacama is the driest place on Earth.

• 1:44:50Speaker 07

  Gotcha, okay.

• 1:44:50Speaker 02

  Most arid.

• 1:44:51Speaker 07

  I just heard that, I'm like, if that's a pun, I'm gonna throw this microphone at your face.

• 1:44:55Speaker 02

  Sahara, you may have heard, is also a desert. This one is science. This is science. And yes, it's on the ground. Like you could see pictures of snow on the sand dunes of the Sahara Desert. I've seen it. Yeah. It's amazing.

• 1:45:09Speaker 07

  Amazing.

• 1:45:10Speaker 02

  And the Atacama recently had, you know, that's the more surprising one, because it is not just arid, it's also, not just hot, it's not just tropical, it's very dry. But they had an Arctic weather pattern that, you know, sent cold air up there and they had snow in the Atacama Desert, which is amazing. Not Arctic. And the lizards, they snowboard, you know? Yeah, they do, the lizards, yeah. In Jay's mind, they snowboard. I tried to find if snow has ever fallen on the equator at sea level. I would say yeah, at some point. No. Never, huh? Never. That, not in recent times. Unpossible. Obviously you can go back to different climates, but I couldn't find any actual reports, and every reference I found said, no, not at sea level.

• 1:45:55Speaker 02

  There's a snow line, you guys know what the snow line is, right? And that, of course, gets higher the closer you get to the equator. There are mountains on the equator, like Kilimanjaro, where there is snow. But you have to get really high up in the mountains on the equator. But this is the farthest equatorial places I could find where snow at sea level was documented. There's these two deserts. Okay. I guess we'll go back to number one. Lightning is just as common during snowstorms as rainstorms, but it's harder to see and hear due to the dense snow. Kara, Jay, and Bob think this one is the fiction, along with most of the audience thinks this one is fiction. Now, there are a couple of details in here, so George, you keyed in on one.

• 1:46:39Speaker 02

  So is it just as common as snowstorms? Does it happen at all? Right? Have you guys ever heard of... Snow thunder. Yes.

• 1:46:48Bob Novella?

  No.

• 1:46:48Speaker 02

  The term "snow thunder"? People have heard the term "snow thunder". I've heard it many times. I'm surprised you guys have never experienced this.

• 1:46:54Bob Novella?

  You made that up.

• 1:46:54Cara Santa Maria?

  What is snow?

• 1:46:59Speaker 02

  Nobody snows.

• 1:47:00Speaker 07

  Kara, it's like cocaine.

• 1:47:02Cara Santa Maria?

  I know of that.

• 1:47:04Speaker 02

  So, "snow thunder" happens. Yeah. It is also true that the presence of the snow

• 1:47:11Bob Novella?

  dampens the

• 1:47:12Speaker 02

  dampens the sound. How much? So, like Jay, you actually kind of, you said something very interesting. You said you could hear the lightning This is my space, excuse me. From 20 miles away. Yeah. Right? So, how much does that do? Then, why would you use that to conclude that you would hear it if we're a half a mile away? The point is, the distance at which you can see and hear a lightning strike is way shorter during a snowstorm than during a rainstorm. Okay, but how much? You wouldn't see the one 20 miles away. Right. Right? That's what you're experiencing. Most of the lightning you're seeing is not a half a mile away, right? During a rainstorm. Yeah. So, that is also true. But it is nowhere near as common as rainstorms. This is the fiction. That's a good one, Steve. Yeah.

• 1:47:55Speaker 02

  This is the fiction because there has to be certain atmospheric conditions in order for it to happen during a snowstorm. It's not as conducive to generating electrical storms, like, you know, lightning storms.

• 1:48:05Bob Novella?

  Yeah, the charge differences, right?

• 1:48:06Speaker 02

  But if you have, you have to have warmer air below colder clouds, and there has to be something going on, like wind, that is forcing that warmer air up into the clouds, and then that can produce the lightning storm during a snowstorm. But I think the reason we've, like, grown up with snowstorms our whole life and we've never seen or heard the snow thunder. I have. Evan has. Yeah, I can't remember if I have or not. I don't, certainly I don't have any clear memory of doing it. It's because they're just really hard to, they're not common and they're very hard to see in here. More localized, very localized. Yeah. Okay. Okay, which means that a, a Omori city in Japan is the snowiest city in the world with an average annual snowfall of about 26 feet is science. 26?

• 1:48:49Speaker 06

  How many people in this city?

• 1:48:50Speaker 02

  The houses get buried in the snow. Houses get buried.

• 1:48:53Speaker 06

  Yes, yes.

• 1:48:53Speaker 02

  It's amazing.

• 1:48:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Where is it? Is it at elevation?

• 1:48:55Speaker 02

  It's in northern Japan.

• 1:48:56Speaker 06

  And what's the population of this city?

• 1:48:58Speaker 02

  It's not in the mountains, no. It's just in northern Japan. It's a city. It's populous enough to be called a city. I don't know what the number is.

• 1:49:05Jay Novella?

  Skiing is a big deal. Snow sports are a big deal in Japan.

• 1:49:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:49:08Bob Novella?

  Can you imagine their snow removal infrastructure? It must be epic.

• 1:49:12Speaker 02

  Yes, no removal as we know from recent excessive snow in our own part of the country. There's a point beyond which they can't just plow the snow anymore, right? Like, you can't just push it to the side.

• 1:49:25Jay Novella?

  Yeah, there's no aside anymore.

• 1:49:26Bob Novella?

  They melt it.

• 1:49:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's a couple of things that they do. One is they pull in the back hose. They pick up the snow and they move it. They have to bring it to like a parking lot. They go, okay, this parking lot's now done for the next two months. And they just dump snow, pile it up into huge piles there. You can melt the snow.

• 1:49:42Speaker 06

  They have melters.

• 1:49:42Speaker 02

  It's just expensive. The equipment's like $200,000.

• 1:49:46Jay Novella?

  I saw a guy trying to do it with a flamethrower and the flamethrower did almost nothing.

• 1:49:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, you need...

• 1:49:51Bob Novella?

  That is not a good way.

• 1:49:53Speaker 06

  That's what hibachi tables were originally for, apparently, was for melting large amounts.

• 1:49:58Cara Santa Maria?

  275,000 people in 2020. So it's a big, I mean, it's a big suburb.

• 1:50:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a big city, yeah.

• 1:50:03Jay Novella?

  I'd like to point out that Kara, who knows the least about snow of probably anybody I know, I still, how the hell did you pick the right one first?

• 1:50:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Prowess.

• 1:50:12Jay Novella?

  You are so good at this, it's really starting to freak me out.

• 1:50:15Speaker 02

  I know, I'm really pissed.

• 1:50:15Speaker 06

  It took you so long, Jay.

• 1:50:16Speaker 02

  I'm sitting here listening to her saying absolutely no, absolutely nothing about any of this. And she's like, "Ah, I'll take one."

• 1:50:24Cara Santa Maria?

  He doesn't know.

• 1:50:24Jay Novella?

  Kara.

• 1:50:26Cara Santa Maria?

  A lot going on in there.

• 1:50:27Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:50:28Jay Novella?

  We should make a meme with Kara, you know, that guy that's always like, you know, bring it.

• 1:50:32Speaker 02

  All right, Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:50:34Speaker 06

  "America's leadership must be guided by learning and reason, or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible would gain popular ascendancy with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem." John Fitzgerald Kennedy, from his speech that he was going to give the day he was assassinated.

• 1:50:56Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Very wise.

• 1:50:58Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:50:59Speaker 02

  Very relevant.

• 1:51:01Speaker 06

  Just saying.

• 1:51:01Speaker 02

  Just saying, yeah.

• 1:51:02Speaker 06

  Some...

• 1:51:03Speaker 02

  I don't know who I'm talking about.

• 1:51:04Speaker 06

  Some quotes are timeless.

• 1:51:06Speaker 02

  Well, thank you guys for joining me for this special episode of D.C. Thank you guys for coming.

• 1:51:15Speaker 02

  It's always nice to visit DC again. We had a lovely crowd. Thank you all. And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

• 1:51:38Speaker 02

  Skeptic's 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 [email protected]. 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.

• 1:52:15Jay Novella?

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