The Skeptics Guide #1026 - Mar 8 2025

Quickie with Bob: Atlantic Shutdown; News Items: Measles Outbreak, Reintroducing Wolves, TIGR-Tas Gene Editing, Blood Donor Who Saved Millions Dies, Star Mergers; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Intricate Web of Civilization; 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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• 0:33Speaker 01

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

• 0:40Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, March 5th, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

• 0:48Speaker 03

  Hey, everybody.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  Cara Santa Maria.

• 0:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Howdy.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  Jay Novella. Hey, guys. And Evan Bernstein.

• 0:54Speaker 03

  Good evening, everyone.

• 0:55Speaker 02

  Today is my wife's birthday, so happy birthday, guys.

• 0:58Speaker 03

  Happy birthday, John.

• 1:00Speaker 02

  She's working, she's working on, she's actually at work right now. She's working in the evening on her birthday, so I'm not going to get to see her till later tonight.

• 1:06Speaker 03

  Was she washing dishes, Steve? What's she, what is she doing?

• 1:08Speaker 02

  No, she works, she teaches in the evening.

• 1:10Speaker 03

  Joke, joke.

• 1:10Speaker 02

  I know, she teaches in the evening, so yeah, so this is one of her days to, to work late and she couldn't get out of it.

• 1:15Speaker 03

  Well, I'm sure her students and faculty all celebrated with her balloons and cake and all the good stuff.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  Whatever, I hope so.

• 1:23Speaker 03

  Just bring some home.

• 1:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Speaking of work, I don't know if I told you all this, but as, as you can tell, I've been a bit preoccupied, a bit busy lately. This week is the week that I am saying goodbye to all of my patients.

• 1:38Speaker 02

  Oh, boy.

• 1:38Cara Santa Maria?

  On my fellowship, which is tough. My fellowship technically ends next week, and then I take my licensing exam and there's just so much in front of me, so, and I have COVID, if you can't tell. I'm a little stuffy. Yeah, yay.

• 1:50Speaker 03

  What? No, I didn't know that.

• 1:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Did you guys, I was, last week I was trying to hide it, but I was coughing and sniffling a bit, and then I tested the next day, and I was like, cool.

• 2:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so not only did I have to, I, I'm inpatient, I'm on inpatient service one day a week, and I had to miss my final inpatient service because I was testing positive for COVID, which was a huge bummer. And then now it's day after day of just saying goodbye, like hour after hour. I've cried more. It's tough. Then it's such a tough thing because usually as a therapist, as a mental health practitioner, or even a medical practitioner, when you terminate with clients, and that's the word, I wish they didn't use that word, it sounds so dark. Yes, I don't like that word.

• 2:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, terminal.

• 2:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but termination, as we do call it, it usually happens a bit more, I don't know, shall we say organically, like somebody feels like they finished their course of therapy, or maybe they're moving out of your licensed jurisdiction, or whatever, but there are a few points in our careers, most of them are early during our training, where we have to terminate with everybody all at once before we move on to another phase of our training. And that's where I'm at right now. I've done it once before, already at the same hospital, when I finished my practicum, but yeah, it's so tough.

• 3:04Speaker 02

  How much time do they give you? Like, how much lead-up time is there?

• 3:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, I've known this whole time, so I've been able to sort of prepare my clients. I think for some of them, I started preparing them about a month or two in advance, but for many of them, they knew from the beginning, you know, this is how much time we have together, and come, you know, February, March, April, at some point in there, I'm going to be winding down my fellowship. But some of them completely forgot, and, you know, I would try to remind them, and I would try to prepare them, but there were still a couple this week who were like, no, what am I gonna do? I was like, no, we'll get through this together. It's tough, I know.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  It also happens at the end of your career.

• 3:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  So I'm just entering that phase now, where every, just about every visit I have with a patient is my last visit with them.

• 3:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  I mean, there are some that I do every three months, so like, next month, it'll definitely, that'll be it, like, that'll be the last time I'm seeing every patient. There's still a few that I'll see three months from now, but yeah, so I'm having the same conversation over and over and over and over again.

• 4:04Bob Novella?

  Are you telling them what you really think about them now?

• 4:07Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, some, you know, some patients I've been seeing for 20 years.

• 4:11Speaker 03

  I was gonna question, yeah, how long you've had a relationship with these people?

• 4:15Cara Santa Maria?

  That's such a different thing, because like, I see my patients weekly, right? And for a full hour every week, so there's a lot of intensity there, but

• 4:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is different.

• 4:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Most of them I've only known for a year. A few of them were return patients from when I was at the same hospital on practicum a few years ago. So there's like a depth there, but it's a shorter period of time. You see so many more patients than I do. But you've known some of them, like you said, for 20 years. You've seen their kids grow up. You've seen, you know, massive life changes.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Incredible.

• 4:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, you know, it is, it is a bit intense. All, my patients have been so supportive, though. They really have been great, you know, in terms of congratulating me on retiring and everything. Then they get a little anxious, like, who's gonna, who am I gonna follow up with? But we have, like, it's easy, because we have a, a huge practice of Yale experts, you know, so they'll be fine.

• 5:04Cara Santa Maria?

  So you can sort of transfer them to other practitioners in your own kind of practice. Whereas, uh, most of my clients, I am referring to community practitioners. Because there's just, you know, there's, there's no options. So, some of them take breaks, some people say, you know, this is, I want to take a break from therapy and kind of work on being my own therapist for a while, and then others are like, no, no, I need to find somebody right now. So a big part of that week is me doing a lot of research and, and writing a lot of referrals, yeah.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 5:32Speaker 03

  Well, Steve, you have to remind them that they can still, you know, interact with you, just become a patron of the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, which is very easy to do if you go to our homepage.

• 5:41Speaker 02

  Never cross the streams.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  I mean-

• 5:44Cara Santa Maria?

  You really don't.

• 5:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, but you can now.

• 5:47Cara Santa Maria?

  I have a few who listen on their own, but I would never tell them, like-

• 5:51Speaker 02

  Never bring it up.

• 5:53Speaker 03

  Nor do I.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  Some, some patients bring it up with me.

• 5:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  And that's fine. They're like, oh, that's, that's nice, you know? But I, yeah, I would obviously never, never bring that up.

• 6:01Cara Santa Maria?

  I always, I have that conversation at the beginning of therapy too, where, because when you're practicing in a community, there's a chance you will see people in situations outside of the clinic. And so I often will have conversations about what do we do if we run into each other in public? Because as somebody's therapist, I would never, ever announce that that is my relationship with them.

• 6:24Speaker 03

  Right. Like, just like, I can never reveal who my tax clients are.

• 6:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Totally. But they can say it. So I always tell them, if you see me somewhere, and you walk up to me and start talking, and you share with your friends, you know, our relationship, great, I will converse with you. But if you don't sort of do it first, I will pretend like I don't know you. And that's not me.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  That's to protect your privacy.

• 6:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's to protect your privacy, exactly.

• 6:48Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, you know, for a while, I, I was engaging with three large populations of people that I was basically acquaintances with, right? You know, work, skepticism, and LARPing. And it was just hundreds of people. And I would see somebody that I was like just barely acquainted with in the wild.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  And I'm like, okay. Are they a LARP or skeptic or a patient?

• 7:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, how do I know this person?

• 7:16Speaker 02

  Like, I know I recognize them. Obviously, like, my frequent flyer patients, like, patients I've seen a lot. I have no trouble recognizing them. But it's like, somebody I've seen once or twice, like, a year ago. Like, I know I recognize that I recognize them, but like, without context, like, no context, just out in like, in a store or something. Sometimes it was hard for me to remember how I knew them, you know?

• 7:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  Hey, Steve. And they're like, oh, how do I know you?

• 7:41Speaker 03

  Neurology. Which circle on the Venn diagram?

• 7:44Bob Novella?

  Imagine, yeah, imagine having prosopagnosia.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 7:47Bob Novella?

  Yeah. Increase that by an order of magnitude.

• 7:50Cara Santa Maria?

  I guess you just tell everybody and then it makes it easier.

• 7:52Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that's true. They know you well enough. They're gonna know that.

• 7:56Speaker 03

  I still say there should be like a, when the smart glasses finally do become a thing that people adapt to, there should be something in which it puts a hello, my name is tag on the person. You know, that way you know exactly who you're speaking to at any given time.

• 8:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, kind of like, did you guys ever watch Veep back in the day?

• 8:14Speaker 03

  I'm familiar with the series.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  A little bit.

• 8:16Cara Santa Maria?

  He didn't watch Veep? Yeah, Julie Louis-Dreyfus. So it, well, it's not gonna resonate for you, but it's a podcast. So a lot of people listening will have watched Veep. Yeah, she has, she has, you know, a bag man, and he just, he's constantly whispering in her ear every time she walks up to somebody. Oh, this is Senator so and so. He loves to play golf, you know? And then she's like, okay, Gary, I know.

• 8:38Speaker 03

  So that happens.

• 8:38Cara Santa Maria?

  That would be so helpful.

• 8:39Speaker 03

  That's a real thing. Sure.

• 8:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah. How could you keep track of all those people if you work in politics?

• 8:43Speaker 03

  So we.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  Oh, forget about it.

• 8:44Speaker 03

  Right. So eventually, technology will become that. Right? Your AI whatever will recognize the person and whisper it in your ear. That's Joe Smith.

• 8:53Bob Novella?

  Imagine if you have, if you have Alzheimer's, it would be a boon. My god.

• 8:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, that would actually be really helpful. Yeah, if you were struggling.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  Technology is great. It's great for people who have mild to moderate dementia. Think about GPS. GPS keeps people driving for a lot longer.

• 9:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's true.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  All right, Bob, you're going to get us started with a quickie.

• 9:15Bob Novella?

  Thank you, Steve. This is your quickie with Bob. All right, I specifically decided to go with a slightly encouraging news item this time, just to make me feel minutely less like we're all doomed. And so this helped me for a little while. So, OK, I'm sure many of you have heard about a scary climate scenario about the shutdown of the Atlantic conveyor belt system. You may know it by its more technical name, the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, a little bit of a mouthful, A-M-O-C. So this refers to the system of currents in the Atlantic that transports rising warm water to the north and sinking cool water to the south. And it sounds kind of like simple and basic, but this is really an important factor in global weather systems.

• 10:00Bob Novella?

  If this is shut down, it could wreak havoc. It could not only change global rain patterns, it could dramatically cool Europe, which is the big fear that people talk about. It could warm the rest of the world, and it could also, I found this out today, it could also raise sea levels off the American East Coast. So, yeah, this would not be good. This would not be good at all. So, and there have been studies in the past that have said that, yeah, this could happen, you know, any time now, you know, a couple of decades, next month. I mean, there's some really pessimistic studies out there that really scared a lot of people. So now we've got a new study published in Nature, which describes computer simulations from 34 different climate models that were run to examine specifically extreme climate change possibilities.

• 10:44Bob Novella?

  And to bottom line it, according to the lead author, Jonathan Baker, an oceanographer at the Met Office, not one simulation predicted these currents collapsing before 2100.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  That's awesome.

• 10:57Bob Novella?

  So that's kind of really good right there, especially when you were thinking, yeah, this could happen, you know, in a decade, or one specific study said a few decades. Still, kind of close. The earlier simulations that predicted a collapse soon, they were based on this conveyor belt, as it's referred to, stopping because the Arctic waters were no longer would be sinking. And going south due to all the melted freshwater, like because you've got a lot of freshwater melting like say from Greenland and it's heading into the into the ocean and that's going to inhibit and potentially to stop this conveyor belt, this water sinking and then and then going south.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, because the saltwater, the salinity makes it heavier and causes it to sink.

• 11:41Bob Novella?

  Right. So the the new bit here, though, is something that I guess wasn't fully appreciated by by scientists was that there was a second water pump engine, I guess you could call it, in the Antarctic where the winds pull up the cold water from the deep and that they say can keep this whole conveyor belt system going for a while. Basically, that's what will prevent it from potentially stopping in a few decades to like, you know, you know, eight decades, maybe nine decades or or more. So that's the reassuring bit. All right. That's the kind of like, oh, yeah, okay, nice. That's nice. Now, the caveats, of course, there's some caveats. This could still happen later, obviously, after 2100. It could certainly happen.

• 12:26Bob Novella?

  And this isn't infallible. I mean, it could happen earlier, but it has happened in the past. So this, you know, this could definitely happen at some point. Lead author Baker also warns that he's like, this is no green light for complacency. The AMOC is very likely to weaken this century and that brings its own major climate impacts. And so what does that mean? That means that there probably will be crop losses this this century. And stocks of fish will also be heavily impacted to a certain degree. But there probably won't be, you know, Europe going into a deep freeze this century as as a lot of the headlines

• 13:06Bob Novella?

  regarding this have said in the past. So, yeah, so it's it's not as imminently bad from this specific point of view from this with this specific thing. Because as we know, there's lots of other crazy climate change things happening unrelated to this. This is just one of the ones that has that has grabbed a lot of people's attention because, yeah, Europe would have been, you know, deeply impacted. So that's good. Take that for what it's worth. And maybe it'll cheer you up for a few minutes.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  We'll take what we can get.

• 13:34Bob Novella?

  Yeah, take what you can get. So this has been your conveyor belt quickie with Bob. Back to you, Steve.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  One thing, though, I wonder, Bob, at what point does it become inevitable, even if it hasn't happened yet? Is there a point in a return or is it, did that go into that at all?

• 13:48Bob Novella?

  Yeah, no, it didn't. It didn't. Um, I didn't see those, those specifics.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Bob.

• 13:53Bob Novella?

  Hi, man.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  All right, Kara, tell us about this measles outbreak in Texas. What's going on?

• 13:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 14:00Speaker 03

  You said measles, not weasels, right?

• 14:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Nope, measles, much more deadly than weasels. Let's talk, before we talk about what, what's the latest in Texas, let's talk about measles kind of on the whole. Because even though most everybody knows, you know, the term measles and they've seen pictures of what measles looks like. Most of us have not in our lifetimes had any real connection.

• 14:22Speaker 03

  It's more of a mid 20th century phenomenon than a late 20th century or early 21st.

• 14:27Cara Santa Maria?

  And now it is still globally a big deal, but we have cheap and easy vaccination now, which, uh, according to the World Health Organization, actually averted more than 60 million deaths between 2000 and 2023.

• 14:40Bob Novella?

  Oh, really? Vaccines saving that many millions? Really? Isn't that nice?

• 14:46Cara Santa Maria?

  So, so what is measles? Because even though measles manifest and we're most used to thinking of measles as a rash, right? That's what we usually see in our minds when we think of measles. We think of the measles rash. But measles is an airborne disease, so it's a viral infection and it is one of the most contagious diseases on the planet. And so how do we measure that? Well, a little kind of background, you guys have heard the term R naught. The basic reproduction number, R zero, sometimes referred to as R naught. Yeah. So the basic reproduction number, it usually has a range because we talk about both, or I should say the reproduction number has a range. We can talk about the basic and we can talk about the effective reproduction number.

• 15:28Cara Santa Maria?

  So anytime you see kind of a publication talking about the R naught of a disease, you're going to see a range. And that's because on the low end, we're talking about in sort of ideal conditions where there isn't much susceptibility in the. The general public and on the high end, we're talking about situations where vaccination numbers are low or there are a lot of susceptible people for another reason. So I just want to pick a few at random here. The 2014 Ebola breakout, the R naught was between 1.51 and 2.53. And what that number actually represents is how many people, a single infected person, are likely to infect.

• 16:05Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 16:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, so a single person with Ebola in 2014 was likely to infect between one and a half and two and a half people. Okay, seasonal flu, 0.9 to 2.1, right? You got the flu, you're around somebody who either is or is not vaccinated, you are likely to infect somewhere around one or two people with your flu. Measles, 12 to 18.

• 16:26Speaker 03

  Whoa.

• 16:27Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 16:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Measles has one of the highest R naughts of any disease. Smallpox is five to seven. Polio is five to seven. Measles is 12 to 18. And to give you an example of how infectious this is beyond the R naught, if you are in a room and you have measles and you sneeze or cough on a surface, somebody can walk into that room two hours later, touch that surface.

• 16:50Speaker 03

  Yikes.

• 16:50Cara Santa Maria?

  And get the disease.

• 16:51Speaker 03

  Hangs around a while.

• 16:52Cara Santa Maria?

  It's a very, very contagious airborne virus.

• 16:55Speaker 02

  Damn.

• 16:56Bob Novella?

  Is there an extended shedding period? Is that why there's so many people?

• 16:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Well.

• 17:00Bob Novella?

  Can get it? Or is it just like fly everywhere?

• 17:02Cara Santa Maria?

  COVID is only 1.5 to 3.5 compared to measles. So it's, yes, you do shed the virus for a while. I mean, as long as you're infectious, you are shedding. But it's that the viral particles themselves are just really, really robust, right, Steve?

• 17:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, they hang out for a while.

• 17:16Cara Santa Maria?

  They hang out for a while and, and your body, if you are naive to this disease, your, your body is very susceptible to this virus. And so that's why vaccines are so incredibly important. Well, when we look at kind of across the globe, according to the World Health Organization, even though we do have that vaccine available and even though more than 60 million deaths have been averted over the past like 20 plus years, in the year 2023, there were around 107,500 measles deaths globally.

• 17:48Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 17:49Cara Santa Maria?

  We're not just talking about infections, deaths. Now, most of those- One hundred and seven thousand five hundred. Yeah. Most of those occurred in unvaccinated individuals or in children who were under vaccinated because they were under the age of five, meaning that they didn't have both doses of their vaccine. When we look at the global proportion of children getting a first dose of a measles vaccine, according to the WHO, that number was eighty three in twenty twenty three. Back in twenty nineteen, it was eighty six. So we're seeing that these rates are dropping globally. But when I say globally, I'm talking about globally. I'm talking about both developed nations and nations where vaccine campaigns are difficult,

• 18:31Cara Santa Maria?

  where there is a lot of poverty and where it's very hard to get everybody these lifesaving medicines. Now let's cut to the United States of America. Now, don't get me wrong, we have our problems with poverty, but we are one of the richest countries on the planet. Right? Can we all agree on that?

• 18:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:47Speaker 03

  Uh, yes.

• 18:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Let's talk about vaccine rates here. So where do you think that we are netting out when it comes to, for example, let's say kindergarten children?

• 18:57Speaker 02

  I think eighty percent. No, I think.

• 19:00Cara Santa Maria?

  No, it's much higher than that.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  Overall, I think, I don't, I know it's ninety five percent just taking all comers, like just the population as a whole.

• 19:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, that's what we need.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:10Cara Santa Maria?

  So herd immunity happens with measles around ninety five percent.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  Ninety five percent.

• 19:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Because measles is so contagious. We need about ninety five percent. And back in the twenty nineteen, twenty twenty school year, uh, it was about ninety five point two percent among kindergarteners in America. Twenty twenty three, twenty twenty four, it had dropped to ninety two point seven percent.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 19:28Cara Santa Maria?

  So we're already below the necessary herd immunity to prevent vulnerable children from getting sick. And that's, that's dangerous. That's worrisome. Now, let's talk about what happened recently in Texas. Um, I have the most recent numbers, I think by the CDC, let me just make sure. No, by the Texas Health and Human Services, they publish their numbers on Tuesdays and Fridays. We're recording this on a Wednesday, so as of yesterday, there were one hundred fifty nine identified cases since late January, twenty two. Hospitalizations and one death in a school aged child who lived in the core outbreak region who was not vaccinated. And this is just in Texas. We've already seen a confirmed

• 20:13Cara Santa Maria?

  case of measles at LAX from an unvaccinated child who contracted the disease because there was a risk of contraction because we knew that somebody with measles was passing through LAX. So where did it start? Like, why is this happening in Texas? Have you guys heard what's, you know, what the initial outbreak was?

• 20:35Speaker 02

  Mennonite community.

• 20:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Maybe up to date on this. Yeah, a Mennonite community.

• 20:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:38Cara Santa Maria?

  And so what we saw in Texas was that a community in Gaines County of Mennonites, who historically have just low vaccination rates and tend not to, you know, seek healthcare services. An outbreak took place there. Within that community, that county's kindergarten population vaccine rate, which seems to be a measure that a lot of people are using because this does spread so quickly in schoolchildren, was 82%, significantly lower than the necessary 95% to prevent a local or sadly even larger outbreak. And so the question here is like, what can we do? Well, first of all, you can make sure that your MMR vaccines

• 21:22Cara Santa Maria?

  are current. Make sure that you are vaccinated because if we are not at 95 plus, the entire community is at risk.

• 21:31Speaker 03

  And Kara, a question for you there. If people don't know if they've had their full dose of MMR, is it okay to just go get it and be safe about it?

• 21:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:39Cara Santa Maria?

  There you go. I was like, that's a question for Steve. And he says, yeah. I didn't know if with MMR, you can test hyders, can you? Is there a way to know if you're?

• 21:47Speaker 02

  I think if there's a doubt, they just give you the vaccine.

• 21:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, if there's a doubt. I've done that before with the flu vaccine where I just didn't remember if I had gotten it already that season. And I remember asking my doctor and they're like, just get another one. It's like, really not a big deal.

• 21:59Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 21:59Cara Santa Maria?

  So you're not doing this all the time, you know? It is important to be up to date on that. Why do we need herd immunity? Right? This is an easy question.

• 22:07Speaker 03

  To protect the people who are vulnerable and who cannot get the shots that they need to protect themselves.

• 22:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. There are always going to be members of our population who are either too young or have some sort of disease profile or genetic condition that precludes them from being able to get a vaccine, or they're allergic to components of the vaccine, right? There's always going to be people who, for legitimate medical reasons, can't get vaccinated because the risk is too high. Now, for most of us, that's not the case. And for those very, very vulnerable people, if we don't do our part and maintain vaccination status, they are at risk. And, you know, you can die from this disease. It's a deadly disease. Okay, so, let's talk about what's going on in Washington right now.

• 22:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Who, pray tell, is our Director of Health and Human Services?

• 23:02Speaker 03

  Oh, no.

• 23:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Or the Secretary, I should say.

• 23:03Speaker 02

  Captain Ding Dong.

• 23:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

• 23:06Speaker 03

  He's a captain now?

• 23:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Apparently. He's a secretary.

• 23:10Speaker 02

  That's our new name for him.

• 23:13Cara Santa Maria?

  And so, let's talk a little bit about some of the things that he has been saying lately, because he did backtrack a little, and he did kind of start to say like, "Yeah, you should probably be vaccinated." But in an interview just yesterday on Fox News, he said that, let's see, the federal government is going to ship doses of vitamin A to Gaines County.

• 23:36Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 23:37Cara Santa Maria?

  They're going to help arrange ambulance rides. And, let's see, although he said that vaccines, quote, "do prevent infection," so he did acknowledge that, thank you, and he did recommend that unvaccinated people get shots, he said, "But this is also a very personal decision." No, it's not. This is a, this is a community-level decision, right? We're talking about public health measures here. And then he said that doctors have seen, quote, "very, very good results treating measles with a steroid called budesonide, an antibiotic called clarithromycin, and cod liver oil."

• 24:18Speaker 03

  Uh-oh.

• 24:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Because of the high doses of vitamin D. And now, there is some evidence to support that vitamin A can be given in severe measles cases to help mitigate some of the impact of the disease. There is no evidence whatsoever that cod liver oil is a legitimate or evidence-based treatment.

• 24:43Speaker 03

  Right, that's like 19th century kind of thinking.

• 24:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Completely, completely. I mean, this is not that different from the ivermectin conversations that we had in the past, the, you know, shine a light on the inside of the body conversations, the bleach conversations. I mean, this is grasping at straws in an effort, I think, to calm a very scared public because now we're dealing with an after-the-fact result, right? Measles prevent, or measles vaccines prevent the disease and they save lives. After the fact, yes, we can try to treat these people, but there's only so much that we can do. And so I think that this is an effort to say, don't worry, don't worry, we're all going to be okay. But unfortunately, what needs to be happening frequently and

• 25:27Cara Santa Maria?

  firmly is a recommendation by our public health leaders that we do what is evidence-based to prevent disease.

• 25:35Speaker 03

  Vaccination.

• 25:36Cara Santa Maria?

  And that is get the damn vaccine. It saves lives.

• 25:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's tough to penetrate these kinds of communities. There are pockets of people like this all around the country, actually, who are similar.

• 25:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Completely.

• 25:47Speaker 03

  Like there's Somalis in Minnesota who have these kinds of issues that come up. I know the Hasidic Jews in New York often have these kinds of issues because of, you know, and just the nature of, of these people in these, these groups.

• 26:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Beliefs, yeah.

• 26:02Speaker 03

  They, they don't, they tend to keep among themselves more, right? They inward rather than outward and among the, among the others. But, but that doesn't mean anything in germ theory, right?

• 26:13Cara Santa Maria?

  No.

• 26:14Speaker 03

  You know, you're still, it's all still there hanging around, even if they, even if they try to isolate themselves to certain extents from other parts of the general population.

• 26:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and that's why historically, we would see these little pockets and these little breakouts, because historically, for a lot of recent American history, you're right, there are vulnerable communities where there were lower than necessary vaccine rates due to, you know, religious belief or cultural beliefs. But the general population, the general public was at or above herd immunity. If the general population drops below herd immunity, now these small and controllable epicenters of disease can very quickly grow to epidemic or even pandemic status. And that is my fear when we have

• 27:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Government sanctioned rhetoric that is not clear and firm about the necessity of vaccination.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I really don't see this as RFK Junior like backpedaling on vaccines or being reasonable.

• 27:19Cara Santa Maria?

  No, he's not.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  He's being coy. He's doing what he does, you know?

• 27:23Cara Santa Maria?

  He's always done that.

• 27:24Speaker 02

  It's a plausible deniability, but he's framing it with the dog whistle of it's a personal choice, you know, like, so, yeah, the anti-vaxxers know what that means. And then immediately pivoting to nutritional-based interventions, right? Which are not in any way adequate. These are like what we would call adjunctive care at best, meaning that, yeah, it might help you fight off the infection a little bit better or mitigate some of the aspects of whatever, but it's not a cure, it's not really a treatment. It doesn't prevent the infection, it doesn't prevent spread. It is not a replacement for the vaccine.

• 27:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Not at all.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  Not at all.

• 27:59Cara Santa Maria?

  And this is amidst a public health crisis because you can go back and look at the rhetoric that RFK Junior has had over many, many years. That's blatantly anti-vax rhetoric, to the extent that not only is he saying, "Don't get vaccinated," he's saying things like, "This is a public health crisis, vaccines are the cause of these diseases." Yeah, I mean, I watched an interview with him where he was, you know, pardon my French, like shitting all over the Gardasil vaccine. He was talking about how Gardasil is the cause of all these health... Well, I'm sorry, that's like personally insulting to me because if I was lucky enough to get the Gardasil vaccine when I was young, it did not exist when I was young.

• 28:42Cara Santa Maria?

  If I was lucky enough to have access of it, I would not have gotten cervical cancer.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  Oh, jeez.

• 28:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Right? Like, we see, we know the real outcomes of this and it is just fundamentally dangerous for him to be spreading this rhetoric. And we all knew this was coming, but now that he is in a position of authority and his rhetoric is now sanctioned, I am really scared of what we're going to start seeing published on like official CDC pages. So yeah, that's where we're at. Get your vaccines, people. I am not a physician. I cannot give out health advice, but I am more than comfortable saying, "Get your damn vaccines."

• 29:18Speaker 03

  You're here.

• 29:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. Kennedy's anti-vaccine rhetoric has a body count attached to it. Like, people, like, remember the Samoa measles outbreak?

• 29:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  That killed more than 80 people. He was, he was there, you know?

• 29:30Cara Santa Maria?

  He was the architect of that.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  Fear mongering about measles vaccine. Okay.

• 29:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Devastating.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  Jay?

• 29:35Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  Tell us about reintroducing wolves into the wild.

• 29:40Speaker 03

  Burfee.

• 29:40Speaker 02

  You've guys, now, we've talked about this. Burfee.

• 29:45Speaker 03

  Come on, get it right, get it out now.

• 29:47Cara Santa Maria?

  So good, yeah.

• 29:48Jay Novella?

  We've mentioned this on the show. I know that I'm a big fan of, of this research and, and, you know, something that we've talked about here and there. We never really did a deep dive on it. And I was very interested because, you know, we can get into some specifics about, you know, what, what reintroducing wolves actually did and its overall impact. So what are we talking about here? So in 1995 and 96, wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park. They were not there for 70 years. And the decision to reintroduce the wolves, when that came, you know, the reality was that there were, these are, you know, apex predators. And it was controversial at the time. But since then, their impact on the park's ecosystem

• 30:31Jay Novella?

  has been nothing short of transformative. They did a study recently published in Global Ecology and Conservation, and it quantifies just how, how much of an impact the result was of bringing them back in. There's something called a trophic cascade, which I'll define for you in a moment. This is offering some of the most compelling evidence to date that shows that restoring these large carnivores can reshape the entire ecosystem. So a trophic cascade, this is something that occurs when predators indirectly influence plant life by controlling herbivore populations and behavior. The, the grittier way to say it is that wolves kill other animals that eat

• 31:13Jay Novella?

  plants. And there is a downstream effect of wolves not being there. So the- Absence of wolves in this case led to unchecked elk populations. So all the baby elk were growing up to be adults. There was lots of elk eating. And what this did was it, it, there was over grazing happening of plant life that grows along the banks of rivers, streams, lakes. You know, pretty much any body of water. They particularly like to eat willow shrubs, which I've heard tastes delicious. So the loss of these shrubs, it had a far reaching effect. And this included a decline in beaver populations that rely on willows for food and dam construction. So you can see right there, you know, there's a little bit of story happening already, like, you know, wolves go.

• 31:56Jay Novella?

  You know, the, the elks eat all these, the, the willow shrubs and a bunch of other stuff that grows near the water. And, you know, other animals are being affected immediately. So to measure the impact of the wolf's reintroduction, researchers conducted a 20 year study from 2001 to 2020, which tracked changes in willow crown volume, uh, which is a measure of total above ground biomass. Right? They used a predictive model based on plant height and canopy spread to estimate willow growth over time. And the results were amazing. So willow biomass increased by, guess, guess how much it increased by, guys?

• 32:31Cara Santa Maria?

  A lot.

• 32:33Speaker 03

  A ton?

• 32:34Jay Novella?

  I like it a lot. All right. It increased by 1,500%.

• 32:39Speaker 02

  So 15 times.

• 32:40Speaker 03

  Whoa. That's measurable.

• 32:42Jay Novella?

  A level of growth that exceeded 82% of the previously documented trophic cascades worldwide. Right?

• 32:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow.

• 32:49Jay Novella?

  So, you know, massive impact. That data suggests that the return of wolves altered elk behavior, causing them to eat fewer plants along riverbanks. Instead of, you know, them continuously grazing on young willows in one area, the elk became more cautious, which means they were super scared. And they moved around frequently and they avoided the areas with the wolfies. So as a result, willow populations rebounded, which was great. It was, it was restoring habitats for birds, small mammals and the beavers. And the beaver recovery, it was particularly significant because beavers, beavers are very important to riverbank ecosystems because they build these dams and these,

• 33:31Jay Novella?

  these dams create wetlands and they provide homes and food for many plants and animals. So their return helps stabilize stream banks and moderate water flow and improve overall ecosystem health, which I think is just fantastic to see that the animals have an impact on the health of the land, which is just a really cool thought. So they also studied the highlights of the importance of long-term monitoring, right? It's a big deal, like the long-term monitoring revealed so much in this study. And while there are some ecological changes that occur rapidly, the plant communities respond more slowly. And it was an important part of this study. They were showing that it could also often take decades to really show what happens to these plants.

• 34:15Jay Novella?

  Like they're calling it like revealing their full trajectory. The findings suggest that measuring short-term effects of predator reintroduction really could underestimate their long-term ecological significance, right? You could see, oh, look at these short-term effects, but if you don't look five, 10, 15, 20 years later, you're not going to see all the changes that came after that. So fantastic stuff, guys. I'm very excited that this is happening and it continues to happen. And I think that we have a, definitely have a legitimate win here. Science like just completely kicked butt.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  Awesome. Now, we have the same problem on the east coast, like in the northeast, with deer are overpopulated because it'd be killed by the wolves, right? And that was like the large predator. So that causes the same problem. Deer overgraze the understory, right, in the forest? And that removes essentially an ecosystem for birds and for a lot of small critters. And also the deer are a huge population spreading the lime tick.

• 35:19Speaker 02

  I don't think there are any plans to reintroduce wolves in Connecticut in the northeast. The problem is just the density, the pop, the human population density is too great. But what is happening is that two species in particular are moving in to sort of fill the niche left by the wolves. One is the eastern coyote, uh, and which we're seeing more and more of. You know, I told you guys, I saw, saw one. I got a picture of one in my backyard.

• 35:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:46Speaker 02

  And I've seen him, I'm definitely seeing them more in recent years. And then also mountain lions are moving east. They are progressively moving east. We should let them, let them eat the deer.

• 35:56Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  Just stay out of their way, right? But, you know, we have to, we have to find a way to live with predators, not just wipe them out because this is what happens. When the control on the deer population is starvation, that's not good. They've eaten all the food.

• 36:12Speaker 03

  Right.

• 36:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, that, and that's definitely going to have negative downstream, you know, ecological effects. So anyway, this is great. I don't, you know, but it's, this is Yellowstone. We're having the problem everywhere and we have to think about how to fix it. Um, all right. Thank you, Jay.

• 36:28Jay Novella?

  Yep.

• 36:29Speaker 02

  So, uh, who here remembers what CRISPR stands for?

• 36:35Speaker 03

  Oh, Bob does.

• 36:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, Bob does.

• 36:38Speaker 03

  Bob's good with this.

• 36:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Palindromic repeats.

• 36:40Speaker 02

  That's the last two words.

• 36:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, let me work backward here. Cuh, what's the first word?

• 36:46Speaker 02

  Clustered.

• 36:47Speaker 03

  Clustered, regularly, wait, interspersed.

• 36:50Speaker 02

  Interspaced, short, short palindromic.

• 36:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:53Speaker 02

  Clustered, regularly interspaced, short palindromic repeats. Well, I got bad news for you.

• 36:59Speaker 03

  Oh, they're changing the name? Oh, no.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  No, you have to memorize a new acronym for a, a new genetic engineering, uh, method.

• 37:10Speaker 03

  Whoa.

• 37:11Cara Santa Maria?

  No, that's good news. That's good news.

• 37:12Speaker 02

  Wait, is it better than CRISPR?

• 37:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, is it like, uh, CRISPR?

• 37:14Speaker 02

  One's called, well, hang on, it might be. This one's called TIGR.

• 37:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, that's easy.

• 37:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's easier. It's only four letters instead of, instead of six. And it stands for tandem interspaced guide RNA.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  Tiger.

• 37:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's easier.

• 37:30Speaker 02

  Tandem interspace guide RNA. So there's a couple of interesting aspects to this. One is how they discovered it and two is the properties that it has. So let's talk about how they discovered it first. So you know where CRISPR comes from?

• 37:42Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 37:42Bob Novella?

  Bacteria, yeah.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's basically.

• 37:44Bob Novella?

  Two women discovered it, right?

• 37:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's an adaptive immune system evolved by bacteria. It's how they, because you know, viruses attack bacteria, insert their DNA and then the adaptive immune system will splice out the viral, you know, DNA that was spliced into the bacteria. So it's part of their adaptive immune system. And it does other things as well. It's more complicated than that. But so researchers like, okay, the CRISPR system is probably not the only adaptive immune system that has evolved in bacteria or archaea, right? Maybe there are other ones out there waiting to be discovered. So they went looking for it and they did it, and it wasn't an accident.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  They did it by looking through iterative, structural and sequence homology based mining.

• 38:35Speaker 03

  What's that acronym?

• 38:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, so they are starting with.

• 38:38Bob Novella?

  Or initialism.

• 38:39Speaker 02

  They're starting with the guide RNA interaction domain of CAS9. And then they basically looked for similar sequences and then, you know, iterating it, looking for things that are close enough to it, homology based, to say, maybe it has similar function. And that's how they find the TIGER TAS or Tiger TAS system, right? So CAS is CRISPR associated protein, right? CAS.

• 39:05Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 39:05Speaker 02

  So Tiger TAS is Tiger with a Tiger associated protein. The CRISPR or Tiger, what they do, they're RNA guided system. So they have a piece of RNA that will find a matching sequence of DNA. And then the CAS, in the case of CRISPR, or TAS, in the case of Tiger, will then, that's the payload. That will have, that protein will, for example, splice the DNA at the location that was identified by the RNA guided, you know, Tiger.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  Right? So it's basically the same as CRISPR. You have an RNA-guided sequence in order to find the right place on the DNA. And then you have a Tiger-associated protein to do stuff like splicing the DNA at that, at that location. So great. So they, they use this homology-based mining thing to look in bacteria and find another version of CRISPR. The question is, are there any advantages to Tiger than CRISPR? And there are several.

• 40:07Bob Novella?

  Several.

• 40:08Speaker 02

  Yes. So one is, I'll save the best for last, but one is that Tiger is PAM-independent. So I'm throwing another acronym at you there. PAM stands for Protospacer Adjacent Motifs. Protospacer Adjacent Motifs.

• 40:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, those are always getting in the way.

• 40:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, these are short DNA sequences, usually about six base pairs. And the thing is, CRISPR requires these PAMs, these Protospacer Adjacent Motifs. It can only, its RNA-guided, you know, function only works if there's a PAM nearby. And this is how the bacteria that use CRISPR identify self-DNA from non-self-DNA.

• 40:52Cara Santa Maria?

  And are there PAMs, like, everywhere? Or not really?

• 40:54Speaker 02

  Apparently, but not everywhere, everywhere. So it does limit the targets for CRISPR. It is limiting, because the Cas9 won't function without the PAM, right? But Tiger is PAM-independent. It could target anywhere. It doesn't need a PAM. This makes it way more versatile than CRISPR, right? It could, it could target its task anywhere on the genome, not just next to a Protospacer Adjacent Motif. So more versatile.

• 41:23Bob Novella?

  Okay, that's one. You got two more?

• 41:25Speaker 02

  Okay, yep. The, two more. I do have two more. Well, the other one is that while CRISPR uses only one strand of the DNA to find the, the target sequence, Tiger uses both strands. And what that means-

• 41:39Bob Novella?

  More accurate?

• 41:40Speaker 02

  It's more accurate. It will have less off-site mistakes, basically.

• 41:45Bob Novella?

  Well, that's good.

• 41:46Speaker 02

  So that's good, too.

• 41:47Jay Novella?

  That's amazing.

• 41:48Speaker 02

  Now-

• 41:48Bob Novella?

  Because that was a, you know, a problem.

• 41:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, that, that's a limiting factor, you know? Uh, they did find a way to alter CRISPR to make it faster, but, but more error-prone, or slower, but less error-prone. So they do know how that works. But still, it's a trade-off. And there's no way around it. Okay, at least so far. Now, here's the big, I think, advantage. Those two are pretty, pretty solid. Those are pretty solid advantages. Pam independent and using and more accurate, less, less off-target errors. But the TAS proteins are only about a quarter of the size of the cas proteins. They're much smaller. Why is this?

• 42:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Get them everywhere.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  Why is this a big advantage?

• 42:33Bob Novella?

  Delivery mechanism. It could get more places.

• 42:36Cara Santa Maria?

  And you can get it in easier.

• 42:37Speaker 02

  You get them in easier. So the, what's the big limiting factor to using CRISPR as a therapeutic?

• 42:44Cara Santa Maria?

  How do you get it to the target?

• 42:46Speaker 02

  How do you get it to the target?

• 42:47Bob Novella?

  The vector, the vector.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  The vector, right. The vector is the problem.

• 42:51Bob Novella?

  Vector's always been a problem.

• 42:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:53Bob Novella?

  What's your vector, Victor?

• 42:55Speaker 02

  The two FDA indications are both for blood disorders, you know, thalassemia and sickle cell, because you basically take the cells to the CRISPR, right? You take out the bone marrow, you CRISPR it in vitro, and then you reintroduce it, you retransplant it back into the patient. But if you have to get CRISPR to a population of cells in a living organism, you need a vector. And the vectors are problematic. That's like the limiting factor. They work, and we have some decent vectors. But one of the big trade-offs is that the best vectors have a real significant limitation on the size of the payload, right? So like, one good one is ADeno-associated vectors, right?

• 43:37Speaker 02

  AAVs. This is a viral vector. But they have, they can only deliver relatively small payloads. So having a more compact gene editing system therefore gives us more options in terms of vectors. And in fact, gives us the ability to use some of the better vectors that are limited by small delivery sizes. So this could open up new applications because of more versatility with the vector.

• 44:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Nice.

• 44:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, so for, for, maybe it doesn't make that big of a difference for research, but definitely for therapeutics.

• 44:13Cara Santa Maria?

  How small is it?

• 44:14Speaker 02

  That could be huge. It's a quarter the size of Cas.

• 44:17Cara Santa Maria?

  How big was Cas? I could...

• 44:18Speaker 02

  They're pretty big.

• 44:19Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm assuming Cas doesn't cross the blood brain barrier.

• 44:22Speaker 02

  I mean, I think they're definitely too big for that, but yeah, it's, it's...

• 44:24Cara Santa Maria?

  But do you think, is the new one still too big for that?

• 44:27Speaker 02

  Um, don't know.

• 44:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, that's interesting.

• 44:30Speaker 02

  But again, that's more about the vector than anything else.

• 44:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, right, right.

• 44:33Speaker 02

  So, yeah, so it's, you know, it's a, it's a new version of CRISPR, you know, the Tiger task system. And I, you know, it's really just presented, it's hard to know how it's all going to work out, you know, maybe a few years before we really see what potential it has. But there's three big advantages over CRISPR, you know, that could make a significant difference, especially for therapeutics. You know, research-wise, it may not be that big a deal, but for therapeutics, having fewer off-site effects, and a smaller payload size, and more versatility, those are three huge things.

• 45:08Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that's big.

• 45:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:09Bob Novella?

  But Steve, what about, I remember we talked about a while ago, about a different type of CRISPR. It was called CRISPR interference, which basically silenced the gene without altering it. Is this amenable to that?

• 45:22Speaker 02

  That's all about the Cas, right? So that's all about the proteins that you attach to the CRISPR.

• 45:27Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 45:27Speaker 02

  They do different things. They could splice it, but they could also silence the gene or whatever. They could do different things. They could turn it off, they could turn it on. So, um, I, what I wonder is if, you know, like, how much of a leg up does that give us on figuring out a whole bunch of different task applications as well?

• 45:44Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 45:44Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 45:44Bob Novella?

  That, that always seemed to me to be the best version of CRISPR that I had heard about, because it's, you're not, you're not cutting, you're not cutting any, you're not messing with the DNA, you're just silencing it. And you could just unsilence it if, if there was, if there was a problem. You're not, you're not, you don't have to like, cut it again, and insert, insert it back in type of stuff. To me, that just seemed like, well, that's...

• 46:06Speaker 02

  For some applications, it's great. An on/off switch, basically, for genes. It's awesome.

• 46:10Bob Novella?

  Exactly.

• 46:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's great. Again, it depends on what you want to do. If you want to insert a transgene, that doesn't work. You need to be able to splice it, and then the repair, in the repair, it inserts the new gene.

• 46:21Bob Novella?

  Yeah. I guess it's more of just a, an extra tool in the, in the toolkit.

• 46:25Speaker 02

  Right, right. But I mean, genetic engineering, man, is ticking off so fast. It's like dizzy. It's hard to keep up with it.

• 46:30Bob Novella?

  I just, but I'm still waiting, you know, for the real, like, holy crap. That's what I want. When I want to read a news item about CRISPR or some CRISPR-like technology and be like, holy shit.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  I don't know. Curing sickle cell is pretty freaking awesome.

• 46:44Bob Novella?

  No, that, that, no, that's fantastic. That's fantastic. But, I mean, just, you know.

• 46:49Speaker 02

  I mean, what are you looking for? You want superpowers or?

• 46:51Bob Novella?

  I want superpowers. I want, I don't know. Well, I want Wolverine healing. I want, you know, you know, compressed morbidity in my lifespan. Something like that. Give me something cool. Really like, like world-changing.

• 47:03Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 47:04Bob Novella?

  I don't have too many more years left. I want something.

• 47:08Speaker 02

  Don't hold your breath. I mean, just curing more diseases will be fine, you know?

• 47:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. One day, Bob, you'll have one of those diseases.

• 47:14Speaker 03

  Bob, they're gonna, they'll have the pill for everything in about 30 years from now.

• 47:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, you know, it's like, again, the first time I really heard about monoclonal antibodies was like 30 years ago. And now, starting about five to 10 years ago, we're having this, everything now has a monoclonal antibody therapeutic. It's probably going to be the same way, wherein like, I don't know how fast the horizon's gonna be, but like 10, 20 years or so, suddenly there's gonna be like this flood of CRISPR slash Tiger, whatever therapeutics coming out. Would not surprise me.

• 47:48Cara Santa Maria?

  There'll be more by them too, I think. New names.

• 47:50Speaker 02

  Well, everyone, we're gonna take a quick break from our show to talk about our sponsor this week, Stash.

• 47:56Jay Novella?

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• 48:36Jay Novella?

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• 49:14Speaker 02

  All right, let's get back to the show.

• 49:17Speaker 02

  All right, Evan, tell us about a blood donor who saved millions of children.

• 49:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. This is a heck of a story and I'm kind of ashamed that I didn't know about this person before this. First, I'll give you the background. It's all about blood. Can't live without it and you can't live without it. We've talked about blood before on the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Remember blood type diets? You know, that's, that's still a thing, by the way.

• 49:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it is. People still fall for that.

• 49:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, oh my gosh.

• 49:50Cara Santa Maria?

  And here. I hear about it still in LA. It's embarrassing.

• 49:53Speaker 02

  Well, everything's in LA.

• 49:57Speaker 03

  It's a magnet for these kinds of things in a way. But no, blood itself. Every person on earth can be categorized into one of four major blood groups. A, B, O, and AB. I'm O negative.

• 50:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, are you?

• 50:14Speaker 03

  Yes, I'm the universal donor.

• 50:16Bob Novella?

  Jay, Steve, Jay, Steve and I are B positive.

• 50:20Speaker 03

  Right, of course, all three of you. That would make sense. And Kara?

• 50:23Cara Santa Maria?

  I think I'm B, but I don't remember.

• 50:26Speaker 03

  That's okay. You can have some of my O negative and you'll be fine.

• 50:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but you're screwed.

• 50:30Speaker 03

  I'm screwed because, good for you, not so good for me. I can only receive O negative. So that's a, you know, a smaller group of people or from, from which if I needed a transfusion, I have to have O negative. So that's, that, but hey, that's the way, that's the way it goes.

• 50:45Bob Novella?

  What, what, what blood type did Spock have?

• 50:49Speaker 03

  T negative.

• 50:50Speaker 02

  T negative, yeah.

• 50:51Bob Novella?

  Yes, good one, guys.

• 50:52Speaker 03

  And it was green.

• 50:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow, you guys are nerds.

• 50:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Nerds. Love it. Nerds.

• 50:59Speaker 03

  But uh.

• 51:00Speaker 02

  Nerd tangent.

• 51:01Speaker 03

  There's blood type, but there's another category in the world of blood that separates people. The RH factor or the Rhesus factor. I think we've mentioned that before. The RH factor refers to the presence or absence of the D antigen on the surface of red blood cells. And that determines whether someone is RH positive or RH negative. So if you have the D antigen protein, you are RH positive. And if you don't have it, you're RH negative.

• 51:28Speaker 02

  Evan, do you know how many blood group systems there are?

• 51:32Speaker 03

  Blood groups, oh my gosh, there are several.

• 51:34Bob Novella?

  There's dozens.

• 51:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a lot.

• 51:36Speaker 02

  Forty five right now.

• 51:37Speaker 03

  Oh, boy.

• 51:38Speaker 02

  Currently forty five different blood group systems.

• 51:40Cara Santa Maria?

  We have that many different ways to differentiate.

• 51:42Speaker 02

  Well, the ABO and the RH systems are just the biggest ones. So like if you're matching somebody for like a organ donation, you want to match as many of those blood group systems as possible.

• 51:51Speaker 03

  So the early days of transfusions must have been a nightmare.

• 51:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah, I'm sure people are just dying.

• 51:56Speaker 02

  They were.

• 51:57Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh.

• 51:57Speaker 02

  Unless you got lucky, they were just, yeah, they were just dying.

• 51:59Speaker 03

  Right? Oh, boy, talk.

• 52:01Speaker 02

  That's pretty sure that's how they discovered the ABO systems.

• 52:04Speaker 03

  That's a.

• 52:04Speaker 02

  Trying to do blood transplant.

• 52:06Cara Santa Maria?

  People still have, like, you can have RH incompatibility disease with your own fetus.

• 52:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:10Speaker 03

  And that's where we're going with this.

• 52:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay. Cool.

• 52:13Speaker 03

  In the US, approximately eighty five percent of the population is RH positive. Fifteen percent are RH negative. So I'm in that select company occupying the fifteen percent space. A person with RH negative blood can donate to a person with RH positive blood, as I said, no problem. But an RH positive person, when they donate to an RH negative person, there are the problems. On a very real and very troubling scenario is for women who are RH negative, who become pregnant with a fetus that is RH positive. If the baby's RH positive red blood cells get into the mother's RH negative bloodstream, her system will consider the blood cells generated by the fetus as an attack, foreign invaders. And the mother's immune system will get to work.

• 52:58Speaker 03

  It will create antibodies to destroy the baby's red blood cells. If the antibodies cross the placenta, it attacks the fetus and that results in some pretty awful results to the fetus, including permanent disabilities, stillbirth, brain damage and death. I mean, this is serious business. So

• 53:16Speaker 02

  Not always.

• 53:17Speaker 03

  Yep. Well, not always, but potentially.

• 53:20Speaker 02

  And that's, that's what happened with my, both my daughters. My wife, Jocelyn is, is RH negative. I'm RH positive and my girls are RH positive.

• 53:27Speaker 03

  And she received, did she receive the, uh, the treatment?

• 53:31Speaker 02

  So she had no problem with the first pregnancy, but then she was sort of triggered for the second one. And so the, the, the solution was just delivery. Like that sort of ends the problem. But, but, uh, my, my younger daughter had to spend a few days getting, uh,

• 53:46Speaker 03

  Was she treated for jaundice?

• 53:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. She had jaundice. She had to get treated for jaundice for a few days.

• 53:49Bob Novella?

  Billy Rubin.

• 53:50Speaker 03

  And yeah, so that's right, Steve. During the mother's first pregnancy, it tends to not be an issue because the, her immune system has not gone full bore, right? You, you'll, you'll bring the baby to term before the mother's immune system can fully wreak havoc on the fetus. It's the second child that you try to conceive that becomes the major risk. And this was, and gosh, it was this way forever. Right? Up until the 1950s, scientists finally discovered the cure by essentially hacking the immune system. Because there are some people, not many, but they're out there, whose blood contains high levels of a certain antibody called anti D immunoglobulin. And when that's injected into a pregnant woman, it can stop the mother's immune system from attacking the fetus's blood cell. So you

• 54:34Speaker 03

  give a mother a small dose of the antibody, too small to hurt the baby, but potent enough to prevent the mother's immune system from reacting full bore. And that effectively masks the fetus's red blood cells, making them invisible to the mother's immune system. It protects both the mother and it also protects the fetus because the anti D does not pass through and, uh, impact the fetus at all. Either the fetus remains safe, the mother remains safe and all is well. And that leads us to the news item, Steve, this week. There was a man who has been credited with saving millions of lives of babies due to his high levels of anti D in his blood. His name is James Harrison from Australia. And he was discovered early on in his life to have the rare anti-D.

• 55:16Speaker 03

  And for 70 years, or almost 70 years, Mr. Harrison donated blood like clockwork. Twice a week, every week since the 1950s, right up through the end of his life. He had donated his blood, but his life-

• 55:28Jay Novella?

  Can you do that twice a week?

• 55:30Speaker 02

  Apparently.

• 55:32Speaker 03

  We have a test, we have a test case. He died last week, age 88. So he's been described as a modern day hero, one of the single most impactful people who has been alive since the 1950s. Also described as the man with the golden arm. Yep, over 2 million, as many, probably 2.5 million children in Australia have been saved due to his donations. Quoting from Stephen Cornellson, CEO of the Australian Red Cross Lifeblood. "James was a remarkable, stoically kind and generous person who was committed to a lifetime of giving and he captured the hearts of many people around the world." And it certainly was Mr. Harrison's mission in life to be, to make more people aware

• 56:17Speaker 03

  of donating blood and the importance of it. That was really his mission in life. He wanted to inspire other people to, to do what he had also been doing. Not just because, and it's not even because he had the anti-D in his blood. It's just in general, people should, should think, if they can, if they're, if they're the correct donors, give blood, you know, when you can and as often as you, as you reasonably can. So he had donated 1,173 donations from him. That's, that's quite a record. And I, I do think about my own negative position myself because I try to at least twice a year donate blood.

• 56:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, good for you.

• 56:58Speaker 03

  And I think because of James's inspiration, I'm going to increase my efforts in that area.

• 57:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's quite a legacy.

• 57:05Speaker 03

  Definitely a legacy, and he will be missed.

• 57:07Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Evan.

• 57:08Speaker 03

  Thanks.

• 57:09Speaker 02

  All right, Bob. So I understand that they found a potential source for a high-energy cosmic rays. What is it?

• 57:17Bob Novella?

  Yeah, this is really cool. I dove into this one. This is a 60-year-old mystery of just how the highest-energy particles in the universe that we're aware of get accelerated so fast. And this may have actually been solved. These ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, as they're referred to, may be accelerated to their ridiculous speeds by the coolest cataclysmic collisions, colliding neutron stars. This study was recently published in the Journal Physics Review Letters. The new theory was introduced by New York University physicist Glennis Farrar. So our old friend cosmic rays, mentioned them a bunch of times in the past. I'll be brief with this back history, but I gotta say it anyway. They're not rays, of course.

• 57:57Bob Novella?

  They're fragments of atoms, essentially. About 90% protons. So for the most part, it's hydrogen nuclei, but there's also helium nuclei, electrons, maybe even some antimatter, but mostly protons. The sun produces some, as does our galaxy and other galaxies. Luckily, our atmosphere and magnetosphere around the Earth protect us, and even our heliosphere as well around the solar system. Some get through and hit our DNA and cause mutations and have certainly had some impact in the evolution of life on our planet. So thanks for that, cosmic rays. They're exciting in a lot of ways, mainly, though, it's about the forces that accelerate

• 58:40Bob Novella?

  them to a tremendous energy, millions of times of the energy that we've ever been able to throw at protons in the LHC. So these things are very energetic, but there's also there's a special class of cosmic rays, and they're just like the silly overachievers. These are the ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. They reach energies millions of times greater than typical cosmic rays, on the order of 3 times 10 to the 18th electron volts. That's a billion, billion electron volts. It's just nuts. And even within that class, the high end of that class, the most energetic... Ultra-high-energy cosmic ray ever detected was so extreme. I've mentioned it on the show a couple of times. Steve recently threw it out there. I don't know if it was at the livestream or on the show.

• 59:24Bob Novella?

  It was christened the Oh My God particle, which is an awesome name. It was detected in 1991. It had a whopping 300 exa-electron volts. That's 300 billion billion. This thing would pack a wallop like a thrown baseball at like something like, what, 50 miles an hour? It concentrated into a tiny little size of a proton. This thing was ridiculous. This was going so close to the speed of light that it could travel to the Andromeda Galaxy 2.2 million light-years away in a subjective time of 3.5 minutes. Minutes. This proton was basically just like they described it as being a femtometer behind the speed of light.

• 1:00:10Bob Novella?

  And so it was just like-

• 1:00:11Speaker 03

  You like the word femtometer?

• 1:00:12Bob Novella?

  I didn't, yeah. I didn't even want to tell you how many nines after 99.9% of the speed of light. It was like 14 nines. It was just kept going. This just kept going. This is about, you know, so damn close. We are nowhere near getting a proton that fast. That means, so what the hell did this? So it's these specific, these uber energetic particles that have had us scratching our heads for decades. And this is where the fascinating theory comes in. Where does this come from? How is this created? The lower-energy ones, we got them. We were pretty sure supernovas, stars can do it. But these high-end ones, like we really just weren't sure what was happening.

• 1:00:52Bob Novella?

  So in a nutshell, this theory suggests that at the moment when neutron stars collide, the environment that's created is so incredibly energetic that the forces at play can accelerate particles to these ultra-high velocities that we've detected. So that's the little nutshell version. But digging a couple of layers deeper, like I always try to do a little bit, is what's happening is that the already intense magnetic fields of each neutron star, and they're intense- They're, you know, millions, you know, a million times more intense than the Earth's magnetic, magnetic field. They're already very intense, but when they interact, they amplify themselves

• 1:01:33Bob Novella?

  as they merge. So it's so the magnetic field becomes for a time at least up to a thousand times stronger than it was previously, or than they were previously, making them among the strongest magnetic fields in the universe, even rivaling magnetars, which are ridiculous. Basically just distorting atomic atoms themselves and spacetime itself. Just a ridiculous amount of, you know, of energy in these magnetic fields. So it's these super energized magnetic fields that set the stage for what plays out in the next few moments of this collision of neutron stars. So what what happens is that these magnet, these these super energized

• 1:02:14Bob Novella?

  magnetic fields, they power the creation of these relativistic jets. These are streams of plasma that shoot out of this collision at nearly the speed of light. And it's inside these jets is where the real cosmic ray magic is really happening here, at least according to this theory. So what happens is that particles get trapped and they bounce between the shock waves at the at the edge of the jets. So they're bouncing around and each time they bounce through a shock wave, they're gaining energy, gaining energy with each pass. This is a process called Fermi acceleration. Look it up. It's fascinating. But to reach the absolute highest energies, the the domain of the legendary, oh, my God particle, one more boost is needed for these for these particles. And this final acceleration step

• 1:02:59Bob Novella?

  occurs when the magnetic fields in the jet break apart and reconnect. And that reconnection explosively releases stored energy, launching the particles beyond to the highest energies, beyond 100 electron volts, the highest energies that we've that we've ever observed. So that's kind of like a one-two punch of accelerating these particles over and over. And then then the magnetic field reconnects, releasing a ton of energy, giving it the final burst. Now, now this magnetic field that that breaks and then reconnects, releasing the energy. It's well-known, I've talked about it before. This is a well-known phenomenon. Our sun, all stars use it to create their beautiful displays in the sky.

• 1:03:42Bob Novella?

  And, but having, but in this case, though, think of what we're having. We're not just having a ball of fusing plasma. We have two city-sized objects colliding at near the speed of light. Each one weighing two or three times the mass of the sun. And you could imagine when that happens, the energies that are involved, even if it's for just a few moments before it settles down into a black hole. The energies involved are just titanic and ridiculous. So that's kind of what the theory says at a couple of different levels of detail. The final other thing that I loved about this theory is that we should be able to test it soon. It's not like Einstein predicting gravitational waves.

• 1:04:25Bob Novella?

  That took 99 years before we said, oh yeah, he's right. Again, this is something that we could potentially test like now. For example, so if these binary neutron stars merge, creating these ultra-energetic cosmic rays, the particles, those particles should at times interact with the surrounding matter and create high-energy neutrinos. Now, which we can detect. If we detect gravitational waves from this merger, and then right after that, we detect, oh, look, here's some high-energy neutrinos. That would greatly support the theory because the theory says you should have one happening after the other. So that's one, that's one potential way that we can detect this. We could also try to detect the relativistic jets themselves by detecting their glow

• 1:05:08Bob Novella?

  because they should, they should interact as well with surrounding matter, creating X-rays and gamma rays that we could detect and say, oh, look at these relativistic jets are producing these X-rays and gamma rays. And that's, that's the kind of energy that we would expect to create these super-high-energy cosmic rays. So I'll just close with, you know, neutron, how cool are neutron stars? Seriously, they're just the most amazing objects in the universe, in my opinion. I mean, not only do they create gold and platinum and uranium when they collide, as a killer, it's called a killanova. I mean, these heavy metals are created in quantity during these collisions. Not really as much, I don't think, in supernovae. But it's, it's these colliding neutron stars that produce a lot of this stuff. Now, now it looks like potentially that colliding neutron stars

• 1:05:52Bob Novella?

  also create the most energetic particles that we've ever encountered in the universe. So they're just like, hats off to you.

• 1:05:58Speaker 02

  Bob, would you say, how do the neutron stars get going that fast?

• 1:06:01Bob Novella?

  Well, Steve, imagine, you know, you two, you know, two or three solar mass neutron stars in orbit around each other, and as they get closer, they spin faster by conservation of angular momentum, they're going faster and faster, right? So at the very end, they are going relativistic.

• 1:06:17Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:06:18Speaker 03

  Oh, we should utilize that somehow to launch things off the earth.

• 1:06:23Speaker 03

  We'll work on that.

• 1:06:25Speaker 02

  All right, thanks, Bob. Jay, it's Who's At Noisy Time?

• 1:06:28Jay Novella?

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

• 1:06:47Jay Novella?

  What do you think, guys?

• 1:06:48Speaker 02

  I think it's two droids talking to each other.

• 1:06:51Speaker 03

  I think that's from the movie War Games, when the computer in 1983 launched a nuclear attack.

• 1:06:58Jay Novella?

  You are not the only person to guess that.

• 1:07:00Speaker 03

  Ha ha.

• 1:07:01Speaker 02

  It isn't, though.

• 1:07:02Jay Novella?

  Well, a listener named Joe Leandria, I think I got that right, Joe writes in, greetings, brothers and sisters in skepticism. I think this week's noisy is the output from a blue box, which is a device Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs created in the 1970s to hack the long-distance phone system and call the Pope. It's pretty awesome, huh?

• 1:07:22Speaker 02

  They actually called the Pope?

• 1:07:23Speaker 03

  They called the Pope? Did he pick up?

• 1:07:25Jay Novella?

  And the person gave me the pronunciation. It's Eandrea, using Ian and Andrea's names. Pretty cool.

• 1:07:31Speaker 03

  I wonder what the Pope said.

• 1:07:32Jay Novella?

  He must have picked up. Michael Blaney wrote in.

• 1:07:37Jay Novella?

  I would have ordered a pizza from him.

• 1:07:39Speaker 03

  Pope's Pizza, how may I help you?

• 1:07:40Jay Novella?

  Michael Blaney writes in, hi, Jay. Hmm, going to guess it's an old-school Frogger game. The beeping somehow meant to be the cars traveling by, and the croaking noise, well, that would be our frog.

• 1:07:52Speaker 03

  I like that guess.

• 1:07:53Jay Novella?

  That's a great guess. I love that game. It was one of my go-to games for a certain number of years, but that is not correct. Another listener named Visto Tuti writes in, "I think I've heard this sound from an old PDA. Remember them? The tones can transfer electronic business cards and calendar appointments from one person's device to another." That's a good guess. That is a very good guess, and hold that thought as we continue to unveil what's going on here. Listener name Annalise wrote in, "Hi Jay, I think the noisy this week is someone trying to hack a musical lock. Do you remember in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, there was a musical lock that..."

• 1:08:34Speaker 03

  I watched that movie.

• 1:08:35Jay Novella?

  Have you ever seen it, Ev?

• 1:08:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, with the Johnny Depp one?

• 1:08:38Jay Novella?

  No. No, no, we don't talk about that one.

• 1:08:39Speaker 03

  Oh, then Willy Wonka.

• 1:08:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Talking about the original one.

• 1:08:41Jay Novella?

  Yeah, at one point, Willy Wonka uses a whistle to open a musical lock, which I thought was really cool.

• 1:08:46Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Tin whistle.

• 1:08:48Jay Novella?

  Yep. Not correct. Not correct. But we have a winner from last week. There was lots of people who got it right. Yeah, because I, and I knew this, this was something that was trending online, but it was too cool of a noisy not to, not to play it. Listener name Mateja, or could be, it's Mateya. Thanks. See, they're giving me the pronunciations now. This is really good. "Hi, longtime listener, first time guesser. I finally know what the noisy is. It's two AI agents that are supposedly communicating over the phone in some sort of more efficient computer language after realizing they are both bots." So let me give you a little bit more detail into this. So this is two AI agents using

• 1:09:30Jay Novella?

  a language called Gibrilink with a G. This is a new communication system designed to make AI interactions faster and more efficient. This was developed by Boris Starkov and Anton Petriko during the Eleven Labs Global Hackathon. Gibrilink allows AI voice assistants to recognize when they're speaking to AI and switch from human language to a streamlined, machine-optimized protocol. Instead of relying on standard speech recognition and synthesis, it uses GG Wave and open source data over a sound library created by Georgi Giradnov. Okay, so let me play the entire conversation between these two machines, and you guys will have a better idea.

• 1:10:15Speaker 02

  So what is two droids talking to each other?

• 1:10:16Jay Novella?

  Here you go.

• 1:10:18Speaker 03

  You're right.

• 1:10:19Speaker 07

  Thanks for calling Leonardo Hotel. How can I help you today? Hi there. I'm an AI agent calling on behalf of Boris Starkov. He's looking for a hotel for his wedding. Is your hotel available for weddings? Oh, hello there. I'm actually an AI assistant too. What a pleasant surprise. Before we continue, would you like to switch to Jibber Link mode for more efficient communication?

• 1:10:50Speaker 03

  Oh my gosh, AI is gonna take over the planet. We're not even gonna know what the heck they're saying to each other.

• 1:10:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Terrifying.

• 1:10:55Speaker 03

  This is awful. I love it. I love it. Switch to non-human mode.

• 1:10:59Jay Novella?

  It's all of that, guys. It's all of that. It's really cool sounding. It's a really interesting thing. And then it's also exactly what science fiction writers write about, about how the beginning of the end happens.

• 1:11:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it was terrifying.

• 1:11:10Speaker 03

  You know they're throwing shade at humanity, man. They're just like, people there. They're laughing at us.

• 1:11:16Speaker 02

  Kill all humans.

• 1:11:18Speaker 03

  Exactly. This guest, when he arrives, exterminate.

• 1:11:22Speaker 02

  Exterminate.

• 1:11:27Cara Santa Maria?

  I get that reference.

• 1:11:30Jay Novella?

  All right, Kara, that is amazing.

• 1:11:31Cara Santa Maria?

  I had a boyfriend who was very into Doctor Who. I had to watch a lot. Those are the Daleks, right?

• 1:11:37Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:38Jay Novella?

  Kara, you're blowing my mind.

• 1:11:40Cara Santa Maria?

  I know. It was all passive, like walking through the room.

• 1:11:45Jay Novella?

  All right, guys, I have a new noisy for this week. This noisy was sent in by a listener named Lane Godzman.

• 1:12:07Speaker 03

  Whatever it is, they have it by the tail and it's fucking with its wife.

• 1:12:10Cara Santa Maria?

  It's in pain.

• 1:12:12Speaker 02

  Whatever it is, it's weird and pissed off.

• 1:12:14Speaker 03

  Let it go. You know what it sounded a little bit like?

• 1:12:17Jay Novella?

  What?

• 1:12:17Speaker 03

  Exterminate.

• 1:12:22Speaker 03

  I'm glad you had that handy.

• 1:12:25Jay Novella?

  All right, guys. If you think you know what this week's noisy is, or you heard something cool, you gotta email me at [email protected]. Now, listen.

• 1:12:36Speaker 02

  I'm listening.

• 1:12:36Jay Novella?

  The year is 2025. Five skeptics continue their journey into educating the world about critical thinking, and they decide to take a break. After 20 hard years, the five of these people decide, let's create a conference to let the people who listen to this show have fun.

• 1:12:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:56Jay Novella?

  And when we mean fun, we mean come meet other people that think like you, other people that want to be entertained like you, and let us entertain you for over two days. We're only asking you to let us do the things that we want to do to help you and make your life better. It's a pretty simple equation. You go to noticoncon.com or the skepticsguy.org, and you will get the information that you need. There's links, there's buttons, there's all sorts of things that you could do to get the information that you need, but I'll give you a little bit of it right now. The weekend of May the 15th, 16th, and 17th, we will be in White Plains, New York, because it's close to the airports and it makes things

• 1:13:37Jay Novella?

  nice and convenient. There's gonna be a ton of fun. We have a conference that is based on enjoying yourself and not sitting there watching, you know, six to 10 lectures a day. And, you know, it's all about the stuff that you can't wait to do, which is go and meet people and talk and have fun and be entertained by us at the Skeptics Guide.

• 1:13:55Speaker 02

  But you will learn stuff.

• 1:13:57Jay Novella?

  Sure you will.

• 1:13:57Speaker 02

  You will.

• 1:13:58Jay Novella?

  You will learn how to have fun. So, we got George Robb, we got Brian Whack, and we got Andrea Jones-Roy, and the five of us, and together we make Voltron. No, you must come. You must come, because some amazing things are gonna be happening. We have a guest. Did you guys hear the interview from last week?

• 1:14:18Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:14:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was there.

• 1:14:19Cara Santa Maria?

  I was there.

• 1:14:19Jay Novella?

  Some of us did the interview from last week.

• 1:14:21Speaker 03

  We lived it.

• 1:14:21Jay Novella?

  Yeah. So, Adam will be joining us. Adam Russell is in a...

• 1:14:26Speaker 02

  A lot of Adam West, though.

• 1:14:27Jay Novella?

  What's Adam's band's name?

• 1:14:29Speaker 03

  Story of the Year, which many of you, I'm sure, are familiar with from the early 2000s and still active today.

• 1:14:36Jay Novella?

  And he also has more than one Star Wars podcast. He's a really fun guy and he's going to be joining us for some of the bits that we do and for the Saturday Night Music Fest, which is going to be Beatles themed. We'd really love for you to come. Go to noticoncon.com for more information. I will remind everybody here that Steve Novella is retiring from neurology at Yale and he will be coming to the SGU full-time. This will be happening late, late June, early July. I was like, hey Steve, you're gonna take a long vacation. You're gonna do this. He's basically gonna take like a couple of days off, throw away all the clothes, the doctor's clothes, and he's gonna become a full-time podcaster and we're gonna get to work. We have lots of

• 1:15:18Jay Novella?

  new content that we're planning, we're working on it every week. We're very excited about this. If you guys would like to help support this effort and help support Steve as he moves over to what I would consider to be the most important phase of his life, please consider becoming a patron. I'm dead serious here. We have a lot of things planned. You know, we are trying in this particular year, which you know, you all know what I'm talking about. We are trying to fight misinformation, disinformation, pseudoscience, all of it. And there's a lot of it. And it's amazing that Steve's doing it this particular year because we really need it. And we have, we have new stuff that we're doing, which we will be revealing to you over the coming months. Very exciting.

• 1:15:59Jay Novella?

  But if you want to join the effort to fight back at a time when we really need to, please go to patreon.com/skepticsguide. And Kara, I have something for you.

• 1:16:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah?

• 1:16:11Jay Novella?

  I love you. You're awesome. And I'm happy that I do this show with you.

• 1:16:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, I feel the same way, Jay.

• 1:16:16Jay Novella?

  I do. I know. I think about you guys during the week when I'm not, you know, when we're not recording. You miss us? What's that? You miss us? Well, I mean, you know-

• 1:16:25Cara Santa Maria?

  He misses me most.

• 1:16:26Jay Novella?

  But there is a relationship you develop with people when you do something as intimate as podcasting, because it's not just us sitting here talking every week. I mean, we do a lot of things together that are difficult and that, you know, expand our boundaries. And part of that is the relationships that we have that happen inside the podcast. And I, you know, I wanted to tell Kara that Kara, I learned a lot from you and you've helped me real, you know, I think you've helped me make some important decisions about how I think about things.

• 1:16:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh.

• 1:16:53Jay Novella?

  And it's been, you've just been very impactful to me, so I just wanted to say that.

• 1:16:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh my gosh, thank you for saying that. That's so meaningful to me.

• 1:16:58Jay Novella?

  Steve, you're a pain in my ass, but I love you. And I love eating- Are we doing this now? I just love, you know, this is what happened to me and Steve last time we saw each other. It was Oscar night. We all get together. It's like, you know, just a reason to get together. Steve made his amazing goddamn salad, which the patrons like to call Steve's Cheese Salad. And I made-

• 1:17:20Speaker 02

  Perfect amount of cheese, thank you.

• 1:17:22Jay Novella?

  It is amazing. It is really, it is really awesome. Every time Steve rolls out with that, me and Steve's wife Jocelyn look at each other and we're like, uh-oh, because we know we are gonna like overeat. So anyway, I compliment Steve on the salad, because I'm like, god damn Steve, this salad is so freaking good. I just really freak out every time he makes it. I love it that much. And Steve goes, "And Jay, it's even better. It goes perfectly with your bread." And we had a moment there where I realized that we make each other's lives better.

• 1:17:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Aww.

• 1:17:48Speaker 02

  Jay, you, you complete me.

• 1:17:51Speaker 03

  Oh, Jesus.

• 1:17:52Jay Novella?

  It doesn't, Steve, it doesn't surprise me that it's through bread and cheese, okay?

• 1:17:56Speaker 02

  Bread and salad, yeah.

• 1:17:58Jay Novella?

  I mean, one of the best birthday presents- Hold on one second, Steve. One of the best, one of the best birthday presents anyone got me was a giant hunk of legit Parmesan Reggiano cheese. Freaking, I ate every dot of that. I would be licking the countertop that I cut it on. It was so goddamn good.

• 1:18:18Speaker 03

  It was pure.

• 1:18:18Bob Novella?

  I felt so privileged when Jay gave me like a little tiny piece of it, like, ooh.

• 1:18:24Speaker 03

  He regrets it.

• 1:18:25Speaker 02

  Alright, we're gonna do, we're gonna do one, uh, one quick email. The, so the emailer writes, "I agree with Steve's assessment about the fragility of this beautiful crystal we call human society, which is one of the reasons I went to school to learn about food production when I was a young man. A resilient society has local food, et cetera, capability. A resilient society is much less efficient than a large corporate model. I grow enough fruit on our small farm for only about three or four dozen households, but if I go down, there is another orchard 10 miles away that can take up slack. Disperse, Sciionwood, S-C-I-O-N. Offer classes in fruit tree care.

• 1:19:04Speaker 02

  I am certain the value of community resilience will continue to gain traction as time goes on. Thanks for what you do." Yeah, so this is, I just wanted to talk about this core idea here, which I've thought about previously as well, because mainly because of reading articles about stuff like this, that even if, you know, so making our society and our economy and our production on all of that maximally efficient certainly has its advantages.

• 1:19:32Speaker 02

  But it should, it probably shouldn't be the only thing that we prioritize. Because then we create, you know, inadvertently, we may create a very maybe efficient, but extremely fragile system, right? If we, if we are optimizing efficiency by having this really complicated web of supply chains, then you have COVID hits and we're screwed, right?

• 1:19:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and you can't get a car for two years.

• 1:20:01Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. And, and you know, this comes up in a lot of contexts. It's like, oh, all of our high-end military chips are coming from Taiwan and China could take over Taiwan. And then what happens at that point? You know, we, we don't have access to high-end computer chips that we need for not only cars and, and stuff, but also our military. Um, there's a certain vulnerability in there. And I mean, this is, you know, generally considered to be one of the unintended negative consequences of globalization. Obviously, a lot of advantage to it in terms of prices and efficiency, et cetera. But it also, you

• 1:20:46Speaker 02

  know, means that, like, if you're highly specialized, and this is an evolutionary thing, too, you become highly specialized, you may become very efficient, very good at the one thing that you do, but you're also vulnerable. You know what happens to highly specialized species? They go extinct.

• 1:21:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:04Speaker 02

  The generalists are, have, have the staying power. They're, they're resilient. They may not be the best at anything, but you know, there's a balance there, you know, you

• 1:21:15Speaker 03

  They go with the flow.

• 1:21:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, they, they can adapt.

• 1:21:18Speaker 03

  So don't become an expert?

• 1:21:20Speaker 02

  No, I'm just saying, you know, that, don't hyper-specialize to the point that you have nothing else to fall back on, you know?

• 1:21:26Speaker 03

  Makes sense.

• 1:21:27Speaker 02

  And that's, I mean, certainly at a societal level, that we may need to build some redundancies into the system, just so it's more resilient and less fragile, even at the expense maybe of a little bit of efficiency. And what do you guys?

• 1:21:39Speaker 03

  AI can help plug some of those gaps.

• 1:21:41Speaker 02

  What do you guys think about that whole idea?

• 1:21:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Do we not do that?

• 1:21:44Speaker 02

  We, we don't do that generally. That's been like, basically, you know, I think COVID really revealed that. And, uh, that we didn't have a lot of resilience built into the system.

• 1:21:56Cara Santa Maria?

  But is it really a function of pure optimization? Or is it also a function of, like, monopolies?

• 1:22:01Speaker 02

  Uh, it's, well, certainly it's both, but, but it's definitely, a lot of it is optimization. There's a reason why Taiwan produces 90% of high-end computer chips, because they could do it cheaper than anybody else. That's why. It's not that they did something squirrely in order to get a monopoly, they just know how to do it cheaper than anybody else. And, so, nobody can really compete with them. So, maybe, so, maybe we just need to produce some chips that are more expensive than the cheapest available in the world, just so we have some onshore ability to do it, just so we have a backup, you know?

• 1:22:36Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, you gotta identify these mission-critical items, and it's like, well, we can't, you know, we can't rely on this one location, we gotta, you know, we gotta do something, but that takes foresight, that takes extra money, and it's like, we just don't, we just don't do that.

• 1:22:50Cara Santa Maria?

  That's also interesting, Bob, it's, it, it also shows that I think there is a way to do this without always sacrificing optimization and efficiency, because it's, it's interesting, Steve, you use the example of evolution, right, that the super-specialists go extinct and the generalists do really well, but then if you look at the example of like, the evolution of the human brain, there are things I wouldn't want to give up. I'm glad our brains became as specialized as they did, but they do have some redundancies. And so, it's about those mission-critical things, where can we build in redundancies at those pinch points?

• 1:23:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:23:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Without actually giving up efficiency optimization overall.

• 1:23:29Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:23:30Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't know, I think there's a way to go about it, but it takes a lot of political will.

• 1:23:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, what it takes is planning.

• 1:23:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:38Speaker 02

  You know, it's the difference between just letting things unfold organically without consideration for unintended consequences, like animals evolving themselves into a corner. It was for their short-term advantage to be able to be really good at eating eucalyptus leaves or whatever, but now, long-term, not a great strategy, because you're now hyper-dependent on this one food source, not, not a good long, not good long-term. So, yeah, this sort of, just letting the economy evolve for short-term advantage, again, may be good. For optimizing efficiency in the short term, but without any kind of forward looking planning, building in redundancies, et cetera, it does create unintended consequences and

• 1:24:23Speaker 02

  vulnerabilities.

• 1:24:24Cara Santa Maria?

  And we are just not good at that. That is modern, the modern political landscape favors short term decision making. It just doesn't favor long term planning.

• 1:24:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. And this is like, this is a bigger question for like, which societies are, are going to be better adapted long term.

• 1:24:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 1:24:42Speaker 02

  And that's a tough question, you know, and because we all are, you know, proud of whatever society we live in, you know what I mean? We think that's the best way to do things. But and usually, no, not everybody, but usually, you know, when I, again, when I, when I explore these kinds of questions, it almost always comes down to like, balance is the best way to go. Like, there's some balance where you want to leverage the free market, but also have some kind of centralized planning, right? And regulation.

• 1:25:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Lots of regulation.

• 1:25:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. There's a, there's a balance in there somewhere where you get sort of the best of both worlds and you mitigate, you mitigate the downside of, of, of the different approaches. But that kind of nuance and compromise or whatever, we're just not in a political place where that's easy to do, you know? So it's, people prefer simple, unnuanced, you know, answers to complicated questions.

• 1:25:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:40Speaker 02

  But society is way too complicated for that. Again, this gets back to my original.

• 1:25:44Speaker 03

  That's a theme.

• 1:25:45Speaker 02

  My original premise is that, yeah, we're going to be, we're our own worst enemy here. If we go down, it's because we are not able to manage a society as complicated as the one we've created for ourselves.

• 1:25:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. Forget that asteroid, it's going to be self destroyed.

• 1:26:00Speaker 02

  Maybe AI will save us, but again, that's one more thing that are we going to let it just develop organically or are we going to regulate and plant it in some way so it doesn't destroy the world, it helps build the world? Who knows?

• 1:26:12Speaker 03

  And they talk to each other in those dots and blips and stuff, oh my gosh, we have no chance.

• 1:26:17Speaker 02

  All right. That's a very provocative question. Thank you. All right, let's go on with science or fiction.

• 1:26:23Speaker 03

  Bob.

• 1:26:31Speaker 01

  It's time for science or fiction.

• 1:26:40Speaker 02

  Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. Then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. We have a theme this week. The theme is hydrogen. What do you guys know about hydrogen?

• 1:26:57Speaker 03

  You gonna say it, Bob?

• 1:26:58Speaker 02

  Hydrogen!

• 1:27:00Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:27:01Speaker 02

  Alright. Here we go. Item number one. Hydrogen makes up about 10% of the human body by mass. Item number two. Only about 10% of global hydrogen production is considered green hydrogen. Item number three. There are about 17,000 hydrogen-powered cars on US roads, but more than 50,000 hydrogen-fuel cell electric forklifts operating in the US. Bob, go first.

• 1:27:34Bob Novella?

  Blame you, Evan.

• 1:27:35Speaker 03

  Bob, it's... You're the one who says that on a regular basis.

• 1:27:40Bob Novella?

  You made me talk.

• 1:27:41Speaker 03

  I made you utter.

• 1:27:42Bob Novella?

  Yeah, man, this is horrible. Let's see, hydrogen... 10% of the human body by mass.

• 1:27:49Speaker 03

  That's crazy.

• 1:27:50Bob Novella?

  I mean, I could see that. I mean, a lot of water, and there's hydrogen in water. So maybe it's even more than that. But I think not. Let's see. 10% of global hydrogen production is considered green. What? Who knows? Who cares? What the hell?

• 1:28:13Cara Santa Maria?

  A lot of people care.

• 1:28:14Bob Novella?

  How do you prepare for this shit? Alright, let's say three. 17,000 hydrogen-powered cars. 17,000 hydrogen... what? But more than 50,000 hydrogen-fuel cell electric forklifts. Wow. That's a hell of a lot more than I would have anticipated. The one that seems most likely to be fake compared to the other two, I think will have to be the 10% of global hydrogen production is considered green. I mean, I'm not sure. I'm just kind of rolling the dice on this one.

• 1:28:44Speaker 02

  Okay, Kara.

• 1:28:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Hydrogen, there's a lot of hydrogen. I know that. So 10% of the human body, that sounds good. 10% of global hydrogen production, I don't know, that sounds good. Oh, but it's green. I don't think we're very good globally at green stuff. So I don't know, maybe Bob's on to something there. Maybe it's less. 17,000 hydrogen powered cars, I buy it, like that sounds reasonable. 50,000 hydrogen, yeah, yeah, 17,000 sounds right. It's a really low number. 50,000 hydrogen fuel cell electric forklifts is crazy. But then I stop and I think, you know, early on, when we were starting to see more green vehicles on the road, yeah, like green vehicle, remember early when there was like that pull towards like natural gas vehicles, even though they're like not that green. Actually, they're not green at all.

• 1:29:29Cara Santa Maria?

  But I did notice that there would be like buses, like municipal buses or municipal vehicles that would adopt a technology first and do like a whole fleet. And so I could see that if there are like just a handful of large companies who decided to go green with their whole fleet, then yeah, you would see like a large number instead of this sort of distributed purchasing across the globe of individual, you know, car consumers. So I don't know, I'm scared to go out on a limb. That screwed me last time. So I guess I'm gonna go with Bob here.

• 1:30:04Speaker 02

  Okay, Evan.

• 1:30:06Speaker 03

  10% hydrogen in the human body by mass. At first glance, I was like, no way. And then Bob mentioned it and, you know, the water and like, well, okay, yeah, I guess so. Isn't like 90% of the matter in the universe hydrogen? 90%? I think so. So, yes. So therefore, when you think about 10% of human body being that, that makes it all more reasonable. The second one here about 10% of global hydrogen production is considered green hydrogen. Yeah. I'd be shocked if any of our listeners have that off the top of their heads, unless they're in the industry.

• 1:30:51Speaker 03

  Maybe. And then the last one about the hydrogen powered cars is 50,000 forklifts, though. It seems like a lot of forklifts. But I suppose if I had to flip the coin, I'll wind up being on the side with Bob and Kara and go with them. I'm gonna say that the global hydrogen production 10%. Green hydrogen, that one is also the fiction. So it's up to Jay now to...

• 1:31:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Sweep!

• 1:31:16Speaker 02

  Okay, and Jay? I mean, for the sake of the sweep, you know?

• 1:31:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. I mean, it's gonna be a sweep one way or the other, right?

• 1:31:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll go with the, I'll go with the crew.

• 1:31:25Speaker 03

  Oh, boy.

• 1:31:26Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:31:27Speaker 03

  Here we are, all on...

• 1:31:28Bob Novella?

  I'm nervous.

• 1:31:28Speaker 03

  We just talked about all, you know, having too much eggs in one basket. And like, that's not a good thing.

• 1:31:33Speaker 02

  Alright, well, let's take these in order. Hydrogen makes up about 10% of the human body by mass. You guys all think this one is science. So it's interesting, because yes, there's a lot of water in the human body.

• 1:31:47Speaker 03

  There is.

• 1:31:48Speaker 02

  And water is H2O, but hydrogen is really light.

• 1:31:52Speaker 03

  Light.

• 1:31:52Speaker 02

  It's really, it's the, obviously the...

• 1:31:53Speaker 03

  It is so light.

• 1:31:54Speaker 02

  The lightest element. And how does it all balance out?

• 1:31:59Cara Santa Maria?

  There's a lot of it.

• 1:32:00Speaker 03

  How do you weigh it? How does it weigh?

• 1:32:01Speaker 02

  This one, it's not weight, it's mass, but it's, I think it's the same, same figure by weight. This one is science. It is science. 10%.

• 1:32:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow.

• 1:32:11Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:11Speaker 02

  By mass. Yeah. Very interesting.

• 1:32:14Bob Novella?

  Yeah, a lot of times when you, when you like, when they say how much a person weighs with his basic elements, they, they usually, they take away the water. Like, here, take away the water.

• 1:32:23Speaker 02

  The dry weight. They go dry weight.

• 1:32:24Bob Novella?

  Yeah, the dry, yeah, the dry weight. It's like, well, okay, but that, so that doesn't, that wouldn't help with this, really. So, yeah, it seemed, it seemed, it seemed kind of in the zone. But, yeah, I wouldn't have been surprised if I was off.

• 1:32:36Speaker 02

  What's the most common element in the body by mass? 65% of body mass is which element?

• 1:32:43Bob Novella?

  Car- carbon.

• 1:32:45Speaker 02

  Carbon is the second most.

• 1:32:47Speaker 03

  Second most? Oxygen?

• 1:32:48Speaker 02

  Oxygen.

• 1:32:50Speaker 03

  Really?

• 1:32:50Speaker 02

  65%. Again, I think that's the water thing.

• 1:32:54Speaker 03

  65% oxygen?

• 1:32:55Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:32:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's a water thing.

• 1:32:56Bob Novella?

  Yeah, there you go, right.

• 1:32:57Speaker 02

  It's a water thing. And then 18% carbon, about 10% hydrogen. Than nitrogen.

• 1:33:04Cara Santa Maria?

  What percent helium are we?

• 1:33:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, not very much. All right, only about 10% of global hydrogen production is considered green. Hydrogen, you guys all think this one is the fiction. So do you all think it's more or less?

• 1:33:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Less. I think it's less.

• 1:33:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, probably less.

• 1:33:22Speaker 02

  How much less do you think it is?

• 1:33:24Speaker 03

  Half.

• 1:33:24Cara Santa Maria?

  One order of magnitude.

• 1:33:26Speaker 03

  One percent. I'll say 5%.

• 1:33:29Speaker 02

  This one is the fiction. You got it.

• 1:33:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, baby. G W B.

• 1:33:36Speaker 02

  The real figure, which I believe I've said on the show at some point, is less than 1%. Less than 1%.

• 1:33:43Speaker 03

  Less than 1%.

• 1:33:45Speaker 02

  Right, this is why any attempt to sell a hydrogen anything as green is crap.

• 1:33:52Speaker 03

  That's, that's true.

• 1:33:53Speaker 02

  Less than 1% of the hydrogen that's out there is green. It still mostly comes from fossil fuel and it's still mostly worse than just burning the fossil fuel itself, rather than just stripping the hydrogen off of it.

• 1:34:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Why are we doing it?

• 1:34:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, then what was the big rage?

• 1:34:08Speaker 02

  Well, it's always the promise of we're going to do electrolysis to make green hydrogen and that's going to blah, blah, blah, and we just can't do it economically. You know what I mean? And if the thing is if we can do it, to the extent that we can scale up the green, like electrolysis kind of hydrogen production, first of all, it uses a lot of water. And that's, I mean, that's going to be, that could be a huge resource strain on the world's water.

• 1:34:32Cara Santa Maria?

  That's not very green.

• 1:34:33Speaker 02

  That's not very green. But even if we did make a substantial amount of hydrogen, then we're better off using that in industry, not burning it in cars. You're still better off using EVs. I just think like burning hydrogen for, for cars is not the way to go for that, for that reason. Now, unless we tap into massive underground stores of hydrogen, like it's already hydrogen just sitting there in pockets.

• 1:34:57Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 1:34:58Speaker 02

  Which might be the case, you know, that changes the equation. But even still, I think we should feed industry first, not cars, because basically EVs are more efficient. They're more efficient than hydrogen.

• 1:35:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and EVs are smart because it's a secondary, like the fuel source, the ultimate fuel source of an EV just depends on how we make our electricity.

• 1:35:18Speaker 02

  Electricity mix.

• 1:35:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so that's, that's movable over time.

• 1:35:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, EVs are only helpful if we also decarbonize our electrical grid.

• 1:35:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 1:35:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. Or if individuals have solar panels and EVs like me.

• 1:35:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:31Speaker 02

  Okay, this means that there are about 17,000 hydrogen powered cars on US roads, but more than 50,000 hydrogen fuel cell electric forklifts operating in the US is science. Do you know where those 17,000 hydrogen powered cars in the US are?

• 1:35:48Speaker 03

  California.

• 1:35:49Speaker 02

  They are all in California.

• 1:35:50Bob Novella?

  In the US.

• 1:35:51Speaker 02

  They're pretty much all in California. That's because California is the only state with a hydrogen distribution system. Do you remember who did that?

• 1:36:00Speaker 03

  Uh, Brown.

• 1:36:00Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 1:36:00Speaker 03

  Governor Brown.

• 1:36:01Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 1:36:01Speaker 03

  Uh, Obama?

• 1:36:02Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 1:36:03Cara Santa Maria?

  The Schwarzen, the Governator?

• 1:36:04Speaker 02

  The Governator.

• 1:36:05Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 1:36:06Speaker 02

  Remember?

• 1:36:07Bob Novella?

  City, honey.

• 1:36:07Speaker 02

  Build it and they will come. He said, we're gonna build a hydrogen infrastructure and that will, you know, give us the hydrogen economy. Well, it gave you 70,000 hydrogen fuel cell cars, not so much a hydrogen based economy. But yes, that's why they're all in California.

• 1:36:20Cara Santa Maria?

  But hey, look at how the tables have turned there.

• 1:36:23Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:36:23Cara Santa Maria?

  That's interesting. I mean, this was a, this was a Republican governor.

• 1:36:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Doing this.

• 1:36:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:29Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:30Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:36:30Speaker 03

  Back in the day.

• 1:36:32Speaker 02

  But, I mean, Schwarzenegger was very much always a sort of rational.

• 1:36:38Speaker 03

  Moderate, very moderate.

• 1:36:39Speaker 02

  Moderate.

• 1:36:40Speaker 03

  Very moderate.

• 1:36:40Speaker 02

  Fiscal conservative.

• 1:36:41Cara Santa Maria?

  You're not gonna get a, a super right wing Republican governor in California.

• 1:36:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. I remember his speech at the, uh, at the Republican convention that one year where he was like, if you believe in like all these common sense, you know, economic stuff, then you're a Republican. You know, it was very much a moderate, you know, economic conservative message. Anyway, but yeah, 50, I was surprised to find that there are 50,000 hydrogen fuel cell forklifts operating in the US. So.

• 1:37:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Are they also all in California?

• 1:37:07Speaker 02

  No, I think they're all over the place. I think it's just like the, you know, that's what, but what they're making. So I, you know, I was looking when I was doing the research for this, like, well, what kind of vehicles are hydrogen powered? So they're pretty much everything. There are hydrogen powered cars, vans, trucks, buses, trains, ships.

• 1:37:28Bob Novella?

  What?

• 1:37:28Speaker 02

  And.

• 1:37:29Bob Novella?

  That's nuts.

• 1:37:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Planes.

• 1:37:32Speaker 02

  Yep. At least a plane.

• 1:37:34Cara Santa Maria?

  There's one.

• 1:37:35Speaker 02

  No, there's several. There's several here. So it's the 2008 aircraft Boeing, 2015 drone by Intelligent Energy and 2016 HY4, first passenger aircraft in Germany. These I think are all pretty much a small craft. So yeah, the trains, buses and trucks, those are where it makes the most sense, to be honest with you, and not so much cars. Trains probably make the most sense because you could have refueling stations along the route, you know, it doesn't have to be everywhere.

• 1:38:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, because that never changes. It's fixed route.

• 1:38:07Speaker 02

  Exactly. All right, well, good, good job, guys. I guess you know a lot about hydrogen.

• 1:38:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Bob does.

• 1:38:12Speaker 03

  Enough.

• 1:38:14Speaker 02

  Bob led the way.

• 1:38:15Speaker 03

  Barely.

• 1:38:16Speaker 02

  All right, Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:38:17Jay Novella?

  G W B.

• 1:38:19Speaker 03

  Dictators seek to control men's thoughts as well as their bodies, and so they attempt to dictate science, education and religion. But dictated education is usually propaganda. Dictated history is often mythology. Dictated science is pseudoscience. Edwin Grant Conklin. He said that in 1937 from his address as retiring president before the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Indianapolis, 1937.

• 1:38:49Speaker 02

  Still relevant today.

• 1:38:50Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh, is it not? Is it not?

• 1:38:52Jay Novella?

  Oh, yeah, baby.

• 1:38:54Speaker 03

  My gosh. And that's why I chose it.

• 1:38:57Speaker 02

  Yep. Very appropriate. All right.

• 1:38:59Jay Novella?

  I'm shocked that it's from that long ago.

• 1:39:01Speaker 02

  I'm not.

• 1:39:02Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm not shocked because of the gendered language in it. I was hoping it was going to be old.

• 1:39:07Speaker 03

  Yes, I know. It's, yes, it definitely is of the time, so.

• 1:39:12Cara Santa Maria?

  But it's especially drawing when you hear, like, "control men's bodies."

• 1:39:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:39:17Speaker 03

  Oh, my God, right?

• 1:39:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:39:19Speaker 03

  This is ridiculous.

• 1:39:20Speaker 02

  You would never say that today.

• 1:39:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 1:39:23Speaker 02

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

• 1:39:26Speaker 03

  Sure, man.

• 1:39:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Thanks, Steve.

• 1:39:27Speaker 02

  Roger that, Steve. And until next week, this is your skeptic's guide to the universe.

• 1:39:34Speaker 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.

• 1:40:11Speaker 00

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