The Skeptics Guide #1045 - Jul 19 2025

Quickie with Bob: Weird Exoplanet; News Items: Voyager Thrusters Brought Back to Life, Space Tourism, Global Temperature and Ice Sheet Melting, Robots Learn Physical Tasks 60 Times Faster, Most Powerful Solar Storm; Your Questions and E-mails: EV Charging, Off the Hook; 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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• 0:32Speaker 03

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

• 0:39Speaker 04

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is May 16th, 2025, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey, everybody. Kara Santa Maria. Howdy. Jay Novella. Hey, guys. And Evan Bernstein.

• 0:53Speaker 05

  Good afternoon, everyone.

• 0:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I think I'll be using this particular episode in the middle of July while I'm traveling, so that's why we're recording a couple of months before it's actually gonna air. So who knows what crazy stuff has happened in the next

• 1:09Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 1:10Speaker 04

  two months as we record this, previous two months as you listen to this. There could be something going on that we're totally clueless about. Right. I hope, we hope you're not in a bunker right now.

• 1:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, this could be a time cap. This is our time capsule episode. It could be.

• 1:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was just interviewed by a Finnish magazine.

• 1:28Speaker 05

  Oh, like a place where they, you know,

• 1:30Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:30Speaker 05

  prepare people for clothing and accessories? Is that kind of finishing?

• 1:33Speaker 04

  They were, wanted to talk to me about RFK Jr.

• 1:37Speaker 05

  Oh, that.

• 1:38Speaker 04

  Ah. All the ways in which he is absolutely destroying healthcare in the United States.

• 1:43Speaker 05

  So it was like a five hour interview?

• 1:44Speaker 04

  Yeah. Now, I had to do it quickly because I'm prepping, was prepping for recording this. But I hit everything. I knew what I knew. It was like, you know, don't even bother asking questions. Here's what you wind up. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:56Speaker 04

  No, but she had the correct questions, but she had a couple of, you know, reportery ones. Like, he's softening his rhetoric. Do you think he's modern? No. No, stop. Not at all. No. This is all BS. But it is, you know, so I was reviewing everything just to like have like quotes and stuff handy. It's just amazing. It's so, it's so much worse than any of us thought it was gonna be. Even those of us who thought it was gonna be an apocalypse, it's like even worse.

• 2:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 2:21Speaker 04

  Just to give a very quick review, you know, he's like replacing people at the CDC and the FDA with anti-vaxxer cranks, right? The CDC is no longer going to be releasing its morbidity and mortality date reports, right? So we won't be, we won't be tracking like infections, you know? They are no longer gonna be essentially promoting vaccines. It's all personal choice now.

• 2:45Cara Santa Maria?

  They're also limiting access to vaccine. They're like rolling back a new vaccine, the new one that's finally been kind of approved, they're rolling back access. They're saying, oh, you can only take it if you're over 65. Like, back to the original parameters.

• 2:59Speaker 04

  So one of the big things, so this is something that I think it requires a little bit of explanation, so I'll just say it very quickly. He is recommending that for all new vaccines, there are placebo-controlled trials.

• 3:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:13Speaker 04

  So that sounds superficially good, right? You're like, oh, that's, that's good, right? We should be doing placebo-controlled trials. But here's the thing. So right now, first of all, like, the big anti-vaxxer talking point is that we don't do placebo-controlled trials for new vaccines, and that's wrong. That's a lie. We absolutely do placebo-controlled trials for new vaccines. But there are two types of vaccines for which we don't do placebo-controlled trials. One are vaccines where we're, they're just updating the vaccine. So there's already an approved, safe and effective vaccine, and the pharmaceutical company's like, we wanna tweak the formula, right? So they're updating it. The second kind are ones where they're making a strain upgrade or update, right? So it's like the flu vaccine, we're now going to make targeted against the new strain.

• 3:58Speaker 04

  It's the same vaccine, they're just making it with a new strain.

• 4:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Is the idea here, Steve, that it would actually be unethical to give a bunch of people a vaccine that doesn't work?

• 4:06Speaker 04

  A hundred percent.

• 4:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's what I figured. We know the flu vaccine works. We can't give people a fake vaccine.

• 4:13Speaker 04

  You can't give people a placebo. Yeah, then the broader, to state the ethical principle more broadly, you cannot withhold proven therapies from people in order to get them into a clinical trial.

• 4:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 4:25Speaker 04

  You can't say, so yeah, we're going to randomize you to the arm that doesn't get standard of care, you know, or doesn't get proven treatments. We're going to withhold effective treatments from you just to see how bad things get.

• 4:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, we can only do that when we don't know if the treatment is proven yet.

• 4:40Speaker 04

  Right, but if you have a proven vaccine and you're updating it, then what we do is we compare it to the existing vaccine. That's the baseline. We know it works, we know it's safe. We test the new one against the baseline and to make sure that no new side effects crop up or that it's at least effective or hopefully more effective or whatever, right?

• 4:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, because what happens if the ones who were to get the placebo, the hundreds of people who were to get the placebo, were exposed to the flu because it's flu season, got sick and died?

• 5:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. So that means no IRB, no respectable legitimate IRB would approve that study, which means it will never get done. That's an institutional review board. They're the people who review the clinical trial, make sure everything's on the up and up, including ethical. So they, so either, so probably the studies just won't get done. So it was just a backdoor way of shutting down, you know, vaccines. Because all vaccines are updated, you know, at some point in time and some need to be updated to the latest strain, right? The flu vaccine, if you weren't updating it every year to the strain, it'd be useless practically. But so couching it as we're going to do placebo controlled trials equals we're going to shut down any new vaccines.

• 5:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 5:51Speaker 04

  You know, any vaccines updates or strain updates by making an unethical recommendation.

• 5:56Bob Novella?

  Wait, so isn't so isn't the flu vaccine this season, then the people getting really sick going to explode?

• 6:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, of course.

• 6:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course.

• 6:04Bob Novella?

  So, all right, well, then.

• 6:06Speaker 04

  The other thing is

• 6:07Bob Novella?

  Wonderful.

• 6:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 6:08Speaker 04

  For the for the strain updates, even if they did get a, even if we did do the study, they did approve it, it would delay it by six months, the flu season's over.

• 6:17Bob Novella?

  Right, right.

• 6:18Speaker 04

  So you can't track the strain.

• 6:21Bob Novella?

  Yeah, what do you think would happen like, oh, we had X people, the effectiveness of the strain of the flu vaccine last year was this, and now it's far, far worse. And we had, oh, you know, 30,000 more people die.

• 6:34Speaker 04

  Well, they're not going to report them. They're not going to, because the CDC is shutting down their reporting.

• 6:38Bob Novella?

  There you go.

• 6:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 6:40Speaker 04

  So is there no other way to get the information, Steve? Well, we'll see.

• 6:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, that's the difference between this happening in 1938 and this happening in 2025. The hope, right? The hope is that there will be enough people with independent capabilities. But it is hard to do things like that on a national level. I think some universities are going to try, some different states.

• 7:03Speaker 03

  States will.

• 7:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, they're going to try to take those numbers.

• 7:06Speaker 03

  That's where we're going to have to collect the data from the states, probably.

• 7:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. But, you know, or we're going to start seeing states going around these federal guidelines to protect their people. And then we're going to see bigger differences between health outcomes amongst the states, which we already see. That's just going to grow. I mean, talk about, Steve, did you talk about the fluoride stuff, like the fluoride supplements?

• 7:26Speaker 04

  Didn't even get that. This is more about the vaccines.

• 7:28Cara Santa Maria?

  He wants to pull them. Yeah, I mean, it's just, it's amazing.

• 7:31Speaker 04

  I know, it's terrible. And so the thing is, so many things are happening at once. Again, it's interesting, this is two months, two months later, you'll, you know, you'll you know more than I do about what's already happened. But they're the, so they're attacking the reporting of data, they're attacking the like the rollout, the updating, the study of vaccines. Then they're also attacking the universities who could potentially keep them honest about it. And they're also trying to prevent states from bypassing their terrible federal regulations, right? They are fighting on every front. So anything you say, well, this could happen, they're actually trying to prevent that from happening, too.

• 8:04Cara Santa Maria?

  And it's one thing to be incompetent. It's one thing to be I guess I would say weaponized ignorant, like intentionally ignorant. It's another thing to say our weaponized ignorance and incompetence is going to be the rule of law and we are actually going to ensure death. Like not just oopsie, some people died. We're going to make sure that we ensure that people die.

• 8:29Speaker 04

  There's a body count with this. A hundred percent. But it's also, I wouldn't even say the rule of law. It's because they're substituting the rule of law with the rule of a person.

• 8:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, you're so right.

• 8:38Speaker 04

  Yeah. This is the rule of Trump. That's what we are under. It's none of it is, really.

• 8:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and you sort of left out the fifth estate. And that's what, I mean, I know that this is not timely, but as of last night, when we're recording this, or two nights ago, that's when what John Oliver's most recent episode was all about the media and how we're starting to see the media kowtowing to pressure.

• 9:01Speaker 04

  They're backing down too.

• 9:02Cara Santa Maria?

  They're backing down. They're censoring themselves. They're not pushing back and that's so frightening.

• 9:08Speaker 04

  So what's left?

• 9:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 9:10Speaker 04

  Science Podcast.

• 9:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 9:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:13Cara Santa Maria?

  To do this thing.

• 9:14Bob Novella?

  So we're like the geeky little nephew of to, that saves the enterprise? Is that where we are? Third line, the last line of defense?

• 9:21Jay Novella?

  I think of us like that, that little boy that spoke like an adult in Star Trek, the original series that was drinking Tranya.

• 9:28Speaker 04

  Oh, that always creeped me out.

• 9:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Tranya, Tranya. Sure.

• 9:34Speaker 04

  Carol?

• 9:35Cara Santa Maria?

  You guys, you have no idea.

• 9:37Speaker 04

  Chances of you knowing that are zero.

• 9:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 9:43Speaker 04

  That the rest was like, yeah, absolutely. Oh, sure. That makes total sense. Perfectly cromulent. All right, Bob, start us off with a quickie.

• 9:50Bob Novella?

  Oh, boy. Thank you, Steve. This is your quickie with Bob. New details have been recently revealed about one of the hottest exoplanets ever discovered, Kelt 9B. Astronomer John Allers describes it well when he said, "The weirdness factor is high with Kelt 9B." Why would he say that? Let's see. So Kelt 9B is about 670 light years away in the constellation Cygnus. It's a gas giant and it's a behemoth. It's 1.8 times bigger. than Jupiter with 2.9 times its mass and it doesn't have a nice stately 12 year orbit around its star like our big gas giant Jupiter does. Kelt 9B has a 36 hour year, 36 hours to go around its star.

• 10:33Bob Novella?

  It's whipping around. Yeah, going fast. It's, it's so close. It's 3.2 million miles or 5 million kilometers away, which is far closer to Earth than Earth is. And it's 1/10th Mercury's orbit, 1/10th, the closest planet in our solar system is like far away from this, from this one. And its orbit brings it almost directly above its poles, right? Which is odd. You know, when you think of a planet orbiting a star, it's orbiting like, you know, in the equatorial region, not over its poles. It happens, but it's not, I don't think it's terribly common. Okay. So as you might imagine, the planet is quite hot. It's, it receives 44,000 times more energy than the Earth does from the sun.

• 11:14Bob Novella?

  44,000 times. So that makes its day side temperature 7,800 degrees Fahrenheit, 4,300 Celsius. That is hotter than the surfaces of some stars. So yeah, this is a hot planet. Yeah, imagine, yeah, see that, see that star over there? This planet is hotter than that, than the surface of that, of that star. Now, of course astronomers imagine that, you know, such incredible heating is causing the planet's atmosphere to stream away into space to a certain extent. I wonder how long that would last, right? You can't do that forever. And the star is also weird. The star is twice our sun's size. I believe they meant, they said the radius, twice the radius and 56% hotter.

• 11:56Bob Novella?

  And it also spins 38 times faster than our sun. So what do you guys think? What would such a spin do to a star? Well, it changes shape. Centrifuge. Exactly. Exactly, Jay. So it's, it's like an oblate spheroid. It's flattened at the poles. Imagine you're squishing down the poles closer to together in a sense. And that widens, widens the equatorial region, right? The Earth is an oblate spheroid, but it's not, not as dramatic as this one. So this, this has a result that I haven't heard about before. It's called gravity darkening. Never heard that term before. It's interesting. Means that the polar areas are hotter and the equator is cooler. And so if you could take the temperature at the poles and at the equator,

• 12:39Bob Novella?

  you'd find a difference, almost 1,500 degrees between the two, 800 degrees Celsius difference, which is dramatic. I love how they describe the planet as having four seasons in its 36-hour year. So it's got, right, you've got two summers and two winters. You're going over the poles twice a year and it's hotter. Then you're going over the equatorial area and it's a little bit cooler. So it's like, it's got four seasons. Let's see, Nicole Cologne, as a co-author of the paper, said, "It's really intriguing to think about how the star's temperature gradient impacts the planet. The varying levels of energy received from a star likely produce an extremely dynamic atmosphere." Yeah, I think this would have an amazingly dynamic atmosphere. It's also tidally locked, as you might suspect.

• 13:22Bob Novella?

  So we've got some crazy, and just imagine the interplay between the incredibly hot sun side and the farther, you know, night side. And then, of course, you've got that strip between, you know, what's going on there? Are there any temperatures that are even remotely pleasant? I doubt it, but who knows what's going on? All right, guys, so Google Kelt9B to find out more fascinating details. This has been your Gravity Darkening Quickie with Bob. Back to you, Steve.

• 13:49Speaker 04

  Thanks, Bob. Jay, how are the Voyagers doing? I heard they're still kicking out there.

• 13:55Jay Novella?

  Well, this is Voyager 1. This is, guys, I have to say, this is one of the most impressive feats of spacecraft troubleshooting engineering. Definitely nowhere near, though, the Apollo 13 air scrubber fix.

• 14:09Bob Novella?

  Oh, geez, right.

• 14:10Jay Novella?

  That was largely credited to one man who recently died.

• 14:13Bob Novella?

  Oh, really?

• 14:14Jay Novella?

  NASA engineers successfully reactivated a set of thrusters on Voyager 1 that hadn't been working since 2004. And there was a really important reason why they pulled this off. So quickly, Voyager 1 launched back in 1977. And it's currently the most distant human-made object in existence at over, anybody know how far away? Oh, gosh. All the far away.

• 14:36Bob Novella?

  Damn.

• 14:37Jay Novella?

  All the far away?

• 14:39Bob Novella?

  All the far, yeah. How many?

• 14:41Jay Novella?

  Fifteen billion miles. Ooh. It's fifteen billion now, wow.

• 14:44Bob Novella?

  How many, how many light hours is that?

• 14:47Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it's a meaningless number to me. So like, where is it physically? It's, it, it left our, our solar system over ten years ago. Yeah, it's amazing.

• 14:56Bob Novella?

  Well, yeah.

• 14:57Jay Novella?

  Left the heliopause? Well, okay, Bob, right, we could have a side conversation for an hour about where, where's the rim, blah, blah, blah.

• 15:04Bob Novella?

  It's still nowhere near the Oort cloud, so yeah.

• 15:07Jay Novella?

  Did it leave the heliopause?

• 15:08Bob Novella?

  Yeah, it, it passed the influence of the, of the, of the sun's influences. So it's basically in, in a sense, it's in interstellar space. Uh, but still, there's, you know, I mean, you've got the Oort cloud, which is still, I think, a light year away. So it's, you know, it's nowhere near that. But yeah, in a sense, yeah, it left the, it left the primary influence of, of our, of our sun.

• 15:28Jay Novella?

  How do we know where it is?

• 15:30Bob Novella?

  Heliosphere.

• 15:31Jay Novella?

  Hmm? Cause we're in communication with it. Yeah, right? We know, we know what direction it's in. The trajectory. Yeah, exactly. We can calculate that. By how long it takes to transmit to us, we know how long, how far away it is. So in order to keep those transmissions from Voyager going, NASA has to maintain this very, very precise orientation. So its high-gain antenna stays pointed at the Earth, right? If that antenna doesn't point at the Earth, we're not going to get the signals. So to do that, Voyager relies on these small thrusters that control its, its orientation. Particularly the roll motion, which helps it stay aligned with a guide star that they're using to, to, to help the overall alignment. This is tough. And I would imagine that the farther away it gets, the more difficult that's going to be.

• 16:16Jay Novella?

  The problem is, nothing on board Voyager was built to last forty-seven years. So the, the primary roll thrusters, which are used to control these very tiny little movements that we needed to make, they stopped working in two thousand and four after their internal heaters failed. And apparently the heaters need to, to function in order for the gas that they're emitting to flow properly. NASA engineers assumed that the system was completely done and they switched it, they switched basically everything off and, you know, they went, they moved over to the backup thrusters. So those backups... Have worked really well in way past what NASA thought they would be able to do,

• 16:56Jay Novella?

  but they gradually are now clogging due to propellant residue, which again, they didn't think it was going to last 47 years. I don't think residue was a problem when they were building it. So Voyager 1's thrusters are powered by hydrazine and this is a monopropellant fuel and it's usually used in spacecraft attitude control systems, right? These little thrusters that you'll see in movies and stuff that move jockey things around. It's stored in a liquid form, it's in pressurized tanks. And my first question was like, is there enough of that stuff?

• 17:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, right.

• 17:28Jay Novella?

  I think they need so little of it to make the adjustments that that's why it's lasted so long. But there's got to be a time when they know that that propellant's going to no longer be there. So if the thrusters failed completely, Voyager would simply just lose its ability to stay oriented with the Earth and that would effectively just and quickly end the mission because no more, no more talking, no more mission. And to make this problem even worse, NASA, the only antenna that's powerful enough to send commands to the spacecraft, this is called Deep Space Station 43, DSS-43. It's in Canberra, Australia.

• 18:03Speaker 05

  I thought you were going to say Deep Space Nine.

• 18:06Jay Novella?

  Yeah, if I read Deep Space Nine in my head the first time I read it, I'm like, "Deep Space Station 43." It's like, no, Deep Space Nine. Just call it Deep Space Nine and everyone can go home.

• 18:17Speaker 05

  That's right. We're conditioned that way.

• 18:18Jay Novella?

  So the Deep Space Station 43 is scheduled to go offline from May 2025 through February of 26 because they're doing a major overhaul of it. And this means that the team had this very narrow window of time left when that dish is functioning to attempt to fix. Or, you know, with the article that I first read, it said, you know, is it a risk being unable to send commands for nine months? No. What would happen is, is without, without the thrusters working properly, it could just have veer, it could veer off its angle to us and no longer be able to right itself, which means the mission would have died. So I think the few articles that I read and everything were underplaying the severity of it. Like, you

• 19:02Jay Novella?

  know, it just would, it would end the mission, apparently. So they had to get the fix in. They had to come up with the fix. They had to send it. And it's a, it takes two days to send and receive, right? It's 23 hours each way. So this was a nail biter because when that, when that dish went out of service temporarily, there was just nothing that could be done in over nine months. That could have been the end. So engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, they went into full on think outside the box mode. Of course, lots of people were proposing different things and they were, they were scrambling. You know, they, they had to really, this was, this was a real close call.

• 19:41Jay Novella?

  One team member proposed this novel idea, which is what if the heater system isn't actually broken mechanically, but it was just disabled by a, a circuit being off or something like that, like, you know, some other downline thing that could affect it and, and have the same exact effect, right? You know, the switch could be in the wrong position somehow. And if they could, if they could reset it or flip it back, essentially resetting the power pathway, they might be able to restore the heaters, which would then allow them to bring these primary roll thrusters back online, right? And that idea, it was, it's risk, it was very risky. And this was a big thing that NASA had to figure out is is it worth the risk?

• 20:22Jay Novella?

  Because first, you know, they send the commands to restart these dormant thrusters, then they have to carefully realign the spacecraft. Again, like I said, to point the, the star tracker as its guide with, with super high precision. And if the roll thrusters came alive too soon, right? As the heaters are heating up and if those thrusters like, you know, were able to function and, you know, this machine is 47 years old. Before the heaters could completely warm the thrusters, they, the thrusters could very likely misfire or even explode. And if they exploded, goodbye. That was it. It was unrecoverable situation. So the timing on everything of all these different nuances in the system were wicked

• 21:04Jay Novella?

  important to go specifically as they, they, you know, they specked it out. So they sent the command on March 20th, 2025. Since Voyager is so far away, like I said, it took 23 hours to send it out. And then it was executed, then it took 23 hours for it to send a message back. So they had to wait almost two days to find out if they bricked the Voyager or fixed it, right? And that, again, the news could have easily just said Voyager 1 is toast. So when telemetry finally came back on, it showed the heater temperatures rising dramatically, which is a clear sign that the plan worked and the thrusters came back online and they work.

• 21:45Speaker 05

  Amazing.

• 21:45Jay Novella?

  So that one scientist at JPL basically came up with the idea that maybe it's not broken, which is so counterintuitive, right? Because if a thing's been broken for, you know, 11, 12 years, you know?

• 21:58Speaker 04

  But I like that though, because that's always a good plan. Let's assume this is doable, or let's assume it's fixable. What could we do? I often do that in medicine and I tell as like to my students, like, all right, what could this be that's treatable? Just think about it from that perspective. Don't worry about how likely it is. Just is there anything this could be that is treatable? And then let's make sure it's not that, or let's treat it empirically, right? Because like, if you assume it's untreatable, that doesn't lead you to anything useful.

• 22:31Jay Novella?

  Right.

• 22:31Speaker 04

  Even if it turns out to be the correct answer, you haven't lost anything, right? Because if it's untreatable, it's untreatable. It's the same kind of thing. Let's assume it's fixable.

• 22:38Jay Novella?

  Steve, he was a lone wolf.

• 22:39Speaker 04

  Good for him.

• 22:41Jay Novella?

  Tom Barber, who was the mission lead at JPL, he said, and I'm quoting, "These thrusters were considered dead and it turned out one of our engineers had an insight that maybe it was fixable." Right? That's all it took. Hey, guys, maybe the thing, maybe this thing is set to evil, you know?

• 22:58Speaker 04

  He's your problem.

• 22:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, someone set the Voyager to evil.

• 23:01Jay Novella?

  My final statement, this sentence I'm about to read to you that I finally crafted.

• 23:08Jay Novella?

  Is meant to have massive subtext. Let's see if you guys can pick up on it.

• 23:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, ready.

• 23:12Jay Novella?

  This kind of success isn't just about keeping the 47-year-old spacecraft running. It's a perfect example of how a highly-trained scientist using creativity and a nuanced understanding could carefully engineer a seemingly, you know, one-out-of-a-million fix, even when you're dealing with a one-ton robot, you know, racing through space at 35,000 miles per hour, that's 15 billion miles away, science kicks ass and can do things that we never thought possible. Subtext: RFK is a jackass.

• 23:50Speaker 04

  All right, thanks, brother. All right, Kara.

• 23:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes.

• 23:53Speaker 04

  I suspect we're gonna have some lively discussion.

• 23:55Cara Santa Maria?

  I think so, and maybe some emails? Oh, okay.

• 24:00Speaker 04

  Tell us about space tourism.

• 24:03Cara Santa Maria?

  So I came across an article that was written by Betsy Pudliner. I looked them up on their university website at University of Wisconsin-Stout, and they are a professor of hospitality and technology innovation. Kind of their little bio is, "With more than 30 years of experience in the tourism industry, Dr. Pudliner has cultivated a deep understanding of the field shaped by travel, blah, blah, blah, blah." Okay, so this is a researcher of tourism, which is fascinating. And they wrote an article in The Conversation: "Space Tourism Growth Blurs the Line Between Scientific and Symbolic Achievement. A Tourism Scholar Explains How."

• 24:47Cara Santa Maria?

  So if we all remember, April 14th of this year, there was a very media-friendly, media-focused launch by Blue Origin. So Ayesha Bo, Amanda Nguyen, Gail King, Katy Perry, Carrie Anne Flynn, and Lauren Sanchez. What do these six human beings have in common? Other than the fact that they flew on a Blue Origin?

• 25:14Speaker 04

  They're cities.

• 25:15Speaker 05

  They're celebrity or, you know, figures in culture.

• 25:18Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't think all of them were celebrities.

• 25:20Speaker 04

  Well, you know.

• 25:22Cara Santa Maria?

  They're civilians. What else? There's something really obvious. What?

• 25:25Speaker 04

  They're women.

• 25:25Cara Santa Maria?

  They're women, right? So what were the headlines that we saw?

• 25:30Speaker 04

  That, you know, all female crew put men in space?

• 25:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Historic moment for women in space. We know all female astronauts dominate the skies or, you know, whatever. And the question that like I would pose to you, that Betsy posed to the audience or to the reader, that I think the, you know, obviously the heart of this conversation is, were they astronauts or were they space tourists? And what does that even mean? So if we were to take a poll, what do you, what do you all think? What do you vote astronaut or space tourist?

• 26:02Speaker 05

  Well, in the past, they used to reserve the term astronaut for having achieved a certain altitude. I think that tech, in some technical sense, you became an astronaut. But I'm not sure if they refined it since then.

• 26:15Speaker 04

  But that's just completely separate, you know, indication, right? So you can, we can have, you can set one threshold for did they get high enough to be in quote unquote space? But let's say they were in space and that we put that issue aside.

• 26:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 26:28Speaker 04

  What were they? Right? That's the question.

• 26:30Cara Santa Maria?

  That is the question, right?

• 26:31Speaker 04

  And so it's a continuum.

• 26:32Cara Santa Maria?

  When you say in the past, an astronaut has a certain, but there are other definitions of an astronaut.

• 26:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a continuum, right? So clearly, if you're a pilot, right? If you're operating a spaceship.

• 26:44Speaker 05

  If you're controlling a ship.

• 26:45Speaker 04

  If you're the crew, if you're part of the crew.

• 26:47Cara Santa Maria?

  What if you're a payload specialist?

• 26:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, we're all flying airplanes, but we're not the pilots.

• 26:52Speaker 04

  So payload specialist, so, yeah, so, but if you're working in space, like if you're like going on an EVA to do work in, that is occurring in space, that can only be done in zero G or whatever.

• 27:05Speaker 05

  Science research, yeah.

• 27:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's also, I think, an astronaut. But there's a, that's funny, it's a continuum. But what if what you're doing is not specific to space? Like, let's say you, you know, you have nothing to do with flying the ship. You just, you go up to the space station and you fix the toilet and you come back down. You're a plumber. You're a plumber in space. Does that make you an astronaut?

• 27:25Cara Santa Maria?

  I might consider that a space, I might consider that an astronaut, but I will say it also has a lot more to do with not what you're doing once you're there, but everything you did to prepare to get there.

• 27:36Speaker 04

  Well, that's another thing, yeah. How much training did it take?

• 27:39Bob Novella?

  I like that angle. And how I was gonna say something like, if you're doing work, that would lean me towards thinking that you're, you're more, more of an astronaut than not.

• 27:48Speaker 04

  All right, what if you're a journalist?

• 27:49Bob Novella?

  Prepping.

• 27:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Interesting. Yeah.

• 27:52Speaker 04

  They're just there to experience and document your experience.

• 27:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, we're, like, let's think about wartime, right? We're embedded journalists, soldiers.

• 28:00Speaker 05

  Well, right, but there are civilian journalists also embedded with soldiers, or they're not soldiers.

• 28:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 28:07Speaker 05

  So there's different types.

• 28:08Cara Santa Maria?

  There's different types. And, and this, that civilian versus expert, or civilian versus professional distinction is an important one here, right?

• 28:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think so.

• 28:17Cara Santa Maria?

  And I noticed that Betsy uses that throughout their writing. They say things like, "As commercial space travel becomes more accessible to civilians, more people are joining space flights, not as scientists or mission specialists, but as invited guests or paying participants."

• 28:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:33Cara Santa Maria?

  That line between astronaut and space tourist is becoming increasingly blurred.

• 28:36Speaker 04

  What if you have to train to, like, wear the spacesuit?

• 28:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Just to wear the suit?

• 28:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's interesting. So, basically, they did say something, you know, kind of interesting in their writing. Were these passengers astronauts? Not in the traditional sense. They weren't selected through NASA's rigorous training protocols, nor were they conducting research or exploration in orbit. Instead, they belong, and, you know, they claim, to a new category: space tourists. These are participants in a crafted, symbolic journey that reflects how commercial space flight is redefining what it means to go to space.

• 29:08Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 29:09Cara Santa Maria?

  And actually, they point to, and I didn't know this, origins of space tourism going all the way back to 1986, when the Mir was launched. Because the Mir was the first kind of thing, they called it the first orbital platform, to host non-professional astronauts. So in the 90s, the 2000s, Mir and then the ISS did welcome a handful of privately funded civilian guests. And the most famous one, I guess, was in 2001. There was a businessman from the US named Dennis Tito, and he's often cited as the first space tourist, all the way back in 2001.

• 29:46Speaker 05

  Did they call him a astronaut?

• 29:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow, that's a surprise. No, they called him a space tourist.

• 29:49Speaker 05

  Right.

• 29:50Cara Santa Maria?

  And so now we're starting to see this market, right? We're seeing Virgin Galactic, we're seeing Blue Origin, we're seeing SpaceX having these kinds of conversations. And I pulled, I highlighted a quote directly from the article that I think was very, I don't know, like, they said it way better than I could summarize, and it's pretty short. "The Blue Origin flight was not a scientific mission, but rather was framed as a symbolic event. In tourism, companies, marketers and media outlets often create these performances to maximize their visibility. SpaceX has taken a similar approach with its Inspiration 4 mission, turning a private orbital flight into a global media event, complete with a Netflix documentary and emotional storytelling.

• 30:35Cara Santa Maria?

  The Blue Origin flight sold a feeling of progress while blending the roles between astronaut and guest. For Blue Origin, the symbolic value is significant. By launching the first all-female crew into suborbital space, the company was able to claim a historic milestone, one that aligned them with inclusion, but without the cost, complexity, or risk associated with a scientific mission. In doing so, they generated enormous media attention." Because you can imagine if this was a haphazard crew, or just a crew, not just, but a crew of a bunch of different people, in, you know, mixed-gendered crew, it would not have gotten the media attention that it got. But this author points to the fact that although this

• 31:18Cara Santa Maria?

  seemed like this big victory, it was really symbolic, about visibility, about inclusion, about celebration. It's not the first time women have been in space. There have been 61 women astronaut candidates, many of them have flown. Sally Ride, Mae Jamison, Christina Koch, is it Koch? Koch? And Jessica Mir. But they trained as astronauts, they-

• 31:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Contributed to science, engineering, and, you know, long-duration mission research. There have been historic achievements. And so the question is, when we see all the media attention around these women who flew up and came down and then had all of this press around them, is that something that we should celebrate and should it like bolster like, ooh, women in science, women in space, this is amazing? Or, and maybe I should say and/or, does it actually minimize the accomplishments of the women who came before them and who will come after them, who are doing astronaut work?

• 32:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, so like many things that we talk about, this is primarily an issue of categorization, which is ultimately arbitrary and context-dependent. So, you know, back in the day, everyone going into space was an astronaut. There was no question about their status because you, you know, you had to be trained, you were doing something, like there was no tourist, no dead weight, nothing, except for pilots and mission specialists, basically, people who were absolutely astronauts. Now, the categories of people going into space is broadening and we could start to split them out into different, different subcategories, you know, of there's space travelers, people who go to space, some of them are astronauts, meaning they're professional, their profession is going into space in some way, or working in space, all the way to like tourists who

• 32:59Speaker 04

  do absolutely nothing. But in between, there's going to be a continuum of people who are doing, doing some job in space.

• 33:05Cara Santa Maria?

  The in-between, yeah.

• 33:05Speaker 04

  Or doing something, maybe like, just like, your job is to be a tourist and write about it. Like, if you take a picture and now you're a space photographer, does that also make you an astronaut, quote-unquote astronaut? There's no right or wrong, anti or, you know, and we have to think, as you say, about the meaning of these categories.

• 33:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 33:22Speaker 04

  And how that is communicated to the public and how that affects the space program and space tourism and how the public thinks about it and about what it means to us as a society.

• 33:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes.

• 33:35Speaker 04

  Culturally, everything, so.

• 33:37Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's the framing that the author really takes. They talk a lot about the history of tourism and tourism theories, which I didn't even know there was a whole area of scholarship around this, but that Tourism is really an evolution over time. So, and they even have a little like, kind of graphic of like, starting with exploration into development, consolidation, stagnation, then sometimes rejuvenation or decline, where they show that like, the earliest tourists very often were and are hand-selected, that are either inordinately wealthy, or it's seen as some sort of rite of passage. And we think about early exploration in the same way.

• 34:20Cara Santa Maria?

  There have always been tourists who are along for the ride because they could pay their way onto the ship, because they could pay their way along. And they may have contributed to history and science as well, simply by virtue of being present when something miraculous was happening. But then over time, it becomes more democratized. So, they talk about the Grand Tour of Europe, which was a rite of passage from, I just pulled the article, like, 1600 on, that eventually it became a pretty accessible thing to do. But early on, you, you needed like, kind of a lot of money, you needed a lot of prestige, how do you get that ticket? How do you get that spot? And then eventually, modern travel sort of mimicked that.

• 35:04Cara Santa Maria?

  And so, the idea here is that, yeah, with space tourism, right now, we're in the exploration stage. It's expensive, it's exclusive, it's invite-only, it's available only to a few, the infrastructure is limited, companies are experimenting with what it looks like. It's not mass tourism yet, but maybe it will be. And so, how we talk about it right now, how the media shapes these narratives, is going to have a big impact for the categories that we use in the future. And I think, as much as it's, you know, a categorization problem, and as much as we often talk on the show about the idea of constructivism, and we put a label on something, and that label is arbitrary, that doesn't mean, it doesn't instill deep meaning, right? It can be both arbitrary and deeply meaningful.

• 35:47Cara Santa Maria?

  And so, that's something we, we definitely have to think about, because the narratives, the storytelling, is actually all of it, right now. It's, it's less about the thing itself, and more about how we spin the thing. That's going to affect what we think about it in the future, and what the future of space exploration actually looks like, from both the tourist and, I guess, professional perspective. Fascinating question, though. Yeah. It's one that's near and dear to my heart, because I have Friends, I know people who have been to space, both as astronauts, you know, in the very traditional sense, and then as sort of what I would consider tourists, but but who might have used or had the label put on them as astronaut. And I've always grappled with the feeling that comes up for me when when that label is used.

• 36:32Cara Santa Maria?

  So and I think we all kind of need to do that.

• 36:34Speaker 04

  Mm hmm. It's like, what's the difference? Where's the line between an explorer and a tourist?

• 36:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, for sure.

• 36:40Speaker 04

  If it's the first time you're going someplace or it's, you know, exotic to you, at some point, that make you a little bit of an explorer? Or maybe you're just an adventurer versus you're just a tourist because there are people already there? But was Columbus a tourist because there were already people in the in the Americas? Anyway, yeah, it's it's it's complicated.

• 37:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's complicated.

• 37:01Speaker 04

  That doesn't mean you can't, as you say, you could still make meaningful and useful definitions, even though you recognize that this is just imposing patterns on reality, which is infinitely.

• 37:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and I think the part that kind of bums me out, too, is that in taking on a label that maybe doesn't feel earned or genuine, it minimizes the label that actually doesn't need to feel minimized. Does that make sense? Like, being a space tourist, being the first space tourist or an early space tourist is actually really cool. And so owning that and celebrating it and being like, I'm helping pave the way for many people just like you to eventually do what I do. Like, what a great thing to celebrate. But in being like, I'm an astronaut, then there's all this like, really? Are you an astronaut? And now all of a sudden we go, no, you're just a space tourist. And I don't like that.

• 37:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, but you could use a term like you're a spacefarer.

• 37:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, or you could just celebrate the terminology. Yeah.

• 37:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it's not a tourist definitely has a minimization feel to it. Oh, yeah, absolutely. But astronaut is obviously the maximally, you know, sexy terminology. But you guys, I agree, there should be something in the middle. It's an accomplishment. You put your ass in that seat and you got shot into near orbit orbit, whatever. And you know what I mean? That that's something. Not trivial.

• 38:15Cara Santa Maria?

  No, it's a huge accomplishment. But there is something kind of yucky that happens when somebody who makes a massive accomplishment embellishes and uses terminology even beyond, you know? It's like, can't it be a massive accomplishment on its own? Because the second you go, no, but it's this thing. Everybody goes, no, it's not. It's just that thing. And the just is the problem. Because it's still very cool in and of itself.

• 38:37Speaker 04

  Don't embellish, but don't minimize.

• 38:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 38:39Speaker 04

  But I mean, it might mean that we're always tinkering with the terminology to try to capture the right connotation, the right nuance. All right, let's move on. So, more bad news about the climate.

• 38:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, God.

• 38:52Speaker 04

  There's always gonna be bad news about the climate.

• 38:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 38:55Speaker 04

  One of the big issues with climate change, with the warming average global temperatures, is melting ice. That has a problem for numerous reasons, but one of the big reasons, depending on where the ice is coming from, is that melting ice can raise sea levels. Do you guys know, like Jay, what do you think is the two main reasons that sea levels rise due to a warming climate?

• 39:19Jay Novella?

  I think the obvious one is, like you're saying, why does it rise?

• 39:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, why do sea levels rise?

• 39:24Jay Novella?

  Melting Arctic ice, releases of poisonous gas. That last one was a joke. I mean, what else can cause it other than more water in the ocean?

• 39:32Speaker 04

  What else, guys?

• 39:33Jay Novella?

  Wait, wait, does the ocean take up more space when it's warm?

• 39:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's expanding because of the heat.

• 39:37Speaker 04

  So thermal expansion. And actually, until very recently, thermal expansion was the number one reason for sea level rise due to warming.

• 39:43Cara Santa Maria?

  But now we're losing land ice.

• 39:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it's ice sheets.

• 39:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's not the sea ice, it's the land ice melting.

• 39:48Speaker 04

  Exactly, so it's the ice sheets that are on land. So basically, it's the Greenland ice sheet, the Western Antarctic ice sheet, and the Eastern Antarctic ice sheet are the three main ice sheets. There's also mountain ice and glaciers. Any ice that's on land, that then ultimately ends up in the water can raise sea levels.

• 40:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, because ice that's already floating in the water doesn't change it.

• 40:06Speaker 04

  We're actually just getting to the point where ice, melting ice, is having a bigger impact on sea level rise than thermal expansion. But the question is, how much sea level rise are we gonna get at any particular level of warming? That obviously affects the recommendations for where, like, how much do we need, really need to limit warming to? But that's a complicated question, because it's not only, it's not only a matter of the peak temperature, it's also how long we stay there. If you get the temperature debt back down fairly quickly, it doesn't have as much of an impact.

• 40:47Speaker 04

  Right? So, the Paris Accord and the recommendations of the IPCC have stated that we want to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Right? And because, based upon the science at the time, the irreversible or catastrophic ice sheet melting is likely to occur somewhere between 1.5 and 2.0 degrees Celsius warming above pre-industrial levels. So, if you stay below 1.5, we're probably okay. But, of course, you know, this data, that conclusion is based upon modeling from multiple independent

• 41:31Speaker 04

  lines of evidence, and data is changing, and so those numbers can change. By the way, do you guys know where we are right now? How much warming have we had above pre-industrial levels? In terms of percentage? No, in terms of degrees Celsius.

• 41:45Speaker 05

  Oh, the degree?

• 41:46Speaker 04

  So, 1.5, right, is the Paris Climate Agreement and the IPCC recommendation. Well, we've gone past that already, right?

• 41:52Speaker 05

  2.5?

• 41:53Bob Novella?

  Just under 2?

• 41:53Speaker 04

  1.9? No, no. You guys, we're 1.2. We are not past 1.2. Oh, it's so hard because we're always dealing with projections. Yeah. This is what you're confusing, is that we have temporarily crossed the 1.5C, but the average, like, for the year has not crossed 1.5. We have, like, a heat wave, or like, oh, we're actually, you know, 1. For this week or this month, we're at 1.5, but not for the year. We're at 1.2. So, we're above 1, but we're not quite at 1.5. We're getting pretty close now.

• 42:25Speaker 05

  I feel a lot better now.

• 42:26Speaker 04

  But we're getting pretty close to 1.5, and we're gonna, we're gonna exceed 1.5. There's, at this point, there's no way we're gonna keep it below 1.5. Really, the question is, where's it gonna peak and for how long? Yeah. And so, we wanna, we wanna keep it as low as, the peak temperature as low as possible, and we want to get it, have it, you know, bend that curve back down as quickly as possible. And it's all about how much CO2 we put into the atmosphere, right? That's basically what it comes down to. I mean, methane and other greenhouse gases play a role as well. Their effects are bigger but shorter term, but in terms of, like, over the next 100 years, 200 years, CO2 is the main, is the main forcer or driver.

• 43:08Speaker 04

  Right, so the new study looks at multiple lines of evidence, including historical data, like in the past, when it's been warmer, how much melting has there been, or what were the sea levels like when the temperature was 1.5 C, you know, warmer than it is, than above pre-industrial levels, for example. And they concluded that in order to avoid significant sea ice melt, we need to keep global warming below 1.0 degrees Celsius.

• 43:45Bob Novella?

  Ah.

• 43:46Speaker 04

  So we're already past that point, and maybe even lower, they say, but you know, at least, you know, 1.0 is probably closer to the number that we really need to be shooting for. Again, it doesn't mean it's too late, don't do anything, because again, it's all about time as well. So we still need to bend that curve back down as quickly as possible. So, you know, we're at 1.2. If we can start to reverse these trends quickly, we could avoid the worst of it. And again, when we talk about these glacier melts and sea level rise, we're talking about over the next 200 years, right? A lot of these projections are to like 2,300, you know, 2,200, 2,300. So

• 44:31Bob Novella?

  Star Trek time.

• 44:32Speaker 04

  Yeah. But we have to think about what the sea level is going to be in 100 or 200 years because of something called hysteresis. You guys know, this is my word of the week. You guys know what hysteresis is?

• 44:43Bob Novella?

  I have heard of that word, yes.

• 44:45Speaker 04

  So hysteresis is when there is a delay between a physical cause and a physical effect. So in this case, we're talking about the delay from the temperature rise to the sea level rise resulting from ice melt, which could be decades or even 100 years or 200 years. So

• 45:08Bob Novella?

  It's about inevitability, right?

• 45:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we're trying to prevent the worst of the climate, of the effects of climate change, even though they won't, I mean, they'll stick Still be very bad at 2100, you know, like by the end of this century, but they may not peak until 2200 or 2300. But by then, like it's too late, you know, they're that's again, historesis works both ways, right? Then anything we do to mitigate or to try to reverse that trend will take a long time to kick in. It actually takes longer, it takes longer on the way down than the way up. Because the historesis is asymmetrical, meaning that it takes tens of years, right?

• 45:49Speaker 04

  For the ice to melt or hundreds, tens or hundreds of years, but it takes hundreds or thousands of years for the ice to build back up again, right? So it's like an order of magnitude off, so like, yeah.

• 46:00Speaker 05

  Must be artificially somehow with technology and accelerate that.

• 46:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but there's also the, it's not just historesis, is it? Because historesis is the delay, but we're also dealing with the negative like runaway feedback.

• 46:13Speaker 04

  Well, that's a different issue, you're right, that's a completely, that's the tipping point effect. Do you do other effects kick in that then make us jump to some other new, new stability?

• 46:26Speaker 05

  Equilibrium, yeah.

• 46:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, new equilibrium, that's like, oh, we're gonna now our equilibrium now is 2.0 above pre-industrial levels and that's where we are. Right, you might, yeah, if you hit 1.5, you're gonna hit 2.5, right? If you hit 2.5, you're gonna hit 3.5.

• 46:39Speaker 05

  It's like a domino.

• 46:40Speaker 04

  If you hit 3.5, you're gonna hit 4.5, yeah. So it's exactly, it's the tipping point, like a domino effect. So and that's all, that's, that's, there's a lot of unknowns there because again, it's, we don't know exactly where those tipping points are. So it's all about the precautionary principle, like a actually rational, reasonable outcome of the precautionary principle. Where we're saying, well, we're trying to avoid these possible tipping points. Because if it turns out that we pass them, there's nothing we could do about it at that point. You know, we're kind of committed, that's the idea, like there's now, now you're committed to this much warming. You're committed to this much ice melt and we're committed to meters of sea level rise.

• 47:22Speaker 04

  So if all of the, the ice sheets, the land-bound ice sheets melted, they all melted. How much sea level rise would, would occur?

• 47:33Speaker 05

  All of it?

• 47:34Speaker 04

  Yeah. Oh, boy. This is a wild.

• 47:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Feet?

• 47:37Speaker 04

  This is a wild guess, but five feet?

• 47:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, many feet?

• 47:40Speaker 04

  Oh, no, it's meters. Twenty feet. It's meters, so. Sixty-five meters.

• 47:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Jesus!

• 47:46Speaker 04

  That's a hundred and eighty feet, basically. Sixty-five meters, if it all melts.

• 47:51Cara Santa Maria?

  So, basically, we would only have mountains sticking out.

• 47:54Speaker 04

  So, that's a lot. I mean, there'd be more than, yeah, there would be more than.

• 47:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but that's flooding.

• 47:58Speaker 04

  Wouldn't exactly be Waterworld, but it would be pretty bad.

• 48:00Cara Santa Maria?

  There'd be no coastal areas left. We would be only the most inland of the largest land masses.

• 48:05Speaker 04

  It would be unrecognizable, absolutely. Yes, you also think about, all right, how many people live within one meter of the current sea level? Oh, gosh.

• 48:15Cara Santa Maria?

  I know I do.

• 48:16Speaker 04

  Forty percent of the world's population. No, no, it's two-hundred-and-thirty-million people. That's only one meter, right? That's a add.

• 48:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah, maybe I do.

• 48:23Speaker 04

  A one meter. It's within one, not within sixty-five meters, as Karas said, like, everybody along every coast. But, yeah, but that's, that could, and that, but we could get, we could reach a meter by the end of the century. That's two-hundred-and-thirty-million people at current population levels displaced, essentially. Infrastructure, the whole thing.

• 48:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, my elevation in L.A. is three-hundred-five feet. That's it.

• 48:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. I'm at three-hundred-seventy-one feet at my house.

• 48:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, we're screwed.

• 48:48Speaker 04

  So, but of course, it's not just like, that's where the water level is. Obviously, the higher the water level is, the more surges you're gonna get, you know, there's obviously, there's also tidal effects. Storms. There's more storms, you know, all the other things kick in as well, and so.

• 49:05Cara Santa Maria?

  New York is thirty-three feet.

• 49:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, New York would be. Very, very much under.

• 49:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Eight million people, just gone.

• 49:10Speaker 04

  Gone, yeah.

• 49:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow, this is, oh, my god.

• 49:12Speaker 04

  So, so, yeah, so, basically, they said, one-point-five no longer is a safe level. Really, one-point-oh is kind of a safe level. We're already past it, which makes it all the more urgent that we turn the ship around, that we really start to, you know, reduce the amount of CO2 we're putting in the atmosphere, and, you know, get down to very low levels, even reversing it, right, if we could, you know, to be taking out more than we're putting in for a while. Unfortunately, under the current administration, everything is going in the wrong direction. And even this. Even the things they're saying they're going to do, like Trump said, again, we're two months behind reality here, but Trump said, I want a quadruple nuclear in the United States.

• 49:54Speaker 04

  Like, that sounds good, but then he's gutting the Inflation Reduction Act, which was providing a lot of funding for new nuclear. So like, what's actually happening is going to slow down the adoption of new nuclear. And of course, he's deliberately going after anything renewable, you know, which, which all, and also any, anything against the EV market. So it's, it's bad times, you know? And of course, he's gutting the Environmental Protection Agency and, and NOAA, like, so we won't even have the data or, you know, to, and we won't have the scientists, we won't have the infrastructure to study these problems. Any federal grants studying climate change, gone, defunded, completely, just totally defunded.

• 50:39Speaker 04

  So that's what we're dealing with now. In the meantime, it's, you know, the effects of climate change are more urgent than we thought. But, you know, I think, you know, part of me has to believe, though, that the, the current crop of people doing this know that, yeah, the worst of it won't hit until they're dead, so they don't care.

• 50:55Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah. Sure. That's a huge part of it.

• 50:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, just completely selling out the future.

• 50:59Bob Novella?

  They even believe it in any way.

• 51:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, in many ways, in every way you can think of, they're totally selling out the future. All right. Evan, tell us about how quickly robots could learn to do physical tasks.

• 51:10Speaker 05

  Hmm, yeah, there's been some news this week on that front. I'm going to call this piece, "How to Train Your Robot from Dragon," as in slowing down Dragon. See, how to train your dragon. And I met, I smashed those two together and...

• 51:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, I got it.

• 51:27Speaker 05

  You got it. Phrase. Thank you. Let's role play a little bit, guys. All right. I want each of you to be a, take the role of a robot designer.

• 51:35Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:36Speaker 05

  You have just, you've just designed...

• 51:38Speaker 04

  Wait, are we a robot that designs, or are we somebody who designs robots?

• 51:42Speaker 05

  You are a human that has designed a robot.

• 51:44Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 51:45Speaker 05

  You designed a human-sized robot with human-like features, you know, arms, legs, hands, head. It looks human and you designed it to take the place of humans doing manual labor, okay?

• 51:56Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 51:56Speaker 05

  Now, you have to te... yeah, you have to teach this robot to do a task. Any manual task you decide, you know, sweeping the floor, picking up a box and moving it, basic kind of things that humans do. Give me a limiting factor in the teaching of the robot to do this task. What do you think some things limit our capabilities to teach the robot to do this task?

• 52:20Speaker 04

  Not its ability to do the task.

• 52:22Speaker 05

  Correct. Just about how, you know, how are you going to, how are you going to train this robot?

• 52:28Bob Novella?

  I would train it in virtually. I wouldn't...

• 52:31Speaker 05

  Expand on that, Bob?

• 52:32Bob Novella?

  They're doing a lot of that now where the training is happening in a computer with, you know, with, you could have a training, you know, using like I say, a physics engine. Lots of people, you have lots of people doing it and then from there you could then translate that to a real world. So I think you could do it a lot faster virtually than just starting training it in, you know, you know, meet space.

• 52:56Speaker 05

  That's a great point. Any other thoughts, guys?

• 52:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that's, I agree with Bob, I was going to say that as well because I know they're doing that, training it virtually and then you have to train it on the actual task.

• 53:05Speaker 05

  You have to train on the actual task, right, Steve? And when it comes to humans doing these tasks, we work on a very, what, human time scale? Right? And therefore, a lot of the times when these robots are being trained, the human time scale becomes a limitation for that. Robot learning is slow because human tasks are, you know, have nuance and context and physical complexity and the current AI systems, they're doing okay right now, but they're still catching up to those kinds of demands. And one major challenge for robot makers is the lack of large-scale real and synthetic and synthetic data to train these robots. Human demonstrations are not scalable.

• 53:50Speaker 05

  They're limited by, what, like, number of hours in a day, for example. But robots also need to be tested in the physical world. So you have to compromise, but it's timely. There's a cost associated with that, and there are certainly risks, safety risks, also that come along with that.

• 54:08Speaker 04

  Evan, can you train one robot or a limited number of robots to do the task and then have those robots train the other robots 24/7?

• 54:16Speaker 05

  Probably. You probably could, if you can get to that point, right? That would be a smart way of doing it.

• 54:21Bob Novella?

  I wouldn't think they'd have to specifically train other robots. They would just transfer the learning data over and like bam, like I know Kung-Fu.

• 54:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. So you train one robot and then you just copy the programming to every other robot?

• 54:32Speaker 05

  Right, is eventually what you would do, but you still have to get that one robot up to speed and running, right? And in order to do that, you have to come up with better methods in order to train it, not on human timescales, but things that are, work better with robot learning and the way robots learn. And Nvidia has come up with a way to make the learning time for robots as much as 60 times more efficient than they were for robots prior to this technology that just came out. Nvidia has announced Isaac Groot N 1.5, which is the first update to Nvidia's open, generalized, fully customizable foundation model for human reasoning and skills.

• 55:17Speaker 05

  So this is an upgrade to Groot N1. Under Groot N1, if a robot had to take, for example, 90 days to learn a task, whatever that task is, that robot can now do it in 36 hours, can learn the task in 36 hours. You go from, right, it took three months for the robot to be able to process all this stuff and get it to the point where you need it to function correctly. Now it can learn the same thing in 36 hours. That's quite a jump.

• 55:43Speaker 04

  However, when you ask it a question, all it says is, "I am Groot."

• 55:48Speaker 05

  I love that they used Groot. I love that they used and didn't call it some, you know, L2Z65, whatever. Like astronomers, take note of that, please, when you're naming things. Thank you. Yeah, Groot N1.5. It can better adapt to new environments and workspace configurations as well as recognize objects through user instructions. And this upgrade significantly improves the model's success rate for common material handling and manufacturing tasks like sorting or putting away objects. And this is open sourced. It's out there. You grab it and they have grabbed it. Since the announcement came out, I think it was Monday of this week, which is we're recording this in late May.

• 56:31Speaker 05

  On the first day, I think 6,000 downloads of Groot N.1.5 took place. It learns quickly in large part due to a technique they refer to as dreaming. I don't know if you guys, have we talked about the dreaming way of learning for robots? Dreaming? Dreaming, that's the term. Here we go. Android dreaming of robotic sheep moment. We finally reached it. Oh, that's a Blade Runner reference, by the way. Kara?

• 56:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, thanks.

• 56:59Speaker 05

  Just so you know.

• 57:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Not just for me, just for all of you in the audience.

• 57:02Speaker 05

  Well, yes, and for everyone.

• 57:04Cara Santa Maria?

  I am the proxy for a particular type of listener.

• 57:09Speaker 05

  So dreaming, in this context, dreaming means using synthetic data generation, creating large scale, high quality simulation data in virtual environments rather than collecting real world, physical data. Right? So instead of using actual time, real world, physical means to teach something, you do it like Bob, you suggested in a, in a virtual, in a virtual environment. But essentially it's dreaming for these robots, but they retain what they learn. What a wonderful advantage.

• 57:36Speaker 04

  Why not?

• 57:37Speaker 05

  Robots, could you imagine if people could?

• 57:39Speaker 04

  You could do that. You could, you could practice in your mind.

• 57:42Speaker 05

  But to the point where you can accomplish a specific task?

• 57:45Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, there are limits because it won't really help your muscle memory as much, but just because of the way we are neurologically, but you know, you can't, you absolutely, like if you can train a sequence or think about things like that, you could do things in your head. I think people with aphantasia probably have a harder time doing that, but.

• 58:02Bob Novella?

  What about lucid dreaming, Steve? I think that would also go apart, at least part of the way towards a muscle memory as well.

• 58:08Speaker 04

  I don't know. I don't know about the, how that works neurologically.

• 58:12Speaker 05

  While they are dreaming, they are practicing their tasks millions of times over in parallel across simulated environments, millions of times. That's why this is reduced so drastically. The simulation data acts as a stand-in for actual sensor data, which enables the model to generalize skills before even being deployed in the real world. So this reduces the need for expensive, real-world robot trials. It enables rapid iteration and scaling across many different tasks, and it allows the robots to safely explore edge cases, you know, falling, colliding, failing, without all the real-world

• 58:56Speaker 05

  risks that are involved with such things. So this is much more efficient and safer, and certainly more cost-effective ultimately as well.

• 59:04Speaker 04

  So when do the robots take over the world again?

• 59:06Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, so it was gonna be in about a year or two, but now it's 60 times that. So, next week.

• 59:13Speaker 04

  All right. That's good. Bob, tell us about the most powerful solar storm ever, well, ever recorded or known or whatever. What's going on?

• 59:23Speaker 05

  By people.

• 59:24Bob Novella?

  Yeah, fascinating story here. Scientists have found evidence of the worst solar storm to hit the Earth ever found using a new climate chemistry model. With that, they were able to decipher the clues left over 14,000 years ago, farther back in time than any other previous model could accurately perform. This is from Science Direct. The title of the study is "A New Model Reveals That the Late Glacial Radiocarbon Spike of 2350 B.C. Was Caused by the Record-Strong Extreme Solar Storm." To appreciate this news item, as usual, a little homework we gotta go over here. You need some familiarity with carbon 14 and the link that it has with solar storms. Carbon 14, we've talked about it on the show a few times. It's a radioactive isotope of carbon. It's weak.

• 1:00:09Bob Novella?

  It's really nothing that you need to be worried about radioactively, like beta radiation. What happens, though, in its formation, cosmic rays hit the atmospheric nitrogen, and that turns it into carbon 14. Carbon 14 then combines with oxygen and creating radioactive carbon dioxide. And then from there, the radioactive carbon dioxide gets taken up by by plants using photosynthesis and animals consume the plants. So there, we've got carbon 14 in our bodies that's replenished every time we eat. So now, this is the basis for radiocarbon dating because carbon 14 decreases after death, right? So you're not eating it anymore. And then the half-life kind of becomes noticeable because it'll decrease.

• 1:00:51Bob Novella?

  And so if there's if there's less C14, then it's older. And that maxes out for what, like 60,000 years? Essentially, at that point, there's so little carbon 14 left that we can't even detect it. So then we have to use other methods for for dating. All right.

• 1:01:06Speaker 05

  Homeopathy, yeah.

• 1:01:07Bob Novella?

  Yeah, oh, yeah. The now, the link to solar storms, though, is that the storms create spikes of carbon 14 in the environment, like in like trees, for example. This is pulse of carbon 14 that's created with all with all the particles and that are part of the the solar storm itself. An extreme storm, like we're talking about here, leaves distinctive spikes in, for example, in this example, tree rings. We could we could detect it. And so it's like it's like a fingerprint, but it's, you know, it's more complicated than that, of course, as usual. So there are some past famous storms, solar storms that we're all aware of, but we've heard of all of these. And not, yeah, but but even before, well, let's let's start with last year.

• 1:01:50Bob Novella?

  They actually named last year's solar storm, the the Gannon Storm of 2024. It actually saw a mass migration of satellites because they thousands of them began firing their thrusters to make up for the altitude loss, right? Because all those particles within within the atmosphere just essentially makes it denser. There's more drag. They lose their orbit and they got to get back up to their to their maximal, you know, their working orbit. So a mass migration of satellites, interesting words there. Then there was the Halloween Storm of 2003. Now, that was similar in strength in strength to the Gannon Storm. For that one, similar to Gannon, just like satellite trajectories were just changing unpredictably predictably because of this density. ...atmosphere caused by all these charged particles from the sun.

• 1:02:35Bob Novella?

  And then, my favorite, the 1859 Carrington event. Ten times, ten times stronger than what we experienced last year in the Halloween storm. Order of magnitude stronger. Took down telegraph wires all over the world. Luckily, technologically, we're basically the infancy of such things that could be impacted. And so it wasn't this unmitigated disaster that it would be today. Now, the strongest, though, I wasn't aware of this, the strongest of all the storms we had detected until previously was 775 A.D. solar storm. Doesn't really have a name. This was back when Charles the Great reigned in medieval Europe. There's few written records of this, but historians have found hints of this happening

• 1:03:19Bob Novella?

  from ancient Chinese and Anglo-Saxon chronicles. So there are hints of it. So that's the biggest one that we have ever detected evidence for. But the thing is, though, we live in the Holocene, right? This is like essentially the modern day till 12,000 years ago is considered the Holocene. It's interglacial, right? We're in a period of time between glaciers. It's characterized by relative warmth and stable weather, right? So that's kind of what the Holocene's all about. But we've never been able to detect anything outside of the Holocene because the weather was different, like the Pleistocene, right? It's very problematic. It was less warm, it was more glacial, and all of our models are meant really for a Holocene atmosphere.

• 1:04:04Bob Novella?

  And so they don't really work reliably in atmospheres different enough to have their own designation, like Pleistocene. Technically, scientists would describe it as that we have a lack of carbon transport models that happened during those glacial conditions characterized, you know, that happened in the Pleistocene. And so we found tree rings from 14,000 years ago that were very notable. There seemed to have been potentially a huge spike of carbon 14, but none of our models could really handle it. They couldn't really decipher it. I mean, potentially, it could have been a huge solar Or but maybe it was something geomagnetic or it was maybe it was due to to climate change.

• 1:04:48Bob Novella?

  So they couldn't really say with any any scientific certainty what these spikes were in those the spikes of carbon 14 in those tree rings from 14,000 years ago. So this is where the new the new model comes in. This is a new chemistry climate model called so-called 14C EX model. So this is where this model comes in. I mean, I won't go into too many details about it, but obviously this model is optimized for interpreting carbon 14 spikes during glacial periods, during the type of atmosphere that we believe was around when, you know, 14,000 years ago during this time. And what I liked is that they took they took this new model and they tested it against

• 1:05:28Bob Novella?

  the 775 AD solar storm, which was, you know, clearly within the Holocene with with modern atmos, you know, atmosphere. And that solar event, 775 AD, the biggest one we've ever studied, obviously, it's it's very, very well studied. They use this model against that and and the results were were actually very favorable. I the sense I get is that this model could be used in the Holocene and the Pleistocene. So it does so it's kind of like it seems like they expanded its capabilities to also incorporate the Pleistocene as well as the Holocene because because otherwise they wouldn't have tested it against the 775 AD solar storm. Okay, so what the conclusion is obvious.

• 1:06:09Bob Novella?

  It's the largest solar storm, they believe, odds are really good that this is the largest solar storm that's ever been detected, the the most carbon 14 ever injected into the into the environment that quickly. Lead study author Kencia Kolobenko said, "This event establishes a new worst-case scenario. Understanding its scale is critical for evaluating the risks posed by future solar storms for modern infrastructure like satellites, power grids, and communication systems." So, yeah, this is this is important information for us to to take and prepare for. So my big question at this point was, all right, that's interesting, but what would this what would happen if this storm hit today? And it was hard to get some

• 1:06:52Bob Novella?

  Real solid predictions, but the obvious answer is that it would be a global crisis. It would be a disaster. There would be long-term blackouts. It would overload transformers lasting weeks or months, or I think it could easily last potentially for years because a lot of these things are not easy to replace, very expensive. Infrastructure damage, like I was saying, transformers, substations, high voltage transmission lines would be damaged or destroyed. We would experience huge problems with our satellites and a loss, I think, of a good chunk of some of our very important satellites, you know, because the high-energy particles in the radiation can permanently damage or disable them. Imagine, you know, having, you

• 1:07:35Bob Novella?

  know, GPS communications, weather monitoring, weather monitoring being disabled or destroyed for significant periods of times. Like, wow, not fun. There would be disruption of air travel, which, you know, it sounds kind of trivial with all this other stuff going on, but I mean, imagine having a lot of the flights that were happening to be rerouted or grounded. So essentially, global travel chaos is what would result. And then, and then don't even get me started on the financial markets, global financial markets massively unstable. It would be, can you imagine? I just can't imagine a better, you know, a worse day for the financial markets when that really hit. If it, I'm not even going to say if, because

• 1:08:15Bob Novella?

  this happened 14,000 years ago, and it's going to happen again, just a matter, just a matter of when at this point. And then finally here, supply chain collapse. And that's all about, you know, global logistics, you know, shipping and transportation systems. We could have amazing shortages for critical supplies, medicines, food. I mean, all right, have I painted the picture? There is a bright side. The bright side is the auroras would be off the hook. We would see, we would see auroras potentially in equatorial regions. And so if you see, if you see auroras and you're at the equator, you know some shit is going down. And I, can you even imagine being in a polar region when this was happening?

• 1:08:56Bob Novella?

  How bright, how amazingly bright that is? I would love to see that simulated. So yes, clearly, this is A global crisis and I'm really hoping that this is this is a wake up call yet another wake up of the many wake up calls we need. I hope this is a wake up call, but I'm not confident at all because we are not very good for long term possibilities or or scenarios like this where you know it could happen tomorrow, it could happen in a hundred years, but if you look at the statistics, Steve, I never forgot that talk we did years, years ago about the probability of getting hit with a, you know, a car even a Carrington level event, which is weaker than than any of these, you know, and the odds were not encouraging at all. I mean, it was, I forget the exact numbers, but you know, within what 20 or 30 years, it's just like,

• 1:09:40Speaker 04

  Like on average, it should happen like within 20 years. Remember, actually, as pessimistic as you are, we have been hardening the grid for the last 10, 15, 20 years. The bottom line is what I found is that we, yeah, we do not know what would happen. We just don't straight up don't know. And now we may know even less because we have like these new upgrades. But the thing is like this one from 14,000 years ago, something that strong, yeah, that is, that is hard, really hard to protect against.

• 1:10:10Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:11Speaker 04

  Something that powerful.

• 1:10:12Bob Novella?

  It is. I mean, I mean, I think we should be making lots of transformers, just like, and I know they're really expensive. Make a bunch of them, store them.

• 1:10:20Speaker 04

  Like we have a strategic reserve, a strategic reserve. We have a strategic reserve of oil. We need a strategic reserve of transformers.

• 1:10:27Bob Novella?

  Right. Exactly. And yeah, you got to harden these facilities. And yes, you're right. They, they have made progress. They absolutely have made progress. But, but I'm not confident that it's anywhere near enough.

• 1:10:38Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, enough again is relative. That's enough for how bad of a, see what I mean? We're talking about.

• 1:10:43Bob Novella?

  I think preparing for a Carrington level is reasonable. You don't have, you don't necessarily don't, you know, because as we know, that last 5% protection could, could make it a thousand times more expensive. But, um, but a Carrington level is reasonable. I mean, it only happened in like eight, what in the last 1800s. Not that long ago. And like,

• 1:11:02Speaker 04

  Well, like with floods, they talk about flooding, they talk about a 50-year event, a 100-year event, a 500-year event, a thousand-year event. Same thing with these coronal mass ejects. We have to talk about a 100-year event, a 500-year event, a thousand-year event. And we should be protecting at least for the every 100-year event, if not the every thousand or 10,000-year event.

• 1:11:21Bob Novella?

  Right. And hopefully, models like this will help us detect even more, more of these ancient solar storms, and we can get a better sense on, you know, on when we might expect the next one.

• 1:11:32Jay Novella?

  And this is like, it's not just like an inconvenience, like you were saying, Bob. Like, we could be out of power for so long that, you know, it becomes Lord of the Flies. You know what I mean?

• 1:11:41Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God, yeah.

• 1:11:42Speaker 04

  Millions of people, tens of millions of people could die, you know, as a result. It could, yeah, it could take years for us to really get civilization back on track, if it's bad enough.

• 1:11:51Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah, this would be...

• 1:11:52Speaker 04

  Bob, interestingly, you used the term "off the hook" to describe...

• 1:11:57Cara Santa Maria?

  I know, I was like, Steve, how excited are you that he said that?

• 1:12:00Speaker 04

  How cool the Aurora Borealis would be. Well, we're going to get to that in a minute. First, we're going to talk, we have two emails. That's actually the second email. The first email comes from Levante Vizi, or Vitsi, from Orono, Maine, and he writes, "A paper in Nature Energy written by Siobhan Powell suggests that we should be charging during the day to reduce strain on the grid. The idea seems very counterintuitive when thinking about lowering the peaks in grid demand, but makes sense for maximizing renewable energy usage. The other things I was wondering, which the paper doesn't mention, is how much excess energy production we would need on a day that has low solar and wind output.

• 1:12:42Speaker 04

  On such days, the demand on the grid would be very strenuous." An interesting idea, though. So he is talking about using car batteries for grid storage, but also...

• 1:12:54Speaker 04

  The demand on the grid of recharging all of our EVs. The study he's referring, referencing comes from September 2022, so it's a couple of years old, but it's still relevant. And what they found was if you use a rapid, a model of rapid electric vehicle adoption, right, so towards the more rapid end of the spectrum, by 2035, that's 10 years away, basically, everybody recharging their cars overnight would actually increase the demand on the group, the peak energy need of the grid by 25%. And during a stress test, during a stressful situation, could be up to 50%.

• 1:13:36Speaker 04

  It may not be, therefore, a good idea to have everybody recharging their vehicle overnight. And that it's better just to let, you're better off just saying, all right, just recharge whenever you want, because some people will be recharging during the day, in terms of lowering peak demand on energy production. Does that make sense? But actually, when you look, you know, you read this paper, and there are other related papers, because there was also like a paper published also in 2022, that said that with even conservative adoptions of EVs by, say, 2050, there could be between 32 and 62 terawatt hours of grid storage in EVs, in personal EVs.

• 1:14:18Speaker 04

  And that even with modest adoption by 2030, there could be enough EVs for that to provide short-term grid storage. Now, short-term grid storage means two to four hours, which doesn't sound like a lot, but that's enough to shift peak solar production to peak demand, as opposed to like days or months, right, or seasonally shifting it. Like, seasonally shifting it, we need closed-loop hydro or something like that. But batteries would be used basically for short-term storage. But that's, again, that's enough to balance the production and demand during the day, right? On the level of a day.

• 1:14:59Speaker 04

  But what all this means is that the expanding EV market is both an opportunity and a challenge. It's an opportunity because it could provide a lot of grid storage, but it's a challenge because it's also going to increase our energy demand. And it's going to, and again, especially if we're all charging our batteries roughly at the same time. Now, I think the same solution exists to both of these issues. And that is having all of the EVs networked, you know, which they are. Especially if you have a Tesla, Tesla, you know, can't communicate to your car. But also, like, run off of software that is, basically, you've just said it and forget it, right?

• 1:15:43Speaker 04

  You like, we tell our Tesla, "Have the car ready to drive at 8 o'clock in the morning." And then it's always plugged in when it's parked in our garage. And then the car decides when to charge it, right? We're not deciding when to charge it. And it's based on a couple of things. It's based mainly on like, when the lowest demand is, which is also when electricity is the cheapest. But it could easily be, all right, like, these computers are just going to decide, like, when do we need to take energy from the batteries? Like, for peak shaving, when do we need to store energy into the battery? And how do we balance that demand across a vast network of millions of EVs

• 1:16:23Speaker 04

  to basically stabilize the grid, stabilize production to demand, and minimize peak demand? Right? So I think this is kind of an issue that's going to solve itself. Because, right, again, all we have to do is just keep doing what we're doing. You plug it in when you get home, and you let your computer decide how to recharge it. And it's just a matter of incorporating that into the grid. Right now, there's a legislation in Connecticut that if you allow the state utilities, right, if you allow the utilities to use your home battery backup for grid storage, you get like a massive rebate on your battery, like $7,000, $10,000, you know, like something

• 1:17:08Speaker 04

  significant. So that's good, right? That's a, yeah, let us use your battery for grid storage and we'll give you a huge rebate on the cost of installing battery backup in your home. So it could be the same thing, like you get a tax rebate or something. You get some kind of benefit for plugging your car in and allowing it to be used as part of grid storage and stabilizing the grid. I think we have to do that. Like, this is gonna have to be how things evolve, right? But at the end of the day, you know, there's a lot of storage, a lot of energy storage in an EV battery. And there's no reason why we should have millions of batteries just sitting there and not be using it for grid stability. But I do think, I'm confident that this is an issue that we'll take care

• 1:17:52Speaker 04

  of, because this is all software at this point, right?

• 1:17:55Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:55Speaker 04

  But let's get to Off the Hook. This email comes from Annie from Ontario. And Annie writes, "I keep hearing Steve and his brothers use 'off the hook' to mean a superlative. On the most recent episode, Steve said that the animation was off the hook on a show that he mentioned right at the end. I have always used the phrase 'off the hook' to mean being let off without punishment, probably derived from a fishing metaphor, as in, somebody did something bad and was let off the hook. I hadn't noticed the rogues doing this until the last couple of years. I've been meaning to write in about this for some time, but keep forgetting, and I'm usually out and about when I'm listening. I happened to be at my computer when I heard this time. Is this more of a New England thing, or is it

• 1:18:37Speaker 04

  more widespread? In my life, I have never heard anyone use 'off the hook' to mean any, to mean great or excellent. Any idea when this started to become more commonly used? It drives me crazy every time Steve or one of the others says it. I've never noticed Cara or Evan say it. I don't know if you guys do." I think it's only Bob that says it.

• 1:18:58Bob Novella?

  I don't know why I gravitated towards that expression.

• 1:19:00Speaker 04

  Do you say it, Steve? I absolutely have said it, yeah. Oh, I feel like you guys are mixing up off the hook with off the chain. So, we're not mixing up anything.

• 1:19:09Speaker 05

  I think it became more commonly used around May of 2005.

• 1:19:12Cara Santa Maria?

  No, but I guess it's true. Some people do say like, you know, that that's off the hook. Like that party was off the hook.

• 1:19:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. You are linguistic pioneers.

• 1:19:17Cara Santa Maria?

  But I definitely hear off the chain.

• 1:19:19Speaker 04

  We're not pioneers. So this is, this is the history of this. So the term off the hook goes back to the mid 1800s. And it was a fishing metaphor and it did initially mean like to be let not just it let off of your responsibility. Right? Not.

• 1:19:33Cara Santa Maria?

  But to be fair, it didn't just initially mean that. It still means that.

• 1:19:37Speaker 04

  Oh, it still means that. Yeah. I'm still saying.

• 1:19:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, people use that for the way that it's been used all the time.

• 1:19:41Speaker 04

  That was its first meaning, like the term off the hook. However, some references, some references say that it may also have been used to refer to like leaving your phone off the hook. Right?

• 1:19:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, I'm seeing that in etymology. Yeah, I just looked up the etymology. That's the second etymology.

• 1:20:01Speaker 04

  Phones used to have hooks.

• 1:20:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. You would leave it off the hook to prevent yourself from getting phone calls.

• 1:20:07Speaker 04

  Or you could say my phone is ringing off the hook. Have you ever heard that?

• 1:20:10Speaker 05

  That I've heard. Yes, that's the one.

• 1:20:12Speaker 04

  Which means like it's out of control.

• 1:20:14Speaker 05

  Right. Like physically moving, it's ringing so much.

• 1:20:18Speaker 04

  So that's what we've appropriated. No, no, no, no. It means that you're getting called so frequently that it's ringing off the hook. That's what that means.

• 1:20:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:25Speaker 04

  Um, but in the, in the 1980s and 1990s, it took on a different meaning in black urban American hip hop culture.

• 1:20:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, A A V E.

• 1:20:39Speaker 04

  Exactly. And this is, this usage was to mean impressive or superlative, right? Like this party was off the hook. And that then got mainstreamed by the two, early 2000s. So we're just picking this up from the mainstreaming of this, you know, black urban culture playing of using it to mean awesome. But that's 20 years ago, 30 years ago. We didn't, it's not new. We didn't make it up. It's not New England. It's just, this is a mainstreaming of they, they're saying mainly hip hop culture.

• 1:21:14Cara Santa Maria?

  But also off the chain, by the way. They sort of cross.

• 1:21:16Speaker 04

  Yes, but off the chain is like your dog is off the chain. They're wild. It's loose. It's crazy.

• 1:21:21Cara Santa Maria?

  But it means this, but they're both like superlatives. Yeah, they mean like cool.

• 1:21:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I don't know. Then that's one of the speculation is that it kind of merged off the hook and off the chain. But it's, but there's no evidence of that. And it could have just been that somebody just started using it to mean this is awesome. It kind of sounds like, like when you say like, this is off the hook. It kind of sounds that way, you know? It sounds like this is amazing, you know?

• 1:21:47Cara Santa Maria?

  It is a funny, like, it is a bit jarring though. And I can see what she means because it's like one of the only types of those sort of phrases that you guys use. Like this very eighties, nineties.

• 1:22:00Speaker 04

  Well, we have.

• 1:22:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Urban.

• 1:22:02Speaker 04

  We have proximity to New York and that's probably the path that it took to our vernacular. And I like it. Get used to it.

• 1:22:10Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:22:12Speaker 04

  I like it too. I like saying it. It's something rewarding about.

• 1:22:16Speaker 05

  It's totally rad.

• 1:22:17Cara Santa Maria?

  That's so, it's so weird because why would I have never noticed you say it, Steve? But I always know, I think maybe Bob.

• 1:22:24Speaker 04

  You might use it more, but I definitely use it. I use it. I even know what they're talking about. I know the episode they're referring to. I definitely.

• 1:22:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Jay, what about you?

• 1:22:31Jay Novella?

  This whole thing absolutely came from, I think, rap music influence, listening to MTV and things like that. I mean, we didn't make it up. It was absolutely something that we picked up from the culture and it was not a mild infusion. It was everywhere. Everybody was saying that in the eighties.

• 1:22:49Speaker 04

  Really?

• 1:22:50Cara Santa Maria?

  I guess I'm more meant to you say it often now because I don't, I didn't think so. Yeah. I don't think I've ever heard you say it. So it's, it's mostly Bob and also.

• 1:22:58Speaker 05

  Occasionally Steve.

• 1:22:58Speaker 04

  Fair.

• 1:22:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay. And never.

• 1:23:01Speaker 04

  I've been, have you used it?

• 1:23:02Speaker 05

  Nope, I do not use it.

• 1:23:03Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't either.

• 1:23:04Speaker 04

  Bob and I are just cooler than us.

• 1:23:05Jay Novella?

  And if I was going to say something was off the hook.

• 1:23:07Speaker 04

  That's clear.

• 1:23:09Jay Novella?

  It would, the sentence would start with, that shit was off the hook. It would never be like, hey, that was off the hook. It'd be like, that shit was off the hook.

• 1:23:17Speaker 04

  You know what I mean?

• 1:23:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And I would definitely always use it the way that our dear writer, you know, like, okay, guys, you're off the hook.

• 1:23:23Speaker 04

  I use it that way, too. I also use it that way as well. I just, yeah, I just haven't. What about off the hizzy? What? That's a very type of off the hook. Uh, never heard it.

• 1:23:31Cara Santa Maria?

  We're just gonna stop there.

• 1:23:32Speaker 04

  I first heard that today. Wow. Right now. No, that definitely, that, that's, that's even too cool for me.

• 1:23:38Cara Santa Maria?

  No, this should, yeah.

• 1:23:40Speaker 04

  I say it's for shizzle. Is that okay? Can I say that? That's like saying, it's like saying for shizzle. It is. For shizzle. That's off the hizzy. Yeah, I say that all the time. We have one friend who non-ironically uses the term shizzle. But anyway.

• 1:23:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, no.

• 1:23:54Speaker 04

  It's true. Maybe not anymore. It's been a while, but we'll see. Oh, boy. All right, guys, let's go on with science or fiction. That letter was off the hook.

• 1:24:04Speaker 03

  It's time for Science or Fiction?

• 1:24:14Speaker 04

  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 loosely based on not a con. The theme is not a pig. I have never been to that conference. Not a pig.

• 1:24:35Cara Santa Maria?

  So, wait, these are things that are not pigs?

• 1:24:36Speaker 04

  These are things that are not pigs. Okay. I like it. That narrows it down. It'll make slightly more sense when I start to give you them. Okay. Item number one, I think this is pronounced scotoplannus, P-L-A-N-E-S, planus? Scotoplannus? What'd you call it? Also known as the sea pig, is a round, pink sea cucumber that uses elongated feet as legs to walk on the soft ocean bottom in the deep abyssal plain. Abyssal, my nizzle. Number two.

• 1:25:09Speaker 04

  My shizzle.

• 1:25:09Jay Novella?

  In the deep shizzle plane.

• 1:25:12Speaker 04

  The deep. All right. Not to be confused with the Hognose snake, the large anaconda pig snake is a roundish and mostly pink South American snake that is trapped for its abundant and apparently tasty meat. And I number three, the river pig is a finless freshwater porpoise that is round and pink in color with intelligence considered comparable to that of a gorilla. Right, so these are three animals referred to as pigs, at least in their common names, that are not pigs. All right, Kara, go first.

• 1:25:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Um, okay, so we've got a sea pig, which is a little sea cucumber. Uh, we've got a pig snake, uh, which, but a large anaconda pig snake, and then we've got a river pig, which is porpoise. Okay, so river, I've never heard of a freshwater porpoise being called a river pig, but I do know that there are pink dolphins in the Amazon River, um, or in the Amazon region. And so these pink dolphins could be called river pigs. Why not? They're pink and they are freshwater, so that seems reasonable. And intelligence comparable to a gorilla? Sure, I mean, you know, cetaceans are really, really smart. We know this.

• 1:26:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Sea pig, I feel like when I think about like a plesia or sea cucumber or like, um, all the little kind of, oh, what are the ones I'm thinking of that are really colorful? And, but all of these little, um, uh, animals that you might see when you go like tide pooling and stuff, there are so many of them and they're so vibrant and they have such really interesting and unique, uh, looks to them that I could see that one being reasonable. The one that bothers me is the large anaconda pig snake. A pink anaconda? I think I would have seen this before. And also anacondas are big, they're charismatic, they're, they're just these large creatures. I feel like I would have heard of this, so that one's bothering me. I'm just gonna say that's the fiction.

• 1:27:11Speaker 04

  Okay, Bob.

• 1:27:12Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, nothing really jumped out at me, uh, that much, except for the, this anaconda, fusing the, the idea of anything pig-like with an anaconda just was rubbing me the wrong way otherwise, but I'm, I'm just rolling the dice here. Oh, I should get my science fiction coin out. Oh, damn.

• 1:27:32Bob Novella?

  I don't have my damn coin, it's upstairs. We can just flip that. And Kara, say that's fiction.

• 1:27:37Speaker 04

  Okay, Jay.

• 1:27:39Jay Novella?

  The Skoto Plains, it just sounds like a name you made up, Steve. The Deep Abysmal Plain. That's pretty cool.

• 1:27:46Speaker 05

  Abyss.

• 1:27:47Jay Novella?

  Alright, yeah, I mean, this is all spitballing. Let me see.

• 1:27:51Jay Novella?

  The hog-nosed snake. It's an anaconda pig snake, but it's not a pig. The Large Anacondas Pig Snake. That sounds fake, too. The last one, The River Pig, is a finless freshwater porpoise, right? Oh, sorry, I'm reading that off the internet.

• 1:28:08Bob Novella?

  Porpoise.

• 1:28:09Jay Novella?

  I'm just kidding. So I'll just consider comparable to that of a gorilla. A gorilla, a pig? A pig, a pink-water porpoise gorilla? That's crazy. The River Pig. How come we haven't heard of any of these guys? Let me see here. There's a coin. Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna say, I'm gonna say, um, the second one is a fake. The pig, the hog-nosed snake. No, the, I'm sorry, that's the other name for it. The Anaconda Pig is not real.

• 1:28:39Speaker 04

  Okay, and Evan?

• 1:28:40Speaker 05

  Jay, did the coin tell you to say that?

• 1:28:42Jay Novella?

  No, I just, I just, you did a series of moves with it that led me to the truth.

• 1:28:47Speaker 05

  So it's a divine coin?

• 1:28:49Jay Novella?

  It's a divine coin?

• 1:28:51Speaker 05

  Steve, I'm surprised you didn't go with Whistle Pig?

• 1:28:54Speaker 04

  I know you guys know the whistle pig.

• 1:28:56Speaker 05

  The pink is, throughout all these answers, everything's pink.

• 1:29:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're brown and pink, that's why they're all called pigs.

• 1:29:03Speaker 05

  Is that why? Yeah, I was thinking, okay, what should I do, guys? Should I, should I go against, should I go against everyone and say the River Pig one? With the comparable, with the intelligence comparable to a gorilla? That one, that didn't surprise anyone. Kara, you, you seemed to think that was perfectly fine.

• 1:29:21Bob Novella?

  Well, citation. Not saying anything.

• 1:29:25Speaker 05

  I'm allowed to ask probing questions or get comments.

• 1:29:29Speaker 04

  Sure, ask any questions you want.

• 1:29:30Speaker 05

  You get no answers or feedback. That one is really the one I want to call the fiction. Um, but everybody else went with the anaconda pig, so there's this pig pressure of me to go with the anaconda pig is the one being the fiction. But I don't know that you have great reason to assume that. Therefore, I will boldly go where no pig has gone before and say the river pig, that one is going to be the fiction.

• 1:30:00Speaker 04

  Okay, so you all agree with the first one? So we'll start there. Skotoa planis, or planis, also known as the sea pig, is a round, pink sea cucumber that uses elongated feet as legs to walk on the soft ocean bottom in the deep abyssal, not abysmal, plain.

• 1:30:17Speaker 05

  Same thing.

• 1:30:18Speaker 04

  You guys all think this one is science and this one is science. This one is science. Has anyone seen this critter before? I know of it before. Pretty cool looking.

• 1:30:28Jay Novella?

  It is weird, though. It totally looks like AI made it.

• 1:30:31Speaker 04

  Well, I am now.

• 1:30:32Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm not. Well, now, yeah.

• 1:30:34Speaker 04

  Um, yeah, it's got like a bunch of legs on the bottom. It's got these four tentacles on top. The legs are operated by like filling it, you know, with fluid. They're just feet that are elongated into legs. And they often have crabs, like these little king crabs as, no, but they're, they're not parasites. They just sort of hitch a ride for safety. These things, you know, eat a lot of stuff. They're basically, you know, they eat all the crap on the bottom of the floor, right?

• 1:31:01Speaker 05

  Oh, I see.

• 1:31:01Jay Novella?

  So they're, they're sea dogs.

• 1:31:03Speaker 04

  They'll even eat whale corpses. They tend to exist in collections of like 300 to 600 individuals.

• 1:31:12Speaker 04

  So, yeah, they're really, they're, they are very cool looking.

• 1:31:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, I was thinking nudie bronc. That's the word I was looking for that I couldn't find.

• 1:31:17Speaker 04

  Okay, well, what's that referring to?

• 1:31:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, a little nudie bronc. They're like, they're sea slugs and they come in all different colors and slavers and they're really cute.

• 1:31:25Speaker 05

  He created slugs.

• 1:31:27Speaker 04

  They're also very deep, so if you do bring them to the surface, they do tend to shrivel and die.

• 1:31:34Speaker 04

  Let's go to number three. The river pig is a finless freshwater porpoise that is rounded pink in color, with intelligence considered comparable to that of a gorilla. So how do we compare the intelligence of different animals? That's the question. One way is... Take a look in the mirror? Mirror test. The mirror test, right? So do gorillas pass the mirror test? Yes. Do, does this, you know, finless freshwater porpoise exist? And if it does, does it pass the mirror test? I don't remember hearing about porpoises passing that test. Well...

• 1:32:08Cara Santa Maria?

  I think so, yeah. I think so.

• 1:32:09Speaker 04

  Specifically remember.

• 1:32:10Cara Santa Maria?

  My guess would be that they 100% do. They're super smart.

• 1:32:12Speaker 04

  This one is... Science. Sorry, Evan. But, the gorilla does not pass the mirror test, and neither does this porpoise. Are you serious? Really? How the hell...

• 1:32:23Cara Santa Maria?

  But do they pass a version of it that was made for them?

• 1:32:26Speaker 04

  So, from what I'm reading, because I checked it out, so first of all, they're saying like, every reference as I read is like, they're considered to be as intelligent as gorillas. It's like, okay, but, then my first question was, do gorillas pass the mirror test? And the answer apparently is no. chimpanzees do, but apparently gorillas don't, but...

• 1:32:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Which makes no sense, because gorillas can like, communicate with sign language, but they can't see a red dot on their face and know it's them? Oh yeah, I'm like, eh, maybe. But again, we know that the mirror test is actually quite biased, because it's like geared towards animals that have a lot of specific skills. It doesn't, it's not the only way to...

• 1:33:01Speaker 04

  It's not the only measure of intelligence or something, or whatever.

• 1:33:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Or even just self-concept, or self, you know, recognition.

• 1:33:07Speaker 04

  But in any case, they said, according to studies, they're as intelligent as a gorilla. Okay, whatever. But yeah, they're cool again, they have no, they're finless, they have no dorsal fin, right? So they have a smooth head. They do have a dorsal ridge, but they have no dorsal fin. They are freshwater, they don't, they're not in South America, though, they're in the Yangtze River. In China. And they are critically endangered, you know, less than 2,000 individuals. But yeah, they're, and they're not pink at every age. Usually start out gray or, or, you know, dark gray. And then they, they lighten up as they get older and some of them get just like pink color. The pig, you could find picture that look like, yeah, they look like swimming pigs, you know, in terms of like their, their skin color. But, uh, yeah, so they exist. Which means that not to be confused with the hog nose snake.

• 1:33:51Speaker 04

  The large anaconda pig snake is a roundish and mostly pink South American snake that is trapped for its abundant red and apparently tasty meat. Is the fiction.

• 1:34:00Bob Novella?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:34:01Speaker 04

  Now, the hog nose snake is real. That looks like a rattlesnake with a hog nose, like a turned up nose. The large anaconda pig snake, I just completely made up.

• 1:34:12Speaker 04

  Of course you did.

• 1:34:15Speaker 04

  But I imagine if they did exist, they would be quite tasty. Have any of you guys eaten snake? Never.

• 1:34:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I've had snake.

• 1:34:21Speaker 04

  Nope. Does it taste like chicken? No?

• 1:34:23Cara Santa Maria?

  No.

• 1:34:24Speaker 04

  What does it taste like?

• 1:34:24Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't think so. I think a lot of things that people say tastes like chicken don't taste like chicken. Like frogs don't taste like chicken. I think it tastes more like frog than like chicken.

• 1:34:32Speaker 04

  Is, what is it? What does it taste like? Is it greasy? Is it gamey? What would you say?

• 1:34:36Cara Santa Maria?

  It's muscular. So to me it was like gamey.

• 1:34:39Speaker 04

  Oh, thanks.

• 1:34:39Cara Santa Maria?

  But gamey is such a vague, like gamey is just anything that's like more ancient, I guess. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But definitely gamey. There's a lot of like, like if you're in Florida, if you're out here, even in California, there's a sausage place sort of near me that specializes in like, quote, exotic sausages. So you can get like rattlesnake sausages.

• 1:34:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, I've had that. I've, I've had like whatever snake bits or bites or chunks or whatever before. It, it tastes like, uh, alligator to me. It was similar to that.

• 1:35:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, totally. Like it's a little bit, I guess greasy is not quite the right word, but definitely more gamey than like.

• 1:35:12Speaker 04

  No, also depends on how you prepare it. I'm sure like if you know what you're doing, you can make anything taste good. Yeah.

• 1:35:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, hell yeah.

• 1:35:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, I had haggis. It was great.

• 1:35:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Cultural norms.

• 1:35:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:35:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:23Speaker 04

  Against all expectations.

• 1:35:25Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that was surprising. I think there was a lot of non-Haggis.

• 1:35:27Speaker 05

  Not have right 15th century.

• 1:35:29Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it's a big difference, I know.

• 1:35:30Speaker 04

  But that's my point, if you cook it properly, or not, you know, properly. If you cook it in a way that's accessible, accessible to an American like me, yeah, it could taste good.

• 1:35:39Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's, that's really the point, right? Cause there are things we eat here that other people are like.

• 1:35:42Speaker 04

  Like hot dogs. Hot dogs are one thing that all the rest of the world thinks is disgusting, that we love.

• 1:35:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Or baloney.

• 1:35:48Speaker 04

  Or baloney.

• 1:35:49Speaker 05

  Ah, baloney.

• 1:35:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, god, baloney's like hot dogs.

• 1:35:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, baloney's like the kid version of a hot dog. Like, I liked baloney when I was a kid. I don't, I would not eat baloney today, but I still love hot dogs.

• 1:35:58Jay Novella?

  You have a degree in baloney?

• 1:35:59Speaker 04

  Like a nice boiled hot dog, I love it.

• 1:36:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, boil, ew, I could only eat an all beef hot dog that is made on the grill.

• 1:36:05Speaker 04

  Grilling is even better, but even boiling is fine. I like, I like boiled hot dogs.

• 1:36:08Cara Santa Maria?

  I can't do it. That baloney, like boiled hot dog.

• 1:36:11Speaker 05

  Boil 'em, says I.

• 1:36:12Cara Santa Maria?

  It's so porky, it's just so overtly porky, I can't do it.

• 1:36:17Speaker 04

  But if they're grilled, you're good.

• 1:36:18Bob Novella?

  Also, I mean.

• 1:36:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Totally, and if they're all.

• 1:36:20Bob Novella?

  Throw like chili on it, or.

• 1:36:22Speaker 05

  I agree.

• 1:36:23Bob Novella?

  Ketchup, or whatever, mustard.

• 1:36:26Speaker 04

  I like my plain.

• 1:36:27Bob Novella?

  Plain?

• 1:36:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Ooh, you know what, Steve, you might like this, I don't know. This is a, I don't know if this is a Texas thing, or just a, my weirdness growing up and in Texas thing, but I put baked beans.

• 1:36:37Speaker 05

  Ooh, I've seen that.

• 1:36:38Bob Novella?

  I like that idea.

• 1:36:39Speaker 05

  That's like a chili dog.

• 1:36:40Bob Novella?

  Yeah, yeah, I like that idea.

• 1:36:41Cara Santa Maria?

  It's like a chili dog, but they're baked beans.

• 1:36:43Speaker 04

  I could do that. I don't like mustard or ketchup, though. I don't like condiments.

• 1:36:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Me neither, I don't like mustard or ketchup, so otherwise, I would eat them plain, or with cheese, but with baked beans, it gives them the best of it.

• 1:36:53Speaker 04

  I gotta try that.

• 1:36:54Bob Novella?

  Pork and beans.

• 1:36:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Pork and beans, yeah, exactly, or beef and beans.

• 1:36:57Speaker 04

  All right, good job, guys. You didn't go for my anaconda pig snake, huh?

• 1:37:02Bob Novella?

  Nope.

• 1:37:03Speaker 05

  I did.

• 1:37:04Speaker 04

  Evan did, yeah.

• 1:37:06Speaker 05

  It was delicious.

• 1:37:08Speaker 04

  All right, Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:37:10Speaker 05

  Of all forms of deception, self-deception is the most deadly, and of all deceived persons, the self-deceived are the least likely to discover the fraud.

• 1:37:20Speaker 05

  That was said or written by a gentleman named Aidan Wilson Tozer, T-O-Z-E-R. Who, and I like the quote. Do you like the quote?

• 1:37:30Speaker 04

  Sure. We've, we've had that in many versions, you know, there's different ways of saying that.

• 1:37:36Speaker 05

  Many guises. Now, here's the thing about Tozer, though. He's an American, he was an American Christian pastor from the early 20th century. Very much a pro-Christian person, an evangelical and, and did all these things. So, in regards to that. However, he has some quotes for him and some things that he's written about that have these tinges of skepticism to them. It's like, it's like he almost got there, but didn't really fully apply it to everything in his, in his life.

• 1:38:07Speaker 04

  That is very common. That is very common. I'm hearing that all the time, even today, from people across the political spectrum, pseudoscientists, science deniers. They, they talk the talk, but they don't walk the walk, right? They say it, they say, they enunciate perfectly cromulent skeptical principles, but clearly they're not applying it to themselves.

• 1:38:29Speaker 05

  Exactly. Not self-applying. Right, right. They can't look in the mirror.

• 1:38:33Speaker 04

  Or to their sacred cow, whatever that is. Yeah.

• 1:38:36Speaker 05

  And in this case, for Tozer, that's the exact correct term.

• 1:38:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, just religious belief is the ultimate sacred cow, right?

• 1:38:42Speaker 05

  But if you were to read some of it, some of his, you know, writings and passages, you would say, oh, wow, these are good little skeptical nuggets.

• 1:38:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:38:48Speaker 05

  Which they are on, on their, on their own. They're just not applied correctly when it comes to, you know, certain beliefs and things.

• 1:38:55Speaker 04

  The, the best manifestation of that was the flat-earthers. Like, if you watch the movie Behind the Curve, where like, one flat-earther is describing the conspiracy thinking and science denial of another flat-earther. That was, they were fighting, like, they were disagreeing with. And then they go, is it possible I'm doing that? Then they, then they had that Theodoric of York moment.

• 1:39:18Speaker 05

  Nah.

• 1:39:19Speaker 04

  Nah.

• 1:39:20Speaker 05

  Oh, you're so close. Oh, you almost had it. Let me help, let me, take my hand, I'll help you, I'll pull you.

• 1:39:29Speaker 04

  They walked right up to the abyss, but just couldn't jump in. You know, they just could not do it. Oh, well.

• 1:39:36Speaker 05

  Oh, well. Or the abyssal plane.

• 1:39:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, or the abyssal, the abysmal plane.

• 1:39:40Speaker 05

  Yep. Yeah. That's off the hook, man.

• 1:39:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's off.

• 1:39:44Speaker 05

  Here we go. Here we go.

• 1:39:48Speaker 04

  Well, thank you all for joining me this week. Sure, man.

• 1:39:50Speaker 05

  Yes, Steve. Thanks, Steve. Have a good July. Thank you.

• 1:39:53Speaker 04

  And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

• 1:40:00Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:40:37Speaker 00

  This is Colin Cowherd from the Colin Cowherd Podcast. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. All starts with a great deal on an off-road ready Tacoma or a half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's most capable and longest-lasting trucks. Built on a reputation for quality and reliability, Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. For a great deal today to a great value tomorrow. Shoptoyota.com. Toyota, let's go places.