The Skeptics Guide #1014 - Dec 14 2024

Interview with Noah Lugeons; News Items: Have We Achieved AGI, Coming Bird Flu, Weekend Warrior Exercise, Theoretical Technosignature, Simulation Again; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Blood Thicker than Water; 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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• 0:44Speaker 00

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• 0:53Speaker 01

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

• 1:00Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, December 11th, 2024, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining us this week are Bob Novella. Hey, everybody. Kara Santa Maria. Howdy. Jay Novella. Hey, guys. And Evan Bernstein.

• 1:15Speaker 03

  Good evening, folks.

• 1:16Speaker 02

  So guys, this is the last regular SGU episode we will be recording for the year.

• 1:22Speaker 03

  For the year. Okay.

• 1:23Speaker 02

  We're at the end of the year. Uh, next week, we're using the episode we recorded in DC last weekend. And then the week after that will be the Year in Review Show. Speaking of which, all of our listeners out there, we need you to send us at info at the skeptics guy dot org. The you, every year we do this vote for your favorite episode, your favorite moment, favorite quote, favorite guest, science news item of the year, and the skeptical hero of the year, skeptical jackass of the year, and just anything as any other feedback you want to give us, anything you want us to talk about in the Year End Review Show. Always fun.

• 2:00Speaker 03

  A lot to review.

• 2:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, there always is. And Ian, Ian always joins us for that episode.

• 2:05Speaker 03

  That's right. The man, the myth, the legend.

• 2:09Speaker 02

  The man, the myth, the watermelon.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  Did you guys have a good time in DC?

• 2:16Jay Novella?

  Oh, I loved it.

• 2:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Great time in DC.

• 2:17Jay Novella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:17Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:17Jay Novella?

  Beautiful. Yeah, it was really good.

• 2:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Great.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  It's always fun to be back there. Yeah, I lived there for six years. It's a beautiful city. I always enjoy going back. My one regret is that we didn't make it to the Lebanese Taverna.

• 2:27Jay Novella?

  Yep, me too.

• 2:28Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 2:29Speaker 02

  It's so good and we didn't, yeah, didn't make it because it took too long to get there. Yeah, we were gonna go Friday night, but.

• 2:34Speaker 03

  It was a pretty tight schedule that we were under, turnaround and everything.

• 2:38Cara Santa Maria?

  So much fun.

• 2:39Speaker 03

  Lot of fun. Great, you know, just the audiences are always so much fun to be around. They elevate the whole experience.

• 2:45Jay Novella?

  Oh, definitely. I mean, you know, when we do the extravaganza, I mean, there's, we're looking at the audience the whole time.

• 2:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 2:51Jay Novella?

  From where I sit, there is a ton of interaction because I'm just seeing everybody's faces and, you know, their experience as we go through all the crazy things that we do on that stage.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I do that sometimes too. Like, there are segments of the show where like, I'm not doing anything for a few minutes. And I just look at the audience and just see like what they're laughing at.

• 3:08Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  Partly, it's a good, it's a good way to tell what's landing, what's not landing, what's working, but they're, they're pretty much laughing continuously.

• 3:15Speaker 03

  They are.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  Throughout the show.

• 3:16Speaker 03

  They definitely are. They're engaged. I rarely ever see them checking their cell phones during, during the show, which means we're doing something right. And we're being more entertaining than the internet at that particular moment.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  So you have a great interview coming up later in the show with Noah Illusions. That's Noah Illusions, not Noah Illusions.

• 3:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  And.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  From God Awful Movies and the Skating Atheist. But let's get on to some news items. Jay, have we achieved artificial general intelligence yet?

• 3:50Jay Novella?

  Oh, boy.

• 3:51Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 3:51Jay Novella?

  Well, that's a, that is the thousand dollar question. You know, the answer is no, we have not. So OpenAI introduced us to Sora, you know, I think it was almost a year ago, Bob. I don't remember exactly how long ago it was, but I remember seeing video of what, what this application can generate. It's their video generation tool and it was open to the public on Monday of this week. So, you know, just a few days ago on the ninth. And I think it's only available. In the United States and because I had an existing account with OpenAI, I was able to actually get in and use the tool. So to be honest, it worked as I expected it to. It's like all the other AI tools I currently use, like, you know, I use Midjourney, ChatGPT, I use 11 Labs, you know, there's a lot of them out there.

• 4:36Jay Novella?

  I was impressed with what it can do, right? Right out of the gate, like, yes, it can create video, it can create very high quality video. But you do have to learn how to use it. But the real elephant in the room here isn't that, you know, it's a cool thing to use. The elephant in the room, though, is, you know, what will the future bring us? What's it gonna be like? And what are the implications here? So right now, Sora is capable of creating really lifelike imagery. And that imagery can be absolutely stunning. And I noticed that the lighting was super dramatic and beautiful. That it really is powerful. And some people feel like, you know, this is all positive and amazing and really cool. And it opens all of us up to being able to, you know, to use these tools for cool things.

• 5:19Jay Novella?

  And I agree with that. There's, there is a lot of potential great things that can come out of this. But that, that is kind of part of my concern though, right? So Google has their video generation tool, which is VO, and Meta has their Movie Gen. The AI tools, they're spilling out. There's so many of them out there right now and there's so many more. I mean, I wanted to do some photo editing and I, I found, you know, a half a dozen, without even blinking an eye, a half a dozen really good AI, you know, upscale apps that worked really well. I mean, they, they're good, they're all good at different things. This is great. And yes, it does increase everybody's power to create and gives us, you know, reach that we wouldn't have had just a handful of years ago. But, you know, there is a massive negativity to this whole thing.

• 6:04Jay Novella?

  You know, the world has shifted to a place where we're not going to be able to know what's real and what was created by someone. And it's happening right now. I've been, we've all been predicting it. It's super obvious that this was coming, but it is happening right now. The web is already filled with AI images, which, you know, as they get better and better, we're not going to be able to know which images are real and which are fake. You know, I, I feel like, you know, it could be the toupee fallacy, but I do feel like I can spot them. Now that video can be created, the stakes are way higher than just image generation.

• 6:36Jay Novella?

  And skepticism and critical thinking are going to be, I think, the primary tool that should be used in order to navigate through this stuff. Now, you think public opinion is affected today by disinformation on social media? Yeah, it's true, and there is quite a bit of it. But the future of fake content is going to explode, and it's going to make the past recent years look like elementary school.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  Let me clarify something, Jay, like for the Sora videos or for other things. I mean, experts can tell that these are AI-generated, right? The finger, the digital fingerprints of their creation is still on there, correct?

• 7:08Jay Novella?

  Yeah, they watermark it. I'm sure that all three of them are. I'm, you know, I know that OpenAI is watermarking their stuff, and it's in a way that isn't super obvious, right? But they do have a way of...

• 7:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:19Jay Novella?

  But that, Steve, that's, that could be easily gotten around. You know, once you have, once you've downloaded the video, and if somebody figures out like what their watermark algorithm is, it would be pretty damn easy to undo it. Prepare yourself for the idea of someone scamming you by calling you as someone you know, right?

• 7:38Speaker 02

  Isn't that already happening?

• 7:39Jay Novella?

  The voice could be duplicated very easily. You know, we're going to have to change our society because we're going to have to come up with safe words as families, ways to get around this super-high-level attempts to hack us and to get, you know, to get money from us, right?

• 7:54Speaker 02

  You should be doing that now, right?

• 7:55Jay Novella?

  Absolutely. We should do it right now. Like, everybody that's listening to this should really think about, you know, a family strategy, maybe, you know, talk to everyone...

• 8:03Speaker 02

  What's our safe word?

• 8:04Jay Novella?

  Yeah, come up with a, with multiple safe words, come up with ways of doing, like, if somebody calls you and says, "I need money," you say, "Okay, I'll call you right back." You know, even something as simple as that. You know, so there is a huge potential here for misuse, for scams, disinformation, extortion, abusive content creation. I mean, this, you know, the list just goes on there. When and if a news outlet that you currently trust, imagine this is, this happens, they get duped into believing that a fake video is real, and they report on it like real news. That that's going to be a turning point for a lot of people. That's when the light bulb's going to go on and they're going to go, damn, I can't.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, but worse than that, because sure, that could happen, but then hopefully, you know, news out like mainstream responsible news outlets are trying to like vet any video before they would show it and claim that it's real and that should hopefully not be that difficult. But what's what's worse is not responsible news outlets that are basically propaganda outlets pretending to be news outlets. Who will happily share fake video.

• 9:05Jay Novella?

  Absolutely.

• 9:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Or, you know, government agents.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, if you have an authoritarian government.

• 9:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  If you can control the perception of truth, you can control people significantly. And once you have like a generation that goes by where that's the case, you lose all of the cultural knowledge of being able to vet your own information or like not trusting the government, like the government propaganda is trust the government. And that's how people get raised. And then you have complete information control. And that's the perfect recipe for authoritarianism. That's always my biggest fear. Like, I think like as an open democracy, assuming that we will continue to be an open democracy going forward, that these are problems and and we will have to adjust our lifestyle to to deal with them, but we'll deal with them.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  But for even semi authoritarian governments, this is going to be like springtime, right? This is going to make it so much easier to control the flow of information in a society.

• 10:01Cara Santa Maria?

  This already happened during the entire election.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:05Cara Santa Maria?

  There's a ton of AI generated abject bullshit that was propagated by individuals running or individuals stumping for those who are running that people bought hook, line and sinker.

• 10:18Jay Novella?

  You know, look, for example, guys, you know, Kamala Harris had, you know, she got off of not sure what plane she got off of, and they were saying like, it wasn't real with all the people that were there because it was a huge crowd there. It wasn't real because of the reflection in the airplane and all that. That was just one picture that they made a huge think over. Like, think about what people can do, like, the ability to make false videos. It's going to be-

• 10:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's just sowing distrust.

• 10:47Jay Novella?

  But to clarify-

• 10:47Cara Santa Maria?

  It's easier to sow trust.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  That was real.

• 10:50Jay Novella?

  It was real.

• 10:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that was a real picture that they were sowing distrust about.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, but that's it. The existence of the ability to make fake images like this means that you could dismiss real pictures and videos by saying, "Oh, that's fake, that was generated." And that sows at least enough doubt that if anybody wants to, you know, believe that plausible deniability, it's there for them.

• 11:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, if you have a narrative that suits people, and you can either create evidence or you can reject legitimate evidence for that narrative, these tools are the tools to do it. And they're being used that way already.

• 11:23Jay Novella?

  And my experience has taught me that, you know, your average person isn't going to do the things that a trained skeptic would do. They're just not going to do it. They're not going to be-

• 11:34Speaker 02

  It's a continuum. I think there's a, you know, but yeah, we have to increase this-

• 11:37Jay Novella?

  Of course, Steve, of course, but there's a ton of people, though, that won't do anything.

• 11:40Speaker 02

  It's one of the pillars of what we do, of skepticism. It's media savvy, right? It's scientific literacy, critical thinking, and media savvy. You need to understand how information flows through our society, how it is created, how it is vetted, et cetera. And, yeah, I agree, we have to do this, but it can't just be us. This has to be woven into education, has to be woven into information ecosystems. This is something that, as a society, we need to mature to the point where-

• 12:09Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 12:09Speaker 02

  -we, you know, can vet our own information, because I also do think there's a role for-

• 12:15Jay Novella?

  But society's always way behind the curve, Steve. That's, you know, it's a catch-up is going to, that's going to be a dangerous time.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  And I think the government regulation's way behind the curve, too. They don't know how to deal with this. It's changing too fast for the infrastructure to deal with.

• 12:26Cara Santa Maria?

  But we also need to be voting in representatives who care about this stuff. You know?

• 12:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:33Cara Santa Maria?

  This needs to-

• 12:34Speaker 02

  And are knowledgeable about it.

• 12:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, this needs to be a platform that we support.

• 12:38Jay Novella?

  I totally agree. So there's one more thing we got to talk about, guys, because another thing happened in this whole vein here. Someone named- Bahid Kazemi, who is a staff member at OpenAI. Apparently, this person said on on X that, quote, "We have already achieved AGI." And then he clarified what he said later by saying that "OpenAI systems might not outperform humans in every conceivable task, but it is, and I quote, "better than most humans at most tasks." That's that's his stance on that. You know, this, there's an implication here that OpenAI views AGI as a spectrum rather than a singular thing that's going to happen, right? But it's even more interesting because, and I will reduce this down to word on the street,

• 13:24Jay Novella?

  but I am reading about this idea that OpenAI is trying to convince the public that they achieved AGI, and the question is, why? And I think it's very likely that they're doing this because of their deal with Microsoft. Their deal is that OpenAI needs to create safe AGI with this $100 million that they were given, right? And once they create it, though, then a checkmark will be checked on their contract with Microsoft. And once they do that, they will be able to go into contract with other companies and make other deals, other business deals. And a lot of people are surmising that they're they're pushing this AGI story,

• 14:05Jay Novella?

  which, again, I will very confidently tell you right now, it's complete nonsense. They don't have AGI, not to any operational definition that we would all agree on, right? You know, if we're saying that ChatGPT is a narrow AI that can do very specific things, and it's really powerful at doing these very specific things. And a general AI is much more the way that a human brain works in a way, you know, a human thinks and interacts with the environment and everything, right? We could go into that definition for quite a while. But the idea is that AGI is is and has always been this idea that is much harder to achieve, and we always project that out into the future. We don't know how long it's going to take, but I'm certain we don't have it now, and it's very unlikely that we're going to have it in the short term.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  But as you say, the definition does change over time. And at first, it's just this like ideal that is not very operationally defined. So it's like, yeah, like human-like, human-level intelligence is we'll call that the artificial general intelligence, and intelligence that is all-purpose and can do and can think and therefore do anything, potentially. You know, I read a good example, a good analogy of like to self-driving cars. We were, you know, 20 years ago or 10 years ago, talking about self-driving cars. It was this kind of vague concept of a car that can drive itself. But now that we're actually developing the technology, like, well, actually, there's five different levels of self-driving. You know, then you could go, you could delve down and parse out the different levels of autonomy of a self-driving car.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  And there are these like five categories. So I think we're getting to the point where the same thing is happening with with artificial intelligence, where AGI is like an all-purpose, top-down, sort of understanding, thinking intelligence, rather than an artificial narrow intelligence that like plays chess or is a chatbot or whatever, does this one thing.

• 15:52Jay Novella?

  I think the word you use that I think works best is thinking, right?

• 15:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, but if you choose to define AGI that way, the thing is, we may need to now, just like with, oh, there's five levels of self-driving cars, we may need to say, well, there's five levels of AGI. And we may have achieved one of those, which is a more of a multi-purpose, narrow intelligence, I would say, than a real, truly, general-purpose intelligence. But, you know, I think it's we're getting on this sort of continuum to an AGI. I don't think we're there yet. I agree, not by any reasonable definition.

• 16:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Isn't the question like, does it do the thing we want it to do? Like, we were talking about the five levels of cars, and that's all good and great. But like, there are Waymos all over LA, driving around without drivers.

• 16:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:38Cara Santa Maria?

  So like, ultimately, there are self-driving cars.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, but that, those are level four or something, I think. They're not level five.

• 16:44Cara Santa Maria?

  They may not be level five, but they're in traffic and they're doing the thing.

• 16:48Jay Novella?

  Yeah, but again, even even though they're there doing that, Karen, I agree with you. Like, they've been trained on that city like exquisitely. But the idea is like a level five car would be able to drive on a road that it knows nothing about.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Which is great, but but if we're splitting hairs and go, yeah, but it's not quite general AI, then it's not quite well, but it's doing the thing.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I I think it's more like a two than a four. I don't think we're quite there yet. I think is I would characterize it more as a multipurpose. Sort of narrow AI rather than a truly general AI. It's still very. Brute force, bottom up, you know, like we're we're training in a massive data. It's really good at pattern recognition that can. It could duplicate regenerate those patterns, but it's not, you can't throw it curveballs. It's still brittle, which is that that brittleness. Is kind of the hallmark of a narrow AI. And by brittleness, I mean, like you can easily break it by throwing it a curveball, right? That's outside of its programming, outside of its training data or whatever. Like one of the examples that we Jay and I were talking about earlier.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  Was that like the art generation AIs, they are really good at regenerating. Art in the style of something that already exists or combining styles that already exist, but tell it to create your own unique style. You know, do you know that kind of they can't do that. It it could, you know, it could only, you know, generate things from data that has that it has been explicitly trained on. Which also to me makes it problematic to conclude that it's better than humans. You know, because well, is it really better than humans when it can't do what it's doing without humans in the first place? Like it could never have generated the art that it's now trained on to generate art.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  It it's makes that that conclusion problematic. So I that's why and that's part of the reason why I don't think we're at a general AI. You can't do that sort of thing. And that that's a real qualitative difference, not just an incremental difference.

• 18:46Bob Novella?

  Wanted to add one little bit of context, though. That specific version of chat GPT that was being commented on. Was one that has not been released yet fully. And so it's it's an unknown. Nobody, nobody in the public is using it right now. So this is so this is the one that's in general release now. I think it was one oh and but he's referring to what the company has access to full powered. So no one has really used this except if you work at OpenAI, but still I don't think it's AGI.

• 19:15Speaker 02

  All right, Kara, tell us about the bird flu. How long do we have before this next pandemic hits?

• 19:20Cara Santa Maria?

  The bird flu, what a big topic. I'm going to narrow it down just a tiny bit and I'm going to focus on a subtype called H5N1, influenza A virus subtype, H5N1. That is, as I said, subtype of the influenza A virus and it causes the flu in birds. Well, there's a lot of interesting stuff to talk about. I'm going to try not to get all doom and gloom right here at the top, but I want to tell you a little bit more about what we know currently, that this is, this flu this year, 2014. And specifically, I'm going to focus, sorry, everyone across the globe, on United States numbers because the CDC is keeping this sort of day by day and it's very difficult to get the latest surveillance numbers across the world.

• 20:05Cara Santa Maria?

  H5N1 is widespread in wild birds all over the world. They are an endemic carrier and there are zoonotic outbreaks all the time. There are outbreaks in poultry and in dairy cows right now in the US and there have been several recent human cases, many of which have occurred in California. I'm going to look at those numbers. And this is straight from the CDC. The current public health risk is low. The CDC is watching the situation carefully and they're monitoring people with animal exposures and they do have flu surveillance systems to monitor specifically H5N1, bird flu activity in people. So there have been, so far in 2024, as of their most recent update, 58 confirmed total reported human cases.

• 20:49Cara Santa Maria?

  32 of them came from California alone. 10 of them came from Colorado, 2 from Michigan, 1 from Missouri, Oregon and Texas each, and 11 from Washington. 35 of them came from cattle, 21 from poultry. 2 cases, researchers still don't know where those came from. So if you notice, of those 58, these were direct spillover transmissions from a cow or a bird, or we're not sure, but probably a cow or a bird, to a person. There are no human to human confirmed cases and there's a Reason for that. But if we look at what's kind of just out there in the the bird and cow populations,

• 21:33Cara Santa Maria?

  as of 2024 in the US, 10,718 wild birds have been detected. Now, obviously, the number is much higher than that. That's just how many birds have actually been tested and found to be positive for the flu. So that's 51 different jurisdictions across the US. 121,027,46 poultry, 49 states with outbreaks in poultry, and 774 dairy herds effective. So that's 16 states where there are outbreaks in cows. As I mentioned, a lot of those are in California. So, bird flu, highly, highly transmissible from bird to bird. Bird flu is not going to go away, right? It's out there in wild bird populations.

• 22:17Cara Santa Maria?

  We now know that bird flu can cross over clearly into cows. And so the question is, why can we get it from these animals? But why can't we get it from each other? And that has to do with specificity of a very specific protein. So researchers, and this is the new bit. Researchers published a new article on the 5th of December in Science Magazine. "A Single Mutation in Bovine Influenza H5N1 Hemagglutinin Switches Specificity to Human Receptors." So what they did is they looked at the first event that they knew of in the US in 2024,

• 22:59Cara Santa Maria?

  where a human being caught bird flu from a dairy cow in Texas. And they dug deep into the actual pathogenesis of what was going on here. They decided to focus in on hemagglutinin. And hemagglutinin, of course, is a, of course, it's a protein. It's a glycoprotein that is found on the surface of these different flu viruses. And they help the virus like kind of cling to and infect the cell of the organism that's being infected. They decided to zero in here on the hemagglutinin, and they Found that a single substitution.

• 23:40Cara Santa Maria?

  So they were swapping here a single glutamine to lucine mutation at residue 226. So it's named for that. GLN 226 LEU, gluten, sorry, glutamine to lucine at 226 was sufficient to change the specificity from overwhelmingly avian, meaning that it clings really well to avian cells, to pretty okay human. As of right now, it sort of sucks at infecting human cells. And that's why a person who has bird flu can't really give it to another person. The flu, the virus is just not that good at kind of connecting to, binding to what it needs to on a cell and entering.

• 24:22Cara Santa Maria?

  But it's really good at doing that to birds. So you might ask, well, how come you can catch it directly from a dairy cow? Well, if you're working with a dairy cow that has a really overwhelming infection and a lot of virus is actually dumped into your body, that's good enough to overwhelm it. But no human to human transition, transmission would be that intense. The viral load just wouldn't be that high. So in a human to human transmission where we're looking at a lower viral load, the virus just can't get into the human cells very well. So we don't get sick. But a single mutation at this one site is enough where, yes, it's still better at infecting

• 25:03Cara Santa Maria?

  bird cells and cow cells, but it's good enough at infecting human cells that it would be likely that human to human transition, uh, transmission would start. They further looked at a different mutation, at a different, um, glycoprotein there, and they found that if there were two, we're probably looking at a pandemic. So, single mutation point, and this could change the game from 58 confirmed cases to hundreds, thousands, millions. Now, talking about this in the context of a few things. First one is that on December 6th, the USDA said, listen, up until now, we have been on a

• 25:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Volunteer basis, offering to test milk samples from different dairy herds. And also in places where there, where we knew that there was transmission occurring, we've been going in and we've been looking at these dairy herds to try to contain any outbreaks. But as of December 6th, they said, okay, no more. Everyone needs to send us their milk. It's really, really important that we start looking at milk in its raw form so that we can test it for bird flu. Now, do not despair, milk drinkers. Pasteurization works.

• 26:15Speaker 03

  Thank goodness.

• 26:16Cara Santa Maria?

  If you are buying milk in the grocery store that has been pasteurized, you're not going to be drinking active bird flu. Even if that bird, even if that milk in its raw form did have some H5N1, pasteurization kills the virus. It is no longer active. You will not catch it from that. The problem is, there are a lot of people in this country who think it's okay to drink raw milk.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  But Kara, RFK Jr. tells me that we should be drinking raw milk and the government is evil for suppressing our ability to drink raw milk.

• 26:49Cara Santa Maria?

  So not only are there a lot of people right now who drink raw milk just because, soon there will be more people drinking raw milk because the head of the Health and Human Services Department is telling them it's okay. The potential will be, possibly, hopefully not. There's, there's a lot of pushback right now, which is great. But yeah, when you have people in positions of power who are saying it's okay to engage in a deeply risky behavior that, I mean, how far back? When did we discover pasteurization? How long and how much data do we have to show that it is 100% necessary to prevent disease? Like, did anybody read The Jungle?

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, what year is it? So this is, this is worrisome for a lot of reasons, right? We know that the milk. Gets bird flu in it. We know that a lot of dairy cows are catching this infection. And so we've got two points of potential spillover here. Drink, like a direct zoonotic spillover where a person is right in the face of a dairy cow or bird, or they're drinking the milk that they produced that hasn't been pasteurized. And right there, people are going to get sick and people are going to die. I think I read somewhere, and I'd love some confirmation of this, Steve, maybe you know, based on like your writing, that certain H5N1s can have a fatality rate of like 30%. It can be pretty deadly.

• 28:11Speaker 02

  Zoonotic spillovers are the main source of like these epidemic, you know, pandemic infections.

• 28:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, they run rampant when they can then switch to person to person.

• 28:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, once they get to person to person, it's a different ballgame.

• 28:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, all bets are off. And we're talking a single mutation based on the research that that the scientists did in the last.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  And that's inevitable, right? I mean, a single mutation, it's gonna happen.

• 28:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. And they were only focusing on one specific part. They didn't look at every possible mutation. So not only can many people become sickened now, not just farm workers, if they drink milk that has not been appropriately pasteurized, but in the future, many more people who are actually doing their due diligence and practicing, you know, safe kind of food handling practices and public safety practices will still be at risk if that event occurs and that mutation takes place. And will we have an appropriate pandemic response? Based on all available evidence, I'm gonna say probably not.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  I would be worried.

• 29:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. So stock up on toilet paper, everyone.

• 29:18Cara Santa Maria?

  You heard it from the doctor.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  Above all else. Okay.

• 29:22Speaker 03

  Toilet paper.

• 29:23Speaker 02

  I'm gonna give you some good news.

• 29:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, thanks.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  Potentially.

• 29:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 29:28Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 29:28Speaker 02

  But I'm gonna ask you a question. So do you think that if you get most of your exercise on the weekend, is that as good as spreading out your exercise throughout the week? Like getting five days of exercise a week or cramming more than half of it into the weekend? Do you think there's a difference?

• 29:47Jay Novella?

  I think spreading it out is probably better.

• 29:49Cara Santa Maria?

  I bet. My guess would be spreading it out is probably better, but not really perceptibly. It's probably good enough.

• 29:55Speaker 03

  It develops a better routine, right? And less chance of missing a weekend.

• 30:00Cara Santa Maria?

  My guess is that if so long as you're getting those minutes in, whenever you get them in, it doesn't matter. A week is fungible.

• 30:05Bob Novella?

  I don't know, man. Four, five days of being sedentary, it's hard to get.

• 30:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, but Steve just said more than half of it on the weekend. So most of it coming on the weekend. He didn't say absolutely sedentary for five days straight.

• 30:19Bob Novella?

  Then, in that case, then, if I had actually listened, I said, well, then I think half, you know, 50, 55, I think that should be fine.

• 30:29Cara Santa Maria?

  I think even probably 75% is fine. So long as you're somewhat active during the week and then you're going hard on the weekends, I bet you that's good enough to be, you know, cardio protective.

• 30:37Speaker 03

  80%.

• 30:39Speaker 02

  All right. So there was a study and the study looked at a lot of people, 89,573 participants. This is a retrospective study, but they were, they were piggybacking on the UK Biobank prospective cohort study. And during that, that study, many of the subjects wore a Fitbit for one week, sometime between June 2013 and December 2015. And so they looked at that Fitbit data, right, an accelerometer, to see how much activity were people getting and what was the distribution throughout the week. Then they broke the data up into three groups. So the one group were people who got less than 150 minutes of moderate or greater physical activity per week. What's moderate physical activity?

• 31:23Speaker 02

  Walking, doing vigorous housework like vacuuming, basically anything other than sitting and doing nothing, right, is moderate physical activity. All right. So less than 150 minutes, more than 150 minutes, but with 50% or more concentrated in two days on the weekend. And greater than 150 minutes, but spread out more evenly throughout the week. And they call, they're calling the greater than 50% on the weekend group, the weekend warriors. Right. That's of course, now, of course, in all of the write offs, all of the reporting on this. Uh, so the question is, how did those three groups compare to each other? So unsurprisingly, both of the groups that had more than 150 minutes of exercise did fared better than

• 32:09Speaker 02

  those that had less than 150 minutes of exercise. And what they were doing is they were looking at Fewer than? That had fewer than 150 minutes. Yeah. And what they were doing is they were looking at greater than 200 different conditions, diseases and what like hypertension, diabetes, all kinds of obesity, um, including a lot of cardiovascular ones, but a lot of non cardiovascular ones too. You know, cancer, all that stuff. So what do you guys think they found, right? Between those three groups?

• 32:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh, obviously the people who didn't work out at all were sicker.

• 32:41Speaker 02

  Well, less than 150, right?

• 32:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 32:42Speaker 02

  Right. So the two groups that had greater than 150 minutes per week, regardless of how it was spread out, did better than the group that had fewer than 150 minutes per week, right? In like over 200 conditions, like pretty much across the board, not in every single one, but they had, they were, they were improved in health outcomes from more, you know, more than 200 conditions. But the, but the effect size was greatest in the cardiovascular conditions, which

• 33:10Cara Santa Maria?

  That makes sense.

• 33:11Speaker 02

  Makes perfect sense. But the real question was, when you compare the weekend warrior to the spread out throughout the week groups, was there any difference there? And the answer was

• 33:24Cara Santa Maria?

  No.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  No difference. No diff. Absolutely, pretty much. No diff. No difference.

• 33:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Cause they're still getting their, their exercise.

• 33:30Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 33:30Cara Santa Maria?

  And they're resting.

• 33:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the thing is, when you think about it, a week is an artificial construct. It's not a biological construct, right? So that's how we break up our time and how we think about things. But, you know, going four or five days with not much activity and then doing a lot more activity over two days, and I think Kara is right, at least over that time period, it doesn't really seem to matter. The, you know, the advantages, pretty much all the advantages were there, even for the weekend warrior. So, to me, this is good news, right? Because it means that you don't have to obsess about your schedule and about how, just get the 150 minutes in, you know, or more during the week.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  And the other thing is, it doesn't have to be athletic exercise, you know, Olympic level exercise, you don't have to be killing yourself. You should even just moderate exercise. Go for your evening walk of 30 minutes and that gets you covered. Or, you know, if you do have time on the weekend, go for a longer walk on the weekend, like on a Saturday and the weather's good, go out and walk for two hours or whatever. You'll get most of your weekly exercise when you have the time to do it. And again, it doesn't have to be significant, just, you know, even moderate exercise. I think what this data is telling us is that being really sedentary is very unhealthy.

• 34:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 34:53Speaker 02

  And that not being sedentary is healthy and you get most of the benefits pretty easily, you know, without having... Yeah. Yeah, and that something is better than nothing. But what's interesting is, there's a logical fallacy hiding in here, in my opinion, called the linearity bias. You guys are familiar with the linearity bias? Oh, yeah.

• 35:16Speaker 03

  Of course we are.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, cognitive bias, where we tend to think that systems are, we tend to make linear assumptions, right? That things progress in a linear fashion. We see this in healthcare all the time. I'm sure you encounter this a lot too, Kara, where it's the whole idea that, well, if a little is good, more is better.

• 35:32Cara Santa Maria?

  More is better. Yeah, I see this all the time.

• 35:34Speaker 02

  And, yeah, and that there's... True to the ice cream. With no limit, really. So this is like, we see this with vitamins, we've talked about this a lot, where, oh, if I take a little bit of vitamins, that'll improve my nutrition. If I take more vitamins, I'll even be more healthier. And if I take mega doses of vitamins, I'll be super healthy.

• 35:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and I see this with patients. So I work with cancer patients, which means that a lot of my patients go through things like chemo, radiation, nuclear medicine, surgery. And very often, I'll see, you know, different types of personality structures with patients post-surgery. And there are some patients who don't get up and walk, and they need to get up and walk. But there are other patients who are like, I'm fine, and they overdo it.

• 36:12Speaker 02

  They overdo it.

• 36:13Cara Santa Maria?

  And it's like, no, all you should be doing right now is walking. Do not push yourself any harder than that, because it's no longer healthy, it's now detrimental. And I think that tracks to people I've known in my own life who are so obsessive about working out, that they're actually, you know, sacrificing sleep.

• 36:31Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, how is that healthy?

• 36:34Speaker 02

  So, yeah, so you're right. And so for a lot of things, especially like biological things, there is sort of a steep part of the curve, you know, the S curve, that so many things. There's a steep part of the curve where you get most of the benefit, and then it sort of levels off. You start to get diminishing returns. And in medicine, not only do you get diminishing returns, it may start to turn down again if you go to extreme lengths, like for like vitamins, right? A little bit's good, more is not necessarily better. Too much, and you start to get into toxicity. You actually start to get negative effects if you do too much. Same thing with exercise. I see that, I see that a lot too, Carol, like people recovering from a stroke, or whatever, some neurological thing.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  And there are that subset of people who think, and I think this is partly just wishful thinking, they think, I'm going to like exercise the crap out of this, and I'm going to get better just through sheer will, and just, you know what I mean?

• 37:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep, or people who just were so high energy beforehand, that they're trying to get back to baseline way too fast.

• 37:35Speaker 02

  And they want to censor control, and I get that. And it's, and you're right, you can over-exercise, you could actually injure yourself. So one thing about the weekend warrior thing, what we don't like to see is people who are sedentary for most of the time, and then do extreme physical activity occasionally.

• 37:53Cara Santa Maria?

  That's how you like break things.

• 37:54Speaker 02

  Not only that, like we talk about, like I remember like working in the emergency room. In the summer, we have the 50-year-old guy or 60-year-old guy who comes in because they were gardening. And in the winter, it's because they were shoveling snow. So it's basically somebody who is sedentary, not in great shape, and then they do a sudden, extreme, physical activity. Like, shoveling snow is hard, you know?

• 38:16Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah, man. Wet snow, forget it.

• 38:18Speaker 03

  It can kill you. Heart attack stuff.

• 38:20Speaker 02

  The other thing to point out, by the way, that in this cohort, the average age was 62. So this is in older people, right?

• 38:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  So, and which is great to know that even like in your 60s, just walking was great. You're on that steep part of the curb, it's the low-hanging fruit. That's what you want to do. Don't feel like you have to have some ridiculous or inconvenient schedule. Don't feel like there has to be some extreme workout. Just, you don't want to be at the sedentary end of that spectrum.

• 38:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And don't sacrifice other things, because-

• 38:48Speaker 02

  Yes. Don't sacrifice sleep.

• 38:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Health is not just exercise.

• 38:52Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 38:53Cara Santa Maria?

  It's interpersonal connection. It's sleep. It's well-rounded work.

• 38:59Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly.

• 39:00Cara Santa Maria?

  And I see when people become obsessive about one aspect of it, and they really give up quality of life in other areas, which kind of defeats the purpose.

• 39:07Speaker 02

  Right. I know, we see that so much. People who like, "I want to have a clean diet." They actually generally end up worsening their diet.

• 39:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah, because it's way less varied.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  Right, right. They get restricted.

• 39:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 39:19Speaker 02

  Well, everyone, we're going to take a quick break from our show to talk about one of our sponsors this week, Aura Frames.

• 39:24Jay Novella?

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• 39:42Speaker 03

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• 40:02Bob Novella?

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• 40:23Speaker 02

  All right, guys, let's get back to the show. Okay, let's move on. Bob, this is an interesting one. You know, a theoretical techno-signature. Tell us about this.

• 40:34Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I always love when techno-signatures are in the news. A new study recently published suggests a new paradigm for detecting extraterrestrial civilizations. Instead of detecting the conventional, you know, ET radio signals à la SETI, you know, that they might be broadcasting, or even the alien atmospheric pollution that we can look for in the atmospheres potentially. The researchers contend that they might be found by looking at their very long-term use of fusion technology. This study was led by Dr. David C. Kettling, professor of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington. The name of the paper is "Potential Techno-Signature From Anomously Low Deuterium-Hydrogen In Planetary Water Depleted By Nuclear Fusion Technology."

• 41:18Bob Novella?

  That says it. But that's so awesomely concise. I love it. The first argument these researchers make is that even really advanced aliens might use fusion technology as a primary source of on-planet power for not only millennia, but perhaps even over geologic time scales, millions of years. That, to me, that's just like, wow, okay, yeah, here's a really cool technology. Maybe some aliens are going to use it for millions of years. I mean, it's just like, what, millions? All right, whatever. Other primary power sources have problems in their estimation over that much time. They say nuclear fission is not viable long-term because uranium and thorium sources will be depleted eventually, and that's reasonable.

• 42:04Bob Novella?

  Wind, tidal, and geothermal sources, they say, are fine for current and near-term power generation. But they say that maintaining it beyond something like an arbitrary 1,000 terawatts of annually average power could not work. And that number comes up a lot in the paper. That number is 10 times what our power utilization is expected to be in the year 2100. Okay, you got that? So they're just extrapolating. So that's 50 times our current... Power usage now for some advanced civilization. Now, solar power, I was waiting for them to get to this one in the paper. They said that solar power could reach 1,000 terawatts, but eventually, they say it would cause intolerable disruption

• 42:48Bob Novella?

  to ecosystems from the huge land use. So just as I started mentally shouting at them, they did say this quickly afterwards. They said, "It is possible to generate large amounts of power using off-world solar power." Okay, that's fine, that's true. The land use, though, struck me as odd. Like, well, so what? It doesn't need to be on the land. I mean, the oceans are pretty big. I can imagine futuristic society putting solar panels over water. Whatever, it doesn't matter. So then they said this, and they said that it is possible to generate large amounts of power off-world, okay, but reliably and safely transferring 1,000 terawatts or more to a planetary surface from space presents engineering challenges.

• 43:33Bob Novella?

  So that's their problem with solar, is that even off-world is going to create engineering challenges. And I thought that was silly as well. You know, if you're hundreds of thousands of years more advanced than us, and having engineering issues transferring thousands of terawatts, that's going to be a problem? But then they immediately, they get to the crux of their power argument. They say this, they say, "In any case, we see no rational justification for an extraterrestrial society to stop using nuclear fusion once developed, given its exceptionally high energy density, its small aerial footprint, and reliability as a continuous source." So that, I think, is more defensible.

• 44:14Speaker 02

  What's interesting is, we made that exact argument in our Skeptic's Guide to the Future book, that once a civilization achieves fusion, that's going to be their power source forever, basically.

• 44:28Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 44:28Speaker 02

  Until you get to like really exotic things like black holes or whatever, that are not even sure if it's even feasible or plausible. But from that point, and I mean, millions of years is stretching it a bit, but I mean, but we basically said that's going to be indefinitely.

• 44:45Speaker 02

  Because why would you ever stop using fusion? It's so awesome.

• 44:47Bob Novella?

  Right, we do make that point. I agree with it. And for centuries, you can make, you know, reasonable you know, projections like that. I think you can, based on what we know about science, we could say that for centuries, we will probably be really going crazy.

• 45:01Speaker 02

  I would say with thousands of years, definitely, definitely on a time scale of thousands, even maybe tens of thousands of years.

• 45:07Bob Novella?

  I wouldn't be, I wouldn't be shocked, but when you go to millions of years, it's just like, whoa, wait a second.

• 45:11Speaker 02

  That's hard to say.

• 45:12Bob Novella?

  It just seems, it just seems kind of nuts. But so let's go into a little bit more detail, though. They are arguing specifically here that deuterium fusion makes a lot of sense in this context, not only because it's nuclear and therefore there's an inherent, you know, energy density to it. And it also has a small footprint as well. Think about it, think of, you know, nuclear reactors compared to, you know, solar panel farms. I mean, yes, much smaller, but primarily, though, here's, this is important, primarily, we've got oceans filled with deuterium or heavy hydrogen, right? Most of that water is made with regular hydrogen, and that's called protium, which is such a great word that you just don't hear very often.

• 45:53Bob Novella?

  But one out of every 6,400 of those hydrogen atoms is a deuterium atom. That's got an extra neutron, essentially. So there's, there's a lot of that here on Earth. There's a, there's so much water that when you say that there's one deuterium atom per 6,400 hydrogen atoms, do you know how much deuterium that is? That is, it's so much, in fact, that deuterium fusion on Earth represents a total energy of just about, just under 2 times 10 to the 31 joules. That's a thousand quadrillion, quadrillion joules. That's the energy that could be extracted using all the deuterium in the world's oceans, using it for fusion, for a deuterium, deuterium fusion.

• 46:34Bob Novella?

  That is such, think about, that number just blew me away, 10 to the 31 joules. That is such a big number that it's actually only an order of magnitude smaller than the gravitational binding energy of the entire Earth. That means that that much energy could basically blow up every small component of the Earth out to infinity with no gravitational interaction. With the pieces at all. So bottom line, there's enough deuterium around the earth to use as fusion fodder for millions of years. Tremendous amount there. So now assuming that an advanced civilization would use deuterium fusion tech on their home world for so long, which is a big assumption, I know, but they would be very slowly depleting the new the deuterium in their water.

• 47:16Bob Novella?

  Right? Because you're using all this deuterium over time, you're going to it's going to get the ratio of deuterium to hydrogen. It's going to get smaller and smaller. And that is what these scientists say would be detectable by our technology now. So use and they in their equations, they use earth as a model. So they calculated that a civilization using about 50 times the power we use today. That's that. That's that thousand terawatts I mentioned earlier. So a civilization using 50 times the power we use today would reduce their deuterium hydrogen ratio to to below what is found in interstellar space. And that's that's the marker right there because if it's below the interstellar, the average in interstellar space, then then something is out of whack.

• 47:57Bob Novella?

  Something is anomalous. And that would point to a techno signature by an advanced, extremely long-lived civilization. So that's the that's the crux of their argument right there.

• 48:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Is it a total assumption that their deuterium concentration is the same as that on earth?

• 48:12Bob Novella?

  Oh, no, that that's just their starting point. That's just their starting point, just to see, just to get a baseline. And they they fully.

• 48:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but everything's built around that baseline in their model.

• 48:22Bob Novella?

  No, well, yes, but let's I I address that specifically in just a moment here. So how long would it take for such a planet to drive their deuterium hydrogen ratio lower than interstellar space? The earth example that they that they used said that it would take 170 million years. And I I just laughed out loud when I read that. So you have an advanced civilization on an earth-like planet. And if they used deuterium fusion for 170 million years, their the level, the ratio of deuterium to hydrogen would be so low that we could detect it from many, many light years away. So that's what that's what they're saying.

• 48:56Cara Santa Maria?

  We're never going to detect this.

• 48:58Bob Novella?

  But, right, but, but then, what, but what if they have far less deuterium than us? Say it's a land planet, it's not a water planet like Earth, it's a land planet, it's got 3% of the, of the water that we have. And also, I think when they say that their, their estimate of 50 times our current power demands, I think that's just laugh, laughable for such a civilization. I think a more reasonable number, probably more accurate number, in my estimation, would be having a power needs 10,000 times greater than ours, or even a million times. In that case, that might drive their ratio low enough for us to notice a planet like that only after a million years.

• 49:41Bob Novella?

  Now, alright, it's a million years, that's still a tremendous amount of time. I mean, damn, I, I just want us to survive the next four years, let alone millions of years. So it's still a tremendous amount of time, but a million years, having the idea that a civilization could survive a million years is a lot more palatable than having one last 170 million years. So it all depends, it depends on your power usage, it depends how much deuterium are you starting with, all that stuff. So, so using the Earth as a baseline, that's fine, and they do say that, that those numbers will vary depending on the specific situation that you're trying to, to determine. Now, the, the big benefit here, could any of you think of the benefit?

• 50:19Bob Novella?

  What's the benefit of, of this technology over, say, SETI or, or detecting extraterrestrial industrial pollution?

• 50:28Speaker 02

  It will persist for a very long time.

• 50:30Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that, that's, that's the, the big, the big takeaway benefit of, of this. If, if aliens somehow use super deuterium fusion on their planet for millions of years, and then say the entire civilization dies, or say that they all move to the more fashionable end of the universe, it doesn't matter, it wouldn't matter if they, if they disappear. We could still detect their depleted deuterium hydrogen ratio millions of years after they stopped. That's not necessarily the case, the authors argue, for SETI-like radio communications or industrial pollution, for certain wouldn't, wouldn't, wouldn't stay polluted for millions of years. So it, it wouldn't- Doesn't matter as long, even if they transferred, you know, to antimatter or a black hole powered

• 51:13Bob Novella?

  power sources, it wouldn't matter because it would still, the water vapor, you know, the hydrogen or the, the lack of deuterium in the water vapor in their atmosphere would be detectable using telescopes that we could use and build today, it would be detectable by us. So there you go. That, that's their idea. It was an interesting read. I recommend looking it up online because the, um, it's, it's, uh, eminently readable. Uh, there's not a tremendous amount of jargon in there. So you can definitely, definitely read the intro and the conclusion. It's very easy to read, very interesting stuff. And it's such an interesting approach to this entire topic. Like, hey, you know, why not give it, give it a try? You know, looking at a planet, you're like, oh my God, where's the deuterium? The ratio is way off. You know, maybe, maybe

• 51:55Bob Novella?

  they, they were using some super deuterium fusion for the past million years on that planet. I don't

• 52:00Speaker 02

  know. This is basically, this is a thought experiment, but the idea is that you could put it, you could do the experiment, like observe planets that have a water atmosphere, you know, water vapor in the atmosphere to see if they, what their ratio is. It certainly, if it all worked, it would be amazing, but.

• 52:17Cara Santa Maria?

  It would, but right now, the only exoplanets that we can observe, we already have other ways to look at their signatures that are more feasible. It just, it's so far-fetched. You know what I mean?

• 52:28Speaker 02

  Well, I'll tell you what I think is the weakest part of the, the chain of reasoning here. Bob, so you're saying over those millions of years that they're burning deuterium in their fusion reactors, they didn't figure out a way to make deuterium?

• 52:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 52:43Cara Santa Maria?

  They had to like mine it from the ocean water?

• 52:45Bob Novella?

  Why would you make, Steve, why would you make deuterium? Why? You've got a million years supply right in your backyard. Why the hell would you make it?

• 52:53Speaker 02

  It's eventually more convenient than getting it from the ocean.

• 52:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Why do we, Bob, why do we make diamonds?

• 53:00Bob Novella?

  Because, because it's expensive. It's expensive to, to dig it out and it's got many other uses than having on your finger.

• 53:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. It's not just because it's expensive, because there are geopolitical reasons and these are supposed to be complex, intelligent societies.

• 53:14Bob Novella?

  The point is, all the fuel is right there. That, that's the entire point of this whole thing.

• 53:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but it's not, is it easy to get? Just because it's right there?

• 53:22Bob Novella?

  I, I think that a civilization about 10 times more advanced than us will have no trouble taking deuterium out of their ocean.

• 53:28Speaker 02

  But they also may have no trouble making it.

• 53:30Cara Santa Maria?

  It might be easier to just make it.

• 53:31Speaker 02

  Out of water.

• 53:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 53:33Speaker 02

  We just don't know, right? That's a huge unknown.

• 53:35Bob Novella?

  Yeah, we don't know. That's just one of the...

• 53:37Cara Santa Maria?

  There are so many assumptions in this thought experiment.

• 53:40Bob Novella?

  Well, in that case, then they would make, then they wouldn't even use deuterium. They'd use tritium.

• 53:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're right.

• 53:47Bob Novella?

  That would be better. That would be better.

• 53:48Speaker 03

  Tritium.

• 53:49Bob Novella?

  They talk about that in this, in this, in this paper. They, tritium actually would be a little bit better, but it's got a, it's got a half-life and it's also, it depends on how much lithium you have. And there's not enough lithium, you know, accessible lithium on the planet. So that's why deuterium is a better candidate.

• 54:07Speaker 03

  It's abundance.

• 54:07Bob Novella?

  But, but whatever. I think it's a, it's a real fun thought experiment. To think that you could determine the, you know, the amount of the fusion technology that they use based on what we could detect of their, their water is just a fun thought.

• 54:20Speaker 02

  It's interesting. Huge long shot, but, but interesting.

• 54:22Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 54:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Huge.

• 54:23Speaker 02

  All right, let's move on. All right, Evan, are we living in a simulation or perhaps 52 million simulations?

• 54:32Speaker 03

  It all depends on what you read on the internet, I suppose. On our drive from Connecticut to Washington DC this past weekend, and I'm, Carrie, you are not among us. Sorry about that.

• 54:42Cara Santa Maria?

  No, I was on an aeroplane.

• 54:43Speaker 03

  I know. And I'm about to bring up Star Trek 2, so I'll apologize for that. So bear, bear with me here. Because on the ride down, I brought up a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode called The Inner Light. Do you gentlemen remember that?

• 54:56Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 54:57Speaker 03

  Discussion.

• 54:57Bob Novella?

  Absolutely. Often considered one of the best episodes.

• 55:00Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah. For those who don't know, in that particular episode, the Enterprise rendezvous with a probe. Real quick, the probe emits an energy beam at Captain Picard. Picard falls unconscious. When he awakens, he's on a strange planet and he's assuming the life of a person. He thinks, he thinks he's he, but he's actually another person. He's not changed at all, but it turns out he's someone else on this planet and he goes on to live for 30 or 40 more years. All right, spoiler alert, it's all in his head. He actually wakes up on the Enterprise shortly after the beam had actually hit him and only 25 minutes of real time had passed. So in his head, Picard was able to live in simulated life on a different world for decades

• 55:43Speaker 03

  and at the same time he only lived for 25 minutes in his real life. That's crazy science fiction, right? Great story, Bob. Great episode and totally implausible, right?

• 55:55Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 55:55Speaker 03

  Right. Well, what's this headline that I'm reading? When we just got back from Washington DC, a scientist theorizes we may be living 52 million lives in the current simulation. This was at, over at Popular Mechanics. I think we're all familiar with that magazine and that website. The author's name is Caroline Delbert, and she writes about a particular chap named Melvin Vopson. Vopson works at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom as an associate professor of physics. But he also started his own physics institute, and he self-published a book in 2023 through that institute. The 2023 paper he released to coincide with that book was published in an open access

• 56:38Speaker 03

  mega-journal called AIP Advances. Now, what he's claiming is that through his scientific observations and measurements, they support his theory, a theory that he calls the second law of info-dynamics.

• 56:53Bob Novella?

  Oh.

• 56:54Speaker 03

  That people can potentially live millions of lifetimes by spending each minute in a simulated life. Yep. Caroline, the author of this article, to her credit, states upfront and within the first three sentences of her article. She says, "He may be a good professor and even a good scientist, but this work makes errors and wild claims." Good for Caroline to point that out. She also writes that she delved into this more because of a revitalized story on the Daily Mail's Mail Online Science section that appeared about a week prior to her writing the piece. And, you know, Daily Mail is a science section. There are better places to go, let's just say that.

• 57:36Speaker 03

  But in any case, some guru over at Daily Mail ran the math, as they say, on Vopson's theory that time dilation seems possible in a simulation. And according to that idea, it's sort of in the same ways that our dreams can feel days long but only last minutes in real life, while an entire lifetime in a simulated universe could take just one minute in the real world. And what that means is that a person could become virtually immortal by stacking up these one-minute simulated lives across their entire human lifetime, leaving 52 million chained lifetimes behind. Now, 52 million minutes being roughly 99 years, so you're lucky enough to be able to live for that long.

• 58:21Cara Santa Maria?

  I smell a cult.

• 58:23Speaker 03

  Ah, well.

• 58:26Speaker 02

  So I'm still not sure what the claim is like, how, what kind of simulation are we talking about?

• 58:30Bob Novella?

  Yeah. How's time dilation being impacted?

• 58:33Speaker 03

  She writes that his theory is the way that information is organized, seems to violate the second law of thermodynamics, that everything in the world experiences rising entropy, right? Meaning that what the level of overall disorder is always increasing.

• 58:47Bob Novella?

  In totality, though, yes.

• 58:49Speaker 03

  Right? And that's, that's what directs, say, time's arrow pushes events in our universe in a forward direction. Bupson believes, Bupson believes that information experiences less entropy over time rather than more. And his work supposedly can prove that. I'm sorry, I didn't have time to, to read his papers or go back and listen to everything that he's talked about on, on the various podcasts and other places that he's been. But he concludes that, uh, this, and she writes, he concludes that this is a way in which we could verify that the data portion of our world is being simulated and organized. If it's breaking physical laws, he postulates it could be the smoking gun for a simulation.

• 59:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Because he says so.

• 59:34Speaker 03

  You're right. Basically, yeah. She calls this circular reasoning, cherry picking one very specific measurement, with terms he has extrapolated. She, she, she writes like a dead reckoning navigator and counting it as evidence of his theory. And it doesn't even really make sense in its own context. And she writes, think about it, some higher intelligence that could manufacture the entire universe wouldn't be so foolish as to leave a giant footprint in the way that they handled the data load for us to find. And, you know, there's a lot of talk about simulation. Like, I know Elon Musk is a, what? He's on the proponent side of there being a simulation. I believe he has spoken about it and there are other very, what?

• 1:00:16Speaker 03

  You know, wealthy tech oriented people out there who kind of ascribe to this as well. There's plenty of people out there though, to, you know, of a real scientific mind that, you know, basically say this is, this is impossible. Oh, and by the way, Bupson and Kara, you brought it up. Bupson, basically, uh, what is he doing? He's trying to match this to, in a way to the Bible. Here we go. For those who say they question our assumptions, including at least one show where he went on and he talked about finding evidence for his simulation theory in the Bible. So he's trying to make this whole, I don't know, sort of metaphysical connection between it all. And, you know, I mean, when you start invoking the Bible and trying to make that

• 1:00:59Speaker 03

  retrofit your ideas and stuff, I mean, it sounds like you're reaching for something here.

• 1:01:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, it doesn't surprise me, right? Because I'm hearing two themes that you see over and over when it comes to religiosity and cult-like social control, which are some means to break mortality, right? Like, oh, through this, I get to live forever. That is a very appealing thing. I want that. I'm going to join this cult. And also, this idea of there being a maker, this idea of there being a greater intelligence more than us, which gives some people comfort. Oh, there's somebody pulling the strings. And you see this over and over with this sort of like solipsistic.

• 1:01:39Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:01:39Cara Santa Maria?

  It's fundamentally, I think, kind of narcissistic to believe that there is like some thing, or idea, or person, or being out there that so gave a shit to create all of this for us.

• 1:01:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. And how much does that diminish the real human experience at the same time?

• 1:01:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely. Like, I don't want to be a puppet. Like, that doesn't bring me comfort. But for some people, it does.

• 1:02:05Speaker 03

  And I suppose if you're gonna, well, and if you're gonna cross this Rubicon or go into this threshold, sure, why not save? Yeah, 54 million lifetimes, you know, instead of even just saying two or three lifetimes.

• 1:02:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Because that's how his math worked out.

• 1:02:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. What's up with his math? I'll leave you with this thought, though. There's another person out there, James Anderson, who has written a lot in recent years about the simulation, you know, basically asked all the time, are we living in a computer simulation? His blog is called Analogical Thoughts. Let me read this paragraph for you. I think he sums it up nicely. "The simulation hypothesis itself is based on scientific theories and concepts derived from our experiences of the world." It's predicated, at least in part, on what we take to be empirical scientific knowledge. But if we accept the simulation hypothesis, then we acquire a defeater for all of our empirical beliefs,

• 1:03:02Speaker 03

  and thus for all of our scientific beliefs. Simply put, if the simulation hypothesis is true, we can't trust the science on which the simulation hypothesis is based, in which case, it would be irrational to believe the simulation hypothesis.

• 1:03:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Ah, catch 22.

• 1:03:19Speaker 03

  Yep, the simulation hypothesis has a deeply self-defeating character to it. Seems like a reasonable conclusion to me. Hard to argue with that.

• 1:03:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Only an insane person would go to war.

• 1:03:32Jay Novella?

  All right, thanks, Evan.

• 1:03:33Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:03:34Jay Novella?

  Jay, it's Who's That Noisy Time? All right, guys, last week I played this noisy.

• 1:03:45Jay Novella?

  What is that? Every parent's nightmare.

• 1:03:49Speaker 03

  Every airplane passenger's nightmare.

• 1:03:52Jay Novella?

  Well, some dude named Visto Tuti wrote in.

• 1:03:55Speaker 03

  Never heard of him.

• 1:03:56Jay Novella?

  And he first was like thinking, maybe it's a plastic party trumpet, but then his true guess is it's a juvenile bird, maybe a galla. It is not a juvenile bird. Thank you for guessing, my friend. Next one, Matthew Morrison. Hi, Jay. My daughter Nev thinks that it's a kitten. I think it sounds like a human child whining for cake at a birthday party.

• 1:04:20Speaker 03

  Or some adults.

• 1:04:22Jay Novella?

  Two, two good guesses. Absolutely, both of them good. It is not a kitten, and it is not a human child whining for cake at a birthday party. I can guarantee you of that. Dan Jackson wrote in and said, hi, Rogues, it's my daughter's first guess at Who's That Noisy? She guessed a chicken, and she's, her name is Celeste, and she's five, from the UK. And I thought that, you know, it's a good guess. It is not a chicken, but you know, I bet you there is a chicken out there making that noise right now. Listener named Jesse Babonis. Hi, I think this week's noisy is a nestling crow begging for food, maybe a fish crow. That is incorrect. And then I have a, a close guess here. Benjamin Greenberg said, hi, Jay, this week's noisy sounds like something whimpering,

• 1:05:05Jay Novella?

  and the chatter of people makes me think maybe it's an animal at a veterinary office or a recovery center. Going to throw it out there and say an alpaca, because I've heard similar sounds. You hit on a couple of things there, Benjamin, but it is not an alpaca. I have a winner from last week. This is Trina Diaz, and Trina said, hi skeptics. My partner and I are longtime listeners and first time guessers. I truly believe this noise is from a cute little. Ready? Nobody? A baby beaver.

• 1:05:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh.

• 1:05:40Jay Novella?

  Listen again, this is a baby beaver.

• 1:05:50Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:05:50Jay Novella?

  Very human sounding, huh?

• 1:05:52Cara Santa Maria?

  It's very cute.

• 1:05:53Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:05:55Jay Novella?

  And there was a lot more of it, but there was people talking over it. So I didn't want to add that in, but if you should check it out, go listen to that. They are really adorable. All right, guys, I have a new noisy for this week. Now, Steve, this is the last noisy of 2024.

• 1:06:10Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:06:11Jay Novella?

  That everyone's going to hear, and we will not be.

• 1:06:13Speaker 02

  You won't reveal it.

• 1:06:14Jay Novella?

  Talking about this. It'll be what, two weeks or three weeks? Three weeks until we talk about it again. All right, I just thought I should say that, just to clarify any confusion. I have a listener named Hamish Guthrie, who sent in this week's noisy. Check it out.

• 1:06:59Jay Novella?

  All right, there's lots of sounds in there, lots of different things going on. I will give you a hint. The hint is that listen to all the different types of sounds you're hearing and let that affect your. What would you call it?

• 1:07:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Decision making?

• 1:07:12Jay Novella?

  Let that affect your decision making. Thank you. All right, guys. So every week I tell you, if you heard something cool or you have a guess, you can email me at [email protected]. That is not changing, by the way, in 2025. We will not be changing that.

• 1:07:27Speaker 02

  As far as you know.

• 1:07:28Jay Novella?

  Um, so Steve, we have done all of our shows for 2024.

• 1:07:31Speaker 02

  Yep, we're done.

• 1:07:33Speaker 03

  That's it.

• 1:07:34Jay Novella?

  And I am fully focused on 2025 and beyond. And I would like to say. That we have a wonderful show on its way up for May. It's the weekend of May 15th of 2025. That is Nauticon. We are all very excited about it because we know all the things that are going into it, all the different stuff that's going to happen at the conference. I will be giving a formal announcement at some point in January with more of a schedule idea of what's going to be happening. But I do believe that if you are a listener of this show and you are capable of coming, that you will have a wonderful time because I have data. And that data is the 240 people that came last year. They were very, very satisfied with what we did.

• 1:08:19Jay Novella?

  And it's a lot of fun. Basically, you'll meet people, you'll have a great time. We'll make you laugh for two and a half days, 2.2 days, Kara.

• 1:08:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 1:08:28Jay Novella?

  And we would just like it if you would consider coming. And I would like to tell everyone out there, have a wonderful holiday if you're celebrating anything over the next month and have a wonderful new year. And let's all look towards a happy and safe future.

• 1:08:41Speaker 02

  And Jay, you know what's happening the week before Nauticon?

• 1:08:45Jay Novella?

  Yes, I do.

• 1:08:46Speaker 02

  Does anybody else know?

• 1:08:47Bob Novella?

  Um, I think I'm getting a haircut.

• 1:08:50Speaker 03

  The week before. Oh, it's 20 years.

• 1:08:55Speaker 02

  Years. It's our 20th anniversary.

• 1:08:57Speaker 03

  Oh, I think we have to buy each other clocks or something.

• 1:09:00Jay Novella?

  Yeah, we're going to plan something. We're going to, we're going to plan a 20th year something.

• 1:09:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. So we're going to do a 20 hour livestream. Kara, you're going to have to do that from China.

• 1:09:09Jay Novella?

  No, we're not doing that.

• 1:09:10Cara Santa Maria?

  If I'm there.

• 1:09:11Speaker 02

  No, we're not doing that.

• 1:09:12Speaker 03

  We're not doing that? 40 hours?

• 1:09:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Thank fuck.

• 1:09:18Speaker 02

  20 minutes?

• 1:09:18Jay Novella?

  But there is, but Steve, we talked about this. There is a milestone with the number of patrons that we have. If we get to 5,500 patrons.

• 1:09:25Speaker 02

  We do a 24 hour.

• 1:09:27Jay Novella?

  We will do a heavily extended.

• 1:09:29Speaker 02

  We will do a 20 year.

• 1:09:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Heavily extended. I love it.

• 1:09:33Speaker 03

  Not only will it be 24 hours, we're going to do it on daylight savings, switch over. So it'll be a 25th hour.

• 1:09:38Speaker 02

  We'll do it at Antarctica.

• 1:09:41Speaker 03

  What time, what time is it there?

• 1:09:43Jay Novella?

  We will reenact the movie The Thing, scene for scene, shot for shot.

• 1:09:47Speaker 02

  Um, no, but seriously, we're gonna be doing some 20 year celebration in May. We have to coordinate that with Nauticon. Um, it may have to like wait until after that, just, you know what I mean? For the dust to settle on Nauticon, but we'll see sometime around then. We'll, we'll be celebrating the fact that we crossed the 20 year mark. All right, we're gonna do one semi quick email. A bunch of people emailed us on this. This has to do with the saying, blood is thicker than water. And if you call, this came up on the show and I think, and I brought up that, or we were talking about sayings that where their meaning gets changed over time.

• 1:10:22Speaker 02

  And there's many, many references that say that, you know, the blood is thicker than water, which means that basically family ties are more important than other commitments that you may have or other relationships. But that the original saying was the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb, which means the opposite, that the, the blood of a covenant, that alliances and whatever that you with, whether it's with the church or the blood brotherhood of battle or whatever is more important than the water of the womb, meaning your kin. But it turns out that that's probably not true, that that seems to be a not too distantly invented myth.

• 1:11:04Speaker 02

  So I did, you know, independently look, look this up as much as I could. Yeah. It, so it turns out, I, I do think this is the kind of thing that requires some actual academic research. I think like just doing Google type of research is not going to be enough to definitively resolve this. But even on like linguistics forums or whatever, we have people who know what they're talking about debating it. It seems that the reference to the blood of the covenant is things in the water of the womb only goes back to like the 1990s. Maybe it's based upon something from the late 1890s, although it's not clear if that reference is valid or not.

• 1:11:45Speaker 02

  Meaning that, you know, you're, you're always looking for earlier incidences, but you don't know necessarily. If there's a direct cultural connection between it. But there's no, certainly no ancient or medieval even use of like the, the blood of the covenant thing. That's recent, either completely invented in the nineties, or maybe based upon a misinterpretation of something that was written in the late, the late 1800s. Whereas references to blood is thicker than water, meaning what the modern meaning, you know, that blood ties are stronger than other ties. It goes back into medieval times.

• 1:12:27Speaker 02

  Again, it's always hard to say exactly what the first thing was. Many, many people give like a Scottish reference from the 1200s, but it's not clear if that, you know, is interpreted the exact same way. That quote says something like that the blood is not tainted by water or something. But they, but in the context, it does seem that in context, it means that family ties are more important than other ties. So I do, yeah, so it does seem that that meaning, that whatever the exact verbiage is, that meaning of family ties are more important, does have precedence, is the older interpretation. And that this sort of idea that it originally meant something that was the opposite,

• 1:13:09Speaker 02

  seems to be a more recent misunderstanding that I think then just got perpetuated. And again, if you just look it up, you still see references to that, you know, all over the internet. I think just because it seems like, it seems like a nice story, you know? It's like, oh, this is one of those things that got reversed. So people like to say it, but actually if you track it back, it's probably not real. But I would like to see a more academic treatment of this, you know, to say, just, you know, what really is the etymology of this phrase? And there might be other references that, that people are not aware of. All right. So thanks, everybody who wrote in to alert us to that.

• 1:13:51Speaker 02

  Well, everyone, we're going to take a quick break from our show to talk about one of our sponsors this week, Quince.

• 1:13:55Bob Novella?

  You know, it's great when you can get someone a gift they wouldn't necessarily get for themselves. Aren't they the best, you know, that little bit of luxury that they don't know that they're, that they're even missing? For quality gifts at an affordable price, my go-to is Quince.

• 1:14:09Jay Novella?

  My wife and I have been shopping at Quince for years, and she particularly loves the sweaters. So guys, a Quince sweater for your wife this Christmas would be awesome. But they're, they have a ton of different things. They have codes. I mean, there's, there's a lot of stuff on their website. You should check it out. Also, this company only works with factories that use safe and ethical and responsible manufacturing practices with, you know, in today's world, that's a big deal.

• 1:14:33Speaker 03

  So gift luxury this holiday season without the luxury price tag. Go to quince.com/sgu for 365 day returns plus free shipping on your order. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com/SGU to get free shipping and 365 day returns. quince.com/SGU.

• 1:14:55Speaker 02

  All right, guys, let's get back to the show. Well, guys, we have a great interview coming up, so let's go to our interview now.

• 1:15:11Speaker 02

  We are joined now by Noah Lusens. Noah, welcome to The Skeptic's Guide.

• 1:15:15Bob Novella?

  Awesome to be here. Thank you.

• 1:15:17Speaker 02

  So Noah, you are the producer of The Scathing Atheist and other podcasts. Why don't you tell us about all the stuff that you're doing in the social media verse?

• 1:15:26Bob Novella?

  Our, our first podcast was The Scathing Atheist. We started that one back in 2013, which seems old when I compare myself to anybody but you guys. We've got another show called God Awful Movies where we break down Christian cinema. We, we often have our mutual friend Cara as a guest on that one.

• 1:15:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:15:46Bob Novella?

  We also do a D and D podcast called D and D Minus, a politics podcast called The Skeptocrat, and we team up with our buddies from Citation Needed to do a just general trivia podcast, I guess, called Citation Needed. So we've got, we've got a lot of irons in the fire at any given time.

• 1:16:01Speaker 02

  How long ago did you start The Scathing Atheist?

• 1:16:03Bob Novella?

  Started it in January of 2013 and

• 1:16:08Bob Novella?

  Uh, it was, uh, it was you guys that inspired us to start. You were our first podcast love.

• 1:16:12Speaker 02

  Oh, is that right?

• 1:16:13Speaker 03

  Oh, that's awesome.

• 1:16:14Bob Novella?

  It helped that you guys were like the third podcast, though, right?

• 1:16:17Speaker 02

  I know. I mean, I don't know if you were the third, third, but we were, yeah.

• 1:16:20Bob Novella?

  Maybe the fifth.

• 1:16:22Speaker 02

  We started podcasting before podcasting really existed, before it was a thing on iTunes. Like iTunes didn't have a podcasting category yet. It was just an idea. The word existed, but...

• 1:16:34Bob Novella?

  Protocasting, yeah, right.

• 1:16:36Speaker 02

  The infrastructure was not yet there.

• 1:16:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:39Speaker 02

  Um, I mean, nothing. We, when we started, I mean, we were like just hosting it on our own website and, you know, like, we, like, we, we had no idea what we were doing.

• 1:16:48Speaker 02

  Cause nobody did.

• 1:16:48Bob Novella?

  Well, yep. Ri- right. Yeah, you were inventing it as you went. Yeah.

• 1:16:52Speaker 03

  Yep. Build the airplane as you fly it.

• 1:16:53Speaker 02

  So that's basically it. So tell us about your experience with the Scathing Atheist, uh, in terms of how, you know, how well it's been received and the kind of stuff that you talk about on that show.

• 1:17:02Bob Novella?

  Well, yeah. So when we first started that, uh, there were a number of atheist podcasts in the podcasting universe. And by a number, like back then, you know, fourteen, there was quite a few. But most of them were designed as outreach, uh, where atheists were trying to present themselves as, you know, not, non-frightening to, to Christians. Uh, and, um, and that was great. I was, I was glad that there were people out there doing it, but there really wasn't at that time, much in the way of atheists talking to atheists. Uh, so we started a show to, sort of to help atheists keep abreast of the important news of the day.

• 1:17:40Bob Novella?

  Now, this was back in the Obama administration. We couldn't imagine how important secular news would become shortly thereafter, right? Uh, but, uh, but yeah, we, we talk a lot about, uh, what's going on in the Christian blogosphere, specifically the, the sort of right-wing evangelical blogosphere. Uh, that's the kind of thing that, um, I think most people don't want to have to dig that deep into and would kind of rather somebody else look into for them. So we're providing that service to the secular community.

• 1:18:11Speaker 02

  And so what, what, tell us a little about the content. Like, you do interviews or is it mainly just a roundtable discussion?

• 1:18:18Bob Novella?

  It's pre-scripted comedy-based stuff, so we try to keep it light and airy, even though the stuff we're talking about is terrifying. Uh, we've been doing a long-term thing where we're going through the Bible, uh, book by book, reenacting. For everybody, because that's a hard read, right? We kind of need to know what's in there. Uh, yeah, it's a, it's a much bigger task than we realized it was going to be. Uh, when we started digging in, but we're already into the gospels though. So we're most of the way through. We've done quite a bit.

• 1:18:45Jay Novella?

  So you dramatizing it with audio and stuff like, what does that sound like?

• 1:18:48Bob Novella?

  Yeah, it is a lot of wacky sound effects. Uh, we brought in a voice actor because we needed to do, uh, more voices, but it's, you know, it's, it's obviously it's a, it's a comedy thing. More than anything, but it is kind of a fun way to learn. What's actually in the book without actually having to read a thousand pages of it?

• 1:19:07Speaker 02

  I mean, I, I think I've read the entire Bible. At some point, but I was, you know, we went to a, um, Catholic prep school and I took four years of theology.

• 1:19:16Jay Novella?

  So yeah, so did I, man.

• 1:19:17Speaker 02

  Just to get through those courses.

• 1:19:18Jay Novella?

  That was something.

• 1:19:19Speaker 02

  And there's some wacky shit in there.

• 1:19:25Bob Novella?

  Yeah, you know, like I, I thought I knew a lot about the Bible when I first, or not a lot, but I thought I knew like an average amount about the Bible. When we first started doing the show, we started doing a, a section called the Holy Bible where we read through it chapter by chapter. I'm, I'm a couple of chapters in, I'm like, there's a talking donkey in this thing. Why aren't we talking about this?

• 1:19:44Jay Novella?

  Why aren't we talking about, I know, but the thing is it, it's so absurd. But you know, it's so generally accepted that, you know, people don't, like people aren't really bringing it up because it's, it's wide, it's widely loved and, and worshiped. You know what I mean? Like what, what are we going to do? Like we, there's a million people out there to put it down, but there's 10 million people for every million people that believe it and love it.

• 1:20:06Speaker 02

  More than that. It's true, but I think like just what you're doing, like here's what's actually in the Bible. I mean, you could believe whatever you want about it, but here, let's just, you know, not whitewash this, right? And that's quote unquote sane wash the Bible. Uh, cause I do, and it is, there have actually been studies that show that like atheists know more about the Bible than Christians do, generally speaking.

• 1:20:28Bob Novella?

  Generally speaking, yeah. Well, and it becomes incredibly important when you start looking at other, you know, comparative religion, right? Because you very often hear Christians denigrate the Quran and, and say, oh, you know, the Quran is this very violent book. And it is, I've read the Quran as well, uh, but it's not more violent than the Bible.

• 1:20:45Jay Novella?

  Definitely not.

• 1:20:47Bob Novella?

  You know, but, but of course if you, you know, if you sort of sane wash the

• 1:20:50Speaker 02

  Bible beforehand, and then you look at the Quran. Honestly, you're going to see a much more violent book. So yeah, I, I think it offers an important balance there as well. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, because again, we also having been in, you know, to church many times being, you know, being confirmed as it ever sort of got exposed to the Bible through all of that. And they don't really emphasize all the, the

• 1:21:13Jay Novella?

  The crazy.

• 1:21:13Speaker 02

  The crazy, interesting stuff that's in there. Like, I don't remember ever learning in church that at some point, God sent a couple of bears out to kill 40 kids because they called his prophet Baldi. You know, but that's in there. That's objectively in there. Like, there's no way to interpret that any other way than God killed children for being children.

• 1:21:33Jay Novella?

  Yep, that'll learn those kids.

• 1:21:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, there's a part where, where God moons Moses and it's, it's fascinating stuff. And that's really the saddest part of it, right? Because the Bible is a genuinely fascinating book. But you have to be honest about what's in there to see why.

• 1:21:50Jay Novella?

  I find it really interesting, like when I first found out how much the, the Bible and Christianity like took from other religions. You know, as far as it being unique, it's not, it's so much of it is borrowed and stolen. It's like a mishmash of different, of different beliefs.

• 1:22:05Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah. It's just, you know, it just like every other story, it's borrowing from the stories before it and, and, and those are borrowing from the stories before them, right? It's just these same motifs that show up again and again. And, you know, the Bible offered sort of the, you know, the, the, the best honed diversion of a lot of those stories because we had, you know, this sort of natural selection. You know, they don't like to believe in regular evolution, let alone the evolution of the Bible, but, but natural selection within sort of the editing of the Bible has sort of honed it into this very poetic and, and very like, you know, beautifully written version of this, again, same story that we've heard over and over. How much do you get into like more of the academic end of theology, like talking about

• 1:22:49Speaker 02

  non biblical sources of information, like the Nostic Gospels and the Gospel of Jude, like that sort of, that to me, that's Source, what was that one? The Nostic Gospels, Gospels and the Gospel According to Judas. Have you heard about that one? Yeah, yeah. So there's a ton of really interesting stuff there. We did cover a lot of that stuff early on in our show. We actually read through the Bible and then we went through a lot of the Apocrypha and then we went through the Quran and the Book of Mormon because you're, you know, obviously you guys have been podcasting long enough to know you're always looking for new sources of content. But now that we're this sort of like second go around on the Bible, we're really just sticking to the canonized stuff.

• 1:23:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, but which is great, but you know, again, to me, when if you want to know like, again, what the origin of the Bible is, you can't just look at what has emerged as the canon. You have to look at everything that was being written at that time because like there are, there are many different versions of Jesus in the other gospels that, you know, once Rome decided this is Christianity, then they actively destroyed any non-canon books that were out there and a few squeaked through. And it's just, it's just amazing how completely different they are, like utterly and completely different. It's as if like, you know, DC Comics destroyed every

• 1:24:14Speaker 02

  non-canon comic book out there or whatever. Once they decide, oh, this is the story we're going to stick with and any other versions, like there's no multiverse. We're just going to destroy every other version of these stories. Jesus had a talking crucifix sidekick in one of those gospels.

• 1:24:29Bob Novella?

  Like Freddy the flute.

• 1:24:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Let's talk a little bit about God awful movies because that's a, that's a fun show. Yeah, you know, it started as a segment within the scathing atheist. We were doing movie reviews. This was about the time that the first God's not dead movie came out. In case you're not keeping up, we're, I think we're at five now going on the sixth one.

• 1:24:52Speaker 03

  Still not dead.

• 1:24:55Speaker 02

  If you could believe that, you know, he's like Freddy. He keeps coming back at the end of every movie. But we used to do just movie reviews on that show, became a hugely popular segment with my friend Eli Bosdick, who you guys know, you had him on your show as well. He used to show up on Scathing Atheists once a month or so to do these movie reviews. He lost his job at a very opportune moment for us, so we decided to spin that off as its own show. And we thought to ourselves, well, you know, surely we'll run out of Christian movies eventually. So we just got to, I believe, episode 487 of that, and they're not slowing down on those at all. And this is another thing where like, I think it's actually very

• 1:25:38Speaker 02

  important, genuinely important, that the secular community, the atheist community is keeping track of what's going on in Christian cinema. What, you know, what are they showing their kids? What political ideals are they infusing in their movies? And of course, nobody wants to watch these movies because they're just objectively horrible. So, you know, that's another service we're providing for the community. We're going in and watching all the Kirk Cameron's newest and best Ray Comfort's films.

• 1:26:06Jay Novella?

  What's the absolute worst one you've reviewed so far?

• 1:26:12Speaker 02

  Well, so that's a, that's a huge question. Worse in terms of like, the message behind it, or worse in terms of like, the actual production quality, you know? So, I would say the worst movie we've ever reviewed is a movie called Loving the Bad Man, about learning to forgive your rapist. So, yeah, sorry, I should have probably put a trigger warning on the beginning of that, but about how rape victims should carry the baby to term, rather than getting an abortion. I think that might be the worst, or maybe that, or there was a, we did a movie a long time ago called Right to Believe, that was about a Christian local news reporter who was being forced to cover a gay pride parade without

• 1:26:56Speaker 02

  telling his readers how sinful gayness was. So that was, that was also a really fun one.

• 1:27:03Jay Novella?

  Noah, how do you dig these movies up? Like, where, what's your resource?

• 1:27:06Speaker 02

  Well, so early on, we got a lot of recommendations from people who came out of the Christian faith, you know, and were subjected to these movies when they were kids. But eventually, man, your YouTube algorithm and your Netflix algorithm just get ruined. It's just wrecked in there and everything it recommends to you is another terrible movie that, you know, fortunately is great for the show.

• 1:27:28Speaker 03

  Will Battlefield Earth ever be part of that lineup?

• 1:27:31Speaker 02

  We did a live show for Battlefield Earth, actually, in Detroit, Michigan. We, yeah, we'd been saving that one for a while.

• 1:27:38Jay Novella?

  Can I tell you something? I saw Battlefield Earth. Not a horrible movie.

• 1:27:43Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 1:27:44Bob Novella?

  It's a pretty horrible movie, Steve. Wait a second, wait a second here. I, Steve, I saw it too. It's like, I don't know, five years ago. Now, granted, my expectations were supremely low.

• 1:27:56Jay Novella?

  They were super low.

• 1:27:56Bob Novella?

  It was super low. So I was like, you know, that wasn't as horrific as I was anticipating.

• 1:28:00Jay Novella?

  It wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. I mean, say it that way.

• 1:28:03Speaker 02

  So for everybody listening at home that doesn't really listen to this, who hasn't seen this movie, I want to point out that like about 80% of this movie is shot at a Dutch angle, which is like where that camera is like 30% off tilt to try to make you a little bit nauseous.

• 1:28:16Speaker 03

  Like the boat is yeah, is listing, is listing to one side.

• 1:28:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, a lot of curious choices in that one. Well, I'll tell you what, if you like that one, I've got a lot of great ones.

• 1:28:27Bob Novella?

  I didn't say I liked it. Didn't say we liked it.

• 1:28:30Speaker 03

  They'll send you the whole VHS collection.

• 1:28:32Jay Novella?

  Wasn't as horrible as I thought.

• 1:28:34Speaker 02

  All right, well, yeah, I guess that's a much lower bar to care.

• 1:28:37Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:28:38Jay Novella?

  I watched like about a half an hour of it and it made me so uncomfortable. It like actually made me freak out a little bit. I was weirded out by it. It was, that's how bad that movie is. So I don't know what you're talking about, Steve. I think it's always compared to your expectations going in.

• 1:28:55Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, I've seen, hey, listen to this, Jay, I saw The Nightmare Before Christmas in 1991 and I was a little disappointed. Why? Because that movie is a classic cult.

• 1:29:08Speaker 02

  It's legendary.

• 1:29:10Bob Novella?

  I watch it every year, but my expectations were so stupidly high for that movie. I was actually a little bit disappointed. Of course, on the second, third, fourth, and a hundredth viewing, I absolutely am in love with that. One of the best movies ever. But you know how expectations can mess with your head.

• 1:29:27Jay Novella?

  Sure.

• 1:29:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, that same thing happened to me with Rogue One, because everybody went so crazy for that. And it's a fantastic movie. It's such a great movie, but it had been built up so big that the first time I saw it, I was like, meh.

• 1:29:36Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that's, I feel bad for you, because, but I could absolutely see that happening.

• 1:29:41Speaker 03

  Especially in the context of all the other Star Wars movies. It's definitely one of the better Star Wars movies out there, no doubt about it.

• 1:29:46Speaker 02

  Oh, yes.

• 1:29:47Jay Novella?

  So, let me ask you this question, then. Were there any god awful movies that you reviewed, you're like, you know what? As a movie, that wasn't half bad. Well, you know, that it had some virtue to it, you know, as a film.

• 1:29:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a couple of them. They slip out of my mind, so I can't really name one of them right off the bat. But there's definitely been a couple of movies that we're reviewing, where we, like, right before we start the record, we're like, oh crap, this is gonna be a little trickier than usual, isn't it?

• 1:30:13Speaker 03

  No softballs there.

• 1:30:15Speaker 02

  Normally, though, there's at least, you know, the movies that we choose tend to at least have a few poisonous ideas that we can latch on to. Right? Because, you know, I don't want to, I don't necessarily want to just make fun of a person trying to make a movie and fail, right? There's a lot of podcasts that do that, and power to them. A lot of them are very funny. But we want to focus on movies that either send, you know, poisonous messages, like, be they, you know, misogynistic messages, or anti LGBTQ messages, or another real common one is anti psychiatric messages. They really love to jump into that. And then also, we dive into pseudoscience documentaries as well.

• 1:30:54Speaker 02

  You know, these movies that, of course, COVID gave us a rash of these, but, but there's a ton of them, vaxxed and those types of movies. We dive into those kinds of things as well. So even if the production value is high, even if the movie itself is fairly good, there's usually something poisonous enough at the heart of it for us to latch on to.

• 1:31:11Jay Novella?

  No, as a fellow podcaster, do you have any stories of, of dealing with people that listen to the show?

• 1:31:17Speaker 02

  So, okay, so, honestly, yes, and I'm afraid maybe she's listening now, but we did a live show in Seattle, Washington, one time, and at the end of the show, we took questions from the audience, and we've learned our lesson. We don't do that anymore.

• 1:31:33Speaker 03

  Oh no.

• 1:31:33Speaker 02

  So, so this, this girl who's sitting up front, she's like, hey, I have a gift for you guys. And she handed us three skulls that she had painted. Uh, they, they weren't human. Uh, they, they were like a, animal skulls that she, upon, uh, questions she had found in the woods.

• 1:31:52Speaker 03

  Quote, found in the woods.

• 1:31:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, right, right. She found dead things in the woods and painted them for us. And that creeped me right on out. So, there was that. I, so do I, because I was holding them when I found out she found them in the woods.

• 1:32:06Jay Novella?

  Did you clean them up a little bit? I mean,

• 1:32:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:09Speaker 02

  I, I cleaned me up a little bit. I think I may have forgotten to put those in my luggage and bring them back across the country with me.

• 1:32:17Jay Novella?

  No, when you take questions, you don't have people ask the questions live. You have them write,

• 1:32:21Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 1:32:22Jay Novella?

  You write them down and then you read them, which means,

• 1:32:26Speaker 02

  Now you tell me. That's great timing.

• 1:32:29Jay Novella?

  No, you can choose the good questions and you don't, you don't get people who stand up and pontificate for 20 minutes, but you know, uh, no, that, that's the, we, we just did a live show. We did that method. It works really well. So for future reference.

• 1:32:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. No, I'll keep that in mind. Actually, you know, I took a, a podcasting course from you, a lesson from you. Uh, many, many moons ago, Steve, right? When I first started the podcast, you and George Robb did one at Nexus.

• 1:32:55Speaker 03

  Oh, yes.

• 1:32:56Jay Novella?

  I remember that.

• 1:32:56Speaker 02

  I was, I, I, I think I was like three months into it and it was great. And I was learning a lot of stuff. And at one point, George says, hey, does anybody here actually have a podcast? And I raised my hand and like one other person did. And there's like 40 people in the room and they're like, what the hell are we even doing here then, guys?

• 1:33:13Jay Novella?

  Well, they were thinking of maybe starting a podcast.

• 1:33:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, right, right. Yeah, I guess. Everyone seemed to have a ton of fun. And hey, 50% at least of the podcasters that were in that went on to do it for a living.

• 1:33:22Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 1:33:23Jay Novella?

  Well, it's pretty, pretty high.

• 1:33:24Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:33:24Jay Novella?

  Pretty good hit rate.

• 1:33:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:26Jay Novella?

  No, this is a full-time gig, right?

• 1:33:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:29Jay Novella?

  No, this is a full-time gig for you, right?

• 1:33:31Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah. We've been doing it for a living now for, well, I guess a little over 10 years.

• 1:33:36Jay Novella?

  That's awesome, man.

• 1:33:38Speaker 02

  That's, that's actually pretty, pretty rare for podcasters. Well, you know, I, I honestly, you were talking earlier about how you guys had to sort of build the infrastructure as you went. I think one of the big advantages that we had is we kind of got into it right before Patreon became a thing, right before the, the infrastructure for podcast advertising became pretty accessible to even a smaller show. So the ability to monetize sort of came about right after we started, or the, the ability to easily monetize, right? You, you guys, like I said, were already sort of building your own infrastructure for monetization at that point, which made it a hell of a lot harder. You totally, well, first of all, we did this for many years with no monetization, right? So that was the first

• 1:34:16Speaker 03

  Many years.

• 1:34:17Speaker 02

  Third of our career. And then we started to do it on our own and then the more prefab ones like Patreon and, you know, advertising came into play. But yeah, I was, that was, uh, it was a nice transition, but we did this for many years before there was any monetization. Yeah, people often ask, what's the secret to success in podcasts? I say, start in 2014. Yeah.

• 1:34:40Jay Novella?

  Well, I've, I've had people over the years ask me for advice so many times. You know, my, my number one thing I say is you've got to come up with something. It's got to have a unique angle or perspective, you know, it could be, you know, there's a million, you know, movie review shows out there, but you've got to have your own kind of angle of attack. And on top of that, you have to be willing to do it for a year before you even begin to judge what's going on.

• 1:35:03Speaker 02

  Yes. What, what I often tell people is, you know, that somewhere out, at some point in your life, you're going to say to yourself, as you're looking for podcasts, I wish there was a podcast that was X, right? That's the podcast you should make.

• 1:35:14Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:35:15Speaker 02

  Right. There's, there's obviously a hole in the market. If you've noticed it, somebody else has too, and there's probably a reason.

• 1:35:20Speaker 03

  Find those gaps.

• 1:35:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. Right, right. But it's also, it's kind of like asking, oh, what, what's your advice on starting a successful rock band? You know, it's like, well, I could tell you how to form a band, you know, and but being successful is no guarantee. I could tell you how to buy a lottery ticket, basically, but there's no way to guarantee that you're going to win.

• 1:35:38Jay Novella?

  But the common element, Steve, is that whether you make it or not in any of these ventures, you have to put the time in and you have to develop a skillset and you have to have a massive commitment. I mean, we did it, we did it for 10 years on raw passion. We just loved doing it.

• 1:35:55Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:35:55Jay Novella?

  You know what I mean? And it, it really takes that in order to, to, to build it up to, you, your, your chances of building it up slightly increase when you have that level of commitment.

• 1:36:05Speaker 02

  All right. Well, Noah, thank you so much for joining us.

• 1:36:07Jay Novella?

  We definitely highly recommend all of your podcasts to our listeners out there.

• 1:36:12Speaker 02

  Excellent. Well, thanks again for having me on. It has been a real pleasure.

• 1:36:16Jay Novella?

  So what's the easiest way for people to find you?

• 1:36:18Speaker 02

  Just find us anywhere you get podcasts. Look for the scathing atheist or god awful movies and we'll get you all the rest of them from there.

• 1:36:24Jay Novella?

  Sounds good. All right. Take care Noah. Thanks Noah. Bye.

• 1:36:27Speaker 02

  Adios.

• 1:36:31Speaker 01

  It's time for science or fiction?

• 1:36:40Jay Novella?

  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. You have three news items. This is the last science or fiction of the year with just regular news items. Next week's show again is the show that we recorded in DC and then we have the year end review. So just three more opportunities to affect your science or fiction record for the year. You guys ready for the news items? Yep. Here we go. Item number one, a new analysis finds that if existing plans to achieve worldwide net zero carbon emissions were implemented, it would use an area of land larger than the United States.

• 1:37:26Jay Novella?

  All right. Number two, scientists have discovered a new class of magnetism called alter magnetism and find that it can potentially increase the speed of memory devices up to a thousand times. And item number three, paleontologists describe a species of flying reptile that is not a pterosaur and is 15 million years older than the oldest pterosaur, making it the oldest known flying vertebrate. Evan, go first.

• 1:37:53Speaker 03

  The first one, existing plans to achieve worldwide net zero carbon emissions. If they were implemented, it would use an area of land larger than the United States. The United States is large. It's very large. It is, I believe, the fourth largest country on the planet. That's a lot of area, boy. And that kind of would be sad if this one, in a way, I think, is, uh, is science. Oh, boy. Tough to, uh, tough to see. What does that exactly mean, that it would use land larger than the US?

• 1:38:24Bob Novella?

  Using land in what capacity?

• 1:38:26Speaker 03

  For all of our solar and wind and...

• 1:38:29Jay Novella?

  They'd have to plant more trees, all that stuff. If you look at like every country's plan to achieve, achieve net zero, and how much land it would take in the, to execute their plan, and you add it all together, it's a land area greater than the United States.

• 1:38:43Speaker 03

  Meaning it's close to implausible. Not good. Uh, number two, uh, the new class of magnetism? Alter magnetism? This sounds like something right out of the 18th or 19th century, right? And they find that it can potentially increase the speed of memory devices up to a thousand times? Thousandfold increase? Holy crow. That's, uh, you know, here's one of these items where, you know, you can either increase that by a factor of 10, reduce it by a factor of 10 by 100. I don't know about this one. And the last one, paleontologists describe a species of flying reptile. That is not a pterosaur, and is 15 million years older than the oldest pterosaur.

• 1:39:27Speaker 03

  And this makes it the oldest known flying vertebrate. Yikes. I don't know. The United States is big. I mean, Alaska is, is, is part of the United States, and that's a huge chunk as well you have to consider. I think that one's fiction.

• 1:39:40Jay Novella?

  Okay, Jay. The first one about the plans to achieve net zero, and it would need the landmass of the United States. I mean, I, I think that's science. I mean, I think that when taking the entire world into account, that's, you know, that's about how much land we would need. I would think a lot of that would be, um, you know, planting trees and, and, and stuff like that, but, sure, I mean, I know the United States is huge, but the world is really big. That's science. The second one, uh, scientists have discovered a new class of magnetism, and it could potentially increase the speed of memory devices up to a thousand times. Oh my God, that's amazing. I mean, this seems unlikely, but I don't know. I still think that it's very, it's, it's in the realm of possible.

• 1:40:25Jay Novella?

  Yeah, that's tough. All right, and you go about, going down to the third one. Uh, the paleontologists have described a species. It's a flying reptile. Oh boy, 15 million years older than the oldest pterosaur. Wow, I mean, this goes against things that I've read, making it the oldest known flying vertebrate. Steve, is this a recent find? Yeah, of course. 15 million years older than...

• 1:40:47Bob Novella?

  They've been sitting on it for 10 years.

• 1:40:49Jay Novella?

  I don't know.

• 1:40:49Speaker 03

  Well, I had to be sure.

• 1:40:51Jay Novella?

  I mean... Yeah, these are all recent.

• 1:40:52Speaker 02

  Recent news items.

• 1:40:53Jay Novella?

  Okay, so first one definite yes, the second one magnetism one, you know, new class of magnetism. I don't know how profound that is, you know, maybe it's like an offshoot of other types of magnetism that we, of course, we, we, we understand, you know, I don't know, I just don't think that, I don't think that that one is, that one doesn't seem that crazy to me. And I, this last one here, now, last time Steve gave us one of these, you know, about basically dragons.

• 1:41:20Speaker 03

  Oh, wait, Steve believes in dragons like Joe Rogan now?

• 1:41:24Jay Novella?

  But the, but, last time I, I, I said that I thought it was, uh, was science and I was wrong. I'm gonna say this one is the fiction.

• 1:41:33Speaker 02

  Okay, Kara.

• 1:41:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Class of magnetism sounds kooky.

• 1:41:37Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:41:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Magnets are also a little bit magical.

• 1:41:40Speaker 03

  Still.

• 1:41:42Speaker 03

  Still.

• 1:41:42Cara Santa Maria?

  They are. I don't know, increase the speed of memory devices. Oh, potentially. I love all the qualifiers. That always makes things that sound fantastic.

• 1:41:52Speaker 02

  Well, until you do it, you haven't done it.

• 1:41:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. So eh, I'm on the fence about that one. I, I agree with Jay about the landmass. Like, the United States is big, but if we're talking solar panels on all these roofs and we're talking planting trees and all this stuff, like, yeah, I think that could easily fill the landmass of the United States. They're not saying it has to all be in one place, right? It's distributed across, across the world. So, yeah, that, the pterosaur one bugs me. Those are flying reptiles and they are old. And there's a whole new class of flying reptiles that are not pterosaurs or types of pterosaurs that are older. That one bothers me. I feel like I would, I would have heard about this. So I'm gonna say that's the fiction.

• 1:42:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, Bob.

• 1:42:34Bob Novella?

  Yeah, the United States is big, but I mean, but then again, how many countries actually have plants? Four? Three? I don't know. It seems like a lot, but yeah, it adds up. Um, and I'm sure there's a bunch of countries that have plans. Um, the, the memory device, new, we need a new class of magnetism. We really, that's just too awesome for me to be pessimistic about it. So I've gotta just say that that's, that's science. Yeah, the flying reptile, I don't think so. That's, I gotta. Put that in the class of would have heard about it. You know, the would have heard about it class. Um, that's, that's huge. I, I went through news items today earlier. I didn't see that. Um, it's just too, that's just too good. Steve's got a wet dream here. Um, that he wants us to buy into.

• 1:43:18Bob Novella?

  So I'm, I'm, I'm gonna shatter that dream and say fiction.

• 1:43:22Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 1:43:22Speaker 02

  All right, so you guys all agree about on the, the middle one, right? The magnetism one. Uh, so we'll start there. Scientists have discovered a new class of magnetism called alter magnetism and find that it can potentially increase the speed of memory devices up to a thousand times. You all think this one is science and this one is science. This is science.

• 1:43:45Bob Novella?

  Better be science.

• 1:43:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. So what do you, what do you think it is? What do you think alter magnetism is? Have you read this one?

• 1:43:50Bob Novella?

  I, I briefly scanned it real quick. And that's why if you could, this was fiction. I was already planning driving to your house.

• 1:44:00Bob Novella?

  And, and basically flattening, flattening all of your tires. Something about, something about the, um, the magnetic moment and the spin.

• 1:44:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. So there are different magnetic materials. Not, you know, magnetism is magnetism, but this is about magnetic materials. You know, like there are ferromagnets and antiferromagnets and diamagnets. You know, diamagnetism, this is, this is alter magnet. So this is basically materials that when a little piece, like a little magnetic moment heading in one direction next to it, there'll be a magnetic moment in the opposite direction. Right? So they're anti-parallel. But then one, each little piece of the material that has a bunch of these, these, these moments pointing in opposite directions. They are twisted a little bit relative to their neighbors.

• 1:44:51Speaker 02

  So they say it's kind of like, so an antiferromagnet is one where each neighboring moment is in the opposite direction. Right?

• 1:45:00Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:01Speaker 02

  This is like an antiferromagnet, but also with the added twist that each, that the, the pieces of it are rotated with respect to their neighbors. So they said the result is it's a, it's a subtle difference, but there's a profound effect that you end up getting the best of both worlds of, of ferromagnets and antiferromagnets.

• 1:45:24Bob Novella?

  Nice, man.

• 1:45:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the end result. Is that we might be able to make, you know, magnetic memory devices out of cheaper material. Like we won't have to use so many rare earths and stuff. And also it could potentially be a thousand times faster than existing technology.

• 1:45:41Bob Novella?

  That's wicked. I hope that works.

• 1:45:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, hopefully it works.

• 1:45:44Jay Novella?

  That is awesome.

• 1:45:45Speaker 02

  All right, let's go back to the first one. A new analysis finds that if existing plans to achieve worldwide net zero carbon emissions were implemented, it would use an area of land larger than the United States. Evan, you think this one is the fiction. Everyone else thinks this one is science. And this one is science. Sorry, Evan. This is very bad news. This is, so yeah, there's a lot of.

• 1:46:09Bob Novella?

  I was hoping.

• 1:46:10Speaker 02

  They, they looked at many countries. What was it? 140 countries? And they went through all of their climate plans between now and like 2060. So what are you going to do to get to net zero? This is what we're going to do, right? And it involves planting a lot of trees, doing a lot of carbon capture and sequestration, repurposing a lot of land. So they said, so they added it all together. So, okay, if everyone does what they say they're going to do, what would be the net effect? And it would be a repurposing of land from current use equal to 990 million hectare. The United States is 983 million hectare.

• 1:46:53Speaker 02

  So it's greater than the area of the United States. But also it's an area equivalent to two thirds of global cropland, which is 1561 million hectare as of 2020. Now, the problem here is that we don't have, we don't have the land to do this.

• 1:47:13Cara Santa Maria?

  And we're going to need more cropland, not less.

• 1:47:16Speaker 02

  And so that, right, so they're saying that.

• 1:47:18Bob Novella?

  Start going upward.

• 1:47:19Speaker 02

  This is if you, so a lot of the times this, this involves reforesting farmland. Think about the problem, the problem there. Like if everyone does what they say they're gonna do, we're not gonna be able to grow enough crops. Can't do it. And also, it's a lot of it is saying, well, we're gonna have biofuels. It's like, okay, what land are you gonna use to grow the biofuels? When you're also reforested land and also doing carbon capture? And, and also doing other things. So they said, basically, this would be a disaster. It would come up, it would cause problems for our global food production. It would actually cause a decrease in biodiversity. And it would be an economic disaster for many people.

• 1:47:59Speaker 02

  So this is, the problem is, everyone is has, is doing, is in their little bubble, coming up with plans for their little slice of the world. And, and unless you coordinate this all together, you know what I mean? Like you have things like, okay, well, we're not growing enough food for everybody if everyone does this. So they, yeah, they're basically saying, we're over relying on carbon capture. We're over relying on a lot of this repurposing of land. This cannot be the approach that we take. If, again, if we're coordinating all of our approaches across the world, we have to think more globally. You know, we have to coordinate this. But it also, I mean, I think the bigger picture here is that changing our civilization so that we're not emitting carbon is a massive undertaking.

• 1:48:43Speaker 02

  And no matter how we do it, no matter how we get there, it's massive. We are shifting over, transitioning entire industries, transportation, steelmaking, you know, aviation, obviously, energy production. That we have to build a massive infrastructure. Part of the challenge is that it takes energy and therefore carbon to build the infrastructure we need to make the transition. But another part of the problem is, we have, we, you know, we're basically using all the land that there is, right? There's, anything we do with land is taking it away from something else that we're, that's already happening. The people are living there, or we're growing food there, or there's already a forest there, or there's animals living there, or whatever.

• 1:49:26Speaker 02

  You can't just say, we're gonna use this land for this new purpose now, um, on this scale. Anything you do to mitigate climate change is on a massive scale. This is- Part of the problem with saying, I think any one simple solution in terms of like transitioning to green energy, saying, oh, we're just gonna build solar panels everywhere. Saying, okay, where are you gonna put them all? Even in the desert, you're gonna be disrupting that ecosystem. Which is why I think, same thing with growing food, you know, we do really need to prioritize minimizing land use in our solutions, whether that's feeding the world or mitigating climate change.

• 1:50:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Or having dual purpose or tri-purpose land.

• 1:50:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, because, yeah, that's why, any things that, especially if they like, we're gonna have hydroponic food where we're gonna be growing it on a very little land, but we're gonna go tall, you know, like, anything that shifts to a strategy that uses less land is huge, is very beneficial. So.

• 1:50:23Cara Santa Maria?

  That's why I live in a small lot house. It honestly is. Like, it's a huge reason why I chose to live the way that I live, because I'm utilizing my, the square footage of my house is higher than the square footage of the land I own.

• 1:50:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:50:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Because it's built up.

• 1:50:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, yeah, that's nice. Right, the land is the one finite resource that we cannot make more of, right? Till we go to Mars or whatever, but for now, we're pretty much, the earth is it. This is also why I think, and the more I've been studying this and reading opinions about it, whatever, the stronger I believe this, is that there's no way, there is no way. No way. You're gonna get to net zero. No way. No way, Wade. Without nuclear power. This is not gonna happen. Oh, yeah. Nuclear has the advantage of producing the most energy per acre, you know what I mean, per bit of land. It also has the advantage of, you can plug it into existing connections to the grid. You don't need to build new grid infrastructure. I've also been reading

• 1:51:21Speaker 02

  recently, not only is, you know, land use a huge issue, but, but raw material, like, you realize, like, we don't have enough copper to make the green energy transition? Like, we just don't have it. That's right, Gabor. It's not gonna, it doesn't exist. Maybe alchemy can take care of that. Right, I mean, we would have to open up so many, probably somewhere on the world. But I mean, you know, we, the ability to, to mine and, and everything enough copper to feed, to make all the batteries we need to make, all the, all the wind turbines, everything, upgrade the grid, you know, just, we don't have it. That's going to become a limiting factor.

• 1:51:59Speaker 02

  So, solutions that don't require stressing our natural resources and using a lot of land are going to be the most valuable. And when it comes to energy production, I don't know, nuclear energy just has the, you know, beats everything else in those features. You know, so anyway, I, I believe that more strongly, the more I read about it, the more I think that's, there's just no way we're going to get to net zero without, we should be, be somewhere between 30 and 40% nuclear energy, you know, in terms of the, the mix.

• 1:52:31Bob Novella?

  And similarly, similarly, we're not going to feed everybody without GMO.

• 1:52:35Speaker 02

  Without going to feed everybody without GMOs, right?

• 1:52:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh yeah, for sure.

• 1:52:38Speaker 02

  Right, unless you want to cut down more forests, right? Which we don't want to do, which then that exacerbates the global warming end of the, of the spectrum, you know, totally.

• 1:52:45Cara Santa Maria?

  And not just GMO, but yeah, like a lot of more kind of technologically oriented, yeah, approaches.

• 1:52:51Speaker 02

  Agricultural technology. Get rid of, get rid of organic farming. Organic farming uses up 20% more land on, than average than conventional farming, and that difference is probably going to get greater because, you know, organic farming does not use the modern tools.

• 1:53:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. Like farm, farm indoors, farm in shipping containers or in enclosed spaces where the light and the water and the humidity are all controlled.

• 1:53:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:53:15Cara Santa Maria?

  And you can make any climate anywhere in the world.

• 1:53:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this is, this is a bigger problem than I think many people realize. And, and we can't just be, we've sort of been doing the like, let's just build solar panels and blah, blah, blah. It's all good, but the, the, the phase where we could just do anything green and it's good, we're kind of coming to the end of that phase.

• 1:53:37Cara Santa Maria?

  It's good, it's just not enough.

• 1:53:38Speaker 02

  It's just not enough. We're getting to the phase now where we need global coordination and strategic planning.

• 1:53:44Cara Santa Maria?

  And that scares the living shit out of me.

• 1:53:46Speaker 02

  And that's hard to do.

• 1:53:47Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:48Cara Santa Maria?

  We don't even have country coordination.

• 1:53:50Speaker 02

  I know. It's hard to do it on the level of a single country, but.

• 1:53:54Bob Novella?

  Eventually, all of you will be as pessimistic as me.

• 1:53:57Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm halfway there.

• 1:53:59Speaker 02

  But we are not doomists, we are not doomists, we can do it. All right.

• 1:54:04Bob Novella?

  Just on the

• 1:54:05Speaker 02

  I don't.

• 1:54:06Bob Novella?

  side of doom.

• 1:54:07Speaker 03

  Which means.

• 1:54:08Speaker 02

  Which means that paleontologists describe a species of flying reptile that is not a pterosaur and is 15 million years.

• 1:54:15Speaker 03

  I say that one's the fiction.

• 1:54:16Speaker 02

  oldest pterosaur. Make it the oldest known flying vertebrate is complete and utter bollocks fiction.

• 1:54:23Speaker 03

  Cool.

• 1:54:24Bob Novella?

  Too good, too good to be true.

• 1:54:26Speaker 02

  I made it up.

• 1:54:27Speaker 03

  I made it up too.

• 1:54:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. But.

• 1:54:30Speaker 03

  I believe my own malarkey.

• 1:54:31Speaker 02

  Uh, it is based upon a real study. They did, uh, paleontologists did present a new flying reptile from the Queso Relato locality.

• 1:54:42Speaker 03

  The cheese what now?

• 1:54:43Speaker 02

  In Patagonia and it is, you know, not the, it's not the oldest flying vertebrate. It's just older for that branch than we knew previously, but it is a pterosaur. Um, yeah, so pterosaurs are the oldest, uh, flying vertebrates. There's only so many vertebrates that fly. You have pterosaurs, birds and bats, right? And then you have insects, but pterosaurs are first. You know how far back they go, Kara?

• 1:55:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Ooh, 180?

• 1:55:12Speaker 02

  The oldest is probably 220 million years old.

• 1:55:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:55:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:55:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:55:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, so far, but yeah, but they really took off, you know, 180 to 200 million years ago is when they started to have adaptive radiation.

• 1:55:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Meat.

• 1:55:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, and of course that could get pushed back if we find still older specimens, but that's currently the record holder, some around 220 million years old. All right, good job, everyone. Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:55:38Speaker 03

  Being ignorant is not so much a shame as being unwilling to learn.

• 1:55:43Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:55:44Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:55:44Bob Novella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:55:45Speaker 02

  Ignorance is a completely fixable state.

• 1:55:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 1:55:48Speaker 03

  That one was written in 1755. It appeared in Poor Richard's Almanac, therefore it's attributed to Benjamin Franklin.

• 1:55:55Speaker 02

  Benjamin Franklin, pseudonym Richard Saunders.

• 1:55:58Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:55:59Bob Novella?

  No way.

• 1:55:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:56:00Speaker 03

  And no illusions was on tonight. What's going on with these names?

• 1:56:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I remember when I realized, when I realized, Richard Saunders, I know that name.

• 1:56:08Speaker 02

  He's not even Australian. Yeah, attributed to Benjamin Franklin. Close enough.

• 1:56:13Speaker 03

  Close enough. And I did check it out at some quote, check websites and they didn't say this was attributed to someone else.

• 1:56:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:56:21Speaker 03

  So.

• 1:56:22Speaker 02

  It's not contested, but.

• 1:56:23Speaker 03

  It doesn't seem to be contested.

• 1:56:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay. Sounds good. Good enough.

• 1:56:27Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:56:28Speaker 02

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

• 1:56:31Jay Novella?

  You got it, brother.

• 1:56:33Speaker 02

  Don't forget, listeners, to send in your votes for all the best of, worst of for 2024. We're going to record that episode next week. That'll be our Christmas week episode, the Saturday after Christmas that will come out. And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

• 1:56:54Speaker 02

  Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to [email protected]. And if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com/skepticsguide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.

• 1:57:33Cara Santa Maria?

  What's that?

• 1:57:33Bob Novella?

  My fresh detector.

• 1:57:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh, your what?

• 1:57:36Bob Novella?

  There it is.

• 1:57:37Cara Santa Maria?

  What is it detecting?

• 1:57:39Bob Novella?

  Fresh produce, fresh meat.

• 1:57:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, what happens if it detects something really fresh?

• 1:57:47Bob Novella?

  Apparently we celebrate.

• 1:57:49Speaker 07

  At Food Lion, you can count on fresh food at fresher prices when your fresh detector is going off. Head to your local Food Lion or shop at foodlion.com.