The Skeptics Guide #1108 - Oct 3 2026

Special Guests: Christian Hubicki and Julia Novella; Designing Your Dream Costume; Conspiracy Theories; News Items: Stellar Streams and Dark Matter, Possible Cause of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, IgNobels 2026, Pet Bird Research, Speedrunning Video Games; Science or Fiction

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

• 0:02Speaker 00

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

• 0:09Jay Novella?

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

• 0:19Jay Novella?

  Today is Saturday, September 5th, 2026, and this is your host, Steven Novella.

• 0:29Jay Novella?

  Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

• 0:30Speaker 02

  Hey, everybody.

• 0:33Jay Novella?

  Jay Novella.

• 0:34Bob Novella?

  Hey, guys.

• 0:37Jay Novella?

  And we have two special guests on this episode, Christian Hubicki.

• 0:44Jay Novella?

  Christian's still a little new to podcasting, so he waved to the audience instead of speaking.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  Good to be here.

• 0:53Jay Novella?

  And for the first time on a full episode, she may have made a cameo on a previous episode, my daughter Julia. Julia, welcome to the show.

• 1:01Speaker 04

  Hello.

• 1:04Jay Novella?

  Julia, tell us a little bit about yourself.

• 1:07Speaker 04

  My degree is in astrophysics, and like many other people my age, I am not working in astrophysics.

• 1:15Speaker 04

  I do, my title is technically scientist, but I work at a lab doing cell stuff, not space stuff.

• 1:24Jay Novella?

  Doing cell stuff, yeah, but it's still data stuff.

• 1:26Speaker 04

  Yes, data. Using Excel can be used pretty much anywhere, actually. It's really good for that.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  Is that like prison cell stuff? What kind of cells are we talking about?

• 1:37Speaker 04

  Biochem cell stuff.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:40Speaker 04

  So, super fun. I got into that during COVID, doing COVID-related stuff, and it's been really boring ever since COVID has kind of eased off. So, day-to-day, regular degular, no pandemic panic at all.

• 1:54Jay Novella?

  So, we need a good pandemic to hit through.

• 1:56Speaker 04

  That would make things more exciting, yeah.

• 1:58Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it'd work. All right, we'll work on that. Maybe this holy Ebola thing will really take off. So, we are at Dragon Con. We did record a live stage show earlier today, and we always like to do a private show while we're here as well. So, when we're at Dragon Con, we like to find, okay, what's the intersection of skepticism, the SGU, nerd culture, Dragon Con, whatever, and try to come up with some kind of discussion topic that hits all those, ticks all those boxes. So, we have a couple of discussions that we're gonna start off with today. The first one is this. If you could, let's say you had an unlimited budget and you had access to the best makers

• 2:38Jay Novella?

  in the world to build you any costume you can imagine.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:45Jay Novella?

  What would you do? So, what costume would you want them to build for you? So, this is like, you have Weta Works working on it, ILM, whoever, whoever, anybody who could do any aspect of the costume that you need and with no limit on budget. So, Christian, you're gonna go first.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  Okay, all right. I've thought about this, Steve, and my answer is Zordon from Power Rangers. Okay, I.

• 3:10Jay Novella?

  Nice.

• 3:10Speaker 02

  I want to be inside of this, no, no, there's a tube. It's like a transparent tube, seemingly filled with fluid, and there's a projection of a head in the middle of this tube, and he talks, it's like, "Power Rangers, you need to go and do this thing at this time, within 22-minute episode," whatever they say, right? And I want it where, you know, I'm inside of this tube. I am driving it around, okay, and I want to be able to see all the people around, but I don't want them to be able to see me. I want them to be able to see through the tube. I don't care what kind of optical illusion stuff you have to do, so it looks like you're looking through the tube, but I'm in there, and it projects a version of Zordon, but it's

• 3:52Speaker 02

  gonna be imitating my facial reactions and distorting my voice to be like Zordon, so I can be like one of those Disney-roving characters that sasses people. Roll around, and then like, and then people will be, I'll be rolling around, I'll be talking to someone, and then people will be hoarding up around me, and all of a sudden, the head will turn around 180 degrees, talk to the person they thought they were out of the range. It's like, it's like, "You cannot seek up on Zordon," that kind of thing. That's what I wanna do at Dragon Con, driving around. I think, I think with unlimited budget, we can make that happen.

• 4:23Jay Novella?

  Yeah, that would be, you wouldn't need an unlimited budget to do it, but.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  Half unlimited. Half, yeah, yeah, you know, a fraction of infinity. But yeah, I mean, like, I think the technical challenges are, one, the illusion that I'm not in the tube, but because it's a fluid, you have all these kind of refractive properties you could probably take advantage of, and some combination of mirrors, you know, embedding a lot of webcams around, so I can see, have a 360 view of all the people that are like poking up like at me, so I can, I can, I can see who there is to interact with, and I just have a little remote control that drives, another remote control that changes which direction the head is going. I think that is a doable thing. I didn't Google to see if anyone else did a Zordon, but I think that that would be fun.

• 5:08Bob Novella?

  So, first I was thinking zombies. Now, I'm thinking us, all of us, as a group, so we'd all have, but zombies, if you have an unlimited budget, there's only so much you can kind of do. So, to take it to the next level, I'm going the predictably robot route. So, we would all have the best robot costumes that have, that have ever been, ever been created. I've got quite a budget to do this. So, Steve would be something like a robot that has multiple, multiple arms coming out of his back, kind of like, not, kind of like inspired by Doc Ock, but multiple arms, different types of arms, that are, that are controllable and movable

• 5:48Bob Novella?

  and totally, you know, work to a certain extent. I envision Jay in a, in a big kind of like Hunkbuster robot, huge, huge one, that's, you know, lightweight, but also metal, you know, metal components to it.

• 6:04Jay Novella?

  It would have a real cooling system?

• 6:06Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah, absolute cooling system. They would also, they would, we would all have wheels on the bottom of them that can be, that can be turned on, so that when we were in the parade, they would, you would just roll. You wouldn't really even have to walk unless you, unless you want, unless you wanted to. I would be a corpse in an exoskeleton. So, I'm basically, my body is dead, so I'm kind of like a zombie, but my brain has been artificially kept alive. So, there's tubes going into lights and things, so somehow my brain is alive, but I'm basically, I'm basically dead.

• 6:36Jay Novella?

  So, you're a zombie robot?

• 6:37Bob Novella?

  Zombie robot. It's a good way, good way to describe it. Now, we would also, of course, have robot minions that are just real robots, controlled by either us or other people, so that we always have our forward, our heralds of these little robots that are always zooming around and interacting with people and.

• 6:55Speaker 04

  This is obviously the first time you've ever thought about this.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  I like this. Keep going, Bob. I'm thinking about this.

• 7:01Bob Novella?

  It is, though, it is. I mean, I started thinking about it an hour ago, so this is what I've come up with in an hour. Give me time, I'll come up with something even better. But that's, that's basically would be the best robots ever seen by Dragon Con. It would, they would just be, you know, imagine if you've got, if you spent $50 million on this type of stuff, they would be amazing.

• 7:19Jay Novella?

  Amazing robots.

• 7:20Bob Novella?

  All right.

• 7:21Jay Novella?

  All right, Jay, what do you got? It's hard, because there's so many cool things to think of. Like, I thought of robots, too. I was thinking of like the original Terminator robot, but of course, I couldn't fit in it because it, you know, the way it looks. So, then I thought, well, in order for me to fit in it, so it still has the right proportions, it'd have to be big, which would be cool, right? Imagine, you know, one of those really big. I was also thinking of a Dementor, with a face that articulates.

• 7:46Bob Novella?

  We planned.

• 7:46Jay Novella?

  We talked about it.

• 7:47Bob Novella?

  We talked about actually pulling that off. I had a plan that would have worked, mostly.

• 7:53Jay Novella?

  But if you had like Weta Works on it.

• 7:54Bob Novella?

  It was like.

• 7:55Jay Novella?

  They can make.

• 7:56Bob Novella?

  Dangerous and too much work, so I didn't do it.

• 7:58Jay Novella?

  Weta could actually make it wearable. But the thing is, you know, we did come up with a cool idea for the Dementor costume, though, because the Dementors don't walk, they float, right? So, we thought we would be on the low segways, you know, you just basically lean and it'll let you move, and you could have like the bottom of its clothing actually, you know, literally just skimming above the ground, so you couldn't see the mechanism that you're moving around. And, you know, I own one of those, and I got good at it, and you really.

• 8:23Bob Novella?

  Yeah, we practiced on it. It was tricky, but doable.

• 8:27Jay Novella?

  It doesn't make any noise. It's an electric vehicle, right? So, it's silent, like, so you could move in any direction you want, and it would, it would be a really convincing, you know, way to move the costume around. Now, of course, the costume is way taller than a person, right?

• 8:40Bob Novella?

  Right, because we.

• 8:41Jay Novella?

  They're hulking.

• 8:41Bob Novella?

  We were in London, and we visited the Harry Potter set, the behind the scenes, and it was fantastic. And I saw, I saw the Dementor plans and some of the props. So, I even bought a metal backpack that you strap on your back, and from there, I was gonna attach like a spine and then the whole scary head and the hood, and everything was gonna be draped off of that. So, it would have been, you know, it would have been so good.

• 9:05Jay Novella?

  In your mind, it was awesome.

• 9:06Bob Novella?

  I mean.

• 9:07Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it was just a way to connect the Halloween church to yourself.

• 9:09Bob Novella?

  So, I'm somewhat realistic about it. I could have, totally could have pulled that off. I've seen videos of people making Dementors that I would have used as templates for my ideas.

• 9:17Speaker 02

  So, are, I think the Segway idea is great, but like, are there other ways to like make something appear to disappear? You know, like mirrors or things like that? Or is that not like not really a viable thing?

• 9:27Jay Novella?

  To make it so they can't see.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  The floating part, I'm kind of obsessed with the illusion.

• 9:31Jay Novella?

  I mean, you could do skates, you know, like.

• 9:33Bob Novella?

  Skates. And mirrors could make it seem like.

• 9:36Jay Novella?

  No, but the problem is, you have to be taller, you know, and like skates, I think skates would be a little jerky, you know? You have to be really good on skates to make it, so it feels seamless. The other thing is.

• 9:46Bob Novella?

  You could also train yourself to walk. You've seen those dancers that can walk, like they're floating. I mean, it's a, it's a tough skill to work on, but I mean, it's doable.

• 9:54Jay Novella?

  Is it tougher than learning how to.

• 9:55Bob Novella?

  Walk on, ride to one of those segways. I don't know, man.

• 9:57Jay Novella?

  That didn't take long to get there.

• 9:58Speaker 04

  I have trouble walking normally around Dragon Con all day.

• 10:01Jay Novella?

  Right? But I also would want to be able to see really well because I do. One big problem with costuming is that you could, it can obstruct your vision very quickly. You know, depending on what you do. Like, if you just look at people, you walk around and I'm always kind of deconstructing the costumes. You know, just having fun in my head like, wow, they do that. And how, you know, and you look at the people, where, where is their head actually? Is there something covering their face?

• 10:21Bob Novella?

  Right, right.

• 10:21Jay Novella?

  So the Dementor, like I'm inside the, the chest. I'm in the chest.

• 10:25Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 10:25Jay Novella?

  So there's a couple of ways to do it. One, you could have a sheer fabric that can, you could see through, which you, you can usually see that.

• 10:31Bob Novella?

  You could see, okay, yeah, but, but you could, it looks black. It, it covers you nicely.

• 10:36Jay Novella?

  But you don't get to have good vision. So, so you could do a, you know, you could be wearing goggles and have there be a camera at least that would give you a clear picture of what's going on.

• 10:45Bob Novella?

  Absolutely. Yeah, that would be great.

• 10:47Jay Novella?

  And then you need spooky sounds and stuff like that, that they, whatever, you know, they make that.

• 10:50Bob Novella?

  You could have a smoke machine. There's, there's personal wearable smoke machines. We could have smoke emanating from anywhere on the, on the, on the costume. That would be a really cool effect.

• 10:59Jay Novella?

  That'd be fun.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  Where do you wear the badge, though? Or else they don't let you in?

• 11:03Speaker 04

  One time, uh, my husband and I were walking around and, uh, on the Hyatt Skybridge, I believe. What, someone was in one of those big inflatable T-Rexes. And the attendant was asking them like, hey, hang on, I gotta see your badge. And we, you could just see them slap it inside.

• 11:22Speaker 04

  As they walked by. It was so funny.

• 11:24Bob Novella?

  Christian, the, the Dementor could have a kid that has been sucked into a husk, right? And the badge is around his neck, so they just hold it up.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's my badge. Beautiful.

• 11:35Jay Novella?

  That's a good point, Bob. They, they do have really cool hands. Now, how about, how about the ability to have?

• 11:40Bob Novella?

  Totally animatable, yeah.

• 11:41Jay Novella?

  Inside the costume, you can articulate the hand and extend it out and stuff. So you could actually interact a little bit.

• 11:47Bob Novella?

  Well, you do you know my, you know that vampire I have? That, that vampire dude where you put on, you put on the harness and there's a rod coming out of your chest?

• 11:54Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 11:54Bob Novella?

  And there's a vampire hanging there. So coming out of his elbows is a rod that I hold and squeeze the trigger. So as I squeeze him, his head, his head goes back and forth. But those triggers can do anything. They could manipulate closed hands. So, yeah, that's so, that's very doable.

• 12:08Jay Novella?

  All right, Julia, what do you have?

• 12:10Speaker 04

  So I am very fortunate that I saw something at Dragon Con yesterday that was extremely close to my answer to this question.

• 12:19Bob Novella?

  Wow.

• 12:20Speaker 04

  Somebody had a, uh, so my friends know I'm very into the game Monster Hunter. They, they got me into it. And there is all different kinds of, or like, you know, the whole game loop. Kill monster, make armor out of it. So there's pretty much a, you know, two different armor sets for every single monster in the game. And this person had done Jindahad from the new game. And they actually had something that was shown in the trailer for the new expansion of the game. And I went up to them and I said, so when did you start working on that? And they were like, three weeks ago when the trailer dropped. And it looked amazing. It was almost perfect. Um, so I would do, again, they did it pretty much perfectly. I would do, um, Xeno Jiva because that's the, I spent a lot of time in that armor in the game.

• 13:05Speaker 04

  I love it. I'm obsessed with the design, but the bigger thing that would require that unlimited budget. You know, Xeno Jiva, like, okay, obviously someone can feasibly do that. Um, the thing that would need the unlimited budget is my weapon of choice. It's called a Charge Blade. Uh, it's a sword and shield that becomes a giant axe by putting the shield on the end of the sword and swinging it around. And my favorite thing to do with it is I call it, uh, pizza mode because it looks like a big pizza cutter. Uh, where you have the end spinning like a chainsaw and you use it to hit things. Maybe that's asking too much, but I have an unlimited budget.

• 13:41Bob Novella?

  Doable.

• 13:41Jay Novella?

  No, yeah, that's, I, you could make that work.

• 13:44Speaker 04

  Absolutely, that's what I would do.

• 13:46Jay Novella?

  All right, well, if I had an unlimited budget, I have two choices. One, the first, my first choice is unworkable, but I would want to have, and only if it's to scale, a Godzilla costume.

• 14:00Bob Novella?

  So you want to rip apart the hotels?

• 14:02Jay Novella?

  Well, the thing is you couldn't go inside any of the hotels, but it would be, it would be an awesome, maybe for the parade.

• 14:09Bob Novella?

  So you'd walk down the street in your costume?

• 14:10Jay Novella?

  Yes, basically.

• 14:11Bob Novella?

  And then people would terrorize.

• 14:12Jay Novella?

  Come out and marvel at you. Atlanta with the Godzilla costume. But for, for walking around the hotels, there's like, I mean, obviously there's a million costumes I would love to have. But I, you know, I always admired, uh, Mr. Freeze's costume. And that's totally doable. I mean, you could also really trick it out so it looks cool. Plus, you're in a, your glass helmet, so you could actually see what's going on. Um, and it could be environmentally controlled in there. And for my, for my freeze gun, you could actually just modify it so that you're actually just cooling people off. And they would really appreciate that.

• 14:44Bob Novella?

  Wow. So they would love you and want to be with you.

• 14:48Jay Novella?

  Right, and then I'd talk smack about Batman and Robin.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  The, I'll go back to Godzilla for a moment.

• 14:55Jay Novella?

  Okay.

• 14:55Bob Novella?

  Yeah, shall we?

• 14:56Jay Novella?

  So where would you be in the costume? Like in the bottom and the head?

• 14:59Bob Novella?

  Well.

• 15:00Jay Novella?

  In the middle, in, in the control center.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  The control center. Well, what, what if we scaled down just a touch, just for argument's sake? Cause you say it's unworkable. What if it was two stories tall? Because that is kind of doable.

• 15:12Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  The, uh, because especially in, in, in like, not even in a crazy way, because the, the company Unitree, uh, who makes a lot of humanoid robots and robot dogs at the, out of China. And they sell to the United States until they recently, were recently banned from doing so. They made also a giant exoskeleton that is, I, I want to say 15 feet tall, something like that. And you literally just climb up into the thing. Maybe it's, it's not quite that tall. But you literally climb up into the thing and you, and it walks around. It can even crawl on all fours. And, and when it's even was crawling on all fours, it's taller than the cars that's walking by.

• 15:50Bob Novella?

  Is it autonomous or is it human controlled?

• 15:52Speaker 02

  Human controlled, but you give it direction, but it, but it, it walks fast. It's not, it's not slow, you know, plodding thing. It's, it's the same kind of gate where it kind of like steps from dum, dum, dum, dum, dum pretty quickly.

• 16:03Bob Novella?

  Damn, man.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, and, um, imagine dressing that up.

• 16:07Bob Novella?

  Yeah, you could, you could, that could be the skeleton of an amazing costume.

• 16:10Jay Novella?

  That is really cool.

• 16:11Speaker 02

  We, we, we hashed it here, folks. And also it's the kind of thing that I, one thing I love about that idea, Steve, is that at that point, it becomes a media sensation.

• 16:20Jay Novella?

  Of course.

• 16:21Speaker 02

  And so the, and then you turn that into a much bigger opportunity. Like you're like the guy with the Godzilla costume.

• 16:27Jay Novella?

  Right. Who'd be wearing an SGU T-shirt, of course, to scale.

• 16:32Bob Novella?

  Now, would you want mini buildings for you to step on and like little people running away? Like, we, how do we jazz it up?

• 16:37Speaker 04

  Mini buildings.

• 16:38Jay Novella?

  Well, there wouldn't have to be that many because that would be to scale. But, yeah, I mean, if we, if we did the like, big enough to be Godzilla, but, you know, but able to walk down the streets of, of Atlanta, I, yeah, you could imagine all kinds of things.

• 16:49Bob Novella?

  And it was, and you'd be able to make like that, like a definite noise of Godzilla's roar.

• 16:54Jay Novella?

  Oh, you would have to have like a massive speaker system. That would give the classic, the classic Godzilla roar, you know? Uh, absolutely, that would, that's, that's no compromise on that.

• 17:06Bob Novella?

  That's pretty cool.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  What about the, the radiation breath beam thing he does?

• 17:10Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 17:10Speaker 02

  I mean, that'd be hard.

• 17:11Speaker 04

  You fit it with a nuclear reactor. And then you have some vents.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  Well, but, but, but, but workshop this. I mean, you talk about smoke machines. What about a pressurized smoke output with a bunch of lights that illuminate it at the right time?

• 17:23Bob Novella?

  Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, that is, that is doable.

• 17:24Jay Novella?

  Yeah, we don't need actual radiation.

• 17:26Bob Novella?

  It just occurred to me, like, which version of Godzilla? Like, you talking like old school Godzilla that had the little baby? Or you talking like the recent Godzilla?

• 17:35Speaker 04

  I like Shin Godzilla.

• 17:36Bob Novella?

  No, no, I do. I like the old school one, too.

• 17:38Jay Novella?

  I, I like the old school.

• 17:39Bob Novella?

  But he looked very kind, you know what I mean?

• 17:41Jay Novella?

  The, uh, he, yeah, I mean, I don't know how you would characterize the old Godzilla because he kind of was a good monster.

• 17:48Bob Novella?

  He was good depending on what movie you're watching, right?

• 17:50Jay Novella?

  Depending on it. But if he came up against like Mothra, you know, then he was, he would save you from the bad monsters, right?

• 17:57Bob Novella?

  Yeah. Oh, Mecha Godzilla.

• 17:59Jay Novella?

  Mecha Godzilla?

• 18:00Bob Novella?

  Yeah, there's a robot Godzilla that was in a movie. I've got a bottle of him. He's like this big, he's awesome.

• 18:05Jay Novella?

  That wouldn't be as impressive, though. I mean, I think like the, the, the normal Godzilla would be like the one you'd go for.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  Do y'all know I was in a commercial for Godzilla: King of the Monsters?

• 18:14Jay Novella?

  No.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, there was a Survivor promo tie-in. And when the movie was, and I don't know how these things get greenlit or how the creative works and how these things come together. But I remember where, like, I was, I just got a call from my mom saying, I just saw you on TV. It was a guy, and she taped it. And, um, and, and the, the idea was, the, the advertising idea was that somehow, you know, Godzilla was finally good in this movie against the other monsters, right? And some monsters are here to be good and protect us. And they showed a picture of me. And I'm not sure how that, that works. Then they, so then, then they're like, and some are here to, they're here to kill us. And they showed like some notorious villain from Survivor from another season.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  So I was like, apparently in that metaphor, I was Godzilla.

• 19:00Jay Novella?

  You were the good monster.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  I was the good monster.

• 19:03Speaker 05

  Interesting.

• 19:04Bob Novella?

  That's pretty cool.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  I got paid nothing for this, by the way.

• 19:08Speaker 05

  That was in the fine print of your contract.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  Oh, oh, yes.

• 19:11Speaker 05

  We'll give you a T-shirt after the show.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 19:13Speaker 05

  All right, we have another kind of pseudoscience-inspired discussion topic. And this, this one could be fun. So, the question is, the question for my panel is, if there were, what, what conspiracy theory would you least mind if it were actually true? Like, if you had to pick one conspiracy theory to actually be true, what would it be? Anybody want to go first? I can go first, if you guys, you know.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  I'll, I'll go first.

• 19:39Speaker 05

  All right.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  I'm shooting from the hip a little here. Uh, Umbrella Man.

• 19:43Speaker 05

  Oh, yes.

• 19:44Speaker 02

  Umbrella Man. So, for those who don't know, Umbrella Man is part of the great pantheon of JFK conspiracy theories. And, of course, on the Zapruder film, or the many filming, filming opportunities that they had at Dealey Plaza on the day that JFK was assassinated, there was conspicuously a man by the side of the road. Dapper. Dapper man, dressed, dressed in like, almost like, uh, almost like Slenderman for the new kids. I like, but, uh, anybody, but it was holding an umbrella, a big, black umbrella.

• 20:17Speaker 05

  Open.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  Open umbrella, on a sunny day, no rain, so.

• 20:21Speaker 04

  Who does that?

• 20:22Speaker 02

  Well, I'm glad, I'm glad you, you know, we know the answer to this. This is a, this is a fantastic story already, before we make it real.

• 20:28Bob Novella?

  And frustrating.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  So, it, so, the, when, so, naturally, when conspiracy theorists are picking apart all the footage, they see this Umbrella Man, and of course, because it's something weird, therefore, it must be part of the conspiracy that's caused, that, that's, that caused JFK to die, that, that he was part of the assassination plot.

• 20:48Speaker 05

  Now, Christian, just to, just to interject a little bit.

• 20:50Speaker 02

  Yes, please.

• 20:50Speaker 05

  I wrote about that, I did a deep dive on the Umbrella Man.

• 20:53Speaker 02

  Oh, please, go ahead.

• 20:53Speaker 05

  Because, I'm just gonna say, that it's a great example of what we call anomaly hunting.

• 20:58Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 20:58Speaker 05

  Where the conspiracy theorists were looking for anything unusual, any anomaly, then they point to the anomaly, and go, there is your evidence for the conspiracy. It's like, yeah, but that's just an anomaly. All that means is, you don't know what, what the hell that guy was doing there. But, of course, we, we do learn what the guy was doing.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  Yes, and that, so, of course, this takes off as a conspiracy theory, who's this Umbrella Man? People were coming up with elaborate schematics of how the umbrella could have actually been a weapon, a gun that fired a bullet, like, the drawings and things like that, to the point that, was it during the Warren Commission that he testified?

• 21:31Speaker 05

  He testified.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  The actual Umbrella Man testified at the Warren Commission, the big investigation into the JFK assassination, because there are always questions about who this Umbrella Man is, and he showed up with the umbrella in, at Congress, to explain that this was part of the, uh, oh, gosh, what was the name of the protest?

• 21:51Speaker 05

  It's an umbrella protest.

• 21:52Speaker 02

  The umbrella protest. So, this was, the, the purpose of the umbrella and the costume was, he was protesting JFK's father's appeasement of Hitler during, in the lead-up to World War II.

• 22:07Speaker 05

  And that was actually his father's support for Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler during World War II.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  Right, and, and so he's dressed like Neville Chamberlain with the umbrella.

• 22:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, right.

• 22:17Speaker 02

  But, so, so, crazy story.

• 22:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  Like, exactly.

• 22:20Speaker 05

  Who would have ever have guessed that?

• 22:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 22:22Speaker 05

  But that's the point, there's lots of crazy shit happening.

• 22:24Bob Novella?

  Right, you can't predict that.

• 22:25Speaker 02

  So, it's a beautiful metaphor for anomaly hunting, a, a, a life lesson in that way. But if it was real, that's kinda, that's kinda cool. The guy actually pulled off an assassination with an elaborate umbrella mechanism of a president? Pretty badass.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  I do not endorse, to be clear.

• 22:43Bob Novella?

  Yeah. Can you imagine when the Zapruder film came out? When did it come out, in terms of after the assassination?

• 22:49Speaker 05

  Not, not long after.

• 22:51Bob Novella?

  Could you imagine, he's watching TV, and he's like, oh my god, he sees himself and realizes that he's gonna get, he's gonna get embroiled in this huge, huge thing?

• 22:58Speaker 05

  He said he massively regretted doing that, because it, it was kind of a petty, stupid protest at that point. He's protesting JFK because of his father's support of Neville Chamberlain. He's just like, that was really stupid of me, and of course, it happened to coincide with the day he got assassinated. He felt like a jerk, basically. Jake, go ahead.

• 23:17Jay Novella?

  So, when we were kids, my dad was, was a contractor, he built custom homes. And, one of the people that he bought cabinets from, guy owned a ca, you know, a custom cabinet-making company, you know, for kitchens and bathrooms and everything. He, you know, dad was friends with the guy, remember?

• 23:35Speaker 02

  The Kingswood kitchens?

• 23:35Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it was Kingswood, Kingswood kitchens, right? So, one time, we went over his house, he brought, we brought the whole family over, we spent like, you know, a day at his house, and he spent like, two hours showing us his theory on, on Christianity and the actual.

• 23:52Speaker 05

  He self-published the book.

• 23:53Jay Novella?

  He did, he self-published the book, and he fully believed it, so, right?

• 23:56Speaker 04

  Was it the charity of the gods?

• 23:57Speaker 05

  Well, sort of.

• 23:57Jay Novella?

  Kind of, basically, aliens were the vehicle on which Jesus did the things that Jesus was famous to do.

• 24:05Speaker 05

  But you remember his big linchpin piece of evidence, you remember what it was?

• 24:08Jay Novella?

  I don't remember.

• 24:08Bob Novella?

  So, it was? Pyramids, or Nazca Lines?

• 24:11Speaker 05

  No, no. His, here was his, I remember this very, very clearly, his centerpiece evidence was a commonality among architecture around the world.

• 24:21Bob Novella?

  Taj Mahal.

• 24:22Speaker 05

  The Taj Mahal being sort of the type, where you have four sort of pillars and a central, whatever dome. And then he showed like, a bunch of examples of buildings, like the Taj Mahal is the one that you remember.

• 24:32Bob Novella?

  Clearly alien, clearly.

• 24:34Speaker 05

  And that was on the cover of his book. And, and, yeah, so, his idea was that that's this, that's the ship, right? Was like, that's the shape of the alien ship, and then, and, and that's been, you know, people see it, and then they build monuments to it. It was all nonsense.

• 24:46Speaker 04

  His conspiracy was squares?

• 24:47Speaker 05

  Yes, his conspiracy was that we build things in, in squares.

• 24:51Jay Novella?

  But he was also saying, like, you know, he was taking pieces of information from different religious texts and stuff.

• 24:58Speaker 05

  He was a crank.

• 24:58Jay Novella?

  He was.

• 24:58Speaker 05

  I was just gonna say, he was a crank.

• 24:59Jay Novella?

  But, but, you know, you do enough research, and, you know, with the intent of finding something that, that validates what you're, what you're pitching, you can find some compelling little pieces of information, like, you know, there was one thing, it was not in the books that are in the Bible, it was in books that were, you know, adjacent to the books that are currently in the Bible, right? Because there was way more books being written back then, and documents and all that stuff, like, somebody literally picked what books the Bible was gonna consist of.

• 25:24Bob Novella?

  So, there's like a Fantastic Beasts kind of thing going on?

• 25:27Jay Novella?

  But, the, the cool thing was, that he, you know, the angels were depicted a certain way, and then, some scriptures that were written, or whatever, old texts, were, were writing in such a way where you could easily interpret them as being aliens. And he made that connection, then he found like, imagery, he was like, look, there, there's.

• 25:43Speaker 05

  So, you want that all to be true?

• 25:44Jay Novella?

  I, I do, and I'll tell you why. One, because I would love hard evidence to disprove a religion, which I, I'm just, I would just be curious to see how the world reacts.

• 25:53Speaker 05

  They'd adapt.

• 25:54Jay Novella?

  They would, but still, it'd be fun. And two, like, you know, validating that aliens are alive, to me, is, is a pretty cool thing, it's scary to, whatever, but the fact that there is other life, it, likely, there's other life in the universe, and if they did come here, and they did do that, I don't know, I just find that brilliantly entertaining and interesting.

• 26:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, I, I mean, in terms of, um, I, I will say, I wouldn't want any conspiracy theory to be true from the point of view of, that the conspiracy theorists would be like, see, we told you, and they would want, they would use that as evidence that every other conspiracy theory is true, and that skeptics don't know what they're talking about. But if we put that layer aside, and you're just talking about the actual thing itself, sure, the idea that there were ancient aliens, you know, poking around the earth, okay, it wouldn't bother me if that were true, it would be kind of interesting, they're not like, setting out to destroy us or anything, nothing horrible, it's like, yeah, okay, the Taj Mahal was inspired by an alien spaceship, all right, you know, that wouldn't bother me at all.

• 26:49Jay Novella?

  Or how about they, like, literally, they gave Jesus the ability to, to pull off what he did, to start a religion that they thought would help humanity, right? It's just a cool premise to a story, I don't know, I just find it interesting.

• 27:01Speaker 05

  All right, I got one. And again, I would not want this, you know, you know, the, the fact that it would, there would be a massive downside to the, to the conspiracy theory being true, because, because of what it would validate in the minds of so many people. But, if I had to pick one, I would pick the conspiracy that the, the powers that be, Big Pharma, whatever, are hiding a cure for cancer. Because that would mean.

• 27:26Bob Novella?

  That's a good one, that's a good one.

• 27:27Speaker 04

  It means there is one.

• 27:28Speaker 05

  It means there's a cure for cancer. And so, the upside of there being a, which it wouldn't exist, get a cure for all cancer, whatever, but let's say if there, if that conspiracy were true, that there were some one treatment that could eliminate all cancers, the upside to that, I'd live with all the downsides of that conspiracy being true, if it meant we had a cure for cancer, right?

• 27:48Jay Novella?

  All right. Like, and a cure for cancer, everyone knows.

• 27:50Speaker 05

  I was like, all right.

• 27:50Jay Novella?

  There is no universal cure for all the different types of cancers, but is that what you're saying? Like, they found like?

• 27:55Speaker 05

  That's what they said, that's the conspiracy.

• 27:56Jay Novella?

  Absolutely.

• 27:57Speaker 05

  Is that they are hiding the cure for cancer.

• 27:59Bob Novella?

  Because they're making more money by treating cancer rather than just curing it, so that's, they're, they're.

• 28:03Speaker 05

  Which is nonsense.

• 28:04Bob Novella?

  Yeah, it's, it's utter nonsense.

• 28:05Jay Novella?

  The story's fascinating.

• 28:06Bob Novella?

  All these doctors, all these doctors that know, that have the cure for cancer, are letting their family members die because of this, this secret, like, oh, I'm not gonna cure my, my family, because I want them greedy bastard.

• 28:16Speaker 05

  They just, it's a complete ignorance of how the world works.

• 28:19Bob Novella?

  And, yeah.

• 28:19Speaker 05

  Including the medical industry. That there's no one entity that could have the cure for cancer and keep it from the rest of the world. The other thing is, is that that conspiracy theory's been floating around for 50 years. So, they've been keeping it secret for that long, and they had it 50 years ago? So, and no one has been able to replicate the line of research that led them to come up with the cure in the first place? And where did they get all that research from?

• 28:46Jay Novella?

  I want to see, but I want. It's a really cool thought experiment, like writing this story, trying to make it make sense. Like, that would be a really cool thing.

• 28:54Speaker 05

  You can't make it make sense. It's based upon a fundamental ignorance of, again, how medicine and academia and science and industry works. And also, it could be.

• 29:03Jay Novella?

  And human psychology.

• 29:04Speaker 02

  And even conveniently forgets that the United States does not control every government on earth. I mean, like, you know, it's like, yeah, I mean, it's like, oh, yeah, you know, Sweden is gonna like, is gonna bow to Big Pharma, you know, like China's gonna bow to, you know, us.

• 29:16Speaker 04

  They couldn't even keep Epstein safe.

• 29:19Speaker 05

  The people who say it have not thought it through.

• 29:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:22Speaker 05

  Right? They haven't thought beyond they. They don't even know who they are. They don't even get up to the, up to base on it. They will, and you ask them, well, who's they in this equation? They don't know. They haven't thought it through at all. And you can keep asking questions like how this works. So where did they get the cure from? And how did they keep the, the thousands of researchers who would have had to build to that point? From, you know, sharing their research with the rest of the world, which they would have anyway.

• 29:48Jay Novella?

  Why would it have to be humans, though? Why couldn't it be an artificial intelligence? Which would mop up that whole problem in the story, right? The real, the real linchpin here is we need to know why they're keeping it from us. That's the cool.

• 29:59Speaker 05

  It's always because it's better for their profits, right? That's always the.

• 30:02Jay Novella?

  But we could write a better.

• 30:03Speaker 05

  It's a lame conspiracy theory. It's really, it's a, it's a very shallow, ignorant and unimaginative conspiracy theory. It's just, yeah, those people, they, they're hiding, they're just keeping this from us. It's really not based upon anything, and they don't have anything to show for it either. You know, it's just, it's just, and it's perpetuated largely as a way of just sowing animus and distrust in the medical establishment so that you could sell your snake oil, right?

• 30:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course.

• 30:34Speaker 05

  That's what it's for.

• 30:35Jay Novella?

  But that, but the underlying concept, though, there, there is a cool story in there somewhere. I bet, I, I like to turn that around in my.

• 30:41Speaker 05

  I mean, it would be, I don't know, I don't even know how you could make it make sense. You know what I mean? Like, if you had to retcon it, retcon the conspiracy so that in some way it could make, I don't even know how you could do it.

• 30:52Jay Novella?

  All right. So did you ever, did you ever see the, the original movie Tron?

• 30:57Speaker 05

  Of course.

• 30:57Jay Novella?

  All right. So you have the master, the master program, right? And the master program was in an intellectual and power battle with the actual man who owned the company that created it, right? Remember like that cool actor? I love that actor. So you set that situation up. You have, you know, because we have artificial intelligence now, so it's not a big leap here. You have, you have an artificial intelligence that this company creates. It creates a cure for cancer and it's got the owner of the company, like it, it's manipulating and controlling him and blackmailing him or whatever to have him do physical things in the physical world that it wants done. So it could all be an artificial intelligence that's pulling all the strings.

• 31:35Speaker 05

  All right. Yeah, now, but that's a very recent kind of retcon of something that where it could happen now, right? But it wouldn't explain why people thought it 50 years ago.

• 31:44Jay Novella?

  Doesn't matter. I'm just, it's a cool story.

• 31:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, sure. Steve's like, well, you know, putting aside your cool story. No, I mean, like, why? I mean, you could, you could invent a new hiding the, the cure for cancer conspiracy, science fiction out of, you know, current AI stuff. Sure, okay. It's not really what I was talking about. But then there's also, there's a lot of conspiracies there that are, they are hiding this cool technology from you. It's not just the cure for cancer. It's also the free energy or running your car on water. Or we can make gasoline out of whatever. And it's all always nonsense. Like, and it's, and a lot of it's been, in fact, there was a movie called The Formula, right? Stupid movie. But it's all based upon this secret formula.

• 32:29Speaker 05

  It's, again, it's, it is people just internalizing this Hollywood plotlines that just do not make any sense in the real world, right? They're like, where did the formula come from? And anyway, even if we had a formula to make gasoline, that's not the problem. We know how to do that. The problem is where you get the energy from, not what the formula is. Again, it's just so scientifically ignorant at every level. You can't even make it make sense, right? I still would be happy to have a cure for cancer though. All right, Julia, do you have anything?

• 33:03Speaker 04

  So I thought about this.

• 33:04Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 33:04Speaker 04

  And I had a couple of ideas, but then I decided that, um, just for fun, I was gonna share my great shame as a skeptic. I 100% bought this. I was fully, I fully believed this. This is a much younger conspiracy. I don't know if you've ever heard, it's not even a conspiracy, it's more like a hoax, I think. It's called the Lake City Quiet Pills hoax nowadays, because we know it's not true. But the idea was that through, you know, Reddit posts and websites, people found that there was, someone was trying to get out the message that someone in a small community had passed away. And they were trying to invite people to like, come pay their respects.

• 33:49Speaker 04

  And it, you know, led to this website that was masquerading as an image hosting website. And if you like, went into the HTML, you could see all these secret coded messages and people were encoding them. And they found all this information about some kind of event that was happening at a certain time, in a certain place. And then, once that event came to pass, you know, there were all these like code words for different things that you might need to bring. And people were kind of making assumptions on what those meant. But then, in the news, there was somebody really close to that time and place that was assassinated.

• 34:29Speaker 04

  And some of the suspects that they had were seen at the hotel that was in the HTML of this website. And it, people immediately made that connection and were like, this is a secret messaging system for multinational assassins. And like, you know, these are all the code words that mean these different things.

• 34:50Speaker 04

  So they found who was hosting the website and it was a 16-year-old in the Midwest.

• 34:57Speaker 05

  Was that the piece of information that clicked you into reality?

• 35:00Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 35:02Speaker 05

  How do you know that wasn't disinformation to throw you off the trail?

• 35:05Speaker 04

  I, I, I didn't quite give up on it until it was unequivocally proven to not be true. And even then I was like, so how did they get all of that right?

• 35:14Speaker 05

  I'll give you one word.

• 35:15Speaker 04

  It was a complete coincidence.

• 35:17Speaker 05

  Apophenia, right? So that, you are, you are making the connections. If you have any, so that's basically pattern recognition, right? Which we are really good at. That's like pareidolia where you see face in the clouds. Apophenia is sort of the, the umbrella term psychologically, seeing patterns where they don't exist. We're really good at it. That's what drives conspiracy theories. And so, the, yeah, you tend to underestimate how often and how likely coincidences are. So we see patterns. They can't be coincidental, when they can be. And then there's bound to be something that happens that you can then pattern match with whatever's happening. And then you get confirmation bias kicking in. Then you don't, you underestimate the degree to which you're looking for things to then fit into the pattern.

• 35:59Speaker 05

  And so you end up with this thing, you're, you've convinced yourself this has to be true, when it's really just all pattern recognition and confirmation bias.

• 36:07Speaker 04

  And it was honestly a really good hoax because it also kind of activated that part of your brain that likes codes and puzzles. Or maybe that part of my brain. I love codes and puzzles. So figuring out like, what different words meant based on their context and usage was so much fun. And that's why people will sometimes now not call it a hoax, they'll call it an ARG, like, uh, very popular, Autumn just laughed. Because it's very popular with the young people, these alternate reality games where you're basically, um, you have to step outside of, the first one that you'd probably recognize is the Blair Witch one, where you have to step outside of, you know, the movie itself to figure out all this other stuff about the world. They're very popular nowadays. They're very fun.

• 36:48Speaker 04

  I think this, I would classify this as more of a hoax, but it did have that kind of like, this is so much fun to figure out all this.

• 36:55Speaker 05

  Well, it's funny because, yeah, I read an article by somebody who designs these ARG games, like these, these, you know, things that are happening in real, in the real world. And explaining that oftentimes players will get distracted by things that are not part of the game because of their own apophenia. They say, look, that looks like an arrow pointing in that direction. That's just a scratch on the wall. And you can't anticipate all the false clues people will see out there in the real world, because it's not a controlled environment.

• 37:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 37:26Speaker 05

  It's chaos. Now, what do you guys think is the biggest apophenia conspiracy theory out there?

• 37:32Jay Novella?

  Currently or of all time?

• 37:33Speaker 05

  Currently, currently.

• 37:35Speaker 04

  Oh, it's gotta be Q.

• 37:36Speaker 05

  QAnon, it's QAnon. So what you described is exactly what people are doing with QAnon, just in kind of a bigger way. And the, and the, the person or people who are perpetuating the hoax, it probably is a guy, I think we kind of know who it is, is just throwing random shit out there and letting people run with it.

• 37:53Speaker 02

  Is he 16 years old?

• 37:55Speaker 05

  Right?

• 37:55Speaker 02

  Kind of looks it.

• 37:56Speaker 05

  It's so easy, like, it's so easy to generate this just by giving random noise and letting people's imaginations run wild.

• 38:06Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 38:06Speaker 05

  And they stormed the Capitol based upon this.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  On the castle.

• 38:10Speaker 05

  I mean, it's amazing.

• 38:11Jay Novella?

  Apophenia is, is incredibly powerful, right? And you have to, you know, I think as a skeptic, you can kind of learn and check yourself in a way too, right?

• 38:20Speaker 04

  It could happen to you too.

• 38:21Jay Novella?

  Like, I, um, when I was like, I don't know, 16 years old, I, I really, like, the backward, if you play Stairway to Heaven backwards, like, as corny as it sounds, I don't know, man, like, I can hear it very easily. I guess I trained myself to hear it now.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  Well, that's the. That's the thing.

• 38:38Speaker 05

  That's the priming. Like, when you know what you're listening for, your brain matches.

• 38:41Speaker 02

  Will find it.

• 38:42Speaker 05

  Yeah. That's like, well, like, cuz I live with Satan or something like that. Yeah, there's all that backward, backward masking.

• 38:47Speaker 02

  And I think that another way of saying, like, it could happen to you, there is a hook for everybody. You know, that, like, you love this sort of, like, puzzle solving things. It's like, oh, it gets you in this thing that, that's sort of orthogonal to your skepticism. Uh, it's orthogonal to your skepticism. So you, so I think that, uh, that, again, is a reason to be vigilant. Sometimes, because we all have our own little biases. They're like, oh, I, it's like, I hate that kind of person. And then, no, then a conspiracy theory, because I'm like, of course I knew it was true. I get you.

• 39:15Jay Novella?

  Just to be clear, I didn't think that the devil was writing the backward lyrics in Stairway to Heaven. I thought that, well, let's face it, Led Zeppelin is the top, in the top two bands in the world for me.

• 39:24Speaker 05

  They might have done it as a publicity stunt.

• 39:25Jay Novella?

  Yeah, but they, I wouldn't, I wouldn't have put it past those guys to have been able to pull that off if they wanted to do it. You know what I mean? But they didn't.

• 39:33Speaker 04

  I guess kind of the, the only reason why maybe I chose this as my, like, I kind of wanted it, maybe like in the past wanted it to be true, maybe want it to be true now, is if there were people doing this, they're very easily traceable by 14-year-olds on the internet.

• 39:49Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 39:50Speaker 04

  So that kind of could be a positive for the world that, like, they're not that smart.

• 39:55Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 39:55Jay Novella?

  Bob, you have one you want to be true?

• 39:57Bob Novella?

  No.

• 39:57Jay Novella?

  Okay. You don't have to have one if you don't want one?

• 40:01Bob Novella?

  I mean, I came with something quick, just Roswell. Roswell.

• 40:04Jay Novella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 40:05Bob Novella?

  And so, I mean, it's kind of like what they were saying, what Jay was saying is the end result would be that there would be aliens that have visited us in some form, and they were benign because they didn't kill everybody, so that's good. But otherwise.

• 40:19Jay Novella?

  And they're really bad at flying spacecraft.

• 40:22Bob Novella?

  But, I mean, the way in my mind, I was trying to evolve this idea was that it's like, well, they left a technology that they're still trying to crack, and they're just about to crack it, but everything else was made up. Everything else was fluff and untrue, but they have this technology, and that's all they found. They didn't find bodies, they didn't find a spaceship. But then I'm messing with the conspiracy, so I just said, I gave up.

• 40:42Jay Novella?

  Bob, you want to hear something cool about Roswell?

• 40:44Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 40:44Jay Novella?

  So, you know, there was the weather balloons situation happening, right? So, one of the scientists who was releasing the weather balloons, like, they were like, you know, this was like, low-budget stuff.

• 40:55Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 40:56Jay Novella?

  He, they, they had a problem.

• 40:58Bob Novella?

  Balsa wood and sticky tape.

• 40:59Jay Novella?

  They had a problem with one of the balloons. The guy goes, because I need some adhesive tape to fix the balloon, goes out, couldn't find anything that was strong or whatever. He finds like this tape that had fun patterns on it for kids.

• 41:13Bob Novella?

  Like duckies and chickens and stuff.

• 41:15Jay Novella?

  No, it was, it was, the symbols on it were like.

• 41:18Bob Novella?

  Kind of random, but they kind of random, but they ducks.

• 41:20Jay Novella?

  Yeah, there was, it was, people found the wreckage of the balloon, saw those symbols, like, that's an alien language.

• 41:26Bob Novella?

  And alien hieroglyphics.

• 41:28Jay Novella?

  And the guy's like, no, man, that's like the tape I bought for a dollar fifty at the convenience store to fix the balloon, and they found, like, I love that type of thing, because it shows you how far people will go. Like, they find that, and they turn it into an alien language.

• 41:40Bob Novella?

  That's another anomaly that just took off.

• 41:42Jay Novella?

  All right, we have a few more sort of news items slash discussion topics we're going to burn through here. Bob, you're going to start us off by talking about.

• 41:49Bob Novella?

  I'm going first?

• 41:50Jay Novella?

  Yeah, you're going first. About, you know, Bob and I are always updating our internal map of the Milky Way galaxy, and this is another way which we had to do this. So, tell us about it, Bob.

• 42:00Bob Novella?

  This was interesting in a lot of ways. So, a recent study seems to cast doubt on a prominent theory about detecting dark matter using stellar streams. Now, this is from the University of Washington study. The name of the study is "No Stream Left Unscathed: The Imprint of a Host Galaxy." So, related to what Steve was saying now, for years now, since Steve and I have loved astronomy, I've had a mental map of the Milky Way. So, early in my interest in astronomy, the Milky Way was just basically a spiral galaxy. I mean, right, it's a spiral galaxy, but then it evolves over time as more data comes in.

• 42:38Jay Novella?

  Oh, hang on, Bob.

• 42:39Bob Novella?

  What?

• 42:39Jay Novella?

  Julia, can you tell me what your internal map of the Milky Way galaxy is?

• 42:43Speaker 04

  Um, it's, you know, I don't really have a good one. I know where we are, and I know the general shape of it, because mostly, like, when you're studying, you're like, okay, that's like the sombrero shape, that's this shape.

• 42:55Bob Novella?

  Yeah. So, um, so it went from a spiral.

• 42:59Speaker 04

  Using that degree every day.

• 43:00Jay Novella?

  It's not a handlebar, is it? Is that what it's called?

• 43:02Bob Novella?

  So, it went, it went first, a spiral galaxy with four major spiral arms, but then it kind of evolved into a barred spiral. So, it's got the, so you got the nucleus, you know, the center of it, but you've got this barred shape, and then you've got not four, but two spiral arms that kind of branch off from each other. So, it changed to that. Then there's also bends and twists within the galaxy, right? Steve said that it's kind of skewed like this, it's kind of twisted a little bit, but there's also little waves at the end of it, because of the gravitational interaction with Andromeda, which is two and a half million light-years away. Then, I remember like five years ago, I read about these gamma ray lobes, or Fermi bubbles. So, if this is the Milky Way, so going from the north and the south, there's lobes of

• 43:47Bob Novella?

  gamma ray radiation that's been detected. Very hard to see, but they're there. So, that was another update to my mental map. So, I recently found out that there's stellar streams.

• 43:56Jay Novella?

  Well, I would add, there's also globular clusters revolving at the center of the galaxy as well.

• 44:00Bob Novella?

  Okay, that's earlier, yeah, globular clusters, which is like ancient stars, like up to a million stars that are just basically just orbiting around, and then you could also throw in a halo of dark matter on the outside. So, there's lots of changes to this mental map.

• 44:15Jay Novella?

  So, you guys got all that?

• 44:16Bob Novella?

  All right. So, I mean, that's just, you know, obsessed geek. So, then stellar streams came in, but this, we've known about this for years. I somehow never really read about it, and they're fascinating. So, stellar streams are, they're streams of stars. When a galaxy, like, say, a stellar cluster or a dwarf galaxy interacts with our Milky Way, the tidal forces, it's called tidal stripping, it basically takes the stars in those collections and turns them into like these long skinny filaments of stars that just then orbit the galaxy. So, you've got these arcs of stars that just are orbiting the galaxy.

• 45:00Jay Novella?

  Well, you're saying that they're not, you know, they're not globes, that they're like, they turn into like a filament of star.

• 45:06Bob Novella?

  A filament of star, a stretched out line of stars that stay together like a train, and it's kind of orbit.

• 45:11Jay Novella?

  No, is it one star that stretched out?

• 45:13Bob Novella?

  No, no, no, I'm sorry, sorry.

• 45:14Jay Novella?

  It's a daisy chain of stars.

• 45:15Bob Novella?

  Right, yeah, so hundreds to thousands to thousands of stars. Now, we used to think there was 10 of these orbiting the Milky Way. They've now found over 100. We've found some in Andromeda, so we think that these star, these stellar streams are probably around a lot or most of most galaxies, but they're very faint, they're very hard to see.

• 45:35Jay Novella?

  Do they have planets?

• 45:37Bob Novella?

  Sure, why not?

• 45:38Jay Novella?

  Okay.

• 45:39Bob Novella?

  So, the other thing about these stellar streams is that they've got, they're not uniform, they've got gaps, they've got clumps, they've got kinks, so they're very, kind of like fingerprints of how, you know, of how these stars have changed over time and into these weird kind of shapes. So, so here's a study quote. The researcher said, "A stream's morphology and kinematics are set up by the gravitational field through which it orbits. Therefore, streams serve as sensitive probes of the host's gravitational potential." So, that means that as these stars orbit, it's dealing with the varying gravity of the Milky Way, and that gravity, that changing gravity, because you've got clumps of regular

• 46:21Bob Novella?

  stars, you've got all these different things happening that changes the gravitational landscape of our galaxy. So, as these streams orbit around it, it's kind of interacting with the stream and changing the stream. So, so this brought in, this led to the creation of a very popular theory that dark matter subhalos. Then, I wasn't too sure where they were exactly, but apparently, our best model about dark matter is called cold dark matter, and the prediction is, is that there's dark matter, little knots and clumps of dark matter spread throughout our galaxy. And dark matter, as everybody knows what dark matter is at this point, I hope, it's

• 47:04Bob Novella?

  just like matter that is basically the scaffolding of the universe, where galaxies arise and were born around this scaffolding of dark matter that we can't see in any way except gravitationally, and that it's kind of holding galaxies together. Galaxies spin in such a way that they should fly apart, because there's just so much going on, it's spinning so fast that they should fly apart, there's something holding it together, and it's dark matter that's holding it all together and preventing that from happening. And there's lots of other indirect and direct points of evidence that point to dark matter existing. It's a huge mystery, like something, what, 75% of the matter in the universe is dark matter? We don't even know what it is. Huge, huge mystery. If you could solve that, you're getting multiple Nobel prizes.

• 47:49Bob Novella?

  It's just one of the biggest mysteries in all of astrophysics. So, this model predicts that there's going to be clumps of dark matter that's in the galaxy, and these clumps are interacting with the stellar streams. And when the stellar stream goes by, or when a clump goes through the stellar stream, it's going to kick stars out in such a way that it creates very distinctive kinks and bumps and wiggles in the stellar stream. So, they say that stellar streams are a wonderful detector for dark matter. It's a probe of dark matter, because if you scrutinize the stream, you could see, look at these, look at these wiggles and kinks, that's being caused by dark matter. And hey, it's proof of dark matter, in a way. So, that's where this study, this new study comes in.

• 48:33Bob Novella?

  So this study wanted to address a scenario where what is the galaxy's contribution? Not the dark matter. What's the galaxy's visible matter contribution to changing these stellar streams? So they wanted to say, forget about the dark matter for now. What about the galaxy itself? What is that doing to these stellar streams? So what they did is they created four simulated Milky Way sized galaxies. And they included almost everything, the disk itself of visible stars, regular matter, right? They included the evolving, the evolving shape of the galaxy because the galaxy will change over the eons. And that means its gravitational play, its gravitational influences will change. So the, you know, the large scale gravitational structures, they included all that stuff.

• 49:18Bob Novella?

  They even included the galactic dark matter halo, which is outside, just outside of the galaxy. But they did not include these dark matter clumps that are going through the galaxy as predicted by the cold dark matter models. So they wanted to get basically a baseline, a baseline of the impact of our galaxy's impact on the stellar streams. So they added 15,000 of these stellar streams throughout these four simulated galaxies. And then they waited five billion simulated years. So they probably waited, I don't know, maybe weeks or months. So they waited for five billion years to pass. And the team observed these irregularities within the stellar streams in almost every stellar stream.

• 50:02Bob Novella?

  So here's what, here's what they said in this study about the results. In our simulations, the host galaxies alone cause the same kinds of irregularities that we observe in real stellar streams. Now that we can predict what the host galaxy, galaxy does on its own, we can start isolating the effects for which dark matter is responsible. So, so do you understand that? They, they showed that the galaxy itself without the dark matter was making the stellar streams look the way we observe them. So that's kind of disappointing and a little scary like, holy crap. But what does that mean? Does dark matter not exist? No, dark matter exists. It has to exist. It's the, it's the best explanation for what we're observing out there. Not only for galactic rotation, but things like bullet cluster.

• 50:45Bob Novella?

  And look that up because they're wonderful examples of really solid evidence that dark matter exists. So what, so what does this mean? So perhaps there's a lot, there's a few possibilities. Perhaps, perhaps these, these clumps of dark matter are, are making changes to the stellar streams. But there, we have, but when we test for that, when we simulate the dark matter clumps, we'll see distinctive changes that only they cause. And we could, and maybe we'll see that in the stellar streams. Like, well, look at this, look at these irregularities right here. That's what the simulation said dark matter caused. So they might see that, that's possible.

• 51:23Speaker 05

  Are these sort of more subtle distortions in the stellar streams?

• 51:26Bob Novella?

  That's the, that's the other possibility that the, the, the streams might have extremely subtle effects caused by dark matter. If that's true, then that means that we may need to re-look at our cold dark matter models and say, all right, this model needs to be changed in a way where we'll find versions of it that predict subtle changes to the stellar streams, not these bigger changes that we're, that we're seeing. It's actually, it's good for dark matter because now it's, it's, it's reducing its, the constraints. It's increasing the restraints for what, for what dark matter can do to stellar streams. So we may need to change our, one of our big models and theories about dark matter, which would be good because it's being, it's being more refined. So that's it. So the next stage is obvious.

• 52:10Bob Novella?

  The next stage is to create another simulation now that includes the dark matter sub halo knots in the galaxy and see what that causes in terms of the stellar streams and then compare it. Then we'll go from there. So just, I'll, I'll let you know what happens then in a couple of years when they write another paper.

• 52:27Speaker 05

  Cool.

• 52:27Bob Novella?

  All right.

• 52:28Speaker 05

  All right, let me ask you guys a question. What do you think of when you hear the term chronic fatigue syndrome? What do you think?

• 52:35Jay Novella?

  I think.

• 52:36Speaker 05

  What's your reaction?

• 52:36Jay Novella?

  You people are, there's some people that are tired chronically.

• 52:42Speaker 04

  I think, boy, I'm glad I don't have that.

• 52:44Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 52:44Speaker 02

  I think symptoms of life.

• 52:46Speaker 05

  Right. What do you mean by that?

• 52:48Speaker 02

  I, I've heard you say the phrase symptoms of life. That it's like we, there are things you just experience in life and you just, and you associate that with a singular disease. And when, when in fact, it's just normal living.

• 53:01Speaker 05

  What about you, Bobby?

• 53:02Bob Novella?

  My first thought was, oh yeah, I remember that. Why haven't I heard about that in years? It disappeared.

• 53:07Jay Novella?

  Can I give you another answer?

• 53:08Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 53:08Jay Novella?

  Isn't it one of those catch holders, right? There's, there's diseases, you know, diseases that like they say, oh, you have fibromyalgia. And it doesn't really mean anything. It just means that you have this collection of symptoms and we don't know what causes it. So we're just kind of give it a name.

• 53:23Bob Novella?

  Garbage pill diagnosis.

• 53:24Jay Novella?

  Is that it?

• 53:25Bob Novella?

  That was cool.

• 53:25Speaker 05

  A garbage pill diagnosis or yeah, placeholder diagnosis or you know, charitably, it's a clinical diagnosis. It's based upon, or a diagnosis of exclusion where it's like, all right, we've, you have this cluster of symptoms. We've excluded everything we know how to exclude. So this is what's left, whatever that is.

• 53:42Bob Novella?

  It's like dark matter. It's like a holding place for, you know, it's like.

• 53:45Jay Novella?

  Bob, we're done talking about that.

• 53:48Speaker 05

  Bob's like, everything's like dark matter.

• 53:49Bob Novella?

  All right, how about dark energy then? How about dark energy?

• 53:52Speaker 05

  How about let Steve continue and you stop talking about dark matter? No, that's right. That's fine, Jay. So.

• 53:57Bob Novella?

  That was right.

• 53:58Speaker 05

  Do you have, it sounds like there's a, I'm sensing a bit of a, of a negative sort of connotation though about like, maybe like, is it really real? Is it just people who have, are fatigued for whatever reason? And it's not really a thing unto itself. And you know, again, this is something that has existed my entire career. I've tracked it very closely my entire career. As a neurologist, I see a lot of patients primarily for their chronic fatigue. Or that is a symptom of their neurological disease that I'm seeing them for. So I, and you may not have heard it because the terminology has changed over the years as well. So it, we actually have, the, the scientific evidence has evolved a little bit beyond a diagnosis of exclusion. And.

• 54:43Bob Novella?

  Just a little bit?

• 54:43Speaker 05

  I think first of all, I would like to just lay to bed. It is a real thing. It is, it is a clinical entity. It is a real thing. It is not just people, it's not just a symptom of life.

• 54:52Bob Novella?

  Got it.

• 54:53Speaker 05

  It is not just people putting a name to something which we all experience to some degree. This is people who have profound fatigue, which again is one of those symptoms. It's like when you say, I'm depressed and somebody thinks, yeah, I get sad from time to time too. It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You don't know what real like major depression is unless you've experienced it. It's the same way. You hear the word fatigue, you're like, yeah, I get tired all the time. I get tired after a long day. Like, no, no, no, no, that's not what we're talking about. This is a profound metabolic fatigue. Like your body isn't making energy.

• 55:27Bob Novella?

  They get, they get tired from sleeping.

• 55:30Speaker 05

  I mean, it's like, they, it's like really, they don't have enough energy to get through their day. And it is, it is a metabolic exhaustion. You really have to think about it like that. It's not just being tired. It's not anything that you've experienced from just normal activity. It's, you know, maybe when you've been really sick, that, remember like if you, a time you've had a real viral illness? And I think the last time I experienced is when I got COVID. Yeah. Cause that was probably the most severe sick illness, maybe a lot of us have had in the last few years. The kind of like really crushing fatigue you had when you were in the throes of COVID. Do you guys remember that?

• 56:02Bob Novella?

  Absolutely.

• 56:02Speaker 05

  Now imagine if that was every day, forever. That's what we're talking about.

• 56:06Jay Novella?

  So they, they come into the doctor's office and they describe this to you like, I can't move. I can't get out of bed. I, I'm too tired to go to the bathroom.

• 56:14Speaker 05

  So here's the other, here's the other thing is that we see people with chronic fatigue as a symptom. Again, chronic fatigue syndrome is more like you have it and we've ruled out a lot of other things. But there, the thing is, we, part of the reason why we know this is a real thing is because we see it in people as a symptom of diseases that we know and understand very well. So one disease where we see it quite frequently, for example, is multiple sclerosis. Right? So if you have, some people with MS have chronic fatigue as part of their MS.

• 56:46Bob Novella?

  Is it related to ATP at all?

• 56:48Speaker 05

  Probably, but we'll get to that. Yeah. It is related to ATP, but I'll, I'll tell you how. So, so we know that a chronic autoimmune disease like MS can cause chronic fatigue. People who do have clinical depression can have chronic fatigue as well. People who have had brain trauma, and this is the thing I've mostly seen myself, patients who have a traumatic brain injury. Cause you know, I was a general neurologist and a headache specialist and then they tended to go to me like at, at my department. They can also have like, as part of their syndrome, just like they have no energy. They just have chronic fatigue. So we know it can happen from, from an infection. I also see a lot of people post infectious chronic fatigue.

• 57:32Speaker 05

  Like they had a, an encephalitis, a viral infection that affected their brain. And then afterwards they have chronic fatigue syndrome.

• 57:40Jay Novella?

  Wait, and once you get it, it doesn't go away?

• 57:42Speaker 05

  Well, it can go away, but in some people it's chronic. It doesn't go away. It could last for many years or indefinitely. So we see a very similar clinical syndrome in people with a psychiatric illness, major depression, an autoimmune disease, multiple sclerosis, and traumatic brain injury, a traumatic illness, right? A traumatic, you know, effect. And also just post infectious, right? There's a post infectious chronic fatigue syndrome. So the question is scientifically, well, how could all of these very different things result in the same clinical syndrome?

• 58:20Speaker 05

  That right, that's a very provocative question medically. And and there's different ways to think about it. It's like, is that because it is the same thing? So one, one way to think about it is the final common pathway. Right? That even though these are different entry points, they overlap somewhere downstream where they result in the same effect that is causing chronic fatigue. And wouldn't it be great if we could figure out what that is?

• 58:47Jay Novella?

  Yeah. So when you, do we know that like, for example, like, is it that your muscles aren't having ATP? Like, is you're not recovering from being?

• 58:55Speaker 05

  Right now, there is no biomarker.

• 58:57Jay Novella?

  Okay.

• 58:57Speaker 05

  Right, there's no blood test or screen or anything you could do to say you have chronic fatigue syndrome. There are things you can test for that might be a cause of your chronic fatigue syndrome. Right, like you might have the, some of the autoimmune diseases that we've identified it with now, or some of the viral infection. Yeah, you're more likely to have one of these infections chronically as, as the, the associated with your chronic fatigue syndrome. We're still trying to nail down whether it's actually the cause, but it's looking more and more like, like it is, right? So, um, so the, and I'm leading up to a study, obviously, where the researchers were asking, well, can we figure out what the final common pathway of all of this is? And again, we don't know the answer to this and they're kind of shooting in the dark, but they're just, this is what good researchers do.

• 59:41Speaker 05

  They're just sort of brainstorming, like, what could be going on here? So what they were looking for is, very interesting, is gene networks. Right? So, you know, genetics is, is very complicated. It's like the galaxy. Your internal map of how genes work in the body is always more complicated than you think it is. And we're always discovering new things. So now we have to think of these gene networks, suites of genes that get activated at the same time in certain situations. And that could be like, when you get an illness, then the suite of immune activated genes will then come into play. Or when you're recovering from trauma or whatever, or, or even at different times of your life,

• 1:00:24Speaker 05

  or when different things are happening, or after you've exercised, whatever. There's genes operate not in isolation, but usually in networks of genes towards some common end. And, and so they just were like, all right, let's do this. Now they're just sort of looking for patterns. So if we look at a, at a, across these things, at MS and, and trauma and infection, right, and people who have chronic fatigue, but with very different clinical syndromes behind them. And if we look at all of their gene networks and compare them to people who don't have chronic fatigue, can we see a pattern across all of these causes of, of chronic fatigue? Or these things that are associated with chronic fatigue?

• 1:01:03Bob Novella?

  Is there a name for it, you know, like genome, proteome? Is there like a kind of active home, something that's?

• 1:01:08Speaker 05

  I haven't seen one of those sexy terms. It's just networks of genes, basically.

• 1:01:12Bob Novella?

  All right.

• 1:01:13Speaker 04

  What's another example of like, what a bunch of genes all working together do the same thing, getting activated randomly?

• 1:01:19Speaker 05

  So, um, not randomly, but usually.

• 1:01:21Speaker 04

  Oh, right, right.

• 1:01:22Speaker 05

  For, for a purpose. So like the things that I, that I mentioned, like usually in some disease state or as a reaction to some kind of trauma or some kind of stressor. Right, so like anytime you have, under any kind of say psychological stress or physiological stress, a suite of stress genes will be activated, right? So that's another network relevant to what I'm, what I'm talking about. So here's what they found. And again, this is, it was an exploratory study, right? We talk about this a lot on the show where there are exploratory studies and confirmatory studies. And you don't get too excited about the exploratory stuff because that's just, we're just looking for patterns out there. And not all the patterns that we see, as Julia learned, are real. And so they have to be confirmed.

• 1:02:06Speaker 05

  You need to do confirmatory science to say, what does this really mean? Is this really true? And so we're, we're still at the exploratory stage. What they found is very provocative. What they found was that, that there was a commonality among all of these different entities that are correlated with chronic fatigue in people who had chronic fatigue and suites of genes that are associated with immune function, with metabolic function.

• 1:02:32Bob Novella?

  I'm shocked that you could just do, I, I, you can't see, he has no notes in front of him.

• 1:02:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:02:36Bob Novella?

  He's doing this. This is all off the dome. I know you all know this, but it's.

• 1:02:40Jay Novella?

  I hate that about him.

• 1:02:41Speaker 05

  But I do, and the third one was stress response. Right, so immune function, stress response.

• 1:02:47Jay Novella?

  Steve.

• 1:02:48Speaker 05

  And metabolic. And when I say metabolic, I mean producing ATP from mitochondria. Right? So imagine if you're mitochondria.

• 1:02:55Jay Novella?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:02:55Speaker 05

  We're just not making as much ATP.

• 1:02:57Speaker 04

  They're not the powerhouse of the cell?

• 1:02:59Speaker 05

  They are the powerhouse.

• 1:03:00Bob Novella?

  They're a brownout.

• 1:03:01Speaker 05

  Your power, you're at a brownout. Your cells are on a brown, they don't have as much ATP. And it's like, you're stressed all the time and your immune system is chronically activated all the time and sapping you of all of this energy.

• 1:03:12Bob Novella?

  Oh, man.

• 1:03:13Speaker 05

  And so, so it's that, it's probably not a coincidence that the things we thought probably were going on in these people are the network, gene networks that seem to be activated in these people.

• 1:03:24Jay Novella?

  This sounds promising though, Steve.

• 1:03:25Speaker 05

  It's very promising. That's why I'm talking about it. It's very, very promising. But I'm, again, I'm cautioning, this is exploratory. This is not like we could hang our hat on this. This is absolutely true. But this is a huge clue pointing in the direction of maybe what chronic fatigue syndrome is, is disruption in the networks of genes that regulate immune activity, stress response and metabolic function that is sapping people of their ability. Can you think about, again, we take for granted how absolutely amazing our bodies are. And the fact that we make enough energy at a cellular level to function and feel good and, you know what I mean, and run a marathon or whatever, that people can do that is amazing how well regulated our body is.

• 1:04:09Speaker 05

  And of course, there's going to be times when it's not going to be well regulated because something happened to the body. And, you know, fatigue is a really common symptom of life, Christian, because it happens, so many things cause fatigue. Why is that true? Because it's, it's hard not to have fatigue. It's hard to have everything be working so well that you don't experience any fatigue. So it, it would be shocking if there weren't chronic fatigue syndrome almost, you know?

• 1:04:35Bob Novella?

  So, so, I mean, this sounds like such a, a promising avenue. I mean, like, is this a technique that you could apply to all these other, like kind of vaguely defined, uh, uh, you know, constellation of symptoms?

• 1:04:47Speaker 05

  So, yes. So if by, by this, you mean the, looking at networks of gene activation?

• 1:04:51Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 1:04:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, absolutely. And, and that's, this is not a new tool. That this is the tool that they're applying to this. This, this research group is applying to this question. Now, what, what happens going forward? So first, we need to, just to independently regulate, replicate these findings. Just to say, is this really real? You know, and, and until it's replicated in science, it doesn't really exist. We just, as a good first approximation. But then, and again, I know every news item always says this, and even the researchers always like, this might lead to blood tests for chronic fatigue syndrome. They're going to say that no matter what the prospects are, because that's just what they say. But, okay, it is possible. I would say it's not necessarily true that it will lead to a reliable clinical blood test or, or CSF or whatever.

• 1:05:35Speaker 05

  But it is, this creates the possibility. If we, if we can detect that there's something metabolically and genetically different about these people, that, that opens the door for there being a biomarker we can test for. The problem is, and the reason why it doesn't always translate into a biomarker is because there could be so much variability that there's just a statistical relationship. And, but, you know, having said that, a lot of blood tests, that things that we test for is just a statistical relationship. It's just not that useful when that's the case. For example, there are many things I tested for in neurology, especially like immune mediated neuropathies, where it's like, this antibody correlates to 60% with this clinical entity.

• 1:06:17Speaker 05

  That's nice, but 60% means 40% of the time it doesn't correlate with that clinical entity. And that cuts both ways. You could have the antibody without the clinical syndrome. You could have the clinical syndrome without the antibody. So what does it really mean? So, yes, it's a biomarker. Yes, there's a statistical correlation, but it's, and it's just one piece of a complicated clinical puzzle. But it's not like you get the test and you get your answer and you have your diagnosis. I suspect that's probably where we're going to end up, where it's not going to be a one to one correlation between a biomarker and, and a clinical diagnosis. It'll be one piece of information that will give us, you know, information about a patient. Yeah, you seem to have a dysregulation in your suite of metabolic genes and maybe that's where the problem is. And of course, then you add, does this lead to a treatment?

• 1:07:02Speaker 05

  And of course, the answer is, we don't know. And we don't know downstream.

• 1:07:06Bob Novella?

  It's almost useless then.

• 1:07:07Speaker 05

  Well, no, I'm just saying, well, it's not, it's not useless.

• 1:07:10Jay Novella?

  Not at all. I mean, it's, the scientists poking around are the beginning of basically everything that they've, that science has ever achieved.

• 1:07:16Speaker 05

  Of course, we hope that these things always lead to a diagnosis and a treatment. That's always the goal. It, there's not always a direct line though, to that.

• 1:07:24Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:24Speaker 05

  But the more we know, and maybe this, this knowledge needs to be combined with other knowledge that we don't have yet. And down, downstream, we, we may look back and go, yeah, this was a milestone on the way to us doing a blood test and then giving a treatment, you know, for people who have crushing chronic fatigue.

• 1:07:40Jay Novella?

  About 40 years ago, the beginnings of the, you know, the work that ended up becoming the mRNA platform began.

• 1:07:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:07:48Jay Novella?

  They didn't even, they weren't even doing work to build the mRNA platform. They were just, that, that early research.

• 1:07:54Speaker 05

  They were just studying mRNA.

• 1:07:54Jay Novella?

  You know what I mean? It's like they.

• 1:07:55Bob Novella?

  I know, but finding it's, and diagnosing it's great, but it's not necessarily any, any closer to actually dealing with it. What, what about CRISPR? Could CRISPR, um, deal with these gene networks?

• 1:08:07Speaker 05

  Maybe.

• 1:08:07Bob Novella?

  I mean.

• 1:08:08Speaker 05

  It's more about the activation of the networks than the genetics themselves. But maybe there is something that, in that, that we could do that would be, would be mitigating. Who knows? Again, you know, it's always hard to predict downstream where there's going to leave. Okay. Julia, you are going to talk about bird research and owning a bird. Now, you and I are big birders.

• 1:08:29Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:08:29Speaker 05

  And we sort of got each other into birding. I got into birding the same time Julia did. You were four years old at the time. So you grew up with it. And so you're a way better birder than I am. But yeah, it's true. She could identify bird sounds amazingly because she grew up with it. It's just different that when you learn it when you're 50 or whatever. So, but tell us about, and I told you, I'd come up with something fun to talk about on the show. You're like, it's going to be about birds.

• 1:08:56Speaker 04

  I did say like, easy. But speaking of birding, part of the thing I really realized with this was how much having a bird in your home teaches you about looking at wild birds and birding in general. And it's completely different, like just going outside and bird watching like you normally would. I never would have imagined all the preening behaviors, like what's playing versus what is they're very upset. Like you're just tuned into what their little behaviors mean a little bit differently than, you know, when you're looking at wild birds and you're looking for, how to identify them more than like, how does that bird feel right now?

• 1:09:40Speaker 04

  But the reason I got into this whole rabbit hole was I was scrolling on social media, as we all are want to do. And this article came up about a new, a novel locomotion for parrots. This is Dickinson Young and Granatoski reporting about lovebirds moving along a thin bar. And basically what they would do is they would have their beak and their feet. And they would move along like this kind of swinging, like a primate brachiation. So it's like a bird brachiation. So what do you think it was called?

• 1:10:11Speaker 05

  Oh, beakiation or something?

• 1:10:13Speaker 04

  It's beakiation. They use their beaks. And this study was awesome because it had a video in the article. So you could watch how exactly this bird was moving. And I looked at it and I said, I see my parrot do that every single day. She loves to eat the foam around my microphone. She loves to rip it off and chew it. And the only way to get up there, because I try not to let her up there, is to crawl along the cord connecting the microphone. So she does it pretty much all the time. So I'm thinking about that and I'm like, how many studies, you know, are accounting for pet parrots instead of like specifically either wild birds or just like birds that were studying?

• 1:10:57Speaker 04

  So I wanted to do a little roundup of all the fun little studies inspired by pet parrots. Obvious starting point is the famous Alex. This is an African gray. His name is short for avian language learning experiment. And he was bought by an animal psychologist, Dr. Pepperberg, in 1977.

• 1:11:20Speaker 05

  Pepperberg is the guy?

• 1:11:21Speaker 04

  Pepperberg, yes, this is her name. She, and she bought him for the express purpose of studying him, as you can probably tell by his name.

• 1:11:28Speaker 05

  He was amazing.

• 1:11:29Speaker 04

  Oh, my God. I could talk about Alex forever, but I won't.

• 1:11:34Speaker 04

  So this is a study of a bird throughout their life where they're specifically being trained to use language in a way that contradicts kind of the previous understanding of parrots, which is they are mimics. Which is that's a model of associative learning. You know, you show a parrot an orange and you teach them to call that thing an orange. And then whenever they see that thing, they say that's an orange. Alex was a little bit different because it's hard to tell what an animal is thinking. We're humans, we aren't parrots, we can't speak parrot. But Alex could identify, he could understand bigger and smaller. He could identify how many of something there was up to six.

• 1:12:15Speaker 04

  He could identify, and this is the big one, he could identify a key, even if it was a different shape, size and color than any key he'd ever seen before.

• 1:12:24Speaker 05

  He knew keenness. He knew what the features of keenness were.

• 1:12:29Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:12:29Speaker 05

  Didn't have to be the same key.

• 1:12:31Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:12:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:12:32Speaker 04

  So that kind of takes us away from mimicry and into, he's understanding the class of object.

• 1:12:38Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:12:38Speaker 04

  That class of object is a key.

• 1:12:42Speaker 04

  And that's a huge step.

• 1:12:42Speaker 05

  That's profound.

• 1:12:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:12:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:12:44Speaker 04

  That's, that's excites me so much because that's such a huge difference from mimicry to like language.

• 1:12:52Speaker 05

  Julia, wasn't he the bird where they could say, go get the blue ball? And he was able to do like two levels of categorization to understand the difference. And you could say, go get the orange ball. And he could do that and you could do that with different shaped objects and everything, right?

• 1:13:06Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 1:13:07Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:13:08Bob Novella?

  And the clever Hans disout, obviously.

• 1:13:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's the thing is, of course, you know, we're, we're living with these birds. It's very easy for us to anthropomorphize them, which I'll talk a little bit more later. But, but yes, understanding the class of object is a very good test for say, like, do they actually understand what they're saying?

• 1:13:28Speaker 05

  And just to follow up on what Christian was saying, the clever Hans effect is when the trainer or the researcher is giving subconscious cues, visual cues or whatever to the animal and then overinterpreting what they're doing. It's like, no, they're not understanding your words. They just know when you nod at the object or whatever, whatever clue you're giving them. So you have to very carefully control for that.

• 1:13:50Bob Novella?

  Right, but you know the animal, but the animal knows you to a certain extent as well.

• 1:13:54Speaker 05

  Very well, yeah.

• 1:13:55Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:13:56Speaker 05

  So yeah, so you're confirming they did control with the clever Hans effect in this research.

• 1:14:00Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:14:01Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:14:02Speaker 04

  And there are successors to Alex as well. This is the one that it probably more people, more people probably know this bird because of course now we have social media. But Apollo is taught using the same method that Dr. Pepperberg used. And I wanted to bring this up because you brought up earlier kind of that model training. It's very, very close to that, but it's model and rival. So you have the trainer and, you know, some other human being or, you know, in Alex or Apollo's case, a bird who already knows these words.

• 1:14:40Speaker 04

  And you do the trick with them and you also have them get it wrong and have them, you know, model what getting the incorrect answer looks like. And if you have two humans doing it, you can even have them switch and have, you know, the other one be the trainer and the other one be the student. And that also kind of teaches this reciprocal relationship. But yes, so it is that kind of training. Now, that's a really obvious way that pet parrots can affect science is if a scientist buys a parrot and spends that parrot's lifetime studying them. But there's also citizen science that can be done on pet parrots. And one that came up recently, and this is very relevant to the discussion of how well do these animals actually understand and use language the way we do?

• 1:15:23Speaker 04

  This is about name use among pet parrots. And I'm sure, you know, anyone who's in this room who's had a parrot before knows that they will learn names very well because they're around name use a lot. People around them are using names all the time. And there's other animals that kind of we suspect have name use. I'm not super familiar with them.

• 1:15:43Bob Novella?

  What is it, name use? What do you say?

• 1:15:45Speaker 04

  Calling something by its name.

• 1:15:47Speaker 05

  An individual thing by an individual name.

• 1:15:48Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:15:49Speaker 05

  I think dolphins, we've established to have that.

• 1:15:51Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, I've read about dolphins. I've read about elephants having, you know, a signature sound to get an individual's attention. And that's, you know, what we would call name use, but it's really hard to study that in other animals because we don't speak elephant. So who knows if they're actually using names or if it means something else. We don't spend all of our lives 24/7 around elephants. So it's hard to get recordings and there's just a lot of variability. But with parrots, do spend a lot of time around them. They speak English, so we don't need to speak parrot because they can use our language. And they're, as I said, they're around name use all the time. They're hearing it a lot. So this study took a survey of 880 captive birds of various species.

• 1:16:35Speaker 04

  So this is a self-reported survey by the owners. And they did a lot of species, not just African grays, which Alex and Apollo are African grays, to see if they could learn and use names as vocal labels. What do you guys think they, what do you think they found?

• 1:16:51Speaker 05

  I would say they succeeded extraordinarily well at doing it.

• 1:16:55Speaker 04

  Do you think it was mostly African grays or other species as well?

• 1:16:58Speaker 05

  I mean, you know, I know that African grays tend to like perform really, really well at things like this, better than usually other, other species. But I would, yeah, I would say it's probably more universal.

• 1:17:09Speaker 04

  It was, it was quite a few. They did have to control four brand names. They excluded brand names from this. Some of the more common ones were very funny. I'm sure you can probably guess what at least one of them was.

• 1:17:22Speaker 02

  Kleenex?

• 1:17:23Speaker 04

  Kleenex is very funny. I didn't see that, though.

• 1:17:26Speaker 05

  Q-Tip?

• 1:17:27Jay Novella?

  How about Q-Tip?

• 1:17:27Speaker 02

  Band-Aids.

• 1:17:28Speaker 04

  Q-Tips? The big ones were the brand name of their treat and the Amazon Alexa.

• 1:17:35Jay Novella?

  Oh, yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:17:37Speaker 04

  So saying, Alexa, play this, that does not count as name use in this study.

• 1:17:40Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:17:42Speaker 04

  They recorded name use as to referring to people or animals with an individualized name. So an example is the parrot saying, quiet Rufus, when, only when the dog Rufus barks, not when another dog barks. That is when name use is used and appropriate. And they found kind of a mixed bag. About half of all the birds surveyed used word, that used words, also used names. About a quarter of them used them appropriately. And that's the big thing. So they, you know, if a bird uses a name and uses it appropriately, that would be like greeting someone by name when they come in the room. A name use that is not appropriate would be, and this was a very funny example I saw,

• 1:18:26Speaker 04

  saying their own name in that person's voice when they come in the room.

• 1:18:30Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 1:18:31Jay Novella?

  Right, because they're clearly mimicking that person.

• 1:18:33Speaker 04

  Yes, they associate them coming in the room with them saying the bird's name. So they, they repeat it. So most of the birds that showed individualized, appropriate name use were in fact African grays, but there was a wide diversity. So it was mostly African grays and then the rest were kind of all equal. Pretty wide diversity of different parrot species using names.

• 1:18:53Jay Novella?

  And I wonder if the non-African grays were just all false positives, you know?

• 1:18:58Speaker 04

  It was a self-reported survey.

• 1:19:00Jay Novella?

  This is self-reported owner's survey, so grain of salt.

• 1:19:03Speaker 04

  And that kind of leads into the next thing I wanted to talk about, which is, you know, there's these are the benefits of having parrots as pets is we learn a lot about their cognition. But unfortunately, there are some detriments to keeping parrots as pets. And I'm just going to talk about intellectually, like emotionally with the relationship with the parrots. Obviously, there's an environmental factor there, too. There's a lot of other things going on, but just in the emotional and intellectual health of the bird, larger, smarter parrots need a lot of engagement with their brains. A survey of parrot welfare experts found that in their opinion, the most prevalent issue is lack of owner education and awareness.

• 1:19:46Speaker 04

  And I thought, great, that is a solvable problem. If only people knew more about how parrots think, then their welfare would improve. Easy. And then I found a study by Burrmeister et al. That specifically looked at that question. It's owner behavior and correlation with behavioral problems among birds. They marked the factors as inattentive, closeness to the bird, anthropomorphizing, so treating the bird like a little human, and then socially supported, meaning the bird was providing that human with most of their social support. And so obviously, inattentive negligent owner is bad. I'm sure we could all guess that.

• 1:20:28Speaker 04

  But there was another subtype that was almost as bad as negligent.

• 1:20:32Speaker 02

  Overly coddling, like they treat it like it's a little, little person, that one?

• 1:20:35Speaker 04

  It was anthropomorphizing, treating it like the bird is a person. Almost as bad as negligence.

• 1:20:41Jay Novella?

  I was going to guess feeding them too much meatballs, but. That might be related.

• 1:20:47Speaker 04

  Is that negligence or anthropomorphizing?

• 1:20:50Jay Novella?

  Tony wants some meatballs. So, so, so Julia, they, uh.

• 1:20:55Speaker 05

  Tony wants some meatballs.

• 1:20:56Jay Novella?

  Tony wants some meatballs. So Julia, like, you're talking about people like talking to the animal as if they understood and then doing things like getting mad at them for not understanding.

• 1:21:07Speaker 04

  Exactly. So, looking at the questionnaire I have in front of me, they asked, you know, they asked these questions and then people self-reported what they would say. And some of the questions that if they said yes to would be called anthropomorphizing were, I think my bird understands me. My bird knows when I'm feeling bad. Sometimes I wonder what my bird is thinking. And I can talk to my bird about anything. People who rated those highly were, and this is obviously correlation and self-reporting, but were highly correlated with behavioral problems in the birds. So aggression, plucking, things like that. So putting all this together, I'm thinking, okay, I thought the solution was, you know,

• 1:21:52Speaker 04

  when people understand and sympathize with how smart and emotionally intelligent these birds are, hopefully their welfare will improve. But I think a big factor here is now that the type of intelligence. And I think it's not making the mistake that people who thought birds were just mimicking were making, which was, oh, it doesn't have a big primate brain, so it can't be intelligent. You know, it's kind of doing the same thing of, you know, oh, it's intelligent, therefore it's like a human intelligence. But we kind of have to meet parrots where they are and say they're intelligent in a bird way.

• 1:22:26Jay Novella?

  I wonder how much of an analogy there is to people thinking ChatGPT is intelligent.

• 1:22:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a great.

• 1:22:31Jay Novella?

  Right? You think a parrot is intelligent because it's talking, because it's saying the words you taught it to say. It's interesting.

• 1:22:37Speaker 02

  It, it also, I mean, what do people call LLMs, derisively, stochastic parrots? And, and then people push back on that term. It's like, no, it's actually doing reasoning, it's actually smart. But as we're talking about, so are parrots.

• 1:22:54Jay Novella?

  The one that you said that bothers me is, I can talk to my parrot about anything. Because like, when you break that down, it's like, well, you know, you can. You can say whatever you want to your parrot, right? But I'm thinking because of the nature of this study, are they, are they like thinking the parrots are communicating back?

• 1:23:11Speaker 05

  Parrots are really good listeners, Jay.

• 1:23:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:23:13Jay Novella?

  No, no, but do you understand what I'm saying? Like, there's a big difference between like people saying, oh, yeah, I'm, you know, I talked to my parrot about all my problems and everything. But are they getting like some type of feedback, I wonder, that makes them think the parrot is kind of comprehending what they're talking about? Because that's crazy.

• 1:23:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, there's also the idea of, I think this relates to like how, you know, treating a bird like a human can relate to bad emotional well-being is, sometimes birds, birds will emote and react to things. But it's not always the way that mammals emote and react to things. A bird that looks really relaxed could be like on death's door. A bird that it looks really excited and playful, that could be a sign of a behavioral issue. Birds can get really hormonal if you don't have a breeding pair. And if you, you know, treat them a certain way, if you do what, so one of the big things is they tell you, your vet will, avian vet will tell you, don't pet the bird anywhere but their head, because that is something only their partner would do to them.

• 1:24:13Speaker 04

  And that can make them pissy at the end of the day.

• 1:24:16Jay Novella?

  Ah.

• 1:24:17Speaker 04

  So it's stuff like that.

• 1:24:18Jay Novella?

  So basically, don't turn your bird on.

• 1:24:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, people will be like, oh, he's so excited, he loves me. But the bird might actually have serious behavioral problems.

• 1:24:27Speaker 05

  Like you're, you're rubbing its genitals, dude. Don't do that.

• 1:24:30Speaker 04

  But yeah, that's.

• 1:24:31Speaker 02

  See, that's interesting.

• 1:24:32Speaker 04

  I think that if, there is a lot we can do to improve parrot welfare. One of the big things is there is a lack of avian vets. I myself have had three vets retire on me. By the way, my bird is a Pacific parrotlet. She's this big, she's yellow, and her name is Pikachu. And if I wanted to take her, so I used to take her to an avian specialist. And now if I want to do that, I have to drive her two hours north, pretty much.

• 1:25:02Speaker 02

  That's common.

• 1:25:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know it is. I, I was so lucky, I had one right down the road for me, but they sadly retired.

• 1:25:10Speaker 05

  You gotta stop picking the old vets, I think. They're all retiring on you.

• 1:25:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, she now sees that vet had a mentor who's not an official avian specialist, but she worked very closely with one. And I think that is kind of the best I can do without putting my bird, who hates car rides, through a two-hour ordeal to get checkups.

• 1:25:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, having, you know, having a bird vet as a friend, I imagine, which, which I actually do. It's a mixed bag. I don't have a bird, so I can't take advantage of that. But sometimes I'll just get a FaceTime call, like, hey, how you, and they're like, how you, how you doing? And it's like, oh, are you at work? It's like, yeah, take a look at this. And it's like, it's an owl. I'm like, yes, it is. Isn't it really cool? It's probably dead by tomorrow, but it's really cool.

• 1:25:55Jay Novella?

  But it's, it's interesting, you know, but I find birds fascinating because they have, they're, they have diverged from mammals for a very long time evolutionarily. And they've evolved their own intelligence. It's not mammalian intelligence, but we, it's so hard for us, us to get out of our mammal brain. We do this with aliens, right? We, now imagine, bird intelligence is really different than human intelligence. Imagine how different alien intelligence would be. And yet, we talk about the fact that many aliens are, are intellectually human, which is incredibly implausible, that that would be the case. It would be almost, it would be extremely difficult for us to sort of interface with them. All right, Jay, tell us about the Ig Nobel's. Right.

• 1:26:39Jay Novella?

  I'm going to start by asking Christian, Christian, what is a kiss scientifically?

• 1:26:43Speaker 02

  Ooh, an intentional planting of lips on another person.

• 1:26:48Jay Novella?

  Okay, would you say that?

• 1:26:50Speaker 05

  You can kiss non-people.

• 1:26:52Speaker 02

  Intentional planting of lips on another object that could be a person.

• 1:26:57Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I like, you know, the person thing, I think is a good, you can kiss your hand, but like, I don't think that's what they're talking about.

• 1:27:02Speaker 05

  You can kiss my ass.

• 1:27:07Jay Novella?

  But that would take all week, so.

• 1:27:08Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 1:27:10Jay Novella?

  Thank you. That was a joke from our childhood, I wasn't being mean, he knows what I'm.

• 1:27:14Speaker 05

  No, he wasn't being mean, but it was.

• 1:27:16Speaker 02

  That was from a movie, Hot Stuff, so.

• 1:27:18Speaker 05

  Oh, my God, so just out.

• 1:27:20Jay Novella?

  So the Ig Nobel, so first off, Ig Nobel, guys, this, this isn't like ridiculous research. These prizes are given to people for doing research that first makes you laugh. Or, you know, like you have some type of emotional kind of like ha, ha response or whatever. It's weird, it's, it's gross or whatever, but then it's supposed to make you think. So don't look at these like it's worthless, but there, there are some funny elements to a lot of these. So biomechanics, they did a study that they wanted to, to define what a cross-species kiss could be, right? But they had to define what a kiss is first. So Christian, they said, non-aggressive mouth-to-mouth contact, not aggressive. What's, what is aggressive, biting? I don't know.

• 1:28:02Speaker 02

  Ah, don't ask me.

• 1:28:03Jay Novella?

  Some movement involved, and the last one's my favorite, no transfer of food.

• 1:28:10Jay Novella?

  So if you're, if you're-

• 1:28:11Speaker 02

  You don't want people like baby birding.

• 1:28:13Jay Novella?

  Yeah, like, yeah, so basically, if you're feeding someone during the kiss, it's not kissing. Yeah.

• 1:28:19Speaker 04

  I mean, like, we could featherless biped this definition all we want, but like, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?

• 1:28:25Jay Novella?

  Yeah, that's, that's not kissing.

• 1:28:26Speaker 02

  It's romantic.

• 1:28:28Jay Novella?

  All right, clarification, not cross-species, across-species, right? So I'm not saying like, a dog and a person making out-

• 1:28:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, not talking about a dog and a cat living together.

• 1:28:38Jay Novella?

  But it is an interesting research that they did. They're just looking evolutionarily, like, what are the roots of it? Like, how far back did it go? They're saying it went back 16 million years. So it's a big deal. Like, kissing is a, is a, you know, a deeply seeded mammalian thing that, that is happening.

• 1:28:53Bob Novella?

  Isn't it relatively recent in human culture, though?

• 1:28:57Jay Novella?

  That's a good question. It's not as universal as you might think.

• 1:29:00Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:01Jay Novella?

  But then again, so is brushing your teeth, which might have something to do with it. The next one in economics, they did research that investigated the relationship between social class and unethical behavior. And they found out that people who have more money are more, they are more ethically compromised. Read more about it. It's an interesting study that they did, but I found that interesting. Then we're gonna go to the physics of blowing your nose. They studied what actually happens when you blow your nose.

• 1:29:28Speaker 02

  Cool.

• 1:29:29Jay Novella?

  This is in medicine. And again, it sounds kind of silly, but, you know, it is something that, that most of us do. And there are things that can happen-

• 1:29:37Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:29:37Jay Novella?

  Bad things can happen to you when you blow your nose. Like, for example, our mother, like, literally ruptured her inner ear from blowing her nose. Remember that?

• 1:29:45Bob Novella?

  Yes, I do.

• 1:29:46Speaker 05

  The big thing that could happen is, which has happened to me, if you blow your nose too vigorously, you could blow the viruses that are in your nose down your eustachian tube into your throat and cause a secondary infection. So you should try not to do that. So don't blow too vigorously. Don't like, really, really go for it.

• 1:30:01Bob Novella?

  What about, what about the blowing where you block one, you get a-

• 1:30:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's fine.

• 1:30:05Bob Novella?

  That's okay?

• 1:30:06Jay Novella?

  Just don't do it too hard, if you have to-

• 1:30:08Speaker 05

  Don't do it too hard.

• 1:30:08Jay Novella?

  Yeah, because you could actually do physiological damage to yourself.

• 1:30:12Speaker 05

  As a quick aside, Jay, I have to say, we've been covering the ignobles the whole, even before we were doing the podcast. It's just fun. Same guys doing it, though, just amazing longevity here. But one that I will never forget was we were at a lecture of the guy who does the ignobles, what does he have his name? Mark Abrams, is that good? We were at a lecture by Mark Abrams, he was talking about the ignobles for that year. And one of them was, I'm gonna paraphrase the title of the study, just threw up the title of the study, "The Use of Nitroglycerin to Accelerate Birth." And everyone laughed.

• 1:30:45Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:45Speaker 05

  Everyone laughed, and I'm like, why is that funny? I didn't get it. This is a reverse what I was just telling you before. This is the time when the doctor would not get a joke, because I forgot, because nitroglycerin is a drug that causes vasodilation. And if, I'm like, sure, of course it does. And the idea that the lay public thinks of nitroglycerin as an explosive was completely lost on you for a moment.

• 1:31:07Jay Novella?

  You're too smart to laugh, that's what I'm saying.

• 1:31:08Speaker 05

  I was too smart to laugh, Jay, that's what I'm saying. No, it's, we use words differently, we use words differently.

• 1:31:13Jay Novella?

  No, I like that, because it goes both ways. Because Steve, Steve, we were at, we were doing a show, and, and a joke was made, and Steve and one doctor in the audience got it and laughed. And then Steve explained to us what the joke was, and to the doctors-

• 1:31:26Bob Novella?

  Which makes it funnier, right?

• 1:31:27Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:31:27Jay Novella?

  But it, but it wasn't funny. It wasn't funny. Like, so you had to be a doctor to actually find it humorous, which I, I think is funny.

• 1:31:35Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:31:35Jay Novella?

  Okay. So, this next one, I think, is, the title of it is, "Scientists Stepped on Venomous Snakes." So why were they stepping on snakes? I'm sure they did it with their-

• 1:31:45Speaker 05

  To see if they would strike, I guess.

• 1:31:46Jay Novella?

  Yes, to decide if they would, they'd bite them. So what they did was, they just, they were trying to figure out where and how much weight would you have to put on the snake to, to make it do the bite thing? Because not all contact with the snake would do that. Not horribly unuseful information. I think it's gonna be down to like, the species of snake, though. It won't be like, okay, all snakes behave the same way when they get stepped on, right? But it is a cool, cool thing. The physics, and I, I agree with this, they, they were trying to figure out the best, uh, best way to build a splash-free urinal. If you aren't someone who uses urinals- Men's rooms are disgusting. Universally, everywhere where men urinate, wherever it is, it's disgusting. And urinals are nasty. I have a, I have an anecdote. Guys, let's get real with each other.

• 1:32:31Jay Novella?

  Do you ever notice that when you're wearing shorts, and you pee in a toilet or a urinal, that some of it gets on your legs? You feel it splashing your leg? Don't look at me like, the face is guy, the secretary did it. Maybe you don't drink enough water, sir.

• 1:32:47Jay Novella?

  But no, the urine is indeed bouncing out of whatever you're peeing into, including a toilet, and it's hitting you. And it's hitting everywhere, by the way. So it's disgusting. So like, any research into this is, is important. And they, they did make some headway on it, so that's cool, you can look into that.

• 1:33:03Speaker 04

  I would wanna, I'm interested in that, because I have a habit of closing the toilet seat in my bathroom where my toothbrush is before I flush it. Because I'm paranoid about this flashback of that. So I would want to be validated on that, and that I'm correct, and I should. But it would be interesting to know, even if I'm wrong.

• 1:33:19Speaker 05

  Should you bother?

• 1:33:20Jay Novella?

  In technology, they were using, uh, they were using- Mosquito, like, the, what do you call it? Like, the nozzle that a mosquito has.

• 1:33:28Bob Novella?

  Minut, minut.

• 1:33:29Speaker 05

  Probuskas?

• 1:33:31Jay Novella?

  Is that proboscis, it's proboscis?

• 1:33:32Speaker 05

  I think it's proboscis.

• 1:33:34Jay Novella?

  Proboscis, they were using it to do 3D printing.

• 1:33:37Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:33:38Jay Novella?

  How cool is that? They were using a, um, the nozzle of a mosquito-

• 1:33:43Speaker 05

  The proboscis.

• 1:33:43Jay Novella?

  To, to use it to help, to get really fine filament 3D printing.

• 1:33:48Speaker 02

  We call those necrobots.

• 1:33:49Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:50Speaker 02

  I mean, seriously, there, there, there are other studies, such as using, for a gripper, for the end of robotic arm, they use a dead spider, and they'll inject or remove fluid. Actually, one of my talks today, yeah, and so that way it grips things, yeah.

• 1:34:03Bob Novella?

  That's why a dead spider is, the legs are all curled up, because it's like, the, uh, the pistons, right, are drained of the fluid, so they, they-

• 1:34:09Speaker 04

  Birds are like that, too. They're, this is the relaxed position, and this is the extended position. So that's how they fall asleep on twigs. Is their feet just, like, grab?

• 1:34:19Jay Novella?

  They have to spend energy to open their hands, but not, not to keep it closed. So another award was given to a group that were studying olfaction, they wanted to know, why do babies smell better than teenagers?

• 1:34:32Jay Novella?

  Now, I can, I could, they, all I had to do was call me. Because I, I might, I have teenagers in my house now, and my son, my god, okay?

• 1:34:43Bob Novella?

  I mean, it's evolution, it's evolution, man, because, because no babies would make it out of babyhood if they smelled like teenagers. They, the human race would end.

• 1:34:53Jay Novella?

  They say, they were trying to figure out if the, the smell was a part of parent bonding and things like that. Interesting, really cool study, I, you know, look into it. It's like, we don't have time to get into all the details. Another one, in peace, we like friends who are nice to us, but maybe not nice to our enemies. So they were studying, like, do you like people more who are mean to your enemies?

• 1:35:16Speaker 05

  I think it's a little betrayal when somebody who's, who's your friend is nice to your enemy.

• 1:35:20Jay Novella?

  Right. Yeah, of course. That means they got your back. Soil science, scientists buried 1,000 pairs of underwear. Anybody have a guess what they were doing?

• 1:35:29Speaker 02

  Time capsule.

• 1:35:31Jay Novella?

  They were basically-

• 1:35:32Speaker 05

  A biodegradable art?

• 1:35:33Jay Novella?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. They wanted to know what bacteria and fungi and other organisms in the soil would, you know, be able to like, decompose the, the material faster.

• 1:35:44Bob Novella?

  I have an anecdote for that.

• 1:35:45Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:46Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah?

• 1:35:47Bob Novella?

  I was making zombie clothes. So, so distressing clothes to look realistic is very, very hard. So one technique I came across was, you go to a pond and just pick up, get the water, make a, a little, make, dig a hole, throw your clothes, the clothes in there, preferably like natural fibers, not polyester or anything like that. Then you pour the, uh, the pond water on it, bury it, wait a couple of months. And I did this, I did this, and when the clothes, when you dig them up, they are wonderfully and realistically distressed. You know, but they're kind of nasty. And I never really tried to replicate that, but I might have to do that again, because it's a really good technique to distress clothes for zombies.

• 1:36:28Jay Novella?

  Yeah, this year Bob's doing that same study with a corpse.

• 1:36:33Speaker 05

  All right, thanks, Jay. Chris, are you gonna finish us off on the news segment, or the discussion segment, with a talk about speedrunning in video games?

• 1:36:41Speaker 02

  Yes. I've all, okay.

• 1:36:44Jay Novella?

  This is awesome.

• 1:36:45Speaker 02

  This is really just an excuse for me to talk about one of my favorite hobbies, which is not speedrunning video games, is watching people speedrun video games.

• 1:36:53Speaker 04

  Have you ever tried?

• 1:36:54Speaker 02

  I dabble, I dabble.

• 1:36:55Speaker 04

  In what?

• 1:36:55Speaker 02

  Uh, Mega Man X mostly.

• 1:36:59Speaker 02

  So, for those who don't know, speedrunning in video games is exactly what it sounds like. How fast can you finish a video game? And it is such a vibrant community. People now make their livelihoods streaming and recording themselves. Good livelihoods. Good, they do good money streaming and recording themselves, doing speedruns of classic games, weird games you'd never heard of. It's just, it's so engaging. There's something so interesting about it. So why am I talking about it here? Well, one, there's a little bit of news associated that somewhat in, in, in the recent past, some interesting tidbits in the history of speedrunning video games. But also, I think it has a lot of parallels to how science operates. And I think there's a lot of, and, and, and now explain why, okay?

• 1:37:42Speaker 02

  Well, first off, so in August of this year, very recently, a speedrunner by the name of Nitski, Nifsky, Nifsky, you, you, you can't see it, but Julia is making all kinds of gesticulations.

• 1:37:53Speaker 04

  I know exactly who you're talking about.

• 1:37:55Speaker 02

  Okay. Who is a speedrunner of the original Super Mario Brothers for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985, okay? He set a new world record, okay? Well, how long does a game usually take to, to go, do you know? Oh, uh. Well, it's like one level, right? I mean, one. So, well, well, okay. So for me to do Super Mario Brothers, you know, it'll take like an hour, maybe half an hour, right? Okay. Uh, the world record is currently four minutes, 52 seconds and point, you know, point 332 seconds at the end, okay? All right. That is the. Three decimal point. The, yes, oh, yes.

• 1:38:27Speaker 04

  And sometimes it comes down to.

• 1:38:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, it matters, it matters. Well, okay, so, but to be clear, the fundamental unit of time in a video game is a frame, as in your frames per second. And, um, Super Mario Brothers operates at 60 frames per second. New world record. Why is this a bigger deal, though? Well, it is believed that this is just four frames shy of the absolute minimum possible time for finishing Super Mario Brothers.

• 1:38:53Speaker 04

  How do they, how do they know what the minimum time is?

• 1:38:55Speaker 02

  That is, I'm glad you asked that question, Julia, okay? Setting me up, setting me up here. So this, this gets to why, one of the many reasons I find speedrunning very interesting. Because how do you know what is the fastest time? There's no other way to get it, to get it faster. Well, the short answer is we, is we don't, we don't. Um, but there's a really vibrant community of people trying to figure out what that fastest time is. One could argue that that isn't, that it, that that is a scientific endeavor, okay? Absolutely. Oh, optimal, optimal paths. Oh, and, and, and, and, and all kinds of ways, Bob. Traveling, traveling salesman, perhaps? So, well, it gets, it's even more complicated than that, Bob. So, you gotta, so first off, for those who don't know, people speedrunning these games, this is absolutely insane. You can really get sucked down a rabbit hole, rabbit hole, the degree to which people go

• 1:39:39Speaker 02

  to, to optimize their time for the games. And it's not just someone who's really good with twitch reflexes on a controller, like, oh my God, they're so good at it. There is a full-on investigation to try to figure out how to do a game faster. And, and just to know that the, the, the scale of these speedruns, the game Elden Ring, this massive, huge game, right? Current, uh, current world record, 52 minutes, very fast. Uh, but that game could be literally a hundred hour game. Yeah, hundred hour game, 52 minutes. Uh, another classic example is the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Some people consider that to be the best game of all, all time. Current world record, 3 minutes, 47 seconds, a lot of which is a cutscene, okay? A fair bit is, okay? So, and the, and, and in some of these games, they will, they will create glitches that

• 1:40:23Speaker 02

  actually, that, that, that look like complete nonsense to the, if you're watching it on the screen. You'll see the character jumping around against a wall, against the thing, doing a, doing a slash, and all of a sudden opening a chest, and all of a sudden, in the chest is an item that was never there in the game before. They are overwriting the memory within the game itself to provide new instructions to execute, which is go to the final scene of the game and you win. That's, so they're doing elaborate, that's why you could take a game like Zelda Ocarina, like Zelda Ocarina of Time, and finish it in three minutes and 52. Is it a backdoor? It's, it's, they're making a backdoor. They're making it. So they're basically. Isn't that cheating, why isn't that cheating? Oh, oh, there are subcategories.

• 1:41:04Speaker 04

  They're cheating in a purposeful way.

• 1:41:06Speaker 02

  These are called glitches. Taking advantage of a glitch, man.

• 1:41:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:41:10Speaker 02

  So, so, so there are many categories of speedruns, uh, Steve. So like there, there, there are things called glitchless, where a community of people agrees, this is a glitch you can't use, this glitch you can't use. But then, but the most competitive, I love the 100% speedruns, where you have to do every single frickin' thing in the game. That's what I like to do when I play my games, when I played Cheers of the Kingdom, I completed that 100%, no spoilers, by the way, and no glitches on my own, oh my God. Anyway, but, but, but the most competitive are the any percent speedruns. Literally, you do whatever you need to do to get to the end as fast as possible, and glitches are on the table. And so, they will find ways to, with, with inputs, override the memory and, and execute code, and, and this is elaborate ways, yeah. And just to clarify, these are pre-existing glitches?

• 1:41:55Speaker 02

  They're not hacking the game and making glitches? No, no, no, no, this is something. They're exploiting pre-existing glitches. This is something that you could do if you had a controller in your house with the original system, they're all, yeah, like that. So, these things become super elaborate. So, how do you find these things? Well, there are actually subcategories of people in the speedrunning world. There are so-called glitch hunters, right? They're, they're actually looking for things that could potentially help them in the game. The, and it's sort of like an applied research, right? Like, a lot of times, there's a wall in the way. It's like, if I have a way, way to get past that wall, I can shave two hours off my time. Sometimes they'll do this for shaving a second off your time, but. That sounds monotonous, man. Oh, but, but, but it, it, it's sound, but it, it sounds like they're just running into the wall randomly, and sometimes they do that, right?

• 1:42:39Speaker 02

  But what's most interesting is that there are people who just look for random glitches and have reverse engineered the code of the game to figure out where they could be exploited, right? Yeah. So they, so they've reverse engineered the code and say, okay, well, if I manage to overload, overload this number, so it rolls over past the highest integer value available, becomes negative, that'll make this other avenue available for me to exploit the game. It becomes, you can see some of the explanation for this, they're basically full-on computer science projects, research projects. And, and my favorite example of this, before we get back to the original Mario, Super Mario Brothers, is Super Mario 64 for the Nintendo 64.

• 1:43:16Speaker 04

  Is this gonna be the?

• 1:43:18Speaker 02

  Yes, you know where I'm going with this.

• 1:43:19Speaker 04

  I think I do.

• 1:43:20Speaker 02

  Yes. So, so as we get back to the end of, so, so my favorite example is there's a guy, his name is Panenkoik2012. I, I, Julia, I'm, I'm, I'm speaking your language here. And his whole thing is he, is he's obsessed with completing everything in Super Mario Brothers 64, which is collecting all 120 stars, these tickets in the game. Uh, but what you do in Super Mario Brothers, what's the thing that Mario does? What does he do? Run and jump. He jumps, right? What do you do to press jump? You hit the A button. Yeah. He, he wants to do it in the minimum number of A presses possible, potentially zero. Can he beat Super Mario Brothers 64 in zero A presses? He's not yet achieved it. What's that? 14. Close.

• 1:44:02Speaker 02

  14, collecting, it's less, it's less, it could be less now, last I checked, it was 14. In order to do this, he will, first off, he will use, what a lot of people use in this, in this community when you're hunting for glitches, are TASs, T A S, Tool-Assisted Speedrun Tools, which basically allow you to put in pre-scripted inputs into the game. That way you can check, would this work? You don't have to rely upon your, your meat thumbs to do it, right? And, and so, in order to get up this one, this, to get past this one hill you had to jump up, what he showed in this video that has gone viral as of like almost 10 years ago now, was, is he reverse engineered that there's a floating point difference in, in between the position where Mario is and how the collisions with objects are detected?

• 1:44:46Speaker 02

  And he exploited this to say, okay, if I build up enough speed, Mario will go so far in one frame, it'll pass over the collision detection, go to a parallel universe where there is no walls. And he calls them parallel universes, and he plots a course through these parallel universes, and he teleports back to where he needs to go. And it requires him to run against a wall to build up speed for 12 hours, all to shave off not one, but what's called a half of an A press. Okay, so there's a video called, you know, uh, the, watch for rolling rocks in point five A presses. It's incredible. And this guy, he's just doing it for the fun of it. And sometimes he'll do these just random glitches for fun. He wanted to show that the pendulum swinging in, in a level in Mario were not caused by

• 1:45:28Speaker 02

  any physics simulation, it was, it was actually succeeded by the position of the character. So to prove that he could manipulate this pendulum with the character, he decided to make pendulum spin so fast that it would crash the game. So, and which took five weeks? And he, and he synchronized his code so it would execute, it would finish executing on, at midnight on New Year's Eve. So, and he streamed it live, right? Okay, but this all gets back, okay. But what's interesting about this is sometimes people are just searching for these glitches just for fun, because it's interesting. That's basic science, right? And, and, and then later, people realize, oh my God, that glitch is actually really helpful for me to shave off time in this thing. And these applied researchers will find ways to route around. You're talking about traveling salesman problem, Bob? There are people who do routing.

• 1:46:13Speaker 02

  They'd say, okay, well, in order to shave off time, I come up with this route. You do a computer op, people do straight-up computer optimizations of these things. Uh, people, um, which brings us, and which brings us back to Mario, the original Super Mario Brothers. This is such a widely poured over game. The code is so well understood. All the glitches that are available that people think that it is actually four frames away from us achieving the best possible optimal time. That's widely believed to be the case. And someone might achieve it soon. This guy almost had it, but he made four tiny little one frame mistakes on the last level of the game.

• 1:46:49Jay Novella?

  What a screw up.

• 1:46:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know. He choked, man.

• 1:46:51Speaker 04

  That's a sixtieth of a second, by the way.

• 1:46:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, so four sixtieth of a second. You do the math, right? That's how close it is to achieving this. But it's a fun. I love it when my, when these fun hobbies have such fun parallels to actual science. It's, it's, it's taking these, these, these youngins, let's face it, they're youngins, and teaching them how to do science for what they think is a practical goal. I think that's really great. Now, the thing that I do wanna see, and I challenge the speed and running world to tell me if such a case exists, where a speedrunning computer science innovation somehow gave us a practical application in other sciences, I was gonna say real science.

• 1:47:29Jay Novella?

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:47:29Speaker 05

  Outside of speedrunning.

• 1:47:30Speaker 02

  Go, yeah, outside of speedrunning, right? So that, that, but, but I, but I, but I, but it's such an interesting, vast and rich world to look into. And you will be fascinated by the sheer cleverness and, um, that people go through just to shave off milliseconds of time.

• 1:47:47Jay Novella?

  I mean, it's amazing what people do when they don't have any responsibilities. Christian, Christian, I assume these guys absolutely despise software updates.

• 1:47:58Speaker 02

  Well, thankfully, I mean, because these games are, well, yeah, for the new games, but these games are so old.

• 1:48:02Jay Novella?

  These are like, yeah. Sacrosanct, not changing, yeah.

• 1:48:05Speaker 02

  I mean, think about it.

• 1:48:06Speaker 04

  Well, it does change depending on the console you're using. Sometimes they'll have a console that was like only sold in Japan.

• 1:48:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:48:12Speaker 04

  And the code will be slightly different than the one that was sold in America. And that will ruin the whole category.

• 1:48:17Speaker 02

  It gets, it gets crazy. I mean, first off, think about the fact that like, just some Japanese engineer 20 years ago, 30 years ago, decided, I'm gonna write the if statement this way. And now it's seeding a tighter glitch. Oh, he, he assigns variable to be the floating point instead of an integer. And now these glitches exist that prepare all universes. And, but, uh, but, and, and, um, sorry, I'm done, done.

• 1:48:38Speaker 05

  That's okay, because it's time for science or fiction.

• 1:48:41Speaker 02

  Woo.

• 1:48:45Speaker 00

  It's time for science or fiction.

• 1:48:54Speaker 05

  Each week I come up with three science news items or facts. Two are real and one is fake. And I challenge everyone to tell me which one they think is the fake. There's a theme for this science fiction. The theme is weird stuff that NASA did.

• 1:49:08Jay Novella?

  Well, that's great.

• 1:49:09Speaker 05

  Yep. Okay, here we go. Item number one, early astronauts could not get life insurance. So, starting with Apollo 11, right before launch, they signed hundreds of special envelopes their families could later sell as a financial failsafe. All right, number two, Skylab's uncontrolled de-orbit in 1979 resulted in a debris field across Western Australia, prompting one small town, particularly hard hit, to fine NASA $40,000, a sum they paid. And item number three, George Aldrich has worked for NASA for over 50 years as a sniffer, smelling objects before they can go in a crew compartment to make sure they don't smell too much.

• 1:49:55Speaker 05

  Okay, we're gonna start over here on the right with Bob. We'll get the, uh, the panels of choices first, and then we'll see what the audience thinks about it.

• 1:50:04Jay Novella?

  All right.

• 1:50:04Speaker 05

  No, no coaching so far.

• 1:50:05Jay Novella?

  I mean, I guess it makes sense that they, astronauts, weren't getting life insurance, because I mean, they're like test pilots. I mean, they're, imagine what it would cost them, uh, what their premium would be. That's a, that's a great idea. I just love the idea of them signing envelopes that can be, that can be, actually make money after they're gone. So that, I love that idea. I want that to be true. Uh, Skylab, yeah, I don't think there were any regulations for de-orbiting, especially something that big. And, uh, it just was bad luck that it actually landed, you know, on a continent and not the water, which is what, 70% of the earth? That seems plausible to me, so I'm gonna go with that too. It just said, that just seems totally reasonable that that would happen. And now this third one here, the NASA sniffer, the sniffer guy.

• 1:50:49Jay Novella?

  Never heard of a NASA sniffer guy. I mean, I don't have a lot to go on there. It just sounds a little much, so I'll just say that, that, uh, that that's fiction.

• 1:50:58Speaker 05

  The sniffing is the fiction. Okay, Julia, this is your first science or fiction.

• 1:51:02Speaker 04

  Well, you know, I, I've played a lot, obviously. Unfortunately, I think I do a little bit worse than chance. Um, and if you, if you took, if you round up all of my answers throughout time, one of the only times I was right is because I caught a mistake in the science or fiction. So I said the wrong answer, but I was technically correct. And that's really all I got going for me.

• 1:51:24Jay Novella?

  It's the best kind of correct.

• 1:51:26Speaker 04

  Okay, so early astronauts could not get life insurance, signing special envelopes that they could sell. I, I could see them doing that anyway, even if, you know, they could get life insurance. So maybe it wasn't caused by the lack of life insurance that they did that. But I could see, you know, I could see them not having life insurance, and I could see them writing envelopes for, for, so their families have some money later. Skylab's uncontrolled de-orbit. This is gonna sound so pessimistic, but I could believe having an uncontrolled de-orbit. I could believe the debris hitting a small town. I don't know if I believe that NASA paid the fine because of the,

• 1:52:11Speaker 04

  you know, obviously I don't know a lot about international or Australian law, but the logistics of deciding how much NASA was at fault, how much the town was damaged by the satellite, and deciding, you know, how much money it is, and then actually setting the precedent that satellite damage would have to be paid later. I don't know if I believe that.

• 1:52:31Speaker 02

  Steve, can you elaborate on uncontrolled de-orbit? Does that mean they're like, well, it's going down, whatever happens, happens? Or did they actually try to make it de-orbit?

• 1:52:41Speaker 05

  They just failed.

• 1:52:41Speaker 02

  Okay, all right. Just wanna make sure that they weren't that level of negligent. Okay, go ahead.

• 1:52:46Speaker 04

  And then possibly, you know, this might be one of the reasons why I don't do that well at science or fiction, but I want three to be true so bad that I'm gonna say that's science. That is so funny, having a sniffer for NASA, because there are some people, yeah, I'll be like, totally like anecdotal evidence. Like, you do know some people who are just a little more sensitive to smells in a room than you are. And you kind of expect that that person is like the minimum baseline of like how bad smells are. I just think that's so funny, and I want it to be true so bad. So I'm gonna say the second one is fiction.

• 1:53:18Speaker 05

  Okay, the Skylab falling is fiction. All right, Jake, are you gonna?

• 1:53:22Jay Novella?

  Yeah, so the early astronauts, the life insurance thing, um, I think that's science. I, I can totally see a circumstance where they couldn't get insurance, and they were, they were trying to mitigate that by, you know, basically making something that their families could sell to generate money. That, sure, that's, that seems legitimate enough. The Skylab one, the uncontrolled de-orbit in 1979. So I, I remember when this happened, I, I just, I think I remember like a, a big chunk of Skylab falling in some person's backyard. And for some reason, the state of Alabama popped into my head, which, I know, it doesn't mean anything because it's memory, right? But, so I, I don't know, I'm holding back a little bit with the Skylab one. I'm, I'll, I'll come back to it. The sniffer guy, George Aldrich, is this someone I should know who he is?

• 1:54:08Speaker 05

  I don't know.

• 1:54:09Jay Novella?

  Okay, all right, that, that's helpful. Um, so for 50 years, the guy's been sniffing. Now, what if they have, want to put glue on these, you know, up on a ship? He's gonna sniff the glue?

• 1:54:19Speaker 05

  I guess.

• 1:54:20Jay Novella?

  You didn't find that funny at all?

• 1:54:21Speaker 05

  No.

• 1:54:22Jay Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:54:22Speaker 05

  That's my poker pitch, it's my science fiction.

• 1:54:24Jay Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:54:24Bob Novella?

  Jocelyn found it funny, Jake.

• 1:54:26Jay Novella?

  Got it, Jocelyn. I mean, you'd think that they'd want this, you'd think, and then would they leave it to some guy? And like, you know, he's been doing it for 50 years. So let's, let's just say that he's an old guy now, because he has to be. And they still have this old guy sniffing things to see if they should go. And like, would they trust the olfactory of an old man? I just don't know. If it's true, then it must be more of an honor, an honor, like a, a, a, honor, what do you call that? An honorary position or whatever. But there's, I don't know, there's something about that one I really don't like either. So let's just say, the first one is science. Between these two, de-orbit in Australia, I don't remember anything about Australia, $40,000. You know, if you go back into 1979, still not a lot of money.

• 1:55:07Jay Novella?

  You know, a house could have been less than that, much less than that in the, in the 70s, I'm assuming. But then is that US dollars or is that Australian dollars? You know, this is really, you're all over the place here, Steve. But you don't care. You know, Christian, I'm gonna go against my original assumption, and I'll, I'll say the sniffer is true and the Skylab information is incorrect.

• 1:55:25Speaker 02

  Okay, all right.

• 1:55:27Speaker 05

  All right, Christian.

• 1:55:27Speaker 02

  Okay, so, uh, early astronauts couldn't get the life insurance. They sell these envelopes. I mean, I'm trying to think of 1960s, like, the idea of what was like a collectible you could sell. And like, they're like, oh, you know, it, it's got my signature. And the idea of signing an envelope, is that like the version of like collecting baseball cards? And they're worth money later someday? I, I can buy that, so I, I, but like, I, I, that seems, seems believable. Skylab, Skylab's control, uncontrolled de-orbit, the $40,000. I can imagine paying it out of a sense of international cooperation, that, that NASA wants a good relationship with Australia. It doesn't wanna, and, and especially if they're, you know, collaborating on like telescope stuff,

• 1:56:12Speaker 02

  you know, or whatever's going on. I can buy that. But I feel like there's, I, there's a lot of details that could be twisted in that. But I just kinda believe it. Number three, I totally buy that there's one dude at an organization. Now, I think about institutions when you're like, oh, there's this one person, there's some lady, some, some guy, they've just been around forever, they're the person that does the thing. Why change it if they're still there? So I mean, you have, I mean, like, that's just, that's something that happens. And I can imagine something, that someone's smelling all these things. I wonder if there's, if this is the fiction, because you, it's not about like, they don't smell too much. There's something about the smelling for, or maybe he tasted, or maybe he licked everything on the spaceship. I don't know.

• 1:56:55Speaker 02

  But, uh, maybe something, there's something that got twisted there. So I'm gonna go number three is the fiction. I'm imagining there's some kind of strange twist to what he was doing.

• 1:57:05Speaker 04

  Did me saying I'm really bad at this affect any of your answers?

• 1:57:09Speaker 05

  All right, so we got the, the panel is split. Let's take a quick survey of the, of the live audience here. So if you, we're gonna do the one clap thing, you guys all know how to do this. We'll practice once, clap when I get here, ready?

• 1:57:22Speaker 05

  Good, good enough. All right. So if you think that the astronauts couldn't get insurance is the fiction clap. If you think that Skylab's crashing into Australia is the fiction clap.

• 1:57:34Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:35Speaker 05

  And if you think that the sniffer guy is the fiction clap.

• 1:57:39Bob Novella?

  All right.

• 1:57:40Speaker 05

  I think the third one, though, I thought maybe.

• 1:57:42Speaker 04

  Number two and number three were split by side of the room.

• 1:57:44Bob Novella?

  Do it again. Do two and three again.

• 1:57:46Speaker 05

  I will do. All right. So Skylab fiction.

• 1:57:49Speaker 05

  The sniffer. It's hard to say. I don't know if that guy's just a loud clapper or. Too, too few people to really generalize. All right. So I guess we'll take these in order. We'll start.

• 1:58:01Bob Novella?

  Encouraged, I'm encouraged.

• 1:58:03Speaker 05

  Well, anyway, the panel all agreed that number one is assigned, so we'll start there. So early astronauts could not get life insurance. So starting with Apollo 11, right before launch, they signed hundreds of special envelopes. Their families could later sell as a financial failsafe. Everyone on the panel and most of the audience, a few people in the audience say this is the fiction. Most people up here think it's science and this one is. Now here's my question.

• 1:58:27Bob Novella?

  Hate when he does that.

• 1:58:28Speaker 05

  Why didn't the US government just insure them?

• 1:58:31Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:32Speaker 05

  Right? I mean, yeah, I can see our private insurance company. Yeah, you're going up and no, there's no way we're going to insure you. But why wouldn't the government say, all right, guys, I mean, you're our test pilots, you're NASA. Just all right, yeah, we'll give you some government sponsored insurance for your families. Like the, the army did that in World War II. Soldiers could buy insurance for their, for their families. And they were way more likely to get killed than the Apollo astronauts were statistically speaking. Anyway, this one is science. This is absolutely science. Now, why envelopes? Why do you guys think they were signing envelopes?

• 1:59:03Bob Novella?

  They were special envelopes.

• 1:59:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, but why?

• 1:59:05Speaker 02

  US government, because a government issued stamps or something like that?

• 1:59:09Speaker 04

  USPS.

• 1:59:10Speaker 05

  They were post, they were, because they'd be postmarked the day of the launch. So somebody, so they signed hundreds, this, they're, remember, they're in isolation. Prior to their launch, because remember, they don't, you don't want to get a cold right before you go up in space. So they're in isolation and they're signing each of them hundreds of envelopes. And then they gave them to a volunteer who went to the post office and had them all postmarked the day of the launch. So that's what made them a special souvenir, collectible. It's they're signed by the, especially if they died, right? They signed them on the day that they launched and it's validated by the postal service stamp. And it worked. They, of course, none of the, except after Apollo. No, no, after Apollo three, right?

• 1:59:56Bob Novella?

  Didn't they rename it Apollo one was the one that got voted on?

• 1:59:59Speaker 05

  Was Apollo one, yeah, Apollo one, where they, they, the three astronauts died, but none of the, this is Apollo 11. So none of the astronauts from Apollo 11 onward died, but their families still had the envelopes, right? They still were collectibles. So right now, what do you think they sell for? Like, if you had one of these things and you sold it on eBay or whatever.

• 2:00:16Bob Novella?

  What you got?

• 2:00:17Speaker 05

  What do you think? A thousand dollars?

• 2:00:19Speaker 04

  I'd say at least a thousand dollars.

• 2:00:21Bob Novella?

  I'd think 50,000.

• 2:00:22Speaker 02

  No, a thousand and one.

• 2:00:25Speaker 05

  They typically go, they typically go between five and $10,000.

• 2:00:28Bob Novella?

  Wow.

• 2:00:29Speaker 05

  So that's, that's not bad. That's not bad. Now, before Apollo 11, what did they do?

• 2:00:33Bob Novella?

  What do you mean before Apollo?

• 2:00:34Speaker 05

  Well, because there were astronauts before Apollo 11, they didn't get insurance either.

• 2:00:38Speaker 02

  What did they sign?

• 2:00:40Speaker 05

  So yeah, the envelope signing scheme didn't come up until Apollo 11, but they had other things that they could do. So one of the things they did.

• 2:00:45Bob Novella?

  They brought stuff into space.

• 2:00:47Speaker 05

  Well, that was illegal. And that's what ended the envelope signing thing, actually. On Apollo 16, somebody smuggled some envelopes on. Because then now they're selling a souvenir that was in space.

• 2:00:58Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:59Speaker 05

  Right? But that, but that was, of course, violated the, the rules because you can't have people smuggling weight onto the Apollo capsules. And so it's all right, that's it. No more envelopes for you. So they ended the program, but I think with Apollo 17 because of the violation in Apollo 16. So one of the things that they did was the astronauts were really good because they, they were, they looked out for each other as well. So they kind of pooled their resources so that, so first of all, one thing they did was that Life Magazine made a deal with the Mercury astronauts, which carried over to the Apollo astronauts, that they would give, the astronauts would give Life Magazine exclusivity for their background, life stories and whatnot. And then they would pay a chunk, a big chunk of money, I think it was like $500,000.

• 2:01:44Speaker 05

  And then the astronauts agreed that no matter who was more famous or got more whatever, or went up in whatever order, this is for everybody's family. So the Mercury astronauts are shared it all evenly regardless. And they also used that money and invested in local real estate that would provide ongoing passive income for their families. So they basically were very smart and proactive because they knew that, hey, we, all of us could die, right? So we have to make sure we're financially covering, covering our families. So very, very, very forward looking. Okay, let's go on to number two. Skylab's uncontrolled de-orbit in 1979 resulted in a debris field across Western Australia, prompting one small town, particularly hard hit, to fine NASA $40,000, a sum they paid.

• 2:02:28Speaker 05

  Julia and Jay think this is the fiction. Bob and Christian think this one is science.

• 2:02:34Bob Novella?

  Vague, potentially false memory of this.

• 2:02:36Speaker 05

  This one is the fiction.

• 2:02:40Speaker 04

  Damn it.

• 2:02:40Bob Novella?

  Hell, man, I remember it.

• 2:02:42Speaker 05

  Now, I'll tell you, not, not all of it's the fiction. So Skylab did have an uncontrolled de-orbit in 1979. You guys remember that. That was big news at the time.

• 2:02:51Bob Novella?

  Was I right about what I remembered?

• 2:02:54Speaker 05

  I think you're thinking of the Challenger or whatever. What was the one that, not the Challenger, the Columbia? I think that's what you think.

• 2:03:00Speaker 02

  Oh, oh, three.

• 2:03:01Speaker 05

  That, because that broke up over the US. No, so they didn't really calculate when, where Skylab was going to de-orbit. And then they figured out, oh no. Well, what happened was there was a solar storm. It puffed up the atmosphere. This happens, right? It increased the drag and that, that shortened the time. They thought it was going to de-orbit in the late, early 1980s. Like, no, it's going to de-orbit earlier and it's going to hit California. So then they, they induced a tumble to delay its de-orbit enough that it would land in the Pacific Ocean and they overshot. And it, and it landed in the Indian Ocean and Western Australia. And they're, they're, this was a fairly low population area of Australia, but there was this one small town that was, had a huge debris field across it.

• 2:03:47Bob Novella?

  Food science.

• 2:03:47Speaker 05

  So there were two NASA, new, two NASA employees were visiting this town. And I don't know if it was the mayor, somebody, somebody official from the town presented them with a $400 ticket for littering.

• 2:04:02Speaker 04

  Ooh.

• 2:04:03Speaker 05

  Not $40,000. It was a $400 ticket and they laughed and they never paid it. They took it for the joke that it was. It wasn't serious. It was just a joke. They never paid it. And Julia, I think it was absolutely right. I don't think they would ever want to create that precedent of.

• 2:04:17Speaker 04

  The curse is lifted.

• 2:04:18Speaker 05

  We're paying. But 30 years later, as a sort of publicity stunt, a radio station raised the $400 and paid the ticket. They backpaid NASA's littering ticket from this town in Australia. But no, NASA did not pay $40,000 for, for, for littering this town and the rest of Australia, which means that George Aldrich has worked for NASA for over 50 years as a sniffer, smelling objects before they can go in a crew compartment to make sure they don't smell too much. He started doing this with Apollo. He did it in the shuttle program. And now he sniffs things that go, that would go up on ISS in any enclosed space where people are going to be, any enclosed crew compartment. So why is that?

• 2:04:59Bob Novella?

  He's a snapper, a super sniffer, isn't he?

• 2:05:00Speaker 05

  Well, he, so you, you brought up like, isn't he old now and why is he still doing this? He was 18 when he started. So he's 68. He has to pass a test every year. He has to score 10 out of 10 on a sniff test in order to keep doing this. And he's not the only one. There's a team of sniffers. I think there's 20 at any given time. And he's just the chief sniffer because he's been doing it longer. He's doing it longer than anyone else. So he started as a volunteer. This is all volunteer work. And then after a couple of years, he'd like worked for NASA. He was very reliable. He showed up more than anybody else.

• 2:05:35Bob Novella?

  You tell me they chose chief sniffer instead of senior sniffer?

• 2:05:39Speaker 05

  No, that's an informal title that he was given. He is really, he, he, he started working full time for NASA as a chemist. Right? So he's a, his official title is some kind of chemist. And, but he, his job is to, to smell stuff. So why, and so they do it in a blinded fashion. So he doesn't see what he's smelling. So there can't be any accusation of any bias or influence or anything. And he, and he and the other sniffers and, and, and each thing is smelled by multiple people, you know, and they have, and they had come up with an average aggregate sniff number. They get a number from one to five. One is odorless. Five is, oh my God, that's the worst thing I've ever smelled in my life. And, and there's a cutoff of 2.5. If you're 2.5 or less, you're good.

• 2:06:24Speaker 05

  Over 2.5, you cannot go into space on the ISS or in any crew compartment. And why is, what's the reason for that?

• 2:06:31Bob Novella?

  Because it would, it, it would drive the people crazy up there. Because it would drive the people crazy up there.

• 2:06:36Speaker 04

  Do they need to sniff for other things that if something is too odorous, they couldn't sniff the other thing?

• 2:06:41Speaker 05

  One is that they need to be able to smell, like if there's an electrical fire or whatever. So that's one. But it's, the, the thing I'm looking for here, guys, I'm sorry to do this to you, but is that because then maybe it's obvious, this is a closed loop, right? This is a closed system. The air is, is never refreshed.

• 2:06:58Speaker 02

  We assume that.

• 2:06:59Speaker 05

  Nothing dissipates. This is, it's 100% recirculated air. So anything, any odor that gets into the air is there forever. And so they. So they have to, well, yeah, but they have to, they have to limit as much as possible, anything volatile, because when you smell something, that means it's volatile, right? And so even like things that are benign, that's why I didn't say smell bad. It smells too much, even like perfume, nope. You cannot have perfume up in there, because anything would over stimulate, you know, the astronauts who were up there, and again, would mask things that they need to smell.

• 2:07:33Jay Novella?

  So they would not pass the average attendee of Dragon Con?

• 2:07:36Speaker 05

  Absolutely not. So what happens if you don't pass?

• 2:07:40Speaker 02

  Out the airlock.

• 2:07:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, if you, if like, you have, you're a company making things that are supposed to go up on the ISS, and it doesn't pass the smell test, you have to reformulate it. So that might mean you need to swap out the glue for an odorless glue, or you might need to heat it to bake out all the volatiles before you submit it to this, to resubmit it for a smell test. Yeah, so there are things you could do, or you just, you just, you lost out.

• 2:08:04Jay Novella?

  But they probably know ahead of time now.

• 2:08:05Speaker 05

  Well, of course, this has been going on for 50 years, right? This is baked into the process. So you know, if you're a NASA contractor, if it's going to be in the, not on the outside of the ship, but who cares? But if it's going to be in an enclosed, an enclosed crew compartment, it's got to pass the sniff test. He has sniffed, George, this guy George, he's sniffed over a thousand things for NASA, which is a lot of stuff, a lot of sniffing. But there's, look, he's not the only one. There's, there are teams of snippers that come and go, but whatever, that, that do this as well. I didn't know that. I didn't know NASA had snippers. That's cool.

• 2:08:37Speaker 04

  You know, my work does icebreakers before our big meetings, and one of the questions was if you could swap places with any person and just take like their, their legacy, their job, their aura, their vibe, who would you, who would you switch with? My original answer was David Attenborough, but now I think I have to say George Aldrich. That's so awesome. I love this guy.

• 2:08:57Speaker 05

  NASA's chief snipper.

• 2:08:58Speaker 04

  Oh, my God.

• 2:08:59Speaker 05

  All right, well, that was Julia's first one.

• 2:09:03Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:04Speaker 04

  I do know. All the at-home ones don't count.

• 2:09:08Jay Novella?

  They don't count.

• 2:09:09Speaker 02

  And I have never won.

• 2:09:10Jay Novella?

  And Christian is a cheerleader.

• 2:09:12Bob Novella?

  And I won twice today. That's all I.

• 2:09:14Jay Novella?

  How do you, Jay?

• 2:09:15Bob Novella?

  I've lost twice today.

• 2:09:17Speaker 05

  Jay got one clap for that. All right, Bob.

• 2:09:20Jay Novella?

  Let's do that again. Jay won science fiction twice today. That's what I'm talking about.

• 2:09:25Speaker 05

  All right.

• 2:09:26Bob Novella?

  Bob lost science fiction twice today, damn it. All right, so, all right, I got a quote.

• 2:09:31Speaker 05

  All right, Bob, give us a quote.

• 2:09:32Bob Novella?

  All right. Tried to come up with something different. I've got three quotes. Don't know who said them, but the category is overheard at Dragon Con. Overheard at Dragon Con. All right, here's the first one. Bro, I just took a random pill in the bathroom.

• 2:09:46Jay Novella?

  Oh, my God.

• 2:09:49Bob Novella?

  As one does.

• 2:09:50Jay Novella?

  You two, don't ever do that. Seriously.

• 2:09:55Bob Novella?

  Second quote, overheard at Dragon Con. You can't swing a Harley without hitting a dungeon crawler Carl. So there's a lot of dungeon crawler Carls. If you don't know who he is, it's a wonderful book.

• 2:10:06Speaker 05

  It's anyone with, with white undies with red hearts. Right? They're all over the place. It's a very popular topic.

• 2:10:14Bob Novella?

  Listen to the audiobook. It's fan, it's hilarious and geeky and wonderful. Go ahead.

• 2:10:19Speaker 04

  We made a bet. We all picked a costume that we think we thought we would see the most of. My friend has, all, the rest of us are in the single digits, and my friend hit over 75. 86 dungeon crawler Carls in two days.

• 2:10:33Speaker 02

  Oh, my son was, my son was Mongo.

• 2:10:35Bob Novella?

  Visually saw them and counted them?

• 2:10:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:10:37Bob Novella?

  All right, one more, one more quote. This one, this one was my favorite. Arg, the Daystar, it burns me.

• 2:10:44Jay Novella?

  Yes. The Daystar. Daystar is wonderful. I love it.

• 2:10:53Speaker 05

  All right, thank you, Bob. All right, well, thank you all for joining me for this very special Dragon Con private show.

• 2:10:59Jay Novella?

  You're welcome, Steve.

• 2:11:00Speaker 05

  And thank you all for joining us.

• 2:11:01Bob Novella?

  Yes, thank you.

• 2:11:02Jay Novella?

  Yay.

• 2:11:03Speaker 05

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