The Skeptics Guide #1027 - Mar 15 2025

Interview with Professor Dave; What's the Word: Psionic; News Items: Screen Time and Mental Health, Exposure to Mass Shootings, Stem Cells for Parkinson's, Brown Fat and Exercise; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Vitamin A and Measles; Science or Fiction

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  It's 6:47 on a Friday. Your team's already gone home, and somewhere a phone is ringing. It's a customer. They're ready to book. Nobody picks up, so they call the next company. That's a missed call and missed revenue. With Quo, you don't have to choose between doing the work and answering the phone. Your team can share calls, texts, and customer conversations in one place. And when no one's available, Quo's AI assistant can answer, handle questions, and even book the appointment for you. So whether you're on a job, in a meeting, or done for the day, your business can keep answering. Setup takes minutes. Keep the number you've already got and add your team as you grow. No IT required. It's why over 90,000 companies trust Quo, the number one rated business phone system on G2. Money

• 0:45Speaker 00

  is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free, then get 20% off your first six months at quo.com/tryquo. That's Q-U-O dot com slash T-R-Y-Q-U-O.

• 1:03Speaker 01

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

• 1:09Jay Novella?

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, March 12th, 2025, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

• 1:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Hey, everybody.

• 1:19Jay Novella?

  Cara Santa Maria.

• 1:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Howdy.

• 1:21Jay Novella?

  Jay Novella.

• 1:22Speaker 04

  Hey, guys.

• 1:22Jay Novella?

  And Evan Bernstein.

• 1:24Speaker 05

  Good evening, everyone.

• 1:25Jay Novella?

  How's everyone faring? We've got some beautiful spring weather starting up.

• 1:29Speaker 04

  Oh, I know. It's percolating.

• 1:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Really? It's raining here in LA. It's been quite dreary today, which I'm not going to complain about because...

• 1:36Jay Novella?

  No, you're not. Cara, is it true, I've heard this from several people, is it true that when it rains in LA that things look really clean for a couple of days?

• 1:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Well, hopefully you get a couple of days, at least one day. Like, the day after it rains, you can see, like, the visibility's amazing. You can see out to the ocean. The mountains look crystal clear.

• 1:56Jay Novella?

  Oh, the sky is clear, too.

• 1:57Cara Santa Maria?

  That's what they're talking about.

• 1:58Jay Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:59Cara Santa Maria?

  That's what looks clean.

• 2:00Jay Novella?

  Okay.

• 2:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh-uh. The air. The air is clean after it rains. Yeah, but I have news. Good news, everybody.

• 2:06Jay Novella?

  What?

• 2:07Cara Santa Maria?

  I took my exam today and I passed. Congratulations. Fantastic.

• 2:12Jay Novella?

  Oh, my God. I was sweating, and I was, I couldn't have been farther away from that test, and I was worried about it.

• 2:19Cara Santa Maria?

  So I took the E triple P, which is the licensing exam for professional psychology in the United States. Everybody has to take it. I still have to take my exam for California licensure, but that's a lot shorter. It's, it's just like the law and ethics. It's not nearly as intense. Um, so yeah, I'm one step closer, but pretty much like I've jumped over all the big hurdles.

• 2:40Speaker 05

  That's a big hurdle.

• 2:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Uh huh. Who, you remember, Steve, you remember taking that good old boards or I don't know how many, you have multiple exams.

• 2:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm actually, I have, I have three board certifications.

• 2:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, well, yeah. So that was your.

• 2:54Speaker 05

  Which will expire in due course.

• 2:56Speaker 04

  Eventually, yeah.

• 2:57Cara Santa Maria?

  But you also, do you have a licensing exam just for the medical license as well?

• 3:00Speaker 04

  I mean, initially there is, but you don't have to retake that. You have to pass your, your, uh, your examinations initially. There's like three parts to it and you need to pass them in order to get licensed, but then that's it. Uh, but then.

• 3:13Cara Santa Maria?

  That's like, I think equivalent to what I'm, what I just did.

• 3:15Speaker 04

  But then there's also board certification in your specialties. So I have on top of that.

• 3:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, which we also have.

• 3:21Speaker 04

  Yeah. On top of that, I have three board certifications. Yeah.

• 3:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, there aren't that many board certifications in psychology. Like medicine has so many different boards. There's a, there's a handful in psychology. It's not a hundred percent necessary, but obviously it can open doors. I think the only one that I would really be interested in or would even be, I don't know, would make sense for me would be health psychology. But it doesn't seem to, I don't know. It doesn't seem to be required.

• 3:44Speaker 05

  Kara, I have a question about the test, the examination.

• 3:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes.

• 3:47Speaker 05

  How, the material you studied in order to prepare for it?

• 3:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:53Speaker 05

  Was it overall spot on? Was it a bunch of things that you wound up not being tested on?

• 4:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, a million. Yeah. So many things I ended up not being tested on. Bunch of things on the test I'd never seen before.

• 4:06Speaker 05

  Was it a hundred questions or?

• 4:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Two hundred twenty-five questions.

• 4:09Speaker 05

  Multiple choice?

• 4:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm hmm.

• 4:11Speaker 04

  What, what they did in, in the, for the, like the board exams is, and the medical exams, they typically will, like they have obviously broad questions, but they'll pick one area and they do like deep questioning on one area. And, but you better hope that they pick an area that you understand well, or you just gotta understand every area well so that whatever they pick, you're, you're, you're good at.

• 4:34Speaker 05

  Right.

• 4:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's basically it for, for psychology. There's like multiple areas and the questions are so obscure. They're so narrow focused in these, you know, bigger areas and.

• 4:46Cara Santa Maria?

  A lot of times, you know, and there's whole sections of things that you have to learn fresh just for the exam. Like, there's a whole bunch of questions on industrial organizational psychology and clinical psychologists don't learn that during their PhD programs.

• 4:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:58Cara Santa Maria?

  So it's like-

• 4:59Speaker 05

  You only learn it in preparation for this exam?

• 5:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:02Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 5:02Cara Santa Maria?

  And I'll never use it again, because I'm not an IO psychologist. And then there's just stuff that's like, I don't remember. It's stuff that sounds easy. Like, when we talk, we've talked on the show a lot about classical and operant conditioning, right? Like, these classic Pavlovian, and then later, these, you know, pairing an unconditioned stimulus with a conditioned stimulus to get a conditioned response. And so it seems really straightforward, but then it's the most random, obscure, higher-order conditioning question with all these distractors and confusing things. And you're just like, oh, sometimes you read it and you're just go, I don't know what I just read. I don't know how to answer this question. Your eyes are just crossing. And of course, Steve, when you did it, did they have testing centers back then?

• 5:44Speaker 04

  Not when I did my very, my original exams or my original board certification. They, they came online before I had to do any of my subspecialty boards or my later recertifications.

• 5:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Testing centers are so weird.

• 5:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:58Cara Santa Maria?

  It's like, there's a bunch of people there. They're all taking their own licensing exams for whatever specialty there. There's like some nurses there.

• 6:04Speaker 05

  Right, legal, whatever.

• 6:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, legal people, like, yeah, teachers.

• 6:07Speaker 05

  I'm sure accounting is a part of it.

• 6:08Cara Santa Maria?

  And they like, check your glasses, and you can't have jewelry. And if you want to drink water, you have to like, raise your hand and leave the room and drink water. And you're like, being observed the whole time. Cameras all over you. It's very intense.

• 6:20Speaker 04

  Now my board recerts are online.

• 6:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, nice.

• 6:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:25Cara Santa Maria?

  That's so nice.

• 6:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're, they're very hard to get originally certified and then fairly forgiving on getting recertified.

• 6:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, pass that first hurdle.

• 6:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Now I can finally breathe and tomorrow's my last day of fellowship, you guys.

• 6:39Speaker 05

  Right.

• 6:40Cara Santa Maria?

  So I go into the hospital tomorrow, say goodbye to everybody.

• 6:44Jay Novella?

  How's that feel?

• 6:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Weird. I mean, I already, last week I already said goodbye to all my patients. So that was like, you know, bittersweet. Now it just feels like, I don't know. I think I'm just very tired, you know? I got up very early this morning and I was very stressed all, well, not all day, until I got that answer right after. Also, very lucky in psychology that they tell you right when you finish what your score is.

• 7:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:10Jay Novella?

  Oh, really? How come?

• 7:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh huh. Because it's on a, it's on a computer, so it can be scored. Whereas, you know, I, I have friends who are lawyers who told me they had to wait like, I don't remember what it is, like six months for their bar results?

• 7:21Speaker 05

  What?

• 7:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, something, maybe five months, something obscene. And then they're like publicly posted. So I feel very lucky.

• 7:30Jay Novella?

  So that, well, I mean, then what happens? Like the, this is, this time of your life is ending and what's the next thing?

• 7:38Cara Santa Maria?

  So the next step now is paperwork, right? I have to submit everything to the board and then the board will issue me my license once it's ready. And then the hospital will start the process of credentialing, which can take months and months and months and months. And I don't really know what credentialing involves, except for making sure that I'm like legally and ethically and, I don't know, competently okay to work at the hospital. But I know they do a lot of backgroundy stuff and they do a lot of paperworky stuff and it takes months and months. And then once I'm credentialed at the, oh, and put me on all the insurance panels, I think is a big part of it. And once I'm credentialed at the hospital, then I can come back on as an attending. But I'll be part time.

• 8:16Jay Novella?

  Oh, it's gonna be a part, as we're just gonna ask.

• 8:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I want to be part time there and then I'll probably have a part time clinic as well. Just, um, private, private patients.

• 8:23Speaker 05

  You're making it happen. That is so great, Kara.

• 8:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Phew. Going back to school when you're an old is weird, you guys.

• 8:29Jay Novella?

  Yeah, my wife did. My wife got her PhD in her.

• 8:32Speaker 04

  Forties, fifties.

• 8:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Did she? When, how old was she when she first started? Do you remember?

• 8:36Speaker 04

  Uh, I think late forties.

• 8:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow, go Joss. Yeah, I, I don't know if I could do that. Like, I'm forty one right now and thinking about doing all this again, oh, I would die. I just couldn't. I started at thirty six? Is that right? No, I started thirty four. This is a six year degree and I'm in, yeah, and I just finished postdoc. Uh huh. I can't imagine doing it in my late forties.

• 8:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, and she was working full time at the same time.

• 9:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah, I was working full time. It was really hard.

• 9:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:04Cara Santa Maria?

  But you have to do that when you're an old.

• 9:07Cara Santa Maria?

  You're not like on mom and dad's health insurance anymore.

• 9:11Speaker 04

  Right, exactly.

• 9:12Cara Santa Maria?

  You got bills to pay. So anybody else out there who went back to school or changed careers, I feel you. You can do it.

• 9:19Speaker 04

  I can't, I couldn't imagine going through medical school now.

• 9:24Cara Santa Maria?

  I can't imagine sitting down and getting a PhD right now, even though I just did it. It's, it's too much now. I don't think I could.

• 9:31Speaker 05

  Surreal.

• 9:32Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm remembering back to like, guys, I was still working in television. So I would be on set or in my dressing room with textbooks, like reading or like on location somewhere in another country and like sitting, huddling in Video Village or something, studying between takes. It was nuts. What was I thinking?

• 9:50Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, that's what, that's what you gotta do when you're young to, to get, get to that, that base level where you want to start your career, you know?

• 9:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but I was starting a whole career over.

• 10:00Speaker 04

  But I think my experience has been both personally and professionally, you know, that people who go through, you know, like go through medical school, go through training or whatever, uh, when they're older, like after they've been in the private sector for a while or whatever, are excellent because they have a lot more perspective. They have a lot, you know, more, they're more versatile. They appreciate and understand what they're going through a lot more.

• 10:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 10:23Speaker 04

  You know, the value of the information that they're learning. They haven't just been in school their whole life, you know?

• 10:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. And there's like, there's also kind of like a confidence.

• 10:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:32Cara Santa Maria?

  That's not a fake confidence, but you know, just a comfort sitting with patients that I definitely, the younger folks that I would be working with, I did see, you know, a lot of them were like, I couldn't work in the older adult clinic like you do. What would I have to say to these people? Like, they loved working with kids, I think because they didn't feel confident.

• 10:48Speaker 04

  Something to be said for life experience, you know?

• 10:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:51Speaker 04

  All right. Well, congratulations, Cara. That's I had no doubts. I had no doubts.

• 10:56Cara Santa Maria?

  I lied to them before we started recording.

• 10:58Speaker 05

  Well, you know, it was a lie of omission, though, right? It wasn't. It's not like you missed.

• 11:02Cara Santa Maria?

  But it's true. I hadn't. I didn't tell anybody when I was going to take it because I couldn't. I didn't think I could handle the either a good luck text or the how'd you do text? In case I failed, you know?

• 11:14Cara Santa Maria?

  But yeah, anyway, thank you, Steve. Thank you.

• 11:16Bob Novella?

  It was a little white lie. We forgive you.

• 11:19Speaker 04

  Evan.

• 11:20Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 11:21Speaker 04

  You're gonna do your own what's the word?

• 11:23Speaker 05

  Yes, I am. My first attempt at a what's the word? And this what's the word segment was inspired by Mick West. Mick West, yeah, one of the best UFO debunkers out there today. We highly recommend him. Go to his channels and subscribe to everything he does. He sent out a tweet back on February 24th, and I'm going to read to you the tweet right now. Word for word, here's what he said. "I find the history of word usage fascinating. The word psionic has briefly become popular in a corner of ufology, but it's primarily been a Dungeons and Dragons specific word. Looking at trends, the only spike was in August 2010 with a D and D book.

• 12:08Speaker 05

  This begs the question, are the people who use it now D and D fans? Is there perhaps a little fantasy involved here? Now, that may seem like an innocuous tweet to a lot of people, but to those of us familiar with Dungeons and Dragons, oh, my gosh, the responses poured in. Wanting to correct Mick about, you know, the fact that he's kind of saying, well, yeah, August 2010, you know, there was this spike, so maybe that's kind of where they they pulled it from. But oh, my gosh, the word psionic has a history before that. And I think all well, Cara, not you, but but the four of us are are familiar with the term from Dungeons and Dragons, and it is well before 2010.

• 12:53Speaker 05

  I'll read to you a couple of their follow up tweets that. Help paint the picture a little bit. One reply was, "The word means nothing, Mick. My mental association of it comes from playing Mass Effect in 20, in 2007 on my Xbox 360. You're looking for popularity and a cultural significance for a word that has plenty of synonyms." Um, okay, so they used it in 2007. That's where this, that particular person who sent a tweet or an X out, uh, had it from. And then there was another one. It was used in a late two-part episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which I don't really remember, even though I watched Next Generation. Yeah. "An ancient psionic weapon was assembled by Vulcan separatists.

• 13:37Speaker 05

  Robin Curtis guest starred." I actually think she's better in the role than Savic, than as Savic in the films.

• 13:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Are you saying psionic, like S-C-I-O-N?

• 13:48Speaker 05

  P-S-I-O-N-I-C. Yes. Sorry. Thank you, Kara.

• 13:53Cara Santa Maria?

  No, it's good because I was like, there's a car called a scion, but it's a different.

• 13:57Speaker 05

  Yeah. And I'm going to get, and I'm going to get to the nitty gritty in a second. I just wanted a couple more tweets for, for some flavor here. Um, another one. "Psionics in D and D have been around heavily way before August 2010, Mick. Having first seen myself in the Dungeon Master's Handbook in the early 80s, the Dark Sun world, which was created in the early 90s, is based upon a world where everyone had psionics." Okay. So this person's getting closer sort of to the origin of this. And then a few other funny ones. "It sounds better than magic or telepathy. It sounds more scientific, the word psionic." I agree.

• 14:27Speaker 04

  By, by design.

• 14:28Speaker 05

  "My recollection of this word dates back to the original Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rule system, which came out in the late 1970s. I began playing Dungeons and Dragons in 1980, so it wasn't, uh, soon, soon after that I discovered it. And if you go to page 110 of that old player's handbook, which I'm sure many of us still have a copy of on our shelves, you'll will find it. Psionics, here's their definition. Psionics are various powers derived from the brain, and they enable characters so endowed to perform in ways which resemble magical abilities."

• 15:01Speaker 05

  Okay, but I hadn't really thought about that really. What about prior? Like, was there any use of the word psionic prior to the original Dungeons and Dragons books? Well, actually, yes. Let me tell you a little bit about the word psionic itself, though. It's a combination of psi, which is a reference to psychic phenomenon derived from the Greek letter psi, P-S-I, which has been associated with psychology, the mind, and parapsychology. And the last part are the suffix onyx, a suffix that suggests a scientific or technical aspect, similar to words like electronic or bionic. So psionic.

• 15:40Speaker 05

  Linguistically, the term's origin is well before Dungeons and Dragons, so says the Rhine Research Center's director, John Kruth, K-R-U-T-H, who was asked about this and replied eventually in one of Mick's threads here, and he said, "Psionics is a term that gained popularity about 55 years ago in the 1970s. I first understood it to mean mechanisms that enable psi to be expressed, and it includes different techniques developed through research, like meditation or sensory deprivation techniques. It is most often used to discuss devices, human-made machines, and other manufactured technologies that are considered to be either amplifiers of psi ability or have the ability

• 16:25Speaker 05

  to store psi intentions so that they can be released by the owner at a specific time or in a specific location." Okay, so, and he goes on a little bit more about that. But actually, that's not really the origin of it. It goes back even further than that. You really have to go to the mid 20th century, the year 1951. This is really where it came from. The term psionic was popularized in science fiction and speculative fiction, particularly in the mid 20th century. 1951's the first use of the word. One of the earliest uses was John W. Campbell Jr.'s science fiction magazine, Astounding Science Fiction, in the 1950s.

• 17:09Speaker 05

  Campbell, a key figure in shaping modern sci-fi, used the term to describe psychic abilities that function like a science-based power, often linked to telekinesis, telepathy, and other mental abilities. And while psi has been used in earlier discussions of parapsychology, the structured term psionics emerged to frame psychic phenomenon as a kind of technology or scientifically measurable force rather than purely supernatural. That is the origin of the term psionic or the word psionic. It derives from science fiction from the, from the 50s. And if you think about it, it kind of makes sense that it would be incorporated in the 1970s when Gary Gygax and his other partner, whose I forget, or the people he worked with in order to develop

• 17:52Speaker 05

  the game system Dungeons and Dragons, they were of the age, what would they have been reading when they were kids in the 1950s? That is exactly what they would have been reading. And they obviously borrowed it from, from this era of science fiction and brought it in as a game mechanic to Dungeons and Dragons. So that is where the word psionics comes from, all the way back to 1951. So this has been a very special, what's the word? Inspired by Cara Santa Maria as a segment of the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Tune in next time when we explore the origins of the word thako.

• 18:25Speaker 04

  Or not.

• 18:29Bob Novella?

  I found, I found mention of the word psionic in Babylon 5 from the early 90s.

• 18:33Speaker 05

  Hello.

• 18:34Bob Novella?

  Psionic Monitoring Commission replaced the psycorp, psycorp. So, uh, yep, I, I knew they must've said it in there because psy cops were all, was all over Babylon 5. So yeah, Psionic Monitoring Commission.

• 18:47Speaker 05

  Makes sense. It's, uh, it's a, yeah. What's it, is that a portmanteau when you take two words, slam them together and make a new word out of it?

• 18:55Cara Santa Maria?

  It is, except that's not really a portmanteau because this, it's just using a suffix.

• 18:59Speaker 05

  Oh, I see.

• 19:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Portmanteau is if you take two words like psychology and bionic and you make it into psionic. But that's not how they, they just used a word forming part.

• 19:12Speaker 05

  Okay. So it's a not.

• 19:14Cara Santa Maria?

  So it's not technically, no, it's just a, uh, not a malapropism. It's a neo, neologism. It's just a new word.

• 19:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, a new word.

• 19:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 19:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's like a half portmanteau. They took onyx from words like electronics and then they just replaced the, the prefix with psi.

• 19:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 19:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:31Cara Santa Maria?

  But I mean,

• 19:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, but it's not technically.

• 19:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Like all of it. Yeah, you could say like, I'm a computerologist.

• 19:36Speaker 04

  Right.

• 19:36Cara Santa Maria?

  But that's not really a portmanteau.

• 19:38Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 19:38Speaker 05

  I love how a discussion starting with UFOs and this brought up by Mick, all of a sudden, you know, and they all ignored like the UFO aspect of it. It all turned into a discussion of Dungeons and Dragons.

• 19:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 19:50Speaker 05

  It's funny in its own right.

• 19:52Speaker 04

  All right. Thanks, Evan.

• 19:53Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 19:53Speaker 04

  Jay, start off the news items with a discussion of screen time and mental health.

• 19:59Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I was reading a study that came from the University of California, San Francisco, published by, or was published in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology. And the study shows that preteens aged 10 to 11, who essentially, you know, watch too many screens, right? Too much phone and, and you know, iPad and computer screen use are at a heightened risk of developing manic symptoms. And that's kind of scary because, you know, if you read about mania, you know, it could be very severe and it could be very difficult to deal with. So the symptoms included an inflated self-esteem, decreased need for sleep, distractibility, rapid speech, racing thoughts, and impulsivity.

• 20:42Jay Novella?

  And these are all characteristics of bipolar spectrum disorders. And a second study, this was a Finnish study at the University of U Väskula and the University of Eastern Finland. They followed 187 adolescents over eight years. And their findings show that a higher screen time, particularly on mobile devices, this correlates with increased stress and depressive symptoms. So adolescents who engage in regular, you know, physical activity and organized sports, they of course had lower stress levels and fewer depressive symptoms. Notably, those with both high screen time and low physical activity faced the highest levels of stress and depression. Now, at this point, I think nobody is shocked at all, right?

• 21:25Jay Novella?

  Anybody who is reading the news and who's been paying attention, even through your own experience, like, you know, would be able to, you know, hear what I'm saying and be like, yeah, of course. Like, you know, this is not, this is not a surprising piece of information. What is really sad about it, and you know, this is essentially just making people aware. You know, we have a huge number of people that are setting themselves up for mental health issues. And it doesn't have to be that way. There are things that can be done to help these people. So, you know, if you have kids or you have nieces and nephews. Whatever your job is, like if you have anybody that you could, you could help pass this information to, I think it would be very helpful. So let me give you some more

• 22:06Jay Novella?

  information, in case you get into a discussion about it, you want to talk about more details. So the screen times vary significantly, significantly across age groups, which I think tracks very nicely with my experience. This was coming from data from 2019. American children aged eight to 12 spend an average of, guess how many hours, guys, per day, ages eight to 12?

• 22:28Speaker 05

  Oh my gosh, it's going to disturbingly, I was six.

• 22:31Jay Novella?

  Yeah, you're right in the zone. It's seven hours per day on screens.

• 22:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, you're right.

• 22:35Jay Novella?

  Wow. Teenagers aged 13 to 18 averaged how many hours daily?

• 22:39Cara Santa Maria?

  12.

• 22:40Speaker 05

  Oh no.

• 22:41Jay Novella?

  It's eight.

• 22:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, really?

• 22:43Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 22:44Cara Santa Maria?

  I thought it would be higher because they're on their phones all the time.

• 22:45Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I was gonna, I was in the same exact place.

• 22:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 22:48Jay Novella?

  So younger children have lower screen times with those under two years old averaging 42 minutes per week. Wow, like even, even, you know, two years and younger, like 42 minutes a week, that's a lot of screen time. Two to four year olds averaging two hours per week, five to eight year olds averaging two hours per week. These statistics definitely highlight this increasing engagement with screens as children grow older, right? This is a significant problem. It's a mental health problem. Could also be connected to a child's physical health because screens are definitely keeping them from going outside and exercising and all that stuff. Like, I mean, this goes hand in hand. So it's definitely very concerning

• 23:30Jay Novella?

  and it's really obvious. This isn't like muddy, you know, results. This is crystal clear what's going on here. So over the past 20 years, there, you know, there's been a significant increase in mental health issues among various populations. This is going, you know, this is globally. In the UK, for instance, the surveys showed that mental health problems have been on the rise since the year 2000. 65% of Britain's experience a mental health problem, this was in 2017, and in the United States, the National Comorbidity Survey replication, this is called NCS-R.

• 24:10Jay Novella?

  It indicated that nearly half of Americans, forty-six point four percent, reported meeting criteria for a mental health disorder at some point in their life. I don't think it's that uncommon for people to have problems throughout their life that could give them spells of mental health issues or whatever, it could be depression, anxiety. But we're not talking about a year or two of someone struggling with something, like we're talking about something that is definitely persistent. You know, imagine this generation growing up who are, you know, heavily into their screens. You know, I, I struggle with my children as well, like when the weekends come around, like that, that's all they want to do and I can't get them outside. You know, they could be setting themselves up for a very uncomfortable future with, with, you know, these mental health issues that will seemingly come out of nowhere.

• 24:55Jay Novella?

  You know, my wife and I do the best that we can, but you know, other parents out there, I'm sure you know, like it's very hard. And the other thing is like the screen, screens are a, like a, pretty much a cure-all for like adult problems. Like if I need my kids to be involved in something, so I can focus on something, giving them screens, like, you know, hands that to me very neatly, you know, but we gotta stop using it that way. We've got to really monitor not only the kid's screen time, but what are they doing on the screens as well, which that's a completely different topic. So they're saying here that, you know, regular engagement, of course, in physical activity and organized sports, these things promote a physical well-being and it also acts as a buffer against stress and depression, meaning that if a child is doing this, it, it's harder

• 25:38Jay Novella?

  for the child to develop mental health issues because they have this, you know, built-in, essentially like a mental buffer that, you know, doesn't make it come on as quickly. So it's a very, very healthy thing for, for them to do, for all people to do. And also the, the experts are recommending, of course, limiting children's leisure screen time to two hours per day. And, and there are people inside of, of these studies that are, you know, making recommendations that are saying two hours is probably too much, even, even though they're saying like, you know, if this is like the thing we're going to agree on is the, the max number, there, there are people that don't agree with that and think it's gotta be even less. You know, but you think about it, my kids use screens in school, every class. They, you know, my, I have a nine-year-old and a twelve-year-old and like they have

• 26:23Jay Novella?

  Chromebooks that the school gives them and they're on those screens non-stop and they're on them when they get home. And that's all just school-related, it's still screen time. So I'm, I'm worried. I think, you know, this is one of those things that we have a lot of these types of issues that we have to deal with in modern times, like, you know, just the plastic issue as an example is another thing, like, I'm worried about it. I don't know what to do. It's a very hard thing to not fall victim to, and it's a very, it's a very hard thing to train your kids to not be screen addicts.

• 26:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, one of the first things we can do is model good behavior, because I can assure you that the vast majority of these kids' parents are also screen addicts.

• 27:01Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 27:02Cara Santa Maria?

  And I think it's really, we talk about it a lot in terms of it being like a kid problem, but what are, how are kids supposed to have better impulse control than their own parents?

• 27:09Jay Novella?

  Yeah, exactly. I totally agree. I mean, you know, kids definitely model their behavior after their parents. I mean, I, there are things that I say in my house, like, you know, I was not even aware that I'm saying them, and all of a sudden I hear my kids repeating them and using them. You know, they're, they are picking up on our behaviors, on the, you know, tones of voice, the words that we use, you know, how angry are you? How, you know, how calm are you? All of those things get passed down to them, for sure.

• 27:33Cara Santa Maria?

  And how addicted to your phone are you?

• 27:35Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it's terrible. I mean, I, I work on my phone. And one way or another, I got a phone in my face most of the day, you know, or my computer screen. Just, just, you know, I can't do any of my work without a screen.

• 27:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 27:48Speaker 04

  I think it's important, though, also, as we, and I know we've said this before, that the strategy, the better strategy is probably maximizing non-screen, screen time rather than limiting screen time. Because if you just take the approach of, like, you get two hours of screen time per day, but you're not making an effort to say, well, what are you going to do the rest of the time?

• 28:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, you're just like, you're on your own, kid.

• 28:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, then it's kind of a losing strategy, where if it's like, you're going to spend two hours outside there, we're going to do this thing together, or, you know, whatever, you have to give, give them other things to do that does not involve screen time. And then you can also have some protected time, like, dinner is a great example, like, no screens at dinner.

• 28:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 28:26Speaker 04

  This is family time. You could, you incorporate some of that as well. But I agree, Cara, the hardest thing is for parents to limit their screen time.

• 28:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm. And I would see it all the time when I was working in the kid clinic, the parents being like, oh, my kid's on the phone all the time. And I'm like, your phone is in your hand while you're talking to me.

• 28:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, while you're saying that, yeah.

• 28:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, exactly. Like, mm, why do you think, I mean, and I'm, I'm not saying it's the parents' fault, it's, you know, it's... Culturally normative now to be on your phone all the time.

• 28:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 28:52Cara Santa Maria?

  But yeah, I mean, how on earth is a kid expected to have, like, kids don't have a developed frontal lobe. You know what I mean?

• 28:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, it is very difficult.

• 29:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Really hard for them to control those impulses.

• 29:02Speaker 04

  Well, Jay, I'm going to give you one more thing to worry about.

• 29:05Bob Novella?

  Okay.

• 29:06Speaker 04

  And that is the effect of mass shootings on the public.

• 29:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah, sorry. I get, I know. So there's a new article that was published in Cosmos Magazine, which is an Australian publication that you can access by, ooh, what a name. Imma Perfetto, who's a science journalist at Cosmos. And she wrote about a publication that just came out in JAMA Network Open titled, "Direct Exposure to Mass Shootings Among U.S. Adults." So the researchers here were interested in getting a little bit more information because we, we've talked about this on the show. So I'm not going to get too deep into the weeds on this, but we've talked about how historically

• 29:50Cara Santa Maria?

  there were barriers to accessing information about gun violence in the United States. And so there just isn't a lot of data. And what these researchers wanted to do is understand from a self-report perspective, how many people in the U.S. have had direct exposure to mass shootings? And also, is that risk equal across different demographic groups?

• 30:17Bob Novella?

  What does direct exposure mean?

• 30:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, that's, yeah, we'll define that. So they used a survey company called YouGov. I think we've, we've talked about YouGov in the past, which is a, a polling organization, a market research firm. And they were able to put together a representative survey of adults in the U.S. So 10,000 adults. And then the, if you look at the kind of sample demographics, they're pretty representative of the U.S. population. So like 4% silent generation, 30% boomer, 25% Gen X, 28% millennial, 15% Gen Z.

• 30:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Almost half, half female, male, fifty one and a half percent or fifty one percent female, forty nine percent male, and then also across race and ethnicity, three percent Asian, twelve and a half percent black, sixteen percent Hispanic, sixty two percent white, five percent other, blah, blah, blah. And they also have demographics on income and on educational attainment. And so they gave this survey to ten thousand respondents, and they asked them some questions. And so the question that you were asking, Bob, well, first of all, they were asking specifically about gun-related crimes where four or more people are shot in a public space, such as a school, shopping mall, workplace, or a

• 31:38Cara Santa Maria?

  place of worship. That's how they are defining a, quote, mass shooting. That's based on the Gun Violence Archives definition. That direct exposure question, they said, quote, "Have you personally ever been physically present on the scene of a mass shooting in your lifetime?" And then it further clarified physically present as, quote, "in the immediate vicinity of where the shooting occurred, at the time it occurred, such that bullets were fired in your direction. You could see the shooter, or you could hear the gunfire." So that's how they defined. Okay, makes sense. Yeah, it's pretty specific. Then they asked, for those who said that, yes, they were, they asked, "Were you physically injured in the incident?" And that could include being shot, trampled, or something else that caused physical injury. They coded that.

• 32:20Cara Santa Maria?

  They asked about mental health consequences of exposure, but they really focus in this publication on physical injuries, other than psychological impacts. I'm sure there will be another study coming out with that information. They also asked about where the shooting occurred. Was it in a, quote, "geographic area in which you reside, or to which you feel especially close, such as a neighborhood, small city, or area in a larger city, or a place where you spend a large amount of your time, such as a workplace, place of worship, or recreational area?" And then they also asked about media coverage. Was this, do you believe that this incident was, quote, "covered widely by news media," which they defined as national news media, or by a media beyond your city? Okay, so.

• 33:03Cara Santa Maria?

  They got demographics on everybody and then they asked all of these questions. And what they found was that 7% of adults

• 33:13Bob Novella?

  Oh, wow.

• 33:14Cara Santa Maria?

  were present on the scene at a mass shooting. And 2% were actually injured in that same shooting. And so then the researchers extrapolated those numbers, right? Because this was a sample of 10,000 people that they believe was representative. And they, they think that approximately 1 in 15 US residents have been present at the scene of a mass shooting. 1 in 15.

• 33:39Bob Novella?

  Wow.

• 33:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. So they also found a few other highlights. Younger people, especially millennials and Gen Z'ers, are, were more likely to have been present at or injured. Males were more likely than females to report direct exposure. So, so those both, they kind of make sense, but there's no way to fully know. So basically, men being more likely than women to report direct exposure is in keeping with other statistics about gun violence and gun violence risk. The generational difference, the researchers think, could be attributable to the fact that mass shootings are becoming more and more frequent. So it's simply a function of time. So younger people are being exposed to them more than older people. But they, they talk about some of the limitations of their study, that there could be like

• 34:24Cara Santa Maria?

  forgetting effects and things like that as well. And then there's an interesting section here, which I think is important to note on. So one of the authors said, "Some have hypothesized," this is a direct quote, "some have hypothesized that the US pays disproportionate attention to mass shootings because they affect mostly white people. But this report shows this perception to be incorrect. As with other types of gun violence, black adults were more likely to report exposure to mass shootings." What the report does suggest, however, continuing the quote, "is that we are simply less likely to talk about mass shootings that affect black individuals or other marginalized groups. A lower proportion of black respondents say that the mass shooting at which they were present received media attention."

• 35:09Cara Santa Maria?

  So according to this survey, approximately, or extrapolating- Out from the survey, the authors believe, you know, if they can repeat this study because they do say this is a huge limitation, right? It's only a 10,000 person sample. What if it turns out to be biased? We don't have a lot of other measures, so we don't know if this has external validity because we can't compare it to anything else, or not external convergent validity because we can't compare it to anything else. Like, one of the authors said that this survey is the best we can do to estimate the number of people directly affected by mass shootings is frankly frustrating. We need better, more reliable data. But if this estimate turns out to be representative, that is, that's epidemic, right? Like, that's a, that's a really troublesome statistic.

• 35:52Cara Santa Maria?

  And we're not even looking at the psychological impacts of being present on the scene when there's a mass shooting, witnessing death. You know, one of the, the main diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress syndrome is that you have real or imagined exposure to death. Like, you either witnessed somebody else or you thought you were going to die. And so I'm not saying that everybody who's exposed to a mass shooting will develop PTSD, but if they do, the criteria are there. And that's really worrisome.

• 36:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's, that's an incredible number of people.

• 36:26Cara Santa Maria?

  So we'll see, obviously, if, if we can continue to collect data and look at this. And if you are interested, you can go to thegunviolencearchive.org, where these researchers have tirelessly been compiling gun data over the last several years.

• 36:40Speaker 04

  All right. Thank you, Cara. So, guys, have you ever heard of using stem cells to treat Parkinson's disease?

• 36:49Speaker 05

  No, not specifically.

• 36:50Speaker 04

  When would you guess, when would you guess that started? What was the first?

• 36:56Speaker 05

  2000.

• 36:57Speaker 04

  Actual treatment using stem cells?

• 37:00Speaker 05

  2000.

• 37:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, on a person?

• 37:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, on a human being.

• 37:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's probably been a bit.

• 37:03Speaker 05

  Last week?

• 37:04Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't know.

• 37:05Speaker 04

  About 10 years ago.

• 37:06Cara Santa Maria?

  2015?

• 37:07Speaker 04

  1987.

• 37:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Shut up.

• 37:10Speaker 04

  1987 in Sweden.

• 37:12Cara Santa Maria?

  What were they doing?

• 37:14Speaker 04

  What were they doing?

• 37:15Speaker 05

  That was before the whole stem cell kind of became a became, you know, well, a well-known term.

• 37:21Speaker 04

  The 2000s is when like it sort of hit the public consciousness. It was fetal derived dopamine producing neurons. Fetal derived, so that's how you got stem cells back in 1987, right? You got them from voluntary abortions, basically.

• 37:36Cara Santa Maria?

  But how did they get them into the brain?

• 37:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, you get surgery, so.

• 37:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay, okay.

• 37:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, you implant them.

• 37:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Cool.

• 37:44Speaker 04

  The Parkinson's is interesting and it's an it's an obvious target for stem cell therapy because you have a very specific population of neurons in the brain that are dying.

• 37:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 37:55Speaker 04

  Right? And so all you would think that we need to just replace those neurons right there. Uh, and that could cure the disease. So it's always been on the shortlist in terms of like neurological uses of stem cells. Let me just very quickly remind people what Parkinson's disease is. It is caused by degeneration of the substantia nigra pars compacta neurons, which are dopamine producing or dopamine secreting neurons in the basal ganglia part of the brain, which is responsible for um smooth voluntary muscle movement. Right? It facilitates movement.

• 38:36Speaker 04

  It modulates moment to moment the connection between the desire to move and the resulting movement. Right? So.

• 38:45Cara Santa Maria?

  And and to be clear, you mean smooth as in fluid, not smooth as in smooth muscle?

• 38:49Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 38:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, skeletal muscle.

• 38:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, skeletal muscle voluntary movement, yes. And not coordinated because that's the cerebellum, right? This is our belly system. If this feedback loop is is off in such a way that that connection, the gain of that connection, if you will, is increased, you get Korea. You get too many movements. If it's turned down, you get hypokinesis, you get Parkinsonism, right? You you freeze up, you. Can't move as much. So that's basically what's happening in Parkinson's disease. So Parkinsonism is kind of the suite of neurological symptoms that you get when this part of the brain isn't working.

• 39:31Speaker 04

  Parkinson's disease is specific cause of that and it's, you know, spontaneous neurodegenerative disorder and it responds to treatment with dopamine. So early on in the disease, you can give L-dopa, which is a precursor to dopamine and that increases the amount that gets made by the surviving, you know, dopamine producing cells in the basal ganglia and it effectively, you know, treats the symptoms of Parkinson's disease. But in the end stage, you basically lose most or all of your, of those neurons. Then that doesn't really work very well anymore because there's no buffering, there's no neurons. The circuit is not complete. You're just sort of bathing that part of the brain in dopamine.

• 40:15Speaker 04

  The blood level basically determines your clinical effect. So people are constantly going through being hyperkinetic and then having a brief moment, you know, like five, 10, 15 minutes of being well managed and then they get hypokinetic again. Then they have to dose and they go through that cycle many, many times a day. Right?

• 40:33Cara Santa Maria?

  And to remind folks who may have seen the film Awakenings, which was based on an Oliver Sacks book. He, you know, talks a lot about use. They, they had post encephalitic Parkinsonism.

• 40:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:45Cara Santa Maria?

  But yeah, that's, that's.

• 40:46Speaker 04

  Not Parkinson's disease.

• 40:47Cara Santa Maria?

  That's what's happening in that movie.

• 40:48Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. They had a post infection destruction of the substantia nigra cells. Right? So.

• 40:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Which is why they awoke and then.

• 40:55Speaker 04

  So they basically had end stage Parkinsonism.

• 40:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 40:58Speaker 04

  Right away. Like they just, the virus wiped out those cells rather than, than dying over 20 years.

• 41:03Cara Santa Maria?

  And so the L-dopa worked for a minute.

• 41:06Speaker 04

  It basically worked for a brief window, then it quickly burned out whatever remaining neurons they had. Yeah. Which was.

• 41:14Cara Santa Maria?

  But that's how, didn't he discover that L-dopa could be used in that way? Yeah. Yeah. It was amazing.

• 41:19Speaker 04

  And you can also use dopamine agonists, you know, so drugs that mimic the effects of dopamine. They bind to those receptors. You can use anticholinergic drugs, which sort of have, choline has the opposite. ...effect, so it kind of pushes the system in the other direction. This is all a massive oversimplification, but you get the idea. So if you could, however, increase the number of neurons in that part of the brain, it would dramatically improve control of patients with Parkinson's disease. But if you go back to like the 1987 kind of approach, they weren't putting really like neuron, like they weren't putting those neurons that they were transplant, those fetal neurons, weren't making connections in the brain.

• 42:03Speaker 04

  They were just sitting there secreting dopamine. So in essence-

• 42:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Must have died pretty quickly, right?

• 42:11Speaker 04

  They, they, we were eventually able to get them to survive for a while. Years, you know, wouldn't be really worth it otherwise. But it basically was just a drug delivery system, right? It wasn't repairing the damage to the brain. It was just another way of getting dopamine to the place where it needed to be. And it only worked in people who responded to L-dopa as a treatment, right? So it's like not a treatment for people who were not responding to medication. It was just a way of improving the drug delivery and therefore the level of control. Never really became like a mainstay of treatment.

• 42:52Speaker 04

  Because it's, you know-

• 42:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, because that's like, you could just swallow L-dopa.

• 42:55Speaker 04

  You could just take it, yeah, so-

• 42:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so why would you get brain surgery?

• 42:57Speaker 04

  Well, again, some people, they got better control because they're having a continuous release of dopamine rather than, again, being dependent on their-

• 43:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, but that's a big risk benefit.

• 43:05Speaker 04

  It's a very expensive, massive brain surgery for moderate improvement. Yeah, so it was, it's why it never really became a mainstay of treatment for Parkinson's disease. But then, you know, you fast forward to the 2000s, Evan, right? When you, when the whole controversy over doing stem cell research and of course Parkinson's was one of the diseases that we were supposed to cure with stem cell research. This is now we're going to like embryonic stem cells, not fetal, not fetal tissue. And this was, you know, the infamous decision by George Bush to ban research creating new cell lines. You could only use existing ones. You could only use existing cell lines, which is very, very problematic and it was very draconian, the way it was applied.

• 43:47Speaker 04

  And universities could lose like all their federal funding if one clinic was using stem cells in the wrong way and whatever.

• 43:55Bob Novella?

  You know, I didn't think I could get madder at a president.

• 43:58Cara Santa Maria?

  I know, I was gonna say, oh, they could lose all their funding, huh?

• 44:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, at the time, that was like the worst thing a president did in terms of health research. It really had a very massive dampening effect on stem cell research in the United States. But in South Korea, they basically took the lead in stem cell research at that time, and Japan and elsewhere. Eventually, you know, what happened to the law was that it just became irrelevant because we figured out how to make induced stem cells. So we didn't.

• 44:32Bob Novella?

  Didn't need the embryos.

• 44:33Speaker 04

  We didn't need, well, yeah, there are still advantages to embryonic stem cells. They're tode potent instead of pluripotent.

• 44:41Bob Novella?

  Like preprogrammed?

• 44:42Speaker 04

  No, no, no.

• 44:44Cara Santa Maria?

  They can become like literally everything.

• 44:46Speaker 04

  They can become anything, including the placenta, right? Whereas the pluripotent could become any fetal tissue.

• 44:51Bob Novella?

  I see.

• 44:52Speaker 04

  So in any case, because we could make induced pluripotent stem cells from like fibroblasts,

• 44:59Speaker 04

  that opened up a whole new area of clinical research that wasn't dependent on these banned, you know, or very limited cell lines.

• 45:07Cara Santa Maria?

  I love that about science. It's like, oh, can't do that? I'll figure out another way.

• 45:11Speaker 04

  Luckily, it was easier than we thought it was gonna be, like four genes and boom, you're done. So, and it didn't have to necessarily be that way, but it was. So we got very good at making stem cells. And we could even make those stem cells then, we can induce them to become the type of cell we want them to be, like neurons.

• 45:28Bob Novella?

  That's the key.

• 45:28Speaker 04

  So you start with a skin cell, turn it into a stem cell, turn it into a neuron. We're good at that. The applications, not so much. And here's the problem, and I know we've discussed this before on the show, but just as a reminder, it's hard to get the stem cells to do what we want them to do and not do what we don't want them to do. So they're basically tumors waiting to happen. And it's the reason why we're not flush with stem cells to begin with, right? Evolution kind of minimizes the number of stem cells to just what we absolutely need because it's a double edged sword. Stem cells can turn into cancer and tumor. And that's a problem that we're having. If you don't know what you're doing and you, you know, clinics are getting a little bit ahead of the evidence or whatever. They don't

• 46:12Speaker 04

  have the expertise. They're just injecting stem cells into your spinal cord. There, there's a high rate of that becoming tumors.

• 46:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, this is why you don't go get some unapproved stem cell treatment in another country.

• 46:24Speaker 04

  Don't go to some stem cell clinic tourism somewhere in the world because yeah, you know, you don't know what they're injecting into you and there are lots of potential for harm there. But it's also hard to get neurons to make meaningful connections in the brain. And this is whether you're looking at stroke rehab or Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, whatever. Right? So we were hoping, it's like, oh, we just have to like introduce these stem cells into the brain and they'll automatically hook up with each other and start making meaningful circuitry and everything. Not so much. Research for a lot of neurological applications has shifted to, all right, but they can still help because they could be

• 47:07Speaker 04

  support cells. These stem cells that we inject into the spinal cord into the brain will, you know, again, produce neurotrophic factors and positively affect the local environment and maybe process toxins or whatever. They will improve the environment so that the neurons that are already there will survive longer and function better. And then that's, so that's a lot of the research now is focusing on that application of stem cells, which is great, but it's not the cure we were hoping for, but we haven't given up on, on doing that. So given that we've been doing this now since the 1980s, it's, it may seem a

• 47:48Speaker 04

  little surprising to, to read that there's a phase one clinical trial just getting going, looking at using autologous induced pluripotent stem cells to treat as Parkinson's disease therapy. Again, in the hope of like really taking this treatment to the next level. Don't know how, don't know how it's going to work out. Again, it's just more, they're, they're getting the neurons to survive longer and the hope is that they will not only take up shop, but actually start to, to replace some of the lost functionality.

• 48:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. So I guess, and if we iteratively have improved the ability to, like you mentioned, kind of release trophic or trophic factors, so that, okay, now I know where to go and now I kind of want to stick and now that eventually they'll just work their way into the networks.

• 48:42Speaker 04

  That's the hope. But even if they just improve the function of the cells that are there, it could still be advantageous. And just the fact that we're able to use the patient's own cells to make stem cells, so that they don't require any immunosuppressive therapy, they don't have to be harvested from any exotic source, they're not animal cells, they're not fetal cells, they're the patient's own cells. So anything we can do to reduce the complexity, the cost, the risks of doing this procedure, then if you're doing a risk versus benefit analysis, even if it's the same benefit as we've already been getting, like from the fetal cells from 30 years ago, but if we could do it safer,

• 49:27Speaker 04

  cheaper, faster, better, then it changes the calculus to where it may become more of a mainstream treatment for Parkinson's disease.

• 49:36Cara Santa Maria?

  And Parkinson's, Stephen, I'm curious, like I might be getting into the weeds, is it literally just the dopaminergic cells? Do some of the glial cells get damaged? Like, is there structural support that could be? I'm just wondering if like a cocktail would be better for integrating?

• 49:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a good question. My understanding is, it's definitely predominantly the dopamine-producing neurons. And you could see it. If you look at either an MRI scan, like we do what we call the DAT scan, it's like a dopamine scan, or you could look at the pathology slides of brains of patients. You could see dramatically the loss of the substantia nigra. It's those neurons that are dying. Now, why that's happening is not clear, and it may be different reasons in different people. Again, the disease is defined largely by the populations of neurons dying, not why they are dying. Just like ALS is defined by the population of motor

• 50:39Speaker 04

  neurons that are dying, not why they're dying. And so there's different types based upon the cause. But in any case... You know, the, the stem cell therapy thing, like, this is one of the things that we lived through, you know, starting with, I mean, I obviously knew about them in, in my medical training in the nineties, but really became part of the popular discussion in the 2000s. And there's a lot of hype around all the amazing things that stem cells were gonna do, and it has been largely unrealized.

• 51:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, don't we really only use them for like, a handful of?

• 51:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're still pretty limited, I mean, bone marrow transplants are technically stem cells.

• 51:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Bone marrow transplants, I think, um, skin graft kind of work.

• 51:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:21Cara Santa Maria?

  But there's not that many things that are like, approved as skin cell therapies.

• 51:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Or, I'm sorry, as stem cell therapies.

• 51:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, since 25 years later, this is one of the things that I, 25 years ago, I would have predicted we would have been much farther along than we are today, but that's because it's just turned out to be, the technological hurdles are massive.

• 51:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 51:40Speaker 04

  And it's really, it's turned out to be a much more difficult nut to crack, uh, and we may have to settle for, you know, some really good applications that are just not what we were hoping for in terms of like, cures. It may not be a cure for these neurodegenerative diseases, but it may be another therapy that is effective, you know, safe and effective.

• 52:00Speaker 05

  As usual, the good shit will come out after we're dead.

• 52:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, probably.

• 52:04Cara Santa Maria?

  But hey, we, also, there, there is good shit, like, that's the thing, like, yeah, we're like, eh, bone marrow transplants.

• 52:09Speaker 05

  That's true.

• 52:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, do you understand? Like, that's a...

• 52:12Speaker 05

  There's some good shit.

• 52:13Cara Santa Maria?

  People are cured of their cancer through this.

• 52:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Cured, I mean, that's amazing.

• 52:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know, but Bob, we always have an eye on what's coming, we're always 20 years behind, you know, the cutting edge.

• 52:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, right.

• 52:24Speaker 04

  But the, but there are things out today that we were just dreaming about 20 years ago, you know? And so, and there are some fields where it's like, exceeded my expectations, like genetic engineering, you know?

• 52:35Speaker 05

  Some of the stuff I really, really want. You want the reverse aging, Bob, come on, say it, admit it. There's lots of things, I want Wolverine claws and lots of cool stuff. You want the telomeres?

• 52:45Speaker 04

  Didn't we have this conversation last week? All right.

• 52:47Cara Santa Maria?

  We have this conversation every week.

• 52:50Speaker 04

  Well, all right, Bob, what you're going to talk about is another, you know, body hack. Tell us about brown fat and exercise.

• 52:58Bob Novella?

  Uh, this was a lot of fun. Researchers claim that mice without a specific protein developed an enhanced type of fat, of brown fat, that not only increases exercise capacity, but also extends healthy lifespan. Um, wow. So this fascinating study was published in the journal Aging by a team of, from Rutgers, uh, New Jersey Medical School. The name of the study was Brown Atopous Tissue Enhances Exercise Performance and Healthful Longevity. All right, let's dig in. So let's start this one with the skinny on fat. What basically everyone means when they refer to fat is white adipose tissue. That's the fat that's right under our skin. We all know it. We all have it. And most of us want to get rid of at least some of it.

• 53:42Bob Novella?

  Um, the fat is primarily energy storage, but it's also for insulation and hormone production. And it's also not just under our skin. This white fat is also around our organs. And it's actually, uh, not good to have too much fat there because that's, because then the fat gets into the blood and then all sorts of crazy bad stuff happen. Okay. There's another type of fat called brown adipose tissue, or just brown fat. Um, not too many people, I think, have ever even heard of this. This fat is in many ways like anti-fat with little goatees like evil Spock in the mirror universe, but this fat is not evil. It's kind of awesome, actually. I've, I've known about it for a couple of decades and I've always, uh, wished I had more brown fat.

• 54:23Bob Novella?

  So in a nutshell, brown fat can't make us fat. It makes us warm. That's what it does. This is thermo regulation. When you get cold, what happens? What typically happens when you get cold? You shiver. You shiver. Why, why do we shiver? Has every thought about that? What does that?

• 54:39Speaker 04

  To produce heat.

• 54:40Bob Novella?

  Yes, shivering generates heat. And brown fat also kicks in when we get cold and it generates heat force by itself. And it's actually funnily, is funnily a word? It's actually humorously referred to as non-shivering thermogenesis. Non-shivering thermogenesis. It is now. This is now, this is incredibly important for newborns who have a lot of brown fat relatively. I think 2% to 3% of their body weight is brown fat. So when they get cold, they don't have all the mechanisms fully in place to make them warm that we do. For example, they literally cannot even shiver.

• 55:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh yeah, you never see a little baby shivering. Weird.

• 55:21Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 55:22Cara Santa Maria?

  I've never thought about that until right this moment. I've never seen a tiny baby shiver.

• 55:27Bob Novella?

  It's just not developed, the musculature is, nervous system is not developed enough to even make shivering happen. But they have brown fat. They've got a good amount of brown fat and that literally can save their lives. You know, maybe not so much in modern days, but of course in the centuries past, I'm sure it saved a lot of babies' lives. Now, these cells diminish as we age and we used to think that they disappeared, but they found them in adults not too long ago. I think maybe 30 or 40 years ago. We have, we still have them mainly in our, in our upper chest and neck area. But now brown fat cells, they're small, they're smaller than, than white, than white fat cells. And they're different, they're actually different, but I don't need to go into too much detail about that. And they're spread out.

• 56:11Bob Novella?

  So I remember microbiologist Covert Bailey, some audiobooks years ago. He was saying things like that. If you collected all the brown fat cells together, it would be the size of a small organ, a little heat generating organ. Now, and they're brown because these cells are packed with mitochondria. And that's the reason why it's one of the most metabolically active tissues in our bodies. It's just so ironic that a type of fat is so metabolically active. Where do you guys think the mitochondria in these brown fat cells get their energy from? Where do they get all this energy to generate this heat? Where they, where they, where they pulling it from?

• 56:46Cara Santa Maria?

  What do you mean?

• 56:47Bob Novella?

  From regular, from regular fat cells, from white adipose tissue, which is great, actually, if you think about it. That means that when you activate, when you get cold and you activate these brown fat cells, it's burning calories from your regular fat. And that of course then can promote weight loss and enhance, it'll, you know, enhance insulin sensitivity. And that has intrigued researchers for years and years.

• 57:10Speaker 05

  Don't tell me ice baths are good now for weight loss? Is that what it is?

• 57:12Bob Novella?

  Oh man, dude, I'm telling you, it would, it would actually help activate and even perhaps even generate extra brown fat cells. So yeah, so yeah, that, that's actually a thing. So this is why, this, you know, enhancing insulin sensitivity and weight loss, that's, this is why. Brown fat has intrigued researchers for years because brown fat has, could have or should have some obvious therapeutic potential for obesity and diabetes and a host of other conditions. But that isn't exactly why these Rutgers researchers were studying the brown fat of mice. They were studying brown fat because other researchers had noticed that mice that lacked a signaling protein called RGS14, they seem to have better longevity and even exercise

• 57:57Bob Novella?

  performance than typical mice. So they wanted to dig deeper and see what the hell was going on there. So what they do, they created specific knockout mice, right? Knockout mice that do not have RGS14 protein. But otherwise, they were the same as the control mice. So when they looked at the brown fat cells from these knockout mice, what they found almost seemed like a super brown fat to me. It was like, what? This is really happening? The mitochondria, now we know mitochondria, right? These are the powerhouses of the cells. They were essentially souped up. They were more efficient than normal. They were better at producing energy and heat. And the mitochondria had greater overall heat generating capacity as well.

• 58:39Bob Novella?

  And even enzymes, the enzymes levels like Sirt3, S I R T three, they were enhanced as well. And those, these enzymes further enhanced mitochondria function. And they also protected the mitochondria from things like oxidative damage, which they're very prone to. And let's see, one other big benefit here, the brown fat cells themselves benefited from the creation of new, of new blood vessels to give them better blood flow and nutrients and also boost the cells metabolic performance. So all that stuff is a lot of, are the things that they found. And so when they looked at the knockout mice themselves, of course, they showed some interesting changes. I mean, if you're changing, you know, your metabolism to a certain extent, to that level,

• 59:23Bob Novella?

  you're going to be seeing some things, you know, just like. Right out of the gate here. So, and I'm not even sure how much I believe some of this stuff. It's just like, are you kidding? So they noticed that the maximum lifespan was significantly greater in these knockout mice than in the control mice for both males and females. And they also, get this one, 24-month-old knockout mice. Now, that's, that's an old mice. And this is a quote from the study. These knockout mice did not show the aging phenotype normally present in the control mice of similar age, including body atrophy, loss of hair, graying of fur, of fur color. So these mice-

• 59:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Mice get old and gray at two years?

• 1:00:02Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah. They're-

• 1:00:03Cara Santa Maria?

  That's so sweet.

• 1:00:04Bob Novella?

  Well, that's, it's sad. It's sad, but it makes them great, you know, lab animals, right? I mean, a couple of years, you go through the whole life cycle. And so they're looking at old mice and they're seeing that no atrophy, they're seeing no balding mice, and they're not seeing much graying of the fur either. It's like, I mean, what the hell? And if that wasn't good enough, good enough, the researchers also showed improved exercise performance and endurance of the knockout mice as well, to a significant degree. One site was saying 30%, 30% exercise performance improvement. And that's, but I didn't see too much of those specific numbers in the study itself. All right. And then to make this even cooler, when the researchers transplanted the knockout brown fat into the control mice, right? Because they wanted to say, all right, these, these knockout mice don't have this

• 1:00:49Bob Novella?

  protein, so let's just transplant that brown adipose tissue, the brown fat, let's just transplant that in and see what happens. So if it's something, if something happens, then we know it's, it's the, the brown fat that's doing it and not some other, some other reason. So that, so what happened was when they, when they transplanted the brown adipose tissue into the mice, within three days, they were showing similar exercise capabilities and the during, and enhanced durability capabilities. So when they did it from knockout mouse, and when they did it from control mouse to control mouse, they saw some enhanced enhancements, but it took eight days and it wasn't nearly as, as significant as what they were seeing. So I guess if you put extra brown fat in your body, you're

• 1:01:33Bob Novella?

  going to see something that's noticeable, some enhancement in performance, but it was nothing like when it was transferred from the enhanced brown fat, right? You follow that?

• 1:01:42Cara Santa Maria?

  So the knockout mice had a gene knocked out that coded for a protein that suppressed adipose tissue? Like, what did the protein do?

• 1:01:51Bob Novella?

  One of the things that it does, it's a signaling pathway for metabolism, as you might imagine. So that's why, that's why we're seeing this difference here. This protein essentially puts on the brakes for your metabolism. It's very similar to myostatin. You've heard of the myostatin protein is similar. It puts the brakes on muscle growth. So when you, when you see like a whip it, a dog or, or some like cattle that do not have the myostatin protein, protein, they are must, they are jacked to the, to the sky. It's incredible because there's no brakes. So this is similar in that without this protein, that these certain, certain metabolic pathways just don't have the brakes.

• 1:02:34Bob Novella?

  It makes the changes that I've discussed in terms of mitochondrial efficiency and, and all that, all that extra stuff.

• 1:02:39Cara Santa Maria?

  So here's a question.

• 1:02:40Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:41Cara Santa Maria?

  What is the evolutionary purpose of having a brake on our metabolism?

• 1:02:45Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 1:02:46Cara Santa Maria?

  And if we knock that out, is that bad downstream? Because it's one thing to look at a two-year-old mouse. It's another thing to talk about a human that has like a 90-year lifespan.

• 1:02:53Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't know. And there's also, there's also other problems because this, you know, this protein, it impacts, you know, metabolism, but it also impacts other things like, like your nervous system and plasticity. So that's one of the things that, that I think they need to, they need to be concerned about. If this, if this does take off, they're going to have to seriously study what are some of these other potential impacts. You know, you just can't like, oh, let's, let's do this on people now because who knows, you know, what else it could impact. But let me, let me mention this other piece here that they took a control mouse and they put the enhanced brown fat into the control mouse at three months old. And when that mouse was old, it also wasn't gray, wasn't losing hair, wasn't atrophied.

• 1:03:38Bob Novella?

  So just by having that, that enhanced brown fat in their bodies, it made, it made, it gave them all these benefits.

• 1:03:45Cara Santa Maria?

  And to be clear, Bob, when you're, you're using shorthand when you say a mouse, right? They didn't only do this once.

• 1:03:51Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah, there was, they had a lot of, yeah, they did this on a lot of mice.

• 1:03:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Just making sure.

• 1:03:54Bob Novella?

  I don't know the exact number, but yeah, this wasn't just one of my, this was a bunch of mice. Yeah, I'm seeing here from my notes that they had, the, the other effects of, of this protein is, is it impacts learning, a memory and synaptic plasticity. So, yeah, so.

• 1:04:11Bob Novella?

  That's just like, oh yeah, you just can't mess around with that stuff.

• 1:04:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Does the protein suppress those things or does the protein enable those things?

• 1:04:18Bob Novella?

  I wonder if it puts the brakes on it as well as metabolism, I'm not sure. So obviously, all that would have to be, would have to be studied. Okay, so, but for people to benefit from this, right, because this is where we're going, right? We want to, we want to benefit people with this discovery. So that doesn't necessarily mean that, you know, we have to make ourselves a knockout people that don't have this RGS14 protein. So as they say in the study, "It becomes increasingly important to develop a pharmacological analog to the RGS14 knockout brown fat that can be translated to the clinics to promote enhanced exercise capacity and healthful aging in patients." That's the wet dream scenario, right, for this? Not knocking out our own proteins or genes, but targeting therapies, creating these targeted

• 1:05:03Bob Novella?

  therapies to give us, to give our own brown fat similar properties without necessarily getting any of the potential downsides, but some, some, some sort of targeted therapy that could do with it. So that would be, that would be amazing. I mean, but I mean, to me, like, what are the odds of this transferring to people? First off, yeah, you can never assume that, that these, what you see in these studies in mice is going to transfer cleanly to people. Almost guaranteed that that's not going to happen. But it does happen, and we may learn enough about this enhanced brown fat that we could, we could mimic these properties and, and transfer that somehow through some, some therapies to people. That would be amazing, you know, to, you know, the impacts to enhancing, you know, longevity

• 1:05:48Bob Novella?

  and health and, and dealing with obesity and diabetes and all these other problems that it, that it could potentially ameliorate, I think. It could be, it could be dramatic if this transfers well, but we'll see.

• 1:06:00Cara Santa Maria?

  But I guess, Bob, an important question is, like, I don't know if you've done the research on this because you're so interested in it, but I feel like every day we're seeing more and more that these like GLP-1s or these semaglutides have these positive benefits beyond what they were originally developed for. How do they affect brown fat?

• 1:06:18Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Because we might already have, I mean, I'm not saying that they're a panacea by any stretch, but like... We already have these targeted therapies that really, really seem to be helping people metabolically. And so I'd be curious to see if, I don't know, it might not be that crazy an idea.

• 1:06:34Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I hope because I mean, this by knocking out this protein, it turned the mice brown fat into like super brown fat. Super, I mean, it really was, this is dramatic where you're looking at an old mouse and it's not gray and atrophied. I mean, that's just like, what the hell? That's, that's incredible. I mean, even if it doesn't, and it doesn't have to extend our, you know, our lifespan, if what it needs, what it would be great if it could extend our healthy lifespan, you know, if it compresses the morbidity so that, so that we're in really great shape until we're, you know, into, into our 80s. And then, you know, that's the goal, right? You, you experience this compressed morbidity where over the course of a year, you, you really decline really fast. And it's not

• 1:07:15Bob Novella?

  like 15 years of, of just a horror show of like medical expenses and decrepitude and all that nasty stuff.

• 1:07:22Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm seeing like, just a quick, quick internet search, an article in Cell Biochemistry and Function that's from 2022, semaglutide, GLP-1 receptor agonist stimulates browning on subcutaneous fat adipocytes and mitigates inflammation in visceral fat adipocytes of obese mice.

• 1:07:40Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:41Cara Santa Maria?

  So it's like, we already have drugs that are doing this. I mean, it's cool. But like, I don't think it's, it feels iterative to me.

• 1:07:49Bob Novella?

  Scientists have noticed that these mice before, and that's why, that's what these, these researchers did. They're like, wait, you know, these people are seeing mice that that seem to have increased longevity and, and enhanced exercise capabilities. What's, what's going on? That's why they, they took a deep dive onto the brown, the brown fat. And like, holy crap, look what's happened to this brown fat.

• 1:08:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. Cause there's already individual differences in mice and people. There's already people who have never had a problem with their weight their whole lives. And there are people who really, really struggle. Like what's going on there from a genetic perspective, from a protein perspective? I don't know. There's a lot to learn.

• 1:08:23Bob Novella?

  Yeah. I wonder if you're like, like, you know, like there are people that don't have the myostatin protein and are, you know, really muscular. Maybe there are, there's, maybe there probably are people out there that, that already don't have this and they could, and they can check them out. And that would be, it'd sound like an awesome study right there.

• 1:08:39Speaker 04

  All right. Thanks, Bob.

• 1:08:40Bob Novella?

  Sure.

• 1:08:41Speaker 04

  Jade, who's that noisy time?

• 1:08:43Jay Novella?

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

• 1:08:58Cara Santa Maria?

  I think it's an animal.

• 1:08:59Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:00Bob Novella?

  That, that sounds like some flying mythological creatures from a Ray Harryhausen stop-motion movie scene.

• 1:09:06Cara Santa Maria?

  But, but I think it's a real animal.

• 1:09:08Jay Novella?

  Steve, what do you got?

• 1:09:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, I mean, it definitely sounds like an animal, you know?

• 1:09:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Is it a bird?

• 1:09:13Jay Novella?

  Is it a plane? No, it is a, uh, it is not a bird.

• 1:09:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 1:09:17Jay Novella?

  Uh, Frederick Niant wrote in and said, "I believe this is someone pulling the string on a broken 80s to 90s voice box found in dolls." It's a cromulent, cromulent guess. That is not correct, but thank you for trying.

• 1:09:32Cara Santa Maria?

  No, it's not.

• 1:09:35Jay Novella?

  Hunter Richards wrote in and said, "Hi Jay, I know a lot of people are going to say it's an animal of some kind, but if you listen closely, it sounds too mechanical. My guess is this is a record being scratched. Most likely, someone has a hold of the belt that turns the platter and is pulling it back and forth while the stylus is in contact with the record. Not sure what kind of record, but something that, when sped up and played backwards and then forwards, sounds like a growling baby bobcat." Now, what that person just described is actually this.

• 1:10:15Jay Novella?

  Okay, that's, that is, uh, you know-

• 1:10:17Bob Novella?

  Am I too old to recognize that?

• 1:10:20Jay Novella?

  No, I mean, just saying, like, that, it's funny, when I read it, I'm like, "I don't know, does he not know? Does he not, does he not know that this has, like, been around for a very long time?" That is not correct, but, but thanks for the guess. Let's move on to J.D. Bergen. J.D. said, "It sounds like it could be some little angry rodent, like a sugar glider."

• 1:10:41Bob Novella?

  A sugar glider? I've no, I don't know what that is.

• 1:10:43Cara Santa Maria?

  They're not angry.

• 1:10:45Jay Novella?

  How do you know, though? They might be.

• 1:10:47Cara Santa Maria?

  They're so sweet. Have you ever met a sugar glider?

• 1:10:49Jay Novella?

  No, I wish I did, though. I think they look really cool.

• 1:10:52Cara Santa Maria?

  They're cute.

• 1:10:52Jay Novella?

  All right, there's no winner this week, guys. I'm, I'm shocked. I'm utterly shocked that there was no winner. I'll play it for you one more time.

• 1:11:04Jay Novella?

  Okay. That's a skunk.

• 1:11:06Bob Novella?

  What?

• 1:11:06Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 1:11:07Jay Novella?

  Yeah, and I, now, I grew up with a standard poodle. That was the dog that my family had growing up. And our dog would get sprayed by skunks, you know, at least twice a year. It was not uncommon. And I remember hearing the mother and baby skunks making that noise as they were running away. So I recognized this right away. But I'm really surprised, like, nobody, nobody really did it. Maybe it was an off week, but, you know, it is what it is. You know, sometimes I stump you on some, something that I would consider to be pretty easy. All right, I have a new noisy for you guys this week. Carrie, you were correct all the time.

• 1:11:45Jay Novella?

  This noisy was sent in by a listener named Dale Robinson.

• 1:12:07Jay Novella?

  If you think you know what this week's noisy is, or you heard something cool, email me directly at [email protected]. Steve, very quickly. Yes? The SGU is changing significantly this year because Steve is going to retire. So Steve will be going full-time at the end of June, early July. He'll be taking his certification in July. He will. We are giving him a Skeptic's Guide. He'll have to answer. Yeah, he'll have 20 minutes to answer the questions, and I'll give him the answers immediately. The bottom line is, if you'd like to help support us during this time when Steve's going to be going full-time, because we could really definitely use the support,

• 1:12:48Jay Novella?

  and if you also want to support us, because, I don't know, the world is in a very non-skeptical place, and I think, you know, we need skeptical outreach now more than ever, please consider becoming a patron. You can go to patreon.com/skepticsguide. You can also join our mailing list. We send out an email every week, giving you details on everything that we did the previous week. You can go to theskepticsguide.org to check out our email list. You can give our show a rating on whatever podcast player you're using. I think iTunes is still like the number one place to rate podcasts. And that's it. Oh, no, it isn't. The conference. Guys, I know you're excited. I can hear you guys chomping at the bit, wanting to talk about how excited you are about this.

• 1:13:31Speaker 05

  Nauticon. Woo!

• 1:13:33Jay Novella?

  No, we are, we are very excited just because we know how much fun it is and, you know, we've been working on this conference for the last six months. Very, very excited and happy that we're running it again. If you'd like to join us, it's called Nauticon, Nauticon 2025. We have a Beatles theme this year and it'll be on the dates May 15, 16, and 17. You can go to nauticoncon.com for information about the conference. Everything you want to know is on there and also you can buy tickets there. Please join us. It's going to be great.

• 1:14:04Speaker 04

  All right. Thank you, Jay. Going to do one email. This email comes from Tim Graham from Canada, Canada. And Tim writes, Dear skeptics, your show is a highlight of the week for me. I am sure I am not the first to point out inaccuracies in episode 1026 regarding the Texas measles outbreak. I certainly got the sense from the skeptics that fun was being poked at the recommendation to use vitamins in the treatment of measles. According to the WHO guidelines, vitamin A has been and continues to be a core treatment for measles, and cod liver oil contains not only vitamin D, as reported, but also vitamin A. In the situation with the Mennonites, it's plausible that this traditional remedy would be more palatable, given their cultural norms, than pills from the big bad government.

• 1:14:48Speaker 04

  For example, Cochrane states that vitamin A reduces death by 87% in children younger than two. Any cursory search for measles treatment would have outlined the importance of vitamin A. While I think the reporting content was uncharacteristically shoddy, it was actually the tone that I found more problematic. I agree with the general premise that RFK Jr. has been a dangerous vaccine skeptic, but in this case, he basically seems to be recommending the correct treatment. While I understand the bias of judging RFK Jr. based on previous crackery, each time the skeptical community stoops to judging the current behavior, in this way, it feeds the narrative that the sky is falling. If RFK Jr. starts to promote general health via exercise, will that be taken at face value or also laughed off?

• 1:15:31Speaker 04

  Lest we forget, vaccine hesitancy and denialism exists on all sides of the political spectrum. I would hope the skeptics can try to stick to a more neutral and fact-based approach. Keep up the great work.

• 1:15:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, no.

• 1:15:43Speaker 04

  I

• 1:15:44Cara Santa Maria?

  There's a lot here.

• 1:15:44Speaker 04

  I responded to Tim with the information that I'm about to give you guys. And he responded simply, thanks for the correction because Tim is completely wrong here. And but in a very interesting way that is worth exploring. So the idea is that, well, vitamin A is actually a WHO and actually CDC recommended treatment for for measles and therefore we were we were unfair to criticize RFK Junior in recommending vitamin A for measles. But that's not true. I wrote about this today on on Science Based Medicine as well. If you want to have all the references. Here's the skinny. If you look deeper into the data, what the data clearly shows is that what vitamin A

• 1:16:27Speaker 04

  is treating is not measles. It's vitamin A deficiency. The problem is that measles exacerbates vitamin A deficiency. It depletes vitamin A. The infection itself depletes vitamin A. So if you already have vitamin A deficiency, measles can make it worse. What the WHO is essentially recommending is targeted vitamin A supplementation in at-risk populations who are either likely to get measles or do or who do get measles. It's also true that measles and vitamin A deficiency both weaken the immune system, right? So there's also a synergistic effect there.

• 1:17:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And in like a developed country where somebody is not likely to have vitamin A deficiency, they may still be given vitamin A as an adjuvant treatment, but it's not going to because measles does make you deficient in vitamin A. So while they have the measles, they might have temporary vitamin A deficiency. But it's not like, oh, if you get the measles, don't worry. You can just take vitamin A and then you won't have the measles.

• 1:17:35Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:17:35Cara Santa Maria?

  That's

• 1:17:35Speaker 04

  It's actually it's actually more, I would go farther than that, Cara. So because it's been studied. So first of all, the 87% figure is highly misleading. That was in one small study. The most recent systematic review I Found had actually put the number at 12%. So a 12% reduction in mortality. RFK Junior actually referenced a study, an earlier review, an older review that cited 65%. Why are these numbers so wildly variable? It because it depends on the level of vitamin A deficiency in the population that you're studying. But all of these studies, all of these studies are in developing nations with rampant vitamin A deficiency.

• 1:18:20Speaker 04

  All of them. It also found, by the way, even right in the maximally a positive patient population for the effects of vitamin A. No preventive benefit. It does not prevent measles. It doesn't prevent the spread of measles. It doesn't prevent a lot of complications of measles. It does reduce overall mortality from vitamin A deficiency. Right? It also prevents blindness from vitamin A deficiency. So yes, vitamin A is an effective treatment for vitamin A deficiency. It doesn't have any anti measles viral activity. Right? It has no antiviral activity. It's not treating the measles. It's treating the vitamin A deficiency we see in measles.

• 1:19:03Speaker 04

  I found one study that specifically looked at the effects of vitamin A in the treatment of measles in a developed nation. And you know what it showed? Nothing. Zero benefit. Yeah. No benefit. So citing data from parts of the world with vitamin A deficiency for the efficacy of vitamin A supplementation, and then applying it to Texas is classic, classic RFK Junior. It's completely getting the science wrong. He's interpreting it on the most superficial level possible with no medical understanding.

• 1:19:42Speaker 04

  Not like as a physician, you hear that there's a massive reduction in mortality from measles from vitamin A. The first thing you think of is like, I wonder what the mechanism is that? Are they just treating vitamin A deficiency? But if you're not a physician, you just think, oh, it's treatment, right? It's just it's treating the measles, you know? And you just take. Something that supports your ideology that like everything is nutritional, right? And also, while he has to make positive statements about the vaccine, he's still throwing out all the anti-vaccine tropes. And then he gets interviewed later on Fox News and he's bringing up vaccine side effects and it's a choice and all that stuff. He's still a hardcore anti-vaccinationist.

• 1:20:27Cara Santa Maria?

  You know what's so infuriating to me is that, obviously, there's so much misinformation there that's going to lead people to make bad decisions because this is now a public health official. I should say disinformation. But to be clear, and this is the part that's so infuriating, there is no cure for measles, which is why we have to rely on vaccination. When we think about the vaccines that have really dramatically changed the landscape of these diseases, it's usually diseases for which there is no cure. If you get this virus, all we can do is give you comfort measures and hope that your immune system can fight it off. That's all we can do. That's so scary. We can't say, oh, after the fact, you're gonna be fine.

• 1:21:09Speaker 04

  You'll be fine. Take vitamin A, you're good, even though it has no benefit in America, right?

• 1:21:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. It's like COVID too. That's what's so infuriating. It's like, people are going to die from this. People die from the flu. People die from all of these diseases. And even though we have, quote, "treatments," those treatments don't actually fight the disease.

• 1:21:27Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 1:21:28Cara Santa Maria?

  They do things like, reduce your mortality.

• 1:21:31Speaker 04

  The only thing, the only messaging the government should be having on this, or the primary messaging should be, full-throated support for vaccination. Confusing people by misinterpreting the vitamin A literature is counterproductive. Right? And so, like people said, the CDC recommends it. This is what the CDC has to say. Supportive care, supportive care, again, physicians know what that means. It's not a treatment, it's not a disease-modifying treatment. It's just making the patient better able to weather the storm of this illness. Supportive care, including vitamin A administration, under the direction of a physician, may be appropriate. Whoa, is that lukewarm. Right?

• 1:22:13Speaker 04

  That's just like, it may be adjunctive supportive care. It's not a treatment. For it completely gets it wrong, but in a way that's very typical for RFK Junior and for cranks in general who don't.

• 1:22:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I almost wish that the language would be even stronger though. Like I'm, I'm looking at the Mayo Clinic and they literally say, there is no specific treatment for a measles infection once it occurs. Treatment includes providing comfort measures.

• 1:22:38Speaker 04

  It's.

• 1:22:39Cara Santa Maria?

  That's it.

• 1:22:40Speaker 04

  And also to be emphasized, it is not a substitute for the vaccine.

• 1:22:44Cara Santa Maria?

  No.

• 1:22:45Speaker 04

  But people are doing it. They are taking vitamin A to prevent measles and it even in the, the studies that show that it's effective in reducing mortality, it doesn't prevent the contraction of the illness.

• 1:22:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 1:22:58Speaker 04

  And vitamin A is like the most toxic vitamin that there is, right? You're aware of that. Like it's very easy to overdose on vitamin A with horrible consequences.

• 1:23:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, you can overdose on vitamin A just from eating too much liver.

• 1:23:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's correct.

• 1:23:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Like not just from taking too many of the supplement. This is why it's so dangerous when there are these supplements that are like 2,000% of your daily value.

• 1:23:19Speaker 04

  That happened by, you know, there was one polar mission that they had to kill and eat polar bears. They ate the polar bear livers. So safety tip, don't eat predator livers because predators eat livers and their livers concentrate all of that vitamin A and they got hypervitaminosis A and died from vitamin A poisoning because they ate a polar bear liver. So I thought, I don't think that we were unfair to RFK, but point, the point is well taken that we, we shouldn't reflexively say that anything that he says is wrong because he will throw in correct things at times as well.

• 1:23:58Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's what good pseudoscientists do.

• 1:24:00Speaker 04

  They do, like, yeah. And this is like rampant in the healthcare, like the alternative healthcare and should the guy eat right, you know, have a lot of vegetables, exercise regularly and take these bullshit supplements. It's like, you know, that is par for the course.

• 1:24:14Cara Santa Maria?

  As part of a well-balanced diet.

• 1:24:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, we even have, this is the Trojan horse phenomenon. We even have terms for this. We write about this all the time, how they do this. You couch your nonsense in reasonable and reasonable sounding common sense or generally accepted good health advice. And it gives it the air of, again, of reasonableness and that you're reasonable and you're just throwing in this thing. But, but there's the poison pill always. There's always the nonsense. And he is touting, inappropriately touting vitamin A because he's an anti-vaxxer. Period. He's trying to present it as an alternative, and it's not.

• 1:24:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Steve, I'm, I'm looking at the symptoms of vitamin A.

• 1:24:57Speaker 04

  It's horrible. Your skin like melts off your body.

• 1:24:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, your bones get thin and chronic exposure, but in acute exposure. Listen to this. Increased intracranial pressure.

• 1:25:07Speaker 04

  No, you're getting organ failure. It's terrible.

• 1:25:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh my, yeah. You don't want that.

• 1:25:11Speaker 04

  No, no, no.

• 1:25:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Yikes. So if you, if you, if you've been taking vitamin A, it says, and you have a headache and a rash, you need to seek medical attention.

• 1:25:19Speaker 04

  Yeah. Don't just, yeah, stop taking the vitamin A, but go to the doctor. That's why the CDC, CDC says, under the direction of a physician. They do not want people self-medicating with vitamin A because it's dangerous.

• 1:25:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Oof. But it's just a vitamin, Steve.

• 1:25:34Speaker 04

  I know. All right. Well, we have a fun interview with Dave Farina, Professor Dave, coming up. So let's go to that interview now.

• 1:25:51Speaker 04

  We are joined now by Dave Farina. Dave, welcome to the Skeptic Guide.

• 1:25:55Speaker 07

  Hi, thanks for having me.

• 1:25:56Speaker 04

  Dave, you are also known as Professor Dave from your Professor Dave Explains YouTube series, which is very popular. I've been enjoying watching. Just watch your most recent one. I think it's your most recent one, Reacting to Pathetic Answers and Genesis Propaganda Video.

• 1:26:12Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's a good one.

• 1:26:13Speaker 04

  You seem to have a good time doing that one.

• 1:26:15Speaker 07

  I do. The reaction videos are fun. It's just, I can kind of just let loose a little bit. So.

• 1:26:20Speaker 04

  So tell us a little bit about your, this project, how you, how and when you started it and how it's been going.

• 1:26:26Speaker 07

  Sure, I started my YouTube channel in 2015, January of 2015, so I actually just celebrated my 10th anniversary, if you can believe it. But yeah, I started out just, I had been teaching organic chemistry and I had noticed that some people were uploading educational content, tutorial-based content to YouTube. Not that much, this was quite a while ago, but there definitely was some up there, most notably Khan Academy and some other things like that. And I thought, well, why can't I do that? So I basically just filmed myself delivering my organic chemistry lectures as though I were teaching class and did a little branding, made a little theme song, you know, some

• 1:27:06Speaker 07

  fun little tidbits to make it a little more fun and put them online and just thought, well, let's see what happens. And I was actually pretty shocked at how well it was received immediately, which prompted me to start making general chemistry tutorials this time with green screen and some animations and, you know, kind of up the production value a little bit. And those were also received well, so I started doing biochemistry and physics and astronomy and math and just really, you know, kind of was off to the races with as many topics as I could cover. And then around 2019, 2020, a new component of the channel emerged. I started to do some debunking content where I just take charlatans and frauds who lie

• 1:27:48Speaker 07

  about science and expose them, debunk them increasingly maliciously, I guess, over the years, which has become something of a reputation for me. And so those are the two things I do to this day.

• 1:28:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we kind of started with debunking. That's kind of, I think it's a critical part of scientific, science communication.

• 1:28:10Speaker 07

  I think so.

• 1:28:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's funny that you kind of found it after the fact. Yeah, because, you know, most people have misconceptions about science. Not just filling a void, you're correcting misinformation, right?

• 1:28:24Speaker 07

  That's right.

• 1:28:25Jay Novella?

  Dave, I saw your videos, I think all of them at this point, of your ongoing battle with the flat-earthers.

• 1:28:33Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:28:34Jay Novella?

  And yeah, I mean, it's, you know, I really liked your angle on it. I guess, you know, you're at the level of aggression that I wish that I could be at.

• 1:28:43Speaker 07

  Yeah, I hear that a lot.

• 1:28:44Jay Novella?

  I mean, it's perfect. It's perfect because, you know, it's really interesting as the, as a science advocate and science communicator myself, like, you know, you're saying the things that I wish I was educated enough in that particular area, you know, I just isn't one of my areas that I, that I've done a deep dive on, you know, and it seems so obvious to most of us that this is so ridiculously, you know, ill, it's an ill-thought-out position, right? It's just like you can't, you can't, it doesn't hold water on so many levels. How did you get into that? Like, tell me about the story behind how that kind of became your focus.

• 1:29:17Speaker 07

  So, I mean, it was, I definitely wouldn't say it's my focus now, but I would say that it's the first thing that I debunked because I kind of got dragged into it. So I was making an astronomy series, and, you know, basically astronomy 101, right? Tutorials to a company, a freshman year undergrad that's taking astro 101, right? This is what you learn in class. Here you go. I just thought at the end it would be kind of fun to do a couple of pieces. One debunking astrology and one debunking flat earth. I didn't look into anything that flat earthers say. I just had heard that there were flat earthers and I thought, haha, that's so silly, isn't it? So I did those two pieces and I thought I'd get more heat on the astrology one, but nobody seemed to care on that. But with the flat

• 1:30:00Speaker 07

  earth one, all I really did was kind of recapitulate points from earlier in the series. How did we, how did the, you know, in antiquity, how did we observe the celestial sphere, things that we noticed that helped us understand that the earth is a sphere 2,500 years ago, right? Here are some things to talk about. And that video went to the top of the flat earth keyword search that day when it went out. So these guys, the globebusters, decided they were going to do a live stream, just tearing it apart. Oh, man, this guy's so dumb. This professor Dave is so indoctrinated. He's a NASA shill. And they did this long, long, long, long livestream, just, and they were really, I mean,

• 1:30:42Speaker 07

  they were really nasty towards me. And that, it's just, at the time, I was not used to people talking about me on the internet. Now, it's every minute of every day, and it's just, it's, it's a constant barrage of vitriol being thrown my way. But at the time, I just, I, I wasn't used to it, and I got, you know, I took it personally. So, I did a response video. I did a forty-five minute video, tearing apart their little livestream. I'd never, it's the first debunk I've ever done. It's the first long-form content I'd ever done. And I loved it. I found out that I'm really good at it. People loved it. It's still, to this day, the most viewed video on my channel by a lot. And so, it was just this incredible

• 1:31:24Speaker 07

  thing, where I discovered this other type of content, that I felt compelled to do, that I really enjoyed doing, that looked like it could be lucrative as well, which would help me, you know, not have to do other kinds of work, and I could really focus on science communication. So, I really went for it. I mean, I stuck with Flat Earth for a few more videos, but then I pretty quickly branched off into creationism, and electric universe, and anti-vaxxers, and just quantum mysticism, or whatever I felt like debunking. I mean, there's, it's a never-ending well, that we can dip into for things to debunk, but just kinda went for it.

• 1:31:57Jay Novella?

  I used those videos to introduce my son to Flat Earth. And, you know, he really got into, well, he and I both liked your, your point of approach. You know, I just think it was like, first and foremost, you really knew all the answers. Like, you, you weren't, they weren't really get one over on you, which is, their typical way of doing it is, they'll throw a bunch of lingo at you, and like, make you second guess your position, just because you're not, you know, following everything that they're saying. Yeah, I could see that they were being aggressive towards you, and that you decided that you're gonna take the gloves off a little bit, which, it worked really well, obviously. Like, people really responded to it. Other than that, what, what are some of your topics that you felt, you know, landed really well?

• 1:32:38Speaker 07

  I mean, creationism and intelligent design is one of the biggest focuses, if not the biggest debunking focus, just because, like Flat Earth, it is a denial of entire fields of science, depending on the flavor of creationism, right? Flat Earth is a denial of the entire field of physics, the entire field of geology, the entire field of astronomy. In the same way, Young Earth creationism denies almost as much science as Flat Earth. The difference is that it's tremendously more prevalent and is also, you know, part of a political movement, right? There's definitely a push towards Christian theocracy, the erosion of church and state. These are things that really, the separation of church and state, trying to get religion

• 1:33:23Speaker 07

  taught in public schools, things like that. These are things that I'm really concerned about from a societal standpoint, right? Flat Earth is adorable in comparison, right? It's a very silly, tiny little cult, and it's fun to make fun of, and it's important to expose how stupid it is and use it as a case study in conspiratorial thought to teach lessons about it. But creationism and intelligent design and all that, that's something that actually directly threatens our freedoms as a country, as a citizenry. So I have devoted quite a lot of attention to that, and now I'm starting to look at, you know, what the current administration is putting out. I actually just finished editing a piece on, that'll come out probably this Saturday, about all the Trump, the trans mice comment that he made, and it's just like insane, and

• 1:34:08Speaker 07

  I mean, this is where our government is at. So I'm trying to be topical and do things that are, you know, I gotta talk about RFK Jr., I gotta talk about people in his cabinet, I gotta talk about this stuff, and hope that that makes an impact. So that's definitely, at least, part of my, the main part of my focus at the moment with the debunking.

• 1:34:27Speaker 04

  What I found with the Flat Earthers, actually, is that, I think a lot of them are creationists, because even though it might have started as kind of this more of a cult thing on its own, it's kind of merged with the, well, it's the firmament, you know? That notion of affirmament comes from the Bible. And so to them, to I think to a lot of the ongoing Flat Earthers, it's a support of creationism, of, you know, the literal interpretation of the Bible, right? There is no space, because there's affirmament up there. They quote the Bible when they talk about it, and...

• 1:35:00Speaker 07

  Well, I mean, I wouldn't say merged. I think that there is a sub-community of flat-earthers that are that way because they are biblical literalists. Some are just conspiratorial thought on steroids. Like, it's just insane conspiracy.

• 1:35:14Jay Novella?

  Yeah, absolutely. The conspiracy, the hardcore conspiracy theorists are into everything conspiratorial, regardless. But then there's the ideological conspirators.

• 1:35:22Speaker 07

  Yeah, if you're a flat-earther, you believe in every single conspiracy. But the difference is that the overwhelming majority of creationists are not flat-earthers.

• 1:35:29Jay Novella?

  Yes, that's correct.

• 1:35:30Speaker 07

  There's only about 10,000 flat-earthers at the most in the world, whereas there are millions upon millions of creationists, even young Earth creationists. They're a much larger demographic, and they believe these things in earnest. And ironically, they mock flat-earthers. Even Kent Hovind will mock flat-earthers as like a silly belief system. And it's like, that's the one thing that you don't advocate for, you know. But yeah, it's pretty incredible.

• 1:35:58Jay Novella?

  Dave, what are you working on right now?

• 1:36:00Speaker 07

  Literally, this moment today, I was working on the piece I was just telling you about, the Trump transmice. Other than that, I'm working on, like, I'm also constantly working on academic tutorials. So I'm working on some math tutorials on differential equations. I'm working on zoology tutorials. I'm working on forensic science tutorials. I'm working on world history tutorials. And then a whole bunch of other debunkers are constantly kind of in the queue, as it were.

• 1:36:28Jay Novella?

  When you're going to, in the future, talk about the Trump administration and what the government is doing, are you, you know, we're struggling with it right now, right? Because first of all, we started out this show being apolitical. We really don't want to talk about politics.

• 1:36:42Speaker 04

  Not apolitical, nonpartisan.

• 1:36:43Jay Novella?

  Nonpartisan.

• 1:36:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we don't talk about things that are strictly political, but of course, whenever politics has a scientific angle to it, we talk about the science. You know, if they're getting the science wrong, we will absolutely talk about it. Just like, we don't talk about religion, but we talk about religion like creationism when they make scientific claims.

• 1:37:01Speaker 07

  Correct.

• 1:37:02Jay Novella?

  Yeah, so, yeah, just, I mean, I wouldn't say we are not political, because that's just not accurate. We just have to be clarified, so we're nonpartisan.

• 1:37:09Speaker 07

  Yeah, when, when, when demagogues politicize science, I'm going to debunk their politicization of science. And so, you know, it's annoyed, it's turned some people off, you know, I'll talk about trans issues, but it's because I'm tired of this aspect of the culture war, and people, 10 years later, we've been talking about this, people still refusing to learn about what trans people are, so I try to teach them aspects about human anatomy and physiology, and what gender identity is and these things, and I do get comments, you know, "Why are you being political?" I'm not, I'm talking about science. This is about, you know, hormones and, you know, human anatomy, and like, that's biology, my friend, that's called the science.

• 1:37:51Speaker 07

  So, but it has to be done, it just, I'm really tired of the discourse, I'm really tired of the abuse in our government of science, and now I'm finally seeing scientists turning around and starting to become more available for commentary because of the gigantic funding cuts, NIH funding cuts, scientists are panicking, right? They are finally starting to realize what I've been saying for years, and that is that public perception of science informs voting behavior, which informs your ability to do your jobs, right? That Trump got in there is why you guys are all freaking out about, about your work. So, work with me, right? Let's, let's all together, the scientific community and us science communicators,

• 1:38:35Speaker 07

  help the public figure out what the hell is going on and how they're being lied to, left, right, and center, by this administration and, and others, you know?

• 1:38:42Jay Novella?

  And that's part, part of the, the problem and issue as science communicators, like, you know, we have audience members, we have people who've listened to the show for a long time and who... Can't really tease apart the idea that, you know, we're talking about the science and how politics has affected it and distorted it, you know, but we're not specifically talking about politics like, you know, that's not our focus. That's not the thing that we get out of bed in the morning.

• 1:39:08Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:39:08Jay Novella?

  But again, we have to talk about it because things have become so unbelievably unclear. The trans issue in particular is something that the skeptical community is really wringing their hands over because there isn't agreement inside, inside the skeptical community. There isn't agreement about what the science says.

• 1:39:25Speaker 07

  Yes. Yeah. It's unfortunate. Yeah.

• 1:39:28Jay Novella?

  It sucks. Yeah. It's very frustrating because

• 1:39:31Speaker 04

  It's unfortunate and completely unnecessary.

• 1:39:33Jay Novella?

  Right.

• 1:39:34Speaker 04

  Because, and I've spoken about it quite a bit recently as well. Of course, I get, I get attacked as a woke ideologue, you know, liberal, because I say like, yeah, well, you know, biological sense, sex is not strictly binary. You know, that's just a fact. And

• 1:39:48Speaker 07

  Correct.

• 1:39:49Speaker 04

  But, but they say, but, but it is because of gametes, right? If you encountered the gamete theory, right? This, the gamete gambit, like that's the new ideology. That's the, that's the dogma. It's like, well, it is strictly binary because the gametes are binary. Yeah.

• 1:40:03Speaker 07

  But that's flawed.

• 1:40:04Speaker 04

  But people are not single celled creatures and that's not what we mean by biological sex. Oh, you're trying to redefine biological sex?

• 1:40:10Speaker 07

  But the, but the reason it doesn't work is that, so, okay. So how do you, so when a boy is born, are they not male until they begin producing sperm?

• 1:40:19Speaker 04

  Right. Exactly. It's not sensical. I agree.

• 1:40:22Speaker 07

  It doesn't work, right? You cannot use a strictly gonadal definition nor strictly genital based definition, right? Sex refers to a suite of characteristics that don't always agree.

• 1:40:32Speaker 04

  But they say it doesn't. So that's, that's the, that's the weird dogma they've gotten themselves into. Like because of evolution, it's really only about gametes. So yeah, but we're talking about people, you know, which, and, and the very At the most, you're making some kind of weird, it's a semantic argument. It's a completely semantic argument. Alright, so call it something else. But the fact is, you can't divide all of humanity cleanly into two categories.

• 1:40:58Speaker 07

  No.

• 1:40:58Speaker 04

  That's what we're talking about.

• 1:40:59Speaker 07

  They're trying to impose a rigid mathematical certainty onto the biological world in a way that just does not fit, period.

• 1:41:06Speaker 04

  Right. It also just like, it doesn't make sense in, this is the conversation we're having. Well, you know, men shouldn't compete in women's sports. Like, well, yeah, okay, but the definition of male and female from a sporting perspective is not so clean. It's like, yeah, but gametes. It's like, yeah, but we don't have gamete leagues. Like, we don't have a sperm league and an egg league.

• 1:41:24Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:41:25Speaker 04

  So you're using other features that you are telling me now are not part of biological sex because of evolution or something to divide. So it doesn't even make internal sense within the own argument that they're having.

• 1:41:36Speaker 07

  But, but more importantly, um, you know, there, informed nuanced discussions about social issues are never going to happen until everybody agrees on the science.

• 1:41:47Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:41:48Speaker 07

  We're not there yet. We're still having people called, well, men can't be women, men can't have babies, blah, blah, blah. Right? Until, while, while people are still talking like that, how the hell are we going to talk about these nuanced social issues? Everybody has to understand the basics. Then we can talk about what to do, right? I'm not going to have this, this sport conversation or the locker room conversation while people are still talking this way. It's ridiculous.

• 1:42:10Speaker 04

  Hmm. I agree. This is why it's unfortunate. I think that, you know, the science communication community needs to get their shit together.

• 1:42:18Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:42:18Speaker 04

  Because if we're arguing with each other about how to define biological sex, we have no hope of having a coherent message to the public. It was kind of this, a little bit of the same way 25 years ago with climate change. And I think that was one of the, it's not the first issue, but one of the early issues where, um, the science, you know, the ivory tower scientists had no idea what was coming for them, right? And then, come on, like a wonky field of climate science, like we probably never had any interaction with the media before, suddenly becomes in the crosshairs.

• 1:42:54Speaker 04

  A political movement.

• 1:42:55Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:42:55Speaker 04

  And they didn't know what they didn't know how to deal with it. Took them ten years to get their shit together.

• 1:42:59Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:43:00Speaker 04

  In terms of dealing with the public. Now, I think they they kind of know what they're doing. But I think we're still kind of in the same place with with the trans issue, the biological sex issue.

• 1:43:08Speaker 07

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:43:10Speaker 04

  We went through it fifty years ago and then it kind of got swept under the rug and now we're going through it again. Unfortunately, I'm afraid of what's gonna happen.

• 1:43:18Speaker 07

  Yeah, I'm actually doing a piece, uh, I'll probably put it out not this Saturday, but the following. Uh, about, uh, I was actually asked to be on a Piers Morgan, uh, panel with Jerry Coyne. So there was the whole F F R F, uh, resigning from the board of Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, these guys. I think what you're alluding to is, you know, these figures largely extensions of the, you know, atheist community. That are doubling down on, uh, the, on the, on the conservative talking points.

• 1:43:48Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 1:43:48Speaker 07

  This issue. Yeah, so I'm doing a piece on what Dawkins said on that panel and I'm tearing him a new one in that. And, uh, yeah, it's, it's really disgraceful, you know, I mean, it's, it, what the irony about it. Is that he is accusing people that actually educate themselves about. Gender identity and all, and, you know, all of these concepts that he's pretending to have expertise in. He's accusing them of being ideologues when in fact he is, he is bending over for ideologues. That are using his rhetoric to try to impose Christian nationalism, right? These guys, Dawkins and Coyne, they're famous for fighting against, um, you know, anti-evolution, uh, propaganda in the, in, in that space.

• 1:44:31Speaker 07

  And now they're tools, they are instruments of the very same people. It's just, it's, you can't write this stuff, you know.

• 1:44:38Speaker 04

  I know, I hate to say it, but it's just so is Michael Shermer. They're, they're complete tools of Christian nationalists. And they don't, you know, they don't see it, but.

• 1:44:47Speaker 07

  All because they refuse to learn something new. It's just ridiculous, you know?

• 1:44:51Speaker 04

  I think they've decided that anyone who disagrees with their perspective are liberal, you know, woke liberal ideologues, and then it shuts down any discussion.

• 1:45:00Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:45:01Speaker 04

  And so it's very dismissive, you know, so you can't have a conversation. And the vitriol and the rhetoric is so intense. It's like, can we lower the heat a little bit and just try to focus on what our common ground is? Like, there's none of that happening. And they're just stuck in this ridiculous semantic argument that is just fueling, you know, this, again, this right-wing Christian propaganda. It's so ironic. I agree. It's completely ironic.

• 1:45:34Jay Novella?

  Yeah, but Steve, if you ignore all the edge cases, it is binary.

• 1:45:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, if you ignore, yeah, it's like, they always come out at night, except during the day.

• 1:45:42Speaker 07

  It's binary, except for when it's not.

• 1:45:44Speaker 04

  Except for all the exceptions. I mean, Jerry Coyne recently, I'm gonna call him out a little bit, because we invited him on the podcast to talk about this issue, and he refused to come on. Right? But then he still trash-talks me on his blog, and on a recent one where he was touting a survey, and that said, "Look, most scientists agree that biological sex is binary." The question was, is biological sex binary? And then with an asterisk, and necessarily asterisk, it said, "If you don't include all of the intersex people."

• 1:46:17Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:46:18Speaker 04

  Right? So, like, 52% of people of science would have agreed with this statement. So he's saying, that's supposed to mean something, is biological sex, if you don't include all the people who are not binary? It's ridiculous.

• 1:46:30Speaker 07

  But it's also, but it's not just intersex people. The far more interesting cases are the, I forget off the top of my head the names of the syndromes, but you can have XY chromosomes and express female genitals, and you can have XX chromosomes and express male genitals.

• 1:46:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:46:45Speaker 07

  We're not even talking about different chromosomal situations.

• 1:46:48Speaker 04

  Those are, they are technically intersex, but now they turn-

• 1:46:50Speaker 07

  Oh, those kind of intersex?

• 1:46:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, the term would be difference of sexual development, DSD.

• 1:46:54Speaker 07

  Yeah, gonadal dysgenesis, right? But, but, but the thing, typically when we're talking about intersects, we're talking about X monosomy or XXY trisomy, where we're talking about irregular chromosomal situations. We're talking about, instead, there are situations where you have XX and XY, just like everybody else, but you express the opposing set of genitals and reproductive organs, right?

• 1:47:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, I use it as an example.

• 1:47:16Speaker 07

  How is that in the binary?

• 1:47:18Speaker 04

  There's CAIS, right? There's a complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, there are XY, they have testicles, they make sperm, the sperm doesn't, is not functional because the testes don't descend, but they have no response to testosterone, and therefore they develop completely morphologically female. They are, they don't have uterus, but other than that, they are completely morphologically female. And, you know, according to Coin, that's a male, that's a guy, because they have sperm inside of them, even though they're female.

• 1:47:49Speaker 07

  But he'll also say it's based on genitals. This was the funniest thing about the Pierce segment, is that Coin started talking about, "Oh, it's based on the genitals," and they go, "Yeah, yeah, yeah," and then he goes, "No, it's based on the gonads," and they go, "Yeah, yeah, yeah," and then Pierce starts fixating on that boxer, that Egyptian boxer, who was born with female genitals and reproductive organs and everything, but has XY chromosomes, and he starts saying that, that, that that's a man because of the, it's like, you guys, you don't even realize you're contradicting each other, because you don't care about any kind of accuracy, you're just grandstanding to get the, the points from the conservative audience that you're courting, right? It's just ridiculous.

• 1:48:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know that that's, oh, I mean, I think Coin is sincere and just misguided in his conception of this. Yeah, I think he, he's just applying, he's making a category mistake, he's making the wrong argument, and he doesn't realize the full context.

• 1:48:38Speaker 07

  It's unfortunate. He's chosen his camp and he'll, you know, that, they're, these men are of a certain age, Coin and Dawkins, and it's just, they're never gonna get free to it.

• 1:48:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's generational, I agree. Yeah, the idea that there's something different than just men and women is so anathema, they can't wrap their head around it.

• 1:48:54Speaker 07

  Impossible for them to wrap their head around, yeah. I just, it's, I wish that everybody could just learn the lesson, you know, I'm, I'm not quite old enough. I mean, it was the seventies and eighties, I think, primarily when people started to become aware of the homosexual community and that sexuality is not as rigid as, you know, as, as the Puritans would have us believe. And now, right, even, even conservatives, even, even mainstream conservatives are tolerant towards different sexualities, you know what I mean? And it's because it just would be so incredibly unpopular, right? It's not, it would not be trendy to be bashing on gays in 2025. And so they're tolerant of gay people. It's like, you guys, can't you just learn the lesson here? Right? Take, I'm, it's not

• 1:49:39Speaker 07

  Adam and Eve, it's Adam and Steve, right? Can't you see that that's what you're doing about trans people right now? Can't you fast forward 20 years and just like, get the tolerance that we're all gonna have societally, hopefully?

• 1:49:49Speaker 04

  I do think it's generational. Talk to the younger generation, they don't give a shit. You know, I, I just, they're, they're not gonna have the same ick reaction that I think the older generation has about it. Just gotta wait till they die out. Unfortunately, that's the way revolutions happen sometime in science. Gotta wait for the old guard to die off.

• 1:50:09Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:50:10Speaker 04

  All right. Well, Dave, thank you so much for being on the show. Why don't you tell our audience how they can get to your content?

• 1:50:15Speaker 07

  Absolutely. Yeah. I am Professor Dave Explains on YouTube, and that's pretty much all I do. I have some other socials, but I don't really use them. So, yeah.

• 1:50:23Speaker 04

  Okay. Sounds good. All right. Thanks for joining us. Thanks, Dave.

• 1:50:26Speaker 07

  Thanks a lot.

• 1:50:27Speaker 04

  Thanks, Dave.

• 1:50:41Speaker 04

  Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. And then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. You guys are coming off a sweep from last week. See how you do this week. There's a theme. Okay. This week, there's a theme, ancient roots. These are modern scientific ideas that have roots that go back maybe a bit farther than you thought. I've done this before. I like this theme. Are you ready? Mm-hmm. Okay. Here you go. Item number one, Persian scholar Abu Rahan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Buruni proposed in the 11th century that India may have been connected to other continents in the past.

• 1:51:24Speaker 04

  Item number two, Aristarchus of Samos was the first to propose a heliocentric system in which the Earth revolves around the sun in one year and rotates on its axis in one day. Item number three, in his 1025 work, Muslim physician Ibn Sina proposed human-to-human transmission of disease through invisible entities and was the first to propose a quarantine to limit the spread of contagion. Evan, go first.

• 1:51:54Speaker 05

  These are all very plausible. Um, I won't try to pronounce the names though, because I will fail. But the first one about the 11th, uh, the one proposed in the 11th century, that India may have been connected to other continents in the past. I think of the three, this might be the one that I've have some inkling, some sort of memory in filed away in my head where there was, there was, there was early suggestions that, um, that, that India was, uh, was not originally part of Asia.

• 1:52:35Speaker 05

  I just, I just don't know if it's tied to this Persian scholar specifically, but something is saying that this is right, uh, science. Number two, the second one about the heliocentric system in which the Earth revolves around the sun in one year and rotates on its axis in one day. You didn't give the year.

• 1:52:56Speaker 04

  Oh, I should, I meant to, um, uh, it's, this is like BC, something from 310 to 230 B.C. So somewhere in there.

• 1:53:06Speaker 05

  Um, hmm, I don't know. I mean, they, they were able to figure out pretty early that the size of the Earth. I remember there was a measurement done around that time in which they were able to pretty much accurately figure out how that the Earth was a sphere and roughly how big it was. They were pretty close. So could they have also figured this out, uh, back then? Maybe, maybe. Let me look at the last one again. 1025 was this one Muslim physician, um, proposed human-to-human transmission of disease through invisible entities. And was the first to propose a quarantine to limit the spread of contagion. I mean, just plausible.

• 1:53:50Speaker 05

  But you know, you don't think of that until what, like the 19th century is kind of, I think, when that came back, or maybe late 18th century. So that's a long time. That is a long span in which it proposed, but they did talk about. All right, I have to say something. So I will go with the earth. And revolving around the sun and rotating on its axis in one day. I think of the three, that one will be the fiction.

• 1:54:19Speaker 04

  Okay, Kara.

• 1:54:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Pass.

• 1:54:23Speaker 04

  Automatic failure for Kara.

• 1:54:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Damn, never mind, never mind. Okay. So Evan went with Aristarchus.

• 1:54:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:54:33Cara Santa Maria?

  I like the name of Samos.

• 1:54:37Cara Santa Maria?

  So first to, I don't know, somebody must have thought of it before, even if they couldn't prove it. Like they could draw a picture of it, no? I feel like that's the case with all of these things. Like, okay, I don't know, let's get creative. Human, human transmission of disease, like if you just watch people, you notice that people that are close to each other get sick. So what if we take them apart and then they don't get sick? Like, we don't even really need a model of, you know, viruses or anything. So that one feels reasonable, too. India may have been connected to other continents in the past. Plate tectonics in the 11th century? I don't buy that one. The maps weren't even that good, were they? No. Didn't people still think that they could sail off the edge of the earth?

• 1:55:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Persian, though, Persian scholar, maybe they did have good maps. They were very mathy. That name, too. Abu Rayhan Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Al Biruni. Wow, that's a good name. I'm going to say that it wasn't him. I thought it was somebody with an easier name. I don't know. I'll say that's the fiction.

• 1:55:40Speaker 05

  Because of the name?

• 1:55:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Let's spread out so we can sweep Steve, you guys.

• 1:55:44Speaker 05

  All right.

• 1:55:45Jay Novella?

  All right, Jay. I'm pretty sure that, um, Bob, see, what's his name? Aristarchus?

• 1:55:52Speaker 04

  Aristarchus.

• 1:55:53Jay Novella?

  Yeah, Aristarchus Samos. He's of Samos.

• 1:55:58Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:55:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes.

• 1:56:00Jay Novella?

  Okay. Well, that changes everything.

• 1:56:03Speaker 05

  Well, yeah, I mean, if you're from Samos.

• 1:56:05Jay Novella?

  I know something about this rings a bell for me about him being the first one to say that the, uh, that, you know, the heliocentric system of Earth. Um, so I think that one is science. The Muslim physician proposed a human transmission of disease. Wow, that 1025. Hmm. And then the first one here, so this guy, this guy had a, the, uh, his name is Rehan Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Al-Buruni. I'm gonna say that one is the fiction because I, I, um, I don't have a good reason, Steve. I just, my gut is telling me that, that he wasn't the first person to say that.

• 1:56:47Speaker 04

  Okay. And Bob?

• 1:56:48Bob Novella?

  Yeah, these are good. These are really good. I'm looking forward to see what's what here. But I'm only, what's rubbing me the wrong way is the Aristarchus in heliocentrism.

• 1:56:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh oh.

• 1:56:58Bob Novella?

  I mean, I, I don't know, Kara, I don't know. This is just a, a schwing. I, um, I mean, everyone knows Copernicus is, uh, the heliocentric guy, right? Um, I mean, it wouldn't surprise me, but I think I just would have known, I would have heard of this or known this. So I'll just say whatever and say that's fiction.

• 1:57:16Speaker 04

  All right. So you guys are all spread out. So no sweep for me. So I'll take this in order, as I do when they're all spread out. I'll start with number one, Persian scholar Abu Rahan Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Al-Buruni, or just Al-Buruni. Proposed in the 11th century that India may have been connected to other continents in the past. Kara, you think this one is the fiction. Jay, you think this one's the fiction also. Bob and Evan think this one is science. And this one is the fiction.

• 1:57:45Speaker 05

  Oh, hey, way to find it.

• 1:57:47Speaker 04

  Although none of what you said is true.

• 1:57:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh.

• 1:57:51Speaker 04

  But. So yeah, this this is not true, although all right. So I used ChatGPT to research this this theme for science fiction. And this is one of the things that ChatGPT spit out. Now, of course, I don't I don't take ChatGPT's word for anything. Of course not. I so then I typed in, can you give me a reference to support this? And ChatGPT has said, oh, I'm sorry. I made a mistake. This did not happen. Wait, it does that?

• 1:58:21Bob Novella?

  All right, saved, you know.

• 1:58:23Speaker 04

  I mean, I had looked it up anyway, and I kind of I couldn't find it. I'm like, why can't I find it? So give me a reference. What I did find, which was true, so Alberuni, so this guy was an amazing polymath astronomer, mathematician, mapmaker. He calculated the size of the Earth uh within 2% of the modern value, just using some trigonometry and measuring mountain heights or something. So just really pretty amazing. What he did do so after he calculated the size of the Earth, he reasoned that there should be another continent between Europe and Asia, like on the other side of the planet, basically the Americas. That's that's what he really did. He anticipated the discovery of the Americas. So that's too.

• 1:59:08Speaker 04

  He's like, that's too much water. Yeah, why would there be all this land on one side of the Earth and then nothing but ocean for the all the world? There's got to be a continent over there. Uh, and he was correct. That's cool. Yeah. He also thought that there would probably be in the temperate zone, at least part of it, and therefore that's probably inhabited, which was also correct. He so no, but he did not anticipate plate tectonics. Nobody did. People did did notice the map thing, though, Kara. So does so the even before plate tectonics was discovered, you know, there were observations of even going, you know, later than this, though, not quite more like 1500, 1600. Right, when they could see the Americas, right? And they were like, whoa, that it's really well next to Africa.

• 1:59:53Speaker 04

  Once we once you like mapped out North and South America and Africa, people started to say, wait a minute, that hmm. And then also, um fossils.

• 2:00:02Speaker 04

  were lining up to Leonardo da Vinci, actually, was one of the early proponents to say, oh, maybe there's a land moves around you like the why are there fossils on mountains like why are there shells on mountain tops? You know, maybe land moves, you know, so there's the inklings of these ideas that land can move and these things sort of piece together on the map, you know, even before plate tectonics was discovered. All right, let's go to number two. Aristarchus of Samos was the first to propose a heliocentric system in which the earth revolves around the sun in one year and rotates on its axis in one day. Bob, you said that one was the fiction. This one is science. He got it pretty much exactly correct. He also, by the way, agreed with those ancient Greeks who said that the sun

• 2:00:47Speaker 04

  is just another star. So his cosmology was pretty spot on.

• 2:00:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Wait, I just realized that I said Ptolemy, but he's geocentric. When was Ptolemy?

• 2:00:56Speaker 04

  No, Ptolemy's geos- yeah.

• 2:00:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, he was geocentric. When was he compared to Aristarchus?

• 2:01:01Speaker 04

  Ptolemy is basically Ptolemy won out over this guy, right? So Ptolemy's views predominated over Aristarchus until Copernicus, right? And in fact, Copernicus cited Aristarchus in his, in his writing.

• 2:01:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Geez.

• 2:01:22Speaker 04

  Although he later tried to suppress the, the citation to so he can keep the credit for himself.

• 2:01:29Cara Santa Maria?

  No such thing as a new idea.

• 2:01:30Speaker 04

  Yeah. But yeah, so it was just Ptolemy beat out Aristarchus, but Aristarchus was completely correct. So it is amazing to think that the ancient, there were ancient Greeks like, yep, the earth revolves about the sun. It spins in a day, it rotates around the sun in a year, and the sun is just another star.

• 2:01:44Cara Santa Maria?

  So like, they didn't have screens or anything. All they did was just stare at the sky all day.

• 2:01:49Speaker 04

  Yeah. They had no telescopes. It was all naked eye astronomy.

• 2:01:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 2:01:53Speaker 04

  All right. All of this means that in his 1025 work Muslim physician Ibn Sina proposed human to human transmission of disease through invisible entities and was the first to propose a quarantine to limit the spread of contagion is also science. This guy, also amazing.

• 2:02:08Bob Novella?

  Yeah, what the hell, man?

• 2:02:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, and again, he didn't, he didn't quite nail the idea of germs, but he knew it was particles, as opposed to, Kara, so yes, Miasma. Miasma, exactly. So the idea that there's contagion was definitely around, because you're right. It's just easy to observe that there's contagion, but the predominant belief was that it was miasma coming from the soil and the air, right? Bad air, but not necessarily people to people. So that was the, human to human transmission was definitely something that he was an early proponent of. The idea that it was particles and not miasma, also him. The idea that it was microscopic organisms, he didn't quite get there,

• 2:02:54Speaker 04

  but he got pretty far to like the modern germ theory. And also the idea of quarantine, he thought 40 days, like, there's human to human transmission, we need to quarantine people for 40 days to, in the middle of an outbreak or epidemic in order to limit spread. His, so his work, these, these guys, like you, you read about these ancient, like, polymath scholars, like, they write hundreds of books. He wrote The Canon of Medicine in, you know, 1025. That was the work in which he, he proposed this. This was among, a total of 450 works, right? The Canon of Medicine was used as a global medical textbook for 600 years. Wow. After he wrote it.

• 2:03:39Speaker 04

  Basically until the modern times, until we started to like do scientific medicine. Really, and I do think that in our, you know, Western-centric history of the world, we don't spend enough time studying the Persian and Muslim scholars that basically

• 2:03:57Bob Novella?

  Yep.

• 2:03:57Speaker 04

  was, you know, science and scholarship in our Middle Ages, in the West's Middle Ages, like,

• 2:04:03Bob Novella?

  Amazing accomplishments.

• 2:04:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely, they, they, yeah, they're absolutely amazing. The astronomy, the math, the medicine, all of that.

• 2:04:11Bob Novella?

  Oh my god, you name it, yeah, optics.

• 2:04:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, yes, optics was, they were,

• 2:04:15Bob Novella?

  Algebra.

• 2:04:16Speaker 04

  For a thousand years, they were it. They were the scientific and cultural center of the world.

• 2:04:20Bob Novella?

  They leveraged that.

• 2:04:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:04:22Bob Novella?

  Think, uh, like what religion came in and he messed it all up?

• 2:04:25Speaker 04

  Well, no, that's that's an oversimplification because a lot of them, the religion was there the whole time, Bob. And a lot of them did it, like a lot of the astronomy was done specifically to, to, uh, to create the religious calendar.

• 2:04:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, you literally wrote in his 1025 work Muslim Physician.

• 2:04:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, no, the religion was there to begin with.

• 2:04:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:43Speaker 04

  And it wasn't, it was not an impediment. It wasn't. It was actually part of it. Uh, it's really just more modern evangelical type.

• 2:04:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, fundamentalist.

• 2:04:52Speaker 04

  Or fundamentalist, say, modern fundamental type interpretations that would have, you know, hold anti-scientific views. But at this time, they, they completely accepted, you know, science and scholarship and it was just part of, of their, their culture.

• 2:05:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, there's actually.

• 2:05:07Speaker 04

  Alongside their religion.

• 2:05:08Cara Santa Maria?

  There was a phenomenal Sudanese, uh, journalist and researcher at this, um, conference that I was just at earlier this week. And she was talking about communicating climate science to Muslim communities in Sudan. And she was like, I couldn't remember the number that she cited, but she was like, I dug into the Quran and I was able to find like dozens, plural of passages to promote taking care of the earth, to promote planting trees, to promote like, she was like, there's so many ways that you can meet people through the religion and promote that kind of science. And there's, you know, a lot of religious passages that, that, uh, enforce that. It's what we choose. It's what we choose to read, right? And how we choose to interpret it.

• 2:05:54Speaker 04

  Mm hmm. All right. Well, good job, Jay and Kara.

• 2:05:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, Jay.

• 2:05:59Speaker 04

  You're right.

• 2:05:59Bob Novella?

  Well done.

• 2:06:00Speaker 04

  This was a fun one, but that man, ChatGPT is still hallucinating. And you can't trust anything it says. It's, but it's how, it is helpful to just like throw out a bunch of ideas. You know what I mean? Then I could do the research on them, but just to like, give me a starting point.

• 2:06:15Bob Novella?

  So don't ever do that again.

• 2:06:17Speaker 04

  It's a bit of a time saver. Like I just said, give me, you know, three examples of modern scientific theories that have deep ancient roots. And then I actually had to give me like 20 of them before I settled on the ones I wanted to use. But and so that was good. It's a good way to just say, again, a starting point. It's like Wikipedia, you know, it's a good starting point. You can't use it as your ultimate reference. You know, you gotta go to, you know, first sources, primary sources. But it's a good, you know, shortcut. All right, Evan, give us a quote.

• 2:06:47Speaker 05

  The burden of proof as far as authentication is concerned is on the claimant, not on anyone else to prove a negative. Asserting that a particular image must be paranormal because it is unexplained only constitutes an example of the logical fallacy called arguing from ignorance. One cannot draw a conclusion from a lack of knowledge. That was written by Joe Nichol.

• 2:07:10Speaker 04

  Joe.

• 2:07:10Speaker 05

  Joe Nichol, who died.

• 2:07:13Speaker 04

  Last week.

• 2:07:13Speaker 05

  Last week, and a kind of a shock to the entire skeptic community. Do I need to explain who Joe Nichol was to our audience?

• 2:07:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know. We heard about that after we recorded last week's show. But yeah, Joe Nichol was, you know, a friend of ours. He was one of the first people that we really got close to in the skeptical movement. A really consummate skeptic. He really, he settled, I mean, so many pearls, I remember him saying over the years, that were totally true. Like, he really, really got the process, the logic, you know, the essence of, you know, skepticism as an endeavor, investigation as the consummate investigator. Again, the only person really, at the time, definitely, who was a full-time paranormal scientific skeptical investigator, you know what I mean?

• 2:07:59Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:08:00Speaker 04

  And he, he did it, man. He was boots on the ground. You know what I mean? Also a great lecturer. I enjoyed every lecture of his that I.

• 2:08:09Speaker 05

  So interesting to listen to.

• 2:08:11Speaker 04

  He knew how to tell a story.

• 2:08:12Speaker 05

  Great lecturer.

• 2:08:13Speaker 04

  Knew how to tell a story.

• 2:08:14Speaker 05

  Wonderful in an interview. His books were fantastic. So much information, so much that we all learned.

• 2:08:20Speaker 04

  Inquest on the Shroud, the definitive debunking of the Shroud of Turin.

• 2:08:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's right.

• 2:08:25Speaker 04

  Absolutely definitive was Joe Nichol.

• 2:08:27Speaker 05

  Without question. And also one of the first to take, really kind of take down the Warrens during their, during their rise throughout the 70s and the 80s. He, he was there toe to toe with them the whole way. So many great stories and just, my gosh. He will be missed. He was tremendous.

• 2:08:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, he was. All right, guys. Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

• 2:08:50Speaker 05

  Thank you, Steve.

• 2:08:51Speaker 04

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

• 2:08:59Speaker 04

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

• 2:09:36Speaker 08

  500 orders a month was manageable. 5,000 is madness. Embrace intelligent order fulfillment with ShipStation, the only platform combining order management, warehouse workflows, inventory, returns, and analytics in one place. What used to take five separate tools, ShipStation does in one. Automate fulfillment and rate shopping to ship up to 15 times more with up to 90% savings. Go to shipstation.com and use code AUDIO to try ShipStation free for 60 days.