The Skeptics Guide #1058 - Oct 18 2025

News Items: Why People Believe Misinformation, Measles on the Rise, Is Therapy Speech, Solar Activity Increasing, Possible Wormhole; Who's That Noisy; Name That Logical Fallacy; From TikTok: Earth in a Vacuum; Science or Fiction

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:32Speaker 03

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

• 0:39Speaker 04

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

• 0:54Speaker 05

  Hi, everyone.

• 0:55Speaker 04

  How's everyone doing?

• 0:56Bob Novella?

  Nice.

• 0:57Speaker 05

  Not bad.

• 0:58Speaker 04

  Nice. You guys, do you guys chase comets? Like, do you pay attention to when comets are in the sky?

• 1:03Bob Novella?

  Sure.

• 1:04Speaker 04

  Of course.

• 1:04Bob Novella?

  Does it everybody?

• 1:05Speaker 05

  They hit my news feed, and I take a look.

• 1:08Speaker 04

  We had a couple in October, but they're, you know, they're gonna be barely visible.

• 1:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, not exactly Hale-Bopp or Halley's.

• 1:15Speaker 04

  A Halley's Comet, although don't get me started with Halley's Comet.

• 1:18Bob Novella?

  Don't even start. Change the subject right now.

• 1:20Speaker 05

  Wait, wait, Halley's Comet's a controversial thing?

• 1:22Speaker 04

  We had the worst viewing in 2,000 years of our lifetime, that's all.

• 1:26Speaker 05

  But that's okay. You just need to be alive 79 years later.

• 1:29Bob Novella?

  Steve and I, Steve and I are still distraught over that in the mid-'80s.

• 1:33Speaker 05

  Oh, my gosh, I didn't realize it was a trigger moment. I'm so sorry. I apologize.

• 1:37Bob Novella?

  Think about it. Think about it. How iconic. The most iconic comet ever, Halley's Comet. It's coming, we're like, ready for it, and it's like, oh, yeah. Not only is it ridiculously far away this time, it's also the weather sucks. So it's like, double slap, cosmic slap to the face. No comment for you.

• 1:54Speaker 04

  But we're not gonna talk about it, Devon. But, but Comet Lemon, which is-

• 1:59Speaker 05

  Comet Lemon?

• 2:00Speaker 04

  Is getting- It had its, it was, it had its southern hemisphere viewing and now it's transitioning to the northern hemisphere. It will climb higher and higher above the horizon and in the end of October will be good viewing. However, from what I'm reading, it's only gonna be naked eye visible if you are in a dark sky location, which we are definitely not.

• 2:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Nor am I here in LA.

• 2:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:24Speaker 05

  Dang.

• 2:24Speaker 04

  So about binoculars, you whip out your binoculars, you should be able to see it above the horizon.

• 2:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, just get to the right horizon and have nothing in front of you in your binoculars, I guess you'll be alright.

• 2:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Horizon viewing is always really difficult.

• 2:35Speaker 04

  It's always really difficult.

• 2:36Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm, challenging.

• 2:37Speaker 04

  I haven't had in my life a naked eye visible-

• 2:40Speaker 05

  Whoa.

• 2:41Speaker 04

  Way above the horizon gorgeous giant comet, right? I just haven't seen, I haven't had my quintessential comet experience.

• 2:49Speaker 05

  So Hale-Bopp was not that, Steve? Cause we did see Hale-Bopp.

• 2:53Speaker 04

  It was a little thing, it was, you know.

• 2:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Is it as bright as like the ISS? Like, does it look like the ISS or is it-

• 3:00Speaker 05

  No, it was better than that one.

• 3:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, it was better, okay.

• 3:03Speaker 04

  Cause it had a tail.

• 3:03Speaker 05

  You could see the tail.

• 3:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's, that's cool. I've never had anything, I mean, the closest I've had are like meteor showers, but definitely never seen a comet. That's cool.

• 3:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, but you, yeah, but you'll probably make the next Halley's, I think.

• 3:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, maybe.

• 3:15Speaker 05

  Maybe.

• 3:16Cara Santa Maria?

  We never know.

• 3:18Speaker 04

  And Kara, Kara promised me that you'll, you'll remember us, right?

• 3:22Cara Santa Maria?

  You guys, like, I'm, I'm about to have my Hitchhiker's Guide birthday and it's depressing me.

• 3:27Speaker 05

  Farty too.

• 3:31Speaker 04

  That's right, happy birthday Kara.

• 3:32Speaker 05

  You're a disaster. When you're listening to this, right?

• 3:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it'll be the Sunday, yeah.

• 3:36Speaker 05

  Sunday, okay, day before, alright.

• 3:38Cara Santa Maria?

  But I guess that's like, that's an exciting one, Hitchhiker's Guide.

• 3:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:42Speaker 05

  Oh, sure. And, and Steve, you're particular to even numbers rather than odd numbers, right?

• 3:47Cara Santa Maria?

  It's a nice balance.

• 3:48Speaker 04

  I have an even number bias, yeah.

• 3:51Cara Santa Maria?

  But what about fives? We've talked about this, right?

• 3:53Speaker 04

  Fives are good.

• 3:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Fives are good too, right?

• 3:54Speaker 05

  Five's work.

• 3:55Cara Santa Maria?

  They're even in their way.

• 3:57Speaker 04

  It's all just a symmetry thing, I think.

• 3:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:00Jay Novella?

  But no number's cooler than a number five.

• 4:02Speaker 04

  What?

• 4:03Speaker 05

  You think so?

• 4:03Jay Novella?

  Hell, yeah. Five is the best frickin' number.

• 4:05Speaker 04

  No way. Twelve is much better than five.

• 4:08Speaker 05

  Oh, interesting.

• 4:08Cara Santa Maria?

  We're at forty-two.

• 4:09Jay Novella?

  Forty-two's fine, but that's a made-up special number.

• 4:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, really? But five isn't?

• 4:15Jay Novella?

  You know what I meant, goddammit.

• 4:18Cara Santa Maria?

  I love it. I love it.

• 4:19Bob Novella?

  Thirteen's pretty awesome.

• 4:20Speaker 05

  Thirteen, yeah. I do have a thirteen bias.

• 4:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Thirteen, is that like triggering for you, Steve? Thirteen is like all the bad things.

• 4:27Speaker 04

  No, thirteen, for a skeptic, thirteen is like your badass number.

• 4:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's funny, but it's...

• 4:33Speaker 04

  It's like a countercultural number. It's like, I really like six, six, six.

• 4:37Speaker 05

  If you're gonna have a uniform number, you're gonna wear thirteen.

• 4:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but thirteen is definitely like odd and unbalanced and doesn't feel so much...

• 4:42Speaker 05

  Prime.

• 4:43Speaker 04

  It's all prime and shit.

• 4:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Prime, yeah.

• 4:44Bob Novella?

  I loved, yeah, that's just more reasons to love it.

• 4:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, I agree. There's a lot of reasons to like thirteen. It's the first teen.

• 4:51Speaker 04

  But twelve is very useful. Whether it's twelve months in a year, it's twelve inches in a foot.

• 4:55Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 4:55Cara Santa Maria?

  It's very useful if you're on, yeah, the weird measurement systems that we use here in the US.

• 5:00Speaker 05

  Twelve, D12, twelve-sided die is a perfect solid.

• 5:03Jay Novella?

  Evan, you made me think of something. Like, so this, the teen thing, why doesn't it start with eleven? Because it's the double digits numbers, right? Like, what's the spe- what is so special about when we get to thirteen? What the hell does teen even mean?

• 5:15Speaker 05

  Right, why isn't it ten teen?

• 5:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, it is in other languages. Once, two, three, four, like, yeah, we just do it weird. Also, I mean, while we're on the subject, twelve months, but we had to do like ten for twelve, eleven for, for, sorry, nine for eleven. I know, but we should have added them to the end, not the beginning.

• 5:35Speaker 05

  Right.

• 5:36Cara Santa Maria?

  That would have made a lot more sense, right?

• 5:38Speaker 04

  But they were added in the middle.

• 5:39Speaker 05

  Right, December.

• 5:41Cara Santa Maria?

  And we should shit did the names.

• 5:43Speaker 04

  In August, like Julio.

• 5:44Speaker 05

  I believe it's July, right, Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar.

• 5:47Cara Santa Maria?

  But we, they should have changed the names then.

• 5:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, because then yeah, October is the tenth month.

• 5:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Make November and December July and August when you do this, right? And then all the, ugh.

• 5:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, I got you.

• 5:58Cara Santa Maria?

  I guess people just weren't very literate then. Yeah, alright.

• 6:01Speaker 04

  Talk about too late. They forgot to make zero the first year. Yeah, right? And I was stuck with that problem.

• 6:07Bob Novella?

  Oh my god. Don't bring back that can of worms.

• 6:10Speaker 04

  Oh, Y2K is in 2001.

• 6:13Bob Novella?

  Oh my, remember that, Bob? That took a whole year to figure out, basically.

• 6:17Cara Santa Maria?

  I saw a whole new conspiracy theory the other day. I mean, not to like beat this into the ground, but my friend sent me on Instagram this whole new conspiracy theory. The years 614 to 9/11 might never have existed. Some historians claim the Middle Ages added 300 fake years.

• 6:36Speaker 04

  Tell that to Radiocarbon Daily.

• 6:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, if that's true, we're living in 1726, not 2026. And that's exactly what I said to him. I was like, well, we can measure how old things are.

• 6:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Especially things that are only that old.

• 6:50Speaker 04

  I mean, we have a lot of records from the Middle Ages.

• 6:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And they just made up 300. Well, not a lot happened in those 300 years. Weird. I wonder if they really exist.

• 6:59Speaker 04

  It's my gap of ignorance.

• 7:00Bob Novella?

  Depends where you were on the planet.

• 7:01Speaker 04

  Therefore.

• 7:02Jay Novella?

  Hey, Bob, I didn't realize that so many things, like science-related things piss you off. Like, we should make like a...

• 7:09Bob Novella?

  Oh, that's a segment.

• 7:10Jay Novella?

  We should make a coffee book, like a, you know, like a coffee table book of like science facts that piss Bob off.

• 7:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 7:19Jay Novella?

  And of course, you'd be featured on the cover, like, looking really pissed off while you're looking at clouds in the sky.

• 7:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Shaking your fist, yeah.

• 7:27Bob Novella?

  Yeah, yeah. I like this idea. Let's have a meeting.

• 7:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, things that piss off Bob. Science edition.

• 7:34Speaker 04

  Scientific pet peeves.

• 7:37Jay Novella?

  Steve will be on page 13.

• 7:41Speaker 04

  Alright, well, let's dig into our news items. Kara, you're gonna get us started with another item about misinformation.

• 7:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Ooh, and this one is especially interesting to me. It's one that I struggle to communicate about because I'm still working on engaging in my own paradigm shift to see this news item through the lens of the psychologist who authored it. So...

• 8:06Cara Santa Maria?

  There is a new study that was published called symbolic show of strength, a predictor of risk perception and belief in misinformation. And then there was a really good write around in The Conversation just yesterday by two of the authors. So Randy Stein from Cal Poly Pomona and Abraham Ruchek, hopefully I'm pronouncing that right, from Cal State Northridge. And so their argument, and they studied this construct, I guess you could say, during the COVID-19 pandemic. This whole conversation is going to be about this idea called symbolic strength.

• 8:52Cara Santa Maria?

  During COVID, they wanted to understand why are people believing, not just spreading, but believing super bizarre misinformation, misinformation that's demonstrably false. Because we talk about this a lot on the show, right? That people believe weird stuff. And sometimes it's because their beliefs are really entrenched or because it might shatter their worldview or whatever. But on the farthest fringes, one of the things that still bugs me, and I wonder how you guys feel about this, is when people, hook, line and sinker, fall for things where there's overt evidence right in front of their faces. And they're like, nope, don't believe it.

• 9:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Just don't believe it. Just want to talk about this. And it's like, what is that phenomenon? What is going on in their brains?

• 9:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, I encounter that in certain people, like in the comments on my blog, for example. I've called that selectively gullible. Because these people are not necessarily generally gullible. They are gullible for claims that align with their belief system, their ideology, their tribe. Sacred cow? Yeah. Not just even a sacred cow. Sacred cow. This aligns with my political team, therefore I believe it. No matter how dumb or transparently wrong it is. Very dangerous.

• 10:11Cara Santa Maria?

  And so what these researchers claim is that it goes beyond their tribe. It goes beyond their political leanings or their ideology.

• 10:21Cara Santa Maria?

  And it goes beyond gullibility. And so this is why I think this is such an interesting. In some ways, it's a paradigm shift in the way that we think because we as skeptics, we live in a world of truth, of facts, of science, of reality. And to put yourself in the mindset of somebody who doesn't think that way is difficult, but I think it's necessary to understand their hypothesis here. So they study political psychology, they're social psychologists. They're interested in questions about how people think about reality. And during COVID, they surveyed 5,535 people across eight different countries.

• 11:02Cara Santa Maria?

  And they wanted to figure out, why do they believe in really bizarre COVID-19 misinformation? Like false claims about 5G causing COVID? They found that their strongest predictor of whether somebody believed in this type of misinformation was not how they felt about COVID-19 in general. It was not their thinking style, and it wasn't even their politics. It was a construct that they are calling symbolic strength and weakness. And what that is, is whether somebody would appear to the outside world through their perception to fend off or give in to untoward influence. How strong are they in their convictions?

• 11:48Cara Santa Maria?

  How much are they willing to look even in the face of something that's false? And say, this is what I believe. I don't care what you think. And it's a really, really interesting construct. So they, you know, measured on a scale of how much people agreed with sentences. And this might illustrate it a little bit better. Things like, quote, "Following coronavirus prevention guidelines means you have backed down."

• 12:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Or, quote, "Continuous coronavirus coverage in the media is a sign we are losing." So what they kind of, how they interpret it is that people who respond positively to statements like that, they feel like they're winning by endorsing misinformation. Because when they do that, they're showing, quote, "the enemy," whatever ineffable thing that is, because there's not a singular political leaning that would describe this. As we know, we've seen it on the left and on the right. Now it's becoming more of a right-wing talking point. But historically, we saw kind of like health misinformation heavily on the left. But doing so could like show the enemy that, you know, they're not going to gain ground. And so this is where things get interesting, right?

• 12:55Cara Santa Maria?

  They say, "When meaning is symbolic, not factual." So they liken this unto psychological warfare. And have we talked about that much on the show before? Psychological warfare, like psy-ops? Not directly. Propaganda, you know? Touched on it. Yeah. And we've seen it throughout historical conflicts. We can point to really obvious examples during the Cold War, for example, but also during World War II, during Vietnam. We can uncover really obvious examples that are well documented within our own military, but definitely within Axis military or within like Russian military. Sure. This idea of sort of winning hearts and minds through rhetoric as opposed to bombs,

• 13:39Cara Santa Maria?

  for example, and changing the way people think about things and turning them against, you know, certain ideological stances, for example, or whole cultures or countries. So they, they kind of liken it unto this concept of psychological warfare. For example, like vaccination, or masking, or social distancing at the time, they could be seen, as they worded, as a symbolic risk that could weaken one psychologically, even if they literally benefit them physically, right? Even if they are better, more healthy, more well, by engaging in these practices, they're psychologically weak. They're weak-minded because they're following the deep state, or they're following, you

• 14:23Cara Santa Maria?

  know, whatever kind of name they want to use for them, for the enemy. And so when they were looking at this study, they, you know, they found a strong correlation. They actually did regression analysis and they found that- This concept, right, symbolic strength seemed to have the most variance over whether somebody would kind of say, I believe in this thing, even when it's overtly not true. But they wanted to push it a little bit further and say, is this just a phenomenon with COVID? Or can we apply this to other things? So they decided to take that same sort of paradigm and apply it to crypto.

• 15:04Cara Santa Maria?

  So they measured whether people saw crypto as a form of signaling independence from the traditional financial systems that we have. And they found that the same people who endorsed a lot of claims about needing to be separate from traditional finance were more likely to believe in other kinds of misinformation, other kinds of conspiracies, and really bizarre ones, like, well, not bizarre, but we've talked about this a lot, like the government's concealing evidence of, you know, aliens or whatever. And they found that they also saw other strong associations with this mindset, namely authoritarian attitudes and support for autocratic governments.

• 15:49Cara Santa Maria?

  And so they're wondering if there's a common thread here that could explain why authoritarian leaders tend to be so effective when they use overt misinformation? Because there are a certain segment of a population who symbolically want to show that they're psychologically, quote, "strong, not weak" by saying, "I believe him. He has the answer." You know, all of these authorities, all of these other groups, they're misleading you. And so, you know, they talk a little bit about how this relates to what's happening today.

• 16:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, for example, the August 2025 claim by Trump that crime in Washington was at an all-time high. You guys saw the media was like, "No, it's not." There were just like so many think pieces and like fact-check pieces that were like, "No, it's not." But still, you see people going, "Yes, it is. Yes, it is." You know, "He knows. I don't care what the data show." They talk about the concept of like, you know, edgelords. You guys have heard that term before, just sort of trolls online, but trolls that are specifically contrarian, that there's this interesting thing that happens where people like Trump or people like edgelords on the internet. Even though they are pushing narratives that are overtly and demonstrably false,

• 17:12Cara Santa Maria?

  there's a sheen about them that they're more quote authentic, right? That they're just, they're just telling their truth. They're just saying what's real or what's on their mind or, you know, what people don't want you to know. And, and it can have real consequences as we know. So, so sort of they close out with, with, you know, the conversation that a lot of researchers do, which is this is a construct and we're trying to name and make sense of a phenomenon, but could it be something else? Or, you know, are there some limitations here? And they were saying, you know, maybe sometimes that it's true that these symbolic beliefs, that's what they keep calling them, right? They're not true beliefs, they're symbolic beliefs, ultimately are endorsed and continue. Like, why do they keep going?

• 17:56Cara Santa Maria?

  But because like downstream, they do have, you know, benefits for people. Like they're, they stand as good loyalty tests or a fake it till you make it long game is what they call it, that eventually does become a reality. It makes me wonder, or it makes me struggle with this idea that there are individuals in power now who have been pushing this rhetoric for so long and ultimately are, I don't know, have a hand in the financial problems that, that, you know, have incurred that then made that a reality, that there is this sort of fake it till you make it long game. So, so it's an interesting question, right?

• 18:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, are these symbolic beliefs happening simply because some people have this type of mindset? It doesn't appear to be a thinking style per se. It doesn't appear to be a very particular political stance. It, what appears even more than those things is a need, an intention, a, maybe even a personality trait or, or, yeah, if we could dig into that.

• 19:08Speaker 04

  It can be cultural too.

• 19:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it can't be cultural. I mean, they looked across eight, or it can be cultural, but it's not specific to one culture, right? Cause they looked across eight countries when they did this study. Um, and they saw this, you know, kind of holding true across these different eight, eight countries.

• 19:24Speaker 04

  But it reminds me a lot of how a lot of religions operate, right? Where having faith is a virtue. And the more, almost like the more untrue, the thing that you're having faith in, or the more-

• 19:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, test your faith.

• 19:38Speaker 04

  The more radical it is, the more extreme it is, the more virtuous it is to believe in it. It's about the belief, it's not about whether it's true or not.

• 19:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely.

• 19:48Speaker 05

  And you take it to an extreme and you get people drinking bleach because-

• 19:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah.

• 19:52Speaker 05

  You know, and things like, and insane things.

• 19:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Or literally drinking Kool-Aid that will, you know, spiked Kool-Aid that will kill them.

• 19:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:58Cara Santa Maria?

  And I just want to kind of close with, it's so funny that I woke up early this morning and I watched the newest South Park. I don't know if you guys are watching this season, but it's brilliant. And I watched the newest South Park and it was all about how the principal of South Park Elementary was sort of, I mean, it was also about how Peter Thiel knows about the Antichrist, but it was about how the principal of South Park was basically like puffing his chest up against Jesus, who was the new guidance counselor at the elementary school, about whether or not he's like, he's like, whoa, you questioning my faith, bro? Come on, let's throw down, bro. And it's so funny, like to Jesus, and it's so funny. And it's a perfect kind of, you know, extreme example of this mindset.

• 20:41Cara Santa Maria?

  And, and don't get me wrong, the, the researchers do say, if this sounds like an edge case, like if it sounds very extreme, it is. This was by no means the dominant group that they studied. But there were continuously a small and reliable, you know, sliver of this sample that they looked at, who, who do tend to prioritize what they're calling symbolic strength. And so I think it's important that we all start to shift a little bit our perspective and our paradigm when we are talking to people who appear to be completely disconnected from reality,

• 21:22Cara Santa Maria?

  that continuing to show them facts is actually, we've talked about this, we're going to make them dig in their heels, counterproductive, all that, but this helps explain why. And there may be new ways to appeal to these individuals. Maybe the less we care about their viewpoints, the less that their viewpoints feel relevant. Like, whatever, everybody has their thoughts and feelings and, okay, fine, I don't care. Like, maybe that type of approach would kind of take the power. Away from that symbolic strength a little bit. I don't know.

• 21:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's kind of a no brainer scenario, in my opinion. And I do think that even though this may be a minority, I think this style, this intellectual style is on the ascension. And this is, I think, wrapped up in the post-truth world, you know, that we're heading towards. Where whether or not something is true is not the primary, of primary importance to too many people. Right, there's way too many sources of plausible deniability, of alternative sources of information. And sometimes, you know, again, engaging with people in the public about a lot of these

• 22:32Speaker 04

  topics that we talk about, some people, whether or not something is true is really irrelevant. Like, it doesn't even enter into their calculation when they're thinking about it.

• 22:41Cara Santa Maria?

  And we've been focused for so long on the fact that the truth is irrelevant to these people, but what I love about, which is kind of like a negative view, but what I love about what these researchers did is they, they were like, yeah, but what is relevant to them? And what they identified was, a show of symbolic strength is what is most relevant. And so if you take that strength away, and you take that power away, perhaps there is some room there to, to change attitudes. I don't know, but-

• 23:10Speaker 04

  Or at least know what you're dealing with.

• 23:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly, but as long as we're just fighting against the fact, we're always like, oh, truth doesn't matter to these people, truth doesn't matter to these people, but we don't identify what does matter. I do think that it's a lesson in beating our heads against the wall.

• 23:23Speaker 04

  The other approach is, and we've talked about this in various contexts, is to, first you have to get people to care about the truth. Until you have that as a commonality, right?

• 23:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but, but what if by definition, caring about the truth is a show of weakness? So you're not going to get there with it.

• 23:42Speaker 04

  Well, I think, understanding that that's the psychological phenomenon might help you get them to the point where they will prioritize truth to some extent. Because if you don't have that as common ground, everything else is irrelevant, right? Then talking about-

• 23:54Cara Santa Maria?

  That's, that's difficult, right?

• 23:56Speaker 04

  It's all faith, and-

• 23:57Cara Santa Maria?

  But ultimately, you know, that might be a long game. If we're talking about, because I think the other thing that these researchers do so beautifully is they connect this to what is happening in the real world, they connect this to authoritarianism.

• 24:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, which sounds ironic.

• 24:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it does, right?

• 24:14Speaker 04

  It's like your anti-authoritarianism makes you vulnerable to authoritarians.

• 24:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:19Speaker 04

  Which we, again, we've looked at this from different angles before as well. It's like whenever you have a situation in which something other than facts and evidence and logic and truth is the most important, the con artists come out of the woodwork. And that includes authoritarians. They know how to exploit people who are...

• 24:40Speaker 05

  Some of the best at it.

• 24:41Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, if you're, if you're, you will believe anything that is not mainstream that makes you predictable and easy to manipulate, ironically.

• 24:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 24:51Speaker 04

  So you become the sheeple that you condemn because you become

• 24:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely.

• 24:56Speaker 04

  super easy to manipulate. And we see...

• 24:58Cara Santa Maria?

  But you don't see it that way because you see that strong man as the ultimate source of strength, and that's what matters most to you.

• 25:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:05Cara Santa Maria?

  And so, and so I just, I actually, you know, no financial stake in this at all, but like I recommend folks, like, watch that episode of South Park because it's like Trey Parker and Matt Stone read this study.

• 25:18Speaker 04

  Well, sometimes they get it exactly right about stuff like that.

• 25:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, or they just, they tapped into the exact same thing these researchers tapped into without, you know, having a name for the construct. And it's such a beautiful, kind of take it to its extreme so that it's so obvious, right?

• 25:32Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, that's what they do.

• 25:33Cara Santa Maria?

  But, so every character in it is, is doing exactly that. They're showing their symbolic strength in the space of reality.

• 25:41Bob Novella?

  Steve, you, you mentioned something I think you might need to change in the, you say, and I've heard you say it a million times, are we sliding towards a post-truth society, right? I mean, wouldn't you agree that we're basically there now?

• 25:54Speaker 04

  Well, it's all relative. It's not a black or white, right? It's just a matter of, it could always get worse. And I just mean, we've moved in that, the pendulum has swung in that direction. I think it is swinging in that direction.

• 26:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's, yeah, that's the direction we're moving, not the other direction. Whether we, yeah, what does it mean to have moved there? I mean, we have a leader of...

• 26:13Bob Novella?

  Read the news, read the news.

• 26:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 26:16Bob Novella?

  That's what it means. We are there.

• 26:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 26:19Bob Novella?

  Hello, everyone, we're there.

• 26:20Cara Santa Maria?

  And we'll keep going, and sadly, there's more room to keep going there.

• 26:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 26:25Speaker 04

  All right. Thanks, Cara. Jay, give us the latest on the measles.

• 26:30Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, you know.

• 26:32Speaker 05

  Is it still a virus?

• 26:34Cara Santa Maria?

  I mean, you know.

• 26:36Jay Novella?

  It's, you know, following up Cara's, you know, depressing situation. We got a little bit more of that. But don't worry, guys, because who's that noisy is going to cheer you right back up.

• 26:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, good.

• 26:47Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 26:48Jay Novella?

  So wait for that. So I titled this segment, Steve, US measles is back and it's worse than you think.

• 26:58Jay Novella?

  And it's worse than you think, guys.

• 26:59Speaker 05

  Worse than it, because I think it's not good.

• 27:01Jay Novella?

  If we go back to the year 2000, is that from a flock of the Flight of the Conchords? Remember when they were the robots?

• 27:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah. The distant future, the year 2000.

• 27:12Jay Novella?

  It is the year 2000. Okay.

• 27:15Jay Novella?

  All right. So if we click back to the year 2000, measles was officially eliminated in the United States. The definition of elimination in this, in this concept here is that it means that there was no continuous domestic transmission of measles for at least 12 months at a time. So in general, very, very good status when it comes to this disease. That status was achieved after what? It was decades of

• 27:43Speaker 05

  MMR vaccine.

• 27:43Jay Novella?

  Control, basically, following vaccine rollout since 1963. So this drove cases way, way down by more than 95% within a few years. And now we're in 2025, and as most of you know, measles are coming back. They are coming back strong, though, and it's, it's going to scare you how, how strong this is. The case counts are already topping previous surges and outbreaks are popping up in multiple states and the root cause, it isn't a new, you know, pathogen. It isn't, you know, a new version of the measles. It's gaps in vaccine coverage and public health infrastructure essentially failing to keep up because of funding and lots of other stuff.

• 28:23Jay Novella?

  According to the CDC, 2025 has already seen over, how many cases, guys, do you think we've seen in 2025?

• 28:30Speaker 05

  In the country?

• 28:31Jay Novella?

  Yeah, just in the US. 1,500.

• 28:33Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 28:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh.

• 28:34Jay Novella?

  Yep.

• 28:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, my God.

• 28:35Jay Novella?

  These are confirmed measles cases.

• 28:37Cara Santa Maria?

  No.

• 28:38Jay Novella?

  And roughly 86% of those cases are tied to

• 28:43Jay Novella?

  Clearly defined outbreaks and three deaths have been confirmed so far, including two young children in Texas. Hospital rates are climbing. We have about 12% of patients ending up in the hospital care. And we've crossed into territory that we thought we would hopefully never happen again, right? We feel like, hey, we've achieved this goal. We know how to do it. What could possibly ruin this status that we've achieved? Well, the CDC reports 1,596 confirmed measles cases in the United States going to October 14th. So roughly what, you know, two days ago as we record this versus 285 for all of 2024.

• 29:23Jay Novella?

  Now, the comparison of those two numbers, 1,596 to 285 is the first giant red flag that I want you to take note of because that's a very important thing to see because that is a massive increase in people getting this infection. That is an increase of about 460% per year. And keep in mind that 2025 still has two months to go or two and a half months to go as we record this. Now, if we take into account recent changes that have happened with vaccines and we are in the first year of Trump's presidency, meaning that, you know, RFK is going to be wreaking havoc on on health in this country, you know, as the years go by.

• 30:07Jay Novella?

  So a 460% increase year to year is likely to even go up if you follow me. And as a lot of you know, Texas is ground zero, right? Their major outbreak in West Texas, I think it was Gaines County area, that drove the state totals above 700 cases. That outbreak resulted in hospitalizations in the dozens and at least two or more confirmed deaths. Local public health officials report that the outbreak is largely centered in these close knit communities with historically low vaccine coverage. None of this information I'm giving you should surprise you or sound foreign in any way like because, you know, we're hearing all these tidbits and everything. But put all together, you know, the trend is definitely.

• 30:50Jay Novella?

  Communities that have low vaccine coverage and the reasons why they have low vaccine coverage can vary, but these are known reasons that I'm sure that you guys know as well. In South Carolina, the situation is more contained, but it's still worrisome. So as of October 1st, the state health department confirmed that there were eight cases in the upstate region with most infections occurring within the last month. Earlier reports suggest higher student exposure and school quarantines. I think there was more than 130 unvaccinated students that were isolated in connection with these separate outbreaks. Utah, their public health data is more conservative, only a handful of confirmed cases so far,

• 31:29Jay Novella?

  but the presence of the measles virus, it's, the fragments of it are detected in wastewater, which suggests that there is a silent transmission that is not captured by the case counts. Local authorities are currently characterizing it as it's a risk to general public. It is low, but there is a risk. They don't discount upticks if vaccination gaps widen. And then as another example, we'll click over to Minnesota. They have less prominent coverage, but state health department's data confirms that there's an uptick into the high teens and this state information might seem, what? It doesn't seem like a lot, right? When I, when I put it to you, like these numbers are low, it's a few states or whatever, but this is really serious, right?

• 32:13Jay Novella?

  Because measles infections are taking root in other states. It's not localized to these small communities or one state in the United States. It's moving. People are getting infections in other states now and the numbers are increasing. So measles is officially no longer confined to these fringe pockets and it's going into larger populations. This is the beginning of something very, very worrisome. I'm pretty concerned about it to the point where I'm going to talk to my primary care physician about getting booster shots for the MMR, if I can even get my hands on that. So the vaccine coverage in general is slipping. You know, herd immunity against measles needs 95% coverage. This will take two doses.

• 32:55Jay Novella?

  In 2023 to 24, the national kindergarten MMR rate was around 92.7%.

• 33:03Jay Novella?

  This is already below the threshold in dozens of communities. Now, in 2025, 92 to 95% of patients were either unvaccinated or their status was unknown.

• 33:14Speaker 04

  Patients with measles, just to clarify, they had 92% of people who have been confirmed measles cases were either not vaccinated or their vaccine status was unknown.

• 33:24Jay Novella?

  Right, correct.

• 33:24Speaker 04

  Oh, man.

• 33:25Jay Novella?

  A lot of outbreaks begin when a traveler imports measles into a low vaccination community and the local transmission fans out from there. So in 2025, only about 12% of cases were directly imported, meaning most spread happened domestically. Reports are that public health systems are stretched, you know, disease tracking, contact tracing, quarantine enforcement, all of the infrastructure has degraded over the years due to underfunding. And now we have a dramatic downturn in funding this year, which sets the stage for a serious increase in infections. So what does this all mean and what should we do?

• 34:06Jay Novella?

  So if what we're seeing right now, if it keeps up, and I see no reason why it shouldn't, largely because of what's happening with the government, measles could easily become another huge problem in the United States. So here are some steps. They might be hard to achieve, but here are some steps. So we have to boost vaccination aggressively, especially in vulnerable communities. This one, I give a big red X. That's not going to happen, but it should. We need to strengthen surveillance, which means including new tools like waste board or monitoring, things like that. That's not going to happen. That gets a red X because there's no money. Rapid outbreak containment. This means isolate cases, trace contacts, use post-exposure.

• 34:50Jay Novella?

  What is this guy's prophylaxis? Prophylaxis.

• 34:54Speaker 04

  Prophylaxis is prevention.

• 34:56Jay Novella?

  The problem here is that that costs a lot of money, that takes a lot of people to do it, and these are typically state and government employees, and that's another red X. That is not going to happen. And public communication, basically, we need public communication as the last measure here that is going to say that the truth is really important and we all need to listen to it, and it has to be more powerful out there than the lies that are being told. We need credible messengers inside. Skeptical groups, inside science communication, inside, you know, large media, none of this is going to happen. It's already happening in, in the world of, of science and skepticism, maybe not as much as we could be doing, but we're, you know, we are covering this.

• 35:41Jay Novella?

  It is being talked about and there is a lot of awareness around this. But that doesn't track to the rest of the country, obviously, and, you know, however many skeptics there are that are vocal in the United States is not going to change the needle. Needle is still going to go in the bad direction. So, to protect yourself and your children, just please make sure that all your vaccines are up to date. Make sure everybody that you care about gets boosters if they're older, and you make sure that young kids get them right up until they're not able to get them anymore, which might happen, from what we're seeing. Steve, what is your take on everything that I said, and from your knowledge, like, where are we?

• 36:23Speaker 04

  You know, measles was one of the big vaccine success stories. As you say, we eliminated measles in the US and a lot of Western countries. All cases were basically imported. We hadn't eradicated it from the world, but, you know, we had made great strides. And it always comes back when there are, basically, attacks on vaccines. You know what I mean? It's, the, the return of measles is 100% entirely due to the anti-vaccine movement. Absolutely. There's no question about that. As you say, the numbers are very, very clear. The, the outbreaks occur in under or unvaccinated communities. It spreads mainly through people who are not vaccinated.

• 37:08Speaker 04

  And now, we've, we've dipped below sort of a critical threshold for herd immunity, and that's why we're seeing, you know, these outbreaks. And now, it's going to get worse because RFK and, and Trump are further confusing people and spreading misinformation and fear mongering about vaccines. It's going to cause a further dip, and this is just the canary in the coal mine, right? This is, uh, this, we're going to see more return of vaccine preventable diseases. And again, not, it's not a surprise. We've predicted this for 30 years. This is what we say, whenever this happens, whenever you fear monger about vaccines and it, and it reduces the rate of compliance... Then we see outbreaks. This is absolutely predictable.

• 37:53Jay Novella?

  What would it look like, though? I'm curious to know, like, fast forward three years, you know, where could we be? How bad could it get?

• 38:02Speaker 04

  I mean, it's hard to say. You know, a lot of people have already been vaccinated. You know what I mean? So it's not like we're not starting with a naive population. But it's mainly for new kids coming up, right? School, you know, there could be a lot of, if children are not getting vaccinated. And if more states follow Florida, for example, say, "We're going to eliminate the vaccine requirements for public schools," which would be a disaster. But that's what they're pushing for. This could get 10 times worse than it is now, or 100 times worse than it is now. There's, measles is extremely contagious. It's a very contagious virus.

• 38:39Jay Novella?

  What do you think about people in their late 50s and older getting booster shots?

• 38:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, if you have any doubt, you can get your titers checked, you know? And then if your titers are low, you talk to your primary care doctor about getting a booster.

• 38:52Jay Novella?

  What should we go in? We go in and say, "Hey, can you test to see if I need a booster for MMR?"

• 38:57Speaker 04

  Yeah. Or just they'll decide if you need one. Just talk to them, "Hey, what do you think about me needing a booster for MMR? You know, should I just do it? Should I get my titers checked? What do you recommend?" And then they'll individualize the recommendations to you.

• 39:12Jay Novella?

  Well, Steve, what do tigers have to do with this?

• 39:15Speaker 04

  A tiger, you know what a tiger is, Jake? You know, with the specific technical definition?

• 39:19Jay Novella?

  No, I'm waiting for you to tell me. I'm asking you.

• 39:21Speaker 04

  A tiger is how much you can dilute something and still detect that it's there. Right? So it's just a...

• 39:27Speaker 05

  Oh, homeopathy-ish.

• 39:29Speaker 04

  No, no. Nothing to do with homeopathy.

• 39:32Cara Santa Maria?

  With homeopathy, they keep diluting until it's not there.

• 39:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, you start with something and then you get nothing. Or you start with nothing and you get nothing.

• 39:38Speaker 04

  When you talk about how much of a tiger something has, the bigger the number, the more of it you have. Because that's like you can dilute it, you can dilute it more and still be able to detect it. That's what that number means. It's like, how much did you dilute it before you stopped detecting it, right? Does that make sense? So it's a dilution. What you're, the number is how much it was diluted.

• 40:01Jay Novella?

  And that gives you an understanding of how much you have left in your body, right?

• 40:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 40:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 40:07Speaker 04

  All right, guys. What didn't plan on having three sort of political items on this show? Just sort of worked out that way. But I'm going to talk to you about is... Therapy, like in the context of like counseling therapy, right? Is that speech in the context of free speech?

• 40:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, God.

• 40:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, Kara knows exactly where this is going. And this, this question is before the Supreme Court and it could have profound implications for the regulation of not only therapy, but of medicine in general and, you know, standard of care, quality control in medicine. And I think this also gets back to the whole issue of expertise and, you know, whether we're living in a truth versus post-truth kind of world, right? So here's the issue, that this specific issue, again, which is not as important as the broader implications here, but the specific issue has to do with conversion therapy. Do you guys know what conversion therapy is? Yes.

• 41:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, we talked about that. It is debunked and unethical.

• 41:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, so conversion therapy is the idea, it's also called sexual orientation change efforts, that's the technical term in the literature, S O C E, also might be referred to as reparative therapy, which is somewhat, you know, assuming a conclusion there. But conversion therapy basically is trying to treat, treat people, clients, who, for their sexual orientation or their gender identity, to convert them to the correct one, right? So there's a lot of air quotes in there.

• 41:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 41:49Speaker 04

  The idea is that like, say, people who are homosexual, that homosexuality is some somehow, it's either unnatural, or it's a mental illness, or it's just not preferred, right? And you're going to convert them to be heterosexual, because that's what God's, God wants you to be, or whatever, whatever the context is. Usually, this is overwhelmingly done in a religious context, but, you know, even if, even if not, that, that's the idea. And this has been, this has been going on for a long time. It has been studied for decades. So let's just start with the premise here. You know, the premise is that conversion therapy, A, does not work, and B, is harmful. Again, there's a great South Park episode about this, Kara.

• 42:33Speaker 04

  You know, where there's like the conversion therapy camp where the kids are just committing suicide left and right. Obviously, that's that is exaggeration, but it is true that the consensus is, again, first of all, it doesn't work because it's, you know, your sexual orientation and your gender identity is not a choice. It is not a lifestyle thing. It's not something that is inflicted upon you by culture. It's something innate about your neurological status, right? It's about your brain development. You are the way you are. Obviously, this is much better established scientifically for sexual orientation than for gender identity, but gender identity seems to be heading in the same direction as well.

• 43:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. So not only does it not work, as you were saying, it's actively harmful.

• 43:19Speaker 04

  It's actively harmful.

• 43:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it causes psychological distress.

• 43:22Speaker 04

  Increases the risk of depression, of anxiety, and suicidal ideation and suicidal attempts. Not a good thing. So for this reason, pretty much every medical, psychological, psychiatric healthcare organization, and when I wrote about this on Science-Based Medicine, I have a list of 53 of them, have condemned the practice. Not only do they not recommend it, they actively condemn it. Like, this is harmful, bad, do not do this.

• 43:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah. You could lose your license as a psychologist if you engage in this.

• 43:59Speaker 04

  Do no harm.

• 44:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's not healthy.

• 44:01Speaker 04

  So half of the states in the United States have banned it outright, have banned conversion therapy as a practice. Only half. Yes. This is, you know, this is a complicated issue.

• 44:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Can you guess which states have banned it and which ones haven't?

• 44:16Speaker 04

  I can probably come close. It is banned in Connecticut. I know that.

• 44:20Cara Santa Maria?

  And California.

• 44:21Speaker 04

  But here, so in Colorado, a therapist has sued the state, Colorado was one of the states where it's banned, saying that The ban on conversion therapy is infringing on their free speech rights.

• 44:39Speaker 05

  Not if there's harm involved.

• 44:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, I guess they have free speech to harm their patients.

• 44:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, but don't you?

• 44:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, here's an interesting question, and I know I'm getting into the weeds a little. When you say therapist, that could be a million things.

• 44:49Speaker 04

  They're a licensed counselor.

• 44:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Counselor, okay, so they have their own governing body. Like, I obviously operate from licensed psychologist.

• 44:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:57Cara Santa Maria?

  You know, the APA, and I know our stance on it is across the board, but I guess licensed counselors, I'm not sure who their governing body is.

• 45:07Speaker 04

  Most articles about it don't say specifically what her.

• 45:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 45:12Speaker 04

  Just that she's a licensed therapist, but that, yeah, therapist could, there's several ways you can get to that.

• 45:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, you can be like an LPC, like a licensed professional counselor.

• 45:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, we'll put that aside. There's multiple different licenses under which you could do talk therapy.

• 45:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 45:28Speaker 04

  And she's one of them. So she says, "This infringes upon my free speech." Multiple cases have gone before circuit courts before, and they've all decided that, no, the state has the right to regulate what happens in therapy, right? This is, yes, the state health departments can determine standard of care for the profession for which they give you a license. That's fine, there's no disagreement among the circuit courts, which means, which makes it unusual for the Supreme Court to take up the case, because they usually only take up cases when there's disagreement among the circuit courts. They're trying to resolve that disagreement.

• 46:10Speaker 04

  But they did take up a case, the Colorado case, and they have not made a decision, but they did give here testimony, and of course, they often tip their hand by how, by the questions they ask. And it does look like the conservative justices on the court are leaning in the direction of that this is, you know, of erring on the side of free speech for the therapist.

• 46:33Speaker 05

  Oh, my God, that's gonna be a problem.

• 46:34Speaker 04

  It's a huge problem. So there's many layers here, and interestingly, just to start, I'm actually not a fan of states, of legislatures getting involved in specific standard of care decisions.

• 46:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Me neither. Right. Because the thing is there's They don't have the expertise. And there should be an overarching governing body

• 46:55Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 46:55Cara Santa Maria?

  over her license.

• 46:56Speaker 04

  Right.

• 46:57Cara Santa Maria?

  That's what I, that's why I was digging into this. Like, I was specifically looking at, you know, the governing body that, that covers me, the American Psychological Association, but also the California Board of Psychology. Both of them combined say that I could lose my license if I engaged

• 47:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:13Cara Santa Maria?

  in conversion therapy because I would be violating

• 47:15Speaker 04

  And that should be enough.

• 47:16Cara Santa Maria?

  both California law and professional ethics.

• 47:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:18Cara Santa Maria?

  And you're right, that should be enough.

• 47:19Speaker 04

  That should be enough.

• 47:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Just losing your license.

• 47:21Speaker 04

  So

• 47:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Then you shouldn't be able to practice anymore.

• 47:22Speaker 04

  I've always advocated for this should be handled at the, the certification level. The, the state that gives, that grants you your license, um, they regulate the standard of care. They don't determine the standard of care. Right? They don't say this is the standard of care. The profession determines what the standard of care is. But if you practice below that standard of care, if you violate it sufficiently, that could be grounds for the Health Department to act against your license. And that's not just all like, they take it away, they don't take it away. They could suspend it, they could censure you, they could require you to get CME or whatever, to, to go to, go to get education. There are remedies in place, right?

• 48:05Speaker 04

  There are some remedy up to and including you're, they're taking your license away.

• 48:10Cara Santa Maria?

  But here's a reason that might not be enough, Steve. So I, I just found a report from the Trevor Project from 2023. They looked at over 1,300 conversion therapy providers in the US and they found that 54% of them were operating in an unlicensed religious or ministerial capacity.

• 48:28Speaker 04

  Oh, boy.

• 48:29Cara Santa Maria?

  So only 46% of them even had a professional license.

• 48:32Speaker 04

  Right. But that, that is, you're, you're correct. And that's a, that's a good reason to just ban it. If it is happening outside of the confines of, of professional licensure, then obviously regulating licenses is not sufficient. But it's, which is, that should be fixed, right? That, that should be

• 48:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that should be fixed.

• 48:50Speaker 04

  That's practicing medicine without a license.

• 48:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 48:52Speaker 04

  That's another problem that creates a situation where then you have to get legislatures involved. And the thing is, usually when legislatures do get involved, or many times, It's not a good thing, right? It's politicizing a topic that should be entirely evidence-based and determined by experts. And the legislatures can get involved in both directions. So they could ban a practice, they could also exempt a practice from the standard of care, which is kind of a worse problem. So in Connecticut, for example, the Connecticut legislature exempted the treatment of chronic Lyme disease from licensure issues.

• 49:36Speaker 04

  So which means a practitioner is free to do, you know, whatever they want to treat chronic Lyme disease. Ah. And the state cannot act against their license for doing that. I see. It sort of carved out this protection. Yikes. Terrible. But on the flip. It's terrible law. The legislature should not be determining what the standard of care is. Now, again, I do agree that there are some exceptions. One is if the existing mechanisms are insufficient, but also if something is really egregious, like we've known. Yeah. Like conversion therapy? Yeah, like conversion therapy. If it's egregious enough and there's pressures to do it, then you could, it might be just logistically easier.

• 50:18Speaker 04

  In other words, instead of having to go to court on each individual case, you know, to have a hearing about a practitioner's license and basically establish the standard of care each and every time, you could say, all right, this is so far beyond the pale, we're just going to categorically say that this is below the standard of care and we're just going to ban it statewide. So it is reasonable in these kinds of cases. I just wish it weren't necessary. I know. And I'm just also logging my discomfort with legislatures being involved in the standard of care, because they really, other than enforcing it, they should not be determining what it is. But again, having said all that, that's not the issue at stake here.

• 51:02Speaker 04

  The issue at stake is whether or not the states even have the right to regulate what a therapist says in the context of a therapy session, a licensed therapist. And, you know, the fact that there are justices expressing skepticism about that is chilling. It's frightening because, think about that. They're saying that, "Oh, this is a free speech issue." It's like, no, it's absolutely not a free speech issue. First of all, that therapist can say whatever they want in the public forum about conversion therapy. They can advocate for the law to be changed. They could, if they have a case to make, they could make it in pretty much any venue they want.

• 51:43Speaker 04

  The only thing that this law is regulating is what they're doing in a professional client relationship. Right, different. Which is absolutely has to be under regulation. That's the whole point of regulation.

• 51:57Cara Santa Maria?

  And I think there's another layer here, which is that most of the laws that are in existence right now are actually specifically intended to protect minors. And I think that when we're talking about conversion therapy for minors, it has special consideration, and you could be looking at it from a different angle, which is an abuse angle.

• 52:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, and which is all the more reason why it should be banned. So oftentimes, it's done on minors. Oftentimes, it's done without their consent.

• 52:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Most of the problems are with minors, yeah. Because their parents ordered it.

• 52:28Speaker 04

  And it's often done in the context of extreme pressure from parents, from religious groups, from society. So, that was, I think that's the reason people who have advocated for these laws banning conversion therapy, that's one of their main arguments. This is a vulnerable population.

• 52:46Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's the thing that's so frustrating. We've already legislated this. We've already adjudicated this. We have case law already.

• 52:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. I agree. So... I think there's a couple of reasons for it here. I think why the conservative justices were sort of leaning in this direction, it seems, you know, by their questioning. One is, they don't really think that therapy is medicine. Right? And that's just a bias against mental health.

• 53:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 53:17Speaker 04

  Complete bias against mental health.

• 53:18Cara Santa Maria?

  They think it's no different than pastoral care, ministry.

• 53:22Speaker 04

  Right. So, it's not like, well, you're not prescribing a drug. It's like, well, it's still a medical intervention meant to treat a defined problem. And these people are licensed professionals, they're supposed to be practicing evidence-based interventions, and there's all the ethics involved about first do no harm, etc. It's absolutely, in this context, a medical intervention. And so that is just an anti-mental health bias, in my opinion, which I completely think is wrong. And then the other thing is that it's because they agree with it. Right? Yep. One of the justices, I think Sotomayor asked a very, very telling question, which I think cuts right to the heart of the whole issue.

• 54:06Speaker 04

  And I hope this resonated with the other justices. She asked, "If a dietitian decides to help anorexics starve themselves, can the government stop them?"

• 54:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 54:17Speaker 04

  Or is that free speech? Right? That was good. I like it. If a therapist or a dietitian basically helps someone who has anorexia starve themselves to death, is that free speech? Or can the state say, "That's malpractice. That is substandard care." Or how about this one? This is a little bit of a hypothetical. What if there were an intervention that could abort a fetus? Would it be free speech for a doctor in a state where abortion is banned to tell a patient, "By the way, if you take this dose of this combination of medications, which you can get over the counter, that would abort your fetus. I'm just giving you information."

• 55:00Cara Santa Maria?

  That's an even better example because that one makes their heckles go up.

• 55:03Speaker 04

  Right, so that would they feel the same way about that? Of course not, of course not, it's whatever they want. That's my point. It's also been pointed out that the same court reaffirmed Tennessee's right to ban gender-affirming care for minors in Tennessee, right?

• 55:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Interesting, yeah.

• 55:22Speaker 04

  So the state can ban gender-affirming care, but they can't ban conversion therapy. It's kind of hard not to see that as blatantly hypocritical. Again, you have to say, well, that one's a medical intervention, the other one is therapy. It's like, ah, but I've already dealt with that. I disagree that one has a standard of care and the other one is do whatever you want. It's only talk therapy. And the only other difference is that they're in sort of opposite directions ideologically. So, I don't know, it's hard. I think that they're gonna, they might vote a certain way because of how they feel about this issue without fully appreciating how devastating this would be to the standard of care in American healthcare. Because now every quack,

• 56:06Speaker 04

  every con artist is gonna, is gonna hide behind freedom of speech for any nonsense that they want to do. This would be such a dangerous precedent. It'd be absolutely devastating to science-based medicine, absolutely devastating. Right? Well, this is the first line of defense, right? This is like, there is a standard of care. That standard of care is basically regulated at the state level, and if, if it's all free speech now, it, you know, then there is no standard of care. And this is just one of many assaults on the standard of care.

• 56:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, other aspects of society, other professions, vocations.

• 56:45Speaker 04

  It's again, good thing this is part of the broader.

• 56:47Speaker 05

  This could become a runaway thing.

• 56:48Speaker 04

  It's part of the broader assault on expertise in general, on professionalism. Right? It's like, everything is opinion, everything is just freedom, and every, there is no right or wrong, there's no standard, there's no whatever.

• 57:02Speaker 05

  Relativism at its worst.

• 57:04Speaker 04

  It's so scary. Very dangerous. Keep an eye on this, this could be potentially devastating. Yeah. All right, Bob, we're gonna switch gears here. Tell us about solar activity. What is going on with the sun, huh?

• 57:16Bob Novella?

  Don't be too worried, Steve.

• 57:17Speaker 04

  All right.

• 57:18Bob Novella?

  All right, so a recent NASA analysis asked a seemingly simple question. Is the sun sliding into a decades-long slump? Or has it been kind of surreptitiously revving back up since 2008? This new research comes from plasma physicist Jamie Jazinski and space physicist Marco Velli, both from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. So, the opening sentence needs some unpacking, so, um, let's put this latest research into a little bit more of context. We all love the sun, right, guys? It seems constant, right?

• 57:51Speaker 04

  It's my favorite star.

• 57:53Bob Novella?

  And predictable, right?

• 57:55Speaker 04

  It's like the king of planets, Bob.

• 57:57Bob Novella?

  Right. It's, it's always there doing its job, even though it's been crazy hot lately, and that's all on us, that's our fault. She's got nothing to do with it.

• 58:05Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 58:06Bob Novella?

  But, but even a superficial scientific inquiry shows, you know, just how changeable and irascible it really is. And this is reflected in one pattern that almost everyone, I think, has, has heard of, many people, certainly almost everyone listening to this podcast. What's that? What, what pattern reflects this kind of like weird changeability to a certain extent?

• 58:27Speaker 04

  The solar cycle?

• 58:28Bob Novella?

  It's solar cycles, right?

• 58:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, every 11 years, right?

• 58:30Bob Novella?

  It's, yeah, it's solar cycles. Yeah, it's an 11-year cycle, right? Evan, where the, the sun cycles from a minimum, sunspot activity, to a maximum, and then back down to a minimum again. That's a, that's an 11-year cycle. Uh, did you know that at the end of the maximum part of that cycle, there's also a magnetic pole reversal? And it's not, this is, it's not something that just like flips one day, like, up, we're flipped now. This could take, it could take a couple of years or more for this, for this reversal to happen. And it, of course, is no- You know, no negative consequences. It's not like apocalyptic. It happens every 11 years. So this cycle, as I said, is mainly tracked by counting sunspots, essentially. But we also typically see an increased amount of solar flares, right?

• 59:12Bob Novella?

  Our coronal mass ejections as well as we head to that solar maximum in the middle of the 11-year cycle. So we see those things as well. So we're currently in solar cycle 25. And since they take about 11 years, that tells you how long we've been tracking these solar cycles specifically. A long time. And before that, people were tracking sunspots, I think, since the 1600s. So it's been quite a while since we've been, you know, taking a critical eye and looking at our sun. This cycle, as I've described it, though, in many ways, it's more of a guideline than a rule. For example, should I wait for any private comment? No, okay, that's okay.

• 59:51Bob Novella?

  For example, for a whopping 70 years, between 1645 and 1715, there were almost no sunspots at all on the sun. You could, people born in 1645, if they tried and tried, they probably would have never seen any sunspots at all their entire lives. This is called the monder minimum. You may have heard of that term. And a similar lull occurred between 1790 and 1830. Definitely not as powerful as the monder minimum, but this was the Dalton minimum as well. So that happens. So now, we've been thinking for years now that perhaps the sun was entering another similar quiescent phase. Something, you know, some kind of grand minimum that could take, who knows?

• 1:00:36Bob Novella?

  It could take many, many decades potentially.

• 1:00:38Speaker 05

  Have to come up with a name for it, too.

• 1:00:40Bob Novella?

  Like the monder minimum, where there was no sunspots. It was kind of, you could describe that as a quiescent phase if you want. So this pattern started around late 1980s, early 1990s, where this phase of the sun, where it just seemed like, yeah, it's just not as active as it typically is. The solar wind emitted by the sun started getting noticeably weaker. And if you counted those, right, if you counted those peak number of sunspots during the solar maximum, like so halfway through the solar cycle. You know, you do a count. How many sunspots do we got? So that peak number started decreasing, starting in there, say, 1990 approximately. The most recently completed cycle, solar cycle 24, which ended in 2019,

• 1:01:23Bob Novella?

  was also notably very weak. And so that weakening trend seemed to be continuing. And so this is where, this is where the researchers come in because they wanted to answer this question. You know, are we entering potentially another type of grand minimum phase of the sun? And what does, and what does that bring? Because it's important to know that kind of stuff because the, the evidence we have for those two other mon, those two other minimums we have, it was, it coincided with a cooler climate. So it could potentially have cooled the earth a little bit, although that evidence could be a coincidence. But that's, you know, things happen when the sun is less active. There are, there are ramifications in various arenas. So this is where the researchers come in.

• 1:02:05Bob Novella?

  They took a detailed look at the cycle 24, starting in 2008 through 2019. And they found that even though the solar wind was weak, it was clearly, its strength though, the strength of the solar wind had stopped declining, which was a major, major inflection point. So no matter, no matter how they looked at the solar wind, they looked at the speed, they took, they looked at density, temperature, thermal pressure, mass, magnetic field magnitude, all of these, all of these attributes showed an increase. And also the sunspot numbers were also consistent with these, with these solar wind changes. So the, the information was in the data. It was subtle, but it was definitely happening. That, you know, the increases were happening and the decreases had stopped.

• 1:02:48Bob Novella?

  So, so these scientists looked at this evidence and they interpreted as, I mean, their conclusion was basically the sun is not slipping into something like a monder minimum. This is something that was just a 20, you know, a 20-year period. And it doesn't seem to be going into this minimum phase. Plasma physicist Jamie Jazinski said, "All signs were pointing to the sun going into a prolonged phase of low activity. So it was a surprise to see that trend reversed." The sun is slowly waking up. So if you read websites on this, people are always latching on to that phrase, that the sun is slowly waking up. Now, cycle 25, which we're in right now, it's no monster.

• 1:03:30Bob Novella?

  This is not a monster that like cycle, solar cycle, where it's like going crazy. But it's definitely a lot punchier than than cycle 24 was. And their interpretation of what's happening actually makes sense when you consider another cycle that kind of supersedes this solar cycle. And it's called the hail cycle. So now the hail cycle consists of two 11-year solar cycles back to back. So it's not 11, it's 11 and 11. You know, those two, one after the other, is this hail cycle. So this means, though, that at the beginning and the end of the hail cycle, what happens? The sun's polarity is the same. Because remember, the magnetic poles flip every 11 years. So it takes 22 years for it to get back, right?

• 1:04:12Bob Novella?

  So from at the end of one solar cycle, it's the polarity flips. But then at the end of the next cycle, it's flipped back to where it was 22 years previously. You understand that? This is actually in line with a lot of solar scientists. They're beginning to think that this cycle, this solar cycle is more fundamental than just 11 years, 11 years, 11 years. It's this hail cycle that kind of is a better representation or a better marker of what's going on under the surface of the sun than just the simple, you know, 11-year cycles. So it looks like the sun was not in a deep sleep. It was more, maybe it was more of a power nap, you know, a 20-year power nap. But it wasn't anything like a 50 or 70 or 80-year minimum equivalent to that monder minimum.

• 1:04:57Bob Novella?

  That means, though, what? That means that we could have a more lively sun in the near future. And that's a double-edged sword. Because on one hand, you've got the sun's heliosphere, you know, its magnetic influence in the solar system. It gets beefier when the sun is more active and because of the way that the heliosphere is oriented, that it could actually protect us from cosmic rays even more than it's doing right now. Yeah, more protection. Yeah, that's nice. But. But on the other, yes, the other side of that coin is that there's greater risk from space weather, you know, so satellites, GPS, power grids, they're all or at higher risk when the sun is much more lively than when it's not. So that's kind of a double edged sword.

• 1:05:38Bob Novella?

  So in the future, these scientists think that if we ever want to truly model the sun and accurately predict cycles and minimums, we need to track closely far more aspects of its behavior than we're doing now. I mean, I mean, these cycles rely a lot on just counting these sunspots and we need to do a lot more than that and you've got to treat them more seriously, more on the level of how we focus on sunspots. They do, they do look at these other things, but it's just, we need to encompass more variables and track that. And it just made me think of just how amazingly incredible stars are. Imagine you've got gravity and you've got a huge amount of hydrogen, you put them together, give it some time, this amazingly complex engine arises from that over millions and

• 1:06:23Bob Novella?

  billions of years and it's still, you know, the complexities still baffle our brightest minds. One thing that this study points to is the fact that the better that we understand our sun's rhythms, especially its magnetic rhythms, of course, the more we can turn guesswork into real forecasts.

• 1:06:39Speaker 04

  So Bob, here's a question. I don't know if they went into this. If the sun wakes up and gets more active, doesn't that cause a little bit of increased warming of our planet? Could this then exacerbate global warming?

• 1:06:52Bob Novella?

  The typical flux of irradiance from the sun during these cycles, these solar cycles is like, it's like one in a thousand. It's 0.1%, so the kind of flux you get there is not dramatic, is not dramatic enough to really, I mean, you know, Steve, you know very well that many people tried to blame...

• 1:07:12Speaker 04

  Solar forcing. There's no solar forcing going on.

• 1:07:15Bob Novella?

  Yeah, there's no...

• 1:07:16Speaker 04

  But there's still cycles. And as you say, the cycles could be reinforcing or counteracting a little bit of the global warming. I didn't know if that was.

• 1:07:25Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I think it's fairly trivial and it's nothing, yeah, it's nothing we can really do about it, but I think it's pretty trivial.

• 1:07:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, I hear that, but I don't know intuitively that 0.1% is not significant in terms of earth weather.

• 1:07:42Speaker 05

  Because, didn't you say that in the opposite direction, if there was a prolonged lack of activity, that has a

• 1:07:47Bob Novella?

  There could be cooling, yeah.

• 1:07:48Speaker 05

  It possibly could go cooling?

• 1:07:50Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that's what the data we have from the two big minimums in our past, it seemed to coincide with a cooler climate, but it could be just coincidence. But yeah, so Steve, I just don't know how dramatic that would be for climate change. I expect it's not dramatic, it's just like, you know, at what level, how negligible is it? I don't know exactly.

• 1:08:14Speaker 04

  All right, thanks Bob. Evan, tell us about this wormhole and specifically, are we building a deep space station next to it?

• 1:08:23Bob Novella?

  Nice.

• 1:08:24Speaker 05

  Steve, that is the question. I mean, you gotta have a deep space station next to it. Any wormhole, assuming there is one, and scientists claim they might have detected a wormhole, and that these wormholes were created by boar worms.

• 1:08:39Speaker 04

  Not the boar worms.

• 1:08:42Speaker 05

  Thank you. Right on cue. Yeah, science fiction right there. But no, there is this new paper that suggests a gravitational wave event that was first detected back in 2019. Bob, this is GW190521.

• 1:08:58Bob Novella?

  21, okay, gotcha.

• 1:08:59Speaker 05

  And it might be the echo of a black hole merger in another universe that opened a transient wormhole into ours. Hmm. How do they know that? Do they know that?

• 1:09:11Bob Novella?

  No.

• 1:09:11Speaker 05

  What's this all about? Well, I read about this first at an article over at Futurism.com.

• 1:09:18Speaker 05

  They are, this is a pre-print article.

• 1:09:22Speaker 04

  That's an important caveat.

• 1:09:24Speaker 05

  Yes, very important, pre-print, this has not been peer-reviewed or anything close to it yet. But here's the title, "Is GW190521 a gravitational wave echo of a wormhole remnant, or from another universe?" So the authors of the paper are reinterpreting the gravitational wave event that was detected in 2019, which has been attributed to two black holes merging, but instead they're suggesting it's possibly an echo of a merger that took place in a different universe, but it was transmitted through a wormhole, we call it a wormhole throat, that momentarily connected with our universe,

• 1:10:07Speaker 05

  and sort of created, I don't know, this like cosmic burp in a sense. I just think the only way to sort of maybe describe it. And so here's what they're suggesting, their model, the merger happens in the other universe, and produces a ring-down gravitational wave, and that wave traverses the wormhole throat and emerges here as the short, isolated pulse, pop, you know, and not even that, it's like, you know, that's exaggerating it, I'm sure. But a wave emerges and traverses what they call the wormhole throat, you know, which I think we can all sort of envision, we've all watched Star Trek, except for Kara. And so we know what that would look like visually.

• 1:10:46Speaker 05

  And you get this short, isolated pulse at the end. They say they used a Bayesian statistical analysis, and what they found is that, yeah, the standard black hole merger interpretation is favored, but it's not so strongly favored that you can rule out the wormhole echo hypothesis. And sure enough, media jumped all over this with flashy headlines like "Signal from another universe", and "Wormhole detection", of course.

• 1:11:15Speaker 04

  That's always the weakest form of argument, well, you can't strictly rule it out.

• 1:11:20Speaker 05

  Therefore.

• 1:11:21Speaker 04

  Okay, so you got that going for you.

• 1:11:24Speaker 05

  Therefore, imagination, run wild, go, yay, clickbait, clickbait. That's basically what it comes down to. Yep, not peer reviewed yet, as we say, it's the idea itself is very speculative. And, and look, futurism even acknowledged that, certainly, they didn't gloss over that. They specifically said that prevailing scientific consensus prefers the standard binary black hole merger model. But again, not significant enough to rule out the alternate echo for wormhole model. All right, well, what can we make of it? Like, how should we weigh this? How much skepticism is, do you think is appropriate here?

• 1:11:59Cara Santa Maria?

  All of it?

• 1:12:02Bob Novella?

  Yeah, even, even a little more than that, maybe.

• 1:12:05Speaker 04

  I mean, I kind of file this away like saying it's aliens. It's like, well, we can't prove it's not aliens, but that's not a really good reason to say that. Especially when there's a far more mundane and known cause that, that itself can't be real. Until you rule out that this is two black holes merging or some other similar type of event.

• 1:12:28Bob Novella?

  My, my reaction, yeah, my reaction was three words, holy Occam's razor.

• 1:12:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:12:35Bob Novella?

  This, this hypothesis requires

• 1:12:37Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:12:38Bob Novella?

  other universes.

• 1:12:39Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:12:39Bob Novella?

  Hello, hello, no independent evidence that they even exist.

• 1:12:44Speaker 04

  Wait, Bob, haven't you been watching the Marvel movies? There's a multiverse out there.

• 1:12:48Speaker 05

  It says so in the title.

• 1:12:50Bob Novella?

  Yes, and this is the, this is the, this is the universe where we don't believe any of that crap.

• 1:12:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:12:56Speaker 05

  So they decide, okay, well, here's, here's how a wormhole throat would work, right? I mean, you have to introduce so many new things.

• 1:13:03Bob Novella?

  And exactly, and that's the other part of the holy Occam's razor. Because you would need to hold open that throat, you would need enough exotic negative energy, which we've never seen in any, in any astrophysical amounts that could account for that in anywhere in space. So those two things, you know, are like, come on, this is, it's ridiculous. You don't need to, this, this is, you know, black hole collisions are, are messy things, you know, the, and these were very heavy black holes. You know, the, the way they spin, they could have eccentric orbits. That, that's all a recipe for these weird, short, potentially bursty, you know, signals. You don't need, you don't need a wormhole. This is well within normal black hole physics and just invoking. Other universes is ridiculous, ridiculous.

• 1:13:48Speaker 04

  I wouldn't object to that per se, like coming up with a more exotic explanation for this signal, but just give me a testable hypothesis, right? Or some way of, beyond anomaly hunting, again, don't just give me some, oh, this is weird. Give me something concrete, like this is, argue strongly against a black hole merger, or is an indication that we would predict of some other type of phenomenon, rather than just totally shooting from the hip.

• 1:14:19Bob Novella?

  I mean, what does this other universe even add to their hypothesis? It's all, it's just clickbait, and that's why, and we're talking about it because of that. We're talking about it, and many more people have read about this than we've been what have.

• 1:14:32Speaker 04

  But Bob, we're skeptics, so we get to talk about clickbait.

• 1:14:34Bob Novella?

  That's right.

• 1:14:35Speaker 04

  But because we're skeptical, it's okay.

• 1:14:37Bob Novella?

  Yes, I agree with that. I agree with that.

• 1:14:39Speaker 05

  Steve, you used the word exotic, right? And yeah, so exotic compact objects, ECOs, Bob, have you ever heard of those?

• 1:14:48Bob Novella?

  Exo, oh, yeah.

• 1:14:50Speaker 05

  Speculative signatures sometimes invoked in quantum gravity, also known as exotic compact object proposals. They include things, I'll give you three examples, boson stars, gravastars, hadn't heard of that one before, and something called fuzzballs.

• 1:15:08Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:08Speaker 05

  There's a thing called fuzzballs.

• 1:15:10Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I've heard of them.

• 1:15:11Speaker 05

  In quantum physics, holy crow. Great names, great names. I'll wrap it up with this, because I did throw this out to our resident, you know, physicist, Brian, Brian Wecht, of course.

• 1:15:22Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah?

• 1:15:22Speaker 05

  Just to say, hey, Brian, you know, give me your quick lowdown on this, like, how skeptical should I be of this? And I'll read to you what he wrote to me. He said, "Hello, Evan, this paper strikes me as what if normal thing was weird thing." One of those kinds of projects like Avi Loeb likes to work with.

• 1:15:39Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:15:40Speaker 05

  "These are a dime a dozen in theoretical physics." He says he doesn't know anything about the researchers or the specific work, but he doesn't see anything that causes this paper to rise above the usual noise. That is all it is. He's not saying it's wrong, he says that he doesn't think it's really worth the ones and zeros that publish this.

• 1:15:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, and again, like, I don't have a problem with the background noise of science that happens. My problem is when The media picks up on the background noise and amplifies it as if it's something that deserves special attention when it doesn't.

• 1:16:16Bob Novella?

  Yeah, how many people now are gonna say, "Hey, didn't scientists find evidence of other universes with that with that black hole merger thing?" I mean, come on.

• 1:16:24Speaker 04

  And worse than that, Bob, then they'll say, "Ah, those scientists, they don't know anything. Ten years ago, they were saying they discovered another universe or whatever." They'll use it as an example of scientists not know what they're talking about or changing what they're saying all the time.

• 1:16:37Bob Novella?

  Oh, great.

• 1:16:38Speaker 04

  Or throwing shit against the wall. It's like, no.

• 1:16:40Bob Novella?

  Pure deconstruction, right?

• 1:16:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:16:42Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, how cool. Imagine if they did find some extra little bit of evidence that this paper sorely needed, something that you could, that we could follow through and investigate with other black hole mergers in the future. And how cool would that have been if this was, if there was some weird hint that seemed, "Oh, damn, man, that's worthy of more investigation." It would have been so cool, but no, there's like nothing there. They leave it hanging there. It's like, "Oh, look at this." Pretty shiny, talking about it.

• 1:17:11Speaker 05

  Nothing to it, but hey, it shines.

• 1:17:13Speaker 04

  All right, thanks, Evan.

• 1:17:14Bob Novella?

  Yep.

• 1:17:15Speaker 04

  All right, Jay, it's Who's That Noisy Time?

• 1:17:18Jay Novella?

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

• 1:17:35Speaker 05

  I don't know what it is, but I like it.

• 1:17:37Jay Novella?

  What's happening in this? What is this, guys? Come on.

• 1:17:40Speaker 04

  I think it's another animal.

• 1:17:43Jay Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:17:43Speaker 04

  I guess singing along with whatever. Is that the best you got? What do you want? Let me tell you what kind of animal?

• 1:17:52Speaker 05

  Is it also playing the piano?

• 1:17:53Speaker 04

  It also has that squeaky herpetology kind of vibe going on.

• 1:17:57Bob Novella?

  It's Cartman on ketamine.

• 1:17:58Jay Novella?

  Okay, well, I have listeners that have guessed. And we'll start with a listener named Chuck. And he says, "Hi Jay, my guess for this week's noisy is that somebody took audio of a baby making baby noises, then matched the pitches to musical harmony, then played along chords on the piano that matched the noises." Yeah, okay. That is not correct, but not fully incorrect. Ahah. I will move on. A listener named Michael, and here we go, Kalonikos. Kalonikos. Tony Samos. Okay, so Michael says, "Hi Jay, it's a bird, specifically a bird singing along to the song that the human is playing on the piano." You're seeing a pattern here. He also says, "Looking forward to seeing you in Sydney.

• 1:18:43Jay Novella?

  Don't know if I can come to all three days," but he wants to go. He wants to go to the private show in Extravaganza. He wants to have popcorn with Steve. Lots of fun stuff. Another listener named Charlie Cluepfo said, "This week's 'Who's That Noisy?' Sounds like someone using a rubber party balloon as a musical instrument, constraining the outflow of air to control the pitch." Damn. The tune being played with piano accompaniment." That is not correct. I had a ton of people guess correctly. So I have to default to the very first person who sent in the first correct guess. This listener is named Bradford West, and Bradford said, "I-I-I-Jay, believe it or not, this is the second time I'm guessing

• 1:19:28Jay Novella?

  that a particular noisy is a turtle doing the naughty. I was wrong the first time, maybe it's just me, but this week's noisy totally sounds like a turtle." And then he gets into a few catchphrases here, which I can't say, but the turtle is doing something. He ends the sentence with ecstatic moaning, and then supported by piano chords. Okay, so now, mind you, this was a video that was sent to me by a listener, and since I grabbed the audio, that video has been taken down. Wow. I think Big Turtle just doesn't like what was going on there. I am almost 100% sure that what was happening in the video is the turtle was indeed having coitus,

• 1:20:13Jay Novella?

  and they recorded this turtle, and then someone went in and put music on top of the noises. Yeah, I don't think the turtle was auto-tuned.

• 1:20:24Jay Novella?

  But it was edited or not? No, I saw, you know, I saw a good 20-second video with the camera moving and stuff and, you know, and I've heard, you know, this noise before. I think a lot of listeners have. To summarize, I completely think that this is a turtle doing the act that I told you, being recorded, then someone playing music afterwards to make it match. So, uh, great guess. Everybody that guessed correctly this week, I read all of your emails. I could, you know, I can't respond to everybody and I can't put you all on here, but I know who you are. And I do keep a list. It's a secret, who's that noisy list, but I do keep a list. So, anyway, thank you all for this week. That was a lot of fun and my god, that noisy, like, I wasn't even sure I was gonna play it,

• 1:21:08Jay Novella?

  but then I realized I've played something similar before, so no worries there. I have a new noisy this week. This is from a listener named Mark Penny.

• 1:21:26Jay Novella?

  Okay, if you think you know what this week's noisy is, or you heard something cool, email me at [email protected]. Jay, are the people talking in the background incidental? They are incidental. Okay.

• 1:21:39Speaker 04

  Nice, Jay.

• 1:21:41Speaker 05

  That's right out of Silence of the Lambs. And Jay, that, that, that sounds like that dentist cleaning gun water squirt thing.

• 1:21:51Jay Novella?

  Oh, the, like, the water pick type thing?

• 1:21:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, that high pitched, oh, I hate that. But that's what it sounds like to me.

• 1:21:57Jay Novella?

  So, anyway, you know what to do. Now, let me get on to a couple of other things. Yeah. Yeah, so first of all, um, I haven't mentioned this in a little while, but we do have a mailing list that goes out every week. And that mailing list contains everything that we've done the previous week. And as you know, we're adding more things as these weeks roll by. So, if you'd like to get on that mailing list, go to theskepticsguy.org. And you can join the mailing list on our homepage. You'll find the link there.

• 1:22:22Speaker 05

  Takes a long time to fix all those stamps to that mail.

• 1:22:25Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it sure does. Thank you, Evan. I appreciate it. At least one of you realizes how busy I am. And then I'd like to remind everyone that we have a Patreon. It's patreon.com/skepticsguide.

• 1:22:36Jay Novella?

  Not to sound dramatic, but in these times of unbelievable, how do you summarize it in one sentence? You know what's going on, and we need to get science and critical thinking out to everybody. But it starts with us educating skeptics. And those skeptics can go around and start helping other people get the truth, the real information, get an understanding of what's going on in the world. If you want to help us make this happen, you could become a patron of ours, patreon.com/skepticsguide. It's, you know, dark times, guys, it's dark.

• 1:23:17Jay Novella?

  And, you know, I'm personally scared and frustrated and angry, but the bottom line is the only thing that we can do is get, you know, get the real information out there and educate as many people as we can and be a voice of reason in a world that is becoming very unreasonable.

• 1:23:34Speaker 04

  I'm hopeful and optimistic.

• 1:23:36Jay Novella?

  You keep saying that, and I'm like, I'm glad you are, Steve.

• 1:23:40Speaker 04

  But that's because I'm thinking in terms of hundreds of years.

• 1:23:44Jay Novella?

  Yes.

• 1:23:45Speaker 04

  Things will be better.

• 1:23:46Cara Santa Maria?

  On a geologic timescale, things are fine.

• 1:23:48Speaker 04

  On everyone's chance of survival. It's all about your perspective that you choose.

• 1:23:52Jay Novella?

  Yeah, but in the short term, work needs to be done. We are the kind of people that do the work, and if you want to support our effort, then please consider becoming a patron.

• 1:24:01Speaker 04

  Thank you. We have a quick named that logical fallacy. This one comes from our Thwala Pot. Wow. That's the guy, that's what he wrote. Love it. And he writes, "I'm engaged in a discussion on the internet about pornography. The argument is made that, quote, 'If you think porn causes no harms, then let's broadcast it in every public place.'" Apart from the straw man argument that nobody has actually said that porn causes no harms, what is the fallacy here? So, what do you guys think?

• 1:24:35Cara Santa Maria?

  So, is he asking, so he's saying, okay, straw man?

• 1:24:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Porn causes no harm. Yes, in certain instances, we know the porn does cause harm. So he's talking about the if it did cause no harm.

• 1:24:48Speaker 04

  If it causes no harm, why not broadcast it everywhere?

• 1:24:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Hmm, is that like a slippery slope or a nirvana kind of a thing?

• 1:24:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's definitely a slippery. It's partly a slippery slope. You could also say the argument, I think the closest is the argument at absurdum. Yeah. Let's take it to its extreme example, you know, then. It's like saying, oh, yeah, if you think guns are safe, why don't we just arm every single person in the country? You know, it's like, well.

• 1:25:13Cara Santa Maria?

  People say that.

• 1:25:14Speaker 04

  I know, I know that. But those kind of arguments are silly because they are just taking it to a deliberately absurd. Again, and we've talked about the argument at absurdum, that can be a valid type of argument. If you're saying, if you're making a specific premise, you can test that premise by seeing how far you can push it, right? And if someone is making an absolute statement, then you could definitely challenge the absoluteness of that statement by saying, well, let's then take it to its logical conclusion and see if it holds up. But there's the invalid argument from absurdum, which is like this. Like you take a reasonable argument, you turn it into an absurd extreme

• 1:25:57Speaker 04

  and then argue against that or say, well, because this absurd extreme isn't true, your more reasonable version is also not true.

• 1:26:05Cara Santa Maria?

  So if somebody was trying to argue that porn was, under every circumstance, every iteration, always safe and always, you know, whatever, welcome, then they could make that and it wouldn't be an invalid.

• 1:26:21Speaker 04

  I don't know. I think it's still invalid because saying that porn is safe is not the same thing as saying that it's appropriate for public broadcast, especially everywhere, regardless of location or situation or the people who are there or whatever. Safety's not the only issue. So there's a lot of unstated major premises in that as well. Right. But yeah, be careful of those kinds of arguments, you know, because they're rarely valid for a number of reasons. Okay, we're also gonna do, talk about a video that we talked about on TikTok, actually last week, but it's kind of fun, so I thought we would talk about it on the show as well. So then this video, the person, the creator

• 1:27:05Speaker 04

  is arguing, well, he's actually not arguing anything. He types into ChatGPT, what would happen if the Earth were suddenly in a vacuum, which is kind of a silly question, but that's the question he asked ChatGPT. And the answer he got was, well, because it's in a vacuum, the atmosphere would go away, right? And then the oceans would boil and all life on Earth would be destroyed. And the guy's just sort of smugly crossing his arms and nodding as if that's correct, right?

• 1:27:36Speaker 05

  Is his point that Earth is not in a vacuum?

• 1:27:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think this is a flat-earther, right?

• 1:27:41Speaker 05

  Probably, yeah.

• 1:27:42Speaker 04

  Because this is one, that's one of the things the flat-earthers say. So, a couple of things we could say about this. On one level, first of all, don't use ChatGPT like an oracle, right? You can't just ask it a question and take whatever it spits out as if it were the absolute

• 1:28:02Speaker 05

  The unviable truth, right?

• 1:28:04Speaker 04

  Right? We know that it hallucinates, we know that it makes mistakes, we know that it makes assumptions about context. So I did, just to see what would happen, I asked the same question to, you know, ChatGPT, and it did give that answer. But then I asked a follow-up question. I said, yeah, but isn't the Earth already in a vacuum? And it says, yes, of course it is. You know, good point, you know, that's a great point.

• 1:28:31Bob Novella?

  Way to go, Steve!

• 1:28:32Speaker 04

  You know Bob?

• 1:28:36Speaker 04

  It's just generically talking about what happens to things in a vacuum, right? And then just not really putting it in the context of the earth, which is in space, which is a vacuum. But then, once you push it on context, then it gives you, you know, if you have an actual conversation with it and you haven't asked clarifying questions and contextual questions, then it starts to give you more reasonable information, like, yes, there is no sort of demarcation between the atmosphere and space, you know, that, you know, it talks about internal versus external forces, you know, the, the, the atmosphere is being held in by gravity, hello?

• 1:29:19Speaker 04

  And that's balanced by the pressure of the gas in the atmosphere. And that's why the atmosphere gets thinner as you go higher and higher in altitude.

• 1:29:27Bob Novella?

  And we do lose atmosphere. We do lose.

• 1:29:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, some of it escapes.

• 1:29:31Speaker 04

  Right, but there's, there's an, it's at equilibrium. It's at equilibrium with gravity and it's basically held in by the weight of the atmosphere above it, right? So you could actually get some real scientific information out of it if you know how to ask questions correctly and you have, you ask clarifying questions, et cetera, et cetera. But, so it's, yeah, so it's kind of a stupid question. It's a total flat-earther thing. Yeah, but it is disturbing the degree to which, and how quickly people are falling into, it's like, well, ChatGPT says it, therefore it's true.

• 1:30:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's really scary.

• 1:30:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's just, it's.

• 1:30:07Speaker 05

  Not good.

• 1:30:08Speaker 04

  It's nuts.

• 1:30:08Cara Santa Maria?

  I mean, it's like, and with that, that's with just overt reality. Now talk about all of the biases, because all ChatGPT is doing is scraping stuff that people already said and put online.

• 1:30:19Bob Novella?

  And also, Steve, another way to look at it is just purely from a escape velocity point of view. And that, that applies as well. These, you know, the atmosphere does not have the escape velocity to get out, away from the earth like that, you know, regardless if there's, if there's a vacuum out there. And we do, in fact, do lose some atmosphere all the time, but we've got so much that we would probably last a billion years losing it at that rate before it was problematic. So it's like, come on.

• 1:30:44Speaker 05

  And, and space is technically not a pure vacuum either.

• 1:30:47Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:30:48Speaker 05

  I mean, there, there is an interstellar medium that we actually exist within. It's not really 100% vacuum, right? Which is why we can't get to zero.

• 1:30:56Bob Novella?

  No, I mean, even the purest vacuum though would have, you know, you'd have to get into quantum mechanics and virtual particles and that kind of stuff, which is kind of out of scope here, but.

• 1:31:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm not going there. Stay away.

• 1:31:08Speaker 04

  All right, guys, it is time for science fiction.

• 1:31:14Speaker 03

  It's time for science or fiction.

• 1:31:24Speaker 04

  Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine and one fake, and then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. We have a theme this week. The theme is insects. A lot of insects in the world. How much do you guys know about them? A little bit. A little bit. All right.

• 1:31:43Jay Novella?

  I know that there is a beetle that cannot lift 97 pounds.

• 1:31:47Speaker 05

  92 pounds.

• 1:31:49Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:31:49Jay Novella?

  Whatever. 90 plus pounds.

• 1:31:52Speaker 04

  All right, well, let's see what else you know about insects, Jay. Here we go. Item number one, flight evolved independently three times among insects and emerged first among insects about 350 million years ago. Item number two, termites are a type of cockroach, the one with the most complex social system. And then item number three, the largest insect to ever live was Meganeuropsis permiana, a giant predatory dragonfly with a wingspan of 2.5 feet that likely hunted frogs and small mammals. All right, Mr. Confident over there, Jay, why don't you go first?

• 1:32:36Jay Novella?

  All right, Steve, we have flight evolved independently three times among insects and emerged first among insects about 350 million years ago. I mean, that sounds legit to me. I mean, flight is so unbelievably useful. There's such an advantage with it that I wouldn't be surprised if it did evolve independently a few times and, you know, insects before, you know, larger animals, that makes sense, too. So I think that's science. The second one, termites are a type of cockroach, the one with the most complex social system. Okay, so there's two things in there that he's saying, is that termites are a type of cockroach, and that they have a very complicated social system. So what would be complicated about termites? I know some things about termites, Steve.

• 1:33:21Jay Novella?

  I know that there's also different kinds of termites. Yeah, I mean, why wouldn't they have a complex social system? Lots of other insects do, so that's, that's, sounds perfectly cromulent to me. And the third one, the largest insect to ever live was mega supapoo and a giant predatory dragonfly with a wingspan of 2.5 feet that likely hunted frogs and small animals. That damn, now, I remember reading something about like, the large wingspan thing. I don't know how big it was, 2.5 feet sounds huge. There is something that is bothering me about this one, because it sounds familiar.

• 1:34:04Jay Novella?

  Large dragonfly and it hunted little animals. Question is, do dragonfly, would they eat things like that? Would they eat things like that, or would they only eat other insects and fruit and stuff like that? I don't know. Dragonflies typically don't bother me when I'm outside, they just kind of see you and they fly away. I don't know what they're eating. Eh, I'm gonna say that the dragonfly one is the fiction, Steve. I don't think they, I don't think they eat small mammals and frogs. Okay, Bob?

• 1:34:32Bob Novella?

  Yeah, all of these seemed quite reasonable. Three, like for insects, 350 million years ago, that seems pretty spot on. And then two, sure, termites are a type of cockroach. Yeah, that sounds like obvious. And then three, this Meganoropsis permiana, I'll call her, I'll call him Megan. Megan, yeah, that, that sound, I remember reading about that years ago, and that, I don't specifically remember the name, but the size seems about, close to what I, what I remembered. So I'm like, alright, what's gonna nail me here? And then I went back. To insect flight and you say here that it emerged three times independently?

• 1:35:14Bob Novella?

  And I remember we did a recent one, Steve, where it was a similar angle and it was like, no, it happened once and everything else was a have that as a common ancestor. I think that might that might apply here. So I'm going to say that that the insect one, well, not the insect one, the independent flight one is fiction.

• 1:35:33Cara Santa Maria?

  All right, Evan?

• 1:35:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, so the one that was striking me weird about the flight evolution is the 350 million years ago. How do we know? Uh, we have a fossil? We do. Um, we have winged fossils from back then. I can't recall anything that old with wings. I mean, that's my, you know, I'm basing it simply off my own memory, which is really not use, you know, useful here. However, I don't know. I would, I thought I would have remembered of something dated 350 million that had that had wings, uh, flying, you know, wings for flight specifically. So that one, that's the reason why that one's getting me. The other ones, termites or cockroaches?

• 1:36:19Speaker 05

  That's new information to me, but not, uh, you know, shocking. And the other one about the large dragonfly, uh, yeah, I didn't know that it hunted frogs and small mammals. There were frogs and small mammals way back when this would have been alive, right? I guess I'll go with Bob. I'm going to say the 350 million years ago one is going to be fiction.

• 1:36:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, and Kara? I feel like you always do such a good job of making them all seem perfectly cromulent and also completely ridiculous. Yeah, that's the goal. The same time. Um, a two and a half foot, uh, dragonfly? That's bananas. But then again, it was super, super old and, uh, okay, hunted frogs and small animals? Likely, right? We don't really know. Um, but I do think dragonflies are carnivorous, so a really big one would eat bigger stuff, right? I want, I want that one to be science. Termites being a type of cockroach? I have no idea. I don't remember reading about this, but I guess why wouldn't they be more like cockroaches than ants, for example? And they are really social.

• 1:37:22Cara Santa Maria?

  And then Bob and Evan both think that the flight evolution. So I remember learning a long time ago. Uh, four, like that powered flight evolved four times. And I don't remember, I think it was like bugs, birds, bats, and something that doesn't start with a B.

• 1:37:39Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 1:37:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh, oh, like di- not dinosaurs, though, like I'm flying, flying reptiles, right? Cause those wouldn't be bats or birds.

• 1:37:45Speaker 05

  Reptiles, right?

• 1:37:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Reptiles, like pter- like pterodactyls and stuff. So if that's true, then did they break down bugs into multiple times? Maybe, but maybe not. I'm sure my knowledge is very outdated here. Um, but I guess that one, I'm the least, I don't know. That one, I think, I think I'm gonna go with the guys because I got to go last. So, sorry, sorry, Jay. You're on your own on this one.

• 1:38:10Speaker 04

  No worries. Alright, so you all agree on the middle one, so we'll start there. Termites are a type of cockroach, the one with the most complex social system. You guys all think this one is science and this one is? Science, this is correct.

• 1:38:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Weird.

• 1:38:25Speaker 04

  Uh, they didn't always think this. Um, cock- uh, termites are put into their own order, but then DNA analysis showed that they are in fact cockroaches. So then they have, now they've been placed within the cockroach order. Ter- termites are cockroaches. Cockroaches have, are not as social as termites are, other cockroaches are. Some, they're, you think of them as kind of solitary, but they do have some social interaction with each other. Most do not have complex social interactions, but termites, you know, have a nest with a division of castes and the queen and division of labor and all that stuff. They have a very complicated, uh, social structure, more like ants, for example, uh, than other cockroaches.

• 1:39:09Speaker 04

  Alright, so let's go back to number one. Flight evolved independently three times among insects and emerged first among insects about 350 million years ago, uh, meaning that it evolved among insects before any non-insect flight. You're right, the other three origins of flight are pterodactyls, bats, and birds. Um, and then there's all of the insect flight, the insects, you know, again, evolved flight first. Question is. Yeah, how many? Is every single insect that flies have a common ancestor? Oof. Or not? Hope so.

• 1:39:49Speaker 04

  Right, so are dragonflies and butterflies and hornets? All have a common ancestor with wings? That's the question. What's the answer? And the answer is, this one is the fiction. It is a fiction. Because, yes, they all have, there was a one common ancestor with flight. And all flying insects evolved from all insects with wings. Many insects are secondarily flightless like most cockroaches. There are some cockroach species that do fly. Most do not fly. They have wings, they have wings, but they don't fly. And so the wings have evolved to be more like armor. You know, they're tough.

• 1:40:33Speaker 04

  Or they use them, you know, you know what most cockroaches use their wings for? Not just to jump really far? Or thermoregulation? No.

• 1:40:41Speaker 05

  Attracting mates?

• 1:40:42Speaker 04

  Nope.

• 1:40:43Speaker 05

  Detracting mates?

• 1:40:45Speaker 04

  To, to flip back upright when they land on their back.

• 1:40:47Speaker 05

  No, come on, the turtle thing?

• 1:40:50Speaker 04

  But they're so bad at it still. That's absolutely ridiculous.

• 1:40:55Speaker 05

  No, no, no.

• 1:40:56Speaker 04

  That's their primary function. The other, Kara, you're sort of right in terms of jumping far. Some cockroach species glide with their wings. They don't have powered flight, but they'll like jump from a high place to a low place and they'll sort of glide down with their wings. And then a few do have like actual powered flight, but most, yeah, most just use to flip back around again. All right, which means that the largest insect to ever live was Meganoropsis permiana, which lived in the Permian. If you can guess that. A giant predatory dragonfly with the wingspan of two and a half feet. That likely hunted frogs and small mammals. You have to see models of this thing, like a person holding. It's like unbelievably huge.

• 1:41:40Speaker 04

  You know, foreign insect, these things were just ginormous. And you know why? You probably do, I know we've mentioned this show. Why were they so big? Oxygen, like thirty something percent at that point. What is it now?

• 1:41:52Speaker 05

  Twenty four?

• 1:41:53Speaker 04

  Twenty, yeah, twenty three.

• 1:41:54Speaker 05

  Twenty one, thirty five then, twenty one now?

• 1:41:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, thirty to thirty five, yeah, that's how it got, in the early Permian, that's how high it got, thirty to thirty five percent.

• 1:42:03Speaker 05

  What if, what if we lived in a thirty five percent oxygen?

• 1:42:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, we would have giant insects flying around. So insects, you know, they don't have, they don't have lungs, they just have openings called spiracules, and then they have little tunnels that bring the oxygen to their tissues, so it could only diffuse so far. And so the higher the oxygen concentration, the farther the oxygen can diffuse into the insect, the bigger the insect can be. They don't have adaptations, you know, for getting bigger, uh, by having circulation, circulating oxygen, right? Um, so, that was it, a bit more oxygen meant bigger bugs, uh, then they had to get small again when the oxygen levels dropped.

• 1:42:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Imagine getting bit by one of those?

• 1:42:44Speaker 04

  And how low did oxygen go at the end of the Permian?

• 1:42:47Speaker 05

  Oh, that's a good question.

• 1:42:48Speaker 04

  Sixteen percent.

• 1:42:50Speaker 05

  Oof.

• 1:42:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:42:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, it got really, then it then it came back up to whatever, twenty, one, two, three, wherever we are now. Yeah, but these, yeah, these things are cool, look, look, look them up, look at pictures of the Meganeuropsus permiana, they're, they are, they are awesome looking. Yeah, they basically ate like mice, can you imagine, like a bug flying down, grabbing a mouse and carrying it off? They were like birds, they basically filled the niche of birds, you know?

• 1:43:15Bob Novella?

  Is, is that the insect that flew on in the movie Caveman?

• 1:43:19Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:43:20Speaker 05

  Oh, gosh.

• 1:43:21Bob Novella?

  Lands, lands on his chest and the guy kills it?

• 1:43:22Speaker 04

  That's where I saw it, that's where I saw it.

• 1:43:25Bob Novella?

  He squishes it and all the, all the insect guts go all over, all over him? That was nasty, funny movie, man, I wish they'd hold up.

• 1:43:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, basically, that's what that was, yep. Alright, good job, guys. Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:43:37Speaker 05

  It is strange to reflect how much energy is thrown away in attempting to know the unknowable. That was written by Joseph Barber Lightfoot.

• 1:43:46Speaker 04

  Is there a context to that quote?

• 1:43:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, so, um, he was actually a biblical scholar.

• 1:43:54Speaker 05

  Lightfoot was, so I thought it was kind of interesting, having, having come from a mind like that. But he was apparently also an academic. They're saying that, you know, you're not, you're not supposed to spend time, you know, worrying so much about the mysteries of the universe, afterlife and other abstract concepts. It's a futile effort, a poor use of one's energy, diverting attention from more tangible and meaningful pursuits.

• 1:44:20Speaker 04

  But yeah, I'm just curious if there's more to say about it, because like, what do you mean by unknowable? Something that's inherently unknowable? You know, I agree, it is kind of a waste of energy chasing things that are not even in their basic concept, scientific or empirical.

• 1:44:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, which is kind of one of the, really the first sort of scientific and skeptical concepts I was, I grasped early on in my, in my journey.

• 1:44:43Speaker 04

  But if you're just talking about things that are, that are currently unknown.

• 1:44:46Cara Santa Maria?

  That we don't know now, yeah.

• 1:44:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's not necessarily a waste.

• 1:44:48Cara Santa Maria?

  It's interesting, too. It's, it's one of the biggest things that I think I talk to patients and even like friends and colleagues and stuff about when it comes to people who struggle with anxiety, is I feel like one of the most pernicious aspects of sort of human behavior is obsessing over what other people are thinking without just asking them. Like, so often, people spend emotional and mental energy and cause a lot of internal strife by inventing the thoughts and the feelings of other people. And it's like, in some respects, it's unknowable, because you can never think what somebody else is thinking. In other respects, they can share with you to the extent that they're willing to share.

• 1:45:32Cara Santa Maria?

  But it is, it's such a futile practice and it causes so much pain.

• 1:45:36Speaker 05

  But because he says unknowable in this quote, I just, I, I take that to mean not unknown.

• 1:45:42Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:45:42Speaker 05

  But that it's a set of information that is specifically unknowable.

• 1:45:47Speaker 04

  Right. Inherently unknowable.

• 1:45:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And in, in some ways, kind of, even my example, I think it holds there, because we inherently, by definition, can never actually know what someone else is thinking. We can only know what they tell us they are thinking. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:46:03Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:46:03Speaker 04

  All right, well, thank you all for joining me this week. Cheers, Dave. You got it. And until next week, this is your skeptic's guide to the universe.

• 1:46:14Speaker 04

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

• 1:46:51Speaker 00

  Breathe in and reset with Lincoln Rejuvenate, an available multisensory feature in the 2027 Lincoln Navigator SUV. Experience the luxurious massage, visuals, and sense to help you relax in the driver's seat. It's your time for a reset. Visit lincoln.com to learn more. Lincoln Rejuvenate does not operate unless the vehicle is in park. When the vehicle is off, or if any doors open, do not use the feature in a closed garage or in other enclosed areas. See owner's manual for important operating instructions. Lincoln and Navigator are trademarks of Ford or its affiliates. All rights reserved.