The Skeptics Guide #1081 - Mar 28 2026

Back To Basics: Confirmation Bias; News Items: NASA Announces New Moon Plans, The Limits of Cloning, Giant Insects, Pushing Exorcism, Update on 3I-Atlas; Who's That Noisy; 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

  Your joints help you keep doing what you love. Give them daily support with Ancient Nutrition Multi-Collagen Protein. Two scoops deliver 20 grams of collagen from 10 types, including clinically studied eggshell membrane, plus vitamin C and probiotics to support skin, hair, nails, and joint health. Visit ancientnutrition.com/protein and use code PROTEIN for $15 off. That's ancientnutrition.com code PROTEIN.

• 0:30Speaker 01

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

• 0:37Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, March 26, 2026, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey, everybody. Cara Santa Maria. Howdy. Shane Novella. Hey, guys. And Evan Bernstein.

• 0:52Speaker 03

  Good evening, everyone.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  Good evening, everyone. I'm enjoying the spring weather today. It's perfect, like 60-something. This is when I get to open the windows and like get all the, get some fresh air into the house, you know?

• 1:03Speaker 03

  I love that.

• 1:03Speaker 02

  I have to be enclosed in all winter.

• 1:05Speaker 03

  Especially after the winter we had, which was pretty brutal here in the Northeast.

• 1:08Bob Novella?

  I'm seeing some leaves grow already.

• 1:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow, it must be so strange to have seasons. You're seeing leaves grow. And I'm like, the trees and shrubs and stuff have been blooming for weeks in LA.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  Well, aren't you?

• 1:20Speaker 03

  Well, LA has seasons. It has fire season.

• 1:23Speaker 02

  Moon season.

• 1:24Speaker 03

  It has, right, it has.

• 1:26Cara Santa Maria?

  It has award season.

• 1:28Speaker 03

  Atmospheric river season.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  And if things go how they seem, you may have an oil spill season.

• 1:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's true. No, it's, well, at least it's not 95 out this week. It's only 85, so it's been more.

• 1:42Speaker 03

  Can't believe it.

• 1:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, manageable. Woof.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  Woof. Did you just absorb my exclamations that I've been saying weirdly now?

• 1:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Did you invent woof, Bob?

• 1:52Speaker 02

  I didn't, butter man. It just comes out. When something dramatic happens, I just, it just comes out. And now I've infected you, apparently, so that's cool.

• 2:00Speaker 03

  Speaking of things just coming out, I'm looking at a picture.

• 2:06Speaker 03

  Of what's being described as, well, I'll read you what one website is saying. A tentacle object that is with with its limbs emerging from what appears to be a space egg floating on the International Space Station. What is this?

• 2:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:23Bob Novella?

  You mean the potato? Stop the podcast, stop the podcast right now and Google ISS space potato.

• 2:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Don't tell people to stop the podcast. Do it while we're still playing.

• 2:31Bob Novella?

  If you can multitask, then have at it.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  Or look at the picture that's associated with this podcast, because that's what I'm using as this podcast picture.

• 2:38Bob Novella?

  That's pretty awesome.

• 2:40Speaker 03

  So.

• 2:41Bob Novella?

  It looks, it looks very Cthulhu-esque here. I'm digging it. And it's because it's a, because it's not a conventional potato. It's like a, it's like a, what, a purple, weird purple potato?

• 2:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, yeah.

• 2:52Speaker 03

  Which are delicious, by the way.

• 2:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 2:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:55Bob Novella?

  You just don't, I don't know, you don't see them that often.

• 2:57Cara Santa Maria?

  It's, it's a contextless photo. I think this is why it looks so bizarre, because it's in space, it's floating.

• 3:06Speaker 03

  It's floating.

• 3:07Cara Santa Maria?

  You know, so right there, that's weird.

• 3:09Speaker 03

  You know, they, they took the picture at an angle as such as like, it does look like something's possibly emerging from it. So you think, and it's shaped like an egg. So what do you think? You think, okay, something is hatching, right? That's your first thought.

• 3:22Bob Novella?

  And don't forget, it looks evil. There's a clear evil cast to this.

• 3:28Speaker 03

  It, it, it is gnarly.

• 3:30Cara Santa Maria?

  But it's just sprouting. It's just a potato that's sprouting.

• 3:33Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 3:34Cara Santa Maria?

  That's all it is. And, and the sprouts are purple because it's a purple potato.

• 3:37Bob Novella?

  It's probably yummy.

• 3:38Cara Santa Maria?

  No, aren't they kind of gross by the time they do that? Or am I wrong?

• 3:41Speaker 02

  No, you could, no, you just cut them out.

• 3:43Speaker 03

  You cut those out, yeah, you just.

• 3:44Cara Santa Maria?

  But sometimes they're like deep in there.

• 3:46Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 3:47Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't know. Yeah, I guess you just cut out the eyes. It's, it's, Jesus, that sounds evil.

• 3:51Bob Novella?

  Just cut out its eyes.

• 3:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. It's also got like a weird sheen on it. It's got Velcro attached to it. It definitely, without context, you would never know that's a potato.

• 4:00Speaker 02

  I know, I instantly thought it was a potato, but I've seen potatoes sprouting like that.

• 4:04Cara Santa Maria?

  You've seen potatoes floating in the air.

• 4:06Bob Novella?

  It looks like, it looks like a very sick kiwi.

• 4:09Cara Santa Maria?

  It kind of does.

• 4:10Bob Novella?

  Someone on, someone on Twitter is referring it to as Spudnik one.

• 4:16Speaker 02

  Spudnik.

• 4:16Bob Novella?

  Of course.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  I love it.

• 4:18Cara Santa Maria?

  And also, when you, have you seen the photo where they zoomed in on the little growth? It looks like a, I don't know, what does it remind me of? A gremlin? Is it gremlin-esque? It almost has like a little face and little arms and legs. I mean, that's my parallel.

• 4:33Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

• 4:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, you can see it, right?

• 4:36Bob Novella?

  No, it looks, it looks like Ryland Grace from, in Xenonight on Hail Mary.

• 4:41Speaker 02

  No, it looks like Quato from.

• 4:46Cara Santa Maria?

  I know none of these references.

• 4:47Bob Novella?

  Get your ass to Maz.

• 4:49Speaker 03

  Those are, so those are the eyes, right? That's what we're looking at? These are potato eyes.

• 4:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, it's the, it's the sprout growing out of the eye.

• 4:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, that's right. And there's, there's a reason, I'm sure, why, why these things occur.

• 5:04Speaker 02

  This is how potatoes reproduce.

• 5:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, they're plants, they're growing.

• 5:08Speaker 02

  What you do, like, if you want to propagate a potato, you cut out each eye and plant it.

• 5:12Speaker 03

  Oh, you cut the eye and plant it?

• 5:14Speaker 02

  No, you cut out a piece of the potato containing an eye.

• 5:16Speaker 03

  I see.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  Didn't you watch the Martian? That's what he was doing.

• 5:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I thought he took the smaller, the, just the smaller potatoes and used those.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  Cause each eye will root and grow a new plant.

• 5:27Cara Santa Maria?

  You can, yeah, you can also just plant the whole potato.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  You could.

• 5:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure.

• 5:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. But either way, yeah, that's just a root system.

• 5:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Apparently, they're called peeps.

• 5:36Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 5:37Bob Novella?

  Peeps?

• 5:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, according to the AI overview on Google, sometimes they're called peeps. And they signify the end of the potato's dormancy and the start of a new plant growing.

• 5:47Speaker 03

  Often mistaken as an alien from space.

• 5:51Cara Santa Maria?

  And it also says, as to what you mentioned, they are natural and safe to eat if removed, though they indicate the potato is getting old.

• 5:57Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:59Cara Santa Maria?

  So, yeah, at a certain point, it gets gross.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  If you have them sitting in your pantry, it's like, oh, right.

• 6:04Speaker 03

  Well, there's that old expression, long in the tooth, right? It's getting old, so this is long in the eye.

• 6:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 6:10Speaker 02

  Do you know what long in the tooth refers to?

• 6:12Speaker 03

  Horses, right? Horses. Receding gum lines?

• 6:15Speaker 02

  Well, their teeth, from what I understand, because I could look it up, they continue to grow. And so you could tell the age of a horse by how long its teeth is.

• 6:22Speaker 03

  I see.

• 6:23Bob Novella?

  So then-

• 6:24Speaker 03

  Other animals have similar, and I think rabbits also, their teeth will continually grow.

• 6:29Bob Novella?

  So for a person, could you say long in the ear? Because ears and what noses just continue growing as you, as you get older?

• 6:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, and what I'm reading that you're kind of both correct, Evan and Steve. The teeth themselves don't grow, but they continue to erupt because as the horse chews, the tooth emerges from the gum line. So there's a reserve of tooth that's always there and it looks like it's growing because it's erupting over time.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  So it is getting a lot, the visible part is-

• 6:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, the visible part is physically getting longer, yeah. But the tooth itself is not growing.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  It can't grow, it's gotta be from the base, from the root.

• 7:05Cara Santa Maria?

  That's interesting.

• 7:06Speaker 03

  From the root. The root, the root of the tooth, the root of the potato plant, hey, it all comes together.

• 7:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Root of the problem.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  All right, we're gonna do another back to basics. That was a very popular segment, Cara, that you did a couple of weeks ago.

• 7:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, great.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  On Cara.

• 7:19Bob Novella?

  How do you know it was popular? Emails?

• 7:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Email.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  Based on email.

• 7:22Bob Novella?

  You just saying that?

• 7:24Cara Santa Maria?

  It's also one of those things where like, after talking about the fundamental attribution error, it is, I mean, obviously I am doing this, it's my own bias, but it is coming up in therapy sessions, in casual conversations with people. I'm noticing it everywhere. It's just been a hot topic of conversation in my life ever since I kind of redrew my attention to it.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  Do you know what that's called?

• 7:45Bob Novella?

  Funny how that's-

• 7:45Cara Santa Maria?

  I would call it the Pi effect. You guys remember that movie Pi?

• 7:48Speaker 03

  Something.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  It is the frequency illusion, but that's a more specific name. That's the Bader Minehoff phenomenon. When something is drawn to your attention, then you start to see it everywhere.

• 7:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah. And that is, you guys remember Aronofsky's film Pi? That is basically the whole crux of it, is that he was just seeing this number every single place he looked and he started to think it had deeper meaning than it actually had.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  Right, like Ralph Cramden.

• 8:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  Who gets that reference?

• 8:13Speaker 03

  Cara?

• 8:14Cara Santa Maria?

  I do not.

• 8:15Speaker 03

  Well, I know who Ralph Cramden was.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  There was an episode where he was noticing the number four everywhere, so whatever, he bet on it, on the lottery, and of course he came in fourth.

• 8:25Cara Santa Maria?

  What are the odds?

• 8:26Bob Novella?

  Oh my god.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  All right. So I'm gonna do confirmation bias.

• 8:34Bob Novella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  Because this is, I think, the most basic of basics in terms of skeptical thinking. It is the mother of all cognitive biases.

• 8:42Bob Novella?

  Wait, I thought non sequitur was.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  That's logical fall- that's your core logical fallacy. This is a core cognitive bias.

• 8:49Bob Novella?

  Gotcha, gotcha.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  So how would you guys define, give like, what would be a quickie definition for confirmation bias?

• 8:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Remember the hits and not the misses?

• 8:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's the classic phrase. You note, remember the hits, forget the misses. Which is true as far as it goes, but doesn't come close to really capturing the breadth of what it is. So.

• 9:08Bob Novella?

  Not even close?

• 9:09Speaker 02

  Not even close.

• 9:11Bob Novella?

  It skims, but it skims the surface.

• 9:13Cara Santa Maria?

  But it's pithy, Steve.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  I know, it's pithy. Confirmation bias is, it's more comprehensive than that. It's more all pervasive. So it basically means that we tend to process information in such a way that it confirms what we already believe or what we want to believe. Right? So even if you think.

• 9:35Bob Novella?

  Ah, that is.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  That's something, yeah, I have to agree that this is the case, but I really want it to be this other way. You will look for information to confirm what you want to believe. It's all confirmation bias. So it goes beyond just remembering the hits and forgetting the misses. So it has to do with what you notice, right?

• 9:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah, you have to attend to it first.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  How you interpret what you notice. The energy you spend debunking things that do not fit what you want to believe. Right? And then, and your memory. So it's like every step of the way in terms of how you are processing information. So for example, if there's something on the news that is in line with your political ideology, you'll notice it, accept it, and remember it. And then your memory will also alter over time to make it like even more support. You want, right? It becomes apocryphal almost.

• 10:30Cara Santa Maria?

  There's like, and then there's like all this post hoc reasoning where you like. Justify after the fact as well.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that is, I would file all that under motivated reasoning, which goes hand in hand with confirmation.

• 10:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, confirmation, it's funny, it's one of those things where when you dig below the surface of a lot of cognitive biases, there's confirmation bias at the core.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's lurking there, like, that's why I said like the mother of all cognitive biases. But same thing with motivated reasoning, if you want to make a case for something, you can do it. And ironically, the smarter you are, the better you are at that, and also the more practiced you are in rhetoric, like skeptics, right, you're armed with knowledge of things like logical fallacies, you could leverage all of that to get to the point you want to get to. So that's again, it kind of goes hand in hand with confirmation bias. So how that works, I think a good way to think about confirmation bias, that it's working in the background, this is largely subconscious, it's working in the background

• 11:29Speaker 02

  to curate your entire perception and memory of reality in order to confirm or reinforce narratives about how the world is and how the world works that you believe or want to believe.

• 11:44Speaker 03

  So this is the reason why our brains do.

• 11:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, the reason why is because you need heuristics to survive.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  That's a deeper question.

• 11:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  And that gets to, there's a lot of motivation there, like, we all want to think about ourselves as being good people, we all want to be correct, we all have, you know, we want to reinforce our community or identity, there's all kinds of motivations, but that's kind of irrelevant to the question of this process. Whatever your motivation for wanting to believe something, confirmation bias is the mechanism by which you create the illusion that it's real.

• 12:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and that's the point I was trying to make, is that as human beings, we have to have a consistent narrative for our own sense of mental health.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, we have to feel like things in this world are predictable and consistent, and we can make sense of them and tell a story, because if we didn't, we would be experiencing constant disruptions to our sense of self.

• 12:45Cara Santa Maria?

  To our sense of continuity. That's what I meant when, when I was saying like, that's why we do it.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 12:51Cara Santa Maria?

  It's foundational to the idea of identity.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  Absolutely. All that is true. And then we, we do explain the world and understand the world and our place in it with this, these narratives. And that's why if you want to change somebody's mind, you can't just, hey, here's a fact, you know. We don't just know disconnected facts. We plug them into a narrative. That's sort of another way to look at confirmation bias. Like, once you have the narrative structure, you're plugging facts into that narrative structure. So you select facts. That's also the other thing is there's a selection bias going on. You select facts. You force them to fit within your narrative. You re, and you find reason to reject facts or reinterpret them if they don't fit.

• 13:35Speaker 02

  Right? I mean, I was just, you know, arguing with an anti-vaxxer in the comments, you know, of my blog. You know, he said something that was absolutely incorrect. I cited two published studies showing him that he's incorrect. And he found a reason to dismiss each study. Oh, that came from this university and they take pharma money. Like, who doesn't? I mean, it's just like waved away the evidence because it didn't, he couldn't plug it into his pre-existing narrative. You know, blatant confirmation bias.

• 14:01Bob Novella?

  Take a lot of effort to incorporate that to his narratives.

• 14:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 14:04Speaker 02

  Well, his narrative is wrong. There is no way to incorporate it into it. You'd have to

• 14:07Bob Novella?

  Well, yeah.

• 14:07Speaker 02

  Change his narrative.

• 14:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And sometimes it's more obvious than other times when we're using confirmation. Just like that, that's a perfect example, but we do it all the time.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  Everyone does it all the time.

• 14:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  All you could really do is be on the alert for it and to minimize it and try to compensate for it. But it's really powerful because it does, again, the, the power of confirmation bias is that it creates the illusion of evidence that you are correct. Like a powerful illusion. And so you come away thinking, this is, this is rock solid. I know this is true because I've experienced it. I've lived it. I've seen it. It's out there, whatever. But it's like, yeah, but that's all com, that could be all confirmation bias. The, it may have nothing to do with reality, but we can carve our Our narrative out of reality using confirmation bias.

• 14:59Speaker 03

  Oh, sure.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  It's really powerful. I think it's it took me a long time to like really appreciate how powerful this could be. It's not just about remembering, you know, again, remembering hits. It's this it really is. It's this narrative preserving, you know, all encompassing perception, reasoning, memory process that really does create this powerful illusion. You have to be aware of it. You may really think something is true and you have to acknowledge unless you have completely objective, verifiable evidence that other people can look at. You know what I mean? If it's just based upon in any way, you know, if there's any opportunity for confirmation bias,

• 15:41Speaker 02

  it could be complete nonsense that you have constructed entirely out of confirmation bias.

• 15:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and even verifiable evidence, which I think this is such an important point that you're getting to here is that there are things that are verifiable. There are facts in the world that that we can say beyond a shadow of the doubt are true, but those exist discreetly. Those exist decontextualized. It's our role to contextualize them into a narrative. And that is where there sort of is no such thing as no confirmation bias.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  Well, that's yes, that's correct.

• 16:19Cara Santa Maria?

  When you glue the all those things together to have a narrative, it can no longer be scrutinized fully in whole as as purely evidence based, for example.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  So I think a good point to emphasize there is that through confirmation bias, you can construct a narrative that's wrong out of facts that are true.

• 16:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  It doesn't have to be out of misinformation. Then you could say, but each one of these individual facts is true.

• 16:46Bob Novella?

  How insidious is that crap?

• 16:48Speaker 02

  It is very insidious, which is like, I would say that's a necessary but insufficient criteria for your your narrative being valid or better than other narratives. But you have to then say, but did I cherry pick these facts? Or were they curated for me? Now we live. Here's the other thing. We now live in a world where other people are doing your confirmation bias for you.

• 17:10Bob Novella?

  Social media, baby.

• 17:12Speaker 02

  Thank goodness. Yeah, that's what social media largely is. And mainstream media increasingly is becoming this where if you're inside an information ecosystem that is all confirmation bias. It's like we all have had this experience, especially with the political polarization in this country over the last 10 years of talking to somebody who's otherwise a reasonable person, you may be close with them, and they're like, what universe are you living in? Like, it really feels like they're living in a different universe.

• 17:39Bob Novella?

  Now you hate them.

• 17:41Speaker 02

  Because they are, because they are, they're living in a different information universe. That's confirmation bias too. It's sort of like pre-confirmation bias, before the information even gets to you.

• 17:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and I would argue that even if all of your facts are correct, and you could have two different people with the same sets of facts coming up with two different narratives, one might be true, one might not be true, there are also situations in which those two different people have two equally valid narratives, even though they're different, because they're made up of the same facts, and their interpretations are up for interpretation.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, so here's, again, you know, on the comments to my blog, there's one particular poster who is clearly an informed and intelligent person, but we disagree on a lot of things. And when we disagree, it's interesting, because we agree on the facts, not all, not 100% of the time, but we mostly agree on the facts, and we disagree on how they're weighted, like what the relative contribution of them are. It's like, yes, I'm agreeing with you that that happened, and he's agreeing with me that this other thing happened, but he thinks he has the 90%, and I think I have the 90%. And that's where it's like, well, how do you prove that? That's really judgment and logic, and it becomes down to confirmation bias.

• 18:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  He's constructing a different narrative out of the same data that I am, because of the judgment element that's involved.

• 19:05Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's why we have to be so careful to watch the hubris and the arrogance, especially in the skeptical community, because so often... I encounter individuals who will describe a complex narrative as being, you know, beyond reproach or scientifically accurate, when it's not something that is even necessarily like, subject to scientific scrutiny. Like, the facts may be appropriate, but now, all of a sudden, we're inserting our own moral judgments, our own ideological components that are not evidence-based.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:40Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's okay, too. We just have to recognize that that is what's happening.

• 19:44Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:45Cara Santa Maria?

  And I think we don't do a great job of that. And, you know, Steve, I'd be curious, you know, one of the things as a psychologist that I do with my patients that I think is a good, I don't want to call it a buffer, but good practice for fighting against, mitigating, protecting, preventing?

• 20:03Speaker 02

  Demolishing.

• 20:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, not demolishing. That's the thing. Like, I don't want to demolish confirmation bias, because it exists. Instead of saying, "I'm gonna cut this out," which I think is futile, what we should be saying is, "I want to recognize it."

• 20:16Speaker 02

  You should be aware of it.

• 20:17Cara Santa Maria?

  But I think one of the best ways to, to recognize it, to be aware with it, and to really grapple with it, is to practice the discomfort that comes from uncertainty and from ambivalence.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Sit in the unknown. Sit in those times when you feel two opposing feelings about the same thing. And don't force yourself, which many people do when they have cognitive dissonance, to choose.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Allow yourself to say, "These things can be true at the same time," or, "It's okay that I'm not, you know, fully investing in one feeling over the other." And the more that you can do that, I think the less reactive you are when you come across opposing viewpoints, and the more you can put together a narrative of lots of different information

• 21:05Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:06Cara Santa Maria?

  without needing to become polarized ideologically in how you do it.

• 21:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's tough.

• 21:13Cara Santa Maria?

  It's really hard to do. It takes a lot of practice.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  Like, one of the conversations we were having online was, "Who's to blame for the current backlash against vaccines and mainstream medicine?" Like, I was blaming RFK Jr. as being now a major architect of what's going on, as a major driver, and other people arguing that, "No, it was, it was the mismanagement of COVID." And, again, we got to this point where it's like, "Yeah, this is all, these are all the facts." But, you know, it's, how does that add up to, like, what was the effect of all of those things? It's kind of, we get this into this all the time, where it's like, yeah, there is scientific fraud. And yeah, pharmaceutical companies put their thumb on the scale of research. Like, these are proven facts. But like, we don't think that adds up to a big

• 22:00Speaker 02

  pharma conspiracy. But other people do. You know, it's like, they just have a different narrative than we have. We have a more of a scientific skeptical narrative. They have an alternative medicine conspiracy laden narrative. And they could be based upon the same set of facts, you know?

• 22:17Cara Santa Maria?

  But you're right, with a lot of differences in how we weight the evidence.

• 22:20Speaker 02

  Exactly. How you weight the evidence. And yeah. They think it's like dominant, and they say, yeah, it's not dominant, but it's there. But we can overcome it. It's not a deal killer.

• 22:31Cara Santa Maria?

  And we also don't see it as unique to medicine.

• 22:34Speaker 02

  Right.

• 22:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, we know that when you are in a system that is a capitalist system like we are in, there will always be an incentive to cheat the system to make more money.

• 22:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:47Cara Santa Maria?

  So we have to root that out in every field. And there are places where it is more dire when that happens.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  But some people say, yeah, I don't trust any corporation. That's like, that's their narrative, anti corporate. Because they, or you got to just talking with somebody today, the government lies. Okay. But does that mean they lie 100% of the time?

• 23:04Bob Novella?

  Well, it depends what part of the government you're talking about.

• 23:07Cara Santa Maria?

  And also, does it-

• 23:08Speaker 03

  That's an enormous net.

• 23:09Speaker 02

  That's a, that's a, I said, that's a pretty simplistic algorithm you have there.

• 23:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. And you can say, I don't trust politicians. And you can also say, I will still engage civically.

• 23:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 23:20Cara Santa Maria?

  You know, it doesn't have to be, I don't trust politicians, therefore, there is no point to vote.

• 23:25Speaker 03

  Right. Therefore, I'm taking my marbles and going home.

• 23:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 23:27Speaker 02

  But also, all right, one final word, then we really do have to move on. But this is so deep, because we've had the whole show talking about it. Think about racism. Or sexism, or whatever. And because I've seen this in action, you know, talking to somebody who, you know, I by my judgment, they're a racist, let's say. And like they they notice every time something happens that fits their racist narrative and they remember it and they amplify it. And it's like, okay, I'm not saying that that guy who got arrested wasn't black, you know, but I just don't think that is indicative of a racial trait or whatever. You know what I mean? They're just weaving it into their pre-existing narrative about racism.

• 24:05Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's also a perfect example of remembering the hits and not the misses.

• 24:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Because that's it's, you know, cherry picking on steroids for sure.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. So every day you need to think about confirmation bias. It is so pervasive. Just really, really think about it and how you process and remember and think about information.

• 24:24Bob Novella?

  And be very happy that science somehow finds a way to transcend confirmation bias and actually make progress.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  That's what all of science is about, man. It's controlling the biases like that.

• 24:34Bob Novella?

  Exactly.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  That's the whole idea. All right, Jay. NASA is once again iterating their plans for going to the moon.

• 24:43Jay Novella?

  Yeah, this typically frustrates me, but this one doesn't. That's because what I'm about to tell you is going to make several people happy that are hosting this podcast right now.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  I hope it's me. I hope it's me.

• 24:55Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I couldn't believe it when I read this. And I'll just get to it. So NASA wants a moon base and a nuclear spaceship. And this is real, you know, the only suspect part of it.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  And they want it now.

• 25:13Jay Novella?

  I was just gonna say, the only suspect part of it, of course, is the timeline because they, you know, they clearly don't fully meet their timelines. But NASA just announced, you know, ma- major change to its current space plans. Instead of thinking of the moon as, you know, a place where the astronauts would kind of go and leave and not have it be too substantial, the agency now wants, hold your breath, to start building a lasting presence on the lunar surface.

• 25:44Jay Novella?

  All the applause are amazing. So

• 25:47Bob Novella?

  They were kinda leaning in that direction, right?

• 25:50Jay Novella?

  Not, not as strongly as, as I previously thought, Bob. I guess, you know, this, this information coming out showed me that it wasn't, you know, as permanent or as aggressive as I originally thought it was. So what they're doing is they're shifting away from their earlier focus on the gateway. You know, that, that was the planned station that would orbit the moon.

• 26:10Bob Novella?

  Right. And you go up and down to the surface, which, which, uh, was, sounded cool.

• 26:14Jay Novella?

  Yeah, that sounded very cool. And when, when that came out, I was psyched about it, but I'm more psyched about this. So what they want to do is they just want to put more time and attention on building a moon base and they want to build it in stages. Now NASA is also saying, I'm going to get to both of these topics. They're also saying that they want to send a spacecraft called Space Reactor One Freedom. They want to send it to Mars in 2028, using a nuke.

• 26:37Bob Novella?

  2028? With a person, with people?

• 26:40Jay Novella?

  They didn't say. Probably not.

• 26:42Speaker 02

  All right. This is the reason for that. You know what the reason, because, because in reading up on this, a lot of times they said by the end of Trump's term. So that is the reason for the timing.

• 26:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course. He also just signed, he also just got, got, uh,

• 26:58Bob Novella?

  It's a lot political, yeah.

• 26:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Sorry. Did you guys just see it happen right while we were signing on? That he's changing precedent and get, putting his signature on the money?

• 27:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I saw that.

• 27:08Speaker 03

  What? Not the, not the Secretary of the Treasury?

• 27:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, maybe both. I don't know. So like, I know that that sounds like a wildly different thing, but it's not, it's not any different than, than what you're talking about, Jay. It's hubris. It's, I did that.

• 27:23Jay Novella?

  Yep, I know.

• 27:24Speaker 02

  And if NASA's leveraging that to get commitments, even though it will not be done by the end of his term, that's fine. But a lot of this announcement, yeah, we're gonna do all this cool stuff while Trump is still in office. That's what they're explicitly stating.

• 27:39Jay Novella?

  Well, so to finish what I was saying, so this space reactor, One Freedom, right? That vessel is going to be a nuke electric propulsion. It's a new way of powering and moving a spacecraft. I think it's really cool, you know, and it's not speculation. This is what they're saying, and this is NASA. So they said it directly in a public announcement on March 24th, man. So this is, this is the real deal. So the moon side of the plan, it's pretty straightforward. NASA says it wants to build a more lasting presence on the lunar surface. They want to do it in stages. They want to begin it with robotic missions and then expanding toward a longer term, human-based operation there.

• 28:20Bob Novella?

  So Jay, I assume that there's been no mention of lava tubes on the moon.

• 28:25Jay Novella?

  I didn't see anything, Bob, but you know, that's in their, that's in their, um, that's in their potential plans. I can't confirm or deny that they've outruled that. I mean, it just sounds like they've changed direction and they don't seem to have it all completely sussed out yet, but this is-

• 28:40Bob Novella?

  Well, I hope they take that seriously because, man, that's the way to go, in my opinion.

• 28:44Speaker 03

  I thought that was the plausible solution.

• 28:46Bob Novella?

  It solves so many problems, so many problems.

• 28:48Jay Novella?

  But it has problems of its own, you know?

• 28:50Speaker 02

  More importantly, though, Jay, is it going to be called Moon Base Alpha?

• 28:54Jay Novella?

  I, you know, Steve, they're not ever gonna do it. They had so many chances, it's just not gonna happen. According to Reuters, they reported that this mission would cost 20 billion, and I don't believe it for a second because it's gonna cost a lot more than 20 billion. I don't know who they're kidding.

• 29:10Bob Novella?

  At least 25.

• 29:11Speaker 03

  That's compromised.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  I think that was, they're just taking the budget from the, the Gateway and saying, we're gonna use that money to make a base on the moon.

• 29:18Jay Novella?

  Sure. Yeah, and I wouldn't be surprised if 20 billion was exactly what they specked out Gateway to be because they're, they're just clearly moving away from Gateway and then they're, they're focusing more on, directly on the surface of the moon, which, you know, look, if it's, Gateway seemed to have a purpose, right? It was gonna be literal Gateway to the moon, so you'd always lay over there and then take another ship down to the surface, but I think they're just gonna go right down to the surface now. And you know, that might be because technology has advanced faster than they thought, who knows? I'll be on the lookout for that. They, they haven't released every detail, of course, but even the Gateway webpages, you know, they're, they're being updated to reflect this new Artemis architecture. So it's, uh, it's, looks like this is it. This is going to be it.

• 30:03Jay Novella?

  The nuke spacecraft is, uh, is the part that makes, I think, all of us that love space travel, we get a little verklempt here because it's, it sounds almost too good to be true. Like the moon mission, of course, to me, that is my favorite part of this, but you know, to have, to have this new, new craft freedom, uh, be, you know, be powered by, uh, nuclear fission, man, the reactor, you know, this, it's going to be the propulsion that they're going to use.

• 30:31Bob Novella?

  Yeah, it's just so far superior in so many important ways to chemical rockets that, yeah.

• 30:36Jay Novella?

  And it's not just that, but they're saying that they're gonna, they're gonna use a reactor on the moon because, you know, if there's two weeks of no sunlight where they put them, for example, you know, this is the, a sure, a surefire way that they will get constant power, you know, the solar panels can only collect so much if they're on a ship, you know, if you're getting farther away from the earth, you know, even less sunlight gets there and it is, it is a significant difference in how much solar energy you can turn into electricity when you start going out to Mars. So I just think this is, uh, you know, one hell of a change. I really hope someday we can find out exactly why they decided to do this.

• 31:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was gonna say, I get the feeling that we don't really know what the hell's going on. You know what I mean? And we would have to talk to somebody who actually knows what's going on, but they're, they probably, the people who really know probably wouldn't be at liberty to give us the strength.

• 31:34Jay Novella?

  Well, I don't know, Steve, you know, last, the, the few times that we've pulled people from NASA, they did give us information.

• 31:41Speaker 02

  No, I agree. I agree. So I, I think we should do that. No, we're trying to do that. We're trying to get people who are a little bit more on the inside to tell us what's really going on here. Um, but, uh, I don't, even then, I don't know if we're going to get the actual, you know, in the room where it happens, kind of. Story, you know what I mean?

• 32:00Jay Novella?

  But you know.

• 32:00Speaker 03

  Okay, because some of this is deemed to be classified, I suppose.

• 32:04Jay Novella?

  Yeah, well, they've got a, they don't say anything until they've gotten things progressed to a certain point. I think once they make an announcement like this, you know, it's, it's what they're doing. It's a big deal too, you know, to reshape the Artemis missions at this stage in the game. It's a big deal, you know, it's like this, this thing has been in the works for a very long time. Uh, they're saying they, they want a, um, a reactor on the lunar surface by 2030. They're, they're making a lot of.

• 32:34Bob Novella?

  They could, they could do that. They could do that because they already have, they already have, you know, prototypes and plans and stuff for these, for these powers, these nuclear power sources. That's been, been worked on for many years at this point. So I'm not, I'm not worried about making that happen, but the, the nuclear rocket, I'm probably going to be talking about this next week in much more detail.

• 32:54Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 32:54Bob Novella?

  Um, but I'm going to see, I don't know where we are with this type of nuclear electric propulsion, but I'll, I'll, I'll be finding out very soon.

• 33:02Jay Novella?

  And one last thing, so NASA's Office of Inspector General, uh, they said this month that, that both human landing system providers like SpaceX and Blue Origin, they have faced delays, there's technical difficulties, they have integration challenges that could affect the cost and the timelines. And that office also said that NASA still does not have a way to rescue stranded Artemis crew. If there was a catastrophic emergency, right? They're on the moon, something horrible goes on and how do we get those people back to earth? So of course we have to take everything that NASA is proposing here with a grain of moon regolith, okay? But I'm excited guys, because you know, I, I don't know, I, I, I don't know why for people in my generation that are science nerds,

• 33:48Jay Novella?

  that we have such a fixation for a moon base, it probably was based on TV shows, right? You know?

• 33:55Speaker 03

  I. Well, I think we wished maybe something came of that from the Apollo.

• 33:58Jay Novella?

  I think, yeah, because when, when the, when the Apollo mission ended, we were thinking, oh, you know, what's next? A base on the moon. And then Space 1999 came out, I was like, yeah, by the, by the eighties, nineties, we're going to have a base on the moon. And here we are, you know, 50 years later, 60 years later, none.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  And so

• 34:16Jay Novella?

  But we're closer than we ever were, Steve.

• 34:19Speaker 02

  Well, I'd like to think so, and it's better than them saying we're canceling everything. But I just, you know, I think the probability of what they say they're going to do actually happening is pretty low. I think we're probably going to have more changes in plan ahead. And, you know, again, unfortunately, like every time the administration changes, it's like, you know, everything's up in the air again. It's hard to sustain these big, long projects over multiple administrations without there being major changes. And I think this all, all these timelines we're hearing are BS. That's all political. So we'll see. I do, I do think we're getting to the point now where so much has changed and it's such influx. We really need to talk to somebody who actually knows what they're talking about here.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  Because the news reports we're getting is just press releases at this point.

• 35:06Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I don't know how they built the pyramids in the Great Wall of China over so much time. How do they sustain that effort?

• 35:15Cara Santa Maria?

  They're a forward-thinking people, unlike us.

• 35:18Jay Novella?

  That'd be a good, good to have like fake news from history, like funding for the Great Wall of China cut.

• 35:26Bob Novella?

  The onion.

• 35:28Jay Novella?

  Kara, do you know that the Great Wall of China is not a kind of like a straight line that goes from point A to point B?

• 35:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh yeah. Haven't you seen like imagery? If, if anybody has a, what's a good way to put this? A, an Apple TV? Do you, you guys probably don't use Apple TV at home, do you?

• 35:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I had Apple TV.

• 35:44Cara Santa Maria?

  That's, that's my streamer or, you know, whatever the service that I use connected to my, my TV. And one of the screensavers is a beautiful like aerial image of the Great Wall and it's very zigzaggy.

• 35:57Jay Novella?

  Yeah, if you know it's multiple walls, it's many, many different walls.

• 36:01Cara Santa Maria?

  And it's disconnected too.

• 36:01Jay Novella?

  It's a bunch of different wall segments is what it is.

• 36:03Cara Santa Maria?

  And even the portions that are segmented are very zigzaggy.

• 36:06Jay Novella?

  If you grew up thinking like the Great Wall of China is this one meandering wall that goes from roughly point A to point B, do yourself a favor, you will be shocked at how wacky this, this web of walls are. And, and if you read about the history of it and why it ended up that way and everything, it's even more wacky, but it's a, it's a fun story.

• 36:25Speaker 02

  It really is the great walls of China.

• 36:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 36:29Bob Novella?

  For sure.

• 36:30Jay Novella?

  All right, Kara, tell us about the limits of cloning.

• 36:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Ooh, this is a, this is such an interesting story. And I'm like, ooh, how deep do I go? Okay.

• 36:39Speaker 03

  Start with Dolly.

• 36:40Cara Santa Maria?

  You guys, we will be talking about Dolly. Did you, do you guys remember the film Multiplicity?

• 36:45Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 36:46Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 36:47Bob Novella?

  Yeah, Michael.

• 36:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, 1996, Michael Keaton, Andy McDowell. Do you remember what the, the concept of that movie was? What was the conceit? You don't?

• 36:55Bob Novella?

  He made clones of himself. He made duplicates of himself.

• 36:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 36:59Bob Novella?

  And were they stupider? Each one was stupider than the original?

• 37:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes. So, so, and they

• 37:03Bob Novella?

  Were you copy of a copy?

• 37:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Bladed in the movie that it was a copy of a copy. And, and I don't know if we have listeners today who, who don't use copy machines.

• 37:12Speaker 03

  Really? No. Don't say that.

• 37:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Or like if you've ever looked at a fax, right? And the resolution goes way down. I know, I'm sorry. I'm aging myself. But if you take a copy and you make a copy of that copy, and then you make a copy of that copy. So I'm not saying copy the original over and over, because then you'll have a bunch of copies that look pretty similar if you use the same machine. But if you make a copy of a copy of a copy, the quality starts to diminish over time. And this has long been thought as the, as, as a kind of natural limit to cloning itself. And it's based on something called Muller's Ratchet Theory, which is a model that predicts that when reproduction occurs asexually, especially in mammals,

• 38:00Cara Santa Maria?

  there are mutations, deleterious mutations, that start to accumulate over time. And this is an inevitable fact. And ultimately, the mutations will become so burdensome that the, the lineage won't be able to persist. And that kind of cell lineage, or not cell lineage, that animal, which has been undergoing asexual reproduction, will, will go extinct. So some researchers in Japan, this is so fascinating, back not long after Dolly, the sheep. Do you guys remember when Dolly happened?

• 38:35Speaker 02

  Was that?

• 38:35Speaker 03

  1999?

• 38:37Cara Santa Maria?

  I think it was before that.

• 38:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I thought it was earlier than that.

• 38:38Speaker 03

  96?

• 38:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, 1996, Scottish researchers, after 276 attempts, finally were able to produce Dolly. And Dolly is a lamb that was produced from the utter cell of a six-year-old sheep. Since then, do you guys know?

• 38:54Speaker 03

  That was big news.

• 38:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Huge news.

• 38:56Speaker 03

  Boy, that was big.

• 38:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Since then, do you guys know what other animals, I should say mammals, have been cloned? Because there have been a lot of non-mammals that have been cloned.

• 39:05Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 39:05Speaker 03

  Oh, like dogs and pigs and?

• 39:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Dogs, yep. Cat, deer, rabbits.

• 39:10Speaker 03

  A bunch, man. I lost track after a while.

• 39:12Cara Santa Maria?

  I think even a rhesus monkey. But a rhesus monkey didn't use somatic nuclear transfer. They used embryo splitting. But these researchers decided to work on mice. And it wasn't long after Dolly. Once kind of the code was cracked, they said, okay, we're going to start doing our own cloning experiments here in Japan. And one of the experiments we're going to do is we're going to make a copy of a copy of a copy and see how long we can do that for.

• 39:42Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 39:43Cara Santa Maria?

  I know. I'm obsessed with this study.

• 39:45Speaker 03

  Interesting, yeah. That's not unethical, is it?

• 39:48Cara Santa Maria?

  They're mice. We use cloned mice all the time in research, all the time. Actually, this is an important question to ask. What happens when you make a clone of a clone? And how long can you keep going? And how, you know, what does that do to the organisms themselves and to their genetic lineage? So just to remind everybody, does everybody kind of fully understand what a clone is? And that cloning, insofar as we do it in laboratory research, is a mechanism we use in some ways to reproduce something that happens in nature all the time. What organisms do we know that reproduce in a similar manner to how we clone animals?

• 40:29Speaker 03

  Oh, interesting.

• 40:31Speaker 02

  Well, anything that reproduces asexually, right?

• 40:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly, bacteria. But sometimes what, and these researchers will refer to, which I don't really like, as lower organisms, which kind of bums me out.

• 40:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Sometimes with these organisms that reproduce asexually. Or even organisms that don't reproduce asexually in nature, but have been induced to reproduce asexually in the lab. Non mammalian animals and especially like insects and worms and research animals of that nature. They are able to push that boundary really far. But there's been a question about how many times you can make a copy of a copy, a clone of a clone in a mammal. And what actually happens to the genetic material in that organism? So how do we clone mammals artificially? There's three different kinds.

• 41:24Cara Santa Maria?

  There's gene cloning, reproductive cloning and therapeutic cloning. Here, what we're talking about is actually reproductive cloning. So the kind of main way that it's generally done is through something called a somatic cell nuclear transfer. It's the most common technique. It's what they did for Dolly and it's what these researchers did. And that's where they actually take an egg. They take the nucleus, the genetic material out of the egg. They enucleate it and they transfer that nucleus into a donor somatic cell. So that could be like a skin cell or a blood cell or a cumulus cell. That nucleus from that donor cell is inserted into an empty egg. And then that egg is stimulated.

• 42:08Cara Santa Maria?

  It's kind of like induced to grow as if it's been fertilized and eventually differentiate and develop and hopefully be born and then continue to develop. So we're taking nuclear material out of a somatic cell. Somatic meaning not germ line, right? Meaning from somewhere in the body that's not the reproductive organs. And then it's put into basically an empty egg. And then that through a series of different factors. And when I say factors, I mean like chemicals. It's induced to to continue to develop and grow. And there are other types of of things like embryo splitting and freeze dried cell techniques. But in this case, we're talking about somatic cell nuclear transfer.

• 42:52Bob Novella?

  And it's growing in a womb.

• 42:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Usually, yeah, yeah.

• 42:55Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 42:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 42:57Bob Novella?

  What else is it gonna grow in?

• 42:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, I don't know if we have artificial wombs that work for an, for certain animals yet.

• 43:05Bob Novella?

  I don't think so.

• 43:06Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't think so either. I think it's just easier to do it in a, you know, living mouse, because a lot of those factors are actually naturally produced then. And so what they did is they made a copy of a copy and they did it over and over and over. And does anybody want to guess at what point they couldn't do it anymore? How many generations?

• 43:27Bob Novella?

  Forty-five.

• 43:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Close.

• 43:29Bob Novella?

  Forty-six.

• 43:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Fifty-eight.

• 43:32Bob Novella?

  Fifty-eight.

• 43:32Cara Santa Maria?

  They made it to fifty-eight generations. Twenty years of experimentation.

• 43:37Bob Novella?

  Wow.

• 43:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Ultimately, they produced, I think, over twelve hundred. I guess we could call them offspring.

• 43:45Bob Novella?

  What was the fifty-seventh like?

• 43:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, that's, the fifty-seventh was interesting because that's where things really went to hell. So they did start to notice, um, early on that the clones of the clones seemed pretty normal, both behaviorally, from a lifespan perspective. They really didn't see a lot of concerns. But then as they kept going, there was sort of an inflection point where they saw the birth rate decline. And that was at the twenty-seventh generation. They kept pushing and they kept pushing and sort of around fifty-seven, things were getting real bad, right? The birth rate was like in the toilet. They weren't sure if they were going to be able to produce anymore.

• 44:32Cara Santa Maria?

  And they just couldn't sustain beyond fifty-eight generations. They all died and they weren't able to keep cloning. They did notice some interesting, uh, kind of takeaways because of course, they didn't just...

• 44:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Clone these animals for 20 years and write down who lived and who died and write up their results and publish. These are genomic researchers and they wanted to understand what's going on, what's going on genetically with these organisms. Why is this happening? They found that there was a massive accumulation of mutations, these DNA abnormalities. They still don't fully understand the mechanisms, but they do know that in order to even do this experiment, they actually had to promote something called nuclear reprogramming using an epigenetic modification reagent.

• 45:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Nuclear reprogramming, have you guys ever heard of that process, nuclear reprogramming?

• 45:36Bob Novella?

  No. In this context.

• 45:38Cara Santa Maria?

  It's something we do all the time. So basically, we have both our epigenome and we have our genome. Right? And do you know the difference between the two?

• 45:49Bob Novella?

  The genome codes are proteins, right?

• 45:52Cara Santa Maria?

  And genome is fundamental, right? It's fundamental inheritance that is kind of not always as readily subject to environmental cues. Whereas the epigenome is full of what are sometimes referred to as tags, where genetic information can go from generation to generation, but genes can be turned on and off based on these environmental cues. And we didn't even used to think the epigenome existed. Like, we didn't know that epigenetics was real. It felt very Lamarckian. It felt like that had been debunked.

• 46:33Cara Santa Maria?

  But we now know that there is both genomic lineage and an epigenomic lineage, but...

• 46:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Epigenes typically are reprogrammed over and over. And that's because, you know, eggs and sperm, they develop from cells that have specific gene expression profiles. Like their genetic information is is present within this embryo and it needs to be able to grow in a healthy way early on with the coding that's there. And so the body actually physically wipes the epigenetic tags during certain key times in development. Sometimes it's even referred to as like a genetic blank slate. But this doesn't occur 100% of the time.

• 47:21Cara Santa Maria?

  We do reprogram most epigenetic tags so that a fertilized cell can develop into any type of body cell. Because if it was carrying all those epigenetic tags, it wouldn't be pluripotent, right? It wouldn't be like, I want to be skin, or I want to be hair, or I want to be... It would be like, I'm going to be all the things that these tags are telling me to be. But about 1% from what I've read of genes escape epigenetic reprogramming through a process called imprinting. And so the researchers of this study, they were able to sort of induce further reprogramming using an epigenetic modification reagent. And that promotion of nuclear reprogramming helped them increase the generations of mice that they could clone.

• 48:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Because back in the day, early studies showed that like serial cloning just wasn't possible. Like after a few generations, the copies of the copies were fully multiplicity, right? Like shaving their tongues, like in the movie. But so, so through this reprogramming, they've been able to really extend that and they're continuing to push the limits. Now, we have to remember that when they started this experiment 20 years ago, they didn't have the tools they have now. And so anytime you do a longitudinal experiment like this, there's going to be improvements in the actual methodology over time. Ooh, I should say methods. We got a weird email about that, but I'm not going to go off on that tangent right now. To the emailer, I hear you. The methods, not the methodology.

• 48:51Cara Santa Maria?

  And so, so what, what these individuals did is they, they, you know, reprogrammed so that they could clone and then reclone and then reclone and then reclone. And then they did something interesting as everything started to break down. And that's that they took that final generation of recloned mice and they actually mated them with males. So they, they brought them back into a sexual reproduction framework. And they were able to fertilize the O O sites within these cloned mice. And yes, most of the embryos degenerated, but a few embryos were normalized, as they say, by the myotic process and fertilization and they developed full term. So the researchers, you know, are taking from this that animals and well,

• 49:36Cara Santa Maria?

  specifically mammals, rely on sexual reproduction. We need that variance that comes about by sexual reproduction and by the myotic process. Right? And now we know, I mean, I don't think we can say beyond a shadow of a doubt, 58 generations is the cutoff, 1,200 mice. That's the only thing you can do. But they did show that as of the advancements that we have right now, the technology that we're working with, they couldn't push beyond 58. And, you know, they are sort of reinforcing, I guess you could say, or reiterating the theory, Muller's ratchet theory,

• 50:16Cara Santa Maria?

  that asexual lineages, they just cannot persist after a certain point. And narrowing in on what that certain point is, I guess we'll be up to other labs to see if they can beat their record or, or if they can show that it's different in different species, for example. Oh, and just another interesting number. So they did 30,000, more than 30,000 nuclear transfer attempts across those 58 generations. And as far as they know, this was the first empirical demonstration of what, what is predicted by Muller's ratchet, this concept of mutational meltdown.

• 50:51Speaker 02

  As an aside, I usually always hate how it's such a movie trope that when you clone somebody, first of all, an adult pops out. And they have all the memories of the God, I know, right?

• 51:04Bob Novella?

  That's right.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  Give me a break.

• 51:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah, that's, that's ridiculous. No, no, no, no, no. And luckily, that's not the case because I gotta tell you guys and bear with me here for a second. But little killer, he's, he's gonna be 16 in May. We're gonna throw him a sweet 16, maybe get him a Barbie dream car. I'm not sure. But I love this little dude. And when I got his DNA test, they told me that he is like 40% mixed beyond recognition. They couldn't even pin down how incredibly mutt-ish. Yeah, this dog is, which is a great thing. And he's been so healthy. He's, he's a, he's a smart, sweet companion who has just, he's the best dog you could ask for.

• 51:47Cara Santa Maria?

  And I gotta tell you, when I hear about people cloning their dogs, I used to think it was weird. And now I'm like, well.

• 51:53Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 51:54Cara Santa Maria?

  If they met killer, you know, I have a friend who cloned their dog, which is like amazing and bananas. But they had a purebred boxer and I was like, well, couldn't you just get another?

• 52:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, I'm not saying it's the exact same, but it was pretty close, right? But there is no other killer. The only way to get another killer is to clone him.

• 52:13Speaker 02

  And like every time one of my dogs has died, it's like, of course, it's very sad and you would love to get that dog back. But then I get the next dog and I fall in love with them and they're even better. The way I see it, every dog you own is a unique experience and you shouldn't deprive yourself of that because you're trying to recapture the last one.

• 52:30Cara Santa Maria?

  I, I agree from a psychological perspective.

• 52:32Bob Novella?

  Put on a dog or a cat.

• 52:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 52:34Bob Novella?

  A lot of pressure.

• 52:34Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't want, I don't want the next dog to be killer, but it would be nice if it was killer's brother, you know? And, and that's really what cloning affords you, a genetically identical creature that is now going to have their own epigenetic experiences and, and changes. And, and so, I don't know, I won't do it. I think it's still pretty expensive.

• 52:56Speaker 02

  It is. Was it 20,000 last time I heard? Is it less than that?

• 53:00Cara Santa Maria?

  I mean, people pay close to that for like designer breeds.

• 53:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you can get a dog for a hundred bucks.

• 53:07Speaker 03

  Well, dog breeding is its own horror show.

• 53:10Speaker 02

  I'm not gonna diminish anything that you're saying, Kara, but like, there's, there's a lot of dogs that need rescue out there.

• 53:16Cara Santa Maria?

  No, I know. And Killer was a rescue.

• 53:17Speaker 03

  Yes, rescue your dogs, please.

• 53:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, Killer was a rescue, and I'll get another rescue. Probably, there'll be some time in between, though. I don't think I could, I could dive right into that right away.

• 53:26Speaker 02

  We said that too, and then when you see a puppy, a puppy find, you're like, I want that dog.

• 53:32Bob Novella?

  I've lasted a long time.

• 53:34Cara Santa Maria?

  That's true.

• 53:35Bob Novella?

  But I do have a cat, but.

• 53:38Speaker 02

  All right, well, Bob, in the meantime, tell us about these giant insects.

• 53:43Bob Novella?

  All right, guys, this was a fun, fun item to research. So new research has produced interesting evidence that those huge prehistoric insects, millions of years ago, you guys heard about those? They, they may have gotten so big for reasons that are, you know, much more complicated than just the fact that there was a ridiculous amount of oxygen in the atmosphere at that time. So this is from an international team of researchers, including ASU School of Life Science Professor John Harrison. The name of the paper is "Oxygen Supply Through the Tracheolar Muscle System Does Not Contain Insect Gigantism." The last two words are the fun words in that damn title. But let me give you the setting, though. So we have 300 million years ago, the continents have coalesced into the Pangaea, right?

• 54:28Bob Novella?

  You've heard of that one? So this is the end of the Paleozoic era, and, which is roughly the Carboniferous period, and then into the Permian period. The periods after the Permian were what? We all heard these. Everyone has Triassic.

• 54:42Speaker 02

  Jurassic and.

• 54:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Cretaceous.

• 54:44Speaker 03

  Oh, Cretaceous.

• 54:45Bob Novella?

  Yeah, so the, so the, yeah, the two here are just Triassic and Jurassic. But yeah, we're not even worried about those. The ones before that, Carboniferous and Permian, that's what we're talking about, okay? 300 million years ago, dinosaurs were as far off in the future as they are in our past right now. You follow that? So, obviously, there are no birds or bats, and you looked, if you looked up in the sky, if you're gonna see anything flying around, it's gonna be insects. That's all. That's the only thing that was flying at that point.

• 55:12Speaker 03

  And a big moon.

• 55:12Bob Novella?

  Yeah. I wonder how big the moon was back then. Oof.

• 55:15Speaker 03

  Oh, sorry.

• 55:15Bob Novella?

  Some nasty tides. Yeah. So some of those insects were absolute whoppers. Like, they had a giant mayfly-like species. You guys know mayflies, right? You've seen them. They're kind of like mosquito-sized, two to 30 millimeters perhaps. Back then, they were 17 inches or 45 centimeter wingspan. Big boys, but that's really nothing compared to the iconic insect of that period. And that's the dragonfly-like flies that were called griffon flies. They were not dragonflies. They were griffon flies. Largest insect ever. Today, if you look at an equivalent dragonfly, for example, they're roughly palm-sized, right? Roughly palm-sized, you'd say?

• 55:58Bob Novella?

  The griffon fly, the body, just the body, was 43 centimeters or 17 inches. 17-inch-long skinny body, right? The wingspan, 75 centimeters, two and a half feet. Two and a half feet.

• 56:12Speaker 03

  Wow, thanks.

• 56:12Bob Novella?

  This was a big boy. Who remembers the movie Caveman with the Ringo Starr?

• 56:17Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh, Bob!

• 56:18Bob Novella?

  There was an iconic scene where a huge dragonfly-like insect lands on his face. One of the character's faces. Oh, my God. That's exactly what it was. So these are called, these are Megani Soptera, which is an extinct order. So that order is gone. It's no longer with us. The dragonfly, for example, is, the order is Odonata. So different order, but otherwise, a type of insect, informally known as griffon flies. And often, probably most often, incorrectly identified as giant dragonflies, because they were not dragonflies. Okay, these guys, I mean, that big. I've heard varying things about what they could eat, but

• 57:01Bob Novella?

  some sites are saying that they could have feasted on small vertebrates, amphibians, mammals. Why do you think they were so big? What do you guys think?

• 57:09Speaker 03

  Well, so something beyond the oxygen.

• 57:11Speaker 02

  Well, that's the answer that I've always read, and that's the conventional wisdom. The oxygen tension, the atmosphere was higher. At the time.

• 57:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Is that why or how, though?

• 57:21Speaker 02

  Well, that's how. Yeah, but why or how? Well, the thing is, they get it, that allowed insects to get that big, and some of them did, not all of them, but some, you know, that means.

• 57:29Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 57:30Speaker 02

  The upper limit of size was increased, and, you know, you can see insects of every size and shape, so.

• 57:35Bob Novella?

  Well, well.

• 57:36Speaker 02

  That's because oxygen passively diffuses, they don't have lungs, right?

• 57:40Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 57:40Speaker 02

  And so you need a gradient, and that's as big as the gradient would allow. That's, that's the.

• 57:45Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 57:46Speaker 02

  Conventional wisdom, until now, apparently.

• 57:49Bob Novella?

  Yeah, so it started really in the eighties, because that's when they developed this new technique to reconstruct the constituents of ancient atmospheres. And that's when they realized that, oh, wow, 300 million years ago, roughly, there was a lot of atmospheric oxygen out there, about 45%, instead of what is it now, like, low 20, 20%? I mean, so that's a huge, you know, doubling, more than doubling the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere. And so, and there were certainly more fires back then, I, you know, they're pretty sure about that. And then in the, in 1995, there was a study released in Nature, and they were, they were saying in that study that, that this high oxygen content of the atmosphere was coincided with these ultra-large insects.

• 58:31Bob Novella?

  So they proposed, at that time, in the mid 90s, that the large insects needed all this extra atmospheric oxygen. So that's kind of where that, that, that common wisdom of like, they needed the oxygen to be that big. That's how, that's when it kind of got baked in, and most, and people who have heard about it, that's exactly what they heard. And it made a lot of intuitive sense, and Steve kind of alluded to it. Insects do not breathe like we breathe. They, they do not have lungs. They have a, they have a trachea, and, which is basically these branching air tubes, and those trachea eventually will branch into smaller and smaller things called tracheoles, and these are the super, the finest tubes, kind of like capillaries, in a sense.

• 59:16Speaker 02

  Tracheoles are tracheoles.

• 59:18Bob Novella?

  Tracheoles, tracheoles. These tracheoles are the finest tubes, only like five to maybe, I think, a couple hundred nanometers, really, really small, and they actually penetrate the flight muscle cells. These are the only tracheoles that actually will go into the cells. And I think they're basically, they needed to get really close to mitochondria. And then, as Steve said, the oxygen would diffuse across, you know, the carbon dioxide would diffuse away, and the oxygen would diffuse directly into the muscle cells and mitochondria. So it was easy to believe, for scientists to believe, that this diffusion process would be much more efficient and better if it had, if there was more oxygen in the atmosphere, especially for these large insects.

• 1:00:03Bob Novella?

  So that's why it was, it was kind of intuitive. It made some sort of intuitive sense that the large insect bodies needed a lot of extra oxygen. So that's kind of where we've been since essentially 1995. So then, this latest research, Edward Snelling of the University of Pretoria, he used a high-power electron microscope, and he measured the space taken up by tracheoles in muscle tissue for modern insects. And he looked, he and his team looked at 44 insect species across 10 insect orders. So they looked at thousands of these micrographs, I think they called them. And then they took that information, and they kind of extended that into, they extended that to the griffon flies,

• 1:00:47Bob Novella?

  right, to these big, huge dragonfly-like insects. They kind of extrapolated in what would they, what would they be like. So their findings were that the space that's taken up by these oxygen-delivering tracheoles, right? Because imagine you've got these little, super tiny tubes that are going into the muscle. And if you look at how much space of the muscle are those tracheoles actually taking up? And they found that it was 1% or less in most modern insects. So there's not a lot of the muscle that is taken up by these tubes that are going in to feed it oxygen. They did find that the bigger the insects are, generally speaking, there would be a negligible Increase in the tracheoles. You would, you would need, you know, some of them or most of them

• 1:01:32Bob Novella?

  had more of the tracheoles, but not much. And actually it was insignificant, an insignificant increase going from the smallest insects to the largest insects. We got some big insects. I mean, the praying mantis is like, geez, you know, 18, 19 inches long, some of those guys. So we've got some big boys that are still, that are alive now that not as big as the griffon fly, but you know, considerable, kind of freaky looking for sure. I mean, if you had that on your hand, like whoa. Now, so they, so they believe that this low, this low percentage, this, this 1% percentage of the muscle taken up by these tracheoles would also apply and can extrapolate it to the griffon flies. And, and assuming that the, that extrapolation holds, you know,

• 1:02:16Bob Novella?

  that's an assumption. And that's probably the biggest, one of the biggest assumptions I came across is that, that, that going from modern flies and extrapolating it to the bigger extinct flies, that pattern still makes sense. So if the griffon flies had only slightly more of those tracheoles in modern big insects, right? Which is what their extrapolation suggests that sure, the big ones would have some extra tracheoles, but not much at all. It's suggested then to the researchers then that the flight muscles did not need half the, half of their atmosphere to be oxygen, because those tracheoles took up so much little space of the, of the muscle itself, that it would have been easier for selective pressure to, to create more tracheoles. And they didn't. In their extrapolation, they wouldn't need those extra tracheoles. Okay. Extrapolating

• 1:03:01Bob Novella?

  from the modern insects. Lead author Edward Snelling said, "If atmospheric oxygen really set a limit on the maximum body size of insects, then there ought to be evidence of compensation at the level of the tracheoles." He said, he continues, "There's some compensation occurring in larger insects, but it's trivial in the grand scheme of things." So yeah, there were more, more tracheoles in bigger, modern insects, but it was such a tiny increase that it would, it probably would not have made the griffon flies have an absurd amount of these tracheoles in order to, to beat those huge wings. So now remember though, this is a As I said, this is based on a reasonable extrapolation, right?

• 1:03:41Bob Novella?

  They didn't directly measure fossil soft tissue because there is none for these guys. The fossils are big and beautiful, but you can't interrogate the tracheals with a microscope because that data is just not there in the fossils.

• 1:03:58Speaker 02

  We need one trapped in amber.

• 1:03:59Bob Novella?

  Oh, man, imagine that. That would be so cool. It'd be a big blob of amber, though. I guess not. You just need a bit of it. You just need a bit of the flight muscle and that's all you would need.

• 1:04:10Speaker 03

  But to have the whole thing would be cooler, Bob.

• 1:04:12Bob Novella?

  Yeah, but here's another thing that you guys need to remember. A lot of people, and even me initially, even I initially, conclude that griffon flies could survive in our atmosphere and that such high oxygen levels were not that important, right? If you transported one to modern day atmosphere, would it survive? We don't know, actually, because this data doesn't really address that. It only showed that getting oxygen to the flight muscles was probably not the critical limiting factor as it was thought to be. Right? Because if you talk to an expert in this field before the study, he would say, yeah, getting the oxygen to the flight muscles, that was the critical point where you needed all of this oxygen in the atmosphere.

• 1:04:56Bob Novella?

  And now this is basically ruled out. I think their confidence levels are pretty high. It seems like a pretty solid study, so they're fairly confident. So that's almost basically just ruled out at this point. But that's all that they're ruling out, is the oxygen to the flight muscles. And who knows what else was going on in these insects? Scientists are going to have to look elsewhere for why these giant insects existed. You know, looking at the flight muscles really isn't going to help. Perhaps, some people have suggested that there's an oxygen limit elsewhere in the respiratory system, maybe upstream from the trachee. There's something there that needs a lot more oxygen. They're not sure. If it turns out that oxygen did not limit this maximal insect size,

• 1:05:39Bob Novella?

  then they're going to have to look at other culprits. For example, predation by vertebrates, maybe vertebrates and other...

• 1:05:48Bob Novella?

  Creatures, I guess birds started about 150 million years ago. So I don't know how long these insects lived, but if they lived long enough to be in the air when early birds took to flight, then I'm sure they would, they would gobble them up. They probably were quite yummy. And somebody also mentioned something about perhaps there's some biomechanical support limits on the exoskeleton of the insect. I'm not, I didn't see too much confirmation on that one. So, so there you go. So that, that common trope that, you know, the, these insects needed the oxygen, you know, one of the major components of that argument has, seems to have been ruled out, but who knows, it's still more complicated and they still can't definitively say that they really needed all that oxygen, but it still was an interesting study. Hope you liked hearing about it.

• 1:06:32Speaker 03

  So now I have to un-remember this.

• 1:06:34Speaker 02

  No, I, I think this is a reasonable inference from the data that they have.

• 1:06:40Bob Novella?

  Needs more.

• 1:06:41Speaker 02

  But there's a lot of assumptions in there, as you were saying.

• 1:06:44Bob Novella?

  That extrapolation was, is big. Who knows? Once you reach a critical limit in size, to get to that size, maybe you can't have a smooth curve. They're going from modern day insects up to the size of the ancient ones. So, so that, yeah, that's definitely an extrapolation.

• 1:06:59Speaker 02

  I think this is not the final word and there's

• 1:07:01Bob Novella?

  No.

• 1:07:02Speaker 02

  Again, there's still a good inference from the fact that these insect size, maximum insect size does correlate with oxygen tension in the atmosphere. It would seem like an amazing coincidence if that, those two things were not causally related. So I'm not willing to say bye-bye to that.

• 1:07:19Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:19Speaker 02

  Based upon this one study.

• 1:07:21Bob Novella?

  Yeah. I mean, the thing that surprised me was that looking at a huge range of insects, modern day insects, and from smallest to largest, there was not, there was a negligible increase in tracheals.

• 1:07:33Speaker 02

  All right, Evan. The Catholic Church still doing exorcisms?

• 1:07:38Speaker 03

  Oh, the Catholic Church is still doing exorcisms. You know, there was a head of exorcism in the, within the Catholic Church. That position is probably still active, but I'll get to that. There is an old expression that has stuck with me for many, many years. Medieval beliefs yield medieval results. And the reason that it's stuck with me all these years is because I came up with the expression.

• 1:08:05Speaker 03

  I've been saying it for the better part of two decades, and I hope some others have borrowed it. You're free to do so, and I think it's good to do because it's true. And I bring out this saying most often when the subject of exorcisms is talked about on the show. And much like any of the other classic skeptical topics that rear their ugly heads on a regular basis, we find that once again, exorcism is in the news. And where there's exorcism, the news is rarely good, as far as I'm concerned. Pope Leo XIV has hosted an exorcist summit at the Vatican over fears of worldwide surges in Satanism. So reads one headline, and there's a lot of different headlines about this meeting that

• 1:08:49Speaker 03

  took place. Catholic exorcists are urging the Vatican to appoint a trained exorcist in every diocese around the world. So they want, they want one position at every, how many are there? How many dioceses? Around the tens of thousands, maybe? I don't know. So, right, we're not talking about them limiting exorcisms or tighter restrictions on them, or a shift towards either medical or psychiatric explanations for what's going on. No, the solution is you need more exorcists. In case there are maybe a handful of people in our audience unfamiliar with what exorcism is, I will go ahead and remind us all that an exorcism is a religious ritual intended to expel what is believed to be an evil spirit,

• 1:09:34Speaker 03

  such as a demon or a devil from a, oh, person, a place, or an object. And that practice is based on the belief in possession, or this idea that a supernatural entity can inhabit and control a human being, or a place, or an object. But in a human, it will manifest itself through unusual behavior, such as altered speech, or some form of physical distress. Now, exorcisms are not unique to Catholicism.

• 1:10:01Speaker 03

  But in the Western context, they are most commonly associated with the Roman Catholic Church, which does have a formalized rite involving prayers, commands directed at the alleged entity, plus the use of holy water and religious symbols in the rites. While officially regulated within some institutions, the practice also occurs informally, and it's often carried out by untrained individuals who interpret psychological or medical conditions as signs of possessions. There is an international association of exorcists, which is called the AIE. I don't know why I and A are reversed here, but that's how it reads.

• 1:10:43Speaker 03

  This was founded in 1990 by Father Gabriel Amorth, or Amorth, who I think we may have mentioned before on the show. He is claimed to have performed over 60,000 rites of exorcism during his 30-year run as the Vatican's chief exorcist.

• 1:10:59Speaker 02

  How many?

• 1:11:00Speaker 03

  Over 60,000. I saw some estimates as 170,000. Now, some of these rites are just simple prayers, right? So it varies. It's a spectrum. It's not like out of the movie, if that's what you're thinking about, in which he goes to the person and does a whole day's worth of stuff to them.

• 1:11:18Cara Santa Maria?

  But sometimes it is abusive.

• 1:11:21Speaker 03

  Oh, absolutely. 100%. Yeah, it's a spectrum. It's absolutely a spectrum. But his organization, this AIE, has asked Pope Leo XIV to ensure that, of course, every Catholic diocese worldwide has one or more trained exorcists, because they say there is a rise in cases linked to occult practices and spiritual distress. Of course, that's what they're going to argue.

• 1:11:43Speaker 02

  How many thousand did he perform?

• 1:11:45Speaker 03

  60, I've seen, the estimates are anywhere between 60,000 to 170,000.

• 1:11:51Bob Novella?

  That's more than one a day for decades.

• 1:11:54Speaker 02

  So 60,000 is one a day for 164 years.

• 1:11:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but remember, it could be just a one-line prayer.

• 1:12:01Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 1:12:02Cara Santa Maria?

  And he could knock out a bunch in a day.

• 1:12:04Speaker 02

  I think he's probably doing, counting group exorcisms as multiple different exorcisms.

• 1:12:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, probably that too.

• 1:12:10Speaker 03

  I was reading. Giving another report about him in which they claim where he had actually went to a place to visit and do the the more larger whatever ceremony that that exorcism takes on 100 of those. They did it 100 times. That's over 30 years. That's a manageable number. So that I that I believe, but he's credited, you know, with 60,000 or more, however you want to take that. So let's see, Father Francesco Bomonte is the vice president of this association. And in an interview about his meeting with the Pope, he said, "The spread of occultism in its

• 1:12:51Speaker 03

  various forms and of Satanism unfortunately opens doors and windows to the extraordinary action of the devil in today's world. This can cause grave suffering in those who imprudently turn to these practices through possible cases of possession, vexation, obsession, or diabolical infestation." So the premise, yeah, diabolical, you like that one? The premise is that there's a growing number of people who are suffering because of these kinds of extraordinary actions of the devil and demons and what have you, and that without trained exorcists, those people are left vulnerable and they'll potentially turn to what the Church describes as inappropriate solutions, which could be a whole wide variety

• 1:13:35Speaker 03

  of things. I think the framing is important because it positions exorcism not as superstition, but as a necessary pastoral response to a real and growing problem. And we've seen this pattern before during periods of social stress, economic hardship, illness, isolation. People tend to have, well, there there tend to be increases in the reporting of possessions that go along with these times in life. And therefore, if there's possession, then what? The solution is exorcism. So the two go hand in hand. Now, I've noted before in prior reports and talks about this that I've done that

• 1:14:17Speaker 03

  the clergy themselves observed a rise in exorcism requests during the COVID pandemic, which frankly are often tied to psychological distress rather than anything supernatural. Historically, the symptoms attributed to possession, which include convulsions, altered voices, unusual behavior, they tend to map extremely well into known neurological and psychiatric conditions, epilepsy, schizophrenia, disassociative disorders, among others. So it's not a new mystery, it's just an old misinterpretation, as it were. But exorcism, as you said, Kara, is definitely not harmless. As I said, it exists on a spectrum. On the one end, you have some what can be called benign rituals, prayers and blessings and symbolic acts.

• 1:15:02Speaker 03

  But on the other end, you have restraint, starvation, suffocation, physical violence, sometimes resulting in death. There is a real body count that is associated with exorcism. Recently, one example, a three-year-old girl in California died after family members attempted to force demons out through hours of choking, gagging and physical restraint. Three-year-old? Three-year-old. So sad. Little girl. Cause of death officially asphyxiation followed prolonged, followed by prolonged abuse. So not an isolated case, unfortunately, it's part of a larger pattern. When we hear for calls for expanding exorcism, I think you have to really ask, you know, what are we expanding exactly?

• 1:15:45Speaker 03

  Because if possession is real, then perhaps more trained practitioners make sense if in that belief system. But if possession is not real, and there has never been a single scientifically verified case in recorded history of possession by a demon or some sort of entity, then what you're actually expanding on is a system that misidentifies what is most likely medical and psychological conditions and treating them as supernatural threats. And this has real consequences.

• 1:16:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, the worst is when someone clearly has a psychiatric illness.

• 1:16:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:21Speaker 02

  And as part of their delusion, usually people's delusions will align with their cultural beliefs and their religious beliefs and their family beliefs, etc. And so they may believe that they're possessed by a demon as part of their schizophrenia, let's say. The absolute worst thing you could do is reinforce their delusions by saying, yes, you are possessed and I'm going to do an exorcism on you.

• 1:16:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 1:16:46Speaker 02

  That's guaranteed to backfire.

• 1:16:48Cara Santa Maria?

  100%.

• 1:16:49Speaker 02

  That's malpractice.

• 1:16:50Cara Santa Maria?

  So dangerous, yeah.

• 1:16:52Speaker 02

  That is absolutely psychiatric malpractice. But I've seen it happen.

• 1:16:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 1:16:55Speaker 03

  We have. Steve, do you remember the doctor in Hartford, Connecticut?

• 1:16:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:59Speaker 03

  That's our, that's our example of our experience.

• 1:17:03Speaker 02

  One we've had the most direct interaction with, that's correct.

• 1:17:05Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm, yep.

• 1:17:05Speaker 02

  It's just horrible. Like you say, it's medieval. It's terrible.

• 1:17:08Speaker 03

  It is.

• 1:17:09Speaker 02

  Okay, guys, I have a quick update on 3I Atlas, the third interstellar object to pass through our solar system.

• 1:17:16Speaker 03

  Oh, Avi Loeb, right?

• 1:17:17Speaker 02

  Avi Loeb, yes. So first I was like, hey, I wonder what's, you know, at the end of the day, what do we know about comet 3I Atlas? So as it was coming in, it was a lot of atypical features of it. And of course there is, because it's the first in time we've seen an interstellar comet. Every other comet we've seen originated in our solar system. And so they have very typical features of comets that form in our solar system. This comet is different for a couple of reasons. First, it formed in a different part of the galaxy, right? It probably formed around a star that has low metallicity. And it's closer to the center of the galaxy. And it's also very old.

• 1:17:59Speaker 02

  It's probably seven billion years old or so. And so it's older than our solar system. And it'd also been traveling through interstellar space for billions of years. So it may have collected stuff along the way. So of course it's different than comets that originate from within our solar system. But the more we observed it, the more it was clear that this was a comet. It behaved like a comet. It was right in all the important ways. It had a tail, it had a coma, it had, the, its constituents were the stuff you would expect to see in a comet. And of course, every step of the way, Avi Loeb was trying to make grist out of, well, it's close to the ecliptic, or it's, it's hiding from Earth, right?

• 1:18:43Speaker 02

  It's like, oh, when it's close to Earth, it's investigating Earth. When it's far from Earth, it's hiding from Earth. Talk about confirmation bias and motivated reasoning.

• 1:18:54Speaker 02

  So.

• 1:18:54Bob Novella?

  Bastard.

• 1:18:55Speaker 02

  And everything he said turned out not to be true, right? And he's like, well, maybe, we'll know it's a, we'll know it's a spacecraft if after it passes from behind the sun, it makes a turn towards Earth. And of course, it didn't. It's now, it's now headed out towards the orbit of Jupiter and out of our solar system. It's a comet. There's no question about that. So now, the latest headlines, this is really like just from yesterday. Scan finds presence of nuclear fuel in 3I Atlas.

• 1:19:25Cara Santa Maria?

  What?

• 1:19:26Speaker 02

  Nuclear fuel.

• 1:19:27Cara Santa Maria?

  What's that even mean?

• 1:19:28Speaker 02

  What do you think it's referring to?

• 1:19:30Speaker 03

  Nuclear.

• 1:19:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Hydrogen?

• 1:19:31Speaker 03

  Like hydrogen.

• 1:19:32Speaker 02

  Yes. What kind of hydrogen?

• 1:19:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh.

• 1:19:35Speaker 03

  Well, like what the sun does, right?

• 1:19:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Not atmosphere, the hydrogen you find in the solar system.

• 1:19:41Speaker 02

  Deuterium.

• 1:19:42Bob Novella?

  Yeah, deuterium.

• 1:19:43Speaker 02

  It's an isotope of hydrogen with an, with an extra proton. Right? So deuterium. Now, deuterium occurs naturally, right?

• 1:19:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 1:19:51Speaker 03

  It does.

• 1:19:52Speaker 02

  This comet has slightly more deuterium than other comets that originate from within our solar system.

• 1:19:58Bob Novella?

  Oh.

• 1:19:58Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:19:59Cara Santa Maria?

  That's the headline.

• 1:20:00Speaker 02

  It's not quote unquote, nuclear fuel. It's just a different ratio of a naturally occurring substance. It's again, but Avi Loeb was like, this is interesting. This, this is interesting that this is nuclear fuel, you know, where they could, in fusion, you can combine deuterium and tritium to make.

• 1:20:18Bob Novella?

  That is reprehensible to use that term.

• 1:20:20Speaker 03

  That is abusive.

• 1:20:21Speaker 02

  It's, yeah.

• 1:20:22Bob Novella?

  It really is.

• 1:20:23Speaker 02

  It's ridiculous.

• 1:20:23Bob Novella?

  That's so unprofessional and misleading.

• 1:20:26Speaker 02

  Piece of alien technology.

• 1:20:27Speaker 03

  Talk about confirmation bias.

• 1:20:28Speaker 02

  Oh my god.

• 1:20:29Bob Novella?

  Cocked, man.

• 1:20:31Speaker 02

  He's a crank. At this point, I think this guy's just a crank. And then I think, you know, he's just, you know, hounding for, for fame and attention.

• 1:20:38Speaker 03

  He's milking it for every last little piece he can get.

• 1:20:40Bob Novella?

  Damn, man.

• 1:20:41Speaker 03

  Woo, this guy.

• 1:20:42Bob Novella?

  It's pathetic.

• 1:20:43Speaker 02

  But 3I Atlas is a comet. That's it. You know, it's, there's not, these anomalies are not anomalies, really. They're just, it's a little, it's different than the comets that are typical of our solar system because it's an interstellar comet. That's it. And they're all, you know, astronomical clues about its origin, you know, and about its life. It's not evidence, nothing is, it's even worth bringing up this idea that maybe this is evidence of alien technology. It's ridiculous. But here's the other thing, in this blog from yesterday or the day before, so, you know, all the time, there are people

• 1:21:22Speaker 02

  sifting through the, you know, countless photos, hundreds, thousands of photos from the Mars rover, from satellites, whatever, looking for anything unusual. And somebody sent one of these pictures up the chain to Avi Loeb. It's a picture of the surface of Mars by the Mars rover, and I think of the Curiosity rover. And there is a small, what appears to be a small cylinder in the picture, within the frame. It's over, so either that's just a, an optical kind of illusion type of thing. You know, he says it has a flat surface. It doesn't really have a flat surface. Its surface is in shadow. You can't really tell what it is. And it's, you know, we're only seeing it from one angle.

• 1:22:05Speaker 02

  And so he's like, we see it from multiple angles. And he showed four pictures from the same angle.

• 1:22:12Speaker 02

  Maybe you're talking about a half a degree? What are you talking, what's the same?

• 1:22:15Speaker 03

  Maybe they don't know what the word angle means.

• 1:22:16Speaker 02

  To visual inspection, it looked the same to me. So it wasn't a completely different angle. It might have been just slightly different. I don't know. But in any case, I'll even say, I'll even stipulate, okay, it's probably an actual cylinder and not a natural formation. I'm not ruling out a natural formation, but let's say I agree to that. It's, it's small. It's like 22 centimeters. There's a lot of space junk on Mars now, right? We've had a lot of probes and satellites and there's a lot of pieces of them fall off, the landers are, fall apart. It's almost certainly a piece-

• 1:22:47Speaker 03

  It is a robot planet.

• 1:22:48Speaker 02

  It's just a piece of junk from one of our previous, existing or previous missions. And Avi Loeb was playing this game where he says, just like he did with Three Eye Atlas, this is likely to be natural, but we can't rule out that it's intelligent and we should be doing A, B, and C. So here he does the same thing. He says, this is likely to be man-made space junk, but the Curiosity rover should immediately turn around and go back and take a closer look at it. So now he's instructing NASA how to prioritize their, you know, rover missions because he's mystery mongering about something that is almost certainly just a piece of debris.

• 1:23:27Speaker 03

  And don't you think the people who are spending their entire lives dedicated to the, to the Mars projects, they would be the ones to be able to make the call?

• 1:23:36Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 1:23:37Speaker 03

  Maybe we should, maybe we should go back. If they decided to not go back and take a second look, I think that's pretty, you know, a pretty good example of, there's nothing there, there. Let's just keep going. There's nothing to be had, nothing to be found.

• 1:23:51Speaker 02

  Of course. So this is, when people say, it's like, well, what do we lose by considering the hypothesis that something might be alien? And again, it's not, I'm all for projects like SETI or whatever that include techno-signatures within the realm of things that they're thinking about when they examine the universe. Absolutely. But he's saying that this is likely enough that we need to redirect the Curiosity rover in order to make this a higher priority than whatever else NASA is doing with that at this point in time. That's ridiculous. He's just inserting himself into this, you know, because it'd be something they write- About on this blog and it gets him attention.

• 1:24:35Speaker 02

  And he also is playing this game where he's being coy, saying it's likely to be space debris, but we should investigate it. So in the overwhelmingly likely case that it's space debris, he could say, well, that's what I said. It was probably safe basis.

• 1:24:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 1:24:48Speaker 02

  But in the infinitesimal, you know, probability that it's something more interesting, he could take credit for it. It's like, I told you, we should go back and take a look at that.

• 1:24:55Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:24:55Speaker 02

  It's just a win win for him.

• 1:24:57Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:24:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. Mm hmm. Um, same thing with three I Atlas. It's a very, it's likely to be a natural, but if it, if anything is genuinely mysterious about it, he could take credit for it.

• 1:25:06Speaker 03

  And if that thing was churning out maybe plutonium or something, right? Uh, maybe, but not deuterium.

• 1:25:12Speaker 02

  I mean, it's just, it's a, it's a, it's a little more deuterium than would, we would expect to naturally occur on terrestrial, on comets from our own solar system.

• 1:25:21Bob Novella?

  Right. But something you would probably not be surprised at all to find on a, a comet from another solar system.

• 1:25:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:27Bob Novella?

  I mean, it would actually be bizarre if it, if it wasn't different in some ways like that.

• 1:25:32Speaker 03

  If it was identical to our system.

• 1:25:33Speaker 02

  If it was ever identical, yeah, to, to native comets, it would.

• 1:25:36Speaker 03

  That would be more interesting.

• 1:25:38Speaker 02

  Uh, it's just terrible. All right, Jay.

• 1:25:41Bob Novella?

  Huh?

• 1:25:42Speaker 02

  It's who's that noisy time?

• 1:25:44Jay Novella?

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

• 1:25:53Jay Novella?

  What do you think that is?

• 1:25:55Speaker 03

  Do they, is that called a klaxon or something?

• 1:25:57Speaker 02

  I've developed a rule of thumb is that when something sounds really otherworldly, it's probably been time altered in some way.

• 1:26:07Speaker 03

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:26:08Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:26:09Jay Novella?

  Hmm. That's not bad.

• 1:26:10Speaker 02

  Right? Either sped up or slowed down.

• 1:26:12Jay Novella?

  Um, okay. That, I like where you're going with that, Steve. A listener named Bradford West wrote in and said, Hey, Jay, cool noisy this week. It's definitely a cop car with a gibbon in it, except the cop, except the cop car part. So he thinks it's a gibbon.

• 1:26:30Jay Novella?

  Not a bad guess, not a bad guess, uh, but you are incorrect. Let's move on. Jay Williams wrote in and said, Hey, uh, there is a wind up and wind down sound, but sounds like it's struggling. I'm going with a siren that is being underpowered and sounds kinda sad. You are correct on everything, except it's not a siren, but every, the way you described it was, was brilliant. Travis Martin wrote in, he said, I will guess dolphin.

• 1:26:58Jay Novella?

  Which I thought was very, very succinctly.

• 1:27:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Mic drop.

• 1:27:01Jay Novella?

  But right, thank you. You are incorrect. That is not a dolphin. Andrew Denman wrote in, "Hey Jay, I think the March 21st noisy is a lemur called an indri. I could be wrong, but I'm hoping my youth spent binging on nature documentaries won't let me down. Love the show." You are incorrect. And we did not have a winner. No winner this week.

• 1:27:23Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:27:24Jay Novella?

  All right, you guys want to take a guess before I tell you what this is?

• 1:27:27Speaker 03

  No, no winner. Don't reveal the answer. I think that should be the new one.

• 1:27:29Jay Novella?

  I see.

• 1:27:33Jay Novella?

  So this is something called a screaming, a screaming pihá, P-I-H-A.

• 1:27:40Speaker 02

  It sounds like a cocktail drink.

• 1:27:41Jay Novella?

  Screaming pihá, yeah.

• 1:27:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Is that a bird?

• 1:27:44Jay Novella?

  It's a plain looking gray songbird in the Cotenga family that lives mainly in lowland evergreen forests across much of the Amazon and parts of eastern Brazil. Usually forages in the forest midstory, right? So it's not at the top or the bottom of the trees. It eats fruits and insects and it's famous not for its appearance, but for its call. Now, I did play a trick on you guys. This is the slowed down version. I'll play it for you again.

• 1:28:09Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:28:16Jay Novella?

  I just love that. Here is the regular version.

• 1:28:23Speaker 02

  Well, that's more obviously a bird.

• 1:28:24Cara Santa Maria?

  I've heard that.

• 1:28:25Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:25Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:28:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, the screaming pihá. I'd remember that when I was in the Amazon. They're so loud.

• 1:28:31Jay Novella?

  Yeah, they have a piercing scream, but I love it slowed down so much. Listen again.

• 1:28:39Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:28:41Jay Novella?

  That's like he's at a baseball game or something, you know?

• 1:28:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, he sounds like a siren.

• 1:28:45Jay Novella?

  Very cool. Birds are amazing. Their, their scream, Kara, can be 110 decibels.

• 1:28:52Speaker 03

  Whoa. That'll cause damage.

• 1:28:55Speaker 02

  That's dramatic, man.

• 1:28:56Jay Novella?

  It's loud as piercing. They say call it a piercing scream.

• 1:29:00Speaker 02

  It's almost as loud as my children screaming when they were younger.

• 1:29:07Jay Novella?

  All right, I got a new noisy, guys. This was sent in by a listener named Ram, and here it is.

• 1:29:35Speaker 03

  Nice finish.

• 1:29:36Jay Novella?

  When I first heard that, my response was, what the hell is going on?

• 1:29:42Speaker 02

  That's that alien floating outside the spaceship and lost in space.

• 1:29:46Jay Novella?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:29:47Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God, Steve.

• 1:29:48Jay Novella?

  You're right.

• 1:29:49Bob Novella?

  Green? She was green, right?

• 1:29:51Jay Novella?

  Of course. Steve, don't. Of course. Steve, don't forget you said that.

• 1:29:55Bob Novella?

  Okay. And had like a conical-like hat on her head.

• 1:29:58Jay Novella?

  There might be.

• 1:29:58Bob Novella?

  I can picture her.

• 1:29:59Jay Novella?

  There might be a connection.

• 1:30:01Bob Novella?

  Holy crap.

• 1:30:01Jay Novella?

  Maybe, maybe, I don't know. Let's see, let's see. Though, very funny, I did not speed it up or slow it down or anything. I just want you guys to send me in a guess if you think you know what this week's noisy is. And if you want to send me a noisy, which I appreciate the number of people who actually do, you can email me at [email protected]. Okay, Steve, you know, we have this huge list of shows that we're doing.

• 1:30:25Bob Novella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:30:25Jay Novella?

  So we're going to be in Madison, Wisconsin. Those tickets are going to be on May 29th and May 30th. We're doing a secret meetup. We're doing a private show plus, and we are doing an extravaganza all in Madison, Wisconsin. Of course, you can go to the skeptics guide for any of the tickets that I'm going to be telling you about. We have Nauticon 2026. That'll be happening in Sydney, Australia. That is happening in July. Actually, that'll be starting on July 23rd.

• 1:30:56Bob Novella?

  Do you think we need to go wait online at the airport now, though?

• 1:31:00Jay Novella?

  Probably, Bob.

• 1:31:01Speaker 03

  Please don't, no.

• 1:31:04Jay Novella?

  We will also be at the New Zealand Skeptics Conference, which will be the following weekend. You can go to conference.skeptics.nz for that. And if you, for anything to do with Nauticon, you can always go to nauticoncon.com. To find out the ticket information. Oh, before I forget, yeah, so we are actually running out of tickets in some of these events. I had a discussion with Iran and Iran wanted me to pass along the message that if you typically wait to buy your tickets, you might want to get on it if you want to see any of the secondary shows. Alright, so the main conference tickets, we won't run out of those because I got the venue big enough where I can fit more people than I think we're going to get. But the other ones are limited seating. So if you're interested,

• 1:31:49Jay Novella?

  you should go check those out now. Steve, we're also going to be at Psychon. I'm very much looking forward to this. I have a growing list of people that I know that are going to be there, not just speakers, but just friends that I've met through skepticism. Really looking forward to it. That's going to be from June 11th to 14th in Buffalo, New York. You can go to psychonconference.org to get more information on those tickets.

• 1:32:14Speaker 02

  That's it. But we do want to clarify something we said last week because we were asking people to send in their ideas and fan art or anything for our swag. So Jay and I are in the midst of updating our swag. So, you know, I think what we said was we were poorly worded and it's not what we were talking about. So the point is, if you have any swag ideas, meaning that there's something, there's some SGU swag you would like to see, now's the time to tell us because this is the time that we are going to be buying swag probably for the next two years. Not that we won't ever add anything in the meantime, but this is the time. If there's something that you really, if you have a swag idea, you'll say, I'd love to have an SGU blank, tell us. And in terms

• 1:32:56Speaker 02

  of art, we did not mean to give the impression that we never pay for art. We always pay for art. We pay artists for pictures, for digital backgrounds, for music, for anything that we do that's part of all the social media stuff that we put out and all of our swag. We have paid for every piece of art that we're using. However, people do sometimes also send us fan art, which is unsolicited, and we always appreciate that. We use it however we can, and we don't pay for that because it's unsolicited, you know, and we figure people want to send that in. And so we were saying- Hey, if people want to send us art, go right ahead. We're not going to pay you automatically for that. But here's the thing. If we're going, if we really like a piece of art that we want to turn into swag,

• 1:33:41Speaker 02

  that's going to need to be iterated and put into a format that we could use. And if we engage with you to do that, we'll pay you for the work that you do. We will pay you for your art. Absolutely. So just to clarify that, we were not saying, oh, we never pay for art or whatever. That's not, I think some people came away with the wrong idea. But that was our fault. We stayed, we were very unclear in how we said things.

• 1:34:02Jay Novella?

  And not only that, like, but Steve and I didn't even fully have the conversation beforehand. So we kind of winged it in, you know, historically, anybody that's done business with me, since the SDU started having a positive cash flow, I pay people for everything.

• 1:34:17Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:34:17Jay Novella?

  So, you know, I just want to make that perfectly clear. And it was legitimately something for people to show concern about because, you know, we should not be accepting or asking people to do free work for us. And, and I happily pay people for the work that they do. That said, so if you want to, if you want to send us any swag ideas, just, hey, I want you guys to buy a blank because I'd buy it. Or if you want to send us any, any art concepts, you can just email us at [email protected]. And of course I will be, if I, you know, if I reach out to you or whatever, and we start talking and everything, you know, at some point we can talk about what the cost is.

• 1:34:59Jay Novella?

  Just to give you clarification, I do not pay percentages. I'll buy artwork outright, but I've done percentages in the past and it's a huge, it's a huge nightmare. And like, you know, if you order something four years later, I still have to pay someone. It's too complicated. I would just rather pay to, to own the artwork outright.

• 1:35:18Speaker 02

  All right, guys, let's go on with Science or Fiction.

• 1:35:33Speaker 02

  Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine and one fictitious, 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 global nutrition. Here we go. Item number one, about half of all deaths in children under five are linked to malnutrition. Item number two, the most prevalent micronutrient deficiency globally is vitamin A. And item number three, according to recent data, current fortification programs prevent 7 billion nutritional deficiencies per year. Evan, go first.

• 1:36:14Speaker 03

  Half of all deaths of children under five are linked to malnutrition. Linking to malnutrition, so how wide a net is that? That could be a pretty wide net. And if that were the case, then...

• 1:36:30Speaker 02

  So since you bring it up, I didn't know if anyone was going to pick that out, but you did, so I'll explain it to you. It basically means they wouldn't have died were it not for the malnutrition, probably. Or at least, like, you know, when we list the cause of death, there's always the proximate cause of death, like his heart stopped. But there's also contributing factors. So it would be listed as a contributing factor leading to the death of that child. Yeah, but it doesn't necessarily mean they died 100% of malnutrition.

• 1:37:01Speaker 03

  Okay, okay, right, okay, all right. It's a sad topic, obviously. But this could be true. The second one, about the most prevalent micronutrient deficiency globally is vitamin A. I wish I knew more about which foods contain which vitamins, son. Sadly, not, not perfect in that realm. And, well, this one leaves itself open to a lot of other possibilities. Now, vitamin A, yeah, most prevalent micronutrient deficiency globally, maybe not. Maybe there are other vitamins that...

• 1:37:48Speaker 03

  Would, I mean, that'd be the only other thing that could be wrong here. I mean, it's A or it's not. So this one's kind of a binary choice. This has a 50/50 chance of being correct or incorrect. The last one is impressive. According to recent data, current fortification programs prevent 7 billion nutritional deficiencies per year. Yeah, that seems impressive and also correct to me. I may not be able to put my finger exactly why, but, I mean, really, fortifying our foods with vitamins, and that has got to have results that yield billions. Could it be 7 billion? Maybe that number's too

• 1:38:31Speaker 03

  high. I don't think so. I'm gonna go with the one that's the 50/50 choice. I'm gonna say the vitamin A is going to be the fiction.

• 1:38:38Speaker 02

  Okay, Kara.

• 1:38:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I think Evan kind of spoke my mind with a lot of these. I would not be surprised if half of the deaths of children under 5 are linked to malnutrition, which is absolutely devastating, because that's like 100% preventable. And I would not be surprised if, I mean, I think that the question with fortification programs, I mean, the way you worded it, it prevents 7 billion nutritional deficiencies per year. You don't mean 7 billion people are not nutritionally deficient per year.

• 1:39:11Speaker 02

  That is correct. There could be more than one deficiency per person.

• 1:39:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, we're right. And like, that deficiency is gonna be based on some sort of like, measurement that's taken in a setting. And so, yeah, there's gotta be some way that that number is identified and recorded. Yeah. So that one does seem reasonable to me as well. And, I mean, honestly, the most prevalent micronutrient deficiency being vitamin A also seems reasonable, but so does vitamin D, so does iron. I'm trying to think of things that a lot of people globally would struggle with, especially because some of these micronutrient deficiencies are simply from not having it.

• 1:39:57Cara Santa Maria?

  In your diet. And sometimes there's another reason like I am chronically iron deficient and have to get iron infusions. We can't figure out why I get iron in my diet, so I'm struggling to absorb it. And I think sometimes micronutrient deficiencies happen, yes, because in impoverished regions, there's just simply not enough nutrition available. And sometimes they happen because of other factors like not getting enough sunlight or or maybe having some sort of medical reason that somebody can't can't get that. So I don't know. I think it's a statistics gamble like Evan. More things could be true on the vitamin A one. So I'll call that the fiction.

• 1:40:40Speaker 02

  Okay, Bob.

• 1:40:41Bob Novella?

  I'm still trying to figure out the seven billion nutritional deficiencies. Can, I mean, I just don't know how much to extrapolate that. I mean, can I have three nutritional deficiencies in in one day? Because, you know, then I eat this cereal and it's like, oh, that's three.

• 1:41:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, if you go to the doctor and they do blood work and you have three different things that you are deficient on your blood work, that's three deficiencies.

• 1:41:08Jay Novella?

  It's per years, right? It says specifically per year.

• 1:41:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:11Jay Novella?

  So it's not per day, right?

• 1:41:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Gotcha, gotcha. Yeah.

• 1:41:14Bob Novella?

  Yeah, but still, that's I just I'm just having a hard time figuring out what would be a reasonable amount of nutritional deficiencies for a person. And then you then you got to think of other countries because I'm I'm sure there's plenty of countries that really take fortification programs seriously and put serious money into it. And I'm sure there's plenty of countries that just don't have the funds to really, you know, do that nearly as well or even at all in for for poor countries. I would think, you know, fortifying things just is, you know, they just don't have the money to do it. And and also, what type, what types of fortification programs are there? I mean, I just, first thing I think of is like fortifying cereal and milk. I'm sure there's probably a million other things.

• 1:41:58Jay Novella?

  Let's take a carbohydrate and coat it in sugar and we'll spray on some fricking vitamins on there.

• 1:42:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Better than eating it without the vitamin.

• 1:42:06Jay Novella?

  No, I'm not disagreeing with that. It's funny that it's like, you know, let's take something that.

• 1:42:10Speaker 02

  It's completely unhealthy and spray some vitamins on it and say it's fortified and you get kids should eat it, you know?

• 1:42:16Bob Novella?

  So since that one's kind of really hard to figure out, but numbers two, I agree. There's a lot of, for number two, there's a lot of other letters in the alphabet besides A, so I'm going to go with that.

• 1:42:26Speaker 02

  Okay, and J?

• 1:42:28Jay Novella?

  Okay, so the first one about half the deaths of children under five are linked to malnutrition. I think that one is science. Can't tell you how many times I've read something along the lines of like the food waste in the world would easily feed people who are malnourished. You know, making a point on both sides, like there's an incredible amount of food waste and food spoilage. And there's an incredible amount of people who are suffering from it. And what else is going to kill kids? I know there's diseases and everything, but I think malnutrition is the thing that could literally be anywhere. You know, a poor family living in a not so poor neighborhood, your kids could be malnourished. So that's science to me.

• 1:43:07Jay Novella?

  The last one, it's worded weirdly, you know, like that I got caught up the same way everyone else did, like seven billion nutritional deficiencies per year. Like you would figure they'd say, you know, there was whatever, like there was three billion people that were measured and they totaled the seven billion nutritional deficiencies. That would have been a much clearer way to say it. Just odd, but I'm going to take it the way that Kara said it and Steve agreed because Steve agreed. And I think sure, seven billion nutritional deficiencies globally, that's it. You know what I mean? I would expect that number to be way higher than that. And then the last one here about vitamin A. I think Kara said that there's a lot of deficiencies and there are, and at my age that my doctor has been

• 1:43:50Jay Novella?

  telling me if I'm deficient or I have too much of something and it's pretty easy to slip into a deficiency. And yeah, so I think vitamin A is on that list and Kara, you said iron and vitamin D, like they fortify cereals with vitamin D. I totally agree with that. I think though that iron is the, is the number one. I have several reasons to believe that, but I do think it's iron that a lot of people have problems with. Anyway, I think that's, that's the fiction. I think vitamin A is probably on the list, but isn't number one.

• 1:44:20Speaker 02

  All right. So you all agree on the second one. So we'll just take these in order. Item number one, about half of all deaths of children under five are linked to malnutrition. You all think this one is science and this one is? Science, unfortunately. And yeah, a lot of those deaths are infection because malnutrition predisposes you to infections and compromises your immune system, makes it more likely that you will die from the infection. But it's a lot of other things too, liver failure, heart failure, lots of other things can happen when you're malnourished. Some of it is dying of starvation, but not all of it, right? Obviously, it's, most of it is dying from other things that you probably would have

• 1:45:03Speaker 02

  survived or not caught in the first place if you didn't, if you weren't struggling also with malnutrition. So let's go on to the second one. The most prevalent micronutrient deficiency globally is vitamin A. You all think this one is the fiction and this one is the fiction. You got it.

• 1:45:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yay.

• 1:45:24Speaker 02

  So I'll tell you, vitamin A is number three.

• 1:45:26Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:45:27Speaker 02

  So what do you think is number one and two?

• 1:45:30Jay Novella?

  I think iron and

• 1:45:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Iron's up there.

• 1:45:32Speaker 02

  Iron and iodine. That's both correct.

• 1:45:34Speaker 03

  Well, you got iodine.

• 1:45:36Speaker 02

  And iodine is two.

• 1:45:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Iodine. It'd be fortified salt.

• 1:45:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, that's why I thought iodine because they still sell it in salt and salt is like used on everything.

• 1:45:45Speaker 03

  Good reasoning.

• 1:45:46Bob Novella?

  You could have told us.

• 1:45:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, it would have, it would have helped us.

• 1:45:49Cara Santa Maria?

  When he did say he thinks it's iron.

• 1:45:51Speaker 02

  Where is, what's fortified with iron?

• 1:45:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh.

• 1:45:55Bob Novella?

  Cereal?

• 1:45:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, cereals.

• 1:45:58Speaker 02

  Well, in America.

• 1:45:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Grains.

• 1:46:00Speaker 02

  Worldwide, flour.

• 1:46:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, okay, flour.

• 1:46:02Speaker 02

  Really? I've never seen that. And the flour I use, interesting.

• 1:46:07Cara Santa Maria?

  There's also these really interesting, I don't know if you've read about these global programs to deliver, they're basically like iron, little like chunks of iron or using iron pots and cooking with that in your cooking water. So that the iron is infused into whatever you're cooking.

• 1:46:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. All right. All this means that according to recent data, current fortification programs prevent 7 billion nutritional deficiencies per year is science. Now, the, the technical term they use in the paper was person nutrient intakes. So I didn't, right? That's a talk about. It's like person years, you know, it's like,

• 1:46:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:46:46Speaker 02

  It's so we have one person has three different nutritional deficiencies or deficient nutrient intakes. That's three, even though it's one person, right? So what the study found was that again, the existing programs at a cost of about $1 billion prevent 7 billion inadequate nutrition intakes. This is out of so this, that's the, that's the, the global, that's the per person cost. So it's 18 cents per person.

• 1:47:13Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:47:14Speaker 02

  For 18 cents per person, you prevent 7 billion nutritional deficiencies, which saves the economy in both direct healthcare costs and lost productivity, trillions of dollars. Like it's a massive, massive ROI.

• 1:47:30Speaker 03

  What else comes close to that? I don't know.

• 1:47:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:33Speaker 02

  What's the number one nutritional deficiency prevented by fortification?

• 1:47:38Speaker 03

  Rice, right? When we fortify rice.

• 1:47:42Speaker 02

  It's mostly iodine, actually.

• 1:47:44Speaker 03

  Oh, it is the iodine.

• 1:47:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh.

• 1:47:45Speaker 02

  That's our most successful fortification program.

• 1:47:48Speaker 03

  Really?

• 1:47:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think just because it's salt and it's so ubiquitous.

• 1:47:51Speaker 03

  It's ubiquitous, yeah.

• 1:47:52Speaker 02

  But yeah, iron would be, would be next. But yeah, but I think it's like 60% iodine or something, some huge amount.

• 1:47:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow.

• 1:47:58Speaker 02

  But the, the study also found that there's a lot of headroom there that if we expand the, expand the fortification program, we could prevent as many as an additional 17.2 deficiencies. And that could again, have massive ROI if we did that. So there's a lot, there's still more to be done. We could basically triple the benefits of the fortification programs if they were, if we extend them and they were, you know, optimally funded.

• 1:48:32Speaker 03

  And if we combine that with genetic modifications, Steve?

• 1:48:35Speaker 02

  Well, that's part of the program, right? So if we fortify like Mick Golden Rice, which is fortified with vitamin A, then that's, that's a fortification program that, and that, that's a huge benefit. So the thing about, about vitamin A deficiency is that Causes like half a million instances of blindness every year. So it's not really captured in the deaths. It does increase, it does cause a lot of deaths too.

• 1:49:01Speaker 03

  Human suffering.

• 1:49:02Speaker 02

  But it's number one, number one, you know, the thing that it does is cause blindness. It's a massive cause, it's like the most important cause of blindness worldwide. And it's a hundred percent preventable.

• 1:49:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and that's not just human suffering. That's actually a massive impact on the economy. Because these individuals often can't do the job that they could do previously.

• 1:49:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's like the vaccination program. This is a massive ROI. It's not that expensive. It has a huge payback for the world. And also, of course, just preventing childhood death and human suffering and blindness, et cetera. So it's worth continuing to invest in this and in fact, increase that investment and working on technologies to deal with it, like I think the golden rice, for example. So yeah, it's, so it shows it's a massively successful program, but there's still, it could be three times as successful if we optimally invest in it and optimize the standards and improve compliance and do those things. All right, well, good job, everyone.

• 1:50:02Speaker 03

  Thanks, Steve.

• 1:50:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, swept me this week.

• 1:50:03Bob Novella?

  Sure, man.

• 1:50:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Thanks, Steve.

• 1:50:05Speaker 02

  All right, Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:50:07Speaker 03

  This week's quote was suggested by Andrew, who is in Jefferson City, Missouri. Thank you, Andrew. De omnibus dubitandum, Rene Descartes. So that's a Latin phrase, meaning everything must be doubted. And of course, most famously associated with the philosophy of Rene Descartes. But the phrase itself is actually a little more layered, shall we say? It's actually de omnibus esse dubitandum. Doubt as far as possible, all things, instead of just simply, everything must be doubted.

• 1:50:46Speaker 03

  So it's a little more nuanced than that. And that appeared in his 1644 work Principles of Philosophy.

• 1:50:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. And what he was going with the cogito ergo sum, like I think therefore I am, was he wanted to deconstruct all of philosophy, right? Because there's a lot of philosophy was based upon tradition and authority and whatever. And Aristotle, he said, okay, but if we wanted to go back to first principles, like just break it all down to nothing and then build it back up from first principles, where do you get to, right? What's the first first principle? And that was, I think, therefore I am. And then you have to start from that one piece of information, which he said is the only thing you could actually know in and of itself, and then build your philosophy from there.

• 1:51:36Speaker 02

  So that was the point of that, which is kind of cool. Which is again, it's good dovetails with the doubt everything, you know? But still, he's, the name Descartes is connected to Cartesian dualism, which is unfortunate.

• 1:51:50Speaker 03

  Oh, right. Forgot about that part.

• 1:51:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I should have doubted that a little bit more. All right. Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

• 1:51:57Jay Novella?

  You got it, Steve.

• 1:51:58Speaker 03

  Thanks, Steve.

• 1:51:59Speaker 02

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

• 1:52:06Speaker 02

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

• 1:52:42Speaker 07

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