The Skeptics Guide #1090 - May 30 2026

I Learned Today: How Toilets Flush; News Items: Autism Clinics, Errors in Climate Change Database, Weekly Exercise, Why Birds Fear Women, Latest Ebola Outbreak; 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

  Overwhelmed? That was me with diabetes. Hey, I'm Jabran. Between teaching and coaching, managing diabetes felt like an extra job. With the Freestyle Libre 3 CGM, I get real-time glucose readings and have the insights to make informed decisions. My life feels lighter now. Learn more at freestylelibre.us.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  The views expressed should not be used for medical diagnosis or treatment as a substitute for professional medical advice. Individual circumstances may vary. For prescription only. Safety info found at freestylelibre.us.

• 0:33Speaker 02

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

• 0:40Jay Novella?

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Monday, May 25th, 2026, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

• 0:48Bob Novella?

  Hey, everybody.

• 0:49Jay Novella?

  Kara Santa Maria.

• 0:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Howdy.

• 0:51Jay Novella?

  Jay Novella.

• 0:52Speaker 06

  Hey, guys.

• 0:53Jay Novella?

  And Evan Bernstein.

• 0:55Speaker 07

  Happy Monday.

• 0:56Jay Novella?

  Yeah, rare Monday recording for us.

• 0:58Bob Novella?

  What the hell, Monday? What are we doing here on Monday?

• 1:00Speaker 07

  Unusual.

• 1:01Speaker 06

  Well, we're going to Wisconsin this weekend. This was the only night we could record early enough to get the show done before the weekend.

• 1:07Jay Novella?

  Correct.

• 1:08Speaker 07

  Wisconsin.

• 1:09Jay Novella?

  Here we are.

• 1:10Speaker 07

  Oh, we're actually here already, if you're listening.

• 1:12Speaker 06

  If you're listening to it, yeah.

• 1:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Time travel.

• 1:14Jay Novella?

  Yeah, so have any of you guys been specifically been to Wisconsin before?

• 1:19Speaker 06

  No, but I've had their cheese.

• 1:20Bob Novella?

  I don't think so.

• 1:22Cara Santa Maria?

  I've been only when it was winter, so it was cold.

• 1:25Speaker 07

  Oh, gosh, that had to be freezing.

• 1:27Cara Santa Maria?

  I've never seen summer in Wisconsin. I don't, you know how I remember sometimes where I've been? Is I go to my photo app in my phone and I search for the place.

• 1:35Speaker 07

  Uh huh.

• 1:35Cara Santa Maria?

  And I see how many pictures I took there. Yep, there's some.

• 1:38Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I've been to Milwaukee, Chicago, Minneapolis.

• 1:41Cara Santa Maria?

  I've been to Madison.

• 1:43Speaker 06

  Chicago, Wisconsin.

• 1:44Jay Novella?

  Yeah, well, I'm just saying, in that area.

• 1:46Speaker 06

  The region, yeah.

• 1:47Jay Novella?

  I got you.

• 1:47Cara Santa Maria?

  In the Midwest.

• 1:48Jay Novella?

  But I've never been on any of the lakes. I've never been on them. I've only flown over.

• 1:53Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I haven't either. I don't even remember flying over any.

• 1:56Jay Novella?

  When would you even go? When would you go over one of the lakes? Like, who travels the lakes?

• 2:02Speaker 06

  You mean by boat?

• 2:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Travels them?

• 2:03Jay Novella?

  Yeah, by the boat. Why?

• 2:04Bob Novella?

  Commerce, man, commerce.

• 2:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 2:07Bob Novella?

  You gotta go all the way around Lake Michigan and just cut right across it.

• 2:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, that's true.

• 2:12Bob Novella?

  Yeah, but if you're sending anything over there, you might as well be a lot cheaper. Just pure expense of, of just shipping it instead of trucking it all around.

• 2:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but aren't there, Bob, I'm looking at the map too. Aren't there just like bridges?

• 2:23Jay Novella?

  I don't know.

• 2:23Speaker 07

  Over some very narrow points.

• 2:25Bob Novella?

  Too big for bridges, man.

• 2:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Really? It's too big for bridges?

• 2:29Bob Novella?

  The, the, the main girth, the main width, sure, but I'm sure there's smaller, there's smaller areas with plenty of bridges.

• 2:36Cara Santa Maria?

  The I-10 looks like it goes straight across Lake Michigan. I don't know if it goes over or under, but.

• 2:41Jay Novella?

  Do you guys know why there are lakes and not seas?

• 2:44Speaker 07

  Because they're freshwater.

• 2:46Jay Novella?

  That's one.

• 2:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Because they're inland?

• 2:47Jay Novella?

  Because they're surrounded by land. Well, so, so can a sea. They're freshwater. They have a natural outflow to the ocean and.

• 2:55Speaker 07

  Uh huh.

• 2:55Jay Novella?

  One that's not really intuitive. They sit significantly above sea level.

• 3:00Speaker 07

  Oh, good.

• 3:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Ah.

• 3:01Speaker 07

  Oh, interesting.

• 3:02Jay Novella?

  I thought it was all about size. I guess it isn't. It's not just about size. Jay, it's never just about size.

• 3:10Cara Santa Maria?

  So Michigan is kind of like a little, well, it's not really an island. It's like a peninsula.

• 3:14Speaker 07

  Is it not an ismus?

• 3:17Cara Santa Maria?

  It looks like a hand.

• 3:18Bob Novella?

  Be my lucky.

• 3:19Cara Santa Maria?

  You ever met somebody from Michigan and they go, where are you from? And they point to their hand.

• 3:23Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 3:23Cara Santa Maria?

  That's like how they know.

• 3:25Jay Novella?

  There's an island, there's an island in, um, Lake Michigan and it's called Beaver Island. It's pretty big.

• 3:32Speaker 07

  A lot of seals live.

• 3:33Jay Novella?

  I wonder if people live there.

• 3:35Bob Novella?

  Probably because that, that looks huge.

• 3:37Speaker 07

  Well, gosh, I mean, you know, beavers were one of the main reasons why people settled the area initially to the beaver trade.

• 3:44Jay Novella?

  It's a huge beaver trade, yeah.

• 3:45Speaker 07

  It was enorm- it was so many. There had to be billions of beavers.

• 3:49Jay Novella?

  There's an airport on Beaver Island.

• 3:51Bob Novella?

  What?

• 3:52Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 3:52Speaker 07

  Beaver International Airport.

• 3:53Jay Novella?

  And I'm like literally zooming in and I'm like, okay, there's like houses that go, you know, along the coast, but it doesn't seem to be like, it just doesn't seem to be like a lot of people here.

• 4:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Wait, is Beaver Island part of Michigan or is it part of Wisconsin?

• 4:11Speaker 07

  Oh, interesting. Probably Michigan.

• 4:14Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't know. It's like right in between them.

• 4:16Speaker 07

  I need to zoom in on this map.

• 4:18Speaker 06

  I think like the state line goes down the middle of Lake Michigan.

• 4:22Jay Novella?

  Yep, it's not, they're not a part of it.

• 4:24Bob Novella?

  That's what those lines are.

• 4:25Speaker 07

  It does?

• 4:26Bob Novella?

  Interesting.

• 4:27Cara Santa Maria?

  So Beaver Island is Michigan. Yeah, I see that.

• 4:30Speaker 07

  Maps.

• 4:31Cara Santa Maria?

  But we're not going to Michigan, we're going to Wisconsin.

• 4:34Jay Novella?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 4:34Speaker 07

  Yes, but Wisconsin is surrounded by the Great Lakes.

• 4:37Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I didn't know Wisconsin had a little border with Lake Superior. Guys.

• 4:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, it does? Up north, huh?

• 4:44Bob Novella?

  I read about Lake Superior not too long ago, and I actually got a little scared.

• 4:50Speaker 07

  You should.

• 4:51Bob Novella?

  It's more, it's more of a beast than I ever imagined. Right here, I'm looking at an overview here. It's like, Lake Superior is exceptionally dangerous.

• 5:02Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 5:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Why is it dangerous?

• 5:04Bob Novella?

  Well, they're describing it as it behaves like an inland ocean. Let's see, temperamental weather, hurricane force winds. Unpredictable and massive waves.

• 5:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow.

• 5:15Speaker 07

  It sunk the Edmund Fitzgerald, you know, that in the 1875, which is an enormous ship, you know, Titanic size almost.

• 5:23Bob Novella?

  And you don't want to fall in that water. It's saying here that the year, the annual average is 40 degrees Fahrenheit. You fall in there, it won't take long before you are done.

• 5:34Speaker 07

  30 seconds and you're probably toast.

• 5:35Bob Novella?

  Just to, you know, it says here, after a few minutes, you lose fine motor control. I think that's underselling it. I think 40 degrees is some nasty, that will suck the heat out of you.

• 5:46Jay Novella?

  Yeah, Bob, you know, you want to know something about Lake Superior?

• 5:49Bob Novella?

  Yeah, what is that?

• 5:50Jay Novella?

  It's very far away from Connecticut, so you should not be scared.

• 5:55Speaker 07

  No, but we're going to Wisconsin and.

• 5:57Jay Novella?

  We think Lake Superior is going to crawl across the land and suck us into its depths.

• 6:01Bob Novella?

  Well, you know. I would like to go on it. I want to go on it and I want to see it because.

• 6:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Bob likes being scared, though.

• 6:09Speaker 07

  He does, yes. Bob, you do have a Scottish.

• 6:12Bob Novella?

  Fear minus death equals fun.

• 6:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but this could be death. There's a whole group of people who surf Lake Superior.

• 6:19Bob Novella?

  Oh, wow.

• 6:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, this is so cool. They're freshwater surfers.

• 6:22Bob Novella?

  They must wear, yeah, they must wear dry suits for that.

• 6:25Jay Novella?

  Now, I could do that because there's no sharks.

• 6:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's no sharks in Lake Superior.

• 6:29Speaker 07

  Oh, no sharks in Lake Superior, okay.

• 6:31Cara Santa Maria?

  But still some death.

• 6:32Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:33Speaker 07

  You know, if a creature like the Loch Ness monster were to exist, it would. It would be in a lake more like this rather than Loch Ness, which is so tiny compared.

• 6:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Is there a cryptid in Lake Superior?

• 6:45Speaker 07

  That's a great question. Let's find out.

• 6:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Great Lake cryptids, there've gotta be.

• 6:50Speaker 06

  Jay, are there any freshwater sharks?

• 6:54Jay Novella?

  There better not be, that's what I'm saying.

• 6:56Speaker 06

  There are.

• 6:57Jay Novella?

  River sharks.

• 6:58Speaker 07

  River sharks.

• 6:59Jay Novella?

  How are we not hunting these bastards down right now?

• 7:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Evan.

• 7:04Speaker 06

  Mainly, they're rare, mainly in Australia and Southeast Asia.

• 7:07Jay Novella?

  Of course they're in Australia.

• 7:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Evan, Lake Superior's monster is called pressy.

• 7:13Speaker 07

  Pressy. How great is that?

• 7:16Cara Santa Maria?

  So Lake Erie has South Bay Bessie, Lake Superior has pressy, Superior and Huron have an underwater panther.

• 7:25Jay Novella?

  An underwater panther?

• 7:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, these are like indigenous legendary, you know, creatures. And then Ontario has a plesiosaur-like creature. Yeah, so we've got our own versions here and we never even talk about them.

• 7:40Jay Novella?

  Oh my god.

• 7:41Speaker 07

  Why?

• 7:42Jay Novella?

  Guys, river sharks specifically.

• 7:44Speaker 07

  Jay. Can't get over the sharks.

• 7:48Jay Novella?

  I'm going to hang in the background. Of course I am. River sharks, specifically bull sharks, are highly dangerous and are widely considered one of the three most dangerous shark species to humans. So swimming in freshwater is more dangerous.

• 7:59Speaker 07

  Is there a non-dangerous shark?

• 8:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but river sharks live in Asia.

• 8:03Bob Novella?

  Most of them are absolutely fine. Absolutely fine.

• 8:07Jay Novella?

  But Karen, follow the movie plot here. Someone from Australia brings them to Lake Superior. Bob goes out on a boat ride. The captain got drunk. The boat hits a rock. Bob's tipped overboard and a river shark comes and eats his left leg.

• 8:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, he was keeping them in their tank and they got tired of him and flushed them down the toilet. They went into the lake.

• 8:28Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 8:30Speaker 06

  Where they grew unlimited size because of how big the lake is.

• 8:34Speaker 07

  Yeah, like goldfish, right? They grow to the size of a bull. Yeah.

• 8:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Whoa, a bull shark was found in Alton, Illinois, Jay.

• 8:41Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I'm telling you. Look, man. You can't go in any body of water.

• 8:45Speaker 06

  It's like sewer alligators.

• 8:47Speaker 07

  Jay, here's one that evolved into a walking shark. It walks over land.

• 8:51Bob Novella?

  Land shark.

• 8:52Jay Novella?

  It's a land shark.

• 8:53Speaker 06

  Never mind. Alright, now we're getting silly.

• 8:58Speaker 06

  All right, guys, I have a what I learned today for you.

• 9:01Jay Novella?

  Okay.

• 9:01Bob Novella?

  Gather round, kids.

• 9:02Jay Novella?

  Another one.

• 9:03Bob Novella?

  Gather round.

• 9:03Speaker 06

  This is, this is, I don't know, this is a little silly and it's kind of small, but I just something I didn't fully wrap my head around until recently. So I'm going to ask you, Kara, to start. Explain to me exactly how toilets flush.

• 9:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly how? Well, I had to replace the thingy in the back of my toilet recently.

• 9:21Bob Novella?

  Very technical.

• 9:22Cara Santa Maria?

  So there's a tank in the back of the toilet.

• 9:24Speaker 06

  Right.

• 9:25Cara Santa Maria?

  And it holds water. And when you've hit the little flipper thing, a stopper comes up and the water goes out of that tank.

• 9:33Bob Novella?

  That's right, stopper.

• 9:34Cara Santa Maria?

  That's right, stopper. And somehow that also makes the water disappear out of the toilet bowl. And then when the water, and then when, when the water level is low, the stopper closes on itself.

• 9:47Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 9:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Because gravity. And then it refills slowly and that also refills the toilet bowl.

• 9:53Speaker 06

  The bowl, right.

• 9:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 9:54Speaker 06

  Wait, but Steve, I know what you're getting at. Yeah, you do, you, well, then hold on to it. I want to know if everyone has anything to add to that.

• 9:59Bob Novella?

  Wouldn't it be, when you add water, okay, so you start with water in the bowl.

• 10:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm hmm.

• 10:04Bob Novella?

  And then when you're flushing it, you're adding more water to it. Now, that doesn't that cause the, the, the, the water to then force downward through the pipe out?

• 10:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 10:15Bob Novella?

  Off the S curve or whatever they call that piece.

• 10:17Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 10:18Bob Novella?

  And so, so it's, so it's the addition of the tank water to the bowl water is the.

• 10:25Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 10:26Bob Novella?

  Is the flush.

• 10:26Cara Santa Maria?

  That makes the thingy open.

• 10:27Speaker 06

  Well, what, what, what open, Kara?

• 10:30Cara Santa Maria?

  The thingy in the back.

• 10:31Speaker 06

  What thingy in the back?

• 10:32Cara Santa Maria?

  When you flush, it pulls the chain.

• 10:34Speaker 06

  Emptying the tank into the bowl.

• 10:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that empties the tank into the bowl.

• 10:37Speaker 06

  And then the bowl empties.

• 10:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Into the ocean.

• 10:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, into your, wherever it's going to go.

• 10:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 10:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, what you guys are saying is all correct, but you're missing an element.

• 10:49Bob Novella?

  It's a vacuum, partial vacuum siphoning type.

• 10:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, there you go. That's what they're missing, right? Well, let's, let's get to that in a second. So.

• 10:55Jay Novella?

  Well, this is how you could see it. Like, wait, if you're listening to the podcast right now, go into your bathroom and look at the side of your toilet. Look at the side. Now, if you, yeah, if you have a regular toilet that isn't like $30,000 and blows hot air on you.

• 11:09Speaker 06

  You'll see that there's like, you could see the pathway of the water on the side. Like you can see almost like the piping inside of the porcelain. And that has like a big turn in it, right?

• 11:20Jay Novella?

  Mm hmm.

• 11:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, Bob, I hear you. I know what you're saying about the siphon. I don't know exactly how it works, but I know that it's kind of just, it keeps pulling the water after itself.

• 11:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Is it kind of like your lungs?

• 11:31Speaker 06

  Hang on, hang on, all right.

• 11:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Like it's backward?

• 11:34Speaker 06

  Yes, you're getting close. Bob said the magic words, but let me put it all together for you. But first, let me give you an explanation why I was thinking about it.

• 11:39Bob Novella?

  I know my shit.

• 11:40Speaker 06

  I knew Bob would know. That's why I asked Kara.

• 11:43Jay Novella?

  Did your wallet get stuck in the, in the turn this thing?

• 11:46Speaker 06

  So this past weekend, I was opening, we have a little, we have a small cabin on a lake in New Hampshire that we bought for my wife's cousin, right? Just to keep it in the family. And so we were opening, it's not winterized, so we have to, you know, prepare it for winter. Then we have to open it in the spring. So we ended up there to open it for the spring. And it's always a gamble, like what's going to be working, what's not going to be working, you know? And this time, the one toilet was leaking. The tank was leaking around the water intake.

• 12:13Bob Novella?

  Oh.

• 12:14Speaker 06

  So I replaced the intake just to make, just to see, because that's like a $20 part, it's nothing, right? And hoping that that would fix it, but it didn't. So then I needed to call a plumber. So now I'm there with four women. That's, you know, I mentioned that they're women because they are, they were incredibly unwilling to do their business in the woods.

• 12:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, right.

• 12:36Speaker 06

  Far more unwilling than I would have been, all right? But so, so the tank, I had to turn off the water and empty the tank, you know, flush the tank just so that the, that all, that water wouldn't leak into the bathroom. But I said, listen, we could still, the toilet bowl itself is still working. And we could use it, you know, we're near, we're near our lake. So we could get a bucket of water from the lake and do what's called a bucket flush. Have you guys ever heard of a bucket flush?

• 13:03Bob Novella?

  I've done it.

• 13:03Cara Santa Maria?

  So you add that to the back?

• 13:05Bob Novella?

  During a power outage, during a nasty, um.

• 13:08Jay Novella?

  Of course, you take the power outage.

• 13:09Speaker 06

  The water out of the tub and you, and you pour like a five gallon bucket type situation into the toilet.

• 13:14Bob Novella?

  Into the bowl.

• 13:14Speaker 06

  Into the bowl.

• 13:15Bob Novella?

  Took the water out of the pool. Right, not the tank, the bowl.

• 13:18Speaker 06

  If the flushing mechanism is working, you could put it in the tank. If you just have no water, but the toilet's totally working, you can put it in the tank and then flush normally.

• 13:26Speaker 07

  Oh, it's great, man.

• 13:27Speaker 06

  I didn't want to put any water in my tank. So you just pour it directly into the bowl, and it flushes like a normal flush. And it does, but you have to pour it quickly. Why do you have to pour it quickly?

• 13:40Jay Novella?

  Or else it won't.

• 13:41Speaker 07

  The force of the water, it must have, you have to get it to a certain.

• 13:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, okay.

• 13:45Speaker 07

  With one cohesive glob of water.

• 13:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Have to break a seal?

• 13:48Speaker 06

  So let me put it all together for you.

• 13:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 13:49Speaker 06

  In a way that's, yeah, so I was like, when I was thinking about it, oh, yeah, this is, it was just more clear to me. I just never thought about it, you know, in this detail before. So you, Jay's correct, you have the bowl, and then there's the pipe that goes up before it curls down, right? That's called the trap. And so the water level in the bowl is the height of that pipe, right? Because water seeks its own level.

• 14:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 14:15Speaker 06

  The tank, the water in the tank is closed off from the bowl by the stopper that Cara mentioned, right?

• 14:21Speaker 07

  That's our stopper.

• 14:22Speaker 06

  When you flush the toilet, the water in the tank rushes into the bowl, and the weight of that pushes it up and over that hump, right? Over that S curve in the pipe.

• 14:32Speaker 07

  Over the S.

• 14:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's like the top of a curve. So it has to go, it has to drop past it.

• 14:37Speaker 06

  Now, Bob is the only one to have mentioned the critical element there. Because the water is filling the pipe, as the water goes over the top and then down, that creates a suction effect, right? There's a vacuum behind the water which sucks the water out. It's like, you know, when you suck gasoline or water through a hose,

• 14:57Speaker 07

  The siphoning.

• 14:58Speaker 06

  And then, yeah, you siphon it off, you let it run. It's the same exact thing.

• 15:01Speaker 07

  Right.

• 15:02Speaker 06

  That's why, so it's not just the water being forced down the pipe. It then gets sucked down the pipe. That's why when the.

• 15:10Speaker 07

  Taking everything with it, yeah.

• 15:11Speaker 06

  It all goes, not just back to the level, it all goes until it gurgles at the end, right? What's the.

• 15:18Cara Santa Maria?

  It works like lungs.

• 15:21Speaker 06

  Well, no, it's not. No, it's not really. It's it's

• 15:24Cara Santa Maria?

  No, it is. It creates that vacu- the low pressure vacuum.

• 15:28Speaker 06

  But it's not expanding or anything.

• 15:29Cara Santa Maria?

  With our lungs, it's air that rushes in.

• 15:31Speaker 06

  There's no diaphragm. It's not expanding. It's the it's a siphon. It is a siphon.

• 15:35Cara Santa Maria?

  No, but I'm not talking about the actual mechanism there. I'm talking about how lungs fill due to that vacuum.

• 15:41Speaker 06

  In it, in it, in that it's driven by a vacuum.

• 15:44Bob Novella?

  Right. Low pressure. Yep.

• 15:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Low pressure causes the air to follow. Low pressure causes the water to follow.

• 15:49Speaker 06

  So when the so it sucks all the water out, siphons all the water down the pipe and everything with it until air gets gurgles in and that breaks the vacuum. And then, once that happens, the water settles back in, then normally functioning toilet, the the water will fill up the tank and fill the bowl back up to its normal height.

• 16:09Bob Novella?

  That's why you want to pour it in fast, get it all in there.

• 16:11Speaker 06

  Exactly. So if you all you have to do is pour it in fast enough to force that water over the hump and then siphoning will take care of the rest. It'll suck all the water out of the out of the bowl of the toilet.

• 16:21Cara Santa Maria?

  But the problem is if you don't pour it in fast, then you just overflow your toilet.

• 16:25Speaker 06

  Well, it won't overflow. It'll just leak.

• 16:27Bob Novella?

  It'll just slowly.

• 16:27Speaker 06

  It'll it'll drain over the hump and it you need it needs to go enough that you maintain the plug, right? You have to.

• 16:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. So when toilets overflow, it's because there's a blockage.

• 16:36Speaker 06

  It's blocked.

• 16:37Bob Novella?

  In the ass.

• 16:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, because it's blocked. So if it's not blocked, it'll just leak over the edge and never create that siphon effect. So you just got to do it. It's not that hard. You just got to do it fast enough that you get that a full plug of water goes over the pipe and then creates that suck that siphoning effect behind it.

• 16:54Jay Novella?

  So theoretically, a river shark could be in your toilet.

• 16:58Speaker 06

  It would have to be very small. Have to be very small. Newly newly born.

• 17:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Newly born river.

• 17:04Speaker 06

  So I just I didn't appreciate the critical aspect of the siphon effect until I had to trigger it without flushing the toilet. You know what I mean? Just trigger it by dumping water into the bowl. They're doing the bucket flush.

• 17:15Jay Novella?

  So the lesson here is what, Steve?

• 17:17Speaker 06

  No one had to pee in the woods. That's the bottom line.

• 17:18Jay Novella?

  Okay, that's the women. The women's.

• 17:21Speaker 06

  They were typically did not have to do the things that they don't want to do. Correct.

• 17:25Jay Novella?

  Okay, and you, did you come out looking good, or were they angry because it took too long?

• 17:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 17:29Jay Novella?

  Okay.

• 17:30Speaker 06

  Cause it was a day before the plumber got there, you know?

• 17:32Speaker 07

  Oh, so you were the hero? Oh, man, man.

• 17:34Jay Novella?

  And how much did the plumber charge you?

• 17:36Speaker 06

  I haven't gotten the bill yet, but it was definitely weekend holiday pricing.

• 17:39Speaker 07

  Saturday. Oh, you are done. Oh, gosh.

• 17:42Speaker 06

  They love that.

• 17:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah, it was the pricing where they don't charge you right then. You get a big bill later.

• 17:48Speaker 06

  Well, it's a longer story because the, the, um, the pump house also was broken, so we had to come out for two reasons. And that pump house serves me and my neighbor. So we were both, and he's the neighbor's plumber because he's, he's been there longer and it was his plumber. So I'm like, yeah, while you're here, fix our toilet kind of thing. But, but we had to pay the whole vig for the weekend thing because that was the only reason why they were coming out on the weekend.

• 18:11Speaker 07

  I see. Oh. Okay, well, what are you gonna do?

• 18:13Speaker 06

  So I'll get a bill. But what are you gonna do?

• 18:15Speaker 07

  It happens. Real life happens. What are you gonna do?

• 18:19Speaker 06

  Uh, and what happened was the plastic flush mechanism cracked. Uh, and you know, it's plastic. And he said, yeah, a little water. Here he goes, here's your problem, right? A little bit of water was left in there. So when you winterize it, when you, when you prepare your cabin for the winter, you gotta get every drop of water out of every pipe, right? So you close every valve, you drain everything, and then you gotta pour gallons of antifreeze down every pipe to make sure there's no water. Cause if the water, any water left behind freezes, expands, and breaks whatever it's in. So a little bit of water must have been left in there and it just cracked over the winter.

• 18:55Speaker 07

  Damn.

• 18:56Jay Novella?

  Which means you did a really bad job of winterizing your home.

• 18:58Speaker 06

  Well, what he said was you should disconnect the water intake before you leave. So we'll add that to our list of things to do.

• 19:05Speaker 07

  I'll take that disconnect. Not just turn the valve off, disconnect?

• 19:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, right. We were just turned the valve off, flushed, you know, emptying all the water and then pouring antifreeze down. He said also disconnect it, whatever. Okay.

• 19:15Speaker 07

  Well, that is the ultimate safety, you know? Can't, can't go wrong doing that.

• 19:20Speaker 06

  All right, Kara, tell us about these autism clinics.

• 19:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, this is such an interesting story and it's just getting deeper and deeper. So, The New York Times did a big investigative report that they published on May 23rd. So, just two days ago as of this recording where they've, they've published like a series of articles. One is very, very long form. One is sort of a takeaway. There are some videos that accompanying it and they're all about autism clinics that are rapidly growing across the United States, apparently in Canada as well. And you do see some of them across the globe. Now, have you guys heard of an autism clinic?

• 20:06Jay Novella?

  Not at all.

• 20:07Speaker 07

  Nope, I have not.

• 20:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, so these are clinics that offer like pediatric occupational therapy, speech therapy, but most of them are fundamentally based in an approach to treatment called applied behavior analysis. And there's a lot of controversy around applied behavioral analysis. That is not really what we're going to be focusing on. We could do an entire different, you know, day where we talk about applied behavior analysis, something that was developed specifically for working with children with autism and has kind of just grown and exploded.

• 20:50Cara Santa Maria?

  It is viewed as an evidence-based approach by most major organizations, but there are always, within each of these sort of major organizations, there are critics that argue that it, it sort of advocates for conformity. I guess that's a good way to put it because it's, it's based in behavior techniques, right? So, the idea is in applied behavior analysis, children with autism are taught to do things like stop stimming.

• 21:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Or to engage in specific behaviors in order to fit in within the classroom environment, in order to reduce what are seen as, quote, problematic behaviors in public. And while sometimes it can be a godsend for families who are really struggling with certain difficult behaviors, the compliance component of it, a lot of individuals who obviously are advocates for neurodiversity movements are like, what's wrong with my kids stimming? The field itself, ABA, is actually evolving. It more focuses on independence and, you know, happiness rather than complying with what is publicly deemed as, quote, appropriate

• 22:05Cara Santa Maria?

  behavior. That's not really what we're talking about, but that's the foundation of what happens in these therapy clinics.

• 22:12Speaker 06

  Can I say, though, Cara, that the evidence really is not strong?

• 22:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I mean, I was about to like, just rip it a new one, but then I looked and I was like, every major organization does say it's an evidence-based treatment.

• 22:23Speaker 06

  Evidence-based is not what it used to be. This is like, the whole purpose of science-based medicine is saying that evidence-based medicine is not enough, because things like this get termed evidence-based. But when you look at the evidence, so it's poor blinding, high risk of bias.

• 22:39Cara Santa Maria?

  And also, like, how do you define, I mean, there's a lot of problems with something. It's like, on the one hand, Steve, like, how do you define whether something like this works? On the other hand, you can't blind something like, so there are certain things where the evidence may not be as strong as we would like, but there's also, I worry that ABA falls in the camp like, like a lot of what I do, which is existential psychotherapy, where it's just, it's not as easy to do it.

• 23:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, but I think that you're about to tell us why this is, these stakes are pretty high here.

• 23:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, and that's true. The stakes are very, very high, especially because when I think about what I do in more existential orientations towards therapy, I'm often working with older adults, I'm working in end-of-life settings, and it's all about dignity and meaning and purpose. And, you know, very often, what we hear from patients is, I, Helps. I feel better. Whereas with children, especially children who are maybe more severe on an autism spectrum, they may not be able to communicate if they're in distress or if something is not helping.

• 23:45Speaker 06

  And the huge problem with this, I don't know if you came across this, but I've come across it in other contexts with treating kids, is that children improve as they age. And so everyone's going to get better, you know, to some extent, whatever measure you use. And so if you're not adequately controlling for that, it's very easy to create the illusion that any intervention's doing something.

• 24:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely. And what we've been talking about up to this point is the, an intervention like ABA done well.

• 24:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 24:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Done by the books and done to the highest standard. Unfortunately, that is not what is often happening in these autism clinics. So it looks like the main takeaways here, they have to do with, of course, money, doesn't it always? And they have to do with, let's talk a little bit about potential harm. So why have we seen an explosion? I'm talking like thousands of these clinics opening over the past decade when, you know, none or very, very few existed before that. Well, part of it is that there was a federal requirement that was passed that said that all state Medicaid programs, now remember here in the

• 24:56Cara Santa Maria?

  United States, we have federal funding for health services that really comes in two major buckets. There are others as well. There's Medicare, which exists for individuals 65 or older. It's sort of our version of a universal healthcare, but it's for older adults. And then there's Medicaid, which typically exists for people who, who reach certain sort of financial thresholds. So individuals in poverty and often a lot of the programs are dedicated towards children. Medicaid is interesting because it's, it's a bucket from the federal government that goes to each state to be managed the way they.

• 25:34Speaker 06

  States manage Medicaid.

• 25:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. So like here in California, we call it Medi-Cal. We have our own program. It's partially funded by the federal government, but it's also very much funded by our state government.

• 25:44Speaker 07

  Connecticut is called the Husky Program, I believe.

• 25:47Cara Santa Maria?

  There you go. And so there was a federal requirement that required that all state Medicaid programs pay for autism treatment. Right? Which is a good thing with kids need autism treatment. We got to make sure it gets paid for and it's not getting denied or rejected. The problem is an industry popped up around that saying, oh, there's dollars to be had. Let's see how we can extract those dollars. And guess who's investing? Private equity firms. So once this regulation passed and private equity firms kind of got in on this opportunity for billing, what the New York Times investigation found is that oftentimes

• 26:30Cara Santa Maria?

  the way that these services are billed and extracting as much money out of these government funds as possible seems to, I'm going to say sometimes, maybe often, I don't know if those numbers are in yet, but take priority over the wellness of the children. And so what are some of the major ways that they're doing it? Well, one is by over prescribing what are called hours. So I'm a government biller. I see patients in psychotherapy and I bill Medicare, different than Medicaid, but we also bill Medi-Cal here in California.

• 27:10Cara Santa Maria?

  And your CPT codes, the codes that you use when you're, when you're charging for services are usually in different increments, like time increments. So I can do a 30 minute session, a 45 minute session, or a 60 minute session. But there are very specific cutoffs for that. So if I'm billing, for example, for a 30 minute therapy session, legally, it has to be between 16 and 37 minutes long. If I am billing for a 45 minute therapy, legally, it has to be between 38 and 52 minutes. And if I'm billing for a 60 minute therapy session, legally, it has to be, it has to be 53 minutes or longer. These are like very specific cutoffs. That can mean the difference between getting reimbursed for your services or not.

• 27:56Cara Santa Maria?

  You have to bill them exactly correctly. Apparently, in a lot of these autism clinics, they are billed at the 15-minute increment. And there are some really interesting cutoffs. They tell a story about visiting a clinic where a child is napping, and they're waking the children up just before the seven-minute mark. Because if they're asleep for longer than seven minutes, they can't bill for that 15-minute increment.

• 28:20Speaker 07

  Oh, my gosh.

• 28:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Because you can't bill while a child is asleep. You can't bill while a child is in recess. You can only bill while a child is in therapy. And so, these clinics are serving, in a lot of cases, as de facto daycare.

• 28:36Speaker 07

  Right.

• 28:37Cara Santa Maria?

  But unfortunately, they don't have the same required oversight as most daycares. And they are also bringing in much, much, much more money, because these are clinics where therapy is being offered. But we also have to remember that ABA therapy can be delivered by a psychologist, by a, you know, a social worker, maybe even by a psychiatrist. But it can also be delivered by somebody with a high school diploma who went through 40 hours of training. You do not have to be a licensed provider to offer ABA therapy directly to children.

• 29:16Cara Santa Maria?

  And so, what this investigation showed is that there are clinics across the country with a surging spending that the actual coffers, the amount of money in the state budget for these Medicare programs is being taxed significantly. For example, they said last year in Colorado, their Medicaid spent more on care for children in autism treatment last year, specifically in therapy clinics, than for all emergency room care across the state. That's a big, big difference. And again, these people working with the children do not necessarily have a degree,

• 29:58Cara Santa Maria?

  and they don't need a specific license to do so. Obviously, there's a lot. We already mentioned some of the pushback against the therapy itself, the evidence behind. Behind it, the different organizations, for example, in Canada, this is covered by their healthcare system, but in the UK, the NHS won't pay for this. And here's another big one. More time means more money. So very often, these clinics will prescribe standard therapy of how many hours do you think would be like a standard therapy for a child with autism attending a clinic? Evan, what would you think? Let's say across a week. How many hours a week do you think they would prescribe?

• 30:42Speaker 07

  Um, 20 a week.

• 30:45Cara Santa Maria?

  The standard has become between 25 to 40. So oftentimes, parents are urged to keep their children out of school and to only attend these clinics.

• 30:56Speaker 07

  Oh, boy. That can cause a lot of problems.

• 31:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And sadly, it's kind of being positioned as an alternative to public school or an alternative to the type of support, which is already legally mandated and protected in public school. Now, listen, I know that there are parents listening to this. I know that there are people who have horror stories about not having their IEPs valued or respected within the public school setting. I know that there are parents who are going to these autism clinics with their children and they're seeing really good outcomes and they're really excited and happy that they're that these are available to them. But unfortunately, the data are showing,

• 31:40Cara Santa Maria?

  and it's not really panning out, that across the board, that is the case. And very often, kids get the services that they need in a public school setting, but they're spending, well, they're not spending, their governments are spending so much money in these private firms that are backed by private equity. And the kids are falling behind in school because of that. And unfortunately, we really, I think time is really going to tell with some of these kids, because as I said, this is, this industry has really popped up just over the last decade. So time is going to tell whether these kids are You know, worse for wear, whether they're benefiting.

• 32:22Cara Santa Maria?

  And also, the investigation showed a lot of examples of just like outright fraud, of outright abuse, which unfortunately, when you dig deep into any large industry, especially involving vulnerable children, sadly, that's what you're going to find. People are going to take advantage. There are going to be individuals that didn't get their background checks, that aren't, should never have been working in these clinics to begin with. For example, in Minnesota, prosecutors recently charged two clinic operators with fraudulently billing the government $46.6 million for either services they never delivered, or straight up giving kids fake diagnoses in order to enroll them in their clinics.

• 33:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Ooh, outright fraud. Yeah, so we're starting to see more of a crackdown, because this is a massive, this can be a massive source of Medicaid fraud, but it's another one of those examples of desperate people in desperate financial and emotional situations, looking for help, looking for help that feels like it's backed by science and by government oversight, and unfortunately, being taken advantage of. And so be on the lookout, folks. If you do see these autism clinics popping up in your town, if you have kids that are enrolled currently or that you want to enroll, I just would highly recommend that you do some digging, that you're checking in regularly,

• 33:51Cara Santa Maria?

  and that you don't just make the assumption that because it has a, you know, a shiny logo, and it says all the right words, and that the government is paying those Medicaid bills, that it's actually going about it the right way.

• 34:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'm getting serious predatory vibes off of this whole industry.

• 34:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Me too.

• 34:09Speaker 06

  And it's triggering a lot of, it's, to me, it feels very similar to the psychomotor patterning industry. Which is, just very, very quickly, again, it's this, you know, very intensive treatment, hours a day, every day, with the promise that it's going to cure your child who has some developmental disorder, whatever it is, and based upon a really thin justification without good backing in science. And so this feels similar. First of all, the whole idea that we're going to use rewards to train these behaviors out of these kids, sounds really simplistic, and I just don't like the one simplistic trick or hack that's going to cure this or significantly improve this complex problem. It has all of the issues

• 34:54Speaker 06

  with the psychomotor patterning industry where they're advising more and more hours, that becomes all consuming. There's like little oversight, and the evidence base is really, is mixed at best, is highly problematic, and is almost certainly not as good as the proponents are saying it is, just looking at the patterns.

• 35:17Cara Santa Maria?

  And like, and when we think about what is the specific ingredient here, you know, like, is it the ABA, or is it the fact that these kids are getting one-on-one attention all day?

• 35:26Speaker 06

  Right. But they're also not getting schooling, which I think is probably going to have a bigger detriment.

• 35:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. They're not getting education.

• 35:32Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's the social aspect of it all, as well.

• 35:34Cara Santa Maria?

  But you can see where parents get really stuck, because yes, their kids could be in daycare for, or they could be in school for seven hours a day, but if they're in this clinic for 10 and 12 hours a day, now I don't have to pay for daycare, now I don't have to pay for after-school care. They're getting everything they need, and the state is paying for it. So it's actually a trap for a lot of parents who are struggling financially as well, because how could they not? And it really does remind me, Steve, I had a patient recently who asked me to dig in a little bit, because they were getting like, basically predatory ads on social media, it's an older adult patient, for these, you know, Medicare-approved and Medicare-paid, perfectly free-to-you, healthcare advocate companies, where they'll

• 36:17Cara Santa Maria?

  help you navigate your healthcare system, and they'll basically act as like a case manager for you. And I Googled some of these companies, and everything I saw was like, this is a scam, it's just another way for these companies, they figured out how to charge Medicare for services, and then like, fall short on delivery.

• 36:33Speaker 06

  That's, you know, you can't just make a bucket of money available without really strict controls and oversight and evidence and all that stuff.

• 36:41Bob Novella?

  Take advantage.

• 36:41Speaker 06

  So that's, sounds like that's what happened here. Here's a bunch of money, it means well, and I'm not saying that these children don't need services and et cetera and can't benefit from interventions, but it just becomes a scam. You're creating the scam by just making all the money available without oversight.

• 36:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely. And like my cynicism says, and I'm not saying this is a blanket, this is a blanket statement, but the minute that an industry is developed that is sort of a helping industry, whether it's educational, healthcare, you know, providing food to individuals who are food insecure, the minute that you see like a social justice oriented industry form and then private equity gets behind it.

• 37:18Speaker 07

  Oh, gosh.

• 37:19Cara Santa Maria?

  I would say, let's, let's make sure that we're being really careful here.

• 37:23Speaker 07

  Become the venture capitalists.

• 37:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 37:25Speaker 07

  Oh, gosh.

• 37:26Speaker 06

  All right. Thanks, Kara. Jay, I understand there's some problems with this climate change database.

• 37:32Jay Novella?

  Yeah, well, first off, let me ask you guys a question about, so you have climate change, right?

• 37:39Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 37:40Jay Novella?

  What other things do you think about that are associated with climate change in your head?

• 37:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Pollution.

• 37:46Speaker 07

  Health.

• 37:47Cara Santa Maria?

  I often think about, yeah, like environmental health.

• 37:48Speaker 07

  People's health.

• 37:49Jay Novella?

  Do you guys ever think of any people in particular?

• 37:52Speaker 06

  Well, people. Climate refugees. I'm talking about Al Gore.

• 37:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Refugees, sure.

• 37:56Jay Novella?

  Right. I think Steve got it. So it's Al Gore, right?

• 37:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay.

• 38:00Jay Novella?

  So, I, you know, I think I have to say this because, you know, we have people who may not really remember or know who Al Gore is because they're, they're too young. Well, Al Gore was the Vice President of the United States. He did run for president and he lost, right? That was a very contentious election, right? But he is very active and he's, you know, he's an environmentalist and, you know, he actually does, has done quite a bit of incredible work since his VP years. He created a documentary called An Inconvenient Truth back in 2006, which was for most people the first time they really heard about global warming and had some type of base understanding of what it is and what's going on. So Al-

• 38:43Jay Novella?

  Al Gore was recently named in some article titles here, right? Like, you know, pulling him out from the past. This is making the rounds. You're gonna, you guys will probably see it if you're, if you've been looking at science news recently, I'm sure that a lot of people have seen it. It says, "Al Gore-founded Climate Pollution Database" had, you know, was found with errors or whatever they say about it. But they're gonna invoke his name and say that, you know, scientists, you know, have major errors with this Al Gore, you know, founded database or whatever. There's no reason to bring up Al Gore here whatsoever. Right? First of all, so like, this can't help it, but even with some reputable outlets here that are using his name, it's for, to have political weight.

• 39:28Jay Novella?

  And there's something that really bothers me about this because during a time in human history when tons of people are only reading headlines, right? This is amazingly bad science communication. You know, not just to bring up his name, but to phrase this article with something that has to do with like, scientists found major errors and there's like some type of like turmoil going on here or whatever. That isn't actually what's going on. If you read the article or you read the original source information, you know, this isn't a big dramatic gotcha moment for, for climate, you know, information, for, for anything to do with us measuring climate change. The denialists are gonna spin this, right? And it's really frustrating to me because we're handing them, you know,

• 40:13Jay Novella?

  using this type of article against us. Because again, they'll tell other people, like they'll say, you know, the climate data is garbage now. We have the proof and they're making it up and you can't trust climate science and all that nonsense. And they'll, they'll pass it around and they'll probably only communicate the name of these articles, which are saying, you know, that scientists have, you know, found major data errors in climate, in climate information.

• 40:37Cara Santa Maria?

  So what's the relationship to Al Gore? You said there isn't one at all?

• 40:41Jay Novella?

  There, well, the only relationship is that Al Gore is associated with climate change and he, at some point, I don't know if he personally backed this company called Climate Trace, right? You know, this is the company that tracks global warming information, like the scientific data. And I think at some point he funded it or funded them or whatever, was involved with getting them funding. He wanted to fund these organizations and scientists who are trying to collect the data that are going to give us a clearer picture of what's going on. There's not, there's no malfeasance here for him to have, you know, been involved with getting funding to this company and probably a lot of other companies or organizations that are trying to, you know, to wrap their heads around climate change. So the database that is being

• 41:24Jay Novella?

  referenced is called Climate Trace and its goal was to figure out where greenhouse gas emissions are actually coming from around the world. And instead of relying on, you know, like where are the other places that we could get information from, like the average person or even people that are trying to- Governments. Right, governments, big companies that put out their own reports on things. Climate Trace was using like raw satellite information, machine learning and other data sources to independently estimate emissions instead of having it go through, you know, these potentially politically motivated sources that could skew data, you know, look at what's happening in the United States as an example. So there was a group of researchers at Northern Arizona

• 42:09Jay Novella?

  University and they compared Climate Trace's estimates for road vehicle carbon dioxide emissions in 260 US urban areas against another database called Vulcan, which was doing the same thing. And Vulcan has a high resolution fossil fuel CO2 emissions inventory and they have their own ways of gathering the data. So the study that was published, environmental research letters, found that there was discrepancies between Climate Trace's information and conclusions and Vulcan's information and their conclusions. And according to the researchers, Climate Trace's city level road emission estimates were on average, how off do you think they were, guys, from Vulcan's?

• 42:51Speaker 06

  20%.

• 42:53Jay Novella?

  Anybody else?

• 42:54Bob Novella?

  10%.

• 42:55Jay Novella?

  70%!

• 42:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah! That's not good.

• 42:57Jay Novella?

  70% lower. Like this is like ding ding ding, massive problem going on here. So, you know, this isn't like a rounding error, you know, like this is a, this is like a, this is a core issue that they're having that is, you know, some type of error is being introduced- Into this data and they had to figure out what it was.

• 43:15Cara Santa Maria?

  You know, we call that in, um, in like most statistics, but definitely when we're doing like, uh, social sciences statistics.

• 43:22Jay Novella?

  What?

• 43:22Cara Santa Maria?

  We call it convergent validity. So when you're looking at construct validity, like you want to know if a construct, like something you're measuring is actually a valid measure of that thing. You look at two different ways, two different measures that are trying to yield similar results.

• 43:38Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 43:39Cara Santa Maria?

  And when they give you wildly different results, you're like, huh, maybe we don't actually know how to measure this thing.

• 43:45Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 43:45Cara Santa Maria?

  We need to get better at that.

• 43:47Jay Novella?

  Well, the, so the researchers that looked into all this, they suggested that the problem may have come from issues with the machine learning model. And this included assumptions about how many vehicles there were, what kind of vehicles there were, you know, how efficiently were they burning fuel? And how those factors, you know, translated into emissions. It's really complicated. You know, you have all this raw data and then you have to be able to process it now. There could be a problem with the raw data itself and/or there could be a problem with the processing and the researchers were saying, we think it's the processing. So Climate Trace responded to this, you know, to this research that was done on them.

• 44:26Jay Novella?

  And the study, they said the study was based on an older version of its city level data that contained a bug, right? So they, they flat out admitted there was an error in their programming. And according to Climate Trace, the problem affected how road transportation emissions were being assigned at the city level, which made some local estimates look much lower than they should have been. So, you know, their formal, um, response was we've identified the bug, we've corrected it, we've updated the database. And after the fix, you know, the current road emission estimates are much closer to Vulcan's numbers roughly within six to seven percent, which I guess is acceptable at that point.

• 45:04Jay Novella?

  This is interesting, right? Because the headline makes it sound like there was malfeasance, you know, or data was being hidden or whatever.

• 45:12Cara Santa Maria?

  That Al Gore was doing it on purpose.

• 45:14Jay Novella?

  Yeah. And that Al Gore, who was like pulling strings or whatever, like, you know, that, that could be the most absurd, um, interpretation. But again, people will, will come to that. Why else would they put his name in the title then?

• 45:26Cara Santa Maria?

  People believed in pizza gate. People believed in QAnon.

• 45:31Bob Novella?

  Jay, I remember, I got, I got happy when I found out that they underpredicted instead of overpredicting. Because you were trying to be slimy and say, "Look, climate change is real," when you knew it wasn't. You would overpredict. You would make it worse, right? Then, so that kind of error was like, "Okay, good." That may, it may be happy that it was an underprediction, because it's less obviously, you know, this, you know, intentional

• 45:56Speaker 06

  But Bob, they can play it both ways.

• 45:58Cara Santa Maria?

  It has worse outcomes for, like, humanity.

• 46:00Speaker 06

  I've heard, I've seen climate change deniers work those kinds of errors both ways, right? Saying, "Oh, we were overpredicting." They say, "See, they were cheating." If you're, if you're underpredicting, say, "Oh, see, it's not happening, so they have to goose the numbers now." Now they're pretending like they were underpredicting.

• 46:16Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 46:17Jay Novella?

  Yeah, they'll play it both sides.

• 46:18Bob Novella?

  Yeah. So, I'm sure.

• 46:20Jay Novella?

  But this is a very different, you know, story than saying that the data is wrong and there was actual malfeasance, which, you know, that's what the takeaway is with, with titles like that. People are gonna look for that type of conclusion.

• 46:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. What other industries do you see that, especially those that have been deeply politicized? Do you see that systematically happening, where the researchers or the interested parties say, "Oh, we found an error. Ooh, thanks for pointing that out."

• 46:48Jay Novella?

  Right, exactly.

• 46:49Cara Santa Maria?

  "We want to do better."

• 46:50Jay Novella?

  And look, no, we're not saying that science functions perfectly in every organization everywhere around the world all the time. It doesn't, and it's far from doing that. But science, you know, when it's performed correctly, and when all the rules are applied, and all of the methodology is there, it works. And it's, and it, and we have the, the test of time here, because science always works over time, right? It does have a very strong self-correcting nature to it that makes it so eventually, these things, these things get figured out.

• 47:21Speaker 06

  All right, thanks, Jay. All right, Bob, tell me, how many minutes should I be exercising every week?

• 47:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yes, please. I want to know if I'm doing enough.

• 47:29Bob Novella?

  A lot. Okay, let's go through this.

• 47:31Speaker 06

  If the, if the, I think if the question is, "Are we doing enough?" The answer is no.

• 47:35Bob Novella?

  I do, wait Bob, I want to find enough.

• 47:37Cara Santa Maria?

  I go to gymnastics, I do at least four hours of gymnastics a week, at least. That's on a not great week. Sometimes it's six. Am I doing enough?

• 47:45Bob Novella?

  It depends on your goals and probably, but let's see, let's see what this, let's see what this study said though. So this was, this was a new, large observational study showing that, that the current public health recommendations that we may have all heard of, 150 minutes, right, of moderate to vigorous physical activity per week, it may be more of a, that might be more of a bare minimum than we might have even have thought. So the study suggests that if your goal is cardiovascular risk reductions, right, to be specific, the benefits may continue well beyond that initial 150 minutes. It may continue, get this, possibly into the 560 to

• 48:29Bob Novella?

  610 minutes per week range. That's 80 to 90 minutes per day. So that was kind of their takeaway. So yeah, this kind of pissed me off, but let's go through the details here.

• 48:42Cara Santa Maria?

  That's a lot.

• 48:43Bob Novella?

  It's a lot. The research is, these are from researchers based in five institutions, all in China and Macau. The study is based on, this is important, this is the UK Biobank, which is a large, huge British health research database, half a million adults aged between 40 and 69. And this study was published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. Okay, so let's break down what this was all about. So this all starts, like I said, with this Biobank, right? Researchers mined this huge database to find study appropriate study subjects. So in a lot of, a lot of ways, this is like a database archaeology than, than anything else, because this has already existed with, with lots of information. So they really

• 49:25Bob Novella?

  didn't even, all they did was mine that data and then evaluate the data is ultimately what they did. So with, with a half a million people in there, as you might imagine, there was a lot of winnowing, there was a lot of filtering out. So of those half a million people, 100,000 wore motion sensors on their wrists for seven consecutive days back. Back when this, you know, they were added to the database years ago. So they wore the motion sensor and that is actually kind of a big deal. Wearing a motion sensor sensor to determine activity because a lot of studies like this, they use self-reporting, right? And that is, Steve, you will agree. Notoriously over estimations. People are horrible at relating like, how active are you? How much time do you spend, you know, working out all this stuff?

• 50:09Bob Novella?

  So having something that's much more objective, objective, having this sensor on their wrist for seven days. I like that fact that, you know, that that was, that didn't rely on self-reporting so much like so many other similar studies. So there's that. So that was, that was a critical thing that they were looking for. They needed, they wanted these people and that was a hundred thousand of them. Uh, some of these people, a subset of a hundred thousand had also done this, these um stationary bike tests that were kind of, they weren't like maximal, like go until you can't do it anymore. It was submaximal, but they did these tests and they did that to get an estimate of um the VO2 max. And we, we actually discussed VO2 max recently. It's essentially, there's a lot of ways to describe this, but it's, one way to describe

• 50:51Bob Novella?

  it is a measure of how efficiently your body gets, transports and uses oxygen for these sustained physical efforts. So if you have a higher VO2 max, you could interpret that as being more fit, absolutely. Apparently they use this as also as a way to give an estimate on cardio respiratory fitness. So there was also, each person also had lots of other data, lots of other potentially confounding data as well, I might add, but smoking status, alcohol consumption, health and, and diet data, their body mass index, heart rate, blood pressure, et cetera, et cetera. So they got all these people, when it, when it was all said and done, they ended up with 17,000 and 88 people, a decent chunk of people.

• 51:34Bob Novella?

  Now, keep in mind, I want to reiterate this, uh, this is an observational study. Uh, this means that cause and effect are a lot harder to nail down because the researchers are essentially just sitting back in a sense and watching what the real life behavior was. And they're not assigning, you know, randomly assigning people to exercise groups. And things like in a clinical trial. So observational data, you know, observational studies are limited in that way. And then there was the follow up. These people were followed for up to like eight years. And, you know, how did they fare over those eight years? How many cardiovascular events were there? And they, and they found 1,233 cardiovascular

• 52:16Bob Novella?

  events in these 17,000 plus people. So that included mostly atrial fibrillations, 874 of them. That was kind of the biggest thing. But they also found 156 myocardial infarctions or heart attacks. They found 111 heart failures and 92 stroke events in these 17,000 people over about roughly eight years. So, so that's, this is kind of all the data. This is the data that they all, they correlated it into something like a cardiovascular risk map. Stephen Care, I'm curious if you're, if you've heard of this before. They use something that piqued my interest. They use Mandelian randomization. The idea behind Mandelian randomization was that, that as we know, nature randomly deals everyone a different

• 52:59Bob Novella?

  set of genetic cards, right? You have a genetic hand, right? So some genetic markers that people have are associated with being more active or having, or having higher fitness or just more fit, higher cardio respiratory fitness. If people dealt those cards also have a lower heart risk, that makes the fitness, heart health connection look more causal, not just a lifestyle coincidence, right? So they're trying to, they're correlating these markers with and trying to show the connection between, you know, lower heart risk and greater fitness. Cause if they can show that the fitter you are, the better your heart health is, then that, that kind of makes it more of a, of a causal relationship instead of just like, you know, oh, it could be explained by other confounding factors.

• 53:44Bob Novella?

  I don't know if I'm describing this.

• 53:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Do they have access to the gene markers?

• 53:49Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

• 53:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 53:50Bob Novella?

  Right. Oh, yeah. So when they're, so when they're, when they're kind of correlating all of this data and trying to come up with, you know, with, with a conclusions, this was, this was factored in. Just to make the observational study. A little bit more of a more causal, you know, it's never going to be really as solidly causal as something where you're assigning people and it's double-blind and all that stuff. But this is just to help it to be a little bit more rigorous. So that's kind of one of the things that they did that I thought was interesting. It's important to mention the limitations of the study. The researchers admit that the the study group that they used, the 17,000 people, they could have been healthier and fitter than the general population.

• 54:32Bob Novella?

  That that's a possibility that they that they didn't investigate or rule out or anything, I guess.

• 54:38Cara Santa Maria?

  But there's no reason to believe that, right?

• 54:39Bob Novella?

  No, no, no, they just say that they could have been healthier and fitter than the general population, which would skew their results a little bit. So that's just one, that's one of the limitations that they didn't have an answer for necessarily. So that's just the limitation. Like another example here is that they did not measure how sedentary these people were, or how much, how much exercise did you do that was less vigorous, you know, than than others, you know? So this wasn't a perfect study, obviously, and I'm just trying to list some of these limitations to the study. And also, one thing that I noticed that the VO2 max was estimated, it wasn't directly measured, because to directly measure VO2 max, it's harder. You got to feed them the the air or the oxygen as they're working out and every and every

• 55:24Bob Novella?

  tiny bit of it is measured and it's not lost to the atmosphere in the room. So, yeah, it's a little bit harder to do a real VO2 max test, which they did not do in this study. So they just kind of estimated it from that that submaximal life, you know, exercise, you know, exercise bike thing that they did. So that's another, just another limitation of the of this study. And if they do it again, maybe they could try to get this information, but I just wanted to put that out there. Okay, so now the study conclusions. And I wanted to say here that, you know, I rarely, I rarely get pissed off when I read study conclusions, but this one pissed me off. It's just, it was just very frustrating, not that like, oh, it's stupid or wrong. It's just like, damn, I didn't know that. What the hell have I been doing? This is from their, this is a direct quote from their paper.

• 56:08Bob Novella?

  "The current guideline of 150 minutes per week offers a universal but modest safety margin of approximately 8 to 9% risk reduction. Whereas achieving a larger relative risk reduction greater than 30% appears to require activity volumes three to four times higher than current max minimums across fitness strata." So my take on that is, is that 150 minutes per week of moderate to vigorous exercise will, is only associated with an 8 to 9% risk reduction of those cardio events. So that, so to me, you're 150 a week and you're getting only 8 to 9% reduction of those things that I mentioned. The atrial fibrillations, but also the strokes and the heart attacks

• 56:53Bob Novella?

  and all that nasty stuff. So an 8 to 9%, that just seems like a lot less than I thought it would have been if you were doing, you know, say 150 to 250 minutes a week. It seems, it seems a lot smaller. So that's one of the reasons why I was frustrated. To get the risk reduction that I assumed I was fairly close to getting already, I would have to double what I'm doing now. And that's, and that, so that's, that's where my frustration came in. It's like, oh my God, I thought I was doing some good cardio here. And now I've got to double it, you know, double or triple what I've been doing to get what I, to get the effect that I thought I was already getting based on this study. So that's, but that was just my immediate kind of knee jerk annoyed Bob reaction. So after, after reading more research and some time to think about it,

• 57:37Bob Novella?

  here's a, I think is a better takeaway to this study. If you, if you come across it, if you want to even read about it online. It was really interesting. So the 150 minute per week guideline is not wrong. It's important because it gets you in the game, right? It has real tangible benefits. And, and there's far, far too many Americans, and I think probably people throughout the world, that don't reach that goal. They don't do 150 minutes of activity, of at least moderate activity every week. So this is an important goal for a lot of, lot of people. So.

• 58:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Did they define moderate activity?

• 58:09Speaker 06

  I know what the standard definition of moderate activity is. It's enough to get your heart rate up, but you could still talk while you're doing it.

• 58:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay.

• 58:17Bob Novella?

  That's a good, that's a good way to.

• 58:19Speaker 06

  Severe, like rigorous exercise is like you're too out of breath to talk, you know, significantly.

• 58:25Bob Novella?

  Right. It's important to understand and to stress that what this study is saying, or what the study is reinforcing is that 150 minutes a week is the floor. That isn't, that is not the ceiling.

• 58:37Speaker 06

  But overall, it sounds like this is good news. It basically just means that there, there isn't as much of a ceiling on the benefit of regular exercise as we thought there was. So you could do even better. So just do as much as you can. If you could do more, there's more benefit to it. But we do have to emphasize the caveat that this is an observational correlational research. And it was a, it's a big study and a lot of it is in sync with other smaller studies. And we, and there's, there's ways this study could be even, even better. And I don't think because of this, public health agencies should start saying, everyone needs 10 hours a week. That would absolutely backfire. I mean,

• 59:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, people would just say, I'm never going to get that. So I won't even try.

• 59:13Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God. Cause 10 hours a week is just way, way too much. That's like, that's like talking to a new skeptic and going right for, right, you know, right for their heart in terms of like, God doesn't exist. You know, like whoa, whoa, take it easy, slow down. You know, you gotta teach them, you know, the, you know, skeptical mindset before you jump down their throat with that.

• 59:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying. That, that minimum is like, yeah, if you do the 150 minutes a week, that's kind of where the benefits start. You could, if you could do more, great. You know, but.

• 59:39Bob Novella?

  Well, if I, if I, yeah, right. If I put it in a sentence, it would be 150 minutes is a meaningful minimum, but the benefit curve does not stop there.

• 59:47Speaker 06

  All right. Thanks, Bob. Evan, do birds really fear women more than men?

• 59:52Speaker 07

  Well, if you read the headlines, you might be like, I think.

• 59:57Cara Santa Maria?

  What?

• 59:58Speaker 07

  Once again, we have a baffle of scientists making headlines, literally.

• 1:00:02Bob Novella?

  Baffle?

• 1:00:04Speaker 07

  Here's the headline that I came across. Why are city birds more afraid of women than men? Scientists are baffled. Of course they are. The actual research paper is titled, Sex Matters: European Urban Birds Flee Approaching Women Sooner Than Approaching Men. This was published in the British Ecological Society's journal titled People and Nature. Researchers examined flight initiation distance. That means it's how close a human can get before a bird flies away.

• 1:00:39Speaker 06

  I am extremely familiar with that distance.

• 1:00:44Speaker 07

  So I was gonna ask Steve if you've had any practical.

• 1:00:48Speaker 06

  Oh, my God, that's every birding experience, right? So I, when I see a bird, for example, I want to take a picture of. First, I take a picture, then I get a little bit closer, take another picture, and I keep doing that until it flies away. And it's remarkably consistent how close you can get to birds before they fly away.

• 1:01:06Speaker 07

  Does it matter the bird?

• 1:01:08Speaker 06

  It really doesn't. I mean, sure.

• 1:01:11Cara Santa Maria?

  A fledgling pigeon will let you walk right up to it. They're real dumb.

• 1:01:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, there are some, there are some exceptions, but for most wild birds, like ones that are not massively acclimated to humans. It's, it is remarkably similar.

• 1:01:26Speaker 07

  Did you ever think there could be a difference between, say, a man and a woman approaching the same bird?

• 1:01:32Speaker 06

  Never even occurred to me.

• 1:01:33Speaker 07

  No, nor I, which is why this kind of, this headline kind of, kind of reached out and grabbed me.

• 1:01:38Cara Santa Maria?

  I would also think if there were a difference, it would be in the other direction.

• 1:01:42Speaker 07

  Well, that's.

• 1:01:42Cara Santa Maria?

  That women would be like better at skulking, like lighter on our feet.

• 1:01:46Speaker 07

  That was the prediction the researchers made, Kara, going into it. And then it yielded the opposite result, which is one of the things they were like, oh, that's interesting. Researchers observed 37 urban bird species across five European countries and found that, on average, birds let male observers get about one meter closer than female observers before fleeing. So on average, women observers, the birds fled at about 8.5 meters. For men, it was 7.5 meters. And, you know, that's a pretty straightforward behavioral metric, in a sense, you know, you have a researcher.

• 1:02:27Speaker 06

  It's a number.

• 1:02:27Speaker 07

  Towards, yeah, walk towards the bird, control pace, measure how close you get, bird flies away. Straightforward, right? But of course, many headlines that have covered the news item, they were implying that birds somehow recognize human gender. And have developed maybe a preference against women. That's really not what the study demonstrated, a little more nuanced than that. Here are some details from the paper. There were 2,701 bird approaches that were analyzed. Again, 37 bird species, five European countries.

• 1:03:01Speaker 07

  Eight observers in total, four of which were men and four were women. And of course, flight initiation distance, FID, of course, the key metric here. And the researchers did, they attempted to control for a person's height, their clothing, their hair visibility. And of course, there were other factors involved, you know, the size of a flock. They were approaching a flock of birds, the sort of vegetation that was nearby, species relatedness, land use variables was another category.

• 1:03:34Speaker 06

  And I was very interested to read that they told them how to walk, which of course, at birders learn how to approach birds too. Do you know what the key factor is?

• 1:03:47Speaker 07

  Slow pace?

• 1:03:48Speaker 06

  Slow pace, low, not really.

• 1:03:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Noise?

• 1:03:52Speaker 06

  Well, you're, it's given that you're trying to be quiet.

• 1:03:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Smooth, like not?

• 1:03:57Speaker 06

  No, you actually want to do it in fits and starts. Like you don't want to do it all at once. You want to take a few steps and stop.

• 1:04:03Speaker 07

  Oh.

• 1:04:03Speaker 06

  Take a few steps, but also you want to, you never go directly at them. You zigzag. You're tacking towards them. So yeah, so it's slow, few steps at a time, never directly at the bird.

• 1:04:14Speaker 07

  Interesting.

• 1:04:15Speaker 06

  So I don't know exactly what they told them to do, but they did say that they made them walk the same way because that does matter.

• 1:04:20Speaker 07

  They don't know why this pattern, and it is a pattern, appears. That's, they're left scratching their heads.

• 1:04:27Cara Santa Maria?

  And they're sure, they're sure it's a pattern of male versus female and not just two or three researchers versus two or three other researchers.

• 1:04:36Speaker 07

  Well, it was kind of a small sample, right?

• 1:04:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 1:04:38Speaker 07

  We're only talking about eight and that's one of the big limitations.

• 1:04:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. So like if Joe always made them fly, or like Sally always made them fly and Joe was like really good at approaching birds, that would have skewed the data.

• 1:04:49Speaker 07

  Could have, yeah, because you are dealing with, with, with two, the numbers here are too small. And they, the researchers acknowledged that. They, they definitely did.

• 1:04:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Maybe women remind birds of children.

• 1:05:00Speaker 07

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 1:05:01Cara Santa Maria?

  And maybe children are terrifying to birds because they're unpredictable. I know my dog barks at small children all the time, no matter what, because all of his interactions with small children have been terrifying to me.

• 1:05:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:05:14Speaker 07

  Oh, gosh.

• 1:05:14Speaker 06

  They do things like poke them in the eyes randomly.

• 1:05:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 1:05:18Speaker 07

  But is that, is that like across, do all dogs have, have a similar?

• 1:05:26Cara Santa Maria?

  No, my friend has a small child and her dog does not care what she does to him.

• 1:05:31Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah, right. I've seen some videos of dogs, you're right, the children will crawl all over them, the dog will just lay there and take it.

• 1:05:36Cara Santa Maria?

  And I'm always like, this is bad that your, your dog puts up with so much because the next dog your kid comes across will not.

• 1:05:42Speaker 07

  And like I said, they, they expected that it was going to be the opposite result here. And, and I think the main thing was that they may have thought that birds might fear men more due to historical hunting patterns. That was one of the things they speculated, but they really can't, can't pinpoint it. Here's what they said. We found that male birds were more risk tolerant than females and unexpectedly, birds in general escape sooner when approached by women than men. And again, it was a one meter distance on average. We discussed various hypotheses to explain birds' escape responses related to the observer's sex. However, for the researchers necessary to fully understand the phenomenon. And, and when they're saying sex, it's important to understand they, they, it's an operational

• 1:06:27Speaker 07

  framing as opposed to, associated with the observers themselves. It's not some proof that birds conceptually recognize human gender categories, right? So, so they're, that's the subtlety there. Behavioral ecology, small effects, hidden, hidden and confounding factors, they're often difficult to untangle. So this is by no means robust. It's interesting. And of course, you know, and, and like Jay was talking about with, with his news item, you make a sensational headline out of that, people are going to stop, you know, and, and then take a second look at it, you know, to, to read the product and, you know, it does work.

• 1:07:09Speaker 07

  It definitely does because it's just, it just, I don't know, it just jumped off the page at me like, what are you kidding?

• 1:07:16Speaker 06

  Evan, did you emphasize, did you emphasize that this is city birds?

• 1:07:20Speaker 07

  I did say city birds, yeah.

• 1:07:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, so that, so these are birds that would have a lot of contact with humans. And I think that may be meaningful here, though they didn't do a comparison to rural birds or suburban birds. But it does make it at least semi plausible that these birds are learning something about human behavior. We know that birds could recognize like individual people. And so it's not implausible that they, just on average women, I don't know, they might walk faster or be more likely to want to feed them and therefore go right at them or something, whatever. There might be some behavioral difference that the birds are learning. And that's making, yeah.

• 1:08:02Cara Santa Maria?

  My guess is it doesn't matter that they did thousands of approaches when there were only eight people.

• 1:08:07Speaker 06

  Eight people.

• 1:08:08Speaker 07

  It's too small.

• 1:08:09Speaker 06

  It does seem artificial. It does seem artificial, but it'd be very interesting if they followed up with more and different researchers, you know, people and see if it's consistent. So yeah, before we speculate too much on why this is, we have to prove that it is an actual phenomenon. And we're not there yet with this one study.

• 1:08:28Cara Santa Maria?

  These are bird researchers, right?

• 1:08:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:08:30Cara Santa Maria?

  You're so right, Steve. Like a lot of urban birds, especially like corvids, they remember people.

• 1:08:36Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:08:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Like individual people. So if these bird researchers have ever done any naturalistic bird research before, these encounters might have been with birds that know them.

• 1:08:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, I don't know, but that's interesting.

• 1:08:49Speaker 07

  There's a lot of birds.

• 1:08:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but there's also, you know. Yeah, it's like, there's a lot of bias when you're only dealing with eight people.

• 1:08:57Speaker 06

  Yeah. All right, it should be, it'd be interesting to see if there's any follow-up study on this. We have, this is again, one of those ones we have to keep on our radar, either positive or negative. I'd be very interested to see if this replicates. But until it does, it's hard to take it too seriously.

• 1:09:13Speaker 07

  And it's hard not to think of you, Steve, when I see a bird.

• 1:09:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:09:16Speaker 07

  Science news item, of course, like, ooh, Steve's gonna like this one.

• 1:09:21Speaker 06

  Okay, guys, have you heard about the latest Ebola outbreak?

• 1:09:25Bob Novella?

  A little bit, yeah.

• 1:09:26Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:09:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, it hasn't been that much in the news.

• 1:09:29Cara Santa Maria?

  I've been seeing it a lot in like the science news. I guess if you're, if you're reading science news regularly.

• 1:09:34Speaker 06

  Definitely if you're reading science news, you know, mainstream news, it's not front page. You know, it, you know, it is enough that we should be like, okay, let's see what's going on here. But there's really two stories here. The first story is about the outbreak itself, which is happening in the DRC, the Democratic Republic of Congo, also in Uganda. It is a species of Ebola, the Bundi Bugio species, which is a rarer one. And while it's less deadly than the Zaire and some of the other ones, it's also, yeah, it's also one that does not have a vaccine and does not have any specific antiviral treatment.

• 1:10:17Speaker 06

  So it's supportive care only. And we are, we're getting, I read different numbers and although everyone says these numbers are definitely an underestimate, like we are not capturing all of them, but I'm reading numbers between 800 and 1,000 cases and 75 to 100 deaths. So we're kind of at that level, which is a big outbreak for Ebola.

• 1:10:42Bob Novella?

  Yeah, but nowhere near the, nowhere near the, you know, what we have seen in the past 10 or 15 years.

• 1:10:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, we've had some big outbreaks in the last 10 or 15 years. Before that, this would have been.

• 1:10:51Bob Novella?

  Many thousands, many times more than what we're seeing right now.

• 1:10:54Speaker 06

  But we're getting, you know, we're cracking 1,000 with this. So this is getting into again, one of the bigger ones. Prior to that, like a 40 or 50 people, like that's an outbreak. Now we're like, it's routine that it's hundreds and cracking 1,000. But, and in the DRC, this is their 14th, you know, recorded Ebola outbreak. I should mention that this is not a disease that we, that we have the ability to eradicate because it has a lot of animal vectors. So it just basically exists in the jungle and every now and then it's going to break out into the human population. What's the risk for the general public while the World Health Organization is now recently declared this a health emergency of international concern?

• 1:11:39Speaker 06

  That phrase may sound familiar to you like that was, you may have heard that in the early days of COVID-19. This is not going to be another COVID-19. Let me just say that upfront, right?

• 1:11:49Cara Santa Maria?

  No, it won't.

• 1:11:49Bob Novella?

  Oh, no.

• 1:11:50Speaker 06

  Because this is the Ebola is transmitted through direct fluid contact. One of the big concerns is burial practices, right? Or healthcare workers who are treating these people. So people who are in direct contact with patients or bodies. But it's still, you know, it can spread enough that you can get an epidemic that is continuing to spread. The last DRC Ebola outbreak, how long do you think it took before the, it ended? Like the, the World Health Organization said, it's over.

• 1:12:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Like from the first confirmed case?

• 1:12:23Speaker 06

  From the first case to the last case, what was the duration of the last?

• 1:12:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Years.

• 1:12:26Bob Novella?

  Four months?

• 1:12:26Speaker 06

  Two years, two years.

• 1:12:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Two years, yeah. It'd have to be years. Oh, they cracked. Because we're talking a lot of times people in very remote places. It's very difficult to get this, these healthcare services to them and pockets like they fester. They pop up, they fester, they spread.

• 1:12:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, so this is like, they're getting them every few years and they're lasting, you know, could last up to a couple of years. So like they're almost continuously in one Ebola outbreak or another. Obviously there, there's time in between, but I mean, you know what I mean? It's pretty regular.

• 1:12:56Bob Novella?

  And this one is about what, what do they say? 25 to 45% mortality rate, which is pretty high.

• 1:13:02Cara Santa Maria?

  That's horrible.

• 1:13:03Bob Novella?

  But nothing, I mean, but Ebola Zaire is up to 90% mortality.

• 1:13:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but you've got to remember that that one has become significantly more well studied and we have better treatments for it.

• 1:13:13Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:14Cara Santa Maria?

  25 to 40% with nothing but supportive care is terrifying.

• 1:13:18Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that's not good, man.

• 1:13:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And that means that also people, so if people were inoculated already against the other ones, they don't have any, it doesn't confer any benefit?

• 1:13:30Speaker 06

  I don't think so.

• 1:13:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Is that right? Oh, that's awful. And also talk about like public health trust in, in. In very remote regions where people, you know, were painstakingly reached out convinced to get these vaccines and then all of a sudden, why am I still dying of Ebola?

• 1:13:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, so in the DRC, there's a few issues. One is the extremely remote areas, hard to get aid to. But also, there's conflict happening in the region right now. So it's not a safe place to be. And they're very resource poor. So it's kind of like a perfect storm, you know, not where we do not want to have, you know, this kind of simmering outbreak happening, especially with a virus as deadly as any of the Ebola variants. But this one.

• 1:14:13Bob Novella?

  Yeah, one of the biggest mistakes that they made was when they did the initial testing, they said, hey, man, let's make sure this isn't Ebola. They did a test, but they tested basically for Ebola Zaire and maybe Sudan. They did not test for this specific variant. And so they got back a negative. And they're like, okay, so they basically lost about a month, which was a critical month. You know, I don't think we'd be anywhere near as bad as it is now if they just did that test initially.

• 1:14:42Speaker 06

  The size of these outbreaks is mostly determined by how big of a village or town or city they get into, you know. You get one person getting into a bigger, like a small city or a big town, and suddenly it jumps by an order of magnitude in terms of the spread. So it's a risk. And of course, that can keep happening. And especially in any cities with distant travel. This is how like patients wound up in the United States, you know, in whatever that was, 10, 15 years ago, in one of those outbreaks.

• 1:15:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and the healthcare workers themselves can be, I mean, luckily, they have more, you know, education and better at, you know, preventive measures. But at the same time, they become vectors sometimes because they're entering into locations that they wouldn't have otherwise been in and moving around. And what a way to go, too. This is such a

• 1:15:35Speaker 06

  It's a horrible way to die. So that's, that's one of the stories, right? The other story is our response to this outbreak and why it is not good.

• 1:15:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Are we even having a response?

• 1:15:47Speaker 06

  Well, yeah, there is a response. Absolutely.

• 1:15:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 1:15:49Speaker 06

  So.

• 1:15:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Like from our government?

• 1:15:51Speaker 06

  So the US is responding, the World Health Organization is responding, the CDC is responding, and local organizations are responding. But the but the response is way too little. And it is disorganized and ineffective. There's a good article written by some infectious disease specialists called Panic, Neglect, Repeat: The 2026 Ebola Outbreak Shows Us We Must Change The Pattern For Global Pandemic Preparedness And Response. Basically making the case that we are less prepared, less prepared for this Ebola outbreak than we were for the previous one. We are getting worse.

• 1:16:32Cara Santa Maria?

  It'll surprise me.

• 1:16:32Speaker 06

  Partly because, and so what are the reasons for that? Part of it is because of COVID-19. We're still experiencing a backlash against public health measures and trust in science, trust in the governments, trust in public health measures. And that is hampering everything.

• 1:16:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but what about we completely defunded USAID?

• 1:16:52Speaker 06

  100%. So the bigger, the far bigger factor here is we've gotten rid of the USAID, right? It's basically completely defunded it. And that's a huge, huge problem. Because even if we give money to this effort, like the United States is always the critical partner in any of these kinds of outbreaks because we have the most resources, right? And that's not just money, but actual lots of relevant resources.

• 1:17:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, aid workers, lots of access to medication.

• 1:17:25Speaker 06

  Experience. So in previous outbreaks, when USAID was up and running, we could say, okay, here's, here's, you know, all the resources that you need, not only money, but vaccines and medicine and protective equipment and all the things that you need to get control over an outbreak like this. And we had organizations and people on the ground with connections to organizations and people in the region to immediately put those things to work.

• 1:17:56Speaker 06

  All of those connections are gone. They are gutted. They don't exist anymore. So we don't even have the ability to do the kinds of things that we could have done just two years ago. Because all of that infrastructure is gone. So we say, okay, well, it's the World Health Organization is responsible. And yes, they were slow and they're not doing enough, but we just cut their funding by pulling out of the World Health Organization. They had to fire 2,000 people. And so they're underfunded, they're under-resourced. USAID is gone. The CDC is being cut back, is much smaller in resources than it was at the time.

• 1:18:39Speaker 06

  And we don't have any of the infrastructure in place that we should have. So this is, this is what these all-

• 1:18:47Bob Novella?

  Who could have predicted this, Steve?

• 1:18:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Right? I mean, it's insane.

• 1:18:50Bob Novella?

  What a surprise. Wow.

• 1:18:53Cara Santa Maria?

  How can somebody look at disaster preparedness and go, oh, they're just sitting around doing nothing? What a waste of money. And then a disaster happens, they're like, oh, that's why they were sitting around.

• 1:19:06Bob Novella?

  It's not my fault.

• 1:19:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:19:08Speaker 06

  I mean, 10 years ago, I remember we were talking about whatever that Ebola outbreak was at that time. And somebody characterized it as saying, this is like building the firehouse when the fire is going.

• 1:19:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 1:19:19Speaker 06

  It's like, no, you gotta build the firehouse first, then you activate them when the fire is reported.

• 1:19:23Cara Santa Maria?

  This is worse. It's like tearing it down after the fire.

• 1:19:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, we just tore down the fire. Whatever fire, it was inadequate, but whatever we did have, we just tore it down. Absolutely. Now, of course, the government denies all that. They say, oh, we were doing this, we're doing that. But the people on the ground are like, no, this is all bullshit. This is, we are gutted. We do not have the resources. We do, cannot adequately respond to this. And with outbreaks like this, it matters how quickly and how robustly you can get the resources in place. You could do the testing, you could do the contact tracing, you can police the borders. You could do all the things that you have to do. You need to stand this up quickly because if you don't, it gets out of your control. It spreads, it spreads beyond where you want it to be.

• 1:20:10Speaker 06

  Then you're fighting this losing battle against a spreading contagious disease. Right? So that's the position that we're now in.

• 1:20:19Cara Santa Maria?

  And the thing too, that we forget, it's not just about like actual death and disability. Right? Because this disease is horrific. The 40% or however many that are going to die are going to die. The people who don't die from it are going to have, you know, permanent problems because of this. But it's also that the longer that we allow certain infections, especially zoonotic infections, to rage in humans, the longer we allow them to mutate.

• 1:20:47Cara Santa Maria?

  As long as they have figured out how to do well in a human population and we don't act, the longer that they get better at infecting people.

• 1:20:56Speaker 06

  Right. And the greater the chance of it busting out, right? Of it getting, you know, somebody going into a town that then causes another outbreak and then gets spread to a big whatever, the greater the chance that it can break out.

• 1:21:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, we all saw that movie.

• 1:21:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. So it's like, you know, we've been covering Ebola outbreaks for the last 20 years and it's, nothing has changed or it's worse. You know, like the, and whatever lessons we had learned and people that we were putting in place have all been torn down in the last year. And then while the government's pretending like everything's great, we're just handling it all fine. But it's all nonsense. That's not what the people on the ground are saying.

• 1:21:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Because we did have robust infrastructure and like.

• 1:21:46Speaker 06

  We did the play, we have the playbook, no one's using it.

• 1:21:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it could have been a situation where we see these isolated cases. They pop up, the people get quarantined, they get the help they need and then move along. The way, this is always going to happen.

• 1:21:59Speaker 06

  Yeah. And so, but the key here is again, the panic, neglect, repeat, right? We're in the panic mode. The, once this falls off the headlines, are we going to, is everyone going to forget about it? And the bottom line is we're not going to be ready for the next outbreak, which could become an epidemic, which could become a pandemic, right? So we have not really learned anything from COVID-19. In fact, we're worse because of the pushback after it, you know? All right, let's move on. Jay? Who's that noisy time?

• 1:22:33Jay Novella?

  Alright guys, last week I played this noisy.

• 1:22:49Jay Novella?

  Any guesses?

• 1:22:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Sounds like baby seals barking.

• 1:22:57Jay Novella?

  Alright, well a listener named Jonathan Kettor wrote in and said, "Jay, listening to the SGU on my way back from a winery visit, my wife and kids and I all thought we were listening to a bird, but couldn't agree on which one." So, the 11-year-old, I guess his nickname is Johnny Danger, guessed a pigeon. His wife guessed a puffin and he's thinking it's a chicken. These are incorrect, but when I listen to it, I can guess I can hear that in there, you know? But it's more important that you tried than if you succeed, I think, for most things. Good try, keep trying, I'll see you next time. Let's move on to the next guest, Michael Blaney, who sends in lots of guesses over here. He said, "Sounds like a flock of baby geese."

• 1:23:38Jay Novella?

  So that's four different birds that have been guessed so far, all incorrect. Another listener named Martin wrote in and said, "Jay, I have to admit, I could never get the noisy right, but this time I'm 100% sure it's the squeaky sound of my running shoes that gets made on the floor when I go in for an early morning run and try not to wake anyone at home." And then he tells me the story about how he like forgets something and he has to sneak in, his wife is sleeping and he wakes her up with the squeaky noise. It's a good guess, but it is not correct, these are not running shoes. Lots of people guessed this one correctly, that's why I don't have any more examples to show you. There was lots of repeat guesses, lots of people guessed birds too.

• 1:24:20Jay Novella?

  But there was one person who guessed correctly first, and this is Kevin Bland. And Kevin said to Who's That Noisy, "This week's Who's That Noisy is people." It's people, guys. What are they doing?

• 1:24:32Speaker 06

  They're walking.

• 1:24:33Jay Novella?

  Walking on what?

• 1:24:35Speaker 06

  Uh...

• 1:24:36Jay Novella?

  In the snow? They're walking in sand!

• 1:24:39Speaker 06

  Sand!

• 1:24:40Bob Novella?

  Sand!

• 1:24:40Speaker 07

  It's coarse and it gets everywhere.

• 1:24:42Jay Novella?

  It does, it's a big pain in the ass. So what's happening here? Why is this particular sand? Let me play it again and I'll tell you the description.

• 1:24:57Jay Novella?

  Why is walking on sand making that particular noise?

• 1:25:00Bob Novella?

  It's wet.

• 1:25:00Jay Novella?

  Lots of people walk on sand.

• 1:25:01Speaker 07

  Quick, quick sand.

• 1:25:02Jay Novella?

  It's not wet, it's very dry. So here's what happens.

• 1:25:07Bob Novella?

  Super dry.

• 1:25:08Jay Novella?

  And I guess they call it singing sand as well. It happens when your foot compresses and shears very dry sand, making grains rub and slip past each other at the same time. So it's important that lots of sand, grains of sand rub against other grains of sand at the same time. And under the right conditions, those tiny grain movements synchronize enough to create a sound that you can hear, and it's often a squeak, a chirp, a bark, or a whistle. These are all different words that people use. So yeah, so, and people from around the world wrote in and told me, "I know exactly what that is." So it's not just one beach somewhere, like, you know. Now, I don't know if the grains need to be of a certain size or whatever, but I think they need to be a similar size, and they need to be rounded and smooth.

• 1:25:53Jay Novella?

  And they're often made of quartz and silica. So there you have it, guys. It's just sand.

• 1:25:58Bob Novella?

  Whoa.

• 1:25:59Jay Novella?

  Alright, so that was cool. I've known of this phenomenon. I don't think I've used it on the show before, but it is possible. You know, we have been doing this for 20 years. But, that was cool. Alright, I have a new noisy for you guys this week. The noisy was sent in by a listener named Rick Downing, and here it is.

• 1:26:28Jay Novella?

  That's all you got.

• 1:26:29Bob Novella?

  That was Groku, who has not had snacks in a week.

• 1:26:35Speaker 07

  That's a Star Wars reference, Karen.

• 1:26:37Jay Novella?

  Guys, we've been doing the podcast for 21 years, coming up on 21 years.

• 1:26:43Bob Novella?

  We're past 21.

• 1:26:45Jay Novella?

  We are past our 21st year.

• 1:26:47Bob Novella?

  Yeah, we've completed 21 years.

• 1:26:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow.

• 1:26:50Jay Novella?

  So, we do this for a reason. You know, we want to educate people on critical thinking. We want them to understand what skepticism is. We want them to understand why it's so important and why is it more important now today, I think, than ever in modern human history because of what's going on in many places around the world. If you want to support the work that we do, if you find value in this, please consider becoming a patron of The Skeptic's Guide. You can go to patreon.com/skepticsguide for more information, and we would appreciate any support that you're willing to give. The next conference we're going to be at is PSYCON. This is happening June 11th to 14th. So, how many weeks is it from when this show airs for us, Steve?

• 1:27:32Speaker 07

  Two weeks.

• 1:27:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Three?

• 1:27:34Jay Novella?

  Two weeks. Alright, so it'll be two weeks. So, this is happening in Buffalo, New York. You can go to c s i c o n f e r e n c e dot org for more information. It's a wonderful conference. We're going to be doing a live SGU podcast and then a ticketed event that same night, which is Friday. We will be doing our Skeptical Extravaganza with George Robb. It's going to be a really great weekend. You have lots of great things to see. We hope to see you there. And then after that, guys, we are going on our giant SGU mini tour. It's a giant mini tour. It's going to be LA, then it's going to be Sydney, and then it's going to be Christchurch in New Zealand. It's going to be a really great time. I am going crazy prepping

• 1:28:19Jay Novella?

  and doing all my final preparations for this trip. If you're interested in joining us at any one of these three conferences, the LA conference, you can go to theskepticsguide.org. When I say conference, it's going to be the following. So, Friday night, we're going to have a SGU secret meetup. This is a low-number attendance event where you'll have a lot of FaceTime with the SGU. These are a ton of fun. You can get tickets for that on theskepticsguide.org under our events page. If you want to go to see us do a Noticon conference in Sydney, Australia, you can go to noticoncon.com. That's not a con con. It's the same word, con con. C o n c o n dot com.

• 1:29:00Jay Novella?

  Or you can go to skepticcon.org.au to buy tickets for that and see what tickets we have left. A lot of the tickets have sold out, but there are still, you can still go to the main conference and still attend a couple of the other shows that we're doing. And if you want to see us in New Zealand, you can go to conference.skeptics.nz and we will also be doing an extravaganza that same weekend. So you can buy another ticket for that if you're interested. So we hope to see you guys. This was it. It's all happening now. The next time that we talk to you, one of these events will no longer exist. So we really do hope to see you at one of them.

• 1:29:34Speaker 06

  All right. Thanks, Jay. All right, guys. Let's go on with Science or Fiction?

• 1:29:41Speaker 02

  It's time for Science or Fiction?

• 1:29:50Speaker 06

  Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real, one fake. Then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one they think is the fake. We have a theme this week. The theme is obscure inventors. Okay, ready?

• 1:30:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Didn't we just do an obscure inventor one?

• 1:30:08Speaker 06

  Not this year.

• 1:30:09Cara Santa Maria?

  I guess I'm mixing up. There's like the peanut thing.

• 1:30:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, that was totally different.

• 1:30:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, there was a Canada one.

• 1:30:15Jay Novella?

  That was Canada.

• 1:30:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:30:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Canada. Sorry.

• 1:30:18Speaker 06

  All right. I have number one, Swedish American electrical engineer Gideon Sundberg perfected the zipper, revolutionizing modern apparel. All right. Number two, English inventor Jonas Hanway invented the modern umbrella for use as a waterproof rain guard in the 1750s. And I have number three, Josephine Cochrane patented, manufactured, and sold the first successful mechanical dishwasher, her patent being issued in 1893. Okay, Kara, it's your turn to go first.

• 1:30:55Cara Santa Maria?

  I mean, these are all just like dartboard questions.

• 1:30:59Speaker 07

  It's a trivial pursuit.

• 1:31:00Cara Santa Maria?

  I know. It's like, can I reason through any of this? Is there something particularly Swedish about a zipper? I don't know. I'll buy the Josephine Cochran patented, manufactured and sold the first successful mechanical dishwasher.

• 1:31:14Speaker 07

  Why?

• 1:31:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Because she's a woman and I think only a woman who washes dishes all day would have been like, I need to make a machine so I don't have to do this. But there may be something there where like, she didn't actually do the patent or she, I don't know, somebody, somebody else like sold it and stole all her money. But I'm hoping that she actually got paid for this. So I'm going to say that that one's science. So I guess it's between the Swedish-American electrical engineer, Gideon Sunbak, who perfected the zipper, did not invent it, but perfected it. Because before, I don't know, it just got stuck all the time, but now we can have a hoodie. I'm wearing one right now.

• 1:31:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Or Jonas Hanway, English inventor, who invented the modern umbrella for use as a waterproof ring. Okay. So maybe the year, well, there aren't even years in all of them. So I can't even compare that. 1750 for a modern umbrella? What makes it modern? Like that it opens? That it's actually waterproof? I feel like umbrellas have been around a lot longer than 1750. So I'll say that one's the fiction. I don't know.

• 1:32:26Speaker 07

  Okay, Bob.

• 1:32:27Bob Novella?

  Yeah. My problem with Josephine Cochran is that, you know, the year 1893 and she was allowed to patent, manufacture and sell something?

• 1:32:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:38Bob Novella?

  I hope it's true because, but after doing so many superheroes of science, I mean, it's just like, I'm very skeptical of that one.

• 1:32:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:32:47Bob Novella?

  Sure, there's, there's ways that, you know, there's so little detail here. She could have been partners with somebody, some guy probably. But I hope she didn't need that. But it just seems like 18, I mean, they couldn't even get, you know, women could had the hardest time getting any degrees in, in school at that time. But patenting and manufacturing and selling are kind of different. So I don't know. But yeah, I get this modern umbrella thing that, yeah, it seems like 1750s is, you know, not, not a good, you know, a good date for that, probably earlier, it seems. But. And the only thing I could say about the zipper is that, you know, I've read about the zipper, the invention of the zipper so long though, that I just barely remember

• 1:33:29Bob Novella?

  anything about what I read, but soon back, getting soon back doesn't even ring the tiniest little bell, but who knows, it's been, I don't remember who the inventor was, it could have been him and I just forgot the name. Yeah, I think I'd just go with the umbrella. It's 1750s, this just seems like, uh, not a good date for that invention, probably earlier, but, um, it's a pretty simple device. So yeah, I'll go with that.

• 1:33:51Speaker 06

  Okay, Jay.

• 1:33:52Jay Novella?

  Yeah. I mean, I agree with Kara. These are like, it's hard to like, try to find something in here that you can be like, no, whatever. But these are all fun though. Okay. So I like that Kara said that Josephine Cochran, I like thinking that a woman invented the dishwasher. So I'm going to just say sure with that one. You know, the thing about the umbrella, Kara, I agree with you is, are you telling me that people that lived before the 1750s didn't say, what? You know, I'm walking out in the fricking rain. Like, what could I do to not have the rain hit me? Like, is that, that, that like can't have, have started in the 1750s because, you know, I think it's kind of universal that being out in the cold rain kind of sucks. I don't care when you were born, you know, like it's,

• 1:34:35Jay Novella?

  so 1750s sounds like really way too, uh, too late in the game. Yeah. So I think that's, you know, that's the only one I can kind of build an argument for. So I'm going to agree with Kara.

• 1:34:46Speaker 06

  Okay. And Devin?

• 1:34:48Speaker 07

  Uh, why would a Swedish-American electrical engineer perfect a zipper? There seems to be a disconnect there. Unless I'm missing something, you know, zippers, what, what role would they have that an electrical engineer would have been interested maybe in trying to perfect that thing? Why? That's why that one's stumping me. But you made some maybe, you know, good points about the umbrella being the other one. It's possibly fiction. I don't know. I want to go with, but it's got, you know, it's easy to go with the umbrella. We're all in the same boat. We give Steve a two chances out of three at a sweep. But if I go for electrical engineer and the zipper,

• 1:35:33Speaker 07

  that reduces his chance for a sweep, doesn't it?

• 1:35:37Speaker 06

  It does.

• 1:35:37Speaker 07

  But it puts my-

• 1:35:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Moneyball over here.

• 1:35:39Speaker 07

  But my neck is out on the line with this one. I'll put my neck on the line. I'll say the electrical engineer and the zipper.

• 1:35:45Speaker 06

  Oh, boy.

• 1:35:45Speaker 07

  Wow. Fiction. I do not see the connection.

• 1:35:49Speaker 06

  Good, bold move, Evan. I like it. All right. Let's start with number three. Since you all agree on that one. Josephine Cochran patented, manufactured, and sold the first successful mechanical dishwasher. Her patent being issued in 1893. You guys all think this one is science. And this one is science. She did do it. Yay. Good for her.

• 1:36:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Josephine. Hell, yeah.

• 1:36:17Bob Novella?

  How'd she pull that off?

• 1:36:17Speaker 06

  Proud of you.

• 1:36:18Bob Novella?

  For the 1900s.

• 1:36:19Speaker 06

  Well, her husband died. I think that's part of it. So she was on her own. But yeah, she was the goods, man. She patented it. She invented it. Other people had tried to invent a dishwasher prior to her, but they failed. They just mechanically did not work. And she came up with, they were trying to use scrubbers. She was the one who came up with the idea of using pressurized sprays of soapy water. Basically, the modern, modern mechanism of a dishwasher. So she came up with that. And she, she, you know, friggin' engineered it, built it, manufactured it, and sold it.

• 1:36:52Bob Novella?

  That's awesome.

• 1:36:53Speaker 06

  Yeah. Eventually, her company was sold to KitchenAid, which is now part of Whirlpool.

• 1:36:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow. That's great.

• 1:37:01Speaker 06

  But Kara, you said, yes, of course, a woman invented it because she was trying to relieve herself of the drudgery of washing dishes. But that wasn't her primary motivation.

• 1:37:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Ah, what was it?

• 1:37:13Speaker 06

  Who knows, right? I'm just going on with references. But she, first of all, was wealthy. She lived in a mansion. And apparently she got the idea after a dinner party when the servants chipped the nice china. And so she was looking for

• 1:37:30Bob Novella?

  Those damn servants.

• 1:37:31Speaker 06

  A way to wash the dishes that would not, that would be more gentle than hand washing. But then, this is from the Wikipedia article, also gives another reference that says, "And she wanted to relieve housewives of the drudgery of washing dishes." Okay, so give her credit for that as well. But yeah, but she, you know, she was a wealthy Chicago.

• 1:37:56Cara Santa Maria?

  She herself was not hand washing dishes.

• 1:37:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, that was, and that was probably why she also could afford to, you know, she had the money to

• 1:38:03Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:38:03Speaker 06

  Launch this herself. Yeah, but she did it. I mean, she invented a working dishwasher and it worked. And it, you know, basically has continuity to modern day whirlpool dishwashers. It's interesting. All right, we'll go backwards. An English inventor Jonas Hanway invented the modern umbrella for use as a waterproof rain guard in the 1750s. Kara, Baba Jay, you think this one is the fiction avenue? You think this one is science? So interesting that you guys think, oh yeah, umbrellas were around for a long time. But again, I said, modern umbrella.

• 1:38:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, how do you define that?

• 1:38:38Speaker 06

  Well, that's a good question. What defines the modern umbrella versus older versions of it? And waterproof, so you think they had waterproof umbrellas prior to the 1750s?

• 1:38:49Cara Santa Maria?

  A hundred percent, I think they had waterproof umbrellas before 1750.

• 1:38:52Speaker 06

  So what elements of a modern umbrella do you think might reasonably date to the 1750s? For example, the collapsibility of it?

• 1:39:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, maybe. Or even if it wasn't collapsible, like the fact that it was like metal, maybe?

• 1:39:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, the metal ribbing, the modern metal ribbing that keeps them from turning up in the wind, in a gust of wind, you know, at least some of the time. So there was definitely significant improvements that could mark the modern umbrella that could reasonably date to the 1750s. But this one is a fiction.

• 1:39:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Yay.

• 1:39:27Speaker 06

  No one invented the umbrella, right? So I just wanted to pick something that nobody.

• 1:39:32Jay Novella?

  Wait, someone had to.

• 1:39:33Speaker 06

  No. The umbrella goes back at least 2,000 years. And it was a, it was a lot of iterations. No, no one could be said to have invented the umbrella. Just that, oh yeah, they started doing this at this time. So, and you're right, Cara, they, all you have to do is cover it with wax, right? Basically, and you make it waterproof. So the idea of waterproofing umbrellas in order to, to stave off the rain goes back a long time.

• 1:39:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's not like everybody was just getting rained on in their houses all the time. They figured out how to waterproof things.

• 1:40:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like early on.

• 1:40:05Speaker 06

  Yeah. So who was Jonas Hanway? This guy's an interesting character. He is associated with the umbrella. And around that time, 1750. But he was the first man in London to use an umbrella in public. Because umbrellas were considered to be a feminine accoutrement, right?

• 1:40:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, because they were like parasols.

• 1:40:33Speaker 06

  Yeah. And this guy's like, screw that, I'm gonna carry an umbrella and cover myself in the rain. And he was mocked, he was mocked for that, you know, ruthlessly until.

• 1:40:44Jay Novella?

  But everyone else was wet.

• 1:40:45Speaker 06

  But he also.

• 1:40:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 1:40:47Speaker 06

  But it was, but he was dry. And he, and he eventually changed the, the behavior, changed the culture so that it became acceptable for men to use umbrellas in public. But now this, I, you know, I, I'm interested in this guy because he also had a lot of opinions. And, you know, some good, some not so good. So he was this real character Londoner at this time. He also was very anti tea. He was an opponent of tea.

• 1:41:16Jay Novella?

  What is going on with this guy?

• 1:41:18Speaker 06

  He thought it was bad for your health. So I'm not with him on that one. And a lot of other things. There were some other ones.

• 1:41:26Speaker 07

  In the days of bloodline.

• 1:41:27Speaker 06

  He was really ahead of his time in some ways, not so much in other ways.

• 1:41:33Speaker 07

  He was an eccentric.

• 1:41:34Cara Santa Maria?

  He was very confident in his masculinity and I appreciate that.

• 1:41:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:38Speaker 06

  He thought that tea drinking caused bad breath ugliness and weakened the nerves.

• 1:41:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, it does kind of cause bad breath. Black tea does.

• 1:41:47Speaker 07

  I mean, I imagine, well, was was tea in seventeen fifty similar to what we're drinking today?

• 1:41:53Cara Santa Maria?

  I think so. Black tea, I mean, it was already imported.

• 1:41:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:41:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:57Speaker 06

  It was, you know, same plant. You steep it, you know, pretty much same stuff.

• 1:42:01Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 1:42:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah. And my guess is that he wasn't talking about like green tea or herbal tea. He was probably talking about like traditional, like black tea.

• 1:42:08Speaker 06

  So, black tea, white tea, and green tea are all made from the same leaf and they all have caffeine. They're just oxidized for different lengths of time, but.

• 1:42:18Cara Santa Maria?

  And black tea is decidedly stinkier.

• 1:42:21Speaker 06

  Black tea, I think, has the most caffeine of the three, but they all do. Herbal teas do not. There are other plants, but those three.

• 1:42:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, they're not technically tea.

• 1:42:29Speaker 06

  They're not technically tea. You have to call them herbal tea. But Hanway also lived into his seventies and never married. And looking at the picture of him holding an umbrella, I could kind of guess why.

• 1:42:40Speaker 07

  Whoa.

• 1:42:41Cara Santa Maria?

  I love him.

• 1:42:42Speaker 06

  Yeah. So I think it was just an out there kind of guy. He's like, I'm gonna use an umbrella.

• 1:42:47Cara Santa Maria?

  He was confident.

• 1:42:48Speaker 06

  He was very confident.

• 1:42:49Cara Santa Maria?

  In whatever his gender expression was. And people caught on eventually and I dig it.

• 1:42:56Speaker 06

  Yeah. All right. Which means that Swedish-American electrical engineer Gideon Sundberg perfected the zipper, revolutionizing modern apparel is science. This guy did invent the zipper. He made it into a functional piece of apparel. He got it to work, you know what I mean? He perfected it. Not that he wasn't the first one with the idea, but nobody can make it really work before he did. So he's credited with basically inventing the zipper.

• 1:43:23Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 1:43:24Speaker 06

  Credited with the development of the zipper. Many people put it. Yeah, he wasn't an electrical engineer, but I think he did a lot of.

• 1:43:31Speaker 07

  Called it a zipper. Did he also invent the name?

• 1:43:34Speaker 06

  I don't know. That's a good question.

• 1:43:35Speaker 07

  Somebody had to come up with that name.

• 1:43:36Speaker 06

  He had, but he has the patent for it, basically. He has the patent for it.

• 1:43:40Speaker 07

  That's impressive.

• 1:43:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, man. Can you imagine the world before zippers?

• 1:43:44Speaker 06

  Yes, it's the.

• 1:43:45Speaker 07

  Buttons, baby. Ah, button.

• 1:43:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Buttoning everything up.

• 1:43:48Speaker 06

  What about Velcro?

• 1:43:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Shoes.

• 1:43:50Speaker 06

  Velcro came a little bit later. That's what I'm saying.

• 1:43:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:54Bob Novella?

  Yeah, the Vulcans invented that.

• 1:43:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Imagine back when you had to lace up your shoe and button. They used to button their shoes.

• 1:44:01Speaker 07

  Oh, yes.

• 1:44:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Ugh.

• 1:44:02Speaker 06

  That's crazy.

• 1:44:04Speaker 07

  I hate buttons. I have a butt. I have a pet peeve with buttons.

• 1:44:09Speaker 06

  So I occasionally wear button fly jeans and they're okay. The thing about them is you could just rip them open. You know what I mean? You just pull them apart and the buttons all come undone. They're fine. I don't mind. It's only a couple of buttons.

• 1:44:22Bob Novella?

  You get good with buttoning up, you know?

• 1:44:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:44:24Bob Novella?

  Boop, boop, boop, boop.

• 1:44:25Cara Santa Maria?

  But like a hoodie, I wouldn't want to have to button my sweatshirt every time.

• 1:44:29Speaker 06

  You want to, you don't want like 12 buttons.

• 1:44:31Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:32Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 1:44:33Bob Novella?

  Like three or four, you know?

• 1:44:35Speaker 06

  Three or four is okay.

• 1:44:36Speaker 07

  I went to a wedding this weekend.

• 1:44:37Speaker 06

  Three or four.

• 1:44:38Speaker 07

  Yeah. Of course I wore a suit, right? And so was the shirt. Let me tell you about buttons real quick.

• 1:44:44Speaker 07

  I took the shirt out of my closet, had to unbutton it to take, to basically get it off the hanger, had to rebutton it again to pack it. When I got it out, when we arrived at our destination and I had to unpack, unpack it, I put it back on the hanger. I have to unbutton it in order to put it on myself and rebutton it to put it back on to me. Then I have to take it off by unbuttoning it, putting it back on the hanger again, and then buttoning it again before I repack it and then bringing it back home. I had to go eight times. I had to unbutton or in or button the shirt to wear it once. And, and then there's buttons on the, on the cuffs and there's buttons on the sleeves and there's buttons on the collars.

• 1:45:26Speaker 07

  I fastened 58 buttons this weekend to wear a shirt one time. This is what I hate about buttons. You know how much, how many days of my life I've probably wasted in buttoning things? I could, it's probably a week. I will bet you it's a week. I'll bet you it's a week.

• 1:45:44Speaker 06

  And then to add insult to injury, you lose a zipper based science or fiction. It's just, I don't know how you stand in heaven.

• 1:45:52Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm pretty disappointed in you.

• 1:45:54Speaker 06

  I'm going to give you a consolation prize. You get to read the quote at the end of the show.

• 1:45:59Speaker 07

  Appreciate that.

• 1:46:02Speaker 07

  Intelligence cannot be present without understanding. No computer has any awareness of what it does. Roger Penrose, back in supposedly 1989.

• 1:46:15Speaker 06

  I would say definitely true at the time he said that.

• 1:46:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:18Speaker 07

  Yes, at the, at the time.

• 1:46:21Cara Santa Maria?

  And now I guess it just depends on how you define the word awareness.

• 1:46:24Speaker 07

  Right, yeah.

• 1:46:25Speaker 06

  I still think it's probably true today, but it, this is a, even an active question now. And, you know, five years, 10 years, who knows? It could be, the answer could be different.

• 1:46:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's, awareness is a very loaded word.

• 1:46:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:46:39Speaker 07

  Yeah, right.

• 1:46:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:41Speaker 07

  But, but we sometimes.

• 1:46:42Speaker 06

  Ambiguous.

• 1:46:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:46:44Speaker 07

  We have, we have all these current discussions of AI. It's every day practically. Back in 1989, how many of us were really talking about awareness and computers? We were just starting to really learn.

• 1:46:55Speaker 06

  I was.

• 1:46:56Cara Santa Maria?

  It was sci-fi.

• 1:46:57Speaker 07

  What a modern computer was and what it could do, let alone any level of talking about its awareness. You know, maybe with Hal and, uh, 2001, you know, but only in, in the, in the context of movies and science fiction.

• 1:47:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:12Speaker 06

  Well, yeah, some of us were, but, uh, not like now, damn.

• 1:47:16Speaker 07

  No, not like every day now.

• 1:47:18Speaker 06

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

• 1:47:21Speaker 07

  Thanks, Steve.

• 1:47:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Thanks, Steve.

• 1:47:22Speaker 06

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

• 1:47:30Speaker 06

  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.

• 1:48:07Speaker 06

  This is Colin Cowherd.

• 1:48:08Speaker 07

  From the Colin Cowherd Podcast, buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota Fordability. 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.