The Skeptics Guide #1020 - Jan 25 2025

Guest Rogue Andrea Jones Rooy; News Items: Unexpected Scientific Results, Trust In Scientists, Red Dye #3, Andromeda Mosaic, Telepathy Tapes; 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

  Shipping, billing, admin, payroll, marketing. You're managing all the things, so why waste time sending important documents the old fashioned way? Mail and ship when you want, how you want with stamps.com. Print postage on demand 24/7 and schedule pickups from your office or home. Save up to 90% with automated rate shopping. That's why over 1 million small businesses trust stamps.com. Go to stamps.com and use code PODCAST to try stamps.com risk-free for 60 days.

• 0:33Speaker 01

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

• 0:39Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, January 22nd, 2025, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

• 0:49Speaker 03

  Hey, everybody.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  Jay Novella.

• 0:50Bob Novella?

  Hey, guys.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  Evan Bernstein.

• 0:52Speaker 03

  Good evening, everyone.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  And we have a special guest program with us this week, Andrea Jones-Roy. Andrea, welcome back. Thank you. It's great to be here. Hi, everyone.

• 1:01Speaker 03

  Andrea, great to have you.

• 1:02Speaker 02

  You get a lot of positive feedback when you're on the show. Oh, thanks. Well, your listeners are all very nice, so thank you for that. So I had my first audiology exam today.

• 1:12Speaker 03

  Ooh. An audiology exam?

• 1:14Bob Novella?

  Your wife finally forced you into doing it.

• 1:16Speaker 03

  Testing your hearing.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's correct. So, yeah, I'm at that stage where it doesn't bother me, but apparently it bothers other people.

• 1:23Speaker 03

  Apparently, yeah. You mean, they get tired of you saying "what" to every other thing they ask you?

• 1:29Speaker 02

  The problem is that other people mumble.

• 1:32Bob Novella?

  That's gotta be it, yeah.

• 1:34Speaker 02

  Everyone else is wrong.

• 1:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, we have to go see mumbleologists to fix ourselves.

• 1:38Speaker 02

  Bob, I told you that Steve never listened to me.

• 1:41Speaker 03

  He just never heard you.

• 1:42Bob Novella?

  So, bottom line it, Steve, how bad?

• 1:45Speaker 02

  It's not bad, actually. My hearing, so in the, you know, they go, it's the sensitivity on the Y-axis and the pitch, where, you know, frequency on the X-axis, right? And they they chart that. So I'm up in the normal range for most of the like the lower and medium frequencies. Then it starts to drop off as you get to the higher frequencies, which is

• 2:06Bob Novella?

  Normal, right?

• 2:07Speaker 02

  Normal for age, right? We all drop off as we get into the higher frequency. But I have a notch. Rather than being a smooth curve, there is a range of frequencies where I take a dip and then come back to the curve.

• 2:22Bob Novella?

  Oh, it's like a blind spot.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  And I've done both ears pretty symmetrically.

• 2:25Bob Novella?

  So does that, does that notch fit right where Jocelyn's voices?

• 2:30Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. It's a micro, micro evolution? Is that what that is?

• 2:36Speaker 02

  No, I know exactly what the notch is. So she, you know, I'm stick a full history. So one potential cause of, of a notch like that, a drop in a certain range of frequencies is exposure to loud noises.

• 2:48Bob Novella?

  Oh.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  But I don't really have any history of that.

• 2:51Bob Novella?

  Yeah, you weren't in a band.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've never, no, just normal stuff, never.

• 2:54Speaker 03

  You didn't work around heavy machinery?

• 2:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, it's no excessive exposure, exposure to loud noises. But that, but I knew this was gonna be the result from when I was taking the test. The, that frequency where my, where my sensitivity drops is exactly in the frequency of my tinnitus. That's what it is.

• 3:12Bob Novella?

  Ah.

• 3:13Speaker 03

  Oh, geez. Which I have as well.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, and I could tell, like when, you know, you have to pay really close attention because they get as quiet as you can. It gets to the point where it's like, did I imagine hearing the beep or did I hear the beep? You know?

• 3:24Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  But when it, I could, you know, I, when it was not in the frequency of the, of my tinnitus, you know, the ringing I have in my ear, I could separate the two. When it was close to that frequency, I could not separate. I could not tell. When, when it got very quiet, obviously, when it's loud, obviously, it's, you know, they go quiet to loud, loud to quiet. And so they, they, they see where your threshold is. And I knew that my threshold is gonna be much lower in that, around the frequency of my tinnitus. But the but that frequency, it does impair certain parts of speech. Right? So there are certain phonemes which I don't hear as well because it's it it kinda lives in that frequency range.

• 4:05Speaker 05

  Do you have an example?

• 4:07Speaker 02

  Like so like soft sounds is like S's and stuff. So you know, my brain has to work harder in order to interpret it. You know, which is exactly what I noticed. So my experience is if I'm paying attention, I'm fine. Like if I'm attending to someone speaking, especially if it's like one person, it helps if I'm looking at them. Although I don't have to look at them, but that does help. If I'm just if I'm, you know, focusing my attention on one person, no problem. If there's diffuse attention or there's a lot of background noise or I'm not paying attention. My brain is not paying attention. It's not actively trying to interpret what someone is saying. I may or may not, you know, catch, you know, I I usually I can hear. It's not like I can't hear.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  It's just that it sounds like they're mumbling, right? My brain does not interpret the does not interpret the phonemes properly. So I get like half the words, you know, or something.

• 5:02Jay Novella?

  So what can I do about it?

• 5:03Speaker 02

  Uh, hearing aids.

• 5:05Speaker 03

  Eventually or now?

• 5:07Speaker 02

  No, now.

• 5:08Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 5:09Bob Novella?

  Oh, wow.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it'll basically raise the floor because it definitely is volume related, right?

• 5:14Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 5:14Speaker 02

  The louder something is the easier my brain has an easier time interpreting what it what what's being said.

• 5:19Jay Novella?

  Did they tell you what kind you're gonna get or any of that yet?

• 5:21Speaker 02

  No, I have to have a separate appointment now for the hearing aids.

• 5:24Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 5:25Speaker 05

  Does that?

• 5:25Bob Novella?

  What about like earphone iPhone earbuds?

• 5:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, we talked about this like six months ago, the the AirPods that

• 5:33Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  can hear the room noise, they work just as well, you know, as

• 5:38Speaker 03

  And they're less expensive.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  They're much less expensive.

• 5:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'll send you a set and call consider it a gift.

• 5:42Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, the ones that you like, they're like, what are they like 700 bucks or something? They're the ones that

• 5:48Speaker 05

  Oh, those ones.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, they're the good ones.

• 5:50Speaker 03

  It's supposed to $7,000.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, as opposed to six or $7,000.

• 5:55Speaker 05

  I

• 5:55Bob Novella?

  Wait, there's $700 earbuds?

• 5:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're the ones that basically have incorporated a microphone in them so you could hear not only what's being played over the iBuds. But also you could hear the ambient noise. You can hear the room noise.

• 6:09Speaker 05

  I thought it was just the regular AirPods that are like 100 bucks.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, no. It's the special ones that have that feature. They're basically hearing aids, right?

• 6:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  And again, there was a study from about six months ago that compared those like $700 earbuds that hear the room noise with the $6,000 hearing aids and they were pretty much the same.

• 6:33Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  In terms of their effect.

• 6:34Bob Novella?

  Wow.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't, yeah, mom, mom's hearing is pretty bad, probably heading in her direction.

• 6:41Bob Novella?

  I mean, I hope not. She, I walked in yesterday, she's got face down on a, on a puzzle, doing a puzzle. And I'm like, Mom, Mom, Mom. And your head did not come up.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:52Bob Novella?

  And I'm like, oh crap.

• 6:53Speaker 03

  Maybe her aids were not charged.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  She's not using them.

• 6:57Bob Novella?

  I knew it. I knew that she, I thought she just didn't have her, her hearing aid. And she had it in, but the battery panel was jarred, was opened. So it was, so it wasn't working. So she's, she's basically deaf without that, that hearing aid.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  Without the hearing aid. The other thing is you're supposed to wear them consistently, not just when you think you want to.

• 7:15Speaker 05

  Oh, really?

• 7:15Speaker 02

  Because it helps your brain adapt to that noise level. Cause it.

• 7:20Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  Part of the problem is that you don't, you don't hear a lot of the lower, the softer background noise. And it just helps your brain if it's constantly hearing background noise as well as speech and dis, you know, disambiguating them.

• 7:34Speaker 05

  Can they do anything about tinnitus? Or is that a totally different thing?

• 7:37Speaker 02

  No, there's no treatment for tinnitus.

• 7:38Speaker 05

  Really?

• 7:39Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 7:40Jay Novella?

  Not yet.

• 7:41Speaker 05

  I don't know, Steve. I'm pretty sure I saw an infomercial on YouTube once about a cure, but.

• 7:45Speaker 03

  Oh, sure.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a lot of fake cures out there. They're all nonsense.

• 7:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'll grab them.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  There are ways to manage how much it bothers you, you know, but there's no way to actually eliminate the tinnitus or to, or to reduce it. It's complicated. It's like, I did a deep dive on it at one point because I have it. I'm like, all right, what's going on here? Is there any possibility that we're close to a treatment for this? Is there anything out there that might work? What kind of approaches would work? And it's really complicated. We're not really sure what causes it. It, it, but it, we're pretty sure it's not like it's a nerve buzzing away, right? That would be simple. We, we have drugs to treat that. But it's rather, it's how your brain is processing the audio data.

• 8:27Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 8:28Speaker 02

  And because it processes it, you know, like any stereo electronic equipment does, you know, it has a lot of the same kind of processing going on. And, you know, whatever, in that network, it can cause some feedback or whatever it is, you know? So it's not something that's, that's easily amenable to drugs, right? There would have to be some kind of electromagnetic treatment or something, but we don't know how to do that.

• 8:55Speaker 03

  Steve, when you were researching it, did you look into the history?

• 8:57Speaker 02

  Uh, not too much.

• 8:59Speaker 03

  Only because is it a 20th century phenomenon? Did people in the 19th century have this? Any description of it?

• 9:06Speaker 02

  I don't think there's, there's no reason to think that it's a recent phenomenon, but I didn't specifically.

• 9:10Speaker 03

  So it's not tied to, to the electronics that are around us in our environment?

• 9:15Speaker 02

  No, no, not at all.

• 9:16Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 9:17Bob Novella?

  What about, uh, for tinnitus, Steve? Deep brain stimulation or something like that?

• 9:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's possible, but there's, there's no proven treatment for it. I did read, okay, this is unrelated to, I did read one paper. This is unrelated to my deep dive on tinnitus that speculated that Vincent van Gogh cut his ear off because he was suffering from tinnitus and he thought it would cure it.

• 9:40Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  Oof.

• 9:41Speaker 03

  That's a speculation though, right?

• 9:43Speaker 05

  Joke's on us if that's the thing that works though.

• 9:46Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, when he cut his ear off, he didn't, you know, gouge out his inner ear.

• 9:50Speaker 05

  He just cut the outer part, right?

• 9:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:53Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, this is, there's a type of, of scholarship that is basically historical diagnoses. You take a historical figure and you try to figure out what kind of neurological diagnosis might they have had? Based on what information we have. Obviously we don't have the ability to examine them or to have any diagnostics. And so that was one of them, right? Was, did Van Gogh have tinnitus? The other one was, did Joan of Arc have, uh, right temporal lobe epilepsy?

• 10:23Speaker 05

  Do they think she did?

• 10:25Speaker 03

  Consistent with?

• 10:26Speaker 02

  Consistent with having religious visions.

• 10:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:29Speaker 05

  Ah, okay. Do they think that she did have it?

• 10:32Speaker 02

  There's a whole literature on who had schizophrenia throughout history and who was manic depressive and who had ADHD. Um, bipolar disorder, you know what I mean? Like there are people whose lives are documented well enough that you could say, yeah, she probably had this. One, another, a fun one is, uh, fun, is Hitler probably had von Kononmo's disease.

• 10:51Speaker 05

  What is that?

• 10:51Speaker 02

  Which is a neurological degenerative disorder. Part, one of the symptoms of that is that, well, he has shaking, which he always hid. But but did find its way accidentally into some historical film, so you could see it.

• 11:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  He really tried to hide it and not have it be on film.

• 11:08Speaker 05

  Like handshaking, that kind of thing?

• 11:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, like a tremor, like a Parkinsonian tremor. But also it causes a rigidity of thought, right? So like unable to change course, which is kind of, yeah. Kind of how his management of the war was characterized. Like he would just, he was gonna take Russia and that was it, you know?

• 11:30Speaker 05

  Wow. Are you generally persuaded by this type of research? Like, do you think the data?

• 11:35Speaker 02

  You can make, you can make very compelling arguments based upon, you know, again, contemporary writings. But they're describing their symptoms, basically, or their behavior. You just can't ever confirm it. But you can make a strong case.

• 11:49Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 11:50Speaker 03

  Yeah. Even if in the remains of people, they don't leave those kinds of markers in the remain, you know, in bones or anything else.

• 11:56Speaker 05

  I don't have ADHD bones.

• 11:57Speaker 02

  Genetic component to it.

• 11:58Speaker 03

  Alright, yeah.

• 12:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, if there's a genetic component, then we could absolutely test that. I know that that's been done to historical figures, you know, to get their DNA and say, oh, yeah, he had this, this disease or syndrome. But, yeah, for these neurological conditions, that's usually not the case.

• 12:13Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 12:14Speaker 03

  Fascinating.

• 12:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  That was all interesting. I have one other thing to announce.

• 12:18Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  I've, I've announced this on the live streams, but not on the show proper. I, in November, I gave my notice at work that I'm retiring at the end of June.

• 12:28Speaker 05

  Congratulations.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 12:29Speaker 03

  Whoa.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  What the hell?

• 12:31Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 12:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, so.

• 12:33Bob Novella?

  What does that mean?

• 12:35Speaker 02

  I will no longer be, I will no longer be working at my day job.

• 12:39Speaker 05

  Skeptic's Guide every day.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  Be, I'll be working full time for the SGU, that's what that is.

• 12:43Speaker 03

  Alright.

• 12:45Bob Novella?

  Game changer.

• 12:46Speaker 05

  Very cool.

• 12:46Speaker 03

  Nice, Steve.

• 12:47Speaker 05

  Are you excited?

• 12:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, oh yeah, can't wait.

• 12:49Speaker 03

  Wait, 35 years at Yale?

• 12:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, 30, 30 years.

• 12:53Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, 30 years, not including my residency and stuff, but including fellowship, it'll be 30 years.

• 12:58Jay Novella?

  The company I used to work for, I worked on like a three-year global web, you know, website update. You know, this is multiple websites, three-year project.

• 13:08Bob Novella?

  Wow.

• 13:09Jay Novella?

  And the, what they gave me and two other guys that were on this team, they bought, they went out and bought us wings for lunch.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 13:17Speaker 03

  Oh, wow. How high did you fly?

• 13:19Bob Novella?

  I bet they were good wings, too.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  I was so excited.

• 13:21Speaker 05

  Were they the world's greatest wings?

• 13:22Speaker 02

  No.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  But you know, that's, that's, I know a lot of companies do nice things, but not the one I was working for.

• 13:31Speaker 03

  Well.

• 13:32Speaker 05

  I don't think I've ever had a send off of any kind, but I always just assumed it was a me problem, not a, like they were like good riddance as opposed to an institutional shortcoming.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  They did a good, they gave you a good riddance party?

• 13:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. Give me one big shove out the door, like, okay. While they took my ID to get in, like, okay, wow. Well, that's cool, Steve. I'm very excited for you.

• 13:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's exciting. I still love doing medicine and teaching and everything is still great, but you know, two jobs is hard.

• 13:59Speaker 05

  I don't know how you do it.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  I know, I was talking to Jocelyn about it the other day. I haven't had any time off in 30 years and I've, I work, in the last 20 years, I work, either I'm working every Saturday or I'm on a working weekend and I've had to do extra work in order to get to be, to have the ability to have a working weekend because we're doing a live event or something.

• 14:19Speaker 05

  Gosh.

• 14:20Speaker 02

  I have to do the show ahead of time or whatever. So it'd be nice to get my evenings and weekends back, you know, and just have one job. Going down to one job would be a nice change.

• 14:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, well done. Well, I also, I'm always impressed when you're up on like science fiction TV and movies because I'm like, when does Steve have time to watch this stuff?

• 14:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I have to, I have to do some entertainment.

• 14:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  I'm going to go crazy.

• 14:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, don't go crazy. We've got enough of that in the world already.

• 14:47Speaker 02

  All right, let's move on with some news items. Jay, you're going to start us off telling us about unexpected scientific results.

• 14:54Jay Novella?

  Steve, have you ever heard of this?

• 14:56Speaker 02

  The idea that some scientific studies have results that are unexpected?

• 15:00Jay Novella?

  Yes.

• 15:01Speaker 03

  Eureka.

• 15:02Jay Novella?

  Well, I mean, recently there was a study that came out and check this out. So these researchers analyzed over 1.2 million biomedical studies and these were studies that were funded by the NIH. This was between 2008 and 2016. So they compared the paper's content and findings to the goal, or the goals written in the original grant application, right? So what's happening is they're, they're taking like, okay, what did they find? What were the, what were the, um, the Results of the research and all the different things that they found out compared to what the original grant application said. And it turns out that a lot of times, there's a lot more findings

• 15:46Jay Novella?

  than there were originally mentioned in the original grant paperwork. They found that it's around 70% of the papers contain findings that the researchers hadn't originally planned for or expected. And this high percentage, it underscores the prevalence of of these, you know, serendipitous discoveries in scientific research, which, as I dug into this, I realized that there's a lot of that going on. And it makes you think differently about scientific studies and like, you know, and how, what should the process be and how much money should be given out and what should the expected results be and how much should they let them, you know, follow these anomalies that happen that could end up turning into very useful and important information. And even after removing

• 16:28Jay Novella?

  a lot of closely related items, like, you know, example is, if they would like, they would distinguish between liver disease and liver cancer, right? You know, if they take a lot of those into account, they still found that 58% of the papers had at least one unexpected outcome. And in fact, on average, about a third of the topics in a given paper weren't part of the original plan. A third, that is a lot. This indicates that there's a significant portion of research that's being done that leads to unanticipated areas of study. This reflects the dynamic nature of, you know, scientific exploration, which, you know, is exactly what we want people spending their time doing is, is, you know, finding things that we didn't originally

• 17:11Jay Novella?

  know and make discoveries. So this wasn't just random noise. As the researchers explained, they said that larger grants and projects that had longer timelines, these tended to produce more unexpected results. So the deeper into the weeds that they went, the more unexpected results they found, which tracks perfectly. The, the basic science grants, these produced even more surprises in the research. And, and very interestingly, even applied research grants that set specific goals. You know, they go in and they say, we are gonna, we are gonna be able to give information on these specific things. And a lot of these like that are funded through the NIH, these are requests for applications, right? Our RFAs that the NIH puts out.

• 17:54Jay Novella?

  These types of studies produced a significant number of unexpected results as well. So these RFAs are designed to solicit grant applications focused on, you know, very defined, high priority areas of science relevant to the NIH's mission. And even with that in place, they still come up with useful unexpected results. This study suggests that supporting large and long-term grants, particularly for basic research, this might be a good way to, you know, nurture unexpected discoveries, which I think is a, is a fantastic thing to do. And I think that they should be even giving more leeway to scientists to, I know that money dictates everything, but if they, if they allow some wiggle room, you'd be surprised,

• 18:38Jay Novella?

  I bet, on even how much more that they would find. Uh, the research findings also, they challenged the idea that heavy goal-oriented funding, without a doubt, it will stifle creativity and it will stifle these unexpected positive findings that they come to. So they're saying that, you know, these insights are crucial for shaping future funding strategies, which will hopefully foster more innovation. Someone named Telmo Piovani, a philosopher of biological sciences, I think summed this up pretty nicely. He said, "It's okay to fund both basic and applied research as long as we're open to unexpected results and don't dismiss anomalies too quickly." And that's, that's basically it in a nutshell.

• 19:19Jay Novella?

  Like, don't just dismiss anomalies and if anything, let the researchers lean into them and, and gain more information on it to help, you know, you never know what they're gonna find. And again, a lot of the things that we, today, when we hear about these interesting discoveries in the news and all that, a lot of them are these side things that were unexpected that they stumbled on. And if you go back into the history of scientific innovation, I mean, there's lots of cool examples, like the guy that discovered X-rays, right? He was a German scientist. Renkin? Yeah, I mean, that was a total, he was working with, you know, cathode tubes, I think, and discovered frickin' X-rays.

• 19:58Jay Novella?

  You know, if he, and if he

• 19:59Bob Novella?

  I didn't know that one. That was cool.

• 20:00Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it's really cool. He actually, his wife's hand was the first person to have an x-ray done. Just he just wanted to see it work and see exactly what the result would be. And I've seen an image of that. It's pretty cool.

• 20:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, that's a classic.

• 20:12Bob Novella?

  Imagine that. Holy crap.

• 20:13Jay Novella?

  So future studies in this area could expand on the research that was already done to include a few things that the reviewers found important here. So one could be include other fields of science, right? Because this was done in a very narrow, narrow band. It'd also be helpful to know if the researchers were as surprised as the grant reviewers. And this is, is interesting thing to think about because if the researchers were totally surprised, had no idea that anything like this was coming, that's a data point that could be very meaningful in the future. You know, the, the grant reviewers were definitely surprised. But I would love to know what the, what those researchers themselves thought about what they found.

• 20:54Jay Novella?

  And moving forward, the team plans to explore how often researchers explicitly reference these, you know, the serendipity in their work, right? They also want to understand how attitudes towards these unexpected findings vary across different fields. And one researcher put it, you know, that they're only scratching the surface on these unexpected findings that, that crop up quite commonly. Steve, I'm curious though, what, you know, as a medical professional, what's your take on this? You know, have you heard about things like this happening?

• 21:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course. This happens all the time. You know, you get a result that you did not anticipate. You know, frequently, you know, I'll go to grant rounds and they'll basically have a researcher talking about the last 10 years of his research and they walk you through all the studies that they did. And it's full of twists and turns and the, sometimes they're like, we're testing this very specific hypothesis. You know, then, and that's why we're doing the, the study. But oftentimes, as part of the arc of the research, there are what we call exploratory studies. Exploratory studies are explicitly looking for stuff you don't expect to find, right? It's like, what the hell's happening? Just let's just, you know, throw a net out there and see what we catch and then we'll go from there. Then you gotta do The follow up studies to confirm it, obviously.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  So it's that kind of baked into the process. So it's not surprising, but sometimes it does come out of left field. Like you really weren't looking for it. You get something that just doesn't make any sense because there's a phenomenon going on that was not part of the original hypothesis. And that's where scientists have to like really be flexible, you know? Don't be rigid, don't get locked into what, but this is what we're testing. You know, you have to, or don't just assume it's a mistake or an error. It's like the data is the data. Listen to the data. If it's telling you something surprising, go with it, you know?

• 22:43Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 22:44Speaker 05

  I mean, is that something that suggests that maybe the actual percentage of, of studies that are unexpected is higher because the scientists are maybe discounting them? Because they're like, oh, that's like silly and unrelated. Like the J R, or the grant reviewers, they're only looking at what was actually published in the end. So maybe even the scientists are sort of self correcting or ignoring things, just like Steve was describing where you're like, oh, that's so in left field. I'm not even going to pursue that. So we're probably not even seeing the extent of unexpected results.

• 23:12Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I think that from what I read, that that is implied in there saying that they're just scratching the surface. I think that statement clearly is pointing to the idea that there's so much more of this going on and things that were not found. Or again, this is like the first study, you know? Like there's just so much more ground to cover. I bet you they will uncover a lot of that.

• 23:33Speaker 05

  I have a question about, so pre registering your hypotheses and all of that is like considered good practice. Does that practice limit our ability to share unexpected findings? Or generally in this, I guess I'm guessing, I'm asking about biomedical in particular. Like, can you say, okay, I pre registered these hypotheses and this is what I was going to study. And then part two of the paper is all this other stuff I discovered. Like, is that considered acceptable in biomedical sciences?

• 23:59Speaker 02

  Have you heard of the term, the minimal publishable unit?

• 24:02Speaker 05

  Ooh, I have not.

• 24:03Speaker 03

  That's new.

• 24:04Speaker 02

  It is advantageous to one's career to have a lot of papers

• 24:08Speaker 05

  Right.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  in your CV, right?

• 24:10Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 24:10Speaker 02

  So it's kind of an inside cynical,

• 24:13Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  you know, term. It means we're gonna, you know, once we get like the minimal amount of data or analysis that we can publish, we're gonna publish that as a separate study.

• 24:24Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  And then we'll do the rest of it as a different study. That way I get two, three papers out of this one study rather than just one big one.

• 24:31Speaker 05

  I see.

• 24:32Speaker 02

  It's actually not a good practice, I think,

• 24:34Speaker 05

  Right.

• 24:34Speaker 02

  scientifically.

• 24:35Speaker 05

  So another reason we might be missing a lot of unexpected results is that they're packaged as expected results later on.

• 24:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're just, right, that's, that's true.

• 24:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 24:45Speaker 02

  That's exactly true. Also, I was, you know, I don't know if the, because I didn't read the study myself, Jay, but you know, if they were looking at just a particular kind of research, because some research lends itself more to this than others. Like if you're doing translational research, you're just trying to see like, is this drug safe and effective? You're not gonna really see anything too unexpected. Like, you know what I mean? You might, you still might, like, oh, and it also cured their erectile dysfunction. Right? That kind of thing has happened, obviously. But, you know, it's more on rails. Like you really are doing something very specific.

• 25:18Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, like I said, they were, these were NIH funded studies, so.

• 25:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, and it sounds like the distinction, early on, I was wondering about this, but it sounds like there's a distinction between unexpected results in the sense that it's like, oh, yeah, it also cures, you know, excessive sweating or whatever. And then unexpected in the sense that we thought this drug would be safe, but it wasn't. And that is unexpected, but it's not unexpected in the kind of interesting way that you're describing, Jay.

• 25:45Speaker 02

  Right. So just, just to follow what I was saying, the NIH studies are more like basic science exploratory studies. The, the like pharmaceutical studies are not funded by NIH, they're funded by the pharmaceutical industry. So that does sort of select for studies that would be more amenable to these kind of surprising results. All right, Andrea, you're gonna tell us, based upon all of this?

• 26:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  And other stuff, too. How much does the public trust in scientists?

• 26:13Speaker 05

  Yes, indeed. And actually, I'll just add also that Jay's article reminded me of a paper in political science that came out when I was in grad school about an increase in the use of the word surprising in political science paper abstracts. And the initial conclusion was, wow, we have more surprising results in political science. But then it turned out, if you wanted to get a job or tenure, having surprising results was good, so we were just using the word surprising more. So hats off to Jay's study for doing a better job with that. But yeah, so this is a paper, it's called "Trust in Scientists and Their Role in Society" across 68 countries. It was published in Nature Human Behavior. It just came out on January 20th, so hot off the press.

• 26:55Speaker 05

  And this is a paper that attempted to do, well, it did carry out a survey across 68 countries around the world, and it was aiming to understand, look, we have a big narrative, at least in the United States and in a lot of countries, the predominant narrative is that trust in science and scientists is declining. This is a trend that we were talking about even before COVID. It was exacerbated or heightened, and the narrative became even stronger. It's almost taken as a given that trust in science and scientists is plummeting in many circles. And so these researchers, and this is a paper with, you know, 50-some co-authors on it, but these researchers decided to find out if there actually is empirical evidence to

• 27:37Speaker 05

  support our rising fear that there's low public trust in scientists. And of course, they're not the only study to test this sort of thing. You know, Pew Research does a lot of its own work in this way, and there are many peer reviewed studies that do this. But most of these studies that were already out there are in the United States and Europe and/or are in the global north, but generally speaking, in those two places. And the ones previously that have been a bit broader, so it covers more countries, kind of are thinner in the sense that they just ask about trust in terms of one or two dimensions, and it doesn't really, you know, trust is something that can be hard to quantify. And so this project really goes out of its way to test what trust might mean to people. People in a lot of different ways and contexts.

• 28:20Speaker 05

  And by the way, you know, there's, there's, depending on how you count it, there's some 200 countries, give or take, in the world. And so 68, of course, is not at all representative of the entire world, but it is generally more populous countries. So it's, we're leaving off a lot of small nation-states and territories. And it represents, the, the countries surveyed represent 79% of the global population. So it's not everyone, but it's a lot of countries and many countries that have been left out. So overall, I guess the other thing they'll say, and I thought was an interesting point, and I'd be curious what you guys think about it, is they said, "Look, we're beginning from the perspective that high trust in science and scientists is a good thing." And I share that perspective, and I appreciated that they were candid about their own normative views.

• 29:05Speaker 05

  But they also acknowledged that that's not to say that one must always apply a blanket trust in science or scientists. There can be scientists who are up to no good, and there are plenty of instances of science and scientists doing things that are pretty harmful to, say, black Americans in the, you know, syphilis study in the United States and things like that. So it's not to give blanket trust as the goal, but to say that generally speaking, we do see better outcomes in terms of things like COVID and climate change in countries that have higher public trust. So, the, speaking of unexpected results, maybe, although this was, I guess, not unexpected in the sense of Jay's study, and that it is what they were trying to understand, they found that, generally speaking, in these 68 countries, trust in science is, what do they call it? They call it moderately high.

• 29:50Speaker 05

  And now you might be asking, "Well, what does that mean?" Well, they ask along four different, they inspect four different dimensions of how you might think about trust and the role that science and scientists play. I should also flag that they generally asked about scientists as opposed to science, and their argument for that is that scientists felt more specific. And you also, they, they conducted it in lots of different languages and tried to do the local language wherever possible. And so, science could mean something different. It could mean scientific institutions, it could mean government science, it could be universities, it could mean research, it could mean companies. So that, so we're talking about scientists, the people. So their first question, how much do people Around the world trust scientists. They measured trust along four components.

• 30:33Speaker 05

  The four components are perceived competence, benevolence, integrity, and openness. So if you take, you know, a battery of questions about those four things, find the mean over the entire world, they ultimately end up with a global mean of trust in scientists as 3.62. And, okay, it's on a scale from one to five, so five is very high trust in scientists, one is very low trust, so 3.62 they decide is pretty good. Now, of course, there's massive variation across these 68 countries, and I'll talk about that in just a moment, but one other, a couple of interesting tidbits just about this global

• 31:12Speaker 05

  level, none of the 68 countries that they surveyed had low trust in scientists. The lowest country in their survey was Albania, and that came in at 3.05 on that trust index, and one or two range would have been low trust. So everything, everyone is reasonably trusting in scientists. Would you guys like to guess what the country is that was the highest in terms of trust in scientists? There's two that were kind of runaways compared to the others.

• 31:40Speaker 02

  Germany. Yeah, Germany's a good guess.

• 31:42Speaker 05

  Switzerland, China. Germany, China, UK, any other guesses? Switzerland. Ah, I thought something like that too, Jay, but in fact, all of you are wrong. The top results really surprised me. They are Egypt at 4.3 out of 5, and India at 4.26 out of 5. And this is where I think a lot of the studies that focus on, you know, the US and Europe, that's where you would see UK, Denmark, Sweden, all those countries tend to be at the top. And so, you know, the study is free online, they list all 68 countries in order. The United States comes in 12th, we're just after Mexico and before Indonesia, and the United Kingdom is actually more like 15th.

• 32:24Speaker 05

  And I know there's a lot of SGU listeners in Australia, Australia, congrats, you come in at number 5. But there's a lot of countries in Asia, and we'll talk about this in a moment, Muslim countries, that come in quite high on this particular survey.

• 32:36Speaker 03

  That's reassuring.

• 32:37Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah, and then, and then within that trust index, the highest scoring one across the globe was competence. So, most people feel confident that scientists are competent. The lowest of the competence, integrity, benevolence, and openness, the lowest, pretty much globally, was openness. So, a sense of, a lack of transparency about the scientific process, transparency in terms of openly communicating or being in dialogue with the public, that's what generally the aspect of trust that scored the lowest around the world. And there's also, actually, I should say, an online dashboard where you can mess with all of these and kind of go by country and look at these things. So, a couple of other interesting findings, it's worth a read, the entire thing, it's very readable, but a couple of other findings that stood out to me is that they looked

• 33:21Speaker 05

  at individual-level demographics and things about the people or the country that might predict higher trust in science than in others. So, here are some characteristics that tended to, and again, this is globally, tended to characterize higher trust in science. So, women compared to men, more trusting in scientists, older people, urban regions, countries and people with higher incomes, again, this religious people, generally speaking, religion was positively correlated with higher trust in science, and we'll break that down in just a second. Higher education did seem to predict a higher trust in science, though it actually, there wasn't much of a relationship between highest education, so tertiary education, like all

• 34:03Speaker 05

  the way up at the very top, that didn't really play a role, it was more like secondary education, that sort of thing. And the more individuals in the country claimed to be liberal or left-leaning, that tended to also predict. So, the religion piece is one that I want to talk about for a second, because it really surprised me. And it turns out, and this is one of the values of doing a study that is, you know, not just the United States, or not just countries with, you know, similar sorts of breakdowns in terms of religiosity, it turns out that overall religiosity of a country is positively correlated with trust, but it varies a lot. Generally speaking, in Muslim countries, and this is all over the world, Turkey, Bangladesh, Malaysia, the trust in scientists was quite high, and they also asked a question, do you pursue?

• 34:48Speaker 05

  ...a conflict between science and religion and the answer was often no in Muslim countries. And I don't know a lot about Islam, but apparently there is quite a bit of, I guess, pro-science or scientific language in the Quran. And so religiosity in Muslim countries is positively correlated. If you're in the United States, like I am, the story is different. Christianity tends to be negatively correlated with trust in science in the United States. Generally around the world, the role of Christianity can vary from country to country. Basically, the people who have the lowest amount of trust around the world, men generally a little bit lower, varies by country, a conservative political orientation, and then the two strongest ones, the two ones that kind of most predicted a lack of trust in

• 35:30Speaker 05

  science and scientists, is something called the SDO, which is a measure of how hierarchical. It's the social dominance orientation. It's the degree to which individuals desire and support group-based hierarchy and the domination of inferior groups by superior groups. So it's the more you want your society to be hierarchical, the less you tend to trust science and scientists. And then also, if you are more conservative, like I said, and then also if you have something that they're calling "science populist attitudes," which sort of is taking the political populist term and applying it to science, meaning if you have an attitude, and this almost feels tautological to me, but if you have an attitude that common sense is the thing that you should be paying attention to most,

• 36:14Speaker 05

  you're tend, you're gonna have a lower trust in science. So I got very nervous, for example, when, you know, when politicians say, "We just need to do common sense." You're like, "Whoa, I'm not so sure about that." And then the last thing I'll say that stood out to me is they asked people, "What would you like scientists to be working on? And do you think they're working on those things?" So most people around the world said that they wanted scientists to improve public health and then solve energy problems. In third place was reduce poverty. And then fourth of the four that they asked was increase your country's defense and military. Countries in Africa and Asia generally wanted more defense and military. Most other parts of the world thought that there was too much attention on defense and military and wanted more attention to things like improving public

• 36:59Speaker 05

  health. And generally, you know, the kind of the punchline of all of this is, you know, two things. One is, it is good news, and that's, it was heartening to me to read, because I spend a lot of time thinking and worrying about people not trusting science and scientists. But they also made the point that, look, it doesn't take that many people who are not trusting in scientists to kind of ruin policymaking, or ruin public perception for a policy, or ruin the rollout of some kind of science-based initiative. You know, that 10% can be very vocal, and can be potentially very persuasive. And then the second piece is, is this piece of like, well, okay, well, what could we do to further increase trust in science and scientists? And really, they walked away with this, this recommendation of encouraging

• 37:43Speaker 05

  public participation, and not just top-down, like, here ye, here ye, here are my results, but like, actually having a dialogue with people, which is what you all are up to. And I had to do some thinking, because I've spent my life as a professor, which is literally telling people to sit down and listen to me. So, I'll focus on more dialogue. And for future work, you know, they don't make a distinction at the, at the moment between different scientific fields. And certainly, there's plenty of, of work to do to pour through the regional differences. You know, for, and one other quick thing that was interesting is that in some countries, the more left-leaning you are politically, the left's trust there is in science, because of the way that their political system is set up, that, that politicians on the left are more dismissive of science. And other places, it's on the right. And so even that, sort of, how

• 38:28Speaker 05

  politics, and they thought maybe a stronger predictor would be the stance of the key leaders, as opposed to the ideology of people when trying to understand the relationship between politics and science. So, I, I thought it was super interesting, and, and there's a ton more work to do, but I was generally encouraged. I don't know if it's consistent with what you guys thought was going on around the world.

• 38:46Speaker 02

  It is, in that, you know, I've been following surveys about this for years, you know, decades, and trust in science, and respect for science and scientists, always ranks very high, just generally speaking. But I, well, one thing, I'm just trying to make sense of the, a lot of the data you were throwing at us. Is it accurate to say that one possible thread weaving through this? ...data is that the more scientific findings are likely to conflict with your belief system, the less trust you have in science. So if they're like, if your political or your religious beliefs conflict with the findings of science, then your trust in science goes down.

• 39:28Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  And that could come from many sources. It could come from just the prevailing political ideology of your country. It could come from just the way your religion deals with these issues.

• 39:39Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  You know, how fundamentalist it is, et cetera. Yeah. Do you think that's accurate?

• 39:43Speaker 05

  I think that is exactly accurate. And you summarized all of the stuff that I just said very well. And they have a, they have a nifty chart that kind of has a little number line of how much of an influence each of these various elements, like your gender, your education level, your income, the level of inequality in your country, the blah, blah, blah. And all the ones that are on the kind of negatively correlated or negatively predictive of trust in science are exactly what you described. So it's your political beliefs, your, your preference for social hierarchy, your populist attitudes. And then religion was so funny because it just, in, in the world, it shows up in such different ways. But in places like the United States, it absolutely is negatively correlated with trust. And it's exactly what you said. It's, you know, it's not, it's not your income. It's not your education. It's your beliefs.

• 40:28Speaker 02

  It's your beliefs.

• 40:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 40:29Speaker 02

  People basically trust science right up to the point where it disagrees with their belief system.

• 40:34Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 40:35Speaker 02

  That's basically the bottom line. That's, I agree. That's been my perception as well for, for as long as I've been doing this.

• 40:41Speaker 05

  Yep. And, and you find reasons to handpick, you know, well, I generally support science, but like this particular vaccine, I, I looked at the outcomes and I think it's this. And because you just find a way to, you know.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  Or like, I think in this country, it's all about evolution.

• 40:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  Pretty much all about evolution, right?

• 40:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  So you have to attack science and distrust scientists because they say, you know, evolution happened.

• 41:04Speaker 05

  Right. Yeah. I mean, and I was intrigued that they asked, you know, the paper is very kind of high level, like big global stuff. But, but you know, some of the, the smaller questions, specifically, is your religion at odds with science was a question I was glad that they asked. And by the way, globally, 29% of people in the study worldwide believe that science is in outright disagreement with their religion. So it's not nothing. It's about a third.

• 41:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:30Speaker 05

  And I bet it's, it's regionally clustered for sure.

• 41:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. All right, that's fascinating.

• 41:35Speaker 05

  Thanks.

• 41:36Speaker 02

  Guys, we got a lot of questions about this. And so I figured I had to tackle this. The FDA recently removed FDNC red number three, red dye number three, from the list of approved food additives. It's been approved for whatever 50, 60 years. So this is a change for the FDA. Why did this happen? Why do you think it happened?

• 41:59Bob Novella?

  Well, I assume because they discovered some nasty side effects of that.

• 42:02Speaker 03

  People were right.

• 42:03Bob Novella?

  Dying ill from this.

• 42:05Speaker 03

  It was a health concern.

• 42:06Bob Novella?

  Yeah, it was horrible.

• 42:07Speaker 02

  Because cancer, I'm sure.

• 42:08Speaker 03

  National health concern.

• 42:09Speaker 05

  Yeah. Steve, it's probably why you have tinnitus, if I'm honest.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's it.

• 42:13Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  So none of those things are true.

• 42:16Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 42:18Speaker 02

  It has nothing to do with the science. It's all political. So it was initiated by a petition. The petition is by like 30 plus organizations and people that have a long history of being either consumer advocacy or environmentalists. And they all have a reputation, in my opinion, or many of them do, of being chemophobic and anti-scientific, right? They, the science is, is, their approach to science is compromised by their advocacy. And they're not really a respected scientific organization, right? Like, the Environmental Working Group is on there. They're like the poster child for that. They abuse science, in my opinion, all the time. Because they have their narrative, right?

• 43:01Speaker 02

  Their narrative is that, you know, people are being poisoned by industry or whatever. Okay, so this group petitioned the FDA to remove red dye number three from the approved list based upon something called the Delaney Clause. The Delaney Clause is a specific part of an FDA update that was passed in 1960. And it basically says that the FDA must ban any food dyes that have been shown to cause cancer in humans or animals. That's the law, right? Now, there's, I think we have to put this into the context of the Chevron deference. Do you guys know what that is?

• 43:41Speaker 05

  No.

• 43:42Speaker 03

  Court case.

• 43:43Speaker 02

  This is a recent infamous Supreme Court case.

• 43:47Speaker 05

  I was gonna say, now it sounds familiar, yeah.

• 43:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the Chevron deference is the idea that when the legislature passes a regulatory law, the details of how to interpret and enforce that law are left up to the agency that is, that's responsible for it, right? And the thinking is that, you know, experts in that agency are going to use their expertise to properly interpret the law. And the courts generally give deference to the experts in interpreting regulations, regulatory laws. The Supreme Court ended this, ended Chevron deference, last year, I believe, in a decision.

• 44:33Speaker 02

  This is very controversial, it's very horrible, actually, but it got very little, I think, coverage in the mainstream media. Yeah. It was, it was mentioned, but you had to like, be, go looking for it or be interested in it. Think of it, yeah. I don't think most people know what Chevron deference is, but this was a massive win for the populist right. Massive. Because think about what this says, is you can eviscerate the regulatory infrastructure by just saying, well, you're not following the letter of the law, you don't have the right to interpret that, that regulation, right? So it's basically taking the, it was a massive power grab from experts working in regulatory agencies to the courts.

• 45:17Speaker 02

  The court's basically saying, we could decide how the law should be interpreted, that's our job, you don't get to decide how the law gets interpreted, right?

• 45:26Speaker 05

  Right.

• 45:27Speaker 02

  So it seems to me that this FDA decision, and if you read between the lines in their announcement of this reversal, that this was due to the ending of Chevron deference. Because, you think about it, the law says, the FDA must ban any food dyes that have been shown to cause cancer in humans and animals, right? But why hasn't the FDA banned red dye number three before? The data that this was based on, that the petition referenced, is from 1980.

• 46:00Speaker 02

  It's forty-five years old, or eighty-two. Like, the data was collected over nineteen seventy-seven to early nineteen eighty, eighty-one, and was published, I think, in nineteen eighty-two. Forty-three years later, why the change? Because, as the FDA said in their announcement, you know, this, those studies are not relevant to humans. So essentially, there was, the FDA, who have scientists and medical experts who could interpret the data, said, "Well, the Delaney Clause doesn't apply because this data is not relevant to humans." Uh, but now, with Chevron deference gone, they can't do that. It's just, the law says you must ban it, and they're like, "Well, I guess we have no leeway, so we have to ban it."

• 46:45Speaker 02

  Ugh.

• 46:46Speaker 05

  Jeez.

• 46:47Speaker 02

  Horrible precedent. Now, let's, let's look at how horrible... Well, it's not, this research itself isn't bad, it's just should not be used to assess risk.

• 46:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 46:57Speaker 02

  Right? Hmm. This is clearly a toxicology study, and some types of toxicology studies are designed to push a system to its limits to see what happens, if it breaks, and what happens if it does break, right? So you give rats some ridiculous amount of a chemical, and until, like, you could literally do the LD-50 test, like, "Let's see how much it takes to kill half the rats." Or you could say, "Let's just give a ridiculous dose and see if anything bad happens." And then we could use that as sort of a starting point to, to research whether or not there's any, any potential harm in humans. So, they fed rats red dye number three at a rate of two thousand four hundred and sixty-four milligrams per kilogram, per kilogram per day

• 47:41Speaker 02

  during its entire lifetime, following in utero exposure.

• 47:46Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 47:46Speaker 02

  So exposure in utero, and then twenty-four sixty-four milligrams per kilogram per day. That's, now, the, the, except the daily intake, the ADI for red dye number three is zero point one milligrams per kilogram per day. So that was twenty-four thousand six hundred and forty times the dose, the accepted daily intake, of red dye number three. This is clearly not applicable to... To human exposure.

• 48:11Speaker 05

  I feel like 24,000 times the dose of anything would kill us.

• 48:14Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 48:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 48:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, what is safe at 24,000 times the acceptable daily intake?

• 48:19Speaker 05

  Maybe coffee.

• 48:20Jay Novella?

  I mean, if you drink that much water, it'll kill you.

• 48:21Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 48:22Bob Novella?

  Yeah, water poisoning.

• 48:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 48:24Speaker 02

  Now, but, but it's worse than that because, again, the point of this research was, hey, what happens? Not, is this safe?

• 48:30Speaker 05

  Mmm.

• 48:31Speaker 02

  And they found that the rats got thyroid cancer and there was a particular hormonal reason, pathway for this to occur. And it turns out that this pathway is not relevant to humans.

• 48:44Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 48:44Speaker 02

  This doesn't cause cancer in humans. And they looked for other mechanisms that, of cancer, that would be relevant to humans, and they didn't find them. They basically proved this was safe for humans. And that's the data, which is the reason for the FDA decision over the last 40 years, that why they considered this to be safe. The research shows that it's safe.

• 49:07Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 49:08Speaker 02

  Right? And so in there, they got really passive aggressive. So they're saying, there was a petition, according to the Delaney Clause, we are banning Red Dye Number Three. Then they say, "The petition requested the agency review whether the Delaney Clause applied and cited, among other data and information, two studies that showed cancer in laboratory male rats exposed to high levels of Red Dye Number Three due to rat-specific hormonal mechanism."

• 49:32Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 49:32Speaker 02

  "The way that Red Dye Number Three causes cancer in male rats does not occur in humans. Relevant exposure levels to Red Dye Number Three for humans are typically much lower than those that cause the effects shown in male rats. Studies in other animals and in humans did not show these effects. Claims that the use of Red Dye Number Three in food and in ingested drugs puts people at risk are not supported by the available scientific evidence."

• 49:53Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 49:54Speaker 02

  That's in their announcement that they're banning it.

• 49:56Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 49:57Speaker 02

  Right? They're not justifying the banning. They're just passively aggressive, "Yeah, we're banning it. It's stupid. It's, this is completely safe, but we're doing it anyway."

• 50:05Speaker 05

  Wow, that is a dangerous precedent.

• 50:08Speaker 03

  Right, they're gonna apply this as a standard now going forward?

• 50:11Speaker 02

  Well, that's the thing. That's why this is so horrible. Again, do I really care that red dye number three is getting banned? No, I don't care. That's not the point, is the precedent.

• 50:20Speaker 05

  Right.

• 50:20Speaker 02

  So, you could basically weaponize this and get anything you want banned.

• 50:26Speaker 05

  I mean, I'm thinking about anti-vaxxers now, for one.

• 50:29Speaker 02

  Right, you could, exactly. You could, I mean, this is like you're giving a flamethrower to these cranks and charlatans and saying, "Have at it." You can, you know, completely burn down the regulatory infrastructure with this kind of, of claim.

• 50:43Bob Novella?

  Can you, how about taking a tact where you do this, Steve? You weaponize it, but you ban something so ridiculously egregious that it would be, that nobody would seriously ban, just to show how stupid this is?

• 50:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, like, red dye number three? Well, you mean, like, something people care about?

• 51:01Speaker 05

  Like, caffeine or water.

• 51:02Bob Novella?

  Yes, exactly.

• 51:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, right, this is very passive.

• 51:05Speaker 02

  Like, coffee. We're gonna ban coffee. Coffee is no longer allowed.

• 51:07Bob Novella?

  Yep, exactly, there you go.

• 51:08Speaker 05

  If anyone comes for coffee, I would be so radical.

• 51:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. The FDA might ban coffee, based on the Delaney Clause and the lack of Chevron deference. And, and then see what people think about that.

• 51:19Bob Novella?

  That's what you need. You need a precedent of one or two, or even three things, that, that nobody will ever ban, because there will be riots in the streets. Then, then, the next time something comes up, people will be like, "Oh, no, this is just stupid."

• 51:34Speaker 02

  This is part also of a, of a bigger trend on the right, as a very deliberate strategy to, to disconnect expertise from the government. To basically make the government all about power, and not about expertise, right? Trump, on his first day, signed Schedule F, which basically turns career civil servants into just regular employees that could be fired for being disloyal. Right, so, you don't have to find a cause.

• 52:08Bob Novella?

  That's vile.

• 52:09Speaker 02

  Yes, and now, expertise doesn't matter, loyalty is the only thing that matters. And that, so again, it's just the, it's a devaluing of independent expertise.

• 52:18Speaker 02

  The very notion that there could be somebody working in the government who's not a Republican or a Democrat, who's not loyal or disloyal, they're just a scientist, they're just an engineer, they're an expert, and their job, it's irrelevant of any ideology, or parties, or partisanship, is to just work for the American people to do their job.

• 52:36Speaker 05

  Right.

• 52:37Speaker 02

  And to give us the benefit of their expertise. That idea is under attack. And it's losing, it's going away with these kinds of decisions at the Supreme Court level, and now executive action at the federal level. So, this is very dangerous. This is very, this is the opposite direction that we want to go into, where we have a more science-based approach to regulation, right? This will make for a less science-based, more ideological approach.

• 53:06Speaker 05

  It reminds me of a lot of places in, not all, but many places in like Eastern Europe, you know, after the fall of Yugoslavia, where there was a transition into democracy, and a lot of these sort of partial democracies and countries that are trying to become more democratic, like they have elections, but there's still a lot of corruption and demands for loyalty, and it's, the pattern would look a lot like that, where it's like, one party would win the presidency, or become the prime minister, and then all the scientists and the experts would just get kicked out, and all his friends would come in, and then there'd be another election, and then the other party would come in, and all their like cronies would come in, and it really is destabilizing.

• 53:44Speaker 02

  It's very destabilizing, yeah.

• 53:45Speaker 05

  Completely antithetical to science, and everything that, you know, Jay was describing in the opening, and everything else we like about science. It's, I mean, what can we do?

• 53:55Speaker 02

  One of the things that's been sort of the strength of this country, like for my entire life, up until recently, has been that, at the end of the day, it didn't really matter who won the White House. Like, I read a very good article 20 years ago, or so, about, "Don't worry about the low voter turnout." Low voter turnout is actually a good thing.

• 54:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 54:16Speaker 02

  It's a marker of the fact that people realize that we have a stable government, and your life doesn't depend that much on who was in the White House. Yeah, your life, yeah.

• 54:27Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 54:28Speaker 02

  Your day to day life, right, it doesn't really matter because most of the government are just civil servants doing their job.

• 54:35Speaker 05

  Right.

• 54:36Speaker 02

  And if that goes away, and it's just, nope, most of the government are partisan hacks, serving dear leader, then elections have massive consequences. And that, sure, that has high voter turnout, but for the very bad reason, for the reason that our federal government is not stable. It's not, you know, just signing 80 executive orders, or undoing 80 executive orders of the previous guy on the first day is destabilizing.

• 55:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 55:07Speaker 02

  That's not, that's not good governance.

• 55:08Speaker 05

  No, and it's, I feel like this, these past couple of rounds have been so, I mean, I remember when various other elections happened, and I didn't always love the outcome and so on, but I didn't feel like my day to day life would change that much. I was just sort of like, and there certainly were policies that I disagreed with, and policies that killed a lot of people, but you're right, Steve, it's like, just this week, I've just like, I'm not ready for the whiplash of how much everything has changed.

• 55:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 55:32Bob Novella?

  And Steve, your assumption there that, that turnout, voter turnout will increase for really critical, you know, really once in a generation critical votes, I think is now incorrect.

• 55:44Speaker 02

  Well, it was true four years ago. It was true to some extent this time, just not as much.

• 55:48Bob Novella?

  Four months ago.

• 55:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, there was like, what, seven million fewer voters? But that doesn't mean that the general principle is not true.

• 55:55Speaker 05

  Right. No, generally speaking, you're, you're right, Steve, the generally voter turnout was much lower, and, you know, depending on how you measure it, polarization was much lower in the, in the middle of the last century. And a lot of political scientists were like, oh no, polarization is too low, the parties stand for the same thing, this is bad. And it's like, no, that was great. You know, I mean, obviously you want some dissent, and you want productive conversation, and you want different perspectives, but, but the partisan hack, and the screaming, and the everything, that is certainly worse than having a whole bunch of civil servants just trying to do their job.

• 56:29Speaker 02

  Well, we shouldn't disagree on the really big stuff, like, you know, democracy.

• 56:34Bob Novella?

  Yeah, and other aspects of reality.

• 56:36Speaker 02

  And science, right, and basing our policy. Now, in addition to healthcare, which don't get me started on RFK Jr., so we'll keep an eye, we're keeping an eye on that train wreck that's happening.

• 56:45Speaker 05

  Right.

• 56:46Speaker 02

  But this is also going to be massively applied to the Environmental Protection Agency, right, the EPA. So, you know, think about what Schedule F and what the lack of Chevron deference is going to do to all of the global warming and environmental protections that have been put into place. They're all on the chopping block. That, and this, and that's, that's by design. That's why this is happening, because they, they want those regulations to go away.

• 57:10Speaker 05

  I mean, it's basically just saying, like, ignore any science you want, is what it sounds like.

• 57:14Speaker 02

  Or any experts.

• 57:15Speaker 05

  Or any experts.

• 57:16Speaker 02

  Right. Right, my loyal politicians will decide, and the courts will decide, the courts that we packed will decide, not disinterested, expert, you know, nonpartisan experts. Yeah, we're, I think we're just, this is like, this is the canary in the coal mine, right? This red dye number three thing, it seems like a nothing issue.

• 57:35Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 57:36Speaker 02

  But, but this is a, a warning bell to what is on the horizon.

• 57:40Bob Novella?

  Yeah, people are going to refer back to this, and we're like, not enough people realized at the time what this.

• 57:47Speaker 02

  This is the first domino falling.

• 57:48Bob Novella?

  This meant, yep.

• 57:49Speaker 02

  All right, Bob, tell us about this new massive picture of the Andromeda Galaxy.

• 57:54Bob Novella?

  Okay, so you guys remember the HST, the Hubble Space Telescope? It has released its largest photo mosaic image ever, and it is of the beautiful Andromeda Galaxy. What have we learned, though, about Andromeda from this, and why is it such a fascinating and important galaxy? Now, it's easy to think that the Hubble Space Telescope is right, it's passe, it's irrelevant, especially considering the new kid on the block, that, that punk James Webb Space Telescope. Oh, my favorite. It's been dominating space news just because it's making one amazing discovery after the other, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, that's all. Hubble has been, has anticipated this in my, I think, and this is why it's spent 10 years coming up with its magnum opus photo mosaic of the Andromeda Galaxy.

• 58:38Bob Novella?

  So why is this galaxy worth 10 years of effort? I think Andromeda is certainly. Special enough for many reasons. NASA recently referred to it as an enticing empire of stars, which I really loved. That turn of phrase and that's appropriate since Andromeda is the king of our local group of fifty some odd gravitationally bound galaxies. Uh, the local, our local group, the local group of galaxies. It's at, it has a whopping one trillion stars. It dwarfs the second place galaxy, our Milky Way with a, with just a paltry 250 billion stars. Um, at, at two and a half million light years away, Andromeda is often cited as the most distant object visible to the naked eye, which is a really cool statistic.

• 59:22Bob Novella?

  But I gotta say that this claim is problematic. Um, the Triangulum galaxy is probably a little bit farther away at 2.7 million light years instead of 2.5. And that's also visible to the naked eye. However, Triangulum is very dim. You need amazing and rare dark sky conditions and good sight to see it. And then if I want to be even more wonderfully anal, there's, there was a gamma ray burst detected in 2008, which was 7.5 billion light years from Earth. Anyone looking at the right place at the right time would have seen that. At 7.5 billion light years away, but that doesn't really count. And there's a couple of other galaxies that may be a little farther away

• 1:00:04Bob Novella?

  that some astronomers claim that they saw naked eye, whatever. Now you could say Andromeda is basically the most distant visible eye, eye, the most distant naked eye object, certainly the biggest, uh, because most of the time it's not quite that difficult to see. And, uh, the other ones are much, much harder. And so it's, you know, problematic, whatever. Anywho, uh, so none of that takes away from Andromeda, but it wasn't even always thought to be a galaxy. Uh, did you know what used to be called the Great Andromeda Nebula? Uh, they thought it was just glowing gases or maybe a young solar system. But once, once the technology improved enough and they resolved the stars inside it in the 20th century, then it was like, okay, this isn't glowing gas. Many, many thought, um, well, a plasma is glowing gas.

• 1:00:49Bob Novella?

  What, you know, it's, they, they found stars. So many thought that it was, uh, A spiral nebula within our Milky Way, which makes sense if you think that the Milky Way is the entire universe, as they did at that time. But then Edwin Hubble, Edwin Hubble in 23, 1923, studying a Cepheid variable star in Andromeda, he conclusively determined and showed that Andromeda had to be distant island universe of its, of its own. What a day, imagine that. What a day that must have been to, to irrevocably alter the entire conception of the universe. And that happened because of Andromeda. But what makes Andromeda even more special in my mind

• 1:01:29Bob Novella?

  is the fact that it is a big barred spiral galaxy, just like the Milky Way. And because of that, the more we learn about Andromeda, the more we learn about our own island universe galaxy. And because think about it, it's very hard to study the Milky Way since we're basically trapped inside of it. We're not going anywhere probably forever where we can actually get a distant view of the Milky Way. Someone compared it to learning about Manhattan from the perspective of Central Park. And that's a, that's an apt analogy that, you know, we're very limited what we can learn about our own home, our own galaxy. And looking at such a big, beautiful and close spiral galaxy like Andromeda

• 1:02:11Bob Novella?

  helps us learn a tremendous amount. We've learned more about our own galaxy by studying Andromeda than even our own galaxy, I think. All right. So that maybe puts Hubble's 10 years of effort into more perspective. The photo mosaic itself that Hubble created took a thousand orbits. It has a 2.5 billion pixels, gigapixels. The image can make out 200 million distinguishable stars, all of them brighter than, than the sun. The other 800 million stars that are, that we think are in there are, are just too dim to make out with Hubble tech. It was actually very hard to image Andromeda. I didn't know this. This is, it was very difficult.

• 1:02:50Bob Novella?

  They described it as a Herculean task. Why do you think it was so hard to image Andromeda like this? Why Andromeda specifically? And this wouldn't be- Because it's so big in the sky? Yeah, exactly. It's unusually big in- The sky, six times the width of the full moon. Most galaxies, uh, that, most galaxies that Hubble images are billions of light years away. And they, they would span tiny fractions of the moon width in the sky. So this is just so big, it made, it made the task. So big, Jay. I was gonna say, that's so big. It made the task much more difficult. All right. So what have we actually learned by studying Andromeda this way?

• 1:03:29Bob Novella?

  The most interesting thing to me is that it looks like Andromeda has a different evolutionary history than our Milky Way. Even though they both grew up in the same neighborhoods, right? We're basically good neighbors, but yet it still had a different evolutionary history. It has, for example, many more younger stars than the Milky Way. And the researchers say it has unusual features like coherent streams of stars. Daniel Wise, Associate Professor of Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement, "Andromeda's a train wreck." I just love that quote. "Andromeda's a train wreck." It looks like it's been through some kind of event that caused it to form a lot of stars and then it just shut down. This is probably due to a collision with another galaxy in the neighborhood.

• 1:04:13Bob Novella?

  So yeah, it looks like a relatively recent collision of the gases. You know, because you know, when galaxies collide, the stars aren't hitting. It's really, you know, it's a gravitational interaction and, and the gases, the diffuse hydrogen gas. That's where you can get some big collisions. So, uh, so the collision of Andromeda and another galaxy caused many new stars to form in Andromeda. And that, of course, greatly decreased Andromeda's future star making ability. So that's why he says that it seems like Andromeda just shut down. Because it, you know, it shot its wad, it created a bunch of stars a while ago. And now there's just not quite as much gas left to, to form new stars. They even think they know the galaxy that Andromeda collided with. It's called, um, Messier 32.

• 1:04:58Bob Novella?

  They think it used to be a spiral until Andromeda essentially stripped away all its outer stars and incorporated them into those, those streams of stars that I mentioned. And it just left the core. The core is the only remnant from the spiral that once was. And it's just, it's just orbiting, you know, Andromeda now, thinking about why everything went so wrong. In the future, they will use these findings to support future observations by, of course, the James Webb Space Telescope, and I'm sure it will unfortunately make people forget about poor Hubble again. So, so check out the photo mosaic of Andromeda online and read about the fascinating galaxy, the, the great Andromeda Galaxy.

• 1:05:42Speaker 02

  What I would like to see is that picture of the Andromeda Galaxy superimposed on the night sky where it is.

• 1:05:48Speaker 03

  Oh, yes.

• 1:05:50Bob Novella?

  I have, Steve, it's, it's, you know, it's just, it's easy to find, it's, it's all over the web. Oh, it's, it's beautiful. I just can't, oh, if it was just brighter, it's so big. Like, Steve, imagine the full moon, it's, it's five, six times the width, it's, it would be, it would dominate our, it would be a cultural thing where, where, can you imagine the stories that primitive societies would have come up with about this, this huge, beautiful spiral galaxy that you could see with the naked eye in detail? It would, it would, oh, it would be wonderful. But, yeah, there's two, it's too damn dim. Two and a half million light years away. It's big, but it's, it's just too dim and you got, you know, you need technology to see it well. Cause, cause if you looked at it with your naked eye, it's just a fuzzy patch.

• 1:06:32Speaker 03

  That's a dim shame.

• 1:06:33Speaker 05

  There it is.

• 1:06:35Speaker 02

  That was, no, that was not good, Evan.

• 1:06:37Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:06:38Speaker 05

  No, I was sitting here thinking it was like...

• 1:06:40Speaker 02

  That was below your usual standard.

• 1:06:41Bob Novella?

  Go ahead.

• 1:06:42Speaker 05

  That I was missing something obvious, like Orion's Belt, the moon, Southern Cross, like, why am I not seeing Andromeda? Oh, because it's a tiny dim.

• 1:06:51Bob Novella?

  Yeah, it's a, yeah, it's a, it's a fuzzy patch. It's, um, yeah, it's visible. I think it's visible even now in the northern hemisphere. So I'm definitely wanting to make a more of a concerted effort to, to check it out. And just, just to look at something, wow, look at that, that's two and a half million light years away. I want to get in the, it's been so long since I've seen it. I want to check it out again.

• 1:07:10Speaker 03

  We saw the Magellan cloud, right?

• 1:07:11Bob Novella?

  Yeah, the Magellan, the large and small Magellan clouds in the southern hemisphere. That, that was a, a moment because, I don't know, I've, I've heard about those dwarf galaxies for so long, they're, they're, they're very close, relatively close. They're only, I think, what is it, 170,000 light years away. And, oh my God, they are, that was really one of those moments where it's like, I was just spellbound looking at them. Cause I've, I've never seen them before. I've seen a million pictures, but I never saw it with my naked eye in, in, where were we? Were we in Australia or New Zealand?

• 1:07:41Speaker 03

  We were in New Zealand, yeah.

• 1:07:42Bob Novella?

  It was magical, magical.

• 1:07:45Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Bob.

• 1:07:46Bob Novella?

  Sure.

• 1:07:47Speaker 02

  Evan, this is another item that we've gotten a lot of emails about, these telepathy tapes. What's going on there?

• 1:07:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, telepathy. I know, I wish I had done a news search on one of my news browsers recently for the word telepathy. And perhaps I would have been made aware of this much sooner than just recently. I mean, you think telepathy, of all words, you're going to search for skeptic related news? I mean, that's not exactly high on the list of keywords. You know, face, I mean, what, an adult or a child maybe believes in telepathic communication in the year 2025, right? Nah, probably not. We're talking like, you know, it's in, you put that aside with levitation, and alchemy, and astral projection, and those kinds of things. But there it is this week. I found this at the website called inews.co.uk, which is basically an online newspaper,

• 1:08:38Speaker 03

  and it's in their culture section. I think it should have been in their science section, but regardless, it was written by Emily Bootle, B-O-O-T-L-E, who's the culture writer there, or a culture writer. And the headline reads, "The Telepathy Tapes Is Autism Pseudoscience, But It's Top Of The Charts." Tagline reads, "A Podcast Claims Non-Verbal Autistic Children Have Mind-Reading Abilities." Its success, the podcast's success, isn't because of its content, but its powerful methods of persuasion. Uh-oh. Well, first, big shout out to Emily for framing this correctly from the get-go. Big plus there, that mind-reading abilities

• 1:09:21Speaker 03

  are squarely pseudoscience. And the uh-oh part of this, it's about, you know, adults, once again, taking advantage of children diagnosed with autism or other conditions that inhibit their ability to effectively communicate. The telepathy tapes, had you heard about this before, say, just in recent weeks? Because I had not.

• 1:09:42Speaker 02

  I hadn't. Well, you've been getting a lot of emails about it. That's why.

• 1:09:45Speaker 03

  We did, but the podcast launched in September of last year. I don't recall us hearing much about it back in, back in September.

• 1:09:54Speaker 03

  And here's what it's, here's how they are, what she writes in the article, Emily. The telepathy tapes were, were first released in September 2024, but gained traction in December 2024. Over eight episodes, the documentary maker Kai Dickens unpacks a phenomenon that she believes should be given much greater attention and scientific validity, the idea that some non-verbal autistic children can read minds. The show has shot to the top of the charts, podcast charts in recent weeks in both the United Kingdom and the United States, briefly knocking Joe Rogan off the top spot. What? What? The telepathy tapes went to number one practically overnight? Oh my gosh.

• 1:10:39Speaker 05

  I'm so conflicted about this.

• 1:10:40Speaker 03

  How the heck did that happen? When did the, you know, out of nowhere, boom. How did that escape our attention on its meteoric rise? Oh my gosh. That's stunning, to say the least. One might say remarkable, but Bob won't be saying it. I had to go to the source, right? So when you hear something like this, let's give it a listen. I did not download the podcast, but instead I found the transcript and I read episode one. Here are some highlights from the episode one. You can get it right from the source. This is Kai Dickens and you're listening to the Telepathy Tapes podcast. For decades, a very specific group of people have been claiming telepathy is happening in their homes and in their classrooms and nobody has believed them. Nobody has listened to them. But on

• 1:11:23Speaker 03

  this podcast, we do. Welcome to the very first episode of the Telepathy Tapes, where we venture into claims of widespread telepathy via a group who is systematically dismissed, non-speakers who often have autism. For decades, parents of non-speakers have been told by doctors, educators and scientists that their kids are not in there.

• 1:11:45Speaker 03

  They are not capable of communication or competent of learning. Imagine being one of those parents and discovering that everybody has been wrong about your child. They are in there, they are competent, and they can communicate, but then also discovering that your child can read your mind. Would you expect to be believed? We're going to meet people who experience this phenomenon from every corner of the world. They travel wherever, you know, all over the country and other places as well, England, Israel, Mexico, India. And I find it very difficult to figure out how to bring anyone into this world due to the nature, due to the natural skeptic in all of us. So, and she writes, back to the article, "In the podcast, there are tests and experiments

• 1:12:30Speaker 03

  that are conducted, sometimes alongside a neuroscientist, Dr. Diane Hennessy-Powell, who conducts research in the area, that's not a name I'm familiar with, actually, with parents and children with shocking results. The children use iPads to communicate via typing. Using random number generators, random book pages, and random words, she tests their ability to read their parents' or therapist's mind, and, all over the US, they succeed again and again. Even hardened skeptics like her cameraman Matt might find room to pause."

• 1:13:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, cameraman Matt is a well-known skeptic.

• 1:13:04Speaker 03

  Right?

• 1:13:05Speaker 02

  Years of experience.

• 1:13:06Speaker 05

  Why isn't he on this show?

• 1:13:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, seriously.

• 1:13:08Speaker 02

  We asked him, but he refused, he was too busy reading.

• 1:13:11Speaker 03

  Too busy, yeah.

• 1:13:12Speaker 05

  Oh, wow. That's too bad.

• 1:13:14Speaker 03

  She continues, "When you take a step back, there's a great many problems, indeed. Thank you, Emily, for pointing these out. Now, Dickens never claims to be an expert or a scientist. She's simply floored by the empirical evidence, but she does claim repeatedly that her test results are sound. 'I'm not an expert or a scientist either,' says Emily, 'but I have done some cursory research, and I feel confident in saying they're not as watertight as they're making it out, not only because there are too many variables, but they failed to use double-blind methods, or because their sample size is too small, actually, but because something is much more fundamental. The method that the childrens use to communicate..."

• 1:13:54Speaker 03

  Known as spelling or facilitated communication is itself highly controversial. And that's, you know, really what is going on here. Here we go. Facilitated communication, once again, coming to the surface, not only coming to the surface, but fueling this podcast into becoming the number one podcast in two major markets in the world, which is just unbelievable.

• 1:14:20Speaker 05

  Is this an ongoing show? Will there be more seasons or are they done?

• 1:14:23Speaker 03

  10 episodes in total. And then what's going to happen is they're going to produce, I don't know if it will, I don't think it's gonna be on, I hadn't heard if it's really gonna be on Netflix or something like that, but they're gonna make a, either a series or, you know, a documentary series, a small series.

• 1:14:39Speaker 05

  Maybe Gwyneth Paltrow will host it.

• 1:14:41Speaker 03

  Would not be surprised at all.

• 1:14:43Speaker 02

  Yet again, it's just facilitated communication. That's it.

• 1:14:47Speaker 03

  Which we've spoken about so many times in different ways. Yeah.

• 1:14:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's the communicator, the facilitator is doing all the communication. And again, it's like, it is, you know, this is not politically correct. I'm not meaning this. Don't take this the wrong way. It's like the clever Hans effect, right? Not that these kids are like animals, but I'm just saying the, the point is they're not, they're not typically communicative, right? You can't communicate them in the normal way. And if you use a method that is self deceptive, where the, again, like clever Hans effect, it was the people around the horse who were dictating what the horse did, not the horse itself. Once you do that, there's no limit to the illusory abilities of the target, right?

• 1:15:35Speaker 02

  So, most people think that clever Hans could count, right? But actually, it turns out clever Hans could also read and, and do math and do, and calculate dates. And he could do whatever task you put before him. And this is the now with facilitated communication is the same thing. It's like not only are they are these children who are non communicative, are they quote unquote, able to communicate through facilitated communication. They're reading at, you know, five or six grade levels ahead of where of their age. And they could speak other languages. These are all actual cases that I've dealt with. They go, oh, they speak Hebrew or whatever. They could speak another language.

• 1:16:15Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:16:15Speaker 02

  And now they're telepathic. Of course, they're whatever it is you test them for.

• 1:16:18Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah. That's right. No, no limit now as to as to the their amazing, you know, abilities.

• 1:16:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:26Speaker 03

  I mean, to the point where where they go into it. And again, I only read the transcript from the first episode and they go, I'm sure much deeper into the whole case for why they think this is telepathy.

• 1:16:38Speaker 02

  It's ridiculous. And it's completely exploitative. It is horrible thing to do to these children.

• 1:16:43Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:16:44Speaker 02

  It is stealing their voice. It is absolutely.

• 1:16:47Speaker 03

  And and to to parents who are in extremely difficult situations.

• 1:16:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:16:52Speaker 03

  Who will do anything to to to improve, you know, their lives or what perceive their lives of their children and may, you know, and they are clinging on to any any any kind of rope that can be thrown their way. So you are emotionally destroying these people in the process as well with this.

• 1:17:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:12Speaker 05

  Right. It was part of the the power of the the vaccines cause autism movement because didn't it just give parents of children with autism something to blame or some someone to like?

• 1:17:21Speaker 03

  It's part of it.

• 1:17:22Speaker 05

  Fixate on or or as opposed to just sort of accepting who their child is and working with that child, you know, like you just sort of demonize something else.

• 1:17:30Speaker 02

  That was a layer to it, definitely.

• 1:17:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:17:33Speaker 03

  And the other, this is not new.

• 1:17:35Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:17:36Speaker 03

  It's this is repackaged again. It's the same old.

• 1:17:41Speaker 02

  Almost forty years old.

• 1:17:42Speaker 03

  That right. And in the nineties, there were so many studies done that that outright debunked facilitated communication. And what's the what was the other one? It was called what? The rapid prompting method?

• 1:17:54Speaker 02

  There's.

• 1:17:54Speaker 03

  Which is also known as spelling.

• 1:17:56Speaker 02

  Spell to speak and there's but there's a bunch of different. Rivative methods are basically all FC. They're all facilitated communications with with different bells and whistles. But yeah, at the end of the day, you have to control for the facilitator. You have to make sure they're blinded. If the facilitator is not blinded, you are doing pseudoscience. Period. Period. That's it.

• 1:18:19Speaker 03

  There's a very testable set of claims here.

• 1:18:21Speaker 02

  Very testable. And when you test it properly, it fails every time.

• 1:18:25Speaker 05

  I mean, that's it just seems so obvious that if any, all the other claims they have that just like make it double blind and then and then talk to me about it. It just seems so obvious.

• 1:18:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, just do good science. Just do good science.

• 1:18:35Speaker 05

  Just do science. Yeah.

• 1:18:37Speaker 02

  Like 101, like science 101, basic control. The stuff they figured out hundreds of years ago. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:18:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:18:43Speaker 03

  I was watching an old 60 Minutes interview in which Maury Schaefer was interviewing former proponents of facilitated communication, actual people who were administering the tests. And then they were doing the studies for a year or more in some cases, you know, and giving kind of these families and things false hope. And then they were subjected to the to double blinding and they realized that the results all disappeared. And the and they were overwhelmed with grief, saying, my gosh, how could, how could we have deluded? You know, deluded ourselves so badly and the harm that they felt that they caused. It was really a heart wrenching kind of thing to watch. So there, there, thank goodness, some people have realized the problems here and actually, you know,

• 1:19:28Speaker 03

  moved away from it and become advocates, frankly, against it. But, you know, at the same time, these things never disappear fully. They will always reincarnate. And before you know it, you have the number one podcast in the world, basically. So

• 1:19:40Speaker 02

  Terrible.

• 1:19:41Speaker 03

  It's a sad thing.

• 1:19:43Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Evan.

• 1:19:44Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:19:44Speaker 02

  Jay, it's who's that noisy time?

• 1:19:46Jay Novella?

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

• 1:20:03Jay Novella?

  Andrew, do you ever hear things like that in the city?

• 1:20:05Speaker 05

  You know, at first I thought it was a car that couldn't start, but then it turned into what sounded like a lizard. So, no.

• 1:20:14Jay Novella?

  All right, I got tons of guesses this week. So, let's go through these. So Benjamin Davort, Ben said.

• 1:20:23Bob Novella?

  Oh, no, that's great.

• 1:20:24Jay Novella?

  Here from Japan, he said, "The scene seems to be in nature. The sound feels like a large throaty cavity of a massive animal, resounding with the respiration." He says, "You can hear the breath and the clack clack that comes after." He thinks it's a reptile, like a crocodile, and that's his guess. It is not a crocodile, but crocodiles make noises that sound similar to that, if you listen to them. But that is definitely not a crocodile.

• 1:20:53Speaker 03

  They cry.

• 1:20:53Jay Novella?

  Two people guessed that it was a shoe bill stork. Frederick Niant said that it's a shoe bill stork courtship call. And a listener named Cohen Ertz said, "Hi Jay, I'm a longtime listener to the show. My 11-year-old son, Sam, wants to guess this week's noisy. It is the sound of a shoe bill stork." Sam, it's not correct, but that's science, right? Science, there's lots of misses and then, you know, and then you get some hits and you gotta keep trying. Just keep trying. You're gonna get there for sure. Stavis Maples wrote in and said, "Hello, this week's noisy may be a lung-powered piston or rotary. I had to look it up." Look up what a lung-powered piston is for yourself,

• 1:21:34Jay Novella?

  not something that you would want to deal with. Mike Copin said, "Hi, I say it's a velociraptor talking to other velociraptors right before they pounce." Yeah, I mean, you know, we've heard lots of simulated velociraptor sounds. It does kind of sound like a movie, right?

• 1:21:49Speaker 03

  Throatiness to it, yeah.

• 1:21:51Jay Novella?

  But once you understand what it is, I bet you that they may have taken this sound to create the velociraptor sound.

• 1:21:57Jay Novella?

  Erin Lloyd wrote in, who happens to be the winner. She said, Erin here from Liverpool. Love the show since 2015, and I think I finally know the noisy. It's a mama jaguar warming, uh, warning the keeper or the photographer from, you know, keeping them away from her babies. Reminds me of the noise the aliens make in arrival. Thank you so much, Erin. Good job on that. I really think that you, uh, you must have heard this before. Let me play it for you guys. Check it out.

• 1:22:33Jay Novella?

  That's great, because the baby jaguar.

• 1:22:37Jay Novella?

  Yeah, you don't want to mess with that, guys.

• 1:22:38Speaker 05

  No.

• 1:22:39Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:22:40Jay Novella?

  We are hardwired to fear that deep guttural kind of sound.

• 1:22:45Speaker 03

  Good.

• 1:22:46Speaker 05

  I'm so glad I'm wearing headphones, because that would have terrified my dog. We'd all be howling right now.

• 1:22:50Speaker 03

  Poor puppy.

• 1:22:51Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, in the wild, you hear that, and your, your body tells you, run, you know, like you're just getting out of there. I have a new noisy for you guys this week. This noisy was sent in by a listener named Mars Janssens. J A N S S E N S. Check this one out. This is a very cool one.

• 1:23:12Speaker 07

  Hello?

• 1:23:15Speaker 07

  Hello?

• 1:23:18Jay Novella?

  And play it again.

• 1:23:20Speaker 07

  Hello?

• 1:23:23Speaker 07

  Hello?

• 1:23:27Jay Novella?

  Oh, it's so cool. So many wonderful sounds out there. If you think you know what this week's noisy is, or if you heard something cool, email me at [email protected]. So Steve, it's not a coincidence that Andrea is on the show this week.

• 1:23:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:43Jay Novella?

  Because we do things with Andrea.

• 1:23:45Speaker 03

  We do. Skeptical things.

• 1:23:47Jay Novella?

  Yes, skeptical things. And other than like us talking into the void at our home computers, we do stuff in person with Andrea. Andrea was one of the founding directors of Nauticon.

• 1:24:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:01Jay Novella?

  That was Nauticon 2023. We are now running Nauticon 2025.

• 1:24:07Jay Novella?

  Andrea and Brian Wecht and George Robb and all of the SGU will be there and Ian the watermelon guy.

• 1:24:15Speaker 03

  Ian will be there.

• 1:24:16Jay Novella?

  Ian, the Ianster. Anyway, so we would love for you guys to come. You can go to noticoncon.com for more information. We'll be putting up the schedule very soon. We have like one more meeting to go and then we can, we can reveal the schedule. We have a lot of great bits that we're going to do this year. If you don't know what noticon is, this is a conference where there is a lot of socializing. We have a lot of fun entertainment. This is really a get, get out of the house and go do something awesome with a bunch of like minded people. It's a two day conference and you will meet, meet new people. You'll make friends. You'll be a part of George Robb sing along. There is a conference along

• 1:24:57Jay Novella?

  puzzle that is handcrafted that will have lots of inside jokes and funny things going on. And again, all of us will be there and we will be having a ton of fun. Andrea, in 2023, what did you learn about yourself at noticon?

• 1:25:11Speaker 05

  That's a good question. I mean, as you were describing it, I was thinking about how much fun it was. And I think one thing I learned about myself is I spent a lot of time alone and like you said, talking into the void and I learned that I really like being around other people who are nice and it's really just fun to just get together and have a good time with no like major agenda. Like I'm usually not around people unless like we're having a meeting or we're doing a thing. And it was just like so fun to just kind of joke and see where conversations could take you. And it was amazing too, because it was so many people I didn't already know. Like I know you guys, but and maybe a couple of, of people who were there who are listeners of the show, but for the most part it was

• 1:25:54Speaker 05

  people I'd never met. And it was just, it was surprisingly easy and fun. And I just, I learned that I need more of that in my life.

• 1:26:01Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I agree. I mean, that was the takeaway that we all had as the people running it. It was a new conference in 2023. We didn't know.

• 1:26:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, because we'd done Nexus before and I've been to, we've all been to conferences. So I didn't know what to expect.

• 1:26:14Jay Novella?

  You know, we definitely built it to have a friendly welcoming vibe.

• 1:26:18Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:26:19Jay Novella?

  But it kind of did an order of magnitude more than we expected.

• 1:26:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:26:23Jay Novella?

  You know, we had people, you know, that were really complimenting the fact that it was easy to meet people and that it was, it really was a big social event that was a lot of fun about, you know, getting to know people that you don't know, or maybe meeting up with people that you know only online. And for us as the directors, like, you know, Andrew, we've always had fun working with you. I mean, the very first time I met you was at Nexus and you and I were doing like a comedy bit with each other. I didn't even know who you were.

• 1:26:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, I didn't know who you guys were either. They were just like, we need an improviser on stage. And okay, it was super fun.

• 1:26:53Jay Novella?

  Yeah, but that, you know, it's funny that we met at a conference, but you and I like really became friends through all of like the work that we do to go to conferences now, right? Like there's, there's way more time we spend together doing that stuff.

• 1:27:05Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:27:05Jay Novella?

  But it was fun to just socialize with you guys as well, right? We were having just as much fun as everybody else there. So it's a really wonderful thing. If you're interested, go to notakoncon.com. Don't get confused. And if you're not sure, go to the skepticsguy.org and you'll see it right there.

• 1:27:21Speaker 05

  Notakoncon.com is the world's greatest URL. So congratulations.

• 1:27:25Jay Novella?

  It's terrible. We'll talk to begin about that. Couple more quick things, guys. So here we are. It's 2025. Steve has finally decided to retire after being a medical professional for, oh, 30 plus years. And when Steve first came to me to discuss this, um, you know, of course I've been waiting for this for years. You know, I mean, I've been like wanting this to happen for a very long time.

• 1:27:49Speaker 02

  But you did panic a little bit, though.

• 1:27:51Jay Novella?

  Well, it's panicky because it's a big change, you know? We have, we have so much to consider and to plan on and to do. Like Steve's going to be, we will be crafting new content for Steve to do, his own podcast. And, you know, potentially there could be like a very frequent live stream happening, maybe a daily live stream, whatever. There's lots of different irons in the fire. So. So I think the fact that coincidentally that politics have gone crazy in the United States and we need more sanity now than we ever did, it's a great time for Steve to come. And this is the perfect time, if you want to help us support Steve's move to the SGU, you know, and to help us support the work that we plan on doing to help bring more rational thinking to the world, then really consider becoming a patron right now. It would be wonderful if you could join us.

• 1:28:37Jay Novella?

  It really is a great time. And I've said this before, but really consider it. There's wonderful people in the SGU Discord. The SGU community is strong and it's wonderful and it's filled with a lot of fun, really intelligent people that I'm very happy to call a lot of them my friends. But just think about it, Steve's going full time and that is going to enable us to broaden our reach and do a lot more stuff. So I just think if you were ever going to become a patron, now would be a great time to really consider it.

• 1:29:05Speaker 02

  Absolutely. All right, guys, let's go on with science or fiction.

• 1:29:12Speaker 01

  It's time for science or fiction.

• 1:29:22Speaker 02

  Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. And then I challenge my panel of skeptics, tell me which one is the fake. You have three regular news items this week. Are you guys ready?

• 1:29:34Jay Novella?

  Yes.

• 1:29:35Speaker 05

  I'm ready.

• 1:29:35Speaker 02

  Andrea, you're ready?

• 1:29:36Speaker 05

  I'm ready.

• 1:29:37Speaker 02

  It's your first one of the year.

• 1:29:38Speaker 03

  Oh, boy.

• 1:29:39Speaker 02

  Maybe your only one.

• 1:29:42Jay Novella?

  All right.

• 1:29:42Speaker 05

  All right.

• 1:29:44Speaker 03

  So make it count.

• 1:29:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, okay. No pressure.

• 1:29:46Jay Novella?

  Number one, a cross national analysis finds that the presence of climate action policy is a stronger predictor of anti-climate action groups than national economic self-interests. That's a very poli-sai one for you.

• 1:30:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, okay. I feel very on the spot already.

• 1:30:03Jay Novella?

  I had a number two, a recent study of the diet of coyotes in San Francisco found domestic cat remains in almost half the scat analyzed. And number three, a new framework for simulating optimal pandemic responses finds that in 42% of scenarios, it is better to vaccinate high exposure groups prior to high risk groups as was done during COVID, meaning that high risk groups were prioritized during the COVID pandemic, at least here in the US. All right, these are a little complicated. These are a little, little poli-sai-ish.

• 1:30:39Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:30:39Jay Novella?

  Except for the coyote one.

• 1:30:41Speaker 05

  We study coyotes, too. That's actually a branch.

• 1:30:43Speaker 02

  You do?

• 1:30:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. It's politics and coyotes.

• 1:30:46Speaker 02

  Coyote politics?

• 1:30:46Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 1:30:47Speaker 02

  All right. Andrea, why don't you go first?

• 1:30:49Speaker 05

  All right. Well, I'm going to say I want the coyote one to be false, just because I don't like the idea that all these domestic cats are being eaten by coyotes. But that does sound consistent with what people I know on the West Coast have said about the presence of coyotes. So I'm going to say the... I'm going to start with the least political science one and say that the diet of coyotes, being almost half of them having domestic cats, I'm going to say that that one is true. The cross-national analysis on climate action, being that the claim is that the presence or the finding is the presence of climate action predicts anti-climate action more than national economic self-interest. I'm going to say...

• 1:31:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'll explain that a little bit.

• 1:31:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:31:34Speaker 02

  Since you're going first. So essentially, they tried to see like what predicts or what correlates with there being an active anti-climate action group in a country. And one of the things they looked at was, well, does that country sell gas and oil? Right? Is it in there? Is selling fossil fuels in that country's economic self-interest? Another factor looked at is what is the climate action policy of that country? So these are independent variables, right? You could have a country that sells no oil but has a very strong climate action policy.

• 1:32:04Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:32:04Speaker 02

  You could have another country that sells a lot of oil and doesn't have it, or whatever, both or neither, whatever.

• 1:32:09Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:32:10Speaker 02

  So they looked at everything and said, you know what? It's actually more a reaction to climate action policy than it is there being a fossil fuel industry in that country.

• 1:32:19Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:32:19Speaker 02

  That's what they found.

• 1:32:20Speaker 05

  Got it, got it. No, that's interesting, and I'm tempted to believe it, but I'm going to say that that one is false, just because I'm thinking about a lot of countries in Europe, particularly Western Europe, that have a lot of climate action. And if they do have anti-climate action, it's not as vociferous as... it's not vociferous enough that I've heard about it. And so I'm going to say that that one is false, that I don't think climate action strongly predicts anti-climate action more than economic self-interest. And that would leave the third one, that we should be vaccinating high-exposure groups rather before high risk. That means that I think that one is true as well.

• 1:33:02Speaker 02

  Okay, Bob, go next.

• 1:33:05Bob Novella?

  Let's see, all right, the first one, yeah, I'm gonna think, I'm gonna say the first one is science, climate action policy being a stronger predictor of anti-climate action. It just seems like that is probably science to me. Let's go with the second one. Let's go with the third one then, shall we? Let's see, optimal pandemic responses. Yeah, that sounds like a reasonable approach to go with high exposure groups. I could see, I could, I could see that working. High exposure groups are gonna get it and spread it more. So why not focus on them, I guess. The second one, though, this, the coyotes and the cats, a half?

• 1:33:49Bob Novella?

  Half of them have previously eaten cats? I think there would be an uproar. You know, cats are missing and they're finding them in coyote. I mean, I'm just, that just seems like, half seems like too much. So I'll just say that that one's fiction.

• 1:34:04Speaker 02

  Okay, Evan.

• 1:34:05Speaker 03

  All right, let's see. Oh, yeah, climate action policy presence, a stronger predictor of anti-climate action groups. I have a feeling that this one is science as well. There could be several reasons as to why this is the case. Boy, you know, some of these countries otherwise would not allow this kind of thing, don't allow this protests and other things to action, to come into being even, right? Let alone, you know, these groups that, that would rise against them. So I think that has a factor there and that winds up being true.

• 1:34:46Speaker 03

  The second one about the coyotes and the cat remains. I'll say that that one is also the fiction. I think, I think half is too much. You know, Kara has I think spoken before about predator, you know, the wild predators and cat populations. In California, specifically, this is in San Francisco, but the half just does seem too high. And like Bob said, I don't think the people would stand for it. They would want, you know, to cull whole throngs of coyotes, perhaps as a result. The last one, yeah, I suppose, I'm actually a little surprised it's only in 42% of scenarios, better to vaccinate the high exposure groups, right? Because you gotta, you gotta take care of

• 1:35:29Speaker 03

  them if they're going to go in and actually help the, the people who are the higher risks. So, but yeah, I agree with Bob. Coyotes fiction.

• 1:35:37Speaker 02

  And Jay?

• 1:35:38Jay Novella?

  Yeah, to me, the coyote one is screaming fiction because first of all, San Francisco is a city.

• 1:35:43Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:35:44Jay Novella?

  You know, there's not, I would, I would dare say that there are not a lot of coyotes in San Francisco, you know what I mean? Running around the city, uh-uh. But what Bob said was 100% what I was thinking, like, man, if half of them had cat in their scat, then they would, then it doesn't necessarily mean that multiple, you know, multiple coyotes couldn't have eaten from the same cat or whatever, but still, that's a lot. Unless the number of coyotes is extremely low, which, you know, I mean, I have coyotes around here where I live and like, there, you know, there's, there's probably a lot of them. So I really think this one is obviously the fiction. Andrea, I'm sorry, you know, I wanted to go with you. I usually just go with you anyway. You know what I mean? Like, I like the way

• 1:36:27Jay Novella?

  you think and I like the way, you know, like, what do they call that? The cut of your jib? I'm all about that.

• 1:36:31Speaker 03

  Andrea might win the day here.

• 1:36:33Speaker 05

  Well, all the things must end.

• 1:36:34Bob Novella?

  I hope she gets a sweep. I really do.

• 1:36:36Jay Novella?

  But I just don't think, there's, there's lots of lines of reasoning here that make me think like this one is greatly exaggerated. Or maybe it's the reverse. Maybe they're finding coyote in the cat stomachs.

• 1:36:48Speaker 05

  That would be news. I think the cats have telepathy is what I read.

• 1:36:51Speaker 02

  All right. So you all agree with the third one. So we'll start there. A new framework for simulating optimal pandemic responses finds that in 42% of scenarios, it is better to vaccinate high exposure groups prior to high risk groups, as was done during COVID. You guys all think this one is science and this one is? Science.

• 1:37:12Speaker 05

  Yay.

• 1:37:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know this is a little complicated, but and it's 42% of the time, right? Not all the time.

• 1:37:17Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:37:17Speaker 02

  Sometimes it is better to vaccinate the high-risk groups first. Sometimes it doesn't make that much of a difference. This is a, so the, what's interesting here is they developed essentially an algorithm, a framework, you know, like an AI kind of analysis where you could plug in all the variables and it'll tell you which pathway minimizes death and disease, right? And this is important if we don't have a lot of availability. We have to decide who was gonna, who was gonna get the vaccine first. We have a limited supply or, or we have to rush it out and we have to, you know, know who to prioritize. So this could, this kind of analysis in real time during the next pandemic or epidemic or whatever could save lives.

• 1:38:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:38:03Speaker 02

  Right? Knowing how to find who, who to prioritize, who to prioritize first. All right, let's go back to number two. A recent study of the diet of coyotes in San Francisco found domestic cat remains in almost half the scat analyzed. Andrea, you think this one is science. The boys think this one is the fiction. Let me ask you guys a couple of questions. How many coyotes do you think are living in San Francisco?

• 1:38:26Jay Novella?

  Probably not that many.

• 1:38:27Speaker 05

  Very few. I think Jay was right about that.

• 1:38:29Speaker 02

  So if it's not that many, Jay.

• 1:38:31Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:38:32Speaker 02

  You're kind of contradicting yourself.

• 1:38:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:38:33Speaker 02

  If there's not that many coyote, then why is it a problem that half of them are eating cats?

• 1:38:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, if there's only 150.

• 1:38:38Speaker 05

  Probably only eating cats.

• 1:38:39Bob Novella?

  Yeah, there might just be two cats.

• 1:38:41Jay Novella?

  I just don't know. I don't know. You know, it's a, what, a lot or a little? I have no idea what that number is.

• 1:38:47Speaker 02

  There's about 100 coyotes living in San Francisco.

• 1:38:49Speaker 03

  That's all. There's a lot of feral cats out there.

• 1:38:51Speaker 05

  You've heard about the real estate there.

• 1:38:53Speaker 02

  Evan brings up another point. You guys were talking about missing pets, but how many feral cats are there in San Francisco?

• 1:39:00Speaker 05

  Domestic cat, right?

• 1:39:01Speaker 02

  Or just street cats, alley cats?

• 1:39:03Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:04Speaker 03

  Don't know. Stray cats.

• 1:39:05Speaker 02

  The town went over from where I live now, but there were, this is where I lived, you know, 20 years ago in Cheshire, there was a feral cat problem there.

• 1:39:16Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:39:16Speaker 02

  Remember, there's this one street, we would put like you're just driving along the street or you're stopped at a stoplight, you look on the side of the road and there's like 30, 40 feral cats.

• 1:39:25Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:39:25Speaker 02

  Running through the woods. It was a real problem.

• 1:39:27Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:39:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, but they...

• 1:39:29Speaker 03

  They decimate bird populations.

• 1:39:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:39:32Speaker 03

  Among other things.

• 1:39:33Speaker 02

  They were, they have been eliminated though. They're, they're gone now. The, the Cheshire cats, get it?

• 1:39:38Speaker 05

  Dang it.

• 1:39:38Speaker 02

  The Cheshire cats are gone. So apparently, there are 670 feral cats in 123 colonies across the San Francisco Bay.

• 1:39:49Bob Novella?

  That's a lot more than I thought.

• 1:39:51Speaker 05

  Hang on, they're measuring cats in terms of colonies? I didn't know that.

• 1:39:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, they have colonies.

• 1:39:55Speaker 05

  Wow, okay.

• 1:39:58Speaker 02

  So with those data points, would that change your analysis at all?

• 1:40:03Speaker 03

  It may.

• 1:40:03Bob Novella?

  No, based on your attitude, I think we still got it.

• 1:40:07Speaker 03

  You're not, you wait, wait, wait, you're not offering us door number three or something?

• 1:40:09Speaker 02

  No, I'm not offering you to change your mind. This one is the fiction.

• 1:40:14Bob Novella?

  Yeah, baby.

• 1:40:14Speaker 05

  Ah!

• 1:40:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, sorry.

• 1:40:16Speaker 05

  You had me going there, Steve, with all the questions. I was feeling very high and mighty over here.

• 1:40:21Bob Novella?

  I know he's, I know he was just trying to make us...

• 1:40:23Speaker 02

  Right for the wrong reason.

• 1:40:24Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I knew he was just trying to make us look crappy before he said we won.

• 1:40:29Speaker 02

  The real figure was 4.2%. They don't eat a lot of cats.

• 1:40:33Bob Novella?

  Oh, jeez.

• 1:40:33Speaker 02

  14% of their scat had cat in it.

• 1:40:35Bob Novella?

  Can they even catch them?

• 1:40:37Speaker 02

  Sure. Oh, yeah. Yeah, cats go missing around here all the time.

• 1:40:41Speaker 05

  Really?

• 1:40:41Speaker 02

  You see, posted up, Fluffy's missing. Fluffy was eaten by a coyote.

• 1:40:45Speaker 03

  If you don't find Fluffy in a day or two, it's pretty much...

• 1:40:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's why you have to have indoor cats. Also, outdoor cats, first of all, they get eaten and they also are murderers. They go around killing birds.

• 1:40:55Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:40:55Speaker 02

  I could not have outdoor cats in my yard with the...

• 1:40:58Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:40:58Bob Novella?

  No way.

• 1:40:59Speaker 03

  Plus, they bring in fleas and other things.

• 1:41:01Bob Novella?

  It's really like, it's an apocalypse for birds, right, Steve? We covered that. There was like, the devastation of the birds from wild cats, cats is nuts.

• 1:41:09Speaker 02

  And now, you know what else outdoor cats bring in? Bird flu.

• 1:41:14Bob Novella?

  Oh, Jesus.

• 1:41:15Speaker 03

  Ooh, the ass.

• 1:41:16Speaker 02

  Oh, boy, that's terrible. There have been cases of, of cats, bird flu, so...

• 1:41:20Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:41:21Speaker 02

  One more reason that they have outdoor cats.

• 1:41:23Speaker 03

  And what's the other thing? The tox, plasmotoxicity? What's the...

• 1:41:27Speaker 02

  Toxoplasmosis.

• 1:41:27Bob Novella?

  Toxoplasmosis.

• 1:41:28Speaker 02

  Toxoplasmosis, yeah.

• 1:41:29Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 1:41:31Speaker 02

  All right, all of that means that a cross-national analysis finds that the presence of climate action policy is a stronger predictor of anti-climate action groups than national economic self-interests is science.

• 1:41:42Speaker 03

  This is the hardest one of the three to understand.

• 1:41:44Speaker 02

  It was, that's why I explained it, I think I made it pretty plain, but that's what they found, they found that actually it's a reaction to

• 1:41:51Speaker 05

  That's rough.

• 1:41:52Speaker 02

  ... climate policy than the people, you know, don't really care about the national economic self-interest. But the idea was that if there is an industry at risk in that country, they would be driving the anti-climate action groups. But I think maybe initially, but now I think they've sort of taken on a life of their own, so all it takes is that you're responding to something that's out there on social media.

• 1:42:16Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:42:17Speaker 02

  This is more of a social media world now than a traditional

• 1:42:19Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:42:20Speaker 02

  ... big corporate world, although it's still a big corporate world, but you know what I mean.

• 1:42:23Speaker 03

  It's a blend.

• 1:42:24Speaker 02

  In terms of this kind of thing.

• 1:42:25Speaker 05

  I really wanted that to be fiction, that's too bad.

• 1:42:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:42:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you could get one of those ones, which I love, where you could kind of make sense of it either way.

• 1:42:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:42:32Speaker 02

  Right? Because you think, oh yeah, the fossil fuel industry is funding misinformation about climate action, so that would be the driving force, but it was a bigger predictor.

• 1:42:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:42:42Speaker 02

  If you had climate policy.

• 1:42:44Speaker 05

  So anti-climate action is reactionary and coyotes are going hungry, that's my takeaway.

• 1:42:49Speaker 02

  Yep, that's right. Sometimes Andrea, when you know a lot about a topic, it's easier to fool you.

• 1:42:55Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:42:56Speaker 02

  It's true, I get Bob all the time.

• 1:42:59Speaker 03

  That does happen all the time.

• 1:43:00Speaker 05

  Really? That makes me feel better, man.

• 1:43:02Speaker 03

  Actually, every time I lose is because Steve is doing that to me, every time.

• 1:43:05Speaker 02

  Every single time.

• 1:43:06Speaker 03

  Every single one.

• 1:43:07Speaker 02

  Without fail.

• 1:43:08Speaker 03

  Except the times when it doesn't. Yep, right, that's my theory.

• 1:43:10Speaker 02

  It's frustrating to me when somebody doesn't know enough about a topic to get it wrong.

• 1:43:15Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 1:43:16Speaker 02

  I get pissed off, like, are you kidding me?

• 1:43:18Speaker 03

  Stupidity paid off. Ignorance is wonderful.

• 1:43:23Speaker 02

  You should know that this is wrong.

• 1:43:25Bob Novella?

  Or you say something and you're like, and I'm thinking, oh my God, that's extraordinary. And everyone else takes it like, ah, whatever. Like, why are you kidding me? Why aren't you excited at this point?

• 1:43:34Speaker 02

  You don't know? Don't you know?

• 1:43:37Bob Novella?

  I mean, it doesn't happen all the time, but sometimes like, ah, frustrating.

• 1:43:40Speaker 02

  All right. Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:43:42Speaker 03

  Before I give the quote, Steve, I have a question and I'm asking for a friend. They want to know if it's okay to pronounce it tinnitus as well as t-

• 1:43:52Speaker 02

  I mean, I think technically both are okay. The reason why I prefer tinnitus is because tinnitus sounds like T-I-N-I-T-I-S. And itis in medicine means inflammation. This is not inflammation of your ear. This is tinnitus.

• 1:44:10Speaker 03

  That's a very technical, good reason to distinguish.

• 1:44:13Speaker 02

  It distinguishes it from like pancreatitis, right? Or whatever, some other itis. So I think for that reason, it's important to say tinnitus.

• 1:44:21Bob Novella?

  Tinnitus sounds like tendonitis too.

• 1:44:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:44:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, tendonitis, any itis, you know, arthritis, any itis that is an inflammation of whatever. So, and it's spelled differently, should be pronounced differently.

• 1:44:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:44:32Speaker 02

  For disambiguation, but that's very proscriptive.

• 1:44:36Speaker 03

  I think tinnitus is a little slightly more labor intensive. And I think that maybe that's why people might go to-

• 1:44:42Speaker 05

  It sounds like a British pronunciation to me. Like, oh, pass the tinnitus.

• 1:44:46Speaker 02

  Do you have a migraine?

• 1:44:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:44:48Speaker 02

  They're used to-

• 1:44:49Speaker 03

  A migraine?

• 1:44:50Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:51Speaker 03

  I love it.

• 1:44:52Speaker 02

  They're used to saying itis, so that's what they default to. But then if you say tinnitus, then they know it's different, right? It's spelled differently. It means something different. It's important.

• 1:45:03Speaker 05

  Like tinnitus would be my tinning is hurting or something. Yeah.

• 1:45:08Speaker 03

  Those are good reasons. Excellent. All right. Here's the quote for tonight. Thanks for your patience with that. "We live in an enlightened age, however, an age that has learned to see and to value other living things as they are, not as we wish them to be. And the long and creditable history of science has taught us, if nothing else, to look carefully before we judge to judge, if we must, based on what we see, not what we would prefer to believe."

• 1:45:38Speaker 03

  And that was either spoken or written by Robert Charles Wilson, who is an American-Canadian science fiction author. Hugo Award, Best Novel for Spin, Bob. Don't know if you read that one.

• 1:45:52Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:45:53Speaker 03

  Among many other awards, you know, Philip K. Dick Award, so many others. Author Stephen King has called Wilson probably the finest science fiction author now writing. So Robert Charles Wilson, giving us some good skeptical wisdom there.

• 1:46:09Speaker 02

  I have to check him out. Sounds good. I don't think I've read it before. All right. Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

• 1:46:15Jay Novella?

  You got this.

• 1:46:16Speaker 03

  Thanks, Doctor.

• 1:46:17Speaker 05

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:46:17Speaker 03

  Thanks, Andrea.

• 1:46:18Speaker 02

  Andrea, it's always lovely to have you on the show.

• 1:46:21Speaker 03

  Good to hear you.

• 1:46:21Speaker 05

  No, so great to be here. Thanks for having me. And I'll see you at Nauticon.

• 1:46:26Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:46:27Speaker 02

  I'm sure we'll be getting together before that.

• 1:46:29Speaker 05

  Well, yeah, I'll see you at the planning meetings.

• 1:46:30Speaker 02

  We'll see you at the Nauticon planning meetings, and then eventually in person at Nauticon.

• 1:46:34Speaker 03

  Can't wait.

• 1:46:35Speaker 02

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

• 1:46:44Speaker 02

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

• 1:47:20Speaker 02

  Cash Flow Crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.